Dalit Struggle

This seems to be a day for linking to other writing...sorry about that...but I felt I had to add a link to this long post from Zeynep at Under the Same Sun. It is about the author's experience at a panel at the recent World Social Forum. This panel focused on the experiences of Dalits, the so-called "untcouhables" in India. Hearing Zeynep relate how powerful the experience was is itself quite powerful, and helps put our struggles in North America into perspective.

The post includes:

I remember thinking that this was the most uncynical space I have been in a very long time -- and it comes from people who face such massive injustice that one could hardly blame them if they lost all hope, and hated the world that mistreats them so horrifically. Often, one hears people talk of apathy and cynicism as resulting from lack of success. How can that be if these people who have mountains to move, and faced such crushing oppression for thousands of years, do not display a shred of apathy? You feel it sitting there, listening: they are fighting hard, they are struggling against it all with every ounce of their being. They're unfazed. They aren't "moving to Canada," as it were.

Many speakers talked about how "globalization" made things much worse for them. I want to write some more about that at some point, the numbers were really striking. It's clear that the neo-liberal machine is decimating communities like these that were marginally surviving to begin with. Some speakers spoke of how this neo-liberal "advanced capitalism" was strengthening feudal institutions like the caste system.