#stop acting like shipping nazis with people is healthy?????

[ssaalexblake]

... so u can’t ship that f/m pairing b/c it’s slightly codependent (even that’s arguable) but you’re totally fine with shipping a white m/m pairing where one of them is a literal nazi and seriously injured the other half of said pair + added psychological damage done to them also????? 

srsly... people and their white m/m pairings need to fucking stop 

[mashounen2003]

Meditations about the Prime Directive

Ah... The Prime Directive. Perhaps, the most controversial of Star Trek. Before we start talking about it, I think we should remember a little.

The Original Series was broadcast between 1966 and 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War. The Prime Directive, then called "General Order One" or "Non-Interference Directive", had been created to send the message the USA should stop interfering in other countries' affairs in the way they did (and still would do to this day, despite all the wake-up calls); it's worth mentioning that, on many occasions, the "General Order One" didn't sound exactly like a law or something that should be strictly enforced, but more like a principle that should guide the Starfleet captains, or at least something that makes them leave their personal feelings aside and evaluate if what they do is the right thing or not.

On the other hand, there was also an episode called "A Taste of Armageddon", where the societies of two planets (namely, Eminiar VII and Vendikar) were fighting a war, but instead of fighting directly on the battlefield (or should I call it “battlespace”?), they used computers to calculate casualties on both sides and kill the unfortunate "chosen"; in that chapter, Kirk and Spock intervene in the internal affairs of both planets and destroy the computer. There were similar situations in episodes such as "The Return of the Archons" and "Patterns of Force". These chapters would be a way to send a message more or less similar to "If you find a world ruled or inhabited by huge motherf***ers, doing nothing is worse than interfering."

Then, this would be the meaning of the Prime Directive: except for cases where the inhabitants of a planet are killing each other or something similar and doing nothing is several times morally worse than your intervention, interfering in the affairs of another planet without enough development is wrong. It seems simple enough, an open and closed case, right?

But some dilemmas have arisen in this regard: already in the Original Series, Kirk usually broke the Prime Directive, regardless of whether each case really merited it in the same way as in "A Taste of Armageddon", to the point that one could interpret that as a message that more or less says "The USA's intervention in other countries is fine, no matter what". People began to debate what the First Directive actually means, the subsequent series and films of Star Trek delved further into that topic, and now there's this definition:

The Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule.

As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Starfleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Starfleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or accidental contamination of the said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations and carries with it the highest moral obligation.

A rather imprecise definition, if one begins to analyze it. Several times it was emphasized the Prime Directive only applies in those peoples that still ain’t capable of FTL (faster than light) travel and don't know about the existence of life outside their own world, but apparently, it applies to many more cases. This is already demonstrated in "A Taste of Armageddon", where the Prime Directive is applied when both the inhabitants of Eminiar VII and Vendikar are already clearly capable of travelling through space, have made contact with other worlds' civilizations and probably know the Federation exists too. Another case where this seems to be the case is the episode "Symbiosis", which isn’t of the Original Series but of its successor, The Next Generation.

In "Symbiosis", there's a planet whose people seem to be suffering from a disease (I no longer remember their name, but I'm gonna call it "Beta"), and another planet supplying them with a medicine that seems to cure that disease or at least alleviate its symptoms (I don't remember its name either, so I'll call it "Alpha"); Dr Crusher finds out that what Alpha is supplying is only a placebo and makes Beta's inhabitants depend on Alpha's. She demands Picard intervene and stop this monstrosity, but the captain tells her it's not right because it'd be an intervention in internal affairs of planets outside the Federation and thus it'd violate the Prime Directive. Anyway, Picard ends up finding a way to temporarily stop the drug traffic from Alpha to Beta, without theoretically breaking the Prime Directive.

This would mean this rule is also enforced partially in the diplomatic sphere, in the relationship with planets that are already capable of FTL travel, which also brings it closer to the purpose with which Roddenberry conceived it: to send the message that a country's interference in others' affairs is wrong, no matter what. But then, what definition should we believe? Is the Prime Directive enforced only to planets inhabited by peoples who don't know of the existence of life in other worlds and can't do FTL travels? Or is it enforced in the relationships with any world and society outside the Federation?

Then there are questions about whether this rule could actually be enforced in practice, for real: if it's imposed only on the Starfleet personnel, what happens if the interference is made by a freighter’s crew or just a citizen with their own starship? Shouldn't that be prohibited too, if one really wanna avoid interference and cultural contamination?

Another question. It's stated Starfleet can only interact with an alien society when they develop FTL travel, not only because they'll inevitably contact other species in one way or another after achieving this, but also because it's taken for granted a civilization that achieves such a thing is already mentally ready to relate to people from other worlds and receive superior knowledge, strength and technology from them. But is this actually accurate? Within the Star Trek universe, it's clear the Klingons were not mentally ready for this when inventing the own warp drive by themselves; if they had been, they'd not have been a conquering empire. On the other hand, as I said before, a society with FTL travel technology will contact aliens in one way or another; therefore, if a violent conquering people like the Klingons invent the warp drive or something like that, your isolation won't prevent them from eventually developing new weapons of mass destruction, finding your world and trying to conquer it and/or destroy you. Since we also have no way of knowing what criteria to use to define when a society is ready, the invention of means to do FTL travel is still the only reasonable limit between an alien society we can contact with and one we can't.

Another thing: following this idea of "not interfering with the normal evolution of another species", the Federation could easily not contact that species and ensure they dunno of its existence; however, the Federation could still be interfering with the future natural evolution of that same species, by incorporating into its territory the space around their planet or by exploiting the nearby reserves of various resources (for example, minerals inside asteroids). Even if those aliens didn't wage war for it when they developed their own warp drive and learned what the Federation did, they'd still feel forced to join the Federation to have access to at least a portion of those resources; and even if those aliens had no problem with it, there’s this problem: the Prime Directive could easily be summarized as "you must leave everything as it was before you were there, as if you had never been there", so Humanity should never explore space outside the Solar System and the whole Federation would be breaking the Prime Directive by merely existing.

There are people on the Internet who argue that the Federation is fascist or "human supremacist" and considers inferior to those alien societies without a warp drive, while using the Prime Directive as a legal basis for this. As if they wanted to draw a parallel between the discrimination carried out by the Nazis in real life, based on absurd criteria such as race and involving the extermination and exploitation of millions of people, and the Prime Directive of Star Trek, created so that the Future's Humanity doesn't repeat the mistakes committed throughout their past when travelling through space and interacting with aliens. These "fan" theories are usually based on something said by a Klingon delegate called Azetbur in a dialogue with Pavel Chekov in The Undiscovered Country, the sixth film.

Chekov: "We do believe all planets have a sovereign claim to inalienable human rights."

Azetbur: "Inalien... If only you could hear yourselves? 'Human rights'. Why the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a Homo Sapiens only club."

And that dialogue continues...

Kerla (another Klingon delegate): "In any case, we know where this is leading: the annihilation of our culture."

McCoy: "That's not true!"

Okay, it's assumed people on the 23rd century -two centuries after their first contact with aliens and a century after the Federation was founded- should already have at their disposal a new word designating all sentient beings. It'd have been enough if Chekov had said "inalienable rights, inherent in every sentient being", even if it sounded a bit clumsy! But let's suppose it was just a slip of the tongue (either from the writers or the actor), and let's focus our attention on what Azetbur said: it's as much or more tendentious than that line of Chekov (if the latter's line can even be called "tendentious"), especially when the Klingon Empire is something far worse than "a Klingon only club", paraphrasing her.

There are those who claim that, in the universe of Star Trek, the Federation is sinisterly similar to the Borgs: it seeks to destroy the individuality of the Klingon people, by absorbing their culture and mixing it with the interplanetary amalgam the Federation's culture already is, ignoring the Federation’s moral code and way of life shouldn't be considered inherently better than the Klingons’. This would justify what T'Kuvma did at the beginning of the series Discovery: to unite the Klingon Great Houses and wage war against the Federation as soon as the latter made contact with them.

Other theories say the Federation resembles the USA much more than what's usually thought and there's some "depraved human supremacist plan" behind every time Humanity contacts with some alien world. Once again, making comparisons between Star Trek and real life, when the only thing sustaining this are the theories and interpretations of the audience itself.

Yeah... Bullshit. It’s not a bad thing to make comparisons between Star Trek and real life, but Star Trek is supposed to talk about how we can be better, not about how we can be the same jerks we're already being. It's all right with thinking carefully if our own value system is actually better than that of other peoples by default, but Moral Relativism has a limit and what's mentioned in the previous paragraphs goes too far. The perfect answer to this is in that same dialogue I quoted before, just a few seconds after Azetbur and Kerla said their lines:

Chang: "'To be, or not to be!' That is the question which preoccupies our people, Captain Kirk... We need breathing room."

Kirk: "Earth, Hitler, 1938."

Chang: "I beg your pardon?"

God, that was one of Kirk's best moments... Comparing what Chang said with the Nazi idea of Lebensraum or "living space".

There's a thing called "Paradox of Tolerance": in a nutshell, if you're tolerant with everyone, even with the Nazis and other intolerant pieces of crap, there'll come a day when those intolerant will subdue or destroy others, take power and destroy Tolerance itself. Humanity and the Federation in Star Trek may not have a value system better than that of other peoples and saving other peoples by stopping the Klingon advance isn’t morally good, but the "Ethics of Ethics" (I call it that because here we're studying whether it's right or wrong to apply the human morality when exploring space and relating to aliens) has no relevance here, because it'd be impossible to do something morally good in such a situation: if you told the Klingons "Halt! Up to here you have arrived!" and saved their potential victims, you'd be interfering, but if you didn't, the situation of the Paradox of Tolerance would be fulfilled, and you'd also do the opposite of what defines you as a human being, by allowing the Klingons to harm other peoples and perhaps also interfere in whatever may be called "normal development". Using Star Trek terminology, this is an ethical Kobayashi Maru.

And this brings us to another question... It's about Destiny, and about the role of each being in the Universe.

What would be the natural, normal or healthy evolution of a culture? How could we know if the Destiny of an alien civilization ain't to be visited by anyone until the FTL travel can be made, or to be contacted by people like the Federation, or to be conquered by people like the Klingons? How do we know if our role as Humanity is to protect the natural evolution of a planet and its people? If the Klingons are allowed to be themselves and conquer others, wouldn't it be right for the Federation to also be themselves and establish peaceful relations with other planets, always seeking the best for both these planets and for the Federation, guiding themselves by their own value system? If an underdeveloped civilization is about to suffer their extinction due to a natural disaster on their planet, and a starship's crew is able to help them without revealing their own existence, how can it be known the Destiny of that civilization is being extinguished while the starship doesn't intervene? Couldn't being saved by that starship also be what Destiny had dictated for that civilization?

Once upon a time, there was a controversial chapter of The Next Generation called "Pen Pals": Picard and the others find a planet on the verge of suffering a global cataclysm that will make it uninhabitable, and at the same time, Data establishes a friendship with a little girl from that planet through radio messages or something like that; the android asks that planet's inhabitants be saved, by taking advantage of the fact that the ship is capable of doing it without anyone on that planet even knowing they were saved, but his captain argues this would break the Prime Directive because they'd be playing God and interfering with that planet's natural evolution. In the end, Picard and the others save the people of that planet anyway, by finding a "loophole" in the First Directive and intentionally interpreting the little girl's messages to Data as a distress call.

And no, I ain't talking about how Data is, as on so many other occasions, ironically more human than everyone else on the Enterprise-D.

One could oppose saving the people of a planet in that situation, arguing that starship shouldn't have been there and that civilization wasn't destined to be saved, but you could also say there's no way to know what's the Destiny of anyone or anything. In the same way, you can't know if the Destiny of that civilization is to receive a benefactor's interference, nor can you know if their Destiny is to be conquered by the Klingons or be saved by the Federation or be the setting for a chapter of Doctor Who or whatever. If using your power to save those people was a way of playing God, refusing to use that power and letting that natural disaster destroy them would be a way of playing God too.

If a starship and its crew are in a situation similar to that in which the Enterprise-D was in "Pen Pals", the only thing the captain could really count on to make a decision is the judgment of the whole crew and of themself.  The crew’s morality and value system may not be impartial, but those of any other are not either, and when their morality and value system are used in order to make a decision, it'll not be done because that morality and that value system are the best or are considered the best, but because it's the only thing available.

Since we're talking about something where everyone has the same ability to make a decision regardless of their rank, the best thing would be that the decision to make is as democratic as possible. If it's urgent, only the starship's crew should be called to vote; if there's still a long time available to think about it better, the government of the country or planet from which that starship comes should be notified about this, and that government should then request that the matter be evaluated by a special committee appointed for that purpose, by the Parliament or by the people themselves through a plebiscite, depending on how much time is left.

So... I guess that's it for now. It'd be a pleasure to know your opinions on this topic.

(Why do I have the feeling millions of Trekkies will only pour their hatred in the replies?)

[captainimfangirling]

The Boys Season 2 Episode 6

Warning: Major spoilers

Stormfront: I f*cking knew it! Someone else predicted that the creator of Vought was a Nazi and I added that her gandmother is not only her daughter but Vought was her husband! I was wrong that Stormfront was a natural born supe and they took her DNA to make Compund V but she was the first experiment.

Homelander: For sure we know Homelander’s trigger is people lying to him but this dude is easily manipulated. Stormfront is doing exactly what Stillwell did to Homelander. Notice how Homelander fell for Stormfront as soon as she told him the truth? He thinks she loves him because she told him the truth. Nobody tells him the truth because of how scared they are of him. Someone else said this but that Homelander respects people who are not scared of him. That’s why he hasn’t killed Butcher. I love how Homelander acts like an impatient child. He couldn’t wait 20 minutes. Children don’t have that kind of patience.

Billy Butcher: Did you see the way Butcher reacted when Hughie got hurt?! He even respected Starlight for killing that guy because it helped them save Hughie! Him deciding to leave the others shows that Hughie is his fav but at the same time I think he knew they could take care of themselves.

Starlight: Poor thing. She doesn’t want to be like Butcher. I love the scene of her and Butcher bonding over the childish things Hughie does like using L'Oréal Kids shampoo. lol

Kimiko: Her hugging Starlight was so freaking cute! I love how Mother’s Milk and Frenchie calmed Kimiko down. Both care about her. I also loved Butcher bonding with Kimiko watching Homelander and Stromfront’s interview. Both are looking at people who took away someone they loved. I forgot the patient’s name but I have a feeling she’s gonna help that person.

Hughie: True we aren’t good enough for Hughie. Except for Robin. I personally think he still loves Robin very much but because of the trauma, he’s become codependent on Starlight. That’s why their relationship went so fast. Not saying he doesn’t love her (I ship them) but he and Starlight need to work out their own personal issues before they can have a healthy relationship.

Lamplighter: I shouldn’t feel bad but I do. You can tell he didn’t mean to kill Mallory’s grandchildren. He mistook them for Mallory.

Frenchie: My poor broken Frenchie. He wanted Mallory dead. That’s why he didn’t stop Lamplighter but it backfired on him and poor innocent children died. Edit: Sorry I misunderstood. He didn’t want Mallory dead. I didn’t see the part where his friend had a drug overdose. I thought he wanted Mallory dead because she basically used him but she used all of them. She admitted that to Butcher.

A-Train and The Deep: The Deep trying to recruit A-Train into the Church of the Collective. To be honest I don’t have interest in this part of the story line.

Mother’s Milk: He’s like the daddy of the group! Laughed my ass off at his reaction when he realized a big d*ck was wrapped around his neck!

Queen Maeve & Elena: Elena has every right to be upset with Queen Maeve but at the same time Maeve didn’t have a choice. I think Elena is more upset about the fact that she’s gonna use the plane video footage as blackmail instead of just reporting it to CNN.

[gender-chaotic]

There's something hilariously ironic about certain white, cis, straight or variation of b**tlebabes claiming antis have privilege and they're rich brats because they're able to see the show live and im certain cases multiple times. Ignoring the fact that speaking as a poor person and someone who grow up poor not everyone's situation is the same, people save money, ticket lotteries exist,ect.

Even if you they're kids with their parents getting tickets for them many of us are marginalized and i know for a fact some of y'all claiming this stuff are white, cis, and straight. If you're white you have no right claiming what white privilege is YOU have white privilege.

The irony is even more hilarious when these women are claiming sexism and classicism because they romanticize said pedophilic relationships as escapism fantasizes and using their sob stories about their life and growing up poor so they need these romanticized stories and ships and if you dare criticize this media and these relationships your a sexist classist rich privileged brat who hates women.

Sis, i grew up poor, Im black, queer and trans, nuerodivergent with a learning disability and likely a personality disorder, and i am also a csa survivor as well as some beetlebabes. I used to use ships like this including beetlejuice and lydia to cope, i know what its like to want escapism fantasies i get it, but you can have escapism fantasies and ships without a child and a minor and find healthier coping mechanisms literally have an adult and a supernatural character who is coded as an adult or two children characters that are the same.

B**tlebabes complain about xreaders but they're essentially all adults (i do not support beejxminor reader stuff ) fantasizing themselves with beej is mostly healthy ways and they dint throw a fit when criticize by others. Going through shit in your life isn't an excuse, even if you are marginilized. Stop reaching, antis have gone against men and people of all genders for sexualizing minors and shipping minors/adults and being poor isn't an excuse nor does anyone care they just don't want these unhealthy things romanticized and continuing the cycle of abuse even when you're a csa survivor.

Seeing these often white, cis,straight women appropriating language used by marginalized people like "pigs" comparing us to cops (again im black i Am a target of people brutality especially being queer, i have been stopped by cops for doing nothing before) claiming were nazis and general fascists when many of us are marginalized group they target, again claiming sexism and classicism by reaching so seem like more of a victim even though these claims are baseless, and then being white and claiming that WE have white privilege but yet they mock triggers, and minors, including minors who are csa survivors only seemingly respecting csa survivors who ship beetlebabes, call us over sensitive babies, say vaugley homophobic shit, mock people when they correct you for misgendering someone, comparing looking a ship to oppression, calling people against a ships nazis and fascists, now seemingly ok with slurs.

Egg on your friends doing so and act in general.lole reactionary anti sjw, gatekeeping fanboys akin to bronies you have no right to claim were privileged and discriminating against you, im not for harassment, threats, sui baiting. I think y'all can get some unnecessary hate sometimes but y'all aren't always the victim especially when y'all will jump on people and attack them as well y'all jist try to be slick abt it.

And before you use that stupid argument.

" you dont really care about social justice focus on more important issues"

Usually used by people who rarely give two craps about social issues unless it directly effects them or is for their gain (hmm seems familiar).

I cant speak for every anti but i personally am apart of radical leftist spaces, i go in the streets to do protests and risk being arrested as a marginilized person, i am even more exposed to REAL nazis, i speak about social issues online all the time and spread awareness, when im not working which is most days of the week and i have friday if i spend those fridays cooking food and serving this food to people. You say " shut up you don't know what's going in in peoples lives" again take your own advice, you don't know alot of these antis you use your straw man arguments to assume things about us when we do care about other issues, you can care about more than one issue what a shock, or are marginilized. Even if you are as well that doesn't absolve you of sexualizing and romantisizing unhealthy relationships.

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

@damngcoffee​ brought up the topic of the “family, stability” line in AoU (and what it means in the larger picture in the light of Endgame) in this post and now I feel like elaborating on it --

Family? Stability? All CATFA says is that Steve just... wants one fucking girl to like him for a change (“I’d settle for just one”). Sure, you can read the “right partner” thing as him desiring the perfect married life with the perfect girl, but in the context of the movie you have a guy who has been snubbed by women his entire life and just... has basically got this fantasy of finding one who won’t, and isn’t even optimistic that it’ll come true? Which makes utter sense for a person in his situation, what he tells Peggy in the car is basically that he’s given up trying to date girls, before Peggy the “right partner” thing is the embellishing varnish he’s put on his belief that he’s never going to find a girl that likes him, and basically Peggy turns it into a romantic thing between them.

And his pessimism over finding a girl that likes him isn’t just some incel thing--in the context of the movie - which is set in 1943, which matters - you have a guy who is snubbed by society as large, it’s not just girls, that’s just a symptom of how American society in general rejects men like him (not “real” men, and while this isn’t the point of the post, this might be a good time to remind you all that queerness and disability have a long shared history in western society, CATFA alone - on purpose? accidentally? who knows - references multiple layers of historical queer subtext even not counting the actors’, um, chemistry, but I’m digressing).

Steve wants to prove to himself and others that he is no less worthy than the big, strong healthy men who get shipped to Europe and get girls (CATFA and CATWS craft a whole game of foils between him and Bucky which is something that many other stories apply to protagonist and villain, the magical thing about this narrative is that it doesn’t make neither of them the villain, but again I’m digressing). This is where his “I’ll figure I wait for the right partner” fits--let’s not forget that in the same conversation he mentions that since the war broke, he’s basically put “find a girl” lower down the list of his priorities, enlisting in the army has the priority now. He wants to prove he’s not worth less that the “proper” men and his way of doing it, since the war broke, is by going to fight nazis, not dating girls. That’s why he just ditches the double date and goes to try to get himself into the army! Because with the war being happening, he has non-selfish motivations to join in other than his “personal” motivation of proving himself.

Basically nothing tells us that Steve Rogers ever wanted family and stability. Because those are never shown to be factors motivating him. The factors motivating him in CATFA are (and the ambiguity lies in which order they are): a) fighting “bullies”, specifically the current biggest bullies in the world i.e. Nazi Germany; b) proving himself not less worthy of the big, healthy men of his country.

The point of CATWS is that he has nothing motivating him (and Natasha trying to find him dates now has exactly the same motivating force on him as Bucky trying to find him dates while he was trying to enlist, i.e. none) and he’s just conflicted because the “good guys” are dangerously close to being the bullies here and he doesn’t know what to d--oh, look! Now it’s clear. Go fight bullies, and save Bucky, either that means getting him back or die with him. (And you could argue that fighting Hydra and trying to get Bucky back to ‘normal’ are out of a sense of being obliged and he wished he could get stability instead, but there’s literally no argument about his total willingness to go down with Bucky if it turns out that Bucky is not the kind he can save but only stop... except that his unwillingness to experience Bucky’s loss freshly again is stronger than any “positive” motivation like stability, which he never had anyway.)

Nothing about his motivating forces have changed after the ice. He still is motivated by the exact same things. The whole point of the first part of CATWS is that since waking up in the 21st century he hasn’t really known what the fuck he’s supposed to do now because at first he needs to understand the new world, and then he’s conflicted because... the organization Peggy and the others founded, which he joined because he doesn’t have anything else to belong to, is acting now a bit too much like bullies... but he doesn’t feel like he has a solid grasp enough on things to act, until he realizes that he does, and then he’s on. (And isn’t it beautiful, how he doesn’t care who the bullies are - it can be his own organization that he joined because he literally has nothing else but his memories of the founder, it can be his friends and only thing close to family he’s ever gotten in years--you’re acting as an authoritarian force harming people, you fucking go. That’s how strong his morals are, and dismissing it as being precious about his pretty ideals is... problematic. The entirety of the Civil War plot is an ‘idiot plot’ but it’s in character for Steve not to give Tony a pass just because the Avengers are family. And the subtextual/implicit reason he can do that while Natasha can’t is because Natasha really had nothing before Shield and the Avengers, while Steve had his, um, side-plot. But again, digressing :D)

Long story short:

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Fierce Historical Ladies post: Vladka Meed

Part 1: The Ghetto

Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel (1921-2012), escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto with a map of Treblinka hidden in her shoe. She smuggled dynamite into the Ghetto, set up covert aid networks in forced labor camps, and journeyed deep into forests filled with partisans—friendly and hostile—to locate Jews who needed her help. Through grief and pain and loss, and at constant risk to her life, she never stopped working to aid her people, even as the Nazis did their best to destroy the world as she knew it. 

Vladka Meed c. 1942. Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I am, frankly, in awe of her, and I would very much like for there to be some sort of alternative timeline in which she hung out with Hannah Szenes and Noor Khan (also, Peggy Carter even though she’s not real).

But I digress.

Vladka Meed’s story begins in the unique cultural world of interwar Polish Jewry. In 1921, Jews made up 10.5% of the population of Poland; by 1931, they made up 9.8%.1 In the cities, their representation was even higher: by the early 1930s, they made up 30.1% of the population of Warsaw. The Polish Jewish community was uniquely characterized by its deep commitment to Jewish political parties—the three most important of which were the Bund, Agudath Israel, and the Zionists—and their attendant youth movements, which dominated the social and cultural lives of interwar Polish Jewry.

The youth groups in particular played formative roles in the lives of young Polish Jews.2 Vladka, for her part, was a member of the Bund, a secular Jewish socialist movement which understood Polish Jewry as an autonomous nation whose destiny was tied inextricably to that of the Poles. The Zionist movement was split into many separate groups and parties, their politics ranging from far right militarism to far left Marxism. Agudath Israel was a religious party which rejected Zionism and secularism, and united Orthodox and Hasidic Polish Jewry.

When the Nazis marched into Poland, they began their campaign of dispossessing and ghettoizing Polish Jewry. 

They initially paid little attention to the youth groups, and in this slight bubble of freedom the youth groups slowly transformed into centers of the nascent Jewish resistance. Vladka, for example, worked on her Bundist youth group’s illegal newspaper, and worked to organize illegal children’s groups.

A page from a 1942 edition of the Bund’s underground newspaper, perhaps one Vladka worked on. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem.

At first, the youth groups functioned as their own separate, ideologically defined universes. As the Nazis isolated Jewish communities across Poland, the youth groups and their attendant parties, cut off from their members in other towns and cities, reached out to their membership for volunteers to carry information and correspondence to their far-flung comrades. The majority, and most successful of these volunteers, were female, some as young as fifteen.

These volunteer couriers transported papers, documents, forged identity cards, underground newspapers, and money in and out of the isolated Jewish communities—and later ghettos—of Poland. These couriers had only limited protection from certain death: passing Gentile features or  hair dye and makeup to disguise their traditionally “Jewish” features, forged papers, genitalia which could not betray their Jewish identities, and a manner of gendered socialization which prepared Jewish women and girls to be able to engage with both the Gentile and the Jewish communities.3 These female couriers became the backbones of their youth groups, and, as Nazi policy towards the Jews shifted from isolation to extermination, of the organized Jewish resistance.4

In Warsaw, the isolation began in autumn 1940 as the Nazis ordered the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto on October 2, and sealed it on November 16. 

Warsaw Ghetto street scene, 1941. Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Between 300,000 and 440,000 people behind lived within its walls, and inside, conditions inside were grim. In 1941, 5123 Jews died of starvation and disease. Included in their number was Vladka’s father, Shlomo Peltel, who died of pneumonia.

On July 19, 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. It went like this: the Nazis and their Ukrainian troops surrounded the living and working quarters in the Ghetto, building by building, and ordered all Jews to exit. Upon rounding up a large enough group, the Nazis either marched them or sent them via truck or streetcar to the assembly and deportation point (the Umschlagplatz). There, the Nazis loaded the rounded up Jews into sealed freight cars bound for Treblinka.

Jews make their way to the deportation point. Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Jews assembled at the deportation point, 1942. Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Train platform at the deportation point. Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The deportations ended on September 12, 1942. Only 10% of the ghetto’s original population remained. That 10% generally consisted of men between the ages of 15 and 50, and strong, healthy young women able to perform labor. These individuals, initially cleared for survival because of their youth and strength, were generally the only remaining members of their families left in the ghetto. Vladka was no exception: her mother Hanna, her fifteen-year old brother Chaim, and her sixteen-year old sister Henia all perished in Treblinka that summer of 1942.

Those who remained asked themselves how this had been allowed to happen, how 50 Germans and 400 supplementary Ukrainian and Latvian policemen had been able to ship 350,000 of their friends, families, comrades, coreligionists, and loved ones to their deaths without encountering a lick of resistance.5

In the early days of the deportations, few knew where the trains were headed. The youth group and party leadership knew. So did the Polish underground and their allies in the Bund. But Nazi disinformation campaigns easily overtook the power of these “rumors.” Warsaw Jewry was desperate for any shred of hope; when the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners to send cheery postcards homes from Treblinka, their friends and families clung to the false promises contained within these missives. And as they did so, they reacted with anger and hostility towards any Jews spreading information to the contrary, including the stories of those managed to escape from the death camps and make their way back to the ghetto.

Further, it was not, and is not, true that no one tried to resist. In mid-March, 1942, Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of Dror—one of the labor Zionist youth groups—called a meeting between himself, the representatives of the other Left and Center Zionist youth groups, party leaders, and the Bund to discuss the formation of a cooperative resistance group. 

Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem.

However, the attendees feared that any attempt to resist would be met with collective retaliation, and the Bund representatives were comfortable with neither the idea of acting apart from the Polish underground, nor with the Zionist undertones of the meeting. The meeting ended, with little accomplished.

When the deportations began in July, the Center/Left Zionist groups decided to move forward without the Bund, and founded the Jewish Fighting Organization (the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) on July 28, 1942. The ZOB’s first months were riddled with failure and tragedy. Those few Jews aware of their existence distrusted them, perceiving them as dangerous provocateurs. The Nazi captured, executed, and/or deported many ZOB leaders in these early months, and many more of the party and youth group leadership—including those who had called the March meeting—fled the ghetto on the eve of the deportations. These losses, combined with the enormity of the deportations, left the remnants of the ZOB shocked, hopeless, and despondent.

But in a perverse way, it was the magnitude of the deportations which allowed the ZOB to flourish. Those who remained in the Ghetto could no longer view the ZOB as dangerous, because the ghetto had already suffered the worst. Further, the party leaders who fled before the deportations—Mordecai Anielewicz, Yitzhak Zuckerman, and Zivia Lubetkin (the Hero of Another Story/FHL post)—returned to the ghetto in September. 

Mordecai Anielewicz. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem.

Zivia Lubetkin. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem.

In this new atmosphere, the ZOB was finally able to create a military and political framework for an organized Jewish resistance. The ZOB remained the military arm of the organization, while the Jewish National Committee—which included in its body representatives from all of Warsaw’s Jewish parties and youth groups—acted as the organization’s political arm.

In addition, the Bund soon re-entered talks with the ZOB. To bring the Bund, and its contacts in the Polish underground, into the fold, the ZOB developed a third arm: the Jewish Coordinating Committee. The Jewish Coordinating Committee governed the resistance, and spoke on the behalf of the ZOB and the Jewish National Committee in negotiations with Polish underground representatives and potential Gentile allies. By the end of October, 1942, the Jewish underground had achieved what was impossible only a few months earlier: solidarity between and within the Jewish political and ideological streams of Warsaw.6

As October moved into November, Abrasha Blum, one of the leaders of the Bund, called a meeting of all remaining members of the Bund and its youth group. 

Abrasha Blum. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem.

He opened the meeting with the news of the organization of a joint resistance effort, and the creation of the Jewish Coordinating Committee. Abrasha then briefed them on the goals of the resistance: to smuggle women and children out of the ghetto, to smuggle weapons and dynamite into the ghetto, and to train and organize fighting groups in preparation for an uprising against the Nazis when they, inevitably, returned to complete the liquidation of the ghetto.

When he finished speaking Abrasha began to assign missions to all of those present. Finally, it was Vladka’s turn. He noted her distinctly Gentile looks (in her own words, “a rather small nose, grey-green eyes, straight light brown hair”) and made her an offer: if she chose to accept it, her mission would be to cross into the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, and act as a courier in support of the goals of the resistance. Vladka, of course, accepted.

She was to tell no one of her mission, and wait quietly to receive her orders. Two or three weeks later, one night in early December, Michal Klepfisz, an old Bundist colleague of Vladka’s already stationed outside of the ghetto, appeared at her door. “I’ve come to take you away, Feigel,” he said. 

Michal Klepfisz. Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Get ready; you’ll be leaving the ghetto within two days.”7 He instructed her to conceal a copy of the underground newspaper (which included a detailed map of Treblinka) on her person, bribe a leader of one of the labor battalions employed in a factory outside of the ghetto, and leave the ghetto with the battalion, posing as a member. She was then to meet him outside the gates on the Aryan side of Warsaw at 8am.

Two days later, at 6am on the morning of December 5, 1942, Vladka left her apartment for the last time, the illegal literature concealed within her shoes. Following orders, she bribed a leader of one of the labor battalions and joined their ranks. Unfortunately, she was immediately conspicuous of one of the few women in the group. Suspicious, a guard ordered her to stop, and report to a small wooden shack for questioning.

With no other recourse, Vladka obeyed. Inside, she waited in a small room, its walls papered with maps, charts, and pictures of half-naked women; all were spattered with blood. A guard entered shortly, and ordered her to strip in order to search her clothing for contraband. Vladka tried to keep calm; she assured herself that everything would be fine so long as he did not order her to remove her shoes. But, of course, he did. Vladka stalled, unlacing her shoes as slowly as possible. The guard had no patience for this. He ordered her to hurry up, and began to advance on her with a whip. At the last minute, a second guard ran breathlessly into the room. Another Jew, it seemed, had fled the premises. Vladka’s guard swore, and the two ran out of the room, leaving Vladka alone with her partially unlaced shoes. She hurriedly dressed, and slipped out of the room. A third guard stopped her outside the shack, but she convinced him that she had passed inspection.

When Vladka returned to the labor gang, all of its members were shocked to see her emerge alive, unscathed and in one piece; most of those sent into the shack never came back out. She marched with them through the gates, into the “Aryan” side of Warsaw. Outside the ghetto, the battalion members boarded a wagon, their transport to their work assignment. When the ghetto walls were out of sight, Vladka, at the urging of the rest of the gang, who knew that she was on a mission of some sort, removed her white armband (all Jew were required to wear one) and jumped (in 1991, she recounted this experience in an oral history).

Two Jewish men at work in a ghetto factory, c. 1941/1942. Note the armband worn by the man in the background right. All Jews had to wear it, and it is what Vladka pulled off before she jumped. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem.

She was free, but it was an odd sort of freedom, “…it was as if nothing had happened in the last two years. Trolleys, automobiles, bicycled raced along; businesses were open; children headed for school; women carried fresh bread and other provisions. The contrast with the ghetto was startling. It was another world, a world teeming with life.”

Michal Klepfisz had waited for her outside the gates with his Gentile landlord and ally to the Jewish underground, Stephan Machai for hours. Finally, they had returned home, hoping that Vladka had noticed how strict the guards were that day and retreated. Yet, early that afternoon, they heard someone banging on the door of the cellar of Gornoszlonska 3—the address Michal had had her commit to memory before leaving the ghetto. A blonde woman opened it, and there, to her relief, stood Michal Klepfisz.

Her life as an underground operative for the Jewish resistance began. In a period of five months, she would encounter more danger, isolation, fear, and intrigue than she ever dreamed possible as she worked single-mindedly to prepare the Warsaw Ghetto for an uprising.

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1 They made up the largest Jewish population in non-Communist Europe. 2 The 1930s were not a good time for young Polish Jewry. Global economic downturn threatened everyone’s future, while renewed anti-Semitism gave way to public violence, and segregation from and within universities and professional organizations. In short, Polish youth seemed to have no future. Those traditional centers of authority: the family and the rabbis, could not seem to offer any solutions to the problems of young Jewish people. So, they turned instead to the youth groups. Whole classes of Jewish children and adolescents joined one group or another, and looked to the group and party leadership for guidance and authority. These groups even ran school and summer camps. 3 In that time and place, Jewish girls typically attended secular academies taught in Polish—this gave them the ability to speak fluent Polish without the Yiddish inflection so easily identifiable to gentile Poles. Their mothers and communities socialized these girls to be able to maintain a household, raise their children in line with both Polish and Jewish cultural values, and to potentially run the family business. In short, these women were socialized to be able to comfortably navigate the world inside and outside of the Jewish community. Jewish boys, on the other hand, typically attended religious academies taught in Yiddish, and were socialized to dedicate their lives to religious study, and the small number of trades and occupations open to Jews. In short, Jewish boys were socialized to operate primarily within the Jewish sphere of Polish life. There was also the matter of circumcision: if a Jewish man were caught and ordered to drop his pants, his body would clearly betray his Jewish identity. Women’s bodies could not give them away in this matter. Please note that these gender norms reflected social ideals, not lived realities. For more on these particular gender roles, see Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies) by Paula E. Hyman. 4 The article, The Female Couriers During the Holocaust, provided me with much of this information on the female couriers. Definitely worth a read. 5 In addition to those sent to their deaths at Treblinka, 11,580 were sent to forced labor camps, 8,000 escaped to the Aryan side of the city, more than 10,000 were murdered in the streets during the roundups, and 20,000-25,000 successfully evaded capture; the Nazis referred to the latter group as “illegal residents.” 6 Mostly. Betar, the youth arm of the right-wing Zionist Revisionist party, did not join. It could not agree with the ZOB on issues of tactics and leadership, and founded its own, independent resistance group: the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowski, or ZZW). 7 All direct quotations in this post series are from Vladka Meed’s 1948 memoir, On Both Sides of the Wall unless otherwise noted.

[charlie-minion]

The one you’ve been waiting for

I’m going kind of slow with my season 12 rewatch. Actually, I just finished watching 12x05 and some things caught my attention despite the episode being a filler. The plot wasn’t so interesting to me when I first watched it. I remember quite painfully how it happened after the U.S. presidential election last November and how the whole Hitler thing became a little tasteless. However, the episode did have three things worth talking about.

1)      Sublimation is kind of Dean’s thing.

Sam gave a name to what Dean was doing. In 12x04, Dean was obviously cranky and very much affected by Mary’s decision to leave (in 12x03). Through the case in 12x04, Dean learned that sometimes families need space, which was what Mary was asking for herself, so he decided to roll with it even if he didn’t like it.

In 12x05, we didn’t see cranky!Dean anymore. However, every time Dean says ‘no’ to food he’s being offered, it’s an immediate sign that something is wrong. Sam offered him scrambled or fried eggs, and Dean said he wasn’t hungry. Sam was suspicious about it, so he offered pie and Dean declined. That was the alarm Sam needed. Pie is Dean’s comfort food and he was denying himself that.

The problem was that when Sam tried to talk to Dean about their mom, Dean didn’t allow it. Dean started talking about the case and easily diverted a complicated conversation that he definitely wasn’t ready to have. When Sam tried a last time and Dean stopped him, Sammy called him out on what he was doing and said that was called sublimation. Dean didn’t deny it, though. He easily admitted that it was his thing.

What I find interesting about this is that sublimation is a defense mechanism, but it’s considered a mature one. The psychiatrist George Eman Vaillant introduced a four-level classification of defense mechanisms:

Level I – pathological defenses (denial, delusional projection)

Level II – immature defenses (fantasy, projection, passive aggression, acting out)

Level III – neurotic defenses (intellectualization, reaction formation, dissociation, displacement, repression, compensation)

Level IV – mature defenses (humor, sublimation, suppression, altruism, anticipation)

The Level IV defense mechanisms are commonly found among emotionally healthy adults and are considered mature, even though many have their origins in an immature stage of development. The use of these defenses enhances feelings of control. These defenses help to integrate conflicting emotions and thoughts, whilst still remaining effective.

If we ever doubted that season 12 would focus a lot on Dean’s growth, I think this is proof that the writers knew what they wanted to do with our Dean since the beginning of the season. Dean has used denial, projection, passive aggression, displacement, repression, and compensation a lot in previous seasons. He’s used humor, suppression, and maybe other defense mechanisms as well, but why did Sam mention “sublimation” specifically this time?

Sublimation allows a person to channel stress toward something productive. It takes the energy of something potentially harmful and turns it into something good and useful. In other words, Dean was hurting because of what Mary decided. He felt abandoned again, and he felt like a disappointment; he wasn’t the son Mary wanted him to be. Probably somewhere inside his head the words “not enough” were making an appearance. However, instead of being sorry for himself or hiding in a bottle, Dean decided to move on and keep saving people.

Dean desperately needed a win, and he got one by killing none other than Hitler. It’s obvious to me now why Dean easily understood and defended Cas in 12x19. Cas needed a win just as much as Dean needed one in this episode. He felt such satisfaction after a job well done that he was willing to give himself some pie at the end. He even said that he DESERVED some pie.

That was Dean starting to voice the things that he deserved and the things that he didn’t. All of that led to Dean saying out loud in 12x22 that his childhood wasn’t FAIR. We’ve always said that Dean deserved to be a child, but he never was because he had to be more than a brother for Sam; he had to be a father and a mother, and it wasn’t fair. It was glorious to see Dean finally saying it and finally forgiving the one person that unknowingly caused all that.

It’s no coincidence that this was the first episode where Dean wanted to use the grenade launcher and Sam didn’t let him. (The second episode where Dean got a negative was in 12x11, penned by the same writer of 12x05). Sam promised Dean that he would get the chance to use it. It’s like Dean wasn’t ready to tear down his internal walls. He got to use the grenade launcher in 12x22, the same episode where Dean finally faced his mother and told her how he really felt.

So if Dean needed to kill Hitler to realize that he really deserved a pat on the back and some pie, then all I have to say is thank you Meredith Glynn for this episode!

2)      Dean’s visual association to ships.

Once Dean and Sam went to the antique store, what was something that caught Dean’s attention? A ship.

Seriously, they could have chosen any object, any object. Why would they choose a ship? A ship that Dean accidentally knocked down, tried to pick up, and dramatically failed? A ship that wasn’t even related to anything relevant to the episode plot-wise?

Then Dean kept walking around in the store and what caught his eye again? Another ship! 

It’s just that this time Dean refrained himself from touching it because he remembered the damage he’d caused some seconds before.

You might say that it was just the “haha” moment of the episode. Look at Dean making a fool of himself because he’s careless. But why not use a vase or any other thing like that? Why a ship? I’m ready to bet that wasn’t a coincidence.

 3)      I’ll never be good enough.

There’s a reason Sam connected with Ellie and Dean kind of connected with Christoph (the Nazi necromancer’s son). Sam was the one who could relate to Ellie for being Hitler’s descendant. Dean was the one who could relate to Christoph’s words: “All I do is try to make [my father] proud, I’ll never be good enough.” 

Dean who always tried to make John proud and failed. Dean who now wanted to make his mother proud and was failing (in Dean’s eyes the fact that Mary left was because Dean wasn’t good enough; he wasn’t the son Mary wanted him to be).

As his father said about Christoph, the boy had spine after all. He didn’t quietly accept everything his father said. Before the Winchesters caught him, he was saying these things to his father over the phone:

“That is not fair. You know, I try with you, I really do. But you expect me to be a mind reader, and it’s exhausting.”

He voiced what he thought was an unfair treatment. When he was scolded for telling the Winchesters about Hitler, he didn’t remain quiet. He told his father he should be thanking him. He even told him he “used to look up to” him, meaning that he didn’t look up to him anymore. His father called him an unconceivable disappointment and that was when he realized he would never be enough, but he wasn’t willing to simply accept death for that reason.

Christoph was a mirror for everything Dean would have to experience for the rest of season 12. He voiced what Dean didn’t say, but we know he was definitely feeling in this particular episode: all Dean did was try to make his parents (now his mother) proud, but he’ll never be good enough.

The rest of season 12 would prove Dean wrong in that regard. He didn’t have to do anything in particular. HE WAS ENOUGH JUST BY BEING DEAN WINCHESTER. I’m so proud of my boy! :’)

[cats-against-discourse]

I know it's the In™ thing to do in sj circles to be constantly critical of your own behavior, interests, language, likes, and that of others, but like... that's not healthy. That obsession with Purity In Everything Or Else You're A Terrible Person is heavily linked to OCD symptoms (especially scrupulosity, obsessions, and black-and-white thinking), which can be so incredibly dangerous to those of us who struggle with that. I had a panic attack when my friend made vague references to liking being a "little" in an ambiguously kinky context (when my friend told me they liked steven universe. when my friend told me they hated steven universe. when my friend told me they watched american horror story. when my friend used the word "bitch". when my friend told me that they used the r-slur in sixth grade before learning better.) This is not because any of these things legitimately on their own triggered me. It was because, hearing them, I constructed discoursers in my head, witch-hunters; I questioned myself if my friends were trustworthy or if they were irredeemable people who were going to hurt me; if I was a bad person for interacting with them, if I was going to get hurt, doxxed, harassed, stalked--by them or by whoever disagreed with them--for talking to them. Just by knowing this information I went into flight-or-fight mode, even if this was shared privately, or in a context where nobody would care too much. Because I cared--and I was convinced that those panic attacks were the only thing that was helping me reach that unattainable goal of a "good ally". I am terrified of sharing my own opinions or interests because of the opinions of others because of anxiety--because of various mental illnesses (anxiety/OCD tendencies, DPD...) and this was not just encouraged but seen as NECESSARY for me to be a halfway-decent person. I was petrified that one wrong word out of my mouth, one wrong thought in my head, or even one wrong thing my friends said or thought without my knowledge, would /literally/ cause systematic abuse and murder--and the constant reminders on tumblr, of fake allies and deaths and "this attitude literally kills people" and "if you don't reblog this you're part of the problem" from a place that I went to as an escape...didn't help. I promise, you can say things like "thirteen reasons why meant a lot to me as a child" or "I ship incest" or "i used to use slurs before i learned better" or even weird opinions like "i don't think nazis should be punched", "asexual people are LGBT+ but not queer", "attempted murder can be justified", whatever, even bigoted stuff like "trans women have male privilege" and the world will not fall around you, you will not be a terrible person, you will not deserve abuse, you will not be Personally Responsible For All Oppression And Even Genocide. This can be hard to believe! Even writing these opinions out I kept wanting to edit them and add corollaries to be more centrist and ~acceptable~, even though I was trying to deliberately choose controversial and Bad opinions. I am already imagining my callout post in perfect detail, despite being a small and unknown blog- "Pedophilia/incest apologist, Thinks transmisogyny is just an opinion, Cares more about their precious fee-fees than the fact that they're defending oppression, Acts like doing the bare minimum for oppressed people is soooooo hard, demands cookies for being a decent human being/defends oppressive people and behaviors, Ableist bc acts like mental illness symptoms are bad/toxic". But like... I can recognize that it's probably not going to happen. I can recognize that, like, not killing myself or self-harming is usually (there's that editing again: no "usually" and I'm afraid of "cats-against-discourse thinks their self-harming is worse than nd twoc csa survivors LITERALLY DYING due to their ABUSIVE rhetoric") usually more important than a small potentiality of accidentally hurting someone else. Nobody is 100% unproblematic unless they died as an infant. This does not mean "I should have died as an infant so that I could be ~unproblematic~". Your happiness and life free from paranoia is more important than standards of purity. It's good to not be a dick, especially to marginalized people, but when you are too afraid of being a dick to do anything, that can be a problem, and it doesnt stop being a problem if you have privilege on some axis. TLDR: it's not healthy to always be critical of current and past interests, language, and feelings. you can most likely have some controversial, problematic, or even straight-up bad aspects without being a terrible/hurtful person, and you are probably in less danger for these opinions than you think. everyone is problematic, and that's okay.

[eloquence-uncensored]

Let’s talk about the bane of an INTJ’s existence.

Emotions. I’m talking about emotions.

Life is easy when you're selfish! Nothing is complicated or hard to understand. Anything that's good for you is good! Anything that's bad for you is bad.

Whether good or bad things are happening to the people around you is irrelevant, as long as it they don't talk to you about the bad stuff. Everything is only important as it relates to you. Nobody and nothing else matters!

And then you grow up.

In less than a decade, I've gone from hyper-selfish to hyper-empathy, and I don't know what to do about this new-found complication. I made a huge mistake a few years ago. I looked at my attitude about life and other people and thought, “Wow, this isn't very good. God, can you please make me grow a compassion?”

And then He did.

To disastrous results.

Now, I can be having a perfectly normal and productive day, but whenever I'm reminded that domestic abuse and suicide and the sex trade are things that exist, it ruins my day.

Now don't get me wrong—that doesn't mean I sit around and sulk and don't want to do anything until I go to bed. I'll still do fun stuff. I'll still laugh whenever everyone else laughs, still smile whenever everyone else smiles, and I'll at least look like I'm having a good time. But even then, in the back of my head, there's going to be this little kid going—

What do you do with that?? What do normal people do with that? Do they cry? Do they post something angry and vague on social media? I don't know.

(There's another variation of this problem in which, you know, I notice that somebody I know is attractive all of the sudden and I don't know what to do with that, but that doesn't happen as often.

Actually, I've got a great way of getting rid of that problem. Ask God to take away your feelings, and then stop thinking about that person. It works!

But that's a much smaller issue than the negative emotions thing, so I'm going to keep talking about those.)

In the past, I've had two ways of responding to that kid in my head: number one, avoid it, and number two, pursue it.

Avoid it looks something like “ARGH! Shut it out! Ignore it! Nothing bad in the world is happening that I don't know how to deal with!!”

That's a surprisingly easy route to take when you're a sheltered church kid, but that glass fortress will crack eventually because even churches aren't safe from this kind of stuff.

An even weirder variation on “avoid it” is, “I can't let anybody think I have any weakness like compassion! I'm just going to go on with my life as if this doesn't bother me. Nobody will know!”

Which, again, is shoving that little kid in a box, taping it shut, and saying “Shut up!” So it counts as avoiding.

Pursuing it looks like, “I'm a disgustingly privileged, white-ish, middle-class American. Even my family is semi-functional! The only way I can punish myself for being this happy is by making myself miserable. I'm gonna go do some research on domestic abuse!”

Ah, that actually feels good to get off my chest. Because those are really—really unhealthy ways of dealing with it. Seriously, past me needs therapy, stat.

But what is healthy? I still don't know. Do you cry? Do you pray? That helps. It can help a lot, actually, especially if you're sincere and don't hold anything back that's bothering you...it's a whole other post that prayer works and isn't just bouncing words off the ceiling, but I'm not talking about that.

Do you post about your feelings online without context so that nobody knows what you're talking about enough to judge you? Oh, wait.

Sometimes that little kid still stays there. What do you do?

See, there's this thing about me where if something makes me sad, it flicks on a light in my head that says, “Do something—do something.” It's action-oriented. This hurts—“do something.”

But do what? Most of the time, you can't do anything. What do you do when your friend moved away and is really missing home and their old friends?

...Be there for them? Say you're sorry? I've done that. Like, twelve times.

I'm still doing that.

It doesn't work. That little kid is still there.

What do you do when you hear about the suicide rates in your country or the survivors of domestic abuse? These are things where you can really only help by being there for somebody, being their friend, and walking alongside them. Sending them to an organization, especially one run by something as disconnected as the government, doesn't hit right in the chest, where people really need it.

Sure, there are some charities that do really great work, but when you're broke, what can you do? Legitimate question. Should I volunteer? Or what?

If I gave money to every charity that addressed something that broke my heart, I wouldn't eat. Even if I narrowed it down to charities that actually do their jobs well and put people back on their feet instead of making them dependent on a check, I still wouldn't eat.

If I volunteered at all these charities—who knows if there even are some in my area—I'd break my heart every single day, just looking at these people.

Now, not being able to do everything doesn't excuse me from doing something. Nor is emotional pain something to be avoided at all costs, especially if there's something you can do to make the situation better.

I'm just saying that the task is so insurmountable and the very idea of abuse so painful that it's crippling.

Where do I start? I don't know.

And like I said, these are really only areas where you can help by being personally connected to them. But if I don't know anyone who's going through this.

And if I do...they don't want to talk to me. They don't want to be my friend. They think that my happiness is...naïve.

For a while, I wondered if they were right.

And let me make this clear: there is a good use for that “do something” instinct. It's not useless! It's not just here to make our lives miserable. Sometimes, it can help us do a world of good. Like the story of one of my personal heroes—Nicholas Winton.

Look at this nerd. He wasn’t even married yet when he saved the world. When Winton realized that there were Jewish refugee families hiding in what was then Czechoslovakia from the Nazi Holocaust at the outset of WWII, Winton abandoned his vacation in Switzerland to visit and talk to these families.

He discovered that there were thousands of parents who wanted their children out of the country and safe, even if they couldn't make it to safety themselves.

So Nicky did something. He acted as a middle-man to get the kids to foster families in Britain and Sweden. He had someone collect information from the Jewish families; he contacted governments and newspapers himself to ask for permission and get the word out of the need for foster families; and he raised enough money to ship the kids by train right past the Nazis and to safety.

All in all, he saved 669 out of thousands of kids. They lived, while their Jewish families...well, they were killed. Sometimes horrifically. But these kids survived. And they went on to be ministers, doctors, politicians, scientists, mathematicians, film-makers, actors, fathers, mothers; and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren now amount to more than 5,000 people.

5,000 people! Who lived, who died—who wouldn't have existed if it weren't for Nicky Winton. And he just left it behind him. After that, he served in the Royal Air Force, got married, had kids.

That—THAT is what the “do something” instinct can do is at its best. It's useful, it's good, it can save the world.

Boy, it feels good to end this here. If you want a pick-me-up, stop reading at the end of this paragraph and go on with your tumblr browsing. Follow your emotions! It's a good thing that you feel this way! You can help make the world a better place!

But sometimes you can't.

If you kept reading, you're probably asking the same question that I am. What do you do when you can't do...anything?

Unfortunately, I don't have any advice. I'm still struggling with this myself. I've recently come across a new way of looking at this issue—that negative emotions can spur you in the right direction, like a charge that sets off a rocket, but you've got to deal with the emotions before you go in that direction or else your rocket will explode in midair.

But that doesn't always help when there's no direction to go.

And it's really hard to find help for this because “Oh, the American dream is all about getting what you want, being happy, and being satisfied! It's all about you! Pursue your happiness!”

And at the same time, “Pfft, Christians can't be sad!” Because—I don't know, reasons.

Both of those are dumb, and blind.

But I don't know where else to turn.

The one thing I can't do is shove the world's pain off say, “Well, I'm glad that's not me.”

But...it's really interesting to me, as a Christian, that Jesus in the Gospels never seemed to be above people's pain. Whenever someone came to Him asking for a miracle, He never said, “Nope—I don't have time.”

It didn't matter if they were asking Him to reverse death or sickness—i.e. things that happen to all of us and kind of can't be avoided. He never said, “You guys are human beings. You know this happens. Deal with it.”

He just went. And healed them. And brought them back to life.

If you read it carefully, it really starts to look like He cares a lot.

And that gets really interesting when we think about ourselves and our own prayers in the same terms as those people asking for miracles—even miracles for other people.

“Jesus, my servant lies sick and in severe pain.” “Jesus, my daughter is dying. If you come, she'll be healed.” “Jesus, Lazarus is sick. You know Lazarus. He's your friend. Your homeboy. Please, come and heal him. We know you care.”

Funny thing about the Lazarus story. I think it's tainted how we see praying for healing. We can all picture God dilly-dallying for no reason before coming to save us to prove He's awesome.

What we have a hard time believing is that He'll say, “Okay,” go straight there, and do the thing. For us. Because we asked. And He likes to see things work out and see us smile and stuff.

I think we forget just how much He loves us.

Well, that's my rant. If anybody is emotionally smarter than me and can give me any advice, I'll leave the replies option open or something.

If this just let you know you're not alone—good. We could all stand to hear that a little more often.

The last thing I'll leave you with is something I heard from the pulpit recently—which may surprise some of you—and that is this:

What do you do when everything falls apart? When the divorce is final and the diagnosis is fatal and the casket lies open in front of you?

What do you do when your job is gone and the house is gone and your support is gone and your life and family are blowing apart? What do you do when they hurt you in ways that can't be repaired?

What do you do when prayers aren't answered in the way you hoped and believed so hard they would be?

What do you do when everyone hurts?

What do you do when there's nothing left you can do?

You hurt.

Apparently, there's really nothing wrong with that.

[thelastdivide]

The Prince of Judah and the Vice-Consul of Japan

In December 1939, an eleven-year-old Jewish boy named Solly Ganor invited a stranger to his family’s Hanukkah celebration at their home in Kaunas, Lithuania– then the capital city. Solly had gone into a little shop owned by his aunt to borrow a couple of coins to see the newest Laurel and Hardy movie. He found his aunt deep in conversation, speaking Russian with a tall, elegantly dressed Japanese man– the first Asian person Solly had ever seen. His aunt introduced him formally as “His Excellency Chiune Sugihara, the Vice-Consul from Japan.” Solly would have been intimidated, but he felt an aura of kindliness around the stranger. He shook hands with Sugihara and then told his aunt he wanted to go to the movies. Before she could move, Sugihara had pulled out his coin purse and given Solly the money. Solly, a little confused but grateful, responded in kind. He invited Sugihara to their Hanukkah dinner. His aunt was embarrassed and assured the diplomat he was under no obligation to attend. But Sugihara cut her off. “Actually,” he said, “I’d love to.”

It was in one of the darkest winters in human history that Chiune Sugihara joined his Jewish neighbors to hear and celebrate the Festival of Lights’ ancient message of hope and perseverance against all odds, a message that Sugihara needed as much as any of them. Just two months prior, the Nazis had invaded Poland. The large and thriving Jewish community in Kaunas had followed Hitler’s rise closely and listened to his hateful rhetoric on the radio, but they assumed that the worst of the rumors were exaggerated, and the Nazi threat would blow over quickly. Now, thousands upon thousands of Polish Jewish refugees were flooding over the western border into Lithuania, bringing with them reports of atrocities too terrible to imagine. Ghettos in the cities. Pogroms in the villages. Wholesale slaughter of their friends, neighbors, and families. Most had escaped with little or nothing, and the Jewish community of Kaunas was stretching its resources to the limit to take them in. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had occupied tiny Lithuania and dissolved its government, building up its “buffer strip” against the inevitable German advance. It wasn’t a matter of if the war would come to Kaunas, but when. By the summer of 1940, all but two foreign diplomats had been evacuated from the city, leaving only Sugihara and a middle-manager from the Phillips corporation who had been made temporary consul for the Netherlands.

By this time, the Jewish refugees in Lithuania and elsewhere had applied to nearly every country in the free world– including the United States– but all had stopped or severely restricted their acceptance of refugees. To our everlasting shame, we ignored the cry of the helpless and turned our backs on the needy. In March 1939, a Congressional bill that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children to immigrate was allowed to die in committee. This was just a few months after Kristallnacht; there was no secret about the threat to Jews who remained in Germany. But we had strict immigration quotas to maintain. In June 1939, 907 Jewish refugees aboard the German transatlantic liner St. Louis made it all the way to Miami harbor, only to be sent back to Europe, where nearly a third of them were murdered in the Holocaust. An executive order could have permitted their entry into the U.S., but 83% of the public was against it, and President Roosevelt had a third term to win. Everyone from the FBI to FDR invoked “national security,” suggesting it was possible– likely, even– that some of the ship’s passengers were Nazi spies masquerading as refugees.

With so much of the western world under Nazi control or turning a blind eye, the two diplomats left in Kaunas had a full-blown refugee crisis on their hands. Lithuania’s Baltic ports were blockaded. The only safe escape route was eastward across Russia to Japan, from whence they could safely sail to resettlement. But the Soviet officials refused to let the refugees cross Russia without visas approved by the Japanese government.

So it was that Chiune Sugihara and his family woke up one morning to find a crowd of hundreds outside their door, begging for assistance with this last-ditch escape effort. Sugihara wired his superiors in Tokyo three times. He got three ambiguous refusals. They told him to stop asking. Sugihara was left alone, with the fate of thousands in his hands.

A story: According to a classic midrash, when the Israelites arrived at the shores of the sea after their exodus from slavery in Egypt, the waters didn’t immediately part for them. Actually, no one knew what would happen. With the open ocean ahead and Pharaoh’s army behind, they were trapped. An argument broke out. Some said, “We should surrender. Better to go back into slavery than for all of us to be killed.” Others said, “We should fight. If we’re going to die, we’ll die free.” Even Moses, the fearless miracle worker, was at a loss. The people turned on him. “Have you brought us all the way out here only to die?” they asked. He turned aside from the group and went up on a little hill to pray.

Amid all this, a man named Nachshon stepped forward. He was a prince from the tribe of Judah, a leader. But on this occasion he said nothing. He simply walked, directly into the sea, and began to sing praises to God. The water came up to his knees and soaked his robes. It rose to his waist, then to his chest. The waves washed over his head, but he could still be heard, singing clearly between the swells. Finally, he slipped under and was heard no more. The whole congregation of Israel fell silent. It was then that God turned to Moses and said, “Look! My child, my beloved, is drowning in the sea, and you’re standing here praying? I gave you the power to perform miracles. I gave you your staff. Use it!”

And Moses lifted his staff. The waters of the sea parted, and Nachshon led the way to freedom.

Chiune Sugihara was a career diplomat and a man of strict discipline. He had a family to provide for. He knew that if he acted outside of his orders he risked firing and disgrace. But he later recalled being haunted by a Japanese proverb: “Even a hunter cannot kill the bird that flies to him for refuge.” Refugees were begging at his door, even kneeling to kiss his shoes. “The people in Tokyo were not united,” he said later. “I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply.” The visas would be written.

For the next 30 days Sugihara and his wife, Yukiko, worked 18 to 20 hours a day, until their hands were raw and aching and they were nearly collapsing of exhaustion. They produced upwards of 300 visas– what would typically be a month’s workload– every day. Solly Ganor recalled seeing his friend Sugihara in the last days of his monumental effort– the dignified, elegant vice-consul standing outside in his shirtsleeves, haggard, eyes bloodshot, handing out visas. According to some eyewitnesses he was still writing visas and throwing them out of the train’s windows when he and his family were finally forced to evacuate.

Chiune Sugihara saved over 6,000 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. It’s estimated that there are over 45,000 people alive today– their descendants– who would not exist had it not been for a mild-mannered diplomat’s extraordinary courage and fidelity to his own conscience. The Talmud tells us, “Whoever saves one life, saves an entire world.” As he expected, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese diplomatic service after the war. He spent the rest of his career working as a translator for various private companies. Ever humble, he did not talk about his heroic deeds. His own neighbors had no idea what he’d done until his death in 1986, when a massive Jewish delegation-- including the Israeli ambassador to Japan-- showed up at his funeral.

Solly Ganor, incidentally, was unable to escape Lithuania and ended up in Dachau concentration camp, where he survived to the end of the war. Ironically, the camp was liberated by a battalion of Japanese-American soldiers– men whose families were interned in their own country.

Since the issuance of last Friday’s abominable executive order I have seen a million and a half moralisms about welcoming the stranger, helping the helpless, and refusing to fear difference. These are indispensable values, foundational to the maintenance of an open and healthy society, and they bear endless repetition.

But that’s not what I want to say here. We already know the ban is wrong. We already know that “national security” is a false flag for the workings of hatred and greed. We already condemn the culture of fear that has turned so much of our country against its own principles– although we can never condemn it loudly enough. But what we need to have constantly before us, now more than ever, is the example of people like Chiune Sugihara. People like Nachshon. People who know that God and public opinion will follow a true act of conscience, not vice versa.

Someday long in the future the descendants of Syrian refugees will not thank us for our political memes or our late-night comedy bits or our private exasperation. They won’t thank us for impotent prayers of the mind without acts of the body and heart. They won’t thank me for writing this.

But they will thank us for our deeds. They will thank us for hounding the authorities, no matter how many times we’re rejected, and defying them if they fail us. They will thank us for protecting our immigrant neighbors, for meeting injustice with ferocious and creative resistance, for showing up, for hitting the streets, for donating, for volunteering, for putting all our strength of arm and heart and brain into every task, no matter how small, that our lives demand of us in the struggle to heal our broken world. There is no such thing as an insignificant action or an insignificant life. You don’t have to be a diplomat. You don’t have to be an immigration lawyer. You don’t have to be the Prince of Judah or the Vice-Consul of Japan. All that is asked of you is to live the life before you, and live it well, with open eyes, a courageous spirit, and an undivided heart. Don’t wait for anyone, human or divine, to light the fire of justice. Your deeds are both the spark and the smoke.

The great second-century Jewish sage Rabbi Tarfon would say, “We are not obligated to complete the task before us, but neither are we free to abandon it.” Do not be daunted by the magnitude of human suffering. Start where you are. Start now.

Sources:

"An Interview with Solly Ganor, September 1998." Interview by Diane Estelle Vicari. Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness. WGBH/PBS, n.d. Web.<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/sugihara/readings/ganor.html>

"Chiune Sugihara." The Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017. <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/chiune-sugihara>.

"Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017 <https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005594>.

"Voyage of the St. Louis." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017 <https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267>

[randomrichards]

OSCAR 2019 PREDICTIONS: BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

         BLACK SHEEP

Having a black friend doesn’t mean you’re not racist. Case in Point: Cornelius Walker.

In 2000, 11-year-old Walker and his family moved out of London after the murder of 10-year-old Nigerian Immigrant Damilola Taylor. His parents think Cornelius will be safer moving to a housing estate in Essex. They are wrong. Not only do they stand out as the only black family in the community, but the neighbourhood is run by 2 gangs. Not long after moving in, Cornelius gets ambushed by a gang of teenage racists.

In a strange move, Cornelius decides to try to fit in. He not only tries to copy their clothing style and accents, but he even bleaches his skin and wears blue contacts to white. Surprisingly, it works. He starts hanging around with the very racists who beat him up. If this were a fictional story, Cornelius would teach them the error of their ways. But real life is not so cut and dry. Instead, they only corrupt them into their destructive habits, trashing cars and wrecking houses just for the hell of it. And being friends with Cornelius doesn’t stop them from being racist as they still spew racial slurs on other black locals.[1] What makes this heartbreaking is the fact Cornelius says nothing.

Now an adult, Cornelius Walker recalls his misguided attempt to “make friends with monsters” to director Ed Perkins. As he speaks, you can hear the hard-learned wisdom in his voice. You can also see guilt in his face when he describes an incident when he beat up an innocent person. After all these years, he comes to understand all this rage came from his trouble relationship with his father.

That troubled relationship brings a portrait of toxic masculinity. His dad acts like a big shot around his family, bragging “I’m a lion.” At that age, Cornelius looked up to his father and wanted to be like him. So, when he felt he had to keep the beatings to himself, fearing he wouldn’t look manly. But when his father loses his job, he becomes an angry man. And yet through it all, Cornelius still wanted his father’s love.

Ed Perkins intercuts the interview with reenactments of these events, with Kai Francis Lewis portraying the young Cornelius. This results in many powerful scenes, including one of a little kid racial slurs at Cornelius or the real Cornelius watching himself getting beaten up.

The one flaw in this movie is that we never know how Cornelius realized how he got out of the gang. It just cuts to the young and old Cornelius facing each other in a field. It feels like it hasn’t truly finished.

You can catch this one on YouTube.

·         END GAME

Streaming on Netflix is this documentary about professionals and volunteers who help the ailing face the end of their lives.

We follow the work of medics and social workers in Medical Centres and Hospices across San Francisco as they meet with ailing patients to discuss difficult decisions. Do they want to go through with Chemo? Do they want to spend the last moments of their lives in a Hospice or at home with their family?

This film feels like a companion piece for the previous Oscar nominated documentary Extremis. Both follow the work of medics who assist ailing patients. Both documentaries face the uncomfortable issue of death with tender care. As a result, both films are very emotional short films that may cause the audience to tear up. On case in this film is for Mitra, a middle-aged wife and mother with thyroid cancer. When her husband shows pictures of her, it’s devastating to see how different she looks from now.

We also get a lot of words of wisdom from the doctors like “I think it’s healthy people who think about how they want to die and sick people who think about how they want to live.” Most of that wisdom comes from hospice caregiver BJ Miller, MD. Despite having no legs and only one hand, Miller still cares for ailing patients.

·         LIFEBOAT

Every year, thousands of North Africans flee to the Mediterranean seas in hopes of migrating to Europe. They are forced into overcrowded rubber boats by human traffickers with no life jackets, no food and no water. Tragically, thousands drown on their way there. Fortunately, a German Non-profit organization Sea Watch dispatches volunteer ships to rescue boats in distress off the coasts of Libya. Lifeboat journeys with one such boat.

This documentary reminds me a lot of previous nominated documentary 4.1 Miles. They both deal with boats who rescue migrants trapped at sea in rubber boats. To be honest, I feel like I’ve already seen this short film and would probably be repeating myself. You can just read my previous review of that movie to know this movie. But then again, I see a strong importance making more documentaries like these because documentary shorts have a hard time getting an audience. The reason I was able to see these two was because Magazines like the New Yorker post them on YouTube.

One significant difference is that we hear from the refugees themselves. Coming from places like Cameroon or Cote D’ivore, these people talk about being kidnapped and imprisoned in Libya, and then blindfolded and thrown on these boats where they have no idea where they are going.

We also get some words of wisdom from Captain Jon Castle. “Rationality is overplayed. The brain and the mind are a useful tool, but the heart is where your real thinking comes from.”

You can catch this one on YouTube.

·         A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN

On February 20, 1939, Madison Square Garden played host to the American Nazi Rally attended by 20,000 people. Director Marshall Curry presents footage of that night.

This event advertised itself as “An American Rally”. This is only a hint of how these people wrap their hateful group in a package of patriotism. Across the rally you see Nazis marching with American flags and Nazis making speeches in front of a giant portrait of George Washington. But under their empty rhetoric, they barely hide their hateful agenda ranting about the “Jewish Controlled Press.” It’s tragic we can still see this rhetoric being used to this day.

Then there’s a frightening moment, when a protester jumps on stage and gets attacked by the guards. You can only watch in horror as that protester gets swallowed up by the mob, while children laugh. What makes this moment sick is the smug smile of the presenter who puts on an aloof demeanor. It’s a reminder never to always see through for the façade of “civility.”

The only funny thing in this image of Hockey and Basketball games being advertised next to the Nazi Rally.

You can watch this on Vimeo.

·         PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE

Well, here’s another reason it sucks to be a woman in a third world country. In India, many young women can’t afford sanitary pads, so they are forced to use old cloths for their periods. Many will drop out at school the moment they hit puberty. Of course, it doesn’t help that menstruation is still a taboo subject around these communities.[2] Churches won’t even allow any girls in during their periods.

But Arunachalam Muruganatham wants to change that. Determined to make India a 100% pad using country, he has invented a device to make safe, affordable pads. Many women seize on this opportunity to make these pads and sell them door to door. We witness the efforts of these women in this new Netflix Documentary short.

The film looks at the stigmatization of menstruation in India. First, director Rayka Zehtabchi asks teen boys and girls if they understand menstruation. Some girls are too embarrassed to answer. Boys ask if it’s “some kind of illness.” Then girls talk about the discomfort of using cloths for their period; one recalls her clothes getting soaked. And then there’s the social stigmatization. Many are afraid to buy pads because of all the men around.

With these in mind, the women regard the pad machine as a symbol of liberation. They even call the pads “Fly” because they “help girls rise and soar.” 

We also meet with Sneba, a woman who dreams of joining the New Delhi Police. Believing girls don’t have much freedom she sets herself on this goal “to save [herself] from marriage.”

Who Will Win?

I’m going to say this will be a runoff between Black Sheep and Period. End of Sentence. The former makes you reevaluate your perceptions of race. The later sees women in third world countries changing their lives for the better.

[1] It clear they regard Cornelius as “one of the good ones.”

[2] Unfortunately, menstruation is still a bit taboo around here as well.