#and contributed to the side of barbarism over socialism

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

i find conversations around palestine hard to navigate because often people will say that showing support for the people of palestine is anti-semitic and use really inflammatory language and then its difficult to move on from, do you have any advice?

I have thoughts and I hope they are useful. There is an underlying logic to what I'm suggesting - that I think might be useful to make explicit - because it's transferable to other situations. First of all figure out what your political purpose is - and then acknowledge that some of the things you are trying to do are hard and will take effort and you can't rely on your automatic instincts.

I should also say that I'm white and not Jewish and live in New Zealand. This advice is for someone who is also personally distant from Palestine in those ways - and may not be useful for you if you are in a very different situation.

The first step is to not be anti-semitic. This may mean you need to learn more about anti-semitism than you already know. You can't rely on thinking "I am not anti-semitic in my heart and therefore I can't be anti-semitic". Our culture has a lot of anti-semitic tropes that you may have learned without understanding. Do the work of unlearning anti-semitism. The best place to learn about is from Jewish people involved in Palestinian, but if you don't have access. Don't dismiss the possibility that you might be anti-semitic - take it seriously - but know enough that you can easily identify accusations of anti-semitism that you disagree with politically, or that aren't made in good faith.

I think it's worth understanding that not being anti-semitic is important not just morally or in an abstract sense, but that anti-semitism does active harm to the political project of building a Palestine solidarity movement in New Zealand (or anywhere else I've lived) I've always found this piece by Naomi Klein a touchstone

Then I think it's important to start with why you might want to talk about Palestine. I think understanding the political purpose of what you are trying to do. Sometimes the point will be to organise - but in that case you're probably not starting from scratch (organising rarely begins with an argument). But in the type of situation you are talking about - a place where there is hostility - I think the purpose is to legitimise Palestinian solidarity.

Huge resources and power are put into delegitimising Palestianian solidarity - it's always true and has become more clear than ever. Equating Palestinian solidarity with anti-semitism is a significant part of that.

The only way to fight this is to actively promote Palestinian Solidarity without anti-semitism - particularly in spaces where there is hostility and inflammatory. You won't necessarily win the argument - you're not going to undo everyone else's beliefs by the power of your argument. But what you can do is take a small step to insist on the legitimacy of Palestinian solidarity in the space you are in.

If people call you antisemitic for showing solidarity with Palestine and you disagree with them politically or think they're not made in good faith - it is absolutely crucial that you do not get distracted by that. Your purpose is to fight efforts to delegitimise Palestine - not to win arguments about what is anti-semitic and what isn't. The importance of not engaging may be counter-intuitive - they are arguing that solidarity with Palestinian liberation is delegitimate because it's anti-semitic - if you prove that they're wrong then aren't you legitimising solidarity with Palestine?

But in reality you're not - because you don't win arguments. Instead they are taking you away from your goal of showing that you think solidarity with Palestine is legitimate to arguing over whether or not solidarity with Palestine is legitimate - which is a much weaker position.

That sounds easy, but of course it's not. It can be very distressing to have someone call you anti-semitic - when you think that you're not and you believe that anti-semitism is wrong. And what solidarity demands in this moment is that you deprioritise that distress and do not act on it in a political way (although you can and should process it personally in non-political spaces way away from all of this).

If non-Jewish non-Palestinian people who were intending to offer solidarity go into a reactive space when they're accused of anti-semitism - and prioritise their feelings about being called anti-semitism - over the solidarity they were giving they can do incredible harm.

It's a horrific to watch genocide and to be so powerless, but it's all the more reason to focus on what you can do. Show your solidarity, don't get distracted from showing your solidarity.

#I have seen first hand #the damage that people who were not able to take a step back from their personal reaction did #and they contributed to the current environment in the UK #which emboldens Israel #and contributed to the side of barbarism over socialism

[ruminativerabbi]

A Kishenev Moment

Yesterday was the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Reich-wide pogrom in 1938 that signaled to the world that the Nazis were not going to settle back into being armchair anti-Semites who expressed their loathing for Jews through hate-inspired rhetoric and discriminatory legislation, but were going to morph forward into becoming brutal, barbarous killers for whom there would eventually be no bottom line at all when it came to attacking Jews or defaming Judaism. The numbers say it all. 267 synagogues were burnt to the ground in the course of that unimaginable night. Over 7000 Jewish businesses, including both family-owned shops and giant department stores, were damaged, looted, or utterly destroyed. Over thirty thousandJewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, the fig leaf of some sort of phony indictment accusing the incarcerated of having committed some sort of crime not even bothered with. Hundreds were murdered or prompted by the pogrom to take their own lives. The die was cast. Millennia of Jewish life in Germany and Austria were at their end. Other than for those able somehow to escape at the very last moment, there would be no future at all, not even a difficult or unpleasant one, for the Jews of the Reich.

We have not forgotten any of this. Nor has the eventual adoption of Yom Hashoah as the annual memorial day for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi anti-Semitism made it feel superfluous to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht each November. Yom Hashoah, which has its own complicated backstory, ended up as the day on which Jewish people formally mourn for the martyrs who died al kiddush ha-shem during the Second War. But Kristallnacht has its point, its own specific contribution to make. And, indeed, for many of us, Kristallnacht represents not the final debacle, but the early-on turning point, the moment at which the anti-Semitism which underlies so much of Western civilization stepped boldly out of the closet and blatantly shed even the patina of shame that is in theory supposed to attach to race- or ethnicity-based prejudice in the sophisticated lands of our dispersion, in the enlightened West, in lands ruled (as was Germany in the 1930s) by leaders democratically elected by voters fully aware of their platform and program for the nation. There is something tragic about both Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht, but whereas Yom Hashoah inspires regret, Kristallnacht inspires dread.

For me personally, the events of October 7 in the towns and kibbutzim on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border inspires just that kind of ominous feel that Kristallnacht also awakens, that sense that a line was crossed, that the fantasy that a reasonable solution could one day yet be reached with the Hamas leadership was not only a pipedream, but a malign, dangerous one at that, an example of the kind of illusory pipedream that leads, at least eventually, to Treblinka, to the slaughter of innocents, to hell.

And yet the event in Jewish history that I keep seeing referenced with respect to the Simchat Torah pogrom is not Kristallnacht at all, but Kishenev.

Today, Kishenev (now called Chișinău) is the capital of Moldova, a landlocked Balkan nation wedged in between Romania and Ukraine, and home to almost a full third of its population. But long before Moldova was an independent nation, Kishenev was the capital of the Bessarabian Governate in the Russian Empire and home to a huge Jewish population of about 50,000 (out of a total population of 280,000). The Jews of Kishinev were neither better nor worse off than any other Jewish community in eastern Europe: they had business dealings and social dealings with their neighbors, people with whom they shared a common nationality, a common language, and a common hometown. But shortly before Easter in 1903, things began to go off the rails. There were low level anti-Semitic incidents at first, some violent and others just defamatory. But things escalated quickly and an out-and-out pogrom began on April 19 of that year. The violence was, at the time, almost unprecedented. Countless Jewish homes were broken into, plundered, and destroyed. Synagogues were demolished. Jews were openly attacked by mobs armed with pitchforks and guns; hundreds of women were raped openly in the streets. The violence went on for three days and, at the end, about 1500 homes had been destroyed, forty-nine Jewish people had been murdered, and many hundreds had been seriously wounded. The whole story is told in detail in one of the most shocking books I’ve read in a long time (which is saying a lot): Stanford University historian Steven J. Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishenev and the Tilt of History, published in 2018 by Liveright Books. The book, which I can recommend wholeheartedly, is well written and very thoroughly researched. Intelligent and fully forthright in its account of the terror, the book should be read—and read carefully—by every single one of the so-called academics on our nation’s campuses who are willing to be known publicly as supporters of Hamas.

It might be hard for readers familiar with the horrors of the Shoah to take a pogrom in which only forty-nine people were murdered all that seriously. (By way of comparison, the Nazis murdered about 15,000 Jews every single day from August to October in 1942.) And yet the importance of Kishenev lies not so much in its own detail, but in its aftermath because it served in its day as a wake-up call that had repercussions and echoes across the entire Jewish world. And that phenomenon too is chronicled in detail in Professor Zipperstein’s book.

The sense of powerlessness felt by Jews who had no recourse but to cower in their own cellars and hide from the miscreants, rapists, and murderers wandering the streets in search of their next victim was chronicled by many contemporary authors, but by none as successfully as Hayyim Nachman Bialik in his famous poem, Be’ir Ha-hareigah (“In the City of the Killing”), which soon became his most famous work. Others wrote in a similar vein, focusing not on the power of the crowd by on the powerlessness of their victims. And, according to Zipperstein, the combined weight of journalistic accounts, poetic responses, dramatic representations, and literary retelling led to a sea change in Jewish attitudes towards the world and the place of Jewish people in it.

And, indeed, the notion that the Jewish people could only survive in the long term in a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people—the core concept of Zionism—moved quickly from an out-there kind of political theory espoused by some to the kind of basic truism that Jews the world over suddenly found themselves embracing naturally and easily. Kishenev was thus a kind of a catalyst moment, a threshold in time over which the Jewish people itself had somehow stepped…and which could not really be crossed back over again. This was a sea change in public opinion rooted in the realization that the barbarism of the Middle Ages—a time when Crusaders routinely and without fear of reprisal massacred entire Jewish communities and Inquisitors burnt at the stake any Jewish person deemed not wholeheartedly enough to have abandoned Judaism, that that level of barbarism was not a thing of the past but a thing fully of the present. And that triggered a response in the Jewish world that was, so Zipperstein writes, unprecedented.

And that brings me back to October 7, to the Simchat Torah pogrom, to Gaza. I follow the news incessantly. I suppose we all do. The story has yet to reach its conclusion, but I’m already sensing that Gaza was a kind of Kishinev moment for Jewish youth in our nation. The college campuses, once naively imagined by most (including myself) to be bastions of learning, of dispassionate scholarship, of culture, and of civilization, have shown themselves—and we are talking about the biggest and most highly-rated schools in America, these schools have shown themselves to be cesspits of anti-Semitism staffed by at least some faculty members morally depraved enough to feel that the murder, mutilation, and rape of innocents, including children, is a valid mode of political expression. But the Jewish students in those places are waking up and feeling—some, I’m sure, for the first time—the danger, the precariousness that inheres in Jewishness itself, the angst that underlies even the most confident statement of Jewish self-awareness. They too have crossed a line in the course of these last few weeks. And that, just as it was in the wake of Kishenev, will have to suffice as the silver lining in this cloud of unremitting horror stories that we have all heard and read over these last weeks.

Whether this truly will be a transformational moment for America’s Jewish youth remains to be seen. But Kishenev, which surely could have ended up as just one more pogrom on a long list of such events, somehow altered something in the DNA of the Jewish world. Nothing was the same afterwards. And the rise of Nazism just a few decades later only made even more evident the fact that, in the end, hiding from the hooligans and hoping that someone else steps forward to save their potential victims is not a cogent plan forward. Not for Jews, certainly. But also not for anybody.

Professor Zipperstein’s book is a shocking, bracing, very intelligent study of a single moment in Jewish history, but one that somehow nonetheless managed to divide what came before from all that came after. You won’t enjoy the book. No normal person could. But you will learn a lot from it, as I did. For those struggling to understand Gaza in the context of Jewish history, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

#Kishenev #Kristallnacht #Gaza

[theguardian6]

Assistance for Isis much better in Persia web 2 . in Europe when compared to inside Syria

theguardian.com

Sustain for Islamic Declare (Isis) among Arabic-speaking social media clients with Belgium, Britain, England and also the US is usually greater than in the militant group’s heartlands involving Syria together with Iraq, a global analysis associated with across 2m Arabic-language online posts has got found.

theguardian.com

In what exactly understood to be the primary arduous mass analysis of the with regard to and about the world’s largest jihadist organisation, Italian teachers found which in a very three-and-a-half month interval getting into in Come july 1st, content posted as a result of Arabic-speaking Europeans with Twitter and additionally Squidoo was more beneficial to be able to Isis compared to content posted within those countries over the frontline in the discord.

In Syria, Isis is dramatically melting away the battle meant for hearts and opinions with more as opposed to 92% of tweets, blog in addition to forum reviews hostile to the militants who have rampaged on the east with the region and western Iraq, confiscating large tracts of territory along with declaring the store of a christian declare.

The jihadist militants are notable for operating a good slick propaganda piece of equipment - managing via the internet distribution for you to systematically evade content manages, piggybacking popular internet conversations and galvanising thousands of global enthusiasts into growing your message.

Their projects look like having a consequence. Outside Syria, assistance for Isis, at all times a tossing amongst online communities, rises substantially. Forty-seven per cent from studied tweets together with posts from Qatar, 35% with Pakistan, 31% from Belgium and additionally almost 24% of posts because of UK and 21% from the YOU ended up classified as being supporting for the jihadist setup compared with just under 20% in Jordan, Saudi Arabia (19. 7%) and Iraq (19. 8%).

Dr Luigi Curini from Suggests from the Blogs, an agency set up simply by teachers from Milan Or even which is pioneering completely new forms of large-scale examination of online feedback, known as message exploration, says the research is actually wonderful evidence for ones proposition that to understand Isis up close is planned to be hostile to your potential customers.

Your team, including statistician Teacher Stefano Iacus, political scientist Andrea Ceron, and translators, found there seems to be moreover an intense battle flaming above Islamic State’s religious legitimacy.

Out from the vastly larger quantity of anti-Isis suggestions in the posts undertook studies, 1 out of some (32. 8%) criticises Isis for destroying Islam in addition to when using the faith as a include to get pursuing strength and other “private” pursuits.

One tweet stored by the organization at 23 September go through: “They are tyrants and have marred Islam. Everyday Isis will make Islam dress in your mask of a barbarous intimate monster. ”

Almost a third (29%) of anti-Isis reports expressed scary or simply outrage towards the group’s thrashing methods as well as a further 17% broadcast fears of the group’s hostility to help spiritual and political freedoms, the research found.

In the meantime, nearly all of the scaled-down global community with Isis proponents - making up just finished 20% of the 2m posts - championed the group designed for defending and “unifying” the global city involving believers and also spreading their trust.

Perhaps counter to help you western targets, solely 8. 3% associated with pro-Isis posts had been supportive of the crew for being an opposing forces of the western side.

Curini said it was nice thing about it this Isis had been massively attacked on line over its assert to be Islamic, because it demonstrated just how fragile their particular theological standing upright was among on the internet Muslims. “I’d be a little more worried if perhaps families, when they attack Isis, should they say a product negative about Isis, they talk just terrorism, or even assault … and they weren’t for the religious difficulty. ”

The fairly new science from sentiment study - the automated exploration with opinion - has been dogged from the difficulties of getting pc systems to understand a difficulties of natural speech.

A subtleties involving jokes, sarcasm, slang and general situation can show problematic for algorithms so that you can categorise and help make any nonhuman study of a collection of views prone to huge amounts of error. There is also a possibility of which sentiment is normally influenced by people who shout loudest and many frequently inside of a discussion, but this can be mitigated by way of gathering gigantic volumes of material.

The Italian company say they've got presented a number of innovations to relieve inaccuracies. Rather than routine a computer to understand that complexities of dialect itself, these people “hand train” an criteria to be able to acquaint this with hundreds of great and negative thoughts and the compact groups of words along with mini-phrases they are made from.

The team subsequently get the algorithm to see the likelihood of thoughts and opinions within the total amalgamation associated with articles or blog posts. The group say their fellow reviewed methods have got a 95%-98% precision speed.

Trawling for Isis-related words and phrases such as Syria, the caliphate, plus the name of the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the power team have the ability to collect 3, 195, 000 open posts on social media marketing, 93% that originated from Twitter and the remainder coming from public Zynga pages, forums together with blogs. Posts of which did not specific any kind of clear opinion ended up being forgotten.

Form 1 July until twenty two October, the study monitored shifts around idea over some of the most extraordinary functions of Syrian conflict this year, such as Isis’s attack to the Yazidi fraction and the swift advance around american Iraq, this publication of video lessons showing the beheadings of hostages, your bombings of Isis roles by the YOU AND ME and a consortium from other Arab lands, and the duress within the Kurdish town with Kobani.

