#Police took out flag march in villages

[best24news]

Rewari News: पुलिस ने गांवों में निकाला फ्लैग मार्च

Rewari News: पुलिस ने गांवों में निकाला फ्लैग मार्च

रेवाडी: 9 और 12 नवंबर को होने वाली पंचायती राज संस्थाओं के चुनाव में निष्पक्ष और भयमुक्त वातावरण बनाने के लिए सोमवार को धारूहेडा, बावल, कोसली, जाटूसाना व खोल पुलिस द्वारा फ्लैग मार्च निकाला गया। रेलवे ने दिया बड़ा तोहफा, अब यात्री बिना टिकट के कर पाएंगे यात्रा पुलिस ने गांवों में निकाला फ्लैग मार्च चुनाव के मद्देनजर पुलिस ने फ्लैग मार्च निकालते हुए लोगों से भयमुक्त मतदान करने की अपील की । वहीं…

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jun 25, 2024

The impact of the riots at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 has often been overblown. Those few summer days when the beleaguered gay community fought back against the police on the streets of New York City are rightly considered a milestone in the struggle for equal rights in the West. But endless arguments about ‘who threw the first brick?’ have obscured the truth that gay equality was achieved by the activists who persisted in the aftermath, harnessing that energy and changing the world forever.

Perhaps a more important milestone was the march organised by a handful of campaigners a year after Stonewall. Craig Rodwell’s idea had been to make this a yearly commemoration that would supersede the ‘Annual Reminder’ picket events that he had been holding every Independence Day in Philadelphia since 1965. It would be known as the ‘Christopher Street Liberation Day’ – later retrospectively rebranded as the first New York ‘Pride’ march – and it was orchestrated chiefly by Rodwell, Fred Sargeant, Linda Rhodes and Ellen Broidy.

The march took place on 28 June 1970, and it was an audacious display. Police hostility to gay people was rife, the local media were overwhelmingly unsympathetic and there were fears of violent repercussions from observers. The day passed off peacefully, perhaps because of a general sense of astonishment that thousands of gay people would assemble so openly. A reporter for the Village Voice wrote that ‘no one could quite believe it, eyes rolled back in heads, Sunday tourists traded incredulous looks, wondrous faces poked out of air-conditioned cars’. At the head of the march, Fred Sargeant carried a bullhorn and called out instructions to the marchers as they made their way from the West Village to Central Park.

Fifty-four years later, and Pride has transformed from an important act of resistance into a month-long orgy of corporatism and virtue-signalling, full of heterosexuals desperate to identify themselves into an oppressed group with the help of trans ideology. ‘Progress Pride’ flags flutter from every high-street store. This relatively new design – a kaleidoscopic eyesore that has replaced the traditional six-stripe Pride flag – is emblazoned on schools, universities, hospitals, civic buildings. In the city of Arlington in Texas, this year’s family friendly Pride event included displays of dildos, half-naked drag queens and human dogs in bondage gear, all co-spon.sored by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest producer of armaments. In London, numerous pedestrian crossings have been repainted with the ‘Progress Pride’ motif. Police horses find walking across the coloured stripes confusing and disturbing, so the animals have undergone special training to overcome their fears. After all, it is essential to address the rampant homophobia within the equine community.

What might the thousands who turned out on that summer day in New York in 1970 make of this distorted version of Pride? Those gay men and lesbians who risked social ostracism and physical violence to gather in public have little in common with this garish and unsettling facsimile. A poll from 2021 determined that almost 40 per cent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 now identify as LGBTQ. Given the vast majority identifying as such do so as ‘trans’, ‘nonbinary’ and ‘queer’, this means it is statistically certain that gay people are now the minority in this coalition. The early pioneers of gay rights didn’t risk so much for their movement to be usurped by fetishistic heterosexuals with a martyr complex.

It would be interesting to see polling data on how many gay people support Pride in its new ‘trans-inclusive’ incarnation. One recent poll on X asked a simple question: ‘Do you want Pride anymore?’ And although 93.5 per cent of respondents replied in the negative, social-media polls are notoriously useless and we would be unwise to draw any conclusions from them. Still, it is surely significant that this poll was reposted by Fred Sargeant, and that his answer was a resounding ‘No’. That the man who led the first Pride march, bullhorn in hand, should now reject the annual event that he co-created because of its embrace of gender ideology is far from trivial. Nor is it trivial that while handing out pamphlets critical of the trans movement at a Pride event in Vermont in 2022, Sargeant was physically attacked by trans activists.

[ A parade through New York City on Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day, 1971. ]

He is not alone. Many gay people have expressed dismay at the metamorphosis of Pride and feel that it no longer represents them. This can be confusing for those who have not been paying attention to its ongoing political evolution, but there is a very good reason why groups of gay men and lesbians are now holding alternative Pride rallies this year. In August 2022, police insisted that lesbians leave a Pride parade because their banners, proclaiming that ‘lesbians don’t like penises’ and ‘trans activism erases lesbians’, were causing consternation. When gay people are being escorted away from Pride marches by the police, we can safely say that the movement has fallen.

Some might argue that the LGBTQIA+ explosion is an example of what happens when liberalism goes unchecked, that it is the natural consequence of an excess of tolerance and the rise of identity politics. Yet while identity politics in its current intersectional form has proven to be deeply illiberal and regressive, there have been sound reasons throughout history for people with shared characteristics to organise and resist. Unlike the various campaigns for imaginary victimhood that dominate today’s ‘social justice’ causes, being openly gay in the 1970s came at a huge cost. At the time of the first Pride parade, every state in the US with the exception of Illinois criminalised gay sex. In services and employment, discrimination against gay people was permitted, and even most progressives assumed that homosexuality was a mental illness. This is a world away from the exaggerated or fabricated grievances of the diversity, equity and inclusion industry today.

Now that gay people have complete equal rights under the law, the protest element of Pride has been appropriated by those with an apparent craving for oppression. Asexual activists, for instance, have taken centre stage at certain Pride events, even though nobody in the history of humankind has ever been burned at the stake for not wanting to have sex. It isn’t the case that those who identify as asexual are facing discrimination; it’s that nobody cares about what they don’t get up to in the bedroom. But of course, for those of a narcissistic temperament, there can be nothing more devastating than being ignored.

[ Furries march on Congress Street during the annual Pride Portland parade, 2017. ]

Many of those who call themselves ‘nonbinary’ are similarly vocal, but there is no serious comparison to be made between the historical persecution of homosexuals and experiencing some pushback when you demand that others refer to you as ‘they’ or ‘them’. Coming out as gay in 1970 increased the risk of being violently assaulted; coming out as ‘nonbinary’ today only increases one’s chances of being employed at the BBC.

Of course, all of this must be symptomatic of the developing cult of victimhood in the Western world. Ironically, there is now power in being the victim. Those who claim to be ‘marginalised’ are able to get people fired, drive them from public life, and harass and bully them in the name of ‘progress’. Who would have thought there was so much clout in being oppressed?

Far from being a collective gesture of unity, Pride is now widely interpreted as a celebration of homophobia. This is because it has become infected with gender ideology, which seeks to eliminate gay people from their own history. Although trans-identified individuals were rarely seen at activist meetings and events in the early decades of the gay movement, revisionists are now insisting that gay people owe their rights to the hard work of trans campaigners. We are told that a black trans woman, Marsha P Johnson, was the key figure at the Stonewall riots. This is wrong on many counts. The riots were overwhelmingly dominated by young gay men. Although Johnson took part in the demonstrations, he wasn’t present when the rioting began. Most significantly, by his own admission, he was a transvestite who didn’t identify as female.

Fred Sargeant has been much vilified for exposing the truth of what took place in these early years of the gay rights’ movement, and he is now a thorn in the side of activists whose worldview depends on a narrative that runs contrary to the truth. Recently he posted a link to the Digital Transgender Archive on the Third International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, which explicitly outlines how gay and trans movements in the 20th century were completely separate. The conflation of the LGB and T is an invention as recent as 2015. As the document explains, while the gay-rights movement in the US began in the 1920s, ‘the existence of a transgendered community that seeks reforms did not come into existence until the 1990s’.

The historical revisionism doesn’t end at Stonewall. Activists have attempted to claim that certain gay historical figures were mistaking their true trans identity for homosexuality. Just as Mormon priests have been known to baptise the dead and thereby convert them unwillingly to their cause, trans activists have been busy harvesting the annals of history for potential recruits. Those falsely claimed as trans include George Eliot, Dr James Barry, Radclyffe Hall and Joan of Arc. People who were gay and gender nonconforming are particularly vulnerable to this kind of retrospective ‘transing’. It’s very convenient for activists that the dead can’t complain.

While many trans campaigners consider themselves supportive of gay rights, overt homophobia is nonetheless often tolerated and encouraged within their circles. There are innumerable examples online of trans activists claiming that homosexuality is a form of transphobia and that only bigots have ‘genital preferences’. ‘If you’re a cis gay man’, writes one, ‘and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave’. A video recently went viral featuring an activist explaining to gay men why they should transition to female and that ‘maybe being gay is an outdated concept’. An online influencer called Davey Wavey uploaded his attempt at gay conversion therapy in a video entitled ‘How To Eat Pussy – For Gay Men’. One can imagine it being shown to young men at an evangelical Christian retreat for those who wish to find a ‘cure’ for their immoral urges.

This isn’t simply a case of a handful of lunatics on the fringe – this idea has also been normalised in mainstream gay culture. Australia’s Human Rights Commission prohibits lesbians from holding female-only events on the grounds that it discriminates against men who identify as female. Sall Grover, the founder of women’s app Giggle, is currently in a legal battle in Australia because she refused to allow a man to join. Stonewall has even redefined ‘homosexuality’ on its website as ‘same-gender attracted’. Its former CEO, Nancy Kelley, once suggested that women who don’t wish to date trans people are ‘sexual racists’. No, Nancy, they’re just gay.

We have seen all this before. In the 1980s, it was a common trope for gay men to be told that they ‘just haven’t found the right girl yet’ and to suggest to lesbians that they ‘just need the right dick’. The rights of homosexuals depend upon a recognition that a minority of people are attracted to their own sex. Once sex is eliminated from the equation, gay rights are no longer tenable.

The most obvious example of how gay rights have been threatened by trans ideology is that young gay people are disproportionately at risk of surgical ‘correction’. Given that between 80 and 90 per cent of adolescents referred to the NHS Tavistock Clinic were orientated towards their own sex, it is clear that in many cases homosexuality was being treated as gender dysphoria. I am usually mistrustful of accusations of various ‘phobias’ which can be used as a rhetorical technique to discourage disagreement. But if medicalising people for being same-sex attracted doesn’t qualify as homophobic, I’m not sure that anything does.

And so Pride and its accoutrements have come to represent an ideology that seeks not only to erase the foundations of gay rights, but also to re-conceptualise same-sex attraction as a condition that requires medical treatment. When police officers decorate their cars with the Pride colours, when NHS workers display the rainbow lanyard, when schools decorate their halls with bunting in solidarity, they are almost certainly doing so with the noble intention of promoting equal rights. But they are inadvertently promoting a movement whose end goal is the eradication of homosexuality.

This is not to deny that the ‘Progress Pride’ flag and all it represents have been embraced by many gay people. It is clearly the case that a majority have not realised the extent to which the flag has been hijacked for a cause that actively works against their interests. The situation has hardly been helped by prominent celebrities, often now referred to as ‘Vichy gays’, who have cheered on this sinister development. Homosexuals are not immune to the condition of useful idiocy.

Given that Pride has become so divisive, and given that so many lesbians, bisexuals and gay men now consider it to be an essentially hostile enterprise, it would be prudent for corporations and government bodies to stop pretending that there is a consensus on this issue. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. By flying the ‘Progress Pride’ flag, they are taking a side in a highly contentious cultural debate, one that alienates as many gay people as it attracts. Those who are serious about gay rights need to distance themselves from Pride once and for all.

==

When the demand for 'oppression' outstrips the supply.

Time to resist again.

[catdotjpeg]

Protesters acting in solidarity with Palestine interrupted the New York City Pride March on Sunday afternoon, blocking a float from a major LGBTQ+ organization as it made its way down the West Village’s Christopher Street. The action started at around 2:30 p.m. one block from the Stonewall Inn, when activists unfurled a banner that read “No Queer Liberation Without Palestinian Liberation,” distributed leaflets, and sat down in front of the float representing the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) to block it from proceeding, according to a report from Gay City News.

Footage of the action was shared on social media by the group Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), a “coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers who are committed to the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” according to the group’s website. One video shows the protesters unfurling the banner and throwing red paint on the truck pulling HRC’s float as people in HRC shirts run out to intervene. Protestors sat on the parade route with a Palestinian flag and a banner reading “Palestine will be free” in red, black, and green. Another video shows New York Police Department officers arresting protestors as the crowd chants “Shame, shame!”

In a statement provided to Them, the group specifically called out pinkwashing, noting as an example a now-infamous November image shared by Israel’s official Instagram account showing an Israeli soldier standing amid the rubble in Gaza holding a rainbow flag scrawled with the words “In the name of love.” The caption read “The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza 🏳️‍🌈.” “But who among us felt anything other than abject shame when the rainbow flag was raised, purportedly ‘in the name of love,’ over a razed Palestinian neighborhood in January?,” the statement reads.“We refuse the identitarian navel-gazing that would tether us to such violent spectacles and their authors.” It continues, “There is no version of this where we pat ourselves on the back for fighting back, and then go back to ‘yes queen, glitter in the streets, corporate pride but watermelon stickers’ as we boots the house down fifth avenue behind our complicit ‘human rights’ organizations, hand in blood-stained hand with weapons manufacturers and the rainbow capitalists who use the language of our liberation to buy us into their military industrial hellscape while their lobbyists work against us behind closed doors.” A representative for WAWOG told Them that Sunday's protest was carried out by a group formed within WAWOG and comprising both WAWOG members and comrades. On the social media site X, the group wrote that HRC was targeted for its ties to arms manufacturers. Northrop Grumman, an arms manufacturer, is listed as a “platinum partner” of the HRC on its own donor website, alongside names of corporations such as Apple, Amazon, and Google.

[...]

When asked for comment, HRC directed Them to the organization's statement “Humanitarian Crisis in the Middle East,” last updated June 1.

“HRC’s mission is focused on advancing the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people in the United States and around the globe. Given our expertise, HRC’s work outside of the U.S. is focused on issues with a unique impact on the LGBTQ+ community, including the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ+ laws and policies around the globe," the statements reads in part.

According to Gay City News, onlookers joined chants of “Free, free Palestine,” as well as “Shut it down.” Some people on the HRC float joined in the chants, as well, per Gay City’s report. Police, some wearing rainbow NYPD insignia, zip-tied protesters’ wrists and denied journalists access to the protest to capture images of the arrests, Gay City wrote. The parade, which took place on the final day of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, was the latest example of pro-Palestine protesters using pride festivities to demand solidarity with people in Palestine. Earlier this month, protesters brought messages of solidarity to major cities across the United States, including Boston and Philadelphia. Disclosure: While not an active WAWOG member, this journalist signed an October 2023 statement from WAWOG voicing solidarity with people in Gaza.

-- From "Protestors Disrupted NYC Pride in Solidarity With Gaza, Blocking HRC's Float" by Mathew Rodriguez, 1 Jul 2024

[beardedmrbean]

Armed police officers wave cars off the motorway going from Poland to Germany.

They're searching for people-smugglers and their desperate cargo.

This is the German government's latest bid to show it is getting a grip on rising levels of irregular migration.

But, as we found in a rural border district, there's little sense of control.

Altenberg is a small town in Saxony, right by the Czech Republic.

Families race down a toboggan run that weaves through the forest and, when winter's here, there's even a small ski resort.

The local mayor, Markus Wiesenberg, says that - in this area alone - smugglers drop off people as often as once a day.

"The trafficker disappears and probably picks up the next load."

New arrivals put a strain on local services, he says, as well as local people.

"Sometimes they find sleeping bags and campfires in the woods and they are worried for their children."

Migration is looming large in the national debate after the far right is seen to have capitalized on the issue, fuelling recent gains in regional elections.

Ministers ordered "temporary" checks last month on Germany's land borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.

The controls were renewed this week, as they have been for years on the border with Austria, and they are all within the EU's supposedly border-free Schengen Zone.

Registered illegal entries into Germany this year are set to be their highest since 2016.

The country remains a top destination for asylum seekers.

In August, it received around 30 per cent of the 100,000 applications lodged within the EU, Norway and Switzerland.

Inside an old youth hostel in rural Saxony, more than 50 men are waiting for their future to begin.

Thirty-three-year-old Muhammad Abdoum, from Syria, has successfully applied for asylum and hopes soon to find work.

He's adopted a leadership role at this migrant housing centre and seems naturally upbeat.

However, he becomes tearful when recounting a "lost" decade in his life with the prospect of starting again from "zero."

"I lost too much [many] friends. I lost 10 years. What did I make for myself?"

A long journey, he tells me, took him from war-torn Syria to Turkey, through the Balkans and eventually here; to what feels like a remote outpost, just metres from the Czech border, surrounded by pine trees and a heavy morning mist.

Passing through other EU nations, the last leg of his travels was on a train from Prague.

Now he dreams of having a life, maybe even a family, in Germany.

That evening, just ten minutes' drive from the hostel, a small crowd of forty to fifty people gathers in the village square of Hermsdorf.

They're protesting about the possibility that nearby apartments might be used to house migrants.

A speaker, playing anti-establishment songs, blares out from the back of a van.

Thomas clutches a damp, sagging flag of Saxony as he tells me that while an Iraqi family has integrated well into his village, "If hordes of young men arrive… we fear for our safety."

"I'm here for the children," chimes in Anja. "For me the young migrants who come here, they are armies - and when the order comes for them to take action, then we're done. Then Germany is done."

The group eventually marches off into the night to do a loop of the village.

You might think, tucked away amongst forests and hilltops, that no one can hear them - but you'd be wrong.

Polls that put the far-right, anti-immigration, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party ahead of the three governing parties appears to have spooked Berlin into action.

Plans to speed up deportations of failed asylum seekers are being introduced while Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Nigeria this week to try and boost the number of returns.

The German leader has denied that recent AfD state election successes have forced his hand.

But a "sense of fear" has led to fresh, serious discussions in government according to Gerald Knaus, chair of the European Stability Initiative think tank in Berlin.

He's dismissive of border checks and EU plans to fast-track asylum applications, describing them all as "fake solutions."

Mr Knaus was the brains behind the contentious 2016 deal which saw Turkey promised aid and visa-free travel in return for stemming the flow of migrants into the EU.

He believes this kind of agreement should be revived and expanded to countries such as Senegal, Morocco and Rwanda.

Some senior political figures in Germany, including from within the three-party governing coalition, are also calling for third-country deals.

One idea, which has not been endorsed by ministers, could see asylum claims processed in nations that migrants pass through on their way to the EU.

"We must prevent people with no prospect of asylum to start the dangerous route across the Mediterranean," Christian Dürr, the Free Democrats Bundestag group leader, told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Successful claimants would then proceed to Germany whereas the UK's deal with Rwanda, which is being contested in the courts, would see refugees remain in the Central African country.

On Monday Chancellor Olaf Scholz will meet with Germany's regional leaders where migration is expected to top the agenda.

A collision of factors are present in the current migration debate in Germany.

Attempts to tackle irregular migration are running in parallel with efforts to plug labour shortages by attracting skilled foreign workers.

Germany's also taken more than a million people from Ukraine - mainly women and children - following Russia's full-scale invasion.

Increased backing for the AfD comes as elected leaders are accused of ducking the debate.

Mayor Markus Wiesenberg, who's a member of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat party, says there is a perception that the federal government is failing.

All the while, the rise in irregular migration appears to feed gains by the far right as elected leaders are accused of ducking the debate.

"It seems we didn't learn the lesson of 2015," he says - referring to the apogee of Europe's migration crisis.

"We are as unprepared as then."

[tienramadan]

Dozens reportedly arrested as police clear George Washington University encampment

Hundreds of Washington DC police, some deploying pepper spray, cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University early on Wednesday, in the latest clash between law enforcement and protesting students to sweep the US.

The GW Hatchet student paper reported that at least a dozen people had been arrested as the impromptu tent village was dismantled in University Yard. The Metropolitan police department said the arrests had been made for “assault of a police officer” and “unlawful entry”.

The George Washington confrontation follows the clearing of the protest encampment at the University of Chicago on Tuesday. A large police contingent was sent in to remove tents in the university’s Quad, after the school authorities said that negotiations with students had broken down.

Since campus protests first erupted three weeks ago at Columbia University in New York City and spread rapidly across the country, there have been at least 2,600 arrests on 50 campuses, according to the Associated Press.

At George Washington, tension rose on Tuesday night after protesters left the university encampment and marched to the home of the institution’s president, Ellen Granberg. The local TV station Fox 5 reported that they were chanting, “Granberg, Granberg, you can’t hide, you’re complicit in genocide.”

University authorities said in a statement following the removal of the encampment that the protest had “evolved into an unlawful activity, with participants in direct violation of multiple university policies and city regulations”. On Sunday, Granberg went further, claiming the protest had been taken over by outsiders and accusing the demonstrators of a raft of illegal and provocative acts.

“When protesters overrun barriers established to protect the community, vandalize a university statue and flag, surround and intimidate GW students with antisemitic images and hateful rhetoric, chase people out of a public yard based on their perceived beliefs, and ignore, degrade, and push GW police officers and university maintenance staff, the protest ceases to be peaceful or productive,” Granberg said.

Student protesters have called her account of events “deeply misleading” and countered that Granberg had repeatedly refused to meet with them and discuss their demands. They include disclosure by the university of all its investments and endowments, and divestment from academic partnerships in Israel.

One question looming over the volatile events at George Washington was why the DC police took so long to remove the encampment following days of requests by the university authorities to do so. On Friday the police chief and mayor of DC ordered police officers who had been assembling to dismantle the tents to stand down, saying they were worried about being seen to act against peaceful protesters, the Washington Post reported.

The mayor, Muriel Bowser, and the police chief, Pamela Smith, were set to answer questions from US Congress members on Wednesday about why they failed to respond to the university’s request to clear the campus until now.

[nataliesnews]

So many things happening at once 10.2.2023

I feel that my letters are so disorganized but that is the way it is. Every day something changes. The government proposes a law or there is a threat to pass a law...as has happened with Shas demanding that any woman for example holding a Torah scroll be arrested and the next moment it is shot down. Attached the PDF and I suggest women especially  read it. Every time there is a new threat to our freedom and I feel that the net of darkness if closing on us and we are striking out wildly to keep our balance. 

  We were out on a shift. I had had a very bad night with my leg and woke up really dopey. Last night I went to the demonstration here in Jerusalem which was quiet but in Tel Aviv two women who held signs with a small Palestinian flag on it were told that they would be arrested even though there is no law against it. More and more soldiers and police and even security guards are acting as if they  now have all the power in their might to stop anyone acting in a way of which THEY do not approve. If I  did not have to walk with the sticks I would dafke make such a sign. Today, also coming back from a shift a thoroughly nasty piece of work stopped Kamal, our Arab driver, as we were going through a checkpoint. Kamal says the creep knows him and that he has a blue ID but he always delays him and tries to make problems.So today he stopped in, peered into the car and very rudely said to Kamal...."Who are they?" I wanted to say to him did we look like terrorists but it would only have caused him to make Kamal more problems when he goes through and when he is not with us. Anat shot back at him Machsomwatch and he evidently realized who he was dealing with and let us through. He evidently hoped that Kamal was taking Palestinian women through and that he could delay him by demanding their documents

 Last week I went to a documentary...."Two Kids a day" and you can actually see it on this link. Look at the beginning....see how small some of the children are whom they are arresting. And how they handle them. And go to the end to hear what some people say. That by breaking youths, they break the villages. You really need to watch this.

 https://www.gumfilms.com/projects/two-kids-day

 Has your news told you that El Al pilots refused to fly the unroyal family to France?  And do you know how many big firms are leaving Israel?

Have you any idea how many companies are withdrawing from Israel.

Have you any idea of how many Israelis who have money are thinking of opening accounts overseas.

  Netanyahu said to call global credit rating firms amid concern over judicial shakeup

Premier reportedly appeals directly to international ranking companies, banks to convince them government proposals won't damage economy, don't justify downgrade

https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-call-global-credit-rating-firms-amid-concern-over-judicial-shakeup/

And a three day march is moving towards Jerusalem. I will join them at the Knesset (or is it the High Court). There is so much going on. I think there is an expression catch the leopand by the tail and that is what Netanyahu has done. There is also to be an enormous strike throughout Israel on Monday next. Many employers are giving their workers the day off but better that they should simply close down.

  IDF vets start 3-day march to Jerusalem to protest judicial overhaul plans

Dozens of ex-Armored Corps generals pen letter warning legislation will harm military draft, 'willingness of reserves to mobilize'

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-vets-hold-3-day-march-to-jerusalem-to-protest-judicial-overhaul-plans/

 I am also sending you an article by Robyn  of the Bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families. More and more doors are being closed to anyone considered not a "loyal" citizen. Yesterday after a demonstration in Jerusalem in which reserve soldiers took part after a three day march to Jerusalem. As soon as there is something on the agenda of which the right does not agree everyone and every organization bends the knee to them. Last night people coming from the demonstration were stopped at the train station because of the anti-government shirts they were wearing. I do not know how this ended but it is not the first time. I have suggested that a whole group of us go to the train station with our various shirts on and see what will happen.

[suzey8888]

“I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. She was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching. “We elected him by a landslide – 98 percent of the vote,” she recalls. She wasn’t old enough to vote in 1938 – approaching her 11th birthday. But she remembers. “Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.” No so. Hitler is welcomed to Austria “In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates. Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs. “My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people – about 30 daily.’ “We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. “Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. “Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler. “We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed. “After the election, German officials were appointed, and, like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service. “Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn’t support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage. “Then we lost religious education for kids “Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school.. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler’s picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn’t pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles,’ and had physical education. “Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail.” And then things got worse. “The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. “We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had. “My mother was very unhappy,” remembers Kitty. “When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn’t do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly

any fun – no sports, and no political indoctrination. “I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. “Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time, unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. “It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy. “In 1939, the war started, and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn’t work, you didn’t get a ration card, and, if you didn’t have a card, you starved to death. “Women who stayed home to raise their families didn’t have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men. “Soon after this, the draft was implemented. “It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps,” remembers Kitty. “During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. “They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. “When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. “Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service. “When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. “You could take your children ages four weeks old to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, seven days a week, under the total care of the government. “The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had. “Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna.. “After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. “When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. “If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries. “As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80 percent of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. “All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing. “We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. “Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn’t meet all the demands. “Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control. “We had consumer protection, too “We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency

specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the livestock, and then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it. “In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps. The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. “So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. “I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. “I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. “They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness. “As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia. “Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law-abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long afterwards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily. “No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up. “Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.” “This is my eyewitness account. “It’s true. Those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity. “America is truly is the greatest country in the world. “Don’t let freedom slip away. “After America, there is no place to go.” Kitty Werthmann ***Re-read the part where she says “everything was free” - healthcare and so on. Very much worth reading twice.****

[greatworldwar2]

• Otto Skorzeny

Otto Skorzeny was an Austrian-born SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the Waffen-SS during World War II. During the war, he was involved in several operations, including the Gran Sasso raid which rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity.

Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna on June 12th, 1908 into a middle-class Austrian family which had a long history of military service. His surname is of Polish origin, and Skorzeny's distant ancestors came from a village called Skorzęcin in Greater Poland region. In addition to his native German, he spoke excellent French and was proficient in English. He was a noted fencer as member of a German-national Burschenschaft as a university student in Vienna. He engaged in fifteen personal combats. The tenth resulted in a wound that left a dramatic dueling scar known in academic fencing as a Schmiss (German for "smite" or "hit") on his cheek. In 1931 Skorzeny joined the Austrian Nazi organization and soon became a member of the Nazi SA. A charismatic figure, Skorzeny played a minor role in the Anschluss on March 29th, 1938, when he saved the Austrian President Wilhelm Miklas from being shot by Austrian Nazis.

After the 1939 invasion of Poland, Skorzeny, then working as a civil engineer, volunteered for service in the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe), but was turned down because he was considered too tall at 1.92 metres (6 ft 4 in) and too old (31 years in 1939) for aircrew training. He then joined Hitler's bodyguard regiment, the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH). Skorzeny took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union with the SS Division Das Reich and subsequently fought in several battles on the Eastern Front. In October 1941, he was in charge of a "technical section" of the German forces during the Battle of Moscow. His mission was to seize important buildings of the Communist Party, including the NKVD headquarters at Lubyanka, and the central telegraph office and other high priority facilities, before they could be destroyed. He was also ordered to capture the sluices of the Moscow-Volga Canal because Hitler wanted to turn Moscow into a huge artificial lake by opening them. The missions were canceled as the German forces failed to capture the Soviet capital.

In December 1942, Skorzeny was hit in the back of the head by shrapnel; he was evacuated to the rear for treatment. He was awarded the Iron Cross. While recuperating from his injuries he was given a staff role in Berlin, where he developed his ideas on unconventional commando warfare. Skorzeny's proposals were to develop units specialized in such warfare, including partisan-like fighting deep behind enemy lines, fighting in enemy uniform, and sabotage attacks. In April 1943 Skorzeny's name was put forward by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the new head of the RSHA, and Skorzeny met with Walter Schellenberg, head of Amt VI, Ausland-SD (the SS foreign intelligence service department of the RSHA). Schellenberg charged Skorzeny with command of the schools organized to train operatives in sabotage, espionage, and paramilitary techniques. Skorzeny was appointed commander of the recently created Waffen Sonderverband z.b.V. Friedenthal stationed near Berlin (the unit was later renamed SS Jagdverband 502, and in November 1944 again to SS Combat Unit "Center", expanding ultimately to five battalions). The unit's first mission was in mid-1943, Operation François. Skorzeny sent a group by parachute into Iran to make contact with the dissident mountain tribes to encourage them to sabotage Allied supplies of material being sent to the Soviet Union via the Trans-Iranian Railway. However, commitment among the rebel tribes was suspect, and Operation François was deemed a failure.

Throughout the war Skorzeny and his unit conducted several additional operations including Operation Oak (Unternehmen Eiche, September 1943) and operation planned to rescue of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Operation Long Jump a planned operation to assassinate the "Big Three" (Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt) during the 1943 Tehran Conference. The plot was uncovered before its inception. Skorzeny denied any plan existed. Operation Knight's Leap (Unternehmen Rösselsprung, May 1944) an attempt to capture Yugoslavian partisan leader Josip Broz Tito alive. Operation Griffin (Unternehmen Greif, December 1944) a false flag operation to spread disinformation during the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Armoured Fist (Unternehmen Panzerfaust a.k.a. Unternehmen Eisenfaust, October 1944) the planned kidnapping of Miklós Horthy Jr. to force his father, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to resign as Regent of Hungary in favor of Ferenc Szálasi, the pro-Nazi leader of the Arrow Cross Party. As part of the German Ardennes offensive in late 1944 (Battle of the Bulge), Skorzeny's English-speaking troops were charged with infiltrating American lines disguised in American uniforms in order to produce confusion to support the German attack. For the campaign, Skorzeny was the commander of a composite unit, the 150th SS Panzer Brigade. As planned by Skorzeny, Operation Greif involved about two dozen German soldiers, most of them in captured American Jeeps and disguised in American uniforms, who would penetrate American lines in the early hours of the Battle of the Bulge to cause disorder and confusion. A handful of his men were captured and spread a rumour that Skorzeny personally was leading a raid on Paris to kill or capture General Eisenhower, who was not amused by having to spend Christmas 1944 isolated for security reasons. Eisenhower retaliated by ordering an all-out manhunt for Skorzeny, with "Wanted" posters distributed throughout Allied-controlled territories featuring a detailed description and a photograph. In all, twenty-three of Skorzeny's men were captured behind American lines and eighteen were executed as spies for contravening the rules of war by wearing enemy uniforms.

Skorzeny spent January and February 1945 commanding regular troops as an acting major general, taking part in the defence of the German provinces of East Prussia and Pomerania, and at the Defence of Schwedt Bridgehead. On March 17th, he received orders to sabotage the last remaining intact bridge across the Rhine at Remagen following its capture by the Allies, but the bridge collapsed that same day, and the naval demolitions squad prepared instead unsuccessfully attacked a nearby Allied pontoon bridge between Kripp and Linz. Hitler awarded him one of Germany's highest military honours, the Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross. After the war was officially over Skorzeny was interned for two years before being tried as a war criminal at the Dachau trials in 1947 for allegedly violating the laws of war during the Battle of the Bulge. He and nine officers of the Panzerbrigade 150 were tried before a US Military Tribunal in Dachau on 18 August 1947. They faced charges of improper use of US military insignia, theft of US uniforms, and theft of Red Cross parcels from U.S. POWs. The trial lasted over three weeks. The charge of stealing Red Cross parcels was dropped for lack of evidence. Skorzeny admitted to ordering his men to wear US uniforms, but his defence argued that as long as enemy uniforms were discarded before combat started, such a tactic was a legitimate ruse de guerre. Skorzeny was detained in an internment camp at Darmstadt awaiting the decision of a denazification court. On July 27th, 1948 he escaped from the camp with the help of three former SS officers dressed in US Military Police uniforms who entered the camp and claimed that they had been ordered to take Skorzeny to Nuremberg for a legal hearing. Skorzeny afterwards maintained that the US authorities had aided his escape, and had supplied the uniforms.

Skorzeny hid out at a farm in Bavaria which had been rented by Countess Ilse Lüthje, the niece of Hjalmar Schacht (Hitler's former finance minister), for around 18 months, during which time he was in contact with Reinhard Gehlen, and together with Hartmann Lauterbacher (former deputy head of the Hitler Youth) recruited for the Gehlen Organization. Skorzeny was photographed at a café on the Champs Elysées in Paris on February 13th, 1950. The photo appeared in the French press the next day, causing him to move to Salzburg, where he met up with German veterans. Shortly afterwards, with the help of a Nansen passport issued by the Spanish government, he moved to Madrid, where he set up a small engineering business. In April 1950 the publication of Skorzeny's memoirs by the French newspaper Le Figaro caused 1500 communists to riot. In 1952 Egypt was taken over by General Mohammed Naguib. Skorzeny was sent to Egypt the following year by former General Reinhard Gehlen (who was now working indirectly for the CIA) to act as Naguib's military advisor. Skorzeny recruited a staff made up of former SS and Wehrmacht officers to train the Egyptian army. Among these officers were former Wehrmacht generals Wilhelm Fahrmbacher and Oskar Munzel; the head of the Gestapo Department for Jewish Affairs in Poland Leopold Gleim; and Joachim Daemling, former chief of the Gestapo in Düsseldorf. In addition to training the army, Skorzeny also trained Arab volunteers in commando tactics for possible use against British troops stationed in the Suez Canal zone. He stayed on to serve as an adviser to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. According to some sources, he traveled between Spain and Argentina, where he acted as an advisor to President Juan Perón and as a bodyguard for Eva Perón. The Israeli security and intelligence magazine Matara published an article in 1989 claiming that Skorzeny had been recruited by Mossad in 1963 to obtain information on German scientists who were working on an Egyptian project to develop rockets to be used against Israel. According to their information, a Mossad team had started to develop a plan to kill Skorzeny, but chief Isser Harel decided to attempt to recruit him instead, as a man on the inside would greatly enhance their ability to target Nazis who were providing military assistance to Egypt. No confirmed source can explain Skorzeny's motives for working with Israel, but he may have craved adventure and intrigue and feared assassination by Mossad.

In 1970, a cancerous tumour was discovered on Skorzeny's spine. Two tumours were later removed while he was staying at a hospital in Hamburg, but the surgery left him paralyzed from the waist down. Vowing to walk again, Skorzeny spent long hours with a physical therapist; and, within six months, he was back on his feet. Skorzeny died of lung cancer on July 5th, 1975 in Madrid. He was 67 years old. At no point in his life did Skorzeny ever denounce Nazism. He was given a Roman Catholic funeral Mass in Madrid in August 1975. His body was cremated afterwards, and his ashes were later taken to Vienna to be interred in the Skorzeny family plot at Döblinger Friedhof. His funeral "was attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute", according to former Mossad agents who also attended the funeral.

[jojal-jojalkorean]

🇰🇷 March 1st Movement Day (3.1절 Samiljul) 🇰🇷

Today is the 3.1절(삼일절, Samiljul) March 1st Movement Day(Independence Movement Day) in Korea! Samilijul is the day to commemorate the 3.1 운동(March 1st Movement), the major revolt against Japanese colonialism. Today's post will be about the March 1st Movement, on how it started, spread, and influenced the society.

◾ 3.1운동의 배경

What led to the break out of the March 1st Movement?

#일본의 식민 통치

#Japanese colonialism

Japanese Empire had colonized Korea since 1910 when the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty was signed. Under Japanese forced occupation, Koreans had to suffer greatly. Military police system(헌병 제도) deprived Koreans of their freedom. Through land ownership investigation(토지 조사 사업) and Oriental Development Company(동양 척식 주식회사), Koreans lost the ownership of the land that had been possessed by their family for generations unfairly and had to become tenant farmers. Koreans also lost the freedom of assembly and association. The newspapers published in Hangul were banned.

#민족자결주의와 2.8 독립 선언

#Right of “self-determination” and 2.8 Declaration of Independence

After the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the right of national “self-determination”(민족 자결주의) at the Paris Peace Conference. Self-determination, highlighting the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status without any interference, aroused the independence activists. Influenced by Wilson’s speech, Korean students studying in Japan published a statement demanding freedom from colonial rule on February 8th 1919(2.8 선언). Although the 2.8 Declaration of Independence was restrained by Japanese police, it encouraged 3.1 Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, Lenin of Russia proclaimed to support independence movements of colonies.

#고종의 죽음

#Death of Emperor Gojong

On January 21st 1919, the former emperor of Korea, Emperor Gojong died. Along with grief, a rumor that the emperor had been poisoned to death became pervasive. Koreans suspected Japan of the murder. It was rather a plausible suspicion since Japan's previous attempts to kill the Emperor were well known and Japan had already killed the queen of Korea. The national funeral of Gojong were to be held on early March. Having expected a massive crowd to gather on the day of the funeral, some activists began to prepare for the independence declaration.

◾ 3.1운동의 전개

How did the Movement start and spread?

#독립 선언

#Declaration of Independence

On March 1 1919, the 33 National Representatives(민족 대표 33인) were supposed to deliver the Korean Declaration of Independence(독립선언서) out loud and start the Man-se demonstration at the Tap-gol Park(탑골 공원). However, worrying that the Man-se demonstration might turn into a violent riot, they decided to meet at the nearby restaurant instead. After reading the Korean Declaration of Independence by themselves, they called the Chosun Government-General(조선총독부) to inform them of their actions. The Representatives were soon publicly arrested. Baffled by the unexpected change of location, the students decided to deliver the Korean Declaration of Independence to the public on their own. Students received the Korean Declaration of Independence from the representatives and a student of Gyeongshin School(경신학교) 정재용 read aloud the Declaration of Independence to the people. This was the first line of the Declaration:

“오등은 자에 아 조선의 독립국임과 조선인의 자주민임을 선언하노라.” (Original)

“우리는 이에 우리 조선이 독립한 나라임과 조선 사람이 자주적인 민족임을 선언한다.” (Modern interpretation)

“We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea and the liberty of the Korean people.”

After the speech, the students started the Man-se demonstration on the streets. People who came to participate in the demonstration along with the crowd that came from all around Korean peninsula to attend the national funeral of Gojong joined the Man-se demonstration. Soon millions were participating. Sound of "Man-se!" echoed in the streets.

#대한 독립 만세!

#Korea Independence Man-se!

The slogan of the demonstration was “대한 독립 만세!” It can be translated into “Long live the Korean Independence!” People waved the Korean national flag(태극기), their hats or piece of cloths as they shouted the slogan.

#전국적 확산

#Nationwide Spread

After the Declaration of Independence at the Tap-gol Park, the students and citizens started a peaceful Man-se demonstration in Seoul. At the same time, the peaceful demonstration also took place in major cities including Pyeongyang(평양), Jinnampo(진남포), Wonsan(원산). Despite the violent suppression of Chosun Government-General and the Japanese police, the demonstration didn’t stop. Rather, they developed immensely. Along the railways and trunk roads, the demonstration spread rapidly to nearby cities and to rural areas. Students like 유관순 played the key roles in the spread, gathering people in the areas and drawing Korean national flag for the demonstration. As the demonstration prevailed nationally, the participation of laborers and farmers skyrocketed. Late March and early April was the peak of the Movement. Over 1.2 million Koreans participated in around two thousand demonstrations.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary, KBS(a Korean broadcast station) created a site named the Man-se Map(만세 지도) where they displayed a map of Korean peninsula marked with the locations of Man-se demonstration day by day from March 1st. It is astonishing to see how many demonstrations took place all around Korea. Click here to check it out!

Japan tried to suppress the movement harshly. They subdued demonstrations with guns and swords. Many Koreans died of the severe repression. Massacres like Jaeamri Massacre(제암리 학살), where Japanese locked villagers in a church and burned them into ashes, were done. Several thousands were recorded to be massacred by the Japanese police force and army.

◾ 3.1 운동의 영향

What were the impacts of the Movement?

#대한민국 임시정부

#Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea

The movement was the catalyst for the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. After the Movement, Koreans grew increasingly aware of the need for an integrated Korean government. During this period a lot of Korean governments were established but many of them didn't have much power. Three of the most influential governments united to create the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea(대한민국 임시정부) in Shanghai in April 1919. The Government, though it struggled with internal disagreement as the time passed, led many other independence movements. #국외 영향

#Impacts abroad

Not only did March 1st Movement affect Korea and Japan, but it also influenced other independence movements internationally. The 5.4 Movement of China was triggered by the March 1st Movement. It is assumed that the March 1st Movement had influence on the independence movements of India. Some American newspapers published articles of the Movement, criticizing Japan for their cruel repression and massacres.

The Movement was truly the manifestation of Koreans’ undying will for freedom from Japan. Last year, 2019 was the 100th anniversary of the March 1st Movement and this year is the 101st. No matter how much time pass, the spirit of independence activists will lie within our heart. 

< Vocab List >

독립 independence

만세 "hurray" "long live~"

시위 demonstration, protest

독립 운동 independence movement

독립 운동가 independence activist

일제 강점기 Japanese forced occupation period

식민지 colony

희생 sacrifice

민중 people

정부 government

선언 declaration

선언하다 to declare

기념하다 to commemorate

기억하다 to remember

-Written and edited by Admin Yu

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

NEW DELHI (IDN) – On February 6, protesters blocked roads at an estimated 10,000 spots across India as part of the ongoing movement against the new farm laws enacted by the national government last year. For over two months, the most populous democracy in the world has witnessed what is being called one of the biggest protests in human history.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers have been rallying against three new laws that have thrown open the agriculture sector to private players. Protesters feel the legislation will allow a corporate takeover of crop production and trading, which would eventually impact their earnings and land ownership.

The movement has overcome regional, religious, gender and ideological differences to build pressure. Leftist farm unions, religious organisations and traditional caste-based brotherhoods called khaps, which make pronouncements on social issues, are working in tandem through resolute sit-ins and an aggressive boycott of politicians.

India’s right-wing government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, pushed the laws through the parliament in September 2020, despite lacking a majority in the upper house and agriculture being in the jurisdiction of state governments. The protest is a response to the lack of respect for parliamentary democracy and federalism, but its main focus is the pervasive corporate influence on governance.

After limits on corporate contributions were removed and allowed to be made anonymously, 8.2 billion dollars was spent on Indian parliamentary elections in 2019, which exceeded how much was spent on the U.S. election in 2016 by 26 per cent. Most of this money came from corporations and the BJP was the primary recipient.

Farm crisis is the fuel

Farmers are a large electoral block in India, with half the population being engaged in agriculture. No political party can afford to offend them publicly even though policymakers have done little to increase farm incomes and address their indebtedness. Around 300,000 farmers died by suicide between 1995 and 2013, mostly due to financial stress. In 2019, another 10,281 farmers took their lives.

Indian farms are mostly family-owned, and the land is a source of subsistence for millions. Around 86 per cent of farmers, however, till less than five acres while the other 14 per cent, mostly upper castes, own over half of the country’s 388 million acres of arable land.

Farmers in a few north Indian states were able to consolidate their holdings through increased incomes with the introduction of irrigation, modern seeds, fertilisers, machines, market infrastructure and guaranteed price support from the government during the Green Revolution in the 1960s.

But rising input costs and climate crisis have adversely impacted the profits there as well. In Punjab, the most agriculturally-developed state, for instance, the input costs of electric motors, labour, fertiliser and fuel rose by 100 to 290 per cent from 2000 to 2013, but the support price of wheat and rice rose by only 122 to 137 per cent in the same period, according to a government report. Heavy use of chemicals, mono-cropping and farm mechanisation have damaged the soil, affecting productivity and forcing farmers into debt.

Strength and strategy

Punjab saw widespread protests as soon as the laws were enacted. Farmers occupied railway tracks and toll plazas on major roads besides corporate-owned thermal plants, gas stations and shopping malls. Scores of subscribers left Jio, the telecom service owned by the top Indian businessman perceived to be close to Prime Minister Modi.

Farm unions also held regular sit-ins in front of the houses of prominent political leaders forcing an important regional party to leave the national government alliance. Several state leaders of the ruling party resigned from their posts as well. Similar scenes played out in the neighbouring state of Haryana, where leaders were publicly shamed and the helicopter of the elected head of the government was prevented from landing for a public meeting after farmers dug up the helipad area.

In November, thousands of farmers drove their tractor trolleys towards the national capital as they played protest songs by celebrity singers. Stocked with rations, clothing, water and wood for months, they braved tear gas shells and water cannons used by the police along the way. Powerful tractors pushed heavy transport vehicles, concrete slabs and barbed wires that the administration had placed en route out of their way.

Open libraries and medical camps were set up and volunteers offered their skills, ranging from tailoring to tutoring children. Besides speeches by the farm leaders, cultural performances, film screenings and wrestling bouts became a regular feature. More farmers poured in with each passing day.

“These occupations are not just a reaction of wronged citizens who have set out to reform the Indian parliament or assert dissent. Rather, they form an important stage in a still-unfolding narrative of militant anti-capitalist struggle,” wrote Aditya Bahl, a doctoral scholar at the John Hopkins University who is archiving the peasants’ revolts that took place in Punjab in the 1960s and ’70s.

The Indian Supreme Court suspended the implementation of laws and formed a four-member expert committee on Jan. 13 to look into the issue. Farmers have, however, refused to meet the committee members, alleging that many of them have already written or spoken in favour of the laws.

The protests are not only targeting domestic companies and political figures. Farmers have also burnt effigies of Uncle Sam, the World Trade Organisation and IMF, signifying the influence of global trade over domestic agricultural policies. Developed countries have been pressuring India for last three decades to open up its agriculture sector to multinational players by slashing subsidies and reducing public procurement and distribution of food grains to the poor.

Protesters are also seeking a legal right to sell their produce at a guaranteed price. The Indian government usually declares a minimum support price on various crops based on the costs of their production, but only a fraction of the produce is procured at that rate. In the absence of government procurement facilities in their areas, most farmers have to settle for a lower price offered by private traders. A law would make it mandatory for private players to buy the produce at a declared price.

“If Indian farmers are able to get the law on guaranteed price passed through their current agitation, they will become a role model for farmers across the world living under heavy debts,” Sharma continued. “India should put its foot down at the WTO and create much-needed disruption in the world food trade policy for the benefit of the global agriculture sector.”

The movement grows

The BJP-led national government has faced numerous protests over the last six years of its rule..... The country has dropped 26 places in the Democracy Index’s global ranking since 2014 due to “erosion of civil liberties.”

This is the first time peasants have been galvanised in such large numbers against the government. The government has already held 11 rounds of negotiations with farmers’ representatives and offered to suspend the laws for one and a half years on Jan. 20. But farmers are not budging from their demand of the complete repeal of the laws and legal cover for the selling of their crops at a guaranteed price.

On January 26, which marks India’s Republic Day, 19 out of 28 states witnessed protests against the farm laws.

In Delhi, however, a plan to organise a farmers’ tractor march parallel to the official Republic Day function, went awry. A group of protesters clashed with police at multiple spots and stormed the iconic Red Fort, a traditional seat of power for the Mughals, where the colonial British and independent India’s prime ministers have also raised their flags.

The protesters unfurled banners of the farm unions and Sikhs – one of the minority religious groups and the most prominent face of the protests. Mainstream media and ruling party supporters used the opportunity to blame the movement for desecration and religious terrorism. Security forces charged sleeping farmers with batons at one location, filed cases against movement leaders, allowed opponents to pelt campaigners with stones, arrested journalists and shut down the Internet.

The attacks, therefore, ended up lifting the flagging morale of the farmers and helped the movement gain even more supporters, who shunned the government and media narrative. Massive community gatherings of khaps were organised at multiple places over the next few days, extending their support to the protests and issuing a boycott call for the BJP and its political allies.

Mending fault lines

The movement has also been able to overcome regional and gender divisions, and is trying to address caste divides.

The states of Haryana and Punjab are often at loggerheads on the issue of sharing of river waters. Haryana was carved out of Punjab on linguistic lines in 1966, but most of the rivers flow through the current Punjab state. Haryana has been seeking a greater amount of water for use by its farmers, while Punjab’s farmers oppose the demand, citing reduced water flow in the rivers over the years. The current protests have united farmers for a common cause, helping them understand each other even though opponents have made attempts revive the water issue.

Women have also been participating in the protests in large numbers. They are either occupying roads on Delhi’s borders or managing homes and farms in the absence of men, while taking part in protest marches in villages.

“Earlier, we were able to rally only 8,000-10,000 women for a protest. Today that number has swelled to 25,000-30,000, as they recognised the threats posed by the new laws to the livelihoods of their families,” said Harinder Bindu, who leads the women’s wing of the largest farm union in Punjab. “For many women, this is the first time they are participating in a protest, which is a big change because they were earlier confined to household work. Men are getting used to seeing women participate and recognising the value they bring to a movement.”

“When women members participate in sit-ins, men manage the house. I feel this movement will bring greater focus on women’s issues within the farming community – one of which is the need to support the widows of farmers who died by suicide due to financial constraints.”

In Punjab, less than four per cent of private farmland belongs to Dalits, the lowest caste in the traditional social hierarchy of India, even though they constitute 32 per cent of the state’s population. They often earn their livelihoods through farm work or daily wage labour. Even though Dalits have a legal right to till village common land, attempts to assert that right often lead to violent clashes with upper-caste landlords who want to keep it for themselves. Dalits are waging similar battles across India. Researchers recorded 31 land conflicts involving 92,000 Dalits in 2019. A few of the farmers’ unions have supported and raised funds for Dalit agitations in the past.

The movement is gradually encompassing other rural issues beyond the farm laws. In the state of Maharashtra, for instance, thousands of tribal people travelled to the capital Mumbai on Jan. 23 to extend support to the farmers. They also asserted their own long pending demand for land titles under the Forest Rights Act, which recognises traditional rights of scheduled tribes and other forest dwellers on the use of land and other forest resources.

* Manu Moudgil is an independent journalist based in India. He tweets at @manumoudgil.The original version of this article was published on Waging Nonviolence under the title ‘India’s farmers’ protests are about more than reform – they are resisting the corporate takeover of agriculture’.

[readingloveswounds]

Let’s talk about Algeria. More specifically, France’s impact on Algeria, which has been overwhelmingly negative from the very beginning. I’m going to be organizing this relatively chronologically and discussing some elements more than others.

Before we begin, I am in no way the expert on the subject. I’ll add some sources at the end for those who may want to look into any of this further. This is going to be very long, hence the readmore. There are some quotations in French within, but they only add to the argument and are not hugely necessary to get what I’m talking about. It’s just that Benjamin Stora is the expert on the subject and actually knows how to articulate these things. I’m quoting from La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie in all cases.

warning for discussions of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and police brutality.

A timeline:

1830-1847: the conquest of Algeria | 1848 - Algeria becomes part of France’s national territory

This was characterized by extreme violence leveled against the populations in the territory that France desired. The French Army massacred entire villages, tortured, and generally brutalized those they encountered. The levels of violence carried out were understood even at the time to be too much - a civilized nation shouldn’t carry out these acts against another civilized nation. France justified these crimes by claiming that they were attempting to civilize the Algerians as well as counting Algerians as a lower class of people than the French.

1848: Algeria becomes part of France’s national territory

Guess who weren’t citizens? The Algerians. Algeria was a population colony - so French people were encouraged to move there and settle.

1870: “indigènes juifs” (Jewish Algerians) are given French nationality

Notably, Algerians who were Muslim did not have French nationality. This was, of course, the majority of Algerians.

“Rappelons que la situation imposée aux Algériens au temps de la colonisation française était la suivant: devenir citoyen français, c’était renier son appartenance réligieux.” - Benjamin Stora

1945: Sétif massacre

The complete date for this massacre is May 8, 1945. Yes, that May 8, 1945. During celebrations of the end of the Second World War, Algerians also protested and demonstrated for their independence. This march was allowed as long as those involved promised not to carry any anti-French banners etc and only French flags were allowed. This rule was understandably not followed. . A young man unfurled what would later become the flag of Algeria and was beaten by a police officer. Panic ensued, police attacked protesters, and French were attacked as well. Similar events happened in two other cities on that day and subsequently violence spread throughout the country in the following days, leading to particular violence against Muslims.

1954: Official start of the Algerian War for Independence

During this war, the French government took up its old policy that it had used during the conquest and tortured, disappeared, and killed massive numbers of people. France has not really acknowledged their actions in any meaningful way. In 2017, Macron acknowledged that one man’s death (Maurice Audin) was due to torture perpetrated by the French but there only exist only a fiew lieux de mémoir (memory places, such as memorials) that concern the Algerian War for Independence.

The war was bloody on both sides. It was not confined to Algeria in any way, with violence occurring in France as well - though since Algeria was not free, all of it took place in France technically. So what I mean when I say France is la métropole (metropolitain france/the hexagon).

Groups: OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète): ring wing paramilitaries fighting for France against Algerian independence FLN (Front de libération nationale): Algerian nationalist party Harkis: these are Algerians who fought for the French in the French army Pieds Noirs: Algerian inhabitants of French descent And then of course just regular French and Algerians were also involved.

Important names: Ferhat Abbas Messali Hadj

1961: Massacre of Algerians in Paris

This is your friendly reminder that France was complicit in the Shoah and only acknowledged their actions in the 90s after it turned out that oops the Nazis were in the government. A continuing friendly reminder on the subject of known Nazi Maurice Papon is that he was the Prefect of Police and organized the October 1961 massacre of protesters who were marching against the atrocities of the Algerian War for Independence and protesting the curfew leveled only on Algerians in Paris. The numbers of the dead are unknown but it’s undoubtedly higher than the official count, given that the police tied up people and threw them into the Seine to drown.

This same year, De Gaulle declared that Algeria would remain French forever.

1962: Algerian Independence

The country was free, but the wounds remained both in France and in Algeria. Pied noirs were attacked and kicked out (some fled of their own accord) all over the country as Algerians took back control.

Harkis were met with violence in Algeria, being seen as traitors and were not recognized by France, who just wanted to cover the whole thing up and move on.

I will now shift to some of the issues, focusing on the situation in France.

Some of the issues at hand:

The Far Right - specifically the Front National (now the Rassemblement National)

Jean-Marie Le Pen, notable racist and father of Marine Le Pen, fought in Algeria during the War for Independence, and almost certainly committed acts of torture (allegedly, so I don’t get sued...but like...make your own conclusions). The Front National was started as a party of people who agreed with him - if you look at early FN membership, it was greatly populated by OAS folks. Marine Le Pen can kick him from the party and pretend like she’s not also awful, but the FN/RN has never stepped from its roots.

Non-persecution of criminals

There was an amnesty declared - France would not prosecute those who may or may not (aka those who definitely did) commit war crimes during the war. This was not the solution people may have thought it was since, it really just let resentment fester and constitutes the government attempting to sidestep responsability.

“Ce compromis permet en tout cas de refouler encore, de rendre inconscients les conflits antérieurs : il constitue la clef de voute du sarcophage destine à étouffer définitivement la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie. Mais, on le verra par la suite, au prix de la répétition, de la multiplication des symptômes ; car ce qui est refoule n’est pas éliminé, et trouve toujours à s’exprimer par des voies détournées. L’amnistie qui veut masquer, évacuer, prépare d’autres conflits, d’autres régressions.” - Stora

“La levée des sanctions a l’égard de responsables d’atrocités commises pendant la guerre d’Algérie interdit de vider l’abcès, puisqu’il y a effacement des repères qui distinguent entre ce qui est crime et ce qui ne l’est pas...Les responsables, jamais identifies. Les Français ne feront donc jamais ce que les Américains ont fait pour le Vietnam : juger leurs criminels de guerre.” - Stora

“Integration”

People had been immigrating to France from the Maghreb since the end of the Second World War, for various economic reasons. France has an...interesting theory about how immigrants should join into society and it’s essentially ‘exhibit all French values outwardly and be [x origin] at home in private’ while also saying that people are ‘french of [x origin]’

A lot of the ‘difficulty’ of integrating certain immigrants also comes from religion. Algerians were largly Muslim and France has historical issues when it comes to accepting Islam.

“Le problème de l’immigration découvre un conflit obsessionnel, jamais disparu. Derrière “L’Arabe”, le “Maghrébin” et, derrière le “Magrébin”, “L’Algérien”...Les immigrants magrébins seraient inassimilables à la société française parce que profondément différents des autres immigres, ceux de l’entre-deux-guerres par exemple. Cette différence s’expliquerait par la religion musulmane. Une population, par ses croyances, se serait exclue d’elle-même, volontairement, des valeurs établies par la société.” - Stora

As you can imagine, a lot of people fled the violence in Algeria before, during, and after the War for Independence. There is generational trauma present, passed down from parent to child - if you want to know more about this, see Malika Mansouri’s book in the works cited. If you want an example, we can take a look at the 2005 riots. These occured after the deaths of Zyed Benna et Bouna Traoré, who were killed as they took shelter from a police patrol and the subsequent incident of tear gas being thrown into a mosque, which was particularly full, due to it being Ramadan. The original protests started peacefully, but violence erupted eventually, first in the banlieues outside of Paris (where the two events happened) and then spreading throughout the country. The make-up of the banlieues concerned? Mostly people “issus de l’immigration” aka children of immigrants who saw themselves (rightly) as being excluded from French society in a great many ways.  

Memory

The Algerian War isn’t hugely taught in schools, though this may change eventually. This is French history! This is the history of kids in the French education system! Not everyone’s ancestors were ‘les Gaulois’ (the Gauls)! It is doing these children a major disservice by ignoring events that have influenced their lives indirectly and events that may have directly affected their families. There was even a point

You may ask - how do we know about all of these terrible things if the memory of the war has been suppressed?

Well, you see, what I’m talking about is specifically state silence on the matter. People who have been legitimately affected by this have been publishing accounts, books, etc and have been advocating for YEARS. Maurice Audin’s widow has worked for YEARS to find out what happened to him him. There are many other similar stories to hers, as well as accounts from survivors of the tortures. It’s not that acknowledgement doesn’t exist at all, it’s just that the Official French Memory doesn’t talk about it, which is a big deal if you think about all the WW1 and WW2 memorials that exist. Places of memory are a specific and big part of French memory culture and they just do NOT exist when it comes to the Algerian War (there are some exceptions).

Conclusions:

I recognize that because of the many different groups involved and the relative recentness of the War for Independence, that acknowledgement of this conflict is difficult. And yet the French government should admit to the torture and its role in all of this violence because the wound can only continue to fester.

Official acknowledgment will never be easy, but it is necessary.

I know that I just threw a lot of information at you - it’s not particularly well articulated and many things should be expanded upon, but if you take anything away from this it should be that France began to perpetrate violence against Algeria and Algerians and those of Algerian descent in the 1830s and has never stopped.

If you have any questions about things that might not be clear or that I could stand to expand upon, please feel free to ask and I will do my best.

(as a note before I get into book/paper/newspaper sources, I highly recommend the rapper Médine’s music for a look at issues of Algerian heritage and memory though art)

Sources: (pulled directly from the annotated bibliography I submitted for my minor capstone)

Chrisafis, Angelique. 2018. “France Admits Systematic Torture during Algeria War for First Time.” The Guardian, September 13, 2018, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/13/france-state-responsible-for-1957-death-of-dissident-maurice-audin-in-algeria-says-macron. Macron was the first to officially acknowledge the presence of widespread torture during the Algerian War for Independence. This article discusses specifically the case of Maurice Audin, whose widow worked for many years to find out the circumstances of his death.

Cohen, William B. 2002. “The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 28 (2): 219–39. A discussion of the perspective of various groups involved in the Algerian War as well as the reasons that official recognition of the war from France is so difficult to come by.

Mansouri, Malika. 2013. Révoltes Postcoloniales Au Coeur de l’Hexagone : Voix d’adolescents. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. A psychological study of multiple young people from the Paris region who had lived through the 2005 riots. Some had participated and some had not. Her analysis finds that even if they did not know their specific family history, colonial violence from the past had affected their lives. This book also provides a detailed breakdown of Algeria’s relationship with France, from colonization to the War for Independence, and then goes into a background on the racial tensions within France itself that provided the scene for the 2005 riots.

McCormack, Jo. 2011. “Social Memories in (Post)Colonial France: Remembering the Franco-Algerian War.” Journal of Social History 44 (4): 1129–38. This article provides background on the Algerian War and then discusses the path to official recognition and the efforts related to memory preservation that have been put into place.

Stora, Benjamin. 1997. “L’onde de Choc Des Années Algériennes En France: L’« Algérie Française » et Le Front National.” Esprit (1940-), no. 237 (11): 13–28. In this article, Stora describes the way in which Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National has taken and used the Algerian War to further political ends.

———. 1998. La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie. Dolto, Françoise. Essais. Paris: La Découverte & Syros. In this book, Stora discusses the Algerian War and the reasons that it has remained forgotten.

———. 2003. “La Guerre d’Algérie Dans Les Mémoires Françaises: Violence d’une Mémoire de Revanche.” L’Esprit Créateur 43 (1): 7–31. A discussion of the various groups (harkis, OAS, FLN) affected by the Algerian War and its continuing aftermath. Somewhat of an update to the 1997 article on the FN as well.

———. 2007. La guerre des mémoires: la France face à son passé colonial. Monde en cours. La. Tour d’Aigues: Aube. This book is a series of interviews with Benjamin Stora about many aspects of the memory politics surrounding the Algerian War.

Non-annotated sources:

Cohen, William B. “The Algerian War and French Memory.” Edited by Benjamin Stora, Martin Evans, Charles-Robert Agéron, Jean-Jacques Jordi, and Mohand Hamoumou. Contemporary European History 9, no. 3 (2000): 489–500.

“France in Rare Algeria Torture Admission,” September 13, 2018, sec. Europe. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45513842.

“France’s Macron Admits to Military’s Systematic Use of Torture in Algeria War.” Washington Post. Accessed January 31, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/frances-macron-admits-to-militarys-systematic-use-of-torture-in-algeria-war/2018/09/13/6b0e85cc-b729-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html.

Hargreaves, Alec G. “Third-Generation Algerians in France: Between Genealogy and History.” The French Review 83, no. 6 (2010): 1290–99.

Moran, Matthew. “Opposing Exclusion: The Political Significance of the Riots in French Suburbs (2005–2007).” Modern & Contemporary France 19, no. 3 (August 1, 2011): 297–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2011.588793.

Nossiter, Adam. “French Soldiers Tortured Algerians, Macron Admits 6 Decades Later.” The New York Times, October 15, 2018, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/europe/france-algeria-maurice-audin.html.

Oussedik, Fatima, and Benjamin Stora. “Ce Que Disent Les Cadavres En Algérie.” Esprit (1940-), no. 237 (11) (1997): 5–12.

Serhan, Yasmeen. “Emmanuel Macron Tries—Slowly—To Reckon With France’s Past.” The Atlantic, September 14, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/emmanuel-macron-acknowledges-torture-algeria/570283/.

Stora, Benjamin. “Algérie : Absence et Surabondance de Mémoire.” Esprit (1940-), no. 208 (1) (1995): 62–67.

———. Les mots de la guerre d’Algérie. Presses Univ. du Mirail, 2005.

———. “L’onde de Choc Des Années Algériennes En France: L’« Algérie Française » et Le Front National.” Esprit (1940-), no. 237 (11) (1997): 13–28.

WELCH, EDWARD, and JOSEPH McGONAGLE. “A Sense of Place:: Envisioning Post-Colonial Space in France and Algeria.” In Contesting Views, 1st ed., 27:145–79. The Visual Economy of France and Algeria. Liverpool University Press, 2013. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjn3q.11.

[thebackwardsoapbox]

And I Am.

On 27 October 2017, a resolution based on the "Declaration of the representatives of Catalonia" declaring the independence of Catalonia was voted in Parliament and was approved with 70 votes in favor, 10 against, and 2 blank votes

This is a product of that day and the preceeding months when the Catalan citizens took to the streets in an attempt to settle their own destiny in an open democratic election. This was written at the time, Given the combined sentence of 100 years imprisonment of the Catalan leaders Raül Romeva, Joaquim Forn, Jordi Turull, Oriol Junqueras, Josep Rull, Jordi Cuixart, Carme Forcadell, Dolors Bassa and Jordi Sànchez.

I dedicate this piece in solidarity with the Catalan people and the struggle for independence.

I am Jordi and I am a Catalan I am Marta and I too am a Catalan I am Alexi and I am also a Catalan I am Estel, Alba, Neus & Lucia and we are all Catalan

I am a shop worker and I am a Catalan

I am a waiter and I am a Catalan

I am a bus driver and I am a Catalan

I am a single father with two children in Tarragona and I am a Catalan

I am a recently married mother who works for a bank in Barcelona and I am a Catalan

I am a daughter who works for a telemarking corporation in Madrid to a Mother from Reus, today I tell them that I am a Catalan

I am a farmer who’s crop was marked for export to Europe, today I tell them like me that it is Catalan

I am the market stall owner who has not worked in a week as I am one of the millions on the street and I am a Catalan

I am a Footballer who cried because I know my place was with my people that was the same day I would tell the world that I am a Catalan

I am a government worker currently under arrest by the Guarda Civil for giving my people the right to choose their future and I am a Catalan

I am a pensioner in hospital from blunt force trauma because I blocked the door so my people could say that they and I are Catalans

I am a university student who stayed with his little brother and built a barricade outside the high school he attended which was used as polling station unable to vote his voice is of a Catalan

I am the high school teacher who taught them both to believe what is right and brought the supplies to defend mine and their futures as we are all Catalans

I am a woman’s rights lawyer from Seville who now works in Girona who is European and also Spanish but with the actions of my government today I too have become Catalan

I am a firefighter who joined with his fellow firefighters and protected civilians from the batons of the police who could not understand a single word we said as I only can speak Catalan

I am a local journalist who took photos as people were shot with bullets made of plastic by the Spanish police manufactured in Europe to suppress the actions of a people who are all Catalan

I am the doctor on the thirty first of September who saw to the beaten and abused, none expressing even a single regret in the knowledge that theirs is the blood that drains away in the fall rain, the blood that coats the cobbled pathways, the blood given of the Catalan

I am the Singer and poet who can remember back when our words were banned and I am afraid admit may happen again as the songs I sing are Catalan

I am the grandfather who was born the day Franco and his army marched into my capital and today I may die under similar conditions as me and my history are entwined, that history is Catalan

I am a grandmother who’s village has been fined ten times for flying the Estelada the flag of our country as it is a crime to display our flag in our country and all ten times we refused to take it down and paid any cost as money has no importance to show we are Catalan

We are the youth activists who handed out leaflets and created media shared our story’s and showed the world the brutality of Spain and it’s monarchy, a raised fist a four fingered salute we believe we are building the future in front of us as we are the daughters and sons of Catalans

We are striking factory workers who in solidarity with the people’s right to a free and open democracy a refusal to be cogs of the Madrid parliament we have spoken and we have said we are Catalan

And we are the Two million people under suppression and violence left our homes our works our schools to stand in line for hours to decide within just a few minutes, each of us changing the course history in a second. We are the millions who said we and the nation are all one of the same and that nation is Catalan

I am the Son

The daughter

The mother

The father

The worker

The Songs

The Stories

The Poems

The Blood

The Soil

The people

The Pride

The Defiance

The Catalan

And I am Catalonia

Si Catalonia!

Viva Catalonia!

[roboticsappreciationsociety]

It sounds like something from the outer reaches of science fiction: battlefield robots waging constant war, algorithms that determine who to kill, face-recognition fighting machines that can ID a target and take it out before you have time to say “Geneva conventions”.

This is no film script, however, but an ominous picture of future warfare that is moving ever closer. “Killer robots” is shorthand for a range of tech that has generals salivating and peace campaigners terrified at the ethical ramifications of warfare waged via digital proxies.

Now, two women armed with nothing more than a Nobel prize, knowhow and a lot of conviction are standing in front of the march of deadly killer robots. They want them banned. And they’ve done this kind of thing before.

Jody Williams won her Nobel for leading the long, global effort to get anti-personnel landmines banned. Mary Wareham was a prominent supporter in that campaign.

“We were there at the Nobel peace prize ceremony,” Wareham recalls, “and I said to Jody, ‘This is how you finish your career, not start it! What are we going to do now?!’”

The answer? Lethal autonomous weapon systems, also known as Laws. The women expect the struggle to be far harder. “In relative terms, landmines are chump change,” Williams says, pointing to the billions of dollars manufacturers could make selling AI-enhanced weapons.

Artificial intelligence is already spreading rapidly through policing, healthcare, farming and social work. AI experts are cautioning that militaries will be next.

The big question is: what would stop armies from deploying upgraded drone bots to search for, identify, and then take out every man in a village between the ages of 18 and 50? Or to send a killer drone to ID and assassinate a head of state? Weapons manufacturers are riding the same artificial intelligence wave as other industries. Militaries, eyeing each other in a quiet but fierce arms race, are funding some of the most cutting-edge trials.

To some, the advantages are clear: killer robots would never fatigue like a human soldier. They could potentially stay out on the battlefield for months. They would never get angry or seek revenge. They would never defy an officer’s orders. They would remove the imperfect human from the equation. Algorithms would determine who to kill.

But other military experts have expressed concerns. “There are not only legal and ethical concerns about lethal autonomy, but practical ones as well,” says Paul Scharre, a former US army ranger who wrote the Pentagon’s earliest policy statement on killer robots. “How does one control an autonomous weapon? What happens if there’s a glitch in the system or someone hacks it?”

To Williams, the machines represent the very definition of cold-blooded slaughter. With killer robots, World War III would allow little space for what shred of humanity surfaces in wars. There will be no Christmas truce along the western front in any 21st century conflict.

“It’s men getting hard-ons over new weapons,” seethes Williams. “They’re doing it simply because they can. They’re doing it because they want to see where it can go.”

Israel already has some of the most advanced machines, including an armed ground robot that has patrolled the Gaza border and the Harpy, a missile that circles the skies until it finds its target. Marketed ostensibly to destroy enemy radars, no technical barriers exist to stop engineers in the industry from developing similar weapons that would one day attack people.

In the valleys of central California, the US military is running drone swarm experiments. Russia has declared its desire to form an entire battalion of killer robots. And no one really knows what China is doing.

No law governs this AI arms race. Countries currently face a free-for-all.

Scientists have sounded the alarm, and more than 250 research and academic institutions and 3,000 prominent players in the field have called for a ban on killer robots.

But beyond a petition, activists reckon the best way to stop this technology in its tracks is through the tedious, unheroic task of passing an international treaty. That is the strategy of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. More than 100 organisations in 54 countries have joined the coalition, with the aim of getting a deal by 2021.

Williams is an idealist, but she is not naive. She has battled the military-industrial complex since her days protesting the Vietnam war. Sceptics had thought banning landmines would be impossible.

“Anything is inevitable if you do nothing to stop it,” she says. “When they were drumming that at us — ‘it’s inevitable, it’s inevitable’ — the reason people do that is to disempower you.”

In that campaign, Williams and others had lobbied the United Nations to pass an agreement. When that process flagged, they took negotiations outside the UN framework and began corralling countries on board, one by one, until a historic deal in Ottawa in 1997 when more than 120 nations committed to eradicating anti-personnel landmines.

Today, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is following a similar roadmap. The UN has held several rounds of talks in Geneva, including a session at the end of March. But the CSKR has lost faith in that process, and is now focusing on individual western states.

Williams and Wareham hope Germany will take the lead. The country joined the UN security council at the start of the year, and its foreign minister, Heiko Maas, cares about the issue. He recently called killer robots “nothing less than an attack on humanity itself”.

Behind the scenes, Berlin has reached out to other states to push for more progress. At least some politicians in Germany recognise it has the opportunity to be the first country to ban killer robots and if it does, other European states would follow suit. But the country has also, at times, acted with uncertainty on the matter, especially in its discourse at the UN.

In part to put Germany on the spot, members of the CSKR came together in Berlin last month to drum up public support. Standing in front of the organisation’s own “friendly” robot mascot, Williams urged the crowd before her to reach out to their political representatives and to spread the word.

“People freak out over the word ‘activism’,” Williams told them. “All it means is ‘to act.’”

This article is part of a series on possible solutions to some of the world’s most stubborn problems. What else should we cover? Email us at theupside@theguardian.com

[lordendsavior]

BIALYSTOK, Poland — The marchers at the first gay pride parade here in the conservative Polish city of Bialystok expected that they would be met with resistance.

But last week when Katarzyna Sztop-Rutkowska saw the angry mob of thousands that awaited the marchers, who numbered only a few hundred, she was shocked.

“The most aggressive were the football hooligans, but they were joined by normal people — people with families, people with small children, elderly people,” she said.

They blocked her way, first hurling invective, then bricks and stones and fireworks, she said. From the balconies, people threw eggs and rotten vegetables. Even before the march started, there were violent confrontations, and by the time the tear gas cleared and the crowd dispersed, dozens were injured and Poland was left reeling.

Much as the racist violence in Charlottesville, Va., shocked the conscience of America, the brutality in Bialystok last week has rocked many in Poland and raised grave concerns over a steady diet of anti-gay political propaganda in the country. 

In a show of solidarity with the L.G.B.T. community in Bialystok, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Warsaw and other cities around the country on Saturday. They carried rainbow flags and vowed to combat intolerance.

“One week ago, the government betrayed the people in Bialystok, gays and lesbians,” said Pawel Rabiej, the openly gay deputy mayor of Warsaw. “Warsaw is for everyone and so should the rest of Poland. Solidarity will conquer the time of contempt.”

Since this spring, when the governing Law and Justice Party stepped up its anti-L.G.B.T. language in advance of European Parliament elections, the language has only grown more heated as national elections approach this fall.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the governing party, told supporters at a July campaign event staged to look like a family picnic in Kuczki-Kolonia, a village in central Poland, that it was their duty to defend the nation from what he called Western decadence.

“We don’t have to stand under the rainbow flag,” he said.

In recent months, more than 30 localities have passed legislation declaring their region free from “L.G.B.T. ideology.” A national conservative newspaper, Gazeta Polska, distributed stickers so people could designate “L.G.B.T.-free” zones, a stunt that drew a swift rebuke from the American ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mossbacher, and others and was later banned by a Polish court.

A “L.G.B.T.-Free” sticker promoted by a Polish publication.

A group in Warsaw called “Stop Pedophilia” has been traveling the country smearing gay people with baseless claims of abuse.

For weeks, the group set up a tent in the center of the old town square of Bialystok to spread its message. Even after the violence last weekend, the group’s truck still patrolled the streets, broadcasting its claims over loudspeakers.

“What happened in Bialystok was the result of months of propaganda,” Ms. Sztop-Rutkowska said.

The anti-gay language has also been pushed by many figures in the Roman Catholic Church.

Two weeks before the march, Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda issued a letter that was read aloud in all churches in Bialystok and the surrounding province of Podlasie, asserting that gay pride events constituted “blasphemy against God.” He invoked a Latin phrase that was once the rallying cry of priests fighting for freedom against Communist rule. “Non possumus,” he wrote. “We cannot accept this!”

Dozens were injured in Bialystok. The police have identified over 100 people and accused them of attacking the marchers. At least 77 have been fined or charged. One man was accused of beating a 14-year-old boy.

In the week that followed, the violence was condemned by officials from both the governing party and the church — though both also denied responsibility for fomenting fear and hatred.

L.G.B.T. supporters in Warsaw on Saturday.

Jakub Przybysz is well acquainted with the hatred directed at gay people in many parts of the country. It is why he hid his sexuality for years.

Even before the recent anti-L.G.B.T. campaign, it was not easy being gay in this conservative town. There are no gay-friendly clubs or coffeehouses. It would be crazy, he said, to walk hand-in-hand with a same-sex partner.

“The only open life you can live is in your own apartment,” he said.

Still, when he learned that Bialystok County had been declared a region free of “L.G.B.T. ideology,” he was “shocked and horrified.”

“I don’t want to leave this country, but I wonder if there is a place in Poland where I can feel safe,” he said.

Bozena Bierylo, a Law and Justice councilwoman from the Bialystok County, said that the legislation was a response to “provocations” from L.G.B.T. minorities and their “demands” for sex education classes.

Still, she said, “any violence is unacceptable.”

Mr. Przybysz said that the anger he witnessed at the march has been fueled by language from political and religious figures.

His account, along with those of other eyewitnesses and videos, showed how quickly a mob mentality can grip a community.

The march was supposed to begin at 2 p.m., but a group of people who wanted to protest against the event were granted a permit for the same day. Extremist groups put out calls for supporters from across the region to join them.

Police detaining an anti-L.G.B.T. protester in Bialystok last week. 

They assembled on a grassy knoll overlooking the Square of the Independent Student Association, once the site of an old Jewish cemetery that was buried by the Communists after the war.

Ms. Sztop-Rutkowska, a sociologist, said that as she was surrounded by thousands of angry protesters, perhaps the most chilling thing was that there were familiar faces in the howling crowd.

“I recognized a former neighbor,” she said. “A friend recognized their doctor. A student of mine saw a counselor from her child’s school.”

“One young girl from Warsaw came up to me and asked if she could stay with me,” Ms. Sztop-Rutkowska said. “She was so terrified she burst into tears.”

They held each other as they marched.

All along the way, they were met with scorn and derision. One image that has spread around the country showed a man, his small child in a stroller in front of him, confronting the police and shouting at the marchers as he tried to stop them.

An older lady on a balcony waved at the marchers only to be met with shouts from hooligans in the crowd. “We know where you live, you whore!” they chanted.

Videos showed mobs chasing people. One ended with a young boy being stomped on by a group of large men.

Fans of the local soccer team were among the far-right protesters who confronted L.G.B.T. marchers last week.

Talk of the violence has gripped Poland in the days since, with endless hours of discussion on radio and television.

Even as political leaders and church officials have tried to distance themselves from the violence, the campaign against the L.G.B.T. community has shown no signs of abating.

Przemyslaw Witkowski, a journalist, was riding a bicycle with his girlfriend in the city of Wroclaw on Thursday evening when he spotted anti-gay graffiti and told his girlfriend it was shameful.

Apparently, someone overheard Mr. Witkowski. A short time later, a man confronted him.

“You don’t like this graffiti?” Mr. Witkowski said the man asked him.

“I said I did not,” Mr. Witkowski responded.

The man attacked him.

“He beat me badly, leaving me on the ground bleeding,” Mr. Witkowski said from the police station in Wroclaw on Friday, where he was undergoing a physical to catalog his injuries, which included a broken nose and fractures in his face. The photos of his bloody face have been widely shared across the country.

Mr. Witkowski has written about extremist groups and said he was worried for his country.

“We are unleashing things that in the future cannot be stopped,” he said. “It is happening.”

[cksmart-world]

  The Completely Unnecessary News Analysis

by Christopher Smart

March 12, 2019

DESTROYING LOGIC, CANADA'S BAD EXAMPLE

& THE COOL INLAND PORT

Inland Port and Apple Pie

Here at the crossroads of the West, our political brain trust has come up with something called the Inland Port, where trucks and trains and planes from all over will bring cargo to Salt Lake City for distribution. The huge operation will spur the economy but somehow will not cause lots of air pollution or other environmental impacts. The Inland Port is as American as Apple Pie. It has something for everyone — drama, intrigue and comedy, too. Magnanimously, the Utah Legislature usurped the land for the port from Salt Lake City and set up a powerful governing board with special interests that has the public's best interest at heart. It will guide development and set taxation and make the port totally cool. Oddly, Mayor Jackie Biskupski feels cheated and is suing lawmakers for being shitheads. The City Council, by contrast, is negotiating with lawmakers for the very best crumbs legislators will give. Meanwhile, environmentalists are waving red flags at lawmakers, who understand that sustainability is a fad touted by the quiche-and-white-wine set. It's all quite entertaining. It reminds the staff here at Smart Bomb of an E Ticket at Disneyland: there's Futureland, Corruptionland, Poison-Airland, Litigationland and even something like the Electric Light Parade, where excitable legislators form a Conga line and dance around the Capitol Rotunda to Colonel Bogey's March.

Canada's Bad Example

You've got to love those Canadians. They are so friendly and even send their troops to help us out of messy wars. And don't forget the time they rescued American hostages when the Ayatollah took over in Iran. Of course, the Canadians aren't perfect. They have backward ideas on health care and gun control. Their government pays for all their expensive medical procedures and you can hardly find an AR-15 in Montreal. The Canadians are very sensitive, too. Right now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on the ropes for something that wouldn't even make the nightly news here. His attorney general quit when Trudeau allegedly pushed her to look the other way on corruption allegations concerning one of the country's top engineering firms. BFD. Our president is now the subject of 17 different investigations. BFD again. And we couldn't care less about hush money paid by our president to porn stars and Playboy bunnies. But can you imagine what would happen if Trudeau planned to build a multi-million dollar high rise in Moscow while running for election? They'd probably roll out the guillotine and chop off his head. Fortunately, President Trump doesn't live in Ottawa. Down here in the states we're far more... what's the word... cosmopolitan. Yeah, that's it. We're just a lot more sophisticated.

Let's Throw a Constitutional Convention

Here's a grand idea: Let's convene a Constitutional Convention and do a make-over of the document that has guided this country since 1776. Why do it? Well, because, according to Utah's Republican lawmakers, the country is a mess. This is a chance to fix it real good. For starters, let's do away with the First Amendment. All it does is cause problems for those in power. And we could write a ban on abortion right into the new Constitution — no more baby killing. Then, lets pen a balanced budget amendment so that we can never borrow money from ourselves ever again — no matter what. And We also should do away with affirmative action — it's just discrimination in reverse. Our new Constitution would ban discrimination altogether so that minorities would no longer have to worry about things, like jobs, housing or getting shot by police. We would make socialism illegal, too, of course. That would keep us free from things like Social Security and Medicare that are ruining the country. And no more taxing for public education or highways. There are just so many reasons to convene a Constitutional Convention and get this country on a righteous path once and for all. Brilliant. What could possibly go wrong.

Destroying Logic To Save It

We had to destroy the village in order to save it. No, Utah Congressman John Curtis didn't coin that, but he understands the logic. See, there is this thing called checks and balances outlined in the U.S. Constitution and it's real important, the congressman says. Nonetheless, he joined his Republican colleagues in the House, who would not deny President Trump “emergency” funding for The Wall — money Congress had earlier refused to allocate, even though the president said it would stop rapist and drugs from pouring in from Mexico. “I voted against  the legislation because it was largely a partisan bill that dealt only with this one-time instance rather than a serious attempt to permanently rein in executive authority,” he said in a Salt Lake Tribune epistle. “They did not send me to Washington to be a rubber stamp...” Well, that clears that up nicely. Over in the Senate, Mike Lee has a new proposal up his sleeve so “the president can’t act like a king.” It’s just what Curtis was wishing for. Of course it won’t help out now. But at least Lee and his Senate Republican colleagues can talk about that, rather than consider the thousands of women and children fleeing the dangers of lawlessness in Central America who are seeking asylum at ports of entry along our southern border. Yes, immigration officials and facilities are overwhelmed. It is an emergency — that much is true. But why not save face with a little hocus-pocus now to get out of the terrible fix terrible fix there in regarding the emperor’s clothes.

That's a wrap for another week here at Smart Bomb, where the staff keeps track of Fox News, so you don't have to. Speaking of which, the Democratic National Committee has announced it won't allow Fox to a host any of its presidential debates. That's fine and dandy, but how do they plan to reach all those people who don't read? You're right, Wilson, we shouldn't even think about it for another year or so — the election is 18 months away. With that, Wilson, can you and the band take us out with a little something that won't offend Laura Ingram or Sean Hannity: You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies / One day you'll be in the ditch flies buzzin' around your eyes / Blood on your saddle / Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth / You're an idiot babe / It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe...

[kivablog3]

Sylvia’s Cooking

I just got my first Stonewall 50 email. At the bottom of the email in the small print it says Heritage of Pride™, which means it’s still run by the same guys as always, except under more scrutiny now, after getting the march on Channel 7 and with the whole world coming next year to physically or spiritually fit into that little pie-wedge space on Christopher Street where the Stonewall Inn bar is located. This World Pride thing isn’t just an advertising slogan they came up with at HoP, it’s a Thing, like Stonewall 50’s a Thing. My therapist, who’s very active in the community and probably gets lots of interesting emails from various Things, told me it happens at a different city’s Pride each year.

And next year, of course, they’re coming to New York, because it’ll be the 50th Anniversary of the night Sylvia Rivera and her friend Marsha P. Johnson (who I never met, and who may have thrown the first punch, there are scholarly debates on this point, but I am told that Sylvia firmly insisted that she was the first one who punched a cop, it’s like the debate over Lexington and Concord, they’re not sure exactly where the Revolution started but we know that they started it) threw out the first punches to start the legendary three-day riot, rather than just get in the police van like always, right in front of the Stonewall Inn. The night the drag queens finally began to fight back. It made a sound heard ‘round the world, and it’s still reverberating, and if anything really changed the course of history in that wretched year of 1969, that surely did.

It reached me in the front seat of our car when I was with my mom one Saturday, when for once my sister wasn’t with us. I used to like tagging along on her Saturday visits to her office, wherever that was. As we were about to drive away from the small airfield where she worked as a secretary to go to some thing where co-workers were already playing bad country music, I asked her what a homosexual was. It was a sunny day and there was no one else around for a mile in any direction. It was the Summer of 1969, of course, and I was eleven years old.

I can only suppose this is just after I’d heard of Stonewall in the news. It was the first time I’d ever brought up sex as a topic of discussion with my mother, and I did this with some trepidation. I sort of knew this wasn’t her favorite topic of conversation generally, sex, much less transgressive sex. The kind hippies had. Maybe some of them were homosexual, who knew? So I persisted in my line of inquiry. What I didn’t know was that she’d been waiting for some version of that question ever since she’d stopped dressing me in dresses, when I was two.

She put the transmission back in park, turned the engine off, sighed, and for once didn’t light a cigarette before we started what turned out to be a lengthy, meandering conversation, which wandered after a while into related and then tangential topics, and which ended with me correcting her on some minor misunderstandings as to how gonorrhea was transmitted, at which point things kind of ground to a halt and she started the car up.

The whole thing probably took an hour. She used to joke that she’d had the Talk with me, the generalized birds and bees talk, because we did touch on conventional sex and How Babies Are Made, but that I had ended up explaining some things to her, instead, which shouldn’t have surprised her. I did read a lot, after all. I probably already knew a couple of things about homosexuals, but I wanted an explanation of how they actually Did It, and as squirmy as that made me, I wheedled it out of her. I could’ve asked her more about how a male-female couple had sex, but that wasn’t what was on my mind. She wasn’t happy about it, and did her best to make it clear that it was all gross and disgusting. I think she made a face when she was explaining lesbians to me. I liked the sound of the word the first time I heard it, tbh: Lesbian. It sounded soft and fuzzy.

I remember wondering about the feasibility of anal sex, as she sketchily and hastily outlined it, which apparently was what men did together; but what women did together sounded really kind of fun and not nearly as difficult. She didn’t want to talk about that, though, and I do remember that it was around there that the discussion went off into the weeds, to things related and not. Eventually we ended up at syphilis and gonorrhea (aka “VD,” or venereal disease, where venereal=“vaginally transmitted,” rather than “of or having to do with the goddess or planet Venus” — clearly a term invented by men) and I explained some of the then-current science on transmission to her, i.e., you don’t catch it from dirty toilet seats in public restrooms. Not girls, not boys, it’s a myth, mom. They told us in science.

All that was fifty years ago, as of next June. The following June, in 1970, they had the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March, so 2020 is the fiftieth anniversary of the March. But next year is the Big One. It looks like this anniversary will be just as controlled and careful as the 25th anniversary in 1994 was huge and utterly chaotic and wonderfully random, with 200,000 marchers from around the world. We took over Central Park. We took over freakin’ Midtown. It rocked.

Well, not next time. No more of that anarcho-festive celebration stuff. Now you have to be part of a signed-up contingent to be part of the march, and those slots are limited. And no more hopping in-and-out from the sidewalk, apparently. They want everyone in a marching contingent to wear the same t-shirts, ffs. It has to be controlled, as well as going backwards (starting a few blocks north of Christopher, past the Stonewall the wrong way, and up Fifth Avenue, what the fuck?) I’m told some of the people in the Village are tired of the crowds and the noise. They can do what people do in Austin when SXSW comes along: leave town. Tiniest quantum violin playing.

Now that it’s a TV show, I guess it has to run on time and look good on camera. They’ll have a beautifully made-up drag queen doing commentary like last year, along with the usual probably-white cis-guy-&-cis-gal parade anchors. I don’t know where they find those. It’ll become another tradition soon, that trio as parade anchors, now that scientists have established that str8 people in statistically significant numbers will watch drag queens on television and thus advertising time can be sold for this event. It’ll be just like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or the Fourth of July, only with One of Us in the booth along with two of them.

“And you know, Mike, the rainbow flag has been a unifying symbol in the LGBT community since it was first designed in 1978, and did you know that originally it had eight stripes….” There will be carefully-timed performances in front of the Stonewall, and commercial breaks. Some of the stories people tell will break your heart, some will make it sing. Plus commercials, did I mention the commercials? You can record it and FF through them. I did. I stopped this year to watch Chelsea and Rusty talking about Sylvia, which is what makes me think of them all, along with the fact that Sylvia and Marsha deserve statues, and you get reminded of that every June. I’d love to have a statue of the two of them at the Stonewall National Monument, which technically is the little triangular pie-slice shaped park, the benches and the wrought-iron fencing, where you can sit next to the statues representing gay men and women from the 1980s. They should add Sylvia and Marsha.

The whole parade on TV represents some kind of weird queer communications breakthrough, I guess. And now that it’s on every year, I suppose it has to be faaaaaaabulouss! I guess we can record it and go, too. And watch. There were some forums recently at the Center, maybe just one, where people could come and complain about the corporatization of Pride, and the most-of-us not marching thing, and the reverse-route thing where it just kind of ends around 28th Street for no apparent reason, and ask for things they won’t get, but that part’s over and it’s time for Early Bird sign-up.

Whatever. Sylvia and Marsha are the mothers of us all, both trannies and everyone else that fits under this patched, unwieldy tent called “LGBTQ.” We argue, some of us incessantly, about which part of the tent is what, and whether this part is even really part of the same tent as that other part of the tent, but no one argues with the fact that Sylvia and Marsha put up the first tent poles. That may not be the most elegant metaphor, but I’m going with it. Never apologize for your art.

And it’s kind of okay, I think now, or at least I’m trying to convince myself it is, that I never realized “who” Sylvia was, even though at least two people said I should talk to her because I was “interested in politics.” Hm? Oh, ok. No one ever said why. Ffs.

But it felt sort of like I knew Sylvia, the way it feels like I know these professors and other people who my wife works with, after I hear her describe them a few times. She’s a union delegate as well as a math professor, so she knows a lot of people. By now I also know a lot about professors in general. And in the same way I realized after a while from talking to people around T-House, conversations in which she came up, often at vital junctures, that Sylvia was the Mom around the place: she made dinner, I knew that much, and she did a lot of other things to keep Transy* House, Chelsea and Rusty’s house, from burning down, falling over, and sinking during those raucous years around the end of the 20th century. She seemed quite nice when I was introduced across a crowded room downstairs, which actually happened twice I think. She smiled and said hi, I do remember that. She seemed nice.

That, in and of itself, was quite difficult for some people I was around back then — this was and still is New York, the Attitude Capital of the Western Hemisphere and, during Fashion Weeks, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the General Assembly, perhaps the world — but from my brief impression she seemed genuine, and older in a reassuring way when I was twenty years younger. She gave off these hippie-mama vibes, just by making dinner. In a house where a whole lot of chaos happened, and necessarily so given how many trans kids with no other home came through there — because Chelsea and Rusty never turned anyone away, not as far as I know — not to mention how much fun was had there on a regular basis, at least some of it destructive of property, she just looked to me, in a vortex of drama, like a pole of stability.

Maybe that’s shaped by how people talked about her. Everyone said how nice she was; but I wasn’t over there often enough to run into her when she was (a) there and (b) had a free moment, and didn’t know I should prioritize it anyway. And there were other people using up the oxygen in the room at any given time, including me. But it would have been awesome to truly know her.

I knew other people there, had my own reasons for being there. I lived with Kathleen and our two-year-old son in an apartment which was also on 16th Street, in Brooklyn, two blocks away. It was the Nineties, so it didn’t seem unusual to me that there was a house full of transfolx a short walk away, nor that my friend Jamie knew everyone there. Like, she knew everyone. She was the other pole of stability then, around the turn of the century. She doubtless knew Sylvia pretty well, and she probably told me enough to form an impression.

Now Chelsea and Rusty own a bookstore upstate, and T-House is long gone, replaced by the ineluctable tidal forces of gentrification, although there’s a queer history tour that stops at the site and tells a short version of The Story. I wish sometimes they could have a sort of T-House reunion, somewhere, somehow. I would very much like to find Jamie again, even if only online. And I do still wish I’d gotten to talk with Sylvia.

#HistoricalNearMisses

__________

Footnote: Everyone back then except Chelsea, more or less, called it that, but without the “s,” if you get what I mean. We don’t say it anymore, at least not when younger transfolx are around. People get really upset, and if it’s only been used to hurt you it’s a painful word, I get that. Yet it was our word then, and it didn’t hurt at all. It was a warm, friendly word. It was what we called each other, lovingly, and no one else had any reason to use it, and I miss it.

this article also appears at https://medium.com/@kivazo/sylvias-cooking-1b1b4f24e780