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Beyond the Walls
Here we are. It’s the middle of February, and we’re
still in the midst lockdowns and alarms, missing our normal lives. We
could probably all use some sunshine and some cheering up, and surely Other Voices is up to the challenge of providing that?
Absolutely. Sunshine and warmth? You’ll find four items
about Gaza and Palestine in this issue. Gaza? Yes, Gaza. Gaza has
sunshine, as well as its share of beauty, humour, and giggling children
playing amidst the rubble. As Zainab Wael Bahseer writes in “ Gaza City, an unusual beauty”, by carrying on with eyes and ears open, “we teach life.” Her article appears on “ We are not Numbers,” the featured website in this issue, created for Palestinian youth to tell their stories to the world.
In “ Postcard from a Liberated Gaza”
Hadeel Assali joins other writers and activists in imagining a
post-pandemic, post-occupation Gaza where people drink coffee by the sea
and share stories.
Sameer Qumsiyeh, meanwhile, sets out from Palestine,
travels to places (not many) which will accept a Palestinian passport,
copes with all the additional restrictions of a pandemic, and makes a
film, “ Walled Citizen.” His goal in making the
film, Qumsiyeh says, was to create “a picture of how things can be if
you can transcend walls and barriers.”
From Palestine, we continue on to Kashmir,
a territory blessed with many apple trees, and oppressed by a military
regime which, like its counterpart in occupied Palestine, has been
destroying trees by the thousands as part of a strategy of making it
impossible for indigenous people to live. Largely cut off from the
outside world, Kashmiris nevertheless also continue to live, and to
teach life, in the land they are rooted in.
In India itself, people must try to find a way to keep
living in the face of poverty and a pandemic made more difficult by a
government that is worse than useless. “ Online classes, offline class divisions”
tells the stories of students in the Ambujwadi slum in north Mumbai who
are trying to manage online learning using borrowed and shared cell
phones while continuing to work to help their families survive. Serving
customers who come to your vegetable cart while simultaneously
continuing to pay attention to what the teacher is saying is part of a
normal day for these young people.
John Pilger takes us behind the walls of Belmarsh prison, where Julian Assange continues to be imprisoned even after
a court rejected an American extradition request. Watching the trial,
Pilger says, was like watching a Stalinist show trial. Although, Pilger
points out, at least in a Stalinist show trial, the prisoners were able
to stand and face the court directly. Assange was imprisoned behind a
thick wall of glass, and could only communicate with his lawyers by
crawling on his knees to a slit in the glass to pass out a note, on
yellow sticky notepaper, which would then be passed along the length of
the courtroom to where his lawyers were sitting. Pilger reminds us that
Assange’s “crime” is to have “performed an epic public service:
revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our
governments and the crimes they commit in our name.”
Leonard Peltier remains locked up in
the American prison where he has been held for more than 40 years,
convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. The International Leonard Peltier
Defense Committee continues to work for his release. A film about his
life: “ Warrior: The Life of Leonard Peltier” is the featured film in this issue of Other Voices.
The featured book is Viktor Frankl’s “ Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything,”
written in 1946 not long after he was released from Auschwitz. “As long
as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious,” says Frankel,
“we are each responsible for answering life’s questions.”
Life asks us to laugh, love, live, and struggle.
Ulli Diemer
As always, we invite you to share this newsletter with your friends. You can forward this email, or send them the link to the Other Voices home page on the Connexions website at www.connexions.org/Media/CxNewsletter.htm. Please consider sharing it via social media.
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Journeying to freedom in a closed-off world
Bethlehem filmmaker Sameer Qumsiyeh recognizes
the irony of releasing a new film about trying to backpack with a
Palestinian passport amid a global pandemic. Palestinians like Qumsiyeh
know only too well what it’s like to be under lockdown or prevented from
traveling, hemmed in by walls, checkpoints and bureaucracy, themes he
tackles in Walled Citizen, which chronicles
three years of Qumsiyeh’s life in which he travels to Europe, the Canary
Islands and Ecuador, as well as parts of the West Bank. Read more
Keywords: Palestinians - Filmmakers
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Eyewitness to the Trial and Agony of Julian Assange
John Pilger watched Julian Assange’s extradition
trial from the public gallery at London’s Old Bailey. He writes: “The
prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I
have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due
process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with
'British justice', at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show
trial.” Read more
Keywords: Show Trials – Whistleblowers
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Online classes, offline class divisions
“Sir, a few customers are here. Can I attend to
them please? I have my earphones on, I will be listening to you.”
Students living in the Ambujwadi slum in north Mumbai are struggling
with online classes, using borrowed and shared cellphones, while also
working to support their families after their parents'
already-precarious incomes were hit by the lockdown and its aftermath.
Read more
Keywords: Working Poor – Children
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Kashmiris outraged as authorities fell thousands of apple trees
Indian authorities have been cutting down
thousands of apple trees, a major source of livelihood for the Gujjar
tribal community in Kashmir. Nomadic groups such as Gujjars and
Bakarwals have had their houses and orchards targeted as part of the
wide-ranging “eviction and anti-encroachment drive” across the disputed
region of Kashmir, the Indian-administered side of which was stripped of
its special status last year. Since then, the local administration, now
directly under New Delhi, has changed land and domicile laws in an
effort aimed at bringing about demographic change in India’s only
Muslim-majority region. Read more
Keywords: Kashmir – Trees
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Gaza City, an unusual beauty
Zainab Wael Bahseer writes: “Gaza is different
than most other places, so its beauty is different. We have been under
siege since 2006, survived three aggressions that destroyed much of our
infrastructure and saw blood stain the sand of our beaches. But we rose
from the ashes -- and that has a beauty of its own. I see beauty in the
kids who play happily on the rubble of destroyed houses, showing the
world we will not give up -- that ‘we teach life, sir.’” Read more
Keywords: Gaza – Bookstores
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Website of the Week
We are not numbers
When the world talks about Palestinians living
under occupation and in refugee camps, it is usually in terms of
politics and numbers – specifically, how many killed, injured, homeless
and/or dependent on aid. But numbers are impersonal, and often numbing.
What they don’t convey are the daily personal struggles and triumphs,
the tears and the laughter, the aspirations that are so universal that
if it weren’t for the context, they would immediately resonate with
virtually everyone. This website was set up to enable Palestinian youth
tell the human stories behind the numbers in the news. Find them here
Keywords: Daily Life - Palestine
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Book of the Week
Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything
By Viktor Frankl
In 1946, having survived Auschwitz, but having
lost his mother, father, wife, and brother in the Nazi death camps,
Viktor Frankl sat down to write a series of lectures. These have now
been published in English for the first time, under the title Yes to
Life: In Spite of Everything.
Frankl writes “Everything depends on the
individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded
people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action
and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in
his or her own being.” ... “Life always offers us a possibility for the
fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has
a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made
meaningful ‘to the very last breath’; as long as we have breath, as long
as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s
questions.” Read more
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Film of the Week
Warrior: The Life of Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier has spent more than 40 years in
an American prison for a crime he did not commit. The Canadian
government, in its typically craven manner, agreed to extradite Peltier
on the basis of fabricated evidence while mouthing platitudes about the
‘rule of law.’ This film, produced and directed by Suzie Baer in 1992,
remains a powerful statement and provides a vivid picture of man and his
fate.
