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newsfrom-theworld · 5 months

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BRANDS TO BOYCOTT

1 Consumer boycott goals:

Let's start by boycotting these brands that are directly involved in Israeli apartheid

'' BIG THREE''

Mc Donald: gives free meals to Israeli soldiers

Disney ( sadly, Disney was my childhood): declared support for Israel by pledging $2 million

Starbucks: sued his union over its pro-Palestine positions

Siemens

Siemens (Germany) is the prime contractor of the Euro-Asia Interconnector, an Israel-EU undersea power cable that is expected to connect illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories to Europe. Siemens brand appliances are sold all over the world.

PUMA

PUMA (Germany) sponsors the Israel Football Federation, which governs teams in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Carrefour

Carrefour (France) is a facilitator of genocide. Carrefour-Israel supported Israeli soldiers who took part in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with gifts of personal parcels. In 2022 it entered into a partnership with the Israeli company Electra Consumer Products and its subsidiary Yenot Bitan, both of which were involved in serious violations against the Palestinian people.

AXA

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the insurance giant AXA (France) took targeted measures against it. Yet as Israel, a 75-year-old regime of colonialism and apartheid, wages a genocidal war on Gaza, AXA continues to invest in Israeli banks that finance war crimes and the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources.

Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc)

HP Inc (USA) provides services to the offices of the genocide leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Smotrich.

SodaStream

SodaStream is actively complicit in Israel's policy of displacing Israel's indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens in the Naqab (Negev) and has a long history of racial discrimination against Palestinian workers.

Ahava cosmetics

Ahava have their production site, visitor center and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories.

D/MAX

RE/MAX (USA) markets and sells property in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, thus enabling Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank.

2 Divestment objectives:

Elbit Systems

Elbit Systems is the largest apartheid Israeli arms company. It “field tests” its weapons against the Palestinians, including in Israel's ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. In addition to building killer drones, Elbit produces surveillance technology for the apartheid wall, checkpoints and fence in Gaza, enabling apartheid. The US and EU use Elbit technology to militarize their borders, violating the rights of refugees and indigenous peoples.

HD Hyundai/Volvo/CAT/JCB machinery

by HD Hyundai (South Korea), Volvo (Sweden/China), CAT (United States) and JCB (United Kingdom) have been used by Israel in the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians through the destruction of their homes, farms and commercial activities, as well as the construction of illegal settlements on stolen land, a war crime under international law.

Barclays

Barclays Bank (UK) holds more than £1 billion in shares and provides more than £3 billion in loans and subscriptions to nine companies whose weapons, components and military technology have been used in Israel's armed violence against Palestinians.

CAF

The Basque transport company CAF builds and provides maintenance services to the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), a tram line serving illegal Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. The CAF benefits from Israel's war crimes on stolen Palestinian lands.

Chevron

The US fossil fuel multinational Chevron is the main international company extracting gas claimed by Israeli apartheid in the eastern Mediterranean. Chevron generates billions in revenue, bolstering Israel's war chest and apartheid system and exacerbating the climate crisis.

HikVision

Amnesty International has documented high-resolution CCTV cameras made by Chinese company Hikvision installed in residential areas and mounted on Israeli military infrastructure for surveillance of Palestinians. Some of these models, according to Hikvision marketing, can connect to external facial recognition software.

TKH Security

Amnesty International has identified cameras from the Dutch company TKH Security used by Israel for surveillance of Palestinians. TKH supplies the Israeli police with surveillance technology used to enforce apartheid.

Other brands:

Zara

Zara's latest marketing campaign uses corpses in plastic wrapping, and warzone aesthetics, mocking the genocide by israel in Gaza. In a previous incident Joey Schwebel, a Canadian-Israeli dual national and chairman of israel's Zara franchisee Trimera, hosted the convicted terrorist Itamar Ben-Gvir at his home in the lead-up to the Israeli elections. Zara did not made a statement distancing themselves from this association and allowed this ad campaign to run.

Adidas

Adidas uses isr@eli manufacturer, Delta Galil, to manufacture its underwear range.

Prada:

Prada Beauty is a partnership with L'Oreal, which is a 'warm friend of Isr@el'.

Louis Vuitton:

The owner of Louis Vuitton's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Dior:

The owner of Dior's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Caterpillar:

Caterpillar bulldozers have been used in the demolition of Palestinian homes. The D9 bulldozer was specifically designed for the IOF.

American Eagle:

American Eagle posted an image of the Isr@eli Flag on their flagship billboard in Times Square showing their support for the apartheid state.

Fenty Beauty by Rihanna:

The owner of Fenty's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Eurovision:

Eurovision is allowing israel to compete this year despite the genocide theyre comitting and they will use this opportunity to spread propaganda

Donna Italia

Sources:

BDS

this site

this specifical post on Twitter ( X )

if i discover news brands i will edit the post

And Always

Free Palestine, now and always.

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daloy-politsey · 27 days

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It’s so weird when people are like “Israelis are not from Palestine” as if that is the problem and not that Israel is a settler colony committing genocide. Like, are you saying that it would be okay if Zionists built an ethnostate in Europe and committed genocide there?

#genocide mention

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septembriseur · 4 months

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The other day I was talking to a friend who's a Muslim activist, and I made the connection between Amitav Ghosh's analysis of the climate crisis and my feelings about the genocide in Gaza and, more broadly, to the enforcement and regulation of inequality in our current moment. Ghosh refers to the way that we are living in the climate crisis as "the great derangement." There is a kind of collective madness, he argues, in the fact that we all know that climate change is happening and why it is happening and that every day we contribute to it happening, and yet at the same time climate change appears almost nowhere in our culture. We don't talk about it. We don't engage with it. Engaging it with would mean acknowledging that the premises on which our society is built are false and unsustainable. And the genocide in Gaza functions in a similar way: we know that it is happening and yet we don't talk about it or engage with it because it exposes the falseness and unsustainability of the premises of our society (premises that in this case include human rights).

I think that a lot of the things that Ghosh says illuminate how these two derangements are actually the same derangement, the derangement of what people in the environmental humanities have started calling the plantationocene. This has to do with a world ecology that sustains a hegemonic elite (and Eurocentric) modernity through the breakdown and (re)circulation of everything that is deemed to belong to the non- or subhuman. The world of the plantationocene is one that has always been defined by the ability of hegemonic power to treat both ("sub")human and nonhuman populations as interchangeable resources that can be deployed whenever and wherever they are most profitable to hegemonic powers: vide the relocation of African slaves and South Asian laborers, the disastrous ecological reshapings of colonized territories to better produce an elite European modernity.

To challenge what is happening in Gaza requires a challenge to several key principles of this world: that hegemonic elite modernity (which Israel has always formed a part of, as one can easily see by glancing at attempts to define the "Global North") has the right to regulate populations as it sees fit; that this regulation of populations is right because the sub-/nonhuman does not possess an unquantifiable wholeness that can be damaged or destroyed through civil destruction and forced relocation (i.e. it makes no difference to resettle indigenous peoples of the Americas or to transport South Asian laborers to islands halfway around the world, because their interchangeability means that nothing important is lost in the process— no more than transporting a plant to a different continent entails a loss or damage to the plant or botanical world); that the sub-/nonhuman exists as a resource to fuel, produce, and sustain hegemonic elite modernity, and can be simply wiped out if it becomes inconvenient or counterproductive to that modernity.

If you start to pursue these ideas, you realize that the genocide in Gaza is enmeshed in the "border crisis" and "refugee crisis" in Europe and the U.S.; you realize that all of these are enmeshed in your ability to walk into a superstore and purchase cheap consumer goods produced and assembled under inhuman conditions; it is enmeshed in everything you touch. And it becomes so overwhelming that you simply do not know how to think about it, because the suffering and the culpability for the suffering become so vast.

But we cannot let ourselves perpetuate this derangement. We have to look straight at the fact that it is absolutely insane that Gaza is no longer even the top headline on news sites. It is absolutely insane that Americans and Europeans (and even some Israelis!) can walk around and go through their days and not think about it at all. It is absolutely insane that we know what is happening and don't act. And I think that a lot of what Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement about the nature of contemporary politics explains why we don't act— but we have to live in the dissonance and tension of how absolutely insane it is that we don't act. We can't let the derangement trap us inside of it.

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gingerofsuburbia · 3 months

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BDS Consumer Boycott Targets

Everything here is copied over from the BDS website.

Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc)

HP Inc (US) provides services to the offices of genocide leaders, Israeli PM Netanyahu and Financial Minister Smotrich. HPE, which shares the same brand, provides technology for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, a pillar of its apartheid regime.

Chevron (including Caltex and Texaco)

US fossil fuel multinational Chevron is the main corporation extracting gas claimed by apartheid Israel in the East Mediterranean. Chevron generates billions in revenues, strengthening Israel’s war chest and apartheid system, exacerbating the climate crisis and Gaza siege, and is complicit in depriving the Palestinian people of their right to sovereignty over their natural resources. Chevron has thousands of retail gas stations around the world under the Chevron, Caltex, and Texaco brand names.

Siemens

Siemens (Germany) is the main contractor for the Euro-Asia Interconnector, an Israel-EU submarine electricity cable that is planned to connect Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory to Europe. Siemens-branded electrical appliances are sold globally.

PUMA

Since 2018, we have called for a boycott of PUMA (Germany) due to its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA), which governs teams in Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. In a major BDS win in December 2023, PUMA leaked news to the media that it will not be renewing its IFA contract when it expires in December 2024. Until then, it is still complicit, so we continue to #BoycottPUMA until it finally ends its complicity in apartheid.

Carrefour

Carrefour (France) is a genocide enabler. Carrefour-Israel has supported Israeli soldiers partaking in the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with gifts of personal packages. In 2022, it entered a partnership with the Israeli company Electra Consumer Products and its subsidiary Yenot Bitan, both of which are involved in grave violations against the Palestinian people.

AXA

Insurance giant AXA (France) invests in Israeli banks financing war crimes and the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources. When Russia invaded Ukraine, AXA took targeted measures against it. Yet, Axa has taken no action against Israel, a 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, despite its ongoing genocidal war on Gaza.

SodaStream

SodaStream is an Israeli company that is actively complicit in Israel's policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of present-day Israel in the Naqab (Negev) and has a long history of racial discrimination against Palestinian workers.

Ahava

Ahava cosmetics is an Israeli company that has its production site, visitor center, and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory.

RE/MAX

RE/MAX (US) markets and sells property in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, thus enabling Israel’s colonization of the occupied West Bank.

Israeli produce in your supermarkets

Boycott produce from Israel in your supermarket and demand their removal from shelves. Beyond being part of a trade that fuels Israel’s apartheid economy, Israeli fruits, vegetables, and wines misleadingly labeled as “Product of Israel” often include products of illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Israeli companies do not distinguish between the two, and neither should consumers.

Non-BDS Grassroots Boycotts:

McDonald’s (US), Burger King (US), Papa John’s (US), Pizza Hut (US), WIX (Israel), etc. are now being targeted in some countries by grassroots organic boycott campaigns, not initiated by the BDS movement. BDS supports these boycott campaigns because these companies, or their branches or franchisees in Israel, have openly supported apartheid Israel and/or provided generous in-kind donations to the Israeli military amid the current genocide. If these grassroots campaigns are not already organically active in your area, we suggest focusing your energies on our strategic campaigns above.

Recently, McDonald’s franchisee in Malaysia has filed a SLAPP lawsuit against solidarity activists, claiming defamation. Instead of holding the Israel franchisee to account for supporting genocide, we are now witnessing corporate bullying against activists. For both these reasons, we are calling to escalate the boycott of McDonald’s until the parent company takes action and ends the complicity of the brand.

Remember, all Israeli banks and virtually all Israeli companies are complicit to some degree in Israel’s system of occupation and apartheid, and hundreds of international corporations and banks are also deeply complicit. We focus our boycotts on a small number of companies and products for maximum impact.

#palestine #gaza strip #bds #global strike week #free palestine

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morlock-holmes · 4 months

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Gonna try to Steel-man the whole “ Star-dew valley is satisfying an inherently conservative fantasy” as someone who sort of agrees but not strongly and doesn’t care particularly much

The game is fundamentally around the idea of a single person ( and eventually there spouse), managing a substantial plot of agricultural land they have private control over alone, I can’t underestimate how /unusual/ this is as a mechanism of food production, typically pre-industrial societies functioned with a large patch of agricultural land that was managed communally by the entire village, the area of which in practice probably was owned by some lord, but who wasn’t really involved , this was particularly true in rice based societies where the gains to be made via working together to terraform the landscape for irrigation were greatest, but It was the norm in say, wheat based midevil Europe as well, the Idea of a “ Family farm”, of a quaint small, but substantially large, plot of land managed and controlled and privately owned by a single family for agriculture , Is an incredibly Recent and American phenomena, one only possible do to low population densities in the areas being colonized via mass genocide of native Americans, and they’re being a-lot of “ Terra Nulius” to divvy up into chunks, The Idea of The Homestead or Family farm is very heavily tied To American Imperialism And Genocide

( Ugh tumblr deleted this part: anyway It’s not directly related but I had an aside about how this method of agriculture can’t take advantage of economies of scale and is incredibly inefficient and impractical, which is part of why it has gradually been replaced with fewer larger industrial scale farms, that can have the same economies of scale the old village-farms did( and though automation has done a-lot for some crops like corn, for others like cucumbers they are heavily reliant on mass manual labor of many migrants, so for these sort of crops we have sort of moved back to the older “ lord owns a-lot of land, many laborers work together to tend it” (except these people are generally migrants traveling between different farms and not involved in decision making of how to farm) ( I also sort of suspect if American farmers in the late 18/early 1900’s were working together over larger areas of the landscape to irrigate and manage the land, the dustbowl would have not been as bad as it was, with individual farmers trying to maximize production in an individuals tiny chunks of land with basically no control over where the water goes)

Moving on from the innate connection of Family Farms to American imperialism and genocide, we can talk about the role/fantasy of the rural homestead in American patriotism and About the romanticization of rural life in general across conservative/fascist regimes in many countries in contrast to the more multicultural/ formally-educated /liberal cities, or we can talk about conservative doomsday preppers and the myth of individual self-sufficiency, and how the privately owned family-farm plays into that,

or switching subject matters a bit, how a game centered around the farming of livestock and the buying/selling of them and their products reinforces ideas of some sentient beings as less-then/commodities/existing to serve, especially with the humane-washing of these situations as happy or mutually beneficial that erases the existence of such creatures before humans and the innate violence of their subjugation.

There are premises here that I do not agree with.

First: The idea that since America was built on genocide of Native Americans, any fantasy rooted in American culture or norms is necessarily a fantasy of indulging in genocide.

That American small farms were built on genocide of native Americans does not demonstrate that the idea of a small family farm can exist only in such a case.

Like, flip it around, would you find it convincing if I argued that any fantasy of collective land ownership "sucked" because such things can only happen in communist countries, and therefore invoked the purges of Stalin and Mao?

This attitude would seem to rule out any fantasy rooted in actually existing society as inherently right-wing on the grounds that all existing earth societies have built themselves on atrocities.

Second, Preppers are right-wing, preppers believe in self-sufficiency, therefore fantasies of self-sufficiency are inherently right-wing.

I don't buy that thinking.

Preppers presumably fantasize about having sex with attractive people or falling in love; this does not make such fantasies inherently right-wing.

I get the to me disturbing sensation that certain people believe all fantasies of power or control to be right-wing. I find that disturbing, to be honest; individual control, the ability to make certain decisions even in the face of opposition from others, is a very important thing for people. I don't trust a political philosophy which only allows collective decision-making.

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000marie198 · 1 month

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Building port for 'delivering supplies cuz other methods aren't working' is a lie.

The other methods aren't working cuz they aren't allowed to work by the same ones who claim they're not working.

Air drops are out over the sea and contain food that is either not Halal or practically inedible, trucks have been denied entry and distribution for months, what gets through is used as bait to kill starving people risking their neck to get supplies for their dying families.

Port for supplies is a lie

Port is for a clear trade route, it's the root cause of this genocide being permitted by USA and European nations to begin with.

Remember The New Middle East plan?

That is what the so called 'Port' is for. It is not for the supplies, that is just what they will say to hide the history, like they always had. History lies. I suspect that they plan to use the records of their own news channels and papers to appoint it a reliable truth. Don't let them hide, don't let them forget.

Archive everything, from Zionists videos and news and claims and their propaganda to all that is delivered out of Palestine by the mujahid press reporters. Everything

We know the port is a lie. Keep the truth alive, don't let those who are complicit and like to pat themselves on the back to cover their guilt with falsifications forget what they played a part in. Whether it be politicians of USA or Europe or those of the rich Arab countries, whether it be news channels or those who play neutral.

The port is being build with rubble and corpses, stained with blood. It will never be clear from the curse and wrath of what it's being built upon

#palestine #gaza #israel #west bank #free palestine #free gaza #end occupation

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thats-very-like-a-whale · 6 months

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I’ve seen the word “Zionism” thrown around lot in the past few days, with very very few people actually understanding what it means. I've seen it used as a synonym for “Jews” by neo-Nazis, as a synonym for “support of Israel” by people who are anti-Israel, and as a synonym for “support of the occupation” by people who have no idea what they're talking about. So here's a bit about the history of Zionism so none of you have an excuse to use it as a fucking buzzword to mean whatever you want.

Zionism is an ideology that originated in the 19th century that aspired to build a national homeland for the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael, which was historically the home of the Jewish people, dating back to at least the 11th century B.C.E. during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, there were several waves of Aliyah to Ottoman- and then British-occupied Eretz Yisrael, otherwise known as Palestine. These Aliyot were comprised of Zionist Jews from Eastern Europe, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Yemen and other Arab nations, escaping persecution, pogroms and rising antisemitism.

In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, affirming that the Jewish people have the right to return to Palestine and build a Jewish homeland. The new Jewish Olim (immigrants who have made Aliyah), labeled “HaYishuv HaChadash” (“The New Yishuv”) joined HaYishuv HaYashan (“The Old Yishuv”), the Jewish communities who were already living in Palestine, to form the Yishuv - the collective name for the Jewish community living in Palestine before the formation of Israel. They built kibbutzim and developed agriculture, forming the basis of what would become the State of Israel.

During WWI - parallel to the Balfour Declaration - the British made another, contradictory, promise to recognize the foundation of an independent Arab state in the area of the Levant. Both promises were not motivated by any goodwill on the side of the British, as they hardly intended to fulfill either promise, but by the benefit that the Arab and Jewish communities could provide the British during the war.

The British Empire conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in WWI, and, under the League of Nations, controlled the region for nearly thirty years under the British Mandate. Despite their commitment under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine to control the territory until its inhabitants are able to govern themselves, the British were far more committed on their own colonialist interests and aspirations in the area than they were to finding a solution to the growing Jewish-Arab crisis that resulted in several waves of violence against the Yishuv, during which hundreds of Jews were killed.

In the years 1933 until 1945, during the Holocaust, the Nazis committed the largest genocide in human history, murdering six million European Jews - two-thirds of the European Jewish population, one-third of the worldwide Jewish population.

During WWII, approximately 1.5 million Jews drafted and served in the Allied armies against the Nazis. The British Army even formed the Jewish Brigade in 1944 - a brigade built of Yishuv Jews from Mandatory Palestine.

The Holocaust of the Jewish people brought renewed interest and support to the Zionist movement aspiring to build a homeland for the Jewish people. In 1947, the United Nations formed UNSCOP (the United Nations Special Committee On Palestine), to find a long-term solution for the crisis in Palestine. UNSCOP recommended a two-state solution through the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, a partition plan that laid out the borders of two future nations - a Jewish state, and a Palestinian state. The Yishuv leadership accepted this partition plan, while the Palestinian leadership rejected it.

On November 29th, 1947 - a date known in Israel as Kaf-Tet BeNovember - the UN General Assembly voted in favor of UNSCOP’s partition plan, with the British Mandate set to be terminated in mid-May of 1948. The next day, on November 30th, various Palestinian militant groups and terror organizations began a war against the Yishuv. The Yishuv leadership responded to the wave of terror with restraint, only using military force to defend villages and yishuvim being attacked without using active offensive military action, until March 1948, labeled Black March in Israel. In early April 1948, the Yishuv launched a counteroffensive, which continued until the declaration of independence.

Israel declared its independence on May 14th, 1948, according to UN Resolution 181. Immediately with its founding, it faced a five-front invasion by Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, a war for its every existence. Israel won the war in 1949, ending with borders slightly larger than the UNSCOP Partition Plan, but having lost 6,000 lives - almost 1% of its population. Egypt remained occupying the Gaza Strip, and Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Since then - when the Jewish people, against all odds, founded a Jewish nation in Palestine and won an existential war against five fully-fledged armies - the meaning of the word “Zionism” moved on from meaning “the aspiration to found a Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael” to “believing in Israel’s right to exist”. Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has faced existential threats many times over. It is by no means perfect - and has, in fact, committed many atrocities and crimes against humanity since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, which I will hopefully write a full post about in a few days - but the meaning of Zionism is simple. You don't have to support Israel, but it has the fundamental right to exist.

So being critical of Israel and being against its government does not make you an anti-Zionist, nor does it make you an antisemite. But being against the existence of Israel and fundamentally believing it has no right to exist is anti-Zionism, and it does make you antisemitic. Because it means you believe in forcing the Jewish people to assimilate outside of Israel, or in forcing them back to countries from where they fled persecution to face pogroms and antisemitic violence in silence.

So consider your terminology before you use it, and please, please, please do research before you spread misinformation about the war in Israel now.

#israel #zionism #jumblr #palestine #war #1948 palestine war #israel palestine conflict #ישראלבלר #ישרבלר #ישראבלר #cw terrorism #cw war

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pattern-recognition · 7 months

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re:the brutalism post, what do you mean when you say "the landscape" of the US? My interpretation is that you're talking in terms of literal landmass and how populations are dispersed, so I'm confused about why that'd present a more significant barrier to successful socialist organizing in the US than it did in other, larger countries like China or Russia that have seen successful large-scale socialist/communist movements. I don't mean this as a gotcha - I really don't feel that I'm educated enough to know why it might be notably different in the US.

