Pictures From A Peculiar Institution: Writing The History Of American Slavery. Wajahat Ali: Against the Brahmins (Pankaj Mishra) Pankaj Mishra enjoys upsetting the alleged status quo.
The 43-year-old Indian writer has become a leading critic of Western imperialism, globalization, and abuses of power among the political and intellectual upper crust. He charges India’s privileged class with manipulating the democratic process for self-preservation and profit. He publicly blasts peers, such as Salman Rushdie, whom he accuses of choosing to “amplify the orthodoxies of political and military elites.” and Niall Ferguson, whom he condemned as a cheerleader of “neo-imperialist wars.” Born and raised in Northern India, Mishra was expected to join the civil service after graduating from university.
Instead, he moved to a small village in the Himalayas for five years and wrote literary reviews for the Indian press. —Wajahat Ali. Anarchy and Hegemony. Tony Judt · Bush’s Useful Idiots: Whatever happened to American liberalism? · LRB 21 September 2006. Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy?
Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he ‘didn’t realise’(!)
How to do Empire Right? Stratfor. Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition - Home News - UK. The previously unseen records show exactly who received what in payouts from the Government when slave ownership was abolished by Britain – much to the potential embarrassment of their descendants.
Dr Nick Draper from University College London, who has studied the compensation papers, says as many as one-fifth of wealthy Victorian Britons derived all or part of their fortunes from the slave economy. As a result, there are now wealthy families all around the UK still indirectly enjoying the proceeds of slavery where it has been passed on to them. Dr Draper said: "There was a feeding frenzy around the compensation. " A John Austin, for instance, owned 415 slaves, and got compensation of £20,511, a sum worth nearly £17m today. And there were many who received far more. Academics from UCL, including Dr Draper, spent three years drawing together 46,000 records of compensation given to British slave-owners into an internet database to be launched for public use on Wednesday.
Cruel trade. EXCLUSIVE: Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans. A secretive memo from the Justice Department, provided to NBC News, provides new information about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration's controversial policies.
Now, John Brennan, Obama's nominee for CIA director, is expected to face tough questions about drone strikes on Thursday when he appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee. NBC's Michael Isikoff reports. US control is diminishing, but it still thinks it owns the world. This piece is adapted from Uprisings, a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire, Noam Chomsky's new book of interviews with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books).
The questions are Barsamian's, the answers Chomsky's. Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had? The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the western-backed dictatorships. William Dalrymple: How the affair of Karzai’s Afghanistan is replaying Imperial history – internet lookup list. THE name Gandamak means little in the West today.
Yet this small Afghan village was once famous for the catastrophe that took place there during the First Anglo-Afghan War in January 1842, arguably the greatest humiliation ever suffered by a Western army in the East. The course of that distant Victorian war followed a trajectory that is beginning to seem distinctly familiar. In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of dubious intelligence about a nonexistent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul, the Afghan capital, was manipulated by a group of ambitious hawks to create a scare about a phantom Russian invasion, thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and wholly avoidable conflict. Drones, US Propaganda and Imperial Hubris. Pakistanis should be more supportive of having their national sovereignty violated by Americans, according to US-based political scientists who favor drone strikes in Pakistan.
I am trying hard not make this sound like an Onion article, even though it does. In a January 23 article for The Atlantic, professors Christine Fair, Karl Kaltenthaler and William J. Miller argue that Pakistani opposition to drone strikes is not as widespread as previously claimed, and that the US government should take steps to convert Pakistanis to the official US view on drone strikes: William Dalrymple: a life in writing. On page 493 of William Dalrymple's new narrative of Britain's calamitous 1839 invasion of Afghanistan, he draws this present-day parallel: the west's "fourth war in the country looks certain to end with as few political gains as the first three, and like them to terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought to overthrow".
That isn't how the government sees the situation, I tell him when we meet in London just before Christmas: the prime minister is with the troops in Helmand and defence secretary Philip Hammond has just told the Commons that the planned reduction of British troops in April "is possible because of the success of the Afghan national security forces in assuming a lead role". How could you write such an off-message book, I ask Dalrymple. Dalrymple pulls out his phone and shows me a holiday snap from Kandahar. How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini's millions. Few passing London tourists would ever guess that the premises of Bulgari, the upmarket jewellers in New Bond Street, had anything to do with the pope.
Nor indeed the nearby headquarters of the wealthy investment bank Altium Capital, on the corner of St James's Square and Pall Mall. But these office blocks in one of London's most expensive districts are part of a surprising secret commercial property empire owned by the Vatican. Behind a disguised offshore company structure, the church's international portfolio has been built up over the years, using cash originally handed over by Mussolini in return for papal recognition of the Italian fascist regime in 1929.
Since then the international value of Mussolini's nest-egg has mounted until it now exceeds £500m. In 2006, at the height of the recent property bubble, the Vatican spent £15m of those funds to buy 30 St James's Square. Mau Mau to Midnapore: Confronting the brutality of empire - Opinion. In August 1995 I wrote an article in The Spectator in Britain which the magazine titled "Enough Guilt for Everyone", with the tagline: "The British demand apologies for Japanese atrocities, but never examine their own misconduct in Asia.
" I had been driven to write the article by the avalanche of media coverage that year in the United Kingdom about the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which endlessly claimed that Britain had been fighting for freedom and democracy during that war, and that the Allied victory was nothing short of the triumph of good over evil. The fact that a country which held a quarter of the world's population in colonial subjugation could not possibly be fighting for the principles of "freedom and democracy" eluded most British commentators, who seemed high on a rush of patriotic fervour. It was unclear why so many in the UK were still clinging to this level of hypocrisy, which was both absurd and unnecessary. Downplaying the wrongs Blindfold. MLK's vehement condemnations of US militarism are more relevant than ever.
The civil right achievements of Martin Luther King are quite justly the focus of the annual birthday commemoration of his legacy. But it is remarkable, as I've noted before on this holiday, how completely his vehement anti-war advocacy is ignored when commemorating his life (just as his economic views are). By King's own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central - indispensable - to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered. King argued for the centrality of his anti-militarism advocacy most eloquently on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City - exactly one year before the day he was murdered.
That extraordinary speech was devoted to answering his critics who had been complaining that his anti-war activism was distracting from his civil rights work ("Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? "). “the impossible vocabulary of sorrow” « Gukira. Richard Blanco’s inauguration poem spoke a necessary vocabulary, a needed vocabulary, a submerged vocabulary. Tavia Nyong’o tweeted that it exemplified what Eve Sedgwick theorized as the “periperformative”: “‘utterances whose complex efficacy depends on their tangency to, as well as their difference from, the explicit performances’ (of power).” Perhaps more than any other featured figure, Blanco incarnated the fierce resistance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Brookings' Bruce Riedel urges intensified US support for Saudi despots. When it comes to the US "foreign policy community", few if any people are more representative of it than Bruce Riedel.
A 30-year CIA officer and adviser to the last four US presidents, he is now a senior fellow at the wing of the Brookings Institution funded by entertainment mogul Haim Saban (whom the New York Times described as "a tireless cheerleader for Israel" and who described himself this way: "I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel"). In 2012, Riedel contributed to a book on Iran by Brookings "scholars" which argued that the US could launch a war against Iran by covertly provoking its government into responses that could then falsely be depicted by the US to the world "as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression" - exactly what Brookings' Ken Pollack proposed be done in 2002 to deceitfully justify the attack on Iraq. Riedel begins by noting that "Saudi Arabia is the world's last absolute monarchy" and "like Louis XIV, King Abdallah has complete authority. " Druckversion - Divided States of America: Notes on the Decline of a Great Nation - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International.
Happy (which) New Year: Calendar and consciousness - Opinion. HSBC, too big to jail, is the new poster child for US two-tiered justice system. Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves. Tarzan’s White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy before and after the Airplane. DN! Petraeus emails show general scheming with journalist to get out pro-Israel storyline. The treasures of war: the Today programme on 'Britain's great adventure in Basra' M.guardian.co.uk. Pankaj Mishra reviews ‘Patriot of Persia’ by Christopher de Bellaigue · LRB 21 June 2012. Pankaj Mishra reviews ‘Civilisation’ by Niall Ferguson · LRB 3 November 2011. Noam Chomsky, The Great Charter, Its Fate, and Ours. The ruins of empire: Asia's emergence from western imperialism.
Zinn.php. Jacques Rancière Interview: "Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State" - Cunning Hired Knaves. Inside the CIA Dossier on Iraq. Making the Future by Noam Chomsky – review. When Iran Bombed Iraq’s Nuclear Reactor. Six Questions for Asli Bali and Aziz Rana. Dilip Hiro, How to Trump a Superpower. Empire as a practice of power: empire as ideology and as technique.