Tag: History

White Supremacists Bombed A Black Church 60 Years Ago. Survivors Don’t Want History Erased.

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Lisa McNair drove from her home in Birmingham to Alabama’s state legislature in Montgomery last year for a forum about “divisive concepts” legislation being pushed by state Republicans. The GOP bill would have severely limited how educators could teach about race and racism.

McNair believed the bill would force students to learn an inaccurate account of American history — and about the tragic incident that had devastated her own family.

When it was McNair’s turn to speak, she stood at the microphone with a picture of her sister.

“I, too, want to oppose that bill because I feel that that bill will inhibit the teaching of the life of my sister, Denise McNair,” she said. “Her story is not CRT or whatever that is, because I really don’t know, and I really don’t care. But it’s true history.” (CRT refers to critical race theory, a college-level academic theory about systemic racism. In recent years, Republicans have used the term to refer to any education about race, and have increasingly sought to remove such lessons from classrooms around the country.)

Sixty years ago, on Sept. 15, 1963, McNair’s sister, Carol Denise McNair, was one of four Black girls killed in a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The bombing of the predominantly Black church outraged the country and helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement.

The 16th Street Baptist Church, as seen on Sept. 11, 2023.

McNair told HuffPost she saw state Sen. Jabo Waggoner, one of the 12 Republican co-sponsors of the bill, tear up after hearing her testimony. She gave him a T-shirt with Denise’s face on it after the forum.

The legislation would have prohibited students and employees of Alabama schools, state agencies and universities from learning any “divisive” concepts, including that “fault, blame, or bias should be assigned to a race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin,” or that a student or employee should “assent to a sense of guilt, complicity, or a need to apologize,” due to their race or national origin.

The bill never made it to the state Senate for a final vote.

Republican lawmakers made a second attempt to pass the bill in June, but they weren’t successful. Despite meeting McNair, Waggoner still supported the legislation and sponsored it a second time. His office did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Alabama Republicans are discussing reintroducing the legislation again, Republican sponsor and state Rep. Ed Oliver said this summer. (Oliver’s office did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on the legislation.)

“I do believe me being there that day helped them to think differently about voting for that bill,” McNair told HuffPost. “You have to come in and talk to people where they live. You have to put a human face on it, and that is why you have to be in front of our legislators and state senators — because they work for us.”

McNair is happy Alabama hasn’t yet adopted a “divisive concepts” law, but for her and other survivors, it was a brutal reminder of how far the U.S. still has to go.

“It is hard to believe that 60 years later, we still are having such major racial issues,” said McNair, who was born a year after her older sister was murdered. “We never will forget what happened to Denise and the other girls. It was a turning point in our lives. My parents, that was their only child. They did not have any other children at the time. It never left them. They grieved for her till the day she died.”

Three Minutes

Carol Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robinson all died after four members of the Ku Klux Klan set off a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church at 10:24 a.m. that September day. McNair was 11 years old; the other three girls were 14.

Thomas Edward Blanton, Bobby Frank Cherry, Robert Chambliss — and, it is suspected, Herman Cash — planted at least 15 stacks of dynamite with a timer under the steps of the church. An anonymous man called the church, and a teenage Sunday school secretary answered.

“Three minutes,” the caller said, then hung up.

One minute later, the church exploded. At least 22 people were injured during the bombing, including Collins’ 12-year-old sister, who had pieces of glass implanted in her face and was blinded in one eye.

In this Sept. 15, 1963, file photo, firefighters and ambulance attendants remove a covered body from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, after members of the Ku Klux Klan set off a deadly explosion.

At the time, Birmingham was one of the most racially segregated cities in the county. It even became known as “Bombingham” because so many Black residents’ homes were bombed by white supremacists.

By the start of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was underway, with Martin Luther King Jr. largely leading the charge in the South. He worked closely with Fred Shuttlesworth, a minister in Birmingham, to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Birmingham Campaign, an effort to bring national attention to the mistreatment of Black people in the city.

Following the Montgomery bus boycott, where King and other members protested segregated public transportation, King wrote his now-famous letter from Birmingham jail in 1963 — just five months before the church was bombed.

On May 2, 1963, thousands of children left school and gathered at the church to march in downtown Birmingham against racial injustice. The protest became known as the Children’s Crusade. They were met violently with water hoses, police dogs, beatings and arrests.

Many of the tactics were provoked and influenced by the racism of Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, who served as Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety. Despite the police brutality, the children proceeded with their demonstration. It prompted the Department of Justice to intervene and influenced then-President John F. Kennedy to express his support for civil rights legislation.

Lisa McNair talks to a group at the 16th Street Baptist Church about her sister Denise McNair, who was killed during the church bombing.

Activists also blamed then-Gov. George Wallace, a loud segregationist, for inspiring the racist acts. The same year as the church bombing, Wallace proclaimed in his inaugural address, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He also hired Asa Carter, the founder of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter, as his speechwriter during a campaign in which he often blamed integration as the reason for an increase in crime.

Two of the men behind the bombing, Blanton and Cherry, were not sentenced to prison until nearly 40 years later. Chambliss wasn’t tried and convicted for the death of McNair’s sister until 1977. And Cash died in 1994, having never been indicted on any charges.

McNair believes that if the “divisive concepts” bill had been enacted, it would have not allowed the tragedy of the bombing to be told in detail.

“[The bombing] is the story of our shared American history, and it needs to be told,” McNair said. “Little white children, and all children, need to know, because this is what happened.”

No Regard For Humanity

A white supremacist rally was supposed to take place in Birmingham on Sept. 15, and white teenagers Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley were among those who planned to attend. But the rally was canceled due to the bombing.

So the two boys bought a Confederate battle flag and attached it to a scooter as they went into a predominantly Black neighborhood. They carried a .22-caliber pistol they had purchased three days earlier. They saw a young boy, Virgil Ware, and his brother riding a bicycle. Farley told Sims to shoot the gun and scare them.

Sims ended up shooting Ware in the chest and face, killing him. An all-white jury convicted Farley and Sims of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced them to seven months of jail, but the cases were suspended by a judge and changed to two years of probation.

Donnell Jackson,13, left, and Shirley Floyd, right, hold up a portrait of Virgil Ware as members of Ware’s family stand behind it during a memorial ceremony for Ware in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 6, 2004.

Dale H. Long, a lifelong Birmingham resident who also survived the bombing, remembers the bombing and Ware’s killing the very same day, as well as the police killing of another Black boy, Johnny Robinson.

“That is what critical race theory is about. They don’t want people to know, they don’t want their kids to know [about other tragedies],” Long told HuffPost. Sims used Ware “as target practice,” he said.

Long’s parents used to tell him not to go outside for any reason, especially when demonstrations were happening in the city. Black kids weren’t allowed to attend pools with white people, let alone use the same bathrooms or drink from the same water fountains.

“We did not have the luxury of traveling a lot and enjoying the amenities of the local museum. A lot of the activities took place at church,” Long told HuffPost.

Long, who attended Sunday school and played in the orchestra with Denise McNair, lived two blocks from Shuttlesworth and remembers the minister’s home being bombed. “We knew it, because it shook ours,” Long recalled.

Moving Forward

McNair says there is a “sadness” that 60 years later, America is still having major issues with race. While she wishes the country would take more steps forward, she remains optimistic.

“I just wish that we weren’t in this place and that we should be further along. That is part of what I think. I hope that we will try to do better. I like to think so many more of us don’t want racism and will stand up against it,” McNair told HuffPost.

Lisa McNair speaks with attendees during a book signing at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

“But I still see people voting for politicians who espouse racist ideals, and it is hard to believe so many people would vote for a politician who espouses these ideas and not see them for who they are.”

Last year, she spoke to civic leaders in Pensacola, Florida, about her family’s experience. But one local school canceled her separate speaking engagement and another cut her speaking time short to avoid discussions related to critical race theory, according to McNair, which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has aggressively railed against.

Long also said he’s worried by DeSantis’ actions, particularly after the governor and presidential candidate said recently that Black people benefited from slavery.

“They are taking away our history. They find something wrong with teaching Black history,” he said. “You can talk about the Revolutionary War or Boston Tea Party, but they don’t want to talk about slavery because it makes them look bad.”

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September 15, 2023
Putin exposes the myth of Austria’s victimhood

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VIENNA — No one does victimhood quite like Austria.

Over the past century, the Central European country has presented itself to the outside world as an innocent bystander on an island of gemütlichkeit, doing what it can to get by in a treacherous global environment.

