Jan Myrdal in Ludhiana in Punjab on 8th February 2012 "Imperialist War and the Working Class"

picture Jan Myrdal

Organized by Shaheed Bhagat Singh Vichar Manch, Punjab

A Talk with Jan Myrdal (a renowned Marxist and Writer from Sweden)

Topic : The Working Class and the Imperialist War

Date: 8 February, 2012, Time: 11.00 am to 3.00 pm
Venue: Punjabi Bhavan, Bharat Nagar Chowk, Ludhiana

We cordially invite you to a talk with Jan Myrdal, , who is one of the rare amongst those who have personally met and talked with Chairman Mao and a renowned author on China and who has also talked at length with comrade Ganapati, the General Secretary of CPI (Maoist). He has recently authored his second book on India, The Red Star over India. Please be part of the gathering and interact with him.

Source: Sanhati

See Recent Report on Movement in the Punjab by Harsh Thakor
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2012/01/pagri-sambhal-campaign-committee-in.html

Defend the Party of the Committee's to support Resistance - for Communism (CARC) - Italy

Demonstration at Italian Embassy London on Wednesday 8th February Against trial of 12 comrades in Bologna including members of the CARC.

Visit Facebook and Join the Demonstration Page
http://www.facebook.com/events/292179184171133/

"Soccer" Uprising : Egyptian's Battle Police Forces in Second Day of Protest

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For the second day in a row, Egyptians battled police forces in cities around the country. In Cairo, thousands of protesters took on the police in front of the hated Interior Ministry, blamed for being responsible for the deaths of 74 people killed when a major soccer match erupted in violence on Wednesday. 


Protesters threw rocks at police, who fired back with tear gas, buckshot and rubber bullets. More than two thousand have been injured and nine killed in two days of fighting, according to the Health Ministry.


The violence took place one block from the now infamous Mohamed Mahmoud Street, where similar street battles took place less than three months ago. Then, thousands were injured and 40 people were killed by security forces, many by asphyxiation from tear gas. 


The Military Council installed a new cabinet, and the new Interior Minister vowed not to use tear gas on protesters again. That promise was not kept. But protesters have proven more resilient than ever, tearing down an enormous concrete block wall erected by the military after the Mohamed Mahmoud battle, and occupying a government tax building. 


Withstanding a steady barrage of tear gas and buckshot, the protesters continued fighting throughout the day. 


These images of the front line at the northwest corner of the Interior Ministry were filmed on Friday afternoon, February 3, by TRNN videographer Roddy Hafiz

Anonymous Exposes Ron Paul - White Supremacist Links

Visit Here : http://pirasec.com/

Crackdown on Radical Left Groups in Italy

The Italian State has decided to attack leading forces of the resistance to austerity in Italy, and especially those forces that are in some way independent of the 'official left', what in Italy was called the 'autonomous' and which included Anarchists and Maoists and others who did not support the 'official' Communist party. These attacks are significant, as Italy is a European country, and what happens in Italy may well be a testground for what happens here- ie the criminalisation of the part of the radical left that is independent of the 'official' left, the trade unions and the Labour Party.

Comrades Giuseppe Maj, Pietro Vangeli, Giuseppe Czeppel, Manuela Maj, Massimo Amore, Marco Proietti Refrigeri, Paolo Babini, members of the (n) PCI, of the CARC Party or of the Association of Proletarian Solidarity are being put on trial in Bologna on the 8th February accused of “subversive association for purposes of terrorism”(item 270 bis of Penal Code),a law introduced by Mussolini and the fascist regime which imprisoned hundreds of Anarchists and Communists including Antonio Gramsci and Errico Malatesta. oddly, the big government 'rifondazione communist party', a kind of equivalent to our Labour party, have been silent on this.

however, sectarian differences is not the point, but rather see who they are coming for and for whom they are going to target next. if now they go for the Maoists and autonomists, then who next? it would not surpise one too much to see there is an attempt to criminalise anarchism in the UK ( metropolitan police asked people to shop in anarchists!); that these types of laws must be combated in their very beginning before it really will be too late.

We hope that some will come to protest the arrest of the above mentioned comrades under this fascist era law at the Italian Embassy on the 8th February. 

matholicus catholicus 

Source: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/01/491608.html?c=on

Mobilise to Support Protest at Italian Embassy London against Repression in Italy on 8th February 2012

Democracy and Class Struggle calls for support for protest at the Italian Embassy, London on the 8th February 2012 against the trial of 12 members of the (n) PCI, CARC and ASP  in Bologna under subversion charges.




Comrades Giuseppe Maj, Pietro Vangeli, Giuseppe Czeppel, Manuela Maj, Massimo Amore, Marco Proietti Refrigeri, Paolo Babini, members of the (n) PCI, of the CARC Party or of the Association of Proletarian Solidarity are being put on trial in Bologna on the 8th February accused of “subversive association for purposes of terrorism”(item 270 bis of Penal Code), charge built by fascist regime and implemented by the fascists special courts to incarcerate hundreds of communists and anti-fascists, Antonio Gramsci included.




The Protest will be between the hours of 5pm to 7pm on the 8th February at the Italian Embassy London at 14 Three Kings Yard, Grosvenor Square, Westminster , London W1K 4Eh.




defenditaliancomrades@gmail.com


ALSO JOIN OUR DEMONSTRATION FACEBOOK PAGE HERE:
http://www.facebook.com/events/292179184171133/

Virginia Department of Corrections: Stop the harassment of Kevin Rashid Johnson!

We the undersigned add our voices to those of Supporting Prisoners and Acting for Radical Change in demanding that the staff of Wallens Ridge State Prison, Red Onion State Prison and the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) cease their consistent campaign of targeted physical violence, harassment, and administrative repression against the cadre of the New African Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter specifically Kevin “Rashid” Johnson and Kelvin “Khaysi” Canada which is clearly being carried out with the intention of suppressing the basic human and democratic rights of prisoners in VDOC facilities. Furthermore, we support Rashid’s request to be transferred to a less hostile environment, for instance either Sussex One or Sussex Two state prison.

SIGN HERE :

http://www.change.org/petitions/virginia-department-of-corrections-stop-the-harassment-of-kevin-rashid-johnson?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=friends_wall

Announcement of Public Meeting in Delhi by Forum Against War on People–

“Let’s Intensify our Opposition to the Indian State’s War on the People”

picture Jan Myrdal

Forum Against War on People Public Meeting:  3 pm, 6 February 2012,

Rajendra Bhawan Deen Dayal Upadhayaya Marg, near ITO, New Delhi

Speakers:

JAN MYRDAL the internationally acclaimed author will talk on the War on People in India

SUJATO BHADRA will speak on atrocities by Joint Forces in Jangalmahal in West Bengal

The Indian government’s war on people in central and eastern regions has entered its second phase with the deployment of the Indian army. The surreptitiously declared war on the people of this country codenamed Operation Green Hunt (OGH) which was launched in September 2009 by the Indian government is continuing unabated till today. In fact in the recent months, the ruling coalition at the Centre in connivance with political parties of all hues in power in the Central and Eastern states have intensified their brutal war on the poorest, most maginalized and oppressed people of the subcontinent. Contrary to the rhetoric of not deploying the Indian Army in direct combat, the Government of India has increased the number of troops in the region with the intent of crushing the growing people’s resistance against its policies. It is well known that the first batch of 2000 Army personnel were sent by the government to the forests of Narayanpur District in the Bastar on 3 June 2011 with a plan to occupy an area of 600 square kilometres, albeit in the name of Jungle Warfare Training. Just six months later, another 2500 personnel descended on the forests of Bastar on 4 November 2011. Though the Central and Chhattisgarh governments maintain that they have set up this so-called Jungle Warfare Training Centre in Bastar merely to put pressure on the Maoists and to dominate the region militarily, the real purpose is to hand over the vast swathes of mineral-rich forested lands to the Multinational Companies and to evict the people who have stood up to defend their jal-jangal-zameen, their very existence.

The involvement of the army in this war is more than what meet the eyes. Senior army officials were appointed long before OGH was initiated two-and-half years ago to guide and coordinate the ‘counter-insurgency’ operations involving more than two hundred thousand police-paramilitary joint forces. The launch of OGH further +institutionalised the Indian Army’s role under the Unified Command Structure of joint operations of the four different armed forces – the civil police of various states, Special Armed forces raised by different states (like the C-60 of Maharashtra, SPOs of Chhattisgarh, SOG of Odisha and Greyhounds of AP), paramilitary forces under the Union Government and the Indian Army along with the Air-force and the Navy. The Union Government’s public posture that the Army will not be engaged in combat with the Naxalites is only to hoodwink the democratic sections of the public in the country and to safeguard its image in the international domain as the much-advertised “largest democracy” in the world. Such claims fly on the face of the license to kill, handed out by the Indian government to the Air-force and the Army: while the former reserves the ‘right’ to commit aerial bombardments in the name of ‘self-defense’, the latter does not even require such fig-leaf of an excuse as it has been made clear that the army will not wait to be first shot by the Naxalites, but will be the first to fire upon anyone it suspects to be a Naxalite. Indian Army’s operations are being expanded in the war zones where the adivasis and other communities are resisting the sell-out of natural resources to international and domestic monopolies, displacing and decimating the local people. In order to deceive the democrats in the country and outside, the rulers – who are fighting against the most deprived sections of the people – have tried to justify their war as an act of curbing ‘left-wing extremists’ or Naxalites / Maoists. No doubt Naxalites / Maoists are part of the larger resistant movement today in all these regions, but this does not justify the ruling elite’s war on the citizens of this country.

Due to the stiff resistance faced by the Indian state’s Armed forces from the wretched of the earth in these regions, the ‘democratic’ Indian state has followed the policy of raising private armed vigilante gangs. That the corporate sector in India also has time and again asked the Government to further institutionalise such gangs through concrete material and other supports so as to enable the easy loot and plunder of the resources in these regions is an open secret that few have noticed. The list of such private armed groups formed and led by the joint armed forces of the government in central and eastern India is a long one: Salwa Judum and Koya Commandos (now legalised) in Chhattisgarh, Sendra, Nagarik Suraksha Samiti, PLFI, Jharkhand Prastuti Committee, Tritiya Prastuti Committee in Jharkhand, Shanti Sangams in South Odisha, and Harmad Bahini or what is now called Bhairab Bahini in West Bengal, and so on. And these are only a few of the vast number of private armed gangs being propped up by the government to kill and brutalise our fellow citizens by spending the tax-payer’s money. All these forces are under the directions of the Unified Command of the Indian government and the Home Ministry. These publicly-funded private gangs are killing thousands of people branding them as Naxalites/Maoists. If we add the private armed gangs maintained by the local warlords, the mining mafia and other corporate houses supported and patronised by the Indian state, the number of common people who are resisting their oppression and are killed by the government forces in the War on People shoots up exponentially.

The War on People is not restricted to the rural and mineral-rich forested regions of India alone, but has also reached its urban enclaves. It has spread to encompass all the urban and semi-urban regions from where support and solidarity is extended to the rural regions – the mainstay of the resistance movements. Democratic voices are stifled and choked everywhere. Thousands of democratic individuals and hundreds of peoples’ organisations that boldly raise their voice of protest against this War on People are jailed, tortured, threatened or killed in fake encounters. It is important to note here the detailed statement of the Minister of State for Home Affairs Jitendra Singh in the two houses of Parliament showing organisations such as Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP), People’s Democratic Front of India (PDFI), Democratic Students Union (DSU), CPI (ML) (Naxalbari) and other parties and people’s organisations as “being watched” closely by the eyes and ears of the government. That “being watched closely by the eyes and ears” of the government is to provoke a sense of siege mentality in the psyche of the general public vis-à-vis   such organisations so as to segregate them from the vast democratic mass movements that they are part of. Further the minister has gone ahead to brand RDF, CRPP, PDFI and DSU as the frontal organisations of the CPI (Maoist). It is evident that all these organisations have been successful in rallying the voices against the murderous campaign of the Indian state to facilitate this largest land grab ever since the time of Columbus let alone the attendant loot and plunder of resources of the people. So it becomes inevitable for the Indian State to see to it that such voices are criminalised by profiling them as ‘anti-development’ and hence against the ‘national’ interest. This fascistic tendency to supress the democratic voices is a needed strategy for the belligerent ruling forces that are entangled in crisis with the deepening economic crisis world-wide.

The Indian rulers facilitate the unbridled plunder of people’s resources and labour to help the imperialist countries come out of their economic crisis, while the people fall prey to starvation, diseases and planned genocides of the state. This situation is certainly no better than the old colonial policy since Columbus and his brand of land-grab that decimated numerous indigenous tribal communities. The only answer is to intensify our opposition to Indian State’s War on People in the name of Operation Green Hunt.

————————————

About JAN MYRDAL, speaker at the Forum: The Swedish author and columnist, Jan Myrdal, son of Nobel laureates Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, and a central figure in the protest movement against the Vietnam War, has penned more than 80 books, among which are Confessions of a Disloyal European (1968), Report from a Chinese Village, The Silk Road and India Waits (1986). He has written fiction, plays and books on literature, art, politics.

He is a prominent supporter of the civil liberties movements in various countries, a trenchant critic of US imperialism and Israeli colonial settlements in the Middle East. He has also made a number of feature films and TV documentaries.

Two years ago, at the age of 83, Jan Myrdal travelled in the tribal heartland of Bastar and personally interacted with the tribal people and the leadership of CPI (Maoist). His book Red Star Over India is an account of his trip which deftly combines India’s present with its past. The English version the book is released in the Kolkata Book Fair on 28 February 2012.

THE BRITISH: A REFUGEE PEOPLE BY REVOLUTIONARY PRAXIS

 Politicians and the media have a lot to say - mostly negative - about “refugees” or “asylum seekers”.  What they never say is that in reality the people of Britain are made up of successive waves of refugee immigrants and that in the last few centuries millions of people have left Britain as refugees for other countries.

 IMMIGRANTS TO BRITAIN

 Ever since prehistoric times successive waves of people have migrated from Europe into the British Isles: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans - as many of our surnames indicate.  More recently, in the seventeenth century hundreds of thousands French Protestants, Huguenots, fled to England to escape religious persecution.  Their energy and initiative made an important contribution to the industrial revolution and their French surnames are still widespread, e.g. Courtauld, the textile firm.

 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries millions of Irish people had to flee their homeland because of the political-religious persecution and economic exploitation they suffered at the hands of the English ruling class.  Paradoxically, many of them came to England where they made up an important part of the industrial working class required by the growing industrial economy.  Many people in Britain have Irish surnames which means that a considerable percentage of the population are at least partly of Irish descent.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hundreds of thousand of Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire settled here and made a significant contribution to business and the professions.

 After World War II, tens of thousands of displaced Poles and Ukrainians settled in Britain, especially in the East Midlands.  Also large numbers from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent were encouraged by the Government and employers to come to Britain to fill the growing labour shortage, especially in public services.  In recent years many poor migrants from Eastern Europe have come here to do low-paid work.

 There was never an original, “authentic” British people.  Rather we are made up of successive waves of immigrants and the knowledge and skills they have brought are one of our strengths.

 MIGRANTS FROM BRITAIN

 Over the centuries millions of people have left Britain because of political, religious and economic pressures.  It was from villages in North Notts that the religious dissenters who became known as the Pilgrim Fathers set out for America to live free from the religious persecution they suffered in England.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hundreds of thousand of Scots had to leave because of the “clearances” by wealthy landlords driving them out of their farms and many Welsh people migrated, e.g. to Patagonia, at least partly because of attempts by the British state to suppress their language.

 In England the major factor driving millions to migrate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was poverty.  Hardship and destitution drove them to seek new lives in countries such as the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, etc.. Within living memory many orphaned children were forcibly resettled in Australia. For these reasons many of us have kin, both near and distant, in many of these countries.  Even today tens of thousands of people leave the UK every year in search of better lives abroad.

Over the years, Britain has received many refugees but let us not forget that many refugees from Britain - political, religious, economic - have been received and accepted in many other countries.

 LET’S STAND TOGETHER

 The descendants of refugees should be sympathetic to the plight of refugees.  If people in Britain in the past had not accepted previous “asylum seekers”  - our ancestors - then many of us would not be here now!  Some politicians try to distinguish “genuine asylum seekers” from “economic migrants”.  Most of the migrants trying to get into Britain now from places such as the Middle East and parts of Africa are fleeing poverty, but poverty brought about by political and religious strife.  It is a spurious distinction and we should not fall for it.  Instead, we should welcome desperate people less fortunate than ourselves.  That’s what many of our ancestors did and many others of our ancestors were accepted elsewhere.  We should do the same.

 The media are always coming out with scare stories about immigrants taking away jobs and homes from people already here. Racists and fascists latch onto this propaganda to try to stir up hatred against some ethnic groups.  These attempts to divide and rule are a diversion from the problems which threaten us all: falling real incomes, unemployment and housing shortages.  We should not be taken in but stand together to defend ourselves against those who want to divide us.

 PEOPLE IN BRITAIN:

UNITE AND FIGHT!

Revolutionary praxis        

Contact: mail@revolutionarypraxis.org

'People Power' Pries Abu-Jamal from Punitive Administrative Custody by Linn Washington Jr.

He's out!

Credit `people power' for getting internationally known inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal sprung from his apparently punitive, seven-week placement in `The Hole.'

For the first time since receiving a controversial death sentence in 1982 for killing a Philadelphia policeman, the widely acclaimed author-activist finds himself in general population, a prison housing status far less restrictive than the solitary confinement of death row.

Inmates in general population have full privileges to visitation, telephone and commissary, along with access to all prison programs and services, all things denied or severely limited to convicts on death row waiting to be killed by the state.

In early December 2011, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections officials, after the federal courts had removed his death penalty and the Philadelphia District Attorney opted not to attempt to re-try the penalty phase in hopes of winning a new death sentence, placed Abu-Jamal in Administrative Custody (a/k/a `The Hole').

Administrative Custody is confinement in a Spartan isolation cell where conditions are more draconian than even death row.

The release of Abu-Jamal from Administrative Custody into general population on Friday, January 27, 2012 followed with a multi-layered protest campaign by his supporters worldwide that included flooding Pennsylvania prison authorities with telephone calls, collecting petitions containing over 5,000 signatures and a complaint filed with United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. 

Supporters condemned the Administrative Custody placement, calling it retaliation for Abu-Jamal's having successfully defeated the state's efforts to execute him. Abu-Jamal, a model prisoner, did not meet any of the 11 specific circumstances listed in Pennsylvania DoC regulations dictating administrative custody placement.

Prison staff evaluations of Abu-Jamal since his December death row removal, sources said, listed him as "polite [and] respectful." Those positive evaluations did not evidence any of the incorrigibility or other serious misbehaviors that usually trigger AC placement.

"When people are united around an issue they have power. This is the power of the people all races in many places," said Pam Africa, director of the Philadelphia-based International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Abu-Jamal, in a statement released through his wife Wadiya Jamal, thanked his supporters for their hard work. "I am no longer on death row, no longer in the hole, I'm in population," Abu-Jamal's statement noted. "This is only Part One and I thank you for the work you've done. But the struggle is for freedom!"

Media reports quoted Pennsylvania DoC spokespersons confirming Abu-Jamal's placement in general population at Mahanoy Prison, a medium security facility about 100 miles from Philadelphia in central Pennsylvania where he was transferred last December from another prison in western Pennsylvania that houses the state's death row.

DoC spokespersons had previously declined comment on Abu-Jamal's Administrative Custody placement, citing regulations covering inmate privacy.

Prison officials advanced ever-changing rationales for keeping Abu-Jamal in AC at Mahanoy, including the curious claim of that they were waiting for legal clarification that the courts had formally replaced Abu-Jamal's death sentence with life in prison.

That Kafkaesque claim contradicted the DoC's own documents specifically acknowledging that federal courts had vacated the death sentence (thus requiring a default life sentence) and Philadelphia's DA having dropped appeals to reinstate the death sentence.

Typical of the way that Abu-Jamal's long-running case has shone a bright light on grievous abuses within the criminal justice system, his AC placement exposed what independent prison monitors have long contended is a dirty secret of Pennsylvania's prison system: authorities using Administrative Custody isolation to maliciously penalize inmates who are not violating prison rules.

Bret Grote, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Human Rights Coalition, said during a media interview that prison authorities misuse Administrative Custody as repression against inmates for their political activism, their complaining about poor conditions in prison, their roles as jailhouse lawyers and often for racist reasons.

Grote said Pennsylvania's DoC holds approximately 2,500 of its fifty-thousand-plus prisoners in solitary confinement on any given day. That's five percent of the total.

"Andre Jacobs and Carrington Keys, two members of a group of prisoners known as the Dallas 6 [Dallas is a Pennsylvania prison] have been held in solitary for approximately 11 and nine years respectively as a result of their speaking out against torture and other human rights violations inside the state's control units," Grote said during an interview with Prison Radio.

Philadelphian Russell "Maroon" Shoats, a former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member, has spent 30 of his 40 years in prison inside an isolation cell despite not having any prison infractions, said his daughter Theresa Shoats during a press conference in Philadelphia held one day before Abu-Jamal's release.

"Prison officials keep my Dad in solitary instead of releasing him into general population because they say he is a leader. My Dad turns 70 this year and he has medical problems, some from being in solitary for so long. Keeping him in solitary is unfair," Shoats said about her father, who was convicted of killing a Philadelphia policeman.

"My Dad says he encourages young inmates to read to stay sane. Why does that make him too dangerous for general population? He told me that 15 young men hung themselves in SCI Greene during a one-year period."

King Downing, director of the American Friends Service Center's Healing Justice Program, said prison authorities nationwide misuse solitary confinement to "silence political prisoners." Downing hosted the press conference where Shoats spoke alongside other speakers representing Abu-Jamal.

Last October, Juan Mendez, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture, called on all countries worldwide to ban the use of solitary confinement of inmates as punishment and/or an extortion technique, except in very exceptional circumstances.

Mendez cited scientific studies establishing the mental and medical damage arising from prolonged isolation. His report stated that an estimated 20,000-to-25,000 persons regularly occupy solitary confinement cells across America.

Recently a federal jury awarded a New Mexico man $22-million for violations of his constitutional rights arising from his having spent two years in solitary confinement in a county jail in Albuquerque following a drunk driving arrest. Although during that entire time he was never even charged or brought to trial, authorities in Dona Ana County New Mexico vow to appeal that verdict, one of the largest damage judgements in history for illegal incarceration.