
@RizomaSchool 1/3 My fascination with foreign correspondents, half a century old now, prompted my first career, in journalism. Truth be told, if there's one thing the passing of the decades teach, it's that the stories, utterly captivating though they are, remain the same. Plus ça change...

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Quick meta-aside, Allan. Don't think I ever mentioned to you that as a teenager my icons were foreign correspondents - I devoured everything they wrote, and everything about 'em. Always wanted to be one. In retrospect though, the quotidian fare of your typical hack abroad - politics, famine, revolution, assorted disasters n' suchlike - hasn't held my attention for a long time now. Robert Fisk's latest, The Great War for Civilization, strikes me as a classic example of the genre - an unrelieved litany of political mendacity, torture, rape, genocide and war, by a journalist passionately committed to the cause of justice, and rightfully regarded as one of the more remarkable voices of his generation. For old times' sake, I picked up this text by an icon of mine: for new times' sake, I simply had to put it down. I'm deeply thankful, then, to have been offered the mantle of a 'foreign correspondent' whose essential brief is the fundamentals of peacemaking...

end/ @guardian @UniteThePoor guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/allotment/2007/dec/20/fromourforeigncorrespondent
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