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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ed Webb

Ed Webb

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba - ABC News - 0 views

  • In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
  • plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities
  • to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro
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  • "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."
  • neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro. Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.
  • a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds
  • reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election
  • One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.
  • Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.
Ed Webb

Amid Protest, Hong Kong Retreats on 'Moral Education' Plan - NYTimes.com - 3 views

  • HONG KONG — Faced with tens of thousands of protesters contending that a Beijing-backed plan for “moral and national education” amounted to brainwashing and political indoctrination, Hong Kong’s chief executive backpedaled on Saturday and revoked a 2015 deadline for every school to start teaching it.
  • For the past 10 days, swelling protests against the plan were the latest sign of a new interest in political activism by youths here, and there were some signs that this activism could be spreading in mainland China for the first time since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
  • The police initially detained 21 protesters but released them a day later as the crowds swelled. The smelting project itself has been canceled and shows no sign of being restarted, several Shifang residents said, adding that the city had been completely quiet ever since the protests.
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  • The national education curriculum — contemporary Chinese history with a heavy dose of nationalism and a favorable interpretation of the Communist Party’s role — was originally supposed to be phased in school by school starting with the academic year that began last Monday. But only a handful of schools have begun teaching the subject.
Ed Webb

Tesla's Revenge: Filmmakers Kickstart Electrifying Docudrama About Cult Genius | Underw... - 3 views

  • The movie will feature dramatic re-enactments, interviews, vintage film sequences and archival photographs filmed in slow-panning “Ken Burns style,” according to project rep Zach Taiji. Kickstarter funders can snag cool swag including Nikola Tesla action figures.
  • David Bowie’s portrayal of Tesla in Christopher Nolan’s Victorian-era science thriller The Prestige will be hard to beat, and God only knows what it’ll look like if Christian Bale decides to portray Tesla in Tesla, Ruler of the World, now in discussions.
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    History of science is hip!
Ed Webb

BBC News - English language 'originated in Turkey' - 7 views

Ed Webb

Mitt Romney's Search for Simple Answers - NYTimes.com - 5 views

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    Colonialism not mentioned explicitly. Bizarre, given the particular context of Gov Romney's remarks.
Ed Webb

BJUwE.gif (1000×677) - 6 views

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jul 12 - No Cached
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Ed Webb

"There Was Never Any Pay Day for the Negroes" - Ex-Slave Jourdon Anderson's Letter to H... - 6 views

  • Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire
Ed Webb

Popular: Did Marie-Antoinette really say "Let them eat cake"? - 10 views

  • in fact, Marie-Antoinette was a generous patron of charity and other members of the royal family were often embarrassed or irritated by her habit of bursting into tears when she heard of the plight of the suffering poor. There's also a problem with dates. During Louis the Sixteenth's time as king, there was only one case of bread shortages in Paris and that was shortly after his coronation. Marie-Antoinette was eighteen at the time and when she heard about the people's unhappiness at the food situation, she wrote a letter about it back to her mother in Austria, in which she said, "We are more obliged than ever to work for the people's happiness. The King seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget". Marie-Antoinette's personality therefore seems to have been the exact opposite of someone who would joke about the starving poor.
  • The story of a princess joking "let them eat cake" had actually been told many years before Marie-Antoinette ever arrived in France, as a young princess of fourteen in 1770. Her brother-in-law, the Count of Provence, who hated her, later said that he heard the story as a child, long before his brother ever married Marie-Antoinette. The count claimed that the version he heard was that the woman who made the comment had been his great-great-great grandmother, Maria-Teresa of Spain, who advised peasants to eat pie crust (or brioche) during bread shortages. A French socialite, the Countess of Boigne, said she'd heard that it had been Louis the Sixteenth's bitter aunt, Princess Victoria, and the great philosopher, Rousseau, wrote that he had heard the "let them eat cake" story about an anonymous great princess. Rousseau wrote this story in 1737 - eighteen years before Marie-Antoinette was even born!
  • Others think that because the French Revolution was able to dress itself up as the force that brought freedom and equality to Europe, it had to justify its many acts of violence and terror. Executing Marie-Antoinette at the age of thirty-seven and leaving her two children as shivering, heart-broken orphans in the terrifying Temple prison, suggested that the Revolution was a lot more complicated than its supporters like to claim. However, if Marie-Antoinette is painted as stupid, deluded, out-of-touch, spoiled and selfish, then we're likely to feel a lot less pity when it comes to studying her death. If that was the republicans' intention, then they did a very good job. Two hundred years later and the poor woman is still stuck with a terrible reputation, and a catchphrase, that she certainly doesn't deserve.
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    As a student and teacher of, among other things, propaganda and censorship, I think this is a great example for students to play with in thinking about how 'truth' gets established, politically and historically. In discussing nationalism I often talk about the importance of political myth in establishing identities, and here is a powerful example of a myth that became hegemonic.
Ed Webb

First the Nightmare, Then the News - NYTimes.com - 7 views

  • to get an impression of the nature of a person, one has to see him in motion. So much is contained in the posture of the body, the position of the hands, the movement of the eyes.
    • Ed Webb
       
      I've been turning this over since I first read this last week - on Shakespeare's birthday, actually. How true is this? Can we not get a sense of the nature of a person who existed before video technology existed? Are those who exist for us only as text and artefacts irretrievable? I don't think so. But what, precisely, is missing in the absence of this data of how people move?
Ed Webb

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes | UK news | The Guardian - 8 views

  • The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.
  • The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.
  • As independence grew closer, large caches of files were removed from colonial ministries to governors' offices, where new safes were installed.In Uganda, the process was codenamed Operation Legacy. In Kenya, a vetting process, described as "a thorough purge", was overseen by colonial Special Branch officers.
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  • Clear instructions were issued that no Africans were to be involved: only an individual who was "a servant of the Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent" could participate in the purge.
  • Many of the watch files ended up at Hanslope Park. They came from 37 different former colonies, and filled 200 metres of shelving. But it is becoming clear that much of the most damning material was probably destroyed. Officials in some colonies, such as Kenya, were told that there should be a presumption in favour of disposal of documents rather than removal to the UK – "emphasis is placed upon destruction" – and that no trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain.
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