#lightdancer comments on current events

[lightdancer1]

There are reasons why Palestine flag people never say who 'Free Sudan' would free them from:

The reality behind why Sudan is so difficult to govern is actually quite simple. The modern Sudanese state has adopted both Arabism and Islamism in equal measure as unifying forces and the Black peoples of the Nilotic cattle-herding nations are the cheap targets for them to go after and so they treat them. The consequences of willfully sowing fascism and theocracy is both ideologies are murderous dystopian nightmares for people who are not of the right ethnic group or religious sect. Thus can the history of modern Sudan be written.

This is also why the 'Free Sudan' people with Palestine flags are cagey because admitting that the Arabs of Sudan are the people doing the genocide is to them some admission of failure in Palestine even though these are different groups of Arabs with different cultural experiences.

[lightdancer1]

For the last day of Black Military History, the various ongoing and one very recent wars of Africa:

Today, for the last day in Black Military History, the ongoing wars in Africa. There are a grand total of 35 wars, so only a few are being focused on. I covered the events in the Congo and in the Sudan in greater depth before Black History Month and will be returning to them again because I refuse to allow these histories to exist solely in the shadow of Gaza....or of Ukraine, for that matter. Suffering is not an Olympic sport, there are no gold medals for 'best suffering in a genocidal catastrophe.' Leaving the Congo and Sudan wars for last because those are the ones with which people are the most familiar, I begin with the conflict that is why I can never take Hannah Nikole-Jones' Hotepian posture seriously and why no-one over the age of three should.

This is the one in the list that is not, actually, ongoing but is relevant all the same as an illustration of factors that play into the ones that really are. It was a war launched on a small scale by an overmighty oil corporation that stole land from the Ogoni people and operated to smash them with genocidal violence. It is why anyone who takes money from Shell is morally compromised on 'ability to unambiguously claim genocide is in fact a crime.'

And Hannah Nikole-Jones has done precisely this, because the suffering of the Ogoni people does not count, because her sense of empathy is very specifically defined ways that would do tremendous damage to her posturing on who and what she is if more people cared about what companies like Shell get up to in countries like Nigeria.

[lightdancer1]

The Second Congo War has never truly ended:

The first Congo War ended in 1997, the second is the reason for the still-ongoing war in the eastern DRC today. This war, accordingly, long predates the current round of fighting in Gaza and reflects patterns of cultural flexing by Rwanda in particular and Uganda, from time to time, that started the new war and with the Rwandans not only haven't stopped so much as taking pauses so they can reload and clean off the machetes to go and kill more Congolese.

People who think that all history begins and ends within the boundaries of the state of Israel since 1947 might be genuinely stunned to realize this but this is not in fact true in other parts of the world. The animosities stored up here begin with the war of the 1960s and the 1990s, and reflect the simple reality that the DRC does not have the military power to evict the Rwandans.

[lightdancer1]

Mali and the Ukraine War have a very obvious intersection:

In the case of the Mali War, however, the long shadow of the Russian state and the Ukraine War rear their ugly heads, as the same Wagner group of Nazis that were happily used by Russia to ensure Ukraine's 'deNazification' saw Russian Nazis raping, pillaging, and butchering their way across Ukraine were doing it in Mali for a long time before and are back to doing it again. Wagner is employed here by the Malian government to stay in power, in a good illustration of why dictators are bastards all over, regardless of continent or skin color, and why people who sincerely buy Russians object to Nazis at any real level should be parted from money post-haste and preferably into my pocket, at that.

[lightdancer1]

Ending today with one story that basically epitomizes 'why ignoring events in Africa is bad':

Ending today with a look at one of the stories that relied, essentially, on 'nobody gives a fuck about Africa' as a shield and still does, really. In any other context the creation of a new US military command focusing on a new continent and frequent military activities done therein would be a focus of frequent commentary. It's been happening in Africa since the Obama years under that veil of silence and even the paranoid tankies don't give a damn because they're whiter than a Sons of Confederate Veterans rally.

[lightdancer1]

Anyone who believes the ANC objects to genocide on general principles should consider this:

This is, incidentally, why I not only cannot accept that South Africa's ruling political party has discovered the concept that 'genocide is bad' is a thing it actually believes it, but that it specifically if anything has openly endorsed genocide of Black people as a point it considers an acceptable price of modern statesmanship. The Arab supremacist dictator Omar Al-Bashir, creator of the Janjaweed, was given the equivalent of a ticker tape parade and a medal for the ANC for creating an Arab supremacist-Islamist combination to slaughter the Dinka and Nuer of Darfur.

The ANC, the same people who fought so hard against white supremacy, have forgotten anything they used to stand for and the only moral principle guiding them now appears to be sheer spite.

[lightdancer1]

This article lays out a really good summary of the Sudan and Tigray Wars:

[lightdancer1]

The reasons for the South Sudan war have their own different aspects:

South Sudan, too, continues to convulse in its own civil war. For its part this war has a supremely simple root, a country founded by various militias without any political concept of what it should be has very obvious reasons to be war-torn that hardly need the belaboring.

