The Forgotten Cameroon War - 0 views
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In 2005, parliament adopted a law requiring history teachers to discuss the “positive aspects” of colonization. Of course, this has always been done: many French colonial atrocities have been erased, and the driving forces of imperialism are rarely, if ever, critically examined. School curricula propagate a sugarcoated version of France’s bloody past.
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French society as a whole perpetually extols its colonial history. All over the country, innumerable streets and headstones pay homage to the worst colonialists, the scholars who justified a white supremacist racial hierarchy, and the imperial army’s violent feats.
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A significant majority of French people remain proud of their colonial past, unaware of the barbarous manner in which France conquered Algeria, Indochina, and Madagascar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ignorant of how it violently suppressed colonial resistance in Morocco, Benin, and Martinique, and having only a basic knowledge of the massacres that punctuated the last phase of the colonial era — from the carnage of the Thiaroye military camp in Senegal on December 1, 1944, to the mass killings in the streets of Paris on October 17, 1961.
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The British Euro Farce - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Since Cameron’s “No,” there’s been much chatter about the return of Britain’s “bulldog spirit.” Self-delusion is a lingering attribute of former imperial nations adjusting to a lesser reality. In fact Cameron, playing the wrong chips without partners or preparation, was not so much opposed on grand principle as eyeing an opportunity to extract concessions for the very City of London financial institutions seen as the villains of the 2008 meltdown and its dire aftermath. That was politically inept — less the fighting spirit of the Normandy hedgerows than the self-regarding hypocrisy of the giant offshore hedge fund that Britain often resembles these days.
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The thing about the Euro-sceptics behind Cameron’s Brussels bungling is they turn past glory into posturing theater. Their nostalgia for British greatness is often no more than the trumpeting of a bunch of insular snobs who seem to have a hard time restraining their inner-fascist.
LENIN'S TOMB: Why neoliberalism persists - 0 views
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Finance has enjoyed hegemony in the past partially on account of its role in the British empire. Britain's overseas trading companies such as the East India Company or the Hudson Bay Company were based in the City of London, and it was the City's activities which financed the planters and traders. The capital's financial centre was the nexus between domestic producers and the colonies. Undoubtedly, finance has a similar role in today's imperialism, the mechanism by which surplus extracted in the 'periphery' is transferred to ruling classes in the 'metropole'. In fact, one of the reasons why the British government started to take a keen interest in consolidating the City's global role in the late 1960s was due to the loss of the colonies and the need to take on rising financial competitors, not least Wall Street.
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The fact of the matter is that there often hasn't been enough profit to be had in productive investment, while high-risk speculation has consistently delivered, and will continue to do so as long as the public bails the bankers out at moments of crisis. Just how much neoliberalism has delivered is suggested by the fact that by 2006, two fifths of all corporate profits in the US were accumulated in the financial sector - more than double the ratio at the height of 'Reagonomics' two decades before.
Follow the petrodollars: Why Gulf wealth matters to Britain is a question everyone shou... - 0 views
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“The strategic value of the Gulf Arab monarchies to British capitalism and the British state,” Wearing writes, “has meant that securing and defending those monarchies from the threat posed by their own populations has long been a priority for London.”
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“the data show that the British government’s response to the new wave of demands for democracy region-wide was to continue a sharp increase in arms supplies to its key authoritarian allies”
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Without doubt, Britain’s impressively violent imperial history also raises all manner of “moral questions”. And as Wearing makes clear, it was during this very period of empire - comprising a century and a half of British dominance in the Gulf - that the foundations for contemporary interdependence were established.
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Who was behind the Balfour Declaration? - 0 views
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Samuel presented a memorandum titled The Future of Palestine, to the British Cabinet, proposing a Jewish commonwealth, but then Prime Minister HH Asquith did not find his proposal enticing. “He thinks we might plant in this not very promising territory about three or four million European Jews” as a solution to anti-Semitism, Asquith wrote. In a revised memorandum, Samuel said the British government should enable Jewish immigration “so that in the course of time the Jewish inhabitants, grown into a majority and settled in the land, may be conceded such degree of self government”, which he said “would win for England the gratitude of the Jews throughout the world”.
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treaty
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Sykes served as a key channel between Chaim Weizmann and his fellow Zionist activists, and the British government
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Mystery of the stones: How Lebanon's Baalbek ruins are a site for the gods | Middle Eas... - 0 views
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Baalbek’s 300 years of Roman rule overshadow its 10,000 years of continuous settlement, its prehistoric origins and its role as the wellspring of the valley’s two major water sources – an epicentre of life and fertility. Its name is formed from two words: Baal, the Semitic lord of the gods and precursor to Zeus and Jupiter; and nebek, the Aramaeic word for sources. The Romans knew it by its Greek name, Heliopolis, meaning "city of the sun".
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“Baalbek goes back to the beginning of when man settles and there are not that many that have continuously been settled and had a living history,” says Mahlouji, an independent advisor to the British Museum and London-based curator. “It should not be reduced to the folly of a moment in history when those massive Roman temples were built, and to then embed the story of those epic and awe-inspiring stone structures.”
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These foundation stones, particularly those of the Trilithon, are one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. It’s unknown how these heavy blocks - more than 10 times the weight of the individual blocks which make up the Great Pyramid at Giza - were lifted into place. The uphill slant of the mound rules out carts, levers and pulleys.
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The Sacrificial Rites of Capitalism We Don't Talk About | naked capitalism - 0 views
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Supritha Rajan, an English professor at the University of Rochester, sees the dominant story of capitalism working in this way. Part of a wave of humanities scholars taking a closer look at the meaning and history of capitalism, her book, A Tale of Two Capitalisms, reveals how the fields of anthropology and economics, along with the literary form of the novel, which developed together in the late 18th and 19thcenturies, cross-pollinated each other and worked in tandem to investigate and offer new theories about human nature and culture. Together, they helped create a new story for the citizens of an emerging world.
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Anthropologists held that the relegation of the “irrational” to the margins was what distinguished advanced societies from the backward places where such activities remained central to life.
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Rajan started with a hunch that magical rites, sacrificial rituals, and sacred values were not just relics of a pre-modern past, but actually woven right into the story of capitalism from the beginning. They exist everywhere under our noses, popping up in everyday economic activities and permeating even the high-tech exchanges of the global marketplace. What we are taught to think of as irrational and rational are actually mobile, flexible categories that continuously overlap
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Two New Books Spotlight the History and Consequences of the Suez Crisis - The New York ... - 0 views
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The Eisenhower administration relied on the advice of officials who admired Nasser as a nationalist and anti-Communist: a secular modernizer, the long hoped-for “Arab Ataturk.” The most important and forceful of the Nasser admirers was Kermit Roosevelt, the C.I.A. officer who had done so much in 1953 to restore to power in Iran that other secular modernizer, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
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To befriend Nasser, the Eisenhower administration suggested a big increase in economic and military aid; pressed Israel to surrender much of the Negev to Egypt and Jordan; supported Nasser’s demand that the British military vacate the canal zone; and clandestinely provided Nasser with much of the equipment — and many of the technical experts — who built his radio station Voice of the Arabs into the most influential propaganda network in the Arab-speaking world.
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Offers of aid were leveraged by Nasser to extract better terms from the Soviet Union, his preferred military partner. Pressure on Israel did not impress Nasser, who wanted a permanent crisis he could exploit to mobilize Arab opinion behind him. Forcing Britain out of the canal zone in the mid-50s enabled Nasser to grab the canal itself in 1956. Rather than use his radio network to warn Arabs against Communism, Nasser employed it to inflame Arab opinion against the West’s most reliable regional allies, the Hashemite monarchies, helping to topple Iraq’s regime in 1958 and very nearly finishing off Jordan’s.
