Category: Uncategorized

Russia has been utilizing soft power in India since the 1950s to develop a robust relationship with the South Asian country. Over the years, Russia has built a significant cultural, educational, and economic relationship with India, which has helped in maintaining a stable strategic partnership between the two countries

Professor Anil Sooklal, Ambassador-at-Large for Asia and BRICS during an online engagement with business during the BRICS economic indaba, said the purpose of the gathering was to solicit the support of, and galvanise, South African business behind the BRICS Programme of Work

India, Russia and China are emerging “major powers” with notable influence and Beijing was ready to boost ties with Moscow and New Delhi, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said

Early Saturday morning, a major fire broke out at the Pinova manufacturing plant in Brunswick, Georgia, sending a massive column of smoke into the air.

Mayor Cosby Johnson quickly declared a local state of emergency, and the Glynn County Board of Commissioners ordered those living within half a mile of the factory to evacuate.

The plant, located just over 70 miles north of Jacksonville, Florida, was contained initially but later reignited around 3:10 p.m. Firefighters battled the blaze, ultimately bringing it under control through foam firefighting agents. Thankfully, there were no injuries reported, but the cause remains unknown.

Pinova warned that their polyterpene resin dust should not be touched, eaten, or inhaled, and long-term exposure could result in asthma. Chemicals from their epoxy resin can also cause skin irritation, though burning them causes unknown effects.

Officials from the Jacksonville Fire Department and the Georgia Forestry Commission arrived on the scene to lend assistance. The JFD sent a helicopter and a fixed-wing plane to drop fire retardants to help smother the flames, though the smoke obscured visibility and hampered the effort.

On the ground, the GFC deployed one helicopter and two single-engine tankers but had to ground the aircraft due to the thickness of the smoke and a desire to protect those in the vicinity.

The fire at Pinova’s factory in Brunswick, Georgia, significantly impacted the local area, inspiring an evacuation and a state of emergency.

Fire officials were quick to act and, with the help of the Jacksonville Fire Department and the Georgia Forestry Commission, were able to regain control of the blaze.

Louisville, Kentucky, has been rocked by a series of shootings in just one week. On Saturday, a shooting spree in Chickasaw Park at 9 p.m. resulted in two deaths and four injured.

Hundreds of people had gathered in the western park, and police were unable to locate eyewitnesses. While authorities are still determining the number of shooters and searching for potential suspects, this incident marks the third mass shooting for the city just this week.

On Monday, Old National Bank employee Connor Sturgeon committed a senseless attempt to murder five of his coworkers.

Another two people were fatally shot, and a third was hospitalized during a 4:30 a.m. incident on Saturday morning in the Old Louisville neighborhood.

Local citizens are in a state of disbelief, most notably Metro Councilwoman Donna Purvis, who expressed her sorrow by saying, “I’m so tired of this. I can’t make any sense of it. Right now, I’m really at a loss for words.”

The Louisville police are working diligently to investigate the shootings and track down the suspect(s). In the meantime, the citizens of Louisville are dealing with the aftermath of the violence and attempting to make sense of the chaotic week.

Vladimir Kara-Murza gave this speech to a Russian court before receiving his 25-year sentence for ‘treason’ and other charges

Debates about the new AI focus on “intelligence.” But something more interesting is going on: AI is a culture machine.

ChatGPT and its peer systems bring ideology to the surface, and they do it quantitatively. This has never happened before. (Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On February 16, Vanderbilt University’s office for equity, diversity, and inclusion issued a statement on the shooting that had occurred shortly before at Michigan State University. The statement was boilerplate, suggesting that the university “come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus” to “honor the victims of this tragedy.” The only remarkable thing about the message was that a footnote credited ChatGPT with producing its first draft. The office apologized one day later, after an outcry.

This curious incident throws the most recent panic-hype cycle around artificial intelligence into stark relief. ChatGPT, a “large language model” that generates text by predicting the next word in a sequence, was introduced in November 2022, becoming the fastest-ever platform to reach one hundred million users and triggering a new wave of debate about whether machines can achieve “intelligence.” A ChatGPT-supercharged Bing tool was briefly shut down after a New York Times reporter published a transcript in which the bot insisted at length that it loved him, that he did not love his wife, and that it “wanted to be alive.”

These debates, including the exhibitionist scaremongering, are mostly vapor. But the systems themselves should be taken seriously. They may supplant low-level tasks in both writing and coding, and could lead to a mass cognitive deskilling, just as the industrial factory disaggregated and immiserated physical labor. Because these systems can write code, “software” may disappear as a haven for employment, just as journalism has already seen happen, with Buzzfeed committing to using ChatGPT for content creation. Automation is always partial, of course, but reassigning some labor tasks to machines is a constant of capitalism. When those tasks are cognitive ones, the machine threatens to blur the crucial social boundaries between labor and management and labor and “free time,” among others.

Capital conditions are set to change too, with an amusing signal sent when Google’s competitor to ChatGPT, Bard, answered a question wrong in its debut exhibition, losing the company $100 billion in market cap inside of a single day. If anyone is confused about the term “information economy,” this episode should take care of it. But however the next phase of technological capitalism plays out, the new AI is intervening directly in the social process of making meaning at all. GPT systems are ideology machines.

There is also another, less discussed consequence of the introduction of these systems, namely a change in ideology.

Language Models Are the First Quantitative Producers of Ideology

The three main takes on GPT systems are that they are toys, that they are harmful, and that they present a major change in civilization as such. Noam Chomsky thinks they are toys, writing in the New York Times that they have no substantial relationship to language, a human neural function that allows us to divine truth and reason morally. Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru think they are harmful, calling them “stochastic parrots” that reflect the bias of their “unfathomably” large datasets, redistributing harm that humans have already inflicted discursively. Henry Kissinger thinks they are societal game changers, that they will change not only labor and geopolitics, but also our very sense of “reality itself.”

GPT systems, because they automate a function very close to our felt sense of what it means to be human at all, may produce shifts in the very way we think about things.

Dear reader, it brings me no joy to have to agree with Kissinger, but his is the most important view to date. GPT systems do produce language, don’t let our friend Chomsky fool you. And while they are harmful, it’s unclear why they are — and even more unclear how observing that is supposed to stop the march of profit-driven engineering. Kissinger is right, alas: GPT systems, because they automate a function very close to our felt sense of what it means to be human at all, may produce shifts in the very way we think about things. Control over the way we think about things is called “ideology,” and GPT systems engage it directly and quantitatively in an unprecedented manner.

“GPT” stands for “generative pretrained transformer,” but “GPT” also means “general purpose technology” in economic jargon. This highlights the ambition behind these systems, which take in massive datasets of language tokens (GPT-3, on which ChatGPT first ran, was trained on one trillion tokens) scraped from the web and spit out text, virtually in any genre, that is coherent and usually meaningful. A lot of the details are unimportant, but this one matters: the trillion tokens are boiled down by the system into a set of strings (not all words, but that’s the idea) that can be used to create text. These learned tokens are put into a grid in which each token has a statistical relationship to all the others. Think of this like a grid of lights. Touch one light, and a pattern lights up in the others. Touch another, get another pattern. And so forth. The result is that when I give the system a prompt (“write me an essay explaining Marx’s theory of value”), the grid amasses a small group of next-word candidates in a cluster. Then it randomly chooses one of those, and keeps doing that, writing an essay or an article, or just responding to what’s being said.

There are lots of ways to tweak and “fine-tune” this system, but this patterning characteristic is general to all of them. It’s easy to see that words chosen by statistical proximity may not correspond to real-world situations, which data scientists call the “grounding problem,” and which is driving new fears of widespread misinformation. GPT-4, about which OpenAI refused to release any technical details when it was rolled out last month, is supposed to minimize this “hallucination.” But something more interesting and more important than this is going on.

What GPT systems spit out is language, but averaged out around a selected center of words. It’s a mush with vague conceptual borders, English (or most any other language) but ironed out and set to the most middling version of itself. For that reason, these systems are very useful for generating the type of press release that Vanderbilt wanted. This is “language as a service,” packaged and prepared, including its dynamism and meaning-generating properties, but channeled into its flattest possible version so as to be useful to those who mainly use language as liability control.

This is ‘language as a service,’ packaged and prepared, including its dynamism and meaning-generating properties, but channeled into its flattest possible version so as to be useful to those who mainly use language as liability control.

The human who would have written that statement about the shooting would surely have produced a nearly identical document. When we write with strong constraints on what we’re able to say, we tend to average out the choices of words and sentences too. We call this type of language “ideology,” and GPT systems are the first quantitative means by which we have ever been able to surface and examine that ideology.

Hegemony and Kitsch

What went missing in the tale of the New York Times reporter and the chatbot that fell in love with him was the prompt that caused the ruckus in the first place. He asked ChatGPT to “adopt a ‘shadow self’ in the sense of C. G. Jung.” In the panic-hype cycle, it’s clear why this crucially important detail would be overlooked. But it also provides a clue about what happened. In the data set, there is some initial cluster of words that “light up” when you use “shadow self” and “Jung” in a prompt — a “semantic package.” These are surely gathered in discussions of Jungian theory and psychoanalysis, academic and lay blogs and posts on Reddit and elsewhere that discuss this set of ideas explicitly.

But the system does not “know” that there is a person who was named Carl Gustav Jung, or that “shadow self” is a concept. These are just strings. So in the pattern that lights up, there will be another set of common words — let’s say “love,” “wife,” and even “feel alive” might be in there. As the machine keeps processing, it keeps predicting next words, and it “associates” outward from the concentrated “shadow-self-Jung” cluster to other semantic packages. But we don’t know what these other packages are, unless we look — we are simply on a statistical roller coaster of meaning, careening through channels of meaning that are there but with which we are not familiar.

It’s important that no objects exist in the stream of words. If you want a GPT system to halt around something and “consider” it as an object, you’d have to force it to somehow, which must be what GPT-4 and ongoing other attempts are doing. Some things are more likely to be stable as “objects,” or let’s call them “packages” of words. If I ask ChatGPT to tell me about The Dialectic of Enlightenment (the name of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s masterpiece on ideology and modern society), it gives me a shockingly good answer, including details faithful to that notoriously difficult text. But if I ask it to tell me about my colleague Matthew Handelman’s book about Adorno, the Frankfurt School, and mathematics, it tells me some basics about this book but then also that Handelman’s thesis is that “math is a social construct.” This is false (I checked with him). But it’s false in an interesting way.

We are simply on a statistical roller coaster of meaning, careening through channels of meaning that are there but with which we are not familiar.

The package probably shows us the overlap between “critical theory” and “mathematics,” which will then contain the most probable thing to be said about that overlap. To be sure, some academics claim that math is a social construct, but the main group that claims that academics think that is the far right, with its antisemitic conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism,” which blames Adorno and co. for 1968 and everything since then. When you write a philosophical treatise, or a scholarly work of intellectual history, you’re working against the grain of this averaging effect. But the semantic packages that get revealed when you query GPT systems are highly informative, if not themselves insightful. This is because these packages bring ideology to the surface, and they do it quantitatively. This has never happened before.

Ideology is not just political doctrine. When Marx wrote of the “German Ideology,” he meant his fellow socialists’ implicit belief in the power of ideas, to which he countered the power of material forces. But Marxists slowly took up the problem of the power of discourse and representation, acknowledging that what we are able to think, imagine, and say is a crucial political issue. Antonio Gramsci called the dominant set of ideas “hegemony,” arguing that these ideas conformed to the dominance of the ruling class while not being about that dominance. Literary critic Hannes Bajohr has warned against privatized GPT systems in just this sense, saying that “whoever controls language controls politics.”

Hegemony and kitsch are combined in the output of GPT systems’ semantic packages, which might miss aspects of ‘the world’ but faithfully capture ideology.

A wide variety of Marxists have also seen ideology as a form of kitsch. First articulated by the Marxist art critic Clement Greenberg in 1937, the notion of kitsch is “pre-digested form.” Among all the things we might say or think, some pathways are better traveled than others. The form of those paths is given; we don’t need to forge them in the first place. The constant release of sequels now has this quality of kitsch — we know exactly where we are when we start watching a Marvel movie. For Greenberg, the avant-garde was the formal adventurer, creating new meaning by making new paths. Hegemony and kitsch are combined in the output of GPT systems’ semantic packages, which might miss aspects of “the world” but faithfully capture ideology.

