The Atlantic: Make the Anti-War Movement Great Again

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been at war, the longest continuous conflict in its history. Its citizens have witnessed a failed surge into Afghanistan, a catastrophe in Iraq that helped destabilize vast swaths of the Middle East, an unconstitutional war in Libya that created a power vacuum exploited by ISIS, and a drone war that has killed hundreds of innocents in a half-dozen countries. The last two presidents campaigned against dumb wars and won. The more interventionist candidate has lost every election since 2008. [...]

Meanwhile, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy—that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where people it regards as terrorists are found—and in doing so, has fulfilled the warped campaign pledges he repeatedly expressed. The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa province when the United States targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded a week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALs, in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an eight-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).” [...]

But Congress won’t assert itself absent a political angle. “The frustrating reality is that both the Obama and Trump administrations have been able to back the war without ever having to face much serious scrutiny from Congress or most of the media, and so they have not had to defend a policy that has shamefully encountered relatively little criticism and minimal resistance,” Daniel Larison writes. “Even when the U.S. role in fueling and arming the coalition’s planes has been acknowledged in reports, it is often mentioned only in passing and then minimized. It is very difficult to organize opposition to a policy that most people in the country may not even know is happening. I suppose it is good that our officers are sickened by what the U.S. has been helping the Saudis and their allies do, but most of our politicians and policymakers don’t appear to be bothered in the least.”

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BBC4: The Origins of the American Dream

The American Dream is back. President Donald Trump says so. Once again every American, regardless of background, race, gender or education, can, through sheer hard work, make it to the very top and become rich. Did the idea of the America Dream, in which nothing is impossible as long as you work hard, evolve with the 'founding fathers' of the nation? Is it intrinsic to the country's identity? Professor Sarah Churchwell argues that the American Dream is much younger than we realise, and it was born as a response to the 'Roaring Twenties' and the devastating stock market crash of 1929, and Depression that followed. She uses history, literature and music to explore the original meaning of The American Dream - which was an appeal for much more modest dreams of a better life for all, not riches for some.

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The New York Times: From Slavery to Freedom: Revealing the Underground Railroad

A clandestine and loosely organized network of activists, safe houses and secret routes, the actual Underground Railroad shepherded as many as 100,000 slaves to freedom in the six decades before the Civil War. Its route would eventually traverse free states from Maine to Iowa, extending as far north as Canada. [...]

Ms. Michna-Bales’s quest has led to an evocative book, “Through Darkness to Light: Photographs along the Underground Railroad” (Princeton Architectural Press). While much has been written about the subject, there has been little visual documentation, an absence that makes the book even more consequential, both from the standpoint of history and of our contemporary understanding of slavery in pre-Civil War America. The book also includes a foreword by Andrew J. Young, a civil rights leader, a history of the Railroad by the historian Fergus M. Bordewich, and a recounting of the journeys of three former slaves, including Frederick Douglass, by the scholar Eric R. Jackson. [...]

Her photo essay progresses dramatically: a ramshackle cabin on the Magnolia Plantation in Louisiana glows against the backdrop of the night sky; a slave cemetery in Jefferson County, Miss.; an upward and hopeful glance at a star-filled sky in Colbert County, Ala.; twisted thicket emerging from the forest floor in Tennessee; the first view of a free state, the gently rolling hills along the Ohio River crossing into Indiana; the “Old Slave House,” which belonged to the Rev. Guy Beckley in Lower Town, Mich.; and finally, freedom, represented as verdant trees photographed against a bright but cloudy sky in Sarnia, Ontario.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Morii: The Desire to Capture a Fleeting Experience

Haaretz: Are Israelis More or Less Violent Than Their Potential?

The national index of violence released by the Public Security Ministry in 2014 found that from 2003 to 2010, some 620,000 crimes of violence were committed every year on average. Between 2010 and 2012, this number may have fallen, according to the index, but they were more serious. The 18-to-44 age group committed most of the violent crimes reported to the Israel Police, and in most of these cases – what a surprise – the attackers were men. In addition, both the attackers and their victims were usually of the same religious background.

We must now wait for the release of the new national violence index in order to see if it proves, or refutes, our subjective emotions, and to again compare our situation to that in the other OECD countries. Based on the 2014 index, Israel’s rate for robbery was lower than in the rest of this prestigious club of developed nations, but the level of violent assaults was much higher: 700 incidents per 100,000 people, compared to only 300 per 100,000 on average in the OECD. [...]