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Slaughter in Indonesia: Britain's secret propaganda war | Indonesia | The Guardian - 0 views
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what would later be claimed, by those who led it, as one of the most successful propaganda operations in postwar British history. A top secret operation that helped overthrow the leader of the fourth most populous country in the world and contributed to the mass murder of more than half a million of its citizens.
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Recently released in Britain’s National Archives are pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact written by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.
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The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day
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Marcus Garvey's descendants ask Biden for posthumous pardon - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Descendants of the Black revolutionary leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey are pressing President Biden’s administration to grant a posthumous presidential pardon to Garvey, who they say was targeted by the U.S. government and persecuted for his work to uphold racial justice for Black people in the African diaspora.
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Biden administration confronts increasing pressure to grant presidential pardons to correct historic racial injustices and counter former presidents’ issuances of presidential pardons and sentence commutations to wealthy allies and political supporters
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In 1919, Garvey founded the Negro World newspaper, whose contributors included Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg, William H. Ferris and Norton G.G. Thomas. The paper was translated into Spanish and French and distributed worldwide, with front-page editorials by Garvey advocating for Black liberation from racial injustice.The Negro World was banned by colonial powers in some of the African territories they occupied. According to the documentary “The Story of Marcus Garvey,” the Negro World was smuggled into British-occupied Kenya by Black seamen. The paper was read aloud, and children were instructed to memorize Garvey’s editorial. They then went into villages to recite Garvey’s message.
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'Yes, He Would': Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes - POLITICO - 0 views
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“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”
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Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”
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This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin
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Brexit and Boris Johnson Are the Legacies of Tony Blair - 0 views
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British history has a problem with nationalism, and indeed the nation — they’re not supposed to exist, or they exist in very unusual forms. A central claim of my book is that something I call the British nation, corresponding to the territory of the UK, emerged after 1945, with a national economy, national politics, and a self-consciousness of itself as a nation called Britain. But it had a rather short life and was broken up from the 1980s.
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Before the nation came both the empire and a set of places that were located in a global, free-trading space. What came after the nation? A fresh commitment to a globalist, and in particular European, liberal economic perspective.
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Most recently, we’ve had a claim for the centrality of empire in twentieth-century British history, coming right up to the present. I think this very often involves a misrepresentation of what empire was, a failure to distinguish imperialism from nationalism, and an implicit continuity thesis that the empire as it was in 1914 remains a potent ideological force today.
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Things could be good | Dazed - 0 views
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There is something haunting and desperate about the chokehold that white, sallow humans from southern England have over the identity of the UK. In his 2021 docu-series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, Adam Curtis characterises post-war English society as strange and rudderless. During this period of mass emigration and rapid industrialisation, he suggests many white people entered a state of prolonged philosophical mourning over the loss of the empire; sleepwalking through a kind of ambient identity crisis, confused as to what their “story” now was. Speaking of the Black revolutionary and civil rights activist Michael de Freitas, who emigrated to London from Trinidad in the late-50s, Curtis says: “Having grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland at the centre of the Empire, instead, what he found was, what seemed to him, a sad and frightened country.” This feels very much the same now. Misery and spite can be felt in almost every corner of England, lying dormant like a landmine that will go off at the first sight of anyone enjoying themselves outside the parameters of white, middle-class acceptability.
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There is a powerful history of working-class revolt in every nation that makes up the UK, but we are taught very little about it and very rarely celebrate it. Meanwhile Brexit – a political agenda driven by right-wing politicians, aristocrats and landowners – has been consistently referred to as the working class having their voice heard for the first time in decades, which is so far from the truth it would be easy to call a “conspiracy” if it wasn’t so blatantly racist. As a result, our connections to actual working-class history are frayed and obscured, and that has a serious impact on how we act politically today.
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Even the French middle-classes will chuck on a high vis vest and get involved in some street violence once in a while, whereas their equivalents in the UK mainly seem to deal with their grievances by bullying marginalised communities on Twitter.
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Try Fractal Travel this Holiday Season - 0 views
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