Why does the language of journalism fail indigenous people? | USA | Al Jazeera - 0 views
-
Journalists have rarely done justice to indigenous communities because the language of journalism has rarely done justice to indigenous peoples.
-
The language that media uses today does not heed silence and self-interpretation. It does not respect the power of conjured stories. It does not favour the collective over the individual. And this does not fit with indigenous perspectives.
-
Indigenous people know that their representation has failed before they've even begun speaking, because the medium through which they are represented - a hard, sharp language rooted in ideas rather than feeling - has rarely granted them territory.
- ...1 more annotation...
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
- ...10 more annotations...
Tied to a drowning man - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
-
Unlike the Soviets, who had the good grace to implode pretty much alone, collapse of the United States could bring down the international capitalist system along with it.
-
Globalisation has drastically tilted the balance of the struggle between labour and management in favour of trans-national corporations. In the US, the result has been five decades of falling median wages. (Total wages, on the other hand, have soared, with the rich and superrich raking in more than ever.) Easy credit provided a Band-Aid to rising income equality during the 1980s and 1990s. When the housing bubble burst and the credit markets froze in 2008, American consumers - who drive 70 per cent of economic activity - went from feeling poor to being poor. Un- and underemployed, they couldn't earn money. Their credit lines cancelled and curtailed, they couldn't borrow it. Forced to live within their increasingly limited means, the formerly middle class stopped spending. And here we are. Gross domestic product would have to be at least 4 per cent on an annualised basis to start to bring down unemployment. The actual figure is 0.8.
-
Everywhere you look, there's terror that the world, by tethering itself to the once-invincible US monolith, has handcuffed itself to a fat, drowning man—one who's about to suffer another heart attack. The central bank of China, the communist-in-name-only nation that holds $2tn in its foreign exchange reserves—more than two-thirds of the total—plus $1.2tn in US Treasury bonds and notes, is loudly demanding that the US cut its deficits.
- ...1 more annotation...
Court tosses out cases against Chiquita over Colombia killings | Al Jazeera America - 1 views
-
The judges at Thursday’s trial cited a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum that imposed limits on attempts by foreigners to use U.S. courts to seek damages against corporations for human rights abuses abroad.
Mauritius challenges Britain's claim to Chagos Islands at ICJ | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views
-
Judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Monday began hearing arguments for an advisory opinion the UN General Assembly requested on the legality of British sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. The largest island, Diego Garcia, has housed a major US airbase for decades.
-
the process of decolonisation of Mauritius remains incomplete
-
The case is seen by some as a test of whether colonial-era deals struck by great powers and weaker states are legitimate, given the power imbalance. Britain in 1965 detached the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, a British colony that became independent three years later. It leased Diego Garcia to the US in 1966, clearing the way for the construction of the airbase that required the forced removal of around 1,500 people. The islanders have never been allowed to return home.
- ...2 more annotations...
Africa Is Not Waiting to Be Saved From the Coronavirus | The Nation - 0 views
-
when it comes to Africa, the first draft is an incomplete and inaccurate story of a continent waiting to be saved. If only the first story enters the archive, the creativity and agency of swaths of humanity will be lost, which will have consequences beyond the pandemic.
-
Museums outside Africa are filled with masks and pots from Africa, not necessarily because Africans themselves thought these masks and pots were interesting, but because colonizing armies and governments thought they were. A colonial archive would likely contain exhaustive records about a white district commissioner, down to the color of his socks, but not the black woman who worked in his home. It’s not because the latter is uninteresting or even unavailable for documentation: It is because those in power set the tone and the context for what goes into the archive, and subsequently, the stories that history will tell.
-
Africa is spoken for and spoken about, but so rarely allowed to speak, and this allows only a handful of narratives to survive
- ...12 more annotations...
Behind the UK government's false flag 'free speech' campaign | Education | Al Jazeera - 0 views
-
Instead of addressing a very real crisis in teaching and learning conditions that threatens to seriously degrade British universities, Boris Johnson’s ministers have thrown their energies into manufacturing a campus “free speech crisis”. Having deliberately excluded higher education from COVID-19 support, they have spent the pandemic making nonsensical claims about campus “cancel culture” and crafting legislation to protect exactly the kind of hateful speech Durham University students exercised their right not to listen to. The point is less to enshrine freedom of thought than it is to force discredited ideas upon young people.
-
The Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill now progressing through Parliament seeks to prevent invitations to speakers from being rescinded if they are discovered to have peddled discredited or hateful ideas. The legislation targets the tactic of “no-platforming” which was adopted by the National Union of Students in 1974 to stop fascist organisations, like the National Front, from using universities to disseminate their views.
-
A 2018 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights investigation found that there was “no wholesale censorship” at universities
- ...9 more annotations...
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.