#2008 German Nationals

[figureskatingcostumes]

Annette Dytrt's Scheherazade costume at the 2008 German Championships.

(Source: gymfan.de)

[disease]

"UNTITLED" // 2007 YOSHITOMO NARA 奈良 美智 [coloured pencil on coloured paper | 16 ½ x 11 5/8"]

With her short cropped hair, dark green dress and rebellious energy, the girl in Untitled (2007) emits the youthful defiance that has come to typify works by Yoshitomo Nara. [...]

"He is widely celebrated for his paintings and coloured pencil drawings of juvenile, cartoonish characters with large gazing eyes and endearing personalities. They inhabit imagined and insouciant paper worlds, brandish absurd objects and props—knives, sprouts, cigarettes, and electric guitars—and express a wide range of capricious, childlike emotion. Stern and somewhat sulky, our subject hovers in indeterminate space. She stands upon a Japanese flag with her small feet positioned perfectly over its crimson sun. Emblazoned around her miniature figure are the words ‘Up Yours!’, and, ‘All the Nations!’. As an advocate of peace, questions of nationhood, conflict and world politics weave through Nara’s art in such pithy phrases and symbols. Exhibited at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga—the first show of the artist’s work in Spain in 2007-2008—the present work was one of twenty coloured pencil drawings hung along the final wall of the gallery.

Born in 1959 in Japan’s rural Aomori Prefecture, Nara’s youth was marked by his country’s rapid post-war economic development and an influx of Western pop-culture, from Disney animation to punk and rock and roll. The artist expresses heartfelt nostalgia for the retro media—record-sleeves and comic books—that offered escapism from an otherwise solitary childhood. ‘Of course if you think back to the ’70s,’ he says, ‘information moved very differently. There was no Internet obviously and even the release date of albums in Japan could be delayed as much as six months … I would just sit there, listen to the music, look at the art on the cover and I think I really developed my imagination through that’ (N. Hegert, ‘Interview with Yoshitomo Nara,’ Artslant, 18 September 2010). This sensitivity to the worn, tactile quality of objects is triumphant in his art today and distinguishes him from the likes of Takashi Murakami and his Superflat movement. Untitled bears the enlivening traces of artist’s hand, present in the rough ‘outside-the-line’ scribbles that imply the girl’s messy hair. Bracketed with Nara’s unfiltered, handwritten text, the image feels distinctly personal, like a secret note exchanged between friends.

As early as his time at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts in the 1980s, Nara began to draw onto envelopes, cardboard, and scraps of found paper. He continued these explorations at the prestigious Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where, under the tutorship of German Neo-Expressionist painter A. R. Penck, he was encouraged to work fluidly between painting and drawing. ‘I [loved] to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up’, Nara has said. ‘Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected [with] memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose’ (Y. Nara, ‘Nobody’s Fool’, in N. Miyamura and S. Suzuki (eds.), Yoshitomo Nara: The Complete Works, Volume 1: Paintings, Sculptures, Editions, Photographs 1984-2010, San Francisco 2011, p. 43). Mischievous, cute, and quietly ferocious, the present work attests to the enduring appeal of Nara’s little rebels." — via Christie's

[f-ckingawful]

a vice president nominee has fallen from the coconut tree and your local autistic motherfucker is here to summarize Tim Walz's wikipedia page!

democrat (obv) from minnesota

worked in blue collar manufacturing and served in the army reserve national guard after graduating high school, then worked as a social studies teacher

policies as MN governor include free school meals, increased state infrastructure spending, codifying abortion rights, free college tuition for low income families, and gun background checks

GERMAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO ME TOO BUD

IN 1999 HE WAS THE FACULTY ADVISOR FOR THE FIRST GSA AT THE HIGH SCHOOL HE TAUGHT AT!

volunteered for a democratic candidate in the 04 election because when he tried to attend a bush rally, the security staff harassed his students because one of them had a sticker on their wallet for a dem candidate

advocates for veterans rights

co sponsored a bill to raise minimum wage

supported by planned parenthood, aclu, american immigrant lawyers organization, and national organization for women, to name a few

ranked in 2013 as 7th most bipartisan member of congress

advocated and legalized recreational weed in MN

voted against 2008 bill to offer 14 billion in loans for automobile manufacturer bailouts

denounced the nra after parkland and in 2023 signed MN laws that established universal background checks and red flag laws

supporter of labor/workers rights + public school staff rights

public supporter of the queer community and our rights, including banning conversion therapy and protecting gender affirming care in MN

condemned the oct 7 hamas attacks, but has since voiced that he supports the protestors, palestine's right to self defense, and the idea of ceasefire

supports abortion rights as stated multiple times. the national right to life committee (presumably pro life guys) rated him 0% and planned parenthood rated him 100% (these ratings are presumably "how much does this guy align with our organization's views")

DON'T GIVE UP! VOTE! THERE SEEMS TO BE A GENUINELY PROGRESSIVE VP NOMINEE! WE BALL

[tanadrin]

But Germany’s performances of repentance have their limits. They do not extend, for example, to the genocide the German colonial army committed in Namibia against Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908, killing tens of thousands. Germany did not officially apologize for those bloody acts until 2021 and has not agreed to pay meaningful reparations to descendants of the victims. If the new German identity relies on isolating the Holocaust as a shameful aberration in national history and nullifying it via solemn remembrance, there is little room for the memory of colonial violence in the nation’s self-mythology. Genocide scholar Dirk Moses named this approach the “German catechism” in a 2021 essay that sparked heated debate. “The catechism implies a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy,” wrote Moses. “That is why the Holocaust is more than an important historical event. It is a sacred trauma that cannot be contaminated by profane ones—meaning non-Jewish victims and other genocides—that would vitiate its sacrificial function.”

Accordingly, Germany now sees its post-Holocaust mandate as encompassing not a broader commitment against racism and violence but a specific fealty to a certain Jewish political formation: the State of Israel. Germany has relied on its close diplomatic relationship to Israel to emphasize its repudiation of Nazism, but its connection to the Jewish state goes even further. In 2008, then-chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Israeli Knesset to declare that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” the state’s very reason for existence. If asked why it is worth preserving a German nationalism that produced Auschwitz, Germany now has a pleasing, historically symmetrical answer—it exists to support the Jewish state.

