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masumhossanbd · 3 years

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16 December 1971 history of Bangladesh bangle.

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Victory Day (বিজয় দিবস – Bijoy Dibos):

Is a national holiday in Bangladesh celebrated on December 16 to commemorate the victory of the Allied forces High Command over the Pakistani forces in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. The Commanding officer of the Pakistani Forces General AAK Niazi surrendered his forces to the Allied forces commander Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora, which marked ending the 9 month-long[1] Bangladesh Liberation War and 1971 Bangladesh genocide and officially secession of East Pakistan into Bangladesh.

History:

The Bangladesh Liberation War (Bengali: মুক্তিযুদ্ধ Muktijuddho) was a South Asian war of independence in 1971 which established the sovereign nation of Bangladesh. The war pitted East Pakistan and India against West Pakistan, and lasted over a duration of nine months. It witnessed large-scale atrocities, the exodus of 10 million refugees and the displacement of 30 million people.

The war broke out on 26 March 1971, when the Pakistan Army launched a military operation called Operation Searchlight against Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia and armed personnel, who were demanding that the Pakistani military junta accept the results of the 1970 first democratic elections of Pakistan, which were won by an eastern party, or to allow separation between East and West Pakistan. Bengali politicians and army officers announced the declaration of Bangladesh’s independence in response to Operation Searchlight. Bengali military, paramilitary and civilians formed the Mukti Bahini (Bengali: মুক্তি বাহিনী “Liberation Army”), which engaged in guerrilla warfare against Pakistani forces. The Pakistan Army, in collusion with religious extremist militias (the Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams), engaged in the systematic genocide and atrocities of Bengali civilians, particularly nationalists, intellectuals, youth and religious minorities Neighboring India provided economic, military and diplomatic support to Bengali nationalists, and the Bangladesh government-in-exile was set up in Calcutta.

India entered the war on 3 December 1971, after Pakistan launched pre-emptive air strikes on northern India. Overwhelmed by two war fronts, Pakistani defenses soon collapsed. On 16 December, the Allied Forces of Bangladesh and India defeated Pakistan in the east. The subsequent surrender resulted in the largest number of prisoners-of-war since World War II.

Recognition of Bangladesh:

The Surrender of Pakistan Armed Forces marked the end of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the creation of Bangladesh (later reduced to a single word). Most United Nations member nations were quick to recognize Bangladesh within months of its independence.

Celebration:

The celebration of Victory Day has taken place since 1972. The Bangladesh Liberation War became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts in Bangladesh. The ritual of the celebration gradually obtained a distinctive character with a number of similar elements: Military Parade by Bangladesh Armed Forces at the National Parade Ground, ceremonial meetings, speeches, lectures, receptions and fireworks. Victory Day in Bangladesh is a joyous celebration in which popular culture plays a great role. TV and radio stations broadcast special programs and patriotic songs. The main streets are decorated with national flags. Different political parties and socioeconomic organizations undertake programs to mark the day in a befitting manner, including the paying of respects at Jatiyo Smriti Soudho, the national memorial at Savar near Dhaka.

Background:

In August 1947, the Partition of British India gave birth to two new states; a secular state named India and an Islamic state named Pakistan. But Pakistan comprised two geographically and culturally separate areas to the east and the west of India. The western zone was popularly (and for a period of time, also officially) termed West Pakistan and the eastern zone (modern-day Bangladesh) was initially termed East Bengal and later, East Pakistan. Although the population of the two zones was close to equal, political power was concentrated in West Pakistan and it was widely perceived that East Pakistan was being exploited economically, leading to many grievances.

On 25 March 1971, rising political discontent and cultural nationalism in East Pakistan was met by brutal suppressive force from the ruling elite of the West Pakistan establishment in what came to be termed Operation Searchlight.

The violent crackdown by West Pakistan forces led to East Pakistan declaring its independence as the state of Bangladesh and to the start of civil war. The war led to a sea of refugees (estimated at the time to be about 10 million) flooding into the eastern provinces of India. Facing a mounting humanitarian and economic crisis, India started actively aiding and organizing the Bangladeshi resistance army known as the Mukti Bahini.

Political Differences:

Although East Pakistan accounted for a slight majority of the country’s population, political power remained firmly in the hands of West Pakistanis. Since a straightforward system of representation based on population would have concentrated political power in East Pakistan, the West Pakistani establishment came up with the “One Unit” scheme, where all of West Pakistan was considered one province. This was solely to counterbalance the East wing’s votes.

After the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, in 1951, political power began to be devolved to the President of Pakistan, and eventually, the military. The nominal elected chief executive, the Prime Minister, was frequently sacked by the establishment, acting through the President.

East Pakistanis noticed that whenever one of them, such as Khawaja Nazimuddin, Muhammad Ali Bogra, or Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, he were swiftly deposed by the largely West Pakistani establishment. The military dictatorships of Ayub Khan (27 October 1958 – 25 March 1969) and Yahya Khan (25 March 1969 – 20 December 1971), both West Pakistanis, only heightened such feelings.

The situation reached a climax when in 1970 the Awami League, the largest East Pakistani political party, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a landslide victory in the national elections. The party won 167 of the 169 seats allotted to East Pakistan, and thus a majority of the 313 seats in the National Assembly. This gave the Awami League the constitutional right to form a government. However, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (a Sindhi), the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, refused to allow Rahman to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Instead, he proposed the idea of having two Prime Ministers, one for each wing. The proposal elicited outrage in the east wing, already chafing under the other constitutional innovation, the “one unit scheme”. Bhutto also refused to accept Rahman’s Six Points. On 3 March 1971, the two leaders of the two wings along with the President General Yahya Khan met in Dhaka to decide the fate of the country. Talks failed. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman called for a nationwide strike.

On 7 March 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (soon to be the prime minister) delivered a speech at the Racecourse Ground (now called the Suhrawardy Udyan). In this speech he mentioned a further four-point condition to consider the National Assembly Meeting on 25 March:

The immediate lifting of martial law.

Immediate withdrawal of all military personnel to their barracks.

An inquiry into the loss of life.

Immediate transfer of power to the elected representative of the people before the assembly meeting 25 March.

He urged “his people” to turn every house into a fort of resistance. He closed his speech saying, “Our struggle is for our freedom. Our struggle is for our independence.” This speech is considered the main event that inspired the nation to fight for its independence. General Tikka Khan was flown in to Dhaka to become Governor of East Bengal. East-Pakistani judges, including Justice Siddique, refused to swear him in.

Between 10 and 13 March, Pakistan International Airlines cancelled all their international routes to urgently fly “Government Passengers” to Dhaka. These “Government Passengers” were almost all Pakistani soldiers in civilian dress. MV Swat, a ship of the Pakistani Navy, carrying ammunition and soldiers, was harbored in Chittagong Port and the Bengali workers and sailors at the port refused to unload the ship. A unit of East Pakistan Rifles refused to obey commands to fire on Bengali demonstrators, beginning a mutiny of Bengali soldiers.

Operation Searchlight:

A planned military pacification carried out by the Pakistan Army — code-named Operation Searchlight — started on 25 March to curb the Bengali nationalist movement by taking control of the major cities on 26 March, and then eliminating all opposition, political or military, within one month. Before the beginning of the operation, all foreign journalists were systematically deported from East Pakistan.

The main phase of Operation Searchlight ended with the fall of the last major town in Bengali hands in mid-May. The operation also began the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities. These systematic killings served only to enrage the Bengalis, which ultimately resulted in the secession of East Pakistan later in the same year. The international media and reference books in English have published casualty figures which vary greatly, from 5,000–35,000 in Dhaka, and 200,000–3,000,000 for Bangladesh as a whole.

According to the Asia Times,

At a meeting of the military top brass, Yahya Khan declared: “Kill 3 million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.” Accordingly, on the night of 25 March, the Pakistani Army launched Operation Searchlight to “crush” Bengali resistance in which Bengali members of military services were disarmed and killed, students and the intelligentsia systematically liquidated and able-bodied Bengali males just picked up and gunned down.

Although the violence focused on the provincial capital, Dhaka, it also affected all parts of East Pakistan. Residential halls of the University of Dhaka were particularly targeted. The only Hindu residential hall — the Jagannath Hall — was destroyed by the Pakistani armed forces, and an estimated 600 to 700 of its residents were murdered. The Pakistani army denies any cold blooded killings at the university, though the Hamood-ur-Rehman commission in Pakistan concluded that overwhelming force was used at the university. This fact and the massacre at Jagannath Hall and nearby student dormitories of Dhaka University are corroborated by a videotape secretly filmed by Prof. Nurul Ullah of the East Pakistan Engineering University, whose residence was directly opposite the student dormitories.

Hindu areas suffered particularly heavy blows. By midnight, Dhaka was burning, especially the Hindu dominated eastern part of the city. Time magazine reported on 2 August 1971, “The Hindus, who account for three-fourths of the refugees and a majority of the dead, have borne the brunt of the Pakistani military hatred.”

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested by the Pakistani Army. Yahya Khan appointed Brigadier (later General) Rahimuddin Khan to preside over a special tribunal prosecuting Mujib with multiple charges. The tribunal’s sentence was never made public, but Yahya caused the verdict to be held in abeyance in any case. Other Awami League leaders were arrested as well, while a few fled Dhaka to avoid arrest. The Awami League was banned by General Yahya Khan.

Atrocities:

During the war there were widespread killings and other atrocities – including the displacement of civilians in Bangladesh (East Pakistan at the time) and widespread violations of human rights – carried out by the Pakistan Army with support from political and religious militias, beginning with the start of Operation Searchlight on 25 March 1971. Bangladeshi authorities claim that three million people were killed, while the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, an official Pakistan Government investigation, put the figure as low as 26,000 civilian casualties. The international media and reference books in English have also published figures which vary greatly from 200,000 to 3,000,000 for Bangladesh as a whole. A further eight to ten million people fled the country to seek safety in India.

Large sections of the intellectual community of Bangladesh were murdered, mostly by the Al-Shams and Al-Badr forces, at the instruction of the Pakistani Army. Just 2 days before the surrender, on 14 December 1971, Pakistan Army and Razakar militia (local collaborators) picked up at least 100 physicians, professors, writers and engineers in Dhaka, and murdered them, leaving the dead bodies in a mass grave. There are many mass graves in Bangladesh, and as years pass, more are being discovered (such as one in an old well near a mosque in Dhaka, located in the non-Bengali region of the city, which was discovered in August 1999). The first night of war on Bengalis, which is documented in telegrams from the American Consulate in Dhaka to the United States State Department, saw indiscriminate killings of students of Dhaka University and other civilians. Numerous women were tortured, raped and killed during the war; the exact numbers are not known and are a subject of debate. Bangladeshi sources cite a figure of 200,000 women raped, giving birth to thousands of war babies. The Pakistan Army also kept numerous Bengali women as sex-slaves inside the Dhaka Cantonment. Most of the girls were captured from Dhaka University and private homes. There was significant sectarian violence not only perpetrated and encouraged by the Pakistani army, but also by Bengali nationalists against non-Bengali minorities, especially Biharis.

On 16 December 2002, the George Washington University’s National Security Archive published a collection of declassified documents, consisting mostly of communications between US embassy officials and United States Information Service centers in Dhaka and India, and officials in Washington DC. These documents show that US officials working in diplomatic institutions within Bangladesh used the terms selective genocide and genocide to describe events they had knowledge of at the time. Genocide is the term that is still used to describe the event in almost every major publication and newspaper in Bangladesh, although elsewhere, particularly in Pakistan, the actual death toll, motives, extent, and destructive impact of the actions of the Pakistani forces are disputed.

Liberation War:

March to June

At first resistance was spontaneous and disorganized, and was not expected to be prolonged.[45] But when the Pakistani Army cracked down upon the population, resistance grew. The Mukti Bahini became increasingly active. The Pakistani military sought to quell them, but increasing numbers of Bengali soldiers defected to the underground “Bangladesh army”. These Bengali units slowly merged into the Mukti Bahini and bolstered their weaponry with supplies from India. Pakistan responded by airlifting in two infantry divisions and reorganizing their forces. They also raised paramilitary forces of Razakars, Al-Badrs andAl-Shams (who were mostly members of the Muslim League, the then government party and other Islamist groups), as well as other Bengalis who opposed independence, and Bihari Muslims who had settled during the time of partition.

On 17 April 1971, a provisional government was formed in Meherpur district in western Bangladesh bordering India with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was in prison in Pakistan, as President, Syed Nazrul Islam as Acting President, and Tajuddin Ahmed as Prime Minister. As fighting grew between the army and the Bengali Mukti Bahini an estimated 10 million Bengalis, mainly Hindus, sought refuge in the Indian states of Assam and West Bengal.

June – September

Bangladesh forces command was set up on 11 July, with Col. M A G Osmani as commander in chief, Lt. Col. Abdur Rab as chief of Army Staff and Group Captain A K Khandker as Deputy Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Air Force. Bangladesh was divided into Eleven Sectors each with a commander chosen from defected officers of the Pakistani army who joined the Mukti Bahini to conduct guerrilla operations and train fighters. Most of their training camps were situated near the border area and were operated with assistance from India. The 10th Sector was directly placed under a Commander in Chief (C-in-C) and included the Naval Commandos and C-in-C’s special force. Three brigades (11 Battalions) were raised for conventional warfare; a large guerrilla force (estimated at 100,000) was trained.

Guerrilla operations, which slackened during the training phase, picked up after August. Economic and military targets in Dhaka were attacked. The major success story was Operation Jackpot, in which naval commandos mined and blew up berthed ships in Chittagong on 16 August 1971. Pakistani reprisals claimed lives of thousands of civilians. The Indian army took over supplying the Mukti Bahini from the BSF. They organised six sectors for supplying the Bangladesh forces.

October – December

Bangladesh conventional forces attacked border outposts. Kamalpur, Belonia and Battle of Boyra are a few examples. 90 out of 370 BOPs fell to Bengali forces. Guerrilla attacks intensified, as did Pakistani and Razakar reprisals on civilian populations. Pakistani forces were reinforced by eight battalions from West Pakistan. The Bangladeshi independence fighters even managed to temporarily capture airstrips at Lalmonirhat and Shalutikar. Both of these were used for flying in supplies and arms from India. Pakistan sent 5 battalions from West Pakistan as reinforcements.

Declaration of Independence:

The violence unleashed by the Pakistani forces on 25 March 1971, proved the last straw to the efforts to negotiate a settlement. Following these outrages, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman signed an official declaration that read:

Today Bangladesh is a sovereign and independent country. On Thursday night, West Pakistani armed forces suddenly attacked the police barracks at Razarbagh and the EPR headquarters at Pilkhana in Dhaka. Many innocent and unarmed have been killed in Dhaka city and other places of Bangladesh. Violent clashes between E.P.R. and Police on the one hand and the armed forces of Pakistan on the other, are going on. The Bengalis are fighting the enemy with great courage for an independent Bangladesh. May Allah aid us in our fight for freedom. Joy Bangla.

Sheikh Mujib also called upon the people to resist the occupation forces through a radio message. Mujib was arrested on the night of 25–26 March 1971 at about 1:30 a.m. (as per Radio Pakistan’s news on 29 March 1971).

A telegram containing the text of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s declaration reached some students in Chittagong. The message was translated to Bangla by Dr. Manjula Anwar. The students failed to secure permission from higher authorities to broadcast the message from the nearby Agrabad Station of Radio Pakistan. They crossed Kalurghat Bridge into an area controlled by an East Bengal Regiment under Major Ziaur Rahman. Bengali soldiers guarded the station as engineers prepared for transmission. At 19:45 hrs on 27 March 1971, Major Ziaur Rahman broadcast the announcement of the declaration of independence on behalf of Sheikh Mujibur. On 28 March Major Ziaur Rahman made another announcement, which was as follows:

This is Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendro. I, Major Ziaur Rahman, at the direction of Bangobondhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, hereby declare that the independent People’s Republic of Bangladesh has been established. At his direction, I have taken command as the temporary Head of the Republic. In the name of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, I call upon all Bengalis to rise against the attack by the West Pakistani Army. We shall fight to the last to free our Motherland. By the grace of Allah, victory is ours. Joy Bangla.

The Kalurghat Radio Station’s transmission capability was limited. The message was picked up by a Japanese ship in Bay of Bengal. It was then re-transmitted by Radio Australia and later by the British Broadcasting Corporation. M A Hannan, an Awami League leader from Chittagong, is said to have made the first announcement of the declaration of independence over the radio on 26 March 1971. There is controversy now as to when Major Zia gave his speech. BNP sources maintain that it was 26 March, and there was no message regarding declaration of independence from Mujibur Rahman. Pakistani sources, like Siddiq Salik in Witness to Surrender had written that he heard about Mujibor Rahman’s message on the Radio while Operation Searchlight was going on, and Maj. Gen. Hakeem A. Qureshi in his book The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative, gives the date of Zia’s speech as 27 March 1971.

26 March 1971 is considered the official Independence Day of Bangladesh, and the name Bangladesh was in effect henceforth. In July 1971, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi openly referred to the former East Pakistan as Bangladesh. Some Pakistani and Indian officials continued to use the name “East Pakistan” until 16 December 1971.

Surrender & Aftermath:

On 16 December 1971, Lt. Gen A. A. K. Niazi, CO of Pakistan Army forces located in East Pakistan signed the instrument of surrender. At the time of surrender only a few countries had provided diplomatic recognition to the new nation. Over 90,000 Pakistani troops surrendered to the Indian forces making it the largest surrender since World War II. Bangladesh sought admission in the United Nations with most voting in its favor, but China vetoed this as Pakistan was its key ally. The United States, also a key ally of Pakistan, was one of the last nations to accord Bangladesh recognition. To ensure a smooth transition, in 1972 the Simla Agreement was signed between India and Pakistan. The treaty ensured that Pakistan recognized the independence of Bangladesh in exchange for the return of the Pakistani PoWs. India treated all the PoWs in strict accordance with the Geneva Convention, rule 1925. It released more than 90,000 Pakistani PoWs in five months.

Further, as a gesture of goodwill, nearly 200 soldiers who were sought for war crimes by Bengalis were also pardoned by India. The accord also gave back more than 13,000 km² of land that Indian troops had seized in West Pakistan during the war, though India retained a few strategic areas; most notably Kargil (which would in turn again be the focal point for a war between the two nations in 1999). This was done as a measure of promoting “lasting peace” and was acknowledged by many observers as a sign of maturity by India. But some in India felt that the treaty had been too lenient to Bhutto, who had pleaded for leniency, arguing that the fragile democracy in Pakistan would crumble if the accord was perceived as being overly harsh by Pakistanis.

Thank you...

“Md. Masum Hossan”

#16december #vactory #bangladesh

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princessofmerchants · 4 years

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Thoughts on A Court of Frost and Starlight, Chapter 6: Morrigan — Flashbacks and Political Adversaries

(I’m recording my thoughts on each chapter of ACOFAS ahead of ACOSF. This is my third time reading ACOFAS. The rest can be found here.)

Author’s Note: I have not read any of ACOSF as of this posting, so please keep comments, reblogs, and replies 🛑 spoiler free 🛑 (including references and reactions to what is in the first 3-6 chapters of the book).

My first impression here is a bit of a non sequitur given the focus of the next book, but I enjoy being in Mor's POV. I don't always like her in the narrative, but I think I'd like her more if I got to spend time seeing the world through her eyes.

The next thing I noticed in this chapter is a literary device I feel confident we will see in ACOSF: A full blown flashback scene in the middle of another scene in the present, this one of when Eris and his Autumn border patrol find a very injured Mor near the Autumn Court border, left there by her cruel and violent family. I am betting this will be the main way we will get significant moments and snippets from Nesta's and Cassian's past interactions with each other before the time of the present action in ACOSF. I am hoping this includes the weeks immediately after Nesta and Elain are brought to the Night Court after being forcibly Made, interactions in the war camps during the war against Hybern, and anything that may have passed between them in Velaris post-war.

Back to this chapter though: I'll just say one thing about Eris, since his time to be a main object of analysis for me hasn't yet arrived IMO. Mor repeats to herself Eris's most cruel insult to her when he leaves her on the border injured: I am not in the habit of fucking Illyrian leftovers.

But when you look closely at the point in the narrative when he says this, there is what Mor perceives as a cruel, slow pause just before he insults her this way. I predict underlying that pause was Eris determining what he could say to reinforce the terrible, cruel persona he needs to maintain in front of the people of his court. The pause may have been cruel, but it was also strategic and likely filled with more of a detached decision to insult her than one that came from his heart (as it were). And yet, these are the words from the encounter that haunt her most... which means Eris's efforts to maintain a veneer of cruelty have very easily worked on Mor.

Finally, we learn of some politics regarding Beron wanting to expand Fae territories into the human realm below where the wall used to be, which queues up the Night Court's (Rhys’s) imminent visit to Tamlin and Spring.

About this political plot point I'll just say that I think Beron is going to be an adversary at some point in the next two books, or in collusion with one or more public adversaries to peace, so his desire to expand, and likely terrorize the neighboring humans in the process, feels significant to remember plot-wise when heading into the next book.

#acofas #a court of frost and starlight #chapter by chapter commentary #acosf #a court of silver flames #morrigan #eris vanserra #autumn court #beron vanserra #cassian #nesta archeron #nesta x cassian #spoiler free zone #spoiler free

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dabistits · 4 years

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This was 1968, a significant year for Japan’s student movement that coincided with the impending renewal of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty, whose amendment in 1960 triggered the first wave of the decade’s social protests, leading to the death of a female undergraduate student of the University of Tokyo during police clashes, and eventually the resignation of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, grandfather of current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

It was also a time that saw uprisings raging around the world, including the civil-rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests in the United States, the Cultural Revolution in China, massive demonstrations by students and workers in France and Germany, and Czechoslovakia’s failed Prague Spring.

Protests in Japan in 1968 were far more coordinated and larger in scale compared to a decade earlier, beginning with a demonstration against the arrival of the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise, which was due to visit a U.S. naval base in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, in mid-January before heading to Vietnam.

Leftist student organization Zengakuren, an entity formed by groups with varying degrees of radicalism, as well as other peace organizations and political parties assembled to the small town to protest the port call. Fueling the move was the so-called Haneda incidents of the year before — ferocious student demonstrations against Prime Minister Eisaku Sato’s visit to Japan’s Asian neighbors and the United States that stirred the anger of those viewing the move as the government’s collusion with Washington and its policy in Vietnam.

Conservatives viewed the Enterprise’s visit as crucial to Japan’s defense in a volatile region, while others saw the move as the government’s blind support of U.S. strategy in East Asia. Beginning on Jan. 17, these sentiments exploded at Sasebo, as student protesters clashed with police armed with batons and tear gas outside the U.S. naval base. The struggle soon became lopsided, with men in uniform viciously battering defenseless students and raising widespread criticism of police brutality.

#japan #policing #readings #history of

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epochryphal · 4 years

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abolition work

hm i haven’t been posting here much because 1. Work Busy and 2. local movement spaces being largely on facebook, plus 3. disclosing local geographic location on here is still a bit Hhhh

but yeah i’m fairly open about being california bay area, and am working on plugging into local orgs and have been doing some rad captioning gigs for various places on both coasts, and getting to witness really rad conversations around defunding, dismantling, abolition, alternative structures, and communal healing

big plug for Kindred Collective and healing justice, their work on the medical industrial complex, and the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network doing the deprogramming state collusion and relearning community care for social workers & healing practitioners

on surveillance, Hacking//Hustling is doing awesome work and talking about histories of police collaboration to criminalize public health surveillance, as is Red Canary Song,

highly recommend the Just Practice Collaborative’s mixtape on transformative justice coming out at the beginning of august

some great discussion by Mia Mingus and Mimi Kim along with Cat Brooks of Anti Police-Terror Project/APTP about the conflation of transformative justice, which seeks to transform systems that allowed/enabled harm to occur, with restorative justice, which seeks to restore the status quo that existed before the harm, and which the state is picking up on as a veneer of reparative work

and always always love for Critical Resistance and their amazing resources, and to the Abolition Journal Study Guide

for concrete steps to police abolition and things to call for from leaders, i recommend:

APTP’s & Justice Teams Network’s Black New Deal (here, there, and also here)

8toAbolition

MPD150 (who have a huge resource page!)

Critical Resistance’s demands

Movement for Black Lives/M4BL’s Interrupting Criminalization Toolkit

Repeal 50 (New York police misconduct protection laws)

other rad groups with resources include Survived & Punished, Community Justice Exchange, DecrimNow, FreeThemAll4PublicHealth, local Decarcerate ___ groups, Black Youth Project 100, INCITE!

other important names include Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Kristina Agbebiyi, Kelly Hayes, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Kimberle Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Anoop Naya, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, Cornel West, Angela Davis, bell hooks, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Charlene Carruthers, Rachel Cargle

my favorite demands right now are:

freeze police hiring, at minimum

decriminalize public existence (loitering, disorderly conduct, being in a park after dark, eating or drinking in public/on transit, riding a bike on the sidewalk, sleeping in public, littering, urinating in public, etc)

- these shouldn’t be misdemeanors! there can be general public conduct agreements without criminalization, and with competent handling of homelessness

refuse to criminalize COVID-19 and decriminalize HIV/AIDS and end all health care information sharing with police

refuse to use facial recognition tech and end usage of “predictive” tech, license plate readers, etc (saves money too!)

fund public bathrooms and showers, including making existent facilities (eg YMCA, pools) available, and fund COVID sanitation staff

move duties out of the police:

- youth engagement

- community engagement

- re-entry from incarceration assistance

- parking enforcement

- traffic law enforcement

- health crisis response

- mental health crisis response

- homelessness response and services

- neighbor disputes

- trespassing enforcement

- domestic violence response

- transit fares and rules enforcement

--> create new divisions that are unarmed, are not trained&licensed to use force or institutionalize/incarcerate, and are non-coercive

--> start by creating a transition team to start doing this with a five-year plan, for example

*** in the meantime, disarm police responses to these!! ***

--> see CareNotCops.org

articles i’ve found valuable:

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop on Medium

Who Should Pay for Police Misconduct on a legal blog

Domestic Violence & Defunding Police on Huffington Post

Tired Bad Cops First Look to Their Labor Unions on Washington Post

Who’s Afraid of Defunding the Police? on Salon

Defunding the Police: What Would It Mean for the U.S.? on NPR

Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation by Dorothy Roberts

The Color of Surveillance by Alvaro Bedeta (see also the conference’s materials)

article i need to take a moment to find a way around a paywall for lmao: On Trans Dissemblance: Or, Why Trans Studies Needs Black Feminism

documentaries/videos i recommend:

Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise on PBS

books i’ve learned about and super want to read include:

Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation from Colonial Times to the Present

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (by Charlene Carruthers with BYP100)

The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (by Simone Brown)

Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Decarcerating Disability

No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (by Dean Spade)

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

additional books i’m considering and have seen recommended:

Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in 20th Century America

Me and White Supremacy

So You Want to Talk About Race

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

A People’s History of the United States

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (by Patricia Hill Collins)

Eloquent Rage (by Brittney Cooper)

Bad Feminist (by Roxane Gay)

Thick: And Other Essays

Real Life: A Novel

No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

Since I Laid My Burden Down

The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

The Summer We Got Free

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (by Trevor Noah)

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

yeah!!

what/who are y’all reading/watching/listening to and finding helpful, or meaning to get around to?

#abolition bloggin #racism bloggin #journal bloggin #resource bloggin #long post

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kakaji · 4 years

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HOW THE CONQUEST OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES PARALLELS THE CONQUEST OF NATURE by John Mohawk

For some twenty years I’ve been doing a range of writing, including journalism, as a hobby. As a writer I have brought people a lot of bad news. Describing the fortunes of this hemisphere’s and to some degree other hemispheres’ indigenous peoples provides an endless sequence of bad news. At one time I was the editor of the largest American Indian publication in the Americas, Akwesasne Notes, which dealt with ideas that at the time were definitely not mainstream. I remember putting out issues in which we raised questions about the nature of the relationship of the human spirit to the natural world and broached the idea that human-created societies are inappropriately distanced from the physical realities of the world. We talked about areas of philosophical thought that have not been explored to their depths in the English language, although I imagine they’ve been explored at some depth in other languages.

Lately, though, my thinking has been shaped by my official career. I teach social history, a subject not usually associated with ecology, although I think it’s high time to make that connection. But first let me mention some of the issues I find myself grappling with in social history, which deals broadly with people’s everyday lived experiences in different cultural contexts and also with how people come to think and feel the way they do about what they encounter in the world.

I became interested in social history when I was in college, a small and conservative and Eurocentric college. In those days undergraduates were required to take a course in philosophy; in the course I signed up for I learned that there was really only one genre of philosophers, who occupied a narrow niche in the world of thought: they were all Western European, they were all male, they were all from what we would describe as the elite privileged classes, and as a whole they stayed within a set of boundaries they defined for themselves. They belonged to a club, as it were. Each one was required to know what was said by the preceding one, and each one was required to build on that. If a student asked the professor, for example, if there were any philosophers in China or Africa, the more or less curt reply was, Not that I know of, and stick to the book.

Having been exposed since then to the ideas of people of many different cultures, I ask myself why these ideas are not part of the overall survey of philosophy even though the profession has loosened its collar a little bit in the thirty years since I was a student. After all, there certainly can’t have been only one stream of knowledge in all of history. I think we need to study Western civilization in order to understand when certain narrow and limited ways of thinking first appeared and where we went wrong. Therefore, I dutifully went back and started reading about the foundations of Western thought, trying to understand it in the light of other cultures.

As I studied Greek philosophy, I asked myself, Who were these Greeks, who gave us what we think of as the foundation of our thought, of our culture, and gave us our ideas about nature and society? I soon made a distinction between what the Greeks said and what they did. My philosophy professor had described a group of men sitting under a tree philosophizing; I saw them as an arrogant bunch who thought they had a new and better way to think about the world. But what were the Greeks actually doing? They were the creators of the most astonishing military organization in the world, building on centuries, even millennia, of military experience. Some clever people with good administrative and organizational skills put together armies that were able to march across the world and defeat everybody in their path relatively easily.

Classical Greece is taken as the starting point of European history, but actually Greece was old by the time of the classical Greeks. Over thousands of years the populations of the Mediterranean had been conquered numerous times before the formation of the Greek city-states we associate with classical Greek culture. By the time we get to the Romans, all of the peoples had been Hellenized. It is difficult to find anything resembling the remains of an indigenous Mediterranean culture.

This lack of indigenous culture leads me to William McNeill’s observations in The Rise of the West. He points out that the utopian religions which appeared in the two centuries before and after Christ arose out of rootless urban populations who had no consciousness of place. Successive waves of conquest destroyed any continuity of culture. This tied in with my reading of Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity, in which he points out that episodes of horrific human slaughter and devastation throughout history often are the product of utopian ideologies.

Utopian ideology in the context in which I’m using the term means that people have an idea, they have a plan, and according to their plan a utopian society is at the end of their path. All of humankind’s problems are going to be solved by reaching this goal. But usually while they’re pursuing their goal, they discover that there are other people who are standing in their way or at least occupying ground needed for them to carry it out. You can’t have a utopian society unless you’re willing to crack a few eggs, as it were, and it’s almost always necessary to crack other people’s eggs to get there.

Understanding the nature of utopian ideology helps us find answers to certain troubling historical questions. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners Daniel Goldhagen asks, How could average everyday ordinary churchgoing Germans, who we all know were fully acculturated twentieth-century Western civilization people, get up in the morning, walk outside, shoot women and children in cold blood, and then come back in the evening and have supper as though they were doing nothing more than making widgets? How could people act in such a cold-blooded manner? Well, all we have to do is follow the real story of Western civilization and we’ll see that there has been episode after episode after episode of people getting up in the morning, going out, and murdering people. I think it started in what we call the modern era at that moment when Western Europe exploded out of Europe and expanded all over the world, beginning in the 1450s when the level of intolerance in European societies rose enormously. Pogroms were started against the Jews, and then in 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain. What we have is a pattern of behavior of utterly unbelievable cruelty in a society that claims to be civilized.

Another example of the consequences of utopian ideology is the campaign against magic during the three hundred years starting around 1450. Individuals who had a spiritual relationship with plants or animals were considered to be practicing magic. In the 1600s it was believed that these people had renounced Christ and were in league with the devil, who promised them the powers of nature in return, powers they then used against their enemies. This same belief that people making use of the powers of nature must be getting their magic from the devil prevailed in New England: when John Mason or Cotton Mather railed against the practices of the Indians, they were really railing against nature as an evil power, an evil power that must be controlled, overcome, and stamped out.

Witches weren’t going to admit to using magic, so a certain amount of coercive force was required, and the Inquisition was invented in order to drag people into dungeons and twist their limbs until they confessed and even named their neighbors, who were then brought in and treated similarly. That was the beginning of the witchcraft trials—for the most part involving women, by the way. According to some accounts, millions of people over three centuries were accused, tortured, and burned at the stake. What were they guilty of? They were herbalists; they were herb doctors, who believed that the powers of nature could heal the human body. This belief was a direct threat to the power of the Church, which proclaimed that when Christ ascended to heaven, God the Father and the Holy Spirit went with Christ. Until they returned to earth, the Church was the only possible intermediary between humans and supernatural powers. The success of herbalists in curing their patients contradicted this faith in the sole power of the Church.

The war on magic was a psychological war on nature. It wasn’t waged by individuals but by the major institutions in Western culture—by the Church and the state in collusion with each other. They were not only making war on nature, they were also cracking eggs along the way. People accused of being witches were frequently selected because they had property that was desired by the local authorities, so quite often doing away with a witch proved profitable for the coffers of both town and Church. They took the property, including the land. Multiplied by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people over centuries, the plunder must have amounted to a great deal. You might say that the witches provided the early capitalization for the formation of European nation states.

Classical Greek philosophy also rejected nature-based religion. Let’s turn to Socrates by way of example. What did Socrates say about the people who were in the temples interpreting dreams and making forecasts and telling fortunes? He said it was all nonsense that should be replaced by rational thought. Socrates argued that the world must be based on reason, not on dreams and myths and the like. As far as I am concerned, one of the great fountainheads of Western civilization’s understanding of the human spirit is actually the old Greek myths that Socrates disparaged. They are among the most interesting artistic forms ever produced by the West.

I gradually came to believe that it’s not enough to study the history of philosophy, because what the philosophers are saying is entirely different from what is happening. Socrates lived at a time when the major form of social organization could best be described as either military oligarchy or military dictatorship. That is what the Greek city states really were. As I kept delving deeper, I found that in the history of philosophy the part that deals clearly with what’s really going on is something we don’t ordinarily read in social history, and that is military history. Military historians don’t shrink back from talking about political agendas. A military historian comes right out and says, The agenda here was to plunder; the plan was to use so many cannons, so many of this and that. When military historians study human behavior, they come to the conclusion that the purpose of organized armed aggression is to plunder. Now, that’s something which should be inscribed on the library wall at Columbia: the purpose of organized armed aggression is plunder!

I believe that philosophy was used by Western civilization to obscure the act of plunder by cloaking it in fancier terms. Aristotle could have said, We’re evil exploiters, and we’re going to conquer these people; we have the arms to do it, and we’re going to do it without any bad conscience whatsoever because we have the power and we can get away with it.

He could have said that, but he didn’t. Instead, he developed a rationale for one culture ruling another. What he said was: We’re a community of very bright people, and we need someone to do all the drudgery. We’ll make these other folks do it because if they don’t, we real bright people won’t have any time to sit under a tree and think about how smart we are. We’d have to be hoeing the garden, washing the dishes, and all the rest. But we need time to think, and if we think long and hard enough, we’ll come up with all the answers. In fact, the future of the world lies in the governance of the intelligent people of the world, and the project we will set for ourselves is to define civilization. It’s a project of organized thought that will lead us to solve all of humankind’s problems in science, in engineering, in art, in every arena.

Columbus Day was observed recently. For me Columbus Day is a reminder of the Spaniards’ behavior in the Caribbean between 1492 and 1516. Apologists for the Spanish say the decline in the Indian population was not great because there weren’t that many Indians there. However many Indians there were, by 1516 they were almost all dead. Whether there were 800 thousand or 800 million, let’s not lose track of the point here: there was a catastrophic decline in the Indian population on the major islands the Spanish were occupying. Another point needs to be made: one of the books I read said that the Indians were killed off by diseases. No they weren’t. They were not killed off by diseases. The viral diseases the Spanish had that devastated Mexico didn’t reach the Caribbean islands until 1518 or 1519.

What happened during that generation-long occupation of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico? In his book The Conquest of America Stzvetan Todorov raises the question of how the Spanish could be so callously indifferent to the lives of the Indians on the Caribbean islands. The same question applies to the Spanish on the mainland of Central America and South America and to the English and then the Dutch in North America. How could they? How can there be greater indifference to human life than was exhibited in the African slave trade? Western civilization is filled with such episodes.

Let’s consider the Caribbean islands. What do the major works (excluding Kirk Sale’s book,The Conquest of Paradise) say about the Caribbean islands? Samuel Morison says in Admiral of the Ocean Sea that it was unfortunate the Indian population declined at that time; the Spanish didn’t want the Indians to disappear, it just happened. Or take Lewis Hanke’s book, Aristotle and the American Indians. Hanke reports the existence of torture factories on the Caribbean islands. The purpose of such cruelty was not merely to extract wealth, although wealth was certainly one of the prospects; it went way beyond that. There were torture manuals that recommended using green wood instead of dry wood to prolong the time it takes to burn somebody to death.

In the late sixteenth-century the Dutch artist Theodor De Bry did a series of illustrations based on the reports of Bartholomé de Las Casas, a priest who was offended by the torture. Las Casas wrote thirty pages describing what was happening on the islands. I have to tell you it’s gut-wrenching stuff. Read his descriptions; then read the chapters in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners and tell me there is a difference between the psychology of those Germans and those Spaniards. The same thing is going on, only the Spanish are a little more artistic. The Germans tended to torture people more at arm’s length, whereas the Spanish were up close and personal about it. And it went on and on for twenty-five years, but it’s essentially an unknown story. You won’t find it in any American history textbook.

The King of Spain was embarrassed by all the reports about the cruelty of the conquistadors. He wasn’t happy that they were getting out of hand and escaping the crown’s control over them, so in 1550 he called for a debate. Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas, two priests who were also lawyers, stepped forward to make the arguments. Sepulveda took the point of view of the conquerors. He’s called the father of modern racism because of that. He concocted every excuse he could think of to explain why it was all right for the Spanish to do what they were doing to the Indians, and of course he started off with what the Indians were not—they were not Christian and they were not civilized; therefore, the Spanish were justified in treating them as they did.

Sepulveda would have used pretty much the same language and the same reasoning to explain why the Spanish were justified in doing what they did to the parrots, to the trees, to the fish, to every living organism on those islands: they were all biologically inferior beings lacking the consciousness and culture of Spaniards. They didn’t have any rights and therefore could be enslaved and subjected to whatever the Spanish felt like subjecting them to—and the Spanish didn’t need to have a bad conscience.

I think we look at this kind of racism from the wrong perspective in our culture. The real issue here is not Spanish racism toward the Indians. It’s the Spanish claim to superiority over every group, whether human or nonhuman. Once you believe that one group is better than all the rest, murder is justified, genocide is justified; in fact, any act against nature is justified. The only thing that matters is the aggrandizement of Spanish culture.

In all of the literature about what’s happening to indigenous peoples, John Bodley’s book Victims of Progress, on the conquest of indigenous peoples in South America today, seems to spend the most amount of time looking at how people rationalize to themselves their right to seize land, to move other people out of the way, to move plants and animals out of the way—all in order to meet the development needs of modern industrial society. They can do this because of their belief system that says what they are doing is not only not wrong, it has to be done in order to create a world which will be able to solve all of humankind’s problems in the future.

What will the payoff be? One view is that through science we will someday conquer the major diseases of the world, and we’ll be able to live forever. How you get from that idea, by the way, to the idea that it’s all right to bulldoze huge areas in the name of curing cancer is a tremendous leap. Curing cancer has nothing to do with plundering. There’s not a single thing in the way of plundering the earth or destroying peoples that is necessary in order for scientists to be doing research on cancer. The two aren’t connected at all, although when you talk to people, right away they say, Well, we have to do this because we have to cure cancer. What? You have to be two hundred miles from the nearest road killing trees in order to cure cancer?

Think about the Germans in World War Two and the fact that not only were they willing to kill people but they were completely without conscience about it. Most of us look back at that period with horror and ask, How could they have done that? And we say, Well, they were just a little clique of criminals at the top of an aberrant order who had this crazy idea for a while. I encourage people who believe this to read Goldhagen’s book, which claims they weren’t a little clique of criminals at all. According to him, the whole of German society was in on it because they had so valued themselves and so devalued everyone else, not just the Jews. Given that pervasive mentality long enough, most of us would be affected by it too.

The core of Hitler’s message was that Germans as the privileged few deserved to have the fruits of the earth. All the others were in the way, taking up space and resources that should be Germany’s rightful inheritance. So this was not only about race; it was one of the largest projects of armed plundering in world history. But people can’t get up in the morning and say, Oh, we’re pirates and thieves and murderers, and we’re out to plunder. You can’t say that, and the Germans couldn’t either. The Germans said, We’re the master race, we’re the perfect example of humanity, and we’re going to solve all the world’s problems. The same thing the Spanish said.

Those Germans never stopped to reflect about what they were doing, never asked themselves if what they were doing might be wrong. Those Spaniards never stopped to reflect, either. All through history, groups who plundered—like the American miners in California and the American military in the northern Great Plains—never reflected. They built up utopian ideologies that protected them from their conscience. This raises the question in my mind, What about us? Are we like that? Are we blind? Do we have no conscience? Are we so sure we’re on the right path, the right and necessary path, that we have no choice but to follow it and sometimes crack a few eggs? Do we share that attitude?

Every day about forty thousand children die worldwide from preventable causes. You have to look hard to find the literature about it, but there are publications like the United Nations reportThe Fate of the Earth’s Children and Frances Moore Lappé’s Hunger: Twelve Myths. Some of these children die from diarrhea, which can be caused by bad water, but usually it’s assumed that the major cause is the lack of enough food in the world to sustain the poorest people. Lappé says that’s not true. There is enough food, but poor people don’t have the money to buy it. It’s a question of distribution.

What should we do? We should find a way to get food to poor people, shouldn’t we? But that’s not happening. What is in fact happening is that the major financial institutions in the world are imposing something called Structural Adjustment Programs on governments in poor countries. These programs are designed to create hunger. They specifically forbid countries that have a lot of poor people from subsidizing food, and they demand that measures be taken to drive down wages in those countries. The point is to make the poorest people in the world subsidize the richest people in the world by keeping labor at the lowest possible cost. We know that for every percentage point of deprivation they suffer, a number of people will die.

We know this, but we’re willing to live with it. We’re willing to be consciously ignorant. Beyond the fact of hunger is the fact that the engine driving it is the same engine—the same thinking, the same structured institutions—that is driving the destruction of forests and the extinction of animal species, that is at this very moment driving the extinction of the great fishes of the sea, of whole species of plants and animals in many parts of the world. But this is happening far from our vision. Here in New England reforestation is actually taking place. We’re not cutting our trees because we’re cutting somebody else’s. We don’t notice that our newspapers still come from trees, because they don’t come from trees here. For a long time I believed the problem was that people don’t have enough of a connection with nature, and that’s why they’re able to do the things that they do. I don’t believe that anymore.

I publish Daybreak, a magazine in which you’ll find stories about indigenous people trying to think through the issues of free trade and globalization, trying to figure out where they stand, what action they should be taking. Essentially, the purpose of the politics of the intellectual movement of the American Indians in the hemisphere as a whole and certainly in the southern hemisphere is to encourage biological diversity and encourage local food production for local consumption—the kinds of things Schumacher talked about.

Indians understand that self-sufficiency is the antithesis of the global economy. And I think we need to understand that the global economy is playing a major role in the destruction of our natural resources and of species and is rationalizing that destruction in terms of John Locke’s definition of what is rational. According to Locke, rational thought leads you to do that which produces the maximum amount of money for you. This means even down to destroying the last tree, the last fish. As a result of rational thought you try to transform nature into money. Locke argues that it’s a wonderful thing to have money because it transforms our wealth derived from nature into something solid and concrete. Of course, money is not solid and concrete anymore; it’s not even plastic anymore. It’s electronic money we’re dealing with now.

I propose to you that we live in an age of utopian excess that is driving us away from doing what would be sustainable and survivable and is diverting us into participating, in ways we’re not even conscious of, in activities that are destructive in the long term. A good example of this is the electronic information revolution. This revolution will sweep most of us along, whether we want to go or not—in the same way that my ancestors were dragged kicking and screaming into the print revolution. We’ll have to join it because it’s a way of communicating. Some people think the electronic information revolution is going to solve all our problems—the same kind of utopian stuff I’ve been talking about.

Read Wired magazine. It reads as though people have lost their minds. It asks questions like, Is the world growing a brain? No! But our brains are going dead! People who think in the wired mode see a marvelous world of opportunity, without asking themselves, opportunity for whom and opportunity to do what? The information age is concentrating wealth in the hands of the few who have access to and control of resources. The American middle class is being dismantled, and it’s even cooperating; it’s going quietly to its death!

The plan is to make everyone part of a worldwide web, a worldwide marketplace. Internet users have the same capability to communicate with people in another part of the world as with people right in their hometown. This means, for example, that you’re not going to need accountants from North America anymore. You can buy accountants for six dollars a day in Calcutta. You’re not going to need engineers from North America any more because you’ll be able to get all the engineering skills you need on the other side of the world. The idea is to have fewer people doing more things more cheaply, and the cheapest labor of all is on the other side of the world from us. That’s the long-term prospect. But in fact cheap labor does not solve our problems. The things that really matter in human society are not in computers, and they’re not in any utopian vision about solving all the world’s problems.

We are not going to make it to that place called Utopia, folks. It’s not going to happen. The reality is that for all of our ego, which seems to me colossally large, our life span and the space we occupy are incredibly small, and the distance between here and Utopia is insurmountable.