Violence generally seems to mobilise people resistant to the perpetrators, the study uncovered. The beheading involving British aid staff member Jake Haines concerning 13 September as well as the start of US-led bombardment associated with Isis positions in Syria upon 23 Sept were followed by massive anti- then pro-Isis reactions.

Curini talked about the apparent deviation inside opinions failed to necessarily show individuals were changing their opinions, but much more likely showed the mobilisation from revealed supporters or simply opponents following huge events. “The insurance plan increases, therefore you use the and you post far more issues, ” Curini said.

The organization also collected and additionally analysed around 95, 000 Arabic-language current information reports to do a comparison of the social media blogposts against. They noticed the news articles or blog posts to get hostile to Isis eight times from 10 and no record correlation between the a pair of, suggesting genuine and the most useful state-controlled media cant be found handling opinions via the internet. “By analysing web 2 . 0 we can see there isn't always this particular homogenous sentiment against Isis, ” Curini stated.

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[aswithasunbeam]

Reminiscences of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton

One of the contributions to volume 78 of the Atlantic Monthly, published in 1896, came from an unidentified woman who in her youth had stayed as a guest with Elizabeth Hamilton and her daughter in Washington, D.C. during the 1850s. Over games of backgammon and nights by the fire, she was treated to intimate view of Eliza Hamilton in her old age. Her full account follows:

“When I was a child of twelve or thirteen, I spent the winter in Washington, and had the good fortune to know Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, whom I remember to this day with vivid interest and love. It was probably pleasant for her to have a young person about her, and for days and often weeks at a time she and her widowed daughter would have me with them. General Winfield Scott lived in the house next Mrs. Hamilton’s, and I became familiar with his soldierly figure, and remember how eagerly I watched for him on New Year’s Day, when his six-feet-and-four was arrayed in all the glory of full uniform for the President’s reception. I had my own idea of the God of War, but not Mars himself could have filled it more gorgeously than the general as he crossed the broad sidewalk in a dazzle of gold and color, with waving plume and clanking sword. Bur there was no prancing war-horse, and I had a miserable sense of flatness when all that splendor was swallowed up in a rusty hack and jolted away in the most commonplace manner.

Mrs. Hamilton’s favorite room in her house, which was on H street, near the site of the Presbyterian church, was the front room of the English basement, the dining room being back of it. There, by the window, in her own particular chair, she sat for hours, either looking out, or weaving mats on a small frame with pins along the sides. No longer able to read or even knit, this work was a great resource to her who had always been full of activity. Precluded from any social exertion by her great age (she was then ninety-five), she often seemed pleased to turn to me for amusement. I would read to her, or sit near and sew my bits of work while she was in a talkative mood; or, in fine weather, I would walk with her. Leaning her right hand on a stout cane, and her left arm upon my arm, she would walk several blocks, generally to a florist’s, for she was passionately fond of flowers; and always there was from her a cheerful little stream of talk, either of reminiscences, or of observations of nature, or of philosophical reverie, when everything else seemed to be forgotten. In stormy weather there were her mat-weaving and backgammon, of which she was very fond. I would have to tell her the number on the dice, because she could not see; but she would play for hours. I asked her once if she had always like it. She replied: “Yes, always. When I was young, Mr. Franklin taught me to play. He visited my father’s when I was a girl, and was very kind to me.”

One of her reminiscences that made a deep impression on me was the story of a great gathering of the Indians of eastern New York at Saratoga, which was then only a log fort. All the chiefs and greatest warriors of the Six Nations had met in solemn council, row after row of fine specimens of manhood standing silently around an open space, where a bit of greensward gleamed in the sunshine. Although they were dressed in all the barbaric pomp of war-paint, there was peace on their faces as they stood awaiting the approach of a small group of whites,--one or two officers in full uniform, and a tall commanding man in the prime of life, leading by the hand a slim girl about thirteen, dressed in white, with uncovered head and half-curious, half-frightened eyes. This man was General Philip Schuyler, whom the Indians honored as they did no other white man; and they had met to offer him a tribute of devotion. At a sign from the great chief of their ranks parted to admit General Schuyler, who advanced into the open space, still leading his little daughter. There, with many ceremonies, the child was formally adopted by the Six Nations, the chiefs ending the sacred rites by laying their hands upon her head, and giving her an Indian name meaning “One-of-us.” This incident as told by Mrs. Hamilton was the more impressive because she herself was the little maid thus adopted.

I recall one of her reminiscences of General Washington, because it gave me a new idea of him. She had been talking of men of bodily strength, and she observed that Washington was a very strong man. She then told an incident that must have happened soon after her marriage, for she was at the time at headquarters with her husband. Washington was writing in his office, a room on the second floor of a farmhouse. The farmer’s wife, who was washing clothes, suddenly discovered that the shed-roof was on fire. She rushed screaming into the house, and Washington came bounding down the stairs, picked up one of the large washtubs full of suds, ran upstairs with it, got out on the roof, and emptied it on the blaze; then he ran for another tub, and still another, before he succeeded in putting out the fire.

After dinner, it was the custom for Mrs. Hamilton, if well enough, to spend an hour or so in the large parlors on the first floor, where every evening there were many visitors, friends and strangers. Generally she enjoyed their calls, taking part in the conversation and showing a lively interest in current affairs; but sometimes she was unable to make the exertion. She did not make calls herself, but once I remember she went to one of President Pierce’s receptions. When it was known that the widow of Alexander Hamilton was present, she became the attraction of the evening; and the President, anxious to do her honor, left his place, offered his arm, and escorted her around the East Room.

Her dress, always black, of wool in the morning and of silk or satin in the evening, had been made after the same fashion for years. She wore a plain full skirt, and a plain, rather short waist folded over (not under) a muslin kerchief. Around her neck was a broad, finely plaited ruffle fastened behind, and a small soft shawl was laid over her shoulders. Her face, with its fine features, was framed by a plain snowy cap edged with finely plated ruffle, and tied under the chin. Some of the fire of youth still shone in those dark eyes, as she sat and talked with her guests, or, when they had gone, she slowly walked about the large rooms, leaning on her cane, pausing at one old bit or another of furniture to tell me its history. These rooms were crowded with relics,--swords, books, china, pictures, and many other things whose history I would gladly recall. The side wall near the entrance door was almost covered with a large half-length portrait of Washington, who sat to Stuart for it, and gave it to Hamilton. Under a large handsome centre table in the front parlor was a great silver wine-cooler, also a gift from Washington. I remember nothing more distinctly than a sofa and chairs with spindle legs, upholstered in black broadcloth, embroidered in flowery wreaths by Mrs. Hamilton herself, and a marble bust of Hamilton standing on it pedestal in a draped corner. That bust I can never forget, for the old lady always paused before it in her tour of the rooms, and leaning on her cane, gazed and gazed, as if she could never be satisfied.

She always called him Hamilton. One night, I remember, she seemed sad and absent-minded, and could not go to the parlor where there were visitors, but sat near the fire and played backgammon for a while; when the game was done, she leaned back in her chair a long time with closed eyes, as if lost to all around her. I never heard her complain, and I loved her with a reverent love that made me feel awed as the long silence was broken by the murmured words, “I am so tired,--it is so long. I want to see Hamilton.” What thoughts must have come to her from the past!—for she had griefs and losses beyond the usual grievous lot of woman. It is told in history that her oldest son, Philip, fell in a duel before his father met a similar fate; but it is unwritten history that the oldest daughter, a lovely young creature, was so shocked by her brother’s cruel death that her reason fled forever. In a private asylum she lived to be an old woman.

When Mrs. Hamilton died, at the age of ninety-seven, although an interment in old Trinity churchyard in New York had been for years a forbidden thing, her last request was granted. Quietly, at night, that frail little form was laid to rest there by the side of her beloved and illustrious husband. “

#eliza hamilton #alexander hamilton #eliza hamilton holly #benjamin franklin #backgammon #franklin pierce #winfield scott #washington d.c. #1850s #history #hamliza #historical hamliza

[jewish-privilege]

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on Jan. 30, 1933, he gained the authority to implement his racist ideology toward Germany’s Jews, who then numbered 535,000 out of a general population of 67 million. After the Reichstag (parliament) elections on March 5, the new German government removed the constraints on violence against Jews, and assaults and vicious beatings of Jews in the streets of major German cities by Nazi thugs became commonplace. Within months, the Nazi government issued numerous decrees and regulations that effectively removed Jews from German economic life and the professions, the goal being to force the Jews to leave Germany.

German Jews reacted to these developments with shock and disbelief. Diaries and memoirs record their distress and utter bewilderment. Another primary source is the private letters that German Jews sent to relatives living abroad. These letters express the reactions and emotions of men and women to the horrifying events unfolding around them daily. One rarely used such resource is the letters written by German B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant) members to relatives in the United States. Many of these letters were forwarded to B’nai B’rith’s international headquarters in Cincinnati, where they remain part of the organization’s archives.

Jewish men established the German B’nai B’rith in Berlin 1882 to combat a rising tide of anti-Semitism among the populace and in fraternal organizations. From 1882 onward, most German B’nai B’rith members belonged to business, industry, and the legal and medical professions. In general, B’nai B’rith members represented the most influential element within European Jewish society, and many of the leading personalities in Jewish life were members. At the time of the Berlin lodge’s founding, the largest and wealthiest German Jewish elite lived in Berlin and occupied an important position in the city’s cultural and intellectual life. By 1925, Germany contained 107 B’nai B’rith lodges with over 15,000 members.

While all German Jews reacted to these events with alarm and incredulity, the elite of the community experienced an especially deep dismay, having assumed that their economic and social position and contributions to German life and culture would shield them from danger. B’nai B’rith members came from this class, and many of them wrote personal and emotional letters describing the nightmare they found themselves in to family members living in the United States. The letters movingly express the consternation and terror the writers felt as the world they knew collapsed.

...On April 2, 1933, the wife of another Berlin physician and B’nai B’rith member wrote to a relative in the United States movingly describing what she witnessed during the April 1 national boycott against Jews in Germany and her reaction and emotions regarding what she saw.

I will try to give you an idea of my experiences of yesterday—Saturday, April 1st….I have had many experiences in my life, but nothing I have ever gone thru can compare with this Nazi boycott in retaliation of “the atrocity propaganda”  against Germans. No blood was shed, that is true, but the humiliation to the Jews—the absolute helplessness of their position—the cowardliness of these brutes in carrying out to the last vestage [sic], the most intimate details on orders from above (Goebbels and Goerring [sic]) beggars description.  

I wanted to see for myself just what was happening and so went down the Kurfurstendam [sic]–a street much like 5th Ave. in N.Y.—very long, block after block of both large and small exclusive shops interspersed by large coffee houses and movies. Here on a Sat. afternoon it is a sort of promenade and window-shopping, but the site that met one’s eyes yesterday! On the large windows of all shops bearing even the semblance of a Jewish name these brown shirts had pasted plain colored posters about 3 feet long bearing the words, “Deutsche Whart Euch—Kauft nicht bei Juden” (Germans beware do not buy from Jews). On office buildings where Jewish lawyers, notaries, or doctors have their small signs … they smeared over the signs of the Jews and pasted smaller placards. “Jews—geht nicht hier” (Jews—do not enter)….

These young devils like a lot of hungry wolves let loose … with buckets filled with red paint and with large paint brushes, rushed from one shop window to another and not satisfied with having put huge posters against the Jews thereon, printed in huge letters at the side of the posters JUDE [underlined in the original]. These were followed by other troops with white paint buckets who hastily painted a large Shield of David [underlined in the original] on the same windows. It was a concerted action, completely organized so that one atrocity followed upon the other. Up and down these devils flew, across the wide streets over to the opposite side while the crowds of people (there was scarcely a Jew to be seen on the streets, they were mostly at home, being afraid to venture out), looked on, some with serious faces—many (and mostly the bourgeois type, the kind of women one could imagine in France during the revolution) grinning and smiling approvingly as though it was a huge joke! Can you imagine my feeling? Large shops and small ones, shops that no one ever knew that they were owned by Jews… lace houses that have been in the same shops for 50 years—coffee houses and fine restaurants. Hundreds and hundreds of stores, delicatessen shops, the finest Berlin has, were all, without exception smeared up in this way. And what a sight! And what deep misery in the wake of this dastardly, cowardly outbreak. On some stores which from the name one would never think owned by Jews they had smeared “Geborener Jude” [born a Jew]. And on many, oh so many, in large white letters they printed “Ich bein Jude” [I am a Jew]… Well, my dears, my heart ached and bled and it was all I could do to keep the tears back. … Throughout the entire breath and length of this long, long, Kurfurstendam [sic] we never saw one single policeman [underlined in the original], not one officer of the law to protect any outrage that might have occurred. … Can you imagine a civilized land condoning such atrocities? Can you imagine in the twentieth century that troops of young snips should have the right to perpetuate such horrible deeds as the smearing of respectable shops with all these dirty epithets? Juda-Juda everywhere. Kauft nicht bei Juden-kauft nur bei Deutsche. (Don’t buy from Jews buy only from Germans).

...And then, when one thought they had finished with their dirty work—to see them wild with glee and victory heaped upon helpless Jews, (and oh how helpless) this handful of people is against the infamous mob backed by the government of tyrants and Jew haters—to add the finishing touch—the Shield of David painted in white on all the windows. Well, that Shield has led Jews throughout centuries and protected them from greater atrocities than those that are being heaped on them today by this barbarous country…. God has never left us yet and my faith in Him has never been shaken.

The blood-thirsty army which Hitler and his cohorts have been building up have had their first outlet. … The protests of the Jews in the foreign countries played right into their hands and they used their already prepared and fully organized “boycott” as THEIR protest to the lies [underlined in the original] about Germany which, as they claimed, the Jews [underlined in the original] over here broadcast. These demons say, “this is your own work—now take your medicine.” … I am now worried until Pesach is over, for I can’t help thinking, in the face of the placards announcing that the Jews need Christian blood for the Passover feast, that some horrible thing is brewing. Let us hope not. I also am afraid now as many others are, of confiscation of the property belonging to the Jews… I doubt if anything I have written you in such minute detail will come into the press, and that is why I have written my personal account of it.

...As all the letters indicate, by the end of April 1933 few Jewish members of the middle and upper middle classes had any illusions that conditions under the Nazis would improve. With hindsight, we know that the Jewish situation only worsened. But none of the letter writers could have imagined that in 10 years they or their families would be reduced to ashes by a state-run industrial killing machine and that the long continuum of Jewish life in Germany would be broken.

#shoah #holocaust #kristallnacht #'many...grinning and smiling approvingly as though it was a huge joke!' #antisemitism

[transcriptroopers]

@hm-ha-hm-hm-hm-ha

Hi! Thanks a lot for this contribution. I’ve written this three times now because I don’t save my work, and I’m an actual dumbass despite my writing all of this, so bear with me history buffs!!!

This response is a very popular method of washing the west’s hands of Russia: point at Stalin. A high school debate team might scream “ad hominem” if he didn’t so damn well deserve it. Perhaps I should have been more explicit in my original post about Stalin’s acts of barbarism, but I wasn’t for the same reason I wasn’t more explicit with Hitler’s: we know. The west ensures that we are well aware (although perhaps not very well informed) about the atrocities of the USSR and before. Detailing them would have contributed nothing meaningful to my post imo, but for future reference: Hitler: bad. Stalin: bad. Moving on, I believe it is a fundamental misunderstanding of history to call the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact “allying” the USSR to Germany, and it is most certainly fallacious to say that they ready to invade each other anyway.  To say this pact made them “allies” is as misleading as calling the USSR and the U.S. “allies” during the Cold War.

Stalin knew before anyone else that Hitler was planning military expansion. It was a very rough time to live next door to fascists; people have some difficulty distinguishing this, but fascism is not the same thing as communism. Fascism is usually considered the far right and communism is usually considered the far left, but being radical doesn’t make them equivalent ideologies, or “just as bad,” as some put it. They are, by nature, incompatible ideologies. So it’s hard to understand why history remembers them as allies, even hesitant ones.

When Hitler entered power in 1933, he was already intending to invade both Russia and Poland over Lebensraum. He described this concept as land that rightfully belonged to Germans, land they were meant to have by right of destiny. It included pretty much all workable land in the world. Slavic people were also “undesireables” to him, and his original goals included exterminating all Slavic people, which at the time was around 180 million in the USSR alone. Though he wasn’t often a pragmatic man, he did ultimately settle for just taking all of Russia’s land and resources, which at the time was a good one sixth of the earth’s surface. That’s a lot of Lebensraum.

Stalin, by contrast, was far too busy murdering millions of his own people to start carrying out world domination. When people speak of Hitler’s world domination, they mean it literally -- his “master race” and Final Solution and Lebensraum -- his actual plans to wipe out the majority of the earth. When people speak of Stalin’s world domination, they’re usually referring to his efforts towards the “popular front,” an global ideological effort toward educating the masses about leftism at a time when merely being suspected of being a communist was grounds for a life sentence or worse. The ultimate end goal was to end capitalism, but it is a very different thing to stage a war against an economic ideology than on people. If you’re the U.S. and Great Britain --  countries whose rule dangerously toed the line of fascism -- this was tantamount to world conquest. The people were already more aware of the corrupted parts of capitalism than they were in WWI, largely thanks to the Great Depression, and were discovering communism on their own. Unions were beginning to hold real power in the U.S., (you know...regular old unions...the things that gave us the “40 hour work week,” child labor laws, weekends, OSHA, minimum wage, etc) and these and workers’ strikes (along with other efforts for social reform like the Suffragette movement) were the examples provided as “proof” that Soviet spies were invading. America was liberalizing and giving power to the people; that was the domination.

Stalin also intended to assist in liberating conquered, colonized, and annexed countries in the western empire, which if you’re keeping track is all of them lol British France German American and even Dutch empires were being criticized and threatened, for Stalin was an anti-imperialist and unlike Hitler, he did not admire Churchill’s endeavors in India or the U.S.’s “kill every person over the age of 10″ dealings in the Philippines. Depending on who you ask, one might argue that wanting to free indigenous people brutally colonized by western forces was a good thing, but perhaps not so if they were your colonies and your entire nation’s economy depended on you stealing their resources.

Anyway, this gave all of the allies really good reasons to not want to help Stalin even before there was evidence of his many victims when there was evidence of Nazi expansion. Don’t confuse the past and the present; the west did not hate Stalin because he was a monster, (or else it would hate itself a lot more) but because he was trying to spread communism and liberate their colonies. So, again, in 1933 when Hitler took office and was all but announcing his intent to eventually conquer Poland and Russia, the USSR was left without allies. In 1936, Germany broke the Treaty of Versailles and had military forces occupy neighboring Rhineland. This invasion, not Poland, was the beginning of Hitler’s global conquest, and it went completely unchallenged by allies, despite the USSR’s protest. When the west failed to stop him, Stalin grew convinced that Germany and Great Britain (whose ideologies were much more compatible) would become allies, and Churchill would keep good on his word to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle.”

By 1939, Stalin faced the fact that the German war machine was outside Russia’s door and they had no allies who would help if they were invaded. Russia by this point was gearing up for a defensive war, but had no intent to invade Germany, particularly because by 1939 Stalin had his hands full just trying to kill everyone in his own government. So at last, the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact, not a treaty of alliance. The two promised not to commit acts of aggression against each other for the next ten years, to not invade each other, to keep their military forces away from each other. It was the political equivalent of two countries saying “please don’t declare war on me.”

Two weeks after this pact was signed and with no threat of Russian rebuff, Germany invaded Poland, with whom they had signed a non-aggression pact in 1936, and WWII began. The timing was terrible; Stalin and Hitler were the two most evil people the world could imagine, and now they were working together to destroy the world. Germany would break its non-aggression pact (again) with the USSR in 1941, and Russia would not merely “bear the brunt” of the fighting but the overwhelming majority of it. The death toll of its soldiers alone was ten and a half million people. In Moscow, eight and a half million. In Stalingrad, a million people. In Leningrad, one million. All of these civilians and Red Army home defenders with large populations of women and children. In response to Hitler’s invasion of Russia, future president Harry Truman said:  “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” The tagged on line at the end is woefully inadequate compensation for the rest of the statement: that the brutalized citizens of the USSR were no better than the Nazis invading them.

By historical aspects, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of about twenty million Russians. Conversely, Hitler was responsible for the deaths of about sixty million Russians on top of the many millions of other deaths we all know he was responsible for. Russia lost more lives than all off the other nations in WWII combined. It would be a massive historical disservice to those victims to say they deserved it because both sides were equally bad.

#wwii #ww2

[xtruss]

The Future of American Power

Arundhati Roy on America’s Fiery, Brutal Impotence

The US leaves Afghanistan humiliated, but now faces bigger worries, from social polarisation to environmental collapse, says a novelist and essayist

— September 3rd, 2021

— By Arundhati Roy

This By-invitation commentary is part of a series by a range of global thinkers on the future of American power, examining the forces shaping the country's standing.

IN FEBRUARY 1989 the last Soviet tank rolled out of Afghanistan, its army having been decisively defeated in a punishing, nearly decade-long war by a loose coalition of mujahideen (who were trained, armed, funded and indoctrinated by the American and Pakistani Intelligence services). By November that year the Berlin wall had fallen and the Soviet Union began to collapse. When the cold war ended, the United States took its place at the head of a unipolar world order. In a heartbeat, radical Islam replaced communism as the most imminent threat to world peace. After the attacks of September 11th, the political world as we knew it spun on its axis. And the pivot of that axis appeared to be located somewhere in the rough mountains of Afghanistan.

For reasons of narrative symmetry if nothing else, as the US makes its ignominious exit from Afghanistan, conversations about the decline of the United States’ power, the rise of China and the implications this might have for the rest of the world have suddenly grown louder. For Europe and particularly for Britain, the economic and military might of the United States has provided a cultural continuity of sorts, effectively maintaining the status quo. To them, a new, ruthless, power waiting in the wings to take its place must be a source of deep worry.

In other parts of the world, where the status quo has brought unutterable suffering, the news from Afghanistan has been received with less dread.

The day the Taliban entered Kabul, I was up in the mountains in Tosa Maidan, a high, alpine meadow in Kashmir, which the Indian Army and Air Force used for decades to practise artillery and aerial bombing. From one edge of the meadow we could look down at the valley below us, dotted with martyrs’ graveyards where tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who had been killed in Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination are buried.

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist group, came to power cunningly harnessing post-9/11 international Islamophobia, riding a bloody wave of orchestrated anti-Muslim massacres, in which thousands were murdered. It considers itself a staunch ally of the United States. The Indian security establishment is aware that the Taliban’s victory marks a structural shift in the noxious politics of the subcontinent, involving three nuclear powers: India, Pakistan and China, with Kashmir as a flashpoint. It views the victory of the Taliban, however pyrrhic, as a victory for its mortal enemy Pakistan, which has covertly supported the Taliban in its 20-year battle against the US occupation. Mainland India’s 175m-strong Muslim population, already brutalised, ghettoised, stigmatised as “Pakistanis”—and now, increasingly as “Talibanis”—are at even greater risk of discrimination and persecution.

Most of the mainstream media in India, embarrassingly subservient to the BJP, consistently referred to the Taliban as a terrorist group. Many Kashmiris who have lived for decades under the guns of half a million Indian soldiers, read the news differently. Wishfully. They were looking for pinholes of light in their world of darkness and indignity.

The details, the nuts and bolts of what was actually happening were still trickling in. A few who I spoke to saw it as the victory of Islam against the most powerful army in the world. Others as a sign that no power on Earth can crush a genuine freedom struggle. They fervently believed—wanted to believe—that the Taliban had completely changed and would not return to their barbaric ways. They too saw what had happened as a tectonic shift in regional politics, which they hoped would give Kashmiris some breathing space, some possibility of dignity.

The irony was that we were having these conversations sitting on a meadow pitted with bomb craters. It was Independence Day in India and Kashmir was locked down to prevent protests. On one border the armies of India and Pakistan were in a tense face-off. On another, in nearby Ladakh, the Chinese Army had crossed the border and was camped on Indian territory. Afghanistan felt very close by.

In its scores of military expeditions to establish and secure suzerainty since the second world war, the United States has smashed through (non-white) country after country. It has unleashed militias, killed millions, toppled nascent democracies and propped up tyrants and brutal military occupations. It has deployed a modern version of British colonial rhetoric—of being, in one way or another, on a selfless, civilising mission. That’s how it was with Vietnam. And so it is with Afghanistan.

Depending on where you want to put down history’s markers, the Soviets, the American- and Pakistan-backed mujahideen, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, the unspeakably violent and treacherous warlords and the US and NATO armed forces have boiled the very bones of the Afghan people into a blood soup. All, without exception, have committed crimes against humanity. All have contributed to creating the soil and climate for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS and their affiliates to operate.

If honourable ‘intentions’ such as empowering women and saving them from their own families and societies are meant to be mitigating factors in military invasions, then certainly both the Soviets and the Americans can rightly claim to have raised up, educated and empowered a small section of urban Afghan women before dropping them back into a bubbling cauldron of medieval misogyny. But neither democracy nor feminism can be bombed into countries. Afghan women have fought and will continue to fight for their freedom and their dignity in their own way, in their own time.

Does the US withdrawal mark the beginning of the end of its hegemony? Is Afghanistan going to live up to that old cliché about itself—the Graveyard of Empires? Perhaps not. Notwithstanding the horror show at the Kabul airport, the debacle of withdrawal may not be as big a blow to the United States as it is being made out to be.

Much of those trillions of dollars spent in Afghanistan circulated back to the US war industry, which includes weapons manufacturers, private mercenaries, logistics and infrastructure companies and non-profit organisations. Most of the lives that were lost in the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (estimated to be roughly 170,000 by researchers at Brown University) were those of Afghans who, in the eyes of the invaders, obviously count for very little. Leaving aside the crocodile tears, the 2,400 American soldiers who were killed don’t count for much either.

The resurgent Taliban humiliated the United States. The Doha agreement signed by both sides in 2020 for a peaceful transfer of power is testimony to that. But the withdrawal could also reflect a hard-nosed calculation by the US government about how to better deploy money and military might in a rapidly changing world. With economies ravaged by lockdowns and the coronavirus, and as technology, big data and AI make for a new kind of warfare, holding territory may be less necessary than before. Why not leave Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran to mire themselves in the quicksand of Afghanistan—imminently facing famine, economic collapse and in all probability another civil war—and keep American forces rested, mobile and ready for a possible military conflict with China over Taiwan?

The real tragedy for the United States is not the debacle in Afghanistan, but that it was played out on live television. When it withdrew from the war it could not win in Vietnam, the home front was being ripped apart by anti-war protests, much of it fuelled by enforced conscription into the armed forces. When Martin Luther King made the connection between capitalism, racism and imperialism and spoke out against the Vietnam war, he was vilified. Mohammad Ali, who refused to be conscripted and declared himself a conscientious objector, was stripped of his boxing titles and threatened with imprisonment. Although war in Afghanistan did not arouse similar passions on American streets, many in the Black Lives Matter movement made those connections too.

In a few decades, the United States will no longer be a country with a white majority. The enslavement of black Africans and the genocide and dispossession of native Americans haunt almost every public conversation today. It is more than likely that these stories will join up with other stories of suffering and devastation caused by US wars or by US allies. Nationalism and exceptionalism are unlikely to be able to prevent that from happening. The polarisation and schisms within the United States could in time lead to a serious breakdown of public order. We’ve already seen the early signs. A very different kind of trouble looms on another front too.

For centuries America had the option of retreating into the comfort of its own geography. Plenty of land and fresh water, no hostile neighbours, oceans on either side. And now plenty of oil from fracking. But American geography is on notice. Its natural bounty can no longer sustain the “American way of life”—or war. (Nor for that matter, can China’s geography sustain the “Chinese way of life”).

Oceans are rising, coasts and coastal cities are insecure, forests are burning, the flames licking at the edges of settled civilisation, devouring whole towns as they spread. Rivers are drying up. Drought haunts lush valleys. Hurricanes and floods devastate cities. As groundwater is depleted, California is sinking. The reservoir of the iconic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which supplies fresh water to 40m people, is drying at an alarming rate.

If empires and their outposts need to plunder the Earth to maintain their hegemony, it doesn’t matter if the plundering is driven by American, European, Chinese or Indian capital. These are not really the conversations that we should be having. Because while we’re busy talking, the Earth is busy dying.

— Arundhati Roy is a novelist and essayist.

[philosophyofpolitics]

THREE VARIATIONS ON TRUMP: CHAOS, EUROPE, AND FAKE NEWS

There is disorder under heavens; the situation is excellent

Now that yet another week of Donald Trump’s frantic activity is safely behind us and slowly receding into memory, the time has come to think about the chaotic wasteland his visits left behind. Trump visited three places: Brussels, where he met key European leaders; London where he met Theresa May (plus the queen); and Helsinki where he met Putin. Everybody noted the strange fact that Trump was much friendlier to those perceived as American enemies than to its friends. But such facts should not surprise us too much. Our attention should turn in another direction. As is often the case with Trump, reactions to his acts are more important than what he did or said.

Let us begin by comparing what Trump said with what his partners said. When Trump and May were asked by a journalist what they thought about the flow of immigrants to Europe, Trump brutally and honestly rendered his populist anti-immigrant position: immigrants are a threat to the European way of life; they are destabilizing the safety of our countries, bringing violence and intolerance, so we should keep them out. A careful listener could easily notice that Theresa May said exactly the same thing, just in a more diplomatic and “civilized” way: immigrants bring diversity; they contribute to our welfare, but we should carefully check who we let in… We’ve got here a clear taste of the choice which is more and more the only one presented to us: either direct populist barbarism or a more civilized version of the same politics, barbarism with a human face.

Generally, reactions to Trump from all across the spectrum in the US, Republicans and Democrats, were those of global shock and awe bordering on panic pure and simple: Trump is unreliable. He brings chaos: first, he reproached Germany for relying on Russian gas and thus becoming vulnerable to our enemy; days later he praised his good relation with Putin… He doesn’t even have good manners (the horror: when meeting the queen, he violated the protocol of how you behave in the presence of a monarch!). He doesn’t really listen to his democratic partners in a dialogue, while he is much more open to the charm of Putin, America’s big enemy. The way he acted at the press conference with Putin in Helsinki was not only an unheard-of humiliation (just think of it: he didn’t behave as Putin’s master!), and some of his statements could even be considered outright acts of treason. Rumours swirled of how Trump was Putin’s puppet because Putin had some hold over him (the famous photos of prostitutes urinating on Trump in Moscow?), and parts of the US establishment, Democrats and some Republicans, began to contemplate a quick impeachment, even if Pence would be his replacement. The conclusion was simply that the President of the US is no longer the leader of the free world… But has the President of the US really ever been such a leader? Here our counter-attack should begin.

Note that the overall confusion of Trump’s statements contains some truths here and there. Wasn’t he in some sense right when he said that it was in our interest to have good relations with Russia and China to prevent war? Wasn’t he partially right to present his tariff war also as a protection of the interests of the US workers? The fact is that the existing order of international trade and finance is far from just, and that the European establishment hurt by Trump’s measures should also look at its own sins. Did we already forget how the existing financial and trade rules that privilege the strong European states, especially Germany, brought devastation to Greece?

Concerning Putin, I believe most of the accusations against him to be true. Say, with regard to his meddling in the US elections, probably yes, Putin was caught doing… what? What the US are doing regularly and massively, just that in their case, they call it the defence of democracy. So, Trump is a monster, and when he designated himself as a “stable genius,” we should read this as a direct reversal of the truth: he is an unstable idiot who disturbs the establishment. But as such, he is a symptom, an effect of what is wrong with the establishment itself. The true Monster is the very establishment shocked by Trump’s actions.

The panicky reaction to Trump’s latest acts demonstrates that he is undermining and destabilizing the US political establishment and its ideology. Our conclusion should thus be: the situation is dangerous; there are uncertainty and elements of chaos in international relations. But it is here that we should remember Mao’s old motto: “There is great disorder under the sky, so the situation is excellent!” Let’s not lose our resolve, let’s exploit the confusion by systematically organizing another anti-establishment front from the Left. The signs are clear here: the surprising electoral victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed democratic Socialist, against 10-terms House incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York congressional primary was, hopefully, the first in a series of shocks that will transform the Democratic Party. People like her, who are not the well-known faces from the liberal establishment, should be our answer to Trump.

Trump and the Idea of Europe

In an interview on July 15, 2018, just after attending a stormy meeting with the EU leaders, Trump mentioned the European Union as the first in the line of “foes” of the US, ahead of Russia and China. Instead of condemning this claim as irrational (“Trump is treating the allies of the US worse than its enemies,” etc.), we should ask a simple question: what bothers Trump so much about the EU? And which EU is he talking about? This question should be raised because, when Trump was asked by journalists about immigrants flowing into Europe, he answered as it befits the anti-immigrant populist that he is: immigrants are tearing apart the fabric of European mores and ways of life, posing a danger to European spiritual identity… In short, it was people like Orban or Salvini who were talking through him.

So which Europe bothers Trump? It is the Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that, in order to cope with the challenges of our moment, we should move beyond the constraints of nation-states. It is the Europe which also desperately strives to somehow remain faithful to the old Enlightenment motto of solidarity with victims, the Europe aware of the fact that humanity is today One, that we are all on the same boat (or, as we say, on the same Spaceship Earth), so that the other’s misery is also our problem. We should mention here Peter Sloterdijk who noted that the struggle today is about how to secure the survival of modern Europe’s greatest economico-political achievement, the Social Democratic Welfare State. According to Sloterdijk, our reality is – in Europe, at least – “objective Social Democracy” as opposed to “subjective” Social Democracy. One should distinguish between Social Democracy as the panoply of political parties and Social Democracy as the “formula of a system” which “precisely describes the political-economic order of things, which is defined by the modern state as the state of taxes, as infrastructure-state, as the state of the rule of law and, not last, as the social state and the therapy state”: “We encounter everywhere a phenomenal and a structural Social Democracy, a manifest and a latent one, one which appears as a party and another one which is more or less irreversibly built into in the very definitions, functions, and procedures of modern statehood as such.” (Peter Sloterdijk, “Aufbruch der Leistungstraeger,” Cicero, November 2009, p. 99)

In the normal run of things, this Idea that underlies a united Europe got corrupted, half-forgotten, and it is only in a moment of danger that we are compelled to return to this essential dimension of Europe, to its hidden potential. More precisely, the point is not just to return to this Idea but to (re)invent it, to “discover” what was actually never there. As Alenka Zupančič put it apropos of the threat of nuclear (self-)destruction of humanity: “the true choice is between losing it all and creating what we are about to lose: only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense. […] The possible awakening call of the bomb is not simply ‘let’s do all in our power to prevent it before it is too late’, but rather ‘let’s first built this totality (unity, community, freedom) that we are about to lose through the bomb’.”

Therein resides the unique chance opened up by the very real threat of nuclear (or ecological, for that matter) destruction. When we become aware of the danger that we could lose it all, we automatically get caught in a retroactive illusion, a short-circuit between reality and its hidden potentials. What we want to save is not the reality of our world but reality as it might have been if it were not hindered by antagonisms which gave birth to the nuclear threat. And the same goes for the united Europe which lies in the great pincers between America on the one side and Russia on the other. Although America and Russia may appear opposites – unbridled liberalism and individualism versus new authoritarianism–, seen metaphysically, they are the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology grounded in fake patriotism (“America first,” “Russia first”). When the farthest corners of the globe have been conquered technically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when, through televised “live coverage,” you can simultaneously “experience” a battle in the Iraqi desert and an opera performance in Beijing; when, in a global digital network, time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity; when a winner in a reality TV-show counts as the great man of the people; then, yes, there still loom like spectres over all this uproar the questions: what for? – where to? – and what then?…

Anyone minimally acquainted with Heidegger will easily recognize in this paragraph an ironic paraphrase of his diagnosis of the situation of Europe from mid-1930s (Introduction to Metaphysics). There effectively is a need, among us, Europeans, for what Heidegger called Auseinandersetzung (an interpretive confrontation) with others as well as with Europe’s own past in all its scope, from its Ancient and Judeo-Christian roots to the recently deceased Welfare-State idea. Every crisis is in itself an instigation for a new beginning. Every collapse of short-term strategic and pragmatic measures can be a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to rethink the very foundations. What we need is a retrieval-through-repetition (Wieder-Holung): through a critical confrontation with the entire European tradition, one should repeat the question “What is Europe?”, or, rather, “What does it mean for us to be Europeans?”, and thus formulate a new inception.

Both the US and Russia openly want to dismember Europe. Both Trump and Putin support Brexit, and they support euro-sceptics in every corner, from Poland to Italy. What is bothering them about Europe when we all know the misery of the EU which fails again and again at every test, from its inability to enact a consistent immigration policy to its wretched reaction to Trump’s tariff war? It is obviously not this actually-existing Europe, but the idea of Europe that rekindles against all odds and becomes palpable in the moments of danger.

From Fake News to the Big Lie

An obsession with fake news is something that Trump and his critics share: Trump is accused of lying all the time, while Trump himself accuses his opponents of spreading fake news. In debates about the explosion of fake news in (not only) our media, liberal critics like to point out three events which, combined, continuously bring about what some call the “death of truth.”

First, it is the rise of religious and ethnic fundamentalisms (and its obverse, stiff Political Correctness) that disavow rational argumentation and ruthlessly manipulate data to get their message through. Christian fundamentalists lie for Jesus, Politically Correct Leftists obfuscate the news showing their favourite victims in a bad light (or denounce the bearers of such news as “Islamophobic racists”), etc.

Then, there are the new digital media that enable people to form communities defined by specific ideological interests, communities where they can exchange news and opinions outside a unified public space and where conspiracies and similar theories can flourish without constraints (just look at the thriving neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic websites).

Finally, there is the legacy of postmodern “deconstructionism” and historicist relativism, which claim that there is no objective truth valid for all, that every truth relies on a specific horizon and is rooted in a subjective standpoint dependent on power relations, and that the greatest ideology is precisely the claim that we can step out of our historical limitation and look at things objectively. Opposed to this is, of course, the view that facts are out there, accessible to an objective disinterested approach, and that we should distinguish between the freedom of opinions and the freedom of facts. Liberals can thus comfortably occupy the privileged ground of truthfulness and dismiss both sides, alt-right and radical Left.

Problems begin with the last distinction. In some sense, there ARE “alternate facts,” though, of course, not in the sense of the debate whether the Holocaust did or did not happen. (Incidentally, all the Holocaust-revisionists whom I know, from David Irving on, argue in a strictly empirical way of verifying data; none of them evokes postmodern relativism!) “Data” are a vast and impenetrable domain, and we always approach them from what hermeneutics calls a certain horizon of understanding, privileging some data and omitting others. All our histories are precisely that – stories, a combination of (selected) data into consistent narratives, not photographic reproductions of reality. For example, an anti-Semitic historian could easily write an overview of the role of the Jews in the social life of Germany in the 1920s, pointing out how entire professions (lawyers, journalists, art) were numerically dominated by Jews – an account that is (probably more or less) true, but clearly in the service of a lie.

The most efficient lies are lies performed with truth, lies which reproduce only factual data. Take the history of a country: one can tell it from the political standpoint (focusing on the vagaries of political power), on economic development, on ideological struggles, on popular misery and protest… Each of the approaches could be factually accurate, but they are not “true” in the same emphatic sense. There is nothing “relativist” in the fact that human history is always told from a certain standpoint, sustained by certain ideological interests. The difficult thing is to show how some of these interested standpoints are not ultimately all equally true: some are more “truthful” than others. For example, if one tells the story of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of the suffering of those oppressed by it, i.e., if we are led in our telling by an interest in universal human emancipation, this is not just a matter of a different subjective standpoint. Such a retelling of history is also immanently “more true” since it describes more adequately the dynamics of the social totality which gave birth to Nazism. Not all “subjective interests” are the same, not only because some are ethically preferable to others but because “subjective interests” do not stand outside a social totality; they are themselves moments of that social totality, formed by active (or passive) participants in social processes. The title of Habermas’s early masterpiece “Knowledge and Human Interest” is perhaps more actual today than ever before.

There is an even greater problem with the underlying premise of those who proclaim the “death of truth”: they talk as if before (say, until the 1980s), in spite of all the manipulations and distortions, truth did somehow prevail, and that the “death of truth” is a relatively recent phenomenon. Already a quick overview tells us that this was not the case. How many violations of human rights and humanitarian catastrophes remained invisible, from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq? Just remember the times of Reagan, Nixon, Bush… The difference was not that the past was more “truthful” but that ideological hegemony was much stronger, so that, instead of today’s greater melee of local “truths,” one “truth” (or, rather, one big Lie) basically prevailed. In the West, this was the liberal-democratic Truth (with a Leftist or Rightist twist). What is happening today is that, with the populist wave which unsettled the political establishment, the Truth/Lie that has served as an ideological foundation for this establishment is also falling apart. And the ultimate reason for this disintegration is not the rise of postmodern relativism but the failure of the ruling establishment, which is no longer able to maintain its ideological hegemony.

We can now see what those who bemoan the “death of truth” really deplore: the disintegration of one big Story more or less accepted by the majority, a story, which used to bring ideological stability to a society. The secret of those who curse “historicist relativism” is that they miss the safe situation where one big Truth (even if it was a big Lie) provided basic “cognitive mapping” to all. In short, it is those who deplore the “death of truth” that are the true and most radical agents of this death: their motto is the one attributed to Goethe, “besser Unrecht als Unordnung,” better injustice than disorder, better one big Lie than the reality of a mixture of lies and truths. One thing is clear: there is no return to the old ideological hegemony. The only way to return to Truth is to reconstruct it from a new cognitive interest in universal emancipation.

Slavoj Žižek

The Philosophical Salon

#philosophy #Žižek #Trump

[uni-tierra-califas]

[Unitierracalifas] UT Califas Demo Ateneo, 5-26-18, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Compañerxs: We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday, May 26, 2018 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below that are raised by the current conjuncture in which we find ourselves. 

Ghada Karmi informs us that "between 30 March and 11 May Israeli forces shot dead more than 40 unarmed Palestinians and wounded over 2,000 during the Great March of Return series of protests in Gaza. On 14 May alone, in protests coinciding with the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers killed a further 58 Palestinians and wounded nearly 2,800." (see, G. Karmi, "At 70 Israel is a Bellicose Giant.") She also highlights how Israel continues its bullying attacks against other sovereign nations including calling for the assassination of leaders in the region. This, of course, is only possible through the backing of the U.S. and other western nations. The relationship between the U.S. and Israel is more than simply an alliance between two sovereign powers. Israel's connection with the U.S. is such that the one nation can orchestrate a falsehood that can then become the dominant story repeated by the the other, circulated by the U.S. political class, pundits, and mainstream media supported by think tanks, lobby groups, and media manipulators, such as pollsters and communication strategists, and, increasingly, by universities and academic institutions that have marginalized pro-Palestinian faculty. In this instance, the orchestrated falsehood is that the rebellion organized in conjunction with the recognition of the Nakba of 1948 is nothing more than attacks by Hamas. More than one critical media analyst recognizes this as nothing less than propaganda, the propaganda common to fascism. The resistance of the people is framed as terrorist violence. Yet not everyone was so ready to buy the well orchestrated lies as solidarity actions and resistances erupted across the globe in support of Palestine —Tel Aviv, South Africa, Brussels, New York. In San Francisco, chants of Palestine will be free! rose up from the streets as people marched from the Israeli Consulate in the city's Financial District to Federal Building in Civic Center (See, Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, "Hundreds in Israel and Beyond Protest Killings of Palestinians on Gaza Border.") The following day also in San Francisco, the disruption of a planned book talk by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak resulted in eighteen arrests as those present interrupted and drowned out Barak's talk repeatedly, condemned him as a war criminal (see, Palestine Action Network, "Eighteen Arrested as Activists Shout Down Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in San Francisco for War Crimes.")

We are reminded of Aimee Cesaire's observation when examining the brutality of colonization, and that in the context of discussions about the rise of fascism and the Second World War. According to Cesaire: "They [the atrocities of colonization] prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out." (see, A. Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p.41) Israel's settler colonialism project has reached its apex, that is, the level of barbarity that is the natural evolution of colonial occupation. The colonizer loses his or her humanity and is capable of all manner of atrocities blinded by their own righteousness. And it is no wonder that Israel basks in the support of the U.S. Americans, if they are even aware of the violence may be momentarily appalled by the atrocities they witnessed these past few weeks in Gaza. Yet, they, "the respectable bourgeois," nonetheless maintain a system where the state apparatus, all of the elements of it, become an echo chamber for Israel's justification of a genocidal project they have been executing with impunity for seventy years, building on a settler colonial logic and program stretching back to the First Zionist Conference and the Basel Program of August 1897. Colonial and imperial powers, including the U.S. in the post World War II era, continue to rely on Israel for their purposes, that is for their own geopolitical designs for the region. And it is this moment, the moment that W.E.B Du Bois named democratic despotism that is the fundamental cause of all wars. It is the bargain the white working class makes with capital. The bargain is based on the quid pro quo that capital gets a compliant workforce and white labor enjoys a somewhat slightly higher wage, safer working conditions, more leisure time, and the few toys and trinkets of a bourgeois lifestyle, and all of that at the expense of Black and Brown labor and lives at home and abroad. In other words, the bargain can only be fulfilled through, according to Du Bois, colonialism which is to say war. (see, Du Bois, "African Roots of War.") The ethnic Mexican community shares an awareness of the nature of democratic despotism and its ties to war. We have resisted the imposition of the "Mexican wage" as well as fought for access and inclusion in all of America's dominant institutions since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 that articulated the expanded borders of the settler colony. Rather than marking the end of the war, the treaty also articulated the promise of a continuous social war organized around the criminalization of resistance. This has been our plight as Chicanxs and Latinxs in the U.S. —to confront successive strategies of criminalization intertwined with militarization. It is a long standing process that has its most recent articulation in the attack on the immigrant community orchestrated through the elimination of TSP (Temporary Protected Status), DACA, and the deliberately orchestrated home, work, and street invasions and sweeps conducted by ICE, INS, and the Border Patrol, working in conjunction with local law enforcement and private prisons. All of this occurs against the backdrop of increased levels of border militarization that continue to produce numbers of deaths despite the drop in immigration as a whole. And, of course, the violence on one side of the border is linked to the violence on the other side —a violence of kidnappings, assassinations, disappearances, feminicides, and massacres. The colonist's disdain for the ethnic Mexican community of Greater Mexico was on display this week when New York Attorney Aaron Schlossberg excoriated patrons and staff at a Midtown Fresh Kitchen for speaking Spanish and a barrista at a Starbucks in La Cañada Flintridge on the outskirts of Los Angeles wrote "beaner" on the coffee cup of an order placed by a cook only identified as Pedro. (see, Y. Simón, "After Racist Lawyer Goes Viral" and A. Cataño, California Starbucks Employee Writes Racial Slur") Both moments may seem trivial compared to the levels of violence throughout Mexico, across the border, and in the neighborhood, but each also reflects a level of dehumanization common to racial capitalism, settler colonial states, and the fascism that defines them. What connects these locuses of violence besides the trajectories of settler colonialism outlined by Cesaire? It's war. "War, money, and the State are constitutive or constituent forces, in other words the ontological forces of capitalism," explain Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato. To this they add, "the critique of political economy is insufficient to the extent that the economy does not replace war but continues it by other means, ones that go necessarily through the State: monetary regulation and the legitimate monopoly on force for internal and external wars. To produce the genealogy of capitalism and reconstruct its 'development,' we must always engage and articulate together the critique of political economy, critique of war, and critique of the State." (see, E. Alliez and M. Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, p. 15.) It’s total war. But, the total war is not new. It’s colonial war directed everywhere, no longer confined to the colony. Alliez and Lazzarato reclaim primitive accumulation to advance the analysis by not limiting it to a specific historical moment but rather, recognizing it as an ongoing process. It is worth quoting them at length: "It is therefore not surprising that the authors associated with research on the world-economy are completing and enriching analysis of the transformations of war and the ways it is waged in direct relationship with nascent capitalism and the colonies. And in fact, 'primitive accumulation' provides the crucible for all the functions that war would later develop: establishment of disciplinary apparatuses (dispositifs) of power, rationalization and acceleration of production, terrain for testing and perfecting new technologies, and biopolitical management of productive force itself. Most of all, war plays a leading role in the 'governmentality' of the multiplicity of modes of production, social formations, and apparatuses of power that coexist in capitalism at the global scale. It is not limited to being the continuation on the strategic level of the (foreign) policy of states. It contributes to producing and holding together the differentials that define the divisions of labor, sexes, and races without which capitalism could not feed on the inequalities it unleashes." (see, E. Alliez and M. Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, p. 76) 

Thus, it’s war that is based on controlling populations. In specific circumstances, that is when it is applied to “troubled areas,” it is organized as low intensity war, warfare that is not about taking of territory but a complex strategy of military and paramilitary violence, targeted aid, and specific policing powers all designed to disrupt the cohesion of a community so that specific populations can be more easily controlled. It is the Fourth World War as the Zapatistas have warned us, but it's also the longstanding, ongoing war of racial capitalism. The argument made in theorizations of racial capitalism is that race is not simply surplus but constitutive. Racial animus, organized through various strategies of criminalization and dehumanization that make possible dispossession, displacement, and dislocation, escalates with capitalism's collapse. Racial capitalism, as many have come to believe about capitalism in general, is both a mode of production and a mode of destruction. Race and racial belonging become the markers to determine what bodies must be controlled and therefore can be produced as disposable. Our resistances are critical to decolonial practice. Aimed at the architecture of control that checkpoints and borders represent, these are at the same time resistances against dehumanization.

