#Canadian genocidal policies

[enbycrip]

Canada does not get to hide its historical and ongoing genocidal actions and policies towards indigenous people.

And yes, coerced sterilisation *is* both genocide and eugenicist. I wish I didn’t have to keep explaining this to folk, but I do.

#genocide #native canadian #Canadian genocidal policies #indigenous genocide #indigenous canadians #first nations #coerced sterilisation #coerced abortion #canada

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Canada's watchdog for corporate wrongdoing says she has enough to launch an investigation of allegations that Nike Canada and a Canadian gold mining company are benefiting from the forced labour of Uyghurs in China.

It's the first time the office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) has launched an investigation since the federal government appointed Sheri Meyerhoffer to the role in April 2019.

Meyerhoffer made the announcement Tuesday in response to complaints lodged with her office by a coalition of 28 civil society organizations, including the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project.

The complainants alleged that Nike Canada Corp. has supply relationships with six Chinese companies that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) identified as using or benefiting from Uyghur forced labour.

The think tank released a report in 2020 estimating that more than 80,000 Uyghurs had been transferred to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @vague-humanoid

#cdnpoli #Foreign Policy #genocide tw #detention camps tw #China #capitalism #hypercapitalism #Nike #canadian mining

[agentfascinateur]

The 10 top politicians lobbied by the Canadian AIPAC:

And it's not happy with the UNRWA reversal...

#palestine #palestinians #gaza #genocide #childrens holocaust #mass murder #israeli apartheid #israeli occupation #israeli lobby #canada #unrwa #free palestine #free gaza #war crimes #settler colonialism #illegal settlements #aipac #cija #bronfman #canadian politics #foreign policy #zionism #idf terrorists #iof terrorism #ceasefire #arms embargo #traffic of influence #bribing politicians #the maple #investigative journalism

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Anyway.

For those of you aren't aware and aren't involved in NDN circles, the Supreme Court just declared that tribal territories and reservations are part of states and are under state jurisdiction, including in regards to charging someone and putting them on trial in state courts for crimes related to the tribe (as opposed to this being left up to tribal courts), undoing decades of precedent for the separation of tribal and state governments.

In a few months, the Supreme Court is also going to be giving a verdict on whether or not the Indian Child Welfare Act, the only thing keeping indigenous children with their families and communities instead of being "adopted" (trafficked) to white Christian families at every chance, is unconstitutional. This act is also dependent on the belief that tribes are sovereign nations and that giving our children to people outside of our tribes is akin to the US government taking Canadian children in the Canadian foster system and trying to adopt them out to American families.

If the ICWA falls, we're going to see a modern Sixties Scoop, with Native children being stolen from their tribes and families and cultures and assimilated into white Christian society. This is not only traumatizing for the children and their families, it's also a form of cultural genocide that has been used against us before and has devastating effects.

There are family members I never knew because they disappeared into the foster system as children.

This is the beginning of what's going to be wave after wave of attacks on indigenous sovereignty and tribal governance. The Supreme Court, even with a Democratic majority, has historically decided against upholding indigenous sovereignty and tribal protection. We're seeing genocide and forced assimilation become federal policy again.

edit: This post was made in June 2023, the Supreme Court decision in November 2023 upheld ICWA but on highly flimsy grounds and we will likely see it being revisted soon. Reblogs for this post are being turned off.

#ndn tag

[soon-palestine]

The Palestine exception at CBC After October 7, I dreaded going into work: every shift, the impact of the biases went into overdrive. Even at this early stage, Israeli officials were making genocidal statements that were ignored in our coverage. On October 9, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Even after this comment, my executive producer was still quibbling over uses in our scripts of the word “besieged” or references to the “plight of Palestinians.”

[..]

On October 20, I suggested having Hammam Farah, a Palestinian-Canadian psychotherapist, back on the network. In an earlier interview he had told us that his family were sheltering in Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox church in Gaza City. The following week, I learned from social media that his step-cousin had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on the 12th-century building. My executive producer responded to my pitch via instant message: “Yeah, if he’s willing. We also may have to potentially say we can’t verify these things though—unless we can.” I was stunned. Never in my nearly 6 years at CBC had I ever been expected to verify the death of someone close to a guest, or to put a disclaimer in an interview that we couldn’t fact-check such claims. That’s not a standard that producers had been expected to uphold—except, apparently, for Palestinians. 

[..]

In early November, I was asked to oversee production of an interview with a former US official now working for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank. During the interview, he was allowed to repeat a number of verifiably false claims live on air—including that Hamas fighters had decapitated babies on October 7 and that Gazan civilians could avoid being bombed if only they listened to the Israeli military and headed south. This was after civilian convoys fleeing southward via “safe routes” had been bombed by the Israeli military before the eyes of the world. As soon as I heard this second falsehood, I messaged my team suggesting that the host push back—but received no response. Afterwards, the host said she had let the comment slide because time was limited, even though she could have taken the time from a less consequential story later on in the program. The majority of Palestinian guests I spoke to during the first six weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza all said the same thing: they wanted to do live interviews to avoid the risk of their words being edited or their interview not being aired. These were well-founded concerns. Never before in my career had so many interviews been cancelled due to fear of what guests might say. Nor had there ever been direction from senior colleagues to push a certain group of people to do pre-taped interviews. (CBC told The Breach it “categorically rejects” the claim that interviews were “routinely cancelled”.)

[]

Editing out ‘genocide’    Most shows on the network seemed to avoid airing any mention of “genocide” in the context of Gaza.  On November 10, my senior producer pushed to cancel an interview I had set up with a Palestinian-Canadian entrepreneur, Khaled Al Sabawi. According to his “pre-interview”—a conversation that typically happens before the broadcastable interview—50 of his relatives had been killed by Israeli soldiers. The part of the transcript that concerned the senior producer was Al Sabawi’s claim that Netanyahu’s government had “publicly disclosed its intent to commit genocide.” He also took issue with the guest’s references to a “documented history of racism” and “apartheid” under Israeli occupation, as well as his suggestion that the Canadian government was complicit in the murder of Gazan civilians.

The senior producer raised his concerns via email to the executive producer, who then cc’ed one of the higher-up managers. The executive producer replied that it “sound[ed] like [his statement was] beyond opinion and factually incorrect.” The executive manager’s higher up chimed in, saying she thought the interview would be “too risky as a pre-tape or live [interview].” 

Despite the guest’s position aligning with many UN experts and Western human rights organizations, the interview was cancelled. (CBC told The Breach “the guest turned down our offer of a pre-taped interview,” but Al Sabawi had said to the producers from the start that he would only do a live interview.) Never in my nearly 6 years at CBC had I ever been expected to verify the death of someone close to a guest. That’s not a standard that producers had been expected to uphold—except, apparently, for Palestinians.

In another instance, a Palestinian-Canadian guest named Samah Al Sabbagh, whose elderly father was then trapped in Gaza, had part of her pre-taped interview edited out before it went to air. She had used the word “genocide” and talked about the deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. The senior producer told me the edit was because of time constraints. But that producer and the host were overheard agreeing that the guest’s unedited words were too controversial. (CBC told The Breach it “has not ‘cancelled’ interviews with Palestinians because they reference genocide and apartheid.”) By November 2023, it was getting harder to ignore the brazen rhetoric coming from senior Israeli officials and the rate of civilian death, which had few precedents in the 21st century. But you wouldn’t have heard about these things on our shows, despite a number of producers’ best efforts. (By early 2024, the International Court of Justice’s hearings—and later its ruling that Israel refrain from actions that could “plausibly constitute” genocide—forcibly changed the discussion, and the word “genocide” finally made some appearances on CBC.)

But back in late October, I booked an interview with Adel Iskandar, Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University, to talk about language and propaganda from Israeli and Hamas officials. The host filling in that day was afraid of complaints, was concerned about the guest wanting to be interviewed live, and judged him to be biased. Yet again an interview was cancelled.

A secret blacklist?  One Saturday in mid-October, I arrived at work shortly after the airing of an interview with the prominent Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization, Diana Buttu.  There had been a commotion, I was told. A producer from The National—the CBC’s flagship nightly news and current affairs program—had apparently stormed into the newsroom during the interview saying that Buttu was on a list of banned Palestinian guests and that we weren’t supposed to book her.  I heard from multiple colleagues that the alleged list of banned Palestinian guests wasn’t official. Rather, a number of pro-Israel producers were rumoured to have drawn up their own list of guests to avoid. Later, I was told by the producer of the interview that, after the broadcast, Buttu’s details had mysteriously vanished from a shared CBC database. By then, I had also discovered that the name and contact details for the Palestinian Ambassador Mona Abuamara, who had previously been interviewed, had likewise been removed. It didn’t seem coincidental that both guests were articulate defenders of Palestinian rights. While producers distressed by the CBC’s coverage of Gaza were speaking in whispers, pro-Israeli colleagues felt comfortable making dehumanizing comments about Palestinians in the newsroom. In one case, I heard an associate producer speak disparagingly about a guest’s decision to wear a keffiyeh for an interview before commenting that “[the host] knows how to handle these people.” This guest had dozens of family members killed by the Israeli military in Gaza.  It seemed the only Palestinian guest CBC was interested in interviewing was the sad, docile Palestinian who talked about their suffering without offering any analysis or solutions to end it. What they did not want was an angry Palestinian full of righteous indignation towards governments complicit in their family’s displacement and murder.  At this stage, I was starting to feel nauseous at work. And then one Saturday night, that sickness turned into anger.  I had been asked to finish production on a pre-taped interview with a “constructive dialogue” researcher on incidents of campus hostilities over the war and how to bring people together—the sort of interview CBC loves, as it’s a way to be seen covering the story without actually talking about what’s happening in Gaza.  I carried out the task in good faith, writing an introduction leading with an example of antisemitism and then another of anti-Palestinian hate, taking care to be “balanced” in my approach. But my senior producer proceeded to remove the example of anti-Palestinian hate, replacing it with a wishy-washing “both sides” example, while leaving the specific serious incident of antisemitism intact. He also edited my wording to suggest that pro-Palestinian protesters on Canadian campuses were on the “side” of Hamas.  I overheard the host thank the senior producer for the edits, on the basis that incidents of antisemitism were supposedly worse. While the introduction of these biases into my script was relatively minor compared to some other double standards I witnessed, it was a tipping point.  I challenged the senior on why he had made my script journalistically worse. He made up a bad excuse. I told him I couldn’t do this anymore and walked out of the newsroom, crying. 

Truth-telling about CBC That evening at home, the nausea and the anger dissolved, and for the first time in six weeks I felt a sense of peace. I knew it was untenable to stay at CBC. At a team meeting the following week, in mid-November, I said the things I had wanted to say since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza. I prefaced the conversation by saying how much I loved my team and considered some coworkers friends. I said the problems weren’t unique to our team but across the CBC.  But the frequency of Palestinian guests getting cancelled, the pressure to pre-tape this one particular group, in addition to the unprecedented level of scrutiny being placed on them, demonstrated a pattern of double standards. I said there seemed to be an unspoken rule around words like “genocide.” I pointed out that Arab and Muslim coworkers, especially those who were precariously employed, were scared of raising concerns, and that I and others had heard dehumanizing comments about Palestinians in the newsroom. (The CBC told The Breach that there “have been no specific reports of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic comments in the newsroom for managers to respond to or follow up”.) 

I said that two decades since the US-led invasion of Iraq, it was widely-acknowledged that the media had failed to do their jobs to interrogate the lies used to justify a war and occupation that killed one million Iraqis—and that as journalists we had a special responsibility to tell the truth, even if it was uncomfortable. A couple of coworkers raised similar concerns. Others rolled their eyes. (CBC told The Breach that it doesn’t recall there was anyone else who raised concerns in the meeting, but audio recordings show otherwise.) The question of why there was nervousness around this issue came up. I said one reason why we were adverse to allowing Palestinian guests to use the “G-word” was because of the complaint campaigns of right-wing lobby groups like HonestReporting Canada.  Indeed, in just 6 weeks, there were already 19 separate instances of HonestReporting going after CBC journalists, including a host on our team. HonestReporting had also claimed responsibility for the firing at two other outlets of two Palestinian journalists, one of whom was on maternity leave at the time.  All this had a chilling effect. Hosts and senior colleagues would frequently cite the threat of complaints as a reason not to cover Israel-Palestine. During my time there, a senior writer was even called into management meetings to discuss her supposed biases after a HonestReporting campaign targeted her. Her contract was cut short.

This policing of media workers’ output reinforced existing institutional tendencies that ensured CBC rarely deviated from the narrow spectrum of “legitimate” opinions represented by Canada’s existing political class.  Certain CBC shows seemed to be more biased than others. The National was particularly bad: the network’s prime time show featured 42 per cent more Israeli voices than Palestinian in its first month of coverage after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, according to a survey by The Breach.  Although some podcasts and radio programs seemed to cover the war on Gaza in a more nuanced way, the problem of anti-Palestinian bias in language was pervasive across all platforms.  According to an investigation in The Breach, CBC even admitted to this disparity, arguing that only the killing of Israelis merited the term “murderous” or “brutal” since the killing of Palestinians happens “remotely.” Images of children being flattened to death in between floors of an apartment building and reports of premature babies left to starve in incubators suggested otherwise.

It seemed the only Palestinian guest CBC was interested in interviewing was the sad, docile Palestinian who talked about their suffering without offering any analysis or solutions to end it.

I spoke to many like-minded colleagues to see if there was any action we could all take to push back on the tenor of our coverage, but understandably others were reluctant to act—even collectively—out of fear doing so would endanger their jobs. Some of those colleagues would have loved to have walked out, but financial responsibilities stopped them. There had been previous attempts at CBC to improve the public broadcaster’s coverage of Israel-Palestine. In 2021, hundreds of Canadian journalists signed an open letter calling out biases in the mainstream media’s treatment of the subject. A number of CBC workers who signed the letter were hauled into meetings and told they either weren’t allowed to cover the subject or would have any future work on the issue vetted. A work friend later regretted signing the letter because she got the sense that she had been branded as biased, leading to her pitches on Palestine being more readily dismissed. 

Smeared as antisemitic In mid-November, after laying out my concerns to my colleagues, the regular weekly pitch meeting took place. It was then that I pitched the two genocide scholars, before having to attend that virtual meeting with my executive producer—where he suggested I go on mental health leave—and yet another meeting with two managers who raised concerns over my pitch the next day. But the most unpleasant meeting with management was about to come. A week later, I was accused of antisemitism on the basis of something I didn’t even say. According to a manager, someone had accused me of claiming that “the elephant in the room [was] the rich Jewish lobby.”  (CBC told The Breach that “employees expressed concerns” that what she said was “discriminatory”.) The accusation was deeply painful because of my Jewish heritage and how my dad’s life—and, as a consequence, my own—was profoundly damaged by antisemitism. But I also knew I could prove that it was baseless: I had recorded what I said, anxious that someone might twist my words to use them against me.  What I had actually said, verbatim, was this:  “I just want to address the elephant in the room. The reason why we’re scared to allow Palestinian guests on to use the word ‘genocide’ is because there’s a very, very well funded [sic], there’s lots of Israel lobbies, and every time we do this sort of interview, they will complain, and it’s a headache. That’s why we’re not doing it. But that’s not a good reason not to have these conversations.”  I stand by my statement. HonestReporting Canada is billionaire-funded. In December 2023, HonestReporting bragged about having “mobilized Canadians to send 50,000 letters to news outlets.” The group has also published a litany of attacks on journalists at CBC and other publications who’ve done accurate reporting on Palestine, and created email templates to make it easier for their followers to complain to publications about specific reporters. Other, similar pro-Israel groups like the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and the Canary Mission employ similar tactics to try to silence journalists, academics, and activists who tell the truth about Israel-Palestine. I told the manager it was telling that instead of following up on the racist comment I had heard from colleagues about Palestinians, I was the one being accused of antisemitism and discrimination—on the basis of words I hadn’t even uttered.

