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Illustration by Andrea Wan

Illustration by Andrea Wan

By Andrea Crummer
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

It’s an unremarkable Tuesday evening in mid-October and I’ve just entered a second-floor meeting room at the Northern District Library in downtown Toronto.

I’m feeling optimistic. I’ve driven in from Brantford to attend my first Professional Writers’ Association of Canada event, which is supposed to help me decide whether I’ve got what it takes to become a freelancer. I’m putting my money - all $10 of the entry fee - on Writers Association member, writer and lecturer Paul Lima and his “(Almost) Everything you wanted to know about Freelance Writing” workshop.

I take a seat beside a young, friendly looking woman with a blond pixie cut. I peg her as a student who, like me, is hoping to break into the world of freelance, but it turns out she’s just back from England where she interned for a bioenergy research publication. She is now pursuing a freelance public relations career while working for the CBC on the side.

A few rows in front of me are two older women. One seems shy and almost grandmotherly; the other sports a black leather hat and Pink Floyd T-shirt. Looks can be deceiving: grandma has been published in Bikers Monthly, while the Pink Floyd enthusiast writes human interest features for her community newspaper.

The room is filled with community newspaper reporters, occasional magazine contributors, corporate tech industry authors, a self-help ghostwriter and, as I find out later at the pub, a few first-timers hoping to leave behind careers in acting, home inspection and real estate for a taste of what the freelance world has to offer. However varied their interests, their aspirations are the same: get published, build a reputation and earn a living.

That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

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Photo by T. Hussey

Media Democracy Day: Participants mingle at a public forum on media issues at the Vancouver Public Library, October 25, 2008. (T.Hussey)

By Jacqueline Cusack McDonald and Steve Anderson
Briarpatch Magazine
September/October 2009

After World War II, muckraking journalist Edward R. Murrow asked Dave Schoenbrun, a bright young interpreter at Allied Force Headquarters, what his post-war plans were. Schoenbrun expressed his desire to return to teaching high school French, to which Murrow responded: “Kid, how would you like the biggest classroom in the world?” To Murrow, the most renowned figure in U.S. broadcast journalism, education was the primary purpose of news reporting.

Unfortunately, the media in North America has never really lived up to Murrow’s vision of the media-as-classroom. The current media system in Canada - largely based on the business model of ad-based corporate journalism - does not meet the public need for unfiltered information, discussion and debate. It does not adequately address the social, ecological and economic challenges facing communities across the country.

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By Michael Skinner
The Bullet (Socialist Project)
April 25, 2009

The fact that the Taliban is a party of the peasant classes, but certainly not the only one, is not news in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is thus interesting that The New York Times (“Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan,” 16 April 2009) is now exploiting the fact the Taliban do represent significant groups of peasants as if this is news. This indication of a possible reframing of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a class war is significant as the U.S. escalates the intensity and scale of warfare in the region.

My Afghan-Canadian research partner, Hamayon Rastgar, has said many times since we returned from a research trip in Afghanistan that “the West gives the monopoly of anti-imperialism to the Taliban” by crushing and continuing to suppress socialist forces in Afghanistan and by portraying the complex insurgency in the simplistic way Western governments and media do.

Many non-violent resisters as well as various insurgent groups oppose the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and imperialist forces. The complexity of the resistance and insurgent forces remain opaque to most Western analysts. Articles by Afghan intellectuals engaged in non-violent resistance against all the forces of repression – the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and the Western forces – are rarely translated for Western readers. Westerners believe all insurgents are under a Taliban banner. However, as an Afghan Maoist leader told us: “The government credits the Taliban for every insurgent attack; the Taliban like to take the credit; and that works for everyone else at this moment.”

Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan State

It is important to recall that the militaries of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), from the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia, set the stage to institute a supposedly ‘democratic’ state in Afghanistan. However, this state is a reconstitution of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan originally instituted in 1992. The Islamic Republic was instituted by one of several competing mujaheddin factions who were built up as part of the U.S.’s anti-socialist “freedom fighters.” The later rise of the Talban, facilitated as it was by the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA, the ISI, was in good part a response to the horrors inflicted on Afghans by conflicts between the rival mujaheddin factions after 1992. Several of these factions retreated to the north, in 1996, fleeing from the advance of Taliban military forces. These mujaheddin factions formed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which the Western news media sanitised with the title Northern Alliance.

In an article in Briarpatch (March/April 2008) regarding the use and abuse of feminism to sell Canada’s war in Afghanistan, I wrote: “The Taliban are radical Islamists intent on isolating Afghans from the world; the mujaheddin are radical Islamists intent on profiting from their relationship to the U.S. and now Canada. The Taliban are reprehensible, but the mujaheddin are hardly different; both created misogynistic regimes based on erroneous interpretations of Islam.”

The Taliban and mujaheddin also share a hatred of ‘Godless’ socialists. It is still illegal, based on religious grounds, as it has been since 1992, to form a socialist party in the elected theocracy of Afghanistan. Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the new Afghanistan constitution. But in practice the state acts in a way that all Afghans are considered Muslim by default. This misses the incredible cultural diversity in Afghanistan, and the many religions including several unique indigenous ones, that Afghans practice. Moreover, socialists (which include an important organized Maoist component) are not likely to have suddenly found salvation in Islam. There is, it seems, no Islamic equivalent of Latin American liberation theology or Canadian Christian socialism in Afghanistan.

