Re: Re: Revelations of Revolutions in Time

[Guest guest]

In a message dated 11/24/99 4:11:37 AM, Mailmutt wrote a whole lot of good

stuff that is important to hear even though it ain't funny or pretty...

Then he said

<<I don't recall any of these events being mentioned or discussed in

any of my public educational years. Do any of you? >>

There's a moment in my cultural and/or theatre history classes where I'm

carrying on about the Renaissance and its glories when I start to talk about

the other two significant things that went with it:

1) the beginnings of the African slave trade

2) the Spanish Inquisition.

Always a sudden flurrry of pencils making marks in notebooks. Something they

hadn't heard before.

keep the light

phoebe

[Guest guest]

Yeah...

Thank you, .

One of the things you ARE taught about in South African history (there is,

of course, a hell of a lot you're not taught about, but this is one they

lost so they can bitch about it - and with reason) is the Anglo-Boer Wars.

These were, as you probably know, wars that were going to change warfare

forever. The Brits recognised the value of not wearing red coats for a kick

off, and of working in small groups, harrying and never setting up a fixed

headquarters... from the Afrikaners.

They also came up with the brilliant idea of rounding up the women and

children of the Afrikaners and gathering them together in barbed-wire

enclosures called 'concentration camps'... These damn things, of course,

used to get filled to overflowing until someone came up with the even

brighter idea that if you put ground glass in the meal and tiny, hairlike

hooks in the meat you served them, they would clear the camps themselves.

And pretty presto, at that.

Such was tried.

It worked.

A little mucky, but it worked... After that it was just a question of one

pick-and-shovel detail... Kept the flies down...

Many English-speaking South Africans are still a little bemused at the

apparently uncaused hatred their presence sometimes occasions in

all-Afrikaans areas...

But, what I wanted to say is: this was a downside, nothing to do with

rose-tinted glasses, my friend unless one refuses to acknowledge it. Sure

there were - are still - human beings who are so only by default... They

too - even especially they! - are worthy of one's love and compassion...

for all the pain and horror they bring us (and is that not - indeed! -

because we are so akin - could so easily ourselves, but for the grace of

fortune, have been them, as you so wisely point out?)...

Good thoughts, I think, on the sill of the final thanksgiving of the

millennium...

m