(Ex-)Yugoslavia

This week:
1. Warming up police intelligence
2. A hungry man is an angry man
3. Farm land not airports
4. Vintage riot porn: The battle for Narita

If you can keep your head, when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”
— “If”, Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936

You occasionally read a totally mind bending book that opens up a whole new world for you. The Failure of Nonviolence  by Peter Gelderloos is one of them, owing to its unique evidence-based perspective on both “nonviolent” and “violent” resistance. It differs from Gelderloos’s 2007 How Nonviolence Protects the State in its heavy emphasis on indigenous, minority, and working class resistance.

When the demise of Nelson Mandela was proclaimed to the nation by South African president Jacob Zuma the streets were hushed, and in restaurants, bars and nightclubs, there was pin drop silence as people listened in utter despondency.
ANC described him as a large baobab tree that had fallen, whose roots would nourish the soil forever.

At last the world knows America as the savior of the world!
– President Woodrow Wilson, Paris Peace Conference, 1919