#it was about putting the jews of europe somewhere else

[turian]

obviously no more evidence is needed - this was already clear - but the fact that the zionist occupation claims a connection to the land they're stealing while also fucking destroying history inherent to it - because history does not support their settler colonial narrative or their violence - should make it even more obvious that this is only a fucking costume they're wearing

[indecisiveavocado]

using this to show goyim the kind of stuff jews face

brief note: for quotes, some were replying to other users. Because I do not want them to be harassed, I have removed their name when it appears, and if that bothers you, you are welcome to make a world where I don't need to worry about that. I have also generally not mentioned the name of the antisemites, although in some cases I have, generally if the rhetoric was ridiculously antisemitic and/or I considered it worth flagging so Jews would know they should probably block that user.

further brief note: trigger warnings obviously apply here.

even briefer note: this is a long post

These are actual quotes, by the way.

ACTUAL GODDAMN QUOTES

For reference, here is my post in its entirety:

why are jews skeptical of antizionism? a guide for gentiles I'd be ok with the notion Israel wasn't needed if y'all could be trusted not to fuck it up when Jews needed somewhere to flee. But last time (to put it politely) you fucked it up real bad, and six million Jews died. Fundamentally, antizionism is asking Jews to put our lives in the hands of the same people who saw us screaming for help, who knew that death awaited us, and did all of nothing. Nada. Nil. (As demonstrated by the recent Amsterdam pogrom, Israel is totally ok and often proactive in flying Jews out. Around the same time as Palestinians were being exiled, Jews from all over the Arab world were being driven out in similar numbers. The reason you don't hear about that refugee crisis? Israel accepted them, without complaint or delay or objection, just urgency.) Pardon us for being a bit skeptical of your assertions that it won't happen again when a constant theme throughout our history has been it happening again. This is a slightly modified form of an older, longer, post's tags/tldr.

and the tags:

jumblr, jewish, jewblr, antisemitism, judaism, israel, jewish tumblr, tw antisemitism, anti zionism, shoah mention, tw shoah, amsterdam, amsterdam pogrom, jewish history.

Nothing horribly unreasonable. I made no comments on Gaza. I said I supported the existence of the state of Israel, which is different from supporting its policies. Regardless of what China does to Uyghurs, Uyghurs can and should not take over all of China. You would not be able to reasonably make an inference on my support, or lack thereof, for Israel's conduct in Gaza.

Here are some of the replies in the chat. Bolding is mine.

Israel only exists because the us gave asylum, ended the war and created israel. To turn around and say they did nothing is a gross mistelling of history but i get it, youre jewish. Rewriting history to glorify yourself and demonize everyone else is the cornerstone of your culture

“Pogrom” 🙄 so fucking disrespectful to the actual casualties of historical pogroms around the world. Your football fans couldn’t handle not being racist for five minutes. That shit may fly in Israel but not in Europe. [from a non Jew, seemingly; by the way, the pogrom, which has been widely called such by Jews and was called "reminiscent of a pogrom" by Deborah Lipstadt, current US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, was premediated, before any of that happened, and as I've said before, even if someone is wearing a Trump 2024 shirt and jabbers about woke threats to the country, that is not an excuse to throw them in an almost-freezing river and not let them out until they say "Harris Walz 2024!"]

Why don't you look at your fucking religion for the foot if your problems and you think that you are now safe in occupied Palestine? We are going to sweep you back like garbage. Hi and get your revenge from those who turned you into soap [note that later they say they're Semitic. Those who turned us into soap were European. They're not the same. Unless they're saying Palestinians were Nazis...?]

I'm actually saying the username here, because Jews should immediately put them on their blocklist: michmanbiker. Also from Michmanbiker after I called them antisemitic:

Anti Jewish!!!! I am Semite [sic] and 99 % of Jews are slav mongrels. So cut the bullshit

[I should note here that:

Regardless of its original meaning, antisemitic now means anti-Jewish. It's like how "slave" was originally a synonym of Slav, but you'd be laughed out of the room if you referred to them as synonyms today.

Most Israelis are not Ashkenazi--from central/Eastern Europe, where Slavs live. Most of them are Sephardim -- from Spain, generally living in the Middle East for centuries before being driven out due to an outbreak of antisemitism following the foundation of the State of Israel

Both Sephardim and Ashkenazim are recognizably Middle Eastern genetically

Considering the historical situation in which Jews lived - frequently killed, dispersed as slaves, et cetera - and Judaism frowning on intermarriage and having few converts, it is reasonable to assume that a fair portion of that ancestry is from rape. It's also worth flagging that traditionally Jewish status is passed on from the mother, because the Romans raped so many Jewish women that the rabbis changed it, and there has been a whole book written about gendered violence [read: sexual violence] in the pogroms, as well as one about sexual violence in the Holocaust. This is effectively blaming Jews for being raped.]

EDIT two days later (November 26, 2024): I got a new one! A user, youngsuitrunaway, posted the following:

How tf did I get this dirty disgusting primitive idea of pro Zionism in my recommended

One user said the following about Israel:

I go into youre property and say i want the half of it

This superficially sounds reasonable. As I replied, it is not:

No. Two people are living in a region. One is lesser in number because they were *forcibly exiled as slaves*. A neutral group draws up a plan for two states. One group accepts it. The other group, aided by every other country around them, rejects it and attempts to destroy the other group. Miraculously, the smaller group not only survives, but takes some land. (It also loses some - Jews were expelled from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem following the first war).

From thegreatkhan, who I am again naming because they seem fairly active and at first glance reasonably innocuous in name and description:

How about you stop playing victim and just admit that the world is fucking tired of Israel atrocities?

I replied,

you realize that it's not inherent to a state of Israel? Zionism does not imply being a supporter of every action of Israel. It means being a supporter of the fact that Israel gets to exist. It's like confusing "Americanism" (to coin a phrase), which properly refers to "yes, the United States of America gets to exist" with "from 2017-early 2021 you supported every single action taken by the US government!!!". Or, for you (since you're Spanish), confusing thinking that Spain as a country should exist with supporting the Spanish Inquisition.

Instead of engaging with this, he repeated the precise same thing.

And

Isrelies are not a fucking marginalized community. If they were a marginalized community they would not be getting billions in help from the United States. [note that he's conflating Israel with Jews]

Considering your [not mine; this was in a reply to another user] post about the dropout apology, I don't care much about whatever you have to say. Israel is committing genocide, and supporting the existence of Israel in any way shape or form is the same as supporting said genocide. [So if I think Myanmar should not have been colonized by the British, I'm supporting the Rohingya genocide?] If people believe that the land of Israel belongs to them for some kind of special gift or god [that's not why I said it should exist - I am agnostic] then that's their problem. Nobody is special, and there's no excuse to go around stealing houses and land then claiming you are the victim. I desire the worst for anyone that supports Israel, whatever their background. [I have yet to see any examples of thegreatkhan harassing Evangelical Christian users, who are generally also pro-Israel. If that's false, I welcome corrections. But when you only harass Jews, instead of the much, much, larger Evangelical Christian segment of Zionism, it comes off as sketchy]

Michmanbiker drops in:

Jews are not a race they are a religion [we're both, it's called an ethnoreligion, it's fascinating!], a filthy one at that, 99% of Jews don't have one drop of Semite blood in their veins. The whole premise for that abhorrent thing you call Israel is based on a lie. Everything Jewish is a lie including Jews being Jews as you are all sons and daughters of Shikshas. Your common traits are cowardly, evil meek and weak. I guess that makes you a people.

Switching back to thegreatkhan's better concealed antisemitism (michmanbiker is actually fairly weird, their rhetoric is closer to rightwing antisemitism, but they are clearly left-wing. Evidence in support of the horseshoe theory):

How about you isrelies stop committing genocide? It's a pet peeve of mine, sorry.

This is my response:

I...I'm not Israeli. I've never even been to Israel. The only way for you to infer that I'm Israeli from this post is to have a) not looked at my profile, where I say I am a Pittsburgher, and you may not realize this but PITTSBURGH IS NOT IN ISRAEL, which is in itself ok, and b) assumed that everyone Jewish [or Zionist, I forgot to mention that] is Israeli. I have no more ability to influence Bibi than you do. I am not a citizen of Israel and, despite y'all, I am not planning on becoming one soon. I have never been to Palestine. I don't see how I could possibly be committing genocide. Oh, that's right! You equate all Jews with Israelis! Gee, that's not antisemitic. Hey, while we're doing this - how the hell do you justify supporting the Spanish Inquisition, which you clearly do, since you're Spanish [it's in his profile]? How about Spanish colonization? What do you think of Columbus's genocidal actions? Very hypocritical of you to support genocide (what do you think Columbus did, what are you, brainwashed) when it's the Spanish doing it, but hate it when it's the Jews. Spain shouldn't exist, it should all be given to the Basques. All Spanish people (except for the Basques of course) are devils (hey, you called Israelis that [no, I'm not joking, I wish I was joking], it's not like genocide is any less bad when it's in the past)! Oh and by the way I'm not anti-Spanish cause ACKSHULLY Spanish can also refer to Basques and I'm pro-Basque."

thegreatkhan completely missed the point and replied

I actually left Spain years ago [so you were there, which means my extremeness was slightly more justified than yours], and never looked back, and I'm working hard, (through legal means, and not just arriving at a new place and throwing someone out of their house like isrelies do [Tel Aviv was founded legally, most of them were founded legally, after purchasing land, and this was after we had been thrown out of our house - right of return, anyone?]) to bring my dad over. I'm a Spanish republican, and andalucian. I do believe that Basque country should be independent [christ, it was an example!], same as many of other Spanish counties that have been for centuries treated like shit by the central fascist government of franco. Unlike isrelies, i actually work hard to put my money where my mouth is, but I can't expect a tribe of child killers and rapists to comprehend that.

(The child killer argument, by the way, was frequently used to justify violence against Jews in the MIddle Ages. Worth flagging.)

All of this on a post that mentioned supporting the existence of a country. For no other country are supporting the country's existence and actions conflated. If someone says that they don't think Russia should be invaded and taken over by Finland, we don't accuse them of supporting Putin and genocide in Ukraine. If someone says that they don't think Eritrea should be invaded by Ethiopia, we don't accuse them of supporting what's been called the African North Korea. If someone says Afghanistan shouldn't be taken over by Pakistan, we don't accuse them of supporting the Taliban. If someone says why they don't support the British taking over Myanmar (again), we don't accuse them of supporting the Rohingya genocide. If someone says they don't think France should recolonize Mauritania, we don't accuse them of supporting slavery (Mauritania being the last country to outlaw slavery, in the 1980s, and, according to some estimates, a fifth of their population is enslaved). If they don't think the UK should conquer Iran, we don't accuse them of supporting sharia law and despising women. If they say Turkey shouldn't take over Saudi Arabia, we don't accuse them of hating women.

In fact, in many of those cases, it doesn't come up. It's accepted: of course Tibetans shouldn't run China, of course Russia has a right to exist, even if it commits atrocities.

All of those countries I listed--Russia, China, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Mauritania, Iran, Saudi Arabia--are committing human rights abuses, sometimes genocide. But you still don't need to explain why China and Myanmar deserve to exist.

[queenwille]

If you’re open to it, check Martin Shaw’s novel “What is Genocide?” To maybe open your mind about how the actions of Israel are actually a genocide

Open your mind and step out of your little echo chamber, you tell other people to “do their research” so how about you take your own advice

thank you, but i obviously had no access to it, so i did some background research. even if you, same as your nasty friends who choose to come in here with no manners, i will answer in a respectful way and say you are correct, i do like it when people do their research. it’s only because i too take the time to do it and don’t just go round spreading whatever comes to heart or/and mind. i will say, that even though many of y’all hate to hear it, some of the things i do say in here are also common knowledge to people raised in a jewish/israeli community, they’re cultural things that y’all keep choosing to cancel us for. it’s not my problem you choose to fight on things you know nothing about.

as i was saying, i did read a little here and there on his website about his offers for a different take on the word genocide. anyways, take a seat bc i might surprise you. i do agree with the idea of what he’s saying, of the destruction of a society. buuut. and here’s a huge bUT, i think a new and different name is not only in order, but also mandatory. to be clear: idk if the original book was about the conflict or not, i read an article by martin shaw using the term addressing the conflict specifically. the word was given a very specific meaning, regarding very specific historic incidents with very specific characteristics by the polish jewish lawyer raphael lemkin. as he mentioned in “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe", Chapter IX: Genocide, p. 79, when he created the word: “New conceptions require new terms. By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” he did mention on a few occasions that the armenian genocide was a major inspiration for the creation of the word, despite being a jewish european. the term did find light in relations somewhere around the Nuremberg trails (not 99% sure about the timeline here if we’re honest) due the lack of word/offense to charge the nazi officers on their crimes against german jews before WW2 started and other crimes against humanity that couldn’t be proven as a part of the actual war.

with that being said, even if i can understand and agree with what he’s saying about the destruction of a society, even more so as an ~almost~ social worker with community work as my elected speciality in uni (idk how to call it) as a serious matter, the use of the word genocide is simply not an option. same as raphael lemkin did, he may create a new term.

you seriously cannot expect that each new/modern take on laws, on an international scale be taken into consideration at any given time. it’s simply not possible. genocide already has one established meaning approved and used internationally for decades. and it simply does not apply to gaza, even if you, mr martin, south africa, or anyone else for that matter, disagree. even the ICJ has already said it. twice. i’d advise you put your efforts in something that requires less mental gymnastics, but you keep doing you.

[big-gay-bird]

I have kinda a stream on consciousness a lot the I/P stuff I need to get off my chest. I expect it piss off everyone, so I am putting it under a cut.

I just need to say something outloud and my loving gf has listened to me enough.

Some of this rooted in formal education, some is just my understanding. I am not gonna to dig up sources.

Palestine has been home to many different cultural groups for centuries. That includes a lot of different religious practices and unique histories too

Palestine was occupied, as much of the Middle East was at the time, by colonial forces like England between the world wars.

Historically displaced Jews facing antisemitic violence have at times chosen to go Palestine as they felt it was the best option in the face of a lot of shitty ones. (These are Jews whose homes were either burned down or occupied by others.)

After the Shoah, Europe and the US looked at the hundreds of thousands of newly freed Jewish people and said “instead of doing the slow painful work of getting you your original homes and communities back and stable, we’re just gonna send you somewhere else and give you some stuff to figure it and do the work yourself.”

The US actually weighed bringing them all to Alaska at the time but Palestine was chosen.

Out of a desire to, I believe, not have to deal with it, the US and Europe gave the brand new Israel all it needed to do whatever the hell it wanted to do. They didn’t want to actually help displaced people, but they had to do something so we wouldn’t show up in their own countries and require their help.

This began a multiple generations long genocide driven in part by a deep fear that Jewish peoples were no longer safe anywhere in the world so a iron oppressive grip on “Israel” was necessary. Were the early Zionists wrong to be afraid? No. Were they wrong to commit acts of genocide against Palestinian out of that fear? Of course, there were other ways to make a safe place for Jews, and the US and Europe absolutely knew that but they didn’t care enough to reign anyone in (at literally any point.)

I want to state at this point, I despise the way the Israeli government and the IDF especially has taken advantage of Jewish inter generational trauma and fear.

Now are the refugees of the Shoah and their descendants the only Jewish refugees in Israel currently? No! Not by a long shot! There are Jewish refugees from all over the world living in Israel to escape antisemitic violence. Yes this includes groups such as Ethiopian Jews who are not in any way shape or form white! They came to Israel specifically for a reason. To say Israeli citizens are all white is wild af as Israel, to my knowledge, is how to some of the most racially diverse communities of Jews?

Does being a refugee entitle you to genocide of indigenous people? No! Of course not! Refugees and how to support them in ways that keep them safe while not fucking over indigenous populations is an important international conversation that the west is objectively not ready to participate in and it sucks! A lot!!!

I keep hearing “I support all indigenous Palestinians, if you’re Jewish and Palestinian you’re ok!” But a lot of Jewish people in that area are not going to ID as Palestinian! A lot will ID as Mirachi or Sephardi, two identities I will bet that most gentile USAians don’t know much about!

So now getting into this conflict.

What is happening to Palestine currently is genocide plan and simple. The immensity of War crimes committed by the IDF and is isreali government is something I will do everything in my power to see prosecuted. It should not be happening full stop. It is also transparently an apartheid, which is also unacceptable. There absolutely racism being used to target and dehumanize Palestinians. It ALL has to stop and I have organized around this idea in the past.

Westerns who do not know people in the P/I area or do not have people in community that do know people there, are getting their news filtered to them. I understand that, and I understand there is A LOT of propaganda at work.

However I am literally begging leftists to believe average Isreali person who may have a lot of the same beliefs you do in all this. “Unconfirmed” in a war zone does not mean untrue. (Though I also believe the governments repeating it as fact is causing more harm all around too so like there is a little middle ground here.) I am not asking leftist to believe Netanyahu or the IDF, I am asking them to believe people who are literally there living through this who are not all white women.

I am also begging people to understand that not all Jews have a planes to hop on to leave. The reason why you are hearing from those American Jews who did is because they are American and they are more easy to access by news reporters in the US.

It is an absolute shit show over there and everyone has a bias! That is part of existing! It’s ok to have questions and note where accounts disagree, but to assume Jews are always the ones lying because you think they’re all white western colonializers or something actually is antisemitism!

Also I don’t think gentiles understand that Netanyahu and IDF are counting on your antisemitism. They are counting on you making the US unsafe for Jews. They look all this shit that’s being said and say “see, the leftists want you and your loved ones dead. They’ll assume you’re lying. The only safe place that cares about you is here.” So you want to be a real anti-Zionist? You help us fight that propaganda by being both a Palestinian AND a Jewish ally. I promise it is so possible to be both.

[jewishbarbies]

Hey, STOP.

Leave her alone and stop blaming her because your life is pathetic and you are not getting the love she receives.

It's obvious that you are obsessed with her and everything she is because all you do is cry about her.

And it's not her your fault that you're life does not compare to hers and that you're obsessed with every move, jealous, hating on her, and begging for attention and the only attention you get is when you cry about her since you do nothing to make your life better and think complaining is appealing that will advance you somewhere when it leaves you in a pit full of shit.

She is the most wonderful human being and you also only hate her because she's white and doing well when all you do is complain about her being a white girl having all the benefits because she's white like she's privileged when there is not a damn thing privileged about being white. White privilege is a fake social construct for those who cannot make it and need an excuse for their shortcomings (Blame the white people because you're a piece of shit and don't try to make yourself better). If she was in Africa, Isreal, China, Latin America, Europe, Russia, Mongolia, Australia, the Middle East, or anywhere else, what privilege does she have? You claim white supremacy simply because there are more white people by the numbers in certain demographics. Your false claims mirror everything that supremacy is and you're the one acting like a supremacist and hater. But it's okay for POC to call her Becky when it's a subtle word for "cracker" (Believe me because I know and grew up in the racist South as a Jew who had to hide their identity so I was strung up on a tree limb somewhere. I know a racist when I see one and I hear it from all sides and don't like any of it. You're a racist. It's obvious that hate white people. And you guys joke about calling her Becky when it's a racist term and claim your ignorance that you don't know or understand like it's funny as an excuse, then you attack her for everything, even innocent mistakes but you won't put your life display, will you.).

You're just jealous and obsessive with her accomplishments and you have nothing. If you did have anything or any kind of life, you would not be on this web page day in, day out, all night and day attacking others with your hate messages that make you feel better because you're worthless. You're only actions in life are attacking her as an excuse for your worthlessness, laziness, and lack of any skills to do anything worthwhile, nor do you try to make yourself better.

Maybe if you learn how to wipe your ass correctly, you would have something worthwhile to do with yourself instead of smelling like shit everywhere you go and blaming her for all your failures and setbacks in life. And you complain about everyone, and that means, you're the problem, not everyone else.

All you do is bark at the moon, eat, and talk shit, then you wonder why you smell like shit and your life is shit, so you blame her because she is everything that is beautiful and smells wonderful.

I will eat her shit, but I won't eat your nasty shit.

[serendipnpipity]

I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying there’s no God I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why don’t they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because they’re afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they don’t know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharans and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I have no idea who you are, anon, who chose to send me Molly Bloom's soliloquy by James Joyce at this hour. Yes, I read it all, thinking surely this is a joke and somewhere in the middle it will devolve into something awful. Or possibly this was the flower-laden work of a press-in-the-middle-of-the-word-predictor-buttons-on-your-phone kind of post. But imagine my pleasant surprise when I finished and looked it up to find that you felt prompted to gift me actual poetry, right into my inbox like a real letter-sender would in days of old.

Thank you anon. Have a lovely day, wherever and whenever you are!

[itsadragonaesthetic]

Post about the Israel/Palestine conflict. Go ahead and scroll past if you don't wanna read about it right now.

Someone on Facebook asked about it and some people have gone in to explain it to them, including myself. This started some conversations with some people and gosh nobody is more of a fucking Social Justice Warrior than random Americans that couldn't be further from the conflict.

Someone mentioned things about how America is framing Palestine as a bunch of terrorists (which is true cuz American media dumb) and I told them that well, there are terrorist groups within Palestine, but American media is just framing it like ALL Palestinians are like that so they therefore Deserve To Be Hurt and America Is In No Way Responsible For Any Of This. America did the same with the Iraq war. They responded with "Palestinians are just fighting back against colonialism from IsraHELL and they're NOT terrorists! Why are you talking about Hamas? When did I mention that?"

Like... lord have mercy. I'm literally agreeing with these people that America is sensationalizing terrorism to push an agenda AGAIN and that Palestinians deserve freedom and they're yelling at me because I'm not screaming "death to Israel".

They also keep saying that Israel are colonists and I'm like... a colony of what? From where? Israel was made by America and Europe to shove issues with the Jewish people onto Palestine and it's Very Much Not Working. I don't have a solution to any of it. I think Palestine deserves their freedom, but I also don't want Europe to go "but I don't want displaced Jews :((" and then commit several crimes against humanity again. I want freedom and peace for all, but I don't trust anyone in power to go in there and do the right thing. A Jewish state is obviously not solving anti-semitism, but I don't expect anyone to properly say "maybe instead of putting the problem somewhere else, we should stop hating Jews". Sometimes it feels like the whole world would rather die in a nuclear fallout than TOLORATE Jews.

-

I'm a white, non-religious American who has hardly even left my hometown. I love to research and I try to see all sides but the majority of sources I have access to are objectively American propaganda, not to mention I'm hardly culturally or personally tied to any of this. If I say something that you think is incorrect or misleading, please kindly tell me. But of course, I won't listen to you unless you objectively have some kind of cultural or personal tie, or you otherwise have done academic research. I'm not listening to your white suburban ass who read some news articles, AMANDA.

[dzamie]

I'll do my best to give a sort of overview (disclaimer: I'm not a historian, so most of this is just osmosis from being Jewish and therefore hearing about the Holocaust and Israel rather frequently since forever). I can break it down sort of into three questions:

Why is the Israeli government evil?

Why displace people at all?

Why put Israel in Palestine rather than somewhere else?

Starting with the first. A significant part of it is "power corrupts, and being a nation that the biggest military superpower in the world really likes gives you an awful lot of power." Combined with good old-fashioned xenophobia, and you have a recipe for an ethnostate to be aggressively ethnostate-y. Now, granted, fascism rises most easily to power when citizens are scared. And Israel is a tiny little nation that is basically completely surrounded by nations that really, really hate Jews (the entirety of Syria, for example, had fewer than 5 Jews in 2019, and I suspect they're all dead by now). So: scared population, plus ethnonationalism, plus mandatory military service, plus a lot of military support from the US, equals extremely bad times for Palestinians.

Onto the second question. This is basically common to any colonization effort: especially by the 20th century, no matter where you go to settle, if the land can sustain life, people are already living there. And, contrapositively, if nobody's living there, it probably can't sustain life - there's a reason Regina, Saskatchewan alone has over five times the population of the entire territory of Nunavut. It didn't matter if Israel popped up in British Palestine, southern Canada, Puerto Rico, or Argentina, there were going to be people already living there. The only way to avoid this would have been to give up the possibility of a majority-Jewish state, which rather defeats the whole purpose.

And this brings us nicely to the third point: Why Palestine? We have a New York, so why not a New Jerusalem? Well, for one, there used to be a pretty major temple there, and I mean The Temple, with capital letters. One back in the 10th century BCE and lasting a few hundred years, and another shortly after, lasting until about 70 CE. These are Pretty Fucking Crucial to Jewish history and tradition - during certain prayers, we rise and face towards Jerusalem. And for two, at the time about a third of the population there was Jewish, which is. uh. MUCH better than could be said of Europe. Choosing to put Israel where it is today was hardly a difficult choice. British Palestine being on the table for colonization is like your highschool bullies going "look, we're really sorry about what we did back then, and we wanna make it up to you. Uh, would you rather we treat you to dinner, let you slug one of us in the jaw, or give you a million dollars each?"

spotted this sticker outside my apartment building and I think it illustrates an important point about the moment we’re in.

on a surface level this is something that a lot of people who consider themselves antizionist would agree with. but take 10 seconds to google the url at the bottom and you’ll see that this is a sticker for a neo-Nazi group.

“We serve one nation” is a reference to the dual loyalty trope, the idea that Jews can never be loyal to America because they are first and foremost loyal to Israel.

There are a lot of hate groups taking advantage of the moment we’re in. It’s easy to replace “Jew” with “Zionist” and get a lot more people to agree with them. Do not fall for it.

[silvertonedwords]

I’d love to know how they end up living in Dorset, Tina seems such a city girl 💙 PS. omg you couldn’t write anything bad, there’s only less awesome and even then it’s brilliant lol xxx

So first off, thank you so much, that is so sweet of you. Trust me there’s a lot of sweat and tears before things end up published, and I lot of hating things I’ve written, but I think that’s just part of the process.

This has actually challenged me to consider my own thoughts on Tina and cities.

So first, my soon-to-be-irrelevant headcanons on how the living situation unfolds.

I think they get married relatively soon. Maybe Tina goes back to New York for a brief time, or maybe not, but I suspect they’ll be engaged and married by the early to mid 1930s. Unless something happens that we’re not expecting, which is obviously possible, it just doesn’t track for me that it would take them longer. This is the kind of relationship where, once they’re in it, they just know it’s it for them, and what you do in that situation in the 1930s (and probably what these characters would do in the 2020s too) is get married.

I’m imagining a small, tasteful wedding without too much planning time, and I think at first they move into a slightly modified/improved version of Newt’s flat. Seems like a lot of work to build a menagerie somewhere else, y’know, and I think they’d both feel the need to be in London given global circumstances. So the early years of their marriage, I do imagine taking place in a city. I can’t really imagine a world in which they’d end up in America instead, because it just tracks better for me that everything Tina loves (and everything she needs to fight) is in Europe, and I’m imagining she’ll have found not only a romantic relationship but also friendships and a workplace and a culture where she thrives.

My little headcanon, which I could take or leave but kind of like, is that Newt’s family already owns the property in Dorset and uses it as a holiday spot or just a second little cottage on the coast. Not sure that gallavanting around Europe on their honeymoon would be a) within their inclinations as people b) a good idea given the Grindelwald situation and the fact that they’ve identified themselves quite strongly as his opponents c) a good idea as a Jew d) reasonable-sounding given that we expect them to be in an Order of the Phoenix v 0.1 sort of situation. So I sort of love the idea that Newt remembers the cottage and offers it up as a little getaway.

This is where my view of Tina’s relationship to place comes in a little more. She loves being thrown into her work, but I also think she could really take or leave the exact setting of it. It doesn’t seem to me that the city energizes her in a particular way. It’s more that New York was just...home because it was home. And I also think she has a habit of working herself to the point of being unable to relax. I like the idea of her going to Dorset for a few days sometimes (I’ve written this) and gradually realizing that she sleeps better there, and while she always enjoys spending time with Newt, has an easier time really focusing on it, and eventually as they grow and become settled, Newt says to her ‘well we could just live here all of the time?’. There are obvious benefits in terms of less nosy neighbors about the creatures, and the space and ocean, and the pace of everything being a touch less frantic, so that they can carve out a space to be a family even though they’re living through some very turbulent times. Things will be turbulent for a long time—in this scenario I’m imagining, probably at least the first decade of their marriage—and so it would track for me that they’d want just a little bit of space to enjoy some moments within that.

Maybe 100% of this will be wrong, but that’s how I reason it out for now.

Also, as I’ve said, I can see Tina being wary of having children in such a time because she wouldn’t want to put a child in danger or leave her own son or daughter alone as she was (I see Newt as a bit more of an optimist and respectful of her stance but ready to try for a kid the moment she is. Also side note—not sure if they’re being suuuuper careful because I think Tina wants children with Newt, she’s just a little scared of how she’d protect them.) But I kind of love the idea that the first pregnancy is an accident, and then of course they’re terrified and thrilled and in love with the idea from the start.

[ruminativerabbi]

Kindness in the Time of Cholera

I’m still up in the air about the whole thing in terms of where this potential catastrophe may be heading. But what seems beyond dispute to me is that we should be heeding the advice of those wise experts specifically whose counsel is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. And equally clear to me is that we should be insisting unwaveringly that the government put the responsibility and authority to deal with this looming crisis squarely and solely in the hands of scientists, public health officials, physicians, and epidemiologists…and as far as possible from the hands of politicians.  

One of the most intelligent essays about the coronavirus outbreak that I’ve read, by Donald G. McNeil Jr., was published in the New York Times just this week (click here) and I recommend it highly to you. Basically, he observes that there are two ways to deal with a looming pandemic. There’s the modern method of bringing to bear the full force of modern technology to identify the infected, to perfect a vaccine, to develop new strains of drugs to deal with the already-ill, etc. And then there’s the medieval method of locking the infected inside their own cities, closing borders, forbidding international travel or commerce, and quarantining people who may have inadvertently been exposed to the virus until the danger passes and the infected either recover or die.

The latter approach, the one McNeil calls “medieval,” surely does have an old-fashioned feel to it. And it equally surely features a harshness that will make most moderns uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t work and hasn’t worked. President Benjamin Harrison, for example, apparently successful kept America safe from an outbreak of virulent cholera in 1892, for example, by closing American harbors to any ships arriving from Germany, the epicenter of that particular epidemic in Europe. But, as McNeil goes on to muse, just how possible would that approach be today really? The word “quarantine” derives from the Italian word for “forty” and came to have its current meaning because the Venetian Republic had the very successful idea during the Black Death plague epidemic in the mid-fourteenth century of requiring that all ships arriving in their port be isolated for a full forty days before their crew could come ashore or their cargo be unloaded. But Venice has one harbor and its masters had the ability absolutely to control the comings and goings of boats in and out of their city, whereas it is very hard to imagine that approach being fully successful in our globalized world of highly porous borders and uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) interstate travel. Nor am I only theorizing here. The Chinese actually have turned Wuhan, the city where the virus first erupted into the world, into a single huge quarantine zone. But the virus behind COVID-19 is still spreading dramatically in the world, both inside and outside of China.

The Jewish world has yet another way to combat a pandemic, one that was the subject of a fascinating piece on the Lehrhaus website that I read just last week. The essay, by Jeremy Brown, the director of the Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institute of Health, concerns a long-forgotten ceremony developed specifically to address the possibility of epidemiological catastrophe: the shvartze chasaneh, literally “the black wedding.” (To read the full essay, click here.) The name, derived from the fact that brides normally wear white to their own weddings, was intended to suggest that the wedding in question is not just the union of an affianced couple eager to wed under a chuppah, but something else entirely—something rooted not in love and devotion, but in fear and community-wide anxiety.

As far as anyone knows, the last time anyone participated in a shvartze chasaneh was in 1918 at the peak of the Spanish flu epidemic. I’ve heard people mention that specific epidemic many times in the last few weeks, but even by today’s standards the numbers are still astounding. Five hundred million people around the world were infected, about a third of the entire population of the world. (Click here for more on that almost unbelievable number.) The death toll is estimated by most authorities to have been somewhere between forty and fifty million people, but some authorities put it as high as one hundred million. Life expectancy in the United States dropped by twelve years after just one year of the epidemic. This was a terrible time, the cataclysmic coda to the orgy of senseless killing that was the First World War. And the pandemic lasted for three full years, from the beginning of 1918 through the end of 1920.

The idea of the shvartze chasaneh itself is a simple one: the community seeks out a single man who is disabled, orphaned, and/or impoverished and arranges for him publicly to marry a similar destitute and handicapped woman. The ceremony takes place, as would any normal Jewish marriage, under a chuppah. But this chuppah is set up in a cemetery—perhaps as a way of inviting the dead to participate in the simchah—and then the community showers the couple with gifts, including gifts of cash, in the hope that this great act of kindness towards the especially needy will somehow avert the plague.

To document his research, Brown uncovered an account of one of these “black weddings” that took place in Philadelphia in 1918 during the height of the Spanish flu epidemic. Citing from a contemporary newspaper account published in the Public Ledger of Philadelphia, Brown reports that one Fanny Jacobs and one Harold Rosenberg were married just behind the first row of graves in the Jewish cemetery near Cobbs Creek, Pennsylvania, on Friday afternoon on October 25, 1918. A certain Rabbi Lipschitz presided; a full thousand spectators showed up to witness the union. And then, to quote the newspaper story directly, “spectators filed solemnly past the couple and made them presents of money in sums from ten cents to a hundred dollars, according to the means and circumstances of the donor, until more than $1,000 had been given.” And the point of the operation was also made explicit in the newspaper account: so that “the attention of God be called to the affliction of their fellows if the most humble man and woman among them should join in marriage in the presence of the dead.”

Nor was this something invented on the spot to deal with the influenza epidemic. The earliest report of a shvartze chasaneh goes back to 1785, when one was performed in the presence of two of the greatest hasidic masters, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk and Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Halevi Horowitz (the latter better known today as the Seer of Lublin), and was intended to address an outbreak of cholera. Brown reports that similar wedding ceremonies took place for orphaned teenagers in Jerusalem and Tzfat in 1865 during an infestation of locusts that threatened to destroy the food source for the entire country. (The picture is of the one in Jerusalem.) They must have been quite something to see, those ceremonies: the one in Jerusalem took place amidst the graves on the Mount of Olives and the one in Tzfat took place in the old Jewish cemetery there, where the chuppah was set up between the graves of Rabbi Isaac Luria and Rabbi Joseph Karo, each in his own way the spiritual leader of an entire generation of Jewish people. Other such ceremonies took place in Berdichev in 1866 and at Opatow in 1892, which town Joan and I actually visited last summer. 

The Philadelphia ceremony inspired at least one further attempt to ward off the flu epidemic: on November 11, 1918—the very day of the armistice that ended the war—a similar wedding was held in Winnipeg, duly reported in the Winnipeg Evening Tribune under the headline “Hebrews Hold Wedding of Death to Halt Flu.”

I do not think—at least not yet—that we should consider going this route at the current time with respect to COVID-19. But I do think that we could be inspired—and profoundly—by the idea that underlying our response to what could conceivably turn into a world-wide pandemic should be the same sense Jews of a different day had that one responds to the possibility of disaster by being kind and generous, by reaching out formally and publicly to the most needy, by focusing on the future and not solely on the calamity at hand, and by refusing to abandon our most basic values merely because we suddenly find ourselves negotiating straits that even a few months ago were unknown to any of us. The notion that the correct response to looming catastrophe lies in deeds of compassion and charity is very resonant with me personally. My plan for the moment is to wash my hands carefully and often, to leave the real decision making to the kind of public health experts who actually know what they are talking about, and to try to avert the worst by ramping up Joan and my gifts of charity to the poor and the most needy, and I encourage you to do the same!

[absolute-immunities]

Innocent and Sweet

I’m thinking about Elizabeth Gold today.

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

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

I think we should rethink that.

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Gold stayed.

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of this troubled Elizabeth Gold.

III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the work Elizabeth Gold preferred to do.

IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

Okay this is not mbti related but you are an intelligent person so I wanted to ask you whether its really not possible to know everything about a religion?? It was actually my plan to learn everything about four of the five main religions christianity, islam, judaism, hinduism and buddhism (i decided to not study the 5th main religion, hinduism, because i read somewhere that you cannot convert into hinduism, you have to be born as a hindu) and then decide whether i follow one of them or...

....or dont follow any of them and become an atheist or something. its important for me to somehow have something that explains the meaning of life and everything. but i really want to be sure that im believing in the right thing, thats why i wanted to know everything about each religion im considering to convert into. but thats actually not doable? 

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

Hi anon,

No it is not. To illustrate this: I am Jewish both ethnically and religiously; I attended a Jewish day school from ages 5-14 (I’m in the U.S., so this corresponded from K-8) and enrichment programs in high school geared towards Jewish high school students in secondary school. I have been the lay leader of an independent Jewish congregation. I would not under any circumstances say I knew everything about Judaism. If I asked any rabbi I’ve known whether they knew everything about Judaism they would probably not laugh in my face but only because they’ve generally been respectful people.

We are talking about a religion with a history of 4,000 years and with much of that in diaspora, including isolated sects all over the world. Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula and North Africa (Sephardim) have different traditions (within the same larger tradition) than Jews who migrated to more northern and eastern parts of Europe (Ashkenazim) and both differ from Jews who remained in the middle east (Mizrahim) or some of those more isolated areas (eg: the Bene Israel from Ethiopia, Kaifeng Jews in China). There are two entirely different sub-branches of Judaism depending on whether you only follow the laws as written in the Torah (5 books of Moses), which is called Karaite Judaism, or Judaism as most people think of it and which I practice, Rabbinic Judaism, where the vast oral tradition (eventually written down) is also taken into consideration. Please do note that both the oral tradition and the commentary from writing down the oral tradition were both recorded and are both taken into consideration in rabbinic laws, and that new rulings are being made in the modern day depending on sect (eg: reform, reconstructionist, conservative, orthodox) and the changing times; within my lifetime there have been many changes within certain sects of Judaism regarding their positions on LGBT issues, for example.

I can’t speak with nearly as much knowledge about other religions, but I can say that there is similarly a lot of disagreement and multiple sects (I mean, Christianity encompasses everything from Catholicism to Unitarianism which have fundamentally opposing ideas of the trinity vs. a single deity). Seminaries exist. The mere act of learning a whole lot about a single religion is widely considered a several-year endeavor.

I also can’t speak for all religious beliefs, but at least from the perspective in which I was raised the point of religion isn’t to get answers or find the meaning of life. Nor is the idea that one religion is “correct” even true in most non-extremist interpretations of religion. Judaism has the Noahide laws, is compatible to an extent with outright agnosticism due to its status as an ethnoreligion, and no real interest in proselytizing; I believe Islam mentions within the Quran a respect for other “people of the book” (ie, the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity); most mainline protestants and liberal Catholics tend to leave people to do their own thing. There’s a reason the phrase “the lord works in mysterious ways” is a common phrase. It’s like you’re asking for the answer to philosophy - there wasn’t even a single question, let alone a definitive answer.

So to put this somewhere between bluntly and gently, this question sounds like it’s coming from someone with very little experience with religion at all and some fundamental misunderstandings, which is why I said you sound either very young or very sheltered or both. With that being said, I suspect what you actually want to start is a fairly basic overview of these religions (which I think would be good if only to help you better get a handle on the concept of religion and the vast diversity within it), and you could start on that pretty easily, through reaching out to local houses of worship or taking a world religions course. You may end up finding that one of those religions holds meaning for you, or you may find that you’re interested in religion intellectually but not in practice, or something else entirely, but it is not a finite piece of knowledge to which you can come to the end.

[ask-jumblr]

Thank you so much to everyone who’s been constructive.

Both commenters, and the anons below who were open about what they’re struggling with. Since all of the asks were either hateful, or seemed to be addressed at me, the mod, I’m going to handle them. 

Before you get too upset that I didn’t give all y’all equal chance to answer: I’m encouraging the anons to send in some asks dealing with the issues they’re mentioning, formatted in such a way that it’s easier for jumblr as a whole to constructively help. Based on their current asks, I can only ask questions about what they practically need.

Because I’ll be addressing the asks chronologically and the constructive asks come later, I’m going to put it all below the cut. If you don’t have energy today, don’t click through. Even the constructive stuff is heavy.

Here were the first two anon’s received:

Isn't Orthodox just exclusionary extremism? Aren't those the homophobes and transphobes who think you shouldn't be allowed to marry a non-Jew? Why aren't we staying focused on reform/recon Judaism?

It’s okay not to know things, although the assumption was a little harsh so I didn’t want to post it directly. In response I made a myth-busting post. Yes, it is American-centric, but here’s why: I can be pretty darn sure anon is American, or at least North American.

Given that you’re upset about intermarriage, you’re probably not Israeli. Given that the U.S. has the largest diaspora population, anon is likely American. Given that anon is referencing “Reform” Judaism as an alternative, they’re probably not in Britain (”Liberal Judaism”) or outside U.S./Britain/Canada/Israel (”Progressive Judaism” everywhere else).

Realistically speaking, I can’t call up every community everywhere. As an American coming out of a mediocre, Anglo-centric education system, I can only speak one other language with any competence and blurt a few words of a few more. If you want to know about a community in a specific place then please, please ask. There have been folks on here asking about communities all sorts of places who have gotten answers here. Jewish geography + the internet is amazing! When anon is American, with misconceptions about American Jews I’m going to assume such.

Orthodox Jews should probably stop existing. 

This ask is hateful and non-constructive. Hence the threat to block.

After this, I got some anons who are getting at some problems that we can really work on. They aren’t American, so I’ve assumed they aren’t the first anon.

hey if your responses and views could stop portraying us jewery as being the only way things are done and that we somehow all have access to the stuff you do, that would be grand

(cont) or where there zero chance of finding a group of that community that'll accept me and not treat me in hateful ways. I'm sorry that Jewery outside the US/NA is that unfamiliar to you and that our viewpoints and experiences makes you uncomfortable but I guess that's the way US Jews deal with Jewish "outsiders".

I’m going to start with part 1 to stay in order even though part 2 is what gets me antsy to help ya. You’re right. I don’t have a ton of experience with non-U.S. Jewery. That’s why I tag thoroughly and encourage folks who don’t know the answer to signal boost. If you’re specific, someone else on jumblr can help you. 

When anon asks are vague and, as they often do, reference U.S./North American terms for branches (”reform” rather than “liberal” or “progressive”), I’m going assume the anon us in the U.S. or greater North America. Most other respondents likely will too. Anon askers who want otherwise need to use terms that are more globally (”progressive”) or locally (”liberal”) appropriate, or give a little more locational information (e.g. city, country, region). Re-my new explanation above about American-centrism. I respect that you didn’t have the benefit of seeing the language in that ask, but I’m here to help you as much as I can without superfluously emailing every rabbi in every country for another anon who’s linguistically and statistically likely to be in New Jersey or Ohio or somewhere else in the U.S..

Now for part 2 (after “(cont)”), your concerns. (Getting something out of the way: Since you’re saying “Jewish “outsiders”” I’m going to assume you’re Jewish. However, many people reading this might not be; this audience has a lot of prospective converts. I want to point out that prospective converts aren’t entitled to conversion via any particular community. I might personally be dismayed, but it’s that community’s prerogative. Getting that community to a place where people who are already Jewish who are LGBTQ, have disabilities, etc. are accepted is going to be my priority if I were to harangue a community that’s not my own. In other words, people like anon. On that note...) I received another ask with a concern similar to part 2, by someone in a similar situation as a Jewish person under the LGBTQ umbrella whose only option is a community that won’t accept them. I’d like to answer these together. Here’s that second ask:

Not your first anon but there's no non-homophobic Orthodox community where I live. I live in Europe and maybe it is different in the US but the Orthodox communities here do NOT accept lgbt+ people. Or if they do it is under the "don't ask, don't tell" form of homophobia where you're accepted as long as you don't display it publicly or ask them to treat you as an equal in any way. So sorry for not feeling endeared to a group that have always hated me.

This means we’ve got a heck of a problem. There are Jewish people who don’t have a community and need one. Y’all (You all) don’t know me irl, but making sure Jewish people who want Jewish communities have Jewish communities is something I’m very big on. I’ve gotten some flack for being too welcoming or too focused on making sure synagogues are welcoming. I want you to know that we want you here. Unfortunately you aren’t close enough for me to personally offer you that hug.

You see, I’m a U.S. Jew, but I’m not one from a place like New York City where there’s a wealth of Jewish community options. (hint: #SouthernJews #ShalomY’all) I know those people near me who feel forgotten, ignored, scoffed at, or unvalued don’t always have another option (or that it’s a loooong drive and lots of gas money away). I am someone who has had to put in the work to build the community she wants and needs, and a community that is welcoming for the people she cares about. 

Putting aside the extent to which I’ve had to patch up my own education while trying to make sure others aren’t on their own doing it, I’ve also had an obstacle you’ll find more relatable. I know it’s not obvious, I’m also under that LGBTQ umbrella (sexuality, not really gender from my current self-understanding). I’m largely closeted irl because being Jewish makes me enough of a target and is harder to hide. I don’t discuss it much on the internet because I don’t want #woke #discourse about myself as I figure out my own identity, and don’t want my own processing  (yay for internalized -isms!) to hurt someone else. It’s fine that you didn’t know, but I want you to know now so that you can understand my experience:

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend in Israel who’s had to make community choices too. My friend (who is also under that umbrella) convinced me that I should go to a shul with a rabbi who was openly homophobic in the past because it’ll be the best balance between programming that meets my needs (adult learning! services!) and driving distance. The rabbi stopped being openly homophobic, so I know I can be in that community. But it’s not exactly my dream. I don’t plan on relying on that rabbi for psak or life-cycle events--at least not until I know more. Then again, I’m lucky. I’m lucky in that there are rabbis I feel comfortable getting psak from who speak my native language. I’m lucky that I know enough to know that a non-rabbi can officiate a commitment ceremony (and actually a Jewish wedding too...), and that I’m from a well-connected extended-family that is friends with rabbis elsewhere (whoot! Jewish geography!) who would happily come in to officiate for me (though it might be costly and they might only do commitment rather than marriage). And I’m lucky that my extended family would be supportive enough to do so for me (they’d be getting eager enough for me to marry anyone...).  I’m also lucky in that I could drive even farther and hit a Reform community that’s been more accepting for much longer. It doesn’t have the resources or programming I need, but I would have hypothetical access to a place with other Jews that has gender-neutral bathrooms and a rabbi who hasn’t said anything (recorded) that’s unaffirming of my existence.

But what about people who don’t have access to an alternate community? Or for whom that other community is even father from being a good fit?                   With work, it is possible to make change. Do you know why that shul’s rabbi stopped being openly homophobic? Maybe compassion. But there was an outside trend too: the community shifted away from homophobia to embrace its LGBTQ members, and he was forced to follow. It’s quite likely that movement stances and responsum helped, but community organizing, changing minds one-at-a-time, those were definitely pieces of the puzzle.

I want this blog to be here for you in figuring out how to make those changes. I began an initiative on here called Tikkunity. It’s a goofy name for an important mission: help people find strategies to make their communities more vibrant, more welcoming, more supportive, more accessible, more whatever someone needs. The ones I’ve put out so far aren’t as heavy as your topic, but Tikkunity is also here for what you’re looking for. I’ve gotten in touch with some other blogs about topics that are less obvious for communities, and a bit heavier too. If either of y’all feels comfortable messaging me from off anon (just make a side-blog with a random url), I’d love to draft a post with you. Alternately, if you send something constructive and specific enough such as “I only have one choice of community and I don’t feel safe or accepted there as a [insert LGBTQ identity/ies] person. How can I make my community more accepting of [my existence/my partnership/my pronouns/etc.]? FOR: Orthodox and [LGBTQ accepting/affirming/or other word or phrase of your choice that describes people who would be in-line with your goal]” or “ I only have one choice of community (there aren’t many Jewish people near me) and I don’t feel safe or accepted there as a [insert LGBTQ identity/ies] person. Does anyone have recommendations of what to do and tools to help me do Jewish stuff to do without the big community? How can I find people from that community willing to join me so it isn’t as lonely?” then I can post it off the bat

As much as I’m not letting askers generalize Orthodox Jews as individually homophobic/transphobic, the U.S. isn’t a utopia for LGBTQ [Orthodox] Jews looking for communities. “Don’t ask don’t tell” is how many U.S. Orthodox communities function. You’ll notice that the Orthodox LGBTQ-acceptance group I linked (Eshel) is an activist-type group from within the Orthodox community. The most effective change comes from within communities, which is why I’d rather you talk to Orthodox jumblrs than me. There are many LGBTQ Orthodox Jews on tumblr who might be willing and able to help you make that change via advice on a Tikkunity post, connecting you with other activists, or via a longer-term messaging relationship as they make change in their own communities. While I don’t think Eshel formally works outside the U.S. right now, that doesn’t mean you can’t ask them about expansion or see if they can connect you  with other laypeople community builders and shifters to provide mentorship and support.

If you can’t start within the community, you can start building alternate spaces with Jewish people you know who have been willing to engage with you. Even communities that are largely homophobic/transphobic aren’t a monolith. There’s lots of advice out there for people making “start-up” communities or “indepedent minyanim” or “chaburas.” It’s not fair that you have to do the work. But don’t take it out on all Orthodox Jews, individually, especially because some of them are on your side.

And if you’d rather move than make those changes then if/when you are able to move this blog can also be a resource for you. If you send in a message with the cities you’re considering and what you’re looking for in a community, someone in jumblr can likely help give some advice on where you’ll find the best community for you.

[mylovelyfriend]

Perfume is more costly than Cologne.

Hello Beloved Friends,

I am so excited to share with you all about my trip to Europe this summer! I will be sharing my heart and the things I believe the Lord has shared with me for  this trip. Are you ready for the adventure that awaits?  

The first place I will be visiting is: Cologne, Germany.

Some interesting facts: 

Cologne is the 4th largest city in Germany.

The Cologne Cathedral (in picture) was able to be kept illuminated before electricity was created.

Most of the city was bombed and destroyed in WWII and the city was able to be rebuilt in a short period of time.

The Jews were used as scapegoats during the Black Death and were removed from the city in 1349. 

When I see this picture, I can’t imagine something so beautiful, being destroyed, only to be rebuilt again in such a short period of time. I think about the sacrifices that had to be made. I think about the people that were determined even if it meant that they would look crazy, to believe that they could rebuild something in such a short period of time in the midst of destruction. But, they did. I think about how the cathedral was able to stay illuminated - a light in the midst of the darkness that fell over the city. 

But, why? What can I learn from this city as I travel there to immerse myself into a culture I am not familiar with...

Oh, I don’t know...the differences between cologne and perfume? 

Really?

Yes, really. While doing some research I realized that there are a couple of things that make perfume and cologne different:

Perfume contains a HIGHER CONCENTRATION OF ESSENTIAL OILS (20-30%). This means that it is made with less alcohol and is easier to breathe in. Essential oils hold their own properties that are very beneficial to those that use them. 

Cologne contains a much LOWER concentration of pure oils (2-4%). This means that it contains a much higher alcohol content, which is not as pleasing to someone’s nostrils. In French, Eau de Cologne literally translated means: toilet water. Through this, I was reminded of how priceless perfume can really be depending on the source in which it comes from. 

This refreshing revelation brought me to the beautiful demonstration in John 12:1-7 (NLT) 

Jesus Anointed at Bethany

1 Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. 3 Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, 5“Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” 6 He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it. 7 “Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial.” 8 You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

As I was writing this post, this song verse “Holy, acceptable..” kept coming into my head and I thought to myself, “What song is that verse from?” I remembered that we sang it at church, but I did not know what the title of the song was called So like any human would do, I googled it! Turns out the verse is from a song called ‘In This Room’ by Kelontae Garvin. 

Immediately after hearing this, I heard Romans 12:1-2 (NLT): 

1 And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. 2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

From this, I learned of the beautiful reality that I get to walk in every single day. My life is the perfume. My life is a sacrifice that I must choose to walk out as I take my cross up and lay my life down for my friends just as Jesus did. 

Perfume is LONG LASTING and there is a DEPTH to perfume that goes much deeper than skin deep. True perfume is more expensive because of the value that it contains.  There is no need to add extra in order to get someone’s attention. There is no need to dilute its contents to be deemed as acceptable or valuable. Everything that is needed, is already inside of it. The purity of the content is able to speak for itself. It does not have to dress itself or mask itself in different scents in order to hide what is really beneath the surface. 

Cologne is different. It is much cheaper and it is not made as well as perfume. The purity is much lower because of the content that has been put inside of it. There is more that is added to it in order to obtain a desired result. As a result, the contents are diluted and it loses much of its authenticity in the process of trying to become something that people desire and are drawn to. Everything that is within it, it needed to get from somewhere else; it is more synthetically modified.

He saw and continues to see my value. He honors me as His friend. He sees my beauty and will fight for it to never be altered or changed.

When life challenges came my way to destroy my beauty, He reminded me to keep trusting and as I live my life in obedience to Love, He is drawn to the sweet fragrance that is poured out as a result of it. I am acceptable in His eyes.  You are acceptable in His eyes. I will trust that when I am with Him that I have everything that I need. I do not need to cover myself with any other fragrance or perfume, other than His Sweet Perfume called LOVE for me. 

[theheavymetalmama]

And now, some Unpopular Opinions!

Because at this point, why the hell not?

Iron Man was better than The Dark Knight

I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that The Dark Knight is a bad movie. Far from it, in fact. It’s a damn good movie with some fantastic performances, a gripping story, and some of the best written characters and dialogue in the history of movie making. So is Iron Man the better movie? For one, it’s not so stuck up its’ own ass about its’ message. The Dark Knight is a lot of things and one of them is pretentious as fuck, come off as less of a love letter to Batman and more of a method of the director Chris Nolan showing how much he has nothing but contempt for superheroes and comic books in general. Iron Man, in contrast, embraces it and has fun with the idea of a guy who builds a mech suit and fights bad guys. There’s also the question of influence, and that right there is no contest. The Dark Knight influenced Batman; Iron Man influenced the entire movie industry.

Final Fantasy XV was a massive disappointment

I kind of feel bad for dunking on this game considering they just cancelled the last of the DLC. Then again the last of the DLC was going to expand on Lady “Show Up and Blow Up” Lunafreya and Aranea “I’m here and now I’m not” Highwind’s stories and now we’re not getting them and I’m still bitter as fuck for the director’s pathetic excuse for why a girl couldn’t attend the coming of age road trip, so all bet’s are off! Okay, the ladies getting shafted aside, there is a lot to like about Final Fantasy XV, but was it worth the tedious development time? No way in hell. The game looks good but like many open world games feels mostly lifeless and empty, and of the four main characters only one of them is likable and isn’t even playable in the game’s vanilla form. The story is a broken mess that requires other forms of media to fully grasp (dick fucking move there, Squeenix) and the summons coming at random times serves as more of an annoyance than anything, especially since they always seem to show up except during times when and where they’d be useful. It also doesn’t say good things about a company’s management when a game can sell millions of copies in record time as well as do gangbusters on downloadable content and then still manage to lose over 30 million dollars.

And for the record, let it be known that Noctis is far and away the whiniest and most emo protagonist in Final Fantasy history, which is saying something considering this is a series where one such protagonist’s entire character is being so jaded and world weary to the point that his name is the sound a crying baby makes, and he doesn’t whine and complain as much as Noctis does.

Just because you’re a cop or a soldier, that doesn’t automatically make you a good person

I’m in favor of police and law enforcement and even though I believe our military budget makes Caligula himself look frugal in comparison I do support our troops. Having said that, being a cop or a trooper doesn’t mean jack shit if the person under the uniform is a complete and utter scumbag, which happens more often than many care to admit. In fact some people, many people, become cops and soldiers not to protect and serve or out of a sense of honor and duty, but simply because they like making others miserable and want to do it for a living. There’s a reason songs about fighting the law and unflattering depictions of authority figures date back as far as authority figures have been a thing. Respect is earned, not given.

‘White Nationalist’ and ‘Nazi’ are the same things

Calling a Nazi a white nationalist is like calling somebody who abuses their spouse a rough lover. Stop beating around the bush and tell it like it is. Also, don’t debate Nazis, punch them. Punch them as hard as you fucking can. If they punch you back, punch them again, and again, and again until they either run away (which most of them do) or stop moving. Trust me, nobody is going to miss them. That goes double for the alt right. Oh, and speaking of which...

Far Cry 5 chickened out

As somebody who grew up in a dead gold mining community that was mostly Catholic, when the first trailer for Far Cry 5 came out I was stoked as hell for the chance to gun down religious fanatics and skinheads in a place in rural America that didn’t look all that different. Then the game came out and it was abundantly clear to anybody that something somewhere in the game was changed at the last minute. Some have argued that it was their intention from the get go, others claimed they didn’t want to alienate their core demographic. It doesn’t say nice things about your core demographic if you’re worried about depictions of white supremacist cultists scaring them away, but okay, fine. Then make a game that takes place during the decline of the Ku Klux Klan, or in a post World War II Europe where you hunt Nazi war criminals, or failing that make something akin to Black Dynamite or a wacky 70′s Kung Fu movie where everything is purposefully over the top and exaggerated, I don’t care! All your other games have you gunning down hordes of brown people, let people like me and my husband kill some skinheads god damn it!

If you still support Donald Trump after all the vile and abhorrent things he’s done, you’re a bad person

There’s no beating around the bush on this one. I don’t blame people who were swooned by this conman thinking he’d genuinely make a good president and have since regretted their decision. I have nothing but sympathy for them. No, I’m talking about the people who STILL trip over themselves to defend this vile, homophobic, delusions, misogynist, narcissistic bigot. Like when he called Nazis “very fine people,” or is still pushing for a stupid wall along our border that will be bested by two extension ladders and a pair of tin snips. The travel ban, the rollback on regulations that kept food insecure people fed, kids dying in his fucking concentration camps, yeah, no. He’s a treasonous scumbag who deserves to be locked in an 8x8 cell until he rots, and if you still support him then you can claim the top bunk.

Climate change is real and coal can fuck off

Coal is dead. Let it lay down and rot. What, coal is your only source of income in the area you live in? Then move somewhere else! You think I would have left my hometown if there were any opportunities other than timber, fishing, and tourist traps? Sorry, but the longer we stay in the past with coal the lesser we can look forward to a future where a planet can sustain human life. If we want our planet to live then coal needs to die.

No, the left isn’t “just as bad” as the right

This is a fucking gas lighting farce that immediately falls apart when put under scrutiny. Are there extremists and crazies on the left? Of course there are, but they’re entirely different beasts as those found on the right. The left is more of a “eat enough kale and you can talk to dolphins” or “sleep with crystals under your bed and you can see the future” kinds of crazy, whereas the right is more of the “kill all the queers and let the brown babies starve” kind of crazy. Oh, and to each and every single person who said “Clinton is just as bad as Trump,” y’all can cover your reproductive organs in honey and stick them in a mason jar filled with live bullet ants and tarantula hawks, you ignorant scare mongering shitheels!

“Captain Marvel doesn’t smile!”

So what? She’s a space Navy Seal, not a boy scout like Captain America or Superman; she’s not supposed to smile.

No, the ‘alt left’ doesn’t exist and Antifa aren’t the same as Nazis

Are Antifa breaking the law? Yes. Should they be held accountable for their actions? Yes. Are people who want to kill Nazis exactly the same as people who want to exterminate the Jews and subjugate anybody who isn’t white while wiping other people’s culture off the face of the Earth under an authoritarian rule? Hell to the no and “Antifa is just as bad as the Nazis” is right up there with “Vaccinations cause autism” and “the Earth is flat” on the scale of “If you believe this, you are STUPID.” If Nazis and white supremacists went unopposed they’d go around raping and murdering Jews and non whites until there were absolutely none of them left. You know Antifa would be doing if there weren’t any Nazis around? Sitting in their crappy apartments smoking weed, sipping craft beer, eating pizza, and laughing their asses off at 20 year old Saturday Night Live skits. Ooooooh, scary! Yes, Antifa are assaulting people and destroying public property and yes they should be held accountable for their actions. But I’m not going to pretend, even hypothetically, that Nazi apologist scumbags like Tucker Carlson having his door banged on or actual Nazis like Richard Spencer getting punched in the face is on the same playing field as babies being put in cages, innocent black people being murdered by cops, or Jews being put into ovens, you fucks!

New She Ra is better than Old She Ra and 80′s cartoons in general

If you don’t like the new She Ra and prefer the old one, fine, you do you, but don’t act like the original is “So much better” because it isn’t at all. The villains were jokes, the animation was beyond cheap, the characters all looked the same, there were stupid talking animal sidekicks, and the story went nowhere really fucking fast outside of “Bad guys are doing bad guy stuff, our heroes must stop them” because they were commercials to sell toys. Nothing more, nothing less. If the new She Ra isn’t your bag then that’s all well and good, but don’t be a stupid asshole about it, talking about how it wasn’t featured at PowerCon like it’s a big fucking deal when only sad dorks like us give a shit about conventions, or whine about how you’re being oppressed and censored because a 16 year old isn’t rocking 44DD’s, or talk about “CalArts style” like that’s a real goddamn thing. Oh yeah, and speaking of which...

“CalArts style” is not a thing

Shut the fuck up, no it isn’t. It’s a stupid, meaningless buzzword hurled at people who never fucking went to CalArts in the first place. If you’re perplexed as to why modern cartoons all look like Steven Universe, the simple fact is that cartoons are made predominantly for children and shows are made to be aesthetically pleasing to them. With shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe, Star vs the Forces of Evil, and Gravity Falls being soaring success stories while shows like Young Justice, new GI Joe, and 2011 Thundercats ambitious failures, it’s obvious that formal abstractionist non angularity is in while aspirational human physical fitness is out, and a big reason the latter was even a thing in the first place is because they were toy commercials first and there were only so many variations on plastic molds to form the fucking action figures and because it was the 80′s and Arnold was the biggest star at the time.

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi” is a good movie and fanboys can eat bantha poodoo

I’ve heard all the reasons for why The Last Jedi is a bad movie and they’re all either stupid nitpicky bullshit or meaningless fanboy gripes. I could write an entire essay debunking those reasons point for point, like how the reason Holdo didn’t tell Poe a damn thing because no admiral would ever a tell a lowly grunt anything about their plan, especially after being demoted for being a hotheaded little fuckup. Or that Rey being related to Obi Wan or any previous Star Wars character didn’t happen because that would have been stupid and the definition of predictable. Or that the reason Akbar didn’t do the suicide run is because he’s a meme that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about and that there’s no way in Hell that the Mouse would allow a character named “Akbar” to do a suicide run. Or that Kylo Ren not being an intimidating villain is the whole point and that you’re supposed to hate him because he’s a petulant Darth Vader wannabe and a snake to boot. Or that the effectiveness of said suicide run, where Snoke came from, or the state of the Resistance by the end of the movie, or that any other so called ‘plot hole’ doesn’t matter because this is a movie about space wizards for children and paying obsessive attention to meaningless and pedantic details is exactly how we end up with stupid subplots in the Beauty and the Beast remake and Metropolis and Gotham City being across the river from each other! But the biggest one is Luke wasn’t portrayed as some Jedi Clint Eastwood (why fanboys want that eludes me; the EU did that a few times and they were all terrible) and that him exiling himself doesn’t make any sense.

Sorry, but no, Luke running off to a far and unreachable island makes perfect sense. For one, it’s kind of a thing that disgraced Jedi do, and for two, Star Wars is a fairy tale in space. All of the characters draw inspiration from characters and archetypes from fairy tales and fables of old, and the one Luke Skywalker resembles most (largely by design) is King Arthur. Think about it. Common boy who doesn’t know who his real parents are, meets an old wizard, gets a legendary sword, discovers he’s of noble lineage, tags along with a few colorful characters, goes on a quest that’s bigger than him and the life he knew, hits a few bumps down the road, and then eventually he saves the kingdom by overthrowing his father who once was a great man and a hero but gave in to power and corruption and became a dark reflection of his former self.

You will never unsee that. 

Oh yeah, and remember how things turned out for King Arthur in the end? He started a whole new kingdom, he had a few good years, he grew arrogant, things started to fall apart, and suddenly he and everything he worked to build up were undone overnight by a younger, more vindictive relative. Disgraced, Arthur was whisked away to an unreachable island deep rooted in his own legend and mythology where he remained until Britain had fallen to darkness and needed him again. Now of course Britain as we know it has yet to see such a thing (we’ll see how Brexit turns out) but Luke did exactly that. And no, sorry fanboys, but The Last Jedi wasn’t a failure in any sense of the word. It grossed over a billion dollars, received critical praise, the DVDs and BluRays sold like hotcakes, and was adored by kids, teenagers, and young adults, the primary audience that Star Wars is for in the first place. And I don’t give a shit what the audience score on RT says, because for one aggregate sites are a blight on film criticism and we went from this;

“Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad are AMAZING, Rotten Tomatoes is biased and paid off by Disney!”

To this...

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi is TERRIBLE, Rotten Tomatoes says so!”

In just over a year. To say nothing of the fact that what you’re currently saying about The Last Jedi was also said about The Empire Strikes, and like ‘Empire’ twenty years from now people will look back on the fanboy outrage and say “Wow, what a bunch of babies.” And before the inevitable response...

“But Solo bombed because of The Last Jedi!” 

Nooooo, Solo bombed because it came out right between Infinity War and Deadpool 2, was rife with development issues since day one of production, it was aimed overwhelmingly at fanboys obsessed with Star Wars deep lore answering questions that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about, nobody was even interested in the thing until the Lego Movie guys were signed on for a hot second, moviegoers aren’t currently hurting for cocky space cowboys...

...and because of the simple fact that it’s a solo movie about Han Solo...and it’s not 1995 and Harrison Ford isn’t in it. See, fanboys don’t realize that just because nerd and geek bullshit is mainstream now doesn’t mean that everyone is now a fanboy deep rooted in everything from where the characters are from to where they’re going, because when people say “I love Star Wars and Han Solo is my favorite character” what the vast majority of them mean is “Those movies with the space wizards and the laser swords are a lot of fun and Harrison Ford is a great movie star.” That’s it. That’s extent of why people like Han Solo. Sad dorks like us may care about stuff like where and when he got the Falcon, how he met Chewie, where the dice came from and all of that and more, but the general audience just wants to see Harrison Ford do cool shit in space. That’s it. To say nothing of the fact that nobody was even interested in the spinoffs in the first place. When Disney announced that they were making episodes 7,8, and 9 everyone went “Oh Hell yes, sign me up!” Then when they followed up with that they were also making spinoff movies about stuff that happened off screen or between movies the same audience was like “Oh...well that’s neat, I guess.”

And no, that stupid fanboy boycott had nothing to do with. Even the dude who started that petition to strike TLJ from canon admitted that he was in a bad place and that he was being stupid and angry, and I can promise you that all the shrieking dorks on Youtube are the buzzing of flies to Disney. If that crowd had any box office and movie making decision influence whatsoever, the next spinoff we’d see a trailer for would be “My Twi’lek Waifu: a Star Wars Story.”

PewDiePie is the worst thing to happen to video games this side of the gaming crash of 83 and he needs to fuck off

Yes, you read that right, and I don’t say that lightly. All sorts of terrible things have happened in the gaming industry since the gaming crash of 83. The console wars, the Atari Jaguar, the Philips CDi, Jack Thompson, the death of the Dreamcast, WoW, an entire console generation packed to the gills with homogenous gray and brown shooters with protagonists who all looked the fucking same, GamerGate, microtransactions, DLC abuse, the death of Maxis, an increasingly toxic fandom, “women are too hard to animate,” the degradation of E3 from a showcase of the biggest and bestest in gaming to a corporately sponsored circlejerk of self congratulatory backslapping and so much, much more.

I don’t care how much PewDiePie gives to charity, or how many fans he has, or how many people think he’s just the greatest, because he’s not. He’s an embarrassing, stupid asshole who constantly gets busted for making stupid racist jokes and by extension making his fans and everyone who has even the vaguest ties to the word ‘gamer’ look like stupid, racist assholes. He’s a corporate ass sucking apologist who gives exposure to anti Semites and racist wastes of space to his audience of mostly 10 to 15 year old boys, and he’s more terminally obnoxious than an Adderall addicted Pomeranian. 

The day he posted his first video of him overreacting to a jump scare while making loud screeching noises on top of edgy rape jokes was the day the progress of “gaming as an art form” was shot between the eyes, placed in a box that was then filled with concrete, and thrown into the ocean. He’s a dumbass man child that’s making all of us look bad and he needs to take his millions worth of corporate sponsorships and fuck off forever into some dark, lonely corner of the Internet where he’ll never be seen or heard from again until an inevitable meltdown that lands him on an episode of Down the Rabbit Hole.

And that concludes this post. I’ll give my final thoughts tomorrow, and on Saturday I’m closing this account forever.

[romancatholicreflections]

10th February >> Fr. Martin's Gospel Reflections / Homilies on Luke 5:1-11 for The Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time:  ‘Leave me Lord, I am a sinful man'.

The Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time  

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

Luke 5:1-11

They left everything and followed him

Jesus was standing one day by the Lake of Gennesaret, with the crowd pressing round him listening to the word of God, when he caught sight of two boats close to the bank. The fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats – it was Simon’s – and asked him to put out a little from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.

When he had finished speaking he said to Simon, ‘Put out into deep water and pay out your nets for a catch.’ ‘Master,’ Simon replied, ‘we worked hard all night long and caught nothing, but if you say so, I will pay out the nets.’ And when they had done this they netted such a huge number of fish that their nets began to tear, so they signalled to their companions in the other boat to come and help them; when these came, they filled the two boats to sinking point.

When Simon Peter saw this he fell at the knees of Jesus saying, ‘Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man.’ For he and all his companions were completely overcome by the catch they had made; so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were Simon’s partners. But Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on it is men you will catch.’ Then, bringing their boats back to land, they left everything and followed him.

Gospel (USA)

Luke 5:1–11

They left everything and followed Jesus.

While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of God, he was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret. He saw two boats there alongside the lake; the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.” Simon said in reply, “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets.” When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come to help them. They came and filled both boats so that the boats were in danger of sinking. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and all those with him, and likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners of Simon. Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.

Reflections (2)

(i) The Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

A person’s faith journey is very personal and, indeed, unique to each individual. There can come a time in our lives when the journey of faith seems almost to disappear. What had been a clearly visible path can become very faint; our faith seems to grow very week. For some people there can then come a time of spiritual awakening. They rediscover their faith. Having drifted from the community of faith, they begin to feel a call to return to it. There can be many factors in a person’s life that can contribute to such an awakening. Sometimes children have a way of awakening the faith of their parents. When the time comes for children to be baptized or to make their first communion or their confirmation, parents can feel a call to reflect anew on their own faith. Some painful experience in our lives, such as the onset of serious illness in ourselves or our loved ones, can also be a moment of spiritual awakening. The witness of someone else’s faith can touch us in some deep way and awaken our own dormant faith. We might find ourselves at some liturgical celebration, such as the funeral Mass of a friend, where we have an experience of the Lord’s presence that somehow calls us to a renewal of our faith. These experiences of spiritual awakening tend to be very ordinary and non-dramatic for most people. A seed is sown and it grows very gradually. Occasionally for some people such experiences can be more dramatic. They experience a sudden reawakening of their faith.

Each of the three readings for this Sunday describes a moment of spiritual awakening. While the three experiences have a great deal in common, each one is quite distinctive. In the first reading, Isaiah of Jerusalem has a moment of spiritual awakening in a setting of worship, while in the most sacred place for the people of Israel, the Temple in Jerusalem. Isaiah had a sense of the Lord’s presence filling not just the Temple but the whole earth, ‘heaven and earth are full of your glory’. In the second reading, Paul speaks of his moment of spiritual awakening while he was on the main road from Jerusalem to Damascus, close to the city of Damascus. He was engaged in what he considered at the time to be God’s work, persecuting the followers of Jesus. Suddenly the very Jesus whose followers he was persecuting appeared to him, ‘last of all, he appeared to me too’. In the gospel reading, Simon Peter had a moment of spiritual awakening, an experience of the powerful presence of the Lord, on the Sea of Galilee, while he was working at his trade as a fisherman. These were three very different people, Isaiah, Paul and Peter, and the Lord touched their lives in a way that was unique to each one of them. The Lord met them where they were and spoke to them in a way that was best suited to their own situation in life.

The Lord speaks to us too in and through our own unique experience of life. Some of us may have the strongest sense of the Lord’s presence when we are in a sacred place, like Isaiah. Yet, Paul and Simon Peter’s experience of the Lord as they went about their daily chores reminds us that the Lord does not confine himself to our sacred places. In the gospels there are other examples of people having a spiritual awakening in and through the ordinary experiences of their lives. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus encountered the Lord in a fellow traveler, although it took them a while to recognize him. The Lord often comes to us in and through the routine circumstances of our lives; it is above all there that we can be powerfully touched by his presence. The readings today also suggest that a significant spiritual experience is not the prerogative of some kind of spiritual elite. At the very moment when Isaiah, Simon Peter and Paul were overwhelmed by a sense of the Lord’s presence, they had a strong sense of themselves as sinners. Isaiah cried out, ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips’. Peter exclaimed to Jesus, ‘Leave me Lord; I am a sinful man’. Looking back at his moment of spiritual awakening, Paul acknowledges that at the time he was ‘persecuting the church of God’. That is why he states publicly, ‘I hardly deserve the name apostle’. The Lord does not wait for us to be worthy to disclose his presence to us or to touch our lives in some significant way. All that is needed is for us to have an openness of heart and spirit to his presence.

When we experience a spiritual awakening it is never just for ourselves. When the Lord touches our lives in some deep way it is always for the sake of others; there will be some kind of a sending involved. Isaiah was sent to the people of Jerusalem, Simon Peter was sent to his fellow Jews and Paul was sent to the Gentiles. For most of us, the people to whom we will be sent will be those among whom we live and work, with whom we have daily contact. An experience of spiritual awakening is always both a gift to us and a gift for others.

And/Or

(ii) Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

There are times in all our lives when we can suddenly become aware of our failings. We are hit between the eyes by the wrong we have done, or perhaps, more often than not, the good we have failed to do. This sense of our own frailty can strike us when we least expect it. Any number of factors can trigger this awareness in us. It may be something somebody says or something we read. It may be an experience of someone else’s goodness or generosity that reminds us of what we too are called to be but have failed to become. We can find a strong sense of regret descending upon us as a result.

This appears to have been the experience of two people in today’s readings. The prophet Isaiah exclaims aloud, ‘What a wretched state I am in! I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips’. It was not just his own weakness and failing that struck him but that of the whole community to which he belonged. In a similar vein, Simon Peter says to Jesus, ‘Leave me, Lord, for I am a sinful man’. For both Isaiah and Peter, what triggered their sense of themselves as sinners was their awareness that they were in the presence of God. They knew themselves to be in the presence of total goodness, of perfect love, and in that clear light they saw all that was lacking in their own lives. Simon Peter’s instinct was to step out of this light, to put distance between Jesus and himself. In a sense, he wanted to hide from the Lord. This too was Isaiah’s reaction. Neither of them really wanted to show their face.

This is a very human reaction, one that we can all identify with in some way. We know from our own experience that if we have done wrong to someone, if we have treated someone badly, we often hide away somewhere for a while. We can be somewhat ashamed to show our face. We keep a low profile, and, eventually we begin to surface in the hope that our failure will not be held against us. Just as that is how we are with each other at times, so it is also the way we can be with the Lord. We can feel that, in various ways, we have given the Lord far less than he is due, and so we keep our distance from him. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, we hide from him. We give up on relating to him, because we feel we have too much ground to make up.

The readings this morning remind us very powerfully that, whatever about our hiding from the Lord, the Lord certainly does not hide from us. If Simon Peter was uneasy at being in the presence of total goodness, Jesus was not in any sense uneasy about being in the presence of a sinner. The Lord clearly had no wish to depart from Peter, as Peter had strongly suggested. On the contrary, he wanted Peter to stay with him, because he had plans for him. It was Peter - and men and women like him - that the Lord wanted as his followers, as his helpers. ‘From now on, it is people you will catch’. The Lord does not give up on us, even though we may be strongly tempted to give up on ourselves. The Lord does not keep his distance from us, even though we may make every effort to keep our distance from him. The Lord always sees a role for us in his great work, even though we might think of ourselves as having nothing to offer him. In other words, the Lord’s vision of us is far more generous than our vision of ourselves. He is far more interested in our future than in our past, in the person we can be than in person we have been.

The Lord’s goodness is not so much a harsh light that exposes all our weaknesses and frailties, but a warm light that restores and renews us. He comes not to remind us of our sins but to take them away. As the Lord said to Isaiah, ‘your sin is taken away, your iniquity is purged’. Having declared that much, the Lord immediately asked, ‘Who will be our messenger?’, in the hope, no doubt, that Isaiah would respond to that question in the way that he did, ‘Here I am, send me’. That is really what the Lord wants to hear from us, not so much Peter’s ‘depart from me’, but Isaiah’s, ‘here I am’. The Lord is not looking for shrinking violets. You remember the parable of the prodigal son where the son had his speech prepared about what a wretch he was. When he started into it, the father would not let him finish. He was home. That was enough. It was time for a feast, not an inquisition.

In the second reading, Paul reminds the Corinthians of the gospel that he himself received and that he preached in Corinth, and the essence of that gospel is ‘Christ died for our sins’. Rather than departing from sinners, as Peter suggested he should do, the Lord lived for them, he died for them, he rose from the dead for them, and he continues to intercede for them, for us. Paul knew that and that is why, in spite of being the least of the apostles, having once persecuted God’s church, his whole being proclaimed, ‘Here I am, send me’. Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we proclaim the Lord’s death; that same Christ who died for our sins is present among us, asking us, ‘Who will be our messenger?’, waiting for us to respond, ‘Here I am, send me’.

Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or  frmartinhogan@gmail.com

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