[When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year slave uprising and civil war, he became the Americas’ first Black head of state.
For more than two centuries, Dessalines was memorialized as a ruthless brute.
Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti” – the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some 50,000 Haitian-Americans – it’s time to correct the record. They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero.]
It is hard to overstate the importance of Afghan employees, particularly translators, to the US war effort. Translators accompany military and special forces in everything they do, from night raids and helicopter insertions to route clearance, and they are often unarmed. They’re also critical to the work done by the State Department, the US Agency for International Development and US government-supported NGOs.
All that mean they are also targets. Taliban checkpoints are often set up expressly for the purpose of catching such men. Translators casually swap stories of Afghan employees of the US military who have had limbs or heads cut off by insurgents.
Now, with the US scheduled to largely withdraw from Afghanistan later this year, Afghans still waiting on visa applications fear their time is running out. Critics describe the process of applying for a visa as opaque, prohibitively complicated and painfully slow, putting the applicant’s lives at risk with each passing month that their visas aren’t approved.
“It has been a disastrous program,” said one former USAID official.” It’s embarrassing.”
But the State Department says they’ve implemented a set of changes to revitalize the process.
Jacques Derrida writes in Of Grammatology:
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive] the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not befall the subject which would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the subject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organisation, that is to say, of theeconomy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or the referent. [The Outside is the Inside]
Thus, the years of waiting to receive a US visa while the Taliban threaten the local linguists, kidnap their relatives, while, occasionally, they cut a head or two. “Absence”, translator as the referent, as the subject’s relationship with its/his own death. An excellent intellectual exercise on diffe’rance, for the rest of us.
It’s the third time in five years that South Africa has refused to allow Dalai Lama into the country out of deference to Beijing. Russia has also shut the Dalai Lama out repeatedly. But there are also some very surprising nations cowing to China.
Take the United Kingdom. In May 2013, when Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama, even after Beijing warned him not to. China cut off diplomatic relations, and Cameron’s administration spent a year working to get back in Beijing’s good graces. William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, promising that the British government was “fully aware of the sensitivity of Tibet-related issues” and would “properly handle such issues on the basis of respecting China’s concerns.”
An almost identical scenario played out in 2010 between China and Denmark, and, until South Africa’s visa decision, the most recent diplomatic row over the Dalai Lama took place in another Scandinavian country beloved for its openness, tolerance, and social welfare: Norway.
That’s right. When the Dalai Lama visited Norway in May 2014, government officials allowed him to enter the country but refused to meet with him.
According to UNESCO, progress in connecting children to schools has slowed down over the past five years. Areas that lack suitable school routes can often flood, making it even harder for kids to commute. Dangerous paths are one of the main reasons why many children decide to quit school.
[But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the “nonbelievers’” way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation.
This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.]
European governments pay millions of dollars in ransoms to free their hostages. The White House needs to decide whether it’s willing to sacrifice principle for people.
One wishes, of course, for some sort of Inglourious Basterds, in which the former victims rise up to give the monsters a taste of their terrible medicine. That’s what the movies are for. In real life, Obama has done what he can do by sending American warplanes to hammer IS positions in Iraq. For the moment, at least, he has saved Kurdistan from being overrun, and driven the jihadists away from the Mosul Dam. That’s a very good start. There may be nothing Obama can do to save Steven Sotloff. But there is a great deal he can do to show the criminals of the Islamic State that the West is prepared to defend the values it professes.
Police officer Dutta is also an Adjunct Professor of Homeland Security and Criminal Justice at Colorado Technical University. And he uttered those words not in the heat of the moment, but in an opinion piece in the Washington Post responding to widespread criticism of police attitudes and tactics currently on display in Ferguson, Missouri, but increasingly common nationwide.
Contrast that to what happened following the use of assault rifles pointed at the heads of local, state and federal officials by so-called “patriotic” “Tea Party” protesters during the Bundy Ranch standoff earlier this year. Yes, in that case, law enforcement officials also, ultimately, “backed down.” But they backed down to avoid what was a hair-trigger’s pull away from unspeakable violence.
Where the Ferguson demonstrations made the police look silly and dangerous, the armed-up protesters in Nevada made themselves look silly. More importantly, they actually provided, ironically, a twisted form of support to the notion that law enforcement needs to arm itself up, if only in self-defense.
In any event, little changed after the dangerous armed stand-off in the Nevada desert. Real change may come about, eventually, thanks to the peaceful — and very brave — resistance of the unarmed protesters in Ferguson.
America’s militarized police forces now have some highly visible tools at their disposal, some of which have been in the spotlight this week: machine guns, night-vision equipment, military-style vehicles, and a seemingly endless amount of ammo. But the economic arm of police militarization is often far less visible, and offender-funded justice is part of this sub-arsenal.
In reckoning with police militarization, the economic side of the phenomenon should be considered. The connection may not be obvious to those who’ve never had the gas or water or electricity in their homes shut off. But these forces operate in tandem—the tear gas and the tickets; the weaponry and the warrants—compromising a wide range of fundamental rights that seem, in Ferguson and beyond, to have gone up in smoke.
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