Outis

Earlier today I heard on the radio a (hopefullly mistranslated) quote from Evo Morales, the new president of Bolivia. According to NPR, Morales ushered in a series of important land reforms by saying something to the effect of his “giving the land back to its original owners.”

If accurate, it’s an astoundingly stupid piece of demogoguery.

Apart from the difficulty of resurrecting men who died nearly half a millenium ago, there is the questionable political matter of a constitutional democracy offering to expropriate land so that it can return it to an Inca emperor.

I thought of Morales’ soundbite just now as I read this section of the essay Cosmopolitans in the The New York Review of Books:

The provocation he discusses is not the Metropolitan Museum’s recent travails with the Euphronios krater but the looting and destruction of the King of Asante’s palace by Sir Garnet Wolseley in the late nineteenth century. Appiah argues not that the British were anything other than wicked but rather that their wickedness does not mean they should now send everything back. Some of the loot should be returned; but it would be of more use to Ghana if Britain would lend antiquities from other parts of the world and allow Ghanaians to see what they otherwise would have to travel to the British Museum to see.

Update: Yup, that’s exactly what Morales said.

Emily Wax, East Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post has written this excellent and important summary: 5 Truths About Darfur. This is just a taste — she provides the background.

1 Nearly everyone is Muslim
2 Everyone is black
3 It’s all about politics
4 This conflict is international
5 The “genocide” label made it worse

(via Passport)

How did “red hot tamales” get to be a staple of the Mississippi Delta? Southern Foodways Alliance director John T. Edge tells Debbie Elliott that it happened a century ago, when migrant Mexican farmworkers came to pick cotton side by side with African Americans in the deep South.

Tamales, Another Treat from the Delta, NPR.org

Bradford Plumer explains why global seed companies are the equivalent of a murdering, thieving meth-dealing mafia. (My analogy, not his.)

From an interview with Jon Lee Anderson — one of my favorite writers — on his latest report for the The New Yorker:

One senator you spoke to was Prince Johnson, a former warlord who’s notorious for having tortured former President Samuel Doe to death. He had his men cut off Doe’s ears and made him eat one of them—his own ear. I was struck by how open and unrepentant he was when you asked him about that. It doesn’t happen often that you talk to someone who’s done that to another person. One might hesitate to ask him about it. As a journalist, do you find that it works best to be direct with someone like that?

The answer.