Defunding UNRWA: From Containment to Destruction / Laura Robson

On This Day in Rotten History...

In 1843 – (174 years ago) — a land dispute led to a violent clash between British settlers and indigenous Maori people on the South Island of New Zealand. Officials of the British New Zealand Company, claiming to have made a land purchase deal with the Maori, had sent surveyors into the Wairau Valley to mark out parcels. But the Maori, angry at not having been paid for the land, had chased the surveyors away and destroyed their equipment. When a party of armed British men returned to the valley, they were met by some ninety Maori warriors accompanied by women and children. Twenty-two British were killed, along with four Maori, including the wives of two chiefs. White settlers elsewhere in New Zealand were outraged. But an inquiry led by governor Robert FitzRoy later ruled that the settlers had been at fault for trying to settle on land they had no legal right to possess. 

In 1953 – (64 years ago) — Soviet tanks rolled into East Berlin to crush a day-old uprising and general strike against the Soviet-backed East German goverment, which had raised work quotas and threatened wage cuts. Sensing the government’s insecurity in the wake of Joseph Stalin’s recent death, workers had taken to the streets, calling for democracy and German reunification, and bringing the country to a standstill. The Soviet Union responded by sending in sixteen army divisions to assist eight thousand East German military police in quashing the revolt. Hundreds of East Germans either died in the ensuing violence or were executed afterward. Several thousand more were injured or arrested, and a dozen or more Soviet soldiers were executed for refusing to shoot protesters. The violence across East Germany continued for more than a week — a dark precursor to the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.

In 1987 – (30 years ago) — an elderly sparrow was found dead in his food dish, inside a protected enclosure at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida. He was the last dusky seaside sparrow, and the last survivor of a failed attempt at breeding enough of the sparrows to repopulate their original habitat along Florida’s Atlantic Coast, in the swamps around Merritt Island just south of Cape Canaveral, and along the upper St. John’s River. In the early 1960s, when Merritt Island was chosen as... read more

Listen live from 9AM - 1:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast

9:15 - Historian Nancy MacLean profiles the libertarian architect of the right's revolutionary plan for America.

Nancy is author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America from Viking Press.

10:00 - Live from Athens, anarchist Tasos Sagris discusses working within the gaps of austerity-era Greece.

Tasos is a member of the anarchist collective Void Network.

10:35 - Anthropologist Nazia Kazi examines class and complicity in an age of anti-Muslim surveillance.

Nazia wrote the article Against a Muslim Misleadership Class for Jacobin.

11:05 - Writer Peter Moskowitz explores the legal and corporate mechanisms of gentrification in America.

Peter is author of the new book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood from PublicAffairs.

12:05 - Sociologist Joshua Murray explains how capital manufactured Detroit's long decline.

Josh is co-author of the paper "Collateral Damage: How Capital’s War on Labor Killed Detroit" for the journal Catalyst.

12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen goes in half-cocked on American gun culture.

You can't go full-cocked on the radio in our timeslot. Sorry.

 Our Story, So Far

Listen live from 9AM - 1:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast

9:15 - Live from London, Richard Seymour examines Corbyn's rise and a new path for the British left.

Richard wrote the op-ed Corbyn: shifting the possible for the Times Literary Supplement and the essay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Centre for Salvage.

10:05 - Writer Andrea Flynn explains why a class-only politics fails to deliver justice for women of color.

Andrea wrote the report Justice Doesn’t Trickle Down: How Racialized and Gender Rules are Holding Women Back for the Roosevelt Institute.

10:35 - Jacobin's Nicole Aschoff charts the downward prospects of Whole Foods-style conscious capitalism.

Nicole wrote the Guardian op-ed Whole Foods represents the failures of 'conscious capitalism.'

11:10 - Writer Angela Nagle surveys the dark politics of mass hatred, from Malthus to Pepe.

Angela wrote the Baffler article Enemies of the People and is the author of the soon to be released Kill All Normies, which we'll talk about with her in a few weeks.

12:05 - Journalists Maureen Mitra and Candice Bernd explore the toxic (literally) state of mass incarceration.

Maureen and Candice are co-authors of the Truthout / Earth Island Journal report America's Toxic Prisons: The Environmental Injustices of Mass Incarceration.

12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen ponders our destiny, such as it is. Or might be.

Jeff wasn't super clear about this one.

On This Day in Rotten History...

In 1962 – (55 years ago) – in Centralia, Pennsylvania, a fire set deliberately to clear trash out of an underground landfill ignited an ancient coal seam in a nearby abandoned mine. The coal fire gradually spread underneath the town and became a threat to public health and safety. It created dangerous sinkholes, spewed sulfur smoke and carbon monoxide from openings in the ground, and defied all attempts to put it out. By 1984 a mass exodus from the town began, and in 1992, all real estate properties were officially condemned. Centralia, Pennsylvania, once home to a thousand people, is now a ghost town. Nothing remains there but a few derelict buildings and a crumbling network of empty streets covered with graffiti by curious visitors. In some places the ground is still hot to the touch, and cracks in the earth belch poisonous smoke from an underground fire that, experts say, could continue burning for another two hundred years.

In 1971 – (46 years ago) – in the district of Pabna in East Pakistan, units of Pakistan army troops and paramilitaries massacred more than two hundred unarmed members of the local Hindu minority. The killings were a part of Operation Searchlight, a military campaign meant to suppress a Bengali nationalist movement in what was then East Pakistan. Ever since the partition of India after independence in 1947, the new and predominantly Muslim nation of Pakistan had consisted of two sections or “wings” more than a thousand miles apart, with the massive territory of India in between. The two parts of the country had their religious, cultural, and political differences, and as an independence movement grew in East Pakistan, the national government in the West launched a systematic campaign of genocide that led to all-out war, in which India joined on the side of the separatist East. After nine months of air strikes, mass murder, rape, and other atrocities, the war ended with East Pakistan proclaiming itself the newly independent nation of Bangladesh. Body counts vary, but most researchers believe that the war killed about half a million people, and created some thirty million refugees.

Rotten History is written by Renaldo Migaldi

Listen live from 9AM - 12:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast

9:15 - Law scholar Michael J. Glennon examines Trump's battle with the national security state.

Michael wrote the June cover story Security Breach: Trump’s tussle with the bureaucratic state for Harper's.

10:05 - Live from Sáo Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the massive resistance movement sweeping post-coup Brazil.

Brian wrote the article Brasilia 24/5: A View from the Ground for Brasilwire.

10:35 - Gay Liberation Network's Andy Thayer explores Gay Inc.'s mainstreaming of LGBTQ politics.

Andy wrote the article The LGBTQ Movement is an Intersectional Fail for Counterpunch.

11:05 - Geographer Andrew Brooks explains how the Western development agenda expands global poverty.

Andrew wrote the book The End of Development: A Global History of Poverty and Prosperity for Zed Books.