Pakistan: Feudalism Not Democracy

While the pseudo democrats of the Bush and Harper regimes bemoan the passing of Benazir Bhutto let us not forget that she, her family and their political party do not reflect a movement of democracy but rather the entrenched feudal interests of Pakistan's ruling classes.

To one side of the villa is the town of Nau Dero itself; to the other, the family's expansive estates, mirroring the separation between Pakistan's political elite and the country's teeming millions. Today, under the portraits of her hanged father and dead brothers, her testament will be read by Bilawal, her grieving 19-year-old son.

The family's franchise on political leadership will be handed on. The will's contents will determine the future not simply of her party, the Pakistan People's Party, but of Pakistan. But whether it contains enough to stop the violence is, perhaps, out of the Bhutto family's hands as the nation teeters on the edge of perhaps the worst bloodletting since Partition in 1947.

TIME reports that Benazir Bhutto’s son will likely be named on Sunday as new Pakistan People’s Party leader

As Georg Luckas points out in History and Class Consciousness, his seminal ultra left text which should be mandatory reading for all who claim a revolutionary class struggle perspective , this is the political reification of feudalism, that the poor and oppressed identify not with their class interests but with the landlord class.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

In effect there has been no bourgeois revolution in Pakistan that would allow it to evolve a modern capitalist democratic state. The creation of modern Pakistan sixty years ago was a still born bourgeois state.

The coming civil war is the failure of the bourgeois class struggle in Pakistan, to create the conditions for a modern capitalist state. Class War Not Civil War!

See:

Pakistan A Fascist State


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Pakistan A Fascist State

I am still in Jasper on vacation. Yesterday I saw this headline which I had to comment on;

Iran behind flood of weapons to Taliban, MacKay charges

Showing once again the quisling toadying the Harpocrite government engages in by parroting the U.S. political line. I said to my partner what a load of crap, the real threat is Pakistan, not Iran when it comes to succor and aid to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden Inc.

Sure enough even the Afghanistan government agrees;

No proof Iranian gov't behind IEDs: Afghan diplomat

This morning the headlines are that Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in Pakistan. CTV News Net has had Eric Margolis on commenting on it pointing out she was more of a threat to the Musharraf regime than to the Islamist opposition.

Pakistan is not a democracy but a fascist state, one that engages in supporting both clandestine and state terror and has nuclear weapons, unlike Iran. Blame will be placed upon the Islamic opposition and the Taliban, but the reality is that like the earlier attack on Bhutto it is more than likely an act by the State Security Intelligence Service, an agency that has promoted terrorist acts against Afghanistan, Baluchistan and India.

The political assassination of Bhutto is further proof that Pakistan is a rogue nation, far more dangerous than Iran could ever be. But since it is a client state of the U.S. it will be protected from criticism, boycotts, etc. And of course it will not be on MacKay's agenda for criticism like Iran , nor will it be boycotted by the Harpocrites as they have done with the Hamas led Palestinian state.


With Bhutto's death the Terror State of Pakistan under Musharraf is exposed for what it is; a Bonapartist regime that is now a fascist state. Far more dangerous to its neighbours than Iran can ever be. Assassination of one's political opponents, the setting up of a Reichstag Fire last summer with the raid on the Red Temple all these are the politics of fascism. And of course the war on terror is exactly what fascists used to justify their authoritarian regimes in the past.


SEE

Musharraf's Coup

The Economist Agrees With Me

Afghanistan A Failed State

Pakistan Speaks For the Taliban

I Was An IslamoFascist For MI6

Harpers Silence Over Musharraf

Winning Friends

How To Create Terrorists

Say It Ain't So

Brief Cases vs Batons

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Merry Christmas, Happy Yule

The First Christmas Card

In the early 19th century it was common practice to hand write seasonal messages on calling cards or in letters. In 1843, in order to save himself having to hand-write dozens of Christmas messages, Sir Henry Cole had his friend, John Calcott Horsley, design and print a batch of cards. The words printed on the card were 'A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year' much the same is still found in cards today.

As Habermas points out in his seminal work on the Public Sphere, the post office and communications are key to not only the development of capitalism but also the concept of public space that is public communications arising out of private communications. This post card reflects the reality making public what had been a private matter, that is letter writing. The result would then be a whole communications industry devoted to greeting cards, which then created the conditions for public holidays and the resulting mass consumer society of department stores and mass advertising.

Donalda and I are taking our dogs; Trooper and Tami, off for a jaunt in the mountains for Xmas. So I won't be blogging for several days.

We are going to Jasper. Like Banff a national park created by slave labour, after WWI, using Ukrainian Internees. I will raise a glass in their memory.

Have a great Yule all. Drink a cup o' cheer to keep away the winter cold.

Here are links to my previous articles for this season.

Fiat Lux

Bad Headline

Virgin Birth Announced

WWI Xmas Mutiny

Christmas In the Trenches

Merry Christmas Red Baron

Merry Christmas

Cat Carol

Santa's Sweat Shop

Tannebaum

Rebel Jesus

Chavez Puts Christ In Christmas

Merry Christmashkah

Keeping the 'X' in X-Mas

Chuck Jones Explains It All





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Ezra's Petard

Well it looks like the defunct Western Standard, which is now only a blog online, has been hoisted by its own petard.

Western Standard's apology averts Islamic protest
Canada.com -
CALGARY -- A protest planned for Friday afternoon in Calgary to condemn alleged violent and racist postings has been cancelled after an apology from the Western Standard magazine.
Islamic group drops complaints against local mag Canoe.ca
Magazine apologizes for 'hateful' blog comments CBC.ca

The problem is that former publisher and now guest commentator Ezra Levant's Anti-Muslim rants encourage intolerance and hate speech as being so called freedom of speech in opposition to political correctness.

He no longer is publisher of the Western Standard, he no longer has a column with the Calgary Sun. But he seems to have gotten a job as commentator on Mike Duffy. Guess CTV is trying to keep up with CBC.

Ezra is a provocateur and nothing else. He comments to inflame. And then his followers use his excess's to justify their ignorant racist outbursts. Ezra is the problem, as much as those who comment on his rants.


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Shotgun Blog, Western Standard

Justifying the Inquistion

Came across this stunning bit of logic from those nice folks who believe that abortion is worse than well worse than burning folks at the stake. No really I kid you not. Imagine if they get the chance to return society to their medieval values.

If you think that the Inquisition was evil or misguided, just consider the state of those countries today where the Inquisitions were the most active – Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Nearly everyone in those countries is Catholic, and consequently, all three of those nations have the most restrictive abortion laws in the world.

Over the course of six hundred years, the Catholic Inquisitions sent between forty to sixty thousand individuals to the scaffold to be burned by the secular authorities. This is less than half the number of abortions done in the United States every month.

Let's not forget who these folks were that the Catholics burned at the stake.

In the beginning, the Inquisition dealt only with Christian heretics and did not interfere with the affairs of Jews. However, disputes about Maimonides’ books (which addressed the synthesis of Judaism and other cultures) provided a pretext for harassing Jews and, in 1242, the Inquisition condemned the Talmud and burned thousands of volumes. In 1288, the first mass burning of Jews on the stake took place in France.

It is not known when burning was first used in Britain, but there is a recorded burning for heresy in 1222, when a deacon of the church was burnt at Oxford for embracing the Jewish faith so he could marry a Jew.

Book burning and burning folks at the stake just a step to the right of banning books.




SEE:

Unsafe Abortions Continue

Abortion Is Not A Sin

Pro Life?

Antinominalist Anarchism

The War Against Women

Jacques DeMolay Thou Art Avenged

Secular Society Demands Pope Apologize

Pope Benedict Deus Cannus Est

Bring Back Slavery

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Catholic Values

Catholic board bans 'Golden Compass' indefinitely

I guess we are lucky not to live under a Catholic Theocracy like feudal Europe did. Or else poor Phillip Pullman and his books would not just have been just banned by a Catholic school board. His books would have been used for kindling as the Church committed him to an auto da fey which was their punishment for the crime of heresy.



Now aren't you glad you live in a secular pluralist society which allows you the Freedom to Read unless of course you go to a taxpayer funded Catholic School.
Ironically the Catholic Church and its school boards are proving Pullman correct when he asserts the Church and organized religion is a threat to humanist enlightenment values.

Since they accept public funding while rejecting secular and public values in favour of their private morality it is time to tax the churches. Make em pay for their crimes against secular society and its enlightened values that they oppose.



SEE

An Open Mind

Nitwits

More Silly Censorship

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Person of the Year

Time wimped out and made Putin their Person Of The Year. All the right wing media in the U.S. is whining that it should have been Petraeus. But good old Bill O'Riley on Fox last night let the cat out of the bag. The real reason for Time's choice was that they made a choice of the lesser of two evils the real POTY should have been; Al Gore. But that would have driven the American rightwhingnuts even battier.

And Time's Canadian 'Person of the Year' was not a person but a coin; the Loonie. And again that was the lesser of two evils because their real POTY should have been Dion. After all they gave it to Harper last year. And because it has been annus horribulus for the Liberal Leader in Waiting, he should have made Times cover. After all the Liberals adopted a bird as their symbol this year.



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Harpers Other War

This is Harpers other war, though it shares something in common with his War in Afghanistan. The war on drugs. Well actually the war on Pot. The new anti-drug law Bill C-26 was announced the same week Karlheinz Schrieber was making headlines, so quietly the Harpocrites slipped their crime bill into parliament complete with mandatory sentences for marijuana growing and possession. And the media as well as the Liberal Opposition ignored this new draconian legislation.

While New Democratic Party (NDP) drug policy critic MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) has already denounced the measure, neither the Liberals nor the Bloc Québecois have issued statements on it. Nor had either party responded to Chronicle requests for comment by press time.

Burnaby MPs say they will vote against the bill.

Bill Siksay, NDP MP for Burnaby Douglas, says similar laws have already failed in the U.S.

"They fill up the prisons, they disrupt families, but they don't solve the problem," Siksay said in an interview Thursday.

"We've given fare to many people's criminal records for marijuana use, and we've clogged the courts for way too long."

Instead, the government should decriminalize marijuana, Siksay said.

"We need to upset the apple cart when it comes to drug policy, he added.

Peter Juilan, NDP MP for Burnaby New Westminster, agreed, saying the federal government should spend more money on front line policing.

"The bill is the wrong approach to take," he added.

It's Harpers other war. And it is a dangerous one. For it would return us to convicting recreational drug users for victimless crime. And in creating harsh minimum sentences it attempts to duplicate the creation of a prison industry in Canada like that in the U.S.

With an eye on past complaints from the U.S. that Canadian chemical drugs and the country’s booming illegal marijuana industry are threats to America, the bill imposes a two-year minimum for possession of more than one kilogram of a schedule I drug for the purpose of export trafficking. Possession of cannabis and marijuana for the purpose of exporting – with no aggravating factors or minimum amount – would carry an automatic one-year minimum.

But, despite the political drumbeats about drugs and the image of public hysteria, Ertel says the legislation goes too far, too severely.
A conviction for producing from one to 200 marijuana plants for the purpose of trafficking carries a minimum jail sentence of six months. The scale rises to a two-year automatic sentence for the production of more than 500 plants. The maximum penalty for production of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking jumps to 14 years from seven.

“This is obviously crazy stuff,” says Ertel. “They’ve got a minority government and they’re playing cheap politics and the idea of the cheap politics is ‘go ahead and vote against us on this crazy bill and then we’re going to say you guys love drugs.’”

He argues the automatic jail time — no allowance for mitigating considerations — will inevitably prompt the kind of appeal that led to a 1987 Supreme Court of Canada decision striking down a seven-year mandatory-minimum sentence under the Narcotic Control Act as cruel and unusual punishment.

In R. v. Smith, the case of a B.C. man who pleaded guilty to importing seven and a half ounces of cocaine from Bolivia, Justice Antonio Lamer wrote, “The serious hard drugs dealer who is convicted of importing a large quantity of heroin and the tourist convicted of bringing a ‘joint’ back into the country are treated on the same footing and must both be sentenced to at least seven years in the penitentiary.”

Justice Lamer, though, included this obiter: “A minimum mandatory term of imprisonment is obviously not in and of itself cruel and unusual punishment.”
Ertel says the new Conservative bill may not only violate s. 12 of the Charter in certain circumstances, but it also targets the wrong problem, with the wrong weapon.

“Nobody’s putting anybody who’s making liquor into jail, and almost all violent crime, it’s above 90 per cent, is alcohol related,” he says. “I’ve never seen a case where somebody beat up their wife after they smoke a joint; it doesn’t happen.”

A Statistics Canada Juristat report shows drug trafficking accounted for four per cent of all cases in Canadian adult criminal courts in 2004, compared to 11 per cent for impaired driving. Common assault accounted for another 11 per cent, theft cases were nine per cent and major assault accounted for six per cent. Homicide, including attempted murder, accounted for 0.2 per cent of the cases.

Ertel says the mandatory minimums will mean more and longer drug trials because it will be impossible to bargain pleas: “The courts grind to a halt when there’s no incentive for pleading guilty.”

NDP MP Joe Comartin, a former criminal lawyer in Windsor, offers another twist. He says prosecutors will stay drug charges in an attempt to ration court time.
“They just can’t prosecute, they’ve run out of resources,” says Comartin. “They’ve got 100 more files behind them.”

SEE:

Contact High

Canada Goes To Pot

Canada's Prison Industrial Complex

Narco Politics

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Bernier Blows It

The MSM is all gushy over the fact that both U.S. President Bush and Condoleezza Rice mentioned Canada when talking about Afghanistan. I guess this is the big difference between the Conservative Government and the previous Liberal one. When the Liberals were in power Bush forgot to mention Canada. Wow what a victory for the Stephen Harper Party they got the U.S. to 'mention' Canada.

Bernier, Rice to discuss Afghanistan, border issues
Canada.com, Canada - 15 hours ago
Canada's deployment in Afghanistan is expected to be high the agenda at a meeting in Washington on Thursday between Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier and US ...
'Finish The Job,' Rice Says National Post
Canada praised by Bush for role in Afghanistan; seeks more US ... The Canadian Press
Rice praises Canada's role in Afghanistan CTV.ca

What Foreign Affairs Minister Bernier did not get was freedom for Canadian Citizen and teen ager; Omar Khadr still languishing in Gitmo, while the Brits have gotten their citizens released into British custody.

Ex-Gitmo detainee released on bail

Three Gitmo detainees return to Britain

Nor did he mention Mehar Arar let alone get him off the the U.S. terrorist list.

So as a foreign affairs mission it was a bust. It was simply cheer leading for Harpers War.



SEE:

Khadr -Canada's Shame

Cry Justice

Contradictions of the Security State

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Fiat Lux

Let There Be Light

The winter solstice — what many refer to as the shortest day of the year — arrives on Friday at 11:08 p.m. Of course, the day still has the same amount of time but the amount of daylight is at its least. Sunrise on the solstice is at 8:10 a.m. and the sun sets at 4:36

It is the longest night of the year but it has been celebrated by humans since the beginning as the rebirth of the sun. It fills this season with that most ancient human aspiration; hope.

SEE

Happy Solstice

Tannenbaum

Keeping the 'X' in X-MAS

The Monument Builders

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