Search results for ""author robin philpot""

Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared to author Robin Philpot that “the Rwandan Genocide was 100 percent American responsibility.” Yet a more official narrative would have it that horrible Hutu génocidaires planned and executed a satanic scheme to eliminate nearly one million Tutsis after the Rwandan presidential plane crashed in the heart of dark Africa on April 6, 1994. Where do these two contradictory narratives come from? Which is true? Robin Philpot’s vast and methodical research, extensive interviews, and close analysis of events, testimony in courts, and popular writings on the subject show not only that that official narrative is false, but that it was edified to cover up the causes of the tragedy and to protect the criminals responsible for it. What’s more, to make that story more believable, the storytellers have unfailingly reproduced the literary traditions, clichés, and metaphors that provided the underpinnings of slavery, the slave-trade, and colonialism. Nearly 20 years later, the facts about the Rwandan tragedy have been so distorted and the adjudicated facts ignored that Rwanda is now used everywhere to justify so-called humanitarian intervention throughout Africa (and the world). It has become a “useful imperial fiction,” and for that reason, this book seeks to find out what really happened there.

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Drawing on his rich experience in public service and teaching, Jacques Parizeau, former premier of Quebec, explains in these pages how the idea of an independent Quebec first took root and evolved. This is the first book of Parizeau's political writing to be translated into English, and it provides lively commentary on the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, on the the author's career as finance minister under Premier René Lévesque, and on his own administration in the mid-1990s. Parizeau also examines Quebec’s current economic, political, social and cultural situation and reviews options for future development.

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Revealing a little-known part of North American history, this lively guide tells the fascinating tale of the settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley. It also tells of the Montreal and Quebec-based explorers and traders who traveled, mapped, and inhabited a very large part of North America, and “embrothered the peoples” they met, as Jack Kerouac wrote. Connecting everyday life to the events that emerged as historical turning points in the life of a people, this book sheds new light on Quebec's 450-year history and on the historical forces that lie behind its two recent efforts to gain independence.

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In this, her third and least-known book, first published in 1980, Jane Jacobs examines not only the particular question of Quebec and Canada, but also the larger issue of sovereignty and autonomy in general. Using Norway as a model, Jacobs details that country's campaign of peaceful persistence that led to breaking ties with Sweden—and suggests that Canada and Canadians should be inspired by the example. An essential component of Jacobs's urban activism, this new edition of the book incorporates and expands the 1979 Massey Lectures, Canadian Cities and Sovereignty-Association, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Also included is a previously unpublished exclusive interview with Jane Jacobs in her Toronto home in 2005, 25 years after the book appeared and 10 years after the 1995 Quebec referendum. In these musings, she reasserts and updates her thoughts on Separatism—and addresses new issues such as tar sand development in Alberta, the finance of gambling, and the future of the Euro and of Europe.

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