International Events VIII: Been living under a rock so long

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 5/3/2022 at 12:37 PM, RhaenysBee said:

It won’t. But it may not end up being the global inquisition at least. 

So wait do you want considerably more moderation ? Like a curtailment of retweets in a period of time so the amount of negative attention on a specific person(especially if they’re an average citizen)  could be limited or deleting socket accounts

less moderation would undeniably lead to a lot more harassment. 

 

[Zorral]

I guess the arrival of over 40,000 new Cubans at the US borders got Biden thinking he had to do something-or-other.

Biden Administration Lifting Some Trump-Era Restrictions on Cuba
The changes include an expansion of flights to the country and the restarting of a family reunification program.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/biden-cuba-policy.html?

Biden to lift some Trump-era restrictions on Cuba

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/05/16/biden-cuba-travel-remittances-visas/

 

[Zorral]

This may have been the last subject I expected to see at the top of todays New York Times, a long, detailed, multi-facted report on the history and consequences of forcing Haiti to pay the slavemasters indemnity for getting rid of them.

Most of the reports are also available in French and Creole.  A few only in French, and one in Spanish.  All of them in English, of course, if accessing the NYT here.

The thing is though -- historians, people like myself, have known all this all along.  Shouldn't it have been in the history books in school all along too? Why wasn't it?  So now the NYT, which was around for a lot of this in the 19th and 20th, nd 21st centuries, treats it as news? Good grief, next thing we'll see is the NYT presenting us with the breathless discovery of the south's slave breeding industry. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/haiti-history-colonized-france.html

Quote

 

The Ransom

How much did Haiti’s independence from France truly cost? A team of Times reporters tried to put a number on it.

• The Root of Haiti’s Misery: In 1791, enslaved Haitians ousted the French and founded a nation. But their freedom came at a price. Read in Creole or French.
•  A Staggering Debt: After Haiti’s independence, the French demanded reparations. Their request helped cement the country’s path to poverty. Read in Creole or French.
•  Crédit Industriel: A Parisian bank was central to Haiti’s financial exploitation, siphoning tens of millions of dollars out of the country. Read in Creole or French.
•  American Gains: In the 20th century, Haiti fell under U.S. control. Wall Street’s financial interests played a role in the occupation. Read in Creole or French.
•  Demanding Justice: In 2003, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s president, began calling for reparations from France. It was part of his undoing. Read in French.
• 6 Takeaways: This Times investigation saw reporters scouring documents in archives and libraries on three continents. Here are the key findings. Read in French or Spanish.
• Bibliography: The project drew on original documents, as well as the work of historians and researchers. Here is the complete list of sources.

 

[SeanF]

7 hours ago, Zorral said:

This may have been the last subject I expected to see at the top of todays New York Times, a long, detailed, multi-facted report on the history and consequences of forcing Haiti to pay the slavemasters indemnity for getting rid of them.

Most of the reports are also available in French and Creole.  A few only in French, and one in Spanish.  All of them in English, of course, if accessing the NYT here.

The thing is though -- historians, people like myself, have known all this all along.  Shouldn't it have been in the history books in school all along too? Why wasn't it?  So now the NYT, which was around for a lot of this in the 19th and 20th, nd 21st centuries, treats it as news? Good grief, next thing we'll see is the NYT presenting us with the breathless discovery of the south's slave breeding industry. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/haiti-history-colonized-france.html

I think 18th century Haiti must rank as the worst place ever to have been a slave.  Martin is often accused of making his slavers cartoonishly evil, but when you read  about Haiti, you realise that the reality was worse.

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 5/21/2022 at 4:22 PM, SeanF said:

I think 18th century Haiti must rank as the worst place ever to have been a slave.  Martin is often accused of making his slavers cartoonishly evil, but when you read  about Haiti, you realise that the reality was worse.

Seriously in regards to the criticism of Martin?

[SeanF]

2 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Seriously in regards to the criticism of Martin?

I've often read that criticism made.

[Zorral]

In my decades studying the history of slavery, particularly that of the Americas, and specifically that of the US, the more one learns, the worse it is.  One never gets to the final floor of awful. The French always kept meticulous records too.

In the meantime many a scholar and historian is po-ed at this NYT report -- not because it is bad or wrong, but because it pretends this is all new information, when we've been teaching all this for decades, studying and researching it and the NYT gave none of us any credit, though they used our work.

There is nothing at all original here with a single exception, which is important -- they got the ex French president to admit what we all thought at the time, which is that France and the US did kidnap and take out Aristide because his call for financial reparations to Haiti got so much attention and support.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Civilian killings soar as Russian mercenaries join fight in West Africa
Documents, imagery and witness accounts point to a heightened Russian presence in Mali

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/23/mali-russia-west-africa-wagner/T

Quote

 

The man knew what to expect from Islamist fighters. They had appeared at his door for years, demanding money or livestock — the taxes he paid to survive. Then one morning in March, the threat in his rural community suddenly had a confusing new face: White men in military fatigues, yelling in a language he did not recognize.

Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia's war in Ukraine.
“They were shooting people. People in their homes,” he said. “Everywhere, bodies were dropping to the ground.”

At least 300 people are believed to have been killed in the man’s town of Moura, in central Mali, though he and other witnesses suggest the toll could be far higher. Similar accounts have emerged across the West African nation since hundreds of Russian mercenaries joined the Malian army this winter in the fight to reclaim territory from groups loyal to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The hired guns of the Wagner Group — a covert arm of the Kremlin, according to the United States and Western allies — have been repeatedly accused of war crimes, leaving a trail of atrocities across the Middle East and Africa. Profits flow back to Moscow, according to Western intelligence officials and security researchers, helping prop up Vladimir Putin’s government at a time of growing economic isolation over its war in Ukraine.

In Libya, U.S. defense officials said Wagner agents planted explosives in children’s toys. In the Central African Republic, human rights investigators received reports that mercenaries sexually assaulted young women and girls.

In Mali, where insurgents have overrun vast stretches of the country, witnesses told The Washington Post that men they believe to be Russian operatives have killed scores of innocent people in recent months under the guise of restoring peace.

“There are quite a lot of eyewitness accounts on the presence of White soldiers speaking an unknown language,” said Héni Nsaibia, senior researcher at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which documents violent events around the world. Mounting visual evidence, he added, “strongly suggests they are private Russian military contractors and not conventional Russian forces.” ....

.... Wagner operates in secrecy, masking its activities with an evolving network of shell companies that often avoid formal paperwork. But documents and imagery reviewed by The Post, some of them previously unreported, point to a heightened Russian presence in Mali. ....

 

 

[DMC]

3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Seriously in regards to the criticism of Martin?

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

I've often read that criticism made.

I mean, I haven't read ADWD in awhile, but from what I recall they were pretty cartoonishly evil - and obviously they are in ASOS when Dany is taking over Slaver's Bay.  I don't really see a problem with that.  Slavery is cartoonishly evil.

 

[SeanF]

12 hours ago, DMC said:

I mean, I haven't read ADWD in awhile, but from what I recall they were pretty cartoonishly evil - and obviously they are in ASOS when Dany is taking over Slaver's Bay.  I don't really see a problem with that.  Slavery is cartoonishly evil.

 

As @Zorralsays, “one never gets to the final floor of awful.”  Martin’s depiction of chattel slavery as utterly evil is far more moral than Ding & Dong’s attempts to come up with “good slavers.”  The very system of chattel slavery turns masters into devils.

[Zorral]

France and the NY Times in the crosshairs.

BTW, Katz's latest book that covers quite a bit of this ground, Gangsters of Capitalism, is very good.  Plus, it reads as easily and quickly as good old boy's adventure novel.  But it's not fiction.

What's new (and what isn't) in the NYT's big Haiti story
Some service journalism about some (potential) service journalism
Jonathan M. Katz

https://theracket.news/p/whats-new-and-what-isnt-in-the-nyts?

Quote

 

About a year ago, I got a message from my friend Matt Apuzzo, an old AP colleague who is now a big shot at the New York Times. He and his colleagues were working on a story about Haiti’s so-called “independence debt” — the massive ransom and loan the French extorted from Haiti in the decades after the Haitians bottés le cul français in their 1791-1803 Revolution.

Matt wanted my advice starting out. Actually, he really wanted the guidance of my wife, Claire Payton, who has a Ph.D. in Haitian history. As we told him, the broad outlines of that story — the French king’s gunpoint demand, the Haitians’ impossible choice between immiseration or re-invasion, the near-century it took to pay the debts off — are well-known to anyone who knows anything about Haitian history. (I’ve written two books in my life so far, and talked about the debt in both of them.)

But Matt and his colleague told us they working on something new: an investigation that would detail exactly how much the French extracted from Haiti and where the money went. They also planned to dig into the predatory U.S. loan — and subsequent U.S. invasion, demanded by the bank that is now Citigroup — that came as a result.

That story finally dropped over the weekend. “Story” doesn’t really cover it: it’s a four-byline, six-article package with a paper insert in the Sunday edition, teased in a box that dominated the front page. It is, in other words, a News Event — almost certainly modeled on the epic success of the 1619 Project — as only the New York Times can attempt.

The reactions have been … intense. Among the majority of readers who’d never heard (or forgot) that so much of France’s and Citigroup’s wealth was literally stolen at gunpoint from Haiti, it’s been scandal and shock. (I’m getting emails from relatives I talk to once every other year asking if I’ve heard this story before.) My Twitter feed meanwhile is filled with historians who are furious that they weren’t cited for the help they gave the Times, or incredulous that the “Paper of Record” Columbused a central story in the place where Columbusing was invented.

At the risk of a little Timesian bothsidesing, I think both camps have a point. The package did cover a lot of very old ground, a lot of which is presented as if it is new. There’s a lot of “rarely taught or acknowledged,” “the Times reveals,” etc., about things that have been known and talked about by millions of people for decades. But there is value in making this story more widely known in France and the United States. And moreover, there is important reporting that many people who think they know the story are missing.

So as a piece of service journalism for you, dear Racket reader, I’m going to suss out the things that got my attention. Then I’ll theorize about how it is getting lost in the pomp of trying to create a News Event.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. The Exact Amount of the Ransom
This is the big one. Scholars have long known that King Charles X of France demanded 150 million gold francs, and that the sum was pared down to 90 million francs in a so-called “treaty of friendship” in 1838.

What the Times did was calculate exactly how much Haiti paid over the years, including interest on the French loans they were forced to take out to avoid default. That number is 112 million francs, which reporters estimate would be worth $560 million in today’s dollars. They extrapolated from that to arrive at a range of estimates, describing how much the robbery of those funds cost the Haitian economy to date. They give it as a range: $21 billion to $115 billion.1

Suffice it to say that in 15 years of covering Haiti and two books’ worth of fact-checks on the French indemnity, I have never seen numbers that precise and well-sourced before. The research-intensive method they used to arrive at those numbers is detailed in the series bibliography (yes, there is one).

Why is that important? Two reasons. One, it gives some functional precision to the mechanics of the claim: not only do we know that there was an enormous wealth transfer from the Caribbean nation to France, but here are the numbers and dates of each payment, etc. The other is that, if France is ever going to be forced to give any of that money back, then presenting a detailed bill is key.

Yes, surely Emmanuel Macron & Co. will try to just do what the French have done for over a century, and ignore the facts of their crime completely. But as the immediate reaction from one of the accused parties shows, the precision the Times journalists brought to this project will make it harder for French officials to do that. And that could be a real achievement. ....

 

[Zorral]

 

[Zorral]

Capitalism views China's COVID containment . . .

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-05-28/china-s-second-in-command-makes-a-worrying-plea-new-economy-saturday?

~~~~~~~~~~

While 

More Russian Oil Than Ever Before Is Heading for China and India
Up to 79 million barrels of nation’s oil on ships, Kpler says
Asia is now biggest buyer of Russian barrels amid Ukraine war

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/russia-has-record-oil-volumes-at-sea-as-cargoes-shift-to-asia?

 

[Zorral]

Turkey requests/informs the UN to change its international name denomination to Türkiye.  Essentially, now, this is in effect.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/02/turkey-turkiye-erdogan-united-nations-un/

Quote

The move aligns the country’s English-language name with its Turkish-language name. The two words are pronounced similarly, but Türkiye has an extra syllable at the end — pronounced “yay."

 

[Zorral]

A Plea From German Brewers: Bring Back Your Empties
A nation of beer lovers is facing a shortage of bottles, partly because of the war in Ukraine. Breweries are looking to drinkers for a rescue.

"Bottles don't come cheap" ... Their price “has exploded ...” 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/world/europe/germany-beer-bottle-shortage.html?

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Well, there's a deposit on the bottles anyway. 8 cents per beer bottle. They should raise to the 15 cents per bottle, as it is for pretty much anything else.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

They should raise to the 15 cents per bottle, as it is for pretty much anything else.

If there's anything that should be an international concern, it's beer supply!  Is there anywhere that beer isn't essential?

[DMC]

26 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Is there anywhere that beer isn't essential?

Salt Lake City?

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Salt Lake City?

Peoples who live in SLC drive to wherever the beer supply is nearest and stock up.  Not everybody who lives in SLC, but a lot of them!

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Peoples who live in SLC drive to wherever the beer supply is nearest and stock up.  Not everybody who lives in SLC, but a lot of them!

My experience with SLC is grading AP exams in the summer (actually usually about right this time).  The bars/nightlife there SUCKS, or at least did.  Haven't done that in about 5 years.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

The bars/nightlife there SUCKS

Yes it sure does. Also a lot of seriously not intelligent people living around there, with huge families, who think going on private property in the Wasatch in the very dry summer and just starting a fire to roast hot doggies for the kiddies is a good thing to do.  I rushed out with buckets more times than one, and they, terrified at the sight of me, gathered all the kiddies to to get in car and run away.  But they didn't know which direction to drive on that timber road in the Wasatches, and finally the guards showed up.  (This was RRedford's property, btw -- and we spent some weeks for several summers in a row conducting workshops re music-movies at his Sundance.)