The 2012 Mother of All Marches

I'm disappointed by this article, usually Davies' Oaxaca reports are very interesting and informative, yet here all critical, analytical thinking is suspended in favour of a blanket promotion of a rather absurd organisation.

This mission is wishful thinking and handwringing to the extreme. The revolters in Oaxaca used violence as a necessity in response to the state (by which I refer to both Oaxaca and Mexico), for whom violence is the only means of maintaining its hegemony. And in the Zapatista Autonomous Zones, a violent uprising was essential to securing the benefits of the last 15 years and a new system of self-governance, and it is equally essential that the EZLN demonstrates its readiness to defend their gains and autonomy against the quasi-feudalist Chiapan/Mexican/global ruling classes.

Social movements in Oaxaca and Chiapas know this through experience. When you're trying to change your political situation against the odds, you employ pragmatism not moralism, accepting that you live in a dirty, complex world and not one depicted by the absolutist dogmas of external commentators.

I'm not really sure why some politician should mosey in from India and preach - evangelist connotations entirely deliberate - to these people about the holy shroud of nonviolence when they simply lack the luxury of rejecting violence in their struggles to improve their lot.

Even if they manage to convince the Zaps, APPO and Seccion 22 to come on board with this whimsical march, it will achieve nothing aside from aid the public profile and career aims of the characters organising it. As evidence, I present the Make Poverty History marches in the Western world of 2005.

Finally, I'm not sure where the figure of 200 million murders in the USSR comes from, surely that would have nearly eradicated its population? Even the most anti-Bolshevik estimates hinge around 20 million deliberate murders by the Stalinist regime. Around another 20 million troops and civilians were killed in WW2, plus about 10 million starved to death in forced collectivisation in the early 1920s, but 200 million is a ridiculous figure which further discredits this organisation in my eyes. (Just for the record, I'm not a Bolshevik, Leninist or any sort of defender of the USSR. My point is that if these are the base level arguments you use as a means of introducing your methods, then you shouldn't use invented statistics.)

Alan -

The 200 million figure was a typo we should have caught. Thanks for pointing it out to us. It has been fixed.

-Narco News