Why should someone who for three years of their lives, at least, the most natural gesture was to load a rifle and aim it at a civilian population, not conclude that attacking women is their birthright, and those who signed demolition and expropriation orders not upgrade them to embezzlement and computer crimes? And why should someone who attacks a nurse or teacher who they feel has caused them injustice expect to be punished, when thousands of armed Israelis who killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are not only not put on trial as murderers, but are defined in spoken Zionism as heroes?

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America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said religious freedom is one of the key demands they will make of Cuba when they finish reviewing former President Barack Obama's opening with the island. The administration has never been more specific, but outside groups have accused Cuba of systematically repressing the island's growing ranks of evangelicals and other Protestants with acts including the seizure of hundreds of churches across the island, followed by the demolition of many. [...]

Clergy and academics say Cuba's 11 million people include some 40,000 Methodists, 100,000 Baptists and 120,000 members of the Assemblies of God, which had roughly 10,000 members in the early 1990s, when Cuba began easing restrictions on public expressions of religious faith. The church council estimates there are about 25,000 evangelical and other Protestant houses of worship across the country. About 60 percent of the population is baptized Catholic, with many also following Afro-Cuban syncretic traditions such as Santeria. [...]

The Cuban constitution now recognizes freedom of religion, but the law is silent on the issue of church construction. In a system where the government has long monopolized public life, virtually all activities are presumed illegal unless the law says otherwise. Authorities in some areas have prohibited new churches, even as they allow worship in religious buildings erected before Cuba's 1959 revolution.

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America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Two of the most interesting photo ops of France’s current presidential election campaign took place last month 2,000 miles away in Lebanon—and they were all about religious optics.In one, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen called off a scheduled meeting with Grand Mufti Abdellatif Deriane just outside his Beirut office when the Muslim cleric’s staff insisted she don a headscarf before going in for the meeting. With the video cameras rolling, she emphatically refused. 

Later that day, with the same media entourage in tow, she smiled and exchanged pleasantries with Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai, leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christians and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. [...]

After several deadly attacks by militant Islamists in recent years and sliding support for the main parties, politicians—especially from the right and far-right—are harking back to a secularized version of France’s traditional Catholic identity as one of several ways to mobilize voters. [...]

But Francois Fillon showed in November that there were still lots of votes to win on the right when he swept the primary of the Republicans—the main conservative party—by openly appealing to traditional Catholics angered by the Socialist government’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2013.

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IFLScience: There Is No Word For This Color In English – But There Is Now In Japanese

It might sound somewhat unimportant, but the use of this word actually shows how the Japanese language has evolved over the last 30 years. And it highlights the cultural differences in how we describe color in different countries.

The fact you’re reading this suggests you speak English, so you probably know how to describe colors as red, blue, green, and so on. How we get to those colors and what shades we define, starting from black and white, is somewhat intriguing.

The 1969 book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution suggested that there was a hierarchy of colors in all cultures, starting with black and white, then things like red and blue, and finally more descriptive colors like orange or pink.

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Financial Times: Brexit reinforces Britain’s imperial amnesia

This strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of Britain’s relationship with its past. Rather than being obsessed by empire, the British have largely consigned the whole imperial experience to George Orwell’s “memory hole”. Most British people, including leading politicians, are profoundly ignorant of the country’s imperial history.

This imperial amnesia does, however, have a crucial bearing on Brexit. It means that leading Brexiters and advocates of “Global Britain” misunderstand the past — with dangerous consequences for the future. They speak warmly of returning to Britain’s historical vocation as a “great trading nation”, when it was actually a great imperial nation. That important distinction leads to overconfidence about the ease of re-creating a global trading destiny, in a world in which Britannia no longer rules the waves. [...]

The fact that victory in the second world war and loss of empire more or less coincided was also helpful. Victory in Europe was a moment of national triumph that cushioned the psychological blow of the loss of empire. All British opinion formers have 1945 stamped on their memory — the year that marked victory in Europe. Few would be able to tell you that 1947 was the year of the independence of India. [...]

If Prime Minister Theresa May truly wants to forge a future for a “global Britain”, she might consider changing the kind of history that its citizens are taught. It would be helpful if future British politicians understood the significance not just of 1939, the year that the second world war broke out, but also of 1839, the year that the first opium war broke out.

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