135 years ago today, European leaders sat around a horseshoe-shaped table to set the rules for Africa’s colonization. By Patrick Gathara, Al Jazeera — On the afternoon of Saturday, November 15, 1884, an international conference was opened by the chancellor of the newly-created German Empire at his official residence on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin. Sat around a horseshoe-shaped table in a room overlooking the garden with representatives from every European country,…
In the autumn of 1949, with the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the area occupied by the western Allied Powers, the nascent German state still lacked complete sovereignty in every realm. The laws of occupation were still valid and canceling them depended on a variety of political and financial arrangements. One of the conditions for complete German sovereignty pertained to the reparations to be paid to Holocaust…
By Victor Grossman, Portside — The wise priest Laocoön, old legends say, vainly warned against the famous “Trojan horse”. A hostile god sent giant serpents which strangled him and the big wooden present was opened. The soldiers hidden inside opened Troy’s gates so the Greek battalions could rush in, kill the men, enslave the women and destroy the city. Its ruins are still being uncovered. In Germany it is worth…
The author, Burt Neuborne, is one of America’s top civil liberties lawyers, and questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs. By Steven Rosenfeld — A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the…
By Susan Neiman, Los Angeles Times — Born as a white girl in the segregated South, I’ve spent most of my adulthood as a Jewish woman in Berlin. This double perspective has fueled my resolve to explore America’s fraught relationship with its history. It is easy to point to the differences between the Holocaust and the enslavement and abuse of millions of Africans. When examining possible responses to these crimes,…
A Namibian delegation has received the remains of Indigenous Herero and Nama peoples killed during the Namibia Genocide. By teleSUR — A Namibian Government delegation, in Berlin, has received bones and skulls of Indigenous Namibian peoples killed during the “first genocide in the 20th century,” on Wednesday. The bones were in Germany for “scientific” experiments in order to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans during the German colonial and…
By Daniel A. Gross — Mbakumua Hengari grew up in the 1970s on a farm in southern Africa, in what is today the nation of Namibia. The arid soil around his family’s homestead was sandy and grassy, a poor fit for staple crops, so he and seven siblings subsisted on a modest herd of cattle, sheep and goats. Hengari blames systematic racism for his family’s poverty — and he and…
Anti-fascist volunteer Canute Frankson explained his motivation in a letter home in 1937: “We will build us a new society—a society of peace and plenty. There will be no color line, no jim crow trains, no lynching. That is why, my dear, I’m here in Spain.” By Peter Carroll, BlackPast.org — Approximately 90 African Americans fought in Spain during the civil war that engulfed that nation between 1936 and 1939.…
Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism. By Alex Ross — “History teaches, but has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it’s said that…
The German government said Friday it had asked a US court to throw out a lawsuit brought by indigenous groups from Namibia seeking reparations for the genocide of their peoples under German colonial rule. It was the first time Berlin has formally responded to the class-action suit launched by the Herero and Nama people last year over the tens of thousands killed in the 1904-1908 massacres.
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