Quotes of the day - women who lead the struggles

“In today’s Greece of human and social disasters, all those who rush to the defence of the torturers and their inhuman policies (media, political parties, the establishment, corrupt politicians, occult circles of power, employers’ unions and even Mafiosi) play the most diabolical sexist cards to the limit, as never before, to smash the action of women who lead the struggles against austerity policies and the debt system, who defend migrants, refugees, the environment and the many victims of the currently applied barbarous policies.”*

- Sonia Mitralias, “Sexism and Austerity in Greece: the Rampage Against Zoe Konstantopoulou”

“Il est très important de montrer ce qui s’est vraiment passé en Grèce et de révéler le vrai rôle qu’ont joué les banques, les politiques menées et les politiciens corrompus, les représentants des institutions, dans cette affaire de la dette grecque. C’est celle de la victimisation de toute une population, de la marginalisation de générations innocentes par ceux qui veulent toujours que leurs crimes soient payés par les peuples et les sociétés. …À mon avis, la Grèce devrait non seulement revendiquer l’abolition de la dette, mais aussi des réparations pour les dommages provoqués par cette politique criminelle contre la population.”

- Zoe Konstantopoulou

“The people will thwart the plans of those who want to push them into a corner and impose bailouts against their will. The new generations know who betrayed them and will take initiatives to restore democracy in our land.”

- Zoe Konstantopoulou

* I disagree with the use of the adjectives inhuman and barbarous.

Zaytouna, kitty refugee

I needed this today.

Quote of the day – “They insisted on our surrender”

“Friends, I am not here today to drum up support for Greece’s crushed democracy.

I am here to lend the Greek people’s support and solidarity to France’s democracy. For this is what is at stake. French democracy. Spanish democracy. Italian democracy. Democracy throughout Europe. Greece was and unfortunately remains a laboratory where the destructive power of self-defeating austerity was tried and tested. Greece was never the issue for the Troika and its minions. You are!

It is not true that our creditors are interested in getting their money back from the Greek state. Or that they want to see Greece reformed. If they were, they would have discussed seriously our proposals for restructuring Greece’s public debt in a manner ensuring that they get most of it back. But they could not care less. They instead insisted on our surrender. It was the only thing they cared about. They cared uniquely about one thing: To confirm Dr Schäuble’s dictum that elections cannot be allowed to change anything in Europe. That democracy ends where insolvency begins. That proud nations facing debt issues must be condemned to a debt prison within which it is impossible to produce the wealth necessary to repay their debts and get out of jail. And so it is that Europe is turning from our common home to our shared iron cage.”

- Yanis Varoufakis, speech at Frangy-en-Bresse, France, August 23, 2015

Quote of the day

“You are in resistance in order to strengthen sovereignty, democracy and the possibilities of life. The global economic system must be transformed urgently and a new social contract created. As you said, may the people choose to exercise their sovereignty, for the present and future of Greece and of all peoples everywhere.”

- from letter to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras from Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nora Cortiñas, Mirta Baravalle, and Beverly Keene

Quote of the day

“It is wrong to ask Greece to commit itself to an old programme that has demonstrably failed, been rejected by Greek voters, and which large numbers of economists (including ourselves) believe was misguided from the start.”

- “In the final hour, a plea for economic sanity and humanity,” an open letter from Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, and other economists calling for the EU to work with Syriza on anti-austerity reforms

Tick tock?

GREECE: THE END OF AUSTERITY? from Theopi Skarlatos on Vimeo.

Syriza’s victory in Greece is potentially a huge turning point.

Anti-austerity, pro-democracy and justice movements are rising in Spain, where tens of thousands marched yesterday chanting “Tick tock” to count down the time that could be remaining for the dominance of the country’s traditional ruling parties, and it seems also in Belgium.

We shouldn’t forget that these movements represent only the most recent wave of opposition to austerity programs. These protests have been going on around the world, receiving even less attention and respect from the corporate media than those in Europe, for literally decades. Their success in Europe will hopefully contribute to the renewal or construction of links of solidarity with the millions of people in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean who’ve been defending their rights against Structural Adjustment for so long, often at great cost.

