This week:

1. Asian floods
2. Ice Ice Baby
3. Hot pockets
4. Bread ban
5. Phytoplankton apocalypse
6. Intergalactic pimp
7. Under Pressure
8. If I was president

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The final piece from END:CIV is both a reality check and a call to arms. Can we really expect the power structures to change their destructive ways by asking nicely? Do we have unlimited time to stop the destruction of the planet? The answer to both questions is no. If we are serious about defending the biosphere and abolishing the institutions responsible for the hyper exploitation of the land, we have to become a resistance movement and go beyond “feel good” symbolic actions.

Music by stig inge oy. and Omar Torres

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Where you won’t find dharma: in the pseudo-intellectual, nationalistic, self-congratulating middle class of India (and anywhere else this exists).

The Mahabharata is probably my favourite epic of all time. It is the quintessential Hindu myth that explores the universe through one story. It’s so in-depth that you can’t read it; you have to have it read to you, or see it as a play or on television even. It’s so steeped into south-Asian culture that you can’t even italicize the title because it works its way into everything; the Mahabharata is no longer just a single piece of art (not to mention that there are different versions of it).

It was the kind of art I had in mind when I visited Kerala this summer after seven long years. Seeing the vibrant political climate was something else in the state that has been doing everything a little bit differently than the rest of the subcontinent.

I was also quite ecstatic to read a bit on national/inter-state politics from Arundhati Roy within her essays entitled Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy.

A lovely read it was, on the nature of India’s budding new entrepreneurs (a motley crew of politicians, officials, businessmen and media moguls) that stop at nothing to turn anything into an opportunity to make money. Of course, money isn’t really made; it’s just transferred. In this case, transferred to those mentioned above from the coffers of the not-so-opportunistic.

The latter get instead to be called threats to the state; and as marauding mobs call for vengeance, public works are privatized and under-the-table dealings take place.

Let’s be specific: Roy here is talking about the 2001 “bomb” attack on the Indian Parliament house, and the collusion, co-opting and miscarriage of justice that occurred in penning the blame on the usual suspect(s) (as well as some other cases such as the more recent 2008 Mumbai attacks and the ongoing tension in Kashmir).

Roy calls it pretty well: unmasking the show of religious fundamentalism that sets groups against one another as companies and their government lackeys profit from the underlying deals. This sort of tamasha is nothing new, but has a distinctly Indian flavour to it, with the involvement of some very radical hate groups such as the RSS.

Now, as I was sneezing my way through the little shop in Cochin where I’d just grabbed the last copy of the above-mentioned tome, I also came across a book called The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by the man seen smiling in the following picture - Gurcharan Das.

I couldn’t help but pick up the thing and leaf through it. It seemed very promising, especially since it vowed to go through a substantial portion of the longest epic poem in the world, the Mahabharata, in search of the dharma mentioned in the title.

And what a journey! I’m always cautious of former businesspeople that have suddenly found spirituality; I cannot begin to list the number of con-men who have written about lessons the business world can learn from Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Tao. Das, however, hit a different vein altogether.

Gurcharan Das looks at the main characters of the epic, and what they represent in their searches for dharma, which for the sake of this post can be summarized as doing good within the realms of one’s duty (without going into much detail, the Mahabharata is about a massive war over the throne of one of the kingdoms of the sub-continent).

I won’t be writing this from the literature-geek perspective, but from one looking at global migrant and anti-capitalist struggles. I do this because Roy (obviously) and Das (not so obviously) talk about the same.

Das especially relates his lessons from the Mahabharata to what he says are the biggest issues in India, such as the Desi version of Enron as well as the dicey situation involving Naxalites and northern separatist movements. He categorizes them all as people who are not practising dharma.

Before I go on I should note one of the strangest things about the Mahabharata, which is that even though it centres around a massive war, everything stops when time comes to discuss questions regarding philosophy and morals. For instance, the Pandava side uses trickery to shoot down the aforementioned Bhishma in battle, and then sits around discussing whether doing so was dharmic. Just imagine if activists had done the same during the Heart Attack march here in Vancouver after the first rubbish bin got knocked over.

Das makes some very important points, which I’ll cover here. The first has to do with an ongoing debate by leftist protesters about tactics, in which pacifists always relate to their great hero Gandhi (my man Stimulator has addressed this very well, as have I to a lesser extent). In response to the pacifist dogma about Gandhi, many have pointed out that Mahatma was not entirely a pacifist, and sometimes wholly anti-feminist and quite racist. Most importantly, there was a violent end to the means of his non-violence.

In this, Gandhi’s taken a bad rap: the victim of deification by his own supporters in the west. Das’ revolutionary bit of thought to the idea of struggle here is that Gandhi’s fight was within the specific context of a time and place that cannot be found anywhere else. I.e. he chose a method of resistance that spoke against the British occupation of the sub-continent during the 1940s. To try and take his tactics and transplant them to Vancouver (or any other place in the world, including India) in the 2010s is counter-productive because the oppressor and environment of oppression is different.

Das’ second important point similarly is about struggle, but addresses giving up. Recalling the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, he is appalled at the lack of resistance (though it did exist) on the part of those taken to these places and eventually put to death. In light of the resistance I have seen in the Middle East (not just on the side of the Palestinians, but everywhere from Berber-held Saharan Africa to Iraq), to separatist struggles all over south Asia, to here in North America, the Holocaust stands as a monumentally dark period in history. The genocide itself being horrifying, the lack of fighting on the part of those that became victims is especially a lesson worth learning from.

The very last point worth addressing regards a small word that means a lot: envy. Das takes a look at the many forces at work “against” India, such as the Naxalites fighting for freedom and Arundhati Roy criticizing the government’s internal security policy (specifically her thoughts on the 2001 Parliament attack). He attributes these challenges to people who are envious of what everyone else has. He goes further to peg all communists and related persons as jealous wankers; particularly those who advocate wealth/land redistribution.

Das mentions that he was once a socialist himself, but gave up such a way of thinking the moment he realized that a country as large as India needed the saviour that is capitalism. He further chides East Bengal and Kerala for having communist state governments, and for being generally backward.

He did not just call my home state backward. The state with a 100% literacy, the only place where every election is not likely a scam, the one state where I see less beggars each year outside the churches instead of more zhodapathis. Just because there aren’t a bucketload of towering high-rises, Das cannot see “progress.”

Das’ words were something particularly that I had in mind as Canada and Vancouver got ready to welcome 492 Tamil refugees this month to the country. By “welcome” I mean process them with the likelihood of making them stay in prisons in the Fraser Valley. Much of the rhetoric against their being allowed to stay has been cautiously set around having to share milk and honey with “illegal” immigrants who might be “terrorists” (evidence on their guilt being supplied by the war criminals at the head of the Sri Lankan government).

See, Das has one terrible habit and that is that he refuses to think outside the box when it comes to this great unevenly divided world. The idea of separatism in his mind is the anti-Christ; anything other than a unified India is filthy. And CEOs individually are to blame for their crimes; the system itself is not rigged to disenfranchise the poor. Ideas such as gond Maoism, separatism and radical land distribution just cannot exist in his mind because he cannot see outside of capitalism.

His narrow-mindedness is puzzling considering how much out-of-the-box thinking comes through in the Mahabharata, especially when it comes to the idea of dharma. At the beginning of the great battle that begins the Bhagva Gita, Arjuna, champion of the Pandavas, looks at the legions before him and out of sheer pity puts down his weapons, refusing to fight because of the carnage that would occur. Krishna, who is somewhat his charioteer and cousin and also God (not just a god, but pretty much the creator of the flippin’ universe) tries to cajole him to fight, finally showing to him his true form, with every animal in the world being swallowed into his bright face and all kinds of other awesome things a human cannot do. Arjuna realizes then that the universe has a path, and decides that fighting can be done with dharma.

In the same way, I’m finding dharma in radical anti-capitalist movements, whether they be No One Is Illegal that is fighting to make sure the Tamil refugees are treated as human beings, or the many many many ethnic and religious separatist movements within and against India. These are not merely symptomatic but vital indicators that the system as it is does not work, and that a different world is possible.

I’d like to end by returning to one of my favourite things about the Mahbharata: that the characters can actually stop in the middle of everything to assess the consequences of their actions. As I said, a battle sometimes stops mid-stream when a hero falls to the trickery of another (usually Krisha, who is the ultimate trickster). This is something that does not happen in real life. The Get Off the Fence protest in Toronto against the G20 did not stop mid-stream so detractors could give their thoughts on diversity of tactics. I often think about the heroes of the Mahabharat sitting around discussing each major event just after it happened; for all their talk, no one in the epic really got to define dharma, which is a let-down after the many many verses you sit through. At the end of it all, we know just one real thing about dhrama: that it’s subtle.

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This Week:

1. Butt Pluggers
2. Orwellian Decoder Ring
3. Enbridge’s giant metal cock
4. M.E.N.D. is back
5. Rioting Irish in Belfast
6. Russian forest defense
7. Lolita Lebrón R.I.P.
8. Meet me in the basement
9. G20 arrestee report

Join subMedia.tv this month in Vancouver and Victoria for a couple of special events.

1. Global Premier of the next motherfuckin sedition @ 12th & Clark in VanShitty
Sunday August 8th @ 8pm @ 12th and Clark FREE

.

2. Outlaws in the Fort: Fundraiser for G20 prisoners
and Forest Action legal defense.

August 20 at 7:30pm @ Fort Street Cafe in Victoria

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Some of the most celebrated social justice victories of the 20th century are attributed to the great pacifists of our time, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This constitutes a historical whitewash, as these “victories” were achieved when the state weighed its options and chose the lesser of two evils: the pacifists. In this segment Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Aric Mcbay, Harjap Grewal, Gord Hill and Peter Gelderloos deconstruct the Gandhi myth and show us why militant action plays an important role in movements of resistance.

Music by stig inge oy. and CJ Boyd

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This week:

1. Free the prisoners
2. Oscar Grant Riots
3. US military buildup in Latin America
4. The barefoot bandit is caught
5. Ode to Cha-Cha
6. Arresting video ninjas

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After getting lost a bunch of times in the new suburban neighbourhood my parents moved to, I took a look around and saw/heard the same crap as last time. Recession, increasing crime rates, mega-corporate partnerships, and so on.

Having recovered from the shock of being served by an European at a restaurant (recession all over the place), I decided to write a few short stories summing up some of my favourite conversations and experiences here. These are all unfortunately true for the most part.

Suburban Legends

“I never want to go out again,” said Anthony Uncle as he sighed the door shut behind him. In almost one fluid move he removed his shirt, hat and watch to reveal his houseworthy benyan sleeveless under-shirt.

“Why not, Uncle?” I asked cautiously, wishing to goodness that my friend, his son, would wake up so that we could leave.

“Bloody mess this place is. International City, some shit.”

My friend and his parents lived in a part of International City, a development outside of Dubai that was heralded as the prototype for boroughs. It was self-contained, themed and as with all of New Dubai had not lived up to its promises.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, knowing that he was anticipating step-by-step questions.

“Arey, I knew this place was going to hell when they started turning off the street-lamps,” Uncle replied. “Then all the tamasha started happening also. First, some two rival pimps were fighting each other. Two months ago they found the body of some eastern European prostitute in the street, just lying there like some rubbish. Then some children – I think they were Chinese na – vomited in school and they found the bones of another child in the stuff. They ate some girl. Sick.”

“Here?” I asked incredulously.

“Where else?” Uncle brushed back his white plumed hair and walked into the kitchen. He continued in a louder voice that could reach me all the way on the couch. “People can’t even walk the street decently anymore. And then? Cops will take so long to come here if you call them; we’re so far outside Dubai.”

“Ahem. What happened today?” I tried to keep things on track and talk loudly so that my friend would wake from his kung-pao-lunch-induced slumber.

“Oh let me tell you.” Uncle swished to the doorway and looked at me, concurrently taking off his gold chain with the large crucifix. “Just taking a walk I was today near the other side of the City. Some black guys were walking around there. Have you noticed all these Nigerians now in the place? So scary man; so strong and they get angry very quickly. Then, Jesus Mary and Joseph, I saw these big bushes. I just started thinking, ‘What if they kill me and throw me in the bushes? No one will even see for many days until the smell comes. Bloody maintenance crews left after they stopped getting paid.’”

