#to the point that several people wrote that it was worse than the xenophobia

[mourningmaybells]

i’m just saying if my friend was puppetted around like a murder sex doll, I’d also be afraid, but not for anti-sex reasons. it would be for possession reasons

[crimsonthehobo]

Battle Scars - (1/?)

[A/N:] Haven’t been on this account in months, am quite sleep-deprived and I haven’t eaten breakfast yet. Well, lunch now apparently. So before I lose the minimal courage I got, I’ll just drop this off here and hope it works! Don’t know when I might write the next part, might even not. Who knows. Mind’s wonky. This has been in my files for a long while, wrote it back when Guy Sebastian’s song Battle Scars got stuck in my head. Figured I might as well let it stop collecting dust. Also, considering I’ve never done this before, I don’t know how to properly tag. 

If there’s tags I should put, ESPECIALLY if they’re tw tags, please do tell me. [Summary:] The child of a general, the only survivor of a (frankly) unethical experiment, and the old college roommate of one Alexandra Danvers. Somehow all three of those things correlate with one another, not that you can remember at this point. You just want to live in the forest, forgetting the reasons for the scars that litter your body. [Warning(s):] Reader’s thoughts get... dark. Somewhat. More depressing, I think. Some people horrifically mutate too, so there’s that. Again, if there should be warnings in the tags or here that I should put but didn’t, do tell me. What else... uh, this is approximately 11k words long? Maybe that deserves a warning all to itself. Is there a tag that explains “possibly turns you into a modern-day cave person living in forests to steal from humans and wrestle bears”? Possibly a spoiler, but hey, at least it means you read warnings, so congrats!

The first time you felt like you’d failed, was when you had to leave the first love of your life. It was the only scar that had no physical counterpart, but you’d felt the mind-numbing pain, nonetheless.

“You watch yourself, alright? I won’t be around to keep your head screwed on for you!”

“Yeah, yeah…”

You rolled your eyes, pointedly keeping your focus on shoving the remaining belongings you had into your duffle. You didn’t look at her. You couldn’t. You knew if you did, you’d break.

Silence fell over the room at your half-hearted response, the lack of noise almost making you regret not saying anything more in reply. And then…

“Do… Do you really have to go?”

‘Damn it.’

Alex’s words were shaky, barely louder than a whisper. The strained tinge in her voice urged you to look up from zipping up your bag, glancing over at the source.

Seated on your bed with her legs over the side, she sat hunched over as one of her legs anxiously shook up and down against the edge. Her hands were curled into fists between her knees, knuckles white as her forearms tensed from their placement on her thighs.

She looked so… small. Nervous. It wasn’t like her.

She was supposed to be Alex Danvers. A stubborn redhead that was tough-as-nails and was always up for drinking you under the table any day!

But you couldn’t blame her for not being herself. She was heartbroken, and so were you.

Though, it made you feel guilty that it was because of you that she looked so weak.

No, “weak” wasn’t the word.

Vulnerable…

Vulnerable seemed more fitting.

“I’m sorry.”

You looked away, but it didn’t last for long. You felt her tap your jaw; once, twice, then a third time. For you two, it was a universal sign that you needed to listen. That what would be said was important.

It was an action that would only take effect if done by the other, and no one else.

It could calm either of you from rage, or even help you fight the haze of drunkenness to be in some semblance of sober.

It was special. Meaningful.

Hence why your automatic reaction was to turn, to obey the silent request to face her.

“You’ll stay in touch, yeah?”

“…Yeah.”

Now you? You were weak. While the owner of your heart was devastated right in front of you, all you could offer for comfort was an unconvincing smile and a useless apology.

Her throat bobbed as she attempted to swallow back a sob, but the teary shine in her eyes gave her away.

Another surge of guilt struck your heart and made you avert your eyes elsewhere, anywhere, as long as they were not on her.

‘Look at what you’ve done.’

It was your fault. She didn’t even know why you were leaving so suddenly.

Your father had found out of your attraction to her, and needless to say, he didn’t take it lightly. A few strings pulled later, and you were being sent away to be “straightened out.” The thought almost made scoff during that particular conversation in his study, but you accepted the consequences anyway.

You should’ve been better.

You should’ve done better.

You didn’t protect her well enough.

The fault was none but yours… and the knife you felt in your heart would remind you for a long while to come.

~~~

 The second time you felt like you’d failed, happened two years after that moment in your college dorm room.

It took months for that scar to start to heal, but you knew it would take years before it would even begin to fade.

You’d tried to keep in contact, but you had your life to live and so did she. Not to mention the day your father heard of the two of you still communicating, he pulled more strings to cut you off. It was too late, anyway. You’d already stopped talking by then.

But whether the silence was for the better or worse was up for debate.

Just the thought of her made your heart lurch, and actually interacting with her never failed to re-open that scar anew. The space, however agonizing, let the wound heal.

Yet that very same space was what let you drown yourself into your current occupation. In order to compensate for the agony, you let yourself fall deeper and deeper into your work. Though at this point, you were questioning if you should even call it that.

Unknown to her, a month into your time in the military, a general offered you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

You found it hard to believe. You weren’t stupid, you could read between the lines. You knew “opportunity” also meant “ulterior motive.”

He didn’t prove you wrong.

When you walked into the conference room you’d been instructed to enter, your eyes immediately fell to the only individual inside.

General Lane.

You knew three things about him. One, he had been your father’s best friend. Two, he had a palpable dislike for any and all alien life. Specifically, Superman. Three, whenever he began to rant, just smile, and nod.

It was only the two of you there, yet you couldn’t seem to find it in you to focus. Not after he uttered the words “military program.”

You already knew this wouldn’t end well.

Though you remained silent, your eyes having glazed over as the static in your ears prevented his words from reaching your brain, he continued to speak. You only managed to catch bits and pieces, but you got the gist.

They wanted to conduct an experiment and were looking for lab rats. They wanted you to be one.

You weren’t surprised they asked. To everyone else’s knowledge, you had no one left in your life but you. Your father made sure any links between you and Alex were cleanly severed, meaning any history between you two had been cleared. You had no family other than your parents, your mother having passed while you were still in your single digits, while your father had done the same just a week before this very meeting.

‘Tch… no love lost there.’

But, considering he was a respected figure and a close friend of the very same general right in front of you, you had to at least act as if his death affected you. Your father had always been one for appearances, so no one outside of the two of you (and Alex) knew just how estranged you’d been from the other. Because of this, luckily (or unluckily, depending on what way you view it), people took your indifferent poker face to be one of grief.

General Lane wanted to capitalize on that. On you.

You had military blood in you (because apparently that meant you were exactly like your father), you had a “reason” to go missing (grief, hah), and—as far as he was concerned—you had no close relations that would worry should you ever disappear (you… couldn’t really think of a quip to internalize there). You seemed like the perfect guinea pig.

“…We need heroes around here. Human heroes. Not those monsters who could fall to their instincts at the drop of a hat, or at the touch of some space rock—”

Again, it came with no surprise to you that extra-terrestrials were the main focus of said experiment.

You wanted to say no. Fuck, did you want to say no. You wanted no part in this blind hatred. But then…

“—They’re never here when we actually need them. A group of freaks like him are planning to go after National City to lure him out, and where is Superman? Frolicking off in space! The President had an entire clandestine organization made exactly for roach-connected situations like this, yet they don’t even know—”

Your blood ran cold, your hearing suddenly becoming clear as your eyes bore into his.

National City.

Of all the places, they had to go there. You didn’t give it a second thought. You didn’t have to.

“I’ll do it.”

.

.

.

You had no idea what CADMUS was, just that they were collaborating with the U.S. Military to make you and forty-nine others into the ones that would “exterminate the roaches infesting the planet.”

Sounded more like “short-sighted discrimination with an unhealthy dash of xenophobia” than “rational thought for the human race” to you; but as long as you could protect Alex, you didn’t care how much of the mindless drivel you had to sit through.

You didn’t count how many times you found yourself strapped to a metal bed, or how many times you found a needle being stuck into you. Rather, you couldn’t. More than half the time, whatever they put into your bloodstream always made you feel woozy. Enough to make you practically perpetually confused.

Any recollection of your experiences during the experimentation were impossible to stir, and after seeing that one woman’s all-too-amused smirk a few too many times, you were convinced that it had been on purpose.

Before you knew it, another month had passed. Not that you would’ve realized it yourself. Your best guess would’ve been a week, if it weren’t for the woman General Lane had assigned to you telling you otherwise.

She was about your age, maybe a month or so younger. Lucia was her name if you remembered correctly. She’d been left by him to keep an eye on you, or to “keep you sane” as she worded so eloquently.

She was the first person you saw the moment you could properly think again. Her calming presence was a breath of fresh air, and for a moment, everything felt… nice.

Until a soldier barged through the door of your allocated resting area, screaming about an attack.

Time seemed to blur once again, and the next thing you knew, you were in the middle of a war zone. A mile or two from some desert base in the middle of nowhere.

Only you and the rest of the fifty who had been volunteered for the Eradication Program had been deployed. You wished you hadn’t been. The others were bloodthirsty, tearing through the opposition the moment they were ordered to. You, however, chose to take a step back and analyse the enemy.

Most of the “opposing force” looked to be human, not alien. None of them seemed hostile, either. Well… until they were provoked, that is. The human-like members of their group—who you’re sure actually were human—were being protected by their definitely-alien comrades, clearly not trained for combat or any attack whatsoever. In fact, if their attire was anything to go by, they all worked in what could be considered “support” occupations. Engineers, researchers, varying members of medical staff… not one of them appeared to be soldiers.

What was General Lane not telling you?

Were you really protecting National City?

…Were you even in National City?

You felt your comms crackle in your ears, said general’s voice screeching, “What the HELL are you doing?! Move your ass, Six!”

Right. Soldier Six, your call sign. Simply because you were the sixth one to wake up.

How original.

You huffed, and in retaliation to the general’s orders, you tore the device out of your ear and threw it as far as you could over your shoulder.

Because frankly, you didn’t want to. Not when you’d been pit against wrongly identified “hostiles.”

Despite your stubbornness to keep your feet rooted to your spot, soon enough, you didn’t have the privilege of choosing to abstain.

The other “volunteers”—all forty-nine of them—began to stop and convulse. Their flesh rippled beneath their skin, muscles expanding and contracting in an obscene manner.

Something had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.          

Each and every one of them mutated appallingly right before your very eyes, all of them attaining a different level of horrendous to another. Some grew limbs, some lost them. Others had extra eyes while a handful had one left or none at all. A few had their nails elongate into claws, others had a tailbone that whipped its way through the air. More than half had lost the colours of their irises—no, not just the colour. The pupils and irises themselves disappeared completely. It was a horrific spectacle to behold.

To call these things a shell of their former selves, would be insulting to the humans they used to be.

Was this going to happen to you?

You didn’t have much time for your thoughts. The one thing that didn’t change was the sheer amount of bloodthirst coursing through their veins. With the supposedly villainous aliens already exhausted, they wouldn’t last a second round against the other volunteer—

‘…No,’ You shook your head, fists clenched tight, ‘Those aren’t the volunteers anymore.’

From what you could see, those men and women died the moment the experiments started. All you could do for them, was help them rest in peace.

And you doubt they’d be getting any rest with their bodies wreaking havoc as these beasts.

Using the enhanced abilities you shared with the monstrosities, you slowly but surely took them out one by one.

They fought like animals.

Yet no matter how many times they slashed at your body, no matter how many times they lunged for your head, nor how many times they made you bleed, you continued to end every single one of them. You didn’t want any of them to suffer longer than they already have.

As with most things nowadays, in your eyes, the details were nothing but a blur. Everything felt… vague. Flashes of claws, bones, and agonizing pain run through your mind, yet no instance remained distinct for more than a second.

…Was this a symptom? Of the experiment, or the transformation?

Fear of the truth made you falter, and a skeletal tail surging straight through your right thigh forced your focus to return. But then so too would the questions, along with the subsequent terror, until another wound started the cycle another time. Again and again, until after what felt like an eternity, the last of them finally fell with an inhuman screech. It was done. But at what cost?

You surveyed your battleground, heart heavy and clenched in an icy grip. You couldn’t protect them, save them. Any of them.

A mighty hack then reverberated through the painfully silent air and caused you to flinch. Your head snapped up to turn to its direction, your feet already making their way over. You’d thoughtlessly skidded onto your knees, the coin-flip reaction bringing you to the survivor’s side. It was an alien.

Your eyes were wide in alarm, hands flittering around as your mind buzzed at what to do. There were so many injuries. Far too many for him to survive, alien or no. Your eyes met his, and your breath hitched in surprise. His irises didn’t scream anger or disgust like you expected. Instead, they were shining in wonder so innocent, it was almost childlike.

“You… Your body… did not… revolt?” the dying male grinned, placing a hand in yours to grip it in glee, “M-Miracle! It… I-It is m-miracle!”

For a moment, you were confused. Until you followed his gaze and watched as your body slowly stitched itself back together. One shallow cut in particular caught your attention, the damage slowly disappearing before your very eyes, leaving not a single blemish on your skin. You’d been so focused on fighting, that you didn’t even stop and wonder how you were still alive. After this day, there may not even be a single scar found.

At another bloody cough, newfound healing abilities were far from the forefront of your mind. Your vision blurred with tears, a sob escaping without your control. It was your fault. It was all your fault.

“Sorry…” You hadn’t spoken in so long, your voice harsh and throat sore, “I- I’m so sorry.”

He weakly shook his head, “B-Blame… not… on y-you. Deceived. We… We all… were…”

“W-What?”

With a wince, he forced his other arm to point to one of his fallen allies, a human researcher about a meter or so north of you.

“Necklace… take…” the light in his eyes was beginning to die, you could see it and he could feel it. Forcing a shaky smile, he murmured in his broken English, “Promise… y-you… not feel… guilty?”

“I…”

You knew you’d feel guilty.

You should, shouldn’t you? This was all your fault! You were careless and made a mistake once again. You didn’t see through the veil, you weren’t smart enough. You couldn’t stop the others, you weren’t quick enough.

You weren’t enough.

And just like before, people suffered because of it.

But… although he was on his last seconds of life, he looked at you so brightly. He was still so hopeful. How could you break such a wonderous being in his last moments?

You shook your head ‘no,’ lying, knowing this would be a wound that would last a long time to come. From the huff he gave, you felt like he knew that too.

Nonetheless, he coughed out, “P-Promise?”

You swallowed, feeling a fresh wave of hot tears cascading down your cheeks. With another lurch from your heavy heart, you gave him a nod and a shaky smile of your own, “I promise.”

His smile grew a fraction wider, “P… Pro… mise…”

His last breath left him, leaving the hand still in yours to fall, limp.

You were wrong earlier, there was a scar left behind.

The laceration you’d received from foolishly grabbing onto a tail, the one injury that had been obscured from your sight by his hold, had left a mark. You knew what it would be. A memento, of another time you’d failed. Of the first time your naivety took the life of another. You let a sob escape your control.

And another…

And another…

For hours you stayed on the blood-soaked sand, the coarse particles dyed red with the proof of the violent loss of life. By the time you heard a chopper land meters away to analyse the aftermath, your tears had long since dried and the last remnants of your rampant emotions were now trapped deep within, leaving only your now-signature emotionless mask. Thankfully, they understood enough that your mind was stuck elsewhere and didn’t bother to get a mission report out of you.

They did, however, cheer at the averted “crisis.”

All except Lucia. It was a small comfort, but a comfort, nonetheless. Rather than cheering, she sat next to you, a consoling hand on your shoulder as she murmured apologies for wrongs not her own.

For a brief moment, you wondered why she was here. What her role was in all of this mess, how she got caught up in it…

But when the others’ voices drowned out Lucia’s and all you could hear was their excitement and joy, your thoughts were immediately overrun by pure rage. Your stare morphed into a glare as your eyes kept themselves glued to the carnage below, hand clutching the unseen necklace concealed by your dog tags.

You were the only one who survived.

You were the only success.

You were now a monster.

 ~~~

 It was two years later after that, that the third occurrence happened.

Although you held a great amount of distrust for the U.S. Military, you never left their command. Foolishly, you stayed and did whatever they said. You went to where they told you you’d been needed. You fought who they told you to fight. You killed who they told you to kill.

All because of your own fear.

What if you were already transforming? What if your body was just one second away from fighting whatever gave you your powers? What if, the moment you left… you went berserk?

One “what if” after another festered in your mind, leading to you to forcibly suppress your own self and play their perfect little soldier, if only to keep your own body at bay should it ever run amok.

After all, they created you. The only ones who would know how to stop you would be them, right?

Besides, what would you even do once you left? They’d written the end of your life for you the moment you agreed to be a lab experiment.

Who would you have turned to?

Alex?

You scoffed at the thought. You said “yes” to help protect her, not drag her into the damn problem.

For a year and a half, you’d justified your stay with those thoughts, and for more than half of that time you let yourself be used as a mere weapon. It took you a year until you accepted the truth of your situation, and it wasn’t until roughly three months prior to your third failure that you finally let yourself see reason.

 .

.

.

 You sat up on your bunk, eyes on your hands, staring at blood that none but you could see. Sweat dripped from your brow, faint screams echoing in your eardrums, audible just beneath the vigorous beating of your heart.

‘I can’t keep this up…’ You released a shuddering breath, ‘How long will I have to keep this up?!’

Ever since that day in the desert, your nights were never peaceful, your sleep never serene. You’d long since gotten used to the endless screams of terror, the unending stream of unfamiliar faces contorting in woe. But what you hadn’t prepared for—what you never thought you’d ever need to prepare for—was for those faces to suddenly become familiar.

Alex had been petrified, the alien terrified, and Lucia… Lucia lay on the bloodied, black dirt, prone. Her face perpetually mortified. Even after you lurched forward in your bed and had left the realm of dreams, their suffering still danced in the shadows of your surroundings, the remnants of their frightened faces flashing in your eyes like some ghastly slideshow.

Their misery was because of you. You’d stumbled too deep into the haze, and by the time you came out, you had become what you feared the most. The cause of their torment.

‘What am I doing with my life?’

It was on that night that you truly accepted the reality of your situation. You had let your mind wander and, without realizing, let yourself function on autopilot for too long. It wasn’t until now, on this night—when you were terrorized by their screams—that you accepted that fact. But you felt it was already too late.

By mindlessly putting your life on the line, you had saved hundreds of lives—or so you were told. Yet for every life you saved, you knew there had been at least one you’d taken in return.

Your comrades rejoiced at your feats, and even a few of the higher-ups praised your work.

And yet…

Why did you feel nothing? Why did you feel out of place?

Why did you feel like you were doing something you weren’t meant to?

You’d been confused, very much so. For over a year, in fact. Your body felt ironically alien. Different. As if you’d been sleepwalking the past two years. Your memories, too, felt foreign. They were more like dreams than anything else.

No… “dream” was far too nice of a word.

Nightmare—like vulnerable—seemed more fitting.

Your recollection of the past two years was a mess. There were only a handful of distinct memories you could recall, and all were of them. Alex… the alien… and Lucia. The rest were all a hazy blur, a fever dream that kept you jumping from one horrific scene to another.

You didn’t even know who you’d been fighting the entire time. No one ever gave you a clear picture, only stating where you were needed and what had to be done. You vaguely remember a mix of terrified faces, both alien and human. What did they even do wrong?

Did they even do wrong?

It was then that reality truly sunk in. You already knew that you were a weapon, one for them to use however and whenever they saw fit. What was hardest to swallow was the fact that the blood you’d let yourself spill—blood you could’ve chosen not to spill—could very well have been those of innocents.

You buried your face into your knees, fingers threading through your hair and gripping your pounding skull. You felt your nails dig into your scalp.

Luckily for your tattered mental state, Lucia had been there to help anchor you back to reality.

She murmured lowly as she gently pried your fingers from your head, and though her words went through one ear and out the other, her voice alone soothed you. You found that she knew exactly what to do, and even let you bury your face into her shoulder as she cooed at you softly, her hands tenderly drawing calming patterns on your back.

You’d been so happy that she was there. It wasn’t until hours later, after both of you had passed out in emotional exhaustion, that you woke up and realized that she had always been there. You’d just been too stuck in your own mind to see her.

When she woke up, her eyes meeting yours, neither of you spoke a word. Yet you both knew your dynamic had shifted, the air between you different. It simply went unsaid.

It didn’t go unseen, however. Everyone knew how dangerous you were, and after a rookie’s idiotic mistake, knew how equally dangerous it was to make Lucia unhappy in any way.

(His shoulder wouldn’t shove into others the same way again, nor would his ego inflate with the chasm you’d left.)

Stupidly, despite the revelations of that night—perhaps even because of said revelations—you continued living under the government’s employ.

In your mind, it was no longer just for your fear, it was also for her sake. If you left, you knew she would do whatever it took to stay by your side, regardless of the danger. Even if you were to be hunted, experimented, or executed, she would stay. And none of those fates were any you would allow to befall her.

No matter the gruesome sights that looped in your mind like a film at some grisly theatre, you jumped into the fray again, and again, and again. Still as reckless. Still as unrelenting. Still as guilty.

Not a single complaint ever left your lips. You felt you deserved it. But more importantly, you felt you were protecting her.

She didn’t agree.

The topic had been the spark of many arguments between the two of you, one such case being…

“You can’t keep doing this—you can’t keep living like this!”

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

You stayed silent, sat on your bed in your designated quarters. Your eyes were trained on her pacing form as you fiddled with the fresh bandages on your arms, replies only said in mind.

At this point, this scene was common. You’d gotten injured, she’d gotten frustrated, and you had the decency to listen. You knew Lucia wasn’t mad at you. Annoyed? Maybe. But not mad. Her anger was always directed at the same people, and never to you. She just hated to see you hurt.

‘Unfortunately, it’s an occupational haza—'

“—And don’t you say it’s an occupational hazard!”

Or… not?

Lucia stopped in her tracks, eyes boring into your own, “There are always ways to complete your missions without you ending up a bloody mess, but they don’t care about that, do they? As long as the mission is completed as soon as possible, they don’t give a damn. What if you never healed? What if you actually found something that would actually get you killed?” 

You had no response for that.

“They don’t even know of the full extent of your powers—none of us do! They started sending you out the day after that desert! Yet here we are again… I don’t understand why we don’t just leave.”

You opened your mouth to speak for the first time, to remind her of the dangers of such a plan just as you always had in the past, when you felt your hairs stand on end. Someone was eavesdropping. Your glare flashed to the door, spotting an eye widen at your stare before rushing off. You’d rush after them, but you knew nothing could be done without arousing suspicion. This base was full soldiers, and thus witnesses. Unfortunately, it was also full of snitches.

You stood abruptly, causing Lucia to jerk in surprise. Her brow furrowed when she spotted the grim frown you now wore.

“We’re leaving. Now.”

She could only blink in shock, “Now?”

“Now.”

The conversation would’ve been seen as treason. Or, at best, the start of it. You needed to run.

She followed your unwavering stare to the door, the sight of its slight opening making the cogs in her mind connect the dots. Someone had heard, and were no doubt reporting you. Her shock melted into determination, “I’ve already got a bag of necessities packed in case of an emergency escape. Let’s go.”

Next thing you knew, you were both dashing through corridors, unfamiliar alarms blaring the moment you had retrieved her bag. It seemed she wasn’t the only one who had prepared for this eventuality.

Squad after squad were sent after you both, all made up of people you’d seen as comrades and allies not even an hour before. Any fondness you held for each of them, however, immediately dissipated the moment they aimed a gun even a meter in Lucia’s direction. With a growl, you tore through every single one of them, unabashed by their betrayed yells so long as her safety was assured.

But you’d made a mistake. You were focused too much on those aiming for her, that you forgot there were others targeting yourself. Lucia didn’t. Which is why she spotted the soldier pulling out a weapon from a case before you did.

It looked like a gun, but she knew it was different. She could feel that it was. When they overlooked her completely and aimed for you, she knew she was right. Without a second thought, she shoved you out of the way, just as the soldier pulled the trigger.

A bang echoed in your ears, then a pained scream and a thud.

Your heart dropped. She’d pushed you away. Because of her, the bullet only grazed your torso… before tearing straight through her own.

You fell to your knees, not sparing a glance away from Lucia even as you put a bullet straight through the head of the soldier responsible.

“You IDIOT! Why would you do that?! You know I would’ve survived it!”

Your eyes were panicked, breathing growing more erratic by the second as you attempted to staunch the blood flowing from her wound. There was so much blood… why was there so much blood?!

“No…” she shook her head, “You… You wouldn’t’ve. N-Not… Not this one.”

You could hear footsteps and voices growing closer. You ignored them.

“I always survive, it’s my THING!” You gritted your teeth, ignoring the tears leaving tracks down your cheeks, “Stop talking, would you?! You need all your damn energy!”

Lucia simply smiled, even as more of the coppery liquid slid down the side of her mouth, “Promise me… promise me you w-won’t blame yourself f-for this?”

Déjà vu. Taunting, agonizing, déjà vu.

“I… I…” more tears, and a sob. What ever happened to control? “…I can’t.”

Her smile didn’t waver, as if she expected your response. Instead, she lifted a hand to your cheek, thumb gently wiping a tear away, “I know what you’re thinking, and I know it’s hard f-for you t-to think otherwise, love… but this isn’t your fault. I chose to do this. Y-You couldn’t’ve done anything to stop me.”

“…” You shook your head in disbelief, feeling more blood seep through your fingers.

Why wouldn’t the bleeding stop?!

“C’mon, love. P-Please, look at me?”

“…”

You didn’t want to. You didn’t want to see her so accepting of her fate.

Yet you couldn’t help the confused furrow of your brows at her tapping your jaw, your focus immediately swivelling to her. Not on instinct, but in question, confusion, and slight betrayal. You’d never regretted telling her of your first love, of admitting that there were some things you could never forget. Until now.

“Th-There you are. I know it hurts, but you have t-to p-promise me, then you need to leave me.”

The familiar action had increased your pain tenfold, but her words had the panic in your eyes grow more intense, blood freezing in your veins.

‘No. NO. NononoNO—’ You looked away as you felt your body quake, the chill caused by her words making your limbs feel like lead, ‘Not you… anybody but you!’

You felt her tap your jaw again, but you didn’t look to her, preferring to stubbornly keep your eyes on your hands. You wouldn’t- You couldn’t.

“Please…” Lucia’s voice sounded so small, distant. Just like with the alien, you knew she was on her last breaths, and so did she, “L-Listen to me… they… now want you… gone. I-I know… it’s a lot to ask, but you have to leave me. Please. T-That bullet was meant f-for you—”

You couldn’t help but snap, “What bullet isn’t when I’m out on the field?!”

“N-No, love. T-They made it for you. T-To kill you…” she weakly shook her head, “I… I… s-saw it… wasn’t… normal.”

“Shit—SHIT! Why can’t I stop the god damn bleeding?!”

You hated that there were so many things that you couldn’t do. Why can’t you just do something—anything—right for once?!

As always, she knew where your mind was headed, “N-No matter… how little… y-you… think of yourself… I know y-you were meant… to be amazing. F-From the moment I… I saw you… I knew you’d be… a… a-a hero.”

“What kind of fucking hero can’t even save the person she loves?!” head hung low, you pulled your hands away from her wound, reluctantly accepting that it was futile, “What kind of useless hero am I?”

You wrapped an arm around her shoulders, the other draping itself across her stomach. You shifted yourself closer, cautiously embracing the dying woman. Apology after apology left your mouth, your tears dripped down from your cheeks only to mix with her own.

“It’s not… your… fau…” her hand, now much weaker than it had been earlier, fell limply onto the arm you’d placed on her stomach. When her fingers lightly squeezed your forearm, you knew what she expected. You released your grip on her hip, linking your hand with hers, making her chuckle faintly, “I-It… theirs… y-y’hear me? N-Never fo… forget… ‘s wasn’t… fault…”

“I… I won’t…”

You knew you’d never forget this day… just as how you’d never forget where the fault would forever lay in your mind.

“L… Love you…” her eyes were fluttering shut, and at the tug of her hand, you knew what she wanted.

You leaned closer, your lips pressing on hers for the final time. Only a second later did her last breath leave her lungs, and with it, one more piece of your fragile heart.

You could only stare, hoping that she would open her eyes and fill the deafening silence. But she didn’t, and you had to accept that she never would. When your mind finally opened itself to the rest of the world, you could hear the soldiers. Their orders for you to back down… or, more specifically, his.

General Lane.

When you saw a glimpse of his face, everything turned red and screams replaced the buzzing in your ears. You could never remember much past their anguish.

All you knew was the gash on your torso healed, but the mark never faded.

~~~

 Six months passed, and sleep was still a stranger. So were your mind and memories, but what else was new?

You had no idea where you were, you never did more than half the time. More often than not, you’d find yourself lost in thought, staring off at nothing as your finger lightly traced the scar hidden beneath your shirt. Sometimes you’d snap out of it, standing in the middle of an unfamiliar area. Occasionally, you’d stop yourself mid-step as you were walking or crossing the street.

Either way, people would be staring at you like you were insane. You couldn’t blame them, you felt like you were. That was fine, you never stayed in one area for long anyway.

For the past couple of months you’d been hopping from place to place, lingering only for three days at most. You didn’t have to do much to conceal your identity, considering the government already got rid of it for you. You did get yourself a new name, though.

Corazon.

Wasn’t exactly subtle to you, but it was better than Soldier Six and at least you could remember it.

How could you not, when your mistakes were always made by your soft heart?

You only wished that you had the ability to rid yourself of your emotions, then at least living would be somewhat bearable. You hated that even the smallest things could trigger your beating heart. It could’ve been a hair colour, a laugh, or just an oblivious pair holding hands, your heart wouldn’t fail to work with your fractured memories and remind you of what you’d lost.

You wished you could split the two, or at least rid yourself of one… maybe even both. You couldn’t think without feeling, nor feel without thinking. If you had no way to feel, no way to have a conscious thought, or both, then living a seemingly deathless life would be bearable. Sure, that sort of life isn’t one others would say is worth living, but neither is the one you are now.

The only thing keeping you away from finding a way to have that ‘plan’ to come into fruition, was the fact that—as far as you know—only the government could ‘help.’

You never wanted to make contact with those bastards again.

“Wha- HEY!”

At the indignant yell, you blinked yourself out of your stupor. Confused, you looked around.

You’d wandered into an alley. Huh.

Hearing a groan, you glanced down, spotting a boy who couldn’t’ve been any older than mid-teens. He was sat on the concrete, rubbing his forehead, having presumably fallen after colliding with you.

Then, you heard yelling.

You looked up and saw a group of men pointing and yelling unintelligibly at the boy at your feet. He sprang up and made a move to exit, only for your hand on his shoulder to stop him in his tracks. You felt his eyes on you, but yours never left the group stomping closer as they brandished their makeshift weapons in a supposedly threatening manner.

Hammers, nails in bats, metal pipes… generic, stereotypical, bad guy weapons. You saw a gun or two poking out from the waistbands of their pants, yet you couldn’t help but roll your eyes.

When they stopped in front of you, they even puffed out their chests to make themselves look bigger. One of them stepped forward and grumbled with a voice made forcibly gruff, “You with this brat?”

“Pff,” You only shook your head in mirth. You’d heard of people like this in movies, but you never knew they actually existed.

His lips curled up into a snarl, “What’s so funny.”

“…” You smiled, tilted your head in faux innocence, and admitted clearly, “You.”

Predictably, your response infuriated him, and he launched himself towards you to attack.

Within a minute, him and his group were all unconscious, weapons—including their guns—left splintered and bent on the damp ground.

You grumbled, “Idiots.”

With another roll of your eyes, you spun on your heels and moved to leave the scene… only to face an overexcited fourteen-year-old.

“That was AWESOME!”

“!”

You blinked. You’d forgotten he was there. You watched, an eyebrow raised as he asked question after question, each going through one ear and out the other. Your mind didn’t register a single one, but from the rapid rate the words seemed to leave his lips, the number seemed endless.

Didn’t he need to breathe?

It was here that the boy lurched to a stop, his lungs lacking the air required to allow speech. You only blinked when he took in just a little too much oxygen. His overdramatic wheezing caused you to smirk and huff in mild amusement. His eyes darted to you at the noise, focusing on your mirth as he smacked a fist against his chest in an effort to abate his hacking.

“You…” he coughed again, “You don’t talk much, do you?”

You only offered a shrug in response. Considering past experience, human interaction wasn’t something you necessarily searched for. Generally, they all ended up morphing into some form of confrontation for you—or loss, but that was a thought hurriedly buried in the deepest recesses of your mind.

The boy wasn’t deterred by your silence. Instead, he seemed even more determined to fill the space with his own words. Again, most of them generally went through one ear and out the other.

“—I’m Lucas!”

Wait. Why was the kid telling you their name?

You still didn’t reply, but ‘Lucas’ didn’t seem fazed and continued, saying, “My friends call me Luke, though!”

He then scratched his head sheepishly, “Well… they would, if I had any.”

Head tilted in a questioning manner, your brow furrowed at his admission, movements that he managed to notice.

“Ah… well, nobody ever wants to be friends with the weird kid.”

You raised your eyebrow, and he pointed to the unconscious group at your feet as an explanation.

“Wouldn’t be the first time these guys went after me, and they don’t care whether I’m at school or not,” Lucas kicked away a stray can, giving the men an annoyed sneer, “Just that Dad ‘pays them back’ or something, I dunno. No one really wants to be caught up in a mess like this.”

You’d followed his gaze, staring at the people sprawled out on the dirty floor.

What were these guys, self-proclaimed tax collectors? Loan sharks? Wannabe gang members?

That last one seems to fit them to a T.

Your thoughts were interrupted by the loud growling of a stomach. And it wasn’t yours.

Shaking your head, you glanced back at Lucas, his face red in embarrassment. Without hesitation, you rooted through the pockets of a few of the men, forgoing their cards and instead pulled out handfuls of cash from their wallets.

You may already be considered a criminal by the U.S. Army, but you didn’t want more on your record than you already had. And you had standards.

You’d rather have “assault” and “pickpocketing” on that record over “not paying for fast food” any day. That last one just seems like a real shitty thing to be arrested over. Besides, you’d never steal from ordinary civilians… but you’d make exceptions for assholes.

You moved to leave the alley again, tousling Lucas’ hair as you went past. When you didn’t hear his footsteps following, you stopped at the entrance, sending another glance back towards his way you huffed at his stupefied expression before jerking your head in a gesture to follow. You couldn’t help but smile at his joyful expression, biting back a chuckle at his excited hopping at your side.

“Nice to meet you, Luke.”

.

.

.

Six more months passed, and after meeting Lucas, you haven’t left the town. You’d found out that he’d essentially raised himself. The kid’s mother was gone, and he didn’t know why. You met his father, and after that one meeting you knew he was useless. His debts weren’t even for necessities, just for his alcohol and gambling. Guy didn’t even seem to care that his son was the one suffering most from the consequences of his actions.

You were annoyed, but after witnessing him passed out in a bathtub, reaching over the edge to clutch at a toilet while a bottle of whiskey hung from his fingers, you knew he was a lost cause. Lucas knew it, too. Admitted that he’d known so for years.

You felt bad for the kid and did what you could to help. You kept those lackeys off his back. Got him clothes, food, school supplies if he needed them. You didn’t tell him where you got the money and he never asked, but considering how you’d initially met you assume he had a slight idea. You still didn’t talk much, and your attention span failed you at times, but he understood. He knew that you were at least trying.

At times he’d ask you for help with his homework, and you were convinced it caused you just as much grief as it did him. You could barely remember what happened months or a year before, let alone what you’d learnt over a decade ago.

You were a weapon, not a teacher. You could teach him how to kick ass with the best of them, but you didn’t know shit about literature or geography. Or whatever it was high schoolers learnt these days.

Even when you were working with the government, you didn’t have to know how to get around yourself. They just shipped you to the mission location and back, and that was that. You didn’t even know you got around now, considering how most of your time on the road was spent in your head.

You swear he only asked you to laugh at you. You’d try to intimidate him with a deadpan stare, but that only made the cheeky brat laugh louder. Your exasperation would fizzle out soon enough, his joy infectious. You found yourself feeling… happy. Normal. Like an average human. Something you never thought would be a near-unreachable standard.

But of course, as always, happiness in your life never lasted long.

You’d stopped moving. You stayed in one place for too long.

You’d focused too much on the present, that you forgot about the past you’d been running to escape. And so, it caught up.

You were running again. They were at your heels, this time. And you couldn’t just beat them into the ground.

Their weapons looked different. Their bullets hurt.

You didn’t want to believe that this was happening. Just this morning you’d been laughing with Lucas, pancake batter and syrup drizzled over your heads.

Now all you could hear were shouts and gunfire, blood dripping down a healing cut at your temple.

You wanted them to lose your tracks, but you knew how they worked. If you disappeared completely, they’d have to look for clues. Which would lead them to Lucas. Which was why you were leading them, herding them away like sheep to be as far away from the kid as possible. But it was not meant to be.

“Sis!”

The voice made electricity shoot up your spine, catching more than just your attention. You noticed a few soldiers turn to look his way as he ran towards you, even as you shook your head and urged him to turn back. He wouldn’t. You were family, how could he leave you behind?

“LUKE, RUN!”

…Was that your voice? Sometimes you’d forget what your voice sounded like, and not using it for weeks at a time definitely didn’t help your case.

He skidded meters away, eyeing the soldiers, his face conflicted, “But—”

You heard the crackling of their comms and spotted a few guns being pointed his way, one of them even pulled out a pin.

What the fuck was General Lane thinking?!

The kid was a civilian, not a criminal!

You sprinted over to Lucas, body shielding his within a second. You felt bullets pierce your back, easily tearing through the fabric of your clothing. You heard Lucas yelling for them to stop, but you knew they wouldn’t listen. You heard the tell-tale clinking of a grenade rolling on the concrete and you tightened your grip around him, eyes screwed shut. You heard the bellowed orders “TAKE COVER” and then…

Pain.

Searing, white-hot, pain was spreading on your back. You felt shrapnel enter your torso, the heat eating away at your skin. You forced yourself to endure the agony.

You were protecting him.

You repeated those four words in your mind like a mantra, mind clinging to them for a way to ground itself.

When you felt the dust settling, the ringing in your ears calming, you dared to open your eyes. And you wish you didn’t.

Despite your best efforts, Lucas had been hit. Twice. The projectiles had presumably ricocheted. Whether it was shrapnel or bullets, you didn’t know. All you knew was that he was wounded, and that you’ve failed once again.

“No…” You rasped out, tears obscuring your vision. Your throat hurt from disuse, but you continued to force the words out, “No… kid, not you too!”

“Hah,” Lucas laughed, not noticing the blood that came with the motion, “I’m… I… I didn’t e-expect to go like this. P-Pretty badass, huh?”

His eyes were beginning to flutter closed, the light in his eyes quickly dulling. Your breath hitched in your throat, and gritting your teeth, you muttered, “No, no… c’mon, eyes on me bud. Eyes on me!”

His head weakly flopped to the side as he grinned, teeth stained with blood, “S’okay… was meant t-to be gone in… in… that alley. Y’saved me… y’let me be happy… thank you.”

Lucas went limp. Just like that, he was gone. And so were you.

You didn’t flinch when the wounds on your back slowly stitched themselves back together, no doubt leaving a mark as every failure always did.

You didn’t resist when they forcefully yanked you away, uncaring that they had just taken the life of an innocent. The life of a child.

You felt someone forcefully lift your head, to which you muttered, “Kill me. Please.”

You didn’t speak any more after that, no matter how much they tried to get a reaction.

No… you wouldn’t do anything until you were either dead, or put face-to-face with the bastard you knew gave the order.

And as expected, they put him right where you wanted him.

You were back at the base, arid desert and all.

They’d seated you in a metal chair, one bolted down to the thick concrete beneath your feet. Your arms were forced to lie flush against its armrests, wrists cuffed into place.

You were in one of the interrogation rooms, metal walls to the front, back and the left. You weren’t fooled. You knew the wall to the right was a one-sided window. To know that there were people just watching you…

You felt like an animal.

It was only after General Lane stood across from you, after the only door leading in and out of the room clicked shut, that you even twitched. Your attention finally drifted up from the flimsy metal cuffs that they’d clamped around your wrists—not that they knew your strength had grown—and to the poor excuse of a man attempting to stand tall.

You glared at him, unabashedly showing the hatred burning within you. It made him swallow, despite the poker face he attempted to keep up. Your silent staring contest stretched on and on, his mouth repeatedly opening and closing in indecision. He wanted to speak, but had no idea what to say.

The people behind the window had plenty of words, though. You couldn’t catch all of them, but you managed to decipher a muffled few.

“Dad” was one. Which meant one of the people might’ve been his kid. Wouldn’t be implausible. Last time you paid attention to him, he had two. Girls, if your memory actually served you correct. And two of the voices you could hear were distinctly feminine.

“Our” was another, spoken with a lilt for emphasis before “Dad”, which meant both of his kids were there. If your first assumption was correct.

“Superman” was the last one you heard. It was the word that caused you the most grief. Why mention the “Man of Steel”? You remembered hearing someone rant about the Kryptonian, mentioning a possible relation between the hero and a journalist. One of General Lane’s kids was a journalist. That could pose a problem. If his kids really were on the other side of the glass, and Lucas’ info—

‘Luke.’

Any hesitation you had dissipated instantly. No matter what would become of you, you’d make this bastard pay. It was the least you could do.

Breaking away from the General’s stare, your eyes flashed to the window, cogs turning in your mind. Perhaps you could do worse than cause simple, physical, pain. You could expose him, have his children lose their faith in him. Even if they weren’t his children, they would be his soldiers. It could lead to questioning of his authority.

It was worth a shot. Besides, what did you have to lose?

“You killed him,” you snarled, “He was just a boy, but you killed him.”

You shot up from your seat. Rather, you shot up with your seat. The cuffs were still in place, but the bolts that held the seat down had lost their hold with a resounding crack.

General Lane jumped back in shock, the doorknob now jiggling as his soldiers desperately tried to come to his aid.

Without missing a beat, you tore your hands out of their restraints and pulled the long metal table that separated you two upwards, shoving it legs-first into where the door would be. The legs went right through the wall, the body of the table now blocking the entrance as well as the door itself.

‘That’s the front wall and entrance covered…’

With an audible growl, you turned back to the general, the man now scrambling back to push himself flat against a wall in fear. He was pointing a pistol at you, but you were undeterred.

You took a step, and he took a shot.

You took another, and he did the same.

You took a third, and the man emptied his gun into your torso.

You weren’t fazed, your fury burning too great for you to feel anything other than rage.

He looked like he was about to reply to your yell, but you cut him off before he could, snapping, “Your problem was with me. It always has been. There was no need for you to involve a civilian, let alone ordering your men to open fire!”

“I… I—”

“I wanted to live, so you tried to have me die. When I do want to die, you keep me alive. How much more do I have to suffer for you to be satisfied?! How much longer do I have to exist, for my wants to actually matter?!”

As you stomped closer towards him, you gripped the chair that had been meant for him and threw it across the room. The object formed a deep dent upon impact and rendered the back wall weak.

Releasing another growl, you lifted him up by the collar of his uniform, “How much lower are you going to fall, after murdering that poor boy? Is there even a bar lower for you to reach?!”

The general continued to ignore the futility of repeatedly pulling the trigger of his empty pistol, desperate for a way out. But without a miracle, he would never be able to escape.

Unfortunately, he got one. It came in the form of a Kryptonian, at that.

Superman broke through the dented wall, quick in separating you from the general. You felt your back smack against the one-sided window, the cool glass cracking beneath your flesh.

Oh, right. You hadn’t had the chance to change. Your shirt was still burnt at the back, the rest of your clothing tattered at the edges and your feet shoeless. Your state of dress seemed to come as a surprise to Superman, too. If the brief moment he took to observe his ‘opponent’ was any indication.

You glanced at the wall he’d used as an entrance. It wasn’t that much of a fall. It wouldn’t take much to heal if you got hurt. Ten seconds, at most.

Within a breath, you fearlessly leaped through the broken wall. You heard a choke of astonishment behind you as you did, but as much as you wanted to be amused by the alien, you recognized the threat he was to your freedom.

He was a goody-two-shoes. If he caught you, you’d just be locked up. And you’d be used as a lab rat or a weapon all over again. Never able to die.

You couldn’t let that happen.

You’d landed with a wince and a roll, a sickening crack shooting shocks up your left arm. You’d shaken off the pain, sprinting towards where you knew the weapons vault was. The rushing of wind reached your ears, indicating that the alien wasn’t far behind. Spotting the vault entrance straight ahead, you trusted your instincts and slid across the tile floor as if you were running a base. It worked.

Superman flew straight past you, and not expecting you to have sensed him coming, was going too fast to stop himself from crashing into the vault. Your eyes widened at the sight. You hadn’t predicted it either.

Hurriedly pushing yourself up to your feet, you’d rushed into the vault, mind flashing through the arsenal they had you use throughout the years. You’d known what they had in there, and one of them was definitely not good for a Super.

When you stepped foot into the vault, you were proven right. Superman was struggling to stand, green creeping its way through his veins.

“Shit…” without hesitation, you pulled him up. You wrapped his arm around your neck and dragged him out, uncaring of the guns pointed at you. You felt his questioning stare, and grumbled, “What.”

“Why?”

Such a simple question, made of only one word… yet the true nature of its complexity was beyond you. You shook your head. Not the time.

“Never wanted to kill anyone. Never wanted anyone dead, either…” You sighed, voice barely louder than a whisper, “Just wanted to be happy.”

Once you determined that he was at a safe enough distance, you promptly let him flop into the ground. You huffed at his comical “oof” before revealing the smoke grenade you had swiped from the vault. You pulled its pin, and as everyone’s vision began to be obscured, you muttered words only Superman could hear.

“Please, just leave me alone…”

 ~~~

You didn’t know if it was because of Superman’s influence, but you were. Left alone, that is.  Then again, it might’ve been because you’d kept away from civilization as best as you could, staying in forests for as long as you were able.

For how long at this point? You weren’t sure. By the time you’d left him in the smoke, it had been five years since the dorm with Alex. Three since the experiment. One since Lucia. And... none since Luke. 

With a shake of your head, their blurred faces and vague memories faded in an instant, the frown at the resurfacing thoughts of them quickly replaced with an easy-going smile.

The woods weren’t too bad.

The animals were surprisingly amicable, and you found an unfamiliar joy in jumping into lakes and rivers without any remorse. If you needed anything that couldn’t be provided naturally, the camp sites you’d managed to memorize the locations of were useful in that regard. Clothes, food, money…

You didn’t realize exactly how easy it was to steal from civilians until you weren’t one yourself.

Still... it should be troubling that you didn’t know how long you’d been living in the forests. Every day blurs together. You didn’t even know what forest you were living in. Or if you’d lived in more than one. Your memories continued to fracture, and due to lack of practice, you could feel your ability to speak and understand wavering.

Your memories…

Very few of them remained intact. You had a feeling that you had a part to play in it, intentional or not, considering that the ones you could remember seemed happy, and anything otherwise—anything that caused pain… either you got rid of them the second they came, or it made you retreat into the deepest recesses of your mind, never knowing how long you’d been in there the moment you returned to reality.

Could’ve been a few seconds, minutes, maybe even hours. It was partially why you’d lost track of how long you’d been living among the trees.

Every time you thought of your past, you were reminded of the burden that was carrying emotions. Of being human. It was roughly one month into living away from humans, that you accepted it was simpler to just ignore the fact that you had a life before this mess. That there had ever been happier times. If you couldn’t identify what was considered a ‘good’ memory, then you wouldn’t be sucked into the ‘bad’, right?

So you buried them. Even imagined little coffins for them and everything.

Part of you knows that it’s unhealthy. But that mindset is what led to those instances now being few and far in between—or, at least you hoped they were. Again, you didn’t really have a good sense of time.

But living was good. It was fun, not thinking of anything but what to do next. You could spend an entire day chasing after deer, or just climbing a tree. And do the same thing all over again tomorrow!

…It all sounds a bit boring now that you think about it. But oddly enough, the days were surprisingly fun. If you really wanted a thrill, all you had to do was start wrestling a bear! That was fun.  

You were actually rushing away from one right now, teasingly dangling yourself from one branch of a tree to another, when you heard a scream. A female scream, and then… a crash. While the noise terrified the bear, it only intrigued you, drawing you closer. Almost like a siren’s call.

You dropped down to the forest floor, tackling the bear in the process. After absentmindedly hauling it over your shoulder, you dashed through the treeline within seconds. Once out of the forest, you coughed as you blinked at the wreckage before you.

Two vehicles had collided roughly thirty meters away, the smoke billowing from the smouldering wreck making your lungs burn. What startled you more was the armed man holding a gun up to an injured, blonde woman twenty meters away from the crash.

You blinked at the man, who seemed to be talking the woman’s ears off. Rather, what was the word… monologuing? Yeah. Monologuing.

His cocky grin made you roll your eyes, the action leading to you noticing the bear’s presence on your shoulder. An idea struck. Your eyes narrowed at the man, before glancing over to the bear. The man. The bear. The man…

“BEAR!”

You gleefully yelled, startling them both. But what brought complete horror upon both humans, was the fact that there was now a bear hurtling towards them. Correction, towards the man.

He dropped like a rock, him and the bear both did. Whereas the poor, unharmed-yet-traumatised fuzzy animal quickly scrambled to its feet before sprinting back into the woods, the effectively disarmed male stayed flat on the concrete, out cold.

Tilting your head to the side, you walked up to the unconscious human, your brows furrowing as you wondered why he wasn’t moving.

You sniffed and rubbed at your itching nose, wincing at the horrible stench of roasting rubber. You couldn’t tell if the blood you smelt came from the wounds after the crash, or after the bear.

You gave him a light tap of a foot, checking if he’d wake up anytime soon. When the man didn’t budge, you shrugged and turned to go back to the forest, only to freeze when you were startled by the female he’d been threatening. You’d forgotten she was there, and the woman was far closer than you remembered her to be.

She looked stunned.

Her hands were hovering by her cheeks, palms over her mouth, tears brimming in her eyes as she muttered… a name? It sounded familiar. You didn’t know why. You tilted your head, confused.

“You…” she sobbed, tears now flowing freely. She stammered out, “You don’t remember, do you?”

Who was this woman?

Cautiously, you shook your head. Your was body tense, knees bent and ready to escape if you needed to.

“Nothing? It’s me, Eliza,” another shake of your head. She sniffled, “Eliza Danvers? One of my daughters brought you over for Thanksgiving a few times, you were like a part of our family, before… before… you disappeared.”

Danvers.

You didn’t hear anything past that, the word—name?—had a tremor course through your skull. That was… worrying? It should be worrying, right?

Your hands flashed to your aching temples, gritting your teeth, you croaked out, “D-Dan… Danvers?”

You hadn’t said anything in months. Your throat was probably as painful to use as your voice was to hear.

Eliza’s eyes shined brighter in realization. You were remembering.

“Yes, Danvers! Do you… Do you remember my daughter? She’d been your closest friend. Alex, Alexandra Danvers—”

Static was all you could hear. You dropped to your knees, the pain growing more unbearable the more she spoke. You barely felt the gravel of the road digging into your knees.

Alex?

Alex.

Who was—

“No… Don’t!”

That was… you? Why was this hurting so much? What was going on?

Why didn’t you want to remember?

You felt hands on your shoulders, desperately trying to… to what? Snap you out? Of what? Pain? You didn’t even know why it came up, let alone how to stop it!

Then… then a chill. One you haven’t felt since you encountered… someone. You couldn’t remember them, either.

All you could hear were your instincts.

Instincts…

Your instincts were screaming, frantic in wanting you to leave. To escape.

So you followed them.

Shrugging Eliza’s hands off of your shoulders, you jumped to your feet and swiftly fled into the woods, not turning back once. Not even when you heard her scream a name—yours?—and especially not when you heard the tell-tale swoosh of… a cape? You didn’t know.

Your thoughts made no sense right now. All you wanted was to go back and forget. To go back into the woods and be happy.

Just… be happy.

[science-fiction-is-real]

STOP TRYING TO GET ME TO VOTE FOR BIDEN.

Okay.  Look.  If you plan to vote for Biden, I won’t stop you.  And I understand.

But I would like to make a few points as to why I personally will NOT be voting for Biden.

We do actually have other options.  Biden is evil, not just “less than perfect,” but actually evil.  Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems, and this becomes especially clear when you look at the behavior of past Democratic presidents and when you apply a little Marxist theory regarding the State. Also A Biden victory is in itself a form of harm, not harm reduction.

1) WE DO ACTUALLY HAVE OTHER OPTIONS BESIDES VOTING FOR BIDEN.

First of all, the fact that you can even mention 3rd and sometimes even 4th and 5th party candidates indicates that: Yes, we LITERALLY DO have other options.  Are they LIKELY to win? 

No.  But only because people don’t vote for them. We are not trapped in a two party system, though we may be trapped psychologically.  It IS actually possible to create new political parties, and for existing small parties to grow into large parties.  This is a long-term goal, and probably not something that will happen by November.  But the first step is to realize that the democratic party are not our friends.

Second, and most important, voting is a tiny plastic water gun in the vast nuclear arsenal we have at our disposal when it comes to political activity.  Historically speaking, even the most nasty and reactionary asshole presidents suddenly start acting REAAAAAL progressive when they are faced with mass populist movements causing civil unrest.  This also applies to senators, congresspersons, and members of the court.  Remember Richard Nixon passing landmark Women’s Rights legislation?  In fact, the level of political activity of the masses is 8 millions times more important than who is in the Whitehouse.

Where we should really be focusing our efforts is in organizing and movement building.  Protest. Go on strike.  Propagandize.  Obstruct.  Disrupt.  And most importantly:

JOIN AN ORG! Join an org.  Join an org. Join an ORG!  Join labor unions.  Join political parties.  Join non-profits.  Becoming a dues-paying member of a Socialist organization is worth a thousand votes.  You will meet experienced comrades who know the ins and outs of political activism, who will show you the ropes, and will put you to work doing something productive.

Join the Democratic Socialists of America.  Join the Industrial Workers of the World. I’m a member of a political party called the Socialist Alternative.

2) BIDEN ISN’T “LESS THAN PERFECT.”  HE IS A MUSTACHE TWIRLING SUPERVILLAIN.

Biden is not a Liberal.  He’s a center-right conservative.  He embraces Neoliberal policies that leave working class people to die in poverty and debt.  He has made no serious attempts to cater toward Bernie’s base.  He is unspeakably Racist, and actually wrote the bill that created Mass Incarceration as we currently know it.

As part of the Obama Administration he was complicit in all of Obama’s abominable atrocities.  From the drone strike program which killed countless civilians, to the escalation of a draconian surveillance state, to the mass deportation of 3 million immigrants.  Obama created the structures that Trump is currently using to terrorize immigrants, minorities, and protestors.  And he created them for the very purpose Trump is using them for.  Biden was there every step along the way.  Biden has espoused violent rhetoric about doing violence against protesters, arresting people with certain political beliefs, and condoning police brutality.

Biden is better MAAAAYYBE better only on 2 issues.  Abortion rights and LBGT rights.  And while those issues are important.  I highly doubt he will make any progress on those issues.

Biden has said over and over again that he would pander to the republicans and compromise with them every chance he gets.  He certainly has stated callous disregard for the lives of working class people.  And we can only assume that he will betray women’s rights and LBGT rights the moment he finds it politically convenient.

And don’t give me crap about RBG.  Biden will not replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another liberal.  He will replace her with a centrist, or do what Obama did and let the Republicans pick the replacement for him.   And also the supreme court is a tyrannical, undemocratic institution anyway and should probably just be abolished full-stop.

Joe Biden’s rhetoric isn’t even less fascistic than Trump's either.  He says his racist, sexist, anti-working-class sentiment out loud.

And with his billionaire and corporate backers, he certainly can’t be trusted to act on climate change.

He will not respond positively to the pandemic either.  He has expressed out loud no plan of how HE would handle the pandemic, and if his democratic colleagues in congress give us a clue… well, the Dems have been incredibly stingy with their money, refusing funds for relief for the working class.  They have not put up a serious fight for any measures to actually stop the Virus’s spread.

If he’s the “Lesser of Two Evils.”  He is just evil.  

3) IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER WHO THE PRESIDENT IS.

Trump is not actually the cause of our problems.  He isn’t.  Donald Trump is a fat asshole with a desk job.  Donald Trump did not invent racism.  He did not invent sexism or xenophobia or hatred against the LBGT+ community.  If Donald Trump died tomorrow, the forces of reaction would carry on their merry way.  Donald Trump is in office because he is willing to carry out policies that are favorable to the ruling class.  And the moment he stopped doing that, he would be quickly disposed of, either by impeachment or by a military coup.

And in fact, the violence we are seeing from the Trump administration comes from the way the government itself is constructed.  Not from some diseased ideology unique to the American Right Wing.

So let’s think about this a little more carefully.  Why do we have a government in the first place?  You know, a government, the “state,”  the law itself?  It’s not to negotiate peace between different conflicting segments of society, because they are obviously very bad at that.  It’s not to ensure the public good and protect the rights of the citizens.  Because the government doesn’t really do that either.

And this isn’t just a problem when Republicans are in power.  See my previous examples of Obama’s unspeakable atrocities.  

The reason we have a government is to enforce and maintain class based society.  The State is nothing more than Armed bodies of men who exist for the purpose of allowing one class to suppress another class.  The government’s job is to suppress uprisings, control the working class, assume risk on behalf of the capitalist class, and to fight wars on behalf of the capitalist class.  That’s why the Feds are kidnapping protestors.  That’s why immigrants are being put in cages.  That’s why the police harass and intimidate Black people.  To maintain and enforce the power structure.

All of these bad things happened when Obama was president.  And All of these bad things will continue to happen if Biden is elected. This violence we’re seeing isn’t the result of Trump.  You can’t even call this violence Fascism, because this is NORMAL. Fascism is a specific political phenomena that occurs under very specific circumstances . This violence is literally just the government doing its job.  It’s worse now because the economy is going through a rough patch, which isn’t the government’s fault, it’s just because Capitalism is unstable.

The Right and Left Parties represent different segments of the ruling class, and the election process is about the ruling class negotiating differences among itself.  The democratic party does not represent the interest of regular people like You and me, and you DO NOT OWE THEM YOUR VOTE.

2) VOTING FOR BIDEN ISN’T HARM REDUCTION.  IT IS ITSELF A HARM.

A Biden Victory could have several negative consequences.

The democratic party will continue its decades-long drift toward the right.  The democratic leadership will see once and for all that they can get away with running any evil sleazy candidate they want who will serve the interest of their corporate benefactors, and that the public will remain loyal as long as they coat their sleeziness with “Woke” rhetoric.  If the Democrats learn that you will vote for them no matter what they do, then your vote loses all of its power.

It could trigger violent backlash from Trump’s far-right base.

It gives legitimacy to an ultimately UNdemocratic system which is breaking at the seams.

It could pacify a lot of the militant, but less educated segments of the working class who have swallowed the rhetoric that Biden is their ally.  They will disperse from the streets, meanwhile Biden is free to continue the violent, racist, war-hawkish, neoliberal agenda that Trump, Obama, and Bush did before him.

CONCLUSION

Joe Biden is not our friend.  The Democratic Party are not our friends.  Trump is awful, and he sucks.  If we DON’T vote for Biden, Trump may very well win the Presidential Race.  But considering that Biden himself is very evil, and that Trump is not the true cause of the violence and hatred we see coming from our government, the stakes in this race are a lot lower than you have been led to believe.

A protest vote could send a strong message to the Ruling Class that we are not satisfied with racist, violent, neoliberal leadership, and that we want real change.  

Also, we actually are NOT stuck in a two party system.  There is a growing movement within the United States to create and grow a worker’s party that represents truly progressive ideas, one where regular people hold party leadership directly accountable, and the party is forced to serve our interests instead of those of the ruling class.  The first step in building such a party is to let the Democrats go, and stop placing our hopes in people who do not care about us.

But the most important thing to remember:

The ballot box is not the end-all and be-all of political activity.  The ruling class has created this little ceremony of “voting,” inviting us working class folks to come and play their little game of “pick the dictator,” and giving us the illusion that this makes a real difference.  But we have no way of holding politicians in office accountable when they break their campaign promises, and we are only allowed to vote for options the ruling class allows us to see on the ballots. 

We DO have power to change the system, but we have to do it outside the ruling-class’s terms.  We have to be organized and active and militant enough that the ruling class believes we pose an actual threat to their authority.

We have to do the type of things we currently see American’s doing in the streets right now.  Causing a major disruption, threatening the capitalists’ profits, and threatening the politicians’ sense of authority and control.

But we have to remain organized and militant even after the current wave of protests dies down.  And we do that by building left wing institutional power -- by JOINING ORGS.

JOIN A GOD DAMN ORG YOU COWARDS.

[jyndor]

Cop-thing-anon here:

(I don't believe in the blue lives matter thing by the way)

I do get where you're coming from. I guess I see the thing about cops and cop AUs differently because the police is different and not as fucked up in my country. The thing about the fanart is just..I think you're reading too much into it. I don't think the artist really focused on the skin colour of Sokka, I mean, it's a kids show. Skin colour was never really mentioned or important in atla. But Sokka's personality is most likely why the artist was inspired to draw him as a "gangster", with azula (the villain) being a cop. It is kind of insensitive to draw that with the events going on, but I think that a lot of people in the fandom take some things way too seriously, for a kids show back in the late 2000's anyway.

hey anon, I say this with love and I am being sincere. I'm gonna need you to rewatch the show if you think skin color didn't matter. and it doesn't matter where you live because there is no part of the world, no culture, that isn't shaped by colonialism. I don't mean to be condescending so please bear with me, I truly believe in educating people as a part of allyship and anti-racism.

Anon, please know that I am not angry or anything but sincere in what I’m about to say. Just bear with me because I know that unlearning shit is difficult and can be painful, but we’ve gotta do it. I do appreciate you wanting to have this conversation at all. And I’m not writing this just for your benefit - this is for anyone who wants to learn about why A) race is a part of ATLA’s narrative and B) why critical analysis of mass media is actually important. So I’m not assuming you don’t know basic things about this stuff, I’m not trying to be condescending.

Now we’re gonna fix colonialism and imperialism XD wee okay here we go.

No matter where you live in the world you have some awareness of skin color. Your understanding of race might be different than mine, in fact it probably is. Race as we know it today is a social construct that stems from many things (and I wrote several hundred words on it but it was too much and too far removed from the point I’m trying to make so I edited all of that out. Yay.)

You don’t usually see imperialism, one of the major themes in Avatar, without colonialism. Imperialism is slightly different than colonialism - you can think of it like the ideology behind the practice of colonialism.* Imperialism can be used to describe expansionism in general - which has been going on since the bronze age lol humans, I stg - but usually when people today refer to colonialism and imperialism they’re talking about imperialism starting in the 17th century.

Now imperialism is not just a European concept. ATLA is set in a world that we know is supposed to be like a combination of different Asian cultures (with some influences from the Americas). And the Fire Nation is clearly influenced by Imperial Japan. So briefly:

Japan had a policy of sakoku (chained or closed country) which kept it mostly isolated (out of concerns that Japan would fall victim to something like the Opium Wars in China, among other things) from the rest of the world for a couple hundred years until the 1850s when a US Naval commander named Matthew Perry (I am not kidding) forced Japan to open its borders for trade to the United States by gunboat diplomacy, an oxymoron if I have ever seen one before.

Japan ended up signing unequal treaties with a lot of Western countries, and this bred xenophobia and hostility in Japan. The Emperor who signed these treaties died of smallpox, and after some internal conflict his son decided try to renegotiate these treaties. The US and European countries were not interested in renegotiating dick but the mission wasn’t unsuccessful because the diplomats A) exchanged some islands with Russia and B) were inspired by western economic policy and society to “modernize” Japan. Japan began industrialization and it converted to a market economy with the help of the US and other western powers.

So over many years, Japan went to war with China, Korea, Russia (and took back some of the land they exchanged with them), and others. From wikipedia:

Using its superior technological advances in naval aviation and its modern doctrines of amphibious and naval warfare, Japan achieved one of the fastest maritime expansions in history. By 1942 Japan had conquered much of East Asia and the Pacific, including the east of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, part of New Guinea and many islands of the Pacific Ocean.

But ATLA is not a Japanese story. The Fire Nation is not Imperial Japan. The Earth Kingdom is not China or Korea, the Air Nomads are not Tibetan monks, and the Water Tribes are not Inuit. The creators definitely drew heavy inspiration from all of these places and others, but ATLA is a story written by American people in the United States for American kids. It is an American story.

And it was created at a time when the United States was victimizing people in Afghanistan and Iraq (and other places) in many similar ways to how the Fire Nation victimized people. In fact, the show starts in the Southern Water Tribe, which represent Inuit people, indigenous people in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, I think it’s safe to assume that the genocide being referenced here is not one by Japan but rather by European colonizers and later by the United States and Canada.

Imperialism is in the show’s DNA. 

And so is racism. In our world they are inherently connected. And visual cues from the show along with things the characters say suggest that we are meant to make the comparison between our world and the ATLA world. Every story has a purpose - it doesn’t have to be political, but for Avatar it is political, it is anti-imperialist.

In this article about how ATLA resonates with us in 2020, Aina Khan of the Guardian interviews Professor Ali A Olomi about using ATLA to teach at Penn State. “One of the things we see with the Fire Nation is the ideological justification for what they’re doing. We are a glorious civilization. We have abundance, we have wealth, we have technological advancement; we need to share it with the rest of the world. That’s almost word for word European colonisation.”

Zuko and Azula both call Katara a peasant. In fact, Azula calls her a dirty peasant. This is one step away from calling her a s*vage I mean come on. While peasant might just be purely classist (lol no) because Zuko and Azula are royalty, um it’s clearly racialized classism because of real life context. There is real history with colonizers calling indigenous people this, dismissing their cultures as primitive and barbaric.

Add into the mix colorism, which is bias against darker skin and privileges fair skin (which is a byproduct of imperialism) and you have clear race shit happening in Avatar.

When I saw that fanart, I was immediately reminded of black lives matter of course, but mainly of the fact that indigenous peoples are also at high risk of being victimized by police. Not just in the US. And how gross it is to depict a colonizer like Azula as an angry cop (representing the state) turning her gun on an indigenous man who is dressed like a gangster which... yike.

Mass media influence everything we do. The messaging we get, our politics, what we want to eat for dinner because we’re hungry and have been writing this stupid essay for three hours LOL. It’s important that people think critically about what they consume. Otherwise you get the goddamn United States with half of our population stanning a racist fraud. You want to know why US Americans are so ignorant? Because our education system sucks, because we don’t have any real media literacy. But apparently the rest of the world has some fucking nerve making fun of Americans** because all of us suck at it. No one is thinking critically about media.

A really terrifying thing about people is our ability to take whatever message we want from stories, even if it is in direct contradiction with the narrative of a story. There’s a movie called American History X which is explicitly anti-fascist, but because it’s a drama and Ed Norton is cut and looks badass and uncucked or whatever LOL, the iconography in that movie is fairly popular with neo-nazis. Yike. This is not at that level of course, this is some random niche fanart for a rare pairing.

For better or for worse, US media and entertainment gets a lot of attention and people around the world eat it up. Maybe you don’t need to know every little detail about US American shit, and I know we tend to dominate media, but black lives matter is not just a 2020 thing. People have known about it for years, since it started. If that fanart was created in 2019, which I think it was, the BLM movement had already existed for six years. If you’re watching an American show like Avatar and you’re making fanart on social media but you don’t know what BLM is in 2019... well educate yourself lmao.

Considering that Black fans have expressed frustration and discomfort in fandoms over and over again, and I am sure indigenous fans have too because fandoms are racist sometimes, it’s important that white fans help make fandoms better. And I am a white fan, and I consider myself an anti-racist. Which means I have to be active about racism when I see it.

btw I found this great essay by @cobra-diamond which you should read if you want more details about the similarities between Japan and the Fire Nation.

* that is very reductive but it’s fine lol

** I am kidding, unless you are english feel free to make fun of americans for non-gun, non-trauma related things pls

[srwestvikwrites]

Privilege is the Haven of Thorns

I wrote this post the week George Floyd was murdered. I was angry, and tired, and confused, and increasingly more apprehensive in my capacity as a person and as a writer as I was drawn in to the immense whirlpool of the zeitgeist gripping the internet and society. 

It was such a complicated and emotional time. I was wracked with guilt at not going to the BLM protest in Madrid because we had just opened up into Phase 2 of the desescalada and I was scared of COVID. I was furious at the denial of individuals in my home country of Singapore who refused to believe that just because our race riots were in 1964 and not 2020 that it meant we had no more issues of systemic discrimination or privilege to challenge. I was exasperated and uneasy and inspired at having been drawn into a massive shitshow about race that rocked the Tolkien fandom within the same timeframe.

All of this made me question my place and my purpose as an author writing a story like Haven of Thorns. It doesn’t dwell on these issues, but it draws on them, in the same way that my life doesn’t linger on the colonisation of my home country or the country of my ancestors (India) and yet is irrevocably shaped by this history. 

Haven of Thorns was always going to be a story taking place in the strange rivers of colonial legacy. It is a story of drowned histories and ghosts that reside in the very stones of a city and demons that linger inside people who were happy enough to let them back in. All of it is pushed along by the current of time, where history is not stagnant but forces change. It is about war, and it is about subtle discrimination, and it is about what we choose to do when we’re so hung up on our independence story that we refuse to acknowledge the rot in our roots.

I’m reproducing the post as I wrote it all those weeks ago, even though there are better ways I could have expressed my thoughts, and indeed some of these thoughts have new nuances now as I have drafted pivotal scenes in the story. There are other things I’d rather have focused on. The haven of thorns is more than mere privilege now. And perhaps one day I’ll expand on that.

But for now, this is a historical record of what I was thinking as it was all going down and I was trying to decide what sort of story I wanted to tell in the world I lived in as the person I am.

_________________________________________________

I’m not going to be coy about the metaphor anymore. This book was always going to be highly political. It has just become even more political. I cannot begin to describe how apt and how heartbreaking it is to be drafting my novel right now.

Some context should perhaps be given as to the kinds of politics that are informing this story. I began outlining the earliest iterations of Haven of Thorns at the height of the European migration crisis. While migration itself is not a main theme of the story – and where it does feature, it’s from a rather inverted historical power dynamic – the backlash against it was always present in the telling of the tale. The rise of the European right terrified me. I had never experienced open racism before until one incident when I moved to Norway in late 2015, where I was lucky enough to have an ally at the time, though I never learned her name. I have seen far too many swastikas misappropriated from their holiness to represent hatred, spraypainted on neighbourhood walls in Trondheim, London, and Madrid.

For many years, I likened racism and xenophobia and white supremacy to a contagion, even to possession (which may have been down to the title of this book I read during high school). My view on this has changed, now. For those raised into these ideas, sure, the demon metaphor may still apply. But for many, these corrupted values take root and fester because we allow them to.

The old first draft of Haven of Thorns was begun in the first week of November, 2016. I feel I have no need to elaborate on why this timing is significant. Globally, the sense of the triumph of ignorance and vitriol was palpable. Over the next few years, partially because I became more active on social media and partially because of the degree I was studying for, every day required exposure to injustices very often predicated on culture, ethnicity, language, and/or race.

Then in 2019 Singapore commemorated the bicentennial – our 200 year anniversary of being colonised. And once again I was confronted with the bizarre lack of acknowledgment of how blatantly race relations had been directed and segmented by the British, and how whatever the government line says, we have not bounced back from the wounds that gouged in our society. I interned at an NGO dealing with race relations, and it only illuminated what we’d rather cover up – the value judgements we make of people based off their skin colour, the god(s) the pray to, or the language they speak. When COVID-19 reared its head Singapore was lauded for their response, until it hit the migrant worker dormitories. That was a powder keg waiting to explode. And it is false and unjust to pretend that the conditions they are living in do not have their own origins in the petulant protests of those who unfairly profiled and characterised the workers and robbed them of better conditions, resulting in the tragedy that has taken place now.

Even climate justice and its link to ethnicity began to seep into the story, particularly during the early 2020 fires in Australia and how severely the Aboriginal peoples were affected.

As I write this post Minneapolis is up in arms, and Americans are out in the thousands across the country protesting for justice for George Floyd and the countless other black Americans who have been victims of the system and of police violence.

Growing from childhood to adulthood in the 2000s-2010s has meant growing up in a time when discussions about race, ethnicity, culture, and the legacies of our most backward perceptions and prejudiced notions have come to the forefront, both of activism and of violent action taken against others. How could I not be impacted, for example, by the horror of the massacre in Norway on 22 July? How could I not have felt the shadow of the War on Terror through the rampant Islamophobia in the media and in society?

The extent to which all these disparate ideas of politics and power and race and xenophobia and colonialism actually manifest in Haven of Thorns isn’t perhaps measurable in the amount I’ve discussed them here. But the core of this book is that the haven is privilege, and thorns are both the barrier of our ignorance and the spears upon which we sacrifice those who challenge it.  White privilege in the West. Chinese privilege in Singapore. Yes I fucking said it. To refuse to see that is privilege, in and of itself. One can feel hurt, to be associated with the violent ways these ideas manifest. Or, one can choose to acknowledge that feeling implicated by despicable acts is perhaps the spark to challenge one’s own biases.

This story is about breaking that thorn barrier and letting in the light, in all its unbridled blinding glory, to burn away the festering hatred we’ve allowed to take root in our flesh.

In the end an important theme in Haven of Thorns – perhaps the most important – is the power structures and prejudices that prevail when colonisation has ended, along with its associated forms of exploitation, and a state becomes self-governing. It’s about who remains in power, why they remain there, and what it means for those who do not have an equal share in that power. I’m not just talking about physical force. I’m talking about value judgments that disenfranchise people based on their inherent qualities. Things like language, religion, or skin colour. Having a voice and having the power to exercise and sustain what you advocate for are all very different things, and this is why these stories cannot be apolitical. A person’s life, their right to life, and their rights to liberty and equality should not be a matter of politics – and yet they are. Because politics is about power. And power is far too often exercised unjustly.

Blaming the old oppressor only works up to a point. At some stage, a country has to face what it has done and continues to do to itself, and whether they are going to choose to make collective, powerful, and perhaps jarring value changes for the sake of basic human rights and justice. After all, prejudice is learned. It can be unlearned.

While this tale focuses on the legacy of colonisation, these same principles lie behind the abuse of authority and the untended wounds of what has happened to the black community in America for centuries, itself founded upon ideas of racial superiority. The police brutality coupled with endorsement from the highest offices in the land is a horrific ugliness – but worse, is those who choose not to see it for what it is. Those who tweet #alllivesmatter. Those who say they don’t see colour. Those who question why race has to be dragged into everything. To quote Moses in Dreamworks’s The Prince of Egypt: “I did not see because I did not wish to see.” This is privilege. This is us inviting contagion into our societies and refusing to mask up and letting it kill us from the inside out. But unlike a contagion, this is discriminatory. That is the essence of it. The differential treatment is the point. If you question why people are burning and looting, why they aren’t being “peaceful”, why they don’t comply (they do – it doesn’t work, as anyone who watched the clip of the CNN reporter would know), why they are so angry – then you are in the haven of thorns. You just refuse to acknowledge it, because the only light seeping into your little puddle is filtered, screened, and you’d rather ignore the shadows cast by the thorns.

So many of the choices in Haven of Thorns hinge upon deciding whether to preserve or whether to overturn these vicious cycles of hatred. It’s so painful to see these struggles continue to be mirrored in the real world, happening to real communities at this very moment. Part of me wants to stop writing this, because I cannot begin to capture the true agony of what is happening, no matter how much I empathise. But another part of me knows that I am in a position of great privilege, and perhaps it is time I put my voice to something that truly matters. Add another line to the anthem that advocates for these deep-set value changes that we need to make on a domestic and an international scale.

In the first very first chapter of this story, the royal palace burns. It may just as well have been a police station.

[orbemnews]

Asian American diplomats say discrimination holds them back as US competes with China US Rep. Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat and former diplomat, had top-secret security clearance as a State Department adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Afghanistan but was banned from working in or even on issues pertaining to Korea. “It felt like a very clear signal from the government and my workplace that they didn’t trust me fully,” the Boston-born Kim told CNN. It was, he said, “a painful and hurtful experience.” Michael Young, who calls himself a San Francisco “Chinatown boy,” spent 10 years serving as a US diplomat and, concurrently, in the Army Reserve. During that time, the State Department denied him assignments in China twice. “The second time I got denied, I appealed, and I appealed, and I appealed. It didn’t go anywhere,” he said. “At that point, I’d had enough.” He quit. Asian American diplomats say that as they try to serve their country, they face disproportionate hurdles in the form of extremely drawn-out security clearance waits, restrictions on where they can serve — sometimes based on incorrect information — and a flawed appeals process. Their efforts to change the system have had limited success, but their concerns are gaining traction as the US focuses more intently on the strategic importance of Asia, great power competition with China and North Korea’s nuclear threat. Democrats and Republicans, concerned about the potential loss of cultural and linguistic knowledge that could give the US an edge in global competition, have written legislation to address some of the issues. Asian American and Pacific Islander national security professionals are pressing the case that Chinese Americans in particular are the US’ greatest asset in understanding and countering Beijing’s economic, political and military aggression. In response to diplomats’ concerns, the Trump administration launched a task force to study assignment restrictions just before it left office. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has begun an ambitious effort to improve diversity and racial equity at the department, picked up the issue and is expected to make an announcement about it in the coming months. “I am very concerned about these reports,” Blinken told lawmakers at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in March. “I’ve spoken to Asian American colleagues in the department about them and, suffice to say, this is something that I’m looking into.” Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California told the secretary that assignment restrictions “not only affect an employee’s ability to get promoted to senior leadership, it also affects recruiting and retention. It deprives the United States potentially of cultural and language expertise, and it sends the false message that people who look like me happen to be more disloyal.” While this challenge is decades old, more than 20 current and former AAPI national security professionals who spoke to CNN said they have a strong sense that things have gotten worse in the past few years because, as one Washington-based diplomat said, of “bipartisan and especially Republican fear-mongering about China trying to infiltrate all aspects of society.” Data validates their sense of things. The State Department declined to answer questions, provide comment or share statistics about assignment restrictions, but CNN obtained a sensitive-but-unclassified 2018 letter to House lawmakers that said restrictions had affected 166 employees in 2015 and 168 in 2016. In 2017, that number nearly doubled to 307. When lawmakers asked for an explanation of the stark jump, the Trump administration never responded, a Capitol Hill aide said. Diplomats told CNN they have heard anecdotally that colleagues of Russian or Eastern European descent and some colleagues married to Israeli citizens may also have been restricted from certain assignments. But current and former diplomats, lawmakers and others say Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders appear to be more impacted than any other group. ‘Targeted’ In an open letter published in March, AAPI national security professionals wrote that “the xenophobia that is spreading as U.S. policy concentrates on great power competition has exacerbated suspicions, microaggressions, discrimination, and blatant accusations of disloyalty simply because of the way we look. Many of us have been targeted because we are either ethnically Chinese or simply look Asian.” “This is not to dismiss credible counterintelligence concerns as evidenced through indictments of US citizens — some of whom are White — spying for China. Treating all Asian-Americans working in national security with a broad stroke of suspicion, rather than seeing us as valuable contributors, is counterproductive to the greater mission of securing the homeland,” the signatories said. AAPI diplomats speak of the stress, anxiety and pain the restrictions cause, particularly at a time of amplified anti-Asian hate. A 2020 survey by the State Department’s Asian American Foreign Affairs Association found 70% of respondents believed the assignment restriction process was biased, and 41% believed there were outright errors in the process One diplomat with an assignment restriction found their Diplomatic Security file said they were seeking citizenship in that country. That was “unequivocally false,” this person said. Security officials had not even asked them about it. Another diplomat was restricted from serving in China because the department said she had multiple immediate family members in the country. She has none, she said, and never has. The core issue, Rep. Kim told CNN, revolves around some of America’s oldest questions: “What does it mean to be an American, and whether or not they’re forever going to see people of color, and especially of AAPI descent, as fully American.” “I was always told diversity is our strength and that’s what we want to push forward to the world, but it doesn’t feel that way from my experience,” Kim continued. “Instead, we come at it from a place where my diversity is a threat or potential threat first, and only when that is as clearly resolved as it can be, then it can be seen as an asset.” The current and former diplomats who spoke to CNN, some of whom asked to be anonymous in order to speak frankly, mentioned the fear of speaking out about assignment restrictions and how discussion often gets shut down because the restrictions are framed as a national security issue. “All of us who are currently employed fear there could be deleterious impacts on our security clearances because we’re pushing back,” one said. Losing your security clearance makes it almost impossible to work as a diplomat. But many described this moment as a civil rights awakening for Asian Americans. ‘Where are you really from?’ “We’re starting to wake up and think, wait a minute, should we be putting up with this anymore, this ‘Where are you really from?’ attitude,” a diplomat serving overseas said. “We’re Americans.” Assignment restrictions are largely handled by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the security and law enforcement branch of the State Department, which is overseen by a political appointee who is often a security professional, sometimes a longtime “DS” officer, who reports to the department’s undersecretary for management. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual says it applies assignment restrictions “to prevent potential targeting and harassment by foreign intelligence services as well as to lessen foreign influence and/or foreign preference security concerns,” for instance, if an employee or close family members maintain dual citizenship with that country or have substantial financial interests or foreign contacts there. Assignment restrictions can be put in place when initial security clearance determinations are made, before a staffer begins work at the department, during reinvestigations or when a diplomat’s personal life changes because of marriage or other circumstances. They can also be applied weeks before someone is meant to start a job. Restrictions can also apply to jobs focused on a particular country because they “may present vulnerabilities for targeting when there is frequent official contact with foreign individuals.” Temporary assignments in that country cannot last longer than 60 days in any 365-day period. Carol Perez, the director general of the foreign service who oversees personnel issues told a House committee in September that the restrictions aren’t “necessarily that you were born in a country or you have some sort of affiliation, the question is for countries in which there are critical intelligence threats … what are the family connections that you might have that would make you susceptible to some sort of foreign influence.” But Rep. Kim’s experience of being barred from working on or in Korea — assignments he never sought — and the experiences of current and former diplomats CNN spoke with demonstrate that critical intelligence threats aren’t always a factor. Restrictions are applied against diplomats going to close US allies, such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Yuki Kondo-Shah, the California-born daughter of a Japanese American mother, was selected for a position at the US consulate in Fukuoka, Japan, in November 2016. Six weeks before she was to start there in July 2018 — with plane tickets in hand and moving arrangements settled — Diplomatic Security emailed to say she couldn’t be posted there. She was one of several diplomats who recounted the struggle of having jobs yanked at the last minute and recalls the emotionally draining experience of lodging an appeal, including the financial challenge of hiring a lawyer. Kondo-Shah’s file noted that her mother was Japanese, that she had family and friends in Japan, that she had volunteered to help with tsunami relief there. It also said, incorrectly, that she had Japanese citizenship. She appealed and, in a shock to many of her colleagues, won. She flew to Japan weeks later. Diplomats noted other inconsistencies in the way the policy is applied, including that colleagues who are married to Chinese, Japanese and Korean citizens — the definition of a “close family member” — still serve in those countries. Apart from the assignment restrictions, AAPI diplomats sometimes wait so long for security clearances that they lose job opportunities and internships, while non-Asian peers appear to get approvals within months. The net result, diplomats and their advocates say, is a steady erosion of morale and opportunity at the personal level, and a loss for the institution and US national security. Many diplomats told CNN they considered leaving the department; several did. ‘I wanted to serve’ One former diplomat spoke of losing an internship and a department scholarship because her security clearance took almost three years to come through. She watched fellow students get clearances within months and was particularly struck when a peer with an eerily similar background — another American who had gone to a top university, also had studied in China, also had family there — got a clearance in six months. The former diplomat said she and colleagues saw one major difference with this peer: “Their name and their face are not as Chinese sounding as mine.” Her observation echoes one other AAPI diplomats have made: Chinese American diplomats who took Western-sounding surnames on marriage went on to serve in China despite having immediate family there. One diplomat, discussing the hurdles AAPI diplomats face getting clearances, joked bitterly that “it helps immensely to change one’s last name.” The former diplomat said she had quit because the department “just made me feel so small. … I wanted to give back to my country, I wanted to serve, I wanted to be an asset, but the entire time I was seen as a threat and made to feel that I didn’t belong, and that was hurtful.” And there is the invisible career cost. These diplomats meet the criteria for top-secret security clearances, yet the assignment restrictions can create a “stigma,” one diplomat said. “You’re in the department in highly sensitive meetings, or if you are trying to bid on your next assignment, and you have that cloud hanging over you — people think, ‘Can this person be trusted?’ or ‘Maybe we shouldn’t hire this person because they might have a security restriction?’ It definitely prevents people from serving to their fullest ability.” Taxpayer dollars It also costs the US taxpayer. The government spends up to $480,000 per diplomat for two years of language training in what the State Department inspector general calls “super hard languages” — Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean — before diplomats start work at a post. It costs millions of dollars when “we could instead be tapping our workforce that already has that ability and language skill, and immediately start going into the field and supporting US policy,” said one US-based diplomat. Despite the challenges, AAPI diplomats are increasingly optimistic about change. They point to bipartisan support in Congress and also to Blinken. Blinken “is familiar with the issue, he recognizes that it is a problem, he has acted on it before and made the only change so far that has helped,” said one diplomat. As deputy secretary of state during the Obama administration, Blinken helped institute reform that required Diplomatic Security to tell diplomats if they had assignment restrictions and why. Before that, diplomats often weren’t aware until they applied for and got jobs in those countries. Led by lawmakers such as Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, Congress passed legislation in 2017 that created a formal process for diplomats to appeal their assignment restrictions within 30 days and required State to explain the number and nature of restrictions and preclusions in the last three years. The process that has emerged is more of a review than an appeal, diplomats and House aides said. If diplomats ask for assignment restrictions to be reconsidered, they go back to the same office — Diplomatic Security — that made the original decision. And instead of explaining the nature of the restrictions, Diplomatic Security just sent lawmakers annual numbers with no elaboration. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, and the committee’s lead Republican, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, have added language to the Department of State Authorization Act of 2021 calling for an appeals process that wraps up within 60 days and mirrors the steps taken when a diplomat appeals the denial or retraction of their security clearance: The issue goes to another group within State to review. Source link Orbem News #American #Asian #AsianAmericandiplomatssaydiscriminationholdsthembackasUScompeteswithChina-CNNPolitics #China #competes #Diplomats #discrimination #holds #Politics

[impressivepress]

We Should Be Grateful Charlie Chaplin Made 'The Great Dictator' When He Did

Charlie Chaplin is understood to have confided to his friends that, had he known about the full horrors of the Nazi regime, he would probably not have got around to making The Great Dictator.

“There are things in our century that wipe away even the most poisonous smile from the face of the most passionate satirist,” wrote one of the 20th century’s foremost historians. He was referring to Karl Kraus, the great Austrian journalist-polemicist-satirist, whose book The Last Days of Mankind, written in the inter-war years, is a 20th-century classic.  When it came to lampooning National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, Kraus says, “nothing occurs to me”. A little later, he adds: “The word fell asleep when that world awoke.”

When the Holocaust became common knowledge, Chaplin must have also felt that his craft was inadequate to render Hitler’s world in any known cinematic genre – political satire or vaudeville, burlesque or tragedy. The Great Dictator was conceptualised and filmed when it was still possible to make fun of the Fuehrer.

Chaplin started shooting for the film in September 1939, just days after Germany invaded Poland. But he had been planning a movie on Hitler for years before that, and worked on his script through 1938-39. From Nazi newsreels, he had carefully studied Hitler’s mannerisms and the way he harangued large crowds. Chaplin also watched Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will (1935) several times over to make sure that he knew Nazi rituals well enough; his incredible talent for mimicry did the rest.

The film shoot took a little over six months. By the time Chaplin sat down to edit and add the music tracks, Hitler was overrunning Belgium and Holland while France was gently nudging itself into surrender. When The Great Dictator released in the US in October 1940, London was being carpet-bombed by the Luftwaffe, Neville Chamberlain had already made way for Churchill as the British prime minister and Warsaw’s Jews were being herded into the first ghettos run by the Nazis. However, the tone of the film had already been set before the active hostilities began. A tragedy loomed clearly enough then, but few thought yet that it was the Armageddon.

This perspective is important for understanding the satirical and political scope of Chaplin’s film. The ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’ was not only in the future, it had perhaps not begun to take shape as yet in even the most malevolent Nazi sensibility. Chaplin had set out to spoof the pompous bully who was absurd and arrogant, but not yet quite the hideous hangman history was to know him as. Hitler still regarded Mussolini with something of the awe that the disciple reserves for his mentor – this gave Chaplin the opportunity to flesh out a memorable love-hate-love relationship – and  Mussolini’s precipitous invasion of Greece, which annoyed Hitler no end, was not to happen before end-October 1940.

The Great Dictator can very well look a tad too light-hearted today; the fact that an uproariously funny story is being told around what can only be described as unmitigated evil can surprise its modern-day viewers. But it is undoubtedly a film true to its time.

And The Great Dictator is much more than a parody. It is a stirring denunciation of fascism’s core principles – xenophobia, intolerance, bigoted nationalism and anti-Semitism. It is funny, but its world is intrinsically violent. Hynkel is often nervous, even shy, but in the presence of his pretty secretary, his predatory instincts are aroused in a trice.  Holding her in a tight embrace, he digs his teeth into her neck with sudden vehemence, the whole act looking more like the tearing of flesh than love-making. The utter casualness with which he gives up his prey when the telephone buzzes suddenly makes the scene even more chilling.

Writing in Criterion, Michael Wood notes the effortlessness with which Chaplin shows us “how lethal the ludicrous can be”:

Nothing in the film is quite as frightening as the sight and sound of the ludicrous Hynkel casually ordering the execution of three thousand striking workers.

Chaplin plays around marvellously with this crossover between rollicking humour and unmixed horror. Wood has pointed out how the harmless barber waving a razor over the bare throat of a customer looks more murderous than Hynkel ever does in the film. But the masterly mixing of the strains of Johannes Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Dance no 5’ into this edge-of-the-seat scene adds that piquancy which is signature Chaplin.

Again, as the barber sets out on his first date with Hannah, the storm-troopers arrive to get him. A long shot shows the SS men approaching the couple from one end of the street. The barber stops dead, turns around and heads in the other direction nonchalantly, as though nothing was the matter. Another long shot captures another SS column closing in on him from the other direction. Now in panic, the barber scrambles for safety, running first this way and then that, and the camera pans back a long distance before an aerial shot shows him being swept up by an avalanche of burly SS men.

As masterful as the casual mixing of horror and humour is the blending of the ridiculous and the sublime in The Great Dictator. Gracefully, even tenderly, Hynkel performs the unforgettable balloon-ballet with Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ playing softly on the soundtrack. But then he slips on to a tabletop, and goes on bouncing the globe-balloon off his behind, with loving care, a dreamy, enchanted look frozen on his face. When finally he tries to get both his arms around the balloon, it bursts with a scream in his face.

Again, as the fugitive Schultz plots Hynkel’s assassination while sheltering in the ghetto, a serio-comic drama plays out around a noble enterprise. Each of the ‘volunteers’ (Schultz smartly rules himself out right at the beginning) pledges himself to the great project, but is aghast when he finds the fateful coin in his pie. The scene  soon turns into a boisterous farce.

The Nazis hated Chaplin, because they found his humour irreverent, subversive – hardly the kind that promoted the ‘wholesome family values’ so beloved of Hitler. In his 1931 trip to Berlin, Chaplin proved hugely popular in Germany and, though the Nazis did not like his spectacular success in all his public engagements, there was not much they could do at that point.

After Hitler rose to power, however, things changed dramatically for Chaplin, as they did for many other popular artists, German and non-German. In 1935, Goebbels banned The Gold Rush in Germany, presumably because the film ran counter to wholesome family entertainment. Even before that, in 1934, Goebbels had authorised the publication of a slanderous little book titled The Jews are Looking at You which, among other choice epithets, described Chaplin as “a disgusting Jewish acrobat” (Chaplin was not Jewish, though). Chaplin had seen the book, and it is safe to assume that his resolve to make a film around Nazism hardened because of it.

Given this background, he could hardly have chosen to play a part in the film that was non-Jewish. And Chaplin being Chaplin, he decided to deliver the coup de grace by playing Hitler as well. It must have been with grim satisfaction that he wrote into one of the opening credits of The Great Dictator words that dripped with irony: “Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental”. Of course, Chaplin wanted his audience to not look at the dictator and the barber through the same eyes. He expected the audience to laugh right through the film, but he hoped that while the viewers would laugh with the barber for the most part, they would laugh at Hynkel with derision, loathing and worse.

The Great Dictator represented another momentous event: it was Chaplin’s first ‘talkie’. (Modern Times in 1936 had a character screaming at people from a giant TV screen for a few moments, besides the inspired nonsense of the tramp’s song at the cabaret. But it remained a silent movie otherwise.) Chaplin seems to be exploring the enormous potential of his new ‘device’ with great relish here. Hynkel’s public speeches are pure genius. He speaks a mock German that bristles with coughs, sibilants, gutturals and splutters, with occasional identifiable words like sauerkraut (pickled cabbage) and schnitzel (fried meat slice) thrown in with  gusto. It is pure gibberish delivered at an extremely, feverishly high pitch – so much so that the microphone itself cringes on its stem.

In another scene, Hynkel dictates an official note to a typist in a matter-of-fact manner. He is speaking aloud while she is taking it down on her typewriter. When Hynkel spouts a long, solemn sentence, she knocks out just a couple of letters. But when he offers only a monosyllable, she types furiously for several lines, clanging the machine as she works it intently. Hynkel looks on, amazed, but she remains completely unruffled, business-like. This playing-off of sound against meaning is an idea that could only have occurred to someone who was transitioning  from silent to talking films, but it is hard to imagine anyone else picturising it as brilliantly as Chaplin.

The film’s last sequence, of the barber speaking as Hynkel to his victorious troops, is an audacious piece of cinematic thinking. The speech’s content is perched on the edge of mawkishness, and as it begins to crescendo, it sounds very nearly shrill. And yet, in the end, Chaplin pulls it off magnificently. The barber hesitates, approaches the microphone apprehensively, and begins speaking haltingly. As he does that, the frame slowly sheds its sharp focus, becomes somewhat bleary, over-exposed, fuzzy. As his speech gains in passion and force, the speaker himself is no longer very real himself, and as Hannah looks up to the sky, the screen is bathed in a soft, other-worldly light. This is neither Hynkel nor even the barber speaking here, but Chaplin himself stepping in to deliver his own message as the creator of the movie. Come to think of it, this could have been the only way The Great Dictator could have concluded.

For years before the film was made, cartoonists had exploited the quite remarkable resemblance of Chaplin’s moustache with Hitler’s. Chaplin was, of course, all too aware of it himself (which is why he thought of casting himself as the dictator). He knew that, with the minimum of effort, his face could be touched up to look like Hitler’s. And he also knew that the similarities stretched beyond their physiognomy: they were born within four days of each other – Chaplin on April 16, Hitler on 20, both in 1889; and both rose from poverty and neglect to power and prominence.

Did these similarities trouble Chaplin? Many believe they did, Chaplin’s own son telling us they actually haunted his father:

Dad could never think of Hitler except with a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination. “Just think,”’ he would say uneasily, “he’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around.”

Of course Hitler was not only a madman. Nor was Chaplin merely a comic. But in The Great Dictator, the intersection of insanity and laughter produced a memorable movie. Chaplin says he couldn’t have made the film except in 1938-39. We are grateful that he made it when he did.

~

Anjan Basu · 16. Apr 2019.

[red-sniper]

How the hell is speciesism worse than antisemitism

I’m aware I worded it badly. I did not mean to offend anyone. Yes, I think speciesism, in this case industrial meat production, fur industry, sport+entertainment hunting, general animal abuse just for the sake of it etc. is as shitty as antisemitism. In *some* cases do I think it’s worse. No, I do not view jews as less or equate them with animals. I’m not an elitist vegan nor do I think killing animals for food is automatically an act of evil or whatever. I am aware that the struggle of jews facing discrimination isn’t the same thing as speciesism. Let me explain my point:

Speciesism is the idea that humans are better or superior to other animals. Discrimination based on species. Which, yes, is a real thing since humans exist. It exists more in some cultures than in others but it’s still an issue that does not only harm other animals but also the human species itself. And yes, humans are also just animals. Nothing more and nothing less. We need to pull the sticks out of our asses and stop pretending that we’re the best thing on the planet. We are, without question, not the only sentient creatures that are capable of feeling complex emotions. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either misinformed or simply ignorant.

The word “holocaust” originates from animal slaughter. The nazis used facilities built for the mass slaughter of animals as inspiration for the camps. They put the jews on the same level as cattle and did very similar things to them. Many surviving jews compared the camps to slaughterhouses and their experiences to those of the animals in there. Many also could empathize much more with those animals and some went vegetarian/vegan because of that reason. People get pissed at vegan groups for comparing animal suffering and the WW2 holocaust, slavery, etc. while many jews and other marginalised groups with a history of similar treatment make the same comparisons. Comparing animal abuse/slaughter with the holocaust and pointing out the parellels does not take anything away from the other. Both are horrible, disgusting and based on similar ideas. 

Here are some words on it from jewish authors:

“Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, made the comparison in several of his stories, including Enemies, A Love Story, The Penitent,and The Letter Writer. In the latter the protagonist says, “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.”[3] In The Penitent the protagonist says “when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.”[8]

Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, a pacifist, conscientious objector and Holocaust victim who was sent to Dachau for “being a strong autonomously thinking personality”,[9] wrote in his “Dachau Diaries” (kept at the University of Chicago Library[10]) that “I have suffered so much myself that I can feel other creatures’ suffering by virtue of my own”.[11] He further wrote, “I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale”.[11]

Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar also made the comparison. She wrote that if we had not accepted the inhumane transportation of animals to the slaughterhouses we would not have accepted the transportation of humans to the concentration camps.[12] In another article, making the same connection, she wrote that every act of cruelty suffered by thousands of living creatures is a crime against humanity.[13]

J. M. Coetzee, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, invoked the image of the slaughterhouse in describing the Nazi’s treatment of Jews: “… in the 20th century, a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings.”[4]”

https://www.jewishveg.org/schwartz/holocaust.html

Kupfer-Koberwitz, Yourcenar and many others make the point that without speciesism, we would have much less marginalisation and discrimination within our own species as well. It all originates from that same human arrogance, egoism and the idea that some beings are worth more or less than others. Speciesism is a seed that inspired and helped things like racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, etc. grow. 

How is speaking against discrimination based on bias, ethnics, race, etc. while practising the same discrimination and bias towards another group (in this case, nonhuman animals) okay? 

“The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.” -Leonardo DaVinci

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” -Dr. Paul Farmer

I’m sure that, if humanity would be more aware, tolerant and respectful towards other species, treating members of their own species better and recognizing that we are all equal would be much easier as well. But as long as there is speciesism, there will be racism, xenophobia, etc. 

[realeconomicimpact]

Let America Be America Again (By Darren Walker)

By Darren Walker, President, Ford Foundation

(reprinted with permission from the Ford Foundation)

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.   (America never was America to me.)   Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.   (It never was America to me.) – Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again, 1936

In moments of uncertainty, we often return to familiar touchstones. 

For me, one such anchor of comfort and clarity is the poetry of Langston Hughes, icon of the Harlem Renaissance. 

During recent weeks, I’ve found myself ruminating on Hughes’s Let America Be America Again, especially its astonishing opening stanzas. In these ten lines, Hughes evokes the power of the American promise, coupled with the pain of indignity and inequality. He speaks to the complex mix of rage and hope, of anxiety and optimism, that characterizes the black experience in America—and which I would argue has characterized the experience of many Americans at some point, white, brown, black, indigenous, and immigrant. Over the past year, it has become clear that the noxious swill of rage and anxiety remains as potent as ever. Regardless of which side of the US election each of us was on, we all find ourselves living with a public discourse that has become increasingly callous, contemptuous, and polarizing. So, as we launch ourselves into a new year, I find myself reflecting on where we go from here—how we counterbalance anger and hopelessness with radical hope and optimism, and how we create, in Hughes’s perfectly-chosen words, “that great strong land of love” and dignity for all.

Two reactions to our current moment

Hughes’s poem captures a tension I’ve noticed in many of my daily interactions over the past several weeks, in all kinds of settings and among all kinds of people, including myself: a tension between a sense that our times are dangerously unprecedented, and a sense that while dangerous, they are all too familiar.

On the one hand, many of us feel that the world has been turned upside down. To read the headlines is to see an unfamiliar landscape in which several unsettling trends have converged. The proliferation of fake news and the prevalence of brazen falsehoods on air and online are undermining faith in basic facts. The bourgeoning democratic institutions that captured the imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville nearly 200 years ago—our civil society, our free press, our universities—are increasingly beleaguered and besieged. Rising hate speech and violence across the country has rightfully frightened many people. All of this constitutes an assault on what we thought were well-established societal norms.

On the other hand, some of us look to history and recognize that our current moment is not without precedent. To me, one clear parallel is America’s post-Reconstruction era in the South, when some Americans worked to roll back and repeal the hard-won voting rights, educational, and economic opportunities that brought freedom and dignity to the lives of so many of their fellow citizens.

Indeed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all kinds of othering are not new. Identity politics has always been a part of American life. Our founding fathers codified identity politics into our earliest documents, valuing the voices and contributions of white men above all others: Women were denied the right to vote; enslaved African Americans counted as three-fifths of a person; indigenous peoples were exploited and marginalized. And throughout our history, waves of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere were initially met with suspicion and often discrimination. It’s important to remember that over the course of our long, messy march towards justice, women and men—not just our predecessors, but we, the people, of every generation—have endured prejudice and persecution. We have seen it with our own eyes, and lived it in our own lives.

I’ll never forget coming of age as a gay man in the 1980s—watching AIDS ravage our community as politicians stayed silent. I’ll never forget the brutality of Apartheid, and how our own American government condemned Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and the freedom fighters seeking to end that unconscionable regime. I’ll never forget watching as the marches and protests unfolded in Ferguson in August of 2014, or standing with John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge a few months later, awestruck as he recounted the bloody Sunday in Selma fifty years earlier.

America’s rich and inspiring history has taught us that progress is not linear. As the dazzling Zadie Smith recently wrote, “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive.” So while these twin reactions—the sense that our moment is either unprecedented or has clear precedent —may seem at odds, they actually reaffirm a deeper understanding of the persistence of injustice in our world. They also remind us of the strength we must continue to find within ourselves to persevere and fight for our democratic institutions and ideals.

Confronting divisions, affirming dignity

Over the past three years, I’ve written about the ways inequality creates and exacerbates divisions. These include divisions of class, race, gender, identity, and ability, as well as differences in how we make sense of injustice in our lives.

There is no better illustration of this last category than the political binary of an election year, when our two-party system induces us to spend months defining our collective future in terms of us versus them, this stark choice versus that one. This rhetoric reinforces the notion of zero sum outcomes, and encourages us to believe that the gains of one happen at the expense of another.

We must resist this impulse. It is easy to lose sight of what we have in common, but the fact is that all of us share a fundamental human aspiration: to live in dignity. This is true no matter what we look like, where we live, how we worship, who we love, or what our abilities are. Whether by holding a decent-paying job, having agency in the decisions that affect us, or freely expressing our thoughts and creativity, we spend our lives in pursuit of dignity for ourselves and our families. Recognizing this universal quest for dignity is a prerequisite for any meaningful work toward social justice.

I am not suggesting that dignity is guaranteed. There are people and systems that seek to rob people of their innate dignity. They advance narratives that pit communities against one another—that permit some to falsely claim that the only way to ensure dignity for yourself is to strip it from others.

Of course, the dignity of one person does not preclude that of another. We can lift a poor Latina out of poverty and save a rural white man’s factory job. We can fight to protect black lives and the lives of the law enforcement officers who protect us. We can hold up a beacon of light for the “tempest-tost” refugees who seek safety and opportunity on our shores, and feel safe and secure in our neighborhoods and gathering places.

I’m not simply saying that we can do all of these things; I’m saying we must.

Our current context demands we question our assumptions and expand our understanding of who is vulnerable and excluded. If inequality fuels the fault lines of division, then our shared pursuit of dignity must help bridge the gaps. To borrow a phrase from the brilliant artist Lilla Watson, our liberation is bound up together.

The path forward: “America will be!”

It might be tempting to ignore or abandon the mutual obligation that ties us together, to embrace a kind of nihilism of indifference or, worse, to retreat into anxiety or rage. But we can choose a better path forward. With history as our guide, we can follow a path of hope—radical hope.

For Langston Hughes, born in 1902, the gap between America’s promise and its practices was wide. The great-grandchild of slaves on one side and slaveholders on the other—the child of educators and organizers—Hughes lived a life that demonstrated that the overwhelming fact of injustice does not obviate or relieve in any way our responsibility to act against it. He showed that a person can simultaneously feel righteous anger about the world and radical optimism for it. We must affirm the creed to which he gave voice, that the work of creating the America we envision requires optimism and resolve.

“America never was America to me,” Hughes wrote in the penultimate stanza of his masterpiece. “And yet I swear this oath—America will be!”

For as much progress as we have made, America has yet to fully live up to its promise and founding aspiration to be a nation of liberty, dignity, and justice for all. Yet this noble vision remains as profound as ever.

At the Ford Foundation, our commitment to achieving this vision will not change. We resolve to continue fostering a fairer, more just America and world. We remain steadfast and unyielding in our support of the institutions and leaders fighting injustice and addressing inequality of every kind and category. And we are grateful for your leadership—and partnership—during the critical months and years ahead.

Please visit the Ford Foundation website for more information about the organization and its work.

[oldguardaudio]

PowerLine 🔥 Highlights of President Trump – Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Press Conference

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Daily Digest

Highlights of the Trump-Netanyahu Press Conference

Obama’s Secret Communications with Mullahs Undermined American Foreign Policy

Popovich pops off on Trump

Dem comeback on hold in Minnesota

Ready for Warren?

Highlights of the Trump-Netanyahu Press Conference

Posted: 15 Feb 2017 02:37 PM PST

(John Hinderaker)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington meeting with President Trump. Prior to their meeting, they conducted the usual dual press conference. No major news was made, but several interesting points emerged:

1) I’ve rarely seen Netanyahu look so happy. He must be almost as relieved to see the end of the Obama administration as we are.

2) President Trump indicated that he was open to alternatives to the two-state solution, an immutable point of American policy for a long time:

So, I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.

This is smart, I think. The Palestinians need to understand that if they don’t shape up, they don’t get a state. Netanyahu finessed the question:

I read yesterday that an American official said that if you ask five people what two states would look like, you’d get eight different answers. Mr. President, if you ask five Israelis, you’d get twelve different answers.

(LAUGHTER)

But rather than deal with labels, I want to deal with substance.

3) A journalist effectively accused Trump of being responsible for a rise in anti-Semitic incidents:

Mr. President, since your election campaign and even after your victory, we’ve seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic — anti- Semitic incidents across the United States. And I wonder, what do you say to those among the Jewish community in the states and in Israel and maybe around the world who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones?

Trump responded vaguely and with great restraint. Netanyahu answered a different question, then returned to the outrageous imputation against the president:

And finally one — if I can respond to something that I know from personal experience, I’ve known President Trump for many years, and to allude to him or to his people, his team, some of whom I’ve known for many years too — can I reveal, Jared, how long we’ve known you? Well, he was never small, he was always big.

He was always tall. But I’ve known the president and I’ve known his family and his team for a long time. There is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than President Donald Trump. I think we should put that to rest.

Trump:

Thank you very much. Very nice. I appreciate that very much.

4) The first two journalists Trump called on were David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network and Katie Pavlich of Townhall. This caused Democratic Party journalists to go ballistic on Twitter. You can read all about it at Twitchy. The lack of self-awareness of liberal journalists never ceases to amaze.

One of their complaints is that Trump wasn’t hounded enough about General Flynn, although Brody did ask a question about Flynn, Russia, and Iran. Of course, the subjects of the press conference were American-Israeli relations and Israel and the Palestinians. The liberals were incensed that the journalists who were called on stayed on topic. As the press conference ended, someone called out: “Are you gonna answer any questions about your associates’ contact with the Russians during the campaign?” No such luck.

Obama’s Secret Communications with Mullahs Undermined American Foreign Policy

Posted: 15 Feb 2017 12:57 PM PST

(John Hinderaker)

The Democrats are trying to make a scandal out of the fact that one or more people associated with the Trump presidential campaign had telephone conversations with one or more representatives of the Russian government prior to Trump’s inauguration. Is there anything wrong with that? Not as far as we know. The CIA/NSA leakers have declined to say anything about the content of the conversations, so they must have been benign. Let’s release the tapes and eliminate all doubt, and then let’s fire the leakers and, if appropriate, send them to prison.

But in the meantime, let’s not forget an infinitely bigger scandal: in 2008, while he was running for the presidency, Barack Obama deliberately undermined American foreign policy by secretly encouraging Iran’s mullahs to hold out until he became president because he would be easier to deal with than President George Bush. I wrote about the Obama scandal here: “HOW BARACK OBAMA UNDERCUT BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S NUCLEAR NEGOTIATIONS WITH IRAN.” Check out the original post for links. Here it is:

In 2008, the Bush administration, along with the “six powers,” was negotiating with Iran concerning that country’s nuclear arms program. The Bush administration’s objective was to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. On July 20, 2008, the New York Times headlined: “Nuclear Talks With Iran End in a Deadlock.” What caused the talks to founder? The Times explained:

Iran responded with a written document that failed to address the main issue: international demands that it stop enriching uranium. And Iranian diplomats reiterated before the talks that they considered the issue nonnegotiable.

The Iranians held firm to their position, perhaps because they knew that help was on the way, in the form of a new president. Barack Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3. At some point either before or after that date, but prior to the election, he secretly let the Iranians know that he would be much easier to bargain with than President Bush. Michael Ledeen reported the story last year:

During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies. The secret channel was Ambassador William G. Miller, who served in Iran during the shah’s rule, as chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and as ambassador to Ukraine. Ambassador Miller has confirmed to me his conversations with Iranian leaders during the 2008 campaign.

So Obama secretly told the mullahs not to make a deal until he assumed the presidency when they would be able to make a better agreement. Which is exactly what happened: Obama abandoned the requirement that Iran stops enriching uranium so that Iran’s nuclear program has sped ahead over the months and years that negotiations have dragged on. When an interim agreement in the form of a “Joint Plan of Action” was announced in late 2013, Iran’s leaders exulted in the fact that the West had acknowledged its right to continue its uranium enrichment program:

“The (nuclear) program will continue and all the sanctions and violations against the Iranian nation under the pretext of the nuclear program will be removed gradually,” [Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif] added. …

“Iran’s enrichment program has been recognized both in the first step and in the goals section and in the final step as well,” Zarif said.

“The fact that all these pressures have failed to cease Iran’s enrichment program is a very important success for the Iranian nation’s resistance,” he added.

So Obama delivered the weak agreement that he had secretly promised the mullahs.

That, readers, is what a real scandal looks like.

Popovich pops off on Trump

Posted: 15 Feb 2017 09:28 AM PST

(Paul Mirengoff)

Gregg Popovich is a marvelous basketball coach; probably one of the three best the NBA has ever seen. His accomplishments with the San Antonio Spurs — a team he has led to five NBA titles — are remarkable.

Lately, Popovich has indulged in political commentary. To be more precise, he has taken to blasting President Trump.

There is plenty to dislike about Trump, but Popovich’s comments are of the knee-jerk variety. Worse, they play fast and loose with the facts.

Consider his latest shot at the president:

We all hope President Trump is successful. We hope he does some good things for everybody, but he didn’t start the presidency by mollifying any groups he disparaged during the campaign.

He didn’t say anything about women, or black people, or Mexican people, Hispanic people LGBT people, handicapped people. [He] acted like it never happened. So that willingness to do whatever it took to get elected, to say and act the way he did, I thought was unacceptable and really disgusting, so I said it.

When did Trump disparage LGBT people during the campaign? This is what Trump said about them during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention:

Whether you’re gay or straight, the Bill of Rights protects the rights of all of us to live according to our conscience.

Also this:

As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology, believe me.

When did Trump disparage black people during the campaign? He noted that many predominantly black neighborhoods are in terrible shape, which I think is indisputable, and he vowed to try to improve these neighborhoods. But disparaging black people? I don’t think it happened.

During the campaign, Trump disparaged Megyn Kelly, Hillary Clinton, Rosie O’Donnell, and other individual women. He also disparaged individual men too numerous to list.

However, the only disparagement of women as a group that I can think of occurred many years before the campaign in his “pussy grabbing” remarks. This comment did not manifest “a willingness to say anything to get elected.” It was made in private long before he ran for office. As a candidate, Trump apologized for these disparaging comments.

What about Popovich’s claim that Trump “didn’t start the presidency by mollifying any groups” he supposedly “disparaged during the campaign”? Trump started his presidency with his brief inauguration address, during which he said this:

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

I don’t know whether this statement “mollified” members of groups who felt “disparaged” by Trump. Many of them are probably beyond being mollified. It was, however, a clear statement that these groups and others should not be mistreated or disparaged.

With regard to Mexicans, a week after his inauguration Trump said this:

I have great respect for Mexico. I love the Mexican people. I work with the Mexican people all the time – great relationships.

During the campaign, Trump had disparaged Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. As president, though, Trump tweeted this:

Yes, it is true – Carlos Slim, the great businessman from Mexico, called me about getting together for a meeting. We met, HE IS A GREAT GUY!

Turning to what Popovich calls “LBGQT people,” we find that the White House issued this statement:

President Donald J. Trump is determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community. President Trump continues to be respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights, just as he was throughout the election. The executive order signed in 2014, which protects employees from anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination while working for federal contractors, will remain intact at the direction of President Donald J. Trump.

I don’t blame Popovich for not knowing much about what President Trump has said and done as a candidate or as president. He has his hands full figuring out how to contain Russell Westbrook, James Harden, and the collection of stars who play for Golden State. But maybe he should have someone do a little research before he spouts off about politics.

Indeed, it’s ironic that Popovich would discuss politics so ignorantly. He is famous for putting sports reporters down when they ask obvious questions about his tactics. For example:

One reporter asked if Pop had any regrets going with a smaller lineup.

Pop’s reply: “No. Are you coaching now? You should try not to do that.”

Note the clear difference between what the reporter did to Popovich and what Popovich is doing to Trump. The sports reporter observed the game and posed a reasonable question. Popovich, who derided the reporters for performing their job, pays scant attention to what the Trump administration has done and makes accusations.

During his latest anti-Trump diatribe, Popovich said “there’s going to be somebody who will say “just go coach your basketball team.” I’m not that “somebody.” I say if you want to talk politics intelligently, do your homework.

Dem comeback on hold in Minnesota

Posted: 15 Feb 2017 09:27 AM PST

(Scott Johnson)

Donald Trump narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in the contest at the top of the ticket in Minnesota this year, but in other respects, Republicans had an astoundingly good year. They amplified their majority in the Minnesota House to an unprecedented number in a presidential election cycle, when the turnout advantage usually accrues to Democrats and took the majority in the Minnesota Senate. Republicans haven’t held a majority in the state Senate in a long time. As Star Tribune legislative reporter Patrick Coolican put it in the Star Tribune: “Senate Republicans have endured the indignities of minority status for all but two of the past 44 years[.]” I took a look at the results in “What happened in Minnesota” (part 2 here, part 3 here).

It was a bad year for Democrats in Minnesota. They didn’t see it coming.

Chisago (don’t spellcheck me, bro) County borders Wisconsin not far from the Twin Cities. It is Trump territory; Trump handily carried Chisago County by a margin of 30 points.

The Democrats got a rerun in one of the state House legislative races in Chisago County yesterday. Only last week the Star Tribune published an excited preview of the special election. The Star Tribune noted the efforts that Democrats put into the race to pull it off and make a statement.

Now that the results are in, however, the excitement over at the Star Tribune has faded: “Republican Anne Neu will represent Chisago County in an open Minnesota House seat following her victory in a closely watched special election on Tuesday. Neu took 53 percent of the vote in the House District 32B race, while DFLer Laurie Warner took 47 percent.” In his Star Tribune Morning Hot Dish newsletter today, Coolican laconically observes: “That means the House now stands at 77-57 for the GOP.”

Congratulations and thanks are in order for the excellent Ms. Neu while we pause to note that the Dem comeback is on hold in Minnesota.

Ready for Warren?

Posted: 15 Feb 2017 08:02 AM PST

(Paul Mirengoff)

Charlotte Allen at the Weekly Standard reports on the marketing of Elizabeth Warren. It includes a book, The Fight Is Our Fight; a webpage, “Help us elect Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020”; and a Facebook page, “Ready for Warren.”

But is America ready for Warren? A new survey finds her running behind President Trump by six points, 42-36.

A poll was taken almost four years before the next presidential election is meaningless as a guide to whether Trump would defeat Warren. What may be significant is that the same pollsters found that a “generic Democrat” runs ahead of Trump by eight points, 43-35.

As Lloyd Bentsen might say: I knew Generic Democrat. Generic Democrat was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Generic Democrat.

The public has not taken a fancy to the shrill would-be Indian from Harvard. Warren, it seems, is damaged goods.

It may be unrealistic to imagine that the damage can be repaired by a book, a website, and a Facebook page.

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