#prosecute some of the nazi's. that he could only move on from the war when he could see it through to the very end. his war was finally ove | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bloodynereid · 2 months

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Zodiac Suite

pairing: robert 'rosie' rosenthal x fem! reader

tw: mentions of war, alcohol drinking, mentions of smoking, a whole lot of fluff

description: when rosie finds someone who loves jazz just as much as him.

a/n: ok so this was a complete and utter self indulgent fic because i am obsessed with mary lou williams and im now headcanoning the fact that rosie also loves her. SO some random little research details that i found really cool: mary lou williams first performed 'zodiac suite' in 1945, the café society was a real place from 1938-48 and it was located in new york, mary lou williams used to perform a lot there (there's a whole lot of pictures online if anyone's interested) AND a little tidbit i found about real life rosie is that he went back to europe to prosecute the nazis after the war! isn't he really cool??? oh and this is all based off the tv show character, not the actual person. and i would recommend listening to the album (it's free on spotify + youtube) while reading if you can.

Rosie felt right at home at the busy night club, the smoke from many lit cigarettes and the scotch rushing through his veins combined with the dulcet tones of jazz almost made him forget that he had been at war just a few months ago.

Settling back into civilian life hadn’t been the easiest but times like these made him feel like he was okay again. Café Society was a place he used to go to quite a lot before the war, just to take in the ambience and have a stiff drink. Now it had become his refuge once again, tonight one of his favorite pianists was performing.

Mary Lou Williams was an absolute genius and her work didn’t just sound good, it sounded great. She was in the middle of performing her Zodiac Suite, one of the things that made Rosie feel like he had done his job right, because if music, art, could continue undisturbed by those Nazi bastards then it was all worth it.

“God, she’s incredible isn’t she?” A voice from next to brought him out of his reverie, making Rosie turn to the sound of that beautiful voice. A woman was standing next to him with a dazed smile on her face, she looked completely entranced in the music. Rosie was sure he had been mirroring her expression exactly just a few moments ago.

“She really is.” Rosie said, his attention now completely on you. The sound of his voice had you jumping and turning to look at him, it was now obvious you hadn’t meant to say that outloud as you looked a little scandalized.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry for disturbing you, sometimes I get too lost in the music and… well I seem to lose control of my mouth.” You utter the last phrase with a slightly nervous laugh and a few stuttered words but Rosie already felt like he was entranced with you.

“Don’t worry about it, ma’am. It happens to me as well on occasion.”

“Jesus, please don’t call me ma’am. Makes me sound like my mother.” You seemed to have overcome the earlier shyness, which made Rosie’s mouth twitch into an even wider smile.

“Well now I think I should be the one apologizing, sweetheart.”

“I forgive you… but only if you tell me your name.”

“That one is just too easy, Rosie Rosenthal, at your service.”

“Rosie?”

“The air force has a way with nicknames. Now I think I’m owed a name as well?” You smiled and quickly said your name before taking a sip of the drink in your hand. A gin and tonic by the looks of it.

“A beautiful name for a beautiful lady.”

“Are all pilots such flatterers?”

“Only the best ones.” You hummed back in mock suspicion which had Rosie smiling so hard he probably looked like a mad man. The sounds of piano seemed to seep into the comfortable silence and you turned back to the stage, Rosie felt a wave of regret rush over him until he noticed you were moving closer to him so the fabric of your clothes brushed against his.

Rosie moved the glass from his left hand to his right and also turned back to look at the stage, but not before leaning closer to you too. Letting his hand carefully trail along the length of your arm.

A smile crept up on your face and you once again scooted closer to him. You both kept up this little game as you listened to the entracing jazz music, stealing little glances at each other but never meeting each other’s eyes. It was as if you were both encased in your own little bubble.

When the set finished and everyone started applauding and cheering, you finally met Rosie’s eyes. He looked at you with admiration as you laughed and clapped.

“She really is incredible, isn’t she?” He asked, echoing your first words back to you once the din had died down.

“She really is.” You responded before taking a step forward and placing a quick peck on his cheek and uttering a quick goodbye before disappearing into the crowd.

Rosie returned to Café Society the next night, hoping to get a glimpse of you in the same crowd you had vanished into the night before. And he wasn’t disappointed when he saw you sitting at one of the tables at the edge of the room. Two drinks sat in front of you, a scotch and a gin and tonic. Rosie felt a buzz of electricity run through his body when he realized that you had been waiting for him. He saw as you turned your head towards him and a smile blossomed on your face.

“Rosie! I saved you a seat!”

It was a quiet night, at least as quiet as it can be in a big city. Rosie had just gotten back from Europe and he felt at ease once again. As he always did when he was around you.

Your legs were intertwined with his on the red couch you had gone hunting for in one of the little out of the way shops that Brooklyn had. You each had a book in hand and the sounds of a familiar jazz album suddenly crackled onto the radio. Your heads snapped up when you realized that Mary Lou Williams’ Cancer was playing.

“Rosie…”

“Yes, darling?”

“It’s our album.” Rosie looked down at you from where you were lying on his lap. A giddy smile was on your face and he echoed back that smile right back at you.

“It sure is.”

“I’m rather glad I met you.”

“I’m rather glad I fell in love with you, sweetheart.” Rosie answered with a note of adoration in his voice, looking at you as if you hung the very stars in the sky.

“I sure hope you are, because I love you more.”

“Oh I don’t think so.” Rosie deposited his book on the arm of the sofa before assaulting you with tickles, making your laugh ring out into the night. A sound that perfectly complemented the jazz that was still filtering out of the radio.

also... if anyone by any chance finds a vinyl copy of Zodiac Suite anywhere pls lmk. ive been scouring the internet for the past few months and have found nothing. hope you enjoyed and pls lmk your thoughts or asks, i don't bite!!

#robert rosenthal #robert rosie rosenthal #rosie rosenthal #robert rosenthal x reader #rosie rosenthal x reader #masters of the air #mota fanfic #mota spoilers #masters of the air x reader #rosie x reader #masters of the air fic

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wienerbarnes · 3 years

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Witch Bitch

Pairing: Bucky x Witch!Reader

Word Count: 3,943

Warnings: witch stuff, burning at the stake 😳

A/N: this is heavily inspired by american horror story: coven bc i recently watched and ive been binging all of it lately but its not necessary to know anything about ahs lol i kinda just used their fancy magical terminology and concepts bc they were cool🤪

MAIN MASTERLIST

The best time of the day was breakfast. It was the time when Bucky, Sam, and Sharon were most often together. Sometimes training overlapped and they missed lunch. Sometimes missions ran long or friends were in town and they missed dinner. But the morning? They were all early birds, all awake by seven. They took that shared characteristic and shared breakfast together whenever they could. Bucky usually took care of the coffee, Sam usually took care of the eggs and bacon, and Sharon usually took care of the bagels, toasting them to perfection before slathering on a layer of cream cheese.

It was a moment of peace in their day. Quiet before the noise of the gym or the conference room or the jets or the private trainings or the interviews with prospective agents or anything else they do on a daily basis. It was a time for three friends to just sit and eat and enjoy each other's company as though they are just that: three friends. Not super soldiers or captains or special agents. Just people being normal. Normal doesn’t last long, though. It never does for them.

Bucky’s on dish washing duty this morning while Sam and Sharon chat idly behind him, waiting for him to finish so they can all leave together. A soft voice interrupts them, though, making the three of them stop what they’re doing because no one has access to this floor except for the people that live here - meaning them three.

“Who’s in charge here?” You ask.

“Who the hell are you?! How did you get up here?!” Sharon asks, ignoring your question.

You were in a long, flowy black skirt, slit cut in the left side exposing your leg, and a long-sleeve black shirt, tucked beneath the waistband. Think black boots cover your feet and a black hat sits on your head to complete your look. Bucky almost doesn’t notice the folded black umbrella underneath your arm as his eyes trail down the multiple chains and necklaces around your neck, falling between your breasts.

“I’ve been trying to find someone to help me but the people in this building are not very helpful. I figured I’d find who’s in charge myself, something that you all don’t seem to want to help me with, either.” You explain.

“The only way to even enter this building is through strict appointment and background checks, and no one’s even allowed past the nineteenth floor.” Sam explains.

“Why are you entertaining this? I’m getting her out of here.” Sharon says, moving to walk towards you to take you out of the building herself.

As she nears closer and closer, you wave your hand lazily, without taking your eyes off Bucky, the only one who hasn’t said anything this whole time, and Sharon collapses on the floor soundlessly.

“Jesus!”

“What did you do!”

Both Bucky and Sam panic as they rush to Sharon’s body on the floor. They frantically run their hands over her body, looking for the point of injury that made her collapse the way she did, but they find nothing. No holes, no blood; she didn’t even make a sound.

“She’s not breathing and she doesn’t have a pulse, what the fuck did you do to her?!” Sam yells at you.

You roll your eyes, “Okay, you got me. I don’t need help finding who’s in charge, I already know it’s you. I still do need your help, though.”

You’re ignored as the two men hover over their friend, unsure of what to do or what even happened to her.

“Oh, alright, move.” You order them, stepping over Sharon’s body.

You stand before her, lifting your hands to hover over her body before closing your eyes and letting out a deep and long exhale. Bucky and Sam watch as it takes only about seven seconds for their friend to suddenly gasp for air, jumping back to life. The boys crowd her once more, checking her eyes, her pulse, everything to convince themselves that she’s actually alive like that, and if she was even dead in the first place.

Sam finally looks back up at you from the ground, as though he just remembered that you’re there, “What are you?”

You smirk in response, ready to finally get what you came here for.

…

“So, you’re a witch?” Sam asks, the four of them now occupying a private conference room for some privacy.

“A witch who killed me.” Sharon adds.

“And a witch that brought you right back.” You reply, leaning back on your chair, leg crossed over your knee, slit exposing your thigh. Bucky’s eye twitch to look at your bare skin for a second before returning to meet your eyes.

“So… what do you do?” Bucky asks.

You smile at his innocent curiosity, “All witches don’t have one universal power. Some are clairvoyant, some do voodoo, some dabble in pyrokinesis, divination, transmutation, descendum,” You glance over to Sharon, who’s still pouting at you, “Resurrection.”

“And can you do all of those?” Bucky asks.

“Almost all of them, but I’m not here to talk about me.”

“Why are you here?” Sharon asks.

“You guys hunt the Nazi’s, right?” You ask, aiming your question towards Sam, knowing he’s the Captain in charge.

“Hydra, yes.” He confirms.

“Well, your Nazi’s somehow got a hold of my magic. And they are playing with very dangerous fire,” You begin.

Bucky interrupts, “We’re all for taking down Hydra, but, don’t you think you’re a little more… powerful than us?” He asks.

“Bucky!” Sharon slaps his arm, as though she’s shocked that he would ever admit such a thing.

“I am. But I’m not that powerful, either. Not anymore, at least. A group of those Hydra invaded the coven my sisters and I were at. I was the only one that escaped.” You tell them.

“Did Hydra take them?” Sam asks.

“No, they killed them.” You respond, growing irritated as the subject grows touchier and touchier.

“Can’t you just bring them back like you did me?” Sharon inquires.

“No! I can’t. Like I said, I’m not that powerful anymore. Maybe I’d be able to bring back a house full of dead girls when it was me and twelve others but it’s just me now. I wouldn’t come all the way over here if I had other options.”

Silence grows over the group as they process what you’ve gone through. Surviving through the massacre of your fellow witches and not being powerful enough to find the people that did it on your own. You’re vulnerable.

“So what can we do?” Sam asks, ready to join forces with you.

“Help me locate the men who did this so I can handle the magic part.” You tell him.

“What magic do they have?”

“Although witches control most of the magic, sometimes it can be taken on in… physical forms. Specifically blood. The blood they retrieved was from a witch that was skilled in Vitali Vitalis.”

“The alive within the living.” Bucky translates.

“There are two worlds: the living and the dead,” You begin to explain, “Vitali Vitalis keeps the balance between these two things and it’s one of the most difficult powers for a witch to master. Oftentimes it’s used to give parts of your own life, health, and energy to someone who needs it. But it can also allow you to take life from someone and give it to yourself.”

“Like immortality?” Sam questions.

“Not quite. Any witch can be killed with a knife or bullet. This kind of magic keeps you from dying of age. I’ve only ever known one witch who mastered it.”

“What happened to her?”

“She used it for evil, like this. Took the souls of hundreds in order to allow herself to live for almost three centuries. Until she was killed, of course.” You finish, a small smile on your lips knowing that she got what she deserved.

“What, you burn her at the stake?” Sharon jokes.

“Yes, actually. We did.” You tell her matter-of-factly, becoming more and more irritated at the fact that she doesn’t seem to take this is as seriously as you are.

Bucky interrupts, sensing the rising tension between the two girls, “So when we find these guys, you’re going to burn them at the stake, too?” He asks.

“Yes,” You say, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “The consequence of using magic like this for evil is death by fire. I hope you all don’t think the rules will change on account of these men being Nazi’s?”

“Well, we just have a different way of doing things -” Sam begin to defend

“Yes, I’m aware. The countless destruction caused by you and other militaries, the millions of innocent lives lost yearly, not only in the constant war and irresponsible handling of your nuclear and alien weaponry, but by incorrect prosecution. Not to mention the billions of dollars spent on your ridiculous prison systems that don’t work when actual bad people escape and the death penalty practices in certain states. I just figured my way was easier. And cheaper.” You reply.

Silence crowds over the four of them once more as they think over all their options.

“I’m in.” Bucky speaks first.

“Me, too. Even if I don’t like you.” Sharon follows.

“Feeling’s mutual, dear.” You smile at her.

The three of them look to Sam, waiting for his commitment as well.

“Alright. Let’s get to work.”

Plans were made, theories of location were thought of, and plans to execute the mission were put into place, all of which included you. A temporary room was given to you when the information of your lack of a place to stay was brought to light. Only for the duration of this mission, is what Sam told you, but you can spot the amount of love and light in his heart from miles away.

It was later that night, and you’ve since cleansed the room, going as far as to place a protective spell on the entire floor. You’ve lost too much already, and you’re not about to risk anything.

A knock at the door sounds and the visitor you’d been expecting has finally arrived. You walk towards the door, still in your clothes from earlier but now you’ve removed your shoes, and open the door to reveal Bucky.

“I was waiting for you.” You tell him.

“How’d you know I’d come?” He asks, stepping through the door when you step aside, silently gesturing to him to enter.

“I can hear your thoughts. You've been debating whether or not to come see me for the past thirty minutes. Your mind is very loud.”

“Tell me about it.” He mumbles to himself, thinking about the countless nightmares, voices, and all the other reminders of just how loud his mind was.

“You can ask all your questions, you know. I won’t take any offence. You’re just curious.” You tell him, settling on your bed, hoping he’ll join you and stop hovering near the door.

Luckily he takes the hint and takes a seat across from you.

“I’ve never met a witch before. A real one, I mean. Like, someone born a witch. Like Salem witches -”

“I understand.” You chuckle lightly.

“You don’t seem… afraid of me. Or, hesitant, rather.” You tell him, thinking about how he’s received your presence here compared to his colleagues.

“I was wary when you killed my friend, but… you just need some help, is all. I’m sorry, by the way, I’m not sure if I said it before, but, I’m sorry for what happened to your friends.” He tells you.

He’s very polite. But you supposed that’s not abnormal considering he got his manners from the 1920’s. You like it, though. You give him an appreciative smile before giving him the okay to ask you whatever he wanted.

“So you said that witches can master multiple powers but have one specialty; is yours resurrection?”

“Yes; it was the first power I ever exhibited when I was a teenager. I was about fourteen or fifteen. My next mastered skill is descendum and then clairvoyance, where I was in my twenties, or so.” You tell him as he looks at you with pure fascination in his eyes.

“What is - what is descendum?”

You pause, “The power to descend your soul down into the afterlife - to hell. And return alive.”

His eyes widened, not even knowing that was something someone can do; not even knowing that hell existed in the first place, “So, you’ve been to hell?”

“Yes. I’ve also been able to retrieve people from hell, their soul. A variation of my power of resurrection, I suppose.” You explain, not being too fond of that power; descending to hell.

Bucky sits in silence for a few minutes, and you let him. You can hear the question lingering around in his head; what he’s thinking. But you let him build up his own courage to ask it. You know he’s only scared of the answer; the answer you know he’s not going to like.

“What is hell like?” He whispers.

“It doesn’t matter what my hell is like. Everyone has their own personal hell they experience when they die.” You tell him.

Confusion clouds his features as he registers your answer.

“Is there… Is there no heaven?”

You smirk, “It’s nice that you’ve remained religious after all this time.”

“Yes, there's heaven. But only for the purest and most innocent of souls. And rarely do people escape life without sin. Everyone has evil in them.” You tell him, knowing it’s a harsh truth that no one wants to hear.

The people Bucky’s killed, the crime he’s committed, the families he’s hurt; it all passes through his mind. Everyone has evil in them.

“What was your hell like?”

“I’m not telling you that.” You tell him quickly.

Bucky ponders what his own hell will be like, after seeing the way you’re clearly shaken up about your own. The fall from the train. The man in a lab coat sawing off the rest of his arm. The needles poking through his skin in the middle of some facility. The chair.

He doesn’t realize that he’s looked away from you until he snaps his thoughts back to the present and sees he’s looking down into his lap. He glances up to see your face, your soft features and kind eyes staring at him. He glances from your eyes to your lips and back up again before clearing his throat, not realizing how close he got to you during his time here sitting on your bed.

“You know, I, uh, I should go. Thank you for, uh, answering my questions, but we head out pretty - pretty early tomorrow, so,” He trails off, standing and patting down his shirt to smooth out the nonexistent wrinkles in a nervous habit.

He makes his way towards the door and his hand touches the knob when he hears your voice, “Hey, Bucky?” He turns slightly to face you again, a hum to indicate for you to continue.

“Thank you for coming to see me. And thank you for all the kindness you’ve shown me. You’re a very good person.” You tell him sincerely.

He gives you a nod of you’re welcome before exiting.

He’s not sure if you told him that because you truly mean it, or if it’s because of the state of anxiety and existential crises you’ve put him in now that he’s going to be thinking about his personal hell, but he appreciates it, nonetheless.

He thinks you’re a pretty good person, yourself.

…

The mission goes off without a hitch. The combined skill of the Avengers’ stealth, spyware, and experience along with your magic and witchery makes for an easy capture of the men who killed your witch sisters and stole your magic.

It’s not long before the facility they were at was shut down and cleared out, arresting any officers and rescuing any prisoners or hostages, and the five men specifically responsible for the destruction of your coven are in separate custody. What’s left of the blood is returned to you, as well.

That’s where the group of you stand now, a decision to be made about the criminals you’ve captured. To be put in the maximum security prison floating in the ocean, or to be put to death by fire.

“I don’t believe in being the executioner of people.” Sam tries to convince.

You can’t help but let a laugh escape you, “Do you know who you work for?! Do you know who you are?!” You remind him.

“Those guys can’t escape the Raft.” He tries, referring to prison in the middle of the ocean you’ve heard about.

“You did.” You respond, knowing about when Steve Rogers took him out of that prison, along with other superheros.

You see Bucky and Sharon look between the two of you, torn between how these Hydra criminals should receive their fate. Staring into the hot depths of flames or rotting alone in a cell? Both seem to be too merciful, in Bucky’s opinion.

“This isn’t just running the facility or experiments, Sam. This is different. They were using dark magic to commit crimes. Maybe they should face the consequences of a dark-magic-punishment.” Sharon offers.

You don’t have time to be shocked at Sharon agreeing with you and picking your side before Bucky agrees and Sam is outnumbered. He stares at you and gives a single nod, allowing you to do this your way.

You smile, a silent thank you for giving you the closure and opportunity to serve justice to those who did you harm. “Off to Massachusetts, then.” You tell them, and Sam takes his seat in the pilot's chair, Bucky accompanying him in the front of the jet.

You take a seat, making yourself comfortable for the flight to Salem and you feel a body take the seat next to you. You glance up to see Sharon looking at you, but you notice she has something in her hand, offering it to you.

You look down to see a small plastic bag of fruit gummies. But not just any fruit gummies, you realize. Halloween themed fruit gummies. The pictures on the outside show the various options inside: witch’s hat, a broom stick, a melting pot, a vial, and a magic wand. Hilarious.

You take the gummies, though, accepting her attempt at a truce.

It’s not long before you and your temporary teammates find themselves standing before a large, empty field, multiple wooden stakes standing about fifteen feet tall scattered about with plenty of space in between.

You lead the walk to a group of them standing tall in line, so the men can be burned at the same time, as opposed to one by one. A group of large, burly agents lug the Hydra operatives along, behind you and the rest of the team.

Bucky hangs around your left, as to not be in the way of the black umbrella held in your right hand, and Sam and Sharon trail behind you. You can sense their uneasiness and tune out their worried thoughts. Everyone’s first burning is always an experience; they’ll get over it.

Bucky doesn’t seem worried, though. In fact, you can’t hear his thoughts this time around. But he still stands tall and straight, walking with confidence, so you make a safe assumption that he’s okay.

None of the men’s cuffs or shackles are removed, but thick rope is tied on top of it, around the wrist and looped around the waist, tying them to the stake. The cuffs are special grade - high tech Avengers vibranium - and they can be retrieved later once the fire burns out.

“Any last words?” You ask, more for tradition than whether or not you actually care.

They look scared, obviously not expecting their fate to look anything like this. You remember seeing Bucky tackle one of them in the facility, prying his mouth open to rip out a tooth, or what looked like a tooth, like a dog caught eating something it wasn’t supposed to. A cyanide pill.

Silence comes from them, except for one of them, “Hail Hydra!” He yells, as if that cowardly and pathetic phrase would change anything.

With a raise of your hand, seemingly with no effort, you wave it and the stakes all begin to rise up in flames. There’s nothing to spark, no twigs, no gasoline, nothing, and Bucky watches as the flames rise, growing stronger as they engulf the five men. They begin to scream, and Bucky looks over at you, as if to confirm you didn’t bring gasoline or something with you, and he sees a smile slowly grow on your lips.

They haven’t stopped screaming; they’re still alive when you turn and begin to walk back the way everyone came. Bucky follows, and eventually Sam and Sharon do, too, the other agents staying behind until the end to retrieve the cuffs and shackles that will survive the fire.

“So, now what?” Sharon asks, the air quieter as the screams have slowly stopped in the distance.

I can’t imagine what kind of paperwork follows this, “Back to the tower.” Sam responds.

“The coven’s only a short walk from here.” You say, not needing to elaborate much more. The men have been caught and brought to justice, but you still have a broken, battered, and beaten down coven to fix.

A friend of yours was meant to go by and retrieve the… bodies. Which you’re grateful for. But magic won’t help you fix the walls, the floors, mop the blood, or find other witches in need of an escape and a place to improve and master their powers. You have a lot of work to do.

As the view of the jet gets closer, you prepare to bid your goodbyes to the Avengers, your thank you’s as well. Regardless of your attitude towards them before, you couldn’t have done this without them.

A metal hand engulfs yours, pulling you back a bit as Sam and Sharon continue on.

“Do you need any help?” Bucky’s warm and gentle voice floods your ears, hand still in yours.

“You guys have been more than enough help, now, really.” You try to tell him, but he has none of it.

“You may be tough, but you can’t fix up that house by yourself,” He tells you, “I can be pretty handy, fixed up a few things back in my day.” A soft smile grows on his face.

You glance over his shoulder as Sam and Sharon wait by the entrance of the jet, “Don’t you have to go back?”

“They won’t miss me.” He tells you, not even looking back to confirm with his teammates, hand dropping to run it through his hair.

You giggle at him, before giving him a shy nod in answer to his offer to help you fix up your big house.

“I’m going to hang out here for a few days.” He yells over his shoulder.

“We figured.” Sam calls out, and Sharon throws you a wave as they board the jet, the opening close after them.

“Lead the way?” Bucky offers you, taking your hand once more, interlocking the fingers this time.

And so the two of you are off, one of your hands still clutching the umbrella, holding it above your head, and the other hand interlaced with the one of a handsome and kind super soldier. This wasn’t the way Bucky expected the last two days to transpire, but he’s glad they led to holding the hand of a very pretty witch.

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x witch!reader #marvel #bucky oneshot #love me some magic #also if anyone watches ahs... hmu i love it #ive watched all of them except cult and im currently rewatching freak show rn

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cruisingthedemimonde · 3 years

Text

America’s Gay Men in WW2

World War Two was a “National Coming Out” for queer Americans.

I don’t think any other event in history changed the lives of so many of us since Rome became Christian.

For European queers the war brought tragedy.

The queer movement began in Germany in the 1860s when trans activist Karl Ulrichs spoke before the courts to repeal Anti-Sodomy laws. From his first act of bravery the movement grew and by the 1920s Berlin had more gay bars than Manhattan did in the 1980s. Magnus Hirschfeld’s “Scientific Humanitarian Committee” fought valiantly in politics for LGBT rights and performed the first gender affirmation surgeries. They were a century ahead of the rest of the world.

The Nazis made Hirschfeld - Socialist, Homosexual and Jew - public enemy number one.

The famous image of the Nazis burning books? Those were the books of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. Case studies of the first openly queer Europeans, histories, diaries - the first treasure trove of our history was destroyed that day.

100,000 of us were charged with felonies. As many as 15,000 were sent to the camps, about 60% were murdered.

But in America the war brought liberation.

In a country where most people never even heard the word “homosexual” , historian John D’emilio wrote the war was “conducive both to the articulation of a homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolution of a gay subculture. (24)” The war years were “a Watershed (Eaklor 68)”

Now before we begin I need to give a caveat. The focus of this first post is not lesbians, transfolk or others in our community. Those stories have additional complexity the story of cisgender homosexual men does not. Starting with gay men lets me begin in the simplest way I can, in subsequent posts I’ll look at the rest of our community.

Twilight Aristocracy: Being Queer Before the War

I want us to go back in time and imagine the life of the typical queer American before the war. Odds are you lived on a farm and simply accepted the basic fact that you would marry and raise children as surely as you were born or would die. You would have never seen someone Out or Proud. If you did see your sexuality or gender in contrary ways you had no words to express it, odds are even your doctor had never heard the term “Homosexual. In your mind it was just a quirk, without a name or possible expression.

In the city the “Twilight Aristocracy” lived hidden, on the margins and exposed their queerness only in the most coded ways. Gay men “Dropping pins” with a handkerchief in a specific pocket. Butch women with key chains heavy enough to show she didn’t need a man to carry anything for her. A secret language of “Jockers” and “Nances” “Playing Checkers” during a night out. There is a really good article on the queer vernacular here

And these were “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”

In public one must act as straight as possible. Two people of the same gender dancing could be prosecuted. Cross dressing, even with something as trivial as a woman wearing pants, would run afoul of obscenity laws.

The only spaces we had for ourselves were dive bars, run by organized crime. But even then one must be sure to be circumspect, and act straight. Anyone could be an undercover cop. If a gaze was held to long, or lovers kissed in a corner the bar would be raided. Police saw us as worthy candidates for abuse so beatings were common and the judge would do all he could to humiliate you.

Now Michael Foucault, the big swinging french dick of queer theory, laid out this whole theory about how the real policing in a society happens inside our heads. Ideas about sin, shame, normalcy, mental illness can all be made to control people, and the Twilight Aristocracy was no different.

While cruising a park at night, or settled on the sofa with a lifelong lover, the thoughts of Priests and Doctors haunted them. “Am I living in Sin? Am I someone God could love?” “Is this healthy? Have I gone mad? Is this a true love or a medical condition which requires cure?”

There was no voice in America yet healing our self doubt, or demanding the world accept us as we are. And that voice, the socialist Harry Hay, did not come during the war, but it would come shortly after directly because of it.

Johnny Get Your Gun… And are you now or ever been a Homosexual?

For the first time in their lives millions of young men crossed thousands of miles from their home to the front.

But before they made that brave journey they had another, unexpected and often torturous journey. The one across the doctor’s office at a recruiting station.

In the nineteenth century queerness moved from an act, “Forgive me Father I have sinned, I kissed another man” to something you are, “The homosexual subspecies can be identified by certain physical and psychological signs.”

These were the glory days of patriarchy and white supremacy, those who transgressed the line between masculine and feminine called the whole culture into question. So doctors obsessed themselves with queerness, its origins, its signs, its so called catastrophic racial consequences and its cure.

“Are you a homosexual?” doctors asked stunned recruits.

If you were closeted but patriotic, you would of course deny the accusation. But the doctor would continue his examination by checking if you were a “Real Man.”

“Do you have a girlfriend? Did you like playing sports as a kid?”

If you passed that, the doctor would often try and trip you up by asking about your culture.

“Do you ever go basketeering?” he would ask, remembering to check if there was any lisp or effeminacy in your voice.

Finally if the doctor felt like it he could examine your body to see if you were a member of the homosexual subspecies.

Your gag reflex would be tested with a tongue depressor. Another hole could be carefully examined as well.

Humiliating enough for a straight man. But for a gay recruit the consequences could be life threatening.

Medical authorities knew homosexuals were weak, criminal and mad. To place them among the troops would weaken unit cohesion at the very least, result in treachery at the worst. In civilian life doctors had much the same thing to say.

The recruit needed a cure. And a doctor was always ready. With talk therapy, hypnosis, drugs, electroshock and forced surgeries of the worst kinds there was always a cure ready at hand.

Thankfully the doctors were not successful in their task, one doctor wrote “for every homosexual who was referred or came to the Medical Department, there were five or ten who never were detected. (d’Emilio 25)”

Here’s the irony though, by asking such pointed and direct questions to people closeted to themselves it forced them to confront their sexuality for the first time.

Hegarty writes, “As a result of the screening policies, homosexuality became part of wartime discourse. Questions about homosexual desire and behavior ensured that every man inducted into the armed forces had to confront the possibility of homosexual feelings or experiences. This was a kind of massive public education about homosexuality. Despite—and be-cause of—the attempts to eliminate homosexuals from the military, men with same-sex desires learned that there were many people like themselves (Hegarty 180)”

And then it gave them a golden opportunity to have fun.

The 101st Airborn - Homosocial and Homosexual

“Homosocial” refers to a gender segregated space. And they were often havens for gay men. The YMCA for example really was a place for young gay men to meet.

Now the government was already aware of the kind of scandalous sexual behaviour young men can get up to when left to themselves. Two major government programs before the war, the Federal Transient Program and the Civilian Conservation Corps focused on unattached young men, but over time these spaces became highly suspect and the focus shifted to helping family men so as to avoid giving government aid to ‘sexual perversion’ in these homosocial spaces.

But with the war on there was no choice but to put hundreds of thousands of young men in their own world. All male boot camps, all male bases, all male front lines.

The emotional intensity broke down the barriers between men and the strict enforcement of gendered norms.

On the front the men had no girlfriend, wife or mother to confide in. The soldier’s body was strong and heroic but also fragile. Straight men held each other in foxholes and shared their emotional vulnerability to each other. Gender lines began to blur as straight men danced together in bars an action that would result in arrest in many American cities.

Bronski writes, “Men were now more able to be emotional, express their feelings, and even cry. The stereotypical “strong, silent type,” quintessentially heterosexual, that had characterized the American Man had been replaced with a new, sensitive man who had many of the qualities of the homosexual male. (Bronski 152)”

Homosexual men discovered in this environment new freedoms to get close to one another without arousing suspicion.

“Though the military officially maintained an anti-homosexual stance, wartime conditions nonetheless offered a protective covering that facilitated interaction among gay men (d’Emilio 26)”

Bob Ruffing, a chief petty officer in the Navy described this freedom as follows, ‘When I first got into the navy—in the recreation hall, for instance— there’d be eye contact, and pretty soon you’d get to know one or two people and kept branching out. All of a sudden you had a vast network of friends, usually through this eye contact thing, some through outright cruising. They could get away with it in that atmosphere. (d’Emilio 26) ”

Another wrote about their experience serving in the navy in San Diego, “‘Oh, these are more my kind of people.’ We became very chummy, quite close, very fraternal, very protective of each other. (Hegarty 180)”

Some spaces within the army became queer as well. The USO put on shows for soldiers, and since they could not find women to play parts, the men often dressed in drag. “impersonation. For actors and audiences, these performances were a needed relief from the stress of war. For men who identified as homosexual, these shows were a place where they could, in coded terms, express their sexual desires, be visible, and build a community. (Bronski 148)”

“Here you see three lovely “girls”

With their plastic shapes and curls.

Isn’t it campy? Isn’t it campy?

We’ve got glamour and that’s no lie;

Can’t you tell when we swish by?

Isn’t it campy? Isn’t it campy?”

The words camp and swish being used in the gay subculture and connected to effeminate gay men.

I would have to assume, more than a few transwomen gravitated to these spaces as well.

Even the battlefield itself provided opportunities for gay fraternization. A beach in Guam for example became a secret just for the gay troops, they called it Purple Beach Number 2, after a perfume brand.

This homoerotic space was not confined to the military, but spilled out into civilian life as well.

Donald Vining was a pacifist who stated bluntly his homosexuality to the recruitment board as his mother needed his work earnings, and if you wanted be a conscientious objector you had to apply to go to an objector’s camp. He became something of a soldier chaser, working in the local YMCA and volunteering at the soldier’s canteen in New York he hooked up with soldiers still closeted for a night of passion but many more who were open about who they were.

