When Iraq invaded the United States By Eduardo Galeano

[bemildred]

The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano's new book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation Books).

The day Mexico Invaded the United States

On this early morning in 1916, Pancho Villa crossed the border with his horsemen, set fire to the city of Columbus, killed several soldiers, nabbed a few horses and guns, and the following day was back in Mexico to tell the tale. This lightning incursion is the only invasion the United States has suffered since its wars to break free from England. In contrast, the United States has invaded practically every country in the entire world.

Since 1947 its Department of War has been called the Department of Defense, and its war budget the defense budget. The names are an enigma as indecipherable as the Holy Trinity.

God's bomb

In 1945, while this day was dawning, Hiroshima lost its life. The atomic bomb's first appearance incinerated this city and its people in an instant. The few survivors, mutilated sleepwalkers, wandered among the smoking ruins. The burns on their naked bodies carried the stamp of the clothing they were wearing when the explosion hit. On what remained of the walls, the atom bomb's flash left silhouettes of what had been: a woman with her arms raised, a man, a tethered horse.

Three days later, President Harry Truman spoke about the bomb over the radio. He said: "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes."

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-250713.html

[qazplm]

1. bit of hyperbole

1. plenty of countries we haven't invaded.

2. we are no different than any of the nations that came before us in this power position. Worse in some ways, better in others.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Galeano is a brilliant, amazing, wildly courageous man.

He knows what it's like to live with a target on his back, having been kept on the list the Argentinian military dictatorship (U.S.-supported) wanted to execute. He has refused to stop speaking the truth, has refused to STFU.

May he be among us much longer, we can't afford to lose this man who loves and respects life so dearly he has been despised for it by the twisted people who control and adore the weapons.

Thank you for this article. Galeano is a giant.

[bemildred]

3. He is.

If I was going to be a writer, he is one of the guys I'd want to be. I am not easily moved, and I read in translation, but still ...

[Judi Lynn]

4. It was great seeing his comment, “The walls are the publishers of the poor."

A long time ago, heard him say in an interview, something he saw walking through a neighborhood in South America, written upon the side of a building:

"Let's leave pessimism for better times."

That one sticks in one's mind!

[struggle4progress]

5. Eduardo Galeano Reads From His New Book

[Judi Lynn]

8. Here's something great to anticipate.

Plan to watch this soon after getting a night's sleep.

This man stands head and shoulders above so many. He is truly extraordinary.

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Thanks for posting this link.

[struggle4progress]

6. Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History

This chronicle of past times and crimes adds up an almanac of atrocity – and of resistance
Toby Green
Friday 03 May 2013



Eduardo Galeano ends his calendar of human history by drawing on the work of the Roman physician, Sammonicus. His remedy to avoid death was to hang the word "Abracadabra" across your chest night and day: the word "in ancient Hebrew meant and still means, 'give your fire until the last of your days'".

For a reviewer to begin by revealing a book's end is almost heretical, yet in Galeano's case it is apposite. For this deeply humane Uruguayan writer's entire oeuvre is an act of heresy against the status quo. Galeano has given of his fire deep into his vintage: an enemy of falseness and cosy history, of lies parading as truth, of injustice and inequality, he is no friend to the linear narrative - as his latest "history" shows.

Children of the Days offers a fragment of human history for each day of the year. It is a book of outrage. Galeano takes us deep into the murky violence of the past to paint the history of human progress as it is: a desensitised sleepwalking into a void, where enforced overproduction has poisoned us and the world we live in. To illustrate his point, he tells of an eight-year-old Mexican boy messing about by a river in Guadalajara: he fell in and died, not from drowning, but from the toxins seeping into the river from nearby factories. Galeano holds a fragmented mirror to the poisons seeping from our disfigured selves.

The telling of such secret histories makes it easy to see why Galeano is one of Latin America's most influential writers. When he first met President Obama, the late Hugo Chávez pressed one of his books into Obama's hands as a must-read. As in his previous work Mirrors and his masterpiece Memories of Fire, Galeano has taken a lyrical sledgehammer to pat evasions about the historical process. He uses his pithy stories to show both the power of acts of resistance - by women all over the world, indigenous Americans, and maroon African slaves - and the ugliness of the forces oppressing them ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/children-of-the-days-a-calendar-of-human-history-by-eduardo-galeano-trans-mark-fried-8601326.html

[struggle4progress]

7. Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History by Eduardo Galeano – review

This dizzying collection of reminders of man's inhumanity to man is a beach book that will kick sand in your face
Ian Sansom
Friday 17 May 2013 06.46 EDT

... Born in Uruguay, and forced into exile in the 1970s, Galeano has forged a career from refusing to write anything that resembles the work of anyone else. He is perhaps best known in English-speaking countries for Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973), a good old-fashioned Marxist denunciation of US imperialism, a copy of which Hugo Chávez famously presented as a gift to Barack Obama in 2009. (Gordon Brown gave Obama a pen-holder.) Galeano's more recent work mixes history with fiction, poetry and memoir to produce books that resemble mosaics. The method is what one might call refractory. The effect is dizzying, like staring up close for a very long time at the walls of Gaudí's Sagrada Família.

Children of the Days is the ne plus ultra of the Galeano style and form, a triumph of his mosaic art – 365 sad and strange and shiny little fragments, placed adjacent to one another to form a vast and seemingly coherent whole. All of Galeano's usual obsessions are vividly represented here: US imperialism, the pharmaceutical industry, western governments, the military, the church, advertising, business, Hollywood. The entry for 29 February reads: "In routine fashion, on 29 February Hollywood gave nearly all of its awards, eight Oscars, to Gone with the Wind, which was a long sigh of nostalgia for the good old days of slavery." The death of Winston Churchill on 24 January is marked sourly with an excerpt from his statement to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937: "I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia … by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race … has come in and taken their place." 13 March: "On this day in the year 2007, the banana company Chiquita Brands, successor to United Fruit, admitted to financing Colombian paramilitary gangs for seven years, and agreed to pay a fine." For the most part it makes for pretty grim reading, the tone echoing the sentiments of Costa Rica's president Don Pepe Figueres, who apparently once remarked (1 December) that "Here, the only thing wrong is everything."

The only thing wrong in fact is when Galeano tries too hard to make it right. There is a tendency throughout to sweeten the bitter pill and to balance the bad news not so much with good but with odd little whimsical baubles ...

The book is at its finest when refusing to obey even its own rather arbitrary arrangements. When Galeano can find no connection whatsoever between a particular day and some great offence or some little crumb of comfort he simply prefaces his remarks with the phrase "One day like this ...", or adds, "maybe on a day like today or who knows when". This is a book of days, not for every day but for any day.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/17/children-of-days-galeano-review