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DEMOCRACY NOW

A new report in The New York Times takes a deep dive into Project Esther, a policy blueprint to crush the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States from the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank best known for spearheading Project 2025. Project Esther was formed during the Biden administration and lays out plans for surveilling, silencing and punishing pro-Palestinian activists, including deporting non-U.S. citizens and withholding funds from universities. Many of the Heritage Foundation’s proposals appear to have been taken up by the Trump administration.

“Project Esther aims to rebrand all critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters as providing material support for terrorism,” says investigative reporter Katie Baker. “They’re very explicit that this is what they’re doing. … This is all laid out online, and it has been for months.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

We turn now to a new report in The New York Times that takes a deep dive into Project Esther, a policy blueprint from the far-right Heritage Foundation, best known for creating Project 2025. Project Esther was launched October 7th, 2024, and lays out plans for surveilling, silencing and punishing pro-Palestinian activists, including deporting non-U.S. citizens.

New York Times investigative reporter Katie J.M. Baker spoke to the people behind Project Esther for her new piece, “The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement.” Katie joins us now to explain.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. What did you find?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, so, I found that the architect behind Project Esther said that it’s no coincidence that what we’re seeing in terms of actions taken against universities and pro-Palestinian protesters on a federal, state and local level is happening months after they released their report.

AMY GOODMAN: So, The Forward had originally talked about this kind of white paper of the Heritage Foundation, but you went much further. You named names and talked to people behind Project Esther. Tell us who they are.

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, the woman overseeing Project Esther is Victoria Coates. She is a former national security adviser to Trump during his first administration, and she has a long history of working on Israeli matters. And then, Robert Greenway ran the Abraham Accords, and he’s one of the co-authors of Project Esther.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about what exactly their plans are? And how many Jewish groups are involved in shaping Project Esther, as they talk about — as the leaders of Project Esther talk about combating antisemitism?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, Project Esther aims to rebrand all critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters as providing material support for terrorism. So that means that anyone who’s ever participated in a pro-Palestinian protest at a university, for example, is potentially providing material support and should be fired or deported or otherwise ostracized from what they call open society. And there’s not very many Jewish groups involved in this project. There are a few, but the task force that inspired Project Esther was primarily Christian and right-wing organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the role of Christian Zionists?

Democracy Now for more

by PEPE ESCOBAR

This is as serious as it gets. Let’s survey the chessboard – from micro to macro.

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Israel’s shock’n awe on Iran – straight from the trademark US playbook – essentially failed, despite the initial combination of speed, meticulous military planning and the element of surprise, including hacking the Iranian electronic communications within the military grid; decapitation of the vertical IRGC nomenklatura; the spiderweb drone attack playbook; and bombing – ultimately ineffectual – of key nodes of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.It took hours for top Iranian technicians to get their grid back. And once that happened, the tide began to turn, to the point that after surgical missile volleys deep in the night on Sunday, the IRGC announced its capability to seriously disrupt Israel’s command and control systems using “enhanced intelligence”, thus breaching Iron – or Paper – Dome.

Absolutely key infrastructure nodes in Tel Aviv and Haifa have been destroyed – from the Rafael weapons complex (specialized in missiles, drones, cyber warfare and Iron Dome components) to the power plant and oil refinery in Haifa. This is historic in more ways than one.

Compound the cries of joy all across the lands of Islam to the massive psychological trauma inflicted on Israel. The myth of Israeli invincibility has been definitely shattered. Unleashing hell from above, killing women and children and spinning like there’s no tomorrow does not win a war against a real opponent.

The tweaked IRGC strategy – applied by an instantly revamped leadership – is being fine-tuned day by day in a calculated, surgical manner. It’s not that hard for the IRGC to totally paralyze Israel’s economy. Israel has only one oil refinery (already bombed); three ports, of which one is already bankrupt (Eilat) and another is on fire (Haifa); and one airport (already in dire straits).

The blowback on Tel Aviv’s desperate, indeed suicidal move – no chess involved – is in effect. Tehran is proving that every Zionist axis calculation that Iran could – and was – bled dry in a matter of hours was, predictably, false.

The POTUS, for his part, fell into a voracious trap. His MAGA base is already fractured – in depth. Non-Zionist MAGA is the overwhelming majority. He admitted in a stunning infantilist post that he knew everything about the Israeli shock’n awe all along.

Sputnik for more

by SHARON ADARLO

Doctor ChatGPT will see you now.

Since OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT to the public back in 2022, people have done all sorts of ill-advised things with the AI tool — from attorneys filing court documents that cite hallucinated caselaw to everyday users spiraling into severe mental health crises as the chatbot affirms delusional thoughts.

Now add to that list: asking ChatGPT for advice on how to inject facial filler — a trendy cosmetic procedure intended to puff up features like lips and cheeks — at home, without the assistance of a medical professional.

“I’ll be injecting myself tonight,” one Redditor wrote in a recent post. “I have all things needed on hand and I’m trying to research the best way of keeping things as sterile/clean as possible. I asked ChatGPT and it said I should absolutely not use normal gloves, I googled and can’t find any specific info on it.”

Needless to say, this is a resoundingly terrible idea. Please don’t do this procedure at home, and instead go to a qualified medical facility so you don’t hurt yourself. (While pros can screw up this process too, at least they can be held liable.)

Unfortunately, nobody chastised the Redditor for asking ChatGPT for advice. In fact, a quick perusal of the same subreddit, where thrifty beauty aficionados swap tips on administering cosmetic procedures on their own, finds a huge number of similarly alarming situations.

“I used ChatGPT to help me map my tox and PN placements, how to dilute my tox facial and depth of injections, etc,” one commenter enthused. “If you send it annotated photos it can view your mapping and correct it.”

Another user turned to AI after problems with a DIY cosmetic procedure.

“Asked [ChatGPT], and it said that since a small amount likely migrated to cheek area through tear trough [sic],” they wrote. “But since it migrated, likely was dissolved into bloodstream. Fibrosis possible but may resolve. If fat was dissolved it should be very negligible.”

AI models may be set to revolutionize medicine in certain ways, such as at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is incorporating AI into training doctors. Researchers are excited about AI being used to diagnose diseases such as prostate cancer and heart disease earlier than before.

But the jury is still out on how effective AI chatbots will be in dispensing useful medical advice. For example, a recent npj Digital Medicine paper in March revealed that while large language models such as ChatGPT are more accurate than search engines, they are still going to spew out more than 30 percent of incorrect advice under certain circumstances.

In addition, the quality of output is reliant on the quality of the prompt.

Futurism for more

by B. R. GOWANI

the Senate passed the B B Bill 50 (Dem)/50 (Rep) with tie vote by VP on July 1

Republicans Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, & Susan Collins said no to the BBB

one Rep Senator Lisa Murkowski who opposes Trump supported Trump

her no vote would have killed the bill in the Senate

the one wouldn’t have appeared without amendments

the House passed it 218 Republicans to 214 Democrats on July 3, 2025

after signing the “Big Beautiful Bill”, President Donald Trump boasted:

“We have officially made the Trump tax cuts permanent. That’s the largest tax cut in the history of our country.”

parts of the Bill will be paid by cutting SNAP and Medicaid

govt food program/health insur for low income/limited resources people

about 12 million people will lose health insurance over the next 10 years

Trump often promised during the election campaign not to cut Medicaid

the US is not a true democracy but a capitalist democracy

the capitalist class calls the shots & most of the hirelings in Congress obey

a true democracy doesn’t need a Senate — just the House is enough

there area 100 senators — 2 senators for each of the 50 states

California, the most populous state with 40 million people, has 2 senators

Wyoming with less than 6 million also has 2 senators

does it make any sense?

Alaska has 7.4 million people also has 2 senators — one is Lisa Murkowski

in 2024, Mukowski voted for Nikki Haley and not Trump

in April 2025, Murkowski had this to say about Trump:

“We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

what is the retaliation?

Trump would support some other candidate for her seat in 2028

its almost three and a half years away — who knows what happens by then

besides, she has has been in the Senate for more than twenty years

why not devote life to some good cause(s)

she knew her vote is crucial for the passage of BBB

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who knows her very well,

“She knows how to use her leverage.”

she indeed used her leverage very cleverly

she was seriously worried about impact of medicaid cut on Alaska & US

Trump threw some extra money and favors for her state and she agreed

after the bill was passed, NBC’s Ryan Nobles informed Murkowski:

“Senator [Rand] Paul said that this was, that your vote was a bailout for Alaska at the expense of the rest of the country.”

for 12 seconds, Muskowski turned into a statue

Nobles had to to tell her again:

“That’s what Senator Paul said. I didn’t say it, ma’am, I’m just asking for your response.”

Murkowski resuscitated herself back to life

alluding to the immunity she got to Alaska’s SNAP & Medicaid cuts, she said:

“My response is, I have an obligation to the people of the state of Alaska. “I fight for my state’s interests, and I make sure that Alaskans are understood.”

“And so when people suggest that federal dollars go to one of our 50 states in a, quote, ‘bailout,’ I find that offensive. I advocated for my state’s interests. I will continue to do that, and I will make no excuses for doing that.”

Watch the video here.

Now that’s Trump’s girl — commit a wrong but present it as you’re offended

but then Murkowski went for a different tune:

“We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”

she didn’t stopped the bill hoped the House will do it

she is a moderate — as usual greedy hypocrite who supports the status quo

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by JOHN Mac GHILONN

You won’t carry this new AI-powered device – it will carry you

Sam Altman isn’t just coming for your job. He’s coming for your phone, and maybe your soul.

OpenAI just spent US$6.5 billion to acquire a secretive hardware company founded by Jony Ive—the man who helped make the iPhone what it is. You may not know Ive’s name, but you’ve touched his work. Literally. Every day.

When we think of the iPhone, we automatically think of Steve Jobs—the black turtleneck, the enormous ego. The messianic charisma. But the real sculptor behind it was Ive. He’s the architect responsible for Apple’s sleek, seductive gadgets. He’s the reason your phone feels like a lifestyle, not a tool. Ive turned cold metal into a fetish object.

Now he’s back. But not with Apple. With OpenAI.

And that should make you pay attention. Because this isn’t some design side-hustle or futuristic prototype for nerds in labs. This is OpenAI trying to build the first real AI-native device—a category killer designed not just to complement your phone but to replace it. A smart device that doesn’t just respond to your voice, but listens when you don’t speak. That doesn’t wait for your command, because it already knows what you want.

The goal is clear: Kill the iPhone, the interface and the screen. Become the last machine you ever carry.

What OpenAI is building is not a phone. It’s an ambient intelligence system—a wearable, maybe even implantable, AI that will live with you. On you. In you. It won’t need an app store. It is the app. It’ll whisper reminders, flag your blood pressure, read your micro-expressions, log your emotional state, track your speech, and give you answers before you ask.

This isn’t a more developed Siri. It’s something far more intimate. It doesn’t seek your input—it seeks your patterns. Your breath, your posture, your pulse. It’ll understand what stresses you out. What calms you down. Who you’re texting. What you’re hiding.

It’s not a search engine. It’s your new nervous system. You won’t need to tap it. You’ll forget it’s there. But it’ll always be listening. Always learning. Always predicting. Imagine something that makes Google seem slow and Apple seem old.

That’s what $6.5 billion just bought.

Altman didn’t hire Ive to make something cool. He hired him to make something irresistible. Because that’s Ive’s superpower: making invasive technology feel like art. Like you chose it. You didn’t buy an iPhone. You joined the cult.

Altman’s about to launch a new one.

