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armed-with-a-waffle-iron · 5 months

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You do realize that river to the sea is about ethnic cleansing right? Maybe not a good thing to be standing by. Can't rightfully claim a genocide if the people purporting are trying to stop the people who have explicitly said they want every one of them dead world wide

🇵🇸From the River to the Sea! Palestine will be FREE!🇵🇸

Some genocide sympathiser needs a history lesson. I'm mostly a comic blogger.....but I'm also a history student so here it is.

The phrase "From the river to the sea" was born as a Zionist phrase indicating where the supposed "Israeli state" was to be, which we can also see echoed in Israeli political statements welcoming the colonisation of Palestinian land, such as that of the Likud Party in 1977: “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. (Kelley, 2019)

In the middle of the 1960s, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) took the phrase back in a call for de-colonisation; the 1964 and 1968 charters of the Palestine National Council (PNC) demanded “the recovery of the usurped homeland in its entirety” and the recovery of rights to the indegenous population, including right to self-determination. This has ZERO to do with antisemitism; the PNC did not want to remove Jews from a Palestinian nation, just the settler-colonists. The 1964 Charter states that "Jews who are of Palestinian origin shall be considered Palestinians if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine” and the rhetoric would become more inclusive following the 1967 war, when the PLO merged with Arab National Movement and the Palestine Liberation Front to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); which espoused Third World-oriented nationalism and Marxist-Leninism. The PFLP call for a single, secular, democratic, and possibly socialist Palestinian state in which all peoples enjoy citizenship, embracing ALL Jews as citizens. “If we are fighting a Jewish state of a racial kind, which had driven the Arabs out of their lands, it is not so as to replace it with an Arab state which would in turn drive out the Jews. . . . We are ready to look at anything with all our negotiating partners once our right to live in our homeland is recognized,” said one Fatah leader. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was therefore a call for a single, democratic, secular state to replace the genocide committing ethno-religious state of so-called "Israel". (Kelley, 2019)

Kelley, R.D. (2019) ‘From the river to the sea to every mountain top: Solidarity as Worldmaking’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 48(4), pp. 69–91. doi:10.1525/jps.2019.48.4.69.

So, NOT antisemitic. The media, right wing and "Western" states's fear mongering and criminalisation of the phrase is an attempt to stifle anti-imperialist, anti-colonial voices, and somehow justify so-called "Israel"'s slaughter, cleansing and oppression of Palestinians by dehumanising them.

Next off, if you're so concerned about antisemitism, oppression and the safety of Jewish people, I think you're better off organising in person with anti-fascists around you who oppose literal white supremacists and nazis whenever they pull a hateful stunt instead of playing victim online to people showing solidarity for Palestine.

Moreover. So-called "Israel" is committing a genocide. This state is built on the back of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homelands and the state never stopped. Zionism is by definition a fascist project that seeks to create an ethnostate on stolen land through the oppression and genocide of its indigenous population; the Palestinian people. It's an imperialist and settler colonial project that is backed by fellow settler colonial states such as the US and former colonial powers such as the UK. There is nothing that can justify settler colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. NOTHING. Not by the British Empire, not by Apartheid South Africa, not by Nazi Germany, and not by so-called "Israel" and its imperialist allies.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine 1948 by Ilan Pappe

No Muslim, Jew, Christian or Agnostic on that land is free until they're allowed to live as equals under a single, secular nation, and the Palestinians people are allowed to return to their homeland. No one in the world is free until we are ALL free!

Anon, where do you stand when, as of now, around 19,000 Palestinians have been murdered since Oct 7 by the so-called "Israeli" regime, backed by some of the most powerful nations in the world? When the Palestinian people have suffered 75 years of forced displacement, and state-back massacre, terror and discrimination. What the fuck did children in Gaza do to deserve being born into this hell on Earth? I'd hope you choose to stand on the right side of history but frankly it doesn't matter; in our thousands and in our millions, in our millions and in our billions— all of us who march and chant and organise and act and stand in solidarity with the oppressed— we are ALL Palestinians and we will see a free Palestine in our fucking lifetime.

Free the people, free the land! Justice is our demand!

Free the people, free them all! Occupation has to fall!

Free the people, free the land! No peace on stolen land!

Free the people, free them all! Break the chains and let them fall!

Free, free Palestine! Stop- the genocide! End- apartheid! De-DECOLONISE!

🇵🇸From the Sea to the River! Palestine will live forever!🇵🇸

#back up! back up! we want freedom! freedom! all these zionist colonisers we don't need 'em need 'em!#back up! back up! we want freedom! freedom! all these genocide deniers we don't need 'em need 'em!#from the river to the sea #palestine will be free #free palestine #🇵🇸

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sissa-arrows · 7 months

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People who think the West’s support for Israel has anything to do with regretting the holocaust and wanting to support Jewish people are pathetic.

In France Eric Zemmour was in the protest and he was celebrated and people were chanting “Zemmour President” You know what Eric Zemmour said? That “Bugeaud who killed Arabs and even some Jews in Algeria should be celebrated and real French people should be proud of him”. For the record Bugeaud invented what could be called the very first Gas chambers. Women, children, elderly Algerians and livestocks were put in caves. The cave was then closed and they would start a fire at the entrance of the cave and feed it all night so the gas in the smoke would kill the people inside the cave. Zemmour is also a guy who has been condemned multiple times by justice for inciting hatred toward people based on their race or religion. He believes in the “Great replacement” you know the thing that was used as a justification in the West every single time mosques have been attacked. That same Zemmour considers that France was totally flawless in terms of protecting Jews during WW2. He said that Petain was a hero who protected Jews. When faced with someone who said that no Petain sold out Jews actually Zemmour said “No but Petain protected French Jews”. Petain removed the citizenship of thousands of Jews WITHOUT ANY DIRECT ORDER FROM NAZIS GERMANY to make them easier to deport and kill. That’s who Petain is I would never call him a hero he was a Nazis collaborator and a piece of shit but pro Israel protesters do think he is a hero.

Before the protest you know what people who support Israel in France were saying. “That’s what the Arabs want to do to us here they dream of it and if we don’t stop them and defend ourselves now we are next” but suuuuuuure this is all about the holocaust. Because you know nothing says “We regret the holocaust” like supporting a white supremacist colonial project against indigenous Palestinians and wanting to deport/kill all people you label as Arabs in your own country. All of that while supporting and celebrating a man who denied the role played by France during the holocaust and said we should celebrate the death of Jews at the hand of France in Algeria.

This has nothing to do with the holocaust and everything to do with colonialism. When the people at the protest in France chant “France, Israel we have a common enemy” and call for the death of that enemy they are not talking about Hamas cause Hamas was never a direct threat for France. They are talking about people like me. North Africans and Black people.

And this is not just France. I saw many videos of Pro Israel protests all over the world chanting “Death to Arabs” waving flags from Jewish supremacist organizations that call for the death of all Palestinians and Arabs.

But sure lie to yourself so you can sleep well and pretend this is all about supporting the poor innocent Israeli victims. After all they didn’t do anything wrong they just killed, tortured Palestinians. They just stole land from indigenous Palestinians. Put Palestinian children in cages. Used them as shield. Used phosphorus on civilians. Bombed schools and hospitals… Israeli are all soooo innocent they are just active participant to a settler colonial project that wants the end of the indigenous people of Palestine.

Last thing: If this was about trauma caused by the holocaust and about regretting what happened the one being forced to pay for it would be Europeans. Europe would be the one being forced to give up a part of its land not Palestinians who are in no way responsible for the holocaust. So cut the crap. This is all about white supremacy. Western imperialism and settler colonialism. This is colonization. Any support of colonization is a support for white supremacy nothing else.

#france #islamophobia #anti arab racism #eric zemmour #Israel #antizionism

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drsilverfish · 2 years

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The English and “The Shame”

The English dir Hugo Blick (Nov 2022 on BBC iplayer UK and Amazon Prime elsewhere) starring Chaske Spencer and Emily Blunt.

Discussion under the cut because major spoilers warning

This is a really beautiful tale in every way. It’s also a parable about English colonialism. It’s a reparative story, which takes the Western narrative and, for once, gives the starring part to a Native American.

Chaske Spencer’s Native American hero Eli brings so much to his character through a taciturn yet gentle endurance, which speaks volumes about all that he has suffered (losing wife, children, family). He’s someone with a dual identity, a Pawnee tribe member, having been a scout for the US Army in (I think, from the timeline) The Black Hills War against the Sioux.

The drama is called The English, for a reason, because on a broader canvass, this is about the brutality which the colonial conquest of the English ruling class wrought on its own working class, on the Scots, on the Irish, on the Native Americans, on the American continent itself.

Blunt’s character is a representative of that English ruling class. She is Lady Cornelia Locke and she says that her father, “...owned half of Devon”.

She is wealthy, but, she is also a woman in the Victorian era, a period when women (even aristocratic ones) had extremely limited rights, effectively “belonging” to their fathers and then to their husbands.

Lady Cornelia is on a revenge mission. She was raped (by a duplicitous British butcher out to make his own way in the States) and she and the son that resulted from that rape, were infected with syphlilis (then incurable and ultimately fatal) and suffered from the pain, and the social stigma of that.

She is a sympathetic character, but she also embodies “the English” colonial project and its repercussions.

In America, she carries around a bag full of a large amount of money throughout her journey, which is often reacted to with shock (and avarice) by those she meets along the way, who are all scrabbling to make a living. This is of course, a metaphor for colonial plunder, which is where English aristocractic money significantly comes from. Yet Cornelia retains a naivety (a protective ignorance) about that.

It’s also symbolic that Cornelia has been infected with syphillis. Disease metaphors are always a bit narratively dubious, because they tend to reinforce stigma about infection, particularly sexually transmitted infection. Unfortunately, this is no different, as syphllis is partly used to signify sexual and moral corruption in this narrative. Nevertheless, it also functions effectively as part of the colonial critique.

It is believed that Columbus brought syphilis back from the New World to the Old World in the 1400s. On a metaphorical level, we can understand Cornelia’s syphilis as the horrible consequences of colonialism coming home to roost. The character herself did not deserve to suffer, and she is depicted as brave and true-hearted, a victim herself, but the point is that colonialism infects the souls of colonisers as well as colonised. This is a metaphor also carried in the narrative by Cornelia’s identification of herself as a Scorpio, and Eli’s warning that scorpions are often most dangerous to themselves (sometimes stinging themselves to death with their own tails. Looking at the present, a metaphor for Brexit Britain, arguably the self-inflicted wound of imperial hubris coming back to bite us..

It’s entirely important, therefore, that Sheriff Robert Marshall, played by Stephen Rea, is Irish, the Irish being victims of English colonialism themselves. The Sheriff has compassion and sympathy for Eli and Cornelia and helps them escape culpability for the murder of their common enemy, the English villain Melmont.

The love story, told extremely well with two excellent performances from Blunt and Spencer, is the bow in which the colonial critique is wrapped. Cornelia and Eli love one another, but must part, and it is notable that he accepts they must separate while she first protests, in their final scene. But in the end, she does what “good” colonizers should do; she goes home.

And when, in England years later, Cornelia meets the Native American young man whose life she and Eli saved, and he lifts her veil to kiss her, and she whispers, “But...the shame”, he replies, “Yes, but not yours,” and we understand that ‘the shame” is not the shame of syphilis, but the shame of colonialism itself.

#The English #Emily Blunt #Chaske Spencer #Hugo Blick #MAJOR spoilers #Watch if first before you read this #It's really excellent #The Western from a different perspective #My Miscel Meta

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paperstorm · 7 months

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You say you wish Ronen (and presumably other Israeli Americans) showed the same outrage for the attacks on Gaza as they do for the attacks on Israel.

I’m curious, do you hold White Christian Americans do the same standard? When they remember the lives lost in 9/11, do you require them to mention the 70,000 civilian lives lost in the war in Afghanistan, which was started as a result of that attack? Does it put a ‘pit in your stomach’ when they don’t, or do you simply go about your day without thinking it worth mentioning?

Because as a Jew I’ve never supported Israel, but I’m starting to wonder why Israel is held to a far higher standard than any Western nation that retaliates against terrorism. The loss of innocent lives is terrible and should be condemned, but why is it worse than the innocent lives lost in Afghanistan? Is there something in particular about Israel that you and other left-wing Westeners don’t like?

As far as I can see, Ronen’s country was the victim of a terrorist attack. He reacted with sorrow and anger and supports his country as it seeks to punish those responsible and rescue those taken hostage. But why is he deserving of condemnation for an emotional response when Americans and Westeners can mourn and be angry about their citizens killed by terrorists without attracting any of the same vitriol? The West has done terrible things in the Middle East, and yet when the Middle East strikes back against its enemies only Israel and its people are not allowed to be angry.

Maybe you don’t have any answer, but if you do and are willing to respond I would like to know. What is the difference between an Israeli ‘coloniser’ responding to being a victim of terrorism and an American ‘coloniser’ responding to being the victim of terrorism? Why does one attract criticism and hatred and the other not?

