Today, Ethiopia’s prime minister declared “the final and crucial” military operation against the government of the country’s Tigray region.

Photo: An Ethiopian mother and child flee the ongoing fighting near the Setit river on the Sudan-Ethiopia border.

Born in 1883 – José Clemente Orozco, Mexican painter.

Above: “Gods of the Modern World”, a panel in Orozco’s fresco The Epic of American Civilization, painted for the Baker Library at Dartmouth.

Born in 1694 – Voltaire, French historian, playwright, and philosopher.

In Voltaire’s Candide, the title character encounters an African slave in Surinam: “When we work at the sugar-canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.”

A related video.

Above: A 1787 illustration of Candide meeting a maimed slave of the sugar mill in Suriname

Born in 1620 – Avvakum Petrov, Russian priest and saint. Among the first of Russia’s Old Believers.

Avvakum led the opposition to Patriarch Nikon’s reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. For his opposition to the reforms, Avvakum was repeatedly imprisoned and exiled. For the last fourteen years of his life, he was imprisoned in a pit at Pustozyorsk above the Arctic Circle. He was finally executed by being burned at the stake.

Above: The Burning of Avvakum (1897), by Pyotr Myasoyedov

Born in 1942 – Sharon Olds, American poet.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Born in 1882 – Jacques Maritain, French philosopher and author.

“There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.”

“Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. “

Also: Howard Thurman

In 1947, the Screen Actors Guild implemented an anti-Communist loyalty oath.

Above: Members of the “Hollywood Ten”, a group of suspected communists working in the Hollywood film industry who were summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was investigating Communist influence in the Hollywood labor unions. The ten refused to cooperate and were charged with contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison.

Also: Martin Scorsese