Monday, June 10, 2019

Amazing shot of bald eagle taken near Lake Erie goes viral

GRAIN ·

GRAIN took a look at the current status of biofortification in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the emerging critiques from feminist perspectives and food sovereignty movements. What we found is a worrisome push for a top-down and anti-diversity approach to food and health that may ultimately undermine people’s capacities to strengthen their local food systems.

Check out our latest report ➡️

https://grain.org/e/6246

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THAT DID NOT TAKE LONG LESS THAN 24 HOURS

Joe Biden says he still supports ban on federal funding of abortions, after apparent reversal

POLAND PRIDE
Meanwhile, in Poland, central and eastern Europe’s biggest pride parade went ahead without major incident, despite rising tensions in the country over the rights of LGBT+ people.

Tens of thousands of people, accompanied by diplomats from the US, Canada and other western countries, took to the streets of Warsaw on Saturday at a time when the Polish government is depicting the LGBT+ community as a threat.

Participants take part at the 'Equality Parade' rally in support of the
LGBT+ community in Warsaw (REUTERS)

In a first, the Polish capital's mayor also participated. Opening the parade, Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski noted it is now common for cities across Europe to support pride marches.

"Not everyone has to go to the Equality Parade but everyone should respect minority rights," Mr Trzaskowski told the crowd from a parade float. "It's really important for me that Warsaw be open, that Warsaw be tolerant."

City Hall said some 47,000 people took part.

Anthropologist Jane Goodall: China is pillaging Africa like an old colonial power

Imperialism and world economy;

by: Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 1888-1938

Change Alberta

TALKING ABOUT SCIENCE DOES NOT MAKE YOU PRO-ALBERTA OR ANTI-ALBERTA

Some commentators to the piece below are saying that the scientists are "anti-Alberta" while others seem to be bashing Alberta/Albertans for having become wealthier than others through exploitation of fossil fuels. Neither position is helpful. The scientists are not saying that Alberta's fossil fuel industry as such has put the province's forests at greater risk. They are talking about global climate change. But there is no doubt that fossil fuel industries, wherever they are, contribute excessively to greenhouse gas emissions as does cattle raising. In both cases, the current Alberta economy is going to have to give way to such realities though its current government in particular denies any responsibility to act. So, both Canadian and other governments worldwide need to respond in terms of replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources and making it less easy for greenhouse gas emitting industries to survive. As an Albertan, I don't regard that fact as "anti-Alberta" or "anti-Canada" but simply pro-planet

https://www.cbc.ca/…/alberta-wildfires-climate-change-1.516…

CBC.CA

Alberta wildfires linked to climate change, scientist says | CBC News

The Fort McMurray fire and record-breaking wildfire season in B.C. in

SEE

Canada’s First World War: A Centennial Series on ActiveHistory.ca

Active History’s series on the history, memory, and legacy of the First World War launched in August, 2014. The series is intentionally broad in outlook, including subjects as diverse as the war’s political impact, life on the home front, and commemoration today. It is edited by Mary Chaktsiris, Sarah Glassford, Nathan Smith, and Jonathan Weier, with former editor Christopher Schultz in a consultative role. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please check out our “Call for Blog Posts” and contact us at: nsmith241@gmail.com

Thinking about Genocide and Mass Murder: How Could it Have Happened in Nice Canada?

June 10, 2019

By Alvin Finkel

The decision of the Commission on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women to use the word “genocide” to describe past Canadian state policies regarding Indigenous women has occasioned heated debate about whether that word is appropriate for anything short of a conscious state plan to rapidly physically eliminate all members of a defined group or to thoroughly destroy their culture and thus eliminate them as a unique entity. The Commission suggests that in fact the latter has been the goal of Canadian governments all along and that condoning physical violence against Indigenous women has been an unstated side effect of attitudes and policies that deny the right of Canada’s Indigenous people to preserve their millennial cultures.

A Political Cartoon from July 1880 in Grip Magazine

Decisions about what human horror stories qualify as genocide are largely political. There is, of course, consensus that Hitler planned to murder all Jews and managed to kill the majority of them in areas that were under German control at some point during his rule. His murder of Roma was also clearly genocide.

But what about the Holodomor, the murder through famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933? There may have been as many deaths of Ukrainians as a result of Stalin’s maniacal efforts to collectivize and industrialize Ukrainian farming so as to accelerate Soviet industrialization as of Jews in the Holocaust. Many historians and governments view the famine as a genocide, but the Russian government and some historians deny that Stalin, while unbending in his efforts to collectivize peasants’ landholdings, meant to eradicate the Ukrainians as an ethnic group. But claims that he was only involved in misguided class warfare against peasants are contradicted by the Soviet decision to distribute crops seized from Ukrainian peasants not to Ukrainian workers but to workers in other republics, leaving that republic’s workers to share the fate of their peasant co-ethnics.

While most Western scholars seem inclined to qualify the Soviet-induced Ukrainian famine as a genocide, one almost never sees that term employed in discussions about British-induced famines in India and elsewhere. Colonial-era famines began with one in Bengal between 1770 and 1773 that wiped out 10 million lives, a third of all Bengalis. Within a decade another two famines, one in South India’s Tamil region and one in North India, accounted for another 20 million deaths. In all three cases, and many more before independence, the famines were the product of forced monoculture for export purposes and refusal of the British authorities to allow imports of food from areas unaffected by crop failures to the suddenly infertile regions.

Apologists for the British authorities suggest that such famines predated the British and were nature’s way of reducing overpopulation in India. But Indian scholars reject such claims, noting that traditional Indian economies featured a variety of crops as well as gathered fruits and vegetables, irrigation projects, storage of surpluses, and sharing arrangements across wide areas so as to provide insurance for all in case of scarcities. Even during the British raj, the princely states that paid tribute to Britain, but were not incorporated into the area under direct British rule, fared far better than the areas firmly under Britain’s thumb.

The last of the Bengal famines occurred after the Holodomor. In 1942-3, though Bengal produced a bumper crop of rice, two to three million Bengalis died of famine as the British authorities exported most of that crop to reinforce the war effort. Again, it was a decision not to feed people rather than a lack of food that resulted in Indian deaths. In short, what India experienced for much of the colonial period was a kind of economic genocide that paralleled the Holodomor but under capitalist conditions.

Similarly, though we tend to think of the “Irish famine” of 1846, which resulted in at least a million deaths and two million Irish fleeing their country, in terms of the failure of the potato crop, Ireland produced enough food that year to easily satisfy the food requirements of all of the Irish people. But British policy insisted upon the export of most of the crops out of Ireland, leaving Ireland’s poverty-stricken masses, to whom London offered minimal relief, in hunger.

Certain Irish stereotypes create the notion that the potato growers created their own fate because they focused on one crop and an unreliable one at that. In fact they had little choice since the English had much earlier dispossessed them of the better lands on their island, leaving them to attempt to survive in the marginal areas where the potato was about the most reliable crop they could grow. Like the Indian farmers, the Irish were victims of Britain who were stereotyped as the authors of their own misfortune.

Across Africa and Asia, the various European countries imposed regimes of quasi-slavery that left millions dead. The armies of Belgian’s King Leopold II, forcing the Native people of the Congo to supply limitless ivory and rubber, slaughtered between six and ten million of the 20 to 30 million people estimated to be living in the Congo basin.

“Economic genocide” also best describes the fate of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas who were conquered by Spain and Portugal. While the numbers of people in the Americas in 1500, as European colonization began, are calculated as from anywhere from 20 million to 100 million, there were only 1.5 million Indigenous people across the two continents by 1650. While European germs killed many, populations did spring back if they were largely left in control of their lands and their labour as was the case in the fur trade. But for the most part that did not happen. In Potosi, in Bolivia, as many as 4 million miners died in the silver mines over several centuries. The Spanish mineowners forced Indigenous men into the mines to work until their death without ever seeing daylight again and then replaced the dying with slaves still alive.

Because of the fur trade, the early Canadian story of European-Indigenous relations seems tame compared to the Spanish American story. But as settlement replaced the fur trade, dispossession of Indigenous lands, and then efforts to destroy their cultures and break their spirits came to British North America and then Canada. The dispossession was arguably less violent than in the United States not because the Canadian authorities were gentler than because the American experience showed Canadian Indigenous people that it was impossible to fight people who had so little regard for human life as Europeans. In any case, what followed was a horror story that still has not ended despite many Canadian politicians expressing fine words completely disconnected from their actions.

Like the British—and like the Americans, whose record in slaughtering Indigenous people, Latinos, and Asians also counts in the millions—Canadians like to think of themselves as civilized folks whom no respectable person can accuse of genocide or even racism except for the most common-garden variety. Stephen Harper as prime minister famously said that Canada had no history of colonialism. But those who study Indigenous-colonial relations know better, and whether or not we want to use the term “genocide” to describe a long history of racism and sexism towards Indigenous peoples, we need to come to terms with our nation’s savagery towards the first inhabitants of our continent. And we need to act on what commissions like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now the Commission on the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women have recommended. Or we will never get beyond wordplay as opposed to implementing social justice.

Alvin Finkel is the author of Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy. He is professor emeritus of History at Athabasca University, president of the Alberta Labour History Institute, and co-author of the two-volume History of the Canadian Peoples, now in its 7th editions.

A&W GOES FOR PAPER STRAWS
I got a A&W Diet Root Beer in a wax paper cup the other day and lo and behold it had a paper straw. They have eliminated single use plastic straws. Good for them but at the same time could they also not eliminated the plastic cap.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment