Tag: lithium mines

The News Today, Today

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

While looking for something to write about I stumbled upon an article describing a very recent fight between the Indian and Chinese armies on the border in the Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas. While border squabbles happen quite often in that part of the world, be it with India and Pakistan, India and China or China and seemingly every neighbour they have disputed borders with; this one raised a few eyebrows. While versions of events seem to differ with which nation is recounting the story, it does seem twenty Indian soldiers and an as yet unspecified number of Chinese soldiers – forty according to the Indians – were killed in the fighting. While both sides have tried to play it down, certain quite shocking details have still been released. On this border they have since 1996 agreed that there will be a two kilometre ‘no gun zone’ either side of the border which means these soldiers fought hand to hand combat. According to an Indian official fifty-five Indian soldiers with nothing but bare hands faced off against a three hundred strong Chinese “Death Squad” armed with metal bats wrapped with barbed wire. Some were beaten to death while others died from drowning in the river after falling or being push in. This all just seems completely remarkable and in a perverse kind of way; comic. To keep the border from being a flash point they remove guns but come armed with metal bats. Perhaps it’s not just the guns that are the issue here.

The second story I came across is less brutal for sure and is about Elon Musk’s quest for world domination, or at east in the realms of batteries that he operates in. Apparently he has invented or is close to inventing a game changing battery that will render the combustion engine the equivalent of film cameras in the age of digital technology. When put like that it actually sounds feasible, it’s amazing how the mind works. This will be a great step on the journey to save the world from runaway climate change. The article thankfully mentioned the ethical reality of lithium mines in South America and cobalt in Congolese mines renowned for the use of child labour. Bolivia which recently was taken over in a right-wing coup, coincidentally has vast reserves of lithium which Evo Morales didn’t make freely available to foreign corporations but perhaps that’s for another time, and I heard recently Afghanistan has such vast reserves it’s being viewed as the Saudi Arabia of lithium, lucky Afghanistan. There’s just something demoralising about us celebrating the movement away from fossil fuels to another finite natural resource. The long term implications may be unclear but it’s as if we haven’t learnt anything. It’ll also be interesting to see if we start using less fossil fuels in the world economy or this use of ‘green’ energy is just supplementing our increased energy consumption. There is certainly much evidence to suggest this is the case.

The Final Cries Of Empire

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Let’s be honest you’ll struggle to find many complaints from me about the toppling of a statue in honour of a slave trader in Bristol or the latest vandalism of a statue in honour of Winston Churchill, the aptly entitled ‘complex character’. I was chatting with someone today who seemed to agree with me on those points but who also mentioned that war memorials had been vandalised and that she disagreed with attacks on these as they honour people who fought for our freedom. This exhaustively well worn and manipulative word makes me cringe but I can understand why she felt it unnecessary. To understand why people may damage memorials then we must look beyond the obvious surface rational for these protests.

Clearly black lives do in fact matter and the police are responsible for excessive violence. This violence which comes in many forms only serves to exacerbate a systemic racist imbalance within society. This alone is worth rioting over. It’s abhorrent and urgent change has never not been required. The issue of how we are in this situation though relates to our imperial past as a nation. While the Americans may have been conquering the world for the last eighty years, Britain got there long before those upstarts from over the pond even existed. The statue in Bristol celebrated a slave trader who operated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Britain used slavery in the same way modern corporations and their national protectors use Asian sweatshops and cheap African labour in mines. These modern corporate empires are built on the back of the economic descendants who died on the sugar plantations. They also mined the lithium for the battery in this laptop I’m writing on which mustn’t be overlooked even if I inevitably will with any tangible actions beyond sentiment. While war memorials honour those who fought Nazi tyranny or were massacred in the trenches of Verdun, they are also emblems of an imperial past, one which relied upon the extortion of other nations and played upon the notion of a supreme race of white Britons. While they may represent your Grandfathers, as they do for me in many ways, for others they’re nothing more than a constant reminder of the injustice inflicted upon their ancestors which is still being felt in communities across the country and the world today.

There will be narratives pushed on these issues, the Conservative MP’s making an embarrassing self serving show of scrubbing the graffiti from Churchill’s statue doing just that. This concept of freedom means nothing if it doesn’t apply to all, people need more than sentiments. Once you believe, even unconsciously, that there are a deserving free and an undeserving then you’ve already lost the argument. I’ll leave you then with the quote made by the previously mentioned ‘complex character’ in 1937 to the Palestine Royal Commission;

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may lain there for a long time…I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”