You have my sincere thanks and appreciation for continuing to highlight this issue.

Thanks for your comments. I have thought about what you said a lot, particularly in the area of Native American history. I team taught a class a couple of times with an historian of Native American history and culture, and it forced me to think through in excrciating detail the long sad tale of the interaction of European and indigenous culture. We focused on original texts and accounts as much as we could, and also brought in Native Americans to talk with us. I can remember after some classes we all, students and professor, would sit in shock, as if the world had been turned upside down; as if all we had been taught was exactly the opposite (Hegel's verkehrte Welt with a vengeance). I would feel like leaving class to go and take down the American flag on campus and run it back up and fly it upside down and shriek. Does it ever end, this struggle? And you see the progress, and its undeniable, but the darkness that springs up again and again is undeniable as well. To be an American Studier is indeed to be a brave soul.

Rrheard I long ago figured out that the best place for a real philosopher to hide from the authorities would be in a philosophy department, because the last place they would come looking for a real philosopher was amongst the philosophy professors. I never forget how a friend of mine in grad school and I came to the realization, after an afternoon of intense conversation, that all our work and effort to study philosophy had served to propel us to that most dangerous of places to practice philosophy: the philosophy department. Hegel called academia the geistigetierreich, a sort of intellectual/ spiritual zoo, and so it is, with the cage doors open. The most dangerous place to seek the truth is with the intellectual animals, though I have found it can be done. But I would not recommend it to everyone, and certainly to no one with a weak stomach. You can find philosophers hiding in philosophy departments, but they are usually camouflaged like one of God’s spies.

Thanks for your comments. Reading what you wrote made reading the review worthwhile (you redeemed the time I spent on it). I was born in New Orleans and grew up there, and what you said really struck a chord.

The Estes prayer thing was nice. I liked it a lot. Always keep on the upward way.

If someone shot into my house it would not make sense for me to call in airstrikes on the town they came from, killing hundreds of innocent people in response. Your analogy makes no sense to me.

That was indeed a good and disturbing question you asked:

"And a disturbing question:

Have the Palestinians perhaps learnt the lesson of the Warsaw Ghetto? The lesson of Israel's founders, that to acquiesce is to acquiesce in your own destruction, that even if it is hopeless, you must fight, so that people need to be taught that, at the end of the day, not to fuck with Palestinians too?"

The wheel of sadness turns round and round again.

for your lucid commentary and analysis, informed with intelligent moral outrage. You have become a public voice for people like me, who scan the media in vain for a rationally moral point of view, and I appreciate it. It sometimes seems there is so very little we can do in bearing witness to the madness on any side which would dehumanize any human being: but to always call them on it it, always to shine a light on it, always to apeak up--that is the least we can do. And you help me to do that by speaking up in this public space. Thanks for the time and effort and care, sir.

Seemingly by your own analysis we, too, are condemned as less than human (if, as I take it, you are an American--for we have an unrelently violent history with the indigenous peoples of the continent, and anyone else who has ever stood in our way). So by what you say, only some vanishingly small subset of Europeans (which ones?) and those who follow their role model are truly human. Perhaps we should all just go and slit our own throats and get it over with.

I refuse to give up the hope of the potential for humanity in all of us. Its the only gamble worth taking, it seems to me. I would rather go down in defeat and die then to live at the expense of my own or others humanity. Some victories are not worth the cost.