Dilip Simeon's blog

NB: Human rights defenders the world over should read the  Tiananmen Mothers  appeal and unequivocally support the Chinese people's struggle for democracy and justice. We must no longer allow national, ethnic, political and religious boundaries to obstruct clear vision on the matter of human rights - t his struggle is global since violations and injustice are also global - DS The families of those killed during the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown have accused Beijing of subjecting them to nearly three decades of “white terror” in a bid to stop them speaking out about the massacre. In  an open letter , (see below) published on Wednesday ahead of the 27th anniversary of the protests, the Tiananmen Mothers campaigning group said its members had been spied on, detained and threatened by security agents as part of attempts to cover up the killings. China’s Brave Underground Journal - Remembrance Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years on June 4, 1989 - ...

If all the components of a wrecked ship are replaced and restored, is it fundamentally the same ship? The question is Theseus' Paradox — the thought experiment about identity, originally recorded in the late first century and poignantly captured as recent as in Anand Gandhi's 2013 award-winning film Ship of Theseus. The dilemma of 'who am I' in the absence of one's ethnic community and in a conflict-ridden society, led a Srinagar based organization to investigate, for the first time, whether Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley, were really who they thought they were two decades ago. Pandits claim to be the aborigines of Kashmir and boast of a rich cultural heritage and ethnicity. Around 3,00,000 Pandits were driven out, most of them in 1990, with the eruption of Islamist separatist insurgency in Kashmir. As of now, there are only 2,765 Pandits (651 families) left in 192 places across the Valley. Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (KPSS), an organization of Pandits, ...

Noam Chomsky ,  The Responsibility of Intellectuals   ( 1966 ) IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in  Politics  on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terro...

Jason Rhodes - In Service to Scarcity: The Pursuit of Value as the Production of Poverty from Insurgent Notes : Journal of Communist Theory and Practice Preface:  While the left has had little success in developing a critique of capitalist value capable of informing either radical organizing strategies or an anti-capitalist narrative which reaches a popular audience, the conventional assumption that manifestations of economic value are reflections of social utility has escaped critical examination.This essay argues that exploring the roots and subsequent development of capitalist value theory over the course of the nineteenth century reveals a Janus-faced project:on the one hand, the development of a popular narrative which insists upon the “natural” inevitability of the scarcity which both backs value and precludes socialism, and on the other, an esoteric discussion of the need to channel the labor-power of society in directions that maintain the scarcity of the goods for wh...