23 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
    1. contemporary radical thinkersare more likely to see Enlightenment thought as the ultimate inreceived authority, as an intellectual movement whose mainachievement was to lay the foundations of a peculiarly modern formof rational individualism that became the basis of “scientific” racism,modern imperialism, exploitation, and genocide

      second and third order effects of the Enlightenment movement...

  2. Jul 2022
    1. Meanwhile, in Ghana, where a defense cooperation agreement was signed between the two countries in May 2018, the United States had initially said that it was merely creating a warehouse and an office for its military, which then turned out to mean that the United States military was taking charge of one of the three airport terminals at Accra airport and has since used it as its base of operations in West Africa. “From the experience of Ghana, we know what it is,” M’membe told me, while speaking about the American plan to make an office in the U.S. Embassy in Zambia. “It is not [very] different from a base. It will slowly but surely grow into a full-scale base.”

      They already have a base in Ghana, as the base to monitor other African countries and social movements. US imperialism and other forms of oppressive regimes are all gearing up to divide Africa between themselves. The violence of taking over resources will have negative consequences of the well-being of an already fragile population in places like Congo.

  3. Dec 2021
    1. A sharp rise in reported active volcanoes immediately post-WW II was followed by another steep increase in the early 1950s that has no obvious relationship to historic events.

      'No obvious relationship to historic events' is blatantly inaccurate here. The US military was active in the Pacific for the entirety of this time frame reestablishing the power in the Pacific US colonies. It naturally would follow that volcanic activity would be reported at higher rates as military vessels were combing the area.

  4. Oct 2021
    1. The US military is bigger and more costly than the next ten countries combined. It is patently absurd to think that it is Russia or China, not the US that is setting the world stage militarily.

      Propaganda have is think US is the peace force Russia & China the bullies, while it's the 1 vs 10.

    2. The US is not only an Empire, it is the biggest and most powerful Empire the world has ever seen. It has 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and it bends other countries to its will through sanctions and war. It has interfered to subvert the democratic processes more than 50 times in Latin America alone.

      Why is US a great unchallenged imperial?

  5. May 2021
    1. Pratt, then CEO of Pfizer, feared that manufacturers in developing countries would compete with companies like his for these new markets. Along with other business leaders, he encouraged U.S. officials in the 1970s and early 1980s to integrate the defense of intellectual property into U.S trade policy.

      IP rights is war with other means.

  6. Apr 2021
    1. Unfortunately, there is some urgency to this effort. As Shashi Tharoor writes in his book Inglorious Empire (2018), over the past 30 years, there has been a tremendous bout of collective amnesia, espeically in the UK, about the history of empire and its consequences. Into this vacuum, revisionist historians of the worst kind like Niall Ferguson have capitalized on historical blind spots of people living today to make an absurd case for the benefits of empire. This cannot be allowed to happen. Tharoor believes that one of the best bulwarks against this erasure is to do the work of inquiry and to make the history of empire accessible and apparent to the widest audience. It is into this effort that I submit my work. John Company is an unsparing portrait that hopefully will give its players a sense of the nature of empire and the long half-life of its cultural production. It is certainly not the only way to make a game about empire, but I hope that it does its part in adding to our understanding of that subject and its continued legacy.
  7. Mar 2021
  8. Sep 2020
    1. my own country

      Funny (but also extremely sad) how Franklin talks about traveling in “the East” in general, but then says here that he is traveling back to”his own country”. It implies that “the East” is all one country or at least that specificities when it comes to everything foreign to him isn’t important.

  9. Jul 2019
    1. There is much to be proud of here, especially those clear-sighted Britons who refused mythmaking and insisted on solidarity with those at the receiving end of exploitation and dispossession, whatever their skin colour.

      Look at imperialism and empire from this perspective.

  10. Apr 2019
    1. This pattern would be reproduced in the colonies, and indeed in post-Independence America, where the independent small farmers who were supposed to be the backbone of a free republic faced, from the beginning, the stark choice of agrarian capitalism: at best, intense self-exploitation, and at worst, dispossession and displacement by larger, more productive enterprises.

      This goes to the question of the relationship between the rise of agrarian capitalism and imperialism.

  11. Dec 2018
    1. Today, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s Annual Conference with representatives of two open education projects that depend on Creative Commons licenses to do their work. One is the OER publisher Siyavula, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among other things, they publish textbooks for use in primary and secondary school in math and science. After high school students in the country protested about the conditions of their education – singling out textbook prices as a barrier to their learning – the South African government relied on the Creative Commons license used by Siyavula to print and distribute 10 million Siyavula textbooks to school children, some of whom had never had their own textbook before. The other are the related teacher education projects, TESSA, and TESS-India, which use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license on teacher training materials. Created first in English, the projects and their teachers rely on the reuse rights granted by the Creative Commons license to translate and localize these training materials to make them authentic for teachers in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings of sub-Saharan Africa and India. (Both projects are linked to and supported by the Open University in the UK, http://www.open.ac.uk/, which uses Creative Commons-licensed materials as well.) If one wakes up hoping to feel that one’s work in the world is useful, then an experience like this makes it a good day.

      I think contextualizing Creative Commons material as a component in global justice and thinking of fair distribution of resources and knowledge as an antidote to imperialism is a provocative concept.This blog, infojusticeorg offers perspectives on social justice and Creative Commons by many authors.

  12. Aug 2018
    1. But whatever the particular ideological basis, every "developed" country believed in the acceptability of higher civilizations ruling lower ones
  13. Oct 2017
    1. He now intervened to defend imperialism, saying in tones of almost comic reverence, that it had accomplished things that natives couldn’t have done for themselves. It had taught them, among other things, he said, how to appreciate the cuneiform and hieroglyphics of their own traditions

      Imperialism is a huge part of the formation of some of the large empires that we study throughout history. While Said is saying that the man speaking is defending imperialism i think he is portraying a part of it that can be very destructive. The man talks about how these people who may or may not be a large empire have decided that the native peoples are in need of their help whether or not it has actually been asked for. also, how can you teach a people more about their own writings if they are in fact the ones that wrote it?

  14. Sep 2017
    1. : Trump's 2017 U.N. speech trans

      Advocates for strong nation states as a way to elevate the human conditions. Argues that the UN post-WWII has been continually rigged against America. Smaller nations have broken the international system.

      • Uses the word "sovereignty" 22 times — Voyant textual analysis.
      • Nationalist document.
    1. Advocates for strong nation states as a way to elevate the human conditions. Argues that the UN post-WWII has been continually rigged against America. Smaller nations have broken the international system.

      • Uses the word "sovereignty" 22 times — Voyant textual analysis.
      • Nationalist document.
    1. Calling people out using the constructionist ideals — The American government is not living up to their high ideals.

      Poetry as a way to express frustration when there is no way to go up against actual US military power. A weapon of the weak; a powerful message.

    1. This document informs the way Americans have seen themselves since the beginning of the twentieth century.

      Interventions are presented as idealistically noble and undeniably moralistic. Instead of recognizing the complexities and consequences of intervention, we continue to propagate intervention as an ideological imperative

      We take on the domestic issues of other nations without being invited to take part. We identify as the prevailer of freedom and democracy when these are just ideals that we aspire to, sometimes missing the mark just as terribly as the nations we seek to guide and coerce.

    1. Although the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was essentially passive (it asked that Europeans not increase their influence or recolonize any part of the Western Hemisphere), by the 20th century a more confident United States was willing to take on the role of regional policeman.

      While the Monroe Doctrine has been around since 1823, it was unenforceable. Now America can back up their assertions.

  15. Jul 2016
    1. Crimes against women Can the licence to kill be revoked? “Honour killings”

      "In 2015, 1096 women in Pakistan died in 'honour killings'" – That is bad. What is bad, though, about pointing our finger at places where institutionalized misogyny may arguably be worse than in our community is that it helps discount the institutionalized misogyny in our own social order by comparison. And it's that self-satisfying comparison that helps make us be content with consuming outrage over conditions elsewhere instead of being outraged by conditions here that we can work to change straight away.

      On top of that, using special vocabulary like "honour killings" makes us understand the place and people we assign it to as irreconcilably different from us. This comes as rape and murder of women committed by men in our own community are motived by a similar sense of ownership of women -- a.k.a. honour. It is our resulting sense of self and other that makes our weekly drone bombings of people in Pakistan register less with us. In other words, we are less outraged by the regular killing of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, sisters and brothers in Pakistan by our drones and are less prone to become active against that than we care about a slain lion. Because turning people in Pakistan into foreigners by assigning special vocabulary like "honour killing" makes us unable to mourn their death the same way we mourn the death of an animal or the death of people in places we understand as familiar.

  16. Jun 2016
    1. The image on the left is obviously drawn by a pro imperialist because it depicts the Philippine independence as an ugly, ignorant and uneducated person. America, portrayed by Uncle Sam, appears to be a good caretaker of the Philippines as to suggest that taking control over their country would wind up giving them civilizationg and education. The image on the right was probably drawn by a anti-imperialist because of how the new territories of the United States look uneasy with the teachings of Uncle Sam. Also the other non american countries look like they have not achieved since being "taught" by Uncle Sam. They are working bad jobs, uneducated and not allowed inside the school. The artist who drew this portrayed this as a precaution to the 4 new territories of the U.S because they might want to think twice about letting America have control over them.