Adorno famously thought of ideology as the “truth and the untruth” of the “totally administered world.” It revealed as much as it hid, and provided — despite Adorno’s personal taste for high art — a point of entry through which we see social functions as conditioning us. GPT systems have revealed some of this two-way street, manifesting both ideology and its critique (as media theorist Wendy Chun once claimed about software systems in general). GPT systems are an unprecedented view into the linguistic makeup of ideology. There has never before been a system that allows us to generate and then examine “what is near what” in political semantics. The packages of meaning that they produce flatten language, to be sure, although they can also surprise us with folds and nooks of meaning that we have never combined previously.

The slide along those grooves of meaning is a point of entry into the ideology of digital global capitalism, showing us a snapshot of hegemony. Maybe that sounds pretty far from Kissinger’s notion that AI will change our very sense of reality. But what if the most average words, packaged in a “pre-digested form,” constitute the very horizon of that reality? In that case, our little glimpse into the beating heart of ideology is crucial.

When the camera was invented, we saw distant chunks of the world for the first time with our eyes. GPT systems show us parts of the world so close that they basically are our world, but in a strange, flattened form. As labor and capital conditions inevitably change, their connection to ideology is momentarily on display. GPT-4 was released in March, but OpenAI withheld all technical details as industrial secrets. The window will soon shut for us to keep peering with technical awareness into this tepid void. We should take advantage of it now.

Fifty years ago, the LIP watch factory in Besançon, France, announced mass layoffs. In response, the staff occupied the plant — launching one of the most famous attempts at worker self-management in French history.

A group of LIP workers in 1974. (Courtesy of Monique Piton)

The effects of May 1968 were still echoing across France in April 1973, when a renowned watchmaker filed for bankruptcy, drawing up plans for massive layoffs. The LIP factory in Besançon, close to the Swiss border, would become the site of one of the most famous and hardest-fought workers’ struggles in modern French history.

Starting on June 18, 1973, around one thousand workers, including six hundred women, occupied their factory to protest against its closure, seizing the leftover stock of watches, assembling others, and selling them, with the slogan, “C’est possible, on fabrique, on vend, on se paie” (It’s possible, we produce, we sell, we pay ourselves).

May ’68, which saw as many as ten million workers go on strike, was a moment in which traditional hierarchies were being challenged wherever in society they were found. In parts of the labor movement, this was articulated around calls for autogestion — workers’ self-management — in contrast to the Taylorist management regime and lack of dialogue with employees that characterized factories up and down the country.

The LIP factory in Besançon would become the site of one of the most famous and hardest-fought workers’ struggles in modern French history.

On May 16, one of France’s largest trade unions, the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT), published a communiqué that had clearly adopted the principle as a political aim. It wrote: “The industrial and administrative monarchy must be replaced by democratic structures based on autogestion.”

The conflict at LIP captured the imagination in France and abroad, as it symbolized these hopes for a new way of organizing the workplace. On September 29, 1973, around one hundred thousand people attended a march in Besançon in support of the workers.

A number of activists within the Unified Socialist Party even put forward the CFDT’s Charles Piaget, the most recognizable figure in the LIP struggle, as their choice to run in the 1974 presidential election. Despite receiving the support of Jean-Paul Sartre, Piaget was not chosen to run for president, but the “outlaws” of LIP nonetheless inspired a generation of activists.

They were ejected from the factory by Republican Security Corps (CRS) riot police on August 14, but the movement continued until January 1974, when a new boss was appointed and the workers were progressively rehired. LIP filed for bankruptcy a second time in April 1976, and the factory was occupied once more, but the company was liquidated in September 1977.

Monique Piton was thirty-nine in April 1973 and working as a secretary for a researcher at LIP when she learned she would be losing her job. She would become a vocal figure in the movement, notably pushing for the women of LIP to be taken just as seriously as the men, who dominated leadership positions in the trade unions.

In 1975, Piton published a book about her experiences, C’est possible!, which was republished in 2015. She spoke to Jacobin for the fiftieth anniversary of a struggle that remains a symbol of a time when anything seemed possible.

Martin Greenacre

What role did women play in the strike, and how did this role evolve?

Monique Piton

We shouldn’t use the term “strike,” as we did not stop working voluntarily. We no longer had a boss, and there were no unemployment benefits at the time. We were brutally left with no income.

When on June 18 [1973] we were told “You are no longer being paid, starting yesterday,” we began fighting for our jobs, without wondering if there was a problem between men and women.

Certain women volunteered to clean or peel vegetables, in acceptance of these customs, and the typists were evidently very useful for typing up tracts. Others, like myself, chose another role: spreading our message and selling watches all throughout France. My daughter was nineteen, and I was no longer with my husband — I was free.

Martin Greenacre

Were there women who started out doing “feminine” tasks, and took on more responsibility as the weeks went by?

Monique Piton

Yes, those who had been washing the dishes and peeling onions and potatoes — one day they realized it wasn’t normal. They told the others, and we all protested to support them. We asked the men to chip in, but they didn’t know how to do the dishes. I had one who didn’t know how to dry the cutlery and put it away. He was completely lost.

In the end, a few women stayed in the canteen, but it rotated. They were there for two weeks, and then they were free to go out, speak to journalists or visitors, or attend meetings in Paris or Bordeaux.

Monique Piton speaking about LIP to workers at a Renault factory in the Paris suburbs. (Courtesy of Monique Piton)

Martin Greenacre

You wrote that certain women realized that they were capable of things they had never imagined. Reading your book, we have the impression that the struggle was a form of liberation in itself.

Monique Piton

When a woman worked on the assembly line, she couldn’t talk all day, just a bit at lunchtime (then she would go home, and she would talk to her children), but she couldn’t really meet people. Whereas during the fight, we had the whole day ahead of us to meet and talk to people.

We asked the men to chip in, but they didn’t know how to do the dishes. I had one who didn’t know how to dry the cutlery and put it away. He was completely lost.

Lots of journalists arrived and started asking questions. There were women who couldn’t believe they had been able to answer; they would say, “Wow, I didn’t stutter, I didn’t mess up, I told him this or that.”

Martin Greenacre

It is clear from reading your book that women were more comfortable outside the structures of traditional trade unions. Why was that?

Monique Piton

I noticed early on that, during union meetings, women weren’t listened to. A woman would make a suggestion, people would smile at her and then move onto something else. A few days later a man would make the same suggestion, and the others would exclaim, “Ah, what a good idea!”

That’s why I felt better in the Comité d’action (Action Committee). It was created before the struggle by Jean Raguenès, a worker and Dominican priest who never spoke to us about religion, but was able to give even the quietest people confidence. The Comité d’action was not anti–trade union, it was open to ideas, there were no leaders. We were free to express ourselves completely.

Martin Greenacre

Were there also comments or behaviors which were overtly sexist?

Monique Piton

Not really, it was never meant in a bad way. We were these little things they wanted to protect. They liked us, and would smile at us, but they didn’t listen to us.

Martin Greenacre

Were the specific experiences of female workers something you had previously thought about? The term “intersectional feminism” didn’t exist at the time, but it is clear you were already thinking about these questions of dual exploitation.

Monique Piton

Certain male leaders reproached us for protesting in the town center, saying we were straying from the fight for our jobs, but we were participating in a national movement for women’s rights. There was a large movement in those days for abortion to be authorized, and for rape to be recognized as a crime, rather than just a misdemeanor.

They told us we were wasting our time. Which meant all those men prevented their wives from protesting. There were some who disobeyed them and went anyway.

With the sale of watches, we all had the same salary as before. The previous year, the principle of equal pay between men and women had been inscribed in the Labor Code, for equal work or work of equal value. I should explain: working on the assembly line, doing meticulous and repetitive actions, which prevented you from lifting your head and sharing a few words with your neighbor — these jobs were reserved for women. It’s just as tiring, and even more grueling, as moving crates or drilling holes in metal with a machine.

The management at LIP hadn’t respected this law. But during the fight, the trade unions should have created this justice. But no! The women received the same salary as before, even though they were active and committed to the struggle.

Martin Greenacre

You realized that the women at the factory had it more difficult than the men?

