Gary Younge

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de septiembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images. Protesters at the Place de la Concorde, Paris, France, June 6, 2020

MundoAmérica,

In September 1963, in Llansteffan, Wales, a stained-glass artist named John Petts was listening to the radio when he heard the news that four black girls had been murdered in a bombing while at Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The news moved Petts, who was white and British, deeply. “Naturally, as a father, I was horrified by the death of the children,” said Petts, in a recording archived by London’s Imperial War Museum. “As a craftsman in a meticulous craft, I was horrified by the smashing of all those [stained-glass] windows. And I thought to myself, my word, what can we do about this?”…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

'You do not choose to be a son or a daughter," argues Kwame ­Anthony Appiah in The Ethics of Identity. "A Serb or a Bosnian; a Korean or an Mbuti ... In all sorts of ways ... our identities are neither wholly scripted for us nor wholly scripted by us."

We are all a product of our time and place. Born in the midst of a random variety of narratives over which we have no control, most of us spend our lives trying to write the best story we can with the material we have been given. Some struggle with this as a concept.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional

On New Year's Day Atif Irfan boarded an AirTran flight at Reagan National Airport in Washington with seven members of his family. Edging his way down the aisle, he wondered out loud to his wife whether the back of the plane was the best place to be. As they took their seats, his sister-in-law said she thought it was the safest part, rather than being close to the engine or wings "in case something happened".

The conversation was overheard by two teenage girls, who took one look at the mens' dark skin and beards and the women's headscarves and saw a family of suicide bombers, including three small children aged between two and seven.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Last Tuesday a 25-year-old white student was wandering around Union Square in New York when she was set upon by four black teenage girls who pushed her, pulled out her earphones, and spat in her face. She was wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "Obama is my slave" that she had bought from Apollo Braun's Lower East Side store in Manhattan.

This isn't the first controversial T-shirt Braun has printed about the Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. His body of work includes such slogans as "Jews Against Obama", "Obama = Hitler" and "Who Killed Obama?" - which he told New York's Metro was his most popular yet.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

Before his show trial in Hungary in 1948, Robert Vogeler spent three months in a cell sleeping on a board that hovered just above two inches of water. Day and night a bright light bathed his cell, and even then someone would bang on the wall next door just to make sure he couldn't get any sleep. "It is just a question of time before you confess," he said afterwards. "With some it takes a little longer than others, but nobody can resist that treatment indefinitely."

And so Vogeler, who was arrested for spying, buckled under the pressure and played his role in the gruesome farce of Stalin's postwar purges in eastern Europe.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Una de las paradojas más arraigadas del racismo en los Estados Unidos es que los norteamericanos negros más proclives a ejercer en plenitud sus derechos como ciudadanos -votar, presentarse como candidatos, decir lo que piensan- son los más proclives a ser tildados de antipatriotas.

«Por supuesto, el hecho de que una persona crea en la igualdad entre razas no demuestra que sea comunista», dijo el presidente de la Comisión de Verificación de las Lealtades, uno de aquellos tribunales mccartistas desacreditados que en los años 50 se pronunciaban sobre la culpabilidad de posibles comunistas. «Sin embargo, no cabe duda de que ese hecho obliga a considerar la cuestión con especial atención, ¿no?…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Inmigración,

In October, a promising young Iranian-German footballer, Ashkan Dejagah, refused to go to Israel to play for the German under-21 team in a European qualifier. Dejagah, who was born in Iran and came to Germany as a child, claimed if he went to Israel he might be denied entry into Iran. His decision not to go sparked accusations of antisemitism from German Jewish groups alongside calls from some politicians that he be dropped from the team (after some deliberation, German officials decided to keep him on the team).

The debate that followed shed light on how much you have to know, and how much you have to forget, to become German in some eyes, and laid some ground rules for Dejagah's inclusion and integration.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaReflexionesSocial,

The four-hour drive from New Orleans to Jena takes you over long bridges, across still bayoux and deep into the remote backwoods of Louisiana. It's a journey that starts in the city that has become a byword for racial division and infrastructural neglect, following Hurricane Katrina. It then heads north-west through Opelousas where, as in so much of the south, people are literally segregated to death. There are two Catholic churches in the centre of town - Holy Ghost, for African Americans, and St Landry, for whites. In between is the cemetery where, by law and then by custom, blacks and whites have been buried according to their race - separate and finally equal, if only in the afterlife.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, , ,

Mom, I had another friend die today from a massive ied [improvised explosive device] and many more wounded with shattered bones and scrapes. We used to be in the same platoon. 1st platoon and the same squad when I first arrived at fort hood for a good 7 months or so. He was 17 then and barely a day over 19 now that he has passed away.It's tearing me up so badly inside. I just can't stand it. I can't get rid of the feeling that I probably won't make it home from this war. I have this horrible feeling that his fate will soon become my own.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Stand with your back to the Swift meat-packing plant in Greeley and you can see the snow-capped Rockies rise over fields of lush farmland. You are 775 miles from El Paso, the nearest crossing to Mexico. But on December 12 last year the border came to Greeley. Dozens of armed immigration agents supported by local police in riot gear stormed the factory. After rounding up the workers they divided them into two groups - the documented and the undocumented. Simultaneous raids at Swift plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Utah netted around 1,300 undocumented workers.

