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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 8 months

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By: Janice Fiamengo

Published Jan 28, 2024

I was a diversity hire. My department hired diversity hires.

DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) was all the rage in university humanities and social sciences departments when I was a graduate student in the 1990s: everything was about gender, race, class, and empire; oppressor and oppressed; white privilege, the male gaze. Over time, the category of class was edged out as gender and sexual identity muscled in.

On the job market in 1999, I was shortlisted at two universities, both shortlists of all-female candidates. Job advertisements “strongly encouraged” applications from women and visible minorities.

Over the next four years, the department that had hired me hired into four more positions, all heavily influenced by sex and skin color.

“Is it true that there are people in this department who are against equity?” one of the diversity hires asked, scandalized, at a small welcoming party. The clear implication was that anyone who believed in merit-based hiring must be a bigot.

This was already the unchallenged academic mindset.

Our department practiced what was then called equity hiring (a Canadian euphemism for affirmative action). I was told that equity hiring meant that whenever two or more job candidates were equally qualified, the candidate should be chosen whose hiring would make the department more diverse.

The idea is nonsense: no two candidates are ever truly equal.

Once the decision is made to prioritize diversity, that quickly becomes the only urgent criterion. White men’s applications—hundreds of them—simply went into the reject pile; most were barely even read.

Whether the diversity candidates were as good as the white men didn’t actually matter. No serious arguments were made about quality. It was always possible to defend a diversity applicant, to explain why a single article in a marginal journal was not only equivalent to but actually better than an award-winning book.

“It’s true that Candidate XY’s book on Shakespeare is notable,” a pro-diversity department member would say, “but I think our students will benefit more from Candidate XX’s cutting-edge work on woman travelers of the Elizabethan age. XX’s work is still in the preliminary stages [i.e. not published yet, perhaps not even written yet] but it will make a substantial contribution to our course offerings.”

Even glaring weaknesses, such as a paucity of demonstrated achievement, could be spun into a strength. “I like that Candidate XX is working in a non-traditional area, and I respect that she is not trying to publish too much too fast.”

Merit itself quickly became a loaded word, what would now be deemed a right-wing dog whistle. It meant you hadn’t critically interrogated systemic inequalities and didn’t care about correcting centuries of injustice.

Some of the diversity champions in my department were true-believers who bullied others through the force of their fanatical righteousness, believing that diversity was the only cause worth fighting for. Others were careerists using DEI as a route to power. Many were go-along-to-get-along types who didn’t care much either way. Almost no one publicly dissented (I did, to little effect).

Since that time 20 years ago, commitment to DEI has increased. By 2018, a colleague of mine could look around the table at a department meeting and shake his head: “Let’s face it. This department is too white.” There was not a single guffaw.

* * *

In the wake of Claudine Gay’s forced resignation from her position as President of Harvard University earlier this month, critics of DEI have expressed hope and even confidence that its end in the academy is approaching. Writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, Paul Schwennesen (“Is DEI Collapsing?”) described the climate of censorship, tension, outright discrimination, and thought control in his PhD program, and stated that “for the first time in recent memory, the hyper-politicized woke orthodoxy is being successfully challenged.” “Maybe,” he wrote, “the lunacy is coming to an end.”

Maybe, but almost certainly not.

Billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard graduate Bill Ackman, in a long post on X following Gay’s ousting, alleged that “Today was an important step forward for the University,” and asserted that “Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form.” (More on Ackman’s definition of diversity below.)

Substack author Bad Cattitude predicted that “the real fun is about to begin” (“Auditing Academia: What Have the Professors Been Professing?”) as the masses discover what’s been going on in academia. At last, he alleged, those “obscure journals and dissertations, previously read only by other like-minded members of the club who cared about nothing save ideological purity are going to be read widely,” with the result that “propensity for plagiarism will be the least of the revelations.” He provided a few examples of the manically anti-white and anti-male allegations that have passed as scholarship for decades.

But therein lies part of the problem. The attacks on whiteness and maleness have been a central part of academia for decades, at least since Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which insisted that white people, and white men in particular, must acknowledge and make restitution for the allegedly “unearned” comforts of their white lives. The diversity mantra has been promoted in theory (intersectional feminism and critical race ideology) and in practice (DEI admissions, scholarships, hiring, promotion, and accolades). It is now making its troubling presence known in, for example, the military and the aviation industry. How it can be stopped or even fully understood is not at all apparent.

Who is going to expose the academic rot? Notoriously jargon-laden and abstruse, academic writings require serious time and effort (not to mention intestinal fortitude) that most normal people, with jobs and families and busy lives, don’t have to invest. These normal people will need to rely on the few academic dissidents willing and able to be informers. There have already been plenty of these, cogent and compelling, but unable to level anything near a knockout blow: one thinks immediately of the brilliant and funny Sokal hoax-style work of Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, as well as Pluckrose and Lindsay’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity (2020).

And they were far from the first. As long ago as 1987 (in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students), Allan Bloom told the sorry saga of how academic administrators and craven professors sold out liberal education to violent black students in the late 1960s in exchange for ease and status (for an explanation of events at Cornell during Bloom’s tenure, see Paul Rahe’s eye-opening essay in Public Discourse). According to Bloom, humanities academics were the first to lose faith in their disciplines, which came to seem far less important than social goals such as smashing the patriarchy or combating racism. The moment these social goals were embraced, commitment to intellectual excellence became, at best, a secondary consideration.

Bloom’s bracing analysis was confirmed and amplified tenfold over the ensuing decades in books such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990), David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2007), and Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (2013), all of which quoted copiously from radical professors to show how impartial, evidence-based scholarship had been openly abandoned in favor of ideological advocacy. There is now a mini-industry in books about universities as centers of higher indoctrination.

Hands were wrung, the corruption was investigated, but nothing was done. Bloom and many others were promptly dismissed as hidebound reactionaries, regressive and hateful, just as present-day critics of the academy are routinely dismissed (for a pungent example of asinine straw-manning, see Moira Donegan’s Guardian article, in which she claims that the Claudine Gay affair had nothing to do with Gay’s inadequacy, everything to do with “the right wing’s assault on education.”)

A few more raised voices, even with a lot of money behind them, do not a revolution make.

The difficulty of purging DEI can be traced to various causes, one of the most significant being DEI’s many warm and half-warm adherents, especially at the administrative level (all those diversity deans and HR personnel) but certainly not only there. For many academics, the diversity mission is the ground of their identity. At least two generations of academics have built their careers on diversity-focused research, which has fully permeated their teaching and scholarship. They are not going to give it up without a to-the-death fight.

They’re not even honest about what they’ve been doing over the last three or four decades of social engineering (for a definitive chronicling of how equity invaded every aspect of public life in Canada, see Martin Loney’s The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada [1998]; for a more recent analysis of the American experience, see Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture [2018]). In a recent article by CBS News about Bill Ackman’s crusade, high-powered diversity advocate Jarvis Sam, former diversity head at Nike, claimed that diversity has never been intended to discriminate against anyone. All the special scholarships, the targeted hirings and promotions, the women’s only positions, the exclusionary language and ideological forcing have all been a misunderstanding, it seems. “The addition of diversity criteria is not meant to exclude or disadvantage non-minorities,” he reassured the public; it has merely sought to correct the conditions through which “talent from some backgrounds and experiences aren’t given a fair shake to apply and engage in the competitive process for opportunities.”

Yes, that was just the sort of thing my colleagues used to say as they went about turning away white male applicants en masse.

Is it possible to change academic culture? Academics have a deep-rooted disdain for non-academics, whom academics tend to see as less intelligent and, especially, less morally refined than they. Their contempt for Ackman, for Elon Musk, or for any perceived right-wingers is bottomless. They will certainly not take kindly to Ackman’s proposal that business people be brought into Harvard to help right the academic ship. And even if anti-DEI directives were to be issued by reformist university administrations or a bold Department of Education, it is likely that many academics would (quietly or loudly) flout them.

But the real problem may go even deeper. The anti-intellectual moral imperatives of the ‘60s are still with us, so deeply imbedded in our reflex egalitarianism as to make us quail at the task before us.

Such difficulties are glaringly evident in Bill Ackman’s own arguments, in which despite a take-no-prisoners salvo, he can’t help but frequently profess his pro-diversity bona fides, which lead him into various self-contradictions and ideological concessions that spell doom for his declared project. He states near the beginning of his jeremiad that “I have always believed that diversity is an import feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.”

The statement is essentially indistinguishable from any by even the most strident DEI advocate; it gives the game away before the attack has properly begun (and it rather glaringly fails to explain the mathematical, scientific, medical, AI, and technological successes of non-diverse teams in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea—not to mention earlier iterations of American enterprise itself).

Ackman’s confusion on this score is evident throughout his diatribe, in which he tells us, for example, that “I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand,” not seeming to realize, even at this point in the rollout of DEI, that thinking of people as group members is the fundamental problem of a pernicious framework. At another point, he announces that he was at first delighted to hear about Gay’s appointment (“When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community”)—because every decent-hearted person, it appears, must feel a great gush of pleasure at the thought of a black woman’s promotion (and not at the thought of a white man’s).

Later on, Ackman bolsters his argument about DEI’s discrimination against white men by (conveniently) summoning the specter of white men’s racism. “An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less,” he quips, explaining that it “generates resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.” Ackman is so thoroughly marinated in anti-white thinking that he must object to discrimination against white men by summoning a racist bogeyman. Pre-emptively libeling white men for justified resentment and anger is a great way to guarantee the continued life of DEI.

This is the true measure of DEI’s success, that even a man allegedly going scorched earth on a despicable ideology reveals his weddedness to the ideology. Ackman’s sense of himself as a good person is so deeply bound up with DEI as to disable him from anything more than tinkering around the edges of its policies. I suspect he, and most others, will not be able to stomach the disparities that will result if merit is ever allowed to regain its paramount place in academia.

And this is the only possible solution, at once simple and monumentally difficult, for all taxpayer-supported colleges. All disciplines must be radically de-politicized in word and deed. If sex is too dangerous for professors and students, then political indoctrination and ideological harassment are far worse. They are being forced on millions of students without their consent or even, at times, their full awareness, by those whose mission it is to help form their minds. Professors should profess their academic specializations, not berate classes and the world on the evils of Trump or of trans oppression. There is plenty of room elsewhere in the public square for polemics and advocacy. The academy and all employed in it should be a world apart.

A massive decontamination must be undertaken. Programs in the hard sciences, mathematics, medicine, and engineering must be preserved from the already-advancing rot of DEI. All other programs, already captured, must be reformed or abolished. Advocacy should be banned from higher education, both in the classroom and on campus generally. No more Israeli Apartheid Week, no more Masculinity Confession Booth, no more Anti-Abortion Campaigns. No more Take Back the Night, consent workshops, or anti-racism training sessions. The pursuit of knowledge, rigorous and dispassionate, detached from the passions and causes of the day, should be the university’s only goal.

What about free speech? What about healthy debate? That hasn’t been happening on college campuses for many decades, and is not about to start now. Campuses should be reserved for the pursuit of excellence, for the transmission of the western inheritance, and for the hard work of training students to become accomplished in writing, logic, and research. Naturally, political issues will and can’t help but be discussed, but they must be approached in a determinedly non-partisan manner. As Allan Bloom described the ideal, “Socrates thought it more important to discuss justice, to try to know what it is, than to engage himself in implementing whatever partial perspective on it happened to be exciting the passions of the day” (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 317). This spirit must be brought back to education.

But who would do this, how, and under what authority, I can’t formulate for the reasons mentioned above. There is no political will and no clear path to reform. Very few even understand how deep the problem goes. At best, we can hope for “small flares of intellectual light” (private colleges, online courses, gatherings of truth-seekers) amidst the barbarism.

DEI will eventually collapse under the weight of its tawdry, malevolent lies. But it is not likely to be the triumphant rout now predicted.

If you think the perverse form of corruption that is DEI is new, you've got another think coming.

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what00100 · 2 months

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I have a bone to pick. With communists who are fake.

You are trapped in a police state, you get 2 choices every year. A choice between the spice of fascism you prefer. One that benefits the "worthy" in society, republicans. The other that benefit the ones in power, democrats. One is based off "I'm better then you, so I matter more" rules, the other is "well the law just so happens to cover my issue due to xyz interpretation from ____ court".

This is the big picture of American politics. You never have the choice between avoiding fascism with our 2 party country.

3rd party will never win. They're goal is to "vocalize that people want change." But that's utterly useless. Sorry. Yes people want change, we need to start by changing local perception of voting third party. We don't even have a senate member that isn't a republican or Democrat. We need them in the congress to pave the way for popular vote, or better yet ranked choice.

So until we can finally get real change in the places where it NEEDS to start. I'm sorry I'm going to vote for the option to ensure that people in America will at least be able to survive until we can fix the system.

Just because I am setting aside my heavy moral objection of the genocide in palastine. doesn't mean I'm not a communist, it does not mean I am okay with the genocide. I am picking the option that won't cause all minorities in America to be Hunted down.

But also, fuck off if you think criticizing Harris, a black women is racist. Like why the fuck woukd I care that she's a person of color, when I'm talking about her politics. Like obviously I care that she is breaking into this awful political space. I care that she is facing backlash from white women, just because she's existing. But like how dare I say that she's a pig lover because she supports the oppressive prison system. Like nothing I said was wrong. I would say the same thing to ANYONE. I know the fake weed charge thing that went around. And obviously I don't blame her for doing her job. I blame her for picking her job. I blame her for putting people into a system that is just modern day slavery. I would say that to any prosecutor. I will call anyone a pig. Given that, I'm also not gonna go out of my way to make a think peice (like this) this is a throwaway account. Like my main I'm kinda a hoe. It is not my community to critique, I just don't respect any Prosecutor, and I won't pretend like she isn't a pig lover because it's not my community.

I've been seeing this on tiktok. Idk if it's anywhere else, but get off the internet. Go take a class. Talk to some people. You are living under an oppressive system. You will not be able to free yourself of this reality by harming people in YOUR community as well as OTHER communities.

Also for ref, I'm 21. I've been able to vote for 2 elections as of right now. I do take my time tilling out my ballot making sure I agree with what people are saying. Although the judge section can be hard to look up, so if I don't find anything I usually choose the funniest name.

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thatstormygeek · 4 months

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In a society that functioned, Trump would have dropped out of the 2020 Presidential Election and the Republican Party would be scurrying to replace him. Possibly begging Nikki Haley to stop scrawling encouragement for war crimes on the side of bombs long enough to get a team together. Instead, the crazy train continues rolling on. ... Rather than wrestle with the implication of supporting a convicted felon, Republicans and Right Wing influencers have completely ignored the facts of the case and doubled and tripled-down on painting the legal system as a weapon of the “Deep State” and advocating for violent reprisals, including the jailing of political enemies and, in some cases, pushing for outright conflict.

