war is not the answer

There was a roundtable discussion on the AU campus yesterday afternoon on "9/11 and Afghanistan: twenty years after." The panelists were a senior history professor, a veteran who served in Afghanistan and is now the director of the Military Aligned Program at Saint Bonaventure University, a junior history professor who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and a psychologist who was in Junior ROTC in high school. The panel was rather weighted toward military service, terrorism, veteran services, patriotism, American international operations, ineffective Afghan forces, and the messy departure from Afghanistan. Thoughts of the late 1960s efforts to get ROTC off campus were roiling in my brain, along with how there is now a military office on campus. I was feeling quite stressed (though of course I was also experiencing plenty of privilege sitting in a library meeting space on a sunny afternoon). The last question was "was the Afghan incursion worth it?" A veteran in the audience answered in the affirmative and talked about women's freedom, schools, and other good things that had happened. It is good that some of the Taliban tyranny of the 1990s ended but twenty years of costly and destructive warfare can't be the best method for achieving such social change.

Today's Environmental Studies speaker was K. Neil Van Dine on "Water and sanitation in Haiti." His group, Haiti Outreach, works with communities to get a sustainable water supply and sanitation. Many groups have helped with various relief efforts in Haiti but few have helped build the systems needed to manage and maintain the infrastructural improvement. Upwards of 500 communities, mostly rural, have received help from Haiti Outreach which builds community support before any well drilling happens. Van Dine noted that the UN/WHO Global Goal for Sustainable Development is for the water supply to be within a thirty-minute round trip. It's hard for us to imagine anything other than light switches, water faucets, and flushing toilets. But just think if the billions of dollars and hours of effort expended in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of Vietnam and Korea and elsewhere, had been spent on sustainable development.

The Haiti talk will be posted on the Environmental Studies Speaker Series at AlfredU YouTube channel.

Thanks to the Friends Committee on National Legislation for the "WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER" bumper sticker.

separated at birth: military monuments

Les Invalides

Paris, France

(photo from Wikipedia)

Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

Patriot Park, Odintsovsky District, Russia

(photo from Wikipedia via Architizer)

Pompeo & Sesto San Giovanni

The morning news on NPR included a story about new U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo going to Israel and then on to Saudi Arabia and Jordan. He was quoted about fighting the Islamic State and finding partners on other "homeland security" issues. I dearly wish that he and his colleagues would do as much on the social and economic justice issues as they do on the terrorism and military side. I have to believe that a more just world would experience less tumult from war and terrorism.

I got my Sunday Times and a few groceries at Wegmans and headed off to Billy Schu's for some pancakes. A few pages into the main section of the paper, I was taken back to Milan. Our first airbnb apartment in Milan was very near the Bande Nere stop of the Metro M1 line. One end of the line is Sesto San Giovanni, a northern suburb. So we'd take the train in the direction of Sesto 1° Maggio if we were going toward the center of Milan. We had a good modern architecture guide and there were quite a few buildings out that way, e.g., Campari headquarters (Mario Botta), the art space Pirelli Hangar Bicocca (Studio April), Pirelli Real Estate headquarters (Vittorio Gregotti), Deutsche Bank headquarters (Studio Valle), and the Bicocca campus of the University of Milan (Gregotti). Bicocca and Sesto are old industrial areas that are seeing new development. So Sesto was on my list for a field trip but we didn't make it out that way on this trip.

Today's paper had an article entitled "Outside Milan, a taste of a right-wing Italy" about the new mayor of Sesto San Giovanni, expulsion of migrants from public housing, and construction being blocked on a mosque. The new mayor, Roberto Di Stefano, said "If it starts with this [mosque], tomorrow they will ask for a Muslim soccer team, a Muslim school, a Muslim swimming pool." This is happening in a neighborhood that has a significant population of second and third generation Muslims. It just seems to me that it's obvious that an "Italy first" policy, just like "America first," leads to rancor between people which is more likely to lead to the sort of disgruntlement that fosters terrorism and/or fascism, especially when exacerbated by the arrival of war refugees. It seems trite to argue that "we should all just try to get along" but I think I'll keep on saying that we should always give peace a chance.

(anti-war banner in Genoa, March 2018)

peace in Italy

Arco della Pace and former tollhouses, Parco Sempione, Milan

PAX on the Bocconi family mausoleum, Cimitero Monumentale, Milan

Anti-war vigil, Piazza De Ferrari, Genoa

"No F35" on the Via Garibaldi, Turin

refugees and peacemaking

Today's New York Times has an article about refugees stuck in a "grinding U.S. process" as they await permission to come to the land of the free. We've increased the turmoil with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our adventures in Syria, Israel, and Palestine. We've helped make it well nigh impossible to peacefully survive in a wide swath of the Middle East and South Asia.

The Global War on Terror has been about as successful in bringing justice, liberty, and peace to the world as the War on Drugs. Perhaps the problem is the WAR part of both of these efforts.

Facing the article on the refugees is one about a concert in the Cathedral Plaza in Havana. There, Lang Lang played a Steinway while Cuban music superstar Chucho Valdés played another piano and the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra (conducted by American Marin Alsop) played Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, and works by Valdés and other Cuban composers. Steinway is contributing the piano to the Cuban Institute of Music.

I know it's not black-or-white, or just war-or-peace, and that it's been fifty years of embargo and distrust between Cuba and the United States. Cuban refugees have been mostly successfully absorbed into life in Florida and I wish more international relations and interactions could be on the music side.

jihad or crusade

If you were a young person and the path to dropping out of school and drugs seemed more attractive or popular than studying and going to college, if you were a young person of color or a punk and the cops harassed you if you stood around on the street corner, if you were a young person who did not find much support in Christianity, might you be tempted to convert to Islam? If you lived in a society that glorified guns and soldiers and vilified terrorists and immigrants, if you lived in a country that gave early boarding privilege to uniformed servicemen and women, might you be tempted to join a military adventure? Today's New York Times has a profile of two young men from Minnesota, one white and one black, who became jihadists. One, the white guy, went to Somalia and died there in 2009. The other joined ISIS and died this year in Iraq.

If you cannot imagine that, think back a thousand years. The local priest or nobleman is calling on people to join a crusade and rid the Promised Land of the infidel.

Work for peace and justice. Another article on the front page of today's paper was about Al Fawwar, a Palestinian camp in the West Bank, where architect Sandi Hilal and local residents have created a public square. The camps were opened as temporary settlements but have persisted for generations. Social public spaces are important, especially for women in the Middle East, even if they challenge ideas about permanence. Interacting with others in ordinary ways is the foundation of a diverse and peaceful society.

but with more precision, dear sir, do not go too fast

Sunday, 2 March [1919]
Dine with Princess Soutzo at the Ritz -- a swell affair ... Marcel Proust and Abel Bonnard ... there as well. Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced. He puts his fur coat on afterwards and sits hunched there in white kid gloves. Two cups of black coffee he has, with chunks of sugar. yet in his talk there is no affectation. He asks no questions. Will I please tell him how the committees work? I say: 'Well, we generally meet at 10.0, there are secretaries behind ...' 'Mais non, mais non, you are going too fast. Start anew. You take a car to the delegation. You get out at the Quai d'Orsay. You walk up the steps. You enter the Great Hall. And then? With more precision, dear sir, more precision.' So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of paper: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time. 'But with more precision, dear sir, do not go too fast.'

This is part of Harold Nicolson's diary from the negotiations at Versailles at the end of World War I, quoted in In Europe: travels through the twentieth century by Geert Mak (page 127). Nicolson's recounting of his diplomatic experience is heartbreaking, especially in light of the futility of war. He continues with talk of the inevitability of more conflict because of the terms forced upon the Germans.

As horrible as the thoughts are of the futility of the war and negotiations, I cannot help but be thrilled by the precision that Proust wants, the same care that goes into descriptions in In search of lost time.