These Nubian men & boys, delightfully celebrating Eid al Adha with a selfie, live in the Nuba region, Aswan in southern Egypt. Who are the Nubians? The teaching of world history in US high schools & universities is a travesty of colonialism & racism. As an avid student of history, I rejected the elitist good king/bad king scenario explaining political events & change & always wanted to know what ordinary people were doing. But when I decided to stop studying history backwards & start at the “beginning,” I accepted the Eurocentric view that history began with the Greeks. (Forgive my ignorance; that was over 40 years ago.)

It was often through art museums I learned there was an entire historical universe not centered in Europe but in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, & that the best heritage of Greek achievement often came from those places or from interaction with those cultures. Even the Islamic Empire is excluded from US education. But not from museums.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) is a magnificent place with immense, spectacular galleries of Egyptian art which they renovated about 20 years ago to make even more imposing. The renovations were part of expanding the museum to nearly twice the size & included shifting the main entrance elsewhere. To avoid long lines I would enter by the old main door & did so for years without noticing an unlit gallery just off the foyer. Accidentally I noticed it was actually a gallery & decided to explore. An Irish woman tourist & an American Black male student were also there & we explored the gallery together.

It was a gallery of Nubian art, indistinguishable from Egyptian art except that the people depicted were clearly of African ancestry. The three of us were aghast at the disrespectful treatment of Nubian art & could not believe it was not incorporated into the renovated Egyptian galleries or at least adjacent to them where it belonged. And we talked about how our education about Africa & Egypt was a mockery of reality.

It should be noted that the MFA was just as disrespectful of American Black art, displaying it in a busy hallway next to fire extinguishers & behind potted plants. After repeated objections by patrons, including myself, the art was moved to a suitable gallery.

Scholarship has corrected much of the Eurocentrism warping historic education but this is not yet common pedagogy in US schools–nor I suspect in European, Canadian, or Australian schools. US schools still don’t teach the history of Native Americans & the colonial conquest nor a non-supremacist history of American slavery, Black Reconstruction, or Jim Crow.

This historical warp has everything to do with the ability of the US government to conduct wars without massive opposition because it portrays itself as a liberating force for primitive cultures.

Not every one can afford college; that’s what libraries, art museums, & now the internet are for. Correcting the historical warp is part of building solidarity by showing the profound connections human beings have across the globe in history & in every intellectual field of endeavor.

(Photo by Belal Darder/AP)

Pope Francis spoke at great length to the Congress; he spoke so long & said so little it must have seemed like an eternity, so chock-full it was of cliches & sentimentalities–the kind of speech we’re accustomed to from politicians.

He said he wants to dialogue with seniors because we are a “storehouse of wisdom forged by experience.” He’s got that straight. So let’s dialogue, Pope!

There was little to disagree with in his homily & the US Congress, that bastion of war appropriations, broke often into enthusiastic applause–especially vigorous applause when he called for compassion for immigrants.

Was anyone else disturbed, if not also mystified, that yesterday Pope Francis canonized Junípero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan monk who helped colonize California by brutal suppression of Native Americans? Since Native Americans have publicly campaigned against the canonization, the Pope was certainly aware of the controversy.

And not to engage in small-minded carping, but as an antiwar activist it appalls that he would refer to the US as the “land of the free & home of the brave.” Not for Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen, et al, it ain’t. Of course, I’m still bristling over the Pope sweet-talking Palestinians while tacitly supporting Israel.

On Sept 10th, an Indian high court in occupied Kashmir ordered authorities to strictly implement a 1932 law–which they have not enforced for nearly 70 years–making slaughter of cows punishable with up to 10 years of imprisonment plus a fine.

Cows are remarkable, even if underestimated, animals. But this post is not about the sacredness of cows in Hinduism nor the virtues of vegetarianism. It is about the politics of beef in India which is a tangled web of right-wing Hindu nationalism & discrimination against Muslims & the oppressed castes who number about 430 million people combined (nearly one-third of the Indian population of nearly 1.3 billion people) who are beef eaters.

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi came to power with the support of Hindu right-wing nationalist groups who want cows revered as sacred, oppose cow slaughter & want it considered a crime–though the impulse behind it is less likely religious than it is political persecution of Muslims, Dalits, & other oppressed castes. Kashmir is a predominantly Muslim region.

It is in the market that religious attitudes toward cows conflict head-on with the realities of capitalism. India is the world’s largest exporter (exceeding even Brazil) & fifth largest consumer of beef. In the year 2012-2013, USD $29 million of beef was exported from India. When Modi, a Hindu nationalist, was chief minister of the state of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, he banned beef slaughter & consumption under penalty of seven years in jail. Modi also presided in Gujarat over a Hindu nationalist pogrom against Muslims. However at the same time, meat export from Gujarat doubled & the state has one of the largest numbers of slaughterhouses. Throughout India, there are an estimated 30,000 illegal slaughterhouses. Some sources claim these are all Muslim-owned but that isn’t the way capitalism works. If there’s money to be made, religious scruples become ceremonial.

The ban on cattle slaughter has generated a black market industry, particularly to Bangladesh where an estimated two million head of cattle are smuggled annually for food & tannery factories. Bangladesh estimates the worth of cattle smuggling from India at three percent of the country’s USD $190 billion economy.

There are a lot of Indian jobs related to the cattle industry–from farmers & traders to people engaged in processing, deboning, packing, & those engaged in the tannery industry, pharmaceuticals where cow urine is used, & pet food. Poor farmers, already under siege by agribusiness plantations & threatened by crop failure or drought, cannot sustain unproductive animals just because the state declares them sacred. Thousands more farmers would be economically destroyed.

There is a debate generated by a book titled “The Myth of the Holy Cow,” written by Professor Dwijendra Narayan Jha, who claims, contrary to Hindu nationalists, that beef eating was common in ancient Hinduism before the advent of Islam to India. That’s possible since we know from Catholicism & other religions that proscriptions come & go & are most often influenced by political events. But the dispute now in Kashmir & the rest of India is not over Hindu theology & practice, nor is it over advocacy of vegetarianism. It is about right-wing fundamentalists & nationalists under the guise of religion stoking conflict & legitimizing persecution of Muslims, Dalits, & the other oppressed castes–not because they eat beef but because they are persecuted in India.

This photo is Kashmiri activists protesting the beef ban being attacked by Indian police & paramilitary thugs.

(Photo by Dar Yasin/AP)

The British media–already filled to the gills with sensationalism–will be commenting for months about “Pig-gate” & Cameron. The personal debaucheries of the ruling class don’t interest me one iota & I will not be commenting, except perhaps for occasional ridicule. The political worthlessness of these characters is beyond dispute but the British media will only use this crap to distract from the criminal debaucheries of Britain in war & colonialism because those are the things that really matter.

This isn’t the feudal king of Saudi Arabia (SA) with Obama but one of the princes or a minion of some sort. The two jamokes have so much in common–like criminal responsibility for the 6-month bombing siege of Yemen–taking out schools, hospitals, homes, refugee camps with cluster bombs supplied by the Pentagon.

The US State Department welcomes the news that SA was chosen to head up a UN human rights panel. Of course they do. That will make sure the Saudis have Obama’s back in the UN against charges of war crimes–like the atrocities just exposed by Green Berets in Afghanistan–or for supplying the arsenal to Israel for carpet bombing of Gaza.

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