#Resistance against the Nazi regime | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sayruq · 4 days

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Statement: Student organizations in the Gaza Strip in solidarity with the Student Intifada in the United States

In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful… We, the students of Gaza, salute the students of Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and dozens of universities across the United States who are rising up in solidarity with Gaza and to put an end to the Zionist-U.S. genocide against our people in Gaza. As we remain under the bombs of occupation, resisting Nazi genocide, grieving for our martyred colleagues and faculty, and witnessing the destruction of our universities, we welcome the examples of solidarity offered by students facing arrest, police violence, suspension, eviction, and expulsion in order to demand that their universities end their complicity in the Zionist-U.S. genocide and renounce their support for the occupation and the war profiteers that arm it. We have seen hundreds of students arrested across the United States as they work to transform their universities into “Popular Universities for Gaza.” Students, faculty, and staff are disrupting university operations and making clear that while universities in Gaza are being bombed, university business cannot continue as usual in the United States. These actions come as university administrations collaborate with members of Congress to discredit conscientious student activists and faculty, expel students, ban events, shut down student organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine, and condemn activists working to end the Nazi genocide. At the same time, these same universities invest in the same companies that profit from the continued sale of weapons to the Zionist regime to continue its genocidal offensive. Our students – and our educational system as a whole – in occupied Palestine are subjected to ongoing genocidal aggression: our universities destroyed and bombed, our student organizations banned, and our student leaders subjected to torture, assassination and mass imprisonment. However, in Palestine and around the world, the student movement has always been a driving force of our struggle for liberation. When we see videos and images from American universities today, we are reminded of our history of student struggle as well as the student uprisings of 1968, which challenged imperialism from Vietnam to Palestine and reshaped the face of Europe and the United States. Now, in 2024, the student movement is once again leading the way. From here in Gaza, we see you and salute you. Your actions and activism matter, especially in the heart of the empire, in the United States. As members of Congress agree to provide $26 billion in additional weapons to bomb our people and continue the Zionist-U.S. genocide, you are taking meaningful action to shut down the war machine on your campuses. It is clear that a new generation is rising that will no longer accept Zionism, racism and genocide, and that stands with Palestine and our liberation from the river to the sea. Your global student solidarity is breaking boundaries, and it is time to smash the US imperialist war machine. From Gaza to Columbia, to Ann Arbor and Berkeley, our hands are joined to end Nazi genocide and achieve our collective liberation.

#yemen #jerusalem #tel aviv #current events #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #news on gaza #palestine news #news update #war news #war on gaza #students for justice in palestine #palestinian students #columbia university #gaza genocide #genocide #intifada

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incessantscreech2000 · 6 months

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Image transcriptions below:

Legendary South African Jewish Freedom Fighters

And Their Condemnation of Israel

Many people don't know that several of Nelson Mandela's closest and earliest comrades and co-conspirators were South African Jews.

These Jewish comrades and their work was pivotal to the defeat of South African apartheid, giving them a unique perspective on the state of Israel.

—

Joe Slovo (1926-1995) was a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist. In 1942, at age 16, Slovo volunteered to travel to Europe to fight the Nazis. Upon return, he studied alongside Nelson Mandela. He eventually was a founding member of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary arm of the African National Congress.

Slovo was exiled to Mozambique by the apartheid government. Whilst there, his wife, legendary Jewish anti-apartheid activist Ruth First, was assassinated by a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid regime.

Working from abroad for the fall of apartheid, he eventually returned and became a Minister in Mandela's government. Throughout his life he remained a staunch critic of Israel.

—

"Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization for the preparation by Zionists of acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified by the Zionist press."

- Joe Slovo

—-

Denis Goldberg (1933-2020) was a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist. He spent 22 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, for his political activity alongside Mandela.

He was finally freed when his daughter, who lived in Israel, lobbied the Israeli government, which was closely allied to the apartheid regime, to release him. Due to his staunch opposition to Zionism, he refused to join her in Israel.

—

"The violence of the [South African] apartheid regime was nothing in comparison with the utter brutality of Israel's occupation of Palestine."

- Denis Goldberg

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Beata Lipman (1928-2016) was a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist. She drafted the original Freedom Charter in her own handwriting in 1952, which became the basis for the constitution of free South Africa after the fall of apartheid.

Lipman was a proud Jewish critic of Israel, penning many letters condeming Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

—

"We who have fought against Apartheid and vowed not to allow it to happen again can not allow Israel to continue perpetrating apartheid, colonialism and occupation against the indigenous people of Palestine. We dare not allow Israel to continue violating international law with impunity. Apartheid was a gross violation of human rights. It was so in South Africa and it is so with regard to Israel's persecution of the Palestinians!"

- Beata Lipman in joint letter

—

Ronnie Kasrils is a Jewish South African who was also a founding member and Chief of Intelligence for uMkhonto we Sizwe.

In 1992, Kasrils led an unarmed protest when the apartheid government opened fire, killing 28 of his comrades and injuring over 200 others. He went on to serve in various Ministerial roles after the defeat of apartheid.

In 2001, Kasrils was co-author of the

*Declaration of Conscience by South Africans of Jewish Descent, which calls Israel a colonial apartheid-state. He has drawn criticism for stating that Israel has behaved like the Nazis.

—

"We recognise the operation today by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza as a legitimate expression of their right to resist. We support all efforts of oppressed people to liberate themselves from their oppressors in the same way we did in our liberation struggle.

We are saddened by all violence but Israeli Jews will not realise peace until they accept a future where they will live with Palestinians as citizens in a single, democratic Palestinian state, with Palestinians being compensated for seven decades of colonisation, occupation and apartheid."

- Ronnie Kasrils, 7th October 2023

#free palestine #palestine #gaza #hamas #israel #fuck israel #freedom fighters #resistance #south africa #israel is an apartheid state #apartheid #genocide #from the river to the sea palestine will be free

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calabria-mediterranea · 5 days

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25 April - Anniversary of Italy's Liberation

25 April also known as the Anniversary of Italy's Liberation is a national holiday in Italy that commemorates the victory of the Italian resistance movement against Nazi Germany and the Italian Social Republic, puppet state of the Nazis and rump state of the fascists, culmination of the liberation of Italy from German occupation and of the Italian civil war in the latter phase of World War II. That is distinct from Republic Day (Festa della Repubblica), which takes place on 2 June and commemorates the 1946 Italian institutional referendum.

Every year on 25 April Italy celebrates Liberation Day, known in Italian as Festa della Liberazione, with a national public holiday.

In addition to the closure of schools, public offices and most shops, the day is marked with parades across the country, organised by ANPI, Italy's partisan association which preserves the memory of the Resistance movement against Fascism.

The occasion is held in commemoration of the end of the Fascist regime and of the Nazi occupation during world war two, as well as the victory of Italy's Resistance movement of partisans who opposed the regime.

Formed in 1943, the partigiani comprised a network of anti-Fascist activists, from diverse backgrounds including workers, farmers, students and intellectuals, across Italy.

Resistance

Together they united in armed resistance against the Nazi occupation and the Fascist regime, making their struggle both a war of liberation and a civil war.

The annual event marks the day in 1945 when a nationwide radio broadcast calling for a popular uprising and general strike against the Nazi occupation and Fascist regime was announced by the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy (CLNAI), a political umbrella organisation representing the Italian Resistance movement.

This announcement - made by partisan and future president of Italy Sandro Pertini - resulted in the capture and death of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who was shot three days later.

The Festa della Liberazione represents a significant turning point in Italy's history, paving the way for the referendum of 2 June 1946 when Italians voted in favour of a republic and against the monarchy which had been discredited during the war and whose members went into exile.

Scurati controversy

This year's event takes place against the backdrop of a political controversy after the state broadcaster RAI stopped a well-known Italian writer from delivering an anti-fascist monologue on television a few days before the Festa della Liberazione.

Antonio Scurati accused RAI of censorship after his monologue was dropped abruptly from the Saturday night talkshow Chesarà for "editorial reasons".

The writer claimed that the move highlighted the alleged attempts by premier Giorgia Meloni's right-wing government to exert its influence over the state broadcaster which has seen several veteran presenters leave over the last year including Fabio Fazio, Bianca Berlinguer and Amadeus.

In his speech Scurati criticised the "ruling post-Fascist party" for wanting to "re-write history" rather than "repudiate its neo-fascist past".

RAI director Paolo Corsini rejected any talk of censorship, as did Meloni who responded to the controversy by posting Scurati's text on her Facebook page, stating that the broadcaster had "simply refused to pay 1800 euro (the monthly salary of many employees) for a minute of monologue".

Meloni added that the Italian people "can freely judge" the contents of the text which was later read live on air by Chesarà presenter Serena Bortone in an act of solidarity with Scurati.

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fdelopera · 5 days

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Exactly, Anon. Exactly. This is why the Ivy League Universities being turned into Hamasnik terrorist bases is so horrifying. Especially with Jew-hating students attacking Jewish students and professors on campus, with the Universities' sanction. The Universities could shut these Jew-hate riots down. The fact that they don't shows that they want them to continue. They're trying to chase away the Jewish students and professors from these schools. That's always the first step. That's what the Nazis did first, too.

This article is taken from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website. I highly recommend that everyone read the whole article. But even if you read the first paragraph, you'll see the parallels to what is happening on Ivy League campuses today:

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After Adolf Hitler was appointed German Chancellor in January 1933, the new Nazi government began an effort to completely reorder public and private life in Germany.

The Nazi regime quickly targeted German universities—among the most elite in the world at the time—for restructuring according to Nazi principles. While the Nazi Ministry of Education initiated reforms, local Nazi organizations and student activists worked to bring Nazi ideals to German campuses. These forces, along with increasing antisemitism under Nazi rule, transformed everyday life at German universities. Throughout this period, students, faculty, and staff made individual decisions that both upheld and opposed Nazi ideology.

With the passage of the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" in 1933, most Jewish professors in Germany were dismissed from their positions. Others, such as Professor Eugen Mittwoch, were able to keep their posts temporarily only due to the political value of their research. After purging Jewish and "politically undesirable" faculty, the regime then targeted the student body with the "Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities." As German authorities continued to "Aryanize" German universities, Jews increasingly lost the opportunity to teach or study. Many non-Jewish Germans sought to benefit from their persecution.

The daily business of university life continued in the wake of these new policies, but political concerns increasingly influenced the way professors and students worked and studied. The practice of denunciation, as demonstrated by the "Request for the Investigation of Professor Hans Peters," illustrates the danger posed to both students and faculty if they failed to follow new ideological norms. Those willing to voice support for the new regime—whether out of enthusiasm or practicality—often received promotions or other rewards. Meanwhile, many others quietly accepted the new policies and passively benefited from the persecution of their Jewish peers. Very few, such as the small student group in Munich known as the White Rose, took any significant action to resist the Nazi dictatorship.

The Nazi government and its supporters manipulated several aspects of the country's traditional university system to turn German higher education into a crucial source of support for the new regime. For example, the German student population had been largely male long before the Nazi rise to power, and German campuses were dominated by fraternities. Those organizations maintained traditional military discipline and dress codes, and their alumni groups exercised significant political power both before and after 1933. Fraternities—often working with the Student Council and Nazi Student League—served as a powerful and violent force for implementing Nazi principles at universities, often going beyond the party platform in their radicalism. A Report on the Camaraderie House for Female Students of Göttingen shows how Nazi student groups used the format of traditional student organizations to train both men and women to become the next generation of Nazi leaders.

Although the regime could rely on many committed student activists, the Third Reich also sought the support of German professors to lend legitimacy to their policies. Because German universities were state institutions, professors' academic careers became vulnerable to the whims and wishes of the Nazi state. While only a small minority of professors had been Nazi Party members before 1933, several prominent professors quickly voiced their support for the Third Reich. In the new German university, political loyalty was valued over academic ability in the assessment of students and in the selection and promotion of professors. Authorities infused university classrooms with Nazi ideology—as shown in the document, "Foundation of the Advanced School of the German Reich". But prioritizing politics over academics affected the quality of German higher education.

Nevertheless, professors—even enthusiastic supporters of the new regime—often spoke out against some aspects of Nazi policy. The case of Eduard Kohlrausch shows how his opposition to student-led book burnings caused his removal from the university administration. Dissent against individual policies, however, did not give rise to any concerted resistance movements. German universities as a whole formed a solid base of support for the Nazi regime, contributing valuable knowledge to the development of technology for the war effort as well as logistical support for the Holocaust.