To that end, in recent years, Germany’s laudable apparatus for public cultural funding has been used as a tool for enacting a 2019 Bundestag resolution declaring that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel is antisemitic. Although the resolution is technically nonbinding, its passage has led to an unending stream of firings and event cancellations, and to the effective blacklisting of distinguished academics, cultural workers, artists, and journalists for offenses like inviting a renowned scholar of postcolonialism to speak, tweeting criticism of the Bundestag resolution, or having attended a Palestinian solidarity rally in one’s youth. A network of antisemitism commissioners—a system explored in this issue in a feature by Peter Kuras—has been deputized to monitor such offenses. These commissioners are typically white, Christian Germans, who speak in the name of the Jews and often playact Jewishness on a public stage, posing for photo ops in yarmulkes, performing Jewish music, wearing the uniform of the Israeli police, and issuing decrees on who is next in the pillory. When they tangle with left-wing Jews in Germany, canceling their events and attacking them as antisemites in the pages of various newspapers, they suggest what Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein has said directly: That the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans—that, in fact, these Jews do not understand antisemitism at all. In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews. This is not only a matter of rhetorical authority on Jewish matters but is also often literal, as this self-reflexive philosemitism has led to a wave of German converts to Judaism. According to Tzuberi, “The Jewish revival is desired precisely because it is a German revival.”

If Jews are negated by this formulation, Palestinians are villainized by it. Last year, when the German state banned Nakba Day demonstrations, only days after the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, police justified this suppression by claiming, in a familiar racist trope, that protesters would not have been able to contain their violent rage. Indeed, in Germany Palestinian identity itself has become a marker of antisemitism, scarcely to be spoken aloud—even as the country is home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe, with a population of around 100,000. “Whenever I would mention that I was Palestinian, my teachers were outraged and said that I should refer to [Palestinians] as Jordanian,” one Palestinian German woman speaking of her secondary school education told the reporter Hebh Jamal. Palestinianness as such has thus been stricken from German public life. In The Moral Triangle, a 2020 anthropological study of Palestinian and Israeli communities in Germany by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, many Palestinians interviewed said that to speak of pain or trauma they’ve experienced due to Israeli policy is to destroy their own futures in Germany. “The Palestinian collective body is inscribed as ontologically antisemitic until proven otherwise. Palestinians, in this sense, are collateral damage of the intensifying German wish for purification from antisemitism,” wrote Tzuberi.

July 5, 2023

[moongirlwidow]

File: Volkov, Vespera Anetka

Alias: Winter Widow

Status: classified

File Last updated: July 4, 2023 AD

———

Age: 15

Class: 16ABX

Graduation Year: 2023

Origin: Romania

Birthday: August 11, 2008

Ethnicity: Caucasian

Handlers: Krista Udova(62431), Milunka Dulovna(90218), Melina Vostokov(Iron Maiden)

Trainers: Winter Soldier(Barnes, James B.), Taskmaster(Dreykov, Antonia)

Track: Field Agent(undercover; weapons specialist)

Appearance

Eye color: gray

Hair color: black

Skin: white; pale

Build: tall, lean, bony

Height: 5’9.79”

Weight: 101.235lbs

Notable markings:

birthmark;right thigh back, oblong Burn scar; left ankle, inside, 4”x 3”x 9”

Specialty Training

- Figure Skating

Began: 2 years

Training time: 6hrs every other day, 17hrs every Thursday and Monday

On track to the Winter Olympic Games. Reliably lands quads, possible pairing with Hydra 20180 for pair skating.

- Deadlift

Began: 6 years

Training time: 1hr daily

Will reach national record by 2028

Current capacity: 480lbs

- Combat Mimicry

Began: 7 years

Can mimic opponent’s fighting style closely. Taught by Taskmaster

- Biochemistry

- Codebreaking

- linguistics

Languages

Spoken: Russian, English, Norwegian, Welsh, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Qubecois, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Greek, Old English, Cantonese, Japanese, German, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Korean, Swedish, Hindi, Punjabi, Pennsylvania Dutch and Scots Gaelic

Written: braille, Russian, English, Norwegian, Welsh, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Qubecois, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Greek, Old English, Cantonese, Japanese, German, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Korean, Swedish, Hindi, Punjabi, Pennsylvania Dutch and Scots Gaelic

Read: braille, Russian, English, Norwegian, Welsh, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Qubecois, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Greek, Old English, Cantonese, Japanese, German, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Korean, Swedish, Hindi, Punjabi, Pennsylvania Dutch and Scots Gaelic

Other: American Sign Language, Russian Sign Language, International Sign, Morse code

Status

[section redacted]

Role

- replace the Iron Maiden following graduation

- should Taskmaster Program default, replace Winter Soldier and Taskmaster

- restore Red Academy-HYDRA control over XXXXXXXXX

Miscellaneous

— favored by Lt.Borisov

- Untouchable Status — RE; Grad Mission

- Enforced Separations — not allowed with peers without supervision, initiated 2015

- extremely exemplary when undercover in Queer Rebellion Groups, Lesbian Covers reccomended

Graduation Mission Assign.

Seduce XXXX XXXXXXX as debutant Gabrielle La Aubrey(CF61789), knock out with C19JL1990 formula(oral component), identify and procure XXXXXX XXXXX through whirlwind romance focusing on subject’s romantic beliefs. XXXXXXX has taste for young virgin women, will have just inherited full title/shares; foolish party persona crafted. Deep Cover in France; 6 weeks, fake family emergency and return with items. (Summary)

Part II

[scotianostra]

May 17th is Norwegian Constitution Day or Syttende Mai as its known in Norway.

A wonderful spring holiday celebrated with red, white and blue ribbons, national costumes and waving of the Norwegian flag, the three colours are everywhere in Norway at this time of year.

It’s a day Norwegians all over the world take off to celebrate and marks the historic signing of the Constitution in 1814, the year Norway gained its independence from Sweden, which was fully realized in 1905.

In every city, town and village in Norway, children and adults alike express their cultural pride by marching to the bright music of school bands, celebrating the joy of springtime and honoring of those citizens who created Norway’s constitutional government, founding her independence.

Especially popular is the Children’s Procession that brings every child out in their best clothes or national costume.

In Edinburgh the Norwegian community celebrate Syttende Mai too.

Edinburgh’s celebrations include the Norwegian Scottish Society dinner, after a reception at the Norwegian Consulate’s residence.

Each year Norwegian students in Edinburgh hold a breakfast at Prestonfield House followed by a parade along Waterloo Place and onto Princes Street. At the boom of Edinburgh Castle’s One o’ clock gun, the pigeons fly and the parade begins!

Tonight expats and guests gather at The Royal Scots Club Abercromby Place for a celebration dinner held by the Norwegian Scottish Association. The association was founded in Edinburgh in 1966, and has enjoyed over 50 years of Norwegian-Scottish friendship.

Norwegian Scottish Association roots lie in a much older friendly society, one rooted in the shared experience of Norwegians and Scots during the Second World War. Founded in Dumfries in 1941, the Scottish Norwegian Society brought Scots and Norwegians together in difficult times. Having escaped the German occupation of their homeland in 1940, around a thousand Norwegians had come to be stationed at various times in Dumfries, and it was not long before the idea of a formal society was begun.

Of course our history with Norway goes back centuries, Northern Scotland, was, at one time, a Norse domain and the Northern Isles experienced the most long-lasting Norse influence. Almost half of the people on Shetland today have Viking ancestry, and around 30% of Orkney residents.

Many agree that there are many points of commonality between the Norse character and the Scottish one that leads to a sense of kinship between the two countries, even for those living much further south in Scotland, where Viking influence did not reach. Words like bairn and muckle made their way into Scot’s language via the Norwegians.

I touched upon the links during the second world war earlier and have posted before about the Shetland bus which provided a transport link between the Shetland Islands and occupied Norway. Many Norwegian refugees fled their occupied home with the help of Norwegian sailors who undertook daring, high-risk trips across the North Sea. The whole episode became emblematic of the friendship across the seas.

More recently Edinburgh’s Zoo also has a strong connection to Norway as it is home to a very special resident. Sir Nils Olav III is the mascot and colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King’s Guard. The king penguin’s rank has been passed down through three generations since 1972. Knighted in 2008, he even received a military promotion in 2016 with the brigadier title bestowed upon him in a special ceremony at the zoo.

The Zoo’s link with Norway originated in 1913 when arctic explorer Roald Amundsen presented a penguin to them on their opening. Once a year the penguin inspects soldiers from Norway’s King’s Guard.

Edinburgh's Syttende mai parade – the 17th May or Norwegian Constitution Day parade traditionally takes place along the capital's main thoroughfare, Princes Street. At the boom of Edinburgh Castle's 'one o' clock gun', the pigeons fly and the parade begins!

Pics are from last ears parade.

[race-week]

First season since 1952 without the British National Anthem on the podium and the first season since 2008 without the German National Anthem

[hassibah]

"Accordingly, Germany now sees its post-Holocaust mandate as encompassing not a broader commitment against racism and violence but a specific fealty to a certain Jewish political formation: the State of Israel. Germany has relied on its close diplomatic relationship to Israel to emphasize its repudiation of Nazism, but its connection to the Jewish state goes even further. In 2008, then-chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Israeli Knesset to declare that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” the state’s very reason for existence. If asked why it is worth preserving a German nationalism that produced Auschwitz, Germany now has a pleasing, historically symmetrical answer—it exists to support the Jewish state.

...

A network of antisemitism commissioners—a system explored in this issue in a feature by Peter Kuras—has been deputized to monitor such offenses. These commissioners are typically white, Christian Germans, who speak in the name of the Jews and often playact Jewishness on a public stage, posing for photo ops in yarmulkes, performing Jewish music, wearing the uniform of the Israeli police, and issuing decrees on who is next in the pillory. When they tangle with left-wing Jews in Germany, canceling their events and attacking them as antisemites in the pages of various newspapers, they suggest what Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein has said directly: That the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans—that, in fact, these Jews do not understand antisemitism at all. In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews. This is not only a matter of rhetorical authority on Jewish matters but is also often literal, as this self-reflexive philosemitism has led to a wave of German converts to Judaism. According to Tzuberi, “The Jewish revival is desired precisely because it is a German revival.”"

[hboww2rewatch]

Please read the movie descriptions below

Saving Private Ryan (1998) - Following the Normandy Landings, a group of U.S. soldiers go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action. Dir. by Steven Spielberg

A League of Their Own (1992) - American sports comedy drama film that tells a fictionalized account of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) during WWII. Dir. by Penny Marshall

Greyhound (2020) - The film is based on the 1955 novel The Good Shepherd, and follows a US Navy commander on his first assignment commanding a multi-national escort destroyer group of four, defending an Allied convoy from U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Dir. by Aaron Schneider

Mudbound (2017) - The film depicts two World War II veterans – one white, one black – who return to rural Mississippi each to address racism and PTSD in his own way. Dir. by Dee Rees

Twelve O'Clock High (1949) - A tough-as-nails general (Gregory Peck as General Savage) takes over a B-17 bomber unit suffering from low morale and whips them into fighting shape. Based on a novel by the same name. Dir. by Henry King

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) - three United States servicemen re-adjusting to societal changes and civilian life after coming home from World War II. The three men come from different services with different ranks that do not correspond with their civilian social class backgrounds. It is one of the earliest films to address issues encountered by returning veterans in the post World War II era. Dir. by William Wyler 

The Monuments Men (2014) - An unlikely World War II platoon is tasked to rescue art masterpieces from German thieves and return them to their owners. Based on the 2007 non-fiction book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. Dir. by George Clooney

Dunkirk (2017) - Allied soldiers from Belgium, the British Commonwealth and Empire, and France are surrounded by the German Army and evacuated from Dunkirk. It is shown from the perspectives of the land, sea, and air. Dir. by Christopher Nolan

Fury (2014) - A grizzled tank commander makes tough decisions as he and his crew fight their way across Germany in April, 1945. Dir. by David Ayer

Valkyrie (2008) - A dramatization of the July 20, 1944 assassination and political coup plot by desperate renegade German Army officers against Adolf Hitler during World War II. Dir. by Bryan Singer

[fatehbaz]

imperialism and science reading list

edited: by popular demand, now with much longer list of books

Of course Katherine McKittrick and Kathryn Yusoff.

People like Achille Mbembe, Pratik Chakrabarti, Rohan Deb Roy, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, and Elizabeth Povinelli have written some “classics” and they track the history/historiography of US/European scientific institutions and their origins in extraction, plantations, race/slavery, etc.

Two articles I’d recommend as a summary/primer:

Zaheer Baber. “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Contemporary Asia. May 2016.

Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 2020.

Then probably:

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. “Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times.” Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

Sharae Deckard. “Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden.” 2010. (Chornological overview of development of knowledge/institutions in relationship with race, slavery, profit as European empires encountered new lands and peoples.)

Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. 2017, (Interesting case study. US corporations were building fruit plantations in Latin America and rubber plantations in West Africa during the 1920s. Medical doctors, researchers, and academics made a strong alliance these corporations to advance their careers and solidify their institutions. By 1914, the director of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine was also simultaneously the director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals of the United Fruit Company, which infamously and brutally occupied Central America. This same Harvard doctor was also a shareholder in rubber plantations, and had a close personal relationship with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which occupied West Africa.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.”  2008. (Case study of how British wealth and industrial development built on botany. Examines Joseph Banks; Kew Gardens; breadfruit; British fear of labor revolts; and the simultaneous colonizing of the Caribbean and the South Pacific.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” 2014. (Indigenous knowledge systems; “nuclear colonialism”; US empire in the Pacific; space/satellites; the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

Fahim Amir. “Cloudy Swords.” e-flux Journal #115, February 2021. (”Pest control”; termites; mosquitoes; fear of malaria and other diseases during German colonization of Africa and US occupations of Panama and the wider Caribbean; origins of some US institutions and the evolution of these institutions into colonial, nationalist, and then NGO forms over twentieth century.)

Some of the earlier generalist classic books that explicitly looked at science as a weapon of empires:

Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World; Delbourgo’s and Dew’s Science and Empire in the Atlantic World; the anthology Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World; Canzares-Esquerra’s Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World.

One of the quintessential case studies of science in the service of empire is the British pursuit of quinine and the inoculation of their soldiers and colonial administrators to safeguard against malaria in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia at the height of their power. But there are so many other exemplary cases: Britain trying to domesticate and transplant breadfruit from the South Pacific to the Caribbean to feed laborers to prevent slave uprisings during the age of the Haitian Revolution. British colonial administrators smuggling knowledge of tea cultivation out of China in order to set up tea plantations in Assam. Eugenics, race science, biological essentialism, etc. in the early twentieth century. With my interests, my little corner of exposure/experience has to do mostly with conceptions of space/place; interspecies/multispecies relationships; borderlands and frontiers; Caribbean; Latin America; islands. So, a lot of these recs are focused there. But someone else would have better recs, especially depending on your interests. For example, Chakrabarti writes about history of medicine/healthcare. Paravisini-Gebert about extinction and Caribbean relationship to animals/landscape. Deb Roy focuses on insects and colonial administration in South Asia. Some scholars focus on the historiography and chronological trajectory of “modernity” or “botany” or “universities/academia,”, while some focus on Early Modern Spain or Victorian Britain or twentieth-century United States by region. With so much to cover, that’s why I’d recommend the articles above, since they’re kinda like overviews.Generally I read more from articles, essays, and anthologies, rather than full-length books.

Some other nice articles:

(On my blog, I’ve got excerpts from all of these articles/essays, if you want to search for or read them.)

Katherine McKittrick. “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea.” Antipode. First published September 2021.

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde. “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.” A chapter in: Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. 2004.

Kathleen Susan Murphy. “A Slaving Surgeon’s Collection: The Pursuit of Natural History through the British Slave Trade to Spanish America.” 2019. And also: “The Slave Trade and Natural Science.” In: Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. 2016.

Timothy J. Yamamura. “Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell.” 2017.

Elizabeth Bentley. “Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870-1935).” 2021.

Pratik Chakrabarti. “Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past.” Past & Present 242:1. 2019.

Jonathan Saha. “Colonizing elephants: animal agency, undead capital and imperial science in British Burma.” BJHS Themes. British Society for the History of Science. 2017.

Zoe Chadwick. “Perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism in fin-de-siecle literature.” The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates. 2017.

Dante Furioso: “Sanitary Imperialism.” Jeremy Lee Wolin: “The Finest Immigration Station in the World.” Serubiri Moses. “A Useful Landscape.” Andrew Herscher and Ana Maria Leon. “At the Border of Decolonization.” All from e-flux.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” 2019.

Rohan Deb Roy. “White ants, empire, and entomo-politics in South Asia.” The Historical Journal. 2 October 2019.  

Rohan Deb Roy. “Introduction: Nonhuman Empires.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (1). May 2015.

Lawrence H. Kessler. “Entomology and Empire: Settler Colonial Science  and the Campaign for Hawaiian Annexation.” Arcadia (Spring 2017).

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner. “Monster as Medium: Experiments in Perception in Early Modern Science and Film.” e-flux. March 2021.

Lesley Green. “The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene.” e-flux Journal Issue #65. May 2015.

Martin Mahony. “The Enemy is Nature: Military Machines and Technological Bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment.’“ Environment and Society Portal, Arcadia. Spring 2021. 

Anna Boswell. “Anamorphic Ecology, or the Return of the Possum.” 2018. And; “Climates of Change: A Tuatara’s-Eye View.”2020. And: “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State." 2017.

Katherine Arnold. “Hydnora Africana: The ‘Hieroglyphic Key’ to Plant Parasitism.” Journal of the History of Ideas - JHI Blog - Dispatches from the Archives. 21 July 2021.

Helen F. Wilson. “Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship through Imperial Eyes.” Environment and Planning. July 2019.

Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson. “Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. August 2007.

Kirsten Greer. “Zoogeography and imperial defence: Tracing the contours of the Neactic region in  the temperate North Atlantic, 1838-1880s.” Geoforum Volume 65. October 2015. And: “Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 2013,

Marco Chivalan Carrillo and Silvia Posocco. “Against Extraction in Guatemala: Multispecies Strategies in Vampiric Times.” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. April 2020.

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

Paulo Tavares. “The Geological Imperative: On the Political Ecology of the Amazon’s Deep History.” Architecture in the Anthropocene. Edited by Etienne Turpin. 2013.

Kathryn Yusoff. “Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time.” Social Text. 2019. And: “The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower.” Handbook on the Geographies of Power. 2018. And: “Climates of sight: Mistaken visbilities, mirages and ‘seeing beyond’ in Antarctica.” In: High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science. 2008. And:“Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene.” 2017. And: “An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical.” 2017.

Mara Dicenta. “The Beavercene: Eradication and Settler-Colonialism in Tierra del Fuego.” Arcadia. Spring 2020.

And then here are some books:

Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Helen Tilley, 2011); Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Londa Schiebinger, 2004)

Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (Kirsten A. Greer); The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge (Arndt Brendecke, 2016); Medicine and Empire, 1600-1960 (Pratik Chakrabarti, 2014)

Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (Paul Winther); Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Sadiah Qureshi, 2011); Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands (Andrew Stuhl)

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (Britt Rusert, 2017); Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Aro Velmet, 2022); Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Jonathan Saha)

The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (Bernhard Gissibl, 2019); Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Edited by Adriana Craciun and Mary Terrall, 2019)

Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (Cameron B. Strang); The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Chirstopher A. Loperena, 2022); Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Allison Bigelow, 2020); The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (Rebecca J.H. Woods); American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (Megan Raby, 2017); Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism (Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, 2023)

Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (James Sweet, 2011); A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Anya Zilberstein, 2016); Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, 2019); Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970 (Edited by Anderson, Rozwadowski, et al, 2016)

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania (Maile Arvin); Overcoming Niagara: Canals, Commerce, and Tourism in the Niagara-Great Lakes Borderland Region, 1792-1837 (Janet Dorothy Larkin, 2018); A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (Michael A. Verney, 2022); In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1960 (Alice Conklin, 2013)

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Daniela Cleichmar, 2012); Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Arnab Dey, 2022); Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Edited by Crawford and Gabriel, 2019)

Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Hi’ilei Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, 2022); In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokkohama (Eric Tagliacozzo); Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Urmi Engineer Willoughby, 2017); Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region (Edited by Hirsch, et al, 2022); Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910 (Sarah E.M. Grossman, 2018)

Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Ruth Rogaski); Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Lenny A. Urena Valerio); Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Adam Sills, 2021)

Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Alan Mikhail, 2017); Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Jim Endersby); Proving Grounds: Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases (Edited by Edwin Martini, 2015)

Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Multiple authors, 2007); Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Peter Redfield); Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Andrew Togert, 2015); Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism (Hannah Holleman, 2016); Postnormal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance (Katja Grotzner Neves, 2019)

Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Anna K. Sagal, 2022); The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harriet Ritvo); Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (Michitake Aso); A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Kathryn Yusoff, 2018); Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Jessica Barnes, 2023); No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (Keith Pluymers); Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1768-1941 (Lynn Hollen Lees, 2017); Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (Douglas C. Harris, 2001); Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep Time (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy); Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Joyce Chaplin, 2001)

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 (Jeremy Zallen); Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Erik Linstrum, 2016); Lakes and Empires in Macedonian History: Contesting the Water (James Pettifer and Mirancda Vickers, 2021); Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Pratik Chakrabarti); Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (David Fedman)

Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Julie Cruikshank); The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem (Kristin A. Wintersteen, 2021); The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Ralph O’Connor); An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (Benjamin Kingsbury, 2018); Geographies of City Science: Urban Life and Origin Debates in Late Victorian Dublin (Tanya O’Sullivan, 2019)

American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (John Krige, 2006); Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Ann Laura Stoler, 2002); Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (Faisal H. Husain, 2021);

The Sanitation of Brazil: Nation, State, and Public Health, 1889-1930 (Gilberto Hochman, 2016); The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (James Hevia); Japan’s Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (Annika A. Culver, 2022)

Moral Ecology of a Forest: The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation (Jose E. Martinez, 2021); Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (Jessica Bissette Perea, 2021); Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (Mashid Mayar); Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Andrew Zimmerman, 2001)

The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Multiple authors, 2016); The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Katherine Johnston, 2022); Seeking the American Tropics: South Florida’s Early Naturalists (James A. Kushlan, 2020); The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (Perrin Selcer, 2018)

The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Laurence Monnais); Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands (Linda J. Seligmann, 2023) ; Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world (Edited by Kathryn Gillespie and Rosemary-Claire Collard, 2017); Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon (Heather Ann Swanson, 2022); Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Mark Bassin, 2000); The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (Erin Drew, 2022)

Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures (Anita Mannur, 2022); On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, 1830-1890 (Philip Gooding, 2022); All Things Harmless, Useful, and Ornamental: Environmental Transformation Through Species Acclimitization, from Colonial Australia to the World (Pete Minard, 2019)

Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart); Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Setller Colonialism (Jarrod Hore, 2022); Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (Meng Zhang, 2021); The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (David A. Chang);

Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (Christine Keiner); Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (Mauro Jose Caraccioli); Two Years below the Horn: Operation Tabarin, Field Science, and Antarctic Sovereignty, 1944-1946 (Andrew Taylor, 2017); Mapping Water in Dominica: Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism (Mark W. Hauser, 2021)

To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (Jason Smith, 2018); Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (Ian Matthew Miller, 2020); Breeds of Empire: The ‘Invention’ of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa 1500-1950 (Sandra Swart and Greg Bankoff, 2007)

Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya (Lachlan Fleetwood, 2022); Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (John Ryan Fisher, 2017); Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (Timothy P. Barnard, 2019)

An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation (Micha Rahder, 2020); Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Debjani Bhattacharyya, 2018);  Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (Kristen Hussey, 2021)

Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (Jeannie N. Shinozuka); Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Ann Elias, 2019); Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire (Angela Thompsell, 2015)

[aparrotandaqrow]

A lot of folks, especially in the Jewish community, have mixed feelings about Harris picking Walz as her VP over Shapiro. Some wanted Shapiro for the Jewish representation, especially a Jew who is Zionist and yet decries Netanyahu and expresses the desire for peace that so many of us have. Some worried that having two Jews in the White House would provoke yet more antisemitism and possibly even sink the ticket, given the massive surge in leftist antisemitism recently.

Many of us were frustrated and angered by seeing leftists campaign for Walz being the pick over Shapiro more or less entirely because Shapiro is Jewish—and felt a sense of dismay that perhaps Harris had caved to the antisemites.

I'm a Jew but I'm also a Minnesotan. I was glad to see the Walz pick for many reasons unrelated to my Jewish identity or Israel. But I want to also submit that Walz, uniquely among the politicians Harris could have picked, brings something to the table that is desperately important both to the nation more broadly and our community more specifically.

I present as Exhibit A, this archived NYT profile of Walz from back in 2008:

The teacher, Tim Walz, was determined that even in this isolated place, perhaps especially in this isolated place, this county seat of 9,000 that was hours away from any city in any direction, the students should learn how and why a society can descend into mass murder.

...

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters. “The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

My ancestors immigrated to the US around the turn of the century from Mariampol, Lithuania and Luboml, Ukraine. When the Nazis arrived in those towns some 40 years later, the Jews there (many of whom would have been my ancestors' relatives) were massacred not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, who welcomed the Nazis with open arms. You cannot truly help protect the Jewish community from antisemitism if you don't understand this crucial detail about how the Holocaust happened.

So Mr. Walz took his students [...] and assigned them to study the conditions associated with mass murder. What factors, he asked them to determine, had been present when Germans slaughtered Jews, Turks murdered Armenians, the Khmer Rouge ravaged their Cambodian countrymen?

...

They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

...

When the students finished with the past, Mr. Walz gave a final exam of sorts. He listed about a dozen current nations — Yugoslavia, Congo, some former Soviet republics among them — and asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide. Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks. The next April, in 1994, Mr. Walz heard news reports of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, being shot down. [...] Mr. Walz’s students, now juniors, saw their prophecy made into flesh and blood.

...

“You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Mr. Walz said, with those grim anniversaries in mind. “Or it will happen again.”

Y'all, Tim Walz is not Jewish. He's a white guy who grew up in Nebraska and then lived in one of Minnesota's smaller cities, up until going to Congress and then the Governor's mansion. No, he does not provide us with representation, nor will he ever truly understand what it feels like to be Jewish in America in 2024.

But he gets it. He understands not just academic history but people, and understands that "Never Again" is only feasible if we look at root causes, and strive to nip the factors that lead to genocide in the bud. We have all understood that allyship for Jews is only meaningful if you're here defending us before it gets violent.

Governor Walz represents an opportunity to have someone in the White House, on the national stage, who understands the big picture and the history well enough to actually be able to navigate incredibly complex and painful issues like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, like the regional conflicts within the Arab world, like the experience of progressive Jews in the US who would have found ourselves ostracized and alienated from increasingly hostile leftist movements. I cannot begin to explain how rare it is to have a politician at this level who also carries an experienced teacher's grasp of both history and empathy.

Maybe Josh Shapiro would have also brought that. But honestly, I'm not so sure. Walz may not be Jewish. But I think we're going to find that he'll be an ally, and a deeply learned and wise one at that. And I think we really need that right now.

[germanpostwarmodern]

Theo Pabst‘s (1905-79) in the best sense restrained architecture deserves a special place in German postwar architectural history: a long-term professor at TH Darmstadt Pabst didn’t build overly many of his projects but each of them is characterized by careful attention to detail and a timeless quality. The Maxburg in Munich, designed together with Sep Ruf, the Stachus Kaufhof department store or a late work like the Kunsthalle in Darmstadt exemplify these qualities. But despite these undeniable qualities there is very little literature about Pabst and the present small monograph the most comprehensive work to date: „Theo Pabst - Architektur im Kontinuum über die Zeit“, published by Spurverlag in 2008 and edited by Regina Stephan, brings together Pabst‘s major works and biographical excursions that shed light on the human being behind the buildings. Pabst, who graduated from TH München in 1929, subsequently worked for the Oberpostdirektion where he also qualified as „Regierungsbaumeister“ in 1931.

Like many of his generation he started his career during the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism: according to his self-disclosure he became member of the NSDAP in 1933 for better job perspectives, a move that paid off and during the war also contributed to him becoming Baurat for the Luftwaffe during WWII. Denazified as „Mitläufer“, Pabst’s postwar career took off with his appointment as professor at TU Darmstadt in 1949, a position he prematurely left in 1972 as he couldn’t get to terms with the less authoritarian post-1968 university. During these more than two decades at the university Pabst developed a delicate and transparent modernism characterized by stringent clarity.

Through the manifold contemporary illustrations, plans and elevations the development of his architecture is easily traceable and receives adequate contextualization in the accompanying texts. A brief biographical outline together with excerpts from Pabst’s autobiography round out this informative, well-written book on a lesser-known protagonist of German postwar architecture.

[mariacallous]

SONNEBERG, GERMANY—First, in true German fashion, the rules were outlined: no alcohol on site, flagpoles capped at three meters, no protesting past 8 p.m. The demonstration followed, with hundreds congregated in the town square shouting insults at the incumbent government; cracking jokes at the expense of refugees, the LGBTQ+ community, and the media; and waving a sea of German flags, with a few Russian ones dotted among them.

“Anyone who dares call us Nazis will be reported to the police,” one of the protesters shouted from a makeshift stage propped up outside Sonneberg’s City Hall, a white mansion built between the world wars. “Germany first,” the protester continued, beckoning the crowds to join in singing the national anthem under a rainy, dark sky.

At 8 p.m. sharp, the crowd quickly dispersed—but they’ll be back next Monday, as they are every week. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they rallied against lockdowns. Now, they call for the overthrow of the current government coalition, and in recent months, the numbers of agitators have started to swell. Many are affiliated with the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD), and although members say they strongly reject what Nazi Germany stood for, a regional chair of the party, Björn Höcke, is on trial for concluding a 2021 speech with the phrase “Everything for Germany”—a slogan widely used by the Nazis. (Under German law, the use of speech, propaganda, and symbolism associated with the Nazi Party and other terrorist groups is prohibited.)

Sonneberg district, home to 56,000 people, is where AfD has celebrated its biggest success to date: Last year, Robert Sesselmann, 51, was elected as the district administrator in a runoff with 52.8 percent of the vote, making Sonneberg the first county in Germany to elect a far-right candidate since the Nazi era. But Thuringia’s AfD branch—where Sonneberg is located—has already been questioning the legitimacy of state institutions and asserted that the Federal Republic of Germany is not a sovereign state, but rather controlled by external powers.

The Thuringia branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has legally classified the AfD’s Thuringia branch as “right-wing extremist,” and the federal office is now deciding whether the party may be classified as a suspected case of right-wing extremism on the national level.

The question is pertinent, since the AfD is gaining in popularity not just in Thuringia, but nationwide. This trend picked up around the time of Germany’s last federal elections in 2021. Nationally, the AfD’s support base has grown to 22 percent, compared to 10.4 percent in 2021. Three states in the east—Thuringia, as well as Brandenburg and Saxony—head to the polls this fall, and a win for the AfD looks likely, as it’s polling around 30 percent in all three states.

“This is a stress test for Germany, and 2024 is a defining year,” said Olaf Sundermeyer, an editor at the Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcast (RBB) and longtime expert on right-wing extremism in Germany. Sundermeyer said that since the AfD was founded in 2013, “the party has continuously radicalized.”

Initially starting out as a euroskeptic party that primarily criticized the European Union’s handling of the eurozone crisis, the party—and its leadership—have continuously shifted toward more nationalist and populist positions, especially since 2015, when former Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed around 1 million refugees into the country.

The legacy and shame of Nazi Germany continue to influence the nation’s politics, and until the AfD’s rise, German society strongly rejected far-right ideologies. But the economic impact of both the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis have—at least partially—resulted in shifting public perceptions.

“The AfD has successfully managed to alter people’s perception of right-wing extremism, moving it away from its historically charged stigma of Nazism and thus effectively rendering it socially acceptable,” Sundermeyer told Foreign Policy. This, he said, is exactly what has happened in Sonneberg.

The AfD’s new heartland, a remote part of the countryside, was part of the communist German Democratic Republic until reunification in 1990. Surrounded by hills in the Thuringian Forest, Sonneberg’s cobblestone main street and stately houses date back to the Wilhelminian era before the First World War. The nearest major highway is about a half-hour’s drive.

Since reunification, scores of people have migrated westward, leaving many homes empty. Residents say that young people here struggle with drug abuse; that there are few places for them to hang out; and that public transport isn’t adequately connecting the district’s farther, remote villages, making it more difficult to access educational and job opportunities. Since reunification, the country’s east has been catching up to the former West Germany in terms of economic opportunities, but in Sonneberg—and throughout former East Germany—many people continue to feel acutely disadvantaged.

A group of young men lingering after the demonstration echoed these complaints as they chain-smoked Marlboros and packed up whistles and flags. They had opted to move into practical professions—such as construction work, plumbing, and roofing—one explained, to help “build Sonneberg, and Germany overall.”

Attending the demonstration wearing their company uniforms—grey overalls and work pants—the men were initially hesitant to speak to the Lügenpresse, or “lying, mainstream press,” as they described it. “No names please,” they asked politely after agreeing to talk. (“Lügenpresse,” a term used by the Nazis, has resurfaced in Germany’s right-wing circles, as well as among allies of former U.S. President Donald Trump.)

“People call us ‘rats,’ just because we support the AfD,” one of the men said. “There’s no freedom of speech here, no freedom of thoughts. Our country gets involved in wars we don’t want to be part of. The government manipulates the press, our German culture, and our traditions are vanishing due to mass immigration—food and energy prices have skyrocketed. It’s worse than during the German Democratic Republic, and we desperately need change—we need an alternative.” He paused to take a long drag on his cigarette, then added: “Germany is for Germans first—we can’t help others if we’re not helping ourselves.”

“It’s a possibility that the party drifts too far to the right,” he said, “and that’s certainly not what we want. We don’t want a return of Nazi times, but we need change.”

The party’s policy platform is unabashedly far right. For instance, AfD’s stance on immigration is that “the ideology of multiculturalism is a serious threat to peace and to the continued existence of the nation as a cultural unit.” The party advocates for a “German dominant culture” based on the values of Christianity instead of multiculturalism. Africa, the party’s website states, is a “house of poverty,” arguing that migration from the continent needs to be capped.

During a covert meeting last November, uncovered by independent German investigative outlet Correctiv, AfD politicians, together with neo-Nazis and several wealthy business owners, discussed the “remigration” of millions of people—including German citizen—on the basis of racial and religious criteria.

The group of young men in Sonneberg who spoke with Foreign Policy talked about the need for the “remigration” of immigrants, too, and some even had written it on signs. After the rally, though, they headed to dinner at the only restaurant still open: a kebab house owned by an Iraqi Kurd. Their waiter was a Syrian man who arrived in Germany three years ago.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, at least 28.7 percent of Germany’s population—more than 1 in 4 people—have a migration background, meaning that they immigrated to Germany themselves or were born into families with a history of migration. Migration is on the up, with 2.1 million people arriving in Germany in 2015, and 2.6 million in 2022. Germany’s coalition government has said it aims to attract 400,000 qualified workers from abroad annually to tackle labor shortages and demographic imbalances.

The desire for strong leadership is also on the rise in Germany as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues. Several of the AfD’s members have called for a separation from NATO and even the EU; many have turned to Russia, at least rhetorically, arguing that Germany needs to work with its neighbors. Sundermeyer told Foreign Policy that “the AfD is deeply anti-American but pro- Russian; anti-NATO and -EU, but in favor of turning toward alternative government structures such as authoritarianism.”

Meanwhile, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser continuously calls right-wing extremism the “greatest extremist threat to Germany’s democracy.”

Still, for all the Sonneberg residents who voted for the AfD’s candidate, Sesselmann—who did not respond to interview requests by Foreign Policy—there are almost as many people who did not. And unless it’s during the weekly Monday demonstrations, people don’t usually flaunt their political opinions. The day after the weekly protest, at a food stall selling bratwursts during the lunch hour, conversations revolved around work, the weather, increased food and energy prices, and even Germany’s reunification—“before it, everything was better,” several people agreed.

“In Sonneberg, many voted AfD out of spite, while others don’t take an interest in politics but cast their votes for the AfD regardless,” said Regina Müller, a 61-year-old Green Party voter who owns an organic store decorated with anti-war slogans.

But, she added, “what many here don’t see is that [the AfD] are wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

[nerdygaymormon]

Congratulations to Nepal!

Here's a brief history leading up to today.

Nepal has tried to stamp out social discrimination ever since a decade-long Maoist rebellion ended in 2006 and the 239-year-old Hindu monarchy was dismantled in 2008.

In 2007, Nepal repealed laws against gay sex and introduced several laws which protected "gender and sexual minorities". The Supreme Court ruled later that year for the government to create laws to protect LGBTI rights, and for the government to form a committee to look into legalizing same-sex marriage. Successive governments failed to change the law on same-sex marriage. 

A lesbian couple held a traditional Hindu marriage ceremony in 2011, but the marriage has no legal status in Nepal. More and more public parades and unofficial weddings started being held in Nepal.

A new constitution was adopted in 2015 which recognized LGBT rights as fundamental rights, and while it didn't specifically list same-sex marriage, it did list several other rights, such as being able to acquire a citizenship certificate according to one's gender identity.

In July 2017, Monica Shahi and Ramesh Nath, successfully registered their marriage. Shahi is a third gender person, with their sex recorded as "other" on their official identity documents. The Nepal Home Ministry said the marriage could be invalid.

In October 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the government was wrong to deny a Visa to the American wife of a Nepalese citizen. The government argued it rejected the application since Nepal doesn't recognize same-sex marriages. The Supreme Court ruled that the law is as long as they have a valid marriage license, a foreigner who is married to a Nepali citizen is eligible for the Visa, the rules do not specify that the foreign national must be either same or opposite gender. Furthermore, it pointed to the Nepal constitution that an LGBT citizen is entitled to live life with dignity without discrimination.

March 2023, the Supreme Court ordered the government to recognize the marriage of a Nepali citizen and his German husband and to issue a spousal visa. It also directed the government to draft legislation for full marriage equality in Nepal

In June of 2023, the Supreme Court ordered the government to make necessary arrangements to temporarily create a separate register for marriages of "sexual minorities and non-traditional couples" until lawmakers come up with a new legal framework to uphold such unions permanently.

Nov 29, 2023, a same-sex couple officially registered their marriage

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Polish Defense Spending to Hit 4.7% of GDP by 2025 | Gen. Jarosław Kraszewski

Poland's largest defense expo is underway in Kielce, with over 750 companies displaying cutting-edge military technology. Notably, Poland is increasing its defense budget to 4.7% of its GDP by next year. Amid the signing of major contracts, including an airport protection system from a Spanish firm, there’s also a push to develop domestic production, such as a planned ammunition factory. Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has also emphasized the need for "precise" contracts, including ongoing negotiations for more K2 tanks from South Korea. General Jarosław Kraszewski, former Director of the Armed Forces Supervision Department at the Polish National Security Bureau, joined us today on TVP World to discuss these developments.

P.S. The Poles have made a very correct decision! Glad to hear: "Poland is increasing its defence budget to 4.7% of its GDP". Considering the high level of political corruption in the West and the extent to which Russian spies and agents of influence have infiltrated Western societies, Western security "guarantees" and "international laws" cannot be relied upon at all: 1) The Russian imperialists would never have started the war against Ukraine if Western capital, specifically German, French, Dutch, American and all other businessmen, had not invested huge funds in the Russian economy and in the restoration of the Russian military potential (the Russians obtained the military technology they lacked, both directly and indirectly, the West donated for the Russians possibility to steal Western military technology secrets without hindrance); 2) The West significantly reduced the military potential of Western European countries and CATEGORICALLY REFUSED TO INCREASE the defense of Eastern Europe and the Baltic regions at leas since 2006. Even when the Russian invasion of Georgia began in Europe in August 2008, the West pretended that nothing was happening...;

Even more, Western politicians started pushing the idea that NATO is no longer needed, the Western fiasco in Syria, and the West went so far in an absurd situation that they even started talking about giving the Russians a "sphere of influence" in Europe...it must be allowed to attack Ukraine and the Baltic States without hindrance. A. Merkel's German policy in relations with Russia was a particularly big shame for Western politicians, and of course the political circus organized by Donald Trump in America.... It is such a shame that there are no words to describe it... Of course, the Kremlin and Beijing saw all this activity of the Western useful idiots very well... the Russian army, together with Iran, entered Syria without interference, continued attacks in Ukraine, Beijing is becoming more and more aggressive, and this is only thanks to the useful idiots of the West, who have betrayed absolutely all the West's civilization values....

[goldammerchen]

2008

2011

Storyboard

Post from a day after

In the time before the Austro-Prussian War, when Austria was being provoked, the reason for his continued uncertain attitude towards Prussia is cute. He wants to hit Prussia but he doesn’t want to hit (little) Germany. That kind of thing. ↓The comic below this is for the site and is something simple about the Austro-Prussian War, but it’s nothing important, so sorry about that…

And Big Brother France did what Big Brother France does.

September 2014, HWS 1

October 2014

I’m going to explain in advance the comic strip that will be released either next week or the week after!

I’ve only very briefly talked about the Unification of Germany before, so I plan to give another proper explanation of Germany’s closest big brother, his many other big brothers, and that young master who almost became a big brother but didn’t. For now, you can look forward to his reckless big brother’s upcoming appearance.

October 2014, HWS 12

2015, HWS Vol 2

2016

Until then, the German principalities were hardly united, and despite having a kind of federation called Holy Roman Empire, they were at a state where they could easily become friends or foes depending on where their interests lie. That’s why while they grew and strengthened as individual entities, Holy Roman Empire didn’t grow up and his body was weak. And when the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved due to other nations’ interference, it became the catalyst for the German Principalities to really think about what exactly Germany stands for, and it created an outpouring of nostalgia for Germany.

Extra (for me), 2011 post...

Thse are probably the best posts about the topic:

https://ellawritesficssometimes.tumblr.com/post/167889388969