#one of the many ways in which the uk is complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people

[spectersinthesnow]

not to sound like a broken record saying the same thing about mainstream british news outlets all of the time but just now the news have reported on the school in al nuseirat being bombed by israel last night and the words that they chose were ‘it was believed to be a hamas stronghold’ rather than the fact that displaced people had been seeking shelter there and were murdered!!!!!!!!!!!!

[thethief1996]

Gaza has been completely cut off from the world and from each other. Gazans with Turkish SIM cards have been able to make contact with the outer world and said rescue teams don't know where to go because they don't know where bombings have happened. There's no way to call ambulances. At night, due to the electricity cut, Gazans are left in complete dark only lit up by the airstrikes. They have no way to know what's happening on the next street over. Meanwhile, Israel is publishing AI rendered videos of tunnels under Al-Shifa hospital to manufacture consent for its bombing. Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, is housing hundreds of refugees.

This was meant to cut off Palestinians from the world, because we are sympathizing with their first person accounts and it makes Genocide Joe look like a genocide denier when he casts doubt on the death toll (a note on this, Israel has called the Gaza Municipality to threaten them with bombings. They want to erase every record that Palestinians exist in Gaza).

It's not up to us to feel defeated. Israel denies the very existence of Palestinians, and when we turn around and give up hope, we are washing our hands of any work towards liberation and becoming complicit in the zionist narrative. The people of Gaza are alive, the people in the West Bank are alive and the 5.6 million refugees denied the right of return are alive. Mosques are using their minarets to send out help signals. We're being asked to be their voices, so let's be their voices.

Educate yourself. Read into Palestinian history and the occupation. You can't common sense people out of decades of propaganda. If your arguments crumble when a zionist brings up the "disengagement of Gaza", you have to learn more.

Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.

Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.

Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe).

Keep yourself updated and share Palestinian voices, looking to inform yourself from the sources. Palestinians have asked of us only that we share, tweet and post, over and over. Muna El-Kurd said every tweet is like a treasure to them, because their voices are repressed on social media and even on this very app. Make it your action item to share something about the Palestinian plight everyday. Here are some resources:

Al Jazeera

Anadolu Agency

Mondoweiss

Boycott Divest Sanction Movement

Palestinian Youth Movement

Mohammed El-Kurd (twitter / instagram)

Al-Shabaka (twitter / instagram)

Mariam Barghouti (twitter / instagram)

Muhammad Shehada (twitter)

Motaz Azaiza (instagram) - reporting directly from Gaza. He's been offline since yesterday. Keep him in your prayers.

Take action. You can participate in boycotts wherever you are in the world, through BDS guidelines. Don't be overwhelmed by gigantic boycott lists. BDS explicitly targets only a few brands which have bigger impact. You can stop consuming from as many brands as you want, though, and by all means feel free to give a 1 star review to McDonalds, Papa John, Pizza Hut, Burger King and Starbucks. Right now, they are focusing on boycotting the following:

Carrefour

HP

Puma

Sabra

Sodastream

Ahava cosmetics

Israeli fruits and vegetables

Push for a cultural boycott - pressure your favorite artist to speak out on Palestine and cancel any upcoming performances on occupied territory (Lorde cancelled her gig in Israel because of this. It works.)

If you can, participate in direct action or donate. Palestine Action works to shut down Israeli weapons factories in the UK and USA, and have successfully shut down one of their firms in London.Some of the activists are going on trial and are calling for mobilizing on court.

Call your representatives. The Labour Party in the UK had an emergency meeting after several councilors threatened to resign if they didn't condemn Israeli war crimes. Calling to show your complaints works, even more if you live in a country that funds genocide.

FOR PEOPLE IN THE USA: USCPR has developed this toolkit for calls, here's a document that autosends emails to your representatives and here's a toolkit by Ceasefire in Gaza NOW!

FOR PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace targeting the European Parliament

FOR PEOPLE IN THE UK: Friends of Al-Aqsa UK and Palestine Solidarity UK have made toolkits for calls and emails

FOR PEOPLE IN GERMANY: Here's a toolkit to contact your representatives by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN IRELAND: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN POLAND: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN DENMARK: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN SWEDEN: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN FRANCE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN THE NETHERLANDS: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN GREECE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN NORWAY: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN ITALY: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN PORTUGAL: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN SPAIN: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN FINLAND: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRIA: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN BELGIUM: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN ROMANIA: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN UKRAINE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA: Here's a toolkit by Stand With Palestine

FOR PEOPLE IN CANADA: Here's a toolkit by Indepent Jewish Voices for Canada

Join a protest. Here's a constantly updating list of protests:

Here's a list on tumblr

Global calendar

Another global calendar (go to the instragram of the organizers to confirm your protest)

USA calendar

Australia calendar

There will a National March on Nov 4th in Washington, with the participation of 200+ organizations. If you can, get a group of friends and attend.

Feel free to add more resources. Check the links, there are too many protests and tumblr has a word limit for text posts.

[aronarchy]

[transcripts of the videos (which have been merged in the above upload in the order they were shared in the tweet):

1:

… The amount of risk that journalists in Sudan go through every day just to get information out of Sudan and to other countries is just incredible. The last couple of months, we’ve seen Halima Idris Salim run over by RSF soldiers; we’ve seen journalists being assassinated in their own homes; we’ve seen, just a couple of days ago, Abdelaziz Mahmoud Arja being kidnapped by the RSF for reporting on their genocide against the Masalit tribe. And through all this, we see no solidarity or willingness to protect journalists in Sudan, just radio silence.

And above this as well, we see even MPs trying to defend the UAE like Nadhim Zahawi did two weeks ago, going above and beyond to defend the UAE and the complicity in genocide, and implying that allegations against the UAE supporting the RSF is “Iranian aggression.” And Nadhim Zahawi who used his powers as an MP to pass legislation to recognize the Anfal genocide against the Kurds in Iraq is now going out of his way to defend a complicit party in genocide in Sudan right now. And we might wonder why he goes to such lengths. He was actually a middleman between RedBird IMI and the Barclay family for the potential purchase of the Telegraph by the UAE which just fell…

2:

…, which has been proven by the RSF’s own propaganda videos, that Nimr vehicles have been used by the RSF. MBBA designs anti-aircraft and anti-tank turrets for these Nimr vehicles. These same vehicles with these same turrets are being used against Sudanese, against Africans, in the west in Darfur, being used to kill us, being used to massacre us, and this must be addressed and must be opposed.

3:

… Committees and the emergency rooms on the ground right now, who—to avoid their responsibilities, the Western powers have said that they are “political actors” and will not help them as such, even though we have seen that the UN ran out of Sudan in the first five days of the war. 97% of aid that has been given to Sudanese peoples through the emergency rooms and through the Resistance Committees, and denying, simply closing their eyes and thinking that these are “political actors” is a complete lie. As well as this, the UK must stop caving in to the UAE and not, as it has done, postponed deliberations against the UAE in the United Nations.

Coming back to the media, there is—on both sides of the belligerents, we see lies being propagated by the Kezan and by the RSF. We see channels like…

4:

… was one of the last people to meet with Hemedti just weeks before the war started. And right after the UK went to the UN to try to have the Sudanese complaint against the UAE be heard, RedBird IMI dropped their bid. And Nadhim Zahawi, I guess, had some sort of tantrum about him not being able to enjoy the fruits of the blood of our people. So, we see MPs, more than just Nadhim Zahawi—there’s David Cameron, for example, who led initiatives for the UAE to buy up property here in the UK, which includes this Telegraph bid that I just mentioned—there are many MPs compromised by Emirati interests. We must combat this.

/end transcripts]

[commiepinkofag]

Success in disrupting Israel’s war machine

Palestine Action has forced four UK companies to cut ties with Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems in the past three months

Declaring victory

Perhaps the most significant result of direct action against secondary targets is the way the victories are declared. Rather than avoiding admitting that the disassociation with Elbit was due to campaigning pressure, each of the four companies that have recently cut ties with Elbit had to email Palestine Action directly with confirmation.  This has become a necessary requirement to cease the campaign against a complicit company.  Amidst a genocide, every avenue must be taken in order to isolate, damage and disrupt Israel’s war machine.  Focusing our efforts on Elbit Systems and all those who facilitate them is proving to be a successful strategy, one which many more can get behind to channel our rage into results.

Huda Ammori / March 11 2024 / declassifieduk.org >

[newsnigeria]

Kemi Badenoch forgets to Mention the Anglo-Saxon barbarism and that London remains the world's capital for money laundering - Femi Fani-Kayode

Kemi Badenoch's living hell - FFK "I don't want this country to turn into the one I ran away from"- Kemi Badenoch MP. The Right Honorable Kemi Badenoch MP, former Minister of Women and Equalities of the United Kingdom, and the newly-elected leader of the British Conservative Party deserves to be tarred and feathered for the sort of things she says about Nigeria. Apart from her insulting categorisations about Northern Nigerian Muslims, which I shall come to later in this contribution, this woman had the impudence to describe Nigeria, her country of origin, as a "living hell", a place where she had to "walk one mile to get running water" and a country where "lizards run out of the taps!" She constantly launches heavy salvos against the Nigerian people and our ruling elites including politicians, legislators, members of the Judiciary, and those that are in the private sector calling us thieves and labeling us as being corrupt and inept. She snubbed the Federal Government on two occasions by ignoring them when they attempted to reach out to her through Mrs. Abike Dabiri-Eweka, President Bola Tinubu's Special Advisor on the Diaspora, which provoked the latter to say that she was yet "to find the Nigerianess in her". As far as Kemi Badenoch is concerned Nigeria is a land of demons whilst the UK is a nation of angels. She forgets that the country that she lives in has a long history of corruption, looting, and barbarism and that London remains the world's capital for money laundering.

Again, unlike the UK, Nigeria is not supporting the holocaust in Gaza and is not complicit in the genocide that has been unleashed on the Palestinians. Sadly some of our people have not only applauded her for her offensive sentiments but have also become her loudest cheerleaders. I suspect that those that do this may well be suffering from a disease known as "Stockholm syndrome". This affliction causes its victims to fall in love with their oppressors. It compels them to cultivate an affection for those who seek to place them in servitude and who treat them with contempt. The victims of this malaise are masochists whilst Badenoch herself is the female version of Marquis De Sade, the world's most notorious sadist. Her Nigerian cheerleaders have a chip on their shoulders. They are unpatriotic and have no honor. No matter how much she pisses on the graves of our heroes past and defecates on our flag they continue to worship her. This is pitiful. It is a reflection of their malevolent disposition towards their own country and their low self-esteem. We may have issues as a nation but we must never support those that denigrate our country for political gain. Kemi sold her soul to the right wing of the British Tory party and sought to put to shame the land of her forefathers just to become their leader. Nothing can be more despicable than that. I have seen many attempts to rationalise her insolence and none make any sense. Loving those who hate you and consider you to not only be their inferior but also sub-human, in my view, is not a virtue but a vice. The demonisation of our country should not be a pre-requisite to winning a leadership contest of a political party in a foreign land and if it is one cannot expect any self-respecting Nigerian to applaud it. Her victory in the contest for the leadership of the UK's Conservative party does not in any way ameliorate my disgust and repugnance for her or the foul stench that trails her wherever she goes. She reminds me of the creature that the black American leader, Malcom X, described as "a house n*gger". In order to comprehend her self-loathing and reprehensible mindset I urge those who are interested to read the "black" French writer Franz Fanon's book titled "Black Skin, White Mask". The author had the likes of Badenoch in mind when he compiled this insightful masterpiece.

Kemi is a vile, cunning, dangerous, and willing tool of the colonialists, neo-colonialists, and imperialists and she is everything that any patriotic Nigerian and every Pan-Africanist should despise. Unless and until she purges herself of her contempt I shall continue to regard her in the same light as William Shakespeare's character Brutus whose treachery and betrayal was heartwrenching and whose cut was "the deepest of all". Again she reminds me of the character known as Richard Rich in William Bolt's famous play titled 'A Man For All Seasons' who betrayed England's most famous martyr Sir Thomas Moore and sent him to the gallows with his false testimony and lies in return for a title and landed property in the province of Wales! It is in the same way that Kemi has betrayed, misrepresented and murdered Nigeria in return for her position as Leader of the Opposition in the UK. Anyone that calls my country "hell on earth" is fair game and this is especially if that person does so in order to curry favour with members of her political party and win their support. Such a person is nothing but a specious liar, an unconscionable opportunist, a bigoted racist, and a cheap political hustler who will do or say anything, including selling her own people down the river, for political power. Institutional racism is real in the UK and the worst type of racist is a self-hating black African who feels the need to rubbish his heritage, who believes that he must disparage the land of his forefathers and who consistently reinforces the negative stereotyping of Africa, and Africans in order to be accepted into the highest echelons of the British political class. . The Bible asks, "What profiteth a man to lose his soul in order to gain the world". I ask, what profiteth a woman to lose her dignity and self-respect in return for the leadership of a political party in a distant land? This is made worse by the fact that it is a political party whose star has dimmed, whose days of glory are over, and which may not be back in power for the next ten years! The truth is even if the Englanders proclaimed Kemi Badenoch as their Queen yours truly will continue to loathe her because she has contempt for my country. 250 million people live in Nigeria and she is not the dark, evil, beast-infested forest and wild jungle that Badenoch portrays her to be. She is not filled with ignorant, grass skirt-wearing, ape-looking, monkey-sounding, primitive barbarians, and heinous cannibals that she would have others believe. We are not a land of sub-human creatures that have no decency, no decorum, no knowledge, no heritage, and no history. We are not uncivilised, we do not live in trees, we do not behave like animals and neither are we godless, unruly, ignorant or incompetent. Just like any other country, including the UK itself, we are not infallible and we have our own fair share of flaws and challenges. Yet that does not diminish us and I am not constrained to feel any sense of elation when a person who has displayed such disdain for our people achieves anything simply because that person has her roots in my country or in my ethnic nationality. The fact that Kemi is of Yoruba descent does not absolve her of her rancid bigotry and does not constrain me to give her a free pass. To those from Yorubaland who say we must celebrate her despite her foibles because she is Yoruba I ask the following: must we support a Yoruba who hates her ancestry, heritage, values, and culture and who sees and says nothing good in our history? Must we endorse the acts and words of an individual who has denied us before the world, who has nothing good to say about us, and who has insulted and denigrated our forefathers? Surely doing so would be the height of clannish and cultic behaviour and an inglorious display of a crude and primitive disposition. We are far bigger and better than that.

Even if she was a mass murderer those that think like that would still hail her because she is Yoruba. This surely is not our way and neither does it bring honor to our name. We must judge her on what she says and does & not on the basis of her tribe, gender, nationality, religious faith, or the color of her skin. Outside of that, it says a lot about the values of the British Conservative Party when a vainglorious, dangerously ambitious, self-deprecating, Uncle Tom and Aunty Jemima-like figure could be elected as their leader. This is a far cry from the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill & Margaret Thatcher. I have little doubt that they both turned in their graves upon hearing about Badenoch's ascension in the firm knowledge that their party had been handed a poisoned chalice. Those misguided Nigerians who celebrate her simply because she is from our shores are hugging a snake that hates them with passion. Eventually, she will turn around & bite them & they will curse the day that she was born. I fear for the plight of the Nigerian community in the UK in the unlikely event of her ever being elected Prime Minister. Permit me to end this contribution with the following. In Kemi's most graphic display of ignorance, mendacity, religious bigotry, tribalism & racism she said that she does not believe that Northern Nigerian Muslims should be allowed into the UK because they are, in her view, "Islamists". She went on to say that Northern Muslims support terror & that an example of this is the ugly events in Chibok, Northern Nigeria ten years ago when over two hundred schoolgirls were kidnapped! She also said that Muslims who do not support Israel in its relentless ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians & its genocidal acts in Gaza are "not welcome in the UK". The fact that she had to single out Nigeria & cast aspersions on the character of no less than 50% of our population describing them as "Islamists" and alluding to the malicious falsehood that they are terrorists speaks volumes. One is constrained to ask whether the sheer lunacy of this repugnant woman has any limits. On the quest for reparations for the slave trade, Badenoch said, "This is the past. We need to talk about the future. There are many countries now that want to use guilt to try & exploit the UK. They ask for reparations. I saw it as a Trade Minister. I was at the WTO, I won't name the Minister from another country & he was telling me that we needed to give up some of the things we were doing because of colonialism & because they needed time to develop. These arguments are a scam. Don't fall for it. We need to make sure that we put this country first. We work well with our neighbours, we work with other countries but we have to look after ourselves too." Imagine this coming from an African woman millions of whose ancestors were enslaved and shipped off to the West! She is dumb, deaf & blind to the fact that those advocating for reparations rightly believe that the UK & the rest of the West should make up for the damage that they did through slavery. @Africa. Echo put it well when they posted the following on X. "Germany & the rest of the West continue to provide financial recompense to Israel but Kemi Badenoch believes Africans do not deserve reparations for decades of colonialism & centuries of enslavement". If Kemi's views about the quest for reparations do not open the eyes of Badenoch's Nigerian cheerleaders nothing will. She also stands against multi-culturalism even though she is the Leader of the Opposition in a multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-religious nation & she is married to a white man. What a contradiction! She says she believes that "not all cultures are equally valid" & from her divisive rhetoric it is clear that she also believes that not all races are equally valid either.

…An even greater contradiction is the fact that she is staunchly anti-immigration. She asserts that "Britain must not be a sponge for migrants" forgetting that she is a first-generation migrant and a beneficiary of the British immigration system that she now seeks to discredit. These contradictions and asinine assertions betray a level of perfidy, deceit, intellectual barrenness, and scholarly ineptitude that beggars belief. Another display of her crass ignorance is her assertion that Nigeria, a country that she was raised in, has been run by "socialist Governments". This is arrant nonsense. I guess her definition of "socialism" is anything that does not share her fascist, ultra-conservative, neo-colonialist, and neo-imperialist views. The irony of it all is that despite her pretence at being more English than the English and more conservative than Enoch Powell, by the time the British right-wing finish using her, they will flush her down the toilet like the turd that she is. She deserves no better. (FFK) Read the full article

[lostthenfoundmyself]

Firstly, wow. Using Yiddish words to insult a Jew? Really respectful of other cultures there. Shows you care so much about what you’re saying. /s

Secondly, Jews and Palestinians are both indigenous people of the land there. Jewish people have been referring to Israel as their homeland for millennia, it’s woven into our traditions and prayers. Furthermore, DNA evidence shows shared genetic roots. If you don’t believe that? Idk what to tell you, but it’s science.

Thirdly, calling Israel’s response genocide cheapens the term. Genocide is a systematic plan to wipe out a racial or ethnic group. Israel is attempting to defeat a government. Do their tactics have many, many issues? Of course. Countries tend to, you know, prioritize themselves in war, and not what’s philosophically right. But if Israel actually wanted to kill Palestinians as their goal, this is not what it would look like. Israel includes many Arab/Palestinian citizens. They hold office and have full rights. They are not forced to assimilate. This is not genocide. Israel’s leadership is displaying callousness, but Israel is not attempting to wipe out a whole race/ethnicity here. Pretending otherwise makes the term meaningless.

