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Showing posts from April 17, 2022

The UN and the Cultural Genocide

[Raphael] Lemkin “ breaks genocide into three types : physical, biological, and cultural. He recognized that the events and processes of genocide, which culminate in the loss of a national, racial, religious, ethnic, or political group in whole or in part, could manifest in multiple ways, for different reasons, and include multiple modes of destruction of the group and its members besides the loss of life. Each type manifests differently, but the end result of each is the same: an irreparable and tragic loss of a culture that carries further implications of their shifted future.  The gruesome and violent physical forms of genocide raise the hairs on our sensibilities, and the biological forms tug on our heartstrings with broken families and mistreatment of women, yet both of these horrible forms of genocide occur as events making them both identifiable with an end. The process of cultural genocide, the grouping left out of the legal definition, is a large scale deletion of a culture. T

Winston Churchill, Imperial Monstrosity

I don’t like Tariq Ali, but the topic is one of my favourites. In his Preface, Tariq Ali makes clear that he does not support toppling Churchill’s statues wherever they stand—but rather, a deeper battle on the field of historiography, against a consensus that “appears hegemonic but remains vulnerable.” This is the context in which  Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes  is written—and in which, if I’m any judge at all, it succeeds admirably. Timidity of a ‘radical’. What about opposing all statues, be it of Churchill, Thatcher, Lenin or Chavez? A review of Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

France, a Settler Postcolony?

“ In this perverse upending of the very meaning of decolonization, to decolonize France is to rid the nation of the immigrants who are “colonizing” it . Paradoxically, the most vocal advocates of decolonization today are not formerly colonized subjects, but the nativist guardians of the borders of France against the purported invasion of immigrants.”

An Avoidable War?

A leftist detaching the economy and sociology from politics and geopolitics. Is this an approach to counter the liberal and conservative approaches? Maintaining or expanding U.S. hegemony. Yes, but what does that hegemony consist of? What does drive it? Yet it is still worth a read.

‘The Image’ in Islamic Jurisprudence and Art

Can art, and the differences in opinion on it between the Arab and the Western worlds, really explain the violence between the two sides? Are not these attitudes, at odds with one another regarding the depiction of the Prophet, merely a pretext for conflicts with other underlying motivations? Those who endeavor to incite this violence, do they use religion, the Prophet, and images, among other things, to cement their dominance over their local environments? Does successful globalization, wherever the case may be, not exacerbate the pressure on cultural, artistic, and ideological boundaries to adapt and expand? And, in turn, does this pressure not incite “adversarial” and “miserable” and “desperate” situations?  Examining the Past to Understand Present Controversy