The banality of whitewashing war crimes When I handed in my resignation notice on November 30, I felt relieved that I was no longer complicit in the manufacturing of consent for a genocidal war of revenge. Despite my experience, I still believe in the importance of the national broadcaster to act in the public interest by reporting independently of both government and corporate interests, presenting the truth and offering a diverse range of perspectives.  However, I believe that CBC has not been fulfilling these duties when it comes to its coverage of Israel-Palestine. I believe that in the future, historians will examine the many ways that CBC, and the rest of mainstream media, have all failed to report truthfully on this unfolding genocide—and in doing so likely accelerated their delegitimization as trusted news sources. Before resigning, I raised the issue of double standards with various levels of the CBC hierarchy. While some members of management pledged to take my concerns seriously, the overall response left me disappointed with the state of the public broadcaster.  After my appeal to my coworkers in mid-November, I had a phone conversation with a sympathetic senior producer. He said he didn’t think my words at the meeting would interfere with my chances of getting the permanent staff job I had long dreamed of. Despite this assurance, I was certain that I wouldn’t get it now: I knew I’d crossed the line for saying out loud what many at CBC were thinking but couldn’t say openly. Indeed, I wouldn’t have spoken out if I hadn’t already decided to resign. As a kid, I had fantasies of shooting Hitler dead to stop the Holocaust. I couldn’t fathom how most Germans went along with it. Then, in my 20s, I was gifted a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil by anti-Zionist Israeli friends. I’ve been thinking a lot about that piece of reportage when trying to make sense of the liberal media’s complicity in obfuscating the reality of what’s happening in the Holy Land. As Arendt theorized, those who go along with genocides aren’t innately evil; they’re often just boring careerists.  To be sure, while there are a number of senior CBC journalists who are clearly committed to defending Israel no matter its actions, many journalists just follow the path of least resistance. The fact that permanent, full-time CBC jobs are in such short supply, combined with threats of looming cuts, only reinforces this problem.  I still hear from former colleagues that pitch meetings are uphill battles. Some shows are barely covering Gaza anymore.  Being a journalist is a huge privilege and responsibility, especially in a time of war. You’re curating the news for the audience; deciding which facts to include and which to omit; choosing whose perspectives to present and whose to ignore. I believe that a good journalist should be able to turn their critical eye, not just on the news, but on their own reporting of the news. If you’re unable to do this, you shouldn’t be in the profession. I purposefully haven’t given away identifiable information about my former colleagues. Ultimately, this isn’t about them or me: it’s part of a much wider issue in newsrooms across the country and the Western world—and I believe it’s a moral duty to shed a light on it. If I didn’t, I’d never forgive myself. Just as I’m not naming my colleagues, I’m writing this using a pseudonym. Although the spectrum of acceptable discourse continues to shift, the career consequences for whistleblowers on this issue remains formidable. I encourage fellow journalists who refuse to participate in the whitewashing of war crimes, especially those with the security of staff jobs, to speak to like-minded coworkers about taking collective action; to approach your union steward and representative; and to document instances of double standards in your newsrooms and share them with other media workers.  It was scary, but I have no regrets about speaking out. My only regret is that I didn’t write this sooner. 

#palestine #gaza #free palestine

[frida-kahl-of-the-rocky-horror]

Okay, @sihatn wishes to be so hung up on the particular war crime the Israeli government is using to excessively slaughter innocent Palestinian civilians, so let’s explain the difference between Genocide, Ethnocide, and Ethnic Cleansing:

Genocide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group

Examples: The Armenian Genocide (where the term actually originates), the Shoah/Holocaust, Taíno Genocide, and Rwandan Genocide to name a few.

I have seen some Zionists on this platform and on Instagram argue that Israel cannot be committing Genocide because it is a “very specific instance in history that only includes the Holocaust”. That fact is ardently incorrect. For one, the first event to be called a Genocide and where the term was coined was the Armenian Genocide and countless events have been labeled a Genocide since 1943/1944 when the term was initially coined (including events coined after the fact that had already happened like the aforementioned Taíno Genocide).

Ethnocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of the culture of an ethnic group or nation without deliberately killing large numbers of people within that ethnic group or nation

Think “kill the Indian, save the man”, the American and Canadian policy against American Indian tribes and First Nations that sought to forcibly assimilate them into W.A.S.P. culture. A similar policy occurred in Hawaii during the “Republic of Hawaii” and “Territory of Hawaii” days, and even the destruction of Yiddish Culture by Zionists in Israel who feared it for being “too Middle Eastern”. Most Re-Education camps fall in this category too.

Ethic Cleansing: the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society

This term is relatively new and was coined in the aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia and Serbia’s treatment of Croats, Bosnians, and other ethnic minorities, as well as the Stalinist movement of ethnic minorities to different SSRs.

Mass Homicide: the deliberate killing of a large number of people

The only distinction here is the people are not being killed because of their ethnicity or nation, but for ✨ other reasons ✨

Now here’s the kicker, most Zionists would say they are committing Ethnic Cleansing. They might not say it out right, because the term has a nasty connotation, but they will say they’re doing the definition of ethnic cleansing.

Some propaganda reblogging Zionists might claim that they’re just committing Mass Homicide but here’s the thing, almost every example of mass homicide being committed by one nation to another nation has been an example of one of the first three categories. The only real examples of Mass Homicide actually being Mass Homicide occur within a state (see Mao famines, Pol Pot’s mass killings, or the countless purging of communists or anti communists during the Cold War).

Some (wrong) historians may claim the Bengal Famine and Irish Potato Famine were examples of mass Homicide but here’s the thing, in both cases aid from other nations and governments were barred from entering the effected places because the UK forbid it. Food exports were forced to continue to come from Ireland and Bengal because the UK forced it. The reasons these famines were so severe was because the UK had a eugenics inspired belief that the Irish and Bengalis were “sub human animals” and “less deserving of food than the Brits”.

The Irish Potato Famine and Bengali Famine were Genocides, with famine being the preferred method of killing.

Was it intentional at first? Maybe not. Did it become intentional after the fact? Yes.

But this takes us to the most important point. The difference between Genocide, Ethnocide, and Ethnic Cleansing AND Mass Homicide is the intent.

But the intent isn’t truly known until after the fact, when internal government documents are released and the facts of the situation are holistically known.

The Jews/Poles/Romani/etc knew they were going through a Genocide (or well, they didn’t know the word, but they knew what was happening) but most of the outside world didn’t because the N@zis were secretive about it. Yes some activists and Jewish/Polish/Romani/etc diaspora groups warned other governments, but these other governments (US, UK, USSR, China, France, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Italy even) were skeptical.

We don’t full know intent now, but given Herzl and Jabotinsky’s rhetoric which essentially established modern day Zionism and the Israeli state, and the establishment of Area C for Israeli settlement after conflict in the West Bank, the fact that Israel has threatened a Second Nakba, an event internationally acknowledged as ethnic cleansing, the fact that there are oil reserves underneath Gaza and the forcing of 2 million people into an airport sized camp would allow Israel to open up drilling where the ruins of Gaza city lay, or the fact that Israel is an Ethnonationalist country that relies on the superiority of Israelis over Palestinians and other neighbouring countries in order to exist makes the intent known to those of us familiar with the history of this conflict.

Ok ok ok ok ok here’s where I M. Night Shyamalan this whole thing: Genocide, Ethnocide, and Ethnic Cleansing are all the same crime according to multinational organizations like the United Nations. They are all Genocide.

All Ethnocides are Genocides, but not all Genocides are Ethnocides.

All Ethnic Cleansings are Genocides, but not all Genocides are Ethnic Cleansings.

