Here's my review of Immigrants and the Right to Stay by Joseph H. Carens.

Here's something I wrote for the Georgia Straight about the international food crisis.

Winston Churchill

Here's an article I wrote for the Toronto Star.

-------------------------------------------------

A freedom fighter, but not for all; Winston Churchill favoured restricting justice and liberty to white people: Author

Daniel Tseghay Special to the Star
1092 words
4 September 2010
The Toronto Star
TOR
ONT
IN3
English
Copyright (c) 2010 The Toronto Star

----------------------


On the southwest corner of Nathan Phillips Square stands a statue of Winston Churchill, arms akimbo, his bulldog face in a defiant scowl.

At the base of the statue, a plaque quotes from one of his most famous speeches - the June 4, 1940, address to the House of Commons in which he called on England to defend its territory against Hitler when many in his party still supported negotiations. "Whatever the cost may be," he said, in his distinctive slur, "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." And they never did.

When the skies of Europe's future seemed bleakest, it was Churchill who stood firm and fashioned the words that would galvanize a just resistance to one of the greatest existential threats.

Another plaque at the statue's base, however, makes a more contentious statement about Churchill: "His faith and leadership inspired free men to fight in every quarter of the globe for the triumph of Justice and Liberty."

Although he undeniably fought for the triumph of justice and liberty, it was not waged in every quarter of the globe, for he "wanted to restrict it quite heavily to white people," says Richard Toye, a professor at the University of Exeter and author of the new book Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made.

Born in 1874, at the height of the British Empire, Churchill unabashedly believed that Britain's duty was to civilize and preside over the affairs of the global south, particularly the peoples of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. It was a belief he shared with many in his generation; yet few had the opportunity to give voice to it at such high levels of public office.

He did as he believed. In the face of growing agitation for independence among the members of the British Empire's dominion, Churchill proved a stalwart defender of the empire. "We mean to hold our own," he said in 1942. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."

The story of the two Churchills - the man who fought tyranny in the form of Hitler and the man who would withhold the freedom of many others - is finally being told in Churchill's Empire. It's a story that will come as a revelation to many of us, since it does not fit our image of him - "a skewed view of Churchill which is based on 1940," according to Toye.

The book details the ways in which he lent his considerable gifts for a phrase (he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953) to the project of disparaging various races. Upon being elected to parliament in 1900, he said "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph." In 1942, only five years before India would gain formal independence from Britain, he said, to Leo Amery, secretary of state for India: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

As much as this may clash with Churchill's established public image, it is a long-recognized depiction in many places. "As far as people living in Kenya or Sri Lanka or India," notes Toye, "they will be much less surprised about this side of Churchill than Westerners will."

And the same may go for many people in Iran, according to Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Long before the Gulf oil spill, British Petroleum (BP), when it was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, was the cause of great destruction and eventual animosity, and Churchill's role proved substantial.

Britain and its Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had, during most of the first half of the 20th century, complete access to Iran's huge oil reserves and were unwilling to give an equitable share of the profits to their host. The resentment this caused led Iran's Majlis, or parliament, to elect as prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a reformist who took office in 1951 to nationalize and gain complete control of the country's oil.

As prime minister of Britain at the time, Churchill recognized what a threat this would be to their access to oil, or to what he once described as their "prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams." And he did not take it in stride. "The idea that leaders of poor countries would stand up and claim control of their own resources was something Churchill could never grasp or sympathize with," says Kinzer. "The mere fact that some valuable resource was sitting under the soil of another country instead of British soil did not mean that Britain shouldn't have it."

And so Churchill pushed to have Mossadegh deposed. After failing to convince Harry Truman, the president of the United States, to help overthrow the leader, he found success with Dwight Eisenhower after he took office in 1953. The coup took place that year and the Anglo-American forces subsequently installed the Shah, who ruled with an increasing repression "that produced the uprising of the late-'70s, the Islamic Revolution," says Kinzer. "Had we allowed politics in Iran to unfold on its own, democracy might well have survived there and it's hard to imagine how different the Middle East might be had that been the case."

Churchill's efforts to protect "British interests around the world regardless of the costs" certainly "caused horrific suffering to huge numbers of peoples over generations," says Kinzer. Paradoxically, however, he might ultimately have played a role in undoing the empire he held so dear.

"The important things he said about freedom were sufficiently powerful that they could take root elsewhere," says Toye, "and that was why a considerable number of people felt able to be critical of his racial attitudes but also feel affection towards him and respect for him when he retired and after his death."

My article in The Georgia Straight about the wrong-headed austerity measures.

I finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Purple Hibiscus last night. It's really a great story. It's almost like a follow up to a couple of Chinua Achebe's novels. Achebe told the story - in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God - of how colonialism shaped the experiences of the people we now call Nigeria. In his stories, we saw the first generation that learned the West's ways - their religion, their language, their forms of social organization. In Adichie's novel, we read about the children of a Nigerian man who extols the virtues of Westerners and maintains an almost fanatical adherence to Christianity. His children follow his lead - at least until they visit their aunt and learn, for the first time, about their ancestors. The novel never explicitly discusses colonialism, but it's there, in the background. It does a wonderful job of showing the ebb and flow of attitudes towards one's traditions. One generation has it forcibly wiped away, the next accepts this act of cultural genocide, and the one after that attempts a re-integration with the past.

I'm looking forward to reading her latest novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.

Walter Mosley on redemption and other things:

Here's something I wrote for The Georgia Straight about this weekend's protests in Toronto.

Here's something I wrote for The Georgia Straight about South Africa and the World Cup.

Here's my blog post for rabble.ca.

The Toronto Star reports on some alternative and more-democratic meetings during the G20 summit.

