Kidist Paulos Asrat at VFR
Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:
It was fun to go through your search engine to find my first emails to you. I used my initials KPA then, and I think I identified myself as being from Canada since the beginning.Kidist, whose active blog is Camera Lucida (her most recent entries are on Tom Wolfe and Picasso, and on whether post-modernism be defeated), has a unique perspective on things and has provided comments and articles of particular interest at VFR over the years. See, for example, “On the racial character of Ethiopians and Somalis,” and “Can non-Western and nonwhite minorities be pro-Western?” In the latter entry she writes: “[T]he majority of Ethiopians should just go back, since they are so unhappy here and are basically recreating an ‘exiled Ethiopia’ in the snow and the cold.” To which I replied:
I was so impressed by your e-mail, so interested to hear these personal facts about your background. What a strange world we live in. Because of Communists taking over your country decades ago, you grew of age in England, and then ended up in Canada, where you found that your own relatives were on the left and hostile to the very country that had provided them refuge from those Communists. And you, an Ethiopian by birth, found yourself identifying with the countries that were really the only countries you knew, while your relatives absorbed, or perhaps brought with them, the typical leftist minority alienation against those countries.Also see the article Kidist wrote for VFR in 2007 (when she still was ID’d as “KPA”), in which she told how the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia’s tolerance toward its Muslim minority in the 16th century enabled the Muslims to launch a jihad.
I also decided to search and see when I first started commenting on VFR. At the time I posted as “thordaddy,” a pseudonym that you weren’t very fond of. My first contribution was October 27, 2004. You took me to task over my defense of then President Bush. Fortunately or unfortunately, you were far ahead of me in your thinking. It’s weird to read one’s own writing from so far in the past. I also noticed that I didn’t make any contributions from 2005 until sometime in 2007 when I starting using Josh F. I can’t figure why there was such a lull in my correspondence with VFR. But with all your contributors, I’m not even sure that you knew we (thordaddy and Josh F.) were the same person. Anyway, thank you Mr. Auster for all you have done for my intellectual and spiritual development. I hope and pray that you continue to battle for your health and continue to write as prolifically as ever. After your relentless search for Truth, it was your volume of prolific writing that always really impressed me.LA replies:
Thank you very much Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2012 08:07 AM | Send Email entry |