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Megan Flanagan

Istanbul: Explosion by ISIS bomber kills at least 10 - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

attack bombing istanbul

shared by Megan Flanagan on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The suicide bomber who killed at least 10 foreigners Tuesday in a popular central Istanbul tourist area belonged to ISIS
  • pinned blame on the group that calls itself the Islamic State, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq while proving willing time and again to lash out elsewhere.
  • at least nine Germans were killed.
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  • They have targeted the whole of Turkey and the whole world."
  • Syria has been embroiled in a civil war for nearly five years -- a conflict that, according to the United Nations, has cost more than 250,000 lives, spurred more than half the country's 17 million residents to flee and caused humanitarian crises for those left behind, as illustrated by the hundreds starving in the siege of Madaya.
  • ISIS has been behind many of the worst atrocities there
  • Its military cooperation with the United States and other NATO nations in particular has angered ISIS
  • ISIS has responded by singling out Turkey as a primary target
  • ISIS, which has enemies everywhere and has proven willing to strike those who don't subscribe to its twisted, hard-line version of Sharia law.
  • It's seen as a place where you have a mesh of different entities. It's a real melting pot."
  • including allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base
  • Tuesday's blast -- if it's confirmed to be the terror group's work -- ups the ante for Ankara, forcing it to step up its anti-ISIS fight even more
  • An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,
johnsonma23

In Syrian Town Cut Off From the World, Glimpses of Deprivation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...madaya-syria.html

new york times

shared by johnsonma23 on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • In Syrian Town Cut Off From the World, Glimpses of Deprivation
  • BEIRUT, Lebanon
  • The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics
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  • And there is the relentless physical and psychological contraction of their communities,
  • “I don’t go anywhere,” said Maleka Jabir, 85, who said she inherited American citizenship from her father, a World War I veteran, and is so disabled from hunger and heart problems she can hardly walk
  • This portrait of life in Madaya is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen residents, conducted over several months and in recent days by telephone and over the Interne
  • While details of their experiences could not be independently confirmed, international aid workers who have visited the town or been in direct contact with groups on the ground provided accounts that echoed the residents’.
  • While parts of Homs and the Damascus suburbs have been blockaded for years, Madaya managed to survive relatively unscathed, until last summer
  • Both local residents and Hezbollah officials say most of the fighters in Zabadani are affiliated with a Syrian Islamist group called Ahrar al-Sham, and smaller numbers with the more moderate Free Syrian Army and the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
  • Looking for leverage, rebels allied with the local insurgents began blockading and bombarding Fouaa and Kfarya, two isolated, pro-government Shiite towns in Idlib Province, in Syria’s northwest.
  • The medical clinic in Madaya, which works with Doctors Without Borders, was bombed, and thus was moved to a basement. Mr. Mohammad, an anesthesia technician who has been acting as a doctor, said he was overwhelmed with cases he could not treat properly: broken bones, amputations, abdominal wounds
  • giving the most endangered children syrupy medicines, for the glucose, further depleting supplies.
  • Finding food was getting harder. Aid workers and residents said fighters on both sides profited from smuggling it across the lines.
manhefnawi

How the Nazis Tried to Cover Up Their Crimes at Auschwitz - History in the Headlines - 0 views

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Auschwitz Holocaust Nazi Crime

shared by manhefnawi on 13 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • the death march of Auschwitz—part of the Nazis’ mad scramble to escape Allied forces in January 1945
  • Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazis’ more than 400,000 camps and incarceration facilities
  • Beller saw Nazi guards murder prisoners who tried to escape
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  • Nazi guards led them through the forests and fields of southern Poland on their way to Germany. The Germans called the march an “evacuation”; prisoners immediately dubbed it the “death march.”
  • one of Nazi Germany’s most efficient tools in the quest to eradicate European Jews
  • ordinary Germans standing along the road, watching the prisoners go by
  • The Nazis’ goal wasn’t only to destroy evidence of the camp: They had plans to force the prisoners to serve as slave laborers for the Reich
  • Those officers who stayed burned documents in a last-ditch attempt to hide their crimes
  • Then, on January 27, 1945, the Red Army reached the camp. Inside, they found prisoners covered in excrement and starving to death, children who had been used for medical experiments, and other shocking evidence of the Nazis’ crimes.
  • the Red Army immediately began to help feed and care for them. Half of the surviving prisoners died of starvation, disease and exhaustion shortly after liberation
  • few people could even grasp the horror that was found in the camps
Javier E

