After World War II, US hegemony faced a unique challenge. African and Asian countries began liberating themselves from their colonial masters, whose armies could no longer sustain the oppressive violence needed to maintain their colonies. Capitalism had been thoroughly discredited—not only in the Eastern Bloc, where anti-fascist governments took power, but in Western Europe as well. Intellectuals, artists, and musicians in Western Europe increasingly embraced Marxism as the prevailing ideology. While US industrial power had an awe-inspiring reputation for producing unprecedented consumer goods, culturally, the US was viewed as a backwater that created no innovative works of art, music, or literature.

Classical music was seen as a European creation. Hollywood still had not perfected its blockbusters. The American authors who were known abroad such as Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck had socialist leanings, which would not be of any help for the US government officials who were trying to sell American capitalism abroad.

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In the effort to win influence over the world, the US has two big problems: their actions around the world made it clear that the US wanted to replace former colonial powers, second, the racial discrimination in the US made it difficult to win influence in countries populated mainly by people of color.

Their efforts to win influence amongst people of color was severely hampered by the overt racial discrimination that black people faced in the USA. They could not convince African heads of state that they envisioned a partnership on equal footing, when most black people were oppressed at home through overt racial segregation and the more insidious economic discrimination.

In Western Europe, the traditional leftist artists, in their expressions, used art for politics, which often highlighted the crimes of colonialism. For example, Pablo Picasso, who was a Marxist, used his art for political messages. One example is his painting “Massacre in Korea” which highlighted the atrocities committed by the US in the Korean war.

Massacre in Korea by Picasso

A conversation on the grounds of colonial crimes, was one that the US could now win. Therefore, the US strategy was to change the conversation. This problem was tackled by two agencies: the United States Information Agency, which was created in 1953, and operated under the state department and within US embassies. The CIA also took to sponsoring many umbrella organizations aimed at this effort.

They focused on art forms that removed political messages from the traditional leftist art. One of the art forms that they chose to sponsor was modern art, whose abstract expressions steered the conversation about the boundaries and definitions of what is actually art and it steered the conversation away from political commentary. In fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was filled with national security ties.

MOMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Rockefeller. In 1939, her son Nelson Rockefeller became the President of MOMA. He was also appointed by the Roosevelt administration to serve as the Assistant Secretary of State in Latin America. Its executive secretary between 1948-1949, Thomas Braden went on later to join the CIA. In a Saturday Evening Post article entitled, “I’m glad the CIA Immoral”, he wrote that modern art “won more acclaim for the U.S. …than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.”

Under the secret patronage of the CIA, MOMA arranged many art exhibits all throughout the world. In fact, the State Department in 1946 spent thousands top purchase modern art pieces featuring artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollack.

In the field of literature, the United States Government sponsored many magazines around the world such as London-based Encounter and the French-language Preuves. They featured writers who strived away from critiquing concrete actions of the United States to celebrating more abstract notions like “freedom” and “democracy.” This helped create what later CIA employee Cord Meyer described as a “compatible left.”

The field of music was used to combat the most heavy criticisms levied against the US, namely the brutal racial oppression faced by Black Americans. The US had an uphill battle of convincing many newly freed African nations that it was interested in being an equal partner, when Black Americans faced overt segregation and more insidious forms of economic discrimination within the USA. Their answer to this was to promote Jazz music. In one embarrassing incident, two Ghanian Diplomats faced discrimination inside a Denny’s in Delaware, which prompted the Eisenhower administration to desegregate a stretch of highway between New York and Washington, which diplomats frequently travelled between.

Unlike classical music, Jazz music could be touted as a uniquely American form of expression. It started in New Orleans, mainly from Black Americans, who would use a mix of rhythms and fast-paced improvisation. With predominant artists being mainly Black Americans, they could showcase them on a world stage, which would alleviate the charges of the US engaging in active racial discrimination.

Under these guises, the State Department arranged for “Jazz Diplomacy” tours around the world. They sponsored artists such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to tour around Africa. Of course, being sponsored by the State Department did soften the harsh critics both of these artists had about the racism at home.

In 1954, after the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs Board of Education that segregation, was inherently unequal, the instructed the states to proceed to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” But of course, most states did the opposite and tried to hinder any efforts at integration at every step. In 1957, when then Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to surround the Central High School, to prevent the nine students from enrolling in the school, Louis Armstrong’s critique was harsh and unwavering. He said, “The way they're treating my people in the south … the government can go to hell."

However, after accepting his position as a Jazz Ambassador in 1960, when asked about the race relations within the US, his reply was, “I don’t know anything about it; I’m just a trumpet player.”

On top of muting the critics of these once strong musicians, the Jazz tours did not only promote diplomacy, but they helped aid the efforts of the US National Security State, in other ways, unbeknownst to these musicians.

On June 30, 1960, Congo had just earned its independence from Belgium after one of the most brutal colonial rules. Joseph Conrad, in his book, “The Heart of Darkness” wrote about the depths of humanity’s depravity which took place in King Leopold’s Congo. King Leopold desperately wanted a colony, and nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom obliged in the Berlin conference by establishing the Congo Free State. Unlike other colonies, the Congo Free State did not belong to the country of Belgium, but instead of King Leopold’s personal fiefdom. With the patenting of rubber tires by John Dunlap in 1888, demand for a new resource skyrocketed exponentially. Congo, being rich in rubber trees was lucrative for the profit for the profiteers.

Brutality of the Free State of Congo Unprecedented

In order to meet the exorbitant demand for rubber, the Congolese people were forced to harvest wild rubber through daily quotas which was enforced through the vicious Force Publique, King Leopold’s personal mercenary force. Failure to meet the rubber quota meant that the Force Publique would chop off the hands of the Congolese villagers as one of the most brutal forms of retribution.

Later, in part due to the atrocities in Congo under King Leopold, in 1908, Belgium took over the management of Congo as Belgian Congo. Around this time, Congo’s rich deposits of copper became known, which led to the opening of the mining concession Union Minere, which exploited the rich copper deposits in the province of Katanga.

While Belgians exploited the minerals in the tune of billions of dollars, Congolese were left with very little to show for it. Besides the mineral-rich region of Katanga, there were not many highways joining the country together. Schools were few and far between and mostly serviced Belgian pupils. The Belgian colonization in Congo was so brutal that in 1960 when Belgian finally left Congo, the average life expectancy was 40.2 years. Diseases were rampant.

Amidst this backdrop, a young, visionary Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo, which became independent on June 30, 1960. During the independence day processions, Belgium King Baudouin took the stage, where he praised the King Leopold II. He also stated that he hoped the Congolese would prove worthy of the “trust” placed in them by the Belgian colonial powers. Soon afterwards, Patrice Lumumba took up the stage with a fiery speech that highlighted the brutalities of Belgian rule in Congo. He said, “We remember the ridicule, insults, and beatings we had to endure morning, noon and night, because we were ‘negroes’. We recollect the atrocious suffering of those persecuted for political opinions or religious beliefs. Exiled in their own homeland, their fate was really worse than death itself,” he said, recalling that this independence was indeed the fruit of a “struggle.”

Lumumba also expressed desire to use the vast mineral wealth in Congo in order to develop it economically. Immediately, this speech painted a target on his back where Washington and Brussels were concerned. On August 18, 1960, the CIA head Allen Dulles met with Eisenhower in order to plan the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba. Soon, the main plans were made, which involved supporting Joseph Mobutu and his militia to take over the country.

When Louis Armstrong began his tour in Congo in October, Lumumba was already under house-arrest. His tour was promoted in a west, as a way of distracting western audiences from the actual goings on in Congo. The first stop was Leopoldville (Kinshasa) where he played to a large crowd. The more curious aspect of his tour was the second stop: Elizabethville, which was what the capital of the mineral-rich province of Katanga was called.

While the US, formally, did publicly recognize Katanga as an independent republic, they provided the rebels with military support through back channels. The US had established a covert action program. Through, their allies in Apartheid South Africa, they created channels to recruit both mercenaries and also send arms to the rebel group.

While under the pretext of attending a Louis Armstrong concert, the CIA attache Larry Devlin, who was under the cover of being an embassy staffer was able to move freely in Katanga. Embassy staffers also met with the self-declared President in Katanga, without the US giving actual recognition. Ambassador Clare Timberlake went for the event, as well as the CIA chief Devlin. It was later admitted that ‘The object was to talk to Tshombe, the elected president of the Congolese province of Katanga, without recognizing him as the president of an independent state.’

While the concert itself did not enable the coup, it allowed for key meetings between coup-plotters and embassy staff to occur. It gave them the necessary cover to have these meetings without drawing attention to the planning of the coup. A few months after the concert, the Democratically elected leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Of course, even without Louis Armstrong’s Jazz concerts in Congo, the CIA would probably have found a way to meet with key figures that enabled them to create an armed resistance to install the western-friendly Joseph Mubuto into power.

The mineral wealth of Congo remained in the hands of western companies like Union minere.

While the Jazz diplomacy ended in the 1990s, the State Department continues to sponsor similar programs in the interests of its national security state. Nowadays, much of the function of the CIA has been taken over by the National Endowment for Democracy, who continue to give grants to various artists and radio programs.

The US State Department and the US national Security state continues to use music and art to promote its agenda. Most recently, it named Rapper Chuck D, as the Global Ambassador for Rap, and we interviewed him about his transition from “Fighting the system” to “Representing the system.” In his interview with us, he tried to explain that “the devil does not use the same trick twice” and he is not being used in a similar manner as Luis Armstrong and other musicians from the past. But, only time will tell if that is indeed the case.

10.03.24

This post is part of a series highlighting some of our favorite entries from the archives. Read the rests of the posts here.

***

What does history add to the study of law and political economy? As Karen Tani has observed, while history rarely provides an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, it can nevertheless help us understand why the legal landscape looks the way it does and illuminate the consequences of particular legal choices. It can also, Sam Aber & Caroline Parker have argued, reveal contingencies in the established order and make it easier to see potential alternatives. Finally, at its best and as some of the posts below demonstrate, history can offer detailed descriptions and analyses of domination’s force and show how social movements can obstruct, resist, and even bring to an end particular forms of domination. So without further ado, here are just a few of our favorite LPE & History posts.

The Making of a New Working Class – Gabriel Winant

Gabriel Winant’s *The Next Shift *is a historical study of care work, a subject so intimately tied up with law and political economy that the Blog published a symposium on it. In his opening post, Winant explains how industrial and labor policy reflected a too-narrow template of what constituted an industry, excluding healthcare workers from labor protections and producing a health care system that squeezed both patients and workers. As COVID-19 periodically resurfaces, each time sickening and disabling individuals, the lessons of Winant’s study—how the “crisis of care that we witness every day is both deeply historically rooted and, potentially, a lever of change for the millions of us whom the health care system touches”—becomes more urgent.

Tax Havens: Legal Recoding of Colonial Plunder – Vanessa Ogle

Vanessa Ogle, a historian of capitalism and empire, identifies a surprising connection between decolonization and the expansion of tax havens in the mid-twentieth century. To avoid the possibility of having to share the wealth they had extracted from their former subjects, white settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia sent their money to the Bahamas and British Channel Islands, while their counterparts in the French colonies of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria sent their money to Switzerland. Ogle recounts how lawyers took on this work, creating tax havens and using legal recoding mechanisms to make capital more mobile, such that foreign investment in stocks and bonds outstripped direct investments by the 1970s. These former colonies were thus left with the project of developing new states without much in the way of a tax base and in extensive arrears from white settlers’ refusal to tax themselves during the halcyon days of empire.

K-Sue Park on How She Teaches Property

For K-Sue Park, “the histories of conquest and enslavement are key to understanding our property system, both why property remains such a major driver of racial inequality and also how it explains the shape and the dynamics of the real estate market today.” In this interview, Park offers a précis of how she teaches the history of discovery doctrine through Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and how she teaches labor through the connection between John Locke and land acquisition. Park also describes her use of *The Antelope *to teach about the history of slavery. While these are not, Park explains, the extent of how one might teach about race in the property course, they offer focused descriptions of how to teach the histories of conquest and slavery, both of which are central to the law of property.

Historicizing Consumer Protection – Luke Herrine

If we hope to revive a moral economy framework for thinking about consumer protection law, Luke Herrine argues, we need to debunk the conventional story about what happened when the FTC supposedly imbued the notion of “unfairness” with too much moral content. According to this morality tale, when the FTC tried to use its unfairness authority to ban children’s advertising in the 1970s, the public recoiled, and Congress forced the FTC to develop a more objective standard for determining whether something is “unfair”—a standard grounded in consumer choice. As Herrine explains, however, what really happened was that the FTC was blindsided by an increasingly radical business lobby, and a faction of neoliberals within the agency took advantage of the moment to press their view of how the FTC should think about its authority.

The Young Lords: Building Power through Direct Action – Johanna Fernández

Creative and strategic militancy interrupts the normal functioning of society, shifts the terms of debate in public discourse, and expands the definition of the common good. Never has this been more evident than when the Young Lords barricaded themselves inside The First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem. As Johanna Fernández describes, this Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panthers had simply been looking for a space to feed breakfast to poor children before school and the church was closed except for a couple of hours on Sunday. But after the priest denied their request, the Young Lords occupied the building and transformed it into a staging ground for their vision of a just society. They provided hundreds of free meals to children, ran a medical clinic and a lead and anemia testing drive, and used the Church as a headquarters for redress of community grievances and needs. After 11 days, the Young Lords abandoned the church; that same night, Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller proposed launching a breakfast program for 35,000 poor children in the city

The Long History of Anti-CRT Politics – Aziz Rana

Recent attacks on CRT often claim that the United States, since its founding, has been committed to principles of liberty and equality. As Aziz Rana reveals, however, this strategic use of American universalism, along with an explicit focus on public education, has been perhaps the dominant way of articulating white resistance to racial reform for the better part of a century. Since the early 20th century, such “civic nationalists” have argued that the enlightenment arrived in the US, as opposed to elsewhere, because of the culturally exceptional nature of the individuals that settled North America: Anglo-Europeans. And they have used such claims to justify restricting the immigration of disfavored groups and to promote an intense project of Americanization, in which those from less culturally “mature” societies were to be aggressively inculcated with American values.

Racial Myths, Market Myths, and the Policy Roots of Predatory Lending in 1970s Chicago – Beryl Satter

Beryl Satter’s contribution to the symposium on Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money focuses on the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968. As Satter recounts, lenders skimmed profits at every step—first by charging origination fees on inflated mortgages and then by selling mortgages to a secondary market. By contrast, buyers were the victims of accelerated foreclosure schedules, the result of FHA-insured mortgages’ perverse incentives to vacate homes as quickly as possible in order for lenders to collected payment on defaulted loans. The structure of the FHA and HUD Acts created asymmetric structures that spurred lending to a captive market of Black and Latino borrowers, enacting through law and practice a siphon of wealth from minority borrowers to lenders.

Plantation Capitalism’s Legacy Produced the Maui Wildfires – Uʻilani Tanigawa Lum and Kaulu Luʻuwai

In the aftermath of the wildfires that ravaged Maui in August 2023, Tanigawa Lum and Lu’uwai explained that while drought and high winds were the proximate cause of the disaster, there was also a deeper human-focused explanation: the history of plantation capitalism. Haole (foreign) capitalists established sugar plantations across the islands throughout the late nineteenth century, decimating the local biodiversity in favor of monoculture sugarcane and imposing the colossal irrigation systems needed to sustain it. Even as the sugar plantations have closed, Tanigawa Lum and Lu’uwai explain, “the tourism industry has mirrored and reinforced the legacy of plantation capitalism through power structures that persist in disenfranchising Kānaka Maoli and other marginalized immigrant communities living in Hawaiʻi,” including the large Filipino population living on the islands and serving as the primary low-wage workforce. Through recent litigation and legal reform, however, Kānaka Maoli are working to restore Hawai’ian self-determination and make the islands sustainable again.

Constitutional Political Economy for a Democracy, Not an Oligarchy – William E. Forbath & Joseph Fishkin

In this introductory post to the symposium on their *The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, *Forbath and Fishkin note that while their work has emerged amidst the blossoming movement for law and political economy, many in this movement are skeptical of the usefulness of constitutional argument, largely because they are skeptical of how such arguments play out in courts. While they share this skepticism of the judicial supremacy, they argue that for much of American history, constitutional arguments were not the exclusive province of courts. Instead, there was a vibrant  “democracy of opportunity” tradition that impelled legislators and executives to restrain oligarchy, build a broad, wide-open middle class, and construct a political economy that is inclusive across racial lines. By abandoning this tradition, late 20th century liberals mistakenly ceded the ground of constitutional argumentation to the right.

The Origins of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex – Claire Dunning

Despite receiving more revenue from the U.S. government than from private donors, the nonprofit sector is often cast as an independent realm that stands apart from both state and market. This picture, Claire Dunning argues, is not merely misleading, but dangerous, as it naturalizes the idea that the needs of certain citizens are best met by private supplement, rather than by more expansive, more equal government provision. As Dunning explains, the nonprofit industrial complex first emerged in the postwar city, where segregation persisted and demands for freedom and equality grew. While federal grants were, for a time, able to circumvent local governments committed to maintaining segregation, this outsourcing approach created organizations vulnerable to future budget cuts and cast the needs of those traditionally excluded from the full rights of citizenship as optional luxuries rather than essential functions of government.

What the Telegraph Can Teach Us About the Moral Economy – Evelyn Atkinson

Evelyn Atkinson argues that as we grapple with the law’s power to address corporations, one interesting yet largely forgotten set of cases can help us find our bearing: what are known as the “death telegram” cases. These suits, which occurred during the turn of the twentieth century, involved claims for emotional distress against telegraph corporations for failing to deliver telegrams involving the death or illness of a family member. Despite a long-established common law rule that mental anguish alone could not be recognized, the Courts made an exception because telegraph companies and patrons were understood not to be in an arms-length, impersonal market transaction, but one based on affective, emotional duties—in part because they were understood as “public service corporations.” This perspective, Atkinson suggests, can open up new ways of thinking about powerful, monopolistic corporations today.

Article with the original image source and more explanation about it

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people in eastern India. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in World War Two.

There is no memorial, museum, or even a plaque, anywhere in the world to the people who died. However, a few survivors remain, and one man is determined to gather their stories before it is too late.

'Hunger stalked us'

"Many people sold their boys and girls for a little rice. Many wives and young women ran off, hand-in-hand with men they knew or didn't know."

Bijoykrishna Tripathi is describing the desperate measures people took to find food during the Bengal famine.

He is not sure of his exact age, but his voter card says he is 112. Bijoykrishna is one of the last people to remember the disaster.

He talks faintly and slowly about growing up in Midnapore, a district in Bengal. Rice was the staple food, and he remembers its price rising "by leaps and bounds" in the summer of 1942.

read more: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/single-post/bengal-famine-tracking-down-the-last-survivors-of-ww2-s-forgotten-tragedy

I'm from the global South, so I don't know minute details in the western history that well. Yes, this post should have gone under a political community, but since I'm interested in the history, I believe that this is the right place to post them.

I am interested in this part of the article:

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, this town’s population was 80 percent Jewish at the start of the twentieth century. In contrast, at the start of World War II, only 26 percent of the town was Jewish, after Jews fled or were imprisoned and killed in gulags. Devastatingly, the remainder of the Jewish population was killed in one mass slaughter by the Nazis in 1942.

However, from this Wikipedia page:

...in the 1930s the Jews were underrepresented in the Gulag population

Not just that, but according to this page mentions how most of the pogroms were carried out by the ASFR army and UNA, although the Green and Red army were also complicit to some extent.

Anything else I should be looking out for?

PBS Documentary Titled - Egalite for All: Toussaint Louverture & The Haitian Revolution

Avi Shlaim is an eminent historian. He is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2014) and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009). Professor Shlaim is a dual Israeli British citizen who lived in the country as a child. His family originated from Iraq and migrated to the newly founded state in 1950.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3869214

Institution: Yale
Lecturer: Prof. Donald Kagan
University Course Code: CLCV 205
Subject: #history #ancientgreece
Description: This is an introductory course in Greek history tracing the development of Greek civilization as manifested in political, intellectual, and creative achievements from the Bronze Age to the end of the classical period. Students read original sources in translation as well as the works of modern scholars.

More at [email protected]

I'm trying to recall some of my earliest memories of world events. The further back I go, the more vague things get as you'd expect.

I think I recall seeing on tv over the course of several days in the 90s a tragic and mostly unsuccessful rescue operation to try and dig out kids who were buried in rubble and mud from a giant landslide that occurred after an earthquake.

I think it was in a part of the world you might have called 3rd world at the time and this featured in the media coverage in respect to the inadequacy of the rescue operation and the infrastructure allowing access to the site of the disaster.

What sticks in my mind is footage, almost always from the same angle, a very wide shot from far away of the school on a very steep hillside just about completely buried in mud. I think the buildings nearby that still stood looked kind of tropical, I think I recall tin roofs but the memory is a bit too vague to say that for sure. I think the angle all the news coverage seemed to be using over the several days must have been one of the only cameras near the scene and in a fixed spot since it was hard to see much of what was going on and it was the same angle throughout the reporting.

While researching this I came across photos of the Aberfan disaster in Wales and thought that might have been it until I saw it was from the 60s, and also the hillside wasn't really tall enough and the obviously the location, UK doesn't match my memory. I also found stuff about the same thing happening in Yunan Province in China. But that was in 2012. The photo in that article is basically exactly my memory in terms of hillside and type of region I'm thinking except that I recall it being a bit more cropped in and much more blurry SD-analogue TV-ish looking as it was actually footage not a photo.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12865151

Witch-hunting in 17th-century Scotland was so well paid that it attracted some blatant fakers – Susan Morrison

A witch-hunter nicknamed ‘The Bloody Juglar’ appears to have used a retractable needle to prick his victims without drawing blood, while another responsible for the deaths of many innocent women turned out to be a woman herself

At Spynie Palace in 1662, John Innes of Leuchars had a serious problem on his hands. Local people were complaining to him about milkless cows, shrivelling crops and dying children. Pretty obvious that a witch was on the loose. As the local law enforcement thereabouts, John was expected to do something, but witch-hunting was not in Mr Innes’s skill set.

It must have been a relief when a slight young man almost magically appeared in front of him: John Dickson’s the name, and witch-hunting’s the game. Bags of experience. Happy to sort the problem out. Possibly dropped the name of superstar witch-hunter John Kincaid into the conversation, a Tranent man with a fearsome reputation as Scotland's most fearsome witch pricker or ‘brodder’.

The Scots didn't do witch-ducking. We went for the needle. The Devil gave his followers marks somewhere on their bodies. Where the Devil left his mark, there would be no blood, and no pain. Kincaid and his like would use the needle to ‘prick’ the accused. The words prick and needle are misleading. This needle was no dainty thing to be lost easily in a haystack. These were more like hefty great crochet hooks. The ‘pricking’ was more of a violent slam into the body.

The mark could be anywhere. The accused were stripped and shaved, and the needle plunged in. Some victims didn’t move, scream or bleed – the mark had been found. Possibly they couldn’t move. They may have been in deep shock. These were pious times.

Women rarely left home without covering their heads, now they stood publicly naked, shaved and exhausted. There may well have been little or no bleeding, if the needle hit a part of the body with a poor blood supply. Or perhaps the needle was retractable.

There are clues to such trickery. In the late 17th century, a witch-hunter nicknamed “The Bloody Juglar” turned up in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Pretty quickly his trusty needle pricked a victim and drew no blood. A witch, ready for trial and execution. Hold up, said Colonel Fenwick, the town’s military governor. He called in the mayor and the magistrates. He was worried that this evidence was falsely procured. He had his suspicions about that needle.

Why not get The Bloody Juglar to do the pricking again, but with a council-provided needle? Our boy baulked – “by no means would he be induced unto”. To the good people of Berwick, this “was a sufficient Discovery of Knavery”. The Juglar was busted.

John Kincaid may have been a knave, but between 1649 and 1662 he rampaged freely. It was lucrative. He pocketed £6 for a discovery of a witch at Burntcastle estate. They chucked in another £3 to cover the booze bill for him and his manservant.

The year 1659 was a busy one. Kincaid seems to have pricked profitably in East Lothian, where 18 accused witches were executed. In 1661, Forfar was so chuffed with his efforts that they gave him the freedom of the burgh.

Perhaps young John Dickson was inspired by Kincaid. Seemed a good trade for a lad, finding God's enemies and being very well paid for it, too. John headed north, fetched up at Spynie Palace and appeared before the harassed Innes, who wasted no time in signing up his new witch-hunter to an exclusive contract.

John was on a good retainer with performance-related bonuses, six shillings a day expenses plus £6 per witch caught. In no time at all, our man on the make had two servants and a very fancy horse. He was on-call and carried out witch-pricking in Elgin, Forres, Inverness and Tain. He possibly pricked Isobel Goudie, Scotland’s most famous witch.

