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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

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

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.

TOKMOK, Kyrgyzstan – Softly singing along to the wistful strains of Ethiopian music, Haymanot Tesgaye and his friends are transported back to their homeland in Africa, far from this Central Asian nation where they have been stranded for two decades.

the ways in which lives are irrevocably changed when empires and regimes crumble

Kyrgyzstan is a rich blend of diverse ethnic groups, including Uzbeks, Russians, Koreans, Germans and Meskhetian Turks. But ethnic relations are often problematic, as best shown by devastating ethnic clashes between Kyrgyz and minority ethnic Uzbeks earlier this year that claimed hundreds of lives, mainly among Uzbeks, and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.

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

White people think they know history.

when theGrio examined the FDOE’s full “African American History Strand,” we discovered that the “trade-school-for-enslaved people” narrative wasn’t even the most egregious part of Florida’s new academic curriculum standards. The state guidelines include multiple examples of historical fiction, including some that perpetuate misconceptions, conservative ideology and long-held white falsehoods about Black history. Many of the requirements simply reflect ahistorical conservative talking points that often are regurgitated whenever someone brings up inequality.

There is not a single skill developed during the period of legal, race-based chattel slavery that a free person could not have learned. The American experiment nearly failed, ultimately devolving into cannibalism and welfare, precisely because the first Virginia colonizers were inept at… well, everything needed to survive. They could not farm. They could not build things. They had no skills.

Birmingham grew on the back of slavery and colonialism – and, indeed, the city’s gunmakers and chain-makers were the main suppliers of slavers and imperialists. One day there may perhaps be a Bristol-like reckoning of this, or perhaps not. The city is also the home of those remarkable political creeds “liberal imperialism” and “liberal unionism” – which meant elevated rights for those fortunate enough to be on this island, and no rights if you were under this island’s power. Now forgotten, those political ideas put Birmingham – and the house of Chamberlain in particular – at the heart of British politics for sixty years from c. 1880 to 1940. And you can perhaps trace back British exceptionalism to the “liberal imperialism” and “liberal unionism” of Joseph Chamberlain and his supporters.

the religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity that characterized their territories in the Middle East and Eastern Europe no longer chimed with the new world order being organized around nation-states

Designing measures such as the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, the League of Nations legitimized demographic engineering policies and made migration an intrinsic part of nation-building. With international encouragement, the states with Muslim minorities in the Balkans devised multipronged policies to push out the citizens they saw as undesirable. Turkey became the only destination for Balkan Muslims, even when they were not Turkish.

in 1938 Belgrade and Ankara concluded a little-known agreement to transfer 200,000 Yugoslav citizens to Turkey. The transfer did not materialize because of the start of World War II, but the migrations did eventually take place and continued into the 1950s. For both Yugoslavia and Turkey, new states created in the aftermath of World War I, migration was an important part of nation-building.