Colonial Settler Studies

I received an academic paper  from a post-doc about Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in Conversation with Indigenous Theory and Activism. 

"By highlighting Indigenous struggles to protect Mother Earth and her sacred resources, we suggest that Indigenous ontology-specifically relationships to land (Deloria, 1972)-challenges disability theory at the epistemological level by rejecting the taken-for-granted dualism between the environment and (dis/abled) humans within (settler) disability studies."

What can I add? She also wrote a lot about horses and Indians. 

PS: Having written lately a number of academic papers in English, I feel capable of preparing a paper on Palestine using the latest Colonial Settler studies slang. I mean, you had those Aramaic speaking Jewish peasant villages in the Galilee that were brutally colonized during the 6th Century Arab invasion. The beautiful synagogues were leveled and the natives were reduced to second class status, and forced to pay extra heavy taxes. Their language was replaced by the colonist language and religion. By the 20th Century, to quote the above author, they were still "heroically struggling to protect the Mother Earth and her sacred resources". 

Hungarian nationalism

Hungary is a homogeneous, stable, middle-income European country, that has been losing population every year in the last forty years. Its leader, Orban, made the increase of native births the theme of his government. The European Union adopted immigration as the preferred solution. For his rebellion, Orban is being converted into an international pariah and subject of internet attacks. Example below where he is improbably linked to two evil entities: Russia and the American right.

"It is characteristic that the government-supported XI^th World Congress in Budapest, organised by the Word Congress of Families (WCF), was closely tied to the government’s demographic forum. The Congress is mainly known for being a summit of Russian organisations disseminating the Kremlin’s propaganda and American far-right fundamentalists. "

I was born in Jaszbereny, in the very center of Hungary, and am able to feel Hungarian angst and impotence, and also evaluate objectively the effectivity of Orban's policies. Which is nil. On the other hand, I am surprised by Hungarian xenophobia, since traditionally it was very welcoming to immigrants such as Germans, Jews and other peoples. Hungarians themselves are a mixture of those immigrants.

Growing older as I am, I understand the desperate need of European peoples for young workers. I had bought a new faucet but the connection is deep under the sink and am unable to install it. The plumbers around are wealthy middle aged people, refuse to try dismantle the old one and replace it. I would be ready to pay (but not much) to a slim Eritrean to help me, against my personal convictions, but is none available. Importing a foreign working class like Germany and Sweden is doing, would empty Zionism of any meaning, and would surely lead to a South African situation.

The solution to Hungary's problem is to revert to a pre-French Revolution regime, where Church is part of the State and education is its monopoly. The capitalist economy based on consumer demand must be abolished, living standards lowered and demand created by hi-tech wars. Where did exist a society like that? Maybe Japan in the thirties. But I would not like to live there, for sure.

Korean Ballistic Anti-Ballistic Missile

Japan has announced that the last ballistic missile fired by North Korea did not follow a regular trajectory, making it difficult to shot it down. Ballistic objects fall at fantastic velocities from space, but once they are ballistic their trajectory follows Newtonian rules  which can be calculated and the object intercepted. Now it appears that Korean ballistic missiles can change route in flight and maneuver to confuse the antiballistic missile. I think should one missile miscalculate and humiliate the Japanese, America will give them free hand to restore their honor. Who will defend the Koreans? They have no allies.

The Japanese have. Seventy years of peace and prosperity have softened but not castrated the Japanese nation. In six month they can change direction and reinvent themselves as the martial people they always were. In Lagos I worked for a Dutch colonial who invited me to an Indonesian lunch. He had known the Japanese in Bandung and hated them with white hot passion. 

Antiballistic missile

It was announced that an Israeli antiballistic missile was successfully tried in Alaska. That means that we have some defense even if Iran produces nuclear weapons and sends it by the ballistic missile it already has. I just thought about the commercial applications of this new Israeli product. All European countries are exposed to nuclear missiles and they are protected by NATO. Japan is naked in face of North Korea's missiles. Australia may want to have one too. The market for this new weapon must be vast. We may be competing with the US but the world is big enough for all of us. Maybe we can't sell it because of American veto. In short, I know nothing. I do know I am losing a lot of money on the Israeli Communication Satellite company shares. BTW, wanted to order lithium batteries for my sweeper robot but the Chinese stopped selling them.

I assumed that they wanted to keep Lithium for themselves, but apparently methamphetamine labs buy these batteries as reducing agent. Anyway, I ordered a set from Turkey. 

Arab Intellectual Discourse

I am reading lots of analysis of Arab intellectual production of the 20th Century, which is mostly written and published in the West and focuses on the effect of colonialism on the Arab intellectuals. Said set the pattern with his Orientalism book and has created a veritable school of thought. What is shocking for me is the poverty of the documents on which this structure is built: The number of non-trivial books (that is, not children's illustrated stories or religious tractates or porn) are few, there is almost no intellectual discourse that can be analyzed, the journals consist in one or two pages with no controversies nor real content. The overall production of the Arab world, almost one thousand million human beings, is negligible. Contrast that with the copious production of Israel, full of controversies, rivalries, intellectual fights, thousands of original books published every year, hundreds of political films - most of it damning Israel and its "colonialism". There are more serious representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish films than in all the childish stories of Arab TV and filmography. In extremis, compare Arab production with the explosive boiling over of Nigerian literature and filmography, which may be less abstract than German philosophical tractates and shockingly "vulgar", but impress the observer as a tropical explosion of color, libido and elan vital.

