On this date in 1983, NBC aired Motown 25 taped on March 25 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in California, Where Michael Jackson reunited with his brothers including Jermaine for a medley of Motown hits.
MJ then performed his first solo number of “Billie Jean" During the performance, he debuted the iconic moonwalk publicly The move he had practiced privately instantly became legendary.
The special drew an estimated 47-52 million viewers. Michael's performance earned him an Emmy nomination and calls from childhood idols Fred Astaire who praised him and Sammy Davis Jr. who later received the jacket as a gift. This moment is widely regarded as a defining career pinnacle that solidified his status as the King of Pop.
Macron, cut the crap!!!
Africa attracted 97 billion dollars in foreign direct investment last year alone according to UNCTAD, without a summit and without you.
Your “23 billion euros”, spread over an unspecified number of years, are mostly private sector pledges the French state will take diplomatic credit for without financing. And of those 23 billion, 10.5 billion are from African businesses themselves.
Since you want to talk about investment, here is the context you deliberately omitted. Your French companies have been extracting wealth on this continent for decades and make annual returns that dwarf these your 27 billion euros. TotalEnergies alone produces 28% of its global output from Africa. Orange operates across 18 African countries with over 120 million customers. Bolloré at its peak controlled 18 of West Africa's 22 major ports, with 80% of its profits derived from Africa. Orano has been mining uranium in Niger for decades at prices below OECD market rates, leaving behind 20 million tonnes of radioactive waste and uranium concentrations in local drinking water 500 times above safe thresholds. France's development loans from the Agence Française de Développement came with contractual conditions requiring freight to use Bolloré railways, insurance through AXA, and consulting through French firms. The money went from France to Africa and immediately circled back as corporate profit.
Let's have a clear look at Africa's market size and economy. Telecommunications generates 180 billion dollars annually, mining oil and gas generations over 900 billion annually. Financial services, construction, manufacturing, tourism, retail and energy collectively add hundreds of billions more, bringing Africa's total nominal GDP to approximately 2.83 trillion dollars. And then there is the creative industry. Africa's creative economy generates between 6 and 10 billion dollars in directly measurable annual revenue today. This industry was built without a single French summit, without a single French pledge, and without your presence in Nairobi.
The idea that 27 billion dollars over an unspecified period, of which 10.5 billion are Africa companies’ money you are announcing as an achievement, constitutes something worth celebrating tells us everything about how you see this continent. You genuinely believe we will applaud you for this. You really summoned 30 heads of states over some so called 27 billion euros “investment pledge” over multiple years. You see, that is the particular variety of condescension that caused your military to be expelled from Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso.
And since we are being factual: the CFA franc, created on December 25, 1945, has required fourteen of our nations to deposit a portion of their foreign exchange reserves in the French Treasury for eighty years. Kindly return our reserves if you so care about our economic growth. Return the gold. Return the uranium profits extracted from Niger at below-market rates while leaving radioactive contamination in the water. Return the port revenues confiscated by Bollore. Return the decades of oil profits extracted by Total through preferential agreements with the corrupt leaders your government installed and continue to protect.
When you have returned all of that, then come back with your 23 billion euros and we will discuss whether it qualifies as a contribution. Until then, please shut up !
The nation that arranged the poisoning of Toussaint Louverture of St Domingue ( Haïti) for demanding the end of slavery and the liberation of his people in 1803; that assassinated Ruben Um Nyobe, the Cameroonian independence leader hunted down and killed in 1958 by French forces before independence was even formally granted, that had Felix Moumie of Cameroon, poisoned in Geneva by his intelligence in 1960, that orchestrated the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio of Togo by soldiers of his colonial army in 1963, that armed and protected the man who murdered Thomas Sankara in 1987 and sheltered him for decades, that supported the destabilisation that led to the overthrow and death of Modibo Keita of Mali, that printed millions of fake currency to destroy the Guinean Franc after 8 failed assassination attempts at Sekou Toure because he stood his grounds and demanded independence, that stood behind the forces that removed and destroyed Patrice Lumumba, coordinating with Belgium and the CIA to ensure Congo’s most visionary independence leader did not survive his own government, that massacred at least 100,000 Malagasy people, 250,000 Cameroonians, 1.2 million Algerians between 1955 and 1962 simply because they demanded their independence.
The president of that nation, less than half a century after committing such atrocities stood before a room full of African heads of state in 2026 and declared itself the true Pan-Africanist. And not one of them stood up. Not one said: you cannot use that word: not here, not with that history on this continent. Not a single one had the dignity to say what any person with an elementary knowledge of what Pan-Africanism means and what France has done to those who practiced it would have said immediately and without hesitation.
It is the equivalent of a Nazi leader standing before a Jewish assembly and announcing that Germany is the true defender of the Jewish people. There are words that carry such historical mass that no political convenience, no diplomatic ambition, no funding arrangement justifies allowing them to be stolen and worn by those who spent generations trying to destroy what those words represent; Pan-Africanism is one of those words. And it was surrendered in that room without a fight, by men who were supposed to be there representing us.
France is not even a formidable power anymore. It cannot impose its will on its own European neighbourhood. Its economy is strained, its global influence is null, its African military presence has been expelled. It intimidates no one who has chosen not to be intimidated. And yet these boneless, prideless, senseless humans we call Africa leaders sat and applauded this humiliation ritual.
What breaks me is knowing that every generation, without fail, produces its quota of leaders who will trade the dignity of their people for a photograph with a western head of state, for a seat at a table that was never set for them. They dress it up as pragmatism and call it diplomacy. But it is the oldest and most contemptible transaction in the postcolonial playbook: the surrender of collective dignity for personal visibility.
And these are days, I will not pretend otherwise, where I genuinely wonder if we will ever be free. Not because the struggle is not real or the people are not capable, but because freedom requires leaders at the decisive moment, and every decisive moment seems to find us represented by spineless, glory-hunting, photograph-chasing men who would sell the graves of their own predecessors for a handshake with those that tried to erase their people. Every generation inherits the fight for freedom but also produces the cowards who auction it.
sono nata nell’epoca sbagliata, tutto di lui mi avrebbe totalmente fulminata questo video è una colpo al cuore ogni volta.
Nessuno raggiungerá mai questo livello di iconicità. Originalità, autenticitá, talento, amore e dedizione assoluta. Unico al mondo.
Xenophobia is a direct indicator of social decay. In every African country where you see populations turning violently against foreign nationals, what you are actually seeing is a population that is drowning financially, struggling to find work, struggling to eat, watching their living conditions deteriorate with no credible explanation from the people responsible for governing them.
The foreigner becomes the easy explanation and excuse for a failing state.
What makes it particularly revealing is who they target. They never target the foreign corporations extracting resources at below-market prices. Not the foreign financial institutions whose conditionalities have gutted public spending for decades, not the foreign governments whose diplomatic protection keeps predatory local elites in power election after election. Those actors are too distant and too legally armoured, living behind gates in neighbourhoods that the angry and the desperate cannot reach. So they go after the ones they can reach: the street vendor from a neighbouring country, the migrant worker who is every bit as broke and as desperate and as abandoned by power as they are.
The poor man’s oldest and most reliable mistake is to see his enemy in his fellow poor person. It requires a macroscopic reading of how power actually operates to understand that the Malawian vendor and the South African unemployed youth are not each other’s problem. They are both products of the same system of extraction, the same manufactured scarcity, the same political class that needs them fighting each other precisely so they never turn around and face the right direction.
Xenophobia is never a spontaneous eruption of hatred. It is what manufactured poverty looks like when it finally needs somewhere to go.
The hardest thing to explain to someone inside the imperial consensus is the concept of structural violence.
They understand individual violence.
One person harms another person.
There is a perpetrator and a victim and a clear causal chain.
What they cannot see, what the entire educational and media apparatus has been carefully designed to prevent them from seeing, is the violence that happens when a system is arranged so that certain people predictably die, predictably suffer, predictably lose, not because any individual decided to harm them specifically but because the overall arrangement of power requires their subordination.
The people of the Global South do not die of poverty because individual Americans wish them dead.
They die because the international economic architecture, the terms of trade, the debt structures, the conditions attached to IMF loans, the intellectual property regimes that prevent technology transfer, the agricultural subsidies that undercut developing world farmers, is arranged, in aggregate, in a way that concentrates wealth in already wealthy countries and extracts it from already poor ones.
And that architecture was designed.
It was negotiated.
It was implemented by specific people in specific rooms making specific decisions about who would benefit and who would not.
This is violence.
It does not look like violence because no one is pulling a trigger.
But the deaths it produces are just as dead.
And when you try to explain this to someone whose entire identity rests on the belief that what they have they earned, and what others lack they failed to achieve, you are not making a political argument.
You are dismantling the story that makes their life make sense.
They will not thank you for it.
They will defend against it with everything they have.
Because the alternative, accepting that their comfort is downstream of other people's dispossession, is not a policy position.
It is an identity catastrophe.
America…?
A moral compass…?
*clears throat*
The United States was built on genocide and ethnic cleansing
In 1898 it declared itself a ‘global power’ by crushing independence movements in the Philippines, killing at least 200k Filipino civilians
From 1912 to 1933 it occupied Nicaragua, violently suppressing nationalist movements
From 1915 to 1934 it invaded and occupied Haiti, essentially legalising slave labour
From 1916 to 1924 it done the same to the Dominican Republic
In 1945 it needlessly dropped two atomic bombs on civilians days before they knew Japan was to surrender, in a ‘display of strength’ to the Soviets
In 1953 it overthrew Iran’s democracy in an act of pure self-interest
In 1954 it overthrew Guatemala’s democracy leading to decades of violence
In 1965 it backed mass killings in Indonesia, enabling the murder of up to a million people
In the 1960’s and 1970’s it carpet-bombed Vietnam, killed millions, and poisoned the land
From 1969 to 1973 it also carpet-bombed Cambodia with similar effects
In 1973 it installed a dictatorship in Chile through a military coup
From 1979 to 1989 it armed and funded Afghan militias, destabilising the country for decades
In the 1990s it strangled Iraq with sanctions, devastating millions
In 2003 it invaded Iraq on a lie, leading to a million dead
In 2011 it destroyed Libya, turning a functioning state into a failed one where slave markets now exist
In the 2020s it continues unabated, funding and arming the Gaza genocide and more atrocities across the Middle East
This is not even close to an exhaustive list of US crimes
So, what’s very, very important to understand is not that the United States has lost its ‘moral compass’ — it’s that it’s lost its ability to rewrite history in real time because the internet exists
It has lost total control of the narrative
Or, in short, now we’re able to see what it really is, and always has been
I stand with Dr Rahmeh. British Zionists are exercising an obscene abuse of prosecutorial power! This constant arrest & harrasment of British Palestinian @doctor_rahmeh to placate British Zionist Jews & serve at feet of terrorist state of Israel is disgusting!
What the hell is wrong with you @metpoliceuk? There are bloody British IDF soldiers who have committed war crimes walking carefree in the UK without a whisper from Met Police!
They say: Iran is not Arab. Iran is Shia. Iran has its own interests. Iran uses the Palestinian cause.
Fine.
Accept all of that for the sake of argument.
Accept that Iran's support for Palestine is partly strategic.
Accept that there are geopolitical calculations involved.
Accept every cynical interpretation of Iranian motives.
Now tell me: what is your excuse?
You are Arab.
You are Sunni.
You share language, culture, history, and in many cases a border with the Palestinians.
The people being killed are your people by every metric you claim matters.
Ethnicity. Sect. Language. Civilization.
And Iran, the Persian Shia country you're so concerned about, is doing more for those people than you are.
If Iran is using Palestine, what are you doing to Palestine?
You are using Palestine too.
Using it for speeches.
Using it for fundraising.
Using it to claim Islamic credentials with your own populations while conducting a completely different policy behind closed doors.
The difference is that Iran's use of Palestine comes with weapons, money, fighters, and the willingness to absorb American sanctions and Israeli bombs in defense of it.
Your use of Palestine comes with statements.
Deeply concerned statements.
Urgent statements.
Strongly worded statements.
The children in Gaza cannot eat your statements.
BREAKING: Étienne Davignon, 93 year old coloniser and former EU supremo, has been charged with complicity in the murder of Patrice Lumumba. This is genuinely huge news. Great news.
"Every day for the thief, one day for the owner" - African proverb.