Just two brief alerts here:
ON THE GREEK RIOTS promises to report on its blog today concerning today’s mass demonstrations planned across Greece today, with an anarchist assemply currently taking place in the Athens Polytechnic. Demonstrations and riots in Greece have continued, more sporadically since Christmas, and this January 9 mobilization has been planned for at least a couple of weeks now. Also, check Twitter for any updates as people post them from Athens.
Also via Twitter, PALESTINE NEWS offers a news feed on events on Gaza, very rapidly updated. Their news feed now appears at the right on this blog, and can be accessed separately here as well.
To better follow reports on Twitter from tweeters located in Gaza, see this comprehensive list from Jillian C. York.
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Gary Baumgarten
9 January 2009
We’ll be discussing the Israeli invasion of Gaza from perspectives on both sides of the divide Monday and Tuesday January 12 and 13 at 5 PM New York time on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com with Israel’s Consul General in New York Asaf Shariv and Hussein Ibish, executive director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership and senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine.
Please go to http://www.garybaumgarten.com and click on the Join The Chat Room button to speak with Shariv on Monday and Ibish on Tuesday.
Thanks,
Gary
Maximilian Forte
9 January 2009
Thanks very much Gary, what a big pity that I personally won’t be around at that time on those days to hear it, but hopefully others will. Many thanks for posting the notice here.
Graham Candy
10 January 2009
Forgive me for my ignorance, but is the arc of events carried out in these demonstrations and riots similar in a way to the French riots in 2005 both in the triggering event and the movement of the public actions through time? It appears to me on the surface (as someone who has not read in-depth on the riots) that it looked to follow the same general time frame of the riots in France in 2005. These riots also slowly escalated from a single event into large scale public and sometimes violent actions into their second week, followed by a slowdown into a much smaller scale and less ‘intense’ action as they passed about one month since inception. Could we suggest that bearing, having not read much, the /relatively/ checked response on the part of government forces (i.e. not full scale totalitarian dispersal of crowds using extremely violent measures), that demonstrations such as these will apparently slowly lose intensity and, in the end, not result in any sort of really significant social/political change (understanding that the governing party of Greece only held of a tenuous majority in any case).
In any case it seems, as perhaps a somewhat apathetic reader, that these events always bring about a surge of emotion and interest in me and, in the end, leave me wondering if it is all a bit of flashiness in an already very entrenched political system. I think it was seeing the protests in downtown Montreal today and reflecting back on the stunning and massive protests before the Iraq war began, that made me get this kind of gut feeling of bitterness and dismissal of the events at hand.
Maximilian Forte
11 January 2009
Thanks very much Graham.
The Greek situation might be different, I am not sure yet, and I think the main actors themselves are not sure yet since actions are still ongoing, but not with the same intensity as before. I think the comparison you made is a very good one, and I share the exact same sense that you do about the purpose and impact of these protests. I always hope that they help to build up courage and momentum in the protesters, and I think any sense of disillusionment with the outcome might also be a good thing as long as it doesn’t turn into apathy and withdrawal (which it did for me too at one time). At the time we were leading one rally after another in Toronto against U.S. imperialism in Central America…and then when the Sandinistas lost the elections in 1990, one of their high profile ministers said “the cycle of anti-capitalist revolutions has closed,” and I thought, “then f–k you, and thanks for wasting all my time and energy, you formulaic Marxist moron.”