See it here. For more information about Leonard Peltier and the ongoing efforts to win his release, visit the website of the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee
Keywords: Miscarriages of Justice - Political Prisoners
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Organizing
When they say jump
Job action, says this Toronto Transit Commission
maintenance worker, has to come from the bottom up, not from the top
down. Unions as organizations are constrained by laws limiting or
prohibiting job action. Only workers acting collectively can organize
effective job actions. Read more
Keywords: Workplace Organizing - Direct Action
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Postcard from a Liberated Gaza
A piece of fiction published as part of +972’s
New Futures project. In this series, writers, thinkers, and activists
share how they visualize Israel-Palestine the day after the pandemic, as
a way of transforming this dystopian moment into an exercise in radical
imagination of rethinking through the past, present, and future of this
region, and envisioning a different reality for all those living
between the river and the sea. Read more
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From the Archives
The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books
They were known as the “book women.” They would
saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and
through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to
Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities. Atlas Obscura presents a photo
essay about these women. Read more
Keywords: Books – Libraries
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People’s History
The Memory Code: how oral cultures memorise so much information
Aboriginal peoples’ oral traditions are not only
highly detailed and complex, but they can survive – accurately – for
thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. Part of the explanation may
be that the human brain has evolved to associate memory with place,
with a location. Read more
Keywords: Collective Memory - People's History
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February 14, 1949
The Asbestos Strike
Miners walk off the job at four asbestos mines in
Quebec’s Eastern Townships, near the towns of Asbestos and Thetford
Mines. The strike is declared “illegal” by the capitalist courts, and
police and strikebreakers are brought in. Workers eventually return to
work in June, but many do not get their jobs back. In the longer term,
pay and working conditions improve in the mines as employers seek to
avoid similar confrontations. The strike becomes a huge issue in Quebec,
and leads to increased political awareness and upheaval in Quebec
society, helping to open the way for future change.
February 18, 1946
The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny
Royal Indian Navy mutiny, a turning point in the
struggle against British rule over India. It starts when Indian sailors
based in Bombay harbour go on strike against the British. The strike
becomes a full-fledged revolt, encompassing 78 ships, 20 on-shore
facilities, and 20,000 sailors in various ports. Though the revolt is
eventually suppressed by force by the British, it becomes a decisive
factor in the British decision to grant India independence. Realizing
that it can no longer rely on colonial troops to enforce their rule over
India, Britain concludes that it is better to make a deal with the
bourgeois pro-independence organizations than to risk being overthrown
by a popular uprising. The revolt also frightens the mainstream
independence movements, who are working towards the partition of India,
because it succeeded in unifying Hindus and Muslims in a common cause
outside their control. Mohandas Gandhi issues a statement condemning the
strikers for acting on their own without the “guidance” of their
“political leaders” and calling their actions “unholy.”
February 20, 1914
Rosa Luxemburg on Trial
Rosa Luxemburg addresses the German court which is
trying her for having given a speech allegedly instigating soldiers to
disobedience. She was charged for having said “If they expect us to lift
the weapons of murder against our French or other foreign brothers,
then let us tell them, ‘No, we won't do it!’”
Speaking to the court in her defense, Luxemburg
says “We are of the opinion that wars can be waged only so long as the
working class takes part in them with enthusiasm, because it regards
them as just and necessary; or at least patiently puts up with them...
On the other hand, when the great majority of the working people come to
the conclusion... that wars are a barbarous, deeply immoral, and
reactionary phenomenon hostile to the interests of the people, then wars
will become impossible.”
The court sentences Luxemburg to a year in prison for her criminal utterances.
February 21, 1848
The Communist Manitfesto
An obscure German-language printshop in London
prints 1,000 copies of a 23-page political statement issued by a small
revolutionary organization called the Communist League. With the whiff
of revolution in the air, the manuscript has been hurriedly written by
two young members of the League, 29-year-old Karl Marx and 27-year-old
Friedrich Engels. In that spring of 1848, revolts start to break out
across Europe. The original press run rapidly sells out, and the
pamphlet, known as the Communist Manifesto,
is quickly reprinted and translated into other languages. It goes on to
become one of history’s most influential and widely-read political
statements.
The Manifesto combines a vision of the total
overthrow of capitalist society, and its replacement by communism, with a
willingness to ally with other progressive political groups, and a
series of short-term demands, including the confiscation of land held by
wealthy landowners, a heavy progressive or graduated income tax, the
abolition of the right of inheritance for capitalist property, and free
education for all children.
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This issue was edited by Ulli Diemer.
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