Some kind of new model army is beseiging the wealthy foreign-oriented parts of Mumbai. I watched coverage from Lyon in four languages, including Arabic which I don't understand. (Arabic is the best singing language ever, but that's another story.) Nobody knows anything. And its still going on 24 hours later.
This is very interesting - the capacity of small organized guerilla groups to disrupt everything in modern, highly armed, nuclear security states like India. I'm sure it's making poor oppressed people everywhere pay attention. Maybe they will attack actual leaders for a change.
Today in Bretagne farmers set fires outside of the supermarket chains that force unliveable prices on them. In Paris, CNRS researchers occupied the offices of the main research agency, which of course is trying to downsize them.
One among various bad things about these random, bloody attacks on non-combatants like the one in Mumbai is that they help billions of people believe that it's the little people, the poverty-stricken fanatics from illiterate hinterlands who kill. These cases are in fact a tiny minority of the death dealt out for political or economic reasons.
So Mumbai reminded me of former-Soviet Georgia, and the moronic military clash last August, stage-managed by leaders in Tbilissi, Moscow, and Washington DC. One 48 year old man who fled Gori with his family was interviewed by the French daily Liberation. My translation of some of the remarks of Merab:
All this, it's the fault of big-time politics. Before, we all lived very well together, I [a Georgian] had Ossetian friends. We celebrated our births and deaths together, we married each otehr. It's true that after perestroika, the Ossetians started to have nationalist ambitions. The Russians, who helped them in secret, complicated everything. They had money and arms that crossed the frontiers. Everything got worse when Zviad Garnsakhourdia, the first Georgian president, came into power.To keep from making the same mistakes following our leaders, learn the backstory from guys like Merab.
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