#forced labor camps

[thoughtportal]

wcnc charlotte reports on a man who restored a lost slave cemetery

[gwydionmisha]

The plan is to send people with mental illness to forced slave labour camps where they will be denied access to life saving medications.

Do you trust him to fund unbiased studies? Because I don't.

[hearthfire-heartfire]

no one on the english-speaking side of this site gives a fuck about japanese people except as paper dolls in their fantasies. y’all don’t notice or care when we’re targets of violence in america STILL and you don’t notice when our history on this continent is being erased because you can’t fucking recognize it in the first place! even as we relive it.

i’m tired of the gentrification. i’m tired of vandalism, arson, and censorship. i’m tired of arguing about the atrocity of the a-bombs and the incarceration and model minority shit. i’m tired of people using my heritage as an escape, both in imagination and in physical reality. i’m tired of people’s fake familiarity that leads them to correct my grandmother’s accent coming out of my mouth.

if you don’t show up for nikkei where you live, if you don’t even know how, you don’t belong anywhere near japanese culture.

[kopykunoichi]

[shes-some-other-where]

“Forget about them.”

Contains: prison/labour camp, angst

Walking from camp to the worksite was as torturous as the labour. Morning air was deceptively cool, the sky painted in luscious sunrise hues. If not for the prisoners’ exhausted grunts and the never-ending rattle of chains, morning might have been a gentle reprieve, imbued with memories of happier times. Family. Home.

When the work began, and whips cracked, and wounds bled, and the sun beat mercilessly down on burnt, unprotected skin, the memories hurt infinitely worse.

Home, family, happiness—buried by agonizing reality.

Forget about them. But he knew the yearning would repeat the next day. And the next. Forever.

suggested reading order | MWM event masterlist

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All my writing is original. Feel welcome to interact/comment/reblog. Pls don’t steal or repost.

[fatehbaz]

[T]he infamous Diable (Devil’s Island) [French prison in Guiana, South America] [...]. Seventy thousand convicts were sent to French Guiana between 1852 and 1938. [...] Alongside deportation of political prisoners [...], a [...] convict population [...] was sent to the bagne (common parlance for the penal colony) [...] as a utopian colonial project [...] via the contribution convict labour would make towards colonial development in French Guaina. However, [...] French Guiana [...] was predominantly used as a depository for the unwanted citizens of France and its colonies. The last remaining French and North African convicts were repatriated in 1953, whereas the last Vietnamese prisoners were not given passage home until 1954 [...].

[T]he same form of built environment and carceral technology [...] structures found on Con Dao [French prison in Vietnam] and [the French prison in Guiana] [were] built at almost the same time [...] to house the same convict populations (Vietnamese implicated in anticolonial struggles) [...]. Old world colonialism is thus displaced by new world imperialism. Both rely on the prison island and its cellblocks. [...]

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The carceral continuities [...] throughout France’s penal colonies are supplemented by legal exceptionalism which works to redefine colonial subjects within shifting political contexts. [...] Many of the Indochinois convicts transported to the forest camps of French Guiana in 1931, including the Bagne des annamites, had originally been classed as political prisoners. The transfer was intended in part [...] to remove a number of anticolonial actors from Indochina. [...]

As political deportees sent to French Guiana were usually exempt from labour according to the political decree of 1850, this status had to be revoked to ensure the maximum labour force possible.

Consequently, those arrested on suspicion of specific acts of violence or property damage were reclassed as common criminals. Described by Dedebant and Frémaux (2012, 7) as “little arrangements between governors,” this was not simply a sleight of hand but written into legal codes. [...]

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[M]any of the Vietnamese sent to French Guiana had to wait until the 1960s to be repatriated. [...] After their sentences were completed, convicts were not simply repatriated to France or other colonies.

A system of “doublage” intended to shore up colonial development meant they had to serve the same length of their sentence again on the colony. For those condemned to eight years or more, this became life. Opportunities for sustainable livelihood were limited in a territory possessing swathes of free convict labour. Worn out and sick from their time in the bagne, most of these men were unfit to work and relied on charity to survive. [...]

[T]he last living convict [of the Guiana penal colony] [...] died in Algeria in 2007 after being repatriated to Annaba. In an interview given in 2005, he claims that every night he dreams he is back in Cayenne: “when I think about it, I get vertigo, I spent my life there” [...].

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All text above by: Sophie Fuggle. "From Green Hell to Grey Heritage: Ecologies of Colour in the Penal Colony". Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Volume 24 (2022), Issue 6, pages 897-916. Published online 8 April 2021. At: doi dot org slash 10.1080/1369801X.2021.1892507 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[sportsmodepigeon]

I WAS going to enjoy a glass of red wine this hallowed eve, but as has been pointed out to me: I have fucking class tomorrow for once.

[rugged11th]

Libo-on di labi

Dancin' the night away

[vampacidic]

what the fuck was that

[oneofthebestcontent]

The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps that operated in the Soviet Union from the 1930s until the 1950s. The system was initially established to imprison and punish political opponents of the Soviet government, but it was expanded to include common criminals and others deemed to be enemies of the state. The conditions in the Gulag camps were notoriously harsh. Prisoners were forced to work long hours in extreme weather conditions, with inadequate food and medical care. Many prisoners died from malnutrition, disease, or exhaustion, and others were executed for various offenses. Watch Full Video and subscribe channel

[moonwaif]

People who have actually studied the 100 flowers movement and la guerra sucia and Pinochet and etc etc, how we holding up

[collapsedsquid]

On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp. Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase. On days like this, Pablo can’t decide which is worse: that he’s forced to pay $80 a week for this slop, or that everything about what he eats, when he eats and how much he eats is tightly controlled by his employer. Pablo, who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, is one of more than 35,000 migrant workers in North Carolina this year as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, a guest visa program overseen by the US Department of Labor (DoL). The program enables American employers to hire foreign workers to perform seasonal agricultural work. Employers in the program frequently exploit their migrant employees, and the structure of the program makes easy work of it. Visas are tied to a single employer who must also provide housing, transportation and access to food, creating a crushing power imbalance between American employers and migrant H-2A workers.

[worldwidebreakingnews]

Discover firsthand accounts of life under forced labour in North Korea. Uncover the harsh reality and learn how you can help make a difference.

[nimrochan]

It’s so hilarious to me that people spent all this time the past year and a half boycotting and protesting Israeli goods, and now they’re flocking to RedNote in the wake of TikTok being possibly banned.

China has literally one of the worst industrialized oppression of Muslims on the planet. Like actual internment camps, forced labor, apartheid, and forced sterilization. Like r u serious.

[shes-some-other-where]

The Merry Whump of May, Days 1-15

***this is a repost; Tumblr won't let me add more links to the original masterlist, so I split the prompts in half***

All my writing is original. Feel welcome to interact/comment/reblog. Pls don’t steal or repost.

Event Order

Contains: prison, prison camp, forced labour, abuse of power

All drabbles, exactly 100 words. All (loosely) connected, but many can be read as standalone pieces. If you’d like to read in chronological order, the suggested reading order is here.

>>> Days 16-31 here

Day 1 - “Get back in there.”

Day 1 - Breathless

Day 1 - Cliff

Day 2 - Scorching

Day 2 - “Don’t you dare.”

Day 2 - Glasses

Day 3 - “See what happens.”

Day 3 - Lost

Day 4 - “Who are you?”

Day 4 - Forgettable

Day 5 - “Put that down.”

Day 6 - “You thought you could get away with this?” | Barbed Wire

Day 6 - Riverside

Day 6 - Suspicious

Day 7 - “Forget about them.”

Day 7 - Fallen

Day 8 - White-hot blade

Day 8 - “I’m fine.”

Day 9 - “You’re nothing.”

Day 10 - “I don’t have regrets.” (alt prompt)

Day 11 - “Pretty little thing.”

Day 11 - Numb

Day 12 - “Let me hear you.”

Day 12 - Known

Day 13 - “Tell me how it feels.”

Day 13 - Trail

Day 13 - Needle

Day 14 - “I just want you.”

Day 14 - Rock

Day 15 - Stone-cold

Day 15 - “Let me hold you.”

Day 15 - Cellar

Day 15 - Candle

>>> Days 16-31 here

[directactionforhope]

Don't let people tell you that voting doesn't matter

My grandparents came to this country from an authoritarian dictatorship that literally threw out all the votes. And literally falsified the election results. A country where literally no one's vote mattered - and that was during the years you could vote. (You know, all the things people say about the US to try to convince you that your vote doesn't matter.)

It was a country that literally assassinated their political opponents. And literally sent people who spoke out against them to prison for years of hard labor. (You know, the things Trump has openly talked about doing in the US dozens of times.)

My great-grandmother and great-grandfather were both arrested for refusing to join the governing party. They were both imprisoned for years. Their daughter, my grandma, had to live in a boarding house.

My grandpa, her future husband, was imprisoned for two years because of his country of origin.

My great-grandmother forced them to let her out of prison after two years, but only by virtue of being extremely lucky, tough as nails, and willing to potentially die in the process. My great-grandfather was imprisoned at a work camp for seven years, until his legs stopped working from digging holes in the ground in subfreezing water, at which point they threw him in the snow outside the front gates. The only reason he survived was because of the kindness of strangers who drove by.

My great-grandparents lived the rest of their time in that country with surveillance equipment in their home. Hidden microphones and tapped phones, and my great-grandfather's deep-seated fear that his wife's unwillingness to stop talking shit about the ruling party would land them back in prison.

They tried to assassinate my grand-grandfather. They shot at him while he was walking home from the neighbors', and barely missed. They successfully assassinated his cousin, and almost assassinated eight or so other members of his family in the attack.

Voting matters. The right to vote matters. Imperfect elections still matter.

Trump wants to take us to a country like the one my grandparents moved here from. Don't fucking let him.

And don't let anyone persuade you that it's worth the risk to not vote or vote third party.

The country my family is from is now a democracy. Let's keep the US as one too, please.