The monopolies of its use disseminated by judges, prosecutors and deconstituent powers

                                                                                             Elizabeth H. Elys “STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM”

 " Struggle for Freedom" speak to the World : A prisoner struggling to win his Freedom, a political right, liberation from slavery , the power or right to act,speak or think one wants, Freedom in independence, Freedom in Liberty.

 The political spillover of violence 

We live in violent times, yes, but what is violence? Aggressive power that is not always exercised for destruction or injury, although it shows that history was written in blood and that the legitimate use of violence belongs to the State. Our punk philosopher gets involved with the political causes and consequences of hate strategies and with that banality of liberal evil, she is hungry to leave us raw. 

 By Esther Díaz: 2001, a space odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick. In the episode "The dawn of the human", set in prehistory, a group of protohumans face each other in their fight for survival resources. But one of these creatures begins to evolve. He takes a dead tapir bone and turns it into a destructive weapon; giving meaning to the bone, it gave it the property of becoming an instrument of violence. That level of abstraction (later it will be so sophisticated that, in the film, it will become a spaceship) is the jump from brute force to the idea that, converted into discourse, will achieve -among other functions- that violence can also be exercised from language. 

 We live in violent times. But, was there perhaps one that was not?, depending on what is understood by violence. The canonical definition is broad but not sufficient. "Violence: use of force to achieve an end, especially to dominate someone or impose something."

 So, is force equivalent to violence? Is violence exercised only to dominate? What is violence? Excessive aggressive power. But force is not always exerted for destruction or injury, it can also be productive. Although it is clear that history was written in blood. Violence is the midwife of history (Marx). Constant tensions and struggles that use power to bend human wills and dominate the non-human. However, it is equally evident that there are constructive times where the forces are also applied to production and the common good.

 The monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, in modernity, belongs to the State. The spillover theory is fulfilled, although not in an economic sense but purely politically. Only the State is empowered to exercise violence in certain cases and to administer it always. If you exercise your right to violence with discrimination, revenge, abuse or cronyism, justice is transmuted into violence.

 The strategies of hate -which can also come from constituted powers turned into deconstituents- generate violence disseminated by false judges and prosecutors, by hateful political diatribes, as well as by the media sold to the real liberal power. Those who eject hatred through mass dissemination are great ejaculator of violence that embarrass the population with aggressiveness.

 Irritability settles on the surface and explodes in everyday situations; Nobody would say that its causes and consequences are political. Is it a pandemic post-lockdown crisis or is it endemic? A crisis is by definition finite, while political and social aggressiveness threatens to be infinite. We perceive it in certain public discourses, in road and interpersonal aggressiveness, in intolerance and -something that is being eaten away by the banality of evil- in the use of criminal symbols in right-wing demonstrations: guillotines and other criminal symbols, ad hominem attacks in place of debate of ideas and fetishes of assassinated opponents.

 "Is there a way to channel the aggressiveness of the human being and better arm him psychically against his instincts of hatred and destruction?" Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud in 1932, stunned by the widespread fascist violence. “The why of the war” is Freud's answer. He argues that in prehistory conflicts of interest were resolved by physical violence. Then skills in handling weapons were built. Intellectual supremacy began to replace natural force. A weapon is an artifact, something designed and used by beings with understanding. Armed people without ethical solidarity is generalized war.  

 However, the situation is manageable if there are people who manage to implement laws that enable subjectivities to give up part of their personal freedom, so that life in common preserves a certain harmony governed by the State. This is how it is possible to move from violence to law, an indispensable passage to alleviate social inequality. But the death drive is imbricated in violence and that drive is impossible to eradicate, although Freud is optimistic and believes that love can lessen cruelty. Einstein agrees with Freud's pacifist optimism. But he carries within himself a sexist violence that was recorded in testimonies, such as the conditions of coexistence that he imposed on his wife (a physicist and co-investigator in the theory for which Einstein won the Nobel). After a separation (due to his semi-incestuous infidelity) the scientist agreed to reconcile by imposing conditions. 

Here are the requirements that the wise batterer -in addition to being an abandoning father- demands of his wife: “You will make sure that my clothes and those of my bed are clean and in order; that I receive my three meals on time and in my room; that my room and study are clean and exclusive for me; you will waive any personal relationship with me and specifically you will waive my being at home or traveling with you; you will not expect any intimate relationship with me or reproach me for it; you will stop talking to me if I ask you to; and if you are in my study when I enter, you will leave immediately and without protest if I order you to.” As demonstrated, his concern for social violence does not coincide with his responsibility for domestic violence.

 * * * In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler devotes a chapter to the correspondence between the two peace scientists. She does not mention the private violence of the lord of relativity, but she emphasizes the ambivalence of feelings that, according to Freud, manifest themselves in contradictory ways. On the one hand, love preserves social ties, as opposed to hate that savagely destroys. On the other hand, love and hate are passions fighting each other, pecking at each other, intertwining with the drives; therefore, it is not possible to eliminate violence only by expanding Eros, says Butler, we must also live with those who affect us with hostile feelings. The I is unthinkable without the you. "Let us hope to overcome this dilemma by allowing ourselves to live among the living, aware of death, but resisting rage through the rugged and conflictive trajectory of collective action, even under the shadows of doom."

Canadian health agencies that work with state money should be investigated for committing crimes against humanity.

                                                                                   Canada’s restrictive visa policies casting a shadow over IAC 2022

                    Delegates from the Global South struggle to secure visas to attend the 24th International Aids Conference due to start next week in Montreal.

by Ray Mwareya: The 24th International AIDS Conference (IAC) is scheduled to take place in Montreal, Canada between July 29 to August 2. Aimed at promoting the latest HIV science and exploring a range of topics from surveillance ethics and health innovation to HIV cure and vaccine research, the conference was expected to bring together tens of thousands of people from diverse backgrounds working to turn the tide on one of the most devastating public health crises of our time.

Regrettably, however, there is now much doubt that this important gathering – the first in-person IAC since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 – will be able to reach its full potential.

Going forward, visa-restrictive countries, such as Canada, that cannot or will not guarantee access to voices from the Global South should not be allowed to host global conferences on pressing issues like AIDS response or climate change mitigation.

Just a week before the beginning of the conference, many delegates from the Global South are still not sure whether they will be able to attend. The host country, Canada, is taking its time in processing the visa applications of prospective attendees from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. While many delegates are still waiting for their travel plans to be confirmed, more than 100 others have already been forced to accept that they can only attend the conference virtually after their visa applications have been rejected on superfluous grounds.

This is a disgrace. By making it difficult for delegates from the Global South to attend the conference, the government of Canada is not only exposing its discriminatory and harmful immigration policies for the world to see, but also hindering efforts to produce an effective, global response to the threat posed by HIV and AIDS.

HUMILIATING TREATMENT FROM CANADA?

 

The visa hurdles experienced by the prospective attendees of the IAC 2022 were first brought to the global community’s attention in late June, when Keth Monteith, the executive director of the Montreal-based COCQ-SIDA HIV Justice Network, wrote a heavily critical open letter to Canada’s immigration minister Sean Fraser on the issue.

In the letter, co-signed by hundreds of other organisations and individuals, Monteith revealed that he is aware of at least 400 delegates, including some who had already been awarded scholarships to attend the conference, still waiting for a visa response from Canada as well as nearly 100 whose applications had already been rejected.

Since then, countless researchers, advocates and scientists from the Global South talked publicly about the humiliating way Canada’s immigration services treated them as they tried to secure a visa to attend this conference. Some said their applications have been denied because Canadian authorities “did not believe they would leave the country after the end of the conference”. Others revealed that their applications have been rejected after they paid extravagant application fees and spent money to travel to neighbouring countries to give their biometric information to Canadian authorities. Even those who were lucky enough to receive their visas in time complained that Canada needlessly held on to their passports for months, preventing them from travelling elsewhere in the meantime.

In response to the public outcry over its treatment of the Global South delegates, the federal government of Canada finally announced last week that “it is now prioritising temporary travel visas for people seeking to attend the International AIDS Conference in Montreal at the end of July”. The move, however, did little to fix the problem as it will still be impossible for many to receive their visas, book their tickets and arrive in Canada in time for the conference which is due to start next Friday.

Black skin, tough luck

HUMILIATING TREATMENT FROM CANADA?

Canada’s discriminatory attitude towards Global South visa applicants is, of course, not exclusive to those attempting to attend the IAC. The country has been making it hard for people from Latin America, the Middle East, parts of Asia and especially Africa to enter the country on short or long-term visas for a very long time. Prejudice against citizens of Global South countries is entrenched in Canada’s immigration architecture.

 While activists and applicants themselves have been talking about the issue for years, The House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration also recently looked into, and confirmed, the prejudice against African nations in the country’s immigration system. After studying the recruitment and acceptance rates of foreign students in Quebec and in the rest of Canada, the Committee found that almost 70 percent of study visa applications from Africa have been rejected in 2021. (The rejection rate is just 41 percent for applications from non-African nations, and goes further down to 17 percent when Indian and Chinese applicants are also excluded.) Refusal rates appear particularly high for students from Ethiopia (88 percent), Ghana (82 percent), and Rwanda (81 percent).

All this demonstrates that Canada is not and has never been the immigrant-friendly “melting pot of cultures” it tries to sell itself as. Sure, its doors are always open to white, rich immigrants from the Global North. But if you are Black, and especially from a middle or low-income country, tough luck – it doesn’t matter whether you are a brilliant scientist, ambitious student or an activist determined to change lives, the Canadian authorities will make it extremely difficult and financially costly for you to enter the country.

Denying visas to IAC delegates is dangerous

For years, Western nations’ discriminatory visa policies have kept people of the Global South off the decision-making tables of countless international conferences and summits. Many valuable scientists, activists and organisers from Africa, the Middle East and the rest of the Global South failed to attend gatherings on climate change, public health and international relations, despite their home countries often being the most impacted by the issues that were to be discussed.

Canada has shown that it has no intention to break this pattern by failing to process the visa applications of IAC delegates from the Global South this year. This failure is especially dangerous, and a threat to the success of the long-awaited conference, because the Global South, especially sub-Saharan Africa, is still the centre of the AIDS crisis, with 60 percent of the 6,000 daily new HIV infections occurring there. What kind of success can this conference have, if the host country excludes sub-Saharan voices from the conversation with bureaucratic hurdles?

Something needs to change, and something needs to change, now. The international community cannot continue to try and address issues that affect us all with conferences only those privileged enough to carry the passport of a rich, Western country can easily attend.

Going forward, visa-restrictive countries, such as Canada, that cannot or will not guarantee access to voices from the Global South should not be allowed to host global conferences on pressing issues like AIDS response or climate change mitigation.