China – taking steps

A while back a group of Finnish “anarchists” were about to hold a demonstration as a gesture of solidarity toward Chinese farmers. This was about to happen at the same time with ASEM 6 event in Helsinki, a gathering of East Asian and European nations.

Socialist and “Anarchist” groups oppose Capitalism. What makes the whole thing absurd is that the Chinese farmers are poor precisely because of lack of Capitalism – clear property rights enforced by the rule of law. Chinese farmers don’t rule their property as they would in a Capitalist society.

Another topic concerning China is child labor. A Finnish state owned news channel YLE recently aired a documentary about Chinese teenage girls who work(ed) at a textile factory. The documentary was touching. However, many people get the connection between child labor, industrialism and Capitalism wrong. The proportion of children working as child labor has fallen during the last few decades. This is because of economic growth which has brought in more money and more efficient means of production so that families and states can invest more in education and so that farms and factories can replace people with machines. Policies didn’t end child labor in the West – the Industrial Revolution did. The West didn’t just one day decide to let child labor go – we were able to let it go because of economic growth. If you ban child labor at an early stage of a country’s
development you hurt the whole population – potentially especially the children who may end up working as prostitutes (as UNIFEC studies have indicated) or working for black markets with even worse working conditions.

Liberal (or “Conservative” if you happen to live in the US and are all confused by the distinction between European and American liberalism) economic policies have pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty during the past thirty years. The reason why the Chinese countryside lags behind is Socialism. Individuals are ruled by community leaders – an ideal situation for the very “anarchists” who protested against the Chinese government. “Anarchists” don’t believe in property rights – they believe that their utopian community should rule the individual. Instead of protesting against the Chinese
government the “anarchists” should move to China’s countryside which is a step closer to their “anarchist” dream than our relatively Capitalist Finland is.

By no means am I praising China. China is still very far from being a free market economy. However, the markets have done a lot of good and will continue to do so. The Chinese society grows more open and it will become harder (as we are witnessing every day) for the Communisty Party to control the flow of information and new ideas that are spreading through the Chinese society as we speak. The leaders are also becoming more and more open to the idea of implementing a democratic system.

-Mikko Sandt

Earthquake in Pakistan: One Year Later

Exactly one year ago a massive and traggic earthquake hit Northern Pakistan, Kashmir, and parts of India and Afghanistan. This is a moment to simply pause, pray and ponder.

To think back on what has been done and what still needs to be done, I just compiled a quick list of some numbers of where things stand today. They make for a sobering read:

Total dead in Earthquake = 80,000 – 90,000
Estimated proportion of children amongst dead = 80 percent

Early recovery assistance pledged by international donors = US$ 255 Million
Early recovery pledges that have NOT been recieived yet = US$ 94 Million

Original estimate of long-term reconstruction costs = US$ 3.6 Billion
Current (updated) estimate of long-term reconstruction costs = US$ 4.4 Billion
Current estimated shortfall = US$ 800 Million

Total displaced by Earthquake = 3,500,000
Affectees still living in tents in camps = 35,000 – 40,000
At-risk families without permanent shelter = 60,000 – 100,000
Additional people who might need shelter this winter = 30,000 – 60,000

Estimated houses destroyed = 400,000
Estimated houses whose rebuilding has begun = 17%

On my blog – All Things Pakistan – we have been doing a series of posts remembering the tragic earthquake and highlighting all that still needs to be done. These posts also include a number of moving pictures. See: Here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Adil Najam

A Hindu Madonna

One surefire method of amusing yourself is taking a look at the kinds of searches that lead people to your blog. Amongst others, today I saw one that read “ganesha and madonna.” Curiosity took over, and I googled the phrase, frantically thinking that at some point in my foolish youth, I may have had something with Madonna during one of my blackout phases. Alas, no such luck. Not even the blog showed up.

But don’t fret, this post is not a total waste, because I did chance upon something interesting. It was an old 2003 article by Subhamoy Das on the Hinduism page at about.com. In particular, this article was titled ‘Hollywood Hinduism: Art vs. Morality’. And it was about all of the various ways in which Hinduism has been portrayed in pop culture by artists, actors and Hollywood.

For instance, did you know that Mike Myers once posed as a “cartoonish Hindu deity” (the image on the left) in the April 1999 issue of Vanity Fair? I’m not the first to talk about that one. SAJA has done its fair share of hashing and rehashing the issue through articles and online forums here.

Also, Aerosmith, the famed pop-rock (in my opinion) band, had a CD-issue with an image of Krishna on the cover, except that he had a cats face and breasts. After thousands of protests, Sony withdrew the CD.

And, last but not least, Madonna apparently came dressed as Shiva at the 1998 MTV Music Awards after which, India suddenly was hot amongst the fashionistas.

Ok, all of that is well and good, but what Mr. Das says right towards the end is what sparked my interest. He says,

…the entire concept of judging works of art is quite relative. It greatly depends on an individual’s aesthetic tastes, preferences, temperament and forbearance. Many people are of the opinion that art is a free creation of an artist, who has complete license to give art whatever form or sound s/he chooses. But is it morally right to reap creative benefits at the cost of maligning the cultural and religious sentiments of another sect? Therefore, it remains an open debate whether such depictions are OK by any standard. [link]

I agree. I’m still not sure whether I should be offended by these things. Firstly, it might be considered hypocritical since I myself, have taken on the pseudonym of a god. Secondly, having dabbled a little bit in the arts myself (printmaking, photography), I can see how one might feel compelled to use snippets of art from other cultures in their works. But, at the same time, Mike Myers’ photoshoot in Vanity Fair can only very, very loosely be called “art.” And, as for Aerosmith’s album cover, that was just designed to sell albums. Then again, one can argue that art is solely designed to sell itself. So that brings us back to square one.

Many people better than me have argued for as well as against this. And there’s still no consensus. So I guess the debate continues…

Note: This article is cross-posted on my blog.

The Great Ganesha

Reindeer Man

Earlier, I posted about the nutcase posing as a terracotta soldier in China in the name of art. Then, Erlkoenigs Tochter of kuriosa country alerted me to this article about another fruitcake in Norway acting crazy, yet again, in the name of art.

Reindeer Man is not another superhero. Nor is it even a man. It seems that in Øvre Eiker, Norway, residents started receiving mysterious objects in their mailboxes. They got Polaroid snapshots of a person in a reindeer suit, reading the newspaper in their garden. Håvard Fiskum, one of the recipients said:

“I was reasonably surprised when I saw what was in my mailbox. A person sitting dressed like a reindeer was sitting in the picture. He or she sat in a wooden camping chair reading a book in my garden,” Fiskum told the newspaper’s web site. [link]

And, here’s the culprit in action:

Turns out that the perpetrator was a woman, and an anonymous call to a local radio station from someone claiming to be her assistant revealed that she is an “action artist” and this is not even the first time she’s done something like this.

The reindeer woman is reportedly interested in action art and carried out a similar stunt in the district last year. In 2005, together with another woman, the artist appeared in a suit and white make-up and the pair posed with a tuba and violin in private gardens when the homeowners were away. A photograph of the scene was left in the mailbox. [link]

Keep ‘em coming, folks! I was going through a lull-period in my blogging anyhow. With more screwballs like these two, I’ll be busy all day!

Note: This is cross-posted on my blog.

Picture Source: Aftenposten

The Great Ganesha

It is yet to come…

… the day when Bush Administration will be seen as the major responsible factor for the escalade of violence in the last few years. The tendency begins to gain shape in the middle of the President’s propaganda, in spite of being now seen as Dick Cheney’s right arm, when the opposite would be expected. Still I don’t see George W. Bush as the idiot he appears; he’s a strategist, a follower of his father footsteps, which isn’t at all positive.

In relation to the geopolitical options of the Bush Administration i’m globally against them. I believe that fighting terrorism with terror is a foolish thing to do when aware to the international security; the mere existence of the so called ‘terrorist’ groups only makes sense when opposing to something, and that ’something’ is the attempt of democratization and occidentalization of countries where culturally reality is far different. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense that Bush affirms that he intends to end political exploration and despotism throughout the world when he only intervenes in the Persian Gulf naighbour countries, leaving aside serious humanitarian situations happening, for example, in North Korea and China, where a significant part of the population still lives in misery.

The interest isn’t necessarily in improving the international social well-being; it is, most of all, in reaching political-economic and imperialistic interests in arab land, where the ‘Islamic Revolution’ should long ago have had the effect of making the west know that it’s impossible to generalize regional political conceptions and ideologies to other parts of the world, where societies maintain other visions on life itself.

9/11 was no more than a clever answer from an islamic fanatic group to the imperialistic north-american pursuit. It isn’t strange that since then only Bush Administration supportive countries have been attacked. Totally reprehensible, the aerial attack gained, and continues doing it, all the mediatic attention to the war field. One forgets the unnecessary american attacks to islamic countries.

The unconditional support to Israel is another clear signal of the less importance attributed to the humanitarian side on the process. The israeli attack to Lebanon was a coward one and, even worst, it was left unpunished, which was expected from the USA but not in an international level, where the silenced UN revealed how americanized it is. The ‘until-the-war’ martirized people of Israel adopted, for the very first time, an offensive posture, which won’t be at all positive in a medium-term period. The arab naighbours don’t forgive the concession of the holy land to the jews, and that sentiment has, clearly, raised after the killing spree we attended motionless.

This post is cross-posted in my personal blog.

Rui Rocha

German Joins Chinese Army

The terracotta army, that is. A German art student disguised himself and hid amongst the 8,000 plus Chinese terracotta soldiers as part of an art project. He did it so well, even the police had trouble finding him!

“I got to the area where he was supposed to be, looked around and didn’t see him – he looked too much like a terracotta warrior,” Hong Kong newspapers quoted a security guard as saying. [link]

He didn’t harm anything or do any damage, so he wan’t arrested.

Now, if only we had more whack-jobs like him. I would have so much more to blog about…

Note: This is cross-posted on my blog.

The Great Ganesha

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons

Hi! I’m Mikko Sandt from Finland and the latest addition to World Community blog. Check my profile & blog.

(The following entry is actually a few weeks old but I was unable to post it due to not having an internet connection – so I apologize for commenting on old news)

A group of people marched for Israel some weeks ago in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Fine – it’s good to have some people marching in support of Israel’s actions on this day in history when it has become a habit to condemn every single thing that Israel does. But the thing is that almost all of these people were fundamental Christians and Jews who justify Israel’s actions by relying on Biblical arguments.

I don’t know which is worse – left-wing idiotarians marching against Israel or fundamental Christians marching for Israel. Both are doing what they’re doing for the wrong reasons.

Mikko Sandt

Children’s Machine 1 Ready To Ship Out

With a 500-unit field test ready to begin in September, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has announced that the much-anticipated laptop will be called Children’s Machine 1 (CM1). The Linux-based laptop is a remarkable achievement. Next to the new name some other changes were made. Manufactured by Chinese hardware company Quanta, the rugged, portable computer now features a 400mhz AMD Geode processor (the original prototypes had a 366mhz processor), 128MB of DRAM, built-in wireless support, and 512MB of flash memory for internal storage. Because of these changes, the CM1 will now cost $140 instead of the $100 price point the organisation was aiming on.

An Unlikely Unity in the Midst of War

Note: This article is crossposted on Sean’s Russia Blog.

Since the mid-1980s it is estimated that over a million Russians have immigrated to Israel. With a population of just over 6 million, this makes the Russian immigrant community a strong voting block in the Jewish state. Politically, they are considered a staple of the Israeli right wing.

But as Lily Galili reports in Haaretz, war can produce combinations that on the surface of Israeli politics seem unimaginable. At the head of Israel’s antiwar movement against the invasion of Lebanon stands Jana Kanapova and Khulud Badawi. Kanapova immigrated to Israel from the Ukraine as a young Zionist 11 years ago. Badawi is an Arab-Israeli resident of Haifa, which for the last month has been the target of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rockets (which were ironically made in Russia). Together they have been the leaders of the peace movement on behalf of the Women’s Peace Coalition and the Ta’ayush organization. An Arab and a Russian. The combination defies most assumptions about the politics of ethnicity and the ethnicity of politics in Israel.

The way Kanapova and Badawi view the war and Israeli politics in general is laden with feminist overtones. As Karapova told Haaretz, “The police sees Khulud as a natural threat. In the same exact circumstances, the police refuses to see me as a threat. After all, they also share the stereotype that there are no leftists within the Russians. Khulud will always represent a danger, I’m never a danger; Khulud is the demographic ticking bomb, I am the demographic hope. This is the exact same attitude that views both of our wombs as state instruments, and we will not give them that pleasure.”

The demographic problem and solution that both their respective communities represent to the future of Israel makes their struggle more than over policy and war. Theirs is also a biopolitical struggle over what their bodies represent to the present and future of the Israeli state. Israel’s “Right of Return” law has always had biopolitical elements. The hope is that immigration from the Jewish Diaspora will offset the rapidly growing Palestinian population. Israel’s battle for its future therefore is more than about guns and missiles. It is about the reproduction of bodies. But not just any body. It is about the reproduction of particularly Jewish bodies.

The biopolical analysis that both Kanapova and Badawi make is not the only unique quality about resistance to this war. In fact, it is difficult to say whether this consciousness of the body is the main logic behind the peace movement. However, the fact that the protest against the Lebanon war, unlike Israeli peace movements of the past, has been mostly headed by women inevitably throws issues of gender into the mix. “All the aspects of this war tie the feminist, social, ecological and class struggle closely to the ongoing struggle against the occupation,” they told Haaretz. “Women make this connection naturally. The old left, even that of ‘Gush Shalom,’ did not manage to connect these struggles. We did. The women’s social and political networks are also stronger. This war is taking place in our social arena, in our homes. As women and citizens, we produce an alternative feminine voice to oppose the militant male voice.” “This is a war of men fighting for their honor, both the IDF’s honor and Hezbollah’s honor,” concludes Kanapova. “Women are less into the honor thing. Russian women are instinctively aware that wars are men’s games. That is the society we grew up in, and we find it obvious.”

The significance of Kanapova’s and Badawi’s gender is not the only unique aspect of resistance to this poorly planned and ill fated Israeli offensive. Their respective ethnicities is what makes them attractive to the news. If they were two Ashkenazim, their presence and efforts on the Israeli Left would have perhaps been overlooked. Their presence allows for the peace movement to be conducted in three languages—Arabic, Hebrew and Russian–,and according to Kanapova, this has allowed her to engage, and even convince some in her community to oppose the war. The presence of Russian female activists has ballooned from three to 200. It has also led to more contact with Israeli Russians and Arabs:

In the past, Israeli Arab citizens avoided coming to demonstrations in Tel Aviv in the midst of war. At most they resigned themselves to a symbolic representation in the later stages of the protest. Their demonstrations against the occupation also usually took place in Arab towns. No more. This time, the Arabs were equal partners in the left’s demonstrations in Tel Aviv from the outset of the war. The thousands of Katyushas, falling on them as well, have toppled the old inhibitions. They do not see it as another Jewish war, but as a civilian war in which they have an equal right to speak out. Badawi says that they purposefully bring their voices to Tel Aviv, which they consider to be the Israeli capital.

Another kind of change is happening in the Russian-speaking arena. The community of Russian-speakers has long been considered the hard core of the Israeli right wing. The recruitment of a even handful for leftist Zionist demonstrations was always considered a great achievement. On this occasion, there exists a small but prominent and consistent presence of Russian-speakers in the radical left’s protests. The Arabs learn to shout out the slogan “Vayni nyet” (no war), and the Russian and Hebrew-speakers rhythmically call “Salam na’am, hareb la” (peace yes, war no.) It is safe to assume that these ties will remain long after the sounds of war fade away.

One hopes that they are correct.

Sean Guillory

Uncle Sam Meets Shyam Uncle

Note: This article is cross-posted on my blog.

Lately, I’ve been straying away from writing about current events, mostly because I’ve been quite involved with my own stuff. But when I read a short piece by Mark Thompson in last week’s Time magazine, it was time to come out of my shell. The article was about the U.S. Army recruiting in India.

Retired Brigadier General Kevin Ryan suggested in the Christian Science Monitor last week that the U.S. Army open a recruiting station in India–a big potential source of English-speaking enlistees. “Instead of waiting for these people to trickle in,” he says, “we could go out and find the ones we want.” [link]

So, off I go to the Christian Science Monitor and Retd. Brig. General Ryan’s article certainly proved an interesting read. He mentions:

If the US Army placed one recruiting station in the capital of India, an English-speaking democracy of more than a billion people, we would have available a pool of enlistment-age adults equivalent to the entire population of the United States – more than 300 million men and women. [link]

But wait, there’s more. If you’re a grad student or a semi-erstwhile grad student like myself, then this should definitely catch your eye. The Retd. Brig. General suggests that the Army doesn’t even have to go to India:

Or, if we don’t want to pay for a recruiting station in New Delhi, we could mail recruiting brochures to some of the 1 million foreign students who actually make it to America’s colleges and institutes on temporary visas each year. Perhaps they would like to have their school debts paid along with guaranteed work.

Almost the entire chunk of my graduate education was paid for through Assistantships, so fortunately I have no school loans to pay off. But if you’re ready to go and fight in Iraq, then by all means, go to GoArmy.com, the Army’s recruiting site and ask for info. As a lark, I signed up to get their information packet, not because I have the chutzpah to go to Iraq – and, don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for those who do – but just out of curiosity about how and when they award citizenship for recruits. I’m waiting to hear from them.

It’s funny though, because I remember that the US Army hired Indian cooks for Gulf War I, but this definitely is a new take on the whole thing!

Update: I just wanted to clarify that there is no recruiting center in India. The articles above only discuss suggestions by a Retired Brigadier General of possibly opening one some time in the future. And based on quotations in Time, it looks like it might very well become a real possibility.

The Army says it’s interested in the idea. “It has great promise,” says Major General Sean Byrne, the Army’s director of military-personnel policy. “We need to pursue it.” [link]

The Great Ganesha