Re: Shree Paradkar: When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands? (Toronto Star)

[Prem Chandavarkar]

In a similar vein:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/10/in-winston-churchill-hollywood-rewards-a-mass-murderer/?utm_term=.61f5a658e188
 


In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer
Shashi Tharoor
 
Shashi Tharoor is author of “Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India 
.”
 He chairs the Indian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
 
“History,” Winston Churchill said 
, “will be kind to me, for I 
intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great 
mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and 
Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with 
a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary 
Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.
 
As Hollywood confirms, Churchill’s reputation (as what Harold Evans has called 
 “the British 
Lionheart on the ramparts of civilization”) rests almost entirely on his 
stirring rhetoric and his talent for a fine phrase during World War II. “We 
shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. … We shall fight on the 
beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields 
and in the streets. … We shall never surrender.” (The revisionist British 
historian John Charmley dismissed this 

 as “sublime nonsense.”)
 
Words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to. His actions 
are another matter altogether.
 
During World War II, Churchill declared himself 

 in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, 
exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing 
of Dresden were the result.
 
In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of 
state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing 
Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun 
fire or bombs 
”
 to scatter them.
Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the 
colonies, Churchill acted 

 as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the 
uncivilised tribes; it would spread 

 a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an 
entire village wiped out in 45 minutes 
.
 
In Afghanistan, Churchill declared 

 that the Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” 
and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.” He wrote 
:
 “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, 
filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, 
burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. … Every 
tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”
 
In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the 
forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for 
white colonial settlers and the forcing of more than 150,000 people into 
concentration camps. Rape 
,
 castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots, and electric shocks were all used 
by the British authorities to torture Kenyans 

 under Churchill’s rule.
 
But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly 
people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them 
.
 He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet 
colleagues, whom 

Re: The System Development Corporation

[Morlock Elloi]

Using acoustic waves through the air as the carrier is definitely 
confronting at the infrastructure level :)



And then something really radical: talk to your neighbour, come out of


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Jean Noel Montagné: An other Internet is possible: Catalonia and Germany as examples

[Patrice Riemens]

(The French, original version of this article to appear in the next 
issue of 'Le Sauvage'  http://www.lesauvage.org/)



An other Internet is possible: Catalonia and Germany as examples

When Wifi came up in the early 2000s, and it became possible to connect 
a computer to the Internet without cables, many hackers started 
tinkering around with hard and software so as to increase their in and 
outbound range. At first it was mostly about getting Internet in an 
outlying room or at the end of the garden, and then sharing connectivity 
between neighboors became the next stage. At the time Internet 
connectivity was highly desired, especially in places not served by 
ISPs, and the only way to disseminate it was to make it available for 
free and to share it as far the equipment would carry it.


It took a few months only for the culture of an always on, self-managed, 
free, decentralised, and F/OSS-based Wifi network to spread all over the 
world. Before ADSL became widely available, all cities of the world have 
seen clubs, associations or other form of collectives rolling out Wifi 
networks on voluntary basis. Most were by way of hubs, more 
sophisticated ones were meshed, and all saw various outcomes in terms of 
success. The cleverest hacks with antennas involved coffee tins, or 
deep-fry skimming laddles common to Asian kitchens, still used in many 
countries for directional antennas. Progress in reach extention went 
fast: at first hundred of metres then kilometres and then even scores of 
kilometres. Nowadays, all kind of industrial grade equipments are 
manufactured and sold worldwide, this despite very disparate national 
legislation in terms of the range permitted.

.
In France, many 'Free Wifi associations' saw the light around 2001: all 
big cities, but also smaller towns like  Montauban, Mazamet, or villages 
like Les Orres had their self-managed Wifi networks [1].  These networks 
were up for a few months or years, this untill telecom operators 
deployed cable connectivity all over the territory. So today a very few 
of these collectives are left. Some do it 'just for fun', others have an 
educational purpose to self-teach about network protocols and their 
evolution, and still others use them to connect sheperds' huts, isolated 
dwellings and mountain refuges. But the situation in other countries is 
very different.


In Germany you have the Freifunk self-managed network which is still 
growing steadily. Started in Berlin in 2002 if now aggregates 400 local 
communities all over Germany with a total of 41 000 access points. In 
scores of countries, very poor and very rich alike, collectives and 
associations run self-managed  networks, some of them adding  GSM and 3G 
technologies  to Wifi , e.g. around Oaxaca in  Mexico, boosted up by the 
Rhizomatica.org network.


In Catalonia also, as national operators would not provide connectivity 
in mountainous zones of the Pyrenees, or in the hills of the Osona 
region, a self organised WiFi culture developed, and a number of 
villages came together from 2004 onward to start a self-managed 
citizens' network: Guifi.net.This network expanded incrementally over 
the Iberic peninsula, et even connected with other countries, especially 
in South America. As I write there are 34 630 active interconnection 
nodes, of the 58 000 that have been set up.


These nodes all work with ultra small routers available of the shelf for 
30€ or even less, which use very little electricity, something between 
3W and 10W, sometimes more, depending on capacity. Some of them  are 
solar-powered. Internet  at your fingertips with just a small antenna on 
a rooftop, and a router in the attic or the staircase.  Once the 
equipment is connected the set up is through a simple webpage, everybody 
 can do it. The network adjusts seamlessly to new nodes coming up, or to 
old ones disapearing.


The software used to be starkly experimental at first, but by now it has 
been seriously upgraded, just like all F/OSS. This thanks to the 
contribution of scores of developers banding together on a Linux distro 
specifically intended for the devolpement of this type of autonomous and 
resilient Internet networks. It goes under the name of Cloudy [2]. It 
links all the nodes without any need for a centralised server. In 
addition to classic communication protocols, the Guifi community has 
also put in place mail servers, IP telephony, database services, instant 
messaging systems, webradio, webtelevision, and video-conferences 
set-ups.  This way the community created a truly autonomous, 
self-managed and resilient Internet, but one which is also connected to 
the 'big Internet'. And this is exactly where one realises the political 
and technological significance of such an approach in the context of the 
challenging years that await us.


The 'big Internet' itself is a network slowly losing its resilience. It 
is subjected to extremely strong political and technological forces 
which are 

Re: The System Development Corporation

[mp]

On 12/03/18 17:27, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> The old-fashioned way, by confronting at the infrastructure level, away
> from keyboards. Messaging through the adversarial infrastructure is like
> drawing graffiti on the enemy tanks - cute but doesn't do s*it.

Confrontation is good for the system, criticise only what you want to
strengthen.

Want to do shit? Non-engagement and non-symbolism in a move from
abstractions, which are distractions, to another way of life.

And then something really radical: talk to your neighbour, come out of
the echo chamber. The professional critics, the well worded, verbose and
sophisticated theorists are so far ahead, so far up their (our) own
arses and into symbolic universes that they serve only their own careers
while feeding their own brain candy addictions. Go down a non-working
class pub and talk to Make The World Great Again type people and see how
far you get...
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Re: The System Development Corporation

[Morlock Elloi]

The old-fashioned way, by confronting at the infrastructure level, away 
from keyboards. Messaging through the adversarial infrastructure is like 
drawing graffiti on the enemy tanks - cute but doesn't do s*it.


This is not something that will be achieved overnight. What is missing 
is the awareness of the power of the infrastructure, and shifting the 
activism from painting graffiti to liberating the infrastructure.



How to oppose a system where opposition is taken in account?


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Shree Paradkar: When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands? (Toronto Star)

[Patrice Riemens]

In case you go see, or went, to the film 'Churchill' ...


Original to:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/03/09/when-will-there-be-a-film-on-winston-churchill-the-barbaric-monster-with-the-blood-of-millions-on-his-hands.html

When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster 
with the blood of millions on his hands?

By Shree ParadkarRace & Gender Columnist
Toronto Star, Fri., March 9, 2018


Imperialistic pop culture has enshrined Churchill only as a military 
great, a fun drunk, a loyal monarchist with a penchant for fine speech 
and a flair for loquacious prose. But the British PM lacerated the world 
with tragedies, profiting from plunders and mass murders, writes Shree 
Paradkar.



By the time I came across the ledger at the Bangalore Club with Winston 
Churchill’s name on it in the late 1990s, British rule in India had been 
sanitized; airbrushed to present a picture of overall benevolence with a 
few violent splotches.


The entry in the ledger is dated June 1, 1899 and names one Lt W.L.S. 
Churchill as one of 17 bill defaulters. He owes the club 13 rupees from 
a time when a whisky cost less than half a rupee.


Had we then heard that Churchill once described our beloved city as a 
“third rate watering place … without society or good sport,” we would 
have probably laughed it off as the irascibility ever only indulged in 
the great. Jolly good, old chap.


Colonialism of the mind lingers long after the land is free.

And if we had heard that he once said, “I hate Indians. They are a 
beastly people with a beastly religion,” meh. He was dead. We were 
thriving.


There are flawed heroes. Lincoln, MLK and Gandhi to name a few — men who 
inflicted injustices on individuals.


Then there are monsters.

Powerful men who lacerate the world with tragedies. Adolf Hitler, 
certainly, but his nemesis Churchill, too.


It was only in 2014 that I first got a glimpse of genocidal mania in the 
man so lionized for leading his nation through its finest hour.


It was a piece titled Remembering India’s forgotten holocaust, in 
Tehelka magazine that detailed the ghastly origins of the Bengal famine 
of 1943 that killed an estimated 3 million people in one year.


Historians have easily traced it back to Churchill who had diverted the 
bountiful harvest from Bengal to Britain and other parts of Europe. When 
the locals began starving, he steadfastly refused to send them food. He 
said no to rerouting food that was being shipped from Australia to the 
Middle East via India. No to the 10,000 tons of rice Canada offered to 
send to India, no to the 100,000 tons of rice America offered. The 
famine was the Indians’ fault, he told a war-cabinet meeting, “for 
breeding like rabbits.”


In his Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell delves into how the 
historian Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill’s Secret War, dug into 
Britain’s shipping archives to uncover evidence that Britain had so much 
food at the time that the U.S. had become suspicious they were 
stockpiling it to sell it after the war.


In India, she wrote, “parents dumped their starving children into rivers 
and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of 
trains.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers were 
fighting alongside the Allied forces.


Yet, what did the actor Gary Oldman who portrayed Churchill in Darkest 
Hour say last Sunday when he received an Oscar for Best Actor? “I would 
just like to salute Sir Winston Churchill who has been marvellous 
company on what can be described as an incredible journey.”


Salute. Sir. Marvellous. Incredible.

Oldman might as well have danced on 3 million dead bodies, many of whose 
loved ones were too weak to cremate or bury them.


Such tributes for a heinous white supremacist who once declared that 
“Aryan tribes were bound to triumph.”


Words as hollow as the tunnel-visioned ideals on which people fashion 
this man, but they can’t stem the drip, drip of blood from his hands.


They can’t hide tens of thousands of Kenyans who were rounded up in 
concentration camps called “Britain’s Gulags” under his orders, where 
thousands were tortured and killed for rebelling against British rule.


They can’t hide the bodies of the Greek civilians who were celebrating 
German withdrawal in 1944, but were killed by the British army because 
Churchill thought the communist influence on the Nazi resisters — who 
had allied with Britain — was too strong. And we haven’t even got into 
his treatment of Iraqis or the wiping out of entire Indigenous 
populations of Tasmania.


Churchill was not the first Western leader to profit from plunders and 
mass murders. Remember John A. Macdonald? But imperialistic popular 
culture continues to enshrine him, despite the Gallipoli disaster, only 
as a military great, a fun drunk, a loyal monarch with a penchant for 
fine speech and a flair for loquacious prose.


Churchill tried to manipulate history with