The Arab Spring and Iraq

The crimes empires commit are ghastly enough. But then there are the crimes they outsource to their proxies. Case in point: post-invasion Iraq, a country destroyed by a criminally insane US invasion and then an equally criminal neoliberal occupation which enriched Halliburton and Boeing, while sparking a three-way sectarian war (Kurds versus Sunnis versus Shiites) which destroyed Iraq for a generation.

But when the children of the Iraqicide, scarred by US bombs and sectarian butchery, finally grew up, they did not pick up guns. They watched the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya go out into the streets and overthrow tyrants. Then they went into the streets themselves. In 2011, numerous ordinary Iraqis protested in the streets against government's inability to reign in corruption, lawlessness and general social instability. The Kurdish community had its own protest wave (the 2011 Kurdish protests), while Iraqi Shiites demonstrated in sympathy with the democracy movement of Bahrain, where a majority Shiite population is ruled by an autocratic Sunni monarchy.

More recently, peaceful Sunni protesters have campaigned against the Maliki government's sectarian policies in Sunni-majority regions of Iraq. On April 23, government soldiers opened fire on unarmed protesters in Hawija,  a small town near Kirkuk in central Iraq, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. If you didn't hear about this grisly war crime, it's the rough equivalent of the Syrian Clock Tower mass murder of unarmed protesters in 2011 Homs by the evil and dying Assad regime, which triggered the Syrian civil war.

In response to the Hawija massacre, large numbers of Sunnis are mobilizing into militia and citizen armies, threatening a return to the horrendous carnage of the 2005-2007 civil war. You won't hear a word about this in the US mainstream media, because the US empire is still officially backing Maliki's government. The NY Times, that perennial tool of empire whose smooth apologetics for imperial crime almost makes you nostalgic for the straightforward falsehoods of Pravda, whitewashed the Hawija massacre this way:

"The fiercest fighting was at the encampment in a town called Hawija, where Sunni gunmen fought government forces throughout the day."

This is in accord with a long-standing unwritten rule of imperial journalism, namely that massacres happen only to white people, and even if they do, they're never committed by US-backed regimes.

Of course, the last thing Iraq needs is more violence or a return to the days of the civil war. What is needed is a transition to some sort of democratic regionalism under a federal umbrella. Iraqis have a strong and well-developed sense of national identity, and there is plenty of oil money to rebuild the country. But if the Maliki government does not deliver justice, there will be no peace.

You can follow the Iraqi Spring here and here.

From Occupation To Resistance

Where did the energies of Occupy go? They went right here: Chicago's young people are fighting for a better future, against Chicago's horrid and despicable neoliberal political machine (second in viciousness perhaps only to its NYC analogue). And this is just the beginning...

Half Life: The Petersburg Chronicles

Gordon Freeman, in the flesh... or rather, in the independent Russian fan video, Freeman's Days Part 1. (English subtitles are available by clicking on the caption bar).

Fantastically well-done, on almost no budget.

We are approaching a moment in history when we fans have the digital tools and networks to create and distribute our very own media, free from studio moguls or neoliberal pigopolists.

Wisely done, Mr. Freeman!

Freedom on the March

For ineluctable historical reasons (colonial legacies, postcolonial tyrannies, neoliberal immiserations, etc.) Syria is having the bloodiest revolution of the Arab Spring. The people of Syria are paying a terrible price for their freedom, but this is also the reason that their revolution has produced some of the most amazing citizen journalism, independent media, and innovative forms of democratic mobilization in the entire Middle Eastern region. Case in point: Malek Jandali's proposed post-revolutionary anthem. Such a strange paradox, that we human beings are sometimes at our best precisely when we're at our worst.