What was the context here?
What was the context here?
Horrible stabbing attack a couple days ago that killed some kids done by a 17 year old - so they cant give out his name. Online rumour mill riles up that the attacker was a muslim/black/brown/anyone they dont like so the fascist types showed up to riot.
17 year old stabbed a bunch of kids. Police confirm it wasnt terror related and he was white. Right wing idiots know better and started a riot claiming hes muslim
Oh dear.
Brick to the balls doesnât really compensate.
Iâm fairly certain heâs not white, itâs been revealed heâs born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents (a country which is 97% christian).
Oh, yes, Rwanda. A nation that exemplifies Christian beliefsâŠ
âOh, youve got a funny shaped nose. Youâre the work of evil. Thus, your entire race will need to be genocidedâ.
To be fair, that was the Belgians, not the Rwandese.
The Belgians cultivated the divide - badly. The Tutsi were considered the monarchy pre 1900 and ruled harshly on the Hutu.
Whe. Belgium took control of the country from the Germans post WWI they started off by leaving the power structure as was and recognising the Tutsi king. When he died in the 50s to Hutus rose up and the Belgians gave their support to the Hutus.
50 years of civil conflict and millions dead laterâŠand not a lot has changed.
I spent some time in Rwanda and got my info on the ground rather than through books but I was told the Belgians implemented ID cards in the early 20th century to divide and conquer. The initial ID process the Belgians used was measuring skull size and nose size which didnât work because Hutu and Tutsi were essentially the same people. In the end they divided using caste. If you owned a certain number of cows you were IDed
as Tutsi, if you owned less you were IDed as Hutu. Even if you werenât Tutsi but you were IDed as Tutsi you accepted it because with a Tutsi ID card came privilege. Learning about that holocaust is the saddest thing I have ever experienced. I canât bring myself to type the things I saw at the massacre locations. The places were left the same way they were in 1994.
What were you doing in Rwanda?
Colonel in the Belgian army maybe?
Yeah, its a fucked up genocide (although what genocide isnt).
We watched Hotel Rwanda in High School and I kinda did a bit of reading up into the whole shitfuckery afterwards.
It was then I learned how pointless UN âPeacekeepersâ are. Stories about UN Peacekeeping troops not being allowed to open the gates to their base to fleeing civilians and watching as they are literally hacked to death meters away - literally outside the front door - because the gangs knew the UNs Rules of Engagement mesnt they couldnât intervene unless they came under direct fire.
I lost my drivers license 15 years ago and had to bus it to parra and then train it to burwood for 6 months. I was private school hills boys and had never been in a situation where I was around black people but every morning I got on the train every carrage was predominantly black guys. I felt xenophobic and didnt like it. I realised Iâd never met or hung out with black (african) guys so i decided to save up and go to east africa for 2 years to learn about culture, history and to see what was going on. I flew to Egypt and overlanded it to South Africa for 21 months.
At the border if Uganda, I met an aspiring journalist in Rwanda doing a piece on the the genocide 15 years on. I didnt even know that there had been a genocide in Rwanda until i met him. It sounded interesting so I tagged along with him while he met and interviewed people who were trying to move on. We spent 6 weeks hanging out and hearing horrible stories. He didnât even end up writing the piece.
I would argue the UN in general are pointless or at least corrupt. On my travel in Africa, there is poverty, hardship and distress everywhere. So many situations where a a piece of infrastructure would help, like a dam or a highway from green fertile land to barren land. The UN are nowhere to be seen. The one country i saw UN workers in was DRC. There are scores of big white excavators, bogeys, road graders with UN painted on the side building highways to mines. The mines they were building roads to were to get precious metals required to build what must now be the modern phone and battery. what made this more interesting is, that I travelled with the journalist that I met to DRC because during the genocide l, the tutsi had fled there to escape. After the genocidr the hutu fled to DRC to escape reprimand for their crimes. Word was that the Tutsi had been killing hutu in DRC for 15 years aftet the genocide ended and the UN had no interest in that or the 15 other civil wars in sub Saharan africa at the time. They were just interested in building roads to get these precious metals to build phones and batteries.
Michael Parenti as relevant as ever.
And with that growthâwith that investment comes a dislocation in the structure of the Third World country, so thatâso that the whole infrastructure of it beâgets built around capitalist extractionâcapital extraction. The economist Ray Brownâwhen he went to Cuba, before the Revolutionâit was in 1958, he was there, about a year or so beforeâwas impressed by how every major road he saw went from a sugar plantation to a refinery to the seaport. While there were whole communities without roadsâthey couldnât get to doctors, they couldnât have schools, couldnât see a priestâthe sugar companies had their roads.
And when you send foreign aid to those countries, nine out of ten of those dollars goes to build the infrastructure to subsidise the capital investment of the private corporations, or to pay for the police and the army of that countryânot to defend it from foreign invasion, because Uruguay is not going to invade Bolivia, because Taiwan isnât going to be invaded by the Philippines, but they need those big armies to defend their rulers from their own people, because those people are in such a state of immiseration. So thatâs where our foreign aid goes, and as someone once said, âforeign aid is when the poor people (thatâs us) of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.â
Thatâs a hell of a story. Write a book!
I canât remember if it was the UN or a NGO âŠ
I saw a doco once on Haiti after a cyclone. Before the event a local had started a business installing solar powered street lights.
After the cyclone the UN comes in and itâs decided solar powered street lights would be great in the rebuild. So they ignored the guy making them locally and imported them.
Pretty horrible shit going on over there at the moment.
Shit happening in multiple cities, people being assaulted on the street, terrorists trying to burn down a hotel that was hosting refugees.
Kemi Badenoch announced as new Tory leader. Sheâs an absolute nutter.
Theyâve gone further to the right. Interesting to see if they get any Reform voters back.
Considering sheâs black, I donât think Reform voters are going anywhere