The Israeli government has cut off food, water, and fuel to 2 million people inside Gaza as part of its campaign to stamp out Hamas terrorism. Collective punishment is not only contrary to international law, it is inhumane and illogical. It is what my community once endured in World War II, all because of the actions of others who happened to share our ethnicity. Have we learned nothing? How will this possibly help deescalate the violence rather than radicalize many more? It is madness.
Extrait
This is the second post in a series on what Meta did in Myanmar and what the broader technology community can learn from it. It will make a lot more sense if you read the first post—these first two are especially tightly linked and best understood as a single story. There’s also a meta-post with things like terminology notes, sourcing information, and a corrections changelog.
But in case you haven’t read Part I, or in case you don’t remember all billion words of it…
Let’s recap
In the years leading up to the worst violence against the Rohingya people, a surge of explicit calls for the violent annihilation of the Rohingya ethnic minority flare up across Myanmar—in speeches by military officers and political party members, in Buddhist temples, in YouTube videos, through anonymous Bluetooth-transmitted messages in cafes, and, of course, on Facebook.
What makes Facebook special, though, is that it’s everywhere. It’s on every phone, which is in just about every home. Under ultra-rigid military control, the Burmese have long relied on unofficial information—rumors—to get by. And now the country’s come online extremely quickly, even in farming villages that aren’t yet wired for electricity.
For context, Meta’s 2015 global profits hit $3.7 billion and the company jumps 200 places in the Forbes 500 ranking. “2015 was a great year for Facebook,” Mark Zuckerberg announces. “We continue to invest in better serving our community, building our business, and connecting the world.”
And into all the phones held in all the hands of all these people who are absolutely delighted to connect and learn and better understand the world around them, Facebook is distributing and accelerating professional-grade hatred and disinformation whipped up in part by the extremist wing of Myanmar’s widely beloved Buddhist religious establishment.
It’s a very bad setup.
The dangers rising in Myanmar in the mid-2010s aren’t only clear in hindsight: For years, Burmese and western civil society experts, digital rights advocates, tech folks—even Myanmar’s own government—have been warning Meta that Facebook is fueling a slide toward genocide. In 2012 and 2014, waves of—sometimes state-supported—communal violence occur; the Burmese government even directly connects unchecked incitement on Facebook to one of the riots and blocks the site to stop the violence.
This generation in Gaza, which either grew up or was born after the siege began, has lived through at least five big, destructive wars. During these wars, children, along with their mothers, fathers, and siblings, were the main targets and victims.
Terrorist Hamas Einsatzgruppen, many of whom are Holocaust deniers, attempted to stage their own version of Holocaust on the jewish residents of Kibbutz Be’eri not far from the Gaza strip, indiscriminately & joyfully murdering young & old,, little children & youths, girls & boys, women & men.
@raymondpert of course he does, first he ethnicly cleansed 100.000 people and now he buys a ton of attack weapons from #Russia, #turkey and #israel and thretens to cut of therotory of #Armenia
「But there is more to China’s efforts through Unesco [#worldheritage status] than increasing tea sales and tourism. The Communist Party claims that present-day China, which has dozens (perhaps hundreds) of ethnic minorities, is a single nation with a continuous history stretching back thousands of years. National identity is conflated with that of the Han, the ethnic group accounting for more than 90% of the population. China’s heritage laws aim to maintain “the unification of the country” and foster “social harmony”. In practice, this often means distorting history so that it aligns with the party’s view of the past and reinforces its vision of nationhood.」
The actual imperial military occupations and settler colonialism of both Tibetan and Uyghur homelands only began soon after Chinese communists had overthrown the Republic of China (the losing Kuomintang nationalists fled to Taiwan...). Chinese had no foothold on the previously nearly inaccessible Tibetan plateau so Mao sent entire 'PLA' armies there, equipped with modern foreign weaponry and gear. Besides all the massacres that followed — an estimated one million Tibetans were killed — the Chinese invaders looted and destroyed as much of Tibet's invaluable heritage as they could. While major monasteries (functioning as the key places of religion and learning in the Buddhist society) were looted, ransacked, defaced and partially destroyed, in total almost all of the country's 3,000 places of worship were simply destroyed; some were used for... artillery target practice.
The more accessible East Turkestan (ch: '#xinjiang') was targeted for settler #colonialism by establishing a new paramilitary settler corps, #Bingtuan. Those (ex-)soldiers were not only provided with Han Chinese brides but they were allowed to keep their AK-47s... You can guess what happened to the Uyghur homeland next. (links to background in the post below)
I write as we watch the news of Palestinian fighters from the besieged and starved Gaza strip having seized the initiatives from the Israeli daily incursions on Palestinian camps, and towns murdering civilians. Israeli murders this year have reached more than 250 Palestinians, including 47 children.
For Armenians, a classic relic ethnic minority whose Christianity peculiar alphabet date to Romans it was another genocide.
For the Azerbaijanis, Turkic in language and historically Shia Muslim, a great triumph.
Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.
Today in Labor History October 10, 1980: The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front was founded in El Salvador. The FMLN, which fought a long civil war to overthrow the right wing dictatorship, was named after Salvadoran revolutionary Farabundo Marti (1893-1932). Marti, a comrade of Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary leader, helped found the Central American Communist Party. In 1932, he helped lead an uprising that, for ten days, was the first Soviet in the western hemisphere. The rebellion was crushed by the dictator Maximiliano Martinez, who slaughtered over 30,000 peasants, indigenous people and communists in the Matanza. Martinez had once proclaimed, “America is great because it eradicated its Indians. For El Salvador to become great, so must we.” Martinez was also one of the first world leaders to recognize Adolf Hitler. He also believed in the “court of invisible doctors.”
Rejecting the Catholic Church’s “Repudiation” of the Doctrine of Discovery
"On March 30th, 2023 a joint statement was released by administrative departments of the Vatican City-State condemning “acts of violence, oppression, social injustice and slavery, including those committed against indigenous peoples.” The Catholic Church stated that it “…repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’.”
We are used to the deceptions of the church, this “repudiation” is no exception.
We are used to the deceptions of the church, this “repudiation” is no exception.
The words of the Catholic Church are nothing more than an attempt to damage control and downplay their genocidal legacy while obscuring their ongoing benefit from and perpetuation of colonial violence."
Israel-Palestine war: Why Hindu nationalists are backing Israel against Hamas
In recent years, Israel's crackdown on Palestinians has become the Indian benchmark in its own fight against minorities and Kashmiris, writes Azad Essa.
'A Massive #WarCrime': Israel Announces Total Blockade
"Starving 2 million people who cannot move and are under a land siege and naval blockade is #genocide."
Israeli Defense Minister Gallant announced a "complete siege" of the Gaza Strip on Monday, pledging to block food and fuel from entering the occupied enclave and cut off the territory's electricity—steps that international law experts and other observers decried as a clear war crime that will devastate civilians.