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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 12:14:52 GMT
Democratic history challenges imperialist and racist history June 13, 2020 Written by Dominic Alexander www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21307-democratic-history-challenges-imperialist-and-racist-historyDominic Alexander explains how black history is intrinsically connected to the history of the working class Attempts to challenge the glorification of slave traders, racists and imperialists, far from lying about, covering up or denying any ‘complex’ parts of Britain’s history, are essential to a real reckoning with it. They are a necessary challenge to the ideological censorship of the past that denies the centrality of black and working-class struggles in our history. The toppling of Colston’s statue in Bristol is an act of protest that is profoundly democratic and points us to a history of the struggle for social equality that the imperialist ruling class has largely succeeded in wiping out from our collective historical memory over more than a century of selective remembrance, that is best called propaganda.
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 16:14:36 GMT
BMA demands answers over missing BAME pages of Covid-19 report Letter to health secretary calls for urgent publication of suggested safeguards for BAME communities www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/13/bma-demands-answers-over-missing-bame-pages-of-covid-19-report"The British Medical Association has demanded an explanation from the government following reports that pages containing recommendations to protect black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities were removed from last week’s Covid-19 disparity report. In a letter sent to health secretary Matt Hancock, shared exclusively with the Guardian, the head of the BMA called for the missing pages and recommendations to be published immediately. Dr Chaand Nagpaul CBE, the BMA council chair, noted his concern over reports that 69 pages covering seven recommendations were removed from last week’s Public Health England’s report. “I’m finding it inexplicable the government did not release the full report at a time not only when the BAME community suffered so disproportionately with the virus, but also at a time when there was global outcry and outrage to racial inequalities,” Nagpaul said. On Thursday, a senior academic disclosed that the advice for the government on how to protect BAME communities from coronavirus has yet to be published. The safeguarding proposals were drawn up in a document separate from the review published last week showing that Covid-19 kills disproportionately high numbers of people from ethnic minorities. The review was widely criticised for failing to investigate possible reasons for the disparities or make recommendations on how to address them."
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 16:41:15 GMT
“Policing Is Fundamentally a Tool of Social Control to Facilitate Our Exploitation” AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEX S. VITALE The brutality we have repeatedly seen meted out by American police all over the country isn’t a bug of our political-economic system — it’s a feature. www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/alex-vitale-police-reform-defund-protestsThe protests that have swept the United States and the world in recent weeks after the police murder of George Floyd have been unlike anything we have seen in at least half a century. And they show no signs of slowing down. “Defund the police” has emerged as a central demand at these protests. Criminologist Alex Vitale has long made this case, especially in his book The End of Policing (which you can download for free from Verso here). Last week for Jacobin’s YouTube series “Stay at Home,” deputy editor Micah Uetricht interviewed Vitale about the basics of defunding the police, how policing has always been a key component of our economic system, and why the ongoing protests are cause for serious optimism in dark times.
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 16:57:04 GMT
Analysis: 5 of the worst crimes of Winston Churchill sourcenews.scot/analysis-5-of-the-worst-crimes-of-winston-churchill/29/01/2019 Ben Wray There’s no question of Churchill’s racism and crimes against humanity SCOTTISH Green MSP Ross Greer has drawn the ire of such renowned historians as Good Morning Britain’s (GMB) Piers Morgan with his claims that Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill was a “white supremacist” and “mass murderer”. In the end the GMB presenters seemed to decide that Greer wasn’t wrong about Churchill, simply that it was “so offensive” of him to recall the historical record. But the real history of Churchill is an important one that tells us much about the history of British society. Above all else, Churchill was driven by his desire to defend the British Empire in its period of decline, and shore-up Britain’s global influence. This was a bloody mission, full of violence and instances of the suppression of democratic rights and popular sovereignty, of which the following are just five examples. Churchill was an exemplary and era-defining British imperialist, with a career that shocked even his own imperialist contemporaries for its brutality and racism.
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 17:12:22 GMT
U.S. Police: Why Nothing Will Change www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/06/14/u-s-police-why-nothing-will-change/With America in turmoil following the murder of George Floyd, the talk is all about police reform – defunding them, abolishing them, or subjecting them to greater federal oversight. It brings to mind the nineteenth-century British member of parliament who supposedly cried out in despair, “Reform! Reform! My God, aren’t things bad enough as they are?” But not to worry: short of revolution, nothing will happen. Once the shouting dies down and protesters go home, reform will be forgotten and the status quo will return in full force. Cops will tread more carefully, but only for a while. Eventually, they’ll return to the old ways as well. After all, Joe Biden, very possibly the next U.S. president, was merely facing facts when he assured a gathering of wealthy campaign contributors last June that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” if he’s elected. With a 233-year-old Constitution that grows more change averse with every passing decade, America is now one of the most immovable societies on earth. No matter how dysfunctional it grows, the “frozen republic” has forgotten what basic structural reform even means.
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 19:49:57 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 14, 2020 20:46:03 GMT
Boris Johnson, public schools and institutional racism Boris Johnson’s racism derives from his elite schooling which has taught him that he is better than others. www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/boris-johnson-public-schools-and-institutional-racism/12/06/By Tanvir Malik Mukhtar, CEO of Scholar Hub As the statue of Edward Colston wallows in the depths of Bristol harbour metres from Pero’s bridge named after Pero Jones, an enslaved boy who lived and died in Bristol, the UK comes to terms with the the highest excess death rate per million in the whole world. 2020 will be remembered as the tragic year the government failed its people with an incompetent strategy on tackling COVID and the year the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police sparked a global movement against institutional racism – Black Lives Matter. Around the world activists and authorities are tearing down statues from a bygone era of atrocity, and people are introspectively analysing their own racism perpetrated and normalised by a system whose very purpose it is to keep white people supreme. In the UK, starting right in the upper echelons of power, Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in 2002, “What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies,” he also has referred to African people as having “watermelon smiles” and in an article for the Telegraph that “it is absolutely ridiculous that people (Muslim women) should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.” His views on Islam are abhorrently culturalist, as stated by him in The Spectator, “fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke” …. it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers.”
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2020 0:16:40 GMT
Point of no return for Failed States of America An African American academic resident in South Korea finds every good reason never to return home By MICHAEL HURT JUNE 7, 2020 asiatimes.com/2020/06/point-of-no-return-for-failed-states-of-america/"I am a Rip van Winkle – a man out of time. As I watch America eat itself, I muse upon this fact more deeply. My status as a black American who has lived in South Korea since 2002, with no real plans to go back, has seemed strange to some. But in recent years, my friends regard this ongoing decision to not return as less strange. And in recent months, it has come to be a point of no small amount of envy to many of my friends who dream of escaping the twin epidemics of Covid-19 and white supremacy-fueled rampant racism in the United States. In 1670, the Puritan preacher Samuel Danforth warned his fellow colonizers that America had an ongoing moral challenge as it continued its “Errand into the Wilderness.” But the Puritan “wilderness” was not a blank swathe of land, those beckoning fields of Little House on the Prairie. To the contrary, it was a land filled with fearful, fantastic beasts and rapacious monsters. It was a moral maw, a gaping abyss that beckoned the gawker to jump. It was a land of moral risk, of spiritual danger. The spatial and moral wilderness defined the constant fear that Puritan elders had of going “astray” and falling into the beckoning darkness of civic immorality and spiritual iniquity. In 1987, pioneer rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy made the declamation that America was an “anti-nigger machine,” and that, “If I come out alive … then they won’t come clean.”"
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2020 1:37:02 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2020 17:58:39 GMT
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Post by naominash3 on Jun 15, 2020 18:53:54 GMT
The very beach I grew up in used to be barred to blacks.
Segregation still speaks loudly in the U.S.
But all of us are America --- the Natives, the Slaves, the Aliens.
All of us literally make up the soil we now stand on.
We need to process it and ultimately...
Let it go. The beauty of this land is built on sacrifices, but it's still very very beautiful.
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2020 20:18:52 GMT
The coming culture war - CounterBlast 15 June June 15, 2020 Written by Lucy Nichols www.counterfire.org/news/21315-the-coming-culture-war-counterblast-15-juneNo amount of Westminster window-dressing can dampen this global revolt against racism, writes Lucy Nichols In an article written in the Telegraph, Boris Johnson has promised to launch an inquiry into racism in Britain. This decision to announce government policy behind a paywall (rather than in Parliament) has attracted completely justified criticism. According to Johnson, the ‘cross-governmental commission’ will investigate racism in various state institutions like the justice system, housing, and education. But this is all the information he gives us before continuing with an attack on political correctness, and a bumbling explanation of why we need to keep up statues of slave traders, colonizers and racists. He is very obviously astounded at the idea of bringing down these statues: this really does perfectly demonstrate how unwilling the Conservatives are to even try to understand the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain. Johnson also concisely encapsulates the feeling of the ruling class towards Britain’s bloody colonial history:
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2020 21:28:44 GMT
U.S. Police: Why Nothing Will Change www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/06/14/u-s-police-why-nothing-will-change/With America in turmoil following the murder of George Floyd, the talk is all about police reform – defunding them, abolishing them, or subjecting them to greater federal oversight. It brings to mind the nineteenth-century British member of parliament who supposedly cried out in despair, “Reform! Reform! My God, aren’t things bad enough as they are?” But not to worry: short of revolution, nothing will happen. Once the shouting dies down and protesters go home, reform will be forgotten and the status quo will return in full force. Cops will tread more carefully, but only for a while. Eventually, they’ll return to the old ways as well. After all, Joe Biden, very possibly the next U.S. president, was merely facing facts when he assured a gathering of wealthy campaign contributors last June that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” if he’s elected. With a 233-year-old Constitution that grows more change averse with every passing decade, America is now one of the most immovable societies on earth. No matter how dysfunctional it grows, the “frozen republic” has forgotten what basic structural reform even means. Nothing will change here either with Starmer. No real choice here ot in the US.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2020 21:50:37 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 16, 2020 14:18:42 GMT
No, Britain Hasn’t Been a ‘Force for Good’ in the World by Aaron Bastani @aaronbastani 15th June 2020 novaramedia.com/2020/06/15/no-britain-hasnt-been-a-force-for-good-in-the-world/For some reason, it matters to a significant number of people in this country that Britain was, and remains, a ‘force for good’ in the world. Unfortunately it isn’t, nor has it ever been. "But before you get too upset, interpreting this conclusion as an incendiary provocation, it’s important to add that the same applies to every country. The idea that this or that nation has been an outstanding contributor to human progress is absurd. Does Indian prime minister Narendra Modi get credit for the concept of zero and the decimal point? Does the Saud dynasty get to strut the global stage as a result of the West adopting Arabic numerals five centuries ago? Should we salute Iran, Iraq and Turkey for innovations like barley, wheat and rye? Clearly not, and it is a uniquely European conceit to insist one’s country has been the shining city on the hill, the font of wisdom for which all humankind should be grateful. What’s more, Britain has appealed to precisely such claims in its darker moments. To understand the purpose of insisting Britain has been a force for good, we need to comprehend how and why this has happened. In 1946, with Clement Attlee installed in Number 10, Kenya’s colonial governor spoke of how the country was Britain’s “by right of achievement” and that Africans would have to get used to living “in a world which we have made, under the humanitarian impulses of the late 19th and 20th centuries”. Even while occupying faraway lands, Britain’s elite was convinced of its moral superiority. Under the guise of such zealotry, 150,000 Kenyans were killed over the following 15 years, while the colony operated detention camps which, according to one historian, were “probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments”. Indeed, on visiting the country in 1955, Labour’s Barbara Castle observed a pervasive “Nazi” attitude towards the indigenous population. Another aspect of such ‘humanitarianism’ was the policy of enforced segregation between Africans and Europeans. This lasted until 1961 and was constitutive of Kenya’s ‘white highlands’, so called because this fertile land was given over exclusively to European settlers. Again, the pretext for such dispossession was charity, with Kenya’s deputy governor claiming there would be little hope “of erecting here a permanent structure of enlightenment and civilisation” without whites having the best agricultural territory. This civilising mission went so far that, according to Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, around 1.5 million Kikuyu were put in detention camps between 1952 and 1960. Then there was British Malaya which, by 1949, neighboured the newly independent Indonesia. Indonesia had gained its freedom from the Dutch, despite the country’s post-war efforts to re-occupy the vast archipelago, with the help of Britain’s armed forces. This struggle for national liberation, with trade unionists and socialists at its heart, claimed the lives of 200,000 Indonesians. As this political orientation grew even stronger in the years that followed, the CIA facilitated the ascent of general Suharto. Alongside being more accommodating to the interests of foreign capital, Suharto would also oversee the murder of around one million members of the country’s communist party and its feminist and trade union movements. In Malaya the push for national liberation was just as gruesome. Fighting a ‘counter-insurgency’ between 1948 and 1960, British forces deployed defoliant chemicals and forced resettlement – techniques that would subsequently be adopted by the US in Vietnam with Agent Orange and its ‘strategic hamlet’ programme. Those overseeing such efforts were honest about their objectives. Gerald Templer, the country’s high commissioner, declared the country’s insurgents “must be, and will be, exterminated”. Such outrage was born of Britain’s strategic interests, and the high costs of withdrawal: revenues from Malaya, as with Kenya, Iran and elsewhere, were not only funding Britain’s remilitarisation but maintaining the sterling area. But rather than acknowledge these were the dying gasps of Britain’s role as a great power, the claim was that such efforts were humanitarian in intent."
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