It’s also important to remember that these struggles are not just about policies and statistics but people’s lives, their pain and their possibilities. As Paul Mason reports from Greece:

The organiser [of a Syriza food bank] tells me: “This is the opposite of charity. We’re supporting 120 families in one area, and a lot of the work we do is about isolation, mental health and shame.” You cannot get more micro-political than sitting in a small room with desperate people and talking them out of suicide. Spin becomes impossible, the trust built hard to destroy.

Austerity policies everywhere create suffering, despair, fear, and hopelessness,* and opposing them can mean healing and health. Reading about the refugees of the Spanish Civil War in Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen is a harsh reminder of what’s at stake. Victories of the Left don’t inevitably lead to perfect solutions, but victories of capital and the far Right lead to the ruin of everything good.

* And I’ll reiterate once more for the record: these are NOT failed policies. No reasonable person could possibly believe, given decades of evidence of their effects, that they represent anything other than successful attempts to achieve the real goals of finance capital and the IMF, and no one promoting or implementing them can claim otherwise in good faith.

The far Right in Spain and across Europe

A couple of recent articles discuss the state of the far Right in Europe.

The first (marred somewhat by anecdotal and unsourced claims and references) focuses on Spain, but situates developments there in the larger context. Andrés Cala describes “a rising public nostalgia for the Franco era in Spain” forming part of “a broader resurgence of extreme right-wing ideology in Europe and globally” (I’ve briefly discussed Greece and Poland):

Renewed sympathy for fascism in Spain…stirs troubling memories because the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s was an early victory for European fascism. Spain also was the last European state to cast off fascism in 1975.

Another point of concern is that nationalist, populist and fascist movements have historically found fertile ground during times of economic pain, like that felt across much of the world since the Wall Street crash of 2008. In reacting to the financial crisis – and in grappling with the public’s anger over lost jobs and lost benefits – mainstream democratic parties have seen their legitimacy questioned and their political support drained.

In Spain – and to a lesser extent in some other European countries – the immediate danger is not so much from a handful of incipient reactionary movements, but rather from the underlying official permissiveness from more mainstream conservative parties, like the Popular Party, bordering on patronage.

…[T]he severe economic recession that spread across the world after the Wall Street crash – and the EU’s austerity-oriented policies imposed in response – hit Spain especially hard with the country’s unemployment rate soaring to around 27 percent. The loss of jobs and the failure of the democratic political structure to devise an adequate response created an opening for the rightists to revive nationalistic and other traditional cultural messages that had underpinned Franco’s politics.

Though the Popular Party is generally considered conservative – not extreme right – it absorbed the pro-Franco fascist “base” after that movement lost its political representation in parliament in 1982, seven years after Franco died. That extreme right now amounts to about 10 percent of the Popular Party’s constituency, according to some studies.

The numbers of far-right members are high enough so that the Popular Party is politically unwilling to chastise fascist sympathies and thus alienate a significant portion of its support. But the party is making a dangerous bet that the pro-Franco faction will not gain effective control of the Popular Party and thus fully hoist the banner of fascism again.

Police estimate there are about 10,000 Spaniards involved in violent extreme-right groups. But the concern is not so much over these very small violent groups. These are mostly contained, experts agree. The bigger worry is that Franco’s political heirs retain significant influence within the ruling Popular Party and – amid the euro crisis – they could gain greater political clout.

…In Spain, the chief concern is that an increasingly desperate public will be attracted to the historical glow that is being created around a mythical era of successful fascism under Franco.

“It’s true that this is not Greece or France, where the extreme right has become a political power,” Félix Ortega, a sociology professor and expert in public opinion in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, told me recently. “But you never know, especially if it seems that the PP tolerates it.”

This was especially disturbing as I read it at the same time I was beginning Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust:



The second article describes a plan to unite the far-Right parties ahead of the European elections:

Europe's far-right parties are set to contest next year's European elections on a common manifesto, according to French National Front leader Marine Le Pen.

At a press conference in the Strasbourg Parliament on Wednesday (23 October), Le Pen, flanked by Franz Obermayr of the Austrian anti-immigration Freedom party, told reporters that she was hopeful of persuading nationalist candidates from across the EU to run on the ticket of the European Alliance for Freedom (EAF).

Despite the comedic frustrations of holding together an assortment of racist nationalists,* even short-lived coalitions should be a cause for concern.

In this connection, I should note that white supremacist murderer and terrorist Pavlo Lapshyn has been sentenced to 40 years in prison in Britain:

Lapshyn found Mohammed Saleem, 82, going home after praying at his local mosque. The student approached him from behind and plunged a hunting knife into him three times with such force that one wound went through to his front.

Lapshyn's campaign began in April 2013, just five days after his arrival from Ukraine, where he had won a prize to gain work experience in Britain. When the PhD student was arrested in July, police found three partially assembled bombs in his Birmingham flat.

After Saleem's murder, Lapshyn started placing homemade explosives outside mosques on Fridays, the main day of Muslim prayer.

The device he planted in July, which had 100 nails wrapped around it to maximise the carnage, was aimed at worshippers at the Tipton mosque, where 300 were people were expected to attend prayers.

Prayers that particular Friday were held an hour later, thus avoiding mass casualties. The device was so powerful it left nails embedded in tree trunks, police said.

…After sentencing, Louise Gray, a lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service counter-terrorism division, said: "Pavlo Lapshyn is a dangerous man with a dangerous agenda. Just a day after his arrival in Britain from the Ukraine he was researching rightwing supremacist websites, including those linked to convicted racist murderers in Russia."

* The author mentions that

difficulties maintaining discipline and a failure to agree on common programmes have dogged previous attempts to unite the far-right.

The Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS) group was set up in 2007 but only lasted ten months before collapsing when three MEPs representing the Greater Romania party walked out in protest at inflammatory remarks made by Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the Italian dictator, about Romanian people.”

Argo see a Costa-Gavras film

So I had a chance to see the Oscar-winning [!] Argo recently. After hearing such good things about it, I was unpleasantly surprised and a bit angry. Assuming I couldn’t be the only person with that response, I googled. I had to do searches specifically related to racism and imperialism, but I found a few posts from the time it was in the theaters and the Oscar lead-up by people who had a similar reaction:

“Argo, F—k Yourself: This year’s worst Best Picture nominee,” Kevin B. Lee, Slate:

…Perhaps my disgust wouldn’t be as intense if it weren’t for the potentially great film suggested by Argo’s opening sequence: a history of pre-revolutionary Iran told through eye-catching storyboards. The sequence gives a compelling (if sensationalized) account of how the CIA’s meddling with Iran's government over three decades led to a corrupt and oppressive regime, eventually inciting the 1979 revolution. The sequence even humanizes the Iranian people as victims of these abuses. This opening may very well be the reason why critics have given the film credit for being insightful and progressive—because nothing that follows comes close, and the rest of the movie actually undoes what this opening achieves.

Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of revolutionary Iran, the film settles into a retrograde “white Americans in peril” storyline. It recasts those oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde, the same dark-faced demons from countless other movies— still a surefire dramatic device for instilling fear in an American audience. After the opening makes a big fuss about how Iranians were victimized for decades, the film marginalizes them from their own story, shunting them into the role of villains. Yet this irony is overshadowed by a larger one: The heroes of the film, the CIA, helped create this mess in the first place. And their triumph is executed through one more ruse at the expense of the ever-dupable Iranians to cap off three decades of deception and manipulation….

