Chattel slavery in the United States, with its distinctive – and strikingly cruel – laws and structures, took shape over many decades in colonial America. The innovations that built American slavery are inseparable from the construction of Whiteness as we know it today. By John Biewen, with guest Chenjerai Kumanyika.
3 May 2018
openDemocracy: What is the meaning of the Five Star Movement?
In 2012, Beppe Grillo asserted that it was thanks to his party that there was no movement in Italy comparable to Golden Dawn in Greece. The success of Matteo Salvini’s Lega in 2018 – which, among its campaign promises, proposes the mass deportation of illegal immigrants – paired with the rise in xenophobic violence across Italy have proved Grillo wrong. The news that a Senegalese man was murdered by an Italian national the day after the election – a story right out of Camus’ The Stranger – hasn’t had much airtime in a country where Grillo is often considered a leftist despite having defended the “sanctity of borders” in 2007.
Since then, Beppe Grillo has stepped away from the party and the Movement has undergone significant change. Its slate for the March 2018 elections was fronted by the more reassuring image of Luigi Di Maio, a 31-year-old activist from Naples, presenting a manifesto and a list of technocratic ministers mostly drawn from the centre-left. The Movement therefore finds itself to be the party of the anti-vaccine activists as well as that of the cult of experts: a seeming contradiction which perhaps isn’t one at all. As opposed to the narrative in the foreign press that paints this election as an ‘anti-liberal chaos’, in the words of the New York Times, we are proposing an alternative reading, which is no less troubling. [...]
Grillo, believe it or not, was the very first to use V for Vendetta in a political context. The movie ends with a spectacular explosion of the Palace of Westminster in London and this particular image was a perfect metaphor for what Beppe Grillo wanted to achieve with the Italian Parliament. Shortly before the Movimento’s victory in 2012, he declared that he will “open the Parliament like a can of tuna”. Some commentators drew a parallel with a similar statement by Benito Mussolini in 1922. But what is most interesting is how the spectacular rhetoric of a Hollywood movie infiltrated political reality, feeding a strictly post-ideological vision of both power and counter-power. A pure political myth created by the American cultural industry. [...]
Underneath its veneer, the Movement seems to be getting ready to implement a technocratic agenda which will fit into the ordoliberal scheme which governs the European Union. Grillo’s first objective has always been to radically cut public expenses. As for his position towards the Euro, it has kept changing over the years and yet there is a temptation to take seriously his declaration in 2014 according to which the national scale is obsolete and that Italy should be “divided into macro-regions”, just as Gianfranco Miglio used to advocate.
Bloomberg: Trump May Go Too Far in Alienating Europe
After the unsuccessful visits of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to Washington last week, Trump has given Europe another month’s respite from punitive steel and aluminum tariffs. He expects European Union countries to agree to export quotas instead. Why the Trump administration would want that is anybody’s guess: Tariffs would at least yield some revenue for the U.S., while quotas would only result in abnormal profits for the exporters since prices would inevitably go up. But tariffs or quotas, it’s clear European leaders can’t get any traction with Trump. [...]
Then there’s the likelihood — confirmed by Macron after his talks with Trump — that the U.S. will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions on Iran. The presentation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday was clearly meant to strengthen Trump’s resolve to do so. Netanyahu’s forceful way of making a point that doesn’t necessarily agree with the data (the materials obtained by Israeli intelligence concern Iranian weapons plans from before the deal) should appeal more to Trump than the German and French leaders’ measured arguments or top EU diplomat Federica Mogherini’s sober reminder that Iran has been fully compliant with its 2015 commitments. [...]
The favorability of the U.S. (the country, not the administration) is at 46 percent in France and 35 percent in Germany, according to the Pew Research Center. That was the lowest since 2008, when the reputation of the U.S. hadn’t recovered from the Iraq invasion and the financial crisis was gathering steam. No such momentous events are taking place now, but there’s Trump. Germans, according to a poll released last month by Forsa, one of the top polling organizations in the country, overwhelmingly consider him a greater danger to world peace than Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that’s the case even among the conservative supporters of Merkel’s party.
Quartz: A new physics discovery could change the game for quantum computing
One of the most iconic features of quantum mechanics is “entanglement”—describing particles that are mysteriously linked regardless of how far away from each other they are. Now three independent European research groups have managed to entangle not just a pair of particles, but separated clouds of thousands of atoms. They’ve also found a way to harness their technological potential. [...]
While entanglement may sound wacky, experiments have been able to show that it exists for many years now. It also has the potential to be exceptionally useful—particles linked in this way can be used to transfer a particle’s quantum state, such as spin, from one location to another immediately (teleportation). They can also help store a huge amount of information in a given volume (super-dense coding). [...]
Along with this storage capacity, entanglement can also help link and combine the computing power of systems in different parts of the globe. It is easy to see how that makes it a crucial aspect of quantum computation. Another promising avenue is truly secure communications. That’s because any attempt to interfere with systems involving entangled particles immediately disrupts the entanglement, making it obvious that a message has been tampered with.
The New York Review of Books: Armenia’s Bad Week for Autocrats
Back in December 2015, Armenia held a constitutional referendum to transform the government from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary system. The ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), a coterie of free-market business elites, oligarchs, and allied politicians, engaged in its usual election habits of vote-buying and other irregularities to make sure the referendum passed. The object was to enable the RPA’s leader, the former president Serzh Sargsyan, to become prime minster instead, once his presidential term elapsed—which it did on April 9 this year. [...]
Sargsyan is of a different breed to Assad. He is a member of a quasi-oligarchic, nationalist party with wide support in the military. While his government refrained from a draconian crackdown, the Republicans have lacked legitimacy among the population for a long time. An OSCE report documented that election-rigging and outright vote-buying were rampant in the 2013 presidential election. [...]
The confrontation between Sargsyan and the street movement reached a boiling point on Sunday, April 22. A highly anticipated meeting between the opposition leader, Nikol Pashinyan, and the prime minister lasted minutes, and within hours the opposition leader had been detained at a local police station. That night, the rallies swelled to more than 100,000, as demonstrators poured into the streets. On April 23, unarmed soldiers joined the rallies. Pashinyan was released and, within hours, the prime minister had resigned. It was the day of our younger, glass-smashing son’s fifth birthday. The gift was unexpected.
Al Jazeera: Who is Armenian opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan?
He was the editor of Armenia's best-selling daily liberal newspaper, The Armenian Times, which has always been highly critical of the governments of Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan. [...]
In 2004, Pashinyan's car - parked just outside The Armenian Times office in downtown Yerevan - burst into flames after an apparent explosion.
Pashinyan has said the blast was an assassination attempt engineered by a wealthy businessman, Gagik Tsarukian.
Not long before the explosion, Pashinyan's newspaper published a story that accused Tsarukian of illegally cutting down trees to build a villa in an Armenian resort town. [...]
Way Out is a merger of Civil Contract, Bright Armenia, and Republic political parties that together form the opposition in Armenia's parliament. It has nine out of 105 seats in the National Assembly.
Politico: Emmanuel Macron’s coalition of the willing
Defense ministers of France, the U.K., Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Denmark and Estonia will sign a letter of intent in Paris in June, officials told me, pledging to develop a common strategic culture, share analysis and foresight on trouble spots that may require intervention and work to coordinate their forces for future operations.
Macron outlined the idea in his keynote Sorbonne speech on European integration last September, calling for a common European intervention force, defense budget and doctrine for action in contingencies where the United States and NATO may not get involved. France wants to recruit allies that could help share its military burden especially in Africa, where it intervened alone in Mali in 2012 to prevent Islamist militants seizing control of a weak state. [...]
British Prime Minister Theresa May quietly endorsed the initiative at a Franco-British summit at the Sandhurst Military Academy in January but did not publicize the step to avoid antagonizing hard-line Brexiteers in her Conservative Party, to whom any idea of an “EU army” is anathema. She did announce a practical move to help the French in the Sahel region, making available three heavy-lift Chinook helicopters to support operations in Mali. [...]
Paris also approached non-NATO Sweden and Finland and non-EU Norway about the initiative but they chose to stay out at least initially, diplomats said. Under other circumstances, the French would have liked to include Poland, the most serious military player in former communist Central Europe, but that seems impossible as long as Jarosław Kaczyński’s ruling Law and Justice party stays on its authoritarian nationalist course.
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