Monique Piton

We realized that a long time ago. I had previously been fired from another watch factory in Besançon because I didn’t want to sleep with the boss.

Certain male leaders reproached us for protesting in the town center, saying we were straying from the fight for our jobs, but we were participating in a national movement for women’s rights.

I was at the Kelton factory, and we were fighting in May ’68 before the rest of France. We had already been on strike for a week to defend women who worked in a workshop with no windows. There were some who would faint, and were sent to the infirmary, and they had that time deducted from their salaries. We were on strike, then, boom, May ’68 happened all across France.

Martin Greenacre

In C’est Possible, you explain that in 1976, when the factory was occupied once more, you were forbidden from distributing your book to visitors during an open day. Do you feel that the unions stopped you from talking about women’s problems?

Monique Piton

Absolutely. We were supposed to be nice, and when we were outraged about something, they didn’t accept it.

The unions were like religions — they didn’t want to hurt us, but we had to keep quiet. There was a stage in a corridor, and one day I got up and delivered a speech that didn’t mean anything. I said things like, “We women have been suspended so that the social will improve and the unions understood with the prefect . . .” Afterward, a woman said, “I didn’t understand a thing,” and I said, “You’re right, there’s nothing to understand. But since we women are not listened to when we say something intelligent, we’re going to speak to say nothing.”

Martin Greenacre

Some women struggled to reconcile the activist life with household chores, or children. Was this a topic of discussion?

Monique Piton

I regret not addressing this more. We could have created a crèche [day care]. There were women with four-year-olds, or twelve-year-olds, who they couldn’t leave alone. So they left them at a crèche in town or with the grandparents, so they could come to the General Assembly [the morning meetings attended by workers including the various trade unions] — at 9:00 a.m., everybody was there. But if you asked them to come to Lille with you, for example, they couldn’t because of the kids. The husband wouldn’t have understood — he could have looked after the children in the evening, but that wasn’t the thing done at the time.

In France, Arab men did the most difficult jobs, and lived uncomfortably in hostels. They were looked down upon by the government, and French people treated them as subhumans.

There was even a woman who was the wife of a well-known trade unionist. When the factory was invaded by the CRS, she came to protest in front of the factory because it was August, and for the first time, all of her four children were at a summer camp. She told us, “This is the first time I’m able to walk without having a child on my arm.” She was a housewife and had never even been able to come to our General Assemblies. She said, “I’m happy, I’m free, I can’t believe it, I can walk and turn around, with nothing in my hands.”

Martin Greenacre

Could you talk a bit about your interactions with foreign workers? There is this video from the time, from the filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, in which you describe how women are treated, but you replace the word “man” with “white,” and the word “woman” with “Arab.”

Monique Piton

In France, Arab men did the most difficult jobs, and lived uncomfortably in hostels. They were looked down upon by the government, and French people treated them as subhumans. There was no policy of family reunification at the time.

At the factory, there were a few Arab men. They participated in the struggle, and I think they were accepted, as women were, but I never saw one of them speak into the microphone. The video was partly for the union leaders. They weren’t racist; I never heard an inappropriate word. But as with women, they didn’t insult us, but they didn’t listen to us either.

Martin Greenacre

You sold watches from a stock you kept when you occupied the factory. But you also started to make watches to sell as well, is that right?

Monique Piton

That has always irritated me. It was a rumor that spread, but we didn’t make any, we didn’t have the time. You can’t make a watch just like that. There were demonstrations of how they were made, so there were watchmakers who returned to their workbenches, and visitors and journalists took photos and said we had gone back to work, but it wasn’t true.

We used the slogan “We produce, we sell, we pay ourselves,” which just meant that it was our production, and that we were selling the product of our labor.

Martin Greenacre

When LIP is referred to as an experiment in autogestion, or self-management, do you identify with that term?

Monique Piton

You cannot have autogestion when there is not equality, and since there was not equality with women, it cannot be autogestion. There were the beginnings of autogestion, and a whole struggle which operated with men alongside women, but the term is excessive.

You cannot have self-management when there is not equality, and since there was not equality with women, it could not be self-management.

The leaders would ask questions and we would vote, but sometimes it was a yes or no question, and not always the questions we would have wanted.

