#Pierre Deporte

[somegirlsfromk]

Tamra, the island

[manofinjuries]

Material List 💭

Celebrities 🪩

• Coming soon.

Formula One 🏎️

• Coming soon.

Moto GP 🏍️

MotoGP Novels

How to drive a beast

World War 🪖

WWI

• Coming soon.

Spanish Civil War

• Coming soon.

WWII

• Coming soon.

Music 🎶

• Coming soon.

Avatar 👤

• Coming soon

DC/Marvel 🦸

• Coming soon.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“26 Gay Spanish “Mutineers” Land in Halifax Under Guard,” Montreal Star. November 8, 1932. Page 1. ==== HALIFAX, Nov. 8 - (CP) - Gay and “delighted with the feed," 28 Spaniards arrived in Halifax today on the steamer Magnhild from St. Pierre and joked about being sent home to Spain to face charges of mutiny. 

They had fared well since they left the Spanish trawler Euskalerria at St. Pierre, they said. According to a dispatch from the French possession, the 26 men and boys, comprising almost half the trawler's crew refused to work as a protest against rations they had received while fishing on the Grand Banks. 

They went ashore at St. Pierre and refused to return to the ship. The French authorities communicated with Spain and received word that the men must return. The order had no effect on the men and the trawler picked up two dozen natives of the Island to fill their places. 

The French authorities decided to deport the deserters and put them on the steamer Magnhild for Halifax. Arriving here today, they were locked up in the immigration detention quarters to await a liner for England. Thence they will he rent to San Sebastian, Spain to stand trial.

Some of the men spoke English and were quite talkative. They declared they had been overworked and underfed.

“We worked about 20 home a day and did not get sufficient bread to eat or water to drink,” said one of them. He said the “mutiny" consisted of leaving the ship at St. Pierre and refusing to return on board. 

Officers of the Magnhild said the men were not treated as prisoners and were easy to handle. They ate ravenously from the time they boarded the vessel until she reached Halifax.

[retrofutbolmgc]

Pierre van Hooijdonk • Celtic FC (1995-1996)

[zvaigzdelasas]

Covering an entire classroom wall in a Tunisian synagogue in Belleville, an immigrant haven on the slopes of northeastern Paris, are the names of 1,100 Jewish children who were arrested by French police, deported to Auschwitz and killed by the Nazis during World War II.[...]

Despite this dark history, some Jews in Belleville are doing the once unthinkable and voting in France’s National Assembly election for the far-right National Rally party, which is leading in polls for Sunday’s runoff.

One of the party’s founders, Pierre Bousquet, was a French fighter in Hitler’s Waffen-SS. Another, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who led the party from its birth in 1972 until 2011, dismissed Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history.[...]

It’s also a measure of how much the French left has enraged Jewish voters with its ferocious attacks on Israel and Zionism as it tries to build support among French Muslims, a substantially larger group of voters.[...]

Judith Benchetrit said she’d voted for the National Rally in the first round — and asked whether anyone else had watched a harrowing TV documentary the night before about the Oct. 7 attack.

It was her deep loathing of the far-left France Unbowed movement and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, that led her to back the far right.

Mélenchon “campaigns on Palestine, so now he’s got all the Palestinians and every Arab in France behind him,” said Benchetrit, who is 32 and unemployed.

The National Rally has recast itself as an ally of Jews and Israel. If the party wins a majority in the assembly, its leader, Jordan Bardella, could become prime minister, putting France under the far right’s control for the first time since the fall of the Vichy regime that collaborated with the German occupation from 1940 to 1944.[...]

Sonia Lelloum, a daughter of Tunisian Jewish immigrants, said she’d resisted the temptation to vote for the National Rally in previous elections because of its Nazi ties. This time, she said, she went ahead and did it because she likes the party’s crusade against immigration.[...]

Most worrisome to [some] is the constant confounding of Israel, Zionism and Jews.[...]

One of the most stunning illustrations of the new opening to the far right came last month when the renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, 88, an icon to many Jews in France, told French television that if forced to choose between the National Rally and the country’s largest left-wing party, France Unbowed, he would pick the National Rally.

6 Jul 24

[gryficowa]

Boycott!

Now that I have your attention:

[nesiacha]

Frustration when I watched a television show about the Overseas Departments and Haiti during the period of the re-establishment of slavery and in general.

The siege of the Crête at Pierrot in 1802, by A. Raffet, engraving Hébert, 1839

Warning: There are many atrocities I will talk about when we dive into the details of the Haitian Revolution and torture in the reedit in the end . So, don’t read if you’re not up for it.

Completely by chance, I caught the second half of the show "Toussaint Louverture" (though I skipped some parts, I admit) presented by Stéphane in his show "Secrets d’Histoire," which I would qualify as mediocre. However, I was surprised to see that this show, which has always been lenient towards Bonaparte and Louis XVI, finally addresses the horrible re-establishment of slavery and recalls that the second and final abolition of slavery in 1848 was unsatisfactory because financial compensation was given to the colonists, but nothing to the former slaves. The one in 1794 seemed better. The participants of the show indeed say that it was a grave mistake to re-establish slavery, both morally and strategically regarding Haiti. I don't feel they explained how disastrous the consequences were, like how these laws removed brilliant officers from the military, such as Louis Delgrès (although mentioned in the show) or Alexandre Dumas (not to mention many former slaves who served in the military or fought like the group to which belonged Flore Blois Gaillard, who allied with the French revolutionaries against the British forces). This was a severe blow to the army, especially with the laws we could call racial against Black people (though I hesitate to use this term because I'm not sure if the word racist was defined as we understand it today). It was a great blunder—if Bonaparte hadn't had the (stupid) idea to re-establish slavery, perhaps the Overseas Departments wouldn't have fallen under British influence (as for Haiti, I think it would have become independent even without the re-establishment of slavery, and France and Haiti could have been solid allies, but it would have been much less violent with fewer French and Haitian losses). All these wars cost enormous amounts of money, and I believe he wouldn’t have sold Louisiana (frankly, he surely had good reasons, but can you imagine the French revolutionaries, especially those from 1792-1794, even in their worst moments, trying to sell a territory, at least the majority of the Convention? I can't). Moreover, there is no mention of the horrible deportations endured by Guadeloupeans and Haitians to Corsica, whether men, women, or children, under atrocious conditions. The most famous victim is the deputy Jean Louis Annecy (although very forgotten), who died on the island of Elba in 1807.

As usual, revolutionary women are forgotten. There is only a mention of Rosalie, alias Solitude, but there were many who participated in the fight, including Sanité Belair, who was executed by firing squad with her husband, Marie Claire Bonheur, the future Empress of Haiti, Victoria Montou, Dédée Bazile, Cécile Fatiman, Marthe Rose Toto from French Guiana, etc. The list is very long.

Finally, I don't like this whitewashing of Charles Leclerc (they do say that Rochambeau was terrible, at least, but since Leclerc was Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, he surely received some favorable treatment in this show). Here is an excerpt from the beginning of his horrors: "The majority of the deportees were concentrated in Corsica and the island of Elba, where they were used as labor for road construction and fortification restoration starting with the former Black soldiers" (text excerpt from "La guerre des Couleurs" of Pierre Branda and Thierry Lentz) . There was authorization to condemn Black people based on mere suspicion. Moreover, here is a letter Leclerc sent to his brother-in-law Napoleon Bonaparte: "Here is my opinion on this country. We must destroy all the Black people in the mountains, men and women, keep only the children under 12 years old, destroy half of those in the plains, and not leave a single colored man who has worn an epaulette in the colony." To think that I found the orders from the Convention in 1793-1794 frightening because they were ambiguous... Well, another reason why I find Bonaparte much more terrifying than them (already, the torture practiced by the police under Fouché in 1801 was appalling when he allowed it, the deportation without trial of many Jacobins, some of whom died, etc.), it reinforced my belief that he was much worse than the Committee of Public Safety in 1794, who nevertheless committed unforgivable acts in wartime under the infernal situation of internal-external civil war. Leclerc started the drownings in October 1802: it didn't matter whether the victims were civilians or soldiers; they were put on boats that were sunk. This strongly recalls the horrors committed by Carrier. According to Marlene L. Daut, the horrors were such that there were many desertions among French soldiers, which must not have been an easy situation for them because they could be shot for desertion and, even if they survived, forced to avoid returning home to avoid trouble with Napoleonic justice.

Leclerc (and by extension, Bonaparte) fell into the trap that some fighters, victims of an invasion or imminent invasion, have used throughout history, which seems quite old: pretending to ally with their adversaries to buy time, even if it means sacrificing their own to better fight the enemy again (and they certainly don't reach the only ones using this technique). This is what happened with Dessalines: the show doesn’t explain the armed resistance led by the Bélair couple against Leclerc, where they temporarily won victories. However, some believe this uprising might have been premature, although the insurgents weakened Leclerc with certain victories, and consequently, Dessalines allowed Charles and Sanité Bélair to be sacrificed. To be fair, the show I mentioned briefly explains that Henry Christophe and Dessalines did not betray Toussaint; they just wanted to buy time, but there is no mention of the Bélair couple. According to historians Pierre Branda and Thierry Lentz, Dessalines killed two birds with one stone by eliminating a potential rival in the person of Charles Bélair and to lull Leclerc's distrust to better attack when the time comes. In any case, by buying time, they were able to achieve better victories against Leclerc (who surely thought that by compromising Dessalines in the eyes of Black people, the insurgents would no longer dare to fight with him, but he was wrong) and later Rochambeau. Rochambeau continued by increasing atrocities, notably by releasing dogs on Black people and continuing to practice torture. There are allegations that Rochambeau locked Black people in holds and activated sulfur so they would die of asphyxiation. Thierry Lentz and Pierre Branda think it is not impossible that this happened. Bernard Gainot cites Jules Chanlatte from his work "Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue" and published by a former sailor, Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Cissé, in 1824: "Instead of valve boats, another type was invented, where victims of both sexes, piled on top of each other, expired suffocated by sulfur fumes." Whatever the case, the insurgents militarily defeated Rochambeau and the French troops, and their final victory was the Battle of Vertières in November 1803. Following this, Haiti's independence was proclaimed.

Where I totally disapprove is when, in order to try to limit the horrors that the Blacks people have suffered, they explain their reprisals, especially with the horrible massacre of the Whites people in 1804. I have already said in a post that massacre it is absolutely condemnable and atrocious . But imagine the horror of a little less than half of the Haitian population massacred in atrocious suffering, some betrayed by France while they had fought for them, others deported in atrocious conditions and some will never see their home again. I think that if their adversaries who oppressed them and those who applauded them had suffered a quarter of an eighth of the horrors that the Haitians suffered, the carnage would have been even more terrible. I do not want to exonerate the Haitians who took part in the massacre of 1804 from the responsibility but if Bonaparte had not approved such cruel orders (and he is the number 1 person responsible for this carnage), Whites people would not have been killed at least not in large numbers. The historian Thomas Madiou, said "Is it surprising that blacks and men of color used reprisals against whites?" And in any case nothing excuses the attitude of Bonaparte, Rochambeau or Leclerc. In my eyes they behaved like Turreau and Carrier. If we try to exonerate Bonaparte and his clique responsible for these massacres by highlighting the atrocities on the other side, it is a call to also exonerate horrible people like Carrier and Turreau by saying that the Vendéens committed massacre too.

In addition, the show ignored the many Haitians who protected white people from this massacre (Including Marie Claire Bonheur, wife of Dessalines, who nevertheless ordered the massacre I mentioned here: https://www.tumblr.com/nesiacha/758334606594523136/166-years-ago-empress-marie-claire-bonheur-of?source=share) and didn't said that the Polish legionnaires who were sent by Bonaparte to repress them were touched by the horrors that the Blacks suffered and many of them deserted to fight alongside the former slaves (as a form of recognition, the survivors were given Haitian nationality) were spared just like the Germans who had not participated in the slave trade ( but on the second point maybe I am wrong). For my part Rochambeau, Leclerc, Carrier and Turreau are to be put in the same bag concerning their atrocities when they were sent on a mission. Too bad Turreau and Rochambeau did not pay for their atrocities (some say that the fact that Leclerc died of yellow fever is enough karma and Carrier was guillotined and I do not pity him at all)

Finally, this isn't in the show, but I don't like when people say that Bonaparte was "a man of his time" to excuse his actions regarding slavery. No, he reinstated it, which is even worse. Sonthonax, Abbé Grégoire, Jean-Paul Marat, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, Olympe de Gouges, and many others were also from the same era as Bonaparte and were opposed to slavery. The re-establishment of slavery shocked many French people, and a white man named Monnereau, under the orders of Delgrès, was hanged in Guadeloupe because he rose up against the re-establishment of slavery and drafted Louis Delgrès' last manifesto. While Bonaparte was reinstating slavery, a white man gave his life for the fight against it (and there must have been many examples like Monnereau). So, this argument to whitewash Napoleon doesn't hold up.

P.S.: I first found the information about asphyxiation from Claude Ribbe. However, even as a convinced, even a person like me petty, anti-Napoleon person ( and a bad faith person I admit it), I find him not very credible. Comparing Napoleon to Hitler is one of the most absurd things I ever heard. That's why I'm more cautious about this statement.

My sources for this post are: Bernard Gainot Pierre Branda, Thierry Lentz, "La guerre des couleurs"

[philosophybits]

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Liz Skalka at HuffPost:

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Joe and Cheryl Backus have plenty of concerns over the influx of immigrants to this central Ohio city. “They’re giving up on our homeless here,” Joe Backus, a retired 80-year-old, said from a loveseat in his living room, referring to the general strain population growth is having on certain sectors of the local government. “They’re ignoring them.” But the spotlight Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio’s own junior U.S. Sen. JD Vance, have put on Springfield and its estimated 60,000 residents hasn’t helped matters — whipping up tensions here to a potentially dangerous degree after the former president baselessly suggested to a live debate audience of 67 million people last week that foreigners here were eating cats and dogs. It’s quickly upended life, leading to bomb threats and general threats of violence that closed schools and government offices.

“I think here in this town, we’re going to have a — well, you wouldn’t call it a civil war — but an uprising,” said Joe Backus, a Democrat who’s in the minority of this red county that went twice for Trump. “Because I think people are going to get tired.” From a recliner across the room, Cheryl Backus, 67, recoiled at the idea of people associating Springfield with the consumption of pets. “Eating the cats and dogs? No, no, no, no, no. We don’t need — no.” The GOP ticket has made this blue-collar city a Midwestern front in the party’s immigration wars, stoking fears about a reign of terror that includes reckless driving and pet-snatching — all as Republicans continue to blame Democrats for a glut of asylum seekers and illegal crossings at the southern border in an election year when Republicans tanked their own border security bill to help Trump.

At the center of it all are people like Steven Pierre, a 32-year-old who emigrated to Springfield from Haiti at age 12. Now he’s a married father of four and works for Amazon. He has a dog, Baba. “It’s sad, because I gotta hear this, and my kids gotta ask questions about it,” said Pierre, who was building a chicken coop in the back of a pristine white home as Baba looked on. “And it’s like, what do I tell them?” “They’re not here to bother anybody,” Pierre said of the Haitians. “They’re here for a goal and to get on with their life. We’re just regular people. We want to be left alone.” Vance, who grew up an hour south of Springfield in a challenged town he popularized in his memoir, acknowledged last week there was no basis for the viral pet smears. But Vance still told his followers to keep sharing the cat memes these rumors helped spawn.

The vice presidential nominee took it a step further Sunday, suggesting he spread the hoax for the greater good of the country. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said on CNN. Trump also vowed to begin his planned mass deportation of immigrants in Springfield, where the Haitian population is mostly here legally, and claimed to know nothing about the bomb threats he helped stoke. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened,” Trump said Saturday. The rhetoric is beginning to grate on members of even their own party.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has a prickly relationship with Trump, went on TV this weekend to decry the drama surrounding Springfield as “unfortunate” and the pet rumors as “garbage.” He praised Springfield’s population of “hard-working” Haitians, who are able to work legally under a special immigration status afforded to immigrants from countries suffering from civil unrest or natural disasters. Springfield’s own GOP mayor, Rob Rue, said he was tired and angry, and wouldn’t reveal whether he’d vote for Trump in November. All the attention has turned Springfield into a tinderbox. Right-leaning content creators are prowling the streets, hunting down evidence of pet-eating for a $5,000 bounty. Elementary and middle schools were closed or evacuated for two consecutive days last week due to threats. City Hall also closed due to security concerns, as several city commissioners found themselves targeted with threats.

[...] After decades of economic decline from factory off-shoring, the legal influx of Haitian immigrants seeking blue-collar work at factories and warehouses in Springfield struck a raw nerve in a community with a significant number of boarded-up buildings and homes, and longtime residents struggling to make ends meet. An estimated 20,000 Haitians have flocked to Springfield since the pandemic, stressing the city’s housing infrastructure, schools and hospitals. “The people who have lived here pay taxes and support Springfield all their life. They cannot get help, because it’s all about [the Haitians],” said Carol Lawson, 65, who lives a block over from Pierre. Lawson, who said she does not work and collects disability, repeated an oft-cited complaint about the Haitians: That they drive nicer cars than everyone else and appear to be the beneficiaries of generous government support — even though Temporary Protected Status, while it affords a pathway to getting a Social Security card and eventual citizenship, does not automatically confer public benefits like food stamps.

Over the last week or so, the residents of Springfield, Ohio have been unwillingly thrusted into the spotlight thanks to JD Vance, Donald Trump, and the right-wing media’s amplification of the false and racist insinuation that Haitian migrants are eating pets.

Tensions have risen in the town as a result of the debunked and unsubstantiated rumor.

[goldheartedsky]

The Liberation

After the Vél d’Hiv roundup in the summer of 1942, the Nazis, as part of their “Final Solution,” pressured the Vichy government to increase deportations of foreign Jewish families.

The free zone was not spared.

Pierre Laval, Vice-President of the Council of Ministers, pledged to deliver 10,000 Jewish men, women and children. The Camp des Milles, just 30km outside of Marseille, became a gateway for the deportation of nearly 2,000 people, including over 100 children, to Auschwitz.

Few returned.

On January 27th, 1945, Soviet forces arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau after liberating and found around 7,000 prisoners who had been left behind by fleeing SS guards.

Most were middle-aged adults and children younger than fifteen.

Soldiers also found 600 corpses, 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 articles of women's clothing, and 7.7 tons of human hair.

Behind each of the five crematoriums was a pond where the ashes of tens of thousands of people, mostly Jews, were scattered after they were murdered in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

The exact number at each remains unknown.

Never Forget.

(done for @theartguard's monthly theme: Historical Events)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 15, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Today House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) canceled tomorrow’s votes and sent the House of Representatives into recess until February 28.

Before recessing, Johnson refused to take up the national security supplemental bill the Senate passed early Tuesday morning, providing aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and humanitarian aid for Gaza. Johnson said the House must “work its own will” rather than vote on the bill at hand because the measure did not include border security measures.

Yesterday, Johnson told House Republicans that the House will not be “rushed” into passing foreign aid, despite the fact that Ukraine’s desperate need for ammunition is enabling Russia to regain some of the territory Ukraine’s troops reclaimed over the past year. 

But is it a rush? President Biden asked for additional national security funding in October 2023. A majority of lawmakers in the Senate and the House support such a measure, but Johnson bowed to the demands of MAGA Republicans and said he would not bring such a bill up for a vote unless it contained border security measures to address what they insisted was a crisis at the southern border of the U.S., apparently banking on the idea that such a compromise was impossible.

But Democrats were so desperate to pass the Ukraine funding they see as crucial to our national security that they agreed to give up their demand for a path to citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, those brought to the United States as children and reared here but now stuck in citizenship limbo. So, after four months of work, Senate negotiators produced a bill that offered much of what Republicans demanded. 

Once it was clear a deal was going to materialize, Trump demanded it be shut down, likely because he has promised his base that on his first day back in office, he will “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” and a new border measure would both undermine his campaign message and stymie his plans. Although the border patrol officers union endorsed the Senate national security measure that included border security provisions, Republicans killed it. 

Senators immediately went to work on a national security supplemental without the border measure, passing it with 70 votes on Tuesday morning. Johnson indicated he would not take it up, right about the same time that Trump renewed his attack on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that underpins U.S. and global security. 

“House Republicans are…siding with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Tehran against our defense industrial base, against NATO, against Ukraine, against our interests in the Indo-Pacific,” the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said yesterday, and President Joe Biden has repeatedly warned that “[f]ailure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.” But Republicans, too—including Trump’s vice president Mike Pence—are begging House Republicans to pass a version of the measure.  

Perhaps to pressure Johnson, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH), who is a strong supporter of aiding Ukraine in its fight against Russia, yesterday released information about “a serious national security threat,” urged all members of Congress to view the intelligence, and called on Biden to declassify all information relating to it. That threat appears to be antisatellite weapons Russia is developing, but they are not yet operational. Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) of the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed concern that the disclosure might have revealed intelligence sources and methods.

And now, rather than taking up the national security measure, the House has recessed.

National security and border measures are not the only things the House is ignoring. Since this is a leap year, putting February 29 on the calendar, the recess will give the House just three working days to pass appropriations measures for the 2024 budget before the stopgap continuing resolution to fund the government expires on March 1.

The appropriations process is so far overdue that it threatens to become tangled in that for 2025, which is set to begin March 11, when the White House is expected to release its budget proposal for the year. 

While they have been unable to make headway on these measures, on Tuesday night, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, blaming him for an increase in migrants at the border. Johnson has named as impeachment managers a number of Republican extremists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Clay Higgins (R-LA), and Harriet Hageman (R-WY). 

As Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News reported: “This is the most chaotic, inefficient and ineffective majority we’ve seen in decades covering Congress. It started this way under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and has gotten worse under Johnson.”

Trump and his MAGA supporters are demonstrating their power over the Republican Party. Trump is trying to install hand-picked loyalists, including his daughter-in-law, at the head of the Republican National Committee, where she vows that “[e]very single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC—that is electing Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.” 

When Trump was in office, his team installed loyalists at the head of state parties, where they have worked to purge all but Trump loyalists. MAGA Republicans are continuing that process. After Senator James Lankford (R-OK), a reliable conservative tapped by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to negotiate a border measure, produced one that favored Republican positions, right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson called those like Lankford “traitors…spineless scum” who must “be criminally prosecuted.” 

That demand for purity appears to be radicalizing the House as Republicans inclined to get things done, including five committee chairs, have announced they will not run for reelection. Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday said that British foreign secretary David Cameron, who is urging Congress to pass Ukraine aid, “can kiss my ass.” 

But the MAGA agenda is falling apart in the courts. True the Vote, the right-wing organization that insisted it had evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, has told a Georgia judge that, in fact, it has no such evidence. Their claims provided the basis for the arguments about voter fraud highlighted in right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules. 

Today a grand jury convened by Special Counsel David Weiss, whom Trump appointed to investigate Hunter Biden, indicted former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov for making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record about Hunter Biden. Smirnov has been a key witness for Republican allegations about Biden’s “corruption” since Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released Smirnov’s unverified claims about a year ago and other MAGA figures spread them. Matthew Gertz of Media Matters noted that Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show highlighted these allegations in at least 85 separate segments last year, including 28 monologues. Now a grand jury has grounds to think Smirnov lied. 

Trump’s personal problems also continue to mount. 

Today Judge Juan Merchan confirmed that Trump is going to trial on his criminal election interference case, with jury selection beginning on March 25. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felonies for falsifying business records in order to hide critical information from voters before the 2016 election. Prosecutors say that Trump defrauded voters by illegally hiding payments he made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about their affair before the election. As Andrew Warren put it in The Daily Beast, the case “is about a plot to deprive voters of information about a candidate for president—information that Trump and his allies believed to be damaging enough to hide.”

And yet Trump’s MAGA Republicans are calling the shots in the House, and their refusal to support Ukraine threatens to empower Russian president Vladimir Putin and thus to lay waste to the rules-based international order that has helped to prevent world war since 1945. Conservative pundit Bill Kristol noted earlier this month that “politics is often a stage on which people act in bad faith. Still, the demagogic opposition of House Republicans to the border/Ukraine bill, when they've all said the border is an emergency and that Putin should be stopped, is just about the baddest bad faith ever.” 

The implications of that bad faith for the country—and the world—are huge.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[magnetothemagnificent]

This might be a bit sensitive topic, so you don't have to if you don't want to, but could you recommend some holocaust literature? I've come to realize the representation of it in the media isn't always that great, and well, thought you might have an opinion

Absolutely!

Some websites:

Yad Vashem- The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Some books written by or on behalf of Holocaust survivors:

"Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live", by Lily Ebert

"Man's Search for Meaning", by Victor Frankl

"The Redhead of Auschwitz", by Nechama Birnbaum on behalf of her grandmother, Rosie Greenstein

"Night", by Elie Wiesel

"A Gypsy In Auschwitz: How I Survived the Horrors of the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’", by Otto Rosenberg

"I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror", by Pierre Seel

"The Daughter of Auschwitz: A Memoir", by Tova Friedman

"An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin", by Gad Beck

"The Diary of Éva Heyman," by Eva Heyman, published posthumously. She was murdered during the Holocaust.

"The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow", by Krystyna Chiger

"A Teenager in Hitler's Death Camps", by Benny Grunfeld

Some books written about the Holocaust:

Encyclopedia of the Holocaust

Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust

The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration

Doctors Under Hitler

Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism

Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism

Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene

The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals

Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

The Suffering of the Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust 

Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust

Films:

Survivors Testimony Film Series

Numbered

Secret Lives: Hidden Children and their Rescuers in World War II

Shoah

I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal

A People Uncounted

Media to avoid:

Historical fiction written by non-Romani, non-Jewish authors that focuses more on the Germans than on their victims. "Number the Stars" and "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" are the biggest offenders.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I tried to make it as thorough as possible.

[manofinjuries]

• I'm Lluís, a Spanish fan of literature.

• I like Motorsport (F1/MotoGP)

• I like to write, but I will not write anything that is racist, homophobic or discriminatory.

• Request are open! So stop by to ask something to write.

✍︎ Material list ✍︎

• Celebrities

• Formula One

• Moto GP

• World War

• Music

• Avatar

• DC/Marvel

[impetuous-impulse]

Ney’s Execution; Victor’s Remorse

If, in the year of 1815, all eyes are turned to Luxembourg, it is not to admire the Haute Chambre itself, but because a resounding event took place there: Ney first appeared before a council of war that declared itself incompetent; according to his own wishes, he is brought before the Chamber of Peers constituting a Court of Justice. A climate of revenge permeates royalist circles, excepting the King, a fine politician, who would have done without a lynching. His entourage, however, burns to make an example, a sort of expiatory sacrifice. On 4 December [1815], the Peers meet and debate for two days. The result is without appeal: one single Peer, the duke of Broglie, speaks with courage against the condemnation; five abstain; seventeen vote for deportation; a hundred and thirty eight vote for death. They considered themselves judges rather than jurors; they thus enforced the law. Victor voted with the majority, undoubtedly with a heavy heart; in any case in each of the two ballots, he voted for the death of his former companion-in-arms, as did Maison, former chief of staff of Victor and Ney’s companion-in-suffering in Russia. The King will not use his right of pardon and Ney will be shot on 7 December. It seems that Victor, throughout his life, will suffer from remorse of this decision [...]

Jean-Pierre Tarin, Le Maréchal Victor: loyal sous Napoléon, fidèle sous la Restauration, p. 280.

It is common knowledge in Napoleonic circles that Victor voted for Ney’s death, and the circulated claim that Victor regretted his choice for the rest of his life intrigued me as soon as I saw it. From where was it sourced and how valid was the source? The Tarin biography of Victor skims over Victor’s reaction to Ney’s fate (more emphasis was given to figures of the Restoration in the succeeding passages—men, money, dates). Worse, the account Tarin gives of the trial and execution does not seem to be sourced, as if a memory-based anecdote. Evidently, from Tarin’s perspective, Victor’s alleged “remorse” is unimportant to his life. I am sure many reading this would agree with Tarin—it would be more telling to act as one believes in the moment than to cry over spilt milk. Indeed, acting in the moment is what the Marshals are known for, and it's why We Don't Talk About Victor Marshals that fit the archetype are more likeable.

The Le Coustumier biography is sympathetic to Victor. It circulates the same claim with more detail, and fortunately, the source is mentioned (p. 284).

If we are to believe Count André Martinet in an article published in Janurary 1902 in Le Figaro, (as Martinet could consult the Bellune family archives and speak with [Victor’s] descendants,) the death of Ney tormented Victor’s conscience through his remaining life. He reports: “But there was a day in the year where the Duke of Bellune did not appear at the family table, where he refused to receive even the most intimate of his friends: 7 December, which witnessed Ney's execution.* (…) Why, he often said, did my poor comrade refuse to appear before a council of war composed of the Marshals of France? If we were obliged to pronounce a condemnation, rather than executing the sentence, we would all have returned our batons to the hands of the King, and he would have been compelled to give pardon.” * The death of Ney pursued Victor to his grave. It was the 7 and 8 March 1841 that the eldest son of the Prince of Moscow made his entrance after ten years of waiting into the Chamber of Peers, demanding in vain the rehabilitation of his father. On both days, Victor was resting at Saint Louis des Invalides, to be buried on 9 March at Père Lachaise.

A note on the footnotes: Victor had died on 1 March 1841, so Le Coustumier may be stretching the metaphor a little. It might be more logical to say that Marshal Ney was left unrecognised until more favourable hands seized political power. The italics are my emphasis, for clarity. pp. 280-281 of the Le Coustumier quotes Augereau (unsourced!) on a similar note.

Weakened by his remorse, Augereau confessed on his deathbed, seven months later: “We were cowards. We should have declared ourselves competent despite Ney’s objections. If we had done so, he would at least have lived."

Augereau's words are believable enough. Do we buy Victor’s “remorse”?

The source from which the claim is taken from should not be disregarded entirely—Le Figaro is still recognised as an authoritative and independent newspaper—but it does have conservative tendencies, and has largely catered to a middle, if not the upper-middle class. To put it in context, the author of the article was a count, writing about a former government official with a similar status to himself, and conducted interviews with said official’s descendants. As a result of the individuals involved and the demographic the newspaper caters to (one similar to the featured individual), the writer would be more likely to portray Victor in a positive light. If remorse does not exonerate Victor, it softens his cruelties and paints his decision as a one-off mistake instead of condemning his character flaws. Is repenting for twenty-six years not absolution enough? Is it not karmic enough that Ney’s death occurred on Victor’s birthday, permanently blackening a date supposed to be his? (Never mind that perhaps he celebrated his name day or baptism day instead of his birthday, or that one day of mourning each year is a small price to pay for a dead man.) But if, as humans, we want to believe in the inherent goodness in Victor, we must also consider the claim's side affect of apotheosising the man. This is, after all, a family account featured in a sympathetic newspaper.