The Nazification of universities overwhelmed the daily lives of students with new requirements, including mandatory lectures, physical exercises, labor duties, and political assemblies. Many students resented those requirements, even if they supported the Nazi Party. In Heidelberg, for example, where the daily life of students was dominated by political instruction and mandatory physical training, large numbers of students withdrew from the university in search of other educational opportunities. As illustrated in the "Memo Regarding Maria-Elisabeth Koch," students also showed varying degrees of enthusiasm for the labor service that was often required of them in territories occupied by Nazi Germany.

The Nazi government's project of remaking German universities was broadly successful, but it produced unintended consequences. The quality of education suffered significantly as classes were regularly cancelled for political assemblies and students' schedules became filled with ideological and paramilitary training. Moreover, purging Jewish faculty deprived German universities of valuable expertise. Within a few years, many observers in Germany and abroad became deeply skeptical about the quality of German higher education in the Third Reich. Propaganda efforts such as the Carl Schurz tour for American professors and students—documented with a slickly produced video—did not prevent protest. The 550th-anniversary celebration of Heidelberg University met with opposition in Europe, even while prominent American universities such as Harvard accepted invitations.

With the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Allied forces occupying Germany began a long-term effort to remove the influence of Nazi ideology in German society. Many German academics who made significant contributions to the Nazi war effort fled to the United States, where they lived comfortable lives and their expertise was highly valued by American universities and the US military. In postwar Germany, many faculty and students who had benefited from the Nazis' discriminatory policies without being especially vocal or enthusiastic supporters of the regime sought to cast their dissent or their silence as forms of political resistance to obscure their own complicity. Although many Germans denied having supported the Nazi regime, antisemitism persisted in postwar Germany. The case of Hermann Budzislawski shows the difficulties encountered by the relatively few German Jews who decided to return to Germany after World War II.

Sources in this collection document the choices facing students and faculty pursuing their everyday lives in the shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust. Over the course of this period, as antisemitic discrimination escalated to mass murder, the higher education system proved to be a source of support—rather than opposition—to the party's project of remaking German society.

#jumblr #jewish history #the goyim are trying to speedrun the 1930s #goyim have always naively asked “How could the Nazi regime have murdered 6 million Jews??” - and now they're giving us the answer #Jew-hate makes you stupid #NOTE: I report and block antisemites. Any antisemites who comment on this post will be reported and blocked. You have been warned.

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ahaura · 6 months

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Abby Martin tweeted (Nov. 7) a link to an interview she did with an former IOF soldier, Eran Efrati, posted in 2017. He describes the standard brutality of the IOF and how the soldiers enforce the apartheid state—protecting settlers; the standard practice of execution by both the IOF and police; the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians; the role and treatment of Arab Jews in the Israeli state; and Palestinian resistance.

Some excerpts:

"I didn't feel like I was protecting anyone, I didn't feel like I was keeping anyone safe. I feel like I'm terrorizing people. [...] I felt like I was the terrorist. And my job was literally to scare people so they cannot think about acting against the Israeli settlers or the Israeli military. That was actually our defined mission. [...] To instill fear in the hearts of Palestinians [...] and that's exactly what we did."

"At the age of 15-16, I began being almost obsessed with trying to understand the Nazi side in the Holocaust. Not only to hear the stories of the Jewish victims and any other victims of the Holocaust, but to try and understand how can a Nazi soldier get up in the morning, give his kids a kiss, a wife a hug and go out to the camps and do his job. I just couldn't understand it. And when I got into the occupied territories, for the first time I understood how there can be a contradiction inside yourself. As a human being you could do your job and be one person at home—be a loving, caring boyfriend or a son or a brother—and at the same time hold people under a regime so oppressive that people are dying not from only your bullets but the amount of calories being entered into their territory like in Gaza, from depression or sickness. [...]"

"Israel is selling the idea that the soldiers are more important than anything, the soldiers are more important than the lives of Palestinians—not just the life of soldiers, but identity, security, feelings—are more important than Palestinian life."

"Israelis are saying in a very clear voice [...] not only will we oppress Palestinians and do whatever we want, but in a very specific way of saying [...] whatever soldiers do in the occupied territories are right. Whatever we're doing is the correct thing."

AM: I want you to talk specifically about the culture within the Israeli military that fosters anti-Arab sentiment, and racism, essentially. EE: I think the system is not only inside the military, [...] that's actually what being an Israeli means. Growing up in the Israeli educational department, you understand that all the Arabs hate you, that they're actually in a way the continuation of the Biblical amalek, or Hitler, or that everybody there want to throw you into the sea. This is what you're growing up with and you really believe in that. [...] Going in the military, you're already so full of hate and fear at the same time that you don't need much to be very aggressive, violent, and racist toward Palestinians. They see the Palestinian women and the Palestinian men as subhuman. The occupied territories are like an ex-territory, when those human beings are not considered human beings."

(In response to attacks on Israeli soldiers) "[...] I learned [...] that if you will not respect existence, you can expect resistance. And this is how people resist. Israel as a state likes to use the idea that Palestinians only understand force, or power, but the truth of the matter is that Israelis only understand power and force. Every other attempt from Palestinians to try and negotiation this situation in a diplomatic way was countered by more attacks, more oppression, and more occupation, more stealing of the land, more destroying of homes, more settlements being built. We decided to call going into the U.N. 'diplomatic terrorism,' and to go into the ICC 'international terrorism.' We basically describe every form of resistance as terrorism because the sole idea of the occupation is not to be safe; the sole idea is to create an ethnically cleansed piece of land only for Jewish people—with Palestinian workers, of course some Palestinians can stay and do stuff for us—but this is our land. What people maybe don't understand is that Israel is creating the conditions in to the situation of constantly having to 'protect' yourself. We're creating this situation by oppressing millions of people [...] [until] they have no other choice but to resist."

"[...] the truth is that Israel do not hear the diplomacy, Israel do not hear the call of the Palestinians for equality. What we are seeing Palestine is what a lot of people like to describe as the most complicated political situation of our time [but] what is probably the most simple political situation of our time. It's a situation about equality."

AM: Would you say that you support the right of Palestinians to fight their occupiers? EE: Absolutely. I support the right of every human being under an oppressive military rule to resist this rule by any means possible. I do not believe Israel has a right to occupy millions of human beings without every decent human simple basic rights for their name. And I do not believe that Israel will change on its own. At no point in history there was a state or a power that had the power and control over other human beings and benefit from it and just decide to let go of this power on its own. It was always forced on them by the resistance of the people underneath them. All the intervention of other forces around the world. And unfortunately, as I do support the Palestinian right to resist, in any way, I do not believe that their resistance is enough. I do believe that the rest of the world has to interfere. And what's going on in Palestine—there's nothing else we can do except for giving all the Palestinians equal rights and starting a new state, a new equality system for all human beings on the ground."

#palestine #geopol #abby martin #when ur own guy says it...!#📁.zip

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mockiatoh · 1 year

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The last surviving member of the White Rose resistance movement, which urged Germans to stand up against Nazi tyranny during the second world war, has died, according to the group’s historical foundation.

Traute Lafrenz died at her home in South Carolina on Monday at the age of 103, the group said in a statement on Thursday, paying tribute to her “courageous resistance and lasting testimony”.

One of the most famous groups to resist the Nazis in Germany, the White Rose distributed anti-war pamphlets at Munich university in 1942-3, calling on people to rise up against the regime.

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cavalierzee · 10 days

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Gaza: The World's First LiveStreamed Genocide

As we mark the 81st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we are collectively watching the world’s first “livestreamed genocide.”

For so many of us, the images are unavoidable: Our social media feeds are full of Palestinian death and dehumanization by the Israeli military: children left as the sole caregivers of their siblings after their parents are killed, Palestinian prisoners stripped naked and handcuffed, amputations and c-sections with no anesthesia, survivors of the Nakba traumatized again and again, adults and children lined up and numbered, the bodies of Palestinians discarded after execution by Israeli soldiers.

For many American Jews who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, the parallels we see with our ancestors’ own subjugation and dehumanization are undeniable.

For many of us, we are yet again compelled to answer the urgent warning of “never again.”

The experiences of our ancestors’ persecution and mass death under fascism now serve as the foundation for how we define modern genocides.

The genocide we are witnessing in Palestine by the Israeli military is yet another outgrowth from the same fascist mechanisms that extinguished the lives of over 6 million Jews during the Nazi Holocaust.

Journalist Masha Gessen’s comparison of Palestinians in Gaza to ghettoized Jews in Nazi Germany holds power not only due to its accuracy, but because any discussion of Jews during the Holocaust inevitably invokes their harrowing fates.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is the most well known act of Jewish resistance to the Nazi regime’s fascism.

The refusal of Warsaw Jews to accept the violent fate the Nazis prescribed to them, and instead fight back, reminds us all of our duty to resist oppression wherever it is.

We hold these ancestors close and affirm our commitment to ensuring their values of solidarity, collective liberation, and anti-imperialism are carried on into the future as we fight for justice in Palestine.

As Jews, as we continue to witness and struggle against Israeli oppression of Palestinians, we also must engage our collective knowledge of where these ongoing atrocities will lead to, and do everything we can to stop that outcome

Our beliefs, our history and our duty demand we stand up to stop this genocide before it escalates even further.

By Jewish Voices For Peace

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segretecose · 2 months

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girl aren't you atheist

why on earth would that in any way diminish the value and/or importance of the writings of one of the most important figureheads in the german resistance against the nazi regime or my ability to learn something from them?

#i'll be honest here some of you are getting on my nerves a lot as of late

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thesituation · 26 days

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like it’s not an unreasonable or nitpicky thing to expect someone not to praise hitler. i think that’s common sense. someone who understands and has sympathy for the crimes against humanity hitler directly committed would be uncomfortable with any kind of praise leveled at him, regardless of what it is. it’s not just an edgy joke it’s disrespecting and minimizing the victims of hitler’s regime, which is the first portion of normalization on the fascist pipeline. these aren’t harmless jokes, it all works to normalize praising hitler in a “memeable” way so you rid yourself of the discomfort of it and are less resistant to more serious fascist and nazi ideas that you may be exposed to. it’s not something to fuck around with and not something to treat lightly and you’re quite frankly part of the issue if you think it’s just drama. and a fucking idiot but thts neither here nor there idk..

#.txt

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hero-israel · 10 months

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Now 30 years after "Schindler's List" came out, I give you the worst article ever written about it.

Join me for a wallow in the depths of Extremely Online lefty pseudointellectualism and Awareness Raising.

"For all its pathos and earnestness, the movie is too glib in its handling of the Nazis. The concentration camp commandant, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), is a sadistic monster who performs cinematic and dramatic acts of brutality to signal to the viewer that he is pure evil."

Yes, the movie sure was unfair to Amon Goeth. It's not like there was historical evidence of him doing exactly what they showed.

"In real life, when Nazis and their ilk are trying to gain power, they often lie about their motives or their goals, and use dog whistles to rally support. They talk incessantly about black crime rates, or, in the Nazis’ case, about Jewish crime rates, in order to create a consensus for strong-arm law-and-order policies."

The Nazis were just a warm-up act for the REAL threat: Republicans!

And, just like with Goeth, I guess this movie doesn't actually show what Nazis were like in real life. I guess when Adolf Hitler promised in 1922 that he would exterminate all the Jews, that wasn't real life, that was a wandering variant from "Across the Hitlerverse." And speaking of superhero movies:

"But you don’t need to deconstruct Nazi ideology or understand racist dog whistles to condemn the Nazis in “Schindler’s List.” You just need to watch as Goeth takes up a sniper position and shoots anyone in the camp who happens to pause for a rest. It’s no harder than rooting against Lex Luthor or the Joker."

This drivel was published 5 years ago, so the author had to have been like 17 at the time and is just barely out of college now, right? Right??? (*checks*) NO WAY, HE'S 52, ARE YOU FOR REAL??!

"The Jewish people in the film don’t try to resist or kill their German oppressors. They don’t even express much in the way of hatred or resentment... Jewish people are always object lessons, never conscious teachers. No Jewish character criticizes or explains the evils of Nazi propaganda. These Jews never talk about how they experience prejudice, or what they would need to fight it.... the Jews around Schindler only beg him to save their relatives, or praise him for his bravery. They never insist on their rights."

Well, there was that Jewish architect in the camps who talked back to Goeth for a second about how the barracks would collapse and he immediately had her killed. The movie is about people having been ALREADY ghettoized by a for-real genocidal regime once the genocide program is under way. Where was there supposed to be a dramatic lecture? And what Jew would have given one, to which Nazi, in which fucking ACTUAL GHETTO?

Again and again, this screen-addled, zero-life-experience baby WHO IS SOMEHOW 52 YEARS OLD WTF fails to confront the horrors of true Jewish history because his only frame of reference has been Twitter arguments about how sleeping with a mattress is secretly white supremacy.

"The targets of fascism are the people best able to express what is happening to them, and what they need to fight it. But “Schindler’s List” presents victims as supplicants. It doesn’t model any way to show support for journalist Jemele Hill, who fell out with her network for saying that Trump is a white supremacist. It doesn’t push you to show solidarity when anti-racist activists demand that Confederate monuments be taken down. It doesn’t tell you that anti-fascist actions are important — even when they disrupt someone’s meal. The virtuous victims in “Schindler’s List” never protest. Because of this kind of representation, it’s easy for people to claim that protesters aren’t virtuous."

.........Or! OR! Hear me out here. Or maybe, just maybe, there could be another reason why the Holocaust doesn't look like a good match for someone being fired from ESPN, or for well-fed comfortable people protected by the rule of law yelling at a White House press secretary. Without checking - without doing even a five-second Google search - I am willing to declare as an absolute immutable fact of the universe that Noah Berlatsky considers Sarah Huckabee Sanders to be more dangerous, more fascist, and more Nazi-like than he does Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The overall mentality is that real life must be a screenplay - according to Berlatsky's written cues. Real life must be cinematic - according to Berlatsky's direction. And anything that differs from Berlatsky's internal script - "AOC uses the Infinity Gauntlet to stop voter ID laws which are the new Nazism" - is simply not credible as real life, as real history, and must be discarded and replaced by more of what he saw on Twitter.

After a long lecture, of course.

#antisemitism #judaism #schindler's list #noah berlatsky #jumblr

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phoenixyfriend · 1 year

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The older I get, the more I understand how much of my take on certain topics (now including Star Wars, particularly the genocide of the Jedi and the many civil wars of the Mandalorians) stems directly from Balkan Cultural Trauma.

Like. There is not a way to really explain my feelings on Mandalorian imperial history and the genocide of the Jedi without getting into things like (and this has links because I do not have the energy in me to explain everything in detail because it's just so much shit, people do entire doctorates on just tiny parts of any given one of these):

five hundred years of Ottoman oppression of the region (especially the blood tithe of devshirme and its role in the Janissary slave army; the English Wikipedia article is significantly kinder about the practice than the Balkans remember it being), and the rise of nationalism in the wake of its dissolution

the attempted genocide of the Serbs in Croatia in WWII (the Nazi regime of Croatia operated the third-largest concentration camp in Europe, and targeted ethnic Serbs more than all other groups combined, resulting in several hundred thousand dead Serbs at the hands of far-right Croats and Bosniaks, with records kept so poorly that estimates range from 200k to 500k, all committed without the use of mass extermination tools due to lack of adequate equipment), which most of the Western world has no idea about but features heavily in my own family's history

the attempted genocide of Croats and Muslims in greater Yugoslavia by the Chetniks in WWII (far-right Serb nationalists and Yugoslav royalists, resulting in the deaths of about 55k-73k Croats and Muslims)

the same shit happening in the 90s, once again on the same religious/ethnic divides (basically the same thing in the Balkans, a large number of conservative parties are of the opinion that a Serb who converts to Catholicism is now ethnically a Croat, and if they convert to Islam they are now ethnically a Bosnian/a Bosniak), resulting in tens of thousands of Bosniaks dead at the hands of Serb nationalists, and upwards of a million displaced. (Bosnian and Croatian forces also engaged in war crimes against each other and Serbs, but to a much smaller degree.)

The entire mess that is Kosovo, where even I can't really start to explain what's going on because it's been going on for so many years in so many directions and it's probably another 'the Ottomans fucked everyone over and then we turned around and went for each others' throats after they were finally gone'

Within that context, you have all this bullshit about propaganda fed to the people by the government, propaganda fed to the outside world to shift over international perception of the events, propaganda used to help the outside world forget about a horrific historic war crime, arguments about which nationalist attitudes were a direct result of Ottoman oppression instead of a later development, which current conflicts can be traced back to Ottoman oppression and who resisted versus who cooperated, who lied about what, who initiated what, which crimes can be attributed to a rogue military and which to the government, which crimes were supported by the population and which were supported only by the wealthy or high ranking, about what even actually happened, about who even actually died, about how many things were initiated by outside forces since there are theories that the CIA helped kick off or at least inflame the many conflicts of the 90s and 00s--

And I was raised in America, and have tried to do independent research every time my parents told me a story about history because I don't want to trust the words of two people on the history of millions, and it's always so much more complicated than you think.

Except for two rules, really, which is that almost everything traces back to the Ottomans fucking us over, and the Rroma always suffered for everyone else's bullshit even though they weren't involved in the conflicts in the first place.

#star wars #balkans #balkan history #serbia #and various others #history #death tw #ethnic cleansing tw #genocide tw #phoenix posts #vent post

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sayruq · 3 days

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Yemeni, Iranian, and Palestinian authorities have spoken out in support of US university students and faculty members who have been targeted by brutal police repression for the past two weeks during mobilizations calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza. The leader of Yemen's ruling Ansarallah movement, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, said during a speech on 25 April that the US government “does not respect their laws, their constitution, or any headlines they raise and brag about,” stressing that there is a “concerted effort” from Washington to silence a movement that “has begun to wake up to the horror of what is happening in occupied Palestine.” “With the demonstrations and sit-ins at prominent US universities, the US support for the Israeli enemy became clear, as authorities dealt with the demonstrations and protests … in a bad manner that goes beyond all considerations,” the Yemeni resistance leader added.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian also condemned the crackdown witnessed across several universities. “The suppression and violent treatment of the American police and security forces against professors and students protesting the genocide and war crimes of the Israeli regime in various universities of the United States is deeply worrying,” Iran's top diplomat said via social media, adding that this repression is an extension of “Washington's full-fledged support for the Israeli regime and clearly shows the double standard policy and contradictory attitude of the American government towards freedom of expression.”

In Palestine, officials from Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as well as student organizations in the Gaza Strip, issued statements supporting the grassroots movement that has taken over about two dozen university campuses in the US. “We, the students of Gaza, salute the students of Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and dozens of universities across the United States who are rising in solidarity with Gaza and to put an end to the Zionist–US genocide against our people in Gaza,” a statement from students organizations in Gaza reads. “From here in Gaza, we see you and salute you. Your actions and activism matter, especially in the heart of the empire, in the United States … It is clear that a new generation is rising that will no longer accept Zionism, racism, and genocide and that stands with Palestine and our liberation from the river to the sea,” the statement adds. For their part, the PFLP called on Palestinian and Arab students to “rise for Gaza following the example of American universities.” “Palestinian and Arab universities must take the initiative and break the barrier of silence, following the example of American universities which have ignited an intifada within the campus for the victory of the blood of our Palestinian people, and in rejection of the continuing American support for the zionist entity,” the PFLP statement reads. In a similar vein, Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Rishq said that the government of US President Joe Biden “violates individual rights and the right to expression, and arrests university students and faculty members because they reject the genocide that our Palestinian people are subjected to in the Gaza Strip at the hands of the neo-Nazi Zionists, without the slightest feeling of shame about the legal value represented by the students and university professors.” “The Biden administration, which is a partner in the brutal war on our Palestinian people, does not want to acknowledge that [the US public has] discovered the truth about the Nazi entity and is siding with human values and standing on the right side of history. Today’s students are the leaders of the future, and their suppression today means an expensive electoral bill that the Biden administration will pay sooner or later.”

#yemen #jerusalem #tel aviv #current events #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #news on gaza #palestine news #news update #war news #war on gaza #students for justice in palestine #gaza solidarity encampment #columbia university #iran #pflp #palestinian resistance

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sailor-rowling · 1 month

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No, JK Rowling is not a Holocaust denier

The LGBT lobby has found yet another sickening way to attack JK Rowling. Trans-activist bullies, who so often delight in sending death and rape threats to the Harry Potter author, are now suggesting she is a Holocaust denier. It should go without saying that this is an absurd and defamatory slur. It is also one that’s being increasingly employed against anyone who dares to question the trans lobby’s latest attempt to rewrite history.

Rowling was accused of Holocaust denial last week, after she wrote a post on X that doubted claims that the Nazis made trans people a specific target for genocide. This argument is part of a wider attempt by activists to place trans people at the centre of the Holocaust. But the truth is that they weren’t. At least, not in any meaningful sense.

Digging into these claims, I soon discovered that activist historians have been sewing together a patchwork story of an alleged trans ‘genocide’ that is breathtakingly misleading. In fact, their entire narrative is built on only a handful of trans victims. Crucially, most of these victims were also Jewish or homosexual.

In response to Rowling’s comments, Pink News published an article claiming that ‘the persecution of trans people by the Nazis was devastating’. The proof for this? The names of five trans victims. What Pink News fails to disclose is that three of these people actually survived the war and fortunately lived to a ripe old age. One victim – Liddy Bacroff, who was arrested as a male prostitute – did sadly die in a concentration camp. Another, Gerd R, took his own life.

Take the case of Gerd R, one of the victims mentioned by Pink News. Gerd was a married, heterosexual man who had a history of crossdressing. He was arrested multiple times for public indecency after his neighbours grew tired of finding him hiding naked in their communal bins. He was later rescued from a concentration camp by the intervention of his doctor, who pointed out that he was heterosexual. This action saved his life and he was moved to a mental institution. There, Gerd took his own life.

Gerd’s fate was tragic. But it is almost certain that he would have ended up in an asylum for this behaviour anywhere across Europe at that time. The idea that a non-Jewish, heterosexual man like Eddie Izzard would without question have been murdered when Gerd R was not is fanciful, self-serving nonsense.

Another victim, Gerd Kubbe, a woman who identified as a man, had a very close brush with the authorities. In 1938, she was arrested for wearing men’s clothes and sent to a concentration camp. But a few months later, she was released and permitted to dress as she liked and to adopt the gender-neutral name of Gerd. One ‘queer’ historian admits that ‘police at first reacted harshly but later showed surprising leniency’. Even gay transvestite Fritz Kitzing, who was repeatedly arrested for soliciting, was sent to join the army rather than killed in a concentration camp. Kitzing survived the war and ran an antique shop until the 1990s.

So far, the mixed fortunes of the handful of named trans victims suggest that it was entirely possible to be ‘trans’ and elude persecution. If you were heterosexual, considered ‘Aryan’, followed the rules on public crossdressing and avoided prostitution or public indecency, you at least had a chance of surviving the brutal regime. No such leniency was afforded to the Nazis’ key targets, like Jews or disabled people, who were ruthlessly sought out for elimination.

When trans activists describe this truth-telling as ‘Holocaust denial’, they do a disservice to all Holocaust victims – including the few trans victims who really did suffer at the hands of an evil regime for their other characteristics. We must resist this blatant rewriting of history and the trans appropriation of the Holocaust.

#jk rowling #j.k. rowling

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 8 months

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The news that Palestinian Authority summer camps are training children to use weapons and glorify terrorists is a troubling reminder that some regimes view children as little more than tools to be exploited.

Hundreds of thousands of children have been used as soldiers in various international conflicts in recent decades, according to human rights groups.

The Ugandan rebel group known as the “Lord’s Resistance Army” has made the abduction and enslavement of children “its main method of recruitment,” experts say.

In Bolivia, an estimated 40% of the army consists of teenagers who were forcibly conscripted.

The participation of Palestinian Arab children in terrorism against Israelis has become so commonplace that it has attracted the attention of Palestinian advocates in the United States. They’ve persuaded a handful of members of Congress to introduce legislation to restrict U.S. aid to Israel if the Israeli military detains minors who engage in violence.

A Nazi Version of Cinderella

Dictators in previous generations likewise prioritized training children to hate and kill. Adolf Hitler, for example, viewed Germany’s schools as a breeding ground for raising an entire generation of Nazis.

Following Hitler’s rise to power, German school curricula were radically revised to reflect Nazi ideas, and traditional text books were replaced with Nazi versions. Biology texts now advocated the theory of “Aryan” racial superiority. Atlases focused on the alleged danger to Germany posed by surrounding nations and the supposed theft from Germany of various territories. History books presented justifications for renewed German militarism. The Nazis even concocted their own version of Cinderella, with the prince choosing a racially pure young heroine and rebuffing her racially alien stepmother.

