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"How to talk about the war?"

A couple of thoughts: (1) Reading the description of the intellectual abuse going on today in Russian schools feels like looking in a mirror at what is happening in US public schools: the trumpist right's weaponization of critical race theory to prevent students from learning hard, indispensable truths about their own history; the banning of books like "Maus" that help teach the young how to be moral human beings. As Tucker Carlson and his ilk keep reminding us, the authoritarian right in America is not very (if at all) different from its authoritarian counterpart in Russia. (2) In the internet age, every citizen is a potential reporter. A young girl in Minneapolis with nothing but a cellphone created the record that brought justice to the killers of George Floyd. There are videos, emails, voicemails, and texts on the cellphones of ordinary people all over Ukraine. Most cannot be accessed now. But the time is coming when these primary documents will be recovered, like the letters and diaries of WW II. Godspeed to all the valiant Russian and Ukrainian journalists, persecuted for telling the truth.

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Mar 6, 2022
at
8:38 PM