Word: lai
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...Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,” like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling houses and the people in them...
...Blackwater incident in 2007 was no My Lai, and we can be grateful that no such massacre has apparently occurred in Iraq. But the ‘war on terror’ ought always to have been conducted as much a cultural, humanitarian, and moral campaign as a military conflict. What President Bush’s White House never recognized is that the roots of militant Islam could always be traced back to the very sort of careless and baseless military intervention that it ended up endorsing. The war in Iraq may not be the imperialistic oil-grab some...
...crime hollowed out downtown Johannesburg, were some of the most imposing city blocks on the continent, stands an intriguing vision of Africa. Here, the Yung Chen Noodle Den and the Sui Hing Hong Wholesale and Chinese Gift Company rub shoulders with the Gold Reef Restaurant. "Ah, Africa," sighs William Lai, 60, as he gazes out across the great plains of parking lots that define Johannesburg's Chinatown. "Where I was born. Where my children were born. Home...
...High Court judgment caps a bewildering few centuries for the Chinese of South Africa. Lai, who runs a guitar and amplifier repair shop, steers me a few doors down to Sui Hing Hong and a book called Colour, Confusions and Concessions: the History of Chinese in South Africa by Melanie Yap and Daniel Leong Man. It documents how a tiny minority in a land delineated by race have long been abused from all sides. Many arrived in South Africa as virtual slaves, convicts imported as manual laborers by the Dutch and, later, the British. Their second-class status was formalized...
...authors of apartheid found, when you try to order humanity according to race, you quickly descend into tragicomedy. Lai's friend Edwin Chang, 50, a caretaker, says he's lived with this absurdity all his life. He was born in South Africa to immigrants from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, grew up in black townships and speaks English, Afrikaans and Zulu. "Some say we are black, some say we are Asian, some say we are colored, some call me a Boer [a collective term for Afrikaans-speaking white people]," he says. "It's confusing. Where do we stand...