Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987. Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate. Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions. Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.
Our Commando War in 120 Countries: Uncovering the Military's Secret Operations In the O... - 0 views
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“as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at Somalia.”
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Olson launched "Project Lawrence," an effort to increase cultural proficiencies -- like advanced language training and better knowledge of local history and customs -- for overseas operations. The program is, of course, named after the British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), who teamed up with Arab fighters to wage a guerrilla war in the Middle East during World War I. Mentioning Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, and Indonesia, Olson added that SOCOM now needed "Lawrences of Wherever."
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DNA Reveals the Hidden Jewish Ancestry of Latin Americans - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The stories have always persisted—of people across Latin America who didn’t eat pork, of candles lit on Friday nights, of mirrors covered for mourning. A new study examining the DNA of thousands of Latin Americans reveals the extent of their likely Sephardic Jewish ancestry, more widespread than previously thought and more pronounced than in people in Spain and Portugal today.
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The team also found a mix of indigenous American, European, sub-Saharan African, and East Asian ancestry in many people they sampled—a legacy of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and more recent pulses of immigration from Asia
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Spain did not allow converts or their recent descendants to go to its colonies, so they traveled secretly under falsified documents. “For obvious reasons, conversos were not eager to identify as conversos,” says David Graizbord, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Arizona. The designation applied not just to converts but also to their descendants who were always Catholic. It came with more than a whiff of a stigma. “It was to say you come from Jews and you may not be a genuine Christian,” says Graizbord. Conversos who aspired to high offices in the Church or military often tried to fake their ancestry.
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In praise of cultural appropriation - The Indian Philosophy Blog - 0 views
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there is something off about the very idea of knowledge or cultural expressions being “taken from” another culture. The very idea of treating cultural expressions as a culture’s property, which can be taken, seems to extend the capitalist logic of private property into ever further spheres: to use the currently popular jargon, this idea seems a quintessentially neoliberal one. As good capitalists, we all know everything comes down to private property, and private property must be respected. Learning from other cultures is a form of stealing, just like progressive taxation and sharing PDF articles. When did leftists start thinking that this was an idea they wanted to embrace?
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Cultures have always borrowed freely from one another, changing the meaning of objects in the process – without “permission” – and the process is never unidirectional. I remember once being in a restaurant in Phnom Penh that displayed a video of Cambodian women in scanty Santa outfits singing “Jingle Bells” – in August. So too, Christmas is now one of the most popular holidays in Japan – as a day when couples go out to celebrate their romantic relationships by eating at KFC. The process of cultural borrowing is often funny and sometimes awkward, and it leaves humanity all the richer for it. Western Buddhism is very different from original Buddhism – just as Chinese Buddhism is. But the world would be much poorer without Chinese Buddhism or East African Islam, and it frightens and saddens me to imagine a world where such cultural mixing is prohibited.
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As someone who is racially mixed myself, I hope I can be excused for worrying that such prohibitions on cultural mixing feel dangerously close to still more problematic ideologies that say I should not exist. It does not bother me in the least when a white woman wears a sari. Rather, what offends me, and even scares me, is when someone tells white women – women like my mother – that they should not wear a sari.
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Decolonizing ecology - Briarpatch Magazine - 0 views
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The traditional fish weir on the Koeye River. Photo by Bryant DeRoy. Decolonizing ecology by Jade Delisle Jul 2, 2020 18 min read Share Twitter
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At a time when Indigenous land defenders are fighting for cultural resurgence and the application of traditional knowledge to combat the climate crisis, they are often cast as the monolithic, mystical, degrowth opposition to the secular modernity of white leftists and their fully automated socialist future. In reality, solutions to ecological and social problems that were historically or are presently used by non-European cultures are compatible with modern technology, often in consensus with cutting-edge scientific findings, and more necessary than ever.
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Indigenous Peoples now make up less than five per cent of the world’s population, but the lands they maintain hold 80 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity. Protecting and restoring Indigenous Peoples’ lands is the fastest and most readily available way to sequester carbon and mitigate the impacts of climate change, a result of the optimally efficient relationships between fungi, plants, animals, and people in a given bioregion, which Indigenous cultures have coded into their knowledge systems over millennia of human-environmental interactions.
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How to Think About Empire | Boston Review - 0 views
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In your book, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), you identify a few different pillars of empire: globalization and neoliberalism, militarism, and the corporate media. You write, “The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code of democracy. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities on sale to the highest bidder.”
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updates now would include the ways in which big capital uses racism, caste-ism (the Hindu version of racism, more elaborate, and sanctioned by the holy books), and sexism and gender bigotry (sanctioned in almost every holy book) in intricate and extremely imaginative ways to reinforce itself, protect itself, to undermine democracy, and to splinter resistance
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In India, caste—that most brutal system of social hierarchy—and capitalism have fused into a dangerous new alloy. It is the engine that runs modern India
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NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: 'Scotland didn't have empire done to it, Scotland did empire to... - 0 views
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Glasgow’s Dr Campbell Price is British TV’s go-to guy when it comes to ancient Egypt. But the study is riddled with racism and he wants to drag the world of mummies into the 21st century … and he doesn’t care if you call him ‘woke’.
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Price is at the forefront of the fight to ‘decolonise’ the study of Ancient Egypt and drag it into the 21st century. He wants the discipline to confront its history of racism and empire, and he’s not shy about apportioning a fair amount of blame on Scotland and its own role in Britain’s colonial adventures.
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the study of Ancient Egypt was founded by colonialists from Britain and France in the early 1800s and it still hasn’t shaken off the baggage of the past. There’s a lingering sense that Egyptians are considered unable or incapable of studying their own history without the assistance of white, western academics who are really the people best suited to the discipline. The whiff of racism and a “white saviour narrative” still hangs in the air, he feels.
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Illustrating China Is More Than Dragons and Pandas - 0 views
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Aesthetic choices have long shaped how American audiences see the world. Historically speaking, the West’s visual vocabulary tends to champion a fascination “with abjection and violence” in foreign subjects, whether that be the sinister depictions of Japanese people in World War II propaganda, Native American mascots in sports, or distressed communities in Africa and the Middle East.
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Using repetitive, stereotyped tropes to signify that China is exotic, authorientalism visually links these tropes to abuses of government power, thereby promoting the view that authoritarianism is part of the essential character of Chinese-ness. It conflates the culture and the government, and reinforces the state’s own frequent claims that authoritarianism is innate to Chinese history or society.
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Turning authoritarian behavior into an exclusively alien phenomenon also implies that it does not apply to Western political culture, making it harder to recognize totalitarian behavior in more familiar contexts.
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