Vera Macht
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

You are missed with such an intensity that makes you even more present. In all of our minds, in all of our hearts. It's your absence that makes your strength, your kindness and your impressive dedication to people and to humanity so incredibly present.

You are missed as a symbol of the struggle for justice, and for the value of each individual, the value of especially those people who seem to have been forgotten.

You are missed in this world. Vik, I miss you in my world. I miss you as my best friend, as the one who was always there in the last year, in good and bad times. You once told me I should smile, because my smile would light you. But Vik, it was you who made me laugh. Not only by your great sense of humor, but through your unique way to make the world around you a little brighter, just by being there. Everybody who knew you knows that, even those who met you even just once.

You cast a spell on people, through your charisma, through your personality, through your warmth. The world has become a bit darker without you, and it is also my own little world that has become a bit darker through your absence.

And Gaza of course, which I can’t imagine without you, probably no one here can imagine it without you yet. Your Arabic vocabulary of: Mushkile? Leeesh? Mish Mushkile! Yallah! was completely enough to brighten up the people around you, and to make everyone in Gaza your rafiq and your rafiqa.

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Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal

The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society.

Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report; but in this case, I think it must be right—not because I know so much about childhood in all the other 20 countries examined but because the childhood that many British parents give to their offspring is so awful that it is hard to conceive of worse, at least on a mass scale. The two poles of contemporary British child rearing are neglect and overindulgence.

Consider one British parent, Fiona MacKeown, who in November 2007 went on a six-month vacation to Goa, India, with her boyfriend and eight of her nine children by five different fathers, none of whom ever contributed financially for long to the children’s upkeep. (The child left behind—her eldest, at 19—was a drug addict.) She received $50,000 in welfare benefits a year, and doubtless decided—quite rationally, under the circumstances—that the money would go further, and that life would thus be more agreeable, in Goa than in her native Devon.

Reaching Goa, MacKeown soon decided to travel with seven of her children to Kerala, leaving behind one of them, 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling, to live with a tour guide ten years her elder, whom the mother had known for only a short time. Scarlett reportedly claimed to have had sex with this man only because she needed a roof over her head. According to a witness, she was constantly on drugs; and one night, she went to a bar where she drank a lot and took several different illicit drugs, including LSD, cocaine, and pot. She was seen leaving the bar late, almost certainly intoxicated.

The next morning, her body turned up on a beach. At first, the local police maintained that she had drowned while high, but further examination proved that someone had raped and then forcibly drowned her. So far, three people have been arrested in the investigation, which is continuing.

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David Kerans
Strategic Culture Foundation

As we discussed in our previous piece, the authoritarian revolution of the US right that has generated so much tumult in various state capitals over the last two months is more than a struggle over economic spoils. Money is at stake, to be sure, in the form of tax policies, pay packages for public sector workers, andproposed cuts to public services. But the key catalysts for mass street demonstrations and the wider mobilization of progressive sentiment in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and elsewhere have been the attempts to strip collective bargaining rights from unions representing public-sector employees. Clearly, the right has in mind to skew the balance of power in society even further towards capital. As we explained, the intended neutering of public-sector unions will hamstring Democratic party mobilizations and fund-raising for the foreseeable future. Beyond that, it will muzzle some of civil society's most important defenders against large corporations' influence over government. In short, once public-sector unions are demoralized, the Republican party will be free to shape the framework of economic relations even more decisively in favor of their large corporate donors.

Although mass media coverage of the authoritarian revolution has not emphasized the above-mentioned dimensions of the struggle, it has at least deigned to acknowledge them. A broadening portion of the adult population, perhaps even a majority, has by now been exposed to the interpretation of the Republican party as brazenly doing the bidding of the extremely wealthy to strip as much power as possible from the working and middle-classes of the country. Other important dimensions of the authoritarian revolution are going almost undiscussed, however. Here we have in mind assaults on women's reproductive rights, on voting rights, on civil rights, and on the integrity of the judiciary itself. Understanding these features of the current right wing aggression will give us a clearer idea of where the US might be headed in the near future.

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