Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2020

Diamonds vs. Self Determination – South West Africa and the League of Nations I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 15 Feb 2020

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Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points and their idea of self-determination didn’t go unnoticed in the former German colonies like German Southwest Africa. But especially South Africa had other ideas at the Paris Peace Conference and lobbied to take control over future Namibia and its lucrative diamond mines.

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» SOURCES

Emmett, Tony. 1999. Popular Resistance and the Roots of Nationalism in Namibia, 1915-1966. Basel, Switzerland: P. Schlettwein Publishing.
Olusoga, David, and Casper W. Erichsen. 2011. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. London, UK: Faber and Faber.
Onselen, Charles van. 1980. Chibaro: African mine labour in Southern Rhodesia 1900-1933. London, UK: Pluto Pr.
Pirio, Gregory. 1988. “The Role of Garveyism in the Making of Namibian Nationalism.” In Namibia 1884-1984: Readings on Namibia’s History and Society: Selected Papers and Proceedings of the International Conference on “Namibia 1884-1984: 100 Years of Foreign Occupation; 100 Years of Struggle”, London 10-13 September, 1984, Organised by the Namibia Support Committee in Co-Operation with the SWAPO Department of Information and Publicity, edited by International Conference on “Namibia 1884-1984: 100 Years of Foreign Occupation; 100 Years of Struggle,” Brian Wood, Namibia Support Committee, United Nations Institute for Namibia, SWAPO, and Department of Information and Publicity. London: The Committee in cooperation with United Nations Institute for Namibia.
“Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany.” 1918. 1918. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00072665/00001/1j.
Silvester, Jeremy, and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds. 2003. Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book. Sources for African History, v. 1. Leiden, NL ; Boston, USA: Brill.
Smith, Iain R. 1999. “Jan Smuts and the South African War.” South African Historical Journal 41 (1): 172–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/0258247990867….
Vinson, Robert Trent. 2012. Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/public….
Wallace, Marion, and John Kinahan. 2013. A History of Namibia from the Beginning to 1990. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
William Blakemore Lyon. 2015. “The South West Africa Company and Anglo-German Relations, 1892-1914.” Master’s thesis, Cambridge University.
Zimmerer, Jürgen, and Joachim Zeller. 2008. Genocide in German South-West Africa. Monmouth, UK: Merlin Press.
Michell, Lewis (1910). The Life and Times of the Right Honourable Cecil John Rhodes 1853-1902, Volume 2. New York and London: Mitchell Kennerly
Rhodes, Cecil, (1902) “The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes: With Elucidatory Notes to Which Are Added Some Chapters Describing the Political and Religious Ideas of the Testator”, London: “Review of Reviews” Office
Cecil Rhodes, “Confession of Faith”, 1877 https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Rho…

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Enter Erwin Rommel – The British Advance in Africa – WW2 – 077 – February 15 1941

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Feb 2020

While the Germans send one of their best generals to North Africa to bail out the Italians, Great Britain switches focus from Libya to Greece, but make symbolically important gains in East Africa.

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From the comments:

World War Two
2 days ago
When you know the story going forward it’s fascinating to see how the decisions unfold this week — the reshuffling of command both on the Axis and Allied side might seem like innocuous administrative decisions when you don’t know the future. But if you have a crystal ball, you’ll know that not just Rommel arriving in North Africa, but also the decisions on the British side this week will have momentous impact on the war in total. That’s one of the things we discovered early-on with a chronological narrative, it suddenly puts things in a new perspective. The relationship between events changes, and things that might seem too boring, or undramatic to include in a “great story” take on a whole new meaning, increasing our understanding of cause and effect of the “greater” events that will come. On a different note, we just finished shooting a new batch of videos today and we’ll be announcing some fascinating developments on our program in the coming weeks. Stay tuned, and stay awesome, you all are by far the best community on YouTube!

The Canadian economy taken hostage while the PM swans around the world schmoozing for a temporary Security Council seat

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the state of play in the stand-off between (some) First Nations protesters and their temporary fellow travellers of the various permanent protest class:

“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The majority of Wet’suwet’en First Nation members support the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline project, and they are in an objectively peculiar situation. On the one hand, the RCMP is doing its best to clear away the protesters and let construction proceed. On the other hand, anti-pipeline protesters claiming solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en have created chaos in their name — most notably the total shutdown of CN Rail’s eastern Canadian network, the cancellation of nearly every Canadian passenger train, and the layoffs and untold economic costs that go with that.

If protesters acknowledge the diversity of opinion among the Wet’suwet’en at all, they will defer to the authority of five hereditary chiefs who oppose the project, or observe that the five elected Wet’suwet’en band councils — all of which have signed community benefits agreements — represent a form of settler democracy imposed by the Indian Act.

[…]

Clearly the Wet’suwet’en are a divided community, including on the most basic questions of how they should be governed. It’s a mess. Mind you, look at the state of Canada as a whole.

Just as the RCMP have court authorization to clear protesters and encampments along the pipeline route, the Ontario Provincial Police have court authorization to clear the Mohawk rail blockade near Belleville, Ont. Unlike the RCMP, the OPP refuses to exercise its authority. And we just have to live with that. Conservative politicians are barking at Justin Trudeau to “enforce the law,” but he doesn’t give orders to the OPP, and neither does Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and nor should we want them to.

Still, you might expect senior ministers to have moderately stern words for folks illegally causing economic harm. You might expect the prime minister, at minimum, to be in the country. Instead, Trudeau spent the week swanning around Africa drumming up support for the UN Security Council seat with which he remains unaccountably obsessed, then decamped for the Munich Security Conference, where he was photographed warmly embracing Iranian foreign affairs minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, five weeks after Iran blew an airliner full of Canadians out of the sky over Tehran.

The Little Potato is probably doubly happy to have a valid (in his own mind) excuse for not being in the country at this particular time. He loves being the centre of attention … as long as that attention is friendly. He doesn’t handle situations well if the tempers are higher and the hostility is rising … like much of Canada right now.

The pipeline is a provincial project, not a federal one, but if the OPP won’t end the blockade and the feds aren’t willing to take truly extraordinary measures, then at some point in the foreseeable future it may well make short-term economic sense to give in to their demands. Maybe the feds can buy the pipeline from Coastal GasLink and shut it down.

And what if the Mohawks do lose interest, or are somehow induced to stand down? That now counts as the best-case scenario, and it will have involved shutting down the CN railway for at least a week — maybe two, maybe three — with enormous consequences for people’s livelihoods and the economy as a whole, all in the name of killing a project supported by the vast majority of Indigenous people affected by it. And it will happen again, as many times as any group wants it to, on whatever issue they want it to, for as long as they want it to. Unless someone in power does something unusually bold and concrete in the very near future – and it’s not even clear what that thing would be — we are well on the road as a country to being terminally screwed. In the meantime, we certainly have no lessons on accountable government to give the Wet’suwet’en.

Tank Chats #62 KV-1 | The Tank Museum

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 15 Dec 2018

It was decided to put the KV heavy tank into production in December 1939, alongside the T34-76 medium tank.

The invading Germans received a major shock when they encountered the KV1 heavy tank in June 1941.

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QotD: Immigration and diversity

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Let me be clear that I think immigration and diversity are good things, overall. The economists seem to agree that immigration brings large economic benefits. The complete dominance of America in Nobel prizes, music, and the arts, and now the technology sector, would not have happened if we had not been open to immigrants. But as a social psychologist, I must point out that immigration and diversity have many sociological effects, some of which are negative. The main one is that they reduce social capital — the bonds of trust that exist between individuals. The political scientist Robert Putnam found this in a paper titled “E Pluribus Unum,” in which he followed his data to a conclusion he clearly did not relish: “In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

In short, despite its other benefits, diversity is a centrifugal force, something the Founders were well aware of. In Federalist 2, John Jay wrote that we should count it as a blessing that America possessed “one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, the same language, professing the same religion.” I repeat that diversity has many good effects too, and I am grateful that America took in my grandparents from Russia and Poland, and my wife’s parents from Korea. But Putnam’s findings make it clear that those who want more diversity should be even more attentive to strengthening centripetal forces.

Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.

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