What is so civil in a civil war?

In the second version of this blog that began in June 2008 after I deleted all the previous entries, I worried about a few global hotspots as I observed them from my corner of the world.  I listed in that August 2008 post the following countries/regions in addition to Iraq and Iran:

• Pakistan
• Afghanistan
• Georgia
• Zimbabwe
• Sudan/Darfur
• Israel/Palestine
• Lebanon
• Sri Lanka
• Burma
• Tibet

Only Georgia has really gotten off that list, right?

About Sri Lanka, this is what I wrote in that post in 2008:

This AFP report says it all: Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts.

That was in the summer of 2008.  The 25-year old civil war that began on "Black July" in 1983 was entering yet another bloody--yes, literally bloody--stretch. 

Here in the US, it was the summer of the presidential election season, with a young and untested but charismatic Barack Obama even going to Berlin and addressing the crowds that were all eager for a change from the Bush-Cheney era.  

The US couldn't care about the violence in Sri Lanka.

Later that December, I was in India, and observed people and the press expressing worries over the increased military assaults on Tamil areas in order to wipe out the Tamil Tigers.  So, I did what I could.  I wrote a newspaper commentary after returning home.

The Sri Lankan government didn't ease up.  It was a scorched earth approach to wiping out the Tamil terrorists, and civilian deaths and displacement didn't matter one bit to the government.  The leadership of the Tamil Tigers were killed.  An uneasy peace settled on the island.

All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight, which is why they called it serendip, which morphed into the English word "serendipity" to mean something absolutely awesome that just appeared or happened when least expected.

I was reminded of all that, of the roommates in my first year of graduate school, and more, when we watched Funny Boy.

The best #Tamil movie that I have watched in decades ... is a Canadian movie about #SriLanka ...#FunnyBoy involves two complex issues at once: #CivilWar and #Homosexuality https://t.co/Vfpi6unq65

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) February 2, 2021

If you read until here, well, you might be interested in a French/Sri Lankan movie we watched a couple of years ago.  Dheepan is a movie that is about three Sri Lankan Tamils who are in France after fleeing the civil war.

All I can do is read about peoples and countries, watch movies, and wish for peace.  That itself is a start, right?

"We have lost our Moses"

In the summer of 2016, "before an overwhelmingly white crowd in Dimondale, Mich., where 2.8 percent of the population is African American," then-candidate trump stumped for black votes, by asking them, "What the hell do you have to lose?"

Apparently that question did not get him African-American votes!  But, his negative campaign against Bill Clinton's crime bills, in order to remind blacks about Hillary, paid off well: "In 2016, black turnout was down eight points from 2012."  He and his political adviser and conduit to the Russians and Wikileaks, roger stone, played the dirtiest politics on their belief that “Hate is a stronger motivator than love ... Human nature has never changed.”

All these are a long, long, long way from Lincoln who believed in "the better angels of our nature."

Not all the people in the South wanted to secede.  Even in Virginia, where there was plenty of opposition to secede in the western part of the state.  Jill Lepore writes that in June, after Lincoln's inauguration earlier in March, "they held their own convention and effectively seceded from the state, to become West Virginia."

Ironically, West Virginia today is confederate flag land with people talking about their heritage and is a solid trump country!

Even the soldiers--North and South---fighting in the Civil War, knew well that the conflict was over one and only one issue: Slavery.  In 1862,  "a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade's newspaper wrote:  "Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation if the blacks is wither a fool or a liar."

Contrast that with the racists in today's "Party of Lincoln" who falsely claim that the war was about state's rights and not about slavery and emancipation!

Lepore reminds us: "It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy."

Think about this the next time you see a confederate flag!

Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation, shepherded the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibited slavery in the United States, and ran for re-election.  All "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

On Good Friday of 1865--April 14th--Lincoln was shot.  He died the following morning.

On the creepy confederate flag

Way back when I was in graduate school, I was once talking about the road trip I wanted to go on in the Deep South, thanks to having read Gone with the Wind when I was in high school.  The three guys listened to my plan.  One of them--btw, all the three were Whites, born and raised in the US--said something like "even I would not want to get off the freeways there" which puzzled me.  He saw my puzzled expression and clarified--he was Jewish.

There is heritage and then there is heritage that comes with a mile-long freight train full of baggage.  The worry is that not only the baggage of the confederacy has not been completely thrown out but that it is even cherished!  As the NY Times noted in its editorial, "the Civil War is winding down":

to put away old business — the Civil War, Reconstruction, jut-jawed defiance to equality for black citizens — so their state could finally take up the ever-pressing, unfinished job of reconciliation.

Earlier this spring, the friend and I went to the coast.  On our way back, we decided to detour via a road that we normally do not take.  It was pretty, of course.  Not much of a traffic, other than a pickup truck that was behind me and was in a hurry.  No surprise for me when the vehicles behind want to pass me, because I am always the slow guy on the road!  When I got a break, I moved over to the sandy shoulder space to let the pickup overtake me and it did.

A couple more miles in, and the friend and I decided to pull over, figure out where exactly we were and to then proceed.  As I reached a clearing, where I thought I would stop, I passed the same pickup truck that was parked there.  Strange it seemed that the driver was in a hurry and yet was parked there.

We checked the map and figured that we had taken a wrong turn, which meant that I had to make a u-turn at that point.  I started the engine and crawled forward to find a sweet spot to make the u-turn.  The pickup truck also headed out slowly.  We thought it was creepy.  I made the u-turn and passed the pickup, and we never saw that truck again.

A few miles later, we passed a relatively rundown house with a huge confederate flag that was fluttering with the breeze.  After that pickup truck experience, the sight of the confederate flag worried me.  A dark-skinned me, and with a white woman too!  I visibly shifted into a worried mode.

If a dark-skinned me feels this way here in Oregon, far away from the Confederate states, then I cannot even begin to imagine how African-Americans feel about that flag and the "heritage" it represents.

I will leave it to my favorite go-to intellectual on race issues in the US; Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the confederate flag:

Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.

Sudan election in a cartoon :(

I am hoping that at least a few students from a class last term are following the news about Sudan.  I had briefly talked with them about Sudan's long civil war, which had caused extensive destruction of life and property.

It seems to be a foregone conclusion that the South will secede, which by itself will be a good step--to get away from the repressive Khartoum regime.

But, what will happen the day after?

And what about the oil-rich Abyei region?

I often kid with students that most of the world's problems can be placed at the feet of Great Britain.  In the case of Sudan, too, Britain was a major player.  Oh well, old stories that will get us nowhere.  The challenges for now, as the NY Times has wonderfully described it with terrific maps, of which the following is one: