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Ed Webb

No trees: What the landscapes where all recent pandemics originated have in common - 0 views

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pandemics ecosystems capitalism deforestation disease analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • yellow fever, zika fever, dengue, chikungunya, ebola, SARS, Nipah virus, Kyasanur Forest disease, MERS, rabies, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, sleeping sickness, hantavirus-caused diseases, Japanese encephalitis, malaria
  • All these diseases emerged – or re-emerged, more virulent and dangerous – as a result of human encroachment on forests. Historically, we might trace them to tropical rainforests, but right now we must look closer to home. Because the forest was, till very recently, right here somewhere, in and about your housing colony, around that gated high-rise and its adjacent slum.
  • Diseases emerge when we clear forests, cut down trees, flatten hills, dam rivers, and squat on all this usurped territory. Within a 5 km radius of my home are breeding grounds for at least seven of those listed diseases. It’s not something we think about.
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  • Many emerging diseases, like those listed above, are zoönoses – diseases transferred from other vertebrates. Their origins can usually be traced to wildlife. They may have stayed on, unnoticed, in the wild and never made the species jump to infect us if a stable ecosystem had been left undisturbed
  • The urban push into the forest forces bat populations to colonise human spaces and increases their vulnerability – and ours.
  • Urbanisation provides new roosts, new sources of food and new company. Bats are sociable creatures. They form lasting relationships with home, and their urban circle of friends may embrace species that won’t roost together in the wild. And this commingling means a richer, more diversified stew of bat-borne viruses.
  • bats don’t get sick. Not as often as they should, considering the range of viruses they harbour
  • When a bat flies, its metabolic rate rises to meet the exorbitant energy demand of flight, and its body temperature spikes to a high fever. In all mammals, fever upticks the immune process and slows viral replication. As the only mammal capable of sustained flight, the bat has evolved this pattern of spiking body temperature. The benefit is a more efficient immune system.
  • Bats also spend a great deal of time in torpor – a state of suspended animation, when the body’s temperature drops. Was it this that encouraged viruses to co-evolve the ability to flourish across a wide range of temperatures?
  • Coronaviruses are 30 per cent of the healthy bat’s virome. They cause diseases in other species – diarrhoeas and dysenteries; respiratory infections in cattle, dogs and swine; even peritonitis in cats. But before 2002, the worst illness they gave us humans was the common cold. Then, in 2002, SARS emerged. It had a death rate of 10 per cent. What had changed?
  • Words like “coincidental” and “fortuitous” have no place in the narrative of an emerging disease. Instead, we must look for the motive force, the driver that brought about disease. Southeast Asia has lost 30 per cent of its forests in recent years. The deforested land is intensively cultivated. Urban growth is invasive. This abrupt proximity between humans and bats allows greater exposure to the viruses shed in bat saliva and guano, and provides an environment conducive to a rapidly diversifying spectrum of viruses. And since bat coronaviruses cause infections in domesticated species, intermediate hosts are aplenty.
  • when there is a spillover, humans are immunologically naïve to the virus. This results in a virulent infection, and the virus quickly adapts to rapid spread between humans.
  • At present, there are thousands of coronaviruses circulating in bats. Just seven of them have declared themselves in humans. As crowding increases, more may emerge. Can we predict what the next one will be like?
  • The West has long jeered at Asia and Africa as “virus machines”. Such a label is deeply offensive to more than half the people on this planet, besides being scientifically untrue. Viruses are everywhere. Asia and Africa have been historically impoverished by European nations, either through genocide or colonisation. Disease was driven by conquest in the past, and racism in science is rooted in that memory. The language of science often echoes that inequality of power, and, thankfully, we’re growing more sensitive to it.
  • Disease is driven by capitalism today: the forests of Asia, Africa, Central and South Americas are enslaved to richer nations to produce goods that serve few and bankrupt millions.
Ed Webb

Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern wor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ased-from-history-modern-world

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By miscasting the role of Africa, generations have been taught a profoundly misleading story about the origins of modernity.
  • Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the west African coastline. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough that he would later reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home.
  • European expeditions to west Africa in the mid-15th century were bound up in a search for gold. It was the trade in this precious metal, discovered in what is now Ghana by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund Vasco da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia. This robust new supply of gold helped make it possible for Lisbon, until then the seat of a small and impecunious European crown, to steal a march on its neighbours and radically alter the course of world history.
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  • It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.
  • It is not that the basic facts are unknown; it is that they have been siloed, overlooked or swept into dark corners. It is essential to restore key chapters such as these to their proper place of prominence in our common narrative of modernity.
  • The rise of Europe was not founded on any innate or permanent characteristics that produced superiority. To a degree that remains unrecognised, it was built on Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in enslaved people who were put to work growing sugar, tobacco, cotton and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World.
  • The long thread that leads us to the present began in those three decades at the end of the 15th century, when commerce blossomed between Portugal and Africa, sending a newfound prosperity washing over what had previously been a marginal European country. It drove urbanisation in Portugal on an unprecedented scale, and created new identities that gradually freed many people from feudal ties to the land. One of these novel identities was nationhood, whose origins were bound up in questing for wealth in faraway lands, and soon thereafter in emigration and colonisation in the tropics.
  • understanding that the world was infinite in its social complexity, and this required a broadening of consciousness, even amid the colossal violence and horror that accompanied this process, and an ever more systematic unmooring from provincialism
  • Portugal overwhelmingly dominated Europe’s trade in Africans, and slavery was beginning to rival gold as Portugal’s most lucrative source of African bounty. By then, it was already on its way to becoming the foundation of a new economic system based on plantation agriculture. Over time, that system would generate far more wealth for Europe than African gold or Asian silks and spices.
  • Malachy Postlethwayt, a leading 18th-century British expert on commerce, called the rents and revenues of plantation slave labour “the fundamental prop and support” of his country’s prosperity. He described the British empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power [built] on an African foundation”. Around the same time, an equally prominent French thinker, Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, described Europe’s plantations worked by African enslaved people as “the principal cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe”. Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer and spy, bested both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes [sic] etc; no sugar etc, no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade.”
  • In sugar’s wake, cotton grown by enslaved people in the American south helped launch formal industrialisation, along with a second wave of consumerism. Abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history
  • Through the development of plantation agriculture and a succession of history-altering commercial crops – tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice and, above all, sugar – Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy
  • Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the west. African labour, in the form of enslaved people, was what made the very development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World are unimaginable.
  • Spain and Portugal waged fierce naval battles in west Africa over access to gold. Holland and Portugal, then unified with Spain, fought something little short of a world war in the 17th century in present-day Congo and Angola, vying for control of trade in the richest sources of enslaved people in Africa. On the far side of the Atlantic, Brazil – the biggest producer of slave-grown sugar in the early 17th century – was caught up in this same struggle, and repeatedly changed hands. Later in that same century, England fought Spain over control of the Caribbean.
  • By the mid-1660s, just three decades or so after England initiated an African slave-labour model for its plantations there – one that was first implemented in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé little more than a century earlier – sugar from Barbados was worth more than the metal exports of all of Spanish America.
  • Nowadays, the consensus estimate on the numbers of Africans brought to the Americas hovers about 12 million. Lost in this atrocious but far too neat accounting is the likelihood that another 6 million Africans were killed in or near their homelands during the hunt for slaves, before they could be placed in chains. Estimates vary, but between 5% and 40% perished during brutal overland treks to the coast, or while being held, often for months, in barracoons, or holding pens, as they awaited embarkation on slave ships. And another 10% of those who were taken aboard died at sea during an Atlantic transit that constituted an extreme physical and psychological test for all those who were subjected to it. When one considers that Africa’s total population in the mid-19th century was probably about 100 million, one begins to gauge the enormity of the demographic assault that the slave trade represented.
  • It is often remarked that Africans themselves sold enslaved people to Europeans. What is less well known is that in many parts of Africa, such as the Kingdom of Kongo and Benin, Africans fought to end the trade in human beings once they understood its full impact on their own societies
  • Specialists aside, few imagine that islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States. The nation now known as Haiti most of all. In the 18th century it became the richest colony in history, and in the 19th, by dint of its slave population’s successful revolution, Haiti rivalled the US in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfil the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all: ending slavery.
  • My biggest surprise came in Barbados, whose slave-produced sugar, arguably more than any other place on earth, helped seal England’s ascension in the 17th century. I visited the island not long ago, determined to find as many traces of this legacy as possible, only to discover how thoroughly they had been hidden or effaced. Among my top priorities was to visit one of the largest slave cemeteries anywhere in the hemisphere, which included the excavated remains of nearly 600 people. It took me several attempts just to find the cemetery, which had no signage from any public road. Few local residents seemed aware of its historical importance, or even of its existence.
  • Nearly a century ago, WEB Du Bois had already affirmed much of what we needed to know on this topic. “It was black labour that established the modern world commerce, which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves,” he wrote. Now is the time to finally acknowledge this.
Ed Webb

Slaughter in Indonesia: Britain's secret propaganda war | Indonesia | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...britains-secret-propaganda-war

Britain UK colonialism history ColdWar propaganda Indonesia Singapore Malaysia GCHQ FCO

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Oct 21 - Cached
  • what would later be claimed, by those who led it, as one of the most successful propaganda operations in postwar British history. A top secret operation that helped overthrow the leader of the fourth most populous country in the world and contributed to the mass murder of more than half a million of its citizens.
  • Recently released in Britain’s National Archives are pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact written by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.
  • The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day
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  • Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance.
  • Like its US and Australian allies, Britain feared a communist Indonesia. The PKI had three million members and was close to Mao’s China. In Washington the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp was seen as a greater threat than the potential loss of Vietnam.
  • Suharto, appointed supreme army commander on 14 October, used the rebellion to undermine and eventually overthrow Sukarno, and as what historian John Roosa has called a “pretext for mass murder”: the elimination of the PKI in a series of massacres across Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
  • British intelligence agencies and propaganda specialists were complicit, carrying out covert operations to undermine Sukarno’s regime and eliminate the PKI by blaming them for the Untung coup.
  • What Gilchrist wanted and what became the unit’s mission was the production of black propaganda, apparently produced by patriotic Indonesian émigrés abroad, to stir Indonesian anti-communists into action.The influential targets of a propaganda newsletter, according to a declassified report by Wynne, would eventually include “as many personages in the hierarchy of government, army and civil service as we can find”.To disguise the British origin of the newsletter it was sent into Indonesia via Asian cities including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Manila.
  • “No, we do not cry out for violence,” the IRD propagandists wrote, “but we demand in the name of all patriotic people that this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.” The PKI “is now a wounded snake”, they wrote: “Now is the time to kill it before it has a chance to recover.”
  • Detailed historical research has established that the mass killings of PKI party members and alleged supporters appear to have been triggered by local army commanders or the arrival of army special forces, about three weeks after the botched coup had been put down by Suharto.During that period the media in Indonesia was full of black propaganda against the PKI and its alleged atrocities, as the army whipped up popular anger against communists and legitimised what Roosa has described as its “already-planned moves against the PKI and President Sukarno”.
  • The newsletters were approved by IRD in London before dispatch. Copies sent to senior Foreign Office officials were destroyed after reading at IRD’s request.
  • “Anyone who was leftist was picked up. They were very systematic. They targeted all the leftist groups and not just PKI. People kept themselves to themselves and only talked in whispers.”
  • As the massacres progressed in the autumn of 1965, IRD’s unit in Singapore reassured their readers as to the necessity of the slaughter.In Newsletter 21 they wrote: “Unless we maintain a vigorous campaign to eradicate communism … the red menace will envelop us again.”The stakes were life and death. “We are fighting for our lives and the very existence of Indonesia and we must never forget that. THE CATS ARE WAITING TO POUNCE!”In Newsletter 23 Winchester Road’s propagandists praised “the fighting services and the police” for “doing an excellent job”. Sukarno, then trying to restrain the generals, was wrong: “Communism must be abolished in all its forms. The work started by the army must be carried on and intensified.” The authors finished by equating the PKI to Hitler and Genghis Khan.
  • Reddaway had served in the army during the second world war before joining the Foreign Office and playing a key role in the establishment of IRD. After the failed Untung coup he arrived to take charge of the British operation. His brief was simple. In an interview in 1996 with two of the authors, he said he’d been given a budget of £100,000 by the Foreign Office and was told “to do anything I could do to get rid of Sukarno”. Only now do we know what “anything” fully meant.
  • In the 1996 interviews Reddaway boasted of manipulating the British and other global media to take an anti- Sukarno and PKI line but insisted IRD only passed on true facts and did not use black propaganda.As ever with IRD, Reddaway told us a partial truth. According to a memo he had written: “The bludgeon was surprisingly effective because we were able … to supply publicists with information which they could not find from other sources because of Sukarno’s censorship.”
  • “GCHQ could break and read Indonesian codes without difficulty. The government was among many third world countries using equipment supplied by Swiss-based company Crypto AG. For over 50 years, Crypto AG supplied secretly sabotaged cypher machines, with built-in back doors to which the CIA and GCHQ had keys.”
  • The newsletters remained the core work of Ed Wynne and his colleagues in Winchester Road. A key theme was to encourage their influential readers to support the army’s campaign against the communists. They urged Indonesian patriots: “The PKI and all it stands for must be eliminated for all time.”We now know that to do that they included sensationalised lies. On 5 November the pro-military Jakarta Daily Mail claimed that on the day of the Untung coup 100 women from PKI’s Gerwani women’s organisation had tortured one of the generals using razor blades and knives to slash his genitals before he was shot.The story of the torture and mutilation of the generals by the Gerwani women became part of the founding myth of Suharto’s regime, used to justify the destruction of the PKI. It was also, according to Roosa, a pretext for murder. A lie propagated by the Indonesian army, regurgitated and repurposed to incite IRD’s influential readers.
  • The IRD was deliberately silent on the massacres. One document from December 1965 says they should “do nothing to embarrass the generals” and the newsletter carefully itemises accounts of isolated incidents of PKI brutality but makes no explicit mention of the army’s killings.
  • By early 1966 the mass murders in Indonesia, if not their scale, were well known.In January Robert F Kennedy compared the massacres to “inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the communists” and asked when people would “speak out … against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged communists have not been perpetrators, but victims?”
  • Wynne regarded the operation as a success. In his 1966 annual report he proudly says his operation was “fairly successful” because all his enemies (Konfrontasi, Sukarno, Subandrio and the PKI) were “destroyed”.
  • According to Prof Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham, the declassified documents show that: “Britain was prepared to engage in dirty deeds which ran contrary to its purported values.” They reveal, he says, “how important black propaganda was to give the illusion that Britain could wield global power – even if many people might be killed for that illusion”.
Ed Webb

Marcus Garvey's descendants ask Biden for posthumous pardon - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...marcus-garvey-biden-pardon

US USA politics Africa pan-Africanism history racism FBI africanamericans race

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Descendants of the Black revolutionary leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey are pressing President Biden’s administration to grant a posthumous presidential pardon to Garvey, who they say was targeted by the U.S. government and persecuted for his work to uphold racial justice for Black people in the African diaspora.
  • Biden administration confronts increasing pressure to grant presidential pardons to correct historic racial injustices and counter former presidents’ issuances of presidential pardons and sentence commutations to wealthy allies and political supporters
  • In 1919, Garvey founded the Negro World newspaper, whose contributors included Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg, William H. Ferris and Norton G.G. Thomas. The paper was translated into Spanish and French and distributed worldwide, with front-page editorials by Garvey advocating for Black liberation from racial injustice.The Negro World was banned by colonial powers in some of the African territories they occupied. According to the documentary “The Story of Marcus Garvey,” the Negro World was smuggled into British-occupied Kenya by Black seamen. The paper was read aloud, and children were instructed to memorize Garvey’s editorial. They then went into villages to recite Garvey’s message.
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  • In the 1920s, people in the Belgian Congo could receive the death penalty for reading the Negro World
  • Garvey preached to Black Americans that their history did not begin with enslavement and that they came from a great civilization. “I am the equal of every White man,” Garvey said. “Always think of yourself as a perfect being.”
  • Garvey caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, a lawyer in the Department of Justice, who would quickly rise to director of the FBI, a role in which he became known for his racist pursuit of Black civil rights leaders. The first Black undercover agent hired by the FBI was assigned to spy on Garvey.“Mr. Hoover, in his role as director of investigations on ‘Negro Activities,’ became obsessed with extinguishing the flames of the man who had become known as the ‘Negro Moses,’ ”
  • As Garvey preached about the importance of Black economic independence, he opened several businesses, including the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, which he said would help facilitate the travel of Black people to Africa. It was one of the first Black-owned shipping companies in the world.
  • “It was the audacity of founding the Black Star Line that drew the attention of federal investigators. And ultimately, the company’s financial downfall led to Garvey’s prosecution for mail fraud in a trial replete with reversible errors and questionable evidence.”
  • “Marcus Garvey was targeted because of political and social efforts, not because of anything to do with the Black Star line.”Garvey was convicted of defrauding one investor out of $25, Pierce said, and “for that, he got five years in prison.”
  • on Nov. 18, 1927, Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence. Nine of the 12 White jurors who voted to convict Garvey said they supported the commutation of his sentence. Garvey was released from the penitentiary and deported to Jamaica. He later traveled to London, where he died in 1940.
  • On Feb. 23, 2021, Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.) introduced a resolution expressing “the sense of the House of Representatives that Marcus Garvey should be recognized as a leader in the struggle for human rights and that the President should take measures to exonerate him of charges brought against him.”
  • Clarke said in an interview that she believes Garvey should be exonerated — a legal process that would clear him of wrongdoing. “A pardon implies guilt,” Clarke said. “The real transparency comes from looking at the records of J. Edgar Hoover and looking at his history and past with respect to the Black community.”
  • “When it comes to Marcus Garvey, not just an individual was harmed, not just a family was harmed, but millions of people around the world are harmed by the destruction of the social justice movement. The U.S. government played a role in the false conviction of Marcus Garvey.”
Ed Webb

Fortress Europe: the millions spent on military-grade tech to deter refugees | European... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-grade-tech-to-deter-refugees

EU migration politics tech technology borders policing military-industrial_complex