After the war he was left with a network of gay friends and a strong sense of belonging to a community. It was dangerous tho, he was victim of robberies he could not report because they happened during hook ups, but police were always ready to raid gay bars when they were bored. “It was obvious that [the police] just had to make a few arrests to look busy,” he protested in his diary. “It was a travesty of justice and the workings of the police department (d’Emilio 30).״

Now it might seem odd he was able to plug into a community like that, but over the war underground gay bars appeared across the country for their new clientele. Even the isolated Worcester Mass got a gay bar.

African American men, barred from combat on the front lines, were not entirely barred from the gay subculture in the cities. For example in Harlem the jazz bar Lucky Rendevous was reported in Ebony as whites and blacks “steeped in the swish jargon of its many lavender costumers. (Bronski 149)”

The Other War: Facing Homophobia

“For homosexual soldiers, induction into the military forced a sudden confrontation with their sexuality that highlighted the stigma attached to it and kept it a matter of special concern (d’Emilio 25)”

“They were fighting two wars: one for America, democracy, and freedom; the other for their own survival as homosexuals within the military organization. (Eaklor 68)”

Once they were in, they fell under Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: “Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.”

Penalties could include five years hard labour, forced institutionalization or fall under the dreaded Section 8 discharge, a stamp of mental instability that would prevent you from finding meaningful employment in civilian life.

Even if one wanted nothing to do with fulfilling their desires it was still essential to become hyper aware of your presentation and behaviour in order to avoid suspicion.

Coming Home to Gay Ghettos

“The veterans of World War II were the first generation of gay men and women to experience such rapid, dramatic, and widespread changes in their lives as homosexuals. Bronski 154”

After the war many queer servicemen went on to live conventionally heterosexual lives. But many more returned to a much queerer life stateside.

Bob Ruffing would settle down in San Francisco. The city has always been a safe harbour for queer Americans, made more so as ex servicemen gravitated to its liberated atmosphere. The port cities of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles became the prime destinations to settle. Vining’s partner joined him in New York, where they both immersed themselves in the gay culture.

Other soldiers moved to specific neighborhoods known for having small gay communities. San Francisco’s North Beach, the west side of Boston’s Beacon Hill, or New York’s Greenwich Village. Following the war the gay populations of these cities increased dramatically.

The cities offered parks, coffee houses and bars which became queer spaces. And drag performance, music and comedy became features of this culture.

These veterans also founded organizations just for the queer soldiers. In Los Angeles the Knights of the Clock provided a space for same sex inter racial couples. In New York the Veterans Benevolent Association would often see 400-500 homosexuals appear at its events.

A number of books bluntly explored homosexuality following the war, such as The Invisible Glass which tells the story of an inter racial couple in Italy,

“With a slight moan Chick rolled onto his left side, toward the Lieutenant. His finger sought those of the officer’s as they entwined their legs. Their faces met. The breaths, smelling sweet from wine, came in heavy drawn sighs. La Cava grasped the soldier by his waist and drew him tightly to his body. His mouth pressed down until he felt Chick’s lips part. For a moment they lay quietly, holding one another with strained arms.”

Others like Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), Fritz Peters’s The World Next Door (1949), and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950) explored similar themes.

In 1948 the Kinsey Report would create a public firestorm by arguing that homosexuality is shockingly common. In 1950 The Mattachine Society, a secretive group of homosexual Stalinists launched America’s LGBT movement.

References:

Michael Bronski “A Queer History of the United States”

John D’emilio “Coming Out Under Fire”

Vivki L Eaklor “Queer America: A GLBT History of America”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Lesbians

In 1947 General Eisenhower told a purple heart winning Sargeant Johhnie Phelps, “It's come to my attention that there are lesbians in the WACs, we need to ferret them out”.

Phelps replied, “"If the General pleases, sir, I'll be happy to do that, but the first name on the list will be mine."

Eisenhower’s secretary added “"If the General pleases, sir, my name will be first and hers will be second."

Join me again May 17 to hear the story of America’s Lesbians during the war.

#gay history #world war two #queer history #gay #lgbt

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whetstonefires · 4 years

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mcu ethics bad

The thing is that, while I was angry at Tony during Age of Ultron, particularly when he rode over Bruce’s compunctions about building a giant combat super-robot and pressured him into the project like a very very bad friend who happened to also be wrong...

...and when he equipped Hulkbuster armor and fought the Hulk in the middle of a city rather than attempting de-escalation or attempting to haul the Hulk out into the giant adjacent desert....

(And my suspension of disbelief snapped like a frayed cable when he brought down a skyscraper that had had no time to be evacuated on a street full of fleeing people and the only reason we were given to believe he hadn’t just cold-bloodedly created massive civilian casualties was that he told his AI to find the impossible magic angle where doing this wouldn’t kill anyone...)

While I was angry with him then, and unspeakably relieved that he recognized his own damage and retired at the end, haha psych, I was revolted by him during Civil War.

It’s supposed to make us sympathize with a character more, spending so much time with them, getting into their heads, being shown their emotional drives and reactions to things, and we spent so much time with Tony during that film, understanding his point of view. And...I did understand him. He’s not complicated. I even sympathized with his emotional state.

But in the context of his actions, throughout the film, I gazed into that understanding the way I did into Kylo Ren’s face in the seconds after he first unmasked. I see you, I know you, everything you are is written here, and the lines of your shame and self-revulsion are so thick upon you, and you should be ashamed but your self-destruction does not expiate or justify one jot of the harm you do.

Because everything Tony did in Civil War came from a place of selfishness. He was selfish all throughout that movie down to his very spine.

And selfishness isn’t itself necessarily bad--you need a little, to get through life, you have the right to your own portion of it. Your boundaries and your needs. But the type of selfishness that is forcing other people pay dearly for your emotional comfort and sense of control: no.

That is tyranny. That is not acceptable.

And you know how I know he was being selfish? Because his motive for pushing the Sokovia Accords was his personal guilt for the destruction of Sokovia.

But the Accords didn’t address that at all! They were tangential to the issue! None of the terms of the Accords would have saved Sokovia--in fact, the existence of them could easily have prevented the evacuation and harm-reduction the Avengers managed there, without saving a single soul.

The Ultron crisis was something Tony did, not as Iron Man but as Tony Stark, with Bruce Banner’s help, and which Wanda as criminal fugitive later helped exacerbate, and which all the other Avengers were involved in only to mitigate harm.

Legislation, or...treaties, idk, the UN isn’t actually empowered to pass laws so who knows what this thing was...aimed at preventing another Sokovia would mandate constant ethical oversight of billionaire science man’s mad science. At the very least! He never has to run things by ethics boards because he’s self-funded, at the very least let’s invent a mechanism to make up for that.

That would address the actual Sokovia issue, both in terms of risks and in terms of Tony’s personal guilt feelings.

But no one suggests that! It’s not even on the table! Because no one, certainly not any government, can tell Tony Stark what to do unless he lets them, that’s been a clear matter of record since Iron Man 2.

And because no one writing this legal instrument of whatever description was actually motivated by wanting to avoid another Sokovia, or even another ‘Wanda tries to neutralize a suicide bomber but merely gives him a different, smaller victim pool’ incident.

They didn’t care! They blatantly didn’t care! The entire thing was a ghoulish use of the dead to gain enough political leverage over the Avengers to put a leash on them!

(Which might not be a bad thing in principle, everything needs its checks, but when the last quasi-governmental organization you worked for turned out to be Nazis who were only prevented from staging a mass slaughter of undesireables by the skin of your teeth, I think you’re well within your rights to be very choosy about who you agree to obey, and to be firmly against pledging your honor to follow people whose first move was dishonest coercive tactics.

Actually you’re well within your rights to demand to negotiate the terms of even a much less sweeping contract, even without the Nazis. The whole approach to this thing stank to high heaven.

The fact that it was written by the UN like a treaty, expected to be signed by private individuals like a contract, and then enforced like a law except not because 1) laws are for everyone 2) if you break a law you get a trial not extrajudicial incarceration and 3) being pressured to consent to a restriction and then punished for refusing consent is hypocritical circular logic and in fact police corruption at its finest, all continues to show it was a bullshit nonsense franken-document.)

The whole movie is people ghoulishly using the dead to manipulate Tony into making bad decisions in response to his emotional pain. That’s. The plot of the film.

Then Zemo staged T’Chaka’s assassination and framed Bucky for it to raise the tension, ramp up the pressure, and prevent any sitting-down and talking reasonably through this, which might have allowed for the recognition of how extremely bullshit the entire concept was.

Tony was being used. Tony was a tool of bad people for most of that movie, and while Zemo banked on using his wrath for it, the politicos were leaning on his guilt.

And there’s honestly little I hold in deeper scorn than going out and hurting other people to assuage your own guilt and treating this as having the moral high ground. No. You don’t have the moral high ground on account of your guilt motivation. You have it if the actions you took were just, or at least could reasonably be assumed to have been so at the time.

And Tony fucking knew they weren’t. He didn’t even last to the end of the movie before recognizing that he’d been manipulated and fucked up, and doubling back.

That he then walked into a different manipulation, turned on a dime, and had to be stopped from doing a murder doesn’t unwrite that.

And it drives me nuts that people will say Tony was acting out of principle while Steve was acting out of personal attachment. Because sure, the Bucky thing was important, was the reason he was walking forward against all opposition instead of standing still to argue, but it wasn’t the reason Steve said no, while...

Tony wasn’t acting out of principle. Tony isn’t...very good at having principles. That’s not even a criticism or condemnation, it’s just how he functions. Since Iron Man he’s been substituting good intentions and emotional investment, which has worked out to varying degrees. It works best for huge, difficult, very straightforward decisions like ‘ride the nuke through the portal and save my hometown.’ It works less well for nuanced situations.

Tony was, as usual, acting out of emotion. And some awful shitheads who’d figured out where his levers were had calculated how to jiggle his emotion switches in the right places to make him do exactly what they wanted.

And you can tell he wasn’t acting out of principle because, for example, someone who was trying to get the superhero community under outside control for the sake of harm mitigation...

...well, firstly wouldn’t have chosen to stage a massive battle? But it’s possible someone in the UN specifically told him to do that, and in theory they at the very least signed off on it, presumably for its PR value of making Captain America look deranged and violent since it’s a deranged decision from every other angle, so yay, he can pass that responsibility up the chain and not have to angst about it, as promised.

But I was going to say would not have approached a minor who (this timeline takes pains to show us) had no prior experience of battle or even, somehow, serious violent crime, to recruit him to go be a government child soldier on another continent, without his guardian’s knowledge or consent. There were overtones of blackmail in Tony’s approach, before it turned out Peter was such a big fan he didn’t need that. What the fuck frankly.

That is not the action of someone who wants to start doing things by the letter, scaling the violence down, keeping within the law and putting the power of decisionmaking in other people’s hands because he’s realized he can’t trust his own.

And frankly even if he did act like that I wouldn’t necessarily support his choices, in particular his snap decision to behave coercively toward other Avengers with vastly less social power and security than he has.

And that’s the other thing! Everything about ‘Tony + Accords BFFs’ rings so hollow because he has never thought rules applied to him, and he knows perfectly well the entire time he’s fighting to force this surrender of agency down other people’s throats that he is going to be practically immune.

This man was technically a terrorist, proabably the most prolific single terrorist in world history until his rogue android exceeded his body count, but he was immune to prosecution because he was in tight with the United States military-industrial complex and basically untouchable due to his status within capitalism, and pursuing their international goals anyway. In the time between Iron Man and Iron Man II he was basically a one-man upgrade of the US drone program, and so good at it that the crest of blood he carved through the Middle East allowed him to announce he had ‘privatized world peace.’

(You are never going to get a world peace worth anything on the basis of a giant flying gun, okay.)

He went to war as a private individual, against non-state actors who were not directly threatening him, which is very much defined as ‘mass murder’ in all domestic and international law, and the US army in response sued him for control of his weapon. And lost! Lost.

No one attempted to press charges. No one. Because Tony Stark is above all that. And he knows it.

And like. I’m willing to accept the mass murder under the heading of ‘superheroing’ within the terms of this setting! Even if, after his vengeance rampage on his specific kidnappers, this violence was kept strictly off-screen for a reason. I did that! I bent that far! Genre convention!

But this history is kind of vitally important to any analysis of what he thought he was doing, and what he actually was doing, when he decided to become the iron gauntlet of the Sokovia Accords.

The currently active member of the Avengers who needed muzzling most was very manifestly Iron Man, and he knew even as he jammed the muzzle on all his comrades to make himself feel better that it would affect him the least, even if he didn’t finally retire for real this time. You don’t force Tony Stark. Not if you want anything out of it but blown up. You persuade him.

And once you have...oh, look at what he can do.

#hoc est meum #mcu #tony stark critical #i am so angry with this man and i will never stop #i throw salt #an ocean of it

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introvertguide · 3 years

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The Life of Roman Polanski

The director of our current movie under review, Roman Polanski, is a man that has been surrounded by sadness and controversy. I think that he is a great director and an amazing creator of the visual arts, but he has a major flaw that makes me very glad he is nowhere near me. I think a statement like that deserves some explanation, but know that a lot of my take is based on opinion. I was not alive when a lot of his issues occurred so I base my opinion on news and official record statements. I will try and rely on recorded facts as much as possible and make a point to mention if something is not proven. I also encourage anyone who is interested to find out more because it is a fascinating story.

Polanski started off the in a pretty bad way as he was born in 1933 in Paris during the height of Nazi reign in Europe. He was moved to Krakow in 1937 right before the German invasion and his parents were taken in raids. He was kept alive in foster homes under an assumed identity and was lucky to survive. His mother died in Auschwitz, but he was reunited with his father after the war in 1946. Roman had quite the artistic eye and used it for both photography and filming. He attended the National Film School in Lodz, Poland and started directing short films that gained recognition. One film in particular was called Bicycle. It was a true story of a thief that tricked Polanski out of his money when purchasing a bicycle and instead beat Polanski around the head with the butt of a gun. The thief was found and eventually executed for past crimes including 3 murders.

After graduating in 1959, Polanski went to France and continued to make short films. He reported that there was a problem with xenophobia at the time since so many Polish people had dispersed around Europe after the war. He went to England and made three movies between 1965 and 1968 that gained recognition in America: Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, and Dance of the Vampires. A young woman named Sharon Tate played a role in Dance of the Vampires and Polanski fell in love. He married her in 1968 in England, and they moved to the U.S. so he could make movies in Hollywood. His first film in the states was a horror film entitled Rosemary’s Baby, one of the highest rated horror films of all time. Polanski had a beautiful young wife, a son on the way, a hit movie with more work coming, and great prospects for life in the United States.

As horrific as his formative years were, I am surprised to find myself writing that this is when Polanski’s life really went out of control. On August 9th, 1969, cult members who followed a man named Charles Manson broke into the Polanski home in Los Angeles and murdered the 8 month pregnant Sharon Tate and four friends that were at the home. Polanski had been working in London on a new film and wasn’t there that night. He says to this day that it is by far the greatest regret of his life. Remember this. It seems that some wires got crossed as far as Roman’s thinking process because his behavior really took a turn.

His films had been dark and violent in the past, but they started to have sexual undertones with more graphic nudity. His first movie back after the loss of his wife was Macbeth, a movie that was rated X at the time for graphic nudity and violence. Polanski later said that he was in a dark place, but the media would find things in his movies always looking for a story. He hated the media after the sensationalism and lack of privacy involved with the loss of his wife and son. Next came an extremely odd road trip sex comedy that was appropriately called What?. And then came his last work filmed in the United States and the film he was probably best known for, Chinatown. I don’t want to go over the film too much since it is the film currently under review for the group, but it is very dark and has an extremely down beat ending.

And then another crime was committed in Polanski’s life that would haunt while simultaneously erasing any good will the American public had for him. He was charged for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl who modeled for him during a Vogue photoshoot. It was recorded as occurring at the Bel Air estate of Jack Nicholson. There is no question about this encounter as Polanski was arrested and confessed to the charges. He thought he was going to receive probation and timed served for a guilty plea, but the judge was reported to have changed his mind and was planning to reject the plea and give Polanski prison time for all charges. This would result in up to 50 years in jail and what amounted to life in prison. Polanski would not serve this sentence so he fled the country to France where he would not be extradited.

The charges are still pending and there is no statute of limitations on rape in the United States, so Polanski is on a list of people that if found outside of certain countries will be immediately sent back to the U.S. to face charges. He has dual citizenship in France and Poland; both countries do not extradite citizens. He went on to make one of his best works, a film called Tess, while in Europe. It was a great success and Polanski was nominated for Best Director. The film ended up winning three Academy Awards (none for Polanski). So it seemed that this acclaimed director would live in France and hope that things would blow over. He settled a civil suit in court with the girl and she went on to marry and says she forgives Polanski. But it didn’t end...

Because the woman was in the U.S. and Polanski was not, she was harassed by the press to speak out and tell her story. She reported that the media did much more harm to her and her family than Polanski did. That is a very strong statement considering the charges. Things finally cooled down somewhat when Polanski married an actress from one of his films, Emmanuelle Seignor in 1989. The couple have two kids together and things were apparently going fine in France.

Things remained well through the 90s although nothing Polanski did got much attention. It seemed he would simply live out his life quietly in France. Then in 1999, he came out with a film called The Ninth Gate that garnered attention since it starred the very popular Johnny Depp. Polanski was back on his game and he directed and produced a film called The Pianist. It stars Adrian Brody and told the story of a Polish-Jewish composer who survived the concentration camps because of goodwill received from German officers that appreciated his work. It is a masterpiece and earned Polanski the award for Best Director. He could not accept the award in person because he would be arrested, so Harrison Ford accepted it on his behalf and took it to him in France. A strange little detail about this is that The Pianist was also up for best picture, but stirrings about Polanski’s past were brought up by a competing producer to throw the award. There is no real proof of this, but the man said to have done this was quite powerful in Hollywood at the time. Ironically, that man who was said to remind people of old rape charges was none other than Harvey Weinstein. I don’t have proof of this, but it is an interesting story. One of those “I heard it is said that” kind of things from TMZ.

Anyway, these reminders had people trying to interview Polanski and his wife about the past and he basically said that people needed to move past it. This does not tend to go over very well with the American public or the legal system and Polanski was arrested while in Switzerland and held in Zurich. Public sentiment in America, France, and Poland leaned towards Polanski being sent to America to face trial. The Swiss judge denied extradition and Polanski was sent back to France. There were requests in 2014 by US courts that Poland send Polanski to stand trial since there was question concerning the conduct of the original judge in Polanski’s case. It was believed that Polanski would be given some form of probation, but it also meant he could travel. Polish courts ruled that Polanski had served his punishment and should not have to face U.S. courts again. In 2016, it was presented by Polish officials that no amount of time could account for the crime of rape, but the decision of the lower court was held.

In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences removed Polanski as a member. Strangely, that same year, they offered a membership to his wife (who loudly said no).

So the final say about how to feel about Polanski and his works lies firmly on the individual. Here is all the information about the trial that can keep it nice and ambiguous for you. The judge, the lead prosecutor, and the LA County Deputy DA at the time all admitted bias against Polanski. He would not have gotten a fair trial and would likely have ended up in prison for life. The prosecutor said later in an interview for a documentary that he was not surprised at all that Polanski left and it would have been a media circus. Polanski paid the victim almost a million dollars in civil settlement money and she said she doesn’t want to see any further prosecution. Okay. In 2017, a website run by Matan Uziel was sued by Polanski for libel when it was posted that 5 other women had come forward and accused Polanski of sexual assault. Polanski did not show up in court so Uziel was dismissed of charges. Uziel requested specifically that the cases not be dropped so that Polanski could not try and sue him at a future date. It is true that, in 2010, an English actress accused Polanski of “forcing himself” on her during filming of the movie Pirates. In 2017, a Swiss woman accused Polanski of raping her in the 70s when she was only 15. The same month, another woman accused him of assaulting her in 1975 when she was only 10. Finally, in 2019, a former actress model from France said that Polanski violently raped her at a Swiss chalet in 1975.

So what can you say about the man? His early life was tragedy and misery. The loss of his wife and child was horrific. He seemed like he was in a very bad place in the 70s. I don’t want to give credence to accusation without proof, but it can be sure that he committed at least one sexual assault of an under aged girl. He ran from his trial because he knew it would not be fair, but he was still never held accountable in a court of law for what he did. He has been forced to stay in Poland and France, but he is wealthy with a wife and kids, never seeing the jail time for what he did. And if it is true that he has committed other crimes like this, then he needs to be in jail. But could he ever get a fair day in court at this point? The man is 87 and will likely die soon, likely before any sentencing could occur. Also, how reliable is testimony from any parties about things that happened between 40-50 years ago? Everything he is accused of seems to have happened after the death of Sharon Tate and before his marriage to his current wife, so it seems like his behavior was linked to his state of mind and he is no longer in that state. That may explain things but it does not forgive them.

I don’t know. This is probably why I chose psychology instead of law enforcement or criminal justice. Trying to decide if someone has adequately paid for crimes they have committed is not my specialty. It will be a moot point soon enough because he will be dead. So what do we do with the guy? He has encountered both great suffering and great joy in his life. He as also caused great suffering and great joy. I guess it is more about how he will be remembered at this point. I would be curious to hear what others think.

#roman polanski #sharon tate #chinatown #rosemary's baby #film director #extradition #court charges #life and times #assault #70s #media coverage #introvert #introverts

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beautiful-basque-country · 5 years

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I’m very sorry to have asked it coldly, but it saddens me that most people think the solution to mend what Franco did is communism, or other leftist ideologies. Would you please explain us, foreigners, how much Franco’s politics damaged the regions?

Kaixo berriro, anon

When we talk about a dictatorship, anon, we don’t talk about left and right anymore, we talk about a criminal regime.

That said, and seeing you’re foreigner and you may not know where we come from, let us take you on a bumpy ride:

- In 1933, Spaniards voted for the first time ever, and they freely choose to be in a Republic. This government had progressive ideas and wanted to update Spain to European standards since it was still an agriculture-based state. They also wanted Spain to be a secular country - and regaining some of the huge power the Catholic church had - with mandatory education to lower the iliteracy rate that was rocketing at the time. You see, it doesn’t look TOO leftist to us.

- Some generals of the Spanish army saw all this TOO progressive. Spain without a king was bad, but without religion and with education? Hell to the no. So they revolted and attempted a coup, but failed miserably since not every region and politician supported them. So what’s next? The Spanish Civil War, fought by Republicans - who supported the legal and freely elected government - and Nationals - who revolted and wanted to go back to Middle Ages, so to speak.

- One of those rebel generals was Franco. And slyly killed all the rest by making it look like sad accidents. He got the military support of nazi Germany and fascist Italy while the Republican Government was ignored by Europe - the way they were ignoring Hitler - which lead him to victory and Spaniards to hell.

- 40,000 supporters of the Republic died during war, and 150,000 - 400,000 were tortured, executed, sent to concentration camps and / or went missing during the dictatorship. Many of them are still in mass graves, lost somewhere.

- Bizkaia & Gipuzkoa were labeled “traitor provinces”, which meant that we had no rights and that soldiers and policemen could do everything they wanted: beatings, stealing, raping, you name it.

- Almost 500,000 people had to flee the country, many of them were children who were sent alone in a desperate effort from their parents to save them since fascists killed children, elder people, whatever. Thousands of Basque people, members of the traitor provinces, moved to America and now we have there a very big diaspora.

- Mass rapes were encouraged in the “conquered” regions, during war and after it.

- Around 40,000 babies born of imprisoned mothers were stolen from them and sold to rich families. All this was made by nuns and higher authorities of the Catholic church, who, needless to say, happily supported the fascists.

- Franco wanted Basque people and culture to disappear, and he encouraged people from other regions to move to Euskal Herria so they mixed and our “race” - he was a racist - erased.

- Minority languages were banned and their speakers prosecuted, fined and / or executed. Children couldn’t be baptised with a name that wasn’t Spanish. Fines were up to a whole year of earnings.

- In Franco’s times, a woman couldn’t open a bank account without the permission of her husband. Abortion was illegal, which meant that only rich women could fly to France or England to have it, and poor women risked their lives in illegal clandestine procedures that lacked any basic hygiene.

- In rural Spain, you had to give the Catholic church 10% of your harvest, every year.

- A neighbour wanting your house, your fields, your wife, whatever, could call the police and anonimously say that you were a communist or a mason. No questions asked, you were doomed: police came, took you out of your home and you were never seen again.

Nobody rised systematically against Franco except ETA, yes, the Basque terrorist group. Why? Because repression here - not saying that in other regions was any less, we just talk about what we know - was unbearable.

ETA killed the man that was meant to be Franco’s successor.

But still, Franco died in his bed, there wasn’t a revolution against fascism in Spain. It’s normal though, since most of Spanish antifascists were dead or exiled.

Franco’s ministers and high assistants created a political party to keep on with the regime during “democracy”: AP, that later became PP. And, as you can understand, since its members where active part of the dictatorship and nowadays members are the offspring of those active people, they can’t condemn Franco. Thay can’t say anything bad about the dictatorship. They say let’s not open wounds, let’s let the past be the past.

And now there’s another party, Vox, that’s even more francoist than PP.

There wasn’t a Nuremberg trial. Rich influent people during the dictatorship remained rich and influent after Franco’s death. Francoist judges kept on judging. Francoist teachers kept on teaching. The Francos are still privileged and untouchable by any law.

So now tell us.

Tell us anon, how can we mend all this? Where do we turn to if left wing isn’t the answer?

To the far right?

#euskadi #euskal herria #basque country #pais vasco #pays basque #spain #history #dictatorship #francoism #fascism #anons #personal #politics #francisco franco

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socialjusticeartshare · 3 years

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Stephen Miller and those who enabled him must be investigated and prosecuted

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, “Conspiracy” is a 2001 BBC/HBO film addressing the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference in which General Reinhard Heydrich, upon orders of Adolf Hitler, convened a group of fifteen high-ranking German officials to set forth the parameters of what became known as “The Final Solution,” the comprehensive and systematic plan to exterminate all Jews from the continent of Europe. Only one written record of the proceedings at Wannsee, a locality abutting a lakeside in Western Berlin, survived the war, and it is largely from this written summary (prepared from transcripts of the meeting by Adolf Eichmann) that the film is based.

The most chilling aspect of this film is the banal manner in which the subject is discussed, the euphemisms employed (“evacuation” rather than “extermination” being a typical example), the jocular mannerisms of several of the participants and in particular, their susceptibility to the intimidation of Heydrich as well as representatives of the Nazi SS present at the conference, held in a beautiful lakeside villa and catered with liveried servants.

The juxtaposition of fifteen men sitting around an oval-shaped conference table, alternately breaking for refreshments and wine, then returning to discuss the logistical necessities, facts and figures relating to the identification and classification of Jews, the proposed means of transport for their “evacuation” and ultimately the efficiencies of various means of murdering them, is beyond jarring—it’s fairly horrifying. The acting (Heydrich is played by Kenneth Branagh; Wilhelm Stuckart, the author of the Third Reich’s racial laws, is played by Colin Firth, and Adolf Eichmann by Stanley Tucci) is superior and riveting; you forget rather quickly that the entirety of the action revolves around a seemingly dry bureaucratic discussion around a conference table.

But probably the most unnerving thing, chills aside, about the film is the degree to which a group of people can come to a mutual accommodation towards evil, when that evil is presented and explicated as a means to an end that all of them desire.

In the Trump administration we are not, as far as is currently known, dealing with anything anywhere close to the realm of evil that occurred at Wannsee, but as the media fixate obsessively on the aftermath of the 2020 election and the continuing antics of Donald Trump and other Republicans denying the result of that election, certain things done, and certain actions taken by this administration in our name over the past four years, actions which likewise had their genesis in dry, bureaucratic conferences between highly placed American officials, should not be forgotten or allowed to “slip through the cracks.’ Because the evil that they represent—though not on the par with systematic genocide of the Nazis—should be no less unforgivable and intolerable.

In 2018, the current administration held a meeting, doubtlessly around an oblong conference table, in which it was calmly determined to forcibly and permanently separate children, many as young as babies, from their parents after those parents had been stopped following unlawfully crossing– or attempting to cross–over the border into the United States from Mexico.

As reported by NBC News:

WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room, where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

The meeting was held at the instigation of one of Donald Trump’s senior policy advisors, Stephen Miller, who was unquestionably operating to implement the specific policy aims of Donald Trump. Miller’s rabid xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric had by that time (and has still) conferred upon him the unusual distinction of being one of the few members of Trump’s inner circle to have kept his position throughout Trump’s entire tenure.

As the NBC news report explains, the U.S. Justice Department under the orders of Jeff Sessions had already implemented Miller’s preferred “zero tolerance” policy towards prosecuting any undocumented immigrants captured crossing the U.S. border, a radical departure from decades of prior practice covering multiple U.S. administrations. Yet, as Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff of NBC News reported, the forced separation between parents and their young children had not yet been put into place. According to the report, Miller was “furious at the delay,” and had convened a meeting to emphasize his authority.

Those present at the meeting were Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. According to NBC’s sources, other participants may have included White House counsel Don McGahn, Deputy Chief of Staff Chris Liddell, and representatives of Vice President Pence’s office.

Nielsen, much like several of the participants at Wannsee nearly eighty years ago, had some issues she wanted to air out concerning the logistics. Specifically, she bemoaned the fact that DHS had insufficient resources to implement the separation process, in which children so taken from their parents would be removed to isolated separate facilities. Hers were practical objections, and she noted that the ability of her agency to ultimately return these essentially kidnapped children to their parents was in doubt. She warned that the process could “get messy,” and could end up in children getting “lost” in a system of holding pens, without any recourse.

These complaints did not find a willing audience in Miller, who not only did not perceive any inherent moral issues with separating children from their parents, but in fact wanted to accelerate and expand the process, so that such separated children would ultimately number in the tens of thousands.

The NBC report gives no doubt as to who was in charge of driving the policy:

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” Miller said, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like that, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

Around the same time, the Justice Department was given a similar mandate by Attorney General Sessions, one which was echoed and embellished by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. As reported in October, 2020, by the New York Times:

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

Back at the Cabinet meeting, a frustrated and angry Miller accused Nielsen of “stalling” and demanded that all present demonstrate their loyalty to the policy by a show of hands. Incidentally, the participants at Wannsee were also required to voice their assent for “the policy,” which they dutifully affirmed with varying degrees of enthusiasm (this is one of the more gut-churning events in the film).

With the exception of Nielsen, who still clung to her logistical objections, all hands went up.

Spokesmen for both the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services have denied this “vote” actually occurred. NBC stands by its story. DHS and the State Department have referred all inquiries about the meeting to the White House, and the key Cabinet officials involved, Nielsen and Sessions have refused comment.

In other words, they can’t or won’t confirm one simple point—was there, in fact, such a vote?

Thus did our lawfully elected government enter on a course that at this count, has left over 600 children permanently separated from their parents, trapped in holding cells at locations scattered throughout the United States.

As reported by the NBC, that number is even higher than Trump administration officials previously acknowledged.

Lawyers working to reunite migrant families separated by the Trump administration before and during its “zero tolerance” policy at the border now believe the number of separated children for whom they have not been able to find parents is 666, higher than they told a federal judge last month, according to an email obtained by NBC News.

Nearly 20 percent, or 129, of those children were under 5 at the time of the separation, according to a source familiar with the data.

The issue of immigration has been the touchstone of this administration’s domestic policy since the days of the 2016 campaign. It has been used as both a weapon, an excuse and a bludgeon against Trump’s political opponents. The evidence clearly indicates that the policy of forcibly separating children from their parents was instituted and ordered by persons at the highest levels of this administration. They are therefore—in theory at the very least—amenable to prosecution, possibly for crimes against humanity.

At the very minimum, immediately upon the inauguration of Joseph Biden as President, the Congress should instigate hearings and the Justice Department should initiate an investigation for potential prosecution and criminal or civil liability of those responsible for this inhumane and abhorrent policy decision and its implementation.

Thank you to all who already support our work since we could not exist without your generosity. If you have not already, please consider supporting us on Patreon to ensure we can continue bringing you the best of independent journalism.

