Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Syria is the Middle Eastern Stalingrad

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Syria is the Middle Eastern Stalingrad

Click here to access article by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook.

It is always the ultimate question that we humans at various times in our life must face. To paraphrase the great bard, "in the face of outrageous fortune whether it is better to fight or to submit and wait for another day."

Everything that individual humans enjoy is dependent on so many other humans both living today and those unknown billions that came before us. It is the ultimate and selfish betrayal of this fact so well articulated by Margaret Thatcher who justified her capitalist class serving policies with this statement: "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families."

The will to resist against "outrageous fortune" has been eloquently expressed by others such as Martin Luther King who said:

And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.

Or Mario Savio who said:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

And as Vltchek reminds us, when the people of Stalingrad faced the evil of being enslaved to the ultimate selfishness of Nazi barbarism, they rose up against overwhelming force and fought to the death to preserve their lives and human dignity.

And so it is for the Syrian people.