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The EU is central to the push towards using technology on its borders, whether it has been bought by the EU’s border force, Frontex, or financed for member states through EU sources, such as its internal security fund or Horizon 2020, a project to drive innovation.In 2018, the EU predicted that the European security market would grow to €128bn (£108bn) by 2020. Beneficiaries are arms and tech companies who heavily courted the EU, raising the concerns of campaigners and MEPs.
  • “In effect, none of this stops people from crossing; having drones or helicopters doesn’t stop people from crossing, you just see people taking more risky ways,” says Jack Sapoch, formerly with Border Violence Monitoring Network. “This is a history that’s so long, as security increases on one section of the border, movement continues in another section.”
  • The most expensive tool is the long-endurance Heron drone operating over the Mediterranean.Frontex awarded a €100m (£91m) contract last year for the Heron and Hermes drones made by two Israeli arms companies, both of which had been used by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Capable of flying for more than 30 hours and at heights of 10,000 metres (30,000 feet), the drones beam almost real-time feeds back to Frontex’s HQ in Warsaw.Missions mostly start from Malta, focusing on the Libyan search and rescue zone – where the Libyan coastguard will perform “pull backs” when informed by EU forces of boats trying to cross the Mediterranean.
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  • In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.
  • Poland is hoping to emulate Greece in response to the crisis on its border with Belarus. In October, its parliament approved a €350m wall that will stretch along half the border and reach up to 5.5 metres (18 feet), equipped with motion detectors and thermal cameras.
  • German MEP Özlem Demirel is campaigning against the EU’s use of drones and links to arms companies, which she says has turned migration into a security issue.“The arms industries are saying: ‘This is a security problem, so buy my weapons, buy my drones, buy my surveillance system,’” says Demirel.“The EU is always talking about values like human rights, [speaking out] against violations but … week-by-week we see more people dying and we have to question if the EU is breaking its values,” she says.
  • The EU spent €4.5m (£3.8m) on a three-year trial of artificial intelligence-powered lie detectors in Greece, Hungary and Latvia. A machine scans refugees and migrants’ facial expressions as they answer questions it poses, deciding whether they have lied and passing the information on to a border officer.The last trial finished in late 2019 and was hailed as a success by the EU but academics have called it pseudoscience, arguing that the “micro-expressions” the software analyses cannot be reliably used to judge whether someone is lying. The software is the subject of a court case taken by MEP Patrick Breyer to the European court of justice in Luxembourg, arguing that there should be more public scrutiny of such technology. A decision is expected on 15 December.
Ed Webb

Behind the UK government's false flag 'free speech' campaign | Education | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ot-defending-freedom-of-speech

UK Britain education speech academia censorship authoritarianism empire nostalgia conservatism history heritage

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Dec 21 - Cached
  • 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
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  • It is obviously easier to decimate the higher education sector after painting it as intolerant and partisan
  • what is at stake for the political right here is the opposite of freedom of expression. As draconian laws effectively criminalise political protest, the goal of the fake crisis is to foist retrograde and discredited ideologies like race science and climate denial upon universities which are among the few remaining spheres where knowledge is valued
  • Since universities also have a statutory obligation, alongside academic freedom, to uphold academic standards, repudiating specious thought is a scholarly duty, not cancel culture.
  • Education Secretary Gavin Williamson warned English universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism in its entirety or face sanctions despite widespread concerns. My own university has adopted the IHRA document wholesale even as scores of its academics have warned that some of the examples it gives conflate criticism of the policies, constitutional doctrines and laws of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, and will silence those who work or speak on the topic of Israel and Palestine
  • The sharpest end of governmental cancellation is reserved for those who assess Britain’s imperial past critically. Attempts to undo silences and amnesia around empire and slavery, or question mindless glorification are frequently met with enraged denunciations of “town hall militants”, “woke worthies” and “baying mobs”, to use Communities Minister Robert Jenrick’s epithets.
  • Heritage organisation National Trust has also come under attack. Its “Colonial Countryside” project which sought to modestly illuminate some colonial and slavery connections for properties in its care was met with political fury from Conservatives. A particular red rag was Winston Churchill’s family home, Chartwell, in relation to which his imperial connections, hardly a state secret, were mentioned.
  • Dowden’s warnings to heritage bodies to act in line with government policy or face funding cuts have rightly worried museum staff about political interference in the sector.
  • the extent to which the concocted free speech crisis is influenced by far-right forces in the United States and their culture war agenda. An exposé by Open Democracy last year found that the freedom of speech White Paper, not only cited Policy Exchange (complete with false claims) liberally but also the US-based Alliance for Democratic Freedom International (ADF), a Christian anti-equality organisation which has been classified as a “hate group”. This organisation has spent £410,000 ($542,000) on lobbying in the UK since 2017, also getting involved in campus disputes.
  • Behind the fabricated cultural battles and false flag “free speech” campaigns, a real battle is now unfolding, a fight to defend critical thought, robust scholarship, and the right to challenge the line that wealth and power would have us all acquiesce to.
Ed Webb

NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: 'Scotland didn't have empire done to it, Scotland did empire to... - 0 views

www.heraldscotland.com/...pt-fighting-decolonise-history

UK Britain history museum heritage Egypt orientalism empire

shared by Ed Webb on 04 May 22 - No Cached
  • Glasgow’s Dr Campbell Price is British TV’s go-to guy when it comes to ancient Egypt. But the study is riddled with racism and he wants to drag the world of mummies into the 21st century … and he doesn’t care if you call him ‘woke’.
  • Price is at the forefront of the fight to ‘decolonise’ the study of Ancient Egypt and drag it into the 21st century. He wants the discipline to confront its history of racism and empire, and he’s not shy about apportioning a fair amount of blame on Scotland and its own role in Britain’s colonial adventures.
  • the study of Ancient Egypt was founded by colonialists from Britain and France in the early 1800s and it still hasn’t shaken off the baggage of the past. There’s a lingering sense that Egyptians are considered unable or incapable of studying their own history without the assistance of white, western academics who are really the people best suited to the discipline. The whiff of racism and a “white saviour narrative” still hangs in the air, he feels.
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  • “There’s this conceit,” he says, “that archaeologists - gung-ho western, bearded, white, elite, cis-gendered, ostensibly heterosexual - go to Egypt and ‘discover’ Ancient Egypt because the people, ordinary Egyptians, are too stupid.” He adds: “Ancient Egypt was never ‘lost’.”
  • The “standard colonial narrative”, he says, portrays Egypt as “brilliant - a proto-British empire”. Egyptologists used terms like ‘empire’ and ‘viceroy’ to describe the government of the Pharaohs. Students were taught that “the Ancient Egyptians had a ‘Viceroy of Nubia’ - where the hell is the term ‘viceroy’ coming from?” Price asks. “It’s from the British experience of empire”. This explains why many British academics put Egypt on a pedestal as the greatest of all ancient civilisations.
  • in the imperial age when Britons were travelling to India they would go through the Suez Canal. “You might take a few days and go and visit Egypt. So it’s colonial high noon,”
  • British archaeologist Howard Carter led the dig that opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 - an event which turbo-charged interest in Egyptology and had a huge cultural impact on world, even leading to the creation of movies like The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in 1932. “Some early exhibitions quite literally feel like the spoils of empire,” says Price. “In some cases, it’s literally the spoils - like the Rosetta Stone which was seized from the French.”
  • Price has little time for the use of the word ‘woke’ as an insult, as to him it simply means trying to do the right thing professionally. He adds that he feels “fortunate” that Manchester Museum, where he works, is also having the same “conversations” about confronting the legacy of the past.
  • “the British and French cooked up a system” called ‘finds-division’ or ‘partage’. “Notionally,” he says, “the best 50% of things that come out of the ground go to the National Collection in Cairo, but then up to 50% of what is thought to be ‘surplus to requirements’ or duplicate can leave with archaeologists. So that’s how Manchester has 18,000 objects from Egypt and Sudan - mostly through finds-division.
  • Price is chair of the board of trustees with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) - an organisation, he says, which is “doing a lot of work of self-criticism, self-reflection and self-critique”. The EES, which was established in 1882 at the height of empire and just prior to the British invasion, is now “attempting to unpack colonialism in Egypt”.
  • “some people will tell you, some well known Egyptologists, that you should burn copies of ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’ because it contains racist material. But the society is actually working on a critical re-edition, where there’s a new introduction to put the book in context. I firmly believe, and the trustees firmly believe, you can’t just bury the past. You’ve got to try and face it and constructively critique it. I’m not arguing for cancelling anyone. I’m not arguing for trying to ignore it. I’m saying ‘let’s have a conversation’.”
  • Unlike many nations which had art looted by western powers, Egypt “isn’t particularly interested” in the repatriation debate except when it comes to “a few very exceptional objects like Nefertiti’s Bust and the Rosetta Stone”. Price adds: “Repatriation can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber for western [people]. It doesn’t necessarily relate always to the concerns of indigenous groups, or people who live in places like Egypt.”
  • There’s a funny attitude, where Scots kind of distance themselves and say, ‘oh well, you know, we were colonised first. The English came in, and we’re the victims’. Based on my work on the history of colonialism in Egypt, Scottish people are more than well-represented. They are disproportionately represented in the cogs of the imperial project with Scottish diplomats, engineers and soldiers … There’s a sense that empire was ‘done to’ Scotland, when in fact Scotland ‘did’ empire to other people … We put this stuff on the English and say it was the English … Scots appear surprisingly commonly in the imperial machinery in Egypt.
  • It was legal between the 1880s and 1970s, but it was at a time when mostly the Egyptian government was controlled by the British and French, and the Egyptian government had to repay the massive debt of building the Suez Canal.
  • British egyptology is “more open” to change, Price says than most other western nations with a history of the discipline. “We’re on the winning side of the argument. The tide has turned. You cannot pretend you can enjoy your secluded cocktail terrace in the middle of Cairo and not expect to hear critical evaluation of colonial experiences.”
  • Most of the workers who built the pyramids weren’t slaves - they were paid for their efforts, he points out. The slave stories of the Bible, though, lead to “another form of colonialism - Orientalism”, which depicts the rulers of the east as either exotic and mysterious or brutal and cruel. The notion of “the Oriental despot comes from the Bible: Pharaoh as a despot … The way in the Bible, that the pharaoh is cast as a baddie, reverberates”.
  • Price is also incensed by the current pseudo-science trend for conspiracy theories claiming that aliens built the pyramids - the type of unfounded material aired on over-the-top documentaries like ‘Ancient Aliens’. “It’s racist,” he says, “very racist.” He notes that there’s a hashtag on Twitter called ‘CancelAncientAliens’. The wild alien theory is “based on the assumption that ancient people were too stupid to have [built the pyramids] themselves and so it had to be some outside force. So to be clear in the interests of global parity and justice: the ancient Egyptians were an African people who built absolutely stunning monuments. Get over it.”
  • There is no simple answer, or history - and I think we insult museum audiences if we assume they want an overly simplified story. ‘Ancient Egypt’ is undoubtedly one of the most popular parts of a museum. By asking questions about how colonialism formed our idea of what ‘Ancient Egypt’ was, not just how it got to be in cities like Glasgow and Manchester, I think we can begin to address questions of global inequality.
  • “Egypt more than Greece, Rome or other parts of the world, has existed as both ‘Oriental other’ and ‘western ancestor’ - that is why the colonial dialogue is so intense - and Egyptology is, in a sense, the exemplary ‘colonial discipline’, just as the British Consul Lord Cromer [consul-general in Egypt from 1883] said Egypt should be the exemplary colony.
Ed Webb

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

theintercept.com/...ger-cambodia-bombing-survivors

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shared by Ed Webb on 28 May 23 - Cached
  • 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

Birmingham - The Law and Policy Blog - 0 views

davidallengreen.com/...birmingham

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shared by Ed Webb on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • 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.
Ed Webb

