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orangerosebush · 4 years

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“How does one describe Artemis Fowl?” Artemis Fowl, Book 1, Page 1.

Although this quote from the first series sets the tone of Artemis being a character who is loath to be understood, what with how he “delights in not talking” about how it is he perceives himself to truly be, I want to attempt to answer this rhetorical question. After all, the quote serves as a bookend for the series — both the first and final book contain it.

In answering this question, I want to not answer “how does one describe Artemis Fowl?” but rather, “what is Artemis Fowl?” — the series, that is. I think now is a good time to answer this question, what with the first cycle of the series, the Artemis Fowl saga, being complete and the second cycle, the Fowl twins saga, beginning. In short, I want to ask: what context surrounds the book series being published? What are some important themes to the series? And what gives the book series its spark?

I first have to start this video essay by admitting that I was wrong in another essay: “A look into the role of Irish mythology as inspiration for Colfer's depiction of the People: an essay”. You can find this on fanfiction.net or on archive of our own under works by mentosmorii, by the way. The synopsis I provided for the essay is as follows: “Although Colfer has stated before that he has drawn from his knowledge of Irish mythology, he has never stated specifically which myths informed his writing. As someone with a bit of a background in Irish mythology, I have made a guess at some of the sources of inspiration, explained a couple of references within the series, and analyzed a few characters as having connections to Irish history/mythology.”

A lot of the content in that essay is correct, I feel I should say. However, an area where I misstep is here: “ Eoin Colfer has been asked about the influence of Irish mythology on his writing during various interviews, and his response is usually a sort of permutation of the above answer — ‘I grew up reading Irish myths and legends, [and] I… put… a spin on them’ (Colfer). He admits that he was influenced by Irish mythology, and this admission of influence is usually enough to get interviewers to move along to the next question. I’ve looked through many of the interviews that he’s done, and I think I can say with confidence that there is not currently any interview available in which an interviewer presses him to be more specific and point to the myths and legends in question by which he was influenced. In all likelihood, I think that this is because once Colfer confirms that he did, in fact, take inspiration from Irish mythology, the interviewers think of pop culture Celtic mythology and move on”.

The assertion that I made that was incorrect is about the interviewer moving on due to a lack of visibility of Irish myths. However, you also have to look at when the first book was published, which was in 2001. During the 90s to the early 2000s, Ireland was going through something called the “Celtic tiger”, which essentially means that there was an international market that was becoming quite interested in Irish culture, leading to the development of a new, commercially successful Celticism. Cormac MacRaois (pronounced: cormick Mccreesh) estimated, at the time of writing in 1997, that there were at least thirty books dedicated to the retellings of mythological tales on the children’s shelves of Irish bookshops, alongside a burgeoning quantity of contemporary fantasy drawing upon mythological sources for its characters and themes” (Irish Children’s Literature and Culture: New perspectives). Furthermore, in Mary Donohue’s unpublished 2003 MA thesis entitled “From Wexford to the arctic circle, a cultural journey”, she remarks that in a video interview, Colfer mentions that he had initially planned to publish a collection of Irish myths and legends, but that he abandoned this plan when he realized how many good collections were already in print (Donohoe, 2003, p. 24).

What I want to point out is that although the series was published at a time when there was increased interest in Irish mythology, it is interesting that Colfer deviates from the fairy tale and leans into the futuristic. What do I mean by this?

In many ways, the Artemis Fowl series, at least up until book 8, is more of a sci-fi than it is a fantasy. Which is a bold claim for me to make, I know!

However, a quote from book one in which Root is talking to Foaly as the LEP tries to plan how to get Holly back summarizes this seemingly paradoxical analysis of the series quite nicely: Science is taking the magic out of everything.

As Anna Bugajska (pronounced: ah-na boo-guy-ska) states in her essay "Human Magic", "Fairy Technology" : The Place of the Supernatural in the Age of Cyberculture, which is about the Artemis Fowl series: “Fairies deprived of natural wings use their artificial counterparts. Dwarves are practically walking machines. Invisibility is achieved by ‘shielding’. Artemis uses ‘human magic’ to heal a fairy [the sprite in Ho Chi Minh whom he gives a serum to help her alcohol dependence], but must rack his brains to escape ‘fairy technology’. The convergence point comes at the search for a Booke of Magick and at a failed Ritual performance… In the world where fairies rely on blasters and bio-bombs to take out their enemies, is there any place for good ol’ magic? Or is it by any chance homogenous with “man-made magic”, that is technology?”.

The fact that the people seem to rely more on technology than on magic is important to the parallels that the series establishes between humanity and the fae — in many ways, the two societies are two sides of the same coin. In many ways, you could even take Root’s comment about “Science taking the magic out of everything” as the same sort of thing your boss, or teacher, or any older person, really, might say when presented with new technology that they don’t quite yet understand. It seems like their society also suffers from the same anxieties older humans have about technology progressing and leaving previous generations in the dust.

The fact that the book series seems to be more of a sci-fi than a fantasy is important for two reasons, the first one of which is discussed in Elizabeth Parsons’ essay “Fowl Play: Artemis Fowl, Sitting Ducks, and politics for children” and the second of which is discussed in Patricia Kennan’s essay “Contemplating Otherness, imagining the future” . The first perspective, Parsons’, which I do agree with, is that the book brings up parallels between the People and humanity that suggest that the fairies are just as guilty of the environmental issues and social injustice that they like to critique humans for. The second perspective, which I do not necessarily fully agree with but that I find interesting, Kennan’s perspective, is on whether or not Artemis Fowl series “feels” Irish because of this emphasis on the sci-fi over the myth.

Let’s first address Parsons’ argument. Parsons argues that there is no real, discernible difference between the two worlds that share the planet — “Technological advances drive humanity’s destruction of the earth’s surface as much as they [drive] the spread of fairy civilization underground” (Parsons). In fact, Parsons points to the enormous sum of gold at the center of the conflict in book one as evidence that the People are not as innocent of this kind of environmental destruction as they would like to think. After all, you cannot mine gold from the earth without having some kind of negative impact on the planet. Whether it’s from how you might destabilize the ground as you mine, or the pollutants you may release, or even the effect that comes with removing the gold from its natural place in the earth, you cannot escape the fact that Faeries likely also have a history of troubling environmental impacts to answer for. There is also the fact that fairy society is *extremely* developed and industrialized. Just as how the presence of gold presents the question of how the People acquired that wealth, the technology the people have presents the question of how did they develop said tech. You can’t go from a building the wheel to building a neutrino gun — there was likely an industrial revolution in which the People engaged in unclean energy practices as they developed their understanding of how to engineer. And this concern is supported by the text!

In book one, Holly is talking about two mechanical wing types that the LEP uses — the older models called the Dragonflies and the newer models called the Hummingbirds. The book says the following: “Holly unhooked a set of wings from their bracket... Dragonflies. She hated that model. Gas engine, if you believe it... Now the Hummingbird Z7, that was transport. Whisper silent, with a satellite-bounced solar battery that would fly you twice around the world. But there were budget cuts again.” (pp. 50-51).

Perhaps the People may like to argue that they are more environmentally evolved than humanity, and sure, they are, but they’re far from being as innocent in the exploitation of earth than they’d like to think — they still use gas engines, after all!

But that’s just from an environmental point of view. Socially, there is also little difference between the progress of the People and humanity. Honestly, in some aspects, the people are farther behind, what with how Holly mentions being the first woman to be hired to her position even though the book opens at the start of the 21st century. And although Holly understands that others assuming she is less capable on the basis of her gender is both illogical and prejudiced, she herself falls into similar lines of thinking in books 1 and 2. She certainly makes some unkind assumptions regarding how she thinks her coworker Lilli, an attractive woman, was hired because the recruiter fancied Lili. Which, knowing the rather old-fashioned beliefs the LEP higher-ups have regarding women, could be the case! Yet the way she specifically talks about Lili makes it clear she does not see a potential ally against mistreatment in the office — Lili is someone who, in unkind moments, Holly privately kind of sees as an acceptable target of workplace gossip. And Holly, to be fair, grows out of this mindset by the final book — she still doesn’t like Lili, but she’s matured past the point of engaging in making harmful assumptions about her coworker.

And beyond this, Holly also in book one falls into patterns of making assumptions about the various different groups of fairies in Haven. For example, she implies in her first encounter with Mulch that his rapscallion behavior and petty crimes are kind of linked to the fact he’s dwarf. And she certainly doesn’t treat him well in book 1 — she zaps him when he makes a move to pick-pocket despite the fact the situation could have been de-escalated with initial action other than violence. Again, she moves beyond this way thinking by the final book. Yet the society the society she lived in, no matter how much she values things like justice and equality, still influenced her to make judgment calls that either are solely about another person’s identity, such as her comments about Lili, or that tie someone’s behavior to their identity, such as how she links Mulch’s behavior to the fact he is a dwarf. Holly isn’t the problem — the society is.

This is why you have Mulch’s later quote that “I’d rather trust a bunch of humans not to hunt a species to extinction than trust an LEP consultant” (177). Here, the first book kind of hits you over the head with the message: both of the societies, human and fairy, have issues of inequality and environmental abuse built into them. They both suck!

Holly, I think wakes up to this fact at the end of book 4 following the fact that Sool and the council valued money and power over bringing Opal to justice for her murder of Root. After this, she has a more nuanced perspective on ideas of justice and what means to want justice. A line that sticks out to me is from book 8 when she’s thinking about what she wants for Opal. She brings up the fact that at one point, she would have wanted Opal to suffer as she had. However, what Holly wants by the 8th book is for the suffering to stop, period. She doesn’t want to seek justice by humiliating or hurting Opal, what she wants is Opal to no longer be capable of hurting others. And this doesn’t mean that Holly no longer hates Opal, because she unequivocally does. But the cycle of Opal hurting others, the LEP hurting Opal, and then Opal coming back to enact vengeance again, and again, and again, is something that Holly wants to end. She no longer wants to engage in this cycle.

To circle back to my original point, this is why the series relying on sci-fi more than the more magical elements of fairy society is important: by showing us fairies that evolved past the role they would fill in myths, which is more nature-based, Colfer is able to talk about technology in human society, both good and bad, and human society itself, both good and bad. This different depiction of fairies and a more sci-fi plot was what made the story stand when it was being marketed, but it is also interestingly a point of criticism that is invoked when talking about whether or not the story “feel” Irish.

This is the second point of criticism that I discussed earlier is in Patricia Kennan’s essay “Contemplating Otherness, imagining the future”. She doesn’t think blending sci-fi and fantasy is negative — that would be an uncharitable reading of her essay. She even states in the essay that, “the most successful writers of science fantasy, however, have been able to stretch the parameters of both kinds of minds [the fantasy and technological], a feat to be admired”.

She talks about the blending of both mythic and realistic narratives, as well as that mixture’s popularity in recent Irish children’s science fiction. This idea of hybrid forces, the fantasy and the realistic, is attractive, she suggests, because of the chaos contained in their tension in the narrative. It’s for the same reason, perhaps, that fiction containing elements like vampires, that straddle the boundary between night and day, alive and dead, animal and human, is popular, as they contain interesting and allure characteristics while also being horrifying and repulsive.

(Side note: the idea of “otherness” and the human and the magical intersecting is very interesting as an aesthetic when one considers that one of the most influential vampire novels, Dracula, was written by an Irish author and that many of the aesthetics associated with Dracula also fit neatly with Artemis — this further underlines that he straddles the line between good and bad, human and magical, technology and fantasy in the way he seems to be a hybrid of gothic literature aesthetics dressed up in a modern, sci-fi package. I’m gonna end my sidenote here).

However, Kennan points to the plot and setting of the story as perhaps being why the series does feel very grounded in its Irish roots. The essay quotes Celia Keenan, saying: “all sense of the national and local have been eradicated [from the series]. Speech rhythms are entirely mid-Atlantic. No Hiberno-English or Wexford uses are evident. Landscape has become virtual”.

In some ways, I can see her point. Artemis Fowl is a very James Bond-type series in that it tries to invent settings rather than borrowing from existing reference points to place itself. A good example of this would be the fact that Fowl manor and Artemis’ school, Saint Bartleby’s, never are placed concretely within specific locations in Ireland. There might be a sense that Saint Bartleby’s is near Wexford or that the manor is near Dublin, but what proximity might mean (such as showing neighbors, classmates, and descriptions of the setting) is often avoided: the main characters and settings that are explored are often more international, such as Minerva and Spiro being French and American respectively, and the series often taking place in Haven or locations related to it. However, I think that there are at least some references that make the book still feel grounded as being Irish — I go into this in my other essay, but I can recap. There are specific references to Irish mythology and history, even if things like modern Irish history, side characters beyond the Butlers and Fowls that are Irish, and slang or dialect specific to different parts of Ireland aren’t referenced frequently.

So to summarize this point, the series does play with the trappings of a James Bond series in the sense that the setting bounces around enough that perhaps Ireland isn’t at the center always, and I think that this is a function of how Colfer writes sci-fi instead of something that destabilizes the sense of the where and when of the series. For instance, a big example of pop culture that Colfer references is the Matrix, albeit in a sneaky way. Celia Keenan (who is also quoted Kennon’s essay) wrote the article “Who’s afraid of the bad little Fowl?” which serves as a book review and a look into whether or not one could call the series ‘art’. When talking about references the book makes to pop culture, she writes: “It is possible that the film which has most influenced the ‘‘Fowl’’ books is The Matrix (1999). It depicts two worlds, the computer-controlled world of the matrix itself in which humans function as duped slaves, and the world of human resistance fighters who, like Colfer’s fairies, have been forced to create an alternative home called Zion, in the bowels of the earth. The term ‘‘recon unit’’, echoed in Colfer’s LEPrecon, figures in the Matrix. Colfer actually parodies quotations from The Matrix on a few occasions. For example, in The Matrix one of the characters says to the hero, ‘‘Buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going ‘bye bye’’’; likewise, Root says to Artemis, ‘‘Hate to tell you this, Dorothy, but you ain’t in Kansas anymore’, in Artemis Fowl: the Arctic Incident (p. 63). Another Matrix quip—‘‘never send a human to do a machine’s job’’ (Wachowski, 1999), is parodied by Mulch: ‘‘Tell Foaly not to send a Mud Man to do a fairy’s job’’. In this instance, the narrator emphasizes the cinematic origins of the quotation: ‘‘‘Oh dear,’ thought Artemis, rubbing his brow, ‘Hollywood had a lot to answer for’’’(Colfer, 2002, p. 208).”

The creators of the Matrix, the Wachowski sisters, were pretty influenced by a philosopher named Jean Baudrillard (pronounced: Bow-dree-ard), even if Baudrillard didn’t particularly think their work was grounded in his theory. Baudrillard was undeniably a smart man, but he was also kind of a prick. Make of that what you will. But for those who aren’t familiar with his work or the Matrix itself, these works deal with themes of technology, reality, and the future of our society. To go back to Artemis Fowl, I think the series engages with these themes through both the allusion to Matrix and through the themes of the series itself. Although the series of Artemis Fowl many not engage specifically with many of Baudrillard’s theories, it does engage with similar philosophical concepts about sci-fi and the self.

One particular example of this is how the series (maybe unintentionally) engages with Gilbert Ryle, who was a British philosopher, and his concept of ‘mind-body-dualism’; Ryle came up with the idea of human existence being the tale of ‘a ghost within a machine’, or our sense of self-existing in a separate, physical shell. To simplify, this essentially points out the fact that what we view as being our “us”, our personalities, our inner thoughts, our perception of ourselves, is often separate from our bodies — when I think of who “I” am, I think of my “mind” rather than “body”, and this is exactly what the dualism Ryle pointed out gets at. Often, sci-fi seeks to explore what if this barrier dissolved — such as what if with the evolution of the mind, there was also an evolution of the body, and whether this could be achieved through things like AI, cyborgs, and so on. To go back to Anna Bugajska’s work, she wrote an essay entitled “Artemis Fowl: Posthumanism for teens” that tackles this within the series.

Which admittedly is a bit of a mouthful of a title! It sounds complicated — and it is, it definitely is.

But it is interesting. To go back to the idea of transformation and Artemis Fowl, the series deals with this theme quite a bit. To quote Bugajska: “What naturally could develop into a coming-of-age cycle, swerves into the direction of a transformation, calling into question human nature and individual identity in the age of the morphological freedom, mind uploads, bioengineering, and hybronauts…[the series explores ideas of transformation as a result of a desire to seek previously unaccessible power, but it also explores the idea in the context of the mind and body becoming one in how an impact one must result in an impact of the other].

A prominent example of those who went too far in their quest for [transformative] perfection are Briar Cudgeon, an LEP officer, and Opal Koboi, a genius pixie inventor. Cudgeon, embittered by professional conflict, sought the cognitive enhancement through the use of drugs. As a result, “the tranquilizer had reacted badly with some banned mind- accelerating substances the former acting-commander had been experimenting with. Cudgeon was left with a forehead like melted tar... Ugly and demoted, not a great combination” (Colfer 2003a: 77). [In this case, his desire for power causes his downfall, such as how he tried to enhance his abilities past his limit with the mind-accelerating drug that ended up reacting with the tranquilizer. However, this is also an example of the barrier between the body and the mind dissolving, as Cudgeon’s internal ‘ugliness’, such as his hunger for power, deceitfulness, and disregard for others’, is reflected in his physical form through his overindulgence in substances he uses to try to get around his natural limits.]

In the case of Opal Koboi, we can observe a conscious attempt to transform from one being to another. She has her pointy ears operated upon to give them human shape. What is more, she implants in her brain a human pituitary gland to provoke the secretion of the growth hormone (Colfer 2005: 173–174). She even goes as far as extracting substances from various animals to enhance her magic (Colfer 2011a: 263, 270). All these attempts in the end cost her her sanity (Colfer 2012: 36) and her magic powers, which is especially well visible in the fourth book of the cycle, Opal Deception (Colfer 2005: 329).

On the other hand, the changes in identity must necessarily be reflected in the alterations of at least some parts of the body. Thus, Artemis’s father, a former criminal boss, loses his leg [as he undergoes a sort of transformation after the deal Artemis holds in order to rescue his father from a hostage situation. Beforehand, he might have been a cruel, distant father, but now he has changed. He has become a new man, and in doing so, his body has been altered as well in the loss of a leg and the gaining of a prosthesis] (Colfer 2003b: 80–81). Artemis himself, as he grows from a calculating rationalist to a globally-responsible, empathic man, earns a few body modifications. And although he does not seek them, he does not attempt to get rid of them, instinctively hoarding as much of the “fairness” as he can get. For instance, in The Lost Colony, where Artemis and his friend Holly Short of the LEP travel through a time-tunnel, first his fingers are switched, then he swaps an eye with Holly, and finally he steals some of the fairy magic, which grants him limited healing and regeneration powers. He also gains three years during the travel: in his own time he has to pose as a seventeen-year-old (Colfer 2007: 371)”.

In essence, you have both people seeking to perfect the body in order to match the goals of mind, such as Opal trying to steal new types of magic, and then you have Artemis switching eyes with Holly, representing a more benign example of the body changing to match the mind, as switching eyes represents that he has literally switched perspectives and can see things through her eyes as a result of their friendship. And in the end of the series, you also have Artemis being reborn into a clone — he has changed so much from his self at the beginning of the series, it is like his past self is dead, and his moral rebirth is reflected literally in him being given a new body free of the constraints of the mistakes he made before his passing, such as kidnapping Holly or endangering Butler on multiple occasions.

This I suppose covers most of the grounds that I wanted to in this essay. I talked about the context of the book series being published, the themes, the characters, and the philosophical questions posed by the text.

I don’t know if answered my original question of “what is Artemis Fowl?” — I think I’ll always have something to say about the series. But this puts words to a lot of thoughts I’ve had, and it’s nice to at least have it all there, I suppose. Thanks for listening, and if you have questions, leave me a comment here on on the ao3 version of the essay [x]-- or send me an ask!

#artemis fowl #my writing #my post #hi im zoe and i love making poorly conceived essays abt my interests

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mentosmorii · 4 years

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“How does one describe Artemis Fowl?” Artemis Fowl, Book 1, Page 1.

A lot of the content in that essay is correct, I feel I should say. However, an area where I misstep is here: “ Eoin Colfer has been asked about the influence of Irish mythology on his writing during various interviews, and his response is usually a sort of permutation of the above answer — ‘I grew up reading Irish myths and legends, [and] I… put… a spin on them’” (Colfer). He admits that he was influenced by Irish mythology, and this admission of influence is usually enough to get interviewers to move along to the next question. I’ve looked through many of the interviews that he’s done, and I think I can say with confidence that there is not currently any interview available in which an interviewer presses him to be more specific and point to the myths and legends in question by which he was influenced. In all likelihood, I think that this is because once Colfer confirms that he did, in fact, take inspiration from Irish mythology, the interviewers think of pop culture Celtic mythology and move on”.

The assertion that I made that was incorrect is about the interviewer moving on due to a lack of visibility of Irish myths. However, you also have to look at when the first book was published, which was in 2001. During the 90s to the early 2000s, Ireland was going through something called the “Celtic tiger”, which essentially means that there was an international market that was becoming quite interested in Irish culture, leading to the development of a new, commercially successful Celticism. Cormac MacRaois (pronounced: Cormick Mccreesh) estimated, at the time of writing in 1997, that there were at least thirty books dedicated to the retellings of mythological tales on the children’s shelves of Irish bookshops, alongside a burgeoning quantity of contemporary fantasy drawing upon mythological sources for its characters and themes” (Irish Children’s Literature and Culture: New perspectives).

Furthermore, in Mary Donohue’s unpublished 2003 MA thesis entitled “From Wexford to the arctic circle, a cultural journey”, she remarks that in a video interview, Colfer mentions that he had initially planned to publish a collection of Irish myths and legends, but that he abandoned this plan when he realized how many good collections were already in print (Donohoe, 2003, p. 24).

In many ways, the Artemis Fowl series, at least up until book 8, is more of a sci-fi than it is a fantasy. Which is a bold claim for me to make, I know!

A quote from book one in which Root is talking to Foaly as the LEP tries to plan how to get Holly back summarizes this analysis of the series quite nicely: “Science is taking the magic out of everything”.

As Anna Bugajska (pronounced: ah-na boo-guy-ska) states in her essay "Human Magic", "Fairy Technology": The Place of the Supernatural in the Age of Cyberculture: “Fairies deprived of natural wings use their artificial counterparts. Dwarves are practically walking machines. Invisibility is achieved by ‘shielding’. Artemis uses ‘human magic’ to heal a fairy [the sprite in Ho Chi Minh whom he gives a serum to help her alcohol dependence], but must rack his brains to escape ‘fairy technology’. The convergence point comes at the search for a Booke of Magick and at a failed Ritual performance… In the world where fairies rely on blasters and bio-bombs to take out their enemies, is there any place for good ol’ magic? Or is it by any chance homogenous with “man-made magic”, that is technology?”.

The fact that the book series seems to be more of a sci-fi than a fantasy is important for two reasons, the first reason of which is discussed in Elizabeth Parsons’ essay “Fowl Play: Artemis Fowl, Sitting Ducks, and politics for children” and the second of which is discussed by Anna Bugajska. The first perspective, Parsons’, is that the book brings up parallels between the People and humanity that suggest that the fairies are just as guilty of the environmental issues and social injustice that they like to critique humans for. The second perspective is that the emphasis on the blending of science and magic in the narrative helps explore the themes of moral evolution within the series.

Let’s first address Parsons’ argument. Parsons argues that there is no discernible difference between the two worlds that share the planet — “Technological advances drive humanity’s destruction of the earth’s surface as much as they [drive] the spread of fairy civilization underground” (Parsons). In fact, Parsons points to the enormous sum of gold at the center of the conflict in book one as evidence that the People are not as innocent of this kind of environmental destruction as they would like to think. After all, you cannot mine gold from the earth without having some kind of negative impact on the planet. Whether it’s from how you might destabilize the ground as you mine, or the pollutants you may release, or even the effect that comes with removing the gold from its natural place in the earth, you cannot escape the fact that Faeries likely also have a history of troubling environmental impacts to answer for. There is also the fact that fairy society is *extremely* industrialized. Just as how the presence of gold presents the question of how the People acquired that wealth, the technology the people have presents the question of how did they develop said tech. You can’t go from a building the wheel to building a neutrino gun — there was likely an industrial revolution in which the People engaged in unclean energy practices as they developed their understanding of how to engineer. And this concern is supported by the text!

But that’s just from an environmental point of view. Socially, there is also little difference between the progress of the People and humanity. Honestly, in some aspects, the people are farther behind, what with how Holly mentions being the first woman to be hired to her position even though the book opens at the start of the 21st century. And although Holly understands that others assuming she is less capable on the basis of her gender is both illogical and prejudiced, she herself falls into similar lines of thinking in books 1 and 2. She certainly makes some unkind assumptions regarding how she thinks her coworker Lili, an attractive woman, was hired because the recruiter fancied Lili. Which, knowing the rather old-fashioned beliefs the LEP higher-ups have regarding women, could be the case! Yet the way she specifically talks about Lili makes it clear she does not see a potential ally against mistreatment in the office — Lili is someone who, in unkind moments, Holly privately sort of sees as an acceptable target of workplace gossip. And Holly, to be fair, grows out of this mindset by the final book — she still doesn’t like Lili, but she’s matured past the point of engaging in making harmful assumptions about her coworker.

And beyond this, Holly also in book one falls into patterns of making assumptions about the various different groups of fairies in Haven. For example, she implies in her first encounter with Mulch that his rapscallion behavior and petty crimes are kind of linked to the fact he’s dwarf. And she certainly doesn’t treat him well in book 1 — she zaps him when he makes a move to pick-pocket despite the fact the situation could have been de-escalated with initial action other than violence. Again, she moves beyond this way thinking by the final book. Yet the society she lived in, no matter how much she values things like justice and equality, still influenced her to make judgment calls that either are solely about another person’s identity, such as her comments about Lili, or that tie someone’s behavior to their identity, such as how she links Mulch’s behavior to the fact he is a dwarf. Holly isn’t the problem — the society is.

The second point, that the series uses technology and sci-fi to explore philosophical topics, is also part of the appeal to the series.

One particular example that comes to mind is how the series (maybe unintentionally) engages with Gilbert Ryle, who was a British philosopher, and his concept of ‘mind-body-dualism’; Ryle wrote on the idea of human existence being the tale of ‘a ghost within a machine’, or our sense of self-existing in a separate, physical shell. To simplify, this essentially points out the fact that what we view as being our “us”, our personalities, our inner thoughts, our perception of ourselves, is often separate from our bodies — such as how when I think of who “I” am, I think of my “mind” rather than “body”. Often, sci-fi seeks to explore what if this barrier dissolved — such as what if with the evolution of the mind, there was also an evolution of the body, and whether this could be achieved through things like AI, cyborgs, and so on. To go back to Anna Bugajska’s work, she wrote an essay entitled “Artemis Fowl: Posthumanism for teens” that tackles this within the series.

To go back to the idea of transformation and Artemis Fowl, the series deals with this theme quite a bit. To quote Bugajska: “What naturally could develop into a coming-of-age cycle, swerves into the direction of a transformation, calling into question human nature and individual identity in the age of the morphological freedom, mind uploads, bioengineering, and hybronauts…[the series explores ideas of transformation as a result of a desire to seek previously unaccessible power, but it also explores the idea in the context of the mind and body becoming one in how an impact one must result in an impact of the other].

“A prominent example of those who went too far in their quest for [transformative] perfection are Briar Cudgeon, an LEP officer, and Opal Koboi, a genius pixie inventor. Cudgeon, embittered by professional conflict, sought the cognitive enhancement through the use of drugs. As a result, “the tranquilizer had reacted badly with some banned mind- accelerating substances the former acting-commander had been experimenting with. Cudgeon was left with a forehead like melted tar... Ugly and demoted, not a great combination” (Colfer 2003a: 77). [In this case, his desire for power causes his downfall, such as how he tried to enhance his abilities past his limit with the mind-accelerating drug that ended up reacting with the tranquilizer. However, this is also an example of the barrier between the body and the mind dissolving, as Cudgeon’s internal ‘ugliness’, such as his hunger for power, deceitfulness, and disregard for others’, is reflected in his physical form through his overindulgence in substances he uses to try to get around his natural limits.]

“In the case of Opal Koboi, we can observe a conscious attempt to transform from one being to another. She has her pointy ears operated upon to give them human shape. What is more, she implants in her brain a human pituitary gland to provoke the secretion of the growth hormone (Colfer 2005: 173–174). She even goes as far as extracting substances from various animals to enhance her magic (Colfer 2011a: 263, 270). All these attempts in the end cost her her sanity (Colfer 2012: 36) and her magic powers, which is especially well visible in the fourth book of the cycle, the Opal Deception (Colfer 2005: 329).

“On the other hand, the changes in identity must necessarily be reflected in the alterations of at least some parts of the body... “Artemis himself, as he grows from a calculating rationalist to a globally-responsible, empathic man, earns a few body modifications. And although he does not seek them, he does not attempt to get rid of them, instinctively hoarding as much of the “fairness” as he can get. For instance, in The Lost Colony, where Artemis and his friend Holly Short of the LEP travel through a time-tunnel, first his fingers are switched, then he swaps an eye with Holly, and finally he steals some of the fairy magic, which grants him limited healing and regeneration powers. He also gains three years during the travel: in his own time he has to pose as a seventeen-year-old (Colfer 2007: 371)” (Bugajska).

In essence, you have both people seeking to perfect the body in order to match the goals of mind, such as Opal trying to steal new types of magic or Cudgeon using mind accelerating drugs, and then you have Artemis switching eyes with Holly, representing a more benign example of the body changing to match the mind, as switching eyes represents that he has literally switched perspectives and can see things through her eyes as a result of their friendship. And in the end of the series, you also have Artemis being reborn into a clone — he has changed so much from his self at the beginning of the series, it is like his past self is dead, and his moral rebirth is reflected literally in him being given a new body free of the constraints of the mistakes he made before his passing, such as kidnapping Holly or endangering Butler on multiple occasions.

#artemis fowl #my writing #yes i know this is immensely obnoxious but know this: this is actually the short version of the future video essay

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commentaryvorg · 4 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.7

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time in trial 6, Tsumugi was very clearly just cosplaying Junko despite no-one properly figuring this out for ages, Danganronpa trivia was really not necessary to prove everyone’s memories are fake, Tsumugi kept insisting that Shuichi called this trial because of her backstory when really it has nothing to do with that and everything to do with Kaito, Maki was very distressed to learn even more how she was just being controlled and manipulated like always, Tsumugi was a literal fucking shapeshifter, everyone was more upset than they should have been over Hope’s Peak being fictional for something they’d only known about for two days, but at least that meant that the outside world was…

Well… about that.

Monokuma: “Puhuhu… Forget about the world. It wants nothing to do with you.”

Oh boy. It sure doesn’t, even though it should. Here we fucking go.

…Does anyone have any idea what “kumafarre”, the word plastered all over the trial background from this point on, is meant to mean? Because that’s always stumped me. It has to mean something for them to have put it there. Kuma is bear, obviously, but “farre” can’t be Japanese, so… ???

“first!”

Pfft, of course that’d be the first message to show up. But it also proves that everyone in the audience can see their messages showing up here, so they should know that the characters can see what they’re saying.

“Bring on the spoilers!”

How does this even make sense? You can’t have spoilers for a reality show that’s happening live. The only possible spoiler is who the blackened is during a trial, but we’re way past that now.

“Kyoko is my waifu.”

“Sakura is my muscle waifu.”

“Chiaki #1 waifu”

Ugghh waifu culture. And also, I told you everyone was a bunch of genwunners in this audience! No-one mentions anything like this for any character outside of DR1 or 2. And yeah, obviously seasons past 3 don’t exist in the out-universe, but the out-universe writers could totally have just thrown in some random names we’ve never heard and expect us to assume that they’re talking about unknown characters from other seasons. Fifty other goddamn seasons they could be choosing from! But nope, it’s all gotta be mostly season one with some two, that’s all that counts.

“My husbando Shuichi!!!”

And of course Shuichi gets that shitty treatment too, even though he’s a real goddamn person who never asked to be famous and nobody is entitled to anything from him.

“Wow, Himiko is still alive…”

Seriously, that’s the first thing someone wants to say when their messages are getting displayed in a place where Himiko can see it? Lovely.

“Viewers get to participate now!”

“I feel like I’m participating, too!”

At least these couple of people are currently being fairly reasonable – they’re just excited to be a part of it in some way!

…The first two characters Tsumugi cosplays after this moment are Kyoko and then Sakura, and then Chiaki pretty soon after that. She’s pandering to those people whose messages she saw, isn’t she.

“Sakura”: “Of course, those you see here are only a fraction of our total viewers.”

I. Should. Sincerely. Hope. So. Because that’s the only thing that makes this even remotely believable – the idea that the majority of the fanbase are somewhat more decent human beings than this (you know, aside from the watching real people kill each other thing) and we’re just seeing the vocal asshole minority right now.

…That’s really not what the narrative is going to be going for with this, though. If they actually wanted us to think that this audience we see is just the asshole minority and everyone else is more decent, this topic should get addressed in more than just this one throwaway line, and it is not. So probably the only actual reason this line is here is to establish that the number of viewers is way higher than suggested by just these commenters, and not that the attitude of the rest of them is significantly different.

“I believe in Keebs.”

This is a little early hint to the Keebo deal, since a lot of the audience should be thinking about him the most.

“You can do it, Shuichi!”

I like this person! This person is the most decent and realistic person we’ve heard from so far! Yeah, cheer on Shuichi just like I’ve been doing throughout this commentary! They care about him and want him to succeed! It is of course more twisted in this person’s case because he’s not actually fictional, and becomes even more so now that Shuichi can actually hear them and any pretense that he’s just fictional can’t be maintained, but at least this is otherwise a realistic and relatable response to this.

Shuichi: “W-Wait, why would a peaceful world need a killing game like th—”

“Taka”: “It’s *because* the world is so peaceful that this killing game is necessary!”

“Celeste”: “It is so very peaceful… And so, it is so very boring.”

“Kyoko”: “With so much peace, people have become bored. They need stimulation…”

That’s… kinda bullshit. First Shuichi’s assumption that only a world full of strife could possibly create a reason for a killing game, but then also the idea that peace would make people bored. Humans don’t start wars for entertainment, you know. World peace should be the least boring thing for humanity, because without having to spend so much effort on survival and equality, everyone would have more energy left to make all kinds of technology and art, including entertainment which should not have to involve killing real people to be entertaining!

To be fair, Tsumugi is probably exaggerating somewhat, given that she’s part of Team Danganronpa and is trying to sell the idea that her product is so necessary for the world. But it would seem that we are in a world where one way or another it’s become socially accepted to watch real people kill each other for entertainment… which doesn’t seem like a peaceful utopia at all, really.

“Chiaki”: “Every person in the outside world watching this is a huge Danganronpa fan.”

We get a demonstrative image of people all over the world apparently excitedly watching Danganronpa, most of whom are vague and faceless. If it were just them then it could be possible to imagine that Tsumugi is lying and this is just a hypothetical image of what she’s talking about rather than the truth. But… Makoto’s also there. The kid that we, the out-universe audience, very definitely saw at the beginning of the chapter in a context that had no connection to Tsumugi and no reason to be a lie. Which gives this image a lot of credibility.

(And if this is the truth, again, it really doesn’t look like it’s a shady hidden thing only accessed on the darkest corners of the internet.)

I will say one thing in this world’s favour. I’m not remotely trying to defend the part where they watch real people kill each other, but Danganronpa really must be hugely popular among absolutely everyone for this to have somehow ended up not extremely illegal. Which means, given the fact that the audience are basically telling themselves it’s fiction and treating it as such, this is also a world in which it’s socially accepted, not just in niche geek subcultures but in mainstream culture, to get really excited by and invested in fiction. If you took all the awful murderiness out of it and made sure it was all actual fiction, man I’d love to live in that kind of world. As it is, in our world, only children are really socially expected to get super-excited about fictional stories all the time, like it’s something people are meant to grow out of as adults. Among adults, only very few extremely mainstream fictions get even close to that kind of widely-accepted level of importance in people’s lives. Which is disappointing to me.

“Chiaki”: “This killing game is for everyone… So it’s everyone’s killing school semester.”

That’s the Japanese subtitle of this game, which actually turns out to be very meaningful! The general sense of it she’s talking about here would have applied to every season up until now, but there’s also the more specific sense that this season in particular has audience participation, which is apparently the first time it’s happened, making it even more “everyone’s” than before.

And the localisers just decided to nope on that subtitle and change it to the meaningless “Killing Harmony”, which is honestly a shame. Maybe the Japanese subtitle is a bit too long and too much of a mouthful for western standards, but they could have at least changed it to something which kept that relevance.

“Killing Harmony! I just got it! LOL”

Haha, no, that doooeees not work in the localisation.

“I’ve waited three years for this.”

“I thought the franchise was done.”

Huh, this is some juicy info. It’s taken three years since season 52, long enough that some people thought there wasn’t going to be another one? (And a lot of the rest of the chatter at this point is people applauding, perhaps being happy that they got another season.) That… suggests that Danganronpa might have been already on its last legs even before what happens in this trial comes and puts the lid on it all, which maybe makes things a little more believable. That’d also potentially explain why this is the first time they tried the Keebo gimmick, if they were trying to keep things fresh after worrying people would be getting bored of the same old thing.

Also, even if it’s usually less than three years between games, you’ve still got to imagine it’d be at least one year or so, which means it’s been over half a century since the Danganronpa franchise began. A lot of people who worked on it while it was still pure fiction wouldn’t even be alive anymore at this point.

Plus, geez, how long did they keep Rantaro in limbo between games? Was he allowed to live a relatively normal life for the time being while knowing that if they ever did get around to a season 53, he’d be forced into it, meaning he lived dreading that day and desperately hoping it’d never come? Ouch, poor Rantaro. Or possibly they do in fact have real cold sleep technology in this universe and they just stuffed him in one of those for three years.

“Shuichi, look this way! <3”

That’s… rather entitled but also kind of believable as something someone might do, since it seems like a lot of the audience have forgotten that these characters don’t just exist to perform for them.

“Get to the punishment already!”

Aaaand here’s someone who’s barely a believable person. Do the audience really just watch this to see people be horribly executed, rather than for all the character drama that happens in between those parts?

The opening theme music for this game starts playing… and apparently this is being played in-universe, based on the fact that Maki reacts to it.

Maki: “What is this…?”

“Fuyuhiko”: “Can’t you tell? It’s the title of the current Danganronpa you guys are doing.”

God, that has to be incredibly disturbing and wrong, being told that you’re hearing the theme music for you and your friends’ suffering and death… and it’s just this chill jazz tune, of all things. This probably hammered home more than anything else the awful sense that all of their struggles have just been entertainment.

“Chihiro”: “Danganronpa’s gone on so long because the whole world enjoys and supports it.”

No mention of the fact that apparently some people thought there wouldn’t even be a season 53? Of course not, Tsumugi wouldn’t want to admit that the franchise might be on its last legs.

“Makoto”: “What season do you think we’re on? You should be able to tell from the logo.”

So she claims. But you know what I thought when I first heard her say this? Since I already figured it was probably season 53 from Junko the 53rd, I thought the clue in the logo was the negative space between the V and the 3.

It’s actually kinda shaped like a 5 if you look at it that way! But nope, that’d make way more sense that what it’s actually supposed to be.

(I bet Shuichi figured it out from the Junko hint and not the logo, too.)

“V is the Roman numeral for 5.”

*deep breath*

That is not how Roman numerals work!!! In Arabic numerals, “5” can mean five, or fifty, or five hundred, etc, depending on its position within the number. But Roman numerals do not work like that! “V” only ever means five, and its position in the number does not change that. V3 cannot possibly mean fifty-three. It’s combining two number systems that work completely differently and do not make any sense being combined, but if one were to try and make a number out of it, it’d simply mean “five-three”, separately. Or maybe you’d add them together, so it’d mean eight.

In Roman numerals, fifty is denoted with an “L”. To actually get fifty-three in any vaguely sensible way by combining Roman and Arabic numerals, it’d be L3. Or, heck, why don’t we write the whole thing in Roman numerals? Then it’s LIII. Which just so happens to look and sound very similar to the English word “lie”. If the Japanese writers of this game wanted to do a clever little number/letter trick, why didn’t they go for that? It would have been great! Or they could call it L3 but make the negative space between the L and the 3 look kind of like an I somehow, so that “LI3” almost looks like “lie” as well. Missed freaking opportunity there, guys. Instead it’s just very apparent that nobody in Spike Chunsoft (or Team Danganronpa, for that matter) has any idea how Roman numerals work.

“Danganronpa 25 was the best.”

Shout-outs to this person. They’re the only person we ever see here who mentions any series other than 1, 2 or the one they’re currently watching. Props to them for knowing what their favourite season is and sticking to their guns in a sea of people who disregard every new season that comes along as soon as it’s not current any more in favour of obsessing over the first ones like they’re the only ones that matter. Season 25 probably was genuinely one of the best ones if it has a dedicated fan like this. You go, random person. I feel you.

“This is my first Danganronpa.”

Huh, so despite how much Tsumugi is trying to make us think everyone is obsessed with it, there have to still be at least a few people who don’t get what all the hype is about, if this person only just decided to check it out for this season.

(Clearly there hasn’t been a large enough proportion of these uninterested people who are upset about the whole killing-real-people thing to be able to put a stop to it before now, though. Even if it’s not their thing, if the rest of the world’s okay with it then it must be fine, right???)

“I love Shuichi <3”

Yes, thanks, we’re getting that impression. This is probably the same person from before, who still feels the need to mention this while everyone else is talking about this being season 53.

Monokuma: “The seasons just kept coming, and with it came more killing games… Until it transcended games and anime to become this, the Ultimate Real Fiction…”

They gloss over this quite quickly, but it is important to note that yes, the earlier seasons really were just fiction in this universe like they were in ours. They’re not trying to retcon that the Hope’s Peak killing games were actually only happening for entertainment thanks to Flashback Lights and fabricated backstory. DR1 and 2 were completely fictional in this universe, which means that nothing happening here matters to or compromises that storyline at all.

After all, it does make sense that Danganronpa would need to have worldwide popularity already before society collectively decided that doing this with real people (but definitely not really real people, right) would be totally okay. It’s unclear exactly when the transition to “real fiction” happened, although Shuichi and Maki’s comments on the files in his lab kind of made me assume that there were more real ones than fictional ones. So… I was just shouting out season 25, but that one probably involved real people being killed, too.

“Leon”: “What, did the letter in there throw you off? Well, I guess that happens. But isn’t it just rad how it looks like a letter, but it’s really a number!?”

I am way too amused at how they made it be specifically Leon, mister 11037 himself, who mentions this point. Nice one, guys. Nice.

“Sonia”: “Since this is the 53rd season, one would expect to see a multitude of characters…”

Tsumugi: “But you only have memories from the first two, so you wouldn’t recognize any others.”

They shouldn’t even recognise the ones from season two, like I’ve been saying! But she’s been cosplaying them anyway. So it’s probably a lot less about keeping them recognisable for the students here and more just about pandering to those genwunners and twoers outside.

(Obviously there’s a very good out-universe reason for this, but, you know.)

Tsumugi: “So yes, I’m the mastermind! But the *real* mastermind forcing you to do this is… the people of the outside world!”

Way to deflect your responsibility, Tsumugi! Yes, everyone outside is also partially responsible by demanding this and giving it an audience, but you’re still the one who made it all happen and got everyone killed!

The audience starts chattering about how they’re the mastermind, but it’s in a way that sounds happy about it, like they’re just excited to be part of the story. They don’t seem to register the fact that, hey, maybe being literally actually responsible for the suffering and death of the characters they’ve been watching and caring about isn’t actually a good thing.

“Mmm… Shuichi’s nose <3”

Meanwhile Shuichi’s “fan” here still has a one-track mind and is getting increasingly creepy. I refuse to believe that this is the same person who was cheering Shuichi on earlier, since that person actually cared about him and didn’t only shallowly see him as eye-candy.

“put Maki back on kthx”

Also apparently Maki has “fans” too. But hers probably aren’t the good kind either.

“Mikan”: “The ones managing this killing game aren’t psychos like the Remnants of Despair…”

“Ibuki”: “They’re literal managers! Literally!”

Just because they’re managers, that doesn’t stop them from being shitty, evil people on par with the Remnants of Despair in terms of awfulness. They are quite evidently both.

Tsumugi: “So I want to hear your best guess. What company is running this show?”

…

Shuichi: “…Team Danganronpa?”

I love how Shuichi’s tone of voice makes it clear that he’s just pulling this name out of thin air. How is he supposed to know? Conveniently, Team Danganronpa were apparently just really uncreative when it came to naming themselves. (I guess this is realistic enough, though – our world does have The Pokémon Company, which makes Pokémon.)

We – and therefore presumably the students and the in-universe audience – get shown the opening movie that was right at the beginning when you start a new file, the one that summarised seasons 1, 2 and 3 and then implied this one would be a continuation of it. Which still doesn’t actually make any in-universe sense, since all the evidence other than this clearly points towards Hope’s Peak having not being part of this game’s backstory until Tsumugi improvised it in chapter 5. Maybe this was a promo video Team Danganronpa then hastily slapped together after that point to try and act like they totally had this planned all along?

The only difference from before (because it would have been a huuuuge spoiler to see this last time) is that we also see the supposed logos of every Danganronpa season up to 53. 4 through 10 are clearly the out-universe writers having a field day referencing other works of fiction, but then 11 through 52 are all exactly the same logo with only the number being different. Yeah, that’s not how it actually was, is it. The out-universe writers just didn’t want to take the time to make that many unique logos for a split-second each of screentime. (And, fair enough.)

We then get shown a collage of what appears to be basically all of the illustrations in this game. Which you’d think shouldn’t actually exist in-universe, because the audience’s camera is supposed to be Keebo’s eyes, and he wasn’t there for half of this stuff! So this strongly suggests that despite what Tsumugi’s going to claim about that later, the audience could also watch the game through the Nanokumas’ footage instead and potentially saw all the same scenes that we saw that way.

…Makoto is on there, though. He definitely should not be. The out-universe writers didn’t catch that, I guess.

Shuichi: “Shut up… Shut up!”

Yeeeaaah, I don’t blame Shuichi for this. Tsumugi and Monokuma and the audience have been blabbering on for quite a while now, barely letting him and his friends get a word in edgeways while treating them like objects for their amusement. That has to be awful.

And even aside from Shuichi’s feelings about it, the way the audience has been suddenly babbling excitedly about Danganronpa in general to the point of almost completely ignoring the characters who are in this actual story they’re supposed to be invested in is pretty shallow of them. That’s already a sign of how unrealistically awful an audience they’re going to keep showing themselves to be.

Shuichi: “No matter how many false memories we’ve been implanted with, *we* aren’t fictional!”

This line is here as a setup for the big reveal, of course, but even so… he’s right. Just because literally all of their memories from before this killing game are fake, it doesn’t change that they’ve been real people from the moment they got all of those memories.

Shuichi: (Who… are we…?) “We… are real! We’re living, breathing human beings!”

“Nekomaru”: “No! You’re just like MEEEEEE!!!”

I made Shuichi answer this incorrectly at first because I really feel like he would want to assert this… and he’s still not wrong! They are very definitely living and breathing right now, nobody can deny that!

“Makoto”: “You’re just fictional characters created solely for this killing game.”

“Teruteru”: “Nothin’ we can do about it, I’m afraid. Danganronpa’s that kinda property.”

I’m sure it’s much less some intellectual property dispute and more the idea that everyone might have slightly more issue with actual real people from the outside world being killed in this. It’s totally fine if they were created solely for the killing game, though, because then they’re not real and only exist to die here, right?

And honestly… that does make all the deaths in this game come across as just slightly less awful and tragic, in that context. Not because they aren’t still extremely real people who very much did not deserve to suffer and die, but, since they were created to die, anyone managing to survive and escape despite that feels like even more of a victory than in the previous games. It’s less Monokuma killing a bunch of people who were never meant to die, and more Shuichi managing to save at least a small handful of people who were never meant to live.

“Gundham”: “Your immaterial existence is a fabrication, independent of your actual flesh and blood.”

To translate the Gundham-ese: their “souls” were created separately from their bodies. Kind of like how they were discussing when going into the Virtual World how odd it is that the two can be separated like that.

Tsumugi: “Yep, you’re all fictional.”

“Ibuki”: “You guys out there beyond the fourth wall already knew that, right!?”

I like how this works as simultaneously talking to the people beyond both fourth walls at once, while not actually breaking the real one. (Though the people beyond the in-universe fourth wall are only telling themselves these guys are fictional and aren’t actually right.)

Tsumugi: “You all didn’t look like this when you first came to the Ultimate Academy… Those were your true selves. Now you’re all just fictional characters. That’s the truth.”

Shuichi: (That’s the truth? Then… our real identities…)

Don’t get caught up in her manipulation, Shuichi! You are not any less “real” just because different people used to inhabit your bodies!

Tsumugi goes on to talk about when they first arrived at the school as their pregame selves before they got their outfits and memories. And again, we saw this. It is quite ridiculous to assume we saw an entire lengthy section in the prologue which just straight-up didn’t happen. The game has lied to us, but only with very small lies of omission (re: Kaede’s inner monologue). If the game was willing to lie to us about entire sections we played through, we couldn’t trust anything. We couldn’t even trust if this trial we’re playing is really happening right now, or if anything we saw really happened, which would render this entire story meaningless.

“Byakuya”: “But boring, everyday characters have no right to be in Danganronpa…”

Honestly, why, though? Sure, the talents are supposed to be a Danganronpa thing, but you could totally do a killing game with ordinary people. It might make for an interesting change, especially after 53 seasons.

“Peko”: “Which means your Ultimate talents are all just fiction.”

They may have come from fake memories, but they have those talents now. Nobody can deny that Shuichi’s been a pretty great detective.

Maki: “Our talents as well…?”

Maki Roll, you never killed anyone, and you’ll never have to! This is great news for you!

…I bet if Kaito were still here, he’d immediately turn to her with a big grin and tell her that. Encouraging and being happy for the sidekick with a bright side to this would be way more important than however he might be feeling about this revelation in respect to his own talent.

Maki doesn’t react here with anything other than shock and disbelief, though, so I don’t know if this quite sinks in for her yet. It’s probably very hard for her to accept that she suddenly doesn’t deserve to feel guilty about anything. After all, this won’t diminish the effect Maki’s memories have on her and that she’s going to have to live with feeling like she’s killed countless people for the rest of her life. But knowing that nobody real actually died because of her has got to help a lot. I’m sure that’ll sink in eventually, once she’s had more time to think about it without the trial getting in the way.

“Chiaki”: “I mean, they suited you to a certain extent, but mostly in a placebo effect sorta way. Kinda like a form of autosuggestion… You know, like if you do it, it’ll all work out.”

We’ve seen Flashback Lights do plenty of things that aren’t just straight-up remembering stuff: brainwashing everyone to be filled with meaningless “hope” and a sense of the completely wrong meanings of the words “hope” and “despair” in chapter 5? Brainwashing Shuichi into suddenly being a creepy pervert for that optional scene in chapter 3? Kaito’s phobia of ghosts leading him to feel anxious and nauseous upon simply thinking about a certain irrational stimulus? So, given that, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine they can do this kind of thing too. Heck, most of the talents in this game are things that only require knowledge, and perhaps a certain kind of personality, something Flashback Lights can very evidently do. Some also require muscle memory, which is a bit more of a stretch, but it’s still memory.

The hardest one to buy for me is probably Angie’s talent. There’s some muscle memory and some knowledge involved, but a lot of what makes someone good at art is more intangible and hard to define and might be difficult to encapsulate in a Flashback Light. However, Angie was unique in that she explicitly did not remember creating her art, because Atua was supposedly possessing her, and she had to be alone for that to happen. That’s how she made the waxworks. So it’s possible that what was actually happening was some kind of hypnotic trigger making her pass out when she thinks she’s about to create something, and then the gamemakers put pre-created waxworks in her lab. Remember how Angie made four waxworks without having intended to? Almost as if the gamemakers weren’t sure who she’d choose for the ritual and just made all four in advance. …And, okay, admittedly it’s very unclear how anyone could have got inside the school to put the waxworks there, which is the same question as how a hypothetical clone-with-a-Flashback-Light would have got in for the resurrection thing if that was going to be possible. But there’s something there. (Can you tell I hadn’t thought of this idea until after the commentary for chapter 3 had gone up and so I’m awkwardly fitting it in here instead.)

And ultimately, if the characters being “fictional” is the point of this story the out-universe writers decided to tell, then that always had to include fictional talents as well, since Danganronpa insists on having all its characters be Ultimates. So Flashback Lights have to be able to do this, even if it’s a little bit of a stretch to believe, because it’s just necessary for the premise to work.

It’s a lot like how we had to buy that the Exisal randomly had a voice changer that could perfectly mimic any student’s voice, simply because that was vital for the fifth trial’s premise and that story wouldn’t work if it didn’t. We can’t just use the fact that it was somewhat unrealistic of the Exisal to have a voice changer as any kind of evidence to propose that it actually didn’t.

Another example: I once saw a blind LP of the first Danganronpa game where it got to the memory wipe reveal and Junko handwaved how memory-wipe technology worked. And the LPer was all “Um, no, how is memory wiping even possible? I think it’s pretty important to establish this, actually!”, like he was using the fact that he didn’t understand how to question whether it had even happened at all. But that was missing the point; explaining the technology really wasn’t all that important. The existence of memory-wiping technology was just a necessary part of that story that had to be accepted, because if memory wipes weren’t possible then that story couldn’t have happened. This story is the same, except with Flashback Lights and the multitude of things that they need to be able to do to make this story work. At least in this case, Flashback Lights and some of the things they can do are well-established already, which is better setup than the memory-wipe technology had in DR1.

Tsumugi: “Can you really say you’re not fictional now?”

Yes! Yes, they can and should say that!

“Hajime”: “Even if your body is real, your identities, personalities, talents and past are all fiction.”

Past, sure. Identities… maybe? At least if we’re just talking about legal identity? But their talents are quite evidently still talents now, as I’ve just been saying, and their personalities are also something they’re expressing right here and now. Even if they were deliberately crafted and created to be that way, it doesn’t mean those personalities aren’t now real. You can only call a personality “fake” if that person is knowingly putting on a façade and pretending to be someone they’re not. So the only fictional personality we ever saw was Kokichi’s supposed love for this killing game. …Oh, and Tsumugi’s, of course.

Also, hi, Hajime. It’s fitting that she’d choose him for this. If we’re supposed to believe that Izuru got shoved full of every single talent imaginable by them doing weird brain stuff to him, it’s perfectly reasonable to also believe Flashback Lights could do something similar on a lesser scale. And Izuru’s entire existence was created from that process, but that didn’t make him any less “real” of a person than Hajime was. If anything, it made him more real at that point, because he’d overwritten Hajime completely (at least until the simulation). It’s honestly a very similar thing. Maybe Hajime’s story partially inspired the idea for this game.

Shuichi: “…”

Unfortunately… this seems to be working on Shuichi.

…You want to know what Tsumugi ought to think of as the real reason she killed Kaito? Not to have his death inspire Shuichi to become even stronger. That would still be happening anyway if Kaito were still by his side encouraging him; all that was needed for that final push was for Kaito to admit that Shuichi’s even more of a hero than him and tell him that. The real reason for his death should have been because Kaito would completely annihilate what Tsumugi is trying to do here.

Because the only thing that matters is what you want to believe! Tsumugi is trying to argue that their pasts being fabricated means that they don’t count as “real” people, but who even cares about that? They believe they’re real, and have always believed that, and still want to believe that, so why should anything else matter? Someone like Kaito who puts such value in belief and has such strong, unbreakable convictions about being true to himself wouldn’t be listening to any of this crap. He’d be shaken to learn his memories are all fake and that his grandparents and fellow astronaut trainees don’t exist, sure, but it wouldn’t even scratch his belief in who he is. He’s Kaito Momota, Luminary of the Stars! Who cares if he’s only this way because someone else wanted him to be, it’s still who he wants to be, so it’s who he’s going to keep being, dammit! And, of course, upon seeing that his sidekicks are having trouble with this idea and are starting to doubt if they’re really real, he’d give them just the pep talk they’d need to keep believing in themselves and their own existences.

Kaito is exactly the kind of person who would be able to blow this whole trial out of the water, and nerfing him enough to prevent him from doing that required nothing less than him not being alive any more.

(Meanwhile, if Kokichi were still alive at this point, he’d be his usual infuriating self. “Oh, you guys are only just figuring this out now?”)

Also, if Kaito were still alive in this trial and ultimately ended up surviving and escaping while having learned that his memories are fake and he was never actually an astronaut trainee… you know that would not stop him from striding up to JAXA’s front door and being all “Let me take the astronaut exam, sure you already know I’m too young but you’ve also seen I’ve got exactly what it takes”.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years

Text

Japanese woman recruited and sold by the UC / FFWPU to a Korean farmer

▲ Seoul, South Korea, August 14, 2012: Japanese members of the Unification Church bow as an act of apology for the wartime Korean sex slaves conducted by the Japanese military. Liberation Day in Korea falls on August 15. It is the anniversary celebration of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. This rally was held the day before. _____________________________________________

A 20-year-old woman was recruited by the Unification Church / FFWPU in Japan and was sold to an older Korean farmer in an “apology marriage”. He was NOT a UC member.

_____________________________________________

PLEASE RETURN MY SISTER WHO IS IN SOUTH KOREA

1. Ms. Nameless Posted: 01/10/25 ID:FFmOrZXZ

I want to write about my experience here as my serious warning to all Japanese women. Please note, everything I write about from this point is true!!

My elder sister, who was pretty and bright, got involved with a Korean woman and developed an interest in the country of South Korea.

Then she was taken away to South Korea where she became a virtual slave.

You might say “You are so silly!” But this story is true. The tricks used are surprisingly clever, and thousands of Japanese women have already been taken away to South Korea through this scheme.

Now, I want to reveal their dirty tricks. I want to bring this to the attention of all Japanese women, so they can be careful. And again I want to say that this is based on my actual experience. I would like to sincerely ask you not to interfere with the warning I am going to put on this website.

It all started three years ago.

“I met some Korean people and we became friends.” It all began with these words from my sister. She was in her junior year at university when a female Korean student sat next to her on a bench on campus and started to talk to her. The two of them soon became close friends. I also met that Korean student several times and I had a good impression of her. She was courteous and seemed to be a nice person. I heard that she was a member of a peace organization.

2. Now I really regret that I was not more aware of what was going on at that time. My sister had begun to attend “Culture Classes” given by the peace organization that she had been introduced to by the Korean student. According to my sister, the class was “to learn about peace”. In the class she watched many videos and then listened to lectures.

Although the name of the class was “learning about peace”, the contents were only about “how the Japanese tormented the Koreans”. After watching such videos for hours and hours, they then listened to lecturers from the organization – and the topic was always “How the Japanese people have never compensated for their crimes and always speak irresponsibly”.

One day my sister had a pale face. She explained to me “the Japanese army forced 150 Korean comfort women to stand in a line and they cut off their heads one by one. Then they made a soup from the severed heads – and forced other comfort women to eat this soup ……”

I was shocked by the story, but at the same time it sounded “exaggerated” to me – so I got suspicious.

While continuing to attend the culture classes, my sister’s attitude gradually changed. She began to repeatedly say, with desperate expressions on her face, “I’m so ashamed that I was born Japanese,” or “the Japanese people must make amends to the Korean people right now,” or “the current Japanese prosperity is founded on the sacrifices the Korean people [were forced to make during the Japanese occupation of their country].” She completely forgot about her university studies and started to study the Korean language.

▲ A poster promoting Japanese women available for marriage.

Translation of the poster (Korean on the left and Japanese on the right):

True Marriage to a Japanese Woman

Nonprofit community service organization: Registration No. 1300

♥ Junior college or higher educational background ♥ Healthy body and mind ♥ For a young man who has stable employment (around 30 years old)

(Previously married men and women, now single, must be aged 60 or less)

Ideal spouse with a chaste sense of values.

We will match you up.

True Family Practice in conjunction with ◯◯ Committee

Consultation phone Counselor / Consultation Staff

___________________________________________

The poster was affixed in a South Korean farming village. Marriages were then officiated by Sun Myung Moon in a mass marriage. The poster was found shortly before a Unification Church “Korea-Japan” mass wedding which was held in Seoul. The Korean men had to pay $thousands to get a Japanese bride. It was often a family investment, so the women’s passports were taken, and other measures, to prevent them from escaping. A United Nations report highlighted the cultural problems of these marriages. A substantial number of which ended in divorce. One main reason divorces were granted when requested by the women, was the fact of the FFWPU coercion the Japanese women had experienced to offer themselves in “apology to Korea marriages”. LINK

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3. Then my sister said, “I want to go to Korea to apologize to the Korean people in the Korean language”.

I did not think it was necessary for her to go, but on the other hand I thought it was good to make international friends. I didn’t take it seriously enough.

One day, my sister told me that I should also study the Korean language. I asked her why. She answered, “The Korean language will become the global language and is the most excellent language in all of human history”.

On hearing this I became more suspicious. So I secretly sneaked into my sister’s room while she was away. There I found books entitled “The Divine Principle” and “Apostate” and some brochures. I started reading them and was appalled at the contents. One item said, “Japan is a country ruled by the devil. It tormented South Korea which should be the country to lead the world,” another said, “Japan is the country representing Eve, and Korea is the Adam country. Therefore it is Japan’s obligation to work to serve Korea [to reverse Eve’s mistake in the Garden of Eden].” “After the unification of North and South Korea, the country will become the center of Asia and will then rule the world”. The literature was full of such crazy things!

I asked my university tutor about the information which had given me such an uneasy feeling. He told me, “Well, that is the Unification Church.” Then I researched into the Unification Church and discussed it with my parents. We all tried to convince my sister to withdraw from this Church. But it was too late. She took a hard line and decided to quit university and insisted on going to South Korea straight away.

4. Suddenly, my sister decided to participate in a mass wedding ceremony in Seoul and so finally she left our home.

I protested to the Korean student who had invited my sister to their meetings. This student completely changed from her previously polite demeanor. I asked her “You are a member of the Unification Church, aren’t you?” But she acted as if she didn’t know. “Eh? What is that?” she replied.

I said, “The founder of Unification Church is Sun Myung Moon; he’s really weird, isn’t he?”

My comment made her so upset.

“What did you say?!” She yelled like mad, spitting out her words, her face red with anger.

Although she had hidden this fact, she was indeed a member of the Unification Church!

My family was so sad, we all cried for a while after my sister left home. We all worried about her circumstances.

Soon my sister contacted us to say that she had got married to a Korean man and was living in countryside. For a time we felt relieved. Then she began to send frequent letters. She wrote “Please send money”, and “send electrical goods” and other things. It seemed that her Korean “relatives” in the countryside demanded that she get money and goods from our family for their sake. My parents felt that they had no choice but to continue to send money and goods as requested.

We worried what sort of life my sister had in Korea. I decided to go to there to see her and find out her situation. It was dangerous for me to go alone, so we had to make an effort to find an appropriate person to be my interpreter and bodyguard. We hired Mr. A., who was a Japanese exchange student living in Seoul.

___________________________________________

統一教会の日本人花嫁数千人が韓国農民に宛われた

Thousands of Japanese brides from the Unification Church were allotted to South Korean farmers.

週刊ポスト　No. 20 2010（H22) 年6月4日号 [雑誌]

Shukan Post No.20 2010 (H22) June 4 issue [magazine]

〈衝撃リポート〉〈Shocking Report〉

韓国農民にあてがわれた統一教会・合同結婚式日本人妻の「SEX地獄」見知らぬ土地での生活、貧困、差別に「故郷に帰りたい……」と

▲ “SEX Hell” of the Japanese wives who were allocated to Korean farmers in a Unification Church mass wedding ceremony

living in an unfamiliar land; poverty; discrimination “I want to return home …”

北海道大学教授らの徹底調査で判明した戦慄の真実

The striking reality discovered through an in-depth investigation by professors from Hokkaido University

▲ The matching – Mr. Sun Myung Moon decides couples. [Hak Ja Han is standing beside him.]

___________________________________________

5. Mr. A took me to the address which was written in my sister’s letters. It was in the Korean countryside.

The place was totally different compared to the general countryside of Japan. It was a pre-modern farm in a village with unpaved roads. We found my sister in one of the poor village houses. My sister seemed glad that I had come to visit her. Her husband was the son and heir of a farming family. He was an ugly and uneducated countryman. He seemed to be over 40 years old although my sister was in her early 20s.

Mr. A and I talked together with the poor family for a while.

I thought it was impolite of me to do so, but I gently challenged their marriage, and asked my sister to return to Japan.

Suddenly the interpreter became pale. He explained that my sister’s husband said, “I paid money!” and he continued with a vulgar smile “It was a good deal, ’cause this Jap girl has got a nice body.”

This made me so angry. I really wanted to kill him – but in this situation, I had to silently endure his comments for the sake of my sister’s safety. My sister also said, “the Japanese people must make amends to the Korean people.” She said she was working from morning to night. Listening to the family’s conversation, Mr. A whispered in my ear, “it seems she is almost a slave”.

6. There was nothing I could do for her, so I returned to Japan. On the way to the Seoul airport, Mr. A explained many things to me. For example, he said there was a strange group of Japanese women in Seoul – all Unification Church members – who worked all day from early in the morning. Those women often joined demonstrations and performances against Japan, or were perhaps forced to join in such activities.

In addition, when I spoke about the Korean comfort women, he said he had heard from an old Korean man, who had himself experienced the Japanese colonial era. The man had said, “the coercion story [of forced recruitment] is complete fiction”.

According to the old man, the truth was that poor families in rural areas sold their daughters to Korean prostitution brokers. It was a common solution in the Asian region, including in Japan, for such poor people to get out of deep poverty. “It is fiction that the Japanese Army arranged trucks to kidnap girls. Nobody ever saw such a spectacle and I never heard such rumors at that time”, the old man told Mr. A.

I then said to him “so the comfort women stories must have been created by somebody for a certain purpose.” He caught my drift that the Unification Church was using the comfort women stories. “I know a person who is close to a lawyer, Mr. Takagi, who is responsible for litigation in wartime comfort women cases. I will contact him to see if he knows something about this.”

7. I returned home with a feeling of deep frustration. I could not speak honestly to my parents about my sister’s situation. I had the impression that my sister had been sold to Korea as collateral, as a servant.

A while later, my sister suddenly informed us that one of her “relatives” was going to visit Japan and she wanted us to take care of him. My parents and I really disliked the idea, but felt we could not refuse.

A crude beggar-like young man arrived.

The Korean man had a featureless face with narrow eyes, just like pen lines. At first he seemed emotionless, but soon violent mood swings emerged. He would yell and his face then became the color of a boiled octopus. Especially during meal times he would sit at the table in a very rude manner. He ate his food making horrible noises. Not only that, but he complained saying “Why you don’t serve kimchi, huh?!”, “So bland taste!!” and so on.

Needless to say I really hated this Korean guy.

One day, he yelled at my mother. “The sauce for dipping the tempura is too bland! You’re stingy! Are you trying to belittle your precious guest?!”

I was reaching to the limit of my patience. I seriously thought about putting something like pesticide into his drink.

I felt he was always looking at me in a strange way.

One night, the man sneaked into my room and tried to rape me, covering my mouth with his hand. I screamed and scratched his face. He beat me with all his strength.

This made my father furious and he drove the man out of our house. Finally I could be reassured.

8. One day Mr. A., the student who was in Seoul, sent me some surprising information. The following is a summary of what he sent.

What I should explain first is that it was an organization called the “Hundred Members Committee” who raised the “Comfort Women Issue” for the first time. The goal of this organization was to “obtain official apologies and compensation [from the Japanese government] for the Korean people”. Some Korean members of this organization, and Japanese housewives, went to South Korea “to search for victims” suitable for starting a lawsuit. Kim Hak-soon, who was the “courageous first woman to come forward as a victim of the sex-slave system”, was just a Korean prostitute who made a lot of money from her prostitution business with Japanese soldiers. But the “Hundred Members Committee” searched for such kinds of prostitutes and had them appeal to the Japanese government. Then they started international propaganda about the issue.

Now, what sort of organization is the “Hundred Members Committee”? In fact, this committee was created by the “Asian Women’s Federation for Peace” and that is a secondary organization of the Unification Church! Besides, Kenichi Takagi, the lawyer who supported the prostitute lawsuit, and the Japanese housewives who went to Korea to search for “victims” are also all members of the Unification Church. (Of course they all denied being church members. This is the modus operandi of the Unification Church. Members are instructed to say “We are different” when they are asked “Are you members of the Unification Church?”) Their actions are based on their belief in the teachings of the Unification Church that “Japan is a country of the devil and must therefore act to make restitution for their crimes which plagued Korea, the country of the Messiah”.

9. After the rapprochement between Sun Myung Moon and Kim Il-Sung in 1992, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan came to be involved in activities concerning the comfort women issue, and many North Korean “fake comfort women” appeared one after another. They circulated stories to the international community, such as “the Japanese soldiers cut off the comfort women’s heads with swords, and made soup with the heads which they then made us drink”.

Then what is the reason why the Unification Church fabricated the “sex slave issue”? The reasons are complex.

First, they wanted to diminish the credibility of Japan and the Japanese people, so that they can make the Japanese government pay compensation to Korea, and give advantage and political status to Zainichi Koreans in Japan.

_____________

Note: Zainichi Koreans, also often known as Zainichi for short, (or Chōsen-jin) comprise ethnic Koreans who have permanent residency status in Japan, or who have become Japanese citizens, and whose immigration to Japan originated before 1945, from Chōsen (the old, undivided Korea), or who are descendents of those immigrants. They are a distinct group compared to South Korean nationals who have travelled to Japan for the sole purpose of employment or study. More details on Wikipedia: Zainichi

_____________

Secondly, they wanted to brainwash more Japanese women to set them up for “human trafficking” [as their duty or responsibility]. In the Japanese women’s minds they planted the consciousness that the guilt [or shame of Japan] should be expiated, or atoned for. These Japanese women believed that being in the same situation as Korean comfort women could be a way to personally go through suffering to compensate [for the suffering endured by Korean comfort women during the Japanese colonial period].

According to Mr. A, thousands of Japanese women had already been tricked this way, like my sister. Especially in countryside of Korea there is a high demand for these women. The Unification Church groomed the women for human trafficking to be collateral!

When I heard this story I was stunned.

I also heard from another person who was with Mr. A, that 辛淑玉, Shin Sug-ok, had a relationship with the Unification Church and she delivered lectures to Unification Church-affiliated organizations.

[ 辛淑玉、シンスゴ、신숙옥、女性、1959年1月16日- . とは、東京都生まれの実業家。のりこえねっと（ヘイトスピーチとレイシズムを乗り越える国際ネットワーク）共同代表、シューレ大学アドバイザー。東京都立第一商業高等学校卒業。在日韓国人3世。LINK ]

[ 辛淑玉, Shin Sug-ok, worked for the International Network to Overcome Hate Speech and Racism. She is a third generation Zainichi Korean. ]

I came to think I could not trust Zainichi Koreans.

