Dealing with the dishonorable and the inconvenient (2)

WARNING: This video contains details some readers may find distressing.
Former senator Murray Sinclair, who chaired the (Canadian) Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
delivered this statement on the discovery at Kamloops residential school. https://cbc.ca/1.6049525 *
9:58 ( https://twitter.com/CBCIndigenous/status/1400527710150041601 )
- CBC Indigenous @CBCIndigenous | 3:00 PM · Jun 3, 2021

* Canadians should be prepared for more discoveries like Kamloops, Murray Sinclair says
'We must know what happened,' says former senator, chair of Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Benjamin Blum | Jun 01, 2021

(transcript)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sinclair-kamloops-residential-remains-1.6049525

Statue of Egerton Ryerson toppled after hundreds rally in downtown Toronto
Statue felled amid calls from profs, students to rename university, remove figure
CBC News | Jun 06, 2021

...Since (Kamloops discovery), there have been calls from Indigenous professors and students to change the university's name and remove Ryerson's statue from campus for his role in the creation of Canada's residential school system. ...Indigenous students at the university called on fellow students, faculty and alumni to stop using the name Ryerson in their email signatures, correspondence and on their resumes, urging them instead to call the school X University.

...In a statement posted to Twitter before the statue was felled, the university said: "We share in the grief and sorrow of our community at the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children near Kamloops, and acknowledge that further and ongoing reconciliation is of vital importance."

It also said a task force created to examine Ryerson's legacy and collect feedback from community members is committed to delivering a final report, including recommendations regarding the statue and name of the university, before the fall semester...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/statue-of-egerton-ryerson-brought-down-1....

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Ontario legislature moves Egerton Ryerson painting and bust after request by Opposition
Request made following radar discovery of Indigenous children's remains in Kamloops, B.C.
Shawn Jeffords | Jun 04, 2021

...(Edgerton) Ryerson (a Methodist Minister, educator and politician in the 1800s) was one of the architects of Canada's residential school system, which sought to convert and assimilate Indigenous children into Canadian culture and saw them suffer widespread physical and sexual abuse.

...the bust and portrait of Ryerson that were previously displayed outside (NDP leader Andrea) Horwath's office on the third floor of the building were moved Thursday. As of Friday, both had been placed into storage.

... and remove a statue of Egerton Ryerson from its campus.

Earlier this week, (Toronto's Ryerson) University's school of journalism said it would rename two of its publications (one, the Ryersonian) ahead of the new school year, dropping any reference to the man the school is named after...

Kingston was first capital of Canada before Queen Victoria chose Ottawa instead. There are numerous historical places associated with its first PM, Sir John A MacDonald, e.g., his home, law office (now a great little pub recently renamed), modest burial site, and a statue commanding the center of a downtown park. If I recall correctly, previous demands to remove that statue were met with the establishment of a working group to instead educate on racist and colonial policies of his time and instigation. Also an indigenous name is to be given to Third Crossing, an important bridge now under construction. I suspect that the statue will come under new scrutiny/attack (red paint at the least). Unlike Ryerson(?), MacDonald also has his supporters, from bused-in tourists who visit his former home and leave flowers on his modest grave to those of a more activist nature (http://supportjohna.com/).

Kingston group grapples with role of Sir John A. in residential schools
Brigid Goulem | Jun 03, 2021

The Kingston-based History and Legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald Working Group...discussed the role of Macdonald in these schools, and recognized that while Macdonald was not the sole architect of these institutions, he played a crucial role in the design and maintenance of these schools. The discussion is in line with the responsibility of the group, which is to consider the history and legacy of Macdonald and to address the colonialism and systemic racism that persist as a result of his policies, with the aim of sharing this information at city landmarks.

Many group members expressed that the statues and tributes to Macdonald throughout the city offer an opportunity to educate the public on his racist and colonial policies with a focus on the horrors of residential schools.

Group member Laurel Claus Johnson stated that while the statue serves as an opportunity to educate, Macdonald should not be raised on a pedestal.

“This particular notion of the statue is an opportunity to educate, but take him down off his pedestal. This man should be standing on the ground, not elevated on a horse,” she said.

Other group members reiterated the need to educate the public on the consequences of Macdonald’s policies, with Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte Chief R. Donald Maracle suggesting seeking outside guidance from Queen’s (U) chancellor and former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Sen. Murray Sinclair.

...Johnson echoed (Sinclair sentiment that Canadians should know the truth)... She shared her hope that the legacy of these children, who died before their time, will be to make known the horrors that were endured at residential schools across Canada.

“Two hundred and fifteen released spirits, now into our minds and our bodies, they are saying ‘no more secrets.’ They are telling us by their actions, by what’s needed,” she said.

https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/kingston-group-grapples-with-role-of-sir...

>2 margd: Even Macdonald's supporters couldn't overlook Kamloops:

Sir John A. remembered despite having failed Indigenous Canadians
Michelle Dorey Forestell | June 7, 2021
https://www.kingstonist.com/news/sir-john-a-remembered-despite-having-failed-ind...

...In his opening remarks, host Don Richardson,* secretary of KHS (Kingston historical Society), was careful to acknowledge, “The comments I make now were taped on June 2, but the remaining portions of the commemoration ceremony were taped on May 24, days before the horrific situations at Kamloops came to be known. The Kingston Historical Society agreed that it is absolutely critical that the following comments be made.”

He went on slowly and carefully pronouncing each word, “All-consuming grief, palpable sorrow, anger, horror, questions with no answers, anguish: these are not the words which I would normally use on behalf of the Kingston Historical Society in beginning today’s service of commemoration to Sir John A Macdonald. They are, however, rendered absolutely essential in light of the recent discovery of the burial site of 215 indigenous children found at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

“We cannot begin to imagine the horror experienced by the families of so so many indigenous peoples. And it is a horror shared by all Canadians,” he said.

...Remarks on the commemoration of the death of Sir John A. Macdonald, by Hon. Hugh Segal, OC, OOnt, CD

“History tells us we pay tribute to a great and good politician. No politician, however compelling his achievements, is only great and good. There is always another side. History seeks to reflect accurately on historical events and time.

For all of Sir John A’s leadership, creativity, and determination to shape a country of four colonies — a country that has on balance been a force for good in the lives of millions — the frame of reference that drove his work was not one that recognized the sense of injustice and lack of obligation that Canadians now understand to be essential to the reconciliation and respectful partnership with First Nations. Sir John A. did nothing to stop the residential schools put in place before he was Prime Minister. That there was hunger and suffering on the part of indigenous people during his time is not something we should treat lightly.

The 19th Century was what it was: for all the vision, expansion, growth and progress associated with the Victorian era, that vision did not include any sense of fairness or justice for First Nations residents of Canada or even the United States, to say so clearly and forthrightly now is and will always be necessary. The fathers of confederation took root and succeeded in a 19th Century where humility and compassion and understanding of our Indigenous peoples were not part of the political culture. It would be wrong today to ignore that fact...

https://www.kingstonist.com/news/sir-john-a-remembered-despite-having-failed-ind...
____________________________________________________

* The KHS president began his remarks with a land acknowledgment, a (universal?) practice in this corner of Ontario. They aren't perfunctory either, inclusive as they are. Elsewhere, do others acknowledge tribes/First Nations who first occupied the land, I wonder? I wonder how far back they go: I once accompanied an archeologist as she registered ancient sites of peoples whose cultures no longer exist.

http://landacknowledgements.org/
https://nativegov.org/a-guide-to-indigenous-land-acknowledgment/

Brittlestar @brittlestar | 11:06 AM · Jun 8, 2021:

LET'S UNCANCEL HISTORY
1:09 ( https://twitter.com/brittlestar/status/1402280947530317831 )

The racist legacy many birds carry
The birding community faces a difficult debate about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers
Darryl Fears | June 3, 2021

...Even John James Audubon’s name is fraught in a nation embroiled in a racial reckoning. Long the most recognized figure in North American birding for his detailed drawings of the continent’s species, he was also an enslaver who mocked abolitionists working to free Black people. Some of his behavior is so shameful that the 116-year-old National Audubon Society — the country’s premier bird conservation group, with 500 local chapters — hasn’t ruled out changing its name. An oriole, warbler and shearwater all share it.

“I am deeply troubled by the racist actions of John James Audubon and recognize how painful that legacy is for Black, Indigenous and people of color who are part of our staff, volunteers, donors and members,” interim chief executive Elizabeth Gray said in a statement in May. “Although we have begun to address this part of our history, we have a lot more to unpack.”...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/bird-names-r...

In case of interest,

Indigenous Canada is a 12-module course from the Faculty of Native Studies (U of Alberta) that explores Indigenous histories and contemporary issues in Canada. Starts June 11. Audit for free on Coursera.

Worldview
Fur Trade
Trick or Treaty
New Rules, New Game
“Killing the Indian in the Child”
A Modern Indian?
Red Power
Sovereign Lands
Indigenous Women
Indigenous in the City
Current Social Movements
‘Living’ Traditions – Expressions in Pop Culture and Art

https://www.ualberta.ca/admissions-programs/online-courses/indigenous-canada/ind...

Canada's first PM, Sir John A Macdonald himself asked for his modest headstone--bet HE wouldn't want statue in cemetery(?) Sure hope protests don't move with statue to Sir John A's grave: my great grandmother is buried nearby...

Macdonald statue to be moved to his Cataraqui Cemetery gravesite
Brigid Goulem | Jun 16, 2021

Kingston city council voted (8-5) Wednesday night to relocate the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, from City Park to his gravesite in Cataraqui Cemetery...

...While many councillors were open to the option to relocate the statue, the last-minute addition of the option left some with concerns. Councillors Richard Kiley and Peter Stroud expressed concerns over the vague nature of the suggestion to relocate the statue and the need for additional details to be determined before any movement can be made, while Coun. Jim Neill expressed his concern that the First Peoples Group and the Macdonald working group were not consulted on this option.

Mayor Bryan Paterson expressed his support for the relocation of the statue to Cataraqui Cemetery, though both he and municipal staff confirmed that the First Peoples Group, the working group and the Revolution of the Heart: Ceremonial Action were not consulted on the relocation of the statue to the cemetery...

https://www.thewhig.com/news/local-news/macdonald-statue-to-be-moved-to-his-cata...

Interesting perspective on why less violence against aboriginals in Canada than US--in west at least: with the fur trade, Canadian aboriginals had economic role, whereas in US they were seen as more of an obstacle to settlement. I knew that RCMP afforded protection, but the fur economy was underlying reason:

~"the fur trade would not have existed without the participation of first peoples if they're actually quite vital.
In this sense, and in contrast to other places, people had an economic role, they had a vital economic role and the Europeans understood that.

This is not a situation where it's good for long-term business to shoot your customers, or to shoot all your employees.
You just don't do those sorts of things. So this economic necessity created an economic space for aboriginal people
and for different people, it was different degrees of integration and participation.

And it was very different view than seeing native people as a nuisance or as a barrier to settlement.
So in the United States, where you don't have an enduring fur trade, what happens is violence is very prevalent.

There's a huge number of wars against Indians in the history of the United States.
And I would say that reflects the fact that there was little or no economic relationship.

So, any people in the states were simply a nuisance, a barrier, something to be disposed of.
Whereas in Canada because of an enduring fur trade, this was understood, and their economic importance was understood.
And this actually gave them a strong basis when they did approach the treaty talks."

- Frank Tough, Professor, U Alberta
Coursera: "Indigenous Canada"

(National Catholic Reporter, NCR) Editor’s note: It may seem like papal statements from 500 years ago are ancient history. But Native American activists and scholars insist that Catholicism's past continues to affect the present. Papal bulls from the 1400s condoned the conquest of the Americas and other lands inhabited by indigenous people. The papal documents led to an international norm called the Doctrine of Discovery, which dehumanized non-Christians and legitimized their suppression by nations around the world, including by the United States. Now Native Americans say the church helped commit genocide and refuses to come to terms with it...a six-part series on the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

1. Intergenerational grief on Cheyenne River Indian Reservation
Vinnie Rotondaro | Aug 31, 2015
https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/intergenerational-grief-cheyenne-river-in...

2. Boarding schools: A black hole of Native American history
Vinnie Rotondaro | Sep 1, 2015
https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/boarding-schools-black-hole-native-americ...

3. Limited housing, poor economy plagues reservation
Vinnie Rotondaro | Sep 2, 2015
https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/limited-housing-poor-economy-plagues-rese...

4. 'Reeling from the impact' of historical trauma
Vinnie Rotondaro | Sep 3, 2015
https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/reeling-impact-historical-trauma

5. Disastrous doctrine had papal roots
Vinnie Rotondaro | Sep 4, 2015
https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/disastrous-doctrine-had-papal-roots

6. Doctrine of Discovery: A scandal in plain sight
Vinnie Rotondaro | Sep 5, 2015
https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/doctrine-discovery-scandal-plain-sight

From Tudor courts to BLM, a new book brings London’s black history to life (Guardian)

The work highlights the plaques and art that celebrate a neglected side of the capital’s culture...

She’s 10ft tall, barefoot, with a simple wrap dress stretching across her breasts and belly. She holds aloft an infant, gazing into its eyes. This is Bronze Woman, a statue on a busy traffic junction in Stockwell, south London. Unveiled in 2008, it was then the first public statue of a black woman on permanent display in England...

English Heritage recognises Blyton and Kipling’s racism – but blue plaques to stay (Guardian)

Blue plaques left unchanged, but charity website details Blyton’s ‘old-fashioned xenophobia’ and Kipling’s ‘imperialist sentiments’...

Cotton plantations and non-consensual kisses: how Disney became embroiled in the culture wars (Guardian)

The company has been addressing its historical racism and sexism, adding disclaimers to films and altering theme park rides. But these moves have stirred contempt as well as approval...

>11 John5918: The most lively literature and movies for boys is full of cringeworthy images... I don't think my Asian adoptees thought less of themselves because of Disney's depiction of Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp ( https://video.disney.com/watch/siamese-cat-song-4be38740d6cafa0e1266b068 ), but depiction of Native Americans "burnum at stake" in Peter Pan obviously made an impression on my oldest son ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5-oMMJySD4 ). Our first pow wow turned out to be more of an educational experience--for both of us--than I anticipated. As we were about to step inside, he asked:

"Will there be smoke? From the fires?"
"No. Open fires aren't allowed inside buildings."
"When they're burning people?"
"WHUT??"

Of course we paused to straighten out an obviously nervous little boy, and by the end of our visit he answered an invitation to join the dancers in Grand Entrance procession.

Two Catholic churches on Indigenous lands torched on National Indigenous Peoples Day
Sacred Heart Church on Penticton Indian Band land and the Saint Gregory’s Church on Osoyoos Indian Band land in Oliver were both destroyed by fires deemed suspicious.
Athena Bonneau | June 21, 2021

...( Penticton Indian Band) PIB Chief Greg Gabriel said...it is not yet known what caused the fire, noting PIB is investigating. He says the band is working to salvage items from the rubble — including art by Clint George, a PIB member, and the church bell.

Gabriel said there is a lot of anger within the community stemming from the announcement in late May by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation regarding the discovery of the remains of 215 children on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

“If this fire was determined to be deliberate, our leadership certainly doesn’t condone those kinds of actions or behaviour,” Gabriel said. “I think there could have been better ways to deal with this church.”

The Sacred Heart Church has been closed since June 16 in response to a request from parishioners, who are members of PIB, according to Adam Eneas, a hereditary chief with the Okanagan Nation. He said he asked Bishop Gregory Bittman to close the church on behalf of a fellow parishioner “because of what’s going on with the residential schools.

“He was very open and accepting and wanting to learn about our problems, our history. We had a great meeting,” Eneas says. “He agreed that the church should remain closed until such time as they came to a better situation.”...

https://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/news/two-catholic-churches-on-indigenous-lands-...
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ETA: Not to be outdone, vandals paint the pedestal of Sir John A Macdonald statue (now removed). Just paint at least, and not blood. For now. :(

Site of former Sir John A. Macdonald statue tagged with white supremacist graffiti
John Lawless | June 22, 2021
https://globalnews.ca/news/7970025/john-a-macdonald-statue-kingston-2/
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On a more positive note, not far away from where PM's statue stood (1895-2021):

Indigenous Peoples Day ceremony unveils ‘Manidoo Ogitigan’ at Lake Ontario Park
Michelle Dorey Forestell | June 21, 2021
https://www.kingstonist.com/news/indigenous-peoples-day-ceremony-unveils-manidoo...

All whites living in North America are living on stolen Indigenous land.

If a white person is really sincere, and understands that they are benefitting from
genocide and theft ... then they will return to the continent of their ancestors, and leave
their stolen land to the rightful owners.

Of course, most whites are phoney. They pretend to sympathyze with indigenous people,
and condemn the crimes of others ... but they are very happy to continue enjoying the
stolen land and stolen property that their genocidal theiving ancestors took from the
indigenous people and passed on to them.

Interesting perspective, taken with U Alberta course "Indigenous Canada", free via Coursera:

The Fight Over Canada’s Founding Prime Minister
Attacks on symbols of nationhood are not merely symbolic actions. They strike at the nationhood the symbol represents.
David Frum | June 2021

...The Canada that Macdonald assembled in 1867 stopped just a little north and west of Lake Superior. The terrain beyond that—what’s now northern Quebec and northern Ontario; almost all of what’s now the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, plus a goodish chunk of Nunavut—was acquired by Macdonald from the privately owned Hudson’s Bay Company subsequent to confederation. Macdonald hoped that he could push a railway through the Hudson’s Bay lands to reach the British settlements on the Pacific and thereby bring them into Canada too. In the process, he also assumed sovereignty over Plains Indian nations already on the verge of catastrophe for reasons that had nothing to do with Macdonald or Canada.

In the early 19th century, an estimated 30 million to 60 million buffalo roamed west of the Mississippi, from West Texas up into Canada. These herds supported Plains Indians populations, who ate their meat and hoisted shelters out of their hides. U.S. railway-building disrupted the habitats of the buffalo. American settlers hunted them almost to extinction. As Canadian authority reached the Great Plains after 1870, it encountered an Indigenous population facing ecological crisis. Crisis turned to starvation in the early 1880s.

In the House of Commons in April 1885, Macdonald offered this explanation of his actions in response to the disaster.

When the Indians are starving, they have been helped, but they have been reduced to one-half and one-quarter rations; but when they fall into a state of destitution we cannot allow them to die for want of food. It is true that Indians so long as they are fed will not work. I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole, and I am sure it is the same with the Commissioner, are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense. The buffalo has disappeared during the past few years. Some few came over this year, and although their arrival relieved the Indians, it was rather sorry, looking to the future, that such was the case, as the Blackfeet, Bloods and Peigana who had settled on reserves at once returned to their nomadic habits and abandoned the settlements. It will occasionally happen that the agents will issue food too liberally … We hope that the Indians will now settle down, but Indians are Indians, and we must submit to frequent disappointments in the way of civilizing them.

In 2018, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation staged a debate over the question of whether Macdonald’s actions and inactions amounted to “genocide.” The accuser charged: “Forced starvation is the intentional deprivation of food necessary for survival. And we say it’s a crime against humanity for a government to carry out a policy of forced starvation against its own people.”

But the famine on the Plains in the 1880s was not set in motion by Macdonald or anyone else in Canadian government. The buffalo had genuinely gone, and not for a season or two, but forever. Something new had to be put in place, and again not for a season or two, but forever.

...Macdonald habitually referred to Indigenous people as “the original owners of the soil.” Macdonald’s defeated 1885 law to extend voting rights to female property owners would also have enfranchised many Native people. He attempted, also unsuccessfully, to recruit Indigenous people into what would become the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. To advance his hopes of equal citizenship for Native people, Macdonald initiated a plan to teach them farming and industrial skills. A network of residential schools was established, operated by churches. The schools separated children from their families in hope of speeding the acculturation process. They operated in English and French, not Native languages. In Macdonald’s day, attendance was voluntary, but after 1920 it became compulsory.

These schools proved to be a disastrous failure...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/defense-canada-prime-minister-...

The Met will return three African art objects to Nigeria (CNN)

Following recent moves by European museums to return African art treasures to Nigeria, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Wednesday that it is sending three objects back to the country...

Museum of the Home reopens to protests over statue of slave ship owner (Guardian)

The reopening of the Museum of the Home in London was met with protests on Saturday calling for the removal of a statue of slave ship owner Robert Geffrye following an intervention by the culture secretary to keep it in place. The museum, in Shoreditch, east London, wanted to take down the statue of the 17th-century trader and former lord mayor of London, who made part of his fortune from the slave trade, from the front of its building. But it decided not to after the charity’s trustees received a strongly worded letter from Oliver Dowden last summer, who has warned museums to “retain and explain” controversial statues. As doors to the Grade I-listed building, formerly called the Geffrye Museum, reopened on Saturday morning following a three-year renovation, it was met with calls from residents, activists and politicians, including the Labour MP Diane Abbott, that “Geffrye must fall”...

V&A insists it has ‘responsibility’ to tell truth about collections (Guardian)

The Victoria and Albert Museum has responded to government pressure to align with its stance on “contested heritage” by insisting that it has a responsibility to accurately explain the nature of its collections, including items it said were looted by British forces. The V&A was responding to a controversial letter from the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, in which he suggested that bodies could lose government funding if they fail to toe the line and warned against “actions motivated by activism or politics”.

The museum, based in London, one of many placed under a spotlight amid an often heated debate around calls for the decolonisation of museums, told Dowden: “Our view is that it is both impossible and ahistorical to seek to ‘decolonise’ a museum like the V&A given its foundational connection to the history of British imperialism. Instead, our responsibility is to ensure that we explain the nature of our collections, with historical rigour and accuracy, in a manner which speaks to modern, multicultural Britain and the global audience we serve in South Kensington and online”...

Via an indigenous friend, a bit of graciousness from Tom Fraser on FB re whether to celebrate Canada Day (July 1):

So a friend of mine asked if we should celebrate Canada Day. I think I answered her. But this is just my opinion.

So, I’m gonna qualify this by saying I am Mohawk of the Six Nations.

Bow your head in sadness, not shame. You didn’t write the laws that made these places. You didn’t run the churches that made these decisions. Your (mine too) government did. Old dead prime ministers did. Old dead popes, priests preachers and nuns did.

The country we live in was founded in exploitation, murder, genocide and thievery. But EVERY country in the world is. You didn’t know about these children because the government didn’t want you to know. I’m a conservative minded person, but thank god for liberals.

Now you know about them. You know about us. You are beginning to understand what we have gone and are going through.

So stand up. Celebrate Canada Day if you want. But celebrate it because we have been found. Celebrate it because our children are being recovered. Celebrate it because you don’t want this country to repeat what they have done.

We have been hear since Mother Earth bore the first brothers and sisters. We will be here when Grandfather (Moon) puts Mother Earth to sleep. We have always been here. But now you finally see us.

>18 margd:

Interesting comment. I happened to be in Spokane WA in the USA in October 1992 on the 500th anniversary of the invasion of north America by Christopher Columbus. I was doing my MA in Spirituality and our faculty had connections with some of the Native American nations in the area, and we were invited to attend their memorial of that fateful date which presaged a disaster for the indigenous peoples. For them the anniversary was not a celebration but a day of great sadness yet without bitterness, and we were impressed with the quiet dignity of their ceremonies and their desire for justice and reconciliation rather than revenge.

UN human rights chief calls for reparations over racism (BBC>

The United Nations Human Rights Council has urged global action including reparations to "make amends" for racism against people of African descent. Its new report also urges educational reform and apologies to address discrimination. The findings cite concerns in about 60 countries including the UK, Belgium, France, Canada, Brazil and Colombia...

377: The British colonial law that left an anti-LGBTQ legacy in Asia (BBC)

For much of the past two centuries, it was illegal to be gay in a vast swathe of the world - thanks to colonial Britain. Till today, colonial-era laws that ban homosexuality continue to exist in former British territories including parts of Africa and Oceania...

Currently, it is illegal to be gay in around 69 countries, nearly two-thirds of which were under some form of British control at one point of time. This is no coincidence, according to Enze Han and Joseph O'Mahoney, who wrote the book British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality. Dr Han told the BBC that British rulers introduced such laws because of a "Victorian, Christian puritanical concept of sex". "They wanted to protect innocent British soldiers from the 'exotic, mystical Orient' - there was this very orientalised view of Asia and the Middle East that they were overly erotic." "They thought if there were no regulations, the soldiers would be easily led astray."

While there were several criminal codes used across British colonies around the world, in Asia one particular set of laws was used prominently - the Indian Penal Code (IPC) drawn up by British historian Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, which came into force in 1862. It contained section 377, which stated that "whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal" would be punished with imprisonment or fines... The British went on to use the IPC as the basis for criminal law codes in many other territories they controlled. Till today, 377 continues to exist in various forms in several former colonies in Asia such as Pakistan, Singapore, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar and Sri Lanka...

The House Votes To Remove Confederate Statues In The U.S. Capitol
Barbara Sprunt | June 29, 2021

The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to remove all Confederate statues from public display in the U.S. Capitol, along with replacing the bust of former Chief Justice of the United States Roger Taney, author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared that people of African descent were not U.S. citizens.

The House passed the measure 285-120. All Democratic members supported the legislation; all 'no' votes came from Republican members...

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/29/1011303611/the-house-votes-to-remove-confederate-...

________________________________________________

FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 196
BILL TITLE: Directing the Joint Committee on the Library to replace certain statues in the United States Capitol
June 29, 2021
https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2021/roll196.xml

Among the yeas: McCarthy, Scalise
Nays: Jordan, Stephanik
Not voting: almost all Rs, including Gohmert

>18 margd: contd.

Mr. Fraser must have encountered some blowback(?). He added:

"***I feel it necessary to provide an edit to this post. Please read my subsequent comments, it clarifies much of what I have said.

This post was originally for a small group of friends. As such there is some omission and liberties taken.

I am not, nor have I ever professed to be, speaking for all indigenous of Canada. As I have said, there is some pain that is too great to conquer.

View this post as you want. Take from it what you will, but please don’t twist or manipulate my words. The post is quite literal and was not meant as a political or societal commentary. It meant for my friends to not feel a guilt they should not own.

Thank you to everyone that has shared this. Thank you for all of the wonderful, insightful and heartfelt comments ***

A sad, sad Canada Day...

Pope Francis to meet with survivors of Canada's notorious Indigenous schools amid demands for apology
AP | June 30, 2021

...The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said Francis had invited the delegations to the Vatican and would meet separately with three groups — First Nations, Metis and Inuit — during their Dec. 17-20 visit. The pope will then preside over a final audience with all three groups Dec. 20, the conference said in a statement Tuesday.

... the trip was contingent on the pandemic and that the delegations would include survivors of the residential schools, Indigenous elders and youths, as well as Indigenous leaders and Canadian bishops.

In recent weeks, investigators using ground-penetrating radar have reported finding hundreds of unmarked graves at the sites of two residential schools for Indigenous children...more than 600 graves in one school, 215 bodies in another *— have revived calls...for the pope to make a formal apology.

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society. Thousands of children died there of disease and other causes, with many never returned to their families.

Nearly three-quarters of the 130 residential schools were run by Roman Catholic missionary congregations, with others operated by the Presbyterian, Anglican and the United Church of Canada, which today is the largest Protestant denomination in the country.

The government formally apologized for the policy and abuses in 2008. In addition, the Presbyterian, Anglican and United churches have apologized for their roles in the abuse....

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pope-francis-meet-survivors-canada-s-notoriou...
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* 182 Bodies Found Near Third Canadian Residential School
Maggie Gile | 6/30/21

...The Lower Kootenay Band said in a news release it began using the technology last year to search a site near the city of Cranbrook that is close to the former St. Eugene's Mission School, which was operated by the Roman Catholic Church from 1912 until the early 1970s. It said the search found the remains in unmarked graves, some about 3 feet (a meter) deep.

The release said it's believed the remains are those of people from the bands of the Ktunaxa nation, which includes the Lower Kootenay Band, aqam and other neighboring First Nation communities...

https://www.newsweek.com/182-bodies-found-near-third-canadian-residential-school...
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Opinion: The racist legacy of Canada’s residential schools is still reflected in current policies
Alicia Elliott | June 2, 2021

...The Canadian government was aware of alarming death rates at these schools dating all the back to 1907. Less than 25 years after residential schools became official Canadian policy, Peter Bryce released the Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and Northwest Territories, which revealed 24 percent of all Indigenous children at residential schools had died of tuberculosis. Bryce went so far as to call residential schools “a national crime.”

Nothing changed. The schools remained open and their conditions remained horrific. This shows the Canadian government knew exactly what they were doing to these children — and, in turn, to the families and communities they stole these children from. They simply didn’t care.

They still don’t. Continuing the legacy of Canadian negligence and Indigenous genocide, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has spent $3.2 million fighting the survivors of St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in court since 2013. His government wouldn’t even hand over the records St. Anne’s survivors needed to apply for compensation under his government’s official assessment process until the Ontario Supreme Court forced them to in 2014.

This doesn’t even touch on the fact that, following in the footsteps of residential schools, social services in Canada have unfailingly targeted Indigenous children for removal from their homes since the infamous Sixties Scoop, which removed thousands of Indigenous children from their communities and placed them with White families in the 1960s. According to the 2016 census, the situation is even worse today. Indigenous children reportedly make up 52 percent of all children in foster care. Forcibly transferring children of one group to another group is one of the five acts listed as genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention.

Poverty is cited as one of the main reasons Indigenous children get taken from their families. I myself grew up poor. As a kid, my father had to train us on what to say to social workers so they wouldn’t take us away. I wrote about all this in my book (A Mind Spread Out on the Ground https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/588523/a-mind-spread-out-on-the-ground-b... ), and I’m grateful to anyone who has read mine — or any other Indigenous writer’s work. But reading won’t stop the avalanche that is colonialism, nor will art alone rectify its ongoing, deliberate effects.

Only action can do that.

In the background of this latest gruesome discovery is the fact that only nine of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action have been fully implemented...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/02/canada-residential-schools-in...

___________________________________________

I'm far from their best student, but am finding much to think about in U Alberta course "Indigenous Canada" available free on Coursera:

#CancelCanadaDay
Actions to Support Indigenous People on Canada Day
https://twitter.com/DaveAlexRoberts/status/1409677852685963269/photo/1

_____________________________________________

Above: "Indigenous children reportedly make up 52 percent of all children in foster care" is shocking when one considers that 3-4% of Canadians identify as aboriginal. Communities must be falling apart! Still, as "aunt" to young man who is half-native, I hope that first priority continues to be welfare of individual children. Fix home communities and find culturally appropriate homes whenever possible, but not at the expense of the child. (Welfare authorities can be amazingly inventive in Canada in finding solutions in best interest of the child, which is why I am aunt in quotation marks. )

Delivering on Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action
Learn how the Government of Canada is responding to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls to Action.

(1-5 deals with child welfare.)

https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1524494379788/1557513026413

Amsterdam mayor apologises for city’s past role in slave trade (Guardian)

The mayor of Amsterdam has apologised for former governors’ extensive involvement in the global slave trade, saying the moment had come for the city to confront its grim history... {Mayor} Halsema said history cast a shadow that reached into the present day. “The city officials and the ruling elite who, in their hunger for profit and power, participated in the trade in enslaved people, in doing so entrenched a system of oppression based on skin colour and race,” she said. “The past from which our city still draws its distinctive commercial spirit is therefore indivisible from the persistent racism that still festers”...

Slovenian street name row highlights tensions over former dictator (Guardian)

Thirty years after Slovenia achieved independence, a bitter dispute over a street that since 1979 has been named in honour of Marshal Josip Broz Tito has highlighted how the former leader of the federation of Yugoslavia continues to divide opinion in central Europe. A municipal decree changing the name of Tito Road, or Titova cesta, in Radenci, a town in north-east Slovenia, to Cesta osamosvojitve Slovenije, or Road of Slovenian Independence, has been debated in the country’s highest court. A referendum was even mooted as a solution in the face of opposition...

V&A exhibition will use 250 objects to highlight creativity of African fashion (Guardian)

An exhibition about African fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum will attempt to reframe the narrative about the continent, showcasing its independence and creativity following decades of false assumptions...

Mary Simon was ambassador to Denmark, has CBC background (like many a former Governor General). I'm surprised she doesn't have better command of French language, coming from Quebec. I know at least a couple of senior military and civil service people who were sent for up to a year of intense French instruction--one fellow was close to retirement.

Trudeau Appoints Canada’s First Indigenous Governor General
Dan Bilefsky | July 6, 2021

...Ms. Simon, an Inuk from Kuujjuaq, a village in northeastern Quebec, said on Tuesday that her appointment would help engender reconciliation...Indigenous leaders praised (Mary Simon) as a skilled diplomat who was well placed to champion Indigenous concerns and mediate between the country’s disparate groups.

“Mary is a diplomat, an advocate and a strong Inuk Woman,” Perry Bellegarde, the president of the Assembly of First Nations, a national organization representing Indigenous people, wrote on Twitter.

The Native Women’s Association of Canada said it was proud to have an Inuit in such a prominent representative role, but cautioned that Ms. Simon was “being asked to serve the senior role in what is still a colonial system of governance.”

It called for the Canadian government to re-examine who was leading Canadian ministries dealing with Indigenous issues and services.

While leaders across the political spectrum applauded her appointment as an important moment for Indigenous rights, Ms. Simon’s lack of fluent French, one of Canada’s official languages, was noted by some media in her native Quebec. She spoke on Tuesday in English and Inuktitut, reading a couple of sentences in French...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/world/canada/indigenous-governor-general-mary...

------------------------------------------------------
Not sure if this is still the case, but for a while the Akwesasne community, which lay on US and Canadian sides of the St. Lawrence R, had its own passport.

Indigenous people can now reclaim traditional names on their passports and other ID
Long-awaited policy change follows Truth and Reconciliation Commission's recommendation
Christopher Reynolds | Jun 14, 2021

...In a judicial review being heard in Federal Court on Monday, the federal government is arguing against Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decisions regarding compensation for First Nations children in foster care and the expansion of Jordan's Principle to children who live off reserves.

Miller said Monday the ruling ordering Ottawa to pay $40,000 each to some 50,000 First Nations children separated from their families by a chronically underfunded child-welfare regime, and to each of their parents or grandparents, "doesn't respect basic principles of proportionality."

Every First Nations child who has suffered discrimination "at the hands of a broken child-welfare system" will be "fairly, justly and equitably compensated," he said.

Most of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 calls to action remain unfulfilled, though cabinet ministers pointed to a pair of bills that would incorporate Indigenous rights into the oath of citizenship and align Canada's laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Bill C-8 on the citizenship oath has passed the Senate and awaits royal assent, while the UNDRIP provisions of C-15 continue to work their way through the upper chamber.
1st commissioner of Indigenous languages announced

Mendicino also said his department continues to work on updating Canada's citizenship guide to emphasize "the role and stories of Indigenous peoples, including those parts that relate to residential schools." The revised document will be released "very shortly," he said...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/indigenous-traditional-names-passport-1.6064850

>8 margd: contd.

Sir John A. Macdonald’s gravesite in Kingston, Ont., vandalized
Alexandra Mazur | July 6, 2021
https://globalnews.ca/news/8005783/sir-john-a-macdonald-gravesite-kingston-vanda...

‘Such a relief’: Charlottesville onlookers cheer the removal of Confederate statue (Guardian)

Hundreds gathered to see the monument to Robert E Lee, once a rallying point for white supremacists, hoisted off its pedestal...

New Cross fire tragedy should be taught in schools (Guardian)

The story of the New Cross fire should feature as part of the national curriculum, according to Steve McQueen and the makers of a documentary about the tragedy that happened 40 years ago and changed race relations in the UK for ever.

McQueen’s three-part documentary, Uprising, tells the story of the fire, and the Black People’s Day of Action and the Brixton riots that followed it in 1981, with the Oscar-winning director believing the restive period should be taught in schools.

“These are historical moments, not just for black British people, but for British people in general, because these events have been reverberating throughout the nation,” McQueen said...

‘Not in this town’: artwork about Britain’s ‘nuclear colonialism’ removed (Guardian)

An Australian artist has accused a group of Conservative councillors of using “bullying strategies” to silence and censor her work after an installation she created to highlight Britain’s “identity as a colonial nuclear state” was removed from a park in Essex. The councillors threatened to “take action against the work” if it was not removed, according to Metal, the arts organisation that commissioned and then removed the installation from Gunners Park in Southend...

Confederate statue removed from city hall in Louisiana after 99 years (Guardian)

Spectators cheered Saturday as a stone statue of a Confederate general was hoisted by a crane and removed from a pedestal where it stood for 99 years in front of a city hall in south Louisiana. The removal came a day after United Daughters of the Confederacy signed a settlement agreeing to move the statue of Gen Alfred Mouton or let the city do so...

"Slovenian street name row highlights tensions over former dictator (Guardian)"

Fuck the Guardian and its pig-ignorant centre-right hankerings.

If Slovenians retained the name of the street honouring Tito all this time AFTER they left the federation--thirty years and counting of liberal democracy--then it stands to reason that they didn't see him as a nefarious "dictator", but as someone worthy of such a honour.

These so-called "tensions" are deliberately created because the rightwing creep Janez Janša is holding on to power by the skin of his teeth and like all of his sort from Trump to Orbán puts his hopes in a culture war.

>18 margd:

Government doesn't run the churches in Canada and as far as I know never did, although it's certainly appropriate that the government should apologise and make amends for not protecting the people it supposedly represented. But has your perennially criminal church apologised for its vast abuses? Last I heard, crickets.

>34 LolaWalser: At least some governments in US and Canada still pay churches and church entities to educate and to deliver other services to people--healthcare, foster care, adoption, (ETA: education) etc.--without ensuring that all legal options are made available to women, children, gays, etc. So yeah, governments are complicit.

(I'll post book and author when I find it, but was shocked to learn that 42% of indigenous kids died of TB in one school, per an MD who reported to the Canadian Government in early 20th c. He wrote the book when Ottawa failed to act. Still, crickets.)

As I understand all but one church has apologized for treatment of indigenous kids in residential schools. I assume having invited indigenous reps from Canada to Vatican this fall, Pope Francis intends to apologize.

>33 LolaWalser: If Slovenians retained the name of the street honouring Tito all this time AFTER they left the federation--thirty years and counting of liberal democracy--then it stands to reason that they didn't see him as a nefarious "dictator", but as someone worthy of such a honour.

Cf. >32 John5918:. In my experience, changing things like street names is way more about the body of people who liked that period in history as opposed to the body who want it erased from monuments than anything about the person in the street, who generally has better things to do with their life than spending time on street name changes. Bad names can stick for decades, because nobody cares about enough to push through the bureaucracy.

New website launches to support decolonial scholarship and efforts at Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame)

In May, Accomplice, a student-led website and multimedia hub launched in an effort to elevate decolonial scholarship, conversations, and activism related to the University of Notre Dame...

“We want to create a convening place for threads that are critical to the larger conversation not only of decolonizing Notre Dame, but also to living out decolonial methodologies... Not just asking what does this mean, but how do we actually do this work?”...

“In light of its professed values, the University should engage in a robust and necessarily critical reflection on the ways in which it fails to promote social justice and thereby contributes to injustice... This reflection should address both historical and current practices and should cover both the dynamics of the University and its relationship to the South Bend communities”...

Soldier statue reignites Spanish row over fascism (BBC)

There is unease in Spain over plans for a Madrid statue honouring soldiers who spearheaded Franco's fascist movement.

This week marks the centenary of what is often described as the most shocking defeat in the history of the Spanish military - the annihilation of a colonial force at the Battle of Annual, in what is now northern Morocco...

>36 prosfilaes:

Meaningless twaddle, as if handwaving empty generalities can make up for opinion about things you haven't got the slightest inkling about. Either you know the specifics of the case or you don't, and it's clear that you don't.

Slovenian public, in particular, has been polled again and again on the issue of placenames since the independence and while many have been changed, the ones that honoured Tito and Slovenian national heroes have often been kept with extremely high public approval (over 80% for keeping the names). There are streets and squares named after Tito in half a dozen Slovenian towns, not because people "forgot" to change them, but because they WANT to keep them. It's a political choice, not an accident.

And that's not all. Slovenia one might almost understand, they left the federation at the least cost, why not pretend they had been on the right side of history in WWII with a few nods to the socialist past. But, even the fascistoid regimes in Croatia and Bosnia not only didn't succeed (yet) in erasing Tito's name everywhere, there are more placenames in his honour in these two than in Slovenia. Now, I don't know what's going on in Bosnia, but as for Croatia, that's no coincidence, no passively arising situation.

But what would you know? You'd have to actually care about the history and politics of these countries and follow what's been going on.

In 2003, with the Holocaust-denier Tudjman's fascist regime in full power, a call-in poll of some 8000 people ranked Tito "the greatest Croatian".

In 2021, with the rightwing havoc still burning through the land, we're still remembering that:

https://www.nacional.hr/najveci-hrvati-tito-je-jedini-hrvatski-drzavnik-koga-je-...

I've no taste for hero worship. But I do know whose name, between any number of proud members of the enslaving, colonialist, imperialist, racist countries militating for the greater glory of capitalism, and the antifascist leader of the non-aligned across the world, is a "bad" name.

>35 margd:

Edit: we'll see.

>40 LolaWalser: Meaningless twaddle, as if handwaving empty generalities

You're the one who said "thirty years and counting of liberal democracy".

But I do know whose name, between any number of proud members of the enslaving, colonialist, imperialist, racist countries militating for the greater glory of capitalism, and the antifascist leader of the non-aligned across the world, is a "bad" name.

Tito's not the worst asshole the world's ever seen. But of all these western nations you're bashing, their leaders have the distinction of having ruled over intact nations, nations that haven't had the worst genocide Europe has seen since WWII. The only one of those nations that's had a serious successionist movement is the UK, and that was handled peacefully. But instead of Tito creating a country that could stand together or break apart peacefully (like Czechoslovakia), he left a country that killed 100,000 and displaced four million in bloody civil war. As for racist countries, Serb v. Croat v. Bosniak violence doesn't count?

>41 prosfilaes:

You're the one who said "thirty years and counting of liberal democracy".

In Slovenia. Nothing general about that, I was precisely responding to John's link about an event in Slovenia.

nations that haven't had the worst genocide Europe has seen since WWII...

Seriously, just fucking stop. Learn that your robo-responses are not necessary every time your Yankee rightwingery gets triggered by some mention of a non-capitalist system or random Communist. That post is so idiotic it's almost... pitiful.

I'm done with your 4channish assclownery. In the future, kindly avoid piggybacking on posts I address to other people.

>33 LolaWalser:

Thanks, Lola. I wasn't aware of all that detail and it certainly sheds more light on the issue. I suppose in many countries there are figures in their past who have a chequered record, good and bad, and who are still respected not just by a single small die-hard interest group (such as the Confederates or white supremacists in the USA, or the Tory party in the UK) but by a broad cross section of society. Winston Churchill could be described as a militaristic, imperialist, colonialist, racist and misogynist alcoholic, but I doubt whether the British public would ever want to see his statues removed from public view. His World War II achievements are generally viewed as outweighing or redeeming his less savoury characteristics. World War II still has a cherished place in the British national myth.

>41 prosfilaes: The only one of those nations that's had a serious successionist movement is the UK, and that was handled peacefully.

Not sure to which UK "secessionist movement" you are referring. If you mean Scottish and Welsh independence movements, yes, they have been handled peacefully. But Ireland's quest for independence in the early part of the 20th century, and Northern Ireland's Troubles for the last thirty-odd years of that century, were certainly not handled peacefully.

A turning point: New Zealand museums grapple with return of stolen Māori remains (Guardian)

New Zealand has long fought to have indigenous remains held overseas returned – now it’s reckoning with its own colonial legacy...

>42 LolaWalser: In the future, kindly avoid piggybacking on posts I address to other people.

If you want to talk to someone privately, message them, don't post on an open forum.

your Yankee rightwingery gets triggered by some mention of a non-capitalist system or random Communist

So you want to exclude 300 million people, including the majority of the people on LibraryThing?

In any case, it wasn't a non-capitalist system; it was a dictator. You praise the leader of the non-aligned; why? It's a bunch of nations acting in their own self-interest. It doesn't even seem to have the ethical bases that the US and Soviet Union at least espoused. Half the time, it was led by a dictator, and seem to have no impact on stopping wars among its members or doesn't seem to have cared about crimes against humanity inside its members. Being the leader of the non-aligned movement was no more or less praise-worthy than being the leader of the American Dairy Association.

>45 prosfilaes: the non-aligned

I think you're overly harsh on the non-aligned movement. Many small nations found themselves uncomfortably sandwiched between the two great superpowers, the USA and USSR, and were often the victims of the proxy wars which were part of the Cold War; the Cold War came to define world politics even for those who wanted no part in it. It's hardly surprising that they sought to bolster and support each other and to try to have a common voice against the two big bullies on the block; it was indeed "in their own self-interest". That they were less successful than one might have wished is due to a variety of factors, many beyond their control. There's a saying in Africa: when two elephants fight it's the grass which suffers (or is trampled). The non-aligned nations often found themselves being trampled by the two big elephants.

Sounds like fewer residential schools per capita in the US?

"...According to (AP) report, over 150 residential schools were run by US Catholic and Protestant churches during the 19th and 20th centuries...The majority of the schools, 84, were run by the Catholic Church, while 21 were run by Presbyterians, 15 by Quakers, and 12 by Methodists."... https://thepostmillennial.com/ap-report-calls-for-a-reckoning-for-us-churches-th...

Lost Lives, Lost Culture: The Forgotten History of Indigenous Boarding Schools
Thousands of Native American children attended U.S. boarding schools designed to “civilize the savage.” Many died. Many who lived are reclaiming their identity.
Rukmini Callimachi | July 19, 2021

...The discovery of the bodies in Canada led Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head the department that once ran the boarding schools in the United States — and herself the granddaughter of people forced to attend them — to announce that the government would search the grounds of former facilities to identify the remains of children.

...In 1775, the Continental Congress passed a bill appropriating $500 for the education of Native American youth. By the late 1800s, the number of students in boarding schools had risen from a handful to 24,000, and the amount appropriated had soared to $2.6 million.

...Carl Schurz, the secretary of the interior in the late 1800s, argued that it cost close to $1 million to kill a Native American in warfare, versus just $1,200 to give his child eight years of schooling, according to the account of the historian David Wallace Adams in “Education for Extinction.” “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Capt. Richard H. Pratt, the founder of one of the first boarding schools, wrote in 1892. “In a sense I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/us/us-canada-indigenous-boarding-residential-...

Tulsa race massacre: 19 bodies reinterred as protesters demand criminal investigation (Guardian)

The bodies of 19 people exhumed from an Oklahoma cemetery during a search for victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre were reburied in a closed ceremony on Friday, despite objections from protesters outside the cemetery... As many as 300 people were killed in Tulsa in 1921 when a white mob destroyed a prosperous neighbourhood known as Black Wall Street. Others protesting Friday’s reburial called for a criminal investigation. “The found remains – a skull with a bullet hole – that seems like you’re just beginning to get somewhere" in investigating the deaths...

In Algeria, France’s 1960s nuclear tests still taint ties (France 24)

More than 60 years since France started its nuclear tests in Algeria, their legacy continues to poison relations between the North African nation and its former colonial ruler.
Advertising The issue has come to the fore again after President Emmanuel Macron said in French Polynesia on Tuesday that Paris owed "a debt" to the South Pacific territory over atomic tests there between 1966 and 1996. The damage the mega-blasts did to people and nature in the former colonies remains a source of deep resentment, seen as proof of discriminatory colonial attitudes and disregard for local lives...

Jacinda Ardern apologises for New Zealand ‘dawn raids’ on Pasifika people in 1970s (Guardian)

New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has issued a formal apology for historic racist policing of Pacific people and offered scholarships to Pacific students. Hundreds of people packed Auckland town hall on Sunday to hear the apology for the “dawn raids” of the 1970s during which authorities hunted for visa overstayers. The practice took place under both of New Zealand’s major political parties, beginning with Labour prime minister Norman Kirk and continuing under the National’s Robert Muldoon. Studies have since shown Pacific peoples were no more likely to overstay their visas than migrants from the US and UK, but were much more likely to be prosecuted. The state-backed discrimination and subsequent deportations separated families and devastated communities...

Hundreds demand reparations for Windrush generation (Guardian)

Hundreds of people have gathered in south London to call for reparations and restored citizenship for the Windrush generation and their descendants... “This is not just about compensation. Reparation is about repairing harm, and there’s a lot of harm going on today. We are in a state of emergency. Our children are dying, we have been misled, we have been hoodwinked. Our people have been sold a lie about our life here in Britain. Now, after many of our foreparents have worked their butts off, they’re being deported... We are here today, honouring so-called Emancipation Day. But we’re also sending a key message to the British state and other European governments that we have not forgotten the injustices against our foreparents”...

Dishonourable swine without compare:

U.S. issues new Cuba sanctions, Biden promises more to come

Seventy years of trying to crush Cuba wasn't enough, including through the starvation years of post-USSR collapse?

Swine.

>43 John5918:

Actually I meant to draw your attention to the fact that The Guardian isn't the leftist platform of yore (as I'm told it used to be) but nowadays regularly gives space to right wingers and the right wing perspective. I expect they find that financially rewarding?--or in any case necessary, in these post-knowledge, clickbait-happy days.

The shallow, uninformed views of Eastern European history (or any non-Anglo space) of course aren't particularly new, nor is the tendency to peddle Cold War propaganda in the guise of analysis. But as the generations succeed one another and an ever more general crash of education and standards becomes ever more evident, it distresses me no end that these vapid know-nothing formulas are on track to supplant the last trace of reality.

Forgot to say...

>43 John5918:

Winston Churchill could be described as a militaristic, imperialist, colonialist, racist and misogynist alcoholic, but I doubt whether the British public would ever want to see his statues removed from public view

Your analogy would work far better with the Queen, if one wanted to understand the feeling around Tito. She is unelected, yet wildly popular, so much so that even some (or most) among the republican-inclined bridle at insulting her.

Tito was like that, Yugoslavia's Elizabeth. His personality, determination, activity brought his party success during and after the war. He was the person leading the greatest, most significant native body of resistance in Europe. Not only that, after the war he had the chutzpah to defy Stalin, alone in Eastern Europe and with no help or sympathy from the West. This is why even those like the anti-Communist wing of my family, pre-war liberals and social democrats, respected Tito.

And he got to be "the dictator" because he was special, not vice versa. Yugoslavia was a land of peasants with a peasant king. The king was remarkably, genuinely beloved.

https://www.itinari.com/kumrovec-tito-s-birthplace-and-the-most-famous-village-i...

"Comrade Tito was born here", says the sign. Not "the dictator". Again, it takes knowing the history of the place and these people to understand why this is so. Stupid, facile formulas that equate anything that calls itself a "democracy" with "freedom" and good etc. conveniently leave out the myriad examples of degraded trash, from Hitler to Trump, that was properly "elected".

Finally, in contrast to Churchill, not only was Tito NOT imperialist and racist, colonialist and militaristic, he was the figurehead of a movement explicitly ANTI-colonialist, -imperialist, -racist. I'd say Tito and his politics age far better than Churchill. The world today still needs exactly what Tito's Yugoslavia stood for--peace, disarmament, cooperation, socialism.

>53 LolaWalser: Your analogy would work far better with the Queen, if one wanted to understand the feeling around Tito. She is unelected, yet wildly popular, so much so that even some (or most) among the republican-inclined bridle at insulting her.

Except that she's powerless. She's not a political leader; she's a figurehead.

after the war he had the chutzpah to defy Stalin, alone in Eastern Europe and with no help or sympathy from the West.

"However, in 1948 Tito broke decisively with Stalin on other issues, making Yugoslavia an independent communist state. Yugoslavia requested American aid. American leaders were internally divided, but finally agreed and began sending money on a small scale in 1949, and on a much larger scale in 1950–53."

Besides that little bit of factual error, the simple fact is that many people in Eastern Europe had the chutzpah to defy Stalin, and many of them died for it. One could mention the 1956 Hungarian Revolution; I was about to name check Imre Nagy, but it looks like there were many nameless heroes that gave their lives to free Hungary and are more worthy of remembering than a oligarch who tried to follow the changing winds.

"Comrade Tito was born here", says the sign. Not "the dictator".

Der Führer, not der Diktator. And I always take my advice from signs pointing out the historical significance of small villages, because they're always quite accurate and appropriately critical regarding their native sons.

Stupid, facile formulas that equate anything that calls itself a "democracy" with "freedom" and good etc.

I think that deserves a good old Bronx cheer. Criticizing "Stupid, facile formulas that equate anything that calls itself a ..." is a pretty clear sign you've built yourself a strawman.

Hitler wasn't elected to be leader of the country; he seized power. And the Weimar Republic is considered to be showing the signs of a rotten democracy, brought down by people like you, who thought it would be better to give power to their Comrade or Führer forever than have to continually compromise with their neighbor.

As for Trump, he and his are signs of deep rottenness in the US democracy. But one of the key points of a democracy is that a leader is temporary, but the nation is permanent. We kicked his ass out after four years. That's one of the features of a democracy; when the people have a problem with a leader, the people can toss them out, without an assassination or a coup.

he was the figurehead of a movement explicitly ANTI-colonialist, -imperialist, -racist

Explicitly in what ways? Because at the same time Tito was dictator, most of the English empire was dismantled. Actions speak louder than words, and actions taken personally, against one's self-interest mean a lot more than criticizing someone else for their actions.

(Apparently they're against interfering in internal affairs, but demand self-determination for Puerto Rico. The problem of Puerto Rico is the population is evenly enough split between status quo, independence and statehood that no result will win, unless, as has been done a couple times, the voting questions are manipulated to force a particular choice, in which case the vote has usually seen wide boycotting or lots of ballots left blank. If there's an honest, fair vote and it goes for independence or statehood, then pressure can be put on the US, not that it will help.

Likewise, disarmament, good, not letting Iran and North Korea get nuclear weapons, bad.)

The world today still needs exactly what Tito's Yugoslavia stood for--peace, disarmament, cooperation, socialism.

Sure. Oh, wait, it turns out we got Erich Honecker instead of Tito; let's impeach him or vote him out... oh, damn. That's sort of the classic reason we don't have dictators.

And great, Tito's Yugoslavia stood for this stuff. I'll put it on my list with Marcus Aurelius's Roman Empire to visit if I ever hit the area. Again, with nations instead of demigods, some of the Eastern European nations flew well--Eastern Germany, Baltic Republics, etc. Some had their problems, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary, Romania, in no particular order. Yugoslavia failed ugly and bloody. I'm sorry if I can't wax romantic for Tito's Yugoslavia when it proved to be so bad for its people.

>51 LolaWalser: Do you know why the US still has so many sanctions on Cuba? Most Americans don't care. There's one group that does; I'll give you a hint; it starts with a C and rhymes with Cuban-Americans. Some might say if Cubans in exile insist that every step be taken to crush Castro's regime then that must mean that something is wrong with that government, but hey, everything is always the US's fault. Just like everything is about the educational system and not about people being disinclined to agree with people who call them swine and praise anyone who opposes them.

>54 prosfilaes:

I think your fairly uncritical acceptance of Cuban-Americans' political viewpoint is a bit simplistic. The voice of the diaspora from any country is of course a voice that needs to be heard, but they are often out of touch with the reality in their home country and are still fighting whatever battle caused them to leave it many decades ago. Someone started a thread on Pro and Con a few weeks ago based on the propaganda from a couple of white South African exiles in Thailand of all places; I've met similar ones in Australia and elsewhere, and I've also lived in South Africa and seen a much more nuanced situation there than is portrayed by these people. I've seen factions within the Sudanese, South Sudanese and Ugandan diaspora still fomenting political and ethnic division while people at home are trying to overcome those divisions. Irish-Americans continued to buy weapons for the IRA while people at home were trying to negotiate for peace. One person's "liberation struggle" is another person's "terrorism". By all means include the diaspora in the conversation, but also include the reality on the ground at home and a more general international consensus. Very few things are black and white - there's usually a large grey area.

>53 LolaWalser:

Thanks, Lola. Interesting nuances.

UN criticises UK for failure to redress colonial-era landgrab in Kenya (Guardian)

The British government has been criticised by the UN for a lack of resolution over colonial-era crimes committed in Kenya. Six UN special rapporteurs have written to the government expressing concern over its failure to provide “effective remedies and reparations” to the Kipsigis and Talai peoples. The Kipsigis and Talai clans of Kericho county, Kenya were brutally evicted by the British army between 1895 and 1963 to make way for lucrative tea plantations owned by white settlers. Having never received any form of redress for the human rights violations they suffered, they filed a complaint to the UN calling for an investigation in 2019. Lawyers say the UK pursued an intentional policy of violent displacement after realising the land in Kericho County was suited to growing tea, and argued the treatment of these Kenyans amounted to a gross violation of human rights...

US to return 17,000 looted ancient artefacts to Iraq (Guardian)

The United States is returning more than 17,000 ancient artefacts that were looted and smuggled out of Iraq after the 2003 US invasion, including a 3,500-year-old clay tablet that bears part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iraq has said. Tens of thousands of antiquities disappeared from Iraq after the invasion that toppled its leader, Saddam Hussein...

>55 John5918: There's considerable modern migration, with the most recent numbers I saw being 56,000 in FY2016. But at least some of the pressure is going to come from those who left Cuba in the 1960s and their children who may have never set foot in Cuba.

The point was that the US is supporting these restrictions because the citizens who care about how we treat Cuba support these restrictions, and those citizens are Cuban-Americans. Maybe there's a grey area where we can't just call them swine, and have to listen to what is often their personal experience in Cuba. Maybe it's not because US is a big imperialist nation, but because the Communist government has done a lot of people wrong, and whether or not it's just or rational, those Cubans are unhappy about restrictions being let up on Cuba while that government that hurt them is still in power.

>57 John5918: between 1895 and 1963

I.e. the period of time when all the Communist states took private property and executed dissidents and at some points anyone who looked like they might be a dissident. I know, it's a combination of "you can't get blood from a stone" and "it's very hard to get anything from a sovereign government, and your best hope is one that can be guilted into obeying rulings." Will India pay for its imperialist conquest of Hyderbad ( https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24159594 ) and subsequent atrocities? I doubt it. The US managed to apologize and financially recompensate victims of the Japanese Internment centers, but I think India is going to wait for everyone to be dead and treat it like the US does slavery: "I mean, it was real bad, but it happened a long time ago, so what can you do?" I'm pretty sure the people throwing stones at the US and the UK aren't going to care about anything a non-aligned nation did.

>58 prosfilaes:

If the UK and USA have done wrong, if their own societies recognise that they have done wrong, then they have a responsibility to deal with that wrong regardless of what anyone else does.

Australia to spend $813M to address Indigenous disadvantage
Rod McGuirk | Aug 4, 2021

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s government on Thursday pledged 1.1 billion Australian dollars ($813 million) to address Indigenous disadvantage, including ( AU$378.6 million (US $279.7 million) compensation (by 2026) to thousands of mixed-race children who were taken from their families over decades.

The compensation of up to AU$75,000 ($55,400) in a lump sum plus up to $AU7,000 ($5,200) for expenses such as psychological counselling will only be available to mixed-race children who had been under direct federal government control in the Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory and Jervis Bay Territory.

...Most members of the Stolen Generations had been under state government control when they were separated from their Indigenous mothers under decades of assimilation policies that ended as recently as the 1970s.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison ...“This is a long-called-for step recognizing the bond between healing, dignity, and the health and well-being of members of the Stolen Generations, their families and their communities...To say formally not just that we’re deeply sorry for what happened, but that we will take responsibility for it”...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/australia-to-spend-813m-to-address-indig...

'We want trillions to heal our wounds' (BBC)

In between the blue water of the Atlantic Ocean and the luscious golden dunes of the Namibian coast are the grounds of a former German concentration camp. It was here at the start of the 20th Century where the Ovaherero and Nama people were subjected to sexual violence, forced labour and gruesome medical experiences. Many died of disease and exhaustion...

Mr Kaapehi explains what happened generations ago still has a profound impact on his livelihood. "Our wealth was taken, the farms, the cattle, everything, I was not supposed to suffer this as I'm talking," he says...

Historians have called what happened between 1904 and 1908, in what is now Namibia, the first genocide of the 20th Century. It is when German colonial forces displaced and killed thousands of Ovaherero and Nama people after an uprising against the colonial rulers. It is estimated that 60,000 Ovaherero, more than 80% of the ethnic group's total population in the region, and 10,000 Nama, 50% of its population, were killed in this period. In May, the German government for the first time formally recognised the colonial-era atrocities. It acknowledged the massacres as a genocide, pledging to pay a "gesture to recognise the immense suffering inflicted". But Germany did not label the gesture as reparations...

"The first genocide of the 20th century", and yet few people in the Global North have even heard of it.

>62 TheToadRevoltof84:

Except you've fallen in the Great Fallacy Pit of Right Wing Delusion.

The Democrats of the Civil War evolved during the 20th C. Civil Rights Movement to oppose all the vestiges of slavery and right the wrongs of discrimination and Jim Crow preserved in the South by Dixiecrats. Dixiecrats were the cult of white racists that still wore and hid beneath the Democratic Party's banner.

When the Democrts passed the Civil Rights laws in the late 60s, endowing Constitutional humanity on African Americans, it was a spit in the eye too far for the bigoted Dixiecrats who abandoned their cover and chose to live out in the open within the party they recognized as more aligned with their prejudices. The Republican Party. A Party that has not changed since the Dixiecrat immigration other than to become more cruel and rigid.

While it took the Democratic Party 100 years to evolve into the party of the people, it took the Republican Party only 8 years to devolve into the refuge of racists, beginning with Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy." Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts the two parties have continued their separate paths of diverging ideologies.

In the Republican Party's case, the Nation hopes it has run its course; the present day Party is simultaneously exploding (into assorted violent mobs) and imploding by eating its own and by abandoning political policy making and governance for the intellectually lazy life of personality worship, simply devolving into a cult. Republicans have chosen the path to barbarism and self-destruction. They turned their backs on the gifts of the 18th C. that informed the Age of our forefathers, Reason & Enlightenment; they have foresworn the gift of Rousseau's Social Contract, which underpins our democratic government and society; they have repudiated the tenet of "all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights." Instead, they embrace the malign ideals of nationalism, of racial superiority belonging to whites, of privileges of rank and wealth superceding the rights to opportunity and access. They have kicked aside the concept of the common good in favor of adulation of tyranny embodied in one man. That is a combination whose sum is savagery.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party has embraced the change that time always brings. It recognized in the early history of the 20th C. how to make a real difference that improves people's lives as exemplified by Social Security, Civil Rights Act, Obama Care, Voting Rights Protection, by the passage of laws that protect individual rights of oppressed minorities, by forthright effective action to stop the unnecessary deaths from a pandemic, and by meaningful job creation legislation, direct economic stimulus to those in need, and proposals for infrastructure and fair taxation. All of which, from the time of FDR to the present have been resisted, opposed, voted against, undermined, and attacked with the intent to destroy by the Republicans. To no avail. Fortunately for this country, Democrats know how and are unafraid to govern effectively simply by honoring the democratic gifts of our forebears and always viewing the future as a thing to be made better instead of feared, remembering that their power comes from those who are down, not up; from the governed, not those who would govern; from the common, not the empowered; and from the least of these, not the greatest few.

What nature does, so must people. What people do, so must politics. That 'what' is evolve. It's the only direction that ensures survival.

>62 TheToadRevoltof84: Have you read about generational wealth. Read up on it and see if you think it will mean one bit to pay reparations.

E.g. you're claiming that "I mean, it was real bad, but it happened a long time ago, so what can you do?"

Don't bother with the idiotic, the parties switched claim.

So the Republicans are the same people they've always been; thus "There is no success great enough to justify the employment of women in labor under conditions which will impair their natural functions." (Republican Party Platform of 1924) and they're against women in the workforce, as well as ("The Republican party ... favors the extension of the suffrage to women, but recognizes the right of each state to settle this question for itself.") (Republican Party Platform of 1916) universal female suffrage?

There can be no question that in 1964, the Republicans ran a candidate who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act against the Democratic LBJ who signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and that exactly six states voted for Goldwater, Arizona, and Louisiana through South Carolina, including Georgia which had never before voted for a Republican for president.

But again, facts only care about conservative feelings, right?

>65 TheToadRevoltof84:

Yeah, I know. Facts bite. Bites hurt. You're afraid of pain. That's why you can't handle the truth.

>65 TheToadRevoltof84: You're on a fucking book website. No, I'm not going to spend 22 minutes of life watching a video I could read in 5. Especially not from PragerU.com. Sources matter, and you don't even try.

The parties didn't switch. They changed, they evolved. But somehow states can switch in 8 years but parties are eternal, even though it's clear they're not.

The Hypocrisy Is Mass x Acceleration in Us

After the Republican governor twin set, Abbot and Costello DeSantis, issued no mask mandates, businesses (cruise lines) and school boards (Broward Cty.+ 5-6 other districts in FL & second largest school district in TX + others) Texans and Floridians are defying their governors. FL's governor has threatened to cut off pay for superintendents in the rebellious counties. EPIC FAIL. Even more schools districts are mandating masks in defiance of their Republican governor.

Why? Take a look at the state of their states in COVID case numbers, hospitalizations, percent ICU beds available, and deaths.

Texas Gov Greg Abbott is begging for out-of-state health care workers. Meanwhile Odessa, TX hospitals request portable morgue.

Florida Gov Ron DeSantis is begging for out-of-state ventilators. Meanwhile, Brevard Cty. hospital system has just placed a refrigerated trailer portable morgue on its property.

Sad. But ya get what ya vote for.

#68–the problem is that some people who didn’t vote for DeSantis or Abbott will get it and die. Probably not as many but collateral damage sucks all around as a concept.

The other is there will be spread outside Florida and Texas and other states particularly in the south where the virus is running wild. The irresponsibility of these asshole right wing politicians matters. The anti-vaccine preachers and holier than thou pundits like Carlson should have their crosses shoved right up their asses.

>70 TheToadRevoltof84: I gave you too much credit previously. The video is only 5 minutes long...?

I see, the 22m is the number of viewers. I see now it has a transcript.

Fact: Republicans actually became competitive in the South as early as 1928, when Republican Herbert Hoover won over 47 percent of the South's popular vote against Democrat Al Smith.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ElectoralCollege1928.svg (go ahead, look at it, and click through the maps. They're not controversial; I first saw them twenty five years ago in a high-school level American history textbook.)

That is, in 1928, when Hoover won 40 out of 48 states, he still lost Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina (plus Massachusetts and Rhode Island). Winning an election by 15 points and still losing a state is not being competitive there.

In 1952, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower won the southern states of Tennessee, Florida and Virginia.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ElectoralCollege1952.svg

That is, Eisenhower won 39 out of 48 states, losing Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina and (cut and paste here) Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

And in 1956, he picked up Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, too.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ElectoralCollege1956.svg

And lost Missouri. So now he's up to 41 out of 48 states, with a 14 point lead over his opponent, and he's still losing Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. He won the country by 14 points, and lost by 33 points in Georgia and Mississippi, and came in third in South Carolina, being beat by T. Coleman Andrews of the States' Rights Party.

Richard Nixon, the man who is often credited with creating the Southern Strategy, lost the Deep South in 1968.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ElectoralCollege1968.svg

Wait, what happened to 1960 and 1964? We're not going to mention those years? We're not going to mention that Goldwater in 1964 won Arizona and (cut and paste) Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, and that Georgia had never, ever voted Republican before. We're just going to say that Nixon lost the Deep South in 1968 and not mention that it was to George Wallace, not the Democratic candidate? The guy who said

It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever. First Inaugural Speech as Governor of Alabama, (January 1963)

? The fact that they rejected Nixon for a man more openly racist might be interesting, if this was an honest discussion.

https://newrepublic.com/article/158320/western-origins-southern-strategy says "Ironically, Nixon really did almost nothing to appeal to Southern racists in 1968, for an obvious, but frequently forgotten, reason: Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate, had all their votes in his pocket and made blatant racial appeals the foundation of his campaign. Even as president, Nixon did very little, substantively, to appeal to the South. On the contrary, he moved rapidly to desegregate the schools and established affirmative action programs to aid black workers and businesses. It is now largely forgotten, but the reason Nixon made Spiro Agnew his running mate is because he had a reputation for being good on civil rights, having pushed for open housing laws as governor of Maryland. On balance, Nixon’s record on civil rights is pretty good, according to historians." How much Nixon played the Southern Strategy is debated but what's not debated is that Nixon lost the Deep South to Wallace, not Humphrey.

"If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so."

Look at those maps. Explain those maps. It is clearly bullshit to say that they waited until the late 1980s to do so. In 1956, Eisenhower (R) dominated the election, losing only in a few states mainly in the deep South, that mainly hadn't gone Republican since 1880 or 1884.W In 1960 those states went Kennedy or to Byrd, a third party. In 1964, those states are basically the only ones to go Republican. In 1968, the larger South went for Nixon, but Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia went for Wallace.

My understanding is that seniority rules in Congress at the time kept many Congressmen in their parties even when it would have seemed natural for them to move to other parties. I unfortunately can't find a cite at this time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/26/what-we-get-wrong-about-southe... expands on the issues. It's not that simple, but you posted a 600 word video lecture from PragerU because you wanted it to be simple.

Again, the Southern Strategy in the words of Lee Atwater, one of its creators:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

You'll note that when she says "Its values today are conservative ones: pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-small government." those things disproportionately hurt black people; white people are wealthier and can afford to travel for abortions, and are less likely to have economic reasons to have abortions. Black people are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods with gun problems then in gated neighborhoods, and are more likely to get shot for being a black man with a gun (or cell phone, or who might be going for a gun). Pro-small government has been a southern dog-whistle for a long time; cut welfare, cut any form of support, and again, it hurts the poor more than the rich.

But no, let's summarize it in a five minute video that doesn't approach any of these issues, just tells people like you want you want to hear. And let me guess, you're going to go back to "big picture", which lets you avoid any of the facts.

Member has been removed for creating an account after being removed from the site for violations of the TOS.

>73 timspalding:

Thanks, Tim. There were significant similarities in style and content to not only one but two previous members.

>73 timspalding:

Now who can I play with?

Seriously, sometime shortly after Reincarnation, I noted in a post of his that one of my phrases used against his former self was misused against a post of mine. From then on, I felt I knew who I was dealing with. So, what could I do but toy with him?

Congrats for discovering the deception! We can now return to our regular Reality Based Community.

We're researching the issue. The member may have deleted themselves. But there are significant TOS violations on the other accounts. So if they come back, it will be after a suspension for previous offenses.

>75 Limelite: Don't feed the toad :-)

C’est la vie and au revoir to our little green attention seeking won’t be missed friend.

It would seem that some conservatives would like to attach themselves to Orwell and his 1984 novel. Mr. Toad being one I would suspect. Again though Orwell was an unrepentant and avowed democratic socialist and such right wingers who would do so are misconstruing his work perhaps deliberately and certainly barking up the wrong tree.

Britain’s imperial history deserves better than petty culture wars (Guardian)

Newcastle city council’s decision to add two plaques to its memorial to the Boer war of 1899-1902 has triggered a feverish reaction. One plaque will contextualise the colonial history of the war; the other will reflect the views of local residents. No sooner was the change announced than the right’s “whack-a-woke” culture warriors descended upon the city. But the council’s engagement with the legacy of the Boer war – and Britain’s blood-soaked role in it – should be welcomed by anyone who values serious and honest engagement with history...

500 years after Aztec rule, Mexico confronts a complicated anniversary (National Geographic)

Was the 1521 surrender of the great Indigenous empire to the Spanish crown a triumphant conquest, an existential tragedy—or even a genocide?...

>80 John5918: I think for a lot of people at the time, it was the two elephants fighting, that it was the thumb of one empire exchanged for the thumb of another. As the article briefly touches upon, Cortes had a lot of local allies.

For rightwing culture warriors, to shed light on past conflict is to insult our history (Guardian)

The problem with dishonesty is that you have to remember your most recent falsehoods to at least try to keep your story straight. In their pantomime “war against woke”, the UK’s statue defenders are incapable of remembering what they said just 12 months ago.

Last summer, when the statue of Edward Colston was toppled, those who howled in protest claimed that they were not seeking to defend the reputation of a slave trader – a man complicit in the deaths of 19,000 Africans – but were merely opposed to the destructive way in which the statue had been removed. Toppling statues, or even removing them from public display peacefully, they lectured, entailed “erasing history”.

The answer, they and the government argued, was to leave statues and monuments in place but add contextual details that made visible aspects of the past about which statues had previously been mute. This strategy – “retain and explain” – could be best achieved by attaching plaques to the pedestals on which monuments stand.
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Fast forward to 2021 and the same people seem to have forgotten that this was ever their position. With no statue toppled since Colston’s pavement dive, the statue-philes have been forced to make the most of slim pickings...

making changes to a city centre monument to 370 men from north-east regiments who died in the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. Topped with a statue of Nike, the winged Greek goddess of victory, the Boer war monument has plaques at its base that list the names of men from the region who died in South Africa 120 years ago. In a statement, the council explained that its aim is to “widen public interpretation of the South African war memorial” by installing “two information panels, one to interpret the statute and the other to shed light on its local connections in the city”. To those whose abilities of recall stretch all the way back to 2020, the council’s proposals sound very much like “retain and explain” and there is not much here to get excited about. No statues are to be removed, never mind toppled...

Yet in culture war Britain, even the non-story of Newcastle’s statue audit is enough to pull the hair-trigger of the anger-industrial complex... Yet with wearying predictability, the council’s proposal to provide additional historical information became national news and was caricatured as “cancelling history”...

>81 prosfilaes: Indeed. "Complicated", as the headline suggests.

Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History (New Yorker)

Great estates are among the country’s treasures. But their connections to slavery and colonialism are forcing visitors to reckon with myths they may not want to abandon...

Profits from enslaving Africans slopped misery onto North American shores, not just the Africans, but Scots and Irish cleared from the land by newly wealthy landowners.

In town of my birth, the Irish arrived in particularly sad shape: https://irishfaminestories.ca/en/kingstons_famine_orphans

And the desperate new arrivals weren't, in the long run, good news for the Indigenous people.

We are a weedy species...

Teachers in Scotland given guidance on decolonising the curriculum (Guardian)

Teachers in Scotland have been asked to heed anti-racism guidance which will give detailed examples for decolonising the curriculum, as well as a toolkit to address their own discomfort when discussing race. The Scottish government hopes the package of support material, released on Thursday, would “embed anti-racism and race equality into all aspects of school life” – and includes new guidance from Education Scotland on normalising diversity within the curriculum...

Dog collar or slave collar? A Dutch museum interrogates a brutal past (National Geographic)

Under pressure from former colonies and activists, a storied museum is digging deeper into its collections for a fuller narrative.

When a finely engraved 17th-century golden collar was donated to the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands’ national museum in 1881, it was labeled as a dog collar. But a few years ago, when the museum reexamined its collections for its recent exhibition on the Dutch slave trade, curators realized the beautiful object had an ugly past. “If you take a good look at the paintings of that period and you look for those collars, you find them not on the necks of pets but on the necks of young African men,” says Valika Smeulders, head of Rijksmuseum’s history department and a curator of the Slavery exhibit, which can be explored online...

Nigerians offer artworks to British Museum in new take on looted bronzes (Reuters)

A new guild of artists from Nigeria's Benin City has offered to donate artworks to the British Museum in London as a way to encourage it to return the priceless Benin Bronzes that were looted from the city's royal court by British troops in 1897. Created in the once mighty Kingdom of Benin from at least the 16th century onwards, the bronze and brass sculptures are among Africa's finest and most culturally significant artefacts. European museums that house them have faced years of criticism because of their status as loot and symbols of colonial greed. The Ahiamwen Guild of artists and bronze casters says it wants to change the terms of the debate by giving the British Museum contemporary artworks, untainted by any history of looting, that showcase Benin City's modern-day culture...

Statement of Apology by the Catholic Bishops of Canada to the Indigenous Peoples of This Land
Friday, September 24 2021

...Along with those Catholic entities which were directly involved in the operation of the schools and which have already offered their own heartfelt apologies1, we2, the Catholic Bishops of Canada, express our profound remorse and apologize unequivocally...

https://www.cccb.ca/letter/statement-of-apology-by-the-catholic-bishops-of-canad...
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Canada’s Catholic bishops formally apologize for role in residential school system
Jon Azpiri | September 24, 2021
https://globalnews.ca/news/8219268/canada-catholic-bishops-residential-school-ap...

David Olusoga: ‘Black people were told that they had no history’ (Guardian)

The historian and TV presenter on the story of former slave Olaudah Equiano and the significance of Black History Month...

Chimamanda Adichie tells Germany stolen artefacts in Europe must be repatriated (YouTube)

A twenty minute video which is well worth watching. She is an excellent speaker and puts the case very compellingly.

Nigerian artist says British Museum accepts his gift, keeps looted bronzes (Reuters)

An artist from Benin City in Nigeria said the British Museum had accepted his gift of a bronze plaque in what he felt was a possible first step towards the museum's return of the priceless Benin Bronzes that were looted by British troops in 1897. However, the museum told him an exchange of new for looted artworks was impossible, he said...

We argue over statues, yet history shows they’re really all about power (Guardian) by well-known historian Mary Beard

Today it’s ‘culture wars’ – but from Caesar to Colston, public art has long been reviled and reinterpreted...

For ‘unrecognised black women’: statue of Henrietta Lacks unveiled in Bristol (Guardian)

There were tears of joy and pride as the first statue of a black woman created by a black woman for a public space in the UK was unveiled in a sunlit garden at the University of Bristol... Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 in Baltimore, aged 31, from an aggressive form of cervical cancer, but a sample of her cells survived, multiplied and were used – without her family’s knowledge or consent – in research that helped create the polio vaccine, gene mapping and IVF treatment. After the story emerged, decades after her death, she was dubbed the “mother of modern medicine”...

Cambodia celebrates return of ancient Khmer sculptures from Douglas Latchford collection (Guardian)

Cambodian officials have celebrated the return of five important ancient Khmer sculptures from the collection of Douglas Latchford, among more than 100 his daughter Julia promised to return after his death last year...

Can't Miss the Irony of Evil Here

Taliban now guard site of Bamiyan Buddhas they destroyed. Probably they're guarding the empty stone niches against any attempts to "restore" the images. Or else, they're preparing to remove the bronze plaque at the site that reads, "The Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban authorities in 2001."

Asked if it had been a good idea to blow up the statues -- regarded as one of the greatest crimes against world heritage -- young Taliban member Saifurrahman Mohammadi does not hide his embarrassment.

"Well... I can't really comment," said Mohammadi, recently appointed to the Bamiyan province cultural affairs office.

"I was very young," he told AFP. "If they did it, the Islamic Emirate must have had their reasons.

"But what is certain is that now we are committed to protecting the historical heritage of our country. It is our responsibility."

The destruction is your historical heritage, and yes, you Taliban are responsible for it.

ICYMI, Afghanistan's new Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund was "one of the architects of the destruction of Buddhas."

I read this morning that the Taliban is engaging in a drug war by (of course) targeting the most vulnerable victims, addicts, instead of the dealers and manufacturers. They sure don't take the example of other countries (like the US) who have learned that jailing users doesn't, in any way, shape, or form, stems the flood of drugs into one's country.

Hong Kong University orders removal of Tiananmen Square massacre statue (Guardian)

The University of Hong Kong has ordered the removal of a statue commemorating protesters killed in China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. The 8-metre-high (26ft) copper statue was the centrepiece of Hong Kong’s candlelit vigils on 4 June to commemorate those killed when Chinese troops backed by tanks opened fire on unarmed pro-democracy campaigners in Beijing. The statue, called the Pillar of Shame, shows 50 anguished faces and tortured bodies piled on one another, and has been on display at Hong Kong’s oldest university for more than two decades...

US Soldier & Suspected Murderer under DOJ Investigation for Ukraine War Crimes

The Department of Justice in conjunction with the FBI is investigating seven Americans for taking part in what are described as war crimes while fighting in Ukraine.

One of the men, Craig Lang, a former US Army soldier, is already being scrutinized in the slaying of a couple in Florida, attempted to get three judges in Kyiv to let him remain in the country over fears over war crimes investigations if he returned to the U.S, telling them: "Any separatist or Russian soldier that I have killed would be a murder charge. Understand that some of my fellow combatants are under investigation by the FBI for war crimes."

"BuzzFeed News can reveal that the Department of Justice and the FBI have in fact taken the extraordinary step of investigating a group of seven American fighters, including Lang, under the federal war crimes statute. Authorities suspect that while in eastern Ukraine, Lang and other members of the group allegedly took noncombatants as prisoners, beat them with their fists, kicked them, clobbered them with a sock filled with stones, and held them underwater," the report states before adding, "Lang, the DOJ believes, may have even killed some of them before burying their bodies in unmarked graves."

Lang and the others are believed to be members of "Right Sector," a far-right nationalist group that formed a paramilitary force to serve in Ukraine upon the 2014 Russian invasion. "Right Sector" is described by BBC News as, ". . .the most radical (right) wing of Ukraine's Maidan protest movement that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014."

The DOJ appeal (to the Kyiv court) says, the Americans 'allegedly committed or participated in torture, cruel or inhuman treatment or murder of persons who did not take (or stopped taking) an active part in hostilities and (or) intentionally inflicted grievous bodily harm on them.'"

Crowded calendar--Oct 11, 2021 is Canadian Thanksgiving, as well as US Columbus Day and US Indigenous Peoples' Day.

September 30, 2021 Canada marked its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a statutory holiday.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/national-day-truth-reconcil...
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1041836090/canada-indigenous-residential-schools-...

Canada's Gov. Gen. May Simon (1st Inuk GG) helped feed hungry in Ottawa as her first public event Oct 8, 2021.
https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/gov-gen-may-simon-helped-feed-hungry-in-ottawa-as-dema...

Sure hope all this attention makes a difference in indigenous peoples' lives, especially kids who are over-represented in the foster care system.
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Goodbye, Columbus? Here's what Indigenous Peoples' Day means to Native Americans
Emma Bowman | October 11, 2021

...President Biden issued a proclamation on Friday to observe this Oct. 11 as a day to honor Native Americans, their resilience and their contributions to American society throughout history, even as they faced assimilation, discrimination and genocide spanning generations. The move shifts focus from Columbus Day, the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus, which shares the same date as Indigenous Peoples' Day this year.

...advocates say the recognition helps correct a "whitewashed" American history that has glorified Europeans like Italian explorer Christopher Columbus who have committed violence against Indigenous communities. Native Americans have long criticized the inaccuracies and harmful narratives of Columbus' legacy that credited him with his "discovery" of the Americas when Indigenous people were there first.

...It's all about reflection, recognition, celebration and an education...

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/11/1044823626/indigenous-peoples-day-native-american...

Land Acknowledgments Meant to Honor Indigenous People Too Often Do the Opposite

Land acknowledgments state that activities are taking place on land previously owned by Indigenous peoples. They’re popular—but they may harm more than they heal, say three anthropologists.

Elisa Sobo, Michael C. Lambert, Valerie Lambert | October 7, 2021

...in a move that surprised many non-Indigenous anthropologists to whom land acknowledgments seemed a public good, the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists requested that the American Anthropological Association officially pause land acknowledgments and the related practice of the welcoming ritual, in which Indigenous persons open conferences with prayers or blessings. The pause will enable a task force to recommend improvements after examining these practices and the history of the field’s relationship with American Indians and Alaska Natives more broadly...

‘What Was Once Yours Is Now Ours’...
Sovereignty and Alienation...
Respect and Restoration...

If an acknowledgment is discomforting and triggers uncomfortable conversations versus self-congratulation, it is likely on the right track.

https://theconversation.com/land-acknowledgments-meant-to-honor-indigenous-peopl...

Oxford college installs plaque calling Cecil Rhodes a ‘committed colonialist’ (Guardian)

An Oxford college has installed a plaque next to a statue of the mining magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes, describing him as “committed British colonialist” who exploited the “peoples of southern Africa”.

The explanatory panel about the former prime minister of the Cape Colony has been placed outside Oriel College, where he studied and left £100,000 – about £12.5m in today’s money – through his will in 1902.

The Oxford statue was the target of the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement, which originated in Cape Town and argues Rhodes is a symbol of colonialism and the violence that accompanies it...

Stealing Africa: How Britain looted the continent’s art (Al Jazeera)

During war and colonisation, Western nations participated in the theft of thousands of pieces of African art. This is the story of the role Britain’s anti-slavery mission played in looting African artefacts, and of the campaign to get them returned...

Kamala Harris: European colonizers ‘ushered in wave of devastation for tribal nations’ (Guardian)

Promising to speak the truth about American history, Kamala Harris told the National Congress of American Indians the Biden administration would not shy from a history since the first arrival of European explorers that she said was “shameful”.
Hundreds of Native Americans and other environmental activists rallied against fossil fuels on Indigenous Peoples Day in Washington. The US vice-president also highlighted an “epidemic” of murders of Native American women and girls, which she said “must end”...

The naming of the holiday for Columbus, a slave-holder and trader who brought disease as well as oppression to the Americas, has proven increasingly controversial, criticized on the left and defended on the right and among some Italian heritage groups. The White House this year issued twin proclamations, greeting both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day...

“Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past. We must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today”...

Mexico City to replace Columbus statue with pre-Hispanic sculpture of woman (Guardian)

A replica of a mysterious pre-Hispanic sculpture of an Indigenous woman has been chosen to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus on Mexico City’s most prominent boulevard...

Black History Tube map highlights London's black icons (BBC)

A Tube map celebrating the contribution black people have made to London since the Roman invasion has been issued by Transport for London (TfL). Station names have been replaced on the map with names of 272 notable black people, while Tube lines have also been renamed to link them by common themes...

Sámi people ask Danish queen to return sacred witchcraft trial drum (Guardian)

Norway’s indigenous people are asking for a sacred drum confiscated by Denmark after a witchcraft trial in 1691 to be returned to them permanently, and they have asked the Danish queen for help. The drum belonged to a Sámi shaman, Anders Poulsson, who was arrested and imprisoned, according to court records. It was confiscated and became part of the Danish royal family’s art collection before being transferred to Denmark’s National Museum in 1849...

Why is my chemistry curriculum White? (Royal Society of Chemistry)

the need to decolonise the chemistry curriculums both at universities and in schools...

Proponents of decolonising curriculums typically focus on the history curriculum; but the science curriculum (both in schools and universities) is also littered with the fingerprints of colonialism. Students learn about Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and many other White men, but rarely about Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) scientists and their contributions to science. They are told that Thomas Edison developed the light bulb, but rarely that his device was useless without a modification by the Black American inventor Lewis Latimer. Medicinal chemistry is often taught without mention about Henrietta Lacks – the African-American whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge to create the critically important cell line HeLa, still used for medical research today. In analytical chemistry, few lecturers mention that the man behind Raman spectroscopy is an Indian physicist...

France remembers Paris massacre amid tensions with Algeria (Al Jazeera)

Pressure mounts on France to recognise the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerians as a ‘state crime’.

Sixty years ago, Algerians in Paris were arrested, killed, and drowned in the Seine by French police. They were peacefully demonstrating against a curfew on them months before the end of the Algerian war. Archives estimate that between 100 and 300 people were killed, but there is no exact figure. Historian Fabrice Riceputi says this is because what happened on October 17, 1961, in central Paris was a “colonial massacre”. “One of the characteristics of all colonial massacres in history is that it is impossible to make precise assessments,” he told Al Jazeera. Widely regarded by historians as the most violent repression of a protest in post-war Western Europe, many in France still refuse to confront it...

“It would mean that we finally accept to learn that the French Republic is not a perfect entity by definition. It is the heir of the Enlightenment, of the Declaration of Human Rights, but it is also the heir of this criminal colonial past”...

Links between railways and slavery to be explored in new research project (University of York)

Universities and museums across Yorkshire and the North of England will explore the links between the railways and the global slave trade as part of a new research project...

Germany intends to return Benin bronzes to Nigeria (DW)

A resolution is imminent in the dispute over more than 1,000 bronzes stolen from the former Kingdom of Benin. Germany wants to return all the objects to Nigeria... The German Press Agency (DPA) quoted Nigerian Information and Culture Minister Alhaji Lai Mohammed as saying that delegations of both countries have signed a memorandum of understanding in Nigeria's capital, Abuja. An agreement will follow before the end of December...

Argentinian judge indicts Franco-era Spanish minister on homicide charges (Guardian)

An Argentinian judge investigating cases that happened during the Franco dictatorship in Spain has indicted a former Spanish minister on four counts of homicide. Judge Maria Servini de Cuba, sitting in Buenos Aires, issued the ruling against Rodolfo Martín Villa, 87, interior minister between 1976 and 1979. The judge wrote that she considered Martín Villa “the prima facie perpetrator criminally responsible for the crime of aggravated homicide, repeated on at least four occasions, of which Pedro María Martínez Ocio, Romualdo Barroso Chaparro, Francisco Aznar Clemente and Germán Rodríguez Saíz were victims”...

Spain passed an amnesty law in 1977 that pardoned crimes committed by the Franco dictatorship. Hundreds of Spaniards have tried to get around this by turning to an Argentinian court, under the principle of universal justice, to address crimes committed against them and their families during General Francisco Franco’s 36-year rightwing dictatorship...

Revealed: how UK spies incited mass murder of Indonesia’s communists (Guardian)

A propaganda campaign orchestrated by Britain played a crucial part in one of the most brutal massacres of the postwar 20th century, shocking new evidence reveals. British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to urge prominent Indonesians to “cut out” the “communist cancer”. It is estimated that at least 500,000 people – some estimates go to three million – linked to the Indonesia Communist party (PKI) were eliminated between 1965 and 1966.

Recently declassified Foreign Office documents show that British propagandists secretly incited anti-communists, including army generals, to eliminate the PKI. The campaign of apparently spontaneous mass murder, now known to have been orchestrated by the Indonesian army, was later described by the CIA as one of the worst mass murders of the century. As the massacres started in October 1965 British officials called for “the PKI and all communist organisations” to “be eliminated”. The nation, they warned, would be in danger “as long as the communist leaders are at large and their rank and file are allowed to go unpunished”...

Cambridge University to return Benin bronze to Nigeria in historic moment (CNN)

Cambridge University is due to return a Nigerian artifact looted during a British raid to its country of origin, in a historic first. Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments will receive a Benin bronze cockerel from Cambridge's Jesus College later this month -- in a move the university called the "first institutional return of its kind." The Benin bronze was given to Jesus College by a father of a student in 1905, after it was first acquired in a 1897 expedition by British forces into the historic kingdom of Benin -- now part of modern-day Nigeria -- which resulted in the looting of thousands of bronzes from the region...

“A Snapshot of the Public's Views on History: National Poll Offers Valuable Insights for Historians and Advocates”
Pete Burkholder and Dana Schaffer | Aug 30, 2021

...Two-thirds of our survey takers considered history to be little more than an assemblage of names, dates, and events.

...Over three-fourths of respondents said it was acceptable to make learners uncomfortable by teaching the harm some people have done to others.

https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/...
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History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey
This project aspired to take America’s historical pulse by assessing public perceptions of, and engagement with, the discipline of history and the past.
https://www.historians.org/history-culture-survey

The harsh truths of partition in Ireland can’t be avoided in the name of reconciliation (Guardian)

Bland ceremonies avoid the difficult questions of imperialism, power and class that have divided the country...

Partition was imposed on Ireland a century ago, against the wishes of the majority of its people. The border was opposed not only by republicans, but also by the so-called “constitutional” nationalists of the Home Rule party, the labour movement and indeed many southern unionists. The birth of the border came as part of a violent process with what was to become the minority community in the new Northern Ireland effectively battered into submission...

The idea of “shared history” was always flawed, eliding as it did questions of imperialism, power, class and inequality and often attempting to avoid contentious issues... The issues that deeply divided Irish people a century ago were simplified or glossed over and the role of Britain virtually ignored. Ireland and Britain of course share history, but they did not share an equal history: only one was conquered by the other and only one became a global empire. Ultimately, and allowing for all the complexities and nuances that British rule in Ireland involved, in the last resort the Crown depended on force to hold Ireland. The imposition of the border and indeed David Lloyd George’s threat of “immediate and terrible war” if Irish delegates refused to accept the treaty in 1921 graphically illustrate this. Attempting to commemorate partition and avoiding mentioning these facts lest they give offence will ultimately satisfy nobody...

Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world

The creation of the modern, interconnected world is generally credited to European pioneers. But Africa was the wellspring for almost everything they achieved – and African lives were the terrible cost...

Starting in the 15th century, encounters between Africans and Europeans set the most Atlantic-oriented Europeans on a path that would eventually propel their continent past the great civilisational centres of Asia and the Islamic world in wealth and power. 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...

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... 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.”

Postlethwayt, Raynal and Defoe were surely right, even if they did not comprehend all of the reasons why. More than any other part of the world, Africa has been the linchpin of the machine of modernity. 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...

>106 John5918: the partition also brought a very bloody civil war in the South in the early 1920’s and hard feelings that went on for decades. Eventually in the North in the 60’s taking a cue from MLK and other black leaders in the United States a civil rights movement began to build in Northern Ireland but it was met with a lot of violence including state sponsored violence and squashed. This is when the IRA came back to the fore after a schism between leaders that effectively left two factions—the Officials who continued on as before and the Provisionals or Provos who began killing lots of people. Protestant paramilitaries like the UVF and UDA linked to the British military and Secret Services and the Province’s police force the RUC were already doing the same before the Provos came on the scene and so Ulster descended into chaos and violence for decades. There were political choices mainly from conservatives with power in the United Kingdom that helped allow all this to happen.

Why the witch-hunt victims of early modern Britain have come back to haunt us (Guardian)

The women killed as witches centuries ago are starting to receive justice. But let’s not glamorise the murder of innocents... If it’s a case of cultural amnesia, it’s hiding in plain sight. Halloween 2021 and online fast-fashion retailers are jolly with “witchy inspo”: cross-fusions of witch costumes and bunny girl outfits; miniature pointed hats worn at a jaunty angle, with a lipglossed pout. Meanwhile, designer Viktor & Rolf riffs on “wicked witches” in its haute couture shows (raven-winged leathers and laser eyes); “witchcore” trends on social media (an interior and lifestyle aesthetic centred on dark interiors, gemstones and, oddly, bread-baking); and influencers including the Modern Witch peddle a novel iteration of magical capitalism (spell-casting for business curse-removal, anyone?)...

Hartmut Hegeler, an activist German pastor, wants his nation to come to terms with the estimated 25,000 women murdered in its particularly bloody 1500-1782 witch persecution. Hegeler feels that pop culture’s fascination with witchiness – seen in the resurgent popularity in central and northern Europe of the spring Walpurgis night festival, where witches are ceremonially burned at the stake – is not a route to restoring murdered women’s dignity... want also to see a shift away from witches’ spiritual exceptionalism – dark arts, herby hubble-bubble and magical seer-ing – to a more historically accurate reframing of those persecuted as witches... Popular history also elides the executed who were men: 15% of the Scots victims and 10% of the estimated 800 who perished by drowning or at the stake between 1603 and 1735 in England’s witch trials... Across the world, a campaign for a cultural reckoning, for a candid look at those children’s book characters and campy costumes, for monuments and due apologies, gathers pace...

Mathematics in Africa has been written out of history books – it’s time we reminded the world of its rich past (Independent)

It is impossible to quantify how much the slave trade impacted the reputation of African mathematics, but we are slowly regaining a better perspective...

When we learn the history of mathematics, we tend to learn about the achievements of Greek, Hindu, Chinese and Arabic civilisations. If we learn anything about African mathematics, it’s almost entirely about Egypt. But sub-Saharan Africa has a rich mathematical history too – and it is possible that the world’s museums hold the key to bringing it back to life.

Sub-Saharan Africa has largely been written out of the history of mathematics because many of its traditions were passed down by word of mouth and then lost because of disruptive events such as the slave trade. It also suited Europeans to spread the idea that the peoples that they had captured and enslaved were not intelligent in any meaningful way. But the records we do have, some written, and some bound up in historical artefacts that give a glimpse of daily life, tell us that complex mathematics was always central to the activities of African civilisations, just as it always has been to civilisations in other regions of the world...

Ukraine has legal right to Crimean artefacts, Dutch court rules (Guardian)

An appeals court in the Netherlands has ruled that Ukraine has legal control over a trove of artefacts from Crimea that was on loan to a Dutch museum when Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014. Russia had sought to take control of the historical treasures, often called the “Scythian gold”, which includes gold and ceremonial daggers used by the nomadic tribe, a golden helmet from the 4th century BC, amulets, jewellery, and other treasures, including a Chinese lacquered box that made its way to Crimea along the Silk Road...

Benin Bronzes: 'My great-grandfather sculpted the looted treasures' (BBC)

On the bustling streets of Nigeria's Benin City, residents cannot wait to get their Bronzes back - for them their return symbolises reparations for some of the wrongs committed by British troops during the colonial era. A statue of a cockerel is one priceless artefact soon to be welcomed home, after Jesus College handed it over to a delegation from Nigeria at a ceremony at Cambridge University on Wednesday...

Cambridge University college hands back looted cockerel to Nigeria (BBC)

The master of a Cambridge University college has described the return of a looted bronze cockerel to representatives of Nigeria as a "momentous occasion". The statue, known as the "Okukur", was taken by British colonial forces in 1897 and given to Jesus College in 1905 by the father of a student. A decision for it to be returned was made in 2019 after students campaigned. A ceremony has been held at the college to sign the handover documents. "It's massively significant," said Sonita Alleyne, master of Jesus College. "It's a momentous occasion." She said returning the artefact was the "right thing to do" to and said the bronze piece was of "cultural and spiritual significance to the people of Nigeria... It's part of their ancestral heritage," Ms Alleyne added...

Europe hands back looted African artifacts as it reckons with colonial legacy (NBC)

Statues have been pulled down and national icons re-evaluated, but Europe’s efforts to come to terms with its imperial past have largely stopped short of handing back the cultural treasures pillaged by the continent’s colonial powers. Until now, perhaps. This week, a Cambridge college, a French museum and a Scottish university all returned artifacts looted from West Africa, with activists and officials hailing a potential turning point in the years long battle to ensure Europe’s reckoning on race extended to restitution of what it plundered...

National Trust sees off culture war rebellion in an AGM of discontent (Guardian)

the National Trust annual general meeting. The stage was set for a tournament that promised one victor: either the reforming board of the National Trust, determined to move with the times, or a rebellious contingent calling for a return to first principles of preservation and established scholarship. Renegade challengers from a group called Restore Trust had backed a series of resolutions and prospective council members to give voice to discontented volunteers and members, those who are against moves to reflect growing concerns about the legacy of empire... The planned mutiny was prompted by a Trust report last year that simply listed 93 properties linked to slavery and colonialism. It contained details of plantation owners and people paid compensation for freed slaves after abolition, as well as those who became wealthy through the slave trade... It led to outrage from backbench Tory MPs and rightwing newspapers...

in the end the trustees mostly prevailed...

Britain can't decide whether it should send its looted treasures back to their rightful owners (CNN)

Britain is once again reckoning with its imperial history during a week in which two ceremonies were held to mark the return of ancient looted artifacts to Nigeria from the UK... These moves have put pressure on a number of academic and cultural institutions such as the British Museum, which is facing calls to return its enormous collection of bronzes, comprised of over 900 artifacts... The issue is an uncomfortable one for the museum, which is also home to other world-famous stolen artifacts, including the Parthenon Marbles, a series of ancients sculptures looted from Athens.

The British government believes that the museum is the right home for the bronzes as it makes them accessible to the largest number of people and, as a leading museum in one of the world's most global cities, has the best facilities for their upkeep. This is an argument that many find insulting and steeped in exactly the type of British imperial thinking that saw the artifacts looted in the first place. "This logic suggests that Nigeria is a poorer country that in incapable of properly looking after the artifacts that colonialists stole, despite the fact there is a state-of-the-art museum awaiting them in Nigeria. It's a classic racist argument that Britain is a place of refinement and knows best"...

Cortés must fall! Children of the Aztecs declare war on conquistadors (Times)

The home of the Spaniard who wiped out an empire wants his remains back from Mexico before they can be desecrated...

‘A continuation of colonialism’: indigenous activists say their voices are missing at Cop26 (Guardian)

Activists in Glasgow reject ‘big business’ approach to climate crisis as they commemorate murdered land defenders.

As world leaders inside the Cop26 conference centre in Glasgow boasted about pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions and end deforestation, indigenous delegates gathered across the river Clyde to commemorate activists killed for trying to protect the planet from corporate greed and government inaction. At least 1,005 environmental and land rights defenders have been murdered since the Paris accords were signed six years ago, according to the international non-profit Global Witness. One in three of those killed were indigenous people...

>73 timspalding: you should have banned limelite and Walser instead

Donald L. Fixico et al. 2021. Documenting Indigenous dispossession. Science • 29 Oct 2021 • Vol 374, Issue 6567 • pp. 536-537 •
DOI: 10.1126/science.abl6288 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl6288

Justin Farrell et al. 2021. Effects of land dispossession and forced migration on Indigenous peoples in North America. Science • 29 Oct 2021 • Vol 374, Issue 6567 • DOI: 10.1126/science.abe4943

Long-term impacts of land dispossession
To date, we lack precise estimates of the extent to which Indigenous peoples in parts of North America were dispossessed of their lands and forced to migrate by colonial settlers, as well as how the lands that they were moved into compare to their original lands. Farrell et al. constructed a new dataset within the boundaries of the current-day United States and found that Indigenous land density and spread in has been reduced by nearly 99% (see the Perspective by Fixico (above)). The lands to which they were forcibly migrated are more vulnerable to climate change and contain fewer resources. Research and policy implications of these findings are discussed. —TSR

Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Centuries of land dispossession and forced migration of Indigenous peoples by European and American settlers reshaped the entire North American continent. Yet the full scope of change is not quantified or systematically georeferenced at scale because of severe data constraints. Thus, fundamental questions and hypotheses still remain untested, especially concerning estimated total land loss, land value potential, and current and future climate risks. Building on historical research and Indigenous Studies scholarship, we developed a new dataset to catalog and examine the totality of land dispossession and forced migration in what is currently called the United States and tested hypotheses related to the environmental and economic impacts of these processes over time.

RATIONALE
We constructed a new comprehensive dataset compiled from a broad suite of historical sources for the vast majority of Indigenous peoples, by nation, within the boundaries of the contiguous United States. We classified the land base data for each tribe within two time periods: historical and present day. We then applied statistical models to assess two research questions at scale. First, what was the full extent of land dispossession and forced migration for each tribe and for all tribes combined? Second, did tribes’ new lands, being severely reduced in size and potentially far from their ancestral lands, offer improved or reduced environmental conditions and economic opportunities over time? We tested the latter along four hypothesized dimensions that include exposure to climate change risks and hazards; mineral value potential; suitability for agriculture; and proximity to US federally managed lands that limit Indigenous movements, management, and traditional uses.

RESULTS
Statistical analysis shows that aggregate land reduction was near total, with a 98.9% reduction in cumulative coextensive lands and a 93.9% reduction in noncoextensive lands. Further, 42.1% of tribes from the historical period have no federally- or state-recognized present-day tribal land base. Of the tribes that still have a land base, their present-day lands are an average of 2.6% the size of their estimated historical area. Additionally, many tribes were forced onto new lands shared by multiple Indigenous peoples, even in cases in which nations are culturally dissimilar and have separate ancestral areas. Many present-day lands are far from historical lands. Migration dyad analysis shows that forced migration distances averaged 239 km, with a median of 131 km and a maximum of 2774 km.

Tests related to climate change risk exposure, land conditions, and potential economic value reveal substantial differences between tribes’ historical and present-day areas. First, tribes’ present-day lands are on average more exposed to climate change risks and hazards, including more extreme heat and less precipitation. Nearly half of tribes experienced heightened wildfire hazard exposure. Second, tribes’ present-day lands have less positive economic mineral value, being less likely to lie over valuable subsurface oil and gas resources. Agricultural suitability results were mixed. Last, about half of tribes saw an increase in their proximity to federal lands in the present day.

CONCLUSION
This research suggests that near-total land reduction and forced migration lead to contemporary conditions in which tribal lands experience increased exposure to climate change risks and hazards and diminished economic value. The significance of these climate and economic effects reflect aggregate changes across the continent, but there is an urgent need to understand the magnitude of place-specific impacts for particular Native nations resulting from settler colonialism in future research. This study and dataset initiate a new macroscopic research agenda that prioritizes ongoing data collection, Tribal input, historical validation, public data dashboards, and computational analysis to better understand the long-term dynamics of land dispossession and forced migration across scales.

Abstract
What are the full extent and long-term effects of land dispossession and forced migration for Indigenous peoples in North America? We leveraged a new dataset of Indigenous land dispossession and forced migration to statistically compare features of historical tribal lands to present-day tribal lands at the aggregate and individual tribe level. Results show a near-total aggregate reduction of Indigenous land density and spread. Indigenous peoples were forced to lands that are more exposed to climate change risks and hazards and are less likely to lie over valuable subsurface oil and gas resources. Agricultural suitability and federal land proximity results—which affect Indigenous movements, management, and traditional uses—are mixed. These findings have substantial policy implications related to heightened climate vulnerability, extensive land reduction, and diminished land value.

...In the future, it will be particularly important to include First Nations and other Indigenous polities in the regions that now include Canada and Mexico because many nations have homelands that transcend contemporary settler nation-state boundaries...

Never mind aid, never mind loans: what poor nations are owed is reparations (Guardian)

The story of the past 500 years can be crudely summarised as follows. A handful of European nations, which had mastered both the art of violence and advanced seafaring technology, used these faculties to invade other territories and seize their land, labour and resources.

Competition for control of other people’s lands led to repeated wars between the colonising nations. New doctrines – racial categorisation, ethnic superiority and a moral duty to “rescue” other people from their “barbarism” and “depravity” – were developed to justify the violence. These doctrines led, in turn, to genocide.

The stolen labour, land and goods were used by some European nations to stoke their industrial revolutions. To handle the greatly increased scope and scale of transactions, new financial systems were established that eventually came to dominate their own economies. European elites permitted just enough of the looted wealth to trickle down to their labour forces to seek to stave off revolution – successfully in Britain, unsuccessfully elsewhere.

At length, the impact of repeated wars, coupled with insurrections by colonised peoples, forced the rich nations to leave most of the lands they had seized, formally at least. These territories sought to establish themselves as independent nations. But their independence was never more than partial. Using international debt, structural adjustment, coups, corruption (assisted by offshore tax havens and secrecy regimes), transfer pricing and other clever instruments, the rich nations continued to loot the poor, often through the proxy governments they installed and armed.

Unwittingly at first, then with the full knowledge of the perpetrators, the industrial revolutions released waste products into the Earth’s systems. At first, the most extreme impacts were felt in the rich nations, whose urban air and rivers were poisoned, shortening the lives of the poor. The wealthy removed themselves to places they had not trashed. Later, the rich countries discovered they no longer needed smokestack industries: through finance and subsidiaries, they could harvest the wealth manufactured by dirty business overseas.

Some of the pollutants were both invisible and global. Among them was carbon dioxide, which did not disperse but accumulated in the atmosphere. Partly because most rich nations are temperate, and partly because of extreme poverty in the former colonies caused by centuries of looting, the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are felt most by those who have benefited least from their production. If the talks in Glasgow are not to be experienced as yet another variety of oppression, climate justice should be at their heart...

COP26: What African climate experts want you to know (BBC)

Africa is the continent likely to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change even though studies show it has contributed least to the crisis. So even though Africa has released relatively small amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, those living on the continent are likely to be the victims of climate emergency disasters. It is already suffering from extreme weather events and changes to rainfall patterns linked to climate change - leading to droughts and flooding. With a rapidly rising population, this has knock-on effects for food, poverty and gives rise to migration and conflict...

Smithsonian Museum of African Art removes Benin bronzes from display and plans to repatriate them (CNN)

The Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC has removed its Benin bronzes from display and is planning to repatriate artifacts that were looted by the British in an 1897 raid on the royal palace, according to the museum's director, Ngaire Blankenberg. "I can confirm that we have taken down the Benin bronzes we had on display and we are fully committed to repatriation," Blankenberg said. "We cannot build for the future without making our best effort at healing the wounds of the past"...

National Gallery publishes research into slave trade links (Guardian)

Project highlights links between slave-ownership, art collecting and philanthropy in 19th-century Britain...

Greek prime minister tries to broker deal for return of Parthenon marbles (Guardian)

Kyriakos Mitsotakis offers to loan Greek treasures to British Museum if ‘stolen’ sculptures are returned to Acropolis...

Cambridge college seeks to remove memorial to patron with links to slave trade (Guardian)

Jesus College to appear in front of ecclesiastical court over attempt to relocate memorial to Tobias Rustat...

Oxford University identifies 145 artefacts looted in Benin raid (Guardian)

The University of Oxford is holding 145 objects looted by British troops during an assault on the city of Benin in 1897 that are likely to be repatriated to Nigeria, a report has said...

Revealed: How Lord Salisbury hid rape by his British consul in Benin (Guardian)

Britain has long faced calls to return the Benin bronzes, looted by its soldiers in 1897 from the kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, a former British colony. Now that pressure is set to intensify following the discovery of damning evidence that the then prime minister covered up a rape and other atrocities committed by one of his own officials in the region.

Previously unpublished Foreign Office documents reveal that Lord Salisbury failed to take any action against Consul George Annesley after reading internal reports of his abuse and violence – from having a local woman, called Ekang, brought to his quarters and assaulted by his soldiers while he held her down to ordering raids in which women and children were shot.

The prime minister initialled a note about Annesley’s atrocities, scribbling the words “very bad indeed”. But Annesley, the son of a Foreign Office official, was just quietly pensioned off, avoiding any public scandal...

Six Inuit snatched by Denmark 70 years ago demand compensation (Guardian)

Six Inuit who were snatched from their families in Greenland and taken to Denmark 70 years ago are demanding compensation from Copenhagen for a lost childhood. In 1951, Denmark took 22 children from its former colony away from their families, promising them a better life and the chance to return to Greenland as part of a new Danish-educated elite... “They lost their families, their language, their culture and their sense of belonging”... Once they returned to Greenland, they were placed in orphanages even though they had parents. Many of them lost touch with their families completely. “It was a violation of their right to a private life, a family life” in line with the European convention on human rights...

Greenland's Inuits seek Denmark compensation over failed social experiment (BBC)

Six indigenous Greenlanders taken as children to Denmark in a failed social experiment in 1951 are demanding compensation from the Danish state. The Inuits, now in their 70s, are the surviving members of the group of 22 children who were removed from their homes to be educated as "little Danes". When they later returned to Greenland, they were put in an orphanage, and many did not see their families again...

>126 John5918: A previous case with a very badly run orphanage has opened the gates for apologies and compensations. Very good, IMHO.

Parthenon marbles should never have been removed, Boris Johnson wrote (Guardian)

Boris Johnson believed in 2012 that the Parthenon sculptures should “never have been removed from the Acropolis,” and admitted that ideally they would continue to be seen in their entirety in Athens, a letter shared with the Guardian reveals. Writing to a provincial Greek official, the then mayor of London and future British prime minister noted: “This is a matter on which I have reflected deeply over many years. In an ideal world, it is of course true that the Parthenon marbles would never have been removed from the Acropolis and it would now be possible to view them in situ”...

The letter ended: “Much as I sympathise with the case for restitution to Athens, I feel that on balance I must defend the interests of London.” As prime minister, however, the Tory’s stance has hardened noticeably. Last week during talks with his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, he ruled out discussing the issue, saying it was a matter for the British Museum, despite Unesco stipulating that intergovernmental talks should take place to resolve the long-running dispute... Johnson insisted that the classical-era antiquities had been acquired legally...

Alabama city told to keep Confederate street name or face $25,000 fine (Guardian)

Alabama’s capital city of Montgomery is facing legal action or a $25,000 fine for changing the name of a street bearing the name of a Confederate president for a prominent civil rights lawyer. The state’s Republican attorney general acted after Montgomery city council voted to switch Jeff Davis Avenue, named for Jefferson Davis, to Fred D Gray Avenue, the 91-year-old lawyer who represented Rosa Parks and others in cases that challenged the state’s segregation practices...

Praise for Prince Charles after ‘historic’ slavery condemnation (Guardian)

The Prince of Wales’s acknowledgment of the “appalling atrocity of slavery” that “forever stains our history” as Barbados became a republic was brave, historic, and the start of a “grown-up conversation led by a future king”, equality campaigners have said... Slavery is a tricky subject for the royal family, with recent calls for the Queen to apologise and for the UK to make reparations for the huge wealth the UK reaped through the inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade. Successive monarchs supported or made money from it during the 17th and 18th centuries...

Final Bristol school to shed name of slaver Edward Colston (Guardian)

A fee-paying school in Bristol named after the slave trader Edward Colston is to change its name after a consultation attracted thousands of responses from the school and wider community. Colston’s school was set up by the Bristol-born merchant in 1710 as Colston’s hospital and has retained his name. Present and former pupils, parents and staff at the private school will now help choose a new name, to be announced next summer. Colston’s school is the last educational institution in Bristol to bear Edward Colston’s name. Colston primary school changed its name in 2018 after a consultation with parents and children, and Colston’s girls’ school decided this year to change its name to Montpelier high school...

Charlottesville Robert E Lee statue to be melted down and turned into art (Guardian)

The statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee that drew deadly protests to Charlottesville, Virginia, will be melted down and turned into a new piece of public art by an African American heritage center...

Malcolm X’s former prison cell becomes first of 1,000 planned ‘freedom libraries’ (Guardian)

Malcolm X writes in his autobiography of how he spent hours reading in the library at Norfolk Prison in Massachusetts. Now the cell that the human rights activist is believed to have occupied is set to be transformed into a library itself, thanks to the work of the poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts... Betts is now working to set up 1,000 micro-libraries in prisons across the US through his charity, Freedom Reads, supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. The first Freedom Library opened this month at the MCI-Norfolk, in the cell believed to have been Malcolm’s in the 1940s. While there, the activist, who had been jailed for robbery, spent many hours reading and studying the dictionary in the library and joining the debating society. “One of the things Malcolm X said was that a prerequisite for changing your life is an understanding of what it means to be guilty,” Betts told the Boston Globe. “And what it means to want to be more than that thing. And I think books give you access to that. So it’s this opportunity for people to come close to personal discovery, to come close to reflection”...

Gilgamesh Dream Tablet: Iraq puts looted artefact on display (BBC)

The 3,500-year-old Gilgamesh Dream Tablet has gone on display in Iraq for the first time in three decades. The clay artefact bears part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's oldest surviving works of literature. It was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War and smuggled through many countries before ending up at Washington DC's Museum of the Bible. US authorities seized the tablet in 2019 and handed it over to the Iraqi embassy in September. It is one of 17,926 artefacts recovered by Iraq from the US, UK, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands over the past year, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein. "This day represent a victory in the face of the desperate attempts of those why try to steal our great history and our ancient civilisation"...

A Native American designed Washington’s logo. Now his family want it back (Guardian)

Walter ‘Blackie’ Wetzel created the famous symbol 50 years ago. His son is on a quest to use it to help his community... The logo was a composite of portraits of a Blackfeet chief named White Calf... Blackie considered the logo a sort of “unification symbol” among Native Americans... Wetzel {his son} wanted to make sure he can repurpose the logo so that it becomes the face of the Blackie Wetzel Warrior Society, which hopes to raise public awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women as well as other social inequities on reservations...

New York’s Met museum to remove Sackler family name from its galleries (Guardian)

New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art is going to remove the name of arguably its most controversial donor groups – the billionaire Sackler family – from its galleries. The news comes in the wake of leading members of the US family, one of America’s richest, being blamed for fueling the deadly opioids crisis in America with the aggressive selling of the family company’s prescription narcotic painkiller, OxyContin...

Renowned Egyptologist says it’s time to stop romanticizing ancient Egypt (UCLA)

Pyramids, pharaohs and ancient Egyptian gods have entranced many, but it’s time we stopped romanticizing the trappings of authoritarianism, according to UCLA’s Kara Cooney... The uncritical admiration of the pharaohs that has continued to the present day, she writes, is a legacy of the ancient rulers’ efforts to manipulate how they were perceived, and has even served as a narrative and cultural foundation propping up modern authoritarianism... Cooney describes how the pharaohs created a compelling moral argument for power that continues to mislead people today, and which is linked directly to the current rise of authoritarianism. Cooney explores the pitfalls of patriarchal systems that harm women and men alike, and she convincingly argues that society is duplicating the historical patterns that have repeatedly led to power collapses. Only this time, she notes, climate change has altered the rules of recovery...

The True Stories of 10 of the Most Disputed Objects at the British Museum (Vice)

A group of restitution advocates from across the world are calling on the British Museum to return artefacts that were stolen by the British Empire. The British Museum is home to around 8 million objects. The reality that many of these artefacts – around 99 percent of which are not placed on public display, but hoarded away in the institution’s private archives – were forcibly taken has led to decades-long demands for their restitution. VICE World News has spoken to 10 advocates from 10 different countries about the origins and histories of 10 looted artefacts from their homelands housed in the British Museum, how these treasures are an essential part of their heritage, and why it’s imperative that they are returned immediately...

For the advocates, they see the looting not as distant, one-off events that occurred decades ago, but as an ongoing theft of objects and knowledge that continues to this day. “Chinese history and goods and cultural output becoming loot – it robs the Chinese people of the ability to learn about their own history, which I think is one of the most significant things about this discussion on repatriation and so-called contested goods,” Juliet Patrick, a 21-year-old of Chinese heritage, told VICE World News. It's the fact that, you know, the general public suffer because they lose these connections that they have with the history.” “Colonialism has never gone away,” el Gawad added. “Maybe there aren't British troops in Egypt, but there is still this influence, this knowledge; occupation. There is this colonialism of knowledge, we are not perceived as the successors of the ancient Egyptians. And we are not perceived as the ones who have the right of decision making of where our heritage should be, even how it should be interpreted, and how we can make use of it today in even understanding our present.”

Rand "Just Say No" Paul Demand Disaster Aid for KY

The senator sent a begging letter to President Biden asking for Federal aid for KY tornado victims. This from the guy who is the one-man Hobby Lobby-ist for voting against similar aid to other states when they suffer natural disasters like hurricanes. COVID, and fires.

In 2017, Paul was one of just 17 senators to oppose an emergency $15.3 billion federal relief bill for victims of Hurricane Harvey It had wreaked havoc similar to Friday’s tornado, but not in Kentucky.

In 2013, Paul was one of 31 Republican senators who voted against a $50.5 billion relief aid package for Hurricane Sandy. . .

In 2011, Paul’s first year in the Senate, he was among 38 Republicans voting against a major FEMA funding package despite the fact. . .that his own state of Kentucky had been the nation’s largest recipient of FEMA funding ($293 million), mostly because of a 2009 ice storm.
(SNIP)
In the very first coronavirus Senate aid package -- a mere $8 billion passed on March 5, 2020 -- Paul stood out as the lone Senator to vote no.