The Nakba was an Ethnic Cleansing, therefore the Nakba was a Genocide.

The Netanyahu administration claims that their on going attack on Gaza is a “new Nakba”.

Nakba = Ethnic Cleansing = Genocide

The Netanyahu administration claims that their on going attack on Gaza is a “new Genocide”.

Genocide carries with it negative connotations. If the term was as widely used in 1944 as it is today, Hitler would deny genocide allegations, just as the Turkish continue to deny genocide allegations from the Armenian Genocide, why the Japanese continue to deny Genocide Allegations during their rule of Korea, Taiwan, parts of Micronesia, Manchuria, and Nanjing. Why the British refuse to acknowledge the Irish Potato Famine or Bengal Famine as Genocides. Why the conservative right want to ban the teaching of American genocides against countless groups (namely Native Americans, African Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Chicanos). And why Zionists get so offended when you refer to the actions of Israel as a Genocide.

Those who commit Genocide will never acknowledge that they are committing genocide. The fact that the current mainstream Zionist reaction, like @sihatn, is to deny that the ongoing genocide exists just proves that one is happening… if the horrific videos didn’t prove it enough (this one is from an American pro Israel source, but it doesn’t not take long to find ones from individuals in Gaza)

In conclusion, Israel is committing a genocide, and if you say otherwise, you are blinded by Ethnonationalism just like the Germans were in the 30s/40s, the Turks were during the 10s/20s and onward, the Brits were for (well forever), and the American right wing is.

If you don’t acknowledge the fact that Israel is committing a Genocide you are part of the problem shawty, and it’s not a good look 😬

#gaza strip #israel #palestine #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #gaza #gaza genocide #news on gaza #gazaunderattack #save gaza #free gaza #am yisrael chai #don’t be antisemitic just be anti genocide #genocide #ethnocide #ethnic cleansing #i stand with israel #isreal #israeli history #jewish history #jumblr #gazaunderfire #stand with gaza #anti zionisim #i stand with palestine #war on gaza #israhell #antisemitism #rwanda #hawaii #native american

[intersectionalpraxis]

Canada has never allowed Palestine to be listed as the country of birth for anyone born after 1948 because Palestine is not technically a country, but these passports still list the Palestinian city they were born in. This information is on Wikipedia (the Canadian Passport article, under the Place of Birth section) and sourced with the actual country policy. It sucks, but it is not a new stance Canada is taking, and it is not a conspiracy.

I can’t speak to what bureaucratic failing is happening to this person’s grandmother, but it’s unlikely there will be substantial mainstream coverage because nothing has actually changed.

Maintaining focus on the reality of the genocide taking place is vitally important for collectively taking action in effective manners, so please take this in good faith.

Thank you for the information. I just want to be clear I never stated it was a conspiracy, nor did that creator or folks who were pointing it out over on twitter. The erasure, especially now that I know it happened after the Nakba of 1948 is further evidence of Palestinian erasure and cultural genocide by another settler-colonial country.

I don't know if there will be a follow up about her grandmother, but I will update if there is something more to share. I also didn't know this had deeper roots, but these are the articles referenced in the wikipedia page.

This is quite disturbing, considering how long this has been implemented and normalized. Saying any Palestinian person can't list their birthplace is beyond inhumane and cruel. I can see why there is no coverage on this -because that's how it has been for well over a decade and more.

The post wasn't meant to deflect from current events -that was not my intention either. While this is still important to talk about, I haven't stopped talking about what is going on right now. I posted about this because it was something I was unaware of and I'm sure many of us were as well. I will attach this to the original post I made for more context.

#feminist #social justice #free palestine #palestine #free gaza #current events #settler violence #cultural genocide #canada politics #canadian government #canada #end the occupation #ceasefire now #world news

[capybaracorn]

Demands for Canada to stop supplying weapons to Israel grow louder

But loopholes and a lack of transparency stall efforts to hold government accountable for its role in arming Israel.

Montreal, Canada – Human rights advocates are accusing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government of misleading the public over weapons sales to Israel, which have come under greater scrutiny amid the deadly Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

At issue is legislation that prohibits the government from exporting military equipment to foreign actors if there is a risk it can be used in human rights abuses.

But regulatory loopholes, combined with a lack of clarity over what Canada sends to Israel, have complicated efforts to end the transfers.

Dozens of Canadian civil society groups this month urged Trudeau to end arms exports to Israel, arguing they violate Canadian and international law because the weapons could be used in the Gaza Strip.

But in the face of mounting pressure since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7, Canada’s foreign affairs ministry has tried to downplay the state’s role in helping Israel build its arsenal.

“Global Affairs Canada can confirm that Canada has not received any requests, and therefore not issued any permits, for full weapon systems for major conventional arms or light weapons to Israel for over 30 years,” the department told Al Jazeera in an email on Friday.

“The permits which have been granted since October 7, 2023, are for the export of non-lethal equipment.”

But advocates say this misrepresents the total volume of Canada’s military exports to Israel, which totalled more than $15m ($21.3m Canadian) in 2022, according to the government’s own figures.

It also shines a spotlight on the nation’s longstanding lack of transparency around these transfers.

“Canadian companies have exported over [$84m, $114m Canadian] in military goods to Israel since 2015 when the Trudeau government was elected,” said Michael Bueckert, vice president of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, an advocacy group.

“And they have continued to approve arms exports since October 7 despite the clear risk of genocide in Gaza,” Bueckert told Al Jazeera.

“Unable to defend its own policy, this government is misleading Canadians into thinking that we aren’t exporting weapons to Israel at all. As Canadians increasingly demand that their government impose an arms embargo on Israel, politicians are trying to pretend that the arms trade doesn’t exist.”

Lack of information

While Canada may not transfer full weapons systems to Israel, the two countries enjoy “a consistent arms trade relationship”, said Kelsey Gallagher, a researcher at Project Ploughshares, a peace research institute.

The vast majority of Canada’s military exports to Israel come in the form of parts and components. These typically fall into three categories, Gallagher explained: electronics and space equipment; military aerospace exports and components; and finally, bombs, missiles, rockets and general military explosives and components.

But beyond these broad categories, which were gleaned by examining Canada’s own domestic and international reports on weapons exports, Gallagher said it remains unclear “what these actual pieces of technology are”.

“We don’t know what companies are exporting them. We don’t know exactly what their end use is,” he told Al Jazeera.

Global Affairs Canada did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s question about what “non-lethal equipment” the government has approved for export to Israel since October 7.

“What does this mean? No one knows because there’s no definition of that and it really could be quite a number of things,” said Henry Off, a Toronto-based lawyer and board member of the group Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights (CLAIHR).

Human rights lawyers and activists also suspect that Canadian military components are reaching Israel via the United States, including for installation in fighter jets such as the F-35 aircraft.

But these transfers are difficult to track because a decades-old deal between Canada and the US – 1956’s Defence Production Sharing Agreement – has created “a unique and comprehensive set of loopholes that are afforded to Canadian arms transfers to the US”, said Gallagher.

“These exports are treated with zero transparency. There is no regulation of, or reporting of, the transfer of Canadian-made military components to the US, including those that could be re-transferred to Israel,” he said.

The result, he added, is that “it is very difficult to challenge what are problematic transfers if we do not have the information with which to do so”.

Domestic, international law

Despite these hurdles, Canadian human rights advocates are pressuring the government to end its weapons sales to Israel, particularly in light of the Israeli military’s continued assault on Gaza.

Nearly 28,000 Palestinians have been killed over the past four months and rights advocates have meticulously documented the impact on the ground of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, and its vast destruction of the enclave. The world’s top court, the International Court of Justice, also determined last month that Palestinians in Gaza face a plausible risk of genocide.

Against that backdrop, eliminating weapons transfers to Israel is effectively a demand for “Canada [to] abide by its own laws”, said Off, the Toronto lawyer.

