Global

We — by which I mean most of humanity — are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.

You know, violence is morally neutral — and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers. Make the world a better place.

History will not forgive those who have remained silent, exhibited or expressed ‘balanced’ positions - or worse, defended Israel’s ongoing genocide in an already besieged, impoverished and overcrowded Gaza. 

 This is not a cliché declaration, a desperate attempt aimed at jolting the world, especially the Western world, to show a degree of morality as Palestinians are dying in their thousands, as the pulverized bodies of children are scattered in every neighborhood in Gaza. 

 No, this is about history. 

The screen adaptation of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning: The
Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America directed by Roger Ross Williams, the first African
American director to win an Academy Award, is a cinematic masterpiece. Stamped from the
Beginning – which derives its title from a despicably racist 1860 speech delivered by Senator
Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy – is one of the greatest anti-racist nonfiction
motion pictures ever made, in terms of film form and content.
Stamped goes back in time to before the trans-Atlantic slave trade began in Europe, and shows
how racism was a construct to rationalize the brutality of slavery on the grounds that Europeans
were inherently superior to Africans. Blacks replaced Eastern European Slavs (the film contends
that term is the source of the word “slave”) for forced labor because due to the color of their skin,
it was harder for escaped Africans to blend in with the white population.
When slavery was exported to the “New World,” white indentured servants were given more