“… I began to paint like this.”*
artist Hiam Mustafa, at the opening of a new exhibition “Us and Them”, in our village the other day. She’s a Druze artist from Daliat al-Carmel.
*her words, approximately.
“Empire” meets “The Dawn of Everything”
Before going to sleep, listened to another podcast of the excellent “Empire” series of William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. This was the first of a new series on the subject of slavery, and the episode featured, as guest speaker, David Wengrow, author of The Dawn of Everything.
I was interested in this one because I recently finished this book and think it is brilliant – one of the freshest and most original approaches to human history that one can read. Among other things, it reveals the endless possibilities for human governance, and the range of possible alternative frameworks, once we free our minds of rigid pre-conceived ideas.
Actually, I think this wasn’t one of the best Empire podcasts. Anand and Dalrymple are more susceptible to our human tendency to look for heroes and create value judgements about different societies – in this case, mainly the Sumerians and the Egyptians. Wengrow resists these tendencies, both because his approach is more frank and scientific, and because he’s keenly aware of the lenses through which we look at past civilizations. So in the podcast he was like a slippery fish they can never quite catch.
Two Kids a Day (film)
This is a documentary about the detention of Palestinian children. The title, Two Kids a Day reflects the arrest of 12 – 14 year olds by Israeli soldiers. The statistic is quoted by one of the protagonists, a settler in the Civil Administration to say, as it were, “hey, that’s not so many.” (the true statistic is about 1,000 kids per year.)
Minors are arrested from the streets or from their homes in night raids, usually on suspicion of throwing stones. Twelve to fourteen year olds, under the rules of the Civil Authority, may be detained for 6 months at a stretch, in clear violation of the Geneva conventions to which Israel is signatory. They are interrogated under threats of violence (or worse) and pressured into betraying their friends. Many of them are imprisoned more than once, and some of the boys interviewed in the film, who have now reached the age of 16-18, have spent a total of 3 years in detention.
Links
Ancient Britons built Stonehenge – then vanished. Is science closing in on their killers?
This is wonderful. The oldest-found human in Britain was dark-skinned, had black hair and blue-green eyes. But Stonehenge was probably built by later immigrants who had olive skin and may be related to the Basques. But plague may have reduced the population, making them vulnerable to an incursion by modern Brits, who were descended from fair haired invaders from the Asian steppes.
All this should be a reality check for notions of where people are “really” from, and how we measure who is entitled to settle where in the world. The white British population are certainly not the indigenous people of the British Isles. They are the descendants of immigrants who arrived on boats.