beep beep

US Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction The indiscriminate use of bombs by the US, usually outside a declared war situation, for wanton destruction, for no military objectives, whose targets and victims are civilian populations, or what we now call “collateral damage.”

Japan (1945) 

China (1945-46) 

Korea & China (1950-53) 

Guatemala (1954, 1960, 1967-69) 

Indonesia (1958) 

Cuba (1959-61) 

Congo (1964) 

Peru (1965) 

Laos (1964-70) 

Vietnam (1961-1973) 

Cambodia (1969-70) 

Grenada (1983) 

Lebanon (1983-84) 

Libya (1986) 

El Salvador (1980s) 

Nicaragua (1980s) 

Iran (1987) 

Panama (1989) 

Iraq (1991-2000) 

Kuwait (1991) 

Somalia (1993) 

Bosnia (1994-95) 

Sudan (1998) 

Afghanistan (1998) 

Pakistan (1998) 

Yugoslavia (1999) 

Bulgaria (1999) 

Macedonia (1999)

US Use of Chemical & Biological Weapons The US has refused to sign Conventions against the development and use of chemical and biological weapons, and has either used or tested (without informing the civilian populations) these weapons in the following locations abroad:

Bahamas (late 1940s-mid-1950s) 

Canada (1953) 

China and Korea (1950-53) 

Korea (1967-69) 

Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (1961-1970) 

Panama (1940s-1990s) 

Cuba (1962, 69, 70, 71, 81, 96)

And the US has tested such weapons on US civilian populations, without their knowledge, in the following locations:

Watertown, NY and US Virgin Islands (1950) 

SF Bay Area (1950, 1957-67) 

Minneapolis (1953) 

St. Louis (1953) 

Washington, DC Area (1953, 1967) 

Florida (1955) 

Savannah GA/Avon Park, FL (1956-58) 

New York City (1956, 1966) 

Chicago (1960)

And the US has encouraged the use of such weapons, and provided the technology to develop such weapons in various nations abroad, including:

Egypt 

South Africa 

Iraq

US Political and Military Interventions since 1945 The US has launched a series of military and political interventions since 1945, often to install puppet regimes, or alternatively to engage in political actions such as smear campaigns, sponsoring or targeting opposition political groups (depending on how they served US interests), undermining political parties, sabotage and terror campaigns, and so forth. It has done so in nations such as

China (1945-51) 

South Africa (1960s-1980s)

France (1947) 

Bolivia (1964-75)

Marshall Islands (1946-58) 

Australia (1972-75)

Italy (1947-1975) 

Iraq (1972-75)

Greece (1947-49) 

Portugal (1974-76)

Philippines (1945-53) 

East Timor (1975-99)

Korea (1945-53) 

Ecuador (1975)

Albania (1949-53) 

Argentina (1976)

Eastern Europe (1948-56) 

Pakistan (1977)

Germany (1950s) 

Angola (1975-1980s)

Iran (1953) 

Jamaica (1976)

Guatemala (1953-1990s) 

Honduras (1980s)

Costa Rica (mid-1950s, 1970-71) 

Nicaragua (1980s)

Middle East (1956-58) 

Philippines (1970s-90s)

Indonesia (1957-58) 

Seychelles (1979-81)

Haiti (1959) 

South Yemen (1979-84)

Western Europe (1950s-1960s) 

South Korea (1980)

Guyana (1953-64) 

Chad (1981-82)

Iraq (1958-63) 

Grenada (1979-83)

Vietnam (1945-53) 

Suriname (1982-84)

Cambodia (1955-73) 

Libya (1981-89)

Laos (1957-73) 

Fiji (1987)

Thailand (1965-73) 

Panama (1989)

Ecuador (1960-63) 

Afghanistan (1979-92)

Congo (1960-65, 1977-78) 

El Salvador (1980-92)

Algeria (1960s) 

Haiti (1987-94)

Brazil (1961-64) 

Bulgaria (1990-91)

Peru (1965) 

Albania (1991-92)

Dominican Republic (1963-65) 

Somalia (1993)

Cuba (1959-present) 

Iraq (1990s)

Indonesia (1965) 

Peru (1990-present)

Ghana (1966) 

Mexico (1990-present)

Uruguay (1969-72) 

Colombia (1990-present)

Chile (1964-73) 

Yugoslavia (1995-99)

Greece (1967-74)

US Perversions of Foreign Elections The US has specifically intervened to rig or distort the outcome of foreign elections, and sometimes engineered sham “demonstration” elections to ward off accusations of government repression in allied nations in the US sphere of influence. These sham elections have often installed or maintained in power repressive dictators who have victimized their populations. Such practices have occurred in nations such as:

Philippines (1950s) 

Italy (1948-1970s) 

Lebanon (1950s) 

Indonesia (1955) 

Vietnam (1955) 

Guyana (1953-64) 

Japan (1958-1970s) 

Nepal (1959) 

Laos (1960) 

Brazil (1962) 

Dominican Republic (1962) 

Guatemala (1963) 

Bolivia (1966) 

Chile (1964-70) 

Portugal (1974-75) 

Australia (1974-75) 

Jamaica (1976) 

El Salvador (1984) 

Panama (1984, 89) 

Nicaragua (1984, 90) 

Haiti (1987, 88) 

Bulgaria (1990-91) 

Albania (1991-92) 

Russia (1996) 

Mongolia (1996) 

Bosnia (1998)

US Versus World at the United Nations The US has repeatedly acted to undermine peace and human rights initiatives at the United Nations, routinely voting against hundreds of UN resolutions and treaties. The US easily has the worst record of any nation on not supporting UN treaties. In almost all of its hundreds of “no” votes, the US was the “sole” nation to vote no (among the 100-130 nations that usually vote), and among only 1 or 2 other nations voting no the rest of the time. Here’s a representative sample of US votes from 1978-1987:

US Is the Sole “No” Vote on Resolutions or Treaties

For aid to underdeveloped nations 

For the promotion of developing nation exports 

For UN promotion of human rights

For protecting developing nations in trade agreements

For New International Economic Order for underdeveloped nations

For development as a human right

Versus multinational corporate operations in South Africa

For cooperative models in developing nations

For right of nations to economic system of their choice

Versus chemical and biological weapons (at least 3 times)

Versus Namibian apartheid

For economic/standard of living rights as human rights

Versus apartheid South African aggression vs. neighboring states (2 times)

Versus foreign investments in apartheid South Africa

For world charter to protect ecology

For anti-apartheid convention

For anti-apartheid convention in international sports

For nuclear test ban treaty (at least 2 times)

For prevention of arms race in outer space

For UNESCO-sponsored new world information order (at least 2 times)

For international law to protect economic rights

For Transport & Communications Decade in Africa

Versus manufacture of new types of weapons of mass destruction 

Versus naval arms race 

For Independent Commission on Disarmament & Security Issues 

For UN response mechanism for natural disasters 

For the Right to Food 

For Report of Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination 

For UN study on military development 

For Commemoration of 25th anniversary of Independence for Colonial Countries 

For Industrial Development Decade in Africa 

For interdependence of economic and political rights 

For improved UN response to human rights abuses 

For protection of rights of migrant workers 

For protection against products harmful to health and the environment 

For a Convention on the Rights of the Child 

For training journalists in the developing world 

For international cooperation on third world debt 

For a UN Conference on Trade & Development

US Is 1 of Only 2 “No” Votes on Resolutions or Treaties 

For Palestinian living conditions/rights (at least 8 times) 

Versus foreign intervention into other nations 

For a UN Conference on Women 

Versus nuclear test explosions (at least 2 times) 

For the non-use of nuclear weapons vs. non-nuclear states 

For a Middle East nuclear free zone 

Versus Israeli nuclear weapons (at least 2 times) 

For a new world international economic order 

For a trade union conference on sanctions vs. South Africa 

For the Law of the Sea Treaty 

For economic assistance to Palestinians 

For UN measures against fascist activities and groups 

For international cooperation on money/finance/debt/trade/development 

For a Zone of Peace in the South Atlantic 

For compliance with Intl Court of Justice decision for Nicaragua vs. US. 

**For a conference and measures to prevent international terrorism (including its underlying causes) 

For ending the trade embargo vs. Nicaragua

US Is 1 of Only 3 “No” Votes on Resolutions and Treaties 

Versus Israeli human rights abuses (at least 6 times) 

Versus South African apartheid (at least 4 times) 

Versus return of refugees to Israel 

For ending nuclear arms race (at least 2 times) 

For an embargo on apartheid South Africa 

For South African liberation from apartheid (at least 3 times) 

For the independence of colonial nations 

For the UN Decade for Women 

Versus harmful foreign economic practices in colonial territories 

For a Middle East Peace Conference 

For ending the embargo of Cuba (at least 10 times)

In addition, the US has: 

Repeatedly withheld its dues from the UN 

Twice left UNESCO because of its human rights initiatives 

Twice left the International Labor Organization for its workers rights initiatives 

Refused to renew the Antiballistic Missile Treaty 

Refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming 

Refused to back the World Health Organization’s ban on infant formula abuses 

Refused to sign the Anti-Biological Weapons Convention 

Refused to sign the Convention against the use of land mines 

Refused to participate in the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban 

Been one of the last nations in the world to sign the UN Covenant on 

Political & Civil Rights (30 years after its creation) 

Refused to sign the UN Covenant on Economic & Social Rights 

Opposed the emerging new UN Covenant on the Rights to Peace, Development & Environmental Protection

Sampling of Deaths >From US Military Interventions & Propping Up Corrupt Dictators (using the most conservative estimates)

Nicaragua – 30,000 dead

Brazil  – 100,000 dead

Korea – 4 million dead

Guatemala – 200,000 dead

Honduras – 20,000 dead

El Salvador – 63,000 dead

Argentina – 40,000 dead

Bolivia – 10,000 dead

Uruguay – 10,000 dead

Ecuador – 10,000 dead

Peru – 10,000 dead

Iraq – 1.3 million dead

Iran – 30,000 dead

Sudan – 8-10,000 dead

Colombia – 50,000 dead

Panama – 5,000 dead

Japan – 140,000 dead

Afghanistan – 10,000 dead

Somalia – 5000 dead

Philippines – 150,000 dead

Haiti – 100,000 dead

Dominican Republic – 10,000 dead

Libya – 500 dead

Macedonia – 1000 dead

South Africa – 10,000 dead

Pakistan – 10,000 dead

Palestine – 40,000 dead

Indonesia – 1 million dead

East Timor – 1/3-½ of total population

Greece – 10,000 dead

Laos – 600,000 dead

Cambodia – 1 million dead

Angola – 300,000 dead

Grenada – 500 dead

Congo  – 2 million dead

Egypt – 10,000 dead

Vietnam – 1.5 million dead

Chile – 50,000 dead

Other Lethal US Interventions CIA Terror Training Manuals Development and distribution of training manuals for foreign military personnel or foreign nationals, including instructions on assassination, subversion, sabotage, population control, torture, repression, psychological torture, death squads, etc.

Specific Torture Campaigns Creation and launching of direct US campaigns to support torture as an instrument of terror and social control for governments in Greece, Iran, Vietnam, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama

Supporting and Harboring Terrorists The promotion, protection, arming or equipping of terrorists such as:

Klaus Barbie and other German Nazis, and Italian and Japanese fascists, after WW II

Manual Noriega (Panama), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Osama bin Laden (Afghanistan), and others whose terrorism has come back to haunt us

Running the Higher War College (Brazil) and first School of the Americas (Panama), which gave US training to repressors, death squad members, and torturers (the second School of the Americas is still running at Ft. Benning GA)

Providing asylum for Cuban, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, Chilean, Argentinian, Iranian, South Vietnamese and other terrorists, dictators, and torturers

Assassinating World Leaders Using assassination as a tool of foreign policy, wherein the CIA has initiated assassination attempts against at least 40 foreign heads of state (some several times) in the last 50 years, a number of which have been successful, such as: Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dihn Diem (Vietnam) Salvador Allende (Chile)

Arms Trade & US Military Presence

The US is the world’s largest seller of weapons abroad, arming dictators, militaries, and terrorists that repress or victimize their populations, and fueling scores of violent conflicts around the globe

The US is the world’s largest provider of live land mines which, even in peacetime, kill or injure at least several people around the world each day

The US has military bases in at least 50 nations around the world, which have led to frequent victimization of local populations.

The US military has been bombing one Middle Eastern or Muslim nation or another almost continuously since 1983, including Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq (almost daily bombings since 1991)

This, then, is a sampling of American foreign policies over the last 50 years. The FBI uses the following definition for Terrorism: “The unlawful use of force or violence committed by a group or individual, who has some connection to a foreign power or whose activities transcend national boundaries, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” This sounds like the terrorism we just experienced. It also sounds a lot like the US policies and actions since 1945 that I’ve just described.

This is a version of an an original page atributed to Robert Elias, a US Professor of Political Science , a list which, like so many others,  has otherwise ‘disappered’

via https://web.archive.org/web/20161125052245/http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/whocares/popups/warcrimes.htm

Korean prisoners of war in the 1950s were subjected to early MK-ULTRA experiments while in American custody, according to recently declassified CIA documents which confirm these experiments for the first time. The only reporting that previously referenced Koreans being used as guinea pigs for these experiments was journalist John Marks’s landmark 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Using CIA documents, Marks traced the now-infamous MK-ULTRA project to its start, when it was known as Project Bluebird. In the book, Marks describes how, in October 1950, 25 unnamed North Korean POWs were chosen as the first test subjects to receive “advanced” interrogation techniques, with the overt goal of “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

[. . .]

The first reference to “Project Bluebird” in the NSA’s collection is an office memorandum from April 5, 1950. Addressed to CIA Director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the document lays out the project’s goals, required training, and budget, all while emphasizing that knowledge of Project Bluebird “should be restricted to the absolute minimum number of persons.” The memo includes detailed plans for interrogation teams trained to utilize the polygraph, various drugs, and hypnotism “for personality control purposes.” These teams were to be made up of three people: a doctor (ideally a psychiatrist), a hypnotist, and a polygraph technician. The memo clarifies that while the doctor and technician would need to undergo approximately five months of training, the Inspection and Security Staff’s own department hypnotist could be made available immediately. In a later memo from February 2, 1951, there are inquiries into acquiring six “hypospray” devices: experimental instruments designed to covertly inject sedatives through the skin via “jet injection.” There’s a request to investigate modification of a “tear gas pencil” and other “devices of unestablished action,” such as the “German ‘Scheintot’ [sic] (appearance of death) pistol.”

[. . .]

[W]hile the actual offshore locations are redacted, a write-up of a CIA meeting held one year later specifically notes a “project in Japan and Korea in which the Army had used a polygraph operator along with a team of psychiatrists and psychologists on Korean POWs.” Although the initial proposal for Project Bluebird mostly emphasized the potential for “personality control,” it’s clear that CIA officials were also interested in broader, more ambitious outcomes. One document summarizing a “special meeting” between U.S., British, and Canadian intelligence services notes the CIA’s desire to research “the psychological factors causing the human mind to accept certain political beliefs” and “determining means for combatting communism,” “‘selling’ democracy,” and preventing the “penetration of communism into trade unions.” Another meeting held on May 9, 1950, called for “the Surgeon General of the Army to place on the search list of the Nuremberg Trials papers request for information on drugs, narcoanalysis, and special interrogation techniques.”

[. . .]

Notably absent from these declassified documents is any proof that similar experiments were undertaken by enemies of the U.S. The central animating myth behind MK-ULTRA and Project Bluebird is the narrative of the American soldier who returned home after months of imprisonment by enemy forces, only to be revealed as a hypnotized double agent. Throughout the Korean War, American moviegoers were screened films starring and narrated by future president Ronald Reagan. These films showed American troops being psychologically tortured by Chinese and North Korean soldiers until dangerous, anti-democratic ideals were implanted in their minds without their knowledge.

[. . .]

I agree that migration shouldn't be made harder. It should be much easier and safer. But that sentiment, while decent, doesn't go deep enough. The real goal shouldn't just be making the journey safer; it should be making people's home countries safe so they never have to flee at all.

The fact that the United States is a place people flee *to*, and the fact that people are forced to flee *from* their homes, are not separate problems. They are cause and effect. The second happens largely because of the first.

Let me give a simplified but structurally accurate example, and I'll walk through exactly why the misery is profitable. Picture a giant U.S.-based fruit company operating in an imperialized Latin American country. With the backing of the U.S. government, it helps overthrow popular leaders, supports the torture and murder of activists, and installs a brutal comprador regime, a local ruling class that serves foreign interests in exchange for a cut of the spoils. In return, that regime rewrites the laws so the company can operate with near-zero costs for labor and safety.

Why is this so profitable? Otherwise, a company has to pay decent wages, provide insurance, maintain safe facilities, and properly handle toxic chemicals. Those are all costs. Under the puppet regime, the company can legally pay workers a few cents an hour, far below survival level. It can skip insurance entirely. It doesn't need to spend on safety equipment because if a worker is injured or killed, the company has no legal liability. It can spray pesticides from the air straight onto workers and nearby communities, causing cancer and birth defects, and face zero consequences. Instead of paying to manage toxic waste, it simply dumps it. Every one of these horrors is, in cold accounting terms, a cost eliminated.

The result is fruit produced at a tiny fraction of its real cost. The company ships that fruit back to the imperial country and sells it cheap in supermarkets. Because the price is low, it captures huge market share. The gap between the crushed production costs and the selling price, even a low one, is enormous. That gap is superprofit, profit so large it would be impossible without extreme exploitation backed by state violence.

The chain is simple: imperial state violence installs a puppet regime, that regime eliminates worker protections, labor and safety costs plummet, production becomes dirt cheap, goods sell cheaply in the imperial core and seize markets, and the profit margin swells far beyond normal returns.

Crucially, those cheap goods don't only benefit the company. They flow into the imperial country's economy, keeping prices low for consumers. Ordinary working people in the U.S. can fill their shopping carts with affordable fruit, coffee, clothing, and electronics. That material benefit, cheap goods bought with foreign blood, helps build consent for the entire arrangement. Some working people in the imperial core can feel a small stake in the system because their cost of living is subsidized by misery in the imperialized world. This actively undermines solidarity between working people across borders, because the system makes it seem like their interests are opposed.

Now back to the imperialized country. Because a repressive government has been installed, groups that were already vulnerable face even sharper abuse. Then, in a truly vicious twist, this doesn't just make those people more vulnerable to both local and foreign exploitation, but also creates instability and social breakdown that the company and its regime create are later held up as reasons for more imperial intervention. "Look at the savages, we have to step in." The very wounds inflicted by foreign corporate power are used to justify further domination.

This isn't just about fruit. It's the pattern for whole economies. So what happens next? Some people reach a breaking point and try to flee toward the imperial centers that helped destroy their homes. Many die trying. Their desperation isn't random. The imperial country is a wealthier place to live *because* the imperialized country has been made poorer. The high standard of living in the imperial core and the destitution of the imperialized periphery are produced by the same machine.

When migrants do arrive, if they survive, they are slotted straight back into exploitation. They become a vulnerable, easily threatened workforce, undocumented, unable to demand fair pay or safe conditions, always deportable. The restaurant owner who clawed his way to stability is one of the lucky ones. Many are funneled into dangerous industries, trafficked, sexually assaulted, or worked in conditions no citizen would tolerate. This is not a glitch; it is a design feature. The imperial economy needs a layer of desperate, exploitable labor. The migrant escapes exploitation in an imperialized country only to be fed into a new form of it in the imperial country, which they endure because, compared to the engineered desperation back home, it is still the lesser evil for many- though kidnappings are also common.

This is why simply demanding "make immigration safer" runs into a structural wall. The current imperialist order needs migrants to be a vulnerable category. Even if some reforms soften the edges for a few, the migrant's function as cheap, precarious labor remains locked in. And the fundamental question still towers over everything: Why did they have to uproot their lives and risk death in the first place? Even if the destination were made more humane, is it acceptable that entire regions are deliberately kept miserable so their people have no choice but to leave? What about the millions who cannot flee, left to live in the wreckage?

The real answer isn't to manage the pain more kindly or to tinker with immigration rules. It is to remove the need to flee altogether. But here we must be absolutely clear. This system is not a malfunction of an otherwise decent capitalism. The superprofits that flow to the imperial core depend directly on the immiseration of the imperialized world. The entire machinery of imperialism, the puppet regimes, the labor aristocracies, the reserve armies of migrant labor, exists because capital accumulation across borders requires it. You cannot reform this away with nicer trade deals, better labor standards, or friendlier immigration policies. Capital will always break or co-opt those reforms because its core drive for superprofit demands a hierarchy of nations. It is also part of a reason why we are currently seeing more immigrants drowned in Europe, more put into camps and treated even worse globally including in the US

Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”

that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.

secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --

The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.

whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.

and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:

A man who had cleared brush like a conscience

Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission

Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all

She had the kind of walking that made benches become men

(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”)

what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:

Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.

writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like

latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.

there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".

incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind

and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.

i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:

The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun

I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.

Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

✨️with a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure✨️

hehe i do! here are a few recs:

'what people wore when: a complete illustrated history of costume' has a lot about europe but it touches on historical costume around the globe from ancient times to the 19th century. the illustrations are old and french/german so be cautious re: orientalism and racism lol but it works well as an introductory overview

'indian costumes in the collection of the calico museum of textiles' is an amazing overview of primarily north indian costume from the 18th to 20th centuries with extant garments AND deconstructed sewing patterns, plus information on textile influence in north india via turkish and persian cultures in this period. i found a physical copy of this in a used bookstore and it's my favourite book on the subject

Okay I had this half-finished lying around so I prettied it up into something vaguely usable and added links wherever possible (most of them being totally legal...)

This is not a full treatment of Indigenous history before European contact. It was originally created to be a 15 week class, so it was not intended to cover everything but to give a taste of various regions and histories. Unfortunately, certain essays I would highly recommend are in the Oxford handbooks I listed at the end, and I have been unable to locate free-to-access versions.

Each section includes a question to consider that is intended to suggest ways that these precolonial histories have reverberations into the present. In a course I'd be able to draw them out more clearly, but keep them in mind as you read, if you like. Finally, please keep in mind that few of these sources will read like a "straightforward history" of "precolonial [xyz region/tribe/nation]." Be open-minded and critical-thinking!

Part 1: Foundations

Questions to consider:

Why didn't we learn this stuff?

Why should we learn this stuff?

Why do so many Indigenous people distrust historians / anthropologists / archaeologists?

Readings:

Michael Witgen (Red Cliff Ojibwe), "American Indians in World History" in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History

Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Custer Died For Your Sins, chapter 4: "Anthropologists and Other Friends"

Floyd Westerman (Sisseton Dakota), "Here Come the Anthros" (music video!!)

Juliana Barr, "There's no such thing as prehistory"

Peregrine and Lekson, "The North American Oikumene"

(Parts 2-6 under the cut)

The forces of good are arrayed against the minions of evil on a storm-swept battlefield, and someone is about to yell “Charge!”—Now what?

We’ve all been there. Many fantasy novels end with a climactic battle scene, yet few authors have a solid understanding of how battles are planned, staged, fought, and won. The answers are locked within dense history books—but never fear: I read them so you don’t have to.

This short, accessible book not only gives you a crash course on basic military strategy and tactics across history—it also contains invaluable tips on how to adapt real-world battle tactics into a thrilling scene for your fantasy novel. Along the way you’ll learn:

How socio-economic forces affect the ways that battles are fought.

The importance of factors such as surprise, terrain, fog of war, and more.

Different categories of fighters.

How your world-building and magic system may affect your battle.

The typical phases a battle may go through.

Where to find more advanced resources.

This book contains countless examples from real and fictional battles, collected during the ten years I’ve spent reading up on medieval and modern military history—and put into terms which anyone can understand.