100 quotes found
"As a Macedonian [Philip] was looked down upon by the more refined Athenians, but they shared the same Hellenistic culture. How deep this went is evident in aesthetically the least spectacular, but politically the most explosive, of the finds in Vergina. In the Great Tumulus above Philip's tombs, which was raised by the invading Galatians in 274 BC, the archaeologists found fragments of no fewer than seventy-five funeral monuments, or stelai. The names on these were entirely Greek, save two which appeared to be Hellenised versions of Thracian and Phoenician names. The implication is that Philip's Macedonia was thoroughly Hellenised, an outpost of classical Greek culture."
"I am very pleased to see Blair leaving 10 Downing Street. Really, this man caused the greatest humiliation to the Arabs and Muslims, besides George Bush – and maybe even more than him. He is the only one in the Western world who supported Bush's wars in the Arab region. It was Tony Blair who encouraged the Americans to invade Iraq, and to wage the current war in it. This man employed lies, deceit, and deception. He discovered the British people and the entire world.[...]How can you reward this man by appointing him envoy to the Middle East? It is like a criminal who returns to the scene of the crime. You are sending Blair back to the scene of his crime. This is a problem. He should be pelted with rotten eggs and tomatoes, rather than receive this honor, because he destroyed us, and he hates us, as Arabs and Muslims."
"In future editions many of those who may die in the meantime will, of course, be added. All the same, it is hoped that this announcement will not start an immediate wave of suicide among singers and players."
"Blues. An American dance stemming from the Foxtrot, the speed of which it reduced and into which it brought a deliberately contrived dismal atmosphere. When Blues are sung their words seem to aim at attaining to the utmost depths of gloom and inanity."
"Crooning. A reprehensible form of singing that established itself in light entertainment music in about the 1930s. It recommended itself at first to would-be singers without voices who were unable to acquire an adequate technique and later to a large public because anything, however inartistic, is likely to become popular if only it is done often enough by a large enough number of people."
"The joy, the tension, the exhilaration and the happiness those Sundays brought into our lives served as a cushion, I am sure, for the sterner life which was ahead for all of us."
"All journalism is investigative to a greater or lesser extent, but investigative journalism – though it is a bit of a tautology – is that because it requires more, it's where the investigative element is more pronounced."
"We will encourage reporters to be as specific as possible about the source of any anonymous quotation."
"You can't possibly care about debt relief and the Simpsons. If you listen to Ligeti and James Macmillan then why would you want to know who won the United game last night or which Cabernet Sauvignon to drink with your meal tonight? Get back into your box. Something else missing from the Times of 1968 was anything to do with the home or emotional life. There is nothing about marriage, divorce, children, schools, au pairs, depression, drinking, health, drugs, teenagers, affairs, fashion, sex, successful relationships, failing relationships, interior decor, cancer, infertility, faith, grandparents - or any of the other things that make up the texture of our non-working lives."
"It would be difficult to devise a process more inclined to throw up errors than the production of a newspaper."
"[There is a] widespread feeling that newspapers are failing in their duty of truly representing the complexity of some of the most important issues in society."
"We're no longer a once-a-day text medium for a predominantly domestic audience. Increasingly - around the clock - we use a combination of media in telling stories, and in commentary, to millions of users around the globe."
"The papers should promote minority views as well as mainstream argument and should encourage dissent."
"The greater the speed required of us in the digital world – and speed does matter, but never at the expense of accuracy or fairness or anything which would imperil trust – the more we should be honest about the tentative nature of what is possible."
"In the days when we could take it for granted that journalism mattered, we could only share assumptions about what it was, how it was delivered and funded, but this is not the case any more."
"When I look back over some of the most high-profile things we’ve done recently at The Guardian I see an interesting pattern emerging – a form of collaborative journalism that I can best describe as a mutualised newspaper."
"It took one tweet on Monday evening as I left the office to light the virtual touchpaper. At five past nine I tapped: "Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?"… By the time I got home, after stopping off for a meal with friends, the Twittersphere had gone into meltdown. Twitterers had sleuthed down Farrelly's question, published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday "Trafigura" was one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers. ... One or two legal experts uncovered the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, wondering if that would help? Common #hashtags were quickly developed, making the material easily discoverable. By lunchtime – an hour before we were due in court – Trafigura threw in the towel. The textbook stuff – elaborate carrot, expensive stick – had been blown away by a newspaper together with the mass collaboration of total strangers on the web. Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety."
"It's a highly effective way of spreading ideas, information and content. Don't be distracted by the 140-character limit. A lot of the best tweets are links. It's instantaneous. Its reach can be immensely far and wide.Why does this matter? Because we do distribution too. We're now competing with a medium that can do many things incomparably faster than we can. It's back to the battle between scribes and movable type. That matters in journalistic terms. And, if you're trying to charge for content, it matters in business terms. The life expectancy of much exclusive information can now be measured in minutes, if not in seconds."
"There are plenty who think that, as our libel laws are cleaned up, smart lawyers are switching horses to privacy."
"Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states."
"Ask any British journalist who were their editor-heroes over the last 30 or 40 years and two names keep recurring. One is Harry Evans. The other is . Why were they so admired? Because they seemed to represent the best of journalistic virtues – courage, campaigning, toughness, compassion, humour, irreverence; a serious engagement with serious things; a sense of fairness; an eye for injustice; a passion for explaining; knowing how to achieve impact; a connection with readers. Even if you missed their editorships – as I did with Hugh Cudlipp – both men wrote inspiring books about journalism: about how to do it, but, more importantly, about why it mattered."
"The BBC is almost certainly the best news organisation in the world – the most serious, comprehensive, ethical, accurate, international, wide-ranging, fair and impartial."
"Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them."
"These days, the editor of The Guardian is a journalistic “global celebrity,” as put it to me—' dubbed him “the of phone hacking.” It was under his leadership that the paper broke the WikiLeaks story, then the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, then the efforts at Rupert Murdoch’s company to cover it up. Guardian reporting triggered investigations that have so far led to arrests of more than 40 Murdoch journalists and executives. “Something happened last year,” says Rusbridger, slipping into a sweet reminiscence about the halfway downfall of Britain’s media king, who seems never far from his mind. “It was quite extraordinary if you lived through this period to see … the bursting of the bubble.”"
"Another major Blair ally is Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is instructive that the Foreign Office claims this close official and personal relationship as a great success since it implicates Britain in some of the worst horrors of our time. The invasion of Chechnya in September 1999 was followed by Russia's flattening of Grozny, killing thousands. British leaders offered the mildest of protests, while defence minister Geoff Hoon spoke of "engaging Russia in a constructive bilateral defence relationship". Human rights atrocities in Chechnya are increasing again, with thousands of "disappearances"."
"Britain sided with the Saudis and other Gulf regimes defining themselves as Islamic, to counter and overthrow secular nationalist regimes, principally in Egypt and Syria. The demise of "" left a vacuum that was eventually filled by jihadists."
"London helps keep them all in power by providing training and equipment for "internal security", supporting Saudi forays to end democratisation in the region, as in Bahrain in 2011, and backing Riyadh's domination of Arabia, as now in Yemen. This British support for Gulf dictators pushes the emergence of democracy further away and encourages extremism."
"March 20th marks the 15th anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq which plunged the country into a brutal occupation leading to sectarian civil war, terrorism and a death toll of hundreds of thousands. Yet in Britain the anniversary marks another year of impunity for the ministers who authorised the invasion. This lack of accountability for crimes committed abroad is a British disease with a very long history."
"What is happening now in Yemen is simply a repeat: ministers are also escaping accountability for their involvement in consistent Saudi attacks on civilian targets such as schools and hospitals – using similar rockets to those supplied to Iraq in the 1960s."
"I've tried to document in the updated version of Secret Affairs a chronology of Britain’s covert operations in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime. These began with the deployment of MI6 and other British covert forces in 2011, within a few months after demonstrations in Syria began challenging the regime, to which the Syrian regime responded with brute force and terrible violence."
"There are fundamental issues here about how policy gets made and in whose name. It's not an issue of whether Labour or Conservative is in power since both obviously defend and propagate the elitist system. Jeremy Corbyn himself represents a real break with this but the most likely outcome, tragically, is that the Labour extremists (called "moderates" in the mainstream) and the rest of the conservative/liberal system which believes in militarism, neo-liberalism and the defence of privilege, will prevail if and when Corbyn becomes Prime Minister."
"The revelation that the likely had contacts with the (LIFG) and the 17 February Martyrs Brigade during the 2011 war in Libya – groups for which the 2017 Manchester bomber and his father reportedly fought at that time – raises fundamental questions about the UK’s links to terrorism. Indeed, a strong case can be made for a devastating conclusion: that the UK is itself a de facto part of the terrorist infrastructure that poses a threat to the British public."
"Five years on, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we still don’t know what really happened on 9/11. And this dismal, pathetic state of affairs should not continue."
"It is agreed by all that the fires never burned hot enough to melt the steel columns. Whether or not the steel was hot enough to buckle, the official account fails to explain the deposits of molten metal found after the collapses. If not the fires, what could have caused the steel to melt?"
"Professor Jones didn’t write his paper to support a prior ideological-conspiratorial agenda -- he wrote it to point out that to date, conventional scientific explanations of the WTC collapses remain flawed and inadequate. The molten deposits found at Ground Zero, and the failure of the official narrative to account for them, represent an anomaly that should be investigated impartially, not dismissed for reasons of political convenience -- or arbitrary standards of the boundaries of sanity."
"[N]obody has yet been fool enough to accept his argument that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a pre-arrangement involving the United States government."
"On reflection and on a rereading of his "book," I would change my original article and remove the word "risible." A more apposite term for both the author and his illiterate pages would be "contemptible.""
"I was filled with determination, to do my best to expose and destroy what i then knew to be a legalized infamy, responsible for a vast destruction of human life."
"I saw those hunted woman, the blood flowing as the whip struck and struck again, the savage soldiers and their burning villages, casement told me to be amazed that i 5000 miles away had come to conclusions identical with his in every respect, an immense weight passed from me."
"A cry for mercy and Justice rises from the Congo."
"In any inclusive study of the roots of modern British socialism and internationalism, Casement’s collaboration with E.D. Morel should be cited as a critical conjuncture in a tradition of English radicalism and the struggle for the fairer distribution of land."
"Congo reformers like Morel, much to the annoyance of Hochschild, advocated either German or British colonization of the area (Congo). Morel’s view, according to Hochschild, speaking ex cathedra from the hallowed seat of modern California, “seems surprising to us today” and was among his “faults” and “political limitations.” Quite the opposite. The moment the Belgians colonized the Congo in 1908, a miraculous improvement was noted on all fronts. Seeking to debunk colonialism, Hochschild’s book demonstrates the opposite. This is the first and biggest lie at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost."
"You have sat here too long for any good you are doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"
"Speak for England, Arthur!"
"Photographs of industrial rows of cramped pens, each imprisoning a solitary calf, will shock those who still believe in the fairytale of the pastoral dairy farm … In reality, the daily practices of most dairy farms are more distressing than those of meat production. A mother cow only produces milk when she gets pregnant. So, starting from the age of 15 months, she will usually be artificially inseminated. … When she gives birth, her calf will typically be removed within 36 hours … Following that callous separation, the mother will bellow and scream for days, wondering where her baby is. The answer depends on the gender of the calf. If male, he will probably either be shot and tossed into a bin, or sold to be raised for veal, which delays his death by just a matter of months. But if the calf is female, she will usually be prepared for her own entry into dairy production, where she will face the same cycle of hell that her mother is trapped in … Dairy is proving to be a vulnerable spot for the entire slaughter racket. The public is steadily waking up to the fact that the reality of milk production is not a matter of trivial imperfections, of concern only to idealist vegans, but in fact the most dark and wicked part of all farming."
"If you can’t go vegan for the animals, why not go vegan for yourself? By switching to a plant-based diet, you won’t just help save animals’ lives, you might just save the planet. The meat and dairy industries kill 70bn animals every year – and a new report has found that they are on track to become the world’s biggest contributors to climate change. … Eventually, a tipping point will come, and the planet will turn into a gigantic slaughterhouse. It won’t be just calves and piglets these industries are killing – it will be you, your children and the children they could have gone on to raise. … So each time you eat bacon, or drink milk, you have not only invested in the slaughter of pigs or the abuse of cows, you’ve signed your own death warrant. For this is a problem that is predicted to escalate in the coming decades and emissions for agriculture are projected to increase 80% by 2050. In the 1980s, people started saying ‘meat is murder’, but it could become even worse than that – meat could mean Armageddon."
"Racism is a worldwide phenomenon. In some countries it's met with disapproval, in others with denial. The A to Z of ethnic and religious groups in the Middle East embraces Alawites, Armenians, Assyrians, Baháʼís, Berbers, Copts, Druzes, Ibadis, Ismailis, Jews, Kurds, Maronites, Sahrawis, Tuareq, Turkmens, Yazidis and Zaidis and Nubians (by no means an exhaustive list), and yet serious discussion of ethnic/religious diversity and its place in society is a long-standing taboo. If the existence of non-Arab or non-Muslim groups is acknowledged at all, it is usually only to declare how wonderfully everyone gets along."
"It is hardly surprising that Englishmen would exploit the situation and seek by every means to keep up, if not aggravate, the differences between the Hindus and Muslims. Sir Valentine Chirol’s book, Indian Unrest, published in 1910, serves as an example par excellence of this mentality. “It would be an evil day”, he says, “if the Muhammadans came to believe that they could only trust to their own right hand and no longer to the authority and sense of justice of the British Raj, to avert the dangers which they foresee in the future from the establishment of an overt or covert Hindu ascendancy.’"
"Wikipedia relies on the wisdom of crowds. Knowledge is fluid. A definition contained in a reference work can never be regarded as complete and definitive. More reliable information emerges through continual revision. Consequently, anyone can edit an entry in Wikipedia. Many articles are plainly useless, but owing to the democratic nature of the medium the way is always open to incremental improvement. Some may find this a seductive vision of the spread of knowledge. I find it alarming. It combines the free-market dogmatism of the libertarian Right with the anti-intellectualism of the populist Left. There is no necessary reason that Wikipedia’s continual revisions enhance knowledge. It is quite as conceivable that an early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is there. Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices."
"The book lacks a bibliography, but this hardly matters given Hannan's taste for talking off the top of his head."
"The principal Shakespeare claimant these days is not [[Francis Bacon|[Francis] Bacon]] but Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The case was launched on an indifferent public in a book called Shakespeare Identified in 1920 by a Gateshead schoolmaster with the unimprovable name of J Thomas Looney. Looney surmises from the plays certain attributes that the author of Shakespeare had and then alights on Oxford as possessing them. A small cult following was convinced, including Sigmund Freud. Yet the search for documentary evidence yielded nothing."
"[On the Shakespeare authorship question] This isn't mere whimsy: it's calumnious bilge. It derives not from documentary evidence (there is none) but from dismay that the greatest figure of English letters was a commoner. In his history of this perverse idea, Contested Will, [[w:James S. Shapiro|[James] Shapiro]] documents how it's rooted in an anti-democratic ethos. It’s also irrationalist. If you reject Shakespeare's authorship, you dispense with the methods of historical inquiry altogether. Not coincidentally, the prominent Oxfordian author Joseph Sobran was a Holocaust denier."
"There is no diplomatic way of saying it but, in his journalism, [[John Pilger|[John] Pilger]] was a charlatan and a fraudster. And I use those terms in the strict sense that he said things he knew to be untrue, and withheld things he knew to be true and material, and did it for decades, for ideological reasons. If you know where to look, you’ll uncover his inspiration."
"[On coming to terms with having bowel cancer] I literally got to the point where I listed the pros and cons of everything that had happened to me: leaving Sri Lanka; finding Fran [Frances Robathan, his wife] and falling in love with her at Durham; my career. I added up all of those things and then the bad things that had happened and I just realised in a very visual way, boy, I had had a lot of happiness. There was a lot more in the column of the good things that had happened to me than the shit things that had happened to me. And it was effective. I thought, "Well, let's see what happens." I grew up in a house in Colombo where there was a bucket for a loo and a man came and emptied it out, and I ended up where I am now. It's a good journey, a very good journey. I'm really careful about saying things like this. There are as many ways of dealing with cancer as there are people who have got it, and you've got to find the one that works for you, but for me thinking of things in that way was the key. Ever since, I've been able to deal with — well, some really tough medicine this week, for example. And what is really important is that I love life so much more to the point, I love the people around me so much that I will give it everything I possibly can to hang in there rather than say, "I've had a good life; let bad things happen.""
"One of my happiest memories of George will forever be his 60th birthday party. All his sisters were there and Fran and their very handsome boys. There was nothing “celebby” about it. It was the people that meant a lot to him, gathered in one place, to celebrate an incredibly important moment – a moment he didn't necessarily think he would live to see. George made a speech, as did the boys, and it was incredibly moving and life affirming all at the same time."
"George was a man of great empathy. In the newsroom he was adored and admired by the team of producers behind the scenes. He was a true team player. He wanted to listen to everyone's opinion and never assumed he was right. A man without ego - unusual in the TV world - he never wanted the story to be about him. And then, suddenly, it was."
"What if the powerful can use ‘information abundance’ to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the ideal of freedom of speech to crush dissent, while always leaving enough anonymity to be able to claim deniability?"
"But if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts? Why would you want them if they tell you that your children will be poorer than you? That all versions of the future are unpromising? And why should you trust the purveyors of facts – the media and academics, think tanks, statesmen? And so the politician who makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive. That enough Americans could vote for someone like Donald Trump, a man with so little regard for making sense, whose many contradictory messages never add up to any very stable meaning, was partly possible because voters felt they weren’t invested in any larger evidence-based future. Indeed, in his very incoherence lies the pleasure. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s OK. The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense."
"Conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audience with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov called ‘white jamming’."
"This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge. What’s unsettling isn’t so much that ‘they’ know something about me that I considered private, hidden… more disconcerting is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that I’m not who I think I am – one’s complete dissipation into data that is now being manipulated by someone else."
"Forty years have passed since my parents were pursued by the KGB for pursuing the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted. Today, the world they hoped for, in which censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what academics call an era of ‘information abundance’. But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century – between citizens armed with truth and information and regimes with their censors and secret police – have been turned upside down. We now have more information than ever before, but it hasn’t brought only the benefits we expected."
"A politics of solidarity demands that my ally’s needs are my own."
"Agendas do not have to melt together or shed their distinctness or lose their efficacy when they “correspond or get along.” They do not have to align, at all. [...] There is no time, and there is so much work to be done."
"Politics still matters, as does leadership, vision and statecraft. By sheer will-power, Boris Johnson and his advisers have delivered a radically better deal for Britain, forcing the EU's technocratic juggernaut into a screeching u-turn. It can't be done, we were told, ad nauseam, and yet Johnson delivered, proving that he is, in fact, a statesman."
"We will never fully recover from our long, debilitating membership of the EU."
"But it's not just that we should never have joined: the EU should have kept us out for its own good."
"There is a new nasty party, and it isn’t the Tories. Our declinist-Remainer class has outdone itself, demonising and dismissing Liz Truss, and working itself up into a frenzy of self-righteous rage and indignation at the supposed incompetence of her new Government. Even for those inured to the extreme tribalism and coarseness of modern political discourse, the insults, double-standards and prejudice have been something to behold. I'm optimistic about the Truss Government. Yes, of course, nobody can possibly know how well it will do – whether it will outwit the Blob to push through genuine improvements. But it is absurd to state, almost as self-evident fact, that it is bound to collapse, that it cannot last even two years [until the next general election.]"
"This was the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin. The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times, listening to Kwasi Kwarteng, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, that I hadn’t been transported to a distant land that actually believed in the economics of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek. But Liz Truss and Kwarteng are very much for real, and in revolutionary mood."
"We urgently need an entirely different political class that is willing to puncture our national delusions."
"There is now a striking correlation between levels of education and holding stupid, destructive ideas, between being highly credentialled and falling for every fashionable conspiracy theory, every tribalistic affliction, every online fad."
"He [Rishi Sunak] must eschew complex, technocratic schemes, and focus on clear retail policies aimed at his own voters. He needs to forget about appealing to those who have already made up their minds to vote for Left-wing parties, or who always back the Greens, the SNP, the Lib Dems or Labour. He must give floating voters concrete reasons why they would be better off if he is reelected."
"The PM apparently believes that he has wrong-footed Nigel Farage by calling an election for July 4; he must now make a bold offer to Reform's crucial electorate. He needs to be firm on Brexit, and highlight how Labour is bound to begin a gradual sell-out."
"Unlike prime ministers, leaders of the Opposition suffer from the handicap that often their only weapons are words, not deeds. That's why their actions in how they deal with their own party are used as a proxy for leadership."
"The Russian command knew that by winning the Russia had, in effect, won the war."
"Stephenson’s activity in the United States was regarded sourly enough by J. Edgar Hoover. The implication that the FBI was not capable of dealing with sabotage on American soil was wounding to a man of his raging vanity. He was incensed when Stephenson’s strong boys beat up or intoxicated the crews of ships loading Axis supplies. But the real reason for his suspicious resentment, which he never lost, was that Stephenson was playing politics in his own yard, and playing them pretty well. Hoover foresaw that the creation of Bill Donovan’s OSS would involve him in endless jurisdictional disputes. The new office would compete with the FBI for Federal funds. It would destroy his monopoly of the investigative field. The creation and survival of the new OSS organization was to be the only serious defeat suffered by Hoover in his political career—and his career has been all politics. He never forgave Stephenson for the part he played as midwife and nurse to OSS."
"My interest in history was sparked by introduction to the transatlantic slave trade as a 12-year-old child in an East London comprehensive secondary school in which the National Front were prevalent in the local area."
"I was one of the few African children in a white dominated school taught history by a white male tutor in the late 70s."
"The Brookes ship, built in 1780-81 in Liverpool and co-owned by Liverpudlian Joseph Brooks, is the famous illustrated ship of 454 enslaved Africans, that most British school children are likely to have seen in history books."
"...what lives did these African people have before they were packed like sardines aboard this ship? Did they survive? To say that such an image unsettled me is an understatement."
"I started with African Studies as my first degree and on account of my interest in the history of the African diaspora studied and taught both African and Caribbean history."
"If I had to select one, it would be the life of the Mozambican freedom fighter, Josina Machel because I think we need to retrieve from historical obscurity lesser known historical figures who contributed to transforming society"
"It is very easy to point fingers at historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Siad Barre, Mobutu, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Margaret Thatcher, Sani Abacha and many other unsavoury figures that carried out anti-people policies, dictatorship, genocide and authoritarian rule across the globe."
"I think it’s important for people to grasp that historical figures required systems and structures and specifically other people to be complicit in the operation of such policies and to buy into the societal vision they promoted. Such figures could not act alone."
"...if we are to understand historical leaders, we must also interrogate the values, the socio-economic and political processes they help to engender that required sections of society, state and government to concede to dictatorship, genocide and the implementation of anti-people policies."
"I find deeply troubling the repeal of the Roe V Wade anti-abortion legislation in many conservative US states in a country that purports to be the “the land of the free”, alongside attempts in this country to curb the right to protest that has long been fought for."
"The Police Crime, Sentencing & Court Act 2022 is being pushed through and it seems the police will have powers to shut down protest in anticipation that such protests will inevitably be disruptive. Yet, the police no longer seems to have the confidence of many people on account of the recent alarming findings of Baroness Casey report into Metropolitan police."
"It is deeply inspiring that young people around the world, such as the Ugandan, Vanessa Nakate, are taking up the cause of climate change, as it is their future that will be affected."
"Action on climate change has the potential to bring people together across towns, cities, societies and countries as we are all impacted by the ongoing environmental crisis. Solutions lie in collective action."
"Another inspiring development around the globe is Afro-Columbian woman Francia Marquez, who was elected as Vice President in Columbia in August 2022. Similar to President Obama’s election to office in 2008, her election to office was a significant historical moment for people of African descent, known as Afro-Latinx in the region."
"I don’t think I’ve seen anything as impressive as the gigantic Cambodian Hindu/Budhist temple called Angor Wat that sprawls for 162.6 hectares. It’s beautiful, yet parts of it are deeply eery. I think it’s impressive due to the fact that it was constructed in the 12th century and took 28 years to build. In a part of the temple complex there is a mesmerizing tree that has some of its roots organically clinging onto parts of the temple. I found it unsettling and strange. The entire temple and that tree are certainly worth seeing. A one day’s visit does not do it justice."
"As there is a current bandwagon of “decolonizing” everything i.e. the curriculum, the archive, museums etc, and using “decoloniality” and “decolonisation” as synonyms, I think it’s important to clarify what one means by these terms, in addition to how decolonisation is done?"
"I think the 1960s of the national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia were an inspiring decade that I find particularly exciting. There was so much optimism, excitement and promise during this time in which the mass of humanity were challenging empire, colonialism and seeking to forge new nation states that sought to meet the aspirations of ordinary people in terms of employment, education, health needs and to take control of their economies."
"Perhaps it is with nostalgia that human beings look back in history as there is certainly a romanticisation of certain aspects of the past that erases the ugly deeds of human beings."
"I am very selective in what I watch on TV as there is so much rubbish to act as a new societal opium."
"Corruption wherever it is – in the West or in Africa – is contemptible and unethical. But when we look at corruption in Africa there are often Western multi-national companies involved. They are complicit in the corruption of African dictators, businessmen or leaders. But Westerners and reporters of the West very rarely ask themselves: “How comes that Western banks are accomplices of dictators in Africa?”"
"I think alternative media presents different analysis from a different and progressive ideological standpoint, They often try and go beyond the superficial analysis of the West and give a wider contextual, historical background. They try to inform the readers why things are the way they are in Africa."
"I think it’s difficult for mainstream media to take on this role because they are committed to making a profit. Often advertisers dictate the agenda. And there’s another constraint. The mainstream media have to entertain their audiences and run stories that will interest them. Sometimes they are influenced by whether a story will have a human interest angle. That is also a reason why there are so many stories of misery or famine: they will interest readers"
"One could say that reporting about famine and NGOs helping African people is a good thing, but there is a negative side of how humanitarian disasters are often portrayed: African people are always in need, they are dependent of the white, industrial society. I think this is ultimately harmful to Africa."
"We have to remember that many media houses in Africa inherited their journalist training programs from colonial rulers. And a lot of the press in several West-African countries do tend to be dependent on CNN, Reuters or BBC."
"...there are smaller media houses in Africa that are more alternative. They can determine their own agenda and for example do local stories and are closer to the news. But they are often constrained by money."