authoritarianism & dictatorship Archives

CLIMATE CRISIS

In Bolsonaro’s burning Brazilian Amazon, all our futures are being consumed

24th August 2019

Elaine Brum writes: Believing the Amazon is far away, on the periphery, when the only chance of controlling climate change is to keep it alive, reflects ignorance of continental proportions. Our eyes have been contaminated, distorted, colonised. The forest is at the very core of all we have. This is the real home of humanity….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Could one man single-handedly ruin the planet?

11th November 2018

David Wallace-Wells writes: Brazil’s newly elected president Jair Bolsonaro just might test the proposition that no individual matters all that much to the climate. He plans to open the entire Amazon rainforest to agricultural development — the industrial-scale felling of trees, which, will release into the atmosphere all the CO2 they have stored inside them….

Illustration by Cathryn Virginia

Culture/Cognition

Engineered for Dystopia

18th September 2018

David A. Banks writes in The Baffler: Engineering has not strayed far from its military origins… Engineers are trained to “plug into chain-of-command decision making structures… In times like these it is important to remember that border walls, nuclear missiles, and surveillance systems do not work, and won’t even exist, without the cooperation of engineers….

Appuppen

Conserve/Resist

How Andhra Pradesh built India’s first police state using Aadhaar and a Census

30th July 2018

Gopal Sathe writes: The AP government now has access the intimate personal details of 43 million of the state’s 50 million residents: GPS coordinates of their homes, medicines they use, the food rations they eat, real-time feeds of thousands of security cameras, their castes and sub-castes, their religion, and of course — their Aadhaar numbers….

Appuppen/Braindedindia

Conserve/Resist

Shriya Mohan: The Aadhaar of all things

19th January 2018

From The Hindu: From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. As the Supreme Court begins hearing of petitions that challenge Aadhaar, a timeline of the country’s chequered date with the project….

Development/Growth

A global police state? Digital capitalism and the rise of authoritarian leaders

2nd November 2017

William Robinson highlights some revealing statistics to expose what is really behind the rapid digitalization of global capitalism, the rise of authoritarian leaders and the creeping spread of the global police state. These, he says, are nothing but an insecure transnational capitalist elite’s attempt to insure themselves against rising inequality and a looming economic crisis….