The Bus Is the Best Public Transit for Cities - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...574399

public transit transportation urban city economics

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • A city is a place where many people live close together. The problem of urban transportation is a problem of sharing space.
  • When you drive alone (or take Uber alone) in a gridlocked street or freeway, you are taking more than your fair share of the limited space. When stuck in traffic, you are blocking others from moving freely.
  • If cities want to move people faster than walking while allowing them to take up only their fair share of space, two options arise. One is to use a vehicle that’s not much bigger than the human body, such as bicycles and scooters. Those tools work well for certain people in particular circumstances, but not for everyone. The other option is to share the ride in a vehicle. If space is really scarce, that vehicle will have to carry lots of people. In most cases, riders will have to share a vehicle with strangers, people who are not traveling for the same purposes or even to the same places. That’s what public transit is.
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  • So what technologies make sense in public transit? Efficient transit networks are made of many technologies, each the right one for its own situation. Rail is for high-capacity markets, where you need to move hundreds of people per vehicle. Ferries and aerial gondolas overcome certain obstacles. But everywhere else, the bus is the thing that’s easiest to make abundant. Because labor is the main limit on their quantity, they can be much more abundant after full automation.
  • Fixed public transit deploys large vehicles flowing along a set path, and riders gathering at stops to use them. That way, the vehicles can follow a fairly straight line, and they don’t need to stop once for every customer. That is what makes them worth walking to get to. It is one of the best ideas in the history of transportation
  • And walking is key to it. Out in low-density suburbs, residents can also drive to fixed-transit stops. But in the dense city, there’s no room for that. The microtransit promise of “service to your door” is a promise to abolish walking, and yet walking is the essence of how people share precious space.
  • If the buses are terrible in your city, you may think that buses are terrible in general. In truth, a city’s bus service is as good as its leaders and voters want it to be. Where voters have funded better bus services and cities have worked to give them priority, as in Seattle, ridership has soared.
  • The starvation of high-ridership public transit in America is a choice, one that Americans don’t have to make. I work in cities all over the developed world, but my U.S. clients always have the poorest transit budgets, requiring the most painful trade-offs. They can’t afford to run the frequent and reliable fixed-route services that would do well, so they are forced to run poor service, yielding low ridership, feeding the impression that transit is pointless
Javier E

The unseen driver behind the migrant caravan: climate change | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...climate-change-central-america

climate change central america drought starvation

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty.
  • “The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change – we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.
  • “It didn’t rain this year. Last year it didn’t rain,” he said softly. “My maize field didn’t produce a thing. With my expenses, everything we invested, we didn’t have any earnings. There was no harvest.”
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  • “It wasn’t the same before. This is forcing us to emigrate,” he said. “In past years, it rained on time. My plants produced, but there’s no longer any pattern [to the weather].”
andrespardo

The Guardian view on coronavirus and hunger: the bigger killer? | Editorial | Opinion |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-and-hunger-the-bigger-killer

enviroment nature hunger crisis

shared by andrespardo on 27 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Famine is riding alongside pestilence, on the tail of war. Though coronavirus leaves no part of the world untouched, its impact will be harshest in places that were already suffering.
  • The head of the World Food Programme warns that we are now on the brink of a hunger pandemic, with the prospect of multiple famines “of biblical proportions” within a few months,
  • Covid-19 alone has not created this crisis. Rather, it is one more devastating blow, complicating and deepening the troubles of countries already struggling with the impact of war, global heating, other health crises, and specific threats such as the locust infestations plaguing east Africa. It could almost double the number of those facing acute hunger, pushing an additional 130 million people to the brink of starvation by the end of the year. In all, shortages are likely to affect a fifth of the world’s population. Many of them live in overcrowded conditions, with poor sanitation, and a considerable number have pre-existing health problems such as HIV or TB; malnutrition will make them more vulnerable to Covid-19 and other threats
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  • ikely to suffer, particularly in places where it is labour intensive.
  • UN organisations are uniquely placed to handle border closures, restrictions and transport disruption given their regional presences, contacts and diplomacy. In the long run, warn economists and global health experts, developing countries will need trillions of dollars to recover. The UN is seeking just $2bn for its emergency appeal; yet as of last week, wealthier countries had pledged only a quarter of that. They must deliver on those promises now, and give more.
  • All this is a matter of common decency, but also of self-interest. In 2007-08 we saw how rising food prices can destabilise societies, producing repercussions felt much more widely.
  • climate crisis and wars in Syria and elsewhere should already have told us: that other people’s suffering will not be contained. It is our business, too.
anonymous

'A danger to future generations': $640m pledged as third of world malnourished | Global... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...shed-obesity-hunger-kofi-annan

malnutrition nutrition death starvation culture global

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Donors have pledged an extra $640m (£490m) to reduce the serious burden of malnutrition, which affects one in three people in the world.
  • The World Bank has pledged to increase its spending on nutrition to $1.7bn by 2020. The summit will be accompanied by the launch of the 2017 global nutrition report, in which almost every country in the world is identified as facing a serious nutritional challenge.
  • Although the number of children under five who are chronically or acutely malnourished has fallen in many countries, the data show the rate of decline is not rapid enough to meet internationally agreed targets. At the other end of the spectrum, the “inexorable rise” in obesity continues, with 2 billion adults obese or overweight and 41 million children overweight.
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  • A study published earlier this year showed how the number of people going hungry in the world had increased for the first time since the turn of the century, sparking concern that climate change and conflict could reverse years of progress. Malnutrition prevents almost a fifth of children in Ghana from growing properly. The problem is particularly acute in Bentum, Apprah and Nyanyano, rural communities with scant medical facilities Roughly 815 million people were going to bed hungry last year, compared with 777 million in 2015.
Javier E

Sullivan: Why the Reactionary Right Must Be Taken Seriously - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-must-be-taken-seriously.html

right culture trump reaction conservatism demagogue crisis

shared by Javier E on 06 May 17 - No Cached
  • This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism.
  • Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
  • Anton took issue with an article I wrote for this magazine in which I described Trump as reminiscent of Plato’s description of a tyrant emerging out of a decadent democracy and argued that we should do what we could to stop him.
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  • Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”
  • he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.
  • Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”
  • The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.
  • Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.
  • for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”
  • His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”
  • This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”
  • I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV
  • Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.
  • And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.
  • Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.
  • We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death
  • We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope
  • If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.
  • Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either
  • In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.
  • When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?
  • The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops
  • A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed
  • he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.
  • how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.
  • Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.
  • It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?
  • the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country
  • Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.
  • There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.
  • The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.
Javier E

How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war | News | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-truth-of-the-first-world-war

imperialism racism wwi white supremacy history Crisis

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
  • But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
  • In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power
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  • In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
  • “These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
  • The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any
  • In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom.
  • In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious.
  • But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
  • debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
  • In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged
  • Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
  • The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history.
  • Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
  • Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia
  • A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
  • in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
  • Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered.
  • At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”
  • this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
  • it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
  • Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”
  • With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press.
  • In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
  • the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
  • One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives.
  • his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
  • Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians.
  • In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation”
  • These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
  • The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
  • Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
  • nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
  • It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US,
  • This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
  • We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.
  • Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
martinelligi

Stutthof Camp: Holocaust guard Harry S found unfit to stand trial at 96 - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-56353913

Politics

shared by martinelligi on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A court in Germany has declared a 96-year-old former Nazi camp guard unfit to stand trial but ruled that he should pay his own legal fees.
  • Bruno Dey, 93, was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence last July after being found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 5,000 prisoners.
  • Stutthof also had gas chambers and was notorious for the atrocious conditions in which some 100,000 inmates were kept. Many died of disease and starvation, while others were gassed, shot or given lethal injections.
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  • The west German court said in a statement on Wednesday that "due to his physical condition," Harry S "was no longer able to reasonably represent his interest in and outside of the trial"
  • Germany has been pursuing former Nazi camp workers since a landmark ruling in 2011 that convicted a former guard, John Demjanjuk, as an accessory to mass murder. He died pending an appeal, but the verdict set a legal precedent.
saberal

Opinion | What Can Biden's Plan Do for Poverty? Look to Bangladesh. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-child-poverty-bangladesh.html

us history Culture Biden

shared by saberal on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • One of the great moral stains on the United States is that the richest and most powerful country in history has accepted staggering levels of child poverty. With final legislative approval of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on Wednesday, the United States has decided to scrub at that stain.
  • Most historic in the package are provisions that should sharply reduce child poverty. If these measures are made permanent, a Columbia University study suggests, child poverty could fall by half. By half! Biden will have done for children something analogous to what Franklin Roosevelt did for senior citizens with Social Security.
  • Bangladesh was born 50 years ago this month amid genocide, squalor and starvation.
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  • Back in 1991, after covering a cyclone in Bangladesh that killed more than 100,000 people, I wrote a bleak article for The Times suggesting that the country was “bountiful primarily in misfortune.”
  • But then the government and civic organizations promoted education, including for girls. Today, 98 percent of children in Bangladesh complete elementary school. Still more astonishing for a country with a history of gender gaps, there are now more girls in high school in Bangladesh than boys.
  • Granted, factories in Bangladesh pay poorly by Western standards, have problems with abuse and sexual harassment, and pose fire risks and other safety problems; a factory collapse in 2013 killed more than 1,100 workers. But the workers themselves say that such jobs are still better than marrying at 14 and working in a rice paddy, and unions and civil society pushed for and won huge though incomplete improvements in worker safety.
  • In short, Bangladesh invested in its most underutilized assets — its poor, with a focus on the most marginalized and least productive, because that’s where the highest returns would be. And the same could be true in America.
  • That’s what Biden’s attack on child poverty may be able to do, and why its central element, a refundable child tax credit, should be made permanent. Bangladesh reminds us that investing in marginalized children isn’t just about compassion, but about helping a nation soar.
anonymous

Opinion | What Can Biden's Plan Do for Poverty? Look to Bangladesh. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-child-poverty-bangladesh.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • One of the great moral stains on the United States is that the richest and most powerful country in history has accepted staggering levels of child poverty. With final legislative approval of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on Wednesday, the United States has decided to scrub at that stain.
  • But then the government and civic organizations promoted education, including for girls. Today, 98 percent of children in Bangladesh complete elementary school. Still more astonishing for a country with a history of gender gaps, there are now more girls in high school in Bangladesh than boys.
  • I was right that Bangladesh faces huge challenges, not least climate change. But over all my pessimism was dead wrong, for Bangladesh has since enjoyed three decades of extraordinary progress.
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  • Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 72 years. That’s longer than in quite a few places in the United States, including in 10 counties in Mississippi. Bangladesh may have once epitomized hopelessness, but it now has much to teach the world about how to engineer progress.
  • That’s what Biden’s attack on child poverty may be able to do, and why its central element, a refundable child tax credit, should be made permanent. Bangladesh reminds us that investing in marginalized children isn’t just about compassion, but about helping a nation soar.
  • As Bangladesh educated and empowered its girls, those educated women became pillars of Bangladesh’s economy. The nation’s garment factories have given women better opportunities, and that shirt you’re wearing right now may have been made by one of them, for Bangladesh is now the world’s largest garment exporter, after China.
  • Educated women also filled the ranks of nonprofits like Grameen and Brac, another highly regarded development organization. They got children vaccinated. They promoted toilets. They taught villagers how to read. They explained contraception. They discouraged child marriage
  • This represents a revolution in American policy and a belated recognition that all society has a stake in investing in poor kids. To understand the returns that are possible, let’s look to lessons from halfway around the world.
  • As that nation turns 50, its surprising success offers lessons about investing in the most marginalized.
  • Bangladesh was born 50 years ago this month amid genocide, squalor and starvation. Henry Kissinger famously referred to Bangladesh then as a “basket case,” and horrifying photos from a famine in 1974 sealed the country’s reputation as hopeless.
  • In the early 1980s, fewer than one-third of Bangladeshis completed elementary school. Girls in particular were rarely educated and contributed negligibly to the economy.
  • Granted, factories in Bangladesh pay poorly by Western standards, have problems with abuse and sexual harassment, and pose fire risks and other safety problems; a factory collapse in 2013 killed more than 1,100 workers. But the workers themselves say that such jobs are still better than marrying at 14 and working in a rice paddy, and unions and civil society pushed for and won huge though incomplete improvements in worker safety.
  • In short, Bangladesh invested in its most underutilized assets — its poor, with a focus on the most marginalized and least productive, because that’s where the highest returns would be. And the same could be true in America. We’re not going to squeeze much more productivity out of our billionaires, but we as a country will benefit hugely if we can help the one in seven American children who don’t even graduate from high school.
mattrenz16

Opinion: What happens next in Congress will determine future of country, writes Bernie ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In this pivotal moment in American history, Democrats in the US House of Representatives and US Senate, working with the White House, have proposed several pieces of legislation which can strengthen working families, protect the planet and save American democracy from right-wing extremism.
  • We can create millions of good paying union jobs rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, water systems and constructing the millions of units of affordable housing we desperately need. We can also end starvation wages in America by raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. At a time when real wages for American workers have been stagnant for decades, these actions will be a major step forward in improving the standard of living of a declining middle class.
  • Further, we can create millions more jobs by taking the global leadership in combating climate change -- the existential threat to our planet -- and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels.
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  • By extending the child tax credit, we can cut childhood poverty nearly in half and end the international embarrassment of the US having one of the highest rates of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.Read More
anonymous

Yemen: Saudi Arabia Proposes A Peace Deal, But Houthis Say It's Not Enough : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...but-houthis-say-its-not-enough

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia has proposed a peace deal to end the nearly six-year war in Yemen, if the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels agree.The Saudi proposal calls for a nationwide ceasefire and reopening the airport in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.
  • "The initiative aims to end the human suffering of the brotherly Yemeni people, and affirms the Kingdom's support for efforts to reach a comprehensive political resolution," the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
  • The war has been a quagmire for the Saudis and they are apparently looking for a way out.
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  • "We expected that Saudi Arabia would announce an end to the blockade of ports and airports and an initiative to allow in 14 ships that are held by the coalition," the Houthis' chief negotiator, Mohammed Abdulsalam,
  • The United States and the U.N. have been trying to end what they call the world's worst humanitarian disaster. President Biden has pledged to use diplomacy to end the war and to allow more refugees to come to the U.S.
  • In a briefing, U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said he welcomed the Saudi proposals, and that U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths has been working toward these goals. Asked about the Houthis' rejection of the Saudi offer, Haq said Griffiths would be in touch with all parties to discuss moving forward with Saudi Arabia's proposal.Peter Salisbury, senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, says the Saudi proposal is essentially a new take on an idea that was put forth a year ago.
  • Salisbury says he believes the Saudi proposal is likely aimed at pressuring the Houthis. For now, he predicts more talks, more air strikes, and more fighting on the ground
  • The conflict has become a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Years of fighting have left 80% of Yemen's population reliant on aid and millions are on the brink of starvation.
  • The war in Yemen began in 2014, when Houthi militants supported by Iran overthrew the unpopular Saudi-backed government in Yemen's capital. A coalition of Gulf states — led by Saudi Arabia and with support from the U.S., France and the U.K. — responded with airstrikes, beginning in 2015.While the Biden administration has been critical of the way the Saudis have waged the war, it has also raised alarms about recent Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia.
  • The State Department said that in a call with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken "reiterated our commitment to supporting the defense of Saudi Arabia and strongly condemned recent attacks against Saudi territory from Iranian-aligned groups in the region."
  • The two officials reportedly expressed support for diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Yemen, "starting with the need for all parties to commit to a ceasefire and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid."State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said the proposal is "one step in the right direction," calling on all of the parties to negotiate under the auspices of the U.N.
magnanma

Pol Pot - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...pol-pot

shared by magnanma on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Pol Pot was a political leader whose communist Khmer Rouge government led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. During that time, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork.
  • The Khmer Rouge, in their attempt to socially engineer a classless communist society, took particular aim at intellectuals, city residents, ethnic Vietnamese, civil servants and religious leaders. Some historians regard the Pol Pot regime as one of the most barbaric and murderous in recent history.
  • In 1934, Pol Pot moved to Phnom Penh, where he spent a year at a Buddhist monastery before attending a French Catholic primary school. His Cambodian education continued until 1949, when he went to Paris on a scholarship. While there, he studied radio technology and became active in communist circles.
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  • Pol Pot, who had begun to emerge as Cambodian party chief, and the newly formed Khmer Rouge guerilla army, launched a national uprising in 1968.
  • Both the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol’s troops purportedly committed mass atrocities. At the same time, about 70,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers stormed across the Vietnam-Cambodian border to fight North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops who had taken sanctuary in Cambodia.
  • By the time the U.S. bombing campaign ended in August 1973, the number of Khmer Rouge troops had increased exponentially, and they now controlled approximately three-quarters of Cambodia’s territory. Soon after, they began shelling Phnom Penh with rockets and artillery.
  • Almost immediately after taking power, the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh’s 2.5 million residents. Former civil servants, doctors, teachers and other professionals were stripped of their possessions and forced to toil in the fields as part of a re-education process.
  • Under Pol Pot, the state controlled all aspects of a person’s life. Money, private property, jewelry, gambling, most reading material and religion were outlawed; agriculture was collectivized; children were taken from their homes and forced into the military; and strict rules governing sexual relations, vocabulary and clothing were laid down.
  • In 1997 a Khmer Rouge splinter group captured Pol Pot and placed him under house arrest. He died in his sleep on April 15, 1998, at age 72 due to heart failure. A United Nations-backed tribunal has convicted only a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity.
delgadool

In photos: Nigeria's civil war - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by delgadool on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Nigeria's civil war was one of the most divisive conflicts in post-independence Africa.
  • declared the independence of the Republic of Biafra from Nigeria.
  • Estimates of the number of dead from fighting, disease and starvation during the 30-month civil war are estimated at between 1 and 3 million.
anniina03

A Hunger Strike in ICE Detention | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hunger-strike-in-ice-detention

politics US history Crisis

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.
  • Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.
  • Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.
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  • Over the past several months, the U.S. has been trying to stop Indian migrants before they even reach the border. Last week, Mexico deported more than three hundred Indian migrants who were waiting to cross into the U.S., under a deal with the Trump Administration to avoid tariffs on Mexican exports. In 2016, two anonymous ICE officials described to Buzzfeed the agency’s unofficial policy toward Indian asylum seekers: “Keep them out. If you catch them, detain them.”
  • When Kumar reached California, he spent a few days in a packed cell, and then he and other asylum seekers were put on buses and planes—with chains around their hands, feet, and stomach, “as if we were some criminals,” Kumar recalled
  • Kumar ended up in the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE facility managed by a private contractor, where he says his treatment worsened. The officers spoke to Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers in English and Spanish, and refused to provide translators (except when they filled out medical questionnaires), despite the fact that the migrants spoke only Punjabi and Hindi.
  • Force-feeding is painful and potentially harmful to patients, and organizations including the Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and the World Medical Association consider it medically unethical
  • But what made Kumar most upset was that he and the other migrants were subjected to “animal-like treatment”—foul language, aggression, and punitive responses to minor violations of the rules. “When they cursed at the Indians and treated them badly, I couldn’t stand seeing it, so I would speak out against them,” Kumar told me. “If I said something, they would put me in the SHU”—the Special Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement—“for fifteen days, ten days, by myself in a small room.” (ICE did not respond to my request for comment.)
  • In March of this year, Kumar learned that an immigration judge had rejected his application for asylum, finding the evidence of persecution he had presented not credible, and had ordered his deportation. Kumar filed an appeal. While he waited, he requested to be released on bond, something he had been asking for since he was apprehended, but ICE refused. Though ICE uses punitive measures against detainees, people in immigration detention are officially being held for an administrative violation rather than for a criminal offense, which means that, except in special circumstances, there is no legal limit on how long they can be held.
  • In July, Kumar went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention and looming deportation. “I decided if I am going to die, I’ll die here,” he told me. When the officers at Otero saw that Kumar had stopped eating and drinking, they sent him to solitary. A few days later, he could hear the officers putting others in SHU rooms near his. He couldn’t see or talk to them and only later learned that five other Indian men had also gone on hunger strike. He did not know what had sparked their protest, though the Otero staff considered him their ringleader, nonetheless. “I had one demand from the beginning,” he told me. “I just want my freedom. I didn’t ask for anything else.”
  • n mid-July, Kumar and three other hunger strikers were transferred to the El Paso Service Processing Center’s medical unit, in Texas, where Kumar was at times isolated from the others. ICE obtained a court authorization to force-feed them, a procedure that involves pushing a tube through a patient’s nose and down the esophagus. One of the migrants had just been treated for a nose infection, and, as ICE doctors placed the tube in his nostril, he began spitting blood and lost consciousness. According to Corchado, who also represented this detainee, the doctor administering the tubes told him, “End your hunger strike and we’ll stop this.” He ended the strike that night.
  • Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers were vegetarian because of their religious beliefs, and the staff sometimes taunted them and made them wait until everyone else got food before they could eat.
  • In January, a group of Indian asylum seekers dubbed the “El Paso Nine” banded together in a collective hunger strike. A court gave authorization for them to be force-fed, but the feeding was stopped after two or three weeks in the face of mounting pressure from politicians, activists, and lawyers. Seven of the strikers were eventually deported, and two were released to await rulings on their cases. But forty-nine members of Congress signed a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding an investigation into the use of force-feeding by ICE.
  • Kumar was taken off the feeding tube after nearly a month and then persisted in his strike. His weight dropped, as did his blood pressure and heart rate. He started getting severe abdominal pains. “I was literally seeing him die in front of me,” Corchado told me.
  • On September 12th, the court allowed ICE to resume force-feeding Kumar. The judge wrote in his opinion that he couldn’t order ICE to release Kumar, but he scolded the government for not having given Kumar an independent doctor’s evaluation and for what the judge called its “penological” treatment of him.
  • At the end of his hunger strike, Kumar weighed a hundred and seven pounds. He left the El Paso facility on September 26th and is now staying with an immigration activist in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is eating solid foods again, and gardening, and he recently enrolled in E.S.L. classes. But he can’t run like he used to, and he’s still regaining his vision after going partially blind from starvation. “I’m not fully recovered,” he told me, two weeks after his release. “There are some mental issues—I can’t remember everything. But I’m better than before.”
  • In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed to remand Kumar’s asylum case back to the immigration judge, concluding that the initial ruling, which judged Kumar’s testimony to be not credible, was “clearly erroneous.” Kumar’s case will be heard again, in December, by the same judge. His odds are not great—more than forty-one per cent of Indian asylum seekers were ordered to be deported from the United States last year, and the percentage is likely to be even higher this year.
yehbru

Opinion: Trump is considering a move that would prolong Yemen's misery - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Trump Yemen Civil War Politics United Nations Funding Supplies Terrorism

shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In one of its final foreign policy acts before leaving office, the Trump administration is considering designating Yemen's Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization.
  • The move is part of President Donald Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's campaign to impose more sanctions on Iran and its allies in the Middle East—and to create new hurdles that would make it difficult for the incoming Joe Biden administration to resume negotiations with Tehran.
  • this designation could prolong Yemen's brutal civil war and drive millions of Yemenis into starvation
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  • Yemen is already facing what UNICEF calls the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with around 80% of the population—more than 24 million people—needing food and other aid.
  • United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned that Yemen was "in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades." He added, "In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost."
  • If the Trump administration goes ahead with designating the Houthi rebels as terrorists, the UN and many international humanitarian groups likely would stop delivering aid to Houthi-held territory in Yemen for fear of running afoul of the United States
  • By March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of Washington's closest allies in the Arab world, intervened in the war with massive air strikes and a blockade of Houthi-controlled areas.
  • Since taking office in 2017, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he wants to end US involvement in foreign wars, especially in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Trump and his advisers blamed the war on Iran and its support for the Houthis, ignoring war crimes by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which could implicate US officials who continued to sell weapons to the two allies.
  • Despite international criticism and growing evidence of war crimes, Trump continued to support Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is a major proponent of the Yemen war. In 2019, Trump used his veto power four times to prevent Congress from ending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and its allies.
  • Designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization is likely to make the group more intransigent and to drive it closer to Iran.
  • Because of constraints imposed by the Houthis on humanitarian work, Washington has already cut nearly half of its assistance to Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen this year. In 2019, US aid amounted to more than $700 million.
  • The UN also decreased its food rations to millions of Yemenis because of reduced aid from the US and other donors. If the terrorism designation is finalized, Washington would immediately stop its remaining aid to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen.
  • A terrorist designation would also have a ripple effect beyond hampering the work of UN and humanitarian groups: it would dissuade insurance, commercial shipping and trade firms from operating in Yemen because they would be afraid of violating US laws.
  • As a result, it would become far more difficult and expensive to ship crucial supplies into Yemen, which is almost entirely reliant on imported food. The threat of sanctions or US prosecution could also devastate shipments of medical aid and other supplies intended to shore up a healthcare system that has been devastated by years of war and, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic.
  • It's also unlikely to be a top priority of the new administration, which could be worried about being portrayed as "soft" on terrorism.
  • The full scope of suffering in Yemen has gone partly unnoticed because of an unreliable death toll.
anonymous

Auschwitz survivors: First Jews sent to the Nazi concentration camp were teenage girls ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...997-teenage-girls-few-survived

history

shared by anonymous on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • Even amid the Jewish crackdown, it was still a surprise when the town crier announced a new order — all unmarried women 15 and older were to report to the school gymnasium in two weeks.They were told they would be registering for three months of work in a shoe factory, and that it was their patriotic duty to help in the war effort. But when they showed up to “register,” they were strip-searched, loaded into trucks and taken away. Most were teenagers, some were in their twenties, and a handful of mothers in their forties boarded in place of their daughters. None of those mothers would survive.
  • Over the next few days, Jewish girls were swept up from all the surrounding villages. By the end of the week, Friedman Grosman, then 17, and her sister Lea, 19, were on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz, arriving by train on March 27, 1942.But who ordered that first transport? And why take girls?
  • Himmler had ordered 999 German women from the Ravensbrück prison to be transferred to Auschwitz to serve as prison guards ahead of the Slovak girls’ arrival, she said. And that number — 999 — which may have been an occult obsession of Himmler’s, matched the number of girls who were supposed to be on that first Jewish transport. (Macadam found that authorities miscounted; in reality, there were 997.)
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  • “The parents, of course, [were] duped,” Macadam said. But “this was a patriarchal society, and you’re more likely to give up your daughter than your son.”
  • At first, it had been a Nazi prison for Poles of every ethnicity, then for Soviet POWs. By 1942, the Nazis were focusing on gathering up Jews, though they had not yet started their “Final Solution” — mass extermination.
  • In fact, the girls’ real job wasn’t to make shoes, but to build the very infrastructure that would convert the camp into a death machine.
  • Most of them died that first year — of starvation, disease, beatings, medical experiments and suicide.
  • Though Auschwitz was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945, most of the surviving girls weren’t there to see it. As Soviet troops approached, they were forced to go on death marches through feet of snow, then were moved to other concentration camps deep in Germany.
  • Many female survivors struggled to have children because of the cruelties they were subjected to; plus, other survivors sometimes treated people with “low numbers” tattooed on their arms with suspicion, as though they couldn’t have survived that long without doing something unforgivable.
brookegoodman

Soviet Union: Stalin, Cold War & Collapse | HISTORY - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...history-of-the-soviet-union

politics culture crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The world’s first Marxist-Communist state would become one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, occupying nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface, before its fall and ultimate dissolution in 1991. The United Socialist Soviet Republic, or U.S.S.R., was made up of 15 soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
  • A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.
  • Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.
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  • Between 1928 and 1940, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated.
  • Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police.
  • The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide.
  • The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
  • At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.
  • On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.
  • Gorbachev’s glasnost plan called for political openness. It addressed personal restrictions of the Soviet people. Glasnost eliminated remaining traces of Stalinist repression, such as the banning of books (like Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning “Dr. Zhivago”) and the much-loathed secret police (though the KGB wouldn’t fully dissolve until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991). Newspapers could criticize the government, and parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.
  • During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes.
  • An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.
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