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Ed Webb

The Spy Who Came Home | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States
  • American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.”
  • No military force can end terrorism, just as firefighters can’t end fire and cops can’t end crime. But there are ways to build a resilient society. “It can’t be on a government contract that says ‘In six months, show us these results,’ ” Skinner said. “It has to be ‘I live here. This is my job forever.’ ”
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  • They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”
  • In Afghanistan, the U.S. military was trying to defeat the Taliban and install a new government, while the C.I.A. was primarily focussed on killing members of Al Qaeda. At times, Special Operations Forces and intelligence officers coördinated on highly effective raids. But tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.
  • “People thank cops for their service, but they should be thanking McDonald’s workers,” Skinner told me. “They’re way more likely to have a gun in their face than I am.” He added, “The only place that doesn’t really get hit is the late-night liquor store. People are thinking, If this place gets shut down, how will we get in drunken fights?”
  • should the young doctor somehow pass along actionable intelligence against Al Qaeda, the C.I.A. would have drones ready to strike. In recent years, the agency’s vocabulary had shifted: a “target” was no longer someone to be recruited; it was somebody to be tracked, kidnapped, rendered, or killed.
  • The prevalence of high-powered weapons in America is creating an arms race between citizens and the authorities. Each year, dozens of cops are shot dead, and officers kill around a thousand members of the public—often after mistaking innocuous objects for weapons or frightened behavior for threats. Meanwhile, peaceful protesters are increasingly confronted with snipers, armored vehicles, and smoke and tear gas. In the past twenty years, more than five billion dollars’ worth of military gear has been transferred from the military to state and local police departments, including night-vision equipment, boats, aircraft, grenade launchers, and bayonets. “If we wanted an MRAP”—a military vehicle, designed to protect soldiers from ambushes and mines—“we would just have to submit an application to the federal government,” Skinner told me.
  • “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out.
  • Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed—and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs.
  • Skinner always drives with the windows down: he tries to maximize the number of encounters people have with the police in which they feel neither scrutinized nor under suspicion. “You sometimes hear cops talk about people in the community as ‘civilians,’ but that’s bullshit,” he said. “We’re not the military. The people we’re policing are our neighbors. This is not semantics—if you say it enough, it becomes a mind-set.”
  • The agency’s use of black sites, rendition, and torture had become the subject of intense public scrutiny, and the enhanced-interrogation program, which relied heavily on contractors, had been scrapped. According to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, the torture sessions had extracted no actionable intelligence.Skinner, like most case officers, got results through “rapport-based elicitation.” “You can build great relationships with some unsavory people,” he said. “In any terrorist group, there’s dysfunction, usually some jealousy. It’s literally a job—they get a salary. So you’re looking for the guy who feels underappreciated, the guy who’s getting dicked on expenses.”
  • Last year, Bradley McClellan confiscated a Kalashnikov and several pistols from two juvenile pot dealers in Savannah. Although police-issue bulletproof vests can stop rounds fired from a handgun, they are useless against assault rifles. “After seeing what little kids can get their hands on, I went out and bought hard plates,” designed for use in war zones, McClellan told me. The plates cost him more than five hundred dollars—a week’s salary.
  • Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it’s a factor in a high percentage of police calls. A few hours earlier, Skinner had checked on a schizophrenic man who calls the police multiple times each night, reporting paranoid hallucinations; the department can never ignore a call, because he is the legal owner of a .357 Magnum revolver, and officers told me that he once tried to execute an intruder in his front yard. At times, Skinner feels as if the role of a police officer were to pick up the pieces of “something that has broken in every single possible way.”
  • The agency, in its desire to kill Al Qaeda targets, had overlooked a fundamental rule of espionage: that an ideologue can’t be turned
  • Baghdad, Skinner was mired in politics and violence. It had been six years since the American invasion and subsequent dismantling of the Iraqi Army had led to a full-blown insurgency. Skinner had spent many evenings in Amman drinking Johnnie Walker Black with Iraqi tribal sheikhs, trying to recruit their support. “These guys had fled the war and stolen all the Iraqi money,” he told me. “We would try to develop them as assets for what became ‘the surge.’ ” In 2007, Bush sent an additional twenty thousand troops to Iraq to quell the insurgency, but, two years later, car bombs were killing hundreds of civilians in Baghdad each month. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, was stacking the security forces with loyalists who carried out sectarian massacres. “We were focussed on Al Qaeda,” Skinner said. “He was focussed on Sunnis.”
  • ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul and beheaded aid workers and journalists on camera. As the United States became consumed with fear of the group, Skinner grew uneasy in his role. He fielded phone calls from reporters who seemed more interested in citing a former C.I.A. officer than in what he had to say. “One journalist called me up and said, ‘My deadline is in ten minutes, but ISIS is bad, right?’ ” Skinner recalled.
  • In March, 2016, while visiting his aunt in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he gave a lecture on terrorism at the local World Affairs Council. “We have become the most fragile superpower ever,” he told the audience. While Al Qaeda aims to carry out what its operatives call “spectacular attacks,” he explained, ISIS obsesses over creating a “spectacular reaction.” As an example, he recounted an incident in Garland, Texas, in which two wannabe jihadis were killed after attempting a raid on a provocative anti-Muslim convention. The men had no coherent affiliation with ISIS; they merely followed its instructions—which have been widely disseminated by the American media—to post online that they were acting on behalf of the group. “If you strip the word ‘terrorism,’ two idiots drove from Arizona and got shot in a parking lot,” Skinner said. The real threat to American life was the response. “We shut down cities,” he said. “We change our laws. We change our societies.” He went on, “We’re basically doing their work for them.”
  • “Getting killed by ISIS in Savannah is like expecting to get hit by a piano falling from an asteroid,” Skinner said. “It’s batshit insane. Day to day, it’s the people who are kicking in doors and stealing cars who are actually making life unbearable.”
  • Because local police departments pay poorly, “the people who have been trained to do this work best are never going to be doing it,” Skinner said. According to a study by Brown University, since 2001 the average American taxpayer has contributed more than twenty-three thousand dollars to veterans’ care, homeland security, and military operations in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “I used to spend more money on meals and entertainment for a couple of sources in Amman, each year, than the Savannah Police Department has to spend on cars,” Skinner told me. “And whatever the American people got out of my meals in Amman had way less impact on their lives than what was happening down the block.”
  • in the nineteen-sixties a new chief started requiring officers to write reports. “The black officers—we were educated,” White said. Some of the white officers couldn’t write, and many of the more racist cops left the force. White became a detective, and when Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Savannah he served as his bodyguard. But, when people took to the streets after King’s assassination, White was forced to become the “principal arresting officer for eight hundred and seven demonstrators,” he recalled; his superiors thought that it would be better if white cops were not involved.
  • neighborhood gang violence, which accounts for most of the shootings in Savannah, is driven not only by small-group dynamics, the availability of weapons, and obsessions with vendettas but also by alienation from authorities. “It’s a fundamental break in the social contract,” he said. “If you’re in trouble, you have to take care of it yourself, because you can’t ask the police for help. So that becomes another shooting.” In high-crime areas, he continued, “the networks of perpetrators are essentially the same as the networks of victims.”
  • “We’ve invaded countries on worse information. But, if the C.I.A. taught me one thing, it is to always be acutely aware of the tremendous amount of shit I don’t know.”
  • New Year’s Eve, locals launched fireworks out of abandoned lots, and Cuyler-Brownsville erupted in celebratory gunfire. “Good trigger pull,” Skinner noted, as someone emptied what sounded like a .40-calibre pistol about thirty feet from the car. “Trigger control is half the battle.”Shots fired into the sky take about forty-five seconds to hit the ground. Less than ten minutes into 2018, two other officers, parked a few blocks over, fled Cuyler-Brownsville when bullets took out a street lamp overhead. All through the neighborhood, pavements and doorsteps glistened with brass shell casings. We heard hundreds of rounds—from shotguns, pistols of all calibres, a Kalashnikov.
  • The car weaved through three unmanned barriers and approached the C.I.A. annex, where Matthews, LaBonte, and the others were waiting outside with Balawi’s cake. Balawi had some difficulty climbing out of the car. He started limping toward the greeting party, muttering a prayer, and then reached for a detonator attached to his wrist. There was enough time for everyone to understand what was about to happen, but not enough time for anyone to run away.The explosion killed the driver, bin Zeid, and seven C.I.A. officers and contractors, including LaBonte and Matthews. In martyrdom videos that were released after the attack, Balawi explained that Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives had worked with him to pass along exclusive and accurate information, in order to win the C.I.A.’s trust.
  • Police officers are increasingly filling the gaps of a broken state. “They do it essentially on their own, usually without adequate training and preparation, often without the skills they need, and overwhelmingly without the resources and institutional connections that it would take to do those things well.”
Ed Webb

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.
  • The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.
  • As independence grew closer, large caches of files were removed from colonial ministries to governors' offices, where new safes were installed.In Uganda, the process was codenamed Operation Legacy. In Kenya, a vetting process, described as "a thorough purge", was overseen by colonial Special Branch officers.
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  • Clear instructions were issued that no Africans were to be involved: only an individual who was "a servant of the Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent" could participate in the purge.
  • Many of the watch files ended up at Hanslope Park. They came from 37 different former colonies, and filled 200 metres of shelving. But it is becoming clear that much of the most damning material was probably destroyed. Officials in some colonies, such as Kenya, were told that there should be a presumption in favour of disposal of documents rather than removal to the UK – "emphasis is placed upon destruction" – and that no trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain.
Ed Webb

Namibia: US Judge Dismisses Namibian Genocide Claims Against Germany - allAfrica.com - 0 views

  • A US court has dismissed a compensation lawsuit lodged against Germany by two Namibian tribes for genocide and property seizures in colonial times. New York lawyers for Herero and Nama will appeal the ruling.
  • In the early 1900s, colonial troops killed tens of thousands of protesting Nama and Herero outright or expelled them to their deaths in the Omaheke desert region within what was then known as German South West Africa under an "extermination order" issued by colonial German General Lothar von Trotha.
  • Swain in her 23-page judgment dated Wednesday ruled that the principle of sovereign immunity made the case against Germany inadmissible.
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  • The ruling was predictable, said Germany's legal representative Ruprecht Polenz, a jurist, veteran Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician and former Bundestag foreign affairs committee chairman, who since 2015 has led negotiations with Namibia's government over the colonial past. .column.main div.ad-container.center-ad { width: auto; height: auto; } #div-gpt-async-ad-center-b-label { display: none; } "That's why we've always said that it's not a legal but a political-moral issue," Polenz told the German news agency dpa.
  • During World War One, then-imperial Germany lost colonial territories in what is now Namibia as well as in what are now Tanzania, Samoa and Papua New Guinea. In South West Africa -- held since 1884 -- German colonial troops surrendered to British forces in July 1915. At the time the colony had 14,000 European settlers of which 12,000 were German.
  • In early January, Hermann Parzinger, a leading German museum curator, said a memorial space for crimes committed by Germany in colonial times should be included in Berlin's new Humboldt Forum complex.
Ed Webb

More than Genocide - Boston Review - 0 views

  • Mass state violence against civilians is not a glitch in the international system; it is baked into statehood itself. The natural right of self-defense plays a foundational role in the self-conception of Western states in particular, the formation of which is inseparable from imperial expansion. Since the Spanish conquest of the Americas starting in the sixteenth century, settlers justified their reprisals against indigenous resistance as defensive “self-preservation.” If they felt their survival was imperiled, colonizers engaged in massive retaliation against “native” peoples, including noncombatants. The “doctrine of double effect” assured them that killing innocents was permissible as a side effect of carrying out a moral end, like self-defense.
  • By the nineteenth century, the Christianizing mission had been augmented by a civilizing one of the “savage” natives. More recently, this colonial ideology has manifested itself in the project of “bringing democracy to the Arab world,” with Israel designated as the “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the proverbial “villa in the jungle.”
  • Without imperial possessions and the lucrative trade in sugar and other commodities predicated on the Atlantic slave trade, European states would not have generated the surpluses necessary to pay for their military establishments and the bureaucratic apparatuses required to sustain them. And while European powers and settlers in their colonies did not set out to exterminate the peoples they conquered, they killed any who resisted, claiming that their hands were forced.
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  • Throughout the five-hundred-year history of Western empires, the security of European colonizers has trumped the security and independence of the colonized.
  • The historical record shows that, however terrible, violent anticolonial uprisings were invariably smashed with far greater violence than they unleashed. The violence of the “civilized” is far more effective than the violence of the “barbarians” and “savages.”
  • civilian destruction tends to be greatest when security retaliation reaches the level of what I have called “permanent security”—extreme responses by states to security threats, enacted in the name of self-defense. Permanent security actions target entire civilian populations under the logic of ensuring that terrorists and insurgents can never again represent a threat. It is a project, in other words, that seeks to avert future threats by anticipating them today.
  • Indigenous and occupied peoples, then, are placed in an impossible position. If they resist with violence, they are violently put down. If they do not, states will overlook the lower-intensity but unrelenting violence to which they are subject
  • to ensure that Palestinian militants can never again attack Israel, its armed forces are subjecting two million Palestinians to serial war crimes and mass expulsion
  • If Western states support this solution for Israeli permanent security—as the United States appears to be with its budgeting of refugee support in neighboring countries under the guise of a “humanitarian” gesture—they will be continuing a venerable tradition. During, between, and after both twentieth-century world wars, large-scale population transfers and exchanges took place across the Eurasian continent to radically homogenize empires and nations. Millions of people fled or were expelled or transferred from Turkey, Greece, Austria, Italy, India, Palestine, Central and Eastern Europe. Progressive Europeans reasoned then that long-term peace would be secured if troublesome minorities were removed. This ideology—which the governments of Russia, China, Turkey, India, and Sri Lanka share today—maintains that indigenous and minority populations must submit to their subordination and, if they resist, face subjugation, deportation, or destruction. Antiterrorism operations that kill thousands of civilians are taken to be acceptable responses to terrorist operations that kill far fewer civilians
  • Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” argument from 1923, in which the Revisionist Zionist leader argued that Palestinian resistance was understandable, inevitable—and anticolonial. Speaking of Palestinians, Jabotinsky wrote that “they feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.” Because Palestinians could not be bought off with material promises, Jabotinsky wanted the British Mandate authorities to enable Zionist colonization until Jews, then a tiny minority of Palestine, reached a majority. “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population,” he concluded. “Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
  • Hamas thus reasons that Palestinians have nothing to gain by conforming to a U.S.-led “rules-based international order” that has forgotten about them.
  • When state parties to the UNGC negotiated in 1947 and 1948, they distinguished genocidal intent from military necessity, so that states could wage the kind of wars that Russia and Israel are conducting today and avoid prosecution for genocide. The high legal standard stems from the restrictive UNGC definition of genocide, which was modeled on the Holocaust and requires that a perpetrator intend to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (the dolus specialis) in at least one of five prescribed ways (the actus reus). The words “as such” are widely regarded as imposing a stringent intent requirement: an act counts as genocide only if individuals are targeted solely by virtue of their group membership—like Jews during World War II—and not for strategic reasons like suppressing an insurgency.
  • Together, the United States and Russia have killed many millions of civilians in their respective imperial wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Chechnya; so have postcolonial states like Nigeria and Pakistan in fighting secessions. Genocide allegations were leveled in some of these cases in global campaigns like the one we see now, but none stuck, and they are largely forgotten in the annals of mass violence against civilian
  • Adding to the difficulty of establishing genocidal intent is the uncertainty in international humanitarian law about the legality of civilians killed “incidentally” in the course of attacking legitimate military targets. While the majority of international lawyers agree that civilian deaths are acceptable so long as they are not disproportionate in relation to the military advantage sought, others argue that bombing crowded marketplaces and hospitals regardless of military objective is necessarily indiscriminate and thus illegal.
  • They go far in excusing all Israeli conduct in the name of its legitimate self-defense; the US even seems to have demurred on whether the Geneva Conventions are applicable to Palestinian territories. It is thus unsurprising that they have not pressed the Israeli government to explain how cutting off water, food, and power to Gaza—a “war of starvation” as the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor put it—is a legitimate military tactic, one not covered by the UNGC, which declares one genocidal predicate act to be “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” But if so-called humanitarian pauses are occurring to allow in a little, if grossly inadequate, aid, and the “total siege” is lifted after the military defeat of Hamas (should it happen), it will be difficult to argue in a legal context that Israel’s strangling of Gaza was a genocidal act.
  • the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which, they argue, dictates “disproportionate attacks, including against *civilian* structures and infrastructure.” This is clearly illegal.
  • Excessive reprisals, we should recall, are a staple of colonial warfare and state consolidation
  • Since genocide is a synonym for the destruction of peoples, whether the killing and suppression of their culture is motivated by destruction “as such” or by deterrence, the experience is the same: a destructive attack on a people, and not just random civilians. But the UNGC does not reflect the victim’s perspective. It protects the perpetrators: states that seek permanent security.
  • Unless the conditions of permanent insecurity are confronted, permanent security aspirations and practices will haunt Palestinians and Israelis.
Ed Webb

African Union accuses International Criminal Court of racial bias - The Irish Times - W... - 0 views

  • some kind of race hunting
  • The ICC, established in 2002 to try some of the worst crimes, many of which are committed in countries with underdeveloped legal systems, has insisted it acts impartially in all its cases.However, the organisation, ratified by 121 countries, has increasingly been accused of being biased against African nations because of the high numbers of Africans it is pursuing.
  • The ICC has only ever issued arrest warrants for Africans. It currently has investigations under way in eight countries: Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic, Sudan, Kenya, Libya, Cote d’Ivoire and Mali.
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    How might one analyze this situation through the lens of empire. In some sense a legacy of European colonialism? Persisting imperialism through institutions and norms? Open questions - this certainly doesn't have to be about empire.
Ed Webb

Turkish police 'seize Islamic State coin-makers' | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • Turkish police have arrested six foreign nationals and seized material allegedly used by Islamic State (IS) militants to produce coins for the group
  • the coins produced are used as currency in IS-controlled areas
  • IS announced last year that it would start producing its own currency in an effort to "emancipate itself from the satanic global economic system".
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  • based on the original dinar coins used during the Caliphate of Uthman in 634 CE, was set to include seven minted coins: two gold, three silver and two copper. One gold dinar would be worth about $139
Ed Webb

Colonialism can't be forgotten - it's still destroying peoples and our planet | openDem... - 0 views

  • Colonialism was, and remains, a wholesale destruction of memory. Lands, the sources of identity, stolen. Languages, ripped from mouths. The collective loss to humanity was incalculable, as cultures, ideas, species, habitats, traditions, cosmologies, possibilities, patterns of life, and ways of understanding the world were destroyed. Countless ecological traditions – involving diverse ways of being with nature – were swept away.
  • As formal colonialism came to an end, the process of erasing its crimes from public memory and effacing history began
  • In the last decades of the 19th century, tens of millions of Indians died of famine, while British colonial policy forced the country to export record levels of food.  If their bodies were laid head to foot, the corpses would cover the length of England 85 times over (5). The evisceration of the Congo, designed to extract maximum levels of ivory and rubber, killed at least 10 million people – half the country’s population at the time
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  • The fortunes made from metals, slave trading, and plantation commodities, served as direct stimuli to colonial economies, helping to bankroll the Industrial Revolution
  • Colonialism reconfigured the world economy. India’s share of the global economy shrank from 27 per cent to 3 per cent. China’s share shrank from 35 per cent to 7 per cent. Europe’s share exploded from 20 per cent to 60 per cent
  • Colonialism’s ledger of lavish of destruction – its wholesale removal of ecosystems, and the subjugation of those communities that had nourished them – unleashed major rises in emissions. Between 1835 and 1885, deforestation in the territories of the United States was the largest global contributor to emissions
  • Political ecologist Jason Moore argues that ‘the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization’, marked ‘a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities’
  • Its legacies endure today in colonial complexes that underlie our visions of nature, and other humans. Economically, its inheritance was the naturalization of a model of intense cost-shifting, which allowed for states to offload resource-consuming industries, and the costs of ecological damage
  • Once the industries had been externalized, resources could be extracted with scant attention paid to the environmental consequences.
  • Colonialism also firmly shaped the ways we view conservation and ecology. Colonial efforts to protect nature, particularly popular at the end of the nineteenth century, became further opportunities for colonial control. Inhabitants were removed from areas of ‘pristine nature’ that then became national parks, while lands outside these were devoted to intensive extraction
  • although imperial states were forced to relinquish their hold, their legacies prevailed. Centuries of enslavement, despotism, crushed sovereignty, and ecological demolition, had guaranteed a long afterlife to imperial haunting, and its logics of conquest and predation. Many of the new nation states carried on down tracks laid for them by the colonial powers and continued the process of ecological destruction. Under the banners of development, thousands of communities were evicted and displaced in development programmes
  • Deforestation took hold across former colonies
  • Today’s world is a landscape scarred by environmental violence: the monocultural soybean fields of Brazil’s Mato Grosso; the modern gold rushes of Madre de Dios and Zamfara; the vast tar-sands ponds of Canada; the forest-consuming coal mines of Kalimantan; the megadams of the Mekong Delta; the rivers dredged to yield sand; the phosphate mines of Western Sahara; the palm plantations of Tela; the bauxite mines of Guinea; the mesh of pipelines across the Niger Delta; the sugarcane fields of Uttar Pradesh.
Ed Webb

In 1930s Tunisia, French Doctors Feared a 'Tea Craze' Would Destroy Society - Gastro Ob... - 0 views

  • In 1927, at a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a French-trained Tunisian doctor, Béchir Dinguizli, sounded the alarm about a “new social scourge” spreading like an “oil stain” across Tunisia. It had “entered our morals with lightning speed,” he warned, and if not stopped by French authorities, it had the power to paralyze Tunisian society. The alarming threat? Drinking tea.
  • Although practically unknown before World War I, tea imports nevertheless shot up from 100,000 kilos in 1917 to 1,100,000 in 1926. The catalyst appears to have been the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912, which sent an influx of tea-drinking refugees from Tripolitania (modern-day Libya) into Tunisia.
  • Among these French administrators, there was real fear that the colonized population was turning into tea addicts, with medical, social, and economic consequences for France’s mission civilisatrice.
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  • “The harm that [tea] causes is especially visible in the [Tunisian] countryside, where it weakens the race, which is literally intoxicated and morally and physically diminished.”
  • In 1941, the French doctor Edmond Sergent described in several scientific articles how Tunisians, instead of adding fresh tea leaves to already boiling water, added used leaves to the water as it boiled, creating a harmful, tar-like drink. Sergent also argued that Tunisians’ black tea was more dangerous than Moroccan green tea, which explained why cases of teaism were rare in Morocco, despite Morocco’s tea consumption being much higher.
  • According to Dinguizli, teaism was an addiction comparable to alcoholism, a form of chronic poisoning with nervous tremors, amnesia, palpitations, blurred vision, serious disturbances of the nervous and circulatory system, a general weakening of the body, and even a marked decrease in birth rates. Later authors delineated additional mental consequences, such as hallucinations, delusions, and even psychoses.
  • The perceived social consequences of teaism were founded in the belief that tea addicts would do almost anything to satisfy their habit. According to Sergent, the whole salary of many Tunisian workers went “to the buying of tea and sugar.” When their money ran out, Tunisian teaists sold their last possessions, stole from employers, friends, and family, and, in Dinguizli’s words, lost their “usually docile character.”
  • By the 1940s, a variety of publications had ceased to view teaism as an exclusively Tunisian problem, as diagnoses cropped up elsewhere in the Maghreb, such as, in 1948, the psychiatrist Charles Bardenat offhandedly ascribing an act of conjugal manslaughter committed in Algeria to the overconsumption of coffee and tea.
  • not a single case of a French settler in Tunisia being diagnosed with teaism can be found in the French publications.
  • French administrators tried banning illegal coffeehouses, which served tea, and increasing customs duties on tea. There were also calls for posters and educational films on the dangers of tea and how to prepare it correctly, for creating a state monopoly on tea, and even a law restricting tea sales to pharmacies upon presentation of a prescription
  • Tea neither produced hallucinations nor induced crime, and it did not “corrupt” Tunisians. They simply enjoyed a new drink that French authors objected to.
  • When tea first reached England in the 17th and 18th centuries, writers described it as un-British, “unmanly,” and altogether dangerous
  • chocolate, once the drink of choice at rowdy British clubs, inspired similar concern
  • The French viewed coffee, which was produced in their colonies of Martinique and La Réunion, as the drink of the Enlightenment and reason
  • The sight of Tunisians sitting and chatting over tea fueled settler prejudices about Tunisians as lazy and immoderate—nearly all descriptions of teaism focused on the economic consequences
  • feared attacks, revolt, and any sign of the population losing their supposed “docility.”
  • The irony of teaism is that the only real epidemic was the diagnosis of teaism itself. Today, tea is practically Tunisia’s national drink
Ed Webb

Opinion | France Lifts the Lid on Its Algeria War - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Macron admitted what no French president before him had dared to acknowledge: that torture by French forces was widespread during the Algerian war as a product, in Mr. Macron’s words, of a “legally established system.” French historians described this admission, which goes far beyond the emblematic Audin case, as a turning point for French history. President Macron also promised that archives that might shed light on the disappeared would be opened.
  • Mr. Macron is the first French president born after the Algerian war. In every African country he visits he makes this point: As a 40-year-old, he does not feel burdened by this part of French history, and he encourages young Africans to look ahead, not back.
  • Algeria has a special and painful place in French national memory, and vice versa. The Algerian war in the French psyche is often likened to the Vietnam War for Americans — two conscription wars that ended in humiliating defeat. But the Algerian wounds, kept under a lid, are deeper.
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  • More than a colony, Algeria had been made an integral part of France. For more than a century, hundreds of thousands of settlers left France for a new life across the Mediterranean. After the war, their descendants returned to a country many had never known, and they never quite accepted their loss. More than 1.5 million French conscripts fought in the war; 23,000 died, and those who came back traumatized kept silent. France’s booming economy made the 1960s a time for optimism, not tales of failure. Amnesty laws ensured that army officers would not be held accountable for war crimes.
  • Mr. Macron’s words about torture were cautious, and the Élysée, France’s presidential palace, noted that he was extending “recognition,” not “repentance.” A week later, the French president awarded the Légion d’Honneur to a group of Harkis, the 150,000 Algerians who chose to side with the French during the war and paid a heavy price for it. This is his point: the injustice to be repaired is on both sides.
  • Ms. Beaugé opened the floodgates of memory in 2000 with an interview of Louisette Ighilahriz, an activist for Algerian independence who recounted being raped and tortured by French soldiers in 1957 while generals looked on. She spoke out after all those years to thank the army doctor who found her after an interrogation session and saved her life. The publication of the interview, on Le Monde’s front page, was such a shock that shortly afterward, two retired generals agreed to speak out. They admitted overseeing the use of torture, giving new impetus to a debate that refused to go away. “It was not so much remorse as a need to talk,” Ms. Beaugé says. “They had to unload their dark past before leaving this world.”
  • As the official truth finally moves ahead, soul-searching can be expected about the political responsibilities of both Socialists and Gaullists, and of the highest echelons of the French armed forces. Light will have to be shed on the extent to which rape was used as a weapon, along with torture. The present Algerian leadership, heir to the independence war, will also have to finally confront the dark side of the insurgency’s struggle.
Ed Webb

How To Hide An Empire - 0 views

  • Professor Daniel Immerwahr’s new book, How To Hide An Empire. Immerwahr posits that, for the vast majority of people living in the contiguous United States, our understanding of our own country is fundamentally flawed. This is for one central reason: We omit the millions of people and large territorial holdings outside of the mainland that have, since the founding of the country, also had a claim to the flag.
  • As early as the 1830s, the United States was taking control of uninhabited islands; by 1898, the United States was having public debates about the merits of imperial power; by the end of World War II, the United States held jurisdiction over more people overseas — 135 million — than on the mainland — 132 million. While the exact overseas holdings and the standing of territories have shifted with time, what has not changed is the troubling way the mainland has ignored, obscured, or dismissed the rights of, atrocities committed against, and the humanity of the people living in these territories. When we see US history through the lens of these territories and peoples, the story looks markedly and often upsettingly different from what many people are told.
  • when you start thinking about it that way, it’s hard to unsee
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  • in some ways what’s frustrating to me is that this story isn’t new, and it shouldn’t feel to anyone like it’s new. It’s not like no one knew how devastating World War II was to the Philippines — Filipinos knew and have been saying it very loudly, and if you go to Manila, the city is still marked by it. But folks on the mainland don’t always get to see that. So I see this work not just as doing deep dives into dusty boxes and archives in remote places, but also drawing on knowledge that has been produced around all these sites of empire and trying to bring it into a coherent history of the United States.
  • The more you look at the history of westward expansion, the more you see really enticing resemblances between the kind of political strategy used by the United States during those experiments and practices and what happens overseas, such as the creation of a division between parts of the country that are states and others parts that are territories, or in the 1830s an attempt to create a massive all Native American territory called Indian Country that would be run as a colony. It’s not an accident that the same word we used to describe Kansas and Nebraska before they became states is also the appropriate word to talk about the Philippines, to talk about Guam, to talk about American Samoa
  • any information about the overseas parts of the United States doesn’t really count because it doesn’t really seem to be about the United States
  • Female sterilization, war crimes during World War II, internment — things that happened on the mainland or overseas are remembered with immense specificity and often tied to place, but when it comes to these colonies and territories, few people even know they happened
  • when Congress is debating whether or not the US should have a blanket law saying that anyone who sees an uninhabited guano island can annex it for the country, the key issue in that debate is that this can only happen for uninhabited islands. So it’s a way for the US to ease itself into the logic of empire. But legally those guano islands laid the foundation for a much larger empire, and an empire that is populated not just with some people but with tens of millions of people.
  • before even the US starts interning Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans on the West coast, they were interning Japanese and Japanese-American nationals in the Philippines. It was right after Pearl Harbor, and it was enormous — it encompassed about 30,000 people. it was absolutely brutal. It was accompanied by extrajudicial killings, by rapes, by terroristic racial violence, and then by violent retribution once these internees were released as the Japanese invaded the Philippines
  • the declaration of martial law in Hawai’i and the maintenance of that state of martial law far beyond when it was militarily necessary. It wasn’t individual people being interned — the whole island was turned into a military prison with barbed wire around the perimeter. People were prohibited from moving at night, not showing up at work, changing jobs, using US currency — doing all kinds of things they might have done if they were free. If they violated these things, they were almost always convicted in courts presided over not by judges, but by military officers. There was something like a 99 percent conviction rate in the courts we know about. Another example is the internment in Alaska during World War II. A lot of people don’t remember that Japan didn’t just attack Alaska, but invaded and conquered the western tip of the Aleutian Island chain, and as a result the United States evacuated that entire island chain, including some other islands, and removed the native residents to southern Alaska where they were put in horrific camps where a great number of them died. The death rate was about ten percent
  • There are moments of frankness about the full geographical extent of the United States, and 1898 is one of them. It’s a moment when the United States is forthrightly an empire, according to a lot of maps and political discourse. That doesn’t last very long, and those who fought in World War II didn’t live through that moment and didn’t think about the United States in that way. Then many of them discovered the territorial extent of the country, especially if they went through the Pacific. They get a quick lesson in the true geography of the United States. But those moments of openness and frankness tend to close pretty quickly
  • We have long known and are very aware of the fact that race and racism has shaped the lives people have led in this country. Nevertheless, it’s also important to recognize that race and racism have shaped the actual country itself
  • The idea that you can have this guy who on the mainland is such a hero, but in Puerto Rico is known as an unconscionable villain. The idea that you can have that informational segregation persist for decades — that is extraordinary. That is how you hide an empire
  • climate change is posing serious threats to the US territories, as well as some of the islands where the US stations its military bases. If you think about it geographically, these territories are at the outer periphery of the United States, and that puts them on the front lines of history. The fact that four of the five inhabited territories have endured existential threats in the last two years is a preview of what’s to come, so I think this is going to be a time of reckoning for the United States. Can it still maintain this peripheral zone where there are US nationals and citizens who are deprived of the full rights of US citizens on the mainland?
Ed Webb

Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth. History, though, tells a different story. King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.
  • Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe
  • When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
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  • Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
  • What Grant’s work lacked in scientific rigor, it made up for in canny packaging. He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe. Americans’ gauzy idealism blinded them, he argued, to the reality that newcomers from the Mediterranean and eastern Europe—to say nothing of anyone from Asia or Africa—could never hope to possess the genetic potential innate in the nation’s original Nordic inhabitants, which was the source of the nation’s greatness
  • Reconstruction struggles; U.S. expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration—each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people. On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers
  • much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
  • In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
  • historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name. In the conflict between the Trump administration and its opponents, those rival American principles of exclusion and pluralism confront each other more starkly than they have since Grant’s own time. And the ideology that has gained ground under Trump may well not disappear when Trump does. Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government
  • Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, who sponsored the 1924 bill in the Senate. A Princeton-educated lawyer, he feared that America was going the way of Rome, where the “inpouring of captives and alien slaves” had caused the empire to sink “into an impotency which made her the prey of every barbarian invader.” This was almost verbatim Grant, whose portrait of Rome’s fall culminated in the lowly immigrants “gradually occupying the country and literally breeding out their former masters.” (His plotline helped him preserve the notion that fair-haired and -skinned people are responsible for all the world’s great achievements: Rome’s original inhabitants were Nordic, but contemporary Italians were descendants of Roman slave races and therefore inferior.)
  • In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.
  • The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is
  • Addison Smith, a Republican congressman from Idaho, proudly invoked the Scandinavian, English, Irish, and other northern-European immigrants of his district, highlighting that among them were no “ ‘slackers’ of the type to be found in the cities of the East. We have ample room, but no space for such parasites.”
  • Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”
  • The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.”
  • the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science
  • That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity. But to recognize the homegrown historical antecedents of today’s rhetoric is to call attention to certain disturbing assumptions that have come to define the current immigration debate in America—in particular, that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States. The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
  • External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy. When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows.
Ed Webb

'Lone wolf' or 'terrorist'? How bias can shape news coverage | Poynter - 0 views

  • take a moment to remember U.S. history (or even a few seconds to do an internet search) and it’s easy to find many examples of far deadlier shootings. It’s a sad reality that most victims of the worst massacres that don’t rate a mention were people of color: Native Americans and African-Americans
  • there have been much worse atrocities and mass shootings committed against Native peoples going back to the beginnings of our country’s history
  • The unwelcome title of largest massacre might belong to Bear River, Utah, where at least 250 Native Americans were slaughtered in 1863; Native American historical accounts put the number at more than 450. In 1890, Native American men, women and children were massacred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 150 to 300.
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  • Just 100 years ago this June, armed whites rampaged through East St. Louis, slaughtering more than 100 African-Americans. In Tulsa in 1921, white mobs attacked a wealthy black neighborhood, killing as many as 300 people and leaving 8,000 homeless in what was wrongly labeled a “race riot” and left out of history texts until recently.
  • after mass attacks perpetrated by brown Muslim assailants, such as the Orlando Pulse massacre or the San Bernardino, California, killings, the media, authorities and politicians were quick to label them “terrorism” even before we had full information
  • Just because someone’s angry or even mentally ill doesn’t mean their actions aren’t those of a domestic terrorist (see U.S. Code definition above). As Joshua Keating points out in Slate, being distraught and a terrorist are “not mutually exclusive.” A 2013 study of violence by far-right extremists in America in Criminology and Public Policy found 40 percent of “lone wolf” domestic terrorists had a history of mental illness
  • Fox News dubiously described the shooter’s father’s life as “colorful,” as if it were entertaining that the man’s father robbed a string of banks, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and busted out of a federal penitentiary. Can you imagine a black, Muslim or Latino’s long criminal record being described in the same way?
  • Underlying this bias is the implication that Muslims or brown immigrants are more dangerous to Americans’ safety than white attackers. That is provably false, based on government statistics – yet it was the central narrative of President Trump’s campaign
  • according to an analysis by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh of fatal terrorism on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2015 – including the staggeringly high toll of the 9/11 attacks – the chances of an American being killed in a terror attack on U.S. soil by a foreigner was a miniscule 1 in 3.6 million per year. The chances of being killed by an illegal immigrant in the same 41-year period was an infinitesimal 1 in 10.9 billion per year.
Ed Webb

In praise of cultural appropriation - The Indian Philosophy Blog - 0 views

  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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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  • If the ideology of “cultural appropriation” were correct, it would mean that traditionally white-dominated philosophy departments have been entirely right in their long avoidance and ignoring of non-Western philosophy. It would mean white people shouldn’t be studying the philosophies that “belong to” people from other cultures. They shouldn’t be “taking” and “appropriating” this property, they should stay in their lanes and remain as narrow and parochial and hidebound and Eurocentric as they always have been. The idea of cultural appropriation effectively tells white people to be more Eurocentric – to drop even that far-too-limited exploration of other cultures that they have already engaged in. Intellectual diversity, learning from other cultures and their ideas, is – according to cultural-appropriation ideology – a bad thing. The ideology of cultural appropriation is a way of telling white people to make their culture even whiter.
  • Cultures are not property.
  • if the appropriators are in a position of geopolitical/cultural dominance or hegemony, they may greatly alter the nature, form etc of those aspects of culture for the originating communities themselves. Such influence can show up as coercion under many circumstances, thereby interfering in problematic ways with the (dynamic) capacity of the originating communities for cultural reproduction
  • it is problematic when appropriation is facile – such as using the bindi without interest in or knowledge about what it means and its history in the originating communities
  • I do think respect for others’ sacredness can be a helpful norm in cultural interaction – though I would agree that exceptions must be made for the likes of art and comedy
  • concerning your point about the neoliberal conception of knowledge, an eye-opening moment for me was when I asked whether we can agree that knowledge is a common quest (therefore, it is empowered when it is shared) and not a treasure (which can only diminish). The reply was: it is a treasure. This kind of feeling generates the anxiety which then leads to thinking that cultural appropriation is a crime
  • If one is left with a nagging sense of a debt unpaid, perhaps that’s the way to look: to the moral challenges that now arise
Ed Webb

Africa: How Seriously Is Germany Taking Its Colonial History? - allAfrica.com - 0 views

  • German colonial traces are plain to see everywhere for Naita Hishoono from Namibia. A walk through the country's capital, Windhoek, reveals German street names, German shops, an imposing church built during German colonial days. And under the surface lurks something more sinister and haunting: the genocide of Herero and Nama people by German colonial troops. It's a dark chapter every Namibian knows, but it's a topic that barely sees daylight in Germany.
  • in Germany, you would completely forget that Germany had colonies
  • It took more than 100 years for a German government to officially acknowledge the country's colonial actions in Africa. In 2018, the ruling coalition of the conservative CDU/CSU block and Social Democrat (SPD) parties agreed to take a fresh look the Germany's colonial past.
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  • Among other things, German museums came to an understanding on how they want to proceed with artifacts looted during the colonial times. And a central contact point has been established for former colonies to demand the return of their possessions.
  • Museums and archives have returned skeletons brought to Germany during the colonial period -- for dubious scientific experiments, among other things. Cities have begun renaming streets honoring colonialists
  • Since 2015, Germany and Namibia have been negotiating about an official apology for the genocide of the Herero and Nama people, with no results so far.
  • In February, Tanzania's ambassador to Germany, Abdallah Possi, demanded the German government start negotiating a deal for reparations with Tanzania. This would allow Berlin to show that "Germans have finally accepted responsibility for human rights abuses during the colonial era, and that they take what happened to Tanzanians in the past seriously," the ambassador told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. Possi was referring to the Maji Maji Rebellion, an uprising against German colonial forces from 1905 until 1907, which claimed around 250,000 victims.
Ed Webb

Macron's Algeria Report Isn't Progress, It's a Whitewash. - Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Le Pen’s early political goal was to lobby on behalf of the hugely bitter pieds-noirs class who had swapped their colonial lifestyles for far more modest ones in mainland France. Such far-right nostalgists now rally behind Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen. She renamed the FN the Rassemblement National (RN), but it has lost none of its antipathy toward Algerians.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Compare to Memmi's discussion in the Coloniser & the Colonised
  • The toothless Stora report feigns an interest in justice while whitewashing colonial crimes; it shows Macron is doing everything to try to win over Le Pen supporters
Ed Webb

Xinjiang Denialists Are Only Aiding Imperialism | The Nation - 0 views

  • pundits claim that efforts to expose human rights abuses in Xinjiang are really aimed at generating consensus for a “new Cold War” against China. It is only the latest manifestation of American denialism, and instead of challenging US empire, it only helps to cover up US government complicity in the oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang
  • anti-imperialists on the left who, in order to critique American empire, dismiss obvious truths and question whether well-documented massacres ever happened. Most notorious among anti-imperialist deniers are Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. In their book The Politics of Genocide, they argue that most accusations of genocide are justifications of US imperialism in the name of “humanitarian intervention.”
  • For many anti-imperialists, the need to denounce US empire is reason enough to support any of its opponents. And if those opponents commit atrocities, their abuses can be denied. Xinjiang is just the latest iteration in this pattern. The specific identities of the Xinjiang denialists don’t really matter, and I have no intention of inflating their cause by naming them or linking to their work. What brings them together is a tireless effort to debunk every aspect of the “mainstream” narrative about Xinjiang
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  • Like the United States itself, China is an imperial state. Its contemporary borders are the result of conquest, and its current population is a collection of peoples violently confined by the forces of the state. Whether you think China is socialist or capitalist doesn’t change this
  • The territory now known as Xinjiang (literally, “new frontier”) was invaded in the mid-18th century amid a global spree of imperial expansions. It was retained by the People’s Republic of China because of a loophole in the decolonization process that enabled states to hold on to colonial possessions that were part of the same landmass. Because China didn’t cross an ocean to colonize Xinjiang, the territory and its people were ineligible for decolonization within the UN’s framework
  • If these people want to criticize America, they can highlight US complicity in ongoing colonialism in Xinjiang. One doesn’t need to invent conspiracies. For example, China’s designation of all forms of Uyghur resistance as terrorism has been directly inspired and enabled by the US-led Global War on Terror.
  • in presenting these facts as evidence of benign governance in Xinjiang, rather than the shallow tokenism of colonial rule, they exemplify a hallmark of what Richard Hofstadter once called the paranoid style in American politics. These denialists do not lack “verifiable facts,” just “sensible judgment.”
  • The US War on Terror made it easier for the Chinese Communist Party to redefine Uyghur resistance as terrorist extremism, rather than national liberation or anti-colonialism.
  • he founder of US mercenary corporation Blackwater, Erik Prince (also brother of former US secretary of education Betsy DeVos) transferred his expertise from Iraq to China via the security service provider Frontier Services Group, which trained anti-terrorism personnel in Beijing and planned to open a “training center” in Xinjiang. And despite Blackwater’s claim that it is pulling out of the region, a 2020 financial report sets aside nearly $2.7 million for “setting up business” in Xinjiang. We also know that US tech companies have helped create a surveillance state in Xinjiang. Companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific and Promega have sold equipment to help police in Xinjiang build a system of racial profiling, based on DNA samples obtained, in part, from a prominent US geneticist. And finally, we know that the supply chains of dozens of US companies run through Xinjiang. Companies like Nike and Apple even lobbied against legislation that would affect their capacity to do business in Xinjiang.
  • Whether you think these complicities support genocide, “mere” atrocities, or “only” colonialism doesn’t change the fact that the US security state has inspired, aided, and profited from the domination over Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
  • it’s perfectly possible to oppose US empire without engaging in denialism, praising colonialism, and debasing the dignity of victims and survivors
Ed Webb

Review: 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined
  • hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.
  • In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably. (It also didn’t start in only a handful of centers—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, the same places where empires would first appear—but more like 15 or 20.)
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  • Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call “the ecology of freedom”: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.
  • The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that “land of kings,” urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.
  • the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”
  • What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”
  • does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?
  • The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom.
  • making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.
  • “How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.
Ed Webb

Survivors of Kissinger's Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings - The I... - 0 views

  • Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.
  • U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments
  • Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.
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  • “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”
  • Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands
  • In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around 160,000 tons of munitions on Japan.)
  • Ray Sitton, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and Congress.
  • Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and laid the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide.
  • For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations around the world. A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims, survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.
  • The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia 50 years later is nil.
  • trauma can have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether genetically or otherwise. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on
  • survivors believed that more than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks
  • Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,”
  • Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead, they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines, people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself, then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S. Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said Sheang.
  • in May 1971, U.S. helicopter gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds, along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.
  • As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes, tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army documents.
  • While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.
  • In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S., however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.
  • Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.”
Ed Webb

No winners in the tragicomic colonial blame game | Emmanuel Macron | Al Jazeera - 0 views

  • Being anti-colonial is now trendy. Modern imperialists are thus less forthright about the nature of their country’s conduct in Africa than their predecessors. Many of them, regardless of their actual inclinations, are paying lip service to human rights, and framing their politics and policies as anti-colonial. So much so, they happily accuse each other of neo-colonialism. Meloni’s criticism of France’s “colonial currency” is accurate. Macron’s criticism of Russia’s “predation project” in Africa is also accurate. And even Lavrov and Putin are not lying when they talk of the West’s “bloody crimes of colonialism”. But these “hot takes” are not worthy of celebration coming from political leaders who have no interest in critically engaging with their own countries’ neo-colonial policies or taking steps towards building mutually beneficial relationships with African nations.
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