The left need to resolve a handful of strategic questions for greater success.
Justin Podur
Justin Podur is a writer and editor for ZNet (www.zmag.org), part of Z Communications, an alternative media organization dedicated to political analysis and support for movements for social change. He has reported from Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Israel/Palestine, and Mexico. He has also written on South Asia and North America. He has written for Z Magazine, Frontline (India), New Politics, New Left Review, rabble.ca, and other publications and is part of the Pueblos en Camino collective (www.en-camino.org). He runs a blog (www.killingtrain.com). He is based in Toronto.The Afghan War diary data -- an initial look
Wikileaks allowed us to map Afghan war deaths. A pattern has emerged.
Related rabble.ca story:
The Afghan War diary data -- an initial look
An initial look at the first 76,000 records in the "Afghan War Diary" leaked by Wikileaks yields some important information, much of which has been known or suspected by analysts for years. Given the sheer size of the database, there is a great deal more to be learned, but here are some initial findings.
Casualty data
The first impression is one of an extremely lopsided war, like all wars of occupation, where occupied casualties are vastly higher than those by the occupier.
The G20 debacle
What it might have looked like inside the fence
Hosting the G20 in Toronto was the first of a series of political gambles by the Conservative Canadian government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. At a time when U.S. President Obama, leader of the world's greatest debtor nation, was seeking additional stimulus money and therefore deficit financing (something the previous regime of George W. Bush was no stranger to), Harper's Conservative Finance Minister and delegate to the G20, Jim Flaherty, was advocating austerity.
A progressive dialogue on the future: Six questions for leftists
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Leftists don't spend enough time or energy working on important strategic questions. If we could resolve a handful of these, even tentatively, and try out some solutions, we would be far more successful. Here are six from my list of the most important questions, as well as my answers, which by their very incompleteness and inadequacy should suggest that more people should work on them.
1. How not to be marginal.
Marginalization is not some kind of strategy to counter radical politics, but instead it is a defining feature of our society.
Uribe in Ottawa: Pushing FTA and smearing human rights activists
In my question/answer about the Canada Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA), I cited a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization that has a board with people like George Soros, Kofi Annan, Richard Armitage, Louise Arbour, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Ernesto Zedillo on it -- not exactly raging radicals, in other words.
Stalled but not dead: Update on the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA) was withdrawn from the table while being debated for its second reading in Canadian Parliament on May 27, 2009. Stalled for now, the CCFTA will certainly be back: it has not been defeated, and its proponents (the Conservatives and some of the Liberals) await an opportunity to bring it back.
The following set of questions and answers are intended to help those in Canada trying to stop the CCFTA (or see to it that it stays down).
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the CCFTA represents "modern economics". Is this true?
Sri Lanka: Finishing the work of the tsunami
The Sri Lankan military now -- as of May 16, 2009 -- controls virtually all of the territory that was once controlled by the Tamil Tiger (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE) insurgents. The Tigers have suffered military defeat after military defeat over the past few years.
A reply to Ignatieff on Israeli Apartheid Week
Michael Ignatieff, sometimes described as Canada's "Prime Minister in Waiting," is sometimes falsely accused of justifying torture. He is actually much more sophisticated. He is willing to consider torture, and thinks that people, like him, who are against torture should be honest with themselves that this might be a costly decision. He wrote in Prospect in April 2006.
Turn off the Canadian media, please
If national media help make a nation, then we all need to stop reading and listening to conventional Canadian media if we want to make a decent Canada. Benedict Anderson, perhaps the leading scholar of nationalism, wrote that the daily newspaper (along with other innovations like novels, maps, censuses, museums) played a key role in creating national consciousness.
