Mediaboss Marketing

Since its launching in February 1998, the World Socialist Web Site has devoted a great deal of attention to artistic and cultural matters. We have reviewed thousands of worksfilms, concerts, plays, television series, novels, albumsand commented on artistic currents and problems out of a concern, above all, for the development of the social awareness and consciousness of the working class.

Marxists consider that art and culture play an immense role in shaping and broadening the outlook of the working class, sharpening its awareness of the injustices of capitalism, strengthening and refining the workers outrage and willingness to sacrifice and making more ardent their belief and confidence in the possibility of realizing socialism and building a society based on genuine social equality and solidarity. (Introduction to The Sky Between the Leaves, David Walsh)

Our attitude toward present-day cultural life is highly critical. Indeed, as a leading German socialist once explained, contemporary culture is the enemy of culture. Triviality, self-centeredness and social indifference largely prevail. Art, if it is to make a deep impact and endure, needs to turn its attention, by whatever means it chooses, to the great questions and convulsions of our day.

Follow this link:
Arts and Culture - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS

The Socialist Equality Group (New Zealand) will hold a public online meeting, via Zoom, on Saturday October 3 at 4:00 pm NZ time to discuss the upcoming election, the breakdown of capitalism and the socialist and internationalist perspective that the working class must adopt.

The global COVID-19 pandemic, which looms over the election, has the character of a trigger event in world history: it has greatly accelerated the processes of widening social inequality, the drive by the ruling class towards dictatorship and world war. In the United States, Trump is threatening to disregard the November election result, stage a coup dtat and unleash fascist violence against the working class.

The unlivable conditions created by capitalism are driving millions into mass protests and strikes, further fuelled by anger over the criminal negligence of governments that has led to nearly a million coronavirus deaths worldwide.

New Zealand is not in any way an exception. Contrary to the global media adulation for Labour Party Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, she leads a right-wing coalition government with the Greens and the extreme nationalist NZ First, which is overseeing soaring inequality and poverty. Workers have responded with a series of strikes including by teachers, nurses and healthcare workers, and mass protests against inaction on climate change and police killings.

The governments main response to the pandemic and the economic crisis has been an unprecedented transfer of tens of billions of dollars to the rich in the form of quantitative easing, bailouts, tax concessions and wage subsidies for businesses.

Billions continue to flow to the military to upgrade, expand and integrate into US-led war plans against China. Meanwhile, basic services, including hospitals, are being starved of funds, and unemployment is sky-rocketing to levels not seen in generations.

To divert anger over the social crisis, the government has scapegoated immigrants. Cabinet Ministers have spewed racist filth that echoes the manifesto of the fascist terrorist who killed 51 people in Christchurchan atrocity fuelled by decades of demonisation of Muslims and other immigrants and participation by successive governments in the criminal US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The election will resolve nothing. In their campaigns, the Labour Party and the opposition National Party, along with the minor parties, are seeking to cover up their real agenda with fraudulent platitudes about creating jobs and reviving the economy. Whoever wins, the next government will intensify the assault on workers living standards, attack democratic rights and ramp up preparations for war.

Workers and young people will inevitably be driven into revolutionary struggles. But this movement must be guided by a new perspective and leadership, independent from, and opposed to, all the established parties. Its conscious aims must be the establishment of a workers government, abolition of the profit system and the fight for international socialism.

The Socialist Equality Group, the New Zealand supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International, urges workers, students, young people and readers of the WSWS to register to attend our public meeting to discuss these vitally important issues.

Meeting times:

New Zealand time: 4:00pm Saturday October 3Sydney time: 1:00pm Saturday October 3Britain: 4:00am Saturday 3 OctoberIndia/Sri Lanka: 8:30am Saturday 3 OctoberNew York (EDT): 11:00pm Friday October 2

Liked this article? The Socialist Equality Party is fighting to build a revolutionary leadership of the international working class for socialism. Find out more about the SEP and get involved today.

See the rest here:
Public meeting: New Zealand's COVID election, the breakdown of capitalism and the fight for socialism - WSWS

Significant questions remain: Would the Taliban accept elections? Would they accept a coalition government? An elected parliament? In recent weeks, the Taliban leaders have revealed that they envision a religious authority at the apex of a future Afghan government if not the chief executive position, then a body with power to oversee the executive.

Peace negotiations will be strained on questions such as the Talibans refusal to accept the current share of womens participation in public service. Without the Taliban agreeing to a compromise on individual rights and freedoms, an agreement wont be reached.

In fact, the Talibans positions and attitudes stem from Afghan cultural norms as much as they do Islamic doctrine, which influences them in both strongly conservative and relatively progressive directions. The socially conservative views the Taliban espouse are common among rural Afghans, as well as a substantial share of urban educated youth.

Unlike other modern jihadist groups, the Taliban are not fixated on a literalist reading of textual sources. Their movement was born out of a combination of Islamic oral tradition and pre-Islamic cultural norms, and does not have a single ideological document. In fact, that absence of a definitive intellectual foundation in the Taliban has driven some of its more educated radicalized youth to join rival groups such as the Islamic State in Afghanistan.

The absence of core, rigid ideological texts might enable the Taliban to integrate into mainstream Afghan politics. There are many in Afghanistan who are deeply skeptical about genuine change in the Taliban and the prospect of future transformation. But there are no easier ways to test and build on those possibilities than through political engagement in the context of ongoing peace negotiations.

The evolution of the Talibans political thinking, though, is likely to be slow. Rushing the negotiations would risk producing an unstable result that only papers over the two sides differences; successful negotiations will require not only patience but also a more hands-off approach from other governments than they are usually comfortable with.

The shaping of the post-Taliban Afghanistan by the Western governments, primarily the United States, eventually turned out to be its vulnerability and undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of many Afghans. A new dispensation in Afghanistan will need the support of conservative elements of Afghan society if we want the long war in the country to finally be over.

Borhan Osman is a senior consultant on Afghanistan for the International Crisis Group.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Read this article:
Whose Islam? The New Battle for Afghanistan - The New York Times

When given a choice between security and freedom, people always choose security. That is why so many dictators and demagogues survive by creating a false sense of threat and then presenting themselves as the saviours.

The same logic applies when people are given a choice between safety and justice. They would choose safety over justice. In the case of Afghanistan, this has fed a continuous cycle of violence over the past few decades.

The absence of any legal consequences for violence and war crimes has only further emboldened armed groups. The release of Taliban fighters as part of an agreement between the United States and the Taliban and the continuing negotiations between the armed group and the Afghan government will not lead to peace. Only a thorough transitional justice process will.

The decision to sideline justice to supposedly maintain security and peace is not without precedent in recent Afghan history.

During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1987), more than 800,000 people lost their lives. The United States and several Muslim countries supported the mujahideens fight against Soviet forces.Both sides regularly committed serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law throughout the conflict. While the atrocities committed by Soviet forces were widely reported on, war crimes committed by the mujahideen during the same period were largely undocumented.

After the withdrawal of Soviet troops, infighting broke out between various mujahideen groups which led to more war crimes being committed. In February 1993, for example, the infighting between mujahideen factions resulted in the Afshar massacre, in which up to 1000 Hazara men, women and children were brutally murdered. Intra-mujahideen fighting lasted from 1992 to 1994 costing up to 50,000 civilian lives. It is this violence and upheaval that gave birth to the Taliban, which took over Kabul in 1996 and established an Islamic emirate. In August 1998, the Taliban executed between 2000 to 5000 civilians from the Hazara ethnic group in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

The 9/11 attacks on the US turned the odds in favour of the same mujahideen as the US-led coalition which invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 allied with them against the Taliban. In 2007, after a US-backed government was installed in Kabul, mujahideen leaders involved in the 1990s civil wars passed legislation in parliament granting them amnesty for their war crimes. The justification given for these laws was simple: if the international community and the government of Afghanistan tried to bring them to justice, the mujahideen would provoke more chaos and insecurity.

Hence, no transitional justice measures were carried out, thereby sacrificing accountability to maintain an illusory post-2001 peace. Suffering for more than two decades, the people of Afghanistan who were the primary victims of the mujahideens war crimes let go of justice in the hope of security.

The absence of a transitional justice process against the mujahideen emboldened the Taliban and reassured its members that there would be no consequences for their actions and they continued to commit ever more gruesome violence against the Afghan people. In other words, the impunity the mujahideen enjoyed did not really bring peace to Afghanistan.

This approach to war ethics is problematic, not only because it denies justice to the victims of the Taliban atrocities but also because it strengthens the Talibans capacity to prolong the war to achieve its goal of establishing a theocracy.

The release of thousands of Taliban fighters after the armed group concluded an agreement with the US on February 29 this year has been justified as necessary to jump-start peace negotiations. However, the odds are against any permanent peace in the country.

The Taliban will not give up violence because it knows that it is only through violent means that it can have any political power. Even with its enormous corruption scandals and its own track record of violence against civilians, the government in Kabul is still preferred by 92 percent of Afghans, according to a 2015 poll. Any impunity the Taliban enjoys will also motivate other groups to continue committing crimes against the Afghan people.

Because of this, calls are growing for the leaders of the Taliban to be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Nevertheless, Taliban leaders are unlikely to face the court soon. Not only the Afghan government and its international backers would be happy to give the members of the group amnesty should they agree to make peace, the US itself is not willing to allow the ICC to investigate the crimes its troops allegedly committed in the country.

Moreover, an ICC investigation at this critical junction risks undermining the ongoing Doha peace talks, as it may discourage the Taliban from agreeing to make peace. But there are ways to achieve some transitional justice without insisting on an ICC investigation.

The war crimes committed in Afghanistan in the last four decades by all parties can and should be officially documented. This would put an end to widespread attempts to whitewash history and force the perpetrators of these crimes to face some accountability. Following the documentation of these crimes, all political parties, including the communists, the mujahideen factions and the Taliban, should officially apologise to the people of Afghanistan in general and the victims of violence in particular, to officially acknowledge and atone for their past crimes.

A public apology by leaders involved in war crimes has a precedent. During his 2013 election campaign, President Ashraf Ghanis running mate, Abdul Rashid Dostum, issued an apology for being a part of the 1990s civil wars. Dostums apology and pledge to never repeat his past mistakes was welcomed by many Afghans.

The people of Afghanistan are once again being asked to choose between justice and security. While an acknowledgement of war crimes and a promise by perpetrators to not repeat them would not heal the victims of these crimes, it can be an important step towards healing Afghanistan. If these steps are backed by a commitment by the international community to prevent further human rights violations in the country, Afghanistan can finally leave its painful past behind and turn its face towards the future.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

Go here to read the rest:
Clemency for the Taliban will not lead to peace in Afghanistan - Al Jazeera English

Sarah Hawkes, co-director of the Global Health 50/50 research group

In Her Words is available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.

In May, in a small village in Herat Province in Afghanistan, Sediqas husband came down with symptoms of Covid-19 and was taken to a hospital in Herat City for treatment. When he came home, 10 days later, Sediqa looked after him.

Within a week, she fell ill, too.

I had the same symptoms and day by day, it got worse, said Sediqa, whose last name has been omitted for fear of repercussions. I was feeling so weak, I didnt feel like eating or drinking.

But when she asked to go to a hospital, her husband refused. He said no way. He told me to sunbathe and drink more tea.

Sharifa, who lives in Kabul, faced a similar situation. Her husband tested positive for the coronavirus and, in caring for him, she eventually fell sick, too. But her husband stopped her from getting a test or seeing a doctor.

My husband said that I wasnt even sick, and that I was just seeking his attention, Sharifa said. He was even laughing at me.

In Afghanistan, the number of women reported to have tested positive for the virus or to have died of Covid-19 is far below the numbers reported for men. Globally, men account for 53 percent of confirmed cases and 58 percent of deaths, according to the independent research group Global Health 50/50. But the same organizations country tracker shows that in Afghanistan, men account for 70 percent of cases and 74 percent of deaths a peculiarly wide discrepancy that experts say is most likely the result of gender inequalities that shut women like Sediqa and Sharifa out of the healthcare system and the public sphere.

Theres a really legitimate concern that this is about womens lack of access to services, said Sarah Hawkes, professor of global public health at University College London and co-director of the Global Health 50/50 research group.

There is, however, an important caveat to the data from Afghanistan it doesnt include information on the countrys testing rates, Professor Hawkes noted. Anecdotally, testing is not reported to be either frequent or widespread, despite being free, meaning the numbers arent fully capturing whether the discrepancy in infection and death rates is because women arent being tested or because they are actually not being infected.

Afghanistan also is not the only country with a notably wide gap between male and female infection and death rates. In Singapore and Qatar, for example, men make up around 90 percent of confirmed Covid-19 cases, Professor Hawkes said, partly because of bad outbreaks among male migrants who work in low-paying jobs and live in tight quarters (neither of those countries has disaggregated data for deaths).

Some experts have also pointed to biological differences between men and women as a major driver behind the sex discrepancy in global fatality rates.

But with Afghanistan, it is quite likely that women simply arent getting into the system, Professor Hawkes said.

Decades of conflict and widespread poverty have made access to Afghanistans fragile health care infrastructure difficult for both men and women, noted a recent report by Mdecins Sans Frontires, the group also known as Doctors Without Borders. But women and children are more likely to be left out of that system or receive substandard care because of patriarchal traditions that remain deep and prevalent in Afghanistan.

Afghan women face obstacles both within their own households and the healthcare facilities themselves, explained Suraya Dalil, who served as Afghanistans public health minister from 2010 to 2014 and now leads special programs in public health at the World Health Organization.

Women have to be accompanied by somebody to go to the hospital, so those decisions are often made by the men in a household, whether its the husband or the father or the son, Ms. Dalil said.

And when women do get to healthcare facilities a perilous task in itself owing to the countrys vast mountainous landscapes they are expected to engage only with female doctors, Ms. Dalil added. That becomes a near-impossible hurdle to overcome given the small number of female doctors, particularly in rural settings.

Currently, the country has just over 2,000 female healthcare professionals, according to official government figures, serving the countrys more than 18 million women. And many of these workers, according to the World Health Organization, are concentrated in Afghanistans urban centers.

Because Sediqas husband insisted that she would not be checked by male doctors, her brother was compelled to consult a doctor over the phone. She was prescribed some paracetamol and, after 27 days, started to feel a little better.

In Sharifas case, seeing a doctor was simply out of the question. Now 50 years old, Sharifa hasnt seen a male doctor since she married 35 years ago, when she was 15.

When my husband gets sick, I do anything I can, she said. I take him to the doctor, I talk to his male doctors. But when I get sick, I am not allowed to see a male doctor. I delivered my two boys at home.

If a woman does end up seeing a doctor, and the situation gets to a point where she is hospitalized, another female relative is expected to stay with her at the hospital, Ms. Dalil said, creating yet another wrinkle in a complex situation.

Add to all of this the cost of health care, which is unaffordable for many Afghans, and a volatile environment in which health care facilities are frequently bombed or attacked by insurgents, and the chances of a woman actually receiving adequate care become increasingly slim, Ms. Dalil explained.

The Afghan government claims that it has tried to remove some of these barriers over the years. The ministry does its best to provide services for female patients, said Masooma Jafari, the deputy spokesperson for the ministry of health. We have female doctors and we try to allocate separate areas and beds for female patients.

But the government did not provide specifics about how it planned to close the gender gap in coronavirus testing and treatments.

Another explanation for the gap in female infection and death rates in Afghanistan could be the fact that the countrys labor force, even before the pandemic hit, is still male-dominated.

A new study, published in May by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, tracked data from Global Health 50/50 against workforce participation rates of O.E.C.D. countries, and found a positive correlation between womens participation in the workforce and the Covid-19 death rate for women.

The percentage of female deaths due to Covid-19 is higher in countries in which women comprise a greater share of the full-time workforce, writes Rene Adams, the author of the study and a professor of finance at the University of Oxford who focuses on gender inequality. Work may be associated with a higher incidence of pre-existing conditions and greater exposure to the coronavirus.

In Portugal, for example, women made up almost 50 percent of the workforce in 2018 and accounted for 50 percent of Covid-19 deaths in April. And in Mexico, women made up about 38 percent of the workforce in 2018 and 35 percent of Covid-19 deaths in April.

In Afghanistan, women make up about 30 percent of the workforce, removing many of them from situations in which they might be exposed to the virus in the first place.

That explanation, however, doesnt account for cases like Sediqas and Sharifas, who were most likely infected because their husbands carried the virus back home.

All of this brings into sharp focus just how much hangs in the balance for Afghan women as the government holds peace negotiations with the Taliban, a process that includes just a handful of female delegates representing the government side.

So far, the Taliban have been vague about whether they would support womens right to receive an education and join the workforce, leaving many women worried that a peace deal might push them back into the shadows.

From 2002 onward, there was some meaningful investment with regard to womens empowerment, Ms. Dalil said. She recalled that during her time at the ministry of health, the government made a conscious effort to deploy more female midwives in hard-to-reach communities and rigorous vaccination campaigns.

But now, with the pandemic further stressing a delicate system and widening the schism between those who receive care and those who dont, she added, Im worried about the progress that has been made.

Asad Timory contributed reporting from Herat.

Read the original post:
Data Shows Fewer Afghan Women Than Men Get Covid. Thats Bad News. - The New York Times