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hesbuckcompton-baby · 2 months ago

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I'm Your Man - Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal x OFC - Chapter 18

AO3

Summary: As the war comes to a close, the future is brought into focus.

Word Count: 3.6k

Tags: @mads-weasley @xxluckystrike @curaheehee @footprintsinthesxnd @dcyllom @storysimp @latibvles @love-studying58 @justheretoreadthxxs @blakelysco-pilot

Dear Mrs Higgins

Thank you so much for the tea set - Robert and I think it's lovely...

Frankie lifted an envelope to her mouth, running her tongue along the glue as she finished writing the latest in a long line of thank-you letters still in order from the wedding. The formal niceties felt foreign to her, even to write, and a pile of crumpled paper covered the floor by her bed where she had tossed away a litany of spelling mistakes. Rosie had offered his assistance many times, but with all the supply drops he'd been running, she had no desire to burden him with anything else.

Just as she finished signing the most recent letter, the door to the hut slammed open, making her jump and accidentally smudge the ink. "Oh, for fuck's sake, do you have to barge in here like the building's on bloody fire?"

"Frankie, turn the radio on," George huffed, striding towards her.

"Yeah, in a minute - I've got to rewrite this one now, so-"

"Now," She pressed, getting down on her knees to rummage beneath Frankie's bed. "Where is it?!"

"Over there on the window ledge," Frankie frowned, watching as George zipped across the room. "What's going on?"

"Churchill's making an announcement."

"Oh, shit-" She muttered, letter writing immediately forgotten as they fumbled to set up the radio, perched side by side on the edge of the bed as they listened closely. They had made it just in time, and as the familiar, slurring voice came echoing over the waves, a sense of importance seemed to settle over the room - one so potent that Frankie's whole body seemed clenched, her heart struggling to beat out its rhythm in time.

"Yesterday morning at 2.41am at General Eisenhower's headquarters, General Jodl, the representative of the German high command and of Grand Admiral Donitz, the designated head of the German state, signed the act of unconditional surrender of all German land, sea and air forces in Europe to the Allied expeditionary force, and simultaneously to the Soviet high command."

She felt George grab her hand. The words didn't quite seem real - how could they? Surely, they had been coming for a long time, and yet their arrival seemed so sudden, that it was as if Frankie were recalling a dream - peering through a veil into a fiction constructed by her subconscious, frozen in place as if any sudden movement might break the illusion.

She pressed her heels harder into the floor beneath her feet. It was solid. Real.

"Our dear Channel Islands will be free tomorrow. Hostilities will end officially at one minute after midnight tonight, Tuesday, the 8th of May, but in the interests of saving lives the ceasefire began yesterday to be sounded all along the fronts."

A bark of laughter escaped her, hand rising to clap over her mouth, suddenly embarrassed by the outburst despite being in the privacy of the hut, in the company of no one but her best friend. Beside her, George had begun to chuckle giddily, unable to wipe the grin from her cheeks.

"The German war is therefore at an end. After years of intense preparation Germany hurled herself on Poland at the beginning of September, 1939, and in pursuance of our guarantee to Poland and in common action with the French Republic, Great Britain, the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations declared war against this foul aggression."

Blood rushed to her ears, the pounding in Frankie's chest so fierce that she almost struggled to hear the broadcast. Her lungs felt full to burst, pressing against her ribs so hard they could snap. Neither woman felt any need to listen further before collapsing into each other's arms, squeezing so forcefully that it hurt. But they didn't care.

There was no one else Frankie wanted to spend this moment with. Not Bucky, not Ken - not even her husband. There was no one she'd spent more of this war alongside than George - no one who had seen her at so many of her worst moments, no one who had brought her through them quite like she had.

This was the first instant they'd ever spent as friends during peacetime. And now they had to decide what that meant.

"I'm coming with you," George's voice came hoarse over her shoulder. "If you're going to New York, then so am I."

"What about Ev?" Frankie chuckled.

She felt her shrug. "He'll come if I tell him to."

Grinning, she held her even tighter. Weren't they all just following Rosie in the end?

"I need to find him," Frankie uttered.

George nodded. "Me too. Different him. Same sentiment."

They didn't let go for a long moment, breathing in synch. Maybe the war had brought them together, but peace was never going to tear them apart.

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An almighty swarm of airmen had gathered outside one of the huts by the time Frankie arrived, having jogged all the way from her own, and the moment she locked eyes on Rosie she was running. Even in the thick of the crowd, his gaze found her without even having to call out, shouldering his way through, beaming so widely that the cool air stung against his teeth. She let out something between a shriek and a whoop, hurling herself into his arms the moment they collided, feet swept off the ground as he spun her once, then twice in the air.

Neither needed to say the words 'it's over' - they knew the other knew, that was good enough. Besides, those words held far too much weight to deal with right now. Those words meant their time here was over - that the future was now.

As Frankie touched the ground again, Rosie's hands cupped her cheeks, littering her face with kisses as she guffawed with laughter. A few of the airmen nearby had taken to whooping and whistling at the sight, and she felt the blood rush to her face, tinting her cheeks a bright red. "Alright, alright," She chuckled, gently batting away his hands as she leaned forward to press a quick peck to his lips.

"Sorry fellas," Rosie called over his shoulder, gaze never leaving his wife for even a moment as he seized her hand, abandoning the makeshift celebration without hesitation.

"We didn't have to go," Frankie pointed out as they walked away, bumping against his side as her free hand wrapped around his arm.

"Well, I wanna celebrate with my wife."

"Oh-ho, say that again," She tittered.

"My wife," He grinned, pressing a firm kiss to her temple. "And when we get outta here I'm gonna buy you a house - hell, I'll buy you anything you want."

"Well, yeah, I'd hope so - we both know I married you for the money," Frankie teased as he ruffled her hair beneath his palm in silent reprisal. They were quiet for a moment until she spoke up again, serious this time. "Dad and the kids don't need me anymore. But... I really loved looking after those kids."

She could feel his stare, fixed on her as they walked. "You been thinking about what you said at the wedding?"

"About a baby? ...Yeah, kinda."

Nerves coloured his voice as he spoke again. "...And?"

Frankie shrugged. "Why not? Yeah."

It hadn't seemed possible that he could grin even wider, and yet somehow he managed it. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," She assured him, pulling him into her embrace as his eyes began to well up with tears. Chin tucked over his shoulder, she let herself begin to grin too. "Yeah, honey."

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George's hair blew this way and that as she walked, palms in an endless battle against the wind to smooth it back down again as she muttered to herself, scanning every group she passed for the face she was searching for. Come on Ev, where are you? Many of the men she worked alongside called out to her as she passed, but she was so focused on the task at hand that she offered nothing but the occasional wave, too distracted to properly reply.

"George!" A familiar voice called, an involuntary smile already creeping across her expression in anticipation before she had even pinned down where it was coming from. But then Blakely was hurrying towards her, engulfing her in an embrace so sudden that it was all she could do not to audibly groan. "Ah, I was lookin' for you."

"Hey!" George chirped, holding him tightly. "I was looking for you! I've got something to ask you."

He seemed to grow slightly tense at this. "Yeah, so do I."

Holding onto her cheery demeanour despite the shift in his, she pulled away. "Okay, you first."

Letting out a nervous chuckle, Everett shook his head. "No, no - after you."

"Okay... Look, it's just..." George took a deep breath, hands clasped tightly. "Frankie and Rosie are gonna go to New York together now that this whole thing is done, and I... I wanna go with her, Ev. She's my best friend."

A wave of relief seemed to wash over him as he began to smile. "You wanna go to New York?"

She shrugged. "Yeah."

Blakely began to laugh. "Babe, we can go to New York."

A grin started to crease at George's cheeks. "Really?"

"Yeah, of course," He beamed.

"Okay. Okay, yeah - now you go," She nodded, passing her weight impatiently from foot to foot.

Suddenly he was nervous again, glancing around at the huts and men around them as if self-conscious. "Alright..."

Her brow furrowed. "... You ok?"

"Yeah, yeah, just... didn't really plan on doing this here."

George's frown deepened, and Everett couldn't help but wonder how she hadn't caught on yet. "D'you wanna... go over there?"

"George," He laughed in exasperation, digging deep into his pocket as he shook his head. The faintest yelp of surprise escaped her as the diamond ring caught its first glint of sunlight, carefully unwrapped from the handkerchief that had protected it on the long journey from his mother's house.

"Oh, I'm a bloody idiot," She whispered. Raising both hands to cover her mouth, she let out a giddy laugh, beaming before he could even ask the question.

Blakely had begun to grin, pointing down at the ring in his palm as he waited for her to stand still. "Can I-?"

"Yes! Yes." George nodded firmly, planting both feet in the gravel below as she waited for him to ask the question.

"George Aarons," He started, suppressing a chuckle as he noticed the way she had begun to fidget impatiently. "Will you marry me?"

"Yes!" She cried, her answer tumbling forth so quickly that she almost cut him off completely, throwing herself into his arms as an elated laugh erupted from her throat. Arms wrapped securely around her back, he swept her off her feet for a moment before pulling away to plant a hard kiss against her lips, palms lifted to cup her jaw.

"I love you," George breathed as their lips separated, faces barely an inch apart.

Everett smiled, pressing his forehead against hers. "I love you too."

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Frankie practically screamed when she first caught sight of George, entering the party as it raged in the officers' club, new engagement ring sparkling on her finger. "Holy shit!" She yelped, practically hurling herself at her best friend as she hugged her. Chin tucked tightly in the crook of George's neck, she scanned the crowd for signs of Blakely, pointing a finger as he stopped in his tracks. "You!"

"Me?"

"Thank you for marrying the love of my life," Frankie nodded sagely, gesturing for him to come close so that she could pat him on the shoulder without leaving George.

His brow furrowed slightly. "... So Rosie would be-?"

"My husband. Duh."

"Of course."

Rosie had recognised her yelp from across the bar, burrowing his way through the crowds in search of Frankie. "Ah. Hey! Congratulations!" He grinned as he spied George's ring, giving Blakely an affectionate clap over the shoulder as they shook hands. "Mind if I steal my wife for this next dance?"

"Steal away," Frankie nodded, planting a forceful kiss on George's forehead as she retracted the hug, leaving a lipstick stain in her wake. As the couple weaved their way back through the crowd, Blakely let out a snort of laughter, wiping the stain away with the heel of his palm.

"Is she-?"

"Oh, really quite drunk, yeah," George affirmed.

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"I never got good at this, huh?" Frankie laughed, uttering a swift apology as she stepped on Rosie's toe. Again.

"Well, I don't think being good is really the point," He shrugged.

"In other words, you agree - I'm horrible at this."

"I didn't say that!"

Frankie gasped. "You're 'yes-dear'-ing me!"

Rosie's brow furrowed, somewhere between confused and entertained. "I don't even know what that means."

"It's when you just go along with whatever I say because I'm your wife and you don't want to have to tell me I'm an insane person to my face."

"Well, I like my crazy wife," He smiled, leaning down to press a kiss to her cheek as she hummed a chuckle. They continued to step side to side as the music continued its brisk pace, Frankie's expression twisting with embarrassment as she felt his toe beneath her foot once more, the sight of this making Rosie laugh. "We don't have to keep doing this," He offered between chortles.

"No, I'm gonna do it until I get it right, otherwise I'll get shown up every time we go out," She frowned.

"Then you've gotta do it properly," Rosie said, looking down at the floor as he nudged her feet apart with his own. "Feet like that - you step with this one, then bring them together..."

As he continued to explain, Frankie began to realise that she hadn't been listening to a word, too distracted by... well, him. It was still somewhat embarrassing to admit, but if she stared at him for too long everything else seemed to simply ebb away, his voice fading into background chitter as her gaze traced every subtle movement in his expression, her lip rising in a calm, gentle smile.

For so long, this place had gotten used to firing on all cylinders - always working, always preparing for the next thing - never hesitating, never still. But now? Now there was nothing ahead of her - no planes to prep, no mission to agonise over. She was Just Frankie and he was Just Rosie, and everything else was simply cast aside. It was rare she ever got a moment to simply stop and stare - to take in the man before her and simply bathe in the feeling of how wholly and utterly she adored him.

"No, you've- ...Honey, you've stopped moving."

His voice came into focus once more, and Frankie blinked away her stupor, shaking her head slightly. "... Right."

"You okay?" He asked, brow creasing as he tilted his head slightly, a loose curl tumbling free.

"Mhm," She nodded, reaching up without a second thought to brush it away, her warm fingertips still managing to leave a flush in their wake as they grazed against his skin. "Tired. Little too much whiskey. I'm still working my way through the thank-you letters from the wedding."

"Well, I'll help," Rosie shrugged.

"No, no, you're-" Busy with your missions. The words had nearly slipped out without a second thought. And as a grin began to make its way across his face, she knew he'd predicted them.

"No. I'm not."

"No you're not," Frankie repeated, beginning to mirror his smile. "God, we're about to have way too much free time."

"Well, I can think of a couple things to do," He smirked, making her snort with laughter.

"Shush. We'll do that later. I gotta find Bucky," She beamed, giving his arm a tug as she pulled out of his grip, squeezing his hand as she turned away.

Rosie's brow furrowed. "I thought we were dancing?"

"Later!"

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Flares illuminated the night sky as Bucky sat back in his seat, watching on idly from his perch up on the command tower. Back when this had all started, he would've been inside with the others without a moment's hesitation, drinking and singing and making merry like all the rest. But these last two years had changed him, and that tug in his chest that had once compelled him on nights like this had gone limp.

At least one thing had always stayed the same.

"You fellas need some more booze up there?"

His lip curled in an involuntary smile, craning forward in his seat to peer over the railing. Standing in the grass below, profile brightened in the flickering light of the flares, Frankie stared up at him, a bottle in each hand.

"Get up here, Bevan!" Gale called beside him, letting out that deep, hearty laugh of his. She flashed a grin, the thunder of footsteps rising towards them as she dashed up the stairs, occasionally stumbling from an overindulgence of alcohol.

"Figured you'd be all over your husband tonight, all things considered," Bucky teased, edging over to the edge of his seat so that she could perch beside him.

"He gets me every other day. You and me gotta catch up on lost time."

He smiled, slinging an arm around her shoulders as she popped the cork on the champagne she had stolen, letting out a yelp as bubbles flowed over the brim, covering her hands.

"Before we make any more of a mess, I'm gonna see if I can't find us some glasses," Gale chuckled, stepping around the small puddle of champagne that was forming as he made his way to the door. "You can have my seat, Frank."

"Thanks," She uttered, squeezing Bucky's hand with hers and leaving a sticky palm print behind as she slid off the edge of his chair, sinking into the other.

Left alone, the pair sank into quiet for a long moment, listening peacefully to the cheers and music that hummed steadily from further down the runway.

"How's it feel?" He asked after a while.

Frankie let out a huff of amusement. "Completely, utterly bizarre. I mean... everything in my life changed because of this war, and now it's just... over."

"Which is a good thing. Right?"

"Oh, of course, yunno... I lost family to this thing. Almost all the boys I grew up with are dead now. But then, almost all the best people in my life, I only met because of this war. Hell, I'm married now - I can't just go back to how it was before."

Bucky let out a long sigh, nodding along as she spoke. He stared at the floor for a while, before finally speaking up.

"Y'know... It's gonna sound stupid, but for a little while back then, at the beginning, I kinda thought you and me..."

"Yeah, I know," She nodded, a beat passing before she reached across to grab his hand, holding it in her lap.

They were silent for a moment, letting the weight of Bucky's confession rest between them.

"Your hands are really sticky."

"They are covered in champagne," Frankie snorted, letting out a cackle as Bucky wrestled his hand from her grip, wiping it clean against her skirt. "Oh, you bastard."

"That's what you get."

As their laughter trailed to a stop, she found herself sobering, taking a deep breath.

"Promise me you're not gonna be alone after this. Promise you'll call and visit and find a nice girl to marry, and you won't let yourself go home to an empty house forever."

A flicker of something like adoration crossed his expression.

"Promise."

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Gravel crunched beneath Frankie's feet as she finally returned to her hut, the energy that had carried her through the night steadily dwindling. Scrunching her eyes shut as she yawned, a frown began to crease her cheek as her vision readjusted, noticing the door to the hut as it gaped open, exposing the interior to the darkness.

Creeping up towards the entrance, brow furrowed, she tapped her knuckles gently against the doorframe, peering inside. There was only one light in the whole place, and in the warm glow, she could make out a familiar silhouette.

"... Honey?"

Rosie looked up from his spot on the edge of her bed, pen clasped between his fingers as he began to smile at her. "Hey, baby."

She let out a bemused chuckle, stepping inside. "... What're you doing?"

Shrugging, he raised one of the thank-you letters she'd been working on. "You said you needed help with 'em."

Frankie sighed, beaming as she came to stand in front of him. "I didn't mean right now. You should be at the party."

"Party got boring."

"It didn't sound boring."

"You weren't there."

The admission was so earnest that she swore something inside her melted, lifting both hands to loop around the back of his neck. Casting the cards aside, he stared up at her, arms draped around her waist.

"Now I am."

She pressed a long kiss to his scalp, cradling his head in her palms. Rosie let out a satisfied sigh, his thumb rubbing circles against her hip.

"Let's get outta here," He said.

Frankie's brow arched in amusement. "And go where?"

There was a glint in his eye. "Get us a room at the pub?"

"It'll be full by now."

"Well... I did call ahead."

She gasped teasingly. "Oh, you're good."

Rising to stand, he tugged one of her hands away from his neck, pressing a kiss to the back of her palm. He had that look in his eyes, the kind that made her cackle and go terribly red all at once.

"You have no idea."

#fic | i'm your man #mota oc #rosie rosenthal x oc #oc: frankie #rosie rosenthal #oc: george #everett blakely #john egan #frankie x rosie #george x blakely #mota

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hussyknee · 1 year ago

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Fellas, is it an act of war against a Western European country to hold their citizens prisoner in the open air prison they're carpet bombing?

Lebanon's Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthis have been launching attacks on US military bases in Syria and Iraq and firing missiles at Israel in tandem with Hamas's attacks. All three are funded by Iran.

(I am HEAVING with laughter at Vox and every single one of these propagandist chucklefucks calling them "militias" and "terrorist organisations" and trying to frame this as justification for continuing to fund Israel like. MOTHERFUCKER WHOSE REGION ARE YOU IN EXACTLY?? WHO IS GENOCIDING PEOPLE ON THEIR OWN SOIL??)

"But they're fundie theocratic military states!!!"

*looks at Israel*

*looks at you*

*looks at current state of US*

Oh, ARE they?

US officials have met with the Lebanese caretaker government in an effort to try and prevent the conflict from spreading into Lebanon.

Um. Was this before or after Israel poured white phosphorus on Lebanon? Do y'all even have any control over your dog?

(Btw if you MCU brainrotted Western leftists don't stop trying to pick a Good Guy out of this mess instead of understanding basic geo-politics and the horrific ground realities of the countries the US and its allies have left in tatters, you're frankly just as much of an enemy to the people in those countries as your leaders are. Every one of these people are fascist cunts.)

For those of you who have been BLEATING about Ukraine non-stop, like it's NOT an expendable non-NATO country they're only interested in defending in case Putin gets any bright ideas about Poland, here's an opinion that makes sense to me:

Tell me it wouldn't be perfectly on brand if the US government announced, "Our great democracy bows to the will of the people. We hear you, we see you. We will divest...from Ukraine."

The West has never given one singular shit about protecting ANYONE from genocide. Vulnerability is liability. The only difference between them and Putin is that Putin is greedy megalomaniacal fascist surrounded by self-interested yes-men and the US is run by a committee of greedy egomaniacal fascists surrounded by self-interested yes-men whose end goal is keeping the death machine spinning money rather than even "winning" territories. All they have to do to turn this around is divest from Israel and focus on Ukraine. And no, Israel can't throw in with Putin because it'll be too busy trying to fight off three countries at once without the sugar from its Daddy.

Putin will not stop at Ukraine, for the same reason the US didn't stop at Afghanistan. Empires are built on their military power and militaries need to be fed and kept active and kept active to be fed. The minute you stop, it tries to eat itself. If Putin makes a move on Poland, NATO has to respond, and if the West is also embroiled in an all-out war with the Middle East, well. It looks kinda like a global conflict.

Oh and btw, if this does escalate into another regional war in the Middle East, we're going to be plunged into an oil crisis. Which might actually be the last straw for the UK economy, but it very DEFINITELY will be for the rest of the Global South.

(Also Biden's already auctioned off the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska for oil companies for such an intensive scale of fracking that it's projected to tip the world over the edge of climate collapse. In the event of a war in the ME, the US is going to need that oil soooooo. Good luck stopping it.)

#gaza genocide #free palestine #war in ukraine #death to america #death to israel #geopolitics #us politics #middle east #iran #hezbollah #lebanon #world news #current events #knee of huss

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mariacallous · 10 months ago

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The Times has a rather odd piece today about Radek Sikorski, the new Polish foreign minister. Headlined “Why Poland’s new foreign minister reminds people of Boris Johnson,” it points out that Radek, like Johnson and indeed David Cameron, went to Oxford and joined the Bullingdon Club.

Well, yes, he did, and thank you for reminding us, but we should not hold that against him because there is one glaring and obvious difference between Boris Johnson and Radek Sikorski. Unlike so many Conservatives and Republicans, Sikorski did not succumb to populism. His return to power in Poland is an optimistic moment as it came as part of the regime change that drove the crank right law and justice party from power.

Sikorski fell out with Johnson over Brexit. He knew perfectly well that Johnson did not believe in leaving the EU because had Johnson had told him as much. But then 2016 rolled along and Johnson realised that Brexit was the cause that could propel him to power.

The story of their relationship is told by Sikorski’s wife Anne Applebaum in her memoir Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, one of the best accounts of the rise of the new right in Europe, the UK and the US I have read.

When I gave it a glowing review in the Observer, a few readers complained. Why was I praising a conservative? I pointed out that her background meant that she understood the extent of the right’s betrayal of free markets and free societies better than any leftist. Give me a compromised insider over a purist outsider any day. The insiders know where the bodies are buried.

Here is what I wrote

Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.

Applebaum’s latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal. On 31 December 1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosław Sikorski, a minister in Poland’s then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had helped rebuild from ruins. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world. Unlike the bulk of the left of the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and Nato, because these causes – surely – were the best ways for nations to help their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power, Islamism and climate change.

They were young and happy. History’s winners. “At about three in the morning,” Applebaum recalls, “one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.”

Applebaum was at the centre of the overlapping circles of guests. For the Americans, she was a child of the Republican establishment. Her father was a lawyer in Washington DC and she was educated at Yale and Oxford universities. Now her Republican friends are divided between a principled minority, who know that defeating Trump is the only way to save the American constitution, and the rest, who have, to use a word she repeats often, “collaborated” as surely as the east Europeans she studied as a historian collaborated with the invading Soviet forces after 1945.

Even when she was young, you could see the signs of the inquiring spirit that has made her a great historian. She went to work as a freelance journalist in eastern Europe while it was still under Soviet occupation and too drab and secretive a posting for most young reporters. She then made a standard career move and joined the Economist. But it was too dull for her liking and she moved to the Spectator in the early 1990s. The dilettante style of English conservatism charmed her. “These people don’t take themselves seriously and could never do serious harm,” she thought, as she watched Simon Heffer and his colleagues compete to see who could deliver the best Enoch Powell impersonation. She came to know the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter John O’Sullivan, figures taken with unwarranted seriousness at the time. They had helped east European dissidents struggling against Soviet power in the 1980s and appeared to believe in democracy. Why would she doubt it? How could she foresee that Scruton and O’Sullivan would one day accept honours from Viktor Orbán, as he established a dictatorship in Hungary, whose rigged elections and state-controlled judiciary and media are now not so far away from the communists’ one-party state.

What was life in the English right like then, I asked in a call to her Polish lockdown in that restored manor house in the countryside between Warsaw and the German border. “It was fun,” she said.

It isn’t now.

Her husband knew Boris Johnson. They were both members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. She assumed that he was as much a liberal internationalist as Sikorski was. When the couple met Johnson for dinner in 2014, she noted his laziness and “all-consuming narcissism”, as well as the undoubted charisma that was to seduce and then ruin his country. In those days, Johnson appeared friendly. He was alarmed by the global challenge to democracy, he told them, and wanted to defend “the culture of freedom and openness and tolerance”. They asked about Europe. “No one serious wants to leave the EU,” he replied, which was true enough as Johnson was to prove when he came out for Brexit.

As for the Poles at the party, they knew Applebaum as a friend who had co-authored a Polish cookbook, and published histories of communism, which never forgot its victims.

Today she is a heretical figure across the right in Europe and America. Many of her guests would damage their careers if they admitted to their new masters they had once broken bread at her table.

Heretics make the best writers. They understand a movement better than outsiders, and can relate its faults because they have seen them close up. Religions can tolerate pagans. They are mere unbelievers who have never known the way, the truth and the light. The heretic has the advantages of the inside trader. She can use her knowledge to expose and betray the faithful. One question always hangs in the air, however: who is betraying whom? Although Applebaum has left the right, and stopped voting Conservative in Britain in 2015 and Republican in the US in 2008, she can make a convincing case that the right betrayed her.

In person, Applebaum combines intense concentration with an exuberant delight in human folly. You can be in the middle of a deadly serious conversation and suddenly she will break into a grin as the memory of a politician’s hypocrisy or an incomprehensible stupidity hits her. As the western crisis has deepened, the intensity has come to dominate her writing as she provides urgently needed insights.

You can read thousands of discussions of the “root causes” of what we insipidly call “populism”. The academic studies aren’t all wrong, although too many are suspiciously partial. The left says austerity and inequality caused Brexit and Trump, proving they had always been right to oppose austerity and inequality. The right blames woke politics and excessive immigration, and again you can hear the self-satisfaction in the explanation.

Applebaum offers an overdue corrective. She knows the personal behind the political. She understands that the nationalist counter-revolution did not just happen. Politicians hungry for office, plutocrats wanting the world to obey their commands, second-rate journalists sniffing a chance of recognition after years of obscurity, and Twitter mob-raisers and fake news fraudsters, who find a sadist’s pleasure in humiliating their opponents, propelled causes that would satisfy them.

Applebaum let out a snort that must have been heard for miles around her Polish home when I mentioned the journalist and author David Goodhart’s pro-Brexit formulation that we are living through an uprising by the “people from somewhere” against the “people from nowhere” – a modern variant on the old communist condemnations of “rootless cosmopolitans”, incidentally. It’s a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. “The game was to get everyone to go along with it”. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? “And who do you think funded the campaign?”

She is as wary of the commonplace view that supporters of Trump, say, are conformists, who have been brainwashed online or by Fox News. They may be now in some part, but brainwashing does not explain how populist movements begin. Their leaders weren’t from small towns full of abandoned shops and drug-ridden streets. They were metropolitans, with degrees from Oxford in the case of Johnson and Dominic Cummings. The men and women Applebaum knew were not loyal drones but filled with a dark restlessness. They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite.

Populist activists are outsiders only in that they feel insufficiently rewarded. And their opponents should never underestimate what their self-pitying vanity can make them do.

One of Applebaum’s closest Polish friends, the godmother of one of her children, and a guest at the 1999 party, provided her with the most striking example. She moved from being a comfortable but obscure figure to become a celebrated Warsaw hostess and a confidante to Poland’s new rulers. She signalled her break and opened her prospects for advancement with a call to Applebaum within days of the Smolensk air crash of April 2010. She let her know she was adopting a conspiracy theory that would make future friendship impossible.

Outsiders need to take a deep breath before trying to understand it. Among the dead was Lech Kaczyński, the president of Poland, who controlled the rightwing populist party Law and Justice with his twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński. The party has grown to dominate Polish politics, and the supposedly independent courts, media and civil service. The flight recorder showed that the pilot had come in too low in thick fog, and that was an end to it. Jarosław Kaczyński and his underlings insist that the Russians were behind the crash, or that political rivals in Warsaw, including Applebaum’s husband, allowed the president to fly in a faulty plane, or that it was an assassination. Repeating the lie was the price of admission to Law and Justice’s ruling circles and the public sector jobs they controlled. As Applebaum noted in the Atlantic magazine: ��Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie – it’s to make people fear the liar.” Acknowledge the liar’s power, and your career takes off without the need to pass exams or to display an elementary level of competence.

Other friends from the party showed their fealty to the new order by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. The darker their fantasies became, the more airtime Polish state broadcasters gave them. “They had not suffered or been ‘left behind’ in any way,” Applebaum says. Yet they happily worked for propaganda sites that targeted her family. Because she is married to a political opponent of Law and Justice, and because she writes critical pieces in the international press, Applebaum, who had faced no racism in Poland until Law and Justice came to power, was turned by the regime’s creatures into the clandestine Jewish coordinator of “anti-Polish activity”.

I once believed you should never let politics destroy a friendship. But that maxim depends on politics not turning into a danger to you and those you love. Applebaum could not stay friends with women who would not protest as the state they supported went for her and husband.

The Anglo-Saxon world is not so different from Poland and Hungary. Britain has handled Covid-19 so disastrously because only servile nobodies, willing to pretend that a no-deal Brexit would not harm the country, could gain admittance to Boris Johnson’s cabinet. As Johnson politicises the public sector, showing “fear of the liar” looks like becoming the best way to secure a job in the higher ranks of the civil service as well. American Republicans have had to go along with every lie Trump has told since his birther slur on Barack Obama. As for breaking friendships, British Jews broke theirs when they watched friends in Labour cheer on Jeremy Corbyn and thought: “If they ever came for me and my family, you would stand by, wouldn’t you?”

Careerism is too glib an explanation for selling out, and Applebaum is too good a historian to offer it. Likewise, bigotry and racial prejudice were never enough on their own to move her friends away from liberal democracy. Among Applebaum’s acquaintances is one of Orbán’s greatest cheerleaders. She has a gay son, but that has not stopped her espousing the cause of a homophobic regime. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News presenter, became one of the earliest supporters of Trump, despite the fact that she has adopted three immigrant children.

Rather than grab at standard explanations, Applebaum understands that a society based on merit may sound fine if you want to live in a country run by talented people. But what if you are not yourself talented? Since the 1950s, criticisms of meritocracy have become so commonplace they have passed into cliche. Not one I have read or indeed written stops to consider how one-party states represent the anti-meritocratic society in its purest form. Among her friends who became the servants of authoritarian movements, Applebaum sees the consequences of the lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due.

They were privileged by normal standards but nowhere near as privileged as they expected to be. Talking to Applebaum, I imagined a British government abolishing press freedom and the independence of the judiciary and the civil service. I didn’t doubt for a moment that there would be thousands of mediocre journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and administrators who would happily work for the new regime if it pandered to their vanity by giving them the jobs they could never have taken on merit. Hannah Arendt wrote of the communists and fascists that they replaced “first-rate talents” with “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity” was the best guarantee of their loyalty. She might have been talking about contemporary Poland, Britain and America.

“Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy,” Applebaum says, and explains why better than any modern writer I know. To the political consequences of offended vanity – Why am I not more important? Why does the BBC never call? – a sense of despair is vital. If you believe, like the American right, that godless enemies want to destroy your Christian country, and prove their malice by not giving you the rewards you deserve, or think, like Scruton and the Telegraph crowd of the 1990s, that English culture and history is being thrown in the bin, and you are being chucked away with it, or agree with the supporters of the new tyrants of eastern Europe that a liberal elite is plotting to extinguish your culture by importing Muslim immigrants, and proving its contempt for all that is decent by laughing at you, then any swine will do as long as the swine can stop it. You will pay any price and abandon any principle in the struggle against a demonic enemy.

Shouldn’t she have seen it coming, I ask her. Shouldn’t she have realised that the world she inhabited included authoritarians, who would turn on her and everything she believed in. Typically, instead of huffing, puffing, and trying to pretend she has never been in the wrong, she laughs and admits that she probably should have asked harder questions sooner of her former friends.

Readers should be glad she bided her time. Applebaum can bring a candle into the darkness of the populist right precisely because she stayed on the right for so long. She does not know whether it can be beaten. She’s a journalist not a soothsayer. But I know that if you want to fight it, her writing is an arsenal that stores the sharpest weapons to hand.

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desertdollranch · 4 months ago

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Doll brands I never thought I'd own, part 6(?): WeGirls

WeGirls of the World is another rare and obscure brand of 18 inch dolls that I finally managed to track down. This was a European brand that only made dolls for (at most) four years, so I hadn't counted on actually, miraculously, randomly, stumbling across one of them for sale. But I did, and here she is!

This is Lidia Kozikowska. She recently immigrated here from Poland, which is where WeGirls is based. Check out the Polish text on her original box, which translates to "Girls like you! Have fun and change yourself and the world for the better! Beauty is within you!"

The dolls themselves were manufactured in Germany by Schildkröt, a renowned doll company. Because of that, I'm not surprised at the high quality. This doll is sturdy, her joints move smoothly, and she has eyes that open and close. Her hair is rooted, but it's dense and definitely not the cheap kind.

Overall I'm super impressed.

Lidia has an all-vinyl body. She can fit in American Girl (left) and Maplelea (right) clothes and shoes, although she is slightly slimmer than dolls of those brands. I'd say she's closer to the size of a Journey Girls doll. Her feet, though, are ever so slightly larger than most American Girl feet.

Her vinyl is very soft and squishy with a peachy tone.

It's so soft that her fingers bend easily, so they can hold this adorable pose.

Her face mold reminds me of some Maplelea dolls.

The two brands aren't affiliated, so it's just a fun little coincidence.

I took Lidia out to my favorite doll photography spot in the mountains and let her have a closer look at her new homeland.

I also let her test her equestrian skills, since she'll need them around here. She handled Horsefina very well!

She didn't come with a name, so the name I gave her was one I chose. I was looking at the most popular names given to babies in Poland last year, and was surprised at how many of them were also equally popular in North America. Lidia was #68 on Poland's most used names for babies born in 2023.

#wegirls dolls #lidia #doll review

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wheredidhiseyebrowsgo · 2 years ago

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Hello! Could you please update the sugar daddy!derek tag? Or maybe if you know of any fics similar to the tax evasion series by standinginanicedress. Thank you!

Yeah!

Tax Evasion by standinginanicedress

(11/11 I 139,924 I Explicit I Sterek)

Stiles chews on his thumb a bit harder, and for a second he thinks about saying no. He thinks about letting the whole thing go and just going back to his life, the safe and easy way out. He considers just settling for someone who’ll never really get him, some boring guy who touches him the wrong way and buys him flowers sometimes. He’s been doing it for years upon years, now, and really, what’s a little bit longer? And then, what’s the rest of his life?

What’s the worst that could happen, he wonders? Trying something is better than not trying at all.

***

to take care of you by jesuisgrace

(1/1 I 597 I Mature I Sterek)

“I know. It’s okay. That’s what you have me for. Right?”

“To feed me?”

Derek pauses to look over at Stiles, cross over to him and wrap him up in his arms again. “To take care of you,” he whispers into his ear, holding him close. Stiles melts against him. He squeezes tight and then lets go, directs Stiles to the oversized chair with a view of the kitchen.

here at last by underneath_hell

(1/1 I 623 I Not Rated I Sterek)

stiles is on a gap year. derek’s a multimillionaire with too much spare time.

they meet in a small bar in gdańsk, poland and decide to go from there.

Miscommunication by TheEloquentDecadent

(1/1 I 1,435 I Explicit I Chris/Derek)

Chris knocks, and Derek opens the door to the loft so quickly he must have been waiting. "God, I fucking missed you." Derek pins him to the door as soon as it's closed, kissing him like they've been apart for weeks and months instead of mere days. "Show me what you chose, sweet boy," Derek asks.

Sugar Daddy (?) by BisexualInDisguise

(1/1 I 1,629 I General I Sterek)

Stiles’ friends think his boyfriend is actually his sugar daddy and tease him accordingly

Tuxes and Cummerbunds by redpenny

(1/1 I 3,163 I Mature I Sterek)

With the happy assurance of a man who is about to win a bet, Stiles says, "Told you it would be too tight."

He pokes his Alpha in the tummy. The tummy that said Alpha is trying, with significant effort, to button his pants around.

Don’t You Want Me, Alpha? by wulfarchival (wyrmwolf)

(1/1 I 6,567 I Explicit I Sterek)

In which Derek looses his chill, Stiles is a little shit, nude photos are sent, and there’s sex. Just not in that order. Actually, definitely in that order.

The Same Old Blood Rush (With A New Touch) by rainsoakedshoes

(13/13 I 29,564 I Explicit I Sterek)

“Friends with benefits,” Derek stated. “I just happen to be in a position to provide a few more benefits than your usual hook ups.”

***

Derek was an Alpha with a pack and a multi-billion dollar company to take care of. Stiles was a college kid with assignments and student debt to worry about. Neither of them were looking a serious relationship. A one night stand turned into an easy no-strings-attached arrangement. Although nothing is ever as easy or as simple as it first seems.

Call Us Dropout Heroes by waitingforjudas

(15/15 I 46,186 I Explicit I Sterek)

Derek wants more—but he’s scarred to hell and back, and not just physically. It’s not just that nobody would want him unless they were getting paid—it’s that nobody would stay unless there was something in it for them. So when a date with Stiles, the gorgeous, kind stripper, goes wrong, Derek figures out how to get him to stay, despite his baggage.

#teen wolf #sterek #stiles stilinski #derek hale #sugar daddy!derek #anon

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beardedmrbean · 5 months ago

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EU’s proposed Chat Control law has become a bone of contention between members of the bloc. First proposed by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson in May 2022 as part of bloc’s push to combat child sexual abuse online, the framework of the bill has now come under fire, earning itself a derisive term “Chat Control”.

France, Germany and Poland have particularly refused to accept a clause that allows for mass scanning of private messages by breaking end-to-end encryption. Some tech companies, along with trade associations, and privacy experts have all vehemently opposed the regulation.

On the other hand, Interior Ministers of Spain and Ireland have supported the proposal. Separately, a network of organisations and individuals, advocating for children’s rights in Europe, have lashed out at EU leaders for failing to tackle child sexual abuse online.

What are the concerns of those against the proposal?

Scanning end-to-end encrypted messages has remained a controversial issue. That’s because there is no way to do this without opening risky backdoors that can be accessed by third parties who can exploit the vulnerability, in turn ending the promise of end-to-end encryption.

Tech firms that treaded the encryption bypassing path have have often been made to retreat. In 2021, Apple announced NeuralHash, a feature that could automatically scan iCloud photo libraries of individual devices for child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Employees and activist groups expressed concerns over the loss of privacy. A year later, Apple said it had abandoned the initiative.

Another looming issue the iPhone maker recognised in the process was how authoritarian governments could potentially misuse the feature by using it as a tool to target individuals who oppose the regime.

Erik Neuenschwander, Director of user privacy and child safety at Apple, admitted this in a note saying, “It would […] inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended consequences. Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.”

When brining in a similar clause through the UK’s Online Safety Bill, lawmakers attempted to make way for client-side scanning of private and encrypted messages. The proposal was postponed after receiving pushback from encrypted messaging app owners like WhatsApp and Signal. The duo threatened to leave the UK if such a law was passed. In its final stages, in September, 2023, the House of Lords considered the potential security threat that the clause would bring saying it would not implement scanning until it was “technically feasible.”

What is the status of EU’s Chat Control law?

On June 30, a new draft of the proposal is set to be be reviewed. Legislators have now left the idea of scanning text messages and audio, and are instead targetting shared photos, videos and URLs with an adjustment to appease the naysayers.

Another tweak in the making could be people’s consent in sharing material being scanned before being encrypted. But this compromise has been largely called out as a farcical one. A report by Euractiv which has been confirmed by internal documents show that if a user refuses the scanning, they will simply be blocked from sending or receiving images, videos and links hardly leaving them with a choice.

Despite these measures, EU’s enforcement of such regulations have seen exemptions to the rule. In November 2023, the European Commission reportedly published a proposal to amend the regulation on a temporary derogation of the E-Privacy Directive against CSAM. Under the regulation, specific online communications service providers were allowed to sift through or scan messages to detect, report and remove online child sexual abuse material or CSAM and content that solicits children. The regulation is set to expire in early August . The initial plan on the table was to simply extend this regulation for another three years. But, according to media reports, plans for further extensions were stalled in February this year.

Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal app called the measures to assuage concerns as “cosmetic”, and has signed a joint statement along with a group of over 60 other organisations like Mozilla, Proton, Surfshark and Tuta, voicing out her concerns. Whittaker has echoed her earlier warning saying Signal will leave the UK rather than undermine end-to-end encryption.

A blog, co-authored by Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory and Callum Voge, director of government affairs and advocacy at the Internet Society, notes, ”If government surveillance is a concern in an established democratic entity like the EU, what hope is there for beleaguered democracies like Turkey, India and Brazil, much less autocracies?”

#nunyas news

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usafphantom2 · 10 months ago

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I wanted to share this from my private Habubrat SR 71 Facebook page. This page has not been hacked.

Short story of her love to Blackbird.

As first I wanted to say hello to everyone in the group, especially for Linda Sheffield Miller for creating such an amazing community circled around Blackbird - that's really stunning.

I wanted to share a story - a story of my wife who is actually too shy to talk about her love to Blackbird. Not too many of people outside of US here on the group I'd say, so it may be worth a while reading about this 🙂

Karolina (or Caroline in English) is 29 this year, we've been married for 3 years now. She is mechanical engineer that ended university of technology in 2014. From when I remember, she always had Blackbird on her wallpaper on Laptop and phone. As I'm Polish armed forces officer (we come from Poland) , the background of it was also interesting to me, so many years ago she told me a story of herself.

She is the kind of woman that never played Barbies, she was the Lego kid playing with cars, dreaming of Jaguar E-type and flying through space. When we met, she knew (and still does) know more about cars than I do.

Her dream was always to build Next gen Blackbird - anytime someone asked about her wallpaper, she said the history of it and how awesome it is (they only tried to small talk but she instantly went all in for telling about it 😅).

When she finished UoT, she worked for the company making parts for planes, but she recently changed the job to be a part of the team creating jet engines. It's her dream job right now, but still keeps saying that her future lays in Lockheed Skunk Works.

Last year we had delayed honeymoon, 34 days in United States to see as much as possible from what we only saw in movies.

We visited Kennedy Space Center (it's great for real), where she was amazed and almost cried seeing Saturn V. But the real thing was just coming.

When we arrived in the Washington, the only thing she was waiting for was going to Udvar Hazy Air and Space Museum, where one of the Blackbirds stands.

You can only imagine how she reacted seeing it when we stepped on the gangway above SR-71. She cried her eyes out, but positively.

There was a guy (expert) on a big screen right next to Blackbird, who was actually connected through Skype or something, so we could talk with him and he could tell us the story of this plane. I remember them talking for some time with her making notes of what he said and she didn't know.

When we came back to Poland, with the help of my friend, I decided to make her a scale model of Blackbird. Since I like a little bit of engineering myself and I have 3D printer, I designed the exhaust fumes with Mach diamonds to be lit

When she saw it lit up, she cried again, the same as she did in US when she saw the real one. She is crazy about the Blackbird even more than she was before, but too shy to talk about it outside of her group of friends - maybe your reaction will make her open up a little more in here.

@Habubrats71 via X

Hope the story wasn't too long - since this group exists and I watched Lindas Habubrats for some time now, I always wanted to share it. The fact this plane and community around it is so amazing that the plane itself has fans all over the world.

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adelle-ein · 9 months ago

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god knows there's a lot of antisemitic microaggressions from "friends" that i'm willing to let slide. genuinely my standards aren't that high. which is obvious based on the people i was friends with pre-oct 7th lol. but like i do have limits and those limits have been crossed by

expressing a desire to join hamas/the houthis

expressing open support for hamas and oct 7th

referring to oct 7th as "legitimate resistance/oppressed rising up/revolution/freedom fighting"

denying oct 7th happened at all

insisting shani louk is alive (she is not, while her family had hope at first they have since found pieces of her she could not have survived losing)

joking about october 7th

joking about the holocaust

saying jews didn't "learn their lesson" from the holocaust

denying the holocaust

denying other jewish genocides

mocking the hostages and their families

wishing death on the hostages

using "zio"

saying israelis need to go back to brooklyn/florida/poland/etc

saying jews were and have always been well-treated in MENA regions

openly fetishizing and lying about mizrahi/sephardic jews

saying antisemitism doesn't exist/is over

saying ashkenazism don't face antisemitism

saying judaism is a dominant world religion

saying zionists/AIPAC/israel are controlling companies/the government/biden/trump/US military/US police/hollywood

mocking hebrew and jewish culture

mocking jewish holidays

treating jewish holidays as inherently evil

saying that israeli government crimes are being done in "our [jews'] names" and we bear the guilt for it

saying "happy [jewish holiday/memorial day] now stop doing genocide!!!"

saying diaspora jews are okay but not israeli ones

saying all israelis need to die/deserve to die/are settlers who therefore deserve to die

saying jews have no culture/stole all culture from muslims/arabs/christians

open insane blood libel conspiracies about (for example) israelis kidnapping blonde palestinian children or digging up graves for organ/skin theft

referring to israeli "blood money"

spreading and endorsing neo-nazis

spreading and endorsing holocaust deniers and other bigots ie norman finkelstein

spreading and endorsing avowed tankies, NK/russia supporters, and deniers of the ukrainian/uyghur/armenian/syrian/etc genocides

spreading rhetoric from other hate groups ie neturei karta

sharing cartoons of octopi, big-nosed evil men, netanyahu and co eating babies, etc

spreading conspiracy theories about spotify or tumblr or what the fuck ever being controlled by """zionist""" CEOs (and even explicitly stating they're jewish when they often aren't)

belittling ANY anti-antisemitism movement as anti-palestinian

using terms like "zionist rats/pigs/filth"

"all zionists should die/kill themselves/aren't human/should be gassed"

"the zionist entity/zionist state"

"hitler loved israel/was a zionist"

"[x] is worse than the holocaust"/"the holocaust is the only genocide that's taken seriously bc it's a genocide of white people"/"get over the holocaust"

being creepy and ogling about the token good jews that meet your insane standards

weighing in on deeply personal intracommunity jewish discussions in horrible ways

telling Good Jews that you’re so sorry about how isolated they’re being by the majority of jews, which are Bad Jews

saying not to donate to palestinian aid groups bc it could make israel money bc israel controls all the aid groups apparently bc they're just so greedy and want so much money

did i mention je-isra-zionists really love money

movements against "zionism in medicine" and other witch hunts against "zionist" (jewish) people in professions

participating in mass harassment movements and callouts against random jews online asking people to stop being antisemitic

openly calling for violence against jews and/or israelis

claims of dual loyalty against diaspora jews

support the american south bc they're victims of their government too (true) but kill all the israelis bc they definitely support every action taken by their government (hm)

jokes and memes. the fucking memes. you're monsters

"but lace, this is hyperbole, surely nobody is actually saying these things " -- these are all literally, exactly, personally things my "friends" and mutuals have said and reblogged/retweeted since october 7th. if you're reading this now there is a 99% chance you are one of them.

and yes i fucking hate the israeli government. what is happening in palestine is evil. i'm a nonzionist jew.

but i know that's not enough. unless you're a token in "jewish" voice for """peace""" willing to say "kill every single israeli and the holocaust wasn't a big deal and 10/7 didn't happen and antisemitism isn't real and i have never been afraid as a jew in my life" you're one of Them. Being pro palestine or even antizionist isn't enough, you have to want your whole family dead and you can't say a fucking word about the way you're treated by your lovely leftist "allies". oh and you better post about it! constantly! 24/7!!!! or you're secretly a zionist who loves dead palestinian babies! probably personally killing them yourself! you filthy ki- er, zionist rat!

so, yeah, if you think i'm one of Them, that's fine. feel free to block me, i'd much prefer if you did. and let me be clear that jews are not exempt from this either. it's reprehensible regardless

i am not your fucking good jew. If you have ever thought of me as one, fuck you. You are not my good goy, either. Fuck your bugs bunny "i wish all my jewish mutuals a happy rosh hashanah." Fuck your "pictures of African Jews worshipping" tokenism and "jews fighting god" memes. Fuck your nazi punches and your Anne Frank headcanons. Fuck all your disgusting pats on the back and keep my fucking name out of your mouth. If you can't stop reblogging blood libel then I don't want to see another goddamn WORD of it.

#txt #lacevent #antisemitism

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coffeeandmagicaltales · 1 year ago

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The Auror & The Devil part 4

After Professor Fig's death, prof. Sharp was supposed to take on the role of Morana's mentor. First lesson with potion's master and first doubts- they can't be friends, can they?

A story born in my head, about my OC character Morana and prof. Aesop Sharp. Sorry for my english, I'm from Poland.

(FLUFF, Student-teacher relationship platonic (for now), mentioned trauma, mentioned death, extensive use of the word f*ck, make some coffee/tea and enjoy)

Morana was sitting on a rock near the entrance to the Forbidden Forest, holding a letter written by Professor Sharp. She absently traced her fingers over the paper, anxious about the impending meeting. She curled up, thinking about what she had done yesterday. She felt incredibly embarrassed: he had shouted at Sharp, vandalized his classroom... and he had simply made her tea and listened to her. Then he had sent Scrope to check on her... She deserved at least a reprimand or even expulsion from Hogwarts.

Tilting her head back, she basked in the warm afternoon sun, letting it kiss her skin. Her thoughts drifted towards the gentle face of potion's master. Today, it would be so hard to face him... After she acted like an idiot.

She struggled to open her eyes, feeling the weight of sleeplessness on her eyelids. She was startled to find a familiar figure in front of her. Aesop looked at her with his usual grumpy expression.

"Daydreaming again, Dimm?" he asked softly, tinged with sarcasm.

Morana jumped off the ground, dusting off her light cloak and her uniform. She stood with her head down for a moment, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. "I would like to apologize again for everything that happened yesterday... I don't know what got into me," she began, her voice trembling.

Sharp rolled his eyes and let out a bored sound, heading towards the Forbidden Forest. "Come," he grumbled. "You have a lot of work to do."

Morana followed him obediently and they eventually entered the Forest. Oh, how she loved this place... Nature was magic itself for her, those flickering lights, thousands of busy incects buzzing around flowers, fresh air, gentle wind... Leaves rustled under their feet, and the gravel on the narrow path clinked as they walked. Morana instinctively took out her wand, just in case. Sharp glanced at her with a bemused expression, but, inside, he had found her excessive caution amusing. Sometimes, he wrinkled his nose or grimaced slightly when he put too much weight on his injured leg. Morana assumed he didn't use spells like Apparition or Portkey to avoid losing mobility. Movement was important, even if it caused pain.

She was concerned when she heard a quiet moan of ache from him, and their eyes met.

"Miss Dimm, I won't be offended if you walk a bit faster towards the spider nest I mentioned in the letter. When I see you moving as slowly as a turtle beside me, I feel a bit... uncomfortable," he said with a calm, matter-of-fact tone.

"I won't leave you," she replied, frowning at the thought of his suggestion. "We're supposed to work together, right? You don't leave your colleagues behind."

"Hmm," Sharp murmured, and his eyes flickered in the shadow. A corner of his mouth twitched, and he felt the same pleasant sensation as yesterday, causing his cheeks to redden. "If you genuinely want to keep up with me, then we'll spend more time in each other's company. I want you to tell me why there's such an uncomfortable silence today."

Morana froze, not really wanting to answer the question. She didn't want him to know that sometimes his stern, or even aloof, demeanor, voice, and especially his posture ( she was petite, and he was much taller than her, even when he walked slightly hunched) made her feel „little”...

"'I intimidate you, don't I?' he asked, looking at her with a confident gaze, reading everything from her eyes. Inwardly, he was proud of this skill and the fact that, after all these years away from his beloved work, it hadn't left him. Mora, seeing his dark, intelligent eyes fixed on her, knew that there was no point in lying.

'Yes,' she confessed with difficulty. 'You can be very kind at times, and at other times... gruff and... distant.'"

Fuck... I shoudn't have mentioned that... fuck... She thought to herself, her cheeks burning.

Sharp chuckled softly, thinking about how she had thrown herself into his arms under the influence of emotions yesterday and now hesitated to even look at him when she started to think rationally. Perhaps he was also a bit apprehensive, considering that for a brief moment last night, they had blurred the line between student and teacher, and today he wasn't sure how to approach her.

"Alright, I understand that," he nodded, speaking in a gentle tone. "I'm not one to coddle my students; that's what Professor Garlick is for. But I don't want you to be afraid to ask me questions or talk about anything. I don't want to pressure you in any way. Sometimes, I might ask a question or express curiosity, but mainly, I want you to decide when you want to talk and feel comfortable in my presence. Does that work for you? I promise that when I feel comfortable, I'll try to be less gruff and distant, as you put it."

Morana felt a bit better and nodded.

"As for your apologies..." he added, "I'm not mad at you. I've thought a lot about it, and I'm even glad that your emotions came to the surface because I know what you need to work on. It's not a reproach. Aggression is just as much an emotion as any other; it's neither good nor bad. What matters is how we use it. As I mentioned in the letter, the tasks you'll have to complete are difficult not because you lack the strength but because of the nuances you'll have to discover on your own."

"On my own, Professor?" she asked, recalling the image of Professor Figg leaving her alone before another Trial, leaving her surrounded by the incessant pounding of her terrified heart.

"No, no, no," Sharp assured her, his large hand gently patted her arm in a reassuring gesture. "Your safety is my top priority, and I'll always be close to you, providing you with my knowledge and experience. But I won't do things for you. Although my words sound stern, I want you to feel at ease, Miss Dimm."

"I won't let you down," she said quietly, and Sharp just smiled cunningly. His expression seemed to say: We'll see.

Mora swiftly knocked down the first spiders that had crawled to the surface with a few quick wand movements. She felt proud of starting the fight so well, even though she was just warming up. The task was: collect spider venom. Easy.

Sharp observed her from his hiding spot, concealed by a chameleon spell to avoid being bitten by the chomping cabbage that were rampant in the vicinity. He carefully analyzed her fluid movements, which resembled a dance more than a battle, and the beams of powerful explosions that echoed deep into the forest. Equally spectacular and beautiful as they were dangerous. Mora was giving her all, making flawless evasions, utilizing everything at her disposal, and her voice had grown hoarse from incantations.

"Wrong," Sharp summarized calmly, his eyes mischievous.

Mora stood on shaky legs next to the remains of the largest spider she had ever defeated, sweaty and disheveled, barely catching her breath. A wide smile of pride crossed her face when that short word reached her ears.

"But?.." she began, completely thrown off balance. Her hand triumphantly extended toward Sharp, holding a vial filled with spider venom all the way to the cork, fell limply by her side.

"Well, wrong,'" he sighed in his characteristic tone, which every Hogwarts student knew well. Calm, somewhat bored, with a touch of irony. "That's enough for today."

Aesop gave her a sign to follow him.

For a moment, Mora stood as if petrified, not knowing what had just happened, what she had done wrong. Finally, she moved and caught up with the potions master, trying to organize her mind having thoughts still in a whirl. Sharp looked at her with evident satisfaction.

Well, well... you finally started thinking... hmmm wise woman... he thought, seeing the cogs in her head working hard to find an answer to how a correctly executed task could be a failure.

Dusk was beginning to settle in, and Aesop ordered a break in a spot near Hogsmead as he saw that exhausted Mora was struggling to keep up with his slow pace. With a fluid wand movement, he conjured a few wooden blocks, lit a fire, and then conjured a teapot. He poured a cup for himself and handed a cup to Mora, who had settled beside him on a fallen tree log.

"What's on your mind, Mora?" he asked gently, taking a sip of tea, with a subtle, knowing smile. He had noticed how much she had been affected by the lesson and felt that it was now a safe time to discuss it. He wasn't sure why he sometimes forgot to address her more formally, even though he never did so with other students. Perhaps it was because it was a Saturday outside of classes, or maybe it was because he liked how her name sounded.

"Well, it's just that I don't know; I feel like an idiot," she replied, almost immediately. "I did everything right, executed the task correctly."

Sharp's cold hand gently tapped her fingers intertwined on the cup, reminding her to take a sip, as the exertion must have left her quite dehydrated. He watched the porcelain, which she had put to her lips and emptied in a single gulp, and couldn't help but smile, seeing how she refilled it equally fast.

"I really tried," she confessed with a frustrated voice, catching her breath. In her eyes, there was a flash of anger at Sharp's stern assessment, who, in the meantime, had taken a small knife and an apple from his pocket. He started peeling the fruit, all while listening carefully to Mora. "I used the correct spells, which are sensitive to Acromantulas. I did everything according to the bestiary and what Professor Hecat taught me. I've hunted them hundreds of times and helped people in the area when they had problems with them... I..."

Sharp carefully took her empty cup and placed it on the ground, and then gently, as delicately he could, fearing that his touch would be unpleasant to her, laid a well-peeled half of the apple on her palm. He closed her fingers around it to prevent the fruit from slipping out due to her distracted state. The sweet scent of the apple awakened a gnawing hunger within her. Without thinking, she brought it to her mouth and devoured it quickly. Aesop chuckled quietly an ate a part of the apple with the bitter skin he hadn't bothered to peel for himself.

Poor thing, he thought, sending her a sympathetic look. She had shown great skill in today's battle, and he enjoyed watching such a talented witch in action... as she wasn't aiming at him this time. Still, she lacked experience. He would be a fool not to appreciate her efforts and commitment to completing her first task.

"I must admit I would be very surprised if you had completed this task correctly, and I'm actually pleased that you didn't," he confessed after a moment, in a calm tone, and shrugged. Morana raised an eyebrow, and her eyes blinked in disbelief. "That's why I'm here, for you to make mistakes and learn from them... You know perfectly well what my lessons are like. Failures are a crucial part of learning... Now it's time to think about what you can do, rather than what you didn't do."

"Maybe... maybe I'll look for something in the library, perhaps I missed something... What do you think?"

Hmm... You're starting to understand what this is about, he thought and nodded while his eyes sparkled. "The library is always a good idea. What kind of books will you be looking for?"

"Hmmm... I guess anything on Acromantulas..." She laughed, but it was a laughter through tears rather than joy. Hours of poring over manuscripts awaited her. "Maybe even those from the forbidden section... Although I probably shouldn't go there." She hesitated, fearing a reprimand.

"Right, that's why I'll go with you," he replied matter-of-factly, surprising Morana. He had always seemed to be the first among the professors to strictly adhere to the rules and never break any.

Sharp stood up, but then suddenly winced in pain and swayed slightly. Morana jumped to her feet and lightly supported him. He furrowed his brow and bowed his head, feeling pain, but more of shame than any lightning bolts in his knee.

"Dimm..." he growled menacingly through clenched teeth, turning his gaze away from her big, compassionate eyes, the sight of which would make him completely fall apart. "Please don't do that again. If I'm going to fall, I want to do it while preserving a shred of dignity."

He felt terribly pathetic and wanted to disappear. Pity gripped Morana's heart; although she had never been in his situation and couldn't claim to understand it, she saw how much he suffered and how hard he fought with his disability. He didn't give up, even though you could say the matter was doomed to failure from the start. But... Despite his distance from himself and the wise phrases that came out of his mouth about "fate is what one makes of it"... Deep down, he cursed how unfairly fate had treated him. He saw himself as a pitiable caricature of the former detective Aesop Sharp, Auror, who was once the jewel in the crown of the Ministry of Magic. The shadow of a handsome, confident, and strong man in his prime, who was overflowing with humor in the company of friends, an object of many women's desires and the best match they could dream of for financial security. After the accident, he became a nobody, a cripple whose company didn't suit beautiful women or anyone from the circles he used to move in. His face had become grotesque and didn't fit with marble, expensive carpets, and exquisite dinners, and the comical way he moved, according to him, had its place only in the circus or a retirement home. Sometimes he didn't know whether he was fighting his lack of dignity with himself or with others.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, sir," Morana whispered as quietly as she could and took a step back.

Oh, great... you scared her... she doesn't want to hurt you, you fucking idiot..., he scolded himself in his thoughts.

"It's not about that..." he said, swallowing the tears and controlling his voice, focusing all his strength on it. "I know you want to help, that you want to do well, but... sometimes it does more harm. I don't like it when people treat me like fine china, and I doubt you would like it either. Please, don't do it again." He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts, avoiding Morana's gaze, and then suddenly felt the touch of her delicate hand on his forearm.

"I promise," she said softly, in a tone so sweet and gentle that he struggled not to fall to the ground beneeth her feet and cry. How on earth did she do it? Two days ago, he had a quiet life occasionally disrupted by Mr. Weasley's nonsense or days when the pain in his leg was a bit stronger than usual, but other than that, the daily routine was a blessing, especially after the whirl of emotions that almost pushed him to the brink of endurance five years ago. He didn't want anyone to see him in a bad state, or when he had difficulty with simple tasks... Working with Morana one-on-one, spending more time with her than with others, his disability would be present every day. That's the bitter truth, and he naively deluded himself that maybe it would be different.

Maybe she should have been assigned to someone else... I should be taking care of her, not the other way around, he was plagued by doubts, even though he was happy about the prospect of more challenges. He really wanted to work with her, but...

What kind of magic was she using that made him afraid to look into her eyes? He didn't know how long he would endure with this woman, with this devil who was to him what witches were to Muggles - beings with supernatural abilities who, with a single word or the slightest glance, could captivate someone's soul, disrupt the surrounding reality, and turn life upside down. He kept telling himself that he would somehow manage, that working with her would last until the end of next year, that it was not that far off, that she was capable, and would quickly make progress.

"I know... I know you have questions about my disability" the last word was full of shame and grief, and made Mora want to cuddle him. "I can see it in your eyes," he said, regaining his composure and finding the courage to look at her. Pale blue irises shimmered in the faint light of the moon, which peeked out from behind the clouds and became immaculate as two topaz gems. Surprisingly, they didn't intimidate him; instead, they gently encouraged him to continue speaking. "I'll answer them if I feel they don't intrude too much into my private life."

Oh, please..., his inner voice spoke up in his head. She'll see right through you because she's clever. Aesop immediately silenced him. He was too afraid of the glooming specter of friendship with Morana, which, unfortunately, he thought would seriously undermine his ability to maintain professionalism and discipline.

He couldn't like her.

He hadn't planned on liking her.

Morana nodded in understanding. She wanted to add that she didn't want to cause any trouble with curious questions, but seeing that he had proposed it himself and taking into account his request not to feel sorry for him, she thought such a comment would be unnecessary.

"It's time to go back," Sharp ordered, seeing that it was almost completely dark and feeling raindrops on his skin, which were slowly turning into drizzle. With a quick wave of his wand, he extinguished the fire. "Lumos!" he whispered, and the wand's light somewhat eased his discomfort, although he still felt miserable.

"Lumos!" Morana echoed.

"Tomorrow we'll start a bit earlier than today. Let's meet at 10 in front of the library, and I don't want to hear any complaints about it being Sunday. I also feel like I've been robbed of sleep until 12, and that was the only day I could rest from you all." He began speaking after a moment of silence. "Professor Black seems to be intentionally changing my schedule after the last incident..."

"What happened?" Morana asked, not having any idea of what Sharp, in her mind the epitome of tact and a true gentleman, could have done to upset the headmaster.

It was raining heavily, and Sharp gently tugged on Morana's sleeve to get her to walk a bit closer to him. She lit the way, and he conjured an umbrella around the two of them.

"Well, some time ago, he asked me to brew a certain medicinal elixir, which, to be honest, required discretion. Then, when I met him to let him know that the remedy was ready, he categorically preferred a student to bring it to him... I agreed and sent Mr. Weasley. Well... I immediately got an owl with a complaint about my 'self-willed decision that contradicted our agreement regarding discretion.' He didn't want to listen to me when I explained that it was his decision... A strange man."

Morana blushed and clenched her lips, making a strange face. Sharp glanced at her and narrowed his eyes.

"Dimm... Something tells me you had your fingers in that..."

"I didn't want that, really," she confessed, trying to defend herself. "Professor Fig gave me the Polyjuice Potion... I had to get into the headmaster's office because the Guardians asked me, and I needed the password, which Scrope knew. By chance, I met you, then Mrs. Kogawa, and even Mrs. Weasley. I think I accidentally banned Quidditch forever... I talked nonsense because I was in a hurry, the potion had a short duration, and it just turned out that way... But that one with headmaster I couldn't help it, it was tempting to stirr his life a bit..." She spoke very quickly and chaotically, and Aesop's eyes grew wider with each new fact of this story.

"Well, well... I could have expected this if I brewed it for everyone except Ms. Scribner and Matilda."

"Wait... You brewed it?"

"Weeeell..." he grumbled, looking for a brilliant excuse, but nothing came to his mind at the moment.

"I can't believe it... Why did you do that?"

"Just in case," he mumbled through clenched teeth, avoiding her gaze and blushed. "The Polyjuice Potion is very difficult to brew, and other teachers asked me to make it... A few strands of the headmaster's hair fell into it by pure accident..."

"Sure," Morana snickered with laughter, then smoothly glided in front of Sharp and started to walk backwards, her eyes fixed on potion's master. She took on a disgusted expression. She straightened up and took a deep breath.

"Sharp!" she growled in a tone painfully reminiscent of Headmaster Black, which stunned Aesop and pulled him out of the clutches of dark thoughts. "I hope that what's bubbling in the cauldron is a remedy for me!" she said, ridiculously mimicking Phineas's exaggerated accent. Sharp's stomach twisted with laughter, although he decided to maintain a serious face.

"But of course, Professor," he said towards Morana in his matter-of-fact, calm tone. He didn't know why he did it or why he decided to join in her little game. But he enjoyed every bit of it. Mora suppressed her laughter and resumed playing her role.

"Well, I've been waiting for it definitely too long, and I have doubts whether you're not occupied with something else! Plus, I've caught dandruff, you should do something about that too..." she scratched her head, pretending to lean over the cauldron and inspect its contents with interest.

Devil not a woman... Sharp thought, smiling.

"Of course, Headmaster, everything will be ready on time. Your, uh, boils... I mean, your doubts can rest peacefully," he nodded slightly.

Morana burst into laughter, so disarming that it even infected Sharp. She danced in front of him in the rain, walking backwards, and the light from her wand made the raindrops glisten like diamonds falling from the sky, surrounding her with a truly ethereal aura. Sharp again felt like a character from Muggle fairy tales next to her, a character who met a being of divine nature on his journey, experiencing pure magic for the first time. It was strange; he had seen hundreds of magical creatures, from trolls and mermaids to Veelas and dragons, and practically nothing made a big impression on him. She... Perhaps it was because of ancient magic, or maybe there was really something both devilish and heartwarming about her, something that with one "wicked" look, dissipated all his sorrows.

"His hair went to your cauldron like that, sir?" she asked, catching up to Sharp and taking shelter under the magical umbrella.

"As if you were reading my mind," he mumbled. "You should get a detention for making fun of the headmaster."

"Well, I wasn't the only one," she replied boldly.

"No one will believe you..." he muttered, looking at her askance, a cunning smile lifting the corner of his mouth.

He was right. For a moment, she forgot that she had met this gruff man only a few months ago. Merlin, just yesterday he was simply one of her teachers, whom she simply respected. Today... Now, seeing his figure out of the corner of her eye, feeling his presence, hearing a whole range of quiet sounds involuntarily escaping his lips when he limped... It was surreal, but everything felt so familiar and close to her that she allowed herself to act foolishly, thing that wouldn't have passed even among her friends. They all seemed to be absorbed in their problems, which she helped them solve, and she didn't have time to "be herself." It was a pleasant change, to forget for a few moments about everything that happened before... She missed someone like him in her life, even though it had never crossed her mind to call him her "friend." She felt that she had special consideration from him, always, but she was sure it was due to her diligence and ambition. Qualities that Sharp appreciated as a member of Slytherin... However, she was appreciated by most of the teachers and friends. Only with this man did she feel something, which had long been dormant in her and returned to her only in dreams.

A sense of home and belonging. The hills of Nitra cuddled in the blanket of the evening mist. Delicacy. The closeness of loved ones that surrounded her with safety, which her memory had blurred.

End of part 4, thanks for reading! <3

#aesop sharp #hogwarts legacy #professor aesop sharp #professor sharp #hogwarts legacy fanfic #hogwarts legacy oc #hogwarts legacy mc #hogwarts legacy meme

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itsastronxmy · 7 months ago

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🟠 🟡 🟢 🟣 🎱 🔮 ⚽️

For any of your OCs that you’ve made! For the “OC Ask Meme”! And I’m sorry if this is too much. I’m just curious! If you don’t want to answer ALL of them! That’s FINE!😊👍

Since I've depicted her the least, I'mma do Gambit! I think America's "Grim Reaper" needs some time in the spotlight 😊

🟠 Orange- What is a trait your OC hides about themself from others? Do they refuse to acknowledge it or begrudgingly accept it?

Gambit is actually a nostalgic person. She hides it, though, because "America's Grim Reaper shouldn't be nostalgic if she has no documented past." But it's not like she can always help it. It can be walking into a cafe and smelling coffee, or waking up early and watching the sun come up, and she remembers... something. Something of a home she used to have, whatever it had been. She's not sure why it happens. It just does, and honestly...? She kind of likes the feeling.

🟡 Yellow- What is something your OC wants but knows they can never have? How does it feel to never get this specific desire?

Gambit's... not sure what she wants. But a home is something that comes to mind a few times. Not necessarily a tangible place, no, she's on the move too much to enjoy that sort of thing. But a place she could at least say is safe ground for herself. People she could say are a safe haven for her. But she knows that's something she can't have. Not just because of her work. She's a woman who hasn't had a family in so long. She's sloppy in communication and expression. It's simply no longer her nature to have a family. And sometimes, yeah, it hurts. She watches the children walk down the sidewalk, holding the hand of their parent as they happily talk about their schoolday. So innocent, so unaware that the person who just passed by them was someone who had that carefree life taken away too early. Who had a home taken away too early. But the world keeps turning, and she walks down the path of the lonely hunter once more.

🟢 Green- What is considered a weakness in your OC that is actually a strength? What is a strength in your character that can be twisted into a weakness?

Well, I'd think that Gambit's silent and stoic demeanour can be a strength in some ways. Yes, she does struggle with communication and expressing her thoughts, but she also makes an excellent bluff. It's hard to tell if someone's lying if they've got steely eyes like her. Gambit's smart, yes, but that doesn't mean she's immune to overthinking. If too much information is thrown at her, she begins to overthink, her brain going haywire from all the possibilities she's trying to find at once.

🎱 8 Ball- What situation was your OC lucky to escape from or get out of? What or who helped them unexpectedly?

Not going to say too much because it'll spoil Gambit's backstory that I'm writing. Poland, Jan. 11, 2000. A couple and their daughter went missing after a car accident and explosion. While the parents were found dead not far from the vehicle, the daughter's body was never recovered. Some believe that she was lost immediately with the explosion, her corpse burned into nothing. Others believe she somehow crawled out of that burning wreck, perhaps with the aid of her late parents, and somehow got away.

🔮 Crystal Ball- What kind of future does your OC want to have? What would they do to make it real?

Gambit's not entirely the type to look to the future; she's not even sure how much longer she'll be on this planet with such a perilous job. She honestly intends to keep going until she eithers dies or finally gets sick of killing and decides to retire. Not much to put for this question, but I hope this kinda helps

⚽️ Soccer Ball- Who is someone that your OC believes in and roots for? Are they private about their admiration or do they make it well known?

I think Sunako fits this card, really. Gambit was the one who offered her an invitation to the Shadow Company, recognising the young woman's talent and potential. While she's definitely not open about it, Gambit really wants to see Sunako perform great in the field. She may be rather harsh and almost condescending when she gives tips to the younger, but it shows in her actions how far she's willing to go to ensure Sunako gets a better run in life than she had.

#oc asks #oc questions #oc ask game #gambit weste #hope my english was englishing correctly here 🙏🏽#cod original character #call of duty oc #cod mw #call of duty modern warfare

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suomeen · 7 months ago

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Chapter 6: Cold Waves and Warm Welcomes

On January 2, Russia launched 99 missiles on Kyiv and Kharkiv, leaving dozens wounded and dead. A part of me felt guilty for not being there, even though it would have done absolutely no good. But it also reminded me I made the right call.

Meanwhile, the temperature outside dropped to up to -35 degrees. Apparently, this was unusual even for Finland and a record for the century. I’m glad I had a very thick and warm down jacket with me because I can’t image what I’d do without it. At one point, I had a doctor’s appointment and I miscalculated the distance to the clinic. It turned out to be a 8-minute walk and not 3 so I was genuinely concerned I might get a frostbite because I wasn’t feeling my hands or face. I had to seek refuge in the nearest door, which turned out to be a musical instrument shop with a cool staff.

Our apartment with white beds and plastic cups felt more like a hospital ward. We took very little with us, so we needed all kinds of things, big and small. You don’t really realize how many things you need in your daily life until you have to start anew. Mops and can openers, brushes and scissors, kettles and curtains, - there are so many things you don’t think about but the absence of which makes life very uncomfortable. So we took to the flea markets and consignment shops. We were building our life from the ground up. But we had to still consider the fact that we could be moved any time so we shouldn’t get anything big or costly. Make it cozier but don’t get too attached. From now on, you don’t have a home.

About a week into the year, another young woman moved in. Tetiana is from the Western Ukraine, though she spent the past 10 years working in Poland. At first, I wasn’t sure if we would get along. She seemed a little chaotic, very alert and a kind of territorial. But soon I realized it was just the result of her life experience. She’s working class and spent years working odd jobs, in factories and cleaning, often having to share rooms with very questionable people. She got fucked over a lot so her apprehension became very understandable. Once she felt she was in company of decent friendly people, she relaxed and showed a very different side. She’s not educated, but very curious and hard-working and also quite childlike when you get to know her. She proved to be an excellent cohabitant.

Tetiana also knows how to grip life by the balls so she gets around quickly. There was a middle-aged Ukrainian man living on the first floor. We soon learned his name was Uncle Sasha and many people would come and ask about him. We didn’t know him but it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Uncle Sasha knows things and how to get things. Soon though he was moving out because his children moved and the apartment was considered too big for him and his wife. He had to clear out the apartment, including furniture. This is how we got an old but comfy sofa and a bunch of teen boy clothes. Our standard of living took off.

It took some time to get used to our new arrangement but after a while, the 4 of us formed a loose but stable bond, keeping a healthy distance. We were always very polite and supportive to each other. We often shared meals and occasionally drinks. We gave each other space when he felt someone needed it. It really worked.

Sharing an apartment and a life with strangers… It’s not something I would ever choose but it was nice to live through. It’s amazing how in such a short time you can develop a rather close companionship. It felt like a blessing.

One day I had a talk with one of the social workers from the reception center who came over to install new locks. Not many of them speak English well so I took the opportunity. She was incredibly nice and kind. We had a warm earnest talk and she told me they were there to do everything they could to make us feel at home and give us everything we need. I told her I would love to give back in some way and that I’m doing my best to learn. She said I could take my time, there was no rush. I nearly cried. I asked her for a hug before she left. And I am not a hugger. At all.

Once we finally got our IDs and prepaid cards, my mind was finally somewhat at ease. There was some sort of stability.

But of course, this was just another illusion and it made the upcoming reality check even harder.

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theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

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The hypothesis that the Anglo-Saxon axis is pivotal to the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is only partly true. Germany is actually Ukraine’s second largest arms supplier, after the United States. Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged a new arms package worth 700 million euros, including additional tanks, munitions and Patriot air defence systems at the Nato summit in Vilnius, putting Berlin, as he said, at the very forefront of military support for Ukraine.

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius stressed, “By doing this, we’re making a significant contribution to strengthening Ukraine’s staying power.” However, the pantomime playing out may have multiple motives.

Fundamentally, Germany’s motivation is traceable to the crushing defeat by the Red Army and has little to do with Ukraine as such. The Ukraine crisis has provided the context for accelerating Germany’s militarisation. Meanwhile, revanchist feelings are rearing their head and there is a “bipartisan consensus” between Germany’s leading centrist parties — CDU, SPD and Green Party — in this regard.

In an interview in the weekend, the CDU’s leading foreign and defence expert Roderich Kiesewetter (an ex-colonel who headed the Association of Reservists of the Bundeswehr from 2011 to 2016) suggested that if conditions warrant in the Ukraine situation, the Nato should consider to “cut off Kaliningrad from the Russian supply lines. We see how Putin reacts when he is under pressure.” Berlin is still smarting under the surrender of the ancient Prussian city of Königsberg in April 1945.

Stalin ordered 1.5 million Soviet troops supported by several thousand tanks and aircraft to attack the crack Nazi Panzer divisions deeply entrenched in Königsberg. The capture of the heavily fortified stronghold of Königsberg by the Soviet army was celebrated in Moscow with an artillery salvo by 324 cannons firing 24 shells each.

Evidently, Kiesewetter’s remarks show that nothing is forgotten or forgiven in Berlin even after 8 decades. Thus, Germany is the Biden Administration’s closest ally in the war against Russia. The German government has stated its understanding for the Biden administration’s controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster ammunition. The government spokesman commented in Berlin, “We are certain that our US friends did not make their decision lightly, to deliver this sort of munition.”

President Frank-Walter Steinmeier remarked, “In the current situation, one should not obstruct the USA.” Indeed, the top CDU figure Kiesewetter suggested in an interview with the Green Party-affiliated daily “taz” that not only should Ukraine be given “guarantees, and if necessary, even provided with nuclear assistance, as an intermediary step to NATO membership.”

Coinciding with the NATO summit in Vilnius (July 11-12), Rheinmetal, the great 135-year old German arms manufacturing company, has disclosed that it is opening an armoured vehicle plant in western Ukraine at an undisclosed location in the next twelve weeks. To begin with, German Fuchs armoured personnel carriers will be built and repaired while there are plans afoot to manufacture ammunition and possibly even air defence systems and tanks.

Rheinmetall’s CEO told CNN on Monday that like other Ukrainian arms factories, the new plant could be protected from Russian air attack. Germany has more than doubled the 2022 allocation of €2 billion for upgrading Ukraine’s armed forces. It now touches around €5.4 billion with further plans to increase to €10.5 billion.

Now, is this all about Russia? Germany cannot be unaware that Ukraine has simply no hope on earth to defeat Russia militarily. Germany is playing the long game. It is creating equity in western Ukraine where it is not Russia but Poland that is its contender. Ever since the Tsarist army advanced into Galicia in 1914, Russia has had a difficult history with Ukrainian nationalists. If the current war in Ukraine spreads to western Ukraine, that cannot be Russia’s choice but out of some necessity forced upon it.

The Soviet victory in Ukraine in October 1944, the Red Army’s occupation of eastern Europe, and Allied diplomacy resulted in a redrawing of Poland’s western frontiers with Germany and Ukraine’s with Poland. Simply put, with compensation of German territories in the west, Poland agreed to the cession of Volhynia and Galicia in western Ukraine; a mutual population exchange created for the first time in centuries a clear ethnic, as well as political, Polish-Ukrainian border.

It is entirely conceivable that the ongoing Ukraine war will radically change the territorial boundaries of Ukraine in the east and south. Possibly, it can re-open the post-World War 2 settlement with regard to western Ukraine as well. Russia has repeatedly warned that Poland aims to reverse the cession of Volhynia and Galicia in western Ukraine. Such a turn of events will most certainly bring to the fore the issue of the German territories that are part of Poland today.

Perhaps, it was in anticipation of turbulence ahead that last October, eight months after the Russian intervention began in in February, Warsaw demanded WWII reparations from Berlin — an issue which Germany says was settled in 1990 — to the tune of €1.3 trillion.

Under the Potsdam Conference (1945), the “former eastern territories of Germany” comprising nearly one quarter (23.8 percent) of the Weimar Republic with the majority ceded to Poland. The remainder, consisting of northern East Prussia including the German city of Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad), was allocated to the Soviet Union.