The kicker is that in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan apostasy is punishable by death. Any Afghan socialist could be ‘legally’ executed on the grounds she or he has converted from Islam. Moreover, the Afghan Supreme Court ruled socialists are legally atheists to ban socialist parties from electoral politics.

Despite this suppression, Afghan Maoists claim they have consolidated disparate Maoist and socialist organisations into a new party. The Maoists also claim they will eventually beat the Taliban in a competition for the hearts and minds of peasants, once the insurgency has exhausted the OEF-NATO occupation, which even Afghan liberals consider as an imperialist occupation.

Even Michael Ignatieff (2003), in his book Empire Lite, which is a collection of his New York Times essays, explicitly identifies the occupation of Afghanistan as imperialist. Ignatieff just happens to think this imperialist occupation is “humanitarian,” because, he argues, imposing a liberal world order in Central Asia is preferable to allowing people he claims are “barbarians” the autonomy to govern their own affairs. The fact that the hierarchical priorities of this liberal world order rank the accumulation of state power and individual wealth far above observation of international laws and human rights is, for Ignatieff, an inconvenient but unavoidable truth. Ignatieff’s complaint is that this empire needs to throw its weight around more forcefully to establish liberal world order – an argument the Obama administration seems to be implementing.

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This from a baffling front-page story in The Nation , Thailand’s English-language business daily — a stunningly inane piece of neoliberalese trumpeting a "big-bang" deregulation of capital markets as the solution to the global economic crisis:

The ‘big bang’ plan would lift the capital market’s role in developing the economy as a whole and linking the market with the public and become a major funding source for business operators," [Thai finance minister Korn Chatikavanij] said.

The phrase "big bang" is used in reference to the sudden deregulation of financial markets. The Thai version would cover seven areas:

  • The capital market’s structure would be revised to lift its competitiveness.
  • All securities businesses would be liberalised, which would affect securities services, licensing and commission fees.
  • Good-governance practices must be strengthened.
  • The legal structure would be changed in a way that provides a greater chance for small investors to protect themselves.
  • The tax structure would be revised to get rid of discrepancies, as the capital market covers life insurance, bank savings and investment in bonds or equity.
  • New projects would be introduced, such as property funds, infrastructure funds and state enterprises that are privatised.
  • There must be measures to develop the bond market.

It’s hard to know where to start with this, but I must say I admire the audacity of the attempt to spin the privatization of state enterprises as the "introduction" of "new projects."

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Don’t Let Canwest SLAPP* Mordecai Briemberg and YOU !

By the Seriously Free Speech Committee
Via the Canadian Dimension blog

Imagine you go to a public meeting on the Middle East; you see a humorous parody of the local daily, pick up a few copies and hand them out. Six months later you are served with a writ of summons that charges you with producing the parody, that threatens to cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, that takes up hundreds of hours of your time and aims to prevent you from expressing your opinions in future. Impossible? A Kafkaesque fantasy? This is what is happening to Mordecai Briemberg in Vancouver today and we need your help to stop it.

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Canadian Press
November 11, 2007

TORONTO - Tensions are running high in CanWest newsrooms from Montreal to Vancouver in the wake of recent layoffs at the company’s television stations and fears that more cuts are ahead amid an apparent push to centralize editorial operations.

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“There’s a time and a place for the media,” explained a plainclothes RCMP officer as he and his colleagues unceremoniously ushered journalists out of Charlottetown’s Delta Hotel. Evidently that time was not yesterday and that place was not the Conservatives’ annual summer caucus meeting. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the face of rampant media consolidation, Canadians are finally beginning to get organized and fight back under the banner of the recently formed Canadians for Democratic Media. This grassroots network recently organized a major initiative to lobby the CRTC against further media consolidation, and surely has more campaigns in the works to keep the pressure on.

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Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

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http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

1. Is CBC’s new populism perverted?
Why youth fans like me are tuning out
By Elaine Corden
The Tyee
June 21, 2007

Ideally, user participation makes an outlet like the CBC more democratic. But as we all know, the ideals of a democracy can be easily subverted, and an organized and vocal minority can quickly become the most powerful voice in a debate.

http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/06/21/CBC/

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[In light of our latest issue's partial focus on media in war zones, this article serves as an important reminder of the many ways that reporters can be silenced. -D.O.M.]

By Judith Matloff, Columbia Journalism Review
June 7, 2007

The photographer was a seasoned operator in South Asia. So when she set forth on an assignment in India, she knew how to guard against gropers: dress modestly in jeans secured with a thick belt and take along a male companion. All those preparations failed, however, when an unruly crowd surged and swept away her colleague. She was pushed into a ditch, where several men set upon her, tearing at her clothes and baying for sex. They ripped the buttons off her shirt and set to work on her trousers.

“My first thought was my cameras,” recalls the photographer, who asked to remain anonymous. “Then it was, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be raped.’ ” With her faced pressed into the soil, she couldn’t shout for help, and no one would have heard her anyway above the mob’s taunts. Suddenly a Good Samaritan in the crowd pulled the photographer by the camera straps several yards to the feet of some policemen who had been watching the scene without intervening. They sneered at her exposed chest but escorted her to safety.

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