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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

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

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

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

Bringing Indigenous Experiences into International Relations - Duck of Minerva - 0 views

  • Many scholars of International Relations (IR), especially in the past couple decades, have sought to study and teach about a more diverse set of political actors to counter-act the biases of a relatively homogeneous professoriate. In a word, this has been described as an effort to decolonize IR. As was noted in a 2016 symposium in Perspectives on Politics, however, political scientists still all too frequently ignore indigenous groups—including Native nations in the United States
  • IR as a subfield currently lags behind other subfields in examining indigenous experiences
  • International Security and International Organization had exceedingly few relevant results, and International Studies Quarterly fared slightly better, but these IR journals did indeed lag behind the other journals in terms of substantive research on indigenous experiences
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  • IR scholars ought to do more to study the experiences of indigenous peoples because they can help to better understand international political phenomena
  • In the U.S., for example, the War Department was home to the Bureau of Indian Affairs until 1849, treaty-making with Native nations persisted until 1871, the “Indian Wars” lasted until at least 1890, and Native peoples as a class did not receive citizenship rights until 1924. Relations such as these surely offer much to explore for IR scholars.
  • Indigenous experiences are just as varied as those of other groups and can complement or contrast with existing theories related to the concepts and debates that are central to IR.
  • bringing indigenous experiences into IR means bringing indigenous people into one’s research through, for example, interviews with current tribe members or through more specifically indigenous methods.
  • From state formation to civil-military relations and from environmental politics to genocide studies, there is much work from outside of IR that could fruitfully inform our teaching just as much as our scholarship.
Ed Webb

The Hidden History of the Nutmeg Island That Was Traded for Manhattan - Gastro Obscura - 0 views

  • For the Dutch, securing a nutmeg monopoly was worth giving up Manhattan. The tradeoff was likely a no-brainer, given the lengths they’d already gone to corner the market. In 1621, Dutch East India company officials committed genocide against the uncooperative local Bandanese people, and enslaved those who survived, just to remove one obstacle to their monopolistic dreams.
  • Manhattan soon developed into a cosmopolitan trade center. The Bandas, meanwhile, turned into a single-purpose, slave-driven plantation economy. As transatlantic trade and American commerce boomed, so did Manhattan. As nutmeg’s value eventually collapsed, so did the Bandas’ economy.
  • Rather than simply sitting on a precious resource, the Bandanese were expert traders who cornered the nutmeg market. After the Europeans’ arrival, they repelled and vexed these intruders for over a century. Even after a brutal and openly genocidal campaign laid them low, they did not vanish from history, but slipped to the peripheries of Dutch control to run new trading operations and organize a bit of nutmeg smuggling. Their regional trade dominance outlasted the colonial nutmeg craze. At least two Bandanese villages survive to this day, carrying on old traditions on the nearby Kei Islands.
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  • starting at least around the time of Christ, the Bandas acted as a vital entrepot for trade in bird of paradise plumes and other luxuries from Papua to China and ports in between. The Bandanese were master navigators, whose knowledge of the paths to, and ties with locals in, the nodes at the ends of this network made them wealthy. By the time the Europeans arrived, they lived in autonomous villages, each run by by Orang Kaya, a Malay word meaning “rich men,” which competed with each other, often in federations, for trade power.
  • they quickly became the key port for the nutmeg trade, frequented by Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and (by the 15th century) Arabo-Persian merchants, whose accounts inspired European dreams of the spice islands
  • Bandanese-European conflict finally boiled over in 1621, after the Dutch forced the English to functionally abandoned their claims in the islands. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the man in charge of Dutch East India Company operations in the region, decided to test out his theory that the nutmeg trade would be easier to control if the Dutch could clear out the Bandanese and replace them with Company-linked settlers. He found a pretext to attack Banda Besar, the largest island and a hotbed of resistance, with 1,600 Dutch troops, 80 Japanese mercenaries, and some regional slaves, the largest force (to our historical sources’ knowledge) ever seen in the region. Despite fierce resistance, they swarmed the island, cut deals with local defenders-turned-defectors, and took it within days. In response to subsequent guerilla strikes, Coen’s Japanese mercenaries beheaded and quartered 48 Orang Kaya who came to his stronghold to surrender, and displayed their body parts on bamboo sticks. His troops then scourged the islands, burning villages and enslaving almost 800 people, who were mostly sent to Batavia, a trade center on Java. Many Bandanese reportedly jumped off cliffs rather than surrender.
  • By the end of this Banda Besar campaign, Dutch records indicate that—out of a pre-conflict population of about 15,000 in the year 1500—only 1,000 to 2,000 Bandanese remained across all 11 islands.
  • Even after the Dutch took total control in the region, Bandanese trade networks remained vital to their local economies well into the 20th century. To this day, some people who claim Bandanese descent are still reportedly accorded a high social status in the region thanks to their historical role as high-powered, economically vital traders.
  • On Kei Besar, though, the biggest island in the Kei chain, just under 5,000 people in two villages, Elat and Eli, some of the best ports in the region, still speak the Bandanese Turwandan language, practice Bandanese Islam, make Bandanese pottery (a unique, valued trade good until well into the 1990s), trade along Bandanese networks, sing Bandanese songs, and sail regularly to the Bandas to affirm their heritage and perform rites. “When the Bandanese speak of colonial events” today, says Kaartinen, “they refuse to be cast as victims or refugees.”
  • Research by the Australian anthropologist Phillip Winn shows that most of the more than 18,000 people in the Bandas today acknowledge that they come from many different lands, but still believe that they are legitimately Bandanese. They perform rituals that they believe have roots in ancient Bandanese practices to affirm that identity, and speak of pre-colonial Bandanese history as their own.
  • In 1982, locals in the Bandas also took over the state-owned nutmeg growing enterprise, which still made up a major part of the local economy. They split the groves equally among local families, building collectives that buy from harvesters, then sell nutmeg on to external interests. This, speculates American anthropologist Amy Jordan, seems like a return to pre-colonial cultivation. If so, it is a compelling coda to an incredible history of ingenuity and resistance.
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

