#iraqis photographers

[wearepeace]

“The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” ― Harry S. Truman

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Balad, Iraq

A rare albino Eurasian otter after being found by a fisherman in the Tigris River

Photograph: Media Office Of Iraqi Green Climate Organisation/Reuters

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

Stan Honda is a notable New York-based Asian American photojournalist who has worked for several publications, especially Agence France-Presse. In 2011, he collaborated with Minnesota printmaker and book artist Fred Hagstrom��to produce this artists book, When I First Arrived in Baghdad, from Hagstrom’s Strong Silent Type Press in a limited edition of 35 copies signed by the artist/printer. Hagstrom silkscreened Honda’s images and reflections from his assignments in Iraq, and bound them between printed metal covers using a wire-edge binding. The font is Futura. Fred Hagstrom writes:

I first contacted Stan Honda . . . in the days after September 11th. He took some of the most moving photographs of that day, including some of business people shrouded in dust and trying to get home after the collapse of the towers. These have become some of the most iconic images of that day. I was struck by the human qualities in his photos and invited him to speak at my school. We stayed in touch, and I have seen that same quality in much of his later work, including his photos from the gulf after Katrina, and from two trips to Iraq. He seems to always have a sense for bringing out the human part of these stories. For this book, I asked him to give me a selection of his Iraq photos and to respond to a brief sort of interview for me to generate the text. I then printed the photos in silk-screen, pairing them with his words. Together they do the best of journalism: a human perspective on a complicated moment in history.

View other posts of books by Fred Hagstrom.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

[totallyhussein-blog]

Explore ancient Iraq through the eyes of Latif Al Ani

The New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is hosting an exhibition you will not want to miss!

'Through the Lens: Latif Al Ani’s Visions of Ancient Iraq' presents the work of Latif Al Ani (1932-2021), the founding father of Iraqi photography.

Curated by Pedro Azara, Professor of aesthetics at the Barcelona School of Architecture, 'Through the Lens' is the first major show of Al Ani’s work in New York.

The exhibition will open on Nov. 8th and will continue until Feb. 5th 2024. Admission is free and open to the public.

[sheltiechicago]

Akre, Iraq

Iraqi Kurds carry torches as they celebrate Nowruz, a festival that marks the first day of spring as well as the Kurdish and Persian new year. Nowruz is included in Unesco’s list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity

Photograph: Ismael Adnan/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock

[dozydawn]

“A young Iraqi ballerina peeps at the stage from behind a curtain during the Baghdad School of Music and Ballet's end-of-year performance.”

Photographed by Jean Marc Mojon.

27 April 2017.

[on-a-lucky-tide]

With Price's old man dead, it falls to Mac to do the embarrassing shit like show Nik the proverbial baby photos. In the absence of a bare-arsed Baby Price in the bath tub, Mac falls back on all the embarrassing, grainy photographs and footage he has of Lieutenant Price fresh out of selection being an absolute goofball on main.

Mac has a few with Nik and the 141 at the stag do and whips out a video he has of Price dancing to Soulja Boy with a bunch of Iraqi boys in Helmand. Price is twenty-one in the video. A whole year before he met Nikolai in The Phoenix and convinced him to flip sides. It instantly becomes Nik's favourite image of his captain; laughing, bright-eyed, and floundering around like a Labrador pup with paws that are too big for him.

Soap and Gaz watch the bloody thing on repeat and spend the next few weeks until the wedding perfecting the moves. Price is just about hammered enough at his own reception that he joins in when they get the DJ to play the tune so they can tear up the dance floor.

Old man still has the moves sixteen years later.

[todaysdocument]

US Army (USA) Soldiers of Native American Indian heritage, participate in a game of Native American Indian Stick Ball 

Record Group 142: Records of the Tennessee Valley AuthoritySeries: Photographs Promoting the Use of ElectricityFile Unit: Chattanooga Electric Show

US Army (USA) Soldiers of Native American Indian heritage, participate in a game of Native American Indian Stick Ball during the Native American Inter-Tribal Pow Wow held at Al Taqaddum, Iraq, during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. The Pow Wow was held to honor all past, present, and future Native American Veterans, and this events marks the first time that a Pow Wow was held in a Combat Zone by Native Americans

This color photograph shows a group of men and women mostly in green army t-shirts playing a stick ball game.  A small ball is in the air above them.  Three people hold short sticks.  The ground is all light colored sand.  There is a tall pole near the group.

