Parliamentary Procedure

Russian meetings and conventions are organized after the Continental model rather than our own. The first action is usually the election of officers and the presidium.

The presidium is a presiding committee, composed of representatives of the groups and political factions represented in the assembly, in proportion to their numbers. The presidium arranges the Order of Business, and its members can be called upon by the president to take the chair pro tem.

Each question (vopros) is stated in a general way and then debated, and at the close of the debate resolutions are submitted by the different factions, and each one voted on separately. The Order of Business can be, and usually is, smashed to pieces in the first half hour. On the plea of 'emergency', which the crowd almost always grants, anybody from the floor can get up and say anything on any subject. The crowd controls the meeting, practically the only functions of the Speaker being to keep order by ringing a little bell, and to recognize speakers. Almost all the real work of the session is done in caucuses of the different groups and political factions, which almost always cast their votes in a body and are represented by floor-leaders. The result is, however, that at every important new point, or vote, the session takes a recess to enable the different groups and political factions to hold a caucus.

The crowd is extremely noisy, cheering or heckling speakers, overriding the plans of the presidium. Among the customary cries are: 'Prosim! Please! Go on!' 'Pravilno!' or 'Eto vierno! That's true! Right!' 'Do volno! Enough!' 'Doloi! Down with him!' 'Posor! Shame!' and 'Teeshe! Silence! Not so noisy!'

-- Reed, J., Ten Days that Shook the World, Notes and Explanations, p. 23, Penguin Modern Classics, Reprinted 1970

Conversations (read bottom-up)

(4) Me:

Never made it to MIT or Harvard ( ;) ), but here's my two cents:

I am complicit in the "war on terror" inasmuch as I didn't work hard enough to start a genuine anti-war movement, neither in 2001 nor in 2003. I believed in 2001 that the "sab say pehlay Pakistan" slogan was sheer bollocks, but I didn't have the balls to act according to my beliefs.

I have never paid any taxes to the US, but I suppose every time a US-based multinational whose products I buy repatriates its profits, I end up contributing to the US economy and hence to the US-led wars. This realisation - which hit me soon after Fallujah - was one of the strongest reasons that I tried to pull out of the whole capitalist system in 2004-5, but alas, again, I was not strong enough, not ready both materially and spiritually.

But even so, I would never in a million years fight anyone else's war - and by anyone else, I mean pretty much anyone outside my family or very close circle of friends. Even there, I'd much rather be a paramedic or in civil defence. This is mainly because of my pacifist beliefs, but in the case of the war on terror, it comes from a clear conviction that these wars are as immoral as they come, the result of the worst kind of bullying and greed, a blatant grab for the world's resources - both mineral and human.

This paragraph, though, was quite the little nugget:

"I also took offense to Rakshi's statement that people only join the Army for socio-economic reasons - ABSURD!!! For many, joining or serving the armed forces is a matter of pride and honor, and for some a call of duty. In case you were unaware, for many generations the people who joined the military in Pakistan and India were from the landed gentry and deemed a noble and honorable career (you had to have a certain socio-economic status to qualify for the military). Being an officer or soldier in the armed forces is something to be proud of, and even though one may have ideological differences with those who serve in the US Armed forces, be they of American or Pakistani-American heritage, one cannot and should not rejoice or belittle their service to their country and nation. They served their nation and people proudly and should be honored and remembered for that."

It may be a matter of pride and honour for Ashfaq Kiyani or Tauqir Zia or Talat Masood - or Aziz Bhatti even - to have served in the Army. Good for them. I don't see why I should be asked to respect that when my belief system tends towards demanding an end to a world system predicated on/resulting in permanent standing armies. As for the landed gentry... I mean, really... am I now also supposed to respect someone just because he was born into a "noble" household? I do not deny the tremendous bravery required to fly a long-range bombing mission, or in being an infantry scout, or simply in being a regular soldier in a war zone. What I cannot deny, also, however, is that ever since the time of the French Revolution, war has become increasingly totalitarian, a total effort involving the civilian and military population that has led to civilians being considered fair game under the doctrine of "total warfare" - never mind all the Geneva Conventions out there. And with increased mechanisation - and computerisation of the weapons of war - we're in the process of witnessing the field-testing and perfection of the first robot warriors: the UAV's so familiar to our Pashtoon and Afghan neighbours. So now, war escapes the basic, the fundamental limit against which it used to run up in the 19th and 20th centuries: the limit to which the tolerance and gullibility of the civilian population (those contributing the foot soldiers to the war machine) could be stretched by intense state-sponsored propaganda. Now, NATO is increasingly liberated from worrying about body bags. And some research into recruitment trends since the mid-90's will easily show which social strata the US Army and Marine Corps go to for their cannon fodder: Hispanics (notably Puerto Ricans), Blacks & so-called "white trash". While you're at it, you might want to check out DARPA's huge, incredibly ambitious project to develop robotic foot soldiers, a programme which has been an area of intense research and development at the USC's (Southern Calif.) computer science (mainly AI and real-time systems) faculty.

I am deeply ashamed to belong to as jingoistic, as martial a nation as Pakistan, just as I am deeply ashamed of the terrorism carried out by both the government and the LTTE in my father's country. I am deeply ashamed of what the "Pak" Army did in East Pakistan in 1968-71 and what a detachment of the same mercenary military machine (led by the future dictator Zia-ul-Haq) did to the Palestinians in Jordan in September 1970 (the massacres they still remember as Black September). I would like dearly to send your friend a copy of the relevant chapters where Peter Ward Fay discusses of the truly mercenary nature of the armies that India and Pakistan inherited from imperial Britain. Maybe you can pass on the Google Books link: http://books.google.com.pk/books?id=Un-vVfF3f1MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=pater+ward+fay+the+forgotten+army&sig=ACfU3U0_aRgcGhySl7eA3qol6fDyNrM14w

And then there's The Garrison State. Do try to get a copy. Your library probably has it.

Of course, if one has been around military men just a little bit and has grown out of one's adolescent fetish for weapons and other manifestations of naked power, one doesn't really need books to draw the same inferences.

Nevertheless, I'm honoured that you chose to share this thread with me - and I apologise if I flew off the handle a little bit.

Aman

(3) Out of sheer courtesy, Samad forwarded me some responses he got from various friends discussing the matter. While my view was already represented among his friends, one of them went ahead and said something so outrageous, I felt I needed to respond. [scroll up]

(2) Me:

I feel sorry for his family. I feel sad that another human being has died.

But it does not go much deeper than that when I see that he consciously enrolled to serve in an imperialist army. The sadness I feel for a soldier is usually tempered by the thought that those who choose to live by the sword consciously accept that one day they may die by it - in fact, they are often rather proud of the distinction that they think their supposed bravery confers upon them.

Maybe he only enrolled so that he could get a college education - it's often the case with poor Americans. Who knows. It just goes to show that the masters of war have tagged us, that they know how best to use us. And our complicity cannot be ignored nor forgiven.

(1) Fwd from Samad and Abeer:

PAKISTANI AMERICAN SOLDIER DIES IN THE LINE OF DUTY

Second Lt. Mohsin Naqvi

The Pakistani American community all across the United States joins their fellow Americans to mourn the death in Afghanistan of a Pakistani American Muslim US soldier, Second Lt. Mohsin Naqvi.

Lt. Naqvi, was 26 year old and was in a group of five soldiers killed while on patrol Wednesday the 17th in Afghanistan. He had just been married about 4 months ago. Lt. Naqvi enrolled in the Army Reserve a few days after the 9/11 attacks and later served in Iraq. When he returned from Iraq in 2003, he re-enlisted for active duty after earning bachelor's and master's degrees.

Lt Naqvi while he lived in Newburgh, NY, would be frequent visitor to the neighboring Connecticut. He had worked in CT in the past as well. The Pakistani American Public Affairs Committee (PAKPAC) joins with the larger community to show their respect to him and prays that the family can sustain this huge loss. Burial is being planned at the Albany Cemetery in New York.

boogie shoes

trying to explain or just plain communicate the urge to boogie (abhi! yahaan!), I sent a friend this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq1MTRfiXMU

she cranked it up a notch, sending back links to these hilarious videos:

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=RqzR-KwjlrI

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=rIFh1ydXWmg

Some rants are just too good!

This one, for example, covers all the relevant issues without so much as pausing for breath:

"For god sakes wake up you slumbering fools. Musharraf’s exit does not have to mean the return of another evil period for us. Why cant we make it mean something more and bring in more educated people into the services and politics. Talk, speak out, and demand action and accountability so that these goons don’t get to loot us again. Lets not be quiet and say lawyers are liars and politicians are pansies. Maybe if we just worked just as hard as making things work as we do in criticising, things could get better. Start by doing your bit – bit by bit – and wait for the change to happen. Don’t sit and complain in your comfortable houses and cars. Don’t do that because it doesn’t help anyone."

Get the full note here >>

Brilliant job by the author Saira Ansari.

D.H. Lawrence

Freida Lawrence wrote the foreword to the first published version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The second part of the foreword deals with her husband.
"It is hard for me to write about Lawrence," she starts out. She picks up the thread again with, "I will try. I believe the spring of his being was love for his fellow men, love for everything alive, and almost all creatures were more alive to him than they actually were. He seemed to infuse his life into them. You cannot translate Lawrence into intellectual terms because he was so much more than a man with ideas, an intellectual. But he had a superb human intelligence in big and little things. It exasperated him to see how boring most people's loves were and how little they made of them, and he tried with all his might, from all angles to make them see and change. He never gave up, he did not get discouraged like most reformers. Always he took a new sprint. He was not tragic, he would never have it that humanity, even, was tragic, only very wrong, but nothing that true wisdom could not solve. It was not pity he felt; he never insulted anybody by being sorry for them. We have to learn to take it. It is strange to think that he never got into more trouble than he did, with his absolute independence. He was attacked and abused. It made him angry, but he never felt sorry for himself. It was a spur to go on. Years after his death, I saw in Buenos Aires many of his books in a shop window as I wandered through the streets. It was a shock. 'Here,' I thought, 'where he has never been, people buy his books.' One thin, narrow man has such importance all over the world. He was intensely aware of the importance of time, of the responsibility of every hour and minute. The span from the cradle to the grave is all we have to make our show, to prove ourselves. The older you get, the shorter is the time given us. The fact, 'I am alive', seems more valuable every day. Lawrence knew this quite young.
He made me share what went on in him. His inner life was so powerful you had to be a part of it, willy-nilly. It was hard for me to realise that nothing goes on in many people's insides - nothing at all.
For Lawrence, all creatures had their own mysterious being. Only humans seemed to have often lost theirs.
[...]
Lawrence had this desire to know all the universe in its different manifestations.
[...]
There was an urge in him to find new places on the earth as well as in the human soul. All races, all thoughts, all there was interested him. He had a full life, but the fullness was mostly in him. There is so much to experience and most of us experience so little. A little job, a little house, a little wife has little George and George gets older and one day he is dead and that's all. He has missed the great, vast show.
For me, Lawrence's greatest gift was this sense of a limitless universe around us, no barriers, no little social world to fidget over, no ambition to be a success. We felt we were a success in spite of the tiny bit of money we had, but we felt so rich. If a man owns a Botticelli painting and I enjoy more seeing it than the man who owns it, then that picture is more mine than his. We don't have to put things in our pockets to make them our own. Enjoying is more of possession than ownership.
[...]
We always lived very simply, he was just a man going his own way and I tacked along.
Even such a little thing, that might have looked pretentious, as a topaz ring I offered him with the Richthofen arms on it, he would not take. He looked at it - it was nice for a little while. 'No,' he said, 'that isn't me for me.'
The Lincoln story, when a senator finds Lincoln cleaning his boots and says, 'But Mr President, gentlemen don't clean their own boots,' and Lincoln replies, 'Whose boots do they clean?' might have been true of Lawrence.
They called Lincoln names too. 'Ape' and 'baboon' and pretty names they called Lawrence. The scarecrow they make of him! But birds never have been scared of him. Some make him a sad, mournful, sacrificial object. He wasn't often sad, but very often mad. Mostly, he was very gay and full of pep. The mournfulness lies mostly with the critics.
[...]
He died unbroken; he never lost his own wonder of life. He never did a thing he did not want to do and nothing and nobody could make him. He never wrote a word he did not mean at the time he wrote it. He never compromised with the little powers that be; if ever there lived a free, proud man, Lawrence was that man.

FREIDA LAWRENCE

1944