I don't speak for anyone else but my personal answer to this question is yes. Unequivocally. I haven't been talking specifically about the Iraq/Afghanistan wars this week because that's not what's happening right now, but yes. People mourning/honouring victims of the 9/11 attacks should absolutely also be mourning the (by some estimates) nearly a million innocent people who died in the Middle East in the wars started as retaliation for that attack, in some cases in places like Iraq that had literally nothing to do with it at all. If someone feels sadness in their heart every day for the 9/11 victims and feels nothing for the innocent Muslim people who paid the price for something they had nothing to do with, I feel very comfortable saying that person has fallen prey to American imperialist propaganda campaigns or is just outright racist. The hoopla that followed 9/11 is almost beat-for-beat what is happening right now, all over again. We learned nothing. Once again our leaders are dehumanizing brown people, cheering on imperialism and violent colonial occupation, and using a terrorist attack to manufacture consent for war crimes. (Anyone wanting more info on how they do this should read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.)

The loss of innocent Palestinians is not worse that the loss of innocent Afghans. They are the same. They are both being murdered as payback for something they didn't do and their deaths were/are both being cheered on by the Western war machine because it makes money for defense contractors and because it's politically convenient to see brown people as expendable pawns in the game of Risk world leaders are always playing. So yes, I absolutely do condemn both and mourn for both.

Additionally, I know you didn't ask for sympathy but I know how difficult this is. I know it's a lot more complicated than white online leftists like to make it seem, and I know a lot of Jewish people personally who are struggling right now, as they have before, with their complex feelings for the state of Israel. I hope you're taking care of yourself, as best you can in these awful circumstances.

#israel #palestine #I'm not really here I just wanted to answer this one because it felt important

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frodho-slaggins · 2 years

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I am also thinking about how de writes racism and colonial mindsets in relation to the mercenaries cus i think theres a lot of rlly interesting stuff there. The tribunal is pretty far into the game, so you've spent hours and hours absorbing revochalian culture and getting a sense of how ppl conceptualize themselves and others. Revochal is majority white but its also got a fair amount of nonwhite ppl whos revochalian roots stretch back a while as well as white and nonwhite immigrant communities. Revochal is also pretty racist and xenophobic and you get that both from living in the world and absorbing the ambient racism (for example, the fictional anti-black slur "kipt" is tossed around with great frequency and casualness to the point that some ppl don't even seem to register that they're using an insult) and also because while you play a white character, ur attached at the hip to an asian man and so you observe the constant deluge of racism thrown kim's way particularly.

But anyways, you have a pretty solid sense of race politics in revochal and then you meet those mercenaries and its more of that same hostility towards minority populations, tho even more virulently anti-black than is typical. But a thing that's sort of interesting is that the mercenaries seem to consider all Revochalians to be racialized subjects because of their position as being residents of a country the Moralintern is occupying and that Krenel is deployed in. The mercenaries use really racialized terms to refer to all Revochalians regardless of race. They're "loinclothes", natives of a country that they are visiting violence upon. Their language and actions equate the residents of Martinaise with the Semanese ppl they were comissioned to violate and kill.

That's not to say race is totally irrelevant to the mercs's perspective. I think it's no accident that they target Liz and Theo in particular when they're shooting at people. Liz is especially telling, she is a totally non-violent figure who is actively attempting to deescalate and i think they try to shoot her in part because she is black and because they are inclined to and highly conditioned to kill black victims. They were never gonna listen to her because they were raring for a fight and because she's the resident of a place they consider a backwater slum sure, but also because she is black.

Idk i dont have a point exactly. Just....something about how Krenel's mercenaries are conditioned to consider all populations they interact with as fundamentally and ethnically inferior, regardless of phenotype or whether theyre occidental or whatever. They're white supremacists but with a definition of whiteness that fundamentally excludes white ppl who are "3rd world" even if it still differentiates between white and non-white "loinclothes." Also also something about how this reflects a real world tendency amongst non-eastern europeans to present eastern-europeans in a racializing manner, as historically western european nations have used eastern europe's relative proximity to asia as a means to frame eastern europeans as not white and subsequently frame them as inferior. Or a modern tendency amongst wealthy nations to consider some nations as ethnically inferior regardless of actual racial makeup because of idk poverty or "cultural difference" or something. But also despite that, race is still a major factor in how these countries are percieved (i was thinking about this a lot cus i played de while the american news media was covering ukraine and saying shit like "this isnt palestine, normal people live here how can there be a war" etc etc)

Also something about the motivating racism evident in on-the-ground troops for colonial operations like blackwater (or if you wanna be honest, the legitimate american military as well) is also sort of nihilistic because while it furthers white supremacy it has no allegiance to whiteness, just hostility to non-whiteness and its true allegiance is always capital.