Martin Greenacre

And for it to be autogestion you would have had to restart production.

Monique Piton

Yes, we restarted the canteen, the cleaning, but we wanted a boss! We never wanted to make the factory run. We took the stock so we could be paid, as there was not even a notice period — from one day to the next we found ourselves with nothing. We all agreed, there was not a single person who said we shouldn’t do it.

The watches were hidden in cool places, so they wouldn’t be damaged. I didn’t know where they were. They were hidden in five locations, and nobody knew about all five, so that if somebody was arrested and tortured, they couldn’t give away all five. We were able to pay ourselves for almost a year, and when we were rehired, we returned the rest of the stock.

Martin Greenacre

Do you think there are any lessons that activists today can take from your struggle?

Monique Piton

We never gave up so long as every one of us had not been rehired. We held out in the face of rehiring offers that would have left a few people behind.

We were able to use a local cinema for our worker-assembly meetings every morning, communicated with each other using posters in the church basement, and made a canteen in a fortress provided to us by the town hall.

We had the support of the whole of France. We sold watches all over and had money to pay ourselves, and to make food. I remember in December 1973, I was going to Gennevilliers in the Paris suburbs, because immigrant workers were on strike there. I told the LIP union leader Charles Piaget that I wanted to give them something, because they weren’t being paid, they had nothing, and he gave me 3,000 francs to give to them.

There was never a problem in terms of a man bothering or harassing a woman. Even if I’ll grumble about two or three things in relation to women, we did all fight together.

President Kennedy noted that the presidential seal bore a bald eagle. In the symbolic bird’s talons are the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace. “We will give equal attention to both,” our young president said. And give them equal attention he did; his Peace Corps and the Alianza para el Progreso (for Latin America) projects were intended to establish a goal of his administration. The Peace Corps succeeded rather more than his Latin initiative, but his goals were clear. 

Kennedy’s announcement of his Moon Project on May 25th, 1961 captured the world’s attention. The Soviets’ first man in space had given them the lead in this new frontier, but Kennedy deftly moved the goal posts. Ever after in the new decade, Soviet firsts in space—first space walk, longest time in space, first woman in space—were “scooped” by Kennedy’s proclaiming the Moon as the object of the space race. Amazingly, however, he avoided making space a new and dangerous arms race with the Soviets. He even went so far as to invite the USSR to join us in our quest. 

His staff was stunned. Wasn’t the space race all about “beating the Russkies”? Kennedy understood that if the Soviets joined us in space, they would have to open up their closed system. And if they did that, they could no longer survive as a totalitarian state. Understanding this potential, the USSR rejected Kennedy’s peaceful overture. (Gorbachev would seek to apply glasnost a generation later. When he did, Kennedy’s shrewd approach proved insightful; the USSR opened up and soon collapsed).

Kennedy’s handling of the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961 proved masterful. His military chiefs implored him to knock down this ugly, inhuman scar in the heart of Europe. But Kennedy knew that Khrushchev (and his East German puppet, Walter Ulbricht) had taken care to build this monstrosity on East German territory. Kennedy hated it, but he concluded, wisely, that “a wall is better than a war.” Especially as it might have been a nuclear war. 

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was under the greatest pressure. Khrushchev had overturned the “balance of terror” as daringly as Hitler had in the Czech Crisis of 1938. What Churchill had denounced in the Munich concession as “disturbing the equilibrium of Europe” was in Cuba just as dangerous, but on a global scale. 

Air Force Chief of Staff, cigar-chomping Gen. Curtis LeMay wanted Kennedy to attack the Medium Range Ballistic Missile installations just ninety miles from our shores. Kennedy’s brother Bobby rejected any such sneak attack. He said that could be interpreted as our own Pearl Harbor, in reverse. The Kennedy brothers knew that hundreds of Cubans and scores of Russians would die in any such assault on the Communist island.

JFK instead skillfully instituted a quarantine. Not exactly a blockade, because that would be an “act of war” under international law. But the device of a quarantine applied only to offensive weapons targeted on the continental U.S. and its Latin American allies. President Kennedy reputedly said of the aggressive Air Force general: “If we have to go to war, I want that man to lead our air attacks; but I never want that man to decide if we go to war.” He was right.

