Fascism. CHEGA! de Falta De Coragem

‘Oxbridge institutions are not alone in owing a tremendous debt to slaves.’ The Bridge of Sighs at St John’s College in Cambridge. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters


As Cambridge investigates its past, it’s time we acknowledged that slavery embedded a racial privilege that exists to this day

By Myriam François for The Guardian

…

But Oxbridge institutions are not alone in owing a tremendous debt to slaves. The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at UCL has created a vast database that shows just how profoundly slavery shaped modern Britain – well beyond its two best-known universities. Among the institutions with a history of slavery, connections are the Bank of England, high-street banks (RBS, Barclays and Lloyds), railway companies, insurance companies and even the Royal Mail. And as these organisations flourished through their use of forced labour, their owners bequeathed part of their huge wealth to some of the UK’s leading cultural institutions, including the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Tate, the Victoria & Albert and the British Museum. Visitors to these galleries today are given little or no indication of their murky histories.

Slave-owning planters, and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce, were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain. Profits from these activities helped to endow the industrial revolution, Britain’s naval supremacy, and even British capitalism itself. By the late 1700s, slave-generated profits were large enough to have covered up to a third of Britain’s overall investment needs.

But the privileges accrued from slavery were not only economic: prestige properties were built which would be passed down as generational wealth. If you’ve ever marvelled at some of Britain’s stately homes or listed buildings, you should be aware that many of them were built or bought using money derived from slavery. One example is Dodington Park, a beautiful estate, currently owned by British inventor James Dyson, and which was originally built by Christopher Bethell-Codrington, using sums derived at least in part from plantation profits.

Often this wealth translated into political power. Alderman William Beckford, whose father was one of the most powerful men in 18th-century Jamaica, went on to serve as mayor of London. He even kept enslaved Africans to serve him in England. More recently, former prime minister David Cameron and his wife, Samantha, were both revealed to have slaveowners in their family background. Inherited wealth matters for generations.

Yet, as historian David Olusoga has pointed out, it would be a mistake to think of slave-ownership in the UK as confined to the upper classes. Many middle-class people, “including clergymen, naval personnel and people who had returned from the colonies were also slave-owners”, regarded an enslaved person as “a sound investment”.

…

As the Jamaican-American philosopher Charles W Mills points out, while other political ideologies are acknowledged – socialism, capitalism, fascism – we consistently fail to name the ideology that forged global European imperialism: white supremacy.

…

A Top U.K. Newspaper Explores Its Ties to Slavery, and Britain’s

A Top U.K. Newspaper Explores Its Ties to Slavery, and Britain’s https://t.co/8dKK4ItVnG

— Howard French (@hofrench) July 8, 2023

The Illusion Of Superiority/Being Civilized, British Empire

Britain’s story of empire is based on myth. We need to know the truth

By Priyamvada Gopal

...

Here’s the irony. While discussions of the British empire invariably generate toxic divides, it is in fact this very history that can provide sought-after “common ground” on which to examine the necessarily complex question of what it means to be British today. All Britons, white and ethnic minority, are touched every day by imperial legacies, from what we eat and drink – coffee, cocoa, sugar, tea – to the multinational corporations and banks we work for or buy from, to our basic assumptions and categories of thought including concepts such as race, development, free trade and globalisation which were forged in the crucible of empire. Colonial history also provides context for many contemporary British concerns from identity, multiculturalism and humanitarianism to foreign aid, hard borders and sovereignty.

Moreover, the history of the empire shows us not only that there is nothing especially “British” about values such as tolerance, freedom, human rights or democracy but that often what we call “British values” were influenced by both empire and resistance to empire. The oft-told story of a benevolent Britain “bestowing” freedom on her colonies when they were deemed ready for it is largely myth. In reality, resistance, often violent resistance alongside famous non-violent movements, was a central part of the story. Colonial subjects often had their own ideas about the meaning of “freedom” – like the Jamaican rebels of 1865, who rejected the notion that they were “free” to sell their labour to plantation owners after being released from bondage, and demanded small plots of land in which they could be truly independent. “Freedom”, it became clear, has many meanings and today we are often presented with a rather narrow version mainly to do with consumer choice.

An honest and informed understanding of the British empire and its afterlife is also vital because it can help us go beyond the questionable model where ethnic and cultural minorities in Britain are required to “integrate” into a static model of “Britishness” owned by white Britons.

The enslaved and the colonised were not merely either victims or beneficiaries of empire but agents who actively contributed to Britain. Their labour, often extracted for nothing or little, underlies the wealth that was created in this country, while their resistance to oppression underscored the universality of values such as equality, human dignity, tolerance, justice and freedom. In many ways, they made Britain.

'A demeaning environment': stories of racism in UK universities

'A demeaning environment': stories of racism in UK universities https://t.co/GFGiFz3r24

— The Guardian (@guardian) July 5, 2019

Coffee?

Up to 25 cups of coffee a day safe for heart health, study finds https://t.co/ReObCl9zka

— The Guardian (@guardian) June 3, 2019

Why race science is on the rise again | Angela Saini || The Guardian

By Angela Saini


The public may have assumed that scientific racism was dead, but the racists were always active under the radar




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I still remember vividly the reaction of a racist teacher upon knowing my high school ''graduation'' grades, almost 20 years later. She decided it could only be an error, for her NO African could come to Portugal and have those grades, mind you I did technically quit and had attended classes without glasses on the previous years.
Guess I ended up with better grades than her, and she could NOT stand it.

Augusta Savage

The extraordinary story of the trailblazing artist

By Nadja Sayej

…

“It’s the first exhibition to look at her career, but also how she struggled through poverty and racism,” says the curator, Wendy NE Ikemoto. “She often didn’t have the funds to cast her sculpture in bronze, or the money to store them. Many were cast in plaster and painted with shoe polish to make it look like bronze.”

Savage, who was born in Florida in 1892, moved to New York on a scholarship to study art at the Cooper Union. In 1923, she won a scholarship to study at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France, but the French government retracted her admission after learning she was black.

A typewritten letter from the admissions committee reads that “it would not be wise to have a colored student … as complications would arise, and the student would suffer most from these complications”.

…

It’s not just Cambridge University – all of Britain benefited from slavery || Myriam François

‘Oxbridge institutions are not alone in owing a tremendous debt to slaves.’ The Bridge of Sighs at St John’s College in Cambridge. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters


As Cambridge investigates its past, it’s time we acknowledged that slavery embedded a racial privilege that exists to this day

By Myriam François for The Guardian

…

But Oxbridge institutions are not alone in owing a tremendous debt to slaves. The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at UCL has created a vast database that shows just how profoundly slavery shaped modern Britain – well beyond its two best-known universities. Among the institutions with a history of slavery, connections are the Bank of England, high-street banks (RBS, Barclays and Lloyds), railway companies, insurance companies and even the Royal Mail. And as these organisations flourished through their use of forced labour, their owners bequeathed part of their huge wealth to some of the UK’s leading cultural institutions, including the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Tate, the Victoria & Albert and the British Museum. Visitors to these galleries today are given little or no indication of their murky histories.

Slave-owning planters, and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce, were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain. Profits from these activities helped to endow the industrial revolution, Britain’s naval supremacy, and even British capitalism itself. By the late 1700s, slave-generated profits were large enough to have covered up to a third of Britain’s overall investment needs.

But the privileges accrued from slavery were not only economic: prestige properties were built which would be passed down as generational wealth. If you’ve ever marvelled at some of Britain’s stately homes or listed buildings, you should be aware that many of them were built or bought using money derived from slavery. One example is Dodington Park, a beautiful estate, currently owned by British inventor James Dyson, and which was originally built by Christopher Bethell-Codrington, using sums derived at least in part from plantation profits.

Often this wealth translated into political power. Alderman William Beckford, whose father was one of the most powerful men in 18th-century Jamaica, went on to serve as mayor of London. He even kept enslaved Africans to serve him in England. More recently, former prime minister David Cameron and his wife, Samantha, were both revealed to have slaveowners in their family background. Inherited wealth matters for generations.

Yet, as historian David Olusoga has pointed out, it would be a mistake to think of slave-ownership in the UK as confined to the upper classes. Many middle-class people, “including clergymen, naval personnel and people who had returned from the colonies were also slave-owners”, regarded an enslaved person as “a sound investment”.

…

As the Jamaican-American philosopher Charles W Mills points out, while other political ideologies are acknowledged – socialism, capitalism, fascism – we consistently fail to name the ideology that forged global European imperialism: white supremacy.

…

The 'debate of the century': what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek

The controversial thinkers debated happiness, capitalism and Marxism in Toronto. It was billed as a meeting of titans – and that it was not. But it did reveal one telling commonality

By Stephen Marche

...

Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy. (China’s success makes a joke out of the whole premise of the debate: the old-fashioned distinction between communism and capitalism.) Neither can face the reality or the future. Therefore they retreat.

...

And they both agreed, could not have agreed more, that it was all the fault of the “academic left”. They seemed to believe that the “academic left”, whoever that might be, was some all-powerful cultural force rather than the impotent shrinking collection of irrelevances it is. If the academic left is all-powerful, they get to indulge in their victimization.

And that was the great irony of the debate: what it comes down to is that they believe they are the victims of a culture of victimization. They play the victim as much as their enemies. It’s all anyone can do at this point.

