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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

1317

Mumia Abu Jamal's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/mumiaabu-jamal
Bio: Mumia Abu-Jamal is an acclaimed American journalist and author who has been writing from Death Row for more than twenty-five years.    Mumia was sentenced to death afte... (More)

All Jamal Blogs

Colonies Still?

By Mumia Abu Jamal at Nov 21, 2009


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One of the greatest theorists, analysts and critics of colonialism was the late Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, but Dr. Fanon's work dwelled on the crises of colonialism in Africa.
 
We like to think that colonialism was a problem of yesteryear -- the '60's, '70's and early '80's.  It's history -- right?
 
Well, what really matters isn't what we think, but what others in those countries think.  We should also note that things change; sometimes in form but not in essence.
 
Earlier this year, a group of Pakistani intellectuals, activists, lawyers and political leaders produced a brief but collective report detailing the problems facing the nation.  The 12-page report, entitled Making Pakistan a Tenable State, lists 185 points of concern.  Among them is point 14 which states:
 
Today, Pakistan finds itself fully trapped in the whirl of liberalization,
globalization, privatization and the so-called war on terror. The
economic agreements and covenants bind Pakistan to follow policies
dictated from the outside.  Similarly, the strategies and covenants bind
Pakistan to defend itself against foreign aggression are hugely dependent
upon the defense related agreements signed with the United States.
Frequent visits to Pakistan of the officials of the departments of state
and defense are indicative of the advices of the superpower we are
obliged to follow.  Small wonder, Pakistan is recognized all over the
world as a client state of the United States. [22-3]
 
Client state. It's like the 21st century version of colony.


For if a nation can't freely make its own foreign policy, and must abide by the will of another, client is but a polite term.
 
The report covers Pakistan's colonial history, when it was part of India, when it was once known as East and West Pakistan divided by a vast expanse of Indian territory, and the control of the political elites by the moneyed classes.
 
When we speak of such states as "democracies" we are hardly being honest.
 
They are democracies in name only -- client-states of the superpower.

 
[Sources: Independent Planning Commission of Pakistan, Making Pakistan a Tenable State. (Lahore, Pakistan: Ferozsons Ltd., 2009). ]

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