Now, why do I feel threatened? Because this IS about me. Because Israel is being singled out in a way no other country is. Because Jews in Israel deserve to be tortured and r*ped, but US citizens (who actually are NOT an indigenous population to the land they inhabit) do not. Because people are calling for the complete dissolution of Israel, but not for that of Germany (which actually committed genocide), South Africa (which had actual apartheid, where Black South Africans could not enter many locations, could not have sex with white South Africans, could not hold office, etc.), the United States (which is on occupied, brutally conquered land AND responded to a single attack on a military base by waging a war against the country that did that attack with no more US civilian casualties but many Japanese civilian casualties—wait, that’s normal warfare, as long as you’re not a Jewish state!), Italy (which had a bloody unification), or the UK (which currently includes Northern Ireland, Wales’s and Scotland). Because my classmates have stated that I deserve to be tortured and r*ped. Wouldn’t you be scared too?

So while the war itself isn’t about me, the “antizionism” my classmates are using is antisemitism, and yes, that is about me.

And lastly, as for the war itself, it shouldn’t be about me, even though my classmates’ declarations are. I have NO obligation to denounce Israel, even if Israel was what you say it is. Let it be known that I don’t have a double standard here. You said that Muslims have an obligation to denounce extreme Islamists, but they don’t. I do not expect that of them. They hold no responsibility for what others identifying as Muslim believe. I also, being an ethnically French person who has visited France, have no obligation to denounce Emmanuel Macron (who sucks) or Marine Lapin (who sucks even more). No one says “hey, you have a connection to the country of France, why are you silent about France’s treatment of Muslims? You’re complicit!” France’s treatment of Muslims is awful, but I haven’t made a statement about it because I’m…not a French politician?

Israel’s flag is bloody. As is that of every country in existence. At least Israel can say it never went to war without being attacked first. That’s more than most other countries can. What you created (I’m assuming you created it, since you didn’t credit an artist) shows a country that has been splattered time and time again in the blood of its own people, as they’ve defended themselves against countries that want them eradicated—and that’s a pretty inspiring image. I don’t feel insulted by it, though I’m sure you were going for an insult trending close enough to blood libel but with the plausible deniability of “I didn’t say it was a ritual!”

But anyway, when people who are neither Palestinian nor Jewish hop on this specific conflict, calling Israelis oppressors deserving of brutalization and Israel the most evil state, the one that it’s most important we dissolve…its not because Israelis are monsters or Israel is somehow the Evilist. It’s because Israel is Jewish, and people hate Jews, and it’s easy to whip people up into a frenzy against them. It’s because others saw this “righteous” anger and enjoyed how it felt and jumped on the bandwagon, without realizing that Israel is not uniquely bad, just uniquely Jewish.

I don’t hate myself. I do not deserve to feel unsafe.

Walking through my dorm last semester felt like a gauntlet. Handmade paintings declaring “from River to sea, Palestine will be free” filled the lounge. Announcements about various pro-Palestine rallies were on every corkboard. Each time I passed a room, I’d think of the things that person said on our dorm’s group chat—and none of them were good.

But someone wrote עם ישראל חי on the whiteboard outside their dorm room with a smiley face. And every time I could, I’d make sure to walk past that whiteboard, because it made me feel a little better, a little more hopeful, a little more alive. I was drowning, and three words on a whiteboard helped me surface for air.

[thekisforkeats]

So a European told me today “must be nice to have a culture.”

And I... kind of lost it.

Context: we’d been chatting for a while, and I’d already had to deal with a couple of moments of... white people being white. Being clueless and talking over people, not being outright racist but saying clueless shit. The first couple of times I explained what was wrong and moved on.

To try to lighten the mood, I shared a video of the Métis jig that’s been going around. It’s a really great dance, and the video has some context on it--specifically that the dance had been suppressed for a long time.

I was talking about the Métis people, and how they had created their own unique culture, which I personally find really fascinating and inspiring as a mixed indigenous/Native person. It’s a hopeful thing--even if they wound up losing a lot of that culture, and having to fight to get it back, there was a time where people could create new things without having to burn down the old.

(And I am not Métis, so if I am misrepresenting Métis culture and history here please feel free to correct me.)

But the key thing is that I mentioned being “cut off from everything.” Because I am. Because I cannot wholly embrace my European ancestry. Because I don’t know Kanien’kahe:ka or Choctaw. Because I am stuck between two worlds and sometimes it feels like a struggle to try to create anything new, any hopeful way forward.

And then they said “it must be nice to have a culture.”

This is a European. Living in Europe.

I lost it.

Any white person, and particularly any European, who thinks “I don’t have a culture”--don’t try to justify this stance. Stop and consider that you don’t feel you have a culture because your culture took over the world. Literally, Western European culture is everywhere.

And yes, I am lumping in all of Europe here, and no, I don’t care how different you all think you are, I was getting the same exact attitude from someone in France and someone in the UK. An attitude of “my specific experience is better than anyone else’s.” An attitude of “I don’t know about this so I will disparage it instead of politely asking questions.” An attitude of becoming defensive upon being called out. The same attitude I get from American white people. You’re not that different. You’re really not.

Culture is about food, and language, and art, and religion, and music.

I do not eat the food of my Native ancestors. I don’t even know what most of it was, and if I did, I couldn’t find it in a grocery store, and where I can it’s being marked up for white people to eat. (Wild rice, anyone?)

I do not know their languages, and I probably never will. There’s no Duolingo for Choctaw or Kanien’kahe:ka

If I use art or music of my ancestors I am derided and belittled or else white people come in to steal it and claim it as their own.

My ancestral religions were outlawed in the US until three years before I was born.

And before any European goes “well that’s the US, not me!” No. No. It’s you. It’s still you. The US just imported all the colonialist bullshit your ancestors put out there, and you’re still being isolationist and racist while the world is on fire.

The saddest part is, I don’t hate European culture as such. I am mixed! Many of my ancestors were from the UK or France or Austria! I love frybread, and I love soda bread, and I love strudel! I honor all of my ancestors, and the complex and difficult relationship I have with them. Some of my ancestors are the same people who did the colonizing and the genocide. I have to live with that. But many of them were good people living difficult lives, just like many of the people I know today.

I owe a great deal of my moral and ethical upbringing to my Oma, who was Austrian. She was 9 years old when the Nazis came--invited in, I will note, as she made sure we knew--and her family detested them, and she lost friends. She left as soon as she could. She taught me about her homeland, and she taught me about solidarity, and about the evils of sympathizers. She taught me about the Holocaust. She refused to let those horrible things go silent to her children and grandchildren. She did her best to teach us what she knew of my Opa’s culture, the few things he’d shared when their children were young, because she knew it was important. She was not perfect, but she tried.

White Europeans do not have to continue to be complicit in racism and colonialism and genocide. You can choose to do better.

The first thing to do? Shut up. Seriously. Stop talking. Sit down and listen. Maybe it’s hard, maybe you’ve come from an abusive background, maybe you’re neurodivergent. Maybe you’ve had to be quiet all your life already.

But I am all of those things, too, and I am a survivor of a very recent attempted genocide. Imagine how much time I have spent in my life being talked over. Being told to be quiet. To not make a scene.

Maybe you’re young, but I knew better than to say that sort of thing before I hit puberty. I had to, because to be a person of color--even a mixed one, even one with light enough skin to pass for white--is to be deeply aware of these things at all times.

Which is not to say I haven’t had my moments. I have. But dear gods am I aware of them.

And that’s the thing--the lack of awareness. The lack of consideration. The continual spouting of something clueless and hurtful and then “oh I didn’t know” as the response.

You should know. If you don’t, then go learn.

And for the love of all that is holy, if you read this in the tags and you’re some random person who didn’t already follow me, don’t come into my damn inbox looking for education, because I will kick your ass out so fast your head will spin. If you’re on the internet in 2021, there are so many resources about European colonization and white supremacy that you have no excuse not to at least try to learn things on your own.

The one lesson I will give? Stop talking. Start listening. I don’t need to hear your cutesy shit about how different France and England are from each other. You both did horrible awful fucked up things in the not-so-distant past. Stop talking about yourselves and start listening to the people affected.

[joezworld]

Why has the UK stubbornly refused to recognize sentient vehicle rights like, at all?

At first it was cultural, then it was active coverup. 

Culture

Like many industrial-revolution era countries, human rights kinda fell by the wayside in the name of progress. When child labour is still accepted and slavery is within living memory, sentient machines being treated like horses is not a stretch. 

As a point of fact, most European countries (except Belgium) held similar views until the second world war - long story short, the Nazis offered locomotives full citizenship if they sided with them, and when it was apparent that they were losing, a lot of engines sided with the allies, but kept their (French/German/Vichy French/Dutch/Polish/other Nazi territory) citizenship. That and the US Army Railroad engines that went over to rebuild the continent forced Europe to accept engines as people. 

The UK was mostly spared from the massive loss of infrastructure and never had to deal with the Nazis as an invading force, so they never had that happen. At the time (the 1940s) these views were not too unusual, as the North American/Japanese view on locomotive rights was a relative rarity everywhere else, so the UK was allowed to be a laggard because the world had bigger stuff going on. 

Coverup

The first coverup was in the early 50′s. The cold war was slowly turning hot, and the west was slowly starting to not like communism. Old Uncle Joe Stalin realized in The War that railways won and lost the war, and made active efforts to keep the locomotives of the soviet rail network happy. (If you’ve watched the HBO show Chernobyl, the coal miners had a similar standing to locomotives in the USSR - they kept everything running)

As the soviets began to include locomotives in their society as a whole - equality for all workers and whatnot - this made countries like the UK, who had locomotives essentially in bondage/slavery, decided to keep their engines in the dark, less they decide to break free from their shackles and become communists. It also didn’t help that the vast majority of the British Public viewed locomotives in the same vein as they would a working animal like a horse - barely sentient and hardly worth notice. A few bills about loco rights introduced into parliament were quietly hushed up or just died in committee. 

Then came modernization. 

Word spread slowly, mainly through newsreel footage (that absolutely spawned riots when shown in North America) and escaping locomotives, but the world really didn’t begin to catch on until the late 1960s, when BR started scrapping relatively new steam engines, who were young enough to be considered children even by continental European standards.  

The outcry was mostly diplomatic - most European countries at the time, including the UK, had vanishingly few media outlets and most of those were either directly controlled by the state or were able to be censored by them. The Europeans didn’t want to show genocide on national television because, well, y’know - that, and while the Americans were making some noise about it when not staggering from land war in Asia to missile crisis to a different land war in Asia, the BBC merely refused to air the stories. With “Auntie Beeb” as the driving force behind credibility at that time, ITV and the newspapers didn’t really run those stories. What few they did were either buried deep in the back pages or were blocked by D-Notice. (D-Notices were used because if the trains rioted, the country would be in a bad place from the government’s perspective.)

-

Meanwhile on the international stage, the UN was mostly silent - as it was for most genocides - because of the Cold War. The British Army was one of the largest bulwarks against the Soviets (especially if they stormed their way through Europe and left the UK by itself), and the country was a major world superpower and a world-spanning empire. 

As the thinking goes: You do not accuse a major economic and defense ally of Genocide, especially if they actually did it - because then they won’t be allies with you. 

In fairness to the UN, they did clandestinely fund hundreds of different locomotive extraction operations from the 1960s to present day, so it wasn’t like they did nothing, but they had to give the outward appearance of that to keep the Brits from having massive social upheaval. 

That was the other problem - it was determined that there was a non-zero chance of a revolution level event if the British Public found out that they’d been complicit to a genocide. In order to keep things stable, the UN didn’t push. 

This period of mild détente continued all the way through the 1980s, when Operation Smash Hit happened. I’m writing a longer story just on this, but the short version is that shit hit the fan on an international stage, and the UK Government responded by putting a blanket D-Notice over everything related to OSH and the subject of locomotive rights in general. 

This held all the way into the mid-2000s, when a couple of things started to happen: 

9/11 happened, and some of our strongest partners in peace/commerce became countries with awful human rights records like Saudi Arabia and Russia. The Locomotive Genocide by this point was 30+ years in the past, so the horror was somewhat removed by then, and Britain was seen as comparatively innocent. 

The EU finally managed to slip some locomotive specific legislation into law, and basically added a 300% tax on scrap locomotive parts. This killed the locomotive scrap industry in the UK, and means that most locomotives withdrawn since 2005ish have just sat around on out-of-use lines instead of being killed. 

  The recession happened, and used locomotive exports became a profitable business during 2009-2010, as out-of-use locomotives were sent away to be “scrapped” in Albania and Greece. (The UN paid the scrap merchants for their trouble and the Albanian and Greek state railways got new locomotives for a lot less.)

The last 2 points basically made it seem a lot better for British Locomotives, as they weren’t likely to be killed in the name of the economy, which has settled many of the worries held on an international stage. The rise of the internet has slowly built awareness within the United Kingdom, but nothing has yet happened, as there’s 200+ years of cultural inertia working against locomotives within the UK. It might happen soon, but soon is a very long time to wait.  

[a-stitch-in-time-and-space]

Cardassians aren’t Nazis (and also not quite the USSR, but I see where you’re coming from)

TW: for much discussions of Nazism, fascism, persecution, no details

So tottering around as a lover of DS9 and (disclaimer) as a major fan of the Cardassians as a not-yer-generic-villain type villain that then become less of a villain, because you can’t assign villainy to a whole species + also being German and hearing/watching/reading a lot of analyses that compare them to Nazis is inspiring me to write this (gasps for breath at the end of that sentence).

@tinsnip , @handsome-anne

1. Who were the Nazis that the Cardassians are specifically being compared to (versus neo-nazis/alt-rights, etc. that they’re not being compared to)

Short version: Post WWI the Versailles Treaty fucked over Germany in a way that left it wide open to the sort of megalomaniacal little bastard on a powertrip that fed on people’s fear and pushed them into a far-right disaster. The Nazi party itself didn’t have a ton of members, but it basically eroded any kind of democracy the country had and decided it would scapegoat Jews, Romani, communists, queer people, and other “intelligent elite”/political dissident and then spread those ideals across the world like a demented wannabe roman Caesar state. This didn’t last too long in the grand scale of world history, but left a body count of 6 million+ dead, mainly Jewish.

2. Germany and its relationship to this history

So Germany tries pretty hard to teach people this history in schools, through memorials, in film, etc. It’s not perfect by any means, there’re still discussions on how to make reparations, as well as neo-nazis and other far-right people around still, sadly just like in the rest of the world. 

But it’s not covering up these atrocities, because there’s a belief that the way to make sure it doesn’t happen again is to be honest. Sadly, not everyone around the world gets as detailed a history surrounding its origins, happenings, and aftermaths, nor does every country engage with its own past like that.

3. Let’s get fictional (Cardassians, first impressions)

The Cardassians are a species that we mainly meet first through their subjugation of the Bajoran people, and then on DS9 following the immediate aftermath of the occupation on Bajor and everything that follows on from there. Throughout the story we discover various bits about what they had done - labour camps, mass executions, forced prostitution, and in that one Voyager episode I’m not a fan of because it didn’t have the range, experimentation.

On the surface, pretty comparable to the nazis, I get it. Hell, often that’s definitely “the source” of where the writers are getting their ideas.

4. So they’re... Nazis?

The problem comes when using one fascist regime as a go-to for these atrocities. It ignores the reality of fascism beyond this particular point in history and also it’s just not that simple. 

When looking at Nazi Germany we also have to look at the source of its making, the climate around it (countries like the UK having a nazi party, Italy and Spain having fascist dictators, hell, the list of dictators that were/are not German is disgustingly long, the worldwide anti-semitism making surrounding countries apathetic or even sympathetic to the Nazis, etcetc.) and the aftermaths of WWII.

The Cardassians are not Nazis. (As an aside the Federation are not the brave allies, but that’s another post for another day.) I’ve seen them compared to the USSR - both by official writers and fandom - which I won’t comment on seeing as I am not from anywhere that was affected by that (I’m not East German, but I do have East German friends), but at least this points out that one cannot compare Cardassians to a specific atrocity that happened at a specific time with specific connotations surrounding it. 

Is the Obsidian Order the Gestapo or another secret police? Which secret police? Is Garak “the good Nazi” trope - but then how does that align with Cardassians living under a repressive regime for centuries, not a few years, and therefore take into account an indoctrination and climate of fear created over several generations? No child “born” into the nazi regime became an adult while it was still lasting, unlike the Cardassians (and many other real life dictatorships and fascist states - as well as "democratic” states that have similar kinds of surveillance, oppression, mass-imprisonment and disappearances, and camps).

Is every Cardassian soldier a “nazi”? How does one compare that to polish and french prisoners (see Pierre Seel for a particular harrowing account, all the trigger warnings apply) who were forced to fight for the Germans and put on the front lines? 

Eugenics, labour camps, and every other atrocity has been practised by numerous regimes, both in history and now, can we shrug off every country that’s participated in them for the sake of making the metaphor “easier”?

How does the aftermath of the Cardassian Union - when they’re attacked by the Klingons and themselves occupied by the Dominion and then have their main planet bombed to the point of millions dead - align with Nazi Germany?

5. It doesn’t.

It doesn’t. It doesn’t neatly align with any other fascist or military dictator-led regime either. This is not saying that there aren’t aspects obviously borrowed from history (and can easily apply to now). This is saying that in trying to bend the Cardassians into Nazis specifically, people are ignoring every other aspect about them and in my opinion doing a disservice to those who suffered under the actual regime. This is a fictional world, with fictional people that is based on an oppressive society template. It is also a fictional world in which the people themselves are oppressed (especially if you align with what’s written in Andy Robinson’s book) - I’ll be getting back to that point in a bit.

 I would argue that making it “about Nazis” is too easy. This isn’t about “us” this is about “them” those evil bastards from wwii. It strips the Cardassian story of any current-day relevance. One can look no further than one’s own society to see people struggling against acknowledging histories, being treated as second-class citizens, etc. No need to go back in time to do so.

It also strips the Cardassians of any three-dimensionality. If they’re just villains then why are we rooting for their uprising to succeed at the end of season 7? Why do we want their society to flourish, their people to no longer have a broken court system, and their secret police to stop training and recruiting children if they’re Nazis, the convenient shorthand for über-evil?

Cardassia isn’t about a past society, it’s about our society. If we empathise with the Cardassians and don’t cast them as villains, then it’s a discussion about our own oppression and privilege. And it’s a damned good scifi allegory (even if I sometimes don’t think the writers and showrunners quite understand it themselves - death of the author and all that).  

6. To conclude

I didn’t mention Bajor as much in this, because I was very focused on Cardassians, but I would argue that while there is value in casting them as “space Jews” (as I’ve seen here and there) because I understand the value of representation and I am not taking that away from anyone (I hope), similarly if one reads this take as the only valid one  it ignores the reality of religious oppression on a wider scale and also that the Bajorans’ oppression at the hands of the Cardassians didn’t happen for the same reasons as the Jewish genocide at the hands of the Nazis - I would also argue that in making Cardassians = Nazis / Bajor = Jews, we similarly ignore that the Nazis were and are not alone in perpetuating anti-semitism, which kinda again leans into the “Good Federation (the Allies) Versus Evil Cardassians (Nazis) - because none of the Good Allied Countries have ever/are currently involved in persecution or dehumanisation *stares into the void*

And lastly - bringing back a point I made earlier about Cardassians themselves being oppressed by their own government - something that is often forgotten when people talk “Nazi tropes in genre fiction” is that the first country the Nazis occupied was Germany. I’m mentioning this, because it’s interesting in the metaphor, but it’s also conspicuously is absent in the simplification of how these reads are applied. It’s easy to cast the Cardassians as a whole as Bad People, but it makes for worse story-telling and has uncomfortable undertones of how the world reads Germany’s people as being at fault as a whole as well, without taking into account the specific events that we were globally complicit in - and once again the metaphor falls apart, because allegory doesn’t work so easily, and it shouldn’t.

TL; DR In general I am uncomfortable by “Nazi’s used as tropes” in any fictional world. One shouldn’t sacrifice analysis nor simplify history for the sake of making it easier to make a quick point about “bad guys” and forcing allegories into one shape makes them lose their power.  

Also watch German films on Nazism and European ones on WWII if you’re looking for some better takes (also Cabaret, one of the best movies ever made).

[dippedanddripped]

Human rights campaigners are calling on US authorities to ban all imports of cotton from the Chinese province of Xinjiang after allegations of widespread forced labour.

Two identical petitions, delivered today to US Custom and Border Protection, cite “substantial evidence” that the Uighur community and other minority groups are being press-ganged into working in the region’s cotton fields.

The petitions note the “integral role of forced labour” in China’s penal and economic system, which campaigners state has given rise to a “cotton gulag” in Xinjiang.

'Virtually entire' fashion industry complicit in Uighur forced labour, say rights groups

China is the largest cotton producer in the world, with 84% of its cotton coming from Xinjiang, located in the north-west of the country. According to Chinese government data cited in the petitions, apparel exports from this disputed region were valued at $4.2bn (£3.1bn) in 2018. Footwear and textiles represent an additional $3.06bn.

Rahima Mahmut, a spokeswoman for the World Uighur Congress, one of the campaign groups spearheading the petitions, is hopeful that the economic impacts of a ban could cause Beijing to rethink its prison labour policy.

“This is a very small measure compared to the terrible abuse that is happening to the Uighur people in East Turkistan [now known as Xinjiang] … but hopefully it will hurt China economically and encourage them to stop,” she says.

Since 2017, more than a million Uighur Muslims have been moved to high-security “de-extremification” camps, where they are forced to produce industrial and agricultural goods for export, campaign groups maintain.

“So many international brands rely on cotton from this region that it would be a massive problem for China were the US to enforce a ban,” says Dearbhla Minogue, legal officer for the Global Legal Action Network (Glan), co-sponsor of one of the petitions.

In April, Glan submitted a 57-page petition to HM Revenue & Customs in the UK requesting a similar ban. The request, submitted under a 1897 law banning the import of goods made in foreign prisons, remains “under consideration”, according to Minogue.

In a separate attempt to put pressure on the UK government, the World Uighur Congress is preparing to launch a nationwide campaign later this month. Stop Uighur Genocide has support from MPs across all parties as well as leading faith groups, says Mahmut.

The campaign will call for a public boycott of any products produced by Uighur forced labour or by companies facilitating Uighur suppression. It will also call on companies importing cotton and other goods from Xinjiang to investigate their supply chains.

In July, a coalition of more than 180 campaign groups issued a similar “call to action” to leading high-street brands, demanding that they guarantee their supply chains are not directly or indirectly linked to abuses of Uighurs or other persecuted minorities in China.

“With virtually the entire fashion industry affected, no brand can defend being complacent on this grave human rights crisis,” says Chloe Cranston, business and human rights manager at human rights group and coalition member, Anti-Slavery International.

The Better Cotton Initiative, which runs a sustainable certification system for cotton producers, reported earlier in the year that it was concerned about reports of forced labour in China and has commissioned a third-party investigation into the claims.

In a statement at the time, the cross-sector initiative said withdrawing from Xinjiang could “cause more harm than good” as a critical mass of farmers were dependent on cotton production.

In late March, however, the organisation suspended its certification activities in the region after concluding that “credible assurance” of labour practices was not possible.

“We are in the process of evaluating our presence [and] will announce our approach in the region moving forward in a way that prioritises the safety and wellbeing of farming communities,” a spokesperson for the initiative said.

[digital-strategy]

http://bit.ly/2HgaFU1

With all that has transpired between Facebook and the media industry over the past couple of years—the repeated algorithm changes, the head fakes about switching to video, the siphoning off of a significant chunk of the industry’s advertising revenue—most publishers approach the giant social network with skepticism, if not outright hostility. And yet, the vast majority of them continue to partner with Facebook, to distribute their content on its platform, and even accept funding and resources from it.

Given that Facebook has not only helped hollow out newsrooms across the country but arguably lowered the overall quality of civic discussion, repeatedly flouted laws around privacy in ways that have served the needs of foreign actors like the Russian government, and played a key role in fomenting violence in countries like Myanmar and India, it’s worth asking: Is it enough to be skeptical? Or is there an ethical case to be made that media companies, and the journalists who work for them, should sever their ties to Facebook completely?

The argument in favor of staying on Facebook is obvious: the social network has immense reach—2 billion monthly active users—, which provides publishers with the potential to increase their readership. Facebook also has billions of dollars to spread around, whether it’s through advertising revenue sharing, or by funding journalism initiatives, to which it recently committed a total of $300 million over the next three years. Together, Facebook, Twitter, and Google have become the biggest journalism funders in the world, a sad irony given their effects on the business.

Traffic from Facebook has been declining for many publishers, as the social network tweaks its algorithm to focus more on personal sharing. But even so, Facebook continues to drive a lot of revenue. So if you’re a publisher and you want to stay in business, you really have no choice but to work with it. The only other option is to continue to publish to a smaller and smaller group of readers, bringing in smaller amounts of ad revenue every year. Many media outlets have done the math, and decided they have no other option but to play ball—even if means playing ball with a company that not only owns the ball, but also the stadium, and all the uniforms, and the broadcast rights for all the games.

Some take the case even further. At a recent journalism conference in Perugia, City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis  moderated a panel entitled “Criticize Facebook? Sure. Leave? Why?” Jarvis has argued that media companies shouldn’t just passively use Facebook, but should take advantage of the company’s knowledge about how social networks function to learn how to serve their audiences better. (The News Integrity Initiative, which Jarvis helped create, receives funding from Facebook, but he says this doesn’t affect his views about the company).

The panel featured Jesper Doub, a former Der Spiegel journalist who is now Facebook’s director of news partnerships for the EMEA region, Jennifer Brandel of Hearken, former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, and James Ball, a UK journalist. While many on the panel (apart from Doub) were skeptical of Facebook’s relationship with the media, most seemed to agree with Ball that, despite a multitude of sins, media companies still needed to be on the platform because “that’s where the people are.” Individuals might want to quit the social network, Ball said, but media companies would be stupid to do the same.

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Mandy Jenkins, president of the Online News Association and former editor-in-chief of Storyful, wrote recently that quitting Facebook would amount to deserting the people who use it for news, and condemn them to a fact-free, disinformation-fueled future ruled by trolls. In other words, she suggests that those of us who are serious about journalism have an ethical obligation to remain, and to do whatever we can to improve the information environment there.

“Facebook and its subsidiary tools like Instagram and WhatsApp are where billions of people still come together,” Jenkins writes, “which means we still have to be there too,” not just as companies but as individuals. Quitting the platform is “taking the easy way out,” she says.

This may be the most ethically powerful argument for not abandoning Facebook. But it’s not enough. The fact of journalism today is that working with the giant tech platform in any capacity amounts to a Faustian bargain. The benefits of doing business with Facebook don’t begin to outweigh the ethical compromises required to do so.

It’s not just the pressure that Facebook’s massive size and advertising-industry dominance have placed on the media industry—that’s more of a business consideration for media companies than an ethical one. The ethical questions arise not because of Facebook’s dominance, but because of what it’s had to do to put itself in that position. Journalists using Facebook tacitly lets the platform off the hook, by endorsing its scale as a separate benefit, detached from the harm it does.

The benefits of doing business with Facebook don’t begin to outweigh the ethical compromises required to do so.

Take the harvesting of personal data on more than 2.5 billion people, for example. Users of Facebook provide this information willingly, and in return for it they get to connect and share photos with their friends for free. But Facebook also handles that data in problematic ways, as evidenced by the Cambridge Analytica scandal—in which the personal data of more than 50 million people was shared with researchers and then sold as the raw material for psychographic profiles, created as part of an attempt to influence the 2016 US election and the UK’s Brexit vote, among other things.

This breach was so significant that the Federal Trade Commission came to the conclusion that it broke the terms of a so-called “consent decree” that Facebook agreed to in 2011, in which the company promised to uphold user privacy. The company can now be hit with a fine of as much as $5 billion. (For context, Exxon paid a fine of $125 million for the 1989 Valdez oil spill, or about $260 million in current dollars.) The consent decree was mandated by the FTC because the commission found that Facebook “deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.”

Facebook claims that it has closed the loopholes that Cambridge Analytica used. But new ones keep magically appearing: the company admitted recently that it uploaded the email contacts of millions of users without telling them. There have also been repeated leaks of data on millions of users, where their information has been shared when it shouldn’t have been. What happened to those contacts? No one knows.

At this point, Facebook resembles a Valdez-era industrial conglomerate, continually leaking hazardous materials into the rivers and lakes and  municipal water supplies, but every time it gets caught it promises to do better. Why would anyone partner with such a company? By providing their content and information on their readers and subscribers, media companies are complicit in those data collection practices.

Then there’s Facebook’s obvious role as a distributor of misinformation—and not just fake news about Pizzagate, or Hillary Clinton, but hate speech and propaganda that contributed to the  endangerment of the lives of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya in Myanmar, who were forced from their homes and in some cases killed. Radical, anti-Muslim groups used Facebook as their pulpit to argue that the Rohingya needed to be exterminated, and so did members of the Myanmar military apparatus, who helped fuel the hatred. In a report on the crisis, the United Nations described it as “a genocide,” and said Facebook was partly to blame.

It’s not just Myanmar. In dozens of other countries, Facebook has helped inflame cultural wars and put people at risk, in part because it hasn’t spent the time to understand the local environment, or doesn’t have anyone on the ground who can raise a warning flag. This despite a workforce of more than 30,000 people and a profit last year of $6.8 billion.

In India, Facebook-owned WhatsApp is the most popular form of communication for hundreds of millions of people, which means that it has also become the primary method for sharing hateful gossip about various cultural groups within that country. Dozens of people have been killed by mobs in rural areas in India based on rumors and fake news reports about kidnappers trying to snatch people’s children.

A number of the company’s earliest backers have repudiated it for this reason and say they now believe it might actually be a force for ill. Roger McNamee, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and an early investor in Facebook, says the company he advised when it was small is now “a threat to democracy” because of the way it distributes misinformation and hate. McNamee, who recently published a book entitled Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, has also said that Zuckerberg and his fellow Facebook founders knew there were potential negative effects of the giant network they wanted to build, but they went ahead anyway.

In an infamous internal memo, Facebook senior executive Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said: “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.” After the memo became public last year, Bosworth argued that this was a theoretical position he took as part of an internal debate, but it’s a pretty good summation of how Facebook has approached its growth—unrelentingly, and without concern for its effects.

Former high-level Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitaya, like Tristan Harris and his Center for Human Technology, is convinced that Facebook is a potentially negative force in society in part because it uses psychological tricks to compel users—especially young ones—to revisit the site and spend more time there. Some psychologists are convinced that time spent on social networks like Facebook (and Instagram) can actually be bad for mental and psychological health, in part because they encourage users to compare themselves to others. Former Mozilla developer Aza Raskin called tricks used by such networks “behavioral cocaine.”

There are plenty of obvious reasons to be on Facebook—there are billions of people there, it doesn’t cost anything, and there’s the chance that you might get some kind of revenue boost. But there are also some pretty powerful reasons why you might want to rethink your relationship with Facebook. How much of what you are doing serves the company’s interests rather than yours, or the interests of journalism, or society in general?

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Mathew Ingram is CJR's chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in The Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as Reuters and Bloomberg.

via Columbia Journalism Review

[towardtheunseen-blog]

“There are only children, women, and men to be loved”

God can chase away the “fear of terror” and “the economies of injustice”, said the Archbishop of Canterbury in his Christmas sermon. Clearly the House of Bishops didn’t get that memo, if the snappily-titled, ‘Marriage and Same Sex Relationships after the Shared Conversations’ is anything to go by.

With the kind of blunderingly incompetent timing only the Church of England can perfect, the report was published on Holocaust Memorial Day: surprisingly fitting, given that the report serves to marginalise and persecute an entire cross-section of society.

This unfortunate coincidence led me to reflect on how injustice can spring not only from evil intent, but from good people lacking the courage to do what is right. The Weimar Republic was a properly constituted social democracy, in which Jewish people were truly free. It took less than two years for Hitler to stir up an undercurrent of anti-immigrant sentiment (not dissimilar to that being espoused by Donald Trump in the present day) resulting in the introduction of the laws (passed with common consent) that would eventually lead to genocide.

If Holocaust Memorial Day teaches us anything, it should teach that the arbitrary labelling of an entire ethnic or social group as ‘evil’ or ‘sinful’ can have grave consequences. And that all those with a voice have a responsibility to speak out, and not to become lazily complicit in the persecution of others.

It is hard to see how the Church’s stock term for gay relationships, “intrinsically disordered”, is much different to the Nazis’ “untermenschen” – which led, in turn, not only to the extermination of Jews, but Roma gypsies, the mentally ill, and the disabled; the sterilization of deaf people; and the imprisonment of homosexuals... anyone perceived as a threat to the established order. As soon as a society starts placing emphasis not on unity, but on ‘difference’, trouble almost certainly lies ahead.

The one glimmer of light in the darkness is that no one takes any notice of bishops any more. The extent of their incompetence, their betrayal, and their sheer out-of-touch-ness has led most thinking people – Christians and atheists alike – to completely disregard their hand-wringing pronouncements. As a gay Christian friend said to me: “I’ll f*** whoever I want; and the Bishop of Norwich can go f*** himself”. Offensive? Yes. But it’s hard to disagree with the sentiment. And easy to understand the anger felt by many who were asked to place their trust in the bishops, and willingly did so. 

So it is easy to laugh this off: in one sense, nothing has changed – in spite of the many hours of ‘shared conversations’. And I doubt that the bishops’ self-serving “please have sympathy with us, wrestling with these important questions we were too cowardly to address” will have any lasting effect, other than to further weaken any confidence ordinary Christians have in their Church leaders.

 But the report is important, in three crucial respects:

 1.     Though much has been achieved in recent years, in terms of equality for LGBTQI+ people, learning about and coming to accept one’s own ‘otherness’ or ‘difference’ remains as painful, confusing, and isolating an experience as it ever was. Even in these enlightened times, over half of secondary school students have witnessed homophobic bullying amongst their peers; and 58% do not feel their school is a welcoming place for LGTBQI+ people. Over half of young gay people self-harm (compared to 1 in 12 for young people in general). LGB teenagers and young adults are twice as likely to attempt suicide than in the population as a whole. 

It’s clear, therefore, that any negative messages absorbed by young people have the potential to cause immense harm. In spite of the rising levels of secularism in the UK, there will still be many young people involved in church life – or exposed to it as a result of the beliefs and views of family members and friends. Can ordinary Christians really sleep at night when our Church, instead of caring about and supporting such people, demonises them? I doubt the decision to produce a glossy brochure about how to be nicer to gay people (the only tangible action to result from the report) is going to provide much comfort to anyone contemplating self-harm, particularly when the central conclusion is that anything other than a heterosexual relationship continues to be deemed a sin.  

The Anglican Church is big on guilt and shame. We begin our services not with joy, but by getting on our knees and confessing our sins. LGBTQI+ people experience shame and guilt long before they come to self-acceptance: they don’t need their church to accentuate that. What they do need is love, compassion, and tenderness. 

In this sense this isn’t, primarily, an argument about same-sex marriage. Those who want to get married will do so, and they are unlikely to give the tiniest of damns what some miserable bishop thinks about it all. But continuing to define something as perfectly natural, unchosen, and ‘received’ as sexuality as a ‘sin’ and a ‘lifestyle choice’ is unspeakably damaging and intellectually facile. 

2.     I am yet to hear any convincing moral argument as to why homosexuality and same-sex marriage are ‘wrong’. The bishops’ report is couched in complex ecclesiastical language. These are people for whom any moral question is addressed not through an examination of conscience, but detailed argument about the translation of a particular word from the Greek, or the interpretation of an obscure sentence from Scripture. Their theology is grounded in the academic, not the practical. Their analysis is rooted in a ‘problem to be solved’, not a ‘people to be ministered to’. It is about head, not heart. 

Most normal people don’t think or feel that way. Our relationships with God are a complex, messy business, that involve prayer, thought, soul-searching. They are, in essence, emotional, not academic problems. Trying to find an academic solution to an emotional problem is doomed to failure. The bishops resemble no one as much as the Scribes and Pharisees, so intent on dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s of their rule book that they forgot who their laws were there to serve. It took Jesus to not only challenge the law, but to claim himself as the fulfilment – the human embodiment - of it, for things to change. 

The bishops’ position on sexuality (gay and straight) is remarkably inconsistent. If they were to enforce their Biblical ‘rules’ correctly, they should take as hard a line with straight couples who have sex before marriage as they do with gay clergy who refuse to submit to the requirement for celibacy. The notion of sex solely as a vehicle for procreation is hopelessly outmoded. But it continues to be applied to people in same-sex relationships, but not those in straight relationships. The day a bishop swears faithfully that he only has sex with his wife to produce children, and never for pleasure, I might be more persuaded by his insistence that his gay clergy colleagues must abstain from sex altogether. As an aside, it’s always struck me that churches would be happier places if there was much *more* sex going on, not less. 

3.     Leaving aside the impact of the report on present-day Christians and churchgoers, it is hard to conceive the extent of the damage this issue will do (and is doing) to our mission, our outreach, and our tradition of Benedictine hospitality. Most people under 30 these days will either decide (as LGBTQI+ people) that faith is not for them, or (as straight people) be unwilling to engage with a Church that views their friends and colleagues as sinful or disordered.

27th January 2017 is the day the Church forgot to love. Its laws have taken precedence over the decent, honest, loving actions most churchgoers instinctively know to be right. Desperately clinging on to power and dominance has been signaled as being more important to Church leaders than the care of souls. It has forgotten the words of Henri Nouwen: For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women, and men to be loved.

LGBTQI+ people will not go away. Those whose faith is strong enough to allow it, will stay, and will fight. Gay clergy will marry, and offer improvised same-sex blessings, in defiance of the bishops. The bishops will respond with increasingly strong sanctions and punishments. Let us not forget, it is from these small beginnings of struggle and defiance that a good man – the best man – Jesus, was led on the road to crucifixion, showing a courage and determination noticeably absent in Church of England bishops. It was from a decision to label Jews as second-class citizens that a train of events was set in motion leading to the slaughter of six million of God’s people. Discrimination and injustice rarely lead to positive consequences.  

And it is from this report by the House of Bishops that more young and frightened LGBTQI+ people will feel a little less safe in the UK than they did this time last week. For a Christian Church that, surely, is unforgiveable. 

[republicstandard]

UK: Establishment Islamists Denounce Donald Trump

Ash Sharp Editor

For reasons best known to Betsy Reed and Glenn Greenwald, the Islamist Mehdi Hasan is still permitted to write for The Intercept.

I for one am glad that he has a job, as Mr. Hasan, who has in the past claimed that non-Muslims, unbelievers, and atheists live like cattle and animals, has now interviewed Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. What follows is truly illuminating, but not for the reasons The Intercept or Mehdi Hasan would like to think.

Though this would in most cases be an opportunity for Americans to gain an insight into the character of the man with whom the President has frequently clashed, all that is provided is a hit-piece on Donald Trump and Islamist propaganda.

Hasan writes:

The contrast between the two men could not be starker: the son of an immigrant bus driver versus the son of a millionaire property developer; the brown-skinned Muslim versus the white nationalist Islamophobe.

As much as it would be easy to denounce rhetoric like this for being inflammatory, one must always be thankful for opportunities to witness your opponents speaking at ease.

Khan signed his name to a letter to Tony Blair in 2006, which stated that U.K. foreign policy, especially in relation to Iraq and Israel, risked “putting civilians at increased risk both in the U.K. and abroad” and provided “ammunition to extremists.”

Hasan quizzes the Mayor on if he still believes this to be so- Hasan is a staunch believer that Islamic terrorism would end immediately if only the dreaded Western Imperialists would stop blowing up people committing genocide.

To his credit, Mr. Khan appears to have matured in his views a little in the last 12 years.

“I don’t accept that it’s as simplistic as to say that if we change our foreign policy, it will lead to bad guys going away.”

We can be thankful for small mercies, I suppose- despite the fact that the peerless and sorely missed Christopher Hitchens destroyed the argument that foreign policy is a major factor in Islamic extremism 13 years ago.

...shudder if you ever said, or thought, that the bombs in London in July, or the bombs in Baghdad every day, or the bombs in Bali last Friday, are caused by any "policy" but that of the bombers themselves.

East Timor was for many years, and quite rightly, a signature cause of the Noam Chomsky "left." The near-genocide of its people is an eternal stain on Indonesia and on the Western states that were complicit or silent. Yet Bin Ladenism wants not less of this killing and repression but more. Its demand to re-establish the caliphate is a pro-imperialist demand, not an anti-imperialist one.

Random bombings are not a protest against poverty and unemployment. They are a cause of poverty and unemployment and of wider economic dislocation.

Hinduism is considered by Bin Ladenists to be a worse heresy even than Christianity or Judaism or Shiism, and its adherents, whether in Bali or Kashmir, are fit only for the edge of the sword. So, it is absurd to think of jihadism—which murders the poor and the brown without compunction—as a movement against the rich and the "white."

At Republic Standard, we will reiterate these points until they are accepted as reality by all- because this is reality. Instead of accepting that simple truth, the Islamists Hasan and Khan wish to accuse the President of the United States of that which he is perpetrating himself; sowing division and hatred.

In the interview, Khan says

“We are in danger of amplifying the narrative that Daesh/so-called ISIS have about a ‘clash of civilizations,’ ‘the West hates us,’ by some of the language that Donald Trump has used. He is, if you like, repeating what so-called ISIS/Daesh are saying: ‘The West and Islam are irreconcilable.’ ‘You can’t be a proud American and a proud Muslim.’”

Which Hasan wastes no time in hammering home the point:

Got that? The president of the United States talks like ISIS, according to the mayor of London.

As we have covered in these pages very recently, it is not Westerners who are faking hate-crimes against Muslims. It is not the West that hates Islam.

Skipping over the fact that Mr. Trump has never said that you cannot be a proud American and a proud Muslim, the idea of the clash of civilizations does not originate with ISIS. The Clash of Civilizations was a lecture and essay by The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that wars after the fall of Communism would be fought not between countries, but between cultures and that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to world peace. The lecture was given in 1992. I think by any measure, we can see that Mr. Huntington was absolutely correct in his assessment of the world we now live in.

What you are witnessing here is called Taqiyya. It is perfectly acceptable to the Islamist to say or print all manner of lies to deflect attention away from Islam.

I must, however, give some small credit to Mr. Khan for at least not being as rabid an extremist as Mehdi Hasan. Just.

“One of the things that so-called ISIS/Daesh want is for an increase of Islamophobic attacks; they want a backlash against proud Muslims, proud Westerners," Khan says.

One might suggest to these proud Muslims, these proud Westerners, that to defend the civilization they are so proud of they might consider joining the armed forces in representative numbers.  In Britain, more Muslims joined ISIS than joined the British Armed Forces. Just saying, there is a saying in Western countries- put your money where your mouth is.

Khan goes on;

“They (ISIS) want Muslims to be the victims of Islamophobic attacks so they start believing the false narrative that ‘the West hates us’ and ‘it’s not possible to be a law-abiding Muslim and a law-abiding Brit or American.’” Trump’s rhetoric, is “very similar to the rhetoric used by so-called ISIS/Daesh.”

Yes, we've covered false narratives in these pages recently, so it's quite surprising and pleasingly meta to read the Mayor of London both complaining about one and posing one in the same sentence.

Perhaps it might be easier to defuse this false narrative about the West-hating Muslims if there was some reciprocity. Some sense of gratitude, perhaps. The West, by any measure you would like to adopt, does not hate Muslims- or anyone else for that matter. Europeans in particular, have shown themselves to arguably be the most tolerant people in the history of humankind, save for perhaps the Jains, who walk around looking at the floor to avoid stepping on ants.

In return the proud, Western Muslim population has remained silent in the face of gang rapes perpetrated by Pakistani Muslim men in the United Kingdom, produced the delightful Linda Sarsour in the United States who hopes Allah recognizes her Jihad against her own president, and done nothing on the European continent to promote Western values over Islamic practices. It is far too easy to claim that murdering french priests for Allah is not real Islam.

As Mr. Khan says himself in his interview with Mehdi Hasan:

We cannot escape the “statistical fact” that a significant number of the acts of terror committed around the world are committed by Muslims who are “using Islam, or using their interpretation of Islam, to justify those acts.”

He continues: “That’s not to say that Islam is responsible, but their interpretation of Islam is used as a motivation. I’m not saying that you and I are responsible because we’re Muslims or you and I should apologize for what’s going on. I do think, though, we can be more effective in explaining … what true Islam is.”

Well, Mr. Khan; if you cannot explain to us what true Islam is while being softballed by a Muslim interviewer for a website that can only be described as Islamophilic, I don't know what more we can do. Please tell us what true Islam is. On behalf of victims of all Islamic terrorism the world over, tell us! Tell us so we can find a way to remain infidels and not be murdered for being so.

Mehdi Hasan himself has said that Islam "must not bend" but has also recognized the deep Anti-Semitism among British Muslims. Will Islam bend to expunge hatred of the Jew from the faith? If not, why not?

Perhaps the Mayor of London can clarify what true Islam is, then. Is it the Islam of Hasan, which says that I and kuffar like me are "cattle of no intelligence” or is it something else? It clearly cannot be the Islam of ISIS, who are bad people. Could true Islam be the Islam of around a third of all Muslims, which demands the death penalty for apostates, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

Is true Islam the Islam which over a billion Muslims wish would enforce Sharia Law on the world? Is true Islam the Islam which over 700 million Muslims think endorses the death penalty for adultery- which in many cases includes being a victim of rape. Remember ladies, you have to scream while being defiled, or you want it.

She is not to be punished if it is proven that he forced her and overpowered her. That may be known from her having screamed and shouted for help.

Al-Istidhkaar, 7/146

If none of these examples are true Islam, what is it? What is Islam, if it is not these behaviors that are justified by the Holy Qu'ran?

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of the City of London which saw 13 dead and 106 injured in three separate attacks, does not take this golden opportunity as a Muslim leader to tell us what true Islam is. Instead, he rails against the President of a foreign nation for his tweeting habits.

“The president of the USA has retweeted a tweet from the deputy leader of Britain First, whose name was prayed in aid by the man who murdered my friend Jo Cox,” he says, leaning forward in his chair. “The president of the USA is amplifying that message of hate, intolerance, and division.”

Well then. It appears that the mention of certain words while committing a murder is sufficient to condemn people who had nothing to do with that murder and share no commonalities with the killer at all. This is the perspective of the Mayor of London- when people invoke Allah while stabbing Londoners to death, this is not true Islam. These victims are glossed over. When a far-right white person murders a socialist, the President of the United States of America is complicit.

Why is it, Mr. Khan, that you pose such an obvious double standard? I have no issue with you railing against Mr. Trump, he is a grown adult who has shown himself to be competent in dealing with you himself. What I do find insulting is that you openly demand special treatment for your own faith group at the expense of the nation in which your people are already a protected class.

After the Westminster Bridge attack, terror expert Frank Gaffney of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy said;

“My view is that we are no longer facing random acts of terrorism,” says “We have reached a tipping point. This is now an insurgency.”

“The Muslim terrorist population in Britain and Europe no longer feels constrained to live by stealth,” Gaffney says. “They have built an infrastructure, they have put it in place, and now they are moving up to the next level.”

The interview between the Islamists Hasan and Khan does nothing to countermand this assessment, and in fact proves Mr. Gaffney right. There are many fine and patriotic Muslim citizens in the United Kindom and the United States kept firmly in the back seats by self-interested and substanceless men like Mehdi Hasan and Sadiq Khan. Self-interest in these people includes the exploitation of their status as Muslims and the denigration of the kuffar, as we see in this Intercept piece.

Like I said at the top of this article, we should be thankful for the opportunity to observe conversations like this in public. Heaven only knows what happens when the tape is turned off.

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[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: At BP-Sponsored Art Show, Protesters Call Out the Corporation’s Abuses

BP or not BP? stage an intervention at the National Portrait Gallery in protest against the oil company BP’s sponsorship of the annual portrait award. BP also has extensive oil and mineral interests in West Papua. The painting is by Dale Grimshaw of Benny Wenda. (all images courtesy BP nor not BP?)

LONDON — The National Portrait Gallery’s annual portrait prize exhibition gained an extra exhibit last night thanks to an intervention by BP or Not BP?, an anti-British Petroleum (BP) artist protest group. The BP Portrait Prize is an annual public competition that has run for 37 years and has been sponsored by BP since 1990. The protest was one of many staged events against BP’s involvement in the arts in recent years by BP or not BP? and other members of the Art Not Oil Coalition.

In the hall just outside the exhibition space, BP or not BP? unveiled a portrait of Benny Wenda, a West Papuan independence leader exiled in the UK. Wenda is the face of a struggle that protesters claim has been ignored by BP.

“It felt good to do something not only about BP’s impact on climate change, but also the human rights aspects,” Lianna Etkind, a participant in the protest, told me. “Companies like BP are complicit in people losing their land from flooding resulting from climate change, but also complicit in acts of direct oppression.”

BP works closely with the Indonesian government to extract West Papuan natural resources such as liquefied natural gas. There is a strong liberation movement in West Papua, the western half of the island of Papua New Guinea, to gain independence as a nation, as the Indonesian government has claimed it a province of its country since 1963.

According to a statement given by Wenda, “BP is operating in the middle of a genocide. Since 1963, hundreds of thousands of West Papuans have been killed by the Indonesian occupation, either directly by government forces or through the loss of their homes, their lands and their livelihoods. The money that BP pays to the Indonesian government helps them to buy weapons and ammunition that are used to harass, intimidate and kill my people.”

The portrait was displayed next to the “morning star” flag, used by West Papuan independence supporters but which is banned by Indonesia.

Dale Grimshaw, the painter of the portrait, had submitted his painting of Benny Wenda to the competition as a form of protest, but it was not selected. He explained his decision to protest the exhibition in an impromptu talk to gallery-goers. He said: “[BP] know very well what’s going on in the land, they engage politically and financially speaking with the Indonesian military … could you imagine, on a weekly basis, people you know being imprisoned and tortured for peaceful protest?”

BP or not BP? at the National Portrait Gallery in protest against the oil company BPs sponsorship

He also said in a statement: “BP gets to plaster its logo all over the gallery and present this false version of itself to the world. Art can be a way to fight back against that and tell the truth about what these companies are really doing.”

The intervention was timed to happen on the same day as the submission to the UN of a 140,000-strong international petition calling for a free and fair independence vote for the people of West Papua.

After the portrait was unveiled, the group screened a short video of Wenda and performed a mini “awards ceremony” presenting prizes for “biggest hypocrite” and “biggest polluter” to the “Director of the National Portrait Gallery” and a “BP representative” respectively.

The charge of hypocrisy stems from the National Portrait Gallery’s Ethical Fundraising Policy, released via a Freedom of Information request made by BP or not BP?, which states concern over accepting funds from anyone “known or suspected to be closely associated with a regime known or suspected to be in violation of human rights.”

Dale Grimshaw speaks at the BP or not BP? protest at the National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery does not publicly state how much money it receives from BP, but it is a share of the £7.5 million five-year deal between the National Portrait Gallery and three other British cultural institutions. BP or not BP? point out that a quarter of this amount would be less than 2% of the gallery’s annual income.

Hyperallergic reached out to the National Portrait Gallery for comment but as of this writing has received no response.

BP’s relationship with Indonesia as well as other repressive governments are currently the subject of a formal complaint to the National Portrait Gallery by the campaign group Culture Unstained, who, along with BP or not BP?, are part of the Art Not Oil Coalition.

The BP or not BP? protest took place at the National Portrait Gallery (St. Martin’s Pl, London) on Thursday, August 31. 

The post At BP-Sponsored Art Show, Protesters Call Out the Corporation’s Abuses appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[volubrjotr]

There were over 16,000 Americans Who Honored The Constitution And Refused To Waste Their Lives For The Banking Cabal’s First World War, many of whom, were illegally imprisoned at a burden to the U.S. taxpayer.

The black poppy commemorates all those who have died due to imperialist war and its legacy: dead soldiers, dead civilians and dead conscientious objectors.

On 6 November 2014, counter-militarism activists pasted 16,000 black poppies around the city of Glasgow to appeal to the public to consider what Remembrance Sunday means.

Each poppy represents one of the conciencous objectors, making up 16,000 war resistors who took a stand against their enlistment during the First World War.

The black poppies, which can currently be seen in clusters along streets, appeared in anticipation for the WW1 centenary Remembrance Day commemoration that will take place this Sunday to provide an alternative message to the remembrance industry which is choked on red glorifying poppies, nationalism and militarism.

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The black poppy is a symbol which commemorates all those who have died, and are still dying, due to imperialist war and its legacy. It remembers dead soldiers, dead civilians, dead conscientious objectors.

It remembers those who have fallen victim to invasion, occupation, gender-based violence, starvation and poverty. It remembers the maimed, the wounded, those made homeless or afflicted with physical and mental illnesses due to war.

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The act was done to challenge the ‘poppy mania’ that has erupted in the last few weeks, as part of the £50 million celebrations marking 100 years since UK made a declaration of war in 1914.

Apart from the Royal British Legion selling red poppies, this year there is a poppy selfie campaign, the city of London has seen dancing poppies in the street, a Poppy Lottery and a weekly raffle with cash prizes up to £20,000, or the chance to win a car.

Revealingly, a Poppy Day song has been released in the charts, which uses the words of Eric Bogle’s classic anti-war song The Green Fields of France, while omitting the critical last stanza, which contains its anti-war message.

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Millions of people have visited the Tower of London to witness the 888,246 ceramic poppies that flow from a window in the tower into the moat making up ‘The Blood Swept Lands and Sea of Red’ instillation, which has been criticised heavily for only remembering British and Commonwealth soldiers, as well as sanitizing the memory of a brutal and futile war, which would perhaps be more aptly remembered by filling the moat with barbed wire and bones, as one commentator put it.

Honouring the sacrifice of soldiers in such militarist frameworks only serves to increase xenophobia and racism, as well as prop up false ideas of ‘Britishness’.

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It does not honour the voices of WW1 veterans, such as Wilfred Owen’s sardonic words when he wrote of ‘The old Lie: It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,’ and Harry Patch, the last veteran of WW1 who died in 2009, who said “war is organised murder, and nothing else.”

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The familiar red poppy, fragile yet resilient flowers which grew out of the battlefields of Europe, have been used since 1921 to commemorate British and Commonwealth soldiers who have died in conflicts since World War One.

The red poppy has become an increasingly politicised symbol in recent years since the UK declared their involvement in War on Terror.

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In 2012, a teenager was arrested for posting an image of a poppy being set alight on Facebook.

The white poppy, introduced by Britain’s Co-operative Women’s Guild in 1933 is worn as a symbol of peace.

This Remembrance Sunday, Veterans For Peace will march in the Remembrance Day Parade in London with a wreath of white poppies, carrying a banner saying ‘Never Again’.

The black poppy extends remembrance to all soldiers and civilians who have died, and who continue to suffer from imperialist wars, and the impacts of colonialism.

In a speech Prime Minister David Cameron said that the WW1 commemorations would “capture our national spirit in every corner of the country” and “ensure that the lessons learnt live with us for ever”, however, it is unclear what lessons these might be.

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One of the activists, Samantha Howard, 27, said,

“How we remember today affects what happens tomorrow. I won’t allow selfish politicians to exploit the dead for their own benefits.

There are many lessons to learn from WW1 – firstly, that millions died not in the name of glory and heroism, but for a squabble over land which was in the interest of only the global elite. And we are still in the same situation 100 years later.”

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The red poppy has become a symbol which embodies a militarist manipulation, and has become a cultural component of the military-industrial-complex which seeks to glorify war to justify ongoing campaigns.

That people are made to feel disgraced by not wearing a poppy is testament to the dangerously nationalistic space which they now occupy.

The activists hope that the black poppy re-politicises the symbol of remembrance, but in a way that respects the dead while also respecting the living.

The British Armed Forces have got an ever impeding epidemic of Post-Traumatic Stress on their hands, with more soldiers and veterans killing themselves than being killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

This year, the Royal British Legion has vowed to raise £40 million, which will go towards caring for the Armed Forces community. However, who is responsible for the well-being of injured veterans?

Perhaps the politicians who send soldiers to illegal wars should be accountable for their wounds, and not the public.

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In George Square there is a Garden of Remembrance which claims ‘to honour the dead and remember the living’. How best can we show respect for those who lost their lives in WW1, and conflicts since? How can we best care for veterans and future veterans who are wounded by war?

Erica Green, 30, another one of the activists commented ‘WW1 has always represented the futility of war – something to be avoided at all costs.

Why now is it being seen any differently? I come from a military family so I personally know the trauma of war, and its toxic effects. David Cameron comparing these commemorations to the Queens jubilee is a kick to the stomach, frankly.’

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Not poppies, but navigating away from imperialist military projects will do a much better job of honouring the memory of the fallen, care for our veterans, and for all our futures.’

Our black poppy is inspired by many others who use it as a call against Imperialism. We say no to militarism. We say no to the sacrifice of soldiers and civilians to prop up a false idea of ‘Britishness’.

We stand against profiteering from war and the suffering and destruction it causes. Against militarism, which seeks to glorify war to justify ongoing campaigns which cause nothing but bloodshed for the many, and profit for a select few.

And we stand with whistleblowers and conscientious objectors who oppose them.

During World War I, 250 conscientious objectors from all over the United Kingdom were placed in the Dyce work camp, near Aberdeen, subject to conditions so horrid, one of them died of pneumonia.

Many others throughout the world who have opposed the despicable nature of war have been treated in this manner.

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  The U.S. Constitution & The Patriots Who Died & Refused To Die For The Banker’s Zionist Wars The black poppy commemorates all those who have died due to imperialist war and its legacy: dead soldiers, dead civilians and dead conscientious objectors.