#it's a horribly embarrassing and infuriating part of history and should be treated as such.

[irawhiti]

look. it's been shown time and time again that shockingly, removing the apex predator of a region causes major ecological issues the entire way down. it's well known at this point that the northern side of the fence (the side the dingoes are on) has much healthier vegetation, wider ecological diversity, and healthier native animals in general due to a lack of sickly animals breeding, overgrazing, and destroying habitat that endangered species require when they'd otherwise be killed off.

we've seen the results of removing an apex predator of a region with yellowstone; as soon as wolves were returned to the area (much to the outrage of many ignorant people) there was a cascade of positive effects to the ecosystem, many of which were completely unforeseen. the dingo fence is a similar case on a much larger scale; the fence is one of the largest structures in the world, reaching 5,614 kilometres (3,488 miles). it used to reach over 8,000 kilometres but was shortened as a "compromise" to allow the continued use of poison bait.

the entire reason for the fence - to keep sheep safe and allow larger flocks - has been proven to not even work! the large unchecked population of kangaroos and other grazers compete for resources with sheep and cause reduced stocking availability! feral rabbits, cats, and foxes are destroying the ecosystem with nothing to keep them in check! invasive feral dogs are beginning to overtake the niche the dingo would fill and are now hunting livestock!

it doesn't even stop dingoes from existing on the other side of the fence. dingoes are found fairly commonly where they ""shouldn't be"" and the fence is used as an excuse to shoot on sight. there are holes in the fence and this has been known for at least 30 years but that doesn't stop people from considering the fence an "icon" of australia, considering it an important part of australian history, and suggesting $200 dingo bounties.

there's also an extremely blatant racial aspect to the extermination and exclusion of dingoes that i feel unqualified to comment on in detail, but Aboriginal people have been saying for decades (if not centuries at this point) that there is a direct and obvious link to the extermination of the dingo and the destruction of Aboriginal life, people, land, and culture. i invite any Aboriginal people who want to go into more detail about this to reply to my post since this topic is moot if we ignore the racial aspects of exterminating the dingo and unfortunately this is commonly glanced over if it's even brought up at all.

instead of arguing fruitlessly over whether or not dingoes deserve to be shot for potentially not being "purebred" (the issues with this line of thinking aside, most dingoes are not crossed with feral dogs regardless of their appearance and this is KNOWN. shooting a dingo from far away because it looks a bit darker or fluffier than expected is not the answer and the shooters know damn well it's not) or whether they've been part of the australian ecosystem for long enough to deserve to not be mass exterminated (oh come the fuck on), how about we take a quick look at the dramatic and concerning difference in the health of the ecosystem where dingoes have been largely exterminated?

and it's frustrating. everyone talks about how we've learned from the thylacine, but have we? and who's "we" exactly? Aboriginal people sure as fuck aren't at fault here. the thylacine was exterminated to protect the white man's livestock. dingoes have been largely exterminated to protect the white man's livestock. we are still actively exterminating this species to protect some fucking livestock! and for what? the fence fails in its single purpose! livestock are being hunted by feral dogs and being outcompeted by the massive amounts of unchecked grazers! this is directly caused by the dingo fence!

if you really want to learn from the "mistake" (read: deliberate extermination) of the extinction of the thylacine, i'd suggest you look into the ecological damage done by the dingo fence. look into the ideology surrounding this line of thinking and how it affects human life and traditional land being stolen. look into the damage that mass poison-baiting to target dingoes does to the entirety of the ecosystem, how it's still widely practiced, and how often other animals are accidentally killed off by this practice!

get angry at the fact that people are way more interested in discussing what "percentage" a dingo can be before it can be legally and morally shot on sight than they are discussing the damage caused by fencing off the only remaining apex predator in the continent from a large portion of the land, purely for some farmers to keep sheep! get angry that this has happened before and will continue to happen unless we do something about it!

burn down the ideology surrounding exterminating animals for human benefit, burn down the system keeping Aboriginal people off of their rightful unceded land so that people can farm some fucking sheep, and burn down the fucking dingo fence.

i really hope to see the day when the stupid fucking dingo fence gets ripped down and i'm not even remotely joking. i fucking hate that fence for so many reasons and it's utterly fucking confounding to me that people still argue that the fence is at all necessary

[sabineelectricheart]

Past Premises

Summary: Sylvain has a strict view of the world. His professor challenges it.

Rating: T - Suitable for teens, 13 years and older, with some violence, minor coarse language, and minor suggestive adult themes.

Words: 4600

Notes: It turned out to be quite long, but I find I like it. I hope you do, too.

Sylvain Gautier said he would never trust anyone because humans were self-serving and fundamentally flawed in all capacities.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

Truth be told, the nobleman did not really believe in the inherent goodness in his fellow human. He is not blind, as a general rule, people just sucked. They were useless unless you could use them for something, and so it was better to find a way to exploit their weaknesses and harness their strengths, kicking them to the curb before you were kicked yourself.

Of course, he has been friends with Felix for so long, he cannot help but exclude his single-minded partner-in-arms from this narrative. He supposes he also feels a dutiful fondness for Dimitri, and he would feel rather irritated if someone took advantage of the naiveté of Mercedes or Ashe or even Annette and Ingrid, but still. Exploit for not being exploited.

However, despite not feeling any particular allegiance or shared history, he came to found out that Byleth was different. She changed his outlook in life.

Sylvain treated her very differently, and not different in the same deferent but contemptuous manner he treated Manuela and Hanneman. He genuinely respected and cherished his professor; in a way he cannot remember ever doing with absolutely anyone.

He wonders why. Maybe it was because of how she treated their class. She was patient and accommodating of all their idiosyncrasies, but knew exactly when and where to press them to be better. She was a stabilizing presence for Dimitri, she helped Mercedes harden and Felix soften, she encouraged Dedue to face his trauma, encouraged Annette to mend fences with her estranged father and Ashe to face the realities about his patron.

The professor even managed to make Sylvain himself make peace with what happened to Miklan, a feat so great they should commemorate her a statue in Fhirdiad.

It was hard to find much fault with Byleth Eisner, and the nobleman found himself increasingly unwilling to try.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier said he would never care about what anyone thought of him, because fuck them, thank you very much.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

When she had shown up with absolutely no warning, she turned everything on its head, which was quite rude, in his opinion. He was very used to being fawned over by girls, but she revealed quickly that she was cut from a very different cloth.

What she found interesting was not what most girls found interesting, probably forged on a life of violence and want and whatever happens when you are raised on a mercenary band, and that immunity to the generally feminine proclivities included Sylavin himself.

He never had to try before to make anyone like him, it just seemed to come with the territory. His Crest did the heavy-lifting for him, and the Gautier charm and beauty closed the deal. The few people who did not like him, drops in the ocean that they were, were not worth his time.

Byleth was different for some reason, though. There was something about her that made him self-conscious and awkwardly aware of things he said or did that she might frown upon.

Goddess, frown, she did. She found him to be exceedingly arrogant, sexist, and in possession of an exceptionally large ego. She was thoroughly unimpressed by the way he used his status as a crest-having nobleman to manipulate people, especially women, into doing things for him.

They were little things, mind you, like getting a snack from the kitchens or covering for him during a detention, he was not so uncouth into manipulating naïve girls into his bed, but it made no difference to her. She thought it was particularly deplorable the way he approached his interactions with girls.

“You present as if you feel like they owe you a date just because you lowered yourself to look at them.” She had said with cold judgement one evening. “It is frankly disgusting.”

He felt downright chastised, and, much to his shock, he felt extremely guilty and embarrassed that he did anything to appear like a filthy philanderer to her.

It was then he realized he cared about what Byleth Eisner thought of him. He cared a lot.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier never believed that he was manipulative.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

Sylvain tended to believe he was better than everyone else. That made it pretty effortless to hone in on easy targets for particularly exploitative manipulations, because he would feel little guilt. Some of these services were mostly benign and turned out fine in the end, with only mild humiliation or a few hours of work lost on the part of the victim.

However, sometimes, he disregarded every conceivable limit.

There is no way for a man to know when was the last time the woman has bled, and so Sylvain usually trusted whatever his bedfellow would tell him. He tried to take his own precautions, pulling out and finishing on his hand, but there were times that he loses himself in the act.

One such instances, with a particularly cunning kitchen maid, had her saying she was pregnant with his child. So, he took the easy way out and tried to vanish from her reach. To that end, he manipulated Ashe to ceding his bedroom. It was fine, the archer was more than glad for helping his classmate, even if it meant having to sleep on the entrance hall and dressing at the sauna changing room. It was all very benign.

Byleth, however, did not think it was benign at all. In fact, she made it a point to single him out in the dormitories when it was the most occupied in order to humiliate him as an almost-punishment.

“Serves you right!” She had said scathingly, while throwing him out of the bedroom by the ears and throwing his clothes out the door, the entire academy coming around to see. “You do not think of anyone but yourself. You do not care who you hurt as long as you get your piece of the pie out of it. You're lonely on the inside, and some day, you will end up actually being alone. Who would want to be friends with someone they can never be sure is trustworthy? Pathetic!”

Sylvain was humiliated, and at first, he was infuriated. She had no clue what he was like and who he was, so her accusations and presumptions were baseless. With time, though, he slowly began to admit she may have been right. Ashe really should not have let him take over his room, and regardless of any moral failings of the kitchen maid, what they did took them both, and he had a responsibility to foot.

Finally, Sylvain started to feel guilty. He compensated his classmate with a new, illuminated copy of Loog and the Maiden of Wind, and tried to assume paternity of the kitchen maid’s unborn child, at least for the time being, but his professor had the forethought of taking her to an exam and Manuela concluded she was not pregnant at all.

He realized Byleth was the first girl to ever stand up to him, not counting his own horrible mother. No one ever dared talk to the heir of Margraviate Gautier the way Byleth had spoken to him that night, and he had to admit he thought that that was pretty admirable. While he did not necessarily enjoy being humiliated in front of the entire high society in Fódlan and surroundings, it did make an impact.

Not long after, he began to notice the way the light would catch her eyes during dusk, turning them from sea blue to almost green. He noticed that, in the morning, she put a thin layer of butter on her toast followed by an equally thin layer of jam, which she would eat while reading the Acta Archiepiscopae, the daily publication of the acts and orders of the Church of Seiros. He noticed that before morning classes she would put two pins in her unruly hair to keep them away from her face, and by lunch, they would have already broken free without her notice. She always noticed after lunch, though, and instead she would put her hair in a bun on top of her head. He noticed that her hands were prone to chap in the cold, and that the balm she used smelt like peppermint.

Most of all, he noticed that, now, when she looked at him, he felt nervous and his heart would speed up. Most peculiar.

With a snicker, Ingrid told him that what he had were feelings for Byleth Eisner. Blinking owlishly, Sylvain realized she might be right.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier had never once been turned down by a girl he had asked out, not when they were fresh conquests and not him revisiting those girls particularly talented in bed. Not once.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

The first time Sylvain asked Byleth out, she thought it was a joke, and he could not believe it. Any other girl would have swooned just because he was talking to her, but not Byleth.

She thought the whole idea was hilarious, preposterous really. Her outrageous response? A flat no! She turned him down flat and Sylvain was not prepared to approach a situation like that, because it simply was not done.

The second time Sylvain asked Byleth out, she had the audacity to get irritated with him. Irritated! The nerve! She acted as though he were a gnat that kept flying around in her face and one that always came back, no matter how hard she tried to shoo it away.

The third time Sylvain asked Byleth out, she was well tired of his persistence and yelled at him to leave her be.

“This is highly inappropriate, and even if it were not, I have no interest or intention of ever going out with the likes of you.” She had raved with a look of utter contempt on her face. “You are not to be trusted, Sylvain Gautier, and I am not a fool.”

Needless to say, he was speechless. He began to realize that he was turning into a stupid character from a stupid novel like Loog and the Maiden of Wind, and then became depressed because his only options at that moment were to either become a brood like Dimitri or an ingénue like Ashe, and neither seemed particularly enticing.

He also realized he would do just about anything, within reason, to make Byleth Eisner like him and, hopefully, date him.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier said he never gossiped, and that gossip was "women's talk".

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

Sylvain never really cared for propriety, but if there was something that he begrudgingly respected was privacy and self-determination. Gossip was just uncouth. However, he was determined to find out what made Byleth tick, but he would never figure it out by talking to her, and so some recognition could not be beneath him.

It was not that he did not want to talk to her, but she was so disturbingly stoic and cagey about her own life, it made him shudder with unease. The only moments she showed genuine emotion was when her students needed support, and in his case, this usually translated to exasperation and tough love. When he really thought about it, he was not sure why he actually liked her when he knew next to nothing about her, but the heart wants what the heart wants, he had mused with an internal dramatic sigh.

Sylvain decided that in order to discover what made Byleth Eisner, Byleth Eisner, he would have to, ugh, gossip. It pained him to have to stoop to gossiping and eavesdropping. He dearly hopes he is not found out, if not for his pride, for the absolute ass-kicking he would receive from his professor dearest.

He targeted the girls of his class, specifically Mercedes, Annette and Ingrid, approaching them one day to ask them about her. He realized right away that that was a big mistake. Not only were they unwilling to talk about Byleth, they took advantage of the opportunity of actually speaking to Sylvain face-to-face by descending upon him like wrathful harpies to berate him for consistently badgering her. Needless to say, he never tried that one again.

After a very regretful drunken tryst with Manuela trying to extract information, Sylvain decided his best course of action was to use magic and his sneaking abilities to listen in on his professor’s conversations. He did not really want to do it because he felt like it just proved Byleth's point, but he was desperate at that point and was almost begging on his knees to Jeralt for if only a kernel of information.

During one particular instance, he hit a jackpot. Dorothea and Byleth were talking about nobles, Sylvain in more specific terms, in what was clearly meant to be a private conversation.

“I might be more inclined to give Sylvain a chance if he was not that much of an entitled bastard.” Byleth had said. “I wonder if this is consequence of his Crest.”

Sylvain would not deny that he was hurt by that. He wanted Byleth to like him, and wanted her to see someone good and noble and loyal.

It was then and there that Sylvain Gautier swore he would change Byleth Eisner's mind, and to prove he meant it, he vowed it on the Goddess Tower on the monastery’s anniversary a few Moons later.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier said he would never change for anyone or anything.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

After witnessing that conversation between Dorothea and Byleth, Sylvain worked incredibly hard to be a person his professor would be proud to know. He became responsible and tried to carry his own weight around the monastery. He became more respectful of the girls who approached him, and he never approached any on his own. He also really tried to deflate his huge head and treat people like they were his equals.

The first time he saw Byleth's shocked reaction to the new him, he did a jig inside his head because he knew his personality shift was something that she never thought he was capable of.

The longer he spent working towards change, the more impressed she became, though she would not care to admit it.

Sylvain had to confess that, at first, he only tried to change so that Byleth's opinion of him would improve. However, he found that as time went on, it became easier and more rewarding to help others and treat them with respect. He realized that, before, people told him what he wanted to hear so that he would like them. Becoming more approachable made it easier to foster real friendships instead of fake ones, which he, begrudgingly, admitted was better than being worshipped.

Still, it did funny things to Sylvain's heart to see Byleth begin to smile at him instead of sigh disapprovingly.

The nobleman vowed that he would keep trying to prove himself to Professor Eisner, so he never had to be without her smile again.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier, deep down, never believed he needed anyone.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

At the ripe old age of twenty, Sylvain started getting restless. With the growing discord that was blooming from the approaching war, he began to feel useless and like he wanted to get in on the action.

It could have been that the opposing side mostly consisted of those he had broken bread for years at the monastery, or that Dimitri’s leadership was questionable at best and disastrous at worse, or that he could sense impending danger like electricity across his skin. It could have been a combination of the it all.

Either way, his mood was generally poor and Byleth found herself to be taking the brunt of his temper more often than not. After a while, she could not bear to continue shouldering his anger as if she were the cause of it and, as a result, she left him. With reason, as he could not find fault in leaving someone who has, repeatedly, threatened to kill and/or force upon marriage to her for her Crest.

Not fifteen days later, the Archbishop turned into a dragon and ate her whole, presumably killing her.

Fuck.

Sylvain' world tilted on its axis and it felt like he was dying. For months, Byleth had been the anchor he had tethered himself to, and she had kept him afloat when he felt like he was going to drown.

His professor had been the reason he became the man that he was, so who was he without her? When they were together, in the deceivingly idyll of school, he had taken for granted her unwavering presence in his life and with her gone, he realized how much he truly needed her, how much he had always needed her.

After the war began, Sylvain assumed the traditional duties of Margrave Gautier and patrolled the border with Sreng, making it clear to those filthy barbarians that they would not be able to catch the kingdom unprotected.

He cried himself to sleep for a week straight when he came home on leave one day to a regretful Alois, who carried with him the Lance of Ruin, found amongst the wreckage of the monastery. It had been so surreal until that point, but holding the weapon he had entrusted to her care in his hand was a physical reminder that she was really gone.

It took a literal slap in the face from Ingrid to wake him up out of his funk. She took no mercy on him, and pointed out how pathetic he had become in Byleth's absence.

“She died defending us, protecting us, you useless waste of space!” The blonde knight barked at her former classmate. “She died so that megalomaniac dictator with horns would not kill us all! The least you can do is get off your fat, smelly arse and do something about it!”

Even though he took no pleasure in hearing that his beloved died so he could live, Ingrid’s speech reminded him that, while the professor would not be coming back, he had to act as if she were. To birth upon a world where she would be glad to live in.

So he did, for four long years, until the day Dimitri had made them promise to return to the monastery. For a blessing of the Goddess, Byleth never came back on a promise and miraculously attended their reunion, too, coming back into the Blue Lions’ fold, from where she should have never left.

After looking at each one of them in awestruck appraisal, she hugged Sylvain tightly. He was not sure who cried harder then.

He would never take Byleth Eisner for granted ever again.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier never really cared for romance.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

On the day that Byleth finally agreed to go out with him, in the middle of a terrible, terrible war, Sylvain immediately grabbed his horse and did a parade around the monastery and the village below to share on his happiness, all while whooping and cheering.

It was not until he returned to the stables and placed his horse on a pen for the page to feed it that he realized he had absolutely no idea about what to do in a relationship.

Sylvain never had a girlfriend before. He had plenty of casual flings, but he never made an effort to stick with one girl because, frankly, he just did not care for the idea. However, with Byleth, the things he felt for her ran far deeper than anything he had ever experienced before, so deep that he entered entirely unexplored territory.

He was terrified. He is a good-for-nothing, after all, he had no business with love.

To be perfectly honest, he got such a case of cold feet that he very nearly broke things off with Byleth before they had even begun, but, with a firm word from Ingrid, some eye rolls from Felix, and several incredulous squeaks from Mercedes, Sylvain finally calmed down and came to his senses. He realized he had something special with his former professor, and while it was scary, it was also exhilarating and exciting.

Regardless, Sylvain did not know how to do the whole romance thing. Do girls even actually like flowers and candy, he had wondered. He came to the conclusion that he had no choice but to ask Dorothea, despite being quite frightened by the prospect of being chased around by an angry swordwoman or worse, laughed off the monastery.

In the end, he was extremely grateful that he did, because he was completely off base. He figured he should have known better, since Byleth had been defying expectations ever since he met her. After taking her to a horseback stroll through the woods around the monastery, they had a nice picnic by a pond, followed by a few matches of checkers.

He knew he did the right thing when, upon returning to the dormitories, Byleth turned and beamed at him.

She could weaponize that smile, he had thought as his heart arrested in his chest and his palms started sweating. She's going to kill me some day.

One night, a year into their relationship, as he stared at her while she was sleeping on his chest, he knew with certainty that Byleth Eisner was one of the best things that had ever happened to him.

*_*_*_*_*

Sylvain Gautier would never admit to being scared, ever.

That changed with Byleth Eisner.

As the war continued to strengthen around them, Byleth and Dimitri were repetitively called away for missions due to their unique skill sets, and Sylvain was sick with worry for his girlfriend and crazed monarch. It was a constant source of stress, and at times, he could not even stomach eating.

While the attack on Enbarr advanced to a glorious closing act, Dimitri returned from his latest mission to the Imperial Palace with Edelgard’s head on his left hand and a maniacal laugh on his lips. Byleth did not return at all.

When Sylvain heard the news, he had thrown up because he knew the outcome could not possibly be good.

The Blue Lions became increasingly more agitated the longer Byleth was gone, and after a month and a half missing, the Church gravely made the decision to pronounce her missing, presumed dead once more.

The news devastated her former students, but none other more than Sylvain, who reverted into a shell of a man once again. He never imagined he could feel devastation beyond what he had felt when the green-haired woman disappeared for the first time, but this certainly trumped that feeling a hundred times over.

Sylvain could not help but to think that the more you have, the more painful it is to lose. Six years ago, he lost a professor, now, he lost the love of his life. He could not stop picturing the little girl with green spike hair like hers and amber eyes like his. He had the image of a tranquil life up north, of days of horse-riding and peacekeeping and nights of devoted love underneath thick furs burned into the back of his eyelids.

Most of all, as he fingered the plain Gautier box holding a simple band with a simple stone. He could not stop imagining what it would have been like being able to say I love you, Lady Gautier before they went to sleep every night and as he woke up next to her every morning.

It was a stormy night when a dark figure entered the Royal Palace of Fhirdiad. The Blue Lions were gathered in preparation for the peace talks that would begin to be held amongst the Kingdom and the former Alliance and Imperial noble houses. It was concerning, as every guest was accounted for, and no one was supposed to waltz into the King’s residence so inconspicuously.

However, when Byleth limped through the banquet hall door and slumped against the door frame, thoroughly ragged and covered in scratches, bruises, and blood, it turned into pandemonium. Sylvain felt like the air had been sucked from his lungs as his legs gave way beneath him, and he no longer felt like he was inside his own body.

For the first time since she went missing, the newly-anointed margrave sobbed until he was physically unable to cry anymore.

It took several weeks for Byleth to fully recover, and almost an entire year for Sylvain to let her out of his sight. While it left her thoroughly rankled, after a while she understood that he was just scared and let the issue lie.

The experience was something he never wanted to relive for a third time, and it taught him a valuable lesson. Life is short.

Even though they had not talked much about the future and she was completely blindsided, Byleth Eisner said yes when Sylvain proposed.

*_*_*_*_*

For his entire life, Sylvain Gautier never believed he would have true purpose or meaning in his empty life.

That changed with Lady Byleth Gautier… and Cordelia Gautier, his two girls and the absolute centre of his entire universe.

Following the war and Edelgard’s defeat, Sylvain married Byleth in a small ceremony surrounded by only close friends in their new territory. Alois was entrusted with giving away the bride, which he did while crying obnoxiously, and Dimitri was to officiate.

A little over a year later, Byleth bounced her own daughter around their large, northern manor, covered in furs and shivering with the winter cold, but always so very happy to be there.

She did not notice and would not know for several years, but Sylvain filled up at least an entire sketchbook of renditions of just her and Cordelia. Every so often, he would secretively look at the pictures and smile to himself, letting the warm feeling in his chest fill his entire body.

Years later, Sylvain would look back on his life with his wife and feel content. His daughter would be worried about leaving so far south to Garreg Mach for school, after her magic aptitudes did not warrant an acceptance to the academy in Fhirdiad. Her mother would assure her it did not matter where she would go, they would be always with her, and she would glare at Sylvain when he would jokingly whisper behind his hand, “As long as it isn’t Enbarr”.

Cordelia would end up being as intelligent as her mother and a bit of a heartbreaker like her father, much to Sylvain' displeasure. Where's my lance when I need it?, He would think with a glower. In the end, she would settle, shockingly, on Lady Varley’s son and moved permanently into Imperial territory, which pained her father so, but he was happy if she was happy.

As the years passed them by, they brought children, grandchildren, godchildren, fortune and happiness beyond belief. For their entire lives, every so often with adoration in her still-green eyes, Byleth would murmur to him, “I love you. Thank you for the opportunity to live out this wonderful life.”

Sylvain Gautier had had a lot of never’s in his life, of denials and ordeals. It took Byleth Gautier (née Eisner) to change everything for the better. After so many years chasing the next high, he was pleased in his staunch belief that there was not a single experience he wishes he had had, and that is the most important thing for him.

*_*_*_*_*

Fire Emblem Masterlist

Three Houses Masterlist

[quakerjoe]

We All Know He Did It, It’s Whether He Pays a Price

“The most irritating thing about the whole Kavanaugh bullshit is that I know with every fiber of my being that he did everything he is being accused of, and the reason I know this is because I was one of those special kinds of asshole drunks that he palled around with for years. I never sexually assaulted anyone, and I didn’t whip my dick out at anyone, although I have a buddy who did the EXACT same thing at a party and I have another friend who stuck his dick on the bar on top of a ten dollar bill. I would never have done anything like that because I was a drunk even back then and would never do anything to risk being banned from the only bar on campus. The reason the Duke Lacrosse team was so easily blamed for what turned out to be lies is because it was so god damned believable. That’s what fraternity assholes were (and in many cases, unfortunately), still are. It’s an excuse and an explanation to say that I was a product of my environment - I grew up on a college campus, watched college males at their worst, played college lacrosse in high school because it was a club team, was on all sorts of male only clubs and sports teams, later in a fraternity, later in the male dominated army where the culture was, believe it or not, far worse in the late eighties and early nineties than it is now. I objectified women, said horrible things, attended fraternity parties that were called and advertised as “the meat market” because it was only open to women and the fraternity. I did those things, and looking at the stuff Mark Judge and Kavanaugh’s friends and contemporaries have said and written, I know for god damned sure ole “Bart O’Kavanaugh” was there and doing that shit, too. I’m not proud of the things I did, although like every jackass I was with back then, I bet I was sure proud when it was going on. And here’s the thing- I thought all the way through those years that I was a good guy, but I was part of that toxic culture and a willing participant. It’s embarrassing. My cheeks flush when I think about it now. I regret it, and I am sorry, and I wish I could apologize to anyone I may have unintentionally hurt. Earlier I said it was an excuse and an explanation- the excuse is for me, the explanation is for you. The excuse is how I live with the shame, because I know there were a lot of men my age who didn’t act like a frat asshole, who didn’t look at relationships as “scoring” and little more, who didn’t treat women like objects. Who didn’t call girls sluts or find things like “Renate Alumni” funny and snicker about it. The explanation is that this is how things were and regrettably still seem to be in many places. I’m not trying to paint myself as history’s greatest monster- I had and still do have lots of female friends form the era- I’m super stoked to see a bunch of them this weekend at Homecoming, but the fact of the matter is that while I individually never did the sorts of things Kavanaugh has been accused of, I was a willing participant in the larger culture that allowed those things to happen and shamed women into silence. I’m complicit. Again, this is not a post I am enjoying writing because it’s embarrassing and painful. It hurts to realize that 16-22 year old me is not someone most of you would have liked. It does, on the other hand, afford me the crystal clear clarity that allows me to say with 100% confidence that after watching Kavanaugh disgracefully trot his wife out in front of the cameras and spew lie after lie in his interview and elsewhere, that he is guilty of everything he has been accused of and probably a helluva lot more. Women don’t just make this shit up. And men who pretend they do are as emotionally mature as 17 year old stoned and drunk me and should be summarily ignored. He’s lying. He was a fall down drunk with a bunch of rich prep school boys who were also fall down drunks. There were no rules, no consequences, and no boundaries, because they were a bunch of the untouchables. And you know who, besides me, isn’t fooled by this bullshit? Women. Because women have been on the receiving end of this nonstop harassment, the assaults, the stigmatizing, the, well, you name it. While Brett Kavanaugh can conveniently wipe his memory, the victims and the other women can’t. They lived it, they are reliving it now, and there is no closure for them, even though I think closure is a bullshit concept. There’s no closure for victims of trauma, there’s only justice and hoping things get a little bit easier and a little bit more livable over time. So every fucking scumbag asshole rushing to put this guy on the court can just go to hell. It makes me incandescent with rage to think that RBG, Sotomayer, and Kagan may have to sit in the same room as this prick. It’s infuriating. Because I have his number, and so do the women who have been on the end of abuse from dickheads like me and him. And that’s why you listen to fucking survivors, because they’re telling the truth and being revictimized again in the process. And if you’re still reading this, I’m sorry. I should have been better.”

- by John Cole

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2018/09/25/look-we-all-know-he-did-it-its-whether-he-pays-a-price/

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Pink Floyd always was, and still is, wildly popular and successful here in Germany. The legendary rock group’s former bass player and singer, Roger Waters, still has quite a following here too as a successful solo artist. That following does not, however, include the German government, nor does it include supporters of the current government of Israel, who last fall successfully petitioned the broadcasting honchos who run Germany’s public television network ARD to drop a planned live concert by Mr Waters from the programming schedule. The grounds: as a supporter of the BDS boycott movement and a passionate advocate of justice for Palestine, Waters was accused of being an “antisemite”. Israel’s interests, whether real or imagined, carry a good bit of weight here in the former stomping grounds of Herr H and his millions of supporters, which included a great many who simply had no idea what was going on in those concentration camps — if they are to be taken at their word — and now there are even more millions of their children and grandchildren who sincerely feel deep shame and revulsion at what was done by their relatives and their country. Understandably, they want the world to know that times have changed in the land where the Holocaust was organized and administered. Jews were not the only group targeted and murdered en masse, which may come as a surprise to some. But thanks to what the courageous academic, author, and crusader for Palestinian rights Dr. Norman Finkelstein calls Israel’s and Judaism’s “Holocaust Industry”, there is no danger that those Jewish victims of Nazi bloodlust will ever be forgotten. This cannot necessarily be said of the many Sinti and Roma, gays, disabled persons and others who shared that horrible fate [Not to mention communists, socialists and other sworn political foes of fascism]. We don’t know how many of those others were wiped out, but we all know how many Jews were murdered: six million. Most people who are not illiterate can tell you that number immediately. Dr. Finkelstein is a Jew, both of whose parents were interned in concentration camps by the Nazis. It should not be possible to tar him as an “antisemite” but the Israeli government does it anyway, as is also the case with members of the group Jewish Voice for Peace and many other Jews now banned from entering the country. Finkelstein’s honesty and passion for justice also cost him a professorship at DePaul University. His new book has just been published. Times have, in fact, changed. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish persons are now living in Germany again, their numbers growing pretty rapidly. A great many of them are young people moving from Israel to live in ultra-hip Berlin. I have never been in Israel, although for years I was related by marriage to a good many orthodox Jews, but I have been in Berlin many times and I can easily imagine that it might be more pleasant for many young Israelis to blend into that multicultural megalopolis than to remain at the eye of the Zionist storm, especially if one does not identify strongly with the religious aspects of Israeli culture (as many of these Israeli immigrants do not). Berlin is surrounded by the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, communist East Germany as it was then, now once again part of the (dare I say it?) Fatherland. Most East Germans could not be reunified with the Klassenfeind (“class enemy”) fast enough after the “fall of the wall” in 1989, but these days an awful lot of them are very disillusioned and disappointed, as are many others in the former Soviet Bloc. The majority of those Eastern Europeans renounced the official socialist ideology with obvious pleasure, having apparently never taken it terribly seriously except to the extent one had to in order to stay out of trouble. They tried to walk the capitalist walk and they expected to be welcomed as long-lost brothers. And in many newspaper editorials and speeches by politicians, they were. But 28 years after reunification, in practice those in East Germany are still the objects of West German scorn and arrogance. Many of them have repaid that ongoing slight and condescension by adopting the views and politics of the aforementioned Herr H, expressing their hatred of foreigners, immigrants, refugees and Jews at the drop of a hat, and in many cases going a good bit farther. In some recent years the number of attacks on foreigners and refugees by Germans has reached one thousand for a single year, although it is the rare violent crime by a refugee here that the media continues to find much more horrifying and newsworthy. Not all German Neo-Nazis and associated sympathizers are East Germans, not by a long shot, but it is fair and accurate to say that the center of ultra-right-wing evil here is the federal state of Saxony. Where Bach and Wagner once made musical history, a different cultural phenomenon is now growing rapidly, and in Saxony that fact actually made the xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Saxony’s biggest political party in the September 2017 parliamentary election (see my article “The German Election: The West’s Nervous Breakdown Continues”). Nationwide, the party hauled in almost 13% of the vote, taking so much support from the ruling Christian Democrats and Social Democrats that, four months later, attempts to form a new governing coalition have not yet succeeded. So in Berlin, we now have a large number of Jews living in a single city surrounded by a population which nourishes quite a lot of Neo-Nazi hatred of Jews and immigrants and refugees. It is no surprise that this causes the German government great anxiety. The government was also mortified and embarrassed when a group of demonstrators, which allegedly included many Muslim immigrants, burned Israeli flags at a recent public demonstration in Berlin. That demonstration was organized in response to US President Donald Trump’s announcement that he had decided to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. This flag-burning so infuriated conservatives in the government – who had already spent much of the last year trying to outdo each other with public displays of anti-refugee zeal, and proposing new measures to deport as many refugees as possible – that they immediately began to demand the deportation of any immigrants unwilling to “accept Israel’s right to exist”, and began as well to propose major new programs and laws against antisemitism. The political dimension of the demonstration was practically never mentioned. As we have seen, the government here brands most criticism of Israel, including virtually everything to do with the BDS boycott movement, as “antisemitism”. While the German government joins the rest of the EU in officially opposing Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, calling them “obstacles to peace”, in practice it demands no changes in that policy in exchange for European weapons sales and other support for the Israeli government and military — exactly like Israel’s Ally Number One, the USA. Last year the German Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel was snubbed and publicly humiliated by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who refused to meet with him as scheduled, after Gabriel visited some groups of pro-Palestinian activists in an embarrassingly pathetic and transparent attempt to show some “balance”. Once again, reference was made to the long-dead “Peace Process” as if it still existed. Even this, however, was too much for Bibi, who had not been informed in advance, and immediately cancelled his own scheduled subsequent meeting with Gabriel in a raging hissy-fit, leaving the latter with egg on his face to stammer mild expressions of surprised concern to the media. Gabriel, in typical obsequious German grovel-before-Israel fashion, insisted that while it was all a bit overdone and unnecessary, it would not harm Germany’s ties with Israel in the slightest. Which really says it all, in a nutshell. In a speech last year, the German Head of State, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier – himself for many years the Foreign Minister under Merkel, and a former failed Social Democratic candidate to replace her as Chancellor – referred darkly to alleged poorly-disguised antisemitism as the true motive behind much left-wing criticism of Israeli policy. As outrageous as I found this assertion, I was even more outraged by the fact that I heard not one word of public criticism of this sneering smear in subsequent media reaction to the speech. Germany has groveled before Israel so habitually for so long that it is hard to imagine what it would take to arouse any real resistance here to Israeli apartheid and war crimes. During last year’s international arts festival “Documenta”, which takes place every year here in part with government support, the performance of a scheduled theatrical production called “Auschwitz On the Beach” — which attempts to draw attention to the disgraceful manner in which Germany and the EU are complicit in the drowning deaths and Libyan captivity, torture and slavery of refugees attempting to reach Europe — was also cancelled. Many Jews and supporters of Israel were furious at the implied comparison between these refugee deaths and the Holocaust, which must in their opinion always be treated as an unparalleled crime unique in history. The festival’s staff quickly capitulated and the only thing most people ever saw of the work was the subsequent controversy, having been denied the opportunity to see it and make their own judgments. In his 2011 address to the Palestine Center in Washington DC on the occasion of the annual Shirabi Lecture, retired US diplomat Chas Freeman stated: … the cruelties of Israelis to their Arab captives and neighbors, especially in the ongoing siege of Gaza and repeated attacks on the people of Lebanon, have cost the Jewish state much of the global sympathy that the Holocaust previously conferred on it.  The racist tyranny of Jewish settlers over West Bank Arabs and the progressive emergence of a version of apartheid in Israel itself are deeply troubling to a growing number of people abroad who have traditionally identified with Israel.  Many – perhaps most of the most disaffected – are Jews.  They are in the process of dissociating themselves from Israel. They know that, to the extent that Judaism comes to be conflated with racist arrogance (as terrorism is now conflated with Islam), Israeli behavior threatens a rebirth of antisemitism in the West.  Ironically, Israel – conceived as a refuge and guarantee against European antisemitism – has become the sole conceivable stimulus to its revival and globalization. Demonstrably, Israel has been bad for the Palestinians. It is turning out also to be bad for the Jews … In the same address Ambassador Freeman stated: Examples of criminal conduct include mass murder, extra-judicial killing, torture, detention without charge, the denial of medical care, the annexation and colonization of occupied territory, the illegal expropriation of land, ethnic cleansing, and the collective punishment of civilians, including the demolition of their homes, the systematic reduction of their infrastructure, and the de-development and impoverishment of entire regions. These crimes have been linked to a concerted effort to rewrite international law to permit actions that it traditionally prohibited, in effect enshrining the principle that might makes right. As the former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Legal Department has argued: ‘If you do something for long enough the world will accept it.  The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries . . . International law progresses through violations.’ In the seven years since those words were written, the situation has only worsened. It is clear to any open-minded observer that much of what the German and Israeli governments insist on describing as growing “antisemitism” is actually growing international revulsion in response to the policies and war crimes of the Israeli government and military, policies and crimes committed with plenty of support from the USA and the EU. Of course, there are, and always were, bigots and racists and Neo-Nazis who would and will hate all Jews whatever happens in Palestine. Their numbers may be growing somewhat as well, or they may simply be growing more outspoken about views they have always held, in the current epidemic of nationalist hysteria nourished in particular by social media. But to continue to assert that the true antisemites and the rapidly growing number of persons worldwide – including millions of Jews – who vehemently oppose Israeli ethnic cleansing and military occupation are all motivated by antisemitism, is to be willfully blind. It does credit to Germany that its citizens and political elites sincerely wish to atone for the sins of the Nazis. It is a crime, however, to insist that Palestinians should pay the price for that atonement. In fact, many of Germany’s allies have never expressed much regret over their own genocide, massacres, and ethnic cleansing – whether the extermination of 100 million Native Americans in the United States, the murder of an estimated 60 million persons in India under British rule, or the brutal elimination of 10 million in the Congo by Belgium – and Germany itself is refusing demands to pay reparations to Poland and Namibia. But direct reparations to the victims of such historic horrors and their survivors, whether feasible or not, would certainly be a more just means of atonement than support of a colonial racist regime which is itself committing slow genocide against an imprisoned and largely defenseless population. Germany adds insult to injury when it enshrines in government policy the vicious lie, echoing those equally vicious smears from Tel Aviv, that passionate advocates of the Palestinian cause are motivated by racism. http://clubof.info/