> The death of the political cartoon, whether at the hand of the state, in pursuit of profit or as a sacrifice to appease online mobs, is a warning sign and a herald of the diminution of political freedoms. The canaries are dying. But is anyone paying attention?
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/7/2/the-death-of-the-political-cartoon/
#PatrickGathara on #PoliticalCartoons #PoliticalCartoon #Cartoons

From May, 2023:



.> This weekend, the British will be asking the world to join in celebrating something they have actively denied to other societies – a sense of their own history.


.> Before his anointment, Charles III, like his predecessors, will take the Coronation Oath – pared down to reflect the loss of empire. It is the only bit of the ceremony that is actually required by law.


.> On the African continent, as the late Professor Terence Ranger noted, British colonial administrators had “set about inventing African traditions for Africans”. These subjects were in fact taught that they had no history or achievements, and that the brutal colonial dispossession and occupation was actually for their benefit – that it helped to civilise them.


.> In Kenya, as Timothy Parsons, Professor of African History at Washington University in St. Louis, notes, “faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities, [British] colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units”. In the process, they linked land to ethnic identity, creating a system that assumed each of these fictional ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland.


.> the British divided Kenya into 41 administrative districts and the country eventually ended up with nearly the same number of official “tribes”.


.> ... the persecution of sexual minorities, often justified using colonial ideas of Africa as populated by “noble savages” instinctively upholding supposedly natural Victorian ideals about sex and needing to be protected from Western corruption, is a direct consequence of the erasure of African history.


.> This reinvention of the monarchy as global entertainment has helped to shield it, and the country it leads, from the more unsavoury bits of its history, such as the links to the slave trade. And certainly, true remembrance of the actions taken by British officials in their monarch’s name in the colonies is made harder by the wholesale and deliberate theft, concealment and destruction of documents.


.> As the British Empire crumbled, thousands of documents detailing some of its most shameful acts and crimes committed were systematically destroyed, or transferred discretely to the UK and hidden in a secret Foreign Office facility, to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments. The existence of this stolen record, euphemistically called the “migrated archive”, kept at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, was only officially admitted in 2012 following a lawsuit by Kenyans who were detained and tortured during the Mau Mau Emergency of 1952-1957.

• https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/5/the-coronation-of-king-charles-a-fresh-layer-of-royal-whitewash
  #PatrickGathara #KenyaOnTheUK #TheUKOnKenya #KingCharles #RoyalWhitewash #KenyaJournalism

#^The coronation of King Charles: A fresh layer of royal whitewash



This weekend’s spectacle is the latest episode of the world’s longest-running reality show.

From May 2023:
> .> The UK monarchy is probably the world’s longest-running reality show, with a constant cast of dysfunctional individuals, incredible and melodramatic plot twists, as well as sexual drama, corruption and emotional and moral conflicts. The coronation episode is sure to be a hit with the legions of fans.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/5/the-coronation-of-king-charles-a-fresh-layer-of-royal-whitewash
#PatrickGathara #Monarchy #MonarchyUK #KingCharles #UKHistory #AfricaHistory #KenyaHistory #Kenya on #UKMonarchy

Two weeks ago I discovered Patrick Gathara. He made me laugh while mocking the USA mass media's weekly magazine tone toward elections in foreign countries.^1 He is a cartoonist and writer(!!) in Kenya. He got me ready to enjoy these Kenyan (or based-in-Kenya) journalists mockery of NBC.. It's also good to learn about PEE.



.> ... to your more serious and defamatory allegation that we spread misinformation. Not sure how you do journalism at NBC, but at African Stream, we ensure that our journalists follow the basic principles of Point, Evidence, Explain (PEE). Simply put, if you are to make a point like you have here, claiming we are spreading misinformation, then you need examples to back up your point (something you have failed to provide) and then, finally, to explain how your examples back up your point. You need to drastically improve on two of the three fronts.


https://africanstream.media/african-streams-response-to-nbc/
#AfricanStream #Journalism #JournalismNBC #MainstreamJournalism #PEE #PointEvidenceExplain
/HT @PC via @bsmall2

^1 https://www.aljazeera.com/author/patrick_gathara_20141863917323977
#PatrickGathara

We should be able to adjust the places from which we view events...

Patrick Gathara is refreshing, he makes me laugh while thinking of the people who write this way about other nations in Africa, Latin America, Asia, anywhere that might be a target for USA interference, intervention or aggression (Serbia...). The people who write (and their readers who talk) this way will be livid when exposed to this writing. You have to be either very confident physically or, like Noam Chomsky, have police protection at events to provide this sort of balance to USA Gringos. It would be funny if the effects of the enabled or permitted foreign policy were not so terrible.



Beyond concerns about democracy, many were also eager to downplay problems in the highly indebted country’s economy, including the fact that inflation is 18 percent higher than when Biden took power with many weekly household expenses going up by far more. This has seen many Americans, nearly 40 million of whom live below the poverty line, lose faith in the Biden regime despite his attempts to blame Trump for the economic disarray. The country’s gross inequality and corruption are reflected in the organisation of the convention, with donors paying up to $5m for a seat in luxury suites at the venue. The event’s $85m budget is almost fully funded by the uber-wealthy and influential big-money groups in what one prominent journalist has described as a “pay-to-play” scheme.
Although at 59, Harris is two decades older than the median age of the US population, her supporters have tried to paint her nomination as a passing of the torch to a new generation. However, it is unclear whether this will fundamentally change the country’s gerontocratic politics, where youth find it hard to break through as their elders cling to office well into old age. The median age in the US Senate is over 65 years old and concerns about senescence have dogged several senior politicians prior to Biden. Only half of Americans 18-29 voted in the 2020 elections, though that was up 11 percent from 2016. However, the country will need to do more than simply get rid of an octogenarian incumbent if its politicians are to reflect the demographic of the nation.


- https://www.aljazeera.com/author/patrick_gathara_20141863917323977
#ViewFromKenya #PatrickGathara #USPolView #USPolPOV

#^Patrick Gathara | Al Jazeera News | Today's latest from Al Jazeera



Patrick Gathara

#AlJazeera - #PatrickGathara - Is a rules-based international order truly possible? #IntlCrimCourt #League_of_Nations #Israel #Hamas #KarimKhanQC #WesternIMPUNITY #LindseyGrahamSC #SouthAfrica #Nicaragua #Germany #apartheid #1919ParisPeaceConference https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/5/27/is-a-rules-based-international-order-truly-possible