Jacobin Magazine: Bangladesh’s Incomplete Revolution

East Pakistan faced what amounted to internal colonialism. Economic exploitation extracted millions annually, and the Pakistani government still heavily discriminated against Eastern citizens. Badruddin Umar, active during this time in the East Pakistani Maoist movement, wrote that “the slogan of Independent Bengal had begun to be raised in the streets of Dhaka, especially by the workers belonging to the leftist students’ organisations during the 1968–69 movement. At mass rallies, demonstrators chanted Joi Bangla (Long Live Bengal) and called for Krishok-Sramik Raj, “rule by peasants and workers.” [...]

Though the East had stronger left-wing traditions than the West, Communist parties failed to lead the mass movement or profit from the elections. One reason for this was that both the most dynamic parts of the Left and Pakistan itself had strong ties to Mao’s China. Most left-wing forces were in some way influenced by Maoism, and the government maintained friendly relations with China as a counterweight to their shared rival, India. Because of Ayub’s “objective anti-imperialist characteristics,” much of the Maoist left did not oppose his regime and avoided making demands that might weaken Pakistan’s position in relation to India, including self-determination for the East. [...]

The pro-Moscow left was much smaller, but it enjoyed disproportionate representation in the press and academia. In both halves of Pakistan, these leftists focused on restoring parliamentary democracy so single-mindedly that they became almost indistinguishable from liberal forces. In the East, Soviet sympathizers supported self-determination but were little more than an appendage of the AL. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies.

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Jacobin Magazine: Why Israel Kills

Palestinian nonviolent protests have an additional virtue. They internally divide Israeli society rather than unite it in hatred and violence, strategically undermining the efficacy of Israel’s favorite political glue: anti-Arab racism. As I write, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has launched an unprecedented campaign for Israeli soldiers to refuse illegal orders to shoot unarmed protestors. [...]

First: occupied Palestinians have tried unarmed resistance before. The first intifada, in 1987, was, in Edward Said’s words, “one of the most extraordinary anti-colonial and unarmed mass insurrections in the whole history of the modern period.” An entire society mobilized itself and self-organized not only to counter Israeli domination and occupation but to actively build alternative self-governing structures as well. Women, students, teachers, and workers formulated independent modes of resistance (strikes, demonstrations, tax boycotts, etc.) that allowed them to counter Israel’s stranglehold over their lives. Workers realized the Israeli economy was massively dependent on the cheap labor of Palestinian migrants, giving them leverage over Israel’s occupying society. Israeli peace activists, following the lead of Palestinian activists, actively organized against the country’s occupation regime. [...]

Second: the failure of the first intifada and the Oslo Accords generated a groundswell of political cynicism. While governing elites profiteered, the overwhelming majority of occupied Palestinians experienced deteriorating socioeconomic conditions. Settlements grew, closure intensified, freedom of movement was internally and externally restricted or blocked. In these desperate times, the only way many Palestinians felt they could directly get at their occupiers (which had left the big cities in the hands of the PA’s repressive security apparatuses) was violently — through suicide bombings. Palestinian factions began fetishizing such armed resistance. Organized individual martyrdom increased. Though this violent tactic blasted Israel’s security-with-occupation policy, it ended up harming Palestinian society itself and its international image. Israel’s state terror was unleashed even more harshly, in sync with the global fight against Islamic terrorism after 9/11.   [...]

Lastly: if Oslo divided Palestinian society, Israel tried to stoke these divisions into violent eruptions through its security coordination with the PA (fighting Palestinian resistance factions) and through its policy of isolating Gaza and separating it off from the West Bank. Fueling Palestinian conflict ultimately led to Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2007 and its banishing of the PA’s security apparatus. The schism persists more than a decade later. Hamas is on one side, carrying the old mantle of armed struggle abandoned by Fatah (the PLO’s ruling group) in 1988; Fatah is on the other, carrying the mantle of endless bureaucratic diplomacy and concessions.

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Al Jazeera: Has the Kurdish independence movement failed?

She says the KRG did not expect the "unsophisticated" reaction to the referendum by the US and Europe. "With every statement they made against the referendum, they were emboldening our neighbours and Baghdad to think the Kurds were alone and that they could punish us." [...]

According to Rahman, Baghdad continues to cut off the region's budget and has left them to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and to accommodate 1.8 million displaced people and Syrian refugees.

While she says there's been some improvement in the relationship with Baghdad in recent weeks, Rahman also argues that the budget issue and Iraq's failure to establish a federal and pluralistic democracy is what led to the KRG's pursuit for independence. [...]

When asked whether corruption and nepotism, particularly among family members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party President Masoud Barzani, are to blame for the lack of progress in the independence movement, Rahman says "people know who they're voting for". She says "many people are proud of their record. Many people look up to them for leadership."

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Independent: Slavoj Zizek - We need to examine the reasons why we equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism

This joke turns around the standard argument against critics of the policies of the state of Israel: like every other state, Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticised, but some critics of Israel misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for antisemitic purposes. When today’s Christian fundamentalist supporters of Israeli politics reject Leftist critiques of Israeli policies, is their implicit line of argument not uncannily close to the caricature from Die Presse? [...]

There should be no “understanding” for the fact that, in many, if not most, of the Arab countries, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Hitler is still considered a hero, the fact that, in the primary school textbooks, all the traditional antisemitic myths, from the notoriously antisemitic (and forged) book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the claims that Jews use the blood of Christian (or Arab) children for sacrificial purposes, are attributed to them. [...]

When any public protest against the Israel Defence Forces activities in the West Bank is flatly denounced as an expression of antisemitism, and – implicitly, at least – put in the same line with the defenders of the Holocaust, that is to say, when the shadow of the Holocaust is permanently evoked in order to neutralise any criticism of Israeli military and political operations, it is not enough to insist on the difference between antisemitism and the critique of particular measures of the State of Israel – one should go a step further and claim that it is the state of Israel which, in this case, is desecrating the memory of the Holocaust victims, ruthlessly manipulating them, instrumentalising them into a means to legitimise present political measures.

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Salon: My Tinder date in Thailand: What a vacation fling taught me

In the moment, it was hard to understand the rush of emotions we were both experiencing in such a short period of time. We reached a level of openness that would usually take months to get to back home. In a week’s span, we found ourselves living together, sharing a bathroom, and arguing over what to eat for dinner. We had a morning routine. Daniel described the speed of our romance as a relationship bootcamp. I felt like I’d found myself in an arranged marriage. One night, we sat on a dimly lit porch watching the mosquitos dance to the music we shared with each other. Daniel liked heavy metal jams, and while I never grew an affinity for that genre, I considered adding them to my Spotify playlist for him.

Perhaps our expedited relationship was a consequence of heightened vulnerability travelers are plagued with regularly. On the road, you’re forced to take down the walls you’ve built around yourself, cemented by your own fears and insecurities. Daniel and I couldn’t hide behind our jobs, friends, exes and self-imposed expectations during the usually drawn-out indecisive dating phase. Our relationship lived in a parallel universe where the unfolding of intimacy wasn’t bound to the constraints of time and preconceived milestones. It also wasn’t tied to a committed future. We had the freedom to move with whatever came our way, unattached to the anxiety of the future and the responsibilities of our past.

I found this all very exciting. I liked being able to be myself, but also an idealized version of who I wanted to be, with someone who didn’t know the me from back home. He had never seen me with my hair straightened, or with makeup on. He had never seen how I laughed with my closest friends, or how I dealt with stress from the demands of everyday life. He only knew the free-spirited, backpacker me — a version of myself that felt right in the moment, but wasn’t exactly conducive to Western society, or so I thought. [...]

In hindsight, a part of me wished I had never followed Daniel to Vietnam and then to Cambodia. A part of me believed he was right in being reluctant of intimacy. If we had left our affair in Thailand, I told myself, our memories together would have been warmer. I would have always thought of him as “the one who got away.”

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The Washington Post: Decoding dreams: 6 answers to what goes on inside the sleeping mind

Another part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which controls our powers of both logical reasoning and decision-making, is also shut down. I don’t stop to question why the floodwater is rising so fast, or why I’m back in my childhood home, or even why flying to safety is an option.   [...]

Incidentally, many people have wondered if in REM sleep our eyes are moving to “look” at dream images. Some evidence suggests that this is indeed the case. [...]

Some analyses of dream content suggest that women dream equally about men and women, while men are more likely to dream about other men. Michael Schredl, of the Central Institute of Mental Health, in Mannheim, Germany, has documented dream reports showing that men often dream about fighting other men, while women will dream more often of friendly interactions with people. A couple years ago, Christina Wong and colleagues at the University of Ottawa, wrote a computer program to differentiate between the dreams of men and women. The program correctly predicted the gender of the dreamer about 75 percent of the time. This suggests there may be gender differences in dreaming — but for now it’s too soon to say why.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Time: The History & Future of Everything – Remastered