PRAGOTI

Prabhat Patnaik's reflections on the loss suffered by the Left in the recent Loksabha election.

This is an interview of the Japanese experimental filmmaker Masao Adachi in Tokyo. After making a number of experimental films, in 1974 Adachi decided to go to Palestine to commit his energies to the cause of the Palestinian Revolution for liberation, whereupon he was imprisoned in Lebanon for activities that were revealed only later and extradited to Japan,where he spent two additional years in prison. In 2007, Adachi brought out his first feature film, Yuheisha – Terorisuto (The Prisoner), after his release. The interview marked the celebration of this special occasion.

Basra, Fallujah, Mosul, Kirkuk, Baghdad – names and places and associations of nameless and faceless numbers of the dead and the dying, history’s witnesses to the stories of death, destruction, plunder and subjugation. Six years of war and occupation justified by lies, six years of complicity of the ‘international community’ and six years later an illusory pullout scheme and 138,000 troops according to one report and 142,000 according to another.

17 January 2009: On January 11, up to 80,000 people braved freezing temperatures in Berlin to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the murder of socialist revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.