Asia Times for more

by JAVERIA SHAKIL-KAZIM

Not too long ago, I came across this video of a group of women performing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s famous qawwali ‘Tumhe dillagi bhool jani paregi’. To see white women rendering a classical qawwali was shocking, amusing and entertaining in equal measure.

The singing sounded off-key at times, the notes weren’t always perfect and the pronunciation of words was found wanting. What they didn’t lack, however, was passion while singing. They looked unbothered about how they sounded and what might be said about their performance. They seemed to be living in the moment as they swayed with the rhythm of the ever-enchanting kalam. 

Dawn for more

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

On the last Nation cruise I was on a panel about nuclear proliferation. (Yes, even afloat off Baja California, the liberal conscience is always on guard duty.) Trying to juice up the panel a bit, I remarked that there was one bit of proliferation that seemed to me indisputably okay, which was when the Soviet Union acquired the know-how to make A and H bombs, thus ending the US monopoly on Armageddon, and in my view making the world a safer place. (My position, very shocking to Jonathan Schell, is that every country should have at least one thermonuclear device, if necessary donated by the World Bank along with the “national” flag.)

Nation and MSNBC mini-pundit Eric Alterman was chairing the session. He immediately shed any pretense of neutrality. Was Cockburn, he snarled at the audience, seeing something commendable in the transfer of atomic secrets to the most evil man the world had ever known?

Which shows just how dumb Alterman is, since at least 2/3rds of the audience of Nation seniors, the only subscribers who can afford to pony up for these cruises, were either in the Communist Party or in close sympathy with it. A chill silence greeted Alterman’s ill-mannered interruption and then one old boy piped up angrily and said that it was the Red Army which saved the day for the Allies at Stalingrad. Then Jonathan Schell remarked that my position was identical to that of Sakharov.

Alterman ended up looking silly, and so I wasn’t too surprised when one of the Nation guests sitting next to me at dinner reported Alterman was going around saying I was an anti-Semite.

Now, being called an anti-Semite these days isn’t what it was. The term has got cheapened. As Michael Neumann writes in his brilliant piece on this site, anti-Semitism is “action or propaganda designed to hurt Jews, not because of anything they could avoid doing, but because they are what they are.”

But these days people don’t flourish the charge of anti-Semitism because they’ve heard someone quoting the Protocols or saying that the Jews kill Christian babies. Anti-Semitism has become like a flit gun to squirt at every inconvenient fly on the window-pane. It’s a tool of convenience, used mostly to whack critics of the disgusting conduct of successive Israeli governments and security forces and settlers towards the Palestinians.

Maybe Alterman began to think of me as an anti-Semite after, years ago, I wrote that he was three quarters brown-noser and one quarter cheeky chappie. I came to this conclusion after being invited by the spring-heeled Alterman in his Yale days to go and talk about the press. Since in those days I was the in-house critic at the Village Voice of the policies of the Begin government young Eric knew what he was getting, but nonetheless positively fell over himself with pleasantries as he led me towards the seminar.

These days, at the Nation and on MSNBC he patrols the Democratic perimeter, nipping at the heels of any view over-stepping the bounds of decorous mainstream conversation. The word “Nader” brings an angry flush to his cheeks. “Greens” make him bilious. The cheeky chappie of yesteryear is getting the sour edge that mini-pundits acquire when they realize that mini-pundits are what they are always doomed to remain. When Sharon’s F-16s blew away some kids in Gaza, collateral damage in the effort to kill a Hamas leader, Alterman had this to say on his MSNBC site,

“I don’t know if killing the military chief of Hamas, together with his family, is an effective military measure-as surely someone will rise to replace him and it will make a lot more people angry, perhaps even angry enough to become suicide bombers. It may not bring Israel and the Palestinians any closer to peace or mutual security. But I don’t have a moral problem with it.

“Hamas is clearly at war with Israel. Hamas feels empowered to strike Israeli civilians inside Israel proper and not just on the war zone of West Bank. Sheik Salah Shehada could have protected his family by keeping away from them. He didn’t and owing to his clear legitimacy as a military target, they are dead too…So tough luck, fella.”

Which is presumably what those Palestinian suicide bombers say, as they press the button on their built-in bombs amid a crowd of Jewish kids.

I guess the blatancy of the evictions of Hilliard and McKinney has people like Alterman worried. Suddenly, I’m not just an anti-Semite. I’m shackled to Louis Farrakhan. Here’s what Alterman put up on his site a couple of days ago.

“Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said that “at the grass roots” among African American voters, there is a growing perception that ‘Jewish people are attempting to pick our leaders…here is some concern about that. It’s concern about any candidate being targeted by a special-interest group for voting on any one issue.’ I think AIPAC et al are being very stupid by targeting black Congressman who don’t vote ‘right’ on Israel. Congress could not be more pro-Israeli if it were taking orders from my (late) bubbe and zeida. One vote, one voice, here or there makes no difference. Because it plays into anti-Jew stereotypes, this kind of heavy-handed financial intervention to pick the winner of a largely African American race is actually a boon to anti-Semites of the black and extremist left-wing varieties. (See under: ‘Louis Farrakhan’ and ‘ Alexander Cockburn.’) What AIPAC et al appear to be saying is ‘We will tolerate no dissent of any kind on Israel in American public life.’ They do Israel and America’s Jews no favor.”

Now, behind the colorful conjunction of “anti-Semitism” with the F word and yours truly’s name, what’s Alterman saying here? That by defeating McKinney, the Jewish lobby is providing fuel for anti-Semites? That therefore it’s a bad thing? Not that it’s bad to defeat McKinney, per se. Merely that it’s a strategical error because then the real enemy can rant and rave about it? It’s not the display of raw power so much as how flagrant the display is? What’s wrong with McKinney’s defeat (so Alterman seems to be saying) is that it reveals how much Congress is controlled by the Israeli lobby.

Sad, no? Here’s Alterman using the term Anti-Semitism to attack people outraged by the way McKinney and Hilliard were driven from Congress, and by the horrible persecution of Palestinians in Israel. It’s a debauch of a term that once meant something awful, a term that once set the milestones to Auschwitz, now bandied about on MSNBC and on a Nation cruise as Eric’s little paint brush.

A final note to Alterman and the Nation’s or MSNBC’s lawyers: Careful how you go here. I’m placing you on notice that though I think Alterman and those like him have cheapened the term almost to meaninglessness, the slur of “anti-Semitism” is still intended as a fatal charge; and so the motivation and rationales for its usage are susceptible of examination in a law court.

Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined!, A Colossal Wreck and An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents are available from CounterPunch.

Counterpunch for more

by LAURI NUMMENMAA, ENRICO GLEREAN, RIITTA HARI & JARI K. HIETANEN

Fig. 1.

Significance

Emotions coordinate our behavior and physiological states during survival-salient events and pleasurable interactions. Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving rise to these subjective sensations have remained unresolved. Here we used a topographical self-report tool to reveal that different emotional states are associated with topographically distinct and culturally universal bodily sensations; these sensations could underlie our conscious emotional experiences. Monitoring the topography of emotion-triggered bodily sensations brings forth a unique tool for emotion research and could even provide a biomarker for emotional disorders.

Abstract

Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.