“Argo: film review,” Andrew Schenker, Slant:

…[T]he film becomes an increasingly blinkered tale of the heroic C.I.A. versus the Muslim menace, exactly the narrative that today's hawkish politicians love to propagate. It's astonishing how easily the film is content to give into what critic Jack Shaheen might call Reel Bad Arab syndrome, in which every Iranian face is either filled with hatred or suspicion. Granted, in post-revolutionary Iran, people were indeed filled with anger and hostility toward Americans, but Affleck's decision to portray this sense of fury—quite vividly evoked despite the director's distracting penchant for whip pans and arcing shots—not only seems increasingly misguided in a moment when mainstream outlets like Newsweek run headline stories unhelpfully declaring the phenomenon of "Muslim Rage," but seems to play exactly into the simplified us-versus-them narrative of the war on terror….

“‘Argo’ as Orientalism and why it Upsets Iranians,” Juan Cole, Informed Comment:

…“Argo” could have been a moment when Americans come to terms with their Cold War role as villains in places like Iran. It could have been a film about what intelligence analysts call “blowback,” when a covert operation goes awry. Instead it plays into a ‘war on terror’ narrative of innocent Americans victimized by essentially deranged foreign mobs.

…The film tells but doesn’t show some of the US atrocities in Iran. It shows the plight of the hapless US diplomats. In making that key dramatic decision, and then in Orientalizing the Iranian protagonists as angry and irrational, the film betrays its subject matter and becomes propaganda, lacking true moral or emotional ambiguity….

Lacking true moral or emotional ambiguity is putting it mildly. It takes the ax for the frozen sea within us, breaks the handle over its knee, and shapes the head into figure skates. A disappointing imperial thriller from Affleck.

Not to try to draw too stark a contrast, but Amy Goodman just interviewed director Costa-Gavras about his history of filmmaking and his new work, Capital:

Pavlos Fissas

Pavlos Fissas was an antifascist activist and rapper in Greece. He was stabbed to death a few nights ago by a supporter of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Here are two articles about Fissas and his murder:

• Joshua Stephens, “Anti-fascist Struggle and Race in the Face of Golden Dawn: A Greek Anarchist Responds”

• Leonidas Oikonomakis, “For Pavlos: The Antifa Rapper Killed by Golden Dawn”

The person Stephens interviews emphasizes that his murder shouldn’t be seen as special:

...[A] politician from Syriza was on TV today saying that Pavlos represents the first casualty of Golden Dawn. And he said that straight-faced, with no shame, as though the immigrants who’ve been murdered don’t count; as though Pavlos is somehow more of a person. And that sentiment is fairly widespread. I think a lot of people will be “shocked” today, as though this most recent event is some sort of a revelation.

Like a white body is somehow more jarring to the collective conscience.

Exactly. Why weren’t people equally shocked when Golden Dawn murdered a Pakistani [Shehzad Luqman] biking home from work? The only response came from anarchists and leftists. But maybe now people will finally listen. Maybe it’ll be like when Alexis Grigoropoulos was murdered in 2008. Police kill people all the time; that uprising happened because Alexis was someone people felt connected to.

And you think Pavlos’s visibility as a musician might provoke that same response?

Possibly. I don’t want to diminish anyone’s anger. I just find this “shock” a little repulsive, I think. A musician? A white male? It’s easier for people to identify with him than with nameless immigrants, but they’ve been killed by fascists, killed in detention centers, killed in police offices, and not seen such a broad response as Pavlos's murder has.

I don’t want to minimize the earlier victims of GD violence by talking about Fissas’ murder. Nor do I mean to reduce him to an abstract political symbol when I quote this portion of his friend’s tribute:

…[T]he rise of fascism in Greece is a direct result of the austerity policies that have driven the people here into extreme levels of poverty, marginalization and insecurity, providing fertile ground for the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn who promise them national glory in place for economic security.

The neoliberal austerity policies that have brought Greece to this condition are being imposed by the Troika of foreign lenders: the ECB, the IMF, and the EU, and implemented by the servile government of this country.

