#continuously defending it’s independence even in the face of the partitions.

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Gotta love the phrasing they chose 👀

Vatniks and tankies can't get over the fact that Finland, the Baltic states and Poland still exist (and are much better off without Russia)…. They dream of the day when Russia will re-invade these countries, and if that ever happens you can bet your bottom dollar that vatnik and tankie clowns everywhere will be supporting the imperialism of Russia's ruling class, blaming the victims, mindlessely repeating the Kremlin's propaganda and cheerleading their war crimes from afar. That's one reason why vatniks and tankies also hate NATO, because joining NATO is what prevents Russia from invading….

[militant-holy-knight]

Jesuit Suppression Across the Catholic World

In this blogpost, we track how the repression of the Society of Jesus took place in the late 18th-Century.

Brazil

Ground zero for the persecution of the Jesuits. At the time, it was still a Portuguese colony and Jesuits held considerable influence over it as protectors of the Native peoples, with one of these tribes being the Guaraní, who refused to accept Portuguese rule and leave the mission settlements. In 1754, a 3000-strong Spanish and Portuguese military force was dispatched to force the Guaraní to leave the area. The coalition was victorious and over 15,000 Guaranis were either killed or removed, under the protests of the Jesuits which earned the victors’ wrath...

Portugal

The Portuguese Prime-Minister Sebastião de Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, was a Catholic influenced by the Enlightenment who saw the Society of Jesus as holding back Portuguese society with their grip over science and education. The Guarani War is regarded as the start of the animosity between Pombal and the Jesuits for them supporting the Natives against the Portuguese interests. After King Joseph was nearly assassinated by political rivals, the Marquis used the attempted regicide to implicate the Jesuits and use them as an excuse to remove them from Portugal and seize their possessions. The Marquis was granted nearly unlimited power by the king and ruled as an autocratic, but liberal dictator who ordered that all Jesuits should be banished from Portuguese lands and it’s colonies.

France

The French were the second to follow suit, due to already existing tensions between local factions such as the Jansenists and the Gallicans, who objected against the Jesuits’ independence from the crown and answering to an alien power like Rome. The attack on the Jesuits was opened on 17 April 1762 by the Jansenist sympathizer Abbé Chauvelin who denounced the Constitution of the Society of Jesus, which was publicly examined and discussed in a hostile press. The Parlement issued its Extraits des assertions assembled from passages from Jesuit theologians and canonists, in which they were alleged to teach every sort of immorality and error. On 6 August 1762, the final arrêt was proposed to the Parlement by the Advocate General Joly de Fleury, condemning the Society to extinction, but King Louis XV’s intervention brought eight months' delay and in the meantime a compromise was suggested by the Court. If the French Jesuits would separate from the Society headed by the Jesuit General directly under the pope's authority and come under a French vicar, with French customs, as with the Gallican Church, the Crown would still protect them. The French Jesuits, rejecting Gallicanism, refused to consent. As a response, their colleges were closed and they required to renounce their vows under pain of banishment. 

Poland

The Jesuits were suppressed one year after the First Partition of Poland with many of the Jesuit order possessions taken over by the Commission of National Education, the world's first Ministry of Education. Ironically, they continued to operate in the areas annexed by Lutheran Prussia and Orthodox Russia.

Austria and Hungary

They went even further than merely suppress the Society of Jesus; Secularization Decree of Holy Roman Joseph II issued on 12 January 1782 for Austria and Hungary banned several monastic orders not involved in teaching or healing and liquidated 140 monasteries (home to 1484 monks and 190 nuns). The banned monastic orders included the Jesuits, Camaldolese, Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, Carmelites, Carthusians, Poor Clares, Order of Saint Benedict, Cistercians, Dominican Order (Order of Preachers), Franciscans, Pauline Fathers and Premonstratensians, and their wealth was taken over by the Religious Fund. His anticlerical and liberal innovations induced Pope Pius VI to pay him a visit in March 1782. Joseph received the Pope politely and presented himself as a good Catholic, but refused to be influenced.

Malta

Malta was at the time a vassal of the Kingdom of Sicily, and Grandmaster Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, himself a Portuguese, followed suit, expelling the Jesuits from the island and seizing their assets. These assets were used in establishing the University of Malta by a decree signed by Pinto on 22 November 1769, with lasting effect on the social and cultural life of Malta. The Church of the Jesuits (in Maltese Knisja tal-Ġiżwiti), one of the oldest churches in Valletta, retains this name up to the present.

Spain

The Spanish Empire was one of the last Catholic states to banish the Jesuits. The Spanish crown had already begun a series of administrative and other changes in their overseas empire, such as reorganizing the viceroyalties, rethinking economic policies, and establishing a military, so that the expulsion of the Jesuits is seen as part of this general trend known generally as the Bourbon Reforms. The aim of the reforms was to curb the increasing autonomy and self-confidence of American-born Spaniards, reassert crown control, and increase revenues. A riot against King Charles III which was viewed as incited by the Jesuits (the riot was caused by an arbitrary law on what people should wear and it’s said one Jesuit actually calmed the mob and sent them home) and alarmed the monarch for challenging their authority. Charles III ordered the convening of a special royal commission to draw up a master plan to expel the Jesuits. The commission first met in January 1767. It modeled its plan on the tactics deployed by France's Philip IV against the Knights Templar in 1307 – emphasizing the element of surprise. Charles's adviser Campomanes had written a treatise on the Templars in 1747, which may have informed the implementation of the Jesuit suppression. Secret orders, to be opened at sunrise on April 2, were sent to all provincial viceroys and district military commanders in Spain. Each sealed envelope contained two documents. One was a copy of the original order expelling "all members of the Society of Jesus" from Charles's Spanish domains and confiscating all their goods. The other instructed local officials to surround the Jesuit colleges and residences on the night of April 2, arrest the Jesuits, and arrange their passage to ships awaiting them at various ports. King Carlos' closing sentence read: “If a single Jesuit, even though sick or dying, is still to be found in the area under your command after the embarkation, prepare yourself to face summary execution”.

Mexico

The Jesuits had actively evangelized the Indians on the northern frontier, but their main activity involved educating elite criollo (American-born Spanish) men, many of whom themselves became Jesuits. Of the 678 Jesuits expelled from Mexico, 75% were Mexican-born. In late June 1767, Spanish soldiers removed the Jesuits from their 16 missions and 32 stations in Mexico. No Jesuit, no matter how old or ill, could be excepted from the king's decree. Many died on the trek along the cactus-studded trail to the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz, where ships awaited them to transport them to Italian exile.

There were protests in Mexico at the exile of so many Jesuit members of elite families, but the Jesuits themselves obeyed the order since they had owned extensive landed estates in Mexico – which supported both their evangelization of indigenous peoples and their education mission to criollo elites – the properties became a source of wealth for the crown. The crown auctioned them off, benefiting the treasury, and their criollo purchasers gained productive well-run properties. Many criollo families felt outraged at the crown's actions, regarding it as a “despotic act”.

Philippines

The royal decree expelling the Society of Jesus from Spain and its dominions reached Manila on 17 May 1768. Between 1769 and 1771, the Jesuits were transported from the Spanish East Indies to Spain and from there deported to Italy.

Italy

After the suppression of the Jesuits in many European countries and their overseas empires, Pope Clement XIV issued a papal brief on 21 July 1773, in Rome titled: Dominus ac Redemptor Noster. That decree included the following statement.

Having further considered that the said Company of Jesus can no longer produce those abundant fruits... in the present case, we are determining upon the fate of a society classed among the mendicant orders, both by its institute and by its privileges; after a mature deliberation, we do, out of our certain knowledge, and the fullness of our apostolical power, suppress and abolish the said company: we deprive it of all activity whatever... And to this end a member of the regular clergy, recommendable for his prudence and sound morals, shall be chosen to preside over and govern the said houses; so that the name of the Company shall be, and is, for ever extinguished and suppressed. 

Aftermath

Ironically, the suppression was challenged across most of the non-Catholic Christian nations like Great Britain, Prussia, the Russian Empire and the United States. Frederick the Great of Prussia refused to allow the papal document of suppression to be distributed in his country and Catherine the Great not only refused to allow the papal document of suppression to be distributed, she openly defended the Jesuits from dissolution and the Jesuit chapter in Belarus received her patronage. While Britain did not suppress the Jesuits after seizing Quebec from France, they halted the immigration of anymore Jesuits.

It was also was a major blow to Catholic education across Europe, with nearly 1000 secondary schools and seminaries shut down. Their lands, building and endowments were confiscated; their teachers scattered. Although Jesuit education had become old fashioned in Poland and other areas, it was the main educational support network for Catholic intellectuals, senior clergy and prominent families. Governments tried in vain to replace all those schools, but there were far too few non-clerical teachers who were suitable. This also had an negative effect on the colonies, which saw native populations declining even more rapidly without their protectors. The Jesuit order was restored by the pope in 1814 following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and flourished in terms of rebuilding schools and educational institutions but it never regained its enormous power in the political realm.

Recommended readings:

The Jesuits: History and Legend of the Society of Jesus - Manfred Barthel.

Rise, Character, and Development of Jesuit Education - Cristiano Casalini.

I also recommend the 1986 movie The Mission which features the Guarani War.

[feelingroovie]

Popping the Myths of Israeli War of Independence

War of Annihilation

We do not care how the wars sporadically started and stopped from May 15, 1948 onward with them lasting into mid 1949 before attaining armistices. Peace would be coming later with Egypt and even later Jordan, while technically Israel is still in a state of war with the other four Arab invading nations; Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Don’t worry if you did not realize this, probably a fair number of Israelis are unaware of the fact Israel is still at war. There are likely a set of armistice agreements ending hostilities, but we were unable to find any reference to such between Israel and Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Perhaps we will have to settle with the fact they are not shooting at us currently and be happy with that. But the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-9 was not born in a vacuum, there were a series of initiatives which were rejected outright and even the United Nations sought some settlement which also failed and so much more to talk about and see how we got to where we are today, celebrating our independence which was established the nightfall before the dawn brought on the war. So, where do we begin.

What is difficult to believe, but just the same is true, there was a point in time when the Arab world welcomed the founding of the Jewish State and agreed over borders and everything. The year is 1920, late April to be more accurate, in beautiful San Remo, Italy where the San Remo Conference set up the preliminaries for the Mandate System. Included in this were two Mandates which are of interest to our telling, the French and British Mandates. These were set along with Italian and Spanish holdings (see map below). France was charged to form a Christian State and an Arab State while Britain was charged with establishing a Jewish State and subsequently also an Arab State. France divided their region forming Syria (Arab) and Lebanon (Christian) while Britain divided its region into Jordan (originally Transjordan and Arab) and Israel (originally referred to as Palestine and Jewish). The French attempt to make a Christian state in Lebanon was fragile from the very beginning and is close to becoming ruled by Hezballah who has military control and shares Parliamentary control. Were things to come to a head in Lebanon, the Christians would be hard pressed to mount any resistance to a complete Islamic takeover. The British never actually established a Jewish state and instead simply announced they were pulling out as of mid-May 1948 and washing their hands of whatever developed.

Colonial Structure Post World War I defined by Treaties from initial surrender in 1919 through the San Remo Conference setting up the Mandate System in 1922 plus Sykes-Picot redrawing of much of the Middle East

This is where we start our story, the British are leaving and, on their way out, they are confiscating as many weapons as they can find in Jewish towns and Kibbutzim and for expediency’s sake, they are turning these weapons over to the Arab towns which were preparing to join the war against the Jews. The evening of May 14, 1948, Jewish day begins at sundown, so for Israelis it is the next day while the remainder of the world insists on daybreak or midnight, but it is almost sundown of May 14, 1948, or 6 Iyyar, 5708 on the Hebrew Calendar. So, it is Friday, May 14, 1948 at 4 PM, a full eight hours before the official end of the British Mandate, David Ben Gurion read out Israel’s Declaration of Independence at a moving ceremony at the Tel Aviv Museum (video below). There was no shooting, no artillery, no tanks, just celebratory cheers, singing of songs and general state of joyous exhilaration from the Jewish and even some Arab towns, farms and villages. That was it, the official beginning to the Jewish State followed by recognitions which can be viewed here. The celebrations carried on into the morning, especially in Tel Aviv. The Jews and their Arab friends knew what the morning was likely to bring, so they made the most of the few hours of peace that remained.

The next morning was to bring an assault with an intent which we have found was best described so succinctly by Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab Leagueat that time, who stated, “It will be a war of annihilation. It will be a momentous massacre in history that will be talked about like the massacres of the Mongols or the Crusades.” This was what was intended by the six Arab armies from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan which were perched on every border just awaiting the command or simply the sun to rise so they could swarm across the lands on their way to the Mediterranean Sea wiping the Jews from the land retaking the region for Allah. Their invasion routes can be seen on the map below. For weeks ahead of the morning of May 15, 1948, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini implored the Arabs who were living between the Arab forces and the Mediterranean Sea, in Israel in simple terms, to evacuate to behind the Arab lines for their safety. His claim was this would permit the Arab armies to simply slaughter every single person they came upon. There were exceptions, namely those Arab villages and towns which were to assist the Arabs by sabotaging Israeli supply and communication lines and ambushing the Israelis from behind as they faced the Arab armies advance. The Mufti promised that the Arabs could follow the armies to the sea and partake of the riches of the Jews and all the spoils of war. This was awaiting the next morning after the joyous celebratory evening and night of the Jewish People returning to their ancestral homelands after approximately a two-thousand-year absence of Jewish rule over these lands. There was great joy and few worried about the next day, but there were the select people who did exactly that as they were the ones who were to defend this precious return.

Initial Invasion Routes by Arab Armies on May 15, 1948

This was, very simply put, an Arab initiated war of intended annihilation, not Israel’s War of Independence. Israeli independence came the second David Ben Gurion finished his speech. There was no war necessary. Israel had been declared and that should have been the end of everything except for the celebrations. There was no war, the Jews did not make some amphibious assault on the beaches and push the Arabs out of their nation of Palestine. There was no nation of Palestine and the Jews were already in the land with many having come in the late 1800’s and others who could trace their ancestry back to the times of Kings Saul, David and Solomon. These were the Jews who the Romans had allowed to remain and had resided in these lands for over three-thousand-years. That is an impressive family history to be able to recount, and they can do exactly that. Others returned over the centuries and had resided in these lands for hundred upon hundreds of years. Whenever the British had used the term Palestine or Palestinian, they were referring to Israel and the Jews. The Palestine Post became the Jerusalem Post, the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra became the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and so on with names of banks, hardware stores, plumbing businesses and so much more. The Arabs had their own reference at that time, they were referred to as Arabs or Jordanian, Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi or whatever nation their family names implied. The first time any Arab became a Palestinian was with the birth of the PLO in 1964. Why did the Arabs decide to take the mantle of Palestinians? That is easy to figure out once you understand the history, they intended to steal the history of the Jews claiming that the Arabs were the ones called Palestinians and the Jews were called, well, they never said what the Jews were called because their intent was always to be rid of them so who cares what names they were called by, anyway, that would just confuse things. Their hope was that nobody would bother with the actual history and they could pull a fast one. Well, what timing, just as the Western World decided not to actually teach history, the Arabs bet that nobody would know history, what timing.

World Recognition of Israel

Well, the celebrations ended rather abruptly around dawn as the first shots fired by the advancing Arab armies starting what would be more appropriately called The Arab War of Intended Annihilation instead of the Israeli War of Independence. Israeli independence had already been established and the war was over whether Israel would continue to exist or be killed at her birthing. The other misleading tale was that Israel won this war and took over additional lands. The only way this would have been true would be if Israel had extended her rule across the Jordan River, over the Golan Heights, into Lebanon and into the Sinai Peninsula. None of these were the result. What happened instead was Israel lost control of lands which included the Golan Heights, the Shomron (Jordan controlled this renaming it the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip which Egypt took control over. These are that troubling thing called facts. When the Arabs show maps showing Israel gaining land, they use the map of the plan offered by the United Nations in the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181. This was a nonbinding resolution which suggested a division of the land into Arab and a Jewish states. The Israelis were willing to accept this partition but the Arab League refused the plan planning on the annihilation of the Jews in its stead. When a United Nations General Assembly Resolution is rejected by any of the parties involved, it is forever negated and considered void as if it had never been proposed. So, the Arab League refusal ended any application of the division and the lands reverted to the original borders which was the Jordan River and the border between the Negev Desert and the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights (see maps below). The armistice lines have become the Arab definition of what the Israeli borders should revert to now despite when they were agreed upon the Arab League insisting that these armistice lines were not to ever be interpreted or expected to be actual borders. Their intent was to deny the existence of Israel as it did not have actual borders. Now they demand a return by Israel to those armistice lines so they can have a redo on the Six Day War, another war which was intended to destroy the Jewish State which failed. During the June 1967 Six Day War, Israel liberated the lands lost in 1948-9 as well as gaining the Sinai Peninsula and some claim the Golan Heights.

Resolution 181 Division, Israel on the morning of May 15, 1948, Israel after the War and losing lands of Gaza and West Bank

That is why calling the war which began the morning of May 15, 1948, the Israeli War of Independence is actually a misnomer. Israel would have had her independence even had the Arabs not attacked that morning as she had declared her independence the afternoon before. The celebrations had gone on well into the night and even until the Arabs invaded the established nation of Israel. A better name for this war might be the Arab War of Intended Annihilation of Israel or the Failed Arab War to Erase Israel. Now that war is being fought by Arab proxies of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza which might be named Hamastan. Over the years, the Arab world acquired great amounts of financial assistance from the Western nations along with the United Nations and for a while the Soviet Union into the coffers of these terror entities all with the hope of peace or an end to Israel. Many of those contributing to these entities desired the latter while all claimed otherwise simply claiming they desired for the Palestinian Arabs to have their homeland back. There never has been an Arab homeland or a nation called Palestine and the main reason that so many Arabs resided in what became Israel was due to the British in cooperation with the Arab League kept moving Arabs into the land to prevent the Jews from being able to declare their homeland. The Palestinian Arab refugee problem is largely, if not entirely, due to the Arabs heeding the Mufti and then when the fighting was over, instead of allowing them to return, something Israel was willing to allow, they placed their brothers and sisters into refugee camps and have kept them there ever since. They basically incarcerated just over six-hundred-thousand fellow Arabs in these camps. Over the ensuing decade, the Arab world expelled over eight-hundred-thousand Jews after denuding them of all assets and anything of worth which Israel took in and remarkably simply incorporated every last one into their society despite much hardship and difficulty. Israel did not incarcerate them permanently in camps to use as a political weapon against the Arab nations which expelled them, Israel accepted their fellow Jews with mixed joy and hardship but in the end, we are all living together mostly in harmony. Give Israel another fifty years and there will be no differentiating who came originally from where and there will be more Israelis like myself with a European father and an Arab national origin mother. In my case it was due to World War II as my British father fought in Burma and when injured he was treated in Bombay (Mumbai) where he met my Iraqi origins mother, and the rest is history. The majority in Israel is simply a case of opposites attract and Jews are intermarrying which will allow us to become completely reinstituted as a single people whose histories and futures are forever to be intertwined.

[israelseen]

Steve Kramer – Celebrating Israel’s 71 Anniversary

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Just 71 years ago, Israel declared its independence based on several factors:

God promised the Land of Israel to the Jews in the Bible – echoed in the Christian Bible and even (gasp!) in the Koran.

Three ancient Jewish kingdoms in Israel are part of archaeological and historical records.

Early 20th century diplomatic agreements called for a national home for the Jews in Israel.

The League of Nations issued a Mandate for Palestine*in which a Jewish national home would be established.

The United Nations issued a 1947 Partition Plan allowing for the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine. (“Palestine” is the name Roman Emperor Hadrian called the Land of Israel, in an attempt to erase its Jewish connections.)

After the fact, the United Nations recognized Israel’s independence and three times Israel fought and won defensive wars against Arab invaders, thereby incorporating its ancient homeland into Israel.

  As many of my readers know, Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day) is preceded by Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day the previous week) and Yom HaZikaron (Remembrance Day for victims of terror and military personnel the previous day), which segues into Yom Ha’atzmaut. Here there are no SALES on Yom HaZikaron, nor is it a day off from work, nor are entertainment venues open. But 24 hours after the start of Yom HaZikaron, the nation’s mood changes dramatically from solemnity to excitement. The country riotously celebrates the reality of the Jewish State, a nation which has an amazing number of accomplishments in its brief history.

  Just a few:

In its first decade, Israel absorbed a huge influx of immigrants, more than doubling its population.

Israel’s Jewish population has burgeoned from 600,000 in 1948 to about 6.3 million today.

Israel is the only Western country with a birthrate which more than replaces itself, with 3.1 children per mother.

Israel’s population is one of the world’s happiest.

Israel is a member of the OECD, the “club” of the world’s most prosperous nations.

Israel is the per capita leader in high tech development, its main engine of economic growth.

Israel is the safe home for Jews who face increasing Jew hatred in their countries of birth.

  That’s enough about history and statistics. What about the fun part?

During the morning of Yom Ha’atzmaut, we visit Israeli sites. This year we went to an historical site and museum that we hadn’t visited previously, attended the almost mandatory barbecue in the afternoon, and a few days later, a gala celebrating one of the best organizations defending Israel’s reputation.

  With our usual Yom Ha’atzmaut buddies, we set out early and soon arrived in Holon, which has the second-largest industrial zone in Israel, but is also known for its extensive attractions for children. Our objective was the Hosmasa Building, which today is surrounded by a lovely urban park in this Tel Aviv suburb. The structure was constructed over an ancient well in 1934 and was built in the prevalent Bauhaus style (German-inspired simplicity and lack of ornamentation, with a symmetric, functional, international design).

  Built for defensive reasons, there is an observation tower on the building, storage rooms, and space for personnel to live. During its active period stretching until the 1948 War of Independence, thousands of trainees participated in weapons/field skills, observation, fortifications, communications, first aid, close combat, topography and other courses. There were several “slicks” nearby where weapons (forbidden to Jews, allowed for Arabs by the British during the Mandate period) were secreted.

  The Palmach (strike forces) were deployed from around Hosmasa to capture the area to the north and west of Holon, which included Arab villages on the outskirts of Arab-inhabited Jaffa. Hosmasa was an important station on the security road during the war connecting Tel Aviv with settlements in the south of the country, Jerusalem, and the Negev. Today Hosmasa is a popular spot to visit on Yom Ha’atzmaut and also for school excursions throughout the year.

  Moving on, we drove the short distance to another, very green, suburb of Tel Aviv. Rishon LeZion is the fourth-largest city in Israel, located along the central Israeli coastal plain south of Tel Aviv. It is one of Israel’s first religious Zionist communities, founded in 1882 and located amidst sand dunes and marsh. On this beautiful day, we were keen to see one of Israel’s newest museums, in Rishon LeZion, featuring the kinetic art of Ya’acov Agam.

  From a Trip Advisor review:

“Mr. Agam is a national treasure and this museum, dedicated in 2017, is a testament to his genius. A force in modern art since the 1950s, this artist continues to work everyday at 92 years old, creating new art that pushes the limits [of one’s imagination]. His whole concept is to invite the viewer to become a partner in the art and creative process. Not optical illusion, but true participatory experience. Visiting gives you real understanding of one of the most important movements and artists of the 20th & 21st centuries.”

  Agam’s work is not just museum or home sized. He has three huge projects in the Tel Aviv area. The Dan Hotel’s long frontage on the Mediterranean is completely painted in a huge, idiosyncratic way. Just north of Tel Aviv is a whole development of apartment buildings utilizing Agam’s design aesthetic. And the iconic revolving water fountain (currently being refurbished) which graces the rebuilt Dizengoff Circle in the heart of town.

  We loved Agam’s museum! Its size is small enough to allow viewing the whole collection, but interesting enough to ensure more visits. The complexity of the artwork is an amazing accomplishment, combining artistry, geometry, and a command of many materials and technologies. We’ll be sure to bring visitors there, affording ourselves additional chances to enjoy Agam’s work.

  A few days later, on the exact Gregorian calendar date for Yom Ha’atzmaut, we attended a fundraiser in Jerusalem for StandWithUs, which is an international, non-profit Israel education organization. Founded in 2001, it is dedicated to educating people of all ages, but mostly young ones, about Israel as well as dedicated to combating the Jew hatred and extremism that often distorts the issues about Israel. Its credo: that knowledge of the facts will correct common prejudices about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and will promote discussions and policies that can help promote peace in the region. Through many avenues, StandWithUs ensures that the story of Israel’s achievements and ongoing challenges gets to middle schools, high schools, and college campuses across the world. StandWithUs has eighteen offices and chapters across the US and internationally. (standwithus.com)

  We were treated to hearing several of StandWithUs’s young ambassadors, who described some of the experiences they have had educating and supporting American college students. We were also thrilled to hear Roz Rothstein, a founder and current CEO of the organization. Roz told us how she and others founded this powerhouse just 18 years ago, after waiting in vain for someone else to start this type of proactive effort to defend Israel.

  This celebration was a fitting climax to this year’s celebration of Israel’s independence. Israel goes from strength to strength despite its many enemies and doubters. And by the way, this time of year in Israel is a perfect time for your first visit or for your tenth one!

      Steve Kramer – Celebrating Israel’s 71 Anniversary Steve Kramer - Celebrating Israel’s 71 Anniversary Just 71 years ago, Israel declared its independence based on several factors:

[inthedayglo]

Still alive, and Who S11

I’ve been away, largely, for the last few months because of Doctor Who. I’m back now, though holidays, etc. may make that kind of spotty for a while.

I started watching this series late (hence avoiding Tumblr to avoid spoilers), which is pretty unusual for me--I’m usually chomping at the bit. Not this time. Why? A couple of reasons.

1. General wariness of the gender swap and Chris Chibnall. I don’t know if I’ve said this on here before, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but I was never a proponent of the gender swap, because I’m not a proponent of “just because we can!” in storytelling. I am a proponent of “because it would let us do X, Y, and Z that we can’t do with our current setup.” There’s no guarantee of success with either, but at least one shows some forethought and purpose. “Just because we can” shows neither. And with Chris Chibnall in charge, and his incredibly inconsistent writing--it’s an oxymoron if ever there was one, putting the man who wrote “Cyberwoman,” one of the most incredibly misogynistic things I’ve ever seen, in charge of a male-to-female gender swap--I was not about to hold my breath that any forethought actually occurred.

2. The BBC and apparently everyone else deciding to trash Peter Capaldi in order to promote Jodie was a massive, massive turnoff. Any decent marketing person can tell you there are better ways to create hype than alienating the viewers who are still mourning the previous Doctor. But no, they went for it. I waited until November to start watching--and wouldn’t have started then if one of my friends hadn’t begged me to so she could discuss them with someone.

My short verdict? “Jodie’s a great actress. The fact that watching Doctor Who has never, ever been a chore for me before does not fall on her shoulders. Chris Chibnall, on the other hand, has a hell of a lot to answer for.”

Because the fact is, this series was a chore. A largely incomprehensible, forgettable chore. I have trouble remembering that at least half the episodes even existed--including the ones I liked, like “Kerblam!” And I suspect that number will grow with time. There’s just nothing memorable going on here.

I appreciate what they tried to do, or what I can only guess that they tried to do, but it feels to me like “tried” is an overstatement. I’ve come to call this TARDIS crew the “ticky box” team, because it feels to me as if they said, “Ooh, let’s tick all the boxes for every possible kind of diversity! Won’t that be great! Then we’re done--nothing more we need to do on that front!” And it just doesn’t work that way.

I mean, there should be an interesting relationship between Graham and Ryan...but no. There’s almost nothing, and what little we do get comes so close to the end of the series as to beggar belief. Those two should be, at the very least, getting in each other’s faces right from the beginning--or else pointedly avoiding each other, or one of each. Instead, it’s as if nothing happened, except to Graham, just a little, here and there. And then right back to Situation Normal--until we suddenly get Ryan and Graham Are Best Buds out of NOWHERE at the very end.

Now, I’ve become kind of tired of the big giant overblown series arc over the years, so I’m not saying that going more episodic is a bad thing. I’m just saying even episodic telly in 2018 is being viewed by an audience that’s going to expect more than that, and that, frankly, deserves more. We didn’t get it.

After 10 episodes, I still have no idea what purpose Yaz serves, except to have given us a Partition episode--which was the only truly memorable one of the year, but she was just an excuse for it. For all she sees during that episode, there’s hardly any character development (do we sense a theme here?) But that fits with the fact that Ryan never seems to mourn his Nan, except in that YouTube video in the very first episode, or deal with his father’s absence, and even his conveniently invisible disability gets so little attention that it might as well not be there (and it’s so poorly explained that I was baffled in the first episode that someone his age could not ride a bicycle and why this was such a big deal. I guess we were required to do outside reading to figure it out--which, by the way, explicitly violates the BBC’s charter).

So basically we ticked all the boxes and still managed to make the old white guy the most interesting character on the show. Oops.

A lot of people liked “Rosa”, and it is better than most of what we saw, but here’s why I have issues with it:

1. Ryan seems to serve one purpose in this episode--to be slapped by a white man for trying to return a glove, and to fawn all over Rosa and MLK like a teen meeting Justin Bieber. The episode basically reduced him to the color of his skin and nothing else. (This is exactly what I mean about ticking all the boxes and deciding that’s enough.)

2. The villain is so negligible that he might as well not even be there. And, in fact, had they made systemic racism the villain instead of some unlikely 267684th century nobody, they’d have had a far better episode. That villain’s baked in, and this meaningless yahoo just distracts from it.

3. My biggest gripe: It paints Rosa Parks as a woman who took independent, spontaneous action when that couldn’t be further from the truth. A historical should know better, because a historical should do its homework. It didn’t. Rosa’s action was planned carefully with local NAACP folks who couldn’t use another woman, who’d already done the same thing, as a flashpoint because she was pregnant and unmarried. There is just plain NO WAY that what Rosa did would have set off a movement like it did if that movement wasn’t assembled and ready to respond to her arrest. Rosa could have picked any bus on any day. It didn’t matter. And yet, the episode hinges on the faulty historical read that says otherwise.

Is it a better episode than, say, “The Turanga Conundrum”? Sure. But so is the average episode of “Teletubbies,” because Tsuranga is literally unwatchable, and I know this because I kept trying and couldn’t do it. It illustrates every reason why Chibnall should not have been put in charge of this show, primarily that he tries to do more than the format will allow for, and he does all of it badly. His Doctor spouts meaningless technobabble more often than Geordie Laforge, and with far less plausibility and logic. She doesn’t even bother to notice that she’s endangering other people. And there are not only four lead characters to keep busy but also a handful guest stars who have almost nothing to do--nothing meaningful, certainly, because they each get about three minutes of screen time--but yes, absolutely, do bring on the pregnant guy just because you can. (Why “Just Because You Can” Is A Bad Idea, Exhibit A.) And the less said about the ridiculous villain, which on paper should have been phenomenally threatening and yet just wasn’t, the better.

The whole Tim Shaw thing is irritating for a series that went episodic, as if it wanted the best of both worlds and couldn’t manage either. Having him turn up in the finale is just annoying, and not just because I found the teeth thing revolting, but because it comes out of nowhere (yes, really, sending him back to wherever with NOTHING in between is still nowhere. Any setup you can find there is so thin you’d need a scanning electron microscope to show it to me). Mark Addy and Phyllis Logan should have made for good telly no matter how bad the script, but that concept apparently never met Chris Chibnall before, because even they couldn’t save it. And Graham’s dilemma, such as it was, should have been more interesting, but ended up just being utterly predictable instead. It’s all surface stuff. Style, perhaps, but no substance.

“The Witchfinders” is interesting more because Alan Cumming camps it up and because Downton Abbey’s O’Brien is the Big Bad, proving that Siobhan Finneran has the serious Big Bad chops we...already knew she had. It stands out for one reason only, for me, and that’s that, for the first time all year, the Doctor actually faces some sexism. Pity Chibnall thinks we have to go back to the 1700s to find it--I guess he figures we’re past all that now? The lack of realism in how the Doctor is treated on Earth grated on me for all ten episodes, including this one, because how did it take so long? How was this not part of the PLAN for a female Doctor? (Oh, wait--did I say “plan”?) “Honestly, if I was still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself” is the story of every woman watching this show, every single damn day. I presume the people who wanted a female Doctor wanted it because they wanted to feel represented by this character--but this isn’t it. If I can’t call tech support without having to establish my tech cred every. single. time because I have the audacity to call while female, the Doctor shouldn’t be able to, either, much less wander into a situation and just take over. And yet, she does, again, and again, denying my everyday existence and that of every other woman on the planet. And we’re...not supposed to notice? Decide the 2018 on the screen is some sort of utopia we know doesn’t exist? What, exactly, are we to make of this whitewashing of reality? Yet another missed opportunity in a series riddled with them.

“Demons of the Punjab” is the only episode I really liked, because it’s the only episode that really told a conflicted, compelling story, though Thirteen is still saddled with being the Unnecessary Exposition Fairy and Yaz is frustratingly pointless in a story about her own past. It could, and perhaps even should, have been a bigger story. Continued lack of development for Yaz notwithstanding, it’s solid telly. More like this, please.

The Atlantic ran a piece extolling the show for “allowing” Thirteen to be weak and ineffective. It was, to my horror, written by a woman. It was not satire. I can’t say if Chibnall intended this outcome, to explore this “theme,” but if he did, he picked the wrong Doctor to experiment with. I’m as deeply offended by the idea that making the first female Doctor weak and ineffective is a good thing as I am by the implication that sexism died 300 years ago and by the way Ryan is presented in “Rosa.” IMHO, this take is a fundamental betrayal of what this character has stood for for 55 years--and of all the women who watch the show, and who wanted to see themselves in the title character.

On the other hand, this excellent, stunningly thorough piece looks at the whole series in great detail (seriously, fortify yourself and block out some time on your calendar, ‘cause it will take a while. It’s worth it, though). It works very hard to be as fair as possible. It also makes a very interesting argument that the surface appearance of Chibnall!Who is very progressive, but the inner workings are astonishingly conservative, and I think the author is on to something that explains, for instance, why CC thinks it’s okay to tick the boxes and then move on without a second thought. Appearance is meant to trump substance in S11, and whatever else you can say about progressive intent on S11, the fact remains that a white guy is still in charge.

(I find it fascinating that my biggest concern when I heard the show was coming back in 2005 was that, if given an actual budget, particularly for special effects, it would lose its charm and become a highly rated show that was all about effects driving the plot rather than plot driving the effects. It’s taken 13 years for that original fear to be realized, which is one hell of an accomplishment considering how easily it could have gone this way from the beginning--but that’s still cold comfort considering the quality we’re used to from Who.)

The second author’s most cuttingly insightful commentary might just be this (emphasis mine):

...the abiding moral of the Moffat era was that kindness and compassion were worthy ends of themselves. The Twelfth Doctor’s final advice to the Thirteenth Doctor was simply, “Be kind.” It is a damning indictment of the Chibnall era that the Thirteenth Doctor has failed so spectacularly at that one single piece of advice given to her by her direct predecessor. The eleventh season is a meditation in indifference and obliviousness, with the Doctor at best ignorant to the suffering of others and at worst actively complicit.

(This observation also harks back to my list of reasons for being reluctant to watch in the first place...)

Really, go read it. Even if you don’t agree with it, it’ll make you think. (You can skip the first several paragraphs about production improvements if that’s not really your thing, though his comments on the attempt to make DW “prestige TV” and what that means are insightful.)

I didn’t really mean to write this much, but this year realized my worst fears for the future of my favorite show. If you disagree with me, that’s fine; you’re certainly allowed--but please don’t ask me why I kept watching. It’s such a dismissive question. The obvious answer is “because I kept hoping it would get better, all evidence to the contrary.”

This show has sat in my heart for 32 years now. It made me who I am. I’m not about to abandon it without a fight. But this year was the biggest fight I’ve had to put up since I was 15 years old, and the closest I’ve ever come to despair while watching (which is saying something considering I was not a RTD fan--but S11 is giving me a new appreciation there).

I can only hope that Chibnall will resign and let someone who can do Thirteen justice take over. We need no repeat of the Series of Wasted Opportunities.

[gloriousbanditcashpurse]

🙏🙏🌹🌹🇺🇦🇺🇦Slava Ukraini! How will Russia's war with Ukraine end? Here are 5 possible outcomes : 1. it's widely expected that Russian President Vladimir Putin, loathing Ukraine's current pro-Western government and its aspirations to join the EU and NATO, wants to install a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. 2. Any patchy control over Ukraine by Russia could lead to some kind of partitioning of the country, particularly as Russia becomes firmly entrenched in eastern Ukraine — particularly in the Donbas region where it recognized the independence of two pro-Russian republics ahead of its invasion of the wider country. 3.Ukrainians would continue to fight against any puppet regime, with the conflict descending into an insurgency with those Ukrainians left in the country attempting to topple any such regime by any means available. Ukrainians will resist long and hard even if the formal military battles end.Russia would realize it has "once again fought an unwinnable war. 4. It remains highly unlikely Russia would launch direct military attacks against NATO forces, given that's understood by NATO to be a tripwire for a broader war ... but support for Chechen terrorist attacks into frontline NATO states delivering all these weapons? That's another matter. NATO would be unlikely to respond directly with military strikes against a nuclear power; the only way to prepare is greater intelligence efforts to prevent or at least blunt the effectiveness of the efforts, 5.An unequivocal withdrawal of Russian armed forces from Ukraine would be best possible outcome for the country in its dire situation.Putin would be prevented from toppling Kyiv's government and establishing a puppet regime, while "the determination and skill of the Ukrainian resistance forces a stalemate on the battlefield that favors the defenders,Kremlin realizes that Russia "will pay an exorbitant price" for its invasion of Ukraine and, facing the prospect of a long and costly slog in Ukraine, coupled with economic collapse and diplomatic isolation, Putin would order a withdrawal of his troops. Long live Ukraine! 🇺🇦🇺🇦🌹🌹🙏🙏 https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca2dv3pvo-2/?utm_medium=tumblr

[johnvazhathara]

One-state solution, the way forward in PalestineThe whole premise of the two-state solution is wrong, providing Israel the immunity to continue its ethnic cleansing

26/05/2021 



AFPMOHAMMED ABED/AFP

For more than 50 years, well-intentioned and more cynical, local and external actors involved in the attempts to bring peace and reconciliation to historical Palestine have religiously adhered to the two-state solution as the only way forward.

The idea of partitioning Palestine between the settler movement of Zionism, and later the state of Israel and the indigenous population of Palestine is not new. It was first offered by the British in 1937 and rejected by the Palestinians already then. The Zionist movement was hardly 50 years old and was already offered by the new British occupiers of Palestine, a chunk of the Palestinian homeland as a future state. This in the 1930s and 1940s would have been akin to an offer to decolonise India by partitioning it between a British India and local India or to propose the decolonisation of Algeria by dividing it between a French Algeria and a local Algeria. Neither the Indian anti-colonial movement nor the Algerian one would have ever consented to such a post-colonial arrangement; nor did the British and French dare to offer it when they reconciled with the fact that they will have to leave their colonial empires and go back to Europe.

Catastrophic event

But even when decolonisation was achieved in India in 1947, not only the British but also the so-called civilised world through the United Nations insisted that the Palestinians should give half of their homeland to the settler movement of Zionism. The Palestinians attempted to convince the international community that the problem was not only aboutdispensing with half of their homeland but that the settler movement of Zionism would not be content with just half of the country and intended to take as much of it as possible and leave in it as few Palestinians as possible. This ominous prediction turned out to be chillingly accurate and true in less than a year after the UN insisted that partition was the only solution for Palestine. Under the guise of UN support, the new Jewish state took over nearly 80% of historical Palestine and ethnically cleansed almost a million Palestinians (more than half of Palestine’s population), and in the way demolished half of Palestine’s villages and most of its towns in nine months in 1948; an event known by the Palestinians as the Nakba, the catastrophe.

Incremental cleansing

In 1967, Israel occupied the rest of historical Palestine, and in the process expelled another 300,000 Palestinians. Like all settler colonial projects, it had to navigate between a wish to take over indigenous territory while downsizing the number of native people living on it. It was impossible after 1948 to repeat a massive ethnic cleansing, so it was substituted by incremental ethnic cleansing (the last stage in this process was one of the root causes that ignited the cycle of violence last week — the proposed eviction of Palestinians from Shaykh [Sheikh] Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighbourhood, as part of an overall attempt to Judaise East Jerusalem).

Incremental ethnic cleansing is not the only way of achieving the old Zionist goal to turning historical Palestine into a Jewish state. Imposing military rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after they were occupied was another means which enclaved the people there without basic human and civil rights. Imposing a version of an Apartheid regime on the Palestinian minority in Israel is another method and the constant refusal to allow the 1948 refugees to return completes the matrix of power that allows Israel to retain the land and disregard a demographic reality by which the Jews are not the majority in historical Palestine.

It is Israel that decides

The two-state solution, offered for the first time by liberal Zionists and the United States in the 1980s, is seen by some Palestinians as the best way of ending of the occupation of the West Bank and at least the partial fulfilment of the Palestinian right for self-determination and independence. This is why the Palestine Liberation Organization was willing to give it a go in 1993, by signing the Oslo Accords. But the Palestinian position has no impact in the current balance of power. What mattered is how Israel interprets the idea and the fact that there is no one in the world that could challenge its interpretation.

The Israeli interpretation, until the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu to power in 2009, was that the two-state solution is another means of having the territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, without incorporating most of the people living there. In order to ensure it, Israel partitioned the West Bank (which is 20% of historical Palestine) into a Jewish and an Arab part. This was in the second phase of the Oslo Accords, known as the Oslo II agreement of 1995. The Palestinians were forced to accept it under American and Egyptian pressure. One area, called area C, which consists of 60% of the West Bank) was directly ruled from 1995 until today by Israel. Under Mr. Netanyahu, Israel is in the process of officially annexing this area while at the same time ethnically cleansing the Palestinians living in it. The remaining 40% of the West Bank, areas A and B under Oslo II, were put under the Palestinian Authority, which optimistically calls itself the state of Palestine, but in essence has no power whatsoever, unless the one given to it, and withdrawn from it, by Israel.

A Bantustanisation

The Gaza Strip was divided too. But the Jewish part was small and could not be defended from the local national movement’s wrath. So, the settlers were taken out in 2005 and Israel hoped that another Bantustan, like the one in areas A and B, would be established there under the Palestinian Authority’s rule and under the same conditions. But the people of Gaza opted to support a new player, Hamas, and its ally, the Islamic Jihad, which resisted this offer. They supported them not only because there was a return to religion in the face of the ongoing predicaments but also because there was big disappointment from the compliance of the PLO with the Oslo arrangements. Israel responded by imposing a callous siege and blockade on the Gaza Strip that, according to the UN, made it unliveable.

To complete its strategy that included the partition of the West Bank, its Bantustanisation, and the siege of Gaza, Israel passed in 2018 a citizenship law, known as the nationality law, which made sure that the Palestinian citizens who live in Israel proper (which is Israel prior to the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and who are supposedly equal citizens of the Jewish state, will in essence become the “Africans” of a new Israeli Jewish apartheid state: living in a permanent regime that discriminates against them in all aspects of life on the basis of their nationality.

The endless negotiation on the two-state solution was based on the formula that once the two states become a reality, Israel will stop these severe violations of the Palestinian civil and human rights, wherever they are. But while the wait continued, more Palestinians were expelled and the Jewish settler community in the West Bank doubled and tripled and took over the fertile land, leaving no space for Palestinian expansion. The presence of more than 600,000 Jewish settlers, with a very high rate of natural growth, means that Israel will never consider moving them out; and without that, even a soft version of a two-state solution is impossible.

Decolonise, build a new state

The whole premise of the two-state solution is wrong and that is why it did not materialise. It is based on the assumption of parity and of framing the conflict as one fought between two national movements. But this is not a “conflict” as such. This is a settler colonial reality which began in the late 19th century and continues until today. The late scholar, Patrick Wolfe, described settler colonial movements as motivated by a logic he called “the elimination of the native”. Sometimes it led to genocide, as it happened in North America, sometimes it translated to an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation, which is what has unfolded in Palestine. The two-state solution is not going to stop the ethnic cleansing; instead, talking about it provides Israel international immunity to continue it.

The only alternative is to decolonise historical Palestine. Which means that we should aspire to a state for all its citizens all over the country, based on the dismantlement of colonialist institutions, fair redistribution of the country’s natural resources, compensation of the victims of the ethnic cleansing and allowing their repatriation. All this will be so that settlers and natives should together build a new state that is democratic, part of the Arab world and not against it, and an inspiration for the rest of the region which desperately needs such models to push it forward towards a better future.

Professor Ilan Pappé is the Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, U.K. He is the author of 20 books

[ojamesy]

Ireland’s ‘Lost’ English Region The English Pale in Early Tudor Times

By contrast with the established traditions of regional history in many parts of continental Europe, the study of historical regions in Ireland and Britain has attracted relatively little attention. Throughout the British Isles, the nation has remained the preferred focus for the organization of the historical narrative; but local histories, particularly county histories, are also fairly ubiquitous, and as an alternative focus for historical inquiries they offer a stiff challenge to nation-centred history. The study of regions, however, seemingly falls between these two stools; and the English Pale in early Tudor Ireland, the subject of the present chapter, is very much a case in point. Individually, the shires of Dublin, Kildare, Louth and Meath which together made up the English Pale in early Tudor times have all attracted their fair share of county histories.2 In the fifteenth century, they were often described collectively as ‘the four obedient shires’, before ‘the English Pale’ was coined as a collective name for them. Thereafter, the English Pale was a prominent feature of Ireland’s political geography from its creation in the late fifteenth century until its slow demise following the completion of the Tudor conquest of Ireland in 1603. It was also the inspiration for the familiar expression ‘beyond the Pale’ with reference to actions which lay beyond the bounds of civilized behaviour; and references to the Pale’s creation and to its – allegedly – constantly contracting boundaries are a commonplace of histories.

Yet, beyond noting its avowedly English character and identity, historians have for long remained reluctant to offer any deeper analysis of the Pale, in particular to probe its status and character as a specific English region of the early Tudor state. The English Pale lay on a separate island; and it was the subject of legislation in a separate parliament. Even with reference to Ireland, the English Pale as a region has been largely ignored: almost the only significant exception to the rule that historians of Ireland do not do regions seems to be in respect of Ulster, and this is probably for political reasons relating to partition.5 As a region of the Tudor state, however, the English Pale has remained almost unexplored territory. 

At first sight, the study of the English Pale as a distinct region of Tudor Ireland might seem an obvious line of inquiry. Geographically, it was a fertile coastal plain. It was bounded by the Mourne mountains to the north and, more closely, by the Wicklow mountains to the south, but to the west, the plain’s champaign ground faded more imperceptibly into the bogs of the midlands. In all three directions differences of land capability and use, between pastoralism and tillage or mixed farming, also underpinned the Pale’s relatively visible boundaries: different patterns of settlement, reflecting land quality and the earlier subinfeudation of the region, supplied a clear boundary between, on the one hand, a heavily populated, more urbanized region of market boroughs and nucleated villages defended by a screen of major castles, walled towns, and fortified bridges, and on the other, an unimproved, more sparsely populated, landscape of mountain, moorland and bog. 

Contemporary awareness of these boundaries was further highlighted by ethnic differences among the population: acculturation was of the essence of a frontier society, and in the Pale marches the peasantry was predominantly of Irish descent, but there were evident differences in appearance between the Pale’s ruling elite, the merchants and gentry of English habit and speech and of English law and custom, and the neighbouring Gaelic clans of Irish habit and speech following Irish law and custom. And while the Pale was geographically separate from the English mainland, its population enjoyed the same legal status as English subjects elsewhere, entitled to the king’s protection and access to his courts, by contrast with the king’s ‘Irish enemies’ living in the territories surrounding the Pale whose status at English law was that of aliens.

 The wider European pattern of research on regional history does, however, afford some clues as to why historical research on the Pale should have remained so underdeveloped. Two points seem particularly important here. First, who or what defines a region may vary quite considerably: commerce and the economy; language, culture and religion; environment and climate; or history, identity and administration – all these forces helped in some measure to shape the Pale’s development as a distinct Tudor region. Yet regional history is usually history as constructed or imagined internally by the population of the region; and in the case of the English Pale, the region was later influenced as much as other parts by the development among the population of a separate Irish sense of identity which gradually replaced an earlier identification with the Pale as a distinct English region. Later still, following political partition in 1920, what had in Tudor times been a peripheral region of the English state became the core region of an Irish Free State which loudly trumpeted its Gaelic pedigree and identity. Thus, the modern descendants of Ireland’s medieval English, who had seen themselves as English by culture, identity and allegiance, now see themselves as Irish and identify with this independent Irish state.

A second consideration is that regions in early modern Europe were frequently characterized by their peripheral locations. Very often they were frontier regions, as indeed the English Pale was: but even where regional histories are a common way of organizing historical writing, the topics covered and the questions asked are normally shaped by what may be described as ‘the national agenda’, viz. the past (or future) political and cultural contexts in each country which have shaped its national grand narrative. Thus, the history of the English Pale needed subsequently to be refashioned in an Irish national context, and this was done by integrating the Pale more closely into the national story and marginalizing historic ties with England. This, in turn, called in question the nature of the Pale’s boundaries with Gaelic Ireland, specifically the Pale’s essential character as an international frontier, a subject on which historians of Ireland have traditionally had rather more to say. The concept of the frontier, and in particular the medieval antecedents of the English Pale, has attracted a good deal of attention since Professor James Lydon first explored the problem and sketched its dimensions in a seminal article published nearly fifty years ago. And since then, the frontier paradigm has featured quite extensively in studies of medieval Ireland’s two nations. Lydon saw the establishment of the Anglo-Gaelic frontier as a deliberate policy by the English government, one which supposedly presented few problems in the earlier age of English expansion (1169–1300), but many more later on. After c.1300, he argued, the frontier began to break up, and earlier clear-cut divisions between a terra pacis and a terra guerrae gave place to marchland. The result was that the settlers were ‘at least partially assimilated to the Gaelic Ireland they found all around them’. In the fifteenth century, however, Lydon detected ‘a new frontier emerging’ in ‘parts of the four loyal counties’ around Dublin; but then ‘the real frontier contracted once again to the limits of what was known as the Pale’. Thus, he concluded, the policy ‘of separating the races and driving a cultural barrier between them’ proved ‘a complete failure’. The Tudor monarchs were eventually obliged to ‘face up to the frontier problem in a realistic way’ by means of a complete conquest and a new colonization.

The range of ideas which were very tentatively explored by Lydon in his initial sketch of the problem in the 1960s later achieved almost canonical status, both as regards the gradual development of a distinctive terminology with which to analyse the problem as also regarding the significance which he attached to a supposedly continuing English decline in precipitating the Tudor conquest.15 The medieval frontier is of course a sensitive issue in Irish historiography: the island’s modern partition between two states shapes the historiography of the frontier – a phenomenon which is also true to a lesser degree in respect of regions – in terms of what is studied, from what perspective, and in what terms. It has also influenced the particular construction placed on some of the more familiar and accessible contemporary accounts of the English Pale, such as those provided by Sir William Darcy and Chief Baron Finglas. Thus, the late medieval frontier has been depicted primarily as a frontier, or zone, of contact rather than a frontier of separation, or to use the terminology developed by German geographers, as a Zusammenwachsgrenze (a frontier of convergence), not a Trennungsgrenze (a frontier of separation).

In this context, too, the historians’ quest to uncover the roots of Irishness also invited discussion of the growing ties between native and settler while overlooking inherited differences. The ‘national agenda’ has thus tended to marginalize the development of the English Pale as a physical frontier and also its essentially English identity: it stresses the thoroughgoing nature of the settlers’ dealings with the Gaelic polity, their supposed Irishness and ‘gaelicization’, portraying instead two varieties of Irishmen (‘Anglo-Irish’ and ‘Gaelic Irish’) interacting across a dissolving frontier. And attempts to redress the balance by focusing more closely on particular developments within the English Pale and the settlers’ English identity have been dismissed as ‘two-nation theory’. As this chapter illustrates, however, close attention to the actual evidence – descriptions of the Pale frontier as a physical barrier, and the political terminology actually used by the Palesmen to describe events there – suggests that the English of Ireland were far from seeing the creation of an English Pale as a failed policy in a failed entity. But then the Palesmen did not have the benefit of hindsight available to more nationally minded historians writing with the recent Troubles in mind.

II 

As a distinct region of the English state, the English Pale was a late addition, the product of political change during the course of the fifteenth century. Its emergence as a frontier region reflected the partial nature of medieval English settlement in Ireland and the consequent establishment of a frontier between English and Gaelic Ireland. Attracted by prospects of good land for agriculture, medieval English colonization of the region had been intensive, with the establishment of manors and a system of mixed farming along English lines. The surrounding uplands were unsuited to tillage, however, and largely remained under Gaelic occupation: English settlement thinned out very quickly to the north and south but more gradually towards the west. On the whole, though, the regions of English settlement in Ireland, including the Pale, did not form one compact block of territory but several smaller areas, interspersed between districts in which Gaelic lordship and rule remained unchallenged; and in the Gaelic parts power was fragmented between numerous small but independent chieftaincies and lordships. Thus, what had emerged by 1300, after the initial English impetus towards conquest had petered out and a broad political equilibrium between the two nations had been established, was ‘a land of many marches’, as Professor Robin Frame has memorably described it.20 And political conditions in each of these marches reflected the shifting balance of power between local Gaelic chiefs and English magnates. The following period saw the political and cultural recovery of the native Irish against the English in many parts. As this Gaelic Revival, as it is now called, swept away the more lightly settled, and marginal, districts of English lordship, so perceptions of the Pale’s borders as a frontier were powerfully reinforced by the close coincidence there of geographical, cultural, political, military and administrative boundaries. These contrasts were also underlined by the deployment in English official circles of a rhetoric of difference to describe the English and Gaelic parts. This rhetoric emphasised the ‘otherness’ of the native Irish living ‘beyond the Pale’, castigating them as savages. It reflected English perceptions of the politically fragmented, pastoral and kin-based character of Irish society, a population living in wooden huts in a dispersed habitat, without towns, in a landscape of mountain, forest and bog, all of which English observers saw as indications of a backward and primitive people. In terms of economic activity and social organization, for instance, the English had already developed in the twelfth century a checklist of the attributes of civility which, in reality, simply replicated conditions in lowland England. These included a well-populated landscape, with a settled society, wealthy towns and nucleated villages, a manorial economy, a cereal-based agriculture and a well-differentiated social structure with a numerous and vigorous gentry. By contrast, the ‘wild’ peoples of the upland zone, notably the Irish, were denigrated as lazy, bestial and barbarous – a shifting population living in idleness and brutality in woods and bogs, eking out a miserable existence from cattle raising and rustling. There were similar checklists of civility and savagery in regard to morals, dress and physical appearance. English reports divided Ireland rather schematically into a ‘land of peace’ where ‘the king’s loyal English lieges’ lived a civil life in walled towns and nucleated villages; and a ‘land of war’ where lurked the ‘wild Irish’, ‘the king’s Irish enemies’, in woods, bogs and mountains. Within a few short miles to the south of Dublin, for instance, the English lowlands gave place to the Gaelic lordships of the Wicklow mountains, agriculture to pastoralism, English-speaking gentlemen to Gaelic-speaking clansmen, English cloaks to Gaelic mantles, common law to brehon law, and stone houses to mud huts: in short, ‘English civility’ degenerated into ‘Irish savagery’. Legislation, codified in the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366), aimed to preserve the English character of the colonial parts by proscribing the use of Irish law and customs among the English.  In truth, though, the Irish were there in their midst because the English settlement had in many parts retained native labourers, often as serfs, to work the land, and the fourteenth-century labour shortages had encouraged Irish migration into the English districts. Later, mid-fifteenth-century legislation also required Irishmen living in the Englishry to take English names, to follow English customs, to adopt English weapons such as the use of the longbow, and generally to adapt their lifestyle to meet official checklists of English civility. Equally, the regular convening of parliament allowed Ireland’s English ruling elite (nobles, burgesses, knights of the shire) to demonstrate their Englishness by the enactment of law.

As the Dublin government’s control over the lordship’s outlying parts declined, so marchlands increased. The government increasingly focused its main defensive effort on the region around Dublin, so that in the early fifteenth century ‘the land of peace’ was increasingly identified with the boundaries of ‘the four obedient shires’, the counties of Dublin, Louth, Meath and Kildare. By 1428, ‘the four obedient shires’ had in turn been vaguely divided into marches and maghery.26 The use of this Gaelic term ‘maghery’, a transliteration of machaire (meaning ‘a plain’ or ‘level ground’), to describe ‘the land of peace’ (as opposed to the marches) is revealing. It occurred, for instance, in a statute of 1488, the Act of Marches and Maghery, which prohibited within the English Pale the imposition of coign and livery – a quasi-Gaelic military custom much disliked in the Englishry – except by landlords on their own tenants in the marches. The use of the terms ‘marches’ and ‘maghery’ also reflected an emerging distinction in terms of land capability, settlement patterns and political conditions between, on the one hand, a less densely populated, predominantly pastoral, outer defensive ring of the Pale, the marches, and, on the other hand, an English heartland, the maghery – an area of mixed farming, nucleated villages and market towns, in which conditions approximated more closely to those in lowland England and to official perceptions of ‘English civility’. This focus during the fifteenth century on the region’s defence led to the creation of a standing defence force, a developed system of fortifications, and new regulations for militia service. The Brotherhood of Arms, established by statute of 1474, provided for thirteen leading Pale landowners and local officials to elect from among themselves annually on St George’s Day (England’s patron saint) a captain of a retinue of 120 archers and forty horsemen. MMilitary aspects of the region’s division into marches and maghery were also consolidated. The boundaries between marches and maghery had been fixed by statute in 1477, in part to regulate the taking of coign and livery; and the Act of Marches and Maghery (1488) prohibited coign and livery throughout the English Pale except when imposed by landlords on their own tenants in the marches. Thus, upon proclamation by the governor and council of a hosting against the Irish, ‘everie gentleman dwelling in any marches’ was to cess kerne (billet unarmoured Irish foot soldiers) on his marchlands, but also to send to the hosting one horseman for every ten marks of annual income. The lords and gentry in the maghery, by contrast, were to send a longbowman to the hosting for each twenty pounds of annual income. Thus, the distinction between marches and maghery in terms of militia service was very clear. The marches were also gradually strengthened to prevent Irish chiefs and clansmen from entering ‘the English country’ by building small castles or towers, by fortifying bridges at key points of entry, and by constructing earthen dikes and ditches to inhibit cattle rustling. Thus, a statute of 1495, observing that in many parts the English marches were still ‘open & not fe[n]sible in ffastnes of diches and castels’, required tenants there to erect ‘a double diche of vi foote of herth above the grounde’ at the intersections of their land with Irishmen and other ditches ‘in the wastes or fasaghe landes’ beyond the marches.31 In other respects, too, defence needs promoted collaboration between the landowning elites of the four shires. Upon proclamation of a hosting, the gentry of Meath and Dublin were jointly to elect a captain to lead them; the bowmen of Louth, Meath and Drogheda were to go together; and Dublin city and the towns of Drogheda and Dundalk were to accompany the king’s deputy. Once in the field, the shires with their standards should lodge together: thus Dublin and Kildare were to go together; and likewise Drogheda, Meath and Louth should go together..

By 1494, when Henry VII appointed a new governor for Ireland to counteract the threat to his throne from Yorkist pretenders, ‘the four obedient shires’ had been transformed from an extended march into a distinctive region, with a clearly delineated, defensive frontier. Perceiving this, the new governor, Sir Edward Poynings, coined the term ‘the English Pale’ for the region, a new collective name which recognized the Pale’s separate identity as a region and also its predominantly English character. Sir Edward Poynings had briefly served as governor of Calais, and it was at that time, in 1493, that this English enclave in continental Europe between France and the Holy Roman Empire had likewise first been described as an English Pale. Local landowners and officials in Ireland, however, also recognized that here were not just four contiguous shires but a whole region set apart by its English culture from the surrounding Irishry. Thus, bills promoted by the governor and council and enacted by the 1499 parliament ‘for the increasinge of Englishe manners and condicions’ required those with land ‘within the precincte of the English Pale’ to ride in a saddle in the English manner and not to use Irish weapons. The term ‘the English Pale’ rapidly replaced ‘the four obedient shires’ as the preferred description of the region.

----Steven G. Ellis 

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Rojava supporters may point out that YPG fighters worked with Syria and Russia which allowed the final victory in the liberation of Aleppo last year and note with pride the statement of Hediye Yusuf, the co-chair of Rojava’s Constituent Assembly, who said that they seek autonomy, but do not want Syria to be destroyed. However, there is no doubt that the “good” Kurds are still hostile to the Syrian government: the YPG has killed SAA soldiers in past years (2012-2016 off and on) in “revenge” for purported attacks, even surrounding “enemy” soldiers at certain points, resulting in some counterattacks.1 The illegality of Rojava The Iranians and Syrians have stood against an autonomous entity like Rojava. Recently, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Bahram Qassemi, said that Kurds secured many rights in Iraq’s constitution (see articles 4, 117, 141), and that Iran “will strongly stand against any measures taken with the aim to tear Iraq into pieces.” As for the Syrians, duly elected President Bashar Al-Assad has, in the past, said that “Kurdish demands expressed by certain parties can be discussed nationally,” he has also said that these demands need to be “within the framework of Syria’s unity and the unity of the Syrian people and territory,” and that “Kurds are part of the Syrian fabric…[and] patriotic people” along with saying that they are not “allies at this stage.” More recently, the Syrian Ambassador to Russia, Riyad Haddad, has argued that “the Kurds are an integral part of the Syrian people,” having the “same rights and obligations as the rest of the Syrian people,” but that many Kurds are strongly opposed to a federation, canton, or other form of division. This is buttressed by Syrian government envoy Bashar Jaafari saying that “it’s completely unacceptable for a group of people to decide to create a statelet and call it federalism,” referring to Rojava, of course, and the Syrian government’s clear rejection of the Russian proposal for a Kurdish federation. Adding to this, Assad, in an interview last month, noted that “talking about self-control or confederation or anything like this, when you don’t have war, when you have a normal situation, it’s going to be related to the constitution” and said that “the vast majority of Syrians…never believe in self-governance or confederation or anything” while adding that a few people in Syria, mainly among Kurds, want to remove the word Arab from the country’s name, but that its not a big issue. Adding to this are the numerous Kurdish groups within Syria who ally with the government in its fight against Western and Gulf-backed terrorism. The Kurdish National Movement for Peaceful Change has said that a coalition to fight Daesh inside Syria without approval of the Syrian government “constitutes a violation of the Syrian sovereignty and would bring further support to terrorism.” There have also been meetings over the years by such Kurds, who the US and West may consider “bad” for allying with the Syrian government, which have asserted solidarity with the latter government, saying Kurds are an “integral part of Syrian national fabric.” The truth is that the “bad” Kurds probably constitute the majority of the Kurdish population, especially in the region, and hence the “bad” Kurds are the minority. The former prime minster of Syria, Wael al-Halqi was also quoted as saying that Ayn al-Arab, considered as a “part” of Rojava, is “dear to the hearts of all Syrians” and that the Kurds are “an inseparable part of the Syrian society.” Most directly, the National Kurdish Movement for Peaceful Change has strongly rejected “any divisive or federal project in Syria.” They specifically said that the Rojava entity “is illegal and violates the Syrian constitution,” adding that promises made by Western capitalists cannot be trusted as they “only serve their personal interests and the interests of Israel.” Starting with Rojava constitution, acclaimed by certain parts of the international “left,” this document recognizes territorial integrity of Syria but contradicts that by declaring, in the preamble, “a political system and civil administration founded upon a social contract…a new democratic society.” As the constitution goes on, it says there will be a “renewed social contract between the peoples of the Autonomous Regions” (Article 1), authority within the region “exercised by governing councils and public institutions elected by popular vote” (Article 2), asserting that “Syria is a free, sovereign and democratic state” but also making the “autonomous” Rojava regions seem separate (Article 3), and allowing “all cities, towns and villages in Syria which accede to this Charter” to become part of the region (Article 7). The constitution also says that “all Cantons in the Autonomous Regions are founded upon the principle of local self-government” (Article 8), that “cantons may freely elect their representatives and representative bodies” (same article), asserts that “the Autonomous Regions…[are] a model for a future decentralized system of federal governance in Syria” (Article 12), and says that the YPG “is the sole military force of the three Cantons,” defending the region “against both internal and external threats” (Article 15). Finally, there’s Article 45 which says that “the Legislative Assembly in the Autonomous Region is elected by the people by direct, secret ballot” and Article 81 saying that “the Charter applies within the Autonomous Regions” and can “only be amended by a qualified majority of two-thirds…of the Legislative Assembly.” While this may seem nice and dandy to Rojava supporters, it clearly violates the Syrian Constitution and is, hence, an illegal entity. This document is straightforward and clear, showing that Rojava sovereignty in clearly illegitimate: * The Syrian state is a “democratic state with full sovereignty, indivisible, and may not waive any part of its territory, and is part of the Arab homeland” (Article 1) * The people of Syria “shall exercise their sovereignty within the aspects and limits prescribed in the Constitution” (Article 2) * “Every citizen shall be subjected to the duty of respecting the Constitution and laws” (Article 35) * “Defending the territorial integrity of the homeland and maintaining the secrets of state shall be a duty of every citizen” (Article 46) * “The state shall guarantee the protection of national unity, and the citizens’ duty is to maintain it” (Article 47) Furthermore, not only is the entity of Rojava, not even an internationally recognized state by any measure, illegal, but Western support of it violates sections of the UN Charter. Article 2 asserts that all UN member states must “refrain…from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” which is relevant since this illegal entity is within the “domestic jurisdiction” of the Syrian state. Adding to this, under Article 51, Syria has the right to engage in “individual or collective self-defense” against such entities or attacks by Western or Gulf-backed terrorists. Creation and maintenance of this illegal entity does not fall within the purview of Article 73 as its existence does not promote “international peace and security” by any reasonable measure. Putting Rojava in context and the reality of “divide-and rule” tactics It is important, before closing this article, to provide appropriate historical and geopolitical context to more accurately understand this subject. Stephen Gowans provides this to an extent. He notes that numerous US politicians, including but not limited to Joe Biden, have floated the idea of dividing Iraq into “Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish states,” as the US occupation authority organized elections along sectarian lines, with most Iraqis opposing such partition, and only a slim majority in Northern Iraq favoring such division. He adds that in the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians provided “aid to the Kurds” to fight the Republic of Iraq headed by Saddam Hussein, that the Kurds have waged a “struggle for autonomy” for which the “Turkish state has waged war to annihilate,” but the US does not support their struggle by any means. With such dynamics, it comes as no surprise that the FARC sent a message of solidarity to the PKK and Kurds. It is worth noting that after the US invasion in 2003, things changed for the Kurds in Northern Iraq who had already “carved out an enclave that was protected by a no-fly zone backed by a U.S.-led coalition” after 1990.2 The Kurds became, as one Reuters article claimed, “more powerful” and are now expanding their territory. The support for the “good” Kurds, not the “bad” pro-Syrian government Kurds, is part of US meddling in the country. There has been previous US support for the Syrian National Council (SNC), a vehicle for the Muslim Brotherhood, along with falsely “moderate” Syrian opposition groups/terrorist organizations. More recently this manifested itself in the Free Idlib Army (FIA), a division of the FSA which would theoretically fight “jihadist groups and pro-government forces in [the] northwestern Idlib province” even as it faces likely targeting from such “al-Qaida-linked factions,” even though it has coordinated with them before. The FIA entity, consisting of 30,000 to 35,000 people, is undoubtedly, as one analyst put it, “100 percent an American project,” with weaponry, financial aid, and more, funneled through Müşterek Operasyon Merkezi (MOM), an operations center based in Turkey, operated by the CIA with the supervision of the Turks. Such destabilization measures in the country will continue even with the “de-escalation deal” signed by Russia, Turkey and Iran, the latter of which has “joint industrial projects in the fields of cement, tractors, buses and trucks assembly, cables production lines, pharmaceuticals, and dairy products” with Syria. The plans to break-up Syria fit-in with imperial logic. The country’s government is anti-imperialist, even participating in a “celebration held by the Russian forces, working in Syria at Hmeimem base, on the 72nd anniversary of the victory over Nazism,” as they want to show that they remember their history, with Assad recognizing this in a recent interview, saying that “without the victory of the Soviet Union, the Normandy landings for Western states wouldn’t have been possible.” However, there is a further reason for support of the “good” Kurds by the Western states. It has to do with the oil and gas resources in the region. Of course, this in and of itself is not the only reason for the imperialist destabilization of the country and region, which revolves around putting in place more friendly governments that don’t buck destructive Western agendas. Rojava has set up “ministries dealing with the economy, agriculture, natural resources and foreign affairs” which isn’t surprising since the region, even as humanitarian imperialist Human Rights Watch, admitted years ago, is “resources rich,” with petroleum (“oil”) reserves, cotton, and grains.3 According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), just north of Rojava is the Southeast Anatolian Basin which extends for 32,100 square mile area, containing the Silurian Dadas Shale, which has had “about 100 oil field discoveries to date,” specifically under exploration by “the Turkish national petroleum company, TPAO, and international exploration companies.” This doesn’t necessarily show imperial objectives, but only Turkish ones. A map overlay of an EIA map and the claimed territory of illegal entity of Rojava, shows that oil and natural gas pipelines snake through it, including one north from Aleppo, and others going through the heart of the territory in Northeast Syria where there is also a concentration of oil and gas fields. ExxonMobil, along with Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Total SA, and BP, showed interest in Iraqi Kurdistan, with a registered branch office in the region, and signed, in 2011, six production sharing contracts “covering more than 848,000 acres” in the region, with Rex Tillerson, the current US Secretary of State, having a role in, as one article put it, “placing the company’s financial interests above the American goal of creating a stable, cohesive Iraq.”4 The agreements that ExxonMobil made were strongly opposed by the Iraqi government. Even though ExxonMobil pulled out of half its holdings in 2016, like other companies had years before due to violence in the region, it would be no surprise that they want to exploit the oil in Syria, whether or not what Nafeez Ahmed says on the subject has any degree of validity. A conclusion While Turkey recently threatened “military action against Syrian Kurdish fighters allied with the United States,” buttressing their “public anger to the U.S. move to arm the Kurds,” even as the US stands by Turkey and Mattis declared that “we do not ever give weapons to the PKK. We never have and never will,” the Syrian government is caught in the middle.5 They are surrounded by enemies on many sides, thankful for the help from the Iraqi, Iranian, and Russian governments, along with Hezbollah, as they fight to defend their state sovereignty. While some may cry with distress that I don’t stand with the “revolutionary” Kurds, it should be clear that their struggle, as it stands now, would not be possible without support from Western capitalists. To be even more straightforward, Rojava would not be in existence without the diplomatic and military support of Western capitalists and undoubtedly an illegal entity. When it comes to the PKK, they have abandoned the pretense of Kurdish nationalism and are in a sense, working with Rojava, so, I’d put them in the same category of non-support. To be clear, the “good” Kurds are not fascist in any form, but could be put into the category of deluded and easily manipulated “revolutionaries.” As for the Kurds in general, I do not stand against them like the Turkish government in their never-ending anti-Kurdish war, which has raged against the PKK since 1978, but rather stand with those who ally themselves with the respective Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian governments in a united struggle against terrorism and Western imperialism.6 The “good” Kurds can say they are independent and are simply opportunist, but that is clearly naive. As this article has shown, they are part and parcel of the Western imperialist “divide-and-rule” strategy to break-up the region into “manageable” areas for the global capitalist class. It is not possible to support these “good” (by Western standards) Kurds and support the Syrian government. Such goals are inherently contradictory, since support of those Kurds shows that one is actually supporting imperial efforts, whether they like it or not. The alternative is a much better one: solidarity with the “bad” (pro-Syrian government) Kurds, along with the Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi governments against terrorism. The same goes for standing with these governments against imperialist efforts, as one should extend the same solidarity to the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, and the DPRK, for example. As for powerful world states like Russia and China, both of which are capitalist in their own way, people should be critical. However, it is best to not declare wildly that they are “imperialist,” a term which, when applied to them, distorts the issue of Western imperialism and muddies the waters, leaving one to engage in over-complicated “solidarity” efforts that help no one, anywhere in the world. In the end, the next steps forward are up to everyone out there reading this and especially the international “left” which needs to get its act together with a strong message of international solidarity with governments (and peoples, but not the “good” Kurds) under attack, not division on countries such as Syria. * The Economist, “Assad on the offensive,” February 13, 2016; The Economist, “Too many holes to last,” March 3, 2016; Wladimir van Wilgenburg, “U.S.-Backed Kurds to Assad Forces: ‘Surrender or Die’,” The Daily Beast, August 23, 2016. There have only been certain offers of support to the “good” Kurds by the Syrian government to fight Daesh while still rejecting proposals by Syrian Kurdish figures that flies in the face of “adherence of…the Syrian Kurds to national unity and the state’s sovereignty and their rejection of foreign dictates.” * Isabel Coles and Stephen Kalin, “In fight against Islamic State, Kurds expand their territory,” Reuters, October 10, 2016. * Virginia N. Sherry, “Syria: The Silenced Kurds,” Human Rights Watch, October 1996, Vol. 8, No. 4 (E);  The Economist, “Striking out on their own,” October 29, 2014. * Andrew E. Kramer, “Iraq Criticizes Exxon Mobil on Kurdistan Oil Pursuits,” New York Times, November 12, 2011; Jenna Krajeski, “Iraqi Kurdistan vs. Big Oil,” Slate, 2014; UPI, “Exxon oil deal with Kurds shakes Iraq,” November 11, 2011; Dmitry Zhdannikov, Isabel Coles and Ned Parker, “Special Report: How Exxon helped make Iraqi Kurdistan,” Reuters, December 3, 2014; Missy Ryan and Steven Mufson, “How Exxon, under Rex Tillerson, won Iraqi oil fields and nearly lost Iraq,” Washington Post, January 9, 2017; Patrick Cockburn, “Exxon’s deal with the Kurds inflames Baghdad,” The Independent, December 9, 2011; UPI, “Iraq’s oil rift deepens over Exxon move,” February 15, 2013; Stephen Synder, “How a Rex Tillerson oil deal nearly sparked an Iraqi-Kurdish war,” PRI, Jan. 5, 2017; Jen Alic, “Exxon Mobil, BP face off in Iraq-Kurd oil conflict,” Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 2013; Peg Mackey, “Exxon breaks silence over Kurdistan oil talks,” Reuters, February 27, 2012; Martin Michaels Follow, “Kurds Assert Sovereignty, Push for Oil Deal with Exxon,” MintPress News, June 25, 2012; Kadhim Ajrash and Khalid al-Ansary, “Iraq Warns Exxon on Kurdish Deals Amid Plans for BP Development,” Bloomberg News, January 27, 2013; Nayla Razzouk, Bradley Olson and Kadhim Ajrash, “Exxon, BP Evacuate Iraq Workers as Oil Drilling Continues,” Bloomberg News, June, 19, 2014. * Kareem Fahim and Adam Entous, “Turkey threatens military action against U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish fighters,” Washington Post, May 10, 2017. * If the circumstances were different and the “good” Kurds had asked for direct support from Russia, China, and the Syrian government, instead going directly to grinning Western imperialists, then I would be inclined to engage in international solidarity with them. http://clubof.info/

