whatever-strikes-my-fancy

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

Forces of the People's Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam liberated Saigon, soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City, from the last remnants of the U.S. puppet regime there on Apr. 30, 1975, now celebrated annually as Reunification Day.

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

there's this borderline hysterical laugh garak breaks into a couple of times during the early seasons that is so special to me. like. this man. this man is so high (constantly) and probably drunk (frequently) and he's at all times teetering on the very brink of despair that only pure spite, immense stubbornness, and getting to gaze at julian bashir's smiling face across the lunch table once a week is holding him back from tipping over. and then he has to deal with people like skrain dukat and gul toran on top of that and you can practically hear the cracks forming as he's barely holding on to whatever remains of his sanity by the skin of his teeth

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

first the holocaust was turned into the project of a sole madman who had an entire country under a spell, which suddenly vanished at the stroke of a pen when peace was signed, rather than being a continuation of centuries of scapegoating and antisemitism, enabled by western capital, direct funding to the Nazi party in some cases like the British aristocracy's, with the purpose of creating a massive slave workforce and to boost the German economy via looting, expropiation and a reduction in the worker population, an economy that had been reeling since WWI and propped up by directing all jobless people to work in the arms industry.

then, the (incomplete) victory over european fascism (don't look at Spain and Portugal and Greece) was methodically distanced from the true victors, the soviet people. They suffered an invasion and destruction of the majority of their industrial base, save for the industry relocated to the east, more than 20 million dead soviet workers who pushed the fascists from Moscow to Berlin, ending in an artillery barrage the magnitudes of which had never been seen, the symbolic raising of the red banner over the Reichstag and an enveloping of the city that forced many nazi officials to commit suicide. It was also forgotten how the Yugoslavs liberated themselves, managing to keep fascist forces constantly tied up during the war, how the Italian partisans captured Mussolini and hung him in public, the many uprisings throughout Europe and the concentration camps before the frontline reached them, the exiled brigadiers and republicans who first fought fascism in Spain and was later forced to fight fascism again, unable to return to their homes and under threat of being imprisoned. The indigenous resistance against colonialism in east and north Africa and southwest Asia, and the tens of millions Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Malaysians, Indonesians, Papuans, Thais, Bengalese, Indians, Filipinos, etc, who suffered both Japanese and western occupation. All of these struggles forgotten and erased, reduced to the USamerican, British, and sometimes French armies. Armies who advanced to witness a fraction of the suffering enabled and financed by their own states barely a decade prior. Even minor members of the western allies, such as Brazil, are often forgotten.

After the Holocaust was reduced to an unexpected and unprecedented event with no connection to reality, and after the struggle against fascism was reduced to the involvement of two or three countries, barely any fascists were punished. Anyone who wasn't a top official could claim to be simply following orders, even someone as important like Speer used this defence, he was allowed to live free and publish an autobiography in which he paints himself as the good Nazi, the mere architect caught up in a madman's rise. As if he ignored the plans for a future Berlin would be built by slave labor from the concentration camps, as if the minister of armaments from 1942 to the end did not know about the reliance companies like Krupp or Volkswagen had on slave labor. As if he didn't listen to Goebbels' speeches about total war and extermination and did not understand his armaments would be used. Some fascists were even integrated into the scientific and military spheres of the western allies, others given citizenship and a cushy home in places like Canada. Japanese fascists who had experimented on and tortured countless Chinese and Korean civilians and POWs to research chemical warfare were offered amnesty in exchange for the knowledge they gained doing these experiments. After German reunification, more eastern queer people were imprisoned than fascists were incarcerated or executed at the Nürnberg trials.

After fascists were exonerated and shamelessly integrated into the western states, and after some time passed, the war was turned into a cultural product. Countless war movies were produced, almost always showing usamerican soldiers in the European or Pacific front fighting a mindless horde with hakenkrauzs on their armbands all lead by a single man, or group of men, ontologically evil. It was too complex to examine the actual reasons for the war. Hitler was simply a charismatic devil who had duped Germany into following him (crucially, he was only charismatic for germans. No true American patriot fell for his tricks). Gradually, the figure of Hitler was transformed into a devil in human form who had appeared in München in 1932 to cause evil and fight freedom.

As a result, German fascism and the Holocaust are nothing more but a historical fact you look at with morbid curiosity, to feel disgust, maybe anger, and sigh in relief that it would never happen again. There is no reflection on how it was allowed to happen, how antisemitism was used, like it had commonly been used throughout history, to blame for economic downturn and how the expropriation of jewish property, the enslavement of other minorities alongside them (Slavs, non-jewish poles, homosexuals, roma, communists...) and the rapid stimulation of a military industry was used to save an recessing economy. No examination of how the Nazi party appealed to the German petit-bourgeoisie and monopolies like the aforementioned Krupp, Volkswagen, or IG Farben, by attacking communists and trade unionists, who were beginning to organize at a bigger scale and actually threaten german capitalists. Instead, some even try to paint the nazis as communists or as similar to them, through terms like totalitarianism, which was popularized by Hannah Arendt, a fascist sympathiser who also saw fit to label decolonial struggles as totalitarian.

