Opinions

From the blog “Fuera de Lugar” (Out of Place) of publico.es:
Interview with Ali Abu Awwad, by Amador Fernández-Savater and Juan Gutiérrez. Made in the framework of the meetings “Positive peace: a possible challenge” (8th June 2010, Bilbao).

Shahzad Chaudhry – “In India, we have a 74-year-old, feeble man, à la Gandhian mould, leading a popular anti-corruption movement against a corrupt political and business culture and within that challenging an unyielding political system. While in Pakistan, we only cry out the advent of a transformational moment but remain mired in introspective idealism.”

UK commuters face an 8 to13% increase in rail fares, well above the rate of inflation, whilst Stagecoach, one of the private rail companies, announces a return of £340m in profits to shareholders – including an £88m payment to two chief executives. Meanwhile the inevitable austerity driven “double dip recession” looms across major economies but the banks refuse to lend.

The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

The European Revolution news portal has published a summary of what’s been taking place in Spain for the last three months where people haven’t been so mobilized for generations. “Yet what is certain is that new and powerful social movement has been born here in Spain and it will continue.”

What does the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco have to do with the Arab Spring uprisings from Tunisia to Syria? The attempt to suppress the protests that followed. In our digitally networked world, the ability to communicate is increasingly viewed as a basic right. Open communication fuels revolutions—it can take down dictators.

Whilst the blame game about the UK riots rages in the national and international Media and the State uses the opportunity to get more draconian, punitive and discriminatory, we must keep an eye on the structural changes that the neoliberal agenda is introducing, even as we speak about those changes being the root of the problem.

To speak of nonviolence obliges us to review what we understand by violence. The great backing received by the 15-M movement in Spain is due, apart from their demands, to the fact that their actions and protests are peaceful and non-violent. Nevertheless, we still don’t know very well what nonviolence as a methodology of social struggle is.

Bryan Farrell, a New York based writer and contributor to wagingnonviolence.org gives his view on the English riots and what MLK might make of it all, “It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.”

In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co, although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go