This is the assessment of Mujtaba Rahman in an Opinion piece for the Guardian published today (Wed 3 Jun 2020). He writes:
Most of us who have followed Brexit closely believed coronavirus would soften the government’s stance in trade talks with Europe. The economic shock triggered by the pandemic, and the fact Whitehall is so overwhelmed managing it, made it more likely the government would extend the transition period, due to expire at the end of this year, or strike a deal. It turns out that the opposite is true. Rather than encouraging a more flexible and pragmatic approach, Covid-19 has instead reinforced the case for no deal at the very top of government.
Perhaps the most important driver is the belief among ministers that the UK economy will be permanently reshaped by the crisis, as companies create new supply chains and reshore production to provide greater resilience in the future, not least in case of another pandemic. The government wants a free hand to facilitate this change, one that it believes would be constrained by the EU’s demand that the UK remain tied to its labour and environmental standards and state aid rules.
On the other side of the same coin, there are growing fears in cabinet that maintaining close EU ties would lock the UK into the EU’s post-Covid-19 economic measures designed for its 27 member states, with little regard for the UK’s interests. This is nonsense, as the EU’s rescue package unveiled last Wednesday assumes no UK financial contribution. But it is a powerful argument on the Eurosceptic backbenches and has scared many in cabinet.
Another argument popular with backbench Brexiteers, but now more prominent among ministers, is the belief that coronavirus presents the government with an opportunity to “bury” the loss of growth from no trade deal under the cover of the much more dramatic drop in GDP caused by coronavirus.
The politics of this are very juicy for the Vote Leave team in the driving seat in government. Not least because it is only really a no deal that fully delivers on their substantive “divergence” agenda, while any version of a deal with the EU, no matter how distant, will ultimately tie the UK into EU rules and regulations in some way, an idea they hate and are loth to accept. No deal also facilitates a trade deal with the US, and the symbolism of “Global Britain” is key for ministers – far more important than the limited economic benefit a UK-US trade pact would bring.
Time is also running out. Despite three rounds of talks so far, no progress has been made and negotiators on both sides are downbeat about the likelihood of a breakthrough this week. Big gaps remain – in the UK over whether and how far to align to EU standards, the role of the European court of justice and the EU’s demands to fish in UK waters. But the government won’t extend the transition period. Boris Johnson believes he would struggle to sell to voters the extra £10bn in financial contributions and further spell of EU control of UK laws that this would bring.
A political intervention on both sides will therefore be needed to move beyond the current stage. There will l be an opportunity this month, when Johnson meets the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, virtually, around the time of a long-planned EU leaders’ session in June to review progress. But the EU is unlikely to change its mandate and absent progress, ministers plan to make a judgment in September so they can give business clarity about the trading arrangements from 1 January. They may switch to assuming and preparing for no deal then.
Finally, the survival of Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s closest adviser, despite allegations he broke the lockdown rules, also enhances the prospect of no deal. One reason why Brexiteer ministers and aides rallied behind him is that he sees it as his personal mission to prevent Johnson extending the transition period in June, and delivering a version of Brexit that lets the UK “take back control”. It would be wrong to underestimate his impact on the outcome of these negotiations.
Of course, this could all be tactics and bluster. Johnson and his cheerleaders on the backbenches have convinced themselves that such brinkmanship worked during the withdrawal agreement talks, so it is no real surprise they intend to repeat the trick now. Especially as they believe, wrongly, that coronavirus will make the EU more desperate to conclude a deal and buckle at the last moment. But Downing Street is right that December is the real deadline.
Germany’s role will be key. I say this not as a naive Brit, believing that Angela Merkel will ride to Britain’s rescue, but as someone who has spent more than two decades studying and working on EU affairs. With Germany at the head of Europe’s rotating presidency, and Merkel in the final throes of her chancellorship, she will find it very hard to sign off on no deal. Of all of the EU’s member states, Germany has been the most focused on the longer-term, geopolitical risk of no deal, and the necessity for the UK and EU to maintain constructive ties.
But even Merkel can’t and won’t save the UK from itself, and will not agree to a deal at any price. If the net effect of Covid-19 is that ministers see more benefit than cost from no deal, with the dominant view in cabinet now opposed to extending the transitional period, then that will indeed be the outcome at the end of this year.
Brexit for Boris comes before WHO announcement of Public Health Emergency of International Concern . . .
On 31 January, the first UK cases were confirmed in York. On the same day, British nationals were evacuated from Wuhan to quarantine at Arrowe Park Hospital.
Meanwhile, in Norwich, printed posters, with the title “Happy Brexit Day”, were stuck to doors on all 15 floors of Winchester Tower, the day the UK formally left the European Union.
Addressing residents, it said the “Queens [sic] English is the spoken tongue here” and hailed the moment “we finally get our great country back”.
It said those unwilling to speak English should leave the UK. The text read: “You won’t have long till our government will implement rules that will put British first. So, best evolve or leave. God Save the Queen, her government and all true patriots.”
Norfolk police said all the posters had been removed and were being examined for forensic evidence. Officers were working with the council to examine any CCTV footage of the block.
A spokeswoman added: “There is no place in society for hatred and intolerance. Nobody should have to face intimidation because of who they are and it is more important than ever that we stand together in the face of hostility. We remain committed to helping people feel safe and secure as they go about their lives.
“The matter is being dealt with as a racially aggravated public order incident.”
Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent for the Guardian was reporting on this increasingly ugly social phenomenon over a year ago (Mon 20 May 2019). He writes under the subheading:
Survey shows 71% of people from ethnic minorities faced discrimination, up from 58%
Ethnic minorities in Britain are facing rising and increasingly overt racism, with levels of discrimination and abuse continuing to grow in the wake of the Brexit referendum, nationwide research reveals.
Seventy-one percent of people from ethnic minorities now report having faced racial discrimination, compared with 58% in January 2016, before the EU vote, according to polling data seen by the Guardian.
The data comes amid rising concern at the use of divisive rhetoric in public before this week’s European parliament elections, where some leading candidates, including Ukip’sCarl Benjamin and the independent Tommy Robinson, have records of overt racism.
The survey by Opinium suggests racists are feeling increasingly confident in deploying overt abuse or discrimination. The proportion of people from an ethnic minority who said they had been targeted by a stranger rose from 64% in January 2016 to 76% in February this year, when the most recent polling was carried out of 1,006 people weighted to be nationally representative.
The trend appears in line with crime figures, which have shown that racially motivated hate crime has increased every year since 2013, doubling to 71,251 incidents in England and Wales in 2018, according to the Home Office.
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham and a leading anti-racism campaigner, described the findings as “alarming”, while Omar Khan, the chief executive of the Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank, said it was now clear that Brexit, while not the source of racism, had led to higher levels of racism being expressed and that social media was “normalising hate and increasing division”.
The survey found that at the end of 2016, 37% of people saw racism on social media on a day-to-day basis, but that has now risen to 50%, and is even higher for younger minority ethnic people aged 18 to 34.
Online racism has more than doubled since before the referendum, to 51%, and there were rises of about 50% in the number or people reporting hearing people ranting or making negative comments about immigration or making racist comments made to sound like jokes.
People from a black background reported the greatest increase in discrimination, with the proportion saying they had been abused or discriminated against rising from 59% in January 2016 to 65% the following October and to 74% this February and March, when the latest poll was conducted. Respondents from the east of England were most likely to say they had suffered racism.
Minority ethnic women also reported a sizeable increase, with 74% saying they had faced racial discrimination this year, compared with 61% in the latter half of 2016. This increase in racial discrimination is mainly down to racism from strangers. Looking at the types of racial discrimination faced, the proportion saying they have experienced someone making a racist comment in jest has risen to over half (55%) of people from ethnic minorities.
Lammy said: “It is no coincidence that this rise has come as anti-migrant populists seek to divide the country using the playbook of Donald Trump.
“This has both legitimated and encouraged abuse online and in the real world. I have experienced first-hand the rise in racist content on social media, and the level of abuse experienced by the younger generation makes dealing with this problem of paramount importance.”
Khan said: “The EU referendum has both revealed and amplified the experience of racism among ethnic minorities in Britain.
“Even before the referendum a clear majority of Britain’s 8 million ethnic minorities reported experiencing racism and being targeted with overt discrimination. Following the referendum, these figures have now risen to around three in four ethnic minorities, meaning that millions of ethnic minorities have been targeted with overt racism.”
He said the large rise in racism on social media raised concerns about whether online channels were normalising hate and increasing division.
“Rather than dismissing or ignoring the extent of racism, it’s important for politicians – as well as media and social media companies – to show leadership in challenging racism,” he said. “Britain’s leaders must reflect on how they can ensure Britain’s ethnic minorities feel safe and secure, and have equal opportunities and choices in where they work, commute and live.”
There were small falls in the number of people who felt they were victims of more tacit forms of discrimination such as being treated with suspicion by police or security guards, being turned down for promotion at work or suffering workplace bullying.
Back in 2018 Boris Johnson said in his Telegraph column that Muslim women in burqas looked ‘like letter boxes’.
Boris Johnson has been accused of “dog-whistle” Islamophobia by a former Conservative chair after he compared Muslim women in burqas to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers.”
Sayeeda Warsi said the lack of action by the party over Johnson’s comments showed it was “business as usual.”
Then there's Boris Johnson's version of a lockdown . . .
On 16 March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson advised everyone in the UK against "non-essential" travel and contact with others, as well as suggesting people should avoid pubs, clubs and theatres, and work from home if possible. Pregnant women, people over 70 and those with certain health conditions were urged to consider the advice "particularly important", and would be asked to self-isolate within days.
Q. How many lives would have been saved if lockdown in the UK had been implemented on 16th March 2020?
A. Still waiting for an answer!
Re:LODE Radio chooses to quote an extract from the much admired commentator and comedian Stewart Lee's Opinion piece (Sun 22 Mar 2020):
Is our prime minister, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes Johnson, up to the coronavirus crisis? Or will he be to Covid-19 what the swiftly substituted Neville Chamberlain was to the second world war, remembered only for the futile statement: “I have in my hand a piece of toilet paper!”
On Monday at 5.15pm, Turds issued the following genuine proclamation: “Absolutely what we are doing is giving very strong errrr advice that public venues such as theatres should errrr you know no longer be visited errrrr though the proprietors of those venues are taking the logical errrrr steps that you would imagine, you are seeing that change happen already.”
In short, Turds told people not to go to theatres, but didn’t say he was actually shutting them, giving no indication of where the financial liability for venues, or performers, voluntarily closing themselves into bankruptcy lay, lumbering most with no option but to keep going until they were actually ordered to stop. Backstage, 93 shows into my 150-date tour, at Canterbury’s Marlowe theatre, the virus was finally taking shape for me personally in real terms. The patient and professional stage crew, surely pondering their own immediate futures, prepared for all possibilities; theatre management thrashed out options; and box office staff, as baffled as me by Turds’s spam-fisted pronouncement, dealt diplomatically with calls from punters due to take their seats in two hours.
Conspiracy theorists speculated that Turds’s vagueness was an attempt to shield his donors in the insurance business and the theatre-chain ownership community from financial liability for closures. Ultra-conspiracy theorists imagined Turds saw an opportunity to wipe out vast swathes of creatives, who tend not to vote Conservative anyway, a theory undermined by his apparent sacrifice of the pensioners who put him in power. Others, more realistically, assumed Turds was just winging it as usual. In Iran, the virus has afforded a momentary freedom to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, from a prison that Turds’s typically lazy incoherence condemned her to.
In the end the sold-out show had to go ahead, to a theatre maybe half full, and it was one of the best I have ever been a part of, as the room took on a hysterical identity of its own that I merely had to direct, and not actually cultivate. Afterwards, standing on the stage, everyone working that night had a sense of the evening’s significance, and relative strangers exchanged words of kind comfort as the lights faded and the doors locked. I will never forget it.
On TV, in the hotel bar, Turds looked like death, and not even death warmed up, just death left on a cold pavement and then urinated on by passing dogs. Turds hadn’t seemed this terrified since the morning he won the Brexit referendum, a vote he had clearly intended to lose, having backed Brexit merely for personal career advancement.
After two decades battling the imaginary EU phantoms he himself conjured in the Daily Telegraph, Turds now has to fight something real, which can’t just be bullshitted, belittled and bullied into submission. Dominic Cumming’s conveniently fabricated culture war against manufactured traitors is the luxury of another Turds. An actual virus, embodied as a Lovecraftian entity beyond good and evil, with the face of Yog-Sothoth and the voice of Lawrence Fox, is upon him, and death does not recognise puns about Pliny and Horace.
Not a pretty sight . . .
. . . going forward!
Go whistle . . .
. . . and that goes too for nations across the world implementing the Paris agreement on mitigating the climate emergency!
NO Cop26 in 2020!
Fiona Harvey environment correspondent for the Guardian reports on the delay by a calendar year of the Cop26 summit (Thu 28 May 2020). As Re:LODE Radio has come to expect, Fiona Harvey sets out the context and the potential dangers to delaying action on the climate emergency. This is doubly important, given the present need to plan for the re-building of economies across the globe. She writes under the headline and subheading:
Date moved for Covid-19 travel reasons, but fears raised over delay to green recovery plans
Global talks aimed at staving off the threat of climate breakdown will be delayed by a year to November 2021 because of the coronavirus crisis, the UN has confirmed.
The summit, known as Cop26, which 196 nations are expected to attend, will now take place in Glasgow from November 1 to 12 next year, as reports had anticipated, with the UK government acting as host and president. They were originally set to take place from 9 November this year.
Earlier dates were thought to be too difficult, as travel restrictions may still be in place in some countries next year and finding a new date was further complicated by the scheduling of other major international environmental meetings, including global talks on the biodiversity crisis.
Alok Sharma, UK business secretary and Cop26 president, said: “While we rightly focus on fighting the immediate crisis of the coronavirus, we must not lose sight of the huge challenges of climate change. We are working with our international partners on an ambitious roadmap for global climate action between now and November 2021. Everyone will need to raise their ambitions to tackle climate change.”
Q. Can we believe him? And how accountable is the UK government and its international partners on this issue? What about using Zoom?
A. No! Not accountable! Too obvious!
Fiona Harvey continues:
Cop26 is the most important international meeting on the climate emergency since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. Under the landmark accord, countries must come forward every five years with revised plans on curbing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris goal of limiting global heating to no more than 2C, and preferably no more than 1.5C.
Current national targets would take the world to at least 3C above pre-industrial levels, scientists warn, so countries are under pressure to come up with more stringent commitments.
According to the timetable, those emission-cutting targets – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – should be put forward this year, even though the meeting itself has been delayed. The UK has not yet submitted its NDC, but has pledged to do so before Cop26.
Many developing countries and civil society groups were supportive of the delay, but called for governments to bring forward plans for a green recovery from the Covid-19 crisis, to set the world on the right track to meet the Paris goals.
Patricia Espinosa, the UN climate chief, also linked the two: “Our efforts to address climate change and Covid-19 are not mutually exclusive. If done right, the recovery from the Covid-19 crisis can steer us to a more inclusive and sustainable path.”
Sonam Wangdi, from the Kingdom of Bhutan, who chairs the Least Developed Countries group at the UN climate talks, said: “The postponement of climate negotiations should not be taken as postponement of climate action. Climate action has been delayed long enough … To focus on recovering from the Covid-19 crisis while ignoring action to address the climate crisis would only lead to more devastation in the future.”
Poor countries are concerned that the damage caused by the coronavirus crisis and the global economic shock will mean less assistance is available to help them reduce carbon emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown.
Janine Felson, Belize’s ambassador to the UN and chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: “Small island developing states are at the brink of economic collapse, with the major drivers of our economies at a standstill. This comes at a time when we are preparing for a volatile hurricane season.”
As well as the Cop26 presidency, the UK will hold the revolving presidency of the G7 group of industrialised countries next year, and Italy – which will co-host Cop26 with the UK – will be president of the G20 group, which includes major emerging economies.
That puts the Cop26 hosts in pole position to steer both sets of discussions towards a green recovery, experts said. Environmental and development groups called on Boris Johnson – who spoke on Thursday at a development conference of the need “to build back better and base our recovery on solid foundations, including a fairer, greener and more resilient global economy” - to take an international lead.
“We need to see countries using their economic recovery packages to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon world,” said Kat Kramer, global climate lead at the charity Christian Aid. “Boris Johnson needs to show he’s a credible host by ensuring the UK is leading the world with a truly green stimulus.”
“The government now has a short window of opportunity to start delivering on the Paris agreement,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK. “What is required is action, not words, starting at home by delivering a climate-proof economy that supports millions of jobs. Next year’s climate summit will only be a success if major economies use this opportunity to build a green recovery.”
What is required is action, NOT words! But Covid-19 provides governments across the world with an "unprecedented" excuse for delay!
The prospect of a NO DEAL on the BREXIT trade agreement with the EU, and NO COP26 later this year, does not bode well for the likelihood of a period of planned investment in a sustainable green economy, capable of meeting Paris agreement targets. Overall it looks bad!
According to Rafael Behr in the Opinion piece for the Guardian (Tue 2 Jun 2020):
The prime minister truly believes that leaving the EU without a deal will lift the gloom of coronavirus
Rafael Behr writes:
Words do not often fail Boris Johnson. They are the tools that built his career, wielded for persuasion and deception, often at the same time.
But the gift has deserted him during the pandemic. His performances in parliament are halting and listless. It is a while since he seeded the national conversation with one of his trademark rococo phrases. No “doomsters and gloomsters”, “mutton-headed old mugwump” or “inverted pyramid of piffle”. He had a jaunty metaphor for flattening the peak of infection – “squash the sombrero” – but that was before he caught the disease. Covid-19 drained the colour from the prime minister’s speech as well as his cheeks.
He is miscast as a leader for dangerous times. The role demands responsibility and attention to detail. The Tory leader prefers a less gritty script, but government is about shovelling grit. There is an arduous journey between making promises and keeping them. Johnson outsources that discipline to others. Two terms as mayor of London taught him the value of letting aides do the unglamorous part of the job.
That is why he refused to sack Dominic Cummings for bending lockdown rules. Cummings is vital in Downing Street as a man who sees things through, bulldozing obstacles when others might try to negotiate around them. That trait appeals to Johnson on an intellectual as well as a practical level. The two men have similar self-regard as brilliant mavericks who can ignore rules meant for little people. But Cummings has arranged that arrogance into a pseudo-scientific doctrine (spelled out verbosely on his blog). Johnson’s version is a shapeless blob of intuition, half-learned history and cod classicism.
The chief strategist is the stiff mould into which the jelly of Johnson’s gut impulses is poured. Once set, the doctrine can then hold its shape, albeit with a wobble. That function is especially important for Eurosceptic ultras. When pressure over the lockdown breach was at its most intense, one device used to rally Tory MPs was the claim that Cummings must stay in No 10 to deliver the purest Brexit. The fear is that Johnson will be swayed by the case for extending transitional terms, blanching at the economic cost of a no-deal exit in December and lost popularity when manufacturing industries in marginal seats pay the price. Cummings is tasked with keeping a foot on the accelerator pedal as the cliff-edge comes into view. He is said to “keep the PM honest” on Brexit.
That is not “honesty” in the commonly understood sense of the word that involves verifiable truth. In the Eurosceptic usage it means loyalty to an idea of Brexit, for the sake of which all dishonesties are permitted. Long before rows over lockdown there were dodgy claims about Turkey joining the EU and £350m weekly budget contributions. Apparently, the higher truth of national liberation cancels out any devious means used to achieve it.
Johnson was a liar before he fronted Vote Leave but in a lazy, blundering way. He was into small-time, tactical fibbing that often backfired – making up quotes when he started out in journalism; denying an extra-marital affair when he served in Michael Howard’s shadow cabinet. (He was exposed and sacked both times.) Cummings honed that raw talent for deceit like a boxing coach who turns a back-alley street brawler into a heavyweight champ. Fighter and trainer need each other.
Brexit talks are the next title bout and, for the anti-Brussels hardcore, killing talk of extension beyond December is the prize. There is a round of negotiations this week but no one expects meaningful progress. The two sides are miles apart, accusing each other of stubbornness. It looks like a replay of last year’s nail-biter, which ended with Johnson crumpling at the last-minute, signing a deal on terms he had once rejected and calling it a victory.
Until recently, officials and business leaders on both sides of the Channel expected the same to happen again. They see the pandemic as an irresistible argument for postponing gratuitous economic disruption. But confidence that reason will prevail is draining away because it is hard to find anyone in government who sounds reasonable.
The chest-beating ideology that Tory MPs spout in public turns out also to be what many ministers say in private: freedom must be grabbed with both hands or Brussels will bind them with red tape; the cost of no deal is lower during a pandemic because trade volumes are depressed anyway; a shiny new economy driven by “industries of the future” will have to be built anyway, so Britain should not waste time on relations with rusty old Europe. They do not say this as part of an elaborate bluff. They believe it.
The prime minister will be more attached than ever to that script now because it gets him out of his gloomy Covid-19 pit, back to flights of optimism. He does not sound himself when urging caution. Hard truths are pitched below his natural vocal range. He will hate the solemn tones of the coming recession even more. He wants to be singing hymns to blue skies over Global Britain. The darker the horizon, the more he will need to believe in that brave new dawn, the more he will want to talk it into existence.
Even the prime minister’s allies do not describe him as a man of principle. He struggles with fidelity to people and facts. But his longest relationship is with rhetoric and it is a mistake to dismiss it all as bluster. The lies surround a solid kernel of belief – in himself and his role in Britain’s national destiny. It may seem counter-intuitive, given the reputation for dishonesty, but to really understand Boris Johnson it pays to take him at his word.
The ongoing aftermath to the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in the city of Minneapolis USA, includes a global response across all of the world's continents, with the exception of Antarctica. There is an interactive map on Wikipedia that locates the ongoing global protests, protests about systemic racism, the abuse of power and the narratives of denial, issues that resonate across the world.
Frequent cases of the use of fatal force by law enforcement led to protests against the use of excessive force and the lack of police accountability during the civil rights movement.
In recent years, the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015; and the 2014 death of Eric Garner in New York City (who, like George Floyd, repeatedly said "I can't breathe" in his final moments) have sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Several nationally publicized incidents occurred in Minnesota, including the 2015 shooting of Jamar Clark in Minneapolis, the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, a suburb of neighboring Saint Paul, and the 2017 shooting of Justine Damond, also in Minneapolis. In March 2020, the shooting of Breonna Taylor by police executing a no knock warrant at her Kentucky apartment was also widely publicized. In 2016, Tony Timpa was killed by Dallas police officers in the same way as George Floyd.
The day following Floyd's death, protests began in Minneapolis during which protesters and police began to clash on the streets. Protests also began to form in other cities across the United States, and demonstrations increased with each day. The unrest escalated on subsequent days and the third precinct police station in Minneapolis was burned down on May 28. By June, protests had been held in all U.S. states and permanently-inhabited territories. Protest actions were also reported in some U.S. immigration detention centers and prisons.
As of today, June 3, as unrest continues, at least 200 cities imposed curfews, and at least 27 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 62,000 National Guard personnel.
