How to end wars
I greatly welcomed the Big Story in issue NI 553 with its focus on warfare and the political and business machinery behind it. I particularly welcomed the interview with Vijay Prashad, but fear I must disagree with one statement he made: ‘All conflicts have to end in negotiation.’
Throughout history, we clever humans have come up with just two ways of ending conflicts, of which negotiation is one. The other is annihilation.
The latter was much more common in ancient times, when defeated cities or nations would see all their military aged males slaughtered and everyone else enslaved.
In modern times, annihilation has become almost universally unacceptable, but tragically it is clear that not everyone thinks so. There are those involved in current conflicts who do not want to see negotiated ends, but would rather pursue annihilation.
Caring across borders
Readers should check out a recent report, ‘Care, Inequalities and Wellbeing among Transnational Families in Europe’, published in November 2024. The report shines a light on the challenges faced by a growing number of migrants who, through social exclusion, discrimination and legal uncertainty, are unable to care effectively for family members dispersed across multiple national borders.
A collaboration between Reading and Leeds universities, the work provides a clear analysis of what it means to live in a ‘transnational world’, acting as an antidote to much of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric propagated by the far right in particular.
This is a well-researched and informed contribution to a highly contentious and politically charged area of inquiry.
Read the paper via the link a.nin.tl/report.
More on Haiti
Re: The World Unspun Podcast episode ‘How Haiti became the “poster child” for reparations’.
I thought Harold [Isaac] was great and clearly outlined the connections between slavery and other historical events, such as occupations and neocolonial Western foreign policies, with the situation Haiti is in today. In the future I would love to hear him delve into the history of the Creole pig and how their unnecessary mass culling by the US in the 1980s decimated the Haitian economy and peasant sovereignty. This is an interesting and little-known chapter of Haitian history that deserves more attention and further exemplifies the devastation of foreign intervention.
I thought what Harold said about remaining in Haiti as an act of resistance was inspiring – I can’t imagine the difficult personal sacrifices he’s made to remain there. It would be amazing to have an episode linking up different people/activists around the world who choose to remain in their country of origin in challenging situations, for example, Haiti, Palestine, Sudan etc.
Finally, I don’t know whether you’re able to link up with Leyla McCalla for a future episode? She’s a wonderful American-Haitian musician and cellist, who produces music mixed with archival testimony on Haitian history.
Missing the mark
The article ‘Dying in the passive voice’ (NI 552) failed to make its case. Despite what was said in the text, the illustrations did not mention the passive at all.
In any case, the problem is not with the passive voice as such, since passives can state who carried out the action (as in ‘The Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces’). But short passives, with no ‘by’ included in the phrase, do not do so (‘The Palestinians were killed’). However, the article said nothing about the frequency of short passives in different contexts.
Why I...
...set up a food delivery co-operative.
When I co-founded Wings, a North London-based delivery co-operative, I thought I was doing it for myself. As an ex-Deliveroo rider, I knew how precarious gig work could be. But as Wings got started, I realized it wasn’t just about helping riders; restaurants were also being undercut and residents cheated out of the benefits of an on-demand local delivery service. So we shifted our model – we partnered with neighbourhood restaurants, engaged the council and delivered free food to vulnerable residents. In the right hands, even technology as exploitative as Deliveroo’s platform model could become genuinely community-owned – it is for us to take power over the instruments of our daily lives. Follow Wings at a.nin.tl/Wings.