[lightdancer1]

The Lord's Resistance Army is the most prominent exception to the general rule that long-lasting African insurgencies are Muslim:

The Lord's Resistance Army is the most powerful of the Christian insurgencies in Africa. There are a few small Christian war-bands and witch-hungers in southern Nigeria, but nothing on the scale of Joseph Kony's movement. The movement itself emerged as a backlash to the regime of Idi Amin Dada and the war that removed him from power, and since has boosted itself as a kind of modern-day Crusader movement. And like the Crusaders before it avarice and brutality are intended in how the system works.

[lightdancer1]

This is the answer to why the news every so often notes US drone strikes in Somalia, incidentally:

If people really gave a shit as to why the US does periodic drone strikes into Somalia they could easily find it, but they don't because that would require treating African events as things that matter for themselves. And to most of today's TikTok radicals they would sooner die than admit that their obsession with Palestine instead of UHC or free college is just a trend, and that there is, in fact, no actual concern with the events of this part of the world Al-Shabaab itself is the last trace of the decades of anarchy in Somalia, the local Al-Qaeda spinoff....and those US drone strikes are used to help a reviving state with a still-fragile army do what the state itself cannot, entirely, on its own and is perfectly willing to ask the US taxpayer and US missiles to do for it so it doesn't have to try.

[lightdancer1]

If it sounds like a monolithic list of Islamic insurgencies there are reasons for that:

In the Central African Republic, too, Islamism continues to rear its ugly head as the main cause of major civil wars. The reasons for this one amount to the same pattern as elsewhere, rejection of the 21st Century for the spirit of the Battle of the Camel, and acting accordingly to slaughter everyone who disagrees with it while an enfeebled army hollowed out by corruption ineffectually flails around throwing vast amounts of firepower to relatively little to show for it. There are Christian insurgencies, and the biggest and most infamous of the lot is the last to be covered before the Tigray and Sudan and Congo Wars, but the bulk of insurgencies remain Muslim.

Islam offers, as Christianity once did, a lightning ticket to Heaven as long as people take a gun, call it Jihad, and go forth dying to convert the infidel or the insufficiently pious decadent Westernizer. The incentive here versus regular yearly monthlong fasts or a plane ticket to Saudi Arabia and back for a week or actually being a decent likeable person to everyone around you is obvious, hence the vacuum effect.

[lightdancer1]

The war in Senegal has lasted even longer than the Congo Wars:

The Senegal War of 1982-present relies on a particular juxtaposition that makes its endemic length all but inevitable. Specifically the junction of both local separatism and the kind of Islamist insurgency that can never really be destroyed because the most nihilistic elements of the Islamic religion fasten to it like a vampire to a victim's neck and want a quick ticket to paradise that beats hollow actually living like a decent Muslim like most of the normal people of the Islamic world.

[lightdancer1]

The current war in Mozambique:

The insurgency in Mozambique resembles so many others of its kind. Centers of Islamic culture co-exist with a world that is more secular and part of a modern urban bloc they consider an existential threat, go burning and butchering to resurrect the familiar Jahiliyyah that they long to return to. The locals who aren't like this object, the local army is too enfeebled by its own corruption to put up much in the way of effective resistance. Where it differs is that unlike other African insurgencies the US has found its way to greater involvement here, because in this case opportunists and actual fighters connected to the Islamic State do what others like them do and seek to internationalize local issues, as to put it at least somewhat anachronistically has been a founding part of the Islamic world from its dawn. This part of the world has always had cosmopolitan aspects other parts have lost.

The result for locals is huge wars like this one fought for the same basic reasons as most civil wars against armed Jihadist war bands wanting to LARP Khalid ibn Al-Walid and his ilk become caught up in greater international struggles nobody asked for nor wished.

[lightdancer1]

Nigeria is my favorite case to prove a simple assertion wrong:

To note, however, the reality of the broader war in Nigeria is to underscore a key point that undermines the idea that US foreign policy is neatly associated with oil. Nigeria is the fourth largest world oil supplier in quantitative terms. The various insurgencies it fights that are correlated under the name Boko Haram, a blend of Islamists and irredentists for the fallen Sultanates and kingdoms of what is now Northern Nigeria, have conducted massacres on par with the Shoah by bullet and view themselves as fighting an interlinked war with the various Islamic State movements in the Middle East. Between terrorism and oil the US, if that simple rule applied, should have 150,000 troops in Nigeria fighting an indefinite war to secure that oil.

It does not, and so unlike the other cases the various factions, the massacres, and the brutal realities of said war linger in the kind of ignorance that is anything but blissful, as is the direct correlation between the British Empire merging regions that had no unified prior history as a single political sphere into one and ensuring the bloodier corners of older histories reinvented themselves in new paths.

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/northeast-nigeria-insurgency-has-killed-almost-350000-un-2021-06-24/

[lightdancer1]

Ending today with two articles noting the Long Civil Rights Movement is still a clear and present reality:

[lightdancer1]

Unfortunately Cuba and the United States do share one aspect of present reality:

Wrapping up Cuban history with this note. There is also another grim parallel in that both the USA and Cuba see no small amount of difficulty on the part of Black people to speak to their reality, to their history, and to their experience. The Cuban government nominally professes to be communist revolutionaries but in practice it doesn't care any more than the USA does to hear narratives it doesn't want to admit are there.