[chaberkowepole]

My country is not a question.

Vatniks and tankies can't get over the fact that Finland, the Baltic states and Poland still exist (and are much better off without Russia)…. They dream of the day when Russia will re-invade these countries, and if that ever happens you can bet your bottom dollar that vatnik and tankie clowns everywhere will be supporting the imperialism of Russia's ruling class, blaming the victims, mindlessely repeating the Kremlin's propaganda and cheerleading their war crimes from afar. That's one reason why vatniks and tankies also hate NATO, because joining NATO is what prevents Russia from invading….

[gloriousbanditcashpurse]

🙏🙏🌹🌹🇺🇦🇺🇦Slava Ukraini! How will Russia's war with Ukraine end? Here are 5 possible outcomes : 1. it's widely expected that Russian President Vladimir Putin, loathing Ukraine's current pro-Western government and its aspirations to join the EU and NATO, wants to install a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. 2. Any patchy control over Ukraine by Russia could lead to some kind of partitioning of the country, particularly as Russia becomes firmly entrenched in eastern Ukraine — particularly in the Donbas region where it recognized the independence of two pro-Russian republics ahead of its invasion of the wider country. 3.Ukrainians would continue to fight against any puppet regime, with the conflict descending into an insurgency with those Ukrainians left in the country attempting to topple any such regime by any means available. Ukrainians will resist long and hard even if the formal military battles end.Russia would realize it has "once again fought an unwinnable war. 4. It remains highly unlikely Russia would launch direct military attacks against NATO forces, given that's understood by NATO to be a tripwire for a broader war ... but support for Chechen terrorist attacks into frontline NATO states delivering all these weapons? That's another matter. NATO would be unlikely to respond directly with military strikes against a nuclear power; the only way to prepare is greater intelligence efforts to prevent or at least blunt the effectiveness of the efforts, 5.An unequivocal withdrawal of Russian armed forces from Ukraine would be best possible outcome for the country in its dire situation.Putin would be prevented from toppling Kyiv's government and establishing a puppet regime, while "the determination and skill of the Ukrainian resistance forces a stalemate on the battlefield that favors the defenders,Kremlin realizes that Russia "will pay an exorbitant price" for its invasion of Ukraine and, facing the prospect of a long and costly slog in Ukraine, coupled with economic collapse and diplomatic isolation, Putin would order a withdrawal of his troops. Long live Ukraine! 🇺🇦🇺🇦🌹🌹🙏🙏 https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca2cpbTLqcb/?utm_medium=tumblr

[gloriousbanditcashpurse]

🙏🙏🌹🌹🇺🇦🇺🇦Slava Ukraini! How will Russia's war with Ukraine end? Here are 5 possible outcomes : 1. it's widely expected that Russian President Vladimir Putin, loathing Ukraine's current pro-Western government and its aspirations to join the EU and NATO, wants to install a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. 2. Any patchy control over Ukraine by Russia could lead to some kind of partitioning of the country, particularly as Russia becomes firmly entrenched in eastern Ukraine — particularly in the Donbas region where it recognized the independence of two pro-Russian republics ahead of its invasion of the wider country. 3.Ukrainians would continue to fight against any puppet regime, with the conflict descending into an insurgency with those Ukrainians left in the country attempting to topple any such regime by any means available. Ukrainians will resist long and hard even if the formal military battles end.Russia would realize it has "once again fought an unwinnable war. 4. It remains highly unlikely Russia would launch direct military attacks against NATO forces, given that's understood by NATO to be a tripwire for a broader war ... but support for Chechen terrorist attacks into frontline NATO states delivering all these weapons? That's another matter. NATO would be unlikely to respond directly with military strikes against a nuclear power; the only way to prepare is greater intelligence efforts to prevent or at least blunt the effectiveness of the efforts, 5.An unequivocal withdrawal of Russian armed forces from Ukraine would be best possible outcome for the country in its dire situation.Putin would be prevented from toppling Kyiv's government and establishing a puppet regime, while "the determination and skill of the Ukrainian resistance forces a stalemate on the battlefield that favors the defenders,Kremlin realizes that Russia "will pay an exorbitant price" for its invasion of Ukraine and, facing the prospect of a long and costly slog in Ukraine, coupled with economic collapse and diplomatic isolation, Putin would order a withdrawal of his troops. Long live Ukraine! 🇺🇦🇺🇦🌹🌹🙏🙏 https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca2S1hkPoBA/?utm_medium=tumblr