In my research into the Far Right (as I detailed on last night’s live reaction to the convictions on The Muckrake Podcast), I’ve seen them openly plot terroristic actions that could capitalize on the outrage and, hopefully, plunge the country into a full-blown civil war that could benefit white supremacists. Since, I’ve talked with a handful of Democratic strategists and have heard the same thing over and over. President Joe Biden and his campaign, along with the majority of the Democratic Party, feel it’s unnecessary to engage with the fact that the leader of the Republican Party is now a convicted felon and will let it “speak for itself.” This, of course, is the same tact they’ve chosen with the corrupt Supreme Court stripping women of their reproductive rights. It’s wrongheaded, politically stupid, and just adds to the overall worsening of conditions. This survey speaks volumes. Trump’s political career should be done. Over. Kaput. And the decision handed down by those twelve brave jurors should have been the obituary of this moment. That it wasn’t, that it doesn’t even approach that reality, tells us everything we need to know. ... Any of the decorum we believed existed before - and which was upheld by politicians reacting to scandal or censure by respectably retreating from the public eye or giving up their ambitions - has been shattered. Trump didn’t create this, he simply served as the sensible and logical evolution of what was already happening. American politicians had either survived scandals or wrongdoing in the past because these things were kept under wraps. They were “open secrets.” Their peers and journalists knew about them, but didn’t care to report them. The legal system largely didn’t prosecute them because the business of the American system has never been dragging powerful, white men into a courtroom and airing their sins. On the same day Trump was convicted a story was published in Slate that detailed what former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt had seen and heard while in Trump’s proximity. He confirmed a long-held rumor that Trump was heard by several people on the show using the n-word during discussions about the show’s finale. This “rumor” had existed well before Trump ever won the election. Back then it was believed that if this was confirmed he would never gain power. Well, it’s confirmed now, and it simply joins the confession of sexual assault. Only, it’s not even being discussed in 2024. Because the environment has so radically changed it doesn’t even matter anymore. The Right does not care about any of this. Why? Because it’s inconsequential. The “principles” we’ve been told they carry - small government, fiscal and personal responsibility, traditional values - were never real to begin with. They were cudgels that could be used against their enemies in the pursuit of power. That pursuit of power is all that matters to The Right, because power represents the ability to oppress others to further your own ends.

#us politics #jared yates sexton

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thaimun-x-hsoc · 1 year

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From a concerned whistleblowing citizen of the USSR

The Soviets’ ruthless aggression has proven them time and again to be violent and barbaric. The recent attack on Czechoslovakia is clearly a result of the actions of the authoritarian Communist regime, a group which is relentlessly expansionist and imperialist. The Comintern and Cominform have consistently shown the world that they are not interested in peace. Since their inception, these destabilizing forces have pushed their philosophy of “international revolution,” a concept that will inevitably lead to the ruin of governments the world over. Under the so-called egalitarian communists who supposedly fight for the proletariat and “suppresses counter-revolutionary forces”, this oppressive system continues to push their tyranny after 4 decades of the suppression of basic rights and autonomy all for the “suppression of the bourgeoisie”, which has led to mass authoritarianism and the creation of an all-encompassing totalitarian regime with the main aims of suppressing basic autonomy in order to satisfy Brezhnev’s cravings for sheer power. I, as a concerned Soviet member of the Proletariat, calls for the workers of the world to Unite and join forces against the tyrannical Soviet regime continuing to spread misery all around us. The Soviet government takes away my rights and creates a cult of personality around the CCCP. The Soviets are recklessly wasting our public funds on a war that benefits nobody other than the most elite amongst the bourgeoisie. As a result of their careless invasion of Czechoslovakia, our public infrastructure is crumbling, and despite its outwardly powerful image, the USSR has never been weaker. Dissidence is at an all-time high, and political insurgency is rife – there have been multiple gulag uprisings in Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg, all of which have been brutally and messily silenced by the Soviets. Even so, it is clearly a matter of time before the people cast off the ineffective and brutal rule of the current regime. The Allied nations are rapidly losing confidence in the ability of the USSR to exist as a major and successful world power. This is not the revolution we were promised; we seek liberalization and more decentralization in the economy in order for us to gain back the rights and power of the people. All countries of the world, from the East to the West, I beg you to unite together to help the citizens of the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc gain our autonomy from the tyrannical regime of Brezhnev and the Communist Party. If we are to live in a world of terror and relentless fear for lives with every passing day, what then, is the purpose of enduring?

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dailyadventureprompts · 3 years

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Greetings to Dapper. There is a villain I have for a campaign and I'm looking for ideas on how to introduce her to the story . The villain: a charismatic sorcerer or druid with a very "woke" philosophy and many devoted followers who feel the world has failed them. She selfishly believes in her own power and freedom - If you have the power to do something, why let others stop you? Woe to those who tell her she can't or shouldn't do something. She is rebelling against the kind, just ruling family.

I find it very interesting that you use "woke" to describe what amounts to a "might makes right" philosophy, especially because you bring up how this druid and her followers have been let down by the world, despite the "kindness" and "Justness" of the ruling power.

Sounds to me like you're asking me to create a proxy/punching bag for people you don't agree with politically, especially because in your second message on this topic:

You describe these followers as " Gleefully Lawless" , and the leader has HATING the royal family for in any way infringing on her ability to do what she wants, and this very much strikes me as someone who's so pro-establishment that they've missed the entire point of what d&d and heroic narratives are about.

To address the IRL politics you're clearly referencing: BLM, Antifa, and so called "woke" policies are not about hating anyone*, they're about opposing systems of power that hurt the many for the benefit of the few, systems so old and ingrained into our society that their oppression can be confused for the status quo. As someone who is clearly pro-system, you should want that system to run as efficiently and equitably as possible, and that means hearing the voices of those who say the system is broken and are showing you clear evidence as to how. The only other option is that you prefer the system remains flawed because it benefits you, even if that benefit is just that you don't have to hear about how other people are suffering.

* Except hating fascists, but we should always bash the fash

Now onto why your request doesn't function from a narrative standpoint: Rebellions don't come from nowhere, they occur because there is a fundamental disconnect been those in power and those they govern, with a critical difference between rebellions of the oppressed vs their oppressor, and one power group upsetting the social order to replace another.

In the scenario you set up, the followers of the druid are having their "natural magic" curtailed, which automatically makes their rebellion against authority justified no matter how nice the political figureheads happen to be. I could believe that a powerful faction might want to cease power from the ruling authority by using "restriction of traditional practices" as a rallying cry, but you've deliberately positioned the druid and her followers as the underdogs. A "might makes right" philosophy like you mentioned is held by those who already have power, not by people who are excluded from power by virtue of their birth.

How does the scenario you presented even end? With the party stomping out the rebellion and proving that the persecution of the druidic group was justified in the first place? No matter how corrupt or angry the Rebel leader might be, your kind royal family still allowed their people's plight to go unaddressed in the first place, meaning that the problem isn't solved by quashing the rebellion, it's just put off in favor of protecting the status quo.

Just because I can, I'm going to write an adventure using your framework but do it properly, so you and anyone who might also write adventures with an uncritical eye can see how much better it is when you educate yourself on the politics you take inspiration from.

To anyone in the comments who might take umbrage with me going off like this, I want to remind you that I'm a queer socialist who's dedicated to decolonizing this hobby every chance I get. There's room at the table for everyone except those with hate in their hearts, and I will pry this game from the hands of bigots and authoritarians with a battleax if I have to.

#prompt postage #irl politics #justin kind #bad opinions

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tanadrin · 2 years

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@archaalen i’m breaking this out as its own post bc it’s a huge digression that doesn’t really bear on the main thread, but I wanted to say something about this:

Poverty reduction and improving Healthcare are resisted with almost equal fervor in this country. A concerted effort has been made so that ANY political reform away from baseline is now fraught and prone to collapse without unsustainably-large voting mandates.

in that I think it depends on the strategy and depends on the era. Opposition to poverty reduction, esp. through welfare, is mostly tied to racial anxieties and is mostly a Reagan and post-Reagan thing, thanks to the myth of the welfare queen and the stereotype of poor, urban, black poverty that goes hand-in-hand with the shift in urban economics after white flight (itself a consequence of desegregation). which is to say, I don’t think you’re wrong per se, just that this is an artifact of the present political moment, and one that’s not inescapable.

One reason Sanders is comparatively successful as a politician is that his economic platform is framed in terms which IMO hearken back to pre-Reagan debates on poverty and welfare, and are more akin to early 20th century socialism in America and Depression-era anti-poverty policy. Note I mean his rhetoric, and not the content specifically; I think Sanders has some cross-party appeal that identical or nearly identical policies don’t have under similar politicians that are closely aligned with him, because Sanders, mostly unintentionally, is less off-putting to people who are worried about the undeserving poor benefiting from social programs. it helps that he’s white and old and fuck, ofc, in the same way that if AOC never mentioned race or gender and owned a whole arsenal of small arms she’d probably still be depicted as a swivel-eyed lunatic, just because some voters are inevitably going to judge you on your appearance.

Economic issues are an intensely racialized dynamic in the US--the undeserving poor are stereotyped as the lazy, drug-addicted urban blacks, the deserving poor are stereotyped as the hardworking rural or small-town whites who can’t catch a break, and this whole dynamic is derived from, modulo 160 years of metamorphic processes on the original social division, a need by the land and propertyholding class to foster a division that prevents solidarity among the peasant classes to weaken their political power. Because this enduring division produces politics in America that are just insanely, fractally racist, it is possible to find examples of what @afloweroutofstone usefully calls “red state socialism:” social programs and anti-poverty measures popular even in red states, because either they were originally aimed only at whites (common for Depression-era and post-WW2 social programs in the US), or are framed/thought of as primarily benefiting whites.

Now, I am not arguing that ignoring the relationship between race and poverty is honest, morally correct, or tactically correct. Nonwhite voters matter, their interests are legitimate, and voters who are reluctant to support policies that would benefit them, because they’re worried a racist caricature in their head might also benefit, are assholes. And while there are strains of political thought that IMO focus so intensely on race as a dividing line in American politics, without considering either its origin in a system of oppression with economic ends or ways it could be indirectly mitigated through focusing on more equal wealth distribution (because racist rhetoric is most effective alongside economic misdirection--i.e., you are poor because they are getting the wealth that should be yours), in ways which end up being tactically counterproductive, but I think these are not actually very important in the grand scheme of things, and mostly come to general attention when being used as a cudgel against those who have the temerity to mention racial injustice in a political context.

and looking at things from a recent perspective, I think there’s even more reason to be optimistic, because racial dynamics around economic discourse in the US are only part of the story. the other part is the degredation of the consensus of the 80s, that social programs are bad and a “frictionless” (i.e., precarious) labor market is good, and economic growth goes lockstep with how deregulated the economy is. that whole picture blew up hard at the end of Bush’s second term, hard enough that the policies of the 80s and 90s have been retroactively completely discredited in large sections of the political discourse, and the subsequent period of recovery has not really improved the picture what with the pandemic and great resignation and real estate and crypto bubbles that can be seen from space.

in short, I think that while it’s true that right now you need supermajorities to do something about economic justice right now in the US, the arrow is trending favorably generally, bc in the 90s the overwhelming consensus was that the best way to reduce poverty was to end welfare, the 2008 recession was a huge shakeup to the post-Reagan consensus that dominated even the Democratic party (as under Clinton), and further challenges to that consensus continue to mount, although intermittently. IMO the pandemic checks were kind of a watershed--suddenly we had a context where not only was the idea of the government literally just mailing everybody money a possibility, but it was overwhelmingly popular not just with voters but with politicians.

the heavily gerrymandered and gerontocratic nature of the American political system continues to slow progress, but so far only slow it. hopefully enough progress is made to circumvent a really big explosion.

#healthcare is effectively part of the economic issue #and while there are industry specific pathologies #i think a lot of the political dynamics controlling the debate are effectively the same

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anakinisvaderisanakin · 3 years

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Introductions (AU; the government are introduced to the Emperor’s right hand man)

Emperor Palpatine sat at the helm of the table, his expensive ornate satin cloak pulled up to cover his deformed features. He had made a rare exception to the never appearing in public rule, if only to summon his little group of closely affiliated followers for a less than chummy supper. The Coruscant sun had already begun to set, its pinkish rays disappearing behind the skyscrapers visible from the large single viewport of the Emperor’s dining hall. Two months had passed since the fall of the Republic. Two months since the war came to an end, two months since the Jedi were declared traitors and executed en masse. Two months since Palpatine declared himself dictator, since his regulations had begun being pushed onto all known systems. Two months, and Governor Tarkin had thought himself to be lucky with his role.

A few faces, he recognized. Former admiral Wullf Yularen was a welcome addition despite being a bit below the required rank, fighting the just fight against outliers and naysayers. Orn Free Taa was a more unfortunate case (he had likely invited himself by flattery and empty promises), while Vizier Mas Amedda was an obvious presence. Sate Pestage, Janus Greejatus, Ars Dangor, Kren Blista-Vanee and Verge’s smug faces had Tarkin fighting the urge to roll his eyes at their insipid subservience. Artist Eveli Charis was, Tarkin figured, the most surprising member of the meeting - serving as the only female face of the small crowd. Her aside, and finance minister Gagh rounded off the gathering.

These people were - each in different ways - the most influential people of the new Empire.

“I have not gathered you simply for the sake of sharing a dinner in the wake of our victory. Indeed, I have been wishing to relay to you my plans for the grand future of our Galaxy,” said Palpatine suddenly, his voice gravelly and his gnarly hands reminiscent of claws where they rested against the table cloth.

Tarkin thought he could see a pair of golden eyes gleaming beneath the shrouded darkness of Palpatine’s hood, but chalked it up to a trick of the light. Instead, he focused on the hand stitched embroidery of the Emperor’s burgundy robes. The man had always had an affinity for fancy dress.

“It is clear that you shall provide eyes and ears for me, and I trust you to fulfill your duties towards the Empire, and subsequently to me. However, I’m afraid I must offer you a small surprise.”

“Another, Your Highness?” Tarkin said with an amused smile, and he couldn’t help but feel triumphant when Palpatine let out a pleased cackle in response.

“I’m afraid so, Governor. Surely, you shall all take this little revelation in stride. Are we not in dire need of powerful allies?” he responded, gesturing with one clawed hand towards the Vizier who stood poised by the doorway.

On each side of the hydraulic sliding doors themselves, a royal guard clad in crimson stood at a patient salute. The Emperor’s personal bodyguards, their faces cloaked and hidden from view much like Palpatine himself. Their presence was an odd mixture of reassuring and oppressive, Tarkin had decided. But he saw no reason to fear them, given his own standing with the Emperor. If anything, he benefited from their presence as protectors.

“Will you reveal to us this secret, Your Highness?” asked Charis, her expression curious and incredulous at once.

“My child, have you not been taught the virtue of patience?” was Palpatine’s response; a thinly veiled insult that put her in her place, as she shrank back in shame and lowered her head in an obedient bow.

“Forgive me my insolence, Your Highness,” she offered, apologetic and the Emperor simply shrugged her words off.

“Think nothing of it. You are correct, it appears to me that I have unfairly omitted mentioning this to either of you. Alas, it is time I remedy this arrogance.”

Tarkin noted how the Emperor turned his head briefly, giving the Vizier a barely perceptible nod and the man stepped back. On cue, the guards uncrossed their electro-staffs and parted to the sides. Confusion seemed to overtake most of the party’s faces, as the doorway slid open with ease - only to reveal a man. Clad in black armour with red and silver accents; broad shouldered, tall and visibly disdainful towards his company. He stalked wordlessly up to Palpatine’s right hand side, where he lingered - gloved hands folded in front of his hips, legs wide apart. His eyes were glowing, an amber shade to their irises, a bloodshot sclera. The man’s face was scarred, rugged; and the only visible emotions seemed to be anger and resentment. One single dark blonde curl fell over his creased forehead.

But that wasn’t the oddity. Someone in the company - Tarkin suspected it to be Yularen, judging by the tone - gasped.

Indeed, it was difficult not to recognize the young man by the Emperor's side - the Emperor, whose features had twisted into a toothy grin. The man said nothing, taller than Tarkin remembered him. Something warped and cruel and twisted distorting his rather handsome features into something unrecognizable, all charm vanquished. He was pale, peering in distaste down at the dining party as if they were beneath him. It didn’t sit right with Tarkin, given that they all knew who he was and what his past profession up until about two months ago would have been.

Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker had joined them for supper.

“May I introduce to you Lord Vader,” said Palpatine, breaking the eerie silence. “Some of you may believe you are familiar with this man. I assure you, you are mistaken. The man whom you may recall is long gone. Lord Vader has seen the error of his ways, and accepted the Jedi traitors for what they are. He came to my aid during the assassination attempt ordered by master Windu.”

Tarkin listened closely, but he was not the only one who seemed unable to tear his gaze from Skywalk-- Vader’s stern features. He looked so much older than his age, as if he had seen a million lifetimes of suffering pass him by. His hollow eyes seemed haunted, but their inherent glow was more reminiscent of a predator locked in a cage. Simply biding his time, waiting for the opportune moment to pounce. Still, he made no move and did not utter a single word.

“Lord Vader has turned out to be, much like you, one of my most trusted advisors. He is my right hand man, and while I have neglected to provide him with an official rank - he outranks every single one of you. It is my belief that only he has the means to do what needs to be done,” the Emperor continued.

Yularen seemed to shift uneasily in his seat, his eyes wide and a blunt disbelief etched into his aging features.

“You wish to speak, Colonel?”

Tarkin heard himself say; wondering if they were the only ones present - apart from the Emperor himself - who had maintained some sort of personal relationship to the man Palpatine had renamed and retooled so viciously.

“No, Governor. I--” he began, but was immediately cut off by Palpatine.

“You are wondering how the man you knew as a Jedi could turn on his own kind, is that not so? You are surprised to see that his loyalty towards the Empire could outweigh his loyalty towards his kin. Am I correct, Colonel?”

Yularen seemed to pause a bit longer than required, but gave a curt nod as he found the voice to speak up.

“Yes, Your Highness. I am merely… surprised, as you put it,” he said as a manner of surrender.

“It is understandable that you would be shocked. Should you like to speak of your own decision, Lord Vader?” the Emperor drawled, his voice menacing and sing-songy at once as he gestured to offer Vader the opportunity to speak.

“No,” the young man simply said, standing so still that his lips barely even seemed to be moving; his gleaming eyes scanning each and every person present before it landed on Tarkin - the only man who’s amusement outweighed the concerns. “I believe my actions will speak for themselves, as will your evident trust in me, my master.”

The voice was a bit deeper and gruffer than Tarkin recalled it - but that could be maturity - but its monotone quality was new. Vader spoke as if the words held no meaning to him, as if whatever he said was pointless and a waste of breath. As if his words were unbefitting of anyone but the Emperor. Yet, at the same time, he was matter of fact and to the point. A quality Tarkin had enjoyed in the past, and one he presumed Yularen had as well.

“Oh, I implore you to amuse this unspoken inquiry, Lord Vader,” Palpatine pressed, and as much as it came off as if being in good faith, it was an obvious demand no loyal servant could ignore.

“As you wish, my master,” Vader simply obeyed, his burning eyes still holding Tarkin’s in a cold, disgruntled stare. “I was the single man to commandeer the troops as they marched on the Jedi temple. I surveyed the situation, and I made sure not a single soul present escaped their fate. I am prepared to do whatever it takes to serve my Emperor, and I will not be frowned upon by the likes of you.”

The last word was delivered with such pure, unbridled loathing that it seemed to lower the temperature of the room by several degrees by proxy of mere intent. Vader nonchalantly folded his arms over his chest, lips drawn into a thin line and the perpetual scowl of his forehead had already begun to carve out fine lines in their wake. Palpatine was still sneering, grimy teeth bared in a ferocious grin.

“As you can see, Lord Vader’s conviction is admirable and undeniable. He has proved himself worthy of my trust, and so, I expect you to follow my example accordingly. I expect you to show him the reverence he requires,” the Emperor concluded, that odd glow to Vader’s eyes mirrored by his as he briefly peered up from beneath his hood - this time, it could be no trick of the light.

“I trust your infallible judgment, Your Highness,” Tarkin finally said, being the first to accept the new norm. “I may not be completely assured of Lord Vader’s motives as of yet, but he shall gain my respect when he has proved himself worthy of it.”

“My friend, you need not fear. However, I understand your concerns, and I have no doubt that you will come around quite soon,” said Palpatine, and while there was malice to the tone, he was also unusually honest and benevolent.

Tarkin suspected that was entirely on him, and their long history as colleagues and friends. He nodded, glancing over at Vader whose eyes regarded him still. Their gaze was arduous, and heavy, and vile - but that seemed to be their natural state, rather than any personal vendetta.

“Thank you, Your Highness,” was Tarkin’s only reply, and he shot a defiant glare back at Vader. “You are much too gracious.”

“Will you cease your repulsive display?” Vader snapped, and while Tarkin at first almost expected Palpatine to defend him; he found that the Emperor seemed humored enough by the obvious insult to allow the man to finish his trail of thought. “The Emperor will offer you no favours based on your fawning. You embarrass yourself, Governor.”

“Now, now, Lord Vader. I believe such childish bickering belongs elsewhere,” he finally shushed, as Vader relented like an obedient school boy fearing punishment. “However, I must agree. It would serve you well to evolve your attempts at flattery into a less… tacky matter.”

That triggered a reaction from Vader, as one corner of his lips twitched briefly upwards in a mocking, superior half smirk. He said nothing, but the triumph in those golden eyes spoke for itself.

“Now, with this out of the way, I wish to return to the matters at hand - but there is one more thing I wish to clarify. Lord Vader will not tolerate any mentions of the man you might recall him to be. He is no longer the naive child of yesterday. There will be a penalty for such insolence - no matter whom it may derive from. Lord Vader is a reinvented man. You shall address him only as such, and by no other name. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” was the singular response - and a brief hint of delight, and perhaps relief, crossed Vader’s scornful face.

“Very good,” said the Emperor with a cackle.

__________

I am not generally a fan of suitless Vader, but this idea came to me and it kinda required that so I went with it for once. Enjoy!

Ao3 link below:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/32029582

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gamesception · 4 years

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The Promised Neverland is kind of really good, actually? I mean, yeah, I’m late to the party as usual, but I just binged the first season of the anime, and then the manga from that point on (the site I was on didn’t have any of the second season, but apparently it diverges from the comic and gets bad anyway, so maybe just read the comic to begin with). And, I mean, spoilers, obviously, but I’m going to get into some extremely major spoilers here so if you haven’t read it or if you’ve only seen the first season of the anime maybe skip this post and read the manga, but...

...

I’ve tried and failed to write a big long post about all the ways it’s so good, how the main three characters are each so compelling, how its pitch dark but not cynical or misanthropic, with mortal stakes but not gore-porny, positive and optimistic without being trite or naïve, how choosing Emma out of the main three to be the primary protagonist and viewpoint character keeps the story from becoming a masculine militaristic power fantasy, how the antagonists are treated as characters and not just monsters - even the ones that are literal monsters, about how the story never supports or glorifies the idea of sacrificing the weak so that the strong can survive, about how empathy and understanding and a chance for peace are extended to every single villain without putting a burden to forgive on victims and without ignoring the need to fight those who refuse the offer of peace and uphold the status quo, how the story opposes oppressive hierarchies at every turn - not just those the monsters use to control the human children at the farms, but also how the monster elites use access to human meat to controller the lower social classes of monster society, and even to an extent within the human resistance.

But there’s just way too much to talk about to get it all into one big giant post, and I don’t have the stamina for a big extended ongoing project right now - or else I’d return to one of the like 12 I have on hold.

But, like, to pick just one thing....

ok, so eventually we learn what the monsters are and why they eat people. They’re a weird sort of organism that can temporarily take on the characteristics of things they eat. Eat a bird and grow wings, eat a bug and grow an exoskeleton, eat a human and gain a humanoid body and the intelligence to become self aware, learn language, form societies - for a while. But if they go too long without eating people, then they lose their minds and revert to a bestial form. In order to save the humans, the resistance leader Minerva plans to wipe out the monster society altogether. After all, they literally have to eat humans to continue being people, there is no possibility of peace.

Protagonist Emma, though, has seen not just the horrific human farms and their cruel and corrupt rulers, but also their towns and settlements, their families and children. She was even saved at one point shortly after her escape by friendly monsters who opposed the farm system, and even though it seems impossible, she wants to save both the humans and the monsters.

A more typical show, at least among those with premises as dark as The Promised Neverland, wouldn’t take Emma’s side in this. She would be forced to ‘grow up’ and face the fact that she can’t save everyone. Her naivety would get someone killed to break her heart and teach her to be hard and cruel as if those things are virtues. Or, more likely, she wouldn’t be the viewpoint character to begin with, she’d be a side character whose ideals would get herself killed in order to elevate the male characters’ angst and justify their violence. Either way, the message would be “Emma’s ideals were unrealistic and could never survive contact with the harsh reality of the world.”

TPN instead takes Emma’s Side. She finds monsters who maintain a humanoid body and intelligence without eating humans, and they’re able to spread that trait to the rest of monster society while the humans all escape to the human world. Now, as much as I don’t like the grimdark ‘there is no peaceful option’ hypothetical version of the story, this development could have been handled pretty badly. Like, just reading it like that, it sounds like the story raised a big moral dilemma and then chickened out of it. But that’s really not how it comes off while you’re reading it, for a couple reasons.

First of all, Emma meets the non-human-eating monsters early in the story, long before we get the explanation of how monsters in general work. So by the time we learn that the monsters must eat humans to maintain their self identity, the audience already knows that there are exceptions and that an alternative exists. The story never sets this up to be a moral dilemma in the first place, so when the issue is bypassed it doesn’t feel like it’s undercut itself.

More importantly, though, is the thematic & metaphorical content. Because the monster society is a pretty explicit metaphor for unjust human societies, and monsters represent the people who make up such societies. Not just the aristocrats who benefit from the unjust society, or those who directly enforce and uphold it, but also regular people. People insulated just enough from the suffering and death that their lives are built on that they can turn a blind eye to it, but aware enough of their complicity in that suffering that they construct excuses to justify their part in it, and by proxy excuse those at the top who actually benefit from and shaped the society as it is. People living lives simultaneously just comfortable enough to keep them docile, but precarious enough that they’re too caught up with struggling to maintain the tenuous grasp on the lives they have to feel like they can work towards anything better. Monster society in TPN is a cage built out of the corpses of humans cattle, but built to imprison and enslave the monster civilians who eat them.

Hanging the story on the fantastical element of monster biology would divorce it from that essential metaphor while also endorsing an outright genocidal worldview, and TPN explicitly calls out the plan to wipe out the monsters altogether as just that - genocidal. It never even pretends to entertain the notion that the audience should accept that plan as the right choice, even while it doesn’t condemn Minerva for pursuing it. When Emma is proposing her plan to Minerva, the deal she strikes with him is ‘I will try to make my peaceful solution happen, and if I succeed then you cancel your plan to wipe out the monsters’. Minerva is eventually shown to be lying when he makes that agreement, but Emma isn’t, and note the if there. If Emma’s plan fails, then she - and thus the narrative - accepts that Minerva’s plan to save the children is still better than leaving things as they are, even if it means wiping out all the monsters. After all, the society IS monstrously unjust, and even the lower classes within that society ARE complicit in that injustice.

Minerva’s problem isn’t even presented as a matter of him hating the monsters too much to see a route to peace with them. The story doesn’t frame the conflict between Minerva’s and Emma’s plans as hate vs. love or revenge vs. forgiveness. It’s instead more of ‘hierarchy and division bad, mutualism/openness/relying on each other good’. The point is to show how Minerva’s role as a figurehead who believes he has to project strength to uphold the hope that the other humans have placed in him has worn away his ability to rely on others or to be open to alternatives they offer, leaving him with rigid and inflexible thinking.

So when Minerva learns about the monsters who don’t need to eat humans, he doesn’t see an opportunity for a better outcome - potentially even an easier outcome since he doesn’t have to make enemies of the entirety of monster society - rather he sees a threat to his plan to starve the monsters back into an animalistic state.

And if that whole subplot isn’t explicit enough, Minerva’s internalized need to project strength also results in his physical body wasting away in secret from a condition he believes to be untreatable, but the moment he finally breaks down and admits he needs help Emma is able to point to a solution, one that again doesn’t come across as a cop out because again it takes the form of another character the audience was already introduced to a long time ago.

In a story arc that the second season of the anime adaptation apparently cut entirely, wow the more I hear about anime season 2 the worse it sounds. And after the first season was so good....

...

Anyway, I tried to pick just one thing and this post still turned into a colossal gushing word cascade, and there are so many other elements to talk about. Like how The ‘Mothers’ and ‘Sisters’ are menacing villains with seemingly no empathy for the children, but when Sister Krona realizes she’s lost the power struggle with Isabella she leaves the kids tools to help them, and then when Mother Isabella realizes the children have escaped, she covers up the route they used in order to buy them a little extra time to get away. It’s these little touches - just as much as the short backstories that follow them - that show us how, while they might uphold the system out of fear for their own lives, and might have rationalize their part in it in order to live with the horrible things they’re doing, the mothers and sisters don’t actually hate the children. Knowing that makes it believable when in the end Isabella does turn on the system, and every single one of the other mothers and sisters join her.

The bit when the fighting is mostly over and she tells the Mother at the house “it’s over, now we can just love them” and the other woman breaks down crying is so sad and human, it makes me tear up thinking about it..

Like I said, all the villains are characters, not just monsters. They all have motivations for the horrific things they do - sometimes irrational, often selfish, but not even the most unforgivable of the monsters are just evil for evil’s sake.

Again, I’m rambling. It’s just... I’m used to these sorts of pitch dark dystopias being, for lack of a better term, kinda fashy in their messaging? Or at the very least deeply cynical and misanthropic and just kind of mean spirited. And TPN is so completely the opposite of that, in so many ways.

#tpn spoilers #tpn #the promised neverland #anyway yeah it's pretty good #though again apparently the second season of the anime falls of the rails #like from reading reactions today #it seems season 2 drops or completely flubs literally everything I go into in this post #don't watch it #i haven't #and feel better off for it #edited because I misremembered a couple things #like the 'we can just love them' line comes after the fighting not before #the point remains though

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asma-al-husna · 3 years

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Allah’s name Al-Hakam— The Judge, The Giver of Justice, The Arbitrator— occurs on one occasion in the Quran. He is the One who always delivers justice, in every situation, to everyone. Al-Hakam never wrongs anyone and is never oppressive, He is the only true judge; no one can overturn His judgment and no one can ever appeal His decree!

The Giver of Justice, The One Who Arbitrates

Hakam comes from the root haa-kaaf-meem, which refers to the attribute of judging, being wise, passing a verdict, and preventing or restraining people from wrongdoing.

This root appears 210 times in the Quran in 13 derived forms. Examples of these forms are hakama (to judge), al-hukm (the command, wisdom, judgement), hikmah (wisdom), and Ahkamu (Most Just).

Linguistically, hakam and hakeem are from the same root; hakam is a verbal noun and emphasizes the act of delivering justice whereas hakeem refers to the essential nature of the possessor of wisdom. Al-Hakam refers to the totality of Allah’s power to judge and arbitrate with perfect justice and immense mercy, which cannot be compared with the judging and arbitrating of any other created being.

Al-Hakam Himself says: Then is it other than Allah I should seek as judge while it is He who has revealed to you the Book explained in detail? [Quran, 6:114]

The best of judges

Al-Hakam deals with all the affairs of creation— isn’t that amazing? He beautifully says: All those who are in the heavens and the Earth ask of Him; every moment He is in a state (of glory). [Quran, 55:29]

Al-Hakam makes certain deeds lawful and other deeds unlawful; He instructs us to do certain things and prohibits us from doing others. He has complete legislative power and His discree can’t be overturned by anyone, because He says: His is the creation and His is the command. [Quran, 7:54].

Whatever Al-Hakam legislates for us is never burdensome and never unfair. He laid down the perfect rules to protect the rights of everyone— men and women, the righteous and the sinner, the believer and the unbeliever.

Beautiful justice

When someone converts to Islam, Al-Hakam forgives all of his previous sins and evil deeds. A man called Amr came to the Prophet Muhammad and said, Give me your right hand so that I may give you my pledge of loyalty. The Prophet stretched out his right hand. Amr withdrew his hand. The Prophet said: What has happened to you, O Amr? He replied, I intend to lay down a condition. The Prophet asked: What condition do you intend to put forward? Amr said, That Allah forgives my sins. The Prophet said: Didn’t you know that converting to Islam erases all previous sins? [Muslim] This is the beautiful justice of Allah ‘azza wa jall. Alhamdulillah ‘alaa ni’matul Islam— Praise be to Allah for the blessing of Islam.

How Can You Live by This Name?

1. Trust in Al-Hakam at all times.

Take comfort in the fact that even if people are unjust, you will get your justice from Al-Hakam! Don’t despair, and fully rely on His judgment. Al-Hakam says: Follow what has been revealed to you, and be steadfast until Allah’s judgment comes. He is the Best of Judges. [Quran, 10:109]

2. Be motivated to do good deeds.

Al-Hakam is wise. He is the ultimate Judge, and He decreed that you don’t have to bear the sin of another. You’ll never ever be wronged by Al-Hakam; you’re never punished for more than the sin you commit, nor will any good deed go without a reward.

This is the justice-system of Al-Hakam: Whoever brings a good deed shall have ten times the like thereof to his credit, and whoever brings an evil deed shall have only the recompense of the like thereof, and they will not be wronged. [Quran, 6:160]. Let this motivate you to take each chance to do a good deed; benefit from your health, wealth and free time by using them wisely.

3. Make the Quran and sunnah your guides.

You should take the Quran and the sunnah for guidance in all matters, in all areas in your life. How many people refer to non-Islamic legislations only when it comes to divorce, inheritance, and the like? You should make the Quran and sunnah your guidance between right and wrong in everything you do, to guide you in your personal life, your community, your society, your interactions with others, your business, etcetera.

4. Remember Al-Hakam and stand up for the truth.

Remind yourself that you will stand before Him one day to be judged by Him. Make this your motivation to mind your actions in this world. Always stand up for truth and justice, even if it’s against yourself. Strive for a positive verdict from the One and only judge.

5. Always be fair and equal in judging others!

Whenever you’re in a position to judge between parties, for example a family affair, always be equal and just. Al-Hakam says: Behold, Allah bids you to deliver all that you have been entrusted with unto those who are entitled thereto and whenever you judge between people, to judge with justice. [Quran 4:58]

6. Never object to the decree of Al-Hakam.

Whenever Al-Hakam decrees something, He does so with perfect wisdom. Never object to the decree of Al-Hakam by complaining about your fate and questioning Him (e.g. oh, why do I have to go through this?) Only people who don’t understand Allah’s names and attributes will question Him, so make it a striving to study al Asmaa ul husnaa.

7. Ask Al-Hakam for protection and guidance.

Ask Allah Al-Hakam to protect you from injustice at the hands of others and ask Him to make you just toward others. Ask Al-Hakam to make you adhere to whatever He’s legislated for you.

O Allah, Al-Hakam, we know You are the Perfect Judge. Aid us to adhere to your legislation in our daily lives, make us of those who are equal and just to others and of those who always stand up for the truth. Protect us from the injustice of others, adorn us with reliance upon You and Your justice at all times, ameen!

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revlyncox · 4 years

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Democracy Is Not a State

Delivered to the Washington Ethical Society on January 10, 2021, by Lyn Cox

Congressman John Lewis reminds us what is possible when we join together, combining our collective action and sense of purpose to keep our country grounded in our best and highest ideals. His final instructions to us were to “walk with the wind,” to stay together and respond to the movement of our time in the spirit of peace and with the power of love.

That is what is happening in Georgia. This past week, we learned that Georgia will have two new Senators. The Rev. Raphael Warnock will be the first Black Senator from the state, of which about a third of the population is Black. The congregation Rev. Warnock leads, Ebenezer Baptist Church, is the former pulpit of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also a congregation that Rep. Lewis attended. Jon Ossoff will be the first Jewish Senator from Georgia. Ossoff interned for Rep. John Lewis as a young man, after having written him a fan letter when Ossoff was 16 years old. Relationships built over years make a difference.

Regardless of political party, we can agree that democracy depends on the ability of citizens to exercise their right to vote. True democracy rests on free and fair elections, in which obstacles to the right to vote are not placed unfairly and disproportionately in front of voters from marginalized communities. The runoff election in Georgia was historic, not only because of the outcome, but because of the momentous turnout. Overcoming voter suppression was a major task, and one that grassroots organizations in Georgia have been working on for years. Multiracial democracy is a threat to white supremacy, and white supremacy has been trying to prevent the full flowering of multiracial democracy from the beginning.

Yet there is progress. Between 2018 and the November election, 800,000 new people registered to vote in Georgia. Registering and mobilizing new voters is the big story of this election, and that was achieved one conversation at a time, one knocked-on door at a time, one phone call at a time, one relationship at a time. Stacey Abrams is a strategic genius and a focused advocate, having started the New Georgia Project seven years ago and Fair Fight two years ago.

Abrams will be the first to tell you that a wide variety of leaders and grassroots organizations share the credit for voter turnout in this election. For instance, LaTosha Brown has been fighting voter suppression since 1998, and her Black Voters Matter project helped mobilize voters across the South. In a series of tweets on Friday, Abrams named 30 different grassroots organizations that coordinated their efforts to help Georgians exercise their right to vote, noting that the runoff election was a demonstration of “decades of strategy, grit, + building.”

Between Rep. Lewis’ reminder about clasping hands and moving together, and the turnout in Georgia’s runoff election, our takeaway should not be limited to admiration for the most visible leaders, candidates, and public officials. We can and should admire their good character traits and their dedication to service. We can and should thank the movement leaders who made this possible, especially Black women. But we should not elevate these officials and movement leaders to the point where we regard them as something other than human, an example too rarified for us to follow.

The lesson here is that organizing is happening all around us. Coordinated solidarity to enact structural change for liberation is part of how we help bring the full promise of multiracial democracy into being. There may well be someone like Stacey Abrams in the movements you are part of at your workplace or in your neighborhood. Let’s listen. There are definitely organizations in our own communities being led by the people who are most impacted by marginalization. We can follow the example that has been set out for us by supporting power-building and relationship-building that is already happening locally. Grassroots organizing takes a long time. It requires a lot of one-on-one conversations, very little in the way of immediate results, and broad participation. That path is available to any of us, nobody has to be a superstar to participate in repairing the soul of our nation.

We contrast the progress in building multiracial democracy in Georgia with the violent attempt to destroy multiracial democracy that happened on January 6. Because this Platform is being recorded for posterity, I feel that I have to be very clear about the events of this week; please take care of yourself if a reminder of these events is overwhelming for you. On Wednesday, at the urging of their demagogue, white supremacist insurrectionists invaded the Capitol building, threatened the safety of elected leaders and staff, looted the building, and left chaos in their wake for others to clean up, primarily janitors and facilities staff who are People of Color. They were not merely rascals ignoring the rules of orderly protest, they were an armed mob seeking to disrupt the practice of democracy. Computers were stolen, putting our national security at risk. Five people died, including an officer from the Capitol Police.

In our community, I know we are holding intense emotions about this incident. I am particularly mindful of the impact that this has on those who work for the Federal government, for whom the area around the Capitol is an everyday environment, a place full of memories and colleagues. My heart also goes out to those who live near the Capitol, who had to deal with armed white supremacists wandering the neighborhood unimpeded. To anyone who has ever been treated roughly by the Capitol Police for non-violently exercising their first amendment rights, the lack of resistance to the mob may not have been surprising, but it was yet another insult, a reminder that the level of force with which police respond to protestors is a choice. For People of Color, Queer people, Muslim people, Jewish people, immigrants, or anyone who holds an identity targeted for violence by these insurrectionists, Wednesday’s events were a chilling show of power that was precisely intended to make us feel afraid for existing as our whole selves. We cannot let that fear stop us from living fully, nor prevent us from persevering in the work of liberation.

On Wednesday night, I invited the WES community to gather by Zoom to process the day’s events, to overcome the numbness of trauma by feeling our feelings, and to lift up our shared values in a way that only a community like ours can do. It was short notice, and I apologize if you didn’t hear about it in time. Please reach out if you would like to talk to me or to a member of the Pastoral Care Associates about how you are feeling. More than twenty of you were able to attend. Just from that sample, I know that there are feelings of rage, worry, disgust, helplessness, disappointment, and confusion. There are also feelings of readiness, of curiosity about what to do next, relief about the Georgia election, and even optimism that there are long-deferred actions for repair that can take place with the new Congress. Emotions are what they are, and they will be affected by your previous experiences with oppression, trauma, and violence. Feel your feelings. Please know you don’t have to be in those feelings alone.

The violence on January 6 was designed to reinforce white supremacy. It was a reaction to the expansion of multiracial democracy, fed by the shock of racist white people that the votes of people who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color were allowed to have an impact. White people have been told since the moment Europeans arrived on this continent that the land and its abundance and the benefits of government are for ourselves, that white people own this country, and that this is unassailable no matter what happens to the bodies, voices, and lives of those who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. This worldview is gravely harmful and wrong.

The incredulity with which the insurrectionists faced the results of the 2020 election, urged on by politicians who capitalize on their racism, is rooted in the belief that only white votes are legitimate. Their invasion of the People’s House was meant to mark their territory, to show that their ownership remains primary, and that they can and will use violence to maintain that ownership. White supremacist violence as an attempt to derail multiracial democracy is not new, and it has worked before. We all have choices ahead of us to reduce the chances that this tactic will continue to work.

One avenue is to confront and dismantle white supremacy in all of the ways it shows up around us. For those who have been the targets of racism their whole lives, simply living and thriving is an act of resistance. For those of us who were socialized as white, the construction of a wall of ignorance around the machinations of white supremacy is part of how the system operates. For those of us who were raised with barriers to perceiving racism, let’s not wait another moment before removing those barriers and taking action to uproot racism.

We saw again this week how deadly white supremacy can be. It shows up in the minds and hearts of well-meaning people and in the institutional practices of well-meaning communities. It shows up in the decisions of governments from the level of homeowners associations to the U.S. Congress. It shows up in art and music and literature. We don’t have to look far to find a place to begin uprooting racism. For all of us, the outpouring of voter empowerment in Georgia reminds us that there is room for everyone in expanding multiracial democracy.

Another thing we can do is to insist that the threat of violent white supremacy is real, and that we should take it seriously. Perhaps that seems obvious after this week, but we’re already seeing efforts to humanize, sanitize, and excuse the perpetrators of destruction. News articles about insurrectionists who died emphasize their good qualities or accomplishments instead of their criminal records; an obvious departure from the media treatment of racial justice activists and those who have been murdered by police. Jokes about the perpetrators seem to imply that they are too stupid to be held responsible. Calls to understand their pain and excuse their racism rely on stereotypes that are demonstrably untrue. Exhortations to “move on” without practicing accountability reinforce the idea that harm caused by white people should be consequence-free. White supremacy is and always has been a threat to our national security and our national wellbeing, and the sooner we recognize and address that, the better.

Failing to take white supremacy seriously contributed to our vulnerability to Wednesday’s events. Racist militia groups have been allowed to grow and thrive for years when anti-racist groups have been infiltrated, sabotaged, and undermined with outrageous punishments and mysterious deaths. After the Charlottesville event where Heather Heyer was murdered, nothing happened to reduce the potential for future right-wing violence. The Capitol Police knew that the crowds planned for Wednesday were likely to be dangerous. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal said:

We all were aware of the danger. Ten days ago, Maxine Waters had raised the issue of our security on a caucus call to the Speaker and asked what the plans would be. And 48 hours before, we had gotten instructions from Capitol police about all the threats: that we had to be on high alert, that we had to get to the Capitol by 9 a.m. before the protesters, that we couldn’t plan on going out, that we should have overnight bags. It was very clear, and everyone understood what the threats were.

Rep. Jayapal points out the discrepancy between what the Members of Congress were told about impending events and how the Capitol Police were prepared on the outside of the building. Whether failing to have adequate staff or backup or hard barriers was a result of underestimating the threat or of deliberate collusion or both, the lack of preparedness is a product of white supremacy.

When we recognize the enormity of the problem, we are led to work on systemic solutions. That means examining laws and policies, and the uneven application of those laws and policies. At a Symposium yesterday, award-winning peacemaker and spiritual care activist Najeeba Syeed spoke about the “myth of interpersonal peacemaking,” and how it can be a distraction and derailment of the systemic justice-making that provides the foundation for authentic, lasting peace. Trying to understand and relate to Nazis does not yield systemic change. Attempting to de-radicalize loved ones is another project, not the same thing as building multiracial democracy or expanding liberation. Professor Syeed reminded us that “Peace is not the absence of violence … Peace is the absence of injustice.”

In a week with so many low points, even as we notice the high points, it is understandable to feel disoriented. I have said before that hope is doing the next right thing, working toward a better world even when the outcome is not assured or even clear. Yet if your sense of reality was turned upside down this week, or you were overwhelmed with an experience or a reminder of trauma, maybe the next right thing is especially elusive right now. In that case, the next right thing is to take care of yourself. Drink water. Eat nourishing food. Maybe go outside at some point during the day. Talk to people who care about you. The movement will still be there when you have regained a sense of the ground underneath you. You are a precious being of worth.

Another next right thing is to check up on each other. Remember your federal employee friends. Follow up on a Caring News email. If you’re reaching out to someone who might be having a hard time, you might ask, “Is it OK if I ask how you are?” Let’s try not to make people feel obligated to re-live negative experiences if they aren’t ready. Just being present is often helpful. Even if we can’t fix anything, we can give people the option not to be alone in their grief.

If you have a little more energy and want to channel your feelings into positive actions, consider something that will have a material impact on your local community. R was telling me about Mutual Aid in Washington, DC, especially in Ward 5. For information about Mutual Aid throughout the District, check the website for Bread for the City or find them on Facebook. I also checked in with D, who is involved with Silver Spring/Takoma Park Mutual Aid. You can find them on their Wordpress site or on Facebook. If you’re involved in Mutual Aid, feel free to mention it during Community Sharing or post in the Facebook group later.

R tells me: “Mutual Aid is a non-hierarchical way for neighbors to help neighbors. Anyone can ask for any kind of assistance, and anyone can offer to help. Some roles require some training and learning codes of ethics/responsible service. It's not a particularly ‘formal’ or ‘organized’ thing - it's all hands on deck, and everyone is just doing their best.” R went on to say that there are short-term and long term roles, and those who are able can donate any time.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with dismantling white supremacy, building relationships with your neighbors both is and is not about a larger goal. Building relationships with neighbors is a primary good; it’s something that is valuable and satisfying to do for its own sake. Similarly, offering care when you can and giving people a chance to practice care when you need it are both good, full stop. Neighbors helping neighbors is a form of resistance to oppressive structures.

In addition, neighbors who have strong bonds with each other are in a better position to advocate for their communities. If you and your neighbors are working to overcome environmental racism where you live, or redirect funding to basic human services, or update policies in the local school that have a negative impact on students of color, you will have a head start if you already know each other. This could be its whole own Platform, so I’ll pause there and just say that strong, connected, diverse local communities can be a manifestation of multiracial democracy and a home base for even more positive change.

Forming authentic relationships with our neighbors, community organizing, building power, paying attention to local issues, caring for ourselves and each other: these are some of the tools with which we will resist white supremacy and build multiracial democracy. This way is slow, and it is often hard, and it works. Growing multiracial democracy is a constant practice; Rep. Lewis reminded us that “democracy is not a state.”

When white supremacy attempts to use violence to enforce a warped and harmful vision of who we should be and how we should be together, one of our avenues for resistance is renewing our commitments to communities living into a vision of wholeness. That can mean your local mutual aid society, it can mean a project like the Food Justice Initiative, it can mean a coalition like the Washington Interfaith Network or the Congregation Action Network, it can mean a voting rights organization like Fair Fight, it can mean a community like WES. A better world is possible. There are pockets of it already living and moving among us and around us and within us. Clasping hands (figuratively, for now), traveling together with the winds of our time, let us gather our collective strength to stay grounded in a vision of the world that is possible.

May it be so.

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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When Machiavelli wrote, “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt …,” he was pointing to the truth that knowing what one is up against is a powerful incentive for dealing with it intelligently. Genesis tells us that only in Moses’ time did the Egyptians make clear how harsh was the alternative to the Exodus by deciding to kill their longtime slaves’ baby boys.

Today, the oligarchy that controls American society’s commanding heights leaves those who are neither its members nor its clients little choice but to marshal their forces for their own exodus. The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.

What forces can and can’t this oligarchy bring to bear? We have a hint from Time magazine’s Feb. 4, 2021, valedictory of “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” by leaders of business, labor, and the media, in cooperation with the Democratic Party, that “got states to change voting systems and laws” for the 2020 presidential election in contravention of black-letter constitutional law. Rulings by judges in Michigan and Virginia that changes to those states’ absentee ballot laws were blatantly illegal matters not one whit.

Why not? Because the coalition of masters controls the levers of the state and the press. As Time reveals, they “helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” Because these elites realized that “engaging with toxic content only made it worse,” they decided on “removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.” Instead of answering facts and arguments with which they disagreed, they would ignore their substance and smear whoever voiced them.

The boldness and novelty of these as well as of unmentioned tactics delivered the desired electoral result, and power heretofore unimaginable: Americans in 2021 are being fired or “canceled” from society for whatever anyone connected with the oligarchy finds objectionable—even for asking for evidence of the oligarchy’s assertions. Yet Time tells us that because the process of defeating Donald Trump’s voters angered them further, these oligarchs worry that they gained only “a respite.” Hence the united oligarchy must seek, as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it, permanent “national political dominance.”

Though that dominance seems at hand, the general population’s compliance with it is not. That is because isolating and alienating anybody, let alone half the country, is the proverbial two-edged sword. Anytime you isolate and alienate someone else, you do the same to yourself. The boundaries that the oligarchs have drawn, are drawing, separate them from the American people’s vast majority, whose consciousness of powerlessness and defenselessness clarifies their choice between utter subjection and doing whatever it might take to exit a system that no longer seems to allow for the prospect of republican self-government.

…

By this century’s second decade, the oligarchs who occupy the commanding heights of American life had ceased trying to persuade. Self-government has declined as corporations have wielded public powers with private discretion. America’s ruling class—bipartisan, public and private—grew to disdain the rest of America’s religiosity, patriotism, and tastes. But until our own time, most Americans either had not noticed their loss of status as citizens or assumed that they could vote to regain it. But the rulers inspired no confidence and ruled by pulling rank.

…

Hate-as-identity was key to the ruling class’s victory in the 2020 election. For the elites, indulging sentiments of moral superiority, promoting hate, and rubbing “deplorable” faces in the dirt is a means to secure and mobilize supporters, which itself is incidental to securing the material benefits of power. For those who deliver the votes, indulging hate is affirmation of identity.

Ruling people by insulting and harming them is problematic, and not reversible. The use that the oligarchy made of the COVID epidemic added to insult and injury, as well as to its power, in a manner previously unimaginable. Boldly dismissing without argument the fact that viral infections cannot be stopped from running their course once they have taken root in a population, they asserted that acquiescing to indefinite cessation of social and economic activities they deemed to be nonessential would stop the disease’s progression. The ensuing lockdowns, mask mandates, and other measures made life for most Americans worse in every way. But these strictures also crippled the sectors of American society independent of and resistant to the oligarchy—religious institutions and small businesses. They isolated people and limited what they could hear from and say to each other, leaving them prey to one-way propaganda narratives backed by nightly threats of mob violence.

Correctly, however, the American oligarchy, which resides these days in the Democratic Party, feared that the weaponized, mutually validating narratives with which it had bombarded the population could not guarantee that the American people would vote differently in 2020 than they did in 2016, widespread public dislike for Donald Trump notwithstanding. Not a few suspected that the COVID heavy-handedness had increased resentment among people who had learned to be suspicious of pollsters, reporters, and opinion-samplers.

Ordinary credulity was never enough for swallowing the narrative that universal vote by mail, coupled with drop boxes for ballots and ballot harvesting by self-proclaimed civic groups, plus the reduction or elimination of verification of signatures, would do anything other than transfer electoral power from those who cast votes to those who count them—that is, to the oligarchy and its party. Even so, the ruling class’s victory depended on tens of thousands of votes out of 156 million, in some of the most corrupt counties in the land. In Pennsylvania, the vast majority of all mailed ballots were for Biden. The oligarchy sealed the victory as brazenly as they gained it: by meeting demands for transparency with ad hominem accusations backed by threats of social ostracism and enforced by control, which itself was attained in part by issuing naked threats backed by legislative and bureaucratic power—all over partisan, monopoly digital platforms which eventually participated in censorship.

The oligarchy’s power over American institutions public and private, however, does not change the fact that it rests on near universal voluntary compliance. The irrevocable alienation of and from at least half of Americans has canceled much of the oligarchs’ moral legitimacy and left them obliged to rule by further alienating and punishing—to rule a house that they divided against itself. Hence, the unprecedented power it gathered will prove less significant than the manner in which it did the gathering.

…

The deplorables plainly stand no chance of dismantling the new American system. Corporate executives, not legislatures, governors, or presidents are the ones who decide what happens to the trillions of dollars created jointly by the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. They are the ones who regulate speech and attitudes, who for the most part decide who rises and who does not. And they are the part of the oligarchy most insulated from republican institutions.

…

In our time, millions of people have grown up or been educated no longer to want or be able to live as citizens of what had been the American republic. Partisans in mind, heart, and habit, their support of the oligarchy’s partisan rule has left the United States with two peoples of opposing character, aspirations, and tastes within its national borders. The government bureaucracies are led by persons selected and habituated against the deplorables. The same can be said of the educational establishment and corporate boardrooms. What sort of dictatorial power would it take to purge them? Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst. That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.

Some sort of mostly peaceful exodus is within our powers to achieve. A very bad imitation of Mr. Smith was able to convince 75 million to rise against dangers that were still largely theoretical in 2016. Better imitators can lead many more to act against present ones, and to live within institutions of their own making. We can withdraw our compliance, go our own way, and build anew.

…

Our American exodus won’t be led by a Moses. The Republican Party, with the exception of a few national-level personages, may be as useless as ever. But politics is a collective activity, and the lack of top-down leadership notwithstanding, our exodus is already in progress, thanks to Americans’ legal structures and traditions of state and local autonomy, as well as our Tocquevillian taste for organizing ourselves into ad hoc groups for the common benefit.

…

What to do about the media’s banning or restricting the circulation of ideas with which it disagrees, including the distribution of books and movies, is a major issue of national politics. Without shame, medically unqualified “fact checkers” censor the writings of physicians on medical matters, while defining their own beliefs about gender and race as “science.” Letting such pretenses stand also ratifies the negation of the First Amendment. Overcoming them requires ending the exercise of what amount to governmental powers, indeed of police powers, by nongovernmental persons and entities.

Not so long ago, government power was the only threat to the First Amendment. But oligarchy’s essence is precisely the blurring and blending of public and private power in a partisan manner. Hence, media malpractice must be dealt with as part of a bigger political problem, namely expanding the Bill of Rights’ coverage to ostensibly private entities.

What is to be done about private companies that subject employees to training aimed at convincing them that there is something wrong with being white—or at least pretending to convince them? Or that they must abide by the oligarchy’s preferences? To be sure, state governments may outlaw such training within their borders, as part of their general police power. But big employers may object to such laws as contrary to their own freedom of speech, while asserting that the employees’ attendance at those sessions is voluntary. Even if courts back them up, governors and mayors don’t have to listen and can impose their penalties. Public figures, or brave employees, can organize many if not most employees to stay away and to explain just how wrong it is to racially stereotype. Management can’t fire them all. Yet republican self-government can return to at least some Americans only if and when a bloc of major states puts itself in the position of dictating what will and will not happen within their borders.

…

Until recently, graduation from highly selective colleges seemed to certify their graduates as better for having been admitted, and doubly so for having learned more than students at lesser schools. But for a generation, the Ivy League, Stanford, and others have made a point of admitting many students with lower scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test rather than students with higher ones. In general, and with the exception of physics, chemistry, and pure math, the more highly rated the college, the less work it expects from its students. And since learning is inherently proportionate to studying, graduates of these academic peaks often know less than kids out of Podunk State. Yet they give their students something of supposedly greater practical value than knowledge: prestige, pretentiousness, and access to enviable careers.

Which leads one to ask why the nation’s most powerful consulting groups, private equity firms, and big banks hire Ivy League types and pay them so much. They are not necessarily all that bright or knowledgeable. Why then are they so valuable? Not because of what they know, but who they are: junior members of the oligarchy, identically chosen, trained, and confirmed to defend its interests, to communicate its priorities, and preserve its hierarchy. How come the public-private oligarchy was able to use the COVID challenge to crush independent business, thus transferring massive wealth to itself? Because its various parts are staffed by interconnected people who, whatever their differences, instinctively trump the Smiths’ priorities with those of their own class.

…

The oligarchy’s cancellation of most ordinary people out of its desired America leaves the latter with the choice between helotry and exodus. But since submission to inconstant, inept masters is impossible, common sense suggests counter-canceling: limiting involvement with the oligarchy to minimizing its interference on individuals who don’t share its aims and preferences.

The oligarchy’s cancellation of ordinary working people—of those who actively participate in forms of organized religion, and are otherwise attached to the common norms and values that prevailed in America and shaped the civilization in and by which most of us live—signals an alienation deeper than that between citizens of different but friendly nations. Asking how this cultural chasm has come to be detracts from the hard task of understanding its depth and making the best of it. Like married couples who have lost or given up what had united them, trying to work through irreconcilable differences only drives Americans’ domestic quarrels toward more violence.

#angelo codevilla #tablet magazine #read the whole thing

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cybertrophicr · 3 years

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Atirah's notess 💌:

Politic should be a medium positively used for performing skills of leading the world toward a better nation that give benefits regardless the status. It is a battlefield to propose effective system to build some better places, homes and needs for everyone in the particular area without any hidden intention that might force another party to involve in situation that need some kinds of bribery.

We understand that, as a human being, some of us might get desperate to gain wealth and power through easy channel that are well planned so that normal citizen would never thought the dirty works that are being done behind.

But, I can tell that, no matter what the situation is regardless whoever responsible for the orders that come from government, citizens are not that fool to think how much dirty they are.

It has been 5 months that citizen are being lockdown in their own home without giving permission to cross the border. Living in Malaysia is weird because lockdown is the useless one to portray how the lockdown should be. We are just having time being prisoned in our own house and only can stay in 10 km radius. The weird thing is, vvip can even cross the border just to do some useless appointment and of course, with no doubt, they could lie to authority using some believable reason that makes them feel firm with their decision to allow them just like that. And if they being honest, some of the authorities in malaysia are hopeless because they could not able to give compound to those vvip who are againts the rule. To make it as summary, rules in Malaysia are typically for average community while for those who are getting richer has taking advantage on authorities whether they pay them or they use their power to tame them. Average community is not allowed to be outspoken for their unfairness because they will be charged with huge compound that they could not able to pay for it.

I do not fully understand to the fact that authorities who suppose to protect minority from being oppressed by the rich one that we dont see their way to take people beliefs for advantage. August is around the corner and cases are getting higher every single day. Still, the government is doing nothing benefits for the whole citizen except waiting for the percentage of vaccines given out to people and factories are not closing, as well as addition of new cases every single day.

#Malaysian #People #Hatred #Bisu #Menteri #Parlimen #Politic #Opinion #I dont ask you to buy it

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swordoforion · 3 years

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Orion Digest №29 — The Imperative to Fight Against War and Oppression

The world faces a clear and present danger — the quest for greater power. That lofty goal of being raised above others, of being at the top, is one people have sought after for all of human history — and as a result, we have hardly ever gone a year without war, and the concept of being born in a comfortable life without struggling against disadvantage are left to chance. It’s not as if life has to be this way — everyone in the world has a need, and society in its most ideal would serve to use the resources around us to make those needs fulfilled. But even if ‘world peace’ is a goal everyone would like to promote, our world’s current power structure has proven time and time again to be incapable and incompetent at the simple task of achieving it.

World peace is by no means a push of a button, but compared to all we have done, it is relatively simple. We’ve evaporated cities, dug trenches that connect oceans, created vast cities and libraries from the forests and plains we were born into. I speak to you now over a vast, global system of communication accomplished through machines in the sky, available simultaneously wherever you are in the world. To understand that no one can win in the end by trying to create imbalance, by trying to push agendas onto others without effective communication, is a concept we try to teach to toddlers, yet it is something that the nations and factions of the world cannot bring themselves to grasp through the fog of the narrative they have built. Call it protection, call it a crusade, but in the end it’s greed and stubbornness.

Right now, across the world, people are at each other’s throats because the idea of coexisting is intolerable to them. The states of Israel and Palestine wage war against each other over ancient land, stolen and fought for over the course of thousands of years. The insistence upon Israel as a sovereign state rather than the integration of both into a state based on structure and not religious determination keeps the citizens of both nations in fear and anger — a bloodbath in the making all for allies to make a profit and meet a quota. Further east within Eurasia, the People’s Republic of China cracks down upon its citizens with violent force and censorship, undermining the basis of their argument by turning into the very monster secessionists make them out to be. Rather than hear out the claims of their citizens, they choose instead to use live fire, tear gas, and media silencing to solve issues — plugging a leak while creating ten more. Across the ocean, the United States finds itself unable to answer the problems of increasing gun violence, ecological destruction, public health risks, and the incompetence of its own justice system due to the idea that any give will allow the “other party” to gain ground, and thus we must fester in our national stalemate.

The list goes on and on, but the problem remains the same — the world powers as we know them now, whether economic or political, have lost touch with the people they represent, and are so lost in the world they know that they will never achieve world peace. Fighting and scheming around others for the good of their own citizens is their modus operandi, but they cannot see that even their own citizens are losing faith. Worse still, as they fight enemies abroad, they fight their constituents at home, until the question really becomes “who are they fighting for?” This conflict, these wars, this suppression of outcry and questioning loses any inherent sense of morality, and one thing becomes clear — modern government has become incompetent. Perhaps it always was, and the previous millennia were just a story of corrupted growth into what we are today.

So long as people suffer, as long as innocent civilians bleed and die and go hungry because of the conflict of factions and governments, we have a moral imperative to find a better way, and to achieve change as quickly and efficiently as possible. This question of how to build a better world is not just an abstract thought — it is a solution to a real and present danger, a ticking timebomb where every second costs lives. We’ve stumbled as an international society enough times throughout human history to know better, but those in power see a global society as a standoff where only the foolish put their gun down first, rather than a community where everyone has needs, and working together logically, we can distribute the resources and assistance to make sure all those needs are filled.

This isn’t a problem any one nation is responsible for — every nation contributes to it, and every nation must stand down or be made to stand down. So long has mistrust been the way of the world that it is hard to fathom ever letting our guard down, and surely, if one nation were to let themselves be open, another might come in and become opportunistic, unconvinced that every other nation would follow the first’s example. The first nation would then learn to not trust the others, and because of that shared belief that all others would take advantage in a moment of weakness, no one would step forward in the first place. So, if the current existing governments are not willing to sacrifice power for the sake of using it for the greater good of helping and healing the world, they should not be entrusted with it.

It is our imperative specifically to make and fight for change while others suffer, because complacency with unequal and unjust distribution of power and resources makes one yet another resource to add to the wealth of the corrupt. If you simply feel anger but continue along the same path, you will still have serviced that which you hate — another brick lain in the tower. There is no sense of neutrality — we must act together in the interest of ending bloodshed across the world. If ever there was a reason to fight, the growing death and poverty on Earth is absolute just cause. Our opponent is not any one person — it is instead this way of thinking, this system of war and mistrust constructed by fear, and the politics and economics that perpetrates it. It is a battle that must be fought not with guns and bombs but speeches and shields; protecting those in danger and calling with every voice on Earth to stop the train before it runs us all off the tracks.

Society is a construct that should always be for the benefit and ease of the citizens within it. It is a machine we created for the purpose of automating practices too confusing for each person to figure out all on their own. It has lost its purpose of it disadvantages and harms the people within it, and you do not keep using a broken machine, let alone worship it. You fix the machine, and if unfixable, you replace it. It doesn’t matter how old or big our nations and their governments are. It doesn’t matter how important decorated medals and positions may be. As long as just one person is unjustly hurt or unfairly treated, it is our duty to our human family to fight to our last breath until the problem is fixed, no matter how far we have to go, no matter how bold we must be.

- DKTC FL

#imperative #war #oppression #israel #palestine #china #taiwan #esf #power #world peace #politics #international politics #world politics #orion #orion digest #sword of orion #government #corrupt government #broken machine

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warsofasoiaf · 4 years

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The Celtic Tiger - A Kaiserreich Ireland AAR Chapter 4: Soldiers Are We

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” -W.B. Yeats

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4 January 1939 - Economic Session of the Dail, Dublin, Ireland

Michael Collins had been debating initiatives to help smooth things over with the Ulster Unionists in the North. He had already revitalized plenty of the region’s industrial base, Harland and Wolff and the Short Brothers Aerospace PLC were employing plenty of people in Belfast, but the new American refugees had caused a great deal of cultural friction. The Unionist Party was never particularly quiet about their opinions on the state of affairs, but things were actively getting worse in Northern Ireland.

“We should expand the steel initiative.” Collins had addressed the Dail in the annual IEAA meeting. “Producing steel domestically will allow us to better manage supply shortages in the event that our trade is cut off, and domestic steel production will be invaluable to the factories and shipyards. Belfast has made a compelling point, they have a significant amount of steelworking knowledge and experience that would meet the target goals faster than they would in other regions. Belfast will reclaim her old mantle as our very own Steel City. The Open For Business Initiative has put us significantly in the black this past year, we can afford to invest heavily in steel production in Ulster along with zinc mining in our rural provinces. That should keep us in boom times and diversify our economic base, in case any post-Black Monday bubbles pop.”

Privately, Collins was more concerned with placating the Unionists. They had been complaining that Dublin was largely favored over Belfast, and that the Open for Business Initiative was an attempt to lure away the young workers of Northern Ireland to Dublin where they would lose their culture, and their voices, largely swallowed up by the Catholic voters. Violent crime was steadily rising in Belfast, the victims being either Catholics or American refugees, or reprisal attacks by Catholics. If there was a war, he could not reliably count on Ulster, even in the face of aggression from the Union. That was a pity. That had been the British strategy against Ireland, divide and conquer. Something would have to give very soon, no amount of economic bandaging was going to resolve the core tension within Ulster - they did not see themselves as part of an Irish Republic.

An aide burst into the meeting hall, causing a minor clamor and it took some time to restore order. The aide burst out breathlessly. “The Union, sir, they’re steaming out of port. The RMS Rebecca is going full-speed at our destroyers in the Irish Sea.” The poor fellow could barely complete a full sentence, his stammering professed an almost lack of belief in what was happening.

“Have they declared war?” Collins asked. The Union and Ireland did not have normalized relations, but that did not mean no information passed between the two countries. G2, the Directorate of Military Intelligence routinely monitored diplomatic intentions within Mosley’s government. Of all the espionage work performed by the Directorate, the Union accounted for almost fifty percent of its foreign operations, perhaps even more.

“No, sir. No word.”

What was frightening about Mosley’s intentions was how much sense it made to Collins. Mosley and Deat, despite their opposition to each other, had stressed the urgency of the revolution at their electoral campaigns, and had prosecuted an aggressive foreign policy to export syndicalism to the world. Both had turned inwards, Deat had been particularly violent in his purging of Blum and Gamelin, and they believed now that without dissent, they would not have naysayers and fifth columnists betraying their governments. By all accounts, their countries were ready to stand at the forefront of a global transformation. Yet the results were not successful. France and Britain had been completely humiliated in the Second American Civil War, with Reed about to face a war crimes tribunal. The Commune of France had threatened to annex Savoy only to have Switzerland seek German support and membership within the Reichspakt, and Deat had backed down. A defeat, militarily, within Europe, would be a disaster, evidence of endemic weakness of the Internationale’s new leadership.

Ireland would have been Mosley’s choice for a target. The stunning growth of the Irish economy and rise in the Irish standard of living would be an ideological foe, proof perhaps, that another way would be better. It was close to Britain and far from Mosley’s foes in Germany, Canada, and the United States. Its army and navy were tiny, compared to the Union’s. If they hurried, it could be a fait accompli no matter what any of the other great powers would do.

Collins thought for a moment. Ireland had benefited significantly from its neutrality between Entente and Reichspakt, not the least of which because it hadn’t been drawn into Germany’s wars as it had in Ukraine. The Open for Business Initiative never would have succeeded had Ireland been fully within the German sphere, and trade with the Entente had pacified the Anglophiles in the Centre Party. It was a natural pivot point that Ireland, as the middleman, could profit from. But an invasion of Ireland would see Ireland severely outnumbered in manpower and industrial capacity.

“Get ahold of Admiral O’Muiris, have him mine the Irish Sea. Conduct a full investigation of the radar stations and anti-aircraft batteries, I want them in perfect working condition yesterday. No more drills, our men must go immediately to battle positions. See what we can learn about any invasion plans, put G2 on it; if they’re planning to land, I want to know where so we can put enough guns to turn their landing craft to splinters.” Collins spoke as if it were 20 years ago, as if he was that same man, ready to fight the last time the British refused the demand of Irish independence. “Also, let’s see if there are others as willing to fight for Ireland as we are, start with the Kaiser.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“We look farther then. Look to Canada if you have to.”

“Are you going to invite the Windsors back in?”

“Not for a moment, but sometimes you must deal with devils. ”

---

25 January 1939 - Áras an Uachtaráin, Dublin, Ireland

It was the worst possible news.

The Kaiser had been unable to provide support for Ireland. The Vozhd was threatening the Baltic Duchy and White Ruthenia with his goal of one land for all the Russian people, and Wilhelm II would not abandon them for a western war, especially not one who was not in the Reichspakt. Canada too, could not commit to protecting Ireland, as they were engaged in a large-scale war in India with the Princely Federation. The United States was still deep into Reconstruction, President Garner would not deploy the badly-battered US Army into a foreign campaign when there were still cholera outbreaks and people dying of exposure. They were all perfectly reasonable excuses, but it led Collins to an inescapable conclusion: Ireland was on its own.

No doubt Mosley was jumping for joy. His ambitions would not be curtailed by the major anti-syndicalist factions. Protests certainly arose, even within the Union itself, but Mosley had been able to quell them with daily speeches against Ireland, lambasting the nation for its capitalist economic policies, its embargo of British goods, and the ethnic tensions between Ulster and the rest of Ireland, which Mosley alleged to be inspired by Stephen X and a precursor to the establishment of a Catholic theocratic state. He had harshly criticized Dan McKenna, accusing him and the Thunderbolts of war crimes, summary executions of British volunteers, and torture of Union prisoners; a pointed criticism given that McKenna was soon to return to the United States to give his testimony on Welfare Island and the atrocities that had taken place in the Mississippi Delta.

Collins had established the Mosley Gan Mosley program on 2RN in response, with Irish comedians regularly mocking Mosley’s wild proclamations and providing evidence against his more spurious claims. Collins ensured that the broadcasts were transmitted on a wide band toward the British Isles, focusing on Scotland and Wales as the Autonomists had chafed under Mosley’s centralization and embrace of British nationalism. Collins directed the program to emphasize Mosley’s speeches as expressions of old British imperialism in the hopes of creating public unrest at home. He wondered if it was working at all, or if he was simply trying to give everyone a laugh before the end.

The days after the German and Canadian refusal had been a tense form of limbo. The An tAerchór only had a few fighter planes with limited training, nothing compared to the British Republican Air Force. Sending up pilots would be risky, and casualties would be high. The An tSeirbhís Chabhlaigh was only slightly better off. The cruisers and destroyers were unlikely to match the British Navy in naval combat, but the submarines could pose a serious threat, and advances in naval mines would help cause further casualties among the landing craft. There was no getting around it, the Irish did not have the ability to contest the seas and so would be forced to repel the invasion with their ground forces. Civilians had been preparing for the coming disaster with air raid drills. Last-minute preparations for war were almost all that Collins could hope for, war would come, and Ireland would be alone.

“To ensure the liberation of the working class from the chains of oppressive and exploitative political and economic systems in the pursuit of global peace has been the compelling and continuing mission of the Socialist Union of Britain. To cultivate friendly relationships with nations likewise dedicated to the emancipation of those enslaved peoples and continue to progress toward the prosperity of mankind has always been the foundation of our foreign policy.

Wherefore the government of Michael Collins has engaged and continues to engage in an economic and political system within the Republic of Ireland that deprives the Irish Worker of the fruits of his labor and depends upon his continued shackling to the dictates of Capital in violation of the Internationale Declaration of Human Rights. In pursuit of its goals against the working class, the Irish Republican government has illegally prohibited the Irish Worker to establish a political party to advance their interests in violation of the 1925 Irish Constitution’s declaration of freedom of association by banning the Labour Party.

The Socialist Union of Britain, in defense of the Irish Worker, therefore demands the reformation of the Irish government to that of a Regional Provincial Workers Council to be directly administered under the oversight of the Trades Union Congress and in accordance with the laws and principles of the Socialist Union of Britain.”

Yet, instead of an immediate declaration of war, Mosley had elected to send words, much to Collins's surprise. For a moment, the Taioseach wondered why Mosley had even bothered, such was the extent of his demands. Perhaps it was to spare himself a war while the Internationale conserved their fighting strength for other targets, or perhaps it was a compromise asked by France. Maybe Mosley thought that Ireland would surrender and he could one-up Deat who had failed to have his ultimatum obeyed. As he had read the words, Collins had almost torn the paper in anger, and among the ministers he had invited to the closed session, he had seen similar expressions on their faces. They may have disagreed on everything else, but not on this.

“The Republic of Ireland will not submit to the colonial dictates of Oswald Mosley. We consider these demands completely illegitimate and a violation of the sovereignty of the independent Republic of Ireland and the government recognized by the Irish people. The Irish Republic is a free and independent nation, and shall not surrender to the British yoke that has for centuries defined the history of Ireland with cruelty and deprivation. We demand the unequivocal cessation of all hostilities against the Republic of Ireland, the immediate removal of British ships from Irish territorial waters, and the abrogation of all demands and claims against the island of Ireland. We also call on the Third Internationale to condemn such a demand and reconsider their relationship with an aggressive nation dedicated to a mission of subjugation.”

Collins was sure that would get Mosley’s anger up. His support of the Anti-Colonialist movement could not abide a direct challenge by naming him the colonist that his government had spoken so long about overthrowing. The Union fixated upon proving that they were not the old British Empire, that they were a modern, just triumph over backward authoritarianism. Questioning the Union’s place in the Internationale was sure to cause some stir as well. South America had long spoken against European colonialism, and Chile had considered itself a bastion of colonial liberation within the continent. Even though Chile had not joined the Internationale, their success in Latin America and their support of Britain and France’s mission had mattered greatly within left-wing intellectual circles; it was their testament against accusations of colonialism. Robbing Mosley of Chilean support could cause unrest at home and with other syndicalist nations like Burma, and perhaps end his expansionist ambitions on Ireland.

Collins was only half-right. None of the major syndicalist nations saw fit to criticize Mosley, neither Chile, nor Burma, nor France, nor the Socialist Republic of Italy in Torino had seen fit to condemn Mosley’s action, nor was any independent comment from the Third Syndicalist Internationale forthcoming, at least not any that Collins had seen or heard. What was true is that Mosley was furious. He had read the Irish response out loud in the Trade Union Congress, and had immediately moved for a declaration of war. It had not been a request, not that any would oppose him after his centralizing purges in ‘37 and ‘38, but the British people were fired up. The declaration of war had been delivered, and almost immediately, planes began flying overhead, and the air raid sirens gave their low bleak wail. For a moment, Collins was certain that he could hear them as a banshee’s wail, and wondered whose death warrant he had just signed.

---

28 March 1939 - Command Bunker, Dublin, Ireland

It had been months since the declaration of war, and bombing missions had been flown against Ireland daily. The anti-aircraft guns and radar stations did their part, but the Union still commanded the skies. They had prioritized strategic bombing, hitting factories, port facilities, and coastal fortresses, but any target would do in a pinch. Each day, Collins made sure to hear the casualty counts, and each day he would address the nation by radio, encouraging them to continue to fight on. Every man, woman, and child had been doing their part. The Union had done a good job choking the imports of steel in an attempt to starve the Irish industrial machine. Air raid shelters had been a regular part of construction during the massive push for industrialization, and for that Collins had been grateful for what foresight he had. Even one life saved was worth it, but thousands had been spared being killed or maimed in a night raid or building collapse. That was small comfort, because fewer people dying still meant people were dying on his watch, soldiers and civilians alike.

G2 had conducted countless missions against the Union. Infiltrating the Army and Marine Corps were a top priority, any landing or invasion plans were a high priority for their agents. It had been a difficult endeavor, but Nancy Stewart, a Union turncoat who had lost her family members in Mosley’s purges and had been recruited to G2 as a local asset, had outdone herself. She had spoken to an overworked member of base security, stolen his keys and identification card, and had snuck it to her colleagues after drugging the man’s gin and dragging him home posing as his girlfriend. From there, Nancy and Rachael O’Brien, who had been recruited from the Cumann na mBan as part of Collins’s efforts to recruit sabotage experts for the Irish intelligence services, had been able to copy the plans all night before sneaking out the next morning, returning everything that they had left before their victim recovered from his night. The plans had been scheduled for late June, to land in the Clew Bay and Killary Harbor, on the west of Ireland.

Surprise was the Union’s primary goal, the territory in that region was a difficult landing, but if the Union soldiers were able to land and fortify, they could use the terrain to repulse an attack, perhaps even establish a breakout while forces had to cross the River Shannon and potentially seize Irish fortifications. The Republican Army was not concentrated in County Mayo, the likely destination would be on the east coast and it was there that they fortified with machine guns and artillery. The Union elected to launch from Cornwall, with a diversionary operation from Liverpool and the Isle of Man. Admiral O’Muiris elected to keep a defensive posture in a double-bluff; he didn’t want to risk any of his few ships on pursuing the Republican feint but kept his ships close to make it seem that he had not known about the Galway-Mayo landings. He didn’t like it, but if they could push back the attack, it might force Mosley to abort his attempt.

Tom Barry had stationed his men in Sligo and Galway city, waiting for forward observers to spot the landings on the western coast. The 1st Armored Division and the 2nd ‘Spearhead’ infantry would strike from Galway, while a mobilized force of cavalry Gardai would strike from surprise from the northeast. The 1st Thunderbolts were given the most difficult position, to fight a pre-dawn attack against the northern landing. Once they had attacked and cleared the beaches, they would march south and attack the main landing zone where the beaches were longer and flatter, supporting the most landing forces. Collins had hoped that he could bombard the beaches to oblivion, pinning the British invasion force soon after it had landed, and destroying their landing craft so they could not retreat.

The landings were commanded by Thomas Wintringham, who had decided to primarily use regular army forces. He had petitioned Mosley for more men, but as that would have compromised the Welsh and Cornwall defensive region, so he was forced to call upon the West Lowlands Home Guard to fill out the invasion. In the middle of the night, the British had attempted to make the landings, but the currents had taken several of the landing craft off course to Galway, where a general alarm had been sounded and the landing craft subject to a heavy barrage. The anti-aircraft turrets weren’t able to be redirected toward the sea, but the river defenses on the Claddagh had utilized static artillery and machine gun pillboxes to create killzones, and the ports within Galway city had been blockaded.

The mobilized Gardai Síochána and the 1st Thunderbolts moved to their northern position, and Barry began to push with a combined infantry and armor push toward the main landing zones. As it was a night landing, the Republican Air Force was unable to provide air support to its invasion zones. The Thunderbolts had marched all night and shot the Mayo landing forces to pieces as they arrived, keeping in contact with radio and light signals, before turning south to attack the main landing point. The 1st Armored advanced rapidly with light tanks before abruptly turning. Ground forces commanders, thinking that the Irish attack had been aborted because the tanks had outpaced their infantry, had attempted a shock charge to attack the Irish armor when they were out of position. Having advanced quickly, Barry closed the net, attacking with the South Mayo Flying Column and the 2nd Spearhead Division as the light tanks returned to repair the damage they had sustained during the light engagement. The ambush had taken the Union forces completely by surprise, and they were scattered, allowing Tom Maguire to push forward with his native Mayo forces and the Dublin Rifles toward the beach landings.

Continuing his hard push, Barry repeatedly probed the Union lines on the beaches, following up weakpoints with infiltration tactics and strongpoints with a withering suppressive barrage of artillery fire. Admiral Richard Boyle, commanding the U-Boats, attacked as the sun began to give visibility, sinking supply ships and troop transports. As the British Republican Air Force began to fly to support their mission, they had found the beaches to be a disaster area, littered with dead Union soldiers and destroyed Union equipment. The Union soldiers had fought tenaciously, but ultimately could not break out of the beachhead. As the hours stretched on, eventually the divisions surrendered. The first invasion of Ireland had been successfully repulsed.

Collins hadn’t been able to sleep, and paced in his command center the night of the march no matter what he tried. Mulcahy had opted to handle the long wait and let Collins try to get a few hours of sleep on a cot, but neither man believed that such a thing could really happen. When the news had come, Collins had listened to Maguire’s report almost dumbfounded, as if he expected to be woken up at any time. A complete success on all fronts, the British invasion had been foiled, and Irish casualties had been exceptionally low. Killed and wounded, Ireland had suffered just short of 3,000 casualties, roughly evenly split among the divisions in theater. The Union had suffered over 111,000 killed or captured in the failed raid, and what few weren’t captured were isolated and fleeing for their lives in the Irish countryside. It had been an overwhelming victory.

“My God, we certainly gave them a bloody nose.” Mulcahy, just as stunned as Collins himself, nodded approvingly.

“Then let us hope all it takes is a bloody nose.” Collins replied glumly.

---

“To conclude, what I witnessed in my almost-two years of volunteer service within the Second American Civil War was commitment in its best and worst forms. The Federal government, armed forces, and civilians of the United States had acted in devotion to their government and their mission, preserving their country and Constitution. Its reverse was true of its foes, a commitment to the annihilation of those who did not fit within their vision.” -Daniel McKenna, closing remarks, Denver Trials

McKenna didn’t belong here. Mosley had tried to invade his homeland. Every man was needed to fight. It was only a direct order from Michael Collins that had sent him to the United States. “We need foreign support more than we need one more general. The Thunderbolts will be well-led, you have my word. If the truth can come out about what had happened in New York, then we can push for further support. Your actions may help the war effort far more than back here in the homeland.”

McKenna thought the idea was sound, but he wasn’t seeing it pan out. Foreign support wouldn’t be pouring in, what had happened in the United States was already known and rationalized away. It was closure for the Americans, perhaps, but abstract notions of justice being punished hardly mattered when real Irish men and women were dying from British bombs. He had gone because he was a soldier and that meant obeying the orders of his commander-in-chief. McKenna had hoped that he could give a quick testimony and return, but he had been approached by the Irish-American Aid Association to give speeches to raise funds to donate supplies for Ireland. The United States was still recovering, but there were plenty of descendants from the Irish diaspora who were willing to donate food, money, and weapons to the Irish cause. That was something at least, some good had to come from this excursion.

McKenna remained in Denver as the tribunal judges deliberated their verdict. Reporters had hounded him the second he stepped out of his hotel until the second he stepped back in, even preventing him from enjoying any meals, calling them a bunch of cicadas in private. However, he was surprised to meet the reporter that he had met in New York covering the Denver Trials. Ruth Sofer had become a minor celebrity for her coverage of Welfare Island, and had resolved to write about the victims and perpetrators of the Second Civil War. “In my view, anything less would be cowardly, and I’ve been told I have an ironclad heart.“ Over dinner, Sofer interviewed McKenna, not only asking him further about Welfare Island, but telling him what she had learned in interviewing members of the Union State and Combined Syndicates who had been guilty of categorical atrocity, and what could have motivated them to do such a thing. It had sickened McKenna to his stomach, but no battle was too difficult for a soldier, and he obeyed his orders.

McKenna had wanted to return to Ireland quickly, but felt compelled to stay to help Sofer until she had finished her manuscript. Her book, Superfluous People, was a chilling examination of the systems of the two rebel movements within the Second American Civil War, their conceptions of a new transformation of reality in a form of secular millenarianism. Most of the second section of the book detailed the rationalizations regarding those to be left out of the new world, and the philosophies of the movements that originated these rationalizations, and the appeals both real and imagined that gave strength to these movements. The third and final section detailed the jump from theory to practice, exhaustively compiled through interviews of ground-level commanders that oversaw these eliminations in action. Notably, Sofer expounded at length on the Federal government in permitting Jim Crow legislation in the South as the foundation for groups like the Silver Legion.

Once the manuscript had been completed, only then did McKenna, hitching a ride on a supply ship from the Irish-American Aid Association, return home, to take up the command of his Thunderbolts once again.

---

12 June 1939 - Forward Command Post, Carrick-On-Shannon

After the failed invasion of Connacht, Mosley had blamed the militia system of the Trade Union Congress, finding the failure of the invasion to principally be the fault of the militia system’s poor organization. To Mosley, the inability of the Union Army to probably organize into a coherent and effective fighting force prevented them from successfully managing the Irish counter-attack until the greater numbers of the British army could land. Mosley dissolved the militias and established a more formalized military with an established central command structure. Officers could no longer be elected by fellow soldiers, Mosley had instead integrated soldier assent via the promotion board and mandated promotion in part on merit and ability to accomplish objectives.

Mosley also reached out to the Communards across the Channel. Deat had not supported Mosley’s invasion of Ireland initially, but he was eager to demonstrate the prowess of the Communard Army. He had anticipated Mosley seeking help, but had thought it would have been more for occupation duties, and had planned for landing from Brittany to land in County Cork on the southern side of Ireland in the middle of August. The initial attacks were mere probing attempts, to see the Munster defenses and better analyze how best to invade Ireland. The weather conditions were right on the 15th of August. Unlike the earlier British invasion, the Communard elected on a daylight landing so their airpower could support the ground invasion. The increased visibility meant the Fenian Rams were able to find the French landings, sinking several troop transports and escort vessels and sinking before the destroyers and naval bombers could attack. Despite the navy’s efforts, French forces were also able to land at Baltimore and in a pasture in County Wexford after being shelled by Irish Republican forces in Waterford. The Dublin Rifles and 3rd ‘Black Badgers’ Division attacked in the Battle of the Sheepfold, where the lack of cover led to high casualties on both sides. The Baltimore landings fared little better, the rocky and open ground provided little cover, and the Irish forces were hard-pressed until reinforcements were trucked in from Limerick.

The landings had similarly failed, though Deat had committed few forces and his troops were far more successful than Mosley’s initial foray. Deat had demanded that Wintringham coordinate with the Communard army for a joint invasion of Connacht. Collins had been able to repulse the Communard landings because his forces, not pressured on multiple fronts, had been able to relieve each other. Overwhelming numerical force would be able to do what smaller forces could not. As Ireland was considered Union territory and the Commune required most of its divisions along the border with the Kaiserreich, the Union would supply most of the manpower for the invasion, although the supreme commander would be from the Communard Army. Union and Communard planes and ships would combine for the endeavor, to support landings from County Claire to Sligo.

The larger invasion force did succeed in its goals. Mosley’s centralization efforts had restructured the militias into an effective and organized fighting force. By standardizing equipment and radio procedures, the Union had been able to break through at Clew Bay, getting off the exposed beach. The Donnelly Division had been scattered, and the French were able to land in County Mayo and attack Sligo after a ferocious onslaught of terror bombing. The initial objectives only sought to reach the River Shannon, as the fortifications made crossing the river a daunting task. The Union took Galway after three days of fighting, Irish Republicans had retreated to the forests and hills outside of the urban centers. After five days, almost the entire province of Connacht was under Communard control. In Sligo and Galway, the Irish tricolor was lowered from the city halls and replaced with the hammer and torch of the Union of Britain, and the Internationale was sung.

The Internationale also executed Irish Republican prisoners. A captain of the 1st Thunderbolts was singled out as a particularly grave offender, accused of having committed war crimes against Union volunteers in Philadelphia during the Second American Civil War. During his impromptu tribunal hearing, he loudly denied the charges against him, demanded hard evidence be presented instead of “self-serving lies from a nation of cowards,” and accused the Internationale of being mass murderers, imperialists, and “the bootlicking spawn of Oliver Cromwell,” disrupting the impromptu tribunal to the point where it was impossible to convene any proper hearing. During the occupation of Connacht, hundreds of civilians were executed. Some were executed for supporting Irish Republican partisan activity or giving supplies to holdout forces, some were members of the Catholic clergy, some others for not turning over foodstuffs to the Internationale army, and yet others were executed after being identified as business owners or landlords by native Irish socialists. The accused were given drumhead trials, their property seized, and hanged from lamposts.

When the news out of Connacht reached Collins, he ordered an effort to retake the lost province. That night, Richard Mulcahy, Hugo MacNeill, and Tom Barry outlined their combined plan to surround and eliminate the invaders, called Operation Execution Ground. A night march along the Atlantic Way from Derry to Sligo led by Barry and Maguire, a march north along the River Shannon toward Sligo for Dublin forces, and the main force pushing up toward Galway from their previous positions in Munster led by MacNeill. The Thunderbolts and Black Badgers, the elite infantry units of the Irish Republican Army, would bloody the Commune in Sligo, while the 2nd Spearheads would seize and destroy stockpiles and command posts that led from Sligo to the Mayo landing points, preventing resupply. Police volunteers from the Gardai offered to help encircle the Communards while the Union forces faced the main infantry force southeast of Galway. It left Belfast and Dublin critically exposed, only their naval minefields and garrison forces would protect them.

Cathal Brugha, already getting old, volunteered to lead any home guard for Dublin. Unafraid of any invasion, he insisted that regulars and volunteers support the Irish Republican Army. With a pistol in hand, he gave a stirring speech, that he would defend the Four Courts by himself if it meant that the interlopers were driven from Irish soil. Collins and Brugha took a photo of themselves, pistols in hand, standing on the steps of the Dail, saying that all Irish citizens young and old can do their part for the fight.

Liam Lynch commanded the infantry coming from the south. When he had seen the bodies in Galway, he told the troops under his command that they were not obligated to “be kind to those who have shown us their cruelty.” Both in Sligo and Galway, the Irish Republican Army ordered heavy shellings on enemy positions followed by aggressive charges. The cavalry forces and the Spearheads moved along the shore, attacking supply lines and cutting off avenues of retreat. To complete the encirclement, the Thunderbolts moved to the west, hoping to break the Communard forces first so that they would flee east into hostile territory rather than west toward the Union.

A G2 agent, masquerading as a sympathetic Irish turncoat, made contact with the Communard forces in their forward positions by the River Shannon. Carrying mock orders, G2 successfully tricked the Communard forces into believing that the Irish had seized radio equipment and were attempting to trick them into thinking that they were attacking their landing sites in an attempt to move them out of their defensive positions and ambush them. The Communards didn’t leave for several hours until communications were severed entirely, exposing the ruse. The extra time proved invaluable to the Irish Republican Army, who were able to complete their encirclement before ordering an attack from all sides. Without radio communications, and surrounded on all sides, the Communard forces were shot to pieces. Only the units hunting the partisans to the west were able to successfully rendezvous with Union forces, the rest, after a ferocious battle, surrendered en masse.

The Union forces opted to abandon Galway early, and establish a strong position near their landing zones with Communard forces that had been ambushed in the forests to the west of Sligo. Lynch continued to push aggressively with his infantry, issuing Pervetin rations to the infantry under his command to sustain the attack. As Lynch turned to support the French encirclement, the Union returned to attack the city, revealing their earlier retreat as a ruse to attack while the Irish before their armies could get into position. The Donnelly Division, who had tried to hold Galway, were almost completely destroyed as a fighting unit, losing almost half of their fighting force. A relief effort from the Spearheads was the only thing to save Galway from being overrun.

Only after the Communard Army was defeated did the army regroup and push toward Clew Bay. In the same position that the previous invasion failed, the Union and Communard forces fought a desperate defense. Eventually, the Internationale’s forces were ground down as they began to run out of ammunition and wounds began to take their toll. The news of the murdered civilians and POW’s had enraged the Irish Republican Army, and the Internationale’s landing zone was subject to intense bombardment that, in the words of one private: “seemed to be the devil’s own hand reaching out with one fell swoop to wreak his evil upon the world.” With little in the way of functional radio equipment, surrender was only possible at night when a desperate signals operator flashed Morse code using a spotlight to communicate surrender.

The aftermath of the invasion of Connacht was tragic. Prisoners were marched in chains to prisons in the center of the country, and many officers and enlisted both were sent to firing squads if they were found to have had a hand in executing Irish civilians or in stealing food from non-combatants. Confessions were broadcast around the world about what had happened in Connacht, with the Internationale virulently denying the charges, accusing the Irish of fabricating war crimes to inflame public support and justify their unjust executions of prisoners of war. Collins had barely heard the figures - eight thousand Irish soldiers had been killed or wounded, while the enemy had suffered 179,000. Most of them had been Union soldiers, about 115,000, while France had taken around 75,000. The numbers were one thing, but his people were executed by a foreign power on Irish soil. It was the subjugation of Ireland all over again. Even if they had taken back their territory, how much more would it cost? The Internationale had six times the industrial capacity and fielded far more men. Even now, there had been no indication that Deat would abandon the fight or Mosley call for a truce. Perhaps they would drown Ireland in blood, if they couldn’t have it for themselves.

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30 June 1939 - Special Joint Session of Congress, Washington D.C., United States of America

“If you will not fight for the Irish, help the Irish fight.” -Eamon “Dev” de Valera

If there was one good thing to come out of the failed invasion of Ireland, it’s that the world finally seemed to wake up to Ireland’s plight. Eamon de Valera had gone to the United States to lobby for more support, and he had been received warmly by President Garner. Warm regards, however, hadn’t translated to what Dev had actually sought, a threat from the United States to back down or face war. The Gallup polls had been encouraging: 47 percent of Americans favored unqualified economic and materiel support to include shipments of food and oil to Ireland, which went up to 57 percent when the responses included “provided it does not enter us into the war.” Most opposition had come from the thought that America still required all of its strength to rebuild, but estimates had been heartening, support for Ireland wouldn’t threaten American recovery, or so the economic analysts had said. There had been much pain suffered by the United States, but it was on the road to recovery. Major Longist guerrilla networks that were uncovered in the Lousiana bayous had been broken up, and the last remnants of the socialist resistance had been killed or arrested among the factory wreckage of Chicago’s industrial district. It was heartening to see America recovering so quickly.

Food and medical supplies, unarmed and flagged as humanitarian aid vessels, had already sailed to Ireland mostly without problems. The Union Navy demanded the right to search the ships, but Collins had threatened that if humanitarian food aid to Ireland was cut, the first people to starve would be the prisoners taken during the failed invasion. Dev had hoped to acquire more significant war support than mere food aid. Even basic equipment was starting to run bare in the depots, and bombing raids had started to take their toll on the factories. America had the industrial capacity needed to supply the Irish war effort, if it could only turn on the taps, an endless river of artillery, planes, and ships could flood the Irish Republican Army with everything it needed to fight the war.

Harry Hopkins had drawn up a bill with considerable bipartisan support, one that he hoped could both provide vital jobs for a recovering America as well as helping Ireland. Ireland could receive oil and war materiel on credit, to be returned when the war was concluded unless “the return of the equipment is made impossible due to use or damage.” Dev had asked Hopkins just how anyone was expected to return spent ammunition or artillery shells after they had been fired, answered with a simple chuckle.

Dev gave a rousing speech in the halls of the US Congress, and had specifically asked for the German and Canadian ambassadors to be invited to the session as well so that he might be able to address the Entente and the Reichspakt together. The pictures of what had happened in Connacht had risen the ire of many Americans, and shouts of “Remember Welfare Island” had frequently been shouted at pro-Ireland rallies.

“We are a small nation, and in our young history as an independent republic we have never once acted with aggression toward another nation, whether stronger or weaker. In our history we have been the victims of aggression, not its perpetrator. We have now come to yet another chapter in the long history of struggle, a new foe empowered by an industrial war that far surpasses the Weltkrieg. We have stood strong, taken with calm courage and confidence in our people, that our nation will endure. We know full well that we cannot demand any other to stand beside us, or ask that their fathers, husbands, or sons do so in their stead. We ask only that you remember Ireland, a land who with tearful hearts had her sons and daughters leave her fleeing the horrors of famine and destitution, and who welcomed many of America’s sons and daughters fleeing the horrors of war and deprivation. We ask that you remember a land with blue rivers choked with blood and oil and green fields burnt and stained red. We ask you, America, such a vast and mighty nation, to remember a nation that could be swallowed by most of your own constituent states. We ask that you remember the injustice being wrought upon her, and we ask that you remember the words of your Benjamin Franklin, about how a great nation may be reduced to a lesser one. We know firsthand how difficult the path of justice is, but acting justly has its reward.”

Transcripts of the speech, personally written by de Valera, were delivered to the Canadian and German ambassadors, with slight modifications. Instead of referencing Benjamin Franklin, Dev had referenced British and German liberal thinkers. The Canadian speech had omitted about how Ireland had a long history of oppression, instead focusing upon Union aggression wishing to expel people from their homeland. These speeches were eventually collected together, with the German Foreign Minister secretly praising de Valera for the craft of tailoring his message to his audience. The response had been beyond what de Valera had hoped. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm had declared the German Empire recognized the plight of Ireland, and had promised shipments of materiel protected by the Kaiserliche Merchant Marine. In Canada, the Tories were emboldened, accusing the sitting Prime Minister MacKenzie King of not doing enough to support the effort to reclaim the Home Isles, and that Ireland was fighting the Union just as the Entente had been fighting against the Totalists in the Bharatiya Commune in India. With overwhelming support, the Canadian Parliament authorized shipments of weapons to Ireland, emboldening the hawks in the Entente to push for Reclamation Day. Argentina, preparing for its own war with Chile, had independently recognized Ireland’s plight, and offered several large field guns every month to help keep the Irish in the war effort.

The shipments were invaluable, and protected by convoy systems, most of the promised aid had landed in Cork and Galway. A reporter was on hand and took a picture of marching Irish soldiers wearing the German stahlhelm and carrying the Lee-Enfield rifle. The quartermasters had difficulty initially in supplying troops in the field, as German and Canadian rifles used different calibers and parts were often not interchangeable. Eventually, units were marked as “Grey” or “Blue” by the nationality of the loaned equipment. Speaking for the cameras, Collins was in high spirits, stating: “This is the turning point in this war. The Internationale knows that it has not cowed us. While we seek a just peace and an end to hostilities, we are capable of fighting this war forever, and this commitment proves it. Neither the Reichspakt nor the Entente would provide supplies to a nation that was doomed; they would not extend credit to a nation whose defeat was inevitable. We are committed as ever before, because we know that we have already won this war.”

Privately, Collins was less enthusiastic, but he had to keep the faith. Every soldier was doing so, and Collins could do nothing less, because he was still a soldier through and through.

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17 August 1939 - G2 Headquarters, Dublin, Ireland

The new supplies were put to use almost immediately, as the Union had attempted a quick invasion at Leinster before the Irish Republican Army could field an effective response. Army engineers had not been idle, the An Balla program had established an extensive array of coastal fortresses facing the Irish Sea. Fielding only 10 divisions, the Union attack only achieved anysuccess at the earlier French landing sites in Wexford, but an aggressive counter-attack by Richard Mulcahy had achieved great results. As much as Collins didn’t like it, ceding the landing grounds to the invaders and then attacking them after they had landed was far more productive than attempting to engage them at sea. Poorly supplied and out of place, they could be driven back to the sea, and the landing crafts weren’t able to pick many back up, if at all. The casualty counts had to be discouraging for the Internationale. 2RN had made sure to broadcast the figures of killed and captured every day toward the Union, to help spread fear and discouragement among the Union’s public. They didn’t have the strength to attack the Union directly, if they were going to win they had to make the cost unbearable, and prayed that the enemy called it quits first.

G2 had launched their most audacious campaign yet in an attempt to deter the Internationale’s invasion of Ireland given the new shipments. The new Argentinian cannons had included several decoy pieces meant to be installed on mock forts to draw fire away from real artillery pieces; a technique that was invaluable in their conflict with Chile to cause the enemy to expose their position for no gain. G2 had opted to go further, and opted to make an entire phantom army. The radio office had highlighted that the expanded conscription laws, increased volunteerism in support for the war effort, and new shipments of equipment from the Great Powers had finally allowed Ireland to double the size of their armies. Dan McKenna, freshly returned from the United States, would lead this new army with the 1st Thunderbolts at its head. Taking advantage of young, patriotic artists, G2 designed inflatable tanks and prop equipment to be used for staged photo ops. To properly seed the information, G2 designed the ‘public’ news to be disseminated through the public radio waves in Ireland itself and friendly countries, including a few foreign divisions signing on for adventure and the chance to fight syndicalism. Ireland couldn’t directly claim to receive foreign volunteers, that would undoubtedly run afoul of their foreign partners, but “expatriates” would be invaluable, drawing on the formation of the United States Refugee Brigades during the Second Civil War. G2 had expertly designed one division of British emigres in Ireland electing to “fight the syndicalist menace that the crown itself would not” called the Blue Lions, and a division of German emigres called the Iron Wolves whose goal was to secure “a peaceful future for the Irish Republic and the German Empire both.” McKenna had drawn upon his experience with the Volunteer Brigades to help design the false brigades, combined with the intelligence division’s Army Department to establish a formalized command structure complete with unit patches, fake pay records, and even a speech given to the new army by McKenna himself.

To make sure that the Union got it, Ireland elected to release a few wounded POW’s back to the Union after ensuring that they had overheard the information while they were in convalescence. Not sure of how much each man could remember, G2 had made sure to release multiple POW’s. Collins himself had made the offer, suggesting that as a humanitarian gesture, certain prisoners who were well enough to be moved could be released in order to free up hospital beds for other wounded individuals. Collins had instructed his negotiators to push for a payment in gold, but to back down if pressed. Mosley had thought he had secured a win, but Collins was the man with the last laugh. The news of the new Irish army, primarily stationed in Leinster, gave Mosley reason to pause, and instead he focused his attention upon County Kerry, hoping to secure Munster and establish a secure foundation to offload more Internationale troops with a short naval trip after a successful invasion.

The trap had worked perfectly. Collins had ordered general evacuations to ensure civilians would be able to flee, and had ordered the armies to wait until the enemy had landed in order to attack. On the day of the attack, Collins had ordered the An tAerchór to fly and contest the skies from the Internationale with the new delivery of fighters and close air support aircraft from the United States. The Irish pilots were not well-trained, but had been drilled extensively on formation flying for air superiority missions. The surprising attack blindsided the Republican Air Force, who had grown lax in their patrols due to their dominance over the skies since the beginning of the early war. Now with the aircraft to match the Communard and Republican Air Forces, the Irish were able to wrest control of the airspace over the Irish island and attack enemy bombers. Casualties were highest among the Air Force, many of whom were outmatched by the more experienced enemy pilots, but the surprising victory and establishment of further control had further enraged the Commune of France, who elected not to pursue “any Irish ventures” further. They had returned to focus on their Alpine Warfare program, and reinforce their borders with Germany and Spain, recalling their forces from the British Isles and reminding Mosley of the greater mission against the Reichspakt. Half a million casualties in a short campaign, multiple failed invasions only useful for teaching lessons on how to repulse the Entente when the French had elected to cross the Mediterranean; a true waste in every sense of the word. While the war was not ended, the Internationale had decided on other priorities. With Ireland in control of her skies and her territorial waters, they had held on, and they had won.

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23 September 1939 - Áras an Uachtaráin, Dublin, ireland

According to the poets, autumn was the time of loss, from the possibilities of summer into the chill of winter. The poets had not seen fit to think of Ireland in that summer of 1939, where the possibilities of summer were to be bombed by a Syndie plane or executed for failing to turn over their food and valuables to an invader. Yet Ireland’s salvation was no balm, an end to war. On the 9th of September, Deat’s Communard government demanded the return of Elsaß-Lothringen, calling it Alsace-Lorraine, and flew over German airspace to drop leaflets in both French and German detailing their grievances. The Kaiser had refused the audacious demand, claiming that the territory had been German territory for over fifty years. The next day, the Commune of France had declared war on the Kaiserreich, with the Union of Britain joining. The Socialist Republic of Italy, already in a border war with the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, joined the Internationale, and King Ferdinando II responded by joining the Reichspakt. On the 10th of September, Savinkov, declaring the necessity to liberate the Russian people from German subjugation and second-class citizen status, declared war on White Ruthenia, the Baltic Duchy, the Polish-Lithuianian Commonwealth, and Germany itself. On the 15th of September, the Entente declared war on the Union of Britain, the Commune of France, and the Socialist Republic of Italy, citing the illegitimate nature of the governments there, and prepared their invasions. Finally, on the 20th of September, the Empire of Japan, citing pan-Asian ideals and the need to liberate the Far East from Western Dominance, declared war on German Indochina in addition to their ongoing wars in China.

Ireland was no longer the focal point on the world stage, but the rest of the world would feel the fires of war that the Irish had borne, and the fires would burn hotter and brighter than any the world had ever seen. Collins wondered who had been listening to his wish

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Diplomatic Moves in Ireland

Show of Force

Ireland Abandoned

Britain Demands Annexation

Mosley Declares War

Infiltrating the Army

Come Weal or Woe!

Ambush in Connacht

Casualties - First Invasion

French Landings in Southern Ireland

Casualties - Second Invasion

French Forces Encircled in Connacht

Casualties - Third Invasion

Irish Soldiers with Canadian Rifles and German Helmets

G2 Invents a Fake Army

Casualties - Final Count of the Irish War

Alsace Ultamatum

Alright then, 1939 is down. It’s the longest chapter so far, with the Second Weltkrieg having begun, all the Great Powers (except the US) at war. It’s a more successful tale of Czechoslovakia in 1938 combined with some Battle of Britain and some Operation Fortitude. Let me know what you think

#kaiserreich #creative #celtic tiger

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