Apparently the Unification Church believers, the General Association of Korean Residents, and human rights campaigners in Japan were all in one crony gang.

The reality is that they are despicable people who continue activities to prepare and induce Japanese women to become the slaves of Koreans – all behind a mask of justice!

10. Currently, a lot of Japanese women are being fooled by this Korean propaganda and support their activities. This it is totally wrong because it just helps the crimes of the Unification Church. I will say it again and again, so many Japanese women are sold to Korea as a “commodity” for human trafficking by the Unification Church, just like my sister. If you doubt my story, please take action and research what miserable lives those Japanese women have in Korea. You will find out those women are virtually enslaved. I don’t understand why the Japanese mass media do not report these harrowing tales. Why do the the so-called quality papers like Asashi shimbun, Mainichi shimbun or Yomiuri shimbun not explain to the public that right now such women are being trafficked ? Why!?

I simply want to ask why Japanese TV stations do not report the fact that Japanese women are victims like this? Why is this so?

Right at this moment, many Japanese women are brainwashed by this bad Korean religion and sold to Korea to be enslaved for their whole lives.

I want my sister back!

11. Now, I will finish my story about the miserable experience of my family.

I think our experience is hard to believe for most Japanese women, but it is true.

I think all Japanese women need to know the existence of this terrifying trap that leads Japanese women to such miserable situations. That is why I put this series of messages on the internet.

However, I do think most of the Zainichi Koreans in Japan, and the South Korean people, are good people. So please do not have prejudice based on ethnicity against all Korean society. But it is a fact that there are some crazy people who have done horrible, malicious and wicked things to the Japanese people, and they continue to do so. And they have no scruples about what they are doing. It is also a fact that such things have been neglected or ignored.

[Because there have been many instances of the abuse of foreign wives, the South Korean government introduced the screening of men wishing to marry them. There has been a gender imbalance in South Korea due to some couples having a preference for sons – they are more valued in the Korean neo-confucian mindset. In 2017 there were about a million fewer women than men in the 15-50 age group. This is one of the reasons for an increased demand for foreign wives, and it can present good business opportunities.]

Maybe there are some people who do not want to believe my story.

I don’t want to be hurt by heartless responses like “show the evidence!” or “don’t make up such a story!” So I will never come back here again.

Each person is free to believe or not. I cannot blame people who do not believe my experience. It has not been broadcast or well publicized by the mass media.

But anyway, let me insist again, the whole of my story is true! It is factual!!

___________________________________________

Notes

Sun Myung Moon was the founder of the Unification Church [now known as the Family Federation for World Peace], which is a South Korean based religious organization. [He claimed to be an] activist in the Korean independence movement during Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula. After the independence of Korea, he established the International Federation for Victory Over Communism against North Korea. [Moon died in September 2012.]

Kim Il Sung was the former leader of the socialist nation, the Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea). He was well known for his Red Terror with continuous blood purges to maintain his political power. Kim died in 1994.

There were Korean Comfort Women used by the Japanese military. There are testimonies and photographs, and there is a lot of evidence. However, it seems to be true that most of the recruitment of the women was done by Koreans, and there were even notices in Korean newspapers for Comfort Women (see example below).

It seems there are also fake Comfort Women seeking compensation. [There is clear documentation that Korean Comfort Women changed their testimonies over the years – and there is evidence that some were coerced to do that under threat of losing their accommodation.]

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『毎日新報』1944年10月27日付  『軍』慰安婦急募  一、行先　〇〇部隊慰安所  一、應募資格年齢十八歳以上三十歳以内身體[体]強健한者  一、募集期日　十月二十七日부러十一月八日外지  一、出發[発]日十一月十日頃  一、契約及待遇本人面談한後即時決定함 一、募集人員数十名  一、希望者左記場所에��急問議할事京城府鍾路區楽園町一九五  朝鮮旅館内  光③二六四五  （許氏）

Maeil Shinbo (Korean language newspaper, probably Seoul) Newspaper ad dated October 27, 1944 “Military” Comfort Women Urgent Recruitment Destination: Troop Comfort Station (location not decided) Employment Requirements: Age between 18 and 30; good physical health (robust body) Recruitment period: From October 27 to November 8. Departure date: Approximately November 10. Contract and Remuneration: Decided immediately after interview with individual Recruiting number: several dozen Aspirants should make urgent contact at the following location: Kyeongseong-bu, Jongro-gu, Akwon-jeong 195 [Seoul Prefecture] Inside the Joseon Inn Gwang (3) 2645 (Phone number) [Ask for] Mr. Heo 허 (name of the Korean person in charge)

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『京城日報』 “Keijo Nippo” 경성일보 Kyongsong Ilbo (Daily) newspaper. The paper was published during Japanese colonial rule. At this time (1910–1945), Seoul was called Keijo (京城); (Korean: 경성; Gyeongseong or Kyongsong, literally meaning “Capital City” in Hanja.)

京城日報』（1944年7月26日付）

慰安婦至急大募集 Comfort Women Urgently Wanted – Large Recruitment 年齢一七歳以上二三歳迄 Age: From 17 to 23. 勤先　後方〇〇隊慰安部 Place of work: Troop comfort station behind the front-line 月収　三〇〇圓[円]以上（前借三〇〇〇圓[円]迄可） Monthly income: more than 300 yen (advance borrowing of up to 3,000 yen allowed) 午前八時より午後十時迄本人来談 Individual client consultations from 8:00am to 10:00pm 京城府中* 新町四ノ二〇 Apply to: 4-20 Shinmachi, Keijo City [Seoul] 今井紹介所 Imai Agency (a private company) 電話東⑤一六一三 Telephone East: ⑤1613

These salary rates are huge. Women factory workers earned about 20-50 yen at this time.

Excerpts from Korean comfort woman Mun Ok-chu’s memoir

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The Comfort Women controversy

“About 100 Korean women were abducted by Korean prostitution brokers but were rescued by Japanese military police.”

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Cult Indoctrination through Psychological Manipulation

In one of his studies, Nishida (1994) found that recruiters offer the targets a new belief system, based on five schemas. These schemas comprise:

1. notions of self concerning one’s life purpose (Self Beliefs);

2. ideals governing the type of individual, society, and world there ought to be (Ideal Beliefs);

3. goals related to correct action on the part of individuals (Goal Beliefs);

4. notions of causality, or which laws of nature operate in the world’s history (Causality Beliefs); and

5. trust that authority will decree the criteria for right and wrong, good and evil (Authority Beliefs) represented by: ▲.

Read a series of articles HERE

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Una mujer japonesa fue reclutada por la FFPUM y luego vendida a un granjero coreano

Mujer de 20 años reclutada en Japón por la Federación de la Familia para la Paz Mundial y la Unificación / la Iglesia de la Unificación y luego fue vendida a un granjero coreano en un “matrimonio de disculpa”.

“Please search for the 6,500 women missing from the mass wedding ceremony,” victim’s families appealed.

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Dae Mo Nim (Hyo-nam Kim) poured guilt on the Japanese

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Japan gave $800 million as reparations for Korean occupation

Asia Times Online December 2005

In 1965 Japan gave $800 million as reparations for the occupation of Korea, in a combination of grants and low-interest loans. This was part of the Korea-Japan Normalization Treaty of 1965. In January 2005 details were disclosed to the Korean public for the first time.

James Card: “Declassified dossiers revealed that Seoul demanded US$364 million compensation for individuals who died, were injured or used as laborers during Japan’s 35-year occupation on the Korean peninsula. Instead, the South Korean government received $800 million, in a combination of grants and low-interest loans, as reparations from Japan.

South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee agreed that after this payment, South Korean citizens would give up their right to make individual claims against the Japanese government. What the declassified documents revealed was that Park only paid out about 2.56 billion won ($251 million) to families killed by the Japanese and 6.6 billion won to owners of destroyed property. None of the thousands of South Koreans conscripted into the Japanese military and labor workforce received compensation.

The remaining money was earmarked for nation-building construction projects. Park’s often-criticized vision of linking Seoul and Busan in the south by expressway became a reality. He poured money into developing infrastructure and heavy industry, especially his favored state-owned business, Pohang Iron & Steel, which later became Posco, one of the world’s top steelmakers.

The Japanese reparation money, along with American foreign aid, was the gratuitous seed money that bootstrapped the South Korean economy into the industrial nation of today. Arguments in the winter of 2005 revolved around the wartime victims being sacrificed for the greater good of the nation and Park’s Japanese philosophy of ‘poor people, strong state’.”

James Card is a freelance writer in South Korea.

https://www.asiatimes.com/atimes/Korea/GL23Dg02.html

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South Korean forces killed more than Japanese killed in 36 years

In about 36 months in 1948-1951 South Korean forces killed more South Koreans than the Japanese killed in the 36 years of their occupation of Korea.

There were some 1,222 probable incidents of mass execution without trial by the South Koreans in 1948-1951.

South Korea Admits Civilian Killings During War New York Times (November 26, 2009) By Choe Sang-hun

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6,500 Japanese women missing from Moon mass weddings

Questions about the 1992 Mass Wedding in Seoul

UC/FFWPU “Recruiting unmarried men and women” just one week before 1995 mass marriage

韓国よ、私の姉を返せ！！Please return my sister from Korea.

Moon: “Women have twice the sin”

Why did a Japanese UC member kill her Korean husband?

Japanese member, Ms. U, married to a Korean man who beat her

Japanese member, Ms. K, was forced to marry Korean man she did not like

Yuka Nakamura, a Unification Church member in Korea, recently took her own life

The ‘True Father’ who could not forgive: “I haven’t been able to release my grudge towards Japanese people yet.” November 2011

Moon personally extracted $500 MILLION from Japanese sisters in the fall of 1993. He demanded that 50,000 sisters attend HIS workshops on Cheju Island and each had to pay a fee of $10,000.

FFWPU / UC of Japan used members for profit, not religious purposes

“Apology marriages” made by Japanese UC members to Korean men

The Atsuko Kumon Hong “suicide / murder” of August 2013

Annexation of Korea – some facts and a song

Top Japanese ex-UC leader, Yoshikazu Soejima, interviewed

The original Japanese text is here: http://mimizun.com/log/2ch/ms/1003978299/

#Sun Myung Moon #exploitation of Japanese #FFWPU of Japan #Hak Ja Han #manipulation #Divine Principle #Unification Church

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pfenniged · 5 years

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Recommendations for Social Sciences Literature:

So as a recently graduated law student and lawyer (as well as being affected by many areas of intersectionality related below), I’ve been really into studying the social sciences and how society reflects how it treats the least of its citizens. My friend suggested that I draw up a list of recommendations for her, and share it with others as well.

While my interest in these books might begin in how to consider the perspectives of others and consolidate my own point of view when representing a client, I can safely reassure you all that these are (for the most part) layperson books that I read in my spare time; not ridiculous legal dirges that will put you to sleep. All these books were spectacularly engaging for me, and I’d recommend them highly.

I’d also like to preface this list with the fact that I educate myself on books that consider intersectionality and how the experiences of individual subsections of society affect society as a whole and an individual’s position in them. While as a result of the topics themselves these books often consider bigotry and sensitive issues/topics, they are academic considerations of societal constructs and demographics (as well as the history that grows from oppression of certain subsections of society), and attempt to be balanced academic/philosophical narratives. Therefore, while difficult topics might be broached (such as, for example, the discrimination transexual women face in being considered ‘women’), none that I have read would ever be intentionally insulting/ extremist in their views, and many are written by scholars and academics directly affected by these issues. Just research these books before purchasing them, is all I ask; for your own self-care. ♥

That being said, I have divided these recommendations into several areas of study. I will also mark when there is a decided crossover of intersectionality, for your benefit:

Feminist Theory: Mostly concerned with the limitation of womens emotions, the experience of women within Trump’s America, and the idealised liberation of women in 1960s, with a particular focus on the UK and ‘swinging’ London.

Disability Theory: Academic Ableism in post-educational facilities and within the immigration process.

Black Theory: This includes the relations between colonialism and the oppressed individual’s underneath its weight, the struggle through American’s history through ‘white rage’ towards the success of African-American success, and a sad history of racial ‘passing’ in America.

Immigration Theory: This mostly focuses on the experience of the disabled and Southern/Eastern Europeans/ Jewish people entering both Canada and the United States. It also provides this background to the immigration policies against a backdrop of social eugenics. I also included a book on the UK history of the workhouse in this category, as immigrants were often disproportionately affected by poverty once arriving in the UK/England, and often had to seek shelter in such ‘establishments.’

LGBT+ Social Theory/History: The history of transsexualism and the development of transexual rights throughout history.

Canadian Indigenous Theory/History: A history of the movements between the Indigenous peoples of North America and colonialists, as well as a two-part series on Canada’s Indian Act and Reconciliation (’Legalise’ aside in its consideration of the Indian Act, these are fantastic for the layperson to understand the effect such a document has had on the modern day issues and abuse of Indigenous people in Canada in particular, as well as how non-Indigenous people may work actively towards reconciliation in the future).

Toxic Masculinity: Angry White Men essentially tries to explain the unexplainable; namely, why there has been such a rise of the racist and sexist white American male, that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump (However, this really rings true for any ‘angry white men’ resulting from the rise of the far right across Europe and beyond). It is based on the idea of "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them by THE REST OF US~~~. While good, also just really expect to be mad (not in particular at the poor sociologist studying this and analysing this phenomenon, as he tries to be even-handed, but that such a thing exists at all).

1. Feminist Theory:

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger:

As women, we’ve been urged for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet there are so, so many legitimate reasons for us to feel angry, ranging from blatant, horrifying acts of misogyny to the subtle drip, drip drip of daily sexism that reinforces the absurdly damaging gender norms of our society. In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly argues that our anger is not only justified, it is also an active part of the solution. We are so often encouraged to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Approached with conscious intention, anger is a vital instrument, a radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power—one we can no longer abide.

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America:

Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.Featuring essays by REBECCA SOLNIT on Trump and his “misogyny army,” CHERYL STRAYED on grappling with the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss, SARAH HEPOLA on resisting the urge to drink after the election, NICOLE CHUNG on family and friends who support Trump, KATHA POLLITT on the state of reproductive rights and what we do next, JILL FILIPOVIC on Trump’s policies and the life of a young woman in West Africa, SAMANTHA IRBY on racism and living as a queer black woman in rural America, RANDA JARRAR on traveling across the country as a queer Muslim American, SARAH HOLLENBECK on Trump’s cruelty toward the disabled, MEREDITH TALUSAN on feminism and the transgender community, and SARAH JAFFE on the labor movement and active and effective resistance, among others.

(A heavy focus on intersectionality ♥)

The Feminine Revolution: 21 Ways to Ignite the Power of Your Femininity for a Brighter Life and a Better World:

Challenging old and outdated perceptions that feminine traits are weaknesses, The Feminine Revolution revisits those characteristics to show how they are powerful assets that should be embraced rather than maligned. It argues that feminine traits have been mischaracterized as weak, fragile, diminutive, and embittered for too long, and offers a call to arms to redeem them as the superpowers and gifts that they are.The authors, Amy Stanton and Catherine Connors, begin with a brief history of when-and-why these traits were defined as weaknesses, sharing opinions from iconic females including Marianne Williamson and Cindy Crawford. Then they offer a set of feminine principles that challenge current perceptions of feminine traits, while providing women new mindsets to reclaim those traits with confidence.

How Was It For You?: Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s:

The sexual revolution liberated a generation. But men most of all.

We tend to think of the 60s as a decade sprinkled with stardust: a time of space travel and utopian dreams, but above all of sexual abandonment. When the pill was introduced on the NHS in 1961 it seemed, for the first time, that women - like men - could try without buying.

But this book - by 'one of the great social historians of our time' - describes a turbulent power struggle.

Here are the voices from the battleground. Meet dollybird Mavis, debutante Kristina, Beryl who sang with the Beatles, bunny girl Patsy, Christian student Anthea, industrial campaigner Mary and countercultural Caroline. From Carnaby Street to Merseyside, from mods to rockers, from white gloves to Black is Beautiful, their stories throw an unsparing spotlight on morals, four-letter words, faith, drugs, race, bomb culture and sex.

This is a moving, shocking book about tearing up the world and starting again. It's about peace, love, psychedelia and strange pleasures, but it is also about misogyny, violation and discrimination - half a century before feminism rebranded. For out of the swamp of gropers and groupies, a movement was emerging, and discovering a new cause: equality.

The 1960s: this was where it all began. Women would never be the same again.

2. Disability Theory:

Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education:

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.

(See immigration below for another book by this author on the intersection between immigration policy and disability).

3. Black Theory:

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon:

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism:

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, the author examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide:

From the Civil War to our combustible present, and now with a new epilogue about the 2016 presidential election, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race. White Rage chronicles the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.”Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life:

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied―and often outweighed―these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

4. Immigration Theory:

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America:

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later.

Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability:

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable. This premise forms the crux of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability, a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealing how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival.

The Workhouse: The People, The Places, The Life Behind Doors:

In this fully updated and revised edition of his best-selling book, Simon Fowler takes a fresh look at the workhouse and the people who sought help from it. He looks at how the system of the Poor Law - of which the workhouse was a key part - was organized and the men and women who ran the workhouses or were employed to care for the inmates. But above all this is the moving story of the tens of thousands of children, men, women and the elderly who were forced to endure grim conditions to survive in an unfeeling world.

5. LGBT+ Social Theory/History:

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution:

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s.

Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

6. Canadian Indigenous Theory/History:

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America:

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King's critical and personal meditation on what it means to be "Indian" in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.

21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality:

Since its creation in 1876, the Indian Act has shaped, controlled, and constrained the lives and opportunities of Indigenous Peoples, and is at the root of many enduring stereotypes. Bob Joseph's book comes at a key time in the reconciliation process, when awareness from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is at a crescendo. Joseph explains how Indigenous Peoples can step out from under the Indian Act and return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance - and why doing so would result in a better country for every Canadian. He dissects the complex issues around truth and reconciliation, and clearly demonstrates why learning about the Indian Act's cruel, enduring legacy is essential for the country to move toward true reconciliation.

Indigenous Relations: Insights, Tips & Suggestions to Make Reconciliation a Reality:

A timely sequel to the bestselling 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act - and an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to work more effectively with Indigenous Peoples.

We are all treaty people. But what are the everyday impacts of treaties, and how can we effectively work toward reconciliation if we're worried our words and actions will unintentionally cause harm?

Practical and inclusive, Indigenous Relations interprets the difference between hereditary and elected leadership, and why it matters; explains the intricacies of Aboriginal Rights and Title, and the treaty process; and demonstrates the lasting impact of the Indian Act, including the barriers that Indigenous communities face and the truth behind common myths and stereotypes perpetuated since Confederation.

Indigenous Relations equips you with the necessary knowledge to respectfully avoid missteps in your work and daily life, and offers an eight-part process to help business and government work more effectively with Indigenous Peoples - benefitting workplace culture as well as the bottom line. Indigenous Relations is an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to improve their cultural competency and undo the legacy of the Indian Act.

7. Toxic Masculinity:

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era:

One of the headlines of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night four years later, when Donald Trump was announced the winner, it became clear that the white American male voter is alive and well and angry as hell. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men – from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students. In Angry White Men, he presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage.Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.

Happy reading, everyone. ♥

#ugh this took forever but you're welcome #it's actually good stuff take a look :3 #social sciences #sociology #history #literature #recommendations #feminism #disability studies #black studies #immigration theory #toxic masculinity #indigenous theory #lgbt theory #future reference #my recommendations #intersectionality

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omgktlouchheim · 7 years

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Diary of Katie Louchheim

Below are thoughts and feelings of mine that have been brought forth by current events. My expressions below are solely my own, I do not claim these experiences to be anyone else’s or claim to speak for everyone with similar backgrounds or feelings.

Pretty much since the election I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts together. I feel like I’m being torn in a million directions. I wake up every day praying that this is an episode of The Twilight Zone, or a really fucked up dream I’m having and not reality. But I know it’s real. I’ve always known it was real. Growing up Jewish in Arizona was a constant reminder of my otherness while being within the Jewish community was a constant reminder of how much we’re hated solely based on that otherness. The weird thing about never knowing what it’s like to go to your place of worship or day school without security and metal detectors, or that when school gets cut because there was a bomb threat at the JCC or a swastika tagged on one of the synagogues in town, is that these things are not normal. And yet, by the time I was a young child they were completely normalized.

Maybe it didn’t seem so bad because I’ve had a complicated relationship with my Jewish identity so siding with people who were suspect felt easier. Or because that insecurity balanced out with my white privilege. When people didn’t know my heritage, I definitely benefitted, and still mostly benefit, from that. That’s the lie of assimilation, though. There’s something off-white about living in America while having a Jewish background. (Obviously, for Jews of color it’s a whole other ballgame). Once that part of my identity was known I became “nice for a Jew” and “pretty for a Jew” but I most certainly was not nice or pretty enough to make me human enough to open up the minds of those bestowing compliments to me with their backhand. It would be me; alone, trying to toe the line between making a good and diplomatic impression while also denying a part of myself and any emotional reactions to people and instead, making sure to accommodate their feelings. I didn’t realize how small I was making myself in these situations. And how much responsibility I was shouldering that wasn’t my business to shoulder at all.

One time in high school, a bunch of us choir buddies were asked to sing at one of our friend’s churches. We went, sang a song about Jesus, nailed it (sry, too soon?) and then were forced to listen to this preacher sermonize about how non-Christian people are going to hell. At which point I turned and looked at my friend (an Iranian Zoroastrian) and we both just rolled our eyes because we were so used to this treatment by people toward us. Fucking jaded as fuck from this shit by 17 years old. I think the girl who asked us to go apologized after. I really don’t remember. At this point, and honestly since the dawn of time, apologies are not enough.

Being nice is not enough. There are no “both sides” to this equation. It’s not ok to tell people being brutalized that they need to identify or compromise with their abusers. It is not my job to hold your people accountable. Or hold your hand through your discomfort. White Christian folk, it’s yours. If I had been at that service today, I would have just gotten up and walked out. I don’t have the tolerance my younger self had for bullshit and no one’s fuckery is entitled to my time and space. It is not my job to constantly try to prove my worth to people who already believe I’m worthless and taking up space that belong to them. All I know, without a doubt, is that my life is more important than White Christian Feelings™. The lives of my friends and family and all the various communities we are members of: POC communities, LGBTQ+, immigrant, Indigenous, Muslim, etc. are more important than White Christian Feelings™. If YOU have feelings it is YOUR job to go to a therapist and work on them and not culturally appropriate the use of tiki torches by using them to throw a tantrum while waving Confederate and Nazi flags, ramming your cars through crowds of people, and beating the shit out of peaceful protestors.

I try to be a good person. I know that majorities of people in this country are also trying to be good people. But, I’m going to level with you white Christian folks. I don’t trust you. I also have a lot of resentment toward you. If you’re hurt by me saying that, I don’t care. It’s taken me a very long time to admit this. It’s taken an incredible amount of work to unpack and uncondition myself to the idea that I’m a bad person for feeling this way and for not seeing the “many sides.” But, you don’t deserve my trust. You’re not entitled to anything from anybody. Once again, YOUR problem. Tough titties, bro.

When I started seeing images of the gathering of angry white men with torches on Friday night, I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be able to participate in the onslaught of coverage of what was happening in Charlottesville, VA. I was right. The moment I opened Facebook and saw image after image and article after article of the Pasty Wasps Boys parade screaming anti-Semitic slurs, racist drivel, and throwing their arms up in Sieg Heil to Fuhrer Trump I found my breath catch in my throat. Those images turned into the countless hours of footage of the Nazis and their methodical tactics to exterminate our families shown to us every year to make sure we never forgot. The shots of piles of dead bodies found and photographed by the liberators morphed in my head from unknown members of the tribe to my parents and my siblings. Lifeless forms hanging from trees became my friends who dare to be themselves; worship who they wish to worship, love who they love, celebrating being black as fuck (Talia, I am living for you and your InstaStories right now and forever and always). It took me almost a full twenty-four hours and a hiatus from social media to get the panic attacks to stop.

Never again. Our communities make a point to pass down the atrocities we faced so we can make sure these things never happen again to anyone. Why don’t you learn what has happened to us? How is it that our heritage, which is intertwined with yours, weighs so heavily on only our hearts?

Do you not have hearts?

What exactly is wrong with you.

Here’s a collection of other things that have been swirling around in my brainhole:

- Have we past the point of no return for democracy in this country? I’m afraid of staying in this country until it’s too late. I’m afraid of leaving this country that I love and have so much hope for and not knowing if I’ll have more confidence in my survival instincts at the end of it or live with feeling like a coward for the rest of my life. Then again, some of my family made it here in time. Others were murdered and dumped in a grave they were forced to dig themselves.

-I was in Israel with my family in June and I remember I had a moment while sitting on the roof of the hotel we were staying at in Jerusalem with my dad. I remember feeling very quiet and comfortable. I thought of a conversation I had had with my aunt a few weeks prior when she had said that when she went to Israel for the first time 30 some years ago it amazed her that she was in a place where everyone was Jewish. Then, it clicked. I realized that despite the fact that Jerusalem and much of Israel is religiously diverse and that there is still a hugely unsettling political environment present there, that I was in a place where Judaism was accepted. It was a norm. I was in a place where I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone no matter what my actual beliefs, practices or lack thereof are. That’s when I thought, “Wow. This is what it must feel like to be a White Christian back home.”

- I love this country. Maybe, more accurately, I love the concept of this country. I’m a 6th generation American. Which means that my lineage has been here almost as long as this country has been the United States of America. Which also means my lineage has been oppressed while actively engaging in and benefitting from the oppression of others. Immigrants were able to come and build a life for themselves as a result of the genocide of hundreds of millions of First Nations people. My five-times great grandfather fought in the Civil War against the Union. He was not allowed to fight with his fellow southerners and instead was in a separate infantry specifically for Jews. Everything about this sucks. I can only guess that this relative was doing what he felt was right, as way to assimilate, get closer to the American Dream, I’ll never know. Here’s what I do know: The Confederacy lost, as they should have. State’s rights my ass. And failure is a good thing. Failure means things have the potential to be better. It gives us a chance to sit back, deal with our filth, and clean it out. Something this country still hasn’t done.

#BlackLivesMatter

#StopDAPL

#NoBanNoWall

#LoveisLoveisLove

#TransisBeautiful

#WomensRightsAreHumanRights

#ImmigrantsWeGetThe Job Done

#DisabledandCute

#Resist

#feminism #life stories #justice #resist

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damleon24 · 7 years

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#13 75% Mexican

Strap the fuck in, y’all. We’re about to go on a wild ride.

On Friday I had a date planned for 8 at the San Pedro Market Square in San Jose. For some background, I messaged Andria on Okcupid because her profile said she is gay and interested in writing. She told me she’s Latina, which made me confident that a “date” would be fun. I didn’t expect anything romantic, and was just looking for conversation and some company.

I showed up 15 minutes early because mami taught me that if I wasn’t 10 minutes early I was late. 5 minutes before we were meeting up I got a text from Andria, Okay so I’m actually running super late :( does 9 work for you?

I responded, I was in Salinas and drove up already, but don’t stress it. I’ll be here whenever you get here :)

I felt unbothered; I was in a particularly good mood and glad for the time to take selfies. I put up a video of me appreciating me on IG, and responded to messages from friends hyping me up. Then I sat in my car to charge my phone a bit and watch some DOTA videos.

At 8:30 she texted again to say she was there, so I went down to meet her. She got a beer (and offered me a drink), but I told her that I was good and didn’t need the alcohol. We sat down on the brick steps in the middle of the open courtyard and started talking. We bonded over both of us having ADD.

After an hour of talking about anything and everything that popped up, we decided to try to find a tall building to appreciate the Downtown View. We walked towards 3rd Street, until she stopped me and yelled, “We should go into Olla!”

Now she mispronouned ‘Olla’, and I had to ask what she was talking about. She pointed out the restaurant and I asked, “Olla Cocina?”

She looked a little embarrassed, but said, “I don’t know the first word, but the second means kitchen right?”

“It’s literally ‘Pot Kitchen’,” I laughed and we walked in.

She ordered elote, and I ordered ceviche. Once we got our food I joked, “This is the type of place that preys on white hipsters.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I could go in the hood and get 3 times the food for half the price. White folk are too scared to get the good shit though.”

She seemed defensive about my explanation and pushed me to say more. My answer insulted her sensibilities, and she asked, “What’s the difference between appreciation and appropriation anyway?”

I should have let the subject go, but I assumed that she agreed with me. She’d been very clear that she disliked Trump because she was a feminist, and that she disagreed with her parents about their hatred of Mexicans and her dating women.

Instead, I tried to answer. I told her that if the owner was Latinx, or if they employed Latinxs, that I supported them getting their cash no matter who they got it from. I continued, “It’s admirable that you want to educate people about your culture, but I’m not the person that can have ‘Devil’s Advocate’ conversations. That’s the kind of thing that white men pulled on me at Vassar way too often, and I’m tired of repeating it.”

To me, I’d made it very clear that I didn't want to continue the conversation, but she took it as a slight bump on her journey to ‘get me riled up’.

“What if someone wants to understand your culture, and they’d support you if you spent time to educate them? Like I hate Trump, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but don’t you want to spend time to understand him?”

Her riling me up worked, and I’m not sure what I said next. I know my eyes rolled so far back that mami would have slapped me, and that I was completely fucking done. I offered to pay for dinner and told her I was meeting friends to go out dancing. She invited herself to walk with me, and continued asking about educating ignorant people.

I responded, “If they want to understand there’s art like Get Out. It showed everyone else a black man’s perspective of racism.”

“Oh I didn’t watch that movie, I thought it was stupid to make fun of racism like that.” I hadn’t been surrounded by that much whiteness since dealing with blizzards in Poughkeepsie. I didn’t respond, and she continued, “Like do you remember learning about the holocaust? I was so heartbroken and wanted to write something serious about it. I should be able to if I want to support those people.”

We got to the bar and I told her, “I’m done with this conversation. I’m gonna meet my friends.”

She started crying, grabbed my hand, and said, “You can’t go! You hurt my feelings and made me feel like I’m a bad person. You have to fix this.” That level of entitlement seemed almost childlike, and I felt bad enough to agree.

“You have one minute to get some closure then I’m meeting my friends.”

“What about this did you hate?”

I hadn’t had this kind of conversation since Vassar, and never to this extent. I’d never talked to someone who pretended to care so strongly while prioritizing their own feelings above all else. I tried to explain again every single thing that I’d disliked: that she couldn’t disregard how other people presented their experiences, that I’d made it clear I didn’t want to have that conversation and she’d pushed anyway, and that her perspective came from her being perceived as a white woman (as I was often perceived as white).

She yelled, “I told you I’m 75% Mexican! You can’t ignore my identity and call me white!”

“I said other people perceive you as white, and you’re playing the victim now.”

“I am the victim here! I have such a big heart and you’re calling me out on all these things and won’t even take the time to help me grow.”

I’d told friends earlier that night that nothing could ruin my mood, but at that moment I started crying. Not because I felt bad for her, but because I was so frustrated in trying for a whole night to explain to someone that they should care about other’s feelings and ownership of their identities and failing. I felt scared because she is the type of dangerous ally that enters spaces to center themselves, and she was so good at hiding it.

I brushed the tears away, smiled, and said (honestly), “I hope you have a good night.”

She yelled back, “NO YOU DON’T!”

I joke that I don’t fuck with white people, and when I say that I’m thinking of people like Andria. They can be (75%) Mexican and gay, but if their experiences as white folk make them incapable of understanding or caring or even listening, I don’t fuck with them. Online dating makes this shit hard because most people on there are white, but I’m completely fucking done even trying.

I’d much rather be lonely than date a person that cannot understand me and my friends.

#52essays2017 #essay #personal essay #latinx #queer #dating #okcupid

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theblacktivity-blog · 7 years

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Taking The Stage

In these crazy times the ABC network special “Taking The Stage; African American Music and Stories That Changed America” was a reminder of a gallant history. It was at once a testament to the resilience of a people and in some ways, the constant invocation of that trait seem to quietly whisper to the viewers for whom it was meant: “we must begin again to prepare ourselves”. In the main, it was a Black musical tribute celebration of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and Culture. But the panning of the camera’s throughout the Kennedy Center’s mostly Black and illustrious audience, (not the least of which included takes of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama dancing harmoniously to the rhythms like college sweethearts reliving the conjured up memories brought on by the songs) gave it the air of pomp and circumstance. To a degree, it was the sort of thing that's met with a wink and a nod, in that it seemed very much like a celebratory send off to The First Couple and all that they mean to us in symbol and reality. And as each performer did the stage their justice, often times acknowledging the President and First Lady in the rafters, that love was radiated back in the form of warm appreciative smiles and what seemed like chest thumps and air daps sent telepathically...the Black way. The show opened up with a jovial Oprah Winfrey as host who exclaimed “Although I should open up the show by saying, ‘good evening everyone’, what I’d really like to say is hallelujah!”. Getting a rise out of the crowd as only Oprah can, and with the president and first lady looking on, she continued; "We’re here to celebrate, from our first days here as African Americans, we’ve left a record of how we felt and how we moved through life, from the spiritual side to the sexy side, life in all of its colors. Tonight is about music and it’s about memories and it’s about imagination and tonight is about taking the stage and changing America." What may have seemed on the surface like a typical awards show or tribute show introduction when looked at with more depth seemed more like a soft call to arms. It showed something of an acknowledgement of the days ahead and as usual, the role we as African Americans will have to play in bringing about and insuring justice. Afterwards, the performances began to roll in. Beginning with a tribute to the legendary Black opera singer Marian Anderson, Mary J. Blige performed ‘My Country Tis’ Of Thee’ as a projected background of the Lincoln Memorial served to create the ambiance of the moment Anderson made history by singing on those very steps in 1939. Following was actor Jesse Williams, with an introduction to the musical form of ‘The Blues’. Amid the receding of thunderous applause, grew the somewhat tense silence of an audience more than likely familiar in some way or another with Williams’ strident and fiery oratory, the very type displayed at the 2016 BET Awards. Among the Black faces in the crowd were white ones as well, some celebrities, some carrying an air of quiet importance, all of whom visibly appeared to be on either end of a black to white spectrum. They either seemed genuinely engaged with the words of Williams as he linked the history of ‘The Blues’ to the dark legacy of chattel slavery, or developed that reddish blush indicated when some whites anxiously await guilt (real or perceived) to be transmitted into their souls via the rhetorical barbs of the smart or “radical” Black man in-residence. The air was broken when Gary Clark Jr. performed a number in the blues tradition followed by a performance by the Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe of the lyric ‘Wade In The Water’. In the lead up to the first commercial brake was an article on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art & Culture entitled; “Bill of Sale of a slave”. It’s a record dating back to 1835, detailing the sale of a slave (more than likely a fair skinned woman) between the seller a local judge, and the buyer, both from Arkansas, right around the time when slavery was beginning to expand further westward. This intermission was timely as it highlighted the historic ills from which such a racially divided nation sprung. Then, as the show continued there was a moment of awkwardness. The type that makes one say to oneself; “And....exactly why is this?”. Dave Grohl (former drummer for the legendary band Nirvana and Foo Fighters founder and guitarist...rock renaissance man) joined the stage with legendary go-go icon Trouble Funk as a tribute to the musical form that has its origins in the nation’s capital. Granted, Grohl did grow up near the D.C. area (northern Virginia more specifically Alexandria) and may have very well been influenced by the art form, it just seemed out of place. One wonders why not UCB and Trouble Funk? That would have been appropriate and more in tune with Washington D.C.’s historic sound. Instead what happened is overbearing guitar and vocal riffs that overpowered the very percussive rhythms for which go-go is known. Whether that was a producer or network choice, who knows? In any event it had the slight air of paternalism (no fault of Grohl to be sure) that tends to occur when white America feels the need to awkwardly force itself into spaces in the name of an over-the-top proof of solidarity with Black culture. I mean all due respect to the white brothers and sisters who are really down. Let’s be clear, we appreciate those who truly are, the Black delegation fucks with you! But sometimes we would rather you refrain from messing up the beat. Post that incident, Fantasia took us down home with her rendition of Aretha Franklin’s 1967 song Dr. Feelgood. Such a performance from the North Carolina bred songstress reminded us that there is indeed a difference between singing and sangin’. Usher’s tribute to the late great James Brown left nothing to be desired as he slid, glided, and jump-split his way all over the stage in the way only he could, clad in the flyest damn black tuxedo I’ve ever seen. Then there was another awkward “huh?” moment, albeit less than the go-go performance. Actor Tom Hanks introduced the 7 surviving members of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen. Of all the tributes of the night, this one was undoubtedly the most moving as their wasn't a dry eye in the house as Hanks described the story men despised by their country for the color of their skin, even as they shot down America’s enemies abroad in record numbers. The airmen, some walking some in wheelchairs and all who looked incredibly well kept (Black don’t crack ya’ll) were then met by Fmr. General and Secretary of State Colin Powell who gave an emotional salute and greeted each man with an embrace and handshake. A moving moment indeed but also one that begged the question; “Why wasn’t Colin Powell himself slated to tell that story in addition to everything else?”. At the very least if they wanted an actor to introduce the story, why not someone like Lawrence Fishburne? After all, he was casted in the original movie about the Tuskegee Airmen circa 1995. No disrespect to Tom Hanks (one of my favorite actors by the way) but it just seemed like yet another example of that paternalistic brand of altruism. Afterwards the gorgeous Angela Basset led an introduction of tributes to singers Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Sarah Vaugh, and Nina Simone which were performed by various artist including Christina Aguilera and accompanied by jazz musician Robert Glasper on piano. At break, we were introduced to yet another artifact on display at what will henceforth called the “Black Smithsonian”, rock-n-roll founder Chuck Berry’s candy apple red 1973 Cadillac El Darado. Little was mentioned about Berry being the founder of the musical form of rock-n-roll as we know it, instead the break opted to say the he was “influential” in early rock-n-roll. I noted that, duly. The convenient avoidance of the fact the Elvis Presley stole practically every move he had from Chuck Berry....but I’ll move on. Usher graced the stage once more to give tribute to the role of Black athletes in America including a montage of Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe (Rich--what! Richmond!), Althea Gibson, Juan Carlos, Tommie Smith, and a host of others past and present. In usual form, comedian Chris Tucker took the stage to lead into what would be NeYo’s best Michael Jackson rendition. It was yet another reminder of just how big a hole that loss will always be in the world of entertainment at large and the Black community. While NeYo in true fashion did ‘The King’ much justice...it’s just not the same. P.S. The person that didn’t think to schedule the Prince tribute there after should definitely be demoted, possibly fired. The incomparable comedian Dave Chappelle, broke the seriousness of the moment as only he could with some sharp and socially observant zingers before his piece honoring the tradition and importance of Black humor. From Moms Mabley, to Dick Gregory, to Redd Foxx, to Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, the montage provided reminded us of the role of Black comedy in the analysis and coping with life in an often absurd America. Janelle Monae did her part prefacing the Motown sound that brought Black soul music to “mainstream” America. Gladys Knight was honored and how better to honor the honor the legendary soulstress than the Ms. Knight herself, leading the crowd in the classic “Midnight Train To Georgia”. John Legend followed, tapping into his inner Marvin Gaye with a rendition of “What’s Going On?” in his signature staccato voicing, as perfectly timed a song as it was when Marvin first wrote it. After a commercial break which included a commemoration of the revolutionary Nat Turner (white America’s historic candy man) in which the Bible that Turner was caught with after the Southampton, VA insurrection was explained, the Blackness continued with a tribute to the jazz art form. The legendary Herbie Hancock was introduced to the crowd by one of the coolest Black men on the planet in Samuel L. Jackson. Hancock performed the signature contortions and improvisations that make the art was it is from piano, to electronic synthesized keyboard as the crowd looked on in awe. Improvisation being a key trait of the Black experience as a whole, it was only right that jazz would be preceded by hip hop. Will Smith took the reigns by citing a Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Common cited Langston Hughes’ “I Too, Am America” Chuck D when into his legendary verse on “Fight The Power” as President Barack Obama mouthed along, and Doug E. Fresh set the proverbial “it” off when he laid as only he could the a vocal percussive that would serve as an instrumental to “The Message”. The crowd clapped and lip synched along; don’t push me/cause I’m close to the edge/I’m tryin, not to lose my head/a huh huh huh huh/it’s like a jungle sometimes/that make’s me wonder/how I keep from going under. I watched on wondering if those in the crowd (more particularly the white folks) yet understood poignancy of Melly Mel’s words after almost four decades. Arguably hip hop’s most famous bridge, this is in varying degrees, the Black experience in America summed up. Essentially a hip hop version of writer James Baldwin’s quote that; “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time”. With an inward chuckle, my inner Mr. T pitied the fools. Ending the night were actress Octavia Spencer and Stevie Wonder. Spencer played her part introducing us to that timbre, that down home sound that we know as gospel. After the pleasantries, Donnie McClurkin graced the stage joined by the legendary Howard University Gospel Choir in a performance that was so good it should’ve been followed by 1st Sunday church basement potato salad after. Thereafter Beyoncé protégés Chloe and Halle led the crowd in a soulful and vocally mature version of “There Eye Is On The Sparrow” that was certainly another check off of the list in a series of performances in which the duo should aptly be considered soul music’s generation next. Of course though, what is a tribute to gospel without the incomparable Rev. Shirley Ceasar! As she always does Ceasar the lit the stage as only a traditional down home Reverend and gospel icon can, sweat dripping from the forehead and all, as she too was joined by Howard University’s gospel choir. After catching the holy ghost like Julio Jones in one on one man coverage, the crowd welcomed none other than Stevie Wonder onto the stage. Breaking into his classic “Higher Ground” he was joined on stage by all the performers and guest as he beat the piano up like self defense. Such an ending seemed to serve as a signal to Black America at large, that this musical and cultural tribute would've been best summed up by the words of Kendrick Lamar: “we gon be alright!”.

#blacklivesmatter #blackexcellence #blackexperience #black music #wegonbealright

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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VANDANA SINGH IS a writer who straddles the boundary between the sciences and the humanities. From August to May, she devotes her time and energy to teaching physics at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, but in the summer months her attention turns to the writing of what she calls imaginative fiction. Born and raised in New Delhi before moving to the United States to pursue a PhD in particle physics, Singh’s cultural and scientific understanding of the world is woven into her narratives, the minds of her characters, and the richness of her landscapes (whether earthly or extraterrestrial). This background makes her fiction at once startling, unique, complex, and beautiful. By employing features common to genres such as magic realism, science fiction, fantasy, folklore, and myth, Singh’s fiction defies boundaries and, in that defiance, captures a vision of the world that is both far-reaching and profoundly original.

Singh uses her imaginative aesthetic to explore worlds where once dominant ideologies no longer prevail, where new mythological structures are emerging, and where seemingly settled categories such as race, gender, and even species cease to hold weight. As such, her work is about more than aliens and alternative universes: it exposes forms of alienation caused by social and political constraints. As she explains in her “Speculative Manifesto” (2009): “Reality is such a complex beast that in order to begin to comprehend it we need something larger than realistic fiction.” Singh’s fiction is indeed much larger.

Her works include the short story collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2009), along with several novellas: Of Love and Other Monsters (2007); Distances (2008), a Carl Brandon Parallax Award Winner; Infinities (2008); Sailing the Antarsa (2013); Entanglement (2014); and Of Wind and Fire (2016). Her essays and short stories, many of which are routinely featured in “Year’s Best SF” volumes, have appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. Her second short story collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, will be published by Small Beer Press in February 2018.

On April 8, 2016, at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, Singh presented a reading alongside fellow SF author Joe Haldeman at an event entitled “Imagining the Present: Science, Science Fiction, and Society.” Prior to this reading, Singh graciously agreed to sit down with me to discuss (among other things) speculative fiction, storytelling, physics, climate change, and her recent trip to the Arctic. Below is an abridged version of our conversation.

KYLIE KORSNACK: In your “Speculative Manifesto,” you write: “[S]peculative fiction is about what cannot ever be or what cannot be as yet.” Can you talk a bit more about this statement? What do you mean by this particular definition of speculative fiction?

VANDANA SINGH: I have always thought of constraints as something to push against. There are constraints that are social and constraints that are physical — laws of nature, for instance. The only thing that at least theoretically can transcend constraints and boundaries is the imagination. So, to me, the literature of the imagination is speculative fiction and it is the freest literature. Despite the fact that a lot of science fiction does have constraints and can be very short-sighted — it can repeat and not challenge certain types of norms and customs — this literature still has the potential to soar above those constraints to another space, and that is why I love speculative fiction. And the revolutionary part of it is that you can imagine a different way to be.

Now, speculative fiction is not necessarily going to tell you how you can get there. But if you can imagine it, then, in a sense, you’ve already taken the first step. If it involves violating the laws of the universe, then you will never get there, but it is going to nevertheless change you-the-writer or you-the-reader in some fundamental way. So I think that the practice of writing and reading speculative fiction, at its best, is a very freeing thing. And so that is what I was referring to when I wrote that “Speculative Manifesto.”

I really like the way you emphasized just now that both reading and writing speculative fiction gives access to its revolutionary potential. Would you say that you’re not simply trying to challenge the reader to think in a different way, but that you are also challenging yourself?

Yeah. But it is a challenge. When I write, and a lot of people probably write like this, I have a beginning or an idea or an image or a character, and it’s like I’m entering some new land and can’t really see very far into the distance. And so I follow this guide rope, and I leave the guide rope as I’m going along too, and I discover things. To me, that is the most exciting part about writing — that I don’t know what is going to happen, and I want to find out! And there is that pleasure at the end if it goes well. You have this sense of everything working out, not necessarily neatly, because real life is never neat and you want that aspect to be there — the messiness and the complexity. There is a certain satisfaction in doing that, but I do think that pretty much all of my stories are in some ways failures. Some more than others, but nevertheless, I hope they are valiant failures.

Failures? Why do you think they are failures?

Well, I’m not saying, “Oh, my work is bad.” What I’m saying is that there is such a gap between that wordless sense of where I want to be with the story and the actual story itself, you know? It used to bother me a lot, but now I just kind of know that that gap is going to be there to a greater or lesser extent. And I feel like it is better for me to try to do things and fall flat on my face or not get so far, or have this abyss between intention and reality, than to write something safe. So in that sense I think that it’s like I’m reaching for something and not quite grasping it. And maybe you never can, but I have this sense of the story as an amorphous thing in a space I cannot describe in words or pictures. But I have a sense of where the story should be and most of my stories don’t actually get to that place. So that is what I mean by my stories all being failures.

So, do you ever know how a story is going to end when you start writing?

There have a been a few stories where I have known, from the get-go, as I am writing the first paragraph, how it’s going to end and I have some idea of the middle as well. It’s almost as though the whole story has come together in a rush, and I just need to type it out. That happens rarely, but it has happened. Other than those rare instances, I generally don’t know the ending.

I came across another version of your “Speculative Manifesto,” in the introduction to your collection Breaking the Bow. In that one, you say: “Speculative fiction comes naturally to us Indians since we have a tendency to embroider, to propagate, to let the imagination run wild, and to argue incessantly.” I was curious, thinking about what you have said about speculative fiction, if you could talk more specifically about Indian speculative fiction and/or what you meant by this idea that “imaginative literature comes naturally to Indians”?

Well, you know, I can’t back it up with data, but it’s what I feel from having grown up in India and being Indian. You know, even going to the market — well, now there are more supermarkets, but you still have the neighborhood vegetable market where farmers bring produce from the fields outside the city and sell them — is such an interesting thing. I remember going with my mother to get vegetables and the witticisms that would pass back and forth. My mother would challenge the quality of the vegetables and the seller would take umbrage and it was like a drama — a script, but a very inventive one. And they would — each side — make up stories about the vegetables — something about the “beautiful conditions under which these pumpkins ripened” or other tall tales. The place is so thick with stories! It was something I didn’t realize until I lived in the United States for a long time and then went back … that you can almost pluck the stories from the air!

Even in my mother’s rendering of the Ramayana when I was a kid (I heard it from her and my paternal grandmother as I was growing up), she would interpolate, add her own descriptions, things like that. Only later I discovered from my grandfather that there were actually multiple Ramayanas, so it seemed like not just my mother but a whole bunch of other people had been doing this stuff and even going much further with it. (Breaking the Bow, which I co-edited with Anil Menon, is a volume of Ramayana tales that keeps that tradition alive in the 21st century!) A lot of Indians seem to be comfortable living in parallel with realities that are metaphoric or imaginative as well as in the so-called factual world. For instance, my mother is a very educated person but she grew up near a small village, and because of this she relates to the world through story. She would weave interrelations between people through story. Later on, though reflection, I came to realize this, and that is why I wrote what I did. It just seems to come naturally and I don’t know if I can explain it any better than that.

Do you feel that you are the same way? Do you understand the world through story?

Well, I would have said no to that question for probably many years of my life. But reflecting on that statement now, I think I have to say yes. But I didn’t know it for a long time. Being a scientist, you think, well, I’m going to look at data, I’m going to look at what it’s telling me, what nature is telling me through these numbers. Though I was never the kind of scientist who went into the field for the sole pleasure of working with data — as Einstein once loftily said, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.” (Of course, the devil is also in the details.) For me, I wanted to know what the great patterns of the universe are, which is an aesthetic longing. But at the same time, I was bound by restraints — that this is what you can say because this is what nature is telling you, but other things outside of this are speculation. But being out of academia for 10 years gave me a chance to think about things critically and to reflect on science and its role in society — science, which I love very much and yet which is so flawed in the sense that it is so easily appropriated by powerful forces, such as colonialism. There is a link between science and colonialism that cannot be denied.

My area of study was particle physics — I studied the physics of quarks, but I have always been interested in language and in the nonhuman too. And so, later on, I realized that what I sought, even in the sciences, was stories. But it was stories of neutrons and protons or planets or whatever. And the stories had constraints because they were being translated through human mechanisms, and because of physical laws. Nevertheless, they were stories, and they weren’t any less interesting than stories about human beings. Later on, I realized why, even though I love a lot of mainstream literature, it doesn’t fully engage me and why I can never write it — because it is so divorced from the nonhuman. So, I got a sense of science as stories we are trying to interpret, stories that matter is telling us, filtered through our particular human/cultural lenses.

I think that, in the act of reading, one creates a kind of world that is neither the writer’s world nor the reader’s world, but a hybrid. And similarly, I think that when we interpret what nature is telling us, it is kind of a hybrid world that we make between humans and matter or humans and other species. That is when I realized that it has been all about stories after all. Which was a bit of a pleasant shock. Now, my thing is: “Hey, all stories are important! Not just human stories!”

Did this realization that science too is made up of stories change the way you teach your science classes at all?

Yeah, totally. It was a very delightful thing to think about — that we are trying to interpret nature’s stories. Particularly for the non-science majors in my physics classes, I think this is a way that engages them, but also other students as well. Now, every couple of weeks or so, they have to tell me physics stories. I’ll ask them: “So, what did the world tell you that has to do with physics?” And we will talk about it in class for a bit. It is a lot of fun.

That is really neat. And it feeds into another question I had. I’m really interested in the relationship between your scientific work and your literary work. In a past interview, you stated that, “Physics and literature are to me are like breathing and eating. I need them both to be alive, and in a sense they give me a sort of binocular vision of the world.” I can see from your last answer that part of this has to do with your interest in stories that thread through them both, but is there anything else that you see connecting these two domains — physics and literature — for you?

Yeah, there is one other thing: in science, traditionally (and we have to remember that science is still evolving, so what we call science now is not necessarily going to be what science is later on), if you think about its origins with Newton and Descartes, the reductionist idea of a clockwork universe, we are still deeply influenced by that vision today. It gave birth to the industrial revolution and all the “-isms,” political and economic, that we know now. But then we also have the great revolutions in physics — relativity and quantum mechanics and so on — which are telling us that things aren’t quite that way. The universe is actually not a clockwork machine; in fact, it is non-Newtonian. So, who knows what science is going to become in the future?

In that regard, one of things that has always bothered me is how scientists keep talking about objectivity. I get that you don’t want your own biases to affect your experiments or your conclusions, but how can you be objective when you are studying the universe and you are part of the universe? There is a limit to what we can mean by objectivity. It can only be temporary and contextual. In fact, this fetish for objectivity is almost becoming an excuse not to talk about the ethical implications of scientific developments. It is as though, when you are doing science, you cannot participate in the universe. You have to artificially remove yourself and say, “Hey! I am here, and this thing I am studying is over there.” Which makes it easier to think of it as separate from you, a thing you can study in a disinterested way.

Instead, I think the scientist should say, “Hey! I am part of the universe and this is part of the universe!” And we are just going to inquire into it, befriend it, and see what happens. There is still a humility involved — you don’t want to let your feelings or desires or biases distort your perception or throw you off track — but I believe scientific inquiry is more like a dance than a distancing. For me, I feel that the place where you can really be a participant observer in the universe is in science fiction or speculative fiction. Here, you are dancing with the ideas of science, but you are also engaged with what it means to be human and alive. So that is another aspect of my life in science, which has taken some strange turns.

I don’t do particle physics research anymore and haven’t for a long time because I took 10 years off from academia. You can’t easily go back to research in that field because it is growing so fast. But what I do now is a lot of research on the pedagogy of science — creative and critical pedagogy — and I’m also shifting toward talking about climate change, studying the science and pedagogy of climate change through an interdisciplinary lens. This is one of the things where the interlocking of various systems is so important that you can’t look at it from a reductionist perspective. So I’m hoping to go into that area more and more.

Speaking of your emerging interest in climate change, you took a trip to the Arctic not too long ago. Did that trip change your perspective in any way? Did it impact your desire to continue teaching yourself about climate change or your interest in climate fiction?

Yes, very much so. I went to the Arctic in 2014 when I was on sabbatical. I received a program award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities to create a case-study-based project for undergraduate education, so I picked climate change. I wanted to situate the study in a place where change is occurring most dramatically, and so the Arctic seemed a logical choice. I went to Alaska. I visited two or three places there. The most dramatic place I visited was Barrow, right at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Firstly, it changed me just seeing a place that is so different from where I grew up and so different from anywhere else that I’d been. I think place changes us if we let it. It speaks to us. And the experience was so incredible that I’m still processing it now.

But also, the people who live there are the Iñupiaq Eskimos; they’ve lived there for thousands of years; they’ve adapted to modern lifestyles while retaining some of their traditions, such as whaling. They are actually among the more well-off Native peoples in Alaska because they are able to get money from oil leases. Thinking about their experiences, I realized how complicated the whole climate situation is — not just the physics of it, but how human beings interact with the climate and with the economic system. And I realized how important visions and voices of indigenous peoples are to us. I’m not trying to revive some noble-savage stereotype here because obviously there are many indigenous cultures and even within indigenous cultures there are many different ways of thinking. For example, I found that in some communities people were divided about offshore oil drilling. But still, I think that the alternate paradigms indigenous peoples give us, especially at a time when it seems literally true that we are looking at our own potential extinction, are very important. Some of the papers I read when I was at the University of Alaska Fairbanks were scientific papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, co-authored by Native elders who had not received a formal education. They were the result of decades of scientists and elders working together, of scientists realizing these people have something really important to give.

One of the things I’m really interested in now is looking at India and how traditional knowledge systems — the knowledge of the so-called tribal or indigenous peoples — might inform our own worldviews as we face the climate issue. This sort of engagement has been a big and very exciting new thing for me. I’ve always been curious about indigenous cultures, but my Arctic trip made me really, really interested. I’m following right now the fortunes of a tribe in northeast India. I just talked to a journalist-activist who has been working with them, and he emphasized how the development policies that are occurring in India are basically colonialist in nature even though it’s the Indian government that’s doing it. He said it is driving the people to ruination. This particular tribe just won a Supreme Court case against a mining company after a long and bitter fight. They didn’t want to have development the way it is generally defined. They said, “We know what it is like in the cities. We’ve gone there. We see how you live. We don’t want to live like that.” But, you know, if you look at how modern culture has crushed our imaginations, people can’t even think of an alternative. They’d rather think of the collapse of humanity than imagine an alternative. Which is why I like imaginative fiction so much, because it is about alternatives.

Kylie Korsnack is a PhD candidate in English at Vanderbilt University. She studies contemporary literature, speculative fiction, and digital pedagogy.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years

Text

Japanese woman recruited and sold by FFWPU to Korean farmer

Updated February 22, 2018

▲ Seoul, South Korea, August 14, 2012: Japanese members of the Unification Church bow as an act of apology for the wartime Korean sex slaves conducted by the Japanese military.

Liberation Day in Korea falls on August 15. It is the anniversary celebration of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. This rally was held the day before.

A 20-year-old woman, recruited by the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification / Unification Church in Japan, was sold to an older Korean farmer in an “apology marriage”.

PLEASE RETURN MY SISTER WHO IS IN SOUTH KOREA

1. Ms. Nameless Posted: 01/10/25 ID:FFmOrZXZ

I want to write about my experience here as my serious warning to all Japanese women. Please note, everything I write about from this point is true!!

My elder sister, who was bright and pretty, got involved with a Korean woman and developed an interest in the country of South Korea.

Then she was taken away to South Korea where she became a virtual slave.

You might say “You are so silly!” But this story is true. The tricks used are surprisingly clever, and thousands of Japanese women have already been taken away to South Korea through this scheme.

It all started three years ago.

I was shocked by the story, but at the same time it sounded “exaggerated” to me – so I got suspicious.

3. Then my sister said, “I want to go to Korea to apologize to the Korean people in the Korean language”.

I did not think it was necessary for her to go, but on the other hand I thought it was good to make international friends. I didn’t take it seriously enough.

We were desperate. We tried to stop her, but she swore at us angrily saying, “You people are all devils who want to insult the Messiah and South Korea which will lead the world!” We were horrified at the change in her. I cried, together with my parents.We were desperate and tried to stop her, but she swore at us angrily saying, “You people are all devils who want to insult the Messiah and South Korea which lead the world!” We were horrified at the change in her. I cried, together with my parents.

▲ A poster promoting Japanese women available for marriage. It was affixed in a South Korean farming village. Marriages were then officiated by Sun Myung Moon in a mass marriage held in Seoul. Translation of the poster (Korean on the left and Japanese on the right):

True Marriage to a Japanese Woman

Nonprofit community service organization: Registration No. 1300

♥ Junior college or higher educational background ♥ Healthy body and mind ♥ For a young man who has stable employment (around 30 years old)

(Previously married men and women, now single, must be aged 60 or less)

Ideal spouse with a chaste sense of values. We will match you up.

True Family Practice in conjunction with ◯◯ Committee

Consultation phone Counselor / Consultation Staff

4. Suddenly, my sister decided to participate in a mass wedding ceremony in Seoul and so finally she left our home.

I said, “The founder of Unification Church is Sun Myung Moon; he’s really weird, isn’t he?”

My comment made her so upset.

“What did you say?!” She yelled like mad, spitting out her words, her face red with anger.

Although she had hidden this fact, she was indeed a member of the Unification Church!

My family was so sad, we all cried for a while after my sister left home. We all worried about her circumstances.

週刊ポスト　No.20 2010（H22) 年6月4日号 [雑誌]

Shukan Post No.20 2010 (H22) June 4 issue [magazine]

〈衝撃リポート〉〈Shocking Report〉

韓国農民にあてがわれた統一教会・合同結婚式日本人妻の「SEX地獄」見知らぬ土地での生活、貧困、差別に「故郷に帰りたい……」と

▲ Japanese wives “SEX Hell” – they were appointed to Korean farmers (in a Unification Church mass wedding ceremony)

見知らぬ土地での生活、貧困、差別に「故郷に帰りたい……」と living in an unfamiliar land; poverty; discrimination “I want to return home …”

統一教会の日本人花嫁数千人が韓国農民に宛われた

Thousands of Japanese Unification Church brides allotted to South Korean farmers.

北海道大学教授らの徹底調査で判明した戦慄の真実

The striking reality discovered through an in-depth investigation by professors from Hokkaido University

▲ The matching – Mr. Sun Myung Moon decides couples. [Hak Ja Han is standing beside him.]

On the left is a poster promoting Japanese women for marriage. It was found shortly before a Unification Church “Korea-Japan” mass wedding which was held in Seoul. The Korean men had to pay $thousands to get a Japanese bride. It was often a family investment, so the women’s passports were taken, and other measures, to prevent them from escaping. A United Nations report highlighted the cultural problems of these marriages. A substantial number of which ended in divorce. One main reason divorces were granted when requested by the women, was the fact of the FFWPU coercion the Japanese women had experienced to offer themselves in “apology to Korea marriages”. LINK

5. Mr. A. took me to the address which was written in my sister’s letters. It was in the Korean countryside.

Mr. A. and I talked together with the poor family for a while.

I thought it was impolite of me to do so, but I gently challenged their marriage, and asked my sister to return to Japan.

This made me so angry. I really wanted to kill him – but in this situation, I had to silently endure his comments for the sake of my sister’s safety. My sister also said, “the Japanese people must make amends to the Korean people.” She said she was working from morning to night. Listening to the family’s conversation, Mr. A. whispered in my ear, “it seems she is almost a slave”.

6. There was nothing I could do for her, so I returned to Japan. On the way to the Seoul airport, Mr. A. explained many things to me. For example, he said there was a strange group of Japanese women in Seoul – all Unification Church members – who worked all day from early in the morning. Those women often joined demonstrations and performances against Japan, or were perhaps forced to join in such activities.

A crude beggar-like young man arrived.

Needless to say I really hated this Korean guy.

One day, he yelled at my mother. “The sauce for dipping the tempura is too bland! You’re stingy! Are you trying to belittle your precious guest?!”

I was reaching to the limit of my patience. I seriously thought about putting something like pesticide into his drink.

I felt he was always looking at me in a strange way.

One night, the man sneaked into my room and tried to rape me, covering my mouth with his hand. I screamed and scratched his face. He beat me with all his strength.

This made my father furious and he drove the man out of our house. Finally I could be reassured.

8. One day Mr. A., the student who was in Seoul, sent me some surprising information. The following is a summary of what he sent.

9. After the rapprochement between Sun-Myung Moon and Kim Il-Sung in 1992, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan came to be involved in activities concerning the comfort women issue, and many North Korean “fake comfort women” appeared one after another. They circulated stories to the international community, such as “the Japanese soldiers cut off the comfort women’s heads with swords, and made soup with the heads which they then made us drink”.

Then what is the reason why the Unification Church fabricated the “sex slave issue”? The reasons are complex.

_____________

Secondly, they wanted to brainwash more Japanese women to set them up for “human trafficking”. In the Japanese women’s minds they planted the consciousness that the guilt [or shame of Japan] should be expiated, or atoned for. They believed that being in the same situation as the comfort women could be compensation.

When I heard this story I was stunned.

I also heard from another person who was with Mr. A, that 辛淑玉 Tsura Yoshi-dama [Shin Sugo], had a relationship with the Unification Church and she delivered lectures to Unification Church-affiliated organizations.

[ 辛淑玉, Shin Sugo, worked for the International Network to Overcome Hate Speech and Racism. She is a third generation Zainichi Korean. ]

I came to think I could not trust Zainichi Koreans.

Apparently the Unification Church believers, the General Association of Korean Residents, and human rights campaigners in Japan were all in one crony gang.

The reality is that they are despicable people who continue activities to prepare and induce Japanese women to become the slaves of Koreans – all behind a mask of justice!

I simply want to ask why Japanese TV stations do not report the fact that Japanese women are victims like this? Why is this so?

Right at this moment, many Japanese women are brainwashed by this bad Korean religion and sold to Korea to be enslaved for their whole lives.

I want my sister back!

11. Now, I will finish my story about the miserable experience of my family.

I think our experience is hard to believe for most Japanese women, but it is true.

I think all Japanese women need to know the existence of this terrifying trap that leads Japanese women to such miserable situations. That is why I put this series of messages on the internet.

However, I do think most of the Zainichi Koreans in Japan and the South Korean people are good people. So please do not have an ethnic prejudice against all Korean society. But it is a fact that there are some crazy people who have done horrible, malicious and wicked things against the Japanese people, and they continue to do so. And they have no scruples about what they are doing. It is also a fact that such actions have been neglected or ignored.

Maybe there are some people who do not want to believe my story.

I don’t want to be hurt by heartless responses like “show the evidence!” or “don’t make up a story!” So I will never come back here again.

Each person is free to believe or not. I cannot blame people who do not believe my experience. It has not been broadcast or well publicized by the mass media.

But anyway, let me insist again, the whole of my story is true! It is a fact!!

Notes

Cult Indoctrination through Psychological Manipulation

In one of his studies, Nishida (1994) found that recruiters offer the targets a new belief system, based on five schemas. These schemas comprise:

1. notions of self concerning one’s life purpose (Self Beliefs);

2. ideals governing the type of individual, society, and world there ought to be (Ideal Beliefs);

3. goals related to correct action on the part of individuals (Goal Beliefs);

4. notions of causality, or which laws of nature operate in the world’s history (Causality Beliefs); and

5. trust that authority will decree the criteria for right and wrong, good and evil (Authority Beliefs) represented by: ▲.

Content analysis of the group’s dogma showed that its recruitment process restructures the target’s belief-system, replacing former values with new ones advocated by the group, based on the above schemas.

Abelson (1986) argues that beliefs are metaphorically similar to possessions. He posits that we collect whatever beliefs appeal to us, as if working in a room where we arrange our favorite furniture and objects. He proposes that we transform our beliefs into a new cognitive system of neural connections, which may be regarded as the tools for decision making.

Just as favorite tools are often placed in the central part of a room, or in a harmonious place, it appears that highly valued beliefs are located for easy access in cognitive processing. Meanwhile, much as worn-out tools are often hidden from sight in corners or storerooms, less-valued beliefs are relocated where they cannot be easily accessed for cognitive processing. Individual changes in belief are illustrated with the replacement of a piece of the furniture while a complete belief-system change is represented as exchanging all of one’s furniture and goods, and even the design and color of our room. The belief-system change, such as occurs during the recruitment and indoctrination process, is metaphorically represented in Figure 1 (below), starting with a functional room with its hierarchy of furniture or tools, and progressing through the stages of recruitment and indoctrination to the point at which the functional room has been replaced by a new set of furniture and tools that represent the altered belief system.

Step 0. The Figure shows the five schemas as a set of the thought tools that potential recruits hold prior to their contact with the group.

Step 1. Governed by their trust in authority, targets undergoing indoctrination remain naive about the actual group name, its true purpose, and the dogma that is meant to radically transform the belief system they have held until their contact with the group. At this stage of psychological manipulation, because most Japanese are likely to guard against religious solicitation, the recruiter puts on a good face. The recruiter approaches the targets with an especially warm greeting and assesses their vulnerabilities in order to confound them.

Step 2. While the new ideals and goals are quite appealing to targets, their confidence level in the new notions of causality also rises; some residual beliefs may remain at this stage.

The targets must be indoctrinated in isolation so that they remain unaware that the dogma they are absorbing is a part of cult recruitment. Thus isolated, they cannot sustain their own residual beliefs through observing the other targets; the indoctrination environment tolerates no social reality (Festinger 1954). The goal for this stage is for the targets to learn the dogma by heart and embrace it as their new belief, even if it might seem strange or incomprehensible.

Read full article HERE

“Please search for the 6,500 women missing from the mass wedding ceremony,” victim’s families appealed.

THE COMFORT WOMEN: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan

by C. Sarah Soh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 384 pp., $25 (paper) ISBN: 978-0226767772

This book was written by a professor of anthropology at San Francisco State University. It confirms some of the above points.

Overall, this is a brave and impressive book that usefully complicates and adds layers to our understanding of a sordid system.

Review of this book

Korean newspaper advertized for Comfort Women!

Kim Tŏk-chin was recruited by Koreans at 17

Kim Tŏk-chin was recruited by a Korean man. She was also transported to Japan by a Korean couple, and then taken on to China to work in a brothel as a ‘comfort woman’ which was managed by the same Korean couple.

The Japanese military were concerned about the criminal methods used by Korean “comfort women” recruiters and brokers.

Below is a notice to Japanese military commanders in China concerning Comfort Women.

Dated March 4, 1938.

Title: “Matters regarding recruitment at military comfort station”

[list of signatories]

To: Army Chief Generals of the troops in northern China and of the expeditionary force in central China

When brokers recruited comfort women for the establishment of brothels during Sino-Japanese war, there were more than a few infamous cases to which we need to pay attention: the case of some brokers using the authority of the Japanese military for their recruitment, as the result, they ruined the credibility of the Japanese military, which led to a misunderstanding of ordinary people, the case that some brokers used an unruly method of recruiting through embedded journalists and visitors, causing social problems, the case that some brokers were arrested and placed under investigation because their recruiting method was similar to kidnapping. From now, as regards the recruitment of comfort women, the expeditionary force must properly choose and control brokers who recruit comfort women. Also, it is necessary to cooperate with the military police and law enforcement authorities. To keep the prestige of Japanese military, and to consider social problems, take careful note without omission.

March 4, 1938

Japan gave $800 million as reparations for Korean occupation

Asia Times Online December 2005

South Korean forces killed more than Japanese killed in 36 years

In about 36 months in 1948-1951 South Korean forces killed more South Koreans than the Japanese killed in the 36 years of their occupation of the country. There were some 1,222 probable incidents of mass execution without trial by the South Koreans.

South Korea Admits Civilian Killings During War New York Times (November 26, 2009) By Choe Sang-hun

韓国よ、私の姉を返せ！！Please return my sister from Korea.

The Comfort Women controversy

Moon: “Women have twice the sin”

Yuka Nakamura, a Unification Church member in Korea, recently took her own life

Why did a Japanese UC member kill her Korean husband?

The ‘True Father’ who could not forgive: “I haven’t been able to release my grudge towards Japanese people yet.” November 2011

Moon personally extracted $500 MILLION from Japanese sisters in the fall of 1993. He demanded that 50,000 sisters attend HIS workshops on Cheju Island and each had to pay a fee of $10,000.

Former Korean Comfort Woman Mun Oku-chu’s Memoir

What Is Behind South Korea’s Criticism On Comfort Women Issue

Annexation of Korea – some facts and a song

Dae Mo Nim (Hyo-nam Kim) poured guilt on the Japanese

Hyo-nam Kim used the story of the Korean comfort women to manipulate the Japanese members. She used fear, guilt and shame to trap the Japanese members. However, she used a very distorted Korean version of events.

Human trafficking in the FFWPU / Unification Church is despicable. Here is one Filipina’s story of her slavery in the US at the hands of Korean leaders.

Israel Houghton, Yolanda Adams, Hezekiah Walker, Noel Jones and A. Curtis Farrow are supporting the FFWPU which sold girls into slavery

Una mujer japonesa fue reclutada por la FFPUM y luego vendida a un granjero coreano

韓国よ、私の姉を返せ！！

#Comfort women #human trafficking #FFWPU #Hak Ja Han #Sun Myung Moon #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification #mass marriage

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