Remembering a Comedian

Many times communists have a quite insular culture where we fail to give mention to mainstream cultural artists or phenomenas which aren’t quite directly in our range and aims. Here at Good Morning Revolution, we like to remember the work of George Carlin, a comedian from a an Irish catholic family from Morningside Heights (jokingly referred to by him as “White Harlem” for its proximity to Harlem). His comedy is marked for its scathing criticism of white American culture and life, political authority, corporations, and religion. It was also just fucking downright funny. So we post up the first part out of seven of George Carlin’s last show.

What about the Maobadi?

[This is a repost for something which I put up on the social networking site Facebook. It was basically a frustrating letter and note to friends within mostly the New York Student Activist scene to begin looking toward Nepal and whats happening there. I repost this up because Mike Ely has posted a brilliant essay, entitled Eyes on the Maobadi: 4 Reasons Nepal's Revolution Matters, which we will post on this site June 10th, 2008]                              

 

I tend to sit at my computer, googling for the news and updates about what is happening in Nepal over the current political struggle between Maoists, their growing coalition, and the other parliamentary parties who are set to try to win as much as possible if not sabotage the process of creating a coalition government under the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), a Party who won a great plurality of the historical elections, which surprised the international community. It has been over ten years of People’s War, which saw around 10,000 people lose their lives, over two years of political struggle since which saw the fascist feudal King Gyendera fall from power and beginning of desolution of the Monarchy. There is a real struggle for the path and future of over 25 million people in Nepal, and yet my Google news search results only get the international news from the Hindi Times or Kantipur Online. Unbelievable.

How is it we in this country here nothing of what is happening? How is it there is almost an unspoken silence of the struggles of South Asia? Of course there is a failure here of the media to report, no questioning, we hear nothing of the truth in the struggles of the people in Latin America, in Palestine, etc. We know this as just the Chomksyian unspoken rule of the media, it is general knowledge. This is not what makes me flinch, its the fact that the Left is unquestionably silent on it. We still get more reports on Chipas (a struggle, that for all honesty, has stagnated and is losing its base.), on Tibet and all its Oriental mystique attached, and even on the need to defend China (Party for Socialism and Liberation is promoting a book on the need to defend tarnished “socialism” in China.). There are a few notable exceptions like Revolution in South Asia blog and Learn from Nepal project.

I am astounded of why this is, whats with the silence? First it has to be laid on the feet of the fraternal party of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) for creating an atmosphere of ignorance of whats happening in Nepal, that fraternal Party being the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. It is an absolute shame that you can’t even pick up The Worker #11 [11th issue of the theoretical journal of the Nepali Maobadi] at the nearest Revolution Books near you. It also goes without saying that the very tactics and methodology of the RCP is motive enough for many to be turned off from the Maobadi in Nepal, the Naxalites in India, armed struggle in the Philippines. But it also on the heads of the general Left, for all those who speak of politics of liberation and aren’t acknowledging the most thorough-going and radical Revolutionary Movement in more than two decades.

If you want to get a grasp of the emerging world economy, how can we ignore South Asia? Nepal is a country, that has been a semi-colonial outpost of India. It is a a source of cheap labor for the developing economies in Qatar, the UAE, in the cities of India (remittances are a huge part of the Nepalese economy). Men go into these countries as guest workers, often paid well below the national minimum, others are recruited into the Indian armed forces. There is also an incredible amount of human trafficking of Nepalese women into prostitution in India. It is also a country deep with the contradictions presented in the Global South of developing emerging urban centers, alongside great shantyization of poor communities in the cities or near them. It is coupled with the deep backwardness of rural peasantry with the emerging Industrial agriculture throughout South Asia.

What is more bothersome is that there is from this not even the willingness to postulate what possibly can be a new South Asia. Why isn’t it accessible to us, the fact that India (the largest “democracy”) practices holistically a policy of repression of political revolutionaries [imprisoning and murdering], and puts into policy a Hindi-chauvinistic oppression of the various national minorities that compose the country? Why isn’t it well known that half the states of India have active revolutionary parallel states in rural areas, that national oppression is being fought with national liberation by the various ethnic minorities, that the Naxalite uprising of 1969 hasn’t died, but has intensified. That the Maobadi have united in many areas and are actively fighting the militiarist police state in West Bengal? In Andra Pradesh? In Jarkhand? Whats happening in Bengal? Whats happening in Bhutan? We would be surprised to learn the truth isn’t the typical good-will story development perpetuated by NGOs’.

To not begin even looking at the developments of Nepal shows the utter routine that the “Left” of this country has gotten into, how we are so stuck in our models, or have already set our verdicts. This goes for everyone from the A’s to the C’s.