We often experience emotions directly in the body. When strolling through the park to meet with our sweetheart we walk lightly with our hearts pounding with excitement, whereas anxiety might tighten our muscles and make our hands sweat and tremble before an important job interview. Numerous studies have established that emotion systems prepare us to meet challenges encountered in the environment by adjusting the activation of the cardiovascular, skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, and autonomic nervous system (ANS) (1). This link between emotions and bodily states is also reflected in the way we speak of emotions (2): a young bride getting married next week may suddenly have “cold feet,” severely disappointed lovers may be “heartbroken,” and our favorite song may send “a shiver down our spine.”Both classic (3) and more recent (4, 5) models of emotional processing assume that subjective emotional feelings are triggered by the perception of emotion-related bodily states that reflect changes in the skeletomuscular, neuroendocrine, and autonomic nervous systems (1). These conscious feelings help the individuals to voluntarily fine-tune their behavior to better match the challenges of the environment (6). Although emotions are associated with a broad range of physiological changes (1, 7), it is still hotly debated whether the bodily changes associated with different emotions are specific enough to serve as the basis for discrete emotional feelings, such as anger, fear, or happiness (8, 9), and the topographical distribution of the emotion-related bodily sensations has remained unknown.Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique computer-based, topographical self-report method (emBODY, Fig. 1). Participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions, and they were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt to be increased or decreased during viewing of each stimulus. Different emotions were associated with statistically clearly separable bodily sensation maps (BSMs) that were consistent across West European (Finnish and Swedish) and East Asian (Taiwanese) samples, all speaking their respective languages. Statistical classifiers discriminated emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of bodily topographies across emotions. We propose that consciously felt emotions are associated with culturally universal, topographically distinct bodily sensations that may support the categorical experience of different emotions.

PNAS for more

by FASIL MERAWI

Riven by two competing schools of thought, the future of philosophical enquiry in Ethiopia stands at a crossroads

‘I was born in the land of the priests of Aksum,’ ZeraYacob is believed to have written in the 17th century. ‘But I am the son of a poor farmer in the district of Aksum.’ So begins the Hatata (a Ge’ez word meaning ‘enquiry’) of ZeraYacob, in which he documents his spiritual journey against a backdrop of intense religious controversy. He proceeds to reflect on the nature of God and human existence, the essence of evil and the basis of morality. A second Hatata, commonly attributed to WeldaHeywat, concentrates on issues of justice and moral truth. These two short texts are at the centre of Ethiopian philosophy. They have been generating intense controversy for generations because their authenticity and philosophical value have a crucial bearing on the very existence of Ethiopian philosophy and how it should be done.

There are, very roughly, two camps within Ethiopian philosophy today. The universalist approach to Ethiopian philosophy starts with the historical narrative that philosophy is a refined intellectual exercise that serves as a foundation for societal progress and individual enlightenment. This approach sees philosophy as one continuous dialogue, each philosopher learning from another in order to come up with new ideas. The universalist approach is founded on a cumulative and linear path that sees philosophy as starting at the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers, developing through the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rest of the ancients, on to the medieval age, and finally into the modern era that was inaugurated by René Descartes and that is currently dominated by German and French Continental philosophy.

Other traditions of philosophy, such as the many strands of Indian philosophy, the philosophy of the Aztecs, the Japanese and the Chinese and so on, are, for the universalist, subsumed under the label of ‘comparative philosophy’. The value of non-Western philosophical traditions derives from what we might call an intercultural perspective. All philosophies are concerned with universal truths – all philosophies can be put into dialogue around this universal search for the conditions that make our existence possible and the reasons we have to live the way that we do. In general, the universalist position does not pay attention to the qualifiers of a tradition: it is not Indian or Aztec or Chinese philosophy that is at issue, but simply philosophy itself, philosophy as such.

The other camp we’ll call Africanist. For the Africanist way of doing Ethiopian philosophy, the history of philosophy is a process of deliberate exclusion that consists primarily in epistimicide – the systematic process of obliterating the knowledge system of the Other. In Africa, epistemicide was committed by colonisers in the name of disseminating the values of the Enlightenment and modernity. The Africanist approach sees itself as the saviour of, specifically, Africa and Ethiopia’s history. It is engaged in the search for a philosophy in the past that can serve as a foundation for cultural pride and recognition. Challenging the superior epistemic and cultural position that has been occupied by the West, Africanists see themselves primarily as countering the influence of Eurocentrism. In the words of Bekele Gutema, what is needed is ‘a robust understanding of philosophy that recognises the existence of philosophy in many cultures’.

Aeon for more