Olympics: A Stage for Athletics... and Politics

As the Olympics have come to a close, we can see that it was a stage for more than just athletics. For those who haven't at least heard, Ukraine is in a state of extreme unrest with deadly protesting and extreme international tension. This tension was brought to the Olympics with the Ukrainian athletes, who wore simple black armbands to pay their respect to their country's unrest. But even that was shut down by the IOC, which led to some of the Ukrainian athletes leaving in protest.

Americans fear that Russia will become more involved (potentially with their military) in the Ukraine situation, and it is feared that they will now become more involved now that the Olympics are over. America wants Ukraine to join the EU as opposed to joining Russia. It is a place where international tensions are held as well as local struggles for a better life.

If you want to read more, here's a link (or there's always google):
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ukraine-and-olympics-180949840/ 

CIA "Manages" Drugs rather than Fights them.

Here is an interesting article written about the CIA's involvement in the Mexican drug trade. Multiple Mexican officials associated with fighting the drug trade have suggested that the CIA does not fight the drug trade "they try to control and manage the illegal drug market for their own benefit." Please take a look at the articles and let me know if you think it is true or false.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/12247-cia-manages-drug-trade-mexican-official-says

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/north-america/item/17396-u-s-government-and-top-mexican-drug-cartel-exposed-as-partners

Speaking of Fascism....Lego Movie!

Check out this article.  Discuss.

http://www.ibtimes.com/how-lego-movie-everything-awesome-parody-creeping-everyday-fascism-1555165

Facism

I think we can all agree that todays presentation on facism was very interesting and thought provoking. Nathan offered a very peculiar proposition, facism would work and  be prosperous if the leader/ruler used love rather than fear to rule. This is very true, but is it possible? No, as I brought up in class Jesus was a leader who tried to lead with love but was still unsuccessful. It came up that he was hubris because he walked around proclaiming himself the son of God. Yes, he did, I wasn't objecting that he didn't people just cut me off before I could finish. He didn't walk around proclaiming himself as the son of God to be hubris but more so in an altruistic sense. He was letting the people know who he was and what he was there to do, he was the son of God sent by the messiah to lead people in the right direction to a better, happier life. Wasn't that the main argument of the presentation, that when we have a leader who is more concerned with the well-being of others than his own it will work? Then why didn't it work? It didn't work because despite Nathans objections we are human and we aren't perfect. As a part of human nature when someone has that much success there's always someone who gets consumed with jealousy and does something to take that power away. In this case it would be Judus who was one of Jesus very own disciples. I know some people aren't very religious and don't believe in God so another example would be the Zulu leader Shaka. Shaka was a great leader who was loved by everyone and he wasn't hubris but still he was killed by his half brother over jealousy. Facism will never work because it puts one person higher than the rest of the people which will result in failure due to jealousy.

"Jacob Zuma and his ailing alliance"

So this week’s (actually by now last week’s) Economist happened to have a bit on the current situation of South Africa.  Where is it now, politically, economically, and socially?  For economics, a large amount of it is in president Jacob Zuma’s new house, which he spent $20 million of the public’s money on building.  The country is, as it has been for quite a while, in economic disarray, with “barely four in ten people of working age” employed.  There have also been issues with the central bank’s new 5.5% interest rate, raised from the previous 5%, as well trouble with foreign investment (although this problem is more indirect than some of the others).  As for South Africa’s political scene, you probably could’ve guessed it: corrupt, racially divided (although perhaps not as much as you would suspect), and dominated by one party.  Which party is this, might you ask?  Well, none other than the ANC, with the aforementioned Zuma as their leader.  The public was certainly outraged by the blatant act of greed, but support for the party remains above 50%.  Much of the country still remains relatively loyal to the party that Mandela had led.  However, when “contrast[ing] Zuma’s ANC with the ANC of yesteryear”, most are severely disappointed. The greater goal of internal unity and equality that Mandela had promoted Zuma has contributed to eroding away.  For example, I can personally recall an article perhaps a year old describing a scene that played out at a South African mine, an even quite reminiscent of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country; the police/army/‘agents of the man’ opened fire on a crowd of relatively unarmed miners on strike.  And yes, many of said strikers were killed.  But perhaps out of all the political and economic chaos comes a blossoming of social reform; a societal equalizing from the formation of a common enemy.  This could be too much speculation, given the one resource I used did not wholly touch base on South Africa’s social problems.  But there does seem to be some congruence between this idea and the political scene, where the ‘main opposition’ Democratic Alliance, a party formerly-viewed as too white-dominated, has decided to run the African Mamphela Ramphele, “one of the heroines of the fight against apartheid”.  This might just be enough motivation for those supposedly loyal followers of the ANC to switch sides.  If not, then at least both sides, blacks and whites, will be able to boo Mr. Zuma through his second term together.

Nigeria, Biafra,... and You

    Okay, let’s talk Nigeria.  Why, you ask?  Because it’s probably the only African country most can name aside from Egypt and that one with all the white people.  And maybe Chad, just because it’s so silly.  But more importantly, Nigeria should be better understood because it is the largest country in Africa by population (about 7th in the world, with around 180,000,000 people and growing tremendously) and therefore the arguable hope for a huge amount of the continent (some people say Ghana is the hope, I think it’s too small to be so).  But, as you probably could have guessed, Nigeria has not been doing too well at all as of... as of... ever.  Since its creation, Nigeria has been completely crippled by rampant political corruption and internal conflicts.  While political corruption is fairly self-explanatory (“take what you can when you can”), the conflicts are what I wanted to focus on.  What internal conflicts may these be?  Quick, the map!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/world/11/nigeria_election_toggle_maps/img/nigeria_ethnic_624.gif

Huh, that certainly looks complicated… and not a whole lot different from any other African country.  Let’s take Gabon:

http://www.ecoi.net/file_upload/3256_1368625160_gabon-ethnic-1968.jpg

Okay, so most African countries’ borders completely suck, in the fact that they’re totally arbitrary; they don’t reflect anything about their inhabitants.  So then why does Nigeria stand out, even amongst them, as particularly awful?  Maybe this will help:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Religius_and_Ethnic_map_of_Nigeria.png

You got Muslims in the north and Christians in the South; the religious fault line of Africa runs right through the god-damn country.  You might think, “Well, it looks like the Muslims control well more than half the country, so what’s the big deal?”  Well, here’s the thing.  See that thing in the lower left corner called Lagos?  That’s the second biggest city in the world, at least as far as cities ‘proper’ go.  As for the Igbo, they control the populous Niger Delta, meaning together the two southern regions’ population is about equal to the North’s.  And it’s not even like these religious groups are united.  On top of flat religious differences, there are more even more general cultural ones.  For example, the Hausa-Fulani of the North have traditionally supported a very autocratic form of government, where the Igbo have been traditionally democratic, and the Yoruba in between.  Anyhow, there’s yet another overlay adding even greater tension to this house of cards.  This division would be that of economics.  When the British controlled Nigeria, each group responded differently towards them.  The North, which the British controlled indirectly (through allowing the rulers of the area to remain in power), had become staunchly anti-Western.  On the other hand, the South, especially the Igbo region, embraced the British cultural imperialism much more.  I don’t mean that like all the Igbo ran into the streets and threw flowers at the British, but rather that the Igbo elites were willing to, say, work with them more.  So, what happened was that by the 1950s, the North was totally underdeveloped and clinging to the rest of the country like some grotesque tumor of sorts.  This led to a culmination of great paranoia in the region; widespread belief that the South would just overrun the North when it could.  When Nigeria won its independence, the North’s leaders acted on this fear and demanded that the new Nigerian state’s government favor the North.  The South, desiring political independence from Britain above anything else, agreed.  That was until 1966, where a failed, predominantly Igbo-run coup d’etat and the events that ensued ultimately resulted in the installation Nigerian Army’s general, an Igbo, as president of the country.  The North felt that the Igbo conspirators had planned to put the fellow Igbo Army general into office, and became ever more fearful of the Igbo taking them over.  This led to an explosion of ethnic violence in the North, targeting the wealthy Igbo tradesmen who had made their ways into the area.  This prompted the Igbos to secede in 1967, as the state of Biafra.  What followed was one of the more horrific African conflicts in history; the Nigerian Civil War.  The Yoruba region basically sat idle as the Hausa-Fulani of the North sent in “police forces” to dislodge Biafra’s secessionist government.  Although the Biafran soldiers fought surprisingly valiantly, and even launched a fairly effective offensive into Yoruba territory, they ultimately could not stop the bigger and better-equipped northern force.  The Nigerian army was able to ultimately encircle Biafra, with the capturing of Port Harcourt in May, 1968.  What ensued was the real tragedy; between over 1 million (and possibly as high as 3 million) Igbo civilians starved to death over the course of a year and a half.  The war ultimately end in 1970, with Biafra being repossessed by Nigeria.  It was a truly horrific moment in history that had so little implications beyond just flat ethnic between the two groups that the rest of the world was legitimately confused in what to do.  For example, the UK, the Soviet Union, and Saudi Arabia all sided with Nigeria, where the US, France, and Canada sided with Biafra.  It just astounds me that there was a war where the US was on the opposite side of both the UK and Saudi Arabia, but that’s just me.  Anyhow, the war did not really change much in the long-term, in that the country’s south still remains economically dominant, with the Igbo and Yoruba controlling both oil and commerce, respectively.  The North is still significantly anti-Western, with the spreading influence of the terrorist organization Boko Haram (“Western education is sinful”), as well paranoid over being ‘taken over by the South’.  As of 2010, Nigeria’s presidential cycling between the North and South was interrupted when then-president Umaru Musa Yar'Adua (a Northerner) died, allowing for Vice President Goodluck Jonathan (a Southerner) to finish his term.  Jonathan then ran for presidency 2011 and subsequently won.  This outraged many in the North, who wanted the North to be given another term since their last president died in office.

    Anyhow, I just wanted to bring up the whole ‘Nigeria’ thing because of two reasons.  First, it draws many parallels, even if loose, to what has been discussed in class.  Nigeria continues to be imprisoned by its history of colonialism just as much as Rwanda, and many elements of the Nigerian Civil War resembled genocide.  But I’ll let you decide for yourself through your own independent research.  Anyhow, Nigeria also greatly reminds us on how much history repeats itself, or rather can repeat itself if allowed.  Perhaps we’ve already seen this in class.  The Holocaust, Yugoslavia, Rwanda.  It is up to us to not understand this simple fact of repetition, but learn to counteract it.  If we fail to, then we will be no better than this country of Nigeria, too busy reliving the tragedies of the past to break out of its quiet desperation.

Obama answer the question!

Its about 1:35 and am watching the super bowl pre game show and as i sit here watching they are having a segment with our president Barrack Obama. The reporter bill keeps asking him tough questions regarding health care and syria and as i watch i notice that our president doesn't answer his questions he goes around it and as the reporter keeps pushing him to answer the question Obama gets frustrated. I feel like this is a great example of not answering the questions! I hope there is a link to the segment later so i can add it. Link to article http://news.yahoo.com/obama-oreilly-super-bowl-211853753.html?vp=1