Catching Up

 I have finally gotten around to  reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  The book was published in 2010  I don't know what preoccupation preempted my attention back then to produce such an oversight.  What finally woke me up was stumbling on an interview of Wilkerson on the New Mexico PBS program,  Report from Santa Fe, first aired in 2013.

Lorene Mills interviews Isabel Wilkerson

 Wilkerson, before producing the book, had a long and much acclaimed. career in journalism which included a Pulitzer -- the first given to an African-American woman.  She conducted a thousand interviews in the fifteen years of researching and writing The Warmth of Other Sons.  In it she recounts the decades-long story of the migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow Southern states to the North and West of the U.S.

 I found Wilkerson's speaking ability in the PBS program to be totally captivating.  I don't recall listening to anyone before who was so articulate.  Her eloquence in speaking about her experience in producing the book made me immediately resolve to find a copy.  A quick search turned up a copy on AbeBooks for just $7.50, shipping included.

The story of the great migration, covering decades is a complicated one which the author makes into an enjoyable read partly by focusing on the lives of three individuals who found very different paths out of the South.  

For me, the book has got me to remembering my own developing awareness of Black History.  In fact, I recall when I was in school being skeptical about the idea that there was a need for such a categorization of History, even though I had seen a lot of evidence supporting such a need during the course of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s.

Travel and life experiences eventually showed me the way to a more critical view of how History is constructed and told (and often distorted), but even these many years later Wilkerson's book is filling in a lot of important facts and ideas for me about this country's record of dealing with civil rights and human rights.

The Case for Mexico's Annexation of the U.S.

 Claudia Sheinbaum's address to the Summit for Democracy. 

Foto Oficial Claudia Sheinbaum, Presidenta de México

Stop American Complicity in War Crimes

 Biden is about to leave office with his catastrophic policy of unconditional support for the Israeli war intact.  He has backed away from the anemic threat to withhold some American bombs which have already killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.  Harris' failure to separate her campaign from Biden's policy certainly contributed to her defeat.  Time to send a clear message to the Democrats.

Support Amnesty International

See Owen Jones' opinion piece in The Guardian: Is there any red line that Israel will be held to? Biden has just confirmed the answer is no

The West Bank

I was pleased to discover recently that I can once again access magazines online from the Albuquerque Library through my old Kindle Fire tablet.  Even though the long-outdated tablet is slow and cumbersome it is still a nice way to read (at no cost) the two magazines that I follow, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

This last issue of the NY Review has some particularly good book reviews and articles, including an extraordinary account of the the atrocities currently taking place in the West Bank against the Palestinian population by right-wing Israeli settlers with the full cooperation of the Israeli Defense Forces.

An 'Unlawful Presence' is by David Shulman, an Israeli human rights activist who works on the ground to try to combat the endless, horrific persecution of the rural Palestinian people.  He also, in this article, describes how it is that so many of his fellow citizens have become numb to the facts of the genocidal assault in both Gaza and the West Bank. He mentions in regard to that skewed perception of reality that it is attributable in part to the dereliction of the Israeli news sources, with the sole exception of the Haaretz newspaper; how that paper's willingness to persevere in the country's climate of right-wing terror is another story that needs telling.

Chile, 50 Years Beyond the Coup

 

Pascale Bonnefoy

We spent two hours on Sunday at the Art Museum listening to a marvelous lecture about Chile's recovery from the Pinochet coup.  The speaker was Pascale Bonnefoy, an investigative journalist based in Santiago, Chile, and associate professor of journalism at the University of Chile, Santiago.

Seventeen years after the 1973 coup which ended the Allende presidency the Chileans voted the dictator out of office.  That unique termination of a dictatorship was accomplished only with carefully crafted compromises, the first of which was to grant amnesty to Pinochet and to leave him as the commander of the armed forces for eight years after he stepped down from the highest office.

While many of those responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of Chileans remained safe from prosecution for a time as well, the advocates of human rights gradually assembled the facts of the period and identified the perpetrators, many of whom are only now being brought to justice.  Pinochet, however,  escaped that justice.  He always denied any direct knowledge or responsibility for the human rights abuses and in the end he threw his subordinates under the bus.  So, while he was able to die in his own bed, he did ultimately earn the hate, not only of most of the citizens, but also of the army that had supported him.

Bonnefoy spent years assembling the story of the search for justice in Chile and produced a detailed account of it in her book, The Investigative Brigade.

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The story continues:

Aljazeera 29 Aug 2023

Chile court upholds jail term for retired soldiers over Victor Jara murder.

No Exceptions

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.