Category: History

Tactics of rebellion in Egypt

Accounts of the protests that brought down the Mubarak government stressed the role of new internet-based social media, which helped organisers and supporters plan the protests. The critical event in toppling the regime, however, was the initial seizure of Tahrir Square on 25 January – a development in which the social media functioned partly as a decoy. Knowing that the security forces would use violence to break up any attempt to occupy the square, the organizers used social media to plan protests at twenty sites in working-class districts of the city, hoping to strain the security forces by dispersing them to multiple locations, while drawing large crowds that would increase the chance of breaking through security cordons and linking up at Tahrir Square. They planned one additional gathering, in Bulaq al-Daqrur, a working-class neighbourhood close to the centre of the city, with an industrial workforce employed in a nearby cigarette factory and in railway yards. They avoided announcing this gathering over the internet, allowing a crowd of several hundred to gather without the presence of security forces. This was the group that marched to Tahrir, swelling to several thousand along the way, and seized the square, by which time the protest was too large for the armed police force to crush.*

* Footnote: Charles Levinson and Margaret Coker, ‘The Secret Rally that Sparked an Uprising‘, Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2011.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 229

Mitchell on “Carbon Democracy”

A surprising oversight in Timothy Mitchell’s generally-insightful Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil is how he gives relatively little consideration to static versus mobile forms of fossil fuel consumption. He strongly emphasizes the production and transportation logistics of coal versus oil, but gives little consideration to special needs for fuels with high energy density (and sometimes low freezing points) in transport applications from cars and trucks to aircraft and rockets. People sometimes assume that oil demand and electricity production are more related than they really are, especially in jurisdictions where oil is mostly used as transport fuel and for heating (both areas where little electricity is generally used).

At a minimum, I think it’s important to give some special consideration to the needs of the aerospace and aviation industries, especially when pondering biofuel alternatives. Also, we need to try to project things like the deployment rate of electric ground vehicles in various applications, when trying to project how the forms of energy production and use in the future affect politics and low-carbon policy choices.

Racist incident in Halifax on Canada Day

In a disturbing development, a Mi’kmaq ceremony in Halifax on Canada Day intended to honour missing and murdered Indigenous women was interrupted by what CTV News called “a U.S.-based ultra-conservative fraternity-like group that believes in reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism during an age of globalism and multiculturalism”. The CBC has a primer on the “Proud Boys”.

Two members of the Canadian Navy allegedly took part in the incident, which occurred at a statue of Edward Cornwallis, a military officer who issued a bounty for the scalps of Mi’kmaq people in 1749. Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan condemned the group’s actions via Facebook.

Subsequent news coverage has been fairly encouraging:

Explaining Clinton’s defeat

From Hillary’s perspective, external forces created a perfect storm that wiped her out. In this telling, laid out in scores of interviews with Clinton campaign aides and advisors for this book, the media bought into an absurd and partisan Republican-led investigation into her e-mail server that combined with Bernie Sanders’s attack on her character and a conservative assault on the Clinton Foundation’s practices to sow a public perception that she was fundamentally dishonest. From there, Comey’s unprecedented public condemnation of her handling of the server, the Russian cyberattacks on the DNC and Podesta’s e-mail account, and new voter ID laws suppressed support for her. In a twist, Clintonworld sources said, Comey’s final exoneration of her enraged Trump backers and pushed them to the polls in droves. Along the way, they said, misogyny played a quiet role in turning men against her without an offsetting boost in support from women. Her most ardent defenders maintain that she nailed every major moment of the campaign. “Those debates were her. The Benghazi hearing. Her convention speech. Her getting off the mat in New Hampshire,” said one senior campaign aide. “She does not give up.”

But another view, articulated by a much smaller number of her close friends and high-level advisors, holds that Clinton bears the blame for her defeat. This case rests on the theory that Hillary’s actions before the campaign—setting up the private server, putting her name on the Clinton Foundation, and giving speeches to Wall Street banks in a time of rising populism—hamstrung her own chances so badly she couldn’t recover. She was unable to prove to many voters that she was running for the presidency because she had a vision for the country rather than visions of power. And she couldn’t cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions and yearned for a fresh approach to governance. All of it fed a narrative of dynastic privilege that was woefully out of touch with the sentiment of the American electorate.

“We lost because of Clinton Inc.,” one close friend and advisor lamented. “The reality is Clinton Inc. was great for her for years and she had all the institutional benefits. But it was an albatross around the campaign.”

Allen, Jonathan and Amie Parnes. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. Crown; New York. 2017. p. 398–9

Closing days of the Clinton campaign

But over the course of the next seventy-two hours, on a series of conference calls, her team would radically reshape their approach to the final days of the campaign. In an effort to close a nasty contest on a high note and set herself up to govern from a more aspirational place, she had planned to spend millions of dollars on positive television ads in battleground states. The reintroduction of her e-mail scandal—and its attachment to Weiner—meant that she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on getting undecided voters to feel good about picking her. They already had deeply held concerns about her character, and this was going to add “Clinton fatigue” to the mix. Comey had raised the prospect of her facing criminal inquiry from the Oval Office and the country was being plunged back into the nasty, queasy politics of Bill Clinton’s final years in office.

Instead of just promoting herself on the airwaves, Hillary’s aided decided, she would use more of her cash to throw mud on Trump, to try to prevent him from getting a free ride while she again slogged through the e-mail saga. Her end-of-the-race persuasion campaign would be more of a reiteration of the case against Trump. She had to convince voters that he was even worse.

Allen, Jonathan and Amie Parnes. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. Crown; New York. 2017. p. 360

Clinton and Sanders

The real answer: she’d become the candidate of minority voters on social justice issues while Bernie was hitting her as a corrupt Wall Street-loving champion of the “rigged” financial system that took advantage of working-class voters. Whether she was perceived as hostile to working- and middle-class whites or just indifferent, it wasn’t a big leap from “she doesn’t care about my job” to “she’d rather give my job to a minority of a foreigner than fight for me to keep it.”

…

Meanwhile, Bernie had a message that was tailor-made for working-class whites. He’d take on the rich guys and the rigged game to deliver money and benefits to the working class. He’d kill trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that workers and their union leaders believed would result in jobs being shipped overseas. He argued that his economic fairness doctrine was color-blind and would help everyone on the lower end of the scale. Trump was hammering home the same message in the Republican primary: He’d be for the white working-class stiff. He’d void or rewrite bad trade deals, and, going beyond Bernie, he’d protect their jobs against the encroachment of undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Allen, Jonathan and Amie Parnes. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. Crown; New York. 2017. p. 179–80

Anger and the Trump-Clinton election

After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together. She had tried to learn the lessons of 2008 and had built a campaign that was different, if too similar in some respects, this time around. But fundamental changes in the electorate eluded her grasp. She couldn’t find ways to connect with portions of the primary electorate that were driven to Sanders because he represented an all-out assault on the establishment thinking at the core of her being.

When she peeked at the Republican primary, she saw campaigns running into a similar problem. Jeb Bush—the favourite going into the race—was being pummelled by Trump. Like Sanders, the free-wheeling billionaire businessman turned political force was taking advantage of the populist fury that had swept the nation. From her perspective, these guys weren’t offering plausible solutions. But they were good at channeling anger.

Meanwhile, she was running into the same trap as 2008. She was becoming the inevitable candidate of the status quo, the one she tried so desperately to avoid this time around by offering a raft of new policy proposals. Her message wasn’t getting through—even in the moments that weren’t dominated by the e-mail scandal. The one thing Hillary could put her finger on was that her 2016 team wasn’t doing any better job of figuring out how to connect her to the national sentiment. She was in a bubble, and so were the people around her. Together, they had a feel for national politics from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, when the public was less dissatisfied with the Democratic establishment’s inability to solve their problems.

Allen, Jonathan and Amie Parnes. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. Crown; New York. 2017. p. 146

The allegedly uncoordinated Clinton campaign

But Hillary still struggled with the question of whether she was running for Bill Clinton’s third term, Obama’s third term, or her own first term. “How do you take credit for eight years of Democratic progress but also get that things haven’t gone far enough?” said one aide who wrestled with the conundrum. “She hired us all to help her figure this out, and I think at the beginning we struggled to do that.”

The confusion was reflected in the conclusion that Favreau and Muscatine both reached early on: The campaign was an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary…

Favreau thought Clinton’s campaign was reminiscent of John Kerry’s, where he had gotten his start in 2004—a bunch of operatives who were smart and accomplished in their own right but weren’t united by any common purpose larger than pushing a less-than-thrilling candidate into the White House. Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her. In fact, the more people she assigned the task of setting the tone for her campaign, the more muddled her message became.

Allen, Jonathan and Amie Parnes. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. Crown; New York. 2017. p. 13-4

Canada’s deadly residential school system

The worst damage the residential schools inflicted directly on Aboriginal children resulted from the schools’ deplorable physical conditions and the cruelty of their custodians. Persistent underfunding produced terrible overcrowding, poor sanitation, and grossly inadequate diets. For many children, this meant death. In 1907 Dr. P.H. Bryce, the Indian Affairs Department’s medical inspector, reported that the death toll of children in the fifteen schools he surveyed was 24 per cent. That figure would have been considerably higher had children been tracked for a few years after returning home to their reserves. The magazine Saturday Night commented that, “even war seldom shows a percentage of fatalities as does the educational system we have imposed upon our Indians.”

Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests. University of Toronto Press, 2017. p. 193

Canada’s history of oppressive Indigenous policies

Almost every year the Indian Act was amended to add new measures of control, many of them requested by the government’s agents in the field. In twenty-five pages of its report, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples laid out in detail the “oppressive measures” that were added to the act right up until 1951. They included the power to force bands to use the municipal election model of governance and to police elections so that chiefs and other traditional leaders could be disqualified for office. Indian agents were given the power of justices of the peace, extending their control to the justice system. Enfranchisement, that ticket to white man’s freedom, was forced on Indians who obtained university degrees and later on Indian leaders mobilizing resistance to their people’s oppression. The totalitarian ambition of the Act was manifest in its attack on traditional ceremonies and festivals such as the potlatch and the sun dance. Even dress was regulated when a 1914 amendment prohibited Indians from wearing, without permission, “Aboriginal costume” in any “dance, show, exhibition, stampede or pageant.” The land base of bands was steadily reduced through government pressure to surrender land to real estate developers and municipalities. In 1911 public authorities were given the power to expropriate reserve lands without a surrender. It was a criminal offence for Indian farmers to sell their produce without the Indian agent’s permission. That permission was frequently denied. And to make sure Indians did not challenge any of this in the white man’s courts, a 1927 amendment made it a criminal offence to solicit funds for taking claims to court without a license from the superintendent general.

Of all the “oppressive measures,” the one best known and most regretted by non-Aboriginal Canadians is the residential school program. It is the one thing we Canadians did to Aboriginal peoples for which we have made an official apology. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, speaking in the House of Commons on 11 June 2008, said “I stand before you today to offer an apology to former students of Indian residential schools. The treatment of the children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history. We are sorry.” Justices of Australia’s High Court concluded in the Mabo case that the Aboriginal peoples they encountered were fully human and their insistence for over two centuries that they arrived in a terra nullius (an empty land) “constitute the darkest aspect of the history of this nation.” Canada’s residential school program for Aboriginal children is surely “the darkest aspect” of Canada’s history.

Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests. University of Toronto Press, 2017. p. 191–2