Human cultures have an enormous capacity to reframe things. Part of our problem in Western culture has to do with how we reframed nature. Cultures that are nature based have reframed nature in ways that have given it life and color and energy and excitement. I went to visit a particular group of Indians living on what you might call a gravel pit. No trees, no grass. Why don’t they plant some grass? The place is a desert as far as the eye can see. You’d look at that landscape and think to yourself, My God, this is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been; it never rains, it’s always so dry. Then you talk with the Indians, and they bring that place to life for you. The place is full of things you can’t see. Live with the Hopis for a little while; their world is full of spirits that come in from the sky, from the ground. Almost every few days the Hopis perform a ritual of one kind or another to acknowledge the spirits of their place. And what a wonderful world they have.

Once I visited a tribe on the northern Great Plains. I was just sitting there with members of the tribe. I looked around and thought, No trees. But they have something else: a culture, built by the creative internal aspects of human society, that establishes a beneficial relationship between the society and nature. Not between the individual and nature. An individual can’t practice Lakota culture or Hopi culture. You need a whole group of people for that. When that culture exists, it has a sort of magic. You can find people who are part of it and who don’t have very much money, but they are living more happily than the people living in California’s affluent Marin County. Of course, the people in Marin County are trying to find that happiness; they’re trying to find that connectedness, that essence which makes your lived human experience truly lived and human. It exists among Buddhist communities throughout the world, it exists among the Australian aborigines, it exists among Indians in the deep rainforest. These are happy, adjusted people who are not destroying their environment, who are in fact celebrating their environment because they aren’t engaged in utopian thinking. They’re reliving a cycle instead.

To have a utopian vision you must believe that time is linear, that someday life will be better than it is here and now, and you have to sacrifice others in order to make it happen. I think this has been, if I may say so, the history of the West, a series of competing ideas about how we are going to get there. When we get there, we’ll all be happy. And where is there? It may be heaven, for example, or it may be a machine paradise.

The actual trend over the centuries has been toward a politics of conquest and plundering. And we have rationalized our behavior in the context of that conquest and plunder. When we make choices about what we’re going to buy, most of us don’t ask ourselves, How does this purchase implicate me in the plunder? Most of us don’t talk to people who are from Indonesia before we go and buy our Reeboks. Instead, we listen to Michael Jordan saying, I wear these shoes; he’s a great basketball player, so they must be good. Most of us don’t ask ourselves, What’s behind my purchase? Could there be military dictatorship behind it, exploitation of people, destruction of towns and villages, pollution?

In choice after choice that people make, they tend to buy things that come from places which create social orders they’d prefer not to support, but in fact they do choose those products because they can claim innocence of the underlying conditions. So people commonly will buy things in the grocery store that were grown 3000 or 4000 miles away. Most people I know can’t tell me where the clothes they wear were manufactured, who manufactured them, or what the conditions were under which they were manufactured. We’re all like the television star Kathie Lee Gifford, who started her own line of clothing, which is produced in the Third World. We don’t know anything about it.

I think this kind of information is part of social history. Social history has to do with where the things in your life come from and what the conditions are that produced them and how the conditions that produced them contribute to the life you’re living. It also has to do with what expectations you have concerning the kind of life you might live, with what options you have for choosing the quality of life you want. This kind of information is not offered to people in college. Where do you find courses on values? Show me a course about choosing your options. You can say, Well, of course, it’s not there because if the college offered a course like that, its funding would be jeopardized.

I began by saying I wanted to emphasize the connection between ecology and social history. Once we recognize this connection, we are led to obvious choices. I don’t believe it’s necessary to cut down the rain forests to satisfy consumer demand for cheap lumber. I don’t believe it’s necessary to create conditions that kill 40,000 children every day in order to maintain the world market economy, which in my opinion shouldn’t be retained in its current form. If you believe that’s necessary, then you can support the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but I personally don’t believe we have to take steps to starve people in the Third World in order to drive down the price of labor. I don’t believe it was necessary to murder all those Indians in the Caribbean. We should step back and ask ourselves some serious questions: Just how much of that world market economy do we really need? What costs are we paying for what we get?

https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/how-the-conquest-of-indigenous-peoples-parallels-the-conquest-of-nature/

#John Mohawk

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Juneteenth takes on new meaning amid push for racial justice (AP) Protesters marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, chanted “We want justice now!” near St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, stopped work at West Coast ports and paused for a moment of silence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, as Americans marked Juneteenth with new urgency Friday amid a nationwide push for racial justice. The holiday, which commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, is usually celebrated with parades and festivals but became a day of protest this year in the wake of demonstrations set off by George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police. In addition to traditional cookouts and readings of the Emancipation Proclamation—the Civil War-era order that declared all enslaved people free in Confederate territory—Americans of all backgrounds were marching, holding sit-ins or taking part in car caravan protests. Thousands gathered at a religious rally in Atlanta. Hundreds marched from St. Louis’ Old Courthouse, where the Dred Scott case partially played out, a pivotal one that denied citizenship to African Americans but galvanized the anti-slavery movement. Protesters and revelers held signs in Dallas, danced to a marching band in Chicago and registered people to vote in Detroit.

Law enforcement families face harassment, vandalism, and threats at home (Washington Examiner) Law enforcement officers say they and their families face harassment and bullying by strangers and neighbors as a result of a nationwide crackdown on law enforcement following protests around the death of George Floyd. One former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, faces a charge of second-degree murder over the 46-year-old black man’s death. The episode triggered nationwide protests over police practices and some violence and looting. At the same time, police officers around the nation, facing scrutiny by local, state, and federal officials, say morale is down in local departments. Budgets have been cut, and overtime pay for shifts during protests has been slashed. And the homes of police officers have been vandalized while anti-law enforcement activists have watched them from outside. Paul Chabot, a retired deputy sheriff reserve out of San Bernardino County, California, who runs a website that helps officers relocate to police friendly municipalities, told the Washington Examiner that officers and their wives who reach out to him reveal their children are targeted as well. “It’s not the same like it was even just two weeks ago, three weeks ago, just because they’re a law enforcement family now. Their kids are being targeted by people in the neighborhood.”

The battle over masks in a pandemic: An all-American story (Washington Post) In this sprawling, heterogeneous country, the pandemic has become yet another thing on which Americans are divided. Mask-wearing for some people is an identifier of broader beliefs and political leanings. Like so many issues rooted in science and medicine, the pandemic is now fully entangled with ideological tribalism. This has played out before: helmets for motorcyclists, seat belts in cars, smoking bans in restaurants. All of those measures provoked battles over personal liberty. Now it’s masks and the coronavirus, with face coverings emerging as an emblem for what cleaves the nation. A flurry of recent studies supports wearing cloth face coverings as a means to limit transmission of the novel coronavirus, which causes the illness covid-19. To many people, masks represent adherence to civic duty and a willingness to make individual sacrifices for the greater good of public health. To others, masks symbolize government overreach and a violation of personal liberty.

U.S. Watched George Floyd Protests in 15 Cities Using Aerial Surveillance (NYT) The Department of Homeland Security deployed helicopters, airplanes and drones over 15 cities where demonstrators gathered to protest the death of George Floyd, logging at least 270 hours of surveillance, far more than previously revealed, according to Customs and Border Protection data. The department’s dispatching of unmanned aircraft over protests in Minneapolis last month sparked a congressional inquiry and widespread accusations that the federal agency had infringed on the privacy rights of demonstrators. But that was just one piece of a nationwide operation that deployed resources usually used to patrol the U.S. border for smugglers and illegal crossings. Aircraft filmed demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio; New York City; Buffalo and Philadelphia, among other cities, sending video footage in real time to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a branch of Customs and Border Protection. The footage was then fed into a digital network managed by the Homeland Security Department, called “Big Pipe,” which can be accessed by other federal agencies and local police departments for use in future investigations, according to senior officials with Air and Marine Operations.

Barber offers hope in Peruvian barrios devastated by virus (AP) Once a week, barber Josué Yacahuanca makes his way up the dusty hills of Peru’s capital, heading into its poorest neighborhoods carrying a treasured golden briefcase that holds his life’s passion—five clipper blades, 20 combs, four scissors and a bottle with alcohol. Yacahuanca seeks out clients devastated by a coronavirus lockdown that has gone on for nearly 100 days in an attempt to stem the wave of new infections. He does it for free. “I want them to look in the mirror and see a bit of hope,” said Yacahuanca, who though just 21 years old is a veteran barber, having started cutting hair at age 13. Yacahuanca had a rocky start in life himself. Abandoned by his mother, he was raised by his godmother, Gloria Alvarez. Despite obstacles, he discovered a business savvy at a young age. He hustled at odd jobs, selling sweets, cleaning houses, working in outdoor markets and at a bus station.

Brazil tops 1 million cases as coronavirus spreads inland (AP) Brazil’s government confirmed on Friday that the country has risen above 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases, second only to the United States. Official data show a downward trend of the virus in Brazil’s north, including the hard-hit region of the Amazon, a plateau in cases and deaths in the countries’ biggest cities near the Atlantic coast, but a rising curve in the south. In the Brazilian countryside, which is much less prepared to handle a crisis, the pandemic is clearly growing. Many smaller cities have weaker health care systems and basic sanitation that’s insufficient to prevent contagion.

European powers refuse to back U.S. call for escalating Iran sanctions (Washington Post) France, Germany and Britain said they will not support reimposing sanctions on Iran if a U.N. arms embargo is not extended, but they urged Tehran to allow inspectors into sites where nuclear material may be stockpiled.

China unveils details of national security law for Hong Kong amid backlash (Reuters) Beijing unveiled details of its new national security law for Hong Kong on Saturday, paving the way for the most profound change to the city’s way of life since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The much-anticipated legislation, which has provoked deep concerns in Washington and Europe, includes a national security office for Hong Kong to collect intelligence and handle crimes against national security, the official Xinhua news agency reported. It said Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam could also appoint specific judges to hear national security cases, a move likely to unnerve some investors, diplomats and business leaders in the global financial hub. China says the draft law is aimed at tackling separatist activity, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, but critics fear it will crush wide-ranging freedoms that are seen as key to Hong Kong’s status as a global financial centre.

Egyptian president says Libyan city Sirte a ‘red line’ (AP) Egypt’s president Saturday warned that an attempt by Turkey-backed forces in Libya to attack the strategic city of Sirte would cross a “red line” and trigger a direct Egyptian military intervention into the conflict. Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, in televised comments, said Egypt could intervene in neighboring Libya with the intention of protecting its western border with the oil-rich country, and to bring stability, including establishing conditions for a cease-fire, to Libya. El-Sissi warned that any attack on Sirte or the inland Jufra air base by forces loyal to the U.N.-supported but weak government in Tripoli would amount to crossing a “red line.” “Let’s stop at this (current) front line and start negotiations to reach a political solution to the Libyan crisis,” he said.

Ethiopia to fill disputed dam, deal or no deal (AP) It’s a clash over water usage that Egypt calls an existential threat and Ethiopia calls a lifeline for millions out of poverty. Just weeks remain before the filling of Africa’s most powerful hydroelectric dam might begin, and tense talks between the countries on its operation have yet to reach a deal. In an interview with The Associated Press, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew on Friday declared that his country will go ahead and start filling the $4.6 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam next month, even without an agreement. “For us it is not mandatory to reach an agreement before starting filling the dam, hence we will commence the filling process in the coming rainy season,” he said. “We are working hard to reach a deal, but still we will go ahead with our schedule whatever the outcome is. If we have to wait for others’ blessing, then the dam may remain idle for years, which we won’t allow to happen,” he said. He added that “we want to make it clear that Ethiopia will not beg Egypt and Sudan to use its own water resource for its development,” pointing out that Ethiopia is paying for the dam’s construction itself. He spoke after the latest round of talks with Egypt and Sudan on the dam, the first since discussions broke down in February, failed to reach agreement.

Congo president’s chief of staff guilty in corruption trial (AP) A court in Congo on Saturday sentenced the president’s chief of staff, Vital Kamerhe, to 20 years of forced labor after he was found guilty of corruption and embezzlement of more than $50 million. His lawyers said they would appeal. Kamerhe, 61, has called the trial a political attack on himself and President Felix Tshisekedi, who has not commented on the case. The charges stem from what the court said was “unequivocal” participation in the embezzlement of money from projects undertaken by the president during his first 100 days in office last year.

#headlines #news

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woundedheartwithin · 6 years

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Far Cry 5: The Lamb and The Four Living Creatures

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I finally got some time to really sit down and get my thoughts into some kind of order. We know that the events of Far Cry 5 are based on the Book of Revelations. The Seeds are described as the four horsemen of the apocalypse, which seems to be a favorite among game devs and writers, and so on and so forth. So the horsemen are accounted for, as is the Lamb of God (the junior deputy) who opens the Seven Seals on the Apocalyptic document and brings about the end of the world.

But nobody ever talks about the Four Living Creatures who stand before the Throne of God.

The four beasts of Revelations are as follows: the lion, the ox, the man, and the eagle. They are the creatures that announce the opening of the first four seals, as well as the appearance of each of the four horsemen. In some traditions, the beasts are believed to be cherubim (not putti, which are the flying babies in Renaissance paintings), and are God’s throne bearers. When they arrive with the Lamb, they chant, "HOLY, HOLY, HOLY LORD GOD ALMIGHTY, which was, and is, and is to come" (Rev 4:8).

I don’t know if this has been discussed before, I know I haven’t seen anything on it, but here’s what I’ve got: the four living creatures are represented by Whitehorse, Pratt, Burke, and Hudson.

You simply can’t explain the beasts out of context, so I am going to analyze each of the seven seals and describe my thoughts on the beasts as I go along. The main point of this post is to look in detail at the beasts, but I’ve got a bone to pick with Joseph Seed on the fifth seal, and I’d like to talk about the sixth and seventh seals as well, so they will all be included.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a theologian, I’m not even a traditional Christian (I’m deist, if anyone was curious), and I admit that I am more or less shoe-horning the Bible into the context of the game. I am not looking too deeply into any of the mythology behind the Christian apocalypse, and I am not really looking at anything other than the text of the King James Version of the Bible. For instance, we do know that the beasts have an order (Lion, Ox, Man, Eagle), but I’m throwing that out in favor of using the games cues and plot points to discern the order. We can do this by looking at how the Bible describes each of these creatures throughout, and by looking at the characters. Everybody is always welcome to add to or contradict my post as you see fit, but remember that I’m just rambling and putting my thoughts into an FC5 shitpost because I’m obsessed with this stupid game.

I also feel compelled to warn you that there are a TON of mistakes in this...

Anyway, on to the main event, right below the cut.

Lamb on the Throne And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth. (Rev 5:6)

This is pretty straightforward, actually. The Lamb of God is the only being worthy of breaking the Seals and opening the Book. Joseph Seed describes the junior deputy as being the one to break the seals, and yet he calls them Hell, who follows the white horse. Simply put, Joseph is wrong. This isn’t really all that surprising considering he believes he speaks to God, when in reality he is likely hearing the voice of Satan, which in reality is likely just auditory hallucinations brought on by mental illness. He also claims that John was wrong when he assigned the deputy their sin, saying that the junior deputy is consumed by pride. He’s wrong about this as well.

And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? (Rev 6:16-17)

John was absolutely right about the junior deputy being the embodiment of Wrath, because Revelations tells us that the wrath of the Lamb is what will end the earth.

The First Seal And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. (Rev 6:1-2)

This is Joseph (I’ll talk about the antichrist angle in a bit, just hold on). Joseph is the only member of the Seed family acknowledged in the opening mission. This isn’t a coincidence. The person who calls him forward and announces his appearance is Cameron Burke.

I believe that Burke is the living creature who has the face of a man. The Man is the heavenly representation of humankind, man’s dominance as God’s favorite creation (cast in His image), humanitarianism, and taming the influence of the other three living creatures. The Man embodies dignity and power. Burke is the one that brings the other three officers together to arrest Joseph Seed. He’s the one who serves Joseph’s arrest warrant for kidnapping with intent to harm. He leads them into the church and attempts to thwart Joseph’s inhumane treatment of the people in Hope County.

The Man is often attributed to Matthew the Evangelist, one of Christ’s apostles. Matthew-- who was likely the same person as Levi, a tax collector before he met Jesus and was considered a despicable person because of his collusion with the Roman occupation force-- invited Jesus to a feast. When other folks criticized Jesus for fraternizing with such tax collectors and sinners, Jesus replied, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." (Luke 5:32) Matthew is thought to have been martyred with a halberd while he was preaching the gospel. He is the only Evangelist to have been killed with a weapon, just like Burke (he shoots himself in the head, making him the only one to be threatened or killed with a weapon).

The relationship between Jesus and Matthew is rather similar to the junior deputy’s relationship with Burke. When everyone else sees Burke as a yes-man and an errand boy, all too ready to charge into battle for a commendation, the deputy treats him as a valuable member of a team that they are prepared to fight for. They try to save him, even if that ends in tragedy. Why would the deputy try to save Burke, especially when Burke didn’t want to be saved? Because the Sheriff told them to? I don’t think so. I think they were compelled to save him because they believed he deserved to be saved. The deputy saw Burke as a partner, not as an objective.

The Second Seal And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another horse [that was] red: and [power] was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. (Rev 6:3-4)

The horseman of war is Jacob Seed. Jacob is perhaps the most obvious of the horsemen. He has red hair, is ex-military, and is consumed by a kill or be killed mentality. The beast that accompanies him is Staci Pratt, the Ox. (note that in some versions, this beast is referred to as the Calf. Both are acceptable in this instance, but I like the Ox better)

Throughout the Bible, the Ox is described as the single most important animal to mankind. It is the ultimate beast of burden, and stealing your neighbor’s ox is punishable by death throughout the Old Testament. The Ox symbolizes dependability, strength, willingness to serve, and divine sacrifice. The Ox was often sacrificed in place of an actual person because it was the second most divine creature in existence.

Pratt literally sacrifices himself for the junior deputy. He knows that his plan, should it fail, would end up disastrous for them both, and he knows that if the junior deputy doesn’t get out then they’re both dead. So, rather than jumping onto the truck instead of the junior deputy, or jumping onto it with them, he sacrifices himself. He stays on that balcony, knowing full well that when Jacob finds him the punishment will be severe. He fully expects Jacob to kill him, but he does it anyway. Aside from that, Jacob’s entire deal is about strength and sacrifice. That ties right in with the ox’s role.

The Ox is attributed to Luke the Evangelist, one of Christ’s apostles. Luke was the saint of several patronages, but the most interesting in this context is the bachelor. In the voice files (as uncovered by other members of the fandom), Pratt laments that he only became a cop to get laid, indicating that he is much more interested in “sowing oats” than in settling down, so that more or less fits him.

Finally, there’s a lot of confusion regarding Luke’s death. Some sects believe he was martyred by having first his writing hand and then his head cut off, others believe that he was imprisoned without food and water and wasted away in a jail cell (which is Pratt’s intended fate at Jacob’s hand).

The Third Seal And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a denarius, and three measures of barley for a denarius; and [see] thou hurt not the oil and the wine. (Rev 6:5-6)

This is John. Even if the concept art didn’t tell us that John is the third horseman, verse 6 would. Oil and wine have often been considered luxuries in many cultures, and the grain is being carefully weighed and rationed, which ties into John’s own lavish lifestyle, as well as his job of collecting resources from the people of Fall’s End. The horseman also carries a set of balances, which are a common motif for law and order, and John is a lawyer. The beast that accompanies him is the Eagle, Joey Hudson.

The Eagle symbolizes courage, power, shrewdness, and exerts dominance over the sky and air. It is nearly equal to the Lion, and is a proud and fearsome creature that does not bow easily to oppression or suppression.

Hudson is unbreakable, indomitable, and fights John every step of the way. She never once lets him beat her, and steadfastly refuses to submit to John’s torture. Interestingly, the eagle applies to John as well in that he is an exceptional pilot and carries a strong flight motif. Also, Hudson has a tattoo on her forearm of an eagle and an American flag, directly marking her as the Eagle.

The Eagle is attributed to John the Evangelist, which is interesting in and of itself for an obvious reason. In art, Saint John is sometimes depicted in medieval art as androgynous or feminine, making him the only Evangelist that could have been a woman. Hudson is the only one of the junior deputies partners that is female. John was the only Evangelist to die of natural causes, just as Hudson was the only one to have never been under any real threat of death, at John Seed’s hand or otherwise.

The Fourth Seal And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. (Rev 6:7-8)

This is Faith. This one is less straightforward than the other two, and is perhaps the most nuanced of the four. Looking at personified aspects of Death and Hell, Death is of course Faith herself. Everywhere she goes, death and destruction follows her. Tracey tells us this explicitly. The Hell that follows her could be the zealots (priestesses) and demons (angels) that surround her and fill her region. Death is indicated to use the tools of the other horsemen to destroy the earth, and if you pay attention to how Faith runs her region, you can see that she does exactly this. She is perfectly willing to kill and torture people (Jacob/war), she uses her greenhouses and fields to grow Bliss instead of food and doesn’t seem to care if this negatively affects other people (John/famine), and she tries to control everything and everyone around her with brainwashing and drugs (Joseph/conquest). The verse also mentions killing with the beasts of the earth. This could be the Bliss hallucinations the junior deputy sees all over her region, where they see a deer that suddenly transforms into a bear when they get close. The beast that accompanies her is Earl Whitehorse, the Lion. His name is just a red herring for Joseph to latch onto to justify what he and his people do during the Reaping.

The Lion symbolizes leadership, bravery, protectiveness, and fearlessness. The lion is also an analogue for God. Whitehorse is literally the Sheriff of Hope County, and is one of the highest ranking people in the county. He’s selfless and protective of the junior deputy (resistance members sometimes mention that Whitehorse seems to think of the junior deputy as his own child, which is further supported by the Lion symbolizing God, and the Lamb symbolizing Christ).

The Lion is attributed to Mark the Evangelist. He is depicted in art as rescuing slaves (Whitehorse’s personal mission is keeping innocent civilians from becoming angels), and is often associated with the Resurrection of Christ (Whitehorse likely personally hired the junior deputy). Mark died in Alexandria when Alexandrians tied a rope around his neck and dragged him until he was dead. Whitehorse planned to hang himself if the junior deputy had failed to stop the Bliss.

The Fifth Seal And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they [were], should be fulfilled. (Rev 6:9-11)

In the final confrontation, Joseph tells the junior deputy that they have made martyrs of his family, and so he is prepared to do the same with the deputy’s “family.” Once again, Joseph is wrong. The souls of the martyrs are the people that Joseph and the cult murdered. The souls are asking God when they will be avenged, and they are answered that they must wait for just a little while longer, until their brothers and sisters are martyred as they were. If we look at the arrival of the four horsemen as being represented by the Seeds’ deaths, then yeah the souls of the martyrs would be Joseph’s flock. However, looking at it this way simply doesn’t make any sense, because the deputy hasn’t killed Joseph, who is the first horseman. The first seal is opened when the deputy first comes into contact with him, so it stands to reason that the other seals are opened when the deputy first comes into contact with the other siblings as well.

I don’t have a single theory for this. Hell, maybe the deputy just ran around the county like a chicken with their head cut off, I don’t know. Maybe the fifth seal is opened as the other seals are opened, meaning the deputy avenges the martyrs as they go before confronting Joseph at the end. Either way, the martyrs whose souls cry for vengeance are the people that the cult has slain, including Eli and Virgil, Virgil’s son, etc. If you look around at the posed bodies all over the county, they are often wrapped in or draped with white sheets. These are the white robes given to the martyrs. God’s revenge for the martyrs is killing the members of the cult (as well as the actual apocalypse).

