History – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Tue, 21 Jan 2025 05:45:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 Death shaded the Life of this Holocaust historian. The cancer Memoir he began in Hospital was a final ‘Act of Love’ https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/holocaust-historian-hospital.html Tue, 21 Jan 2025 05:08:41 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222631 By Tess Scholfield-Peters, University of Technology Sydney

(The Conversation) – Mark Raphael Baker began writing his final book, A Season of Death, from his hospital bed, in the wake of his terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis. His second wife, Michelle, would later observe: “More than a comfort or distraction, in him it was a need.” The renowned Jewish Australian author and academic died a year later, after 13 months of illness, aged 64.

In 2022, after nearly four months of misdiagnoses and inaction from doctors – despite persistent complaints of unbearable abdominal pain – an MRI had finally revealed the grave news. Cancer would claim his life, as it had his first wife Kerryn in 2016 (aged 55), and his brother Johnny in 2017 (aged 62).

He wrote:

I kept thinking, this can’t be happening. I was invulnerable. The odds of another person in one family being hit by terminal cancer seemed impossible.

How does one write the essence of a life once it has come to an end? Baker was no stranger to this question.


Review: A Season of Death – Mark Raphael Baker (Melbourne University Press)


His first book, The Fiftieth Gate: a journey through memory (1997), is an exploration of his parents’ Holocaust survival, told through the eyes of a son grappling with his connection to their trauma. When it was reissued for its 20-year anniversary in 2017, it had sold over 70,000 copies. His second book, Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love (2017), was written after his first wife, Kerryn, lost her ten-month battle with stomach cancer.

Death shaded much of Baker’s life. Writing was his salve, a window to understanding and hope.

Baker was director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University. Religion, which was central to his family and intellectual life, is woven throughout the memoir.

Liminal grief

A Season of Death is short, at 253 pages. It is structured in five parts: Regeneration, Remarriage, Re-Creation, Retribution and Revelation. The repeated prefix “re” (meaning again, or back) speaks to the cyclical nature of life as Baker lived it.

The book begins with Kerryn’s cancer diagnosis, seven years prior to his own. Baker writes, “That experience followed me; every breath I took felt like Kerryn’s last breath.” He continues:

Death and life became inextricably bound; I was unsure which world I belonged to, and in my dreams at night I danced with her spirit, sang the songs of our courtship, reanimated her in my mind and eventually rushed to write a version of our life story, which I completed in thirty days.

Baker writes beautifully and eloquently about the liminality of existing in grief after such a profound death. Less than two years after Kerryn’s passing, Baker’s brother, Johnny, also died of cancer. This death was particularly difficult for Baker’s parents, who both survived the Holocaust.

For many survivors of genocide – who’ve lost their family, their sense of place, everything – children become the centre of their universe. This was certainly the case for Baker’s parents:

What to say to these people whose entire existence revolved vicariously around the successes of their two sons? When my mother was asked about her idea of revenge for what she had suffered, her answer came back without hesitation, “You, my children, are my revenge.”

‘Something was seriously wrong’

The book is written in a fragmented style, traversing past and present, shimmering between early childhood memories and life as an adult.

We are with Baker through his courting of Michelle Lesh, who he had first known as the stepdaughter of his close friend, Raimond Gaita. Their relationship transformed and deepened through their shared intellectual and political interests, particularly concerning Israel-Palestine, and centred around travel and their respective careers. They were married in 2018 and in 2021 welcomed a daughter, Melila.


“Fifty Gates,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

We are with him as he reflects on his parents’ survival of Holocaust Europe and the trauma they experienced. (Baker’s father died in 2020, three years after his brother Johnny. Baker’s mother, Genia, was 88 when he died in 2023.)

And we are with him in the doctor’s office as his worst fear becomes reality.

The best word for my reaction was one of bewilderment. Something was seriously wrong. We’d talked about pancreatitis but that was different from pancreatic cancer. I was numb. It didn’t feel possible, but I immediately pictured my death. The only question in my mind was if I would last as long as Kerryn and Johnny.

For anyone touched by cancer, this feeling of bewilderment is familiar. Few diseases have a more profound physical and psychological impact. Baker observes, often with searing clarity, his own corporeal degeneration and his thoughts as he confronts his own mortality.

“While no number of deaths could make me indifferent to what awaits me, watching a sequence of deaths in the family has made me more prepared,” he writes.

I feel as though I have been trained or mentored in the art of dying. My fear is less the prospect of my ultimate demise than the pain I will endure reaching the end.

What is surprising is Baker’s persistent humour and palpable energy, despite the pain and despite the closeness of his ultimate demise.

An act of love

A Season of Death is not an easy read. It is an intimate, at times harrowing portrait of grief and of death. What Baker has written is a final observation of his life, offering a rare perspective on death – and life as it comes to an end.

To persevere with a writing project in the midst of such bodily trauma, to write through and towards death for his children, for his family and descendants, is an incredibly courageous feat.

“Over the course of his illness Mark wrote almost every day, despite the ravages and debilitating side effects of his treatments, which often left him weary in body and mind,” write Lesh and his friend Raimond Gaita, in the book’s postscript.

Baker passed away before the book was published, and Lesh and Gaita brought it to publication in his absence. In their postscript, they observe:

Writing the memoir was an act of love that took possession of him. It gave him comfort and energy. He sacrificed sleep, physical and mental rest, and refrained from engaging with people and aspects of the world to which he had previously given so much of himself.

What lingers with the reader is a sense of the fragility and miracle of being alive for the very short time we each have. We are all going to die, and whether or not this fact is a preoccupation, it is moving to witness, through writing, an at once introspective and philosophical mind work through his imminent death.

There is no linear story, or discrete chapters. There is no Before or After. There is only the projection of what was and what might have been: memory – fickle, pliant, circular, fragmentary.The Conversation

Tess Scholfield-Peters, Casual Academic, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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What I Learned after the End of History https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/learned-after-history.html Fri, 17 Jan 2025 05:06:50 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=222553 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” So declared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ah, if only it had proved to be so.

Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history’s actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it’s downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing).

Let’s consider a specific, very recent segment of the past. I’m thinking of the period stretching from my birth year of 1947 to this very moment. An admission: I, too, once believed that the unfolding events during those long decades I was living through told a discernible story. Although not without its zigs and zags, so I was convinced once upon a time, that story had both direction and purpose. It pointed toward an ultimate destination — so politicians, pundits, and prophets like Dr. King assured us. In fact, embracing the essentials of that story was then considered nothing less than a prerequisite for situating yourself in the ongoing stream of history. It offered something to grab hold of.