“Austria was always apolitical,” insists Herr Karl, the archetypal Austrian opportunist, brought to life in 1961 by Helmut Qualtinger, the country’s greatest satirist. “We were never political people.”

Recalling Austria’s collaboration with the Nazis, Herr Karl, a portly stockist who speaks in a working-class Viennese dialect, was full of self pity: “We scraped a bit of cash together — we had to make a living…How we struggled to survive!”

Russia’s war on Ukraine offers a bitter reminder that Austria remains a country of Herr Karls, playing all sides, professing devotion to Western ideals, even as they quietly look for ways to continue to profit from the country’s friendly relations with Moscow.

The most glaring example of this hypocrisy is Austria’s continued reliance on Russian natural gas, which accounts for about 55 percent of the country’s overall consumption. Though that’s down from 80 percent at the beginning of 2022, Austria, in contrast to most other EU countries, remains dependent on Russia.

Confront an Austrian government official with this fact and you’ll be met with a lengthy whinge over how the country, one of the world’s richest, is struggling to cope with the economic crosswinds triggered by the war. That will be followed by a litany of examples of how a host of other EU countries is guilty of much more egregious behavior vis a vis Moscow.

The unspoken, if inevitable, conclusion: the real victim here is Austria.

The myth of Austrian victimhood has long been a leitmotif of the country’s bilious tabloids, which serve readers regular helpings of all the ways in which the outside world, especially Brussels and Washington, undermines them.

Outside supervision

Earlier this month, the EU’s representative in Austria, Martin Selmayr, ended up in the sights of the tabloids — and the government — for uttering the inconvenient truth that the millions Vienna pays to Russia for gas every month amounted to “blood money.”

“He’s acting like a colonial army officer,” fumed Andreas Mölzer, a right-wing commentator for the Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s best-selling tabloid, noting with delight that both of Selmayr’s grandfathers were German generals in the war.

A few weeks before his “blood money” remarks, Selmayr told a Vienna newspaper that “the European army is NATO” | Patrick Seeger/EPA

“The Eurocrats have this attitude that they can just tell Austrians what to do,” Mölzer concluded.

Yet if Austria’s history since the collapse of the Habsburg empire in 1918 has shown anything, it’s that the country needs outside supervision. Left to their own devices, Austrians’ worst instincts take hold.

One needn’t look further than 1938 to understand the implications. But there’s no shortage of other examples: voters’ enthusiastic support for former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim as president in 1986, despite credible evidence that he had lied about his wartime service as an intelligence officer for the Nazis; the state’s foot-dragging on paying reparations to slave laborers used by Austrian companies during the war; the resistance to return valuable artworks looted from Jews by the Nazis to their rightful owners.

Not that Austrians learn from their mistakes. To this day, Austrians rarely heed the better angels of their nature unless the outside world forces them to, either by shaming them into submission or brute force.

That said, the West is almost as much to blame for Austria’s moral shortcomings as the Austrians themselves.

The Magna Carta for Austria’s cult of victimhood can be found in the so-called Moscow Declarations of 1943, in which the allied powers declared the country “the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression.” Though the text also stresses that Austria bears a responsibility — “which she cannot evade” — for collaborating with the Nazis, the Austrians latched onto the “victim” label after the war and didn’t look back.

In the decades that followed, the country relied on its stunning natural beauty and faded imperial charm to transform its international image into that of an alpine Shangri-La, a snow-globe filled with prancing Lipizzaners and jolly folk enjoying Wiener schnitzel and Sachertorte.

Convenient excuse

A key element of that gauzy fantasy was the country’s neutrality, imposed on it in 1955 by the Soviet Union as a condition for ending Austria’s postwar allied occupation. At the time, Austrians viewed neutrality as a necessary evil towards regaining full sovereignty.

During the course of the Cold War, however, neutrality took on an almost religious quality. In the popular imagination, it was neutrality, coupled with Austrians’ deft handling of Soviet leaders, that allowed the country to escape the fate of its Warsaw Pact neighbors (while also doing business with the Eastern Bloc).

Today, Austrian neutrality is little more than a convenient excuse to avoid responsibility.

Austria’s center-right-led government insists that on Ukraine it is only neutral in terms of military action, not on political principle. In other words, it won’t send weapons to Kyiv, but it does support the EU’s sanctions and allows arms shipments destined for Ukraine to pass through Austrian territory.

At the same time, many Austrian companies continue to conduct brisk business with Russia for which they face little criticism at home.

Andreas Babler took over as leader of the Social Democrats in June AND has a long history of opposing not just NATO, but Austrian participation in any EU defense initiatives | Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images

In the Austrian population as a whole, decades of fetishizing neutrality has left many convinced that it’s their birthright not to take sides. Most are blissfully unaware of the EU’s mutual defense clause, under which member states agree to come to one another’s aid in the event of “armed aggression.”

That mentality explains why Austria’s political parties — with the notable exception of the liberal Neos — refuse to touch, or even debate, the country’s neutrality and its security implications.

In March, just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy began an address via video to Austria’s parliament, Freedom Party MPs placed signs stamped with “Neutrality” and “Peace” on their desks before standing up in unison and leaving the chamber.

The far right wasn’t alone in its disapproval of Zelenskyy. More than half of the Social Democratic MPs also boycotted the event to avoid upsetting Russia.

Geographic good fortune

Andreas Babler, who took over as leader of the Social Democrats in June, has a long history of opposing not just NATO, but Austrian participation in any EU defense initiatives.

In 2020, he characterized the EU as “the most aggressive military alliance that has ever existed,” adding that it “was worse than NATO.”

It’s an extraordinary assertion given that NATO is the only thing that kept the Soviet Union from swallowing Austria during the Cold War. The defense alliance, which Austrian leaders briefly entertained joining in the 1990s, remains the linchpin of the country’s security for a simple reason: Austria’s only non-NATO neighbor is Switzerland.

Austria’s neutrality and geographic good fortune have led it to spend next to nothing on defense. Last year, for example, spending fell to just 0.8 percent of GDP from 0.9 percent, putting it near the bottom of the EU league table with the likes of Luxembourg, Ireland and Malta.

A few years ago, the country’s defense minister even proposed doing away with “national defense” altogether so that the army could concentrate on challenges such as natural disaster relief and combatting cyber threats. The idea was ultimately rejected, but that it was proposed at all — by the person who oversees the military no less — illustrates how seriously Austria takes its security needs.

Over the past year, the government has pledged to increase defense spending, yet those plans are still well below what the country would be obligated to pay were it in NATO.

Put simply, Austria is freeloading on its neighbors and the United States and will continue to do so until it’s pressured to change course.

Reality check

That’s why it needs more straight talk from people like Selmayr, not less.

A few weeks before his “blood money” remarks, the diplomat told a Vienna newspaper that “the European army is NATO,” noting that the accession of Sweden and Finland to the alliance would leave only Austria and a few small island states outside the tent.

Austria’s neutrality and geographic good fortune have led it to spend next to nothing on defense | Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images

The reality check dashed Austria’s hope that it could avoid paying its share for EU defense by waiting for Brussels to create its own force.

Even so, rhetoric alone is not going to convince Austria to shift course. Nearly 80 percent of Austrians support neutrality because it’s so comfortable. The EU and the U.S. need to make it uncomfortable.

At the moment, most Austrians only see the upsides to neutrality; yet that’s only because the West has refused to impose any costs on the country for freeriding. That needs to change.

Critics of a more aggressive approach towards Vienna argue that it will only harden the population’s resolve to sustain neutrality and bolster the far right. That may be true in the short term, but the history of foreign pressure on Austria, especially from Washington — be it the isolation it faced during the Waldheim affair or the push to compensate slave laborers from the war — shows that the interventions ultimately work.

If forced to choose between remaining in the Western fold or facing isolation, Austrians will always chose the former.

Though almost no Austrian security officials will say so publicly, few have any illusions about the necessity of a sea change. More than one-third acknowledge that the country’s neutrality is no longer credible, according to a study published this month by the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy. A further third say the country’s participation in the EU’s common foreign and security policy has a “strong influence” on the credibility of its neutrality claim (presumably not in a good way).

And nearly 60 percent say the country needs to improve its interoperability with NATO in order to fight alongside its EU allies in the event of an armed conflict.

The problem is that no one is forcing them.

If Austria’s partners continue to avoid a confrontation, the country is likely to continue its slide towards Orbánism.

The Freedom Party, which wants to suspend EU aid for Ukraine and lift sanctions against Russia, leads the polls by a widening margin with just a year until the next national election. With neighboring Slovakia on a similar trajectory, Russian President Vladimir Putin may soon have a major foothold in the heart of the EU.

So far, the EU and Washington have been silent on the Freedom Party’s worrying rise, counting on Austrians to snap out of it.

Barring foreign pressure, they won’t. Why would they? With its populist prescriptions and beer hall rhetoric, the Freedom Party encourages Austrians to see themselves as what they most want to be: victims.

Or as Herr Karl famously put it: “Nothing that they accused us of was true.”

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Matthew Karnitschnig

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September 14, 2023
Unbelievable facts

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September 9, 2023
Cuba arrests 17 for luring young men to fight for Russia

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Cuban authorities said they arrested 17 people in connection to a human-trafficking ring that allegedly coaxed young Cuban men to fight for Russia against Ukraine.

Earlier this week, the Cuban foreign ministry exposed a Russian trafficking operation used to entice Cubans into the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. Cuba condemned the recruitment racket and the interior ministry said authorities were working to “neutralize and dismantle” the network.

On Thursday evening, César Rodríguez, a colonel with Cuba’s interior ministry, said 17 people had been arrested, including the “internal organizer” of the ring, reported Reuters.

Rodriguez said the group leader relied on two people living on the island to recruit Cubans to fight for hire on behalf of Russia, but did not name any of the suspects.

Those involved in the network risk up to 30 years in prison, a life sentence or the death penalty, according to prosecutor Jose Luis Reyes, depending on the severity of the crimes.

Russia and Cuba share a history of communism and have historically been allies. In July, Cuba came under fire after the country vehemently opposed certain wording condemning Russia in a joint EU-Latin America statement on Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has been scrambling for new military recruits as its full-scale invasion of Ukraine stalls on multiple fronts. It raised the military draft age to 30 years in July.

On Monday, Cuba denounced the trafficking ring, underlining that the country is “not part of the war conflict in Ukraine,” and that it does not want to look “complicit in these actions.”

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Claudia Chiappa

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September 7, 2023
Cuba exposes Russian human trafficking ring for military recruitment

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The Cuban government has exposed a Russian trafficking operation used to lure Cubans into the war against Ukraine, Cuban authorities announced Monday.

“The Ministry of the Interior has detected and is working to neutralize and dismantle a human trafficking network operating from Russia to incorporate Cuban citizens living there, and even some from Cuba, into the military forces participating in war operations in Ukraine,” the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Monday.

The authorities are taking legal actions against the traffickers, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday.

Cuba condemned the recruitment racket, underlining that the country is “not part of the war conflict in Ukraine,” and that it does not want to look “complicit in these actions.”

Russia and Cuba share a history of communism and have historically been allies. In July, Cuba came under fire for allegedly taking orders from Russia, after the country vehemently opposed certain wording condemning Russia in a joint EU-Latin American statement on Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has been scrambling for new military recruits, raising the military draft age to 30 years in July.

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Laura Hülsemann

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September 5, 2023
Rome: As hot as always

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A look at how ancient Romans coped with hot weather and how global warming has affected modern-day culture.

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August 26, 2023
What Elon Musk Learned from Napoleon About Leadership | Entrepreneur

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Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed history buff.

“He likes military history,” Walter Isaacson, the author of a much-anticipated Musk biography, told Axios. “He believes there are lessons that apply to corporate life.”

One of his inspirations was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French military genius who rose to power during the French Revolution and became Emperor of France.

Isaacson points to one leadership strategy Musk learned from reading about Bonaparte.

“He believes that wherever Napoleon was, that’s where his armies would do best. So he liked to show up late at night on the assembly lines at Tesla and SpaceX,” Isaacson said.

Related: ‘We Can All Agree Elon Isn’t Serious’: Mark Zuckerberg Slams Elon Musk as Feud Continues

Sharing the battlefield

For example, while engineers were building a Starship booster at the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, Musk hung around the area for an hour, observing.

“If they see their general on the battlefield, they will be more motivated,” Musk told Isaacson.

This may also explain why Musk spends so much time in the ‘X’ offices. According to an article in the BBC, Musk has installed beds in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters so that he can sleep there.

According to employee Dolly Singh, Musk slept on the office floor at SpaceX.

“Elon wants to live in a world where he works 80 hours a week,” she said. “It’s OK for him to say, ‘I expect you to work as hard as me,’ because he’s not phoning it in from the beach, he’s sleeping in a sleeping bag on the factory floor.”

About the new biography

The intimate, new biography entitled Elon Musk will drop on September 12. Isaacson, who also wrote bestselling biographies of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci, spent two years shadowing Musk. He was given unprecedented access, attending meetings with him and joining him for walks around his factories. He also spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries.

About the cage match

Oh, and speaking of Musk’s adversaries, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is undoubtedly one, as evidenced by all the talk about a cage match between the two billionaires.

But Isaacson told Axios he thinks talk of Zuckerberg fighting Musk in a cage match “is completely ridiculous.”

A few days ago, he shared a screenshot of a text exchange between Musk and Zuckerberg, making the fight seem like it won’t happen anytime soon.

I got this text message from Elon Musk at 4:44am CT showing a screenshot of some text messages in which he tells Mark Zuckerberg they should fight this Monday at Zuckerberg’s home in Palo Alto. pic.twitter.com/krgRsH5P5G

— Walter Isaacson (@WalterIsaacson) August 13, 2023

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Jonathan Small

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August 15, 2023
China’s oldest water pipes were a communal effort

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Newswise — A system of ancient ceramic water pipes, the oldest ever unearthed in China, shows that neolithic people were capable of complex engineering feats without the need for a centralised state authority, finds a new study by UCL researchers.

In a study published in Nature Water, the archaeological team describe a network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches at the Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai dating back 4,000 years to a time known as the Longshan period. The network shows cooperation amongst the community to build and maintain the drainage system, though no evidence of a centralised power or authority.

Dr Yijie Zhuang (UCL Institute of Archaeology), senior and corresponding author on the paper, said: “The discovery of this ceramic water pipe network is remarkable because the people of Pingliangtai were able to build and maintain this advanced water management system with stone age tools and without the organisation of a central power structure. This system would have required a significant level of community-wide planning and coordination, and it was all done communally.”

The ceramic water pipes make up a drainage system which is the oldest complete system ever discovered in China. Made by interconnecting individual segments, the water pipes run along roads and walls to divert rainwater and show an advanced level of central planning at the neolithic site.

What’s surprising to researchers is that the settlement of Pingliangtai shows little evidence of social hierarchy. Its houses were uniformly small and show no signs of social stratification or significant inequality amongst the population. Excavations at the town’s cemetery likewise found no evidence of a social hierarchy in burials, a marked difference from excavations at other nearby towns of the same era.

But, despite the apparent lack of a centralised authority, the town’s population came together and undertook the careful coordination needed to produce the ceramic pipes, plan their layout, install and maintain them, a project which likely took a great deal of effort from much of the community.

The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralised state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organisation and resources to build a complex water management system. While other ancient societies with advanced water systems tended to have a stronger, more centralised governance, or even despotism, Pingliangtai demonstrates that was not always needed, and more egalitarian and communal societies were capable of these kinds of engineering feats as well.

Co-author Dr Hai Zhang of Peking University said: “Pingliangtai is an extraordinary site. The network of water pipes shows an advanced understanding of engineering and hydrology that was previously only thought possible in more hierarchical societies.”

Pingliangtai is located in what is now the Huaiyang District of Zhoukou City in central China. During neolithic times, the town was home to about 500 people with protective earthen walls and a surrounding moat. Situated on the Upper Huai River Plain on the vast Huanghuaihai Plain, the area’s climate 4,000 years ago was marked by big seasonal climate shifts, where summer monsoons would commonly dump half a metre of rain on the region monthly.

Managing these deluges was important to prevent floodwaters from overwhelming the region’s communities. To help mitigate the excessive rainwater during the rainy seasons, the people of Pingliangtai built and operated a two-tier drainage system that was unlike any other seen at the time. They built simple but coordinated lines of drainage ditches that ran parallel to their rows of houses in order to divert water from the residential area to a series of ceramic water pipes that carried the water into the surrounding moat, and away from the village.

These ceramic water pipes represented an advanced level of technology for the time. While there was some variety in decoration and styles, each pipe segment was about 20 to 30 centimetres in diameter and about 30 to 40 centimetres long. Numerous segments were slotted into each other to transport water over long distances.

Researchers cannot say specifically how the people of Pingliangtai organised and divided the labour amongst themselves to build and maintain this type of infrastructure. This kind of communal coordination would also have been necessary to build the earthen walls and moat surrounding the village as well.

The Pingliangtai drainage system is unique from water systems elsewhere in the world at the time. Its purpose to drain rain and flood water from monsoons differs from other neolithic systems in the world, many of which were used for sewerage water drainage or other purposes.

Funding was provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Newton Advanced Fellowship of the British Academy.

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University College London

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August 14, 2023
Mr. Not-So-Brightside. The Killers booed in Georgia for bringing Russian fan onstage

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American rock band The Killers apologized after singer Brandon Flowers invited a Russian fan onstage at a concert in Georgia.

At a performance on Tuesday at the Black Sea Arena in Batumi, Flowers brought the fan onstage to play drums on the song “For Reasons Unknown.”

Georgia is a former Soviet state and a fifth of its territory is still occupied by Russia, which invaded in 2008.

In videos circulating on social media, Flowers asked the audience: “We don’t know the etiquette of this land but this guy’s a Russian. You okay with a Russian coming up here?”

Fans responded with a mixture of boos and applause.

Part of the audience left concert of @thekillers at the Black Sea Arena in Georgia in protest after amid booing the group’s frontman who invited a Russian drummer to the stage and said everyone are “brothers and sisters” pic.twitter.com/mhtklWIOKf

— Formula NEWS | English (@FormulaGe) August 15, 2023

Flowers attempted to placate the audience by saying: “You can’t recognize if someone’s your brother? He’s not your brother? … We all separate on the borders of our countries … Am I not your brother, being from America?

“Tonight, I want us to celebrate that we are here together and I don’t want it to turn ugly. And I see you as my brothers and my sisters,” Flowers added. Some concertgoers left the arena in protest, the Guardian reported.

The Killers later apologized on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It was never our intention to offend anyone!” the band wrote, adding that they regularly invite people on stage at their shows and “it seemed from the stage that the initial response from the crowd indicated that they were okay with tonight’s audience participation member coming onstage with us.”

Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Relations between the two nations deteriorated in the following years, with the election of a pro-Western government in Georgia in 2003 and Russia’s invasion in 2008, during which Moscow occupied northern Georgia.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine — which has caused an influx of Russians to Georgia and boosted its economy — the Georgian government has refused to participate in Western sanctions against the Kremlin.

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Laura Hülsemann

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August 11, 2023
In Our Shoes: How Women of Color Are Stylizing a More Liberated Future

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Women of color have long forged pathways of defiance and liberation through a legacy of serving lewks. Fashion — even at the highest and most superficial echelons — is inherently political and, when executed with the intention, culturally transformative.

We witnessed this viscerally throughout the 20th century, with Black women dressing in their Sunday best to juxtapose the ignorant characterization of Black people as being unclean, impoverished, and uneducated. This paradox was on full display during moments of protest that turned violent. Civil rights strategists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Dr. Dorothy Height understood that the stark visuals of seeing well-dressed Black women in skirts and pantyhose brutally beaten with water hoses and police canines would be a powerful alarm for the American psyche. They were right. These deliberate sartorial choices laid the foundation for enticing white America’s attention, sympathy, and ultimately support to condemn the oppressive state of Jim Crow.

“Then and now, women of color have used threads to fashion their resistance.”

Nearly 60 years later, women of color have assumed these same tactics — creating intentional moments of discomfort and disruption to direct attention to the realities of ongoing injustice.

There is a remarkable link between some of the most significant Black and Brown social justice movements, cultural shifts, and empowerment campaigns, and the aesthetic choices that were adopted. Fashion in itself is a tool of disruption — articulating taste, cultural agency, and, at times, political dissonance. Our style serves as a universal language. Then and now, women of color have used threads to fashion their resistance amidst invisibility, intolerability, and injustice.

Back in 2019, we witnessed “The Squad” walk through the halls of Congress dressed in all white for President Trump’s State of the Union. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib deliberately chose stark white ensembles as a reference to the suffragist movement of the 1920s. But there was something acutely powerful seeing Black and Brown women stylized in all-white power suits and dresses, in a sea of mostly white men — it called out the lack of representation in Congress and referenced how women of color were not invited to participate in the suffragist movement or subsequent women’s movements. Even in the halls of Congress, women of color are forced to contend with America’s devaluing of their existence. But what AOC and her squad offered was a style guide for ongoing disruption.

Now, a few years later — as we engage in discourse around bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and the lack of protection of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people — women across the country continue to make bold statements with their attire: confronting societal expectations, demanding acknowledgement of our existence, and challenging practices of systemic equity.

This year, the stylization of cultural dissonance is taking place from the halls of Congress to the runways of New York Fashion Week to the streets of our hometowns. Back in May, in response to the questionable choice to honor Karl Lagerfeld (a known misogynist with harmful ideals of beauty) at the Met Gala, a few guests offered bold rebuttals. Actresses Viola Davis and Quannah Chasinghorse both chose to wear pink gowns. According to fashion writer Patrick Mauriès’s book “The World According to Karl,” Lagerfeld once said, “Think pink. But don’t wear it.” Davis’s extravagant, feathered, hot pink dress seemed to be a literal and figurative shading of the designer, and she called on a decades-long tradition of Black women asserting their power and refashioning ideas of beauty through the natural state of our hair.

Chasinghorse sported a more subtle pink shade than Davis, choosing a subdued powder pink dress. But like Davis, she styled her hair and makeup with nods to her heritage, inspired by her Han and Lakota Indigenous traditions. The look challenged the often siloed and silenced visibility of Indigenous women that has instigated the Missing and Murdered and Indigenous Women movement, which seeks to elevate the staggering statistics of Indigenous women who are silently abused and killed. These stylized choices offered autonomy and agency in spaces that have been reluctant, if not refused, to offer such power to women of color. In a cultural arena historically unconcerned with our stories, Chasinghorse and Davis unapologetically took up space.

If there is anything that the rise of the Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements have taught us in the past few years, it is that “fear of the other,” and protection of power predicated on dehumanization, is at the core of the American social fabric; woven together by policy, social politics, and language. Perhaps there is power in examining and renegotiating the ways in which we have literally and figuratively fashioned our national paradigms, cultural practices, and misguided policies to disenfranchise, disempower, and disregard the voices and humanity of women of color and the communities they represent.

“I challenge us to assume a new aesthetic of equity, one that becomes a uniform we all try on this year.”

We can all agree that the summer of 2023 hasn’t just been one of the hottest recorded in the Earth’s history, but one of the most politically and thus socially hellish. We watched the undermining of our humanity from all sides. The Supreme Court has voted to deconstruct and, in some cases, abolish abortion rights, affirmative action, and debt relief, transforming a generation and deepening the already painful wounds of entrenched racial oppression. It was particularly demoralizing to watch affirmative action get overturned a few days before we celebrated the most recent federal holiday, Juneteenth. While we prepared to honor a public declaration of freedom for Black America and thus, America, we witnessed the ongoing contradiction of the American dream.

As I prepared for my weekend celebrations in Austin, TX, I found myself oscillating between jubilee, joy, and jadedness. I’d been invited to speak at a Juneteenth Summit at the Lyndon B. Johnson School at the University of Texas in partnership with the Emancipator to discuss what Black freedom means today. Aesthetics, like writing, has always been a way to express my emotional state and my current posture in the world, and I knew my outfit choice would need to reflect my state of anger. While the idea of Juneteenth evokes celebration, I was overcome with righteous indignation, and thus chose to select an all-black ensemble that articulated militancy and rage. I put on a somewhat risqué black blazer with peek-a-boo moments throughout and black cargo pants. The monochromatic look was interrupted only by the intentional color accents of a red lip (Mac’s “Feel So Good” matte, of course) and lace-up green heels — my not-so-subtle nod to Black liberation (or Pan African flag) colors. And adorning my blazer were lapel pins highlighting the faces of some of my inspirations: James Baldwin and Rosa Parks.

Image source: Alyssa Vidales

Of course, I stood out from the suits and Austin business casual attire that filled the auditorium. It called into question the politics of appropriateness in an academic institution and a grand hall named after Lyndon B. Johnson. There was a cyclical operation at play that day. My outfit articulated my emotional state and stylized my intellectual posture before I ever spoke a word on stage; simultaneously, I felt emboldened to speak unfiltered, unapologetic, and unabashed.

With the help of the tasseled blazer and vintage lapel pins, I fashioned these words to the audience: “We are less than three years removed from the so-called racial reckoning of 2020, and yet companies and institutions are saying, ‘I thought we already did that work? We wrote that check, I did that one march, we did that workshop.’ But we are talking about 400 plus years of harm; 400 plus years of creating systems that were predicated on the understanding of who would be valued as human and who would not. So, I think it’s going to take a bit longer than three years, or even sixty years, and it’s going to take a bit more than policy. It’s going to take sustained investment and a pervasive shift in our cultural paradigm.”

And, perhaps, it will take stylizing new tactics of resistance. So, my challenge to us all is to reflect on these and other stories of resistance to inspire, inform, and set intentions for the ways we can continue to disrupt spaces and agitate the system. I challenge us to assume a new aesthetic of equity, one that becomes a uniform we all try on this year.

Virginia Cumberbatch is racial justice educator, writer, creative activist, and the CEO/Co-Founder of Rosa Rebellion, a production company for creative activism by and for women of color. She splits her time between her hometown of Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York. When she’s not elevating the voices of women of color, you can catch her styling outfits with her latest vintage finds and the designer shoes she found on sale at Nordstrom Rack. She’s a graduate of Williams College and The University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School and the author of “As We Saw It: The Story of Integration at UT.”

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August 8, 2023
Sex, lies and stolen sunglasses: The 11 most embarrassing political resignations

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It’s not every day that a pair of sunglasses causes your downfall. But that’s what happened to Bjørnar Moxnes, a Norwegian left-wing party leader who was caught on camera stealing a pair of luxury sunglasses from Oslo airport.

“A lot of people have asked me how I could do something so stupid. I’ve asked myself that many times in recent weeks. I don’t have an adequate explanation,” Moxnes wrote on Facebook.

In honor of Moxnes’ fall from grace, POLITICO brings you some of the most embarrassing resignations in European politics (and there were a lot to choose from). From sex scandals to misused government funds to petty theft, here are 11 of the most shameful examples with a facepalm ranking from 1 (yikes, that’s embarrassing) to 5 (dear lord, what have you done?).

Tractor Porn

Facepalm rating:

UK Conservative MP Neil Parish resigned after being caught watching porn in the House of Commons chamber in 2022. Parish claimed it was a “moment of madness” and said he chanced upon the offending adult content accidentally while Googling tractors, only to later admit that he did then look at actual porn (it’s unclear if the porn involved tractors).

Parish admitted in an interview that his wife always found him “oversexed.” He added that she would tell him “I’ll get the scissors to you if you don’t behave yourself. Snippety, snip” if he got “a little too amorous.” A classic case of TMI.

Cuban cigars and a private jet

Facepalm rating:

When Haiti was hit by an earthquake in 2010, French Development Minister Alain Joyandet was ready to help. To get to an international aid conference held in Martinique, Joyandet hired a private jet worth a cool €116,500 — not a great look. He resigned after the scandal hit the headlines.

Joyandet was not the only minister found to have wasted taxpayer money under former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Junior minister Christan Blanc came under fire for buying €12,000 worth of Cuban cigars using public cash. Alas, Blanc couldn’t remember who had smoked them all. “I smoke two a day … that’s the maximum,” he said. Who consumed the remaining thousands of euros worth of cigars? he was asked. “I don’t know.”

Tax hypocrisy

Facepalm rating:

Former French Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac used to be a strong advocate against overseas tax havens. You’ll never guess what he was later found guilty of. It was tax fraud! Of course it was. Cahuzac’s illegal fiscal activities were first made public in a 2012 investigation by news site Mediapart, which reported he had failed to declare money kept in a Swiss bank account for close to 20 years. Oops! The Panama Papers confirmed that Cahuzac also owned a company in the Seychelles. He was sentenced to two years in prison for money laundering and tax fraud.

There was some good news that came out of this case, the creation of an ethics body, the Haute Autorité de la Transparence pour la Vie Publique.

The City of Light — and graphic sex messages

Facepalm rating:

The 2020 race to be mayor of Paris was riddled with internal feuds and party rivalry. And then Benjamin Griveaux — the La République En Marche candidate and one of Emmanuel Macron’s biggest supporters — made everyone forget all about it as he was hit with allegations that he sent graphic videos to an unidentified woman. Screenshots of sexually explicit messages attributed to Griveaux — married with three children — went viral, prompting the candidate to step down. “I don’t want to expose myself and my family anymore when any sort of attack is allowed, it goes too far,” Griveaux said in a statement, perhaps ill-advisedly using the word “expose.” The sexually explicit content was published on a blog registered by Russian artist and activist Piotr Pavlenski. In an added twist, one of those who spread the graphic videos widely on social media was MP Joachim Son-Forget, who in 2021 had his Twitter account suspended for impersonating Donald Trump!

From a fake Russian with love

Facepalm rating:

Austrian Deputy Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache thought he was going on a nice vacation in Ibiza, where he met a woman claiming to be a wealthy Russian citizen who said she wanted to invest in Austria. The woman offered to buy a 50 percent stake in Austria’s Kronen-Zeitung newspaper and switch its news line to push the agenda of Strache’s far-right Freedom Party. In turn, Strache said he could award her public contracts. Alas for Strache, she was not a wealthy Russian at all. He later tried to justify his actions by saying it was “a drunken night” and he was in whatever “intimate vacation mood” is!

The ensuing scandal — dubbed “Ibiza-gate” — brought down Sebastian Kurz’s government. To be fair to Strache, let those of us who haven’t tried to trade public contracts for party donations from a woman we believed to be the wealthy niece of a Russian oligarch cast the first stone.

25 naked men and a whole lot of drugs

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Hungarian MEP József Szájer had one of the wildest exits from office in recent memory. A senior member of the Fidesz party, known for its conservative views and its anti-LGBTQ stance, Szájer was caught attending a lockdown-busting party in Brussels in 2020. Police found 25 naked men at the gathering, according to Belgian media reports, and a passerby reported seeing a man fleeing along the gutter, leading the police to apprehend Szájer and find narcotics in his backpack, prosecutors said. Viktor Orbán called the deed “unacceptable and indefensible” and Szájer quit the party and his post in Brussels. For some reason, there is not a statue of Szájer in Brussels.

Skin in the game

Facepalm rating:

Five years before Moxnes and the Hugo Boss sunglasses, regional head of Madrid Cristina Cifuentes made headlines when old footage circulated showing her allegedly stealing anti-aging cream. The incident was an “involuntary error,” said Cifuentes, who was released after paying for the €40 cream. But as the shoplifting scandal broke on the tail of a news site accusing her of lying about her graduate degree, Cifuentes stepped down from her role.

Grabbing a bite to eat

Facepalm rating:

In yet another shoplifting scandal, a Slovenian MP lost his job after stealing a sandwich from a shop in Ljubljana. Darij Krajcic reportedly told his colleagues he became annoyed when supermarket employees ignored him and decided to conduct what he called a “social experiment” to test the shop’s security. While the theft went unnoticed, pressure from colleagues led to his resignation — and to him paying back the cost of the sandwich.

EU mass exodus

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Of all the embarrassing resignations on this list, this is the one with the most people involved. In 1999, the entire European Commission led by Jacques Santer resigned after a scathing committee report found it guilty of “corruption, misuse of power and fraud.” The 140-page report by independent experts looked at charges of widespread fraud, nepotism, and corruption in the Commission. One of the commissioners at the center of the storm, former French Prime Minister Edith Cresson, was heavily criticized for hiring friends and relatives, including her local dentist, to well-paid positions. The dentist, René Berthelot, did not get his teeth into the adviser role he was given, and produced only a 24-page document during his 18-month stint working for the EU.

Got any snus?

Facepalm rating:

John Dalli, the EU commissioner for health, resigned in 2012 after an anti-fraud inquiry linked him to an attempt to influence tobacco legislation. A Dalli aide called Silvio Zammit was accused of trying to obtain a whopping €60 million from a tobacco company called Swedish Match to reverse an EU ban on snus, a type of smokeless tobacco that can make the user look like they are gargling bin juice. Dalli claimed he was dismissed by the Commission chief at the time, José Manuel Barroso, and took him to court. In 2019, the EU’s General Court rejected Dalli’s claim for compensation for damages he claims he suffered as a result of losing his job.

The PM, the spy services, his wife and his lover

Facepalm rating:

In 2013, Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas resigned after his chief of staff, Jana Nagyova, was charged with corruption and abuse of power. Among the crimes, Nagyova was accused of bribing former MPs, but what made headlines was her illegal use of the secret service. It turns out that Nagyova, who was having an affair with Necas at the time, allegedly used military intelligence to spy on the prime minister’s wife. Needless to say, this particular resignation was followed by a divorce. But it wasn’t long before Necas and Nagyova had a happy ending, getting married soon after.