U.S. Press Freedom Tracker recorded at least 49 arrests, 192 assaults (160 by police), and 42 incidents in which equipment was damaged during the protests. In comparison, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented between 100 and 150 such incidents per year for the past three years. Many journalists described being intentionally targeted by police even after they identified themselves as press. One journalism professor suggested that the unusual aggressiveness toward journalists might relate to Trump's repeated public attacks on the press as "enemies of the people"; in a May 31 tweet, Trump blamed the "lamestream media" for the protests and said that journalists are "truly bad people with a sick agenda."
Journalists at several protests were injured and arrested by police while trying to cover the story, being shot by rubber bullets, or sprayed by tear gas. As of May 31, Bellingcat had identified and documented at least 50 separate incidents where journalists were attacked by law enforcement officials during the protests. According to Bellingcat, "law enforcement across multiple cities, but especially in Minneapolis, are knowingly and deliberately targeting journalists with less lethal munitions, arrests and other forms of violence."
May 28 2020 On the evening of May 28, officers fired pepper bullets at several employees of The Denver Post who were reporting on protests in Denver, Colorado. A photographer was struck twice by pepper bullets, sustaining injuries on his arm. The photographer believed it was not accidental, saying, "If it was one shot, I can say it was an accident. I'm very sure it was the same guy twice. I'm very sure he pointed at me." Another journalist said an officer shot at least one pepper bullet at her feet.
May 29 2020 Omar Jiménez, a black Latino CNN reporter, and his news crew were arrested while giving a live television report on May 29 in Minneapolis by the Minnesota State Patrol, and then released about an hour later. After the incident took place, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that he deeply apologizes for what happened and would work to have the crew released, calling the event "unacceptable" and adding that there was "absolutely no reason something like this should happen."CNN called the arrests a "clear violation of their First Amendment rights" in a tweet posted the same day. After the incident the Minnesota State Patrol tweeted that "In the course of clearing the streets and restoring order at Lake Street and Snelling Avenue, four people were arrested by State Patrol troopers, including three members of a CNN crew. The three were released once they were confirmed to be members of the media," however the CNN crew had already informed the troopers that they were members of the media before and during the arrest and carried the relevant paperwork and identification with them. The Minneapolis Police Department falsely stated both while performing the arrest and via Twitter that his crew had not adequately responded when asked what they were doing. Linda Tirado, a freelance photo journalist, was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet or a pellet by the police in Minneapolis, and following surgery was left permanently blind in that eye. Also in Louisville, Kentucky, an officer fired pepper bullets at a reporter from NBC affiliate WAVE who was reporting live on air for her station. The station manager issued a statement strongly condemning the incident, saying there was "no justification for police to wantonly open fire." A 29-year-old mother of two was peacefully protesting in Sacramento when police shot her in the right eye with a rubber projectile; she was permanently blinded in one eye.
May 30 2020 On May 30, members of a Reuters crew were fired on with rubber bullets in Minneapolis shortly after a curfew they were reporting on began. One reporter was hit in the arm and neck while another was hit in the face, which deflected off his gas mask. Also in Minneapolis, France 2's U.S. correspondent Agnès Varamian said her photojournalist, Fabien Fougère, was hurt by non-lethal bullets as she shouted "press" to the police. Expressen's U.S. correspondent Nina Svanberg was also hit in the leg with rubber bullets. Meanwhile Deutsche Welle journalist Stefan Simons and his team were shot at by police in Minneapolis. In another incident that day, police also threatened to arrest Simons.
May 31 2020 Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, a reporter for Los Angeles NPR/PRI affiliate KPCC was hit in the throat with a rubber bullet, on May 31. Ali Velshi and his MSNBC crew were hit with rubber bullets live on air in Minneapolis. CBC News correspondent Susan Ormiston was also hit by rubber bullets during live coverage there. Michael George from the same network also reported his sound engineer being hit by a rubber bullet in the same city. Sarah Belle, an independent journalist, was hit by a rubber bullet in Oakland. Los Angeles Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske reported reporters and camera crews being at the receiving end of tear gas by Minnesota State Patrol, while the same happened to an KABC-TV news crew in Santa Monica. Several Detroit Free Press journalists were pepper sprayed by the city's police, as was KSTP reporter Ryan Raiche along other journalists. Michael Adams from Vice News also reported that happening to him and other journalists present. HuffPost journalist Christopher Mathias was arrested in Brooklyn, as were independent journalist Simon Moya-Smith in Minneapolis, and CNN'sKeith Boykin in New York. A BBC cameraman, Peter Murtaugh, was purposely attacked by police on May 31 outside the White House. Murtaugh filmed a line of police officers charging without warning, whereby a shield-wielding officer tackled Murtaugh to the ground. A fellow BBC journalist stated that the attack had occurred before a curfew was imposed. In Minneapolis, for the second day in a row, police shot at Deutsche Welle journalist Stefan Simons and his crew. June 1 2020 During a live television broadcast for the Seven Network covering protests near the White House on June 1, Australian journalist Amelia Brace and cameraman Tim Myers were assaulted by a charging United States Park Police line as the area was cleared for Trump to visit St. John's Church. Brace was clubbed with a police baton while Myers was hit in the chest by a riot shield and then punched. Brace said she and Myers were also shot by rubber bullets. Brace said at the time, "You heard us yelling there that we were media but they don't care, they are being indiscriminate at the moment." In response, the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia would launch an investigation into the incident. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the actions of the police and said they had "a right to defend themselves."Park Police acting Chief Gregory Monahan announced that two officers involved had been assigned to administrative duties while an investigation took place.
June 2 2020 The Manhattan District Attorney's Office announced that they would be investigating the alleged assault of a Wall Street Journal reporter, that took place on May 31, by members of the New York Police Department.
Photo-op
Once he arrived at St John's Trump held up a Bible that read "God is love", while posing in front of the church's sign.
Ian Millhiser writing for Vox (Jun 1, 2020), reports under the sub heading:
Law enforcement used tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protesters so that Trump could have his photo-op.
The Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop for Washington, DC, condemned President Trump shortly after law enforcement officers used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a peaceful protest — all so that Trump could have a photo op in front of a church.
Sunday night, as large groups of peaceful protesters and much smaller groups of less peaceful demonstrators filled the streets of DC, a fire was set in the basement of St. John’s Church, an Episcopal church located near the White House. The fire was extinguished, and the church reportedly suffered only minor damage.
Nevertheless, Trump decided to visit the church Monday evening and stand outside it while holding a Bible. Shortly before this visit, he delivered a brief address that quickly slipped into authoritarian rhetoric. “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” Trump proclaimed, “then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”
The demographic profile of the George Floyd demos, especially as it develops into an international phenomenon, is increasingly diverse, and with a high proportion of young people getting involved, and many joining a demonstration for the first time.
Every few years, being black becomes a macabre spectacle. What is usually a complicated private identity becomes a public one. A black man is killed by a white police officer in the United States, and suddenly the world is attuned to your race.
Suddenly, the world is trying to help. It’s trying to amplify black voices. It’s posting Martin Luther King and Malcolm X quotes and videos. It’s donating money. It’s circulating videos of black protesters and black media voices.
And it’s being humbled. It’s trying to learn. It’s ashamed that it wasn’t educated enough before about racism, and it is here to take a cue from black people – your book recommendations, your understanding, your absolution. And it’s also here a little bit for the righteous feeling of proximity to you, to your virtuous victimhood, to your moment in history.
I can almost feel the blackness tingle on my skin as it is stripped off, posted, projected and explained over a billion social media posts. It is uncomfortable. It feels unnerving. Is it unkind? It feels like spending your life asking for solidarity from others, then saying, “No, not like that.”
During the Arab spring, one of the favourite lines of commentary was that it was the world’s first “social media revolution”. An image of graffiti painted on the shuttered gates of a travel agency in Cairo went viral. It read: “Twitter, al-Jazeera, Facebook.” It was a neat little story about the virtues of globalisation, technology and the promise of youth: just a few apps and websites had helped to bring down outdated regimes that had not kept up with the times.
The events after George Floyd’s death feel like they’ve also hit a new social media nerve. Today, that graffiti would say: “TikTok, Instagram, Twitter.” But it feels as though there is no promise here. The explosion of support around black lives just means that there is a new racial divide opening up. Black people are on the ground risking their lives and livelihoods, and white people are mostly online, where there is only upside.
Because this is the easy part: no matter how much effort has gone in to making sure you are the right sort of ally, no matter how much money you have donated or supportive feeds you have curated. For white people in America, there is no solidarity that is not received without a heavy dose of scepticism. The frequency of black men and women dying at the hands of white police officers tars a whole nation, not just a police force – one that is so empowered only because of the systemic complacency and normalisation of black murder. Those officers who kill are not all flukes, they’re not all “bad apples”. A black man would not end up under the knee of a white officer for almost nine minutes if a black life mattered.
For white people outside America, the solidarity is simpler. You don’t have to reckon with your role in this. You don’t have to grapple with guilt as black people are handcuffed and pepper-sprayed. If the riots were on your doorstep in the UK, for example – in Hackney or Handsworth or Moss Side – you’d have to balance any conflict about really totally seeing where the protesters are coming from with worrying about your daughter walking home from the bus stop, or the integrity of your windows.
So while the action is happening far away in the US, you won’t find yourself tempted to equivocate because the thought of a black man being murdered on your patch is too uncomfortable and taints you with a sense of complicity. You won’t have to come up with excuses: perhaps he had a gun; perhaps he was drunk; perhaps he was threatening. You won’t find yourself, as your neighbourhood is destabilised, instinctively feeling more empathy with the police, with whom you’ve never had a bad experience; that yes, they are doing a tough job and have to make split-second decisions.
Solidarity in the absence of proximity is a clean hit. America can be viewed as a uniquely violent place, cursed with a uniquely tragic racial history. It’s an even more satisfying perspective when the voices and scenes emanating from the riots are so high-octane. With the heavy curation, editing and production quality of new social media channels, America’s race riots already feel, even as they are still playing out, like a historical showreel montage. The impromptu speeches of African Americans, either pleading for restraint or choking back tears of anger, provide a lyrical and emotional soundtrack to the burning cars and buildings.
The legacy of years of pain, of exhaustion, of retreading the same ground, have morphed into a sort of modern-day blues: a newly forming tradition of oratory that narrates the experience of being black in America. Giving it weight is decades of activism, literature, film and music that have made African American history vivid and intimate – so much so that outsiders feel an ownership and familiarity with the texture of race relations in America in ways they do not about their country’s own. Racism becomes reduced to the US version, to its most dramatic transgressions. A tragedy for Americans, a break for everyone else, who can fret about how singularly awful it is over there.
This mass global support cannot be separated from American cultural hegemony, from its power as exporter of its story. From its glamour. Hip-hop, the popular culture of African American distress – one that came into being to come to terms with death and dispossession – has been merely entertainment for everyone else. When the real thing happens, consumers treat it like just more celluloid, sharing it as an aesthetic and artistic arms-length experience, rather than the visceral expression of anguish that it is. It is not blackness that is being elevated here – an experience that is jagged, diverse and unbranded – it is African Americanism, sold as a consumer product.
This is why the “white ally” support is uncomfortable. It kicks in only when black people conform to an image and live up to a single moment. It raises them at this point, but the rest of the time black voices are not fashionable, their grievances not dramatic or simple enough, or caught on camera. True solidarity, the one that helps in the long term rather than merely buys a sticking plaster for the short term, is in those moments. It is in the daily discomfort of taking risks, of challenging a system that subtly but emphatically excludes black people, when there is no reward for doing so, and of making way and giving up space where it counts – at the table where power sits – and when no one can see you do it.
Parting with money and sharing on social media is the easy bit. And thank you, I guess. But the moments in between are the only ones that really matter.
Talking of hashtags . . .
. . . the protest movement sparked by the death in police custody of George Floyd in Minneapolis spread from the music business to social media on Tuesday as major institutions around the world posted black squares and stopped online activity in solidarity in . . .
. . . "Blackout Tuesday"!
Lanre Bakare and Caroline Davies report on this social media "event" (Tue 2 Jun 2020), under the headline and subheading:
Millions post black squares in solidarity with fight for racial justice after George Floyd death, while others say it’s reductive
The #BlackoutTuesdayhashtag dominated social media, as musicians, actors, major museums, social media companies and ordinary users all took part. But the hashtag was criticised by some for being reductive.
Black squares replaced the usual barrage of colourful posts and paid-for ads on Instagram, but some refused to take part, calling the move, which started with the music industry, a “major label record executive white guilt day”, and called for people to share anti-racist literature and films instead of remaining silent.
Others, including UK rapper Awate, said the move was undemocratic and enforced on artists. He tweeted: “Instead of this performance, we should find a way to unionise and innovate methods of supporting the struggles of our people under attack. Capitalism got us here. Let’s try a collective approach.”
Ariana Grande, one of the most popular Instagram users with 189 million followers, posted a black square with links to Black Lives Matter accounts, with the caption: “Sending strength and if you are protesting today please be safe.”Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who has 185 million followers, simply posted a black square with the hashtags #normalizeequality and #blackouttuesday.
People taking part were reminded to not use the Black Lives Matterhashtag as protesters in the US, and worldwide, are using it to organise future protests and share information.
The artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, who was due to show at the Barbican before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, captioned her post: “Please don’t use the black lives matter hashtag, it’s to help those on the ground, and instead refer to local bail fun or international organisations.”
Many other artists also took part, including Olafur Eliasson, and Tracey Emin, who wrote: “The world is full of so much fear, and those who are in charge are making it worse and worse and worse and worse.”
Museums and galleries including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Queens Museum in New York, postponed their online activities, while, on Monday, Tate posted a Chris Ofili painting in tribute to Stephen Lawrence with the caption: “Nobody should have to live in fear because of the colour of their skin.”
TikTok said it was “standing in solidarity with the Black community and the music industry” by turning off its playlists to mark what it called “the extraordinary recurrence of injustice the Black community is experiencing in the long fight against inequality, racism and violence”.
Internet radio network SiriusXM said it was silencing music channels for three minutes. The first minute “to reflect on the terrible history of racism”, the second was “in observance of this tragic moment in time” and the third “to hope for and demand a better future”.
Hip-hop label Def Jam announced that it was pausing the release, marketing and promotion of some artists’ music, while others were donating a day’s wages to various organisation “on the frontlines of this fight”.
In the UK, TV channels and radio stations changed their programmes to mark “Blackout Tuesday”.
BBC Radio 1Xtra hosted a series of discussions and debates in support of the black community, with song choices reflecting black pride, empowerment and identity. BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 broadcast moments of reflection. Some commercial stations, including Kiss, Magic and Absolute Radio were observing a social media blackout “to stand with the black community to fight against racism and support our presenters, musicians, colleagues and listeners”.
ITV daytime show This Morning briefly went dark, showing a black screen with the words “Black Lives Matter”.
MTV planned to go silent for eight minutes – marking the length of time Floyd’s neck was knelt on. Other channels, including VH1 and Comedy Central, were planning a similar gesture, while 4 Music was pausing its output once an hour throughout the day.
The refusal to represent . . .
Re:LODE Radio recognizes the strategy of "the refusal to represent", and the need to counter the temptation to illustrate, describe and/or to depict, when depiction diminishes the reality, instead of communicating the human significance of the "actuality".
The BLACK SQUARE in modern art . . .
. . . is indeed a strange story, part of the early 20th century modernist emergence of so-called abstract art, as an artistic strategy, and to a purpose.
Black Square (also known as The Black Square or Malevich's Black Square) is an iconic painting by Kazimir Malevich.
The first version was done in 1915. Malevich made four variants of
which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or
early 1930s. Black Square was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10
in 1915. The work is frequently invoked by critics, historians,
curators, and artists as the "zero point of painting", referring to the
painting's historical significance and paraphrasing Malevich in his artistic statement that:
"It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins."
. . . and underneath the cracking paint there's a hidden joke!
In 2015, while viewing the Black Square with a microscope, art historians at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered a message hidden underneath its black paint. It was believed to read as "Battle of negroes in a dark cave."
The reference was linked to an image in an 1897 comic by French writer Alphonse Allais with the caption: “Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit” or “Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night.”
Q. Racism or word play?
First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls In The Snow (1883)
A. Racism & wordplay!
Any apposition of these two images and their captions would be loaded with negative and positive connotations. These works are of their time, where the black and the white are appropriately cast as being casually racist.
Alphonse Allais (1854 – 1905) as a writer and humorist, probably had more in common with 20th
century Dada, or Neo-Dada, and particularly the works of the Fluxus
group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since
Malevich.
Allais wrote the earliest known example of a completely silent musical composition. His Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Great Deaf Man of 1897 consists of twenty-four blank measures. It predates similarly silent but intellectually serious works by John Cage and Erwin Schulhoff by many years.
Allais participated in humorous exhibitions, including those of the Salon des Arts Incohérents of 1883 and 1884, held at the Galerie Vivienne. At these, inspired by his friend Paul Bilhaud's 1882 exhibit of an entirely black painting entitled "Negroes fight in a tunnel" (which he later reproduced with a slightly different title), Allais exhibited arguably some of the earliest examples of monochrome painting: for instance his plain white sheet of Bristol paper Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige(First Communion of Anemic Young Girls In The Snow) (1883), and a similar red work Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea(Aurora Borealis Effect) (1884). While consuming absinthe at café tables, Allais wrote 1600 newspaper and magazine pieces, and co-founded the Club of the Hydropaths (those allergic to water).
Blackout versus Whiteout!
An unfinished manuscript by James Baldwin, Remember This House, a memoir of his personal recollections of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr, was expanded and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award–nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016), and released in 2017. In a 1960 Canadian television interview, broadcaster Nathan Cohen talks to James Baldwin about race relations and the black experience in the United States.
Re:LODE Radio knows that dealing with this "information" is fundamentally significant in addressing the "global emergency". It is NOT just about the ideologies that perpetuate racism, it is about a global history that begins with the emergence of capitalism. This is the same actually existing global capitalismthat is the stumbling block to addressing the present climate emergency.
Re:LODE Radio applauds UK rapper Awate, quoted above in the Blackout Tuesdayreport. He tweeted:
“Instead
of this performance, we should find a way to unionise and innovate
methods of supporting the struggles of our people under attack.
Capitalism got us here. Let’s try a collective approach.”
This video compilation begins with video from the US news, showing armed Black citizens helped escort Ahmaud Arbery protesters through the Georgia neighborhood where he was killed. On May 9 2020, a day after Ahmaud Arbery’s 26th birthday, men and women identified as members of the Black Panther Party gathered with other supporters through the Georgia neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed, after being pursued by father and son George and Travis McMichael. This is followed by an excerpt from a NYT Opinion video that uses a clip from the acclaimed documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of The Revolution, and the stylish announcement in Atlanta of the New Black Panthers Jun 7 2020.
The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a revolutionary socialist political organization founded by Marxist college students Bobby Seale (Chairman) and Huey Newton (Minister of Defense) in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982, with chapters in numerous major cities, and international chapters in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and in Algeria from 1969 to 1972.
At its inception on October 15, 1966, the Black Panther Party's core practice was its open carry armed citizens' patrols, or "copwatching", to monitor the behavior of officers of the Oakland Police Department and challenge police brutality in the city.
In 1969, a variety of community social programs became a core activity. The Party instituted the Free Breakfast for Children Programs to address food injustice, and community health clinics for education and treatment of diseases including sickle cell anemia, tuberculosis, and later HIV/AIDS.
In this same year, 1969, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover described the party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." He developed and supervised an extensive counterintelligence program, "COINTELPRO", of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and many other tactics, designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate and assassinate party members, discredit and criminalize the Party, and drain organizational resources and manpower.
The "COINTELPRO" program was responsible for the assassination of Fred Hampton, and is accused of assassinating other Black Panther members, including Mark Clark.
Government persecution initially contributed to the party's growth, as killings and arrests of Panthers increased its support among African Americans and the broad political left, who both valued the Panthers as a powerful force opposed to de facto segregation and the military draft. The party enrolled the most members and had the most influence in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. There were active chapters in many prisons, at a time when an increasing number of young African-American men were being incarcerated.
Black Panther Party membership reached a peak in 1970, with offices in 68 cities and thousands of members, but it began to decline over the following decade. After its leaders and members were vilified by the mainstream press, public support for the party waned, and the group became more isolated.
Capitalism plus Racism breeds FASCISM
The Black Panthers had style!
Talking about aesthetics and the politics of the left out on the streets of Oakland and over 60 other US cities then, and how Black has always been beautiful, and that NOW we can see, feel and hear that TRUTH, a truth that comes with a new urgency and power.
This video compilation begins with 3 mins of BLACK and the sound track of Lil Donald'sBlack is Beautiful. Hailing from Atlanta, the epicenter of hip-hop, Lil Donald lives up to the hardcore hip-hop style of the ATL.
This is followed by 3 mins 42 secs of BLACK with the sound track from Chronixx and Zambian-Australian rapper Sampa the Great for the “Black is Beautiful” remix.
This video "Just Being White, You Will Win", showing an advertisement for a "whitening pill" can be found on thisRe:LODEarticle linked to the Methods & Purposes article on Eurocentrism titled:
The video shows how Black and White have become embedded in the experience of identity as a global phenomenon that Samir Amin, whose is presented in the Eurocentrism article as the originator of the term, considers symptomatic of what he calls the "Americanisation" of the world, a phenomenon that troubled and concerned him deeply. His ideas on this are set out in his book The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, where he emphasized the extreme form taken by the ideology of contemporary capitalism, and what he called the "liberal virus".
The article addresses this "Americanisation" of identity in places along the LODE Zone Line, with specific reference to India and also Indonesia, as a complex and important post-colonial South East Asian nation-state.
The video "Just Being White, You Will Win" is embedded in an article relating to the LODECargo created at Maribaya, Java, a place in the hills, with a view that overlooks the Javanese city of Bandung. The article is called:
As now, the main global players in this moment were China and India, and, as now, China was in contention with the US over its potential global influence among newly independent post-colonial nation states. And, in the context of the "Americanization" of the world, in what was then an ongoing "cold war", something we would recognize as a propaganda based, "culture war".
At the Colombo Powers conference in April 1954, Indonesia proposed a global conference. A planning group met in Bogor, Indonesia in late December 1954 and formally decided to hold the conference in April 1955. They had a series of goals in mind: to promote goodwill and cooperation among the new nations; to explore in advance their mutual interests; to examine social economic and cultural problems, to focus on problems of special interest to their peoples, such as racism and colonialism, and to enhance the international visibility of Asia and Africa in world affairs.
The conference's stated aims were to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation. The conference was an important step towards the eventual creation of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Both India and the People's Republic of China sought to claim the leadership of the emerging Asian–African nations; Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai was the political personality that most impressed delegates, along with the host of the conference, Indonesian President Sukarno.
The Bandung Conference reflected what the organisers regarded as a reluctance by the Western powers to consult with them on decisions affecting Asia in a setting of Cold War tensions; their concern over tension between the People's Republic of China and the United States; their desire to lay firmer foundations for China's peace relations with themselves and the West; their opposition to colonialism, especially French influence in North Africa and its colonial rule in Algeria; and Indonesia's desire to promote its case in the dispute with the Netherlands over western New Guinea (Irian Barat).
Major debate centred around the question of whether Soviet policies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia should be censured along with Western colonialism. A memo was submitted by 'The Moslem Nations under Soviet Imperialism', accusing the Soviet authorities of massacres and mass deportations in Muslim regions, but it was never debated.
A consensus was reached in which "colonialism in all of its manifestations" was condemned, implicitly censuring the Soviet Union, as well as the West.
China played an important role in the conference and strengthened its relations with other Asian nations. Having survived an assassination attempt on the way to the conference, the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, displayed a moderate and conciliatory attitude that tended to quiet fears of some anticommunist delegates concerning China's intentions.
The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference
An historically significant observer of the conference was the African-American author Richard Wright. His book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956) is based on his impressions and analysis of the postcolonial Asian-African Conference. In addition The Color Curtain bases its analysis of the postcolonial world on Wright's interactions with several modern Indonesian writers and intellectuals.
In
2015, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Asian-African
Conference, Wright’s 1955 observations on Indonesia still occupied a
pivotal place in the conference’s historiography. Significantly, this
was also the case in Indonesia itself. While living as an expatriate in Paris, Wright learned in early January 1955 that the Bandung Conference would be held in April 1955 and immediately wanted to attend. For Wright this was "a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the earth."
As he explains in The Color Curtain: "Idly,
I picked up the evening's newspaper that lay folded near me on the
table and began thumbing through it. Then I was staring at a news item
that baffled me....Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Asia and
Africa are meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss 'racialism and
colonialism' . . ."
This
book was one of the first substantial accounts of the gathering of
Asian and African nations in Bandung, and it continues to be seen as a
seminal account of the conference’s world-historical significance and
its role in the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.
Wright's methodology
Having made arrangements for the Congress for Cultural Freedom to cover his expenses, Wright arrived in Indonesia on April 12 and staying on for more than three weeks.
During
his time in Indonesia, Wright spent the week of April 18–24 reporting
on the conference. He spent the remaining two weeks of his Indonesian
travels interacting with various Indonesian writers and intellectuals,
including Mochtar Lubis, Sutan TakdirAlisjahbana, Asrul Sani, Ajip Rosidi, Achdiat Karta Mihardja, Beb Vuyk, and others.
He also gave a handful of lectures: at an art event held at the home of Jakarta's mayor, for a meeting of Takdir Alisjahbana's study club, for a group of university students, and for PEN Club Indonesia. After his return to Paris, Wright "worked day and night on [The Color Curtain] and finally sent it to his literary agent on 20 June." Meanwhile, in accordance with the funding agreement Wright had made before traveling to Indonesia, the Congress for Cultural Freedom published several articles (which later became chapters in The Color Curtain) in its international magazines, including Encounter in English, Preuves in French, Der Monat in German, and Cuadernos in Spanish. The Color Curtain was published in English in March 1956, a few months after it appeared in French translation, in December 1955, as Bandoeng, 1.500.000.000 d'hommes.
Themes in The Color Curtain Introduced by Gunnar Myrdal, The Color Curtain contains five chapters: "Bandung: Beyond Left and Right", "Race and Religion at Bandung", "Communism at Bandung", "Racial Shame at Bandung", and "The Western World at Bandung".
In "Bandung: Beyond Left and Right",
Wright narrates his pre-conference research into Asia and Indonesia,
describing interviews conducted in Europe with several unnamed Asian,
Indonesian, and Dutch informants. He also documents the reactions of the
Western news media to the upcoming conference. Toward the end of this
opening chapter, Wright arrives in Indonesia and, hosted by Mochtar Lubis, meets Indonesian cultural figures and interviews Indonesia's first prime minister, Sutan Sjahrir, as well as the country's fifth prime minister, Mohammed Natsir.
In "Race and Religion at Bandung",
Wright travels from Jakarta to Bandung to attend the Asian-African
Conference. He recounts the Indonesian President Soekarno’s opening
speech: "Before [Soekarno] had uttered more than a hundred syllables, he
declared: 'This is the first international conference of colored
peoples in the history of mankind!'" Later in the chapter, Wright
recounts speeches by several other delegates, including by Prime
Minister of Ceylon Sir John Kotelawala, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kojo Botsio of the Gold Coast, Prince Wan of Thailand, and Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, among others. Wright states: "As
I sat listening, I began to sense a deep and organic relation here in
Bandung between race and religion, two of the most powerful and
irrational forces in human nature."
In "Communism at Bandung", Wright discusses Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s presence and speech at the conference, examining how Zhou Enlai
worked to balance Communism’s atheism with Indonesia’s dedication to
Islam as well as with the other participant nations’ religious
traditions.
In "In Racial Shame at Bandung", Wright discusses the unofficial presence of the African-American US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell
at the conference and situates US racism in relation to a Cold War
political situation in which racism was becoming an international
liability for the United States. Later in this section, Wright recounts the story of a fellow African-American reporter, Ethel Payne, who was also reporting on the Bandung Conference and was apparently looking for some Sterno to straighten her hair. Wright believes that racial shame prompts her to straighten her hair. He also reports on "an intimate interview with one of the best-known Indonesian novelists", who is quoted as saying: "I feel inferior. I can’t help it. It is hard to be in contact with the white Western world and not feel like that."
In "The Western World at Bandung",
Wright notes that the West’s influence permeates the conference,
observing that English is the meeting’s main language of communication.
But he cautions that the West has only a limited window to appeal to and
influence the postcolonial world. If the West does not use this window,
"it faces an Asian-African attempt at pulling itself out of its
own mire under the guidance of Mr. Chou En-lai and his drastic theories
and practices of endless secular sacrifices."
"I feel inferior. I can’t help it."
This feeling is a globalised phenomenon, the consequence of the violence immanent in capitalism and its methods, of colonialism, neo-clonialism and globalisation.
In 2017, the year of the Re:LODE project, Shea Moisture released a commercial with the message "Break free from hair hate", featuring mostly white women and one ambiguously racial woman. The commercial generated controversy for barely featuring the brand's original customer base, which were black women with diverse hair textures including kinky and curly. The company soon issued an apology, saying that they “really f-ed this one up”, an apology that was still perceived as lacklustre and insincere by those upset by the ordeal.
This video compilation shows the controvertial Shea Moisture Ad, and the reaction, followed by a video piece about what dark skinned people think and feel, and usually would never tell, and a post-controversy follow up Ad for Shea Moisture.
Eurocentrism
has affected the beauty realm globally. The beauty standard has become
westernized and has influenced people throughout the globe. Many have
altered their natural self to reflect this image. Many beauty and
advertising companies have redirected their products to support this
idea of Eurocentrism.
Whiteout! Is this part of the Americanization of the world?
Skin
lightening has become a common practice throughout different areas of
the globe in order to fit the Eurocentric beauty standard. Many women
risk their health in order to use these products and obtain the skin
tone they desire. There
is evidence to suggest that some types of skin-whitening products use
active ingredients, such as mercurous chloride and hydroquinone, which
can be harmful. Hydroquinone is not available without a prescription in
Europe. This is also the case in many other countries where hydroquinone
can only be prescribed by a doctor for certain skin conditions.
A
test of common skin lightening creams available in Nigeria showed that
they caused mutations in bacteria and were possibly carcinogenic. A
study that examined skin whitening creams in Mexico found a high
concentration of mercury in several of them.
Ankita Kumari
is appointed as Miss India International 2017 by Glamanand Supermodel
India. She will represent India at Miss International 2017 in Japan
later this year. She succeeds Rewati Chetri as Miss India International.
In India, the sales of skin lightening creams in 2012 totaled around 258 tons, and in 2013 sales were about US$300 million.
Indian
actor Freida Pinto's lighter skin tone in a new advertisement of
L'Oreal Paris has sparked controversy but the cosmetic brand has denied
that they resorted to photoshop to get the fairer skin tone.
The
Slumdog Millionaire star, who was signed as the face of the brand in
2009, appears fairer compared to her original skin tone in their new ad
for 'Colours Take Flight' make-up. The cosmetic brand claims that the fairness comes because of the lighting effect and not because it was altered on computer. "Freida
Pinto has been a spokesperson for L'Oreal Paris brand since 2009 and we
highly value our relationship with Pinto. This campaign was meant to
highlight Freida Pinto's make-up colours applied on her eyes and lips.
Thus, some powerful studio lights with ring-flash have been used for
this purpose to create a "runway" effect on the picture," the brand said
in a statement issued here. "There has been no whitening retouching process whatsoever on Freida Pinto's face," the statement further read.
In
2011, her L’Oréal contract came under scrutiny when it was suggested
that the company had lightened her skin in a campaign. Had they
Photoshopped the image? L’Oréal denies altering her skin tone but she
says: “I’m sure they did, because that’s not the colour of my skin you
saw in a few of the campaigns.”
Did she complain? “I said to my
agent after the first controversy that I would like to see the pictures
before, and I would like to be able to question them on colour
correction.” She also insisted on having a clause written into her
contract. “All the brands, including L’Oréal, have a skin-lightening
range that they sell in India and I made them put it in my contract that
I would not touch that with a barge pole. If you don’t put it in your
contract before you sign on, they can come and you will be compelled to
do it.” After she protested about the skin-lightening, she says, it
never happened again. (L’Oréal has been approached for a comment.)
As
of 2013, the global market for skin lighteners was projected to reach
$19.8 billion by 2018 based on sales growth primarily in Africa,
Indian-Asia, and the Middle East.
With
the rise of these products, research has been done to study the long
term damage. Some complications experienced are exogenous ochronosis,
impaired wound healing and wound dehiscence, the fish odor syndrome,
nephropathy, steroid addiction syndrome, predisposition to infections, a
broad spectrum of cutaneous and endocrinologic complications of
corticosteroids, and suppression of hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal axis.
Despite all these health effects it can cause, many will not give up
their products.
Whitening products have become increasingly popular in many societies across Asia, and so has plastic surgery.
It's
an accepted truism that all beauty pageant contestants have a certain
similar "look," but one Japanese blog has touched off a firestorm of
speculation that South Korea's plastic surgery craze may have taken that
cliché too far.
Richard Wright's concerns regarding race and religion remain. Since the publication of his work The Color Curtain the expanding and globalised information environment, cast in the mold of a consumer society, has amplified colonial and neo-colonial types and stereotypes. Memes and images are mobilised by advertising to shape the individual process of self-identification. While America exports "Racial Shame" world-wide, at home in the US, power which is "white" continues to brutalize African Americans.
. . . civil rights leaders have criticised Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to take no action against a Facebook post from Donald Trump appearing to threaten to start shooting “looters”, after a Monday night meeting with the company’s executives ended in acrimony.
Alex Hern and Jim Waterson report for the Guardian (Tue 2 Jun 2020) under the headline and subheading:
Activists say Facebook boss’s decision to leave ‘shooting threat’ up sets dangerous precedent
“We are disappointed and stunned by Mark’s incomprehensible explanations for allowing the Trump posts to remain up,”Vanita Gupta, Sherrilyn Ifill and Rashad Robison said in a statement.
“He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters.
“Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook.”
The three activist leaders – the heads of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Color of Change – met Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, on Monday night. They discussed Trump’s Thursday night post, which urged the military to intervene in Minneapolis with the words “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.
The message, originally sent by Trump as a tweet before being cross-posted to Facebook, was restricted on Twitter after the platform decided it broke rules about glorifying violence. On Facebook, Zuckerberg personally intervened to leave the message up, arguing that the company has a policy to allow warnings of the use of force by state actors.
Zuckerberg’s decision led to a “virtual walkout” of Facebook staff on Monday, with hundreds of employees downing tools in protest. A number of Facebook employees publicly expressed their dissent on rival social networks such as Twitter, and were quickly supported by senior managers at the company.
At least one employee has quit over the decision. Timothy J Aveni, a software engineer who worked on misinformation, said on Facebook that he had resigned on Monday. “Mark told us that he would draw the line at speech that calls for violence,” Aveni wrote. “He showed us on Friday that was a lie ... Facebook, complicit in the propagation of weaponized hatred, is on the wrong side of history.”
A Facebook spokesperson told the Guardian: “We recognise the pain many of our people are feeling right now, especially our black community. We encourage employees to speak openly when they disagree with leadership.”
The company would not require walkout participants to take paid time off, Facebook said.
On Monday night, fresh detail about those internal discussions emerged, after the Verge obtained recordings of Zuckerberg speaking at an internal meeting on Friday night.
“How to handle this post from the president has been very tough,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s been something that I’ve been struggling with basically all day, ever since I woke up … This has been personally pretty wrenching for me.
“My first reaction [to Trump’s post] was just disgust,” he added. “This is not how I think we want our leaders to show up during this time. This is a moment that calls for unity and calmness and empathy for people who are struggling.”
Zuckerberg also told employees Facebook would review the policies that allowed Trump’s post to stay up. “There is a real question coming out of this, which is whether we want to evolve our policy around the discussion of state use of force. Over the coming days, as the National Guard is now deployed, probably the largest one that I would worry about would be excessive use of police or military force. I think there’s a good argument that there should be more bounds around the discussion around that.” The Facebook walkout was followed by sanctioned events at other technology companies. A number of YouTube executives, including the company’s chief business officer and its global head of music, told their teams they could take Tuesday off to participate in the protests, according to the Information.
On Tuesday morning, Spotify followed suit, encouraging employees to join the day of action “by taking time to reflect and educate themselves”.
The decision on whether to allow Trump’s posts to remain on Facebook could be one of the final major calls made solely by Zuckerberg. The company recently confirmed the creation of an independent Oversight Board of academics, politicians and former journalists from around the world who will act as as a “supreme court” deciding what content should be allowed on Facebook, while providing guidance on policy.
Members of the Oversight Board met on Tuesday afternoon and discussed the issue but the organisation is reluctant to start wading in to debates before it is up-and-running. It is due to be fully functional by the autumn - towards the end of the current US presidential election campaign.
Members declined to give any detail what was discussed on Tuesday, although a spokesperson for the Oversight Board suggested Trump’s posts are the sort of issue they will rule on in the future: “There are many significant issues relating to online content that we recognise people want the board to consider. We’re working hard to set the board up to begin operating later this year so it can start considering cases referred by users and Facebook. We will make decisions without regard to Facebook’s economic, political or reputational interests, in a fair, transparent and politically neutral manner.”
Twitter’s decision to restrict the Trump tweet – which was followed by a Trump executive order aimed at reducing the platform’s protections against civil claims – won the backing of the European commission.
The EU executive branch’s vice-president, Věra Jourová, said in her response to the dispute that politicians should answer “criticism with facts, not with threats and attacks”.
“I support Twitter in their efforts to develop and implement a transparent, clear and consistent moderation policy,”Jourová said. “This is not about censorship. This is about flagging verifiably false or misleading information that may cause public harm, linking to reliable information, or flagging content violating their policies.”
Additional reporting by Daniel Boffey in Brussels.
In 2015, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Asian-African Conference, Wright’s 1955 observations on Indonesia still occupied a pivotal place in the conference’s historiography. Significantly, this was also the case in Indonesia itself. While living as an expatriate in Paris, Wright learned in early January 1955 that the Bandung Conference would be held in April 1955 and immediately wanted to attend. For Wright this was "a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the earth."
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