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Ginger's avatar

Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase "stay woke" as part of a spoken afterward to a 1938 recording of his song "Scottsboro Boys", which tells the story of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. Has anything changed? Best defense is an offense.

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docrhw Weil's avatar

Yes, this is an old, old story and is particularly dangerous when both sides want a war to bolster their status. The Falklands conflict (Argentinian fatalities were listed as 649, incidentally) began when the ruling junta in Buenos Aires decided that enforcing their nation's claim to the islands would bolster their legitimacy. (They also considered starting a war with Chile.) And Napoleon III thought he would win a short war against Prussia, thus improving his standing with the French people. Bismarck, who engineered the 1870 fight, expected that it would unify Germany, which it did, and never mind that 180,000 people died.

One can think of many other cases in terms of armed conflict, whipping up the mob against a supposed domestic "enemy” or telling people to economically “sacrifice for the common good” while the rich get richer. And none of these distractions help the ordinary citizen one whit. In fact, they pander to the worst instincts in people. As a fellow college geography professor told me, "I laid out to my students that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Their reply was that it didn't matter. Somebody had to pay."

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