Where i was going with that post before it evolved into a discourse about brutalism, which i never really intended, was towards the atomization of American social life. More so than any aesthetics of architecture form and what they mean, I was motioning towards the ways in which the built landscape in the US is specifically designed to isolate people, dehumanize them, and make living as hard as possible for people without the privileges of wealth. The most obvious example is the homelessness crisis and car based infrastructure. it’s true that there are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people, but even then those homes are of the most deleterious type, even compared to other capitalist nations like Francs, Britain, etc. American zoning laws, in most cities, eschew affordable high-rise apartment buildings for single family, two story at most, housing that forces people into having a vested interest, wether they like it or not, in capitalist real-estate speculation through mortgages and whatnot. The phenomenon of suburbia in the United Stated was specifically an anti-communist one and heavily parallels the Wehrbauer system in Nazi Germany. The latter, should it have come to fruition fallowing Gerneralplan Ost (the mass genocide of all eastern european peoples and subsequent resettlement of eastern europe by Germanic colonizers) would have been structured around a system of semi self reliant small business owners and peasants (and I use this word in the Marxian sense, as in small land owners in control of their own means of production) who would act as a bulwark against both physical reprisals by freedom fighters (the Wehrbauers were intended to be heavily armed) as well as an ideological one because communities where everyone is a petit bourgeois would be resistant to Marxist agitation. The parallels to contemporary American suburbs, as well as the settlement and colonization of the west through manifest destiny, should be obvious.

#splittheeadam #there are many many more examples but i hope this one suffices

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sailor-rowling · 1 month

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No, JK Rowling is not a Holocaust denier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#jk rowling #j.k. rowling

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galerymod · 2 months

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The crisis of the world - 1933 and 2023

Thomas Weber

Memorise content

What does 1933 teach us? If we understand National Socialism as a form of illiberal democracy, we can see that today's variants could easily slide into something worse. Then as now, exaggerated perceptions of crisis play an important role.

In times when several major crises are brewing into what is perceived as an existential poly-crisis, fears of the political consequences of this perception spread. The most spectacular case of the collapse of a democracy - the collapse of the Weimar Republic in January 1933 - is therefore repeatedly scrutinised in the hope of discovering lessons for the present.

A prime example of this in recent years is what has been happening in the United States: since the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen greeted his readers with "Welcome to Weimar America" in December 2015, "Weimerica" has developed into a veritable genre of opinion pieces and books. After the attack on the Capitol in Washington in January 2021, the son of an Austrian SA man also used his fame as a Hollywood actor and former governor of the US state of California to record a video message to the world: In it, Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke about his father and drew direct comparisons between the Reichspogromnacht, the Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom of 9 November 1938, and the situation in the US in early 2021. to resolve the footnote[3]

It is therefore not surprising that Adolf Hitler is more dominant in public discourse today than he was a generation ago. Between 1995 and 2018, the frequency with which Hitler was mentioned in English-language books rose by an astonishing 55 per cent. In Spanish-language books, the frequency even increased by more than 210 per cent in the same period. To break up the footnote[4] This increase is a result of both a growing perception of crisis and another phenomenon: an awareness of how much the world we live in today can be traced back directly and indirectly to the horrors of the "Third Reich" and the Second World War.

But the world that emerged in 1933 is not invoked everywhere in order to understand and interpret today's situation. Strangely enough, one country in the heart of Europe has taken a different direction: Germany itself. Here, the frequency with which Hitler was mentioned in books fell by more than two thirds between 1995 and 2018. The same trend applies to other terms that refer to the darkest chapter of Germany's past, such as "National Socialism" and "Auschwitz". To resolve the footnote[5] However, a declining interest in National Socialism should not lead to the false assumption that today's Germany is less strongly characterised by the legacy of the "Third Reich" and the horror that the Germans spread throughout Europe. The legacy of National Socialism defines who the Germans are, and has done so since the day Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor in January 1933.

New "special path"

In Germany, there was probably not so much explicit publicity about National Socialism because it was believed that the country had learnt from the past and built an exemplary political system with a corresponding society that had internalised the lessons of National Socialism. The prevailing narrative of the early Berlin Republic was that Germany had taken a "special path" towards dictatorship and genocide in the 19th and early 20th centuries. With reunification in 1990, however, the country had finally left this path and had fully arrived in the West. To resolve the footnote[6] According to this interpretation, the Berlin Republic was a new player in international politics, working side by side with its partners in Europe and the world to secure peace and stability at home and abroad.

However, the varying frequency with which Hitler, Auschwitz and National Socialism are referred to in books in Germany and abroad shows that Germany did not abandon its special path in 1990, but rather embarked on a new one. Germany's actual special path is that of its second (post-war) republic, which was founded in 1990 and, if one follows the argumentation of journalist and historian Nils Minkmar, collapsed in the wake of Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine. Germany's second republic, writes Minkmar, "took a holiday from history, was finally able to enjoy the moment like Faust and, also like Faust, made a pact - with Putin and with bad consequences". To resolve the footnote[7] However, Germany's holiday from history came to an abrupt end with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In the words of Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz: "24 February 2022 marks a turning point in the history of our continent." To resolve the footnote[8] Scholz is right when he speaks of a turning point, but it does not primarily concern "our continent", but first and foremost his own country. The Russian invasion of Ukraine made many Germans suddenly aware of the realities of international politics that had been present to Germany's neighbours for some time.

The Faustian pact was not born of malice - Germany's second republic had been founded and governed with the best of intentions. Rather, a certain short-sightedness had prevailed that prevented many Germans from seeing what many of their international partners had long recognised after Russia's previous invasions or the shooting down of MH17 - the Malaysia Airlines plane that was shot down by a Russian missile in Ukrainian airspace on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in July 2014. And this short-sightedness is closely linked to the normative conclusions that the protagonists of the Second German Republic had drawn from the country's experience with National Socialism, which differed quite drastically from those drawn by other countries.

As a result, many Germans relied on soft power and had little interest in hard power - without realising that the former is just hot air if it is not accompanied by the latter. At the same time, many failed to recognise that Putin's aggressive approach since the day he took office was in line with earlier phases of Russian history. This is also reflected in a sharp decline in references in German-language publications to terms associated with the dark side of Russia's past, such as "Gulag", "Stalin", "Prague Spring" or "popular uprising". Dissolving the footnote[9] In English-language books, the number of mentions of the terms "Stalin" and "Prague Spring" remained relatively constant between 1995 and 2018, while mentions of the "Gulag" actually increased significantly. Resolution of the footnote[10]

The illusions that were harboured in Germany ultimately stood in the way of both even more successful European integration and the creation of an even more durable security and peace architecture. Minkmar therefore believes that a third republic must emerge from the ruins of the second: one that takes a less short-sighted view of the world around it and leaves behind the "naivety" of thinking about the world. To resolve the footnote[11] It is therefore necessary to work out lessons from the "Third Reich" for the third republic.

Historical misunderstandings

However, the myopic view of the past is not limited to Germany. In fact, many of the lessons learnt worldwide from 1933 for crisis management in the 2020s are based on historical misunderstandings. For example, although there are countless books about the "Third Reich" and its horrors, in many cases, and without realising it, they reproduce clichés dating back to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, or they portray Hitler and the National Socialists only as madmen driven by hatred, racism and anti-Semitism. However, such approaches will never understand why so many supporters of National Socialism saw themselves as idealists. And they will not be able to explain why, according to Hitler, reason, not emotion, should determine the actions of National Socialism. On the resolution of the footnote[12]

A reductionist approach to the question of what characterised Hitler and other National Socialists is dangerous. It tempts us to look for false warning signs in today's world and to search for Hitler revenants and National Socialists in the wrong places. We are therefore recommended to read Thomas Mann's essay "Brother Hitler" from 1938, in which he portrays the dictator as a product of the same traditions in which he himself had grown up. In doing so, he opens our eyes to the realisation that it is not the angry crybabies, but above all people "like us" who are open to dismantling democracy in times of crisis. In fact, as soon as we take the ideas of the National Socialists seriously, it becomes disturbingly clear that many people supported these policies in the period from the 1920s to the 1940s for almost the same reasons that we so vehemently reject National Socialism today - not least the conviction that political legitimacy should come from the people and that equality is an ideal worth fighting for.

It is therefore important to dispel various misconceptions about the death of democracy in 1933 that are still taught in German schools today, including the idea that the seeds of Weimar's self-destruction were sown as early as 1919, that the "unstable Weimar constitution (.... ) ultimately led to the self-dissolution of the first German democracy", that "coalitions capable of governing [became] impossible because there were too many splinter parties", On the dissolution of the footnote[13] that the rise of Hitler resulted from the strength of the German conservatives, that the world economic crisis played the decisive role in the death of German democracy, that Germans supported the National Socialists, because they longed for the return of the authoritarian state of the past and rejected democracy in any form, or that the actions of the National Socialists did little to bring Hitler to power - which is evident, for example, in the tendency to speak only of a "transfer of power" in relation to the events of 1933 and not of a process that was both a "transfer of power" and a "seizure of power". On the resolution of the footnote[14]

The beliefs of the National Socialists and the appeal of their ideas cannot be understood if we do not take seriously the central apparent contradictions at the core of National Socialism, namely that the National Socialists destroyed democracy and socialism in the name of overcoming an all-encompassing, existential mega-crisis and creating a supposedly better and truer democracy and socialism. The National Socialists preached that all power must come from the people, not out of insincere and opportunistic Machiavellianism, but because they believed it. The promise of a National Socialist illiberal "people's community democracy" as a collectivist and marginalising concept of self-determination was widely accepted and promised to overcome what was supposedly the greatest crisis in centuries. This made 1933 possible and ultimately brought the world to the gates of hell.

So if we understand National Socialism as a manifestation of illiberal democracy, we see that today's variants of illiberal democracy could very easily slide into something much worse in times of crisis than we are currently experiencing in many places around the world. If we refrain from a reductionist account of National Socialism, we will recognise that the parallels between the present and the past lie primarily in the dangers posed by illiberal democracy and the general perception of crisis.

Furthermore, if we understand National Socialism as a political religion, we can understand why Germans followed its siren song en masse. Hitler's political religion demanded a double commitment from converts: firstly, to National Socialist orthodoxy - adherence to 'correct' beliefs and the practice of rituals - and secondly, to National Socialist orthopraxy - the 'ethical' behaviour prescribed by orthodoxy. In this way, acts of violence and war against internal and external "enemies of the people" were given a moral and even heroic significance - because they supposedly served a "higher" purpose, the good of one's own "national community". The belief systems of National Socialism are therefore inextricably linked to the violence and horrors of the "Third Reich". In other words, while it may well be true that liberal democracy brings with it a "peace dividend", illiberal democracy - at least in its totalitarian, messianic incarnations - can easily generate a "genocide and war dividend" if people believe they can overcome an existential crisis in this way.

Just as the National Socialist mindset should be taken seriously as a key driver of violent and extreme behaviour, the National Socialists themselves should also be understood as political actors with a clear plan for the future. Although it often looked as if they were merely reacting to others, it was precisely this reactive character of National Socialist behaviour that was a tactic - and a very successful one at that - that explains not only the developments in 1933, but also the dynamics of twelve years of Nazi rule. The path from the seizure of power to the settlement policy in the East, to total war and to a war policy of extermination and genocide was by no means long and tortuous - in the self-perception of its actors, it was the path to overcoming an existential polycrisis.

What does 1933 teach us?

The way in which the National Socialists succeeded in seizing and consolidating power and ultimately pursuing radical policies has more in common with the cunning of Frank Underwood, the fictional US president from the Netflix series "House of Cards", than with many of the portrayals that question whether their rise was coolly calculated. The political style and the illusion game of the National Socialists, the undermining and destruction of norms and institutions as well as the pursuit of a hidden agenda are increasingly becoming characteristics of politics in our time as well. Understanding the year 1933 should therefore help us to better understand today's challenges.

We therefore need a defensive democracy with strong guard rails in order to be able to counter the perception of an existential polycrisis. This includes strong party-political organisations that - unlike in daydreams of the transformation of parties into "movements" - prevent the internal takeover by radicals. Crucially, strong party structures also provide a toolkit to deal with polarised societies by both representing and containing divisions. The behaviour of conservative parties is particularly important here. German conservatism played a central role in the fall of Weimar democracy, but in a counter-intuitive way, not through its strength but through its weakness and the fragmentation of its organisations.

However, guard rails offer little or no protection if they are poorly positioned. Thus, a look beyond Germany reveals that in trying to make our own democracy weatherproof and crisis-resistant, we may have more to learn from cases where democracy survived in 1933 than from the death of democracy in Germany. The Netherlands, for example, had established a resilient political structure, or a defencible democracy avant la lettre, capable of dealing with a wide range of shocks to its system and responding flexibly to crises. As a result, the Dutch did not need to anticipate the specific threats of 1933, as their crisis prevention and response capacities were large enough to avoid the establishment of a domestic dictatorship. The comparison also shows that some supposed guard rails of today's democracy in Germany - such as the five per cent hurdle in elections - are largely useless and only appear to offer security.

The problem of looking at specific cases of the collapse of democracy, including the German case in 1933, harbours a danger: that the most important variables are insufficiently recognised and too narrow conclusions are drawn. The exact historical context of the collapse of a political order will always vary, as will the perception of an existential polycrisis and its political consequences. It therefore makes sense to identify states and societies from the past that were resilient to the widest possible range of shocks. Or as historian Niall Ferguson puts it: "All we can learn from history is how to build social and political structures that are at least resilient and at best antifragile (...), and how to resist the siren voices that propose totalitarian rule or world government as necessary for the protection of our unfortunate species and our vulnerable world." To resolve the footnote[15]

Nevertheless, the fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933 is a warning of where uncontained perceptions of crisis can lead. After all, it was Hitler's polycrisis consciousness and the associated individual and collective existential fear that formed the core of the emergence of Hitler's political and genocidal anti-Semitism. Added to this was the identification of the Jews with this crisis and the implementation of this identification in a programme of total solutions in order to "protect" themselves permanently. To resolve the footnote[16]

Perhaps the most important warning that the past century holds for us is that the biggest and most terrible crises in the world only arise when we try to contain real or perceived crises headlessly and without moderation. To resolve the footnote[17]

This article is a revised extract from Thomas Weber (ed.), Als die Demokratie starb. Die Machtergreifung der Nationalsozialisten - Geschichte und Gegenwart, Freiburg/Br. 2022.

Footnotes

On the mention of the footnote [1]

Roger Cohen, Trump's Weimar America, 14 Dec 2015, External link:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/opinion/weimar-america.html.

For the mention of the footnote [2]

Niall Ferguson, "Weimar America"? The Trump Show Is No Cabaret, 6 Sept. 2020, External link:http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/weimar-america-the-trump-show-is-no-cabaret/2020/09/06/adbb62ca-f041-11ea-8025-5d3489768ac8_story.html.

On the mention of the footnote [3]

Cf. Thomas Weber, Trump Is Not a Fascist. But That Didn't Make Him Any Less Dangerous to Our Democracy, 24.1.2021, external link:https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/24/opinions/trump-fascism-misguided-comparison-weber/index.html.

On the mention of the footnote [4]

Cf. Google N-gram analyses for "Hitler" and "Auschwitz" in English and Spanish, created on 10 August 2022: External link:https://t1p.de/ngramspanish and External link:https://t1p.de/ngramenglish.

For the mention of the footnote [5]

Cf. Google N-gram analyses for "Hitler", "Auschwitz" and "National Socialism" in German, created on 10 January 2022: External link:https://t1p.de/ngramgerman.

On the mention of the footnote [6]

Cf. Heidi Tworek/Thomas Weber, Das Märchen vom Schicksalstag, 8 November 2014, External link:http://www.faz.net/13253194.html.

On the mention of the footnote [7]

Nils Minkmar, Long live the Third Republic, 10 May 2022, External link:http://www.sueddeutsche.de/projekte/artikel/kultur/e195647.

Mention of the footnote [8]

Government statement by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, 27 February 2022, External link:http://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/suche/regierungserklaerung-von-bundeskanzler-olaf-scholz-am-27-februar-2022-2008356.

Mention of the footnote [9]

Cf. Google N-gram analyses for "Stalin", "Gulag", "Prager Frühling" and "Volksaufstand" in German, created on 10 August 2022: External link:https://t1p.de/ngramstalingerman and External link:https://t1p.de/ngramgulagpfvgerman.

For the mention of the footnote [10]

Cf. Google N-gram analyses for "Stalin", "Gulag" and "Prague Spring" in English, created on 10 August 2022: External link:https://t1p.de/ngramstalinenglish and External link:https://t1p.de/ngramgulagpsenglish.

On the mention of the footnote [11]

See Minkmar (note 7).

On the mention of the footnote [12]

In his first known written anti-Semitic statement - the so-called Gemlich letter of 1919 - Hitler rejected "anti-Semitism on purely emotional grounds" and advocated an "anti-Semitism of reason". Cf. Hitler to Adolf Gemlich, 16 September 1919, reproduced in: German Historical Institute Washington DC, German History in Documents and Images, n.d., external link:https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/deu/NAZI_HITLER_ANTISEMITISM1_DEU.pdf.

On the mention of the footnote [13]

Cf. Fabio Schwabe, Gründe für das Scheitern der Weimarer Republik, 12 March 2021, external link:http://www.geschichte-abitur.de/weimarer-republik/gruende-fuer-das-scheitern.

On the mention of the footnote [14]

Cf. Hans-Jürgen Lendzian (ed.), Zeiten und Menschen. Geschichte, Qualifikationsphase Oberstufe Nordrhein-Westfalen, Braunschweig 2019, pp. 237-264; Ulrich Baumgärtner et al. (eds.), Horizonte. Geschichte Qualifikationsphase, Sekundarstufe II Nordrhein-Westfalen, Braunschweig 2015, pp. 242-270.

On the mention of the footnote [15]

Niall Ferguson, Doom. The Politics of Catastrophe, London 2022, p. 17, own translation.

On the mention of the footnote [16]

Cf. Thomas Weber, Germany in Crisis. Hitler's Antisemitism as a Function of Existential Anxiety and a Quest for Sustainable Security, in: Antisemitism Studies (n.d.).

On the mention of the footnote [17]

Cf. Beatrice de Graaf, Crisis!, Amsterdam 2022.

#Creative Commons Licence #CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DE #Thomas Weber #bpb.de #Germany 1933 #weimar #weimar America #stop violence #stop trump #save our democracy #vote democrat #vote blue #please vote #Weimerica #Roger Cohen #read more

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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To what extent were the nations of ancient and medieval Europe just as malicious, cruel, genocidal, and/or otherwise evil as their post-1492 era counterparts?

Genocide, as both an actual physical practice and a semantic concept/political strategy is, in my view, a decidedly post-Columbian notion. It first got going and had an immensely complex legal, military, religious, and cultural framework built to justify it, after the "discovery" of the Americas in 1492. Before that, kings and rulers obviously did kill and mistreat political enemies, sometimes in large numbers and for ideological purposes, but I wouldn't argue that it was done with the same overall aims (or indeed, sheer multi-level/multi-national complexity that requires modern infrastructure) as modern genocide. People sometimes try to argue that the crusades (1095-1291) were genocide, which I disagree with. The primary aim was the capture of territory, not the extermination of people and culture, and that designation obscures the complicated and reciprocal Christian-Muslim contacts, conflicts, and political/diplomatic relations that took place at all levels and involved substantial exchanges apart from just the battlefield. That is the "a bad thing can be bad without affixing every bad buzzword to it" fact that Tumblr often struggles with; the crusades were Bad and involved people of different beliefs killing each other, therefore they must be Genocide! However, war -- even religious war -- and outright genocide are two different things. You can condemn the crusades for what they were without also arbitrarily making them every other bad thing in history too.

This is why it always drives me crazy when people insist on describing every act of violence or seemingly indiscriminate killing/torture as "medieval." First, it separates out the "medieval" as a category which is somehow always inferior to modernity by its very nature, and second, it resists any realization that modernity has invented some things that are much worse than they were in the premodern era, simply because technology and the development of mass/industrialized murder became so much easier. There is nothing comparable to WWI, the Holocaust, and other mass-casualty events of the twentieth and twenty-first century, which we have become able to produce and rattle off at a scale simply unheard-of by medieval technological or geographical capability. I saw someone the other day describe the action of BOMBING A TRAIN STATION (in the Ukraine war) as "medieval." How, I ask you, is using a bomb (a modern weapon) to attack a train station (an institution not invented until the 19th century for a mode of transportation likewise that became current in the 19th century), in a modern war stemming from modern reasons, MEDIEVAL? It is just a catch-all term for "violence that we like to think ourselves too good to inflict, while ignoring all the violence we have endlessly inflicted, so we act like it has no place in this century, while using more and more of it in even more sophisticated ways."

Whenever I point this out, I usually get people crying that MEDIEVAL TIMES WERE BAD TOO!! as if I somehow don't know that, or otherwise trying to justify, partition away, or excuse the existence and targets of modern violence, because they're uncomfortable with examining its ultimate roots and justifications. When it comes to this fact, the modern world is not peaceful or pacifist or free of violence or morally superior to the medieval world in any way; indeed, if anything, it's become overwhelmingly reliant on the military-industrial complex (another thing that has no meaningful medieval analogue) to solve its problems. This isn't to say that no violence or war or murder existed in the medieval world, as it obviously did! That should not be controversial! But genocide, colonialism, imperialism, and other such wide-scale and deliberate destruction of people's ways of life, culture, language, political system, collective memory, etc, simply are not medieval phenomena. They are early modern, modern, AND postmodern. But because we are so used to lazily affixing "medieval" to every practice that is bad from a modern liberal perspective, we don't see that, understand it, or take steps to coherently confront it in our own up-to-the-minute systems, institutions, and leaders.

#blackcur-rants #ask #history #medieval history #modern history

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