
Kalundi Serumaga
12.7K posts

Kalundi Serumaga
@NativeLandgrab
Born-again Pagan. Banned broadcaster. Proud Mission School reject. Fighting the 2nd Scramble for Africa. Restoring Native Thought for Africa and all Humanity.




Barack Obama and Zohran Mamdani sing ‘Wheels on the Bus’ at a childcare center in the Bronx.










The Constituent Assembly convened in 1994 to debate the draft constitution prepared by the Odoki Commission. Most Constituent Delegates returned as MPs to entrench substantive democracy. Sadly, the 1995 Constitution was abused to exhibit the worst features of autocracy.









@sejudav ‘Cos Iran’s PhD leaders studied the enemy to develop a multi-decade strategic response based on their mountain terrain. NRA mocked the PhD “Gang of Four” for its mountain bases (“reading books in trees”) choosing Rambo dramas in the savanna instead. Now it’s America’s errand-boy.


Paul Schroeder offers essentially two theories for the origin of WWI. 1) early modern Europe was violent for basic offensive realism reasons, but after the disasters of the Napoleonic Wars, exhausted monarchs learned the lesson that war is hell and agreed to try to keep the peace of 1815 (at least within Europe). A new culture of diplomacy followed, where geopolitical tensions were worked out proactively, and often multilaterally, so that the conditions for general war didn’t explode. But a few generations went by, and that extremely fragile, hard-won peace culture receded into the background along with the memories and experiences that justified it to elites. In the later part of the century, a new kind of aggressive winner-take-all masculinity emerged at the top (Perry Anderson adds: in the context of winner-take-all monopoly capitalism and imperialism beyond Europe’s borders; Arno Mayer agrees: Nietzsche, Darwin, Futurism all index this new worldview and self-conception). The idea that elites must cooperate to prevent full-scale war, which had come into being a century earlier, just melted away. Thus they could walk to war with ‘eyes wide shut.’ They knew what would happen, but unlike their fathers and grandfathers the international system didn’t possess the common knowledge that they needed to cooperate to stop it. Conflict as a way of life appeared inevitable. 2) the security architecture worked out after 1815 never took care of the Balkans, it was an open question how to keep the peace there that was worked out on an ad hoc basis for a century in a way which depended on the Austro-Hungarian empire balancing Russia. That equilibrium of forces became less and less stable as Austria-Hungary declined under Franz Joseph I (reigned way too long, 1848-1916; the guy who was gonna modernize the empire and reset equilibrium? Franz Ferdinand. Alas) and Russia took off under Witte. That hole in the European security architecture grew big enough to drive WWI through, and the elites went along for the ride with their ‘eyes wide shut.’