New projects and a vision for research moving forward that begin to articulate new theorizations about the current race situation must take seriously how combined research efforts can contribute significantly to the de-criminalization of our communities, especially confronting the socially, politically, and economically constructed disposability associated with black wage-less life, illegal immigrant labor, third world “narco-terrorists,” and Indigenous autonomous communities. It must also engage in the de-militarization of our communities by exposing how capitalist extractivist strategies advance practices and strategies of dispossessing by de-humanizing, displacing by criminalizing, and dislocating through policing, especially pre-emptive policing executed by combined forces of police, military, and increasingly state bureaucracies once designed to administer a social wage. Successful research can be mapped out in cartographies of struggle confronting the spread of low intensity war and its manifestation in various moments of state and state manufactured violences across communities. These maps can include a variety of systems of information generated from the local, situated, and poetic knowledges that can shift the dominant frames of an increasingly complex media landscape and tell a different story about social justice. Such an effort can, for example, map fierce care, a category of struggle, or convivial tool, that emerged out of and was articulated through the efforts of mothers who re-directed their grief and rage at the injustice dealt them and their family into strategic moments of care to consciously reclaim community spaces while also raising awareness about the specific injustice suffered by often targeted families and the community as a whole. The collective construction of convivial tools emerges organically and is articulated in performances and practices that address inequality, especially the violences produced as capitalism reaches its internal and external limits as a result of the exhaustion of “cheap nature,” contradictions of commodity fetishism, and the advances of grassroots struggle. It is therefore a research that must approach the topic genealogically, that is to say, by uncovering how our present has come to be defined by racial inequality and a persistent racial animus organized through successive modes of criminalization, including the epistemological dimensions of settler colonial dominance. That is to say we must map out how knowledge is produced in such a way as to legitimize the criminalization of certain groups, i.e. those targeted for “premature death.” 

South Bay and North Bay crew

#UniTierra Califas #UT Califas #ateneo #democracy #Palestine #total war #racial capitalism #Aimee Cesaire

[fatkidvegan-blog]

On Battling Vegan Depression

I am an empath and a highly sensitive person with bipolar disorder, which means that I am always at the mercy of my emotions, which are in turn at the mercy of what’s going on around me.  I imagine that a good number of vegans are also empaths and/or highly sensitive people, so this may be one post in a sea of many, but I just wanted to share my experience in the short time that I have been vegan.

As a lot of you know, I went vegan for health reasons. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about animals; in fact, I loved them, but I was blind and ignorant to what’s going on in the world, and my mind had never made the connection between the creatures I love so dearly, and the double bacon cheeseburger on my plate.  Once, I explained to my first therapist about how I used to feel like it was important to be educated about what was going on in the world, but now every time I watch the news or stumble across an article about what’s happening, I have to fight off this massive existential crisis, because it’s all so upsetting. She explained to me that it’s best to avoid things like that, because you can’t do anything to change it, so you’re basically upsetting yourself for no reason. I took this to heart and, while it may not be the most ideal approach, it has made things a little easier on my mental health.

It didn’t take long after going vegan for me to want to reach out to other vegans for support. My husband, son, and family are all meat eaters, and while everyone is pretty supportive, it’s still very difficult, and I kind of felt like a freak. So off I went, joining every facebook group I could find. In these groups, I began to see more and more posts about the ethical side of veganism, and while I mostly tried to avoid it, because I knew it would upset me, a little part of me kept saying, “But wait, I care about the animals, too!” So eventually, this world opened up to me, and I became enlightened, for lack of a better word, to the treatment of animals in our carnist society. I ate it up, listening to podcasts, reading articles, and watching documentaries, hungry to learn everything I could about the lifestyle, but still being careful to avoid anything too graphic. The turning point for me was when I was recommended to watch the Gary Yourofsky speech on youtube that he gives to a classroom. Embedded in this speech (much to my surprise), was a video a few minutes long with slaughterhouse footage. So here I was, face to face with the thing I’ve feared most, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop watching it. It felt like I owed it to the animals to see exactly what they go through, only to wind up as a dollar burger at the drive through. I was enraged, I was shocked, and above all, I was destroyed. I watched the video, sobbing, and saying, “I’m so sorry” over and over. Eventually, after what felt like a lifetime, the video ended, but it continued to haunt me for much longer. It followed me to dinner with my meat eating family, it permeated my dreams, and every waking moment it was in the back of my head, eating away at me. How could I have ever contributed to such savage and barbaric cruelty? 

I posted in my local group, explaining that this, and other things I had heard in podcasts, were things I had been carrying with me, and that I was now sad all the time. I got a lot of good responses, and many more people who didn’t necessarily have an answer, but just wanted to tell me that they felt it too. 

It’s been a while, and I still remember the video, everything I’ve heard, and everything I’ve read; it’s just not as raw anymore. As a new vegan, those things were always in the back of my mind, keeping me from cheat meals, and encouraging me to speak my truth whenever the opportunity arises. In many ways, I’m glad that these videos exist, because I do believe we should all be aware of what’s going on. I think they serve the purpose of keeping people on track who would otherwise lack the self control to do so (I’m not here to judge; self control is definitely not my forte!). 

I still have many bad days, where I feel like I’m weighted down by the cruelty. I’ve had moments where I feel like I don’t even want to live in a world where 56 billion farmed animals (not including sea creatures) are slaughtered for food because of it. It’s on every TV commercial, every billboard, everywhere I turn. I fight every day for kindness and empathy for other humans, and some days are much more difficult than others. 

However, there is beauty in the knowledge that people are changing for the better every single day. Things are leaps and bounds better than when I was a vegetarian in high school. There are more of us than ever before, and we are growing all the time. 

In my experience, and from the answers I’ve gotten from the people I’ve spoken to about this, the best way to combat this sadness is to get involved. My specific form of activism right now is being a Joyful Vegan (stolen from our lord and saviour Colleen Patrick Goudreau). I will stay on my path, and I will show everyone how happy I am, how easy this is, and how delicious the food is, and slowly but surely, people become curious and start asking me questions. I do this through the blog, through social media, and just by being an example to friends and family. I keep myself so distracted, that I hardly have time to think anymore about how sad I am.

Volunteer at animal shelters, rescues, sanctuaries, and with local groups in your area. If you can, foster or adopt a rescue animal. My Chile is a constant source of happiness in my life. 

Get involved with groups like Vegan Outreach and go leaflet. You may not convert anyone on the spot, but you are planting seeds!

My favorite source of vegan joy is going to our local farmed animal sanctuary, Santuario de Karuna. This little slice of bliss is nestled in the mountains East of Albuquerque, and run by two beautiful souls who give these animals lots of love, a great life, and a forever home. I bring them donated produce, and in return, I get to go love on these adorable creatures. Let me tell you, NOTHING makes your day like a pig snorting his little wet nose into your hand, looking for treats. 

This is a list of animal sanctuaries around the world, so check and see if there’s one you can visit nearby.

I guess my point is to be a light in the darkness around you. Sometimes it’s hard to be the only light, but I promise you, people are going to see what you’re doing, and eventually you’ll win them over, too. I’m going to keep fighting, and the lights are going to keep growing. Remember, be the change you want to see in the world!

Special thanks to Tamara Hubbard and Coral Ricketts of Santuario de Karuna, the ABQ~Vegan group on facebook, and everyone around me who has to either listen to me constantly ramble about veganism, or deal with me being a hot mess, depending on the day! I love you guys <3

#vegan #veganism #veganblr #vegan activism #animal sanctuary #vegan depression #veganism and mental health

[armeniaitn]

We Build. They Destroy!

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/society/we-build-they-destroy-38897-23-07-2020/

We Build. They Destroy!

A damaged home in the village of Aygepar, July 17, 2020

Nothing sums up the contrast in contributions to our global society of Armenia and Azerbaijan more than this phrase. It is borrowed from several current recovery campaigns such as the Paros Foundation and my good friend, their executive director Peter Abajian. Since 2006 the Paros Foundation, like many other patriotic nonprofits, has worked tirelessly to improve the quality of life of the citizens of Armenia and Artsakh. Much of their incredible work in schools and infrastructure has been in the Tavush region, the current hotspot of Azerbaijani madness. The contrast in core values is why the Armenians have endured the hardships of unilateral attacks and why the latest aggression against Armenia will fail.

Armenians have seen this movie too many times. A small Christian nation, the indigenous population of its multi-millennia homeland is attacked, blockaded and subjected to relentless abuse by barbaric newcomers. Even though the Turks have now been in the region about 1,000 years, to the Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks, they are shallow rooted. This applies also to their treacherous cousins to the west called Azerbaijan. They attack Artsakh and Tavush and have the audacity to “claim” the Republic of Armenia. Despite signing treaties that recognize the sovereign state and international borders of Armenia, Azerbaijani self-interest intersects with criminal behavior. Essentially, with every rant of rhetoric and military incursion, they are violating international laws. But then again, they are only modeling their behavior after their big cousin currently occupying Western Armenia, who has violated the sovereignty of Syria, Iraq and Cyprus and is very close to adding Libya to the list. Yet they are a “valued ally in NATO.” The behavior says a great deal about the integrity of international agreements.

Why will Azerbaijan fail? They are larger (nearly three times the population of Armenia) and wealthier (fortunate to have a desired fossil fuel supply) and in a world lacking political morals, they can buy the silence of many. So much for the bad news. Let’s start by looking at the national makeup of each country and how that impacts their commitment to achieving their objective.

Several years ago while in Artsakh, my family was given a tour of the Artsakh state museum by a remarkable young woman. Her tour work was not a job but a responsibility to educate…to tell the truth. She called Azerbaijan an “artificial nation” which is a phrase I have never forgotten and found to be a key weakness of Azerbaijan. It sits on oil, but also on a shaky foundation. Azerbaijan as a nation state did not exist before 1918. Its name is borrowed from a region in northern Iran. The nation called Azerbaijan and its ethnic makeup reveal a heterogeneous mix. The indigenous Caucasian Albanians were first converted to Islam under Arab and later Persian influence. The Seljuk Turkish invasion (11th century) brought the Turkic influence with language (Oghuz) and culture. Today although a majority are called ethnic Azerbaijani, it is a relatively new combination of multi-ethnic groups, Shia Islam with Turkish influence. There are significant minority groups such as the Lezgins and Talysh who have their own issues of free expression with the ethnic majority. Azerbaijan’s relatively short national history has little experience with democracy. Since its independence from 70 years of Soviet rule, it has been run by autocrats, the latest being the second generation of the corrupt Aliyev clan. When there are lives on the line, the shallow national roots of Azerbaijan will cause its citizens to question who and what they are fighting for.

No such problem with Armenia and Artsakh. Armenia is a study in homogeneity with over 98 percent of its citizens ethnic Armenians adhering to a Christian heritage and speaking a common language. They have also been the indigenous population of the area for centuries. Evidence of the Armenian civilization exists everywhere, except where Azerbaijani authorities have overtly sought to destroy the historic presence of Armenians. When we look at the enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh (as defined by the Soviets), it is really a scaled down version of the centuries old Armenian province of Artsakh. The seven liberated territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh (which are a part of the Republic of Artsakh) along with the still occupied northern Shahumyan and some eastern districts are the bulk of historic Artsakh, which dates back to the first millennia BC (Tigranes Metz). The Azeris’ claim of an historic population presence in Artsakh and the Stalin “award” in 1923 is the basis for their “territorial integrity” rights. The reality is that the demographic changes were forced migration and “artificial” attempts to dilute the Armenian homeland in the 18th to 20th centuries. The Stalin decision was an injustice but was also designated an “autonomous” region. It is not within any definition of “territorial integrity.” One cannot claim what was never theirs to own. A contributor to their continuous failure has been the lack of a substantive justification for their claims. Anyone can bully false claims, but sustaining a motivation with your citizens is entirely another challenge. Aliyev, in the absence of the truth, has propagandized a false narrative based on lies and hatred to feed his naive masses. Any national objective based on hate, anger and racism is not sustainable. This fuels the core motivation of the Azeris towards Artsakh and Armenia. Hatred is not an infinite rechargeable motivation.

This brings us to one of the core issues. What are the two sides fighting for? The Armenians are defending their homes and homeland. It doesn’t get much more personal than that. They are also defending the investment and sacrifices they have made. The departed lives of brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers must not be lost in vain. Since 1991, Artsakh has become a functioning democracy with a parliament and market-driven economy. This is a remarkable accomplishment given the blockades and unrecognized status. With each year of new housing, economic growth, historic preservations and culture, the people of Artsakh build on their core foundation. Remember that Armenians build. In stark contrast, since 1991, Azerbaijan has built their existence almost solely on their good fortune of fossil fuel. It has corrupted their entire economic, political and social existence. Azerbaijan has evolved into a dictatorship where self-preservation dominates and lies and hatred become commonplace. Over the last 30 years, despite the rhetoric of a “national liberation” effort to take Artsakh and Armenia proper, Azerbaijan has employed thousands of mercenaries from Chechens to Islamic terrorists. The latest move seems to be with Turks who are rumored to be sending terrorists from their northern Syrian adventure to Azerbaijan. They are also causing trouble in Nakhichevan where they have a small common border (compliments of Stalin). This is troubling but will also fail. Mercenaries get paid, as the economic base of Azerbaijan is diminishing.

Azerbaijan will never be a match for the landowners defending their families. The professional Armenian military of Armenia and Artsakh is the collateral to guarantee this mandate. They are the successors to Avarayr and Sardarabad where a different generation fought against overwhelming odds and succeeded. Like the Holy Muron of our faith, all these events are connected in spirit. This is the reality that expands the capability of the Armenians and will always limit Azerbaijanis.

