A Guardian column on "alt-right" celebrity Katie Hopkins' carpetbagging critiques of London stumbles into an important truth. Marina Hyde:
For now, it falls to her [Hopkins] to explain London to the Americans. “Londoners can’t even be honest about these attacks,” she told Fox News. “Because it would mean everything they believed in was false.” >Ah, the false idols of the decadent metropolis! Had Katie spent more than 10 minutes in the World History aisle of Wikipedia, she would know there have always been people who hated cities for what they stood for. The metropolis has at many times served as shorthand for a kind of moral decay and wicked permissiveness that requires (usually forcible) regression. “This place where monsters lurk and steal lives away in an instant,” thunders Katie of the capital’s wickedness. “For nothing.” Dear, dear – it does all seem rather terminal. I wonder what Katie would do with the failed, corruptive experiment that is London? The Khmer Rouge decided that the only solution was to empty the cities, and send their suspiciously educated denizens to the countryside. Come Katie’s revolution, perhaps Londoners will be forcibly migrated too.
Quite right, Marina. Don't forget that anyone wearing glasses will be labeled as a dangerous intellectual and eliminated.
Half a century after United States B-52 bombers dropped more than 500,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia's countryside Washington wants the country to repay a $US500 million ($662 million) war debt.
The demand has prompted expressions of indignation and outrage from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.
Over 200 nights in 1973 alone, 257,456 tons of explosives fell in secret carpet-bombing sweeps – half as many as were dropped on Japan during the Second World War.
The pilots flew at such great heights they were incapable of discriminating between a Cambodian village and their targets, North Vietnamese supply lines – nicknamed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail."
The bombs were of such massive tonnage they blew out eardrums of anyone standing within a 1-kilometre radius.
War correspondent James Pringle was two kilometres away from a B-52 strike near Cambodia's border.
"It felt like the world was coming to an end," he recalls.
According to one genocide researcher, up to 500,000 Cambodians were killed, many of them children.
The bombings drove hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, an ultra-Marxist organisation which seized power in 1975 and over the next four years presided over the deaths of more than almost two million people through starvation disease and execution.
The debt started out as a US$274 million loan mostly for food supplies to the then US-backed Lon Nol government but has almost doubled over the years as Cambodia refused to enter into a re-payment program.
William Heidt, the US's ambassador in Phnom Penh, said Cambodia's failure to pay back the debt puts it in league with Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
"To me, Cambodia does not look like a country that should be in arrears…buildings coming up all over the city, foreign investment coming in, government revenue is rapidly rising," Mr Heidt was quoted as saying by the Cambodia Daily.
"I'm saying it is in Cambodia's interest not to look to the past, but to look at how to solve this because it's important to Cambodia's future," he said, adding that the US has never seriously considered cancelling the debt.
Cambodia's strongman prime minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected to Vietnam, hit back, saying "The US created problems in my country and is demanding money from me."
They dropped bombs on our heads and then ask up to repay. When we do not repay, they tell the IMF (International Monetary Fund) not to lend us money," he told an international conference in early March.
"We should raise our voices to talk about the issue of the country that has invaded other (countries) and has killed children."
Mr Pringle, a former Reuters bureau chief in Ho Chi Minh City, said no-one could call him a supporter of Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia with an iron-fist for three decades.
But he said on this matter he is "absolutely correct."
"Cambodia does not owe a brass farthing to the US for help in destroying its people, its wild animals, its rice fields and forest cover," he wrote in the Cambodia Daily.
American Elizabeth Becker, one of the few correspondents who witnessed the Khmer Rouge's genocide, has also written that the US "owes Cambodia more in war debts that can be repaid in cash."
Mr Hun Sen pointed out that craters still dot the Cambodian countryside and villagers are still unearthing bombs, forcing mass evacuations until they can be deactivated.
"There are a lot of grenades and bombs left. That's why so often Cambodian children are killed, because they don't know that they are unexploded ordnance," he said.
"And who did it? It's America's bombs and grenades."
A diplomat posted in Phnom Penh between 1971 and 1974 told Fairfax Media the food the US supplied Cambodia came from excess food stocks.
"I remember well that shipments of maize were made," he said.
"Cambodians do not eat maize so it was fed to the animals."
He pointed out that the US refused to normalise relations with Vietnam until it accepted to take on the US debt of the former southern regime.
Dana Kramer-Rolls says on Facebook: Dr. Ben Carson got into some trouble by saying that black slaves were immigrants, too. But I heard poetry and wondered what Maya Angelou would have made of it. I'm not her, but here is my take.They came as immigrants, Stolen by invaders, sold by their kings.They came as immigrants, Chained in the holds of ships, the living and the dead.They came as immigrants, Sold, beaten, families torn apart.They came as immigrants,The religion of their mothers mocked and forbidden.They came as immigrants,Now the chains were broken, but they were still lynched, shot.And then it began again.They come as immigrants.Fleeing invaders, fleeing the bombs.They come as immigrants, Washed up on shores, the living and the dead.They come as immigrants,Their religion mocked, families torn apart.They come as immigrants,They think they are safe, but still they are beaten and shot.Will it ever end?
Americans have made quite a cult of the Founding Fathers, the political and military leaders who led the Atlantic colonies to throw off British rule – a remarkable achievement that often is used to support the similar idea of American exceptionalism: that America is a country unlike any other, thanks in large part to the wise choices made by the equally exceptional Fathers.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the Fathers were pretty amazing. George Washington, for instance, had exactly the aristocratic character that was needed to lead a new republic in the 18thcentury. But his ability to charm and impress his contemporaries is now entirely mysterious to us. If he showed up in modern America he would have no hope of a political career. It's hard to imagine what kind of role he could find in public affairs. Aristocratic, eccentric rich guy, perhaps a shadowy investor in cutting edge tech firms?
An amazing FF that we can partially understand is Thomas Jefferson. He gets credit for a wide selection of contributions to the American character and American institutions over more than 50 years of public life. We appreciate and praise his constructive efforts, the importance of which is pretty obvious (freedom of religion); what we wonder is how he addressed all of those issues.
Kevin Gutzman may not have an answer to this question, but he gives a pretty good analysis of what he considers Jefferson's key achievements. This is not a full biography – there are good biographies and they are massive –it's a portrait. Gutzman compares Jefferson to a pointillist painter who created a political philosophy by dealing with one issue at a time. Gutzman himself has a pointillist approach in describing Jefferson, and it works for him.
Gutzman identifies five areas that Jefferson dealt with in the course of his career: Federalism (his opposition to centralized power), Freedom of Conscience (his opposition to established churches), Colonization (what might be better called Deportation, meaning the elimination of racial conflict by eliminating the slaves), Assimilation (of the Native population) and "Mr. Jefferson's University" (the most important piece in Jefferson's desire for public education). Put those 5 issues together and you find yourself treading surprisingly familiar paths through a political landscape that maybe has changed less in the past 200+ years than we might first think. I am particularly thinking of the issue of "federalism," meaning not centralism (as it does in Canada) but quite the opposite, which Jefferson supported because he believed in the legitimacy of the separate states, with their differing institutions and "values" as people say today.
One issue that Gutzman says little about is Jefferson's relationship with his slave mistress, Sally Hemmings. It's a tough question for an alumnus of Jefferson's own university, but I do have to wonder if she would have been deported, if colonization of slaves and ex-slaves had ever taken place. Is this so ridiculous a question? I think this is just one way that the contradictions of the Founding Fathers' position can be expressed.
So: a book of reasonable length, well-written, with the power to inspire serious contemplation about both Jefferson's time and America's present.
Next session, women will compose 19.5 percent of Congress. “We went from 104 to 104 — down one in the House, up one in the Senate,” reported Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. Obviously we could do better, but on the plus side, we’re just a sliver away from passing Equatorial Guinea when it comes to gender diversity in the nation’s legislature.
Of course, we are no longer taken aback by such comparisons.
Last month I announced I would occasionally revisit some of my better posts of yore. Well, today I recalled my discussion of a Pulitzer-prize-winning novel and its author, Allen Drury, whose books recall a lost time when FDR was the great villain of American politics -- because he ruled by an expansive interpretation of executive authority. Have a look at thee posts that use the label "Allen Drury," starting with this one.
