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Black Kos, Week In Review "A Blitzkrieg to Re-write History So That Democracy May Perish" [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-28
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Editor
I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut the other day. I was thinking about the firebombing of Dresden and the burning of Beatles albums in the South. I was thinking about the destruction of the Library in Alexandria and the cannonading of the Buddhas of Bamyan. I was thinking of laws that prevented Blacks from reading and if there were no laws, the local Citizens Council made sure no reading occurred, by any means necessary.
Vonnegut was not the only one to call the bombing of Dresden an act of terror. Even British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson, a confidant of Churchill, admitted to AP war correspondent Howard Cowan, that the raid also helped destroy...
“ ... what is left of German morale… “
Cowan then filed a report that the allies had resorted to terror bombing.
The firebombing of Dresden, a center for Art and Literature, was a strategic act of terror. The burning of Beatles albums was a conscious act by white supremacists and one meant to intimidate. The murder of Trayvon Martin and the gaslighting about his brutal murder, like the removal of the Tuskagee Airmen from the military record, did not happen in a vacuum devoid of racist intent. It is one thing to admit the virulent resurgence of laws to enforce only a “white” education, but we are in a full-blown Rawanda Radio ethnic cleansing with masked government hit squads renditioning professors and scientists right off the street in broad daylight, we are witnessing a wholesale blitzkrieg to re-write history, to erase anything or anyone from the annals who fought long and hard so that democracy would not perish from the face of the Earth.
In the historic center of Baghdad, on a street named after the tenth century classical poet, Al-Mutannabi, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls, an area often referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community, a car bomb exploded and killed 26 people on 5 March 2007.
did you notice
how quickly the open sky
folded in upon itself the flaking burnt pages
like torn moth wings
flying up the fetid smoke
then drifting
down the broken teacups
and coffee stained saucers
the splintered chairs
empty shoe
splattered blood and
just before
that moment did you hear the
euphony of the street
as men wrangled
and summoned
swore and cajoled
addressed
if not solved
defined
if not created
the problems
and the promise
of their country's
tomorrow did you even know
of the dreams imploded
inside the molten iron
across the narrow
book lined street
as debate turned
to barbed screeches
philosophy
into choked smoke
and a thousand
years of history
was buried in the rubble or was there nothing
except an inexorable
deadly silence - devorah major
”on the day Al-Mutanabbi street was bombed"
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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President Donald Trump on Thursday revealed his intention to force changes at the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order that targets funding for programs that advance “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology,” the latest step in a broadside against culture he deems too liberal.
Trump claimed there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite American history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” adding that it casts the “founding principles” of the United States in a “negative light.”
The order he signed behind closed doors puts Vice President JD Vance, who serves on the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents, in charge of overseeing efforts to “remove improper ideology” from all areas of the institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.
It marks the Republican president’s latest salvo against cultural pillars of society, such as universities and art, that he considers out of step with conservative sensibilities. Trump recently had himself installed as chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with the aim of overhauling programming, including the annual Kennedy Center Honors awards show. The administration also recently forced Columbia University to make a series of policy changes by threatening the Ivy League school with the loss of several hundred million dollars in federal funding.
The executive order also hints at the return of statues and monuments of Confederate figures, many of which were taken down or replaced around the country after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is detested by Trump and other conservatives.
People wait in line to enter the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Cultural on the National Mall in Washington, Mat 1, 2017. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
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By day, the stressed-out Haitian police officer patrols the streets of his beleaguered city with an Israeli assault rifle to do his bit to resist the onslaught of the gangs. By night, the 28-year-old returns home to his increasingly empty neighbourhood wondering what calamity may unfold as he rests.
“Yesterday afternoon … there was panic, heavy gunfire ... It was tense … there was continuous gunfire throughout the day,” the officer said this week as the battle for control of Port-au-Prince raged on.
“I wondered if by the time I woke up the next morning, I would still recognise the city,” added the officer, a member of a specialised rapid-response unit tasked with thwarting the advance of the gangs. “I fear we’ll wake up to the announcement that Port-au-Prince has fallen.”
The officer, who asked not to be named, is not alone in his trepidation.
The year-old criminal insurrection in Haiti’s capital has plumbed new depths in recent days, fuelling speculation that the entire city – the third-largest in the Caribbean – may be on the verge of falling into the hands of a coalition of heavily armed gangs called Viv Ansanm (Live Together).
Frantz Duval, the head of Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, warned in a despondent editorial that the fall of Haiti’s capital could be imminent. “Like Phnom Penh overrun by the Khmer Rouge, Saigon swallowed by north Vietnamese troops, Tripoli after Muammar Gaddafi’s fall, Sana’a seized by the Houthis, or Kabul taken by the Taliban – Port-au-Prince has been hanging by a thread for long enough that one must now fear the rumours and cries of anguish are not mere echoes, but the sound of its final collapse,” he wrote.
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When Yaw Bediako lost his father to liver cancer, it set the Ghanaian immunologist on a journey to know more about the disease. He quickly realised the burden of cancer in Africa was much greater than he had thought – accounting for about 700,000 deaths every year – and that very few scientific papers about the disease on the continent were available.
“I realised that cancer is this huge disease in Africa that doesn’t really get much research attention,” he says. “But it’s not just an African problem, it’s global … It stands out as a problem that does not distinguish between geographies or socioeconomic class.”
Fifteen years after his father’s death, Bediako is leading Yemaachi Biotech, a company he co-founded in 2020 in Ghana’s capital, Accra, dedicated to building the largest, and possibly the first, database of genetic and clinical information in Africa from up to 7,500 cancer patients.
Its employees are young, most in their mid- to late-20s, and drawn from across the continent. More than half of the workforce is female.
The African Cancer Atlas will provide insights into cancer in African populations, invaluable for drug discoveries and treatment research, while helping to address disparities in cancer outcomes. It will be available for free to African researchers. Last month, the Swiss pharmaceutical multinational Roche announced it would back the project with funding and technical support.
The initiative will include a subset of data on children. An estimated 85% of paediatric cancers occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with survival rates estimated to be 30%, compared with 80% among children living in high-income countries.
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They have no bottom. Talking Point Memo: Trump’s Pick For Ambassador To South Africa Actively Opposed Fight To End Apartheid
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As Black activists in South Africa fought against their country’s racist apartheid government decades ago, some on the American right felt they took it too far. One of those people who stepped up and spoke out against their fight was L. Brent Bozell III, the right-wing activist that President Trump tapped this week to serve as America’s ambassador to South Africa.
According to the congressional website, Bozell’s nomination was received by the Senate Foreign Relations committee on Monday. Trump had previously picked Bozell to be head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, but that nomination was withdrawn.
Bozell has been a prominent right-wing activist for decades. He is the founder and president of the Media Research Center, a self-described “watchdog” dedicated to exposing alleged liberal bias. In the late 1990s he founded the Parents Television Council, which opposed what it saw as indecent content on the airwaves. Bozell’s son, L. Brent Bozell IV or “Zeeker,” was among the people who were sentenced for their role in the January 6 attack before being pardoned by Trump earlier this year.
While Bozell’s career in American issues has been high-profile, his past foray into South African politics is less well known.
Yet documents surfaced by TPM show that Bozell once weighed in on the fight against South Africa’s apartheid government. While that regime brutally enforced minority white rule and legal segregation with violence that included the killing and torture of activists, Bozell was concerned with aggressive action taken by the Black opposition.
In 1987, Bozell was president of the National Conservative Political Action Committee. On January 28 of that year, he wrote a letter to his counterpart at The Conservative Caucus, a right-wing policy group, declaring that his organization was “proud to become a member of the Coalition Against ANC Terrorism.” The group was opposed to the militancy of the African National Congress (ANC), which was the largest Black nationalist organization dedicated to ending the apartheid regime.
Bozell and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
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“Targeting hard-working civil servants because they are associated with an idea the government dislikes violates the First Amendment,” said a rep for the ACLU-D.C. NBC NEWS: Federal workers fired in anti-DEI purge say it was because they're not white men
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Federal employees across several government agencies filed a class action complaint Wednesday against the Trump administration, claiming it unlawfully fired employees for DEI activities as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order that banned diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the federal government. The administration fired employees it perceived as being associated with DEI, the filing alleges, including those who were not involved in any DEI-related activities or whose only DEI-related activity was involvement in a training or employee resource group. In the complaint, filed to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board — an independent, quasi-judicial agency established to protect federal employees against abuses, including politically motivated firings, and is not a federal court — the former employees said that the mass firings violated their First Amendment rights for perceived political stances. Additionally, the complaint alleges that the anti-DEI executive orders violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by disproportionately singling out federal workers who were not white men for hostility, suspicion, job interference and termination. The complaint was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, D.C., private law firms and the legal organization Democracy Forward. The complaint was filed in tandem with numerous charges of discrimination to federal Equal Employment Opportunity offices, related to Trump’s Jan. 20 executive orders that the Office of Personnel Management terminate all activities related to DEI across the government. “The decision to go after people for DEI work they are no longer doing shows the administration’s true motive: to punish employees who they think hold values that clash with the president’s extremist agenda,” Scott Michelman, legal director at the ACLU-D.C., said in a press release.
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