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elliepassmore · 4 years

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The Book Thief Review

5/5 stars Recommended for people who like: historical fiction, unusual narrators, WWII, themes of words, coming-of-age stories, mischievous MCs This has been one of my favorite books, and especially one of my favorite WWII fiction books, for years. It follows the story of Liesel Meminger, and also, to a lesser extent, Max Vandenburg, but instead of having it narrated in 1st POV by either of them, Zusak was clever and had the story narrated in 1st POV by Death. And Death is "haunted by humans" (550). I think that's one of the things that makes this book quite timeless, in my opinion. I read the book for the first time when I was 11 (I believe, for some reason GR doesn't have the read dates for it), and I'm still enjoying it 9 years later (8 still, when I reread it and wrote this review). I know teenagers and adults who have read it and loved it. It's just one of those books, and Death as a narrator is partially responsible. To be clear, this isn't a scary version of Death, this is a tired Death, a world-weary Death who, ironically, seems to be a bit tired by and of death. He describes things in terms of color and small facts and how a soul feels when he picks it up. Death has emotions and gets attached, and it comes through in his narration. It also gives us a good way to see what's going on with Liesel, Max, and the war while still getting the more personal 1st POV and no chapter-switches. In the story, we get to follow Liesel from when she's 9 up to when she's 14, and then we also get some bits at the end where she's older, but these are relatively short and more of a wrap-up than part of the main story. I really like the idea of telling a story of a girl 'without words' who's growing up in Nazi Germany, which has the practice of taking words, and making words this girl's obsession, the object of her stealing and her identity and her power. Liesel is also just constantly this firebrand of a girl who stands up and fights or who goes after what she wants, even starving, even under the blood-red flag and nation of Hitler. I just really have trouble explaining how much I love Liesel's character and her growth throughout the book. I also really love how she reclaims words in various contexts and for different situations. Rudy Steiner, Liesel's best friend, was a good source of camaraderie, comedic relief, and a good way to show a different perspective of how kids change as they grow up. On Himmel Street, Rudy's kind of an infamous trickster/mischief-maker and also generally enjoys playing soccer and running. Naturally, he befriends Liesel almost instantly. I think the interesting thing about his growth as a character is that it happens gradually. We see him as this trickster who's fiercely loyal from the get-go, but as he grows the two morph more into one another and it leads to a series of incidents with an especially tyrannical Hitler Youth leader that is, at least in part, driven by his desire to help another kid from Himmel Street who gets relentlessly bothered by the Hitler Youth leader. And then that later translates into him concocting a plan that has him and Liesel leaving bread ahead of one of the forced marches to Dachau. There's also a brief scene where he finds a shot-down British pilot after an air raid and Rudy gives the dying boy a stuffed teddy. Make no mistake, he's still a smart-ass with a deep desire to cause mischief, but he also gets a chance to develop and show off his loyalty and deep sense of empathy. Max is a difficult one to talk about because I have difficulty pinpointing his arc and mainly just come up with reasons I like his character. He's definitely integral to Liesel's development, both growing up and as a character with an arc. He's one of the people who helps her develop her love of words more, and even gives her a couple hand-created books that she deeply cherishes. Max is also a character with demons chasing at his heels. In order to go into hiding and survive up to when he arrives at the Hubermanns, he had to leave his family behind, and the mix of pure relief and guilt (and guilt at feeling relief) eats him alive. He sees their faces in dreams and he boxes with Hitler in those as well. I really love Max's character and the complexity of his situation (there's that relief again along with guilt at letting Liesel and the Hubermann's risk everything), as well as his gentleness. Hans Hubermann is another person who's vital to Liesel's reading and love of words. He's actually the one who got Liesel reading in the first place. Hans is a pretty gentle soul and seems to intuitively know what Liesel needs. He's definitely more patient and outwardly kind than Rosa (not that she's not also kind, she's just kind in a less outward manner). Hans' empathy really jumps out throughout this book, first with being patient when Liesel arrives at Himmel Street, then in hiding Max, then painting black paint over windows and shutters for next to nothing, giving bread to a dying Jewish man on a Dachau forced march, and on and on the list goes. He's one of those characters who tries to be the best of humanity even if it doesn't always work out in his favor. That's one of the things I really like about this book, actually, is that we get to see someone like Hans who wants to help people face the consequences of his actions in a regime that most certainly does not want to help or feel empathetic for people. Rosa's a rougher character, but also has a deep well of kindness and empathy in her as well. I think it's easy to forget that until Max comes into the picture, but this is a woman who, reportedly, has taken in multiple foster kids before and turned them out better than they came in and who agreed to foster/adopt a pair of siblings, and we all know how difficult it is for siblings to stay together in foster care. I think with Rosa we get to see a different kind of empathy. She feels for others and wants to help, but she has trouble expressing it, so she does it in a gruffer manner and in a way that's easy to go unrecognized. As soon as the situation arises, though, she's off and ready to help. She's gentle with Max and asks no questions (and frankly it's a little unclear if she even knew he was coming, even in the vague way that Hans knew Max would be coming eventually). With Frau Holtzapfel, a woman she hadn't gotten along with in years but who Liesel read to and who had one of her sons die in the battle for Stalingrad, Rosa takes time during an air raid to attempt to coax the woman out of her house and into the shelter, and even lets Liesel stay and attempt to do so as well. As Death says, Rosa is a good woman to have in a crisis, and she's a warm person when she wants to be. Ilsa Hermann, the mayor's wife and the owner of an exquisite library Liesel takes quite the liking to. Ilsa has been a woman in mourning for over two decades by the time Liesel enters the picture. When she witnesses Liesel stealing a book from a book burning, Ilsa takes a shine to her and becomes another person who aids Liesel in her reading and writing journey. Ilsa isn't a main character by any stretch, but she plays a pretty major role in Liesel's story. She lets Liesel read in her library, which later becomes a library Liesel steals books from, and she also gives Liesel a blank journal so that she may write her own stories. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone, and it's just one of those books I think would be well-suited if it were in a school curriculum, as it shows the war in a new way and also deals with things like political beliefs (Alex Steiner, Rudy's father has some interesting conundrums re: politics in the book, as does Hans) and when helping someone else will doom you. It's also a nice introduction to some German, and as I reread this book, it occurred to me that I can finally pinpoint where my obsession with the language originated (and it was not Code Name Verity, like I'd expected).

#book #books #book review #book recommendations #the book thief #markus zusak #liesel meminger #rudy steiner #max vandenburg #hans hubermann #rosa hubermann #historical fiction #wwii #wwii fiction #books everyone should read #favorite book

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moonsabr · 4 years

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Disney Fever Rant

Let’s be honest with ourselves, the Family Friendly Disney©️™️ Corporation became nothing but another soulless, creatively bankrupt, money hungry business that has a board full of greedy — potentially and allegedly (don’t sue me Disney) potentially criminally so — directors who, according to Abigail Disney allegedly underpay their employees, and only put in any sort “effort” (READ: spending half of their film’s marketing budget buying up opening night seats to make sure that every single one of their films makes $1 Billion dollars because God forbid Disney have a single flop), believed they didn’t need to market Galaxy’s Edge because Chief Executive Asshole Bob “I know we’re having a bad quarter & our PR is in the shitter but imma take a book tour for my autobiography real quick” Iger thought it would market itself (this is the same Disney CEO Bob Iger, by the way, who keeps raising prices because he’s so confident in the brand created, built, and embedded permanently within previous decades of Americana due to the hard work and creative genius of Walt Disney that he believes he can peddle out absolute garbage without consequence. CEO of Disney Lil’ Bitch Bobbie “My salary is 1,000x Greater Than the Average Disney Employees Even Though My Decisions Are Causing a Cutback in Hours and Even Getting People Laid Off” Iger really got his head up his ass because he believes he can say shit insanely out of touch and greedy shit like “[I can’t imagine] a maximum price guests will pay for a ticket to [our] theme parks” and keep hiking up the prices until one day, big surprise, this foolish, smug turd charged too much or didn’t market enough or maybe, people are just not blinded by the now-defunct and decades-long neglected Disney Magic™️ because the man in charge is more focused on a single-minded and extremely concerning-to-artistic-integrity-and-the-very-concepts-of-free-speech-and-fair-trade-and-anti-monopolistic fair business practices of purchasing every potentially lucrative IP known to man in a move so anti-competitive that they were forced by the fucking U.S. Justice Department to sell off some of their news properties — oh, but it’s okay, guys! The extremely hardworking and under-appreciated employees of Disney World will finally be making a baseline amount of $15/hour, so at least those hardworking folks can have the chance of affording a shared apartment less than 40 minutes away from the park! And hey, at least we’ll inevitably get a Summer Blockbuster X-Men trilogy, which I’m sure won’t be a bland and extremely superficial set of films more concerned with entertaining a general audience than preserving the heart of X-Men and why it was created and what it continues to symbolize. Good Ol’ Bobbie Buy-ger’s “Hello, Fellow Children” Disney will absolutely not make a mockery of the integrity with which those contemporaneously radical set of complex and volatile cultural and sociopolitical issues of the 1960′s were addressed via the humanization of both the protagonistic X-Men, who were peaceful advocates for the (then-primarily racially coded) mutants’ integration and equality within a society that is terrified and disgusted by them, in contrast with the slowly developing and unexpected depth of character and humanization of the members of the Brotherhood of Mutants, who are constantly portrayed as an antagonistic but not wholly evil foil to the X-Men as a much more violent group of radicals with a more extreme and militant approach to gaining mutant’s rights (coded heavily at the time, of course, as the Black Panther Movement) which fought for an apartheid with a zealous “Mutant’s First” slogan, believing themselves superior to humans without the X-Gene. And because of the appropriately addressed and carefully handled themes, mutants occasionally even switched sides because after all, they were all fighting for mutant rights. Baring in mind the intricacies and mature themes of X-Men and the MCU’s masterfully sophisticated and tactfully manifold take on sexism which can be succinctly summarized as “WOMAN GOOD; MAN BAD” (which strikes me as particularly unusual narrative composition to frame the villain, who has assaulted a stranger and stolen his property because he gave her a cheesy pickup line that wasn’t particularly sexual or intimidating, as the hero of the story — clearly, if the Disney MCU is willing to create such an experimental piece of avant-garde cinema verité wherein the reality of a cruel, spiteful, and sadistic person is constantly thrust into the spotlight and incessantly touted as a heroic figure is put on display. None of this would have been possible, however, without a courageously flawless and unconventional choice to hire Brie Larson via the application of typage casting, allowing Boden and Fleck to shine a b l a c k m i r r o r , if you will allow me to be so edgy and bold as to use such a trite phrase in this post Netflix world, on our own flawed society, they will be capable of producing a mere three trivial films on something so relatively simplistic as translating the extremely volatile and divided zeitgeist of race relations in the height of the civil rights movement into a modern, appropriate, and respectful piece of representative fiction.

I’m sure Disney CEO Bob “Galaxy’s Edge Only Severely Underperformed Because People Were Worried There Would Be Too Many People There and This Has Nothing to Do With the Fact that I Thought My Dick Was Bigger Than It Actually Is and So I Thought I Could Get Away Without Marketing it Whatsoever Until Like 3 Months Before it Opened in Disneyland Because I Realized (but will never, ever admit) that I Fucked Up After they Low Crowds in Disney World and Over-Estimated the Current Value Of the Star Wars Brand After Green-Lighting A Film Wherein All the Original Characters Left Were Bastardized and Shat On So Now Everyone Who Wants to Watch TV Will Have A 35% Chance of Being Assaulted By Our Incessant Ads for this Bullshit Because I Bought a Bunch of Shit with No Creative Vision in Mind and Am So Incompetent and Think So Lowly of My Own Customer Base that I Signed Off on a Plan for This Park that Didn’t Include Most of the ‘Immersive Experience’ as Advertised Because I Truly Believe Most Consumers are So Stupid That They Will not Notice or Care that They’ve Paid ~$400-$500 per Person to Get Access to a Glorified Shopping Mall with Extremely Overpriced Toys that You Can’t Even Use within Park Grounds” Iger will make sure these concepts are addressed via internal, philosophical dilemmas such as “What level of respect do we owe to our oppressors?” and “How much humanity should we offer to those who don’t offer us the same courtesy in return?” that were written and drawn by a couple of Jewish WWII-Veterans who had fought violently on enemy soil for their right to live and be seen as human and were, twenty years later, observing an uprising against a disturbingly similar “Separate but Equal” system that was reminiscent of the insidious and dehumanizing relegation of German Jewish communities into ghettos implemented early during the Nazi regime. I’m just feeling so fucking positive about this Fox acquisition guys, because I’m just so sure somebody whose very goal is to buy up all his competition and suppress even the most constructive of criticism is truly concerned about honestly and properly representing a title with so many counter-cultural and anti-establishmentarian ideals that aren’t already commonly accepted in today’s political climate, right? At least we get the X-Men in the MCU, right gamers?!?!?!?!!!!!!

Regardless of how you feel about Disney, you can’t deny that the company’s board atm is entirely creatively bankrupt and out of touch. For god’s sake, they created a hyper-realistic CGI remake of The Lion King that perfectly represents the state of the Disney Corporation today: bland, boring, forgettable, and completely lacking in any sort of creative vision.

#i wrote this after being awake for 20 hours with a 100.1 degree fever #i have not edited it such that you too may enjoy its insane ramblings #lets be honest #bob iger is dead and i killed him #idk how to even tag this #marv*l #mcpoo #i actually dont hate the mcu #just disney #d*sney #bob i pooped my pants iger #bitch iger #fever rant #not art #not writing #sabr rants #sick sabr rants #the official roast of bob iger #unedited for your viewing pleasure/horror

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thisdaynews · 4 years

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How Trump Created a New Global Capital of Exiles

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-trump-created-a-new-global-capital-of-exiles/

How Trump Created a New Global Capital of Exiles

An asylum-seeker outside El Chaparral port of entry in Tijuana, Mexico, waits for his turn to present to U.S. border authorities to request asylum. | GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images

Jack Herrera is an independent reporter and photojournalist covering immigration, refugees and human rights. His writing has appeared in Pacific Standard, The Nation, GEN magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, USA Today and other publications.

TIJUANA, Mexico—If you go early in the morning to the plaza in front of El Chaparral, the border crossing where a person can walk from Mexico into the state of California, you’ll hear shouts like “2,578: El Salvador!” and “2,579: Guatemala!”—a number, followed by a place of origin. Every day, groups of families gather around, waiting anxiously underneath the trees at the back of the square. The numbers come fromLa Lista, The List: When a person’s number is called, it’s their turn to ask for asylum in the United States.

These days, the most common place names shouted are Michoacán or Guerrero, Mexican states where intense cartel violence has sent thousands fleeing northward—occasionally, they’ll call Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras, countries where pervasive poverty, gangs, drugs and femicide have done the same. But every so often, the name of a different, more far-off country is called. In the span of just two weeks late last year, a list-keeper called out a number, in Spanish, followed by “Rusia!” They also called out numbers for people from Armenia, Ghana and Cameroon. Asylum-seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo crossed, as well as people from Eritrea. One day, the list-keeper called out “Turquía!” and a Turkish family rushed forward to claim their spot. The family was escorted by Mexican immigration officials over the pedestrian walkway into the United States, where they told Customs and Border Protection agents that they had, like everyone else, left their home country fleeing for their lives.

These people were the lucky ones. They had managed to persist in Tijuana, waiting until the day they finally heard their numbers called. Others haven’t been so fortunate. With The List’s queue regularly stretching longer than six months, many migrants fall victim to predatory robbery, kidnapping or murder before they can find refuge; others find the wait in one of the most dangerous cities in the world simply unendurable.

When Americans think of the people crossing the southern border, they might imagine Mexicans or Central Americans—or, even more generally, Latin Americans. But migration, both legal and illegal, from Mexico into the United States is incredibly international. In the course of 2018, Border Patrol agents apprehended nearly 9,000 Indians, 1,000 Chinese nationals, 250 Romanians, 153 Pakistanis, 159 Vietnamese people and dozens of citizens of over 100 other countries. Fifteen Albanians and seven Italians were stopped trying to cross the southern border, as were four people from Ireland, a single person from Japan, and three people each from Syria and Taiwan. Border Patrol even apprehended two North Koreans on the border in 2018 who were separately attempting to cross into various parts of Texas.

Now,one of the most direct effects of Trump’s border policy is that thousands of foreigners from all over the world have found themselves unexpectedly stuck on the southern border. Since 2017, President Donald Trump has turned the country’s immigration system on its head to deter Central American asylum-seekers. But policies meant to address Guatemalan or Honduran migrants have also affected Jewish people fleeing persecution in Hungary; Syrians escaping civil war in their home country; and LGBTQ people fleeing Vladimir Putin’s homophobic regime in Russia. The effects of U.S. border policy are not confined to northern Mexico. They reverberate around the world.

When I met asylum-seekers at El Chapparal and around Tijuana, most of them told me that they’d been waiting in the city for months. Even though U.S. law says that anyone who claims to be fleeing for their lives should be immediately admitted to a port of entry for vetting, under the Trump administration, Border Patrol has started a controversial policy of “metering.” Now, agents accept only a set number of asylum-seekers each day and send the rest back. In Tijuana, they accept around 20 to 60 people per day, while thousands are left waiting and more are constantly arriving. That’s how The List was born: Migrants themselves began keeping a ledger as an attempt to create a fair waiting system—a virtual line—to get past the manufactured bottleneck.

But that wait may now be for nothing. In July, the Trump administration announced it would no longer accept asylum applications from people who transited through a third country on their way to the U.S. Anyone who traveled through Mexico or another country that wasn’t their place of origin without first applying for asylum there could be returned automatically. (The asylum restriction, immediately challenged in court, has been temporarily upheld by the Supreme Court pending a final decision).

At a time when the total number of refugees around the globe has reached the highest level since World War II, the United States has refashioned the immigration system in a way that forces those fearing for their lives in their home countries to put their lives at further risk on the way to safety. Many potentially legitimate asylum-seekers who once might have found at least temporary refuge in the United States while their applications were being reviewed are now made to undertake a harrowing and dangerous journey across the world, only to be forced to wait in Mexico’s borderlands—and less likely than ever to be allowed in later. Across the border, Mexican cities like Tijuanaare struggling to deal with a shifting crisis of their own, with thousands of desperate people, many stuck in a foreign country they never intended to stay in, struggling to survive in a region afflicted by its own intense violence and poverty.

That’s Daniel’s situation.(Out of an abundance of caution, I’m using pseudonyms in place of current asylum-seekers’ names.) An English teacher from Ghana, Daniel has been waiting in Tijuana since June to cross at El Chaparral. This past October, Daniel told me his number on The List was 4,068. At that time, the numbers being called were in the high 2,000s. By New Year’s Day, the numbers being called on the list were still below 3,800, and Daniel was still waiting to cross.

I met Daniel in the small church shelter where he sleeps in a ramshackle neighborhood built on the steep side of Cerro Colorado, the enormous hill that rises out of the center of Tijuana. As we sat on a bed in the pastor’s room, the 42-year-old spoke openly, though he initially remained vague about the reasons he left Ghana.

“I came here because I had a problem with some people. If I hadn’t left that place, it wouldn’t be good,” he said.

Daniel told me his story is “very sad,” and he didn’t want to burden me with the details, but he had to leave the country very quickly. He spoke in a voice that was soft but gravelly and rough: He said he has throat cancer, and I could hear it was painful for him to speak. But he still had the gentle tone and mannerism of a teacher. When he noticed me misspell his real name in my notebook, he quietly reached over and pointed out where an “e” should have been an “a.”

Mexicans call asylum-seekers like Daniel extracontinentales—a word for immigrants who come from outside the Americas. Daniel has been one of the many extracontinentalesbiding his time in Tijuana, waiting for his turn to cross into the U.S, and he thinks he’s still got months before they call his number on The List.

Life for extracontinentalesin northern Mexico can be tough. While thousands of people from outside the Americas arrive on the border each year, most shelters are equipped to house Latinos. Staff at migrant homes around the city told me they had trouble providing the right food for foreigners, especially those with religious dietary restrictions. There can also be a cultural disconnect. Though Daniel is friendly and approachable, he still has a look of distance to him, a gulf created by language and custom. Each night, he sleeps in a small bunk bed in a room with about two dozen other people, all from Mexico or Central America. No one in the shelter speaks any English besides the church pastor, so Daniel’s evenings are mostly quiet. He smiles when others make eye contact with him, but most people quickly look away. While in the shelter, I heard a Central American man use a demeaning word for black people in Spanish to describe Daniel.

As wait times to cross the border grow longer, many foreigners live in precarious and unstable conditions in Mexico. In many ways, the situation has become a humanitarian crisis.

Many foreigners I met in Tijuana—people from Ghana, Yemen, Jamaica, Cameroon, India—talked about experiencing loneliness, isolation, and racism. They told me Mexicans are generally welcoming, tolerant and respectful, but the country is still a hard place to be for non-Latinos—especially those who do not speak fluent SpanishorEnglish.

Some get by using a phone to translate into Spanish, but most foreigners have trouble integrating, especially when it comes to finding work. Many wind up working long hours in the factories on the outskirts of the city, or in other jobs involving physical labor. At many car washes around the city, it’s become a common sight to see groups of Africans—Ghanaians, Cameroonians, Congolese—cleaning cars, the very same kind of cheap but steady labor that many Mexican migrants resorted to in Southern California in the 1990s and 2000s.

For people like Daniel, the wait might become permanent. In July, the Trump administration announced it would no longer accept asylum claims from anyone who transited through a third country on their way to the United States unless they applied at each country they passed through first, effectively making allextracontinentaleslike Daniel ineligible. Though U.S. officials say asylum-seekers can simply seek refugee status in Mexico, journalists and human rights groups have documented many cases of asylum-seekers facing kidnapping, rape, robbery and murder in that country.

“Mexico is a good country,” Daniel says. But he still wants to make it to the United States, where he hopes he might finally be able to find stability, safety and a community.

Though the experience of being a foreignerin northern Mexico can be isolating, Tijuana is a decidedly international city. Long a transit point, it’s become a milieu of cosmopolitan culture. Russians have been arriving in the city since the late 1940s (many fled the former USSR), and there’s even a popular taco stand called “Tacos El Ruso” with a cartoon on the wall that proclaims, “Que Rico Takoskys.”

This multinational characteristic is particularly vivid in the city’s only mosque, a small, plain building in the city’s west, not far from the Pacific Ocean. During a Friday prayer in October, I watched as the imam began his sermon in Spanish before transitioning to English—though many of the men gathered didn’t speak either language.

“We’ve got people from Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan—I mean, everywhere. You name it, we’ve got it,” Imam Omar Islam, a Mexican-born convert, told me. He says many of the people he meets in the mosque have come fleeing conflict in their home countries, trying to make it to the U.S.

The men mostly arrive in groups with their compatriots (Egyptians with Egyptians, Indians with Indians), but during prayer the group comes together as one, and at the end of the imam’s sermon, they rise to greet one another. There was a young man who escaped civil war in Yemen who shook hands with a group of West Africans, including Emmanuel, a man who fled multiple homophobic attacks in Ghana.

Today—especially as the Trump administration cracks down on the asylum process—many migrants who first intended to go to the U.S. have decided to stay in Mexico. Some seek humanitarian visas, while others try their luck as undocumented immigrants.

Emmanuel told me has no desire to stay in Tijuana. With clear west African features, he stands out, and he says he’s been beaten and robbed multiple times by thieves who target the vulnerable migrant population.

“I can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous,” he said.

In 2018, Tijuana was, by some measures, the murder capital of the world. And, according to reports by U.S.-based advocacy organization Human Rights First, “refugees and migrants face acute risks of kidnapping, disappearance, sexual assault, trafficking, and other grave harms in Mexico.” Besides the inherent vulnerability of being itinerant, asylum-seekingextracontinentalesalso can routinely face racism and anti-LGBTQ violence in Mexico.

Emmanuel plans on crossing the border and asking for asylum in the United States, but his number on The List is weeks, if not months, away. After his last robbery, he says he can’t afford rent. He’s desperate, and unsure what to do. For many of these extracontinentalesstalled in the north of Mexico, the U.S. border is simply the final obstacle at the end of an immense odyssey.

There’s a fairly straightforward reason why so many people from around the world end up in northern Mexico, even though their ultimate destination is the United States: visa restrictions. For many people, it’s impossible to fly straight to the U.S. without a visa, so many asylum-seekers fly into Latin American countries with the plan to travel northward.

For people with stronger passports, like Russian, Indian and Chinese nationals, it’s possible to fly directly into Mexico. Many of theseextracontinentaleshave landed first in Mexico City or Cancún, where they masquerade as tourists before making their way to the border. (The rate of arrival is higher than you might think: On a single Monday when I was in Tijuana, six Russians and two Chinese nationals were detained at the airport on charges of traveling with forged or improper documents; they were promptly returned.)

But many people from African and Middle Eastern countries have trouble securing travel even to Mexico. So, for many forced migrants—like Daniel and Emmanuel—the journey through the Americas begins much further south.

Daniel says he never had any intention of coming to the U.S. originally. He just needed to leave Ghana. In a rush, he flew to one of the few countries on the planet where Ghanaians could travel without a visa: Ecuador. (Daniel arrived in April, three months before Ecuador added Ghana to a very short list of countries whose citizens can no longer arrive without a visa.) He landed in Quito, the country’s high-altitude capital in the Andes, without any plan.

“When I got to Ecuador, communication was a real problem. I speak English, but I have never traveled to the American continent. So when I got there, the language—Spanish—I didn’t understand anything,” Daniel said. “I asked someone, ‘Which country in this area speaks English?’ And they said, “Around here? Nowhere—unless you go to the United States.’”

Daniel says he didn’t know anything about the U.S. “All I knew is that there is a country called United States, and that it’s very good country,” he said. But, after a week in Quito, he made his choice and caught a bus toward Colombia, the first leg in a long journey to Tijuana.

On the buses he took, Daniel spoke to other migrants—many from Venezuela but also others from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—all heading northward. In recent years, thousands of people from around the world have made the same long and arduous journey as Daniel, from a South American country to the U.S.-Mexico border. (Ecuador, which has some of the freest visa requirements of any nation, is perhaps the most popular starting point.) From there, they travel down out of the mountains into Colombia, and then to the border with Panama. At this point, the journey becomes incredibly perilous. Many do not survive.

There is no road between the jungles of northern Colombia through the swamps into central Panama. Traveling on foot, northbound migrants must trek first over cloud forest and then across 50 miles of marshland, through a stretch of sparsely populated wilderness called the Darién Gap. The trip is, by all accounts, brutal. Reporting from northern Mexico in the past year, I’ve spoken with asylum-seekers from Ghana, Cameroon, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of the Congo who all said they had made this trek. The stories they tell are harrowing: People die from snakebite or from drowning. Many eat nothing but uncooked rice for the week it takes to transit the Gap.

Emmanuel grew silent when we started talking about the journey through the swamps in Panama. He asked to pause the interview and later explained he was overcome with guilt because he didn’t stop to help people he saw dying. He barely had enough strength to carry himself forward.

“I can’t let my mind go back there,” he told me, shaking his head repeatedly.

Along the migration routes, human traffickers, kidnappers and robbers prey on travelers. People get robbed in every country, but every person I spoke with, without exception, said they were robbed at gunpoint by bandits in the jungle in Panama.

Daniel says that if he had known exactly how horrible the journey would be, he might not have made it. But many of the people traveling northward do know how arduous their travel will be and continue anyway. They simply have too much to lose if they turn back.

For Emmanuel, the situation back in Ghana became so severe that he chose to make the journey northward from Ecuador not just once, but twice. After he first fled homophobic violence in Ghana in 2016, Emmanuel made it to the U.S. border and crossed at the official port of entry. As he argued his asylum case in court, he remained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. He says he learned his English while there. After almost two years, Emmanuel was hopeless and depressed. He decided he couldn’t stay locked up anymore and chose to give up on his asylum case. ICE deported him back to Accra.

Once returned to Accra, Emmanuel was attacked again by the men who originally persecuted him. Emmanuel says he’s not gay, but he welcomed LGBTQ patrons into the mechanic shop he ran. Nevertheless, people in his community accused him of being gay and tried to kill him, he says. He showed me huge scars on his belly from stab wounds and a video someone filmed soon after he was returned to Ghana showing him bloody and unconscious in a crowded hospital. Fearing death, Emmanuel escaped again and flew back to Ecuador this past spring.

He says the journey is the hardest thing he’s ever done. But still, he chose to make the trek a second time. He says he had no choice. In Mexico, he showed me that he still gets threatening phone calls and WhatsApp messages from unknown contacts. He is certain he’ll be killed if he ever returns.

The people making the northward journeyto the United States have left behind some of the world’s most severe strife and brutality. In Tijuana during the past year, I’ve met English-speaking Cameroonians who told me how they fled violence at the hands of their country’s Francophone majority (an ongoing campaign of repression that some humanitarian organizationsbelieve amounts to ethnic cleansing). They shared stories of torture and rape used as weapons of war. I met Russians who arrived on the southern border in recent years after escaping the persecution of LGBTQ people under Putin’s regime. People have fled war in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Central African Republic. Thousands of Hungarians and Romanians have made their way to the southern border after fleeing increasingly violent anti-Semitism and growing authoritarianism. And in the past four years, the U.S. has seen a fast-growing number of Indian religious minorities cross the border, after leaving behind burgeoning Hindu nationalism in their home country.

At the same time, the Trump administration has claimed that the promise of refugee status has become a “pull factor” that has drawn to the U.S. people from around the world with dubious asylum claims. What the U.S. needs, the administration argues, is a deterrence-first policy. But it’s hard to imagine a deterrent more onerous than the journey from Ecuador to the southern border—a punishing gantlet that some like Emmanuel have been forced to make more than once.

Thanks to the Trump administration’s new “third country” asylum restriction, declaring asylum in the U.S. now comes with a dramatically increased risk of deportation back to one’s home country, a terrifying prospect for so many.

However, new immigration policies have delayed effect, one felt acutely here on the border: Many people trying to reach the U.S. were alreadyen routewhen the newest restriction was announced in July. Emmanuel was making his way through Guatemala; Daniel had been in Tijuana less than two weeks and had already taken a number from The List. Now, both men are stuck in Tijuana with limited choices.

Even if they decide to remain in Mexico, their fates are far from certain. Besides the dangers of robbery and violence, Human Rights First has documented cases of Mexican officials deporting asylum-seekers without due process. And, under pressure from the Trump administration, Mexico has begun dramatically expanding its own deportation machine. Just during a few days I was recently in Tijuana, Mexican officials deported over 300 Indian nationals back to Delhi on a flight from Mexico City.

In October, I visited a Mexican immigration office in southern Tijuana that’s been converted into a makeshift detention center.

“Which countries are detainees inside from?” I asked a janitor on her smoke break.

“Every country,” she told me. “Peru, Haiti …”

“United Nations inside there,” someone else joked.

When I asked the woman what the conditions were like inside, she just shook her head and raised her eyebrows. As she looked over her shoulder nervously, she motioned silently in a clear gesture: “not so good.”

The threat of detention might persuade some foreigners to give up, to leave Mexico. But for many people, like Daniel or Emmanuel, going home is not an option.

The promise of the United States, of freedom from persecution or violence, persuaded the two Ghanaians and thousands like them to travel tens of thousands of miles, across oceans and mountains. But steps away from the southern border, they learned that the door had been slammed shut. Tijuana was never meant to be the final destination for Daniel or Emmanuel or so many other asylum-seekers. Rather, the city is just a place they’ve wound upatrapado—stuck.

Jorge Armando Nieto contributed to this report.

#capital #Exiles #Foreign #Politics

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krinsbez · 5 years

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Book Recommendations: Da Big List, Non-Fiction Edition

(same disclaimer applies)

-The Seven Lives of Colonel Patterson: How an Irish Lion Hunter Led the Jewish Legion to Victory by Denis Brian. A slim biography of Colonel John Henry Patterson, a man who, among other things, led the hunt for not one but TWO man-eating lions, got involved in a scandal that inspired a story by Hemingway, and helped form what eventually evolved into the core of the Israeli Defense Force. -The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula by Eric Nuzum. A fun little book in which the author tries to explore vampires in pop culture from every possible angle (at the time; it was written pre-Twilight); he goes on a tour of Transylvania, visits a Dark Shadows con, watches all of Buffy, reads Dracula and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, plays Vampire: The Masquerade, works as a vampire at a haunted house, makes a noble effort to watch every vampire movie ever made, and more. -Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James. A somewhat weightier tome, in which the creator of sabermetrics turns his attention from studying baseball to studying murder, or at least the pop culture appreciation of murder. It's rather more entertaining than you'd expect, and includes lots of good stuff; my favorites are how he explains that it is simultaneously impossible for Lizzie Borden to have murdered her parents AND for anyone else to have done it, and the bit at the end when he suggests a novel approach to prison reform. -The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson. You've probably heard of this one, which explores the efforts to build the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and juxtaposes 'em with the crimes of serial killer H. H. Holmes in the same time and place. -The Golden Age of Quackery by Stuart H. Holbrook. Everything you can ever want to know about the age of patent medicines is in this book. -Sacred Monsters: Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud, and Midrash by Rabbi Natan Slifkin. In this book, banned by several Haredi Rabbis, the author discusses various creatures mentioned in Jewish holy texts that are known not to exist and tries to figure out what it's talking about; was the term for a mundane creature mistranslated? was it a metaphor? or were the Sages of old mistaken? -1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza. A fascinating look at the US presidential race for 1920, in which, as the title notes, six men who were or would become President were majorly involved. -The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hadju. A marvelous book that is exactly what is says on the tin. -Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum. In which a man who is somehow both a liberal and a gun-lover travels America exploring various facets of American gun culture. As close to an unbiased look on the subject you're liable to get, and fun besides. -Triumph in a White Suburb: The Dramatic Story of Teaneck, N.J., the First Town in the Nation to Vote for Integrated Schools by Reginald G. Damerell. Exactly what it says on the tin. Admission; I have family in Teaneck (though they moved in much later), so my enjoyment of the book may have been skewed. -Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King. As it says, the tale of a serial killer who used the climate of fear created by the Nazi occupation of Paris to lure his victims and cover up his crimes, and afterwards tried to escape justice by claiming to be a resistance fighter. -The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick. The tale of Dutch art forger Hans van Meegren, who's counterfeit Vermeers were only exposed when he was put on trial for selling one to Goering. -Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of WWII by Ben Macintyre. The story of how British Intelligence used a corpse to convince the Nazis that the Allies were planning to invade Sardinia instead of Sicily. -Charlemagne's Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting by Nichola Fletcher. As the subtitle suggests, this book looks at feasting throughout history, exploring not only what people of different times and places chose to ate when they feasted and why, but the cultural activities that accompanied the eating. -Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel. Tells the story of the 18th Cenutry quest to create a reliable method of telling time at sea, and of John Harrison, the man whose invention of the chronometer solved the problem. The book was later re-released as The Illustrated Longitude, with a lavish array of photos and such, which is what I read. -Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization by Andrew Lawler. In which the origins of the world's most common barnyard fowl are explored and it's surprisingly powerful impact on history are explicated. -Connections by James Burke. Written as companion to a 1978 TV documentary, this is a marvelous history of science and invention, showing how seemingly disparate discoveries and events led to many of the cornerstones of the modern world. -A. J. Jacobs is a writer for Esquire magazine who will periodically spend a year doing...something, and then write a book about the experience, spiced up with interviews with relevant experts. I've read four of these books; they are vastly better than they have any right to be and I adore them. In order (seriously, read them in order, some of the best stuff is seeing what lifestyle changes stick between stunts), they are The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become the Smartest Person in the World (in which he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica); The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest To Follow The Bible As Literally As Possible (the subtitle is fairly self-explanatory); The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life As An Experiment (a collection of shorter stunts, EG the time he impersonated a C-List movie star and crashed the Oscars, a week where he tried to live according to the precepts of Radical Honesty, stuff like that); Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest For Bodily Perfection (where he tries out a bunch of fad diets and exercise regimes and so forth); and It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree (genealogy, the fact that ultimately everyone is related ot everyone else, which fact leads him to attempt to create a "Global Family Reunion") -Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat by Sarah Murray. A collection of essays that explores, of all subjects, the transportation of food. Ranging from ancient Roman amphorae to modern refrigerated shipping containers, and subjects as diverse as the influence of the grain elevators of Buffalo, New York on Bauhaus architecture, the logistics of the Berlin Airlift, and the science of making MREs. -The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8 Lee (no, that's not a typo, her middle initial is the number eight). This is another one of those "layman author looks at a particular subject from a wide array of angles" books that I'm so fond of. In this case, as the title suggests, the subject is Chinese food, ranging from investigating the true origins of the fortune cookie and discovering who the hell General Tso was to documenting how running a Chinese restaurant caused one immigrant family to disintegrate and delving into the Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989. -Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America's Food Answers To A Higher Authority by Susie Fishkoff. And speaking of Kosher food, that's the subject here. I admit to being somewhat biased for obvious reasons, but this is actually a really interesting subject, and there's a lot of ground here for Fishkoff to cover; the Agriprocessors scandal, the current "kosher revival" in the Reform and Conservative movements, the intersection of Jewish kashrut and Islamic halal, the sometimes surprisingly cutthroat competition between kosher certification agencies, not to mention the nitty-gritty details of being a kashrut supervisor from the Midwest to China. -Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs by Ken Jennings. After achieving national prominence for having the longest winning streak in the history of the game show Jeopardy!, Ken Jennings was naturally paid to write a book about it. Rather than simply produce a memoir of his experience, he decided to explore the world of trivia in general. The result is thoroughly entertaining, and of course introduces one to loads of fascinating, if useless, information. He later went on to write Maphead: Charting the Wide Weird World of Geography Wonks, which is equally entertaining. -Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and A Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human by Grant Morrison. This one's actually a bit difficult to define; it's partially a history of superhero comics, partially the autobiography of an acclaimed comics writer, and partially a somewhat rambling philosophical interrogation of superhero comics. It's great fun AND makes you look at certain aspects of superherodom in new ways. -Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers by Lee Sandlin. This book chronicles the long and twisted path of tornado research. While it starts with the first documented cyclones of colonial America, the bulk of the text is taken up covering the great scientific debates of the early and mid 19th century over the nature of tornadoes. Men long forgotten, such as Espy, Hare, and Redfield are brought back to life, along with their bitter rivalries. Later sections on the efforts of the Army Signal Corps to predicate tornadoes and of the political battles on the nature of weather forecasting are equally fascinating, though are cut somewhat short - I really wish the book lasted a bit longer. Either way, Storm Kings was a truly great look at a little-known facet of history. (NOTE: This review was originally written by Alamo, but I second every word) -The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures by Edward Ball. You've probably heard of the story about how the motion-picture was invented, and how it involved a bet made by the Governor of California on how horses galloped. However, the tale of Eadweard Muybridge, the actual inventor, is often ignored, or glossed over. As one reads this book, the reasons for that become increasingly clear. Ball chronicles the long and twisted journey that brought Muybridge from his native Britain to the wild west, and the then-famous murder he committed. (NOTE: This review was also originally written by Alamo, but again I completely agree) -Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman. This is an inside look at the FBI's efforts to recover rare pieces of art and antiquities. (NOTE: This one was also one of Alamo's, etc.) -The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. A fascinating biography of William Moulton Marston, the idiosyncratic creator of the world's most famous superheroine. Really fascinating stuff. -Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution In America by Barry Werth. The story of how the theory of evolution became accepted a smainstream by the American elite, and the corollary origins of Social Darwinism. -Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars by Paul Ingrassia. Honestly, the subtitle is fairly self-explanatory. -The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes by Zach Dundas. This is another one of those "layman author looks at subject from multiple angles" books, that I'm so fond of. Very well written, occasional insightful, and with lots of cool trivia.

#Book Recommendations #Book Recs #Non-Fiction

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elizabethleslie7654 · 6 years

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With Nuclear Deal Gone, Israel Trains its Guns on Iran

all kinds of cool jewelry and no shipping or getting mobbed t the mall

Recent weeks have seen some extraordinary developments in the Middle East. It can be easy to feel whiplash at times like these, but in hopes of giving you a clear understanding of these events, I want to give a short rundown of these developments and give an explanation as to why they are so important.

After Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, the Israeli military carried out a massive series of strikes on Iranian targets within Syria. According to the New York Times, “Israeli fighter jets struck dozens of Iranian targets in Syria overnight, Israeli officials said, following soon after what the Israeli military described as an unsuccessful rocket attack against its forces in the Golan Heights.” For the first time, Israeli and Iranian forces are directly engaging with one another. They are not hitting one another’s proxies any more, they are launching direct military assaults on Iranian and Israeli military installments. The Iranians targeted Israeli armed forces in the Golan Heights and the Israelis targeted dozens of military installments that the Iranians have built up over years of fighting in Syria.

The Israelis had already destroyed a massive military installation a few weeks ago in which 11 Iranian military personnel died; the only thing different this time is the number of targets and the fact that the Iranians actually responded this time. The Israelis have now shown that they are perfectly willing to kill Iranian soldiers and to wage massive military strikes against facilities owned, run, and created by the Iranian government. As Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Liberman, said “If there is rain on our side, there will be a flood on their side.” Israel is prepared to go all the way because it takes for granted the fact that America will back them all the way, no matter what. And thus far, we have. The Trump administration just blamed the Iranians for waging a military response to this Israeli attack. Apparently, in the administration’s view, Iran was just supposed to not respond to the umpteenth attack by Israel. Why exactly? What leverage over them do we have now? Now that we have walked away from the Iran deal and re-imposed sanctions, why would they continue their policy of restraint?

Secondly, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, accepted Israel’s right to “have their own land” and, just last week, told the Palestinians to “shut up” and take whatever deal the Israelis offered them. The importance of this shift cannot be under rated. It means that the Saudis are formally moving away from any connections to the Arab world and moving fully to the side of the West and Israel. Saudi Arabia wants to be the China of the Middle East. It wants to be an advanced, modern, secularized oligarchy, a country that is allowed to be a regional power house and stay undemocratic because they have conceded to the demands of the West to liberalize their approach towards women, become more accepting of homosexuals, and create modern cosmopolitan cities in which it is easy for rootless cosmopolitans carry out their merchant money-lending operations. The Saudis have largely done this, thus they can now become formal members of the Western alliance and fully integrated into the global markets. An Israeli / Saudi alliance would be a major Middle Eastern alliance and it would reshape the map of the Middle East.

These two developments, combined with the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal, signal a major shift in the geo-political fight over the Middle East and Syria in particular. As recently as a year ago, it seemed as if the Russia, Iran, Syrian alliance held all of the cards in Syria. Now, that is not so clear. To Israel, Iran, and Syria, Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal was a clear signal that America was back to being on a neocon posture. America has, in the last several decades, had an unwavering support for Israel. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have fervently stated their dedication to the state of Israel, but there is a big difference between having a president who is somewhat rational about Israel and is willing to take a somewhat neutral policy in the Middle East by negotiating with the Iranians, like Obama, and a president who is surrounded by neocon war mongers, like Trump. The Israelis know that they now have more room to take military action because of who sits in the White House and what stances he has taken. The Israelis have certainly carried out strikes against Iranian targets before but the massive strike that the Israelis carried out this week is clearly a response to Trump’s decision on the Iran deal.

These developments have seriously increased the chances of war with Iran. The Israeli pit bull, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been let off of his chain and he is trying his best to provoke the Iranians into bombing him directly. Netanyahu now sees an opportunity to finally take out the one Middle Eastern enemy that he has not been able to get the United States to take out for him. Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, all seen as threats by Israel, have all either been taken out or crippled. Regimes that the Israeli government doesn’t like either get taken out or are plunged into such chaos that they are no longer a threat to Israel.

Israel perceives stability for other nations in the Middle East to be an existential threat to the Jewish state. Therefore a stable, modernized country like Iran is a serious threat to Israel because it has the ability to resist Israeli designs for the region. The current Israeli regime views the whole of the Middle East as more or less an Israeli back yard, a piece of land that Israel should be able to do whatever it likes with. Iran stands in the way of total Israeli domination of the Middle East. It is Iranian troops in Syria that have bolstered the Assad regime. It is Iranian-backed rebels in the form of Hezbollah, that attack and kill IDF forces on the ground. Iran is the linchpin. The destruction of Iranian power in the region is the primary foreign policy goal of the Israeli state. So the question you should be asking yourself is, why is it also our primary foreign policy priority? Why has the US government spent untold foreign policy capital either trying to make a deal with the Iranians or trying to destroy them? Because American foreign policy is just an adjunct of Israeli foreign policy at this point. The American military is just an auxiliary force of the Israeli military. And for those American war planners who don’t care about Israel, Iran is an ally of Russia. So they can all pretend as if this were “The Hunt For Red October”, which is really what everyone in the CIA day dreams about. Israel is no longer under any kind of control, expectations of normalcy would be a mistake.

MY FAVORITE ACCESSORIES

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#IFTTT #LIZ FASHION FEED

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touching-eternity · 7 years

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PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER – A PROPHETIC REPORT (Part 1)

Prophecies in the Biblical sense are like pieces of a jigzaw puzzle. You put bits and fragments that fit together to form a picture. The more pieces you put together, the clearer the picture becomes.

Paul the apostle says that we know in part and prophesy in part, like seeing through a glass dimly, but a time will come when we will see “the perfect”, the complete picture.

The pieces of the end-times prophetic jigzaw puzzle have, in recent years, been coming out so quickly and so prevalently through so many prophetic people from all over the world. Putting these pieces together, we get a picture that is so much clearer now more than ever.

YEARS OF SHAKING: 2008-2028

The Bible book of Hebrews says that God’s people are receiving a Kingdom that cannot be shaken. At the present time, this Kingdom is not fully observable yet. But soon, it is going to manifest in what is known as the Millennium (or Thousand-Year) Reign of Christ on Earth.

In the meantime, since what is arising is an unshakeable Kingdom, all things that can be shaken are being cleared away. At this juncture of the earth’s history, all the elements and all the systems of this world are being tested. Their foundations are being rocked to find out if they are unshakeable – that is, if they are founded on righteousness and justice and all that Christ is. Whatever does not pass the test of shaking will not be a part of the emerging Kingdom.

In December 2001, American prophet Terry Bennett was visited by the angel Gabriel (the same angel that announced to Mary more than two thousand years ago that she was going to be the mother of the Savior of the world). Gabriel outlined to Terry a series of three seven-year periods beginning in 2008 and ending in 2028.

First Seven-Year Period: 2008-2014

According to Gabriel, the years 2008 to 2014 were going to be a time of economic shakings. All the nations of the world were to be shaken economically. At this time the foundation for the economic system of the Antichrist would be laid.

The Antichrist is the coming world leader described in the Bible book of Revelation as the “first beast”. He will be given authority and empowered by Satan himself. During his three-and-half-year reign on earth, all the people of the earth will be compelled to give him their allegiance. His name or his number will be tattooed or marked on people’s right hands or foreheads. Within his economic system, no one will be able to buy or sell anything without this mark. The Antichrist’s regime will be totalitarian – one that will crush all our freedoms yet, at the same time, one that will seduce many into absolute, devoted surrender.

From hindsight, it is easy to see that the years 2008 to 2014 had been years of great economic turmoil on a global scale. We saw the housing and stock markets of the United States collapse in 2008. Over the following years, this financial storm sent ripples of economic troubles around the world, more notably in the PIIGS nations of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain.

Many countries of the world buried themselves deeper in massive debt to bolster their failing economies and to prevent their citizens from going hungry, homeless, and angry. The more indebted these countries have become, the more control their creditors now have over them. Creditor nations (or organizations that represent them) can constrain debtor nations, for example, in the laws that the latter can or cannot pass, or even in how their natural resources are used. As the saying goes, the debtor is servant to the lender.

In contrast, a new economic bloc, the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, gained strength to resist the European-American-led world economic order. It remains to be seen if, in the end, these nations, together with some others, would resist the Antichrist’s economic system.

Second Seven-Year Period: 2015-2021

Gabriel explained to Terry that 2015 to 2021 would be a season of political and governmental shakings for the nations. It would be a time of laying the foundation of the Antichrist’s political system.

At the moment we are witnessing worldwide governmental changes and political realignment of nations. Through the past several decades, the United Nations has been grouping and regrouping the nations of the world, many times into ten governmental regions.

Here in our part of the world, we keep hearing the words “ASEAN integration”. On the one hand, our nation has been pursuing a path of more integration with our ASEAN neighbors. On the other hand, President Duterte, through a series of maverick actions and pronouncements, has distanced our country from our traditional allies, the Americans and Europeans, and has made friends with the Chinese and Russians.

On the other side of the planet in 2016, the British effectively disentangled themselves economically and politically from the European Union, with their so-called Brexit. The Americans, for their part, elected Donald Trump as president, much to the consternation of the noisy majority who voted for Hillary Clinton. In his first 100 hours as president, Trump upset the globalists’ New World Order agenda by abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It seemed like he set back their timetable just by getting himself elected president of the United States.

In December of 2016, then American President Obama, who has long been at odds with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, allowed the passing of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which Israelis perceived as betrayal by Obama. Israel felt that the resolution damaged its position in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. No matter which side of this conflict we are on, it looks like anti-Semitism has begun to rear its ugly head again. The Middle East continues to heat up, in danger of being ignited anytime by the tiniest spark into a grievous conflagration. If Israel goes to war against the Islamic nations, the rest of the world will have to make a choice between the two warring factions. Whether we are religious or not, it will decidedly be a showdown between Yahweh (of Judaism and Christianity) and Allah (of Islam).

Around the world, in many countries, laws that overturn centuries-old moral beliefs (e.g., abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage laws), as well as laws that are meant to give governments tighter and more extensive control over people’s lives, are being passed in quick succession. Right now, every country is at a crossroads, whether to reject or to embrace these new laws.

Governmental changes and political realignment of nations – need we say more?

Third Seven-Year Period: 2022-2028

The angel Gabriel told Terry that this period, the years 2022 through 2028, will be a time of religious shakings for the nations of the earth. A religious system will be added to the economic and political systems to complete the Antichrist’s world system.

This time period has yet to arrive and unfold. However, the trend towards global integration even in the area of religion is already quite evident to the keen observer. On September 25, 2015, on the heels of the Pope’s historic speaking visits to the most powerful institutions of our time – the White House, the U.S. Congress, and the United Nations General Assembly – about 400 representatives from dozens of different faith communities held an inter-faith prayer service in New York. Pope Francis, together with Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Jewish leaders, offered prayers and meditations for peace. Held at the Ground Zero museum, the shrine built to remember the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, the service was hailed as highly symbolic of the religious leaders’ desire to craft a religion of peace and unity rather than of hatred and violence. Worldwide, the clamor for tolerance and peace threatens those who are branded as “religious fundamentalists” – those who are viewed as converting or forcing their beliefs on others.

At present, in many communist countries of Asia, faith groups who want to meet for worship and fellowship must either register with an official church (which censors and controls what they teach) or go underground. When the Antichrist appears, the one-world religious system, headed by the False Prophet (the “second beast” of the book of Revelation), will be the mechanism for compelling everyone to worship the Antichrist. The bottom line for Christians will be that all who will not renounce Christ in order to embrace the Antichrist will suffer grave persecution or martyrdom.

Towards the end, as the world’s inhabitants hail their great leader and savior the Antichrist, they will feel the need to purge the earth of recalcitrant Christians and Jews; they will think of them as some kind of cancer that is preventing humanity from evolving or ascending to the next level. Consider how Hollywood celebrity and social influencer Cole Sprouse has recently tweeted that “yearning to get back on path and expunging” his president Donald Trump from office “is patriotism”. Sprouse and many like-minded Americans are of course entitled to their feelings and thoughts of Trump, and the same goes for Trump’s rabid supporters. This is just an illustration of how public opinion can be shaped to a point where people come to feel that certain individuals or groups will have to be eliminated for humanity to go forward.

A Time to Choose

In the Bible book of Matthew, Jesus said that when He comes back to sit on His throne as the glorious King of the universe, He will separate the “sheep nations” from the “goat nations”. Those nations who showed mercy and goodness to His brothers, especially during times of harassment and persecution, will be classified as sheep nations; those that did not will be the goat nations. We know that the Jews are Jesus’ brothers by blood and His Christian followers are His brothers by the Spirit. Any nation, therefore, that welcomes, protects, and takes care of Jews and Christians in the midst of fierce persecution in these end times will qualify as a sheep nation. Sheep nations will be allowed into the Millennium Reign of Christ on Earth, while goat nations will perish for their lack of compassion and evil actions towards the King's own family.

In their December 2001 meeting, the angel Gabriel instructed Terry Bennett to weep for the sound discipline, or possibly severe chastisement, that was coming to his nation the United States of America. The angel made him understand that weeping and intercession can prevent, change, or mitigate some of the things that he showed him would hit America.

Terry also understood that certain nations and cities across the world are meant to be places of refuge during years of upheaval, calamities, and terror. But these places of refuge must first be built by men with Godly wisdom and fought for spiritually through weeping and intercession by God’s people. These nations of refuge will be the sheep nations that Jesus talked about in the book of Matthew.

Terry explained that sheep nations will not adopt the Antichrist’s world system. At the same time, there will be “resister nations” that will not accept the rule of the Antichrist. But other nations will completely adopt all three systems – economic, political, and religious. Still others will adopt just one or two out of the three. The prayers and intercession of the people of God will determine the degree to which their nations or cities will embrace the systems of the Antichrist.

Terry was shown that some places will operate in what he called “sheep economies”. These economies will be founded on the principle of giving and receiving and will function apart from the Antichrist’s economic system. There will also be “resister economies”, those nations and cities that will refuse to join the economic system of the coming world leader, the Antichrist.

Terry said that, in his December 2001 encounter with the angel Gabriel, he was not shown what would happen beyond 2028. He also affirmed that this revelation of the three seven-year periods does not necessarily mean that the Antichrist would appear in 2028, but that certain foundations would be laid for his rule.

It can be said that, besides testing the spiritual foundations of the nations, the years of shaking (the three seven-year periods from 2008 to 2028) are also a time of realigning the nations, of separating them into sheep and goat nations. They are pivotal years when the nations of the earth must choose their fates. Will they be a part of the rising unshakeable Kingdom of God? Or will they persist in repudiating the government of Jesus the King of kings, refusing the love of Christ the Bridegroom, and turning their backs on God their Father? Alas, many will choose to perish with the systems of this world. For them, there will be no more time. But for those who will choose Christ, a magnificent future awaits.

Peoples of the earth, the Millennium Reign of Christ on Earth is at hand. - #

21 August 2017

WATCH OUT FOR PART 2…

photo credit: Paul.White Gondos Pista via photopin (license)

#end times #millennium #kingdom of god #prophecy

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