Mercurial » History and the like

Happy Colombia Independence Day!

Camilo — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:12:29 +0000

So now we celebrate the Dia de la Independencia de Colombia, remembering the words by Acevedo y Gomez:

Si perdéis estos momentos de efervescencia y calor, si dejáis escapar esta ocasión única y feliz, antes de doce horas seréis tratados como insurgentes: ved los calabozos, los grillos y las cadenas que os esperan.

How fitting: It takes a revolution that occurred 197 years ago to think again about who we are, what we are worth and how the regimes, the people, and the institutions that insist on stripping away our humanity have to be replaced, removed and remade according to more enlightened principles.
This discussion of freedom and equality doesn’t come cheap: just translating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will end you up in jail; just demanding those rights from the authorities will end you dead; just walking in front of tanks will end you up in isolation. Yet people do it, across cultures and times, religions and ideologies, across cultures and backgrounds – the basic human rights are universal, and we all understand at a very basic level the absolute right to a decent existence.

Did you know that the first man in the Moon was a Colombian?
According to Luis Dueñas Gallo, author of “La otra realidad”, book number 8 in the Enciclopedia Familiar Colcultura, which you will never find anywhere anymore, Neil Armstrong visited Colombia way back in the 60s, before he was an astronaut, before he was even in the cards, and received an honorary Colombian citizenship.

What? Honorary Colombian? What for? Well, knowing Colombian penchant for pomp and circumstance, it is fitting: the guys flies planes, shows up to say hello, and the ruling President just makes him part of the family, as it were – I have heard of those 60s presidents, and they were prone to those extremely public displays of affection; besides, the country was at war (still is) so every local celebrity, real or made up, was good enough to divert attention from the daily pain.

38 years ago, it was on the 20th of july that we heard

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

And then NASA lost the tapes. Bummer.

Galan

Camilo — Fri, 18 May 2007 01:22:04 +0000

Luis Carlos Galan was a Colombian presidential candidate, assassinated in August 18th, 1989.
He was a big opponent of the drug cartels, and although young, had great promise.

The day of his death I was at an international conference for business college students. We all went into shock, and at that moment the frail scaffolding of our civility started to show its cracks. A few years afterwards I was able to share, albeit briefly, with his political successors – but by then other issues, more urgent, had my complete attention.

More about Galan in the wikipedia.

Colombia Gold

Camilo — Wed, 24 May 2006 14:32:02 +0000

Colombia got back some treasure. Cool. Now, can we see some pictures of said cultures?
technorati: Colombia, history

Ships

Camilo — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 22:56:54 +0000

Reading the Confusion, I happen to find about the Battle of Barfleur.

End of one war

Camilo — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 10:36:33 +0000

An account of the last days of the US presence on VietNam, as described by John Pilger:

Saigon was now “falling” before our eyes: the Saigon created and fattened and fed intravenously by the United States, then declared a terminal case; capital of the world’s only consumer society that produced nothing; headquarters of the world’s fourth greatest army, the ARVN, whose soldiers were now deserting at the rate of a thousand a day; and centre of an empire which, unlike the previous empire of the French who came to loot, expected nothing from its subjects, not rubber nor rice nor treasure (there was no oil), only acceptance of its “strategic interests” and gratitude for its Asian manifestations: Coca-Cola and Napalm.

Classics rediscovered

Camilo — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 09:07:09 +0000

We had mourned the lost of the works of the classic Greek authors: out of the estimated 120 plays by Sophocles, only 7 remained. Damn those bishops and their burnings (Or whoever we blame now)! At any rate, some of those plays, and many others, were thought lost forever have been found (are we so frail and ephemeral?) within the more than 400.000 fragments that comprise the Oxyrhynchus Papyri :

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence.

Oh, we are so getting a movie out of this!

Auschwitz

Camilo — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:00:35 +0000

This article by Deborah E. Lipstadt deserves attention: Auschwitz, by the dignity it shows, and the reminder it gives:

Sixty years later, as darkness fell over Auschwitz, I turned to one of the members of our delegation and said: “It’s really cold. I regret not having worn another layer of clothing.” Suddenly Levi’s words came cascading back on me. I was embarrassed. And then without explaining why, I stood up in silent tribute not just to S&ocute;mogyi, but to the countless nameless others who had died there or those, such as Elie Wiesel’s father, who died soon after the death march. I also stood for people such as Levi, who survived but bore the terrible wounds of the place for the rest of their lives.

I can only hope somebody at the White House reads it.

This is the fight

Camilo — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 00:40:36 +0000

Bill MOyer’s speech at the Inequality Matters Forum: This is the Fight of Our Lives

With honorable exceptions, we can’t count on the mass media.
What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes — there’s plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives.

viaa kalilily

Black Monks

Camilo — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 16:40:23 +0000

There is an excavation of an old medieval Benedictine monastery that could shed some light on the origins of syphilis:

The skeleton of the unknown woman, aged between 17 and 25, was dug up as part of a routine excavation ordered at the old churchyard in 1991 by the then county archaeologist Malcolm Atkin. Dr Charlotte Roberts of Bradford University examined the contents of grave 77 and concluded the
woman had died between 1400 and 1450 from the advanced stages of syphilis. According to her dates, the young woman died of the disease well before Columbus is supposed to have brought the disease back from the Americas in 1493.

It had been widely believed that the disease was brought from the New World to Europe. This could mean that the disease had been actually in the wild in the 14th and 15th centuries, and then exploded as armies started moving through Europe. If syphilis had been in Europe prior to that, that piece of history has to be reevaluated.

via Dangercat

EL Infiernito

Camilo — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 15:21:34 +0000

In Villa de Leyva, Colombia (actually, 4 miles from Moniquira), there is an old indigenous astronomical observatory from the prechibchas, the indigenous groups that came before the chibchas in the first millennium AC; sadly, not much else is known about them, and that collection of 20 eight foot tall giant penises does not help to elucidate what that culture may have been like.

In Eastern Island, they have the heads. In Colombia, well, what a coincidence!