#victims

[elegantzombielite]

"If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story."

Terry Pratchett, novelist (28th April 1948-2015)

[kendzytord]

Victims

Weezer but they are Victims, LOL

[autumnslance]

If we don't acknowledge the crimes of our kin in all their painful truth, then we do a disservice to their victims living and dead. But if we let people paint them as monsters who did monstrous things─things we believe we would never do─then we perpetuate a different but no less dangerous lie.

-Arenvald Lentinus, Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, "Laying the Past to Rest" (Healer Role Quests), on dehumanizing those who collaborated with the enemy and the range of victimization and sins that entails.

[glorioustidalwavedefendor]

The Estonia sank on 28 September 1994

With 852 victims, it is to date the worst shipping accident in post-war European history.

The cause of the accident was the bow visor opening in the storm.

STATISTICS:

Young people, and especially young men, survived the accident to a greater extent than the other passengers.

485 of the 989 people on board were women (49%),

BUT only 26 of the 137 survivors were women (19%).

While 26 (43%) of the 60 young men aged 20 to 24 on board were able to save themselves,

only 4 of a total of 40 (10%) women of the same age managed to do so.

Of the 15 children (under 15 years of age), only one boy survived.

The losses were particularly high among the 301 people aged 55 or over. Of these, only 7 were able to save themselves, including 5 under 65 and none over 75.

Meaning, not much has changed since the days of the sinking of the S.S. Arctic in 1854

[gece-misin-nesin]

why is healing always depicted as forgiving. you don't have to forgive the people who hurt you to heal, to be better.

you can hate them until the day you die and still have healed.

you can take revenge and still have healed. maybe the only way for you to heal is to take revenge.

why are revenge and hate always depicted as being antithetical to healing in fiction even though the characters you are talking about clearly wouldn't be able to heal without them? why is it the case in real life as well.

why is it the victims who have to be morally righteous? why are they held to a higher standard than their abusers. why are you judging the way victims react to trauma when you should be judging the people who inflicted that trauma in the first place?

why are victims the ones who are at fault when they didn't ask for any of it?

why is it the victims who always have to work for reconciliation. why are they the ones who have to be better than the ones who hurt them? why is hating the person who ruined their life considered being worse than the abuser. why would killing their abuser make them 'just as bad'?

why.

[awesomecooperlove]

EXPOSE TRUTH & SAVE LIVES

🌑🌑🌑

[wahroh]

Not the other way around.

[sansmoustache]

I expect to be blocked by a lot of people for what I will write but I need to write anyway.

To the people who say "believe the victims"/"stand behind women" do you really mean "if a woman says she is a victim I will believe her, her words is enough" ?

I am 40. One of my best friend was abused by an ex-boyfriend. I know how hard it was for her that not believed her, that she had to prove what she said. But her and I, we also know one other woman who lied to destroy her ex-boyfriend life. We also have a male friend, a teacher, who was accused of sexual assault by one of his female student. Fortunately for him, he had an alibi...

I think we should believe the victims and the women in the sense of it is important to realise that they are a lot of horror around us and that we should never blame a victim for what happened to them. We should also be aware than more women than men are victims of sexual abuses.

But....when we speak about one specific case I think we should be prudent. I personally will not say "if someone say they are a victim it is true" by principle. I know they are people who don't say the truth. Because they are lying, because they are psychotics, because their memory is tricking them...

I remember a colleague. A really great woman. She always believed rumors and people who said they were a victim at work until the day she was accuse of stealing money (we had the solid proof afterwards that it was someone else).

I don't write this in favor of Neil Gaiman. I am just afraid that so many well-intentioned people say that we should "always believe the victims" without any proof or investigation....

Before closing that long post I want to add that I of course never blame a victim. I know to much of them who feel guilty for what happened.

[zegalba]

Kerouac Magazine: Snap In The Room (1999)

[thepastisalreadywritten]

—

In Byron Smith’s new photography book, Ukrainians are pictured fleeing by any means possible — crammed into cars with pet dogs, waiting to board trains to Poland, or simply taking to suburban streets with infants and backpacks in hand.

As a photojournalist whose work often focuses on the plight of migrants (a mission that has taken him from Greek refugee camps to the battle for ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 and 2017), his instinct was quite the opposite: to run toward the danger.

“I feel like if you see these masses of people fleeing, it would be fake for me to really sympathize with them if I didn't go and see what they were fleeing from,” Smith told CNN in a video interview from Istanbul, Turkey.

Documenting Smith’s travels through Ukraine in the year following Russia’s unprovoked invasion in February 2022, “Testament ‘22 – A Visual Road Diary Through a War Zone” is a contemplative portrait of a nation at war.

The 192-page tome juxtaposes color with monochrome, defiance with despair, hope with fear.

—

The title references “My Testament,” an 1845 poem by Taras Shevchenko in which the author asks to be buried among the fields, rivers and steppes of his “beloved Ukraine.”

The photographer recalled reading it as he first ventured to Kyiv.

“It's pretty much (Shevchenko’s) last will and testament... And I'm riding into this war zone, the Russians are invading and I’m like, ‘Wow, I actually don't have a will and testament for myself, for my parents or family, or even anything to really leave behind for anybody.’

That played on me a bit, and it became the backbone for the story.”

The book serves, too, as a testament to the people of Ukraine, whose stories Smith felt compelled to share with the world.

Its publisher, Verlag Kettler, believes the photographer’s body of work can contribute to the “overwhelming evidence” of Russian crimes.

xxx

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Melanie Phillips

Jews — grotesquely designated in “victim culture” as an oppressor class — are the most victimised people on earth. Jew-hatred through the centuries has led to the persecution, attack and murder of millions. Today it continues at epidemic levels which are out of control throughout the west as well as in the Islamic world. 

Antisemites deny this victimisation. They claim that the Jews invent it, “playing the victim card” to conceal their assumed misdeeds and exploitation of others. They believe that Jews use the claim of antisemitism to enable them to “get away with it”. And what exactly do they believe Jews thus “get away with”? Why, that the Jews are a powerful and sinister cabal with global power which they use to further their own interests and harm others — in other words, all the antisemitic canards about the Jews that are a vicious lie but which antisemites believe to be true. 

Such people also resent any evidence of antisemitism because they want to hate the Jews without being prevented from doing so by social opprobrium. They cannot tolerate the truth about Jewish victimisation because that would reveal themselves to be the disgusting people they are. They want to be able to hate the Jews while continuing to drape themselves in the mantle of moral virtue.

Proponents of “victim culture” have a further problem with the victimisation of the Jews. Using their own “victim” status as a social and cultural weapon, they can’t tolerate the fact that the Jews never play the victim card. 

Despite the ever-ending persecution the Jews have suffered, they have always picked themselves up and sought to transcend their pain and distress by making the best out of their lives and the lives of others. 

The only reparations they sought after the Holocaust were to secure the return of what was rightfully theirs and had been stolen from them. They have never demanded that the Catholic church, the British ruling class or the continent of Europe pay reparations for the centuries of persecution they inflicted upon the Jews. They have never assumed that the appalling way the world has treated them means that the world owes them a living. 

They just got on with building positive and productive lives. From the ashes of the Holocaust, they created the spectacularly thriving, life-affirming State of Israel. And in the war that has followed the barbaric atrocities of last year’s October 7 pogrom in Israel, where a terrible toll has been taken of the best and bravest who are still steadily falling in battle, a grieving and traumatised people under constant attack is continuing to display astounding levels of heroism, steadfastness and resilience.

Despite the fact that they have been so badly victimised, Jews choose never to “be” victims, never to live or behave as victims. Stating this fact drives antisemites mad. “But they play the victim card all the time!” they scream. To them, Jew-hatred is a self-serving fiction. They can’t acknowledge the moral necessity of identifying its unique and all-too-real characteristics. They can’t recognise the difference between truth and lies. They can’t stand Jewish resilience. All that matters is maintaining their own warped and malevolent narrative about a world they choose not to understand. And that, of course, is why such people hate the Jews, who show these haters up for what they truly are.  

[henk-heijmans]

An Iraqi child jumps over the remains of victims found in a mass grave south of Baghdad, 2003 - by Marco Di Lauro (1970), Italian

[gale-gentlepenguin]

It’s easy to play the victim.

Because the truth is you don’t need much to pretend to be one.

All you need is something not going your way. All you need is one excuse to justify your actions.

And it’s so easy to do, because to those that pretend, you can use it when it’s convenient for you. And when it’s not, you can drop it.

But to those playing victim, be very careful, because one day, you might not be pretending and you can’t just drop it.

And the thing about real victims, there is no moral superiority, there are no benefits, only suffering and pain. Your screams and cries muffled by the screams and cries of pretenders. Your plight dismissed because you are just one of millions.

So don’t pretend to be a victim, try to help those that actually are.

[elisabethloxx]

Janet Lynn Shanahan on her wedding day, May 24, 1968. Janet was found strangled to death in her cars trunk in April 1969.