It is interesting to note the inclusiveness in these verses. The ones that are meant to die as revenge for the martyrs are referred to as their brethren, and are described as serving alongside them. This is pretty much what Eden’s Gate is all about, which adds to the idea that Joseph and his flock thought they were doing the right thing. It’s actually rather sad when you think about it.

The Sixth Seal And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? (Rev 6:12-17)

This is super straightforward. I know that Joseph quotes it just before his boss fight, but I think he’s wrong here as well. I think that this is the nuclear war that inexplicably falls on Hope County (seriously, why are there so many bombs concentrated in the middle of nowhere?). Joseph makes a point to tell the deputy that all the politicians have been silenced, which is part of these verses. They all fall to the wrath of the Lamb, and everyone and everything is destroyed. That’s why Joseph is still alive, as well, but I’ll explain that in a bit.

The Seventh Seal And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets. And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer [it] with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, [which came] with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand. And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast [it] into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake. And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. (Rev 8:1-6)

The period of silence is what Joseph refers to when he’s listening to the radio (or lack thereof). After this, each of the seven years they spend in the bunker is one trumpet sound, for a total of seven plagues during which the entire world is completely destroyed. Demons rise from Hell and torment those who remain on earth, the horsemen run around and do what they do, and then the Lamb chooses who will inhabit the earth after God casts His judgment.

I really suggest reading Revelations to get a good sense of what happens here. It’s too much to put in a silly little blog post, but it really is an interesting read. Very fire and brimstone, blood and thunder.

The Identity of Joseph Seed One theory regarding the reason Joseph survives the apocalypse is that Joseph is the horseman of conquest, and the wrath of the Lamb is an act of conquest. Even after all the other horseman have come and gone, conquest remains in the form of a new world order, a new regime, or what have you. Conquest never goes away, even after war and famine and death are gone. Of course, this part isn’t in the Bible, this is just me waxing philosophic, but I think it’s rather fitting.

Another theory is that Joseph is the Antichrist, which also makes a lot of sense. In 1951, a Roman Catholic Bishop wrote:

“The Antichrist will not be so called; otherwise he would have no followers... he will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves... He will tempt Christians with the same three temptations with which he tempted Christ... He will have one great secret which he will tell to no one: he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counterchurch... It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ.”

This is almost exactly Joseph Seed. He resembles the traditional (inaccurate) image of Christ in the west (long hair, beard, blue eyes), his religion is definitely not Christianity (even if it is based on it), and he acts as his own god to his flock. This could make a fourth herald a possibility (cut from the game thanks to budget and deadlines), to take his place as the horseman of conquest.

Yet another theory is that Joseph himself is actually the Lamb, and the junior deputy is the horseman of conquest, reversing everything I’ve said up to this point (including the role of the Seed siblings and the deputy’s partners) This actually makes some kind of sense in that the deputy runs around and takes over every region for the resistance. The deputy is also freeing their partners, which could symbolize the horsemen being set upon the world. This would make the Seeds the beasts. Of course, Joseph can’t be the Lamb and the beast that calls forth the horseman of conquest, so perhaps Dutch is the beast instead. He drags the deputy out of the river and gets them ready to go back out into the fight, so perhaps this is him fulfilling his role as the Man and announcing the arrival of the horseman. Or, as above, a fourth herald could fill this role as well.

Conclusion Again, I am not an expert, and everything I have said in this post has more or less been forced to fit. The characters do not draw exactly from the Bible, but there are enough parallels that I don’t think any of it is coincidence.

So, to recap:

Cameron Burke is the Man who calls out the rider of the white horse, Joseph Seed (conquest).

Staci Pratt is the Ox who calls out the rider of the red horse, Jacob Seed (war).

Joey Hudson is the Eagle who calls out the rider of the black horse, John Seed (famine).

Earl Whitehorse is the Lion who calls out the rider of the pale horse, Faith Seed (death).

Each beast heralds the coming of the Lamb, who is persecuted and takes the throne with the appearance of having been slain. The junior deputy comes after their partners in a very systematic fashion (almost as though they had been heralded), and is battered and bruised and scarred as they “open the seals” and inevitably confront Joseph to “take the throne.” The junior deputy, like Christ, selflessly liberates each region, amasses a fiercely loyal following, and nearly dies for so many people it’s not even funny. They are persecuted, nearly broken, and yet they doggedly push on, determined to save their friends and their county. Also, one of the cuts made to sacrifice and butcher an animal is across the throat. If the cut is made deep enough, it could damage the vocal folds, rendering the animal mute. The deputy never speaks, and the Bible tells us that the Lamb appears upon the throne as it has been slain. With its throat cut and silent.

Anyway, feel free to add to this or whatever! I was going to link a few sources but I lost them. It was mostly just Wikipedia and an online version of the King James version of the Bible. Abrahamic religion and mythology is actually very fascinating, and there’s a lot to love about the motifs illustrated in the Book of Revelation especially, so I definitely recommend reading about it!

Tell me what you think, and thanks for reading!

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worldwarrisingguide-blog · 5 years

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World War Rising Guides

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2020gamehacks-blog · 5 years

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Rise of Kingdoms Hack - Free Gems & Cheats in Lost Crusade

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phroyd · 6 years

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Why does the US media have an anti-Russian fixation? It’s not what the American people want to hear. 71% of the Ronald Reagan-loving, military-obsessed Republican Party approve of Trump meeting with Putin. On the other side, top liberal CNN commentator and former President Obama’s adviser, Van Jones has admitted in a video recording that the “Russiagate” story is a “big nothing burger” which Democrats are not interested in. The Russia-fixated, Hillary Clinton-DNC liberal establishment now faces an upsurge of opposition from Democratic Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, who emphasize the need for populist economics reforms.

Conservatives don’t want to hear it. Liberals don’t want to hear it. Hating Russia is just not a bandwagon the U.S. public is ready to jump on. Yet, if one turns on American television, in the aftermath of the summit in Helsinki, the rhetoric and accusations against the government of the Russian Federation are almost endless.

Like Trump, Obama was also unable to resolve the tensions now being described as the “New Cold War.” Let’s not forget that Obama was elected saying he would “talk to Putin”. In the early years of Obama’s first term, he said he intended to “reset” relations with the Eurasian superpower, and was attacked for it by the Tea Party. The American people favor better relations with Russia, and politicians win votes for promising it, yet the dangerous trajectory continues. Why?

A New Day in the Energy Markets

One answer can be found in the field of economics. On July 18th, crude oil production in the United States reached 11 million barrels per day. This is the highest it has ever been. The drilling and fracking rigs are pulling more oil out of the ground and shale than ever before in U.S. history.

The longtime liberal aspiration for “Energy Independence” has been achieved. The U.S. is no longer dependent on overseas oil. A new OPEC boycott wouldn’t be anything like the catastrophe of 1973. The longtime oil export ban has been lifted, and crude pulled from US shale and soil is now being shipped off to China and other countries.

Meanwhile, the spell of low oil prices that began in 2014 is long over. Oil prices are climbing high, having reached over $80 per barrel in May, and remaining around $70 since then. With high prices, oil companies are raking in profits.

But, amid the energy boom, another entity is also getting stronger. The world’s largest publicly traded oil company is not Chevron, BP, Exxon-Mobil, or Shell. The largest publicly traded petroleum corporation is called Rosneft. It is a government owned super corporation in Russia.

Rosneft, alongside Gazprom, are the two “National Champions” that Vladimir Putin wrote about as a university student. In 1997, as a graduate student, Vladimir Putin published his dissertation “”Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Resource Base.” In it, he laid out how Russia, which was reeling in poverty and massive internal turmoil after the fall of the Soviet Union, could restore its strength. Putin argued that two gigantic government corporations could harness Russia’s natural resources and make the country once again economically powerful.

Russia: A Competitor with Wall Street Monopolists

Putin’s academic work has manifested itself in reality. As President, Putin proceeded to utilize government power and reorient the economy around two super-corporations. As oil prices shot through the roof during the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, Russia’s government raked in new revenue. The oil and gas money rebooted industrial production. Poverty was drastically reduced, and wages multiplied. The massive crisis of the 1990s was resolved by economic planning. Russia is now an energy giant, selling on the global market in competition with Wall Street and London.

As record amounts of crude oil is churned out of the United States, the Trump White House talks of “Energy Dominance.” The USA is also the top producer of natural gas, which is also due to the invention and widespread use of hydraulic fracking.

All of this oil and gas is worthless to the western oil monopolists, unless they can sell it. Every barrel of oil and every ounce of natural gas sold by Russia is a barrel of oil or an ounce of gas not purchased from the Wall Street and London oil banking elite. Russia is a competitor on the global energy markets, selling two of the most vital products in the world economy.

Trump recently lashed out at the Germans for their natural gas deal with Russia. The German public finds the idea of importing natural gas from the United States, on the other side of the planet, to be absurd compared to pumping it in from nearby Russia. The Wall Street energy giant and fracking cowboys naturally disagree, furious that somebody else has captured the German market.

As China’s oil and gas consumption rapidly expands, their neighbor to the north is supplying the fuel they need. American oil companies have just recently gotten in on the Chinese market, while Russia has been selling to the government in Beijing for decades.

Relations between the U.S. and Russia were very good when Boris Yeltsin was running the country. Naomi Klein’s 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine” describes the Yeltsin years in detail. From 1991 to 1998, 80% of Russian farms went bankrupt. Russia was forced to start importing food from U.S. agriculture companies. 70,000 factories closed down. 1 in 4 people were living in conditions of extreme poverty, with unemployment often between 20% and 30%.

In the 1990s, as Russians were dying, being sold into sexual slavery, committing suicide and dying of heroin at massive rates, the US government and the Russian government were fast friends. The Clinton administration saw its relationship with Boris Yeltsin, and his relationship with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to be a great achievement.

In the 1990s, Russia was a dependent, impoverished “sphere of influence” for American corporations. Russians were poor, and not producing very much. They were a captive market for Wall Street and London monopolies, having been economically demolished after losing The Cold War . In addition, British hedge fund managers and stock traders tied with HSBC Bank, among them Bill Browder, proceeded to loot the country’s natural resources.

But that disaster is long over with. Vladimir Putin leads a Russia that is “back in business.” The new Russia is selling oil and gas across the planet. The Russian government has now overseen a mass revival of agriculture, with farms springing up across the country, even in the sparsely populated Far East regions. Russia produces a large amount of the world’s titanium, and sits at the center of the Eurasian Economic Union, a bloc dedicated to overseeing similar revivals in other nations.

Now, as 11 million barrels of crude are pulled from American soil and shale each day, and the USA remains the top producer of natural gas, Russia is a barrier to global dominance on the energy markets.

The forces that seek to maintain a global monopoly are not concerned with “election meddling”, “collusion”, “human rights”, “nationalism”, or any of the other endless canards flickering across U.S. television. What they can’t stand is a solid competitor.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Phroyd

#russia #economics

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beigonethoughts · 2 years

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ISHII SHIGEO (1933-1962)

Ishii Shigeo became a reportage painter by exploring his country’s uneasy subconscious. Though he studied classical painting as a teenager, he developed a distinct style of social critique in his oil paintings through his association with Ikeda Tatsuo, Nakamura Hiroshi, and other reportage and avant-garde painters. He died at age 28, leaving a lot of his work neglected.

"The force driving any individual attempting to create a work of art in our modern world must be his desire to revolt against the inhumane mechanism of his society in order to transform it. Without that craving it is impossible to create art."

Shigeo's dominate works fall under a series of over 15 paintings, collectively named as "Violence" by him; The series include, “The Room,” “Floating Skulls,” “Pleasure" and so on.

His intention was to map the basic contradictions of postwar Japan—the humiliation of occupation, collusion in a neighboring war, political entrapment, and social inequality, though some of the works are highly allegorical.

Some of his works are shown below.

"The Decoy"

The unattractive head depicts Kishi Nobusuke, who became prime minister in 1957 and negotiated the renewal of the security treaty in 1960. Kishi was imprisoned as an accused war criminal between 1945 and 1948, but never brought to trial.

In several works, Ishii set his sights on specific targets, such as war profiteers in his untitled painting below.

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indochinanews · 3 years

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India-China / Pakistan War Fear Zone

With India entangled in a bitter conflict with Pakistan and China concurrently, there is a possibility of a two-front war.

India is ready to fight a two-front war with Pakistan and China if both neighbors are targeting India.

Indian Army Chief General M.M. Naravane recently admitted a threat of possible cooperation between China and Pakistan against India, leading to a two-front war.

Naravane was talking to the media ahead, “Though it can take place at any level, Siachen and Shaksgam Valley are the places where the territory of these two countries meet. The threat of collusion is maximum in the strategically important glacier, which forces us to keep our possession,” said General on the Army Day celebrations in the national capital.

With raging tensions between India and China on the eastern Ladakh border, where the troops of both the nations got into a brawl with 20 casualties on the Indian side and an unaccounted number on the Chinese side, both nations are now keen to de-escalate but ‘how’ remains a big question.

Thousands of Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops were reported to have moved into sensitive areas along the eastern Ladakh border, setting up tents and stationing vehicles and heavy machinery in what India considers to be its territory.

In response, the Indian army had also moved several battalions from an infantry division, usually based in the Ladakh city of Leh, to “operational alert areas.”

Underscoring its importance as Pakistan’s primary benefactor in the realm of arms transfers, China’s recent upward swing in conventional arms sales to Islamabad has ruffled feathers as far as security of the South Asian sub-continent is concerned.

China positions itself as the fifth largest global arms exporter following long-established suppliers—the US, Russia, France, and Great Britain, that weapons sales to Pakistan have been instrumental. China has been the biggest supplier of arms to Pakistan, including ships, submarines, and fighter jets. The Chinese team which took the tracking system to Pakistan enjoyed VIP treatment during the nearly three months stay to assemble and calibrate it and to train technical staff, the CAS statement said. China is using Pakistan as a proxy state for war against India.

India and Sri Lanka as major partners.

Of the 24 conducted over 2002-14, two-thirds (16) were held with Pakistan. While the relationship with Pakistan is a “full-fledged alliance” in nature, China also held five exercises with India. This indicates Beijing trying to fool India in thinking that Beijing does not want “Close ties with Islamabad to come at the expense of a confrontational relationship with New Delhi.”

The inking of agreements between the two countries promising investments of up to $46 billion and the construction of a China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) of roads, rail lines, and pipelines. The corridor runs from Gwadar in Pakistan through Lahore and Islamabad to Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China.

Beijing is also concerned about energy security, and CPEC is an effort to diversify its petroleum import routes. China has been a net importer of oil since 1993, and the overwhelming majority of petroleum arrives in the PRC via Southeast Asia. “To improve security in the Indian Ocean, China has adopted what one US consulting firm dubbed a ‘String of Pearls’ strategy working to establish a network of port facilities in countries around the Indian Ocean region.” Developing Gwadar, reportedly leased by a Chinese company, constitutes a key element.

Pakistan accounts for 42 percent of China’s total arms sales over 2000-14, a report by RAND revealed recently. At the Dawn of Belt and Road: China in the Developing World examines the country’s economic, political and military activities across the Global South.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has been a key supplier of major conventional weapons to South Asian countries, especially Pakistan and Bangladesh. Sales to both amount for over half of total Chinese total arms sales over 2000-14. Bangladesh amounts to 11 percent of the sales, making China the world’s third-largest arms exporter.

In 1988, China agreed to supply and train Pakistanis in the operation of the M-11 solid-fuel rocket, with a 185-mile range and carrying a 1,100-pound warhead. The missiles arrived in 1995. In subsequent decades, China has sold Pakistan hundreds of jet fighters and signed agreements to sell frigates and submarines to Pakistan,” the report read.

Besides arms sales, China has also held military exercises with South Asian countries – more than a quarter of their exercises between 2002 and 2014 were held with South Asian countries. Many of these exercises focused on counter-terrorism operations and influencing operations to coerce and cajole weaker nations to bend to the Chinese will.

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orbemnews · 4 years

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The Mayor’s House Was Bombed. The Message: Keep Our Town Nuclear-Free. SUTTSU, Japan — It seemed like easy money. The Japanese government was conducting a study of potential locations for storing spent nuclear fuel — a review of old geological maps and research papers about local plate tectonics. It put out a call for localities to volunteer. Participating would commit them to nothing. Haruo Kataoka, the mayor of an ailing fishing town on the northern island of Hokkaido, put up his hand. His town, Suttsu, could use the money. What could go wrong? The answer, he quickly learned, was a lot. A resident threw a firebomb at his home. Others threatened to recall the town council. A former prime minister traveled six hours from Tokyo to denounce the plan. The town, which spends much of the year in a snowbound hush, was enveloped in a media storm. There are few places on earth eager to host a nuclear waste dump. Only Finland and Sweden have settled on permanent repositories for the dregs of their atomic energy programs. But the furor in Suttsu speaks to the deep anxiety that remains in Japan 10 years after an immense earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Fukushima Prefecture, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The black mark left on Japan’s nuclear industry has profound implications for the country’s ability to power the world’s third-largest economy while also meeting its obligations to combat climate change. Of Japan’s more than 50 nuclear reactors, all of which were shut down after the disaster on March 11, 2011, only nine have restarted, and the issue continues to be politically toxic. As the share of nuclear energy in Japan has plummeted from about a third of total power to the single digits, the void has been filled in part by coal and natural gas, complicating a promise that the country made late last year to be carbon-neutral by 2050. Even before the Fukushima calamity, which led to three explosions and a release of radiation that forced the evacuation of 150,000 people, ambivalence toward nuclear energy was deeply ingrained in Japan. The country is haunted by the hundreds of thousands killed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Still, most Japanese had come to terms with nuclear power, viewing it as an inevitable part of the energy mix for a resource-poor country that must import about 90 percent of the materials it needs to generate electricity. After the nuclear disaster, public opinion swung decisively in the other direction. On top of a newly galvanized anxiety came a fresh mistrust of both the nuclear industry, which had built reactors susceptible to being overwhelmed in a natural disaster, and the government, which had allowed it to happen. A parliamentary commission found that the meltdowns had been the result of a lack of oversight and of collusion between the government, the plant’s owner and regulators. “Utilities and the government and us nuclear experts kept saying, ‘don’t worry, there won’t be a serious accident,’” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, director of the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University. Now “people think that the industry is not trustworthy and the government that is pushing the industry is not trustworthy.” The Japanese government, which has increased safety standards for nuclear power plants, says it plans to bring more reactors back online. But Fukushima’s legacy now taints all discussions about nuclear power, even the question of how to handle waste produced long before the disaster. “Every normal person in town is thinking about it,” said Toshihiko Yoshino, 61, the owner of a seafood business and oyster shack in Suttsu, who has become the face of the opposition to the mayor. “It’s because that kind of tragedy happened that we shouldn’t have nuclear waste here,” Mr. Yoshino said in an interview at his restaurant, where large picture windows look out onto the snow-swept mountains rising above Suttsu Bay. For now, the politics surrounding the waste indicate that, if it is not entombed beneath Suttsu, it will find its way to a place much like it: a town worn down by the collapse of local industry and the steady attrition of its population from migration and old age. The central government has tried to incentivize local governments to volunteer for consideration by offering a payment of around $18 million for taking the first step, a literature review. Those that go on to the second stage — a geological study — will receive an additional $64.4 million. Only one other town in the entire nation, neighboring Kamoenai — already next to a nuclear power plant — joined Suttsu in volunteering. One thing Fukushima has made clear, said Hirokazu Miyazaki, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University who has studied how communities were compensated after the disaster, is the need to find an equitable way of distributing the social and economic costs of nuclear power. The problem is symbolized both by Fukushima’s partly uninhabitable towns and a battle over the government’s plan to release a million tons of treated radioactive water from the site into the ocean. The government says it would make small releases over 30 years with no impact on human health. Fishermen in Fukushima say that the plan would wreck their long journey toward recovery. “We have this potentially dangerous technology and we still rely on it and we need to have a long-range view on nuclear waste and decommissioning, so we better think about a much more democratic way to handle the cost associated with it,” Mr. Miyazaki said in an interview. Critics of nuclear power in Japan frequently point to the decades of failure to find a solution to the waste problem as an argument against restarting the country’s existing reactors, much less building new ones. In November, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi took his campaign against nuclear energy to Suttsu at the invitation of local activists. Speaking in the town’s gymnasium, he said that after visiting Finland’s underground waste storage site — a facility much like the one proposed by the Japanese government — he had decided that Japan’s active geology would make it impossible to find a workable location. Japanese reactors have generated more than 18,000 tons of spent fuel over the last half century. A small proportion of that has been turned into glass — through a process known as vitrification — and sheathed in giant metal canisters. Almost 2,500 of the huge radioactive tubes are sitting in temporary facilities in Aomori and Ibaraki Prefectures, waiting to be lowered 1,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface into vast underground vaults. There, they would spend millenniums shedding their toxic burden. It will be decades — if ever — before a site is selected and the project begins in earnest. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan, known as NUMO and represented by a cartoon mole cautiously sticking its snout out of a hole, is in charge of finding a final resting place. Long before he took NUMO up on its offer to conduct a study in his town, Mr. Kataoka, the Suttsu mayor, had taken an entrepreneurial view toward government subsidies. Suttsu has a population of just under 2,900, spread thinly around the rocky rim of a deep cerulean bay, where fishing boats prowl for mackerel and squid. Beginning in 1999, with government-supported loans, Mr. Kataoka championed an initiative to install a stand of towering wind turbines along the shore. Many in the town were initially opposed, he said during an interview in his office, but the project has delivered handsome returns. The town has spent the profits from selling electricity to pay off debts. Townspeople have free access to a heated pool, a golf course and a modest ski slope with a rope tow. Next to a sleek community center is a free day care for the few residents with children. The facilities are not unusual for small-town Japan. Many localities have tried to stave off decline by spending large sums on white elephant projects. In Suttsu, the effect has been limited. The town is shrinking, and in early March, snow was piled to the eaves of newly built but shuttered stores along the main street. Mr. Kataoka nominated Suttsu for the NUMO program, he said, out of a sense of responsibility to the nation. The subsidies, he admitted, are a nice bonus. But many in Suttsu doubt the intentions of both Mr. Kataoka and the government. The town, they argue, does not need the money. And they question why he made the decision without public consultation. At a meeting of the town council on Monday, residents expressed concern that once the process had begun, it would quickly gather momentum and become impossible to stop. The plan has fiercely divided the town. Reporters have flooded in, putting the discord on national display. A sign in the hotel by the harbor makes it clear that the staff will not accept interviews. In October, an angry resident threw a Molotov cocktail at Mr. Kataoka’s home. It broke a window, but he smothered it without any further damage. The perpetrator was arrested and is now out on bail. He has apologized, Mr. Kataoka said. The mayor remains bewildered by the aggressive response. Mr. Katatoka insists that the literature review is not a fait accompli and that the townspeople will have the final say. In October, he will run for a sixth term. He wants voters to support his proposal, but whatever the outcome, he hopes the town can move forward together. Losing the election would be bad, he said, but “the saddest part of all this has been losing the town’s trust.” Motoko Richcontributed reporting from Tokyo. Source link Orbem News #Bombed #House #mayors #message #NuclearFree #Town

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