“When the soldiers come, we go into the water up to our necks and hide, with only our noses out of the water,” a displaced villager
.. “Even if you die in the water, it’s better to be killed by snakes or crocodiles than by soldiers,” she said.
.. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.
.. Multiply this family’s tragedy by millions and you get a window into the catastrophe faced by South Sudan, already one of the world’s poorest nations. Even before the civil war started two years ago, a girl was much more likely to grow up to die in childbirth than to finish high school.
.. All sides in this civil war have engaged in atrocities, and it has unfortunately taken on an ethnic dimension.
.. A new United Nations report suggests that government-affiliated soldiers were allowed to rape women in lieu of wages ..
.. it would help to have an arms embargo and sanctions aimed at the assets of individuals on each side of the civil war: Make leaders pay a price for intransigence, instead of profiting from it. “Go after their assets,” advises John Prendergast of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. “Stinging financial pressure that targets the top leaders on both sides will impact calculations more than anything else.”
.. when a government that we helped put in place is regarded by citizens as more dangerous than hungry crocodiles, then surely we can try a little harder.
And you thought the Civil War was over… Confederacy Theory presents and unflinching portrait of the cultural war that has erupted around the confederate flag – a century-old symbol that threatens to divide the South like no issue since the Civil Rights movement. Using never-before-seen archival footage and exclusive interviews with politicians, pundits, activists, and scholars, Confederacy Theory traces the history of this symbol and its impact on Southern culture, history, and identity – from the Civil War to the frontlines of a modern-day secession movement.
Were the Southerners who erected those monuments concerned primarily about the valor of men, there would be many more dedicated to the former slaves who fought for the Union and risked death or, arguably worse, reënslavement. Were the war mainly about tariffs, we would be left to think that these fugitives fled farms and plantations to join the Union Army because of their abiding belief in trade protectionism.
.. The South is exceptional not primarily because of its literature or its food or its politics but because, as historians have pointed out, it is the only region of the United States that has lived for the majority of its history with the experience of military defeat.
.. He added, in reference to the Confederate soldiers, that “it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.”
.. It may seem odd, decades after the civil-rights movement, to note that for a sitting President to say that the Confederacy fought for the institution of slavery—and that doing so was a moral wrong—is a radical statement. Yet it is ..
Suppose Mexican-Americans waved a flag depicting the battle of the Alamo? The point would not be to celebrate the slaughter of Texans, but to express pride in Mexican heritage!
Suppose Canadian-Americans displayed a flag showing the burning of the White House in the War of 1812? Nothing against the Yanks, mind you — just a point of Canadian historical pride!
.. America’s greatest shame in 2015 is not a piece of cloth. It’s that a black boy has a life expectancy five years shorter than a white boy. It’s that the net worth of the average black household in 2011 was $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to census data.
It’s that almost two-thirds of black children grow up in low-income families. It’s that more than one-third of inner-city black kids suffer lead poisoning (and thus often lifelong brain impairment), mostly from old lead paint in substandard housing.