Guest Post: The Flag, the Military, and Patriotism | The Angry Staff Officer - 0 views
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what Washington Post columnist Alex Nowrasteh calls “Patriotic Correctness.” A less kind definition is chicken hawk
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In a nation where the people actually had a relationship with their military, such obtuse displays wouldn’t be held up as paragons of third-party virtue, they’d be mocked for the shameless appropriation they are. Just a generation ago, the American people understood their military wasn’t a faultless bastion of American virtue; it was an honorable, if fallible institution much the same as churches, courts, and medicine–it wasn’t an abstraction, it was a real thing, worthy of respect and the occasional mocking. It’s an unhealthy pathological consequence of the AVF that we can longer treat the military the same.
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Military service is just one occupant in the pantheon of national service. It is not necessarily better or more noble than the Peace Corps, Public Health Service, or Merchant Marine. In fact, the material benefits may often be better in the military than other forms of service; disregarding the sacrifices born by others or dismissing them as “just civilians” is mil-splaining at its worst. Only in a police state, where the military and state power are paramount, do those instruments have a lock on “the flag.”
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The Ever Given is proving hard to refloat. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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the grounding of Ever Given also has exposed how the complex ownership structures in global shipping might make it difficult to hold anyone accountable. The Ever Given is operated by Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen Maritime. Evergreen charters the ship from a Japanese firm; a Dubai-based company acts as the agent for the ship in ports; and the ship flies the flag of Panama
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Flags of convenience, or open registries, have more lax labor and environmental regulations, and lower thresholds for safety and insurance provisions.
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Last summer, the Wakashio, another ship owned by a Japanese firm but flagged to Panama, ran aground in Mauritius, spilling oil into the island’s sensitive marine ecosystem. The fracturing of ownership and operation across different legal jurisdictions and national boundaries also makes it much harder to assign responsibility for accidents such as the grounding of Wakashio and Ever Given.
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British Identity and the Legacy of Empire | openDemocracy - 0 views
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the extent to which the legacy of the British Empire continues to influence contemporary politics and society has also been overlooked by most parties. Only the Conservatives have acknowledged it as a policy aspiration, promising in their manifesto that they will ‘strengthen the Commonwealth as a focus for promoting democratic values and development’. However, their intention to establish annual limits on non-EU migrants suggest that Conservative views towards the former empire continue to be infused with elements of colonialism – a confused message that encourages stronger Commonwealth bonds through the promotion of British values and aid whilst restricting of historic patterns of population exchange.
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The Commonwealth provides stark evidence that imperial withdrawal in some former colonies was not controlled or bloodless and that the post-colonial legacy of the British Empire is far from entirely positive. Sustained efforts to re-evaluate the legacy of empire have proven slight, suggesting a post-empire myopia that can be somewhat attributed to the contentious nature of empire and its inheritance.
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The extent to which the UK can be seen as a post-empire state must be questioned. For some, such as Robert Cooper, British foreign policy continues to be shaped by an ascription to ‘liberal imperialism’. Moreover, transnational constitutional ties endure, with the Monarch continuing as Head of State of sixteen states - of which the UK is but one – and fourteen British Overseas Territories. The Crown is represented in a number of differing ways within the political systems of the Commonwealth realms, providing a key constitutional role with significant—though often theoretical—powers which reflect the enduring legacy of the British parliamentary model of government. The presence of the Monarch on coins and stamps in various Commonwealth realms, and the continued prominence of other ‘banal’ symbols such as the Union Flag on some national flags, suggest the persistence of a more generous transnational Britishness.
Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman - review | Books | Th... - 0 views
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periodic spasms of moral self-questioning, which is unusual for empires
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"The British empire had begun with a series of pounces. Then it marched. Next it swaggered. Finally, after wandering aimlessly for a while, it slunk away."
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At times he appears to be going along with what he takes to be the 19th-century historian JR Seeley's view, that the empire was accumulated "absent-mindedly". (In fact Seeley said the opposite. Everyone gets this wrong.) To his credit, Paxman repeatedly confesses his own puzzlement: "there was something inherently nonsensical about it … How could the ultimate purpose of colonisation be freedom?" Well, there is an answer to that. He might not agree with it, but he should try to understand it. Dismissing things as "nonsense" is a way of avoiding the bother of explaining them.
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Behind the UK government's false flag 'free speech' campaign | Education | Al Jazeera - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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A 2018 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights investigation found that there was “no wholesale censorship” at universities
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The Cypriotization of Northern Syria - JISS - 0 views
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Turkey is turning northern Syria – Jarabulus and Afrin – into the “Turkish Republic of Northern Syria,” just as it has turned northern Cyprus into a Turkish protectorate through military and economic domination.
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Turkey’s military interventions in northern Syria’s Jarabulus and Afrin have turned these two enclaves into Turkish military and economic protectorates. Turkish involvement in these cantons has increased the regions’ economic and political dependency on Ankara which has nearly reached the level of Turkey’s position in Northern Cyprus.
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Turkish anxiety grew when the Pan-Kurdish maps reaching the Mediterranean Sea began to float on the social media and internet. Kurdish access to the sea would constitute a game changer as it would end the landlocked status of the Kurdish entity and will limit Kurdish dependency on Turkey and other surrounding neighboring states. Moreover, a self-sufficient independent Kurdistan could trigger spillover effects in Turkey that would shake the country’s territorial integrity.
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How To Hide An Empire - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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when you start thinking about it that way, it’s hard to unsee
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Ghosts of the Future: A Conversation with Larry Achiampong | The Current | The Criterio... - 0 views
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Relic Traveller is set in a moment in the future where the global West is coming to a point of decline because of nationalism, while the African Union has come into prosperity, harmony, and independence. And it’s quite important that I say this: the project isn’t about a utopia. This point in time brings with it responsibility. During this shift, the African Union creates a range of initiatives, one of which is the Relic Travellers’ Alliance. Relic Travellers are people who are sent around the planet to pick up clues and, in particular, vocal testimonies from people who have been oppressed by the ghosts of colonization. These are stories and experiences of people who have not yet been allowed to be healed or learned from. These stories help to govern the future and create a space for healing, from a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective.
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in the past few years, particularly in the UK, there’s been a real resurgence of empire fetishism, and seemingly more reluctance than ever among the media and ruling classes to address the reality of this history
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the films represent a warning to the West about its negligence, ignorance, mythical approach to history, omission of the histories and legacies of empire, slavery and colonization, and how those things affect the way that we live today: the way that Black people are still disenfranchised. They’re a stark warning that the West will undo itself as a result of the lies it has celebrated, taught, and disseminated for a while
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Illustrating China Is More Than Dragons and Pandas - 0 views
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Aesthetic choices have long shaped how American audiences see the world. Historically speaking, the West’s visual vocabulary tends to champion a fascination “with abjection and violence” in foreign subjects, whether that be the sinister depictions of Japanese people in World War II propaganda, Native American mascots in sports, or distressed communities in Africa and the Middle East.
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Using repetitive, stereotyped tropes to signify that China is exotic, authorientalism visually links these tropes to abuses of government power, thereby promoting the view that authoritarianism is part of the essential character of Chinese-ness. It conflates the culture and the government, and reinforces the state’s own frequent claims that authoritarianism is innate to Chinese history or society.
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Turning authoritarian behavior into an exclusively alien phenomenon also implies that it does not apply to Western political culture, making it harder to recognize totalitarian behavior in more familiar contexts.
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'Yes, He Would': Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes - POLITICO - 0 views
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“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”
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Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”
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This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin
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