Idi Amin

In a movie opening today, The Last King of Scotland, portrays one of the towering and largely despised figures of the second half of the 20th-century, Uganda's dictator Idi Amin. Here is Bob Mondello's review (9/27/2006 - 3:53), with links to an interview with actor Forest Whitaker and with two scenes from the film.

Amin seized power in 1971, and ruled Uganda with an iron fist, in the process killing some 300,000 people before he was deposed and forced to flee to Saudi Arabia in 1979, where he died in 2003.

Musings

• What makes a dictatorial leader a hated figure instead of a strong leader? Consider, for instance, what we know about the President of Sudan, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, the man largely responsible for the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of his country?
  
  
• What is your sense of the status of Saddam Hussein, and just why and when he earned his current reputation?
  
  
• In the theater and films, one sure-fire way to define a strong hero is by creating a strong villain. Does this seem process apply to politics?
  

1906 Atlanta Race Riot

Kathy Lohr presents this overview of four days of race riots (9/22/2006 - 7:44) in the city of Atlanta. The exact number of deaths is in dispute, although the official count was 12 blacks and two whites. The match that seemed to light the fuse was the incendiary claim of black men raping white women, a claim flamed by competing politicians and special editions of competing newspapers.

"There was a great deal of concern about the city itself, and the decaying morals associated with an urban environment," says Cliff Kuhn, history professor at Georgia State University, a concern centered on the question of the danger to white women posed by black men. Then there was a series of allegations of new rapes of white women, all unsubstantiated. Kuhn continues the story:

Newsboys are hawking these editions: 'Extra! Extra! Read all about it!' And at the corner of Pryor and Decatur Street, a man gets up on a soapbox and waves one of these newspaper headlines and says, 'Are we going to let them do this to our white women? Come on, boys!' And the mob surges down Decatur Street.

Musings

• Current heated debate over illegal Hispanic immigration in the U.S. seems to lack the hot-button issue of race. Is that because we have changed or because we feel differently about Hispanics?
  
• Check out this lengthy list of U.S. race riots at Wikipedia.

We welcome your comments on this topic,
including annotated links to related Web materials.