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" MARK TWAIN Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model. Both wars were inspired from heaven. Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . . At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography.” And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars. General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
27
" Presidents of the United States tend to speak in God's name, although none of them has let on if He communicates by letter, fax, telephone, or telepathy. With or without His approval, in 2006 God was proclaimed chairman of the Republican Party of Texas.
That said, the All Powerful, who is even on the dollar bill, was a shining absence at the time of independence. The constitution did not mention Him. At the Constitutional Convention, when a prayer was suggested, Alexander Hamilton responded: 'We don't need foreign aid.'
On his deathbed, George Washington wanted no prayers or priest or minister or anything.
Benjamin Franklin said divine revelation was nothing but poppy-cock.
'My mind is my own church,' affirmed Thomas Paine, and President John Adams believed that 'this world be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.'
According to Thomas Jefferson, Catholic priests and Protestant minsters were 'soothsayers and necromancers' who divided humanity, making 'one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
29
" BLACK WINGS At the same Olympics, staged by Hitler to consecrate the superiority of his race, the star that shone brightest was black, a grandson of slaves, born in Alabama. Hitler had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill, four of them actually: the four gold medals that Jesse Owens won in sprinting and long jump. The entire world celebrated those victories of democracy over racism. When the champion returned home, he received no congratulations from the president, nor was he invited to the White House. He returned to the usual: he boarded buses by the back door, ate in restaurants for Negroes, used bathrooms for Negroes, stayed in hotels for Negroes. For years, he earned a living running for money. Before the start of baseball games he would entertain the crowd by racing against horses, dogs, cars, or motorcycles. Later on, when his legs were no longer what they had been, Owens took to the lecture circuit. He did pretty well there, praising the virtues of religion, family, and country. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
32
" FATHER OF THE BOY SCOUTS Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted, and not for the merits of Sherlock Holmes. The writer was invited to join the ranks of the nobility as thanks for the propaganda he wrote for the imperial cause. One of his heroes was Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. They met while fighting savages in Africa: “There was always something of the sportsman in his keen appreciation of war,” Sir Arthur said. Gifted in the art of following the tracks of others and erasing his own, Baden-Powell was a great success at the sport of hunting lions, boars, deer, Zulus, Ashantis, and Ndebeles. Against the Ndebeles, he fought a rough battle in southern Africa. Two hundred and nine blacks and one Englishman died. The colonel took as a souvenir the horn the enemy blew to sound the alarm. And that spiral-shaped horn from a kudu antelope was incorporated into Boy Scout ritual as the symbol of boys who love nature. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
37
" ORIGIN OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS When Namibia won its independence in 1990, the main avenue of the capital city still bore the name Göring. Not for Hermann, the Nazi, but in honor of his father, Heinrich Göring, one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the twentieth century. That Göring, who represented the German Empire in the southwest corner of Africa, kindly approved in 1904 an annihilation order given by General Lothar von Trotta. The Hereros, black shepherds, had risen up in rebellion. The colonial authorities expelled them all and warned that any Herero found in Namibia, man, woman, or child, armed or unarmed, would be killed. Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun. The survivors of the butchery ended up in concentration camps set up by Göring. And Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow pronounced for the very first time the word “Konzentrationslager.” The camps, inspired by a British forerunner in South Africa, combined confinement, forced labor, and scientific experimentation. The prisoners, emaciated from a life in the gold and diamond mines, served as human guinea pigs for research into inferior races. In those laboratories worked Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, who later became the teachers of Josef Mengele. Mengele carried forth their work as of 1933, the year that Göring the son set up the first concentration camps in Germany, following the model his father pioneered in Africa. "
― Eduardo Galeano , Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone