[Visual History of Korea] Worlds first case of press oppression – The Korea Herald

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Ven. Jibong, the founder of Yeongcheon History Museum, speaks about Minganinswaejobo, the worlds first commercial newspaper, at Yonghwasa temple in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang Province.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

King Seonjo, the 14th king of the Joseon Kingdom, clearly understood that newspapers write the first draft of history, during what was to be the worlds first case of press oppression in 1577.

The first commercial newspaper printed with movable types was in Korea during the years of King Seonjo, said the Ven. Jibong of the Yeongcheon History Museum.

Following three months of the historic printing of the worlds first commercial newspaper in 1577, 30 entrepreneurs and their families mysteriously vanished from Seoul.

The Joseon Wangjo Sillok, or the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, which is the most detailed historical record of any kingdom in the world, listed on UNESCOs Memory of the World registry, recorded the historic feat by a group of entrepreneurs and their subsequent torture, followed by their disappearance in 1577.

The Nov. 24, 1577, edition of the Minganinswaejobo, the worlds first daily commercial newspaper printed with movable types, shows the use of both metal and wooden types. The wooden types print bolder while metal types print with finer lines.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

Because of that incident, records of King Seonjo are thinner than those of other kings, and are supplemented with contemporaneous notes, called Sukdam diary. It contains interactions with the king by Yi Yeul-gok, one of the two most prominent scholars of all of Joseon period, who taught kings.

The Joseon Kingdom released a daily handwritten government communique, called Jobo, which included vast information about the palace, and governmental personnel appointments for the entire country.

Representatives from regional areas posted in the capital city would hand-copy information relevant to their respective regions, allowing the news from the capital to be delivered to far corners of the land within days. It would be read by a select few educated scholars and officials who needed to stay informed of the kingdoms affairs.

Because the handwritten Jobo was written in extreme cursive, intended only for the esoteric and select few readers, it did not serve the wider public.

Even though Korea had already invented movable metal type printing during the Goryeo Kingdom (918-1392), the printing technology was the exclusive domain of the government and of Buddhist temples.

In 1577, a group of entrepreneurs, who had received official permission, started printing a daily newspaper summarizing the vast amount of communique from the government and translating the difficult cursive into a legible format.

The printed newspaper was quite popular among the government officials and noblemen, wrote Yi in the Sukdam diary.

It was about two months after that King Seonjo got wind of the news.

King Seonjo, who was sensitive to his less-than-perfect royal lineage, was enraged to learn that in addition to his governments handwritten daily communique, private newspapers were being printed, featuring news from the palace, including about the health of Queen Inseong, also known as Queen Dowager Gongui, the widow of King Injong, the 12th King of Joseon and King Seonjos uncle.

Even though private citizens were publishing the newspaper using a private printing press, with permission from two of the highest branches of government, a modern-day equivalent of the Chief of Staffs office and the Constitutional Court office, King Seonjo was furious that citizens were publishing their own newspaper.

Is it not the same as setting up another National Archive Bureau when people are selectively printing the news? King Seonjo was quoted as saying in the records.

King Seonjo ordered the metal and wooden types carved by the entrepreneurs for printing the newspaper to be confiscated.

He had all the involved parties imprisoned and suspects tortured to get to the bottom of who organized the so-called crime.

Since the rise of modern newspapers in the 19th century, historians have been searching for physical evidence of the first commercially and privately printed newspaper with movable type, but for centuries it was never located, until the 21st century.

Ven. Jibong, the director of Yeongcheon History Museum, is an art historian who identified the printed newspaper from 1577 when it appeared on an internet auction site trading in rare books.

The November 1577, newspaper, which is the worlds first daily commercial newspaper printed with movable types, shows several variations of the Hanja character horse () in varying sizes and style. Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

The newspaper clipping had references to Queen Inseong, the widow of King Injong.

Ven. Jibong knew about the queen through a painting that was commissioned and installed at the Dogapsa Buddhist temple in South Jeolla Province. The 1550 painting, which was commissioned in King Injongs honor by his widow, has since been stolen, and is now being kept at a temple in Kyoto, Japan.

The Placenta Chamber of King Injong, whose reign lasted only eight months and seven days, the shortest of all Joseon kings, was the other clue that led to the missing newspaper from 1577.

Two Hanja characters sang () are printed with movable wood type (top) and metal type (bottom) in this close-up image of the Nov. 24, 1577, publication of the worlds first daily commercial newspaper.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

The private newspaper that ran an article documenting Queen Inseongs health must have troubled King Seonjo. One day before her death, he asked for everyone to pray for the Queen, granted pardon to King Injongs uncle, and asked his ministers not to make any issue of the granting of the pardon in the future.

King Injongs uncle was killed by a brother of infamous Queen Munjeong, stepmother of King Injong. She was suspected of murdering King Injong and ruled the kingdom as the regent for her son, King Myeongjong, who succeeded King Injong, at age 12, as the 13th King of Joseon.

For many years, Queen Inseong had pleaded with King Seonjo to pardon her husbands uncle who was murdered under infamous Queen Munjeongs rule. But King Seonjo could not restore honor to a man whose family had feuded with Queen Munjeongs family, when Queen Munjeong enabled King Seonjo to become the first King of Joseon from a nonmain bloodline of the royal family.

Joseon-period handwritten government issued communique (right) and the worlds first daily commercial newspaper printed with movable types, the Minganinswaejobo, are on display side by side in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang Province.Photo 2020 Hyungwon Kang

By Hyungwon Kang (hyungwonkang@gmail.com)

Korean American photojournalist and columnist Hyungwon Kang is currently documenting Korean history and culture with images and words for future generations.

By Korea Herald (koreaherald@heraldcorp.com)

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[Visual History of Korea] Worlds first case of press oppression - The Korea Herald

Guest View: Rise of the Taliban and defeat of the U.S. – The Register-Guard

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M. Reza Behnam| Guest View

The most powerful military in the world has been defeated by men in sandals in a desperately impoverished country about the size of Texas with a population of more than 37 million. The Taliban victory has also dealt a blow to Americas pursuit of hegemony in the Middle East and to its power globally.

The chaos at the airport in Kabul, caused by Americas sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, has not shifted attention away from the fact that the Taliban have won a decisive military and political victory over the foreign invaders. In addressing the nation, President Joe Biden stated that he had factored in chaos in his withdrawal plans a remark that runs counter to his promise to adhere to a humane foreign policy.

Americas 20-year occupation of Afghanistan has ended. President George W. Bushs war on terror, which began with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, was built on lies. At home, the absence of truth has given rise to distrust of government and has further weakened the political and social fabric of the country.

Reflection has not been Americas, especially Washingtons, mtier. It is important to weigh the reasons behind Americas colonial adventure in Afghanistan and why it was destined to fail.

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The military mission in Afghanistan has been about defending U.S. geopolitical and economic interests in the region. It has not been, as we have been told, about democracy, freedom and defending human rights.

To understand Washingtons interest in Afghanistan, it is important to recognize the countrys strategic geographical location. Afghanistan at the crossroads of Asia connects the Middle East with Central Asia and India. It is near the Caspian Sea region, reported to contain the second largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.

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Afghanistan is well-situated for oil and gas pipelines pipelines that can bypass Iran and Russia. Since the 1980s, Washington has fashioned numerous pipeline plans that have been delayed or canceled due to political, military or financialproblems.

In 1979, the United States established a military presence in Afghanistan in order to keep the Soviet Union out of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. In that year, the United States armed and financed the mujaheddin which included young Pashtun Taliban to overthrow and fight the Kremlin-supported Communist government in Kabul. In so doing, the United States successfully lured the Russians into a 10-year military quagmire in Afghanistan.

The collapse of the Communist government in 1989 paved the way for Taliban control of Afghanistan in 1996. And in a twist of fate, Washington found itself fighting the Taliban forces it had helped create.

During the 1990s, the United States was willing to overlook the repressive practices of the Taliban government in order to maintain a presence in Central Asia and to move ahead with pipeline access through Afghanistan.

The United States has established military bases throughout the Arab Middle East, Israel, Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Forced to exit Afghanistan, the United States has been deprived of its Afghan base in Central Asia. A lingering question is whether Washington negotiated some future pipeline security with the Taliban before withdrawing.

The Taliban have derailed Washingtons hegemonic plans for the Middle East and Central Asia. China and Russia are now positioned to solidify their presence in the region and to acquire the pipeline access, which has been so coveted by the United States.

It is contrary to reason for Washington to claim that it has been in Afghanistan to benefit the people when tens of thousands of Afghans, who had nothing to do with 9/11, have suffered profoundly because President Bush decided to invade and build a nation transform the government and society in Americas image.

The oppression of women under former Taliban rule is often cited to defend Americas occupation of Afghanistan. U.S. bombs, however, have not discriminated they have been gender-neutral.

That 34 Afghan provinces fell to the Taliban without a fight is evidence that no guerrilla insurgency can win victories without popular support. As the only organized force fighting the American occupation, Afghans turned to the Taliban to provide peace, order and security. They chose the Taliban over foreign occupation. Ultimately, the United States was defeated by the injustice, corruption, inequality and violence brought by the war and their occupation of Afghanistan.

M. Reza Behnam, Ph.D., is a political scientist whose specialties include American foreign policy and the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.

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Guest View: Rise of the Taliban and defeat of the U.S. - The Register-Guard

The unjust war in Afghanistan and the continuing people’s struggle against oppression – Davao Today

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A friend and colleague jokingly asked if the Bangsamoro people are celebrating the August 15 victory of the Taliban over the US-trained Afghan National Defence Security Forces and the US-installed and backed Afghan puppet government.

Based on the social media posts and messages and the talks in the streets, I would say that fellow Bangsamoro are very careful of their opinions, lest they be accused of harboring terroristic ideas again.

Harboring terroristic ideals was an accusation hurled by President Rodrigo Duterte at the Meranaw people to justify the Philippine governments military airstrikes in Marawi City and his declaration of Martial Law in Mindanao in May 2017.

Not to mention that the Muslim communities here in the Philippines have been perenially accused of harboring terrorists, and during the Operation Enduring Freedom was dubbed as the second front of the war on terror which led to the deployment of US soldiers in Mindanao for military exercises on a rotational basis.

But how can we celebrate, when weve seen what we have been warning the world about during our protests against the US-led global war on terror, the consequent US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the continuing military occupation of Afghanistan? That this would only lead to un-peace and destruction of Afghanistan.

The International League of Peoples Struggle (ILPS), the network our group belongs to, has said that the fall of the US-installed and US-backed Ashraf Ghani regime not only exposed the defeat of US imperialism but also how unjust the US war and occupation was.

The US military invasion, occupation and intervention was unjust because the Afghan people bore the brunt of the military operations and encounters with the Taliban. There were 2.7 million Afghans who were forced to seek refuge in other countries while 4 million were internally displaced due to incessant military airstrikes in areas they believe were hideouts of the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network.

The US government created a condition for the Taliban to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Decades of political and economic intervention by the US government in Afghanistan has pushed the Afghan people to see the Taliban as their liberators. ILPS chair emeritus Jose Maria Sison even said that in the absence of a capable revolutionary party, the Taliban group played a progressive role in fighting imperialism and the brutal puppet regime.

There were numerous reports of civilian casualties and human rights violations during the whole decade of US military intervention. According to the Cost of War Project by Brown University, 157,000 people died throughout the US occupation of Afghanistan and civilian casualties reached 47,245.

The project also reported that the number of civilians killed due to military airstrikes by US forces and its allies has increased to 330% since 2017.

The Human Rights Watch had a report about civilians bearing the brunt of night raids by CIA-backed Afghan Strike Forces from the years 2017 to mid-2019 due to mistaken identity, poor intelligence or political rivalry.

In her book Drones and Targeted Killing, law professor and former deputy secretary-general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers Marjorie Cohn wrote that the US government has killed more civilians with the use of targeted killings drone strikes, manned bombers and military raids.

A United Nations data cited by the International NGO, Save the Children, showed that at least 26,025 children were killed or maimed in the years 2005-2019 and that this was due to the attacks on schools by military airstrike of the US and Afghan forces and suicide attacks by the Taliban insurgents.

It is important that we be reminded of these reports because until now, no one from the proponents or architects of the US-led invasion and military occupation in Afghanistan were held accountable. No tribunals were held for war crimes against the people of Afghanistan.

Ive been hearing from CNN the word democracy and the death of it due to the takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Was the US-controlled Afghan government democratic? Was the US invasion and decades of intervention in Afghanistan democratic?

Years of occupation and installing puppet regimes also failed to bring the much-touted democracy, development and genuine peace in the country.

According to the Asian Development Bank, people who live below the national poverty line in Afghanistan reached 47.3% out of 39 million last year while the unemployment rate was at 11.7%.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2020 Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs Overview, posted at the USAID website, 8.2 million people in Afghanistan are in need of emergency food and agricultural livelihoods assistance while 11 million Afghans are acutely and severely food insecure or lacked access to affordable and healthy food.

The continuing struggle against oppression

The news footage played over and over again in the US mainstream media of Afghans attempting to hold on to a US military plane as it took off from the Kabul airport does not only show the desperation of the Afghan people who figured in the US occupation and the puppet government to get out of Afghanistan and escape the Talibans reprisal.

To many, it only shows the true colors of the US government, that in times of crisis they are the first to get out of the country and leave all the mess behind. An opinion in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the US government had no treaty obligation to protect the Afghan government from its enemies.

Imperialist powers should be reminded that the Afghan people have long fought wars of aggression from the British and Russian empires to the Soviet Union and the US-led invasion and occupation. The persistence of the Afghan people will once again be tested under the Taliban government.

The Talibans history of imposing an ultra-conservative and often puritanical interpretation of Islamic laws, especially with women and minorities, is forever embedded in the minds of the Afghan people and the world as abusive and oppressive.

However, we should be reminded that not all Muslims adhere to these strict views, as there are several Islamic thoughts and schools of interpretations of Islamic laws. But we are united in the idea that Islam encourages Muslims to fight all forms of oppression and emphasizes justice for the people.

But we also cannot forgive the US government and its allies for using the propaganda of emancipating women, or for some was reduced to lifting the burqa, as the reason behind their invasion in 2001.

We are hopeful and, at the same time, wary of the Talibans assurance that there will be changes in their attitude towards women. Afghanistan has already experienced the liberation of women in the past and the strength of Afghan women in the struggle against colonialism and occupation.

In some conferences and speaking tours that I have participated in, which were protests against the US-led global war on terror, I have met Afghan refugees and activists who were critical of the Taliban regime but were also against the US-led invasion. They said that there were Afghan activists who had participated in the jihad (struggle) against the Soviet Union, but were critical of the Taliban and were threatened when they took over.

In Afghanistans history, it is the US government and other imperialist countries who benefited from the Taliban.They backed the Taliban in their fight against the Soviet Union, supported its previous regime in the 90s, and wooed the Taliban government into entering business contracts for the construction of oil pipelines, despite reports of abusive leadership and human rights violations.

That is why the Afghan people also need to watch out for negotiations made by the US government and the Taliban forces outside of what was laid down during their peace negotiations last year. The US and other imperialist countries have already benefited during the two decades of war in Afghanistan, securing contracts for reconstruction, defense and security, and mining.

