Eid Mubarik, happy cooking and eating

One of my friends said: Eid Mubarik, happy cooking and eating. Which is really what Eid is about. Someone or the other will be in kitchen all day. Mothers, wives , sisters or servants. And dressing up. If it were a simple celebration it would be well deserved after a month of discipline and charity. But it's days of gluttony, new fashionable clothes after a month of over- stuffed stomachs with fasting without prayers , many selfies, and artificial capitalist nationalist religiosity. All the time while children in Gaza are dying or starving. And, indeed in Sudan too which has a big Muslim population. So much for Ramzan which when I was a God fearing Muslim, I observed with naivete, fasting and 5 daily prayers. Now as a God fearing atheist, I really wonder what is the point and except to rage and critique on deaf ears.

Critique of USAID

 1. Trump and the Closure of USAID: A Candid Conversation on "Independent Media" :

The impact of U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to halt foreign funding through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on Arab media platforms has largely gone undiscussed. Some of these platforms have consistently labelled themselves as "independent" despite being Western-funded.This article examines the reasons behind the failure of economic models for Western-funded institutions in the Arab world and explores the extent of their editorial independence.

Article: https://institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/3038. 

2. Africa Beyond Aid By Robtel Neajai Pailey

Rather than likening aid suspension to the apocalypse, we should instead embrace it as a catalyst for 21st century decolonization.  

For those of us who understand that structural barriers make achieving socio-economic transformation in the so-called ‘Global South’ difficult nigh impossible Washington’s exemption of military aid to Israel appeared rather self-serving and spiteful. But it also exposed the disingenuousness of an aid system that lacks transparency operates as a tool of neocolonial control and breeds dependency.  

Aid is clearly strategic rather than altruistic. For example the US agency for international development (USAID) was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to fight the spread of communism with one American diplomat recently admitting in a live broadcast that “US aid is not charity. It is a tool for advancing the interests of the United States”.

Few aid industry zealots care to concede that the funding freeze disproportionately impacts American companies, contractors and NGOs which absorb 31% of financing after 12% overhead/admin is skimmed off. The lion’s share of USAID financing, 46%, is channelled through multilateral implementing partners such as the UN and World Bank, with only 11% going directly to foreign institutions, including governments, companies and NGOs.    

When Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara famously said, “he who feeds you, controls you”, he was demystifying a multi-billion-dollar industry whose modus operandi is to entrench geopolitical hierarchies of power and sustain global economic inequalities.  

Article: https://www.liberianobserver.com/opinion/commentaries/africa-beyond-aid/article_911e0978-fb19-11ef-be76-4b8ba3f1cb7f.html

3. Chihombori-Quao: USAID was ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ in Africa | The Bottom Line 

Al Jazeera 

It's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mFSRb5dUOM. 

4. Trump’s USAID freeze must serve as a wake-up call for Africa by Tafi Mhaka

13 Mar 2025, Al Jazeera Opinion 

From Zimbabwe to Uganda and Tanzania gaining independence from the so-called benevolence of the West must be seen as a crucial element of Africa’s postcolonial success.The painful and often humiliating contradiction of Western countries providing billions in aid to inefficient and sleazy African governments that preside over resource-rich countries should not remain the norm.

Article: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/3/13/trumps-usaid-freeze-must-serve-as-a-wake-up-call-for-africa?fbclid=IwY2xjawJSmRpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWgGxIb0GVJn8WoYxeGXH0gk42HKEM7WU_NwgBuSgUihf4v2YE4EhLtaWQ_aem_bOJfhMqbdQ4hmNRFyXDMQQ

5.  How the U.S. Uses ‘Aid’ as Soft Power to Dominate the World w/ Matt Kennard : 

15 Feb 2025 

Aid acts as a disguise for imperialism. It manufactures consent for the Empire. USAID. National Endowment for Democracy. These provide propaganda for American Empire. USAID was funding opposition against Eva Morales. Trump merely shows American Imperialism more clearly. Takes away the pretence. 9 out of 10 media outlets in Ukraine funded by USAID = propaganda control.

" For decades, U.S. imperialism has operated not just through military force but through a vast system of economic coercion, media manipulation, and covert operations. The World Bank, IMF, and USAID present themselves as tools of development, but in reality, they enforce American dominance under the guise of aid.  Now, with Trump and Musk cutting USAID, many see this as a shift, but in reality, it’s just a restructuring of the empire. What does this tell us about the evolving strategies of imperialism? How does economic warfare, soft power, and media complicity allow the U.S. and its allies to maintain control with minimal backlash?  Investigative journalist Matt Kennard, co-founder of Declassified UK and author of The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. The American Empire, joins Rania Khalek to expose how U.S. and British intelligence operations, including spy flights over Gaza, are deeply entangled with global imperial control. "

6. Why some in the Global South are not mourning the demise of USAID by Patrick Gathara 

3 Mar 2025

It is to say that the soul of “development” has always been much less humanistic than its proponents assert. In fact the entire enterprise of aid has been a tool for geopolitical control a means of preserving rather than eliminating global inequality and the resource extraction that feeds it.In recent days following the demise of USAID there has been growing openness about this reality – consciously or unconsciously.For example a statement issued by InterAction which “unites and amplifies the voices of America’s leading humanitarian and development organizations” made that quite clear. These organisations it said before a hasty rewrite “work tirelessly to save lives and advance US interests globally”. It added that the attack on USAID had suspended “programs that support America’s global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill”.

7.  The real history of USAID as an imperial cutout by The GrayZone 

11 Feb 2025 

Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on ugly truth behind the United States Agency for International Development which is now on the Trump administration's DOGE chopping block.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ND5xZ802X0

Brexit was a signal...

Brexit was a signal, the fracture of a once mighty colonial power. Germany , which is now thrashing Holocaust survivors for protesting Israel's Genocide, is undergoing Far Right, Nazi striped resurgence. Trumpism is the same destructive internal shit show like Brexit which reveals contradictions but effect of American imperialism is unchanged or even worse.

“The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism”

 This interview “The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism” really spoke to me: 

"the primary impulse behind the book was really to put an end to this horrible loneliness that I felt, along with many other people, a kind of desolation induced by the fact that, you know, powerful people, powerful politicians in democracies, journalists, intellectuals were either silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or, even worse, vehemently supporting it. So, I think, you know, it forced many of us to reexamining not just sort of narratives of Middle Eastern history or Israeli history or Palestinian history, but a kind of broader history of Western supremacism, of decolonization."

One feels a loneliness and desolation at the silence of Western white friends who have not uttered a peep against the Genocide. It exposes the hollowness of an international life with international careers, international education, international colleagues and friends with whom one doesn't share any soul, any solidarity, any politics, any common consciousness.

This sense of betrayal, this sense of desolation has to be acknowledged but also resisted, I suppose. We have to continue to bear witness to the atrocities and this world order.

Some more quotes:

So, I think, for many people in the West, who have been absorbed with a very different narrative — first of all, the narrative of the Cold War, the narrative of the end of history, the narrative of American unipolar dominance — decolonization still comes as a kind of news, or they confuse it with people asking for decolonizing knowledge in the United States or decolonizing educational syllabuses. So, I think there’s a very broad confusion about this world.

But what it really signifies is greater political, intellectual assertiveness and a very fierce desire to not live in a world where racial privilege, most specifically white privilege, orders and forces a global hierarchy. You know, you can see this very clearly in sort of South African president a few days ago making a speech and saying, “We will not be bullied.”

And you can read the whole transcript here: “The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism”: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/13/pankaj_mishra_world_after_gaza .

By the way, I was lucky enough to see a conversation between Pankaj Mishra and Mohsin Hamid in Lahore at the Lahore Lit Fest a couple years ago.

On International Women’s Day

 

On International Women’s Day, we honor Vietnamese revolutionary Võ Thị Thắng. Here, she smiles after receiving a 20-year labor camp sentence from the US-backed South Vietnamese government. She told the judge: “20 years? Your government won’t last that long.”

You can read about her: Reflections on a Joyous Revolutionary: Vo Thi Thang: https://www.eksentrika.com/revolutionary-vo-thi-thang-vietnam/: 

Oh, that’s Ms. Vo. Oh yes, she was quite famous. She used to be the Minister of Tourism for Vietnam for a while. She died a few years ago.

One March 8, Thomas Sankara declared a day of rest for women. Men were asked to go to the market to buy vegetables and do the household chores. The best speech by an African political leader on women's freedom came from Sankara in March 8, 1987, a few months before Sankara was assassinated. In the speech, Sankara said: "The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph. Women hold up the other half of the sky."

This is flooding my Facebook , it's raining on Facebook for the Proxy War in Ukraine

 

Lucky Irani Circus is in Islamabad

Encourage everyone to support these amazing performers who risk everything to entertain the public. Encourage children to see this and, be amazed at the acrobats , especially the young ones! These are working class people and there are as many women performers as men! PS. There are performers from Ukraine and Africa (couldn't catch which country in the pronunciation) too.

I made many many videos of course. See one: 50 Years of Lucky Irani Circus.