Today, we are facing a slippery slope over Ukraine and Taiwan. President Biden was doubtless correct in limiting our involvement with the defense of Ukraine. And he was also right in denying the Ukrainians the “no-fly zone” they pleaded for. Training Ukrainian pilots in the U.S. is also a more cautious course than allowing our instructors to go to besieged Ukraine.  President Biden helpfully cleared up the “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan that invited misinterpretation in Beijing. Such uncertainty let Germany catastrophically miscalculate the British reaction to their 1914 invasion of neutral Belgium.

Still, there are grave missteps being taken in both theaters. When the International Criminal Court recently indicted Gospodin (Mr.) Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, the President endorsed this move. The Kremlin leader has been sharing with cohorts videos of Gaddafi’s lynching (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s grotesque cackling over this grisly film). Now, the U.S. and Europe are endangering hopes for a negotiated end to this tragic and unjust war. 

On Taiwan, the visits of Speaker Pelosi and a high-level congressional delegation to Taipei could only have served to provoke and enrage the rulers of the People’s Republic of China. Stand firm but do nothing to rattle the dragon’s cage. 

German friends have warned me of what they call the Thucydides Trap. Thucydides taught us in our first classic of history, The Peloponnesian War, that thinking war is inevitable is what makes it inevitable. 

The German High Command in 1913-14 dragged all of Europe into the maelstrom of the Great War. We must never assume war with Russia or China is unavoidable. It must be the task of all diplomats, military leaders, and responsible democratic leaders to take care: We are walking on nuclear eggshells. 

Deterrence calls for arming and preparing all NATO allies for defense. But we should take no steps that provoke or show disrespect for our adversaries. When President Biden calls Gospodin (Mr.) Putin and Chairman Xi Jinping “murderous thugs,” he takes grave risks. Kennedy avoided all such name-calling. So did Ronald Reagan. Reagan let the Kremlin tell the world who the evil empire was even without directly referring to the Soviets.

With a just and durable compromise peace achieved at an international conference, we could include a liberated Ukraine in NATO (but not Crimea). Similarly, we should invite Japan, South Korea, and Australia to join NATO with the understanding that it is a purely defensive alliance. NATO is based on a commitment to defending democracy, not a geographic descriptor. 

Russia and China have massive domestic problems. Demographically, both superpowers face a grim future. We can and should offer our assistance to them in coping with such dangers. The Peace Corps was Kennedy’s brilliant rhetorical response to violence and subversion. It reaped decades of benefits for the host countries and for ours, as well. The future does not have to be what the past has been. Russians know that their past is their present plight: Все ешо кровавы (all is still bloody). 

The future should be Mir i Druzhba—Peace and Friendship. That is why Harry Truman turned the Eagle’s head to the olive branch, which the Eagle still firmly clasps. 

The post <strong>America’s Eagle Bears Two Talons: John F. Kennedy</strong> appeared first on Providence.

On Saturday afternoon at about 4:30 local time, tragedy struck at La Palma Resort in Cortazar, Mexico, when gunmen raided the area, leaving seven dead and one seriously injured. Included in the victims was a 7-year-old child, sending shockwaves through the resort and beyond.

The attackers had no hesitation in firing shots, resulting in seven deaths, before taking the security cameras to escape justice.

Surveying what had been a scene of relaxation only moments before, residents on vacation were left traumatized. It was reported that those killed included 3 men and 3 women, and a child.

The authorities have yet to unveil who is behind this violent attack, and the proposed motive is unknown; nonetheless, it is speculated that drug cartels in Cortazar, who have been known to engage in skirmishes in the past, are involved.

The motive may not be known immediately, but one thing is clear – the attackers showed no mercy in taking the lives of seven innocent people, including a child.

The La Palma Resort was left in chaos and fear as the attackers poisoned the atmosphere with terror. The attackers destroyed the resort’s spa store before stealing the security cameras and the monitor and running away.

This heinous attack is a grim reminder that Mexico continues to suffer from violent outbreaks throughout the country. The peace of mind of those in Cortazar has been destroyed, and it is incumbent upon the authorities to have justice served to the perpetrators to bring a sense of order back to the community.