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Claudia Chiappa

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July 24, 2023
Why Latin America still won’t condemn Putin’s war in Ukraine

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The ghosts of colonial history returned to haunt European and Latin American leaders at their summit in Brussels.

For the guests, four hundred years of European colonial rule, economic exploitation and slavery was front of mind. For the hosts, it was Russia’s war on Ukraine in the here and now.

The divergence in views was so profound that the two sides struggled to align their thinking at their first summit in eight years — especially to find words to condemn Russia’s war of aggression in their closing communiqué.

That made the two-day gathering frustrating for all concerned — but especially for leaders of the EU’s newest member states from Eastern Europe, which have their own bitter memories of Soviet imperial rule and Russian aggression.

“It is actually a war of colonization,” Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš said of the 16-month-old Ukraine conflict.

“There is a former colonizer, Russia, and a former colony, Ukraine. And the former overlord is trying to take back their one-time possession. I think that many countries around the world can relate to that.”

Despite the pre-summit rhetoric highlighting the two continents’ shared values, EU leaders struggled to persuade the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) — which includes traditional allies of Moscow such as Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela — to clearly condemn Russia’s war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — a regular guest in Brussels — wasn’t invited this time. Wrangling over the wording in their joint declaration delayed the end of the meeting by hours as leaders sought to bridge the gaps. In the end, only Nicaragua dissented.

“No one intends to lecture anyone,” said European Council President Charles Michel, seeking to placate his guests. “This is not how it works, we have a lot of respect for those countries, for the traditions, for the culture, and the idea is always to engage in a spirit of mutual respect.”

Four hundred years

Spain, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, has its eyes on Latin America and likes to emphasize the close cultural and linguistic ties between the two.

But those links hark back to Spain — and Europe’s — colonial past. The Spanish kingdom colonized much of Latin America starting in 1493 and, over the next 400 years, acquired vast wealth by exploiting its lands and people. The European slave trade also forcibly transported millions of Africans into slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.

While European leaders hoped to ease geopolitical tensions, their Latin American counterparts came to the table with a clear message: Defining relations today means addressing and rectifying past injustices — especially as the EU looks once again to the resource-rich region, this time to power its green transition.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’ Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves | Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP via Getty Images

The prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — a small island state that heads up the 33-nation group — called for talks on economic reparations for colonization and enslavement.

“Resources from the slave trade and from slavery helped to fuel the industrial revolution that has laid the basis for a lot of the wealth within Western Europe,” Ralph Gonsalves told a small group of reporters on Tuesday.

This was part of his argument for a plan to “to repair the historical legacies of underdevelopment resulting from native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies,” as he said on Monday ahead of the summit.

Trade tensions

Trade talks between the EU and Mercosur — which groups four of Latin America’s big economies — also reflected the broader tensions over what it really means for Europe to start afresh in a relationship of equals.

Beyond a cursory mention of a Mercosur deal in the final statement, talks with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay were kept on the sidelines despite previous hopes that the summit could inject new energy into negotiations on wrapping up a trade deal.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen did, however, say after the summit that “our ambition is to … conclude [at] the latest by the end of this year.”

Industry and civil society have fundamentally different interpretations around how much — or how little — the deal would help put the countries on equal footing with their European partners.

For businesses, the deal needs to happen to ensure the region remains on the EU’s political and economic map.

“For us, the [trade] agreements are important. We need stability and don’t want to be at the mercy of political changes,” said Luisa Santos of the industry lobby group BusinessEurope.

But NGOs don’t see it that way. “Any proposal that leaves the region as a mere provider of natural resources for the benefit of the one percent in the region, big corporations and rich countries is business as usual,” said Hernán Saenz from the NGO Oxfam.

Resource craze

Sealing the Mercosur deal has gained importance for the EU, which is banking on the resource-rich region to power the wind turbines and electric vehicles it needs to meet its climate targets.

Brazil is the largest exporter of strategic raw materials to the EU by volume, while the “lithium triangle” spanning Chile, Argentina and Bolivia hosts about half of the world’s lithium reserves. As part of the summit, Brussels and Chile signed a new memorandum of understanding on raw materials.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (left) and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (right) in Brussels | Dati Bendo/EC

But the EU’s new appetite for those metals and minerals evoques those dark memories of Spanish conquistadors who set out to dominate large parts of South America — in the name of god, glory and, not least, gold, fueling an economic boom back home while stripping Latin America of its riches.

While von der Leyen on Monday announced Brussels will pump over €45 billion into the region through its Global Gateway program — for infrastructure projects that, at least in part, will also benefit the EU’s private sector — Europe is coming late to the party in a region where China has already expanded its influence.

And raw materials partnerships today, the region’s countries emphasized, cannot be based on a model where resource-rich countries mine the valuable resources — often under poor environmental and working conditions — only for them to be shipped abroad for processing and manufacturing, making them reliant on imports for finished products.

“This was the first time that we had the opportunity to discuss in such clear terms a mechanism that would take us away from extractivism in Latin America,” Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández said after the summit.

“It took five centuries, but we managed it — I’m saying that half in jest, but we have at last succeeded.”

Camille Gijs and Barbara Moens contributed reporting.

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July 13, 2023
Scoop! Why Ben from Ben & Jerry’s blames America for war in Ukraine

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Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.

At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.

“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”

“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”

It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.

Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.

Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”

In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”

^{Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images}

I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.

It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.

Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?

Masters of war

Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.

He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.

When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.

“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”

Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.

It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”

A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.

“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.

“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.

Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.

“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.

Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.

“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”

Ice-cold activism

Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.

The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.

Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”

In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.

In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990s and they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.

Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).

In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.

It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)

^{Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images}

Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.

The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.

More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.

After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.” Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.

Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.

Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.

The world according to Ben

For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”

The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”

Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.

“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”

It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”

The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”

^{Cohen and Greenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images}

When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”

“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”

I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.

“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”

The Grayzone

I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.

Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”

Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.

When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)

He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.

He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”

Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”

‘Come to Ukraine’

The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.

A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.

But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”

“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.

Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”

What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.

“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”

^{Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s}

His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.

“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”

Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”

“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”

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Nicolas Camut

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July 13, 2023
Giant stone artefacts found on rare Ice Age site in Kent

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Newswise — Researchers at the UCL Institute of Archaeology have discovered some of the largest early prehistoric stone tools in Britain.

The excavations, which took place in Kent and were commissioned in advance of development of the Maritime Academy School in Frindsbury, revealed prehistoric artefacts in deep Ice Age sediments preserved on a hillside above the Medway Valley.

The researchers, from UCL Archaeology South-East, discovered 800 stone artefacts thought to be over 300,000 years old, buried in sediments which filled a sinkhole and ancient river channel, outlined in their research, published in Internet Archaeology.

Amongst the unearthed artefacts were two extremely large flint knives described as “giant handaxes”. Handaxes are stone artefacts which have been chipped, or “knapped,” on both sides to produce a symmetrical shape with a long cutting edge. Researchers believe this type of tool was usually held in the hand and may have been used for butchering animals and cutting meat. The two largest handaxes found at the Maritime site have a distinctive shape with a long and finely worked pointed tip, and a much thicker base.

Senior Archaeologist Letty Ingrey (UCL Institute of Archaeology), said: “We describe these tools as ‘giants’ when they are over 22cm long and we have two in this size range. The biggest, a colossal 29.5cm in length, is one of the longest ever found in Britain. ‘Giant handaxes’ like this are usually found in the Thames and Medway regions and date from over 300,000 years ago.

“These handaxes are so big it’s difficult to imagine how they could have been easily held and used. Perhaps they fulfilled a less practical or more symbolic function than other tools, a clear demonstration of strength and skill. While right now, we aren’t sure why such large tools were being made, or which species of early human were making them, this site offers a chance to answer these exciting questions.”

The site is thought to date to a period in the early prehistory of Britain when Neanderthal people and their cultures were beginning to emerge and may even have shared the landscape with other early human species. The Medway Valley at this time would have been a wild landscape of wooded hills and river valleys, inhabited by red deer and horses, as well as less familiar mammals such as the now-extinct straight-tusked elephant and lion.

While archaeological finds of this age, including another spectacular ‘giant’ handaxe, have been found in the Medway Valley before, this is the first time they have been found as part of large-scale excavation, offering the opportunity to glean more insights into the lives of their makers.

Dr Matt Pope (UCL Institute of Archaeology), said: “The excavations at the Maritime Academy have given us an incredibly valuable opportunity to study how an entire Ice Age landscape developed over a quarter of a million years ago. A programme of scientific analysis, involving specialists from UCL and other UK institutions, will now help us to understand why the site was important to ancient people and how the stone artefacts, including the ‘giant handaxes’ helped them adapt to the challenges of Ice Age environments.”

The research team is now working on identifying and studying the recovered artefacts to better understand who created them and what they were used for.

Senior Archaeologist Giles Dawkes (UCL Institute of Archaeology) is leading work on a second significant find from the site – a Roman cemetery, dating to at least a quarter of a million years later than the Ice Age activity. The people buried here between the first and fourth centuries AD could have been the inhabitants of a suspected nearby villa that may have lain around 850 metres to the south.

The team found the remains of 25 individuals, 13 of which were cremated. Nine of the buried individuals were found with goods or personal items including bracelets, and four were interred in wooden coffins. Collections of pottery and animal bones found nearby likely relate to feasting rituals at the time of burial. Though Roman buildings and structures have been extensively excavated, cemeteries have historically been less of a focus for archaeologists and the discovery of this site offers potentially new insights into the burial customs and traditions of both the Romans who lived at the villa, and those in the nearby town of Rochester.

Jody Murphy, Director of Education at the Thinking Schools Academy Trust said: “We, at Maritime Academy and the Thinking Schools Academy Trust, feel very lucky to be a part of this phenomenal discovery. We take great pride in our connection to our local community and region, with much of our school identity linked to the history of Medway. We look forward to taking advantage of this unique opportunity to teach our young people about these finds, creating a lasting legacy for those who came before us.”

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University College London

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July 5, 2023
New Chinese Canadian Museum opens in Vancouver | Globalnews.ca
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When the Chinese Exclusion Act came into effect in 1923, it didn’t just effectively halt Chinese immigration to Canada — it extinguished the family lines of thousands of labourers already here.

Many were condemned to bachelorhood or cut off from loved ones in China, said Catherine Clement, curator of the inaugural exhibition for the Chinese Canadian Museum that opens to the public on Saturday in Vancouver’s Chinatown, on the 100th anniversary of the controversial law’s enactment.

“They just withered here,” Clement said. “They had no descendants left to tell their stories. Nobody even remember they existed … they broke while they were here.”

4:18
Chinatown Storytelling Centre set to open in Vancouver

Some ended up in mental health institutions, including Coquitlam’s Essondale Hospital, said Clement, calling them “the face of exclusion.”

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Now their stories are being told at the exhibition, “The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act.”

Executives at the Chinese Canadian Museum said they chose its opening date as a poignant reminder of a part of Canada’s history that has often been overlooked.

“I think many people felt that through their history lessons or through schooling, people never understood the full history,” said Grace Wong, the museum’s board chair.

“We take that as our mandate, that public education is so primary to what we should do. And part of that is to help tell that full history.”

There was a time in this country when people like me weren’t allowed to vote, much less hold office.

Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act — a racist piece of legislation that prevented those of Chinese descent from fully… pic.twitter.com/apQlejbaFR

— Mayor Ken Sim (@KenSimCity) June 30, 2023

The museum opens its permanent location in Chinatown’s historic Wing Sang Building after more than six years of planning, starting with then-premier John Horgan mandating the province’s Tourism, Arts and Culture Ministry to establish the institution.

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The society behind the museum was launched in 2020 after community consultations, and the physical location was found in 2022 after the province provided $27.5 million in funding.

An opening ceremony on Friday was attended by B.C. Premier David Eby and other officials. Eby praised Horgan for championing the museum as anti-Asian racism spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eby, who also highlighted the recent election of Olivia Chow as mayor of Toronto, called the Chinese Exclusion Act “the most racist piece of legislation ever passed in our parliament.”

3:37
Chinese Canadians reveal their experiences with racism

Museum CEO Melissa Karmen Lee described the institution as a startup, saying that the facility’s ultimate success will depend on how many visitors it can draw.

Lee said she hopes the museum can contribute to the revitalization of Chinatown and draw more foot traffic to the community.
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“We hope to have partners and shops and cultural institutions also supporting us in moving and coming to Chinatown,” she said. “We hope all that becomes a part of what it is to visit the Chinese Canadian Museum.”

Clement said the subject of the exclusion act, also known as the 1923 Canadian Immigration Act, first caught her interest when she spoke to Chinese Canadian war veterans for another exhibit.

“I would say, where were you born?” Clement said. “They would say Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary. And yet, they would pull out an immigration card, and almost all of them were dated 1924.

1:37
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“Many years later, I realized they were evidence of the exclusion act,” she said. “These are the guys who served in the war for Canada, and they were Canadian-born, and yet they have an immigration card. They were the only community in Canada where children were given an immigration card, who were Canadian born.”

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Clement compiled the documents in the Paper Trail exhibit mainly through private collections and official records from institutions such as psychiatric hospitals.

Lee said the museum is also featuring a second exhibit for its opening, focused on Chinese migration to Canada from as early as 1788.

The key, she said, is to present a diversity of voices within Chinese Canadian history.

“We have Chinese people immigrating to Canada not only from China, but also from Vietnam, from Cambodia, from South Africa, from Mauritius,” Lee said. “So, we want to tell all of these stories when we talk about our exhibitions at the Chinese Canadian Museum.”

Ultimately, Wong said the museum belongs to all Canadians regardless of ethnic or cultural background. She said she hopes people from all parts of the community will take advantage of the new facility to learn more about the challenges people faced in striving for a multicultural Canada.

“It is for all of us because the Chinese Canadian history is fundamentally part of the full B.C. history,” she said. “It’s fundamentally part of the full Canadian history, and it’s a very key moment for all of us.”
&copy 2023 The Canadian Press

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June 30, 2023
Find the latest expert commentary on the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions here

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This Thursday, the United States Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful. Now on Friday, the Supreme Court decided to block the Biden administration’s student debt relief program and sided with a Christian web designer in Colorado who refuses to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings out of religious objections. Despite their limited federal elected power, Conservatives have racked up more huge wins in the great political battles of the early 21st century.

Newswise is your source for expert commentary. Below is a roundup of recent expert pitches concerning the United States Supreme Court.

Sociologists Available to Discuss Affirmative Action Ruling in College Admissions

– American Sociological Association (ASA)

Law and diversity experts react to Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision

– Tulane University

Three important takeaways from SCOTUS decision in Groff v. DeJoy

– University of Georgia

SCOTUS decision on race-based admission: experts can comment

– Indiana University

U law expert available to comment on Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

– University of Utah

Recent SCOTUS decision puts to rest extreme 2020 presidential election claims, confirms state judicial input on states’ election rules

– University of Georgia

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Newswise

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June 30, 2023
Brontë literary treasures on public display together for first time

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Newswise — ‘Becoming the Brontës’ offers visitors the unique opportunity to gain a rich insight into the origins of Yorkshire’s most famous literary family. The exhibition follows Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë on a chronological journey from childhood to the beginning of their literary careers and finally their lasting legacy as genre-defining authors.

Opening on Friday 30 June at the Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, the exhibition features an array of fascinating manuscripts, handwritten letters, personal sketches and more, together on public display for the first time.

‘Becoming the Brontës’ is co-curated by the British Library, the Brontë Parsonage Museum and the University of Leeds’ Brotherton Library. Many of the items on display come from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library – a unique literary collection that was saved for the nation in a campaign led by the Friends of the National Libraries and a consortium of libraries and writers’ houses including the organisations involved in this exhibition.

What’s on display

The exhibition features incredible items on display together for the first time including:

·        A rare, surviving notebook filled with over 30 of Emily’s poems, with annotations by Charlotte, including the handwritten line: “Never was better stuff penned”

·        First editions of ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Agnes Grey’ and ‘Shirley’, previously owned by the family’s faithful servant Martha Brown

·        Emily’s own annotated copy of the first Brontë book, ‘Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’, published under the sisters’ pen names to hide their gender

·        Eight miniature books, handwritten and crafted by Charlotte during childhood and adolescence, including two that are bound in packaging originally used for Epsom salts

·        A pencil sketch by ten-year-old Emily that shows a small hand reaching through a broken window, evoking the image of Cathy grasping Lockwood’s hand in ‘Wuthering Heights’

·        Letters from the sisters that reveal their frustration at errors in first editions of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes Grey’ and the challenges they faced together to get their work seen by publishers.

Sarah Prescott, Literary Archivist at the University of Leeds, said: “It’s such a privilege to host this exhibition here in Leeds, and to work closely with experts in the field at the British Library and the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The display features some of the most significant Brontë items to come to light, and it’s unlikely that they will be on public display together again in our lifetimes. These items give us intimate insight into the lives, hopes and ambitions of some of the most famous and well-loved writers in English literature.”

Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: “The Brontë Parsonage Museum is proud to have been part of the consortium that fought to save the Blavatnik Honresfield Library for the nation. Now, these wonderful manuscripts will be brought together again, offering unique insight into the intense collaboration and creativity that bound the Brontë children together, making clear their long apprenticeship as writers.”

Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Heritage Collection at the British Library, said: “The British Library is thrilled to have been part of the remarkable and unprecedented collaboration that led to these extraordinary works being preserved for the nation. Now visitors will have the unique opportunity to see these incredible items from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library on display together for the first time and gain an unprecedented insight into the Brontës’ evolution as writers.”

Masud Khokhar, University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, said: “It’s a pleasure to share this once-in-a-lifetime collection of literary treasures with the public in this free exhibition. Making collections accessible for the public good is at the heart of the University of Leeds Libraries vision. This unprecedented collaboration has brought together the collections and curatorial expertise of the Brotherton Library, the British Library and the Brontë Parsonage Museum to celebrate the literary lives and legacy of the Brontës and the saving of the Blavatnik Honresfield Library for the nation.

“This is an extraordinary collection of objects, beautifully displayed, and not to be missed.”

Becoming the Brontës is open to the public from Friday 30 June to Saturday 28 October

Tickets: Free, no booking required

Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00am-5.00pm

Location: Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, Parkinson Building of the University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9JT

Exhibition webpage

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University of Leeds

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June 29, 2023
Juneteenth: A platform for critical conversations about race and time to honor the struggle for justice and equality

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Kathryn Benjamin Golden, assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Delaware, is available to comment on stories about Juneteenth.

Golden says the holiday “can be used as a platform for critical conversations about race and the legacies of racial slavery, but also the legacies of Black people’s tremendous resistance across time. It is about an ongoing struggle but also honoring that continued movement to create real justice and equality in this country.”

She shared her thoughts in an article on UD’s news site.

“When we look at and listen to Black people’s histories and perspectives, we realize that no, independence doesn’t come on July 4. It only comes for some. It doesn’t come for all,” Golden said. “And so how can we really think about the true meaning of freedom? It means looking at the most oppressed and suppressed and marginalized of us and really listening to those historical and present voices and perspectives.”

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University of Delaware

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June 16, 2023
Pakistan: Don’t ask us to choose between the US and China

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Voiced by artificial intelligence.

Pakistan has enough problems — including escalating attacks by Taliban insurgents and a spiraling economic crisis — without the added headache of a new Cold War between China and the U.S.

In an interview with POLITICO, Pakistan’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar insisted Islamabad had no appetite to pick a side in the growing global rivalry between Washington and Beijing.

As a nuclear-armed heavyweight of 250 million people, Pakistan is one of the most closely watched front-line states in the contest for strategic influence in Asia. While Pakistan’s old Cold War partner Washington is increasingly turning its focus to cooperation with Islamabad’s arch-foe India, China has swooped in to extend its sway in Pakistan — particularly through giant infrastructure projects.

Khar insisted, however, that Islamabad was worried about the repercussions of an all-out rupture between the U.S. and China, which would present Pakistan with an unpalatably binary strategic choice. “We are highly threatened by this notion of splitting the world into two blocs,” Khar said on a visit to Brussels. “We are very concerned about this decoupling … Anything that splits the world further.”

She added: “We have a history of being in a close, collaborative mode with the U.S. We have no intention of leaving that. Pakistan also has the reality of being in a close, collaborative mode with China, and until China suddenly came to everyone’s threat perception, that was always the case.”

It’s clear why Pakistan still sees advantages to walking the strategic tightrope between the U.S. and China. Although U.S. officials have expressed frustration over Pakistan’s historic ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan — and have rowed back on military aid — Washington is still a significant military partner. Last year, the U.S. State Department approved the potential sale of $450 million worth of equipment to maintain Pakistan’s F-16 fighter jets.

Simultaneously, Beijing is pledging to deepen military cooperation with Pakistan — partly to outflank the common enemy in India — and is delivering frigates to the Pakistani navy. China is also building roads, railways, hospitals and energy networks in its western neighbor. While these Chinese investments have boosted the country’s economic development, there are also downsides to going all in with China, with Beijing’s critics arguing that Pakistan has become overly indebted and financially dependent on China.

Khar grabbed headlines in April when a leaked memo appeared in the Wall Street Journal in which she was cited as warning that Pakistan’s instinct to preserve its partnership with the U.S. would harm what she deemed the country’s “real strategic” partnership with China.

She declined to comment on that leak, but took a more bullish line on continued American power in her interview in Brussels, saying the U.S. was unnecessarily fearful and defensive about being toppled from its plinth of global leadership, which she argued remained vital in areas such as healthcare, technology, trade and combating climate change.

“I don’t think the leadership role is being contested, until they start making other people question it by being reactive,” she said. “I believe that the West underestimates the value of its ideals, soft power,” she added, stressing Washington’s role as the world’s standard setter. China biggest selling point for Pakistan, she explained, was an economic model for lifting a huge population out of poverty.

Leverage — and the lack of it — in Kabul

Khar’s sharpest criticism of U.S. policy centered on Afghanistan, where she said restrictions intended to hobble the Taliban were backfiring, causing a humanitarian and security crisis, pushing many Afghans to “criminal activities, narcotics strategy and smuggling.”

The Taliban in Kabul are widely seen as supporting an expanding terror campaign waged by the Pakistani Taliban | Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images

A weakened Afghanistan is causing increased security problems for Pakistan, and the Taliban in Kabul are widely seen as supporting an expanding terror campaign waged by the Pakistani Taliban. Ironically, given the long history of Pakistan’s engagement with the Afghan Taliban, Islamabad is finding it difficult to exercise its influence and secure Kabul’s help in reining in the latest insurgency wave.

When the Afghan Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2021, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan celebrated their victory against “[American] slavery” and spy chief Faiz Hameed made a visit to Kabul and cheerily predicted “everything will be O.K.” Khar, who took office last year, said Khan had reacted “rather immaturely” and argued her government always knew “the leverage was over-projected.”

While the violence has put Pakistan’s soldiers and police on the front line of the fight against the Taliban at home, Khar said Islamabad was taking a highly diplomatic approach in seeking to win round the Taliban in Afghanistan, pursuing political engagement and focusing on economic development — rather than strong-arm tactics.

“Threatening anyone normally gets you worse results than the ones you started with. Even when it is exceptionally difficult to engage at a point when you think your red lines have not been taken seriously, we will still try the route of engagement.”

She firmly rejected the idea that any other country — either the U.S. or China — could play a role in helping Pakistan defeat the Taliban with military deployments. “When it comes to boots on the ground, we would welcome no one,” she said.

Pakistan is seeking bailout cash from the International Monetary Fund as the economy is hammered by blazing inflation and collapsing reserves. When asked whether she reckoned Washington was holding back on supporting Pakistan, partly to test whether China would step up and play a bigger role in ensuring the country’s stability, Khar replied: “I would be very unhappy if that were the case.”

No to navies

When it came to Europe’s role in the Indo-Pacific region, she was wary of the naval dimensions of EU plans, an element favored by France. She was particularly hostile to any vision of an Indo-Pacific strategy that was dedicated to trying to contain Chinese power in tandem with working with India.

One of the leading fears of the U.S. has long been that China could use its investments in the port of Gwadar to build a naval foothold there, a move that would inflame tensions with India, and allow Beijing to project greater power in the Indian Ocean.

Khar said Europe should tread carefully in calibrating its plan for the region.

“I would be very concerned if it is exclusively or predominantly a military-based strategy, which will then confirm it is a containment strategy, it must not be a containment strategy,” she said of the EU’s Indo-Pacific agenda.

“[If it’s] a containment strategy of a certain country, which then courts a certain country that is a very belligerent neighbor to Pakistan, then instead of stabilizing the region, it is endangering the region.”

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Christian Oliver

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June 13, 2023
The AI apocalypse: Imminent risk or misdirection?

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As tech bosses raise the doomsday alarm, others say it’s a distraction from AI’s real, less sensational dangers.

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June 10, 2023