Idiocy as WMD » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

  • The more oppressive a political system, then, the greater its assault on its subjects’ minds, for it’s not enough for any dictator, king or totalitarian system to oppress and exploit, but it must, and I mean must, make its people idiotic as well
  • whatever utility it may have for the disenfranchised and/or rebellious, the Web is most useful to our rulers. As Dmitry Orlov points out in a recent blog, the internet is a powerful surveillance tool for the state and, what’s more, it also keeps the masses distracted and pacified
  • Not content to kill and loot, America must do it to pulsating music; cool, orgasmic dancing; raunchy reality shows and violence-filled Hollywood blockbusters, and these are also meant for its victims, no less. In a 1997 article published by the US Army War College, Ralph Peters gushes about a “personally intrusive” and “lethal” cultural assault as a key tactic in the American quest for global supremacy. As information master, the American Empire will destroy its “information victims.” What’s more, “our victims volunteer” because they are unable to resist the seductiveness of American culture.
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  • these savages need to take webcast courses from us sophisticates when it comes to genocide, or ecocide, or any other kind of cides you can think of
  • Defending the empire, Ralph Peters cheerfully agrees, “The internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community.”
  • many of us will cling even more fiercely to these illusions of knowledge, love, sex and community as we blunder forward. A breathing and tactile life will become even more alien, I’m afraid. Here and there, a band of unplugged weirdos, to be hunted down and exterminated, with their demise shown on TV as warning and entertainment
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    This is fun!
Ed Webb

Lessons from the destruction of Iraq's marshes - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • officials were constantly disappointed by the ingratitude of the ma’dan for the gift of state-initiated modernization
  • The marsh ecology itself was identified as an enemy to be overcome
  • the actual conduct of counterinsurgency remained anchored in developmental discourse. Iraqi officials justified the construction of new diversionary canals as necessary for agricultural expansion
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  • Similar stories could be told about British and German uses of concentrations camps and “hunger wars” in southern Africa, Soviet eradication of the herds of Kazakh nomads, American defoliation of Vietnamese rice paddies and Portuguese attempts to defeat insurgency by building a dam in Mozambique. Third World states have since adopted similar tactics, as in Guatemala’s genocidal 1982 “beans and bullets” campaign in the central highlands. The logic of ecological intervention continues to influence counterinsurgency today.
  • The destruction of the marshes did not begin in 1991, or even in 1980, but a century earlier. For millennia, the marshes had stood out as a stateless zone, comparable to what James Scott describes of upland southeast Asia. Hydrologically incorrigible and physically impenetrable, the area was a natural haven for escaped slaves, dissenters and brigands. At the turn of the 20th century though, the Ottomans and British began using advanced cartographic technologies and steamship navigation to assert mastery over the marshes and encourage the transition from peripatetic tribalism into modern citizenship based on settled agriculture. “Reclaiming” the marshes for agriculture was a cornerstone of development policies in Iraq.
  • Development and counterinsurgency are thus often linked, both tactically and doctrinally.
Ed Webb

Is Russia attempting to erase Crimean Muslim culture? | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

  • In January, almost four years after Moscow's second annexation of Crimea, pro-Russian authorities started restoring the oldest and holiest part of the complex - the Big Khan Mosque built in 1532. They also announced plans to restore the entire palace. But experts, community leaders and Ukrainian officials have lambasted the restoration as the destruction of the complex's authenticity. They call it part of Kremlin's drive to reshape, ban and erase the cultural identity of Crimean Tatars, a Muslim ethnicity of 250,000 that largely resisted Crimea's return to Russia. "This is a blueprint for the restoration of the entire palace," Edem Dudakov, a construction engineer and former official in Crimea's pre-annexation government, told Al Jazeera. "The palace will be lost; what they're building is a sham."
  • The palace's gradual destruction and "remodelling" exemplifies Russia's fraught relationship with Crimean Tatars. The Turkic-speaking ethnic group once controlled the Great Silk Road's westernmost branch and warred with Moscow for centuries. Crimean Tatars consider the palace the most significant symbol of their lost statehood.
  • Shortly after the annexation, Moscow banned ATR and several other media outlets. It made Tatar-language kindergartens bilingual and reduced Tatar classes in public schools to two voluntary hours a week
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  • Kremlin's broader campaign of pressure on the Crimean Tatar community that includes abductions, arrests, searches and sentences of up to 15 years in jail for alleged "terrorism" and membership in "radical" religious groups
  • Moscow introduced history textbooks that describe how Crimean Tatars pillaged Russia, enslaved and sold tens of thousands of captives, and obediently served Ottoman sultans - the tsars' archenemies. Meanwhile, Kremlin-controlled media stoke anti-Tatar sentiments
  • Ukraine's Culture Ministry bristled at "Russia's totalitarian and aggressive policies aimed at destroying ethnic identity and self-identification" of Crimean Tatars and ethnic Ukrainians.
  • "ethnic genocide conducted to fully colonise the peninsula."
  • Crimea's location - between the Mediterranean trade outposts, Eurasian steppes and Eastern Europe - attracted Byzantine emperors, Mongol khans and Ottoman sultans. The peninsula's multiethnic population included Turkic-speaking nomads, Greeks, Goths and Armenians. Many accepted Islam, but retained cultural traits such as horticulture and sophisticated, odd-metered music
  • A century after the 1783 annexation, Crimea became the cradle of Jadidism, a movement for political and cultural reforms among Russian Empire's Muslims. Jadidism's founder Ismail Gasprinsky published Terjiman (Interpreter), a newspaper that reached Siberia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. His daughter, Shefika, started one of the first magazines for Muslim women, Alemi Nisvan (Women's World)
  • Crimean Tatars used an adapted Arabic script, but under Joseph Stalin, they had to switch to a Cyrillic script, and their next generation simply could not read their pre-Soviet literature
  • In 1944, the entire Crimean Tatar community was deported to Central Asia for alleged collaboration with Nazi Germans, and was allowed to return in the late 1980s. Half a century of exile amid a virtual ban on their language further eroded their religious and cultural identity.
  • Last November, the Kremlin forbade compulsory classes of Tatar, Russia's second-most spoken language and a linguistic sibling of Crimean Tatar, following complaints from the parents of ethnic Russian students in the Volga River province of Tatarstan.
  • Kremlin's tilt to anti-Western nationalism
Ed Webb

Australian researchers lay bare bloody history of colonial massacres - 0 views

  • Thousands of aborigines are estimated to have been murdered in 500 massacres across Australia from European settlement in 1788 until the mid-20th century, researchers said on Friday, as the country continues to struggle with its bloody colonial past.
  • Historians from the University of Newcastle said they had drawn on settler diaries, contemporary newspaper reports, evidence from indigenous groups and state and federal archives to attempt to catalog the violence for the first time.
  • Ryan estimates the death toll from the 250 massacres already identified at about 6,200 people, including less than 100 Europeans. It defines a “massacre” as an incident in which at least six people were killed.
Ed Webb

Terra Nullius: Grifters, settler colonialism and "intellectual property" / Boing Boing - 0 views

  • Both the venality of Aloha Poke and the genocidal brutality of Terra Nullius reveal a deep problem lurking in the Lockean conception of property: all the stuff that’s “just lying around” is actually already in relation to other people, often the kind of complex relation that doesn’t lend itself to property-like transactions where someone with deep pockets can come along and buy a thing from its existing “owner.”
  • The labor theory of property always begins with an act of erasure: “All the people who created, used, and improved this thing before me were doing something banal and unimportant – but my contribution is the step that moved this thing from a useless, unregarded commons to a special, proprietary, finished good.”
  • the people who coined, popularized and nurtured the word “aloha” or inhabited the Australasian landmass are stripped of their claims as though they were honeybees whose output is a naturally occurring substance that properly belongs to the beekeeper, not the swarm.
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

Native Americans being left out of US coronavirus data and labelled as 'other' | US new... - 0 views

  • Native Americans are being left out of demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus across the US, raising fears of hidden health emergencies in one of the country’s most vulnerable populations.
  • about 80% of state health departments have released some racial demographic data, which has already revealed stark disparities in the impact of Covid-19 in black and Latinx communities. But of those states, almost half did not explicitly include Native Americans in their breakdowns and instead categorized them under the label “other”.
  • In states that do categorize Native Americans in the demographic results, early data indicates dramatically disproportionate rates of infection and death
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  • Communities of color are not more susceptible to coronavirus, but because of years of unequal access to healthcare, clean water and nutritious food, they are at greater risk of developing complications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Native Americans experience diabetes three times more than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States, and have the highest rates of asthma. Before the pandemic, the federal health system serving Native Americans was already chronically underfunded.
  • “We are a small population of people because of genocide. No other reason,” said Echo-Hawk. “If you eliminate us in the data, we don’t exist. We don’t exist for the allocation of resources.”
  • in January, the CDC released its most comprehensive study to date on race and maternal mortality rates, but American Indians and Alaskan Natives were not included. When the Urban Indian Health Institute did its own research, it found Native women living in cities were 4.5 times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women.
  • According to some studies, Native Americans have a 50% chance of being listed as the wrong race on medical records, as well as birth and death certificates.
  • The Indian Health Services (IHS), a chronically underfunded federal healthcare system that serves 2.5 million tribal citizens in 37 states, has been publishing testing results daily during the coronavirus outbreak.
  • “Health disparities are nice words for systematic racism … it’s the residual effects of the founding of this country,” social demographer Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (Cheyenne) told the Guardian. But Rodriguez-Lonebear said it was not enough to just include Native Americans in demographic data; the data also needs to include tribal affiliation. For tribal governments, she said, “being able to identify who your citizens are in these big data sets is so vital to being able to understand the impact of the virus on your tribe”.
  • Unlike states and counties, tribes cannot rely on healthcare systems to tell them when their citizens are sick or dying and must collect the data themselves
  • The only public national coronavirus database reporting tribal affiliation is being run by the independent Native newspaper, Indian Country Today, whose team of 16 people has been adding the positive Covid-19 cases and deaths they can verify to a daily report on their website.
  • “With what we’re seeing right now, there will absolutely be a gross undercount of the effects of Covid on American Indian and Alaska Native peoples,” she said. “We have an opportunity to prepare for the next wave.”
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