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Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to cloudy skies and rain overnight. Low 37F. E winds shifting to SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Partly cloudy skies this evening will give way to cloudy skies and rain overnight. Low 37F. E winds shifting to SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%.

BOISE — The Idaho Legislature ignored poet Dylan Thomas’s advice and went “gentle into that good night” Thursday, adjourning the 2022 session without overriding any gubernatorial vetoes.

When asked what he’s been working on during the offseason, Nakia Watson didn’t hesitate.

The images out of Ukraine are horrific, made all the more so by the fact that little or no convincing explanation has been provided to justify the war. Yes, we may hear of Ukraine’s alliance with NATO, and the potential threat that that may pose to Russia. But is that enough? From this angle…

Nearly 90 students from 10 schools in the Idaho panhandle gathered at the Coeur d’Alene Resort Conference Center earlier this month to show off science fair projects they had spent the past few months working on.

The Main Street Video Co-op, formerly Howard Hughes Video, closed its location at 520 S. Main St. in Moscow in 2020 after more than 30 years of business. It was the last independent video store in Moscow.

The images out of Ukraine are horrific, made all the more so by the fact that little or no convincing explanation has been provided to justify the war. Yes, we may hear of Ukraine’s alliance with NATO, and the potential threat that that may pose to Russia. But is that enough? From this angle and one admittedly belonging to a nonexpert, the answer seems “no.”

In the meantime, gone are women and children, teachers and doctors, among others, but also buildings which while no more than a pile of brick and stone in one sense, in another are expressions of critical cultural value. To knock them down is to erase more than material content but cultural self-conception, developed over years, sometimes millennia. Ask a community about itself and its members are likely to point to libraries, museums and schools, proud of the effort and artistry it took to assemble them.

Close to home, we may point to a building such as the Elson Floyd Cultural Center at WSU to point out the extent to which the university, and by association the town, has gone to recognize marginalized ethnic groups around the world. To knock that building down would be to eradicate important efforts at decolonization.

In the 1990s, and in an effort to eradicate the memory of Muslin culture in the former Yugoslavia, Serbs went on a rampage, taking out iconic mosques in Bosnia. As one article said, “everywhere, the Serb takeover was marked by a comprehensive destruction of mosques, as visible signs of the Muslim community’s presence.”

The same can be said of the unprovoked American Invasion of Iraq, in this case taking out political buildings in an effort to erase the memory of the former regime. “Shock and Awe,” the name given to the tactic behind that campaign, was only in part about destroying palaces and governmental structures. More so it was to do so overwhelmingly, crippling the capacity and the will of the opponent to react.

Throughout the attack on Iraq, buildings were used as props to impress upon the enemy the power of the attacker. The scheme worked brilliantly, perhaps too brilliantly, as Iraqies have since struggled to rebuild a society. Today Iraq remains mired in uncertainty. Just two weeks ago, FIFA, the international soccer federation, refused the country the ability to host World Cup qualifying matches on the premise that Iraq remains insecure.

Interestingly, the Russians today are not first and foremost targeting temples and cultural centers, but homes and apartment buildings. “In the weeks since” the Russian invasion, tells us a study by the New York Times, “at least 1,500 civilian buildings, structures and vehicles in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed.” Of those “900 were houses and apartments,” 330 were schools and 98 commercial buildings, among others, making it clear that this is not a war about ethnic cleansing or political misalignment, but fundamentally about the concept of home.

For reasons beyond the scope of this piece, the Russian leader has never accepted Ukraine as an independent nation, but one an extension of Russia. In a recent speech to his people, he denied that Ukraine has ever had ‘real statehood” and said the country has always been an integral part of Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space.” That it has existed independent of Russia since 1991 is a mere mistake of former regimes and only a matter of time before it should be restored back to Russia.

The Israelis say the same thing about the West Bank, evidenced by the way they repeatedly creep into Palestinian settlements and take over, often bulldozing perfectly fine homes and temporarily replacing them with gravel fields. The idea is not merely to push people out physically but mentally, upending their conception of themselves as having belonged somewhere.

In taking out homes and apartment buildings, regimes of oppressions seek to remove more than concrete and glass but also the memory and cultural foundation fostered by those buildings. And once gone, they take with them signs previously used to lay claim to property. Anything is open territory after that.

The situation is dire and it is our collective responsibility to make sure that while the Ukrainian home is neither palace nor museum, it must be rebuilt. It is the root of national identity.

Rahmani has been with Washington State University since 1997 and is an associate professor in the School of Design and Construction.

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