The conditions may not have been optimal but they didn’t look to be getting better – so the Irish Revolutionaries made their move in Easter 1916. A week of urban warfare followed – the revolutionaries lost – but they succeeded in transforming the Irish question forever and setting the nation on the inevitable road to independence.
Tankie Therapy on Day 163: Do we debate genocide?
We didn’t have quorum for a tankie therapy session but we got together anyway – Matteo and Alex joined for a discussion of several psychological warfare methods being used on us: normalizing crimes, treating the criminals like they are a natural phenomenon, and the abuser’s method of “look what you made me do”, absolving the criminals and blaming the victims for apparently bringing it on themselves. And another question: is this a topic to be debated? Courage and cowardice and challenges put to us by things we’ve been reading this week.
World War Civ 35: Agony and Slaughter 1916
The battles of Verdun, the Somme, and the Brusilov Offensive. Epic, tragic military errors, horrors of trenches, battles that killed hundreds of thousands and changed the course of history.
AER 140: The Gaza Siege
The siege on Gaza and the role of the Palestinian Authority are critical context for the Israel’s assault on Gaza. On this episode we take a look at the history of the blockade and how Israel has ghettoized the Palestinian population. Co-production with The Brief.
World War Civ 34: The Armenian Genocide 1915-16
Genocides happen in broad daylight – it is only afterwards that they are covered up. There are still fewer countries that recognize the Armenian Genocide than countries that do not. We read scholars that take the view that it was a genocide as well as a scholar that describes the events without using the label, presenting the story of 1915-1916 as well as the trial of the leaders after the war. One scholar of the genocide says that by refusing to investigate these events enough, “society has lost its moral sensitivity to past genocide as well as to current and possibly future episodes of mass violence.”
AER 139: Pakistan Election Rigging Fails
Waqas Ahmad is back and we recap Pakistan politics since the 2022 coup against Imran Khan. After assassination attempts, vexatious lawsuits, thousands of arrests, torture, and the banning of Imran Khan’s party and symbol, voters still foiled the best-laid plans of the Pakistan military. Where things stand after the elections of February 8, 2024 in Pakistan.
World War Civ 33: Colonial Troops
In desperation, the European empires turn to the people they’ve colonized and press them into sacrificing their lives for their imperial masters, setting off a chain of events that makes decolonization in a few decades inevitable.
Guest post: Driving Canadian Democracy to Oblivion: The Ideological State of the Canadian Establishment
A short letter to the editor from Anna Zalik
[Friends: You can catch up with what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks at Youtube, where I’ve been posting a series of sit reps on the war. Meanwhile, friend of the Anti-Empire Project, Anna Zalik, sent me this letter to the editor that the Globe and Mail declined, after publishing a long and embarrassing op-ed consisting of advice for the left, which is behind a paywall and only available to hardcore Globe and Mail readers. The op-ed is of what I call the “left’s best friend” genre, in which someone who despises you and your cause gives you advice about how you should be going about your work.]
Driving Canadian Democracy to Oblivion: The Ideological State of the Canadian Establishment
Anna Zalik, Toronto
In a poorly written OpEd published in the Globe and Mail on January 27th, embittered UofT humanities PhD Stephen Marche offers a “painfully clarifying reflection on the ideological state of the Canadian establishment.” In a conflation of facts, weakly organized examples, and cherry-picked polling data, Marche tries and convicts a group of people – various employed by universities- who allegedly postered an Indigo bookstore in downtown Toronto. Studiously avoiding reference to Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians which the Canadian government and Reisman’s Heseg Foundation materially support, nor the destruction of all of Gaza’s universities, Marche’s piece could easily have been written by those in the Ontario government seeking to defund public post-secondary education. Precisely what ‘ideology’ Marche refers to is never clarified, but it is clear that his own is the same old elite populism that maintains the status quo – berating racialized and transgender activists, and defending police violence.
Particularly disturbing, Marche shields himself behind a non-sensical invocation of liberal multiculturalism that “leaves its shoes at the door”. Leaving one’s shoes at the door seems to consist of acquiescence to the new McCarthyism all around us. Indeed, despite a hat-tip to Netanyahu’s fascism, Marche’s piece never uses the words Palestine or Palestinians, nor does he acknowledge that various of his favoured targets, including Naomi Klein and Lesley Wood, are Jewish. If it’s best not to scratch the itch activists purportedly pose, why does Marche do so?
Ultimately, Marche does his part to drive Canadian democracy to oblivion.
AER 138: October 7 Hannibal
Israeli media recently published a minute-by-minute chronology of the morning of October 7th from the Israeli military perspective. Jon and I go over it as part of my youtube series of Gaza Sit Reps (for Day 104). Cross-posted over at The Brief, reposted here in case you missed it.
World War Civ 32: Britain’s plans for Arab lands – Sykes-Picot, 1916
Early in the Great War Britain decided to dismantle the Turkish Empire and made promises to Arab leaders of independence if they would rebel against Britain’s Turkish enemy. While one British leader was making these promises, another, Mark Sykes, was making a deal with other imperialists for the division of Arab lands between them. Follow Mark Sykes on his world tour that culminates in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, an agreement we’re all still suffering from to this day.