For our subscribers: PolGeoNow’s Somalia control map has been revised and updated for February 2021! Though lines of control in the south haven’t changed much, Al Shabaab has been seizing villages in the north, plus we’ve made some adjustments after a thorough review of available sources. And as always, the report includes a detailed timeline of territorial, political, and military events since our previous update in October.
Photo of the Day: A Former Child Soldier Is Released From the Army
Photographer caption: A former child soldier is released in Yambio, South Sudan as part of a joint initiative to return children to their families. About 300 children were released, but it is estimated that over 19,000 children have been recruited into the armed forces during South Sudan’s brutal civil war that started in 2013.
Photo by Stefanie Glinski (London, United Kingdom); Yambio, South Sudan
In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln begged the South for peace, famously saying, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Are we doing this again? Okay, we’re doing this again.
The Sokovia Accords are an agreement between 117 countries within a framework that was explicitly established for the purpose of regulating conflicts between nations, and deciding when military action should be undertaken by representatives of member states against other sovereign states to “defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands”. Since 1945 the UN has been the best solution the world has been able to come up with for managing and overseeing international peacekeeping operations. Placing violent non-state actors like the Avengers under the purview of the United Nations is completely in keeping with the decades-long global consensus on how to best manage international military interventionism.
There is zero evidence that the Raft has anything to do with the Sokovia Accords or United Nations; the Accords were never signed during the film and there is zero evidence that they had actually come into force. The post above describes the Raft as “the US government imprisoning US citizens”, which is in keeping with the evidence seen in the film.
There is zero evidence that the Sokovia Accords violate any rights of United States citizens. Private citizens of the United States do not have any rights to unilaterally carry out military operations in foreign sovereign states.
There is zero evidence of any elements of conscription in the Sokovia Accords. On the contrary, the Avengers are explicitly told that they are free to walk away if they do not want to carry out military operations supervised by the United Nations. There is zero evidence or threat of any punishment for Avengers who choose to take this route.
There is zero evidence that the Sokovia Accords would “force US citizens into self-imposed exile” of any kind. I honestly don’t know what this point is referring to.
As the post above post says, all evidence points to the fact that Wilson, Barton, Lang and Maximoff were instances of “the US government imprisoning US citizens”, not of any international implementation of the Sokovia Accords. Their imprisonment was absolutely a gross violation of human rights – and an example of exactly the kind of human rights violation that the United Nations has spent immeasurable time and resources combating over the last 70 years. Indefinite imprisonment without trial may have become par for the course when the USA detains violent non-state actors, but to imply that the United Nations would in any way sanction it goes against every aspect of the organisation’s history. The United Nations has repeatedly and explicitly condemned the USA’s use of Guantanomo Bay and other Raft-like violations of human rights.
Remembering 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered on this day, August 28, 1955, by white supremacists in Mississippi. Rest in peace, Emmett.
“I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense of meaning of brotherhood? For two hundred years we had toiled for them; the war of 1861 came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever freed from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other, but when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or had it made our conditions more hopeless?…
There are still good friends to the negro. Why, there are still thousands….Man thinks two hundred years is a long time, and it is, too; but it is only as a week to God, and in his own time…the South will be like the North, and when it comes it will be prized higher than we prize the North to-day. God is just; when he created man he made him in his image, and never intended one should misuse the other. All men are born free and equal in his sight.”
Elizabeth Keckley was born enslaved and lived in Dinwiddie County and Petersburg as a young girl. She purchased her freedom working as a seamstress after moving to Missouri. With her freedom, she became the most sought after dress maker in Washington D.C. Her talents as a seamstress, both before and during the Civil War, led to her being chosen as the personal dressmaker of Mary Todd Lincoln. Over the years, both women became good friends and Mrs. Lincoln looked on Elizabeth as one of her closest confidantes during the White House years.
“Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.
I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it. I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, now how I am still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. The other slaves in my master’s house noticed the change. Many of them pitied me; but none dared to ask the cause. They had no need to inquire. They knew too well the guilty practices under that roof; and they were aware that to speak of them was an offence that never went unpunished.”
–Harriet Jacobs, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
“My mother was sold at Richmond, Virginia, and a gentleman bought her who lived in Georgia, and we did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone, and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me, and I saw a clear place in the sky, and it seemed to me the way she had gone, and I watched it three and a half years, not knowing what that meant, and it was there the whole time that mother was gone from her little ones.”
“The every-day life of a slave on one of our southern plantations, however frequently it may have been described, is generally little known at the North. The principal food of those upon my master’s plantation consisted of corn meal, and salt herrings; to which was added in summer a little buttermilk, and the few vegetables which each might raise for himself and his family, on the little piece of ground which was assigned to him for the purpose, called a truck patch. The meals were two, daily. The first, or breakfast was taken at 12 o’clock, after laboring from daylight; and the other when the work of the remainder of the day was over. The only dress was of tow cloth, which for the young, and often even for those who had passed the period of childhood, consisted of a single garment, something like a shirt, but longer, reaching to the ankles; and for the older, a pair of pantaloons, or a gown, according to the sex, while some kind of round jacket, or overcoat, might be added in winter, a wool hat once in two or three years, for the males, and a pair of coarse shoes once a year. Our lodging was in log huts, of a single small room, with no other floor than the trodden earth, in which ten or a dozen person-men, women, and children-might sleep, but which could not protect them from dampness and cold, nor permit the existence of the common decencies of life. There were neither beds, nor furniture of any description-a blanket being the only addition to the dress of the day for protection from chillness of the air or the earth. In these hovels were we penned at night, and fed by day; here were the children born, and the sick-neglected. Such were the provisions for the daily toll of the slave.”
–Josiah Henson, “The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave. Narrated by himself. 1849