Both the Troika and the Greek government have chosen to turn a blind eye to the murderous actions of Golden Dawn. They know about it — it’s not that they don’t. But as long as the austerity measures are voted through Parliament and the debt is repaid, the Troika is happy. At the same time, Antonis Samaras’ ruling right-wing party views Golden Dawn supporters as “their own people”, and even the Prime Minister himself regularly adopts Golden Dawn’s hate speech, especially when it comes to matters of immigration….

It seems that his tragic death might be the beginning of the end for the Golden Dawn. I hope it is, but that doesn’t make the loss of this unique human being any less tragic.



(An English translation would be much appreciated.)

Psychiatric Inanity Disorder

I’ve become increasingly angered as NIMH’s reaffirmation of its commitment to biopsychiatry has sunk in, and reading The Body Economic only stoked that anger.

The book’s calls for evidence-based public health policy make the unscientific and ideological nature of the NIMH’s RdoC project all the more painfully evident. The decision to (continue to) pursue this course, shifting millions of dollars away from productive research and interventions, simply ignores the decades of evidence showing that the biopsychiatric model is invalid and leads not to helpful treatments but to ineffective and harmful interventions; it ignores decades of evidence pointing to the social-experiential roots of psychological distress and “madness.” Like austerity plans, it’s being imposed from above without even an attempt to justify it scientifically and against the vocal opposition of many of the people most directly affected.

And the fact that the government agency responsible for investigating and responding to psychological problems is declaring that the roots of these problems lie in individual people’s brains amounts to a political statement and a political project. As Stuckler and Basu discuss, there’s strong evidence – not that this should be a surprising or controversial claim – of the devastating impact of homelessness, poverty, economic insecurity, and the fear and stress caused by joblessness in regimes of austerity on people’s mental well-being (in addition, of course, to their physical well-being). More generally, the evidence for social-political factors, and especially victimization, in psychological problems is overwhelming.* Stuckler and Basu provide the data showing that austerity plans cause substantial increases in suicides, for example, while well-designed social protection programs prevent and even reduce them. Insel’s denial of this reality and his determination to try to locate the source of distress in people’s brains amounts to an apology for systemic problems and failures. It’s a project about propaganda – not science or public health.

Which brings me to my third point. This approach is just so…inane. I had to shake my head reading this (useless and trope-ridden) piece in Forbes. It describes:

…[Bruce] Cuthbert [director of the division of adult translational research at NIMH] says that the NIMH is already working on ways to build “crosswalks” between the DSM-V and its new RdoC diagnosis system, which is still barely sketched out.

Why change at all? Cuthbert gives the example of one symptom of depression called anhedonia, the scientific name for inability to find pleasure in normally enjoyable activities. On the one hand, this condition occurs in lots of psychiatric illnesses, including anxiety and eating disorders. We don’t know if it is neurologically similar in all of them or not. On the other hand, there are different types of anhedonia, Cuthbert says. Some people might go out to dinner with friends and not enjoy it. Others might be so down as to lack the energy to get to the restaurant in the first place, even though they would enjoy it once they arrived.

The NIMH’s strategy with the RDoC approach is to dis-entangle a diagnosis like this. If there were a protein or blood test or brain scan that fit with one type of anhedonia (people with eating disorders who are too tired to go out for instance), but not with the others, it doesn’t want to miss it. But this means taking the DSM-5 apart and re-assembling it through arduous experimental work. “It’s going to take a decade or more for results to bear fruit,” Cuthbert says.

Of course, it’s never going to bear fruit, and it takes a high level of willful ignorance to believe that it would. But aside from this, it’s just so inane. Reading the human stories in the news and in The Body Economic - especially the tragic and iconic story of Dimitris Christoulas - we can start to understand the political and existential meaning of suffering. Or we can do decades of silly research to find the proteins responsible for different types of not-wanting-to-go-out-to-dinner. Inane.

*And that’s not even touching on Erich Fromm!

Economic suicides

“Violence is to work 40 years for peanuts and to wonder if you’ll ever get to retire. . . . Violence is unemployment.” — Savvas Metoikidis, 44, who hanged himself in his father’s warehouse in Thessaloniki on April 21