Quote of the week
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you.
The journey is part of the experience — an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.
Bush’s favourite historian
It is scary to read that Bush’s favourite historian justifies concentration camps as used during the Anglo Boer war. Money quote:
His [Roberts’s] political hero is Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister who, during the Boer War, constructed concentration camps in South Africa that, a generation later, inspired Hermann Goering. Under Salisbury, the British burned Boer civilians out of their homes and farms and drove them into concentration camps. The result was that about 34,000 people–some 15 percent of the entire Boer population–died in the camps, mainly of disease and starvation.
Roberts presents a very different picture for Bush. Drawing obvious parallels with Iraq, he says the British introduced “regime change” in Pretoria out of a concern “for human rights.” They bravely fought on against an insurgency campaign that led many weak-willed liberals back home to believe the war was lost, until victory was finally achieved. (It wouldn’t be surprising to see him claim the Boers had a stash of WMD.)
In his most radical piece of revisionism, Roberts argues that, far from being a “war crime,” the concentration camps “were set up for the Boers’ protection.” Mike Davis of the University of California, Irvine, author of Late Victorian Holocausts, says bluntly: “This is tantamount to Holocaust-denial. His arguments about the Boer concentration camps are similar to the arguments of the Nazi apologists about those camps.”
Must say, if I had to choose between Zuma or Bush for President of South Africa, I’ll choose Mr Umshiniwam anyday.