Even more insidious than this is how Hitler has been mutated into a shorthand for evil, an entity beyond a single man who personifies the collective hatred of minorities by Europeans, a condensation of centuries of hatred and exploitation into an angry man between 1932 and 1945. By doing this we can rest easy knowing there will never be another Hitler because we are so civil now. It was Hitler's speeches that guided every SS member's hand to execute tens of thousands. It was Goebbels' propaganda that clouded the judgment of the millions of Wehrmacht soldiers who looted and massacred their way through Europe. It was Himmler's threat that coerced countless germans to spy and tattle on their neighbors. It was Göring who convinced the Luftwaffe pilots to bomb and terrorize civilians. It was Dönitz who made the Kriegsmarine target civilian ships and ruthlessly pursue trade convoys. And it was ultimately Hitler who controlled these men, and no German had free will or political conviction between 1932 and 1945.

The peak of this attitude I see most in the internet: Do you want to learn about Hitler's Bunker? Hitler's enormous artillery pieces? Hitler's train? Hitler's plans? Hitler's wife? Hitler's army? Hitler's rise through the party? Hitler's veganism? Hitler's dog? Hitler's car? Hitler's Germania? Hitler's camps? Hitler's possible escape? Hitler's military career? Hitler's architecture? Hitler's political maneuvering in the interwar? Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Nobody wants to deal with the fact that Hitler was not omnipotent or omnipresent. He and his party was supported by German and western capital to oppose worker organization and to give an outlet to social tension around the inflating currency and failing economy. Just like in Italy and just like in Spain. Hitler is a cultural product sold to liberals so they can be reassured that they would never become evil. No liberal democracy has ever put an entire minority into concentration camps, no liberal democracy has ever used Zyklon B on dispossessed people, no liberal democracy has ever looted a conquered nation, no liberal democracy has ever killed workers for unionizing, no liberal democracy has ever used nationalism and supremacism to rally popular support, and a long etcetera.

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

Look at that thats pretty cool

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

why the FUCK are weekends only 2 days long do you really think that's enough to recover from the horrors of the work week. really.

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

kitten i'll be honest daddy isn't sure he's cut out for full time employment

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

Please Like, comment and repost so we can reach more people to get my family to safety asap🕊️

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

https://gofund.me/6b59f261

Alia is trying to evacuate Gaza with her parents and 4 children. Their home in north Gaza was destroyed and their entire neighborhood wiped out. They have no resources in south Gaza and are hungry, sick, and terrified. She is raising money to cover application fees and travel expenses for all 7 members of her immediate family, but the progress has been very slow. If you can spare a few dollars, please keep Alia and her family in mind. Reblogging and reposting the link is immensely helpful as well.

A word from Alia:

Currently, there is no safe place for us to live or to go, as of now we are sharing the tiny space with a large number of people. On top of that, after a hard 110 days during this war, I'm worried about my children not getting food or sleep because they don't have the basic necessities of life.

Hearing bombs and explosions scare us, so we flee from place to place looking for safety. We can't find any medication and we keep getting sick and we don't have access to health care. Many of my family members have been killed, and many other members are missing under rubble, we don't know if they are alive or dead.

Please help me collect the application fees and travel costs for seven people.

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

The situation of the Congo Genocide is complicated because we are all implicated in it. We can’t ascribe it to a foreign policy state interest as we can regarding Palestine. It is something we, as consumers, all have a hand in and given the ubiquity of the resources involved, a lot of us are caught off of guard by this premonition of the type of wars to come. This is that nasty intersection of neo-colonialism and hyper capitalism that pits the Global South against the Global North. It’s a war of sustaining a way of life means imposing slavery and genocide on others. This is an instance of global capitalism and hyper consumption as a lifestyle and convenience is being pitted against the humanity of those we deem expendable.

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

Maryam reached out to me to help share her fundraiser. Her sister Noha, who is currently raising money for her own campaign, has hosted the fundraiser for her. She is a Palestinian mother of 5 children urgently raising money to evacuate her family from Gaza. She has only raised $125 out of her $15,000 goal! Please share and donate, and if you can't donate, please still share!

Maryam's Twitter/X account: @maryam_ayyad1

From Maryam's GGF page:

Hello, I am Maryam, from the heart of Gaza, a mother of five children, the youngest of whom she gave birth to under the bombing two months ago. For me and my family, the past six months have been a harrowing journey.

Our hopes were shattered after the occupation bombed our house, my husband lost his job, and we no longer had anything.

We were then forced to move and look for shelter, and we found ourselves trapped in another cycle of violence.

We spent the nights in fear that haunted us at every moment.

And here I am now with my family in the south, living among the tents of the displaced in the city of Deir al-Balah, under bombardment again, and we are still suffering from a lack of water, food, and clothing, and we do not have the minimum necessities of life.

One of my children's most basic rights is to live a safe life and complete their education. Therefore, I place in your hands the donation link and ask you to help me save me and my family to get out of the war and escape the smell of death surrounding everywhere.

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

hi i am a young disabled native american with no income and i'm broke and starving and need money to buy food and clothes

please donate to my cashapp or dm me if you'll buy me a pizza.

cashtag: $cheriespit777

please. i'm begging you. im desperate and in pain.

[whatever-strikes-my-fancy]

Stop trying to be productive