"For I am a direct descendant of slaves, too near to the actual enterprise to believe that its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation. Moreover, I am a direct descendant of Prospero worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using his legacy of language - not to curse our meeting - but to push it further..." George Lamming
According to the logic of elimination that subtends settler colonial projects, native populations are displaced in order to replace their systems of life, a process that structures invasion in its initial stages as in the present. By looking into the case of modern Palestine in an integrative fashion, in this essay we suggest that settler colonialism targets native populations along with social formations – established ways of life – that nurture native life in various ways. We define this settler specificity as the “logic of double elimination.” Our story shows that in Palestine, Zionism developed and the Israeli state was eventually established by means of (a) the continuing elimination of the Arab-Palestinians and their sovereignty, and (b) the destruction of the social infrastructure and identities that fostered Arab–Jewish shared life and forms of cooperation as they flourished in Ottoman times, and the prevention of these forms as they survived into the British Mandate era.
I suppose it's better to die of laughter, than frightened to death by a nuclear holocaust.
The following is worthy of a modern-day Keystone Kops revival:
The EU and US both still appear unable to accept that having failed to kill Russia with their shock and awe sanctions, they are now caught in their own booby trap by reducing access to Russia commodities, particularly ones on which they depend like gas, oil, fertilizers, neon, titanium, aluminum, platinum, palladium…. And then they get pissy when Russia is less than fully cooperative in continuing to supply them, even as they also threaten to stop/reduce buying from Russia (admittedly on largely imaginary timelines).
And as if that weren't enough, here is the Great Leader of Ukraine which the West has been parading all over the media. You just can't make this stuff up!
Seriously, though, this is the reality of the Ukraine conflict:
Suffice it to say that Russia is beating a military trained and equipped to NATO standards [force] over eight year, which had the additional advantage of building extensive, layered bunkers in Donbass. Russia is wearing it down with a peacetime expeditionary force, battle-hardened local militias, the Chechens, the Wagner Group (somewhere between volunteers and mercs) and most importantly lots of ammo and missiles. Russia has depleted Ukraine’s armored vehicles, heavy weapons, and seasoned fighters, as well as draining NATO caches, while reportedly manufacturing ammo and weapons at a rate so high that Russia is keeping up with the usage in the Special Military Operation. Russia has also demonstrated superiority to the West in missiles, missile defenses, and signal jamming. Yet somehow our strategists had convinced themselves that Russia was a military paper tiger, when that is increasingly looking like projection.
A cultural icon who mentored me through his written works (and in person when Gordon K. Lewis brought him as visiting author to the Institute of Caribbean Studies) passed away today.
Renowned Barbadian novelist and poet George Lamming died on Saturday at the age of 94. He passed away in Barbados four days short of his 95th birthday on June 8. Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, in a release following Lamming’s passing, said there would be an official funeral for the writer who was so integral to the literature of the region.
If you frequent my blog you will be familiar with the eternal quote from one of his landmark works at the heading:
"For I am a direct descendant of slaves, too near to the actual enterprise to believe that its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation. Moreover, I am a direct descendant of Prospero worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using his legacy of language - not to curse our meeting - but to push it further..."
This conflict is noteworthy for the concerted effort by the West to dominate the narrative and exclude everything the Russians have to say about it. One should always listen to both sides of any conflict if there is to be a fig-leaf of impartiality.
One of the first documents that should be read and confronted concerning the crisis in Ukraine is the following letter signed and published in 1997. It is testimony to the fact that notable diplomats and historians knew back then that NATO expansion would elicit a backlash from Russia, and that U.S. President Clinton's rush to push NATO eastwards would turn a once compliant and reformist Russia into an implacable enemy.:
As for the nature of the situation in Ukraine, the West has pushed back against accusations that there exist significant fascist elements in Ukraine, something which has been documented beyond a shadow of a doubt:
On 16 February 2020, the U.S. State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism arrived in Ukraine.[1] The agenda was not announced. The hope is that he discussed at least some of the issues discussed in this report with his Ukrainian counterparts. Five years ago the threat of ultranationalist-neofascist Ukrainian terrorism (UNUT) should have been clear to all, but it was not.[2] Things have not gotten any better. The threat has grown, and there remains no acknowledgement of the UNUT threat. The threat remains one both to Ukraine as well as Europe, Russia and the United States and is part of a larger ultranationalist-neofascist international movement and terrorist threat.
Identitarian violence and terrorism is deeply embedded in the nationalist, ultranationalist, and neofascist strand of Ukrainian political culture. Contemporary UNUT is inherited largely from Galicia and the Nazi-allied Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) of World War II and thus is a near century-long tradition. Not only did the OUN assassinate officials, including Polish and perhaps more understandably Soviet officials and NKVD officers, OUN members also tried to assassinate US President Delano Roosevelt, according to archival documents.[3] The UNUT tradition is being carried forward by Ukraine’s ultranationalist and neofascist groups, such as Right Sector, the Svoboda Party, Right Sector, Azov, the National Corps (Natsional’nyi Korpus) or NatsKorpus, and C14. This is no coincidence as it these groups that have fostered a cult of personality surrounding Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich, the OUN’s and UPA’s respective founders. in the nationalist, ultranationalist and neofascist subculture of Ukraine, helping to establish them as officially recognized national heroes.
As for the lead up to the 2022 Russian "Special Military Operation" in Ukraine, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Monitoring Mission had documented a marked increase in Ukrainian armed forces shelling of the Donbass (Ukrainian territory where there is a predominance of Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens) in February of 2022:
...the OSCE’s daily report of 18 February...That same report records numerous violations of the ceasefire agreement by the Ukrainian government in moving heavy weaponry in to menace separatist held areas and in keeping weaponry outside agreed storage facilities. It equally reports precisely the same kind of violations by separatist rebels. None of which balance has been recorded by the same western media which loves to give detailed accounts of troop movements within Russia.
If none of this suffices to convince you that the Russians have a point, then perhaps you should listen to former Swiss intelligence officer, senior United Nations official, and NATO advisor Jacques Baud:
