journalists-from-the-united-kingdom

"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?"

"...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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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 am very selective in what I watch on TV as there is so much rubbish to act as a new societal opium."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"...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 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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"...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."

"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."

"I was one of the few African children in a white dominated school taught history by a white male tutor in the late 70s."

"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."

"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."

"The Russian command knew that by winning the Russia had, in effect, won the war."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"But it's not just that we should never have joined: the EU should have kept us out for its own good."

"We will never fully recover from our long, debilitating membership of the EU."

"We urgently need an entirely different political class that is willing to puncture our national delusions."

"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."

"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.]"

"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."

"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’."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."