That’s because Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act obliges the foreign minister to “deny exports and brokering permit applications for military goods and technology … if there is a substantial risk that the items would undermine peace and security”.

The minister should also deny exports if they “could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws” or in “serious acts of gender-based violence or serious acts of violence against women and children”, the law states.

Meanwhile, Canada is also party to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a United Nations pact that bans transfers if states have knowledge the arms could be used in genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other violations of international law.

But according to Off, despite a growing list of Israeli human rights violations since October 7, Canada “has been approving the transfer of military goods and technology that might fuel” them.

Late last month, Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights wrote a letter to Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly demanding an immediate end to the transfers. The group said it would consider next steps, including possible legal action, if action is not taken.

‘It takes a village’

Still, Canada insists that it maintains one of the strongest arms export control regimes in the world.

Asked whether his government intends to end arms transfers to Israel, Trudeau said in Parliament on January 31 that Canada “puts human rights and protection of human rights at the centre of all our decision-making”.

“It has always been the case and we have been consistent in making sure that we are responsible in the way we do that. We will continue to be so,” the prime minister said.

Gallagher, at Project Ploughshares, told Al Jazeera, however, that Canada maintains “a level of permissibility” in choosing which countries it chooses to arm, including Israel.

And while Canadian weapons exports to the Israeli government pale in comparison to other countries – notably the US, which sends billions of dollars in military aid to Israel annually – Off said, “Any difference is a difference.”

“It takes a village to make these instruments of death and it should make a difference if we cut off Canada’s contributions,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that the pressure on Canada also sends a message to other countries “potentially aiding and abetting Israel’s slaughter of Gaza”.

“If you send arms to countries committing serious violations of international humanitarian law, you will be held to account.”

#free palestine #palestine #save palestine #gaza #save gaza #free gaza #world news #current events #gaza genocide #gazaunderattack #gaza strip #palestine genocide #stop the genocide #genocide #palestinian genocide #middle east #israel #israeli apartheid #canada #arms trade #canadian politics

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Denazification, truth and reconciliation, and the story of Germany's story

Germany is the “world champion in remembrance,” celebrated for its post-Holocaust policies of ensuring that every German never forgot what had been done in their names, and in holding themselves and future generations accountable for the Nazis’ crimes.

All my life, the Germans have been a counterexample to other nations, where the order of the day was to officially forget the sins that stained the land. “Least said, soonest mended,” was the Canadian and American approach to the genocide of First Nations people and the theft of their land. It was, famously, how America, especially the American south, dealt with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Silence begets forgetting, which begets revisionism. The founding crimes of our nations receded into the mists of time and acquired a gauzy, romantic veneer. Plantations — slave labor camps where work was obtained through torture, maiming and murder — were recast as the tragiromantic settings of Gone With the Wind. The deliberate extinction of indigenous peoples was revised as the “taming of the New World.” The American Civil War was retold as “The Lost Cause,” fought over states’ rights, not over the right of the ultra-wealthy to terrorize kidnapped Africans and their descendants into working to death.

This wasn’t how they did it in Germany. Nazi symbols and historical revisionism were banned (even the Berlin production of “The Producers” had to be performed without swastikas). The criminals were tried and executed. Every student learned what had been done. Cash reparations were paid — to Jews, and to the people whom the Nazis had conquered and brutalized. Having given in to ghastly barbarism on an terrifyingly industrial scale, the Germans had remade themselves with characteristic efficiency, rooting out the fascist rot and ensuring that it never took hold again.

But Germany’s storied reformation was always oversold. As neo-Nazi movements sprang up and organized political parties — like the far-right Alternative für Deutschland — fielded fascist candidates, they also took to the streets in violent mobs. Worse, top German security officials turned out to be allied with AfD:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html

Neofascists in Germany had fat bankrolls, thanks to generous, secret donations from some of the country’s wealthiest billionaires:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/billionaire-backing-may-have-helped-launch-afd-a-1241029.html

And they broadened their reach by marrying their existing conspiratorial beliefs with Qanon, which made their numbers surge:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-fringe-groups-are-using-qanon-to-amplify-their-wild-messages

Today, the far right is surging around Europe, with the rot spreading from Hungary and Poland to Italy and France. In an interview with Jacobin’s David Broder, Tommaso Speccher a researcher based in Berlin, explores the failure of Germany’s storied memory:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/germany-nazism-holocaust-federal-republic-memory-culture/

Speccher is at pains to remind us that Germany’s truth and reconciliation proceeded in fits and starts, and involved compromises that were seldom discussed, even though they left some of the Reich’s most vicious criminals untouched by any accountability for their crimes, and denied some victims any justice — or even an apology.

You may know that many queer people who were sent to Nazi concentration camps were immediately re-imprisoned after the camps were liberated. Both Nazi Germany and post-Nazi Germany made homosexuality a crime:

https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/

But while there’s been some recent historical grappling with this jaw-dropping injustice, there’s been far less attention given to the plight of the communists, labor organizers, social democrats and other leftists whom the Nazis imprisoned and murdered. These political prisoners (and their survivors) struggled mightily to get the reparations they were due.

Not only was the process punitively complex, but it was administered by bureaucrats who had served in the Reich — the people who had sent them to the camps were in charge of deciding whether they were due compensation.

This is part of a wider pattern. The business-leaders who abetted the Reich through their firms — Siemens, BMW, Hugo Boss, IG Farben, Volkswagon — were largely spared any punishment for their role in the the Holocaust. Many got to keep the riches they acquired through their part on an act of genocide.

Meanwhile, historians grappling with the war through the “Historikerstreit” drew invidious comparisons between communism and fascism, equating the two ideologies and tacitly excusing the torture and killing of political prisoners (this tale is still told today — in America! My kid’s AP history course made this exact point last year).

The refusal to consider that extreme wealth, inequality, and the lust for profits — not blood — provided the Nazis with the budget, materiel and backing they needed to seize control in Germany is of a piece with the decision not to hold Germany’s Nazi-enabling plutocrats to account.

The impunity for business leaders who collaborated with the Nazis on exploiting slave labor is hard to believe. Take IG Farben, a company still doing a merry business today. Farben ran a rubber factory on Auschwitz slave labor, but its executives were frustrated by the delays occasioned by the daily 4.5m forced march from the death-camp to its factory:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

So Farben built Monowitz, its own, private-sector concentration camp. IG Farben purchased 25,000 slaves from the Reich, among them as many children as possible (the Reich charged less for child slaves).

Even by the standards of Nazi death camps, Monowitz was a charnel house. Monowitz’s inmates were worked to death in just three months. The conditions were so brutal that the SS guards sent official complaints to Berlin. Among their complaints: Farben refused to fund extra hospital beds for the slaves who were beaten so badly they required immediate medical attention.

Farben broke the historical orthodoxy about slavery: until Monowitz, historians widely believed that enslavers would — at the very least — seek to maintain the health of their slaves, simply as a matter of economic efficiency. But the Reich’s rock-bottom rates for fresh slaves liberated Farben from the need to preserve their slaves’ ability to work. Instead, the slaves of Monowitz became disposable, and the bloodless logic of profit maximization dictated that more work could be attained at lower prices by working them to death over twelve short weeks.

Few of us know about Monowitz today, but in the last years of the war, it shocked the world. Joseph Borkin — a US antitrust lawyer who was sent to Germany after the war as part of the legal team overseeing the denazification program — wrote a seminal history of IG Farben, “The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben”:

https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben

Borkin’s book was a bestseller, which enraged America’s business lobby. The book made the connection between Farben’s commercial strategies and the rise of the Reich (Farben helped manipulate global commodity prices in the runup to the war, which let the Reich fund its war preparations). He argued that big business constituted a danger to democracy and human rights, because its leaders would always sideline both in service to profits.

US companies like Standard Oil and Dow Chemicals poured resources into discrediting the book and smearing Borkin, forcing him into retirement and obscurity in 1945, the same year his publisher withdrew his book from stores.

