#and we can free that radical potential from the prison it's been forced into | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

didanawisgi · 4 years

Photo

Martin Luther King Jr., Guns, and a Book Everyone Should Read

BY JEREMY S. | JAN 15, 2018

“Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 89 years old today, were he not assassinated in 1968. On the third Monday in January we observe MLK Jr. Day and celebrate his achievements in advancing civil rights for African Americans and others. While Dr. King was a big advocate of peaceful assembly and protest, he wasn’t, at least for most of his life, against the use of firearms for self-defense. In fact, he employed them . . .

If it wasn’t for African Americans in the South, primarily, taking up arms almost without exception during the post-Civil War reconstruction and well into the civil rights movement, this country wouldn’t be what it is today.

By force and threat of arms African Americans protected themselves, their families, their homes, and their rights and won the attention and respect of the powers that be. In a lawless, post-Civil War South they stayed alive while faced with, at best, an indifferent government and, at worst, state-sponsored violence against them.

We know the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 refused to recognize black people as citizens. Heck, they were deemed just three-fifths a person. Not often mentioned in school: some of that was due to gun rights. Namely, not wanting to give gun rights to blacks. Because if they were to recognize blacks as citizens, it…

“…would give to persons of the negro race . . . the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, . . . and it would give them the full liberty of speech . . . ; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

Ahha! So the Second Amendment was considered an individual right, protecting a citizen’s natural, inalienable right to keep and carry arms wherever they go. Then as now, gun control is rooted in racism.

During reconstruction, African Americans were legally citizens but were not always treated as such. Practically every African American home had a shotgun — or shotguns — and they needed it, too. Forget police protection, as those same officials were often in white robes during their time off.

Fast forward to the American civil rights movement and we learn, but again not at school, that Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit. He (an upstanding minister, mind you) was denied.

Then as in many cases even now, especially in blue states uniquely and ironically so concerned about “fairness,” permitting was subjective (“may issue” rather than “shall issue”). The wealthy and politically connected receive their rights, but the poor, the uneducated, the undesired masses, not so much.

Up until late in his life, MLK Jr. chose to be protected by the Deacons for Defense. Though his home was also apparently a bit of an arsenal.

African Americans won their rights and protected their lives with pervasive firearms ownership. But we don’t learn about this. We don’t know about this. It has been unfortunately whitewashed from our history classes and our discourse.

Hidden, apparently, as part of an agreement (or at least an understanding) reached upon the conclusion of the civil rights movement.

Sure, the government is going to protect you now and help you and give you all of the rights you want, but you have to give up your guns. Turn them in. Create a culture of deference to the government. Be peaceable and non-threatening and harmless. And arm-less, as it were (and vote Democrat). African Americans did turn them in, physically and culturally.

That, at least, is an argument made late in Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms. It’s a fantastic book, teaching primarily through anecdotes of particular African American figures throughout history just how important firearms were to them. I learned so-freaking-much from this novel, and couldn’t recommend it more. If you have any interest in gun rights, civil rights, and/or African American history, it’s an absolute must-read.

Some text I highlighted on my Kindle Paperwhite when I read it in 2014:

But Southern blacks had to navigate the first generation of American arms-control laws, explicitly racist statutes starting as early as Virginia’s 1680 law, barring clubs, guns, or swords to both slaves and free blacks.

“…he who would be free, himself must strike the blow.”

In 1846, white abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, advocating distribution of arms to fugitive slaves.

Civil-rights activist James Forman would comment in the 1960s that blacks in the movement were widely armed and that there was hardly a black home in the South without its shotgun or rifle.

A letter from a teacher at a freedmen’s school in Maryland demonstrates one set of concerns. The letter contains the standard complaints about racist attacks on the school and then describes one strand of the local response. “Both the Mayor and the sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do) [and] the superintendent of schools came down and brought me a revolver.”

Low black turnout resulted in a Democratic victory in the majority black Republican congressional district.

Other political violence of the Reconstruction era centered on official Negro state militias operating under radical Republican administrations.

“The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” So said Ida B. Wells.

Fortune responded with an essay titled “The Stand and Be Shot or Shoot and Stand Policy”: “We have no disposition to fan the coals of race discord,” Thomas explained, “but when colored men are assailed they have a perfect right to stand their ground. If they run away like cowards they will be regarded as inferior and worthy to be shot; but if they stand their ground manfully, and do their own a share of the shooting they will be respected and by doing so they will lessen the propensity of white roughs to incite to riot.”

He used state funds to provide guns and ammunition to people who were under threat of attack.

“Medgar was nonviolent, but he had six guns in the kitchen and living room.”

“The weapons that you have are not to kill people with — killing is wrong. Your guns are to protect your families — to stop them from being killed. Let the Klan ride, but if they try to do wrong against you, stop them. If we’re ever going to win this fight we got to have a clean record. Stay here, my friends, you are needed most here, stay and protect your homes.”

In 2008 and 2010, the NAACP filed amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court, supporting blanket gun bans in Washington, DC, and Chicago. Losing those arguments, one of the association’s lawyers wrote in a prominent journal that recrafting the constitutional right to arms to allow targeted gun prohibition in black enclaves should be a core plank of the modern civil-rights agenda.

Wilkins viewed the failure to pursue black criminals as overt state malevolence and evidence of an attitude that “there’s one more Negro killed — the more of ’em dead, the less to bother us. Don’t spend too much money running down the killer — he may kill another.”

But it puts things in perspective to note that swimming pool accidents account for more deaths of minors than all forms of death by firearm (accident, homicide, and suicide).

The correlation of very high murder rates with low gun ownership in African American communities simply does not bear out the notion that disarming the populace as a whole will disarm and prevent murder by potential murderers.

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated 1,900,000 annual episodes where someone in the home retrieved a firearm in response to a suspected illegal entry. There were roughly half a million instances where the armed householder confronted and chased off the intruder.

A study of active burglars found that one of the greatest risks faced by residential burglars is being injured or killed by occupants of a targeted dwelling. Many reported that this was their greatest fear and a far greater worry than being caught by police.48 The data bear out the instinct. Home invaders in the United States are more at risk of being shot in the act than of going to prison.49 Because burglars do not know which homes have a gun, people who do not own guns enjoy free-rider benefits because of the deterrent effect of others owning guns. In a survey of convicted felons conducted for the National Institute of Justice, 34 percent of them reported being “scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim.” Nearly 40 percent had refrained from attempting a crime because they worried the target was armed. Fifty-six percent said that they would not attack someone they knew was armed and 74 percent agreed that “one reason burglars avoid houses where people are at home is that they fear being shot.”

In the period before Florida adopted its “shall issue” concealed-carry laws, the Orlando Police Department conducted a widely advertised program of firearms training for women. The program was started in response to reports that women in the city were buying guns at an increased rate after an uptick in sexual assaults. The program aimed to help women gun owners become safe and proficient. Over the next year, rape declined by 88 percent. Burglary fell by 25 percent. Nationally these rates were increasing and no other city with a population over 100,000 experienced similar decreases during the period.55 Rape increased by 7 percent nationally and by 5 percent elsewhere in Florida.

As you can see, Negroes and the Gun progresses more or less chronologically, spending the last portion of the book discussing modern-day gun control. It’s an invaluable source of ammunition (if you’ll pardon the expression) against the fallacies of the pro-gun-control platform. It sheds light on a little-known (if not purposefully obfuscated), critical factor in the history of African Americans: firearms.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I highly recommend you — yes, you — read Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms.

And I’ll wrap this up with a quote in a Huffington Post article given by Maj Toure of Black Guns Matter:

https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/huffpo-maj-toure.jpg”

#books #black history #history #american history #Guns #civil rights #constitution #supreme court #gun control #martin luther king jr.#dread scott #concealed carry #concealedcarry #everydaycarry #gun confiscation

288 notes · View notes

96thdayofrage · 4 years

Photo

“Yeshua (Jesus) instructed his followers to arm themselves for self-defense and to address the community’s survival needs by providing health care, free meals, therapeutic counseling, and of course spiritual guidance.”

“Black Christians have the ever-present potential to reclaim a pivotal position within movements that challenge police terrorism, mass incarceration, poverty, militarism, and perhaps even the capitalist system itself.”

A recent PBS documentary by Henry Louis Gates about the Black church is a reminder of the vital role the institution has played in the survival and continuing struggles of an oppressed community. While Black Christians have played a vital role in the development of the Black Radical Tradition, the documentary also highlights the sudden, diminished leadership role the Black church played in movements after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. In recent years, there have been repeated comments about the low-profile participation of the Black church in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Notwithstanding recent history, it will be an error to write off the potential of the Black Church to again find its way to the cutting edge of the revolution. That’s because Christianity has been radical from the start. Yeshua (“Jesus”) himself emerged from a poverty ravaged community of brown-skinned folks who daily endured surveillance, extortion, harassment, and violent attacks by white Roman soldier-cops deployed to First Century Palestine. We know from Luke 22:36 that, in response, Yeshua instructed his followers to arm themselves for self-defense. This group also engaged in an extended campaign to address the community’s survival needs by providing health care, free meals, therapeutic counseling, and of course spiritual guidance. The first Christians also had their share of political prisoners. In many ways they were strikingly similar to the radical organization started in Oakland, California in 1966 by a small band of brothers in berets and black leather.

“It will be an error to write off the potential of the Black Church to again find its way to the cutting edge of the revolution.”

Yeshua was betrayed by an informant, and when he was pegged as a revolutionary by Roman imperialists, he was accused of sedition, railroaded through a kangaroo court, and subjected to the death penalty. The Book of Acts tells us that after Yeshua left the Earthly realm, his followers grew in number, established multi-ethnic solidarity with other oppressed communities, and consolidated them into a small nation governed by socialist principles and socialist practice.

Yeshua’s disciples were not the last community of color to embrace revolution. Black Christians have a long history of radicalism, and that should come as no surprise even though slave masters made their best efforts to use the Bible to justify white supremacy and slavery. Kenyan scholar John Mbiti explains why enslaved Africans with a grounding in traditional African religions would certainly have rejected the lies about Christian doctrine taught by slave masters. He said:

“Because traditional [African] religions permeate all the departments of life, there is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and non-religious, between the spiritual and material areas of life. Wherever the African is, there is his religion: he carries it to the fields, where he is sowing seeds or harvesting a new crop…”

Mbiti goes on to say:

“It is not enough to embrace a faith which is confined to a church building or mosque, which is locked up six days and opened only once or twice a week. Unless Christianity and Islam fully occupy the whole person as much as, if not more than, traditional [African] religions do, most [African] converts to these faiths will continue to revert to their old beliefs and practices for perhaps six days a week, and certainly in times of emergency and crisis.”

“Black Christians have a long history of radicalism.”

Thus, the influence of an African religious orientation naturally led enslaved Africans to embrace Christianity as a weapon for liberation rather than believe claims that the faith justifies slavery. After all, Mbiti points out that “…even if [in traditional African religions] God is thought to be the ultimate upholder of the moral order, people do not consider Him to be immediately involved in the keeping of it.” Consequently, enslaved Africans believed they had to take matters into their own hands if they wanted to be free. Both Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey found in their Christian faith the inspiration to rise against their enslavers. Vesey even organized his insurrection within the institutional framework of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Historian Sterling Stuckey described Vesey as “a sophisticated idealogue.” Stuckey wrote: “Vesey promoted the use of radical Christianity and encouraged, through one of his lieutenants, its melding with African religious practices. ‘Beyond a general antiwhite attitude,’ [scholar Robert] Starobin writes, ‘Vesey combined the Old Testament’s harsh morality and the story of the Israelites with African religious customs.’ Indeed, Vesey used Christian radicalism to reinforce and rationalize his call to arms…”

Turner and Vesey believed their white oppressors were as morally bankrupt and as irredeemable as the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah. They likewise believed these enslavers deserved to suffer the same fate as their Old Testament counterparts. Like Turner and Vesey, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also a radical Christian, but his method presumed the white community retained a conscience that could be pricked and prodded into righteousness through his movement’s non-violent witnessing.

“Both Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey found in their Christian faith the inspiration to rise against their enslavers.”

Because Yeshua was inclined on some occasions toward militant action and on other occasions toward non-violent resistance, we are left to speculate about whether he was in the camp of Turner and Vesey or in that of Dr. King. Perhaps he approved of both, depending upon the circumstances. Regardless of tactics, he clearly favored radical change. Theologian Obery Hendricks explains:

“Yes, Jesus of Nazareth was a political revolutionary. Now, to say that he was ‘political’ doesn’t mean that he sought to start yet another protest party in Galilee. Nor does it mean that he was ‘involved in politics’ in the sense that we know it today, with its bargaining and compromises and power plays and partisanship. And it certainly doesn’t mean that he wanted to wage war or overthrow the Roman Empire by force. To say that Jesus was a political revolutionary is to say that the message he proclaimed not only called for change in individual hearts but also demanded sweeping and comprehensive change in the political, social, and economic structures in his setting in life: colonized Israel. It means that if Jesus had had his way, the Roman Empire and the ruling elites among his own people either would no longer have held their positions of power, or if they did, would have had to conduct themselves very, very differently. It means that an important goal of his ministry was to radically change the distribution of authority and power, goods and resources, so all people – particularly the little people, or ‘the least of these,’ as Jesus called them – might have lives free of political repression, enforced hunger and poverty, and undue insecurity.”

“If Jesus had had his way, the Roman Empire and the ruling elites among his own people either would no longer have held their positions of power.”

Although the Black church has faded from its position of primary movement leader, if Hendricks’ perspective ever resonates with those who have not been bedazzled and bamboozled by charismatic religious charlatans, Black Christians have the ever-present potential to reclaim a pivotal position within movements that challenge police terrorism, mass incarceration, poverty, militarism, and perhaps even the capitalist system itself. Why not? Those who subscribe to liberation theology have played critical roles in Latin American revolutions, and the same can happen in the U.S. Zela Diaz De Porras, a judge during the early years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution explained:

“Faith is the motivation. Politics is the vehicle that carries the motivation. That is to say, if I need to go to Managua, I use a car to carry me. The car can break down or run out of gasoline. There is no comparison…Really, there is no confusion of one thing with the other. Faith is transcendental, and the revolution is like the historical praxis for a transcendental motivation.”

Christian doctrine can always guide the faithful toward a redemptive and fulfilling relationship with God. But that relationship can be substantially enhanced if Black Christians not only take an honest look at how Yeshua and his disciples conducted themselves, but also emulate the first Christians’ active, engaged resistance to oppression. There will be only benefits for movements for justice if the Black church finds its way back to the frontlines of struggle.

44 notes · View notes

rapeculturerealities · 4 years

Link

MARTY GODDARD’S FIRST FLASH OF INSIGHT CAME IN 1972. It all started when she marched into a shabby townhouse on Halsted Street in Chicago to volunteer at a crisis hotline for teenagers.

Most of the other volunteers were hippies with scraggly manes and love beads. But not Marty Goddard. She tended to wear business clothes: a jacket with a modest skirt, pantyhose, low heels. She hid her eyes behind owlish glasses and kept her blond hair short. Not much makeup; maybe a plum lip. She was 31, divorced, with a mordant sense of humor. Her name was Martha, but everyone called her Marty. She liked hiding behind a man’s name. It was useful.

As a volunteer, Ms. Goddard lent a sympathetic ear to the troubled kids then called “runaway teenagers.” They were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out. She was surprised to discover that many weren’t rebels who’d left home seeking adventure; they were victims who had fled sexual abuse. The phones were ringing with the news that kids didn’t feel safe around their own families. “I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem,” she later said.

She began to formulate questions that almost no one was asking back in the early ’70s: Why were so many predators getting away with it? And what would it take to stop them?

Ms. Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual assault as a crime that could be investigated, rather than as a feminine delusion. She began a revolution in forensics by envisioning the first standardized rape kit, containing items like swabs and combs to gather evidence, and envelopes to seal it in. The kit is one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice. And yet, you’ve never heard of Marty Goddard. In many ways she and her invention shared the same fate. They were enormously important and consistently overlooked.

I was infuriated when I read a few years ago about the hundreds of thousands of unexamined rape kits piled up in warehouses around the country. I had the same question that many did: How many rapists were walking free because this evidence had gone ignored?

Take for example, the case of Nathan Ford, who sexually assaulted a woman in 1995. Although a rape kit was submitted to the police, it went untested for 17 years.

During that time, he went on to assault 21 other people, before being convicted in 2006.

And I had another question: How could a tool as potentially powerful as the rape kit have come into existence in the first place? For nearly two decades, I’d been reporting on inventors, breakthroughs and the ways that new technologies can bring about social change. It seemed to me that the rape-kit system was an invention like no other. Can you think of any other technology designed to hold men accountable for brutalizing women?

As soon as I began to investigate the rape kit’s origins, however, I stumbled across a mystery. Most sources credited a Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, with developing the kit in the 1970s. But a few described the invention as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and an activist, Martha Goddard. Where was the truth? As so often happens in stories about rape, I found myself wondering whom to believe.

Mr. Vitullo died in 2006. Ms. Goddard, as far as I could tell, must still be alive — I couldn’t find any obituaries or gravestones that matched her name. An interview in 2003 placed her in Phoenix, and so I collected phone listings for Martha Goddard in Arizona and called them one after another. All those numbers had been disconnected.

Little did I know that I would have to hunt for six months before I finally solved the mystery. I would learn she had transformed the criminal-justice system, though her role has never been fully acknowledged. And I would also discover that Louis Vitullo — far from being the inventor of the rape kit — may have taken credit for Ms. Goddard’s genius and insisted that his name be put on the equipment.

I pieced together dozens of obscure marriage and death notices to try to find her family members; read through hundreds of newspaper articles to establish the timeline of events; and even hired a researcher to dig through an archive of Chicago police department files from the ’70s. Finally, I managed to speak to eight people who knew or worked with her. From these sources, and two oral-history tapes in which she told her life story, I cobbled together what happened.

Back in that Chicago crisis center, Marty Goddard encouraged teenagers to confide in her, and she began to realize just how many of them had been molested.

At the time, most people believed that sexual abuse of children was rare. One psychiatric textbook from the 1970s estimated that incest occurred in only about one in every million families, and claimed that it was often the fault of girls who initiated sex with their fathers. Meantime, it was still legal in every state in America for a husband to rape his wife. Sexual violence that happened within a family was not considered rape at all. A real rape was a “street rape.” It happened to women stupid enough to be in the wrong places at the wrong times.

In Chicago, rape seemed like some sort of natural disaster, no different from the arctic winds that could kill you if you wandered out in the winter without a coat. “Chicago was not a city you wanted to venture out into after dark,” wrote the activist Naomi Weisstein. “Rape was epidemic.” In 1973, an estimated 16,000 people were sexually assaulted in and around Chicago. Only a tenth of those attacks were reported to the police and fewer than a tenth of those cases went to trial; an infinitesimal fraction of perpetrators ended up in prison.

It was a time — much like our own — when millions of people felt that the police had failed them. Chicago was still reeling from the 1969 killing by the cops of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, while he’d been sleeping in his own bed. The Chicago Police Department was notorious as a brutal, occupying force in black neighborhoods. Citizens’ groups were demanding review boards to reform officers’ behavior.

Amid all that, Ms. Goddard began asking questions that might seem so obvious to us today, but were radical in her own time: What if sexual assault could be investigated? What if you could prove it? What if, instead of a “she said” story, you could persuade a jury with scientific evidence?

A lot of men didn’t like her style. But Ray Wieboldt Jr., heir to a Chicago department-store fortune, did, and in 1972 she was hired as an executive at the Wieboldt Foundation, a charitable family fund that rained down money on progressive causes.

The Wieboldt name became her secret weapon. “I could say, ‘I’m Marty Goddard from the Wieboldt Foundation’ and people would just let me in their doors,” she recounted. And so she Wieboldt-ed her way in to meet with hospital managers and victims’ groups and began asking her relentless questions about rape.

Crime labs did not yet have the ability to test DNA; the first use of DNA forensics would not come until 1986, when British investigators used the technology to hunt down a murderer who raped his victims. But they could analyze pieces of glass, fingerprints, splatter patterns, firearms and fibers. Police investigators could find biological clues to help establish the identity of a suspect by, for instance, comparing blood types.

Ms. Goddard wanted to figure out why — even with all this evidence — no one seemed able to prove that a sexual assault had occurred. She learned that victims usually ended up in a hospital after an assault. The cops might dump a shivering, weeping woman in the emergency room and yell out, “We got a rape for you.” As they cared for the victim, the nurses might wash her off or throw away her bloody dress, inadvertently destroying evidence.

The cops didn’t seem to care. Instead, they would isolate the victim in a room and lob questions at her to try to determine whether she was lying. A Chicago police training manual from 1973 declared, “Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” and added, “It is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.” Officers would routinely ask women what they’d been wearing, whether they’d provoked the attack by acting in a seductive manner, and whether they had enjoyed the sex. “An actual rape victim will generally give the impression of a person who has been dishonored,” according to the manual.

In the early days of forensic science, the 19th century, rape exams sought primarily to test the virtue of women. A doctor would be called in to examine a woman’s vagina and then report on her motives. Was she a trollop, a harlot, or a pure-hearted innocent who spoke the truth?

In 1868, a British publication, Reynolds’s Newspaper, reported on one such exam. The surgeon “gave such evidence as left no doubt that the prosecutrix could not have been so innocent as she had represented herself to be.” The magistrate “said no jury would convict on such evidence, and he should discharge the prisoner.”

In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide what they felt about the victim — whether she deserved to be considered a “victim” at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing what had actually happened.

Even in the 1970s, the forensic examination remained a formality, a kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice. The police officers wielded absolute power in the situation; they told the story; they assigned blame. And they didn’t want to give up that power.

Ms. Goddard’s insight was that the only fix for this dysfunctional system would be incontrovertible scientific proof, the same kind used in a robbery or attempted murder. The victim’s story should be supported with evidence from the crime lab to build a case that would convince juries. To get that evidence, she needed a device that would encourage the hospital staff members, the detectives and the lab technicians to collaborate with the victim. On the most basic level, Ms. Goddard realized, she had to find a mechanism that would protect the evidence from a system that was designed to destroy it.

EVEN AFTER MONTHS of searching for Marty Goddard, I hadn’t been able to find her, or even figure out the names of her family members. But I did manage to track down Cynthia Gehrie, an activist who’d been swept up in Ms. Goddard’s crusade.

The two women met at a gathering for anti-rape activists in 1973 and soon they were strategizing over lunches and dinners, notebooks by their plates. At the time, Ms. Gehrie worked a day job at the A.C.L.U.; she was so impressed by Ms. Goddard that she volunteered to be her sidekick as they figured out how to force men in power to reckon with the rape epidemic.

Their timing was excellent, because 1974 was the year that everything flipped in Chicago. Women who had once been ashamed were now speaking out.

In October, a delegation of suburban women gathered before the members of the Illinois General Assembly. One described how she’d tried to fend off a sexual attacker with a fireplace poker. After the assault, she had carefully saved the bent poker and handed this piece of evidence to police detectives. Then, she recounted through tears, the police returned the poker to her straightened out. The idiots thought she had wanted them to fix it.

A mother stood before the committee and said that her little girl had been molested on her way to kindergarten. The police were already familiar with the attacker, a pedophile who had infected at least one child with venereal disease. And yet he was roaming free.

A nurse at the meeting explained how medical staff handled rape cases — and in the middle of her testimony, announced, “I am a rape victim myself.”

A few days later, about 70 women from a group called Chicago Legal Action for Women, CLAW for short, flooded into the office of State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, and plastered the walls with messages like “Wanted: Bernard Carey for Aiding and Abetting Rapists.”

The rape problem had suddenly become Mr. Carey’s problem, and he desperately needed to look as if he had an answer.

A movement was beginning — an awakening, like #MeToo. The fact that many of these activists were well-off white women forced politicians to pay attention. Black women in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods were most at risk of sexual violence, but their stories rarely made it into the newspapers, and rape was all too often portrayed as an affliction of the suburbs. Throughout her career, Ms. Goddard would wrestle with this disparity and try to overcome it. In 1982 she told an Illinois state legislative committee that “the lack of services on the South and West Sides of Chicago where a majority of our black victims reside” was “totally disgraceful.”

Now, though, in the early 1970s, she had just one obsession. She was determined to convince Bernard Carey that the problem could be solved, if he only had the will to do it. One day she showed up unannounced at his office and to her surprise, he welcomed her in. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he told her. But he had a new plan: He was going to let women like Ms. Goddard help figure out the rape problem for themselves. He appointed her and Ms. Gehrie to a citizens’ advisory panel on rape. Their mission: to investigate the failures in policing and suggest sweeping reforms.

Marty Goddard finally had what she wanted: permission to get inside the police departments.

With her new investigative powers, she headed to the Chicago crime lab building to ask police officers what was going wrong. Years later, she described what she had learned there in the oral history tapes. The cops blamed hospital workers, saying: “We don’t get hair. We don’t get fingernail scrapings.” The slides weren’t labeled, and they’d been “rubber-banded” together so that they contaminated one another. “So there goes that. It’s worthless,” the detectives told her.

The problem, she realized, was that no one had bothered to tell the nurses and doctors how to collect evidence properly.

What if hospitals could be stocked with easy-to-use forensic tools that would encourage medics, detectives and lab technicians to collaborate instead of pointing fingers? Gradually, these concepts solidified into an object: a kit stocked with swabs, vials and instructions.

Somewhere along the way, Ms. Goddard had befriended Rudy Nimocks, an African-American police officer who had handled incest cases and been horrified by what he’d seen. Ms. Goddard and Ms. Gehrie described Mr. Nimocks as a mentor. (He would be in his 90s now; I made multiple attempts to reach him without success.) According to several sources, Mr. Nimocks warned Ms. Goddard to proceed carefully. He told her that she should take care not to challenge the men in the crime lab directly. And he said that she’d need Sgt. Louis Vitullo, the head of the microscope unit, on her side.

Sergeant Vitullo was a scruffy cop-scientist, with a lab coat pulled hastily over his rumpled shirt and the pale, haunted look of a man who spent hours peering at murder weapons.

One day, Ms. Goddard found Sergeant Vitullo at his desk, introduced herself, and presented him with a written description of the rape-kit system. She must have been blindsided by what happened next.

“He screamed at her,” according to Ms. Gehrie. “He told her she had no business getting involved with this and that what she was talking about was crazy. She was wasting his time. He didn’t want to hear about this anymore.” Ms. Gerhie said Ms. Goddard called her minutes later to vent about being thrown out of Sergeant Vitullo’s office.

“Well, that didn’t go so well!” Ms. Goddard said wryly.

As far as Ms. Goddard knew at that moment, the rape-kit idea had just been killed off.

INVENTION, ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN — these are not just technical feats. They are political acts. The inventor offers us a magical new ability that can be wonderful or terrifying: to halt disease, to map the ocean floor, to replace a human worker with a machine, or to kill enemies more efficiently. And those magical abilities create winners and losers. The Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff has observed that technology “rules us much as laws do.”

When it comes to sexual assault, there are many inventions I can think of that help men get away with it — from the date-rape drug to “stalkerware” software. More striking is how few inventions, how little technology and design, has been devoted to keeping women safe.

Think about our public spaces, and how much they reinforce the power of men. If you grew up as a girl, you were taught to map out potential sexual attacks when you walked through any city. A hidden doorway, an empty subway platform, a pedestrian bridge with high walls — such places pulse with threat.

In my high-school driving class, the instructor lectured us about the dangers that lurked in empty parking lots. “Ladies, you don’t want to be fumbling in your purse if someone jumps out of the bushes,” he said, and suggested that we hold the car keys in one hand as we hurried to the car. Even as a teenager, I remember thinking how crazy this sounded. If there were rapists lurking everywhere, couldn’t the grownups do something about that?

I learned that the streets did not belong to me. Nor did the stairwells or the empty laundry rooms at midnight. I still remember the sense of defeat my first week as a college student on a pastoral Connecticut campus in the 1980s. I’d been aching to explore its tantalizing forests and hidden ponds. But then the freshman girls were herded into a lecture hall, and the head of public safety told us that if we wanted to walk from one building to another at night, we should first call the escort service that squired females around and protected them from rape.

“No way!” I thought.

And yet, at that time I was struggling to understand — and forgive myself for — having been molested as a small child. And though I never did use the campus escort service, I also never felt that the campus was mine.

But this is not how it has to be. It’s entirely possible to create public spaces and tools for everyone. Our environment and technology can foster a sense of equality and pluralism.

At the same time that Marty Goddard was trying to reinvent forensic technology, the disabled community was radically transforming the design of cities by pushing to make streets and buildings wheelchair-accessible. A wheelchair ramp does more than just allow someone to roll into a building; it also sends out a message that the people in those wheelchairs are important and worthy of dignity. This is the power of invention.

You can see why the idea of a rape kit might have been offensive to Sergeant Vitullo and other police officers. Like many of the great technological ideas, this one blasted through the assumptions of the day: that nurses were too stupid to collect forensic evidence; that women who “cried rape” were usually lying; and that evidence didn’t really matter when it came to rape, because rape was impossible to prove.

Now here was this proposal for a cardboard box packed with tools that would allow anyone to perform police work.

Despite his original reaction, Sergeant Vitullo mulled over Ms. Goddard’s idea. He must have found it intriguing. He studied the plans she’d shown him. And he began to see the sense in it all.

One day, Ms. Gehrie told me, Sergeant Vitullo called up Ms. Goddard and said, “I’ve got something to show you.” When Ms. Goddard arrived in his office, Ms. Gehrie recalled, “he handed her a full model of the kit with all the items enclosed.” Sergeant Vitullo had assembled a prototype for the rape kit and added a few flourishes of his own. And now, apparently, he regarded himself as its inventor.

Another friend of Ms. Goddard’s confirmed this story. Mary Sladek Dreiser, who met Ms. Goddard in 1980, told me that Ms. Goddard always praised Sergeant Vitullo in public. But in private, she described him as a petty tyrant who would “only go along with the kit if it were named after him.”

The rape-kit idea was presented to the public as a collaboration between the state attorney’s office and the police department, with men running both sides...

..and little credit given to the women who had pushed for reform. Ms. Goddard agreed to this, Ms. Gehrie said, because she saw that it was the only way to make the rape kit happen

In the mid-1970s, while still at the Wieboldt Foundation, Ms. Goddard began working nights and weekends to found a nonprofit group called the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. The group filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit in 1978, ensuring that her creation would be branded with a man’s name. For years afterward, the newspapers called the rape kit the “Vitullo kit.” When he died in 2006, an obituary headline celebrated him as the “Man Who Invented the Rape Kit.” His wife, Betty, quoted in the obituary, said that her husband was “proud” of the rape kit “but he didn’t get any royalties for it.” The obituary hailed Mr. Vitullo as a pioneer in a new form of evidence collection that transformed the criminal-justice system. There was no mention of Ms. Goddard.

Even if her name wasn’t on it, Ms. Goddard finally had permission to start a citywide rape-kit system. What she didn’t have was any money to create the kits, distribute them, or train nurses to use them. She had to raise all those funds through her nonprofit group, which represented survivors of sex crimes.

This seems strange. After all, state governments covered the cost of running homicide evidence through the crime lab, so why should sexual assault be any different?

And yet it was. And it still is.

Money problems have always haunted the rape-kit system. Testing a rape kit is expensive; today it costs $1,000 to $1,500. Except in the highest-profile cases, police departments have often pleaded underfunding, and let the kits pile up. That’s why victims themselves have had to bankroll crime labs. In the past decade, groups like the Joyful Heart Foundation have helped raise millions of dollars to test rape kits. The money sometimes comes from bake sales, Etsy crafts and feminist comedy nights.

Fundraising was even harder in the 1970s, however, when most foundations wouldn’t give money to a project with “rape” or “sex” in its title. And so Ms. Goddard had to resort to finding money wherever she could. This is where Hugh Hefner enters the story.

Chicago was built on soft-core porn, and Mr. Hefner was one of the city’s most prominent moguls. Men in suits sidled into his clubhouses for three-martini lunches, celebrities swanned into his mansion for glittering fund-raisers, and a blazing “Playboy” sign scalded the downtown skyline.

Mr. Hefner regarded the women’s liberation movement as a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt. And so his philanthropic Playboy Foundation showered money on feminist causes. In the early 1970s, for example, the Playboy fortune provided the seed money for the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project, which was co-founded by a little-known lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Goddard applied to Playboy for a $10,000 grant (the equivalent of about $50,000 today) to start a rape-kit system. And she got it.

Her collaboration with the Playboy Foundation turned out to be a surprisingly ideal one, in large part because Ms. Goddard had a friend on the inside: Margaret Pokorny (then known as Margaret Standish). Ms. Pokorny brainstormed all kinds of ways to support the project that went beyond the big check. For instance, she recruited Playboy’s graphics designers to create the packaging for the kit. And when Ms. Goddard needed volunteers to assemble the kits, Ms. Pokorny came up with a creative solution: old ladies.

“I’ve got this great idea, Marty,” Ms. Goddard recalled Ms. Pokorny saying. “Everybody just loves the Playboy bunny and these older women, they want something to do.” So one day a horde of them showed up in the Playboy offices, swilling free coffee as they assembled sexual-assault evidence kits.

In 1978, Marty Goddard delivered the first standardized rape kit to around 25 hospitals in the Chicago area for use in a pilot program she had designed — “the first program of its type in the nation,” according to a newspaper article.

The kits cost $2.50 each and contained test tubes, slides and packaging materials to protect the specimens from mixing; a comb for collecting hair and fiber; sterile nail clippers; and a bag for the victim’s clothing. There was a card for the victim, giving her information about where to seek counseling and further medical services.

The New York Times, which described the initiative as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and Ms. Goddard, said that the “innocuous looking” box “could be a powerful new weapon in the conviction of rapists.” The Times noted that one of the most important features of the system was deceptively low-tech: “Forms for the doctor and the police officers involved are included, as are sealing tape and a pencil for writing on the slides. Anyone who handles the box must put his or her signature on printed spaces on the kit’s cover.” There would be a paper trail that showed how the evidence had traveled from the victim’s body to the crime lab.

By the end of 1979, nearly 3,000 kits had been turned over to crime labs. One of them had been submitted by a bus driver who’d been abducted and raped by 28-year-old William Johnson. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and the Vitullo Evidence Kit was credited with winning the day in court.

By now, Ms. Goddard’s friend Rudy Nimocks had been promoted to head the sex homicide department. He told The Chicago Tribune that the new system had improved evidence collection. But perhaps more important, the kit worked magic in the courtroom. “In addition to the kits being very practical,” he said, “we find that it impresses the jurors when you have a uniform set of criteria in the collection of evidence.”

In other words, the rape kit, with its official blue-and-white packaging and its stamps and seals, functioned as a theatrical prop as well as a scientific tool. The woman in the witness box, weeping as she recounted how her husband tried to kill her, could sound to a judge and jury like a greedy little opportunist. But then a crime-lab technician would take the stand and show them the ripped dress, the semen stains, the blood. When a scientist in a lab coat affirmed the story, it seemed true.

Ms. Goddard had invented not just the kit, but a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape. Now, when a victim testified, she no longer did so alone. Doctors, nurses and forensic scientists backed up her version of the events — and the kit itself became a character in the trials. It, too, became a witness.

That’s another reason Ms. Goddard may have been willing to trademark her idea under Sergeant Vitullo’s name. It was as if in order to invent, she also had to disappear. The rape kit simply never would have had traction if a woman with no scientific credentials had been known as its sole inventor. It had to come from a man.

The word “technology” is part of the problem. It’s a synonym for “stuff that men do.” As the historian Autumn Stanley pointed out, a revised history of technology taking into account women’s contributions would include all sorts of “unimportant” inventions like baby cribs, menstrual pads and food preservation techniques. Sometimes the only way that women could navigate this world was to let a white man in a lab coat become the face of their radical ideas, while they themselves shrank into the background.

During World War II, for instance, a team of six “girls” figured out how to operate the world’s first all-purpose electronic digital computer, called the ENIAC. In 1946, one of them, Betty Holberton, stayed up half the night to ensure that the computer would ace its debut in front of the newspaper cameras. And yet she and the others were treated like switchboard operators, mere helpers to the male engineers. Ms. Holberton went on to invent and design many of the essential tools of computing during the 1950s and ’60s almost invisibly, while her male colleagues were celebrated as geniuses of the age.

Ms. Goddard, certainly, had mastered the art of vanishing. Her friends and collaborators from the 1970s had lost touch with her, and were just as flummoxed by her disappearance as I was. But they remembered her in vivid, disconnected flashes. I often felt that I was spying on her through keyholes into other people’s minds.

“She made miniature rooms,” Margaret Pokorny said, describing how Ms. Goddard spent hours with tweezers and tiny brushes constructing fairy-tale interiors inside of boxes. The rooms were scattered all around Ms. Goddard’s apartment, as if a dollhouse had been dissected.

From Cynthia Gehrie, I learned why Ms. Goddard might have been so driven to escape into Lilliputian fantasies. Ms. Gehrie told me that in the late 1970s, her friend had flown to a resort in Hawaii for a vacation and returned to Chicago a different, and broken, person. “I was raped,” Ms. Goddard had told Ms. Gehrie, pouring out a harrowing account of how a man had abducted her.

“He drove her to a remote location,” Ms. Gehrie said. “He taunted her with the knife. She told him she would do whatever he wanted. Finally, he drove her back to the resort. She was astonished when he let her go.” Ms. Gehrie can’t remember whether Ms. Goddard reported the rape to the police, but she’s always wondered if her friend’s prominence as a victims-rights advocate had made her a target. The attacker had won her trust, Ms. Goddard said, by pretending to be a supporter of her cause.

In one obscure interview I found, Ms. Goddard herself mentioned that rape and the scars it left on her body. And, she said, the attacker had infected her with herpes.

I was heartbroken for her, and more determined to find her than ever. By now she had become “Marty” to me — I could think of her only as a friend. I surmised, from the string of addresses she’d left behind, that she had been spiraling into poverty. She would have been 79. Was anyone caring for her? I felt less and less like a journalist chasing down a story. What I really wanted was to save Marty Goddard before it was too late.

Through the 1980s, Ms. Goddard kept fighting for the rape-kit system despite her growing exhaustion. It was “one incident by one incident by one incident,” she said later. “Imagine how many years it took us to go from state’s attorney to state’s attorney to cop to detective to deputy to doctor to pediatrician to nurse to nurse practitioner” and train each person who interacted with the victim and the rape kit. “I felt I had to save the world, and I was going to start with Chicago and move to Cook County and move to the rest of the state. And there was something in the back of my mind that said, ‘Gee, maybe the circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond the borders of Illinois.’”

She was right. In 1982, New York City adopted Ms. Goddard’s system because “its effectiveness was demonstrated in Chicago,” according to The New York Times. Within a few years, the city had amassed thousands of sealed kits containing evidence, and the system was putting rapists in prison.

Ms. Goddard had envisioned a kind of internet of forensics at a time when the internet itself was in its infancy. The idea was to standardize practices in crime labs everywhere and encourage police departments to share data to catch perpetrators who might cross county and state lines. And she had personal reasons for grinding away at the problem, for making it her obsessive mission. The man who had brutalized her in Hawaii still walked free. She knew this because she’d seen him, she told a friend at the time.

She had been walking to the attorney general’s office in downtown Chicago when her attacker materialized out of the crowd and locked eyes with her. It must have been a waking nightmare. Had he been stalking her? Had it been a chance encounter?

I don’t know. She was under an extraordinary amount of stress; maybe she was mistaken. I am working from fragments — from bits and pieces of her friends’ memories. What I do know is that Ms. Goddard began to drink; that she depended now on cheap sherry to dull the pain. She was dragging herself from city to city, evangelizing for the rape kit, sleeping in dive motels, giving everything she had until there was nothing left.

In 1984, the F.B.I. held a conference at its training center in Quantico, Va. Expert criminologists flew in to discuss a new system that would detect the serial killers and rapists operating across state lines. But to the dismay of Ms. Goddard, who attended the conference, the country’s top lawmen demonstrated little empathy for victims.

“So, this one man gets up,” a professor known as an expert in sex crimes, Ms. Goddard remembered later. The professor flashed slides on the screen, a twisted parade of naked female corpses. He made little effort to protect the identities of the dead women. Ms. Goddard was horrified at the way he “couldn’t wait to show the bite marks on the breasts” of one victim, as if to share his titillation with the audience.

That kind of attitude might have gone unremarked at a police convention, but there were lawyers, victims’ advocates and nurses at this conference and they “didn’t appreciate it.” Just as dismaying, this so-called expert described “interrogating” women who’d been raped, as if they were the criminals.

“I went nuts,” Ms. Goddard said. She gripped the arms of her chair, “saying to myself: ‘Calm down. Don’t say anything.’”

AFTER THE PRESENTATION, Ms. Goddard approached one of the organizers and said, “Something’s wrong here, and I really object.” Working on the fly, Ms. Goddard gave a presentation about her pilot project in Chicago, explaining how the rape-kit system worked. Afterward, “two guys from the Department of Justice” approached her and asked her to replicate her program all around the country. She was finally given enough funding to travel to more than a dozen different states and help start up pilot programs.

“I don’t know how my cat survived,” she said of those years. “I was gone all the time.”

She was tired out. And “so many people were downright insulting.” They’d ask her why she was an authority on forensics: “Are you a cop? An attorney?” Ms. Goddard was drinking heavily. She began to step away from her prominent role in criminal justice. She moved to Texas, and then Arizona. And finally she faded from public view so thoroughly that I believe she must have decided to disappear.

Her friend and former colleague Mary Dreiser kept in touch. But one day in about 2006 or 2007, Ms. Dreiser was distressed to dial Ms. Goddard’s number and discover it had been disconnected. Ms. Dreiser’s husband, a lawyer, asked a detective to find Ms. Goddard. She turned up in a mobile-home park in Arizona. “She was happy I had tracked her down,” Ms. Dreiser said.

By the time I started searching for Ms. Goddard a decade later, she had moved out of that trailer and her most recent listing suggested she lived in a dumpy apartment building alongside a Phoenix highway. That phone, too, had been disconnected, so I’d assumed that she had moved on once again, perhaps to a nursing home. But just in case, I called up the building’s management office and asked if the people there could tell me anything about Marty Goddard.

“Unfortunately, I can’t,” said the woman who answered the phone. There were rules about protecting the privacy of residents.

But rules are meant to be broken. So I called back. “Listen,” I said, “just hear me out.”

I then plied the woman in the management office with a brief — and, I hoped, heart-melting — tribute to Ms. Goddard’s genius and her sacrifices.

It worked. “OK,” she said, “let me check into it.” Hours later, she called me back. Marty Goddard had indeed lived in their apartment building, she said, then paused.

“And I’m very sorry to tell you that she passed away.”

The news walloped me. Ms. Goddard had died in 2015, at the age of 74, but there had been no obituary. No announcement. I’d searched for pictures of headstones, remembrances, funeral announcements, and I’d found nothing. This woman who had done so much for the rest of us. How could this be?

Paradoxically, at the same time as Ms. Goddard was fading from sight, her name no longer in the papers, the advent of DNA forensics was giving the rape kit a new kind of superpower.

In 1988, a court ordered Victor Lopez, a 42-year-old repeat felon accused of violent attacks, to submit to a blood draw. He would be the first defendant in New York State to be linked to a crime through DNA analysis — and the case would prove the dazzling effectiveness of this new tool. The DNA test showed a strong match between Mr. Lopez’s blood and the semen collected from one of his victims. Mr. Lopez was convicted of three sexual assaults and sentenced to 100 years in prison. One juror, John Bischoff, told The New York Times that “the DNA was kind of a sealer on the thing. You can’t really argue with science.”

When Ms. Goddard began her work, crime labs could establish only a fuzzy connection between a suspect’s blood and the swabs inside the kit — for instance, by showing that the blood type was a match. But now, DNA markers could reveal the path of a perpetrator as he left his semen or blood at multiple crime scenes.

Starting in 2003, several women across the country accused a man named Nathan Loebe of sexual assault, but those accusations had never stuck.

After the Tucson police received a grant to test a backlog of rape kits, they discovered that DNA from several of the kits matched Mr. Loebe. Rape-kit evidence revealed the pattern of his attacks, and last year he was sentenced to 274 years in prison, including for 12 counts of sexual assault.

But DNA testing was expensive. Compounding that problem was the sheer success of the rape kit system: Victims now felt encouraged to report their assaults and submit to exams, which meant that police departments were flooded with evidence.

And so, just as the rape-kit system began to succeed, police departments strangled it. They began hiding away thousands of untested rape kits deemed too expensive to process.

New York was among the first cities to set up a rape-kit system, and almost immediately it fell behind in processing. It amassed a huge backlog — 16,000 untested kits by the year 2000. The women (and some men) who submitted to rubber-gloved exams did so because they hoped against hope that the police might actually catch a perpetrator. Little did they know that their evidence could be thrown in a warehouse — or even in a trash can.

In 2000, Paul Ferrara, the director of Virginia’s crime lab, said that backlogs were growing all around the country and “cost lives.” The year before, the Virginia Beach police had had to release a rape suspect because potentially incriminating DNA couldn’t be processed quickly enough, and the suspect went on to murder a woman.

It is striking how much Ms. Goddard’s trajectory mirrored that of her invention. In the early 1990s, just when she might have risen to national prominence, she drifted south. She retired, though she was only in her early 50s, and eked out a living with some help from friends. By the 2000s, she had sobered up and spent her days clipping newspapers, tracking the issues that she most cared about. And then — this part hurts my heart — she pursued a degree in forensics at a local community college.

Ms. Goddard had founded sexual-assault forensics, and yet she now lacked any of the bona fides required to be recognized as an expert. Nothing came of her studies, and she never really worked again. Ms. Goddard herself had been warehoused.

I know all of this because just a few months ago, I finally cracked the case of why and how she disappeared, thanks to some clues I found in the announcement of her brief 1966 marriage in a Michigan newspaper. Working through a chain of obituaries and phone records and small newspaper items, I tracked down a number for Scott Goddard, who I thought must be Marty Goddard’s nephew.

One day I cold-called him and left a message. It turned out that he was the right Scott Goddard. His father had died in a freak accident in 1980, and after that, his aunt became like a second mother to him. “When I was 9 or 10 years old, she took me to the Grand Canyon. And I remained close with her for her entire life,” Mr. Goddard said.

He told me that his aunt — who’d always been so busy, so engaged — had turned into a hermit in the 2000s. She withdrew into her trailer in the mobile-home park, with her newspaper clippings fluttering everywhere, surrounded by the miniature model rooms she still loved to build. She was vanishing, shrinking down to nothing.

“When she passed, I inherited about 50 boxes of stuff,” he said, including a tiny toy chest filled with dolls for the doll children to play with.

He told me that when he was a boy, his aunt had taken him through the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago — a place she visited many times. Here they had lost themselves in those perfect shadow boxes, peering into, say, a Georgian dining room with crystal wine glasses, like fragments of diamonds, arranged on a silver tray. Beyond the chandelier and the French windows, a painted garden beckoned, with a lily pond and trees wilting in the summer heat, and paths you could follow into even stranger dreamscapes. You could imagine opening up one of the postage-stamp-sized books to hear the crack of its gold-leaf spine and read the secrets contained in its mouse-print text.

I can’t tell you what drove Marty Goddard into her dioramas. People around her tended to believe she wanted to escape into her imagination. But I think maybe she was exploring the dark magic of ordinary things, the way the most forgettable object can be converted into evidence. Some underwear, a pack of cigarettes, the note scrawled on the scrap of paper — how strange it is that any of these furnishings of your life could one day be used to reconstruct your own assault or murder. I wonder if she was building tiny crime scenes peppered with clues, if somehow she was leaving a message about what had happened to her.

Mr. Goddard told me that about 2010, “depression started to set in,” and his aunt became a furious alcoholic. Her once steel-trap mind wandered. Worse, she raged and accused, believed friends plotted to kill her. “In the last few years, she alienated most of her family and friends,” he said.

THE RAPE KIT WASN’T DOING SO WELL EITHER. In 2009, investigators toured an abandoned parking garage that the Detroit police had appropriated for storage and where officers had been dumping evidence for decades. In the dank building, with pigeons fluttering over their head, the investigators wandered past a blood-stained sofa and a bucket full of bullets and shells. In one of the parking bays, they found the rape kits — what would turn out to be a trove of 11,000, most of which had never been tested. Some of the kits had been collected as far back as 1980. The victims ranged in age from 90 to one month old.

It wasn’t just Detroit. Investigators in cities around the country had begun to open up their own warehouses, and they too discovered towers of untested rape kits.

By 2015, the backlog of untested rape kits in the United States had grown to an estimated 400,000.

In 2016, the Justice Department announced a new sexual assault kit initiative and $45 million to tackle the backlog. More than 25 states have committed to testing warehoused evidence. Despite the government funding, the cost of these initiatives still largely fell on women’s groups and the victims themselves, who organized dinner parties, Facebook charity drives and comedy shows.

So far, the efforts have paid off. Five states and the District of Columbia have cleared their backlogs. Testing thousands of kits has led to a bonanza of DNA identifications and hundreds of convictions. Scientists are also using rape-kit data to show that there are more serial rapists than we ever suspected. In one study of rape kits in the Cleveland area, researchers found that more than half of them were connected to other cases.

In other words, when a victim decides to go to all the trouble of driving to an emergency room and submitting to a rape-kit exam, it’s because she believes that her attacker will rape someone else. And quite often, she’s right.

When Ms. Goddard died, she asked that her ashes be thrown to the winds in Sedona, Ariz., along the red cliffs. Old friends like Cynthia Gehrie and Margaret Pokorny didn’t even know she was gone. She left behind those boxes of tiny furniture. And, also, a nationwide forensics system that might never have existed but for her.

Writing this, I dreamed of one day seeing one of the original kits displayed in the Smithsonian, among the parade of great American inventions. Mary Dreiser told me she might have saved one of the kits distributed in 1980. I asked her to hunt for it, and there it was, in the back of a closet, yellowed after decades in storage. The kit was emblazoned with the logo of a female face, as if to declare that this — among all the man-made objects in the world — had been created by and for women.

Today, a new generation of inventors are figuring out how to speed up the testing of rape-kit DNA, to improve the design of the kits, and to draw new insights from sexual-assault analytics. This story of feminist technology is still unfolding. Half a century after Marty Goddard answered the calls of teenage rape victims, survivors and their advocates are assembling a vast net of evidence, and it is tightening, ever so slowly, around the perpetrators.

#history #rape kits #goddard

138 notes · View notes

sol1056 · 5 years

Note

What are your overall thoughts on Castlevania season 3? So far the season, particularly the last two episodes (especially the 9th episode), have been controversial.

Well, that penultimate episode definitely put me in mind of the famous quote…

Obiwan: “I feel a great disturbance in the force…”

Half of which was probably screams into the void over this seeming betrayal, and the other half was shrieks in delight about confirmed OT3 potential.

On a more serious note, I’ve got a bunch of asks about S3, so I’m covering them all in this one response, because my thoughts come down to one thing.

This season was all about trust.

If we can consider this season (much like S1) to be setup, these episodes are for getting characters into the places and mindsets that the following act will require. So whatever we get in S4, it’ll require that Sypha be accustomed to Trevor’s life as an outcast demon-hunter, that Trevor accept his choices impact more than just him, that Alucard repell intrusions on his solitary guardianship, that Carmilla has a bound forgemaster and solid plans to grow an army, and that Issac has a full-sized army of his own.

A pedestrian approach would have been all plot: a whole lot of running from one place to the next while shouting exposition. It could’ve ended up a truly jarring tonal shift between what’s basically four separate storylines: Alucard and Cho’s former prisoners, Sypha and Trevor and Saint Germain, Isaac’s journey to find Hector, and finally Carmilla and Hector. Though given they hardly interact after the first episode, we could treat this as two parallel storylines: Carmilla and her sisters, and Hector and Lenore.

(Spoilers behind the cut.)

Instead, Ellis uses these four (or five) storylines to explore different issues with trust, betrayal, and isolation. Sypha and Trevor recognize that St Germain’s unexpected willingness to trust wasn’t born of seeing them as trustworthy, so much as a symptom of St Germain’s overwhelming isolation and loneliness – and they even remark on the similarity to someone else, implied to be Alucard. Who – after his highly guarded and distanced interactions with Sypha and Trevor in S2, followed by a month (or a year, Alucard’s lost track) of total isolation – has come to the same place as St Germain.

In both cases, those finales pivots on whether this third, isolated person can be trusted, as well as whether that person can trust the pair that claims to be helping. St Germain isn’t a fighter, and goes into the finale clearly terrified as to whether Sypha and Trevor can even keep him safe, while Sypha and Trevor have to take it on faith that St Germain’s intentions are good. (If you take Alucard’s animation to indicate that he has no experience as a lover, then the parallels are even more stark.)

Meanwhile, Isaac – as the captain so insightfully points out – remains fixated on the offenses done him, easily dismissing the kindness of an unexpected gift from a stranger. Hector’s issue, on the other hand, is too much trust, given too easily, with no questions ever asked (as Lenore drives home, first through interrogation and second through manipulation). Isaac’s determination not to trust anyone makes his way more difficult, while Hector’s determination not to question his immediate trust in the latest authority figure is what eventually traps him.

Even the four vampire sisters (an element I really loved, almost making up for the first two seasons’ near-dearth) pivot around issues of trust, but in their case, it’s whether they can trust that Carmilla’s grand vision is feasible. They don’t distrust Carmilla, or her ideas – they distrust that they can fulfill her visionary plan to its fullest extent. But they’re also intrigued by the idea, and clearly competent enough to make it happen – and despite a few times where it seems there might be fractures (more of Lenore’s diplomatic manipulation, in hindsight), the four really do trust each other pretty firmly.

There’s a secondary theme threaded through the storylines, too, although we only hear it stated explicitly in the Isaac and Trevor/Sypha storylines.

the captain: “If you don’t have your own story, you become part of someone else’s.”

The context here is whether one’s motivation comes from an external source, or is internal to the person. Isaac’s motivation (at least at the midpoint of this season) is clearly stated as revenge on Hector – that is, to rectify Hector’s wrongs that undid Dracula’s story. Alucard, too, is trapped in someone else’s story, as his motivation first is that he thinks helping two lost souls would please his mother, and later that training new demon hunters would please Trevor.

Sypha’s motivation is simpler: action! adventure! excitement! And in not stopping to consider the source (or the results) of her motivation, she ends up being accessory to not one but three stories (with Trevor along for the ride). The Trevor/Sypha storyline could be seen, in this light, as one in which they’re tools in other peoples’ stories. They fail to warn/assert/react fast enough to prevent the mad priest’s actions, they learn of (and then tackle) the church problem due to the town mayor’s need, and they learn of (and then tackle) the thing in the basement due to St Germain’s need.

In the end, St Germain (like Dracula) goes onto the next chapter of his story, with Sypha and Trevor left to handle the aftermath (like Isaac). They don’t even reclaim their story with the final discovery of the mayor’s depravity, as they end up (if understandably) destroying the evidence, as the mayor had requested.

When Trevor echoes the captain’s words (which could be Ellis wanting to drive the point home, or could imply that at some point, Trevor also met the captain), Sypha deflects his point. She’s quite certain she’s been living her own story, and enjoying it immensely. In the aftermath, Trevor turns the point around, saying that for the past few months, they’ve been living Sypha’s life, all action and adventure.

Trevor: “And now, we’re living my life.”

Trevor’s origins, after all, lie in the destruction of his family – but that destruction wasn’t at the hands of the demons they fought. Instead, it was at the hands of the church, its people, and the larger community. His storyline in S1-S2 was of someone who’d seen the worst of humanity, and ended up deciding to fight because he chose to, not because humanity deserves it.

With the possible exception of St Germain (which is more of an open question than a certainty), they trusted and discovered their trust wasn’t misplaced, so much as… that taking everything at face value meant they remained blind to what lay beneath. Their story halts with Trevor reminded of why he originally kept people at a distance (through snark and alcohol), and Sypha now enlightened as to how sometimes humans are far worst monsters.

That blindness is also present in Alucard’s story, when he takes the two young prisoners-turned-hunters at face value. He opens his house (well, most of it) to them, trains them, and tells them secrets of how to hunt his father’s race. It’s a radical shift from his original reaction to the Belmont hold, as a museum dedicated to the extermination of his race.

Which brings me to Ellis’ choice to have the finales as parallel battles, but he manages to have them reflect each other, as well. For Isaac, Sypha, and Trevor, it’s an external battle against an overwhelming foe. Sypha ends with literal blood on her hands, and other than St Germain’s departure, the rest of their victory is literally pyrric.

For Hector and Alucard, their storylines peak (ahem) at what should be a moment of trust and connection, which is why I can see the choice to have those storylines turn sexual. (Honestly, I thought the two young hunters were just going to cook Alucard dinner in return, or something – I had zero expectations that any story would ever go there.)

First, five separate battles would’ve been just a lot of chaos, compared to the contrast of apparent happy-endings (or happy-middles). Second, it drives home that Alucard has defenses all over the place, but none to seduction, while Hector simply clings to whomever is willing to call the shots, and only thinks to question later. They’re in the stage of their story that the captain raises to Isaac: after you’ve achieved this goal, what next? What is left for you?

Which is why I think their parallel endpoints – Isaac’s final battle, Alucard and the hunters, Hector and Lenore – all come to a head at being bound in some way. They’re still playing out someone else’s story, so they run headfirst into situations where that tunnel-vision can be used against them. Isaac may be the least trusting of the lot, but even he shows a remarkable tendency to take things at face value: to trust the gift from the seller, to listen to the captain, to sit and converse with the old witch who tells him about the possessed city. With as little foreknowledge as Alucard or Hector, Isaac rushes in, eyes too fixed on achieving someone else’s goal to see the trap ahead.

None of the bindings are shown as simple, easy to break, or without lasting effect. At the same time, it’s striking that Isaac and Alucard do manage to force their way free, while Hector can only flail about in pain. To me – given the theme of trust – that implies that somehow, both Alucard and Isaac do have the potential for a balanced trust. That is (unlike Hector) knowing when to take it away, even if both struggle with learning to give it.

Oddly, that’s why I think the season managed to position things beautifully for a next season, because we’ve come full circle.

It’s a curious thing about Alucard: when we first meet him in S1, he’s recovering from his father’s betrayal (of attacking humans); in S3, he’s recovering from the grief of loss (his parents, his only two friends) – and S4 ends with him shivering in pain/hurt over the betrayal of two people. Gotta wonder how much more Ellis will see fit to break this character down.

In S2, Hector was a valued lieutenant, if terribly blind to the implications of what Dracula wanted. Now those illusions are gone; he’s enslaved, wanted only for his skills (in the forge and in bed) – and the deal is quite explicit. Lenore has the grace to say that Hector should be getting something out of the deal, but that doesn’t change that Hector can’t pretend there’s no deal being made.

Isaac begins cast out, grieving Dracula (not entirely as a mission, but more as a friend, I think) – and ends with the resources and experiences to go in a new direction. He doesn’t have to take out Hector, who could be seen as small fry, anyway. (Especially given Hector’s now just a shell of a controlled man.) If Isaac chooses to go after Carmilla in S4, that’ll be the first step towards making his story his own. Note also that although Isaac may seem alone, he’s accompanied by a host of creatures. He has allies.

It’s the trust in those allies that seems to determine who ends well, and who does not. Although Trevor and Sypha (especially Sypha) were dealt an emotional blow by the post-battle revelations, they always had each others’ backs – and they leave the town behind, relatively unscathed. Isaac ends victorious, with a few of his army intact and the material to make more.

But the storyline that ends in the ascendant position is Carmilla’s. With her visionary ideas and her sisters’ abilities to make those visions real, Carmilla is positioned to go exactly where she wants. Which is why it’s also striking that (other than Lenore’s sex scene), neither Carmilla nor her sisters really have a ‘final’ battle. They’re effectively a season ahead of everyone else – the trust between the four is already established, solid, and reciprocated equally.

So you could say that being foolhardy about trust will land you in hot water – which pretty much covers all the central protagonists. But the story’s not that bleak, despite its final scenes, because it’s also saying that sometimes, to get where you want to be, you do have to take that leap – as illustrated by Isaac and St Germain. Or even that you trust, and if betrayed, you deal with the consequences, learn the lesson, and move on, like Trevor and Sypha.

Or you learn a different lesson, one preached by dear old dad: put the bodies of your conquests out front on stakes, and lock the doors, and trust no one. Which is a legitimate reaction to betrayal, don’t get me wrong, but one that S3 seems to be firmly saying will only end badly.

#castlevania #season 3 #sol thinks about stuff

154 notes · View notes

lesbianfeminists · 4 years

Text

“I have been dismayed and horrified to see the large numbers of gender critical radical feminist white women who are turning to racism as, apparently, their true ‘identity’, looking to the extreme religious far right to save them from what they see as the greater evil of gender identity or as they say ‘transgenderism’. (I consider ‘transgenderism’ to be a slur as no transgender people use it about themselves; we can discuss the boundaries and ideological disputes between feminism and transgender activism without denying that there are people who identify as transgender and it has a particular meaning. We do not have to, and I do not, accept the view that being transgender changes a person’s sex.) Let’s think about that for a minute.

If the transgender ideology ‘won’ and transwomen could legally identify as no different from me, female, for all purposes – if that legal fiction were to be fully and dogmatically enforced in every area of life – it would make it potentially unsafe in some circumstances for me to get health care (it being important to me to have female providers for most kinds of care, and especially gynecological care), and potentially make body searches (at the airport, or if I am under arrest or in jail or prison) even more abusive and traumatizing. It would – it already has – silenced me and deprived me of solidarity among LGBTQ communities that treat me as a pariah. It could – in London and San Francisco it has – resulted in violence against lesbians and other women who profess that ‘lesbian’ and ‘woman’ are material identities and not subject to appropriation by anyone born male.

What does the extreme far right threaten me with? Race war. Assault weapons being welcomed into our capitols without a murmur – the building of white militias tolerated with a wink as ‘free speech’. Creating a hostile climate against all LGBTQ people – all of us who are same-sex-attracted and/or gender-nonconforming – while allowing some, white, lesbians to occupy a protected space if they turn against others and join the religious fundamentalists in calling LGBTQ pride a dangerous and destructive movement. Lesbian feminists have separated ourselves from ‘LGBTQ’ or previously ‘gay rights’ when it is male-centric and misogynist, and still do. But accepting a protected berth with those who want to return women to male domination (maybe accepting de-sexed lesbianism as a kind of spinsterhood so long as it upholds and doesn’t challenged their authoritarian regime) is not just dangerous for those who do it, it implicates white privilege as fragility and lack of accountability.

For me – though apparently not for all Jewish women – being Jewish puts me emphatically in opposition to white nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Anti-semitism is in resurgence, and though we’re not the main target this time, it’s not just about ‘us’ as Jews in particular, it’s knowing what this is and needing to put ourselves in the way of it – to stop it and to give it no breathing room, no aid or comfort, not an ounce of allegiance. Being confronted with the Amy Cooper video puts it very starkly to all white women: are we going to be that, or are we going to stand with women and men of color and say ‘no more genocide in my name’?

There’s a process that any white woman has to go through, to examine her own thoughts and feelings and unpick racism from what she really needs in the world. We need to defend ourselves against violence or abuse from any man, and too often we don’t get what we need – we are overpowered and the abuse happens, the police don’t come or we choose not to put ourselves through their further abuse in case of rape, too many injustices – like forced psychiatry – aren’t even criminalized. We have a ton of injustices to confront and combat. But taking power that is the power of racism and of a racist, male supremacist state, of anti-woman and anti-gay religious fundamentalists, to bring in bigger guns against someone we have a dispute with, is only empowering what is racist, complicit with a genocidal state and misogynist religions, in ourselves – it cannot empower us as women of the world, as lesbians of the world, as dykes of the world. It doesn’t stop violence, it escalates and accelerates it.

Sally Roesch Wagner, a white second-wave feminist who has studied Haudenosaunee culture and the influence of that culture on first-wave feminism in the US, recounts that a Haudenosaunee friend commented to her that white women look at their culture and think women have significant power, but to her, it was a matter of responsibility rather than power. White women need to think about the relationship between responsibility and power, and that it might be different from our own accustomed starting point – in our lives there might have been responsibility imposed on us without power, so we focus on gaining power – but in doing so, remain within our own frame of reference which is a racist, male supremacist, capitalist one. When we start from responsibility we may think we have to give ourselves up – but we can start from inside, quietly. What are we accountable for, and how can we turn that around, show up for ourselves and others in an exercise of responsibility?

And responsibility has to turn outward to the world as it is, not to an imagined one where the white enclosure is all that matters.”

#rightwing

28 notes · View notes

day0one · 4 years

Link

Donald Trump's Far-Right Extremist Army Has Turned On Him

The monster that Trump created doesn’t need him anymore.

For months, President Donald Trump’s message to his supporters was clear: The election was being stolen from him, and they needed to fight to take it back.

So on January 6, during a Trump-promoted rally to “Stop the Steal,” thousands laid siege to the US Capitol in a stunning attempt to do just that. The fallout of their failed insurrection, which resulted in five deaths, was swift: Trump was de-platformed from nearly every major social network and, on Wednesday, impeached for a historic second time.

When he emerged on camera a short while later, tail tucked between his legs, to condemn the rioters whom he himself had incited, and to call for a peaceful transfer of power to president-elect Joe Biden, his base felt betrayed.

“So he basically just sold out the patriots who got rounded up for him,” one person wrote in a 15,000-member pro-Trump Telegram group. “Just wow.”

In online havens for MAGA extremists, including Gab, CloutHub, MeWe, Telegram, and far-right message boards such as 8kun, the tone toward Trump is shifting. HuffPost reviewed thousands of messages across these platforms and found that a growing minority of the president’s once-devout backers are now denouncing him and rejecting his recent pleas for peace. Some have called for his arrest or execution, labeling him a “traitor” and a “coward.” Alarmingly, many of those who are irate about Biden’s supposed electoral theft is still plotting to forcibly prevent him from taking office – with or without Trump’s help.

“We don’t follow you,” another Telegram user wrote, addressing Trump after the president put out his video urging calm and order. “Be quiet and get out of our way.”

It has become apparent that now – after his mass radicalization campaign of voter-fraud disinformation and conspiracy-mongering – even Trump can’t stop the dangerous delusion he’s instilled across the country or the next wave of violence it may soon bring.

Authorities are urgently warning of armed protests being planned in all 50 state capitals in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration. Politically motivated extremists “will very likely pose the greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021,” according to a new joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and US National Counterterrorism Center. The document, first obtained by Yahoo News, attributes this threat to “false narratives” that Biden’s victory “was illegitimate, or fraudulent,” and the subsequent belief that the election results “should be contested or unrecognized.”

Ahead of last week’s riots, Trump supporters openly planned their attack on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other mainstream platforms, where they shared materials including flyers titled “Operation Occupy the Capitol.” These sites have since cracked down aggressively on such behavior, causing extremists to migrate to lesser-known corners of the internet to plan their next move.

While this has hindered their ability to spread propaganda and enlist new recruits, their new social channels are subject to less scrutiny and have already exploded in reach.CloutHub, MeWe, and Telegram shot to the top of the charts of popular free apps on the App Store and Google PlayStorein the wake of the siege. Gab has also reported a massive surge in new users, with about 10,000 people signing up every hour.

In these spaces, HuffPost has observed calls to “burn down” the Capitol, launch “an armed revolt,” “pop some libtards” and “TAKE THIS COUNTRY BACK WHATEVER IT TAKES!!” Some posts are more specific:“Civil War is here. Group up locally. Take out the News stations,” one person declared. “LET’S HANG THEM ALL,” another implored. “LET’S FINISH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.”

The Boogaloo Bois, a far-right militia organizing to foment civil war, is capitalizing on the unrest to issue online a renewed call to arms. The FBI has warned specifically of potential Boogaloo violence during planned rallies at state Capitol buildings in Michigan and Minnesota on Sunday.

“There's a war coming, and cowering in your home [while] real patriots march with rifles ... will make you a traitor,” commented a member of an encrypted Boogaloo chat.

Some extremists, however, are urging each other not to attend any of the upcoming armed protests. The Proud Boys, a rabidly pro-Trump neo-fascist group that helped storm the Capitol, is cautioning its followers that such demonstrations could be “fed honeypot” events set up by authorities in order to seize attendees’ guns.

It seems that even the Proud Boys are losing faith in Trump: a Telegram channel run by the group reposted a message with Trump’s video along with the text “The Betrayal of Trumpist base by Trump himself continues.”

For four years, the president’s supporters have worshipped him like a god. His rallies have been likened to cult gatherings. Nearly half of his campaign donations came from small donors, trouncing Biden’s 39%. For most of his presidency, Trump enjoyed strong support from the Republican base, polling well above 90% with that group. But after the Capitol riots, his support is plummeting at record rates.

MAGA world has stood unwaveringly by Trump’s side through multiple allegations of sexual assault (including rape), an impeachment for abuse of power, revelations that his administration literally caged children, a historic rise in national debt, countless lies, blatant self-enrichment by him and his family members, a pandemic that has claimed close to 400,000 American lives under his leadership – nearly a fifth of all deaths worldwide – and more.

So to see his “America First” army suddenly begin to turn on him is truly remarkable. It’s happening broadly among his supporters, and even among the far-right extremist communities that have flourished online during Trump’s presidency.

Among the recent messages excoriating Trump in dedicated pro-Trump networks:“tbh I hope they hang Trump at this point”; “He deserves what’s coming to him”; “he is literally done he will die in jail”; “Seriously hoping they’ll lock him up or lynch [him]”; “Guy is the biggest cuck ever at this point”; “Can’t wait til the left locks up his bitch ass. Rot in prison.” Several people have proclaimed that at this point, Trump can only redeem himself by declaring martial law to maintain power by force.

After losing to Biden, Trump systematically attacked the allies that propped up his presidency in a desperate effort to keep his re-election fantasy alive.

He first turned his adherents against Fox News, which stoked his ire by accurately projecting Biden’s electoral victory in Arizona before a few other networks did so. Then, when some Republicans – including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell – declined to play along with his unsupported claims of mass voter fraud, Trump urged his base to turn on them. After that came Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, who refused Trump’s unconstitutional demand to reject votes in favor of Biden. (“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution,” Trump tweeted on the afternoon of January 6, provoking chants of “Hang Pence” during the riots.)

Now that Trump himself appears to finally be backing away from his “Stop the Steal” hoax, a growing faction of his supporters is through with him, too.

But after the dramatic failure of his slow-motion coup, as he counts down the days until his return to life as a private citizen, Trump presumably has more pressing concerns than maintaining his followers’ devotion. Aside from the hundreds of millions of dollars in personal debt hanging over his head, it seems increasingly likely that he could face criminal prosecution, from which he will no longer be immune. And following his latest impeachment, if the Senate convicts him, it can also vote to disqualify him from ever running for office again.

With so much at stake and no sane hope of clinging to power, it’s now in the president’s best interest for his base to avoid further violence, which could increase his chances of conviction. But the reality is that the monster Trump created doesn’t need him anymore.

“He can promise and call for peace all he likes,” one Gab user wrote. “Won’t make a blind bit of difference.”

#donald trump #politics #2020 election #extremism #capitol riot

2 notes · View notes

mobius-prime · 5 years

Text

84. Sonic Super Special #2 - Brave New World

Brave New World

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Ken Penders and Pat Spaziante Colors: Barry Grossman

We're in for a long one, guys! I don't think a single special issue so far has contained only one story within, but this issue is a bit special. It doesn't necessarily contain one cohesive story, but rather serves as a stage-setter for the comic's upcoming issues, addressing many smaller plot points and chronicling the first foray made back into Robotropolis after Robotnik's death.

The beginning already gives us a juicy tidbit even though it's merely a recap of Mobius' history - for the first time, we hear about Queen Acorn, Sally's mother! We don't know much about her yet, only that she's considered a casualty of war in the Great War against the Overlanders before Robotnik's takeover. After the recap finishes, we see what's happening in the present - the celebrations are over, and now the Freedom Fighters and all their affiliates are faced with the enormous task of attempting to restore Robotropolis back into its former glory as Mobotropolis.

Woof, that looks bad. Remember this place isn't just polluted with all sorts of nasty industrial contaminants, but actual radioactive fallout as well (from when the bombs went off in the Mecha Madness special, if you recall). They decide to start with the former palace at the center of the city, but are quickly attacked by a Dynamac robot of the same kind as the one in StH #31.

The robot grabs Hershey, Antoine, Bunnie, and Tails in its weird mechanical tentacles, but Sonic confuses it by running fast enough to create multiple images of himself, making it drop its prisoners. While the fight is going on, Rotor discovers Snively hiding behind a curtain and definitely not doing anything evil to control the robot. With Bunnie's help, they take down the robot and snag Snively in a net before he can get away.

With the threat neutralized, Sally heads upstairs to see what her old home has become, having not seen it since she was only five years old. The shock of seeing her home in such a state is clearly overwhelming to her.

The comic interrupts itself here unexpectedly to show us a map of Mobius - yes, the entire thing - but we're going to hold off on exploring that until the end so as not to interrupt the flow of the story. Sally begins divvying up various tasks to her Freedom Fighters to focus on the restoration of the city - things like running water, power, etc. - but Geoffrey is nowhere to be found. Turns out he's on a call with King Acorn, whose condition has apparently improved enough that despite his crystallization, he can speak and even give orders. It doesn't seem like his mental state is really in the best of shape, however…

See, this is the trouble with monarchy, guys. I feel like if he was anyone other than The Almighty King, his words would be dismissed as delusional and bordering on fearmongering, but because he is the king and Geoffrey is sworn to his service, Geoffrey actually appears to take his words seriously, even as Dr. Quack encourages the king to lie back down and rest.

Well, since Chuck is such a radical, let's check on what he's doing right now, shall we? As it turns out, the blast from the Ultimate Annihilator restored the free will of every roboticized Mobian when it wiped out their slavemaster. While the others have been taking care of business up above, Chuck has been looking after all the newly-freed roboticized folk. Now that they can think for themselves once again, however, they have a new problem - they all, of course, want their organic forms back, but Chuck has to break the news to them that that's not possible.

Hey, who are those two blue hedgehog-looking dudes at the bottom of those panels? Jules and Bernie, Chuck calls them…

Meanwhile, Sonic and Tails are out on patrol, making sure the city is free of any more surprises like the Dynamac. They encounter a line of swatbots transporting materials into factories like usual, but they complete ignore the pair, causing them to speculate this is another contingency Robotnik had set up to continue without him in the case of his death. They're interrupted by a sudden cry for help, which they follow to its source.

Sonic attempts to help Penelope get Arlo out of his pickle, but isn't quite strong enough, until suddenly one of the roboticized Mobians, a polar bear that Sonic and Tails recognize as Rudyard, arrives to lift the rubble off Arlo. Uncle Chuck shows up with more of the roboticized people, and then… introduces some familiar faces to him.

Ouch.

Sonic races off in blind fury and grief, despite Jules attempting to explain to Sonic that they had asked Chuck to keep the secret from him, and Bernie sends Tails off after him to hopefully calm him down. Chuck in the meantime takes his entourage to speak to Sally, who happily welcomes them back to sentience, though they seem doubtful that things can't go back to being the way they were before.

On a cliff overlooking the city, Sonic rages as Tails arrives, furious that Uncle Chuck would keep such an important fact from his as his parents being alive. Apparently, he had told Sonic right at the beginning of the war that they were "casualties of war," something which I suppose technically rings true, though it was clearly interpreted to mean "dead" by Sonic. (Hey, is anyone else noticing a weird parallel between Sonic and Knuckles' family situations right now?) Tails reasons with him that even if he had known his parents were alive, that wouldn't have necessarily made things easier for him to bear, as Sally knew her father was alive and it ate her up inside. This cheers Sonic somewhat, the thought that Uncle Chuck only did what he did to protect Sonic because he cares for him, and together they head back into the city.

That evening, Sally is sitting and watching over the work her people are doing and remarking to Nicole that it would perhaps be easier to abandon the city and rebuild elsewhere, and as Nicole reassures her who shows up to agree with the computer but Geoffrey? He sits next to her to chat, but Sally notices his attitude and finally speaks up about their potentially blossoming relationship.

At least he takes it well! And at least Sally is finally moving on to someone more her age… Of course, at that moment Sonic shows up, and all he sees is Geoffrey acting like he's about to kiss Sally, so naturally he tackles him to the ground and they each begin attempting to tear the other to shreds in a jealous rage. Sally is for some reason not happy with this turn of events at all, so she gets Bunnie and Antoine to hose them down with a high-powered fire hose, and forces them to shake hands while they glare at each other and whisper through clenched teeth a promise of a later rematch. These two have a really healthy relationship, I feel!

That night, Sally uses Nicole as a sort of video call portal to her father, and we find out that apparently, she's not the one really issuing all the orders here - instead, her father is relaying commands to her that she then carries out under the guise of her own leadership. She's incredibly uncertain about the ethics of lying to her friends about the situation, even though Nicole reminds her it isn't the first time she kept secrets (referring to her secret about Knuckles), and she falls asleep alone and lonely.

The next day, Uncle Chuck hits her with some rather shocking news about the roboticized citizens.

It seems maybe they aren't ready to rejoin society yet after all, unfortunately. The issue ends with one last note on Snively - he's been sent to the Devil's Gulag, which is apparently being run in the same way that Winterhold runs its prison system, with prisoners stranded in their cells on the island and guards only coming to check on them and provide food and water once a week. Geez, man, aren't the people running this thing supposed to be the good guys? That seems incredibly inhumane… Snively isn't pleased with his new living situation at all, and vows quietly from within his own cell to strike back when the time is right. On a side note, we actually see the exact same sign that I pointed out all the way back in StH#18, the one at the entrance to Robotropolis. It's been changed for the new situation, with the "R" in Robotropolis crossed out in favor of an "M", the population of evil doctors changed to 0, and the "0 living beings" changed to "many living beings," which is honestly a really cute way for them to take back their own land. The bit mentioning how many robots there are is unchanged however, which means we really are dealing with over four million roboticized citizens recently having regained their minds and wills. Guess we'll see how that plays out in the future…

Okay, time to take a look at this map of Mobius we've been provided!

I always found it rather funny when fictional planets have to set themselves up to look vaguely like Earth. The Sonic games did it, Steven Universe did it, it's a strangely common trope. I went ahead and checked the scale provided, and my earlier statements about Mobius as a planet being comparable to Earth hold true; it's about the same size as our own planet. As you can see, almost everything relevant takes place in Not-North-America, with Mobotropolis and Knothole being situated in a general area analogous to Texas or perhaps Oklahoma. A lot of the noted areas in the legend are just references to old issues, but some are quite interesting. For example, the Floating Island apparently takes a sinusoidal orbit around the planet - it probably looks a bit less dramatic than that considering this appears to be a Mercator projection map (which means that the size of landmasses further from the equator are inflated), so the path is probably much less curved than it appears here. Quite interestingly, there's a section on the east coast of Not-North-America labeled "Overlander Territory" - we knew already about the Great War between the Mobians and the Overlanders, but now we actually get to see where they've apparently been residing this entire time. There's a few locations labeled for places we haven't seen yet (I'm not sure if this is because they were planning ahead for future issues, or if it's because this issue, despite chronologically taking place now, was published later), such as the Mysterious Cat Country and the Kingdom of Mercia, but the one that stands out most to me is the "lethal radioactive zone" located in the equivalent of modern-day Mongolia. There's no note yet on what exactly caused this area to be lethally radioactive, and I genuinely can't remember if it's addressed specifically in future issues, so I guess we'll just have to see!

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #sonic the hedgehog #sonic super special 2 #writer: ken penders #pencils: ken penders #pencils: pat spaziante #colors: barry grossman

2 notes · View notes

blackandwhitemusician · 6 years

Text

On “Crime and Punishment”, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Bungou Stray Dogs

ft. Nikolai Gogol. LONG POST! Also spoilers for the novel/manga if you haven’t read it already/haven’t caught up yet.

Here are some thoughts I have on certain parallels between Crime and Punishment and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in real life and as portrayed in BSD, also some speculations as to how this book and the real Dostoyevsky might have inspired his BSD version.

First, on the real book itself (more like the English translation of the book):

The main character in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, killed an old woman he deemed as wicked and worthless. He was so shaken by the idea of murder that he spent an entire month tormenting himself over it, lost his gut during the actual murder, and proceeded to make himself fall ill from the mental torture. He thought he did it for money, but the more he looked into the event and into himself, the more he realized he just did it to prove that he could (my own interpretation).

“There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one! I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I… I wanted to have the daring… and I killed her.”

Raskolnikov also wrote an article on the psychology and mental state of a criminal, and what leads someone to commit a crime. Raskolnikov and another character, Porfiry, used these concepts to discuss a technique used by Porfiry to trap criminals into confessing, which the two of them referred to as a “cat and mouse” game.

Raskolnikov classified people into “ordinary” and “extraordinary”. According to him, the former follow and obey the law, while the latter transgress it. The former’s role is to follow and maintain the order, while the latter seeks to destroy the status quo and establish a new order. It follows that when a person of “extraordinary” conduct deems it necessary to commit a crime to achieve their objective, they can find the will to do it.

“The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood.”

This does not mean, however, that people of “extraordinary” nature are exempt from feeling guilt. In fact, Raskolnikov recognized that if these individuals do in fact feel guilt from shedding blood, it would be their greatest punishment. The worst punishment for a criminal is not so much the prison as it is by way of their own conscience.

Yet, sometimes such a punishment is essential to make way for change. Raskolnikov compared these “extraordinary” individuals to the likes of Napoleon, who by social standards should be considered the worst criminals ever lived considering the amount of blood they shed, yet are revered as heroes for the change they ushered.

I immediately thought of this:

BSD Gogol’s character fits perfectly in the scheme of Crime and Punishment. The real Dostoyevsky also mentioned Gogol several times in Crime and Punishment, when discussing the topic of morality.

Whatever the objective of the BSD “Decay of Angels” is, I’m fairly certain it has to do with change - they are willing to commit evil to destroy the status quo and advance change. These “villains” are certainly not the usual kind of “evil cause I like it”, or “evil cause I am proudly anti-heroic figures”.

Going back to Crime and Punishment, there are a few other characters that I think are of relevance to the portrayal of BSD Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Porfiry: an investigator, who was convinced Raskolnikov was the murderer in question, and went to almost extreme lengths to psycho him into confessing. He had a pretty sharp mind, and used the sadistic investigative method of trapping his “prey” by letting him roam freely in his natural habitat, which Porfiry believe would make the criminal lower his guard and eventually fall into the trap himself. Raskolnikov realized the trap, of course.

Svidrigailov: an extreme representation of a type of “extraordinary” man, he was portrayed as, to me, a nihilist and hedonist. Svidrigailov doesn’t seem to care about morality, and only wants to satisfy his own pleasures. Whether he harms others in the process is irrelevant to him. He can commit random acts of kindness because the spontaneity of that action gives him pleasure.

While I don’t see these characters as similar to Raskolnikov, they certainly brings out his character in various ways. Raskolnikov understood Porfiry’s investigative methods perfectly (I bet he basically thought “If it was me, that’s what I’d do”). Porfiry also recognized and acknowledged Raskolnikov’s intellectual depth and potential, and was interested in him intellectually. Svidrigailov, on the other hand, mirrors Raskolnikov’s own despair and cynicism, if only more pronounced in the extreme. One can say Svidrigailov is the embodiment of despair. He is totally amoral, and radically indifference to the feelings of others. His radical attitude could have been brought about by his realization and acceptance that evil is inherent in the world, and as such, evil and vice to him is only an “occupation of a sort”. His bleak outlook only serves to worsen his boredom with the world, and prompts him to seek pleasure for its own sake. He views eternity as “a bath house... black and grimy and spiders in every corner”, to which Raskolnikov responds in horror “Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?”

Next, on the BSD portrayal of Fyodor:

Now there has been very little detail about his personal motivations, but I see BSD Fyodor as a combination of all three characters: Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, and Porfiry, maybe more of Svidrigailov than the rest. BSD Fyodor is definitely among the “extraordinary” people Raskolnikov described, maybe even to the extreme. Of course, there is also the personality of the real Dostoyevsky.

Regarding killing people and messing up their families as a petty problem while looking for a happy chit chat about it with one of those he just messed up, that is as Svidrigailov as it gets. (I know Fyo was probably joking, but still)

It has been suggested time and time again that BSD Fyodor might have tired of, been disillusioned or discontent with the world as it is, and sought to correct it (while also having some entertainment along the way). He specifically has issues with special ability users, which still doesn’t stop him from killing normal people if they get entangled in the conflict. This motivation possibly stems from his hatred for his own ability, which seemed as destructive as it gets. Alternatively, BSD Fyodor might also see death as the ultimate freedom special ability users can be granted to be free from their “sins”, which refer to their abilities. As such, he took it upon himself to deliver them.

The constant mention of “freedom” of the will also strike me as a parallel to real Dostoyevsky’s discussion of freedom in Crime and Punishment.

“Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes.”

“He who despises most things will be a lawgiver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right.”

In other words, if you act of your own free will, you are right. Anyone who wills it can transgress the law.

What really intrigued me is how BSD Fyodor saw himself as a divine figure delivering judgement for those he considers “sinners”. I doubt such a strong motivation came about just because he discovered his super human ability one day, which has been suggested as something to do with instant killing. I see a possibility of him having been alienated, ostracized and possibly imprisoned as a result of his ability and his intelligence, seeing how completely unfazed he was by the treatment he received in his prison cell at the Mafia base. His ability would have been dangerous on its own, but his intelligence makes him an even more dangerous individual. Another characteristic of him that interests me is the complete lack of guilt or remorse over his actions. If we assume this is a reference to Svidrigailov, it might have been a result of his mindset that evil is inherent in the world (which fits BSD Fyodor). If I have to guess, he would have been a child who never played with other kids, had no lessons in social etiquette and no guardian figure to teach him about the outside world, heavily religious, either avoided, feared or beaten up regularly, probably had no concept of remorse, probably had to fend for himself and used his intelligence to get the upper hand by gambling, manipulating or tricking others.

BSD Fyodor was probably regarded as a “demon” for as long as he lived. He probably also felt the suffocating imprisonment extended from his home life to the rest of society. He probably got tired and bored of interacting with others who just went on their normal lives complaining about their misfortunes, oblivious to everything else that happened around them. He probably never once saw himself as one of them.

It was also suggested in Crime and Punishment that through suffering and torturing himself with his conscience, Raskolnikov was able to still feel human (my own interpretation). Could it be that BSD Fyodor was past that stage of being human, since he doesn’t seem to be suffering from the weight of his crimes? Could that be the reason why he sees himself as the substitute for God?

Regarding BSD Fyodor’s ability

Not much has been mentioned in the manga, and even in Dead Apple all we got is something along the lines of “Fyodor and his ability are two sides of the same coin”. What strikes me is how Fyodor is portrayed to represent Crime, and his ability Punishment. This is all speculation, but I think his ability definitely has to do with delivering punishment for a crime (no shit!). But whose crime, and on what condition? Could it be that his ability only takes effect if the criminal repents and experiences remorse from their own crime?

Regarding BSD Dazai

Probably the most hotly discussed parallel in the fandom. Sure, Dazai and Fyodor have been described as being made of the same stuff from the start due to their intellect which is unparalleled by anyone else but these two, but they didn’t really strike me as similar until I encountered this line from Crime and Punishment.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

At first glance, this quote describes both Dazai and Fyodor very well. I have no question about Dazai having a “large intelligence and a deep heart”, and so he will continue to have “great sadness” in the form of alienation and loneliness (and self-hatred and guilt to an extent). Fyodor may have an equally great intelligence, but it is still unclear to me what lies in his heart. I think, he at least would have felt loneliness and the boredom of existence at some point, just like Dazai did. Their sharpness would have enabled them to sniff out the most obscure clues to the darkest intentions in people, which might have led them to regard human beings as foolish and utterly selfish creatures. The dangerous and unique nature of their abilities would have rendered them untouchable by others, further worsening their alienation.

“If God does not exist, then I will become God.”

What kind of experience would prompt someone to deliver such a line as that?

It sounds less like a divine sentence than a cry of disillusionment and cynicism to me, which is really... sad??

Other trivial stuff:

- The real Gogol was apparently a drama queen and a master of satire.

- The real Dostoyevsky was exiled in Siberia for reading banned works. He subsequently wrote “Notes from the House of the Dead” to describe this experience.

- The real Dostoyevsky frequently discussed the idea that man does not think rationally most of the time, and as such, man’s actions are not always predictable.

- In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov passionately loved Sonya, a destitute young woman whom he saw as his figure of salvation, and he once bowed to her because she represented “the sufferings of all humanity”.

- Svidrigailov was hinted to see the world as a dirty, meaningless playground in which he was the actor, and kept up his act until the end. When he decided to shoot himself after being rejected by the one woman he loved, he chose to do it in front of a complete stranger at the American embassy. His last words were “When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.”

Credits for screenshots go to @dazaiscans.

1K notes · View notes

the-final-straw-blog · 6 years

Text

Anti-Fascist Struggle in Europe and State Repression in Russia

This week, we feature two segments on the show: an interview with a Russian anarchist about the recent ramping up of torture and repression by the FSB in Russia against anarchists and anti-fascists; and a chat with Patrick Strickland, author of "Alerta! Alerta!: Snapshots of Europe's Anti-Fascist Struggle".

FSB Torture of Radicals

First up, Bursts spoke with Tania, a Russian anarchist, a member of the crew who runs the RUpression website documenting Russian state agencies like the FSB's use of torture to extract stories to build conspiracies to legitimize their tightening of restrictions on public gatherings, chill the political and media landscape, and sustain a state of sense of fear among the populace. We discuss the death of Mikhail Zhlobitsky in a bombing of an FSB office in October, the current state of anarchist organizing in Russia, and the past political repression since 2012 and the cases in Pensa (which we've spoken of in this show in the past) and the 2017 "The Network" conspiracy case. In February 2019, a situation unfolded where Azat Miftakhov disappeared, came back tortured, and accused of taking part in an anarchist terrorist plot. Azat was released by court order only to be re-arrested by another police agency (well documented in this crimethInc article, alongside some downloadable posters for pasting around your town). You can learn more about the case by reading and following rupression.com

Patrick Strickland on European Anti-Fascism

Secondly, William had the chance to interview Patrick Strickland, who is a journalist and author, about his recently released book "Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe's Anti-Fascist Struggle". This book follows the stories and lives of 5 European people who do broadly defined antifascist work or struggle. For this interview we talk about Strickland's journalism, the experiences of compiling this book, and about understanding elements on the far right that might enhance antifascism, in the so called US, Europe, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @P_Strickland_ for news and upcoming projects!

Announcements

Show Up For Rayquan Borum!

If you are in Charlotte NC tomorrow, Monday the 11th, consider showing up to support Rayquan Borum, who is a Black activist arrested during the Charlotte Uprising, a days long protest to mourn and rage against the police murder of Keith Lamont Scott in 2016. From charlotteuprising.com/statement : "The uprising in Charlotte is a direct response to sustained police and vigilante violence against Black people in this city and across the country: Keith Lamont Scott, Jonathan Ferrell, Aiyana Stanley, Jones, Tyre King, Korryn Gaines, Janisha Fonville, Terence Crutcher and so many more. These are names of victims we know and deeply mourn, understanding there are so many other people who have been unnecessarily taken from us."

The arrest of Rayquan Borum was a direct attempt by police to frame Mr. Borum, and he is finally going to trial after 2 years being held in and out of solitary confinement. The trial will be held starts February 11th, and will start at 9:30am in room 5370 at the address 832 East Fourth Street Charlotte, NC, which is the Mecklenburg County Courthouse. You can follow the Charlotte Uprising on twitter, facebook, and tumblr for more ways to get involved and support the folks facing ongoing repression from the Uprising. And here is a link to a useful court support quicksheet made specifically for this trial!

Court solidarity needs for Rayquan are ongoing, so plug in when you can.

Federal Prison Postal Changes Survey

Lawyers & activists doing prisoner support have been concerned with new Federal Bureau of Prisons' rules limiting the type of mail people in prison can receive -- for example, rules that people in federal prison can only get white paper / envelopes, and no cards or drawings. There is work being done to look into what is going on across the country on this issue. If you have heard anything, they'd love to hear about it.

They are also trying to collect evidence of what is happening at all the different federal facilities. If you have any of the following (or if you feel comfortable asking for any of these types of things from people in prison you are in contact with), that would be super helpful, including:

Any memos from federal prisons detailing new mail restrictions

Any program statements from BoP detailing new mail restrictions

Any Institutional Supplements from BoP detailing new mail restrictions

Scans of federal mail rejections based on new restrictions (color of letter, color of envelope, use of mailing label, greeting card etc)

Scans of envelopes with rejected stickers detailing reason for rejection

Scans of grievances from prisoners regarding the mail restrictions

If you are interested in potentially working with us around this issue, let the folks at Certain Days Calendar know, and they can reach out with info about their next meeting. Get in touch at: [email protected]

Free Tibet celebration in Scotland and around the world

If you're listening in Edinburgh, Scotland, there'll be a March on Sunday March 10 from The Mound in support of 60th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising to the invasion and occupation by the Chinese communist regime forces. On the subject of resistance and the Tibetan Diaspora, there'll be guest speakers making speeches and then a march to Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. TBA there may be a film screening afterwards. The event is scheduled from 12-2pm UTC More can be found on fedbook by searching "Tibetan Community in Scotland".

Check out this episode!

#anarchist #podcast #interview #feminist #antifa #anticapitalist

4 notes · View notes

ladystylestores · 4 years

Text

Hong Kong marks handover anniversary under shadow of security law | News

Hong Kong officials marked the 23rd anniversary of the territory’s return to China on Wednesday hours after Beijing’s imposition of a new national security law that drew defiant protests and international condemnation.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam joined her predecessors and other officials at the harbour’s edge for a flag-raising ceremony and a reception for specially-invited guests, as the territory’s annual pro-democracy march was banned for the first time.

In her speech, Lam praised the new law as “the most important development” in the relationship between Beijing and Hong Kong since the 1997 handover, saying it is “necessary and timely” move to restore stability.

She defended the legislation, which came into force overnight after being rushed through China’s rubber-stamp parliament as “constitutional, lawful, sensible and reasonable”.

Pro-democracy protesters march during a demonstration near a flag-raising ceremony on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover on Wednesday [Tyrone Siu/Reuters]

In a press briefing following the ceremony, Zhang Xiaoming, the Executive Deputy Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, said suspects arrested under the law would be tried in the mainland, adding that Hong Kong’s legal system could not be expected to implement the laws of the mainland.

Spreading “rumours” and “directing hatred” towards the Hong Kong police Among transgressions could be among transgressions potentially prosecuted and punished under the new law, he said.

In a separate press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Lam also said that the law reflects Beijing’s desire to uphold one country, two system.

In response, pro-democracy lawmaker Claudia Mo was quoted as telling reporters that “free press could just be announced dead in Hong Kong.”

She added that journalists who publish sensitive information about Hong Kong could also be in “dire trouble”.

Amid threats of possible arrest, protesters gathered near the conference centre where the ceremony was held, carrying banners and shouting their opposition to the new law, which seeks to punish crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces with punishments including life in prison.

The national security law has not muted chants for HK independence at July 1 rally. This is after police made first arrests under the Beijing imposed new law. pic.twitter.com/6mVgfX5v4a

— Wei Du 杜唯 (@WeiDuCNA) July 1, 2020

Protest banned

Authorities barred civil society’s annual demonstration, citing a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people because of the coronavirus, but many activists have said they will defy the order and march later in the afternoon.

As of 0500 GMT, police officers were seen making arrests, including Democratic Party legislator Andrew Wan, who was seen being led by police in handcuff. Images on social media also showed police using pepper spray on Wan’s face.

At the city’s Causeway Bay area, one man wearing a “Free Hong Kong” shirt become the first person arrested by police for violating the new law. A search also yielded a “Hong Kong independence” flag, police said in a statement.

The annual rally is traditionally held to air grievances about everything from sky-high home prices to what many see as Beijing’s increasing encroachment on the city’s freedoms.

“We march every year, every July 1, every October 1 and we will keep on marching,” said pro-democracy activist Leung Kwok-hung.

The National Security Law may outlaw inciting hatred against the Hong Kong government and give the law enforcement sweeping powers, but it definitely didn’t manage to silence the heckling. “DLLM, #HongKongPolice,” protesters shout. pic.twitter.com/ycEslKvQEw

— Rachel Cheung (@rachel_cheung1) July 1, 2020

However, police were seen setting up cordon lines and blocking the area where the banned annual march was supposed to start at 0600 GMT.

On July 1 last year, hundreds of protesters stormed the city’s legislature to protest against a now-scrapped bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China, ransacking the building. The protests continued throughout the year with rally-goers demanding universal suffrage as promised in the territory’s Basic Law or mini-constitution.

Critics fear the legislation, which was only made public after it was passed, will outlaw dissent and destroy the autonomy promised when Hong Kong was returned from the United Kingdom to China in 1997.

Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, reporting from Beijing, said that the speed at which the new law was crafted and passed proved China’s “determination to stamp out” Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, which it sees “as too much of a threat” to the central government’s power.

On Wednesday, Lam praised the new law as ‘the most important development’ in the relationship between Beijing and Hong Kong since the 1997 handover [Kin Cheung/AP]

She said that China may have lost patience over the last year, as the protests continued.

The legislation radically restructures the relationship between Beijing and Hong Kong envisaged under the so-called “one country, two systems” framework, obliterating the legal firewall between the city’s independent judiciary and the mainland’s party-controlled courts.

It empowers China to set up a national security agency in the city, staffed by officials who are not bound by local laws when carrying out duties.

Crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by up to life in prison.

Companies or groups that violate national security law will be fined and could have operations suspended.

Damaging certain transportation vehicles and equipment will be considered an act of ‘terrorism’.

Anyone convicted of violating security legislation will not be allowed to stand in any Hong Kong elections.

The activities of a new national security agency and its personnel in Hong Kong will not be under the jurisdiction of local government.

Authorities can surveil and wiretap persons suspected of endangering national security.

The law will apply to permanent and non-permanent residents of Hong Kong.

The law says the management of foreign NGOs and news agencies in Hong Kong will be strengthened.

It outlaws four types of national security crimes: subversion, secession, terrorism and colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security.

The full text of the law gave three scenarios when China might take over a prosecution: complicated foreign interference cases, “very serious” cases and when national security faces “serious and realistic threats”.

“Both the national security agency and Hong Kong can request to pass the case to mainland China and the prosecution will be done by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the trial will be in the Supreme Court,” the law stated.

“No matter whether violence has been used, or the threat of violence used, leaders or serious offenders will be sentenced for life imprisonment or a minimum of 10 years in jail,” it said.

“The Hong Kong government has no jurisdiction over the national security agency in Hong Kong and its staff when they are discharging duties provided in this law,” it added.

The text also specified that those who destroy government facilities and utilities would be considered subversive. Damaging public transportation facilities and arson would constitute acts of “terrorism”. Any person taking part in secessionist activities, whether organising or participating, will violate the law regardless of whether violence is used.

The law also said certain national security cases could be held behind closed doors without juries in Hong Kong if they contained state secrets, although the verdict and eventual judgements would be made public.

The legislation has drawn international condemnation with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accusing China of “paranoia” and saying the law “destroys the territory’s autonomy and one of China’s greatest achievements”.

The introduction of the law also demonstrated that China’s commitment to international treaties, such as the Sino-British Joint Declaration, were “empty words”, Pompeo added.

Meanwhile, Taiwan opened an office on Wednesday to help people fleeing Hong Kong, with a senior minister saying the self-ruled island would continue to support people in the territory.

“This is an important milestone for the government to further support democracy and freedom in Hong Kong,” said Chen Ming-tong, the head of Taiwan’s China-policy making Mainland Affairs Council.

Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Hong Kong, said that residents of the city probably felt that the new law was “a lot more far-reaching than they imagined, (and) many are “still trying to figure out how it will impact their lives.”

“Make no mistake. This is a law that will going to affect everyone in Hong Kong.”

Source link

قالب وردپرس

from World Wide News https://ift.tt/38fWJp2

#World Wide News

0 notes

alexsmitposts · 5 years

Photo

Is America Dying? The world looks on America as something very different than it really is. Much of what is told of America, both good and bad, is simply as Donald Trump says, “fake news.” Americans themselves know little about America. Few travel within their own country. America, you see, if 50 little countries, some like California or Florida or Texas, a virtual “Europe” in themselves, with regions unidentifiable as part of anything at all. Keeping America divided has been a game for a long time, perhaps since the earliest beginnings when great corporations like the Virginia Company, financed by Europe’s banking elites, unleashed Europe’s excess population, and Europe’s military prowess as well, on an unsuspecting population of 10 million native Americans who, two centuries later, would become a remnant of walking ghosts. Today I was sent a documentary on Seattle, Washington filmed by KOMO News, a local television station. Seattle has long been seen by other Americans as a gleaming city, moderate weather, startlingly robust economy, mountains and oceans, pure vistas, a cultural mecca that openly discourages even moderately well-to-do professionals from settling there. But that changed. You see, the rest of America has become a toilet. Cultural degeneration, drugs, economic disaster, a nation with untreated mentally ill, tens of millions of addicts and the largest prison population in the world couldn’t hide it forever. The “great toilet” of America had to “flush” sometime and when it did, certain cities, bastions of permissiveness and liberal values, where there to accept the effluent. Among those, San Francisco and Seattle, now America’s leading cities in property crime, addiction and homelessness. These are also cities where a moderate working-class home can cost $1 million. I sat through an hour of trash heaps and streets lined with the shadows of human beings, who have flocked to “Free-Attle,” the name that has spread across a secret network of addicts, petty criminals and homeless that have been told that laws aren’t enforced, police are helpless, food and medical care is free and the local population exists only to be stolen from and fed upon. In other areas of America, the behavior seen in Seattle would be met with force. In Seattle things are different, this is the Northern Silicon Valley, a land of tech giants and, let us not forget, Boeing Corporation, the land where Starbucks rules. As much as we all may well love our devices and our coffee, those who deliver both, those who see themselves as “Masters of the Universe” because of their control of the internet, our political races, our news and even our private lives, are the great “solvers.” Yes, people who have lived their lives writing code and playing video games have been handed an entire region of the United States to rule as they will. Driving the politics of ignorance that has led to the destruction of what had been two of the planet’s greatest cities is the tech giants, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and a thousand others. America educated a generation of programmers and “fake entrepreneurs,” and created a hell from heaven and, as we are also noting, a New World Order of surveillance and social manipulation. Their efforts can be seen in how they treat where they live and work, cities whose streets teem with endless armies of screaming paranoids, “meth-heads” and “stoners.” Twenty years ago, the people of San Francisco got used to seeing AIDS victims dying on the sidewalks, learned to look away or step over the bodies. One might wonder if the video game industry, that “other” drug culture, along with the insular existence on social media created a mind set where engineering human degeneration might well be considered a competitive sport. Then we have drugs, we can’t forget that. Drugs are a key component to the lives of every American, millions of methamphetamine addicts and tens of millions of opioid addicts, legalized marijuana and a culture based on gratification and ambivalence. History The culture of drugs that is now running America had its beginnings long ago. A century ago, heroin was sold over-the-counter as a “relaxant” and pain reliever and cocaine was in soft drinks. When the 1960s arrived, a generation of Americans, driven to rebel against decades of self-righteous repression in the midst of a divided racist culture, was primed for being unleashed. Along with the cultural upheaval of The Beatles and the music revolution came LSD and a general acceptance that altered reality led to human growth. Though this message may well have value, there is little doubt that it opened a floodgate. By the 1970s, Vietnam veterans became the prime offenders, self-medicating for PTSD or going to university where they joined several million “displaced” or “throw-away” children of the “greatest generation.” The 1980s saw America flooded first with cocaine, and anyone who doesn’t see the hand of the CIA behind this is blind. Cocaine soon emerged as “crack,” a highly addictive form that flooded America’s inner cities, destroying them in ways no nuclear weapon could approach, with “crack addicts” a virtual army of “walking dead.” Drugs had always been the business of America’s “Mainline” families, the Cabots and Astors, or rather the Cabotas and Astorgas were one to trace their real origin to the ancient Sephardic banking consortiums of 16th century Italy. These great shipping families of America’s Northeast, centered around the universities, Harvard and Yale, ran the slaves, carried China’s opium for Britain and profited from every war as “Americans,” just as they had when they funded Napoleon and his foes. As is so often the case, when you open a door, there is so much behind it, lending toward recognizing those who profit from despair and suffering, but our story is a much smaller one today, or is it that small? As it plays out, the story enacted in San Francisco and Seattle is also London and Paris or Berlin. We return then to America and the generation after what Russians call The Great Patriotic War. In America it was a “watershed,” where those born in its wake would find themselves Parents of “baby boomers” were the veterans of World War II or survivors of the Great Depression who managed to put their lives together at age 50, starting families late in life. When I was a child growing up in Detroit, most of my friends had fathers old enough to be World War I veterans, dropping like flies from heart attacks and years of cigarettes and working in factories laden with the stench of carcinogens. Washing one’s hands with carbon tetrachloride (Google never heard of it) was common. Seattle For Americans, the rural South and West, the teeming cities, the only hedge against cultural decay and rampant crime is economic isolation. For that, moderate to great wealth is required or to simply stay silent. Americans share, though many are unaware of this, the suffering that America’s global policies inflict on others. America’s economic wars, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, China, and the list grows hourly, our misguided war on terror, have lowered standards of living around the world, generally assumed to foster unrest and dissatisfaction. Why then is it being done at home? That answer is also simple, to foster unrest and dissatisfaction. One might ask why a nation would subject itself, its own people, particularly those who blindly support political leaders whose policies are destructive to their own supporters and constituents, to a life of hopelessness and potential radicalization. Why would a nation assume political and economic policies that put millions on the streets to parasite off of and embattle those around them fostering anarchy and crime. This is what we saw in Seattle, the “gem of the Pacific,” mountains of trash, armies of the unwanted, not sent to but rather openly welcomed in, “come steal from us, kill us, spread filth on our streets, defile our parks and monuments.” Conclusion The end result of what we have seen is telling. Behind it is fear, as in the lessons many Israeli’s have learned, that walling out the Palestinians has, in truth walls them in. There is no being “above” suffering. When suffering is engineered, be it greed or social experimentation, perhaps those choosing lives of suffering for others might be held to task.

0 notes

citizentruth-blog · 6 years

Text

ISIS Sympathizer Rises To Power In Iraq Causing Outrage

In a controversial move, Iraq appointed an education minister with well-known ties to ISIS. A relatively new democracy, Iraq has had over the past decade to overcome more internal crises, roadblocks and threats to its territorial integrity than most countries. To add to such a bleak picture, the country was literally sold to the ravages and pestilence of Islamic radicalism, courtesy of Wahhabism growing regional influence. To put it simply, Iraq was put through its paces! One invasion, a semi-military occupation and one attempted takeover by crazed Wahhabi radicals later, Iraq nevertheless managed to stir its budding democracy to safer shores, somewhat battered, but for the most part alive and kicking. One would expect such brushes with political and constitutional annihilations would spur Iraq to apply itself to higher and greater administrative standards, if anything, to protect itself from another ride around the crazy mill. Such expectations are based of course on the assumption that state officials would want to honor their mandate by keeping to both the letter and spirit of the constitution. Recent developments have proven such rationale to be wishful thinking! Late in December 2018, amid the Christmas celebrations, and let’s be honest, a distracted world media, Iraq’s newly appointed prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi Al Muntafiki decided to offer up the education ministry to a suspected ISIS sympathizer. Let me repeat this so it can truly sink in. Iraq, a country that barely escaped the blade of Terror, a country that was bled to an inch of its life, chose a few months into its reconstruction to hand over the EDUCATION ministry to an individual whose ties with ISIS are not only well-known, but run in the family. I give you H.E. Shaima Al Hayali, an academic from Mosul whose appointment was approved by parliament without so much of a whisper of disapproval or rebuttal. What could be wrong, indeed? It gets better: Ms. Al Hayali’s ties with the radical group are public knowledge! So what’s wrong with this picture, other of course than the blatantly obvious? Our first question should be why? Why in the world would any well-informed state official dream of empowering such a potentially nefarious individual at a ministry as vital as the education ministry, considering the fallouts such a decision would have on the overall stability of the country? Why, indeed? I would like to think that Iraq has seen enough of the lunacy of ISIS ideologues to not want to further empower their leadership by offering a platform as sensitive as that of the Education Ministry … but let’s leave this to the side for a moment. News of Shaima Al Hayali’s appointment was received with hot public anger, forcing the new minister to offer up her resignation alongside a fierce denial of any and all affiliations to ISIS terror group. Only Iraqis have a longer memory than their officials and politicians would like to give them credit for. Dr. Abbas Khadim, Resident Senior Fellow and The Iraq Initiative Director at the AtlanticCouncil writes the following on Twitter: "These are not allegations. Mr. al-Hayali's ties to ISIS are established. The salient questions are: 'Was he a willing participant?' and, more importantly, 'Has his sister, Dr. Shayma al-Hayali, done anything wrong to preclude her from being #Iraq's MoEd.?'" While Ms. Al Hayali may not herself be an active ISIS member, we should extend her the courtesy of a trial before condemning her. The same thing cannot be said of her brother, Laith Al Hayali. And while she made a point at claiming that her brother had been strong-armed into serving ISIS during its occupation of Mosul, she conveniently brushed over the fact that he occupied a senior leading position as one of ISIS commanders. Such ‘responsibilities’ are not handed out to mere civilians … not without proving one’s loyalty to both the group and the group’s ideology. “ISIS forced everyone in Mosul to work for them, threatening those who refused to join,” Ms. Al Hayali said on Twitter.

Screenshot taken from an ISIS video published in 2016 where Laith Al Hayali calls for all anti-ISIS forces to suspend their attacks and instead embrace ISIS ideology. Her brother, she alleges, was made to work as a civil servant after the extremists seized control of the city in 2014. “The threats continued even after Mosul was liberated,” she told social media, and “my brother never carried arms nor killed or helped kill any Iraqi … there was no concrete evidence to prove he belonged to ISIS.” Ms. Al Hayali’s defense of her brother also says nothing of his appearance on several ISIS recruiting videos. But why ask difficult questions when one can play the sectarian card by screaming prejudice and thus deflect from the elephant in the room? Whether Ms. Al Hayali does or does not abide by ISIS ideology makes little difference: her close association and the stringent standards Iraq’s Constitution demands for the nomination of all state officials should have rendered her nomination null and void … and yet Parliament was only too happy to oblige its new prime minister by expediting her vetting. But here is where things get a little tricky, or should we say, awry. Al Hayali’s vetting by Parliament is itself a contentious matter as many concerned parties have argued that vote counting was tampered with in her favor - an allegation the Speaker denies. A slow-motion video made public shows indeed that Ms. Al Hayali failed to rally enough yeses to her name. Meanwhile, Iraqis are not amused. Taking to social media, Iraqis laid blame at their Premier’s feet, demanding that he honors the pledge he made to the protection of Iraq and all Iraqis within it.

On this instagram post, Laith Al Hayali is seen bottom left. If anything has transpired from this overlooked scandal, it is that Iraqi politicians care more about the consolidation of their political base than they do serving the people who entrusted them with the affairs of the state … treason often rhymes with self-driven interest. But what exactly do I mean by political consolidation over the benefit of the people? Iraq, I fear, has become a prisoner of latent sectarianism through its warped distribution of power according to individuals’ religious affiliations. Iraq’s unwritten political rule demands for example that Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds be offered a share each of all parliamentary seats, and ministerial portfolios. This division is also reflected at the most senior level, as it is mandatory for all Iraqi PMs to be Shia, for the Head of Parliament to be Sunni, and the President to be Kurd. Such a system does little by way of erasing religious and ethnic divides, and instead forces politicians to be nominated not for their expertise but to fill quotas and political alliances by-laws. In October Reuters wrote the following on Prime Minister Al Muntafik: “He faces the daunting tasks of rebuilding much of the country after four years of war with Islamic State militants, healing its ethnic and sectarian tensions, and balancing foreign relations with Iraq’s two major allies - Iran and its arch-foe the United States.” As long as Iraq’s realpolitik will set a golden standard to religious-identity politics, a reconciliation will remain an inaccessible pipedream. That is not to say that Iraq lies in democratic ruins … far from it. Iraq has proven particularly resilient in the face of overwhelming adversity. That said, officials cannot continue to play Russian roulette with Iraq’s national security to fill their quotas. If ISIS armies have been sent running, Iraq has a long way to go before it can declare itself free from the ideology that sought the destruction of its religious and cultural diversity … there are still sympathizers to its cause sitting in office, and THAT is not tolerable. Read the full article

#iraq #ISIS

0 notes

dgrwomenscaucus · 7 years

Link

An excerpt from the book Deep Green Resistance, Chapter Three: Liberals and Radicals, by Lierre Keith

Distinguishing Categories of Violence

It’s understandable that people who care about justice want to reject violence; many of us are survivors of it, and we know all too well the entitled psychology of the men who used it against us. And whatever our personal experiences, we can all see that the violence of imperialism, racism, and misogyny has created useless destruction and trauma over endless, exhausting millennia. There are good reasons that many thoughtful people embrace a nonviolent ethic.

Violence can be used destructively or wisely: by hierarchy or for self-defense, against people or property, for self-actualization or political resistance.

“Violence” is a broad category and we need to be clear what we’re talking about so that we can talk about it as a movement. I would urge the following distinctions: the violence of hierarchy vs. the violence of self-defense, violence against people vs. violence against property, and the violence as self-actualization vs. the violence for political resistance. It is difficult to find someone who is against all of these. When clarified in context, the abstract concept of “violence” breaks down into distinct and concrete actions that need to be judged on their own merits. It may be that in the end some people will still reject all categories of violence; that is a prerogative we all have as moral agents. But solidarity is still possible, and is indeed a necessity given the seriousness of the situation and the lateness of the hour. Wherever you personally fall on the issue of violence, it is vital to understand and accept its potential usefulness in achieving our collective radical and feminist goals.

Violence of Hierarchy vs. Violence of Self-Defense

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don’t have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the US that has been fought to get access to “natural resources” for corporations to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life. People who fight back to defend themselves and their land are killed. No one much notices. The powerful have armies, courts, prisons, and taxation on their side. They also own the global media, thus controlling not just the information but the entire discourse. The privileged have the “comforts or elegancies” (as one defender of slavery put it) to which they feel God, more or less, has entitled them, and the luxury to remain ignorant. The entire structure of global capitalism runs on violence (Violence: The Other Fossil Fuel?). The violence used by the powerful to keep their hierarchy in place is one manifestation that we can probably agree is wrong.

In contrast stands the violence of self-defense, a range of actions taken up by people being hurt by an aggressor. Everyone has the right to defend her or his life or person against an attacker. Many leftists extend this concept of self-defense to the right to collective defense as a people. For example, many political activists supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, even taking personal risks in solidarity work like building schools and harvesting coffee. Indeed some people refuse to call this collective self-defense “violence,” defining violence as only those brutal acts that support hierarchy. I believe it is more honest to call this violence, and accept that not all violence is equal, or equally bad.

Violence against Property vs. Violence against People

Again, some people reject that violence is the correct word to describe property destruction. Because physical objects cannot feel pain, they argue, tools like spray paint and accelerants can’t be considered weapons and their use is not violent. I think the distinction between sensate beings and insensate objects is crucial. So is property destruction violent or nonviolent? This question is both pragmatic—we do need to call it something—and experiential. Destroying property can be done without harming a single sentient being and with great effect to stop an unjust system. Can anyone really argue against the French resistance blowing up railroad tracks and bridges to stop the Nazis?

But violence against property can also be an act meant to intimidate. This is the source of the unease that many progressives and radicals may feel toward property destruction. If you have been a person so threatened, you know how effective it is. Indeed, if violence against property were an ineffective approach to instilling fear and compliance, no one would ever use it. Burning a cross on someone’s lawn is meant to traumatize and terrorize. So is smashing all the dinner plates to the floor. A friend who survived a right-wing terrorist attack on the building where she worked was later hospitalized with severe PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder). Property destruction can have a crippling effect on sentient beings.

Whatever we decide to call property destruction, we need to weigh the consequences and strategic benefits and make our decisions from there. Again, “violence” is not a bad word, only a descriptive one. Obviously, many more people can accept an attack against a window, a wall, or an empty building than can accept violence against a person, and that’s as it should be. But wherever you stand personally on this issue, basic respect for each other and for our movement as a whole demands that we acknowledge the distinction between people and property when we discuss violence.

Violence as Self-Actualization vs. Violence for Political Resistance

Male socialization is basic training for life in a military hierarchy. The psychology of masculinity is the psychology required of soldiers, demanding control, emotional distance, and a willingness and ability to dominate. The subject of that domination is a negative reference group, an “Other” that is objectified as subhuman. In patriarchy, the first group that boys learn to despise is girls. Franz Fanon quotes (uncritically, of course) a young Algerian militant who repeatedly chanted, “I am not a coward, I am not a woman, I am not a traitor.” No insult is worse than some version of “girl,” usually a part of female anatomy warped into hate speech.

With male entitlement comes a violation imperative: men become men by breaking boundaries, whether it’s the sexual boundaries of women, the cultural boundaries of other peoples, the physical boundaries of other nations, the genetic boundaries of species, or the biological boundaries of ecosystems. For the entitled psyche, the only reason “No” exists is because it’s a sexual thrill to force past it. As Robin Morgan poignantly describes the situation of Tamil women,

To the women, the guerillas and the army bring disaster. They complain that both sets of men steal, loot, and molest women and girls. They hate the government army for doing this, but they’re terrified as well of the insurgent forces ostensibly fighting to free them. Of their own Tamil men, one says wearily, “If the boys come back, we will have the same experience all over again. We want to be left in peace.”

Eldridge Cleaver announced, “We shall have our manhood or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.” This is a lose-lose proposition for the planet, of course, and for the women and children who stand in the way of such masculine necessity. Or as the Vietnamese say, when the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.

As we can see from these examples, whether from a feminist understanding or from a peace perspective, the concern that taking up violence could potentially be individually and culturally dangerous is a valid one. Many soldiers are permanently marked by war. Homeless shelters are peopled by vets too traumatized to function. Life-threatening situations leave scars, as do both committing and surviving atrocities.

But violence is a broad category of action; it can be wielded destructively or wisely. We can decide when property destruction is acceptable, against which physical targets, and with what risks to civilians. We can decide whether direct violence against people is appropriate. We can build a resistance movement and a supporting culture in which atrocities are always unacceptable; in which penalties for committing them are swift and severe; in which violence is not glorified as a concept but instead understood as a specific set of actions that we may have to take up, but that we will also set down to return to our communities. Those are lines we can inscribe in our culture of resistance. That culture will have to include a feminist critique of masculinity, a good grounding in the basics of abuse dynamics, and an understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder. We will have to have behavioral norms that shun abusers instead of empowering them, support networks for prisoners, aid for combatants struggling with PTSD, and an agreement that anyone who has a history of violent or abusive behavior needs to be kept far away from serious underground action. Underground groups should do an “emotional background check” on potential recruits. Like substance abuse, personal or relational violence should disqualify that recruit. First and foremost, we need a movement made of people of character where abusers have no place. Second, the attitudes that create an abuser are at their most basic level about entitlement. A recruit with that personality structure will almost certainly cause problems when the actionists need sacrifice, discipline, and dependability. Men who are that entitled are able to justify almost any action. If they’re comfortable committing atrocities against their intimates and families, it will be all too easy for them to behave badly when armed or otherwise in a position of power, committing rape, torture, or theft. We need our combatants to be of impeccable character for our public image, for the efficacy of our underground cells, and for the new society we’re trying to build. “Ours is not a war for robbery, not to satisfy our passions, it is a struggle for freedom,” Nat Turner told his recruits, who committed no atrocities and stole only the supplies that they needed.

Only people with a distaste for violence should be allowed to use it. Empowering psychopaths or reinscribing the dominating masculinity of global patriarchy are mistakes we must avoid.

A very simple question to ask as we collectively and individually consider serious actions like property destruction is, is this action tactically sound? Does it advance our goal of saving the planet? Or does it simply answer an emotional need to do something, to feel something? I have been at demonstrations where young men smashed windows of mom and pop grocery stores and set fire to random cars in the neighborhood. This is essentially violence as a form of self-expression—for a very entitled self. Such random acts of destruction against people who are not the enemy have no place in our strategy or in our culture. It’s especially the job of men to educate other men about our collective rejection of masculinist violence.

Editors Note: The organization DGR is founded on the ideas and analysis laid out in the book by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay. To increase the book’s accessibility, especially to international audiences, we’re now making it available for free in two ways:

Read Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet as a browseable website.

Download an epub or PDF through the DGR Store. (We suggest a $5 donation, but you can set it to whatever you like, including $0.)