Typical Libertarian; typical Trumpty Dumbpty. "Only I deserve it."

My recommendation if I were a Biden advisor? "Sure, Randie, just tell us the cuts to make to KY's proposed share of US tax-payers money designated for your home state to offset your rampant irresponsible spending demand." And if I were Biden, my reply letter to Randie would ask, "So, you're only in favor of drowning Federal government in the bathtub when your state doesn't need its help?"

Hypocrite Rand Paul is today's living poster child for why Republicans are deplorable.

Accused said Colston statue was ‘an abhorrent offence’ to Bristol, trial hears (Guardian)

A woman accused of helping to topple the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston told police it was “an abhorrent offence” to the population of Bristol, a court has heard. Rhian Graham was one of four people to go on trial at Bristol crown court accused of criminal damage of the 125-year-old bronze statue, which was pulled from its plinth during Black Lives Matter protests last year, and thrown in the River Avon...

Structural racism at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, finds report (Guardian)

An independent review has uncovered evidence of structural racism at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and found the institution’s colonial legacy continues to have a negative impact on students and staff of colour... the culture and practices at the university “still too often disadvantage people of colour”, that the curriculum is Eurocentric, and that the leadership has been too slow to act on issues of colonialism and racism...

Antiques Roadshow ‘should address UK’s legacy of colonialism’ (Guardian)

The BBC’s Antiques Roadshow should address the legacy of colonialism when explaining the history of heirlooms and other artefacts guests bring to the programme, according to an Oxford academic. Prof Dan Hicks, the curator of world archaeology at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, called for the show to inform its millions of viewers about the problematic and violent histories behind how objects came to the UK from its former colonies...

Why America Is at War Over the History of Slavery (GQ)

Wesley Lowery and Clint Smith discuss the "battle happening about how we tell the story of this country"... I think part of it is certainly that we are in this moment where we are having the “history wars,” which are sort of embedded within the cultural wars... And so there is this battle happening, as has happened throughout American history, about how we tell the story of this country, who are we including in the story, and what are we leaving out of the story, and what are the implications that that has through the landscape of our society today?...

I think the implication of that is that you have millions of people who are in the ongoing process of recalibrating their previous understandings of what America has been and what America is today. As a result, I think you have this incredible amount of pushback from people for whom asking questions of American history is an existential threat, because then they have to ask questions of themselves. And they have to reassess their own sense of who they are and how they fit into that. When you have been told a specific story your entire life about how you and your family and your community fit into the American story, and then people come in and tell a different story of America, or a story that includes a lot of facets that were previously left out, then it threatens your sense of self, it threatens your identity...

‘A Francoist daydream’: how Spain’s right clings to its imperialist past (Guardian)

here, beneath the statue of Columbus – after whom the square is named – and in the shadow of the enormous Spanish flag that measures 294 sq metres and weighs more than 30kg, that the country’s right likes to congregate to defend the glories of the past and bemoan the humiliations of the present... Spain’s right and far-right parties are embarking on another voyage of historical revisionism and imperial nostalgia. Not for them the toppling of statues, offers of apology, or bouts of national introspection...

Boris Johnson’s zeal to return Parthenon marbles revealed in 1986 article (Guardian)

The extent of Boris Johnson’s U-turn on the Parthenon marbles has been laid bare in a 1986 article unearthed in an Oxford library in which the then classics student argued passionately for their return to Athens. Deploying language that would make campaigners proud, Johnson not only believed the fifth century BC antiquities should be displayed “where they belong”, but deplored how they had been “sawed and hacked” from the magisterial edifice they once adorned. “They will be housed in a new museum a few hundred yards from the Acropolis. They will be meticulously cared for. They will not, as they were in the British Museum in 1938, be severely damaged by manic washerwomen scrubbing them with copper brushes.”

Last month the British prime minister told his Greek counterpart that the carvings – part of a monumental frieze regarded as the high point of classical art – were legally acquired and must remain in London.“The Elgin marbles should leave this northern whisky-drinking guilt-culture, and be displayed where they belong: in a country of bright sunshine and the landscape of Achilles, ‘the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea,’” he wrote in the article, republished by the Greek daily, Ta Nea, on Saturday...

Women executed 300 years ago as witches in Scotland set to receive pardons (Guardian)

From allegations of cursing the king’s ships, to shape-shifting into animals and birds, or dancing with the devil, a satanic panic in early modern Scotland meant that thousands of women were accused of witchcraft in the 16th-18th centuries with many executed. Now, three centuries after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, campaigners are on course to win pardons and official apologies for the estimated 3,837 people – 84% of whom were women – tried as witches, of which two-thirds were executed and burned...

A new Africa for the youth: Beyond the colonial thought (ecdpm)

Since their independence from colonial masters, African countries have faced many socio-economic challenges. Their development, or lack thereof raises old and new questions of independence from their former colonial masters...

UK accused of abandoning world’s poor as aid turned into ‘colonial’ investment (Guardian)

The British government has been accused by NGOs and trade unions of “chasing colonial post-Brexit fantasies” at the expense of the world’s poorest as they urge Liz Truss to keep aid focused on poverty reduction rather than geopolitical manoeuvring. In a joint letter to the foreign secretary, the group criticises the rebranding of the UK’s development investment arm, which will see the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) become British International Investment (BII) next year...

Italy returns Parthenon fragment to Greece amid UK row over marbles (Guardian)

Italy is returning a fragment belonging to the Parthenon’s eastern frieze to Greece in a breakthrough deal that could renew pressure on Britain to repatriate the 2,500-year-old Parthenon marbles removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century...

BLM protesters cleared over toppling of Edward Colston statue (Guardian)

Anti-racism campaigners have hailed a jury’s decision to clear protesters responsible for toppling a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston as a huge step in getting the UK to face up to its colonial past... the defence had urged jurors to “be on the right side of history”, saying the statue, which stood over the city for 125 years, was so indecent and potentially abusive that it constituted a crime...

“This verdict is a milestone in the journey that Bristol and Britain are on to come to terms with the totality of our history,” said David Olusoga, the broadcaster and historian of the slave trade, who gave evidence in the trial. Olusoga said: “For 300 years Edward Colston was remembered as a philanthropist, his role in the slave trade and his many thousands of victims were airbrushed out of the story. The toppling of the statue and the passionate defence made in court by the Colston Four makes that deliberate policy of historical myopia now an impossibility.” Clive Lewis, the Labour MP, said: “A British jury has confirmed the toppling of Edwards Colston’s statue was not a criminal act. The real crime was the fact the statue was still there when protesters pulled it down. “Today’s verdict makes a compelling case that a majority of the British public want to deal with our colonial and slave trading past, not run away from it. That’s important to understand and I hope it gives political leaders a little more confidence when it comes to challenging the ‘culture war’ our government is currently pursuing”...

Britain’s shameful slavery history matters – that’s why a jury acquitted the Colston 4 (Guardian)

Jurors were asked to rule that Edward Colston’s heinous crimes were immaterial, but they chose to put themselves on the right side of history...

Homer Plessy: Pardon for 'separate but equal' civil rights figure (BBC)

The governor of Louisiana has pardoned Homer Plessy, a 19th century black activist whose arrest 130 years ago led to one of the most criticised Supreme Court decisions in US history. Plessy was arrested in 1892 after he purchased a ticket and refused to leave a whites-only train car in New Orleans. In 1896, the top US court ruled against Plessy, clearing the way for Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South. The pardon was spearheaded by the very office that sought charges against him. After Plessy was removed from the train, his case - Plessy v Ferguson - wound up in front of the Supreme Court. The court ruled that accommodations can exist for different races - a doctrine dubbed "separate but equal". Their decision stood for decades, until the landmark 1954 Brown v Board of Education case helped begin to dismantle racial segregation laws...

Dutch king to retire golden coach with slavery images after racism row (Guardian)

King Willem-Alexander will mothball the controversial carriage that glorifies the Netherlands’ colonial past...

Eighty years late: groundbreaking work on slave economy is finally published in UK (Guardian)

In 1938, a brilliant young Black scholar at Oxford University wrote a thesis on the economic history of British empire and challenged a claim about slavery that had been defining Britain’s role in the world for more than a century. But when Eric Williams – who would later become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago – sought to publish his “mind-blowing” thesis on capitalism and slavery in Britain, he was shunned by publishers and accused of undermining the humanitarian motivation for Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act. Now, 84 years after his work was rejected in the UK, and 78 years after it was first published in America, where it became a highly influential anti-colonial text, Williams’s book, Capitalism and Slavery, will finally be published in Britain by a mainstream British publisher...

UK’s propaganda leaflets inspired 1960s massacre of Indonesian communists (Guardian)

Shocking new details have emerged of Britain’s role in one of the most brutal massacres of the postwar 20th century. Last year the Observer revealed how British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to incite prominent Indonesians to “cut out” the “communist cancer”. It is estimated that at least 500,000 people linked to the Indonesia communist party (PKI) were eliminated between 1965 and 1966. Documents newly released in the National Archives show how propaganda specialists from the Foreign Office sent hundreds of inflammatory pamphlets to leading anti-communists in Indonesia, inciting them to kill the foreign minister Dr Subandrio and claiming that ethnic Chinese Indonesians deserved the violence meted out to them. The British wanted the Indonesian army and militias to overthrow elected president Sukarno’s government. He and Subandrio were considered to be too close to the PKI and communist China, and Britain wanted to end Confrontation, the low-level military and political campaign launched by Sukarno and Subandrio against the Malaysian Federation...

Macron meets Algerian-born French citizens with one eye on election (Guardian)

Emmanuel Macron has told representatives of the Pieds Noirs – the Algerian-born French citizens who fled to France after Algerian independence – that a 1962 shooting by French troops against them was “unforgivable for the republic”. Macron stressed the need for “reconciliation” over the Algeria conflict, as part of his drive to address France’s colonial legacy in north Africa ahead of his bid for re-election this spring. France should “tell the truth even when it’s painful”, and “bring clarity” even if it had to be “pulled from the shadows”, he said.

Macron, the first French president born after the Algerian war of independence of 1954-62, has sought during his five years in office to make steps towards recognising the brutality of the Algeria conflict, which has been shrouded in secrecy and denials and remains a divisive factor in modern French society...

A Toppled Statue of George III Illuminates the Ongoing Debate Over America’s Monuments (Smithsonian)

In July 1776, colonists destroyed a sculpture of the English king. A new exhibit explores this iconoclasm’s legacy—and its implications for today...

New Data Expose Colonialism in Paleontology (Discover)

Colonialism's legacy still casts a shadow over the way paleontologists conduct their research and learn about the world. Some researchers are trying to expose and reform that pattern...

American 'hero' William Clark secretly broke a peace treaty with Britain to conduct a massive land grab from native populations, newly discovered map reveals (Daily Mail)

William Clark, an explorer hailed as an American 'hero', secretly broke a peace treaty with Britain to conduct a massive land grab from native populations, study found. A recently re-discovered map, owned by the famous frontiersman in 1816, has been meticulously studied Cambridge University historian Dr Robert Lee. Historians believe that the map further discredits the idea that Clark was a 'friend' to the native population, instead finding he would go behind their back to claim land. In 1815, after failing to buy land north of the Missouri River from the Sauks, Meskwakis and Iowas, Clark withdrew recognition of their possession. Dr Lee said the map reveals that Clark asserted by proclamation that the US had already bought the region from the Osages by treaty in 1808. By taking it upon himself to redraw an Indian treaty line right after the War of 1812 - an unlabelled line on the map - Clark secured an 'invasive squatter settlement'. This added millions of acres to the US public domain in violation of the Treaty of Ghent, the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812 between the US and UK...

>149 John5918: I'm beginning to wonder if ANY inherited fortunes were earned ethically? An argument for higher taxes on large inheritances?
Haida had the right idea with potlach?

>150 margd:

Indeed. But I think the issue is not simply the individuals who made a fortune by what we would now consider unethical means (although of course in their own day what they were doing was perfectly acceptable amongst their own social class and nationality), but that our modern western nations are all built on such practices - slavery, colonialism, deceit, persecution, oppression, violence, racism, sexism, downright theft, etc. There's nothing we can do to change history, but I think it's important that we should know our history as fully as possible (which means interrogating the accepted "patriotic" and nationalistic myths which are mostly based on an incomplete reading of history) because it shapes our relationships with and attitudes to many other peoples and concepts, that we should acknowledge and take ownership of that history, and where it is practical and desirable we should be prepared to explore reparations and compensation.

Tate’s ‘unequivocally offensive’ mural to have new work alongside it (Guardian)

Tate Britain has commissioned a new artwork to be exhibited alongside a mural containing racist imagery, after discussions with historians, artists, cultural advisers and civic representatives. The new installation will be “in dialogue” with the floor-to-ceiling mural by Rex Whistler in what was formerly a restaurant at the London gallery. A report by the Tate ethics committee concluded in 2020 that the mural was “unequivocally … offensive”. The committee called for a bold approach in contextualising the mural but said it should not be altered or removed. The new artwork will be joined by interpretative material that will “critically engage with the mural’s history and content, including its racist imagery”, Tate said...

Dutch state condoned extreme violence in Indonesian war, inquiry concludes (Guardian)

The Dutch state condoned and concealed a systematic use of extreme violence such as extrajudicial executions and torture during the 1945-9 Indonesian war of independence against colonial rule, a government-backed inquiry has concluded. The ruthless brutality of the Netherlands’ military and intelligence services is said to have been sanctioned at the highest levels of government, with all considerations subordinated to the goal of maintaining the colony. The Dutch government’s position, held since an inquiry in 1969 concluded that there had been only isolated “excesses” and that the armed forces “on the whole” had behaved correctly, is condemned in the report as “untenable”...

Judge Arthur Engoron Deals with the Most Deplorable Deplorable in the Basket

He ruled on Thursday (today) that the New York AG's office has the right to compel Trump and his children to testify -- and now he's given them 21 days to do so..

"In the final analysis, a State Attorney General commences investigating a business entity, uncovers copious evidence of possible financial fraud, and wants to question, under oath, several of the entities’ principals, including its namesake," Engoron wrote. "She has the clear right to do so."

"Copious" -- nice touch there, Judge.

>153 John5918: Dutch PM apologises for state’s role in abuses in 1940s Indonesian war (Guardian)

Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, has apologised after an inquiry revealed that the Dutch state condoned the systematic use of extrajudicial executions and torture during the 1945-9 Indonesian war of independence...

Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman also describes human costs of vaccine development...

Richard Horton. 2022. Offline: A lie at the heart of public health (Comment). The Lancet Volume 399, ISSUE 10326, P704, February 19, 2022. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00312-9 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00312-9/fullt...

The John Snow Society describes their illustrious namesake as “the pioneer of epidemiological method”. His identification of the source of cholera in Soho, London, and the removal of the handle of a water pump in Broad Street in 1854 is celebrated annually with the Pumphandle Lecture. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine named a lecture theatre after Snow. Indeed, the epidemiology community has deified Snow as a founding father of public health. But, as Jim Downs argues in his searching reappraisal of the origins of epidemiology, Maladies of Empire, western epidemiologists have invented a comforting myth, one that disguises the horrific reality of a discipline that grew out of colonialism, slavery, and war...

The Nigerian artwork challenging British history in St Paul's (BBC)

A leading Nigerian artist tells writer Molara Woods why his new installation at London's St Paul's Cathedral is important, as the world-famous building re-evaluates its memorials to historical figures including the admiral who led the campaign that resulted in the looting of the Kingdom of Benin...

Two of Nigeria’s looted Benin bronzes returned to traditional palace (Guardian)

Colourful ceremony marks artefacts’ homecoming more than a century after they were pillaged by British troops...

What led this storyteller to take a personal journey to the bottom of the ocean (National Geographic)

These divers search for slave shipwrecks to discover their ancestors. It's been 400 years since the first enslaved Africans set foot in present-day America. In this short film, meet a group of vibrant scuba divers determined to find, document, and positively identify slave shipwrecks...

‘We’re in danger of forgetting’: congressman’s warning 80 years after Japanese American incarceration (Guardian)

Congressman Mark Takano, whose family was forced into camps, calls for vigilance amid ‘nefarious nostalgia’... Eighty years ago, as anti-Japanese fervor gripped the US, the parents and grandparents of the California congressman Mark Takano were among 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes and sent to desolate camps scattered across the west. They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Everything else was sold, stored or left behind. Confined by barbed wire fences and armed military guards, their only offense was looking like the enemy. “They were incarcerated without any due process of law, never accused of a crime, never convicted of a crime but in an internment camp strictly because of their racial characteristics,” Takano told the Guardian. Two-thirds of those interned were American citizens, like Takano’s maternal grandparents and paternal grandmother. Many were American-born children, like his parents, far too young to pose a threat to national security, as was the spurious claim...

Easter Island Moai statue begins journey home, 150 years after removal to Santiago (Guardian)

A huge Moai statue, one of the iconic stone monuments from Easter Island, began its journey back home on Monday, after being removed and taken to Santiago, where it has been housed since 1870. The return of the statue comes after a years-long campaign to have it returned to Rapa Nui, as Easter Island is known locally... The initiative is part of a repatriation program seeking to return ancestral remains, sacred and funerary objects to the island. Similar negotiations have taken place to try to recover a specimen at the British Museum...