I cannot help but suspect that US interests in the region are still protected. If the Afghan puppet government cannot deliver, the assumption is that the Taliban can.

Afghanistan is rich in minerals like coal, copper, natural gas, petroleum, gold, lithium, uranium, gold and rare earth elements. Add to this the Afghan people who are a potential productive force for agriculture and industry.

We should not be fooled by the for democracy mantra of the US government and its allies. We should open our eyes to the real terrorists and their wars of aggression in the name of profit and securing their political and economic interests.

The fight for democratic rights of the Afghan peoples should not be viewed in the lens of the occupying forces and imperialist countries but the Afghan people themselves. It is in the hands of Afghan people to truly fight for their genuine liberation.

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The unjust war in Afghanistan and the continuing people's struggle against oppression - Davao Today

Political thought The threat from the illiberal left – The Economist

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Sep 4th 2021

SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.

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Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress. It will not vanish in a puff of smoke. But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.

Nowhere is the fight fiercer than in America, where this week the Supreme Court chose not to strike down a draconian and bizarre anti-abortion law. The most dangerous threat in liberalisms spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as faades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America liberal has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling unsafe and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressedwith echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about. For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom upand it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control. By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

This difference in method has profound implications. Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competitionby, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing equitythe outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents. Individuals, not just groups, must be treated fairly for society to flourish. Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group. Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course. The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Milton Friedman once said that the society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. He was right. Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individualsand, in that, it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means. And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.

If classical liberalism is so much better than the alternatives, why is it struggling around the world? One reason is that populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supportersto the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribes excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen. Just look at Britain, where politics in the past few years was consumed by the rows between uncompromising Tory Brexiteers and the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.

In short, it is hard work to be a genuine liberal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when their last ideological challenger seemed to crumble, arrogant elites lost touch with liberalisms humility and self-doubt. They fell into the habit of believing they were always right. They engineered Americas meritocracy to favour people like them. After the financial crisis, they oversaw an economy that grew too slowly for people to feel prosperous. Far from treating white working-class critics with dignity, they sneered at their supposed lack of sophistication.

This complacency has let opponents blame lasting imperfections on liberalismand, because of the treatment of race in America, to insist the whole country was rotten from the start. In the face of persistent inequality and racism, classical liberals can remind people that change takes time. But Washington is broken, China is storming ahead and people are restless.

The ultimate complacency would be for classical liberals to underestimate the threat. Too many right-leaning liberals are inclined to choose a shameless marriage of convenience with populists. Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Dont worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.

Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve societys many problems without anyone resorting to coercion. Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release peoples creative energies. Classical liberals must rediscover their fighting spirit. They should take on the bullies and cancellers. Liberalism is still the best engine for equitable progress. Liberals must have the courage to say so.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The threat from the illiberal left"

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Political thought The threat from the illiberal left - The Economist

Afghanistan and the colonial project of feminism: dismantling the binary lens – EUROPP – European Politics and Policy

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Afghan women are not just victims of conflict but also of rhetoric.Ruhi Khan, ESRC Researcher at LSEs Media & Communication department, argues that we need to break away from binary viewpoints on Afghanistan, probe deeper into coloniality and the history of feminism in the global south and include it into the larger geo-political feminist epistemology.

A young woman just 27 years old was beaten to death in the centre of Kabul by a mob. Her crime? She called out a religious vendor (mullah) selling holy verses on paper which he promised were powerful spells promising the hearts desires. The mullah was agitated that a woman had challenged him and falsely accused her of desecrating the Holy Quran. Soon a mob joined the chorus and started pelting her with stones and sticks, kicking her and hitting her. They tied the badly beaten woman to a car and drove it around until she succumbed to her injuries. Her broken body was thrown along the riverbank and torched.

This was not a witch hunt in the remote hamlets of Afghanistan. Nor did this happen under the Taliban rule. This crime happened in March 2015 in the liberalised Afghanistan under the watch of the allied forces and close to the palace of a progressive President.

Farkhunda Malikzadas story is important to understand the perils of the binary viewpoint that the world has of Afghanistan. When America sold the justification for the war in 2001, women became the central focus. How the Afghan women were subjugated and oppressed by the Taliban made global headlines. Their only savour, we were told, were the Western forces that would set them free by establishing a government that looked out for the women and a rule of law that protected them. We were given only two choices oppression by the Taliban or freedom by the Western invasion. There was no room for an alternative.

Farkhunda was a student of Islamic law and wore the veil, but she was also brave enough to stand up to a man against what she believed were un-Islamic practices. The barbaric actions of the mob captured on video, the incompetence of the Afghan police who stood by and watched the attack, the indifference of the hundreds who cheered or mutely witnessed the atrocities unfold, the sheer brutality of this gendered violence shows that little had changed in Afghanistan when it is not looked at through the rose-tinted glasses of the Western aid agencies.

When America sold the justification for the war in 2001, women became the central focus.

Farkhundas killers were not the Taliban, but city folks from the custodian of a religious shrine to street vendors, from the Afghan police to a 16-year-old boy who was part of the bloodthirsty mob. Many did not don religious attire or sport turbans and long beards, but were clean shaven and wore jeans and tee shirts, some were educated and some grew up in a US-occupied Afghanistan with its liberal dose of womens rights. Yet they were culpable of committing a murder over a rumour. The new Afghan legal system failed to give Farkhunda justice.

However, in an unprecedented display of feminist solidarity, Farkhundas burial saw women carrying her coffin chanting We are all Farkhunda and over 1000 people both men and women attended the funeral. But the spectacle of her murder, the re-enactment of the crime, the twist and turns of the narratives around it, the global outrage (however meagre) propelled this story to be exploited by many for their own socio-political gains, with little focus on structural changes that could prevent another Farkhunda.

If Farkhundas murder teaches us one thing, it is that there are no binaries in Afghanistan: The West is not the saviour of Afghan women. And the Taliban is not the only monster.

If Farkhundas murder teaches us one thing, it is that there are no binaries in Afghanistan: The West is not the saviour of Afghan women. And the Taliban is not the only monster.

The binary thinking of the saviour and the monster can be traced to colonial discourses dominated by what is often termed the white saviour complex. This sentiment was clearly evident in the American First Lady Laura Bushs radio address to her country in November 2001: Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.

By terming the American military attack as heroic and a much-needed intervention to protect the women of Afghanistan from the men within their fold, the First Lady affirmed the subjectivity of the White western male saviour by exploiting the psychological subjugation of the Brown Afghans. Indeed, here the subjects of the Global South the Afghan women and girls are simply used as objects to confirm the White subjectivity through a sense of gratefulness to the White Saviour.

This also exemplifies a clash of civilisations discourse, which is aided by creating a visual palette in the form of photographs and videos that juxtapose the self with the Other. Womens oppression served as an excellent marker to constitute this visual binary. Images began floating in newsprint and television of Afghan women in short skirts alongside those now in full burqa, or of Western women enjoying a music concert with veiled young girls huddled together outside a closed school.

The struggles of the white, heterosexual, elite, western woman have gained currency as the only history of feminism setting itself up as a role model for the rest of the world. Any woman who does not fit this image is deemed oppressed and in need of saving, making her a white mans burden and the white feminists cause clbre. Hence it is important to deconstruct the normative western feminist notions of gender and bring into focus indigenous understandings of gender from the global south and include it into the larger geo-political feminist epistemology.

The struggles of the white, heterosexual, elite, western woman have gained currency as the only history of feminism setting itself up as a role model for the rest of the world

The image of the Afghan woman draped in the head-to-foot burqa became the justification of a military action. The idea that Afghan (read Muslim) women needed saving became the central focus. The identity of global south women is constructed through the western lens and their agency disavowed within a global discourse. This is highly problematic if not understood in a historical and contextual framework. It also reinforces a sense of Western arrogance that their way of life is superior and unchallenged. This binary of the West and global south is simplistic in its construction as it fails to consider that the West is also shrouded in intersectional structural inequalities and gendered violence.

Few understand the country of Afghanistan its demography, politics or culture. The US and the Taliban were not always pitched on opposite sides. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 got American presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supporting and arming the resistance fighters (mujahideen) who have now become the Taliban. In fact one of the USs closest ally was mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, infamous for throwing acid on the faces of women who did not wear the burqa, while the US turned a blind eye.

Many of the Afghan population live in villages and hamlets where the tribal leaders hold a huge sway. Occupation by one foreign force after another British, Russians, US and its allies has only fuelled a revival of extreme religious bigotry as a mode of what they term self-preservation. The foreign occupying army has been equated with liberal thought and the resistance against both has been building. The global discourse (or lack of) on Afghanistans economy and politics coupled with corruption and disregard for the rural poor has left a gaping hole that the militant Taliban filled.

To many women living in the remote mountainous hamlets of the ravaged country, food and healthcare are priorities over education and employment. Mini-skirts and music concerts are not the aspirational goals for many Afghan women. And not all women who wear the veil are subjugated. Making it the central focus of liberation of the Afghan women alienates those who find comfort behind the layers of the garment. Issues around womens education and employment opportunities were largely focussed on select cities while corruption and unfair practices in the government were widespread.

It is impossible to isolate gender from the many cultural and political intersections through which it is constituted and maintained, and it is therefore important to understand and include the complexities of compoundness to explore the diverse experiences of differently positioned women and to make visible the collaboration that exists between systemic gender violence and the power equations that exist between individuals and groups for or against feminist causes and their intersectional differences.

The binary of the white men saving brown women from brown men (as scholar Gayatri Spivak eloquently puts it) is a narrative that needs to be challenged as it erases the history of feminisms within the global south.

Independence belongs to all of us that that is why we celebrate it. Do you think, however, that our nation from the outset needs only men to serve it? Women should also take their part as women did in the early years of our nation and Islam. From their examples we must learn that we must all contribute toward the development of our nation and that this cannot be done without being equipped with knowledge. So, we should all attempt to acquire as much knowledge as possible, in order that we may render our services to society in the manner of the women of early IslamAfghan Queen Soraya Tarzi, 1926

These words of Soraya Tarzi (1899-1968), Queen consort to King Amanullah Khan but better known as the Human Rights Queen of Afghanistan, paved the way for a new Afghanistan in the 1920s. She was born in the Ottoman-controlled Syria to exiled parents Asma and Mahmud Beg Tarzi, who in the early 20th century returned to Afghanistan at the behest of King Habibullah and started the first modern newspaper- Seraj-ul-Akbhar. It gave voice to women under the banner Celebrating Women of the World, edited by Asma. Ideas of womens education and liberty were often discussed. King Habibullahs son Amanullah fell in love and married Soraya in 1913.

After Habibullahs assassination in 1918, Amanullah took to the throne and successfully defeated the British in the third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919. The newly liberated Afghanistan saw a new constitution one that also saw women being liberated from the regressive traditional cultural norms. Amanullah treated Soraya as a partner in his endeavours to modernise the country.

In a dramatic public event, the royal couple introduced the idea of popular feminism. King Amanullah made a powerful speech stressing that Islam did not ask women to wear the veil, at the end of which Queen Soraya publicly tore her veil. Many other women then followed suit. New reforms made wearing the veil optional in Afghanistan.

Reforms by Amanullahs government included abolishment of slavery and the banning of child marriage, polygamy, revenge killing and bride prices. Soraya was the first woman minister for education, started a school for girls and sent her two daughters to it. She also began the first womens magazine in Afghanistan called Ershad-I-Niswan (Guidance for Women). She founded a grievance centre for women suffering from domestic violence and created a special task force a kind of an all-women secret service- to monitor men who abused women. One of Amanullahs sisters founded a hospital and another started an organisation that supported women suffering from oppression. In the 1920s, none other than the Royal family of Afghanistan sowed ideas of feminism by leading from the front.

It is little wonder that women in Afghanistan earned the right to vote after the country won independence from Britain in 1919,one year before women in the United States were allowed at the polls and almost a decade before women in the UK gained the same voting rights as men. Amanullah also introduced a social insurance to provide pensions linked to old age and disability, sickness and maternity benefits and workers compensation (a decade before the US).

To encourage womens education, the royal couple helped facilitate 15 women to go to Turkey to study in 1928. In fact, the King and Queen received honorary degrees from University of Oxford during their tour of Europe in 1927-1928. However, this tour also backfired. It was widely suspected that the British leaked photographs of the tour to the traditionalists in Afghan villages, who used them to instigate the rural masses against the royal couple.

More reforms on the return and in particular a separation of the state and church (mosque in this case) and a Western judiciary (instead of the Shariah law) led to more angst against the monarchy by the traditionalists. Amanullah soon faced a coup by the tribal leaders and the royal family had to flee to Europe in 1929. Soon all their reforms were reversed and the new patriarchal ruler stripped women of their hard-earned rights.

Soraya and Amanullahs story and those of others like them are often lost in grand Western narrative of feminism that has always only visualised global south women as subjugated and oppressed, and men as tyrants and barbaric.

In 2020, Time magazine posthumously put Soraya Tarzi on the cover of the 1927 edition calling her a progressive royal acknowledging her contributions to the womens cause in Afghanistan. But Soraya and Amanullahs story and those of others like them are often lost in grand Western narrative of feminism that has always only visualised global south women as subjugated and oppressed, and men as tyrants and barbaric. The two Afghan Royals were forging a path of progress for women in Afghanistan, yet it was a journey cut short, not just by the religious bigots but also by the British whose political interests superseded women reforms.

It is heart-breaking to know that the generation of girls that grew up believing that they were free to pursue their dreams and realise their potential will now have to hide their degrees and give up their professions as their futures remain uncertain.

By occupying Afghanistan for two decades, the US, UK and allies are duty bound to save the Afghans. A deal has been struck between the Taliban and the US that benefits their political and economic interests, but does this include safeguarding the rights of women and the vulnerable not just on paper but in practice? What would be the consequences should the Taliban renege on its promises? Who will be held accountable?

The Western leaders who once rallied support for the invasion of Afghanistan on the womens liberation card, now seem to have abandoned those very women who were promised safety and security as they enrolled in education institutions, joined the workforce and took up political positions. Today as the expats flee, many natives are left behind, waiting to be killed.

As Taliban establishes its rule in Afghanistan, the future of the country is unpredictable and the situation for women is frightening. Many are expecting to be at the end of a barrel of a patriarchal gun both figuratively and literally. Remember Malala Yousufzai? The next one may not be a survivor.

We, as global citizens, need to rally our support, pressure our governments and the international agencies to protect the Afghan women and other vulnerable citizens. We need to open our borders and our minds to break through the binaries of rhetoric thrusted on us and demand a better outcome an outcome that enables an orderly transition, safeguards the vulnerable and does not turn back the clock on gender reforms.

Women in Afghanistan are counting on our support. We cannot abandon them now.

This article givesthe views of the author and does not represent the position of theMedia@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit

Image 1: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona via Unsplash

Image 2: Andre Klimke via Unsplash

Image 3: Isaak Alexandre Karslian via Unsplash

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Afghanistan and the colonial project of feminism: dismantling the binary lens - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy

Critical race theory bans in schools are making teaching harder – Vox.com

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This year, American history might look different in Iowa classrooms.

In early June, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill that restricts what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and at public universities, particularly when it comes to sexism and racism. It bans 10 concepts that Republican legislators define as divisive, including the idea that one race or sex is superior to another, that members of a particular race are inherently inclined to oppress others, and that the U.S. and Iowa are fundamentally racist or sexist.

The law, which is already in effect, has sparked confusion and distress among educators, some of whom say it is so broad and the language so ambiguous, they fear they might face consequences for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism in the context of US history.

Teachers need to know what the legislation means for us, and they have been asking, Is the district going to support us and have our back? Monique Cottman, whos taught elementary school and middle school for 15 years in the state, told Vox.

Cottman is a teacher leader with the Iowa City Community School District, a role that requires her to regularly coach about 50 teachers on classroom instruction strategies, curriculums, and lesson plans. This year, it involves the added work of creating a comprehensive list of FAQs for teachers about the new Iowa law because there are a lot of questions.

Since at least 2014, when students went to the school board to demand an ethnic studies course, Cottman and other teachers in the district have worked to make anti-racism part of the curriculum, but with the new law, a lot of the momentum they have built has been undercut. Teachers who would have thought about me last year arent listening to teachers like me at all because of fear, she said.

Cottman isnt alone in her predicament. Educators across the country are figuring out how to navigate laws like Iowas that have turned anti-racist education often lumped together under the catchall term critical race theory, an academic framework scholars use to analyze how racism is endemic to US institutions into a boogeyman. While critical race theory opponents fear that the framework places blame for inequality on all white people, proponents argue that their goal is to use the lens to identify systemic oppression and eradicate it. Educators who want to teach with an eye toward anti-racism say that their lessons simply reflect an honest history of the countrys founding and development including the contributions of and the discrimination against marginalized people which has traditionally been glossed over in textbooks and curriculums.

But in the past six months, seven other states Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, New Hampshire, Arizona, and South Carolina have already passed legislation similar to Iowas, and 20 others have introduced or plan to introduce similar legislation, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. Meanwhile, in states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, state boards of education and local school boards have denounced, if not totally banned, teaching critical race theory and/or the 1619 Project, a collection of essays that examines the foundational contributions of enslaved Black people to the US.

Teachers are already facing consequences, too. While debates over critical race theory were going on in the Tennessee state legislature, a high school teacher was fired after teaching Ta-Nehisi Coatess essay The First White President and playing the video of the spoken-word poem White Privilege. A Black principal in Texas was recently suspended without explanation after a former school board candidate complained that he was implementing critical race theory, promoting extreme views on race and the conspiracy theory of systemic racism.

In higher education, entire courses that grapple with inequity were dropped from course rosters or made optional. And even in states where anti-critical race theory legislation hasnt been passed, education leaders are facing pressure.

The first Black superintendent in a Connecticut district resigned after parents and community members complained to the school board that he was trying to indoctrinate students with critical race theory. (According to reports, he had been championing diversity and inclusion training and spoke out against conspiracy theories surrounding the US Capitol insurrection.)

The country is only just beginning to see this culture war play out, educators and curriculum specialists told Vox. On one hand, there will be many teachers, particularly in states where the bills havent passed, who will continue to do justice work in their classrooms, said Justin Coles, a professor of social justice education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But others are going to resort to glossing over key issues in our history that are deeply intertwined with race and racism, overlooking nuance.

While teachers like Cottman will continue to teach with an anti-racist lens despite these laws, more teachers are expected to be silenced. Because of the current social climate, Coles said, it will be more acceptable to manipulate the truth and denounce folks who make deep conversations about oppression part of their classrooms.

Ultimately, the laws, and the discussions around them, have created chaos for teachers who dont know what they should and shouldnt be teaching. A lot of the anti-racist discussions that educators had brought into the classroom following the uprisings of 2020, and even prior, could be in danger of being removed. And the people who will feel the greatest impact are students.

With these bans, learning will be incomplete since [children are] only being taught half-truths, Coles said. The classroom will become unsafe spaces for marginalized students since they cant discuss their lived experiences. These bans make it harder for our country to change.

The pushback to anti-racist teachings began shortly after last summers social justice protests that swept the country, when many Americans started to grapple with the racism embedded in institutions like policing. In August 2020, conservative activist Christopher Rufo declared a one-man war against critical race theory, appearing on Fox News and claiming that federal diversity trainings (which he wrongly identified as critical race theory) were dividing workers and indoctrinating government employees.

It didnt take long for then-President Donald Trump to seize on Rufos narrative, going as far as issuing an executive order that banned racial sensitivity training in the federal government. When Trump lost the presidential election a few months later, Republicans in state legislatures picked up the cause, drafting and introducing bills that placed limits on government agencies, public higher education institutions, and K-12 schools teaching harmful sex- and race-based ideologies.

At the core of these state bills is the desire to prevent discourse about Americas racist past and present. Last year, amid a deadly pandemic and social justice protests, students had questions about the police shootings of Black and brown civilians and why the coronavirus was disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, and teachers couldnt ignore talk about a president who threatened when the looting starts, the shooting starts. As Texas high school teacher Jania Hoover wrote for Vox this July, The reality is that kids are talking about race, systems of oppression, and our countrys ugly past anyway from media coverage to last summers protests to even this very controversy itself, my students are absorbing these conversations and want to know more.

The past year, and the social justice movements leading up to it, left a lot of teachers rethinking how they taught history, challenging the colonialist narratives long embedded in elementary and high school curriculums. For example, a third-grade textbook Cottman was required to use only tells a partial story of Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in Louisiana. Bridges was 6 years old when federal marshals escorted her and her mother into the school building as mobs of white people surrounded them, rioted, and yelled threats and racial slurs.

The textbook states that the marshals protected her from angry people who lined the streets and stood outside the school. It makes no mention of why those people were angry or who they were, leaving out the key context that white people fought for decades to keep Black children from schools because of the belief that Black people were inferior, a detail that Cottman needed to bring forward during classroom discussions.

Another story in a similar textbook tells about a girl who was kidnapped from Greece and sold into slavery in ancient Rome; according to the text, she chose to remain enslaved because her owners treated her well and they all felt like family. Students kept taking away that as long as slave owners are nice to their slaves, theres nothing wrong with slavery, Cottman said.

If teachers continue to do what theyve been doing, no one wins, Cottman added. They need to be interrogating why some of their lessons are problematic.

As bills opposing critical race theory made their way to state legislatures this spring, confusion over what the theory was and what the bills meant overshadowed Americans desire to have nuanced classroom discussions about race. A July Reuters/Ipsos poll found that fewer than half of Americans (43 percent) said they knew about critical race theory and the surrounding debates, with three in 10 saying they hadnt heard of it at all. Respondents were even less familiar with the New York Timess 1619 Project (24 percent). Yet a majority of Americans said they support teaching students about the impact of slavery (78 percent) and racism (73 percent) in the US. State laws banning critical race theory in public schools received less support (35 percent). On all fronts, there was a partisan divide, with Republicans more interested in banning talk about slavery, racism, and the teaching of critical race theory and the 1619 Project.

In Iowa, Cottman, also a co-founder of Black Lives Matter at School Iowa, says a handful of parents in support of the ban have already reached out to teachers about the 2021-22 curriculum, but they are not the majority. Parents in support of anti-racist education have also voiced their support at school board and community meetings.

But the vocal minority, coupled with the new law, weighs on teachers and administrators. Though Iowa City is known as the bluest part of the red state, Cottman says she has talked to a number of teachers who are fine with the curriculum as is; she has also spoken to those who are concerned about losing their jobs if they talk about race.

One group of high school teachers decided to stop teaching Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walkers short story The Flowers (a story about a young Black girl who comes across a dead body, presumably a Black man who had been lynched, while picking flowers in the woods) after parents were up in arms about it on social media, for fear of further controversy.

Last fall, Cottman says her school ordered 1,000 copies of Ibram X. Kendis book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You in an effort to improve their American history coursework. But once some parents got wind of the effort, the book became optional, most teachers chose to not use it, Cottman said.

Teachers in other states are also dialing it back. Joseph Frilot, a middle school humanities teacher, learned from his curriculum manager that all of the content he developed about Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement wont be part of his lessons this year in light of the Texas law that limits discourse on racism and sexism. A huge chunk of the curriculum that I created was about oppression and resistance, so all of that will be excluded from our curriculum, Frilot told EdWeek. Am I allowed to be the transparent and honest educator that Ive been over the years?

In Tennessee, where one of the first anti-critical race theory bills was passed, teachers have requested guidance on how they should reframe their lessons and leading class discussions. The guidance from the education department, released in August, clarifies that teachers can introduce topics like racism and sexism as part of discussion if they are described in textbooks or instructional material, but teachers remain concerned that the law limits them from teaching the true history of the state and country. The states guidance also lays out major consequences for schools and educators found in violation: Schools could stand to lose millions in annual state funds, and teachers could have their licenses denied, suspended, or revoked.

Some teachers, though, plan to keep anti-racist lessons alive despite these new laws. Cottman tells teachers that even under the new law they arent required to say anything to parents, nor are they obligated to solicit parents feedback before lessons, but she reminds them that it is vital to make sure that parents feel welcome and that two-way communication is established early in the school year. When teachers have expressed worry about their classroom libraries, Cottman said she tells them they do not need to remove any books from their classrooms. If theres an anti-racism book on the shelf, a student has the choice to read it.

Lakeisha Patterson, a teacher in Houston, said she plans to continue to talk about how African Americans were considered less than human, and the social justice caucus of the San Antonio teachers union is encouraging lessons that foster inclusion and nonwhite perspectives on history.

For many Black teachers, we arent even expressing financial concerns, Cottman said about the possibility of getting fired for incorporating race discussions in classrooms. Were just pissed off that were constantly being silenced.

States and districts without anti-critical race theory legislation have greater latitude to experiment with anti-racist teaching. For Jesse Hagopian, a high school history and ethnic studies teacher in Seattle, the moment is ripe and long overdue. Beginning in September, Hagopian will be co-teaching the schools two-year-old Black studies course, the result of organizing in the wake of the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016.

If anyone is asking, the answer is yes, we are teaching critical race theory, Hagopian said. Most educators didnt know what critical race theory was until Republicans made it their main reelection vehicle. But many of them are now looking it up and realizing how it is aligned with their principles, which I think is wonderful.

On Hagopians syllabus is a wide array of texts to help students center the contributions that Black people have made throughout history, including Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, A Different Mirror, excerpts from A Peoples History of the United States, Jazz and Justice, and the YA version of The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks. Each text will help bring nuance to the Black experience. Were going to learn about Black intersectional identity all Black people dont have the same experiences so its important to understand sexism, ableism, and all forms of oppression, Hagopian said.

He has also made clear what his class is not about. Im not teaching white kids to hate themselves. Im teaching them to understand how racism is systemic and that they can be part of a multiracial struggle to bring about change, Hagopian said. Thats empowering to white students, not shaming them.

Hagopian is not alone in his efforts. While some states are trying to repress anti-racist education, others are mandating that teachers expand on it: The California Board of Education approved a statewide ethnic studies curriculum for high school students this March, and Indian Education for All standards will go into effect in Wyoming schools next school year. Meanwhile, in July, Illinois became the first state to mandate Asian American history for elementary and high school students, and Connecticut required all high schools to offer African American studies and Latino studies by 2022, with Native American studies being required in all schools beginning in the 2023-24 school year.

While anti-racism education advocates see these initiatives as promising steps forward anti-critical race theory laws are also facing legal challenges teachers in less progressive districts still face an uphill battle if they want to include nuanced discussions of race in their classrooms. For many of these teachers caught in the culture war, what they want most is to give children an education that reflects Americas true, complicated history.

As a Black woman in Iowa public schools, this is my calling as a teacher and as an advocate, Cottman said. I believe fundamentally that students, and teachers, need to know the truth.

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Critical race theory bans in schools are making teaching harder - Vox.com

Government should urgently take appropriate actions to protect women and children – BusinessGhana

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The Network for Women's Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT) has charged Government to take appropriate and urgent actions to protect women and children in the country.

"Women in Ghana deserve to live, and to live safe and dignified lives in environments that nurture and protect them. The home is no longer a safe haven," it said.

A statement issued by NETRIGHT on Wednesday and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra said, it was alarming that family life had increasingly become unsafe for many women since the cruel murder of women by partners, close relations and other perpetrators recently had reached an alarming proportion.

According to the statement, since January 2021, over 25 women had been killed in their homes, on farms, in hotels and other private and public places, and the staggering statistics, rate and trend showed that it was a scourge, and a reminder of the spate of murders of women in the country in 1999 or 2000.

The unacceptably high rate of femicides, it said, had highlighted the extreme forms of sexual and gender-based violence in the country which had been linked to entrenched inequality, discrimination and economic disempowerment in the society.

Adding that, the murders also had been a reminder of the increasing normalisation of toxic masculinity in the Ghanaian society that used women's bodies as battlefields and the insecurities that women faced in their homes and communities.

"Unfortunately, while society is quick to ask women why they remain in abusive relationships, reports have rather shown that women who choose to divorce husbands are killed, those who threaten to divorce are killed. Likewise, women who choose not to continue with intimate relationships are also murdered. Whether women choose to stay or leave, they are still unsafe," it said.

The statement expressed worry over the culture of silence by political and public attention to the murders that it would embolden abusers and perpetuates a 'sense of entitlement' by the abusers.

"It should be clear to everyone that the institution of marriage or relationships and their gender stereotypical norms should not trump human life," it said.

The statement urged Ghana Police Service and relevant law enforcement agencies to perform their duties creditably and as expected, for the perpetrators of the heinous crimes to face the full rigours of the law.

It called on stakeholders including state and non-state actors to as a matter of urgency, create spaces and mobilise their constituencies to discuss systemic violence against women within a broader framework of all kinds of oppression and address the issue of femicide.

It called for an end to femicide, and all forms of sexual and gender-based violence against women because it was a crime against women and girls, as well as humanity.

The statement extended NETRIGHT's condolences to the families of women who had been murdered in Ghana between January and August 2021.

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Government should urgently take appropriate actions to protect women and children - BusinessGhana

Afghanistan. Google blocked the accounts of the ousted government employees. The Taliban sought to reach them – MoviesOnline

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Alphabet Inc, which owns Google, partially confirmed Reuters information about the account ban. The company said in a statement that it is monitoring the situation in Afghanistan and taking steps to secure vital accounts.

A former government employee told Reuters that the Taliban tried to extract messages from their accounts. The informant said he did not agree to the transfer of access and is currently in hiding.

Access to accounts is synonymous with obtaining information about former administration employees, ministers, contractors, domestic supporters and foreign partners.

Publicly available data shows that there are more than 20 Google email accounts linked to the ousted government, includingin a. With Ministries of Financeindustry and higher education. The presidents office and local authorities also used Google accounts.

Watch the video Mourning about refugees at the border: We cannot show Lukashenkas weakness

As an information security expert evaluated in an interview with Reuters, even getting the list of employees into a Google Sheets file could mean serious problems regarding the oppression that former administration employees faced.

Government organizations have also used Microsoft accounts, incl. in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, it is not known if the company has taken any steps to secure Taliban access, and if so, what. Microsoft declined to comment.

Coffee enthusiast. Troublemaker. Incurable introvert. Subtly charming twitter scholar. Award-winning social mediaholic. Internet buff.

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Afghanistan. Google blocked the accounts of the ousted government employees. The Taliban sought to reach them - MoviesOnline

The Repeat Patterns in the Afghanistan Conflicts – The Citizen

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Geopolitical interventions imposed on domestic ethnic rivalries in Afghanistan have created the tragedy unfolding in this region. It is critical to see Afghanistan holistically and not just as a geostrategic game for world powers. If a people-centred and holistic approach is not now taken by the international community, the blowback and spillover of conflicts will have deeper and far reaching consequences.

The human and material consequences of this intervention are still being calculated. But figures from sources indicate: that the US spent a trillion dollars on this war, with less than 2% going to the Afghan people while 98% was for the military. The casualties exceed 72,000 civilians. There is an army of the wounded, 2.7 million refugees, 4 million internally displaced.

Add to this the indignity, impoverishment, disemployment, rape, trauma, corruption. Besides, the $88 billion spent on training the 300,000 Afghan soldiers who melted away, and the huge amount of military equipment left behind. Poppy cultivation and the illegal production of opium is calculated at 90,000 tonnes. This list can go on.

The international focus is primarily on geostrategic consequences, as states recalibrate their responses to the Taliban as state power. To understand this geopolitics and its impacts it is important to see that there is a constant and repeated pattern.

This pattern comes from a combination of (1) imperial projects and militarist interventions. (2) These interventions are backed by imperial and militarist knowledge constructions, and (3) both material and ideology are superimposed upon local power and ethnic conflicts, and combine to oppress the Afghan people, promote xenophobic nationalisms and global Islamophobia, and heighten human insecurity within and outside Afghanistan.

Imperialism and interventions

British colonialism used Afghanistan as a buffer between the Russian southward advance and British colonial possession of India in the 19th century as documented in the three Anglo-Afghan Wars and the British-Russian Boundary Commission of 1885.

Second, the Russians used intervention in Afghanistan to fortify their security positions during the Cold War, and to uphold a failing and faction-ridden pro-Soviet Afghan regime.

The perceived oppression of Islam by the government of Daud and their Communist backers led to the rise of political Islamic nationalism, the creation of the Taliban and Mujahideen backed by the US and Pakistan, the massive inflow of arms and mercenaries, and a rise in poppy cultivation and illegal opium trade controlled largely by the Taliban.

The Russian withdrawal in 1989 was seen as a geostrategic victory for the United States, its allies and Pakistan.

Third, the US quest for revenge for the September 11 terror attacks and thereby its direct intervention into Afghan civil strife to annihilate Al Qaeda did hit some of the bases of this terror group. But it was also advantageous to the USs geostrategic desire to reconstruct west Asia as shown by the simultaneous US war in Iraq.

Afghanistan provided the US with military bases for the various interventions in west Asia and to project US power to threaten Iran. The US withdrawal is now seen as a victory by Russia, China, Pakistan and forces of religious fundamentalisms.

Fourth, regional powers and their conflicts and militarisms have come into constant play in Afghanistan. If Pakistan was key to the nurturing of the Taliban, India supported the Northern Alliance. As for the US versus Iran and Iraq, here Irans long border with Afghanistan was a region for tensions. Saudi Arabia and Turkeys search for regional influence led to their links with both the US and the various Taliban groups, and the central Asian states all played a role.

For example, Kyrgyzstan provided a military air base to both Russia and the US in the early 2000. Uzbekistan has been wary of the Taliban providing support to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the main underground opposition to this autocratic regime.

Russia mans the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan with its 201st Motorised Division. China has an interest in advancing its investments in Afghanistan and linking it with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. India needs to safeguard its security and investments. So all have had a role in militarising the internal divisions in the Afghan civil war for their own ends.

It is evident that there is a repeat pattern where big powers from the US to Russia down to middle and regional powers have constantly used Afghanistan for their own interests. The countries may change, but the nature of intervention remains constant.

Knowledge constructions to support violent interventions

Knowledge construction is important for building hegemony and legitimacy for intervention. This too has had a repeat pattern for Afghanistan.

1) Imperial knowledge construction has constantly presented Afghan society and state as tribalist, violent, backward, without capacity for a modern state and therefore open for intervention.

Joe Biden used the old British analogy that Afghanistan is known in history as the graveyard of empires. This is ahistorical the British won one of the three Anglo-Afghan wars, it presents the past as present and unchanging, and it is racialised, showing Afghans as the keepers of graveyards. Wars produce graveyards everywhere and Afghanistan is no exception.

2) The securitised narrative of victory vs defeat. When the Russians left it was victory for the US and Pakistan. When the US withdraws it is seen as a victory for Russia, Iran, Pakistan and others. This narrative of victory versus defeat prepares for more wars.

When there has been no occupier, Afghanistan has been presented as a power vacuum.

All regional countries selectively protect only their own borders often at the cost of others. Each of these countries sees manoeuvres in the colonial paradigm of the Great Game, or now as the New Great Game. Economic assistance to Afghanistan has been framed as the revival of the Silk Routes, especially as precedent for the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

The current post-withdrawal already sees new types of interventions.

The US has carried out several bombings claimed against the Islamic State in Khorasan. Others from the Pakistan Army present themselves as advisors and well-wishers of the Taliban. Pakistan, Russia, China, Iran see an opportunity from the US defeat. Turkey, Iran, Israel, the Saudis want to use it to project their own power in the troubled west Asian region.

3) A threat perception approach from India and the EU sees Afghanistan as a threat and source of fear: of terror attacks, new refugee influx, and trafficking.

These tropes promote Islamophobia and approach Afghanistan through domestic agendas that have little to do with either the Afghan people and their problems. They ignore the severe issues of political economy, impoverishment, displacement, reversal for women, issues of education and health. These are real issues and ignoring them can turn Afghanistan into a failed state with terrible consequences for the entire region of Asia, Europe and beyond.

Local politics

In this geopolitics, the local Afghan regimes and power holders cannot be cast as progressive national liberation movements or anti-imperialists. The Taliban use religious extremist nationalism, violence, fear and threat to gain control. They supported external interventions when it suited them and turned against them too. More importantly:

1) Politics and governance is ethnic and majoritarian, with the political exclusion of different ethnic groups from political participation, power and government.

2) Afghan rulers have not developed agency for political expression and communications, like institutions, political parties etc. True, this is difficult in conditions of civil war, but even during comparative stability institutions remained weak.

3) Narrow elite economic control and benefits led to poppy cultivation and drug and other trafficking. A well run shadow economy prevails.

4) The Taliban will remain a ruthless, misogynist, anti-democratic, fundamentalist and cruel force that will use their own interpretation of Sharia law to oppress women and public culture.

These are the current continuities and specificities in the geopolitical patterns after the US withdrawal and Taliban takeover:

1) The US is looking for new military bases and quads: if Pakistan does not oblige they can look at India. Settling new waves of displaced, squeezing the Taliban economically, continuing policies of intervention in west Asia and the Indo-Pacific the US policies of curbing Russian and Chinese influence continue as its main aim in the region.

2) Russia is concerned with security and the influx of political Islam in central Asia. All these countries, from Russia and China to India will recognise and give foreign aid to the Taliban to transact security for their own countries.

3) Pakistan sees this as the victory of strategic depth and a victory against India, as new leverage with the USA and it will coordinate with the Saudis and the OIC on this.

4) India sees this as a victory of terrorism, and worries about Kashmir.

5) China wants to develop the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor for trade routes into Afghanistan and Central Asia.

For civil society and a humane approach

It is important to have collective security in this region and to:

1) Oppose a geostrategic approach where the Afghan people are barely mentioned. Afghanistan cannot be made a pawn into any more geostrategic adventures. No more interventions.

2) Ask all nations to support and give dignity to Afghan refugees.

3) Support humanitarian aid to Afghan people and the internally displaced.

4) Oppose unilateral sanctions as these impact people and not ruling regimes.

5) Support the gains made by Afghan women and look for ways to maintain freedoms for women in education, health, workplace, public spaces and for choice.

6) Oppose Islamophobia.

7) NGOs have been part of peace building, keeping and maintaining exercises in Afghanistan since the 1980s. These efforts have come from around the world, regardless of political differences. They need to be activated once more with security guarantees from the Afghan government.

8) Development assistance has been poured into Afghanistan. This should be conditional on the rights of people.

9) Institutional and operational analysis of various NGOs involved in peace building (including Norwegian Church Aid) shows that their strength lay in institutional commitment, developing local capacities, using local languages, and consideration of political, cultural sensitivities. This approach should be used in development assistance.

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The Repeat Patterns in the Afghanistan Conflicts - The Citizen

Many eligible Indigenous voters struggle with whether or not they will go to the polls – Turtle Island News

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By Shari Narine

Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

To vote or not to vote? That is the question Indigenous people face every federal and provincial election.

On Aug. 31, when the Assembly of First Nations released its five-priority platform for the federal election, National Chief RoseAnne Archibald weighed in. Like her predecessor Perry Bellegarde, Archibald encouraged people to vote.

RoseAnne Archibald Assembly of First Nations new National Chief

First Nations voters can and will make a large impact on the results on election night, said Archibald.

The Native Womens Association of Canada launched an aggressive campaign entitled Were done asking, were voting, which aims to activate Indigenous women from coast to coast to coast to get to the polls and have their voices heard, said the news release.

Both the Manitoba Metis Federation and the Metis Nation of Ontario are encouraging all of our citizens to vote.

Despite these pushes by Indigenous organizations to get people to mark their ballots, Courtney Skye, research fellow with the Indigenous think-tank the Yellowhead Institute, says voting is a contentious issue.

Courtney Skye, a former candidate for Six Nations elected chief in her home community says she wont vote in federal election.

Some Indigenous people believe that Canada has long had policies of assimilation and voting is another step along that way of assimilation and indoctrination, said Skye.

The issue is, do you vote for your own oppression? Because Canada is a state that is invested and continues to be invested in the oppression of Indigenous peoples, the suppression of Indigenous rights and the denial of those rights in every aspect of the country, said Niigaan Sinclair, an assistant professor in Native Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Niigaan Sinclair, an assistant professor in Native Studies at the University of Manitoba

We continue to have a country in which Indigenous peoples are seen as second tier, are seen as lesser than, are deemed as not as important or an option for political parties to decide to deal with at some point. In that environment the fact is that it is very difficult to justify voting because if all the parties suck, why would you participate in any of it? he said.

Skye also brings attention to the existence of pre-Confederation treaties with the British Crown, including those held by her Haudenosaunee people.

If we expect the Crown to respect our nationhood and our autonomy over our affairs then we have to extend that back out of mutual respect, and so, for a lot of Indigenous people who consider themselves treaty people and expect the Crown to honour these treaties, then they follow through with that in their own conduct and they dont vote in elections, she said.

For those who do choose to vote, Sinclair says its a matter of making a choice between lessen(ing) the damage of voting in the party that will do the least amount of damage or you choose the party that will be complicit in your own oppression.

Skye isnt as cynical as Sinclair. She says those who choose to vote are often driven by frustration of the status quo and not necessarily (by) being indoctrinated into another system and want to have Indigenous voices in the House of Commons.

Indigenous people make that choice for themselves, informed by their own history, their own treaty agreements, their own view, what riding theyre in, whether or not theres a (good) candidate in their riding, whether they view their riding as close or not.

Theres a lot of different things I think that go into Indigenous people making the choice of whether or not theyre going to vote in the upcoming election, said Skye.

She also points to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which entrenches the human rights of Indigenous peoples and collective groups to participate in elections of the state without losing any of their rights and entitlements of Indigenous peoples.

Skye says it makes sense that the AFN would encourage its members to vote as the AFN itself is a colonial construct ? Its a representative body of Indian Act band councils. They dont represent nations; they represent First Nations as creations of the federal government. They are people who are trying to affect change within the system. I get where theyre coming from.

Getting out the vote is a standard practise of all national chiefs, said Sinclair, adding he believes that push goes back as far as Phil Fontaine who served as national chief from 1997 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2009.

The AFN has to deal with the federal government and so if theres a brown face in that government, naturally, they think that will evoke change, he said.

Skye observes that Inuit have a much different relationship with Canada than do the Haudenosaunee people. That difference became clear with the positive reaction from Inuit organizations when Inuk woman Mary Simon was appointed the new Governor General, the first Indigenous person to hold that position.

Aluki Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc

In an earlier interview with Windspeaker.com, Aluki Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., said that having an Indigenous person representing the Queen was not a conflict, especially an Inuk, as the experiences that we have had are quite different from First Nations and Metis.

As for the Metis, Sinclair says they are pleased with Trudeaus Liberal government. While the Metis do have longstanding issues ?

the fact is the Metis have been able to justify many of the policies that the Liberals addressed and theyve found a very willing dance partner.

While we believe that Justin Trudeaus government has developed the strongest relationship with the Indigenous community in Canadian history, we are willing to work with any party that wins the election, said Manitoba Metis Federation President David Chartrand in a news release. He also said the Red River Metis would be actively participating in the election.

Skye believes the number of Indigenous voters has slowly increased over the years, but she is not counted among those numbers. Skye has never voted nor will she be this time around.

For me I make the personal choice to invest in our own communities, participate in our own governance structures and revitalize our traditional systems over leveraging power from the state to affect change, said Skye.

Sinclair, who is Anishinaabe, has voted in the past although not often. Hes more inclined to vote in provincial elections, he says, because that can influence policies that pertain to his career as a teacher. He is uncertain whether hell be voting federally this month.

Often for me its a determination of will my vote matter?Frankly, my vote never matters in the area Ive lived, said Sinclair.

Shari Narine is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Windspeaker.Com . The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

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Many eligible Indigenous voters struggle with whether or not they will go to the polls - Turtle Island News

UP election 2022: Oppression of Dalits, Brahmins to be BSPs key poll plank – India Today

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Mayawatis BSP is likely to make oppression of Dalits and Brahmins its main election weapon. (File Photo)

With the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election 2022 approaching, political parties have started drawing up their battle plans.

Mayawatis Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is likely to make the oppression of Dalits and Brahmins its main election weapon, sources have said.

The party is working on its social engineering formula of 2007 which helped it win the state election, said a BSP leader.

READ: BJP to launch massive OBC outreach campaign ahead of UP polls

This agenda will be sharpened after the Prabuddha Sammelans, underway in the state under BSP national general secretary Satish Chandra Mishras leadership, sources said.

As part of the strategy, sources said, local BSP leaders will go to places where cases of oppression of Dalits and Brahmins have been reported and meet the families of victims to protest, show solidarity and seek justice.

In election meetings, the BSP will also talk about Dalits, Brahmins and Muslims being oppressed in the last five years and question the BJP government in the state on core issues.

Mayawati is busy preparing for the UP Assembly election from Lucknow. On her instructions, Satish Chandra Mishra is holding conventions or Prabuddha Sammelans to integrate Brahmins with the party.

As per party sources, Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims have suffered the most under the BJP rule and they are not being heard.

Mayawati will start the assembly election campaign by addressing a Brahmin Sammelan at the party office in Lucknow on September 7.

Satish Chandra Mishras conventions will end on September 4. Preparations are being made to start it from CM Yogi Adityanaths turf Gorakhpur.