Wonderful documentary titled "Apartheid Did not Die". Watch it here.

It makes the argument that apartheid continues by other means in South Africa. Though legal apartheid has ended, the economic divisions have been so institutionalized that it is as if nothing has really changed.

Life in Gaza:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here's an article of mine on the 50th Anniversary of independence for 16 African countries.

Here's my article in The Georgia Straight on Bill C-11, the Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act.

Two separate reports show just how bad Canada's environmental record is. Read here and here.

Two thighs will always rub together.

The Zambian capacity for forgiveness.

The Lesser Evil

Beautiful speech by Walter Mosley. He discusses the two evils of poverty and charity. The former, for obvious reasons, is counted as an evil. The latter, however, is often mischaracterized as undeniably good. Well, it's not. Charity is often a band-aid fix where deep solutions aimed towards the root-problem is needed instead. Watch the moving clip:

Round up

The organizers behind the upcoming G20 summit are calling on doctors to help out, treating detained protesters. They've also managed to write this in an email: “I am assuming that these patients are a fairly young, healthy population, and some of whom will probably claim factitious (sic) injury as part of their tactics,” the email continued.

Sounds like an attempt to interfere and colour the judgment of the doctors at the summit, according to Nathalie Des Rosiers of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who said this: “In our view, this is an attempt to interfere with proper medical decision making and this could lead to serious injuries and misdiagnosis of serious injuries.”

---
Profile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Toronto Star's Insight section. It's unfortunate that Ali has drawn the wrong lessons from her experiences. Rather than looking at the issue historically - recognizing the legacy of imperialism and the role of economic deprivation - she seeks to condemn Muslims. She is a conservative who works at a right-wing think-tank and is married to the right-wing historian, Niall Ferguson. Very unfortunate, because she could have used her personal experiences to call for a progressive movement, a more tolerant world. Not one where, according to her, some cultures are superior to others.

---

From today's Toronto Star: "A new report based on 2005 Census data being released Thursday, shows that visible minorities in Ontario are far more likely to live in poverty, have trouble finding a job and earn less in the workplace."

It also found that:

"• Workers from visible minority groups faced unemployment rates of 8.7 per cent compared to 5.8 per cent for all Ontario workers.

• Visible minority workers were paid 77.5 cents for every dollar a white worker earned.

• Visible minority families were three times more likely to live in poverty, with poverty rates of 18.7 per cent, compared to 6 per cent for white families."

Compelling article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the New Yorker. Though I understand where she's coming from in her critique of Islam - considering her very brutal upbringing - I don't like what she's saying: that one culture is better than another, that Muslims should embrace "Enlightenment", Western, even Christian, values. This is a profoundly naive approach to take.

As the writer puts it:

her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam—fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism—are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity. Many more young women are killed in India for failing to bring sufficient dowry than perish in “honor killings” across the Muslim world. Such social pathologies no more reveal the barbaric core of Hinduism or Islam than domestic violence in Europe and America defines the moral essence of Christianity or the Enlightenment.

Book Review

Happy Earth Day. Here is my review of Heat: How to stop the planet from burning by George Monbiot (one of my very favourite journalists).

Did the Globe and Mail really just use the Icelandic volcano to justify increasing carbon emissions?

"Feeling guilty about the carbon-belching SUV you want to buy to annoy the pretentious Greenie next door? Don't. Britain's Environmental Transportation Association estimated that the flight clampdown had eliminated some 2.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere between April 15 and April 19 alone. But hasn't the Icelandic volcano emitted even more? Not so. It is spewing a mere 15,000 tonnes a day, according to one estimate. So go for it – the carbon gap is begging to be filled and your new Ford Explorer or Jeep Cherokee is just the machine to do it."

Incredible.

Interesting article on China's potentially-fraught relationship with Africa. I personally consider it an exploitative one.

Here's my commentary on malaria for the Georgia Straight.

There appears to be some headway in the fight to protect Indigenous rights.

From a fantastic essay, titled "The Mendacity of Hope", by Roger D. Hodge in the February issue of Harper's Magazine:

"Let us grant that Barack Obama is as intelligent as his admirers insist. What evidence do we have that he is also a moral virtuoso? What evidence do we possess that he is a good, or even a decent man? Yes, he can be eloquent, yet eloquence is no guarantee of wisdom or of virtue. Yes, he has a nice family, but that evinces a private morality. Public morality requires public action, and all available public evidence points to a man with the character of a common politician, whose singular ambition in life was to attain power; nothing in Barack Obama's political career suggests that he would ever willingly commit to a course of action that would cost him an election."

"Thinking like ethical people, dressing like ethical people, decorating our homes like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people." - George Monbiot, in Heat: How to stop the planet from burning.

Climate-change deniers

From The New Yorker: "A survey released by researchers at George Mason University found that more than a quarter of television weathercasters agree with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused “mostly by natural changes.”"

My article in today's Toronto Star.

Today's Rabble post.

I've begun a new blog for rabble.ca, one of the best sources for progressive news. Here's my first post.

Cornel West on Courage

My article in today's Toronto Star.

The Kenyan singer, Eric Wainaina, on the mistaken view that the post-election violence in Kenyan was due to "tribalism" (starts around 8:40):

"With the post-election crisis, a lot of people said it has everything to do with tribalism. I think tribalism was maybe a spark that got the fire going, but there are deeper issue. We can't talk about peace if the necessities of life have been curtailed. There can't be peace without food; there can't be peace with sustenance."

Edward Said:

"It is a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me, because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them."

Important article on Haiti.

Book Review

Here's my review of No Refuge: The Crisis of Refugee Militarization in Africa by Robert Muggah.

Who are the happiest people?

Kristof discusses.

Great article.