Zapatistas

Chiapas, Mexico — In May of last year, José Luis Solís López, a teacher in the Zapatista community of La Realidad (one of five affiliated communities of the now 20-year-old Zapatista experiment in autonomy and self-governance) was killed by paramilitaries during an ambush in which several other unarmed Zapatistas were also injured. The paramilitaries proceeded to destroy the community’s clinic and seriously damage its school.

With a general election looming in the United Kingdom and Spain possibly following Greece’s revolt against austerity later this year, we need to think, not just who or what we are voting for, but why we should vote at all.

For example, when we say that the Chilean state should become a true guarantor of material rights, that is certainly antithetical to the neoliberal capitalist vision which turns rights into a business to be regulated by the market.
— Camila Vallejo (former Chilean student protest leader)1

Humility. An important word you rarely hear in our culture anymore. Our culture seems to be going in the opposite direction, everything with a superlative. Everything bigger, faster, better, stronger. Everything new, shiny, pretty, expensive. But never humble. “Dude, love that car. It’s so humble.” Yeah, you never hear that.

Michael Dowdy is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is the author of American Political Poetry into the 21st Century and a chapbook of poems, The Coriolis Effect. His latest book is Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press, 2013).

This week:
1. Aldeia resiste the world cock
2. The War on Christmas Trees
3. NYE Noise Demos
4. Rote Flora Defense
5. 20 years of Zapatistas
6. RATM – People of the Sun
7. Anarchists come out of the closet
https://ia600801.us.archive.org/10/items/WarOnChristmasTreesHD/ITE_JAN_2014_HD.mp4
To start, click on the above video box.