If there were other sources to crosscheck this, we could verify Victor’s sentiments (and if they are true, calling your annual day to wither away in a room “remorse” may be underselling how much you regret your life choices). The problem is that I cannot find other sources. It would be gratifying to believe Victor’s grief was real, because he was only human, but it is dubious at best. One can only hope that, in some timeline, if not in this one, he did pay emotional penance. Ultimately, I think that if a claim is made, it will be remembered if it is a good story.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[CBC is Canadian State Media]

As justice minister in 1967, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau argued against revoking the citizenship of a Canadian citizen the Soviet Union had convicted of heading a firing squad responsible for the deaths of 5,128 Jews during the Second World War, says a 617-page report prepared for the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals decades ago.

The document, now largely unredacted, was released by Library and Archives on Thursday. It was originally prepared for the Deschênes Commission, which in the mid-1980s investigated Nazi immigration into Canada.

The document says a Soviet court tried the Canadian in question, identified only as Subject F, in absentia in Riga, Latvia in 1965 and found him guilty.

It was written by historian Alti Rodal. A heavily redacted version under Canada's Access to Information Act was initially released to the public in 1987. Jewish human rights organization B'nai Brith obtained a less censored copy in June 2023 but Trudeau's position on the case was blacked out in that version.

In 1967, when Trudeau was justice minister in the government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, the Department of External Affairs sought his legal opinion on whether there was a solid case for deporting Subject F, based on the USSR's request.

In July of that year, Trudeau wrote to the department that, "it could not be established that Subject F knowingly concealed material circumstances relating to his good character even if it be assumed that he was, in fact, guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted in absentia."[...]

"I might add that while I appreciate your concern for the repercussions and anxiety which you mention [of the Jewish community and others concerned with inaction with regard to war criminals settled in Canada], it appears to me, on the other hand, that it would be most ill-advised for the government to undertake this venture which would involve publicly accusing a Canadian citizen of having committed crimes in Latvia in respect of which he was convicted, in absentia, in Russia."

"If we did so, I think we would be forced to concede that similar steps might be taken against any person who had obtained a certificate of citizenship if it were found that he had not disclosed occurrences in his past which we, the government now decide to be of sufficient gravity as to constitute concealment of circumstances material to his grant of citizenship.[...]

Other newly unredacted parts of Rodal's report reveal that in 1954, the RCMP was aware that the United States was trying to resettle in Canada people who had aided it in the fight against communism.

Rodal wrote the U.S. told the RCMP that some of these individuals had "criminal records of which a number arose from cases involving moral turpitude" — a category she claimed included former Nazis.

The number of those who did manage to come through to Canada via this program remains redacted in this version of the report, along with other parts of 14 pages. [...]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked Friday why it took the government so long to unseal the records and when it would release the rest of them.

"I think people understand that this is both an important part of the historical record, but also one that has implications around privacy, around community cohesion, around the kind of country we are," he said. "These decisions are ones that are taken responsibly and never lightly."

2 Feb 24

[allthecanadianpolitics]

By wanting to close Roxham Road to prevent irregular entries of asylum seekers in Quebec, the Parti Québécois and its leader are behaving like Donald Trump, says the interim Quebec Liberal Party leader Marc Tanguay.

In a press briefing at the National Assembly on Tuesday, the MNA for LaFontaine compared his political opponents to the former U.S. president, who preached the construction of a wall to prevent illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States.

Tanguay did not hesitate to call the PQ proposal a "deportation policy."

"I find it quite difficult to accept that a political party wants to close Roxham Road," he said. What are they going to do, send the Sûreté du Québec to arrest the people? Put them back on the bus that brought them here and send them where? Come on!" Tanguay said.

"For all intents and purposes, when the Parti Québécois says we have to stop immigrants from coming through, that's building a wall, like Trump said, with security guards," he added.

The Liberals preach "orderly immigration" but put the ball back in Ottawa's court.

"Ottawa needs to renegotiate the safe third country agreement," said Tanguay. "I hope they already have a strategy and a timeline."

"We want the U.S. to take more responsibility, not just be a bridge," continued the Liberal leader. [...]

When pressed by reporters, he was unable to say how law enforcement would proceed.

"It's not up to me to define how the police would intervene," the PQ leader [St-Pierre Plamondon] said during a press conference at the National Assembly.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada