Join Sunil Amrith, a Yale history professor and author of "The Burning Earth," as he reveals the deep ties between violence against both humans and nature. He discusses how language has been weaponized to obscure truths and perpetuate injustices. Explore the colonial suppression of indigenous languages and its impact on cultural identity and environmental movements. Amrith also connects historical violence, technology, and ecological crises, emphasizing the vital need for grassroots activism and justice in a rapidly changing world.
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insights INSIGHT
Violence and Crisis
The world is in crisis because violence warps our moral and political imagination.
This is evident in the destruction of ecosystems and the violence inflicted on vulnerable populations.
insights INSIGHT
Conquest and Violence
The Iberian conquest of the Americas marks a turning point, linking violence against people and nature.
Colonizers viewed indigenous people as less human due to their closeness to nature, justifying destruction.
insights INSIGHT
Language and Violence
Language is the source code of human relationships, often obscuring or justifying violence.
A clear definition of violence remains elusive, highlighting the complex relationship between language and harm.
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The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins is a comprehensive history that reveals the U.S. government's role in fostering systematic mass murder across the globe, especially in Southeast Asia and Latin America, as part of its anticommunist strategy during the Cold War. The book uses recently declassified documents, archival research, and eyewitness testimony to detail the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists and its lasting impact on global politics. Bevins traces how these events influenced later anticommunist dictatorships and continue to shape the social and political landscape today.
The Burning Earth
An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
Sunil Amrith
Sunil Amrith's "The Burning Earth" explores the intricate link between violence inflicted upon the environment and the injustices faced by humanity. The book delves into historical events, tracing the destructive patterns of resource extraction and their consequences. Amrith examines how these actions have fueled inequality and conflict throughout history, highlighting the interconnectedness of environmental degradation and social oppression. The narrative challenges conventional understandings of progress and development, urging a critical examination of our relationship with the planet. Ultimately, the book calls for a fundamental shift in our values and practices to create a more just and sustainable future.
Slow Violence
Slow Violence
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Rob Nixon
Question Seven
Question Seven
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Richard Flanagan
In the beginning was the word—and that word justified it all.
In this stunning conversation with Sunil Amrith, historian and author of Burning Earth, we explore the systemic nature of violence. We discuss how it permeates the human project at every level, and how language is deployed to obfuscate, distract and even deny that which we bear witness to. Sunil walks us to different points in history to reveal the incontrovertible relationship between violence against the earth and violence against people, and that the justification to extract life from the non-human world inevitably justifies the hierarchies which then see the world’s most vulnerable human beings exploited and even killed.
This is a conversation about how the injustice with which the human project was built, about the ideologies that have justified rampant destruction and extraction, and about how to think of a better world tomorrow with the political language the past has to offer.
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