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#procecute #prosecute stephen miller #prosecute enablers #separated children

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years

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Public distrust of the CWP [Communist Workers Party] mobilized sympathy for the white power gunmen. Furthermore, CWP members repeatedly undermined their chance at what justice the court could offer. Several of the women widowed on November 3 confounded the Greensboro community when, instead of weeping or grieving, they stood with their fists raised and declared to the television cameras that they would seek communist revolution.61 Days after the shooting, an article appeared in the Greensboro Record that was titled “Slain CWP Man Talked of Martyrdom” and implied that the CWP had foreknowledge of the shooting and that some planned to die for the cause. This damaged what little public sympathy remained. In language typical of mainstream coverage, the story described the CWP as “far-out zealots infiltrat[ing] a peaceful neighborhood.” Even two years later, when the widows visited the Greensboro cemetery and found their husbands’ headstone vandalized with red paint meant to symbolize blood, they would not be able to effectively mobilize public sympathy.62 Community wariness of the CWP’s militant stance only increased after the CWP held a public funeral for their fallen comrades and marched through town with rifles and shotguns. The fact that the weapons were not loaded hardly mattered: photographs of the widows holding weapons at the ready appeared in local and national newspapers. In the public imagination, these images inverted the real events of November 3, when a heavily armed white power paramilitary squad confronted a minimally armed group of protestors. The defendants, depicted as respectable men wearing suits in front of the Vietnam War memorial, stood in stark contrast to the gun-toting widows.63 National and local CWP members took up a campaign of hostile protest of the trial itself. The day before testimony began, the CWP burned a large swastika into the lawn of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms director, and hung an effigy on his property with a red dot meant to convey a bullet wound. In the trial itself, CWP members refused to testify, even to identify the bodies of their fallen comrades. CWP widows who shouted that the trial was “a sham” and emptied a vial of skunk oil in the courtroom were held in contempt of court. Although the actions of the widows may have “shocked the court and freaked out the judge,” as the CWP newspaper Workers Viewpoint proudly reported, the widows’ “bravery” didn’t translate as such to the Greensboro community.64 Even those who may have sympathized with the CWP after seeing the graphic footage of the shooting soon found that feeling complicated by the group’s contempt for the justice system, however problematic that system was. With the CWP widows refusing to tell their stories, attorneys for the defendants built a self-defense case by deploying two widely used white power narratives: one of honorable and wronged Vietnam veterans, and the other of the defense of white womanhood. The defense depended on the claim that CWP members carrying sticks had threatened Renee Hartsoe, the seventeen-year-old wife of Klansman Terry Hartsoe, as she rode in a car near the front of the caravan. Terry Hartsoe testified that he could see the communist protestors throwing rocks at the car and trying to open the door. Such a statement can be seen as alluding to the threat of rape of white women by nonwhite men, a constant theme throughout the various iterations of the Klan since the end of the Civil War.65 White supremacy has long deployed violence by claiming to protect vulnerable white women.... After many years of ineffective, smaller prosecutions, the Fort Smith trial marked the first serious attempt by the federal government to recognize the unification of seemingly disparate Klan, neo-Nazi, and white separatist groups in a cohesive white power movement, and to prosecute the movement’s leaders in light of this understanding. Affidavits documented nearly a decade of control by Beam, Butler, and Miles, and also named Miles’s home as the command center for the Order.66 “They preached war, prayed for war and dreamed of war,” said Justice Department prosecutor Martin Carlson. “And when war came, they willingly accepted war.”67 The indictments presented a serious enough threat to white power leaders that Beam decided to flee the country, setting off a series of events that would shape the outcome of the trial. Before Beam fled he married a woman whose martyrdom would later rally the movement and appeal to the mainstream. After the fishermen’s dispute, Louis Beam had led a chaotic personal life. He separated from his third wife in 1981, and an ugly custody battle followed the split. Beam took his young daughter to Costa Rica for two years. After his return to Texas in late 1984, he moved permanently to the Aryan Nations compound. He didn’t break his Texas ties, however, and took long trips there frequently.68 Sheila Toohey was a pretty, blond twenty-year-old Sunday school teacher at the Gospel Temple, a Christian Identity congregation in Pasadena, Texas. Beam’s young daughter was one of her students. Perhaps Beam met the Toohey family during the fishermen’s dispute: his Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had run a bookstore in Pasadena. Toohey came from a family that lived in a trailer in nearby Santa Fe, Texas—the site of the Klan rally where Beam had burned a boat painted “U.S.S. Viet Cong” during the fishermen conflict in 1981.69 “Louis fell in love with Sheila immediately,” wrote J. B. Campbell, a white power movement activist who also claimed mercenary service in Rhodesia.70 Campbell’s laudatory essay later appeared on Beam’s personal website under the heading “Love” and framed with images of roses: [Beam had] been visiting her father, talking politics, and couldn’t believe his friend could have such a beautiful, sweet and unaffected daughter as Sheila, who lived at home with her parents and brothers in Santa Fe, Texas. Sheila taught Sunday school. She’d had to wear a back brace from a recent car accident and was in constant pain, although she would never burden anyone by mentioning it. In the following weeks Sheila noticed that Louis was coming over for dinner quite frequently and that he was talking with her more than with her father. He actually likes me, she realized. Within a few months Louis asked Sheila to marry him.71 The passage focused on Toohey as a vulnerable white woman—in constant pain but never mentioning it—and subservient to the man who “actually like[d]” her. Her position as a Sunday school teacher confirmed her innocence, presumed virginity, fitness for motherhood, and, since she taught children at a Christian Identity church, subscription to a white power political theology. That she lived surrounded, and presumably cared for, by her father and brothers emphasized her movement from one set of male guardians to another. It also highlighted the twenty-year age difference of the newlyweds. Toohey was Beam’s fourth wife; the first three had each been around sixteen years old when they married and around twenty years old when they divorced.72 Beam and Toohey married at a Christian Identity church in Pennsylvania in April 1987.73 After the wedding, with seditious conspiracy charges issued, Louis and Sheila Beam traveled to Mexico to avoid trial, taking his seven-year-old daughter with them, though without the proper documents. They settled in Chapala, near Guadalajara, in a community of white American expatriates. Beam spent four months on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list before authorities caught up with him in November 1987.74 One night the Beams returned home after grocery shopping. While the couple was unloading the food from the car and his daughter was still sitting in the vehicle, authorities apprehended Louis Beam. Sheila Beam “glanced out the kitchen window down at the car and was appalled to see Louis bent over the hood with a gun to his head,” according to Campbell’s narrative. Sheila Beam would later say that the officers never identified themselves as policemen and she assumed the attack was a robbery or kidnapping. Purportedly defending herself, she grabbed her husband’s weapon and shot a Mexican federal officer three times, wounding him. Authorities detained her in Mexico for ten days while they extradited Louis Beam to the United States, where he spent the next five months in prison during the sedition trial. A Mexican judge found Sheila Beam not guilty for reasons of self-defense in November 1987, and she was released and deported back to the United States. The officer she shot in the chest and abdomen remained hospitalized.75 To white power activists, this story was about endangered white women, but it was also about government betrayal. Rumors flew that federal agents had used phony drug charges as a pretense for the arrest, in order to extradite Louis Beam to the United States. This narrative placed innocent Sheila Beam in the crosshairs of a renegade state.76 However, Beam would most likely have been subject to extradition in any case, with or without drug charges.77 In an affidavit, Beam presented herself as an innocent white woman in need of the protection of white men. She said that she sustained an abdominal injury when the arresting officers threw her over a chair, and was then taken to jail and kept handcuffed for five days. She also said that the chief of police threatened her with torture, and that she was forced to sign documents in Spanish that she couldn’t read. She testified: While I was in the Guadalajara jail, I was physically and psychologically mistreated. I was kept with my wrists handcuffed behind my back for five days; my wrists were so swollen that my hands were turning colors and my watch was cutting off the circulation. I was hand-fed by a little Mexican boy with his dirty fingers. Officers would come into my cell and leer at me and caress their weapons. I was chained to the bed, which had a filthy, rotten mattress, and when I would try to sleep, they would kick the bed to jar me awake and keep me from sleeping. I was refused water for extended periods and medication for my back injury or my back brace. I was denied medical attention for my abdominal injuries and suffered from vaginal bleeding for several days afterward.78 Her testimony positioned her as endangered. It placed her in peril and in the presence of male racial others—the “Mexican boy” feeding her with “his dirty fingers,” and the officers. It presented men of color “caress[ing] their weapons” as they “leer[ed]” at her, invoking masturbation.79 It also placed her in a violated bedroom space, “chained to the bed, which had a filthy, rotten mattress.” Within the broader frame of pro-natalism, this language positioned Sheila Beam’s body as vulnerable to attack by men of color, and emphasized it as a site of combat where battles might be won or lost through the birth or absence of white children. The vaginal bleeding she said she suffered after her imprisonment hinted at both rape and miscarriage of a white child, and would have signified a double martyrdom. Jailed at the moment when the state had finally turned to the prosecution of the white power movement, Sheila Beam acted the martyr in a way that further united activists and appealed to people beyond the movement. Her wounded body served as a constant symbolic reminder of state failure and betrayal. Metzger lobbied for her release; Kirk Lyons, who represented Beam in the sedition trial and would become the go-to attorney of the white power movement over the next decade, sent an associate, Dave Holloway, to help the Toohey family advocate for her return. Back home, the Tooheys answered the phone with the entreaty, “Save Our Sheila.”80 After her release Lyons told one reporter, “It made a Christian out of me again. Her being freed was a miracle to me.”81 In the mainstream press, too, Sheila Beam became a sympathetic figure in local newspapers and major publications alike. A series of articles in the Galveston Daily News focused on her injuries, stating as fact that she had been “severely beaten” and raising the possibility that she “may have been sexually assaulted.” The same reporter uncritically repeated white power claims that FBI agents had refused to arrange her release to the United States, and described “physical and psychological coercion” during her ten-day imprisonment.82 Other articles linked her faith in God to her hopes for the acquittal of all the trial’s defendants,83 and mentioned her pain and injuries with no mention of the reasons for Louis Beam’s arrest or Sheila Beam’s actions in shooting and wounding the officer.84 The Houston Chronicle reported that she returned to the United States sobbing and limping, escorted by her father and an associate of Lyons, and was met by her mother and three brothers at the airport. The article emphasized that Sheila Beam had a swollen abdomen and walked with such a pronounced limp that two people had to support her.85 A photograph of Sheila’s return in the Miami News featured a flattering photograph of her leaning against her brother’s chest, holding flowers and flanked by a pretty, smiling, female friend. The caption referred to her “break[ing] out in tears” upon her return, and to her being “charged with shooting a Mexican federal police officer during the arrest of her husband at their … home.” It elided any reference to Christian Identity or participation in the white power movement, either by Sheila Beam or by her husband. It didn’t even name Louis Beam, much less discuss his pending seditious conspiracy charges or his stint on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Nevertheless, it made clear that Sheila Beam shot the officer at her home, emphasizing domestic defense beneath a photograph that portrayed her as vulnerable, small, and feminine.86 For her own part, Sheila Beam delivered a political performance of martyrdom both in comments to the press and in her actions. After her release, she flew directly to Fort Smith, where Louis Beam had been transferred to a federal prison hospital following a weeklong hunger strike. White power leaders praised her selfless devotion. “Despite her severe internal injuries and equally severe psychological damage,” Campbell wrote, “Sheila postponed her required emergency surgery and flew to Ft. Smith to reassure her husband.”87 Sheila Beam went to her husband’s side despite her severe pain, the story had it, illustrating the sacrifice of the white female body to the needs of the movement. During the trial, the presence of Sheila Beam’s wounded and wronged body entered the official record in several ways. Lyons invoked her injuries regularly, interrupting testimony about her arrest to ask the pursuing FBI agent what had happened to her back brace and conspicuously leaving court to pick her up at the airport. Sheila Beam continued to speak about her injuries and abuse to the press, and claimed her husband’s innocence with the simple position that since he had quit the Klan in 1981, he couldn’t now be guilty of sedition. In truth, he had quit the Klan to join Aryan Nations and lead the white power movement on a larger scale. She also reminded newspapers that her husband held the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal for Heroism, staking out his moral authority as a hero of the Vietnam War.88 It is difficult to gauge the impact of such performative acts on the outcome of a jury trial, but Sheila Beam’s symbolic work toward acquittal should not be discounted. Even in the pages of academic accounts that have argued that white power paramilitarism partially or wholly excluded them, women nevertheless appear as historical actors who impact events. In Rafael Ezekiel’s widely cited ethnographic study, for instance, which includes his observation of the Fort Smith trial, he notes that “a sister appears for a young fellow who is already serving a long term for involvement in The Order’s robbery of an armored car … entering the court, she touched her brother’s arm, quietly, as she passed him.”89 With these actions, the “sister”—no name given, as she did not qualify as an activist in this study, but perhaps it was Brenna or Laura Beth Tate, sisters of David Tate—conferred humanity upon her brother, appealed to the jury, and neutralized the racism of the movement.90 Similarly, Ezekiel recounts the presence of Louis Beam’s “young new wife,” Sheila Beam, although she isn’t named in his account.91 Ezekiel describes how the couple make frequent eye contact across the room. She had been the Sunday school teacher of Beam’s daughter. A reporter ungraciously described her to me as “a Yahweh freak.” Here in court she wears a frilled white blouse; during Beam’s arrest in Mexico, she shot an armed Federale who had failed to identify himself.92 In other words, Sheila Beam played her part as a movement activist by creating and embodying a particular narrative of her innocence, the arrest, the justified shooting of the Mexican officer, and her husband’s wrongful detention—one persuasive enough to be accepted uncritically by journalists and academic observers.93

Katherine Belew, Bring the War Home

#thinking about amber guyger #she only has 2 white people on her jury #but there's still a level of identification with the prerogatives of whiteness that might override that

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awed-frog · 6 years

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I only just learned that Christine Nöstlinger died last week. It’s the kind of news that leaves you both sad and slightly incredulous, because even as an adult, it’s hard to see someone like Nöstlinger as a real person. To me, she’ll always be a funny, exotic name on the cover of a book - she was one of my favourite writers when I was a young child, and I don’t think it ever occurred to me that those people - people like Roald Dahl, Astrid Lindgren, Bianca Pitzorno or Michael Ende - actually existed in the real world, and did things as mundane as wear pajamas or brush their teeth. In fact, as I was scrolling through a couple of obituaries today, I was surprised to learn Nöstlinger was Austrian, not Swedish (her books were side by side with Lindgren’s on my shelf) and that if her stories were always delightfully subversive, it’s probably because she grew up in Nazi Austria and experienced that reality first-hand. And while I do understand this is a thing that happens - that people have lives, that they must be born somewhere and do stuff and exist in actual reality - as I read of her death I became a child of eight again; what I found myself mourning was that name on my bookshelf - nothing more. I am slightly ashamed of that, of knowing nothing about this person who brought me so much joy, because over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know some YA writers and I now have a new appreciation of how hard they work and how determined they are to make a difference - not only to make children happy, that is, but also to teach them how to think for themselves, to help them engage with the world around them with full awareness. And so, to honour Christine Nöstlinger and her work, I decided to translate a speech she gave to the Austrian Parliament for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen. I couldn’t find an English version of it, and I think it deserves to be more widely read - especially today.

“I was almost two when the Mauthausen concentration camp was opened, and as the last survivors were freed by American troops, I turned eight. For this reason, you could think this is not a subject I remember hearing about or discussing.

But I do.

I didn’t know the word Mauthausen, but I was certainly familiar with the expression ‘concentration camp’. I would hear it again and again as my grandma grumbled about the Nazis with the dairywoman or at the grocer’s. That’s when someone would whisper in warning: ‘You’ll get in trouble!’, they’d say; or: ‘You keep talking like that, you’ll end up in a concentration camp!’.

One memory is particularly clear and vivid in my mind: my uncle, my mom’s kid brother, is visiting us. He stands in his SS uniform, tall and broad, very close to my mother, and says: ‘Ella, the Jews are all going to pass through the chimney!’. And my mother, who was much shorter than he was, went red with rage and slapped him across the face. I think that was the first and only time my normally placid mother ever hit someone.

Obviously, I didn’t understand what ‘pass through the chimney’ meant, but I could guess it was something really bad. And that was the day I understood that Mr Fischl had passed through the chimney.

Mr Fischl was a shoemaker, and he’d had a shop in our alley. He’d resole shoes, repair heels and fix the toe caps so that those who couldn’t afford it wouldn’t have to buy new shoes for their growing children. In 1938, shortly after the Anschluss, my mother witnessed a chilling scene as she was coming home from work: a group of SA soldiers had dragged Mr Fischl out of his shop and they were now forcing him to scrub clean the three white arrows some regime opponents had painted on the wall. A truck was parked in the street, full of grinning SA men. Mr Fischl, on his knees, was surrounded by his amused neighbours. My mother, with a heavy heart, moved to the other side of the street and walked on; she later heard Mr Fischl had been taken away that very day. Soon after those events, an ‘Aryan’ shoemaker took over both Mr Fischl’s shop and his apartment. Nobody ever mentioned Mr Fischl again - nobody, that is, except my mother. Again and again, she’d tell my sister and me what had happened to him. She always felt guilty she hadn’t done anything to stop it, and would always justify that choice to herself by saying: ‘If I hadn’t had children waiting for me at home, I would have gone there and sent those thugs packing!’.

I was a child then, and when you’re a child you need to see your mother as someone who’s big and strong and powerful - especially if your father has been away in Russia for a long time. I hadn’t known then that adults sometimes lie to themselves. For this reason, I was thoroughly convinced that my mother would indeed have saved Mr Fischl if I had never been born. ‘Where did they take Mr Fischl?’ I asked once, and when my mother answered bluntly ‘To a concentration camp.’, I came to believe his death had been my fault.

This irrational sense of guilt started to fade away when I finally noticed that my mother was neither strong nor powerful: she was small and helpless, and definitely not capable of sending anyone packing.

But not being guilty is not the same as not being responsible. Many people have fully accepted this, and have done their best to bear witness for future generations - they’ve tried to explain where racism once led us; they’ve stood up and spoke out whenever the mood was souring against a minority group.

Now, that’s not an easy thing to do, and many others were simply too uncomfortable to even try. Instead, those people interfered with this effort to remember, pretended they hadn’t known what was going on, complained about what they themselves had lost in the war, and basked in the self-serving idea of a ‘new beginning’. In order to expedite this ‘new beginning’, our post-war governments were not particularly keen to prosecute those who’d been implicated in Nazi crimes. To be perfectly blunt, those people were simply too many to be locked away. Without them, there would have been no possibility to establish a functioning state. Where on Earth would we have found a sufficient number of teachers and civil servants with a perfectly clean slate soon after the end of the war?

Meanwhile, the efforts to welcome back home those Jews and political opponents who’d managed to flee abroad were lukewarm at best. And there was no question of even discussing how to better integrate the Roma and Sinti communities - or, those among them who’d survived. For all of those reasons, my generation and my children’s generation have grown up in a country in which racism, far from being a bad memory, was instead an ongoing, deep-seated conviction passed down from father to son and from mother to daughter.

And today, not much has changed for the better. The only difference is that racism now presents itself under a different guise. Nobody dares to use (and few to even think) words like ‘master race’, ‘subhuman’, ‘Rassenschande’ and ‘final solution’. There is a strong taboo around them.

No, our current form of racism simply rejects all that is foreign. It sees native people as being threatened by an unsustainable wave of immigration; it insists that foreigners have it easy, and what it means by that is: ‘Those people want to live off us, they want to take something away from us!’.

Those who think these things, those who say them openly when they know others will agree, well - they won’t write racist slogans on the walls, won’t vandalize Jewish tombs, won’t insult a veiled woman, won’t beat up black people or set fire to refugee centres. On the other hand, what they do is giving confidence and justification to the people who actually do all these things; the certainty that they’re acting in everybody’s best interest. They are the fertile ground upon which violence grows.

And the number of minorities against whom people ‘have something’ (in the best case) or ‘do something’ (in the worst) is already increasing. To the traditional victims of disapproval and aggression, today we can add asylum seekers and economic refugees (no matter where they come from); also people with a migration background (no matter whether they’re Austrian citizens or not). And obviously, people whose skin is a different colour. Today, however, unlike what happened in the Nazi era, total assimilation seems to protect from hostility. And I fear that when we’re talking about ‘more integration’, well - to the large majority of the population, what that really means is ‘assimilation’. We do not want to experience and get used to what is foreign and unknown; we want those who only just arrived to adapt to our traditional way of life, and that will rarely succeed. That’s why we are uneasy with living with people from unfamiliar cultures. For a long time now, our politicians’ solution to this problem has been to wait and hope that the issue will fade as those who’re already here slowly become more tolerant and those who have recently moved here slowly learn how to fit in. Often, these expectations have been met; but just as often they have not.

What we need to do is implement concrete measures: for instance, compulsory kindergarten attendance and all-day schools. We need properly trained teachers so that children who speak a different language at home can learn German quickly and efficiently. That way, as they start school, both their language skills and their chances to have a good education will be the same as those of the native speakers. This is the only way to prevent the emergence of parallel societies in vulnerable neighbourhoods. Better schools are also the only viable tool to weaken the deeply ingrained racism of most of our local population. Let’s remember that those who know nothing will believe everything, even the most outrageous nonsense and the most shameless distortion of facts.

That said, we still need to understand why so many people prefer to believe racists over those who say that it’s perfectly possible to coexist peacefully (if not to truly share our lives with others). Maybe there is a reason; maybe our skin doesn’t have seven layers, as we all have learned, but eight. Maybe this eighth layer is a ‘civilisation skin’. We are not born with it. It appears and changes as we grow up. Whether it’s thick or thin, well, that depends on how well we look after it. If we don’t care for it properly, it stays thin and tears easily. And what seeps from those wounds may lead to consequences that will again cause us to say: ‘No one ever wanted that’.”

Christine Nöstlinger, 2015

#christine nöstlinger #austria #history #ww2 #antisemitism #racism #children's books #childhood memories #man she was awesome #if you have kids #please buy her books #they're really good

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tilbageidanmark · 3 years

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Movies I watched this week - 18

Room 237 - Nine obsessive theorists speculate about the hidden messages of Kubrick’s The Shining. According to one, the subtext is the genocide of the American Indians. According to another, it’s about the holocaust, etc. Interesting interpretations of all the smallest trivia and inter-connections from the original.

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I wish I could relive the night 50 years ago at the auditorium of Jerusalem University when I saw Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey for the first time. It was magnificent, and still is.

Dave Bowman on his death bed represented all of us very much like Neil Armstrong did around the same time.

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“Forget about morality”

In the Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers ( שומרי הסף ) six former directors of the secret service Shin-Bet describe their work in controlling the Palestinian people since 1967. Sinister banality, and for me, an extremely difficult watch.

At the end, and only after they retired, they acknowledged, on camera, that Israel has become “a brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II” .

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The law in these parts ( שלטון החוק ) is another documentary which reviews the legal history of Israel's inhuman occupation of Arab territories, as seen by nine judges and military prosecutes who wrote and implemented these undemocratic and immoral laws.

What would Hannah Arendt have made of these two films? She would probably refuse to believe that this mechanism started 6 short years after and in exactly the same location as the Eichmann’s trial.

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Ali: Fear Eats The Saul - A sad and lonely 60 year old German cleaning lady falls in love and marries a muscular Moroccan Gastarbeiter (immigrant worker) half her age.

As I’m thinking about this film-reviewing project here on the blog, I realize that a sizable portion of it is revisiting films that I saw and loved, mostly 40 years ago, when I studied cinema under Peter Schepelern.

For the last 5 months, I've been watching circa 20 films per week, and 25-33 % of them are “re-watches”: Some are my perennials to which I return again and again, but many others I have not seen since experiencing them for the first time at the old Cinemateket in Christianshavn. It’s like closing a circle.

Fassbinder belongs to the second category: He was such an overpowering, prolific force in the 70′s and 80′s, but after his death as if he disappeared without a trace.

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All that heaven allows, Douglas Sirk’s soapy melodrama that was the inspiration to Fassbinder’s homage: Fassbinder turned the love story between an older woman and younger man into a bitter racial and class exposure. But Sirk’s critique of the 1950′s conformist mores was milder and subtler. Of course he worked within MGM Studio system, while Fassbinder was an outsider rebel at the outskirts of society.

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Ozo’s Tokyo Story, considered by many to be the “greatest” film of all time:

A simple story of old parents who visit their grown up children that have no time to host them, told in a slow and minimalist style.

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Mark Ruffalo in Dark Waters. I love these kind of legal thrillers, where a determined individual goes against a powerful, corrupt corporation that polluted the water knowingly, poisoned the earth and covered it up, or mass-raped thousands of children (Like Michael Clayton, Erin Brokovitch, Spotlight, The Pelican Brief, Runaway Jury, The Informant, A civil action, many others). But the truth is that it had been done many times before, and this new version does not add anything new to the story (except the realization that American capitalism is evil to the core).

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"I am standing outside Shea Stadium, named after the Cuban revolutionary leader, Shea Stadium"

All you need is cash, Eric idle’s Beatlemania mockumentary with lots of cameos. Based on the Rutland Weekend Television show.

Chastity, the Nazi wolf vixen as Yoko Ono, was a bit too cruel.

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Welcome to the Book Guardian’s World:

A 20 minute documentary about the Reykjavík downtown library by Jiaqian Chen, who interviews staff and patrons, including a child, a musician, and a homeless person, and films various activities taking place on the first day the library opened after the latest Covid lockdown in Iceland. The interviews are in English, the narration is in Chinese, and everything is subtitled in English and Chinese. 7/10!

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Straw Dogs, Peckinpah’s regressive and misogynist home-invasion horror show. Ultra violent and unsettling story of a timid math teacher who move into a backward British village with his flirtatious wife. Released in 1971, the “Violence in cinema” year, together with A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, and Dirty Harry.

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“Randolph Scott!”

Blazing Saddles, co-written by Richard Pryor. (Photo above)

Why didn’t Cleavon Little have a film career after that?

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Amazon Women on the Moon, a mediocre John Landis Si-fi spoof sketch comedy, in the same vain as his previous Kentucky Fried Movie. With Doctor Abe Saperstein as a pharmacist, and “lots of other actors”, as per the credits.

The “Every Van Gogh must go!” Art Sale, was the best of the lot. The rest was just not funny any more.

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““A moth goes into a podiatrist office...”

Norm McDonald’s stand-up Hitler’s dog - dry, deadpan, rambling, unpredictable - and sometimes funny.

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Because of this new, first ever interview that John Swartzwelder gave to the New Yorker, I went ahead and watched Homer’s Enemy, the mentioned “darkest Simpson episode ever”. Still, not for me.

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I also have to stop wasting my time with “comedies” like The Good Guys, which I knew before hand was going to be stupid and un-funny, and it was.

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Throw-back to the art project:

Blazing Saddles Adora.

The Simpsons Adora.

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(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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xtruss · 3 years

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Pompeo Says China’s Policies On Muslims Amount To ‘GENOCIDE’

By Mattew Lee | January 19, 2021 | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — On his way out the door, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out anew at China on Tuesday by declaring that its policies on Muslims and ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang region constitute “crimes against humanity” and a “genocide.” The rarely used designation is sure to provoke an angry response from Beijing.

Pompeo made the determination just 24 hours before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. There was no immediate response from the incoming Biden team, although he and members of his national security team have expressed support for such a designation in the past.

Pompeo’s determination does not come with any immediate repercussions although the legal implications mean the U.S. must take it into account in formulating policy toward China. The U.S. has spoken out and taken action, implementing a range of sanctions against senior Chinese Communist Party leaders and state-run enterprises that fund the architecture of repression across Xinjiang.

Many of those accused of having taken part in the repression are already under U.S. sanctions. The genocide designation means new measures will be easier to impose.

“After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that since at least March 2017, the People’s Republic of China, under the direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party, has committed crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” Pompeo said in a statement.

“In addition, after careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that the PRC, under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang. I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”

A main reason cited for the declaration of genocide was widespread forced birth control among the Uighurs, which The Associated Press documented last year. Another reason cited, Uighur forced labor, has also been linked by AP reporting to various products imported to the U.S., including clothing and electronic goods such as cameras and computer monitors.

Tuesday’s move is the latest in a series of steps the outgoing Trump administration has taken against China.

Since last year, the administration has steadily ramped up pressure on Beijing, imposing sanctions on numerous officials and companies for their activities in Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and the South China Sea.

Those penalties have gotten harsher since the beginning of last year when President Donald Trump and Pompeo began to accuse China of trying to cover up the coronavirus pandemic. Just on Saturday, Pompeo lifted restrictions on U.S. diplomatic contacts with Taiwanese officials, prompting a stern rebuke from China, which regards the island as a renegade province.

Five days ago, the administration announced it would halt imports of cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang with Customs and Border Protection officials saying they would block products from there suspected of being produced with forced labor.

Xinjiang is a major global supplier of cotton, so the order could have significant effects on international commerce. The Trump administration has already blocked imports from individual companies linked to forced labor in the region, and the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Communist Party officials with prominent roles in the campaign.

China has imprisoned more than 1 million people, including Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups, in a vast network of concentration camps, according to U.S. officials and human rights groups. People have been subjected to torture, sterilization and political indoctrination in addition to forced labor as part of an assimilation campaign in a region whose inhabitants are ethnically and culturally distinct from the Han Chinese majority.

China has denied all the charges. China says its policies in Xinjiang aim only to promote economic and social development in the region and stamp out radicalism. It also rejects criticism of what it considers its internal affairs.

The genocide designation is a rare step for the U.S. government, which did not apply it to the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda until much later.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell designated the situation in Sudan’s western Darfur region a genocide in 2004. Former Secretary of State John Kerry applied the term to the Islamic State’s repression and massacres of Yazidis and other ethnic and religious minorities in Syria and Iraq in 2016, but he couched it by saying it was a legal determination only that did not mandate action by the U.S. government.

Human rights groups, which have been generally critical of Trump administration policies, welcomed the move, which Pompeo said was taken with an eye toward the U.S. role in prosecuting Nazi war crimes during WWII at the Nuremberg trials.

“We hope to see the U.S. follow these strong words with decisive action,” said Grant Shubin of the Global Justice Center. “Where there is a risk of genocide, there is a duty to act. Moving forward, this designation should inform the entirety of U.S. foreign policy and we hope to hear more from the incoming Biden administration on how it plans to follow through on this historic announcement.”

And, some questioned the decision to apply it to China and Xinjiang and not to the situation in Myanmar, where Rphingya Muslims have been subjected to significant attacks and atrocities.

“The Secretary’s statement underscores the importance of appropriate international investigations and prosecutions of officials for the crime of genocide in Xinjiang,” said Eric Schwartz, the president of Refugees International. “At the same time, I’m baffled and deeply concerned that Secretary Pompeo has declined to make a similar finding of genocide against the state of Myanmar for its vicious mass attacks against the Rohingya population beginning in August 2017.”

— Ben Fox contributed.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years

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Maria raped in Bolivia. Get the Moon sect out.

Aquí (Here) October 11, 2015

Justice for Maria: Get the Moon sect out of Bolivia

Illustration text:

Protest for the continuation of the legal process against members of the “Moon church,” with transparency. They are accused of rape and human trafficking of a young woman from Sucre.

Along with: Captain Yote Zankos Performans

Monday, August 24th at 10:00am

Chuquisaca Prosecutor’s Office (next to the Correo del Sur newspaper)

We denounce the violence; the government does not comply.

JUSTICE !!!!

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By Roberto Ibarguen Ch.

This August, we are witnessing with astonishment the possibility that our judicial system, through incapability and inefficiency as frequently happens, will release a rapist. The defendants in this case are none other than Siichiro Sagawa, the leader of the infamous “Unification Church” in Bolivia, and seven other well-known members of this sect.

The chances that the accused subjects of the Unification Church (better known as the Moon sect) will be freed is quite high, given the power and money the organization has. Previously many other fully proven allegations have been dismissed, namely: the allegations of their participation in the massacres of Guatemalan indigenous peoples when they supported the dictator Ríos Montt (see note 1 below); support for coups d’état in Chile and Bolivia (see Bolivia section on this this web page); countries where they established excellent relationships and business interests with dictators such as Augusto Pinochet and García Meza; of the allegations of fraudulent purchases of companies in Uruguay and of thousands of hectares of land in Brazil and Paraguay, which were fenced off and deforested, mercilessly attacking the inhabitants of the respective areas, who were mostly indigenous people (note 2). [The Moon sect have been protected] because of the excellent contacts they maintain with power groups in different countries, including Bolivia, where Sun Myung Moon himself, at the head of a group of Korean businessmen, held a meeting in 2010 with President Evo Morales. Although it is not known what the meeting was about, some journalists suppose that it was a lobbying effort to participate in the gas business when exported by Chile, since they are the owners of a large fleet of deep draft ships.

The facts about this crime of rape in Bolivia have been described to us by the activists of the group called “Feministas Callejeras” (“Street Feminists”), and can be clarified by reviewing legal information and news media:

“In Sucre, in 2012, a young woman, whom we will call Maria, began her studies at the University. [At the entrance to] her faculty she was intercepted by two women who offer leadership courses for young people. She attended their meetings in which religion was not initially discussed. However, little by little, they introduced the subject of religion, and the transformation [ultimately moves to the necessity] a person has to serve the Reverend SUN MYUNG MOON (world leader of the Moon sect). Although Maria tried to leave the group, she was stuck in through various arguments and by different people. Finally, in 2013 she was invited to a supposed youth congress in Santa Cruz. The group leaders got permission from Maria’s family for her to travel to the event.

In Santa Cruz, Maria meets the leader, SAGAWA SENSEI. Sensei means teacher; his real name is SIICHIRO SAGAWA. He is in charge of the group conferences. On the second day, the young woman remembers that she was praying and then she was fading (losing consciousness). When she regains consciousness, the accused women were holding her feet and hands while saying that “there were only going to be 21.” Maria, feels that they are raping her, a fact that was repeated for three days. Because Maria did not communicate with her mother, she then asks her relative who lives in Santa Cruz, to look for the young woman. They found Maria in a state of shock.”

The legal process, which has been continuing for over a year, has come up against a series of tricks – as reported in the Correo del Sur (Southern Mail) newspaper dated June 10, 2015.

“… an error on the part of the prosecutor assigned to the case and by not presenting the forensic medical certificate which proved the victim had been raped, the defendant was favored with house arrest.” The process is currently on the verge of being closed (shut down), supposedly because of the accusation presented by the prosecution on Friday, August 14 of this year in the city of Santa Cruz, requesting the preventive detention of the defendants is flawed. This would lead to a hearing in the city of Sucre for the prosecution to rectify its error. According to the victim’s family, and the activists group “Feministas Callejeras”, the possibility that the case could be closed (terminated) and the rapists of Maria could be released can only be reversed if civil society as a whole publicly pressures the corresponding parts of the Judiciary to do justice – without the Judiciary leaning in favor of the power and money of the accused [namely, the Moon sect].

From the information on these pages, in addition to joining with the demand that justice be done and that the rapist and his accomplices be imprisoned, we also demand that the “Unification Church” be investigated. We take into consideration what our colleague, the journalist Antonio Peredo Leigue, wrote in one of his articles in 2010:

“Officially, the Moon sect is not active in the country. Freedom of religion does not mean that believers are permitted to carry out any kind of activity while hiding behind a cloak of religion. However, it is almost impossible to believe that the sect is not secretly active in Bolivia. If already in the 1990s the sect was formally expelled from the cities where its missionaries were working publicly, then the sect was likely to remain in the country, maintaining a low profile while continuing its activities.”

We also join together with the request made in the same article by Antonio Peredo Leigue, “The Moon sect, with such a background, must be thrown out.” This measure would not only do justice to the young victim of rape in Bolivia, but it would safeguard other young women who could be assaulted in the same way by the Moon sect. It seems rape is one of their recurring practices. (see note 3) Expelling the Moon sect would also bring some justice to the women and men who were massacred, with the support of the Unification Church, throughout the continent (note 1) – and to the indigenous peoples who were vilely dispossessed of their land in brother countries. (note 2)

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Note 1. The Moon-owned Washington Times raised funds to support the “contras” who fought against the elected government of Nicaragua. Fundraising was just one of the many ways the Moon organization supported that war, which spilled over into neighboring countries.

Here is an extract from pages 180-181 of Inside The League (The shocking exposé of how terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American death squads have infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League) by Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson

“Immediately after coming to power [in Guatemala], Ríos Montt declared he would put an end to the urban death squads, and for the most part he did so. This sudden end to the daily killings and disappearances in Guatemala City amounted to tangible evidence that the death squads were controlled by— and operated from within— the armed forces. It didn’t end entirely, as one of the authors can attest.14

Although most of the violence stopped in the cities, the civil war with the guerrillas, who had shown renewed strength during the Lucas regime, continued in the rural hinterlands. In response, Ríos Montt unleashed a highly successful counterinsurgency program. Although regions were pacified, the operations also resulted in many large-scale massacres of Indians suspected of supporting the guerrillas.

Counterinsurgency was complemented by a civic action campaign. “Beans and Bullets” (beans for those who submit, bullets for those who don’t) was aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the civilians, no matter what it took.

Ríos Montt didn’t fit into the cloak of human rights defender that American conservatives and evangelicals tried to wrap about him. At the same time as the “Beans and Bullets” program was going on, he established secret army tribunals to try and to execute “subversives,” defending the executions on the basis of an amnesty he had offered the rebels: “Why should we kill people without legal backing? The amnesty gives us the judicial framework for killing. Anyone who refuses to surrender will be shot.”15 (Ríos Montt TV interview)

In 1982, one of the authors questioned Ríos Montt about four suspected guerrillas who had just been executed by firing squads.

“When all the bodies appeared on the roads riddled with bullets,” the president rambled, “they said that here was the law of the jungle without any legal validity. These firing squads are legal— judicially established and everything. And the executions were done— but, as I did four, I could have done four hundred. But no, the law is the law.”16 (Ríos Montt TV interview)

Ríos Montt’s evangelical zeal also had appeal for the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. In 1982, CAUSA established an office in Guatemala and the following year organized a “World Media Conference” in Guatemala City [starting on June 8]. The conference included some two hundred participants from forty-five countries. From their base in Guatemala, the press attendees traveled to Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. “The writers met with military and business leaders in each country, hearing from [Bo Hi] Pak and also from then-President Efraín Ríos Montt of Guatemala.”17 (The Washington Post) [There was another WMC in Cartagena, Colombia in September 1983.]

While Ríos Montt waged war in the country and attempted to convert his countrymen to his version of the “word” of God in bizarre Sunday-night television sermons …”

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Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy by Frederick Clarkson, page 136

One place where the politics of demons was played out in a particularly horrific fashion should serve as a warning. Guatemalan Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a 1982 military coup that was hailed at the time by U.S. evangelicals who were excited that one of their own (Ríos Montt is a member of a U.S.-based Pentecostal sect) was now a head of state. What Pat Robertson refers to as the “enlightened leadership” of the Ríos Montt regime,50 lasted into 1983 when it fell to another military coup. Robertson was and remains a Ríos Montt booster, despite, or perhaps because of Ríos Montt’s scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign that killed as many as 10,000 civilians. This genocidal campaign, ostensibly against a guerrilla insurgency, was often framed in religious terms, according to author Sara Diamond. This episode epitomizes the logical outcome of the politics of demons—what happens when religious intolerance is conflated with the political/military aims of state power. One pastor from Ríos Montt’s group, the U.S.-based Gospel Outreach, explained: “The Army does not massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demon possessed; they are communists. We hold Brother Efraín Ríos Montt like King David of the Old Testament. He is the King of the New Testament.”51 Gospel Outreach members also reportedly participated in the Montt regime’s “espionage and torture-interrogation operations.”

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Note 2. The Unification Church organization, the new owners of Puerto Casado in Paraguay, set up fences around the town in the late 2000s. This barred the inhabitants from accessing the forest or the river which flowed nearby. Locals are asking for some land so they can grow subsistence crops and rear cattle. See Paraguay section HERE

Sun Myung Moon’s Land in Brazil Under Seal New York Times May 10, 2003

The police entered a farm in Mato Grosso do Sul belonging to Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church, and sealed it. They also blocked him from selling nine other properties over environmental concerns. The move, they said, was to force Mr. Moon to carry out environmental impact studies for developments on the properties, on the fringes of the world’s largest wetlands, the Pantanal. “It is a region which has a highly fragile environment,” said Alexandre Ruslan, a prosecutor in Matto Grosso do Sul, where Mr. Moon bought 138,000 acres in the 1990’s. Mr. Ruslan said Mr. Moon has built roads and buildings and has cut down forests, but has failed to carry out environmental studies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/10/world/world-briefing-americas-brazil-sun-myung-moon-land-under-seal.html

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Note 3. The allegation of “rape is one of their recurring practices” has not been substantiated. However, in the early days (1946-1962) Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church did practise a “womb cleansing” sex ritual called pikareum. Since the 1960s married couples have to perform a “Three Day [Sex] Ceremony” to reverse the purported sexual sin of Adam and Eve. Sun Myung Moon himself has a number of illegitimate children. He was arrested and charged with immorality, adultery or bigamy in Korea in 1946, 1948 and 1955. In the first two instances, Moon spent time in jail. The Los Angeles Times Moon obituary refers to his bigamy, as do many other sources, including Korean and Japanese sources. The 1955 case, which involved a large number of female university students, is well documented. Moon admitted to the judge in court that he was guilty of draft dodging. He was sentenced to two years in jail. A few months later he was suddenly declared innocent and released late at night. One female church member, who was arrested at the same time as Moon, admitted the sex charges. After a short time in jail she was released due to the intervention of her very wealthy father, Mr. Choi.

_________________________________________

Sun Myung Moon organization activities in Central & South America

Moon’s theology for his pikareum sex rituals with all the 36 wives

Ritual Sex in the Unification Church – Kirsti L. Nevalainen

Sun Myung Moon – Restoration through Incest

The FFWPU / Unification Church and Shamanism

How “God’s Day” was established on January 1, 1968

Moon used a ‘Honey Trap’ – Choi Soon-yeong

Pikareum emerged at Ewha Womans University in 1955

The Fall of the House of Moon – New Republic

Sun Myung Moon’s secret love child – Mother Jones

Actividades de la Secta Moon en países de habla hispana

Teología de Sun Myung Moon para sus rituales sexuales

Una mujer japonesa fue reclutada por la Federación de Familias y luego vendida a un granjero coreano

Justicia para María: fuera de Bolivia la secta Moon

La secta Moon al acecho – Antonio Peredo Leigue

#rape #Bolivia #Unification Church #La Secta Moon #FFWPU

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outweek30 · 4 years

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"Yes. I'm a lesbian. It's part of what motivates me to be a revolutionary."

Lesbian Political Prisoners

"Gay people have no stake in a system that is racist and sexist and that impoverishes some sectors of this society in order to enrich others ... I don't think that we will ever be liberated under this system. We may have a few more rights, but we'll never win our liberation as human beings without some kind of real revolutionary changes."

Shortly after she began to make these realizations in the late 60s, Laura Whitehorn was a Chicago housewife. She came out as a lesbian at about the same time that the Black liberation struggle and the anti-Vietnam War movement had convinced her that nothing short of revolution would guarantee human equality. And, for over 20 years, Whitehorn was an activist in women's communities and Black and Puerto Rican movements. In 1985 she was arrested for weapons possession.

In her statement to the court, Whitehorn declared that she lived by "revolutionary and human principles." Those words, said the judge, were reason enough to hold her indefinitely in preventive detention, under the Bail Reform Act of 1984. Four and a half years later, Whitehorn, at 44, remains in prison without bail. She has yet to be tried on the charges for which she was arrested. During her years of incarceration, she has been placed in 11 different jails and prisons, allegedly for security reasons. After she was moved to the Federal Correctional Institute in Pleasanton, California, Whitehorn was reunited with her friend, Linda Evans.

Evans, the daughter of an industrial contractor and a schoolteacher, had lived all her life in the Midwest, and had come to Chicago in the late 60s to enter college. She met Laura Whitehorn in the SDS, and has been a lesbian activist ever since. Twenty years later, she smiles and declares: "Yes. I'm a lesbian. I'm proud of it. ... It's part of what motivates me to be a revolutionary."

Linda Evans has spent her life as a community organizer. She organized so well against racism in lesbian, Chicano and Black communities, in fact, that the Ku Klux Klan put her on its death list. Evans bought four handguns to protect herself. She was arrested in 1985 for weapons possession, and sentenced by the state of Louisiana to 40 years in prison for making false statements to purchase these guns. At the age of 42, Linda Evans is serving a reduced sentence of 35 years. "The thing that's interesting about the Louisiana case," she says, "is that it's the same jurisdiction where the Ku Klux Klan tried to mount an invasion of Dominica, a Black island in the Caribbean in 1981. Don Black had ten other men with him; he had almost a million dollars in cash; they had a boat full of illegal weapons, machine guns and stuff. ... And he received a total sentence of three years and was out in 24 months."

Laura Whitehorn and Linda Evans are two of an estimated 200 progressive and leftist political prisoners in the United States. Held indefinitely without bail, convicted on exaggerated, if not false, charges, sentenced to many more years in prison than right-wing defendants, these prisoners are invisible to the general public. Their numbers include a range of activists, from New Afrikan and Puerto Rican nationalists who identify as "prisoners of war" and support armed struggle, to sanctuary workers and anti-nuclear protestors, who have received as many as 18 years in prison for their nonviolent opposition to government policies. The gay and lesbian movement, increasingly radicalized by government indifference to the AIDS crisis, is becoming more aware of these prisoners. In doing so, lesbians and gay men have begun to ask: What makes these people so threatening to our government? What does it mean to us and our movement that these prisoners exist?

Whitehorn and Evans are now in the Detention Facility in Washington, D.C They await trial there with four other political prisoners — Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn Buck, Alan Berkman and Tim Blunk — for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Capitol Building and three other government sites in the D.C. area. The bombings, protesting the invasion of Grenada and other acts of U.S. foreign aggression, damaged property but injured no one. The defendants — who face up to 45 years in prison, if convicted — express support for the bombings, but maintain that they did not carry them out. The government, moreover, admits that it does not know who committed the bombings and that it has neither evidence or witnesses to prove that any of the accused were directly involved.

Yet the Resistance Conspiracy trial, as the defendants call it, promises to be one of the most politically vindictive events in decades. Although the trial will probably not take place until early 1990, the government has already installed a bulletproof plexiglass wall to separate defendants from the rest of the courtroom. Special video monitors have also been positioned to observe spectators and the defense table, but not the prosecution. These courtroom security measures — which legal experts say will intimidate spectators and make an impartial jury trial impossible — are virtually unprecedented in U.S. judicial history. They were noticeably absent when Oliver North was tried last spring, in the same courthouse.

North, who admitted having helped engineer the illegal drug and weapons sales that killed thousands of Central Americans, was never held in any form of preventive detention, and was not sentenced to any term in prison. "So the whole case is political," concludes Nkechi Taifa, attorney for Laura Whitehorn, adding "The whole pre-trial detention is political. And the government should not be allowed to use the criminal justice system to suppress political opposition."

The indictment, if successful against these defendants, may help set precedents in suppressing political activism. Because the government has no direct evidence to convict the six, it has charged them with aiding and abetting, and with conspiracy to "influence, change and protest policies and practices of the U.S. government...through the use of violent and illegal means." These are ingeniously broad charges, which could, in the future, be brought against an increasing number of protestors, whose dissent is labelled "violent" or "illegal" by the government. And though it may not be used immediately against actions like sit-ins and blockades, it could well discourage them from happening. "They want to make sure that they can determine the boundaries of our activity at every point," says Linda Evans.

Conspiracy and aiding and abetting charges are traditionally easy to prove. Once a jury is convinced that defendants hold the same political sympathies, convictions can be obtained through mere circumstantial evidence. The prosecution in this case will use the defendants' own political writings and personal letters — exempt here from First Amendment protection — to establish that the six have all known each other and oppose government policies. A jury might, therefore, have no trouble finding a "conspiracy," given such evidence as Evans' and Whitehorn's lifelong friendship and the fact that both were underground at the time of their arrests. "Linda and I have known each other longer than anyone else in this case," Laura Whitehorn says. "I'm proud of that. And so, some of our proudest history is what they're going to bring against us."

Going underground, leaving friends and lovers perhaps forever, was a difficult decision for Whitehorn and Evans. But as their activism grew, including Whitehorn's support work for the Black Panther Party, so did FBI surveillance. When Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered, Whitehorn thought very hard about what Malcolm X had said before he was killed. "I'll never forget the picture of the Chicago police carrying [Hampton's] body out on a stretcher and grinning. ... And it was proven that not a single shot had been fired from inside the apartment. It was a complete assassination of this man. ... We all pretend that it doesn't happen here. But they do things that actually torture and kill people. And I just feel like it's the height of self-deception to think that we can draw lines about what we will and will not do to stop that kind of thing."

Their years of support not only for the rights of lesbians and gays, but also for Black and Puerto Rican nationalist groups, made them phenomenally threatening to the government. Eventually, Whitehorn and Evans decided, they could be freer to do their political work if they dropped out of the public movement. Observes Linda Evans, "If we really want to change the power structure, I think there's going to have to be a revolutionary movement in this country. But, in order to build it, we have to build the capability that's not completely infiltrated and controlled by the government, the FBI. ... That applies not only to the AIDS movement, but to all the solidarity movements. ... It's just not enough to believe that we're going to be able to win change through the legislatures."

Although they have lived in different parts of the country, Evans and Whitehorn always remained close, always supported one another in a variety of political work. So, while Linda Evans was living in a women's commune in Arkansas, fighting developers who were clearing the land with Agent Orange, Laura Whitehorn was in Boston, taking over the Harvard Building with a group of anti-imperialist women — an action that led to the founding of the Boston/Cambridge Women's School. And while Whitehorn was helping to defend Black homes during the anti-busing violence in Boston in the mid-70s, Evans was teaching women to print in a press collective in Texas. While Evans was struggling against the Texas Neo-Nazis and the Klan, Whitehorn was organizing the Madame Binh Graphics Collective in New York City.

"We come out of a sector of the anti-imperialist movement that was dominated by women and lesbians," says Laura Whitehorn, "and I think the government is very well aware of that. And that's why one of the things that we've seen in the last few years was he development of the Lexington High Security Unit, to deal with women political prisoners."

The Lexington High Security Unit was opened in 1986 and within months became infamous for its isolation and sensory deprivation measures used to subdue women whom the Bureau of Prisons deemed "assaultive" or "escape prone." Yet the women assigned to the Unit — political prisoners Susan Rosenberg, Silvia Baraldini and Puerto Rican "prisoner of war" Alejandrina Torres — had never been convicted of injuring or assaulting another person. Nor had any of them presented behavioral problems while in prison. Finally, in 1988, after an international campaign that included the efforts of Puerto Rican groups, women's communities, church organizations and Amnesty International, the Lexington HSU was closed by court decree as a violation of the prisoners' First Amendment right to political freedom.

The closing of Lexington is known to many activists. What is not yet known is the fact that the government appealed the closing, and on September 8, 1989, won its appeal. Implications for every political prisoner in this country are devastating. "Now," says Linda Evans, "the Bureau of Prisons has absolute license to put us in any conditions it wants to, based solely on our past political affiliations and beliefs."

Although the government may not reopen the Lexington HSU, it has begun to create conditions in the Shawnee Unit for women in Marianna, Florida, that duplicate if not intensify, those of Lexington. Already, continues Evans, "They have installed television sets in the cells, which means they can lock us down and say that we're having social interaction via television, instead of via human beings."

"Lock down" is a form of solitary confinement familiar to political prisoners. People in lock down are caged in tiny, often parasite-infested cells for 23 hours each day. They are allowed out, in handcuffs and leg shackles, for one hour to shower and make phone calls. If Evans, Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg and Marilyn Buck are convicted of the D.C. bombings, say defense attorneys, they will undoubtedly be sent to Marianna. Their codefendants Alan Berkman and Tim Blunk will be sent to the Marion Prison for men in Illinois, which is under permanent lock down.

Tough new "anti-crime" campaigns are making an open secret of the fact that U.S. prisons are used to dispose of unwanted sectors of society. In April 1989, the Justice Department reported that there was a total of 627,402 men and women in U.S. prisons. This is the largest prison population of any country in the world and, in less than five years, it is expected to rise to well over one million. Most U.S. prisoners are people of color, who, outside prison, represent "minority" populations. The rate of Black imprisonment alone is twice that of South Africa. "What I see in this jail," says Laura Whitehorn, "and in every jail I've been in, is genocide against Black people, and I think it's worse than it ever was."

Given our society's dependence on prisons, it is in the interest of the social "order" to strip prisoners of any form of self-respect. Women are continually under threat of sexual attack by male guards, and frequently raped with speculums or hands by prison officials in search of "contraband." Male prisoners are often beaten when they refuse to obey an order. Prisoners of both sexes are routinely subjected to humiliating — and unnecessary — strip searches. "Sexuality is not possible in prison," says Laura Whitehorn. "Sex is, but sexuality as a creative form of human expression — forget it. Certainly not under these conditions."

Yet in filthy, overcrowded U.S. prisons, lesbian and gay prisoners still attempt to love each other. They must literally risk their lives to have sexual relationships, since prisons have categorically refused to give out condoms or materials on safer sex. "They can bust you at any point," says Linda Evans. "Because sex is illegal in prison. And so you can be punished for having loving relationships, even though that clearly is one of the most rehabilitative things that can happen to someone."

Obviously, the primary purpose of U.S. prisons is not rehabilitation. While heterosexual prisoners in the general population may at times receive conjugal visits from their spouses, gay prisoners cannot even afford to acknowledge that they have lovers on the outside. Recently, report Whitehorn and Evans, a male prisoner's lover of three and a half years was stricken from the visiting list after authorities discovered that the prisoner was gay. Suspected of being gay or of IV drug use, prisoners in some states are tested against their will for HIV, the virus associated with AIDS, although treatment is rarely available. Once discovered to carry it, they are subjected to enormous abuse and contempt.

Whitehorn and Evans knew that they were taking a great risk in coming out as lesbians in prison. They realized they would open themselves up to the same kind of danger and humiliation that gay people face daily on the street; only in prison, the danger would be constant and inescapable. But coming out, they decided, was something they could do to continue to resist. And being open about their sexuality at times connects them solidly with the women around them. "I'm not saying this is Sisterhood City," remarks Laura Whitehorn, "but I find that there's something about talking to women about why I'm a lesbian, which has a lot to do with my own feelings of love for women and affirming that love, that come back positively."

Their defense attorneys see the "conspiracy" as the government's, not their clients'. If everything goes according to government plans, they say, Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans and their codefendants will die in prison. They will be known, if they are known at all by the general public, as "terrorists," with a bizarre taste for violence. And those on the outside will judiciously avoid any semblance of extremes in their political speech or activity.

But all this may not prove to be so easy for the government. Already, activists have begun to learn about the case and respond. And 80 percent of this response, say Evans and Whitehorn, comes from lesbians and gay men. An open letter asking the government to drop the charges against the Resistance Conspiracy six has appeared in several gay and progressive publications; so far, 12 ACT UP chapters across the country have signed it, as well as hundreds of individual lesbians and gays. People in the community have also begun writing to these prisoners. Linda Evans speculates on the reason for this involvement:

"I think some of that is because the gay and lesbian movement is extremely under attack, because of the problems that our community has with AIDS and because of the rise in violence. ... and of the increasing sexism in our society in general. And I think that that means lesbians and gay people have recognized that, being under attack, we have to fight back."

— Susie Day, OutWeek Magazine No. 20, November 5, 1989, p. 16.

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wordsofkworld-blog · 7 years

Text

Gelem, gelem (Romani anthem)

Origins

“Gelem, gelem” is a song written and composed by Romany musician Žarko Jovanović in 1969. After having personally experienced the persecution of Roma in the Second World War, when most of his family was killed, Jovanović, by cultivating the folk melody, wrote verses for this song in 1949. In the second verse of the poem, the author refers to the crimes committed by members of the criminal Ustasha Black Legion.

During World War II, Nazi Germany prosecuted Romani people as well, which is not something commonly talked about today.

The Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust, also known as the Porajmos, Pharrajimos ("Cutting Up", "Fragmentation", "Destruction") or Samudaripen ("Mass Killing") was the planned and attempted effort, often described as genocide, during World War II by the government of Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate the Romans of Europe. Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the supplementary decree of the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, defining Gypsies as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews. Thus, the fate of the Roma in Europe was paralleled by that of the Jews. Historians estimate that 220,000 to 500,000 Romans were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, or 25% to over 50% of the slightly more than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time. Ian Hancock puts the death toll as high as 1.5 million. In 1982, West Germany formally recognized that genocide had been committed against the Romans. In 2011 Poland passed a resolution for the official recognition of 2 August as a day of commemoration of the genocide.

Tens of thousands of Romani were killed in Jasenovac (one of the most notorious concentration camps) along with Jews, Serbs, Muslims and others deemed as enemies of the state. Yad Vashem estimates that Porajos was most intense in Yugoslavia (Kingdom of Yugoslavia, not to be confused with Socialist Federate Republic of Yugoslavia), where around 90,000 Romani were killed. The Ustashe regime also deported around 26,000.

According to eyewitness Mrs. de Wiek, Anne Frank, a notable Jewish Holocaust victim, is recorded as having witnessed the prelude to the murder of Romani children at Auschwitz: "I can still see her standing at the door and looking down the camp street as a herd of naked gypsy girls were driven by, to the crematory, and Anne watched them going and cried."

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. What makes the Lety camp unique is that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified in Paul Polansky's book Black Silence. The genocide was so thorough that the vast majority of Romani in the Czech Republic today are actually descended from migrants from Slovakia who moved there during the post-war years in Czechoslovakia. In Nazi-occupied France, between 16,000 and 18,000 were killed.

The small Romani population in Denmark was not subjected to mass killings by the Nazi occupiers, instead, it was simply classified as "asocial". Angus Fraser attributes this to "doubts over ethnic demarcations within the traveling population". The Romanis of Greece were taken hostage and prepared for deportation to Auschwitz, but they were saved by appeals from the Archbishop of Athens and the Greek Prime Minister.

In 1934, 68 Romans, most of them Norwegian citizens, were denied entry into Norway, and they were also denied transit through Sweden and Denmark when they wanted to leave Germany. In the winter of 1943-1944, 66 members of the Josef, Karoli and Modis families were interned in Belgium and deported to the gypsy department in Auschwitz. Only four members of this group survived.

Žarko Jovanović, a Yugoslav composer of Roma origin, with a tambura player Miloš (whose surname he does not remember) in 1949 at Radio Belgrade, wrote a text about the humiliations that the Roma survived during the Second World War and added a traditional melody. The text describes the persecution, murder and imprisonment in concentration camps and genocide against Roma by SS divisions "Handžar" and "Kama" and Gestapo in NDH, which describe the so-called " "Black Legion".

The text is based on a song that was very popular in the sixties among Serbian Roma and probably originates from Romania. The melody was taken from a love song by the Serbian Roma, which became famous through the film "Collectors of feathers" by the director Aleksandar Petrović, in which it is performed by the Serbian singer and actress, Olivera Katarina.

According to another version, it was recorded by Milan Ajvazov, born in 1922 in Plovdiv, as he had heard it from his grandfather. He remembered the melody and the title, but he forgot the lyrics.

Since Romani language does not have a single literary language, there are different versions of the text, which can be slightly different in meaning.

The song was first adopted by delegates of the first World Romani Congress held in 1971.

Title variations

Some of the most common title variations include "Gyelem, Gyelem" (Hungarian orthography),"Jelem, Jelem","Dzelem, Dzelem","Dželem, Dželem" (alternative Croatian and Latin Serbian and Bosnian orthography),"Đelem, Đelem" (Croatian and Latin Serbian and Bosnian orthography),"Djelem, Djelem" (German and French orthography),"Ђелем, Ђелем" (Cyrillic Serbian and Bosnian orthography),"Ѓелем, Ѓелем" (Slavic Macedonian orthography), "Џелем, Џелем" (alternative Cyrillic Serbian and Bosnian orthography), "Джелем, джелем" (Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian orthography),"Opré Roma" and "Romale Shavale".

Lyrics

Original:

Gelem, gelem, lungone dromensa Maladilem bakhtale Romensa A Romale, katar tumen aven, E tsarensa bakhtale dromensa?

A Romale, A Chavale

Sas vi man yekh bari familiya, Mundardyas la e Kali Legiya Aven mansa sa lumnyake Roma, Kai putardile e Romane droma Ake vriama, usti Rom akana, Amen khutasa misto kai kerasa

A Romale, A Chavale

Puter Devla le parne vudara Te shai dikhav kai si me manusha Pale ka zhav lungone dromendar Thai ka phirav bakhtale Romensa

A Romalen, A chavalen

Opre Rroma, si bakht akana Aven mansa sa lumnyake Roma O kalo mui thai e kale yakha Kamav len sar e kale drakha

A Romalen, A chavalen.

English translation

I went, I went on long roads I met happy Roma O Roma, where do you come from, With tents happy on the road?

O Roma, O Romani youths!

I once had a great family, The Black Legion murdered them Come with me, Roma from all the world For the Roma, roads have opened Now is the time, rise up Roma now, We will rise high if we act

O Roma, O Romani youths!

Open, God, White doors So I can see where are my people. Come back to tour the roads And walk with happy Roma

O Roma, O Romani youths!

Up, Romani people! Now is the time Come with me, Roma from all the world Dark face and dark eyes, I want them like dark grapes

O Roma, O Romani youths!

youtube

#gelem gelem #romani #gypsy #romani anthem #holocaust #nazi germany #concentration camp #jasenovac #ww2 history #ww2 #world war 2 #genocide

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 5 years

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Among the many Trump Administration officials who are likely to be targets of the Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry, one of the most central is the Attorney General, William Barr. According to Justice Department officials and the whistle-blower complaint about President Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian President, Barr knew of Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election by investigating a possible rival, former Vice-President Joe Biden, and of the Department’s subsequent suppression of the whistle-blower complaint. On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Barr of being part of a “coverup of the coverup,” and signalled that the Attorney General will be a focus of the investigation. “I do think the Attorney General has gone rogue—he has for a long time now,” Pelosi told CNN. “And, since he was mentioned in all of this, it’s curious that he would be making decisions about how the complaint would be handled.”

The record of Barr’s Justice Department supports Pelosi’s assessment. When the complaint arrived at the Department, the Office of Legal Counsel ruled that it was not an “urgent concern”—a decision questioned by Democrats—and therefore should not be handed over to Congress. And then, in a more surprising move, the Justice Department’s Criminal Division declined to investigate the whistle-blower’s allegation that the President had engaged in criminal conduct. Department officials played down Barr’s role, saying that he was “generally knowledgeable” of discussions about the O.L.C. decision to find the complaint not urgent, but was not involved in the Criminal Division’s decision to decline to investigate the allegation. They also maintain that the Department’s decisions about the complaint were based on legal considerations, not political ones.

The distinction between legal and political considerations in these cases, though, is not so simple. Both the O.L.C. and the Criminal Division are led by Trump appointees, who, like Barr, are generally defenders of the power of Presidents to act unilaterally and limit congressional involvement. Human-rights groups questioned the role of Steven Engel, the head of the O.L.C., in the drafting of a 2007 Justice Department legal memo that authorized the use of interrogation techniques—such as sleep deprivation for up to ninety-six hours and forcing detainees to wear diapers—that are widely considered torture. Brian Benczkowski, who leads the Criminal Division, has been criticized by Democrats for having little experience prosecuting cases and close political ties to Trump’s former Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and other conservative Republicans.

Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department official and a professor at Georgetown Law School, questioned the Criminal Division’s decision not to investigate. “I find it very surprising that Justice Department lawyers would find that there’s nothing here worth exploring,” McCord, who led the Department’s National Security Division from 2016 to 2017, told me. McCord, who has also prosecuted government officials on corruption charges, added that a request from Trump to Ukraine for interference in the 2020 election did not, as some Republicans have maintained, need to be explicit. “It’s ridiculous to expect that you’re going to see that kind of language,” she said. “It’s what you see in other corruption cases. You see these kinds of somewhat guarded language.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in election law, told the Washington Post last week that the Criminal Division’s failure to investigate the case was “laughable.” He criticized the Criminal Division’s finding that the value of a Ukrainian government investigation of Biden could not be quantified and therefore could not be investigated as a possible campaign-finance-law violation. “You’re talking about information on a potential rival that could be used in a presidential campaign, a presidential campaign which likely would run into the billions of dollars,” Hasen said. “I don’t think there’s any question that a prosecutor could go forward with the theory.”

Barr, who served in his current role previously, under George H. W. Bush, is only the second American to have served twice as Attorney General. When he replaced Sessions, in February, 2019, he was seen as a skilled lawyer and experienced Washington hand who could act as a restraining influence on Trump. Since he took office, however, Barr has become one of Trump’s closest aides and the focus of complaints that he is the most politicized Attorney General in decades. Critics accuse him of repeatedly using his authority to benefit the President politically, helping Trump mount an unprecedented assault on Congress’s oversight of the executive branch and the President.

First, in March, Barr produced a misleading summary of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on the Russia investigation, in which Barr cleared the President of wrongdoing. “I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” Barr wrote. Mueller, in fact, had found ten potential episodes of obstruction of justice, but left it up to Congress to decide whether Trump was guilty. When congressional Democrats tried to investigate the potential acts of obstruction by subpoenaing the Trump aides who witnessed it, Barr’s Justice Department issued a legal opinion that the staffers were not required to testify before Congress.

In recent months, Barr has amplified Trump’s threats to law-enforcement and intelligence officials. During congressional testimony in April, Barr said that the F.B.I. may have spied on Trump, giving credence to conspiracy theories spread by the President that the F.B.I. had improperly wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, a claim flatly denied by F.B.I. officials. “Spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Barr told senators. “I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated.” A month later, Trump announced that Barr was carrying out a sweeping investigation of the origins of the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia investigation. Democrats said that Barr’s actions sent a message to law-enforcement and intelligence officials that they would face retaliation if they investigated Trump.

The Ukraine phone call sets another precedent. In his conversation with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said that Barr was a participant in the President’s effort to get Ukraine to investigate Biden. Trump, of course, could have been lying to Zelensky. Trump also may never have followed up with Barr after the call. Either way, the President has smeared Barr and fuelled calls for the Attorney General to be investigated. Barr, who claims he never spoke with Trump about Zelensky, now faces a decision. Will he uphold his own reputation or that of the President, who is impugning him?

Barr might recall the example of John Mitchell, who, in 1975, became the first—and only—former Attorney General of the United States to be sent to prison. Mitchell served as Richard Nixon’s Attorney General from 1969 to 1972, and then as chairman of Nixon’s 1972 Presidential reëlection campaign. As campaign chairman, he oversaw the Watergate break-ins and then participated in the coverup. Unlike other aides who broke with Nixon and implicated the President, Mitchell declined to reveal his conversations with the President. He was convicted by a jury of his peers of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury for his role in Watergate. Mitchell served nineteen months in federal prison before being released, for medical reasons.

For many in the American legal community, though, Mitchell’s actions before Watergate were more troubling. While serving as Attorney General, Mitchell hatched secret—and, at times, bizarre—plots to aid Nixon politically. He investigated government officials and journalists suspected of leaking damaging information about the President. He prosecuted opponents of the Vietnam War. And he controlled a secret slush fund used to smear Democratic Presidential candidates deemed a threat to Nixon. In one simultaneously abhorrent and amateurish act, Mitchell approved a payment of ten thousand dollars to a faction of the American Nazi Party in order to carry out a failed effort to remove Governor George Wallace from a Presidential ballot in California. Nixon aides believed that supporters of Wallace—an avowed segregationist running as a third-party candidate—would shift their votes to Nixon.

Judges later found Mitchell’s actions, such as wiretapping Americans without court orders, to be not only illegal but unconstitutional. He had used his powers as Attorney General to harass and smear Americans engaged in constitutionally protected political activity—from leading Democratic politicians to street protesters. After Nixon resigned and Mitchell was sent to prison, an elaborate series of norms and rules was established to prevent the President from acting like an authoritarian ruler—and the Attorney General from acting like the President’s personal lawyer.

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