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redfish

@redfishstream

Dec 21

This week would've marked the 73rd birthday of Burkinabé socialist revolutionary Thomas Sankara. He became the President of Burkina Faso at the age of 33. lasting only 4 years, because he was killed in a military coup, suspected to have had support from the US and France.🧵

Sankara gained the love of his people because of his humble lifestyle, socialist programmes & economic prosperity, but also his confrontation with the national elite, as he stripped power away from them and for challenging Western imperialism and neo-colonialism in the continent.

In those 4 short years he: ⁠

• Lowered his salary to $450 a month, limited his possessions to a car, 4 bikes, 3 guitars, a fridge and a broken freezer.
⁠
• Sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars & made the cheapest car in Burkina Faso the official service car.

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redfish

@redfishstream

Dec 19

The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has apologized for slavery and pledged €227 million for "awareness raising" and a slavery museum. The sum is nowhere near the €50 billion in reparations campaigners demand from the Netherlands to address the legacy of the slave trade. 🧵

Adequate reparations are vital to address the modern legacy of the Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Netherlands’ wealth today is drenched in the blood of enslaved people in its former colonies in West Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Over 600,000 enslaved people produced super profits on Dutch sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and cotton plantations. The wealth of institutions that still exist, like the royal family and the Dutch Central Bank, was born on those plantations.

Read 9 tweets

redfish

@redfishstream

Dec 11

Today marks the anniversary of one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history, the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador committed by a right-wing US-trained death squad.

The soldiers killed 1,000 people, almost the entire village of El Mozote. 🧵

The majority of the victims were women, children and the elderly. Soldiers separated the men from the women and children, then they tortured and executed the men in several locations.

The soldiers separated women and older girls from the children, raped them and then executed them with machine guns. Girls as young as 10 were raped. They slit the throats of the children, hanged them from trees & after killing almost the entire population, set the homes on fire.

Read 4 tweets

redfish

@redfishstream

Dec 10

On #HumanRightsDay, here are a mere handful of atrocities committed by the U.S. in recent memory, for which the victims still have no sight of justice. 🧵

In March 2019, U.S. drones bombed a crowd of civilians in Baghuz, Syria. The drone operators in Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar recognized the crowd of civilians but dropped the bombs anyway, killing over 70 civilians in what was the worst civilian death toll in the war against ISIS.

In 2008, a U.S. airstrike massacred at least 47 civilians, including 39 women & children, who were escorting a bride to her wedding in Haska Meyna, Afghanistan. The bride of the wedding was also killed in the strike. Weeks later, another US attack killed 90 civilians in Azizabad.

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redfish

@redfishstream

Dec 3

On this day in 1984, thousands of people in Bhopal, India, were gassed to death in the pesticide plant of U.S. company Union Carbide (UCC) It remains the worst corporate massacre in history and the victims are still fighting for justice. 🧵

During the night of December 3, 1984, the leakage of 27 tons of toxic chemicals turned the UCC plant in Bhopal into a gas chamber. 3,800 people died instantly, and until today over 22,000 have died due to injuries from the leak. The disaster was entirely preventable.

In its drive to maximize profits, UCC, today owned by Dow – one of the largest chemical producers in the world – cut safety corners and built the plant using untested technology. Aware of the dangers, it wrote them off as an acceptable “business risk”.

Read 7 tweets

redfish

@redfishstream

Dec 2

On this day in 2001, Argentina's neoliberal government blocked the entire population from accessing their savings. The move sparked a crisis known as "El Corralito" which resulted in the deaths of 39 protesters and the president fleeing the presidential palace in a helicopter. 🧵

El Corralito was a last-ditch attempt to salvage an economy wrecked by a decade of IMF-dictated policies including massive privatization, market deregulation and the pegging of the Argentine peso to the US dollar.

Despite Argentina being hailed by the west as a poster child of market-oriented reforms, by 2001 its debt had ballooned to $128 billion. Unable to service the debt, the government of President Fernando De la Rúa banned the population from withdrawing more than $250 per week.

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