Kade Crockford
Tag: Freedom
The stories of unsung heroes behind freedom struggle from British colonial rule
The purview of the freedom struggle from British colonial rule in India is as vast as its geography and culture. Many who were part of the freedom struggle did not realise the crucial weight of their ‘simple’ actions.
P Sainath’s The Last Heroes finds stories of the country’s Independence struggle from forests, villages, homemakers and farmers. His book tells stories like that of of Bhavani Mahto, who were left out of mainstream history books.
Mahto would grow grains and cook for underground revolutionaries during the Bengal Famine. However, even she is in denial of her crucial role towards the freedom struggle because she believes it pertains to her household and domestic life.
Here are a few highlights from Anil Ashwini Sharma’s conversation with Sainath:
Anil Ashwini Sharma: The writer decides who the heroes of the history books are. Several new centres of history have come up in the last few decades. How do you feel about the
— source downtoearth.org.in | Anil Ashwani Sharma | 06 Dec 2022
Free Speech Issue in US
The ACLU has just asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an Arkansas law that requires all state contractors to sign a pledge declaring they will not boycott Israel. Arkansas is one of 35 U.S. states that have passed legislation to criminalize or discourage BDS. That’s the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to boycott Israel and Israeli goods to protest violations of Palestinian rights. The ACLU originally sued Arkansas on behalf of Alan Leveritt, the publisher of the Arkansas Times. He appears in the new documentary Boycott.
For us, it’s just basically a free speech issue. The state of Arkansas is requiring us to take a political position in return for advertising. We’re taxpayers here in Arkansas. We have as much right as anyone else to do business, to earn that business on our merits. And we’re being told that, “No, you have to also take a political position. You have to pass a political litmus test in order to do business.” And so, when we refused to sign and the state started shutting down our advertising, our state advertising, we sued. So, for us, it’s just — we’re not boycotting anyone; for us, it’s purely a First Amendment issue. This is still America.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 24, 2022
History books tell us about just a few who fought for India’s freedom
The purview of the freedom struggle from British colonial rule in India is as vast as its geography and culture. Many who were part of the freedom struggle did not realise the crucial weight of their ‘simple’ actions.
P Sainath’s The Last Heroes finds stories of the country’s Independence struggle from forests, villages, homemakers and farmers. His book tells stories like that of of Bhavani Mahto, who were left out of mainstream history books.
Mahto would grow grains and cook for underground revolutionaries during the Bengal Famine. However, even she is in denial of her crucial role towards the freedom struggle because she believes it pertains to her household and domestic life.
Here are a few highlights from Anil Ashwini Sharma’s conversation with Sainath:
Anil Ashwini Sharma: The writer decides who the heroes of the history books are. Several new centres of history have come up in the last few decades. How do you feel about the
— source downtoearth.org.in | 06 Dec 2022
The Biggest Obstacle To Real Freedom Is The Belief That We Already Have It
If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality.
Whenever I broach this subject I always get a deluge of objections along the lines of, “Well I’d much rather live where I live than under an authoritarian regime like in Iran or China! You would never be allowed to criticize your rulers the way you do if you lived in one of those places!”
And I always want to ask them, what do you think drove you to make that objection? Why are you falling all over yourself to defend your country and the people who rule over you, while condemning foreign countries that your own government happens to dislike? Could it be because that’s how you’ve been trained to behave from a young and impressionable age, and that your objection is arising from the same place as a cult member’s objections to criticisms of their cult?
Because that’s ultimately what holds power structures together in the US-aligned nations of the global north: indoctrination. The same thing used to program religious extremists and cult members. The only difference is that rather than scripture and religious leaders, the means of indoctrination is school, mainstream media, and Silicon Valley algorithm
— source caitlinjohnstone.com | Dec 11, 2022
Role of Muslims in India’s Freedom Struggle
For all patriotic Indians, it is the worst of times, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of incredulity, it is the season of darkness, it is the winter of despair, we have nothing before us, to paraphrase an epic description of the revolutionary tumult of the French Revolution, by Charles Dickens in his novel The Tale of Two Cities. However, the current situation in India is not about a revolutionary tide. The torrents that India faces today are intensely counter-revolutionary.
The forces of Hindutva and its allies are ensconced in power and are hell-bent on overturning the Indian constitution and its Preamble. Their chief picking is to undermine secularism. And to do so, they have chosen to demonise the Indian Muslims.
As you read this article, hundreds and thousands of Indians are being fed the communal pie through WhatsApp University about the inherent ‘anti-nationalism’ of the Indian Muslims. However, even a cursory glance at history would reveal that Indian Muslims not only played a stellar role in the freedom struggle but happily laid down their lives at the altar of the anti-colonial national struggle.
The Great Revolt of 1857 was the mightiest joint effort of the Hindus and Muslims under the leadership of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar to dislodge the British from
— source newsclick.in | Shubham Sharma | 07 Aug 2022
Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution
Black women’s sexual subordination and forced pregnancies were foundational to slavery. If cotton was euphemistically king, Black women’s wealth-maximizing forced reproduction was queen.
Ending the forced sexual and reproductive servitude of Black girls and women was a critical part of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.
Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy contravenes enumerated rights in the Constitution, namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy, as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.
This Supreme Court demonstrates a selective and opportunistic interpretation of the Constitution and legal history, which ignores the intent of the 13th and 14th Amendments, especially as related to Black women’s bodily autonomy, liberty and privacy which extended beyond freeing them from labor in cotton fields to shielding them from rape and forced
Overturning Roe
Supreme Court’s long-anticipated ruling Friday that overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that established the constitutional right to abortion some 50 years ago. The conservative court ruled 6 to 3 Friday to uphold a Republican-backed Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, while voting 5 to 4 to overturn Roe completely. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts supported upholding the Mississippi law but not overturning Roe. Nine states have already banned abortion since Friday; 17 more states are promising to do so soon.
In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
In their dissent, the court’s three liberal justices wrote, “With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.”
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas sided with the majority but argued in a concurring opinion that other key landmark rulings establishing gay rights, the right to
— source democracynow.org | Jun 27, 2022
When Bhabani Mahato fed the revolution
“It must have been very hard for you when your husband Baidyanath was jailed for 13 months in the Quit India movement?” I ask Bhabani Mahato in Puruliya. “Running such a large joint family and…”
“We had a large joint family,” she says. “All responsibilities were mine. I did all the chores. I took care of everything. Everything. I ran the family. I looked after everybody in 1942-43 when all those incidents happened.” Bhabani does not name the ‘incidents’. But they included, among others, the Quit India stir. And the famous September 30, 1942 attempt by freedom fighters to hoist the tricolour at 12 police stations in what was even then one of the most deprived regions of Bengal.
And so the action planned in response happened on September 30, 1942. Fully 53 days after Mahatma Gandhi’s call for the British to ‘Quit India’ at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Mumbai on August 8, 1942. Baidyanath was arrested in the crackdown and suffered in the repression that followed. He was to become a schoolteacher after Independence. Teachers back then played a key role in political mobilisation. A role that would be carried over into Independent India for some decades.
— source ruralindiaonline.org | P. Sainath | Apr 18, 2022
Bhagat Singh: An Unsung Hero of Political Journalism
Bhagat Singh is widely venerated as a radical thinker; political revolutionary; a great intellectual, despite his young age; and a martyr, who was reading Lenin in his last moments before being hanged in a Lahore jail on March 23, 1931. However, he is seldom celebrated as a journalist; an identity that was quite intrinsic to his critical thinking, individuality and revolutionary integrity.
Indeed, the thinking aspect of his personality – which made him stand out markedly from among all modern political revolutionaries – manifested itself, to a large extent, through his journalistic endeavours.
Singh was a committed, multi-lingual journalist. He frequently produced politically charged and socially-rooted writings on several pressing contemporary issues. He mostly wrote
— source thewire.in | Naren Singh Rao | 23/Mar/2022