...

Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough || The Guardian

Network of eight radio telescopes around the world records revolutionary image

By Hannah Devlin

Astronomers have captured the first image of a black hole, heralding a revolution in our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects.

The picture shows a halo of dust and gas, tracing the outline of a colossal black hole, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55m light years from Earth.

Quick guide

What are black holes?

Black holes were first predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which reimagined gravity as the warping of space and time by matter and energy. 

The equations predicted that, beyond a certain threshold, when too much matter or energy is concentrated in one place, space and time collapse, leaving behind a sinkhole through which light and matter can enter but not escape. 

At first these were thought to be mathematical oddities, rather than real astronomical objects, but in the past century overwhelming evidence has confirmed that black holes are out there.

The edge of the black hole is defined by its so-called event horizon. This is the point at which escaping would require something to travel at faster than the speed of light – which as far as we know nothing does – so it is the point of no return.

Black holes are surrounded by an accretion disk of dust and gas, orbiting at close to the speed of light. A lot of this material is destined for oblivion, although some of it is ejected as powerful jets of radiation.

The black hole itself – a cosmic trapdoor from which neither light nor matter can escape – is unseeable. But the latest observations take astronomers right to its threshold for the first time, illuminating the event horizon beyond which all known physical laws collapse.

The breakthrough image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile, in an effort involving more than 200 scientists.

…

France Córdova, director of the US National Science Foundation and an astrophysicist, said that the image, which she had only seen as it was unveiled at the press briefing she was chairing, had brought tears to her eyes. “We have been studying black holes for so long that sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us has seen one,” she said. “This will leave an imprint on people’s memories.”

...

The EHT picks up radiation emitted by particles within the disc that are heated to billions of degrees as they swirl around the black hole at close to the speed of light, before vanishing down the plughole.

The halo’s crescent-like appearance in the image is because the particles in the side of the disc rotating towards Earth are flung towards us faster and so appear brighter. The dark shadow within marks the edge of the event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which no light or matter can travel fast enough to escape the inexorable gravitational pull of the black hole.

Black holes were first predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity – although Einstein himself was sceptical that they actually existed. Since then, astronomers have accumulated overwhelming evidence that these cosmic sinkholes are out there, including recent detection of gravitational wavesthat ripple across the cosmos when pairs of them collide.

But black holes are so small, dark and distant that observing them directly requires a telescope with a resolution equivalent to being able to see a bagel on the moon. This was once thought to be an insurmountable challenge.

The EHT achieved the necessary firepower by combining data from eight of the world’s leading radio observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (Alma) in Chile and the South Pole Telescope, creating an effective telescope the size of the Earth.

When observations were launched in 2017, the EHT had two primary targets. First was Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, which has a mass of about 4m suns. The second target, which yielded the image, was a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, into which the equivalent of 6bn suns of light and matter has disappeared.

The collaboration is still working on producing an image of the Milky Way’s black hole. “We hope to get that very soon,” said Doeleman.

...

Okwui Enwezor: the Nigerian who confronted the European art canon

“The way I see it, it is like night and day. The 80s and before was the colonial, Jim Crow, and apartheid days put together,”.
“It was completely acceptable to the curators of the period that contemporary art did not happen in places like Africa, Asia, South America or the Middle East … globalisation transformed the myopia that previously ruled.”

                                             - Okwui Enwezor said in 2005


By Oliver Basciano

Okwui Enwezor, who has died aged 55, was a peerless, charismatic Nigerian curator who helped place non-western art histories on an equal footing with the long-established narrative of European and North American art. Part of a generation of auteur curators who rose to prominence in the 1990s, he, more than any other, was one with a mission.

...

Enwezor refused to be defined by his two landmark exhibitions. For him just as important was his direction of the Johannesburg Biennale in 1996 and the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2008, as well as Meeting Points 6, an exhibition which took place over 12 months from April 2011 in eight cities across Europe, the Middle East and north Africa, including Damascus, Tangier and Berlin. …

Concealing The Truth Inflates The Illusion Of Superiority

The path to colonial reckoning is through archives, not museums

Returning colonial archives would allow Africans to begin constructing more accurate narratives of colonial experience.

by Patrick Gathara

… 

The colonial archive, the thousands of official records and documents that trace the history of subjugation, oppression and looting of the continent by the European powers is largely resident in Europe. And it is not a history that the Europeans have been eager to reveal, preferring to think of their time as overlords of the continent as something of a benevolent occupation. 

Yet, as Howard French noted in the New York Times two decades ago, "In the closing years of this century, though, historians, political scientists and other students of African affairs have begun a searching re-examination of the continent's recent past. Increasingly, they have concluded that many of its most persistent curses - from the plague of ethnic hatred widely known as tribalism to endemic official corruption - have powerful roots that are at least partly traceable to European subjugation and rule.”

Yet, a more comprehensive re-examination of this history, especially by the Africans who daily endure its worst legacies, is made difficult by the fact that the documents on which it is inscribed are retained by the architects of the oppression. France, for example, has refused to return Algerian colonial records. 

...

In the case of the British Empire, the re-evaluation of the impact of its policies has been made unnecessarily difficult by the UK government's illegal, widespread and systematic destruction, theft and concealment of colonial-era documents in an effort to cover up its crimes. In the last decade or so, however, some of these hidden archives have come to light, showing the scale of the second attempt at "appropriation and alienation" of African history. A 2015 article in Vice by Katie Engelhart details how in 2011, after repeated denials, the UK government owned up to possessing 20,000 files from 37 colonies in "Migrated Archives" hidden in a secret facility at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire. Three years later, an audit discovered yet another 170,000 Colonial Office documents, some of them stamped "Top Secret". In fact, as late as the 1980s, the British were still destroying records on colonial Kenya.

…

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The Killing Times || Indigenous Australians (The Guardian)

Telling the truth about Australia's past will be painful – but it will be liberating

Rather than engendering guilt, the focus should be on healing historical wounds threatening the nation’s future

• The Killing Times: the massacres of Aboriginal people Australia must confront

School students left ignorant of Indigenous massacres, history teachers say

‘History is being squeezed out’ of a curriculum focused on Stem subjects, educators say

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Guns kill faster, but Concealing The Truth IS as much dangerous.


Framing the big picture would require to TELL the TRUTH, to teach the truth in schools, about occupation, colonialism, countless holocausts, directly and indirectly perpetuated by the Europeans, the natives against each other. Just for the sake of fairness. After that, there will be NO need for the illusion of superiority.

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.

... 

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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

THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND || Chiwetel Ejiofor || William Kamkwamba

William Kamkwamba


Chiwetel Ejiofor

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind review – Chiwetel Ejiofor's charming directorial debut By Benjamin Lee for The Guardian

Book Review || Black Leopard, Red Wolf | Marlon James

Marlon James

By Alex Preston 

Sun 17 Feb 2019 12.00 GMT (The Guardian)

It’s two days before the US release of Marlon James’s much-hyped fourth novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the prizewinning Jamaican author has an air of baffled, exhausted ebullience about him. He’s no stranger to critical success: he won the 2015 Man Booker prize for his violent, multi-voiced epic, A Brief History of Seven Killings. But it feels like this new book will propel James into a new galaxy of literary stardom.

...

By Ron Charles 
January 28 (Washingtonpost)

 ... “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” the first spectacular volume of a planned trilogy, rises up from the mists of time, glistening like viscera. James has spun an African fantasy as vibrant, complex and haunting as any Western mythology, and nobody who survives reading this book will ever forget it. That thunder you hear is the jealous rage of Olympian gods.... 

By Michiko Kakutani  
Jan. 31, 2019 (NYTimes)

...In these pages, James conjures the literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe — filled with dizzying, magpie references to old movies and recent TV, ancient myths and classic comic books, and fused into something new and startling by his gifts for language and sheer inventiveness....

So, poorer Brexiters voted to be worse off? There’s nothing wrong in that || Gary Younge

Many working-class leavers were not motivated by self-interest, but by values. Well-off liberals who back tax rises should understand that

By Gary Younge for The Guardian

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there is a moment when Augustine St Clare, who owns Tom, suggests that he is better off as a slave than he would be as a free man. “No,” insists Tom. “Why Tom?” asks St Clare. “You couldn’t possibly have earned, by your work, such clothes and such living as I have given you.” “Know’s all that Mas’r,” says Tom. “But I’d rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything and have ’em mine, than have the best, and have ’em any man else’s.”

… infantilising people in the name of their own advancement is a bad thing – it is counterproductive. When you start from the premise that those who disagree with you are acting illogically or are too unsophisticated to understand their own interests, no meaningful political engagement is possible …

… It is mythical about the past: those who evoke the wars conveniently forget that they could not have been won without allies. Those who evoke the empire conveniently forget that it could not have been maintained without brutality (as the current furore over Winston Churchill’s legacy illustrates). It is obtuse about the present: countries evolve, borders shift, identities develop. Our royal family is German; our favourite food is Indian; …

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The mythification of the past.
I remember this old crass crank who obliquely took a jab at me, after telling that he will be going to Iceland on holiday, that Iceland was also colonized, all this making an indirect reference to a post on my blog (I never told him I have a blog). I ignored him, if he is not a coward he would have at least debated me.