#British culture is extremely different from Central European culture

[someone-you-do-not-know]

But that forgets to take the differences between British and Central European culture into consideration. At the time of German Unification (1866-1871), the German states had just been through several art movements and philosophical branches of thought that put humanism and family at the core – Biedermeier (1815-1848), and before that, Weimar Classism (1772-1805) both placed the family as something idyllic and beautiful, and the German Realism and Naturalism movements also followed this trend of celebrating domesticity.

Outside of art movements, there was also the German philosopher, psychologist and founder of pedagogy, Johann Friedrich Herbert (1776-1841), who placed importance on rigorous education. Even before this, Prussia had instated a public education system from 1763, which was expanded after the Napoleonic Wars – and this system spread to other countries.

Additionally, the Kingdom of Prussia was politically the leading member of the unification of Germany. Without Prussia, the Unification likely wouldn't have taken place, because Prussia and Prussian leaders were so integral to the process.

Now, with all that taken into consideration, why would Prussia in Hetalia not be heavily involved with the upbringing and education of Germany? He's a nation who has already lost one brother, his nation values family and education, and he wants Germany to unify. Who else is going to teach Germany how to be a good representation if not him, the strong big brother?

Victorian ideas about childhood were British, not German, and Prussia would not subscribe to those ideals, because Europe is not a monolith.

Actually Gilbert's parenting of Ludwig is such an interesting thing to look at because German unification was happening at a time when Victorian ideas about childhood where starting to become popular with the middle class in Europe and North America, but they weren't necessarily the norm yet.

In the, admittedly limited, strips where we actually see Ludwig's childhood in canon he seems to almost always be attended by an adult. And Gilbert himself appears to have been a relatively involved parental figure (once again we don't have a huge amount of evidence either way, but he certainly seems to have been more involved than say, Arthur was with Alfred).

Which kind of leads credence to the idea that Gilbert, at a time when social views around the roles of children were just starting to shift, made an active choice to try and give Ludwig something resembling a childhood and move towards the idea of children as a protected class.

And that is just so interesting to me. Like Gilbert doesn't necessarily come across to me as the type of guy who reads Victorian woman's magazines for parenting advice but,,, he might be? Like that's where discussions about childhood and childrearing were happening at the time.

Like, objectively speaking, Gilbert does seem to be one of the better, more involved parental figures in Hetalia, and I think that is just such a weird trait to add on to the rest of his canon personality.

[qqueenofhades]

i have to agree with the anon who ranted about the people of the Caucasus & Central Asia being racially discriminated against in the Russian empire + the Westerners putting the Middle Eastern people in either White or PoC label box depending on their attitude towards MENA in that moment.

i'm from the Caucasus and my US American friend was so shocked when she found out that ethnic Caucasians (Chechens, Armenians, ect) are called "monkeys" and "blackasses" by ethnic Russians and it's even worse for the Central Asians.

but the Westerners don't believe these facts because Caucasians have an extremely diverse phenotype, some may be light brown skinned but others may be really pale.

because of that, the Westerners allow themselves to discuss the people from the MENA nations with less respect and sensitivity - depending on their sentiments and reasoning, i have seen the Westerners call Syrians, Turkish people and the women of Iran either white or brown. the truth is that viewing racial social constructs through the US PoV is stupid.

This is why racism isn't "scientific" or "logical" or any other of the defenses that racists want to use for it, because it's not. It's both fundamentally irrational and shaped by the particular beliefs and prejudices of different cultures and societies. Because western white supremacy has long been tied to the most powerful sociopolitical institutions in the world, there's obviously an aspect of that permeated into everything, but how that shapes up varies WILDLY and the US experience is not at all transferable into a global context. First of all, the modern US was entirely settled by immigrants; if you're a white person in America, you're an immigrant, and that means there isn't an "original" or "singular" white American culture, no matter what racists (again) might like to claim. It's a melting pot of different influences, languages, national origins, etc., and thus "white" in America is more universal than it is in other places. There aren't really fine gradations depending on where in Europe your ancestors came from. If you're white in America, you're white. The end.

This is also the case because modern America was founded on settler colonialism, slavery, and genocide, all of which was deliberately targeted at people of color (Native Americans and African Americans). So as long you couldn't possibly be visually identified with one of those groups, you were safer than if you were. That's why you have people who were ethnically or ancestrally Black, or had two Black parents, but whose skin was light enough to allow them to "pass for white." That was all they needed; the perception that they weren't Black was enough to move them out of their assigned "inferior" place in society, and the 1920s also saw an upsurge of belief in the "extraordinary Negro," or a Black person who was culturally, educationally, and essentially "almost" (but not quite) white. This itself was a concept dating from the 18th century and the first arguments that "some" Black people were "better" or more able to be "civilized" than others, which was often also correlated with degree of skin color and how closely they "looked" white.

All of this construction of racism, and especially anti-Black racism, makes sense because of America's troubled history as a violently anti-Black settler-colonial nation created by European immigrants from all over. But then that obviously isn't the case in Europe itself, where not all white people are created equal, "whiteness" doesn't correlate to perceivable skin color, there are strictly delineated national groups who haven't mixed the same way as they have in America, and there are equally stringent and long-embedded prejudices about who gets access to the most "whiteness," which really means the most power and privilege. The rightwing British press, even after Brexit, still spends a lot of time talking about Those Gross Eastern Europeans (they have had to tone it down because of the war in Ukraine and the decision that Ukrainians are acceptable refugees, but not entirely). There were endless pieces about Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc. coming to "steal jobs" and "cause crime," because Western Europe has always considered itself superior to Eastern Europe, and while Eastern Europeans may look white, they still aren't considered as white, i.e. powerful, as the West.

Likewise, yes, there is the same impossibility of reducing the people of the Caucasus, the Middle East, etc., to stereotypical American binaries of "white" or "person of color." However white they might physically look to American eyes, a fair-skinned Syrian, Turkish, or Iranian person is not white in the sense that either America or the world at large has constructed it. Even if they came to America, they would be subject to other intersectional prejudices (anti-Muslim, anti-foreign, anti-Arabic, anti-Middle Eastern, etc. etc.) that would preclude them from taking part in full privileged whiteness. (Those who are obviously or visibly "ethnic" would, of course, have it even worse.) Therefore, because of the particular regional history and power dynamics of Russia and the Caucasus/territories of the former USSR, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Ukrainians, etc. are not Russians and therefore not white in the way that allows them to participate in the top echelons of the power structure, and will always be reminded of their essential "unbelonging." Their physical whiteness doesn't matter; they are still inferior to the ruling class and therefore labeled with the kind of ethnic and racial slurs that are applied to all oppressed or excluded groups. Once again, what they actually look like is completely beside the point, and anyone trying to interpret or understand global racism through the American lens, where it's entirely about whether you can physically pass for white or not, will therefore be wildly wrong.

[heatedinsanity]

@psychologeek

alright let's do this one at a time

firstly, i am sad that people are dead too. no reasonable person isn't. some people are unreasonable, and this includes some leftists (though not the vast, vast majority), but this person's post was insinuating that all leftists are somehow a monolith and they are all antisemitic for being against the current form of zionism. this is why i replied to the post, as a means of explaining antizionism and why so many on the left are against it, not because they hate jews. and i'm aware this reveals where my concerns lie. my concerns have always lain with fighting imperialism and oppression wherever it rears its head. that's why i left israel in the first place.

second, i'm aware there are different kinds of zionism, but the most prevalent form at this moment is explicitly imperialistic (through a settler colonial framework) and extremely harmful to all the people who live in the region, including Jewish people. again, no ethnicity, no matter how oppressed, no matter how ancient, no matter how desperate, needs a state, which is the central position around almost all forms of zionism. to say otherwise is to erase multiple cultures consisting of millions of people and many different languages and religions, something which israel has attempted to do throughout its history.

third, in order of your listing

israel is harmful to everyone in the region of palestine. it's harmful to jews attempting to be who they are and live their lives in peace. it's harmful to christians and muslims in the region who are trying to do the same things. israel is an oppressive, deeply conservative institution which seeks to quell any and all dissent from within the borders it carved for itself, no matter where the voice comes from. it is a deeply paranoid settler colony which sees any form of progressivism as a fundamental threat to its existence, with a largely invented national narrative centered around an existential threat, which, though certainly not without precedent, is only made worse with the continued actions of the colony.

yes, i am more than aware that there were Jewish people in palestine well before the establishment of israel. i am aware that most of them were there because they were trying to escape legitimate persecution and seek out new lives for themselves. but they are not the people who founded israel. israel was founded by several people, but these were all zionist organizations, the majority of which sought to establish israel as a settler colony and explicitly push out the Palestinians (and in some cases, the Jews) who were already living there by force. they were supported by european institutions, most of which were extremely antisemitic and decided to hand off "the Jewish problem" to far off palestine rather than having to reckon with the inequality, antisemitism, and racism they perpetuated at home. israel as a settler colonialist project was first postulated in the 19th century, but it did not come into real force until the establishment of the british mandate of Palestine, when several zionist militant (and most would claim terrorist) organizations were founded with the express purpose of creating israel as a settler colony. they committed many extremely heinous atrocities, which only intensified an already deteriorating situation between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, and israel rewarded them for it.

you're right, i shouldn't assume the best interests of any people. no one should, which is another reason why i'm against zionism. i am of the opinion, however, that states are not necessary nor even effective in protecting a population from oppression. historically speaking, the state has always been an institution of oppression for people both within its territory and outside of it, and this is as deafeningly true for israel as the bombs raining down in gaza city or the apartheid experienced by Palestinians in israel.

yeah, i and pretty much all other leftists are attacking that ideology, because we don't believe that people need states in order to be safe. quite the opposite really, we believe that nations in general are counterintuitive to the safety of populations and oppressed peoples and that people can only be free when the international proletariat destroys these petty institutions. it's why we advocate for the self determination of people's above all, not the forming of nationalist states, and why any leftist approach to nationalism must be met with extreme caution and suspicion.

hope i cleared some things up for you. if you want i can give you some links to books about why zionism is so dangerous to all people's in the levant, or some other resources for Jewish anti zionism

[biblenewsprophecy]

ZH: Globalist “Guru” Claims Trump’s Re-Election Will Mean ‘The Death Of Global Order’

@bible-news-prophecy-radio

COGwriter

ZeroHedge posted the following:

Globalist “Guru” Claims Trump’s Re-Election Will Mean ‘The Death Of Global Order’

July 18, 2024

Yuval Harari is best known as a globalist “philosopher” or “guru” closely tied to the World Economic Forum.  He is infamous for his Ted Talks and summit speeches declaring the coming abandonment of personal individualism and independence while elevating AI as the harbinger of a new technological religion.  He joyously preaches about the fusion of AI technology with the human body to give certain elitist groups the power of “gods.” His notions of the supposedly infinite abilities of algorithms to influence culture and politics are so overblown they enter into the realm of children’s fantasy. …

This is where we must address the issue of Donald Trump and how he is viewed by the globalists…

In light of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump I think it’s important to revisit the long running globalist narrative on the “world order” and Trump’s position as scapegoat for any and all calamities that befall it.

Their primary assertion is that any movement that values national interests over global centralization is an evil movement that must be suppressed or destroyed.  This very rhetoric has permeated leftist political organizations (including Joe Biden’s administration) and the corporate media; it is being used as a justification for subterfuge and extreme violence against conservatives.

In an interview earlier this year, Harari suggested that the return of Donald Trump would mean the “death of the global order.” He then gaslights, claiming that there is no fight between nationalism and globalism and that the idea of a “globalist conspiracy” is entirely a fabrication of populist movements. These people truly expect us to forget the censorship and oppression they attempted during covid. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/globalist-guru-claims-trumps-re-election-will-mean-death-global-order

No, electing Donald Trump will not result in the death of the globalist plans–it will tend to accelerate them.

The globalists are not giving up.

Notice the following from our free online book Lost Tribes and Prophecies: What will happen to Australia, the British Isles, Canada, Europe, New Zealand and the United States of America?:

The World Worships the Beast

The Book of Revelation teaches:

8 All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. (Revelation 13:8)

The “him” above is the Babylonian European Beast.

The “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) has worked to set the stage for this Beast to have secular and religious supporters of various types.

Secular organizations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF),[i] United Nations,[ii] and the Bilderberg Group[iii] all support a type of a somewhat ecumenical-interfaith-merged religion, allowing for certain differences, yet possibly writing their own holy book with artificial intelligence! [iv] They all promote what could be called a ‘globalist’ agenda, consistent with prophecies (e.g. Revelation 17:1-5).

The European Union does as well, however, its view is that Europe should lead a coming “new world order.”[v]

In May of 2022, World Economic Forum’s founder Klaus Schwab, who is German, said he wanted to make it “clear” — “the future is built by us.”[vi] And the WEF will work with others, like European politicians, to make that happen. WEF Chief Executive Philippe Donnet wrote related to global governance, “The world needs a leader. Europe should step up … Global leadership, especially in socioeconomic terms, could become the shared goal of European citizens.”[vii]

Furthermore, the WEF has wanted Roman Catholic involvement and Pope Francis has, at least twice, sent Klaus Schwab pro-WEF letters.[viii]

In 2020 Prince Charles, now king Charles III, endorsed the WEF’s globalist ‘Great Reset” agenda.[ix] There are prophecies about some of the UK (Ephraim) calling out to Germany (Assyria) after the start of the Great Tribulation (cf. Hosea 5:13). It is likely that at least one or more members of the British royal family will do this, though it will not turn out as they would have hoped (cf. Hosea 5:13b, 11:5).

Former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who has pushed for more European integration, has personally spoken at a WEF meeting a decade ago[x] and was still listed as part of the WEF on its website in 2023.[xi] Herr Guttenberg also has directly called for Europe to reorganize.[xii]

The WEF has called its version of a reorganized world The Great Reset.[xiii] Many aspects of The Great Reset align with a future the Bible warns against. In 2021, the WEF announced it would work with Big Tech and governments to be able to control and censor the internet[xiv]—such control would seem to contribute to the coming “famine of the word” (Amos 8:11-12).

In 2022, Klaus Schwab told the G20 (a group of the most influential/powerful government leaders of the world) that he believed that “a deep systemic and structural restructuring of our world” was needed.[xv] While a deep European restructuring will occur (cf. Revelation 17:12-13), it is scripturally warned against. In 2023 in a keynote speech at the World Government Summit, Klaus Schwab stated, “I agree, artificial intelligence, but not only artificial intelligence, but also the metaverse, neospace technologies, and I could go on and on … And, who masters those technologies, in some way, will be the master of the world”[xvi]–and that is basically what he called for. Bible prophecy points to computer technologies to be used by the coming Beast power (cf. Revelation 13:16-18).

On the opening day of the WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland in 2023, Klaus Schwab called for his supporters to “master the future,”[xvii] which looks to be directed towards globalist totalitarianism. On the closing day of that conference “Tanja Fajon, Slovenia’s minister of foreign affairs, complained about countries placing their own sovereignty over the interests of the ‘world order,’ “ [xviii] (the loss of national sovereignty will happen at least in Europe according to prophecies such as Revelation 17:12-13).

Another 2023 WEF Davos speaker, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari (Pakistan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs) stated shortly after Tanja Fajon, “Here at WEF…there’s a lot of discussion about what the new world order will be…” and he also stated that that they needed to continue working towards, “building this new world order.” [xix] Having watched the video clip of this, Bilawal Zardari also looked to be calling for something consistent with the final time of the Gentiles (Ezekiel 30:3). By not appreciating warnings contained in biblical prophecies, many are pushing in a direction that will end in death and destruction that the Bible says to flee from (cf. Revelation 18:2-19).

It needs to be pointed out that this book is not asserting that the United Nations, World Economic Forum, Freemasons, Bilderberg Group, etc. cannot do anything good. They do have many positive goals, yet also some goals that are opposed by scripture. Despite the good, the Bible warns:

1 Unless the Lord builds the house, They labor in vain who build it; (Psalm 127:1)

And, since these groups do not promote the supremacy of the God of the Bible, they, in that sense, labor in vain.

Related to goals of the New Age movement, consider the following:

A number of fundamental beliefs are held by many New Age followers…

Universal Religion: Since all is God, then only one reality exists, and all religions are simply different paths to that ultimate reality. …New World OrderAs the Age of Aquariusunfolds, a New Age will develop. This will be a utopia in which there is world government, and end to wars, disease, hunger, pollution, and poverty. People’s allegiance to their tribe or nation will be replaced by a concern for the entire world and its people.[xx]

This also sounds consistent with what the Freemasons say they want:

What is the Mission of Freemasonry? To promote a way of life that binds like-minded men in a worldwide brotherhood that transcends all religious, ethnic, cultural, social and educational differences; by teaching the great principles of brotherly love, relief and truth; and, by the outward expression of these through its fellowship, to find ways in which to serve God, family, country, neighbors and self.[xxi]

There has, historically, been friction between the Freemasons and the Vatican, though this has lessened under Pope Francis.[xxii] However, Freemasons, and others without strong ties to the Church of the City of Seven Hills (Rome), are likely to be among those that will one day betray it after the Beast is more fully in power and an antipope is in place consistent with Revelation 17:16-18.

[i] Yanklowitz S. Global unity or chaos: Special report from the World Economic Forum! Jewish Journal, September 6, 2011

[ii] Secretary-General briefs Security Council on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question. United Nations, January 26, 2016

[iii] Richardson I, et al. Bilderberg People. Taylor & Francis, 2013

[iv] Global Agenda: Role of Faith in Systemic Global Challenges World Economic Forum, June 2016; Campbell M. WEF speaker suggests ‘New Bible’ written by AI. The Counter Signal, June 13, 2023

[v] Balázs P. ed. Europe’s Position in the New World Order. Center for EU Enlargement Studies, 2013

[vi] Klaus Schwab at World Economic Forum: ‘The future is built by us.’ World Tribune, May 23, 2022

[vii] Donnet P. The world needs a leader. Europe should step up. WEF, January 17, 2018

[viii] To Professor Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. From the Vatican, 12th January 2018; Franciscus PP. Message of His Holiness Pope Francis to Prof. Klaus Schwab. From the Vatican, 17 January 2014

[ix] Alessi C. ‘A golden opportunity’ – HRH the Prince of Wales and other leaders on the Forum’s Great Reset. WEF, June 3, 2020

[x] Stott M. German minister fears “infectious momentum” in Mideast. Reuters, January 28, 2011

[xi] Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg. World Economic Forum https://www.weforum.org/people/karl-theodor-zu-guttenberg accessed 01/21/23

[xii] Centrifugal Force An Interview with Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Octavian Report, c. 2017; Octavian Report video on November 15, 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTL_CgBwmxo

[xiii] Scwab K, Malleret T. COVID-19: The Great Reset. Agentur Schweiz, 2020

[xiv] Hohmann L. World Economic Forum (WEF) Announces Creation of Orwellian ‘Global Coalition for Digital Safety’ Global Research, 1 July 2021

[xv] Florio G. World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab Announces His Plans For A “Deep Systemic And Structural Restructuring Of Our World” At The G20 Summit. Evie magazine, November 15, 2022

[xvi] Parker T. Klaus Schwab: Those who master new technologies “in some way, will be the master of the world.” Reclaim the Net, February 14, 2023

[xvii] Coglianese V. Editor Daily Rundown: Klaus Schwab Opens 2023 World Economic Forum With Call To ‘Master The Future’Daily Caller, January 17, 2023

[xviii] Dutton J. ‘New World Order’ Remarks at Davos Spark Flood of Conspiracy Theories. Newsweek, January 20, 2023

[xix] Dutton J. ‘New World Order’ Remarks at Davos Spark Flood of Conspiracy Theories. Newsweek, January 20, 2023

[xx] NEW AGE SPIRITUALITY a.k.a. Self-spirituality, New spirituality, Mind-body-spirit. Religious Tolerance.org http://www.religioustolerance.org/newage.htm viewed 07/29/22

[xxi] Reading Lodge No. 254 Free and Accepted Masons of the State of California. https://reddinglodge.org/mission-and-vision-of-freemasonry/ accessed 08/01/22

[xxii] Why do the Freemasons Love Pope Francis? OnePeter5, April 7, 2017

The possible election of Donald Trump will not stop the globalists from moving forward or the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.

Related Items:

Freemasonry and the Destruction of Rome? What is Freemasonry? What about ties to the Illuminati? Could they be involved in the fulfillment of prophecy? Here is a link to a related sermon: Freemasonry, Armageddon, and Rome.

Will the Interfaith Movement Lead to Peace or Sudden Destruction? Is the interfaith movement going to lead to lasting peace or is it warned against? A video sermon of related interest is: Will the Interfaith Movement lead to World War III? and a video sermon is also available: Do You Know That Babylon is Forming?

Some Doctrines of Antichrist Are there any doctrines taught outside the Churches of God which can be considered as doctrines of antichrist? This article suggests at least three. It also provides information on 666 and the identity of “the false prophet.” Plus it shows that several Roman Catholic writers seem to warn about an ecumenical antipope that will support heresy. You can also watch a video titled What Does the Bible teach about the Antichrist?

Europa, the Beast, and Revelation Where did Europe get its name? What might Europe have to do with the Book of Revelation? What about “the Beast”? Is an emerging European power “the daughter of Babylon”? What is ahead for Europe? Here is are links to related videos: European history and the Bible, Europe In Prophecy, The End of European Babylon, and Can You Prove that the Beast to Come is European? Here is a link to a related sermon in the Spanish language: El Fin de la Babilonia Europea.

Is a Great Reset Coming? Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has proposed a societal change that has been basically endorsed by the Vatican and many world leaders. Does the Bible prophesy a major reset? Here is a link to a related video: Will there be a “Great Reset”?

Satan’s Plan Does Satan have a plan? What is it? Has it already been successful? Will it be successful in the future? Here are links to a two-part sermon series: What are Some of the Parts of Satan’s Plan? and Satan’s Plan is More Dramatic than Many Realize.

Mystery of Iniquity What is the mystery of iniquity? How did it start? How will it end? Two related sermons are also available: The Mystery of Iniquity and The Mystery of Lawlessness.

Lost Tribes and Prophecies: What will happen to Australia, the British Isles, Canada, Europe, New Zealand and the United States of America? Where did those people come from? Can you totally rely on DNA? Do you really know what will happen to Europe and the English-speaking peoples? What about the peoples of Africa, Asia, South America, and the islands? This free online book provides scriptural, scientific, historical references, and commentary to address those matters. Here are links to related sermons: Lost tribes, the Bible, and DNA; Lost tribes, prophecies, and identifications; 11 Tribes, 144,000, and Multitudes; Israel, Jeremiah, Tea Tephi, and British Royalty; Gentile European Beast; Royal Succession, Samaria, and Prophecies; Asia, Islands, Latin America, Africa, and Armageddon;  When Will the End of the Age Come?;  Rise of the Prophesied King of the North; Christian Persecution from the Beast; WWIII and the Coming New World Order; and Woes, WWIV, and the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

LATEST NEWS REPORTS

LATEST BIBLE PROHECY INTERVIEWS

[fatehbaz]

aw i swear i reblogged a post of yours with a reading rec and now i can't find it. :( but i was interested in learning more about indigenous vs colonial/imperial relationships with nature (especially in terms of nature as a food source) and was wondering if you had any books (or other resources) you could recommend? thank you for all the resources and information you share!

Thank you for the kind message. :)

Are you thinking about the new book on how the US, despite formally occupying the islands at the time, also simultaneously flexed some so-called “Soft Power” (which is, of course, violent and never actually “soft”) and asserted itself in the Philippines by messing around with food culture and changing food traditions? Taste of Control: Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality Under American Rule. From 2020, by R. Alexander D. Orquiza. (The book focuses on the period between 1898 and 1940s.)

Maybe you’d be interested in these? These are some posts from me. Each post contains short excerpts. (Like, the juicy bits and short enough to not be overwhelming, y’know? Then, if the subject seems cool, the author names and full citation are included. Some of the posts contain maps, photos of plants/animals, other visual aid, and direct links to read the longer full articles for free.) These are posts about local food sovereignty; differences between worldviews of traditional food systems and settler-colonial food systems; difference between traditional and imperial relationships to plants; Empire’s use of food, plants, botany, and scientific institutions to undermine Indigenous autonomy; and contrasts between imperial and traditional human-plant-animal relationships.

-- Manoomin, the imperial plot to domesticate wild rice, “cottage colonialism” in Canada, imaginative control, the power of names and naming plants, different understanding of food contrasted between Empire and Indigenous knowledge. (Covers 1880s to Present.)

-- Pineapple, domestication of breadfruit, and plantations “doing the work of Empire” in Hawaii. Difference between Indigenous Polynesian respect for plants/food, and imperial/industrial food extraction.

-- Leslie Marmon Silko: Gardens. Food sovereignty and imperialist use of food to gain control. Settler-colonial theft of Indigenous plant knowledge. She says: “It wasn’t too long before I realized how very political gardens are. I had actually stumbled into the most political thing of all – how you grow your food, whether you eat, the fact that the plant collectors followed the Conquistadors.”

-- “We don’t need to know what starfish know”: Aboriginal knowledge-holders of Bawaka Country discuss contrast between traditional and settler-colonial understandings of food harvest and multispecies communities.

-- Anna Boswell’s discussion of endemic longfin eels of Aotearoa as example of contrast between Maori worldviews and settler-colonial understanding of ecology; and the problem with making “land-water” distinctions in Euro-American agriculture and land management.

-- Robin Wall Kimmerer speaking frankly about paying attention to plants, and the differences between kinds of inquiry, difference between settler-colonial institutionalized knowledge compared to Indigenous/land-based “ways of knowing”.

-- Native food and imperial appropriation of food/plants: “The Nineteenth-Century Garden: Imperialism, Subsistence, and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes.”  

-- Mapuche cultural autonomy, Valdivian temperate rainforest, and European  plots to dismantle the rainforest to create “Swiss or German pastoral farm landscape” in Chile.

-- The debris and ruins of imperial sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and modern Caribbean art

-- Easy-to-access compilation of audio recordings and oral histories of bioregional foodsheds, from 13 Native food autonomy advocates. (New England maple syrup. New Mexico. Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Abalone/acorns in California. Salmon in PNW, etc.)

-- “Ghostly non-places; settler-colonial hallucinations and fantasy visions; monstrous plants and animals; hiding, destroying, re-making ecological worlds; permanent cataclysm; the horror of settlement”: Anna Boswell on settler-colonial agriculture and ecology.

-- Some fresh annoying OC from me. Vegetation as a weapon: On soil degradation and the use of non-native plants to change landscapes and sever cultural relationships to land; extinction of megafauna; and on the dramatically under-reported but massive scale of anthropogenic environmental change wrought by early empires and “civilizations” in the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and ancient world (including the Fertile Crescent, Rome, and early China)

-- Indigenous Sami reindeer herding contrasted with colonial/industrial resource extraction; “eternal catastrophe”; power over death; “disaster as a form of governance”; apocalypse. From the great writing of Hugo Reinert.

-- Anna Boswell on stoats; native plants/animals of Aotearoa; and how settler-colonial environmental management targets species (and humans) for persecution or sacrifice.

--- Calcutta Botanic Gardens abduction and use of Chinese slaves; Kew Gardens (successfully) plotting to steal cinchona from people of Bolivia to service their staff in India; botanic gardens’ role in large-scale dispossession to create plantations in Assam and Ooty (1790s - 1870s).

-- The role of grasslands, deforestation, and English grasses in ecological imperialism in Aotearoa, early 20th century.

-- “Forage wars” between Native food harvesters and California legal institutions: Abalone, native foodsheds, and food harvesting in Pomo, Yurok, Coast Yuki, and other Klamath Mountains and coastal Northern California communities.

-- Zoe Todd discussing connection to local place, traditional ecological knowledge, and knowledge appropriation: “Not all knowledge is for your consumption.”

-- The grand tale of breadfruit domestication, the mutiny on the Bounty,  and plantation owners plotting with Kew Gardens to domesticate crops to  undermine slave gardens in the Caribbean. (Also includes comments on the under-reported central role of media/PR manipulation and slavery in the “mutiny on the Bounty” story.)

-- Conflating women with “bloodthirsty” and “flesh-eating” plants, and the  dehumanization of Indigenous cultures through scientific illustrations of imperial scientific agents and artistic depictions of plants from  colonized ecosystems (Euro-American art and science of botany in1700s to early 1900s),

-- Robin Wall Kimmerer: Paying attention to plants and her love for strawberries, from Braiding Sweetgrass.

-- “Coyote’s biota”: Comcaac (Seri) and O’Odaham food, plant knowledge, and the ascribing of special names to native plants and Euro-American plants to distinguish between types of food.

-- In the Falkland Islands: Intersections of extinction; the “Antarctic wolf”; colonialism, whiteness, racism, “invasion,” indigeneity; environmental history; decline of penguins; introduction of non-native European sheep, cats, cattle, pigs and ecological reinforcement of settler-colonial culture, etc.

-- Bogong moths and ethics of killing insects in settler-colonial Australian imaginary

-- “The British Museum was built on coral, butterflies, and slavery”: Hans Sloane, Caribbean ecology, museums and curiosity cabinets, and how plantation money and slavery built British scientific institutions

-- Human relationship with bees; use of insects in imperialism

-- Racism in depictions Melanesia; the mapping and naming of Polynesia and Melanesia

-- Records and details of extreme deforestation in ancient Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia around 4500 BC; extreme landscape modification in Asiatic steppes in first millennium AD.

-- Zoe Todd on human-fish relationships in Alberta, prairie, and boreal forest.

-- Dandelions, other non-native plants, and settler gardens changing soil of the Canadian Arctic. (Late 1800s and early 1900s.) From Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North.

---------

And some of the so-called “classic” authors:

-- Zoe Todd: Might be most famous in popular media for her criticism of the Eurocentrism of the  “Anthropocene concept; for writing about racism and anti-Indigenous prejudice in academia; and for her 2014 essay, a retort to Euroamerican anthropologists. But aside from her advocacy, her academic research is often concerned with fish, food, plants, and traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous communities in Canada (she is Metis, from Alberta). You’d be able to find many of her articles online, though I linked some above.

-- Neel Ahuja: Pretty famous scholar, “leading” author on biopolitics. References foodsheds and contrasts local and imperial food production, but also more broadly addresses interspecies/multispecies relationships; entanglements of race, gender, speciesism; health, medicine, and control of disease; control of food and personal bodies as sites of colonization.

-- Robin Wall Kimmerer: Wonderful. She’s a botanist, she loves moss, and she’s concerned with traditional ecological knowledge. (She is Potawatomi.) She does explicitly contrast imaginaries, like the difference between Settler-colonial/imperial perceptions of plants/ecosystems, and Indigenous/local/”attentive” perceptions of plants/ecosystems.

-- Vandana Shiva: She has many, many lectures and publications available. Her politics aren’t always great, but she might be most famous for advocating food sovereignty and resistance to corporate agriculture and food giants. Often speaks of development, industrialization, and gender hierarchies. But one influential text was Biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge from 1997.

-- Anna Boswell: Perhaps most famous for writing about the plight of the endemic Aotearoa longfin eel, she specifically focuses on the contrast between, on the one hand, Indigenous/local perceptions and Maori knowledge of landscape/living creatures, and, on the other hand, settler-colonial and industrial/extractivist perceptions of land. She uses some certain animals/plants of Aotearoa as case studies to clearly demonstrate different treatment/perception of land, to criticize settler-colonial “world reordering” (landscaping, pasture, plantation, etc.) as a form of “deathwork.”

(1) Aotearoa longfin eel and devaluing species; (2) tuatara and colonial environmental change; (3) non-native stoats and persecution; (4) settler-colonial landscapes, fantasy-visions, and ecological apocalypse.

-------

Something I mentioned in the tags on that post about food in the Philippines was that an early formative learning experience for Young Me was when I met a teacher who had worked with ecology and horticulture in Southeast Asia, who stressed that, even after Euro-American imperial powers formally end their colonial occupation of a place, we have to ask: What avenues of food sovereignty are available, if plantation monoculture has destroyed the soil microorganism lifeforms and traditional knowledge systems have been deliberately dismantled or subjugated? Soil is dead, local traditional knowledge has been appropriated and undermined (and traditional knowledge is deliberately targeted during campaigns of erasure and overt violence). And so, even “liberated” places might be forced to drink corporate soda products. There might not be a military occupation, but corporate entities and financial institutions can now act as de facto occupiers. Destroy somebody’s food garden, and you force them to shop at your supermarket. Words like “independence” and “post-colonial” are haunted, because Empire continues, reasserts, finds “new” ways to dominate. But are these tactics really “new”? Just like in earlier historical periods of power consolidation, Empire seems to achieve great power by disturbing, changing, or severing connection between people and their local landscape/environment.

And food is at the center of that human-environment relationship.

If soils are damaged and people are dispossessed, no longer with access to a backyard garden; people of a Caribbean island might no longer be able to grow staple tubers, and instead the US-owned grocer franchise becomes the food source, entangling people involuntarily. Instead of eating Louisiana’s gumbo or the Pacific Northwest’s huckleberries, you can instead eat the same standardized meal at a fast food restaurant in New Orleans and in Seattle, at opposite edges of a continent, which has the effect of undermining potential regional cultural practices situated in local landscape, local plants, local food.

You know what I mean? Anyway.

------

Hope these are interesting. Sorry for all of this, an overwhelming amount of text. :)

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Treat Your S(h)elf: Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

The British Empire has had a huge impact on the world in which we live. A brief look at an atlas from before World War One will show over hundred colonies that were then part of the Empire but now are part of or wholly sovereign states. Within these states much remains of the commercial, industrial, legal, political and cultural apparatus set up by the British. In many former colonial areas, political issues remain to be solved that had their genesis during the British era.

The legacy of the British has been varied and complex but in recent years much attention has been on making value judgements about whether the Empire was a good or bad thing. Of course the British Empire was built on the use of and the continual threat of state violence and there were appalling examples of the use of force. As well as the slave trade, there was the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, the 1831 Jamaican Christmas Uprising, the Boer War concentration camps (1899-1902) and the bloody response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. However, we must not just focus on these events but examine the Empire in all of its complexities.

In the current moment of our times, it would seem that as a nation we are more concerned about beating ourselves up and making the nation feel guilty than understanding how and why the British came to exist, and setting the growth of the British Empire into historical context to be wise about the good, the bad, and the ugly. History has to be scrupulously honest if it’s not to fall prey to propaganda on either side of the extreme political spectrum.

Truth be told I find these questions about the British Empire being good or bad either boring or unhelpful. It doesn’t really bring us closer to the complexity and the reality of what the British Empire was and how it was really run and experienced by everyone.

For myself personally the British Empire was part of the fabric of our family history. The Far East, the Middle East and Africa figured prominently and at the centre of which - the jewel in the crown so to speak - was India. In my wider family clan I’ve come to learn about - through handed down family tales, personal diaries, private papers, and photos etc - the diverse experiences of what certain eccentric characters got up to and they ranged from missionaries in India and Africa to military men strewn across the Empire, from titans of commerce in the Far East to tea farmers in East Africa, from senior colonial civil servants in Delhi to soldier-spies on the North West Frontier (now northern Pakistan).

My own experience of being raised in India, Pakistan as well as parts of the Far East was an adventure before being carted off to boarding school back in Britain and then fortunate in later life to be able to travel forth to these memorable childhood places because of the nature of my work. Having learned the local languages and respectful of customs I have always loved to travel and explore deeper into these profound non-Western cultures. Despite the shadow of the empire of the past I am always received with such down to earth kindness and we share a good laugh. So I always assumed that the British Empire played a central role in the life of Britain has it had in our family history just because it was there. But historians are more concerned with much more interesting questions that challenge our assumptions.

So when I was at university it was a great surprise to me to first read a fascinating history of the British Empire by Bernard Porter called ‘The Absent Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain’ (2004). Porter was, in his own words, “mainly a response to certain scholars (and some others) who, I felt, had hitherto simplified and exaggerated the impact of ‘imperialism’ on Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after years in which, except by empire specialists like myself, it had been rather ignored and underplayed. […] the main argument of the book was this: that the ordinary Briton’s relationship to the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was complex and ambivalent, less soaked in or affected by imperialism than these other scholars claimed – to the extent that many English people, at any rate, possibly even a majority, were almost entirely ignorant of it for most of the nineteenth century.” It became a controversial book but a welcome one because it was well researched and no doubt made some imperial historians choke on their tea dipped biscuits (and that’s not even counting the historically illiterate post-colonial studies crowd in their English faculties who often got their knickers in a twist).

Years later I read another fascinating collection of scholarly chapters by different historians called ‘Anxieties, Fears, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (2016) edited Harald Fischer-Tiné which challenged a rosy vision of Britain’s imperial past by tracing British imperial emotions: the feelings of fear, anxiety, and panic that gripped many Britons as they moved to foreign lands. To be fair both Robert Peckham’s Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (2015) got there before him but Tiné’s history set the trend for others to follow such as Marc Condos’s The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (2018) and Kim Wagner’s Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (2019).

They all set out their stall by highlighting the sense of vulnerability felt by the British in the colonies. Fisher-Tiné’s edited book in particular highlights the pervasiveness of feelings of fear, anxiety, and panic in many colonial sites. He acknowledges that: “the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment, as well as by the regular occurrence of panics.” 

The book suggests that these excessive emotional states were triggered by three main causes. First, the European population in British India was heavily dependent on Indian servants and subordinates who might retaliate against unfair masters or whose access to European dwellings could be used by malevolent others to poison the white elite. Second, anxieties about the assumed toxic effects of the Indian climate fuelled also poisoning panics. Diseases such as malaria and cholera were considered to be the ultimate outcome of an “atmospheric poison”. Third, Indian therapeutics and the system of medicine were also identified as a potential cause of poisoning European communities. These poisoning panics only helped reinforce the racial categorisations of Indians, the moral supremacy of the white population, and the legitimacy of colonial rule. Overall the book expanded the understanding of how a sense of fragility rather than strength shaped colonial policies.

Now comes another noteworthy book which again sound a little quirky but is no less meticulous in its research and judicious in its observations. Many books about the British Empire focus on what happened; this book concentrates on how people felt. When I was first given it I was predisposed to be negative because here was a book about ‘feelings’ - the current disease of our decaying western culture. But I was pleasantly surprised.

Was the British Empire boring? So asks Jeffrey Auerbach in his irreverent tome, ‘Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire’ (2018).

It’s an unexpected question, largely because imperial culture was so conspicuously saturated with a sense of adventure. The exploits of explorers, soldiers and proconsuls – dramatised in Boys’ Own-style narratives – captured the imagination of contemporaries and coloured views of Empire for a long time after its end. Even latter-day historians committed to Marxist or postcolonial critiques of Empire tend to assume that the imperialists themselves mostly had a good time. Along with material opportunities for upward mobility, Empire offered what the Pan-Africanist W.E.B. DuBois called ‘the wages of whiteness’ – the psychological satisfactions of membership in a privileged caste – and an escape from the tedium of everyday life in a crowded, urbanised, ever less picturesque Britain.

The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was coloured and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.” Cultural artifacts such as music, films, cigarette cards, and fiction have long constructed and reflected this rosy vision of the empire as a place of adventure and excitement.

Against this widely held view of the empire, As Auerbach argues here, however, the idea of Empire-as-adventure-story is a misleading one. For contemporaries, the promise of exotic thrills in distant lands built up expectations which inevitably collided with reality. 

In a well-researched and enjoyable book, the author argues “that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment.” In other words, instead of focusing on the exploits of imperial luminaries such as Walter Raleigh, James Cook, Robert Clive, David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes and others, Auerbach says pay attention to the moments when many travellers, colonial officers, governors, soldiers, and settlers who were gripped by an intense sense of boredom in India, Australia, and southern Africa.

For historians, the challenge is to look past the artifice of texts which conceal and compensate for long stretches of boredom to unravel the truth. Turning away from published memoirs and famous images, therefore, Auerbach trains his eye on the rough drafts of imperial culture: letters, diaries, drawings. He finds that Britons’ quests for novelty, variety and sensory delight in the embrace of 19th-century Empire very often ended in tears. Indeed Auerbach identifies an overwhelming emotion that filled the psyche of many Britons as they moved to new lands: imperial boredom.

Precision in language and terminology is essential and Auerbach begins by setting out what he means by boredom. Adopting Patricia Meyer Spacks’ approach, he points out that the term first came into use in the mid-18th century. Auerbach identifies then the feeling as a “modern construct” closely associated with the mid-18th century where the spread of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment emphasis on individual rights and happiness that the concept came to the fore. This does not mean that nobody previously suffered from boredom, but that, with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the individual, this was when the feeling first became conceptualised. Like Spacks, he distinguishes boredom from 19th-century ‘ennui’ or existential world-weariness and also from monotony, which has a much longer history. Whilst a monotonous activity or experience may generate a feeling of boredom, it will not necessarily do so. The two terms must, therefore, not be equated.

Significantly, in a footnote, Auerbach cites a passage from 19th Century English satirical novelist, Fanny Burney, in which an individual is described as ‘monotonous and tiresome’ but, as he emphasises, ‘not boring’. To prevent confusion, the term ‘boring’ is best avoided when describing an activity or experience because this is to beg the question as to whether it does in fact generate feelings of boredom in a particular person.

How then should this state of mind be assessed and what should be seen as the symptoms of imperial boredom? As Auerbach acknowledges, boredom ‘is not a simple emotion, but rather a complex constellation of reactions’. Building on that approach, he says ‘imperial boredom’ reflected ‘a sense of dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the immediate and the particular, and at times with the enterprise of empire more broadly’. If this tends to mix cause and effect, the idea of dissatisfaction and disenchantment essentially mirrors Spacks’ definition of the symptoms of boredom, namely, ‘the incapacity to engage fully: with people, with action, with one’s own ideas’. ‘Imperial boredom’, therefore, was more than a fleeting moment of irritation with a particular situation or person and reflected a mind-set that derived from, and in turn, further contributed to, a sense of disillusionment with the overall project.

It stemmed, so Auerbach argues, from the marked contrast between how empire was represented and how it turned out to be, between ‘the fantasy and the reality’. ‘Empire was constructed as a place of adventure, excitement and picturesque beauty’ but too often lacked these features. Nowhere is this better described than in George Orwell’s Burmese Days, in which the promising young John Flory has become ‘yellow, thin, drunken almost middle-aged’. Beginning with this illustration, Auerbach argues that historians have too often overlooked this essential aspect of empire and sets out to discover the extent to which it was characteristic of what Flory called the ‘Pox Britannica’ more generally.

During the 17th century the British Empire sustained itself on the story that the colonial experience was both righteous and unbelievably exciting. Sea voyages were difficult, and when one eventually did reach landfall there was a good chance of violence, but the exotic foreign cultures, the landscapes, and the wildlife made the trip worthwhile. The British colonialist was meant to be swashbuckling. Advertisements for even the most banal household goods offered colourful and robust propaganda for life in the colonies. Travelogues and illustrated accounts of colonial exploration were wildly lucrative for London publishing houses. All of this attracted a crowd of young Brits eager to escape the drudgery of life in the metropole.

By the 19th century, expectations were catching up. As Auerbach makes it clear, from the beginning, the sense of boredom experienced by many Britons in new colonial settings was much more profound during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the latter was marked by a series of bewildering social, cultural, and technological changes that stripped the empire of its sense of novelty. The development of new means of transport such as steamships, the rise of tourism, and the proliferation of guidebooks jeopardised the sense of risk, newness, enthusiasm that had long been associated with the British imperial experience. Consequently, while “the early empire may have been about wonder and marvel, the nineteenth century was far less exciting and satisfying project.

Auerbach spent 20 years gathering evidence spanning the late 18th century to the turn of the 20th, which records feelings of being bored, miserable and deflated. It’s a captivating history of imperial tedium drawn from memoirs, diaries, private letters and official correspondence. In “reading against the grain”, as Auerbach puts it, he has focused on recorded events normally skimmed over by historians, precisely for being boring – multiple entries repeated over and over again about the weather, train times, shipping forecasts, deliveries, lists and marching; or about nothing ever happening.

In five thematic chapters, “Voyages”, Landscapes,” Governors,” Soldiers”, and “Settlers,” Auerbach shines new light on the experience of traversing, viewing, governing, defending and settling the empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The monotonous nature of the sea voyage, dreary and uninteresting imperial lands, daily routine, depressingly dull dispatches, mind-numbing meetings are some of the sources of an utter sense of imperial boredom.

Whilst the first chapter, Voyages, may be the logical starting-point, it presents particular problems. They may have been monotonous, but it is unlikely that they would have engendered feelings of disenchantment and disillusion at the outset of an empire life or career. Auerbach begins with the somewhat surprising assertion that ‘not until the first half of the 19th century did long-distance ocean travel become truly monotonous’, arguing that this was because, until then, the weather had been ‘a source of danger and discomfort’ whereas, by the mid-19th century, ‘it was barely worth mentioning’. Leaving aside the obvious difficulties with that approach – many 19th-century travellers, assuming they survived, described enduring terrifying typhoons in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea – voyages certainly could be monotonous, particularly, when steam replaced sail.

However, his assertion that this ‘helped to produce feelings of boredom that had never been felt before’ is more questionable. For example, whilst Sir Edmund Fremantle (1836–1929) wrote in his memoirs that, although the sea passages were ‘monotonous’, ‘it never occurred to [him] to be bored’, Auerbach suggests that, ‘in several places his memories [sic] belie his claims’, in that they refer to the ‘the monotony’ of various experiences, including cruising out of harbour under steam rather than under sail, which ‘always possessed some interest’. But, this not only contradicts what Fremantle wrote but also equates boredom with monotony and, thus, deprives it of any proper meaning.

Similarly, because the Royal Naval Surgeon, Edward Cree (1814–1901) recorded his passing the time ‘reading, drawing, walking on deck, eating drinking and sleeping’, Auerbach concludes that ‘almost every leg of his 1839 journey to the East was boring or disappointing’. However, he omits the opening words of this journal entry which reads, ‘making but slow progress towards China. Weather intolerably hot … The time passes pleasantly enough on board’, which suggests he was certainly not bored. Much of this chapter is not concerned with monotony but with how ‘dreadful’ sea voyages could be, particularly, for travellers to Australia, most of all transported convicts, who, as he shows, had to endure the most brutal conditions. But they had no expectations of empire and this seems to add little to the understanding of imperial boredom.

It may well be that, because voyages were so unpleasant, travellers became all the more expectant and thus disappointed, when, on arriving, they found, as Auerbach argues in the next chapter, that much of the landscape was dreary and uninteresting. Moreover, many could not decide whether they were in search of a landscape that was picturesque and exotic or ‘normalised’ by reproducing English architecture, gardens and surroundings. This dichotomy generated further disenchantment.

If Auerbach dwells too long on obscure painters who often had little success in making these imperial landscapes picturesque, there is no doubt that many of them were monotonous, not least the vast tracts of Australian out- back. Consequently, whilst ‘the early empire may have been about wonder and marvel, the 19th century was a far less exciting and satisfying project’ and this contributed to feelings of boredom.

In the chapter, ‘Governors’, Auerbach essentially covers the administration of the empire. Here, there was also a lot of monotony, although Auerbach wavers between whether this was caused by having too much or too little work to do. Either way, it leads to the assertion that ‘throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, British imperial administrators at all levels were bored by their experience, serving king or queen and country’. However, this is qualified in the next paragraph, in which he cites the Marquess of Hastings, who served in India in the early 1800s, and Lord Curzon, who served as Viceroy at the end of the century, neither of whom, he says, suffered from boredom. It was ‘during the middle decades, that imperial service was far less stimulating’ but he does not explain why it should have been limited to this particular phase.

Indeed, in terms of the staggering quantity of paper generated by the ICS, the problem stretched back to the early 18th century. Records were copied and recopied, and months were spent waiting on instruction from London. The few encounters with colonised subjects came in the form of long, drawn-out formal events. Lord Lytton as Viceroy of India between 1876-1880 was required to bow 1230 times during one particularly ceremonial reception with the Viceroy.

Whilst it is ultimately fruitless to exchange examples of officials who did and did not find government service boring, some of those chosen by Auerbach are not convincing. James Pope Hennessy, for example, the eccentric Irishman who delighted in antagonising the colonials and endearing himself to the indigenous people with his unconventional views on racial equality, certainly found the European life-style monotonous but, as a result, made sure he kept ceaselessly active. In the words of his biographer, ‘the chief impression [he] made on British and Orientals alike was one of superlative vitality. “He would do better”, wrote Sir Harry Parkes “if he had less life”’,  Coming from Parkes, that arch- imperialist, who allegedly died from over-work and could never have been bored, the comment is telling.

While idleness certainly contributed to boredom, it was often the labour of maintaining colonial control that proved to be the most dull. Increasingly professionalised, the management of the colonies became characterised by strict report-making, bookkeeping and low-stakes decision-making related to staff. Whilst these officials may have become disenchanted, it is unclear what sort of mind-set they had when they started out: according to Auerbach, ‘they may well have entered imperial service out of a sense of duty, or perhaps looking forward to a colonial sinecure that offered status and adventure as well as a generous salary, but instead found themselves inundated by a volume of paperwork and official obligations that they had never anticipated, and which they found to be, quite frankly boring’. As a result, they were ‘eager to escape the tedium of the empire they had built’.

Whilst this suggests that, as a result, they threw up their empire careers, the example of Sir Frank Swettenham does not seem to fit the picture. He may have found life from time to time ‘extraordinarily dull’, but he continued as a government official in the Malay States for thirty years, before retiring in 1901. His belief in the imperial cause seems to have overcome the dullness and trumped any possible disenchantment.

In the chapter entitled, Soldiers, Auerbach concedes that ‘the link between military service and boredom can be traced at least to the mid-eighteenth century’. However, he argues, what was different in the 19th century was that boredom was no longer simply ‘incidental or ‘peripheral;’ it was ‘omnipresent’ and this was ‘a function of unmet expectations’, namely, the unsatisfied thirst for action and bloody combat as the ‘small wars’ of the Victorian age became shorter and fewer. However, citing Maeland and Brunstad’s Enduring Military Boredom, he concedes that this omnipresent boredom is a ‘condition that persists to the present day, especially among enlisted men’. This, therefore, divests it of any imperial character and suggests that it was, and remains a feature of modern military service.

Nonetheless, it would have been interesting to know how this boredom affected the performance of the military in the context of empire. Certainly, it gave rise to some of its more unsavoury aspects, with drunken soldiers brawling and beating up the locals and spending much of their time in the local brothels.

According to Richard Holmes, by 1899, there was ‘a real crisis’ in the infection rates of venereal disease of British soldiers in the Indian Army: ‘for every genteel bungalow on the cantonment … there were a dozen young men, denizens of a wholly different world, crossing the cultural divide every night’. Here was imperial boredom in the raw and urgent measures had to be taken to abate its consequences.

Although the final chapter is entitled ‘Settlers’, it encompasses a much broader category of imperial agents, including women, who until this point have been little- mentioned, and, in particular, women in India ‘most of whom went there in their early twenties to work (or to accompany their husbands who were working) and then typically left by the time they reached their fifties to retire in Britain’. It is unclear why these women and, indeed the whole topic of women in empire, should be subsumed under this chapter heading, given their importance in the empire project and the attention given to them in post-colonial scholarship.

In recent scholarship, empire white women have been frequently misrepresented and lampooned in the literature, including the novels of E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and Paul Scott and all too often reincarnated as representing the worst side of the ruling group – its racism, petty snobbishness and pervading aura of superiority and shown as shallow, self-centred and pre-occupied with maintaining the hierarchy of their narrow social worlds. They have invariably been portrayed as both bored and boring.

The wives of these officials were encouraged to run their households in a similar way, managing a large domestic staff and keeping a meticulous watch on financial expenditures. Socially, they were faced with constant garden parties and dinners with whatever small group of colonial families lived nearby. It’s difficult to imagine just how dull the existence of these administrators must have been, yet in reading these colonial accounts, the temporality and the totalising effects of boredom feel undeniably similar to the way that we describe the monotony of work today.

Auerbach effectively reiterates the trope as a clichéd illustration of a female, reclining aimlessly on a chaise longue, conjuring up the familiar image of ‘the same women [who] met day after day to eat the same meals and exchange the same banal pleasantries’ and concluding that ‘it was not only in India that women were bored, which suggests that the phenomenon was not a localised one, but a broader imperial one’.

Of course many western women did find life in empire monotonous and suffered from boredom, if not depression, and no doubt many were insufferable, as were their husbands, but there is an alternative image and the analysis is so generalised that their contribution is, once again, in danger of being dismissed out of hand.

A more nuanced approach would have examined ways in which women overcame their boredom by pursuing activities in which they were anything but bored, including, most obviously, the missions, a category which, despite its importance, does not feature, save for one cursory comment to the effect that, ‘even missionary women, whose sense of purpose presumably kept them inspired, could find themselves bored’. The example given is that of Elizabeth Lees Price, who, at one point during her eventful life, had to help run three schools for 30,000 pupils. But, just because her diary recorded ‘with increasing frequency’ the comment ‘nothing has happened’, it seems a stretch to infer, as Auerbach does, that ‘not even missionary work was enough to stave off the boredom that afflicted women all across the empire’.

For Auerbach, recuperating boredom means reframing the experience of empire as one of failure and disappointment. In the context of colonial scholarship, which tends to focus on the violence of colonialism and the myth-making that went along with it, Auerbach’s book is rather counter-intuitive. He drains the power of these myths, looking instead at the accounts of those responsible for building empire from the ground up: “What if they were not heroes or villains, builders or destroyers,” he writes, “but merely unexceptional men and women, young and old, rich and poor, struggling, often without success, to find happiness and economic security in an increasingly alienating world?” The agents of colonialism struggled to find any semblance of agency in the work that they were doing. Imperial time stretched out, deadened over decades of appointment in far off islands and desert outposts: a sort of watered down version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” in paradise.

Whilst Auerbach demonstrates that much of empire life was monotonous, to my mind, he is too quick to infer that this monotony necessarily gave rise to feelings of ‘imperial boredom’, properly so-called. He also too easily assumes that, where people were bored, this could only operate in a negative way and, whilst he may be right in concluding that, ultimately, ‘the British were, quite simply bored by their empire’, he fails to draw the evidence together to explore what impact imperial boredom had on the development of empire, for better or worse, during the long 19th century.

If not quite an invention of the 19th century, boredom was a particular preoccupation of the period: the product of new assumptions about the separation of work and leisure and a prominent theme of fin-de-siècle literature. Less clear is whether Auerbach is right to treat boredom separately from other emotional states – anxiety, loneliness, anger, fear – which afflicted the imperialist psyche. After all, a long literary tradition – from Conrad to Maugham, Orwell, Lessing and Greene – describes precisely how those varied shades of neurosis blended into one another.

Besides, a more capacious history of discontent and Empire might help to connect the frustrations of the imperialist experience to the suffering of imperial subjects. When, for instance, did boredom turn to aggression and violence? One danger of Auerbach’s approach in Imperial Boredom is to portray an enervated and under-stimulated, yet still extraordinarily powerful, elite as more or less passive.

As imperial rivalry intensified towards the end of the century, so did the quest for new ways of staving off boredom, not only for men in the British Empire but also for those in the other European empires, and war was one of the most obvious solutions.

As other imperial historians have argued, what Europeans were seeking was everything the nineteenth century, in its drawn-out tedium, had denied them. War as Cambridge historian Christopher Clark has argued, “was going to empower them and restore a sense of agency to their limbs and lives.” Auerbach refers to what Clark called ‘the pleasure culture of war’, citing the example of Adrian de Wiart who, serving in the Boer War, knew ‘once and for all, that war was in my blood. I was determined to fight and I didn’t mind who or what’. But he does not explore the consequences of this mood further, other than to say that these adventurers also ‘ended up bored … and disillusioned’. But, the implications were, arguably, much more far-reaching.

Even if it was not directly causative, this mood was ‘permissive’ of the more direct causes and certainly formed part of the background against which Europe went to war in 1914. It may be thought that it did so in a fit of imperial boredom.

I admire the audacity of Auerbach’s writing and as a revisionist piece of history it has the dash and dare of British imperialism and colonialism. But after reading the book I came away thinking that sweeping statements such as that the empire developed “in a fit of boredom” are a tad unconvincing.

Although he spent about 20 years collecting materials, Auerbach seems not to have visited Africa or India during his research. Had he done so, I doubt if he would all too easily accepted that colonial accounts of being bored represented the full experience. Absent are deeper discussions of how expressions of being bored are linked to racism, arrogance and the need to assert power in exotic, challenging and unstable environments. Emotional detachment, disdain and a demand to be entertained were also part of a well-rehearsed repertoire of domination.

But where Auerbach does succeed is in admirably capturing the texture of everyday imperialist life as few historians have. Most of these examples are compellingly relevant and illustrative of some of the colonial circumstances that drove Britons mad with boredom, challenging one of the enduring myths about the British Empire as a site of exciting adventure.

If you are a lover of histories of white imperial rulers and thumbnail portraits, this book is for you. It’s full of excellent quotes. Lord Lytton, for example, fourth choice to be governor-general of India in 1875 (and appalled by the prospect), later summed up the British Raj as “a despotism of office-boxes tempered by the occasional loss of keys”. It was certainly the case that propaganda about empire and the populist books written about it to make money created false expectations, leading to bitter disillusionment. Nostalgists for the age of pith helmets and pukka sahibs will find little comfort here.

In mining the gap between public bombast and private disillusionment, Auerbach demonstrates that – even for its most privileged beneficiaries – Empire was almost never a place where fantasy became reality. I would suggest that rather than the British Empire being mostly boring, more accurate would be David Livingstone’s verdict on exploratory travel while battling dysentery: “it’s not all fun you know.”

The concept of imperial boredom provides a novel and illuminating lens through which to examine the mind-set of men and women working and living in empire, how it was that, despite the crushing monotony, so many persisted in the endeavour and what this tells us about the empire project more generally. There are all states of mind familiar to historians of empire (in the lives of their subjects, of course). It has long been argued that strategies to relieve moments of white boredom in the empire included cheating and adultery, husband hunting, trophy wife hunting, massive consumption of alcohol, gambling, copious diary and letter writing, taxidermy, berating the servants, prostitution, bird-watching, game hunting, high tea on the verandah, fine pearls and ball gowns, all were par for course in the every day lives for those bored British colonisers.

Auerbach’s book reminds me of a not so nice female character bemoans James Fox’s scandalous but true to life colonial novel White Mischief (1982), as she looked out over the Rift Valley in 1940s colonial Kenya, she declares, “Oh God! Not another fucking beautiful day.”

An earnest post-colonialist studies reader might might feel triggered by such a flippant remark as evidence of all that was wrong with the imperial project but at heart it’s a pitiful lament disguised as boredom at the gilded cage the British built for themselves to capture the enchantment and disenchantment of every day life in the British Empire.

[architectuul]

Radical Rituals

forty-five degrees is an open collective of architects and designers dedicated to the research and critical making of collective space. They take different forms when engaging in collaborations with other experts, adapting to the project’s scope. In their practice, space-making is about resources, not only material or financial but the intangible resources of human and non-human knowledge.

Talking in the park in front of Tageszeitung in Berlin-Mitte with Alkistis Thomidou and Berta Gutierrez. | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

Their work aims at investigating the built environment through research, design and artistic experimentation, across multiple scales and in its social, economical and structural entanglements.They are collecting protocols and collective approaches, exploring alternative living and city making models and new paradigms of urban development to engage with communities and local agents. They strive to create inclusive and accessible spaces through careful use of scale, material and design language with a commitment to rethinking education through academia and practice placing design at the intersection of arts and sciences. Berta Gutierrez and Alkistis Thomidou were talking to Boštjan Bugarič.

***

For this interview we meet in a new park next to Hejduk’s Tower; why did we meet here?  BG: I really appreciate Hejduk's theoretical work and I find it very relevant nowadays since I believe it can give us many leads on how architecture should be taught during the contemporary crisis. 

In 2010 the architecture community gathered to protect the Kreuzberg Tower as new owners began altering the facade. | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

Around this park are also other important buildings? AT: On the other side we find a first cooperatively built project for offices, FRIZZ, and on the other there is also the new TAZ building.

This park is divided with paths (lines), how can we create these lines? AT: This area had a very strange atmosphere although it is quite central. I am actually the first time in the park after its renovation. These lines cutting through the space shall be a result of shortcuts where people cross the former park, literally, the footprint.

“Radical Rituals” is an itinerary survey along the 45ºN parallel, on the inventiveness of everyday life, new hybrid vernacular practices and rituals that stimulate and nurture the commons across Europe. | Photo © forty-five degrees

What about your line, the forty-five degree? What is a project about? AT: The name came along with the idea of a research of the 45ºN parallel as many people in our team come from the south of Europe but studied or work and live in the north part of Europe. This line has influenced our way of thinking and although it is a fictional line it burdens Europe and represents a border that people try to cross every day from South  to North. We wanted to investigate what is happening along this line that crosses France, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Romania all the way to the Black Sea. Although it cuts the middle of Europe, cities around it are considered ‘peripheral’. We are researching how the European identity is reflected along this line.

Polarisation between north and south, heterogeneous economic models, diversity of cultural and historic backgrounds. | Photo EW Elsevier Weekblad, Issue 22, 2020

What have you discovered so far? BG: We are currently preparing our first field trip, and we will be in Romania and Serbia by September. Right now this is a very fascinating part of the project as it is like a zoom into the ground. If you go very far away, you see the meridians and parallels as the way of shaping the world, but when you start to get closer, you see countries, borders, cities,  landscapes and people. We would like to zoom in as much as possible, so we can really understand local situated practices that are happening in very specific physical environments.

AT: The project “Radical Rituals” is a survey on very local spatial practices or initiatives that addresses climate challenges, space justice and biodiversity. We want to be surprised by what we learn along the way, what kind of collectivity is created and how local identities can influence space production.

A British writer Shumon Basar references the metallic flowers of Hejduk on the facade as,"grips for angels to hold onto when they climb the sides of the tower” inspired by “Wings of Desire"by Wim Wenders. | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

BG: In this sense it is great that we are in front of Hejduk’s building because he proposes the way in which design comes as a result of small narratives or characters entangled with each other, working with crafts or local materials and contexts. For us the exercise is similar, but instead of working with fiction we work with reality as nowadays reality is complex enough. We don’t have all the answers to these challenging topics, but we believe  that this exercise will give us a sort of light. 

AT: Through this research we want to see what stories point to possible futures and possible present-s as people develop tools and knowledge that is embedded in the context of the local space. We worked on this concept at the Architecture Triennial in Oslo, where we created a digital Atlas that connects OAT’s archive and discourse with the transformations that take place on the city’s ground through local initiatives. We encountered initiatives that manage to achieve systemic changes and give multiple answers to the big challenges we are facing. In a way, proving that the environment is a primal source of our knowledge.

Oslo In Action(s) is a research project uncovering city-makers who stimulate and nurture the commons beyond the boundaries of professional practice.

The Digital Atlas was commissioned by the Oslo Architecture Triennial for their 20th jubilee “Conversations about the city". | Photo © forty-five degrees

Your practice was as well put on the list of the Future Architecture Platform? How do you see yourself in the FAP? AT: It was an  important experience to have this opportunity of working with people and institutions. We met extremely generous and inspiring people in Ljubljana and then in Oslo. Then, we got the digital research fellowship at Architectuul which enables us to meet and connect with other projects and not just sit in our office and work on the research but expand our network and bring different perspectives together. We are very grateful that the Future Architecture Platform gave space for this project.

Initiatives in Oslo (up) and Urtegata Sykkellevert space for multimedia production and Tøyen Taxi. | Photo © forty-five degrees

Just finished curating a panel on Kvadrato, how did you choose panels and why you wanted to present them? AT: The panel was called ‘Communication for Commonalities’, where we invited diverse initiatives that work collectively and with several communities. Their work spans from creating digital platforms that communicate collective intelligence on a global scale, to very local projects that engage directly with a variety of actors on the ground.

With Akerselva Trebåtforening, we paddled on a 100-year-old wooden boat on an underground river running into the fjord (up); Losæter is the city farm of Oslo. | Photo © forty-five degrees

BG: It was a great example for us to address our questions and concerns and discuss them in the context of communication of architecture. As we know, communication in architecture is about media and its symbolic representation. Nevertheless, for us communication is related with the ground, physical context, methodologies and the communication channels that people use to promulgate the project with peers or bigger networks.

The Fjord floating saunas - Oslo Badstuforening. | Photo © forty-five degrees

The legendary GSF Skatepark. | Photo © forty-five degrees

The Oslo fjordhage, a floating classroom dome. | Photo © forty-five degrees

How you integrate the theoretical methods in the learning process? BG: In my personal research I try to answer the question of how do we promote other ways of learning coming from non-disciplinary practices since academia became such a rigid space with a very outdated curriculum. With non-disciplinary practices beyond academia we can really find many inputs on this crossing.

Berta Gutierrez and Alkistis Thomidou | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

AT: We are currently collaborating with two other international practices on an Erasmus+ Youth in Action project on how to learn together. During the next two years we will develop formats of different ways of learning and engaging youth to  physical interaction with various spaces in the city, public, private or common areas. We see the engagement of young adults in space-making processes as a project of emancipation and investment in the future.

[memecucker]

If, as I have argued, the distinctions between East and West, Europe and Asia, are not the most realistic or interesting axes along which to think about nationalism, then what perhaps might be more fruitful alternatives? One of the central arguments of my book Imagined Communities is that nationalisms of all varieties cannot be understood without reflecting on the older political forms out of which they emerged: kingdoms, and especially empires of the pre-modern and early modern sorts. The earliest form of nationalism—one that I have called creole nationalism—arose out of the vast expansion of some of these empires overseas, often, but not always, very far away. It was pioneered by settler populations from the Old Country, who shared religion, language and customs with the metropole but increasingly felt oppressed by and alienated from it. The United States and the various states of Latin America which became independent between 1776 and 1830 are the famous examples of this type of nationalism. One of the justifications, sooner or later, for these creole nationalisms was also their distinctive history, and especially their demographic blending of settler and indigenous peoples, to say nothing of local traditions, geographies, climates, and so forth.

Such creole nationalisms are still very much alive, and one could say are even spreading. French-settler nationalism in Quebec has been on the rise since the late 1950s, and still teeters on the brink of separation from Canada. In my own country, Ireland, the ‘settler’ question in the North is still a burning one and has prevented the full integration of the country up to now. In the South, some of the earliest nationalists, the Young Irelanders of the rebellion of 1798, came from settler families or, like my own ancestors, who participated in that rebellion, from families of mixed settler and indigenous, Celtic–Catholic origins. Australians and New Zealanders are currently busy with creolized nationalisms, attempting to distinguish themselves from the United Kingdom by incorporating elements of Aborigine and Maori traditions and symbolisms. So far, so West, it might seem. At the risk, however, of giving some offence, I would like to suggest that some features of Taiwanese nationalism are also clearly creole, as, in a somewhat different vein, are those of Singaporean nationalism.

The core constituencies for these nationalisms are ‘overseas’ settlers from the Southeastern coastal regions of the Celestial Kingdom, some escaping from the imperial state, some sent over by that state. These settlers imposed themselves, sometimes peacefully and integratively, sometimes by violence, on the pre-existing populations, in a manner that reminds us of New Zealand and Brazil, Venezuela and Boer South Africa. Sharing, to various degrees, religion, culture and language with the metropole, these creole countries nonetheless over time developed distinct traditions, symbolisms, historical experiences, and eventually moved towards political independence when they felt the imperial centre too oppressive or too remote. One should not allow oneself to over­emphasize the unique significance of Taiwan’s fifty years under Japanese imperialist rule. After all, the French settlers in Quebec suffered almost 200 years under British imperial rule, and the Dutch in South Africa the same for a demi-century. Nor is it easy to argue that Japanese imperialist culture was significantly more alien from overseas ‘Chinese’ culture than British imperialist culture was from overseas ‘French’ and ‘Dutch’.

Nor can one claim any easy distinction between racist European or Western creoles and the rest. The United States, South Africa and Argentina were extremely racist, but it would be hard to say that the Québecois were any more racist than the Southeast China émigrés to Taiwan or the Japanese émigrés to Brazil. If this argument is right, then we have a creole form of nationalism that crops up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and, surely, also the twenty-first century, in the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, in the Antipodes, as well as in Asia. A global phenomenon.

-Benedict Anderson, Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a difference that matters? (2001)

[things2mustdo]

“White people are terrible,” “I have white privilege,” and “most of the world’s problems are caused by white people” are three general statements countless social justice warriors and their enablers agree with. Yet they are all based on the severest distortion of reality. You or I should no more apologize for being white than an African-American should for being black.

Just as many blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are made more pliable by the media and the establishment by being told they are eternal victims, white people are made more pliable by agreeing that they need to always feel guilty. Using an SJW “anti-racism” that feels awfully like the leftist version of a Nazi book about hereditary, white people supposedly inherit the evil deeds of dead dudes who owned slaves prior to the Civil War or arrived on a foreign continent in a year like 1492 or 1788.

The establishment-enforced guilt is even greater for those directly descended from such people, but even culturally and genetically unrelated individuals like Polish- and Italian-Americans, whose ancestors pretty much all arrived after periods like the slavery era, are held accountable, too. Why? Even if we ridiculously assumed we can find descendants “guilty” of their ancestry, the white guilt thesis is like putting all of Harlem’s young black men in 2016 under house arrest because 20 of them were involved in a vicious street brawl… in 1937.

Provided you adhere to our creed, neomasculinity and the Return Of Kings community form the broadest functional church you will find. We do not care where you come from, so long as you support our goal of a return to masculine societies that emphasize community-building and do not apologize for taking pride in their own cultures. ROK readers who are black, white, Asian or something else are all equal in this regard.

Here are just three of many reasons why I will not hate or feel guilty about my skin tone.

1. I’m the descendant of victims myself because many of my ancestors were from oppressed ethnic and religious groups

Look at those privileged starving Irish!

Are you heavily Irish-blooded, like me? Italian? Polish? Ukrainian? Were your ancestors Catholics living in heavily Protestant areas, or perhaps Huguenots who had to flee persecutory France?

It’s funny how SJWs prance on about white privilege when over half of all whites who emigrated to America, Canada or Australia, from the Puritans to Yugoslavian Civil War refugees, came because the civilian government or monarchy representing another ethnicity or religion essentially chased them out, had killed their family members, or wanted them dead, too. Many of the white groups who did take the journey, particularly the Italians or Irish, were then subjected to quotas and mistreatment in places like New York for years.

A great deal of my ancestors were Catholics in Prussia and other Protestant parts of northern Germany. This section of my family tree is replete with persecutions, including one great-great-great-great grandfather who lost sight in one eye and movement in his arm after being brutally assaulted by a Prussian policeman. His crime? Being an ethnic German leaving a Catholic church on Sunday in the 1800s. Catholic churches were only for “subhuman” Poles. Catholic Prussians were seen as traitors who belonged in Bavaria, prison, or dead. He ended up eking out an existence as a tailor with one good arm, after both he and his brother were repeatedly refused admission to the civil service for their faith.

In addition, I had Irish immigrant forebears whose fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as a result of the Potato Famine. One of these ancestors, the eldest child in his family, was working in Dublin to make money for the family when, in the space of three months, he received news that his parents, all his sisters, and all but one of his brothers had died from starvation, malnutrition, or diseases related to them.

When my aunt did the genealogy over three years, she counted 37 family members in one corner of an Irish county who died from starvation or starvation-related illness in 13 months. The famine was predicted and even aggravated by the British. Considering the squalor into which the occupiers had driven the Irish Catholics, the whole ordeal was fundamentally caused by them, too. With only an extra mouth to feed, this great-great-great grandfather of mine took his barely school-aged brother with him to Australia two months later. What role did these two have in oppressing others, white or non-white, that I should feel shame about today?

Look further back into my family tree and you find German, Dutch and Swiss Jews, many of whom were shunted around various locations within Europe, depending on what limited patience local authorities had for yarmulke-wearers at the time.

With this lineage, what exactly do I have to apologize for, aside from my supposedly very, very privileged, at best lower middle-class English forebears from drab West London and grim Yorkshire? Most of them never saw a dark person, let alone mistreated one. To boot, the vast majority lived poor, thankless lives without clean sanitation, abundant food, or anything close to job security. And these are the stations in life, through no fault of their own, that 95% of your ancestors reached as well.

2. Minorities and other non-whites frequently treated and still treat each other far worse than white people did

Rwandan genocide, anyone?

From the pre-Columbian Central and South American peoples to the Rwandan genocide, non-whites have very often treated one another even more abysmally than whites have treated them. European technology may have amplified the number of indigenous and other deaths in places like the Americas, but raw hatred, aggression, and the continuity of violence can be found in even greater quantities in non-white historical squabbles.

Europeans have also been incorrectly blamed for things like infectious diseases, despite the scientific work of antiseptic procedure pioneer Ignaz Semmelweiss being years, sometimes even centuries away. Meanwhile, non-whites have been allowed to kill non-whites without serious condemnation from SJWs.

For example, critics of the Iraq War and the attempted rebuilding of post-Saddam Iraq have said that the whole country is based on a fiction that dates back to the European post-World War I mandate systems. In other words, if Kurds, Shia Arabs, and Sunni Arabs inhabit the same country, they kill each other! Whilst it is appetizing for SJWs to blame the big, bad British and French for this, it is far from the truth. Kurds and Arabs have been butchering each other for countless centuries. The greatest Muslim figure of all the Crusades, Saladin, was consistently mistrusted because of his Kurdish origins. Similarly, intra-Arab or Arab-Iranian Sunni-Shia violence is age-old and has little if anything to do with Europeans.

Last year, Rock Thompson wrote a superb piece about the hypocrisy of attacking Columbus Day in the Americas. His work exposed the double standards of many Native American and also Central and South American tribes, who pretend their ancestors were routinely peaceful when, in fact, they regularly engaged in deplorable acts of gratuitous violence, including human sacrifices and the sadistic mutilation of enemies who were not so ethnically different. The conquistadors and Puritans are falsely seen as the harbingers of cultural and racial genocide in the Americas. Local indigenous tribes, however, were already hunting each other down for sport well before the tall ships arrived.

3. White-majority countries make the humanitarian world go round

A tent city the Saudis refused to make available for fellow Arab Syrian refugees.

Whenever you find an aid program for starving Africans, war-torn Arabs, or other suffering people, chances are that a number of white Westerners are behind it. Even if they’re not all white, they invariably come from white-majority and/or white-founded Western countries, or are funded by them. All to assuage the guilt of white people living in 2016 who feel the need to apologize for a European colonial regime that replaced almost always far more brutal indigenous ones.

Western countries also welcome non-whites in droves, both as immigrants and as “refugees.” The recent Syrian crisis is a testament to this (over-)generosity. While Saudi Arabia refused to accommodate fellow Arab Syrians in their already-constructed tent city, used normally for the Haj Priligrimage, Germany and other European states bore the brunt of those fleeing, including through the open door policies of leaders like Angela Merkel.

In general terms, white people care more about the developmental outcomes of non-whites. Wealthy non-white countries like Japan and Korea have perfected a system of meticulously keeping their populations pure and rejecting the asylum claims of over 99% of claimed refugees. This asymmetrical state of affairs is ironic when Japan’s own history of colonisation, notably the Rape of Nanking, is taken into consideration.

White guilt is also very profitable for certain establishment figures and zealous entertainers. It’s why twats like Bono and Bob Geldof get up every morning, after all. And, far from sucking the world dry, white folks have repeatedly tried to make it better. Very often this generosity is taken to an extreme, but the point of white-majority countries acting and non-white countries stalling or ignoring remains valid.

[i-want-it-all-or-nothing-at-all]

The geo-political struggle and arms race with the communist world known as the Cold War lasted so long (1945–1991), and was so fraught with existential danger to human civilization, that it is often forgotten that the United States and Soviet Union had been allies against Nazi Germany. Strategic as it was, this alliance came down to a marriage of expediency and no sooner had the dust of war settled than the erstwhile confederates confronted each other over the spoils of victory. At war’s end the United States’ continental territory was untouched and it was by far the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. The Soviet Union, where most of the European fighting had been waged, lay in ashes with 30 million dead. With their common enemies prostrate the two allies briefly had a positive opportunity for a workable compromise over military and economic issues, and thus for a more peaceful future. But peace was not on the horizon.

After World War II anti-communism became the watchword of the day and the Soviets were demonized as entirely responsible for the state of tension that unfolded dangerously and rapidly. Neither side was blameless but the record clearly shows more effort at conciliation by Moscow than by Washington. Unwilling to acknowledge that the USSR had vital national security issues far more pressing than their own, advocates of a permanent military establishment and Open Door to the markets of Eastern Europe and East Asia claimed that the Soviets and Chinese communists had replaced the Nazis and imperial Japan as the threats to the ‘American way of life’. On the basis of this claim they militarized American society as never before.

Atwood, P. L. (2010). War and Empire: The American Way of Life. Chapter 9: Cold War: The Clash of Ideology or of Empires? Pluto Press. [bold and italisized emphasis added by me] Rest of the chapter below the break.

SOVIETS INDISPENSABLE TO DEFEAT OF HITLER

In American popular culture World War II is seen as the victory of democracy over German and Japanese dictatorship, with the United States playing the major role. There is no denying that US military fi repower defeated Japan. Indeed, American war planners never doubted victory. Americans have been loath, however, to accept less than full credit for triumph over Nazi Germany. Certainly the American Lend-Lease program provided Britain and the Soviet Union with essential resources, including arms, and the massive American and British aerial bombardment of German factories and cities contributed to Hitler’s downfall. But in terms of ground combat and the defeat of millions of Nazi soldiers, the Soviet Red Army was indisputably central. The war on Europe’s eastern front was far more destructive and savage than in the west and millions of soldiers and civilians on both sides perished. More than two-thirds of Hitler’s legions were concentrated against the Soviets, where they fought a desperate and losing effort to keep the Red Army at bay. When German forces entered the Soviet Union in 1941 they committed atrocities on a colossal scale, including the roundup and systematic extermination of Jews, and the slaughter of many other civilians. By late 1942 the Red Army had reversed Germany’s fortunes and in 1945 broke through into Germany itself and began to exact an equally atrocious retribution.

It is often forgotten too, deliberately omitted, that when the Nazis conquered states in Eastern Europe they subordinated their governments and forged military alliances with these puppet regimes. The result was that Hungarian, Ukrainian, Romanian and other pro-Nazi troops invaded Soviet Russia alongside the Germans as partners. Thus, it was on the basis that these regimes had waged war against the USSR that the Red Army occupied these nations after driving the Nazis back, eventually to total defeat. In the popular view of the Cold War the Reds had occupied innocent nations illegitimately. But this was false. The Soviets planted themselves in Eastern Europe for much the same reasons that the US occupied western Germany and Japan. It is true that the smaller nations of Eastern Europe were pawns but they were bargaining chips to each side. Both the US and USSR wished Europe to be reconstructed along lines benefi cial to their specifi c economic and security interests. In terms of physical security there was no doubt as to which nation had the greater claim.

The overwhelming majority of Hitler’s best troops had been locked in mortal struggle in the east. Thus, when the US fi nally, in the last year of war, was able to employ its vast wealth of resources to mount the largest seaborne invasion force in history on the north coast of France, the effort succeeded only because the least combat experienced, and fewest, Nazi troops were there as defenders. Had the bulk of Nazi forces not been bogged down in the east they would have been on the beaches of France and therefore no such invasion would have been possible or even considered. Hitler could not have been defeated without the Soviet Union. Had he confi ned his effort to conquering western Europe, and not attacked Russia, Europe’s recent history would be very different.

But Hitler had made it supremely clear in his book Mein Kampf that he intended to extend German living space (lebensraum) to the Slavic east and to defeat communism once and for all. The Soviet system had only recently been stabilized after years of civil war and internal communist party purges. Stalin feared that the western European powers might align with Germany against him. Since he desired no such war he allied with Hitler in 1939. This certainly disappointed the British and US bitterly. But then in the late summer of 1941 Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR. By this time the US was in an undeclared but de facto naval war with Germany. Once full-scale declared war broke out both Britain and the United States understood that Germany could only be defeated with the aid of the Soviets. This posed a very difficult problem for American goals. If US foreign policy was predicated upon keeping an Open Door for American business enterprise to the resources, markets and labor power of Europe as a whole, and the Nazis had to be prevented from shutting that portal, this goal could only be achieved with the indispensable assistance of a regime that had been equally hostile to the Open Door. At best only half the loaf of American war aims could be attained. Instead of Nazi autarky throughout Eastern Europe, Soviet communism would prevail, and whatever access American corporations might have to trade with this bloc it would not be on American terms. The cold hard fact was that at war’s end the Russians occupied the same territory in Europe’s east as had the Nazis.

Some historians argue that if Roosevelt had been younger, healthier and able to continue he might have arranged a favorable agreement with Stalin that may have benefited both nations. FDR would have faced the same bitter opposition his successor faced domestically, but he was far more sophisticated a politician and more of a realist. The Soviets had been portrayed in heroic terms by the US press and Hollywood while the war was still ongoing, but rightists and anti-communists in the US were already in 1945 accusing Roosevelt of having lost Eastern Europe to the hated Reds, though the region was hardly America’s to lose. In any case Roosevelt died just as the war was ending and his place was taken by an inexperienced and easily manipulated, at least initially, Harry S. Truman, who was himself reflexively anti-communist and who almost immediately went on the political and ideological offensive against yesterday’s ally.

YESTERDAY’S ESSENTIAL ALLY BECOMES THE NEW THREAT

In short order the Truman Administration claimed that the Soviets had now replaced the Nazis as the principal threat to global order and American national security. Less than three months after Japan’s surrender on 2 September 1945 the enormously influential Life magazine startled readers with graphic depictions of a Soviet atomic missile attack on US cities, though pointedly the Soviets did not possess an atomic bomb, and intercontinental missiles did not exist and would not until 1957. Most mainstream publications followed suit with lurid depictions of what the USSR could do to the US despite its obvious weakness. In 1946 Admiral Chester Nimitz, hero of the Pacific War, declared, with no evidence whatever, that the Soviets were preparing to bomb England and launch submarine attacks against American coastal cities. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford claimed that the communist threat was so dire ‘the United States must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare’. Only five months after Germany surrendered, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a report calling for the atomic bombing of 20 cities in the USSR if that country ‘developed either a means of defense against our attack or the capacity for an eventual attack on the United States’ (author’s emphasis). 

All this despite the fact that the USSR had suffered the greatest devastation to its national territory of any belligerent, worse even than atomically desolated Japan, and had not the remotest possibility of attacking the United States. Nor did it have such an intention.All of European Russia’s major cities and towns, estimated at 70,000, were destroyed, its roads, and railways in ruins, its crops and livestock dead or stolen, and at least 30 million of its soldiers and civilians dead. Though the Red Army was immense, and its soldiers extremely combat-hardened, it showed no signs of moving beyond the territories it had wrested from the Nazis with so much blood. Nor did it seek territorial gains in Western Europe or the Middle East. Yet, the American public was indoctrinated to believe that Soviet-led communism was on the march with the goal of ‘world conquest’. This was exactly the propaganda employed about the Nazis and Japanese. The permanent enemy required for a permanent war economy had miraculously materialized.

This is not to say that Soviet communism lived up to its promises, or functioned as a benevolent regime. Far from it. Russia was behaving as Russia had always behaved, and still does. The Soviet victory enabled Stalin to re-extend control over some of what had been lost to Russia’s empire during World War I and what he deemed Tsarist Russia’s natural sphere. After two devastating invasions in a quarter century the Soviet general staff obsessed over territorial security. The Yalta Accords of 1945 reflected the realities of war. The Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe as a result of its overwhelming victory over the Nazis. This enormous contribution to Nazi defeat had to be acknowledged. Yalta also accorded the Soviets territories in East Asia, some of which had been forcibly taken from Russia in its war against Japan from 1904 to 1905. At the time the accords were signed then Secretary of War Henry Stimson acknowledged they recognized the USSR’s vital concerns for future security. The same Joint Chiefs who planned a sneak attack on Russia out of fear of its military power also said in another position paper that the USSR’s policy was defensive in nature and aimed merely ‘to establish a Soviet Monroe Doctrine for the area under her shadow, primarily and urgently for security’.

Harry S. Truman’s ascension to the presidency on the sudden death of FDR in April 1945 brought about a sea change in the US’s relationship with the USSR. Demonizing the Soviets quickly became the major component in the campaign to assert the newfound power in Washington’s hand to reconstruct and stabilize the global capitalist economy. Therefore, in order to gain the American people’s support for the remilitarization and increased tax burden that would be required to confront this new enemy, the highly positive image of the Soviets, that portrayed Stalin and the Red Army as noble allies in the war against Nazism induced by American propaganda, had to be reversed.

A hopeful moment thus became a tragic one, yet entirely in keeping with the historical thrust of American development and foreign policy. Though the seeds of both world wars were planted in Europe, the United States entered each war knowing that European empires and Japan would be sapped, if not finished. By 1940 a golden opening had arisen for Washington to intervene at the right moment, replace many of its rivals at the pinnacle of global power and reconfi gure global order. Already, the phrase ‘American century’ had entered the public vocabulary.

The major problem for American post-war plans was that though the war had been a pyrrhic victory for Russia it still remained a great power, and it straddled much of Europe. Despite no navy to speak of and no airforce capable of crossing oceans, the USSR had the largest, most-bloodied, most combat experienced army on earth. Even so, though it occupied much of the very region the US had wanted freed from German rule and opened to American enterprise, it was not capable, nor did it desire, to occupy Western Europe.

Uppermost on Stalin’s agenda was rebuilding an utterly devastated nation and ensuring that invasion by a foreign enemy could never take place again. For Soviet foreign policy maintaining control of Eastern Europe as a bulwark, a cordon sanitaire, was indispensable against any possibility of incursion from the west. To safeguard their country and their rule the Soviets were more than willing to modify the doctrines of communism and world revolution. Had the Truman Administration been willing to acknowledge this profound need on the part of the Soviets, and to work with them to guarantee their security, the possibilities for subsequent cooperation might have proved invaluable to both nations. Genuinely frightened by American actions in the early Cold War, the Russians were goaded to intensify their own acquisition of atomic weapons, thereby ensuring that Soviet nuclear capabilities would become the very threat, and the only such threat, to American national security that propaganda had claimed but which had been utterly false (author’s emphasis).

THE ATOMIC ARMS RACE BEGINS

As American officials intended, the atomic bombings of Japan had badly unnerved the Soviets. Not only were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a warning that such destruction of entire cities and ruthlessness against helpless civilians could be visited elsewhere, they also ended the war abruptly on American terms, forestalling the USSR’s occupation of Japan, to prevent any repeat of the problems inherent in the division of Germany.

The future of atomic weapons thus lay at the center of both nations’ critical concerns. Many Americans, including leading atomic scientists who developed the bomb, had worried that nuclear weapons in the hands of one nation would induce a terrifying arms race that portended the annihilation of human civilization. The Soviets demanded the destruction of all existing atomic weapons, though no American offi cial believed they would stop their own program. To mollify domestic critics the Truman Administration created a special committee headed by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson to advance policies for the control of such armaments and atomic energy in general. When this committee’s proposals were deemed too soft, its recommendations were replaced by those of Wall Street baron, Barnard Baruch. The Baruch Plan demanded that the Soviets submit to international inspections and end their A-bomb project, then in its early stage, while the US would retain its atomic monopoly until satisfi ed no Soviet bomb would or could be created. Then, and only then, would the US reconsider whether or not to destroy its own bomb making capacity. It was, as a Baruch staff member conceded, ‘obviously unacceptable to the Soviets with the full realization that they would reject it’. Acheson himself said that the Baruch Plan would guarantee the failure of international control of atomic weapons. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted only one dimension of control. ‘The bomb should continue to be at the heart of America’s arsenal, and a system of controls should be established that would prevent the Russians from developing the weapon.’ The nuclear arms race, that on more than one occasion would bring the world to the brink of Armageddon, was on.

SOVIETS WITHDRAW VOLUNTARILY FROM CONQUERED AREAS

In early 1946 Winston Churchill made his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in the US in which he described what he termed the barbaric and illegitimate domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviets. Yet, as prime minister of Britain, and Stalin’s ally, he had cut a bargain with the Soviet dictator himself by which Britain would recognize Soviet mastery throughout the east in return for Stalin’s acknowl-edgement of Britain’s continued sphere in Greece, a bargain Stalin kept. The real record of Soviet actions in the immediate post-war period demonstrated a genuine willingness to cooperate with the US and its allies. Austria had been annexed by Germany in 1938 and so had also participated in the invasion of Russia. At war’s end the Red Army occupied about half of Austria, but it withdrew voluntarily.

Similarly, the Soviets also withdrew from Chinese territory occupied when the Red Army declared war on Japan in 1945. In 1947 Truman issued his famous doctrine in which he accused the Soviets of intervening in Greece’s civil war waged between native Greek communists and right-wing forces that had collaborated with the Nazis, and who were then also supported by Britain. But Stalin kept his word with Churchill and gave no aid to the Greek communists. That is precisely why the Greek communists were defeated.

In yet another case both Russia and Britain had occupied Iran and Azerbaijan in order to keep immense reserves of oil from Nazi control. FDR had assured Stalin that Russia could obtain Iranian oil for necessary reconstruction after the war. The Soviets agreed to withdraw from this area by March 1946, yet when the time came they balked; not because they wished to annex the region but to ensure that Iran would provide the USSR with oil. Initially the Truman Administration urged the Iranians to broker such an oil deal. At this early stage of American power Washington was already maneuvering to create a buffer between the USSR and Middle East oil, and saw Iran as pivotal. So, after the Soviets did withdraw Washington then told Iran to renege.

In every one of these cases there was nothing the US could have done had Russia actually behaved in the manner that American propaganda falsely claimed, that is, with military force. In the case of Iran even the A-bomb was useless since that would have irradiated and poisoned (or utterly destroyed) the oil wells. In fact, Russian actions belied the claim that they were relentlessly pursuing new conquests. No evidence existed of any Soviet desire to move militarily beyond the areas occupied during the rout of Nazi Germany. By contrast Britain still had its imperial armies all over the globe, as did the US. None of this meant that Stalin did not remain a despot; it meant that the Soviet leadership was committed to traditional Russian concerns of security and dominance within its perceived sphere. To ensure their security the Soviets were willing to meet the US approximately half way. George F. Kennan of the State Department, the very architect of early American Cold War policy of containing the Soviet Union, nevertheless continued to insist that ‘Our first aim with respect to Russia in time of peace, is to encourage and promote by means short of war the retraction of undue Russian power and influence from the present satellite area.’

Ever the pragmatist and realist FDR recognized that the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe and could not be removed, as did Churchill despite his later hypocrisy. The Yalta Accords, agreed in April 1945 between the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union, not only reflected the real balance of power at that moment but affi rmed the division of Europe with the possibility for future mutual cooperation. Months later the balance of power would be altered exponentially by the American atomic bomb.

It is true that communist parties in western Europe, especially in France and Italy, were very strong and posed an electoral threat to the American reconstruction agenda in that region. Communists could rise to power there democratically and showed every sign of doing so, owing to widespread dissatisfaction with the regimes that had brought on war and ruin. Certainly the Soviets aided such political movements where they could, but given the Soviets’ own domestic problems such assistance was minimal. The American response was to deploy the newly established Central Intelligence Agency to areas where electoral communist success was possible, there to employ every dirty trick available, including bribery, vote fraud and even assassination to prevent communist electoral success. In both France and Italy the CIA worked openly with organized crime to intimidate organized labor. Ironically the US accused the Soviets of thuggery. If democracy was to result in communist gains then democracy had to be jettisoned.

CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM VIE FOR THE LOYALTIES OF THE DEFEATED EMPIRES’ COLONIES

Americans are educated to take capitalism for granted as the only rational system of social and economic organization. The brutal and unjust history of capitalist evolution is all but censored. Indeed, while communist nations were usually derided as slave states, the fact that slavery and mass slaughter were indispensable ingredients of western capitalism’s rise is not open for discussion, at least in mainstream forums. When communist ideas began to percolate into  society they were both an intellectual and grass roots response to the very real depredations of capitalism. Clearly communist revolutions did not succeed in creating better societies for their peoples, as capitalist societies claim they do for their own. Soviet rule over its satellites was brutal. But if the capitalist west prospers greatly today it does so directly as an historical legacy of the early western conquest of much of the planet, a system erected as a result of genocide and slavery at its dawn and maintained by exploitation and war to this day. The west can and does vilify communist crimes. But there is nothing in the communist record not matched by capitalist societies in terms of crimes against humanity. The record of capitalist larceny is why so many colonized peoples struggling for independence from western rule turned toward communist and socialist ideas in the aftermath of World War II; that, and their recognition that the European empires, and Japan, were finished. As victims they had first hand knowledge of the west’s hypocrisy and its claims to bring the benefits of civilization to the benighted denizens of what was condescendingly termed the ‘Third World’. They knew that western nations prospered at their expense. Nationalists like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh had seen first hand the beneficence of French capitalism and rejected it utterly. European colonizers employed noble rhetoric and platitudes but the realities involved plantations and mines that paid slave wages, a system backed by prisons and executions. The widely held notion that the US opposed communism on moral grounds is flatly contradicted by the fact that throughout the Cold War Washington overthrew numerous democracies because they pursued policies in opposition to US intentions. In many cases the US filled these power vacuums with bloody dictatorships every bit as brutish and criminal as anything to be found in the communist world.

American policy-makers understood that World War II’s costs in lives and treasure would all but bankrupt western Europe’s empires, and Japan’s, presenting the long anticipated opening to replace them, if not in exactly the same way. So the stage was set for a titanic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for the loyalties of the former colonial subjects. This contest was one of the cardinal issues at the heart of American opposition to the communist world. Throughout the post-war era, until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, both sides would square off and on too many occasions would stand at the brink of nuclear war. At other times the two opponents would arm proxies such as Koreans, Vietnamese, Cubans, Angolans, Ethiopians and many others, and foster wars all over the planet such that by the end of the twentieth century almost as many people would die of these so-called ‘savage wars of peace’ as had been killed in World War II.

The Great Depression in the US had been caused by speculation in stock markets, overproduction, restriction of credit, collapsed purchasing power and the closure of overseas markets by countries reverting to economic nationalism, or autarky, especially Britain, Germany and Japan. The USSR already impeded capitalist penetration on American terms. In the decade before the war most foreign markets were off limits to American goods and services. Then the war itself shattered the global capitalist system. This was the deepest crisis facing American political, social and economic stability at home immediately in the post-war years. There was absolutely no military threat from any corner of the globe. American analysts reasoned that the only way to avert a return to stagnation was through the economic and financial reconstruction of the global order on American terms.

THE THREAT OF A CLOSED WORLD REMAINS: GERMANY BECOMES A NEW AXIS

American policy faced a four-pronged threat: the ruined nations of Europe and Asia – both friends and former foes – might revert to the economic nationalism and closure of markets that had characterized the pre-war years. Post-war impoverishment in these regions might lead populations toward communism and socialism. Ruined nations could not buy American goods owing to their lack of dollars. Finally, the colonies were in revolt, threatening to align themselves with Moscow, or in nationalist directions otherwise independent of US desires.

So the key to post-war American strategy focused fundamentally on economic security, not the claimed military threat from communism. The ‘closed world’ that had preceded the war, with restrictions on market access and discriminatory trade practices such as tariffs, was a major factor in the depth of the Great Depression. In order ‘to maintain a world economic order based on free trade and currency convertibility’ the US hosted the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 at which the American dollar was pegged as the standard, backed by the world’s greatest gold reserves, against which all other currencies would exchange. This gave the US economy preponderant leverage over the evolution of the new global system.

Germany was the key to reconstruction strategy as the new ‘axis’ of an integrated European market. At the end of the war Germany had been co-occupied by the US, Britain and the USSR. The issue of the shape of Germany’s reunification had been left open by the big three powers. Russia occupied about one-third of the nation, the largely agricultural eastern sector, while the US and Britain ruled the industrial west. This posed an immediate problem for US–Soviet cooperation since Russia wanted to carry off Germany’s remaining industrial plants as part of the exacting indemnity it desired and as a measure to cripple any future re-industrialization that could lead to Germany’s remilitarization. This came directly into conflict with American goals. As Stalin saw matters, the issue revolved around Russian need for security versus American desire for gain. The question of Germany’s future would ultimately be the root of Washington’s decision to militarize the Cold War.

US ambassador to the newly created United Nations, John Foster Dulles, said ‘a healthy Europe’ could not be ‘divided into small compartments’. It had to be organized into ‘an integrated market big enough to justify modern methods of mass production for mass consumption’. An early draft of the Truman Doctrine had declared that:

Two great wars and an intervening world depression have weakened the system almost everywhere except in the United States...if, by default, we permit free enterprise to disappear in other countries of the world, the very existence of our democracy will be gravely threatened.

Envisioning a global ‘America, Inc.’ Washington policy-makers would anoint defeated Germany and Japan as junior partners with management rights over many of the areas formerly comprising the very empires they had sought to rule. In order to renew capitalist prosperity the US would ally with its former enemies to thwart the opposition of both communists and any economic nationalists (any who put their national economic interests before American corporate interests) on the scene. What Truman, a Democrat, and Dulles, a Republican, feared above all was any return to self-contained economic blocs that would freeze American enterprise out. Whether this took the form of Stalinism, Chinese communism, state socialism or Arab nationalism, any type of economic autarky anywhere was unacceptable to official Washington. In 1904 Teddy Roosevelt had extended the Monroe Doctrine and American dominance throughout the western hemisphere; now Truman, in his famous doctrine of 1947, would extend it to the planet.

CONTROL OF OIL BECOMES THE LINCHPIN OF AMERICAN POLICY

Fundamental to American management of capitalist economies, and the military power to back it up, was control of the resource necessary to fuel the system. In the words of the US State Department oil had become ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’. James Forrestal, who had directed the Navy Department during the war and would soon become the nation’s first Secretary of Defense, put matters quite baldly. ‘Whoever sits on the valve of Middle East oil may control the destiny of Europe.’ George Kennan, architect of early anti-communist policy, wrote that ‘US control over Japanese oil imports would help provide “veto power” over Japan’s military and industrial policies.’ In another position paper the State Department declared:

Our petroleum policy is predicated on a mutual recognition of a very extensive joint interest and upon control...of the great bulk of the petroleum resources of the world...US–UK agreement upon the broad, forward-looking pattern of the development and utilization of petroleum resources under the control of the two countries is of the highest strategic and commercial importance. [author’s emphasis]

The inclusion of the British government in this proposed condominium was quite disingenuous, since American policy all along had been to displace Britain at the top of the system, to remake it on American terms: to play Rome to Britain’s Athens.

As we have seen, the Middle East had been cynically carved up and occupied by Britain and France after World War I. Owing to the shock and cost of World War II both nations were losing their empires. Having ascended to the pinnacle of the system that had evolved by conquest, the US would shortly, in the name of countering communists but really in order to maintain its new position, be forced to intervene in the Middle East for strategic reasons and to ensure its access to and control over the disposition of vital oil. Solving these problems would require outlays of US tax revenues that would dwarf the costs incurred by the war itself, and if not managed tightly could lead back to depression.

The Truman Doctrine of 1947 committed the US to provide assistance to any nation at risk from communist movements or insurgencies, but it was also a major response to the economic uncertainties facing reconstruction of the global system. The capitalist British Empire had been the greatest impediment to American hegemony in the pre-war system. In another of history’s ironies Prime Minister Churchill had allied with the US in order to save his nation’s empire, only to see it bankrupted by victory. Britain had succumbed to classic ‘imperial overstretch’, and the main beneficiary of this precipitous decline was its ally and rival. In desperate need of loans from the only nation with funds, London agreed to convert its currency, the pound sterling, to dollars, thereby transferring economic management at home and economic control of its dominions to the US. The imperial roles had been reversed, a goal sought by Washington and Wall Street for half a century. But the US had also now adopted Britain’s role as enforcer in the empire she was losing. The first stop was Greece, formerly London’s satellite, now in danger of succumbing to home-grown communists.

The anti-communist propaganda of the Truman Doctrine also prepared the American public and Congress for even greater outlays of American dollars. Truman’s message emphasized the communist threat to Greece, Turkey and the oil of the Middle East, but this was not entirely honest. Its deeper goal was to overcome political reluctance to extend massive loans for European recovery. As noted, Stalin was not interfering in the Greek civil war between communists and rightists. The aid thus extended by Truman defeated the Greek communists and lined the US up with a reactionary and dictatorial regime. There was no evidence that the Soviets were interfering in Turkey and that Muslim nations’ communists were a weak minority in any case. As Chairman Arthur Vandenburg of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee told Truman, if he wanted Congress to put up the money he would have ‘to scare hell out of the American people’. Thus an equally massive distortion and deception campaign about Russia’s proclaimed threat was set in motion to match the enormous outlays of funds that would be necessary to rebuild Europe’s shattered economies to suit the American agenda of a world open to American corporate penetration. Communism was on the march the public was told; only the United States stood in its path.

THE ‘MARTIAL PLAN’

Named after Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the European Recovery Program is often presented as an impeccable example of American generosity towards war-ruined nations, including former enemies. But the plan was crafted primarily as a measure to resolve the ‘dollar gap’ crisis and restore the US economy and international trade. Prior to the depression and war, Europe and Japan had exported their products to the US and been paid in dollars, which these nations then used to import American products. In the post-war period European currencies and the Japanese yen were essentially worthless. In the absence of dollars to buy American goods, global trade could not be re-established and the US was in danger of falling back into depression, mass unemployment and social instability. The plan envisioned ultimately an integrated European Common Market, with a re-industrialized Germany at its core and a common currency easily converted into dollars. Billions of tax dollars would be pumped into ruined Europe (with a similar plan for Japan) and then be re-circulated back into the US to purchase reconstruction services and materials from American companies. The war-devastated nations would be rebuilt and American prosperity would return.

The key to European recovery, said American analysts, was Germany. Secretary Marshall declared that ‘the restoration of Europe required the restoration of Germany. Without a revival of Germany’s production there can be no revival of Europe’s economy.’ The chairman of General Motors, then the largest corporation in the world, said that without German integration into a common European market ‘there is nothing that could convince us in General Motors that it was either sound or desirable or worthwhile to undertake an operation of any consequence in a country like France’.

France itself was adamantly opposed to re-industrializing the neighbor that had invaded it twice that century but was induced to accept the plan when it realized that the enormous reparations it desired from Germany could only be obtained if German industry was resurrected. France also fervently wanted to hold on to its empire, especially in North Africa and Indochina. To have any hope of success it would have to depend on the United States and would therefore be required to go along with the Marshall Plan.

Russia, however, was a very different case. Under no circumstances could the Soviet Union accept a reunified Germany reconstructed along the lines that had enabled its rise as a military power in the first place. Germany had also twice invaded Russian territory in one generation, with consequences far more extreme than for France. The USSR desperately needed aid, even more than the nations of western Europe, and at the final allied conference at Potsdam had asked Truman for a $10 billion loan, having previously been promised $6 billion by FDR. Stalin took measures to cooperate with the US, such as allowing non-communists to share rule in strategic Poland and Czechoslovakia, by withdrawing troops from Austria, Manchuria and Iran, and by refraining to support communist movements in China, Greece and elsewhere. Washington had continued to dangle the possibility of the loan to Moscow without making any concrete guarantees. It never did extend the money.

In 1948 the US offered Marshall Plan aid to Czechoslovakia which had fallen under Nazi rule during the war when its puppet government had allied with Hitler. Nevertheless, that nation was allowed by Stalin to have elections in which non-communists shared power. Czechoslovakia straddled east and west and sought good relations with both sides. But it was clear that acceptance of Marshall Plan aid would tie the small nation’s economy to the west and erode the cordon sanitaire that Soviet foreign policy saw as key to its national security. Rather than allow Czechoslovakia out of its orbit the Soviets ruthlessly toppled the non-communist government of Edward Benes and occupied the country. This was the first military foray conducted by the Soviets after World War II, and it occurred in a nation that had been an enemy, and had previously been occupied by the Red Army. This move against the Czechs hardly portended the global conquest that Washington’s propaganda insisted was the Soviet goal.

Had Italy at the time elected a communist government and showed signs of lining up with the USSR the United States would have overthrown that government (actually it would never have allowed any communists, elected or not, in the first place). Nevertheless, Washington seized upon the Czech overthrow as perfect evidence of its own propaganda. The Reds were relentlessly seeking world conquest and would have to be ‘contained’. The die was cast. The USSR would be denied reconstruction aid, it would be banned from the renewed global economic system and its proclaimed menace would be employed to justify rearmament in the US and Western Europe.

Critics of the European Recovery Plan in the US, like FDR’s former vice-president Henry Wallace, dubbed it the ‘Martial Plan’. Wallace, who was running for president in the 1948 election, argued strenuously that Truman’s policies were deliberately fostering mistrust, a dangerous arms race and potential future war. Like FDR he believed that mutual cooperation between Washington and Moscow could be worked out favorably to both nations, if only the US would take seriously Russia’s genuine security concerns. He and many others doubted Truman’s professed humanitarian motives for the plan, believing it was calculated primarily to profit large corporations, especially many war industries that had grown to gargantuan proportions as a result of wartime contracts with guaranteed profits. What would the workforce’s share be? If a new war should come who would do the dying?

In response to the dispute over the Marshall Plan big business established the Committee for the Marshall Plan. Massively funded by concerns like Chase Bank, General Motors, Westinghouse, Standard Oil and numerous Wall Street law firms and brokerage houses, the public was saturated with media ads touting the benefits the economy would reap. Simultaneously, critics were portrayed as communists or communist sympathizers. New epithets entered the political vocabulary. Opponents of the plan, or of Truman’s anti-communist policies in general, were now derided as ‘stalinoids’, ‘parlor pinkos’ and communist ‘fellow travelers’. The most conservative elements in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were enlisted to line the unions up with corporate America. The Truman Administration also mandated the Federal Employee Loyalty Program requiring millions of federal employees to take a loyalty oath. This energized the extreme right wing in American politics since it more than implied that the administration had allowed itself to be infi ltrated by ‘subversives’ and fed the witch hunt against any critics of US foreign policy that followed. Wallace himself, whom FDR had trusted as he had never trusted Truman, was depicted in the popular press as Stalin’s ‘stooge’. The former Vice-President’s interest in eastern religions was ridiculed and condemned as a betrayal of America’s ‘Christian heritage’. The strongest political link to FDR’s New Deal, Wallace and his bid for the presidency, was derailed by such caricatures. An age of irrationality, intolerance, censorship and militarized anti-communism had dawned and would dominate American domestic politics almost for half a century.

HE FUTURE OF GERMANY FURTHER POLARIZES THE COLD WARThe years 1948–1950 were critical to the evolution of American Cold War policies and the future of American democracy. The crucial issue of Germany heated nearly to atomic warfare over the capital city of Berlin; the Chinese communists overthrew the regime the US had propped up against Japan; the Soviets exploded their fi rst atomic bomb; war in Korea broke out suddenly, and across the globe the colonies were in open revolt. Panic gripped the Truman Administration while its right-wing opponents mounted a hysterical condemnation of the government’s policies. Owing to its unpopularity, the draft laws of World War II had been allowed to lapse but on 24 June 1948 Congress instituted a new Selective Service Act that would conscript able-bodied males for compulsory military service, not to defend American shores but once again to be deployed thousands of miles from home.27 The militarization of the Cold War and the creation of the ‘permanent war economy’ was now becoming law. The National Security State, what President Dwight Eisenhower would later call the ‘military-industrial complex’, was now unremittingly fastened on to American life, adding new branches to the republican form of government, neither elected nor seemingly subordinate to the original three prescribed by the Constitution. (The Constitution prescribes a legislative branch, an executive and a judicial. The new National Security State involved the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council which effectively acted as new branches unelected by anyone.) Coupled with the rising power of the Central Intelligence Agency this ‘secret government’, operating behind the scenes and in the shadows of American political life, would maneuver ceaselessly to reduce government ‘by the people’ to political theater once and for all.The fate of Germany, split between the capitalist west and Soviet east, polarized the issues between the US and USSR. By 1948 it was clear that no compromise on Germany’s reunifi cation could be reached that satisfi ed either side. When the US announced that it had created a separate currency for West Germany the Soviets decided to close the border between their zone, East Germany, and the West, halting any progress toward reunifi cation. The American intent was to foster re-industrialization and economic stability in West Germany such that it could begin importing American and western European products. This fl atly rendered null the agreement made at Yalta for Russian reparations from the wealthier, industri

APA (American Psychological Assoc.) Atwood, P. L. (2010). War and Empire : The American Way of Life. Pluto Press.

[ninearchbridgesrilanka-blog]

Backpacking Information and facts on Sri Lanka

koneshwaran

SRI LANKA

Population: 19.four million (UN, 2005) Funds: Colombo (professional), Sri Jayawardenepura (administrative) Area: sixty five,610 sq km (25,332 sq miles) Significant languages: Sinhala, Tamil, English Important religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity Life expectancy: seventy one yrs (males), 77 decades (gals) (UN) Financial device: Sri Lankan rupee

The teardrop-shaped island of Sri Lanka is oddly labelled because of the Chinese as being the "land with out sorrow". The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is actually a little nation is one of one of the most ideal countries for travel from the South Asia region. And though the fright on the civil war or perhaps the 2004 tsunami is not great publicity with the tourism market, Serendib, as Persians named it and whence English will take "serendipity" from, is severely serene and serene in more techniques than 1, inland and around the seas.

After the disastrous and destructive Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 where 31,229 fatalities ended up reported and all-around one million still left homeless, Sri Lanka's sweet and gradual recovery accolades it since the "small wonder." Europeans while in the early times of environment exploration thought they had discovered the "Garden of Eden", but what is becoming of this Pearl with the Indian Ocean will be the crown jewel on the spice trade. Over the within, the once-called Ceylon is peaceful and care-free, but close to it, wars ended up waged by terrific empires inside of a quest to covet the loaded island.

GEOGRAPHY & CLIMATE

Sri Lanka is usually a sixty five,610 km2 territory of mainly flat and rolling plains even though mountainous while in the central part to the south. Quite low that the island wonder has a highest altitude, the Pidurutalagala of 2,524 metres above the Indian Ocean, its lowest point, and as such, located at 7 00 N, 81 00 E and south of India, the country basks inside a warm tropical monsoon climate moderated by ocean winds and moisture. The three corresponding seasons are southwest monsoons from June to October, wet northeast monsoon from December through March, and hot season from April to May. January has the coldest of days in the year, though April is extremely unbearable as the Sri Lankan sun glares like no other. There is no ideal time to be in Sri Lanka. It is all about the place you are when you're there. If a person finds the urban jungle too hot to the liking and the air too dim and thin for breathing, heed the call of the countryside for better climate and air.

PEOPLE & CULTURE

In all methods, these factors work for that good of local and vacation existence, for the people in Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankans, are a peaceful and simple unit of people, unit while in the sense of being a nation amidst ethnic and religious disparity. Sri Lanka is constituted by a majority of Sinhalese, from Ceylonese of almost three-quarters in the inhabitants, followed by Sri Lankan Moors, Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil consecutively, and other immigrants.

The constitution of Sri Lanka attests to freedom of religion, but, while in the main, the republic is usually a Buddhist country with almost 70% from the inhabitants following, mainly Sinhalese, but with a wonderful proportion of Hindus (mostly Tamils), Muslims, and Christians. The language in the state is SINHALA used for that most part by all with the Sinhalese populace and far more, that is 75% with the Sri Lanka, although TAMIL is also a national language. ENGLISH is definitely the de facto language for government and business affairs, and is spoken competently by a sizable 10% of Sri Lanka.

FOOD & ATTRACTION

Nowhere else can a traveller see great ethnic and religious proportion than from the cash itself, Colombo basically because it's got anything and everything. Although Colombo is the biggest and the busiest place 1 can go to in their island adventure, there are other relaxing options like a lazy trek to the ancient cities, a cool surf while in the heat in the sun, a scuba dive, a snorkel, or a serene waterfront show with the sunset, all at the moment if preferred, in which it is truly tranquil and no cost to explore. It will be the ideal place to start and end a traveller's Sri Lankan journey.

But should the equatorial sun, add the smothering diesel fogged air of Colombo slowly deteriorate your vacation zest, delve into the world-class attractions countryside like rice valleys, mountain springs, forever falls, tea terraces, virgin rain forests, golden coastlines, the Elephant Rock, the Sigiriya Rock Fortress (Lion's Rock), lost cities, stone temples, forest monasteries, and, really, the list goes on. These are but revelations to what the "small island, big trip" this enigmatic place is.

Then again, no journey can be perfection with no a taste on the Sri Lankan cuisine. In these parts on the globe, food is so fantastic everything stops as if nothing bad can happen. Sri Lankan cuisine- and people think Indian cuisine. The food here is like the motherland itself in variety and heat. In truth, Sri Lankan food has an identity of its own, exceptionally magnificent visually and all otherwise, bar none. Rice, the staple, is the blank canvas to the art of colours and flavours effervescent on your typical Sri Lankan plate. Although spices used here are similar to south Indian cuisine, spices are used in whole and are turned to paste, instead of ground spices, that gives it that distinctive velvety marriage of spices to the food.

Rice with curry is most common dish which can be in vegetable or meat sorts served with scores of sides that create varieties of flavours in every bite. This modern Sri Lankan personality in food is among tradition and fusion from the West (British, Dutch, and Portuguese) and the East (Moors, Malays, Arabs and Indians). Desserts here range from native cakes of coconut to a class that exudes western influences like creme caramel. I say desserts lay the sturdy groundwork for a fantastic Sri Lankan food adventure. Sri Lankan gastronome is just so different from India, so different from what 1 expects.

To see Sri Lanka is to be in Sri Lanka even if it means riding along the same tracks the 2004 tsunami devoured. But given that the train cuts right along the sea past areas and villages, montages flash like in an old 50's film creating some distance from the everyday everyday living that you see for a moment and is gone. Until you get off the train, then you would realise the reality in the previous scenes. Succinctly put, Sri Lanka's main attraction will be the people, the ones you meet here picking tea within the rain, fishing on poles Sri Lankan style, or cooking curry crab.

References World Heritage Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Heritage_Site

[script-a-world]

I hope this isn't a silly question but can beaches be in downtown areas? I personally live in a downtown area full of high rises with the harbour right in front of it. So why can't harbour be replaced with beach. Also some beach pics I find actually have lots of high rises in the backdrop, aren't those downtown areas too? Anyway both my beta and a writing friend are saying that beach in downtown makes no sense.

Synth: Downtown beaches are absolutely a thing that exist, though depending on the level of urbanization, they may not be naturally occurring ones. Last year the city I live in built a permanent beach downtown. Replaced an old docking area with gently sloping concrete slabs and dumped a whole load of sand on them. It has been very popular. IIRC Paris does something similar, trucking in huge amounts of sand to build temporary beaches in a few spots along the Seine during summertime (IDK what happens with all the sand when summer is over). If your city was carefully planned by the original builders, it’s not far-fetched at all to think they would have worked around any already existing natural beaches to preserve them for its citizens’ use.

Tex: I need to orient myself a little bit on this question, so I’m going to pull out a few definitions here.

Downtown:

Downtown is a term primarily used in North America by English-speakers to refer to a city's commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart, and is often synonymous with its central business district(CBD). In British English, the term "city centre" is most often used instead. The two terms are used interchangeably in Colombia.

The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for "down town" or "downtown" dates to 1770, in reference to the center of Boston.[2] Some have posited that the term "downtown" was coined in New York City, where it was in use by the 1830s to refer to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan.[3] As the town of New York grew into a city, the only direction it could grow on the island was toward the north, proceeding upriver from the original settlement, the "up" and "down" terminology coming from the customary map design in which up was north and down was south.[3] Thus, anything north of the original town became known as "uptown" (Upper Manhattan), and was generally a residential area, while the original town – which was also New York's only major center of business at the time – became known as "downtown" (Lower Manhattan).[3]

Beach:

A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles. The particles can also be biological in origin, such as mollusc shells or coralline algae.

Some beaches have man-made infrastructure, such as lifeguard posts, changing rooms, showers, shacks and bars. They may also have hospitality venues (such as resorts, camps, hotels, and restaurants) nearby. Wild beaches, also known as undeveloped or undiscovered beaches, are not developed in this manner. Wild beaches can be appreciated for their untouched beauty and preserved nature.

Beaches typically occur in areas along the coast where wave or current action deposits and reworks sediments.

Harbour:

A harbor or harbour (see spelling differences; synonyms: wharves, haven) is a sheltered body of water where ships, boats, and barges can be docked. The term harbor is often used interchangeably with port, which is a man-made facility built for loading and unloading vessels and dropping off and picking up passengers. Ports usually include one or more harbors. Alexandria Port in Egypt is an example of a port with two harbors.

Harbors may be natural or artificial. An artificial harbor can have deliberately constructed breakwaters, sea walls, or jettys or they can be constructed by dredging, which requires maintenance by further periodic dredging. An example of an artificial harbor is Long Beach Harbor, California, United States, which was an array of salt marshes and tidal flats too shallow for modern merchant ships before it was first dredged in the early 20th century.[1] In contrast, a natural harbor is surrounded on several sides by prominences of land. Examples of natural harbors include Sydney Harbour, Australia and Trincomalee Harbour in Sri Lanka.

Since “downtown” usually means a highly-developed area, there’s a 50/50 chance that they’ll even be near a body of water - and if they are, the coastal areas are possibly also developed into harbours/wharves because water transportation of goods is economically efficient. Under these constraints, a beach would be a stretch of un- or under-developed coastline that doesn’t generate as much revenue for the taxable area it’s connected to compared to a harbour.

Frequently, beaches generate revenue under the auspices of tourism, which means that the area would be cultivated accordingly - esplanades, or promenades, are a popular choice, and often grow near a harbor as a natural extension of a money-generating area. Seaside resorts are a closely-related cousin of esplanades, and sometimes have the focus of being a retreat.

Many of the beaches I’ve been to that have high-rises in the background are either those of hotels - who might own the beach property adjacent to their building(s) - or those of businesses. Idyllic beachfront properties that have a low overall skyline can be low-populated areas (which usually mean drawing a low-income from tourism), protected areas of varying degrees, unsafe for people to play in, or are owned by people in the immediate residential areas and thus private property.

Artificially-constructed beaches, as Synth mentioned, are possible but often costly because of the amount of effort and material that needs to be brought in. Those who build such things need to consider the possible costs and revenue of a beach compared to a harbor, and whether it would be financially beneficial for the area to convert it.

Highly-developed areas like city centers carry the risk of polluting the nearby environment, as evidenced by the history of:

The Nashua River in the US

The Ganges River of the Indian subcontinent

The Citarum River in Indonesia

The Yellow River in China

The Sarno River in Italy

The Matanza River of Argentina

The Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”

The Kamilo Beach of Hawai’i

Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Bajos de Haina in the Dominican Republic

Hann Bay in Senegal

Your beta and writing friend do, unfortunately, have a point - downtown beaches are rarely a thing, and if they are then they’re not likely to be very well-maintained or aesthetically-pleasing. It is possible to have one, if they follow the model that Synth mentioned, but it’s usually expensive, time-consuming, difficult to keep sufficiently clean, and their existence needs to be balanced against the current revenue-generating area that is probably a harbour.

If the society you’re worldbuilding settles a coastal area with the intent to preserve the coast and develop it into a beach, you have a good shot of putting one into your story, but harbours are disinclined in many ways to be replaced by a beach.

Constablewrites: Our idea of the beach as a pleasant leisure destination seems to have started with the English upper classes in the 1700s, and expanded as the growth of the middle class and advances in travel technology made tourism accessible to a larger population. And the business district of a city is built on commerce, which in our world heavily involves shipping. So if the city was developed before industrialization, its planners were far more likely to look at a beach and think “what a terrible place to unload a ship, we should fix that” than “oh, how pretty, people might come here to relax.” Plus, “downtown” generally refers to an area of only a few square miles at most where real estate is in high demand, so any stretch of open land is unlikely to remain open for long.

Now, because today we do value beaches as pleasant leisure destinations, it’s entirely possible that a city might create an artificial beach along its coast. River beaches are also a thing in several European cities, and many of them are temporary summer installations made with imported sand. And though they’re unlikely to be strictly in the downtown area, you can indeed find beaches in highly urbanized areas like in Miami, Vancouver, and frankly most of Southern California but let’s specifically say Santa Monica. But a city developing organically isn’t going to have a beach unless there’s significant incentive to designate and maintain one instead of using that land for something more lucrative. And unless the city was founded and built specifically around tourism, a beach is always going to be in addition to a city’s harbor, never in place of it. (Hell, even then. Cruise ships were one of the earliest and still an extremely popular method of tourism, and even if your tourists want to see the beach, they’re not getting to it without a harbor.)

Feral: Downtowns may be on waterfronts, but as previously pointed out, downtowns are generally not going to be developed on naturally occurring beaches, here being the sandy, ocean front stretches of land. Tex and Constable bring up great points about economic incentive, but also consider the physical constraints of what can be built on the beach - I think Jesus had something to say about building castles on sand, and as the son of a carpenter, I think he would know. In the States, Chicago and Charleston come to mind as being particularly relevant to your query.

Chicago is on Lake Michigan, which does have a sandy beach that is somewhat removed from downtown by various parks and smaller scale infrastructure. Downtown Charleston is a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers where they join to flow into the ocean, creating a small bay. The beaches associated with Charleston are actually on the nearby islands, not downtown Charleston, which has piers, wharfs, etc, as expected in a city founded by pirates.

A lot of the question of whether you can feasibly “build” a downtown on a beach is how built - literally - up you want it to be. The incredible innovation that went into building Chicago’s downtown, particularly its high rises and skyscrapers, is pretty well known in a general sense but you might want to look into how they were able to accomplish what they have given the very difficult topography. Charleston has no skyscrapers. In addition to the unstable, sandy soil, building in Charleston is made more unstable by being in an earthquake prone area. The big issues with downtowns being on traditional sandy beaches are the quality of the soil and bedrock and the question of erosion, which is a greater issue when dealing with ocean currents and tides.

Basically, it’s not impossible for a downtown area to have a beach, but given the issues that beaches present to building a downtown and the economic influences of why there would or would not be a beach, it’s unlikely without a lot of story behind it. And as you’re writing a story… that might be worthwhile to you. Or it might be a distraction from the story you really want to tell.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

A Primer on Northern Syria

Originally posted on the Organise Aotearoa Blog on 14/10/19

Northern Syria, also known as the NES (Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria) or by its Kurdish name, Rojava (the west), is often in the news for all the wrong reasons. This week, Turkish troops and their local Islamist allies crossed the border in the name of protecting Turkey from Kurdish-led militants it denounces as terrorists. The US, ostensibly an ally of the Kurds, has granted Turkey a free hand to bomb the region at its leisure, and has assisted Turkey by closing off the border crossings with Iraq, and along the Euphrates. To understand the conflict holistically means we need to go far back into history, before capitalism, and before the ethno-nationalism it fostered could tear the region apart.

Pre-Capitalist History

Prior to the spread of Islam in the 600s, the region known as The Levant, or Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, was home to a number of competing religions. Greek Orthodox Christianity, Syriac Christianity, and Zoroastrianism (an ancient precursor to modern monotheistic religions) were all practiced across the region, along with smaller religions that can be traced back to the earliest human cities in Mesopotamia, such as the Yazidi religion. Most of these religions are still practiced by minorities in the region today, with the exception of Zoroastrianism which has been reduced to tiny enclaves much farther east.

In pre-capitalist times, humans have understood cultural differences quite differently to how we do today. It’s hard for many to understand now, but race and ethnicity were concepts that would only come into play later. Religious and cultural practice was a much more important and tangible aspect of identity. When Islam spread across the region, many Levantine peoples welcomed it because of its similarities to local forms of Christian iconoclasm (meaning religious opposition to figurative representation of the divine).

Map showing the spread of Islam under successive Caliphs.

Islam brought with it a renaissance period where Levantine peoples led the world in the arts and sciences. The conservative institutions of the Byzantine orthodox church, and Sassanid Zoroastrian fundamentalists were swept aside by a new wave of Islamic scholars and thinkers, whose rationalist approach now seems extremely modern compared to other cultures of the time. Islam was led by Caliphs, ideally philosopher-king descendents of the prophet, far removed from the more sinister modern use of the term.

By the late Middle Ages, the Caliphs were no longer direct descendents of the prophet, but rather powerful sultans who took on the title themselves. By the 1400s the Caliphs were a Turkish dynasty from central Anatolia, the Osmanolgu family, better known as the Ottomans. The Ottomans ushered in a second Islamic renaissance, and despite their brutal methods of warfare, were relatively fair administrators who allowed a great deal of autonomy for minorities. Christians, Jews and Muslims cohabited peacefully, to the point that whole cities were granted to minorities, such as the Jewish-led city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) in Greece.

Map showing the spread of the Ottoman caliphate.

However, this second period of peace wouldn’t always last. As the centuries passed, the Ottomans found themselves in direct competition with European powers, whose absolute monarchies and mercantilism proved to be a much stronger economic and political base. By the time of the Industrial revolution, the Ottomans were referred to as “The Sick Man of Europe.” A vast, but ultimately weak power, that could be easily divided up between the emerging European colonial powers.

The Ottomans adapted to this by adopting European-style cultural, political and economic practices. They experimented with colonial practices, beginning Turkish colonies across their provinces, and attempted to impose aspects of modern state power, like standing armies and police forces. These reforms were not enough, and the Ottomans found themselves being eaten alive by European powers. Napoleonic France took Egypt, Russia took Crimea, and Britain took Cyprus.

Capitalism reaches the Levant

This crisis led to growing anxiety amongst the emerging Turkish bourgeoisie. They feared that the Empire wouldn’t modernise fast enough to avoid disintegration, and that the Sultan needed to abolish the system of regional autonomy (the millet system), and replace it with a modern capitalist state under an absolute monarchy. Ottoman nationalism emerged as a means to consolidate the many regional identities, and a policy of “Turkification” was pursued throughout the empire. Capitalism requires a relatively homogenous populace in order to effectively create a working class to fuel industrial modernisation, and so the myriad ethnic identities of the empire presented a problem.

Several events in the first decades of the 20th century created the conditions for the form of Turkish ethnonationalism we see today. In 1908, Turkish army officers and the Ottoman bourgeoisie rose up in the Young Turk Revolution, demanding a liberal parliamentary system with representation for ethnic minorities. A counter-revolution in 1909 by reactionaries and proto-Islamists reversed some of the changes, and brought violence against ethnic minorities who were seen to be in support of the earlier revolution. The empire was now divided between liberal-bourgeois Ottomanism and reactionary Turkish ethnonationalism. A narrative of betrayal stemming from the loss of the Balkans in 1912 and an inability to mobilise the Anatolian Armenian population against Russia in 1914 added fuel to the flames. From 1915 to 1923, up to 1.5 million Armenians and other Christian minorities were systematically killed, the first modern genocide on an industrial scale, and a crime denied by Turkey to this day. Lesser known are the Greek and Assyrian massacres, which themselves account for up to a million additional deaths. Muslim populations historically allied to the Ottomans, such as Kurds and Circassians, participated in the killings.

Map showing sites of documented Armenian and Assyrian genocide.

Ultimately neither clamping down on dissenting minorities, mobilising Turkish enthnonationalist sentiment, nor an alliance with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary could save the empire. During the First World War, the “Sick Man of Europe” was finally carved up between the European colonial powers, after they successfully took advantage of a large scale Arab revolt by making false promises of statehood. The League of Nations, established in the aftermath of the war and the precursor to the modern UN, tasked various ‘responsible’ European powers with administering the conquered territories in the Levant and Mesopotamia.

The agreements signed during this period, in which the Arab revolt was thoroughly betrayed, would have profound implications, and are the source of many modern borders. Israel can trace its legacy back to this period; in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Zionist immigration to Mandate Palestine was encouraged as a form of demographic engineering. The Sykes-Picot agreement led to the creation of Palestine, Transjordan (Jordan), Kuwait, and Iraq under British influence, and Lebanon and Syria under the French. Saudi Arabia, then known as the Emirate of Nejd, also participated in the partitioning by annexing the Ottoman Persian Gulf territories, and the lands captured in the Arab revolt by the rival Hashemites. In all of these territories, the Europeans encouraged regional nationalism and solidified the new borders, cutting several communities and tribes off from one another and effectively fracturing the entire region.

Map showing European zones of influence following WWI. Europeans also effectively controlled Egypt, Cyprus, and zones within Turkey, which is not shown. 

The Mandate territories revolted against the Europeans several times. Turkey, occupied by the Europeans since 1918, successfully overthrew them in 1923, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), who attempted to combine the liberal-secular parliamentarism and Turkish ethnonationalism of the 1908 and 1909 revolutions into an ideology known as Kemalism. Palestine also attempted to overthrow the British in 1936 but was brutally crushed. Iraq attempted to do the same in 1941, even allying itself with Nazi Germany to do so, but was similarly put down.

After the end of the Second World War, the European powers were no longer able to exert direct control over the entire Levant, instead holding on to key areas like the Suez canal. The British also granted large parts of Mandate Palestine to the emerging Zionist movement as they believed an Israeli state would be more amenable to the West than the unruly Arabs. Pan-Arabism emerged in this period as a rejection of the atomisation, arbitrary borders, and demographic engineering that marked the European mandate territories. Wars against Israel and horror at its genocide of Palestinians would be a rallying cry for this movement, which resulted in a degree of consolidation in Levantine identity.

The Postcolonial Levant

Pan-Arabism would take on a social-democratic character as the various postcolonial states founded welfare systems, and allied themselves with the Soviet Union. However, the ideology was still strongly anti-communist on the domestic front. Indeed, anticommunism was the chief motive behind the zenith of Pan-Arabism: the attempt at a united Arab state in 1958. The United Arab Republic (UAR) was a union between Egypt and Syria, both led by social-democratic nationalist governments who feared that the alternative would be a Syrian communist revolution. Iraqi military officers soon overthrew their pro-Western monarchy and very nearly joined the UAR themselves.

Ultimately however, this sentiment would be short lived. As the threat of communism died down and the realities of post-colonial statehood set in, Pan-Arabism was replaced with a number of competing ideas. Marxists remained a strong faction, but would never again find themselves in a position to take power. Ba’athism, a legacy of the Pan-Arabist period, would later become the dominant ideology in Syria and Iraq, where its contradictory character would lead to both social-democratic reforms and the uneven repression of minorities and communists. Islamism, encouraged as a state ideology in Saudi Arabia, also became a powerful force, buoyed by its successes and US-funding in Afghanistan. Ethnonationalist separatism also emerged out of the decline of Pan-Arabism, which sharpened the contradictions facing minorities like the Kurds, Assyrians, and Armenians.

Modern Northern Syria

Northern Syria bears the marks of all of these competing ideologies from the postcolonial/Cold-War period, as well as the ethnic and religious divides from the preceding centuries. There are Marxist factions, generally split along ethnic lines between Kurds and Arab/Alawites; as well as Ba’athists; Islamists, most infamously ISIS; and ethno-nationalists of all stripes. Amongst them are the somewhat apolitical ethnic and religious minorities, like the Yazidis, who are motivated primarily by survival in the face of repeated threats of genocide. Newer factions include Kurdish Apoists, and the mercenary factions funded by various global powers.

Northern Syria is also the site of three major global battlegrounds. There is an expansionist and ethnonationalist Turkey seeking to quash Kurdish aspirations to nationhood; a regional battle between Saudi wahhabism (extreme Sunni fundamentalism) and Iranian principlism (revolutionary Shia Islam); and the US and EU making the most of the situation to access oil and guarantee long-term superiority over Russia. There are also smaller conflicts exploited by all parties, as well as the opportunism and warlordism that a collapse of civilian government and constant arms shipments engenders.

Map of the Syrian war as of October 13, 2019. Government (Ba’athist) areas are shown in red. Green areas are a mix of Western-backed militias (in Al-Tanf), Free Syrian Army remnants (in Idlib) and Turkish-backed militias (in the far north). Yellow is areas controlled by the SDF and Kurds. Black shows hardline Islamist remnants. Blue shows Israeli occupation.

Discussion of Northern Syria inevitably centers around the PYD (the Kurdish Democratic Union Party), arguably the most mythologised and interesting of all the Syrian factions. Depending on who you talk to on the internet, the PYD can be anything from anarchist insurrectionists, to Marxist revolutionaries, to eco-feminist warriors, to Kurdish terrorists, to Western imperialist Contras paid to undermine peace in the region. It’s our goal to demystify the group somewhat.

The PYD is the Syrian sister party of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, led by the imprisoned Abdullah Öcalan. Initially a Marxist group formed out of Kurdish students in Turkey, the PKK was forced underground by Turkish repression, becoming a guerilla army armed and supported by the Ba’athist governments of Iraq and Syria, who tolerated the PKK’s Marxist rhetoric so long as it was aimed at Turkey. The PKK of today is quite different, having dropped Marxism-Leninism and alliances with Ba’athism from its doctrine. The PKK and PYD, along with the other member parties of the KCK (Kurdistan Communities Union) umbrella organisation, have shifted towards enacting a democratic confederalist or “Apoist” (after a diminutive form of Öcalan’s name) programme in the predominantly Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. This gained a lot of attention in the west due to its communalist, feminist, and anti-capitalist aspirations. However, the system of autonomous cantons remains an admirable small-scale experiment, and tends to be overstated by the western left. The territory has also had difficulty living up to its ecological aspirations due to reliance on diesel generators, unregulated oil refineries, and wartime economic constraints.

The PYD and its armed wing, the YPG/YPJ, also gained infamy for its conditional alliance with the US and EU, whereby the Kurds and their allies gained air support, weapons and other assistance in return for allowing 10 US military bases on their territory. The US also assisted with arming the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), a broad military coalition that included the YPG/YPJ along with those whom it had previously opposed, such as Kurdish nationalists, religious Sunni Kurds, mercenaries, and conscripted soldiers of dubious willingness. As the result of US negotiations this new armed force came to control all lands north of the Euphrates, well beyond the initial territorial aspirations of the PYD, which had initially only included the majority-Kurdish regions in a strip along the northern border. This put the Kurdish-led military force in control of most of Syria’s oil fields, and a large population of Arabs and minorities critical of the SDF, the only Syrian faction to use forced conscription. Allegations of ethnic chauvinism, and the discovery of “blacksites” (interrogation and torture facilities) within SDF areas added to the criticism.

Map showing initial Kurdish territorial aspirations. De-facto Kurdish territories are now much larger.

Turkey is the main adversary of the Kurdish-led force. Since 2014 Turkey has been ruled by the fascist-adjacent and increasingly autocratic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose Justice and Development Party is a direct descendent of the reactionary strain of Islamo-Turkish nationalism introduced in the counter-revolution of 1909. Turkish chauvinism towards Kurds stretches back decades, officially denying their existence and calling them “Mountain Turks” despite their historical loyalty in the Ottoman period.

Turkey is also in NATO, the US imperialist military alliance, however it often violates agreements with the US and makes overtures towards Russia, attempting to play both sides off against one another for military aid. Turkey has used this shaky alliance to lobby the US for more territorial control in Syria. The Afrin region was taken from Kurdish forces in 2016, and this week, vast swathes of northern Syria were declared up for grabs by Turkish expansionism.

Northern Syria invaded

Whatever our overall analysis of Syrian factions may be (and it is so easy to make mistakes in such a heavily propagandised environment) the question of the hour is Turkish expansionism, as this is the specific form that ethnonationalism has taken in the region. Turkey plans to demographically engineer a huge swathe of northern Syria by resettling 2 million refugees in NES, a move tantamount to a threat of genocide against displaced minorities. The US, for its part, has done far more harm than good as an ally, and is now patrolling the Euphrates, effectively enforcing the isolation of NES.

It would be a great mistake for people in the west to conclude that the people of Northern Syria somehow deserve a Turkish invasion as just desserts for their alliance with the US, especially since many Kurds and other minorities joined the fight in a struggle for survival against ISIS and Turkish-funded militias, only later finding their movement subverted by US geopolitical goals. Moreover, Turkey is the only faction in the Syrian conflict with a history of genocidal policies towards all of the minorities of Northern Syria at one point or another, and thus a defense of NES is a defense of all ethnic minorities in the region regardless of their political orientation.

All Syrian peoples deserve self-determination without the intervention of foreign powers. It may be easy to dismiss such a conflict as too complicated, the product of ‘tribal’ conflicts among a backwards people, but this ignores the entire history of imperialism in the Middle East. Thousands of ethnicities lived in relative peace prior to the imposition of nationalist ideology, demographic engineering and arbitrary borders, all products of capitalism. The Syrian people deserve an end to the constant war imposed upon them.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Decline of the Western Male, Part 1

Martin Spengler

Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler – “Martin Spengler” – these two 20th-century thinkers provide the main source of inspiration behind this project. Both sought to understand the times we live in, and to bring into view the deeper historical and philosophical significance underlying many of the political, economic, social, and cultural issues before us today. Both offer profound insight, and our goal here will be to lean on them in order to tease out what is at stake in many of the day to day problems, challenges, and controversies that grip our attention across the Western world.

Spengler’s masterpiece is his Decline of the West, which first appeared in Germany in the years immediately following World War One. His contribution is to set contemporary events within a civilizational context, as milestones in the development of a culture whose evolution has been dictated by its own internal laws and dynamics, apparent at its very birth 1,000 years ago. Spengler allows us to see how the impulse that drove Medieval European craftsmen to construct magnificent Gothic cathedrals that soared towards the heavens, while betraying ever more intricate detail in their stonework, is the same motivating force behind the transgenderism agenda today, Hollywood’s obsession with the superhero genre, and in the attractive power of the dream of space travel.

For Heidegger the key event has been the rise of Modern science and technology, and it is the implications of this development he seeks to reveal. It is Heidegger who helps us to understand how the Modern project is in its essence nihilistic; if followed through to its logical conclusion it means no less than the annihilation of both the world and humanity. This is a cataclysmic perspective, but Heidegger’s reasons for sounding the alarm apply with a monumentally increased force since he first raised this prospect during the 1930s. It was Heidegger who understood that the “subjectivism” which reduces the world to a “standing reserve,” a resource to be used at our convenience, is at its core empty, that the desire for comfort and ease is in fact a death wish. Nietzsche understood this too. The danger does not lie so much in an ecological disaster, the consequence of reckless actions such as the use of GMO crops, but from the success of technology rather than its failure. We can see this with “climate change,” first global warming will be successfully held at bay, then extreme weather events prevented, and then . . . the outside world will be made to look and feel no different from the carefully controlled environment we have inside every shopping mall. After all, if you could push a button from your beachside mansion to stop an oncoming hurricane in its tracks, and instead select for a pleasant view offshore, why wouldn’t you?

No one openly articulates such an agenda, and it does not matter whether it is realistic or complete fantasy, the logic is there nonetheless. It has been present for a thousand years, and it is immensely powerful. Our entire civilization is testimony to its power. This is the value both Heidegger and Spengler bring to a discussion of such issues, they allow us to approach topical subjects such as climate change or transgenderism from a very different angle, to understand why these are the battlegrounds today, and what is at stake.

A third dimension, however, is also needed. It is one neither “Martin” nor “Spengler” were aware of in their lifetime, nor is it a question that has ever concerned Western philosophy to any significant extent in its 2,500-year history. It is a product of our time, and as such is the key to understanding everything. In this respect, “the West” is unique, and at its heart lies a contradiction.

Civilisation by its nature is a masculine project, but Western civilization is in its essence – feminine.

The driving purpose behind the science and technology of the West is to make life easy, comfortable, safe, and amusing. These are feminine desires not masculine ones. Western men have striven for centuries to deliver such a lifestyle to their women, and over the last 70 years or so this effort has borne fruit in the unsurpassed standard of living enjoyed by large sections of the population in Western countries. But the more it has done so, the more the essentially feminine character of the West has come into play. Masculine values, masculinity, men, these were all necessary to bring us to this point, the achievements of science and technology are products of the masculine impulse to make an impact on the world, to understand it, shape it, to create with it, to build with it, for their enjoyment in part but most of all for their women and children, and for the sake of the larger civilizational project to whose success they are committed. But to the extent this project is realized, and life does become easy, comfortable, safe, and amusing, masculinity becomes increasingly redundant, and fades into the background. In its place the feminine becomes primary, a process that has accelerated to an enormous extent over the past half-century with the arrival of the “sexual revolution” in the 1960s.

In the world that is emerging, there are no limits, nothing that women cannot do, nor anything that requires the masculine impetus to turn outwards towards the wider world, to discover its secrets, confront its dangers, for there is no longer is an outside world. Once we reach the point where everything that exists is either an oversized shopping mall, an air-conditioned office building, a campus safe space, a theme park, or a McMansion, masculinity has served its purpose and has no further place, other than to supply routine maintenance services in the background. In this world everything is self-referential, reality is what we make it, truth is what we decide it to be, on the basis of what makes us feel comfortable, safe, and amused. This is why the internet and social media are so central to our culture, why reality TV is our iconic genre, celebrities our key figures, entertainment our main industry, marketing our critical skill set, and brand value our ultimate asset. It is also why #fakenews is a thing.

This self-referentiality is Heidegger’s “subjectivism.” It is extending its influence everywhere, even such former bastions of masculinity as the military. Western militaries are completely feminized, with the partial exception of special forces, the only units who actually experience real combat. This is not to say that US or NATO forces do not kill and destroy, they do on a massive scale, their mostly male members also die, but they do not fight, they do not even engage their “enemy.” Instead they conduct operations against fictitious opponents who are figments of their own imagination, and take casualties at the hands of real adversaries about who they know nothing. The disastrous British campaign in Helmand, Afghanistan, from 2006-10 is the classic example of this, launched against an insurgent force that did not exist at that time, but which soon did come into being with a vengeance as a result of the “counter-insurgency” operation.

Helmand is the rule rather than the exception. It is no accident that the weakest branch of the US military machine has always been Intelligence, because this is the one element that cannot be self-referential if it is to be effective.

The Eclipse of Truth

We see the contradiction that runs through the West above all in the current state of science as an institution. In spite of its critical role in the Western civilizational project, science today is in an appalling state of disrepair. This is so even though vast amounts of data and new information are becoming available to many scientific disciplines due to earlier developments in technology, and also to the enormous resources being thrown into research and academia. Astronomy is a good example of this. However, the ability to intellectually process these sources into theoretical advances, to improve our understanding, has been all but lost, at least in the mainstream. Instead, astronomically related areas such as cosmology and astrophysics have disappeared into a fantastical set of rabbit holes that bear no relation to any reality outside of their own mathematical set of fictions. As a result they are completely sterile, there has been no progress in these branches of science for decades, in sharp contrast to the revolutionary breakthroughs that marked the first half of the 20th century. These gave us the technological advances that make the present possible, although the irony lies in that they also have contributed in large part to the dead end we now find ourselves in. This includes its poster boy Albert Einstein, who in spite of his personal integrity has been the single greatest catastrophe ever inflicted on the scientific enterprise. It is no accident that this individual was the first ever science “celebrity,” in no other period could a set of intellectually incoherent nonsense be mistaken for genius, but then again, it did so because it suited certain purposes . . . long before #fakenews came #fakescience.

The reason for this is the eclipse of truth, which is a masculine value, as the determining factor in decisions over what ideas to accept, papers to publish, research to fund, who to appoint, and who is selected to go viral, at least on the media circuit. Science as a practice has to balance its inquiry into the world as it really is with a whole series of competing interests. These might be commercial, political, ideological, institutional, or personal. The more important a branch of science is to Western society as a whole, the more corrosive these other influences, so that when we get to a central political issue such as “climate change,” we soon find that the quality of the science being produced on this question is utterly corrupted, and from a scientific standpoint completely worthless. This is because its purpose is not to find the truth, but to support an agenda, which it does by creating “models” of how the world should be and then using these to justify policy decisions whose motivation always lay elsewhere – self-referentiality once again. The reality is that climate “science” is not science at all, which goes to explain why its proponents refuse to honor any of the principles that guide genuine scientific inquiry – honest debate, transparency of data, willingness to admit uncomfortable facts, or explore alternative hypotheses.

An indication of the West’s true character and current state of decay can be seen in some of the intractable problems that plague modern society. Many of these revolve around health, arguably the area that provides the greatest source of pride to those who believe in the achievements of Western civilization. But while it is true that life expectancy is at record levels, infant mortality at its lowest, and that a cut finger is unlikely to result in death from a ravaging infection, it can hardly be argued that the population of a nation such as the United States is “healthy” in any meaningful sense. If we look at the obesity epidemic, for example, what is most significant about this problem is less that people are getting fat, but that Western medicine has proved totally incapable of making even a small dent in the constantly rising numbers of the obese. A different approach is clearly needed, but one will only be found on the basis of civilizational values that understand medical treatment in terms that do not involve drugs or surgery. Counter currents of this nature do exist, such as the ancestral health movement, or the advocates of LCHF, but these are defined precisely by their rejection of the Western project and its conception of what a healthy way of life is. The same applies to mental health issues, or the unbelievably high rates of addiction across the West, to everything from pain killers, shopping, gambling, gaming, porn, anything that offers an escape from an otherwise entirely meaningless, but materially quite comfortable, existence.

The Desire to Escape

It is Spengler who shows us that this desire to “escape,” in his words towards “the infinite,” was present at the very birth of the West, and is in fact its driving force. This too needs to be understood in terms of masculinity and femininity. The masculine impulse is not to escape the world but to go out and engage with it, to learn how to navigate through it, to understand it, and with this knowledge to create and to build with it. A man may seek an escape from the wind and the rain for his family, but the shelters he constructs are made from real materials, and if they are not built according to the natural laws that govern civil engineering they will fall down. This is why truth is the paramount masculine value, and this truth is never self-referential, it is truth about the external world, so that humanity can live within this world.

The feminine impulse is the opposite, it is an attractive force and its ultimate point of reference is the woman herself and her children. If the masculine seeks to expand outwards towards the infinitely large, to ever extend knowledge and understanding, then the feminine measures this in terms of what it means to her, how it affects her, whether she likes what emerges around her as a result of this, or not. Men build houses, but women decide whether they want to live in these structures, and turn them into homes. The feminine is in its essence aesthetic, its measure is beauty, and the beautiful is appreciated through emotion, how it makes her feel.

During the rise of the West, this masculine impulse is harnessed and the Modern world takes shape over time. The feminine character of the Western project, however, is expressed in the ultimate end state Western civilization sets as its objective. This is Spengler’s “infinity,” but in everyday terms it goes under the slogan of “freedom.” The dominant motive behind the entire development of the West has been the desire to be free, and this means freedom from any and all constraints. Science and technology emerge as the means by which to escape the constraints of nature, but alongside this there is also the desire to escape social constraints. During the first centuries of the West, this mostly involved the struggle to overcome the Catholic Church, which dominated the social and cultural landscape of medieval Europe, and this lead to the Protestant Reformation. Later it becomes the desire to be free of any religious imposition on life whatsoever, whether through moral codes or the law of the land. Western society becomes secular.

Freedom is a feminine value, not a masculine one.   Femininity resents any external constraints on it, whether natural or social, because its reference point is the woman herself, in her singularity. There is no such thing as a feminine morality, because even two women form a set of entirely different compass points for any moral code. These might coincide, the two might agree and cooperate well together, but they also might not, there is no force behind the agreement, as soon as it feels like a constraint to either of them it will be abandoned. Women approach all relationships in this way, except with their children, there the rules change.

Masculinity does not strive for freedom, it seeks to serve. A man is measured by his contribution to something larger and outside of himself, his family, his tribe, his nation, his civilisation, its Gods, the truth. This service must be voluntary, and it must be valued. The Roman slave in revolt may kill his master but he will also willingly give up his life in the army of Spartacus, and ask only that in battle his general not throw this away cheaply.

For the same reason, equality is not a masculine value either. Men contribute to the best of their ability, because that is the source of their worth, but the end results are measured externally. The input is irrelevant, only the output. Masculinity naturally gravitates towards hierarchy, because some are more talented, experienced, or able than others, and what matters is the common venture, success or failure, victory or defeat. Men will accept the leadership, and even the domination of others, if this leads to a good outcome, because that is all that counts. Better to follow the victorious general, than lead an army to its destruction.

The feminine, on the other hand, does aspire to equality, because like freedom it is an abstract concept, it means the removal of any expectations placed upon her by anyone, which she might perceive as a constraint. Equality is the stepping stone towards freedom, which is the ability of a woman to act as her own point of reference in any aspect of her life. Today this goes under the term, “empowerment,” or “You go girl!” This is one form of the “tendency towards abstraction” we will try to elaborate on further.

Masculinity, however, acts as a counter-balance to this female “solipsism.” The masculine overrides this impulse and it is the woman who benefits, because it allows her to serve something greater – children, to become something larger than herself, to contribute, to leave her mark on the earth, to attain a slice of immortality. Men do this by imposing an order that serves the civilizational project they are committed to, in other words they impose social constraints on women. This is the “patriarchy,” it ensures that a society will continue because there will be future generations, that women will bear children. It is a civilizational project that makes women have babies, and this is its greatest gift to femininity, to those same women, it overcomes their own drive to “self-referentiality” and allows them to be something more, to participate in something larger.

The project of Western civilization, on the other hand, has been to escape this very civilizational constraint. By the 1960s it had achieved an important milestone along this path through the application of science and technology, with the invention of the contraceptive pill. As a result, birth rates have plummeted, well below the numbers required to reproduce the population. This is one reason why it is safe to predict the coming demise of the West, a social order can not survive if its women do not have children.

Part 2: Transhumanism — The Final Showdown

https://www.counter-currents.com/2017/10/decline-of-the-western-male-part-2/

[haydenandtrish]

A tour of Brussels

From historic to hipster. Timeless beauty to rundown surroundings. Nestled within a country that was once a battlefield for World Wars, revolutions and rebellions – it has seen its fair share of bloodshed and misery. The French, Dutch, German, Austrians and British have all staked their claim to the lands at one point in time. They have rebuilt their city from the ruins of war and have created their own culture within Europe. Now an independent multicultural city flourishing with pride for their craftsmanship, food, craft beers, art galleries and more. Welcome to Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the unofficial capital of the European Union, we can’t wait to show you around. 

All right, let's go. We begin in Koekelberg, north of Brussels. The outskirts of the city are more residential – just like anywhere. It is far cheaper to stay here and we were able to gain a greater appreciation and understanding for the city by being immersed in a more authentic area where few spoke English and fewer tourists were in sight. The area was more run down than the city, the cleanliness was subpar but renovations were happening down streets and we got a bargain breakfast of pastries for only 2 Euros, we can’t complain.

Anyway, back on track. Getting around. Our choice of transport in this city was the Metro. The stations are denoted on street level by a sign with a white M on a blue background. One thing to mention is that the Metro system in every city is exceptional – so far. Our Guide to the tram system. Admittedly it’s a little confusing at first, but the routes are displayed in straight coloured lines with dot points indicating each stop. So, as long as you know the destination you want, don’t freak out, take your time and read the lines until you see your stop. Which platform to be on is easy too because they will put one sign at two separate entrances and your particular stop will only be on one of them.  A little tip: Google Maps is a literal lifesaver. It tells you step by step where to go and it will list your suggested stops. 

All tickets purchased are valid for all public transport within Brussels including the tram, local city buses and Metro.

Ticket Price:

A single fare ticket is 2.10 Euros and valid for one hour from activation.

A full day is 7.50 Euros. Be careful with this one though as it is literally one day, it stops at midnight on the day of purchase.

If you are in town for a few days then a travel card may be of more interest to you. It is 5 Euros to purchase but you can top it up as needed. You can buy these form most Metro stations and you save up to 1 Euro per trip.

If you haven’t guessed already, Hayden and I elect to walk nearly everywhere we can. Yes, because it’s free, but also because this environment is completely new to us and we want to see every little bit. Walking gives us the freedom to make our own route, to stop where ever we want and admire every nook and cranny – and its Europe, so there’s many of those. Brussels is also a smaller city so the monuments, museums and galleries are all quite close to one another. 

Food. A perk of staying outside of the main city is that it is cheaper than central. Le Familial is where we got our cheap pastries from. We ventured out for dinner on our first night at 5:45pm only to learn that most kitchens do not open until 6:30pm. Like I said in our last blog post, Europeans love their late starts and later finishes so definitely keep that in mind for your travels. We chose a restaurant/bar and ordered a couple of drinks to wait it out. Le Scenarios could also be slash night club because behind a makeshift wall was a small club with confetti all over the floor and tiny platforms for dancers. It turns out a lot of places replicate this same design so you are not short for options on a night out. For dinner we enjoyed some pasta dishes with a glass of red and a crepe covered in chocolate for dessert

We also had the best kebab shop down the road from our accommodation too. If you are a potato lover like me, you’ll die over the fact they put fries on them. But that’s not surprising considering that the potato frites (fried potatoes) originated in Belgium. We cannot remember our exact shop, but similar ones are everywhere. On that subject, you cannot miss tasting the fries, there will be a huge line, yes, but they are worth it. Thick chips with a perfectly crusted outer layer that crunches and exposes a fluffy inside. I learned that it’s because they deep fry the fries twice. They are perfect. 

What to see.

Our walk started off at one of the higher points in the city and we worked our way down. We caught the Metro to Louise where we saw Palais de Justice or the Law Courts of Brussels. It was under construction when we visited but the mammoth craftsmanship was evident even behind the piles of scaffolding. We then walked over to the Infantry Memorial which was beautiful and daunting in its own right. Behind it was an incredible view of the city which also had an elevator to get down into the streets.  

L’atelier en ville This place is a funky café that we thought was worth mentioning. It is a café, art gallery, clothes shop and wooden bench top store all in one. We later figured out this was the ‘hipster’ side to Brussels. So if you want a little more modern, less touristy, more artsy and more party, then this is the side of Brussels you want.

Mannekin Pis This little guy is one of the best-known landmarks in Belgium. The fun thing about the mannequin boy is that he is dressed in costume to commemorate each major celebration, event or festival. You can view all of his costumes displayed at the Museum of the City of Brussels. There are actually three little statues. One of a boy peeing, one of a girl (Jeanneke pis) and one of a dog (Zenneke).  And a lot like Pokemon – you gotta catch them all, so keep your eyes peeled because they are not very big and can be around any corner. 

Brussels Park There are many parks in Brussels, but this is the one we escaped into when the parade for the150 years of the tram in the city got a little too overwhelming. Its entrance is directly across from the Belgium House of Parliament too. The park is pictured below and it is incredibly busy due to the parade but it was still a nice park to be in. 

Belgium Chocolate Village For 6 Euros per person, you are able to explore the Belgium Chocolate Museum. We found this self-guided tour extremely informative and delicious. We learnt about the history and process of gathering the cocoa beans, how chocolate is made, and where nearly every different style of chocolate originated from. We were able to stand in a class where the chef showed us how to create ganache chocolate, and yes, there was a taste test too. Some of our favourite moments was seeing the sculptures made out of chocolate, they were huge and the smell of cocoa was euphoric. It’s no wonder we finished our tour in the café upstairs to subdue the cravings. Hot chocolate that was made with frothed milk and chunks of dark chocolate was my poison, whereas Hayden stuck to a chocolate milkshake. However, if you are not interested in the museum and tour, that’s fine. There is a chocolate shop on nearly every block anyways. Plenty of opportunities to treat yourself. 

There is plenty more to discover in Brussels, but what we were not prepared for was stumbling across a fun little parade. Just our luck. Labour Day and 150 years of the tram parade. 

We continued on our walk with one destination in the back of our mind – Grand Place. It was almost humorous because I was asking Hayden to get photos of some trees because the branches were mended to create fences – honestly, I just thought they were cool. We walked alongside the tree fence around to the front and saw the most incredible looking building. I said ‘This has to be Grand place, or Kings Palace just look at the detail’. We tried to pinpoint where we were on the map to no avail. But alas, I spotted a young boy in a blue vest which symbolised he could help with information. We found out that no, this was definitely not Grand Place, instead it was Notre Dame du Sablon (Chuch of Our Blessed Lady of Sablon). A gothic-style Catholic church from the 15th century. 

He went on to explain that we were standing in Rue de la Regence. The significance of this little street? It was lined with hundreds of trams. Why? Because the city was celebrating 150 years since the tram was introduced. There was every single model of tram that had ever been driven in Brussels laid out in order of year. 

There was also going to be a parade beginning at 1400 hours. The trams were to be driven through the centre of the city. We walked past crowds of people, past a makeshift grandstand and behind it was at least 12 different food stalls. We got mojitos and fries and sat down to enjoy what was around us. By now we had been out for hours, and although I enjoy public things, I absolutely despise being in crowds, they just tire me out. I was ready to go home. I was a little disappointed we hadn’t seen Grand Place, but our day had been filled with so much excitement I was content. 

We headed back down to Brussels Central Station ready to catch the Metro back home when we spotted an exceptionally busy street, so of course something had to be down that way. We garnered up the energy and made our way down. We stepped around the happy buskers, we admired the street markets and then we were left completely and utterly speechless... We had finally found Grand Place. And it is most definitely its namesake. 

It’s incredible. A huge square that leaves you feeling minuscule. Gilded buildings that leave you feeling, well, poor. It is comprised of the Hotel de Ville (Brussels town hall) and Maison du Roi (Museum of the City of Brussels) famously facing one another and the Guild Houses completing the rest of the shape. There is detail in every little thing from the post lamps to the pillars, from the carved stonework to the gold decoration. Each building is so innately different but perfectly matching the grandness of their home. We literally spent an hour there, in that square, taking in each building, taking a million photos, looking up at the incredibleness of the Grandest place I’ve ever seen – so far ;). Being labour day, it was incredibly busy. Hundreds of people were in that square at the same time, but we never felt overcrowded. Now it was finally time to go. We had come to see what we had wanted to see. We walked back to the Metro and headed back to our beautiful Airbnb on the outer skirts of the town.

Always with love  Trish

[michaeloneillwords-music]

Brexit, Global Governance, Perception Management and Freedom

       Democracy. Democracy. Democracy. I thought by saying it three times whilst staring into a mirror, just like the Horror folktale the Candyman, that I might be able to bring it into reality, however I knew my attempts at ritual linguistic and conscious magic would fail. As Democracy, the idea that Government is controlled by the majority of its members representing the majority will of the population, may very well have existed in primitive forms of smaller Government years ago, but it has never existed under the British Parliamentary system, as this system has always had at its very core a conflict of interests, between Monarchical interests, intrinsically tied up with Aristocratic and Financial Interests, and the interests of the public. Thomas Paine writing in his perpetually relevant critique of the British State and the dangers of Political corruption and cronyism in ‘Common Sense’ first published in 1776, understood this conflict and suggested that at the heart of the British political system lay “two ancient tyrannies��, monarchy and aristocracy, and given the growth of the global banking system since his time of writing, we can now add Financial Power, that lest we forget was co-constructed by these perfectly described ancient tyrannies. Indeed Paine goes on to offer an extremely pertinent description of what the Westminster model was designed to do, and is still  doing in the age of transnational governance and in relation to the current political theatre of Brexit, Paine (1776 ,p9) “the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some will say in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine”. The just rejected commons vote anyone? In all honestly, I couldn’t care less for the concept of democracy that our political physicians keep espousing, as I have always believed it to be a construction of and means to ‘effective governance’, a governance that defends the interests of Monarchy and global finance over the interests of societies.  Furthermore, since the time of Paine’s writing, this type of governance has been able to implement its ideological agenda ever more effectively with the aid of the mainstream media, something which is being used extremely effectively in the current political skullduggery of ‘Brexit’. The following paper will examine the motivations and objectives of the nation state, the European state and the Global state. It will unpack the British State and Mainstream News Media’s use of propaganda relating to Brexit, in particular its use of the ‘Far Right’ to shape opinion and manufacture consent. It will also look at what offering such a ‘once in a lifetime’ referendum offered in terms of State political capital and the capacity for effective governance, by diverting and focusing collective attention. The paper will throughout engage in conjecture relating to British Secret Service involvement in the current state/media propaganda machine. Finally, the paper will examine what political engagement is ultimately supporting, and look at the politics of selfhood and purpose, in relation to societal change and freedom. Now let me contextualize the current political news media climate.

Please Note: This is not an academic essay, although it does use academic referencing. This piece was written for the value in the process itself, and for the value the writer places on self-sovereignty. It is free from the restrictions of institutions and their biases, and from economic compromise - it has not been monetized.

Brexit and the Mainstream News Media

       So, over the past fortnight or so we have seen the big four British Mainstream News Media outlets the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News, set up camp in Parliament Square, to cover what they say is every minute of the ‘Brexit’ negotiations, commons votes, counter votes, further negotiations and so on and on and on and on… . . . . . We have long known that the mainstream news media, at least since Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988) - (I am not a Chomsky fan, I believe him to be a compromised academic political puppet) and long before, Bernays, Vance, etc (media as propaganda has a long history), that mainstream news media receives its information (or script) from Institutional press releases, Whitehall, Scotland Yard and other state institutions, but to create Broadcast hubs at Parliament square is another gear in the state/media propaganda machine. Do we really need such centralized (almost around the clock) coverage of what is essentially a behind closed doors process, except say for the commons vote result on Mays proposal, or the odd press conference that is held? Does the bureaucracy of the political establishment really warrant Big Brother (no pun intended) like screen time? Do we need to see political automaton after political automaton, getting out of their chauffer driven cars, walking through the door of deceit, or prostituting themselves to one or all of the four MNM platforms via their convenient broadcast hubs? Personally I’d rather stare at a tree… . . . . there’s more honesty in it. What we have here is just a project to ‘manufacture consent’ or as may be more exacting, perception management. It is political theatre to shape public perception, a form of propaganda easily as nefarious in its aims as previous forms of fascist propaganda, and far from just involving members of parliament, the cast is wide, and the narrative is deceptively insidious. Let me now turn to one of its brightest stars, Owen Jones, and examine the skeleton of the narrative, the ‘so called’ growing Far Right.  

Owen Jones: A Platform to Opinion Shape

     Jones, fresh out of Oxford, worked as a researcher for a trade union, and then went on to write and secure a publishing deal for his book, Chavs: The demonization of the Working Class (2011) which was hugely successful, and rightly so, I thought it was a good historical account of the perception of the working class through the eyes of the establishment and more so the treatment of the (overly homogenized) working class in mainstream culture and media. In the wake of his success Jones was seemingly elevated by the very establishment influenced mainstream media he had just critiqued to become the go to political commentator of the left, and went on to write ‘The Establishment’ (2014), a piss poor investigation into how established power in Britain works that does not go  anywhere near deep enough into where the real bed of power is, that being the British Monarchy, he daren’t, at this point he was compromised, he had a career, a platform and a healthy income, he had too much to lose in letting his ‘straw critique’ go too far. Since then Jones has been a regular commentator across all major news platforms, and on his own popular Youtube channel, fighting for as he claims ‘social Justice’ (when does rallying for social justice become social engineering?) and aligning himself with the progressive liberal left, and all the issues that the manufactured collective political identity of the new left is supporting. He has become the ‘wet dream’ of the young left, and has taken on a morally righteous messiah complex, aided and abated by the mainstream news media at large. Such ubiquity and perpetual access to such far reaching mainstream platforms should ring alarm bells in any political spectator. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is elevated to such a position of influence based solely on merit, and certainly not if there position, politically, socially or philosophically is a threat to the very established power that the mainstream news media is controlled by, nobody. Now, it has been suggested that I am obsessed with Owen Jones by a much welcomed critic of an earlier post of this paper. However, I would have to argue and restate my point, that it is the Mainstream News Media (MNM) who are ‘obsessed’ with Jones. I am merely interested in their obsession with him, and the platform they give him to establish ‘subject position’ (please refer to the work of culture and media critic Stuart Hall 1932-2014), to shape political identity and with it shape left narrative, in the left/right political theatre we are seeing. The effect being that those with less critical faculties, those with less cynicism and skepticism for the power relations at the heart of the Nation State and its capacity to use the MNM to shape mass public perception, simply adopt Jones’ subject position, political identity and narrative, in what has become a culture of ‘copy and paste’ political identity. And indeed, in can be said that Tommy Robinson serves the same purpose on the right, his subject position, political identity and narrative potentially being adopted by the less critical. The comparison is solely based on their roles, wittingly or unwittingly in the political propaganda playing out in the Mainstream News Media.  

         Jones is on a payroll, most likely multiple, and it’s my suggestion given the way he has been issue hopping on command, like some pre-pubescent political court jester that he is most likely on the payroll of the British Secret Services, probably MI5 whose intelligence operations are widely known to be deeply embedded in the British mainstream media. Robinson certainly is. Jones and a litany of political media whores are employed not to engage in honest investigative journalism and debate, but instead to shape the narrative and thus the nation’s perspective in relation to the national, European and Global political agenda, with the focus right now being the European Union. In the wake of Mays commons rejected deal and long before, the name of the game has been to destroy any consensus in the UK to leave the European Union, and this is why we have seen in the past fortnight these platforms outside parliament used to parade a so called ‘Far Right’ who are framed as Brexit supporters, and thus creating a connection and/or association between ‘Far Right’ perspectives and a skepticism or rejection of centralized European control through the super state of the European Union. Please allow me to digress for a moment to discuss why such an operation is taking place, and why our own state (not mine) is complicit, as I briefly discuss the European Union and Global Government.

The European Union: History, Objectives and Process

         As professor of political geography John Rennie Short (1993, P62-67) discusses in the 2nd Edition of his Introduction to Political Geography, Europe was in terrible shape after the 2nd World War, battered from a war funded by US capital, with many of the individual European countries involved now facing bankruptcy. The political project that was to come, born out of the OEEC, OECD and NATO, was indeed the brainchild of US political and economic strategy, as the USA emerged out of this period as the new global political superpower. One must note and remember at this juncture, whilst the British State may have been economically and politically weakened, its monarchy, which heads the state, and was connected to the German Nazi party retained its wealth and power. Returning back to the European project, as Short (1993, p63) documents, the OEEC  drawn up by the USA was concerned with maintaining peace and co-operation within Europe, but this was secondary to and necessary only for the USA’s real objective, that of resuscitating (and thus indebting) European Economies , and establishing a European trading block. The beginning one may argue of the real consolidation of wealth into the few hands that hold it today, and the projects of increased national and societal debt. Later, in 1958 the European Economic Community (EEC) was established, bringing with it the common market and the free movement of capital, goods and people – or as we would later be referred to as ‘human resources’. Then in 1992 the single market was established - furthering internal economic control, in 1993 the Maastricht Treaty  brought in a single currency and tighter control over sovereign states security and foreign policy, greater restrictions  and centralizing of power coming  again in 2009 with the Lisbon treaty, essentially creating European Law and a European constitution.

     I hope you can see with this trajectory, that the European Union is a political and economic project of Western financial power spearheaded by the USA, one that has used the union of European Nation States as a means of consolidating its wealth, and as by result of its trajectory, and ultimately its overarching objective, has replaced the sovereign nation state with a European Super-state. The state lest we forget has long been merely an administrative system for established national power – monarchical, aristocratic and financial, operating as a ‘so called’ democratic body. Indeed, we as a nation have never and will never be able to influence the mechanics and objectives of the European Union, this is solely left to the ‘European Commission’ (EU,2019), a body of 28 unelected, yes unelected, officials, or if you would prefer to put it another way, self-appointed officials presiding over our future (in material terms at least!). Now, we can send our delegates over to Brussels (like we did with the New Right’s political saviour and supposed anti-globalist Nigel Farage), to put forward our desires and ideas, our likes and dislikes, but this process is merely a pan European Political Pantomime, attempting to imitate a European Democracy. In fact the reality of the ‘European Commission’ headed by the fat necked, red faced piss pot that is Claude Juncker, is that it is  the utter inversion of democratic process, it is more akin to a ‘European House of Lords’ (albeit collectively less wrinkled!) who are there to  protect the interests of the global project. It is through ‘The Commission’ that all national European ‘democratic delusions’ must pass, and thus it becomes a sort of last stop for these delusions, they are noted but ignored, as they do not fit with the Global political project that the European Union is an important part of and stepping stone to. Even the political super villain that was Margaret Thatcher, surely one of the greatest actors to ever grace the stage of political theatre (personally I would have given her an Oscar for every year she was in Office!), eventually saw first-hand what the European Union really was, an undemocratic Super State (Thatcher, 2017). Indeed, in the late 1980’s it can be said that there was cross party skepticism of the European project, as in the form of Tony Benn Labour and the left had one of the European Union’s fiercest critics. However, he was sidelined, as was Thatcher (replaced by Major), no doubt for their positions, with Labour choosing instead the then luke-warm Europhile Neil Kinnock, followed by the boiling hot Europhile Tony Blair, and so with time the skepticism and dangers of the European Union as a Super State receded.

The United Nations and Global Governance

     In addition to the project of the European Union, we have the United Nations, another pack of un-elected or if you prefer self-appointed delegates working in the interest of global finance. The UN in its own words is “an international organization founded in 1945.  It is currently made up of 193 Member States… . . .that brings together its  member states to confront common challenges, manage shared responsibilities”(UN,2019). The UN was another post 2nd world war large scale trans national political project, that has long been concerned with implementing through political coercion and sleight of hand the agenda of global finance. The UN have since their inception been controlling trade and development around the globe with the setting of the UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and pivotally in 1974 working to establish a ‘New International Economic Order’ (Short, 1993, p32). However, their most integral contribution to the project of global governance is the official UN Agenda 21 (UN,1992), and Agenda 30 documents (UN,2015), which claim to be concerned with a sustainable global future, but which go far beyond ecological concern into the realm of large scale global human and resource control, Agenda 2030 is especially revealing  (and sinister) in its desire to control the human experience. Indeed, these documents outline the need for its guidelines to be implemented at a local and not national government level by its member states, to ensure no doubt, that its more questionable at best, and extremely sinister at worst, guidelines do not enter into the public consciousness through national political debate. Furthermore, they are documents that have pretty much been ignored by the Mainstream New Media – to be expected really, with the hopefully soon to be out of print shit rag of the progressive left, the guardian claiming it to be a loose and benign set of guidelines, that has merely stirred the interest of ‘conspiracy theorists. Ha! Well if the sustainable smart cities that we have seen constructed across the West (and China), sort of urban high-rise digital concentration camps, soon to be augmented by the introduction of the ‘extremely dangerous’– words of 350 scientists who have collectivized against its roll out, are invisible to you in the UK, from London to Manchester, Liverpool to Bristol, then you should really visit your local opticians, or if you listen to the ‘conspiracy theorists’, check your wrist and neck for a microchip!

The EU Referendum: The Vote That Keeps on Giving

     Now, before returning to the current political narrative of a growing ‘Far Right’ led by its leading man, the cherub faced Marxist Owen Jones (I’m sure you’re a nice chap Owen, just lost like so many others, in a sea of political and mass media filth), I’d like to talk about the other political advantages of holding a (now increasingly unlikely) once in a generation vote, the great 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership to the European Union, that has resulted in the ongoing political theatre we call ‘BREXIT’! I did not vote in the Referendum, as I believed then, just as I believe now that the Establishments decision (and it was an establishment decision) to offer a so called people’s vote, had a number of other – national and geo political motives. Firstly, one must remember that this decision came in the wake of what should have been a watershed moment in British political and cultural history, the establishment pedophile scandal, that had the ‘Knighted by the Queen’ Sir Jimmy Saville at its centre, a man who held frequent company with, and had very close ties to, our lovely and benign Monarchy, and the ‘servants of the people’ our political elite. Are we to really believe that a man who was welcomed in to these closed circles and elite institutions had not been vetted by British Secret Services? Really? Are we to believe that? The Monarchy and political establishment knew then as they know now who Saville was and what he was involved in. Indeed, our Secret Services and intelligence agencies are the most far reaching, well connected and sophisticated on the entire planet (think of GCHQ, MI5, MI6, and include Canada, Australia and other former commonwealth countries, that are still controlled behind the scenes by British power and finance). Nevertheless, the Establishment paedophile scandal and subsequent piecemeal, toothless and repeatedly derailed public inquiry have long been forgotten in the wake of the all-consuming Brexit, by both the complicit Mainstream News Media and in the minds of the collective public. In addition, we all but ignored the information presented in the Chillcott Inquiry, documenting the illegal and unjust (there has never really been a just war) war that the State waged in Iraq, which should have seen the Fabien fuckwit Tony Blair tried for War Crimes, but has since seen him somehow exonerated for his role, and placed at the forefront of the European and Global political propaganda machine, rolled out to sway public opinion, just as other European and global governance enthusiasts, like Michael Hesseltine and John Major have (you’ve all served your purpose, so please shut up and fuck off back to the Cotswold’s, where I’m sure you can arse rape a fox with impunity, or fuck a pigs head until you heart’s content!). It is a form of what can be considered ‘Effective Governance’, it uses the state apparatus – in this case a referendum to divert public attention, or redirect flak, and it drags out process slowly, ever so slowly, so to ensure that we have collectively moved on from any events or uncovering’s that are potentially damaging to the Established power in question.

     Ultimately, the result of the Referendum vote was irrelevant to the long term geo-political plan, whatever the outcome the National, European and Global power co-operating in the construction of this potential (if not already actual) Global prison could use the result to their advantage, and ultimately reach their objective. A vote to remain would have taken us to where the aforementioned power desired us to go, straight into a seemingly final tie with the European Union, and thus further down the line connecting with the other political zones that have been and are being formed. A vote to leave, as we supposedly got however opened up a myriad of national political and trans-national political possibilities, such as those I have just discussed and those that we have seen. It increased the capacity to divert all attention away from National Austerity – which we should not forget was the result of the European Union’s Maastricht criteria, calculations of government debt and budget deficits against GDP, in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crash (The European Institute, 2019). Indeed, this is the lunacy of the Labour supporting progressive left, they perpetually demonstrate and march against Austerity, yet they (in the main) are seeking a 2nd referendum and realignment with the very institution whose Fiscal Policy proposed our National Austerity Programme. In relation to this, political and social debate also been diverted away from addressing the growing homelessness crisis, and paradoxically the continued building and implementation of Smart Cities (Neo Yuppie Penthouses doubling up as sky rise digital prisons) at a time of austerity. In addition, there has been the globalist attack on Syria and the migrant crisis that have been reported but relatively skimmed over, we have also had an absolute explosion of mental health diagnosis, here and across the west, alongside the criminally ignored dangers of Vaccinations, Artificial Intelligence and the soon to be implemented and scientist labelled highly dangerous 5G technology (5G Appeal, 2017), and on and on and on. It is no coincidence that such important issues have taken a back seat to the political doublespeak of our vapid and deceitful public servants perpetually discussing Brexit, alongside propaganda straw figures such as Owen Jones and Tommy Robinson et al.

Brexit, The EU and the road to Global Governance

     Indeed, when political power on behalf of its Royal and Financial seniors, offer something like the European referendum vote, it is not to hand power to the people (these people see you as a human resource to ‘debt the fuck out of’ – see Baudrillard’s brilliant Debt Economy) so we can decide our own destiny, or to adhere to the tenets of democracy (talk of a 2nd Referendum Vote all but undermines this greatest of political fallacies), but instead to further the agenda of the established national and global power structure towards  Global Governance. Global Governance I hear you say, New World Order? Sounds like ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ stuff to me mate! Well, as Professor John Rennie Short (1993, p52/53) points out, “In 1990-1 a new term was heard in International diplomatic circles: The New World Order. Like all ‘new’ terms it was not that new, as politicians have been predicting a New World Order for at least a couple of centuries”. Surely not you say, a couple of centuries? Well, think on it, we are willing to accept, and seemingly happy to digest the fact that the worlds wealth has slowly been concentrated into the hands of the elusive 1% (I really hate the phrase), yet we seem completely unwilling to accept that this concentration of wealth, and with it power, influence and control, may have risen from meticulous long term planning, using all the state and financial institutions available by a global elite based in Monarchies and Finance banking. Was it chance? Pure luck then? Please, if you believe we are where we are by an unplanned set of random events, happenings and accidents, then I worry for you, and where you ignorance and naiveté may lead you and others like you. Ultimately the referendum was handed to the people (and if power ever hands you anything be very suspicious!) to take us, the British State and all other European Nation States trapped in the undemocratic European Union into the next phase of the Global Governance project, or as  global politicians and diplomats have themselves referred to it as, The New World Order or the even more sinister Global Village. It puts to bed the EU question in Britain and it also acts to send an emphatic message to all other European Countries where there may be a rightfully placed distrust of the European super state, attempt to leave and we will financially destroy you, offering you a deal so bad you will be economically in a worse place than before, and as we are now seeing, we will ultimately gain control of you by your own consent.

The ‘Far Right’, Manufacturing Consent and the Fascist Reality of the Nation State

     I would like to repeat once again, the assertions by a mainstream media that the ‘Far Right’ is on the rise in the UK is pure political propaganda  and shaping of collective public perception to manufacture our consent for their global political project. It is the politics of fear from a mainstream who are increasingly shifting towards the political left – “only our support for a progressive liberal left government united with our European comrades can stop this Fascist rise”. However, evidence of this Far Right rise, is not, to me anyway, visible or tangible in Manchester where I live, and have always lived. I just don’t see it. I do see Owen Jones and Anna Soubry being attacked on the new Broadcast Hubs of Mainstream Media, by what to me looks like a ‘hired in’ pack of supposedly Brexit supporting Far Right protestors. By making the connection on Mainstream News Media between Brexit voters and Far Right Fascists, the powers that be are shaping the narrative, and public perception, as well as risking the increase of serious societal division and prejudice. Only weeks ago a similar objective was sought when the Mossad funded, British Secret Service operative Tommy Robinson (not his real name, but hey, marks for such a British moniker!) it was widely reported was joining Ukip, the party who we’re told propelled us into the leave vote, led by Nigel Farage and who have repeatedly been accused of being Right Wing. As a result of these falsified connections, there would have undoubtedly been left in the minds of all of those who voted to leave on the (completely reasonable) grounds of the impact that unfettered migration has had on our public services, most notably the strain on GP and NHS services, alongside school places, unemployment, housing, and in the minds of all those who own small businesses, whose growth ‘is’ restricted by EU regulations, an instant sense of fear that they are now being unjustly grouped in with, or labelled as ‘Far Right’. It is classic group psychological manipulation, it has created an ‘undesirable’ sub-group linked unjustly by association to leave voters, and thus has generated the power to produce conformity in large numbers to the desirable position of remain. It is straight of the Tavistock Institute of social engineering. The current media melee down at Parliament Square is precisely an exercise in shaping public perception, it is established power seeking the public’s consent - by means of fear, fear of being labelled a ‘fascist’ and not through autonomous informed choice - for closer alignment to a European and in turn Global Government. The Ultimate form of centralized power that has openly been discussed by diplomats, financial power and monarchies for decades now, if not centuries.

     I have seen the ‘Far Right’, marching in Manchester a few years ago now under the moniker the English Defense League, they were, and still are if the BBC footage can be trusted, a bunch of toothless, amphetamine addled, bomber jacket wearing clichés (equally as lost in some collective political identity as the new progressive left) from some of England’s most disenfranchised provincial towns. I don’t despise them, just as I don’t despise the new left, I feel sorry for them, how they have been called to service by their masters and played their required role, pawns in a game of a continuing political, financial and now ever more technocratic agenda. The mainstream news media and Jones’ repeated assertions that the ‘Far Right’ in England is gaining support and momentum is at best an over exaggeration and at worst, further evidence of national State propaganda through the corrupted mouthpiece that is the mainstream news media. However, as I have just stated, the idea that a real ground level ‘Far Right’ is capable of organizing itself into a tangible political Body that will appeal to Britain’s electorate, and thus steal the reign’s of power from the two main parties in our undemocratic political system is absolute nonsense, absurdity personified, utter bollox. I imagine they could collectively barely organize a sock drawer. The only way that these extremely fringe views could ever perceivably be consolidated into some tangible organization, and galvanize support  is with the help of British Secret Services, and historically they have been, not to steal the reins of power, but to once again manage public perception and manufacture political consent.  

         The real farcical nature of all this and the revealing of its true motives come when you examine the new progressive left’s and Jones’ position on how to deal with a supposedly authentic, rising and politically charged ‘Far Right’. They, headed by their self-appointed Guru Jones and assisted extensively by his and the New Lefts access to Mainstream Media platforms, is to deny the ‘Far Right’ a platform (although as discussed it has been given one in very suspicious circumstances through these broadcast hubs at Parliament square), and to deny this groups right to freedom of speech. Through this very act of proposed censorship, we are seeing an attack on the Freedom of speech. Now I do not agree, with the stereotypical views that have long been associated with the Far Right, but I will, yes I will, defend its right to freedom of speech, because I too value my right to freedom of speech, and I understand that if you do not defend the right to freedom of speech for all then there is no such thing. This position of attempting to deny the right for this supposed rising ‘Far Right’ to have its voice heard, is an idiotic and dangerous one to take, and here’s why I believe it to be such. At a basic psychological and philosophical level, at the micro subjective level of the shadow self and at the macro level of the collective shadow, one, or we, must never deny the reality of darkness. Just as we must face the light we must face the dark, for it is the only way to individual and collective consciousness evolution. The danger is that if we collectively deny this shadow (if we are to believe that this fascist Right is authentic) then it will no doubt fester and grow in the shadows. For all shadow or darkness not faced down by the individual or the collective, will eventually come screaming out of the unconscious, for we are all one, and we must deal with the shadow as such. Indeed Carl Gustav Jung 1875-1961 writing on these concepts and the archetypes that must wrestle with them (2001, p156) comments “A consciousness sharpened by experience knows the catastrophic consequences that disregard of this entails for the individual as well as the society”. Thus, drag it into the light, make it visible, face it and diminish its power. The irony here is this, that there is nothing more fascist than the nation state, the framework in which all of this is taking place, aided by its media. Can you think of any greater form of fascism than one which wages wars, builds arms, kills millions on foreign soil, sends its own youth to death in battle, imprisons for profit, surveils its people, drugs entire populations, indoctrinates instead of educates? We have been living under fascism for decades if not centuries, it is only that we are too comfortable under the system of sense pleasure reward it has created for us that we tolerate it. Indeed, by actively engaging with this political machinery, either by voting, joining or canvassing for any political party, you are supporting a system of tyranny and albeit indirectly, supporting all of the above abuses and thus breaking natural law. Greater still is the geo political financially backed march towards global governance, that the European union is a bridge to that if most terrifying, surely a global super state is the apex of fascist possibility, and one that we are sleepwalking into the final stages of, and by engaging with the political machinery you are actively supporting it.

     Let me state again, as it truly needs it, the events that we are seeing unfold in Brussels and Westminster are not the levers of democracy in motion, but instead the institutions of national and global, political, financial and monarchical power shaping the minds and material realities of the mass public, to manufacture our consent, as they lead us from A to B in a manner which on the surface presents democracy in action. Again, British Secret Services are not merely employed to counteract Terrorism as the official narrative goes, far from it, they have long been deployed to surveille their own people, infiltrate and control the mass media and to employ or compromise those with considerable influence, from politicians to authors to musicians, from Tony Blair to Owen Jones to Russell Brand (remember that slimy momentarily ‘new age’ sex pest!), they all have a price or a skeleton in the closet. The current level of political theatre surrounding Brexit at Parliament square is just the ratcheting up of public perception shaping, it is the collusion of the political establishment, the mainstream media and British secret services. It is the leading of the public to conclusions and opinions which secure their position, it is an exercise in how to obtain hegemony through deceit. I am afraid dear reader, it is once again working a treat.

National and European Political Structure: A Conflict of Interests and Lack of Accountability

         We have seen with Brexit, the hardening of Political Identities and increased conformity to them by the general public, positions with deeper divisions than ever before between them, all reinforced by the mainstream news media, political rhetoric and even commercial marketing. We have been individually and collectively psychologically kettled into position by these institutions in the most nefarious of manners. As Thomas Paine rightfully (1776, p5) observed many moons ago “government is at best a necessary evil”, so the idea that collectively we would seek to add another layer of governance to the already compromised and corrupted one we have in Westminster is to this writer anyway, is some form of collectively confused madness and a gross rejection of the greatest virtue of all, freedom. It is proof enough to me that our perceptions, thoughts and actions as a society, are truly not our own. My position is this, and I have already stated I hold no hope in political systems or arms of the state for change, I hold these institutions in contempt, and have as little to do with them as I possibly can (save for examining them and understanding them). Unless you remove the unelected layer of centralized governance that is the EU, you will never truly be able to hold Westminster to account. It will always be able to excuse its actions or non-actions by claiming that it is hampered by EU regulations, which in the coming years will no doubt become all-consuming for the Nation States involved. However, if you remove it (I hold no hope that this is actually possible) then at least you can point the finger solely at your own (not mine) Nation State, one that you must not forget has historically repeatedly lied to you on behalf of those who it really serves, but at least one where you can elect those who are involved to some degree in the passing of legislation, unlike the EU. No body politic should be unelected, nor should it be unaccountable, yet the EU and its globalist big brother the UN are exactly that. Even if we left the EU on WTO rules (the obvious thing to do!), paying the EU nothing in severance and instead investing the saved severance package in the democratically savaged NHS, we would still be faced with a political system unfit (as it always has been) to serve the public. Our Westminster model works on behalf of and answers to The Queen, and thus the Monarchy as a whole, its connected aristocracy, and finance , most notably The City of London (the trading district – not London). Anyone who believes that the British Empire’s (headed by our Monarchy) power, control, influence and wealth diminished long ago, I suggest you they watch The Spiders Web: Britains Second Empire by Michael Oswald (Oswald, 2018) or read Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands. The British Monarchy and its Empire merely transformed its wealth and power into more esoteric form, but that is something to be discussed at another time. I predict that one of two things will happen. First, the whole political theatre will be dragged out until the death, extracting as much political attention out of the whole saga as possible, keeping the public’s attention for as long as possible, then, eventually we will have a 2nd Referendum and the UK will vote to remain in the European Union. The second possibility is exactly the same as the first, except once all of the political propaganda has been squeezed out of the process, we will have a deal that see’s the UK leave the EU in name only.  

The Reality of Political Participation and the Politics of Purpose and Self-hood

          Change, real change, not change engineered by the vested interests of established power through institutions such as the Tavistock Institute, or more openly party political affiliated groups such as Momentum (towards what I ask?), or lest we forget the Mainstream Media and Culture machines, will come with the evolution of consciousness, of knowledge, of self-understanding in individuals, one by one, and the sharing of this knowledge, the change will be internal and as a result reflected externally. All other work then, other than the evolution of the self and the sharing of self-knowledge, a knowledge which takes in our connectedness to all consciousness, encompassing all nature and beyond can be seen as useless toil. Indeed, all other work may be understood as work we are doing on behalf of our unjust masters, and thus the work of our own domination and enslavement. For the system of mass consciousness control with politics at its beating heart is vampyric in nature. As the Psychoanalyst and Social Psychologist Erich Fromm 1900-80 (2001, p112) points out “like the effect of advertising on the consumer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance in the voter… . . . Confronted with the power and size of the parties as demonstrated in their propaganda, the individual voter cannot help feeling small and of little significance”.  Indeed, it drains us of our natural internal energy, it robs us of our creative potential, it engineers self-loathing and it implements a framework of psychic subordination within us, one where we are always less, and never as we should be, that being equal and free to enjoy the magnificent subjective sensory experience of consciousness. Instead we have our consciousness’ reduced to shouting and screaming at one another based on manufactured political identities, or material identities in general, we are left watching change agents such as Tommy Robinson on the so called ‘Right’, and his equal on the so called left Owen Jones vie for our attention. We, in our ‘mugged off’ state of consciousness end up screaming and shouting in support or contempt of these ‘straw figures’, who are merely agents of the state, employed to shape our perceptions and manufacture our consent. One should only ever engage with such a 3rd rate pantomime, to recognize it as such, and acquaint oneself with the mechanisms and processes that propaganda machines employ. Any other type of engagement must surely be in ignorance, delusion or willing self-deception, positions I have no sympathy for. Either that, or as Erich Fromm (2002, p112) also points out, political propaganda can seduce the individuals desire to appear intellectual “All of this does not mean that advertising and political propaganda overtly stress the individual’s insignificance. Quite the contrary; they flatter the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending to appeal to his critical judgement, to his sense of discrimination. But these pretences are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision”. Something I would like you to bear in mind as we move on.  

         In addition and in relation especially to my peer group and the younger generations, any notion that the ‘Red Team’ - The Labour Party will either lead us to a collectively better place or be a ‘stepping stone’ (Marxist clap trap on the use of the state apparatus as a phase towards freedom!) to a collectively better place, are without doubt to my mind delusional, and if I didn’t understand the depraved, sinister and futile field of Pharmacology so well, I would suggest you go to see a psychiatrist. For let me put in the terms of ‘the common’ of which I belong. Whether Manchester United or Manchester City win the Premier League is ultimately irrelevant, as the real winner in this domain will always be the Trans National Corporation that is SKY, or if we refer back to the political domain, the established Monarchical and Financial power it serves. For this my friends, is how the game was constructed to be. Even academics are now (belatedly I might add) conceding to the illusion that democracy is, with the term ‘post democracy’. I would have to argue that we have never really experienced democracy in the UK at all given its conflict of interests (Paine,1776), and furthermore, global governance as is esoterically handed out by the UN and the unelected European Union are obvious examples of governance without even the illusion of consent. Yet we still, like a grieving widow, unwilling to accept her husband’s death, cling to the notion that democracy is alive and well. Furthermore, to my peers and anyone caught up in this political hyper reality, ask yourself this. Are you wanting to change, shape, control and master the material world, the political realm and all of its influence based upon your political identities doctrine of ‘the good’? Then surely you must first be able to shape, control and master you own mind and consciousness? Have you? I know I haven’t. I am not advocating silence here, but instead the communication and sharing of knowledge outside of institutional contexts, free from their restrictions and power relations, where knowledge can lead you where it may. As I have previously stated, change can only come through the development of self-hood, with the understanding of the conscious and unconscious self, for this manifests in the collective, every other preoccupation for all intents and purposes is a diversion. Why then you may ask, am I even writing this essay at all? Well, as I have stated I do not care for party politics, nor the British State (both of my parents are Irish Republicans, my grandfather fought as a member of the Irish Republican Army against British State Occupation, and I am a 2nd Generation Irish Immigrant), but I do care for personal freedom, the right to autonomous thought and the right to self-sovereignty, all in relation to natural law (a law that forbids the infliction of pain and suffering, mental or physical on any other being). And I also believe, as I think this piece has brought to light, that these aforementioned values are under serious threat from global political forces and financial power, who are more and more shaping our reality and human experience. However, one must remember that in times of grave political, cultural and ever increasingly technological deception, that ‘power’ in all its guises from the micro individual to the macro systemic, only has the power that we give it. Indeed, it is power (through wealth accumulation) that has been amassed through our engagement with politics and the economic market, and that is simply the reality of it. Furthermore, this Global structure and its political machinery can never give us what is already ours, that being the freedom of both thought and expression, but it can my friends, as it is attempting to do, take those freedoms away.

Written by Michael O’Neill 23/01/2019

(Notes from the Margins)

References

Chomsky, Noam & Herman, Edward S, 1995, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Vintage

EU, 2019, https://europa.eu/european-union/index_en

EU, 2019, https://europa.eu/european-union/eu-law/decision-making/procedures_en

The European Institute, 2019, https://www.europeaninstitute.org/index.php/112-european-affairs/special-g-20-issue-on-financial-reform/1180-austerity-measures-in-the-eu

Fromm, Erich, 2002, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group

Jung, Carl Gustav, 2001, On the Nature of the Psyche, Routledge

Oswald, Michael, 2018, The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire, Patreon, Accessed via Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8

Paine, Thomas, 1776, Reprint 2004 – Common Sense, The Penguin Group

Short, John Rennie, 1993, An Introduction to Political Geography, Routledge

Thatcher, Margaret, 2017, On Europe, Harper Collins Publishers

UN, 2019, http://www.un.org/en/index.html

UN, 2019, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/milestones/unced/agenda21

UN, 1992, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf

UN, 2015, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf

5G Appeal, 2017, https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Scientist-5G-appeal-2017.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1KaWdcnbtR2pYrHriBhzWfvcfzRAgfUR8SWiaogxcrRA5P9WHJi77hGyM