He had a particular take on the procedure. Folk called him the Pricker “because of his use of a long brasse pin”. He had his victims stripped naked, then the “spell spot was seen and discovered. After rubbing over the whole body with his palms.” In a vicious witch-hunt/clan war in Wardlaw on the banks of Loch Ness, 14 women and one man were treated so savagely under John’s direct supervision that some of them died.

Our boy was on a roll, until he did something stupid. He pricked a man named John Hay, a former messenger to the Privy Council. Now, this was not a man to mess with. He had connections. He wrote to Edinburgh complaining in an incredibly civil servant manner, denouncing the witch-pricker who worked on his case as a “cheating fellow” who carried out the torture without a licence. Even witch-hunters need the correct paperwork.

The Privy Council in Edinburgh agreed. They called the maverick Mr Dickson in for a word. And they made a terrible discovery: John Dickson was a woman. Her name was Christian Caddell, and she came from Fife. Oh, she could tell a witch, no doubt about it. She claimed she spotted them by looking into their eyes and seeing an upside-down cross.

Of course, this was not the scientifically accepted manner of witch-finding. A needle must be used. And, obviously, you needed to be a man.

Christian stood trial, not for fake witch hunting, torturing or even for those murderous deaths, but for wearing men’s clothing. She was sentenced to transportation, and on May 6 she sailed from the port of Leith on the ship Mary, bound for Barbados.

On the day she left Scotland, Isobel Elder and Isabel Simson, pricked by John Dickson, aka Christian Caddel, were burned in Forres. Just because you were discovered to be a witch in the wrong way didn’t mean to say you were innocent. They were the last two victims of the cross-dressing counterfeit witch-pricker.

In the throes of the Cold War, a tiny Caribbean island dared to wage a revolutionary experiment. As the Revo imploded, the United States invaded.

With this poem, George Lamming, Barbadian novelist and poet, ended his address at a December 1983 memorial service in Trinidad for Maurice Bishop, Jacqueline Creft, Norris Bain, Vincent Noel, Unison Whiteman, and all who had been killed during “Bloody Sunday”—the abrupt end to the Grenada Revolution.

“It is the tragedy of a whole region which has brought us here,” said Lamming during his address. “The landscape of Grenada and its people are the immediate victims… But all of us are now the casualties of the American invasion.”

When an intra-party conflict broke out, leading to the killing of revolutionary leader Bishop and other victims on October 19, 1983, the Reagan administration seized the pretext to invade. On October 25, 1983, thousands of U.S. troops landed on the island.

This year, Grenada commemorates both 50 years as an independent nation and 40 years since the violent implosion of the People’s Revolutionary Government and subsequent U.S. invasion. For the first time, the government of Grenada has recognized October 19 as a national holiday, designated as “National Heroes Day.” Decades on, reckoning with the events of 1983 continues.

Writer Marise La Grenade-Lashley spoke at the inaugural National Heroes Day gathering, where she echoed sentiments expressed in her article in Now Grenada a year prior. “The shocking events of 19 October 1983, whose effects reverberated across the Caribbean and beyond, created deep psychological wounds that have never really healed. One coping mechanism adopted by some persons directly affected by the events of that fateful day has been to retreat in silence,” she wrote.

“While silence is a common reaction to trauma, it has, in the case of Grenada, created a void in our society that needs to be filled with factual and unbiased information related to those four and a half years during which Grenada embarked on an alternative path to development that crumbled so abruptly, so brutally, so tragically,” La Grenade-Lashley added.

The designation of National Heroes Day includes a mandate to bring the history of Grenada’s revolution to civics classes in Grenadian schools.

read more including starting poem: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/40-years-later-remembering-the-us-invasion-of-grenada/

archive link: https://archive.ph/esApJ

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3194334

Scrolls count as books, right?

They've managed to find actual words in a two-thousand year-old, burned scrolls from Herculaneum.

The exciting bit? The words they've read so far appear to be from a previously unknown ancient text. And there are over six hundred other scrolls. If we can read more of them, we'll find lost texts. Maybe some we've heard of, maybe some we haven't. Either would be amazing!

From the article:

The Herculaneum papyri, ancient scrolls housed in the library of a private villa near Pompeii, were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. For almost 2,000 years, this lone surviving library from antiquity was buried underground under 20 meters of volcanic mud. In the 1700s, they were excavated, and while they were in some ways preserved by the eruption, they were so fragile that they would turn to dust if mishandled. How do you read a scroll you can’t open? For hundreds of years, this question went unanswered.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/10358195

The road from Rome

The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole

For an empire that collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, ancient Rome maintains a powerful presence. About 1 billion people speak languages derived from Latin; Roman law shapes modern norms; and Roman architecture has been widely imitated. Christianity, which the empire embraced in its sunset years, remains the world’s largest religion. Yet all these enduring influences pale against Rome’s most important legacy: its fall. Had its empire not unravelled, or had it been replaced by a similarly overpowering successor, the world wouldn’t have become modern.

This isn’t the way that we ordinarily think about an event that has been lamented pretty much ever since it happened. In the late 18th century, in his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), the British historian Edward Gibbon called it ‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’. Tankloads of ink have been expended on explaining it. Back in 1984, the German historian Alexander Demandt patiently compiled no fewer than 210 different reasons for Rome’s demise that had been put forward over time. And the flood of books and papers shows no sign of abating: most recently, disease and climate change have been pressed into service. Wouldn’t only a calamity of the first order warrant this kind of attention?

It’s true that Rome’s collapse reverberated widely, at least in the western – mostly European – half of its empire. (A shrinking portion of the eastern half, later known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium.) Although some regions were harder hit than others, none escaped unscathed. Monumental structures fell into disrepair; previously thriving cities emptied out; Rome itself turned into a shadow of its former grand self, with shepherds tending their flocks among the ruins. Trade and coin use thinned out, and the art of writing retreated. Population numbers plummeted.

But a few benefits were already being felt at the time. Roman power had fostered immense inequality: its collapse brought down the plutocratic ruling class, releasing the labouring masses from oppressive exploitation. The new Germanic rulers operated with lower overheads and proved less adept at collecting rents and taxes. Forensic archaeology reveals that people grew to be taller, likely thanks to reduced inequality, a better diet and lower disease loads. Yet these changes didn’t last.

The real payoff of Rome’s demise took much longer to emerge. When Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons carved up the empire, they broke the imperial order so thoroughly that it never returned. Their 5th-century takeover was only the beginning: in a very real sense, Rome’s decline continued well after its fall – turning Gibbon’s title on its head. When the Germans took charge, they initially relied on Roman institutions of governance to run their new kingdoms. But they did a poor job of maintaining that vital infrastructure. Before long, nobles and warriors made themselves at home on the lands whose yield kings had assigned to them. While this relieved rulers of the onerous need to count and tax the peasantry, it also starved them of revenue and made it harder for them to control their supporters.

When, in the year 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne decided that he was a new Roman emperor, it was already too late. In the following centuries, royal power declined as aristocrats asserted ever greater autonomy and knights set up their own castles. The Holy Roman Empire, established in Germany and northern Italy in 962, never properly functioned as a unified state. For much of the Middle Ages, power was widely dispersed among different groups. Kings claimed political supremacy but often found it hard to exercise control beyond their own domains. Nobles and their armed vassals wielded the bulk of military power. The Catholic Church, increasingly centralised under an ascendant papacy, had a lock on the dominant belief system. Bishops and abbots cooperated with secular authorities, but carefully guarded their prerogatives. Economic power was concentrated among feudal lords and in autonomous cities dominated by assertive associations of artisans and merchants.

Read more through the link. And join lemm.ee/c/history

Over 300 students were murdered by the Mexican army during a peaceful protest that occurred 10 days before the 1968 Olympic Games.

On Monday, thousands of citizens gathered to demand answers from President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) regarding the massacre that took place in Mexico City on October 2, 1968. The incident involved hundreds of students protesting against the administration of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-1970).

They marched from the Three Cultures Square in Tlatelolco, where the massacre occurred, to the Zocalo in front of the National Palace.

Mexico City's Citizen Security Secretary deployed hundreds of police officers, who engaged with protesters at some points along the route.

The march commemorates the 55th anniversary of the death of over 300 students in a massacre carried out by the Army and the "Olympia Battalion" paramilitary group during a peaceful protest that occurred 10 days before the 1968 Olympic Games.

read more: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mexicans-Remember-Victims-of-the-Tlatelolco-Massacre-20231003-0001.html

archive: https://archive.ph/r60fU