Pinned
All praise to the inexhaustible labyrinth of cause and effect which, before unveiling to me the mirror where I shall see no one or some other self, has granted me this perfect contemplation of a language at its dawn.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Embarking on the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar," from Selected Poems
When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.
There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.
And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.
And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.
And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.
The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.
Seventy martyrs on the first day of Eid, most of them children in Eid clothes💔
We can't sleep from fear. Children run away at every sound. We've become hysterical.😥
Please help us stop the bloodshed. We're dying every minute.🙏
Tagging for reach under the cut
new post. since mohammed has had to remake their campaign (more info) it's been really hard to pick up any kind of momentum. im the only person advocating for them, i do not have a lot of followers or avenues to organize!!
since the new campaign was published 2 weeks ago there have only been 2 donations. €30 / €7,500 !
they're in northern gaza. they have a 2 month old baby. they need help, i beg you.
donate ❣️ / verification
mohammed texted me this on wednesday, i've not been able to secure another donation for them since.
Let’s see what happens
LUCILLE CLIFTON "shadows"
in the latter days you will come to a place called memphis. there you will wait for awhile by the river mississippi until you can feel the shadow of another memphis and another river. nile.
wake up girl. you dreaming.
the sign may be water or fire or it may be the black earth or the black blood under the earth. or it may be the syllables themselves coded to you from your southern kin.
wake up girl. i swear you dreaming.
memphis. capital of the old kingdom of ancient egypt at the apex of the river across from the great pyramids. nile. born in the mountains of the moon.
wake up girl. this dont connect.
wait there. in the shadow of your room you may see another dusky woman weakened by too much loss. she will be dreaming a small boat through centuries of water into the white new world. she will be weaving garments of neglect.
wake up girl. this dont mean nothing.
meaning is the river of voices. meaning is the patience of the moon. meaning is the thread running forever in shadow.
girl girl wake up. somebody calling you.
urgent help!
as you guys know my grandparents got scammed almost a month ago, some man told them he was going to send them medical equipment they needed for $500 dollars, we were desperate, not only they lost all the money they had, my grandpa has gotten significantly worse, he's starting to lose vision in his good eye and my grandma is losing mobility as well (evidence), I know I sound annoying always coming here and begging for money for my grandparents and for my college, I don't know how to anticipate the grief, losing my grandpa everyday to his illness, losing my college education cause I can't afford it, in México the situation it's just getting worse and even though I feel lonely I have found a community here and I'm forever grateful for that, even a dollar goes a long way and all the money will go to their medical needs since I'm very sure I won't be able to cover college expenses, please share and donate if you can, you can help via p*ypal or any way you want through ko-fi, here's the link! 💕 thank you sm
making a post for my wonderful friend hazel @hazeydaisey , she got fired unfairly and needs support. her venmo is @ escherstairs, please help her out as much as you can, she is so sweet and deserves the world
🍄🌼🌼🍄🌼🌼🍄🌼🌼🍄🌼🌼🍄
Happy TDOV everyone transgenderism will win
Anthony Bourdain at Park Hyatt Tokyo, c. 2008
when the family is abolished theyll keep marriage around for abusive dynamics roleplay
Update since the last post. These pictures speak for themselves! Mona's work is a testament to her generosity and her dedication to her community. And you can help her keep this going! Please consider donating to help the people of Khan Younis!!! Remember, every dollar counts! P*ypal.
(If you live in India or Pakistan and want to donate, contact her through the means listed on her account).
None of this is possible without Mona and her family's diligence and work. If you would like to send her a thank you note or well wishes, please include it in the replies to this post, in your tags, or in the comments! She always appreciates them ♡
(cw csa)
— Philipp Schweighauser, Discursive Killings: Intertextuality, Aestheticization, and Death in Nabokov's "Lolita".