#DGR #radical feminism

14 notes · View notes

romancatholicreflections · 8 years

Text

5th February >> Sunday Homily & Reflections for Roman Catholics on the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Gospel Text: Matthew 5:13-16 light of the worldvs.13 Jesus said to his disciples: “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt becomes tasteless, what can make it salty again? It is good for nothing, and can only be thrown out to be trampled underfoot by men. s.14 You are the light of the world. A city built on a hilltop cannot be hidden. vs.15 No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house. vs.16 In the same way your light must shine in the sight of men, so that, seeing your good works, they may give the praise to your Father in heaven.” ************************************** We have four sets of homily notes to choose from. Please scroll down the page. Michel DeVerteuil : A Trinidadian Holy Ghost Priest, Specialist in Lectio Divina Thomas O’Loughlin: Professor of Historical Theology, University of Wales. Lampeter. John Littleton: Director of the Priory Institute Distant Learning, Tallaght Donal Neary SJ: Editor of The Sacred Heart Messenger ******************************************************* Michel de Verteuil Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels – Year A www.columba.ie General notes Following on the Beatitudes, this Sunday’s gospel adds some more insights into the qualities of the followers of Jesus. It does this through three images – salt, light (in two phases) and a city built on a hilltop. It is a short passage which means that we can spend time on whichever of the images we are drawn to and go deeply into it. Even as we do this, we may find it necessary to refer to the others, as the three complement one another, painting the picture of a perfectly rounded person. As always in the bible, the images are not static and we must discover the movement within them, two movements in fact – one of sin and one of grace. We identify with both movements – repent of the sin and celebrate the grace. In each case we choose who we are identifying with: – Jesus and his followers; – the people whose lives they touch; – Jesus teaching the crowds from the mountain. The passage is a teaching of Jesus but also a personal testimony revealing to us the kind of person he was, and still is, living in the “Jesus people” we meet. We celebrate them and allow them to challenge us both as individuals and as a Church community. Textual comments Salt of EarthVerse 13a – “You are the salt of the earth” Salt is an appropriate symbol of Christian living from different points of view; this text invites us to focus on one of these – it gives taste. Remember people who have brought sparkle to your life (“the earth”), at a time when it had become drab. Apply the image at different levels: – the arrival of a new born baby brings reconciliation to a family; – a family in distress is cheered up by the visit of a kindly parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt; – a manager or worker brings a new spirit of cooperation between management and labour. – a newly elected leader injects idealism into public life; We can apply the image to groups as well as to individuals: – a new movement arises within a parish community or a neighbourhood; – an NGO starts a community project which transforms a run-down neighbourhood; – a new political party brings hope by campaigning against corruption or working for independence; – the Church is converted to the cause of the poor and becomes a force for radical change in society. We think of Jesus being “salt” for the Jewish religion of his time, bringing a humanity to it that was lacking. We remember him – refusing to let the Pharisees intimidate his disciples; – eating with sinners; – so fond of feasting that he was accused of being a “drunkard” and “possessed”. Remember when someone was Jesus for your community or family. All these are stories of grace. The passage then raises another option, a story of sin: the salt becomes tasteless. The text evokes three aspects of the decline: a) “Nothing can make it salty again.” Feel the hopelessness – “If he or she (or the community) acts like this, what hope is there for the rest of us?” b) “It is good for nothing” – extreme pathos, “They had so much potential, now look at them!” c) “It can only be thrown out to be trampled on by men”. Fallen heroes are looked down on in word and deed: – a large church building once packed with worshippers is now empty; – a great doctor is alone in his office; – the seminary has a handful of students; – the church is mocked because of clerical scandals; – former nationalist leaders turned corrupt and now languish in prison. We think of how the great Jewish religion became mean and narrow minded at the time of Jesus, a “loss of savour” which would recur many times in the history of church: – the Crusades; – theologians of the 16th century defending the ill treatment of the Indians; – Christian churches not speaking out against segregation in the Southern United States and apartheid in South Africa; – church leaders blessing armies (today again in the “war against terrorism”). We celebrate bishops of today who “go up a hill and sit down” to challenge their fellow bishops to be “salt to the earth” by taking a prophetic stance against their governments, e.g. Bishop Gumbleton in the US, and Archbishop Ncube in Zimbabwe. Verse 14a – The image of light: “You are the light of the world” This image also presents a contrast, this time between “the light” and “the world”, understood as a place of darkness. We remember good people coming into our lives, like day dawning after a long night, or a rescuer arriving with a light when we had been plunged in darkness. Here the text does not spell out the image, so we can be guided by our experience. We remember our feelings: – clarity: we had been lost and confused, then we saw a way forward; – joy driving away sorrow; – hope: we saw possibilities where before we had seen none. City on HillVerse 14b – “You are a city built on a mountain top” The text brings out one aspect of the image – such a city cannot be hidden. We are free to imagine the reasons why someone would want to “hide” it. – From within, the community is afraid of publicity (“We will become an easy target”), or is over anxious (“Will our message get through?”). – From outside, an enemy fears the consequences; a tyrant says, “If we let them get away with their freedom, others will want to follow”. To all Jesus says “You won’t be able to stop it”. Remember when some person or event made you realise this (with fear or relief); that was Jesus speaking to you. Verses 15 and 16 – second aspect of the image of light, more concrete than the first, a lamp hanging on a lampstand. We choose who we want to identify with – the owner? the lamp? the people in the house? – Verse 15a – The sin option: the owner can put it under a tub, Feel the sadness. Imagine why owners would want to do that. As with the previous image it could be the fear of publicity and the accompanying criticism in case of failure. In this case however, there is another possibility – selfishness. The owners hide the light under a tub because they want to keep it for themselves; they can impose charges or conditions on those who will use it. We think of – the abuse of the notion of “intellectual property”; – resources like water, light and minerals, kept in the hands of a few; – the rules of international trade, preventing the free flow of natural goods. Jesus’ teaching is a radical critique of the modern capitalist system. – Verse 15b – The grace option: it shines for everyone in the house. Feel the relief that the light is no longer hidden under a tub. Celebrate the people who hang it on the lamp stand. – Verse 16 – Application of the image. 16a: your light shines in the sight of all. The image must be interpreted in the light of the other images. Jesus is not advocating showiness or putting ourselves forward; this would go against the images of salt and the city on a mountain top both of which affect others merely by being what they are. We celebrate people who live their values in public but are humble at the same time. 16b: they see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Be imaginative in interpreting “glorify”. It does not necessarily refer to saying prayers. What it reminds us of is how good people dispel negativity, they make others (including those who belong to other Churches and religions) feel happy and hopeful – “life is worth living”, “there is a God!”. Celebrate the times when people (movements) had this effect on you. Scripture prayer “Be men and women of the world, but not worldly men and women.” … Jose Maria Escriva Lord, we thank you for the people who have been as salt for us, bringing life and joy to our lives – families, – neighbourhoods – workplaces – Church communities. Remembering them and their good works makes us glorify you, our Father in heaven. Lord, we remember with immense sadness people who have ruined their lives with alcohol, drugs, fanaticism. We see them lying on the side of the road, no one can bring them to be what we know they are capable of becoming; people are trampling them underfoot. Lord have mercy. “The sons and daughters of the Church must return with a spirit of repentance for the acquiescence given, especially in certain centuries, to intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of the truth.” …Pope John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente Lord, we ask forgiveness for the times, both past and present, when your Church did reject the dominant values of its time and was not salt to the earth. No wonder idealistic people have scorned us, trampling your people underfoot as Jesus foretold. “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth as it wins over the mind with both gentleness and power.” …Vatican II, Declaration on Religious Freedom Lord, in our modern Western culture groups spend much time, money and energy on public relations. We pray that we may not follow this trend in our efforts to attract more people to join us. Help us to concentrate rather on being true to the best of ourselves, remembering that a city built on a mountain top cannot be hidden. “The world has enough to satisfy every person’s need, not enough to satisfy every person’s greed.” …Gandhi Lord, forgive us that many people nowadays see their talents as opportunities for making money. They hide them under a tub so that they can ration them out to the highest bidder. The result is that your abundant gifts are not being shared. We pray that your church may be the voice of Jesus in the world, reminding our contemporaries that you have lit lamps in the world, not to be hidden under a tub, but so that they can be put on a lampstand and shine on everyone in the house. **************************************** Thomas O’Loughlin Liturgical Resources for the Year of Matthew www.columba.ie Introduction to the Celebration My friends, we have gathered here because we have heard and answered the invitation of Jesus, the Anointed One. Gathered we become his people, his body, his presence in the world. We are called to act in the world like salt: giving flavour through its presence. We are called to be a light to those around us. We are called to reflect the goodness of our heavenly Father. So let us begin our gathering by recalling our identity as the community of the baptised. Homily notes 1. Salt’, ‘light’, a ‘shining city on a hill’: three wonderful metaphors for the relationship of each community of Christians to the larger society in which it finds itself. It is a relationship whereby the Christian community is distinct within the larger society and offers it a service it may not even know it needs and might be unwilling to declare that it wants. heaven12_9Our society is fine, one can hear people say, and it does not need a group of Christians thinking that they have the light or that they are a model of what our society should be. For our part, many of us Christians would rather keep our heads down, point out that it makes no difference that we are Christians to what we are like as neighbours, employees, or officials. 2. This situation of Christians being a small, identifiable group within a larger society was taken for granted at the time the gospel was written, and indeed survived until well into the fifth century. Then, for more than a millennium, the situation that Christians experienced was radically different: the community and the Christian community became virtually coterminous. Indeed, the distinction between Christians / nonChristians was often replaced by the distinction of ‘ church’ (meaning the clergy, sometimes formally established as an estate) / state or the distinction of altar / crown. Now, with the occasional exception, that identification of church community and larger society has disappeared. We still hear people referring to ‘Christian countries’ but they just mean background culture, while we as Christians should be quick to deny that simply belonging to a country can be seen as being part of the body of Christ. 3. However, we are left with a few conundrums. First, we have little experience of being a sub-group within society; and we are often far happier thinking of ourselves as the group that gives form to society. Second, we have many mechanisms/ practices in our communal behaviour / pastoral strategies that served us well when we as the Christian community and we as a secular society were almost identical; but little by way of experience in being a servant of the larger society. 4. Just noting this new, or relatively new, situation, and helping people to recognise it as a factor in how they think of themselves, is a first step today. 5. Only when we can think of ourselves as having many ‘belongings’ can we think of how we, in a particular community, can be of service. We have to learn to steer between three sets of rocks. First, the Christians cannot separate themselves out from society at large as if they are an elect sect, ‘the saved’. This is an option that many sects have taken over the centuries, but it ignored the fact that the whole universe is the creation of the Father. The Christ’s love and forgiveness reached out to all, and we are called help the society give praise to the Father, not to abandon it. The second danger is to imagine that there is no distinction between the values of the larger society and that of the community of the church; life is simple if the Christians just disappear and adopt the current trends. We have a distinctive vision that the universe is good, it is loved by the Father, and there is the good news that can transform how we view life. The third set of rocks is to imagine that we can only relate to a society that signs up in detail to our vision. We must work with all people of good will, knowing that the Spirit is always at work before us, beyond our reach, and in ways we cannot see. 5. We are called today – in every place in the developed world to learn an aspect of being Christians that, for the most part, never even bothered our parents or grandparents. But part of the good news is that in every learning curve there is the Spirit’s presence to be called upon to bring light in our darkness. *********************************** John Litteton Journeying through the Year of Matthew www.Columba.ie Gospel Reflection The gospel reading invites us to reflect on the significance of the light of Christ in our lives. The image of worldly light is used to communicate the deeper meaning of the light of Christ. Light dispels darkness. It gives us confidence because it points us in the right direction. It enables us to see things as they are. We often take light for granted. Usually we do not notice it until, suddenly, we are without it. Whenever we experience power-failures we are reminded that we are particularly dependent on light for clear vision and we realise how necessary light is in our everyday lives. The real value of light, then, is to be found in its brightness, which provides us with direction. Jesus used the image of light when speaking to his disciples. He told them that they were the light of the world, just as he was their light. By imitating his teaching and example in their own lives they could, like light, offer guidance and direction to other people. This was because they knew where they were going. The disciples were to share and reflect the light of Christ, which would give light to the world. Jesus light of worldWhat is the light of Christ? The light of Christ is our guiding light. We feel secure in the light of Christ as it directs us through life. It is the teaching of Christ that motivates us to live in imitation of him. The light of Christ is God sharing his life and love with us. It is the life of Christ that is shared with us in the Eucharist: the living bread that has cone down from heaven giving life to the world. The light of Christ offers people meaning and hope. It highlights the love that can be found in the goodness of life. It challenges us to live God-like lives, lives without sin. It offers us consolation and reassurance because it assures us that Christ is near at all times. We are as much disciples of Jesus as those to whom he spoke in the gospel. Each one of us is being challenged to be the light of the world. But we are also being conunissioned collectively, as members of Christ’s Church, to be the light of the world. We are the light of the world when we are decent and respectful towards other people and when we live according to the teaching of Christ and his Church. We are invited to see in a new light. Seeing in a new light is about seeing in a new perspective, God’s perspective. It is about behaving in a different way. Therefore, let us see in a different light and let our light shine in people’s sight, so that, seeing our good works, they may give praise to our Father in heaven. For meditation You are the light of the world. (Mt 5:14) ******************************* Donal Neary SJ: Gospel Reflections for Sundays of Year A: Matthew www.messenger.ie Salt for the Eucharist In Galilee around the time of Jesus, there was a flourishing fishing industry. Peter, James and John were part of it, and they were big-time fishermen. Fish from Galilee went all over the then known empire, and to Rome along the trade route, which went through Galilee. It was kept fresh, as much food was, as we kept food fresh for years before freezers – by salting it. The word of God is kept fresh within us by prayer; otherwise our Christian life may become weak and tasteless. A big food of Jesus is the Eucharist. His bread of life can go stale unless we ‘salt’ it. We salt the Eucharist by our lives. We keep the Mass alive by the way we live. The Eucharist is entrusted to us. God gives us his Son, his food, and leaves it to us how we live by it. Jesus invites us to be the ‘salt of the earth’ – to be people whose lives are centred on helping others and making the places around us places of kindness, compassion, hope, fun and life. We don’t say ‘You’re salt of the earth’, if someone just receives communion. We are the salt of the earth if we live out our communion. The bread of Jesus is salted with the goodness of men and women, young and old, everywhere. Our response then links in with the first reading – if we feed, shelter, clothe and help our neighbour, we are ‘the light that rises in the darkness’. Recall when you helped someone recently. Give thanks you could do this. Lord may your kingdom come in every part of the world.

1 note · View note

venezuelablog · 8 years

Text

Is Venezuela’s Dialogue Dead?

Hugo Pérez Hernáiz

Since early November, when we last covered the dialogue between government and opposition, the Vatican-sponsored initiative has been all but suspended among mutual accusations that the agreements reached at the first round of meetings have not been honored. The next round of face-to-face meetings is scheduled for January 13, but on January 4 Jesús Alberto Torrealba suggested that the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) would not attend.

On January 6 the government seemed to be making last minute efforts to revive the dialogue. On that day the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Delcy Rodríguez, and Socialist Party (PSUV) leader Jorge Rodriguez, met the Vatican’s appointed intermediary Claudio Maria Celli in Rome. As yet there has been no publicized information on what was discussed in the meeting. On January 8, President Nicolas Maduro announced that Spanish ex-president and dialogue mediator José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero would travel to Caracas “in the next few weeks,” to “promote” the dialogue.

But on January 7 the Vatican Nuncio in Venezuela, Aldo Giordano, declared after a meeting with the Venezuelan Episcopal Council that “with respect to the dialogue, there is a lot of obscurity today.” Diego Padrón, president of the Venezuelan Episcopal Council, was more direct in blaming the government for the potential failure of the dialogue initiative, saying: “In Venezuela’s history no other government has made the people suffer so much as the current government.”

International pressure for dialogue was strong during the month of December. The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, insisted that the dialogue is an ongoing affair, but declared on December 17 that so far the process has seen a lack of results. According to Almagro: “The main thing is that we need to keep denouncing the things that are going wrong[…] We will continue to denounce the existence of political prisoners, the lack of respect for human rights, the indifference on the part of the government for the social and humanitarian crisis.”

Also on December 17, the Chilean daily El Mercurio published an interview with U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Thomas Shannon, in which he declared his hope for the dialogue process, but stressed that its success depended mainly on the Venezuelan government’s political will. Shannon said that it is up to the government to establish a viable “electoral agenda” for 2017 to end the crisis.

But despite international calls for dialogue and the deepening of the economic crisis in December, dialogue seems unlikely to resume in the next few weeks.

A Look at Events Since November

The dialogue process had been faltering since immediately after the first joint agreement in October 30. In a confusing incident in November 23, the MUD said the government had decided to “freeze” the dialogue. Meanwhile President Maduro declared that same day that while the government would not continue to participate in the talks, he personally would vow to do anything in his power to “force the opposition to stay in the dialogue round-table.” He also said that he wanted the dialogue process to be “institutionalized” so that it would become a permanent feature of the political system.

On December 1 the Vatican Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, sent a confidential letter, soon made public, to the representatives of both parties in the round-table. In his letter Parolin express his concern for the delay in the fulfilment of the agreements reached in the first round of talks. The letter did not directly accuse the government of failing to fulfill its part, but it did ask for the “restitution of the role of the National Assembly,” and the establishment of an electoral timetable for 2017.

PSUV leader Diosdado Cabello took the letter as an affront against the government. “Pietro Parolin is offensive and irresponsible…He believes that Venezuela can be tutored from the Vatican. We accept no tutelage form no one,” declared Cabello.

The first week of December saw attempts by mediators to save the dialogue. The mediators, Vatican representative Claudio María Celli, and the ex-presidents of Spain (José Luis Zapatero), Panamá (Martín Torrijos), and the Dominican Republic (Leonel Fernández), met separately with the two parties on December 6, the day the second round of talks were due to start.

But after the meeting the MUD announced it would not attend the scheduled December 6 second round of talks, as the government had failed to fulfill its side of the agreements. “Forget about our participation in the round table,” wrote on Twitter the MUD negotiator Carlo Ocariz (@CarlosOcariz), “not the 13th of January nor any other date, unless the government fulfills the agreements we will not attend!”

On December 17 however, President Maduro insisted that the dialogue representatives would meet again on January 13, 2017, despite “attempts by national and international right-wing sectors to sabotage the dialogue.”

The media largely lost interest in dialogue after December 11 after the surprise announcement by President Maduro that the highest denomination bills would be speedily retired from circulation severely restricted the availability of cash and generated episodes of protest and looting, especially in the southern city of Ciudad Bolívar. President Maduro has blamed the crisis on the actions of external agents and internal opposition parties.

Parolin’s letter was publicly answered by the MUD on December 24. The MUD stated that minimal conditions for dialogue to re-start on January 13 –including an electoral timetable, the “restitution of the legitimate role of the National Assembly, and the establishment of a “humanitarian channels” to aid Venezuela- have not been met by the government. However the MUD also leaves open the possibility of future meetings with the government if the Vatican and the mediators are able to “verify” the fulfillment of the accords.

Will Dialogue Continue?

The MUD has repeatedly this past month that conditions have not been met for direct meetings with the government to continue in January, but also accepted the possibility dialogue if those conditions are verified. The government has always insisted that it is willing to continue with the dialogue process, but President Maduro has said he wants to “institutionalize dialogue”, which would make it ineffectual to solve the current crisis.

The dialogue seems unlikely to restart soon. It is not however a dead process, as both parties could decide to come back to the round-table if certain conditions are met in January.

Particularly sensitive for the opposition was the point of the agreement which spoke of “the release of detained persons,” presumably--but never really explicitly stated- referring to political prisoners. Some political prisoners were actually released, but none of the high profile detainees, such as the prominent opposition leader Leopoldo López. Another seven political prisoners were set free on December 31 2016, including the prominent opposition ex-presidential candidate Manuel Rosales. But in early January opposition leader Ramos Allup declared that this fell short of the opposition’s expectations and was not enough to revive the dialogue initiative.

Another sensitive issue for the opposition was the return of legislative powers to the National Assembly (AN), after Venezuela’s highest court, the pro-government Tribunal Supremo de Justicia (TSJ), had consistently blocked all the AN’s legislative initiatives. The TSJ had finally ruled that the AN was in contempt (desacato), and therefore all its proceedings were null, because it had sworn in three legislators from the State of Amazonas, whose election has been contended and nullified by lower courts.

Part of the agreement called for these three legislators to be removed from the Assembly. The AN said it had done so, but the government contended that it had failed to do so during an “ordinary session,” and therefore the TSJ ruled that the AN remained in desacato. The MUD’s position was repeated almost verbatim in its letter to Parolin of December 25.

Public support for dialogue is strong but complex. A flash poll conducted by DATANALISIS during December 9-12, shows that 58.1% of those interviewed think dialogue is beneficial for all Venezuelans. However, when asked if the opposition should remain in the dialogue round-table until the agreements are honored, 68.5% of pro-government respondent, but only 37.3% of opposition supporter, believe that they should.

Carlos Ocariz, one of the opposition leaders who reached the agreements with the government in the first round of dialogue, and who had been strongly criticized by the radical wing of the opposition for “giving in” during the negotiations, seems to have gained approval in public perceptions. 62.2% of those interviewed view him positively, second only to Leopoldo López (64.8% positive assessment) among opposition leaders, and ahead of Henrique Capriles (58.1%) and Henry Ramos Allup (58.3%). Most importantly, 75.5% of opposition supporters think thank Ocariz handled the negotiations well. DATANALISIS director, Luis Vicente León suggests that, contrary to what some public opinion commentators have been arguing, these numbers show that most Venezuelans back a dialogue process to solve the current crisis.

#Venezuela dialogue

3 notes · View notes