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omg-justshutup · 2 years ago

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Thought of the day:

I wasn't sure if to talk about this, since this whole profile is more about me talking about my shit and my stories, because yes, I write.

But since I talked about Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, I thought I should talk about two more things:

1. Iran

2. The 25th of September in Italy

So I'm 90% sure almost everyone heard about what happened to Mahsa Amini, a 22 year old iranian woman that ended up dead because she wasn't wearing her hijab properly. I've seen tons of tik toks talking about this but I still wanted to talk about two things regarding this topic.

First of all I wanted to share what happened even if barely anyone knows who I am, I still think anyone should at least try to spread the word to bring awareness. What's happening right now in Iran is horrible and it's really sad and scary to think people live in a country where they don't even have access to internet anymore, people not being able to hear from their own family living there, knowing just that there are protests and people getting killed because of it.

This brings me to my second point about Iran: the whole cutting your hair thing. I saw videos with people shaving their head, and people reacting to this, saying that unless you are affected by the strict law to wear the hijab, cutting your hair will only give you sympathy points and do little to nothing for the people in Iran, which I do think is true, also because I'm partially scared this whole thing will turn into another trend where people talk about real and serious issues for a couple of weeks and then forget about it entirely.

Now my second topic, which I think is much less known.

So on the 25th September, which means tomorrow, there will be the elections for a new prime minister in Italy. I know since the elections are tomorrow, I wouldn't exactly be allowed to talk about it, but I doubt this will make any change, so I just hope more people at least learn about this.

The problem with these elections is not that they're happening and where, it's who might win. As much as people imagine Italy as another western and modernized country in both technology and mentality, I sadly have to break the second one. Many Italians still have old nationalistic mentalities, I first handedly had to go through it. Many of them are racist, xenophobic, homophobic, islamophobic, you got it. But you know who is all those things all together? An Italian politician that might win the elections: Giorgia Meloni.

Giornia Meloni is the president of Fratelli d'Italia, a conservative party. She has also been called, and still is, fascist. When she was around 20 years old, she stated that Mussolini was a good politician. Italians and all foreigners that live here already have an idea with what she'll do if she wins and I could stay here list everything I know but I guess I'll give some tips to make everyone understand even more why I think this should be known more:

compulsory military service for all Italians;

prohibition to build any more Mosques and all Muslims must pray in Italian so everyone can understand what they're saying;

maximum number of foreign students per class.

I could also go on and prove even more the racism and also homophobia in almost everything she wants and says but I'm pretty sure these three points say it all.

The worst of all is, even if Meloni doesn't win, there are other parties with pretty much the same mentality that have as much of a chance to win as Fratelli d'Italia, and many Italians tried their best on the Italian side of tik tok to prove to as many people as possible to vote correctly at these elections, but we're still afraid we barely made a change. Already Hungary is not being considered a Democracy anymore, and now apparently it's a hybrid regime of electorial autocracy, which causes some problems in the European Union, all we need is an Italy with a fascist prime minister.

I apologize if I got any information wrong, everything I wrote was straight from my memory and knowledge, but even if I wrote a name or a small fact wrong, the idea of both points must've been clearly made anyways.

#mahsa amini #hijab #italy #giorgia meloni #iran #thought of the day

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feelingbluepolitics · 3 years ago

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Republicon "legislators at the state level are codifying into law a draft letter written by a former US Department of Justice official in the remaining weeks of [t]rump's one and only term. That draft letter, according to the Post's Philip Bump, was 'a road map to overthrowing the will of voters.' It explained in granular detail how state Republican officials could have pulled off a coup.

"This quiet coup attempt failed mere days before the loud coup attempt failed. The sacking and looting of the United States Capitol on January 6 was a last-ditch effort by an outgoing president desperate to hold on to power but exhausted of choices. Nullification of the democratic will would have been preferable, because it would not have drawn so much attention. When that failed, [trump] had to risk exposing his true intentions with his last remaining option, a violent revolt.

"The difference between loud and quiet is the proper context for recent remarks by Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. She said her father, Dick Cheney, was 'deeply troubled' about 'where our party is, deeply troubled about where the country is.' She said this after having voted to impeach [trump] and after losing her job as chair of the House GOP conference. With due respect, though, I doubt she and the former vice president are worried about what they should be worried about. They should be worried about state-level attempts to nullify democracy. I don't think they are. I think, instead, they're worried about potential right-wing violence, like what we saw on January 6. It might draw attention to what state Republican officials are doing.

"Dick Cheney's concern about appearances (assuming I'm correct) might sound quaint given the Republicans are less conservative than they are authoritarian. After all, plenty of Republicans and plenty of their media allies are more than happy to shit-can commitments to democracy and democratic values. Tucker Carlson, the Fox talking head, has been talking up Hungary as a model for the future, one that's transparently hostile to pluralism, political equity and democracy. Why not just come out and say the January 6 insurrection was deserved?

"That respectable [sic] Republicans like Dick and Liz Cheney have not said so suggests they understand the importance of political legitimacy. I think the rest of us should understand its importance, too, especially with respect to fears of an authoritarian future in the United States. Even if you're an all-out fascist, you must maintain the appearance among the people who count to you that fascism is totally legitimate. Right-wing political violence, at least for the time being, is almost never legitimate. Right-wing political violence exposes true intentions.

"This is why many of the Republicans lie about the insurrection. The insurgents were 'victims,' for instance. The demands of legitimacy mean they must convince themselves they're the good guys. That makes them susceptible to the fact that they're not. This is why propagandists like Steve Bannon constantly repeat the myth that the former president's supporters represent the 'true majority.' To be sure, the 'true majority' elected Joe Biden. But whether it's true or not isn't the point. The point is even authoritarians understand the importance of appearances. For now, right-wing violence makes them vulnerable, because right-wing violence exposes their true intentions.

"This seems to me the true fault line within the Republican Party. On one hand are the radicals who don't mind everyone knowing the GOP really does have an informal network of paramilitaries waiting to spring into action. On the other are the leaders and the old guard, who really don't want everyone knowing the GOP has an informal network of paramilitaries waiting to spring into action. They don't mind state election laws that nullify democracy, if that's what it takes to control the government, but they also don't want the radicals mucking up complicated efforts to make authoritarianism nice and legal. To be sure, the GOP has maintained this balance for decades. With [t]rump, however, came a genie who won't be put back in the lamp.

"Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be moving to force that Republican fault line to its breaking point...The difference is the Democrats have all the evidence of the January 6 insurrection on their side. The Republicans can only say they're 'deeply troubled.' House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn was asked recently by Roll Call for his thoughts on new state 'rules about who gets to overrule election results, legislators and other elected officials.' With all of democracy and democratic values beside him, the South Carolina Congressman said: 'I want you to call it what it is. Use the word: nullification. It is voter nullification. … Georgia just passed a law, it's got nullification in it, saying that these, this committee, will have the authority to overturn elections if–they don't say it this way, but this is what they're saying–if we don't like the results' (italics mine)."

"It remains to be seen whether or not Clyburn's statement has any effect on the current debate in the Senate over election reform. My point for now is about normal partisan politics. While I have no doubt that the Republicans, seeing they came very close to overthrowing the republic once, will try again when the opportunity presents itself. But that's no cause for hopelessness. Authoritarianism is like any other political ideology in that it's vulnerable to normal partisan politics. Indeed, as I've argued, it saved us once. It can and may save us again."

The further point to be made is that there is no more room for centrists and moderates at this historical inflection point, because they put the country at risk from Republicons and authoritarianism. Whatever typical political and social issues may retain democratic debate or consensus as values -- and very few of those remain -- this is not one of them. We must have baseline protections for voting if we prefer a democracy for our future. We must keep pro-authoritarian factions out of power, and that includes the entire Right-wing.

Be partisan. Be very partisan. Be afraid not to be.

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absolute-immunities · 5 years ago

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Innocent and Sweet

I’m thinking about Elizabeth Gold today.

Gold is the love interest in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). She’s a minor character, but we know a few things about her. She is tall, ungainly, somewhere between plain and beautiful, and young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. And a Communist.

When people talk about Gold, they usually come back to the same few words. The Guardian calls her “innocent”; The Atlantic, “trusting”; The Spectator, “idealistic”. A Film Comment editor calls her “a sweet-natured librarian who comes to Communism out of youthful idealism”. That’s how the author remembers her, too, as an “idealistic Communist” and "an innocent woman librarian from London".

I think we should rethink that.

Elizabeth Gold joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1954 or 1955. By the time we meet her, she is a Branch Secretary, and relatively untroubled by a request to visit East Germany and meet her counterpart in the East German Communist Party.

Something always troubled me about this timeline. It meant that when Gold joined the Party soon after the 1953 East German uprising and remained a member after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. By then, the realities of Communism were apparent to everyone.

Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of February 1956 -- printed in full in the New York Times and the Observer that June -- admitted what non-Communists had long known of Stalin’s crimes. It was different for Communists. It was different to hear it from the head of the Soviet Communist Party, the leader of world Communism, and Stalin’s old companion.

The British Communist Eric Hobsbawm wrote about its impact in his memoirs:

What disturbed the mass of their members was that the brutally ruthless denunciation of Stalin’s misdeeds came, not from ‘the bourgeois press’, whose stories, if read at all, could be rejected a priori as slanders and lies, but from Moscow itself. It was impossible not to take notice of it ... Even those who ‘had strong suspicions ... amounting to moral certainty for years before Khrushchev spoke’ were shocked at the sheer extent, hitherto not fully realized, of Stalin’s mass murders of communists. (The Khrushchev Report said nothing about the others.) And no thinking communist could escape asking himself or herself some serious questions.

The CPGB ignored the speech. The party membership found it harder to ignore. Dissenters rebuked the party’s “slavish adherence” to Stalinism, and its “past uncritical endorsement of all Soviet policies and views.” The Secret Speech had challenged their faith: “the exposure of the grave crimes and abuses in the USSR ... [has] shown that for the past 12 years we have made a political analysis on a false presentation of the facts.”

That was the first blow. The Soviet invasion of Hungary that October was the second. The Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution shocked the conscience of even the most committed Communists. “For Communists outside the Soviet empire,” Hobsbawm later wrote, “the spectacle of Soviet tanks advancing on a people’s government headed by Communist reformers was a lacerating experience, the climax of a crisis that, starting with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, pierced the core of their faith and hope.”

Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker’s reporter in Hungary, was so appalled that he publicly criticized both the repression and the international Communist response. His Hungarian Tragedy, published that December, was about two tragedies: the tragedy within Hungary and the tragedy in British Communism. “It is the tragedy that we British Communists who visited Hungary did not admit, even to ourselves, the truth about what was taking place there, that we defended tyranny with all our heart and soul.”

Fryer wrote to redeem the British Communism, which had “betrayed Socialist principles and driven away some of its finest members by defending the indefensible.” He was expelled. The other dissenters were expelled. Hobsbawm stayed.

British Communism had always been a small world. There were about 30,000 Communists in the early 1950s, and most of them paid little attention to broader world. “My mother ‘wouldn’t have dreamt’ of having a close friend who was not a Communist,” as one old Communist put it. “My own friendships ... were exclusively with Communists or people I was trying to win over.”

The events of 1956 struck this small community with the force of an atom bomb. Hobsbawm remembered the year as a moment of trauma:

Even after practically half a century my throat contracts as I recall the almost intolerable tensions under which we lived month after month, the unending moments of decision about what to say and do on which our future lives seemed to depend, the friends now clinging together or facing one another bitterly as adversaries, the sense of lurching, unwillingly but irreversibly, down the scree towards the fatal rock-face. And this while all of us, except a handful of full-time Party workers, had to go on, as though nothing much had happened, with lives and jobs outside, which temporarily seemed unwanted distractions from the enormous thing that dominated our days and nights. God knows 1956 was a dramatic year in British politics, but in the memory of those who were then communists, everything else has faded. Of course we mobilized against Anthony Eden’s lying government in the Suez crisis together with a for once totally united Labour and Liberal left. But Suez did not keep us from sleeping. Probably the simplest way of putting it is that, for more than a year, British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.

By 1958, the CPGB had lost a third of its members, a third of the staff of the Daily Worker, and most of the old Communist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s. The old Communist and his mother, whose only close friends had been Communists, left the party that year.

Elizabeth Gold stayed.

II.

Elizabeth Gold is Jewish. Gold has anxieties about German antisemitism -- worried that the antisemitic Germans had not been deposited entirely in the West -- but seems unaware of Communist antisemitism, which was pervasive in Communist Europe, and not only in Germany.

Stalin had always been an antisemite -- “In our Central Committee there are no Jews!” he boasted to a visiting dignitary in January 1948. “You are an anti-Semite, you too are an anti-Semite!” -- but Stalinist Russia had not always been officially antisemitic. Jews were useful to Stalin. Poles, Ukrainians and Germans might be nationalists, more loyal to their homelands than Soviet Russia. They might need to be removed or destroyed. They might need to be broken. But Jews had no homeland. They only had Russia.

That changed with the war. Stalin had embraced the Russian nation, bringing Soviet thinking in line with traditional Russian nationalism, with its deep antisemitic currents. That made Jews suspect. If the Soviet Union was rooted in the Russian people, it could not be rooted in the Jews.

In public, the Communists were as explicit as their doctrine allowed. The Soviet Union led anti-cosmopolitan campaigns, anti-Zionist campaigns, or anti-bourgeois nationalist campaigns. The message was the same. The Jews were the enemies of the Russian people.

In January 1949, the Soviet Union stepped up the campaign. Pravda began attacking “cosmopolitans without a fatherland,” “rootless cosmopolitans,” “persons without identity” and “passportless wanderers.” These intellectuals -- sometimes collectively referred to as “the Levins” -- simply did not understand the Russian people. “What notion could Gurvich have of the national character of Soviet Russian man?”

The Soviet Union ultimately murdered more than a few members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. After a secret trial in the summer of 1952, fourteen of fifteen defendants, all Jewish, were executed. The words of the investigating colonel, Vladimir Komarov, revealed Soviet thinking better than anything else: “Jews are low, dirty people, all Jews are lousy bastards, all opposition to the Party consists of Jews, Jews all over the Soviet Union are conducting an anti-Soviet whispering campaign. Jews want to annihilate all Russians.”

The Communist satellites purged their Jewish leaders too. Romania purged Ana Pauker, Czechoslovakia purged Rudolf Slánský and ten other Jewish leaders, the East Germans and Poles did the same. The Slánský trial was public. The Czcechoslovak prosecutors and witnesses did not mince words. Slánský was “the great hope of all the Jews in the Communist Party,” and “Jewish origin” or “Zionist origin” were marks of guilt. Eleven of the fourteen accused were sentenced to death and executed.

During the trial, the Prague Communist press announced that “the Judas Slánský” was betting on “these alien elements, this rabble with its shady past” to perpetrate his Zionist plot against the Czech people. No Czech could have done those crimes: “only cynical Zionists, without a fatherland ... clever cosmopolitans who have sold out to the dollar. They were guided in this criminal activity by Zionism, bourgeois Jewish nationalism, racial chauvinism.”

That was November 1952. The final Stalinist campaign came a few months later, announced in Pravda in January 1953. Three Jewish doctors were accused of murder, conspiring with Anglo-American bourgeoisie, and advancing the cause of Jewish nationalism. The rhetoric was not subtle. This was how TASS announced the Doctors’ Plot in January 1953:

Most of the participants in the terrorist group (M. S. Vovsi, B. B. Kogan, A. I. Feldman, A. M. Grinshtein, Ya. G. Etinger and others) were connected with the international Jewish bourgeois nationalist organisation, ‘Joint’, established by American intelligence for the alleged purpose of providing material aid to Jews in other countries. In actual fact this organisation, under the direction of American intelligence, conducts extensive espionage, terrorist and other subversive work in many countries, including the Soviet Union. The prisoner Vovsi told investigators that he had received orders ‘to wipe out the leading cadres of the USSR’ from the ‘Joint’ organisation in the USA, via a Moscow doctor, Shimelovich, and the well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist, Mikhoels.

Stalin died in March 1953, before the trial. His successors dismissed the charges. In the Secret Speech, Khrushchev admitted that the Doctors’ Plot had “fabricated from beginning to end,” although he said nothing about Jews, Zionists, or cosmopolitans.

In May 1956, Khrushchev would defend the Soviet Union against charges of antisemitism, but he admitted that the Doctor’s Plot had been “given a Zionist, Jewish colouring.” But even that was not Stalin’s fault. “That was one of Beria’s machinations.”

None of this troubled Elizabeth Gold.

III.

We know a few things about Elizabeth Gold. She’s not a laborer. She doesn’t like organizing. “She hated that side of party work,” she says, “the loudspeakers at the factory gates, selling the Daily Worker at the street corner, going from door to door at the local elections.”

Gold prefers Peace Work. That made sense to her. “You could look at the kids in the street as you went by, at the mothers pushing their prams and the old people standing in doorways, and you could say, ‘I’m doing it for them.’ That really was fighting for peace.”

What was Peace Work? Perhaps the most impressive piece of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the early Cold War. The Peace Movement was Stalin’s baby, and became the leitmotif of his foreign policy. “All the real friends of peace ... the majority of the people in every country,” were friends of the Soviet Union, his Foreign Secretary had said in November 1947.

The Peace Movement itself was launched at an August 1948 “World Congress of Intellectuals” in Wroclaw, Poland. There were several “Peace Conferences” after that, in Paris, Prague, and New York. The Peace Movement itself was led by non-Communist figureheads, but controlled by Communists at the committee level and coordinated with the Cominform. Few critics of Soviet foreign policy were invited, and those that criticized the Soviet Union were shouted down.

The Movement gathered millions of signatures in Western Europe and tens of millions more in Eastern Europe, while the Movement itself pressed home the message that the Soviet Union was for peace, while the United States and its allies were for war. It was powerful message, and one to which Western Europeans were sympathetic.

The demands of the Peace Congresses were the demands of Soviet foreign policy: In 1950, they demanded an immediate end to the war in Korea, including a withdrawal of all foreign troops; a complete ban on atomic, bacteriological and chemical welfare; a peace treaty with a united, demilitarized Germany; and for Communist China to take the Chinese seat at the United Nations.

But those demands were as flexible as Soviet foreign policy. In 1953, after the Soviets tested their first thermonuclear device, the old demand for the “outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of people” was suspended. The Peace Congresses followed the party line.

That was the work Elizabeth Gold preferred to do.

IV.

How should we understand Elizabeth Gold? Was she an innocent? Was she an idealist? Maybe that’s how she and her lovers thought of her. I don’t think we should think of her that way.

What does she believe in? "History,” she said. She did not like party work, but she liked talking about that. "It was easy when there were a dozen or so together at a Branch meeting,” she said, to “talk of the inevitability of history.”

What does she mean by history? That “peace and freedom and equality,” defined and proven by the Party, existed outside people. They were facts. They were “demonstrated in history.” And they were inevitable: “individuals must bow to it, be crushed by it if necessary.”

That was what made her a Communist. That was why she defended Soviet foreign policy to mothers pushing their strollers and old people standing in doorways, because she was a member of the Communist Party, and “the Party was the vanguard of history.”

It made it possible to ignore Stalinist crimes and the Hungarian Revolution, and their Communist victims. It made it possible to ignore Communist antisemitism until she saw it in person. (“Jews are all the same,” her guard tells her in East Germany. “We don’t need their kind here.”) History made it possible to ignore everything else.

Here’s how we should understand Elizabeth Gold: She believed in history, the force to which individuals must bow or be crushed. She just wanted to be on the side doing the crushing.

Sources: John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Victor Gollancz, 1963); idem., “The Spy Who Liked Me,” New Yorker, April 8, 2013; Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (Allen Lane, 2002); Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm (Oxford UP, 2019); Frances Stonor Saunders, “Stuck on the Flypaper,” London Review of Books, April 9, 2015; Peter Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy (Dennis Dobson, 1956); James Eaden and David Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920 (Palgrave, 2002); Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (Verso, 2017 [2006]); Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (Harcourt Brace, 1962); Tony Judt, Postwar (Penguin, 2005); Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948-1967 (Cambridge, 1984); idem., The Jews of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1988); Nikita S. Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era (New Leader, 1956); Peter Calvocoressi, Survey of International Affairs, 1949-1950 (Oxford UP, 1953); Guenter Lewy, The Cause That Failed (Oxford UP, 1990).

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xhxhxhx · 5 years ago

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[Peter] Handke [winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature] is a more controversial choice. ... A playwright and novelist, whose screenplay credits include Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, he is also known for pro-Serbian views which include condemning “criminal” Nato intervention in Serbia. Attending Slobodan Milošević’s funeral, he was reported to have said that he was happy to be beside “a man who defended his people”.

yikes

The poet Ezra Pound and the novelist Louis Ferdinand Celine encountered the same reaction: admired for their literary talents, they were pilloried for their pro-fascist sentiments in the 30s and 40s.

Today it is the turn of Peter Handke, the Austrian novelist and playwright. Handke is one of the most influential and thought-provoking writers in the German language, a view supported by John Updike, who has described him as the finest writer in Germany.

But Handke's standing as the flag-bearer of Germany's left-leaning '68 generation has been undermined by a succession of increasingly forthright pronouncements about the prevailing moral issue in Europe at the century's end: bombs and pogroms in Serbia and the response of western artists.

'It's a paradox that the remnants of the peace movement are running around with supporters of mass murder,' remarked poet and essayist Hans-Magnus Enzensberger.

His remarks were prompted by Handke's words on his return from a visit to Belgrade, likening the fate of the Serbs to that of the Jews under the Nazi regime. While the Balkan war convulses the German-speaking literary world - with novelist Erich Loest calling for a 'war congress of writers' to take place in Berlin in order to wrestle with the crisis -- Handke's actions and statements have triggered fierce polemic and controversy across Europe.

A 'baptised and occasionally practising Catholic', Handke, 56, says he is quitting the 'current' Roman Catholic church in protest at the Vatican's views on the Balkan conflict.

He is also returning the 10,000 marks he received in 1973 as the winner of the Buchner prize, Germany's top literary award.

The writer has just returned to his home outside Paris after spending several days in Serbia, driving from Hungary to Novi Sad and Belgrade 'to get a feel for the country' and to 'retain my credibility' after years of voicing support for Serbia.

According to the Belgrade media, Handke received the Order of the Serbian Knight while in Serbia, the latest in a long list of decorations awarded in recognition of his propaganda value to the Milosevic regime.

'Mars is attacking, and Serbia, Montenegro, the Republika Srpska [the Serb part of Bosnia] and Yugoslavia are the fatherland of all those who have not become Martians or green butchers,' declared Handke.

His decision to return the Buchner prize money led Christian Meier, head of the German Society for Language and Literature, which awards the prize, to suggest it should be donated to Albanian refugees deported by Serbs: 'A Handke tent in a refugee camp that would be something.'

Handke's pro-Serb sympathies and his rage at the west go back to 1991 when the bloody dismemberment of the country began.

The son of a German soldier father and a Slovene mother, Handke was raised in the conservative southern Austrian province of Carinthia, an area he grew to despise while falling in love with what was then Yugoslavia, just across the border in Slovenia.

His affection for Slovenia turned to contempt when it became the first part of Yugoslavia to gain independence in 1991. Slovene nationalism, he railed, was 'the most wretched and lowest form of humanity'.

Three years ago, in a travel essay subtitled Justice For Serbia, Handke wrote lyrically and semi-mystically about life in Serbia and Serb-held Bosnia in the wake of the Serbs' brutal campaigns.

His fervour was not diminished by the recently ended three-year Serb siege of Sarajevo. He claimed that the Muslims had staged their own massacres in Sarajevo and had blamed this on the Serbs.

Nor did he believe that Serb troops had butchered thousands of Muslim men at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.

Instead, he found in Serbia a society that western sanctions had turned into a pre-consumerism idyll. He hoped (patronisingly to any urban Serb) that the country would stay that way.

When Nato threatened to bomb the Serbs last October, Handke promptly set out for Belgrade. 'My place is in Serbia if the Nato criminals bomb,' he stated. In February, during the Serb-Albanian negotiations in Rambouillet, outside Paris, Handke appeared on Serbian state television.

'Sometimes I would like to be a Serbian Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo,' he said.

'There is not a people in Europe in this century which has had to endure what the Serbs have had to put up with for five, or more, eight, years. There are no categories for this. There are categories and concepts for the Jews. You can talk about that. But with the Serbs, it is a tragedy for no reason, a scandal.'

yikes!!

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phroyd · 6 years ago

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Reading this article, you see the similarity between right-Wing Orthodox Jewry and Fundamentalist Islam; THIS is why Israel has become an Apartheid, Fascist State, Right-Wing Religious Extremism! - Phroyd

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — The slaughter of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh elicited responses in Israel that echoed the reactions to anti-Semitic killings in Paris, Toulouse and Brussels: expressions of sympathy, reminders that hatred of Jews is as rampant as ever, reaffirmations of the need for a strong Israel.

But Saturday’s massacre also brought to the surface painful political and theological disagreements tearing at the fabric of Israeli society and driving a wedge between Israelis and American Jews.

Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi took pains to avoid the word “synagogue” to describe the scene of the crime — because it is not Orthodox, but Conservative, one of the liberal branches of Judaism that, despite their numerous adherents in the United States, are rejected by the religious authorities who determine the Jewish state’s definitions of Jewishness.

And the attacker’s anti-refugee, anti-Muslim fulminations on social media prompted some on the Israeli left — like many American Jewish liberals — to draw angry comparisons to views espoused by the increasingly nationalistic leaders who now hold sway in their governments.

The result has been a striking and lightning-fast politicization of the sort of tragedy that until now had only galvanized Jews across the world — not set them at one another’s throats.

Here in Israel, the decades-old animosity between left and right has reached new levels of enmity in recent years. Ultra-Orthodox parties that play a kingmaker’s role in the right-wing government are pressing to increase their influence and that of Jewish law on daily life, sparking bitter fights over everything from who serves in the military to whether trains can run and stores can open on the Sabbath. Jews from liberal American denominations feel increasingly alienated from Israel’s state-run religious life.

With the Israeli government, like many across Europe, also taking a decidedly nationalistic turn, the election of President Trump has only compounded that strife, widening the rift between Israeli and American Jews. Politically liberal American Jews have been repelled by Mr. Trump’s solid support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and by Mr. Netanyahu’s effusive embrace of Mr. Trump and his granting of a wish-list’s worth of political gifts. They range from scrapping the Iran nuclear agreement to repeatedly punishing the Palestinians and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

All of that, and more, bubbled up when one of Israel’s most influential politicians, Naftali Bennett, leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, jumped on a plane to Pittsburgh in his capacity as minister of diaspora affairs. Mr. Bennett gave voice only to unifying ideals: “Together we stand, Americans, Israelis — people who are, together, saying no to hatred,” he told a vigil there Sunday night. “The murderer’s bullet does not stop to ask, ‘Are you Conservative or Reform, are you Orthodox? Are you right-wing or left-wing?’ It has one goal, and that is to kill innocent people. Innocent Jews.”

No sooner had Mr. Bennett’s plane departed Ben-Gurion Airport than he was assailed by liberal Israeli critics, who among other things resurfaced a 2012 Facebook post in which he had accused leftists of promoting “crime and rape in Tel Aviv” because they wanted to allow African migrants who had entered the country illegally to stay.

“Is the Trump-supporting, African-migrant-bashing Naftali Bennett really the best person to represent Israel in Pittsburgh right now?” wrote Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz, the liberal daily.

Others cited a pro-Jewish Home party text message sent to Haifa residents in advance of Tuesday’s municipal elections. It warned Jewish voters fearful of “the flight of young Jews” and a “takeover” by “the sector”— shorthand for Israeli Arabs — to vote for the Jewish Home slate.

“That’s almost word-for-word the spirit of ‘Jews will not replace us,’” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a left-wing political consultant in Tel Aviv, recalling the chant of neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

Even Michael Oren, the American-born deputy minister from the right-of-center Kulanu party, faulted Mr. Bennett for having sided with the ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbinate, which refuses to recognize non-Orthodox denominations as sufficiently Jewish to participate fully in Israeli religious life.

“Liberal Jews were Jewish enough to be murdered, but their stream is not Jewish enough to be recognized by the Jewish State,” Mr. Oren wrote in Hebrew on Twitter, adding: “I call on Minister Bennett not to suffice with condolences, but to recognize liberal Jewish streams and unite the people.”

On the right, veteran activists in Likud, Mr. Netanyahu’s party, circulated an email on Sunday — which Mr. Netanyahu’s aides and party leaders disavowed within hours — noting that the Pittsburgh killer had denounced the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which “encouraged immigration” and “acted against Trump.”

“Did we or did we not say that the Left is guilty of encouraging anti-Semitism?,” wrote the email’s author, who responded to queries but declined to identify himself.

Many Israelis, of course, reacted with horror and grief as they tuned into coverage of the Pittsburgh massacre. In Beit Shemesh, a largely ultra-Orthodox city 20 minutes west of Jerusalem, Elisheva Gutman, 24, a social worker, said her parents had vacationed in Pittsburgh two weeks earlier and had attended Sabbath services down the street from the Tree of Life synagogue, the killing site. “When they go to Europe, my father takes off his kipa and puts on a hat,” for fear of attack, Ms. Gutman said. “It’s not supposed to be that way in the U.S.”

Chaim Zaid, 62, a paramedic from Kedumim, a West Bank settlement, said the shooting belied Israelis’ ideas of the United States as a “paradise” for Jews. “You think the big U.S., with the big F.B.I., will protect them, and nothing will change,” he said. “But that was a change point. My sister lives in Brooklyn and was afraid to come to my home. So Sunday morning I sent her a message: ‘Rivka, you were afraid to come to me?’”

If other Israelis were quick to score political points over the Pittsburgh killings, though, in a sense they had been preparing for this moment. The disagreements between American and Israeli Jews have been piling up.

Only last week, the Jewish Federations of North America’s yearly General Assembly drew hundreds of Americans to Tel Aviv for a three-day conference focused on the strains in the relationship, titled “We Need to Talk.”

In a provocative keynote, the head of Israel’s largest real estate company, Danna Azrieli, recited the litany of friction points. For Americans, she said, there are Mr. Netanyahu’s effusive embrace of Mr. Trump, whom most American Jews oppose; the Israeli occupation and Jewish settlements on the West Bank, which many American Jews believe block peace with the Palestinians; Mr. Netanyahu’s reneging on a deal last year to significantly upgrade and grant equal status to a mixed-gender, Reform and Conservative prayer space at the Western Wall; and Israel’s new nation-state law, which opponents call racist and anti-democratic because it enshrines the right of national self-determination in Israel as “unique to the Jewish people.”

For Israelis, Ms. Azrieli said, Americans don’t serve in the Israeli army, pay Israeli taxes or live under the threat of rockets, but also don’t let those realities stop them from trying to impose their views on Israelis.

Long as it was, that list had big omissions. Israelis on the left would add, at a minimum, the Netanyahu government’s warming up to increasingly authoritarian leaders in countries like Hungary and Poland, and its demonization of the Hungarian-born, liberal Jewish financier George Soros — who also is a frequent target of anti-Semitic attacks in the United States and Europe — for underwriting activist groups that oppose Mr. Netanyahu’s policies. Mr. Netanyahu’s own son even posted a meme attacking Mr. Soros with anti-Semitic imagery that drew praise from the likes of David Duke.

And Israelis on the right would add their lingering resentment of American Jews’ support for the Iran nuclear deal struck by President Obama, which Israelis saw as a matter of survival, according to the author Yossi Klein Halevi, a New York-born Jerusalemite.

Mr. Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, said the Pittsburgh shootings had exposed an even deeper and more worrisome divide between the two populations. “Each sees the other as in some sense threatening its most basic well-being,” he said. “American Jews don’t understand the depth of the Israeli sense of betrayal over the Iran deal. And Israelis don’t understand why American Jews regard Trump as a life-and-death threat to the liberal society that allowed American Jewry to become the most successful minority in Jewish history.”

How damaged is the relationship? In her keynote, Ms. Azrieli felt compelled to plead, “Don’t give up on our country,” adding: “Don’t walk away because your liberal sensibilities are insulted. Don’t assume that nothing can change. Things do change — just painfully, slowly, incrementally, and with all of our help.”

And yet among Israeli leaders, some already have given up on American Jews, said Mr. Oren, the deputy minister and a former Israeli ambassador in Washington, who also cited some American Jews’ opposition to President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“One school of thought is: ‘These are our people, we have to do everything possible to reach out.’ The second school says:, ‘It’s too late, they’re gone. After Iran, after Jerusalem, if we have limited resources we should invest in our base — evangelicals and the Orthodox.’”

“The first school, which is mine, is a beleaguered school,” Mr. Oren said. “The burden of doubt is on us; we have to prove that we’re still correct. It’s not easy.”

In Beit Shemesh, Zion Cohen, 66, a mall manager, lamented the acrimony. “I’m Likud, but what’s happened between Israel and America, I’m against it,” he said. “I know it’s painful to Jews in America how Israel acts toward them. The influence of the Orthodox and Haredim on the Israeli government is a catastrophe. And we need help from the Jews of the U.S., especially given how much anti-Semitism there is now in the world.”

He added: “We have to unite the whole Jewish people.”

Correction: October 30, 2018

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the surname of man shown standing in front of a mall in Beit Shemesh. He is Eli Peretz, not Teretz.

Phroyd

#israel #pittsburgh #orthodoxy #fascism

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hicapacity · 3 years ago

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Újabb levelet kaptam.

Nyílt levél egy itt élő kínaitól, aki arra kért, hogy tartsam titokban a kilétét, mert emiatt üldöztetésben és megtorlásban lehet része az otthon élő barátainak, családtagjainak.

Kérését természetesen tiszteletben tartom.

Íme az eredeti, angolul írt levél, majd a magyar fordítás:

THEY DO NOT REPRESENT US!

- An open letter to Mayor Baranyi Krisztina

Dear Mayor Baranyi Krisztina,

I am a chinese immigrant living in Budapest.

My family and I left china because we could not accept the polluted environment, increasingly fascistized society, the brainwashing and politicised education and a country where members of society do not trust each other.

Today I was very shocked to see that some political organizations run by chinese people are writing to you on representing the so-called 40,000 chinese residents.

THEY DO NOT REPRESENT US!

The first thing I wish to let you know is that all these so-called chinese community organizations can actually be considered as agents of the Chinese Communist Party.

Essentially, they are profit-making organizations, and they get financial support by showing loyalty to the China Communist Party.

These organizations include, but are not limited to "chambers of commerce", "hometown associations" , "Student's Federations" ...which even compete with each other to pander to the power of the Chinese Communist Party and grabbing money.

These groups of chinese are carrying out propaganda activities in Hungary under the guidance of the Communist Party and government agencies in China (Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, United Front Work Department) and the Chinese Embassy.

They even have their own Underground Party Committees and privately conduct study sessions related to Communist Party ideology.

Of course, this semi-official Chinese organizational structure exists in almost every country in the world, and these organizations operating in Hungary are only a part of it.

You may wonder why the Chinese residents in Hungary are so silent?

when the only people who can raise their voices are the official diplomatic staff of the Chinese government and these groups that have the ability to print these statements and stamp them with a red seal.

This is because the speech of all chinese overseas is also regulated in various ways by the Chinese government.

When chinese peoples speaking out abroad in opposition to the Chinese government or talk about certain political issues is not the same as facing jail time as it would be in China, but the Chinese government still can uses persecution and retaliation against family members, friends, and even workmates of the speaker as a way to prevent chinese people from speaking out abroad.

What is especially saddening to me and my friends is that the Hungarians came out of the wounds of communism, but seems went back quietly through another way.

The growing economic and trade ties could make people forget that the other side has an unchanged authoritarian ideology.

The Chinese Communist Party is very good at identifying and exploiting the corruption of foreign heads of government for infiltration, thus supporting and developing authoritarian governments to expand the number and power of authoritarian states.

The Chinese Communist Party is seeking international support to reach its purpose of long-term rule.

It is very unfortunate that the Hungarian government is playing exactly this dishonorable role, judging by their recent votes and statements in the European Union on certain issues involving China.

The purpose of my letter is to keep my Hungarian friends vigilant about the formation of authoritarian governments and the alliance of authoritarian forces from abroad.

Please do not let the legal texts against communism and fascism formed with the lessons of history, become a piece of paper.

To the members of the Chinese community living in Hungary, I would like to say that since you have decided to settle in Hungary, please cherish this beautiful country as your home.

My friends and I are not against sharing China's long history and infectious culture with our Hungarian friends, but there is absolutely unnecessary for us to go along with Chinese government propaganda and challenge the values of the local community you live in just because only show your loyalty to the Chinese government.

That is unworthy, dangerous and stupid.

For the reasons of personal security mentioned before, this letter cannot be officially signed with my name.

It will be handed over to my trusted friend working in the Hungarian media for translation, transmission and publication.

He can prove my identity as well as confirm the fact that I live in Budapest.

I hope that one day I will be able to speak freely with my Hungarian friends using my real name and warm words, and that everyone will no longer be forced into silence out of fear and then pathetically "represented" without permission by those who use power, violence and lies to steal the right to speak.

Yours sincerely,

A Chinese immigrant living in Budapest with his family and friends

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ŐK NEM KÉPVISELNEK MINKET!

Nyílt levél Baranyi Krisztina polgármesternek

Kedves Baranyi Krisztina!

Budapesten élő kínai bevándorló vagyok.

Családommal együtt azért hagytuk el Kínát, mert elfogadhatatlannak tartottuk a környezetszennyezést, a társadalom fokozódó fasizálódását, az agymosást az átpolitizált oktatásban és az országot, ahol a társadalom tagjai nem bíznak meg egymásban.

A mai napon döbbenten tapasztaltam, hogy kínaiak politikai szervezetei úgymond 40.000 kínai lakos nevében írtak Önnek.

ŐK NEM KÉPVISELNEK MINKET!

Mindenekelőtt szeretném ha tudná, hogy valamennyi úgynevezett kínai társadalmi szervezet valójában a Kínai Kommunista Párt ügynökének tekinthető.

Lényegében nyereségérdekelt szervezetek, amelyek a Kínai Kommunista Párt iránti elkötelezettségük alapján jutnak pénzügyi támogatáshoz.

Ezek közé tartoznak mások mellett a "kereskedelmi kamarák", a "helyi egyesületek", a "diákszövetségek", amelyek egymással is versengenek a Kínai Kommunista Párt kegyeiért és a pénz megszerzéséért.

Ezek a kínai csoportok a Kommunista Párt, kínai kormányügynökségek (Tengerentúli Kínai Kapcsolatok Irodája, Egyesült Munka Front Osztály) és a Kínai Nagykövetség irányításával folytatnak propaganda tevékenységet Magyarországon.

Még saját nem hivatalos pártszervezeteik és a Kommunista Párt ideológiájáról szóló magánúton szervezett oktatási programjaik is vannak.

Természetesen csaknem minden országban létezik ez a félhivatalos kínai szervezeti struktúra, a magyarországi szervezetek a teljes hálózatnak csak egy részét képezik.

Érdekelheti, hogy miért maradnak csendben a Magyarországon élő kínaiak, miközben a szavukat kizárólag a kínai kormány hivatalos diplomatái és ezek a csoportok emelik fel, amelyeknek lehetőségük van kinyomtatni és piros pecsétjeiket rányomni az állásfoglalásaikra.

Ennek az oka az, hogy a kínai kormány különböző eszközökkel képes szabályozni az összes tengerentúlon élő kínai véleménynyilvánítását.

A külföldön kibeszélő kínaiaknak, akik a kínai kormánnyal szemben foglalnak állást vagy bizonyos politikai témákat érintenek, nem kell olyan súlyos börtönbüntetéssel szembenézniük mintha ugyanezt Kínában tennék, de a kormány még az ő családtagjaikon, barátaikon, sőt akár munkatársaikon is képes bosszút állni, hogy megelőzze a további hasonló kibeszéléseket.

Barátaimmal együtt különösen elszomorít minket az, hogy miközben a magyaroknak éppen csak begyógyultak a kommunizmus okozta sebei, úgy tűnik, hogy most csendben ugyanoda térnek vissza egy másik úton.

Az erősödő gazdasági és kereskedelmi kapcsolatok elfeledtetik az emberekkel a túloldal változatlanul autoriter ideológiáját.

A Kínai Kommunista Párt hatékonyan képes azonosítani és beszivárgásra felhasználni korrupt külföldi vezetőket, majd az autoriter kormányok támogatásán és fejlesztésén keresztül növelni az önkényuralmak számát és hatalmát.

A Kínai Kommunista Párt nemzetközi támogatást keres a vezető szerepéről szóló hosszútávú céljaihoz.

Rendkívül szomorú, hogy az Európai Uniós szavazatai és állásfoglalásai alapján a magyar kormány jelenleg éppen ezt a gyalázatos szerepet játsza el.

Levelem célja, hogy magyar barátaim figyelmét felhívjam az önkényeskedő kormányokra és ezek kapcsolataira más külföldi autoriter erőkkel.

Kérem, ne hagyják, hogy üres papírrá silányuljanak a kommunizmus és fasizmus ellen született jogszabályok és törvények, amelyek a történelemből levont tanulságok alapján születhettek meg.

A Magyarországon élő kínai közösségek tagjaitól azt kérem, tartsák becsben ezt a gyönyörű országot, ha ezt választották új hazájuknak.

Barátaimmal együtt én is szívesen osztom meg a magyarokkal Kína évezredes történelmét, amely nagy hatással volt más kultúrákra is, de egyáltalán nem szükséges, hogy a kínai kormánypropaganda kottája szerint játsszunk és megkérdőjelezzük a helyi közösség ért��keit csak azért, hogy hűséget mutassunk a kínai kormány felé.

Ezek méltatlan, veszélyes és ostoba lépések.

Ahogy ezt már korábban említettem, ezt a levelet biztonsági okokból nem írhatom alá.

A magyar médiában dolgozó megbízható barátomnak adom át, aki lefordítja, és nyilvánosságra hozza.

Ő igazolni tudja, hogy valóban Budapesten élő kínai vagyok.

Remélem, hogy eljön az a nap, amikor szabadon beszélhetek magyar barátaimmal az igazi nevemet használva, meleg szavakkal, és félelemből senkit nem kényszerítenek hallgatásra, továbbá senkit nem képviselnek ilyen szánalmas módon azok, akik a hatalmat, az erőszakot és hazugságokat használva lopják el tőlünk a szólásszabadságot.

Egy Budapesten élő kínai bevándorló, annak családja és barátai

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Ehhez csak annyit tudok hozzáfűzni:

Köszönöm a bátorságát

kép: erősítő

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freevmason · 5 years ago

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Spain Has Been In The 'Wrong' Time Zone For 7 Decades

FacebookInstagramTwittergle more optionsGerman Chancellor Adolf Hitler, talks with Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco, in Hendaye, France, October 23, 1940, in Hitler's railway carriage. Later, Franco moved Spain's clocks ahead an hour to be aligned with Nazi Germany.

It was 1940 and World War II was raging. Nazi Germany occupied Norway, Holland, Belgium, then France. Fascist Italy had already joined with Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer wanted Spain's support next.

So on Oct. 23, 1940, Hitler took a train to the Spanish border to woo Spain's Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco.

But Spain was in ruins from its own Civil War in the late 1930s, and Franco didn't have much to offer. He stayed neutral, but switched Spain's clocks ahead one hour, to be in line with Nazi Germany.

Ever since, even though Spain is geographically in line with Britain, Portugal and Morocco — its clocks are on the same time zone as countries as far east as Poland and Hungary.

Now, more than seven decades later, the Spanish government is weighing whether to change them back.

The Telefonica building at sunset on Aug. 26 in Madrid. Spain's clocks have been set to Central European time since World War II, which means the sun rises and sets later compared to countries in its region.

Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty

Late-Night Spaniards

Spaniards are notoriously late-night creatures. In Spain, the sun rises and sets much later than in the rest of the time zone it's in, called Central European Time, or CET.

Spaniards sleep 53 minutes less, on average, than other Europeans. They also work longer hours — but at lower productivity.

In an office park on the outskirts of Madrid, Emilio Sainz, 30, mills around waiting for his bosses to finish their afternoon siesta.

"Here you work too many hours, but you need to stop at midday for two or three hours, and then finish too late," he says. "It's something cultural."

Sainz is a freelance camera technician who just moved back to his native Spain from Britain, and is having trouble adjusting. He doesn't like working until 8 p.m., even with a big break at midday.

How do people fill that time?

"Go back home, take a big lunch — a typical Spanish meal. The siesta is optional, but if you have time you can do it," Sainz says, shaking his head. "But for me, it's sometimes more useful to keep English time. Like, to come back home earlier in the evening, to have some time on your own."

In many Spanish barrios, you can't get a cup of coffee before 9 a.m. The post office is open until 9 p.m. Of course, you'll have to wait even later than that for restaurants to start serving dinner.

Economists say Spain's time zone feeds that schedule — and costs the country dearly.

Time For A Time Change?

"We have no time for personal life or family life," says economist Nuria Chinchilla, who studies work and family life at Spain's IESE Business School. "Therefore we are committing suicide here in Spain. We have just 1.3 children per woman. And it's because we have no time."

Chinchilla is lobbying for Spain to go back to Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT — the time zone it was on before Franco changed it in the early 1940s.

"Because otherwise, we are not sustainable!" Chinchilla exclaims. "In the crisis, we have seen that the companies that are flexible, that have more rational schedules, then they are more productive too — and they are able to be more flexible in the way they are going out of the crisis."

Spain has already shortened its long holiday weekends to try to align work schedules with the rest of Europe. And this fall, a parliamentary committee approved a proposal by the Association for the Rationalization of Spanish Schedules to change back to GMT. The full legislature is expected to vote soon.

Old Habits Die Hard

But some doubt that Spanish culture — with its late-to-rise, late-to-bed habits — could be transformed by a simple change of the clocks.

"For me, it's difficult to think that it'll be different — really different — from now," says Angels Valls, a human resources expert at Spain's ESADE Business School. "From a practical point of view, there are cultural roots that explain why we have this long day. It's not enough to change the hour."

The siesta was a fixture in Spanish life for centuries. Before air conditioning, it was a way to get through the long, hot Spanish afternoon. Until the end of the 20th century, Spain was relatively poor, and Spaniards had to work two jobs — hence the long hours, Valls says.

"So you used to work in the morning at one job. Then it was necessary to stop to rest. And then there was another job in the late afternoon and evening — in order to earn enough money to survive," she says. "It's said to be the origin of our way of life now."

It's a way of life that could prove stubborn to change — especially in this economy. The 26 percent jobless rate has working Spaniards working more, frantic to hold onto their jobs.

For Emilio Sainz, the Spanish cameraman who's just moved home from Britain, Spain's time zone is the late dictator's final insult. Franco died in 1975.

"Franco changed a lot of things. He made a lot of mistakes," Sainz says with a shrug. "And here we are, carrying on with a lot of these outdated things."

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revolutionaryeye · 7 years ago

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The fuel feeding the fires of Europe's far right

The rhetoric of mainstream European political leaders like Emmanuel Macron isn't so far removed from the open immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia of the far right, writes Seb Cooke, in an article first published at the revolutionary socialism in the 21st century website.

THE FAR right and fascists of Europe were celebrating on the night of September 24. The strong performance of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) party in the German general elections was a moment of real political advancement for their movement. After the relative setbacks in both the Dutch and French elections, here was a welcome result for the continent's racist far right.

"Bravo to our AfD allies for this historic score," tweeted Marine Le Pen, adding that the party was a "new symbol of [the] reawakening of European peoples."

Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), also used Twitter to pass on his congratulations: "The PVV is number two in the Netherlands, the FN is number two in France, the [far-right] FPO is second in Austria, AfD is third in Germany. The message is clear. We are not Islamic nations."

To invoke the "European peoples" as Le Pen does, or talk of becoming "Islamic nations" as Wilders puts it, is not accidental. Many European far-right and fascist outfits identify in particular with an idea of Europeanism. In this sense, Europeanism is portrayed as being the white Christian nations of the continent, coming under siege or under threat from an invasion of people from the Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

"Dear young African men," the AfD's Björn Höcke told a rally in East Germany last month. "We know you're seeking your fortune, but you won't find it here with us. No way, dear young African men: for you there is no future and no home in Germany and in Europe!"

Björn Höcke is a heavyweight of the AfD's most extreme right wing, who has also said that Germany shouldn't feel ashamed of the soldiers who served under the Third Reich. As was the case with that statement, his words above were carefully chosen.

In the quote above, we should note who Höcke means by "us." He talks not simply of "us Germans," but also of "us Europeans." It is this wider sense of "us" that is portrayed as coming under siege from "young African men." This "us" rests on the idea of the white Christian nation-state within a wider Europe of similar nation-states. It is this idea which is being successfully developed by fascists and racists such as Höcke.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

OTHERS ON the far right also reference the idea of a "real" Europe made up of the continent's founding nation-states acting together, and use this to push the EU in a more overtly chauvinist direction.

"We want to see less of Brussels and stronger nation-states," said Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, last week during a visit to meet his hard-right counterpart in Poland, Beata Szydło.

Orbán's comments were the latest salvo in a war of attrition being waged between the EU and the member states of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic over the refusal by the three countries to accept EU directives on taking asylum seekers. Despite attacking Brussels...

Read on:- https://socialistworker.org/2017/10/05/the-fuel-feeding-the-fires-of-europes-far-right

#anti-fascism #european left #EU

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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In Catalonia: A Spanish Tiananmen Square?

By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, September 18, 2017

One of those crises that no one saw coming is about to rear its head in a very unlikely locale: Catalonia, Spain’s richest province, where the local government has scheduled an independence referendum on October 1. Of course, some observers--e,g, Julian Assange--did see it coming, but the current trend to find “fascists” under every bed in America may have obscured our ability to detect them where they really live--in Madrid, where the federal authorities are threatening to arrest Catalonian politicians who advocate independence.

Madrid has mobilized 4,000 police to stop the referendum. They are seizing election materials, shutting down web sites, and invading the offices of newspapers: they have threatened 700 pro-independence mayors with arrest and prosecution.

The Spanish position--upheld by the country’s Constitutional Court--is that only the federal authorities can call a referendum, and that in any case all Spanish voters, not just those resident in Catalonia, must be allowed to vote on the question of Catalonian independence. So much for the right of self-determination.

Catalonia has long been a cash cow for the Madrid regime: the province is by far the richest in the country, and contributes much more to the national budget than it receives. With 16 percent of Spain’s population, the region produces 25 percent of the nation’s exports, hosts 23 percent of industry--and receives 11 percent of government expenditures. This essentially parasitic relationship perhaps accounts for the fierce resistance to the secession movement by the rather shaky regime of conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

Madrid’s hard-line stance is rather shortsighted when one looks at the matter in purely economic terms. Spain has been skirting insolvency for quite some time now, and the federal authorities have been counting on Catalonia’s contribution to the national GDP--which amounts to 19 percent--to pay the interest on the debt. With Spain having only partially recovered from the economic downturn of 2008, the loss of Catalonia would be a hard blow to Madrid--and yet the policy of confrontation pursued by the shortsighted central authorities promises to make the blow all the harder.

For all the secessionists of Barcelona have to do is to refuse to take on a disproportionate share of the national debt, as they have been doing all along. By refusing to negotiate with Barcelona, and instead resorting to threats of force, the Spanish nationalists are ensuring the worst possible outcome for their own cause.

As I’ve detailed in this space before, Catalonia has a long history as an entity separate and distinct from Spain: it has its own language, Catalan, which is spoken by over 9 million people and is not a dialect of Spanish. The language was banned by the fascist dictatorship established by Gen. Francisco Franco after the Spanish civil war, but revived with the emergence of democracy.

Catalonia’s bid for self-determination is an ideological litmus test, one that tells us everything we need to know about the main forces contending for power in the world. The reason is because the crisis is taking place on the terrain of Europe, in the very midst of the “free” West. Since forever and a day we have been told that the “democratic” West doesn’t commit acts of mass repression against their own people: that the right of “self-determination” is universal, and that that liberal democracy is not about to mimic the methods of, say, Slobodan Milosevic, and put down a popular uprising by force. These methods--they claim--are the exclusive province of “illiberal” regimes, like those in Russia, Belarus, and now Hungary.

Except that the threats and repressive measures of “democratic” Spain have exposed this conceit as nonsense. As October 1 approaches, and Madrid prepares to crush the Catalonian revolution with brute force, the myth of the “democratic” West is being shaken to its foundations--with the growing prospect that violent repression will bring the whole dilapidated edifice down on the heads of the people, both Spaniards and Catalonians alike.

As one might expect, the US State Department is taking the position of taking no position, while not-so-subtly signaling support for Madrid. When Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) came out in support of the Catalonian struggle for freedom, US diplomats in Spain issued a statement in which Washington attempted to do what it does best: talk out of both sides of its mouth:

“We want to reiterate that, as we have said on previous occasions, the position of the United States government over Catalonia is that it is an internal matter of Spain. We are deeply committed to maintaining the relationship with a strong and united Spain.”

So it’s an “internal matter” but we want Spain to stay “united”--i.e., screw the Catalonians. The same position of not-so-neutral “neutrality” has been taken by the European Union, whose “president” says that Catalonia would have to reapply to the EU for membership, a move that the authorities in Madrid would surely block. Thus the threat of economic and physical isolation is being held over Barcelona’s head, as withdrawal from the EU free trade and free movement zones would inflict considerable damage.

With Western elites pushing hard for centralization on a global scale, and the creation of ever-bigger more “inclusive” international constructions--trading blocs like NAFTA and the TPP, and the shoring up of NATO as well as the EU super-state--insurgent trends in the other direction like the Brexit campaign and the Catalonian independence movement are being bitterly resisted by the powers that be. They couldn’t use force to subdue the Brexiteers, of course, but it looks like the centralizers of Madrid are being given the green light to do their worst when October 1 dawns.

This would be a huge mistake that would backfire immediately and explosively. For what the West is facing is the prospect of a Tiananmen Square incident taking place in its very midst--an act of violence that, far from ensuring the legitimacy of the authorities in Madrid, would quickly delegitimize them in the eyes not only of their own countrymen but of the entire world. Catalonia would become the collective embodiment of “Tank Man,” with the Madrid authorities taking the role of the despots of Beijing.

#Spain #Catalonia #Catalan independence referendum

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toldnews-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/holocaust-how-spanish-angel-of-budapest-sanz-briz-saved-jews/

Holocaust: How Spanish 'Angel of Budapest' Sanz Briz saved Jews

Image copyright centro sefarad

Image caption The diplomatic ID for Angel Sanz Briz issued in 1942

Thousands of Holocaust survivors and their descendants escaped the Nazis thanks to a Spanish diplomat nicknamed “the Angel of Budapest” – yet the late Angel Sanz Briz is hardly known in Spain today.

His improvised heroics in 1944 saved more than 5,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation to Auschwitz.

“He is a hero of greater stature than Schindler,” says Eva Benatar. Her mother sheltered her as a baby just weeks old and her brother in one of the safe houses set up by Sanz Briz in Nazi-occupied Budapest.

Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist who managed to save more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust. His story was told in the Hollywood movie Schindler’s List.

Image copyright Eva Benatar

Image caption Eva Benatar with one of her grandchildren

After the Nazi invasion on 19 March 1944, codenamed Operation Margarethe, the chief SS Holocaust organiser Adolf Eichmann moved to Budapest with a plan to eliminate Hungary’s roughly one million Jews in record time.

Sanz Briz was serving in Spain’s embassy as commercial attaché, before being left in charge of the mission in mid-1944 at the age of 33. He was one of a group of diplomats who decided to rescue Hungarian Jews.

In a matter of weeks the SS deported more than 400,000 Jews to Auschwitz.

One of the Spaniard’s fellow humanitarian conspirators became a household name – Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who issued “protective passports” and saved tens of thousands of Jews.

Wallenberg later disappeared; he was seized by occupying Soviet forces and is widely thought to have died in a Soviet jail.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Nazi Germany murdered at least 1.1m people at Auschwitz death camp in Poland

Why Sanz Briz took law into his own hands

As reports grew about the escalating Holocaust at Auschwitz and other Nazi killing sites, Sanz Briz started informing the fascist Franco government in Spain about the appalling truth.

A key document he sent was the Vrba-Wetzler report, by two Jewish escapees from Auschwitz.

However, for several months he received no instructions from a regime that had initially backed Hitler in the war.

Image copyright centro sefarad

Image caption Part of the Vrba-Wetzler report on the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz – sent by Sanz Briz to Madrid

Remarkably, he began to take the law into his own hands, falsifying consular documents to grant nationality to refugees on the basis of a long-expired 1924 Spanish law aimed at Sephardic Jews, even though Hungary’s Jewish community was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi.

Jews were hidden in the Spanish embassy in Buda, bribes were paid to local officials. Sanz Briz braved the dangers of Nazi and Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross patrols, as well as Allied bombing raids, to shelter Jews at risk.

Holocaust row taints Hungary museum project

Israel in Holocaust Danube victim search

“I managed to get the Hungarian government to authorise the protection by Spain of 200 Sephardic Jews. Then I turned those 200 units into 200 families; and those 200 families were multiplied indefinitely, through the simple procedure of not expediting any safe conduct to Jews with a number higher than 200,” Sanz Briz wrote in his report for the Spanish government from Berne in December 1944.

“He added letters to each number, using the whole alphabet,” explains the diplomat’s son, Juan Carlos Sanz Briz.

centro sefarad

He was a virtuoso in diplomacy; he put human rights before the law of the land, and was one of the first diplomats to use diplomatic immunity to protect refugees.”

“It was quite out of character; he was actually a stickler for legality. Diplomats aren’t meant to issue false papers or put the national flag on buildings not part of the diplomatic mission.

Safe houses

Sanz Briz’s meticulously recorded final tally came to 232 provisional passports issued to 352 people, as well as 1,898 protective letters, and 15 ordinary passports for 45 Sephardic Jews.

As the Nazis and Hungarian fascists closed in on the city’s Jews, moving them into confined quarters and killing people in the streets, Sanz Briz rented 11 apartment buildings to house the approximately 5,000 people he had placed under Spain’s protection.

In a 2013 interview for Spain’s RNE public radio, Jaime Vándor (recently deceased), who moved to Barcelona with his family after the war, recalled the squalor of those Spanish refuges.

“There were 51 of us living in a flat with two and a half rooms. We were crowded, hungry and cold, infested with fleas. The hygiene was appalling, obviously, with so many people using one toilet. But the worst thing was the fear, the fear of deportation.”

Image copyright centro sefarad

Image caption This Spanish joint passport got the Vándor family to safety from Hungary

Ms Benatar’s mother was one of those granted papers by the Spanish embassy after she brandished a postage stamp from Madrid, where Eva’s grandmother had fled before the Nazi invasion.

Born in a cramped cellar, she never met her father, who died in the so-called death marches in early 1945.

But baby Eva, her mother and brother were able to escape Hungary, ending up in Tangier, then an international city, although the family eventually settled in Spain.

Image copyright centro sefarad

Image caption In 1998 Spain belatedly celebrated Sanz Briz with these 35-peseta stamps

Posthumous recognition

Sanz Briz left Budapest in November 1944, ordered out by his superiors in Madrid, who feared he would suffer reprisals from the approaching Soviet army, due to Spain’s help for the Germans on the Eastern front.

He retreated into a regular diplomatic career, and was not permitted by the stridently anti-Israel Franco regime to receive the honour of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial centre, in his lifetime.

He joined the ranks of the righteous in 1966.

An obituary for Sanz Briz published by Spain’s ABC newspaper in 1980 makes no mention of his exploits in Budapest.

“I never talked about this subject with him. It was not something that was discussed at home,” says Juan Carlos Sanz Briz. “He must have suffered greatly, but he didn’t tell us that.”

Spain and the Holocaust

Before Spain returned to democracy in the mid-1970s, the Franco regime had an ambivalent stance on its role in the Holocaust, sometimes claiming that Gen Franco had in fact been a saviour of Jews.

centro sefarad

Franco needed arguments to improve relations with Israel, and he asked my father to say that he had acted in the head of state’s name. He agreed, but it was completely untrue”

When the Nazis began deporting Jews from France, the Franco regime at first allowed many thousands to flee through Spanish territory, before tightening the policy in 1940.

Jews were refused transit papers, and those caught in the country illegally were rounded up and sent to a concentration camp at Miranda de Ebro.

At no time was any significant number of Jews given the option of refuge in Spain, not even Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews from the Nazi-occupied Greek city of Thessaloniki.

But there is evidence that Franco began to sense the need to improve his regime’s international image as it became increasingly clear that Hitler was losing the war.

On 24 October, 1944, then foreign minister José Félix de Lequerica sent a telegram to Sanz Briz in Budapest. “On request of the World Jewish Congress please extend protection to largest number persecuted Jews,” it said.

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long-way-down-rp-archive · 8 years ago

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Sister Bethany Marie Kazmarek OP

TRUE NAME: No FACECLAIM: Rachel Weisz NICKNAMES AND ALIASES: Beth, Bess to Fabian, Sister Beth to her troop, even though that’s not appropriate. Her birth name was Bethany Katerina Kazmarek and her confirmation name was Joan, but once you take the Vows, your name isn’t quite your own anymore. DATE OF BIRTH: September 2nd, 1970 AGE: 47 GENDER: Cisgender woman KIND: Human OCCUPATION: Catholic (Dominican) nun and science teacher at Our Lady of the Woods School

DISTINGUISHING MARKS: Various freckles and worry lines. Bethany’s never been a makeup wearer. She’s grateful for the habit a lot of the time as her Eastern European hair can be a bit wild, and she’s never been much good at taming it.

PERSONALITY:

Tough but doesn’t look it -Let’s just say Bethany and Joan of Arc have some overlapping traits. Joan was way more pretentious but both of them are pretty unshakeable even when facing down fire.

The one caveat to this is how empathetic she is. She has very little regard for her own safety but great care for others’ well-being. Losing a student, whether academically or emotionally, hurts her, and she does her very best to make sure that no one slips through the cracks.

Along the lines of Joan of Arc, faith and guilt – Bethany’s faith is unflinching, it’s just her faith in herself that waivers. She is very conscious of her propensity to sin, both in wanting Fabian and the littlest things - thoughts of vengeance, impure impulses. Unfortunately, the one person she’s comfortable confessing to is little Father Carvalho, and there’s some things that wouldn’t be fair to say. Yet another thing to self-flagellate about.

Optimist - You have to be one to do what she does, she would argue. But there is something unique about Bethany, at least among her peers. She truly believes everyone can be saved as long as they’re willing to be laid bare. She knows she won’t be because she, well she just can’t but she knows that. It’s not enough but if she could… well, she knows it’s true for other people. Everyone. God’s love washes all sins away, no matter their number.

Speaking of, stubbornness - Bethany is the very polite kind of stubborn. A pleasant kind of defiance. She will not be moved, but she is also very sorry for the inconvenience.

Easily Embarrassed - Perhaps because of her sister Jo, Bethany has a very well developed sense of propriety. She doesn’t get offended or judgmental easily but she does blush. A lot.

HISTORY:

At a very young age, Bethany learned how to stay out of the way. Her parents were hard working immigrants, her father from Poland and her mother from Hungary. Raf and Aranka rarely had time for parenting, so Bethany took care of herself and the house. More than a decade later, her sister Joanna came along. Bright, beautiful, and charismatic, Joanna was everything her sister wasn’t – loud, proud, mean when she wanted to be. Bethany couldn’t muster up jealousy. There was no competition. Each sister stayed in her lane, and they loved and protected each other. Plus, she was so little. Little but fierce.

Mr. and Mrs. Kazmarek loved everything about America, from the chintzy plastics to the cultural melting pot. Finally free to practice their religion, they took their daughters to the Cathedral of the Incarnation every Sunday (and sometimes Wednesdays too, if Aranka’s anxiety was too high.)

Jo was over the moon when her big sister was accepted to the University of Pittsburgh for science education, and Bethany couldn’t wait to go. With Joanna finally in school, she was able to throw herself into her studies. Dean’s List, leadership conferences, internships at the Phipps Botanical Gardens and docenting at the Carnegie Museum of Science, she was exactly where she wanted to be. Going into her senior year, she was on track for valedictorian.

(begin cw: hospital, self harm, suicide)

Then her mother was diagnosed. Breast cancer. It was a hard thing to explain to Jo, and it wasn’t in Raf’s nature to try. Bethany did her best to fill the void, both in her family and in her heart. She dropped out and went home, caring for her mother and family as she watched Aranka waste away. She mourned every moment she’d spent away from her mother. Every precious second she could have had before she couldn’t keep food down, before her skin had become translucent and sallow. Aranka passed on December 17th, the feast day of Lazarus. There was a certain cruelty in that.

Jo struggled, and Bethany tried. Tried to wake her father from his stupor, tried to give Jo a normal life. She began working at Nashville’s Adventure Science Center, teaching children about stars and plants and sunlight. She watched her father float through life, dead eyes, sunken. He wasn’t even trying. He wanted to be with Aranka. Nothing else mattered. Bethany tried to forgive him. Tried. But couldn’t.

Raf stopped working. Stopped doing anything. She leaned heavily on her neighbors in the small Eastern-European quarter of Nashville. They downsized to a two-room apartment above a bakery, and Jo always had kolaches for school. The years dragged on and Bethany parented her sister as best she could as her father wasted away.

It’s a tricky thing, raising a sibling. You get the mother-daughter issues and the sibling rivalry all at once, but somehow, Bethany managed, placing all her hopes in Jo. Then, in the blink of an eye, Jo didn’t need her any more. Early Admission to the Ivy of her choice and offers for combined pre-med and medical school. She was so young, and she was already becoming what both of them always hoped she could be. Bethany trundled around their little apartment, tried to avoid the whispers she heard in her head. (They were in her head, yes? She hoped. Oh God, she hoped.) Her father was no help. He was lost most of the time and angry all the others.

She was walking by the Cumberland when she felt it. A gentle tug towards the dark water. Towards darkness eternal. How easy it would be, she thought, to jump. To disappear and not bother anyone again, to not be the albatross of guilt, weighing down her brilliant sister. Terrified, she checked herself into Donelson Asylum, an isolated mental health facility just beyond the fields of the Hermitage. She got help. She got medicated. The dark voice in her head was quiet. She hid what had happened from everyone she could, even though everything about it had scared her to the core. The white walls, the void in her soul, the whispers she heard in her room at night. She had had a bout with pneumonia, you see. She hadn’t wanted Jo to catch it and was feeling much better now. Her faith (and some modern chemistry) pulled her through.

(end cw)

The day she got out, she drove to Pittsburgh and strolled through Oakland, til she finally stopped at a large wooden door. Without thinking, she’d reached St. Paul Cathedral. She walked in and didn’t look back, becoming a Dominican aspirant, then a postulant. In the Church, she felt safe in a way she couldn’t quite explain. It made her feel the right kind of small, the way she had felt after nuns at Donelson had tucked her in, talked to her for hours. Jo didn’t know quite what to make of her sister’s decision but she was glad to see her so happy. So certain.

But that certainty was short lived. All her life, Bethany had been wrapped up in caring for other people – her sister, her mother, her father. In some ways, the convent was the culmination of that. Then she met Fabian, a young deacon in Pittsburgh, and she’d never felt so cared for in her life.

She’d never had romantic or even sexual feelings before, but for some cruel reason, they all arrived at once. At 26, she was about to become a member of one of the most respected branches of the Dominican Order, and here she was, with the hormones and dreams of a teenager. The teenager she’d never really got to be.

But this was the height of selfishness. She couldn’t tear Fabian from God any more than she could tear her heart from her body. So she transferred home to Nashville, took her vows, finished her degree, and dedicated herself completely to her calling – worshipping and innovating and sharing the incredible power of God by explaining and illuminating the wonders of what he had brought about through science. She dreamed of him at night, yes, but the stars were out at night. And nothing lends perspective like the stars.

(cw: Holocaust mentions)

FAMILY:

Her grandparents and their immediate family were lost to the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, either to the camps or to the ensuing diaspora. Their children found each other in post-war Czechoslovakia.

(end cw)

[Anglicized] Rafal Bazyli Kazmarek (1938 - ) - A former Polish national who was raised in Czechoslovakia by family friends after the disappearance of his parents. Raf’s adoptive father was a clockmaker, and the young man quickly took to the delicate art. But fascists didn’t much like time, and Raf quickly switched to making radios, which provided the perfect opportunity for arranging safe passage to America for him and his new wife…

[Anglicized] Aranka Orsolya Fodor Kazmarek (1938 - 1992) - Aranka taught propaganda in the Soviet Union and history once they moved to the US. No zealot like a convert, so they say. Aranka always struggled with mental health, depression often pulled her away from her children, leaving Bethany to do a lot of the heavy lifting. She would say she didn’t mind, but she also just missed her mom.

Joanna Rachel Kazmarek, M.D. - Jo is… well she’s not Bethany. Their relationship is complicated due to their unorthodox family situation and Bethany’s “sudden” decision to take her vows (according to Jo.) Very much a lapsed Catholic, Jo completed an extended ob/gyn residency over in Atlanta. That’s right. She’s an abortionist, or was, before she decided to go into forensic medicine. [A little note: While Bethany’s official stance on reproductive rights matches the Church, if any of her girls were in trouble, she would help them get access to whatever they needed. Whatever they needed.]

Generally, the Kazmareks are a little fractured now. None of them really understand each other, and it’s not clear if they even want to. Better to stay out of each other’s way. It’s not like much would change anyway.

SEXUALITY AND RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Some of the younger Sisters say that God is their boyfriend, and Bethany’s never found that notion appropriate. God loves everyone equally, and Bethany’s always thought of romantic partnership as a kind of selfishness. Myopia. She’s married to her work, perhaps, and her work happens to be serving the Holy Father as best she can.

Sexuality wise, probably the best word is demisexual, as she’s only ever lusted after one person after achieving an emotional intimacy she could never quite manage with anyone else.

OTHER TIES:

Father Fabian Geier - Per Gerard Manley Hopkins - “for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Or at least that what she tells herself. Bethany’s always been a little awkward, a little closed. But with Fabian… it was easy. So easy. Like sunshine through a cathedral window or rain after a humid day. There’s a pain in them now, but sometimes they can forget, and when they can, it’s profoundly worth the rest of the pain and longing and guilt for loving him.

Father Theodore Carvalho - Bethany immediately liked Father Fabian’s subordinate, as he’s a blusher like her. They have a strange relationship as priests generally outrank nuns and their dynamic is clearly not that, but she generally enjoys running into him and inquires after him if anyone goes to St. Dunstan’s.

Mother Peter Francis - The head of St. Catherine’s has been a mentor to Sister Bethany, and was kind enough to invite her into the convent when her family needed her back in Nashville. The Mother is kind but distant with the Sisters, and she does not take kindly to secrets or games.

Her Girl Scout Troop - Bethany feels like she’s grown up with these girls, far more than she’s grown herself. What began as a filler position while the organization tried to find a Troop Leader for a ragtag Brownie group made up of girls from Downtown that nobody wanted to pay attention to became a decade long labor of love. All 8 girls are now sophomores in high school, and Sister Bethany couldn’t be prouder. (They also help her manage her frustration and regret when it comes to Jo.

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

I’d love to have a Jo. Necromancer M.E. and all :)

Any other Guardians because YES TEAM! Also Tainted and other “baddies” because that’s just fun.

LIKES: The Bible, the Koran, Jesuit texts, and the writings of nuns during the Medieval Era. (She admires the subversion and humor, and loves to study the history of science. She gets very upset when people say that religion and science can’t coexist. Some of the greatest STEM innovations came from the most devout, and she will always argue that the pursuit of knowledge is one of the most profound forms of worship.) Tea - red’s her favorite but anything will do in a pinch. She got through college on Lipton so she has no airs to put on, hot beverage wise. Children; Bethany’s the kind of person who will always engage with a child, no matter how late it makes her or how out of place it might make her look. She believes in giving aid to anyone who asks for it, and kids tend to ask for aid a lot. Then there’s the night sky. There’s nothing that makes her feel closer to God than looking up into the infinite. DISLIKES: Self righteousness, inflexibility, herself HOBBIES: Astronomy, book club with Fabian, horticulture (She’s a member of the Tennessee State Horticultural Society and surveys invasive species for them), Troop Leader for a group of District 19 Girl Scouts. She’s been with them since they were Brownies and is very proud of her now Cadettes. SKILLS: Exhaustive knowledge of Abrahamiac and ancient religions along with extensive study of the history of science, scientific mind (inquiry, investigation, analysis), parenting - or rather just nurturing. She’s a good teacher and a good guardian, but obviously she’s never had any children of her own. (Joanna had her, she would say.) MEDICAL CONDITIONS: Bouts with clinical depression have plagued her since she was a teenager, including a brief institutionalization that only Jo knows about in full detail) but she’s well medicated and receives treatment through a Catholic hospital. She generally doesn’t tell anyone as she doesn’t like people looking at her funnily. Some part of her thinks that people might think it reflects badly on God somehow, as if He failed her. She knows He didn’t, that her body did, but it’s a hard thing to explain. CURRENT FINANCIAL STATUS: Sister Bethany has what she needs, but vow of poverty and all that, you know? Her teacher salary goes to directly to the Church and Convent but she can usually get a stipend from Mother Peter Frances if she needs something for the girls. Bethany’s reading tastes conveniently line up with the School’s librarian, Mrs. Cantù, so she has no trouble coming up with books for her and Fabian to talk about. PLACES: Our Lady of the Woods Academy (Private Catholic School, K-12) - her job, the Convent of St. Catherine of Senia - her home, Donelson Asylum - her former home and current nightmare KNOWN MAGIC: None MAGICAL ITEMS: None

RUMORS: She works with teenagers so needless to say there are rumors. Plenty of the boys at the school wish there was more to go on. Her troop gets the whole “nun” thing vaguely but that doesn’t stop them from trying to set her up constantly.

SAMPLE:

(cw: suicide, cw: hospital, cw: gaslighting)

Sister Bethany remembered him most at night. When the stars were above and the world was quiet. When the moon orbited the Earth at just the right angle to glow like new fallen snow.

She used to hate the darkness. When she was young, it swallowed her up, the night. The black abyss closing over her head. The end, it whispered, thundering in the silence. That’s how you find the light: the end. “Be present, O Lord, and protect us through the silent hours of this night,” Bethany had whispered. “…that we who are wearied with the work and changes of this fleeting world, may rest upon Thy eternal changelessness.” But He does change, it smiled back.

Bethany froze. It had been outside her for a moment. She had felt its breath. Hot but sweet. Like flowers at a funeral.

Every time she thought of this moment - her alone in a moldering white room as people screamed far way - she remembered Fabian. The way he smiled when he was confused. The way he bit his lip when he was too happy to speak. The way he looked at her when he forgot who they were. Where they were going. He is very handsome, the darkness hummed. Do you think you’ll be allowed to fuck in Hell? She recoiled, if one can recoil in the cold void of the mind. A nightmare. Only a nightmare. An echo of a painful past, a monster of her own guilt. Nothing more. What was it the Sister had said at Donelson? The difference between a demon and a nightmare is that a nightmare doesn’t fear God.

Unflinching, she spoke aloud. “Be present, O Lord, and protect us through the silent hours of this night –” A quiet hiss in her ears, high pitched, almost dog whistle. “…that we who are wearied with the work…” A laugh - dark, ancient, maybe weary. “…and changes of this fleeting world” Fleeting, yes. FLEETING. The noise seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The walls of her skull vibrating along with the wooden walls of the convent. “…may rest upon Thy eternal changelessness.” It laughed again, and sighed. A long, heavy sigh. She was frightened, she’d admit it. She’d taken her medicine. This wasn’t normal. She felt awake. She was awake. Right?

What else had the Sister said? Turn on the light, in the dream. It’ll feel wrong. Off. Different. Then you’ll know. Bethany reached for the nightstand. It felt miles away. Her fingers were numb. I’ve told him you love him. Do you want to know what he said?

She wanted to think it meant God, but she knew it didn’t. Nightmares were smarter than that. They knew what you wanted to be punished with. “No. I don’t.” she said, as if she was speaking to one of her seventh graders. He’d care if you ended. Is that why you stay?

Without thinking, she spoke: “The Word, when time began, was face to face with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him there came to be not one thing that has come to be. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not lay hold of it.” And then she felt it – a shudder, a screech, and the dark voice melted away, like wind in a graveyard.

It was a coincidence, its sudden retreat. Nothing more. There was evil in the world, yes, and the Church dealt with demons, but she had her own reservations, founded by the Jesuit priests she had studied with. Faith had to be tempered with what could be helped and what could be proven. The great Mysteries were not interested in someone as small as her, no matter how great her Secret Sin, her thoughts of Fabian’s eyes and tongue. The prayers had calmed her, as they always do. Only a nightmare. Only a nightmare.

“Don’t scare me like that.” she said to the sky. One of the many benefits of living in a convent was that you were always in God’s house. The Holy Spirit was everywhere, yes, but here, when she could hear the Vespers through the walls, there was a new kind of closeness. Like sitting across the dinner table with the Divine. She didn’t expect an answer back but it was comforting to speak anyway.

She turned over, away from the moon, and closed her eyes. Savoring memories of a student union basement. Terrible pizza. Glitchy arcade games and airplane novels. Crying in the theater as the credits rolled on Sense & Sensibility, wanting to hold his hand. Why do you stay? “Because He loves me.” she murmured and promptly went to sleep.

#cw: hospital #cw: Holocaust mention #cw: self harm #cw: suicide #cw: drowning #cw: gaslighting #lwdbio

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ramrodd · 6 years ago

Text

Are the bomb packages that are being sent to prominent Democrats and anti-Trump public figures a false flag operation to drum up sympathy for the Democrats, or is it a right-wing terror attack?

It’s a Russian bot attack designed to spike Conservative enthusiasm and depress the progressive turnout. Emotional Intelligence is the best defense.

COMMENTARY:

I don’t really know.

It isn’t particularly characteristic of the population associated with Clinton voters and never Trumpers, while the sheer methodical breadth of the attacks reflects my experience of the alt-right mind-set.

I mean, George Soros has been a bete noir for Conservatives for a long time, his main affliction in the eyes of the alt-right is that he is a non-aligned Jew in the Evangelical-Isreal axis. His essential focus since 1979 has been on establishing grass roots democratic beach heads in authoritarian regimes such as South Africa and Hungary. But there is no particular loved lost between Soros and establishment Democrats except at the very highest echelons of finance. So, except for the flurry of news stories generated by the Fascist news machine recently, he is an unlikely target to generate sympathy for the Democrats.

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn’t included in the mix, then a stronger argument could be made, in my mind, for a misplaced Democratic false flag operation by a lone mal content, say, a particularly deranged Sanders write-in voter. Like Soros, Wasserman is a little too much alt-right inside baseball, I’m not a Democrat and the ebbs and flows of the Democrat currents simply don’t interest me (I didn’t realize she was head of the DNC until 2016 until I did a little research for this comment) but she is very much yesterday’s news as near as I can tell for the Democrat mainstream.

For Conservative commentators, on the other hand, she remains current in ways I can’t characterize, but not even Trump has spent much tweet capital on her to my recollection and her controversies, for the Democrats, ended when she left office. Democrats really don’t hold open grudges the way Conservatives do and I think they are still a little surprised at the resentment Trump feels towards Obama: it’s a reality they must acknowledge but it is a mystery to them except to people like Rahm Emanuel, whose entire family seems to be organized around paybacks. Her inclusion reflects the methodical obsessiveness of the crypto-Nazi mind because, like Soros, she isn’t a particularly sympathetic figure.

The rest of the targets fall into the usual suspect catagory and are not far out of the fevered imagination of Trump’s thumbs.

I’ve always thought the anthrax attacks were connected with the sabotage of the geriatric votes in Boward County in 2001, because it killed a SUN journalist, Robert Stevens, in a Florida paper continuing to investigate the election and the rest of the attacks were chaff to disguise the intent. I am alone in this conjecture, but this bomb attack has a similar feel. In this respect, it feels more like a clumsy warning shot of some sort across the bow of Soros as opposed to a larger political gesture.

The fact that all the bombs seem to have been design failures is probably a feature of the design of the attack and not incompetence. Again, Democrats don’t usually think in these pattern and the employment of the USPS as a media of the attack exposes their vulnerabilities while the alt-right impulse of the crypto-Nazis in the GOP Deep State take comfort in the fact that crypto-Nazis aren’t usually the target of crypto-Nazi attacks, the exception to this being whoever blew out the 50th floor of Trump Towers was making a similar statement to Trump about something that may have convinced Allen Weisselberg to cooperate with the Meuller investigations.

In short, I don’t know shit.

ADDENDUM:

It is important to be aware of the effect of this news cycle on you own emotional state. The purpose of terrorism is to ampliphy anxiety that can translate into depression for Clinton voters and enthusiasm for forever-Trumpers in the screen shot behind him at one of his pep rallies.

The purpose of this attack was to spike the current political polarization and create the conditions similar to the last Redskins-Cowboys game, with Clinton voters as the Cowboys and the forever Trumpers as the Redskins and the bombs as the goal post in the path of the ball of the blue wave. The forever Trumpers are getting as much energy from the disconsolation of the Clinton voters as from the goose to their own emotional response to the terrorism: they translate fear immediately into anger and anger becomes cheers for Trump when he shoots his mouth off about his boogey man du jour. These bombs are having the same effect as the Comey letter on the enthusiasm of the Clinton voters and if you are unaware of your own emotional state, it is even more effective.

This is exactly the moment “soldiering on” is of the essence, bcause an important reason why Trump is president is because his voters have been soldiering on every day since 1971 and everybody else shows up when the mood strikes them and the Main Event in at the top of the ballot.

Conservatives are constantly trying to talk you out of voting. They will say things like “I don’t like anybody and I’m not going to waste my vote”. The only way you can waste your vote is not to vote: you can’t save them up and push them on the table when you need a winning hand. The Conservative is going to vote: he may believe Trump is the end of the American civilization, but the Conservative will vote for him because of shared appetitites and his emotional state in the moment is not his motivating factor.

Tucker Carlson may sweet-talk Cenk Uygur in front of a crowd of progressives, but he pays for his table at The Palms as a very successful crypto-Nazi talking head. And it isn’t an act. He’s a true believer.

#transformingamericafirst

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barrypurcell · 6 years ago

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[Title Redacted]

How Not to Address Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism

When initially asked about Facebook’s refusal to remove the InfoWars page, John Hegeman, head of Facebook’s News Feed, said, “I guess just for being false that doesn’t violate the community standards.” More recently, however, InfoWars was banned from YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and Facebook, all within a twelve-hour period.

Although it might seem uncontroversial to keep objectively awful content off social media, historically, censorship and de-platforming has done nothing at all to slow down its spread. In fact, as many conspiracy theories are centered around a victim complex, censorship of any kind can make that complex worse. What has, historically, slowed down the spread of false information is exposure.

In 2009, when Facebook was initially asked to remove holocaust denial pages, their official position was that “being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook.” More recently, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wasn’t going to remove Facebook pages advocating holocaust denial, because “there are things that different people get wrong” and it’s more or less impossible to “understand the intent” of such pages. Conversely, the AskHistorians subreddit has pre-emptively banned all Holocaust denial, and strongly urged Facebook to do the same.

Does Facebook Have a Point?

To the delight of an unlikely alliance of authoritarian left wingers and right-wing Israelis, Holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Switzerland.

While there can be no reasonable doubt that the Third Reich did its best to eliminate an entire race of people, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses and gays, inter alia, a problem arises when you legally prevent people from saying that this never happened. These governments have taken it upon themselves to censor people’s opinions. The fact that these opinions are incorrect or that they stem from people with a Nazi ideology is irrelevant: freedom of speech is meaningless if you are only free to speak the right opinion.

Anti-Semitism

In 1979, French academic Robert Faurisson was fined 21,000 francs and given a suspended sentence for denying the Holocaust on national television. Hundreds of people (most notably Noam Chomsky) signed a petition, registering their concern about the consequences for civil rights in France. The following year, Faurisson used a copyright-free essay by Chomsky in defense of the general principles of free speech—without Chomsky’s permission—as the preface to his book, “Mémoire en Défense: contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire”. Although he specifically rejected the idea that he was defending Faurisson in the piece, Chomsky was subsequently vilified as a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite.

Claims of anti-Semitism are so commonly used to silence everything from the mildest criticism of Israeli government policy to genuinely egregious attempts at historical revisionism that it’s almost impossible to assess such accusations objectively. It doesn’t make things any easier that the Israeli government is quite open about its official organization, hasbara, which trains and deploys people to intervene in any and all criticisms of Israel found everywhere from Facebook comment sections to campus debating societies, and has been criticized by the Israeli press for acting as a “substitute for policymaking.”

What we can say, with some certainty, is that anti-Semitic attacks have been measurably on the rise in Europe and the United States. We may not know for some time whether this alarming rise is causing, or caused by, the recent lurch to the right of the electorate in the developed world.

The Holocaust Denial Mind

The more you learn about the Holocaust, the more grotesque and horrifying it seems. The human mind recoils so much that you may even momentarily entertain the thought that surely such a thing could not possibly have happened. But it is important for the study of history, politics and the human mind to understand that it did.

In 1980, the right-wing Institute for Historical Review, whose mission was to promulgate Holocaust denial, announced a $50,000 reward for anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein applied for the reward. When they refused to pay, Mr. Mermelstein took them to court and effectively won his case. In 1985, the institute issued a formal apology to Mr. Mermelstein “for the pain, anguish and suffering he and all other Auschwitz survivors have sustained” as a result of their having made such an offer.

If you trawl the dark corners of the internet, where conspiracy theories breed, you will encounter lots of Holocaust deniers. They occupy the same mental space (and sometimes the same physical space) as people who question the JFK assassination, or who believe that the 9/11 bombings were an inside job. The psychology behind these conspiracy theories is easy enough to understand. First, it’s much more comfortable to believe that dark forces are causing these terrible things than to accept that sometimes genuinely awful things happen for fairly banal reasons. Secondly—much like praying to a god—holding secret knowledge about the “real” explanations for significant events gives a sense of control to the kind of people who have often been excluded from avenues of power.

There are two aspects to Holocaust denialism. The first, of course, is to deny the Holocaust: to claim that it either never happened, or has been wildly exaggerated for reasons which invariably include the idea that this is all a marketing exercise to ensure sympathy for the formation of a Jewish state—to assert that all the records were faked, all the witnesses were lying. I’ve seen people claim, for instance, that around 500,000 Jews were killed, instead of the generally accepted figure of 6 million. Only an anti-Semitic mind could believe that killing 500,000 Jews for any reason would not itself be noteworthy. There are also those who claim that Hitler wasn’t as bad as he has been made out to be, and that he was perfectly fair to Jews in Germany.

The second common gambit is to explain at length how Jews are destroying the world, how they only look after their own kind, how they run the banks and the movies, how they’re also somehow in charge of the labor movements, and how the whole world economy is just a front for Jews who want to get rich from the labor of others. Some even urge that the Jews need to be stopped by any means necessary. Though it is rarely explicitly stated, there is a strong undercurrent to this sort of thinking—that no one could really have blamed Hitler for killing so many Jews.

So, according to this view, the Jews were not killed in the Holocaust, and anyway, if they were, they had it coming. As it turns out, the anti-Semitic thread running through all these arguments is precisely the same sort of hateful rubbish that led to an environment of acceptance of genocide. At the very least, the more hate you promulgate towards the Jews, the greater the demonstration of how much worse it must have been when hating Jews was socially acceptable.

In 1987, revisionist historian David Irving published a book called “Churchill’s War”. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt published “Denying the Holocaust”, which referred to “Churchill’s War” and accused Irving of using different standards of evidence, depending on whether or not a piece of information fit his anti-Semitic theories. In 1996, Irving sued Lipstadt for libel. Despite the fact that he purposefully filed the case in an English court, where the lower standards of evidence required made it easier to prosecute a case for defamation than in any other jurisdiction in which Lipstadt’s book was published, the judge ruled that “he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist.”

Irving was bankrupted by the case, and his career was destroyed, as historians pored over his previous works in the light of Lipstadt’s book. In the end, what destroyed Irving was not his repeated de-platforming all over the world, but the presentation of Lipstadt’s more compelling view, backed up by more convincing facts.

In 2005, Austrian police arrested Irving on the basis of a 1989 warrant for publicly denying the Holocaust. During these proceedings, he said he had changed his mind: “I made a mistake,” because “The Nazis did murder millions of Jews.”

Stopping Hate

One of the problems with fascism, like other fringe political movements, is that it thrives in the dark. The idea that some things can’t be talked about feeds into the victim complex that far-right ideology requires. Censorship doesn’t shut fascists down: it empowers them. Removing offensive opinions from public discourse does not remove them from our lives, but, like vampires, they explode when sunlight hits them.

For Facebook, whose primary interest is in making money, rather than acting as a fact-checking site for political propaganda, mass action on hate speech is very difficult, given that it’s a demand-side rather than a supply-side problem. Although it probably doesn’t feel like it at the time, people choose when and how to take offence. There is always a risk that people will get offended by worthwhile ideas that are nevertheless very unpopular, and safeguarding people from toxic ideologies could turn into babysitting the most offendable users. Catering to the most sensitive members of the audience has a stultifying effect on public discourse, and presumably the more worthwhile values are not so fragile that they require paternalistic protection from being questioned. The best response to bad ideas will always be good ideas and it still counts as censorship even if the thing you’re not allowed to say is incredibly stupid.

One of the prices of free speech is the risk that charismatic malefactors might influence others to do harm, but free speech is objectively more important than that risk. Freedom of speech necessarily supersedes anything you have to say.

The original title of this article was the ironic “Was The Holocaust Really That Bad?” The fact that the title had to be redacted, to ensure it avoided ending up on a list on a server in a dark basement somewhere demonstrates the need for this sort of discussion. The fact that people would have reacted with outrage without actually reading any of the article is part of the problem. Censoring all references to it merely prevents public access to the information necessary to understand why Holocaust denial is such an odious ideology.

Areo Magazine, 9 August 2018

#anti-Semitism #antisemitism #censorship #deplatforming #holocaust denial #hate #Jews

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