When we speak of Germany’s denazification effort, it’s as a German program, but of course that’s not right. Denazification was initiated, designed and overseen by the war’s winners — in West Germany, that was the USA.

Those US prosecutors and bureaucrats wanted justice, but not too much of it. For them, denazification had to be balanced against anticommunism, and the imperatives of American business. Nazi war criminals must go on trial — but not if they were rocket scientists, especially not if the USSR might make use of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

Recall that in the USA, the bizarre epithet “premature antifascist” was used to condemn Americans who opposed Nazism (and fascism elsewhere in Europe) too soon, because these antifascists opposed the authoritarian politics of big business in America, too:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/premature-antifascist-and-proudly-so/

When 24 Farben executives were tried at Nuremberg for the slaughter at Monowitz, then argued that they had no choice but to pursue slave labor — it was their duty to their shareholders. The judges agreed: 19 of those executives walked.

Anticommunism hamstrung denazification. There was no question that German elites and its largest businesses were complicit in Nazi crimes — not mere suppliers, but active collaborators. Antifacism wasn’t formally integrated into the denazification framework until the 1980s with “constitutional patriotism,” which took until the 1990s to take firm root.

The requirement for a denazification program that didn’t condemn capitalism meant that there would always be holes in Germany’s truth and reconciliation process. The newly formed Federal Republic set aside Article 10 of the Nuremberg Charter, which would hold all members of the Nazi Party and SS responsible for their crimes. But Article 10 didn’t survive contact with the Federal Republic: immediately upon taking office, Konrad Adenauer suspended Article 10, sparing 10 million war criminals.

While those spared included many rank-and-file order-followers, it also included many of the Reich’s most notorious criminals. The Nazi judge who sent Erika von Brockdorff to her death for her leftist politics was given a judge’s pension after the war, and lived out his days in a luxurious mansion.

Not every Nazi was pensioned off — many continued to serve in the post-war West German government. Even as Willy Brandt was demonstrating historic remorse for Germany’s crimes, his foreign ministry was riddled with ex-Nazi bureaucrats who’d served in Hitler’s foreign ministry. We still remember Brandt’s brilliant 1973 UN speech on the Holocaust:

https://www.willy-brandt-biography.com/historical-sources/videos/speech-uno-new-york-1973/

But recollections of Brandt’s speech are seldom accompanied by historian Götz Aly’s observation that Brandt couldn’t have given that speech in Germany without serious blowback from the country’s still numerous and emboldened antisemites (Brandt donated his Nobel prize money to restore Venice’s Scuola Grande Tedesca synagogue, but ensured that this was kept secret until after his death).

All this to say that Germany’s reputation as “world champions of memory” is based on acts undertaken decades after the war. Some of Germany’s best-known Holocaust memorials are very recent, like the Wannsee Conference House (1992), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), and the Topography of Terror Museum in (2010).

Germany’s remembering includes an explicit act of forgetting — forgetting the role Germany’s business leaders and elites played in Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi crimes that followed. For Speccher, the rise of neofacist movements in Germany can’t be separated from this selective memory, weighed down by anticommunist fervor.

And in East Germany, there was a different kind of incomplete rememberance. While the DDR’s historians and teachings emphasized the role of business in the rise of fascism, they excluded all the elements of Nazism rooted in bigotry: antisemitism, homophobia, sectarianism, and racism. For East German historians, Nazism wasn’t about these, it was solely “the ultimate end point of the history of capitalism.”

Neither is sufficient to prevent authoritarianism and repression, obviously. But the DDR is dust, and the anticommunism-tainted version of denazification is triumphant. Today, Europe’s wealthiest families and largest businesses are funneling vast sums into far-right “populist” parties that trade in antisemitic “Great Replacement” tropes and Holocaust denial:

https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/Europe%E2%80%99s%20two-faced%20authoritarian%20right%20FINAL_1.pdf

And Germany’s coddled aristocratic families and their wealthy benefactors — whose Nazi ties were quietly forgiven after the war — conspire to overthrow the government and install a far-right autocracy:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/25-suspected-members-german-far-right-group-arrested-raids-prosecutors-office-2022-12-07/

In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about denazification. For all the flaws in Germany’s remembrance, it stands apart as one of the brightest lights in national reckonings with unforgivable crimes. Compare this with, say, Spain, where the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco were housed in a hero’s monument, amidst his victims’ bones, until 2019:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_S%C3%A1nchez#Domestic_policy

What do you do with the losers of a just war? “Least said soonest mended” was never a plausible answer, and has been a historical failure — as the fields of fluttering Confederate flags across the American south can attest (to say nothing of the failure of American de-ba’athification in Iraq):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification

But on the other hand, people who lose the war aren’t going to dig a hole, climb in and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. Just because I think Germany’s denazification was hobbled by the decision to lets its architects and perpetrators walk free, I don’t know that I would have supported prison for all ten million people captured by Article 10.

And it’s not clear that an explicit antifascism from the start would have patched the holes in German denazification. As Speccher points out, Italy’s postwar constitution was explicitly antifascist, the nation “steeped in institutional anti-fascism.” Postwar Italian governments included prominent resistance fighters who’d fought Mussolini and his brownshirts.

But in the 1990s, “the end of the First Republic” saw constitutional reforms that removed antifascism — reforms that preceded the rise of the corrupt authoritarian Silvio Berlusconi — and there’s a line from him to the neofascists in today’s ruling Italian coalition.

Is there any hope for creating a durable, democratic, anti-authoritarian state out of a world run by the descendants of plunderers and killers? Can any revolution — political, military or technological — hope to reckon with (let alone make peace with!) the people who have brought us to this terrifying juncture?

[Image ID: The Tor Books cover for ‘The Lost Cause,’ designed by Will Staehle, featuring the head of the snake on the Gadsen ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, shedding a tear.]

Like I say, this is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about — not just how we might get out of this current mess, but how we’ll stay out of it. As is my wont, I’ve worked out my anxieties on the page. My next novel, The Lost Cause, comes out from Tor Books and Head of Zeus in November:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Lost Cause is a post-GND utopian novel about a near-future world where the climate emergency is finally being treated with the seriousness and urgency it warrants. It’s a world wracked by fire, flood, scorching heat, mass extinctions and rolling refugee crises — but it’s also a world where we’re doing something about all this. It’s not an optimistic book, but it is a hopeful one. As Kim Stanley Robison says:

This book looks like our future and feels like our present — it’s an unforgettable vision of what could be. Even a partly good future will require wicked political battles and steadfast solidarity among those fighting for a better world, and here I lived it along with Brooks, Ana Lucía, Phuong, and their comrades in the struggle. Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this.

The Lost Cause is a hopeful book, but it’s also a worried one. The book is set during a counter-reformation, where an unholy alliance of seagoing anarcho-capitalist wreckers and white nationalist militias are trying to seize power, snatching defeat from the jaws of the fragile climate victory. It’s a book about the need for truth and reconciliation — and its limits.

As Bill McKibben says:

The first great YIMBY novel, this chronicle of mutual aid is politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful even amidst the smoke. Forget the Silicon Valley bros — these are the California techsters we need rebuilding our world, one solar panel and prefab insulated wall at a time.

We’re currently in the midst of a decidedly unjust war — the war to continue roasting the planet, a war waged in the name of continuing enrichment of the world’s already-obscenely-rich oligarchs. That war requires increasingly authoritarian measures, increasing violence and repression.

I believe we can win this war and secure a habitable planet for all of us — hell, I believe we can build a world of comfort and abundance out of its ashes, far better than this one:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

But even if that world comes to being, there will be millions of people who hate it, a counter-revolution in waiting. These are our friends, our relatives, our neighbors. Figuring out how to make peace with them — and how to hold their most culpable, most powerful leaders to account — is a project that’s as important, and gigantic, and uncertain, as a just transition is.

Next weekend, I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con:

Thu, Jul 20 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause— Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)

Fri, Jul 21 1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)

Fri, Jul 21 12h: Signing, AA09

Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/19/stolpersteine/#truth-and-reconciliation

[Image ID: Three 'stumbling stones' ('stolpersteine') set into the sidewalk in the Mitte, in Berlin; they memorialize Jews who lived nearby until they were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.]

#pluralistic #stolpersteine #historians' dispute #Historikerstreit #nazis #godwin's law #mussolini #berlusconi #italy #antifa #fascism #history #truth and reconciliation #the lost cause #denazification

[djuvlipen]

Wanna learn about women history and WWII? Here is a non-exhaustive list to get you started

German women and the Nazi regime

Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, Claudia Koonz

Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944, Elissa Mailänder

Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik, Gisela Bock

Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower

"Backlash against Prostitutes' Rights: Origins and Dynamics of Nazi Prostitution Policies," in Journal of the History of Sexuality Julia Roos

"German Women and the Holocaust in the Nazi East," Wendy Lower, in Women and Genocide, Elissa Bemporad & Joyce W. Warren

Frausein im Dritten Reich, Rita Thalmann

Women as victims or perpetrators of the Holocaust (general)

"Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research," in Signs, Joan Ringelheim

Women in the Holocaust, Dalia Ofer & Lenore J. Weitzman

Das KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern, Robert Sommer

SS-Bordelle und Oral History. Problematische Quellen und die Existenz von Bordellen für die SS in Konzentrationslagern, Christa Paul & Robert Sommer

Sexual Violence during the Holocaust—The Case of Forced Prostitution in the Warsaw Ghetto, in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Katarzyna Person

"Gender: A Crucial Tool in Holocaust Research," Marion Kaplan, in Women and Genocide, Elissa Bemporad & Joyce W. Warren

Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, Carol Rittner & John K. Roth

Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, Nechema Tec

« Reframing Sexual Violence as a Weapon and Strategy of War: The Case of the German Wehrmacht during the War and Genocide in the Soviet Union, 1941–1944 », in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Regina Mühlhäuser

Sex and the Nazi soldier. Violent, commercial and consensual encounters during the war in the Soviet Union, 1941-45, Regina Mülhäuser

Romani women during the Holocaust

« Krieg im Frieden im Krieg: Reading the Romani Holocaust in terms of race, gender and colonialism », Eve Rosenhaft

« Hidden Lives : Sinti and Roma Women », Sybil Milton

« Romani women and the Holocaust Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Transnistria », Michelle Kelso

"No Shelter to Cry In: Romani Girls and Responsibility during the Holocaust," Michelle Kelso, in Women and Genocide, Elissa Bemporad & Joyce W. Warren

Jewish women during the Holocaust

Jewish women's sexual behaviour and sexualized abuse during the Nazi era, in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, Beverley Chalmers

Sexual Violence against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, Sonja M. Hedgepeth & Rochelle G. Saidel

Persecution of lesbians by the Nazis

Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich, Claudia Schoppmann

Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, Claudia Schoppmann

“This Kind of Love”: Descriptions of Lesbian Behaviour in Nazi Concentration Camps, from Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, Claudia Schoppmann

Queer in Europe during the Second World War, Regis Schlagdenhauffen

Ravensbrück

Ravensbrück. Everyday Life in a Woman’s Concentration Camp 1939-45, Jack G. Morrison

Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women, Sarah Helm

Women and the Memory of WWII

Women, Genocide, and Memory: The Ethics of Feminist Ethnography in Holocaust Research, in Gender & Society, Janet Jacobs

Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women's Holocaust Narratives, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Myrna Goldenberg

« An Austrian Roma Family Remembers: Trauma and Gender in Autobiographies by Ceija, Karl, and Mongo Stojka », Lorely French

Beyond Survival: Navigating Women's Personal Narratives of Sexual Violence in the Holocaust, Roy Schwartzman

Comfort Women and imperial Japan

Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, Yoshimi Yoshiaki

The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, George Hicks

The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery During the China and Pacific Wars, Caroline Norma

Lola's House: Filipino Women Living With War, Evelina Galang

Soviet Women during WWII

« “Girls” and “Women”. Love, Sex, Duty and Sexual Harassment in the Ranks of the Red Army 1941-1945 », in The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies, Brandon M. Schechter

Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War, Roger D. Markwick & Euridice Charon Cardona

Soviet Women in Combat. A History of Violence on the Eastern Front, Anna Krylova

#^ i know way more about the holocaust and women than other topics and that's why there are barely any books on women soldiers (except for #german women soldiers - duh - and soviet women (that's bc they were assigned readings)) #and i included stuff in german because those books haven't been translated in english but i still think my german speaking mutuals would be #interested in them #holocaust #wwii #herstory

[enbycrip]

Another enormous and ongoing factor in “Canada is not a human rights paradise”; MAiD.

Canada legalised “medically assisted death” and what literally every disability rights group said would happen immediately proceeded to happen; they started offering it instead of care to disabled people.

Far from being limited to terminally ill people in intense pain, which is what they spoke about when pushing the policy, it’s now routinely offered to disabled and chronically ill people who are suffering *because they are living in poverty* and *unable to access the pretty basic care and assistance that would be needed for a decent quality of life.” They are currently expanding the programme to include mentally ill people because of course they are.

I know disabled and chronically ill Canadians who are living in tremendous poverty - like, crowdfunding food and heating in *Canadian winters* poverty - who speak continuously about the fact that every time they seek any form of government or public assistance, all they get is offered “assisted suicide.”

There is literally no way this is anything other than eugenicist genocide of disabled people. And no one seems to give a shit other than disabled people, because abled people *continuously* seem to believe that death is preferable to disability. They continuously and massively overestimate the suffering involved in, say, incontinence.

#eugenics #Canadian eugenics #medically assisted death #disabled #disableism #chronic illness #disability #chronic pain #chronic fatigue #because fucking Trudeau is pretty and tweets nice things #people keep saying Canada is woke and ignoring fucking this and ongoing indigenous genocide #disability isn’t death ffs and it hurts actual disabled people when it’s presented this way #disabled people are human #disabled people deserve to fucking live and that shouldn’t be fucking controversial

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Another update on your fellow Canadian, Ahmed Kouta. He only ate a lemon on February 17th 2024. That was his meal for the day.

This is the responsibility of Mélanie Joly and Justin Trudeau, who have lied to Palestinian-Canadians time and time again claiming they would help while the Trudeau administration splits itself over their genocidal policies.

Consider donating to his evacuation fund.

#cdnpoli #genocide #ethnic cleansing #Foreign Policy #zionist occupation of Palestine #Mélanie Joly #Justin Trudeau #war crimes #famine

[mostly-mundane-atla]

Real talk: i have been pretty absent from this blog (i wouldn't say slacking necessarily because it is first and foremost a hobby, a means of communication second, and i do not consider it a job to any degree). Do not worry, nothing bad has happened, and a big part of it is rediscovering my love of literature. Got my hands on a copy of Thomas Kinsella's The Táin, read The Handmaid's Tale, and recently finished Ivanhoe through audiobook.

I've already been singing the praises of the Táin Bó Cúailnge so i'll spare you having to read through that gushing. Ivanhoe is incredible and shockingly sensitive on the topic of antisemitism for something written by an early 19th century Christian author intended for a majority Christian audience. The scenes with Robin Hood also filled me with a childish glee and i think it was suppose to be a surprise that this guy is Robin Hood but he introduces himself as Locksley and wins an archery contest and leads a gang of outlaws in the woods, including a hermit who refers to Alan-a-Dale quite a bit so it's very obvious to a modern reader. Handmaid's Tale was also as good as i've heard it was, but there's a specific detail i want to discuss that feels relevant to how i think of this blog and how others use it.

I've read the reviews and the plot synopses amd analyses, i knew about the epilogue that frames the story as a historical document a century or so in the future. This did not surprise me. What did catch me by surprise, and something i feel is entirely overlooked, is that this story of an oppressive theocratic regime that uses Biblical precedence to excuse extreme atrocities of human rights violations and turned out to not even last very long, is contextualized as the topic of a discussion hosted by First Nations academics who study white people cultures. You can be pedantic and say "oh but technically they're only First Nations coded because it's presented as a transcript with no physical descriptions" and to a degree you would be right; but when you see names like Maryann Crescent Moon and Johnny Running Dog used for professors of a University of Denay (an anglo-phonetic spelling of Diné/Dene) in Nunavit, there isn't much room for speculating what ethnicity they're supposed to be.

There are so many little details in the book referencing Indigenous genocide. Details suggesting forms of genocide Atwood would be familiar with as a Canadian citizen. To only bring up religious fanaticism and patriarchal regressive politics in Middle Eastern nations like Iran and Afghanistan as well as the United States as inspirations for a surface level five minute summary is one thing, but to ignore all the anti-Indigenous policies that are also obvious inspirations (literally just read the passages about how the Narrator/Offred's daughter was taken from her, renamed, and given to a "proper home" to get what i mean, it's that blatant) when the iconic epilogue makes it as explicit as it can be without writing "THESE ARE NATIVE ISSUES" in big red letters? I won't lie to you, it feels like a slap to the face. Especially when the take away message of such a conclusion seems to be that Native peoples will outlive these regimes.

#other interests #the handmaid's tale #ivanhoe #the táin #thus concludes Mostly Mundane's Angry Native Literary Analysis Corner

[historia-vitae-magistras]

hello!! I don’t know much about american or british history and I was wondering, why do people have Arthur (unwillingly) abandon Alfred when he’s a baby and basically be an absent father? Could you explain briefly, if possible? Was there anything specific going on in the UK that kept Arthur from raising Alfred and does that mean the British rule in the colonies wasn’t as strong? I promise I will do lots of reading on my own too, but I was wondering from an hws perspective if u could explain what was keeping Arthur busy?? Thank you!! (sorry I am not American nor British so I rly don’t know and it’s a trope I have seen a lot - the absent Arthur thing)

The 17th century was incredibly violent and brutal. Civil and Imperial wars across the board. What's now the UK was a hot mess. I usually link more primary source type stuff but I will put mostly Wikipedia links below and try to keep this brief? Also this is not my period of specialty so I might miss some things I shouldn't have. But I tried?

There was the policy of salutary neglect that kind of permitted the Americans to do their thing.

The English executed a king in 1649, were ruled by a Oliver Cromwell for 5 years, fought a civil war, got another king in 1660 and in the process the conflict spread across the entirety of the British Isles with the War of the Three Kingdoms just cutting a swathe of violence across England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland of a truly horrifying level. Then there was the Great Fire of London, 3 wars with the Dutch, and two or three wars with the French in the 17th century depending on how you define 'war.' I can't imagine Arthur being in any sort of decent shape during all of that, especially between 1639 and 1660.

In America there was pretty much constant conflict between Dutch and French and English settlers until the Dutch were shoved off the continent completely and New England and New France came into more frequent direct conflict. And when the French Canadians weren't reinventing guerrilla warfare against the New Englanders the New Englanders were invading Quebec, or fighting wars of genocide against the indigenous peoples like King Phillips War, or King William's War. No one was having a good time.

In that same period, there were witch hunts on both sides of the pond. In the British Isles, witches were burned. In America, they were hung. But yeah, busy and bloody time.

#the ask box || probis pateo #also this is empire we're talking about it doesnt exactly make for ideal family situations

[max1461]

People know that the genocide of Native Americans/First Nations people (taking the definition of genocide here straight from the Geneva Convention, not adapting it in any way) lasted well into the 70s and 80s in the US and Canada, right? This is when policies of forced transracial adoption were ended (at least in large part). See e.g. the Sixties Scoop in Canada. The definition of genocide specifically lists

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

as one of the actions which constitutes genocide. The definition also includes intent to destroy an ethnic group, and you can of course quibble over whether intent was there. Bureaucracies are complex, and I'm sure for some people there was intent and for some people there wasn't... but this could be said even of other, totally established cases of genocide as well. And one way or another, a policy of deliberately breaking up families and destroying community ties is just as harmful whatever the intent is.

It should also be noted that under this definition, residential schools may or may not count as genocidal, but it is inarguable that the residential school system involved all the most abusive aspects of ordinary public schooling turned up to 11, in addition to the fact that children were taken from their families and forced to be there and corporally punished for speaking to each other in their native language and all kinds of other heinous shit.

And the Indian wars—the conquest of the continent by the US and Canadian governments—lasted into the 1920s (although after the end of the 19th century, skirmishes were mostly minor). There are people alive now who were alive then. Policies of expropriation of land by settlers existed through the 19th century, at least. People know that, right? That these were not crimes committed against abstract cultural groups in the distant past, they were committed against real people in living and close-to-living memory?

I think people should keep this in mind when listening to Land Back discourse. As I've said before, people use the phrase Land Back to mean a lot of different things policy-wise, and I definitely don't agree with all of them. But indigenous communities are in general the poorest on this continent, and a not insignificant contributing factor is that actual, specific pieces of property were taken from actual, specific people within the legal and historical record. Frankly, to argue that their kids/grandkids who are now in poverty deserve some kind of compensation for that is not radical, it should be the absolute centrist position from which deviation is considered radical.

#society

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

McGill University in Quebec, Canada has banned its Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) chapter from using the school’s name after the campus group posted on social media a statement that cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

SPHR described Hamas’ atrocities — which included the murder of 1,200 people, numerous rapes, and taking 240 people hostage — as “heroic.”

“The university cannot be, or seen to be, associated with a celebration of the taking of civilian hostages,” university spokesperson Susan Murley told The Montreal Gazette. “This post by SPHR was antithetical to the university’s values and stands to undermine the important work aimed at bringing our community together through the Initiative Against Islamophobia and Antisemitism.”

Murley added: “The university has clearly indicated to the SSMU [Students’ Society of McGill University] that the revocation should not be interpreted as the university taking a position on the Middle East and emphasized that the university would act in exactly the same manner in regard to any club that used the McGill name when posting content of a similar nature.”

SPHR — a Canadian equivalent of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that earlier this month accused school officials of having “the blood of 20 000 [sic] Palestinians on their hands” — is refusing to abide by the university’s order. In a statement, the group told the Gazette that it is “rejecting this name change” and charged that the ban “is just another blatant way to smear the only group on campus which is representing Palestinian students.”

McGill University has made numerous attempts to combat antisemitic speech on campus, threatening even to disaffiliate with SSMU, the school’s student government, over a referendum it scheduled to declare that Israel is conducting “genocidal bombing campaigns” in Gaza and demand that the university end partnerships with businesses described in the referendum as “complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.”

Tensions between the university and its student government resulting from extreme anti-Israel activism have persisted for some years. In March 2022, McGill officials threatened to defund SSMU after its members voted to approve a policy accusing Israel of imposing “settler-colonial apartheid” against Palestinians and backing a boycott of “all corporations and institutions complicit” in the supposed practice. SSMU advanced the measure against the objections of its own judicial board, which had repeatedly ruled that joining the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel would violate both the SSMU constitution and university’s policy on equity and inclusion.

Later, a McGill University student sued the school for allegedly reneging on its pledge to defund SSMU, and last month he won a victory when a court ordered an injunction to halt ratification of the resolution.

In the latest controversy, SSMU is charged with officially withdrawing the group’s affiliation with SPHR. The student government has so far not chosen to contest the university’s decision, according to a statement issued on Monday.

“We regret to announce that SPHR will no longer be able to use the McGill name,” its executive committee said. “We continue to take our role as liaison between student groups and the administration seriously and will continue to investigate avenues for remedial action.”

As of Wednesday, SPHR has not published new content on its accounts using the McGill University name.

#mcgill university #sphr #solidarity for palestinian human rights #canada