I sat fazed for a while. Uncle waited patiently at the door, switching his gaze between me and the rosary next to the door.

“Ahm,” my friend just barely snorted.#

“Oh you’re awake,” I declared, grabbing his sleeve and moving toward the door.

4X4s Are Not Meant for Cities

I sit at the wheel of a machine far too big for me. As I start it up Slipknot screams through six speakers at me. My brother’s choice.
My baby brother, a foot taller than me and now in high school, sits in the passenger seat next to me in a blazer. It is forty-nine degrees outside.

Thrummmmm. I had woken up to the loud sound of a guitar not two feet away from my face. Opening my eyes, I had seen my brother standing in front of me with white gloves on. Having watched too many serial killer films, I had expected some kind of elaborate death at that point.

Instead I gun the 4X4 out of the parking garage, still groggy with the time change.

“Don’t take the bridge,” says my dad from the back seat. “I didn’t put Salik on the Pajero.”

“Why?” I ask, shifting gear to get ahead of the overstuffed minivan ahead of us.

“I will not pay for two Salik accounts,” declares my dad.

My father is a curious man. He is a formidable presence that constantly distracts itself. He is never one for revolting against systems, though he will complain.

I had seen a curious change in his being on the current visit home, having spotted him sitting at the dining room table with an ominous syringe. I had questioned why a man with type two diabetes needed insulin shots when he could control his blood sugar with an adequate diet.

“If I eat I die; if I don’t eat I die,” he had pontificated.

I look at him with one eyebrow raised. He raises one eyebrow back. “What?”

“This Salik is a scam anyway. Stupid toll to cross Sheikh Zayed Road. I’m not paying it on two cars.”

“But everyone has Salik. Even the illegal taxis.” I honk loudly at a Lexus trying to take my lane on Emirates Road, and speed up.

“Not everyone,” my dad whispers, looking out of the window at a speeding Porche.

“What do you mean?”

“I have a group against this Salik. We all refuse to get it.”

“How many people?” I ask, looking at him instead of the taxi driver pleading with me to come into my lane.

“Two thousand,” he says, his face enveloping into a cat-grin. And a website. Bypasssalik.com.”

“You don’t know website design,” I say. “You need me to change the printer ink every time I’m here.”

“I hired the man who cleans our house to do it.”

“That Dinesh is multi-talented,” I muse, faking the machine to the left to scare a Corolla that had been driving twenty below the speed limit. “Do they know you have Salik on the other car?”

“No need for them to know such small details.”

“Two thousand people, hmm?”

“I have a list of signatures, names and passport photocopies.”

“Oh, that’s a formal club then. Where do you keep these two thousand passport photocopies?”

“They, em, disappeared when the old house burned down.”

“It didn’t burn down. We just moved to Muhasainha,” I press.

“We’re here,” he says.  “Take your brother to school now. I’ll be back from the meeting by midnight.”

I realize that he is not going to the mall that I had dropped him at, but instead the police headquarters opposite it.

The Life and Times of Mohammad Ketchup

“What do you think is the worst thing about this place?” Hashim asked as he exhaled thick white smoke into the clear air.
“Fucking goats everywhere,” Mohammad replied, looking around the cafe outside which they sat. “That harami over there just tried to eat my new cargo pants.”

The goat in question looked at the two, knowing it was being watched. A ripped Styrofoam cup dangled from its mouth.

“No, not Buremi,” Hashim said, shaking the mouthpiece of his shisha. “Dubai.” Hashim was as wiry as a human being could be, gaunt with a shock of brown hair. He was as always dressed neatly in a kandura and shumagh that with a cap underneath. He had just raced through the border in his Range Rover, having completed classes just an hour ago. Within three weeks he would find out that he had failed all his classes bar one.

“Long list there,” Mohammad replied. He thought through the gentle bubbling of the double apple shisha. His left hand trembled slightly, having injured itself as he jumped out of a moving Jeep whist duning in the desert. He would go to the doctor only after having worsened the problem through the week, and then find out that he was suffering from a terminal form of cancer.

“Apart from the cheap food that makes you fat.”

Mohammad laughed. “Yes.” He returned to pensive pose. “But the worst thing about that city? Everything is artificial, mainly. People also. And you feel like dirt if you’re not local or white.”

“You ever notice how people are always hustling there?” Hashim suddenly found something remarkable in the dirt in front of them, and furrowed his brows at it.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean all the time, people are trying to sell you something. Sell themselves.”

“There’s a big prostitute population yes.”

“Not just that.”

“Then?”

“You remember we went to school with this guy Salah?”

“Yeah yeah. Fat guy.”

“That’s an understatement. He was the size of a whale. He works now with some petrol company, only I don’t even know what to believe since he lies through his teeth. First, he called me to ask if I wanted to go to his wedding, and then asked me to help pay for it.”

Muhammad almost fell off his rickety plastic chair laughing.

“I know, what an asshole, right?”

“Ha, yeah.”

“He then contacted – you remember Ahmad Rizwan – on Facebook after, what, now ten years and invited him to the wedding.”

“Oh I know where this is going.”

“He asked Ahmad on his wall, where everyone can see it, to bring money for the wedding.”

Mohammad coughed smoke out of his nose and laughed at the same time. It took him a full five minutes to be able to speak. “Oh Salah,” he finally said. “What a right idiot.”

“But it’s everyone here that’s like that. All these damn projects they have that are supposed to be the next big thing in business. Even their relationships are based on profit.”

“Thank god I’m going back west soon,” said Mohammad. “You should get the fuck out of here too.”

“Soon,” Hashim said. “Y’ani soon,” he reaffirmed.

“And we should get back to that god-forsaken place,” Mohammad continued, getting up.

“Yeah, shisha’s dead,” Hashim agreed.

Mohammad was already walking towards his car, keeping one eye on the goat. Within a week the goat would be in a stew to be presented at the wedding of the shisha shop owner’s youngest daughter.

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subMedia.tv has obtained a highly stylized DVD by that appears to have been produced by the Israeli Defense Forces and leaked to us via youtube user @gangreentv. The video has plenty high tech computer graphics to explain the IDF’s position regarding the events surrounding the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

The video is in Hebrew but the source that leaked it to subMedia.tv told us:

The IDF claims that their soldiers were stabbed, axed, and shot at. But despite their multi-million dollar multimedia production and all of the footage that they stole from the journalists that they arrested, they produce no evidence for any of this. They claim to have been shot at, but can produce no photos or videos of injured soldiers, no firearms (except for the captured soldier’s gun that was never fired), no spent shells, no gunpowder on activists’ hands, nothing.

In light of the international outrage and Netanyahu’s weak backpedalling to at least appear to express humanitarian concerns, new audio is added to demonstrate this. If this was indeed said at that time, why wasn’t this audio released at the beginning of the propaganda war, in the days that followed the capture of the flotilla?

The IDF claims that “the activists shot first”. But for all of the video’s “play-by-play” style, it does not specify when these supposed shots were first fired. It also does not specify when the soldiers shot supposed “paintballs” and when they shot actual bullets. Instead of being revealed, the truth is obscured.

They also say the soldiers were attacked, and that they then “returned fire”. But returning fire implies that they were fired upon. So why not say, “The soldiers were fired upon, and then they fired back”? This is either because they were never fired upon, and they just want to imply that they were, to justify their own usage of live bullets — or else
because they were in such a panic at not being able to easily round up the “evil” activists, that they didn’t even know what was going on, and they were just firing live bullets indiscriminately.

When the three captured soldiers are released by the activists, two of them abandon ship and swim towards their dinghies… they abandon the third soldier, who is left on the deck of the Mavi Marmara! That’s not exactly what I would call “courageous comradery”. By reading between the lines, we can deduce that despite their best efforts to obfuscate the truth and present themselves as humanitarian and professional, the IDF come off as brutal scoundrels.

[Is this propaganda piece the best that billions of dollars in annual military aid could come up with? We're only cash-strapped amateurs, and we picked it apart in minutes!]