[divinum-pacis]

April 2024: Dohuk, Iraq Iraqi Yazidis light candles outside the Temple of Lalish in a valley near the Kurdish city during a ceremony marking the Yazidi new year Photograph: Safin Hamid/AFP/Getty Images

[mariacallous]

One can only rejoice in the demise of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Much is uncertain about Syria’s future, but there is no question that the 24 years of Assad’s rule, preceded by 30 years under his comparably brutal father, Hafez al-Assad, have been utter hell for the Syrian people. No crime was too heinous for the Assads as they did whatever it took to retain power. Few governments worldwide have been as ruthless.

The catalogue of Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities quickly transcends the toolbox of a run-of-the-mill dictator. It is deeply moving, if horrifying, to see people emerge from his prisons after decades in custody. In most countries, families can learn about their loved ones in detention, but few people departed from Assad’s worst prisons, leaving the inmates completely isolated. Their families had no idea if they were still alive.

Many were not. A Syrian military police photographer who adopted the code name “Caesar” had the unenviable task of documenting the bodies of Syrians who had been executed or tortured to death. (Even dictatorships want assurance that their orders are being carried out.) In August 2013, Caesar defected, taking with him tens of thousands of photographs showing at least 6,786 bodies of people who had died in Syrian government custody. Most had been detained by just five intelligence agency branches in Damascus, their bodies sent to at least two military hospitals in Damascus between May 2011, as Assad crushed an initially peaceful uprising against his rule, and when Caesar fled Syria.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) documented 157,634 people who had been arrested between March 2011 and August 2024 and who remained in custody. Many had been forcibly disappeared. These included 5,274 children and 10,221 women. For some, we will only now begin to learn of their fates.

Assad’s slaughter was not limited to prisons. Having inherited his father’s chemical weapons program, he was a rare leader who used these banned weapons against his own people. (The only other ones in recent history were Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons in his 1988 genocide against Iraqi Kurds, known as the “Anfal” campaign, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who deployed the nerve agent Novichok against selected dissidents.) In August 2013, for example, Syrian forces fired rockets filled with sarin gas on Ghouta, a rural area east of Damascus that at the time was held by the armed opposition. The attack killed an estimated 1,466 people, mostly women and children.

Under threat of military intervention after then-U.S. President Barack Obama had declared that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” Assad in September 2013 agreed to surrender his chemical weapons. However, because chlorine has legitimate uses, the government was not required to eliminate its chlorine stockpiles. Between 2014 and 2018, the Syrian military periodically used chlorine as a chemical weapon, even though such use violates the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria had ratified. In April 2014 alone, there were 10 attacks in which chlorine was dropped on civilians in villages in northern Syria. An April 2018 chlorine attack on Douma in rural Damascus killed 43 people. Moreover, the government secretly kept a stash of sarin, which it used most lethally in an April 2017 attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, killing at least 90 people.

(U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday mocked Obama for not having used military force to enforce his red line. However, when Trump, along with Britain and France, responded to the Douma attack by bombing three suspected Syrian chemical weapons facilities in April 2018, it “prompted defiant celebrations in Damascus … as it became clear that the limited attack posed no immediate threat to President Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power and would likely have no impact on the trajectory of the Syrian war,” as the Washington Post reported at the time.)

Horrible as chemical weapons are, their death toll was dwarfed by conventional bombing. The Syrian air force notoriously dropped “barrel bombs” on residential neighborhoods in parts of the country controlled by the armed opposition. Barrel bombs were improvised weapons: oil drums filled with explosives and metal fragments that were dropped without guidance from helicopters, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverized neighborhoods, destroyed entire buildings, and left broad strips of death and destruction. One of the most dreaded sounds of the conflict was the “swish-swish-swish” of the barrels as they tumbled, with people below waiting horrible seconds to learn whether they would survive.

When Russia joined the conflict in September 2015 to prop up Assad’s regime, the Syrian-Russian alliance attacked more precisely. Jets targeted hospitals, schools, markets, and apartment buildings—deliberate war-crime attacks on civilians and civilian institutions—with the aim of depopulating regions in the hope of facilitating follow-up ground attacks on the rebel forces who lived there. The devastation was so bad that many compared the destruction of eastern Aleppo to Russia’s decimation of Grozny during the Second Chechen War. Russian and Syrian government airstrikes have killed more than 100,000 Syrians since 2011, according to SNHR.

The government’s bombing and persecution forced more than 14 million Syrians to flee their homes, half abroad and half within Syria—more than any other country. That represents some two-thirds of Syria’s prewar population.

Assad also used starvation and deprivation to force opposition-held areas to surrender. In eastern Ghouta and eastern Aleppo, Syrian forces imposed a total siege. Even when humanitarian agencies occasionally were allowed to deliver medical supplies, the Syrian military would “delete”—or ban—much of what was most urgently needed, a blatant violation of the legal duty even in time of war to allow humanitarian access to people in need. Gradually, one by one, these areas succumbed, with occupants given the “choice” to take their chances under Assad’s rule or to board the government’s dreaded green buses for a one-way trip to Idlib in northwestern Syria, the last area under the rule of the armed opposition. Most chose Idlib.

Idlib borders Turkey, making a siege impossible, but the Syrian government, with Russia’s help, tried to limit humanitarian access even there. They used a deeply disputed ruling by U.N. lawyers, backed by Secretary-General António Guterres, that cross-border humanitarian aid required either the consent of the Assad government or an increasingly difficult-to-obtain U.N. Security Council resolution. Over time, the Russian and Syrian governments limited aid there. Meanwhile, the U.S. and other governments gradually reduced the aid they supplied, overburdened by new crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan and conscious that the Syrian government was siphoning off large amounts of the aid delivered through Damascus.

With Assad and his henchmen now on the run, the prospect of bringing them to justice for these mass atrocities is no longer theoretical. There are two options.

The first is for national prosecutors in countries outside Syria to file charges under the concept of universal jurisdiction, which allows any authorized national court to address certain of the most heinous crimes, including torture as well as the war crimes of attacking civilians and weaponizing health care. Several governments have already initiated such prosecutions, mainly for lower-level officials who happened to be in custody because they had fled Syria. For example, a German court convicted a Syrian military intelligence officer for overseeing a torture center and sentenced him to life in prison.

France has also charged Assad for the August 2013 sarin attack on eastern Ghouta. As a sitting head of state, Assad had arguably enjoyed immunity for such national prosecutions under a controversial International Court of Justice ruling. Having now been deposed, he no longer enjoys any such protection.

The second is for International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan to file charges. There is no question that Assad’s atrocities are worthy of ICC attention; Khan’s challenge has been jurisdiction. Syria never joined the court, and a U.N. Security Council effort in 2014 to confer jurisdiction was vetoed by Russia and China.

However, facing a similar challenge in Myanmar, Khan pursued a novel legal theory, obtaining jurisdiction by focusing on the Myanmar army’s mass forced deportation of Rohingya to Bangladesh, which is an ICC member. He is now seeking an arrest warrant for Myanmar’s junta leader. Despite the considerable global demands on him, Khan should use a similar theory to obtain jurisdiction over senior Syrian officials, including Assad, for their atrocities that drove hundreds of thousands of Syrians into Jordan, which is also an ICC member.

Such prosecutions are important not only as a measure of respect for the victims and an acknowledgment of their plight. They are also a critical tool for the future. We can only guess how Syria’s new rulers will act. Will they fall back on their jihadi roots, or will they abide by their recent more tolerant rhetoric? Establishing a precedent of accountability for the atrocities of the past would be a significant way for the international community to signal expectations for the future.

[wearepeace]

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” ― Rudyard Kipling

[captain-price-unofficially]

One of the few massively up-armored T-55 "Enigma" tanks knocked out during the Gulf War. According to some Iraqis, the official name was “Al Faw”. As the western name suggests, very little is known about the vehicle. It is estimated that no more than eight (but no fewer than five) Enigmas ever existed (based on photographs), with at least four (possibly five) on display in museums today.

[lonestarbattleship]

"Sailors aboard USS ENTERPRISE (CVN-65) man the rails as multidirectional Z-drive tugboats nudge the carrier to its pier at her homeport Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia. The carrier and its strike group are returning after completing a six-month deployment in support of the global war of terrorism (GWOT), including Operations IRAQI FREEDOM and ENDURING FREEDOM."

Photographed on February 29, 2004, by PH3 Sondra Howett and PHC Greg Mccreash

NARA: 6670304, 6670303, 6670305

[herpsandbirds]

Iraqi Spiny-tailed Lizard aka Iraqi Mastigure (Saara loricata), family Agamidae, found in Iraq and Iran

Herbivorous, an important seed disperser in its habitats.

photograph by Reptiles4all

[cleolinda]

Weekend Links, March 17, 2024

My posts

We have had another Trespasser Weirdness Incident at my house, so. Suffice it to say that the Hot & Vintage Movie Women tournament is my primary coping mechanism at this point, and bless @hotvintagepoll for all their work. All 257 polls are up, although many of them have already closed on a rolling basis these last two weeks. Hedy Lamarr vs Sonja Henie was the very last one, and it is a blowout like I have not seen since the time I asked if people throw away their movie theater trash. I think round 2 starts a week from Monday? I would like to apologize for reblogging every single poll, except that I’m not the least bit sorry. 

I posted propaganda several times--sometimes just because a contestant didn’t have much and I wanted to chip in (still in play: Juanita Moore and Martha Sleeper). But I also showed up specifically for Norma Shearer, Claire Bloom, Tallulah Bankhead, Deborah Kerr, a little bit for Joan Fontaine (poll here), Julie Christie (on my mom’s behalf), Gene Tierney, Paulette Goddard, and Ava Gardner. My loyalties will shift as we see who progresses, but I'm wearing the Ava jersey at this point.

Reblogs of interest

A couple of serious links:

The Jewish filmmakers who won an Oscar for The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust film, used their speech time to condemn what’s happening in Gaza. (It helps to read the quote as “as men who refute {their Jewishness and the Holocaust} being used as justification.” “Refute their Jewishness” jumps out weirdly at first glance and confused people.)

I can’t tell if the JKR defender/Holocaust denier in this ask knows they’re lying or just really didn’t know that transgender health books and surgery did, in fact, exist, and that the Nazis targeted them. If you need photographic evidence for future discussions, here you are. Side note: Don't believe everything your favorite childhood author tells you.

Posts that are not serious links or hot lady polls:

Of course, this week we celebrated the Ides of March. (Happy birthday to... Chocolate Guy Amaury Guichon??) Featuring:

Southern Mark Antony

If Mark Antony was Gen Z

“Oh not you as well, Brutus!”

Also, happy birthday this fine St. Patrick’s Day to Hozier, who was on the Wiggles once, and has a new EP coming out this Friday. Please join me in not being the least bit normal about it. 

The bredlik that the Fairy vs. Walrus debate needed

“Started tone matching my Iraqi corner store guy,” bless everyone involved

A fanfic summary that will hit you like a brick to the face

“Intrigue, Ink, and Drama Grip the Fountain Pen Community”

The Arthur Conan Doyle approach to fic comments

The Kate Middleton Mysteries (”The extent to which this is not Philip Marlowe’s problem is unbelievable”)

Noted power couple/chaos elementals Merchant Ivory

Help improving color in your art

Doggust 2023: the art of Jonathan Wesslund  

Video

Honestly the best part of “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars for me is Margot Robbie fighting for her life not to laugh

This domino project is honestly really upsetting to me, lmao (THE TIME IT MUST HAVE TAKEN!!)

Death: the bees told her

Puma chirps

A seal’s relaxing ice bath

The sacred texts

The reason we celebrate the Ides of March on Tumblr

Happy birthday to the Old as Balls gifset

A cat’s dating profile

Personal tag of the week

pixel art, because there are some incredible artists on here.

[rametarin]

Okay. So. Why DID American society vote for George W. in 2000? I'll tell you.

Last night I saw a youtube video I will not repeat that seemed to imply that if we had social media of today back in the late 90s, W. Bush would've never become president, "because facts would've come to light educating the voters."

This is such an incredibly naive and astonishingly ignorant thing to say, and it assumes the only reason people voted for any candidate was because they just didn't know what they stood for or what they believe or what that means for a candidate. That they were just a bunch of clueless bumpkins with no agency nor education nor drive and position of their own in the process, they just voted based on shallow 30-second "candidate good, theirs bad." and nothing else.

I am 40. We've been in a post 2000 George W. Bush presidency for more than half my life, at this point (Jesus Christ....)

Lets remove the hindsight is 20-20 of the Iraq War, Afghanistan, New Orleans and FEMA fiasco of the George W. Bush presidency for a minute. None of that stuff has happened yet.

It's the year 2,000. Bill Clinton is leaving the White House. People have been talking about George W. Bush, son of George HW Bush, since he threw his had in, the summer of 1999. People have known of Bush since his father was president.

American Society in the 90s was.. decompressing. That's worthy of a few paragraphs in and of itself.

First and foremost, American Society from the 40s to 91 raised its children, lived and became mature and grey on the premise that there were two major forces on earth at the time. The Americans embodied The West. New, free of classic imperialisms, dictators, private property owning, personal liberty loving. And, then there were the Soviets, whom followed principles that ideally envisioned a more purist, Marxist idea of law and society, where the state ("Society") owned everything and people lived equally under that.

The Soviets were ready and willing to steamroll over the rest of Europe to "save it" from capitalism, as evidenced by their massive fleet of, "steamroll immediate neighbors before unnamed enemies from afar can even get their boats in the water" tanks and heavily armored vehicles. And their tens of thousands of big, heavy tanks and demolition vehicles. They claimed they needed a massive land army and heavy tanks for "self-defense." And sycophants and sympathizers for the USSR outside of it claimed the Americans were the aggressors, imperialist and militant. Sometimes they would say that in comparison to the Soviets, as if the Soviets were just intellectuals, and sometimes they'd just say it as critique of the US as negative qualities that miraculously disqualified the US, but not the Soviets. Some real "you can't get me for things I haven't said, but there's lots of quiet parts not spoken here" stuff.

The Soviet Union was a shitshow of mismanagement and idealism and a circus of corruption that finally shit itself when its dreams died, after decades of careful propaganda and grassroots guerilla informational war that tried to disparage the American military's capabilities went up in smoke, as the Sadam Houssein regime got absolutely righteously SPANKED in the most photographed and video recorded war to exist at the time. Where the American Abrams and the British Challenger absolutely decimated 3,300 Iraqi T-72s and similar Soviet made tanks, and lost 30 tanks themselves. And even then, most of those were lost to accidents like falling off bridges, or friendly fire. So the Iraqi regime can only count 10 Coalition tanks. That's a KD ratio of about 1:330.

So good job on that one assessing the Soviet war capabilities, experts. Reformists stay winning, I guess. If you're hearing the laughter of children reverb through the battlefields of Ukraine, that's my voice from 33 god damned years ago at the propagandists that declared the US entering Iraq would just be a sandy version of Vietnam, where we do nothing but try and occupy and die by the thousand per year unable to meet any objectives or hold territory in the face of supposed superior Soviet armor.

And after their biggest trump card was exposed as a limp dick, which the Soviets always relied on to feel secure and content that, at the end of the day, even if the Americans and Western Europeans lived easier, more free lives, at least the USSR had the security of military supremacy, the Soviet delusion collapsed under itself and the entire dream just DIED. Matrix rejected, Soviet citizens disillusioned.

That's not hyperbole, after Saddam's thorough SPANKING that didn't even last an entire changing of the seasons before we swept up and went home, the Soviet Union croaked. Was it the final nail in the coffin? The final insult that did it? The disillusion, on top of the economic problems? I'd say it had something to do with it.

And in the west, our Very Progressive People(tm) have always had a kind of crypto-relationship with anticapitalists, open or crypto-Marxists and all of them liked to hide under liberalism. Not Big L Liberals themselves, but predatorily mimicing it. Even if they wanted liberalism to mean opposition to what they saw as the thing permitting racism.. which.. surprise surprise.. was capitalism.

But the thing is, they're pseudo-intellectuals. They did not want the stigma of openly stanning for socialism or communism, most of the time. They instead chose to convey themselves simply and purely as positive things. Like being "anti-racist," or being "anti-sexist." Wink wink. The fact they intrinsically tied these things to capitalism and western society, to where in order to be good and not oppressive you'd have to destroy and replace western society in its current form (its entire legal system and economic system) was kind of a lower rabbithole you had to go through. They'd still tout themselves as being big fans of justice and equality, even if unknown to you those words had MASSIVE asterisks that departed from the encyclopedic definitions of those words. And unless you were in their vibe and indoctrinated and agreed with them, they weren't about to tell you that.

But the trick was, how do you secretly get Americans to more easily agree with you without even knowing what they're agreeing to? How do you control their feelings and effectively put them down a logical and linguistic corridor so the only conclusion they reach is your logic's conclusion?

You rely on some dirty tricks. Peer pressure, gaslighting, cooking books and then braying about what an educated person you are for employing them. This was the world I grew up in. With little girls being oh-so educated by their buzz cut angry aunts and handed textbooks that were too advanced for them, but contained what amounted to proverbs and bible verses for them to throw out as platitudes and things you weren't allowed to argue with them over. ("Where's your PhD? :^)" )

So. What I'm getting at here is US Society had already been dealing with pseudo-intellectual gadflies, propaganda magazines and unscrupulous people joining publications with a political bias.

It got REALLY, REALLY egregious in the 90s. Radical Feminism was ubiquitously TERF-central, but you couldn't even argue against it as a white man, even if many of the points people like me made in the early 90s were true. Because, "you're a white MAN, you don't get to act like you know anything about feminism and what it means to be a GIRL." And they'd reject any opinion, give you no benefit of the doubt, reject any legitimacy anything you said had, because of its source.

And the thing about this is, the more they argued, the more cracks formed in the obfuscation. The less emotional impact having your younger female family turn on you as disingenuous, morally motivated weapons had on you. The more they would try to back up their arguments by citing the sources of the supposed intellectual professors and professionals they were quoting. The more their works could be scrutinized and made to bleed as men, not omnipotent narrators of science and truth.

The supposed anti-racists, supposeldy motivated by a world where no one is disrespected or made lesser by laws or policies that favored or disfavored people on the basis of race, cheering loudly for legislation that didn't discontinue racist policies, but ushered in "minority community protection" entrenchments, allowing "minorities" (almost uniformly just black people) access to free shit not because they were poor, but because they were black. In the same breath as telling white people they should not be permitted anything on the basis of their whiteness, and should, "get over" race. And in doing so, reveal themselves to not care about racism. And reveal their true values to be about treating race as class, and whites designated as oppressors. These are very different dynamics than trying to free a society from race based favoritism/disfavoritism policies.

So the "anti-racist" populists and their fringe viziers openly bragging about how they believed everybody but white people mattered, how national borders should not exist.. for America.. how they were glad millions of illegal immigrants were pouring in and would eventually be voting for their candidates in their own community's self-interests, and they'd happily vote to make sure the people paying taxes here would finance aid and benefits packages that non-Hispanic whites would not be allowed to enjoy the benefits of. Openly bragging about how "the whites have had enough." and that the poor only mattered if they weren't white.

The "Anti-sexists," which in discussions and arguments from angry radfems at the kitchen table had barked weird Gyno-Futurisms where men would be made obsolete and women would inherit society. How men were the cause and source of all wars, and under a feminist future, "society would equally share everything" and be kind and nurturing and some other shit that phased in and out depending on whether Daughter or Niece Dear felt more like being a spiritualist "witch" or an objective empirical scientist secular intellectual, that day. Where they'd demand all male spaces be made gender neutral and open to all, but open more spaces designated specifically and purely for women, with benefits for women just on the basis of being a woman, and tax the whole of society to make those happen. That women should have automatic positions arbitrarily opened up to remove any possibility women WOULDN'T be elected to share power, and loudly declaring all western art and literature featuring women was garbage, because you couldn't have good western literature and art in a society whose sexual values were garbage (this is hilariously circular and amounts to, "it's capitalist and not socialist, therefore, it's inescapably wrong.")

These were all things we learned as we sat by the supposed saccharine-swet "liberal" that hated all things sexist and racist, and beside them were their best buddies whom they shared literature with. They played Good Cop Bad Cop. They were literally being the Motte and Bailey argument of leftism. The general liberal progressive would set up the general platitudes that if you disagreed with, you were branded a reactionary or retro racist and traditionalist example of the white patriarchy, and then the radical would loudly shout you down while testing the waters of your peers for if they'd resist their own brand of spin on the subject and situations and facts they were beating you with.

So people got a taste of exactly what the very much not-liberal Progressive Leftist believed, and had in store, and through the impurity of the liberal tolerating their very not-liberal leftist friend, was going to allow to taint what should have been simple, acceptable policies.

Policies that were against relegating women to second class citizen status, policies that removed race from the equation in society and did not favor anyone or disfavor anyone based on their background, nor enshrine the importance of anyone's ethnic background.. and then promptly promised that everybody's race and background mattered, but white peoples, specifically. And then had the audacity to call people white supremacists and male chauvinists if they opposed this.

That was my childhood. Stumbling through realizing what bullshit was festering in the left, because according to their own propaganda, none of that was true or existed.

But don't get it twisted; I wasn't blind go the fact racists joined the republican party specifically to deny any benefits to people if it meant minorities would benefit too. Or the favoritism of rich people to rich people. Or the religious fundamentalists that believed in "family values" that used those avenues to push the idea of a monogamous marriage and expectation such would dominate exclusively under a Christian (or Jewish, to a lesser but not insignificant extent) lens. That was true, but not to the degree of evil the hard/far Leftist non-liberal was pushing it.

This is why George W. Bush was elected and even given a chance. Because with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Rodney King riots, the initial wide adoption of anti-racism and willingness to change from the propaganda of what they THOUGHT was true and the status quo, what they THOUGHT was the more left position, only to learn much of what they said were wild exaggerations, histrionic delusions and padded stats vilifying history and the status quo just to get people on their side to vote for what they wanted- which was banning guns, opening the borders, making sure people that weren't white had ample tax-payer driven benefits for the purposes of growing those demographics and securing their success at the expense of the majority. And the promise that more of this would come, the more power their fringe had in the left-wing.

This is why younger voters voted for Bush. Because the, "Racism is when white people oppress black people, Asian people and Indigenous people" crowd revealed their real face and said, "this is Leftism, and whether you like it or not, we're a packaged deal with liberals."

And the more general liberal just sat there smiling, not arguing with the radical, not confronting the radical, not disagreeing with the radical. Just playing the role of the enabling mom as the step-dad sexually abuses their child.

The black children from newly integrated suburbs with their first white friends, and their white liberal sisters that were taught from a young age that smart, progressive white girls should make sure their stupid male family members in this "stupid white supremacist patriarchal society" didn't cultivate racism, that they "challenged it' on radical feminist principles. Where at first, Sally seemed like a nice girl that had their back. But then revealed herself to just be a soapbox standing, histrionic mental abuser that would take every opportunity to get one over her male peers and show off how "anti-racist" she was, while toeing a line and trying not to overreach and destroy the delusion.

At the end of the 80s and towards the end of the 90s, those black children had grown up in a place where the white people that were trying to be courteous and respectful and open, just to get treated like shit by girls like Sally, called racist while Sally ran interference for things she didn't need to run interference for.

It's because of girls like the proverbial Sally (Social Justice Sally) that towards the end of the 90s, black people were writing N-word passes hand over fist and so many adopted a mindset (however brief) that we lived in a post-racism world. Because they saw far more accusations of racism than the sorts of racism they recognized or cared about among white people, and were offended on behalf of their white friends and community. It was so irritating and ideologically slanted and intellectually insulting, this is the origin of why the republicans got such a large spike among black people towards the end of the 90s.

Well. That, and how their very far-left peers tended to join with the likes of Farrakhan black supremacists.. And they weren't having that.

It was not because of a lack of information. It was not because we didn't have Twitter and Community Notes, or the algorithm giving us propaganda articles to read to correct misunderstandings or teach us what we didn't already know. Before the digital world and information outlets, we had sources of that information. We had pamphlets, we had reports from the government telling what we had then and what was coming, we had general ideas of where we were, and where we were going.

Put simply, people had the attitude that something was seriously wrong and rotten with the top of the democratic party for enabling and fascillitating the far-leftists, and giving them access to the platform. They were smarter than industrial wealth hogs and racists, and better able to be the +1 in any policy table.

People felt they could more easily police out the religious fundamentalists, white supremacists and financial oligarchs, while still holding policy to reflect gender and racial equality. Bush was not running on a platform of white supremacism, nor beliefs that put women back in the kitchen.

And after we experienced how the federal government handled WACO and Ruby Ridge (look those up), heard the very unflattering rumblings of what they thought of rural white Americans, the willingness to treat them like active militant hate groups and burn down their homes and kill their families over even PERCEIVED violations of federal law, and the promise of more of that to follow, the absurd crusades made to try and make firearms progressively more and more inaccessible to illegal, we figured maybe the illiberal left-wing was a bit too much of a liability to be in power.

George W. Bush was not voted into power because Americans didn't know anything. He was voted into power because Americans had too many bad personal experiences with the hanger-ons of the left, and hoped maybe the right wing could be spruced up a bit going into the new millenium.

And then the Islamic world attacked the west, financed directly and indirectly by limitless oil money and a network of interconnected cultural interests and sacred delusions, among which was the complete destruction of Israel and the Jews, and radical Islamic jyhad. And just by virtue of tackling this problem, with the supposedly anti-conflict bad press of the illiberal left not helping matters (thanks, smearists and propagandists), the right wing had to tackle Islamofascism and take the responsibility of blame for the conflict even existing at all.

As far as the public consensus, reinforced by hard-leftist propaganda goes, it's just white America trying to impose an evangelical death cult on some harmless religious and ethnic minorities in the middle east, based purely on Christian supremacism and white supremacism.

Meanwhile Obama, a democrat, willingly continued the policy of using drones to take out middle eastern Muslim mafioso families and royals, as they thinned the herds and worked to arrange peace across the Islamic world by curtailing crime bosses and radical structures of power that were leading to fundamentalist groups like ISIS and ISIL. And as messy as that looks in hindsight, just based purely on the structure of that religion and the social elements, it was inevitable. It was a question of how that was going to play out, not if it would.

Today, many countries that previously were on board with the Islamic populist belief of bulldozing Israel and getting every Jew out of it, want peace with the west and Israel, and are working to undo decades to centuries of fundamentalist conservatism. Which is the long term foreign policy goal, and has been, since even before the Ayatollah assumed Iran.

Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden all have been party to this Middle Eastern policy that has openly or secretly been dealing with the shadow war of Islamic theocratic expansionism and imperialism and terrorism as a means of physically and conquering the opposition. The idea that George Bush and the republicans just embody some warpigs fueled by manifest destiny and white supremacy is a very uncharitable reading of some very flawed individuals, with uncharitable assumptions of motivations, and the people that voted for him assumed to just be know-nothing morons that just didn't have informed consent, or malicious defenders of what is presumed the status quo, that has never been and will never truly be the modus operandi of the USA, even if some with fringe beliefs think it should.

Bush was voted in not because of ignorance or malice, but because he was an option, and at the time, they thought the opposition could be trusted with a change.

I anticipate to see more absurd takes that disagree with my lived experience. Statistically, it's inevitable. But it doesn't make it any less insulting to witness.