Behind the UK government's false flag 'free speech' campaign | Education | Al Jazeera - 0 views
-
Instead of addressing a very real crisis in teaching and learning conditions that threatens to seriously degrade British universities, Boris Johnson’s ministers have thrown their energies into manufacturing a campus “free speech crisis”. Having deliberately excluded higher education from COVID-19 support, they have spent the pandemic making nonsensical claims about campus “cancel culture” and crafting legislation to protect exactly the kind of hateful speech Durham University students exercised their right not to listen to. The point is less to enshrine freedom of thought than it is to force discredited ideas upon young people.
-
The Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill now progressing through Parliament seeks to prevent invitations to speakers from being rescinded if they are discovered to have peddled discredited or hateful ideas. The legislation targets the tactic of “no-platforming” which was adopted by the National Union of Students in 1974 to stop fascist organisations, like the National Front, from using universities to disseminate their views.
-
A 2018 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights investigation found that there was “no wholesale censorship” at universities
- ...9 more annotations...
"Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle." | Emptywheel - 0 views
Ayn Rand Helped the FBI Identify It's A Wonderful Life as Communist Propaganda | Open C... - 0 views
-
Listening to Capra’s motivation for the film—as quoted in The Los Angeles Times—makes it hard to believe he had anything like promoting a worker’s paradise in mind: “There are just two things that are important,” he said, “One is to strengthen the individual’s belief in himself, and the other, even more important right now, is to combat a modern trend toward atheism.” But in the FBI’s analysis—and possibly Rand’s, though it’s not clear how much, if any, of the report she authored directly—the tale of George Bailey manifested several subversive tendencies. Flavorwire sums up the charges succinctly: “Written by Communist sympathizers,” “Attempting to instigate class warfare,” and “Demonizing bankers.”
-
even if It’s A Wonderful Life may now look like apple pie on celluloid, Flavorwire points out that it's still liable to raise suspicions among certain aggressive pundits and culture warriors who push a “war on Christmas” narrative and see socialist subversion even in acts of charity, like those displayed so extravagantly in the film's mushy ending
Jadaliyya - 0 views
-
This is the first program to be hit with a gag order by the US government, but it likely will not be the last. Instead, this gag order hopes to stimulate a programmatic shift in the way all Middle East studies programs who utilize Title VI funds teach about the Middle East and Islam.
-
As graduate students involved in the Duke-UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, we will not kowtow to the state—this state or any other. Our first preoccupation is critical thinking and academic freedom, which is integrally linked to the pursuit of justice. We reject the premise of this gag order and its underlying intentions. We stand against all forms of discrimination—racial, religious, gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, and otherwise—in particular as a result of state vision and rhetoric. We will not support imperialism, jingoism, and military hegemony, and we do not support the idea that these are necessary for maintaining peace in any nation, including the US.
Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives | UK news | The G... - 0 views
-
Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.
-
British colonial administration in Palestine
-
Other files the National Archives has listed as “misplaced while on loan to government department” include one concerning the activities of the Communist party of Great Britain at the height of the cold war; another detailing the way in which the British government took possession of Russian government funds held in British banks after the 1917 revolution; an assessment for government ministers on the security situation in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s; and three files about defence agreements between the UK and newly independent Malaya in the late 1950s, shortly before the two countries went to war with Indonesia.
- ...1 more annotation...
How to Think About Empire | Boston Review - 0 views
-
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.”
-
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
-
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
- ...22 more annotations...
Slaughter in Indonesia: Britain's secret propaganda war | Indonesia | The Guardian - 0 views
-
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.
-
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.
-
The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day
- ...18 more annotations...
Figures of Speech - Yale Daily News - 0 views
-
Beyond any specific distortion, the anti-PC writers’ most tendentious claim was that only their opponents were political and self-interested, while they stood for capital-T Truth and what Kimball called “the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.” “The people out there making arguments about being scrappy underdogs trying to speak against the establishment — there’s almost always millions and millions of dollars behind them,” said Mary Anne Franks, a legal scholar at the University of Miami who studies free speech and discrimination and whose latest book, “The Cult of the Constitution,” studies campus speech controversies. “These people try to present their views as intellectually untainted, when in reality we’re talking about corporate sponsorship.”
-
By the mid-1990s, the belief that college campuses were overrun by a liberal thought police had leached into the American mainstream, thoroughly scrubbed of its highly partisan and deep-pocketed origins
-
For conservative individuals and organizations on the front lines of the campus culture wars, the post-9/11 national atmosphere of civilizational besiegement and revanchist bloodlust provided welcome ammunition. One such group was the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, an organization founded in the 1990s by future Second Lady Lynne Cheney on explicit opposition to “political correctness.” Two months after the attacks, the organization issued a report titled “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” The report called university faculty a “weak link in America’s response” to 9/11 and listed the names, institutional affiliations and anti-war statements of dozens of professors, which included lines such as “build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls,” “break the cycle of violence” and “there is a lot of skepticism about the administration’s policy of going to war.”
- ...4 more annotations...
Muslims mourn the Queen under Prevent's watchful eye - 0 views
-
while offering condolences is part of the Islamic faith, a question remains as to what motivates both the need to issue these statements as well as the urgency with which they were thrust into the public domain. For British Muslims, as we know, citizenship has always been conditional. And now, counter-terror and anti-extremism measures such as Prevent work hard to ensure that Muslims stay in line. So an occasion such as the Queen’s death isn’t an opportunity for sincere reflection or honesty – rather it serves as a test of loyalty.
-
maybe the effect of Prevent’s surveillance and thought-criminalisation is so insidious that Muslims have internalised it, causing them to believe unquestioningly that these are their true feelings
-
There are, no doubt, British Muslims who feel anger over the romanticisation of the Queen and the whitewashing of her reign. There are British Muslims who would like to see the monarchy abolished, not least because it is a fundamental symbol of inequality in this country. And there are British Muslims whose grief is reserved for their grandparents who lived, and died, under the boot of British colonialism.
- ...2 more annotations...
1 - 13 of 13
Showing 20▼ items per page