06.27.09
Finished Another Book and Another Gansey
The weather is great here in Los Angeles today! After running errands I got a chance to finish reading Sven Lindqvist’s book “Exterminate All the Brutes” One Man’s Odyssey Into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. Talk about brilliant! I liked Lindqvist’s writing style, and the information he presents and the subsequent conclusions he draws is definitely food for thought. When I first started to read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost, I was amazed because like the author, I was completely unaware of any major killing grounds in Africa (aside from the more recent 1994 Rwandan genocide). Hochschild wrote how he first came to learn about this in his introduction. This is what he writes:
“I knew almost nothing about the history of the Congo until a few years ago[Hochschild's book was published in 1998], when I noticed a footnote in a book I happened to be reading. Often, when you come across something particularly striking, you remember just where you were when you read it. On this occasion I was sitting, stiff and tired, late at night, in one of the far rear seats of an airliner crossing the United States from east to west.
“The footnote was to a quotation by Mark Twain, written, the note said, when he was part of the worldwide movement against slave labor in the Congo, a practice that had taken eight to ten million lives. Worldwide movement? Eight to ten million lives? I was startled.
“Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But if this number turned out to be even half as high, I thought, the Congo would have been one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century’s horrors? And why had I never before heard of them? I had been writing about human rights for years, and once, in the course of half a dozen trips to Africa, I had been to the Congo.”
When I read Hochschild’s book, I was amazed. It really made a lot of sense out of the little bit I knew of Africa and the little bits and pieces I would see through our media (which was hard to make any sense of). If reading his book blew my mind, the added revelations Lindqvist makes in his book, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” has left me flabbergasted. Lindqvist asserts that it’s not more information we need as we have plenty of that. What we need is “the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” And Oh my God, it suddenly starts to bring more meaning to me when Jesus gave us a new commandment to “love God with all our hearts and minds, and to love one another as He has loved us.” If only Christians would truly understand what that means and do it. And I can also understand now what the ramifications of Israel asking God for their own nations lead by a “human” king would lead to and why God was so displeased with that request. I want to study the wars and the genocides mentioned in the Bible and see if what I’ve been learning helps me to understand that more.
I don’t feel ready to write all my comments on Lindqvist’s book yet. All I know is I got to the last page and thought, “Wow. I need to let this info soak in a bit.” What a powerful revelation it is to me, and while I do have another book sitting here ready for me to start into, I think I have to let Lindqvist’s book settle first. I will definitely be looking into his other books. One in particular that looks interesting is called, A History of Bombing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start on Scott Peterson’s book Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda.
But. . . before I log out, I also managed to finish Brian’s gansey. Here’s a pic of it as it looked just last week.
Here it is completed with Brian modeling it for me, heheh.
And this is just a side shot to show the sleeve and the shoulder strap.
Okay, dinner’s ready, so I’m off!
Marlakins