ALSO READ: AAP to hold Tiranga Yatra in Ayodhya on September 14 with possible Ram temple stop

ALSO READ: Samajwadi Party: Looking forward, counting backwards

Click here for IndiaToday.ins complete coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

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UP election 2022: Oppression of Dalits, Brahmins to be BSPs key poll plank - India Today

Connecting the Dots with columnist John Bos: Is racism systemic? – The Recorder

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Critical race theory (CRT) is the latest target in the cultural clash of values, ethics and morality that characterizes the poisonous polarity between right and left-leaning Americans.

Conservatives have been pushing back against the recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses. Their shorthand for this unwanted review is an idea that has until now mostly lived in academia: critical race theory

Elizabeth Harris, in the Aug. 15 Sundays New York Times, wrote that Fox News and other right-wing media have aggressively taken aim at critical race theory, a scholarly framework that examines the role of law and other institutions in perpetuating racial inequality, rather than focusing on individual prejudice. Critics say it is a divisive system of beliefs that portrays whiteness as inherently bad and unfairly paints the country as irredeemably racist, but academics who embrace critical race theory say it has been intentionally misrepresented and widely misused. CRT is often compared by critics to actual racism.

The My Turn essay by two members of the Hawlemont Regional School Committee last Thursday echoes this view. Critical Race Theory is a poisonous, disruptive ideology meant to divide, not unite us they wrote.

In Adam Serwers book The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trumps America, he defends a backlash thesis in which Trumpism must be seen as the white supremacist reaction to societys cultural and political decline. Serwer therefore sees Trumpism as a cruel backlash to the election of Barack Obama and the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be his successor. Serwer writes, Trumps supporters look to him to use the power of the state to wage war against the people who threaten their white supremacist vision of America.

Then there is the 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Its purpose is to reframe the countrys history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

Twelve Civil War historians and political scientists who research the Civil War wrote to The New York Times Magazine concerning the 1619 Project. They were troubled that the Project was to become the basis of school curriculums with the imprimatur of the New York Times while lacking additional historical facts. That said, the letter began with It is not our purpose to question the significance of slavery in the American past. None of us have any disagreement with the need for Americans, as they consider their history, to understand that the past is populated by sinners as well as saints, by horrors as well as honors, and that is particularly true of the scarred legacy of slavery.

In another new book Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court, Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner offer a learned and thoughtful portrayal of the history of race relations in America through the lens of the Supreme Court.

In his review of the book in The Nation, Randall Kennedy writes that Burton and Derfner state The Supreme Court has often been the most anti-progressive branch of the federal government. It has been and continues to be deeply implicated in the countrys history of racial oppression. It permitted the creation of a pigmentocracy that reached its fullest elaboration in the South, where states formally segregated people of color and excluded them from government. Recently, Kennedy notes, the court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act the high point of the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 60s ruling that Congresss continued imposition of special regulations on covered jurisdictions (mainly Southern states with histories of stubborn racial disenfranchisement) was unacceptable in light of positive changes in the demographics of voting. That decision, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), written by Chief Justice John Roberts for a 5-4 conservative majority, was an outrageous act of judicial delinquency. It minimized evidence of an ongoing effort to discriminate against Black voters individually and collectively. It failed to give appropriate deference to congressional policy-making.

Bottom line is that it has again eased the way for an increase in voter suppression and a roadblock to achieving true equality.

Trumps failed attempts to strip immigrants from the 2020 Census count was designed to benefit older, white voters. Racism remains embedded in our legal, political, financial, medical and real estate systems.

Connecting the Dots appears every other Saturday in the Recorder. John Bos is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times and the editor of a new childrens book After the Race available on Amazon.

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Connecting the Dots with columnist John Bos: Is racism systemic? - The Recorder

Biden Can’t Pressure Taliban Without Hurting Thousands of Afghans Left Behind – Foreign Policy

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Until the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan was showered in U.S. and international assistance that amounted to nearly half of its GDP. Now, delivering a stern message to the triumphant militants, U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders are shutting down most of it. The United States is freezing Afghan reserves, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have announced they will also suspend aid, as have major Western powers like Germany.

But Biden has a problem he doesnt face in other rogue countries squeezed by U.S. sanctions: The United States has spent an estimated $2 trillion over nearly 20 years trying to build up Afghanistan and help its desperately poor people. Moreover, given the swift U.S. withdrawal that left behind tens of thousands of Afghans who once supported the U.S.-led effort there, can Biden morally justify cutting them off? This is an especially pressing question as potentially new strains of COVID-19 proliferate among a poorly vaccinated population and Afghanistan heads into the colder months.

The Biden administration is trying to thread that needle by saying it will continue to deliver humanitarian aid to Afghanistan but the Taliban government wont get any of it.

Until the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan was showered in U.S. and international assistance that amounted to nearly half of its GDP. Now, delivering a stern message to the triumphant militants, U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders are shutting down most of it. The United States is freezing Afghan reserves, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have announced they will also suspend aid, as have major Western powers like Germany.

But Biden has a problem he doesnt face in other rogue countries squeezed by U.S. sanctions: The United States has spent an estimated $2 trillion over nearly 20 years trying to build up Afghanistan and help its desperately poor people. Moreover, given the swift U.S. withdrawal that left behind tens of thousands of Afghans who once supported the U.S.-led effort there, can Biden morally justify cutting them off? This is an especially pressing question as potentially new strains of COVID-19 proliferate among a poorly vaccinated population and Afghanistan heads into the colder months.

The Biden administration is trying to thread that needle by saying it will continue to deliver humanitarian aid to Afghanistan but the Taliban government wont get any of it.

Consistent with our sanctions on the Taliban, the aid will not flow through the government but rather through independent organizations, such as U.N. agencies and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Monday as U.S. forces completed their withdrawal. And we expect that those efforts will not be impeded by the Taliban or anyone else.

But bypassing the Taliban could be especially difficultif not impossiblesince the group can now officially oversee the operations of any agencies and NGOs in the country. In any case, its hard to make a distinction between the peoples welfare and the overall health of the Afghan economyparticularly if, as expected, it collapses in the coming months.

The leverage of the West is quite limited, said Adnan Mazarei, a former deputy director at the International Monetary Fund who oversaw Afghan programs from 2009 to 2015. In the end, leverage is a function of how much the United States and other countries care about the suffering of the Afghan people. The U.S. may decide it cares.

Nor are major institutions like the United Nations necessarily on board with Bidens pressure campaign. On the contrary, U.N. Secretary-General Antnio Guterres said Tuesday that extra food, shelter, and health supplies must be urgently fast-tracked into the country because Afghanistan faces a humanitarian catastrophe amid a severe drought and with winter approaching. Guterres said he had grave concern about the threat of basic services collapsing completely, adding 1 in 3 Afghans do not know where their next meal will come from.

The Biden administration has not yet specified how its limited-aid approach will work. Speaking on condition of anonymity, several governmentofficials indicated the U.S. Treasury Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, the key agencies overseeing financial support, have barely begun discussing the details.

On Tuesday, a Treasury official indicated the Biden administration would maintain sanctions against Taliban leaders, including significant restrictions on their access to the international financial system, but could not be more specific. Other major donors, such as the World Bank, which had been overseeing nearly $800 million in programs in 2021 for Afghanistan, are also still figuring out how to navigate the new reality. We continue to follow events in Afghanistan, and once the situation becomes clearer, we will be able to make an assessment of next steps, a World Bank spokesperson said Tuesday.

The European Union, which mainly fears a giant influx of refugees, is now focused on giving aid to neighboring countries where Afghans might flee rather than to Afghanistan itself. In a statement Tuesday, the EU said its member states stand determined to act jointly to prevent the recurrence of uncontrolled large-scale illegal migration movements faced in the past.

The United States and major Western nations also have, over the last two decades, sponsored critical aid programs that many are loath to eliminate nowin particular, hundreds of millions of dollars in investments toward female education, with some 3 million girls and young women affected, said Daniel Runde, a development expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I would argue we would want to support those programs, and theres a lot of money in those pipelines, he said.

They need to distinguish between humanitarian needs and the broader development programs. Its going to be fuzzy, said Earl Anthony Wayne, a former U.S. deputy ambassador in Afghanistan. Theyre going to have to have a set of governance conditions and rights conditions. That will also get fuzzy.

The central issue going forward is whether the Taliban will uphold such conditions of fair governance and observance of human rightsat least adequately enough to keep some of the aid flowing. The Biden team credited the Taliban leadership with helping U.S. forces airlift more than 120,000 people, including thousands of Americans, out of the country. The Taliban have also said they want international recognition, and they appear to be forming a motley governing body that could include technocrats like Omar Zakhilwal, a former finance minister who has returned to Kabul, along with U.S.-designated terrorists such as Sirajuddin Haqqani.

But it is not yet entirely unclear what sort of government will emerge or whether the Taliban will ever moderate their past behaviorespecially their harsh treatment of women and girls.

What is problematic for the West is how to respond to what may soon be urgent humanitarian needs generated by an extensive drought and a large internal displaced population, the possibility of significant refugee flows, and the collapse of the money economyall of which will create pressures to find ways to help the Afghan people, said Peter Michael McKinley, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. That may require dealing with the Taliban more directly.

If Biden comes down too hard on the new Afghan government, he could also face political problems at home as stories of desperation and Taliban oppression continue to make headlines. On Tuesday, facing harsh bipartisan criticism, the president again defended his decision to withdraw by Aug. 31, even though some Americans were left behind along with thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. effort. Biden suggested the only mistake he might have made was to think the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown. And he insisted we have leverage to hold the Taliban to their promise of safe passage for Americans and Afghans holding special immigrant visa applications.

We will continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid, Biden said. Well continue to speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls.

On Monday, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution sponsored by the United States, Britain, and France that called on the Taliban to facilitate safe passage for people wanting to leave Afghanistan, allow humanitarian organizations to access the country, and uphold human rights, including for women and children. The resolution also called on the Taliban to let humanitarian aid flow and combat terrorism. In his speech, Biden said we are joined by over 100 countries that are determined to make sure the Taliban upholds those commitments. Notably, China and Russia abstained.

A key question in the months ahead will be whetherfaced with the threat of an international embargo on at least some financial aidthe Taliban will decide to preemptively moderate their worst past practices, which only in recent weeks have reportedly involved revenge killings and forcing girls and young women into marriage or sex slavery.

A half-dozen foreign aid experts interviewed for this article, all of them well versed in international programs that help Afghanistan, agreed the Taliban-led government will be unable to replace billions of dollars in Western aid with meager revenue from the opium trade or aid from China and neighboring Pakistan, which has supported the Taliban in the past. Given the cutoff in aid, they believe it is inevitable the country will sink further into poverty, opening the way for terrorist groups to exploit the peoples misery with illicit funds.

Its hard to envisage alternative streams of revenues that would provide the same sustenance for running a government and an economy, McKinley said. He said the Talibans narcotics revenues are not at a level that would compensate for the loss of international donor assistance and, in any case, would be grounds for holding off. Pakistan is not a country in a position to provide significant assistance. China is the real issue, but how much assistance does China actually deliver in many situations like this?

Aid specialists say China is probably not interested in large-scale development or humanitarian aid. Its not their forte, Runde said. What the Chinese offer is to say, hey, Ill lend you money to build a port or a road.

The withdrawal of international aid wont necessarily be felt immediately by ordinary Afghans, especially since the previous Afghan governments led by former Presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani were steeped in corruption and most U.S. assistance went to the military buildup of the now-collapsed Afghan National Security Forces.

But there is little doubt that millions of Afghans will suffer in the coming months and years. Mazarei, who is now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, suggests if the Afghan economy collapses completely, U.S. leverage over the Taliban could increase somewhat. There is going to be pressure on the exchange rate and balance of payments and a rise in inflation and poverty levels, he said. The trick is going to be whether the Taliban decide that, at least for now, they will form a more inclusive government so as to get some of this foreign aid.

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Biden Can't Pressure Taliban Without Hurting Thousands of Afghans Left Behind - Foreign Policy

Ahead of his times – The Statesman

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Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an unforgettable name in the socio-economic, cultural and political history of India whose influence was quite apparent in the fields of social and religious reformation, public administration, free journalism and educational development in British-ruled 19th century India. He was born in a prosperous family of the Brahman class but developed an unorthodox religious ideology at an early age.Ram Mohan (1772-1833) was a polyglot ~ he was proficient in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Bengali and Hindi. He also knew Latin and Greek. He was totally against idolatry. He was exiled from home and went to Murshidabad in 1803. In 1805, Ram Mohan joined the East India Company and worked for John Digby in the Rangpur collectorate; it was Digby who introduced him to western culture and literature.The immobile structure of Indian society, beset with blind beliefs like the Sati system, caste excesses, untouchability and the oppression of women divided society. Ram Mohan began to protest against the Sati system and other social evils inside and outside his home. Not only that, being a strong advocate of equal rights for men and women he worked tirelessly for an end to practices like child marriage and Purdah system, dowry system and polygamy.Ram Mohan Roys ground-breaking reforms in various spheres of life laid the foundation upon which future Indias values and principles were laid. An erudite scholar, a champion of the press and freedom of expression, a great reformer and above all, a pioneer of the national movement in India, Ram Mohan Roy is known as the Father of Indian Renaissance. He dedicated himself to the task of modernising India.Sati was a historical Hindu practice in which a widow sacrificed herself by sitting atop her deceased husbands funeral pyre. In 1811 Roy witnessed his brothers widow being burned alive on her husbands funeral pyre. Ram Mohan was severely hurt by the cruelty of the custom. In fact, he was the first Indian to protest against this custom. In spite of vehement protests from orthodox Hindus, he carried out his propaganda against this custom. Finally, Raja Ram Mohans effort became successful when in 1829 Lord William Bentinck banned Sati by law.According to this law, the custom of sati became illegal and punishable as culpable homicide. Abolition of Sati was one of the significant turning points in the social development of modern India. While Ram Mohan is remembered by common people for the role he played in abolishing the evil of Sati, he was also a prominent name in educational reforms.He supported English as a medium of teaching in India for he believed it was superior to the traditional Indian education system. He regarded education as an effective vehicle to achieve social reform and was a strong advocate of introducing western learning in India. Keeping this great purpose in his mind he set up the Hindu College at Calcutta jointly with David Hare in 1817; it later went on to become one of the best educational institutions in the country producing some of the best minds in India.Before that, in 1816, he established Indias first English medium school. In 1822, he gave a big grant to start an English high school of the Unitarian Association that was led by the noted educationist David Hare and Reverend Adam. He established Vedanta college, City College and English schools where courses in both Indian learning and western social and physical sciences were offered.In 1830, he assisted Alexander Duff in establishing the General Assemblys Institution. Roy promoted and urged teaching of scientific subjects like Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and even Botany. He promoted technology, western medicine and English to be taught at Indian schools. He was also a great scholar who translated many books, religious and philosophical works and scriptures into Bengali and also translated Vedic scriptures into English. Not only that, he was the first Indian to make a passionate plea for womens education and rights.To educate the common people, Raja published magazines in different languages including English, Hindi, Persian and Bengali. Notable magazines published by him were the Brahmanical Magazine, the Sambad Koumudi and Mirat-ul-Akbar. He started the first Bengali language weekly newspaper and the first newspaper in an Indian language, called Sambad Koumudi in 1821 and in 1822 he published the journal Mirat-ul-Akbar.Sambad Koumudi helped people to form an opinion about the issues affecting their daily life in British India and represented their grievances before the Government. He vehemently fought for the freedom of press. In 1823, when the British imposed censorship upon the then Calcutta press, Roy, as the founder and editor of two of Indias earliest weekly newspapers, organised a protest, arguing in favour of freedom of speech and religion as natural rights.Ram Mohans spiritual devotion was not confined to the sphere of spirituality alone as social and religious reforms were inseparable to him. True religion was to him an antidote of political tyranny and social oppression. Ram Mohans ideology of Brahmoism derived from the Upanishads condemned polytheistic practises, idolatry and encouraged practise of the unity of God ~ formless, universal and omnipresent.In 1815, he founded the short-lived Atmiya Sabha to propagate his doctrine of monotheistic Hinduism. From 1828, the Brahmo Sabha which was renamed as Brahmo Samaj in 1830, was formed for worship of the Single Divinity irrespective of caste, creed or sect and became one of the most important agents of religious and social change in 19th century India.Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in his book The Indian Struggle called him the apostle of a religious revival in India. Except it, his visions for a democratic, secular and rational society were carried forward by Brahmo Samaj. He also advocated larger association of Indians in the administration, the separation of the Judiciary from the Executive, disbandment of the Standing Army and the formation of militia composed of peasants.He believed in social equality of all human beings, and thus was a strong opposer of the caste system. It was Roy who condemned oppressive practices of Bengali zaminders and demanded fixation of minimum rents. He also demanded the abolition of taxes on tax-free lands. He called for a reduction of export duties on Indian goods abroad and the abolition of taxes on tax-free lands.He was perhaps the first feminist who wanted women to be educated and given the right to inherit property. Roy was the moving spirit behind empowering women and getting them a respectable position in society.Ram Mohan was also the first to give importance to the development of the mother tongue. His Gaudiya Byakaran in Bengali is the best of his prose works. He stood for cooperation of thought and activity and brotherhood among nations. His understanding of the international character of the principles of liberty, equality and justice indicate that he well understood the significance of the modern age. He was perhaps the first philosopher in the world to strengthen internationalism.In his address entitled Inaugurator of the Modern Age in India, Tagore referred to Ram Mohan as a luminous star in the firmament of Indian history. Ram Mohan is an outstanding personality who was not only the pioneer of modernity but also a visionary of liberal democracy not just of Bengal but of the whole world. He proved himself to be a religious, social, educational and cultural reformer who challenged traditional Hindu culture and indicated lines of progress for Indian society under British rule.There is no denying the fact that without Ram Mohans intellectual stimulation and indefatigable campaigns against social evils, it is not possible to conceive of contemporary India. He was the symbol of freedom, equality, fraternity, tolerance, kindness and rationality. He was given the title of Father of Modern India by Gopal Krishna Gokhale.At present we are suffering from religious intolerance. Our everyday life is beset with many severe social and moral problems. In this situation we are in dire need of following the ideologies of Raja Ram Mohan, the relentless crusader against all kinds of injustices as well as exploitative practices for making a modern India in the true sense of the term.

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Ahead of his times - The Statesman

In the Shadow of 9/11 – The Nation

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George W. Bush addresses the nation aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, 2003. (Stephen Jaffe / AFP via Getty Images)

A republic that wages unending war beyond its frontiers sets itself up for decline and fall. Its intractable military skirmishing is like the drip-drip-drip of water slowly eroding the sturdy foundations of an edifice before it collapses. Buffoons soon take their turns as mob rulers, coarsening and dividing a once-free society, before a barbarian horde tries to topple it.1 Books in Review

Or so goes the Roman narrative, an old story of imperial decline that has instructed generations of politicians and political theorists seeking to stave off a similar fate. If you spend too much time fighting savagery, you become savage as well. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual2

warfare, warned James Madison in 1795. Added Barack Obama in 2013, in a statement that, in retrospect, seems prophetic: A perpetual warthrough drones or special forces or troop deploymentwill prove self-defeating and alter our country in troubling ways.3

But there has long been both a minor and a major problem with the Roman narrative. The minor one is that no one ever seems to agree on when the free society went wayward. For millennia, observers have emphasized different causes and dateswhich was easy to do since, as the 18th-century French political philosopher Montesquieu pointed out, from the beginning Rome was in an eternal and always violent war somewhere. Edward Gibbon, the most famous modern chronicler, opens his history with an admiring description of the Roman Empire as it embarked on its wars, with scenes from Augustus to the Antonines that read like a fanboys paean to military achievement. The pivot in his account comes only with the murder in 192 ce of Emperor Commodus, the narcissist who lacked every sentiment of virtue and humanity and was goaded into unspeakable acts of cruelty by a servile crowd that worshiped him. (He did not have red hair.)4

But the larger problem with the Roman narrative is its complacent nostalgia for a time before the decline itself. Historical bickering about what went wrong and when presupposes that a lotor enoughwent right. Taking the virtues of the free society for granted, its way of life glorious until the intrusion of wartime vice, the Roman narrative, whether credulously or ideologically, implies that the problem was adventitious and occurred late. It becomes a matter of saving the last best hope from its unwinding, to quote the titles of two of George Packers recent books. But what if the sources of the cruelty and violence and putrefaction were of long standing? What if the crimes and pathologies of empire abroad and subjugation at home, belatedly fingered as the causes of collapse, had always prevented a republic from actually coming into being? What if the supposedly free society was unconscionably violent to its own people, and its military adventures far away were extensions or reflections of its unfreedoms nearby? The problem wasnt a decline and fall, but a failure to rise in the first place.5

In Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman opens with Madisons warning and refuses to narrate the main events of the War on Terror in the years after 9/11 separately from their domestic ramifications. In Subtle Tools, Karen J. Greenberg studies how policies enacted to allow the pursuit of foreign terrorists 20 years ago, with their unexpected and unholy uses at home in recent years, ended up degrading our laws and liberty. For both, the whirlwind of the forever war of the past 20 years allowed Donald Trump to reap the opportunity for American devastation.6

Both books raise the question of whether the Roman tale of liberty spurned is the right one, while also suggesting the more disconcerting possibility that the pathologies were there all along. Ackerman at one point cites the observation of Aim Csaire that unfreedom oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack of an empire, including those found within its metropole: What happens abroad is only a manifestation of unfreedom at home. If this is true, then Ackermans and Greenbergs focus on how the War on Terror led to Trumps rise and reignthe Roman narrative applied to recent American historyis not necessarily wrong. But starting with the War on Terror and ending with Trump also isolates both from their genuine sources. It also distracts from how Joe Bidenwho called in illegal air strikes in February and promised amid the fiasco of the pullout from Afghanistan to sustain counterterrorist operationsis continuing our war, not ending it.7

Spencer Ackerman has been among the most important journalists to chronicle the War on Terror almost from its inception. Writing for, among other publications, The Guardian and, until recently, The Daily Beast, he has shown himself to be a gifted reporter, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his role in bringing Edward Snowdens revelations about NSA surveillance to the public. In Reign of Terror, Ackerman synthesizes two decades of his and others work to explore how the War on Terror was not simply something that happened on the battlefields. Rather, it happened in the United States and helped to create Trump and allow his profane works.8 Current Issue

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Karen Greenberg, a national security expert at Fordham Law School, has also been a precious resource, especially on the War on Terrors legal machinations. The author of an indispensable study on Americas Guantnamo Bay prison, she has become one of the countrys leading experts on the perverse legal changes brought about by counterterrorism policy and the surveillance state. Like Reign of Terror, her new book draws from this experience to show how the subtle tools forged out of the wreckage of 9/11the governments use of euphemism, flexibility, and secrecyworked for two decades to smother the good out of a democracy in turmoil and pave the way for some of the most infamous episodes of Trumps presidency.9

Ackerman and Greenberg hardly deny the excesses and ravages of our wars abroad. But their interest heresomething the last presidents term and the current anniversary marking two decades (so far) of counterterrorism make pressingis in what these excesses and ravages have done to America itself. And Trump, far from representing a deviation from the War on Terror, epitomized it. He brought aspects of the war home, Ackerman contends, even if fundamentally the war was always home. As Greenberg adds, Trump exploited existing tools, already destructive, and sharpened them into weapons. The boomerang of counterterrorism policy, invented to attack foreign enemies, ended up permanently disfiguring American life once it struck home.10

Both authors sweep across the past two decades before reaching the age of Trump, and in doing so they help periodize the entire experience of the War on Terror. For Ackerman and Greenberg, the two pivotal moments in the evolution of Americas counterterrorism age were the early months of George W. Bushs presidency and the early months of Barack Obamas.11 Related Article

As both authors tell it, the initial days and months after Al Qaeda struck Manhattan and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, were formative for everything that followedespecially Bushs proclamation of a war on terror and the supersession of limits that he and his neoconservative stewards demanded in consequence. Having abandoned the concept of a war against a specific terrorist organization, Ackerman observes, Americans would never be able to agree on when it could be won. From the start, therefore, the whole notion of a War on Terror was conceptually doomed, and yet it would remake the country in its wake. Chillingly, Greenberg cites Trump the celebrity businessman predicting this very thing himself: On September 13, two days after the attack, he noted that a whole different city and world would arise from the smoking ruins of ground zero.12

It wasnt just that Bush chose unending war; he also supercharged border and homeland policing, racializing it on the grounds thatas his attorney general, John Ashcroft, remarkedthe enemys platoons infiltrate our borders. Even as foundational decisions were made about how to movenotwithstanding the constraints of international lawagainst Afghanistan and Iraq, starting with Congresss near-unanimous 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the government began to round up terrorism suspects at home, initiate domestic surveillance, and lift controls on detention and interrogation. Greenberg calls the AUMF the Ur document of the War on Terror, because its vagueness meant that it would authorize force against anyone. And as she shows in a separate chapter, Bush also moved immediately to set up the agency with the sinister name Department of Homeland Security, placing border control in a counterterrorism framework. Meanwhile, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in October 2001, which ended up imposing few limits on such surveillance practices.13

Ackerman stresses how near-universal the support for the War on Terror was across Americas partisan divide in this first pivotal period. The neoconservatives in the cockpit of Bushs foreign policy, however showily many of them would later become never-Trumpers, continued or even extended their dangerous game of indulging the nativist part of the Republican base, which has proved to be anything but an atavistic remnant of the distant past. At the same time, the neocons were not above lecturing paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and others about their insufficient patriotism when they advised caution. As for liberals, they were compliant and supinewhen they were not even more enthusiastic about the opportunity to slay monsters abroad than their neoconservative frenemies. Part of the reason was electoral fear. Anti-communist liberalism built the structures that confronted the Soviet Union, Ackerman comments, but that did not spare it the demagoguery of conservatives for whom liberalism was a stalking horse for communism. Yet the most important reason was that mainstream liberals, too, were grateful for a new enemy to replace the one that had long defined their aggressive posture.14

Minor pushback came only with the faltering of the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib torture revelations in the spring of 2004. The legacy of this period was that the War on Terror was touched up, its torture and related prisoner abuses removed (with an assist from the Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and other cases). In the process, however, the earliest assumptions of the war framing and the licensing of force abroad were continued, even entrenched. Perversely, as I argue in my own new book on the period, the humanization of perpetual war adopted in the later Bush years ratified and even fortified his foundational choices to move the country to a war footing, even as the presidents own popularity tanked. Just as, in 2001, mainstream opinion across the political spectrum had given the government carte blanche to create a new national security state, between 2004 and 2006 a renewed public legitimacy for the War on Terror turned on making it moral.15

That evolution in the war is why its second pivotal moment came during Obamas first months in office. The new president had campaigned on a selective opposition to the Iraq War, presenting himself as a broader peace candidate, while implying to those in the know his acceptance of an infinity war under the new and unconstrained authorities that Bush had asserted and Congress had granted. Obamas anti-war speech as an Illinois state senator in 2002providentially rediscovered as he battled Hillary Clinton, who had even fewer scruples about Americas mightwas taken to be more significant than his votes to fund the Iraq War as a US senator or to expand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which increased government spying, the month after he clinched the Democratic Partys nomination for president.16

Although his rhetoric about the war on terror suggested both legal and operational restraint, Greenberg writes, Obama proved reluctant to surrender the flexibility that vague language provided for the presidential exercise of elastic powers. Neither expansive war powers nor limitless surveillance authority were reformed; their abuse continued, and in some instances they were even broadened. Nonetheless, liberals and the mainstream media lionized Obama for ending the War on Terror, while others nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which he won later that year). Never mind that he killed members of Faheem Qureshis family by armed drone on his third full day in office or that he used Congresss original AUMF against new enemies and in many more places.17

Although the haze of gratitude that Obama enjoyed for not being Bush took a long time to dissipateand then returned once the identity of his successor became knownboth Ackerman and Greenberg show that Obama chose forthrightly to make the War on Terror permanent. Indeed, he not only extended it in time and expanded it in space but, with his lawyerly bent, formalized its legal basis to provide extra legitimation.18

The expanded range and startling rise in the number of drone strikes, so associated with this second period of the War on Terror, should not obscure its other forms, such as the ramped-up use of Americas special forces. Drone strikes were more than just the centerpiece of Obamas counterterrorism strategy, Ackerman notes. They represented how he saw the War on Terror: not as something to end, but something to reorient. Obama understood that the War on Terror could not continue in its cruel earlier form, either in bloody ground campaigns or unspeakable prisoner abuse (which was easier to avoid if suspected terrorists were not captured but killed outright). Even when his other compromises were eventually challenged by a rising left indicting the rampant austerity and anti-Black violence of his era, Ackerman writes, the opposition to Obama was not fueled by antiwar activism. As a result of this transformative period during Obamas first few months as president, what Ackerman dubs the Sustainable War on Terror was launchedand continues to this day.19

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But how persuasive is it to insist, as Ackerman and Greenberg do, that the War on Terror, aside from its grievous effects abroad, transformed America beyond recognition as well? And how illuminating is it to search for proof of a decline and fall in the coming of Donald Trump and his presidencyespecially if Bushs and Obamas early months in office proved so decisive?20

To the extent that both writers focus on the War on Terror proper, they face serious difficulties. Trumps ascent marked what Ackerman calls the decadent or exhaustion phase of the War on Terror. In an excellent chapter, he shows that the American people and even some leading policy-makers had grown weary of endless war even before Trump was elected. Indeed, this fatigue helped give Trump an extraordinary opening, among the others he exploited in his astonishing 2016 breakthrough. Was his condemnation of the wars, then, genuine? Ackerman is contemptuous of any notion of Donald the Dove, and fair enough. Yet Trump pressed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, even if it is also true, as Greenberg documents, that his aggressive and lawless attack on the Iranian general Qassim Soleimani embraced the War on Terrors legerdemain and the erosion of any limits on war powers.21

If there was no Donald the Dove, it is mainly because the Sustainable War on Terrorwith fewer deployed troops and more high-tech death from a distancewas something that Trump inherited more than invented. In reducing troops ever further in most theaters, even as he ramped up the use of drones and special forces against the Islamic State and others, Trump was simply following the policies of his predecessors to their logical conclusion (as would his eventual successor). Still, it is only fair to note that by running in 2016 on his own critique of US military policyand of Bush himself, for the Iraq WarTrump helped make possible the Afghan withdrawal that Joe Biden is putting center stage to mark the 20th anniversary of September 11 and to take credit for ending the forever war. Moreover, the anti-war cause saw no greater successes than during the Trump years, not just on the left but on the rightnotably among the US veterans who massively supported him.22

In other ways, though, Ackerman and Greenberg argue, Trumps tenure did not augur the end of the War of Terror so much as its return home. Ackerman notes how, from its start, the War on Terror helped reactivate a nativist current in American politics and thus shaped the constituency that supported Trump. Greenberg meticulously documents how Trumps Muslim travel ban was debated in the Supreme Court within a War on Terror frameworkand how the considerable deference the court showed to the president in its ultimate decision also presupposed the executive authority that had been granted over the past 20 years. The legal and policy tensions of 9/11 persisted into the Trump era, she writes, and were brought into the open by the Muslim ban. The same was true of border interdiction, with the Department of Homeland Security on the front lines of the administrations outrageous policies. But the most vivid example for their thesis is in the nationwide protests after George Floyds murder. In response to the uprisings, Trump openly referred to the protesters as terrorists, explicitly calling for a counterinsurgency on American soil by the military, if possible, and by militarized police if not. A wartime attitude took hold, Ackerman writes.23

That the former intelligence and military stewards of the War on Terror now professed themselves shocked to find their tools perverted in a domestic struggle against their fellow citizens was ironic, as both Greenberg and Ackerman note. Meanwhile, some Trump supporters moved to protect his nativist racism from the very national security state they once demanded, as the neoconservatives and national security functionaries bolted from Trump and were seen to be using their deep state powers to hem in and undermine the president. This development was the War on Terror through a fun-house mirror, as Ackerman notes, with paranoid fantasies of Islamists in collaboration with the Security State. Now American hatred and racism required turning on the American government itselfin defense of its leader.24

Greenberg concludes her study with the prescription to control or eradicate the subtle tools, now that we can confirm their domestication and misuse. More darkly, Ackerman suggests that by the time Joe Biden providentially ousted Trump, a perpetual-motion machine of death powered by the worst of American history had made it increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.25

But for all the power of a general argument that invalidates the War on Terror through Trump and his works, there are also limits to memorializing its first 20 years this way. As Ackerman sometimes implies, all of American history culminated in Trump. If so, then reducing Trump to the culmination of just one particular episode in that history risks making it too easy for us to pretend otherwise. The #Resistance, Ackerman notes, tended after 2016 to surgically separate their hatred of Trump from any examination of the America that produced him. But by the very same token, one cannot surgically separate ones hatred of the War on Terror from any examination of the country that produced it. American exclusion and nativism are hardly new, and the governmental euphemism, flexibility, and secrecy that Greenberg illuminates have been endemic features of Americas war-making for decades, if not centuries. Also, for all the appeal of the framework of counterterrorisms blowback and boomeranging, racialized oppressionespecially in the furious responses to bids for freedom and justice by the enslaved and their descendantshas been at home in the United States throughout its history.26

Finally, by locating the costs of the War on Terror in the climax of the Trump presidency, we allow the argument to be made that, now that the sane conservatives and liberals are back in charge, all we need is some modest reform of the War on Terrors blatant or subtle tools. That lesson is, indeed, precisely the dominant one among liberals today. Greenberg ends on an expectant note about Biden, even as she worries that the January 6 uprising has been widely analogized with 9/11 as a national trauma requiring the most emphatic kind of patriotic response. She knows, however, that Biden and his foreign policy stewards are old hands at the counterterrorism policy of the past two decades and have so far done littlethe withdrawal from Afghanistan asideto challenge its ways.27

The Roman narrative of civilized freedom undone through foreign wars is alluring. But it is also misleading. For a while, scholars have rejected the whole notion that Rome fella paradigm, as Glen Bowersock wrote some years ago, that mostly represented the fears of observers centuries later as they confronted the instability of the civilization to which they belonged. It still serves such a function today. And as scholars like Dirk Moses and Richard Waswo have argued, the Roman narrative is a founding legend that permits a measure of self-criticism in the name of honoring an otherwise supposedly great civilizationignoring what Mohandas Gandhi and other anti-colonialists have long noted: that civilization has mostly been a euphemism for its opposite all along.28

This is why we should not separate the War on Terror from what came before, nor so innocently fasten its conclusion to Trump, especially as a symbol and symptom of civilizations degradation, without a deeper reflection on what it means to be civilized in the first place. On the 20th anniversary of the War on Terror, it is easy to slip into the Roman narrative, mourning a distinctive or even decisive period of freedoms collapse. The darkerand truerstory to tell is one in which the War on Terror extended and ratified the cruelty and oppression that define our history more than many might care to admit.29

On the other hand, the Roman example could well instruct us that there are uplifting possibilities in disorder and decline. Much as the historian Peter Brown did so breathtakingly in junking all the accounts of Romes decline in the first centuries after Christ, people might someday see the current period as the birth of something creative and interesting. Not only may there be limited value in a narrative of imperial excess coming home, but the harsh transitions we are experiencing now might be the birth pangs of something better and new. Of course, it is up to us to make it so.30

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In the Shadow of 9/11 - The Nation

Marina Warner I ain’t afeared: In Her Classroom LRB 9 September 2021 – London Review of Books

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In 1945, 21-year-old Beryl Answick graduated with a first class diploma from the teacher training college in Georgetown, capital of what was then British Guiana. Guyanese education at the time was rigid and the (tamarind) rod much in evidence: Children were expected to know certain facts, the relevance of which did not always matter, she remembered. Chafing at these conventions, Answick (who became Beryl Gilroy on her marriage in 1954) moved to London in 1951 to study educational psychology at the University of London. She was one of very few teachers from the Caribbean in England in the 1950s; another was her friend E.R. Braithwaite, the author of To Sir, with Love (1959), a catalyst for her own later self-reckoning in Black Teacher. When she began to look for a teaching post, Gilroy was frustrated at every turn, the target of a widespread suspicion founded in an ignorance that could be described as folkloric were the baiting about cannibalism and washing not so vicious. In her memoir she presents herself both as object and subject of her story. Both perspectives offer first-hand testimony of wrongs done and not dusted.

First published in 1976, Black Teacher records the bewildering self-consciousness inflicted on Gilroy by British society: My life at school was clouded by an obsessive interest in my blackness. It seemed that no one could forget it It was difficult, at times, not to become the traditional black with the traditional chip on the shoulder there was, for instance, the usually unspoken implication that there was something sinister about black hands. She began looking at my hands, almost as if I were seeing them for the first time I was nervous about picking things up. I was especially nervous when it came to buttoning up the childrens coats. Rather than endure the staffroom, she took refuge in her classroom at lunchtime.

Children, she writes, are not born with race and colour prejudice. They absorb it from the adults around them. Gilroy countered the bigotry, or at times the simple stupidity, of colleagues, parents and the children who parroted what they heard, with a storytellers verve. When asked by one of her co-workers what natives do when they have their monthlies, she replied: Well, Sue, we swim! We jump into the nearest river and swim and swim for miles. Some of us swim for three days and some for four, but thats what we do. Her account of London in the period is as sharp as anything by Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark. Her phonetic transcriptions of accents, while dated, bring into earshot a teeming cast of characters East Enders, posh North Londoners, Italian immigrants and so on.

As a child Gilroy was considered sickly, and at the age of two was given over to the care of her maternal grandparents, who lived in the region of Berbice, looking across the Corentyne estuary towards Dutch Suriname. This luxuriant tropical scenery and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea his mind was always in Guyana.)

Gilroys grandmother was a smallholder and herbalist, and there were many aunts, too, who passed on local stories. One of her first enthusiasms was botany, which later inspired her writings about nutrition. At twelve she was finally sent to school in Georgetown, where she did outstandingly well. Black Teacher doesnt hark back to those times or hanker for home, but in later books like Sunlight on Sweet Water (1994) and Leaves in the Wind (1998) Gilroy drew on her knowledge of local flora and fauna, as well as the proverbs, rainforest ghosts and wisewoman lore of her family.

In London, after endless humiliating days waiting in labour exchanges, Gilroy took temporary jobs, as a filing clerk in a mail-order sweatshop and as a uniformed maid to Lady Anne (no surname given), a determined supporter of the empire. Often sympathetic in her descriptions of others, particularly women and children, Gilroy can also be unsparing. She notes that Hilda, the ruthless manageress of the sweatshop, keeps a special needle to pick her teeth. She captures the precarity of working-class life: her workmate Mave is abandoned by her boyfriend, who absconds to Australia with their baby boy. Mave swallows two hundred aspirin with a bottle of gin. Gilroy offers to deliver a wreath to the funeral parlour and discovers that none of her co-workers is attending the ceremony, even though its taking place during their lunch hour. This is one of her early encounters with what? Stiff upper lip? Fear of someone elses misery? Revulsion against failure? It was as though, Gilroy writes, that in killing herself Mave had erased any right to their affection Now she was gone and they wanted her to drop out of mind.

Her stint as a ladys maid begins ominously. Lady Anne commends her posture and says: I suppose you come from a long line of carriers. But the relationship changes. Its a mark of Gilroys independence of mind that she is able to acknowledge her employers qualities. She admires her elegance, her possessions (the porcelain teacups), and unexpectedly declares that with her I found my own identity learning how important was a knowledge of both family and country. Theres also a superb comic cameo at the British Empire Reading Rooms, when Colonel Manson-Trot, asked to stand in for Lady Anne (whos been called away to a committee), declares: Count yourself lucky your allegiance is not to the French. No stamina, the French.

In 1954, she at last finds a teaching job, at a convent school in Bethnal Green. When the headmistress, Sister Consuelo, ushers Gilroy into her new classroom, the children dive for cover under their desks, shrieking. Only one boy, John, stands firm, saying: I aint afeared. The children are often hungry, unwashed, shivering in threadbare hand-me-downs, only able to express themselves through blows and screams and tears. This was shocking to Gilroy and her fellow immigrants from the colonies, who arrived full of illusions about life in the metropole. But Gilroy saw the energy inherent in her pupils naughtiness. She was a success: the kids started to learn and they loved her, too. She picked up on fragments of their home lives and turned them into stories and drawings; she emphasised play, music, dance, games of tag and blind mans bluff. She didnt reprimand or censor jokes, even when filthy. She was unconventional: when a little boy lashed out at another child, she smacked him on his hand, but then gave him a family of dolls to play with: Tell the dolls what you did! They want to hear it from your own mouth! Her approach was influenced by the work of Friedrich Froebel (she took a degree at the Froebel Educational Institute in the early 1960s), the founder of Kindergartens, who rejected rote learning and urged teachers to foster responsiveness, imagination and curiosity.

Her success was hard-won. Each day, she writes, it was as if I was going into a boxing ring where any breach in the defence would put me flat on my back all I wanted was to be left alone to do my job without feeling I was always being watched, assessed, measured and compared. Echoing George Lamming, who came from Barbados, she writes: Living as I did in the country of my skin, all the methods I used had to be acceptable to white observers.

Black Teacher was met with hostility when it first appeared. Gilroy was accused of boasting and of exaggerating the prejudice she had faced; for her part, she complained her account had been softened in the editing. In To Sir, with Love Braithwaite had glowingly described his eventual success in an East End classroom, but he wasnt censured. A black womans claims, however, were seen as vanity.

Gilroy took a break from teaching after her marriage to Patrick Gilroy, an English scientist who was active in anticolonial circles. She describes the isolation she felt as part of an early mixed couple in the suburbs, where she brought up their two children: Paul, the historian and author of There Aint No Black in the Union Jack, and Darla-Jane, a dress designer and teacher (Gilroy herself looks super stylish in the photographs in this book; her outfits have been included in exhibitions at the V&A). It isnt hard to see in Paul Gilroys work his mothers refusal of racial essentialism and separatism, a connection between her approach and the stress in his writing on the Black Atlantic on the possibilities of mingling, merging and transformation. (It would have been interesting to have appended to the new edition their thoughts on their mothers approach, as well as an account of, and strategy for, racism in schools today.)

During her years out of the classroom, Gilroy set up playgroups, took several further degrees and diplomas, and produced textbooks and readers for schools in Guyana. She also began a series of childrens storybooks, The Nippers, which brought black children into the action as a matter of course (its impossible to find copies today). In 1959, she wrote her first novel, In Praise of Love and Children, about Melda, a Guyanese woman who moves to London to join her brother, Arnie. The narrative moves between Meldas childhood maltreatment at the hands of her stepmother, and the disaster of Arnies marriage to Trudi, a German woman. The book was described by publishers readers, according to Gilroy, as psychological, strange, way-out, difficult to categorise, and rejected. She was indignant that the Caribbean (male) writers who reported on the manuscript didnt seem to understand it. (She exempted from this charge only the radio producer and writer Andrew Salkey, who encouraged her work.) In Praise of Love and Children didnt appear in print until 1996.

In the late 1960s, Gilroy went back to teaching. She found London much changed, largely for the better: there were now many more children like her own, who had one or more parents from the former colonies or beyond, and she was determined to see them thrive. In 1969, she was appointed head of Beckford Primary School in North-West London, the first black woman head in the city and almost certainly in the country. In Black Teacher, she mentions that there are 44 nationalities at the school; in an interview for Wasafiri magazine in 1986, she says 55. Racist taunts and assumptions still existed, but the mood was brighter. After the Race Relations Act came into force in 1965, she sat on the Race Relations Board.

In his Holberg lecture in 2019, Paul Gilroy argued for a new radical humanism. In scholastic settings, he said, distaste for history increases with increased appetites for sophistry. The resulting combination increases reluctance to approach the central issues of anti-racist ambition and hope. He goes on to warn that docile nihilism, resignation and complacent ethnic absolutism reign unchallenged while the seductions of the alt right to which they are kin present a growing danger. He calls for other kinds of ontological ballast forms of identification that, in opposition to reified identity, emerge from affinity and convivial contact, place, generation, sexualities and gender. (Work could perhaps be added to this list.)

Racial tensions have changed idiom since the 1960s, but have hardly disappeared, despite the structures of recognition that have been established. The more startling change, however, which Gilroy could not have foreseen, has taken place in the classroom. During the two main periods of her career, 1954-59 and 1968-82, she enjoyed, as a teacher, some freedom and even a certain standing. According to Black Teacher, she created her own programmes of learning, devised idiosyncratic projects and sensed where her lessons could eventually lead her pupils she wasnt just wiping tears, joining in their games or buying a troubled child a hamster. Since then, a succession of education ministers have undermined the status and autonomy of teachers, and conditions for children themselves are greatly altered. When John, the not afeared boy, kicked Gilroy sharply in the shins, she decided not to punish him. Perhaps her success with John, who eventually said he was sorry and kissed her name on the blackboard, is idealised. Perhaps she was too indulgent. But for many years now there has been little chance that such behaviour in a classroom would be met with anything other than discipline.

Its not naive to think that in the 1960s and early 1970s education was improving, and prospects set fair. Teachers and former teachers are today vocal in execrating the rigidity and harshness of some academies and free schools. Children as young as five are sent to Pupil Referral Units and Alternative Provision: in 2018, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the number of children sent from primary schools to referral units was 1572, while the figures for permanent exclusion from state secondary schools was 7894, with black and biracial children disproportionately represented. Independent schools dont release statistics, and anyhow prefer to ask that parents withdraw a pupil. The offence is frequently drug-taking, which exists in all sectors of society and is more or less mainstream in many parts of culture.

Beckford School, where Gilroy became head, was named after William Beckford, whose fortune one of the largest in the 18th century derived from vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. He is thought to have owned three thousand slaves. His son, another William, the Orientalist and author of Vathek, blew his inheritance by building and rebuilding Fonthill Abbey, a folly which, in a kind of hopeful foretoken, kept falling down. A campaign to change the schools name and commemorate instead its trailblazing former head was defeated last year. From this month it will be known as plain West Hampstead Primary School. But a mural, or some other permanent memorial, to Beryl Gilroy is planned. As Raymond Williams pointed out (and Paul Gilroy has echoed), we create shared values by choosing our forebears according to our present needs.

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Marina Warner I ain't afeared: In Her Classroom LRB 9 September 2021 - London Review of Books

Capitol Police officers told to prepare for fence to return ahead of Justice for J6 protest – WUSA9.com

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A final decision to re-install the fence has not been made, as law enforcement review intelligence about the Sept. 18 rally.

WASHINGTON U.S. Capitol Police officers have been told to prepare for fencing to return to the Capitol complex, ahead of an alt-right rally scheduled for Sept. 18. A decision on whether to re-install the imposing barriers has not been finalized, as intelligence on the upcoming Justice for J6 rally is examined, officials familiar with the matter said.

The Capitol Police officers said they were first told to be ready for fence reconstruction during a roll call meeting about two weeks ago a huddle when department leaders brief officers on daily matters, changes in procedure, and upcoming events.

The roll call discussions concerning reconstructed Capitol fencing have not been previously reported.

The Justice for J6 rally is scheduled for this month near the west front of the Capitol a protest supporting jailed Jan. 6 insurrection defendants.

Matt Braynard, the head of data for the 2016 Trump campaign, announced the gathering on Steve Bannons podcast this summer, issuing a clarion call for his followers to seek justice for Capitol riot defendants.

As we continue to raise the profile of these individuals, it makes it harder and harder for the lefts phony narrative about an insurrection to stick, Braynard said on Bannons podcast July 30. Whats going to define [the rally] is where its going to take place: were going back to the Capitol.

Around the time of the USCP roll call discussions, Metropolitan Police sent a flash alert to all members of the department conveying a full activation of the Districts police force on Sept. 18.

"In anticipation of First Amendment activities on Saturday, September 18, 2021, the Metropolitan Police Department will be fully prepared, the department said after WUSA9 first reported the alert. As with all First Amendment demonstrations, MPD will be monitoring and assessing the activities and planning accordingly with our federal law enforcement partners. MPD will have an increased presence around the city where demonstrations will be taking place and will be prepared to make street closures for public safety.

Officials familiar with the discussions told CBS News on Wednesday Capitol Police leadership are awaiting final reviews of intelligence surrounding the rally. Two sources familiar with the intelligence said members of far-right extremist groups including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are planning to attend the event, demanding the release of hundreds charged in the insurrection.

We are closely monitoring Sept. 18 and we are planning accordingly, said USCP Chief J. Thomas Manger. After Jan. 6, we made Department-wide changes to the way we gather and share intelligence internally and externally. I am confident the work we are doing now will make sure our officers have what they need to keep everyone safe.

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Capitol Police officers told to prepare for fence to return ahead of Justice for J6 protest - WUSA9.com

GoDaddy cut off Texas Right to Life’s abortion ‘whistleblowing’ website, and it might be gone – The Verge

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In case you havent heard, Texas now has a law that makes it illegal for anyone to help women get an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest and to take advantage of that, the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life is encouraging citizens to report those people at a dedicated whistleblower website, promising to ensure that these lawbreakers are held accountable for their actions.

On Friday, Texas Right to Life had to find a new home on the web, because hosting provider GoDaddy gave the group 24 hours to find a different place to park its website. We have informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have 24 hours to move to another provider for violating our terms of service, a spokesperson told The New York Times and The Verge.

By late Friday, it appeared it found that home: Epik, the provider that also helped save controversial sites Gab, social media platform Parler, and internet hate forum 8chan when other web service providers wouldnt take them, is now listed as the registrar and name server provider for prolifewhistleblower.com as well.

But the site may have gone too far for any web provider to touch, even Epik. Initially, GoDaddy told The Verge that the whistleblower site violated multiple provisions of its Terms of Service including Section 5.2, which reads:

You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent.

After Epik stepped in, the website still had plenty of trouble staying online. As of 4AM ET Saturday, we saw HTTP 503 error codes when trying to access it. According to Ars Technica, the Texas anti-abortion group tried to use Digital Ocean as a hosting provider first, but may have fallen afoul of that providers rules as well, and its not hosted there anymore.

On Saturday, the site appeared to have migrated to BitMitigate, a webhost owned by Epik itself, and one that specifically advertises its sovereign hosting services for platforms under attack. Yet by Saturday evening, the site was not loading for us at all, throwing an accessed a banned URL error. Reportedly, Epik also decided hosting the form that allowed citizens to inform on their neighbors was against its terms of service, too, and has cut it off once more. Weve reached out to Epik to confirm.

The anti-abortion groups website has been under siege for days now, with angry protesters flooding it with fake tips including at least one fake claim that Texas governor Greg Abbott himself had violated the law, according to the NYT. One activist on TikTok even created a script that can automatically feed fake reports into the websites tipbox, as Motherboard reported yesterday. He told the NYT that the automated tools hed created had received over 15,000 clicks.

But on Wednesday, Gizmodos Shoshana Wodinsky suggested another way for activists to protest: blowing the whistle on Texas Right to Life itself, by complaining to GoDaddy about what it was doing. Thats what appears to have happened.

Its not the first time web hosting providers or even GoDaddy specifically have played this role: Gab.com had to find a new home in October 2018, and GoDaddy took down white nationalist Richard Spencers Altright.com that May. Neo-nazi news site the Daily Stormer was similarly given 24 hours by GoDaddy to find a new home in August 2017, and wound up moving to the dark web instead. Gab was able to return, though, and Texas Right to Life at least briefly did as well.

Update, 4:36PM ET: Added additional context from GoDaddy.

Update September 4th, 4AM ET: Added that Epik appears to be Texas Right to Lifes new home for its site.

Update September 5th, 12:18AM ET: Added that the site now appears to be down, following a report that even Epik wasnt willing to host the whistleblower form.

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GoDaddy cut off Texas Right to Life's abortion 'whistleblowing' website, and it might be gone - The Verge

Nietzsche didn’t consider himself a nihilist and other things you should know about nihilism – ABC News

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Nihilism doesn't have a great reputation.

It's associated with existential dread, immorality and Nazis.

But writer and journalist Wendy Syfret says the philosophy can also lead to a happy, positive, fulfilling life.

Syfret says nihilism's basic message is that "life is meaningless".

"Anything around you that is trying to give you any kind of direction whether that is politics, religion or your understanding of love is kind of just made up," she tells ABC RN's Life Matters.

Supplied/photo by Ben Thomson

Nihilism says that, in the scheme of things, everything we do is pointless and everything we experience is irrelevant.

It can be.

In her new book The Sunny Nihilist, Syfret gives some examples of nihilism-gone-wrong, including being used by the aforementioned Nazis to justify their atrocities and by Russian anarchists to justify a political assassination.

Life Matters is here to help you get a handle on all the important stuff: love, sex, health, fitness, parenting, career, finances and family.

Today we see nihilism espoused by alt-right influencers and "black pill" incel groups.

Syfret says if you come to nihilism looking for something destructive, you will find it.

"Like all philosophies, you get out what you put in in many ways, it is a void," Syfret says.

And as a famous nihilist philosopher said:"If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Well spotted.

Syfret describes FriedrichNietzsche as "the poster boy of nihilism".

Public domain

"He didn't invent it but he very much brought it to the forefront," Syfret says.

But, she says, Nietzsche didn't consider himself as a nihilist.

"He didn't say nihilism is this endpoint where you reject all meaning and then you just sit in a dark room," Syfret says.

"He was more saying, use nihilism as a way to look at the people who are telling you what to value and to ask, 'What are these people getting out of this? And how are they trying to control me?'"

Nietzsche was wary of systems of power religion, nationalism or any other system that claimed to offer easy answers to life's big questions.

Once we reject the morals and values promoted by existing systems of power, Nietzsche argued, we are free to explore for ourselves what we truly believe.

His rejection of the status quo can be seen in how, in 19th century Germany, he fiercely opposed anti-Semitism.

So while Nietzsche wasn't the cheeriest guy in the world, Syfret says, he was not an inherently bad person.

His sister on the other hand

Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth was a Nazi when she died in 1935, Hitler attended her funeral.

In 1943, a letter to a journal named Angry Penguins marked the beginning of one of the most sensational hoaxes in Australian history.

In 1887, she and her husband attempted to found a colony of 'racially pure' Germans in Paraguay.

It failed spectacularly. The couple returned home and her husband killed himself.

By this time, FriedrichNietzsche had experienced a mental breakdownand in the years following he suffered multiple strokes.

This was when Elisabeth took control of her brother's archive and used it to further her own racist agenda.

She took bits and pieces of his writing and spliced them together into a manufactured book called Will to Power, which was published under Nietzsche's name soon after his death.

More than 120 years, yes. But Syfret says nihilism is now embedded in internet culture.

She gives the example of young pop music fans posting about their idols murdering them, or the gleeful memes shared at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when a Japanese theme park banned screaming, instead asking ride-goers to 'scream inside your heart'.

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Young people, Syfret says, have witnessed the decay of the structures that were supposed to bind society together: religion, government, the media.

At the same time, she says, those in power are failing to make choices that allow young people to have a steady job, own their own home or live on a planet that isn't wracked by fossil-fuel-induced climate change.

The uncertainty of the pandemic has many of embracing stoic and existentialist ideas, even if we don't know it.

Now, employers try to convince workers to find meaning in their jobs (Syfret devotes a chapter of her book to showing how destructive this can be) and advertisers pretend meaning can be found through the consumption of products.

In her book, Syfrettells of a meeting she witnessed where copywriters were desperately trying to imbuea popular brand of ice cream with meaning.

"It's exhausting when every single interaction you have with your day is trying to tell you that it's some meaningful, life-altering event," Syfret says.

"Sometimes you just want an ice cream."

So do I. But ultimately, millennia from now, neither younor Inor that ice cream will exist.

Pexels: Kindel Media

"Whether you have a great day at work, whether you absolutely nail your presentation, whether you're super charming on the zoom date you have tonight in the scope of human history, of the history of the planet, the reality is these things don't really matter," Syfret says.

"That can be a liberating way to step back from your life a little bit [and] not focus on the incredibly stressful things that we tell ourselves are the centre of the whole universe."

Hopefully, Syfret says, being confronted with how insignificant your life ultimately is also causes you to examine what is truly of value to you.

For some, she says, that might be art, music or social justice. For Syfret, knowledge that the planet will continue long after she's ceased to exist has led to her involvement in climate activism.

"As the idea of the self dissolves, it can also be a way to feel more connected to a larger community, or a sense of the health of the planet."

And, Syfret argues, by acknowledging that nothing you do ultimately matters, you're more likely to take time to enjoy the simple things whether that's patting a dog, breathing fresh air or eating an ice cream.

Enjoy it!

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Nietzsche didn't consider himself a nihilist and other things you should know about nihilism - ABC News

Opinion | The Real Problem with Sex Between Professors and Students – The New York Times

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Consider mandatory arrest laws, which require the police to make an arrest whenever they suspect an act of domestic violence. As many Black and Latina feminists predicted in the 1980s, when these policies began to be implemented, such laws increased the incidence of domestic violence against women of color; numerous studies have shown that retaliatory violence after arrest is linked with poverty, unemployment and drug and alcohol use factors that disproportionately afflict Black and Latino communities. Indeed, male joblessness is linked with domestic violence against women the world over. But poor abused women cannot, as a rule, turn to the state to employ their partners, or for the money they would need in order to be able to leave them. Instead, they can only ask that their partners be locked up, which many are understandably reluctant to do. Mandatory arrest laws were born out of a concern for womens safety. But they have sometimes had the effect of making marginalized women worse off, and have served as a cover for the deep conditions poverty and precarity that make certain groups of women especially vulnerable to violence.

The law has its limits on campus, too. The Office for Civil Rights, which administers Title IX, does not publish racial statistics for allegations of Title IX violations. Title IX requires schools to appoint officers to protect students from discrimination on the basis of sex, but not from discrimination on the basis of race, sexuality, immigration status or class. Thus, as a matter of Title IX law, it is of no concern that, during at least two recent academic years, the small minority of Black students at Colgate University, the elite liberal arts college in upstate New York, have been disproportionately targeted for sexual violation complaints; and, as a matter of law, no notes are kept on where else this might be happening.

Given the lack of data, we cannot know for certain that Title IX disproportionately affects marginalized groups, but there is good reason to think that it might. Janet Halley, a professor of law at Harvard, has spent years documenting the unseen costs of campus sexual harassment policies, including accusations that unfairly target men of color, undocumented immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q. students. How can the left care about these people when the frame is mass incarceration, immigration or trans-positivity, she has asked, and actively reject fairness protections for them under Title IX?

So, we must ask: Would legally recognizing consensual faculty-student relationships as sex-discriminatory make campuses fairer for all women, for queer people, for immigrants, for the precariously employed, for people of color? Or would this bring with it unintended consequences, to be suffered by some of the people already most marginalized in our universities? In a context in which more and more academic labor is performed by adjuncts on low pay and with no job security, which university teachers could we expect to be targeted by such a legal change? Could such a change be leveraged to undermine academic freedom? And would the young people, usually women, involved in consensual relationships with their professors end up better off?

In considering these questions, it is perhaps instructive to return to one of the few times that U.S. courts have been asked to rule on whether faculty-student relationships can be penalized: a 1984 case called Naragon v. Wharton. Kristine Naragon, a graduate student instructor at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.) had a romantic relationship with a 17-year-old freshman student also a woman whom she wasnt teaching. At the time, L.S.U. did not have a ban on faculty-student relationships, but the school decided not to renew Ms. Naragons teaching duties after the freshmans parents demanded that the administration intervene. Meanwhile, L.S.U. declined to sanction a male professor in Ms. Naragons department who was having a live-in affair with an undergraduate woman whose work he had the responsibility of grading. The court ruled in L.S.U.s favor, finding that by punishing Ms. Naragon but not the male professor, the school had not been motivated by homophobia.

None of this is to say that we cannot use the law, and Title IX specifically, to make university campuses more equal. But it is to recommend caution. It is not enough for us to think about what, as a matter of principle, the law should say; we must also think about what, in practice, the law will be used to do, and against whom. The law is a powerful tool, but it can also be blunt. It is also not the only tool available.

Rather than looking to the law, professors might look to themselves. Graduate students tend not to receive much instruction in how to teach much less in how to negotiate the strong feelings (of desire and elation, but also of anger, frustration and disappointment) that can charge the classroom. Likewise, we rarely discuss what to do about the fact that teacher and student are not just abstract intelligences, but embodied creatures. Writing about her experience as a new professor, the Black feminist bell hooks observed: No one talked about the body in relation to teaching. What did one do with the body in the classroom?

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Opinion | The Real Problem with Sex Between Professors and Students - The New York Times