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Learning War; Galeano: Previous Sole Superpower; Obama’s Last Chance in Africa
Learning War: An Educational Historian’s Perspective. Experiencing and living on the home front during decades of US military engagements has taught one historian some central lessons: War is grotesque, it changes US society and its burdens often fall on the most marginalized people. We must be honest about war in order to end it.
Eduardo Galeano, The Previous Sole Superpower. “When Iraq was not yet Iraq, it was the birthplace of the first written words. The words look like bird tracks. Masterful hands drew them in clay with sharpened canes. Fire annihilates and rescues, kills and gives life, as do the gods, as do we. Fire hardened the clay and preserved the words. Thanks to fire, the clay tablets still tell what they told thousands of years ago in that land of two rivers. In our days, George W. Bush, perhaps believing that writing was invented in Texas, launched with joyful impunity a war to exterminate Iraq. There were thousands upon thousands of victims, and not all of them were flesh and blood. A great deal of memory was murdered too. Living history in the form of numerous clay tablets were stolen or destroyed by bombs. One of the tablets said: We are dust and nothing All that we do is no more than wind.”
Obama’s Last Chance in Africa. Obama has, so far, failed to break out of the mold of security- and corporate-based foreign policy. A truly transformative policy would find a way of engaging the vigorous civil society movements on the continent, including environmental and peace movements.