Sadly enough, all of this turned out to be bunk.

That became abundantly clear in the years after 1989 when the Soviet Union began to collapse and the U.S. was left alone as a great power on Planet Earth. The decades since then have carried a variety of labels. The post-Cold War order came and went, succeeded by the post-9/11 era, and then the Global War on Terror which, even today, in largely unattended places like Africa, drags on in anonymity.

In those precincts where opinions are manufactured and marketed, an overarching theme informed each of those labels: the United States was, by definition, the sun around which all else orbited. In what was known as an age of unipolarity or, more modestly, the unipolar moment, we Americans presided as the sole superpower and indispensable nation of Planet Earth, exercising full-spectrum dominance. In the pithy formulation of columnist Max Boot, the United States had become the planet’s “Big Enchilada.” The future was ours to mold, shape, and direct. Some influential thinkers insisted — may even have believed — that History itself had actually “ended.”

Alas, events exposed that glorious moment as fleeting, if not altogether illusory. For several reasons — Washington’s propensity for needless war certainly offers a place to start — things did not pan out as expected. Assurances of peace, prosperity, and victory over the foe (whoever the foe it was at that moment) turned out to be false. By 2016, that fact had registered on Americans in sufficient numbers for them to elect as “leader of the Free World” someone hitherto chiefly known as a TV host and real estate developer of dubious credentials.

The seemingly impossible had occurred: The American people (or at least the Electoral College) had delivered Donald Trump to the pinnacle of American politics.

It was as if a clown had taken possession of the White House.

Shocked and appalled, millions of citizens found this turn of events hard to believe and impossible to accept. President Trump promptly proceeded to fulfill their worst expectations. By almost any of the measures habitually employed to evaluate political leadership, he flopped as a commander-in-chief. To my mind, he was an embarrassment.

Yet, however inexplicably, Trump remained to many Americans — growing numbers, it would turn out — a source of hope and inspiration. If given sufficient time, he would redeem the nation. History had summoned him to do so, so his followers believed, fervently and adamantly.

In 2020, the anti-Trump Establishment did manage to scratch out one final chance to show that it was not entirely bankrupt. Yet sending to the White House an elderly white male who embodied the politics of the Old School merely postponed Trump’s Second Coming.

No doubt Joe Biden was seasoned and well-intentioned, but he proved to possess little or nothing of Trump’s mystifying appeal. And when he stumbled, the remnant of the Establishment quickly and brutally abandoned him.

So, four years on, Americans have reversed course. They have decided to give Trump — now elevated to the status of folk hero in the eyes of many — another chance.

What does this head-scratching turn of events signify? Could History be trying to tell us something?

The End of the End of History

Allow me to suggest that those who counted History out did so prematurely. It’s time to consider the possibility that all too many of the very smart, very earnest, and very well-compensated people who take it upon themselves to interpret the signs of our times have been radically misinformed. Simply put: they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Viewed in retrospect, perhaps the collapse of communism did not signify the turning point of cosmic significance so many of them then imagined. Add to that another possibility: Perhaps liberal democratic consumer capitalism (also known as the American Way of Life) does not, in fact, define the ultimate destination of humankind.

It just might be that History is once again on the move — or simply that it never really “ended” in the first place. And as usual, it appears to have tricks up its sleeve, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House arguably one of them.

More than a few of my fellow citizens see his election as a cause for ultimate despair — and I get that. But to saddle Trump with responsibility for the predicament in which our nation now finds itself vastly overstates his historical significance.

Let’s start with this: Despite his extraordinary aptitude for self-promotion, Trump has shown little ability to anticipate, shape, or even forestall events. Yes, he is distinctly a blowhard, who makes grandiose promises that rarely pan out. (If you want documentation, take your choice among Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump Taj Mahal, and even Trump: the Game.) Barring a conversion akin to the Apostle Paul’s on his journey to Damascus, we can expect more of the same from his second term as president.

Yet the yawning gap between his over-the-top MAGA rhetoric and what he’s really delivered should be instructive. It trains a spotlight on what the “end of history” has actually yielded: lofty unfulfilled promises that have given way to unexpected and often distinctly undesired consequences.

That adverse judgment hardly applies to Trump alone. In reality, it applies to every president since George H.W. Bush unveiled his “new world order” back in 1991, with his son George W. Bush’s infamous 2003 “Mission Accomplished” claim serving as its exclamation point.

Since then, at the national level, American politics, especially presidential politics, has become a scam. What happens in Washington, whether in the White House or on Capitol Hill, no more reflects the hopes of the Founders of the American republic than Black Friday and Cyber Monday express “the reason for the Season.”

In that sense, while Trump’s return to the White House may not be worth celebrating, it is entirely appropriate. It may well be History’s way of saying: “Hey, you! Wake up! Pay attention!”

The Big Enchilada No More

In 1962, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” Although a bit snarky, his assessment was apt.

Today, one can easily imagine some senior Chinese or Indian (or even British) diplomat offering a similar judgment about the United States. America’s imperial pretensions have run aground. Yet the loudest and most influential establishment voices — Donald Trump notably excepted — continue to insist otherwise. With apparent sincerity, President Biden all too typically clung to the notion that the United States does indeed remain the planet’s “indispensable nation.”

Events say otherwise. Consider the arena of war. Once upon a time, professing a commitment to peace, the United States sought to avoid war. When armed conflict became unavoidable, America sought to win, quickly and neatly. Today, in contrast, this country seemingly adheres to an informal doctrine of “bomb-and-bankroll.” Since three days after the 9/11 attacks (with but a single negative vote), when Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, war has become a fixture of presidential politics, with a compliant Congress issuing the checks. As for the Constitution, when it comes to war powers, it has become a dead letter.

In recent years, U.S. military casualties have been blessedly few, but outcomes have been ambiguous at best and abysmal — think Afghanistan — at worst. If the United States has played an indispensable role in these years, it’s been in underwriting disaster, spending billions of dollars on catastrophic wars that were, from the moment they were launched, of distinctly questionable relevance to this country’s wellbeing.

In his inconsistent, erratic, and bloviating way, Donald Trump — almost alone among figures on the national stage — has appeared to find this objectionable and has proposed a radical course change. Under his leadership, he insists, the Big Enchilada will rise to new heights of glory.

To be clear, the likelihood of the incoming administration making good on the myriad promises contained within its MAGA agenda is close to zero. When it actually comes to setting basic U.S. policy on a more sensible course, Trump is manifestly clueless. Buying Greenland, taking the Panama Canal, or even making Canada our 51st state will not restore our ailing Republic to health. As for the team of lackeys Trump is assembling to assist him in governing, let us simply note that there is not a single figure of Acheson’s stature among them.

Still, here we may find reason for at least a glimmer of hope. For far too long — all my life, in fact — Americans have looked to the White House for salvation. Those expectations have met with repeated, seemingly endless disappointment.

Vowing to Make America Great Again, Donald Trump has, in his own strange fashion, vaulted those hopes to a new level. That he, too, will disappoint his followers, no less the rest of us, is, of course, foreordained. Yet his failure might — just might — bring Americans to rethink and renew their democracy.

Listen: History is signaling to us. Whether we can successfully interpret those signals remains to be seen. In the meantime, brace yourself for what promises to be a distinctly bumpy ride.

Tomdispatch.com

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Does Britain owe Reparations to the Palestinians for Engineering their loss of their Country? https://www.juancole.com/2024/10/reparations-palestinians-engineering.html Sun, 27 Oct 2024 04:15:52 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=221204 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ta-Nehisi Coates made the argument for US reparations for slavery in 2014 in The Atlantic. In that essay, he made an analogy with German reparations to Israel. In his new book, The Message, Coates expresses regret for the unexamined Zionist biases in that analogy, which obscured the dispossession of the Palestinian people and their consignment to a form of Jim Crow — something he realized forcefully on a recent trip to Israel and Palestine.

Caribbean and African leaders of the British Commonwealth, CNN reports, are insistently raising the issue of British reparations for slavery and for Shanghaiing colonial subjects, shipping Indians off to Guyana and Fiji on false pretenses. British ships transported some 3 million Africans to the New World between 1640 and 1807, 400,000 of whom died in transit. The unpaid labor of these enslaved people and their descendants added significantly to Britain’s bottom line. Jamaica, one of London’s most profitable colonies because of the sugarcane trade (produced by slave plantations), figures Britain owes it $9.5 trillion.

Once we see that the Palestinians are a deeply injured party, it becomes clear that they are owed reparations. After World War I, the victors divvied up the defeated empires at Versailles and the satellite conference of San Remo. The League of Nations awarded the great powers “mandates,” giving them charge of territories on the grounds that they would administer them and also prepare them for independent statehood. This was a new form of colonialism, since the freebooters of the 18th century conquered countries like India purely for profit, with no obligation to ready it for independence. If it had been up to Winston Churchill, Britain would still be ruling India and taking money out of it to pay for his brandy and cigars.

As I point out in my new book, Gaza Yet Stands, the British Mandate of Palestine was peculiar compared to all the rest. The British Mandate of Iraq eventuated in an independent Iraq in 1932. Formerly German Tanganyika was a British Mandate and became independent in 1961. It joined with Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964. Syria, a French Mandate, became independent in 1946. The French Mandate of Togo became independent in 1961.

The British Mandate of Palestine, however, did not eventuate in an independent Palestine. The other League of Nations members, including France and Italy, remonstrated with Britain that it had to look after the native Palestinians, despite the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British (who did not then rule Palestine) promised a “Jewish national home” there that, they pledged, would in no way disturb the locals.

Lord Curzon wrote in 1920, “As regards the Palestine Mandate, this Mandate also has passed through several revises. When it was first shown to the French Government it at once excited their vehement criticisms on the ground of its almost exclusively Zionist complexion and of the manner in which the interests and rights of the Arab majority (amounting to about nine-tenths of the population) were ignored. The Italian Government expressed similar apprehensions. It was felt that this would constitute a very serious, and possibly a fatal, objection when the Mandate came ultimately before the Council of the League. The Mandate, therefore, was largely rewritten, and finally received their assent.”


“Palestine Reparations,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024.

The League of Nations therefore demanded that the British Mandate of Palestine attend to the “interests and rights” of the 90% of its residents, who were native Palestinians.

When Palestinians revolted in 1936-1939 against the British policy of settling European Jews on their land, the British army brutally crushed them, with the help of Jewish militias like the Haganah. Embarrassed, the British commissioned the MacDonald White Paper of 1939, which pledged an independent Palestinian state by 1949, in which immigrant Jews would form a minority.

The British abruptly departed Palestine in 1948 and they failed to prevent the half-million Jews they had brought to Palestine from expelling 750,000 or so of the 1.3 million Palestinians from their homes and usurping all their property, leaving them stateless, homeless and penniless. Some 250,000 of those refugees were crowded into Gaza, where their descendants are now being genocided by the Netanyahu government.

The value of the land seized from the Palestinians at that time is estimated at over half a billion dollars in 1998 dollars.

But that $500,000,000 worth of property in 1948 is worth way more today.

The total value of Israeli real estate today is roughly $2.5 trillion, and in 1920 when the British accepted the charge of administering the Mandate of Palestine and turning it into and independent country for its citizens, the Palestinians owned virtually all the land in it.

I’d say that $2.5 trillion is a good place to start for British reparations to the Palestinians. That is roughly a year’s worth of the UK GDP. But I’m sure the Palestinians would accept an installment plan.

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Nobel Prize-Winning Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki see themselves in the Palestinians of Gaza https://www.juancole.com/2024/10/hiroshima-themselves-palestinians.html Tue, 15 Oct 2024 05:44:14 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=221010 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The decision of the Truman administration to use nuclear weapons on the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 is one of the great stains on the United States. There are other blots on our escutcheon, including the perfidious treatment of Native Americans and the enslavement of millions of Africans. But to be the only nation ever to have deployed nuclear weapons, and to be the only one to have bombed densely inhabited cities with them, makes the crime pointed and dramatic rather than unfolding over decades.

The survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of whom there are still 106,825, were known as Hibakusha, literally “bombing victims.” They were often stigmatized by other Japanese and sometimes had complicated love lives. Some had disfiguring burns on their bodies or faces. They were thought to be at special risk of dying young from the effects of the nuclear weapons, and so had trouble finding mates. Some Hibakusha hid their past. Some of those willing to come out of the closet formed organizations to lobby for the banning of nuclear weapons.

Friday evening it was announced that Nihon Hidankyo, which Asahi Shimbun glosses as “the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations,” has won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, hung over the victory. According to the Irish Times’s David McNeill in Tokyo, when Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, watched the ceremony in Oslo on television and discovered that his organization had won, he said tearfully, “It can’t be real, I felt so sure it would be the people of Gaza.”

Mr. Mimaki’s certainty that the “people of Gaza” would compete successfully for the Nobel with the survivors of a nuclear attack speaks volumes about how the genocide is viewed outside the North Atlantic world. And, to be sure, the sheer tonnage of bombs dropped on Gaza since October 2023 has exceeded that of the two atomic bombs deployed in 1945.


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Mimaki accepted the award on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo and gave an acceptance speech in which he pointed out that “nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists. For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.” At the press conference, Mr Mimaki went on to compare the plight of Gazan children to that of Japanese children at the end of the Second World War.

He observed, “In Gaza, bleeding children are being held (by their parents). It’s like in Japan 80 years ago.”

Mimaki added, “When it comes to Israel and the Middle East, regardless of the specifics, the underlying issue is conflict and the act of doing things that people abhor. Firstly, it is about killing people. This idea of killing others before being killed oneself —- that is essentially what war is. Also, war involves destroying homes, demolishing buildings, and taking down bridges. These actions constitute war. Japan, too, fought a major war 80 years ago, and it is said that 3 million people lost their lives. Since then, we have upheld our constitution, aiming for a world without war. I hope Japan can become a leader in promoting peace globally.” (- ChatGPT translation of the computer-generated YouTube transcript.)

He also said, “nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists . . . For example, if Russia uses them against Ukraine, Israel against Gaza, it won’t end there. Politicians should know these things.”

The situation in Gaza is therefore very much on Mr. Mimaki’s mind, and on the minds of other Japanese pacifists. They see civilian cities reduced to rubble from the sky and bleeding children in the arms of their parents, and it takes them right back to August 6, 1945.


“Nuking Gaza,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

About 140,000 people were incinerated when the U.S. deployed an atomic bomb against Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and three days later, some 74,000 more were turned into carbon dust in Nagasaki.

Gilad Cohen, Israel’s ambassador to Japan, criticized Mimaki’s heartfelt sentiments, saying on “X,” that Miyaki’s comparison “is outrageous and baseless.” He added, “Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization committing a double war crime: targeting Israeli civilians, including women and children, while using its own people as human shields.” He accused Miyaki of dishonoring the victims of October 7.

Cohen, however, is the one who misunderstands the similarities here. The Truman administration viewed Imperial Japan and generals such as Hideki Tojo (who also served as prime minister during much of the war) as murderous terrorists who had launched a sneak attack that killed 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor, including some 68 civilians.

As for Hamas being responsible for all the Palestinian deaths in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military (!), that is a similar argument to the one made by Truman regarding Japan. It was necessary to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, because the US could lose as many as a quarter of a million troops in an invasion of Japan, since the Japanese would unitedly defend the island. In essence, all the Japanese formed a human shield against any ground incursion. Therefore, it was the refusal to surrender of the former admiral, Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, that made the US kill those 214,000 civilians.

The devil made me do it, is the refrain of all genocidaires.

Mr. Mimaki will have none of it. He condemns belligerent actions whoever takes them. But most importantly, he knows a crime against humanity when he sees one.

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The New Climate Colonialism https://www.juancole.com/2024/10/the-climate-colonialism.html Fri, 11 Oct 2024 04:02:57 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=220925 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Considered Angola’s crown jewel by many, Lobito is a colorful port city on the country’s scenic Atlantic coast where a nearly five-kilometer strip of land creates a natural harbor. Its white sand beaches, vibrant blue waters, and mild tropical climate have made Lobito a tourist destination in recent years. Yet under its shiny new facade is a history fraught with colonial violence and exploitation.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to Angola in the late sixteenth century. For nearly four centuries, they didn’t relent until a bloody, 27-year civil war with anticolonial guerillas (aided by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) and bolstered by a leftist coup in distant Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, overthrew that colonial regime in 1974.

Lobito’s port was the economic heart of Portugal’s reign in Angola, along with the meandering 1,866-kilometer Benguela Railway, which first became operational in the early 1900s. For much of the twentieth century, Lobito was the hub for exporting to Europe agricultural goods and metals mined in Africa’s Copperbelt. Today, the Copperbelt remains a resource-rich region encompassing much of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Zambia.

Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn that, half a century after Portugal’s colonial control of Angola ended, neocolonialism is now sinking its hooks into Lobito. Its port and the Benguela Railway, which travels along what’s known as the Lobito Corridor, have become a key nucleus of China’s and the Western world’s efforts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in our hot new world. If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable. The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals will be required. The International Energy Forum estimates that to meet the global goals of radically reducing carbon emissions, we’ll also need between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050.

It should come as no surprise that most of the minerals from copper to cobalt needed for that transition’s machinery (including electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels) are located in Latin America and Africa. Worse yet, more than half (54%) of the critical minerals needed are on or near Indigenous lands, which means the most vulnerable populations in the world are at the most significant risk of being impacted in a deeply negative fashion by future mining and related operations.

When you want to understand what the future holds for a country in the “developing” world, as economists still like to call such regions, look no further than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “With growing demand, proceeds from critical minerals are poised to rise significantly over the next two decades,” reports the IMF. “Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these accumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.”

Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. It’s estimated that the Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves. In fact, the demand for cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries, is rapidly increasing because of its use in everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. As for copper, Africa has two of the world’s top producers, with Zambia accounting for 70% of the continent’s output. “This transition,” adds the IMF, “if managed properly, has the potential to transform the region.” And, of course, it won’t be pretty.

While such critical minerals might be mined in rural areas of the Congo and Zambia, they must reach the international marketplace to become profitable, which makes Angola and the Lobito Corridor key to Africa’s booming mining industry.

In 2024, China committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, for example, China controls 70% of the mining sector.

Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.

Zambia’s Copper Colonialism

In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn’t much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.

“We meet at a historic moment,” President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the “biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever” and affirmed the West’s interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. “America,” he added, “is all in on Africa… We’re all in with you and Angola.”

Both Africa and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America’s regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position — and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.

In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country’s total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia’s Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it’s much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.

“Friends tell you that there’s a danger as they’re coming out of shift,” a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. “You’ll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time… The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren’t stable… In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain… didn’t put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm.”

An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there’s a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.

AI Mining for AI Energy

The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia’s dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold’s nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world’s green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).

It is in KoBold’s interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.

“Anyone who’s in the renewable space in the western world… is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles,” Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. “That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito.”

Makayi wasn’t beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won’t end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold’s CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist,” he’s been known to quip.

In July 2024, House rang his company’s investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually — or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold’s investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.

“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”

Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but — consider it a guarantee — its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.

The Poisoned River

Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) is today the largest ore producer in Zambia, ripping out a combined two million tons of copper a year. It’s one of the nation’s largest employers, with a brutally long record of worker and environmental abuses. KCM runs Zambia’s largest open-pit mine, which stretches for seven miles. In 2019, the British-based Vedanta Resources acquired an 80% stake in KCM by covering $250 million of that company’s debt. Vedanta has deep pockets and is run by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, affectionately known in the mining world as “the Metal King.”

One thing should be taken for granted: You don’t become the Metal King without leaving entrails of toxic waste on your coattails. In India, Agarwal’s alumina mines have polluted the lands of the Indigenous Kondh tribes in Orissa Province. In Zambia, his copper mines have wrecked farmlands and waterways that once supplied fish and drinking water to thousands of villagers.

The Kafue River runs for more than 1,500 kilometers, making it Zambia’s longest river and now probably its most polluted as well. Going north to south, its waters flow through the Copperbelt, carrying with them cadmium, lead, and mercury from KCM’s mine. In 2019, thousands of Zambian villagers sued Vedanta, claiming its subsidiary KCM had poisoned the Kafue River and caused insurmountable damage to their lands.

The British Supreme Court then found Vedanta liable, and the company was forced to pay an undisclosed settlement, likely in the millions of dollars. Such a landmark victory for those Zambian villagers couldn’t have happened without the work of Chilekwa Mumba, who organized communities and convinced an international law firm to take up the case. Mumba grew up in the Chingola region of Zambia, where his father worked in the mines.

“[T]here was some environmental degradation going on as a result of the mining activities. As we found, there were times when the acid levels of water was so high,” explained Mumba, the 2023 African recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “So there were very specific complaints about stomach issues from children. Children just really wander around the villages and if they are thirsty, they don’t think about what’s happening, they’ll just get a cup and take their drink of water from the river. That’s how they live. So they’ll usually get diseases. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the impact was there.”

Sadly enough, though, despite that important legal victory, little has changed in Zambia, where environmental regulations remain weak and nearly impossible to enforce, which leaves mining companies like KCM to regulate themselves. A 2024 Zambian legislative bill seeks to create a regulatory body to oversee mining operations, but the industry has pushed back, making it unclear if it will ever be signed into law. Even if the law does pass, it may have little real-world impact on mining practices there.

The warming climate, at least to the billionaire mine owners and their Western accomplices, will remain an afterthought, as well as a justification to exploit more of Africa’s critical minerals. Consider it a new type of colonialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run, too many tech gadgets to manufacture, and too much money to be made.

Tomdispatch.com

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Israel’s Destruction of Gaza Heritage Sites aims to erase — and replace — Palestine’s History https://www.juancole.com/2024/10/destruction-heritage-palestines.html Thu, 10 Oct 2024 04:02:52 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=220913 By Pilar Montero Vilar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid | –

(The Conversation) – In 2016, British photographer James Morris published Time and Remains of Palestine. The images in this book bear witness to an absence of architectural monuments, and to the invisible moments of history buried in the rubble and wastelands of Palestine.

Situated at the crossroads between Asia and Africa, Palestine has always been an area of great strategic importance, and it has been populated by various civilisations throughout history. Its emptiness can therefore only be explained by a false history, one that stems directly from the Israeli settler movement, which seeks to destroy the material traces of other cultures that point to a much more complex past than they would like to admit.


St. Porphyrios Church, Gaza: Photo by form PxHere

This complexity has been painstakingly proven in a Forensic Architecture report on an archaeological site known as Anthedon Harbour, Gaza’s old maritime port, which was first inhabited somewhere between 1100BC and 800BC.

October 2023: human cost takes precedence over cultural losses

On 7 October 2023, the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, Israelis celebrated the Simchat Torah holiday. While this was happening, the wall built by Israel inside the Gaza Strip was breached by more than 1,200 Hamas members in a surprise attack. They kidnapped more than 200 people, and left at least 1,200 dead and almost 3,500 injured.

Israel swiftly declared a state of war for the first time since 1973. The conflict, which has just passed its one year mark, has become an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe for 2.3 million Palestinians. The numbers are appalling: over 41,000 dead, including more than 14,000 children, almost 100,000 wounded and more than two million displaced.

A month after the outbreak of the war, UNESCO, at its 42nd General Conference, stated that “the current destruction and eradication of culture and heritage in Gaza is yet to be determined, since all efforts are now being concentrated on saving human lives in Gaza.”

Monitoring the disaster

The scale of Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe has meant that the extensive destruction of significant elements of Palestinian history and identity could easily be overlooked. However, in April 2024, the United Nations Mine Action Service estimated that “every square metre in Gaza impacted by the conflict contains some 200 kilogrammes of rubble.”

Cultural property has been a target of the Israeli offensive since the beginning of the conflict and, as early as November, the devastation of the cities of northern Gaza far exceeded that caused in the infamous bombing of Dresden in 1945. We cannot forget that the Gaza Strip is just a narrow area of coastal land measuring some 365 km², rich in archaeological and historical sites, that the international community has recognised as occupied territory since 1967.

Research over the last century has counted at least 130 sites in Gaza that Israel, as an occupying power, is obligated to protect under international law along with the rest of the area’s cultural and natural heritage. These obligations are laid out in the following conventions: Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948); the Geneva Conventions (1949) and their annexes, and the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954).

As of 17 September 2024, UNESCO has verified damage to 69 sites: 10 religious sites, 43 buildings of historical and artistic interest, two repositories of movable cultural property, six monuments, one museum and seven archaeological sites. Other reports give a much higher number of affected sites. These assessments are made in very difficult situations, in the midst of constant bombardment, thanks to testimonies and studies on the ground and supported by satellite images.

The Great Mosque of Gaza, located in Gaza's Old City, was the largest and oldest mosque in the Strip. It was destroyed in a bombing in December 2023.
The Great Mosque of Gaza, located in Gaza’s Old City, was the largest and oldest mosque in the Strip. It was destroyed in a bombing in December 2023.
Alaa El halaby/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

One especially striking example of a site reduced to rubble is the Great Mosque of Gaza, considered by many to be the oldest mosque in the territory and a symbol of resilience. The Church of Saint Porphyrius – the oldest Christian church in Gaza, built by the Crusaders in 1150 – has also been hit by Israeli airstrikes.

While Israel is not a member of UNESCO – it left in 2018, when the Trump administration pulled the US out – it is still obligated under the 1954 Hague Convention to preserve cultural property. Article 4 of the Convention states that:

“The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect cultural property situated within their own territory as well as within the territory of other High Contracting Parties by refraining from any use of the property and its immediate surroundings or of the appliances in use for its protection for purposes which are likely to expose it to destruction or damage in the event of armed conflict; and by refraining from any act of hostility, directed against such property. ”

The Hague Convention turned 70 in 2024, but cultural heritage sites are still woefully underprotected from armed conflict around the world.

Humanitarian and cultural genocide

The destruction of Gaza’s cultural heritage is intertwined with the ongoing humanitarian crisis. This link is recognised by the International Criminal Court, which states that:

“Crimes against or affecting cultural heritage often
touch upon the very notion of what it means to be human, sometimes eroding
entire swaths of human history, ingenuity, and artistic creation.”

Many independent reports and articles have begun to break down specific elements of the destruction in Gaza, speaking not just of genocide, but also of cultural genocide, urbicide, ecocide, domicide and scholasticide.

On 29 December 2023, the Republic of South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of violating its obligations under the 1948 Convention on Genocide with regard to Palestinians in Gaza.

Among the evidence supporting South Africa’s claim, Israel is accused of attacking infrastructure to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian people, with their attacks leaving some 318 Muslim and Christian places of worship in ruins, along with numerous archives, libraries, museums, universities and archaeological sites. This is all in addition to destroying the very people who created Palestine’s heritage.

Gaza: one big military target

In her report, published on 1 July 2024, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, highlights how Israel has turned Gaza in its entirety into a “military target”. The Israeli military arbitrarily links mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities and hospitals to Hamas, thus justifying their indiscriminate destruction. By declaring these buildings legitimate targets, it does away with any distinction between civilian and military targets.

Although Israel’s attacks against the cultural heritage of Palestine are not a new phenomenon, the current destruction in Gaza’s city centres is unprecedented.

As far as Albanese is concerned, Israel is trying to mask its intentions by using the terminology of international humanitarian law. In doing so, it justifies the systematic use of lethal violence against any and all Palestinian civilians, while simultaneously pursuing policies aimed at the widespread destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage and identity.

Her report unequivocally concludes that the Israeli regime’s actions are driven by a genocidal logic, a logic that forms an intrinsic part of its colonisation project. Its ultimate aim is to expel the Palestinian people from their land, and to wipe away any trace of their culture and history.The Conversation

Pilar Montero Vilar, Profesora Titular, investigadora principal del Observatorio de Emergencias en Patrimonio Cultural www.oepac.es, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Frederick Douglass: The Moral Physician for all Seasons https://www.juancole.com/2024/09/frederick-douglass-physician.html Fri, 27 Sep 2024 04:15:46 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=220662 Los Angeles (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Racism, like cancer, seems incurable as it continues to ravage our nation; its social, cultural and political life imperiled by a relentless disease affecting millions, many of whom deny its very existence. Even so, we must continue to celebrate the undaunted courage and determination of our moral physicians, those who, sustained by hope and idealism, persist in the struggle to find cures or, at the very least, mitigate the suffering of the most endangered. Theirs is a search for healing and truth, and it is that search that fundamentally inspired me to write a novel about Frederick Douglass, using a popular literary genre to introduce and familiarize readers with the life of a remarkable, complicated literary genius who consistently promoted the best in ourselves and in our nation.

Douglass dedicated his life and work to celebrating and explaining freedom, equality, and justice for all while exposing the fundamental threat to the fulfillment of the American experiment: racism and its institutional arms, slavery and discrimination. He warned in a speech, “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

Called a prophet of freedom, Frederick Douglass both challenges and inspires us to think and feel more deeply about the issues that absorbed him. He remains relevant for the twenty-first century, and the debates of his time are the debates of our political season.

Douglass asked: What is the purpose of America? How do we fulfill the hopes and aspirations of its citizens? What are the best tactics to make the claims of the U.S. Constitution real for all Americans?

This passionate and stubborn man offered unequivocal answers. He asserted as the motto for his first newspaper, The North Star, “Right is no sex. Truth is of no color. God is the Father of all, and we are all brethren.”

Millions still dispute these assertions, agitated and energized by the ascendancy of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris whose careers are mocked and derided by politicians and pundits using slurs and tropes all too familiar to Douglass.

If you think viciousness and cruelty are unique to our time, you should explore the political cartoons and commentary of the ninteenth century. Racial fear predominates, the fear of social equality and the presumed inevitable result: interracial sex denounced as “amalgamation,” that telling confluence of disgust and envy.

The language of racism and caste has a universal vocabulary; it targets those who are different: them, the other. And according to our past and present fearmongers, they will come after you; take what is yours; rape your wives; kill your children; eat your pets.

Douglass dedicated his life to exposing these perpetrators, becoming their worst nightmare: the supremely gifted black gentleman.


Sydney Morrison, Frederick Douglass: A Novel. (Portland, Or.: Hawthorne Books, 2024). Click here to buy.

  In 1869, when Southern states were systematically removing rights from black people granted by new amendments to the U.S. Constitution and using the KKK as an unofficial arm of local and state governments to terrorize people, Douglass offered an alternative, a grander vision of America and humanity. Douglass’ rhetoric is founded on the celebration of difference, a rejection of racial supremacy. He said, “The mission of America seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.”

Immigration is good.

Difference will save us.

Unity is inevitable.

Douglass was not naïve; he knew the work of his career would never be easy. He famously observed, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”

This comment might suggest a grim, joyless tenacity that belies the essential optimism of the man, who said while slavery survived in 1855, “I long to have a future—a future with hope in it.”

And after the abolition of slavery, Douglass summarized one of the most valuable lessons learned by the struggle. It was “faith in man, faith in the rectitude of humanity, and faith in the all-conquering power of truth.”

This is my faith, my highest hope, and my novel is dedicated to the great possibilities within us all and our beloved land.

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Eugene Rogan’s The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East https://www.juancole.com/2024/09/eugene-damascus-massacre.html Sat, 14 Sep 2024 04:15:25 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=220539 Review of Eugene Rogan, “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East” (New York: Basic Books, 2024).

Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– How did Ottoman Damascus descend into violence and looting in July 1860? Why did the Damascene masses fall upon the Christians, leaving around 5,000 of them dead? These are some of the questions that Eugene Rogan seeks to answer in his book “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Rogan, a Professor at the University of Oxford, has written some of the go-to books for students and scholars of the Middle East, such as “The Arabs: A History.”

His latest book is motivated by a finding he made more than three decades ago when researching for another project in the National Archives, in Washington, DC. While exploring the archives, Rogan discovered the consular dispatches of Mikhayil Mishaka, the US consul in Damascus when the 1860 Massacre shocked the Ottoman Empire.

In “The Damascus Events”, Rogan contextualizes Mishaka’s first-hand account, as well as other contemporary sources, in the broader historical setting. The result is a gripping and vivid portrait of one of the worst episodes of intercommunal violence in the Ottoman Empire.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was severely weakened. The empire had initially granted, from a position of strength, extraterritorial rights to foreigners to facilitate trade with Europe. This set of rights, detailed in what was known as the Capitulations, allowed protected foreigners to enjoy preferential terms of trade and taxation and the right to be judged by their consuls.

As the balance of power between the Ottoman Empire and Europe shifted to the latter’s benefit, and Europe gained a stronger economic presence in Ottoman lands, the Capitulations became increasingly problematic. Foreign diplomats and merchants in the Ottoman Empire enrolled in their service a growing number of local Christians and Jews, who in turn profited from the same extraterritorial benefits. Mishaka’s case represented a step further. He was not a foreigner, but an Ottoman Christian born in Lebanon. Even so, he worked as a diplomat for a foreign country, the US.

The Damascus Events have their roots in the destabilization of Greater Syria (which roughly included present-day Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1831, the armies of Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali rolled into Greater Syria. The Ottomans could not repel the occupation forces by themselves, and it was thanks to the European powers’ military help that Egypt’s presence in Greater Syria came to an end in 1840. This display of weakness opened new avenues for European powers to intervene economically and politically in the Ottoman Empire.

In 1843, the Ottoman Empire and the European powers established a new system of rule in Mount Lebanon that undermined the privileges of the local elites by giving more power to local councils. Commoners in Mount Lebanon all suffered under the quasi-feudal rule of the region’s notables but were divided along religious lines, mainly between Christian Maronites and Druzes. The Druzes profess a faith that originated as a schism of Shia Islam but became a distinct religious tradition.

The local elites in Mount Lebanon, intent on stopping their loss of power, succeeded in thwarting inter-religious cooperation. Resentments were largely articulated along sectarian lines instead of class. Intercommunal tensions grew increasingly violent, with both Maronites and Druzes establishing armed groups.

The Druzes, being numerically inferior and lacking the kind of foreign patron the Maronites had in France, went on the offensive in May 1860. They burnt down Christian villages and killed the men who crossed their path, before moving to mixed towns and villages. It is estimated that eleven thousand Christians died and around one hundred thousand became homeless.

After the Mount Lebanon massacres, large flows of Christian refugees moved to Damascus and the areas surrounding the city. Tensions were high in the Syrian capital. Local Christians feared they would be killed like their Mount Lebanon co-religionists. Meanwhile, Damascene Muslims were worried that the local Christians, together with the newly arrived Christian refugees, would seek revenge for the massacres they had suffered at the hands of the Druzes. It was tragically unfortunate that Damascus happened to have a deeply incompetent Ottoman governor, Ahmad Pasha, at a time of major crisis. In front of the governor’s erratic behavior, writes Rogan, “Muslims and Christians, notables and commoners alike, were left perplexed.”[1]

Around the Feast of the Sacrifice, when Muslims traditionally assemble in the mosques, there were unfounded rumors that Christians would use the festive opportunity to attack Muslims. The governor sent soldiers to protect the mosques but the faithful, afraid of the Christians, did not turn up – neither did the governor himself. Later on, young Muslim men went through the Christian quarters of Damascus drawing crosses on the floor and upsetting the neighbors, who did not want to step on the symbol of their faith.

Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024). Click here to Buy .

Ahmad Pasha overreacted once again. He arrested young Muslim men suspected of having drawn the crosses and put them in chains. He then forced the men to sweep the streets for everyone to see them. Muslims perceived the governor’s measure as a great humiliation and relatives of the young men shattered their chains.

Soon, false news of Christians having killed a group of Muslims spread. A perfect storm had gathered. Damascene Muslims had long resented the Christians’ growing economic prosperity, facilitated by Europe’s interference in the Ottoman Empire. The massacres in Mount Lebanon had put everyone on edge, and the Ottoman governor had increased the fears of both Christians and Muslims.

When the storm broke, it did so with unprecedented violence and went on for a week. Groups of armed Muslims attacked the Christian neighborhoods, killing and looting. Men were forced to convert, although this did not necessarily save their lives, or directly killed. Women were generally not murdered, but there were many cases of rape.

When US consul Mishaqa realized what was happening, he understood his life, as well as his family’s, were on the line. He decided to abandon his house, located in a Muslim quarter. According to his account, Mishaqa twice had to throw coins at marauders to escape before and he and his family came across a heavily armed mob. The mob spared the rest of the family but severely injured Mishaqa. Only by paying the mob a fortune did he save his life.

Mishaqa and his family would eventually find refuge in the house of Emir Abd al-Qadir, a former Algerian revolutionary. Al-Qadir, who had fought against France’s occupation of Algeria, was forced into exile after being captured by the French in 1847. He had finally settled in Damascus with fellow Algerian veterans, making up more than one thousand armed men. During the Damascus Events, Al-Qadir and his men saved the lives of many Christians. They looked for those who were hiding from the mob and rescued them. Once Al-Qadir’s house was full, they accompanied the Christians to the Damascus Citadel, where they suffered hunger and deprivation but were safe from the attacks.

The Damascus governor, and the small contingent of soldiers he commanded, did not intervene. The pleas of the British consul, the only diplomat who continued to enjoy freedom of movement during the massacre, were in vain. According to Mishaqa’s estimates, around 5,000 Christians had been killed during a week of uncontrolled violence in Damascus.

Rogan notes that “the Damascus massacre was a genocidal moment, but it was not a genocide.”[2] He substantiates this claim by noting that outside the Damascus city walls, Christians had been protected by their Muslim neighbors and no violent events had occurred. Within the walls, not only Al-Qadir and his men but also a small group of influential Muslim notables had prevented even larger carnage.

As the violence subsided and the Sultan was informed of the events in Damascus, the Ottoman ruler knew that he had to act decisively. The priority was to recover the trust of his Christian population and avoid a military intervention of the European powers in Syria under the guise of protecting the Christians. Fuad Pasha, a former foreign minister, was chosen by the Sultan to restore order. The contrast between Fuad Pasha and Ahmad Pasha, whose incompetence as a governor had proven deadly during the Damascus Events, was striking.

Fuad Pasha first traveled to Beirut, where he negotiated a truce between the Maronite Christians and the Druzes and consulted with European diplomats. He promised them that those responsible for the Damascus Massacre would be severely punished. He marched into Damascus with a strong military detachment and visited the survivors of the massacre. A group of fifty-seven Muslim notables who had stood by during the killing, or even incited it, were hung after a rushed trial. More than one hundred irregular soldiers and policemen, negligent at best and complicit at worst, were killed by a firing squad. Former governor Ahmad Pasha was also executed.

Fuad Pasha had to balance competing interests. On the one hand, he had to reassure the Damascene Christians that they were safe and convince the European powers that the Ottomans had the situation under control. On the other hand, Fuad Pasha could not alienate the majority Muslim population to the point that they would rise against him or return to violence against Christians. The situation was further complicated by the need to provide temporal accommodation to the Christians who had lost their homes while beginning the construction of new houses and providing compensation for the lost goods.

The budgetary crisis of the Ottoman Empire hardly allowed this. Fuad Pasha forced some Muslims to vacate their houses to make room for Christians and imposed a new tax to collect money for reparations. Only a fraction of what was owed to the Christians was finally paid, but Christians with fewer possessions were prioritized. Mishaqa complained for years that he had not been properly compensated, but this had much to do with his wealth, far above the average.

Fuad Pasha’s reaction would be alien to any current notion of the rule of law or human rights. Still, it was overall effective. Re-construction is always far more complicated than destruction, but Damascus progressively recovered both socially and economically from the 1860 massacre.

The Damascus Events are far removed from our times, but they have more modern echoes. Some of these are found in Syria, where the civil war that started in 2011 has left many episodes of killing along religious lines (most clearly, but not only, by the so-called Islamic State). Still, the potential for false rumors to circulate and de-generate in violence that we observe in the Damascus Events is universal.

After three young girls were mortally stabbed in the English town of Southport, online misinformation spread that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who had recently arrived in England. This resulted in thousands of right-wing extremists flooding the streets of different towns and cities across the United Kingdom, attacking those they perceived to be foreign and engaging in looting.

In the English town of Rotherham, for instance, a hotel hosting asylum seekers was surrounded by 400 people and set on fire before the flames could be put down. “The Damascus Events” is a story of how a society breaks apart and the long and complicated way to societal recovery. In this sense, it is also a story about our present day.

 

 

[1] Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024), p. 129.

[2] Ibid., p. 163.

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Climate Change has deep historical Roots – Amitav Ghosh explores how Capitalism and Colonialism fit in https://www.juancole.com/2024/09/historical-capitalism-colonialism.html Mon, 02 Sep 2024 04:06:02 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=220362 By Julia Taylor, University of the Witwatersrand and Imraan Valodia, University of the Witwatersrand | –

(The Conversation) – Amitav Ghosh is an internationally celebrated author of 20 historical fiction and non-fiction books. The Indian thinker and writer has written extensively on the legacies of colonialism, violence and extractivism. His most famous works explore migration, globalisation and commercial violence and conquest during the colonial period, against the backdrop of the opium trade in the 1800s.

Caroline Southey, from The Conversation Africa, asked economics professor Imraan Valodia and climate and inequality researcher Julia Taylor about the significance of his work.

What has Ghosh contributed to our understanding about the root causes of climate change?

Julia Taylor: In Ghosh’s recent non-fiction book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he used his storytelling prowess to outline the roots of climate change within two systems of power and oppression: imperialism and capitalism.

Imperialism is the expansion of influence over other countries through military force and colonisation. It usually entails the destruction of the environment to support imperial interests.

Capitalism is the dominant economic system where ownership of the means of production (industry) is private. Private actors are driven by profit and growth, which has relied on combustion of fossil fuels.

What Ghosh makes clear is that violence and destruction of the environment are key to capitalism, as they were to colonialism.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh challenges us to think more deeply about the role of conquest and violence in shaping the planetary crisis we’re facing. And the need to reshape our economic and social relations to address climate change. He does this with remarkable acumen and clarity in another of his works of non-fiction, The Great Derangement. In the book he seeks to explain our failure to address the urgency of climate change. He asks very powerfully whether the current generation is deranged by our inability to grasp the scale, violence and urgency of climate change.

He uses the history of nutmeg to illustrate some of his main points. What does he draw from this history?

Julia Taylor: The story of the nutmeg is one among many of conquest of both people and land during colonisation which led to the industrial revolution and the explosion of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the present day these conquests take different forms. But they continue, particularly in the context of mining and extractivism.


Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. The University of Chicago Press. Click here to Buy.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh traces the history of the household spice – nutmeg – all the way to its origins in the Banda Islands of Indonesia. He uses the analogy of the nutmeg to explain how colonisation of land and people has led to the climate disaster.

The nutmeg was harvested from trees in the Banda Islands and traded by the Bandanese for centuries. With the growth in value of spices, various European countries sought to claim exclusive rights to the nutmeg trade in the Banda Islands. The local population resisted. However, in 1621, representatives of the Dutch East India Company chose to destroy the settlements of the Bandanese population and massacre or enslave anyone who could not escape, to gain control over the nutmeg trade.

Ghosh explains these horrifying events in the context of Anglo-Dutch tensions and the trend of empire in Europe, sanctioned by religious beliefs of racial superiority.

A major theme of his work is the link between imperialism and the planetary crisis. What’s his main line of argument?

Julia Taylor: Ghosh argues in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis that

the discussion of climate change, as of every aspect of the planetary crisis, tends to be dominated by the question of capitalism and other economic issues; geopolitics, empire, and questions of power figure in it far less. (p116)

However, he highlights that

the era of Western military conquests predates the emergence of capitalism by centuries. Indeed, it was these conquests, and the imperial systems that arose in their wake, that fostered and made possible the rise to dominance of what we now call capitalism … colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence were the foundations on which industrial modernity was built. (p116)

Imraan Valodia: This argument forces us to grapple with both capitalism and the dominance of the west in our understanding of climate change. It highlights the power dynamics and violence which enabled the destruction of many lands in the form of deforestation, industrial agriculture, mining and more.

To respond to climate change, we need to rethink these dominant systems and relationships with land and the environment. This can be linked to the need to address inequality and power dynamics if we are to have any hope of addressing climate change.

Professor Valodia will be hosting Amitav Ghosh for a series of events at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa from 10 to 12 September 2024. The university has partnered with the Presidential Climate Commission, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the University of Pretoria to host the sessions.The Conversation

Julia Taylor, Researcher: Climate and Inequality, University of the Witwatersrand and Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor: Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director: Southern Centre for Inequality Studies., University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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