At a press conference in September 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed concern that the German government seemed to be preparing young people for war with Germany’s neighbors. He related a story he heard from an American tourist in Germany, about an eight year-old German boy who in his bedtime prayers each night would say, “Dear God, please permit it that I shall die with a French bullet in my heart.”

Unfortunately, that did not change FDR’s policy of maintaining friendly diplomatic and trade relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Disney Exposes the Nazis

During World War Two, Disney created a series of short cartoon films to support the American war effort and expose the nature of Nazism. They were shown in movie theaters, prior to the main feature. One especially striking nine-minute film was called “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.”

The storyline follows a German child, Hans, as the Nazi school system turns him into a worshipper of Hitler. When Hans’s teacher shows the pupils a fox capturing and eating a rabbit, Hans makes the innocent mistake of expressing sympathy for “the poor rabbit.” As punishment, he has to put on a dunce camp and sit in a corner, while another student gives the “correct” answer: “The world belongs to the strong…The rabbit is a coward and deserves to die.”

Finally surrendering to peer pressure, Hans agrees that the rabbit was “a weakling” who got what it deserved. The teacher then provides the moral of the story: the German people are “an unconquerable super race” who will “destroy all weak and cowardly nations.”

The Disney narrator describes how Hans’s upbringing then proceeds with endless “marching and ‘Heil’-ing, ‘Heil’-ing and marching.” The little boy becomes almost a robot, blindly heeding the Nazi Party’s orders to “trample on the rights of others.” The narrator concludes: “For now his education is complete–his education for death.”

Nazi-educated German children filled the ranks of the Hitler Youth movement. Its members took part in numerous atrocities, from forcing Vienna’s Jews to scrub the streets with toothbrushes in 1938, to the mass shooting of Jews swimming from sinking boats in the German harbor of Lubeck, just before Germany’s surrender in 1945.

In addition, many of those who graduated from Hitler Youth joined the Gestapo and participated in the mass murder of European Jewry. While other branches of the Nazi apparatus collapsed or surrendered in the waning days of World War II, Hitler Youth remained fanatically loyal to their Fuhrer to the very end, which is why they are often mentioned in accounts of atrocities that were perpetrated in the spring of 1945.

Menachem Weinryb, an Auschwitz survivor who was forced to take part in a death march from Poland to Germany, later recalled how when the prisoners reached the Belsen area on April 13, 1945, the German guards went to a nearby town “and returned with a lot of young people from the Hitler Youth [and local policemen]…They chased us all into a large barn…we were five to six thousand people…[They] poured out petrol and set the barn on fire. Several thousand people were burned alive.”

#palestinian authority #palestinian authority summer camps #child soldiers #palestinian child soldiers #nazis #hitler

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girlactionfigure · 7 months

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The Fake Spaniard: Samuel Skornicki

His name was Santos Montero

Samuel Skornicki was a Jewish lawyer from Poland who became legal advisor to the Spanish Consul and saved hundreds of Jews and non-Jews from the Nazis.

Samuel was born in Poland in1899 to a family of secular intellectuals. He married Raizel Sliwinsky from Lodz, and they moved to Paris in 1923, where Samuel studied law and became a civil attorney. Their daughter Arlette later remembered, “My father wanted to live in France, the land of freedom and human rights.”

After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, the Skornicki family moved to Toulouse. As the situation became more dangerous for Jews in France, Samuel and Raizel left Arnette with a Christian family where she would be safe.

Samuel had something everybody wanted – a valid passport and a visa to the United States, where his mother and siblings lived. Instead, Samuel chose to remain in France and help the resistance movement. In Toulouse, Samuel ran a textile factory and distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets and provided Jews with false documents. A master networker, Samuel made connections with important people in Toulouse.

He met with the Spanish Consul, who was overwhelmed with the amount of visa requests from Jews trying to leave France. With legal training and organizational skills, Samuel was well-positioned to help the Consul, and he was appointed legal advisor to the embassy in St. Etienne. Samuel and Raizel were given new identities as Spanish citizens: Santos and Rosa Montero. Neither one of them spoke any Spanish.

In 1942, the Consul returned to Spain and appointed Samuel/Santos as his replacement. Before leaving France, the Consul threw a lavish farewell party where the guests included top officials of the collaborationist Vichy Regime, German Army officers, and off-duty Gestapo storm troopers. The event featured an official swearing-in ceremony where “Santos Montero” was installed as acting Spanish Consul. The Nazis present didn’t realize they were celebrating the promotion of a Jew.

As the acting Consul, Samuel turned the Consulate into a center of the Resistance. He supervised the forging of documents and hiding of weapons, and provided refuge for Jews and members of the Resistance. Meanwhile, he was conducting diplomatic meetings with local Nazi officials, including Gestapo officers with lists of Jews scheduled for deportation on their desks. Samuel read the names upside down and memorized them so he could warn the people on the list.

Since Samuel didn’t speak Spanish, he relied on the Spanish Consulate staff to keep his secret. They were mostly Republican opponents of Spain’s ruler, the fascist Francisco Franco, who was allied with Hitler. As part of that alliance, Franco was sending thousands of Spanish citizens to Germany to provide labor. Samuel and his staff got exemptions for thousands of Spaniards.

In March 1944, the French Resistance attacked a German train near St. Etienne. Determined to catch the French perpetrators, German policemen conducted a house-to-house search. They reached the Spanish Consulate, and before they could even knock on the door Samuel burst out angrily and kicked a German police sergeant! He shouted at them, “Get out of here! I am the Spanish Consul!” The policemen were embarrassed and quickly left. That night, the German Police Chief of St. Etienne visited the Spanish Consulate to apologize in person, and to give Samuel a gun for protection against the dangerous Resistance. Samuel gave the gun to the fighters who’d attacked the train – and were hiding in his cellar!

France was liberated in 1944, and the Skornickis returned to Paris. Since he’d hosted Nazis at the Spanish Consulate, Samuel was suspected of being a collaborator, but people he’d saved wrote letters of thanks proving that he’d been a hero rather than a villain. One of the letters, by Itzkin Rubin, who was hidden in the Consulate, read, “How can I express my gratitude, and the gratitude of my family, for all we owe you? You didn’t hesitate to risk your life in order to save ours. Knowing that we were being hunted by the Gestapo and the (French) Militia, you hid us in your home in those pivotal months before the liberation. If we are fortunate enough to live in peace and to be free, it is thanks to your heroic goodness and your courage. At a time when so many of our friends were tormented or died in terrible physical and emotional suffering, while so many children were separated from their parents, I am blessed to be surrounded by my whole family.”

For saving hundreds of lives after boldly taking on a fake identity, we honor Samuel Sknornicki as this week’s Thursday Hero.

#Thursday Hero.

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dailyanarchistposts · 20 days

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Yesterday an active-duty Air Force soldier named Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy. His last words were “Free Palestine.” Of the cops responding to the scene, some pointed guns at him while others sought to extinguish the flames; the image of a cop pointing a gun at a man on fire is the most American thing I have ever seen.

On June 11th, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon). In South Vietnam, Buddhists were an oppressed majority, ruled by a Catholic minority—the Buddhist flag was banned, Catholics were chosen for all the better jobs, and protesting Buddhists were being murdered in the streets or sent to concentration camps.

So Thích set himself on fire and calmly burned in front of hundreds of spectators on a public street. There’s a film of it, and I’m not big into “watch people die on film,” but some moments in history are worth seeing. He didn’t cry out; he just sat in lotus position, engulfed in flames. Afterwards, the cops tried to take his remains, but thousands of angry protestors took him back, and they re-cremated him for a proper funeral. His heart didn’t burn. It solidified in the fire. Today it is today a sacred relic. I have no explanation for this.

Other monks in Vietnam followed his example. By the end of the year, the CIA led a coup and toppled the Catholic dictator of the country. This isn’t “the US being good,” mind you, they’d been propping the asshole up in the first place. Thích’s sacrifice is often credited as what brought down that regime.

Two years later, the first American set herself on fire in protest of the Vietnam war. Alice Herz was a German Jew, 82 years old. She’d seen some shit. She’d fought for feminism in 1910s Germany, helped bring about the Weimar Republic, fled Germany to France only to end up in a Nazi concentration camp. Survived. Made it to the US. Lived in Detroit and became a Unitarian. Then one day she wrote a letter about how horrible the Vietnam war was, went out to the street, and set herself on fire. She wasn’t the last. In South Vietnam and the US alike, Buddhists and Quakers and Catholics set themselves on fire in service of the same cause.

When a 16 year old Catholic named Ronald Brazee set himself on fire in October 1967, a Catholic Worker named Father Daniel Berrigan wrote a poem for him called “In the Land of Burning Children”

He was still living a month later I was able to gain access to him I smelled the odor Of burning flesh And I understood anew What I had seen in North Vietnam I felt that my senses Had been invaded in a new way I now understood the power of death in the modern world I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousandfold

The Dutch resistance to the Nazi Occupation was characterized by a unique nonviolence, focusing primarily on hiding Jewish people and acts of sabotage. This wasn’t necessarily an ethical or even strategic decision, but one forced onto them by circumstance—according to one resistance fighter, since the Dutch government maintained a firearms registry before the invasion, the Nazis were able to acquire that list and go door-to-door to disarm the Dutch population.

But what the Dutch resistance lacked in firearms it made up for in mass participation. Roughly a million people were involved in sheltering people, secreting people away, striking, or helping those who were doing such things. The two most active groups were churches and communist organizations.

The Nazis responded with collective punishment. The occupiers cut off food supplies inside the Netherlands, blockading the roads between farms and cities. The entire population of the country went hungry during what’s called the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. Between 18-22,000 people starved to death. Four-and-a-half million people were living off of something like 600 calories a day each. A whole generation of children born or living at the time suffered lifelong ailments. Audrey Hepburn grew up in Occupied Netherlands (and as a preteen performed ballet to raise money to support the resistance). Her time in the hunger winter left her with lifelong ailments like anemia.

In case the parallel I’m drawing is not obvious, Gaza is currently being starved by the Israeli government.

Quite notably, quite worth understanding in the modern context, the Hunger Winter persisted despite relief efforts until the Allied forces liberated the Netherlands from the fascists in May 1945.

Aaron Bushnell was twenty-five years old when he died. He sent a message to media outlets before his act: “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

He posted on Facebook: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

His last words, engulfed in flames, were “Free Palestine.”

I know that what stopped US involvement in Vietnam was the military victory of the Vietnamese people against US forces, combined with the direct action action efforts of the American Left that made the war harder to execute. I know what ended the Nazi occupation was the Allied invasion. I know what stopped legal chattel slavery in the US was the deadliest war in our country’s history. I also know that what stopped Jim Crow was… nothing. Nothing has stopped it, not completely. The long, hard, thankless work of a combination of reform and direct action has mitigated its effects somewhat.

I can’t say I think others should follow Aaron’s example. I doubt he wanted anyone to. An act like this needs attention, not imitation. What we can follow is the moral courage. What we need to decide for ourselves is how to act, not whether or not to act. I don’t have any answers for me, and I don’t have any answers for you.

I can say that he shouldn’t be forgotten, that he ought to be remembered when we ask ourselves if we have the courage to act.

I can also say that it takes an incredible number of people doing an incredible variety of work to effect change. That poet, Father Daniel Berrigan, did a lot more than write poetry. He and others in the broader Catholic Left raided draft offices and burned records, directly impacting the US’s ability to send young men off to die in an imperialist war. A group of people who came out of their movement (but were primarily Jewish and/or secular) raided an FBI office and uncovered the spying and disruption that was done of the peace movement under the name COINTELPRO.

A vibrant and militant counterculture sprang up, drawing Americans away from the clutches of conservative propaganda. They built nationwide networks of mutual aid and they helped draft dodgers escape the country.

An awful lot of American soldiers in Vietnam directly defected, enough that “fragging” entered the English language as a verb for throwing a grenade at your commanding officer.

As for the Hunger Winter, it was not ended until the Nazi party was ended through force of arms, but its worst effects were alleviated by the bravery and thankless work of uncountable people who cobbled together meals from nothing or who organized to bring food aid in across German lines.

In the US now we’re seeing a growing movement opposed to our country’s collaboration with the genocidal regime in Israel.

It’s impossible to know if it will be enough. When you pile straw onto the proverbial camel, you never know which straw will be the last. We just keep piling.

And in the meantime, we remember names like Aaron Bushnell, Ronald Brazee, Alice Herz, and Thích Quảng Đức.

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