Colonialism
Imperial Dilemmas
It is an organization clothed in power. From its ranks comes a disproportionate share of the United States establishment – Presidents, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, captains of industry, generals, professors, princes of the earth. Its real estate holdings are worth billions, its buildings are conspicuous in the choicest districts of great cities and small towns. Its art collection is beyond price. Its leaders sit in the councils of state, of war, of finance, and of culture, direct armies, order their global affairs to their liking; their counsel is sought, their word is heeded. It has been powerful for centuries, and owes its ultimate allegiance to the British Crown.
On the other side of the equation are the sworn enemies of this powerful entity. Emancipated, but only just, from discarded colonialism, they are black and brown, fighters for freedom in some of the most downtrodden and exploited backwaters of empires gone by. They are poor, desperately so, and still they feed the hungry, bless the lonely, comfort the lepers. And today, they have risen in revolt against the imperialist dominance of this metropolitan entity in defense of their own values and their own way of life. This revolt is complicated, because these black and brown defenders of their own culture depend on a constant stream of money from the American center to fund themselves. Indeed, they are willing to cut off the stream of money that keeps them in bondage to alien ideas perilous to their indigenous way of life.
Colonialism | Imperialism
All we take for granted has been built on genocide
I experienced an odd sensation today as I was on the subway today. Today was Columbus Day but I had to go in to work for part of the day anyway. The book I am currently reading is King Leopold's Ghost, a pretty horrifying history of the Congo under colonialism.
Reading about colonial genocide in Africa on Columbus Day. Had a kind of irony to it.
I have been ambivalent, in the litteral meaning of the word, towards Columbus Day for years now. I celebrate America and Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World" because the result of his discovery and the ultimate founding of America is that my family, myself included, is alive and thriving today. Without America, my family would have been exterminated in the genocide of Nazi Germany if not before that in the genocide of the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and later Stalin's genocide in the Soviet Union.
But I am reminded every Columbus day of the genocides on which the founding of America was based. My family had a refuge from genocide because of a previous genocide committed against the natives of America. How's THAT for ambivalence?
King Leopold II set out to turn the entire Congo basin into his own personal colony. It wasn't a colony of Belgium until later. It was a colony held by a single man. According to some estimates, ten million people were killed so that one man could make the modern equivalent of $1 billion. Those people were killed to keep costs down in production first of ivory, then of rubber. Eventually, outrage from Britain, the US, France and Germany led to the transfer of the Congo from Leopold to Belgium...without much change in the genocidal practices.
Colonialism | Columbus Day | Congo | Genocide | history | holocaust | King Leopold
22 Years Later, Bhopal claims another victim
Twenty two years after losing his parents and 5 siblings to Union Carbide's criminal negligance at Bhopal, India, activist Sunil Kumar Verma has committed suicide after fighting for years with paranoid schizophrenia an illness which affected many Bhopal survivors.
Meanwhile, Union Carbide and its successor, Dow Chemical, has largely gotten off scott free.
From the International Capaign for Justice in Bhopal:
On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal. In 1999, local groundwater and wellwater testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected. Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits.[2]Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women.[3] In 2001, Michigan-based chemical corporation Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide, thereby acquiring its assets and liabilities. However Dow Chemical has steadfastly refused to clean up the site, provide safe drinking water, compensate the victims, or disclose the composition of the gas leak, information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims.
Accountability | Catastrophes | Child Abuse | Colonialism | Companies | Culture of Corruption | Empire | Environment | Human Rights | News | Pollution | Poverty
Franz Fanon explains Dave Chappelle's departure from Comedy Central, posthumously
These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.
Blaxploitation | Celebrity | Colonialism | Comedy | Culture | Entertainment | Oppression | Political Compass | Politics | Popular Culture | Race | Racism | Stand-up Comedy | TV
Frantz Fanon obviously wrote this before McDonald's colonial empire
By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependences This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations during the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective. Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine drive the native more and more to open, organised revolt. The necessity for an open and decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by the great majority of the people. Those tensions which hitherto were non-existent come into being. International events, the collapse of whole sections of colonial empires and the contradictions inherent in the colonial system strengthen and uphold the native's combativity while promoting and giving support to national consciousness.
Business | Colonialism | Culture | Economics | Politics | Poverty | Travel/Tourism
