Shomona Khanna

Lula ✊🏾

Je crois sincèrement qu'on tient ici la séquence du siècle

In December 1958 the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let the sparrow killers onto its grounds, so the Chinese surrounded it with drummers and kept the drums going for two days until every bird sheltering in the garden had dropped dead from the air, and the diplomats cleared them up with shovels. That is how thorough it was. The campaign had been running since the spring. Every village, school and factory was turned out with gongs, pans and firecrackers to keep the sparrows flying until their hearts gave out. Nests were torn from eaves, eggs smashed, chicks killed, and children went through the fields with slingshots and were paid by the bird. The dead came in by the basket, strung on wires, piled on carts, and the totals went up the chain as a harvest. Something close to two billion sparrows in two years. The embassy garden was the last place in the capital with birdsong in it, and the drums got that too. A zoologist called Zhu Xi had told them before it started that a king had tried this and lost. Frederick the Great of Prussia had put a bounty on sparrows in the 1740s to save his grain and his cherries, and the sparrows went, and the caterpillars they had been eating stripped his orchards to the stalk, and the king cancelled the bounty and paid to have sparrows brought back from neighbouring states and let loose. The whole episode was in the library. The ministry had a figure for what a sparrow ate and no figure for what it did, and a man with the second figure was told to sit down. The locusts arrived on schedule. Then the grain borers. A sparrow takes a few grains from a field in autumn and feeds its chicks nothing but insects all spring, and with the sparrows gone the insects had the rice and the wheat to themselves. The counties with the most sparrows to lose saw their grain fall the furthest, and the rice and wheat that had been holding the country up went down together. That was 1959, and the state took its grain quota anyway, on the harvest that had been reported. What was left in the villages was not enough, and the famine that followed over the next three years is the largest in human history: tens of millions dead, the estimates running from fifteen million to forty-five, whole counties in Anhui and Sichuan where the living could not bury the dead. The sparrows were one cause among several and the economists who have gone back to the county records put the bird's share at something over two million people, with another four hundred thousand never born. Two million, from a campaign against a thing that weighs an ounce. By 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng, who had been cutting open dead sparrows and counting the insects in their stomachs, got the bird struck off the list and bed bugs put in its place. There were almost no sparrows left in China to pardon. So the government did what Prussia had done two centuries before: it bought a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union and shipped them east in crates, to be released into a country that had drummed every one of their relatives out of the sky. The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost. Take the sheep off a chalk down and the orchids are under scrub in twenty years. Fence the cattle off a Welsh hill and the bracken takes it. Empty a savannah of its herds and the grass goes to fire. All of it written down, all of it in the library, all of it available to the next committee with a figure for what a cow eats. Beijing paid Moscow for the birds in hard currency. The men who had said so in 1958 were still not allowed to say so in 1960.

I know you know this picture. All adult people who've carried some of the pain of this world for others do. 58 years ago this month, three men stood on an Olympic podium in Mexico City. Two of them, courageous to a level most people will never reach or even aspire to reach, became famous for raising their fists. The third didn't raise his fist. But he knew exactly what was happening. 16 October 1968. The Olympic Games in Mexico City. The United States is being torn apart by racial conflict. Martin Luther King has been murdered six months earlier. Black Americans are still fighting for rights that other Americans take for granted. Two American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, have just won gold and bronze in the 200 metres. Between them stands a 26-year-old white Australian called Peter Norman. Norman has run the race of his life. He's won SILVER, beating Carlos, one of the overwhelming favourites. His time of 20.06 seconds is so astonishing that it will remain the Australian national record for another 56 years. He should be thinking about his medal, his future, the applause, the extraordinary doors that might open for him. But Smith and Carlos have something else on their minds. They're planning to protest racial injustice during the medal ceremony. In front of the entire world. And they tell Norman what they're going to do. Norman is Australian. The American civil rights movement isn't his fight. He could simply stand there, smile politely, collect his silver medal and go home. Nobody would ever know that he had been given an opportunity to demonstrate moral courage and declined it. But Norman asks the Americans what he can do to help. And he tells them: "I'll stand with you." There's a practical problem. Smith and Carlos have planned to wear black gloves, but Carlos has forgotten his pair. Norman suggests something beautifully simple. Why don't they share the remaining pair? One glove each. That's why, in the famous photograph, Smith raises his RIGHT fist and Carlos raises his LEFT. The Australian also finds himself an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge. He pins it to his tracksuit. And the three men step onto the podium. The American national anthem begins. Smith and Carlos bow their heads and raise their fists. Norman stands beside them. A small white man in an Australian tracksuit, wearing a tiny badge. It doesn't look particularly spectacular. No shouting. No violence. No great revolutionary speech. Just three men saying, in their own ways, that human beings deserve to be treated as human beings. And the sporting establishment goes NUTS. Smith and Carlos are expelled from the Games. They're denounced, threatened and treated as traitors for daring to make people uncomfortable during a sporting event. Norman returns to Australia. His country has its own ugly history of racial exclusion, particularly concerning its Indigenous population. And there are plenty of Australians who aren't particularly thrilled that their Olympic silver medallist has associated himself with two Black American protesters. Norman encounters hostility and ostracism in parts of the sporting world. Four years later, he isn't selected for the Munich Olympics. Norman never repudiates what he did. Peter Norman dies in 2006, aged 64. At his funeral in Melbourne, two men have travelled all the way from America. Tommie Smith. John Carlos. The two Black American athletes he had supported 38 years earlier. And they carry his coffin. Carlos told the mourners that Norman hadn't stood in front of them or behind them. He had stood WITH them. In 2012, the Australian Parliament finally apologised for Norman's treatment and its failure to recognise his courage while he was alive. Forty-four years after the protest. Six years after the man was dead. One day governments will offer apologies to journalists sacked for holding Israeli officials' feet to the fire. Hopefully before they die.

Explosive peice of Journalism by BBC Watch before they get this removed from internet Good investigative journalism is very rare these days