My point is that Western analysis of Arab intellectual discourse is more voluminous than the production itself. The West is trying to attribute intellectual thought to the Arab umma where there is none.

One reason for the wasteland that is the Arab production is that they live in harsh dictatorships, where original bloggers are jailed and journalists live in fear of writing a controversial word. They keep repeating the infantile formula of colonialist oppression because wrongly, they feel it flatters them and know that blaming the short episode of Western colonialism (say sixty years, from 1890 to 1945) they will have no issues with their own governments and they will enjoy the applause of Western universities. 

The Iron Age in Africa

When I worked in Nigeria, collected hand made iron tools. I walked the Onitsa Market on the river Niger, where hundred of African Ibo smiths manufactured original and interesting hand tools, agricultural machines and a large variety of machetes and knives. I bought a lot, very cheap for me, and had it sent back to Buenos Aires. It never arrived.

While in Europe the Iron Age followed the Bronze Age, in Africa it started EARLIER and followed directly the Stone Age. Ancients Greeks used heavy and expensive bronze body armor and hand machetes that were almost useless in battle after a few hits. African iron knives were durable although the quality of the metal (they mined and refined it themselves) was poor.

In Onitsa I bought also bronze statues, some of artistic value, sold to me as "antiquities". A few heads I brought to Argentina in my luggage, and later to Israel, but they disappeared. In retrospective, it is quite imaginable that the Niger River Delta people like Igbo and Ibibio, could have advanced more rapidly than the Europeans, even they peopling Europe instead us. I speculate that they "lost the train" with a difference of 2000 years.

When I worked in the Delta, the area was peaceful and policed, a legacy of recent British colonials. It hits me as paradoxical that instead of developing fast (the region is rich in oil and tropical agriculture), they descended into a jungle slum. The Delta peoples are intelligent, healthy and physically stronger than Europeans. I can't explain their failure but I am sure that raw IQ is not the answer. The IQ of British Africans is similar to that of the autochthonous population that created the Industrial Revolution.
  

Ethnic cleansing in Ethnic cleansing in Palestine

It is not surprising that within a general war, some larger ethnic groups seize the opportunity to clear out smaller ethnias. In the general ethnic cleansing or mass migration that took place in the Mandatory Palestine in 1947, no one noticed the evacuation of seven minority-within-minority villages. Those were the Metawali villages of  Tarbikha, Saliha, Malkiyeh, Nabi Yusha, Qadas, Hunin, and Abil al-Qamh. Their lands were distributed among the nearby kibbutzim and moshavim, and the larger Palestinian villages that had sided with the Jews in the War of Liberation. It is not widely known that the Jewish forces were very weak (and tired) in the Galilee region, and that the Galilee was conquered thanks to the collaboration of the Druze ethnic minority, the Chechen Muslim villages, the Christian villages and the Bedouins that hated and were hated by the Palestinian fellahin. Also the villages of the descendants of African slaves brought here by the Arabs, like Jisr-al-Zarka, sided with the Jews. I heard that the political secretariat of the Jewish Agency, headed by Golda Meir, distributed sacks of gold coins to secure their allegiance. We learnt that from English colonialists, like the political agent Colonel Lawrence. All the villages (except two Christian villages on the Lebanese border) that allied themselves with the Jews emerged untouched from the Palestinian Naqba, they still exist and prosper. They are the Israeli Arab minority. That is their secret shame.


What were those Methawali that some unknown (non-Jewish) hand ethnically-cleansed during the chaos of the 1947 war? The Palestinians follow the Sunni tradition of the Islam, like the Saudis and Jordanians, as against the Shi'a, followed mainly in Iran. Within the Sunni, the  Shafi'i madhab (legalistic thought) is one of the four schools of Islamic law, the one practiced in Palestine, while the Methawali followed a different interpretation. In the Middle East, people hides their real ethnic and religious identities, and the Methawali adopted an ambiguous coloration of Sunni, although with light philosophical disagreements with the Orthodox Sunni majority, with the idea that they could - should the need arise - present themselves as faithful Shi'a. The Alawites are another ethnia that never cleared up what they believe and to where they belong but now that they life depends from Iranian military assistance, they count themselves as Twelvers.  Within the Islamic world, till the return of the Jews to Eretz Israel, Palestinians were barely considered Muslim: almost no village had a mosque, and there was not one Islamic college in the country. The Palestinians - especially in the Galil - started to hit their foreheads against the tarmac only as a reaction to the presence of the Jews. It could have been different, but "It was written" that they would oppose the rise of Judea.