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The formal end of the apartheid government in South Africa was hard-won. It took decades of activism from both inside and outside the country, as well as international economic pressure, to end the regime that allowed the countrys white minority to subjugate its Black majority. This work culminated in the dismantling of apartheid between 1990 and 1994. On April 27, 1994, the country elected Nelson Mandela, an activist who had spent 27 years in prison for his opposition to apartheid, in its first free presidential election.

The white minority who controlled the apartheid government were Afrikaanersdescendants of mostly Dutch colonists who had invaded South Africa starting in the 17th century. Although Afrikaaner oppression of Black South Africans predates the formal establishment of apartheid in 1948, apartheid legalized and enforced a specific racial ideology that separated South Africans into legally distinct racial groups: white, African, coloured (i.e., multiracial) and Indian. The apartheid government used violence to enforce segregation between these groups, and forcibly separated many families containing people assigned to different racial categories.

Black South Africans resisted apartheid from the very beginning. In the early 1950s, the African National Congress, or ANC, launched a Defiance Campaign. The purpose of this campaign was for Black South Africans to break apartheid laws by entering white areas, using white facilities and refusing to carry passesdomestic passports the government used to restrict the movements of Black South Africans in their own country. In response, the government banned the ANC in 1960, and arrested the prominent ANC activist Nelson Mandela in August 1962.

The banning of the ANC and the incarceration of its leaders forced many ANC members into exile. But it did not stop resistance within South Africa, says Wessel Visser, a history lecturer at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

What many dissidents started to do inside the country was to form a kind of an alternativeresistance movement called the United Democratic Front, he says. The UDF, formed in 1983, was a [collaboration] of church leaders and political leaders who were not banned at that stage, community leaders, trade unionists, etc., he says.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Reverend Allan Boesak, two of the UDFs main leaders, started to organize marches to parliament, in Cape Town, in Pretoria, Johannesburgcrowds of 50 to 80,000 people, so there was definitely a groundswell of resistance against apartheid, he says. And around the world, this activism drew attention.

Ronald Reagan delivers a speech regarding South Africa, July 1986.

Dirck Halstead/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

One of the big moments for international awareness of apartheid was in 1976, when thousands of Black children in the Soweto township protested a government policy mandating that all classes be taught in Afrikaans. Police responded to the protests with violence, killing at least 176 people and injuring over 1,000 more. The massacre drew more attention to activists calls to divest from South Africa, something the United Nations General Assembly had first called on member states to do back in 1962.

Campaigns for economic sanctions against South Africa gained steam in the 1980s, but faced considerable resistance from two important heads of state: United States President Ronald Reagan and United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Both Reagan and Thatcher condemned Mandela and the ANC as communists and terrorists at a time when the apartheid government promoted itself as a Cold War ally against communism.

Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, but the U.S. Congress overrode his decision with a two-thirds majority, passing the act to impose sanctions on South Africa. The U.K. also imposed limited sanctions despite Thatchers objections. The combination of international sanctions placed significant economic pressure on South Africa, which was then at war with the present-day nations of Namibia, Zambia and Angola.

Anti-apartheid activism also drew international attention to Mandela. International advocates urged South Africa to release him and other imprisoned ANC members and allow exiled members back into the country.

As early as 1984 there were attempts by national intelligence inside the government structures and also by some of the ministers to make contact with the ANC and sound out the waters of a possibility of a negotiated settlement, says Anton Ehlers, a history lecturer at Stellenbosch University.

Anti-apartheid leader and African National Congress member Nelson Mandela and his wife anti-apartheid campaigner Winnie raise fists upon Mandela's release from prison on February 11, 1990.

Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images

Visser speculates that the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 helped speed the process of ending apartheid along because it took away one of the governments main defenses of itself among Western allies: that it needed to remain in place to fight communism. The argument that the ANC are only the puppets of the Reds couldnt be used anymore, Visser says, both because the Cold War was ending and because the ANC now had a lot more support in Europe and the U.S.

Mandela finally walked free on February 11, 1990, and negotiations to end apartheid formally began that year. These negotiations lasted for four years, ending with the election of Mandela as president. In 1996, the country initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to reckon with the gross human rights violations during apartheid.

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Key Steps That Led to End of Apartheid - History

In your book Communism has a future if we free it from the past (1) , here you are continuing a path which leads you to the idea of a rediscovery of Marx. How does this translate?

Bernard Vasseur Indeed, looking at what is happening in the world today, what is being written, what is also thought, I found something new. Thirty years ago, when you looked in the windows of bookstores, you couldnt find a single book by Marx. The German philosopher was treated like a dead dog. He was equated with the failure of the socialist countries and the USSR. At the moment, on the contrary, we see a kind of incredible flowering of books by Marx and books on Marx. We find new translations, writings that we did not know in my youth. Marx with Engels are being rediscovered. Its very strong. Within the French labor movement, two dimensions were separated for a long time in Marx. We have seen in him the thinker of anticapitalism and the class struggle, but we have often forgotten that he is also a thinker of communism, what he calls the Classless society or The end of the prehistory of human society. A Classless society, it is a society without dominants, nor dominated. This speaks to us immediately when we think of the inequalities of all kinds (not just income) that are exploding and which are perceived as unacceptable. Communism is the aim of human emancipation. So it is certainly not the big night, but it is indeed a revolution. It is the idea of a change of era of humanity, where each human being decides, individually and collectively, to fight for control of his life and to decide his work. I recall the beginning of the Communist Party Manifesto: The history of any society up to the present day has only been the history of class struggles. Marx also poses the question of a real transformation, of a change in the way of making humanity and of working for the human race , according to the famous word of the International. For me, we must reconcile the two dimensions and not stop at the thought of against in order to be, at the same time for . We fight this capitalist society and we act in favor of a change of civilization. And besides, the current challenges are such that we cannot be satisfied with changing power or government, we need a deep, civilizational change. I would add that when we see the success of intellectuals like Alain Badiou, tienne Balibar, Frdric Lordon, David Graeber, Bernard Friot, etc., and even Thomas Piketty in his own way and within his limits, who speak of Marx or the Communism, one can be astonished that the Communists themselves, and the party which is right to want to remain Communist, do not more proclaim themselves the heirs of Marx and evoke so little communism. It is also this paradox that led me to write this book. Another effort, comrades!

How then is Marx fully relevant today?

Bernard Vasseur I was talking about the many intellectual works. But, if we look at the latest social struggles and the Covid-19 health crisis, we can still see the shadow of Marx hovering there. We recall. The caregivers, especially the hospital workers, led a very long strike. I remember this slogan: The state is counting its money, we will count the dead. We see what truth this warning acquires today in the midst of an epidemic. In the earlier period, this remark meant: health is not a commodity. We cannot run the public hospital like a capitalist enterprise with the dictatorship of numbers, with what Alain Supiot calls the Governance by numbers. Lets take the yellow vests again. They have brought to the fore the precariousness of life, the poverty of people who work but who can no longer make a living from their work. The question of inequalities and the political representation of the humble, of the rank and file was raised. Here again, we can find Marxs shadow with the stake of reappropriating the policy that he places at the heart of the communist idea. What is often translated in French by The withering away of the class state. Third example, the retirement movement: everyone has understood that the government project was intended to make us work longer. In a capitalist regime, this means being exploited for longer. The fact of living longer became a prey in order to make ever more profits. Here again, the shadow of Marx and his idea of communism appear. It is not only in intellectual circles that we see it, ideas are born today within the social movement. Which makes me say that communism is fully topical.

And then there is the health crisis and the climatic challenges we are facing. You have also published, with the Editions de lHumanit, a small essay entitled After the health crisis? Post-capitalism. How do these threats to life raise the question of overcoming the capitalist system? And how to do it in the age of neoliberal globalization?

Bernard Vasseur Regarding Covid-19, we have talked a lot about next day . Hay herbal teas and lukewarm water, for my part, I spoke of the After system, therefore, post-capitalism. It is this struggle in the present to get out of capitalism that Marx qualifies as communism, and not a distant horizon, a marvelous ideal or a social model presenting the portrait of a society of the future like a tourist brochure. Now this idea of leaving capitalism, of a new civilization, is coming of age. I read zoonoses specialists (those diseases that pass from animals to humans). To explain the pandemic, they call into question the most high-tech contemporary mode of development of capitalism. Now, capitalism is now rushing into the world without obstacles or safeguards, it dominates societies like no other mode of production before it and it is alone on the trail. He cannot disguise or erase his responsibilities and we can look him in the face, as Marx did in his time. The pandemic which strikes the world sows disease and death, makes visible to all that it imposes a mode of development and existence which is distressing and deadly. This is indeed a de-civilization that must be stopped if we want to continue living by leaving fear. Behind the globalization of capital, that is to say the crazy dream of imposing on the entire planet the Western way of inhabiting it, arise the always most essential impulses of capitalism: the insatiable will to power, the wild competition, inequality, cash fetishism. They have been known for a long time, but they take on considerable proportions, become visible and largely shocking. Here again, the exit from capitalism: this is a good rallying point. Finally, there are the ecological disasters that are looming and which are also becoming visible: the earth is heating up, the polar caps and glaciers are melting, natural resources are being exhausted. For all this too, exit from capitalism!

Does capitalism, with the development of a green market, want to give itself an environmental face?

Bernard Vasseur I show in my book that green capitalism is inconceivable. There is indeed an operation underway to do green marketing around ecology. But capitalism cannot reconcile the search for profit and ecosystems, a myriad of private enterprises and social control of respect for ecological standards, the short term of finance and the long term of planetary balances. If we really read Marx by getting rid of the reading imposed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first by German Social Democracy and then by the Soviet reading of the Third International, we will find absolutely pioneering texts by Marx in it. matter. John Bellamy Foster made this remarkably evident in his Ecologist Marx (Amsterdam, 2011). The productivism that we associate with Marx today is not found in his work, which, on the contrary, is concerned with natural balances in several texts of the Capital. But this is what the Soviet conception of Stakhanovism slipped under its name and made it take for its thought. This is the reason why I say that communism has a future, on condition that it is freed from the traditions of the past. Free Marx from the militant Marxism of the past.

In this concern to free oneself from the past, you insist on the fact that socialism and communism have too often been confused. What do you mean ?

Bernard Vasseur Indeed, there is an anomaly a ruse of history in the development of the workers movement. I repeat: Marx and Engels are thinkers of communism. But what prevailed for two centuries was the word socialism, both in German social democracy and in Soviet socialism. Even today, these two words are still considered synonyms. Did Marx identify them? I think not and I am trying to demonstrate it. In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Party manifesto. Subsequently, we called for socialism but, in my opinion, there is a difference in ambition and political means between the two. For example, socialism suffers from its belief in the state as the engine of social dynamics, not communism. Communism according to Marx has never been tried.

But how is post-capitalism, in other words communism, capable of being the first reference point for change?

Bernard Vasseur In 1992, in the end of history and the last man, Fukuyama portrayed a world where triumphant capitalism achieves Intimate marriage market economy and representative democracy. The time for such enthusiasm has long passed. However, what weighs on social struggles is the idea that what collapsed in the twentieth century was communism. So if communism is dead, there can be nothing other than capitalism. This seriously handicaps all current social movements, which must therefore remain on the defensive. We can only defend ourselves against but we have nothing to propose for. I believe that if one decides to speak of communism as Marx thought it, things can evolve. In the capital, Marx writes: Communism is a form of superior society, the fundamental principle of which is the full and free development of each individual. If we look at what happened in the twentieth century, what we call communism and that we should actually call Failure of the socialist countries, Has nothing to do with The full and free development of each individual. In the first part of Communism? (La Dispute, 2018), Lucien Sve produced a corner stone that we can draw on this story. In view of the world around us, we have to step into the breach. It is time to put Marx and communism back in the public debate, and to recreate the idea that there are two paths for humanity. We are not condemned to capitalism ad vitam aeternam. The second path, that of human emancipation, which has been called communism for more than three centuries, has a future.

(1) Communism has a future if we free it from the past, by Bernard Vasseur, Editions de lHumanit, 344 pages, 11.50 euros. available here.

For the release of his essay Communism has a future if we free it from the past, Bernard Vasseur was the guest of the issue of the books of Humanity, At the foot of the letter, released on November 12.

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Bernard Vasseur: It is time to put Marx and communism back in the public debate - Pledge Times

Dong Fang | Wikimedia Commons | Photo CourtesyCommunism might work better in theory than in practice.This form of government might not be as exciting as you think

With the United States election finally coming to a close there has been a conversation of what it means to be democratic and what it could mean to be part of a more socialist society.

And despite what Twitter would like you to believe, neither Biden nor Trump are the biggest threat to our democracy. Who is the monster under Americas bed? The shadow in our closet? The creature in the corn we should be fearful of? Communist North Korea.

Some Americans truly believe that a socialist and communist style of government would be more beneficial to America and her people. Yeonmi Park, a human rights activist and defector from North Korea, recommends that if you truly believe that communism is much better then you should go live there.

She details her escape in her book, In Order to Live, and also on her YouTube channel where she speaks even more in-depth about growing up in a communist regime and what motivated her to escape.

She has spent a lot of time in the states talking about how her experience growing up in North Korea has shaped her as an individual. She talks about eating frogs, dragonflies, grasshoppers and anything else she could forage on the mountainside because she was so desperately hungry. How the mountains had no trees from people finding anything that can be burned to try and keep their families warm during harsh winters. How she grew up in a home with a maximum of two blankets and eating frozen potatoes to survive.

There are also many things punishable by death or by a sentence to a prison camp. These things include watching foreign films, reading the bible or any religious text, attempting to defect, falling out of favor with the dear leader Kim Jung-Un and fortune-telling are among some of the reasons for listed executions. The executions themselves are often inhumane with public and brutal killings such as burning to death by flamethrower, which was the death of the dictators nephew.

A fate worse than death is the infamous prison camps. There are consistent reports of sexual assault, starvation, torture, slave labor and infanticide, among other unspeakable horrors. There are estimated to be up to 200,000 prisoners in up to 12 camps, some of which have merged or been closed, and one known suppressed rebellion that left 5,000 dead.

Additionally, when one person commits a crime as determined by the regime, three generations of family members can be sent to prison camp: grandparents, parents and children,

Life of a North Korean means living without power, without food, without blankets. The regime is meeting none of the necessities of its people. Those who do escape often end up as sex slaves in communist China. China also has a record of returning escapes to North Korea for execution. Chinas influence makes the regime in North Korea possible.

As Park put it, North Korea is not an oil-producing country. If we cut off China supplying the regime with oil, then the needs of the higher-ups will no longer be met and the regime will begin to collapse in on itself. She does express that food, water and other necessities should not be cut off because that ultimately only hurts the people, not the leaders.

Many believe that the reason that North Koreans live in such dire conditions is that its a third-world country which, according to Park, simply isnt true. North Korea accumulates wealth by manufacturing drugs and selling weapons to the middle east. The reason they choose not to feed and house people is that when people arent hungry, when people arent spending all their time trying to survive, then people begin to think critically and ask questions and the dictator doesnt want that.

North Korea should not have the privilege of hiding from the world. It is truly one of the darkest places on earth, and not just because there is rarely power.The people who live there should not have to continue to suffer. They deserve basic human rights and America shouldnt continue to allow the regime to amass wealth and become a nuclear powerhouse. They have a population of 25 million slaves with no rights, no food, and no hope.

People like Park are the courageous individuals we should be looking up to. She risked it all for food and found freedom. Her compassion for her people inspires us to take a closer look at the secrets that are hidden behind closed doors, and fight to give those without opportunities the chance they deserve.

There are so many more crimes I could talk about like the forced military service, sexual assault, domestic violence, brainwashing, propaganda or the fact that the dictators wife hasnt been seen in 9 months. All of which are problems that can arise from any system but are worsened by the regimes suppression of people and their rights.

North Korea isnt the only country where communism is tearing itself apart. Communist and socialist Venezuela also has dire living conditions, no access to medicine and food and has refused any and all aid from the US and other countries as well.

As nice it sounds in practice, communism isnt effective. Humans are selfish, greedy creatures and it doesnt make sense to give one group all the resources and all the wealth and hope that they evenly and fairly distribute it. People are selfish and once they are in that position of unchecked power they have no reasons to fairly distribute their wealth.

Capitalism isnt perfect. It is flawed, as weve seen this year, and has many problems, such as those within humongous corporations like big tech. But at least we are given basic rights, we can speak freely, at least I have the freedom to get a job and provide for myself. I can choose my profession, control my finances. But these are not universal principles, and we should not be too quick to forget that, because the alternative is disastrous.

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Communism? Yikes. - the Spectrum - NDSU The Spectrum

CHINA-AFRICA

Under the caption Debt-Trap Diplomacy, Wikipedia estimates that in 2020 Angola tops the list of the 10 most indebted countries in Africa, owing an estimated US$25 billion and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) comes at the bottom, owing approximately US$3.4 billion.

As it was asserted in the South China Morning Post in May 2018, China is now Africas most important economic partner. China has also successfully leveraged its economic influence to include African university education.

Confucius Institutes across Africa

During the peak of global communism between the 1950s and 1970s, China was sympathetic to Africas economic and political plight on ideological grounds. China also supported African countries that opted for communism and positioned itself as a global, moral role model.

In that period, as part of its development assistance, China offered Africans only a small number of graduate scholarships to study at its tertiary institutions. However, since 2000 Chinas graduate scholarships and grants to Africans to study in its tertiary institutions have increased to about 61,000.

Over the same period, China has increasingly made its presence in Africa more visible by establishing more than 54 Confucius Institutes (CIs) and 27 Confucius Classrooms (CCs) across the African continent, according to the 2018 edition of Quartz Africa. Both CIs and CCs are major instruments designed to promote Mandarin and Chinese culture in Africa.

The South China Morning Post reports that China has been highly successful in creating a cultural footprint across Africa, the worlds fastest growing continent, through its Confucius Institutes.

Possible cultural influence

In addition, Chinas 20+20 scheme announced at the November 2009 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) ministerial conference links 20 African universities and colleges with those in China. African universities selected for the scheme include the universities of Cairo, Nairobi, Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Pretoria, Makerere and Stellenbosch.

The scheme aims at ensuring a long-term collaboration between African and Chinese higher education. But collaboration for what? What could African universities learn from Chinese universities that they could not learn from European and American universities?

This is a critical question in that Chinese universities increasingly imitate and promote Western university education models for their own use. More precisely, the Chinese insistence that morality and service to the public interest should be an integral component of doctoral education is not quintessentially Chinese.

Quartz Africa also reported on 11 August 2018 that unlike Frances 180 Alliance Francaise centres, Germanys 21 Goethe Institute centres, Portugals 34 Instituto Cames centres and the UKs 38 British Council offices, Chinas Confucius Institutes in Africa are established within colleges and universities across the African continent.

A Confucius Institute is also set up through a partnership between a Chinese university, a host country university and the office of Chinese language and culture promoter Hanban, an agency of the Chinese ministry of education and an affiliate of the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite the fact CIs are housed in African colleges and universities, they are funded and controlled by Hanban.

In addition, a CI is allowed to develop and maintain ties with other local higher education institutions. For example, the CI in Cameroons public University of Yaound has ties with eight local universities and several private language colleges in the country. As a result, in 2017 it was able to enrol more than 10,000 students.

Nonetheless, we must ask why the Chinese government has chosen to establish CIs in African universities? According to my source, a Chinese graduate school colleague, African universities have become very important to China over the past 20 years.

Admittedly, university education is now expected to play a strategic role in African development compared to what was the case at the time of political independence in the 1960s. Indeed, owing to the fact that several empirical studies have demonstrated the importance of human capital, university education in Africa is now seen as a way of nurturing critical human capital for national development.

For this reason, the Chinese want their language and culture to become part of the education of generations of young African undergraduates. More importantly, China wants young Africans to know and appreciate its perspective on world history and to understand the models of economic and social development which have been distorted owing to the dominance of Europe and the United States in Africa.

My colleague says China is doing everything possible to ensure that it gradually wins the hearts and minds of young adult Africans, given the exponential growth of university institutions on the continent. Eventually, the idea is that educated Africans will look to China rather than Europe and America for intellectual inspiration, leadership and models of social and economic development.

This, of course, is a colonial model because colonialism is not merely about forcibly placing a piece of land under foreign control for the purpose of resource exploitation. Colonialism is also about the systematic indoctrination and acculturation of indigenous people for the purposes of cultural domination and exploitation.

Effects on Africas universities

In keeping with Chinas strategic expectations, many African universities are now offering undergraduate degrees and diplomas in Chinese language and culture. An interesting case study is Makerere University in Uganda. In 2019 it launched its first bachelor degree in Chinese and Asian studies. And it is looking forward to creating Chinese and Asian studies degrees at the masters and doctoral level in the near future.

Though the bachelor degree at Makerere University is labelled Chinese and Asian studies, all the constituent courses are oriented towards Chinese language and culture. Where, one may ask, are the courses on Japan, Korea, India, the Philippines, Russia and Vietnam? Are these countries not part of Asia?

The presence of CIs in African universities could influence the academic programmes they offer, how they should be taught and which programmes should be given priority.

It is likely, however, that African governments will roll out more sycophantic policies in the higher education sector in favour of China, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic has further impacted the ability of African countries to repay the debts they owe to China.

As a combined study by the Institute for Security Studies, the Gordon Institute of Business Science and the Frederick S Pardee Center for International Futures has indicated, the cost of repaying African debts and interests have increased substantially while many African currencies have depreciated as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Another effect of the establishment of CIs in African universities is the possibility of crowding out other language programmes, such as German, Spanish, Arabic and Swahili, especially in Anglo-African countries. This may be an unintended consequence.

The problem is that Africa is economically and politically weak and has a burgeoning youth population. That makes it safe, fertile ground for China as a new flowering colonial power. Accordingly, the South China Morning Post declared in 2018 that Chinas soft power policy in Africa was a winner.

The South China Morning Post has also asserted that Mandarin is beginning to challenge the ubiquity of European languages in African countries. While speculation about Mandarin replacing European languages in African universities is exaggerated, it is clear that Mandarin generally poses a formidable challenge to colonial languages in Africa.

The fact of the matter, however, is that English has attained international language status and has even made considerable inroads into Francophone Africa, owing mainly to the cultural influence of the United States as a global superpower.

We should not lose sight of the fact that Rwanda joined the Commonwealth in 2009 and a year earlier changed the medium of education from French to English. In addition, the English language is an indispensable language of communication between African-Americans and continental Africans.

Nonetheless, in Lusophone countries, such as Mozambique and Angola, that have loose ties with their former coloniser, Portugal, Mandarin has good prospects of rubbing shoulders with Portuguese as a national language.

History shows that Mozambique joined the Commonwealth in 1995, though it had no historical association with Great Britains colonisation in Africa. Angola has started campaigning to join the Commonwealth, citing weakness in the Portuguese Association and the continued rivalry between Portugal and Brazil.

Critical African higher education experts are worried about the increasing influence of China in African universities. Yet some higher education experts are optimistic that higher education partnerships between Africa and China will be founded on the basis of mutual respect, equality and honesty.

However, it is my view that African higher education leaders should take care and form alliances to protect their collective interests and to oppose any Chinese colonialism in the higher education sector.

Eric Fredua-Kwarteng is an educator and policy consultant in Canada.

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What is China's higher education agenda in Africa? - University World News

I see you.

In your soft, broken English, I do not hear weakness. In your five-foot frame and small features, I see only strength. I do not know you, but I know you are a survivor a man who has fought for his family his entire life. Im so fortunate to meet a man like you, so grateful to be your doctor.

***

Everyone in the room was watching his breathing, the way he gasped for air pulling in his abdomen and stretching out his neck, using all of his energy to fight against time with lungs that were rapidly failing. His wife was admitted upstairs, on a ventilator, fighting just the same. COVID-19 is smoldering through the Hmong community in St. Paul.

Everyone was watching his breathing, but I saw his feet. Feet that first touched the earth on a misty mountainside in Laos. Feet that ran through the jungle beside his brothers helping Americans fight our secret war on communism. Strong feet that carried the load of his family, their suffering and shared tragedy, across the Mekong River, leaving behind a country that would never welcome him back. Feet that worked in a Thai refugee camp stuffed into slippers made from old car tires. Feet that ultimately found a place to call home in the same city where I grew up, shuffling along snow-covered sidewalks in shoes from Savers that were two sizes too big.

This man survived for his family. Fighting his whole life: in Laos against communist forces that sought to kill him and his people, in Thailand waiting in the purgatory of a refugee camp for a chance at a new start, and here in Minnesota struggling to acclimate to a culture and a climate he could never have imagined.

In 1976, while this man and his relatives were hiding in the jungles and caves of western Laos being hunted and killed en masse after they were abandoned by American forces that had used them like pawns to fight a secret war on communism, Richard Dawkins, an English evolutionary biologist, released his seminal work, The Selfish Gene. This book describes how human emotions and behaviors like sexual desire, love of family, and instinct to protect our young have direct underpinnings in our DNA. Our desire to see our children thrive is hard-wired into our genetic material to give our genes a selective advantage to continue on generation to generation. The problem is that our genes are not alone in this world, they are constantly at odds with the DNA of others: not just other humans, but a dearth of microscopic organisms (including the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV2) living on and around us taking what they need from us to ensure that their genetic material survives on to the next generation.

***

In Laos, you were used by the American government to do our bidding in a war that wasnt yours. You and your family suffered the immense cost of genocide, surviving only to become a stateless people. Here, in Minnesota, you were pushed to the margins of our society, forced to live in an impoverished part of town and take on the jobs white Americans did not want. And now, as you lay here before me, infected with a virus that found you here, but has still not made it to your home village in the lush hills of Laos, again you suffer to survive.

I spoke to your daughter just now. I could hear your grandchildren playing in the background as she gently sobbed, telling me to keep you alive for them. Your genes live on through your family, but sadly your body will not.

Know that I see you. Know that Im proud to call you my neighbor. Know that I will tell my son your story.

Im sorry I cant do more to save your life.

Dr. Daniel Hogan, Lake Elmo, is a resident physician at Regions Hospital.

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Dr. Daniel Hogan: To the Hmong man I met last night in the emergency room - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press