This journal was started in 1999 at the dawn of the 21st Century It was aimed at providing leading edge thinking on Africa and the diaspora issues at a time when a stale orthodoxy ruled the Black academy. At the time I had a full time role as partner in a City firm and the journeying around the world consequent on the launch of the first issue made a second issue impossible! However the need for an independent and…
Jean-Marc Sauve has written about the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church over many decades. His report estimated that 350,000 children over the years have been subject to sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church since the 1950’s. «The most terrible thing for me was to see the most absolute evil – the attack on the physical and psychological integrity of children – that is to say a work of death, perpetrated by people whose mission…
Matt Stoller comes from the anti-monopolist tradition in America. Given the strident screams of neo-liberal ideology that any constraint on business is bad, this sounds like a positive economic position. However, there is more to this than first appears. Matt manages to link the anti-trust issues to anti-China issues. This step involves some extraordinary footwork. But the clue to this may lie in his statement that one cannot be heard in Congress or taken seriously at high levels of…
Biden stated in his speech after the bombing at Kabul airport: ‘We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down. We will make you pay’… (Note 1) You may have missed the hysterical absurdity of threatening to hunt down a suicide bomber and make him pay. Even the hypothetical threat of following them beyond the grave would not work as he/she will not believe the Americans and they are going to the same place….
Some notice the connection between US foreign policy and the revival of extremism. It is conventional to discuss this in terms of mere ‘blowback’ and remark on how the US has sponsored and trained the Taliban, etc. However, the true connections are more subtle. It is not that the US directly supports religious extremism that is the cause of the revival of fundamentalism and extremism. It is rather that US policy systematically undermines all liberal opposition to itself. It…
He shows himself in his video interview on 9 Aug 21 with AriseTV, Bishop Kukah (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQVZHCjdtY) as a wise and critical commentator of the Nigerian political scene. He compares what is happening in Nigeria with what happens in Europe and America. One of the important statements he makes is the failure of Nigerian intellectuals. However, there are aspects that he misses or misconstrues and these are very important. It is correct but not sufficient to refer to the vacuity…
IBB (Ibrahim Bamasi Babangida), in an interview with AriseTV on 6 August 21(IBB Interview, 2021), suggested that he could recommend a way forward for Nigeria. This same person is the dictator who introduced SAP (structural adjustment programmes) to Nigeria. This policy, enforced by the IMF and implemented by Babangida and the military junta, destroyed the nascent manufacturing base of Nigeria and largely reduced the country to poverty. Since then, the IMF has accepted that SAP was a disaster and…
It is interesting to speculate if empirical evidence supports the human sacrifice explanation of US police killing of Black males. It is quite challenging to design tests for a real-world situation, but under certain conditions, one can review the expectations of one theory compared to another. Conventional theories of police brutality would, it is suggested, predict that with the protests and outcries against police brutality in the US, the number of deaths and attacks on Black males during the…
Part 1 Chris Hedges declares in a speech that the US ruling elites are willing to sacrifice human populations for their benefit. In fact, according to Hedges they are perfectly willing to sacrifice fellow US citizens. We have always known, he says, they were willing to dispose of the people of the developing world.(andrewnef, 2021) My only hesitation with Hedges’ analysis is that he uses ‘human sacrifice’ in only one dimension. For Hedges human sacrifice takes place when for…
At a talk at JFK Library, Evan Thomas describes the birth of American global covert operations. Bryan Bender asks him about his description of the motto of covert operations at the CIA in the early days as: Money no object No holds barred No questions asked. He claims that the US had to behave this way because ‘we felt we were up against a great enemy – global communism’, which seemed to be massing to take over the world….
US attacks on China on the issue of cyberwar have been raised to a new level as reported in FT on 19 July 2021: ‘The White House and its western allies have accused the Chinese government of teaming up with criminal gangs to commit widespread cyber attacks, including one on Microsoft this year that affected tens of thousands of organisations The US move to condemn China on Monday was supported by a coalition of allies, including those in Europe…
