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How Many Days

Posted on 28/04/2011 by admin

I am looking at a book on the Six Day war and remembering from history lessons how we title wars, the 30 years war, the Hundred Years war, the war of this or the war of that. Do we really think these wars are all started for different reasons? Do we really suppose that fighting for kingdoms, for empires , for succession, for revenge, for resources are all different wars? That somehow if the soldiers speak Spanish,Dholuo, English or Arabic they are somehow all different soldiers?

History lessons have defined periods of time to teach  and we do tend to divide countries up into strata that make some logical sense, stemming from political or social changes. But I wonder how different we think the English are from the Picts or the French are from the Gauls?

Plato used to talk about the nature of things and differentiated between those things that change and those that do not. Classically he talked about the size, shape, colour and materials of a table all changing but they were all still tables. There was something that was the same no matter what they looked like. The same is true of human beings. Language, clothes, habits matter nothing when trying to define what a human being is because a human being is all times, all countries, all conditions.

Given enough time, everything becomes meaningless.

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Children’s author, novelist, editor and poet.

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