Yearly Archives: 2014

8 Facts about King Moshoeshoe I: The Razor of Southern Africa

  By

Introduction: King Moshoeshoe I, founder of Lesotho, reigned from 1822 to his death in 1870, during a period of immense tumult in southern Africa. He waged one of the most effective resistance efforts to colonialism (from the Dutch Boer settlers and British Empire) over many decades, as well as to Shaka’s military consolidation of what became Zulu Kingdom in the 1820s.

His name was originally a nickname derived from a poem he wrote as a youth, a braggadocio-filled anthem to farm animal theft that could put most hip-hop moguls to shame. From the poorly sourced Wikipedia version of the story:

During his youth, he was very brave and once organised a cattle raid against Ramonaheng and captured several herds. As was the tradition, he composed a poem praising himself where, amongst the words he used to refer to himself, said he was “like a razor which has shaved all Ramonaheng’s beards”, referring to his successful raid. In Sesotho language, a razor makes a “shoe…shoe…” sound, and after that he was affectionately called Moshoeshoe: “the shaver”.

 
He also wore an appropriately supreme tophat and cape, like the badass king he was.

King Moshoeshoe I with his ministers of state (Bensusan Museum, Johannesburg - Wikimedia)

King Moshoeshoe I with his ministers of state (Bensusan Museum, Johannesburg – Wikimedia)

Additional claims to fame include:

  1. He founded his own all-new clan at age 34. Presumably on the strength of his charisma, diplomatic flair, and cattle-rustling skills. This clan established a settlement in a location that could withstand Zulu assaults. His original clan eventually grew to be Lesotho and environs.
  2. He never lost a major battle!
  3. He ruled for 48 years against a colonial onslaught. Many native rulers in Africa were unable to maintain such a strong level of sovereignty and control in their domains during the period.
  4. He united the various Sotho people into a Basotho nation through a combination of battle followed by compassionate diplomacy (rather than subjugation through conquest).
  5. He was very willing to mess with the Boers as they tried to invade. He would give them fair conditions for maintaining peaceful coexistence and then beat them back when they rebelled. Eventually, of course, they took over much of the outlying territories of his realm (as they did in many places). But he never lost control of his home kingdom.
  6. He beat the British military and then threw them a bone so they could make peace with dignity.
  7. He manipulated various Europeans to get defensive weapons and surprisingly valid foreign policy advice to fight off the settlers. He also used them to help preserve local culture in written form for future generations.
  8. He successfully negotiated an intervention by Queen Victoria to preserve Lesotho against all attempts at settler seizure, via protectorate status...

While this did eventually make Lesotho into a colony, it remained separate and intact from British South Africa and Apartheid South Africa both during and after its colonial phase. The monarchy still survives to this day (now in constitutional form) and the Sotho culture endures. Compared to how many of the surrounding areas fared, the decision to pitch a deal to Queen Victoria makes King Moshoeshoe I look pretty insightful.

US suddenly surprised to find Mideast states acting unilaterally

  By

A couple weeks ago, the United Arab Emirates Air Force struck targets in Libya’s capital in a surprise attack. According to the Pentagon, this secret operation attacked Islamist militias opposing the Zintan Brigade, which the UAE supports, and it was launched from Egyptian air bases. Both the UAE and Egyptian air forces — which are currently strongly opposed to political Islam and Islamic terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa regions — are trained and armed with American help, but the United States was not expecting or endorsing such an operation.

An Al Jazeera America headline blared an ominous warning: “UAE strikes on Libya stir US fears of a free-for-all in the Middle East”.

American unilateralism in the Middle East (particularly Iraq) combined with our arming and training these military forces to be self-sufficient was pretty much asking for that outcome. We provided the means and the model. They seized the opportunity. Why should we be surprised?

And as former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman is quoted in there as saying, Israel’s been doing the same thing for years (unilateral force actions, against US wishes, with US military aid) in its immediate sphere, so why should these other countries restrain themselves against targets that can’t hit back?

“Gulf states and Egypt have seen many instances of Israel doing whatever it wants without us,” Freeman said. “They’re saying, if Israel can use U.S. weapons to defy the U.S. and pursue its own foreign policy objectives, why can’t they?”

 
Moreover, the US seems to have managed to systematically take out all the restraints and countermeasures that had been delicately balancing the Middle East/North Africa and Southwest Asia regions, without then having a plan for what to replace it with, except more weapons to even more diffused points. And then we’re shocked — just shocked! — to see the house of cards start to fold in on itself in slow-motion. Which is not to say the US should have continued supporting most of those status quo regimes — they are the reason we’re in such a mess of rampant radicalism — but the handling of it from 2001 to present has been catastrophic. There had to have been a better plan to unravel the system than figuratively and sometimes literally carpet-bombing it without a roadmap toward any sort of objective.
Read more

In praise of South Korea’s flag

  By

The design of South Korea’s flag looks really modern and postwar to me, but in fact the core version was designed and finalized from 1882 to 1883 as the flag of Korea. It included all the current elements even then.

From: "Flags of Maritime Nations," 1882, US Navy via Wikimedia

From: “Flags of Maritime Nations,” 1882, US Navy via Wikimedia

The design was immediately revived in 1945 by locals as the ruling Japanese Empire surrendered to the Allies, and subsequently had only relatively small, stylistic revisions under US military rule in the south, and again in 1948 after independence. Exact color shades were officially set in 1997 but are roughly still the same as the 1883 colors. The 1948 design is the one in use today:

Flag_of_South_Korea

I think maybe the new ratios, angles, precision shapes, proportions, and distances are what make the original late-19th century version into a sort of modernist vibe.

This is the flag equivalent of the Futura typeface. Look at those incredibly precise spacings and lengths radiating across every element. And those exact angle alignments that match every part to every other part! It’s an elegant simplicity with no fluff. Yet they still manage to pack a tremendous amount of cultural symbolism into the flag’s five components. Bravo.

Pennsylvania gov’t admits fracking contamination

  By

Nice to finally have some confirmation that it wasn’t all imagined (as some have insisted to me and others many times):

For the first time, Pennsylvania has made public 243 cases of contamination of private drinking wells from oil and gas drilling operations.

As the AP reports, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection posted details about the contamination cases online on Thursday. The cases occurred in 22 counties, with Susquehanna, Tioga, Lycoming, and Bradford counties having the most incidences of contamination.

In some cases, one drilling operation contaminated the water of multiple wells, with water issues resulting from methane gas contamination, wastewater spills, and wells that simply went dry or undrinkable. The move to release the contamination information comes after years of the AP and other news outlets filing lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests from the DEP on water issues related to oil and gas drilling and fracking.

 
One wonders if there will be any consequences, though, given that the industry has spent massively on the campaigns of favorable state reps and state senators in Pennsylvania to open the way to fracking operations all over the state.

The industry lobby’s response to the disclosure, as reported by the AP/Wall Street Journal, was to fault Pennsylvania rocks for being difficult to work with and to blame the state government for lax regulation on drilling well construction and design (a statement which takes a lot of chutzpah).

US planes hit ISIS siege forces outside Amirli, Iraq

  By

A week ago I asked why there seemed to be a double standard regarding US response toward the Shiite Iraqi Turkmen community at Amirli, which was facing a severe humanitarian crisis after two months of ISIS encirclement, not unlike the situation at Mount Sinjar that had prompted the US to intervene militarily to break the siege around the Yazidi Kurds. The UN and other groups had begun calling for a relief mission to send more food and medicine to Amirli and were puzzled as to why a strong response had not already occurred.

It took longer than it ought to have but tonight we have a resolution to the double standard as U.S. airstrikes began on ISIS positions around the town of Amirli and coalition humanitarian aircraft arrived with help:

American warplanes launched airstrikes on Sunni militants who have been besieging the town of Amerli in northern Iraq on Saturday, in a broadening of the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The Pentagon announced the expanded strikes Saturday night. Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said that American planes also airdropped food, water and humanitarian aid to the town of Amerli, home to members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority. The town of 12,000 has been under siege by the militants for more than two months.

Aircraft from Australia, France and the United Kingdom joined the United States in dropping the supplies, Admiral Kirby said in a statement.

 

Update, August 31, 2014: Iraqi ground troops and Shiite paramilitary forces arrived into the town today after several days of slowly fighting ISIS through the surrounding area. The airstrikes cleared the final path.

Click on the map to navigate in Google Maps.

Click on the map to navigate in Google Maps.

The town, located several dozen miles east of Tikrit or south of Kirkuk, is at the nexus of the Sunni Arab heartland and greater Iraqi Kurdistan. Relations between Kurdish political leadership — who are closely aligned with the United States — and the Iraqi Turkmen people have sometimes not been good, as I explored in the post last weekend.

Possible coup attempt in progress in Lesotho

  By

Lesotho is a constitutional monarchy surrounded by South Africa, with some prior history of military involvement in its politics. The Prime Minister has fled across the border into South Africa, saying that a military coup is under way.

But it’s unclear what’s actually going on here, because the Prime Minister suspended parliament back in June to avoid a no-confidence vote against his unstable coalition government. And today the military allegedly may have just been trying to take him involuntarily to the king (I assume to insist that parliament be recalled into session and a new government be formed under a different prime minister). The military also claims they were merely acting today to disarm the country’s police force, which they accuse of providing weapons to the prime minister’s party supporters.

According to the BBC:

The army is understood to have acted after the prime minister attempted to remove its chief, Lt Gen Kennedy Tlai Kamoli.

The army said the general was still charge, saying the military “supports the democratically elected government of the day,” Reuters news agency reported.

A spokesman, Maj Ntlele Ntoi, denied staging a coup, saying: “There is nothing like that, the situation has returned to normalcy… the military has returned to their barracks.”

Earlier, troops were seen on the streets of Maseru and there were reports of gunfire.

Radio stations were taken off air and phone lines were cut, although later reports suggested they were working again.

 
Eyewitness account by Basildon Peta, publisher of the Lesotho Times, quoted by the BBC:

This whole thing started around 03:00. There were gunshots since early morning. The city is currently calm. People are playing it safe within their homes, but there is basically a media blackout.

To all intents and purposes it is a military coup with the aim of ousting the prime minister. There can be no other reason of soldiers behaving the way they have been behaving other than to seize power.

So far we have no reports of killings. It would be correct to call it a bloodless coup attempt. But I am not going to stick around. The chances are the situation may deteriorate. One does not know what is going to happen.

 
South Africa’s government, which has long had a very influential role in Lesotho’s politics, has said it is monitoring the situation closely and would oppose any unconstitutional change in power there.

The former British protectorate of less than 2 million people is very poor and still has a subsistence-oriented agricultural economy. The government is the largest employer in the country, according to the CIA World Factbook. The military has strongly resisted government plans to reduce its size to a more reasonable level for a country whose outside defenses are actually now maintained by another country (South Africa).

Map of Lesotho's location in southern Africa. (CIA World Factbook)

Map of Lesotho’s location in southern Africa. (CIA World Factbook)

Update, August 31 2014: There has been an attempted assassination against Lieutenant General Maaparankoe Mahao, who was Prime Minister Tom Thabane’s choice to replace Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli as head of the armed forces. The latter is accused of leading the attempted coup this weekend.

Low-ranking soldiers contacted by AFP said it was unclear who was now giving their orders. They remain confined to barracks.

Prime Minister Thabane remains in South Africa. His political rival, Deputy Prime Minister Mothejoa Metsing, has also now departed Lesotho for Pretoria, at the invitation of the South African government, to try to sort out the situation. This appears to leave Public Service Minister Motloheloa Phooko, from the third rival party in the coalition government, as the acting chief executive, assuming the civilian leadership is still in power, despite the coup attempt.

Confirmed: Ron Paul’s 2012 team bribed a state senator

  By

After a guilty plea this week, we now have confirmation that Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign bribed an elected official $73,000.

A former Iowa state senator pleaded guilty Wednesday to receiving and concealing payments in exchange for switching his support from one presidential candidate to another in the 2012 election, the Justice Department said.

The former lawmaker, Kent Sorenson, resigned from the Iowa Senate last year after an investigation found that he probably violated ethics rules by taking money from presidential campaigns.

Mr. Sorenson, 42, of Milo, Iowa, had been the state chairman for the presidential campaign of Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, but then switched his support to former Representative Ron Paul of Texas just days before the state’s caucus.

In a statement filed with his plea agreement, Mr. Sorensen admitted that he agreed to switch his allegiance in exchange for $73,000 in payments.

 
Please tell me more about Congressman Paul’s integrity and principles and blah blah blah. Though I suppose that buying elected officials is very free-market and all that.

The fallout began Friday night, as a Paul family insider, Jesse Benton, was forced to resign as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign manager in Kentucky.

Benton has worked in high-ranking positions in Rand Paul’s first Senate bid in 2010 and Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, and he has married into the family, as well. It’s not known whether Benton himself knew about the bribe, but there would be a lot of questions either way, and so he had to go. If he’s cleared, I’m guessing he’ll be back for Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign team, which he had already been slated to join before this scandal broke.