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ACM MemberNet - March 28, 2019
Welcome to the March 2019 edition of ACM MemberNet, bringing you the world of ACM and beyond. Explore the many facets of ACM with our newsletter of member activities and events. Read past issues of MemberNet online at https://www.acm.org/membership/acm-membernet-archive.
Elisa Bertino Named 2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer
2019 ACM SIGGRAPH Candidate Slate
ACM's FY 2018 Annual Report
Jack Dongarra Named 2019 Recipient of SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering
ACM and CSTA Announce 2018-2019 Cutler-Bell Prize Student Winners
ACM-W Creates Rising Star Award
SAC 2019, April 8 to 12, Limassol, Cyprus
CPS-IoT Week 2019, April 15 to 18, Montreal, Canada
CHI 2019, May 4 to 9, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
50 Years of Complexity Theory, May 6 to 9, Toronto, Canada
ICSE 2019, May 25 to 31, Montreal, Canada
ACM-IMS Data Science Summit, June 15, 2019, San Francisco, California
Featured Member Benefit: Discounts on HP Products
Watch April 3 Talk on the Future of Wireless with ACM Athena Lecturer Andrea Goldsmith
Apply Now for Computational and Data Science Fellowships and George Michael Memorial Fellowships
Applications for 2019 ACM Europe Summer School on High Performance Computing Deadline Extended to May 1
Featured ACM Distinguished Speaker: Mark Billinghurst
ACM Queue Presents: "Net Neutrality: Unexpected Solution to Blockchain Scaling"
ACM has named Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
Working independently and together, Hinton, LeCun and Bengio developed conceptual foundations for the field, identified surprising phenomena through experiments, and contributed engineering advances that demonstrated the practical advantages of deep neural networks. In recent years, deep learning methods have been responsible for astonishing breakthroughs in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics—among other applications.
Bengio is Professor, University of Montreal and Scientific Director at Mila, Quebec's Artificial Intelligence Institute; Hinton is VP and Engineering Fellow, Google, Chief Scientific Adviser, The Vector Institute, and Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto; and LeCun is Professor at New York University, and VP and Chief AI Scientist, Facebook.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. Bengio, Hinton and LeCun will formally receive the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award at ACM's annual awards banquet on June 15 in San Francisco, California.
"Artificial intelligence is now one of the fastest-growing areas in all of science and one of the most talked-about topics in society," said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. "The growth of and interest in AI is due, in no small part, to the recent advances in deep learning for which Bengio, Hinton and LeCun laid the foundation. These technologies are used by billions of people. Anyone who has a smartphone in their pocket can tangibly experience advances in natural language processing and computer vision that were not possible just 10 years ago. In addition to the products we use every day, new advances in deep learning have given scientists powerful new tools—in areas ranging from medicine, to astronomy, to materials science."
Read the ACM news release.
ACM has named Elisa Bertino of Purdue University the 2019-2020 Athena Lecturer for pioneering and impactful contributions to data management and data security theory and systems, along with outstanding contributions to broadening participation in computing via professional leadership and mentoring. Bertino is recognized as one of the top database security experts worldwide, and has made contributions to data security and privacy in many different contexts and perspectives including context-based access control, digital identity management, data intregrity, Internet of Things and sensor network security, secure and privacy-preserving provenance, privacy-preserving analytics, protection from insider threats, and cloud security. Bertino is also an outstanding educator and mentor, who has been especially active in encouraging young women to pursue careers in computing. Bertino is the Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where she also heads the Cyber Space Security Lab.
Initiated in 2006 by the ACM Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), the Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma.
"Elisa Bertino's work has made fundamental contributions that allow people access to systems based on their roles, the time of day, as well as their locations," said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. In addition, "Bertino has had a lasting impact on the field, through her participation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC), as well as her mentorship of younger colleagues."
Bertino is the Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where she also heads the Cyber Space Security Lab. She will formally receive the Athena Lecturer Award at ACM's annual awards banquet on June 15 in San Francisco.
The ACM SIGGRAPH Nominating Committee has proposed the following candidates for the 2019 ACM SIGGRAPH election which will commence on 14 June 2019:
DIRECTOR A:
Adam Finkelstein, Princeton University
Paul Kry, McGill University
DIRECTOR B:
Elizabeth Baron, Founder of Immersionary Enterprises (formerly Immersive Realities Technical Specialist, Ford Motor Company)
Mona Kasra, University of Virginia
DIRECTOR C:
Adam Bargteil, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Joaquim Jorge, INESC-ID/University Lisboa
In accordance with the ACM SIGGRAPH Bylaws, additional candidates may be placed on the ballot by petition. All candidates must be ACM Professional Members as well as members of ACM SIGGRAPH. Anyone interested in petitioning must inform ACM Headquarters, Pat Ryan (ryanp@hq.acm.org), of their intent to petition by 2 April 2019. Petitions must be submitted to ACM Headquarters for verification by 18 April 2019.
The Nominating Committee:
Rebecca Strzelec, Chair
Scott Owen
KangKang Yin
Mark Elendt
Paula Gaetano-Adi
Ladislav Kavan
ACM's past fiscal year included several initiatives focused on the health of the field. New curricula were introduced to prepare next generations of computing professionals for employment in the global workplace of the future. ACM also released a revitalized Code of Ethics that fortifies our leading role in articulating what it means to be a computing professional. ACM has also formed several key partnerships that will foster new collaborations and allow us to share our rich and extensive resources. Learn more about ACM's activities, including those of the Europe, India and China Councils, in the Annual Report.
Jack Dongarra, a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, was awarded the 2019 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE19) held February 25 to March 1 in Spokane, Washington. He received the award and delivered his prize lecture, "The Singular Value Decomposition: Anatomy of an Algorithm, Optimizing for Performance," on February 28. SIAM and ACM recognized Dongarra for his key role in the development of software and software standards, software repositories, performance and benchmarking software, and in community efforts to prepare for the challenges of exascale computing, especially in adapting linear algebra infrastructure to emerging architectures. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He also received the 2013 ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award.
Read the SIAM news release.
ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) announced the winners of the 2018-2019 Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. Four high school students were selected from among a pool of graduating high school seniors throughout the US who applied for the award by submitting a project or artifact that engages modern technology and computer science. A panel of judges selected the recipients based on the ingenuity, complexity, relevancy and originality of their projects.
The Cutler-Bell Prize promotes the field of computer science and empowers students to pursue computing challenges beyond the traditional classroom environment. In 2015, David Cutler and Gordon Bell established the award. Cutler is a software engineer, designer, and developer of several operating systems at Digital Equipment Corporation. Bell, an electrical engineer, is researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research.
The winners are Naveen Durvasula, Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Springs, Maryland; Isha Puri, Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, New York; Eshika Saxena, Interlake High School, Bellevue, Washington; and Varun Shenoy, Cupertino High School, Cupertino, California. The winning projects illustrate the diverse applications being developed by the next generation of computer scientists.
Each Cutler-Bell Prize winner receives a $10,000 cash prize. This year's recipients will be formally recognized at the Computer Science Teachers Association's annual conference, July 7-10.
Read the news release. For more information visit CSTA.
The ACM Women's Council (ACM-W) has announced the creation of the ACM-W Rising Star Award, recognizing a woman whose early-career research has had significant impact on the computing discipline, as measured by frequent citation of the work; creation of a new research area; a high degree of technology transfer; and/or other positive influences. Andrea Goldsmith, who was named the ACM Athena Lecturer in 2018, wanted to "give back" to women in the computing community after receiving that honor, and was instrumental in creating the Rising Star Award.
ACM-W is establishing an awards committee that will solicit nominations for the award annually in early August. The winner will be recognized at a conference of her choosing, pending the approval of the conference program committee. The awardee will receive a framed certificate and $1000 stipend to be used at her discretion. Read more in the ACM-W Connections newsletter.
The Senior Member advanced grade of membership recognizes ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous ACM Professional membership. Nominations are accepted on a quarterly basis. The deadline for nominations is June 3.
SIGCSE: Awards for Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Education Community and Outstanding Contribution to CS Education
Top Ten Symposium Papers of All Time Award (ACM news release)
The 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing gathers computing professionals engaged in the development of new computing applications. Tracks will cover topics ranging from Robotics and Multi-agent Systems to Digital Life for Human Well-being. Scheduled keynote speakers are Jocelyn Chanussot (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble Institute of Technology) and Yiorgos L. Chrysanthou (University of Cyprus).
CPS-IoT Week is the premier event on cyber-physical systems and internet-of-things research. It brings together five top conferences, multiple workshops, tutorials, competitions and various exhibitions from both industry and academia. Victor Bahl (Microsoft), founder of SIGMOBILE; Moshe Vardi (Rice University), former Editor-in-Chief of Communications of the ACM; and Tulika Mitra (National University of Singapore) will deliver keynotes.
This year's ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction will include workshops on crowdsourcing creativity; HCI and aging; human-centered machine learning; social robots; and more. Keynoting will be Aleks Krotoski, host of The Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast, and of the BBC's Digital Human series; and Ivan Poupyrev, Director of Engineering in Google's Advanced Technology and Projects division.
The Symposium on 50 Years of Complexity Theory: A Celebration of the Work of Stephen Cook will be held at the Fields Institute in Toronto. This symposium celebrates 50 years of NP-completeness and the contributions of ACM A.M. Turing laureate Stephen Cook and his influence on the field of computing. Four other Turing laureates will be attending: Manuel Blum, Shafi Goldwasser, Richard Karp, and Leslie Valiant. Talks will be broadcast live online whenever possible.
The 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering will feature the latest in research, education, open source projects, testing, analysis, and more. Keynoters are Paul Clements, VP of Customer Success at BigLever Software; Margaret-Anne Storey, Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of the Matrix Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Victoria; and Joelle Pineau, Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University.
ACM and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics are hosting the ACM-IMS Interdisciplinary Summit on the Foundations of Data Science. This full-day event will bring together distinguished speakers and panelists addressing topics such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, fairness, and ethics, in addition to discussions about the future of data science and the role of ACM and IMS. Keynote speakers are ACM award recipients Jeff Dean and Daphne Koller, and MacArthur Fellow David Donoho. There will be limited seating, so register early.
Take advantage of HP's best-in-class technology with the full portfolio of personal and printing systems. The HP Employee Purchase Program (EPP) offers HP consumer and commercial-grade products at discounts typically up to 10% off starting prices. You can also take advantage of instant rebates, coupons, and HP Home and Home Office sales promotions that combine with your EPP discount, for a typical savings of 20 to 30%. HP offers ACM members exclusive savings on the most innovative PCs, printers, and accessories. HP offers personalized assistance in choosing the perfect electronics for all of your personal or business needs. Visit the HP Direct Employee Purchase Program page for more information.
Watch the free ACM TechTalk, The Future of Wireless and What It Will Enable, to be presented on Wednesday, April 3 at 12 PM ET/9 AM PT by Andrea Goldsmith, Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and 2018-2019 ACM Athena Lecturer. Marco Gruteser, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University's Wireless Information Network Laboratory and Chair of ACM SIGMOBILE, will moderate the Q&A session. Leave your comments and questions with our speaker now and anytime before the live event on the ACM Discourse page. And check out the page after the webcast for extended discussion with your peers in the computing community, as well as further resources on wireless technology and the Internet of Things.
ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships
If you are a graduate student in data science and computational science, you are encouraged to apply for the ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships, an international program of graduate fellowships created by SIGHPC, ACM's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing, and Intel. The ACM Fellowships aim to increase diversity in these fields.
To qualify, you must be either currently enrolled in a graduate program or accepted to begin in one no later than October 15 of this year; pursuing a graduate degree (Master's, PhD, or equivalent) in computational or data science; be less than halfway through her/his planned program of study; and a be woman and/or a member of a racial/ethnic group that is currently underrepresented in the computing field in the country where you will earn the degree.
The deadline for applications is April 30. Each fellowship recipient will receive a stipend prior to the start of their first academic term after August 1, and will be recognized formally at the annual SC conference awards presentation in November.
ACM-IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships
The ACM-IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships honor exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers that are currently available. The awards are presented each November at the annual SC Conference, where the recipients are recognized at the SC Awards Ceremony. Each fellowship is accompanied by an honorarium of $5,000 plus travel expenses to attend the conference.
Candidates must be enrolled in a full-time PhD program at an accredited college or university and must meet the minimum scholastic requirements at their institution. They are expected to have completed at least one year of study, and have at least one year remaining between the application deadline and their expected graduation.
Nominations are due May 1.
Apply now for the 2019 ACM Europe Summer School on HPC Computer Architectures for AI and Dedicated Applications which will take place in Barcelona July 17-24. The School will be hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTECH). The deadline for applications has been extended to May 1.
Jesús Labarta, BSC, UPC, ACM - IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award recipient
Luca Benini, ETH Zürich, University of Bologna, ACM Fellow and Francesco Conti, ETH Zürich, University of Bologna
David Carrera, UPC, BSC, ERC grantee
Mauro Olivieri, Sapienza University of Rome
The online application form is available via this link. The deadline for applying is end-of-day May 1 AoE (UTC -12).
ACM Student Research Competitions (SRCs), sponsored by Microsoft Research, offer a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research at well-known ACM sponsored and co-sponsored conferences before a panel of judges and attendees. The most recent SRC winners presented at SIGCSE 2019. The next conferences accepting submissions are:
ASSETS 2019, October 28-30, deadline July 10
SIGSPATIAL 2019, November 5-8, deadline August 5
This month's featured speaker is Mark Billinghurst. Mark is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, and Professor in the Bio-Engineering Institute at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He is well known for his research in augmented reality, having published over 450 research papers in the field. He has received awards for VR technical achievement and most influential paper, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. An ACM member, Mark has served on organizing committees for ACM IUI and SIGGRAPH Asia conferences.
For more information on Mark, please visit his DSP speaker information page.
Mark Billinghurst's Digital Library author page
Chapters are the "local neighborhoods" of ACM. The regional ACM Professional, Student, ACM-W, and Special Interest Group (SIG) chapters around the globe involve members locally in competitions, seminars, lectures, workshops, and networking opportunities. ACM welcomes new chapters that were chartered February 13 to March 12, 2019:
Adelphi University ACM-W Student Chapter, Garden City, New York
Azusa Pacific University ACM Student Chapter, Azusa, California
Hashemite University ACM Student Chapter, Zarqa, Jordan
KARE ACM-W Student Chapter, Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education, Srivilliputhur, India
RCCIIT ACM-W Student Chapter, RCC Institute of Information Technology, Kolkata, India
SASTRA University ACM Student Chapter, Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy, Thirumalaisamudram, India
SMIT ACM Student Chapter, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Rangpo, India
SNHU ACM Student Chapter, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester
SRM ACM SIGAI Student Chapter, Sri Ramaswamy Memorial Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India
Texas State University ACM Student Chapter, San Marcos
UDLA ACM Student Chapter, Universidad de las Américas, Quito, Ecuador
ACM Professional Chapters:
BgASC ACM Chapter, Technical University Sofia, Bulgaria
RTP ACM Chapter, SAS, Cary, North Carolina
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic of Northwestern University proposes a solution to the problem of blockchains' lack of scalability. Blockchains possess a disruptive potential because of their decentralized nature, but this is limited by their lack of scalability. However, provably neutral clouds are a viable solution to blockchain scaling. By optimizing the transport layer, not only can the throughput be fundamentally scaled up, but the latency could be dramatically reduced. The key to this vision, however, lies in establishing trust by the blockchain ecosystem into the underlying networking infrastructure. Cloud-delivery networks could dramatically improve blockchains' scalability, but clouds must be provably neutral first.


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Posts Tagged 'Islam'
What Were Stalin's Real Crimes? Critique of "A Marxist-Leninist Perspective" on Stalin (Part II/III)
The meaning of forced collectivization: an irrigation project in Fergana, Eastern Kazakhstan, 1935 (courtesy David Goldfrank)
"It is in the nature of ideological politics […] that the real content of the ideology […] which originally had brought about the 'idea' […] is devoured by the logic with which the 'idea' is carried out."
– Hannah Arendt1
What's the biggest problem with the "criticisms" of Stalin raised by the "Proles of the Round Table"? That they are so disingenuous and anemic. One of the three critiques raised—about Spain—in fact isn't critical of Stalin, while we've seen (in part I) how the "criticism" on deportations is entirely misleading. A related question might be to ask how it looks for two presumably white U.S. Americans to criticize Stalin for some (1-2%) of his deportations of ethnic Germans, but not to do so when it comes to the dictator's mass-deportations of Muslims, Buddhists, and other indigenous peoples. At least Mao Zedong judged Stalin as being "30 percent wrong and 70 percent right."2 For Jeremy and Justin, though, Stalin appears to have been at least 90%, if not 95%, right. Maybe we can soon expect the "Proles of the Round Table" Patreon to begin selling wearables proclaiming that "Stalin did nothing wrong."
Besides the aforementioned Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the May Days, and the mass-deportations of ethnic minorities, let's now consider five of Stalin's real crimes.
1. "Socialism in One Country": Stalinist Ideology
His revision, together with fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, of the tradition of socialist internationalism to the reactionary, ultra-nationalist idea of "socialism in one country." Stalin and Bukharin arrived at this conclusion to compete against Lev Trotsky's rival concept of "permanent revolution," which calls first for a European and then global federation of socialist republics. This Stalinist doctrine, which demanded that the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy be considered first within the Third International (or Comintern), can explain both the General Secretary's demand to crush the anarchists in Spain in 1937 and his effective facilitation of Hitler's rise to power by means of the disastrous Comintern policy that considered the social-democratic (that is, non-Stalinist) opposition to Hitler to be "social-fascist." The General Secretary would only reverse course and endorse a "Popular Front" strategy after Hitler had taken power.3 Stalinist ultra-nationalism finds contemporary purchase among neo-fascist, national-Bolshevik movements, whereas—perhaps ironically—the Comintern doctrine on "social fascism" has echoes today among ultra-leftists disdainful of coalition-building with more moderate political forces (e.g., as in the 2016 U.S. presidential election). Moreover, Stalin's preference for "socialism in one country" can help us understand the Soviet Union's continued sale of petroleum to Mussolini following this fascist's military invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935.4 Within this same vein, and anticipating the affinity of today's neo-Stalinists for campist "analyses" of international relations, Moscow variously supported the feudalist Guo Min Dang (GMD) in China, the Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Afghan King Amanullah Khan, and Ibn al-Sa'ud (founder of Saudi Arabia) during this time on the grounds that these leaders staunchly opposed the West, despite their great distance from any kind of socialist paradigm.5
Courtesy Voline, The Unknown Revolution
2. Stalinist Imperialism
His "Great-Russian" chauvinism, as manifested in his brutally imperialist policies toward ethnic minorities—particularly the deportations of Muslims (as mentioned above in part I)—and other subject-peoples of the former Tsarist empire, whose colonial project Stalin enthusiastically embraced. Though Georgian by origin (his birth name was Ioseb Jughashvili), Stalin (whose Russian nom de guerre means "man of steel") was "the most 'Russian' of the early leaders" who advanced not only "socialism in one country,' but […] a socialism built on a predominantly Russian foundation."6 According to Dunayevskaya, Stalin's "national arrogance" was "as rabid as that of any Tsarist official."7 In contrast to his mentor and supervisor Vladimir I. Lenin, who at least formally supported the right of self-determination for the oppressed nationalities of the Tsarist empire while greatly violating this principle in practice, Stalin was openly imperialist on the national question: according to the terms of this relationship, the colonies were to be "plundered for raw materials and food to serve the industrialisation of Russia."8 It therefore remains clear that, under the Soviet Union, "Russia was not a nation state but an empire, an ideological state. Any definition as a nation-state would probably have excluded at least the non-Slavs, and certainly the Muslims."9 Accordingly, the official history taught in Stalin's USSR rehabilitated the mythical Tsarist narrative that the Russian "Empire had brought progress and civilisation to backward peoples."10
Ethnographic map of the former Soviet Union. Date unknown
In Georgia, a former Tsarist-era colony located in the Caucasus Mountains, the social-democratic Menshevik Party declared independence in 1918 to found the Georgian Democratic Republic, otherwise known as the Georgian Commune, wherein parliamentary democracy and a relatively collaborative relationship among the peasantry, proletariat, and political leadership lasted for three years, until Stalin and his fellow Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze organized a Red Army invasion in 1921 which crushed this courageous experiment in democratic socialism. The errant ex-colony of Georgia was thus forcibly reincorporated into the ex-Tsarist Empire—by then, the "Transcaucasian Federated Soviet Republic," part of the Soviet Union.11 Besides Georgia, this "Transcaucasian Federated Soviet Republic" would include Azerbaijan and Armenia, which had also been occupied by the Red Army in 1920.12
In the Muslim-majority provinces of Central Asia, otherwise known as Turkestan, the poorest region of the former Tsarist Empire, Lenin and Stalin sided with the interests of the Russian settlers against the Muslim peasantry.13 In Orientalist fashion, the Bolsheviks considered Central Asia's "Muslims as culturally backward, not really suitable to be communists and needing to be kept under a kind of tutelage."14 Yet in light of the sustained Basmachi revolt waged by Muslim guerrillas against Soviet imperialism in the first decade after October 1917, Stalin also recognized the significant threat these colonized Muslims could pose to the Soviet Union—hence his active discouragement of pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism by means of cutting off the USSR's Muslims "subjects," many of them ethnically and linguistically Turkic, from the rest of the Ummah (Islamic global brotherhood or community) abroad. An early 1930's law punishing unauthorized exit from the USSR made observation of hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, quite impossible.15 The expulsion from the Communist Party (1923) and subsequent imprisonment (1928) of the Volga Tatar Sultan Galiev, a pan-Islamist "national-communist" who envisioned organizing the Turkic Muslims into a fighting force against Western imperialism, followed a similar logic.16
In the Stalinist conception, the numerous subject-peoples of the Soviet Union could be classified hierarchically according to their "stage of development," as based on their mode of production and whether or not they had a written language, such that supposedly more 'advanced' peoples would qualify as 'nations' that were granted the status of "Soviet Socialist Republic" (SSR), whereas "less developed" peoples would be granted "Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics" (ASSR), while those without written languages would be placed in "Autonomous Regions" (AR), or "National Territories" (NT). In 1953, the year of Stalin's death, there existed 14 SSR's, 20 ASSR's, 8 AR's, and 10 NT's in the USSR.17
Map of Soviet administrative subdivisions, 1989. Notice the numerous ASSR subdivisions in Central Asia
This systematic atomization of oppressed nationalities followed Stalin's "principle of the dual bridgehead," whereby the State would favor those minorities that could assist the USSR in expanding its reach while repressing other minorities whose existence could serve as a "fifth column" for the USSR's rivals. In part I of this critique, we saw how this rationale played out in Stalin's mass-deportations: the General Secretary felt justified in forcibly transferring the Turkic Muslim Meskhetian people, among others, because they were supposedly too close to the Turkish State headed by Kemal Atatürk. Furthermore, this principle can be gleaned in the Soviet Communist Party's initial favoring of Uzbeks over Tajiks beginning in 1924, followed by a 180° shift in perspective upon the overthrow of Afghanistan's King Amanullah (a Pashtun) by Bacha-i Saqqao, a Tajik, in 1928—leading to the proclamation of the Tajikistan SSR in 1929.18 The capital city of Dushanbe was subsequently renamed as "Stalinabad."19 In addition, whereas the Communist Party favored its own Kurdish minority, some of whom included refugees, because it could use them in the future as pawns against Iran and Turkey, it had refused to support Kurdish and Turkmen rebellions abroad against Turkey and Iran in 1925. Above all, Stalin's nationalities policy achieved its greatest "success" in its complex partition of Turkestan by means of the drawing-up of borders that were defined along ethno-nationalist lines: just look at the region's current borders (see map above), which are based on those concluded by Stalin's regime. In thus pitting Central Asia's mosaic of different ethno-linguistic groups against each other, Stalin definitively laid the pan-Islamist specter to rest.20 Dunayevskaya's observation here seems apt: it was in Stalin's "attitude to the many [oppressed] nationalities" that the General Secretary's "passion for bossing came out in full bloom."21
A Soviet mosaic in Karaghandy, Kazakhstan (Courtesy The Guardian)
Stalin's imperialist assertion of power over Central Asia, which imposed the collectivization of cattle herds and the nationalization of bazaars and caravans managed by indigenous peoples while promoting Russian settlements, resulted in famine and revolt.22 It involved a high-modernist assault on Islam in the name of emancipating women and remaking traditional patriarchal Turkic social relations, as we shall examine in more detail in the third part of this response.
Regarding Ukraine, see the section on Jeremy and Justin's Holodomor denial in the third part of this response. Briefly, Jeremy's Russian-chauvinist attitude toward all matters Ukrainian comes through at a fundamental linguistical level when he refers to Ukraine as "the Ukraine." This formulation, like the Russian «на Украине» ("in the Ukraine"), is an imperialist way of referring to the country, which is not just a colony of Russia or the Soviet Union (as in, "the Ukrain[ian province]"). The proper way is to refer just to Ukraine, as in the Russian equivalent «в Украине» ("in Ukraine").
Such attitudes are shared by Ó Séaghdha, who falsely claims Ukraine today to be a "bastion of the far right and neo-Nazism," just as Justin compares "Ukrainian nationalists" to the U.S.-based Proud Boys. One's mind is boggled: as of July 2018, the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party had only 6 seats, or 1.3%, in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada, while in both rounds of elections held in 2014, Svoboda and Right Sector alike gained less than 5% of the vote.23 In fact, Ukraine has held its first major LGBT Pride marches following the Euromaidan protests which overthrew the Putin-affiliated President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Meanwhile, by focusing on the supposedly 'fascist' Ukrainians,24 Ó Séaghdha and his guests deny the global reach of Putin's neo-Nazism, from his 2014 occupation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine and his subsequent mass-detention of Crimean Tatar Muslims, including in psychiatric hospitals, to his regime's criminalization of homosexuality, decriminalization of domestic violence, and genocidal intervention in support of the Assad Regime in Syria—to say nothing of his mutual affinities for the Trump Regime. How ironic is this misrepresentation, then, considering that Ukraine was the "centerpiece of Hitler's vision of Lebensraum."25
A typically socialist-realist depiction of a collective farm celebration, by Arkady Plastov (1937): presumably, this is how neo-Stalinists and 'Marxist-Leninists' idealize the outcomes of forcible collectivization in the Soviet Union.
3. Stalinist State-Capitalism
His advocacy and implementation of state capitalism in the Soviet Union, whereby the basic relationship of exploitation between capital and labor persisted after the Russian Revolution, with the difference that capital in this case was managed and expanded by the Communist Party bureaucracy rather than the private capitalist class.26 Upheld by the Army and police, the Soviet economy reduced workers to mere slaves: during the existence of the USSR, workers could not regulate, choose, or control their overseers and administrators, much less anticipate not having any, as through anarcho-syndicalist organization, or autogestion (самоуправление). In the USSR,
"[t]he State [wa]s [the worker's] only employer. Instead of having thousands of 'choices,' as is the case in the nations where private capitalism prevails, in the U.S.S.R. (the U.S.C.R. [Union of State-Capitalist Republics: Voline]) the worker ha[d] only one. Any change of employer [wa]s impossible there."27
Following the Revolution, "[f]or the Russian workers, […] nothing had changed; they were merely faced by another set of bosses, politicians and indoctrinators."28
Peasants under Stalin were similarly reduced to serfs, particularly during and following the forced collectivization process that began in 1928. Continuing with the precedent of the Bolshevik policy of "War Communism," which had involved considerable extraction of grain and the conscription of young men from the peasantry, Stalin declared war on the countryside, expropriating all lands held by these peasants and concentrating these into kolkhozi, or "collective possessions," and sovkhozi, or State farms, which were to be worked by the peasants in the interests of the State.29 This nationalization did not discriminate between "rich" peasant, or kulak, and poor—in contrast to the misleading presentation Jeremy and Justin make of Stalin's forcible collectivization campaign. The "Proles of the Round Table" deceptively explain the emergence of the "kulaks" by referring to the Tsarist Interior Minister Peter Stolypin's land reforms of 1906, while saying nothing about Lenin's "New Economic Policy" of 1921, which formally reintroduced private property. They also completely misrepresent Stalin's collectivization policy, which proceeded at the points of bayonets, as a natural outgrowth of the traditional peasant commune (mir or obshchina), which had resisted the Tsarist State for centuries. In fact, it was arguably through Stalinist forcible collectivization that the Russian countryside fell under the control for the first time.30 As peasant resistance to this "total reordering of a rural civilization from the top down" mounted, including an estimated 13,000 "mass disturbances" just in 1930, Stalin's regime resorted to atrocious counter-insurgent tactics to bring the countryside to heel, including mass-executions, reprisals, and the resulting famines of 1931-1933 in Ukraine, South Russia, and Kazakhstan.31 The Stalinist regime conveniently expanded the definition of exactly who was a "kulak" from a class-based to a political definition, such that even poor peasants who opposed forcible collectivization could be labeled "kulaks" and deported to Siberia, the Far North, and Central Asia, as about 1.8 million peasants were in 1930-1931. As during the numerous other episodes of mass-deportations devised by Stalin, mortality rates among "dekulakized" peasants were high.32
Puzzlingly, the "Proles of the Round Table" claim this collectivization to have been "extremely successful" in providing "stability" by the mid-1930's, the resistance of at least 120 million peasants to the Terror campaign and the "excess mortality" of between 6 and 13 million people such Terror caused during this period notwithstanding. By precisely which standards can this campaign have said to have been "successful"? The historian Catherine Evtuhov observes: "From any humane perspective, the terrible costs were far greater than the rewards."33 In contrast, Jeremy and Justin either do not recognize the brutality of the Stalinist regime's campaign, or they simply explain away mass-death during collectivization as resulting from natural disasters—thus 'naturalizing' the Soviet regime's contributions to famines—and/or "kulak resistance." By so easily dismissing mass-death, they imply that the millions of poor peasants who were destroyed as a result of forcible collectivization deserved such a fate.
Jeremy and Justin are very insistent on arguing that the deaths associated with collectivization were "not due" to Stalin's policies—against both logic and evidence. They have nothing to say about Stalin's reconstitution in 1932 of the Tsarist-era internal-passport system, or propiska, in order to tightly control the movements of the Soviet peasantry and proletariat during forced collectivization. Upon its proclamation in December 1932, such "passportization" was effected and mandated in "towns, urban settlements, district centers, and Machine and Tractor Stations, within 100-kilometer radiuses around certain large towns, in frontier zones, on building sites and state farms": it thus openly revoked the freedom of movement of the majority of the Soviet population, including peasants and ethnic minorities.34 With this in mind, it would appear that the "Proles of the Round Table" do not to want to concede the possibility—and reality—that Stalin's "dekulakization" campaign involved the oppression and dispossession of many poor peasants, whether these were insurgents against whom the State retaliated for defending their communities against Stalinist incursion or simply peasants whom the parasitic bureaucracy considered mere objects of exploitation and either killed outright or left to die during forcible collectivization—thus reflecting the extent to which internal colonialism characterized the Stalinist State.35
Indeed, Stalin's "dekulakization" campaign followed a very clearly state-capitalist rationale, both requiring and (once established) providing mass-labor inputs. Based on the economic theory of Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, Stalin's massive State project to centralize the peasantry so as to more deeply exploit it represented the phase of "primitive socialist accumulation" that was considered as necessary to finance a rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. In parallel to the colonization of the New World, the enslavement of Africans, and the enclosure of the commons by which capitalism arose as a historical mode of production,36 Preobrazhensky essentially argued that the Soviet State must exploit the peasants and use the surplus value extracted from them to accelerate the growth of capital and industry.37 This brutally mechanistic logic, which has served as the model for similar industrialization processes in countries led by Stalinist bureaucracies such as Maoist China and Ethiopia under the Derg,38 openly exhibits Marxist-Leninism's fundamental bias against the peasantry, whether "kulak" or otherwise. Such bias was clearly on display on Ó Séaghdha's podcast, given the embarrassing side-comments about "comrades cuddling" during the horrors of forced collectivization, and Jeremy and Justin's astonishing conclusion that this collectivization which took the lives of millions of poor peasants had been "extremely successful." These Stalinists thus appear to have no class analysis of the peasantry, instead considering them all as reactionaries and "capitalists" whose oppression and destruction signifies progress. They malign the peasants and laugh over their corpses while saying nothing about the conditions of "second serfdom"—represented by barshchina (State labor requirements), extraction, and low pay—that formed the basis of Stalinist industrialization.39
Within Soviet class society, according to Voline (writing in 1947), there existed approximately 10 million privileged workers, peasants, functionaries, Bolshevik Party members, police, and soldiers (comprising approximately 6% of the population of the USSR/USCR), as against 160 million effectively enslaved workers and peasants (or 94% of the USSR/USCR's population).40 The basic structure of the Soviet Union, on Paul Mattick's account, was "a centrally-directed social order for the perpetuation of the capitalistic divorce of the workers from the means of production and the consequent restoration of Russia as a competing imperialist power."41 This 'total State' "resembled an army in terms of rank and discipline," and atop it all "lived Stalin, moving between his Kremlin apartment and his heavily guarded dachas. He and his cronies indulged themselves night after night, in between issuing commands and execution orders, feasting and toasting in the manner of gangland chiefs."42
The meaning of forcible collectivization: child labor on an irrigation project in Fergana, Eastern Kazakhstan, 1935 (courtesy David Goldfrank)
4. The GULAG Slave-Labor Camp System
"The deaths of the conquered are necessary for the conqueror's peace of mind." – Chinggis Khan: a phrase of which Stalin was fond (Evtuhov 676)
His regime's founding (in 1930), mass-expansion, and vast utilization of the GULAG slave-labor camp system, known officially as the "State Camp Administration," which played a central role in the General Secretary's "Great Purge," otherwise known as his "Terror." These purges served the goal of "ensur[ing] the survival of the regime and Stalin's position as its supreme leader" by eliminating the remaining "General Staff of the [Russian] Revolution" as well as the workers, peasants, and intellectuals who resisted Stalin's state-capitalist plans.43 The General Secretary's insistence on obedience, his paranoid vengefulness, his equation of any kind of opposition with treason, and the fear felt by Communists that the Soviet Union was militarily encircled, particularly in light of a newly remilitarized and fascist Germany, can help explain the Terror, which involved the arrest of at least 1.5 million people, the deportation of a half-million to camps, and the execution of hundreds of thousands. The total camp population reached 2.5 million in 1950.44
As Yevgenia Semënovna Ginzburg's memoir Journey into the Whirlwind attests to, the GULAG system was designed in such a way as to partially recoup the financial losses involved in the mass-imprisonments which followed from Stalin's Purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: instead of summarily being executed or idly rotting away in prison, many detainees were forced to work for the State with little to no material compensation. Ginzburg shows as well that political prisoners suffered greater discrimination in access to health services, nutritional intake, shelter, and types of labor performed in the GULAG, relative to other convict groups: the 'politicals' were always assigned hard labor. Many GULAG prisoners died performing slave-labor, whether clearing forests or constructing railroads: such was the fate of numerous enslaved prisoners forced to construct the Moscow-Volga Canal from 1932-1937.45 Within the Magadan camp located in Eastern Siberia where Ginzburg was held, the discrepancy between the housing conditions of Hut No. 8, a "freezing cold" "wild animals' den" where the female political prisoners lived, and the abodes of those convicted for lesser offenses, in which lived individuals with "healthy complexions and lively faces" enjoying "blankets in check patterns" and "pillows with hemstitched linen covers," clearly illustrates the discrimination.46 This same dynamic seems to explain the contrast in appearance—and physical comfort—among the female slave-labor teams assigned to the Kilometer 7 work site: the "peasant women" "had managed to keep their own coarse scarves" and some of the "ordinary criminals" had sheepskin coats, while the political prisoners "had not a rag of [their own]" and wore footwear which was "full of holes [and] let in the snow."47 Ginzburg's fellow inmate Olga was therefore right to anticipate that Stalin's regime would expand the use of "hard-labor camps" in the wake of the downfall of NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov in 1939, especially considering that the majority of those imprisoned by Stalin were of prime working age.48
In a reflection of the maxims of Stalinist state-capitalism, Ginzburg reports that the slave-labor system to which she was subjected in the GULAG would dole out food only in proportion to the output that a given team would achieve. For teams like hers comprised of intellectuals and ex-Party officials who lacked experience with manual labor, then, this dynamic would result in a downward spiral of production—and welfare, since they were unable to achieve a basic threshold for production which would allow them access to the very food they needed to maintain and increase production in the future.49 Yet slave-laborers were sometimes provided with food relief if mortality rates were deemed 'excessive.'50 Ginzburg's memoirs thus suggest that, as far as political prisoners were concerned, the GULAG system was designed to torment such 'politicals' by maintaining them at a minimal level of sustenance, rather than starving or otherwise killing them outright.
On a more positive note, Stalin's death in March 1953 brought "hope [to] the [inmates of the GULAG] camps," inspiring both the June 1953 workers' uprising against Stalinism, which not only overthrew State power in several cities and work-sites in East Germany but also involved workers' liberation of prisons and concentration camps, and the unprecedented strike by political prisoners at the Vorkuta slave-labor camp which followed just two weeks later.51 Dunayevskaya comments in a manner that remains completely germane today that both of these episodes represented an "unmistakable affirmative" response to the question of whether humanity can "achieve freedom out of the totalitarianism of our age."52
5. Assassination of Trotsky
"What specific characteristics in a man enable him to become the receptacle and the executor of class impulses from an alien class[…]?" – Raya Dunayevskaya53
His ordering of the assassination of Lev Trotsky, as carried out by the Spanish NKVD agent Ramón Mercader in Trotsky's residence in Coyoacán, Mexico, in August 1940. Whereas there is little love lost between us and the "Old Man," as Trotsky was known, given his status as the butcher of the Kronstadt Commune, the would-be executioner of Nestor Makhno, an advocate of the militarization of labor, and an apologist for State slavery54—still, Stalin's brazen attempts to assassinate him in Mexico City not once but twice remain shocking in their brutality to this day. They may well have inspired the commission of similar atrocities on the part of the C.I.A.,55 the Israeli Mossad, and even Mohammed bin Salman's recent murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
First, on May 24, 1940, the Mexican surrealist and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros led an assassination-squad in an assault on Trotsky's fortified family residence, which the exiled Bolshevik leader had been granted by Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, who had afforded him asylum and personal protection. Mercader represented Stalin's back-up plan. Having adopted an elaborate "deep-cover" false identity as "Jacques Mornard," a Belgian aristocrat unconcerned with political questions, Mercader had seduced and used Sylvia Ageloff, herself a leftist Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn connected through her sisters to Trotsky, for two years to get close enough to facilitate both assassination attempts. While the complicity of "Jacques" in the first plot remained undetected, this was only possible because Siqueiros' team captured and murdered Trotsky's young American security guard Robert Sheldon Harte, whom Mercader knew and also used to gain access to Trotsky's residence in the early morning of May 24. Yet a combination of luck; quick-thinking by Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's wife, who isolated and shielded her partner's body from the would-be assassin's bullets; and the imprecise strategy to kill Trotsky that morning ensured his survival.56 Nevertheless, following a dry-run to assassinate Trotsky in his study using an ice-pick on the pretext of discussing a political article he had begun to write, Mercader invited himself back to Trotsky's residence on the hot summer day of August 20, 1940, to discuss some revisions he had supposedly made to improve the same article. Concealing his ice-pick under a heavy raincoat, Mercader provoked Natalia Sedova's suspicions about his presentation:
"Yes, you don't look well. Not well at all. Why are you wearing your hat and raincoat? You never wear a hat, and the sun is shining."57
Nevertheless, despite Natalia Sedova and Trotsky's own intuitive misgivings, this Stalinist agent did 'succeed' in assassinating the exiled Bolshevik that day—precisely by burying an ice-pick into Trotsky's head from behind, as the "Old Man" was distracted turning the page while reading the very essay Mercader had brought him:
"The moment was rehearsed. Wait until he finishes the first page, [NKVD officer] Eitington had coached. Wait until he is turning the page, when he will be most distracted."58
What a fitting allegory for Leninism and Stalinism: conflict-resolution according to the principle of "might makes right."59 Trotsky's fate also openly displays Stalin's anti-Semitism: in so ruthlessly murdering his primary political rival, a world-renowned Bolshevik leader and Jewish dissident,60 in Coyoacán, which lies approximately 6,000 miles (or 10,000 kilometers) from Moscow—after having exploited Sylvia Ageloff, a fellow Jewish intellectual, to gain access to the desired target—the "Man of Steel" flaunts his attitude toward the relationship between Jews and his false "Revolution." Mercader's assassination of Trotsky therefore illuminates the clear continuities between Stalin and the bourgeoisie, in terms of their shared instrumentalization of human life, and the "full-circle" development of the Russian Revolution, proving Voline's point that "Lenin, Trotsky, and their colleagues [as Stalin's predecessors] were never revolutionaries. They were only rather brutal reformers, and like all reformers and politicians, always had recourse to the old bourgeois methods, in dealing with both internal and military problems."61
2Elliott Liu, Maoism and the Chinese Revolution (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 68).
4Henry Wolfe, The Imperial Soviets (New York: Doubleday, 1940).
5Alfred Meyer, Communism (New York: Random House, 1984), 92-93.
6E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 195-196.
7Dunayevskaya 318.
8Hensman 36.
9Olivier Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 52.
10Hensman 53-60.
11Eric Lee, The Experiment: Georgia's Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 (London, Zed Books, 2017). See a review here.
13Roy 50-51, 83.
14Ibid 50.
16Roy 45-46, 52-53, 66.
17Ibid 64-65.
18Roy 67.
20Roy 46, 68, 73.
21Dunayevskaya 318.
24This line is disturbingly close to that of the neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin, who welcomed Russia's 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine by calling for "genocide… of the race of Ukrainian bastards [sic]." Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (Chico, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 233.
25Plokhy 259.
26Wayne Price, Anarchism and Socialism: Reformism or Revolution? 3rd ed. (Edmonton, Alberta: Thoughtcrime, 2010), 186-189; Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Role of Bolshevik Ideology in the Birth of the Bureaucracy," in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 282.
27Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975), 359-361.
28Paul Mattick, "Bolshevism and Stalinism," in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 271.
29Voline 372-375.
31Ibid 668; Voline 374.
34For a translation of the text of the December, 1932 decree of the USSR Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, see M. Matthews, Soviet Government: a Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policy, J. Cape, 1974, 74-77.
35Hensman 34-35; Plokhy 249-250.
36Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin: London, 1976), 873-904.
38Jason W. Clay and Bonnie K. Holcomb, Politics and Famine in Ethiopia (Cambridge, Mass.: Cultural Survival, 1985).
40Voline 380, 388.
41Mattick 264.
42Evtuhov 688, 730.
43Plokhy 255; Dunayevskaya 320.
44Evtuhov 671, 676, 693, 730.
45Ibid 675, 688.
46Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (San Diego: Harcourt, 1967), 366, 368.
51Dunayaevskaya 325-329.
54Ida Mett, "The Kronstadt Commune," in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 185-190; Voline 592-600; Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control (London: Solidarity, 1970).
55Arendt xxn4.
56John P. Davidson, The Obedient Assassin (Harrison, NY: Delphinium Books, 2014), 48, 193-199.
59Voline 374.
60A dissident relative to Stalinism in power, that is, but not relative to anarchism or libertarian communism.
61Voline 431-432 (emphasis added).
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Posted in 'development', Afghanistan, Africa south of the Sahel, audio, China, displacement, Europe, fascism/antifa, health, imperialism, Imperiled Life, Iran, Kurdistan, México, reformism, requiems, Revolution, Russia/Former Soviet Union, Shoah, U.S., war | 1 Comment »
Stop Rohingya Genocide!
Courtesy Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The Burmese military that effectively rules the Southeast Asian State of Myanmar is currently engaged in a campaign of intensifying genocide against the country's Rohingya minority. Of the 1 million Rohingyas who were estimated to have lived in Myanmar's northwestern Rakhine State before this newest episode of ethnic cleansing, approximately one thousand have been killed and over a half-million displaced in the past two months. These Rohingya refugees, many of whom are women and children, have fled the brutal scorched-earth tactics of the Burmese State for neighboring Bangladesh—although over 100,000 remain internally displaced in Rakhine in perilous conditions.
The Rohingyas of Burma
The dispossessed Rohingyas have confronted mass-murder, torture, and sexual assault and had their homes torched and their crops destroyed. Scores of villages have been burnt to the ground. In addition, the Burmese military has installed a series of landmines adjacent to the Naf River that divides Myanmar from Bangladesh, both to harm those fleeing and to dissuade their return. Why has this happened?
Many observers point to the ethno-religious aspects of this oppressive dynamic. Whereas the Burmese State is largely controlled by majority ethnic Bamars who are Buddhists, the Rohingya minority—considered by the State to be "Bengalis," as from the region of Bengal that spans India and Bangladesh—are mostly Muslim, with a Hindu minority. While Islam and Buddhism are not mutually hostile to each other, such fault-lines as differing religious identities have been used in this case to prepare and ultimate rationalize the ongoing genocide. British colonialism—with its logic of racialization and bordering—prepared the groundwork for the atrocities unfolding today, as imperialists used Rohingyas during the war against Japan and even at one point promised them independence, a promise later revoked. Since its 1962 takeover in the early post-colonial period following Burmese independence from Britain in 1948, the military has promoted Buddhist nationalism as an ideal and excluded many of the country's ethnic minorities, none more than the Rohingya. In 1974, the State identified all Rohingyas as foreigners; in 1982, it formally revoked their collective citizenship.
Military "Clearance Operations"
Over the past half-century, the State has systematically starved, enslaved, and massacred the Rohingya people. In response, between the 1970s and August 2017, an estimated 1 million Rohingyas fled Burma/Myanmar, with 168,000 refugees crossing State borders between 2012 and August 2017. In violation of international law, Rohingya refugees have been forcibly repatriated to Rakhine several times over the past 40 years. This time, however, the ethnic cleansing appears to be meant to be final.
In his report on an October 2017 meeting with the U.S. ambassador, General Min Aung Hlaing, the Burmese commander accused of ordering the ongoing atrocities, falsifies history by claiming that the Rohingyas are "not native" but rather foreigners who were introduced to the country by British imperialism. Such a self-serving account overlooks the historical presence of Muslims in Rakhine since at least the fifteenth century and conveniently erases the cosmopolitan past in which Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists coexisted without war. Ominously, Aung Hlaing has publicly declared that the ongoing "clearance operations" are meant to resolve "unfinished business" from Burma's independence. For her part, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, the former political prisoner and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, is entirely complicit in these crimes, given her guarding of silence on the current crisis and her past rejection of the idea that the State's military campaigns in Rakhine constitute ethnic cleansing.
The "Last Asian Frontier" to Capital
Yet however much responsibility for the Rohingya genocide rests with the Burmese military and ruling class, capitalist and imperialist elements play important roles in the oppression of the Rohingyas as well. The power of the Burmese State and military has grown hand-in-hand with the expanding extraction of its fossil-fuel resources and the accelerating opening-up of trade and investment in recent years. Having been relatively unknown to global capitalism, Burma/Myanmar is sometimes considered the "last Asian frontier" for capitalist models of plantation agriculture, deforestation, mega-mining, and the super-exploitation of labor.
Over the past two decades, the State has dispossessed millions of Buddhist peasants of their land to make way for corporate-extractivist projects, and before the current crisis erupted, the State had already awarded a million hectares in Rakhine for "corporate development" schemes. In northern Rakhine, moreover, the State has plans to establish a "special economic zone" with Chinese investors to construct oil and gas pipelines to the tune of $10 billion. When one considers that all burnt land in Burma reverts to State property, the meaning of its military's "clearing operations" against the Rohingyas becomes clearer. The ferocity of the State's response to the coordinated guerrilla attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on 40 Burmese police stations and a military base in Rakhine on August 25, which provoked the current wave of mass-displacement, shows that the ARSA attack is only a pretext for the State to implement its broadly genocidal designs.
Courtesy Showkat Shafi/Al Jazeera
International Complicity in Genocide
Since 1990, China, Russia, Israel, and former Yugoslavian countries have been Burma's major arms suppliers, while the UK provides training to the Burmese military. In fact, in September 2017, the Israeli State argued before the High Court of Justice that ethics have no place in business or international relations, and that no restrictions should be placed on Israeli arms sales to Burmese security forces. Although the U.S. and the European Union currently observe an embargo on trade in weapons with the country, recent meetings between EU leaders and General Min Aung Hlain suggest that this embargo may well be lifted soon in the interests of profitability.
Moreover, recently at the United Nations, the Trump Regime cynically used accusations of war crimes against the Rohingyas as leverage against the State's allies, China and Russia. While it is clear that Trump has no actual interest in the Rohingyas as human beings, it bears noting that the Obama administration helped legitimize Suu Kyi and the military junta she serves by suspending sanctions against Burma following her party's electoral victory in 2015. Of course, overcoming the "barrier" that such sanctions had represented to the expansion of capital serves U.S. imperialist interests as well.
In closing, we condemn the State Terror that has targeted Rohingyas for four decades, leading to the current genocidal catastrophe, and we express our solidarity with those displaced both internally in Burma/Myanmar and as refugees in Bangladesh. We denounce all imperialist and capitalist support for the Burmese junta, whether provided by the U.S., Israel, Russia, or China. We take inspiration from the mutual aid provided by Bangladeshis to the Rohingya refugees, even as that country confronts mass-inundation and disappearance due to rising sea levels that result from capital-induced climate change. We look forward to the potential unification of peasantry and working class across ethnic lines against the Burmese State, and we demand justice.
Never again! Stop Rohingya genocide!
Message to the world from Nasima Khatun, a Rohingya (Al Jazeera, 17 Sept. 2017)
Message to the world from Noor Kajol, a Rohingya (Al Jazeera, 15 Sept. 2017)
Message to the world from Begum Jaan, a Rohingya (Al Jazeera, 12 Sept. 2017)
UN: Rohingya in Bangladesh need 'massive' assistance (Al Jazeera, 24 Sept. 2017)
Al Jazeera releases virtual reality project on Rohingya (Al Jazeera, 28 Sept. 2017)
'No pictures, no words can explain Rohingya plight' (Al Jazeera, 16 Oct. 2017)
Tags:Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, ARSA, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bangladesh, Buddhism, Burma, capitalism, China, climate catastrophe, climate change, ethnic cleansing, EU, General Min Aung Hlaing, Islam, Israel, junta, militarism, Min Aung Hlaing, mutual aid, Myanmar, Naf River, nationalism, Obama, Rakhine, refugees, Rohingya, Rohingyas, Russia, sanctions, Stop Rohingya Genocide, Trump, Trump Regime, UK, Ummah
Posted in 'development', China, climate catastrophe, displacement, health, imperialism, requiems, Shoah, South Asia, Southeast Asia, U.S. | Leave a Comment »
Laurence Davis: "Only a Bold and Popular Left Radicalism Can Stop the Rise of Fascism"
Written by Laurence Davis and published on Open Democracy, 12 February 2017
Walter Benjamin's observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution speaks poignantly to our current condition.
Horkheimer is front left, Adorno front right, and Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair, Heidelberg, 1964. Wikicommons/Jeremy J. Shapiro at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Some right reserved.
Two new worlds are now struggling to be born amidst the crumbling ruins of neoliberalism and market globalisation. The first is the waking nightmare now unfolding in the United States in the glare of the international media. A reality show with a cast of horrors, its politically successful mix of faux right-wing populism and neo-fascism has inspired and emboldened autocrats everywhere and threatens in the absence of an effective counter-power to become our new global reality.
The second, a just, compassionate, ecologically sound and democratically self-managed post-capitalist world, may be detected in what Colin Ward once described as scattered 'seeds beneath the snow'. Deeply rooted in a rich soil of ideas and grounded utopian imagination nourished by countless counter-cultural critics of capitalism, industrialism and grow-or-die economics from William Morris, Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus to Gandhi, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin and Ursula Le Guin – as well as a long history of popular movements from below working together to resist regimes of domination and develop progressive and sustainable alternatives to them – the tender shoots of another world are emerging all around us.
They are visible in a wide range of grassroots practices, movements, and practical utopias, from Buen Vivir in the Andes, Ubuntu in South Africa, Ecoswaraj in India, Zapatismo in Mexico, and the budding degrowth movement in Europe to solidarity economies, commoning activities, permaculture projects, re-localisation movements, community currencies, transition towns, co-operatives, eco-communities, worker occupied factories, indigenous people's assemblies, alternative media and arts, human-scale technologies, basic and maximum income experiments, debt audit movements, radical democratic movements such as Occupy and democratic confederalism in Rojava, and emerging anti-fascist fronts and coalitions uniting immigrant solidarity groups, anti-racists, feminists, queers, anarchists, libertarian socialists and many others.
The great danger we now face is that newly empowered forces of reaction will use that power to repress progressive alternatives before they are able to coalesce as an effective counter-power, sowing seeds of hatred and intolerance instead.
Many commentators of a liberal democratic or centre-left political persuasion have dismissed such warnings as scare-mongering, and suggested that the most effective antidote to 'populist politics' is a renewed commitment to social democracy and market globalisation with a 'human face'. Rather than seek to understand the complex mix of reasons why American citizens voted for a demagogue like Trump, they blame an undifferentiated 'populism' and advocate more elite democracy instead.
The breathtaking naivety of this commentary is perhaps matched in recent memory only by Francis Fukuyama's equally naïve and now risible prediction in 1989 of an 'end of history', i.e. an end to mankind's ideological evolution with the 'universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government'.
Walter Benjamin, Paris, 1939
Now more than ever, it is vital that we recognise and articulate careful ideological distinctions between competing right and left wing varieties of populism, and that those of us committed to values like equality, democracy and solidarity take urgent action to oppose Trumpism and the rise of fascism not with more of the same failed elite-led liberal democracy, but with a bold left egalitarian and inclusive radicalism.
The Trump campaign gave voice to the ugly authoritarian and reactionary face of popular opposition to the political establishment. It castigated the elitism and corruption of the system, emphasised its ineffectuality in the face of sinister threats to national well-being posed by Muslims and illegal immigrants and other easily scapegoated 'outsider' groups, and maintained that Trump and Trump alone could 'make America great again'. It succeeded by peddling false solutions and scapegoats for real social problems generated by the governance of interconnected political and economic elites.
By contrast, a bold and inclusive left populist radicalism would expose the real roots of festering social problems by speaking plainly and directly to ordinary people's needs, without pandering to their worst prejudices and fears. It would offer a generous vision of a better world, and a sweeping programme for revolutionary social change that can be translated into everyday practice.
This will require a reconnection with revolutionary roots. Historically, revolutionary ideas and social movements have tended to emerge out of, and give ideological coherence to, popular democratic social forms. However, in our time once revolutionary ideologies and movements like socialism and anarchism have grown increasingly detached from their radical democratic roots, leaving a political vacuum that right-wing populists and demagogues have been quick to fill.
Walter Benjamin's observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution speaks poignantly to our current condition. It may be interpreted not only as warning, but as a grimly realistic utopian hope that we still have a fleeting historical opportunity to act before it is too late.
Tags:anarchism, anti-fascism, anti-racism, antifa, buen vivir, capitalism, counterpower, democratic confederalism, Donald Trump, ecology, Ecoswaraj, Elisée Reclus, EZLN, fascism, feminism, Francis Fukuyama, genocide, immigration, industrialism, irrationalism, Islam, Ivan Illich, Liberalism, libertarian socialism, Max Horkheimer, Max Weber, militarism, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Murray Bookchin, permaculture, Peter Kropotkin, Populism, queer, radical ecology, radical politics, Reason and Revolution, revolution, Rojava, social democracy, socialism, struggle, Theodor W. Adorno, Trump, Trumpism, Ubuntu, Ursula K. Le Guin, Walter Benjamin, William Morris, Zapatismo
Posted in 'development', Abya Yala, anarchism, climate catastrophe, displacement, Europe, Frankfurt School, health, imperialism, Imperiled Life, Revolution, Shoah, U.S. | Leave a Comment »
Review: Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. Originally published on Sept. 13th, 2016
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson's Foucault and the Iranian Revolution presents a fascinating historical account of the process whereby the despotic Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was overthrown by the Iranian masses in 1978-79, only to yield a dictatorial Islamist regime led by reactionary clerics. The transition to the Islamic Republic, ruled over by Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini, found the unlikely support of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher well-known for his anti-authoritarian critique of Western modernity, who expressed great enthusiasm for the Shi'ite Islamist elements of the Revolution in a number of public articles he wrote about the fall of the Shah, as based on the two visits he made to Iran in 1978.
Afary and Anderson observe that, while many progressives and leftists — both in Iran and elsewhere — favored the Revolution against the Shah but could not countenance the notion of an Islamic Republic replacing such despotism, Foucault was less critical toward Khomeini and the possibility of clerical rule. The authors argue that Foucault's attitude in this sense — rather than signify some aberration or lapse in judgment — indeed follows from his post-structuralist political theorizing, which rejects the Enlightenment and despairs at the historical possibility of emancipation. As such, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution serves as an important warning for Western radicals and intellectuals vis-à-vis revolutionary movements, anti-imperialism and political authoritarianism in the rest of the world. Moreover, it raises questions about the liberatory potential of post-structuralism, detailing how that tendency's preeminent spokesperson so clearly betrayed Iran's workers, women, LGBTQ citizens, dissidents and religious and ethnic minorities by romanticizing what French leftist Maxime Rodinson refers to as "a type of archaic fascism."
In their investigation of Foucault's relationship with the Iranian Revolution, Afary and Anderson situate the philosopher's writings within the context of the rejection of modernity he advances in works like Madness and Civilization (1961) and Discipline and Punish (1975). In this way, the authors hold that Foucault privileges pre-modernism, irrationalism and traditionalism — and therefore patriarchal domination. In fact, Foucault was not very attuned to feminist concerns, as is clearly seen in the October 1978 essay, "What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?" Here, the writer uncritically cites the vision of a future Iranian Islamic state in which there would supposedly not be any "inequality with respect to rights" between men and women, but "difference, since there is a natural difference." Beyond this, in certain ways, the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini can be said to typify the "will to power" developed by Friedrich Nietzsche, the authoritarian irrationalist whose thought was central to Foucault's worldview, as was that of Martin Heidegger, the Nazi-friendly phenomenologist whose concept of "being toward death" resonated with Foucault. The authors have a point, then, in observing that "Foucault's affinity with the Iranian Islamists […] may also reveal some of the larger ramifications of his Nietzschean-Heideggerian discourse."
Psychologically and philosophically, Foucault found the 1978 mass-demonstrations against the Shah that re-enacted the historical drama of the battle of Karbala (680 CE) and the martyrdom there of Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shi'ites, highly compelling. For Afary and Anderson, Foucault's attraction to the Iranian Revolution can be explained by the common interests the philosopher shared with many of the insurgents in terms of traditionalism, anti-imperialism and death. During the Revolution, the mourning celebrations of Muharram and Ashura, which commemorate the death of Hussein ibn Ali, his family and followers at the hands of the Sunni Umayyad dynasty, saw Shi'ite Islam being interpreted to emphasize the righteousness of masses of people electing to give their lives for the cause of overthrowing the Shah. Indeed, the principal intellectual forerunner of the Iranian Revolution, Ali Shariati, stressed martyrdom as the defining element of Shi'ism: Alavid or "red Shi'ism" (that of Hussein ibn Ali) against Safavid (institutionalized) or "black Shi'ism." Shariati's view is that all generations are invited to give up their lives in the struggle if they cannot kill their oppressors.
While Shariati did not live to see the Revolution he inspired, the major uprisings of September 1978 followed his predictions, as scores of protesters were killed in the streets by the Shah's security forces on "Black Friday" (September 8). Thereafter, general strikes were launched in various industries and the Shah's end drew precipitously closer. Foucault was deeply struck by these mobilizations involving hundreds of thousands of people, seeing in them the total "other" of established Western society. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the advance of the Revolution through Islamist "political spirituality" led him to disregard the secularist and left-wing elements participating in the movement as less authentic than the expressly Shi'ite protestors, and in fact to declare that the collective political will of the Iranian people was entirely unified by political Islam and a generalized love for the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the aforementioned article regarding Iranian dreams, Foucault also embarrassingly reproduces a line from a cleric stipulating that Iran's ethnic and religious minorities — Kurds, Jews, Baha'is, Zoroastrians — would be respected insofar as their lives did not "injure the majority." This lapse, together with the anti-feminist sentiment Foucault reproduced in the same essay, led an Iranian woman named "Atoussa H." to call him out publicly. In a letter to Le Nouvel Observateur published in November 1978, Foucault's critic issued a warning about the philosopher's romanticization of Islamism and the prospect of an Islamic State in Iran, noting that, "everywhere outside Iran, Islam serves as a cover for feudal or pseudo-revolutionary oppression." Atoussa H. despaired at the prospect of having the reign of the bloody Shah merely yield to religious fanaticism. Foucault's public reply to Atoussa H. was condescending and evasive — rather than respond to the woman's concerns, Foucault accused her feminism of being Orientalist.
In his writings from late 1978, moreover, the intellectual provided significant ideological cover to Khomeinism, claiming the Shi'ite clergy to be non-hierarchical and reassuring his readers that "there will not be a Khomeini party" or a "Khomeini government." Some months later, after the Shah's abdication and the "victory" of the Revolution, Foucault announced that "religion's role was [merely] to open the curtain," and that now, "the mullahs will disperse." Meanwhile, Rodinson publicly challenged Foucault's delusions on Iran in Le Monde, arguing that the domination of the Revolution by clerical elements threatened to merely have one form of despotism be succeeded by another. In parallel, Iranian Marxists and the Fedayeen guerrillas made known their unease at the prospect of the same.
The oppressive nature of the clerical regime that Foucault had helped to legitimize became readily evident after February 1979. Upon his return from exile, Khomeini moved swiftly to overturn established laws protecting women's rights, and on International Women's Day, March 8, 1979, he announced that all Iranian women were obligated to wear the chador. Such actions led masses of women to mobilize on the very same day to denounce the incipient dictatorship, declaring ironically that, "In the Dawn of Freedom, We Have No Freedom." Their courage as women rebelling against a new "revolutionary" order was hailed from afar by Simone de Beauvoir and Raya Dunayevskaya — but not by Foucault. Neither did the philosopher in question speak out after the new regime's summary executions of political opponents and men accused of homosexuality became evident, to say nothing of the state's attacks on the Kurds and Baha'is. Such silence led yet another critique of Foucault on Iran to be written, this time by Claudie and Jacques Broyelle. As they argue: "When one is an intellectual, when one works both on and with 'ideas,' when one has the freedom […] not to be a sycophantic writer, then one also has some obligations. The first one is to take responsibility for the ideas that one has defended when they are finally realized."
Foucault's public response to the Broyelles was as unsatisfying as his response to Atoussa H.: dismissive and opportunistic. While it is true that Foucault came in passing to acknowledge the chauvinistic and nationalistic aspects of the Iranian Revolution — and even questioned in the end whether it could be considered a Revolution, as it had installed a "bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy" — his stance toward Khomeini and the Islamic Republic was "fundamentally a stance of support," as Afary and Anderson conclude. From June 1979, by which time the regressive nature of theocratic rule had become undeniable, to the time of his death in 1984, Foucault guarded silence on the question of Iran and the Revolution. Never did he recant his previous excitement about Shi'ite Islamism or plead forgiveness, much less express support for the Iranians who suffered so terribly under the very Islamic Republic for which he had served as an unwitting propagandist. On the contrary, Foucault in his writings on Iran advanced reactionary criticisms of human rights, democracy and feminism.
Post-Structuralism and Counterrevolution
The case of a renowned anti-authoritarian Western philosopher legitimizing the coming-to-power of a brutal theocratic ruling class in Iran raises a number of pressing questions. How could this have come to pass? In the first place, Afary and Anderson are right to observe that Foucault failed to grasp that "an anti-Western, religiously based system of power" could be as oppressive as fascism or Stalinism. His lapse in this sense owed in part to his ignorance and romanticization of political Islam in general and the thought of Ayatollah Khomeini in particular — for Khomeini in 1970 had already anticipated the despotism of the Islamic Republic with his text Velayat-e Faqih, which calls for clerical domination of the state. As has been mentioned above, as well, his attitude toward Iran was surely influenced by his affinities with traditionalist, non-Western elements.
In addition, nevertheless, Foucault's unique philosophical proclivities likely played an important role. Post-structuralism rejects the "grand narratives" of socialism and historical progress, basing itself instead in the nihilist-irrationalist approach of Nietzsche, a thinker who argues in On the Genealogy of Morals that the French Revolution represented the victory of slave morality, ressentiment and the supposed power of "Judea" over Roman virility, centralism and imperialism. It is arguably Foucault's pseudo-radical innovation of post-structuralism that set him apart from the rest of the global progressive movement on Iran; earlier that decade, in his debate with Noam Chomsky, the philosopher had already rejected anarcho-syndicalism. Moreover, according to Edward Said, he sided with Israel over the Palestinians, losing his close friend Gilles Deleuze in the process. In truth, one need only review Foucault's shameful attitude toward a clerical-fascist regime that executed more than 20,000 citizens — many of them gay people and guerrillas — during the remainder of Khomeini's lifetime to see the regressive qualities of his post-structuralism manifesting themselves clearly.
Beyond this, Afary and Anderson do recognize and commend Foucault's activism and organizing in favor of prisoners, the Polish Solidarity Movement and the Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing Stalinist victory in Southeast Asia, but they argue that the Iranian Revolution formed a much more central commitment in the life of the philosopher. Foucault's delusions regarding Iran mirror the serious errors expressed by several left-wing intellectuals in history — Albert Camus, for example, who rejected Algerian independence from the French Empire, or the numerous thinkers who lent their support to the Soviet Union and Maoist China — and they are well-critiqued by Dunayevskaya's denunciation of observers of the Iranian Revolution who prioritized anti-imperialism over internal oppression. Such considerations remain very much germane today, particularly with regard to the catastrophe in Syria, where the Islamic Republic has played a most oppressive role together with Russia in propping up the fascistic Assad regime.
Tags:Alavid Shi'ism, Albert Camus, Algeria, Ali, Ali Shariati, anarcho-syndicalism, archaic fascism, Assad, Atoussa H., Ayatollah Khomenei, Baha'i, Bashar al-Assad, battle of Karbala, Black Friday, chador, China, Claudie Broyelle, death, democracy, Discipline and Punish, Edward Said, fascism, Fedayeen, feminism, Foucault, French Revolution, Friedrich Nietzsche, guerrillas, human rights, Hussein ibn Ali, International Women's Day, Iran, Iranian Revolution, Islam, Islamic Republic, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Jacques Broyelle, Janet Afary, Jews, Judaism, Karbala, Kevin B. Anderson, Khomeini, Kurds, LGBTQ, Madness and Civilization, Maoism, Martin Heidegger, Maxime Rodinson, Michel Foucault, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Nietzsche, Noam Chomsky, Orientalism, Palestine, Palestinians, prisoners, Raya Dunayevskaya, Russia, Safavid Shi'ism, Shah, Simone de Beauvoir, solidarity, Soviet Union, Stalinism, Syria, theocracy, Umayyad, USSR, Velayat-e Faqih, Vietnamese boat people, Zionism, Zoroastrianism
Posted in 'development', anarchism, book reviews, displacement, imperialism, Iran, literature, reformism, requiems, Revolution, Syria, U.S., war | 1 Comment »

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: awaitMessages doesn't collect slash commands I have a botReady.js file that executes as soon as the bot is ready. Within the file, the section under client.channels.fetch is for a channel in which a bump bot is run. You can bump your server with /bump on the public website.
Within my own bot, I've made a function that reminds people that it's possible to bump again, so basically, it's a bump reminder. The problem I'm facing is that with channel.awaitMessages, if I execute the /bump slash command, awaitMessages doesn't work. I've tried just sending a message and when I do this the rest of the code does execute.
Maybe awaitMessages doesn't pick up bot messages? Or is there a way to pick up slash commands from other bots?
client.channels.fetch('953344670094737418').then(channel => {

        channel.messages.fetch({ limit: 1 }).then(messages => {
            roleId = 965589664914354196
            let lastMessage = messages.first();

            if (Date.now() - lastMessage.createdTimestamp > 0) {var timeoutTime = 7200000 - (Date.now() - lastMessage.createdTimestamp)}
            else {var timeoutTime = 7320000}

            async function myFunction() {
                setTimeout(() => {
                    channel.send("It's time to bump again! \n <@&965589664914354196>").then(() => {
                        //Wait for message to be sent and than continue. Doesnt pick up slash commands.
                        channel.awaitMessages({ max: 1 }).then(message => {
                            console.log("Succesfully Bumped!")
                            timeoutTime = (7320000)
                            myFunction()
                        })
                    })
                }, timeoutTime);
            }

            myFunction()
          })
    })

A: If you don't use a filter to filter out messages coming from a bot, awaitMessages does pick up these. The problem is that a slash command is not a message, so you can't use awaitMessages here.
However, you can create a new InteractionCollector that only collects slash commands. Just make sure its type is APPLICATION_COMMAND:
const { InteractionCollector } = require('discord.js');
const { InteractionTypes } = require('discord.js/src/util/Constants.js');

// ... more code here

channel
  .send(`It's time to bump again! \n <@&965589664914354196>`)
  .then(() => {
    let collector = new InteractionCollector(client, {
      channel: channel,
      filter: (i) => i.commandName === 'bump',
      interactionType: InteractionTypes.APPLICATION_COMMAND,
      max: 1,
    });

    collector.on('collect', (i) => {
      console.log(`Successfully bumped with command "${i.commandName}"`);
      timeoutTime = 7320000;
      myFunction();
    });
  });

PS: You will need to store snowflakes as strings as JS will replace the last digits with zeroes. So, it should be roleId = '965589664914354196'

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Home / Post / 5 Facts That Nobody Told You about Romsons Portneb Handheld Nebulizer
5 Facts That Nobody Told You about Romsons Portneb Handheld Nebulizer
A nebulizer is a machine that turns water-based solutions into drops that are small enough (1 to 5 μm) to be inhaled to reach the lungs. The droplets are generated using different methods ranging from air-blast atomization to high-frequency vibrations and colliding liquid jets. Nebulizers are used with drugs that help expand the lung passages.
Nebulizers are recommended for people who can't use specific breathing, as in the case of children and the elderly. People with frequent airflow obstruction or low volume of breathing are also advised to use nebulizers.
People suffering from respiratory diseases like asthma, bronchitis or/and chronic illnesses like cystic fibrosis, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) need nebulizers to help them breathe. For these people, nebulizer becomes the primary delivery source of their medication.
Both, short-acting rescue medicines and long-acting medicines are used in the vapour form. Anti-inflammatory medicines that reduce inflammation and mucus production are commonly used in nebulizers to open your airways.
One of the best portneb nebulizers with several benefits for individuals who face difficulty in breathing is the Romsons Portneb handheld nebulizer. Let us understand the prominent features that make it stand out from the rest.
The portneb nebulizer by Romsons has a tubeless design with a closed valve that is greater than or equal to 0.08 ml per minute. It is a handheld machine with dimensions of 63.1mm x 63.9mm x 153mm and weighs 302 grams.
Romsons Portneb handheld nebulizer comes with a patented 'Valve Adjustable Technology' that boosts its operational power. The average nebulization rate of this nebulizer by Romsons when fully open is greater than or equal to 0.2ml per minute, while its medication capacity is 5ml (cc).
One of the most important yet underrated features of a nebulizer is its mobility. Romsons' handheld nebulizer meets this criterion as it is a compact, lightweight and portable nebulizer that offers instant relief to the user.
Portability becomes all the more important for patients who find traveling with a nebulizer, a necessity. For such individuals, a nebulizer that can be carried as per their convenience is truly a blessing!
Particle size & Consistency
Consistency, no doubt is the key element when it comes to using a nebulizer. Romsons nebulizer efficiently delivers a consistent particle size of greater than or equal to 3um to maximize the medication delivery to the lungs in just 5 to 6 minutes.
Another factor that holds great significance is how much noise does your nebulizer makes. Nebulizers that produce a higher level of noise can't be used in the night especially for a child or while you are trying to fall asleep. Therefore, always opt for the nebulizer that produces the lowest sound as possible so that you can do the nebulization comfortably, anywhere you wish to.


Kitchen · Kitchen Cabinets · Cabinet Samples. Brand. American Woodmark (11) · KraftMaid (8). Color Family. Beige (7) · Biscuit (9) · White (3). Door Material.
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Biscuit joiners allow you to make solid precise joints, accurate enough to build fine cabinets. ... The top of a table saw or a solid-core door is a good choice.