#anti-communism hysteria

[thediaryofarevolutionist]

Sometimes I just wish I was ignorant and didn't know anything. I wouldn't care about politics and would no longer break down when I find out about injustice against women. I just can't do it. I'm not strong enough and this misogyny is getting to me. It’s tearing me apart. I feel paralyzed and don't understand why women must go trough this. All i want is women to be safe and liberated but i dont see any hope.

[gaybaseball-fan]

[sabrinanichole22sblog]

I’m craving 🍆. Want to help out?

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"During the panic of the fall of 1939, the RCMP began harassing communists, arresting them for violating Defence of Canada Regulations (DOCR) regulations 39 and 39A, even before the Party published its position against Canadian participation in the war.

On September 9, Philip and Gordon Tonner, from Toronto, were arrested for distributing Party materials. The court quickly threw out the case against the two men. The Party published its position against Canadian participation in the war on October 14, 1939. On November 10, the RCMP arrested 23, including ten in Montreal, for distributing communist documents. The Canadian Press reported on November 13 that four more communists in Toronto, eight more in Montreal, as well as one man in Lacombe, Alberta were arrested and charged for having distributed anti-war flyers. On November 21, the Canadian Press reported that Douglas Stewart, business manager of the communist newspaper, Clarion, was sentenced to two years of imprisonment for printing the Comintern statement of opposition to  participation in the war. In Oshawa, an ex-soldier, Frank Towers, was sentenced to three months imprisonment for having sold Clarion, even before it had been banned along with its French-language equivalent, Clarté.

Most of these cases were thrown out of court, although some did receive sentences of up to six months in prison and fines of $500. Four communists were arrested for violating regulation 39, or for merely saying things that police judged to be dangerous to the security of the state or the prosecution of the war. Nick Tuchinsky, from Tilsonbury, Ontario and Alfred Neal, from Kingston, were arrested in December, 1940, but each case ended in acquittal. Nevertheless, two men from Kirkland Lake, Ontario, B. L. McMillan and Charles Stewart, each received sentences of three months and fines of $200 for having expressed sentiments judged to be dangerous or subversive. Four people were accused of having distributed Party newspapers, and twenty-one were charged with possession of communist documents, while eight Winnipegers were arrested for being Party members. The most common reason for arrest was distribution of subversive flyers, for which 44 were charged.

Most cases were thrown out of court for insufficient evidence. In fact, this was the case for twelve women from across Canada, while Olive Swankey, wife of Hull internee Ben Swankey, was held for ten days of interrogation in Edmonton, then released without being charged. Hull internee Charles Weir was arrested for distributing anti-war literature, but was freed since there were no witnesses, only to be soon interned. Another Hull internee, Patrick Lenihan, a Calgary alderman, was acquitted by jury of having expressed statements likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty, only to be interned soon after.

Not all was failure for the authorities when charging communists for specific offences. Nine women were successfully charged, including three in Manitoba and four in Saskatchewan, where authorities seemed to be more successful in prosecuting precise offences. The unfortunate Annie Buller and Margaret Mills each received sentences of two years, while Ida Corley received a sentence of one year. All were from Winnipeg, while Regina resident Gladys McDonald was imprisoned for a year, followed by fourteen months of internment, making her the only communist woman to be interned during World War II.

Two cases of imprisonment in Manitoba deserve special mention. In the fall of 1940, Mitch Sago, a Ukrainian community leader, and Tom McEwen, a member of the political bureau of the Party, were charged with being members of the Party. On November 8, 1940, Sago and McEwen were tried and sentenced to two years less a day of hard labour at the provincial jail in Headingly. Nowhere was hard labour to be found within the DOCR, therefore, on October 10, 1941, McEwen and Sago applied for habeas corpus on the grounds that the original magistrate had exceeded the law with the hard labour sentence. Justice Donovan of the Manitoba Supreme Court agreed and granted Sago and McEwen their freedom, however, on September 9, 1941, Justice minister Lapointe had issued an order for internment, which took effect immediately after the men’s liberation from Headingly, whereupon they were interned in Hull. Internment was to prove a much more useful tool for repressing communists, as opposed to imprisonment for specific offences, especially after the Party was made illegal in June, 1940.

Approximately two-thirds of those detained were held using articles 21 and 39C of the DOCR read together. The official history of the Communist Party of Canada cites that “according to the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, 64 persons had been arrested by the end of February, 1940, of which nineteen received prison terms ranging from one month to two years, while the rest were fined amounts ranging from $1 to $500.”

- Michael Martin, The Red Patch: Political Imprisonment in Hull, Quebec during World War 2. Self-published, 2007. p. 121-123.

[taliabhattwrites]

The most widespread form of transmisogyny within the queer community is denying trans women epistemic authority.

Which means: people do not believe us on our own experiences. They frequently assume any and all oppression we face must be mild or must simply be anti-effeminacy instead of "real misogyny". We are considered to be exaggerating the material consequences of bigotry on us and assumed to not experience various harms that we in fact do, including medical misogyny, sexual violence, CSA, being infantilized and dismissed, being inadequately represented (since most popular depictions of us are cissexist caricatures and do not authentically portray our lived realities!), and more besides.

Perhaps the most hysteria inducing aspect of this is being told that our testimony is not frequently dismissed, BY PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTIVELY DISMISSING OUR TESTIMONY ON HOW MUCH MISOGYNY AND DEGENDERING AND VIOLENCE WE EXPERIENCE.

We are not "new to oppression". We do not have to be taught what it is like to be feminized and dehumanized under patriarchy. We are painfully familiar with how misogyny operates and experience it regularly, in addition to having to justify even to "our" communities that we do in fact experience it!

That, my friends, is the core of transmisogyny: being dehumanized while being denied the right to even name one's oppression or have it be acknowledged as such!

[beardedmrbean]

Centrist Democrats are slamming their far-left colleagues following Election Day, arguing that their emphasis on "identity politics" and other issues handed huge victories to the GOP.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., argued that President-elect Trump has "no greater friend than the far left." Like-minded Democrats say racial politics, anti-police rhetoric and gender hysteria are alienating millions of voters.

"There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world," Torres wrote on X. "The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling."

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville put it more bluntly in a Sunday interview with the New York Times, calling "defund the police" the "three stupidest words in the English language."

"We could never wash off the stench of it," he said.

Torres is one of several Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate who have called out his party's "nonsense." One centrist House Democrat complained to Axios on Monday that the "identity politics stuff is absolutely killing us."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., argued on Sunday that Democrats are "out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA."

"We don't listen enough; we tell people what's good for them. And when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base," Murphy wrote.

Not all Democrats are ready to make a change, however. When Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., broke with his party to condemn biological males playing in women's sports last week, he faced an avalanche of hate.

"Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face," Moulton said in a New York Times report. "I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that."

The statement resulted in calls for Moulton to resign, and at least one of his staffers quit in protest.

Massachusetts state Rep. Manny Cruz suggested Moulton's stance was "a betrayal" in a post on X.

"Congressman Moulton, your commitment then was protecting the LGBTQ community, standing up for their rights, and compassion. Now, on a political whim, our Congressman has betrayed the words he signed onto just last year by scapegoating transgender youth in sports for the failures of the national Democratic Party and leaders to win the presidential election. You said you 'would stand with Nagly and with all our community … against all forms of bigotry, discrimination, bullying, and harassment,'" Cruz wrote. 

Salem city Councilor Kyle Davis, another Democrat, called for Moulton to resign. 

"I’m not looking for an apology from [Moulton], I’m looking for a resignation," Davis wrote in a post on X.

Moulton refused to apologize and instead doubled down in a statement late last week.

"I will fight, as I always have, for the rights and safety of all citizens. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and we can even disagree on them. Yet there are many who, shouting from the extreme left corners of social media, believe I have failed the unspoken Democratic Party purity test," he said.

"We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop. Let’s have these debates now, determine a new strategy for our party since our existing one failed, and then unite to oppose the Trump agenda wherever it imperils American values."

[possiblyunhinged]

I really wish I could remember where I heard this from, but I remember listening to a podcast that said the hysteria amongst some white men and their push towards the alt-right is because they know full well that the only thing they've had to offer is their whiteness and maleness. They've relied on that for years, and the idea of this privilege being lessened petrifies them.

I love how their response is to fall into the hands of the far-right and not, y'know, do some soul searching, find what you are passionate about and work out who you are separate from 'masculinity'. It's too feminine, I guess.

I don't mean this to sound unkind, but all the images coming out of Sunderland, Hartlepool and Aldershot... like they're just fucking embarrassing. I feel sorry for them. These 'men' really don't have anything else to offer apart from hate. They don't know who they are. They don't feel a part of anything.

But they can't work out that they feel like that because who the fuck wants to be around people so hateful? Who wants to be around people whose response to children being murdered is getting pissed and ruining communities? Make more kids scared. That'll do it.

Meanwhile, we're seeing anti-racist protests, thousands raised for Alder Hey, people volunteering their time to rebuild and clean up the mess these 'men' left behind in their communities.

[thediaryofarevolutionist]

I sometimes feel like I can feel people's suffering. I just have to look into their eyes and see how much they are suffering. I see what this system is doing to them and not giving them what they need and rightfully deserve. I see that they hoped for more in life than this...

It really breaks my heart that I sometimes feel paralyzed by all the pain and suffering in this world. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it really feels that way, I remember this feeling from before and I was hoping it would go away, but it hasn't. I still feel it and it's just getting more intense. I see the injustice and inhumanity and I can't look anymore because it hurts me so much. It's not fair. I know I'm too sensitive and sensitive, I know it and telling myself doesn't help me, I need to know how to get rid of these feelings. I feel everything too intensely and strongly, I can't feel “nothing”, even if I hate you, I feel too much for you. Why did I have to become like that? Writing all this here makes me cry. I can't stand or digest anything. Everything gets stuck inside me so that one day I'm afraid of suffocating. Why me and no one else?

[sysmedsaresexist]

To the anon asking about my username...

There's a bit of confusion here, I'm going to answer many of your questions but I may not post the ask itself, hopefully it'll make sense :)

When I started my blog I was heavily anti endo and I specifically posted bad pro/endo takes, debunking or just laughing. To this day, most of it is still pretty hilarious. I wasn't focused on cringe, but totally crazy, out there claims that made zero sense and were flat out wrong. Check out my tags #shit endos say, #shit singlets say, and my newest tag, #shit anti endos say, I hope you have a laugh at a couple of them.

In my pinned post, you'll see the thing that started it all. A pro endo saying that sysmeds are sexist.

I would also like to know how they came to that conclusion. I'm right there with you. Also like you, I still have many issues with the pro/endo community. I believe CDDs are trauma based disorders. I post research pretty much weekly about it (check out #debunk and #research). I think endogenic plurality and CDDs are completely different things.

And you know what, my pro endo friends support me. We're all learning. I'm kind with my opinion, I'm open to talking about it, we debate, we share resources, we change our views and adjust based on new info.

This blog corrects misinformation from both sides, now. Some of it is worse than others. Antis can and do spread just as much misinformation as pro/endos.

What I would encourage you to do is start with the multiple selves theory. It actually developed right alongside Freud's theories on hysteria (which included early versions of CDDs at the time), and if Freud hadn't been such a perv, it might actually be much more well-known. It's a nonpathological theory on consciousness and philosophy. People have been describing this phenomenon for a very long time, "endogenic" is just the newest term for it. Here's a couple examples.

2015 - at any given moment in time, one or another of our subselves is in control and determines how we think and act.

1987

2012 - this one has so many links to other people talking about this theory

2023 - These results suggest that the normative principles by which agents have adapted to complex changing environments may also explain why humans have long been described as consisting of “multiple selves.”

2020

2010

Like I said, though, you can find this stuff as far back as the 50s with ease, anything older might take a bit more digging, but it's not a small or new theory.

I think an overlap in language has created a lot of confusion, but it's really not out of the realm of possibility for people to be more in tune with these parts of themselves. It's been documented for over a century outside of psychology, in other areas of research-- anthropology, philosophy.

I'm going to be honest, I don't think a single one of the headmate sale blogs are real. I think they're antis trying to start shit. Like maybe one out of every ten is actually someone misguided behind the screen.

Even CDD systems still incorrectly believe in core theory, endogenics picked it up from us and don't know any better. System resets aren't real, but there are real experiences that can FEEL like a reset-- try being patient and educating people. Ignore the others, because some people just can't be helped, and you're better off spending your time spreading good, accurate posts than arguing with people who don't want to learn anything.

I forget what I was saying.

Anyways, I'm a pro endo sysmed.

I hope you'll stick around and see what's going on.

[gaybaseball-fan]

[mariacallous]

In 2019, the American chattering class was atwitter about “cancel culture”: The New York Times reported on its popularity among teenagers; in 2020, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” whose 153 world-renowned signatories—academics, writers, and artists—worried that a lack of “open debate” over police reform and other issues of social and racial justice was yielding to “dogma or coercion.”

Outside legacy media, cancel culture then became part and parcel of right-wing political agendas, with the End Woke Higher Education Act—which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Sept. 19—marking one of several “anti-woke” initiatives launched by Republican congressional lawmakers.

A heavily reworked version of a 2022 German book, The Cancel Culture Panic by Adrian Daub offers a historical analysis of the so-called cancel culture moral panic that spread from the United States to the rest of the world. Daub argues that cancel culture is but the latest iteration of discussions of political correctness that emerged in the United States during the administration of former President Ronald Reagan.

Daub’s goal isn’t to catalog. Rather, he wants to reorient our attention and demystify fears in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, as he believes that “[p]eople talk about cancel culture so that they don’t have to talk about other things, in order to legitimize certain topics, positions, and authorize and delegitimize others.”

Ultimately, Daub argues, hysteria over cancel culture keeps “us from finding solutions we desperately need” to widespread problems “of labor and job security,” the “digital public space,” and “accountability and surveillance.”

Daub begins by arguing that accusations of cancel culture obscure a widening gap between the “objective frequency of the phenomenon and its media presence.” Fears of alleged censorship, of excessive identity politics, and of “wokeness” are, Daub says, disproportionate to verified cancellations.

For example, the individuals who are often affected—for instance, professors at U.S. universities—have lost their jobs not because of cancel culture, but a specific academic or professional dispute. One example: “In 2021, Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada moved to fire [math professor] Lars Jensen, citing two consecutive unsatisfactory performance reviews that accused him of ‘insubordination,’ among other things.” Specifically, Jensen had distributed “fliers at a state math summit that criticized the college’s math standards—a move Truckee Meadows administrators said disrupted the meeting.”

Cases of real “canceling” in America’s colleges and universities are thus in fact quite low; Daub notes, for example, that “[f]or the year 2021,” his research indicates that just a “total of four” professors “experienced what we would likely see reported in the press as a classic cancel story.” This, despite the conservative National Association of Scholars listing hundreds of cancellations.

Daub argues that “the persuasiveness of cancel culture warnings results from the fact that it insists on suddenness while actually drawing on well-established truisms and conventions.” Historically, he links the panic over cancel culture to fears over political correctness, which—reacting to feminism and the diversification of workplaces and universities—spread in the United States in the early 1990s, above all during the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

But Daub identifies a deeper discursive background: conservative narratives, which first emerged in the 1950s, that imagine U.S. higher education—really, the eight universities that make up the Ivy League—as bastions of “anti-Christian” bias and “anti-individualistic” ideologies.

In these narratives, which Daub argues were produced by members of “think tanks and nonprofit foundations set up by wealthy conservative donors” beginning in the 1970s, leftist academics insidiously swap canonical works—by William Shakespeare, Plato, Homer, and so on—with literature supposedly focused on identity and ethnicity, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Intersecting with this backdrop, a wave of mainstream publications about political correctness’s apparent tyranny in the academy swept through the United States. These presented the concept sensationally, with “the flavor of the courtroom,” even if those presentations were “nowhere near the truth.”

In fact, Daub argues, a certain type of anecdote about cancel culture—imprecise, brief narratives from questionable sources with a punch line—are told as credible and received as plausible. For example: Psychology professor Jordan Peterson once reported in a viral video that a client of his was a bank employee who spoke of how their bank decided to cease using the term “flip chart” because it could be used “pejoratively to refer to Filipinos.”

Particular features of this and other cancel culture anecdotes develop, disappear, or are replaced with new details; in fact, this anecdote has been circulating since the 1990s, and sometimes features a Filipino gang member at a community panel meeting. Regardless, the more frequently that a cancel culture anecdote is referenced and recounted, the more that it gains credibility, and the more that it further inflames the moral panic over cancel culture.

Daub expands his analysis to our age of globalization—one in which, he argues, cancel culture anecdotes have helped produce moral panic in different global settings, becoming invariably linked to particular national issues, discussions, and societal anxieties.

In Germany, fears intersect with the concern that “left-wing censorship” and “identity politics from the left” will culminate, as theorized in political scientist Josef Joffe’s March 2021 Neue Zürcher Zeitung essay, in an imagined violent and wholesale cultural revolution. In the United Kingdom, cancel culture arrived after Brexit and became, in Daub’s assessment, “at least in part a crutch for managing the shambolic aftermath of the decision to leave.”

And if Europeans obsess about U.S. universities, in Russia and Turkey, Daub writes, “the focus is on popular culture and social media.” In March 2022, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the supposed cancellation of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for her views on transgender people.

In his conclusion, Daub interrogates how “calls for a defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the so-called woke campus, or cancel culture in publications such as Le Figaro, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic can morph into—or at least indirectly contribute to—illiberal political-governmental restrictions on speech and institutions.

For instance, following the flurry of articles on cancel culture in 2019, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis signed the Stop WOKE Act into state law on April 22, 2022, and positioned himself as a 2024 presidential candidate in part by whipping up hysteria about cancel culture.

But, more broadly, Daub sees the anti-cancel culture movement as advancing a dark and illiberal vision of institutions and society. For him, “figures like the Le Pens [of France], the Trumps [of the United States], [Austria’s] Jörg Haider, [Italy’s] Silvio Berlusconi, [the United Kingdom’s] Boris Johnson, and [Brazil’s] Jair Bolsonaro … retain a certain conservative institutionalism, while they simultaneously participate in the populist/authoritarian degradation of institutions,” and they do this in part through using the tool of the cancel culture panic.

For these leaders, universities teach junk to students; companies go woke and go broke; the military is weak due to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and experts are politically correct drones. All while casting themselves as liberal and tolerant, these illiberal figures construct straw man arguments from the legitimate concerns of minority perspectives and dismiss them as cancel culture; this allows for the powerful and privileged to reinforce political and social hierarchies, uphold majority rule, and crush opposition.

The fact that the cancel culture panic spread to other countries indicates how U.S. soft power remains operative. Nevertheless, despite Daub’s insights into the moral panic in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, he does not, for example, engage with its occurrence in China, where competitive social media platforms, streaming and video platforms, and state-run media outlets drive a “real” version of “cancellation.”

In 2021, for example, there were a series of high-profile celebrity cancellations in China; some transgressors were imprisoned, others not. The latter group included actor Zhang Zhehan, though, in his case, being “canceled” meant losing work and removal from social media platforms: in August 2021, Zhang was “canceled” because of old vacation photos showing Zhang posing with cherry blossoms, which had been taken in the open park area of Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war criminals involved in the atrocities of World War II.

Furthermore, the intense public concern about cancel culture in the United States seems to have modulated itself. One reason might be related to changes in perceptions about the political alignments of Big Tech and social media companies. According to a 2024 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans are overall inclined to see Big Tech corporations as more aligned with liberal than with conservative views. But these views now run up against the reality of Big Tech’s political donations in this year’s U.S. presidential election. “Silicon Valley,” as reported in The Guardian, “poured more than $394.1m into the US presidential election this year,” and most of that—$242.6m—was given by Elon Musk.

Americans’ perceptions of Big Tech corporations also now collide with how changes in the ownership and operation of Big Tech and social media companies have affected platforms, their attention economy, and the way that they circulate information.

It was announced after Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022—which he claimed to do because he wanted to protect “free speech”—that the rechristened “X” would discontinue its policy prohibiting COVID-19 misinformation; at the same time, algorithm changes led to X’s promotion of false viral information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Center for Countering Digital Hate issued a November 2023 report declaring that 98 percent of misinformation, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other hate speech vis-à-vis the Israel-Hamas war remained publicly viewable on X after a week of notice was given to the social media site.

Meanwhile, in 2023, Twitter—like Meta and Alphabet, the parent companies of Facebook and Google, respectively—dumped a significant number of its content moderators. While Gizmodo reported in 2016 that Facebook workers routinely suppressed conservative news in the “trending topics” section, a recent study published in Science and Nature showed that “[a]udiences who consume political news on Facebook are, in general, right-leaning.” And as reported in El País, 97 percent of links to what Meta’s fact-checkers deem to be “fake” news “circulate among conservative users.” (It’s fair to wonder whether cancel culture memes figure prominently among these links.)

Cancel culture panic’s newest inflections might also be related to a shift in who seeks to do the “canceling”: Rather than only cultural left—which prompted the era of #TimesUp, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter—the cultural right also now commands public attention. In 2023, conservatives in America “canceled” Bud Light because of a social media promotion by TikTok personality and transgender woman Dylan Mulvaney, and the new Star Wars TV show The Acolyte, because it centered women and people of color.

Will U.S. citizens become fed up with the ways that Big Tech and social media feed panic on both sides of the country’s political divides? According to the aforementioned Pew Research Center study, large majorities of Americans believe that social media companies as possess too much political power and as censor political viewpoints that they reject.

But political will appears to be lacking in the United States to do much about it. In contrast, in August 2023, the European Union enacted the Digital Services Act, which aims to curb online hate, child sexual abuse, and disinformation.

Still, the panic about leftist cancel culture hasn’t so much faded from Americans’ consciousness as it has transformed. The idea of “wokeness” was the primary axis on which U.S. President-elect Trump oriented his latest campaign rhetoric. “Kamala is For They/Them. President Trump is For You,” voters were told in one prominent anti-woke campaign advert.

Now an anti-cancel culture president and his anti-woke cabinet are chomping at the bit. Stephen Miller, Trump’s nominee to become his Homeland Security advisor, launched America First Legal in 2021, filing more than 100 legal actions against “woke corporations” and others. And Musk, who vowed in 2021 to “destroy the woke mind virus,” along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote the 2021 book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, were named by Trump to lead a department that aims to “delete” aspects of the U.S. federal government deemed too costly.

One shudders at the possibility that other liberal democracies will follow the path of cancel culture panic as far as the United States now has.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"How did the Canadian government see the war after the first, German conquests in  Western Europe? On April 30, 1940, O.D. Skelton wrote a document called The Present Outlook. Skelton was [Prime Minister Mackenzie] King’s under-secretary of Foreign Affairs, thus King’s deputy  minister, his most trusted advisor, one of the leading public servants in Ottawa. Skelton’s document was remarkable for its lack of foresight. For example, it suggested that Japan represented no danger to the allies. It also linked as one force the two, bitter enemies, communism and fascism, as rival forms of totalitarianism, which now united. Skelton  described the horrifying possibility of a victory of the associated Germans, Italians, and  Soviets as if Canada were in an undeclared war with the Soviet Union, now allied with the Nazis. Writing about U.S. neutrality, Skelton wrote that, in the recent past, probable victory for England and France against Germany meant that the American people rightly saw no need to fight against totalitarianism. With the possibility of a victory of a German-Italian-Russian coalition, American public opinion would now change. All this nonsense from one of the most powerful men in Ottawa, a man who had the ear and respect of King about Canada’s war policy. In actual fact, Skelton probably believed the government’s own propaganda about the nature of the war as being a war upon totalitarianism and, therefore, an undeclared war against the U.S.S.R. The nature of anti-Soviet manipulations in Europe during the phoney war was clarified eventually when Swedish diplomatic archives revealed that a week before the German blitzkrieg was launched upon the French, the French government and military had been preparing to  send 50,000 troops to wage war against the U.S.S.R. in Finland, rather than preparing to  defend France against Germany.

After France and the Low Countries fell to the Germans in the Spring of 1940, the character of the war changed for Canada. A general panic among the public ensued. Canada was now the most important ally of the British, isolated and beleaguered in Europe. Canadians rushed to volunteer for the military. The King government insisted upon the voluntary aspect of Canada’s contribution in military manpower. In October, 1939, Duplessis had sought re-election in Quebec by using the threat of conscription, against which Duplessis was to be the bulwark. Federal Liberals, led by Justice minister Ernest Lapointe, promised there would be no conscription, and pledged their seats in Quebec towards this commitment. Duplessis was defeated when Quebeckers voted for the provincial Liberals, led by Adélard Godbout.

What then was to be Canada’s contribution to the defence of Britain? King prepared Canada for a war of limited liability in terms of its contribution to the war effort. The priorities were to be economic aid, which would help Canadian capitalists make profits, re-launch the economy, and create jobs; national unity, especially the unity of King’s Liberal Party, powerful in Quebec; and defending Canada’s borders and infrastructure but even more importantly, Canada’s internal social order. In the immediate flush of pro-British enthusiasm after the start of proceedings, King had sent an army division of 20,000 troops to Britain. He soon regretted this decision when negotiations were held between Britain and Canada to train aviators in Canada as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. During the acrimonious negotiations with Britain, King fought and scrapped about the costs of the plan, $600 million per year, of which  Canada was to assume $350 million, in order to train 20,000 airmen per year for use by Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. King insisted that Canada’s contribution to the plan would be its most effective contribution to the war effort. Emphasis on the plan also permitted King to envisage a reduced loss of military lives, which might also ease pressure for conscription.

Many English-Canadians felt that King’s proposed contribution to the war was too calculated, too timid. They wanted Canada to do more than help Britain financially, guard borders and infrastructure, and train aviators. They wanted Canadians to fight alongside Britain, this in spite of the Phoney War early in WWII that precluded immediate, actual combat. In Ontario, the provincial Liberal government of Mitchell Hepburn said so in a resolution, adopted on January 18, 1940, which criticized King’s lack of vigorous execution of the war. King used this occasion to call elections, which were coming due as King was now in the fifth year of government. King manoeuvred the leader of the Tories, Robert Manion, into approving the no-conscription pledge to Quebeckers. On March 26, King won an overwhelming majority, 181 seats out of 245 in the House of Commons. The Liberals were now free to conduct a war of limited liability according to their priorities. King’s priorities for this war of limited liability illuminate the real reason why Canada went to war. Writes Jack Granatstein: “Canada went to war in September, 1939 because Britain had gone to war, and for no other reason. It was not a war for Poland; it was not a war against anti-semitism; it was not even a war against Naziism,” even though the horrible atrocity of the Nazi genocides against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and  political opponents did provide post facto moral justification for World War II and  Canada’s participation therein."

- Michael Martin, The Red Patch: Political imprisonment in Hull, Quebec during World War 2. Self-published, 2007. p. 59-62

[hearteiji]

Hi honey, the state of the country is extremely devastating right now,very anxiety inducing, just wanted to ask,how have you been?

Thank you so much for asking baby! I’m not gonna share too many details on the state I live in, but you all know I’m Mexican and only a few hours away from the border.

What is happening right now is purely rooted in racism. There’s not much more to say. There is a new wave of comfortable and proud nazism very parallel to traditional Jewish hate happening amongst groups of specifically targeted minorities.

Where I live, Mexicans are the majority population and I believe the mass deportations will not only destroy families and push this hate agenda, but also cause the economy to take a major hit. I was a blue collar mechanic out here, a kitchen worker, etc. I am speaking from firsthand experience when I say we are the majority when it comes to construction, food, maintenance work, and engineering.

We are noticeably comfortable with racism these days. It is the first time in my generation that I have seen a politician openly express these judgements without appropriate backlash. I cannot believe so many people in this country supported him and there is no doubt that those who did are just racist. I don’t really care. ‘A vote for the economy’ when they are too fucking stupid to realize immigrants ARE PART OF OUR FUCKING ECONOMY !!! DID YOU THINK ELONS STUPID ASS WAS ABOUT TO GO FARM YOUR EGGS WHEN HE DOESNT KNOW A CHICKENS HEAD FROM ITS ASS? If you have never worked blue collar you shouldn’t get to vote tbh.

The transgender hate train going on is a moral hysteria—they are currently a lightning rod for hate in the LGBT+ community. There is no logic, statistic, or reason behind the influx of anti-transness in this country. Literally none. But bigotry is not and has never been reasonable, so I guess that adds up.

It kinda reminds me of the ‘should trans people be allowed in the Olympics’ conversation where it’s like. Trans people get killed for being trans and you’re concerned about the sanctity of the track & field category 💀 there is no statistic for the trans bathroom hysteria, because trans people are not cartoon villains. And yet here we are, making everyone in office take pronouns out of their email sign offs. The stupidity and hatred combo is like—fucking insane. It would be funny if it wasn’t real.

Thank you for asking baby, I hope you’re okay. I literally hope everyone is okay. I know most of the people who follow me fall under many umbrellas as many online communities do. If anyone needs anything, please message me !!!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Luke Hallam at The UnPopulist:

For the past seven days, the U.K. has witnessed its worst riots in over a decade. What started off last week as a wave of protests over the horrific murder of three young girls, fueled by false claims about the identity of the attacker on social media, has metastasized into something far more profound: a deep fracturing of relations between communities that threatens to do lasting damage to Britain’s social fabric.

Origin of a Race Riot

Last Monday, a knife-wielding teenager entered through an open fire door at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the seaside town of Southport and killed three participants, all girls under the age of 10. He also injured eight more young children and two adults. It was an evil crime, the horror made all the more acute by the youth of the victims and by the fact that someone would target for such an atrocity, of all things, a joyful summer dance party. What came next should be considered a textbook example of how harmful lies can spread on social media. There are generally good reasons to be wary of finger-pointing when it comes to “fake news” and social media’s role in spreading it. But in this instance, it’s hard to overstate the extent of the hysteria that was unleashed. Mere hours after the attack, the killer was seemingly identified as Ali al-Shakati, a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the United Kingdom by boat, and was known to the British security services as a potential threat. Within minutes of the first social media post identifying al-Shakati, the story was picked up by a dubious news organization calling itself “Channel 3 Now.” The al-Shakati story was then parroted by Russia Today, and began appearing in a raft of viral posts on social media, including X, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Right-wing influencers with huge followings, like Andrew Tate, amplified the story, and various posts amassed thousands, often millions, of impressions.

Unrest broke out initially in Southport, Hartlepool, and London. Rioters released smoke flares and set fire to a riot van; they threw trash cans and bottles at police officers. As the unrest spread, it was the far right—an ad hoc coalition of former members of the English Defense League, supporters of notorious far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and ordinary people swept along on social media—fueling the violence. It was common to see English flags and chants of “English till I die.” Mosques and Islamic centers were targeted in a horrific wave of xenophobic thuggery. It was, in large part, a genuine race riot—not a phrase to use lightly. In the first three days, it was well known that the suspect was only 17 years old, which means that by law they couldn’t be identified in the media. Still, in an attempt to head off the violence, the police released some limited information confirming that the alleged perpetrator of the atrocity was in fact born in the U.K. Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist-right Reform UK party and a newly-minted member of parliament, echoed a widespread fear that the establishment was conspiring with the police forces to protect an illegal migrant for fear of fueling an anti-immigrant narrative, irresponsibly declaring: “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us.”

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, a judge took the unusual step of allowing the media to release the full identity of the alleged perpetrator despite his being a minor, noting that the suspect was only a few days away from turning 18. It turns out that Ali al-Shakati doesn’t exist. The real suspect, Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Wales to Rwandan parents, was not a refugee. We don’t know that he’s not Muslim, nor that his motives were unrelated to some sort of Islamist ideology—though, given that only 2% of Rwanda’s population is Muslim, it seems unlikely. Of course, it hardly matters. There’s no earthly justification for violently attacking mosques, harassing the public, and setting fire to police vans.

[...]

Far-Right Xenophobia Capitalizes On Britain’s Integration Issues

There are two things to say in response to all of this: two things that may at first glance appear to be mutually exclusive, but are nevertheless both true. The first is that the right-wing polemicists have long been packaging these problems together into one overarching, catastrophist narrative of British decline. The problem is, there is no evidence that the knife crime wave has been directly fueled by asylum seekers. As bad as knife crime and other problems may be, it is also simply incorrect to assert that the country has in recent years become, in the words of one representative commentator, “a lawless country where there is no justice at all.” What’s more, right-wing catastrophism is hypocritical insofar as it has often been fueled by the very same politicians who were in government until last month, and spectacularly failed to tackle most of these problems. Indeed, it was the Conservative government that slashed the number of police officers and presided over the arrival of a record number of refugees, while failing to find a humane, durable solution for processing them. (In addition, it’s notable that even as one part of the country, Scotland, managed to successfully bring its knife crime problem under control by adopting a community-led agenda, Conservative politicians in Westminster made vacuous pronouncements about law and order that amounted to nothing for most of the country.)

The second thing to say is that there are real problems with Britain’s model of dealing with ethnic and religious diversity. Whenever there is social unrest or communal strife in France, for example, Brits and Americans like to put the blame squarely on the French model of laïcité—an imperfect approach to the separation of church and state that is often caricatured as consisting in naked animus against religious minorities. But Britain’s own highly communitarian approach—which often gives a free pass to the most radical elements within a religious community—does not seem to be faring much better, with the result that elements within some immigrant communities in Britain’s major cities have failed to properly integrate, and, as the present riots show, longstanding resentments have been left to fester.

Over the past week in the United Kingdom, far-right race riots over the UK’s immigration policies and the Southport stabbing have sprung up all over the Home Nations, especially in England.

These riots are fueled by paranoid Islamophobia, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and fake news.

[touchd0wn-boy]

Since I keep seeing it in certain corners of the fandom:

Chromosomes = gender is a transphobic statement. Genitalia/secondary sex characteristics = gender is a transphobic statement. I can't believe I have to explain this. It's "real transphobia" not just a fun argument you can co-opt to use against other queer people online. It's the basis for why transphobes want to bring back chromosome testing and sex verification in all sports so only Real Women and Real Men can compete against each other, something that's not only damaging to trans people but pretty much everyone who doesn't fit the very narrow definition of what a "normal" body and "normal" hormones are, even cis people, as the whole controversy around Imane Khelif has shown during the Olympics. It's why bathroom access for trans people has become such a point of hysteria and conspiracy theories. It's why anti-transgender laws are on the rise all over the world.

Last month, the ACLU published a very illuminating research brief on the impacts of anti-transgender laws and policies that I HIGHLY recommend (you can check it out here).

Instead of posting performative bullshit about what an Ally you are, and how we should all focus on "real transphobia" instead, you could reflect on why immediately falling back to transphobic rhetoric 101 as a cheap gotcha argument against the actual queer and trans people in your fandom saying things about your favs you don't like and don't agree with, is not actually??? a good thing? If your first gut-jerk reaction to shut down queer people is to rehash the talking points of every conservative politician and every Elon Musk Verified Alt-Right Twitter Influencer, then maybe do some introspection on WHY that is. When you perpetuate arguments about chromosomes and gender, you’re giving oxygen to the same ideologies that justify anti-trans laws and discriminatory policies. You're contributing to the environment that makes life harder for trans people, even if you don’t realize it.

By all means, donate to trans and queer charities and inform yourself on the issues impacting trans and queer communities.

But performative allyship is not a substitute for genuine support and understanding. Donating without actually challenging your own biases or engaging in meaningful discussions isn't enough. Being an ally means being willing to listen, learn, and grow—even when it makes you uncomfortable. It means understanding that harm can be done through ignorance, and being willing to address that ignorance within yourself and your circles.

Anyway. Translegislation is a wonderful website to track anti-trans bills that are being considered and passed in the US. Contact your representatives. VOTE, not just in the upcoming presidential election but also—and ESPECIALLY—in your local elections.

Besides the Trans Youth Equality Foundation, I also recommend

The Trevor Project

Mermaids (UK-based, God knows they need the support, considering Ms. Joanne R. still has internet access in the year of our lord 2024)

your local Planned Parenthood

your local trans/queer organization

mutual aid requests for gender affirming care

[eretzyisrael]

Shlaim falsified timeline in order to blame Zionists for Iraqi exodus

The Oxford professor Avi Shlaim’s memoir ‘Three Worlds’ has been amply reviewed, but few reviewers have treated the book to an analysis as forensic as Gilad Ini’s. Writing for CAMERA,   Ini  finds that Shlaim is torn between his twin roles as historian on the one hand, and mudslinger against Israel on the other.  At times he acknowledges that Iraqi persecution of Jews was “the main reason for the Jewish exodus from Iraq,” but ends up concluding that the Zionists planted bombs to cause the Iraqi Jews to flee, going as far as to falsify the chronology of the explosions in order to reverse cause and effect.

Avi Shlaim: questionable chronology

We felt vulnerable because we were Jews,” he admits. It was already in 1948, before the series of bombs but after an anti-Jewish gang threatened to kidnap or kill members of his family, that his mother began “thinking about leaving Iraq for good.”

The bombs, he later elaborates, compounded a feeling of insecurity that had already existed:

The real reason for leaving, according to my mother’s later account, was that life in Iraq had become too dangerous by 1950, for the Jews in general and for our family in particular. Persecution of the Jews was intensifying, and it assumed many different forms. The government, the judiciary and the public became overtly hostile. Restrictions were placed on Jewish trade and commerce. Jews in the civil service were dismissed and the entire community was placed under surveillance. Young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of further education. The police arrested, tortured, imposed arbitrary fines and extracted money from innocent Jews in what looked like a government-sanctioned campaign of harassment.

And yet he allows himself to conclude elsewhere, “My family did not move from Iraq to Israel because of a clash of cultures or religious intolerance.”

This is part of a pattern. Though Shlaim is willing to detail antisemitic mistreatment, he is equally willing to shrug it off when making sweeping judgments.

Were Jews “subjected to a host of discriminatory regulations” over the centuries? Yes. But no matter. They were “the living embodiment of Muslim-Jewish co-existence.”

Was there an “infamous pogrom” —the anti-Jewish bloodbath known as the Farhud? Sure. But just one. “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful coexistence and fruitful interaction.”

What of the “harassment,” “Nazi militarism,” “official persecution,” “anti-Jewish propaganda,” “strident anti-Jewish … sentiments,” the “powerful popular wave of hostility toward … the Jews,” demonstrators who “marched through the streets of Baghdad, shouting ‘Death to the Jews,’” a “government that actively whipped up popular hysteria and suspicion against the Jews”? Rest assured. “Iraq was a land of pluralism and coexistence.”

The absurdity seems to know no limits. If during the Farhud “an angry mob armed with knives, sticks and axes set upon the Jews on buses, in the streets, and in their houses,” and if Jews were “murdered, raped, looted” until 179 Jewish corpses were tossed into a mass grave, Shlaim still finds someone to insist that the pogrom was “not an antisemitic episode.”

Shlaim’s mother didn’t get the memo. After the Farhud, she and her Jewish friends “began to wear abayas, the loose black overgarment worn by Muslim women, in order to conceal their Jewish identity. They also imitated the dialect of Iraqi Muslims, fearing their very voices would give them away.” Just as Ms. Shlaim made clear that their family left Iraq due to anti-Jewish persecution, she left little doubt that she understood the antisemitism behind the Farhud.

But Avi Shlaim knows better than his mother. He is, after all, a professional historian. One who changes dates. One who ignores chronology. One who dismisses facts that don’t suit his politics. But a professional—for what it’s worth.

Read article in full

More about Avi Shlaim