Make no mistake about the importance of the Eastern border for German culture and politics. Indeed, there is always something volatile about a “handicapped” Great Power when a whole new intensity appears in political, economic and historical circumstances, which prompts those in power to turn ideas into reality, and revanchist and imperialistic discourses that were quietly but steadily streaming below the surface of the carefully considered diplomatic efforts begin to probe pan-nationalist expansion.

In retrospect, Germany’s — in particular, then foreign minister and current president Steinmeier’s — diabolical role to align Germany with the neo-Nazi elements during the regime change in Kiev in 2014 and the subsequent German perfidy in the implementation of the Minsk Agreement (“Steinmeier formula”), as admitted recently in February by former Chancellor Angela Merkel should not be forgotten.

Suffice to say, even as Russia is winning the Ukraine war, the concern of the German foreign policy makers once again faces the need to redefine what was German. Thus, the war in Ukraine is only the means to an end. Recent reports suggest that Berlin may be moving, finally, toward meeting Ukraine’s pending demand for Taurus cruise missiles with a range exceeding 500 kms and unique “multi-effect war head” that can be a game changer in the the combat dynamics on the battlefield and create the prerequisites for victory.

Equally, German soldiers already comprise about half of the Nato battlegroup already present in Lithuania. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said two weeks ago while on a visit to Vilnius that Germany is preparing the infrastructure to permanently base 4,000 soldiers (“a robust brigade”) to Lithuania so as to have the capability to maintain military flexibility at the Eastern flank. The decision has support from both Germany’s governing coalition and its main opposition.

The CDU foreign policy expert and member of the Bundestag, Kiesewetter called the idea of establishing German base in the Baltics a “decision of reason and reliability.” Indeed, there have been past attempts, historically speaking, to create German rule in the Baltics based on revisionist claims towards the new states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania where German colonists had settled as far back as in the 12th and 13th centuries.

#kaliningrad #germany #russia #nato #ukraine conflict #poland

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mariacallous · 9 months ago

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In February of last year, Donggang Jinhui Foodstuff, a seafood-processing company in Dandong, China, threw a party. It had been a successful year: a new plant had opened, and the company had doubled the amount of squid that it exported to the United States. The party, according to videos posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, featured singers, instrumentalists, dancers, fireworks, and strobe lights. One aspect of the company’s success seems to have been its use of North Korean workers, who are sent by their government to work in Chinese factories, in conditions of captivity, to earn money for the state. A seafood trader who does business with Jinhui recently estimated that it employed between fifty and seventy North Koreans. Videos posted by a company representative show machines labelled in Korean, and workers with North Korean accents explaining how to clean squid. At the party, the company played songs that are popular in Pyongyang, including “People Bring Glory to Our Party” (written by North Korea’s 1989 poet laureate) and “We Will Go to Mt. Paektu” (a reference to the widely mythologized birthplace of Kim Jong Il). Performers wore North Korean colors, and the country’s flag billowed behind them; in the audience, dozens of workers held miniature flags.

Drone footage played at the event showed off Jinhui’s twenty-one-acre, fenced-in compound, which has processing and cold-storage facilities and what appears to be a seven-floor dormitory for workers. The company touted a wide array of Western certifications from organizations that claim to check workplaces for labor violations, including the use of North Korean workers. When videos of the party were posted online, a commenter—presumably befuddled, because using these workers violates U.N. sanctions—asked, “Aren’t you prohibited from filming this?”

Like Jinhui, many companies in China rely on a vast program of forced labor from North Korea. (Jinhui did not respond to requests for comment.) The program is run by various entities in the North Korean government, including a secretive agency called Room 39, which oversees activities such as money laundering and cyberattacks, and which funds the country’s nuclear- and ballistic-missile programs. (The agency is so named, according to some defectors, because it is based in the ninth room on the third floor of the Korean Workers’ Party headquarters.) Such labor transfers are not new. In 2012, North Korea sent some forty thousand workers to China. A portion of their salaries was taken by the state, providing a vital source of foreign currency for Party officials: at the time, a Seoul-based think tank estimated that the country made as much as $2.3 billion a year through the program. Since then, North Koreans have been sent to Russia, Poland, Qatar, Uruguay, and Mali.

In 2017, after North Korea tested a series of nuclear and ballistic weapons, the United Nations imposed sanctions that prohibit foreign companies from using North Korean workers. The U.S. passed a law that established a “rebuttable presumption” categorizing work by North Koreans as forced labor unless proven otherwise, and levying fines on companies that import goods tied to these workers. China is supposed to enforce the sanctions in a similar manner. Nevertheless, according to State Department estimates, there are currently as many as a hundred thousand North Koreans working in the country. Many work at construction companies, textile factories, and software firms. Some also process seafood. In 2022, according to Chinese officials running pandemic quarantines, there were some eighty thousand North Koreans just in Dandong, a hub of the seafood industry.

Last year, I set out with a team of researchers to document this phenomenon. We reviewed leaked government documents, promotional materials, satellite imagery, online forums, and local news reports. We watched hundreds of cell-phone videos published on social-media sites. In some, the presence of North Koreans was explicit. Others were examined by experts to detect North Korean accents, language usage, and other cultural markers. Reporting in China is tightly restricted for Western reporters. But we hired Chinese investigators to visit factories and record footage of production lines. I also secretly sent interview questions, through another group of investigators and their contacts, to two dozen North Koreans—twenty workers and four managers—who had recently spent time in Chinese factories. Their anonymous responses were transcribed and sent back to me.

The workers, all of whom are women, described conditions of confinement and violence at the plants. Workers are held in compounds, sometimes behind barbed wire, under the watch of security agents. Many work gruelling shifts and get at most one day off a month. Several described being beaten by the managers sent by North Korea to watch them. “It was like prison for me,” one woman said. “At first, I almost vomited at how bad it was, and, just when I got used to it, the supervisors would tell us to shut up, and curse if we talked.” Many described enduring sexual assault at the hands of their managers. “They would say I’m fuckable and then suddenly grab my body and grope my breasts and put their dirty mouth on mine and be disgusting,” a woman who did product transport at a plant in the city of Dalian said. Another, who worked at Jinhui, said, “The worst and saddest moment was when I was forced to have sexual relations when we were brought to a party with alcohol.” The workers described being kept at the factories against their will, and being threatened with severe punishment if they tried to escape. A woman who was at a factory called Dalian Haiqing Food for more than four years said, “It’s often emphasized that, if you are caught running away, you will be killed without a trace.”

In all, I identified fifteen seafood-processing plants that together seem to have used more than a thousand North Korean workers since 2017. China officially denies that North Korean laborers are in the country. But their presence is an open secret. “They are easy to distinguish,” a Dandong native wrote in a comment on Bilibili, a video-sharing site. “They all wear uniform clothes, have a leader, and follow orders.” Often, footage of the workers ends up online. In a video from a plant called Dandong Yuanyi Refined Seafoods, a dozen women perform a synchronized dance in front of a mural commemorating Youth Day, a North Korean holiday. The video features a North Korean flag emoji and the caption “Beautiful little women from North Korea in Donggang’s cold-storage facility.” (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Remco Breuker, a North Korea specialist at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, told me, “Hundreds of thousands of North Korean workers have for decades slaved away in China and elsewhere, enriching their leader and his party while facing unconscionable abuse.”

In late 2023, an investigator hired by my team visited a Chinese plant called Donggang Xinxin Foodstuff. He found hundreds of North Korean women working under a red banner that read, in Korean, “Let’s carry out the resolution of the 8th Congress of the Workers’ Party.” (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Soon afterward, the investigator visited a nearby plant called Donggang Haimeng Foodstuff, and found a North Korean manager sitting at a wooden desk with two miniature flags, one Chinese and one North Korean. The walls around the desk were mostly bare except for two portraits of the past North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The manager took our investigator to the workers’ cafeteria to eat a North Korean cold-noodle dish called naengmyeon, and then gave him a tour of the processing floor. Several hundred North Korean women dressed in red uniforms, plastic aprons, and white rubber boots stood shoulder to shoulder at long metal tables under harsh lights, hunched over plastic baskets of seafood, slicing and sorting products by hand. “They work hard,” the manager said. The factory has exported thousands of tons of fish to companies that supply major U.S. retailers, including Walmart and ShopRite. (A spokesperson for Donggang Haimeng said that it does not hire North Korean workers.)

At times, China aggressively conceals the existence of the program. Alexander Dukalskis, a political-science professor at University College Dublin, said that workers have a hard time making their conditions known. “They’re in a country where they may not speak the language, are under surveillance, usually living collectively, and have no experience in contacting journalists,” he said. In late November, after my team’s investigators visited several plants, authorities distributed pamphlets on the country’s anti-espionage laws. Local officials announced that people who try “to contact North Korean workers, or to approach the workplaces of North Korean workers, will be treated as engaging in espionage activities that endanger national security, and will be punished severely.” They also warned that people who were found to be working in connection with foreign media outlets would face consequences under the Anti-Espionage Act.

Dandong, a city of more than two million people, sits on the Yalu River, just over the border from North Korea. The Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge links Dandong to the North Korean city of Sinuiju. A second bridge, bombed during the Korean War, still extends partway across the river, and serves as a platform from which Chinese residents can view the North Koreans living six hundred yards away. The Friendship Bridge is one of the Hermit Kingdom’s few gateways to the world. Some trade with North Korea is allowed under U.N. sanctions, and nearly seventy per cent of the goods exchanged between that country and China travel across this bridge. At least one department store in Dandong keeps a list of products preferred by North Korean customers. Shops sell North Korean ginseng, beer, and “7.27” cigarettes, named for the date on which the armistice ending the Korean War was signed. The city is home to a museum about the conflict, officially called the Memorial Hall of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. On boat tours, Chinese tourists purchase bags of biscuits to toss to children on the North Korean side of the river.

Government officials carefully select workers to send to China, screening them for their political loyalties to reduce the risk of defections. To qualify, a person must generally have a job at a North Korean company and a positive evaluation from a local Party official. “These checks start at the neighborhood,” Breuker said. Candidates who have family in China, or a relative who has already defected, can be disqualified. For some positions, applicants under twenty-seven years of age who are unmarried must have living parents, who can be punished if they try to defect, according to a report from the South Korean government; applicants over twenty-seven must be married. North Korean authorities even select for height: the country’s population is chronically malnourished, and the state prefers candidates who are taller than five feet one, to avoid the official embarrassment of being represented abroad by short people. Once selected, applicants go through pre-departure training, which can last a year and often includes government-run classes covering everything from Chinese customs and etiquette to “enemy operations” and the activities of other countries’ intelligence agencies. (The North Korean government did not respond to requests for comment.)

The governments of both countries coördinate to place workers, most of whom are women, with seafood companies. The logistics are often handled by local Chinese recruitment agencies, and advertisements can be found online. A video posted on Douyin this past September announced the availability of twenty-five hundred North Koreans, and a commenter asked if they could be sent to seafood factories. A post on a forum advertised five thousand workers; a commenter asked if any spoke Mandarin, and the poster replied, “There is a team leader, management, and an interpreter.” A company called Jinuo Human Resources posted, “I am a human-resources company coöperating with the embassy, and currently have a large number of regular North Korean workers.” Several people expressed interest. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)

Jobs in China are coveted in North Korea, because they often come with contracts promising salaries of around two hundred and seventy dollars a month. (Similar work in North Korea pays just three dollars a month.) But the jobs come with hidden costs. Workers usually sign two- or three-year contracts. When they arrive in China, managers confiscate their passports. Inside the factories, North Korean workers wear different uniforms than Chinese workers. “Without this, we couldn’t tell if one disappeared,” a manager said. Shifts run as long as sixteen hours. If workers attempt to escape, or complain to people outside the plants, their families at home can face reprisals. One seafood worker described how managers cursed at her and flicked cigarette butts. “I felt bad, and I wanted to fight them, but I had to endure,” she said. “That was when I was sad.”

Workers get few, if any, holidays or sick days. At seafood plants, the women sleep in bunk beds in locked dormitories, sometimes thirty to a room. One worker, who spent four years processing clams in Dandong, estimated that more than sixty per cent of her co-workers suffered from depression. “We regretted coming to China but couldn’t go back empty-handed,” she said. Workers are forbidden to tune in to local TV or radio. They are sometimes allowed to leave factory grounds—say, to go shopping—but generally in groups of no more than three, and accompanied by a minder. Mail is scrutinized by North Korean security agents who also “surveil the daily life and report back with official reports,” one manager said. Sometimes the women are allowed to socialize. In a video titled “North Korean beauties working in China play volleyball,” posted in 2022, women in blue-and-white uniforms exercise on the grounds of the Dandong Omeca Food seafood plant. (The company that owns the plant did not respond to requests for comment.) A commenter wrote, “The joy of poverty. That’s just how it is.”

Factories typically give the women’s money to their managers, who take cuts for themselves and the government, and hold on to the rest until the workers’ terms in China end. Kim Jieun, a North Korean defector who now works for Radio Free Asia, said that companies tell workers their money is safer this way, because it could be stolen in the dormitories. But, in the end, workers often see less than ten per cent of their promised salary. One contract that I reviewed stipulated that around forty dollars would be deducted each month by the state to pay for food. More is sometimes deducted for electricity, housing, heat, water, insurance, and “loyalty” payments to the state. Managers also hold on to wages to discourage defections. The women have been warned, Kim added, that if they try to defect “they will be immediately caught by Chinese CCTV cameras installed everywhere.” This past October, Chinese authorities repatriated around six hundred North Korean defectors. “China does not recognize North Korean defectors as refugees,” Edward Howell, who teaches politics at Oxford University, told me. “If they are caught by Chinese authorities, they will be forcibly returned to the D.P.R.K., where they face harsh punishment in labor camps.”

Chinese companies have significant incentives to use North Korean workers. They’re typically paid only a quarter of what local employees earn. And they are generally excluded from mandatory social-welfare programs (regarding retirement, medical treatment, work-related injury, and maternity), which further reduces costs. In 2017, Dandong’s Commerce Bureau announced a plan to create a cluster of garment factories that would use North Korean labor. The bureau’s Web site noted that all such workers undergo political screenings to make sure they are “rooted, red, and upright.” “The discipline among the workers is extremely strong,” it added. “There are no instances of absenteeism or insubordination toward leadership, and there are no occurrences of feigning illness or delaying work.” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions for this piece, but last year the Chinese Ambassador to the U.N. wrote that China has abided by sanctions even though it has sustained “great losses” as a result. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently said that China and North Korea have “enjoyed long-standing friendly ties,” adding, “The United States needs to draw lessons, correct course, step up to its responsibility, stop heightening the pressure and sanctions, stop military deterrence, and take effective steps to resume meaningful dialogue.”

North Koreans face difficult circumstances across industries. In January of this year, more than two thousand workers rioted in Jilin Province, breaking sewing machines and kitchen utensils, when they learned that their wages would be withheld. Many North Koreans—perhaps thousands—work in Russian logging, in brutal winter weather without proper clothing. Hundreds have been found working in the Russian construction industry; some lived in shipping containers or in the basements of buildings under construction, because better accommodations were not provided. One recounted working shifts that lasted from 7:30 A.M. to 3 A.M. In preparation for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, held in Russia and Qatar, thousands of North Koreans were sent to build stadiums and luxury apartments. A subcontractor who worked alongside the North Koreans in Russia told the Guardian that they lived in cramped spaces, with as many as eight people packed into a trailer, in an atmosphere of fear and abuse like “prisoners of war.”

Although it’s illegal in the U.S. to import goods made with North Korean labor, the law can be difficult to enforce. Some eighty per cent of seafood consumed in America, for example, is imported, and much of it comes from China through opaque supply chains. To trace the importation of seafood from factories that appear to be using North Korean labor, my team reviewed trade data, shipping contracts, and the codes that are stamped on seafood packages to monitor food safety. We found that, since 2017, ten of these plants have together shipped more than a hundred and twenty thousand tons of seafood to more than seventy American importers, which supplied grocery stores including Walmart, Giant, ShopRite, and the online grocer Weee! The seafood from these importers also ended up at major restaurant chains, like McDonald’s, and with Sysco, the largest food distributor in the world, which supplies almost half a million restaurants, as well as the cafeterias on American military bases, in public schools, and for the U.S. Congress. (Walmart, Weee!, and McDonald’s did not respond to requests for comment. Giant’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, and ShopRite’s parent company, Wakefern, said their suppliers claimed that they currently do not source from the Chinese plant in question, and added that audit reports showed no evidence of forced labor.)

Two of the plants that investigators from my team visited—Dandong Galicia Seafood and Dalian Haiqing Food—had an estimated fifty to seventy North Korean workers apiece. One worker who has been employed at Galicia said that the managers are “so stingy with money that they don’t allow us to get proper medical treatment even when we are sick.” Galicia and Haiqing have shipped roughly a hundred thousand tons of seafood to American importers since 2017, and Haiqing also shipped to an importer that supplies the cafeterias of the European Parliament. (Dalian Haiqing Food said that it “does not employ overseas North Korean workers.” Dandong Galicia Seafood did not respond to requests for comment. One of the U.S. importers tied to Haiqing, Trident Seafoods, said that audits “found no evidence or even suspicion” of North Korean labor at the plant. Several companies, including Trident, High Liner, and Sysco, said that they would sever ties with the plant while they conducted their own investigations. A spokesperson for the European Parliament said that its food contractor did not supply seafood from the plant.) Breuker, from Leiden University, told me that American customers quietly benefit from this arrangement. “This labor-transfer system is for North Korea and China as economically successful as it is morally reprehensible,” he said. “It’s also a boon for the West because of the cheap goods we get as a result.”

North Korea doesn’t just export seafood workers; it also exports fish—another means by which the government secures foreign currency. Importing North Korean seafood is forbidden by U.N. sanctions, but it also tends to be inexpensive, which encourages companies to skirt the rules. Sometimes Chinese fishing companies pay the North Korean government for illegal licenses to fish in North Korea’s waters. Sometimes they buy fish from other boats at sea: a letter from a North Korean, leaked in 2022, proposed selling ten thousand tons of squid to a Chinese company in return for more than eighteen million dollars and five hundred tons of diesel fuel. Sometimes the seafood is trucked over the border. This trade is poorly hidden. In October, a Chinese man who said his last name was Cui posted a video on Douyin advertising crabs from North Korea. When someone commented, “The goods can’t be shipped,” Cui responded with laughing emojis. In other videos, he explained that he operated a processing plant in North Korea, and gave information on the timing of shipments that he planned to send across the border. When I contacted Cui, he said that he had stopped importing North Korean seafood in 2016 (though the videos were actually from last year), and added, “It’s none of your business, and I don’t care who you are.” My team found that seafood from North Korea was imported by several American distributors, including HF Foods, which supplies more than fifteen thousand Asian restaurants in the U.S. (HF Foods did not respond to requests for comment.)

Chinese companies often claim that they are in compliance with labor laws because they have passed “social audits,” which are conducted by firms that inspect worksites for abuses. But half the Chinese plants that we found using North Korean workers have certifications from the Marine Stewardship Council, which is based in the U.K. and sets standards for granting sustainability certifications, but only to companies that have also passed social audits or other labor assessments. (Jackie Marks, an M.S.C. spokesperson, told me that these social audits are conducted by a third party, and that “We make no claims about setting standards on labor.”) Last year, one of my team’s investigators visited a seafood-processing plant in northeastern China called Dandong Taifeng Foodstuff. The company has been designated a “national brand,” a status reserved for the country’s most successful companies, and supplies thousands of tons of seafood to grocery stores in the U.S. and elsewhere. At the plant, our investigator was given a tour by a North Korean manager. On the factory floor, which was lit by bright fluorescent bulbs, more than a hundred and fifty North Korean women, most of them under thirty-five years old, wore head-to-toe white protective clothing, plastic aprons, white rubber boots, and red gloves that went up to their elbows. They stood with their heads down, moving red, yellow, and blue plastic bins of seafood. Water puddled at their feet. “Quick, quick,” one woman said to the other members of her small group. (Taifeng did not respond to requests for comment.) Just weeks after that visit, the plant was recertified by the Marine Stewardship Council.

Marcus Noland, who works at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said, of social audits within the seafood industry, “The basic stance appears to be ‘See no evil.’ ” Skepticism of such audits is growing. In 2021, the U.S. State Department said that social audits in China are generally inadequate for identifying forced labor, in part because auditors rely on government translators and rarely speak directly to workers. Auditors can be reluctant to anger the companies that have hired them, and workers face reprisals for reporting abuses. This past November, U.S. Customs and Border Protection advised American companies that a credible assessment would require an “unannounced independent, third-party audit” and “interviews completed in native language.” Liana Foxvog, who works at a nonprofit called the Worker Rights Consortium, argues that assessments should involve other checks too, including off-site worker interviews. But she noted that most audits in China fall short even of C.B.P.’s standards.

Joshua Stanton, an attorney based in Washington, D.C., who helped draft the American law that banned goods produced with North Korean labor, argues that the government is not doing enough to enforce it. “The U.S. government will need to put more pressure on American companies, and those companies need to be more diligent about their suppliers and their supply chains, or face stricter sanctions,” he said. Chris Smith, a Republican congressman from New Jersey and a specialist on China, noted that social audits “create a Potemkin village.” He added, “The consequence is that millions of dollars, even federal dollars, are going to Chinese plants using North Korean workers, and that money then goes right into the hands of Kim Jong Un’s regime, which uses the money to arm our adversaries and repress its own people.”

Late last year, when I set out to contact North Koreans who had been sent to China, I ran into significant obstacles. Western journalists are barred from entering North Korea, and citizens of the country are strictly prohibited from talking freely to reporters. I hired a team of investigators in South Korea who employ contacts in North Korea to get information out of the country for local and Western news outlets—for example, about food shortages, power outages, or the rise of anti-government graffiti. The investigators compiled a list of two dozen North Koreans who had been dispatched to a half-dozen different Chinese factories, most of whom had since returned home. The investigators’ contacts then met with these workers in secret, one-on-one, so that the workers wouldn’t know one another’s identity. The meetings usually occurred in open fields, or on the street, where it’s harder for security agents to conduct surveillance.

The workers were told that their responses would be shared publicly by an American journalism outlet. They faced considerable risk speaking out; experts told me that, if they were caught, they could be executed, and their families put in prison camps. But they agreed to talk because they believe that it is important for the rest of the world to know what happens to workers who are sent to China. The North Korean contacts transcribed their answers by hand, and then took photos of the completed questionnaires and sent them, using encrypted phones, to the investigators, who sent them to me. North Koreans who are still in China were interviewed in a similar fashion. Because of these layers of protection, it is, of course, impossible to fully verify the content of the interviews. But the responses were reviewed by experts to make sure that they are consistent with what is broadly known about the work-transfer program, and in line with interviews given by North Korean defectors. (Recently, the investigators checked in on the interviewers and interviewees, and everyone was safe.)

In their answers, the workers described crushing loneliness. The work was arduous, the factories smelled, and violence was common. “They kicked us and treated us as subhuman,” the worker who processed clams in Dandong said. Asked if they could recount any happy moments, most said that there had been none. A few said that they felt relieved when they returned home and got some of their pay. “I was happy when the money wasn’t all taken out,” the woman who did product transport in Dalian said. One woman said that her experience at a Chinese plant made her feel like she “wanted to die.” Another said that she often felt tired and upset while she was working, but kept those thoughts to herself to avoid reprisals. “It was lonely,” she said. “I hated the military-like communal life.”

The most striking pattern was the women’s description of sexual abuse. Of twenty workers, seventeen said that they had been sexually assaulted by their North Korean managers. They described a range of tactics used to coerce them into having sex. Some managers pretended to wipe something from their uniforms, only to grope them. Some called them into their offices as if there were an emergency, then demanded sex. Others asked them to serve alcohol at a weekend party, then assaulted them there. “When they drank, they touched my body everywhere like playing with toys,” a woman said. The woman who did product transport in Dalian said, “When they suddenly put their mouths to mine, I wanted to throw up.” If the women didn’t comply, the managers could become violent. The worker who was at Haiqing for more than four years said, of her manager, “When he doesn’t get his way sexually, he gets angry and kicks me. . . . He calls me a ‘fucking bitch.’ ” Three of the women said that their managers had forced workers into prostitution. “Whenever they can, they flirt with us to the point of nausea and force us to have sex for money, and it’s even worse if you’re pretty,” another worker at Haiqing said. The worker from Jinhui noted, “Even when there was no work during the pandemic, the state demanded foreign-currency funds out of loyalty, so managers forced workers to sell their bodies.” The worker who spent more than four years at Haiqing said, of the managers, “They forced virgin workers into prostitution, claiming that they had to meet state-set quotas.”

The pandemic made life more difficult for many of the women. When China closed its borders, some found themselves trapped far from home. Often, their workplaces shut down, and they lost their incomes. North Korean workers sometimes pay bribes to government officials to secure posts in China, and, during the pandemic, many borrowed these funds from loan sharks. The loans, typically between two and three thousand dollars, came with high interest rates. Because of work stoppages in China, North Korean workers were unable to pay back their loans, and loan sharks sent thugs to their relatives’ homes to intimidate them. Some of their families had to sell their houses to settle the debts. In 2023, according to Radio Free Asia, two North Korean women at textile plants killed themselves. The worker who told me that she wanted to die said that such deaths are often kept hidden. “If someone dies from suicide, then the manager is responsible, so they keep it under wraps to keep it from being leaked to other workers or Chinese people,” she said.

This past year, pandemic restrictions were lifted, and the border between China and North Korea reopened. In August, some three hundred North Korean workers boarded ten buses in Dandong to go back home. Police officers lined up around the buses to prevent defections. In photos and a video of the event, some of the women can be seen hurriedly preparing to load large suitcases onto a neon-green bus, then riding away across the Friendship Bridge. In September, another three hundred boarded a passenger train to Sinuiju, and two hundred were repatriated by plane. Workers who return face intense questioning by officials. “They asked about every single thing that happened every day from morning to evening in China, about other workers, supervisors, and agents,” the worker who processed clams in Dandong explained. As 2023 ended, the North Korean government began planning to dispatch its next wave of workers. In the past couple of years, according to reporting by Hyemin Son, a North Korean defector who works for Radio Free Asia, labor brokers have requested that Chinese companies pay a large advance; they were being asked to pay ahead of time, one broker told her, because “Chinese companies cannot operate without North Korean manpower.”

Some North Korean workers have yet to go home. One woman said that she has spent the past several years gutting fish at a processing plant in Dalian. She described working late into the night and getting sores in her mouth from stress and exhaustion. In the questionnaire, I had asked about the worst part of her job, and she said, “When I am forced to have sex.” She also described a sense of imprisonment that felt suffocating. “If you show even the slightest attitude, they will treat you like an insect,” she said. “Living a life where we can’t see the outside world as we please is so difficult that it’s killing us.” ♦

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