Homeland security and immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) agents claimed the raids were prompted by an inquiry into identity theft.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

There is no overestimating the popular reverence Americans have for their men and women in uniform. A direct translation of "squaddie", a term steeped in class contempt which betrays as much antipathy and ambivalence as it does admiration in the UK, simply does not exist in the US. Fighting for your country is generally regarded as the ultimate form of public service.Flight attendants will announce the presence of an active service man or woman to cheers from the rest of the plane. At anti-war demonstrations, protesters wave banners proclaiming "Support the troops, oppose the war." The nation may be irrevocably split on the moral value of any war, but when it comes to backing the people who are executing it, they speak as one.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

In Cardiff last week Tony Blair claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. This is the speech he could have made.

There is a strange kind of liberation that comes with knowing that your days in office are literally numbered. Journalists spend a decade trying to finish you off and then, just when it looks as if they might be successful, they feed you to the historians.

So in this year when we commemorate the 200th anniversary of parliament passing the bill to end trading in enslaved Africans using British ships, I've come to Cardiff to make history.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

On December 20 1954, a woman known as Marion Keech gathered her followers in her garden in Lake City, Illinois, and waited for midnight, when flying saucers were supposed to land and save them from huge floods about to engulf the planet.Keech had received news of the impending deluge from Sananda, a being from the planet Clarion, whose messages she passed on to a small group of believers. Unbeknown to her, the group had been infiltrated by a University of Minnesota researcher, the social psychologist Leon Festinger.

As dawn rose on December 21 with no flying saucer in sight, Keech had another revelation.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

One morning several years ago, an MP's secretary agreed to meet me off a train in rural Wales and take me to her boss for an interview. The train arrived on time and about 15 people got off, leaving just me standing there. A middle-aged woman remained looking straight through me for what seemed like an age before it occurred to her that the black man with whom she was sharing the platform might just be the Guardian journalist she was supposed to be meeting. She said she was expecting someone taller.

I was reminded of that incident last August as I crossed into the US from the Mexican border town of Palomas.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo,

Only the squeaking of the boots of the military pallbearers could be heard in the Calvary church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Thursday as Chad Vollmer's coffin was wheeled to the front. By the time the service was over their steps were inaudible amid the chorus of sobs and sniffles. Vollmer died two weeks ago when a makeshift bomb exploded near his vehicle in Salman Pak, Iraq. His funeral was a profoundly patriotic affair. Family members and fellow soldiers praised the 24-year-old as a young man who "honoured his country, family, and God". Huge billowing flags lined the entrance to the church and one hung over the pulpit; the first hymn was America the Beautiful.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

A few weeks ago, Washington-based radio host Jerry Klein announced his own very radical plan to assuage public fears of terrorism. All Muslims, he suggested, should be branded with a crescent-shaped tattoo or be forced to wear a red armband. The phones rang off the hook. The first caller said Klein was "off his rocker". The next thought he was a genius. "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country," the caller said. "They are here to kill us."

And so it went on, with Klein being praised or pilloried, until he finally confessed that the whole thing was a hoax to see how deep the rivers of American Islamophobia ran.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

'In the endgame," said one of the world's best-ever chess players, José Raúl Capablanca, "don't think in terms of moves but in terms of plans." The situation in Iraq is now unravelling into the bloodiest endgame imaginable. Both popular and official support for the war in those countries that ordered the invasion is already at a low and will only get lower. Whatever mandate the occupiers may have once had from their own electorates - in Britain it was none, in the US it was precarious - has now eroded. They can no longer conduct this war as they have been doing.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

There are polls and there are people. Polls are relatively straightforward. When compiled reliably they are supposed to tell a story in digits. That story may be contradictory (people say they want more social services and less tax), but even the contradictions are clear. Polls provide the pillars for the mega-narratives - the broad brush strokes that draw the big picture.People, on the other hand, are anything but straightforward. They dissemble, evade and lie - even to themselves. They confuse what they want to be true with what they know to be true. A person who does not contradict himself or herself is a bore, an ideologue or both.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

"All the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a stranger to be incomprehensible or puerile," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic 19th-century treatise, Democracy in America. "And he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them."And so it is that, as the extent of the carnage in Iraq becomes evident and North Korea goes nuclear, America's political class obsesses over a single Congressman's predilection for teenage boys.

The scandal of Mark Foley, the Florida representative who sent lewd email messages to Congressional pages, has galvanised the Democrat leadership into aggressive opposition in a way that Abu Ghraib never could.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

On Wednesday September 20 Corporal Donald Payne became the first Briton to admit to a war crime. Payne, 35, is accused of repeatedly banging the head of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old Iraqi hotel worker, against a wall and floor until Mousa died - an accusation he denies. Payne called his Iraqi prisoners in the jail in Basra "the choir", because he liked to invite friends to hear them shriek with the pain he inflicted. "Corporal Payne enjoyed conducting what he called the choir," Julian Bevan QC told the court martial, which is taking place at Bulford Camp, in Wiltshire, and is expected to last for 16 weeks.…  Seguir leyendo »