FOTOS OCTOBER 22

GLOBAL DAY IN SOLIDARITY WITH IRANIAN WOMEN

Demonstrators chant slogans while marching during the "March of Solidarity for Iran"

GLOBAL SOLIDARITY WITH MAHSA AMINI

80,000 rally in Berlin in solidarity with women-led protests in Iran

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Editorial Staff in Iran, Kurdistan

Some 80,000 people joined a Berlin rally in solidarity with women-led protests in Iran sparked by the death in custody of young Kurdish woman Mahsa Jina Amini, Berlin, Germany, October 22, 2022. Photo: Rudaw

BERLIN,— Some 80,000 people joined a Berlin rally Saturday in solidarity with women-led protests in Iran sparked by the death in custody of young Kurdish woman Mahsa Jina Amini, a police spokesman told AFP.

“Today, thousands of people are showing their solidarity with courageous women and demonstrators in Iran,” tweeted Germany’s Green Party minister for family affairs, Lisa Paus. “We are by your side,” she added.

Some marchers joining a rally called by a women’s collective brandished slogans such as “Women, Life, Freedom” with some waving Kurdish flags.

Participants peacefully made their way towards the city centre in radiant autumnal sunshine, as police followed their progress from helicopters.

Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish woman from Iranian Kurdistan, who was not allowed to use her Kurdish first name (Jina), died on September 16, three days after falling into a coma following her arrest by Iran’s notorious morality police over an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s strict dress code for women.

Some 80,000 people joined a Berlin rally in solidarity with women-led protests in Iran sparked by the death in custody of young Kurdish woman Mahsa Jina Amini, Berlin, Germany, October 22, 2022. Photo: Rudaw

Iran has seen some six weeks of growing women-led protests and on Saturday, shopkeepers and factory workers went on strike as citizens react angrily to the death in custody of Amini.

The protests are the biggest seen in the Islamic republic for years, harking back to 2019 rallies sparked by rocketing fuel price rises.

Young women have led the charge, removing their headscarves, chanting anti-government slogans and confronting the security forces.

Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group says at least 122 people — including some children — have died in the unrest.

Copyright © 2022, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | AFP

Mike Davis (1946 –2022): Enemy of the State

Tariq Ali
26 October 2022

Verso is extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and comrade Mike Davis, the pioneering historian of the US working class and fierce critic of the economic, political, and military apparatuses of the US state machine and the brutalities of empires in general.

I’m a fatalistic Celt, and I have the example of my mother and older sister, who died like Russian soldiers at Stalingrad. Thanks to California’s aid-in-dying law, I have control over the final act. But I guess what I think about the most is that I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — fighting. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless.

Mike Davis, 2022

Verso is extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and comrade Mike Davis. He had been ill for many years, but that never really softens the shock of actual death. A feeling of loss. This was especially true in Mike’s case. He never stopped writing essays and notes. Close to the end he took his own editorial duties very seriously, exchanging mails with NLR commenting on recently submitted articles. And he was usually persuadable to transform a blog or a private communication into a text, short or long. Intellectually always vigorous, he was very generous with his time.

Many of Mike’s essays and most of his books were published in the New Left Review and by New Left Books/Verso from the early Eighties onwards. His style varied. He could be didactic, lyrical, funny, truculent, ferocious when he needed to be, but his principal target was usually the same: the economic, political, and military apparatuses of the US state machine and the brutalities of empires in general. (Late Victorian Holocausts was a devastating critique of the British in India). Several weeks ago, rumours spread on the social networks suggesting he was dying. There was an outpouring of affection and respect and many articles: premature obits. The breadth of the tributes surprised and pleased him.

There will be others as time passes, for his was a remarkable life. He was an American working-class intellectual, radicalized in the Sixties by the US Communist Party and later moving leftwards, without ever denigrating the women and men in the CP who had educated him. His life was lived on the Left and he both learnt from others and educated many more. Together with his friend and comrade, Michael Sprinker, he set up a US-specific list in Verso (Haymarket) linked to the American Socialist Yearbook, published annually between 1985 and 1988. The intellectual quality was high. His classes at UC Irvine and other institutions were popular with students. How to convey wisdom without being patronizing or incomprehensible; how to remind the young of the fine fruits of past experiences without making them feel ignorant. These were always his concerns.

His many books will always live. We were very proud to publish and work with him. Our condolences to his partner, the Mexican artist Alessandra Moctezuma, whose regular emails kept us informed of the various stages of his illness. His four children – Róisín, Jack, and the twins James and Cassandra – he loved dearly and this inspired him to write a work of fiction that treated kids as intelligent humans.


He would have liked this poem by Brecht:

EPISTLE TO THE CHICAGOANS

The laughter on the slave markets of the continents
Formerly confined to yourselves
Must utterly have shaken you, the cold in the regions of the fourth depth
Will have soaked into your skin.
So you still love the horse thieves’ blue eyes?
But when you’re taken into the old people’s home
I shall examine your backs to see
If the winters have marked you.
Your children
Will hear from me, on the evidence of your dead wrists
Whether you stood in the rivers
Between the ice floes and the black fishes
And learned something about this planet.
Oh, in reality there is nothing
But
Deceivers and deceived.
See?

Fire in the Belly: Mike Davis (1946-2022) Ciarán O'Rourke remembers the work of Mike Davis: "One of the many charms of Davis himself, and of his writing, was his combative irreverence, often literally incendiary."

Mike Davis on becoming a Marxist After losing a coveted niche in the trucking industry, I started UCLA as an adult freshman, attracted by rumors of a high-powered seminar on Capital led by Bob Brenner in the History Department.

The American Earthquake: Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster Adam Shatz's classic profile of Mike Davis from 1997. Shatz touches on the writing and success of City of Quartz, Davis's time working at New Left Review, and his general refusal to uncritically follow the postmodern trends of class-skeptical left intellectual life into the late 20th century.

TRIBUTES TO MIKE DAVIS

The Nation: Mike Davis: 1946–2022 Los Angeles Times: Mike Davis, ‘City of Quartz’ author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies NPR: Writer, truck driver, meat cutter and prophet of compassion Mike Davis dies at 76 The New Republic: Los Angeles Has Always Been Burning: Remembering Mike Davis Kirkus Reviews: Author Mike Davis Dies at 76

A fiercely elegant and wide-ranging history of L.A.’s Dickensian extremes and Pynchonesque conspiracies “As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies.”   – Dana Goodyear, New Yorker DOWNLOAD CITY OF QUARTZ AS A FREE EBOOK

Late Victorian Holocausts
by Mike Davis


Ecology of Fear
by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream
by Mike Davis

The Monster Enters
by Mike Davis

Buda’s Wagon
by Mike Davis

Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis

Set the Night on Fire
by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener