PINA – Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost – International Trailer

saw “pina” and loved it! a radical play on the documentary form. a visual treat. it’s an electric experience to be drawn into the world of dance – so much more dynamic, vigorous and alive than words.

PINA – Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost – International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.

how beautiful is this?

love the interplay between the male and female dancers – something so vulnerable and heartbreaking yet beautiful in its complementarity. what a poetic representation of love. or perhaps life itself – its fragility has to be constantly cherished, protected, calibrated.

and this? heart-stopping.

Capitalism and Class Consciousness: the ideas of Georg Lukács

in an interview published in guernica magazine, kashmiri writer mirza waheed asks: “what makes brutality banal? how do we come to accept violence as an everyday thing? … how do we come to a point where killing as many people as possible is a job?” i was thinking of this when i read this article on capitalism: Commodification shapes the physical process of work itself and our understanding of it. Work becomes dominated by rationalisation, a high division of labour, repetition and obsession with quantity rather than quality. The finished article no longer appears as the object of a process at all. The fragmented process of production of the object ends up producing a fragmented subject: ‘The personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle fed into an alien system.’… So way beyond the profit-making workplace, in institutions across society, tasks are reduced to quantifiable functions, to ‘unit throughput’, in processes that acquire autonomy from the personality and therefore from human judgement. Even for those dealing directly with other human beings the sense of overall purpose is lost, all sense of cause and effect obscured. Lukács gives the example of the journalist whose powers of empathy, judgement, knowledge and expression are divorced from personality, and who is placed in an unnatural isolation when confronting the facts or events he or she ‘reports’ on. ‘The journalist’s “lack of convictions,” the prostitution of experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.’

More here.

Richard Falk: Saving Khader Adnan’s Life and Legacy

It is important to pause long enough to take account of Khader Adnan’s achievement, symbolically, substantively, and with respect to future possibilities. We should note that Mr. Adnan’s hunger strike of 66 days is the exact length of Bobby Sands’ hunger strike in 1981 strengthening the bond between the two men, a bond that has been movingly confirmed by a number of Irish family members of their strikers. What is more, the date of Bobby Sands’ death, May 5, 1981, is generally viewed as the turning point in the Irish struggle, the time when the British Government finally started treating the IRA as a political actor with genuine grievances rather than as a terrorist organization that must be run into the ground and exterminated. We can only hope that February 21, 2012 will live in history as a turning point in the Palestinian struggle. Only the future will reveal whether this is a pious wish on my part or becomes over time a historical reality. Substantively, it is crucial to support a campaign to free the other several hundred Palestinians currently being held in administrative detention and to exert enough pressure to end reliance on the practice altogether. Mr. Adnan’s brave stand will have been mostly without effect if his compelling exposure of the cruelty and arbitrariness of Israeli reliance on administrative detention is allowed to slip from view now that his strike is over. Instead, knowing what we have come to know, it is the responsibility of all of us to do all we can to discredit and force the abandonment of administrative detention by Israel, and as well, challenge its role in the United States and elsewhere. A fitting tribute to Mr. Adnan’s hunger strike would be to put opposition to administrative detention on the top of the human rights agenda throughout the world. We should begin by refusing to use the phrase “administrative detention,” rechristening it as “administrative torture” or “lawless captivity,” and associate with past colonial and present authoritarian tendencies of “democratic” governments. (Richard Falk)

More here.

U.S. v. Pakistan on transparency and accountability

pakistan is changing. in the little time that it has had to develop democratic institutions, such as a strong judiciary, it has done amazingly well. imagine what it could have accomplished over 60 yrs of uninterrupted democracy… this is such an emotional case. people were crying uncontrollably when the 7 men were presented in court.

Virtually without exception, the American judiciary has refused to allow any victims of America’s War on Terror abuses — whether foreign national or American citizen — to even have their claims heard in court….But consider the extraordinary — and now distinctly un-American — event that just happened in Pakistan, from CNN, today: Seven men detained by Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, appeared in court Monday in a landmark case that places one of the nation’s most powerful institutions under the scrutiny of its highest court… Yet this type of accountability just brought to Pakistan’s intelligence service is simply inconceivable in the United States. It is virtually impossible to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the CIA to disclose documents about its treatment of detainees or, even more unrealistically, to permit the victims of CIA abuse to have their grievances heard in court. More here.

NYPD spying program aimed at Muslims

It is really worth looking at this document for a sense of how insidious it is when the government spies on and compiles files about innocent citizens. The report contains numerous maps identifying the locations of all mosques in Newark. It contains photographs of those mosques and other Islamic groups and even schools, including ones in private homes, accompanied by identifying information and other notes suggesting some sort of nefarious intent (“aggressive counter-surveillance observed,” which presumably means that someone from the mosque was watching police agents spy on them). The report even includes maps and active surveillance of halal shops, Middle Eastern groceries, and restaurants where Muslims gather.

…there are two odious aspects of the Surveillance State specifically highlighted by the NYPD’s program here.

First, Muslims generally — and, increasingly, American Muslims — are branded with virtually official non-person status under the law. On Monday, I wrote about the way in which core tyrannical powers — arbitrary detention, limitless spying, due-process-free assassinations — have become normalized in the U.S., Israel and its Western allies, but it is almost always Muslims who are the target of these abuses. Every serious episode of civil liberties assaults in American history was driven by the full-scale demonization of one specific group. There are still plenty of groups who perform that function, but there is no question that Muslims are the prime target now.

Second, this perfectly illustrates what I have often described as the one-way mirror dynamic of the American Surveillance State: it isn’t merely that the State knows more and more about the private activities of citizens, but worse, that happens at exactly the same time that citizens know less and less about the activities of the State. At exactly the same time that the Surveillance State has exploded into a sprawling, ubiquitous, unaccountable apparatus, the U.S. Government and its various agencies have erected an increasingly impenetrable wall of secrecy behind which it operates. This imbalance grows inexorably. That’s the essential expression of the American Surveillance State: we can and will know everything about what you do, and you will know virtually nothing about what we do.

More here.

Jeremy Lin and ESPN’s “Accidental” Racism

Last week in an ESPN column, Asian-American writer Jay Caspian Kang is quoted as saying, “If you can’t look at Jeremy Lin and see why America is the greatest country in the world, well, then you don’t understand America.” We’ll leave aside for a moment the substance of this comment: the fact that the United States, in the theater of war, has performed genocidal crimes against people who were called the same epithets as Jeremy Lin. We’ll leave aside the fact that people of Asian descent were interned on US soil or the hate crimes they silently suffer in schoolyards and on street corners that persist with little national outrage or discussion. We’ll leave that aside, and just say that in the wake of his own employer’s accidental slips, Kang should perhaps amend his statement to, “If you don’t understand why racism still infects the Lin story and why there is an urgent need to stand up against it, then you really don’t understand America.” More here.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Mohsin Hamid in Conversation with Akhil Sharma

The war on terror has been examined from myriad angles: social, political, religious. How might fiction illuminate the complex forces at play and the individuals involved on all sides? Join Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and the award-winning Indian author of An Obedient Father, Akhil Sharma, for a conversation on the power of novels to reveal, explain, and even anticipate contemporary events. Introduced by author Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review.

Guernica – The Literature of Conflicted Lands

Andrew Feinstein: From your work I gather that brutal dehumanizations of the other are dependent on extraordinary misinformation and distortion. Is this something that each of you, as you’re writing books about what are very difficult circumstances, very difficult regions”is this something you’re conscious of, that you’re trying to restore in some ways, this loss of collective conscience?

Mirza Waheed: You look into it, the loss of collective conscience. You look into the moral landscape of these times and areas … what happens to normal behavior, the suspension of every day good behavior in a way which seems normal. We come to expect and then accept that this is how it’s going to be. It’s war, and these things happen in war. And then, as a novelist, as a writer, you do want to question that. And you want to explore … so how did we get to this place? What makes brutality banal? How do we come to accept violence as an everyday thing? And as a novelist, I want to explore those things and see … how do we come to a point where killing as many people as possible is a job? And what does it do to the person who’s doing the killing and, obviously, also to the people who are getting killed in that manner. You know, we live in this strange, bizarre age where the Nobel peace laureate has ended up as a proud assassin. More here.

Maan News Agency: Revisiting the rules of war in Israel and Palestine

so much for working only (and only) within the framework of international law when it comes to human rights.

Israeli philosopher Kasher has been explicitly frank about his contempt of current International Humanitarian Law. He, like some others at the conference, questioned why Israel should have more responsibilities towards what he perceived as the “enemy’s civilians” than towards its own soldiers. “IHL only cares about civilians, not about soldiers, and this is immoral,” Kasher said. For the former chief of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin, the ethical norms of IHL do not fit Israel’s operations in Gaza. More here.

New Statesman – Lets learn from Blairs mistakes, so we dont repeat them in Syria

John PILGER: ‘The suppression of Blair’s criminality and that of his administrations is described in Gareth Peirce’s Dispatches from the Dark Side: on Torture and the Death of Justice, published in paperback this month by Verso. Peirce is Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyer; her pursuit of miscarriages of justice and justice for victims of state crimes, such as torture and rendition, is unsurpassed. What is unusual about this accounting of what she calls the “moral and legal pandemonium” following the 9/11 attacks is that, in drawing on the memoirs of Blair and Alastair Campbell, cabinet minutes and MI6 files, she applies the rule of law to them… Peirce’s book achieves the impossible on Blair: it shocks. Tracing the “unjustifiable theses, unrestrained belligerence, falsification and wilful illegality” that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she identifies Blair’s assault on Muslims as criminal and racist. “Human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently… in Blair’s language a ‘virus’ to be ‘eliminated’ and requiring ‘a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations’.”

?’The very notion of war was wrenched from its dictionary meaning and became “our values versus theirs”. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, mostly Saudis who trained to fly in America, were all but forgotten. Instead, the “splashes of colour” were made blood-red – first in Afghanistan, land of the poorest of the poor. No Afghans were members of al-Qaeda; on the contrary, there was mutual resentment. No matter. Once the bombing began on 7 October 2001, tens of thousands of Afghans were punished with starvation as the World Food Programme withdrew aid on the cusp of winter. In one stricken village, Bibi Mahru, I witnessed the aftermath of a single Mk 82 “precision” bomb’s obliteration of two families, including eight children. “TB,” Campbell wrote, “said they had to know that we would hurt them if they don’t yield up OBL.”

The cartoon figure of Campbell was already at work on concocting another threat in Iraq. This “yielded up”, according to the MIT Centre for International Studies, between 800,000 and 1.3 million deaths – a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.

And yet, Peirce wrote, “the threads of emails [and] internal government communiqués reveal no dissent”. Interrogation that included torture was on “the express instructions . . . of government ministers”. On 10 January 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed his colleagues to agree that sending British citizens to Guantan­amo Bay was “the best way to meet our counterterrorism objective”. He rejected “the only alternative” of repatriation to the United Kingdom. On 6 February 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett noted that he was in “no hurry to see any individuals returned to the UK [from Guantanamo]”. Three days later, the Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw wrote: “We need to do all that we can to avoid the detainees being repatriated to the UK.” Not one of the people to whom they referred had been charged with anything; most had been sold as bounty by Afghan warlords to the Americans.

Immersed in its misadventure and lies, listening only to their leader’s crooned “sincerity”, the Labour government consulted no one who spoke the truth. Peirce cites one of the most reliable sources, the Conflicts Forum, run by the former intelligence officer Alastair Crooke, who argues that, to “isolate and demonise [Islamic] groups that have support on the ground, the perception is reinforced that the west only understands the language of military strength”. In wilfully denying this truth, Blair, Campbell and their echoes planted the roots of the 7/7 attacks in London.

Today, another Afghanistan and Iraq beckon in Syria and Iran, perhaps even a world war. Once again, voices such as Crooke’s attempt to explain to a media salivating for “intervention” in Syria that the civil war in that country requires skilled and patient negotiation, not the provocations of the British SAS and the familiar bought-and-paid-for exiles who ride in Anglo-America’s Trojan horse.’

More here.

Here Are Easy Ways to Have Tough Talks With Kids About Race

In the US, many people think that by talking about race and racism, we create racialized thinking. But what studies show is that students recognize race and are often not provided with the language or the space to talk about it in their schools or in their homes. Teachers have to inform themselves about issues in the communities they stand in. Acknowledging these tough issues as they come up and not silencing students’ questions or comments is a first and very important step. It’s tough, and sometimes feels counterintuitive to have these conversations with children, because they deal with topics we try to shield young children against. Ignoring or silencing tough conversations sends the message that this topic is off limits and doesn’t allow the child engage in a deeper understanding of their world. If you don’t have an answer, it’s ok to acknowledge that, look for answers together or do the research and follow up. More here.

Adnan, the Palestinian hunger-striker who’s forcing the world to notice him

If a dearth of coverage of Khader Adnan’s hunger strike in the Israeli media is deplorable, albeit predictable, Palestinian activists believe the lagging coverage of the international media is unconscionable.

“It is simply despicable and downright outrageous that Khader Adnan only managed to get media attention after 50 days of hunger strikie,” Al-Saafin says. “The media goes crazy over its portrait of Palestinian resistance fighters or dissenters as bearded terrorists with a bomb strapped to their torsos. Khader Adnan has surpassed Gandhi’s hunger strike legacy. The world’s silent complicity is telling.”

Steven Friedman, director of The Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, says Adnan’s hunger strike is set to reframe the conflict in the Middle East as a fundamental human rights issue. “It is an important departure, an attempt in a dramatic and tragic movement to reframe Palestinian rights. The Palestinian issue is not widely understood as a human rights issue. It is the illegitimate exercise of power by one party over another,” Friedman says. More here.

Schools We Can Envy by Diane Ravitch

Sahlberg speaks directly to the sense of crisis about educational achievement in the United States and many other nations. US policymakers have turned to market-based solutions such as “tougher competition, more data, abolishing teacher unions, opening more charter schools, or employing corporate-world management models.” By contrast, Finland has spent the past forty years developing a different education system, one that is focused on “improving the teaching force, limiting student testing to a necessary minimum, placing responsibility and trust before accountability, and handing over school- and district-level leadership to education professionals.”

Testing can provide useful information, showing students and teachers what is and is not being learned, and scores can be used to diagnose learning problems. But bad things happen when tests become too consequential for students, teachers, and schools, such as narrowing the curriculum only to what is tested or cheating or lowering standards to inflate scores. In response to the federal and state pressure to raise test scores, school districts across the nation have been reducing the time available for the arts, physical education, history, civics, and other nontested subjects. This will not improve education and is certain to damage its quality.

No nation in the world has eliminated poverty by firing teachers or by handing its public schools over to private managers; nor does research support either strategy.2 But these inconvenient facts do not reduce the reformers’ zeal. The new breed of school reformers consists mainly of Wall Street hedge fund managers, foundation officials, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, but few experienced educators. The reformers’ detachment from the realities of schooling and their indifference to research allow them to ignore the important influence of families and poverty. The schools can achieve miracles, the reformers assert, by relying on competition, deregulation, and management by data—strategies similar to the ones that helped produce the economic crash of 2008. In view of the reformers’ penchant for these strategies, educators tend to call them “corporate reformers,” to distinguish them from those who understand the complexities of school improvement.

In the 1980s, envious Americans attributed the Japanese economic success to its school system. Now the most favored nation is Finland, and for four good reasons.

First, Finland has one of the highest-performing school systems in the world, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assesses reading, mathematical literacy, and scientific literacy of fifteen-year-old students in all thirty-four nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United States. Unlike our domestic tests, there are no consequences attached to the tests administered by the PISA. No individual or school learns its score. No one is rewarded or punished because of these tests. No one can prepare for them, nor is there any incentive to cheat.

Second, from an American perspective, Finland is an alternative universe. It rejects all of the “reforms” currently popular in the United States, such as testing, charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, competition, and evaluating teachers in relation to the test scores of their students.

Third, among the OECD nations, Finnish schools have the least variation in quality, meaning that they come closest to achieving equality of educational opportunity—an American ideal.

Fourth, Finland borrowed many of its most valued ideas from the United States, such as equality of educational opportunity, individualized instruction, portfolio assessment, and cooperative learning. Most of its borrowing derives from the work of the philosopher John Dewey.

In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation’s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland’s story is important, he writes, because “it gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.”

More here.