Right now, Aliyev is likely betting on two things. He is counting on the world to remain indifferent either by buying silence or general ambivalence. He is also assuming that Armenia will blink and not respond to his provocations. On the former, this is our job in the diaspora to work with the homeland to prevent indifference in host nations. Sanctioning Azerbaijan, influencing political bodies and mounting public support are critical. In this country, the ANCA and the Armenian Assembly of America are busy in this regard. Never underestimate the importance of third parties. Aliyev was hoping that the emergence of a new government under Pashinyan would be more open to “compromise.” Pashinyan has shown himself to be stronger in his words and actions than his predecessors. He and the relevant ministries have been on the offensive diplomatically by countering Azeri rhetoric with substantive positions such as the return of Artsakh as a direct negotiating party. He has skillfully avoided undermining the OSCE mediators despite the frustration of their neutrality. Aliyev, on the other hand, has done everything to countermand their actions by ignoring confidence building measures (St. Petersburg, Vienna, etc.), continuing sniper fire, patronizing on-site support and launching at least two major assaults since 2016 with unprovoked action. Privately, their behavior is wearing thin with many and will one day pay a return. Despite the surface level material strength of Azerbaijan, a closer view shows why they have and will continue to underperform. It does not lessen the danger for the Armenians. It simply illustrates why a united Armenia will prevail.

Back to “We Build. They Destroy.” For most Armenians who are not directly involved in the military responses, the most important issue is to rebuild. The vitality of the border villages in Tavush, Artsakh, Ararat (including our beloved Paruyr Sevak), Vayots Dzor and Syunik are strategically important to the national security of our nation. The strongest message to Azeris is that their attempts are futile. Their activity is an attempt to destabilize the borders by intimidating the population to leave. We must immediately rebuild and make these villages even stronger economically. This is our job in the diaspora. You have all seen several emergency fundraisers by organizations such as Paros and individuals (our ardent patriot Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte). We must meet and exceed the goals to BUILD and give a clear message to our brethren and the AZERBAIJANIS. We are not going anywhere. Our history has been a case study of overcoming oppression and prevailing. Today is no exception.

Stepan Piligian

Stepan was raised in the Armenian community of Indian Orchard, MA at the St. Gregory Parish. A former member of the AYF Central Executive and the Eastern Prelacy Executive Council, he also served many years as a delegate to the Eastern Diocesan Assembly. Currently , he serves as a member of the board and executive committee of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR). He also serves on the board of the Armenian Heritage Foundation. Stepan is a retired executive in the computer storage industry and resides in the Boston area with his wife Susan. He has spent many years as a volunteer teacher of Armenian history and contemporary issues to the young generation and adults at schools, camps and churches. His interests include the Armenian diaspora, Armenia, sports and reading.

Latest posts by Stepan Piligian (see all)

Read original article here.

#Armenia #Armenians #Artsakh #Karabakh #Society

[proserpoet]

Gusto ko lang i-share ang artikulong ito para sa susunod na may pagagamitan, alam ko kung saan kukunin. Maliban dito, naging mulat ako sa kalagayang pangwika at kung gaano ito kahalaga. Hindi ako wika ang pinag-aralan ko kundi panitikan subalit dahil sa mga kursong itomuro ko sa taong ito, binuksan nito ang posibilidad na magustuhan ko ang pag-aaral sa wika. Ang pagpapahalaga sa pagtanggap sa iba't ibang wika na mahalaga at may halaga. Sa katunayan, ayos nga itong ginagawa kong blog kasi nailalahad ko ang sarili at nagagamit ko ang wika. At higit sa lahat naiuuwi ko ang interes sa pagsulat muli nang sa ganoon tuluyang mahasa ito.

___________________________________________

LINGUA OBSCURA

What We Lose When We Lose Indigenous Knowledge

By mistaking a culture’s history for fantasy, or by disrespecting the wealth of indigenous knowledge, we’re keeping up a Columbian, colonial tradition.

A collection of Native American utensils and weapons.

By: Chi Luu

October 16, 2019

This week, more and more regions in the U.S. celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, but many more know the federal holiday as Columbus Day. More than 500 years ago, a guy known as Christopher Columbus got famous for something he never did, having never even set foot on the North American continent, much less having “discovered” it. But Columbus should perhaps be more notorious for something he did do.

It’s remarkable the lopsided stories we tell in order to conveniently ignore or deny an uncomfortable reality. As we continue to celebrate the sepia-toned world of a false past, full of men and monsters and their colonial cruelties, as entire cultures, their languages, their knowledge, and their science were destroyed along the way.

After getting lost somewhere in the Bahamas, the friendly Arawak people Columbus met helped him, bringing food, water, and gifts. He even wrote of how kind they were. Columbus repaid their generosity by mocking their “ignorance” of things they had never seen before, forcing them to be his slaves, and demanding that they lead him to the source of the gold that their earrings had been crafted from. Columbus and his men proceeded to commit brutal acts, to destroy this peaceful population, thinking “nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” One of his associates, Bartolomé de las Casas wrote: “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age can parallel. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.” Bartolomé de las Casas promptly quit the world to become a priest.

Once you know the full stomach-churning story, it’s hard to imagine how such a person, who treated whole populations as less than human, could be celebrated.

Some historians argue that you can’t blame Christopher Columbus for being a product of his time, which is a nice, convenient story. Nevertheless, contemporary accounts of Columbus’s senseless cruelty, and his subsequent arrest for his behavior, suggests that even taking racist historical attitudes into account, this was unspeakably barbaric. Once you know the full stomach-churning story, it’s hard to imagine how such a person, who treated whole populations as less than human, could be celebrated.

One of the most persistent and damaging legacies colonizers left behind was perpetuating the myth that they were men of action and science and business, modernizing all worlds they encountered. Indigenous nations all over the world, whole peoples and unique cultures, were framed as ignorant, culturally and socially backward, even primitive, with nothing to offer a new and exciting modern society. Columbus and the many colonizers after him are still commemorated hundreds of years later for “discoveries” of entire nations that already existed, with their own cultures and political systems and ways of understanding the world.

Columbus is remembered for his supposed contributions to science (such as “proving” that the earth was a sphere, despite most people knowing that long before him), to business (kicking off a global capitalism in the slave trade, for instance), to human progress in the exchange (read imposition) of Western ideas and values on supposedly backward cultures. But these first people, far from being scientifically impoverished, had already developed a rich and robust science and knowledge of their own, with their own language and understanding of how their world worked. It’s become ever more important for us tell, and listen, to those other stories, to balance the one-sided tales of destructive conquest with a focus on the indigenous peoples, who have far more to offer the world than many would think.

Is there really only one way to build a modern society, one based on Western ideology, with progress through constant growth and consumption? Is there only one kind of science we can use to truly understand the world? There’s hardly an indigenous culture surviving that does not struggle to preserve their traditional language and knowledge against the overwhelming homogenizing influences of Western colonialism.

There is still large scale dismissal and disrespect of indigenous language and traditional knowledge, based on the widespread belief that it contributes “nothing to the development of knowledge, humanities, arts, science, and technology.” Scientists and scholars, the very people who strive to objectively preserve the world’s knowledge, may regularly reject or misinterpret information. When knowledge does not take the scientific forms we’ve come to expect from academic research, it’s rejected, but that’s due to an unthinking bias about what value traditional knowledge has to offer. If it isn’t in the form of a scientific report or paper, but is delivered in the form of a story, it’s regarded as unscientific and anecdotal folklore, no matter what new information is being conveyed.

We are slowly learning how crucial traditional knowledge and language diversity is in areas such as biological diversity, especially with the rapid decline of rare plant and animal life in unique ecosystems around the world. Their unique properties have long been recorded by indigenous groups through their language—if anyone had ever cared to look and listen. In many places, scientists are finding, to their surprise, that traditional knowledge is on a par with many scientific discoveries. As many endangered languages die out, so do the unique discoveries their speakers have preserved across generations in their oral histories.

But what does it mean when we accept traditional knowledge as a kind of science only after it’s been compared with contemporary scientific knowledge and processes, and shown to be similar? Why is it that we don’t just respect and trust the work of indigenous scholars, researchers, and scientists, who may present their work in a different form to scientific conventions? As more researchers understand the value of different ways doing science, there have been calls for there to be an integration of long disregarded indigenous knowledge into the academy’s scientific process. Traditional knowledge often values a more nuanced, contextual, and holistic view of information from observation and thought, not just piecemeal experimentation of discrete, individual components of a system.

The Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete says of “Native science” that:

…it is a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and ‘coming to know’ that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. Native science is born of a lived and storied participation with the natural landscape. […It] is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world.

It’s not hard to see how these different approaches could complement each other, one collective and holistic, one individual and detailed, if both sides were able to engage with each other. We know that stories and oral histories are memorable and effective tools for teaching and learning science, but they are often rejected as not serious or scientifically rigorous enough. There’s more than one way to record knowledge and more than one way to engage in scientific explorations and observation, just as there is more than one way to frame our reality and experiences through language.

The way we talk and use language to explain phenomena does not interfere with our ability to do objective, informative research, yet this is often something unthinkingly assumed about other cultures.

It’s easy to forget that the reality of our lives, through our very language, has been mapped out in conceptual metaphors—micro stories where we think and talk about things in terms of something else we all can relate to. We march on with life in a straight line, with our futures ahead of us and our pasts behind, our feelings colorful, green with envy, seeing red, feeling blue, as we build up our scientific theories about the world till they’re safe as houses, their foundations unshakeable. These are our realities, yet they are not real.

The way we talk and use language to explain phenomena does not interfere with our ability to do objective, informative research, yet this is often something unthinkingly assumed about other cultures. It’s easy to misinterpret the metaphorical language of an indigenous culture as though it was a literal belief, especially if a researcher was predisposed to thinking of those people as very different, or unscientific, or even primitive.

How would a strange alien researcher judge us? As the anthropologist Roger Keesing points out in the Journal of Anthropological Research (link above), we may consider ourselves modern, but we often talk like people before the people before Columbus, who knew the earth was round. In our metaphorical language, we think of the world around us as flat. The sun rises and sets at either end of the earth in this reality, and we all accept this as normal, even though we know that little story we tell ourselves to understand the world is astronomically untrue. “But it would be nonsense for an ethnographer of England or the U.S. to write that ‘the natives believe that the earth is flat and that the sun goes up and comes down,’ or that ‘the natives believe that the heart is the seat of the emotions.'”

Yet that is the kind of generalized misinformation that gets set down in the records about many indigenous cultures. Yes, it is —so long as that alien ethnographer starts from a position of respect for the people they were studying, and assumed they understood the realities of the world as well as anyone can, and that it’s just a little matter of language that makes it seem like they believe the impossible. When people are very different from ourselves, it’s easy to believe they’ll believe anything. We may often misinterpret the things we hear, choosing readings that make that culture seem more exotic and different. Keesing wonders if scientific explanations that try to account for some ambiguous indigenous concepts that are hard to understand can actually end up inventing whole belief systems for indigenous peoples that just aren’t real. Not all fantastical sounding language is magic; sometimes it’s just ordinary.

For example, the mysterious Oceanic Austronesian concept of “tapu/tabu,” which was brought to the English language as “taboo” by the controversial Captain James Cook, has been recorded with a sense of the “sacred,” “forbidden,” but also “unclean” or “cursed.” It’s a somber, foreboding, and certainly exciting reading of what appears to be a serious religious belief of the people of the Pacific. But “tapu” is contradictory, sometimes a positive in terms of its air of sanctity and a negative in terms of its cursed uncleanliness. How can it make sense to be both?

Keesing points out that it can be read, more boringly, as something like “off limits,” because things are usually “tapu” in certain contexts to certain people, in a nuanced way. Things are not “tapu” in the absolute, infused with a strange mystical energy by gods and ancestors as they are revered by credible worshipers. Relatively speaking, someone can sensibly define what’s off limits, “tapu,” and that could be a god making a religious pronouncement or it could be parents telling their kid not to do something. Or it could be as blandly ordinary as the related word “kapu,” which some modern Hawaiians put on their non-magical fences to mean “no trespassing.”

There are many ways of seeing the world, and indigenous cultures all around it have had a long time to amass a great knowledge about how things work. They have evolved languages to tell people about it in ways that they could understand. By mistaking a culture’s hard won history for a fantasy, or by disrespecting the wealth of knowledge in all its different forms, treating it as worthless because it doesn’t look like the conventions we expect, we’re merely keeping up a Columbian, colonial tradition of treating people not like ourselves as less than human. And that might cost us more than we expect.



Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples' Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels

By: Michael Yellow Bird

American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring, 1999), pp. 1-21

University of Nebraska Press

The Turn Toward the Indigenous: Knowledge Systems and Practices in the Academy

By: Kerstin Knopf

Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 60, No. 2/3 (2015), pp. 179-200

Universitätsverlag WINTER Gmbh

Conventional Metaphors and Anthropological Metaphysics: The Problematic of Cultural Translation

By: Roger M. Keesing

Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 41, No. 2, Language and Poetics (Summer, 1985), pp. 201-217

The University of Chicago Press

Indigenous Knowledge, Science, and Resilience What Have We Learned from a Decade of International Literature on “Integration”?

By: Erin L. Bohensky and Yiheyis Maru

Ecology and Society, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Dec 2011)

Resilience Alliance Inc.

Writing Stories in the Sciences

By: Eunbae Lee and John C. Maerz

Journal of College Science Teaching, Vol. 44, No. 4 (March/April 2015), pp. 36-45

#aralniUno

[eocwwah]

Before European settlers colonized the west, the Indigenous population of the land we call Canada, or the United States today operated a society that was very matriarchal and believed in balancing rights for men and women (Ontario Native Women’s Association, 2018). With colonization, inequities grew between men and women in Canada as patriarchy and racism towards Indigenous people became dominant (Ontario Native Women’s Association, 2018). 

6% of the Manitoba population consists of Indigenous groups and they represent 20% of the homeless population in that province (Duchesne, 2015).  Indigenous women have higher chances of living in poverty than non-Indigenous women (Duchesne, 2015). What can account for these over-representations? 

Well, looking into Canada’s past and present, colonial acts are the best explanation to this question. To understand the present, we must look into the past.

The Sixties Scoop reflects a dark side of Canadian history, where social workers basically were removing children who are Indigenous in the 1960s from their own homes and were placing them into non-Indigenous families (Sinclair, 2007). The ideology that justified this by the Canadian government and society was that Indigenous culture was too “barbaric” and growing up in an Indigenous household is not in the interests of the child (Sinclair, 2007).  The second image in this post is a picture of April and Annette Semaganis, two sisters that were part of the Sixties Scoop (CBC News, 2018). I listened to Connie Walker’s podcast Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo a few months ago, and it teaches so much about this wrongful event and the “Indian Residential School” program that the Canadian government introduced in the 1880s, where children were removed from their homes and were enrolled into schools that coerced them into practicing the Christian religion and live like a “Canadian” (Sinclair, 2007). The podcast also gives listeners an understanding about homelessness and Indigenous women. 

April and Annette were subject to physical and sexual abuse in their foster homes before being placed into a permanent adoptive family (Walker, 2018). This abuse forever changed their lives. The sisters were experiencing troubles in overcoming their past and fled their adoptive home (Walker, 2018). April and Annette lived on the streets of Toronto and suffered severe strikes to their mental health after being separated from their mother Lillian (Walker, 2018).

The Ontario Native Women’s Association say that violence is the “leading cause of women’s homelessness in Canada” (2018, p. 3). Indigenous women have a higher likelihood of being victimized physically or sexually than non-Indigenous women, and the abuse is a contributing factor that pushes them out on the streets (Ontario Native Women’s Association, 2018).  

These actions by the Canadian government explicitly occurred through running advertisements of their “Adopt Indian Métis” program that encouraged white families to adopt Indigenous children, to ensure that Canadian cultural practices become dominant in the country (Walker, 2018). Sure, the program is scrapped several years later, but this doesn’t mean that the Canadian government stopped playing with the lives of Indigenous people. I think colonialism is discreetly operating. Those with power in Canada just aren’t expressing their ethnocentrism loudly. I support this idea with mentioning the systemic issue of racism. Indigenous women are furthered into poverty with being subject to high unemployment rates and inadequate access to affordable housing (Ontario Native Women’s Association, 2018). Those who are non-Indigenous have lower rates of unemployment and aren’t subject to overcrowded housing as much as Indigenous people are (Ontario Native Women’s Association, 2018).

It is just unfortunate that homelessness is being experienced by a vulnerable group and the leading cause of this is violence and systematic problems in Canada (Ontario Native Women’s Association, 2018). If our society created the problem, we should be the ones fixing it. 

[countrymadefoods]

“The story of South Korea’s past starts with a provisional government often forgotten about in history textbooks. The People’s Republic of Korea lasted only from 1945 to 1946, and its capital was in Seoul...As soon as American troops landed on the September of 1945...What immediately occurred afterwards was the abolition of the People’s Republic of Korea by military decree. Officials serving under the government were shot, buildings were bombed, and supposedly “communist-sympathetic” Korean troops stationed in the country were summarily executed in a bloodbath lasting for several months. The United States Army Military Government was established, causing the eruption of mass public outrage at military personnel from the former Japanese Empire serving in office in South Korea.

With haste, the First Republic of Korea, what we now know as South Korea, was declared in 1948. Syngman Rhee was flown abroad a US military aircraft to Tokyo, travelling to Seoul, and was installed as President. Rhee immediately arrested the remaining left-wing opponents in the political arena...Syngman Rhee, as a fierce anti-communist and nationalist who would later be forced into exile by his own citizens.”

“Rhee encouraged his internal security force, headed by his trusted ally, Kim Chang-ryong, to arbitrarily detain people he suspected of having “leftist affiliations” and subject them to days of detainment in labour camps...Syngman Rhee was such a popular leader that he was re-elected four times. During elections, his political opponents often suddenly died or were arrested by South Korea’s internal security force under the suspicion of being “North Korea collaborators”.   

(via The secret genocide in South Korea you’ve probably never heard of)

The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed

“Syngman Rhee was a conservative nationalist who lived in the United States for over four decades after being imprisoned by the Japanese as a young man.  The Truman administration brought him back to Korea in October 1945 to lead the new South Korean government. Considering him a “Jeffersonian democrat,” the U.S. Office of Strategic Services believed that Rhee harbored “more of an American point of view than other Korean leader.”

In practice, Rhee exhibited strong autocratic tendencies and relied heavily on Japanese collaborators – in part because he had been out of the country so long.  He was elected president in July 1948 by members of the National Assembly, who themselves had been elected on May 10 in a national election marred by boycotts, violence and a climate of terrorism.

“The primary cause of the South Korean insurgency was the ancient curse of average Koreans – the social inequity of land relations and the huge gap between a tiny elite of the rich and the vast majority of the poor.”  At the same time Rhee followed American dictates in passing a secret clause agreeing to export rice to Japan and signed contracts allowing American businesses to exploit the So Lim gold mine and take over the Sandong tungsten mine, which was guarded by U.S. troops.”

The director of the U.S. Army’s Department of Transportation stated:  “We had a battle mentality.  We didn’t have to worry too much if innocent people got hurt.  We set up concentration camps outside of town and held strikers there when the jails got too full…. It was war.  We recognized it as war and fought it as such.”

By mid-1947, there were almost 22,000 people in jail, nearly twice as many as under the Japanese...Professors and assemblymen were among those tortured in custody. Those branded as communists were dehumanized to the extent that they were seen as unworthy of legal protection...Any red was not considered human...Because we weren’t human, we had no rights.” The scale of repression in South Korea at this time far surpassed that of North Korea.  In Mokpo seaport, the bodies of prisoners who had been shot were left on people’s doorsteps as a warning in what became known as the “human flesh distribution case.” A government official defended the practice saying they were the most “vile of communists.”

On war’s eve, seasoned intelligence analyst Lt. Walter Choinski and the South Korean G-2 chief of staff were curiously transferred and a report by distinguished cross recipient Donald Nichols predicting a North Korean attack 72 hours before was suppressed by Willoughby.  This contributed to the “intelligence failure” that rendered the North Korean attack of June 25th a “surprise;” a perception that made the war more politically palatable.”

“In mid-September Gen. MacArthur engineered an amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon...“Operation Chromite,” as it was called, was enabled by the seizure of Wolmi-do Island, after it was showered with rockets, bombs and napalm, and by a joint CIA-military operation on Yonghung-do, a small island ten miles from Inchon, where Navy Lt. Eugene Clark obtained vital information for the assault.

The Korean War was replete with atrocities undertaken in violation of the Geneva Convention and international laws of war, which the U.S. ironically had been instrumental in establishing (four Geneva conventions of 1949).  Because of the climate of the Cold War and continued North-South division, a proper accounting and reckoning never took place, and many Koreans never were able to obtain justice for unlawful killings of their loved ones.

Whereas in the United States, most of the war atrocities were little discussed or attributed to the communists, under the South Korean military dictatorship, all sympathetic discourse designed to raise awareness of massacres was subject to prosecution. The bereaved families suffered severe discrimination as authorities marginalized them from civil society and politics and placed them under surveillance by the Korean National Police (KNP) and the Korean Central Intelligence Agency...Some of the worst atrocities occurred in the summer of 1950 when South Korean KNP and ROKA units emptied the prisons and shot detainees, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches, abandoned mines, or the sea.”

“The most concentrated killing of the war occurred in Taejon, where the KNP slaughtered thousands of leftists under American oversight.  According to the historian Bruce Cumings, in July 1950, as “the North Korean People’s Army bore down upon the city of Taejon, south of Seoul,” South Korean police “authorities removed political prisoners from local jails, men and boys along with some women, massacred them, threw them into open pits, and dumped the earth back on them.   Somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 died . . . American officers stood idly by while this slaughter went on, photographing it for their records, but doing nothing to stop it.  In September 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to keep these photos classified; they were not released until 1999, after a determined effort by a psychologist in New York, Do-Young Lee, whose father had been murdered by southern authorities in August 1950.”

“Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force officer who worked in military intelligence, was the embodiment of the dark side of American participation in the Korean War.  He issued bounties for the severed body parts and heads of captured communist agents, threw POWs off of helicopters, and recruited defectors for suicidal missions into the North.  He also witnessed the systematic torture and massacre of Korean civilians.

In many ways, Nichols was a real-life version of Lieutenant Kurtz, a character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now, who had formed his own private army which engaged in wide-scale torture and eschewed all civilized norms... “Nichols was an uncontrollable commander in a faraway shadow land.  He was a highly decorated U.S. Air Force Intelligence officer who ran his own secret war for more than a decade [in which he] lost touch with propriety, with morality, with legality – even with sanity if military psychiatrists are to be believed.

[I]n Nichols, Rhee discovered a back door for delivering intelligence that could influence American policy towards Korea.  He referred to the young American as ‘my son Nichols.’”  According to Air Force historian Michael Haas, the personal ties that Nichols maintained for more than a decade with a foreign head of state had no parallel in the history of U.S. military operations.  Incredibly, one had to ask “what the hell is a twenty three year old air force sergeant doing in the role of private confidante to a head of state.”

The capture and execution of senior communist leaders was often confirmed by cutting off their heads and sending them in gasoline cans to army headquarters in Seoul. A photo of Nichols shows him and several other army officers inspecting the heads;  in another, the head of a guerrilla leader was being pulled out of its box by the hair.”

“After the North Korean invasion of the South, Nichols witnessed the massacre of hundreds of South Koreans by the ROKA at Taejon.  In his memoirs, he misstated where the massacre took place in order to uphold the official army narrative that blamed the killings on the communists; an allegation reported uncritically in Roy Appleman’s official army history of the Korean War.

Nichols’ nephew stated that after he returned home from Korea, he had a huge amount of cash which he kept in his freezer.  The money may have derived from currency manipulation schemes that were widely prevalent among army officers in Korea and the illicit selling of military equipment, though Nichols handled a lot of cash in running secret agents.  In 1957, he was relieved of his command for undisclosed abuse of authority, and put in a straitjacket and admitted for psychiatric treatment.  His nephew states that Donald told him “the government wanted to erase his brain – because he knew too much.”

(via The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed | US Foreign Policy blog)

Failure to Communicate: U.S. Intelligence Structure and the Korean War

“The Korean War had three distinct phases. The first phase began with the North Korean invasion across the 38th parallel in June 1950...In September 1950, the amphibious landing at Inchon cut off North Korean lines and initiated the second phase of the war. U.S., ROK, and U.N. forces drove a demoralized and unsupplied North Korean army nearly back to the Chinese border. MacArthur’s decision to invade North Korea led to the third phase of the war—the Chinese decision to commit forces into the conflict.

Military leaders in the Pacific also mistrusted each other and the young civilian intelligence agencies. Willoughby and MacArthur refused to cooperate with the CIA and denied them access to Army reporting and facilities. The Air Force and Army refused to combine human intelligence efforts in Korea, specifically with regards to interrogations. The Air Force created their own interrogation team that competed with the Army’s Korean Liaison Office (KLO) and CIA for intelligence, each meeting with limited success.

Operation Trudy Jackson, a joint CIA-Navy operation, prepared the environment for the invasion. One naval officer, two Korean operatives, and three others landed on Yonghung-do Island west of Inchon and trained guerilla fighters, launched raids, and gathered intelligence. At one point up to 150 guerillas conducted island-hopping operations around Inchon. The intelligence gathered was vital to the landings and included the numbers of Chinese personnel crossing the Yalu River.”

(via Failure to Communicate: U.S. Intelligence Structure and the Korean War | The Strategy Bridge)

“Clark met with Hans Tofte, in charge of special operations for CIA, and asked for what help he could give in securing qualified agents. Clark also sought assistance from counterintelligence (CIC), and was able to obtain the services of an energetic bilingual Korean Navy lieutenant, Youn Joung, as well as a middle-aged ROK Colonel Ke In-Ju, Rhee’s former head of counterintelligence officer, who had been fired when he failed to predict the North Korean attack. Fearing for his life, Ke had turned himself in to the U.S. Army for protection.”

(via In Mortal Combat: Korea 1950-1953 | John Toland)

Inchon 1950: Operation "Trudy Jackson"

The Secrets Of Inchon, (2002)   Commander Eugene Franklin Clark, USN 

 Two of Clark's men were Korean officers: a bilingual Navy Lieutenant, Youn Joung; and a former Korean counterintelligence officer, Colonel Ke In-Ju (기인주.) Both had served on General MacArthur's staff. Youn and Ke used the aliases...to try and mask the intelligence nature of the covert mission. Youn is standing at center with the pistol at his belt [Ke In-Ju next to him]...Clark brought Youn and Ke out to the McKinley with him, but most of the men in the above photo were probably caught and killed by the North Koreans, who also murdered 50 civilians at Yonghung-do who had helped the mission succeed.

Clark later took about 150 South Korean Guerillas, including Youn, on island-hopping forays all the way up to the Yalu. In October, Clark was able to notify Tokyo Headquarters that his agents had reported large numbers of Chinese were crossing the Yalu into North Korea.High Command evidently discounted this information. The belief that China would not intervene permeated Eighth Army leadership right down to the Battalion level and lower.”

(via Inchon 1950: Operation "Trudy Jackson" | Korean War Online)

“Aug. 25 - 1950 - The first major OPC operation, code named Trudy Jackson, is conducted by a US team led by 39-year old Lt. Eugene Clark of the US Navy. Clark was a Japanese linguist attached to MacArthur's G2. He is volunteered to lead an OPC team made of Lt. Youn Joung (ROK Navy), Col. Ke In Ju, (ROKA), a US Army captain, and 10 Korean agents trained by Tofte. Col. Ke was formally an intelligence officer who was fired by Rhee for his failure to predict the invasion.

August 28, 1950 - Hans Tofte flies Clark and the two Korean officers to an OPC camp at Sasebo. There they receive a quick lesson on covert operations and get teamed up a CIA radio team. Tofte gives Clark enough weapons, rice, dried fish, sugar, whiskey and gold bars to form a guerrilla army.”

“On Augst 31, 1950, the team boarded the British warship HMS Charity and left for Inchon. They were transferred to the S Korean warship PC-703 at the entrance of Flying Fish Channel. On Sept. 1, 1950, Lt. Clark and his team landed at Yonghong-do in preparation for the Inchon (14 miles from Yonghong) landing. Clark pressed some 50 islanders into scouting missions in Inchon. Informants called in the N Korean troops; the commandos escape to a nearby island of Palmi-do leaving behind the islanders. Those who helped the Americans were shot by the communists.”

(via Eyewitness: A North Korean Remembers | Young S Kim)

Colonel Ke In-Ju (기인주) was fired and imprisoned by Syngman Rhee for failing to warn of the pending North Korean invasion. Col. Ke In-Ju was replaced by USAF Capt. Donald Nichols as head of the future KCIA (the comparison to Lt. Kurtz from Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now is too kind, more accurately Nichols is Reinhard Heydrich [ SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei SS/GESTAPO] reincarnated), for correctly predicting the North Korean invasion. 

Ke In-ju recounts that he was rescued on the eve of the mass execution, by a U.S. Army captain who drew his pistol to coax the ROKA jailers to release custody. He was under orders from General MacArthur to bring back to Army Head Quarters in Tokyo, Col. Ke In-Ju, his former G-2 counterintelligence chief of staff, from the Taejon Prison where thousands of political adversaries to President Syngman Rhee were being held. Fortunately, Col. Ke In-Ju was rescued and spared execution, unfortunately a fellow family member, our Grandfather Kee (my father became fatherless at 11 y.o., as the son of the [mayor] of Kwangju, our family impoverished, the community stepped up and took care of our family with my father granted scholarships all the way through medical school), disappeared among the thousands killed by Syngman Rhee’s death squad at the Taejon Prison. After being rescued Colonel Ke In-Ju met with Gen. MacArthur in Japan and suggested the name “Operation Bluehearts” for the code name for the invasion of Inchon.

USN Lt. Eugene Clark operated a guerilla force of Korean partisans on the Yalu River, in which he is credited with providing a report to the CIC warning of a pending Chinese invasion, which was unfortunately discounted at the time. Clark like Hans Toft and other early CIA, accumulated large stashes of gold bars through the Korean War. Nichols operated a top secret North Korean currency counterfeiting operation, which was shut down by Syngman Rhee, who feared Kim Il Sung would retaliate by reciprocating and deflate the South Korean currency with counterfeit money, however there was no accounting of the secret warehouse full of cash. Hans Toft and other CIA leaders, built secret personal private islands with their newfound fortunes. 

Clark and his special forces (future Navy SEAL)  crossed into China to hold a village so that USAF Capt. Donald Nichols’, whose specially designed CIA “fishing boat”, was able to retrieve a downed MIG-15 (secretly flown by Russian aces) with the US Navy and Air Force providing cover support and Clark’s partisans holding back enemy ground forces. There is speculation that a cache of “Yamashira’s gold” was purportedly located by CIA agents, who clandestinely removed the “WWII war loot” before withdrawing under the guise of capturing a downed MIG-15 jet, which risks being misinterpreted by the Chinese as the start of an invasion by UN Forces, triggering a Chinese invasion in response. 

Operation Chromite (film)

“Operation Chromite is a 2016 South Korean war drama film directed by John H. Lee and based on the real-life events of the Battle of Inchon, although it presents a fictionalized version of the historical CIA/US military intelligence operation "Trudy Jackson", conducted before the actual landing operation. It was released on 27 July 2016 in South Korea.”

#operationbluehearts #operationchromite #operationtrudyjackson #CIAfirstwar #battleofinchon #eugeneclark #futurenavySEAL #donaldnichols #KCIAfather #syngmanrhee #1stkoreanpresident #keinju #기인주 #chiefofcounterintelligence #koreanwarfilmtrilogy #bluehearts

[rbzpr]

The Thermidorians: Paul Barras

The Thermidorian Reaction is one of the most complex and controversial events of the French Revolution ; accordingly, its primary actors & initiators (commonly known as “Thermidorians”), coming from diverse social and political backgrounds, often had very different reasons & motives for participating in the events of Thermidor.

In order to elucidate the history of Thermidor, I intend to focus on prominent Thermidorians in the course of this research project, examining their political & ideological background, as well as their respective reasons for taking part in the Thermidorian Reaction.

In traditional historiography, Barras has commonly been portrayed as a staunch opponent of Robespierre ; according to this narrative, Barras, having been recalled from his mission with Fréron by Robespierre due to violent excesses in terms of repression, feared for his life and took part in the Thermidorian conspiracy in order to save himself. This account, however, particularly prominent in the historiography of the 19th century, has been called into question in more recent studies. [1]

First of all, clarifications concerning Barras’ mission to Toulon and Marseille are necessary. Contrary to what is commonly said, Barras and Fréron were not recalled because their measures were considered excessively violent or brutal by their colleagues in Paris ; rather, they were reproached primarily for their failure to cooperate with the revolutionary institutions of Marseille (Barras went as far as to have Maillet, the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Marseille, arrested ; Maillet, however, was ultimately acquitted by the Paris Tribunal), as well as for the débaptisation of Marseille (provisionally named “Sans-Nom”, in accordance with the order of 17 Nivôse Year II). [2] The latter measure, incidentally, caused particular outrage, as the city’s name was considered symbolic due to its connection to La Marseillaise and due to the role of the Marseillais fédérés in the events of 10 August 1792. [3] It is also important to remember that it was not Robespierre who recalled Barras and Fréron to Paris, but Billaud-Varenne, who signed the order of the Committee of Public Safety on 4 Pluviôse Year II along with Collot d’Herbois ; in said letter, Billaud and Collot openly challenge the representatives’ decision to change the name of Marseille: 

You have believed that Marseille had to change its name. And here, citizens colleagues, the Committee of Public Safety stops (s’arrête).

The name Marseille recalls immortal memories to the mind of free men ; criminals, under the mask of republicanism, have outraged it ; but the monsters who sought to ruin it have ceased to be Marseillais.

Has one not been forced, in order to lead it to federalism or monarchy, to incessantly present the sacred words of the Republic One and Indivisible to it? 

Could history, when writing our annals, not let a name escape which marches into posterity alongside the fall of kings? [4]

Returning to Paris in early March 1794, Barras and Fréron found themselves rather isolated and disoriented after having been absent for over a year. “Ce qui se passe ici est de l’hébreu pour nous”, Fréron is reported to have said [5] ; Barras, in turn, was met with distrust and hostility by the Committee of Public Safety. While his hostility towards several members of the CSP (such as Carnot, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois) is well-known, there is no sign of Barras being opposed to Robespierre in particular, as post-Thermidorian historiography seeks to affirm ; on the contrary, there is circumstantial evidence suggesting a relationship of mutual respect between the two men. (On a side note, one could speculate if and how the confrontations between Barras and Augustin Robespierre on their mission to the Army of Italy impacted Barras’ relationship with Maximilien, although there is little historical data on this to begin with.) [6] Barras, in a handwritten note, mentions the following encounter with Robespierre:

Robespierre accosted me on the [day after Carnot had vainly tried to send Barras on a mission to the armies], and said to me, “You feel the necessity of remaining in the Convention ; it is time the Convention should take measures to free itself from the factious majority of the committees.” My reply was embodied in these few words: “Well, then, ascend the tribune, and disclose to the Convention its usurpation of power and the bloody measures it daily takes against good citizens.” Robespierre answered, “It might, perhaps, be dangerous to make these things public, but the time is not far off when it can be done.” [7]

While there is no historical evidence for the authenticity of this story, its atmosphere does certainly not seem to indicate hostility and suspicion. (It has to be considered that such passages only appear greatly altered in the Mémoires de Barras, as these have not been written by Barras himself, but by his friend and secretary Rousselin de Saint-Albin ; Rousselin, a former friend of Danton, took liberties when writing the memoirs based on notes and manuscripts of Barras, often misrepresenting the latter’s thoughts and attitudes on important issues, such as his relations to Robespierre). [8] Furthermore, in a later passage of this note, Barras describes Robespierre’s efforts of moderation in a quite sympathetic manner:

[L]astly, the committees […] decided upon making common cause with the Thermidorians […] and casting on Robespierre the odium of all the crimes committed by them. Robespierre was not an ordinary man. Swept away by the torrent of the Revolution, he had allowed himself to have recourse to extreme measures. He had become convinced that the system of terror and death carried out to the highest degree of bloody barbarity was devouring all men truly Republican ; he sought to put an end to these atrocious executions ; he opposed the arrest of several deputies, of a number of respectable citizens, paid homage to divinity, talked clemency, and ended by perishing […] through this very return to the principles of justice. [9]

These words, of course, were only written in hindsight long after Thermidor, and the experience of the Consulate and Empire may have altered Barras’ perception of Robespierre. Nonetheless, it can be concluded that the image of Barras being a staunch opponent of Robespierre is but a myth.

Based on this, and considering the relative political isolation of Barras after his return, it can be assumed that he was not involved in the preparation of the Thermidorian conspiracy (contrary to the traditional narrative of 19th century historiography, wherein he is depicted as one of its initiators). Indeed, by all accounts, it seems that, like the majority of the deputies, he was genuinely surprised by the Thermidorian Reaction. This would also explain his apparent hesitation in the face of the events: not once did he intervene during the stormy session of 9 Thermidor, and it was only reluctantly (according to his own account) that he accepted his appointment to commander of the Convention’s forces during the evening session. [10] His nomination was not based on political considerations, but rather due to technical reasons: the Convention was in need of a strategist to command the National Guard ; Barras, being a former officer and possessing considerable military experience due to his missions to the army, fulfilled these requirements perfectly. [11] (Incidentally, according to Courtois, it was Fréron who nominated Barras for this position.) [12]

Barras’ role in the military operation was considerable, albeit purely organisational: it was Léonard Bourdon who led the troops storming the Hôtel de Ville, whereas Barras only arrived on the scene afterwards. Yet, his contribution is not to be underestimated: intending to avoid direct combat, he suggested outlawing Robespierre and his allies in order to weaken their defence ; this caused a significant number of soldiers to defect from the Commune’s troops, which was a considerable factor in the victory of the Thermidorians. [13] Accordingly, Barras was afterwards celebrated as the “saviour of the Convention” ; he seized this opportunity and ultimately managed to secure himself an influential position in the new regime. [14]

In conclusion, while Barras certainly played a considerable role in the events of Thermidor and particularly in their aftermath, his motives were by no means comparable to the ones of leading Thermidorians such as Fouché. Barras was not, contrary to what is commonly said, a staunch adversary of Robespierre ; nor was he involved, in all probability, in the preparation of the Thermidorian conspiracy. Therefore, his status as a “Thermidorian” (in the classical sense) has to be reconsidered and reexamined critically.

What do you think, citizens? Feel free to add your thoughts.

Further reading

P. BARRAS: Memoirs of Barras, t. 1.

H. MONTEAGLE: Barras au Neuf thermidor, in: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n° 229, p. 377-384.

J.-R. SURATTEAU: BARRAS Jean Nicolas François de Barras-Clumanc, in: ALBERT SOBOUL: Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, p. 80-83.

References

H. MONTEAGLE: Barras au Neuf thermidor, in: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n°229, p. 377.

ibid., p. 378.

J.-R. SURATTEAU: BARRAS Jean Nicolas François de Barras-Clumanc, in: ALBERT SOBOUL: Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, p. 81.

F.-A. AULARD: Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public, avec la correspondance officielle des représentants en mission et le registre du conseil exécutif provisoire, t. 10, p. 401. 

J.-R. SURATTEAU: BARRAS Jean Nicolas François de Barras-Clumanc, in: ALBERT SOBOUL: Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, p. 81.

M. YOUNG: Augustin: The Younger Robespierre, p. 89.

P. BARRAS: Memoirs of Barras, t. 1, p. 400f.

H. MONTEAGLE: Barras au Neuf thermidor, in: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n°229, p. 377.

P. BARRAS: Memoirs of Barras, t. 1, p. 408.

H. MONTEAGLE: Barras au Neuf thermidor, in: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n°229, p. 380f.

ibid., p. 381.

J.-R. SURATTEAU: BARRAS Jean Nicolas François de Barras-Clumanc, in: ALBERT SOBOUL: Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, p. 81.

H. MONTEAGLE: Barras au Neuf thermidor, in: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n°229, p. 382f.

ibid., p. 381.

#french revolution #frev #thermidor #les thermidoriens #barras #robespierre #augustin #rbzpr

[wand3r3r]

Pure Comedy - An Essay by Father John Misty (aka Josh Tillman)

“What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.



Is there a thing of which it is said,
‘See, this is new?’
It has been already
in the ages before us.



There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.”
- Ecclesiastes



Pure Comedy is the story of a species born with a half-formed brain. The species’ only hope for survival, finding itself on a cruel, unpredictable rock surrounded by other species who seem far more adept at this whole thing (and to whom they are delicious), is the reliance on other, slightly older, half-formed brains. This reliance takes on a few different names as their story unfolds, like “love,” “culture,” “family,” etc. Over time, and as their brains prove to be remarkably good at inventing meaning where there is none, the species becomes the purveyor of increasingly bizarre and sophisticated ironies. These ironies are designed to help cope with the species’ loathsome vulnerability and to try and reconcile how disproportionate their imagination is to the monotony of their existence.



Now all of a sudden they expect light in the dark, warmth in the cold, and to make something out of nothing. Cooperation among the species to achieve these goals eventually yields a worldview wherein some among the species believe that there are individuals for whom this type of work is maybe ill-suited. The contribution of the ill-suited is of a more abstract, inspirational nature. The ill-suited begin to make subtle distinctions among themselves that extend beyond “eaten by a bear/not eaten by a bear”. These distinctions involve do-it-ness, cool-face-and-body-ness, craftiness, etc. – an arrangement emerges where these traits can be traded in for better-than-ness. This better-than-ness really starts to run rampant, and the species begins to wonder if there isn’t a Sky-Man in the sky who is perhaps the source of all better-than-ness. It seems like a pretty good explanation for why the species is so important.



Sky-Man pretty much runs the show for a really, really long time, and his inner-circle of better-thans gets increasingly smaller and smaller, even though by the end of his reign everyone in the species considers themselves one. Unfortunately there are some better-thans who get together and decide that one way of better-than-ness is better than other betters-thans’ better-than-ness and teach their little half-formed-brain babies as much (most who interpret this distinction as “me’s” vs. “not-me’s”). “Not-me’s” eventually come to encapsulate everyone that is not a single “me” at any given time, and this paves the way for incredibly distasteful behavior until the species arrives at a place of such alienation and fear there is really nothing so horrible that one of them wouldn’t do to the other. To deal with this less than ideal state of affairs, which seems suspiciously incompatible with how progressive and evolved they are by this point, they set about to entertain themselves into an oblivion with politics, sex, finance, philosophy, and other games of war. This they do until they are so numb, and the idea of any “not-me” so untenable, that they are blissfully incapable of noticing they’re all dead. This happens more or less on an infinite loop until the end of time.



Something like that.



Imagine if you will, as the album starts, that you’re way out in space looking at the earth and, though it’s impossible to “fall” through space, you start a free fall anyway in the direction of the bright blue marble. For the next 75 minutes you plummet toward the earth, losing more and more perspective on what an abstract and impermanent place our planet is, how predictably we step on the same rakes, slip on the same banana peels over and over again through the ages, quickly becoming more and more immersed in the very messy business of being a human – the dubious privilege of being here, the elusiveness of meaning, true love and its habitual absence, random euphoria and the inexplicable misery of others, truth and its more alluring counterfeits, the sophistication of answers that don’t make any sense, the barbarism of our appetites, lucky breaks and injustice, faith and ignorance, crippling, mind-numbing boredom, and the terror of it all ending too soon. Before you know it, you’ve delicately crash-landed and find yourself lying on your back looking up at the stars. If you’re lucky, with someone you love; even if just for a day, a year, a lifetime. Though just an hour has passed you have no recollection of what the earth looked like from the far-flung reaches of space, nor how simple it all seemed a matter of minutes ago.



I know everyone doesn’t feel the same about what’s going on right now. What for some is clearly garden-variety violent white nationalism serving as a catch-all for any number of paranoia-induced anti-fantasies foisted upon the poor and uneducated precisely by the ideologues bent on manufacturing voters who can be manipulated into voting against their own interests by making good and sure they remain poor and uneducated before cravenly blaming their problems largely on people bearing distinctions like race, gender, and sexuality so people forget everything that’s good about the American experiment, is to others an opportunity to wrench the country back from the influence of hypocritical corporate tyrants bent on enslaving our minds with spineless liberal rhetoric in order to justify wiping out the jobs of decent people so they can fulfill their fey utopian dream of an impossible global community designed to profit only its architects (probably Banking Consortiums, pedophile rings, and definitely The Illuminati).


This album does not espouse either of those views.



Both of those views take for granted a certain degree of sophistication, or at least a knack for cooperation, that I’m absolutely convinced humans do not possess; not to mention some kind of innate logic to the proceedings here on Earth – which make a much better case for being some kind of demented joke than anything else.



The terrifying reality concerning the dilemma above is everything is chaos and no one is really in control of anyone or anything.



But what about the well-documented history of humans making life a living hell for other humans since time began?



There is no intellectual, political, or spiritual explanation that will ever satisfy anyone for longer than a moment, least of all this, the only explanation with any dignity. The explanation that appeases both our instincts for compassion and liberation. The explanation that we can either accept and move forward together or keep screaming to our respective heavens, “Why, God, why?”



Things are the way they are because this is how we, the human race, want them.



This is how we want it.



Hold the motherfucking phone. Josh Tillman, you have said and done some stupid fucking things since we’ve known you, but this is too much.



Now the liberals and the conservatives are both outraged because that is a sentiment that is so profoundly insensitive to the ways in which the other side is clearly wrong in objective ways regarding basic decency, but what’s the alternative? We’re either all complicit in this purest comedy, or the people who aren’t to blame are at war with the people who are to blame until everyone is dead. Simple as that.



Is progress possible? What does it look like? The conversion of everyone to our respective beliefs? Well, we’ve seen how that typically goes. The destruction of everyone who fails to conform? That’s not it. The erection of institutions with the power and infrastructure to enforce a rule of law with the good of as many as possible at heart? Not much evidence for that panning out.



What I recommend is this: we return to the Vedic cycle and submit ourselves to the likelihood that many of us will end up getting eaten by bears. It’s only natural. What if instead of imbuing our expectations for the quality of our lives to include perpetual happiness, dream fulfillment, excessive painlessness, existential certitude, material wealth, and all variety of romantic stimulation, we were just grateful for every day that didn’t involve getting eaten by a bear? What if progress only meant literally progressing from one day to the next without getting violently dismembered by a 9-foot tall, 500-pound grizzly?



The irony here of course is that many more humans than we’d like to think, most of whom are not reading the interminable liner notes to a folk rock album, do live in daily, perpetual fear of getting killed by a mammal far more terrifying than a bear, and I think you know the one to which I refer. This form of mammal attack is made all the more nightmarish by virtue of the fact that the mammal in question kills purely ideologically. Bears kill because they’re hungry; they’re very reasonable in that way. So maybe we should submit ourselves to their authority. Bears we can trust.



Bottom line is that as long as we expect to live in such a way – immune to the natural laws of this godless rock that govern everything else here – human existence will continue to be a cruel joke. I fear, however, that it is too late for us to go back into the natural order. We have no desire to return to our primal scene. We like the way things are. We’ve got sandwiches when we’re hungry! Airplanes for when we want to go somewhere! Social media when we want our voices to be heard by all God’s creation! We know that these magical conveniences come at a staggering price, and that excess for the few is based on the scarcity of the many, but that’s why we invented the business of globalization! We’ve already built the wall! It’s a great, great wall that goes up to the heavens and is as transparent as museum glass. It’s a beautiful wall that winds surgically through nations, cities, neighborhoods, and sometimes even homes. It is a globe within a globe, and those who live within its interior are as clueless as to what’s happening on the other side as we are to what’s happening right now on the far side of Mars.


There’s only one creature that can penetrate that wall, friends, and it is bears. Bears can smash through that glass like a pitcher of sugar water through a brick wall. The equalizing revolution of bear justice is coming too. Sooner than you think. As it gets hotter and hotter, they’re coming. They’re coming into our neighborhoods, they’re coming into our schools, into our churches, into our banks, into our places of business, into our governments, into our beds.



The joke is that the best we can do is keep on keeping on, which we’ve proven ourselves pathologically adept at. We’re going to save the planet alright, and it will be a glorious sacrifice just like the Sky-Man we invented showed us how.

Bears, man.