#but the germans as an entire country were fucking complicit

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Youtube video preview: How much did the Germans REALLY know about the Final Solution?

Me: ::ninety-seven minute sigh::

[soryualeksi]

The first German media is carefully starting to report on our Foreign Minister "warning against" the absolute bloodbath "humanitarian challenge" of an all-out Israeli attack on the refugees in Rafah.

And I found myself baring my teeth against the radio like a weirdo because I can't contain my disgust and fury.

You.

Were all cheering this on UNTIL NOW.

You.

Were persecuting anyone who raised the alarm about the ON-GOING humanitarian catastrophe as an "antisemitic terrorism supporter". People lost JOBS. People lost social standing. PEOPLE WERE SUED.

Everyone with a human heart WAS SCREAMING ABOUT THIS FOR FOUR MONTHS but you were too fucking racist and arrogant to listen, because "who can trust these Muslims and anyone who lets themselves by MANIPULATED by them amirite".

And NOW that 30 THOUSAND bodies are counted and MANY will follow, NOW that EXACTLY WHAT PEOPLE SAID WOULD HAPPEN IN RAFAH IS HAPPENING.

Now you're getting scared because those people who kept screaming about human rights might ACTUALLY have been onto something, and you're seeing yourself unable to wiggle out of the fact that YOU TOO cheered on this ethnic cleansing, you see yourself in some DEEP SHIT of I don't fucking care "public opinion" or something, because CERTAIN AS HELL IT'S NOT SUDDENLY GROWING A CONSCIENCE.

And now you try to fucking quickly get up some "plausible deniability" defence, so that you might be protected from the full brunt of "The world is watching the targeted massacre of refugees on livestream and YOU personally told the perpetrators that it's fine, go ahead, no red lines, do as you wish because PER DEFINITION your ends are pure of heart and justify ANY means physically possible" UNTIL THIS FUCKING MOMENT WHEN IT BECAME TOO OBVIOUS TO FURTHER DENY REALITY.

I fucking hate everyone.

I hope their stories haunt you to the end of your days, awake and asleep.

Germany is complicit and was ENTHUSIASTICALLY so until THIS moment, where now everyone is trying to wiggle out.

"We just didn't KNOW! UwU"

FUCK THIS ENTIRE FUCKING NAZI COUNTRY

[shi1498912]

For those of you, who're saying they're not going to vote, blue, or are not going to vote at all because of how Biden is handling the war in Gaza:

HAVE YOU ALL FORGOTTEN THAT IT WAS TRUMP WHO MOVED THE US-EMBASSY FROM TEL AVIV TO JERUSALEM, THUS POURING EVEN MORE OIL INTO THE ALREADY RAGING FIRE? THUS KNOWINGLY GIVING LEGITIMACY TO THE CLAIM OF THE FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISTS IN ISRAEL, THAT THERE SHOULD ONLY BE ONE STATE. KNOWING THAT A MOVE LIKE THIS WILL LEAD TO THE DEPRIVATION AND OPPRESSION OF THE RIGHT OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE TO HAVE A HOME OF THEIR OWN?

HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN THAT NETANYAHU IS EAGERLY AWAITING A TRUMP WIN, BECAUSE THAT WOULD MEAN HE CAN ABANDON ALL PRETENSE THAT HE'S ADHERING TO INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND JUST PULL ALL THE FUCKIN STOPS, AND STRAIGHT UP ANNEX THE WESTBANK AS WELL AS GAZA?

The Democrats have the Two State Solution written in their party's agenda. Just because you don't get so see every minute details of the diplomatic exchang happening between US and Israeli officials, between US and Palestinian officials, does not mean, that Biden has given Netanyahu carte blanche. The fucking opposit is the case. What's shown in the news does not reflect what's happening in those diplomatic meetings.

The Gqp on the otherhand is overrun by christo-faschists, frothing from their mouths because they can't wait for the Rapture to happen already. Aside from Netanyahu, they were the ones who cheered the loudest, when Trump moved the Embassy. Atop of that, those same christo-faschists rallying behind Trump would very much like to turn the Handmaid's Tale on US soil into reality as well, while they're at it.

Voting third-party, or abstaining from voting entierly is automatically a win for Trump. So stop pretending you are okay with sacrificing your own rights and right of safety and security, and bodily autonomy in your own damn country, in your own damn home, because of a war that is far more intricately complex than your "Biden should've stopped the war, he is complicit in genocide" will ever be able to cover.

Voting blue this election is the only way to ensure that there ever will be another election in the future! Votig blue this election will ensure that the sliver of hope for peace in the Middle East will still be alive.

Sincerly, from a European, from a German to you all US-Americans: for your own goddamn sake, and for the sake of the rest of the world, vote blue, because whoever sits in the Oval Office, still is the most powerful person on the entire goddamn globe. Get a perspective on that!

Putting this as a meme so maybe y'all will actually read it.

Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.

And this is why we cannot let Trump win another term: he now has complete immunity for any acts he "officially" performs as president. You thought he was bad before? Now he will have zero fear. He will do whatever he wants. And what he wants is outlined in Project 2025.

[arlingtonpark]

Attack on Titan and the Myth that Won’t Die

Sigh, I really don’t want to be a rain cloud. I’m very caustic and critical in my posts and don’t want to come off as a sourpuss. Attack on Titan is a very political series in a time when the series’ politics is particularly relevant. It’s been fascinating to follow along, to say the least. 

But I can’t really let this one go. This is a travesty. I can’t describe it any other way. If I learned I made a mistake as awful as Isayama’s made, I’d be crushed. 

So it seems Isayama named, or even flat out based, Erwin’s character after Erwin Rommel.

Why?

Why?

Why?

And he made Erwin’s birthday the same day as when Rommel killed himself!

Goddamn it!

Damn it!

Damn it!

You know, people say SNK is Nazi propaganda, and they’re wrong, but Isayama himself isn’t helping. 

Here are the facts: Rommel was an OP tactician. His tactics were cunning, clever, and he wasn’t like the others. He was a good man, not a Nazi. 

He defied inhumane orders from his superiors, didn’t believe in Nazism, and, in fact, was directly involved in an assassination attempt on Hitler’s life.

LOL, not! 

As World War II was coming to a close, the US military’s historical division began the work of creating an account of the war. Part of those efforts involved interviewing high-ranking members of the Nazi military. Those members did not have access to archival records (and neither did the historical division; those records were in the hands of war crimes prosecutors) and were speaking entirely from memory. As you can imagine, their accounts were rather rosy. 

Not helping things was the person who oversaw the project: Franz Halder, a Nazi general who was thrown into a concentration camp after getting on Hitler’s bad side. When the camp was liberated, he proclaimed his desire to aid the Allies, which he did. Halder served as a star witness in the Nuremberg Trials. However, while he may have been willing to testify against members of the Nazi high command, he was also involved in white washing the actions of the Nazi military in general. Halder would use his position to help formulate this narrative of an apolitical Nazi military victimized by Hitler. 

This would form the foundation.

After World War II and as the Cold War was beginning, Germany was split in two: an East, allied with the Soviet Union, and a West, allied with the United States. The West German government needed to remilitarize in order to deal with the threat of the Soviet Union and its allies, including East Germany, which was literally across the border from them.

To sell the public on remilitarization, Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, directed a PR campaign to convince people that the German military of the Nazi era, the Wehrmacht, was clean of any Nazi taint.

To this end, the Adenauer government worked to influence how the history of the war was written to cast the Wehrmacht in as positive a light as possible. They even enlisted former Nazis to write autobiographies that fudged the facts and pushed the government’s narrative.

The United States was partly complicit in this, since Adenauer demanded that the Western powers stop “defaming” former Wehrmacht troops and that soldiers charged with war crimes be released. The western powers accepted this, though not completely.

The German people were also partly complicit in this. Many Germans either served in the Wehrmacht or knew someone who did, so to taint the Wehrmacht was to taint yourself or someone you knew. Thus, the German people were largely receptive to this narrative.

And thus, one of the most enduring myths of history was born: the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht.

The Nazi military was separate from the Nazi government!

The Wehrmacht was OP as fuck! They lost because it was all Hitler’s fault!

Wehrmacht soldiers had nothing to do with the Holocaust!

Erwin Rommel was a brilliant general and a good man!

The truth is far less rosy.

When the Nazi’s invaded the Soviet Union, Wehrmacht soldiers were informed that if they committed rape, murder, theft, or any other war crime, they would not be prosecuted.

The Nazi’s saw the war with the Soviet Union in ideological terms. The Soviet Union was a communist country and in the Nazi ideology, communism and Judaism are the same. Thus, the USSR was a branch of the globalist Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Aryan race.

With this in mind, the Nazi high command issued the Commissar Order. In the Soviet Union, commissars were agents of the communist party who supervised the rank and file troops. Their job was to enforce the communist party line. To the Nazis, this made them targets; they were the enforcers of the globalist conspiracy. Wehrmacht troops were ordered to kill any and all Commissars on the spot.

Wehrmacht troops were also ordered to kill all Jews immediately upon capture.

The general policy towards Soviet POWs for the first year of the war was to corral them behind fencing and leave them to starve. That policy was changed and afterwards, captured Soviet troops were used as slave labor instead. Over 3 million Soviet troops died while in Wehrmacht hands.

The Wehrmacht actively aided and abetted the Final Solution. They helped transport Jews to the camps and even took part in killing them.

Captured Wehrmacht soldiers, while living in Allied POW camps, would talk about their actions amongst themselves when no one was listening.

Except people were listening and their conversations were recorded, so we actually have a good idea about how much the rank and file knew of the Nazi war crimes.

They all knew. They knew because many of them perpetrated it. And in general, they supported it.

People will do many awful things when they think their race’s existence is on the line.

So that’s the Clean Wehrmacht Myth in general. What about Rommel?

The Good Guy Rommel Thing is the product of both the German government and the other western powers, especially the British. The two strains are separate, but there’s a strong interplay between them. 

The short of it is that Rommel was elevated because everyone needed a “good German” to contrast with the “bad Germans” like the ones on trial at Nuremberg. 

West Germany was remilitarizing and would eventually join NATO, and there was a push by some elements of British society to make Rommel the face of the Wehrmacht to soothe any anxieties from the general public. Several bestselling books about Rommel by British historians, all of them gravely inaccurate, were published shortly after the war ended. 

The same was true on the German side of things. Adenauer made Rommel a point of focus in his PR campaign to soften the Wehrmacht’s image in the public conscious. 

By this point in time, Rommel had already garnered a reputation for being a brilliant general not just from the Nazi’s (duh, for propaganda reasons) but even from the Allies (who wanted to save face after suffering some embarrassing loses at Rommel’s hands).

Rommel also supposedly played a role in Operation Valkyrie, which if you remember the movie from 2006, was a plot by a group of Wehrmacht troops to kill Hitler and end the war. Rommel committed suicide and this was lionized as an honorable act of defiance, an act memorialized in SNK with Erwin’s birthday being the same day as Rommel’s suicide.

In reality, while Rommel was indeed a talented tactician, he was also heavily criticized for being a rash leader who’d sweat the details too much. In any event, Rommel was far from the best the Nazis had to offer. That would probably be Guderian or Manstein. He was a respectable general, but not particularly praiseworthy.

Rommel committed many war crimes throughout his career. The Afrika Corps that Rommel commanded was not chivalrous. Like, seriously, is that a joke? They committed pogroms against Jews and utilized Jewish slave labor.

But it didn’t stop with that. Rommel gave license to acts of brutality in general. His troops would execute enemy soldiers summarily, sometimes via hanging. Those that weren’t killed had a good chance at being enslaved.

Rommel was also directly involved in the Holocaust. He used Jewish slaves to build concentration camps, which those slaves were then sent to die in.

The most famous vehicle for how the Nazi’s implemented the Final Solution were the camps, but less well known are the kill squads the Nazis employed, the einsatzgruppen. Rommel worked closely with the einsatzgruppen and even said that when the Nazis captured Palestine, it would be the job of the einsatzgruppen to kill the Jews there.

(A major reason why Rommel is so fondly remembered is because the first major biography of him was written by David Irving, who we now know to be a neo-Nazi and a holocaust denier.)

And as for Operation Valkyrie?

Rommel was charged with aiding the conspiracy but there is no proof that he did. None. At all.

Rommel’s suicide was sacrificial, but it was not an act of defiance. The Nazi’s had previously praised Rommel for propaganda purposes and that left them unable to put on a show trial and execute him. So instead they coerced him into killing himself lest his wife and kids be punished.

Rommel was a Nazi. He believed in the Nazi ideology. This was attested to by Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, who literally wrote that Rommel “…[I]s a national socialist.” Read: Nazi. 

In fact, Rommel wrote to his wife saying he was shocked about the assassination attempt and was happy Hitler survived.

You see, he was a close personal friend of Hitler’s.

Soooooooooooooooooo………..

I knew the Good Guy Rommel Thing was popular, but God, wading through posts online about it was unbearable. I almost wanted to throw up. 

Forget teaching financial literacy to high schoolers. We need to make information literacy a part of the curriculum. People need to learn how to gather information and evaluate its authenticity.

And maybe some education on logic would help. People admit Rommel fought for the Nazis but say he only did it out of loyalty to his country as if that makes him a good guy!! I am embarrassed for these people for saying something so ridiculous!

If there is an institution whose existence is unambiguously a problem and you are part of that institution, then you are part of the problem. If you are being coerced then that’s potentially exculpatory, but that’s a moot point because Rommel wasn’t coerced.

He. Believed. In Hitler.

I am completely dumbfounded by this! Rommel fought with full faith and conviction for the Third Reich. Does it matter that he loved his wife and kids?

No.

Loving your family is a given; you don’t get credit for that.

The Rommel Thing is a lot like how it is with Robert E. Lee in the United States.

For any non-American readers out there, the US once allowed slavery within its borders. But a movement to abolish slavery increasingly gained momentum and in the 1860s several states, wanting to preserve slavery, basically conspired with each other to destroy the country. War broke out and the rebellion was crushed.

The American Civil War was a momentous occasion in human history because it marked the first time a government was founded specifically on the ideology of racism. The Confederate States of America was an abomination. It was unlike anything that had ever come before. The people who gave their lives to defeat it truly are heroes.

Robert E. Lee was no such hero. He fought for the Confederacy. For slavery. For racism. Like Rommel, Lee is mythologized as a brilliant tactician who had an aura of nobility to him. It’s all bullshit.

And just like Lee, Rommel. Fought. For racism. Isayama, in his ignorance, has chosen to honor this man. 

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how incredible this is. A bestselling manga has a character based on a Nazi because the author cares enough about history to pepper his story with references, but not enough to do actual research! This can’t be happening!

If Isayama weren’t successful, famous, and popular, I’d feel bad for him. 

I mean, it’s like, “Hey, check out this character I created. He’s a brilliant general who fights for his people over his government. I based him on Erwin Rommel.”

“Didn’t Rommel use Jewish slave labor?”

“...” 

*cue sad trombone*

It’s not as if Isayama thought to himself “I want to name this brilliant general-type character after a similarly brilliant general from Germany” and just settled on Rommel because that the first person he thought of.

No.

Erwin’s birthday is the anniversary of Rommel’s suicide. Isayama is specifically choosing to honor the memory of this man. He could have chosen other generals to honor. Helmuth von Moltke. Carl von Clausewitz. Frederick the Great.

Or hell, it didn’t have to be a Germanic general. The Germanic setting isn’t a hard rule. He could have chosen Charles De Gaulle. Or Bernard Montgomery. The Duke of Wellington. Or maybe Horatio Nelson.

But no, it just had to be Rommel. Why?

My guess is that Isayama saw something in the Good Guy Rommel Thing that lined up with the story he wanted to tell. In the myth, Rommel is something of a freedom fighter. He was a good man who tried to do good in spite of the bad system he was embedded in, and ultimately died trying to overthrow that bad system.

If SNK in any way reflects Isayama’s own values, then it makes sense he would be enraptured by that accursed myth. There are elements of it all over SNK.

SNK is all about people living under oppression and trying to either overthrow it or work within it. There’s the oppression of the titans, of King Fritz and the Reisses, the oppression of the Marleyans, and hanging over all of this is the oppression of Ymir’s curse.

In the myth, Rommel is a good guy in a bad place who dies trying to change the world for the better. No wonder Isayama loves this tale so much.

But shit like this reeks of an annoying thing I see sometimes. One thing I’ve feared about SNK is that the author is the kind of guy who thinks he’s a Civil War buff because he read Shelby Foote. By that, I mean I fear Isayama only cares about history in a superficial way.  

Attack on Titan is about freedom and what’s so cool about it is that it’s not about any one particular kind of freedom, but just freedom in general. SNK’s conception of freedom is very well developed.

Attack on Titan embraces a pluralistic view of freedom. Freedom means different things to different people, but at its core is self-actualization. Achieving some level of happiness or accessing the potential to be happy.

Having a loving family. Seeing the ocean. Being able to say you saw the ocean. All of these things mean freedom in some way to some one. They are each of them a different path up the same mountain.

The problems start to arise when the series tries to be more than a story with an interesting theme. Whenever the story pointedly tries to impart wisdom to the reader, it fails. 

I can think of a number of examples of SNK trying to be smart and failing miserably.

Like when Armin said the people “have a screw loose” for thinking the titans won’t breach the wall after 100 years of trying.

Or when Armin said that Erwin being a bad person was a good thing.

Or when Armin said good people are just people who do things you like.

(Armin is supposed to be the smart one, which unfortunately means he ends up saying a lot of silly stuff whenever the author uses him as a mouthpiece.)

There have been some exceptions to this. Return to Shighanshina tackled themes of rising above nihilism well. I’m not sure it stuck the landing, but it handled things well enough.

And things are a bit interesting now that the story is tackling the theme of nationalism more explicitly. The way the series deals with nationalism is actually kind of nuanced and that’s appreciated. I guess.

My sense is that the Good Guy Rommel Thing is an example of this. He didn’t just base Erwin on Rommel. He apparently also based Pixis on a Japanese general. Mikasa is apparently named for a Japanese warship from the imperial era. Isayama clearly has a passion for history.

But if you’re ignorant enough to buy the Rommel Thing, then do you really care enough?

Isayama cared enough about Rommel that he knew the day of his suicide and he cared enough to mark that day in his story. But he doesn’t care enough to look deeper and see the myth for what it is. And if you haven’t reached that threshold, you can’t really call yourself a history buff; you’re just reading Shelby Foote.

It’s the difference between pop history and real history.

Pop history is history that’s been crafted for mass consumption. It is simplified, often times to the point of being misleading, and it’s not particularly rigorous with the facts, again often times to the point of being misleading. Pop history is often tempted to go with the more dramatic interpretation of events just to get more viewers. It’s history as reality tv.

Real history is both much more rigorous and much more messier. It involves work with primary sources and it involves heavy analysis of those sources. And if no definitive answer can be drawn from those sources, then so be it. Most people don’t think of history in this way, and that’s a shame, but the truth is that a lot of the historical record is murky or even completely blank. There’s a lot we don’t know.

But from a pop history perspective, that’s a problem. People pick up history books to learn about history, usually by being told a story; history is taught to people with a storytelling format. They don’t want to hear shit like “We don’t know what happened.” It’s bad storytelling, which is why you don’t see stuff like that in most pop history. In the world of pop history, it’s style over substance.

The Good Guy Rommel Thing is (bad) pop history, not real history. It’s awful that so many people believe in it.

I don’t want people who like reading pop history to feel diminished though. There’s good pop history out there. The Oxford History of the United States is excellent. Anything by David McCullough, Ron Chernow, Eric Foner, and Robert Caro is great. 

Basically everything on the r/AskHistorians book list is worth seeing, if you’re into the subject matter. Those are real historians overseeing that sub. They’re professionals. You can trust them. 

There’s nothing wrong with preferring pop history over real history. *I* prefer it over real history.

Have you ever seen what historians do? They wade through mountains and mountains of firsthand accounts and try to make sense of what’s happening. There’s a certain sherlockian aspect to it all, trying to piece together what happened from what clues we have left, but mostly it seems like trying to draw meaning out of a lot of noise; I’d rather read the final report.

Isayama may have a thing for history, but he seems almost glib about it. You’d have to be to buy into the Good Guy Rommel Thing. I mean, yeah, Japanese schools don’t go into detail about the European theater of World War II, but you’d think if a man cared enough about Rommel to base a character after him, he’d care enough to read a book about him. 

So in closing:

One of the most important things about Erwin’s character is the fate of his father, who died for rejecting the government’s official account of history. It’s an important little side story, because it’s true. Governments can and do try to push certain narratives. It’s usually not for nefarious purposes, but it does happen, and it’s great that SNK highlights this fact.

Ironically, Isayama himself seems to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for just that sort of thing.  

[anderjak]

“#ThisIsNotUs” Is A Lie.

The hashtag "#ThisIsNotUs" was trending yesterday on Twitter, and... We need to have a history lesson.

Prior to World War II, a commonly overlooked fact is that many corporations founded in America assisted Nazi Germany leading up to WWII. Companies like Coca-Cola and IBM (the latter of which will be important in this essay) would work to great ends to help the Nazi regime function.

Just before WWII, around 1936, the German-American Bund (formerly Friends of New Germany), a Nazi-endorsed American coalition of German-born American immigrants and Americans of German descent to push German ideology (which, at the time, was Naziism) and promote German excellence, was created. They would utilize the symbology, from the swastika to uniforms, in their public appearances. The group would dissolve, capping out at around 25,000 members in the US after immigration issues, taxation fraud, and more made it impossible to keep going. We didn't really stop them, they just sort of faded out due to legal trouble and lack of leadership.

In 1960, the American Nazi Party, formerly the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, was made an official political party in the US. This was a group explicitly devoted not just to Naziism but Hitlerism -- the expression of ideals that are in line with Adolf Hitler as both an individual and the leader of the Nazi party. While their numbers never rose to incredible heights, the group still persists to this day (despite an assassination attempt by a follower on the original founder, George Lincoln Rockwell) as New Order. They also once held the name National Socialist White People's Party explicitly to mirror the NAACP in name, fun fact. While they are technically no longer "active" as there is no longer membership within New Order, they still come up time to time, including a 2008 attempt to run another candidate for President of the USA. Much of their desire to stay afloat has been due to a lack of condemnation from official public figures; any faltering in their status has been largely from within, despite a history of violence and assassination attempts within the group.

I mention this because we sort of forget that the USA did not fight the Axis Forces because we were angry about what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish people; we only got involved after attacks were launched against us. We assisted in shutting down Nazi Germany and forced their leaders to stand trial in Nuremberg. Afterwards, many Nazi leaders were executed, Germany put a hard ban on all Nazi imagery and profession of ideology, and paid reparations to many affected Jewish people and surrounding nations -- but we didn't do it because they were Nazis. -We-, as Americans, did it because they Fucked With Our Shit. At the time, we were more than happy to contain anyone of East Asian descent in internment camps, and were rapidly heading toward our own genocide of East Asian people because of how we reacted to Japanese involvement at Pearl Harbor. (And, for the record, the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were dropped a fair deal after the Japanese surrendered; it wasn't a defensive act but a lash-out because our at-the-time sitting president was virulently racist towards East Asian people.)

What's more: We're responsible for how the Holocaust was carried out. And that's thanks to IBM.

We don't mention this much, but there was a lawsuit toward IBM about documents they held about their involvement with the Nazi Party leading up to WWII. This shouldn't really be a shock; Henry Ford, of Ford Motors, was granted the Grand Cross of the Golden Eagle, a high honor in the Nazi regime, for his assistance in manufacturing for war (it helped that he was publicly incredibly anti-semitic). Coca-Cola created a wholly unique ad campaign in Nazi Germany supporting the Third Reich and its ideals in an effort to gain a foothold within the region to push more beverages. American companies being involved with Nazis was pretty damn common since, before WWII, we had a solid relationship with Hitler.

But here's the kicker: The Holocaust, the Final Solution, would not have been possible without IBM, an American tech company. (Technically it was founded in Germany, licensed over to the US, and, as CTO of the company, Thomas J. Watson changed the name and established themselves as a unique brand within the US.) IBM acted as the means for gathering census data in Germany as early as 1933, to help identify and target political adversaries of the rising Nazi party and non-Aryan folk, specifically the Jewish people. The tattoos on interned Jewish people were a code developed by IBM. IBM would invest around $1 million to establish a new factory in Berlin, which helped Germany essentially throw out old census data of up to 600,000 Jewish folk eventually interned, as the new census data targeted 2 million people. Without IBM, Nazi Germany would likely never have been able to reach the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

I say all this because the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs is a lie; it is us. It has BEEN us. We continue to shy away from our responsibilities as a people to shut down intolerance, to be intolerant toward intolerance. We hold up Confederate statues, display Confederate flags, and try to downplay slavery's role in the Civil War. Unlike Germany, we never paid reparations, banned slave era imagery or Confederate imagery. Some Confederate leaders would go on to hold political office and even become Senators. When WWII was fought and won, we still had people coming back to segregated schools, where interracial marriage was still illegal in most of the country, where the Civil Rights movement had yet to begin, where we still treated a significant portion of our population as "lesser," as "inferior" to White People -- and we still do, with being complicit in bigotry of the highest order, of police violence toward black people, of giving extreme racism nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

I've contended with people who argue that the White Supremacist movement is directly caused by Black Lives Matter because they sincerely believe any collection of Black people for a purpose is inherently violent and toxic, despite claims that they are "absolutely not racist" and tell me about the black friend they have who's totally cool with it. I've contended with people who argue the Anti-Fascism protests are somehow causing White Supremacists to elevate to full-blown Nazi status in Charlottesville (including, but not limited to, throwing up the Nazi salute, wearing Nazi armbands, shouting "Blood and Soil," protecting Confederate monuments, et cetera). We continually contend with politicians who refuse to acknowledge the violent racist contingent of folks in this country, including our own President, who all say "violence from all sides" is somehow responsible -- despite three being dead solely because of Nazi protestors wanting to shut an Antifa counter-protest down. (An act that has been repeated in BLM protests, NADPL protests, anti-Trump protests, and more.) Our own President even refuses to answer questions about the Actual For Real Nazis in Charlottesville, taking the stance of "all sides" -- because he knows he relies on the votes of bigots who look to Trump as validation for their fears and actions. It's no wonder these people wearing Nazi armbands are also bearing MAGA hats -- they legitimately feel emboldened by our current President.

I mention all this not to make us feel worse about what's going on. I mention this because a lot of White People don't know about this, because a lot of this isn't taught in our schools. Even as a kid, I was witnessing slavery's role in the Civil War being downplayed as a small tenant of around fourteen philosophical disputes of the Confederacy (all of which, ironically, relate to the right to own slaves and the benefits it gave land owners). I had to look a lot of this stuff up myself, and take extra-curricular history courses to understand how these things connect and weave into the fabric of our country's very being. Because I don't personally experience this level of racism on a remotely regular basis; it's all second-hand. It's all witnessing it happening to others. Seeing the scars, the wounds, the obituaries of people who resisted, or people who were simply trying to get to work or go home or just perform their inalienable right to protest peacefully against injustice.

I mention all this so we all understand This Is Us. And it doesn't have to be. But we have to first acknowledge that it is. And we have to be loud about not wanting this. White Supremacy, White Nationalism, Naziism, are intolerant viewpoints. They are viewpoints whose ultimate goal is the destruction of non-Whites by any means necessary; to try and paint the entire country White as an ideologically "pure" nation. With history and with active resistance, it is on us to be loud, to shout these people down, to act in defense of the people we believe belong in this country.

We're a nation of many, and the only way we can truly be a tolerant nation is by shutting down intolerance where it stands. Make racists ashamed to voice their ideas. Make them scared. Make them suffer consequences for preaching violence toward a people on the basis of their skin color or religious identity. Naziism and White Supremacy absolutely must not be given a platform under any circumstance.

[nikkifinnie-blog]

Slow Faction palpable convictions and impressive energy

Citing The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers as major influences London based Slow Faction have been around in their current incarnation since 2012. Their first two releases The Shopping Malls and The Brixton Tapes came out in 2014 followed by This Machine Kills Fascists in 2016 and Under Heavy Manners in 2017. The latter elicited widespread praise with one reviewer describing it as ‘music...so spot-on and tunefully perfect-punk that this is simply a great mini-album (1)’ and another commenting about the songs that they have ‘a rare songwriting craft about them (2)’. I caught Slow Faction in Nottingham a few weeks ago where I spent their entire set grinning to myself at having stumbled over such an outstanding band (a subject me and a mate keep returning to!) and then saw them again in London where they confirmed what I had suspected-they’re a musically and lyrically exceptional band who can do it in the studio and on stage where their convictions are palpable and their energy impressive! At the London gig, that John (Youens) had also helped organise, we had a chat about getting an (email) interview together and lo and behold here it is!    Could you give us an overview of Slow Faction, how long have you been going, how did you get together? If truth be told, Slow Faction is a lifelong project for me, albeit an intermittent one. I first used the name Slow Faction in 1986/7 when I was writing songs with a friend at University in Exeter. We went our separate ways but carried on writing songs by correspondence – I got into 4 track home recording and he sent me lyrics or I sent him themes to go with tunes I had. He moved down to London in 1993 and we put the second incarnation of Slow Faction together as a gigging band. 4 years later we split in acrimonious circumstances. I and the other musicians limped on for a year or so under a different name but the impetus had gone. After the split I continued down the home recording path and writing new songs and this time lyrics – I posted the songs under the name Suburban Armchair Paranoia and always got good feedback so never lost sight of the fact that these songs should one day be played live. I never lost touch with Umbi, the bass-player in 93-99, and we used to see each other every couple of years, but he was always in bands doing this and that…then in 2012 we met up and he wasn’t in a band anymore. It might seem strange that I waited 13 years to play live again but I always had the feeling that Umbi and I would make music again and it felt that this time around, the time was right. We recruited Zen (drums) and Lee (rhythm guitar) through Gumtree and worked up a live band and started gigging again in Feb 2013. Zen left in Dec 2016 and Kit joined us on drums. Since Kit joined us I feel that we are more musically complete than at any time and the gigs are getting better and better. Did the band come together out of a shared politics or shared music? Which was the main driver behind Slow Faction? Could Slow Faction have been a band who sung about getting pissed? To be in Slow Faction you have to have a broad sympathy with the politics but the music has to come first. My idea for Slow Faction was always the best possible tunes & melodies which rocked but allied to lyrics that had substance. I always wanted Slow Faction to be a literate punk rock band that quickened the pulse. I feel there are enough bands singing about getting pissed already. Had any of you been in bands before? I would guess from the level of musicality that you have! As I said above, for me Slow Faction is a lifelong project and I have grown musically over the years through improving my musicianship, teaching myself about recording and sound engineering and trying to find a lyrical voice. Umbi, Kit and Lee have been in multiple bands before. But, just as important, we are all massive music fans and listen to a broad range of music – we don’t sit around listening to just punk – and within our music there are different influences at play which come out when we play live. What bands are you conscious of being an influence on your sound? You describe yourselves as being influenced by the first wave of punk and people have mentioned The Clash but I was also thinking about The Alarm and The Levellers, I think it's because the songwriting is so 'musical'! Thanks, yes for me the Clash and early Stiff Little Fingers were a prime motivating factor to pick up a guitar and write songs. Later on I became a big Rancid fan – I think Tim Armstrong is a very interesting story-teller lyricist. I have also followed the Manic Street Preachers from the start until now – I love the way that even 29 years into their careers they can still pull out a big exciting melodious song. Was Slow Faction's sound a deliberate decision, or is it the combination of the component parts? I always had a vision (if that’s the right word) for how I wanted Slow Faction to sound. Of course, like everyone, we went into studios a few times but it was always an unsatisfactory experience. In the days before digital, there would always be the pressure to mix quickly so the studio could wipe and reuse the tape. This led to hurried mixing and we never came out sounding how we wanted to. Now, we record ourselves and each recording comes closer to how we want to sound. The reviews for Under Heavy Manners (Sept 2017) were outstanding – and no one mentioned the DIY production so we must have been doing something right! How does a song come about in Slow Faction? Is it a collaborative process or does there tend to be one main songwriter? Because I have spent so long writing and recording myself, it is not a collaborative process. I tend to have the song completed in terms of lyrics, structure and guitar riffs and present a drum machine demo to the band, which we then work out into a band version. My writing has always come about from an acoustic guitar or electric guitar on a clean setting. I focus very much on chord structures and melody lines…I live with this for a while until the right lyric starts to form and then I will start to think about arrangements, riffs, solos…but it always start with the melody lines… 'Can’t you see, there’s a war going on out there?  It’s a fight for survival now  But you don’t really care  You think it doesn’t affect you  Two million children live in poverty  And they say we’re a civilised land The social contract’s been rescinded  As a million queue for food banks' ('There's a War Going On'-Heavy Manners) One of the things that marks Slow Faction out is the relevance and quality of the lyrics, they stand out for their sophistication and intelligence. What sort of resources do you draw on? I'm guessing a lot of time reading is distilled into three minutes of singing!? Thanks – yes, this was always the long-time aim of Slow Faction to write relevant, literate songs which mean something and it hasn’t exactly come about overnight. Like most people my sort of age, I am a synthesis of everything I’ve experienced, read, listened to and this has come together to form my lyrical voice. If you want to boil it down to a few ingredients – punk rock, left wing politics, German 20th Century Literature, Eastern Philosophy and meditation – my wife is a Thai Buddhist and we go to the temple regularly and I have studied Taoism and meditation for over 25 years. I have also travelled extensively for my job and have experienced many different countries and cultures. In the broadest sense I would describe my views (as Heinrich Boell did of himself) as humanitarian liberalism. I am from the left but not dogmatic about it…I am more concerned with equality and fairness and balance and, certainly in this country life has become far more unequal, unfair and unbalanced. There is a war going on in this country and as I write in the song Under Heavy Manners, it’s one that’s being waged by the rich upon the poor… You released your first EP The Shopping Malls in August 2014, The Brixton Tapes later that year, This Machine Kills Fascists came out in 2016 and last year you released Under Heavy Manners. That's quite a stream of creativity! What sort of subjects have preoccupied you over those 20 or so songs? The overarching themes are the abuse of power by the rich which is used to control and subjugate and destroy the poor, aided and abetted by the complicit people in the middle who unknowingly allow it to happen while being fed a diet of stultifying drivel by the media. If you look at just the song 'Under Heavy Manners', this contains most of the major themes in its 3 verses: closing down the cities and ordinary people’s way of life, distracting people with cheap reality television, lying politicians leading us into unjustified wars while all the time taking from the poor and giving it to the super rich, surveillance and CCTV spying on our lives while we sit at home satisfied by what the media provides as a distraction…and all the while we are more and more divided and there is no motivating factor to unify us to take to the streets and say enough is enough…those of us who seek to offer a different viewpoint are lone voices in the wilderness as I conclude in the song 'Clear Channel'… In your song 'Poundland Society' (Under Heavy Manners).. 'Now in this world of demagogues  They stir up hatred to unite  So you rally one more time  Behind your flags of ignorance I'll leave you now as you celebrate  The hollowness of your victory  Your aim was so wide of the mark  You've handed power to the enemy  - and you'll always have nothing Poundland Society  - I see the desperation  - of this divided nation  - enjoy the independence  - of your bargain bin fucked existence  - you've got your sovereignty now  - say hello to penury now  - wave your flags that's all that you've got left' ..you've nailed Brexit completely 'You've handed power to the enemy', is a succinct analysis of the class dimension that seemed to be missing from most working class peoples' thinking. Did you find that a particularly frustrating time? Personally, I am horrified by Brexit. I have lived and worked across Europe and I view (and backed up by European friends) the EU not as some globalist, fascist state, but rather more as a well-meaning but obviously imperfect social democratic institution which, by necessity, is seeking compromise across many countries’ interests. Sometimes they get some issues very wrong, but on overall balance, I see the EU as more positive than negative. I see Brexit as a very negative step that’s been sold to the British public by unscrupulous politicians from the far right and by tax-avoiding media enterprises. Also there is definitely something behind US and Russia interference both of whom would benefit from a weakened EU. People in this country have been left behind by the rich NOT because of EU policies but because of policies pursued aggressively by our own government. If the EU was a neoliberal plot then how come the gap between rich and poor is much narrower in Germany (which has had a conservative president for most of this century) than it is in the UK? It is entirely down to domestic politics that we are so unequal and so much has been taken away from the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. If people who voted Brexit seriously think things will become much fairer in this country in a government led by Johnson, Gove, Raab, Fox, etc, supported by Murdoch, Dacre, Viscount Rothermere, Richard Desmond and the Barclay Brothers, then I think they might well be in for a nasty shock… You are a political punk band, whereabouts would you place yourselves politically or is there a continuing evolving of thought? Is there a spectrum of positions within the band? We are a band of mature individuals who all have our own life experiences which form our own thoughts and opinions. Having said that, we are all left of centre to varying degrees. Personally, I view myself as more of a European-style social democrat but on the social issues (fairness, equality, race, the abuse of power, etc) very much to the harder left of the spectrum. How did your politics develop? Were there any significant experiences or influences? Punk rock was very much my first music, being 13 in 1977 and growing up in the Midlands, but it was very much the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers who sparked my interest in politics in the broadest sense. When I was 18 I lived in Germany working in a hotel and, for what was then a very prosperous country, saw homeless people for the first time. At the same time I started reading Heinrich Boell (Boell had been a leading liberal voice of reason in Germany at the time of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the public reaction had led to extreme measures against anyone with a leftwing background). His views were very much ones of the politics of the everyday – how we relate to people, our thoughts when confronted by people less fortunate or different than ourselves, how sharing a conversation or a coffee or a cigarette could be interpreted politically or even take on an almost sacramental value. At the height of the terrorist paranoia he described the feeling of Beruehrungsangst (fear of contact) and how the clampdown on freedoms, supported by media distortions, was making society more atomised and people less willing to have anything to do with people different from themselves. In this country from Thatcher through to today we have seen this happening – we are more remote from other people, we live outside communities and society is very fragmented and this is supported by a media full of stories designed to make us look down on or fear our fellow human beings – the fear of contact that Boell was referring to 40 years ago, has come to fruition in the UK. Slow Faction are very involved with the DIY punk scene in London and with the South London Punk Collective, how do you think grassroots punk is doing? Is it encouraging to be part of? Grassroots Punk is very healthy in terms of the number of bands out there writing and playing amazing music – the songwriting talent and musicianship is incredible. In London, however, you are always chasing the 200-300 people who are regular gig-goers and if there are 4 or 5 punk gigs on the same night (very common) then the audience gets very fragmented. Yes, it is very encouraging to be part of as certain bands really contribute to the feeling of community, that’s so lacking elsewhere. However, the frustrations are the ones of bands everywhere and live music in general – some bands are only in it for themselves – they message me for SLPC gigs but never see them at a DIY gig unless they are on the bill themselves. Even if they can’t make a gig, they could help share and promote the DIY gigs on Facebook but even clicking on share is too much effort for some people. The other frustration is that there are people who will pay to see ‘name’ bands – particularly on the punk nostalgia circuit – but wouldn’t walk to the end of the road to check out a free entry gig of local bands. Has involvement in grassroots punk grown again in reaction to the imposition of neoliberal class war inspired cuts aka austerity? Have you seen more young people looking to punk as a site of resistance? I’m not sure about that. Punk feels very much a niche music genre these days and London is a very big city which has always been home to people of alternative outlooks, attitudes and lifestyles so it’s very hard to tell if the ranks have been swelled as a response to austerity. Also, although we are a political band, there are some who state firmly that punk is not and never was about politics – and those views are not confined to age groups or genres within punk. I feel that anyone drawn to politics or resistance of whatever form of protest, will do so regardless of whether they see themselves as punk or not. Over the years has the numbers involved in punk tended to move in waves or is it fairly constant? In terms of making music and active punk groups I would say we are currently at a peak. In spite of venue closures, there is always a choice of gigs every weekend in London. Recording technology is cheap and people can make their own music at reasonable expense and the internet means you can distribute it to a potential audience. The problem is that the audience for punk both as music consumer and gig-goer is very limited. Punk remains a niche genre. Do you think punk has generally developed in a positive way? Has it fulfilled your hopes for it? Personally, yes – punk is in my heart and in my head and informs how I live my life – not just in the music scene, but how I approach my relationships, my work, my family – this is also combined with my interest in Buddhism, Taoism & meditation – through these I try to live my live with honesty, integrity and transparency and punk values inform this approach to life just as much as the Eastern values. I also know many people in the punk scene who I would trust 100% to uphold these values. But, but, but – being a punk is not an automatic pass to the higher plain. Punk is a microcosm of society and there will be racists, sexists, selfish people, users & abusers within punk just as much in society at large. In your own experience has it managed to stay as a counter to consumerism as identity, to offer positive community and creativity as alternative resources for the construction of self? Once again, for me, personally, punk embodies many healthy values which I subscribe to and which have informed my life. Yes, punk has made me less susceptible to consumerism and selfishness. It has engendered a sense of community to me, my band and the bands we most closely associate with. ‘Ignore Alien Orders’ still informs my thinking and leads me to question everything. This in turn leads to the desire to keep on exploring ideas which then come out in the form of new songs – and yes, always being questioning does lead to an exploration of self, if not a construction – that happens with every thought, experience, action, not necessarily just through punk or punk attitude…Hermann Hesse described those who explore through questioning and self-examination as Morgenlandfahrer and with my combination of punk and Eastern philosophical values, that is how I view my own personal journey What are Slow Faction's plans for the rest of 2018? Are there plenty of opportunities to see you playing live? We’ve still got a run of gigs through May/June/July and August. Umbi, our bass player, goes to Japan every year around October time so we’ll be out of action for mid-autumn but gigs always come up and we’ll no doubt organise some SLPC gigs in London. I would also like to take some time out to write new songs. Each year our set changes and we want to keep moving forwards – writing new songs, exploring new ideas… What bands and writers have you been enjoying lately? Who should we keep an eye (ear?) out for musically? Writers – I’m re-reading at the moment a novella by Boell as I had a discussion with a friend about a month ago and she inspired me to pick something up by him for the first time in 20 years. My other favourite writers are Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. I would also recommend reading the Tao Te Ching – reading this 25 years ago literally changed my life. Musically, I love so many DIY bands that if I mention some, then I will only leave someone out….but special mention goes to my SLPC comrades Stone Heroes and Mindframe plus the wonderful bands we toured Germany with recently: The Phobics and Proud City Fathers. Favourite CD of 2017 – the debut EP by the utterly wonderful Backstreet Abortions. Bandcamp link https://slowfaction.bandcamp.com/album/under-heavy-manners Photo by Frau Mony courtesy of Slow Faction. Bibliography. (1) Babey, G. (2017), Louder Than War, https://slowfaction.bandcamp.com/album/under-heavy-manners (2) Whyte, J. (2017) https://slowfaction.bandcamp.com/album/under-heavy-manners Read the full article