(neo)Colonialism || Kenya

ICYMI: This was one of our most-viewed videos on Twitter this week 👇 pic.twitter.com/w4QP1EEO6v

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 29, 2020

Britain's colonial past should be taught so children have an 'honest understanding' of history, think-tank says.

"It is important our future political leaders understand the history of [Britain] fully and properly." - Kimberly McIntosh, Runnymede Trust. https://t.co/8FmRlksnhM

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 5, 2019

Wilfried Traore

Meet the Ivorian artist recycling cans into pieces of art as a way to tackle his city’s waste problem. pic.twitter.com/OHleFarkfv

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) June 18, 2019

Sudan's First Flying Robot Farmer | Witness || Seeds of Inspiration

via Al Jazeera English

Hatem and Mohammed are two Sudanese inventors determined to stop the desert from swallowing up their country. They are obsessed with drones and robots and even though they are isolated by international sanctions and frustrated by a failing economy they succeed in building

The New Zealand massacre and the weaponisation of history

Brenton Tarrant suffers from common historical delusions. 

by Ibrahim Al-Marashi

On March 15, Australian-born Brenton Tarrant attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 people using five guns inscribed with the names of various historical figures and battles. It was not the first time a white supremacist was weaponising the past.

… 

To find such level of historical delusion among the likes of Tarrant and Breivik is not surprising, but unfortunately, this type of thinking is not limited to their tight-knit far-right circles. The clash of civilisations narrative is also quite popular among the higher echelons of power across Western capitals.

…

How Britain forcefully depopulated a whole archipelago

And managed to cover it up.

By John Pilger

   There are times when one tragedy tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments often justify their actions with lies. 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the British government of Harold Wilson expelled the population of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean, to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island. In high secrecy, the Americans offered the British payment for the islands in the form of a discount on the Polaris nuclear submarine system. 

....

The British media all but ignored it; the Washington Post called it a "mass kidnapping".

... 

The difference was that the Falkland Islanders were white and the Chagossians were black and, crucially, the United States wanted the Chagos Islands - especially Diego Garcia - as a major military base from which to command the Indian Ocean.

The Chagos was a natural paradise. The 1,500 islanders were self-sufficient with an abundance of natural produce, and there was no extreme weather. There were thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway and an undisturbed way of life - until the secret 1961 Anglo-American survey of Diego Garcia led to the expulsion of the entire population.

... 

.................................................................................................................................

By Owen Bowcott

‘It’s heartbreaking’: the Chagos Islanders forced into exile

In 1973, hundreds of citizens were deported from their home. One woman tells her story

...

UN court rejects UK's claim of sovereignty over Chagos Islands

Judges advise Britain that separating archipelago from Mauritius in 1960s was wrong

...

UK used secret threats to keep Chagos Islands, court hears

Mauritius defence minister claims UK forced it to cede territory before independence

EU members abstain as Britain defeated in UN vote on Chagos Islands

Who is really 'wrecking' Europe? | Mark LeVine || Aljazeera

The 'nationalist onslaught' is a symptom, not a cause of Europe's crisis.

by Mark LeVine

"The idea of Europe is in peril."

So wrote 30 leading intellectuals in the Guardian last week - including an assortment of Nobel laureates and other literary prize winners and a sprinkle of philosophers - as the threat of Brexit and the May European Parliament elections loom on the horizon.

Europe indeed appears to be in bad shape. An Italian-Austrian-Hungarian-Polish axis of xenophobic populism is coalescing in the heart of the continent, Swedish Democrats are threatening to derail what's left of the quintessential European liberal welfare state in the north, and a powerful far right is tearing apart the centrist German political establishment. To the west, Brexit UK and Trumpian US are a cause of much anxiety, to the east, scheming Russia and an increasingly authoritarian Turkey are a constant source of tension. And from the south, millions of forced migrants are on the move seeking safe haven on European shores.

...

What is Europe?

It's too much to ask a manifesto-like polemic to provide a monograph's worth of historical analysis. But acknowledging and accounting for Europe's bastardised, highly problematic history is, in fact, a sine qua non for moving towards the liberal Imaginarium the signatories seek to enable. 

Laying aside the evident elision in the text between Europe and the EU (which isn't mentioned in the manifesto though it's clearly the idea more in danger today), even the origin of the word points to a core problem faced by "European patriots" such as the signatories.

Did Europe arise from the idea of "eruba", the Akkadian/Mesopotamian term for the western horizon or the Phoenician "erub" meaning evening or west? And did the Ancient Greeks adopt it into the myth about Phoenician princess Europa of Sidon (modern-day Lebanon), who was kidnapped by Zeus and brought to Crete? Or did they come up with the word combining "eurus" (broad) and "opt" (eye)?

Although various uses of the word can be found as far back as the Roman Empire and became more common with the Reformation, it was Napoleon who first imagined a politically "United States of Europe" with one overarching identity and set of laws and culture. In the centuries before and after Napoleon's grand imperial vision, millions would die fighting over precisely who had a legitimate right to define European identity. That definition was never arrived to.

…

By the early 20th century, well over a million poor Europeans wound up in North Africa, with cities like Tunis, Tripoli and Alexandria becoming home to hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, French, Maltese and other migrants from the north. At the same time, both France and Italy offered at some point full citizenship to colonised Algerians and Libyans ("Muslim Italians" as Benito Mussolini would say) in return for supporting continued metropolitan rule. 

From illiberal empires to neoliberal fantasies

Indeed, Europe's colonial past is also completely absent from the discourse of the manifesto, even though the "idea" of Europe has always been inseparable from the nearly half millennium of inhumanly brutal, massively exploitative and often genocidal imperialism, colonialism and slavery. 

In this context, it's tellingly ironic that when the Italian deputy prime minister, Luigi di Maio, wanted to blame France for the migrant crisis that has sent untold tens of thousands of Africans towards Italy's shores, he accused the French government of "taking the lead" in "never stopp[ing] colonising tens of African states" and "impoverishing Africa." "Africans should be in Africa," he continued, "not at the bottom of the Mediterranean." Of course, Italy was no less brutal in its own colonial wars and rule in Africa (nor were any other European colonial powers). 

Ultimately, Europe is both deeply and implicately related (to borrow a sadly underused concept from Israeli geographer Juval Portugali) to its Muslim and African neighbours and could not have become the bastion of liberal and Enlightenment ideals the present manifesto's signatories rightly strive for without the massive violence perpetrated or supported by European states during the last half millennium.

More to the current point, the financial and broader corporate elites of every EU member state have benefited greatly from the policies of neoliberal "openness", "export-led-growth" and "foreign investment" imposed on the very countries that currently threaten to flood it with refugees, often with the support of brutal and corrupt authoritarian regimes that enriched themselves mightily in the process. 

None of this is mentioned in the manifesto, even though the policies at the root of the political "wreckage" across Europe today lie in neoliberal policies, which, in fact, have been visited directly upon European populations as well. Indeed, neoliberalism in the Euro-American contexts can be well understood as the application of colonial ideologies and policies to metropolitan populations.

…

Manufacturing Consent || Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman

Manufacturing Consent (wikiPedia)

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in which the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.^[1] The title derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent," employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).^[2]

Amira Hass: Why Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is still relevant (aljazeera)

It Is Time To Teach Colonial History in British Schools

Ruqaya Izzidien

If you grew up in Britain, like me, you probably would not be able to recall being taught anything substantial about British colonial history in school.

The British curriculum dedicates plenty of attention to the violence of others - in Nazi Germany or during the American Civil War - and goes into great detail on a few events in medieval and pre-Victorian English history, like the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the reign of Henry VIII. But a British school would not teach you anything about the brutality of British colonialism.

We were told nothing of the concentration camps the British army ran during the Boer War, the Bengal famine of 1943 or the massacres of Kenyans in the 1950s.

In school, I heard nothing of the many crimes the British perpetrated against my Iraqi ancestors. No textbook ever mentioned that Winston Churchill, so deeply venerated as a hero and a brilliant statesman, openly endorsed a chemical attack on Iraqi civilians when they demanded independence from Britain.

The British curriculum did not teach me that Britain invited Iraqi leaders for negotiations, only to kidnap and imprison them, that it sent planes to bomb civilians when they refused to pay taxes or that it burned and destroyed villages and towns to quash revolts.

Since I left school thirteen years ago, the situation has hardly changed. When, in 2010, the British government decided to overhaul the curriculum, then-education secretary, Michael Gove, decided to invite an apologist of empire, historian Niall Ferguson, to help. As a result, British textbooks still whitewash the British Empire and fail to address the foundations of white supremacy on which colonialism was built and the lasting impact of imperial policies on colonised peoples.

…

Yet, the dominant whitewashed narrative of British colonial history seems to be deeply ingrained in the British psyche. Today 49 percent of Britons still think that the British Empire was a force for good that improved the lives of colonised nations and only 15 percent think it left them worse off, according to a survey by market research company YouGov.

There also seems to be a persistent nostalgia for that colonial past. The truth is that in today’s Britain, colonialism sells.

…

I knew O. bin Laden || Aljazeera