Victor Orban's eyes may be bigger than his stomach - 0 views

jamesmdorsey.substack.com/...ctor-orbans-eyes-may-be-bigger

empire revanchism territory history nationalism extremism Hungary India

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Aug 22 - Cached
  • When Prime Minister Victor Orban recently spelled out his vision of Hungary's frontiers, he joined a club of expansionist leaders such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Xi Jinping, and members of the Indian power elite who define their countries’ borders in civilisational rather than national terms.Speaking on Romanian territory in the predominantly ethnic Hungarian town of Baile Tusnad in Transylvania, a onetime Austro-Hungarian possession home to a Hungarian minority, Mr. Orban echoed the worldviews of Messrs. Xi and Putin.
  • a worldview also embraced by members of India’s Hindu nationalist elite that endorses a country’s right to expand its internationally recognized borders to lands inhabited by their ethnic kin or territories and waters that historically were theirs
  • he civilisationalist concept of Akhand Bharat embraced by his ideological alma mater.The concept envisions an India that stretches from Afghanistan to Myanmar and encompasses nuclear-armed Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.
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  • Mr. Modi has approached Indian Muslims, the world's largest minority and its largest Muslim minority, in much the same way that Mr. Orban envisions a racially and religiously pure Hungary
  • Mr. Orban asserted that mixed-race countries "are no longer nations: They are nothing more than conglomerations of peoples" and are no longer part of what he sees as "the Western world."
  • Romanians may be more concerned about Mr. Orban’s racial remarks than his territorial ambitions, described by one Romanian Orban watcher as a "little man having pipe dreams.”
  • Mr. Orban shares Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi's resentment of perceived historical wrongs that need to be rectified irrespective of international law and the consequences of a world whose guardrails are dictated by might rather than the rule of law.
  • Mr. Orban left no doubt that his definition of the Hungarian motherland included Transylvania and other regions in the Carpathian Basin beyond Hungary's borders that ethnic Hungarians populate.
  • Mr. Orban implicitly suggested a revision or cancellation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which deprived Hungary of much of its pre-World War I territory.
  • So far, Mr. Orban’s support of Russia has isolated him in Europe with the de facto demise of the Visegrad 4 or V4 in its current form in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine and the threat of an economic recession.
  • Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger has pledged to use his current six-month presidency of the European Council to return the Visegrad 4 to the roots of its founding in 1991 as the four countries emerged from communism: respect for democracy and a commitment to European integration.
Ed Webb

The Search for Oklahoma Native Americans Lost Land and Mineral Rights - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ineral-rights-in-trust-podcast

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shared by Ed Webb on 11 Sep 22 - Cached
  • More than a century ago, the Osage Nation, whose government had just been dismantled by the US, negotiated a unique arrangement: All the mineral rights to its nearly 1.5 million-acre reservation would be put in a federally managed trust. Those rights soared in value when oil drilling took off in the state in the 1910s, and tales of Osage wealth swept the country — many exaggerated and racist, painting rich Osages as unworthy and financially reckless. The Osage people were supposed to be safeguarded by the US government because of the agreement their leaders negotiated. Instead, federal policies allowed a massive transfer of Osage land and wealth to outsiders that the Osage Nation is now working to get back.
  • an upcoming movie directed by Martin Scorsese, based on David Grann’s bestselling book “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
  • “In Trust,” a new investigative podcast series by Bloomberg News and iHeartMedia, tells the story of how US policies helped facilitate that transfer of riches. It also tells the tale of three brothers who laid the foundation for an Oklahoma ranching dynasty on land once owned by the Osage Nation.
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  • The Osage Nation itself owns 3.5% of the historic reservation.
  • policies by the US government, which owed a fiduciary duty to the Osage people, frequently undercut that promise. Congress capped how much of their own money Osages could access, courts appointed White men to oversee Osage financial affairs, and US politicians undermined Osage leadership. Over generations, this shifted power — and money — from the Osage Nation to White settlers.
Ed Webb

The Annihilation of Florida: An Overlooked National Tragedy ❧ Current Affairs - 0 views

www.currentaffairs.org/...an-overlooked-national-tragedy

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  • since development in Florida began in earnest in the 20th century, state leaders and developers have chosen a cruel, unsustainable legacy involving the nonstop slaughter of wildlife and the destruction of habitat, eliminating some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world.
  • Consider this: several football fields-worth of forest and other valuable habitat is cleared per day2 in Florida, with 26 percent of our canopy cut down in the past twenty years.  According to one study, an average of 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation worldwide.
  • Prodevelopment flacks like to pull out the estimates of the millions who will continue to flock to Florida by 2030 or 2040 to justify rampant development. Even some Florida economists ignore the effects of the climate crisis in their projects for 2049, expecting continued economic growth. but these estimates are just a grim joke, and some of those regurgitating them know that. By 2050, the world likely will be grappling with the fallout from 1.5- to 2-degree temperature rise and it’s unlikely people will be flocking to a state quickly dissolving around all of its edges.
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  • The state has 1,300 miles of shoreline, 600 clear-water springs, 1,700 ravines and streams, and over 8,000 lakes. More than 3,000 native trees, shrubs, and flowering plants are native to Florida, many unique to our peninsula and also endangered due to development. Our 100 species of orchid (compared to Hawai’i’s three native orchids) and 150 fern species speak to the moist and subtropical climate across many parts of the state.3 Florida has more wetlands than any other conterminous state—11 million acres—including seepage wetlands, interior marshes, and interior swamp land. Prior to the 1800s, Florida had over 20 million acres of wetlands.
  • “the worst I’ve ever seen,” the head of one major Florida-based conservation group told me, referring to the predatory and anti-science environmental actions of our Republican-dominated state legislature.
  • Shown on maps as a slow curve up through South Florida, Central Florida, and into the North Florida Panhandle, the wildlife corridor offers a quixotic hope for the future. The ultimate goal is 17.7 million acres, with 9.6 million acres existing conservation land (some of it compromised by other uses, like ranching and silviculture) and 8.1 million “opportunity areas” for future conservation, including through the underfunded Florida Forever land acquisition program and the Rural & Family Lands Protection Program. The creation of the corridor also gives an overriding purpose, or story, to other environmental projects that feed into the corridor goal while emphasizing the importance of the 75 state parks, 32 state forests, and 171 springs that form part of the corridor.
  • If the idea behind the Wildlife Corridor represents a profound expression of a sustainable, biodiverse future, then the toll roads are the purest distillation of capitalist evil. Governor Ron DeSantis, the Florida legislature, and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) seem determined to ram these roads through rural Florida—even as the people who live there, regardless of political affiliation, are united in fighting the roads and the destruction they will bring with them.
  • Most sensible urban planners will tell you that adding more highways to solve congestion just leads to more congestion. Environmental organizations and residents are quick to point out that existing roads are underused, meaning the toll roads represent a classic case of induced demand. Politicians who support them often have received substantial campaign contributions from the entities that stand to profit. 
  • lawmakers who “do not understand how they fit into nature or how nature works. Perhaps they just don’t care. Many hold the belief that there is no ‘value’ to nature. … If it isn’t ‘improved,’ it’s worthless. There is a lack of recognition of the ecosystem services that conserved lands can provide, therefore it is easy to claim that more conservation lands are not needed, or that they are too expensive.”
  • developers even bulldozed over critical migratory bird nesting areas, resulting in Sandhill Cranes dying on the nearby highways as they tried to protect their (flightless) young
  • The sense of bearing witness to the first, vigorous days of the creation of Mordor hung heavy in the air.
  • Just ramming such roads through farms, forest, and swamp destroys many hundreds of acres. But, worldwide, roads are often just a pretext for developers and others to come in and transform an area forever. This is why, for example, environmentalists and indigenous groups in Bolivia recently opposed a road through sensitive territory that would forever change the region.
  • the initial road construction creates potential flooding, erosion, and water quality issues. In addition, road builders don’t always follow proper environmental guidelines, resulting in pollution to the surrounding areas. If runoff containment is insufficient, heavy metals and other contaminants enter the soil.
  • The fencing of verges and median strips made of concrete barriers accelerates ecosystem fragmentation via isolation of populations.
  • Nationally, roadkill deaths add up to more than one million vertebrate animals per day.
  • An oligarchy, with its system of favoritism toward certain elites and special interests, deliberately fosters corruption as a function of its existence. It is often stacked against environmental causes in ways different from a decaying representative democracy. Combine the worst attributes of capitalism with oligarchy and in the future, Florida’s leaders may actually give developers and other special interests even more tools of suppression.
  • Street lights immediately create additional light pollution in formerly dark-sky rural areas. The now-favored white LEDs, while more energy friendly, are actually worse for nocturnal wildlife and insects because their glow disrupts life cycles, decreases reproduction, and thus further degrades ecosystems. According to a 2016 study, every year, the world loses another two percent of the Earth’s dark skies to light pollution.
  • larger-scale developments appear, often extending from the existing urban areas, but sometimes plunked down in the middle of nowhere, with the expectation of further infrastructure and services accreting around them. Creating these subdivisions and planned communities is the main goal for developers. This kind of development involves wholesale clearcutting similar to what’s done by ranchers in the Amazon for agriculture, up to 5,000 acres at a time wiped clean, including the topsoil: the complete slaughter and dismantling of a complex system. In its place will come thousands of overpriced, often poorly made houses
  • mining operations that follow the law have to protect the environment to a far greater extent than development projects
  • Any wildlife that manages to flee often perishes in new, unfamiliar environments. In place of the native organisms come lawns of useless sod propped up with chemical fertilizer and herbicide
  • Echoes of these same dysfunctional processes even infiltrate supposed “green” energy in the form of Southeastern forests destroyed to send fuel to biomass plants and efforts by utility companies to nix personal solar in favor of industrial solar farms that, not properly regulated, destroy habitat in a way similar to the worst kinds of development.
  • The damning thing is how invisible this ecocide feels to those of us who live here and care. The nature of clearcutting with soil removal leaves no evidence of the crime behind—just a void. The way in which much of the ultimate green-lighting for ecocide occurs at the local government level also makes much of it invisible, doomed to reside at best in regional news cycles, but often not even reported on there.
  • Gopher tortoises often suffer a horrific fate. If you have bought a house of a certain age, in the dry sand scrub that was once prime tortoise territory, chances are you live on top of the dead bodies of gopher tortoises—slaughtered outright or sealed alive in their burrows to suffocate or starve to death. Reports estimate more than 100,000 gopher tortoises have died this way. The true number may be twice that.
  • Just as with the palmettos, a keystone species, gopher tortoises support all sorts of other organisms, which use their burrows. What this means is that development wipes out entire ecosystems and kills a host of other animals when either of these species is extirpated.
  • legacy licenses to outright kill gopher tortoises have no end date, meaning some companies still can legally chop up live tortoises to build their subdivisions
  • It is widely accepted now that cutting down mangroves is foolhardy, however many decades it took for that lesson to be learned. But what we’re doing in other parts of Florida is exactly the same as cutting down mangroves. Combatting increasing heat, flooding, and erosion can be matters of life and death. When you remove mature live oak trees and pine trees that help mitigate these issues, you are creating a future disaster that was partially avoidable, even factoring in the climate crisis.
  • The story of how we got here includes concerted, planned actions by elites—including developers and parasitic politicians—but gross incompetence and stupidity as well
  • Under former governor Rick Scott and now DeSantis—who pays lip service to the wildlife corridor while undermining it with most of his policies—the stacking of regional water quality boards and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission with political appointees emboldened to make terrible decisions has become almost laughable. Last year, for example, Florida’s top wildlife official wanted to fill in a South Florida lagoon full of manatees to make a profit in real estate. 
  • it is not too extreme to recognize that DeSantis’ approach in Florida, including the enemies list, begins to at least feel like something approaching oligarchy, not representative democracy. A corresponding lack of government transparency, despite our Sunshine Law, protects developers and pro-development politicians while making it harder to report on environmental issues.
  • This initial phase kills and displaces wildlife, liquidates the important mature pines and live oaks,5destroys rare plants and trees, and allows extremely harmful invasive plant species a foothold
  • warning signs of intense ecocide
  • Create propaganda to support the idea that reckless development and new weakened environmental rules are actually progress and those who oppose it are extremists
  • despite so much that is good in our community, Tallahassee has become a cautionary tale of how even Florida cities that have managed to retain biodiversity and climate crisis resiliency can begin to squander it quickly. Elites and special interests similar to those that push the toll roads now enthusiastically push destructive development here. DeSantis’ oligarchy is expressed in the city’s government: a city manager less and less accountable to the public; a smug mayor who silences dissent; and the good ol’ boy nature of the local Chamber of Commerce leadership, which sees itself as a thought-leader while having done little or nothing to fight poverty in traditionally underserved Tallahassee communities —which are often the ones to suffer from lack of a healthy urban canopy
  • The mindset of an alien occupation is apparent in so many ways, especially through Blueprint, the run-away intergovernmental agency that spends our tax dollars on large-scale projects and infrastructure. Every plan that includes parks or landscaping tends to emerge from a sanitized view of the outdoors from the 1950s. (For example, a Market District park plan that was to emphasize shade trees and wilderness now features a giant tree-less lawn instead.)
  • The paper of record, the Tallahassee Democrat, has unfortunately become part of the problem. The Democrat, under the current Executive Editor William Hatfield, lacks a dedicated environmental reporter and rarely makes the link between quality of life and the quality of our environment. Stories about developers and new development are more or less press releases from the developers themselves, letting us know vital information such as the fact that one developer, Hadi Boulos, “cries” when he clearcuts properties, mourning the trees. The paper ran no story when the same developer tried to hike the price of new houses by thousands of dollars after homeowners had already signed contracts. 
  • The very Tallahassee-Leon County economic development agency the newspaper reports on spends thousands of dollars on advertisements in that publication. When confronted about sponsored articles by developers, the paper’s news director, Jim Rosica, had the audacity to write, in a Facebook comment, that these puff pieces “help support the vital journalism we provide every day.”
  • Our tourist brochure touts Tallahassee’s importance to migratory birds—boasting that “Here you can spot 372 of the 497 species of birds residing in or visiting Florida”—yet we have almost certainly doomed some migratory birds to localized die-offs because when they reach our area there isn’t enough food (seeds, berries, insects) because of habitat destruction. 
  • Systematic destruction and death came to the Fallschase property in April of 2021. The box turtles hibernating in their burrows would likely have been smothered or killed outright, along with the skinks and ring-necked snakes in the leaf debris. The frogs and the toads would also have had little chance to escape, nor would the flying squirrels, hibernating bats, or anything other than foxes, deer, coyotes, or bobcats. Migrating bird species known to frequent the site, some already nesting, would have had to leave rapidly, including the Hermit Thrush, Blue-headed Vireo, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, and Swallow-tailed Kite.The salamanders would not have had this luxury. Native plants and trees did not have that luxury.
  • all of these lives existed and had meaning. Box turtles, some as old as 50 years, would have had their own nuanced understanding of the world they moved through.  Did we have a right to kill them? Do we always have a right to kill them?
  • We have an urgent need for affordable housing that no amount of urban sprawl can provide and every day in my house on the edge of a ravine, I see the wasted opportunity. Instead of half-acre lots with houses built along the top of this ravine, we could have had the vision and imagination for high-density, affordable housing, while still leaving the trough of woodlands below intact. This is perhaps the most terrible truth about all of this maximized destruction: It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary, given even moderately good and sane urban planning.
  • the sloppy “wacky Florida Man” narrative invested in by so many journalists and pundits stings because it makes a joke out of what is deadly serious and becoming more so: A state that had been among the wildest outside of Alaska or Montana asks its citizens to passively watch as the nonhuman world is liquidated while we go on about our daily lives and others look on and say we deserve it as a “red” state. 
  • Worse, foundational ideas buried in a settler colonialism mindset, which previously brought us the slaughter of indigenous people amid “Manifest Destiny,” are still hardwired into our society and these ideas help support the destruction. Trump wanted to “drain the swamp,” Disney literally did, and Elon Musk now wants to do it again to build more of his Space X near Cape Canaveral, in a biodiversity and carbon sink hotspot.8
  • Florida’s leaders are engaged in acts many societies and cultures would deem evil. They have been given the green light to exploit the state in an extractive way similar to events unfolding in Brazil, Indonesia, and other places we think of undergoing deforestation while not always realizing our complicity and our own perilous condition.
  • The moral and ethical considerations of entire species being exterminated for the cause of untenable, unplanned, unaffordable development, or even just another Wal-Mart or a parking lot, are absent from most public narrative
  • When I was born, in 1968, the world had 50 percent more terrestrial wildlife than now. I was born into a world still alive and I will die in a world near death, brought to that condition by our own hand.
Ed Webb

Things could be good | Dazed - 0 views

www.dazeddigital.com/...d-actually-be-good-adam-curtis

UK Britain analysis opinion culture economy class empire austerity politics

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Feb 22 - Cached
  • There is something haunting and desperate about the chokehold that white, sallow humans from southern England have over the identity of the UK. In his 2021 docu-series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, Adam Curtis characterises post-war English society as strange and rudderless. During this period of mass emigration and rapid industrialisation, he suggests many white people entered a state of prolonged philosophical mourning over the loss of the empire; sleepwalking through a kind of ambient identity crisis, confused as to what their “story” now was. Speaking of the Black revolutionary and civil rights activist Michael de Freitas, who emigrated to London from Trinidad in the late-50s, Curtis says: “Having grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland at the centre of the Empire, instead, what he found was, what seemed to him, a sad and frightened country.” This feels very much the same now. Misery and spite can be felt in almost every corner of England, lying dormant like a landmine that will go off at the first sight of anyone enjoying themselves outside the parameters of white, middle-class acceptability. 
  • There is a powerful history of working-class revolt in every nation that makes up the UK, but we are taught very little about it and very rarely celebrate it. Meanwhile Brexit – a political agenda driven by right-wing politicians, aristocrats and landowners – has been consistently referred to as the working class having their voice heard for the first time in decades, which is so far from the truth it would be easy to call a “conspiracy” if it wasn’t so blatantly racist. As a result, our connections to actual working-class history are frayed and obscured, and that has a serious impact on how we act politically today.
  • Even the French middle-classes will chuck on a high vis vest and get involved in some street violence once in a while, whereas their equivalents in the UK mainly seem to deal with their grievances by bullying marginalised communities on Twitter.
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  • There is this assumption, particularly among the British middle and upper classes, that things exist to serve the individual. The shop better have the thing they want or they’re going to go sicko mode, hospitality workers are punching bags for a bad day, coastal Wales exists exclusively as a holiday destination. There is a lack of real connection to anything, which imbues society with an austere and passionless vibe.
  • At some point we’ll need to put the mindset that globalisation has instilled – one that dangles £18 flights to Italy in front of our noses while rapidly eroding the quality of life we have at home – into reverse gear, if only for a reason to get up in the morning. Many countries across Europe and the world are experiencing similar socio-economic problems following the 2007 financial crash, but when you can’t even have a decent sandwich about it… well, that is very sad.
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