Tomorrow the trial of international law begins, and I fear that poor international law won't be up to the task. The idea of international law as this edifice that bolts the gates of hell is based on a story of what happened in the 1940s.

I have been trying to think why this is so psychologically destabilizing. Below rational thought and historical understanding are some core beliefs about how things work that we need to be true for us to function.

The Franc of the French Colonies in Africa, the CFA Franc, is used by 14 African countries.

Cameroon, CAR, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, R. Congo...

Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Senegal, Togo, and Niger. In May, France conducted an anti-migration operation. Africans were illegally coming to French territory.

The French territory is an African island called Mayotte which France colonized in 1841.

When Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, there were huge rallies in New York and Boston supporting fascist imperialism. In Boston they hanged effigies of Ethiopia's leader Haile Selassie. American women gave up their wedding rings and received steel replacements from Mussolini. The New York correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, wrote that the US wouldn't oppose the invasion: "America knows the Negro well and understands how to treat him."

It is hard to grasp but European imperialism is unique. There were wars in the Americas before 1492, but not genocides that killed 95% of the people on two continents.

To prepare for the genocide against the Herero the Germans put atrocity propaganda in the Western press in 1904.

"Many newspapers... carried reports of atrocities – most exaggerated, some entirely fabricated" of German children killed, white women raped, men mutilated... "To amplify the impact of these stories, artists produced fantastic illustrations. One engraving showed a gang of marauding Herero holding down a defenceless German woman in a white dress."

Re-reading Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation after 20ish years and I don't agree with it any more, 1st chapter in. He asserts that the period of the most immense colonial violence - which he concedes - (19th C) is a "long peace" and then goes to explain this "peace". And the explanation (that high finance had an interest in no intra-European war spoiling [what I'd call] the imperialist plunder party) is interesting, but the premise is weird.

On pg. 145 of Global Fracture Hudson says the US encouraged Third World countries in the 1970s to borrow $ from the IMF if they needed money rather than trying to negotiate higher prices for their commodities. Table 12.1 in Global Fracture is absolutely wild. There were 15 General Principles at the UN Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) created in 1964 by Third World pressure. The table shows how Western countries voted on the principles. Shall I tell you how the US voted?

This is going to be quite a story. pg. 71 - Herzl tells British Col. Albert Goldsmid in 1903 that having a Zionist settlement in Egypt would be good in the event of a future "Arabi Pasha, Mahdi, or Mullah" - these being the nationalist leaders in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia who were taken out by the British.

Getting the US to designate a situation as a genocide is not a part of the solution.

This is going to be a long and brutal thread on Central Africa: Rwanda, the DR Congo, Uganda, Burundi, and a few others. The main thing I want you to think about is all of the things that are not designated as genocides. Centuries of British slaving killed tens of millions of Africans directly and relatively depopulated Africa, as this table from Rodney shows (populations in millions).

Good afternoon everyone. Today I would like to talk to you about the BLU-82 and the GBU-43, otherwise known as the "daisy cutter" and the "mother of all bombs", both of which were dropped on Afghanistan. Let's start with the GBU-43, The Mother of All Bombs, or the MOAB. The BBC's description "It is a huge weapon - a 30ft (9m), 21,600lb (9,800kg), GPS-guided munition that is dropped from the cargo doors of an MC-130 transport plane and detonates shortly before it hits the ground."

How to Write About Afghanistan: A Style Guide for Western Journalists

(An homage to Binyavanga Wainaina.) First, the opening. All good articles about Afghanistan start with a few lines from a poem by British imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling. You know the one, "the women come out to cut up what remains, blow out your brains, blah blah blah".

Why do orientalist writers cite Sharia, rattle off the ethnicities of Afghanistan (Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Nooristani), talk about the Pashtunwali code, and never mention Afghaniyat? Some quotes from Nathaniel Davis 2010 paper, From Colonialism to Neo-Colonialism: Nationalism, Islam, and the Cultural Framing of Conflicts in Afghanistan.

OK a massive thread with some stuff about Afghanistan and imperialism that you may not have heard despite all that you have heard. It's going to be long, I'll just say that in advance. This thread begins with a quintessential imperialist regime change operation. In 1839. Yes, the same year Britain was committing the atrocities of the Opium War in China, it also invaded Afghanistan.

(Opium War history is covered in the podcast here: podur.org/2021/02/06/civ…)

Du Bois spells out the social democratic dream: " It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor." Science and religion both serve imperialism:"Thus arises the astonishing doctrine of the natural inferiority of most men to the few, and the interpretation of 'Christian brotherhood' as meaning anything that one of the 'brothers' may at any time want it to mean."

Just playing a quick game of Jim Gasperini's Hidden Agenda this morning.

Steering the ship of state in Chimerica is hard and this is one of the toughest dilemmas. Do I heed the Cuban Ambassador or my cautious External Affairs minister who says I should refuse military aid? I guess I did it right because I just successfully resisted two coup attempts.

I know you don't want to hear this, but the position that you "love the Palestinian people but hate Hamas" is actually helping Israel kill the Palestinian people. The propaganda line that "we love the people but hate whoever happens to be leading them" is the standard Israeli position (ie., Israel had the same position on the PLO back in the day, etc.).

The Anti-Empire Project is sharing tonight a resource on Anti-Palestinian Racism.

The goals are a) to recognize this as a distinct type of racism and b) to make it easy to identify when an argument or claim is based in such racism and not good faith.

podur.org/2021/05/23/ant… Some of the key points made in the resource -

Anti-Palestinian racism is distinct from Islamophobia and it is distinct from Anti-Arab Racism, despite overlap and the importance of both of those racisms.

Here are some things you need to know about politics, economics, and the environment.

1. The rich get what they want from politicians, and you don't.

cambridge.org/core/journals/… 2. Rich people take trillions from poor people each year.

rand.org/pubs/working_p…

An attempt to spell out anti-imperialist moral truism. Or, why Western dissent against Chinese or Russian crimes does not make the world a better place. A thread. As usual, the starting point is Chomsky. One of his moral truisms is that it is only moral to campaign on issues you can affect.

So, after reading Losurdo's book on nonviolence, a thread on why Hannah Arendt is no guide for leftists (probably most of you know this, so skip if you already knew). Arendt is famous for a phrase, "the banality of evil", and for the analysis of "totalitarianism". The phrase is of course clever but by now confuses more than it helps, since there are obviously evils that aren't banal and banalities that aren't evil, so whatever.