#disco elysium #also something about how a fascist white supremacist like gary would go insane if he met the mercs #cus his prized whiteness would actually not protect him at all from the mercs's denigrating perception of him and their subsequent violence #hes a loincloth too! cus loincloth is not merely utilized as a racially charged term here #its a racializing term #also this is long and rlly rambly srry #long post

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criptochecca · 3 months

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Promptings to reinterpret the Judeocide also hail from cultural and political circles that should not in any way be confused with historical revisionism. Some time ago, a debate developed in France that pitted Armenian intellectuals and Jewish intellectuals against one another. The former attacked Bernard Lewis as a revisionist and negationist. Concerned to reassert the incomparability of the Holocaust, he had rejected any attempt to equate, or even compare, it with the Armenian tragedy. The latter was to be interpreted as a 'simple' deportation which, in conditions of total war, objectively resulted in a large-scale massacre: 'no serious proof exists of a decision and plan by the Ottoman government to destroy the Armenian nation' as such. The angry reaction of descendants of the victims of this tragic episode in modern history is fully understandable, especially since for some time now they have been stressing that it was precisely to the genocide of their ancestors that Hitler referred when planning the war of extermination in the East: who, Hitler asked, now remembers the Armenians? And who, some decades hence, will bother about the drastic reduction in numbers of the natives that the Wehrmacht intends to carry out in the impending German colonial empire? In the history of the twentieth century, then, the Armenian genocide is not only the first chronologically, but the model inspiring the culprits of subsequent genocides. The Jewish Holocaust is not a unique phenomenon, and not even the original genocide. This thesis provoked cries of scandal over the 'ultimate expedient of a more subtle revisionism' and a new riposte from the Armenian side: does drawing attention to 'genocides other than the Jewish one', and rescuing those suffered by the Armenians and Romany from oblivion, 'attest to a more subtle revisionism'? Romany likewise lament the lack of attention paid to the tragedy of their people:

Romany are confined to oral culture and must speak the unspeakable to distracted ears in simple terms. They do not possess organic intellectuals who can express the collective anguish of exterminated families or schol- ars capable of analysing the specific character of Nazi legislation, describing the process of deportation, and quantifying the impact of the extermination.

Identified as responsible for the first twentieth-century genocide, Turks not only reject the charge, but sometimes observe that behind their measures against the Armenians lay the experience of the concentration camps employed by the British against the Boers some years earlier. Significantly, it was precisely then that a term and category destined to play a crucial role in today's debates began to make its appearance: the British pacifist press denounced the 'holocaust of child-life' which occurred during the suppression of the Boer rebels. The latter in fact embodied the worst of the colonial tradition in their policy towards the natives, who met with the fate traditionally reserved for Indians and peoples regarded as dross. From Europe and Africa we thus pass to America. During the inauguration of the mausoleum dedicated to the Holocaust, survivors of the Native American population asked why a similar monument had not been erected in memory of the genocide committed in the Western hemisphere. Like the Romany, Native Americans cannot count on many organic intellectuals. Perhaps they have found an exception in the author of a book, at once committed and rigorous, devoted to the ' American Holocaust'. As early as the end of the sixteenth century, the ' discovery' of the New World had led to 60-80 million deaths, but 'the carnage was not over'. Intellectuals of Jewish origin do not challenge the fact that 'sheerly as a matter of quantity the Indian catastrophe is unparalleled' and, 'both absolutely and proportionally, surpasses the destruction of European Jewry'. In this instance, however, we are not dealing with the planned total destruction of an ethnic group. To which the scholar on the Native American side of the question replies:

A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated masses of' Africans' into one single category and undifferentiated masses of 'Indians' into another, while making fine distinctions among the populations of Europe, permits the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American Indians has resulted in the total extermination - purposefully carried out - of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.

This thesis is fully confirmed by the picture drawn by a loyalist historian of the American Revolution. Ryerson observed of the policy of 'the destruction of the Six Indian Nations' adopted by the rebel colonists: 'Congress, by an order which, we believe, has no parallel in the annals of any civilized nation, commands the complete destruction of these people as a nation �� including women and children.

[...]

The fate of the Native Americans evokes that of the blacks, who were called on to replace or flank them in the forced labour required in the continent conquered by the Europeans. Descendants of the slaves deported from Africa in their turn underscore the centrality of the 'Black Holocaust', if only on account of its secular duration and the number of countries involved, including the most civilized - among them, the leader of the Western world today. A religious curse has long followed blacks. In Genesis (9, 2 1-7), we read that, after the great flood and following a copious libation, Noah slept naked and was discovered thus by his amused, disrespectful youngest son, Ham. When the patriarch awoke and realized what had occurred, he condemned Ham's descendants to be slaves of the descendants of Shem and Japheth (Noah's other sons). Blacks were subsequently identified and branded as descendants of Ham and their slavery was thus theologically sanctioned.

[...]

Over the centuries, anti-Hamitism has raged alongside anti Semitism; and Christians and Jews have participated in it. More than on any other people, the horror of world history has been focused on blacks. Unlike all others subject to persecution, noted Malcolm X, they cannot hide their skin colour and identity. Consequently, we can understand the success of Islam among black American activists, who, to prove the uniqueness of the 'Black Holocaust' , sometimes stress Jewish participation in the slave-trading from Africa. While the thesis of the exemplary character of the Armenian genocide sparks accusations of revisionism, the latter argument prompts the charge of anti-Semitism. But it is meaningless to brand as such an assertion corresponding to historical reality. The tendency to inflate the role of Jews in the black slave trade is certainly dangerous and inadmissible. Yet it would be absurd and unjust to claim that Jews alone were strangers to a historical experience and infamy whose protagonist was colonialism in its entirety, and to which Islam - often referred to by black militants in their polemic against the West (and the Judeo Christian religious tradition) - was certainly no stranger.

[...]

Silence on the 'Black Holocaust' and the 'American Holocaust' is matched by trivialization of the Jewish Holocaust. Although, in justifying two different ideas of global 'mission' or 'task' , the genealogical myths thus constructed can come into contradiction with one another, they fully converge in reinforcing a third genealogical myth. With the repression of the Native American and black tragedies, and the trivialization of the Judeocide - or, at any rate, its severance from the colonial tradition and assignment to Asiatic barbarism (the fact that the fate of the Jews was sealed by their dual stigmatization as Eastern 'natives' and bearers of eastern Bolshevism is ignored) - the West undergoes a dazzling transfiguration that affords no space for balanced historical assessments and relations of equality with the rest of the world. While he characterizes the genocide of the Native Americans as the worst ever perpetrated, the author of American Holocaust suggests regarding each of the great genocides in the history of humanity as 'unique, for one reason or another'.

At work here is a concern to put an end to the quarrels dividing the victims and their descendants. It is clear that historians must continue to examine the peculiarity of each of the great historical tragedies. Yet the horror of the dual naturalistic de-specification of which the Jews were victims in the twentieth century cannot be adequately appreciated if their experience is severed from the colonial tradition, which the Third Reich sought to resume and radicalize.

Domenico Losurdo - War and Revolution

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dykesynthezoid · 6 months

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I am being so so serious when I say western leftists need to find a way to understand colonialism that isn’t “something white people do to brown people.” Which isn’t to say that the role white supremacy has played and continues to play in modern colonialism should be overlooked; obviously it shouldn’t. It’s a huge component of how colonialism as it exists today has been able to function.

But the truth is that colonization existed long before 1492. And granted, it’s also true that Europeans did it on a scale never seen before, and also committed genocide on a scale not seen before. And that shouldn’t be dismissed. But if your only framework for understanding colonialism is “white people perpetrators, brown people victims” you are going to miss such a colossal amount of complexity in how colonialism has actually sustained itself. And you are going to confine people of color around the world to an identity based around victimhood and nothing else.

#colonialism #leftism

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nicklloydnow · 7 months

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“Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

(…)

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

(…)

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

(…)

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

(…)

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.

(…)

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

(…)

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.

(…)

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

(…)

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

(…)

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

(…)

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

(…)

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.”

“The idea in this case is “settler colonialism,” a term that appears often in the pro-Hamas statements collected by the Anti-Defamation League. Various chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America have decried “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and called to “decolonize Palestine—from the river to the sea,” a slogan that, by invoking the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. Mondoweiss, an anti-Israel online publication, has called the Hamas attack “part of the Palestinians’ century-long struggle for liberation” from “Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism.”

Like all theoretical terms, “settler colonialism” can mean different things to different people. But most who use it would probably agree with the definition offered by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute: “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.” The paradigm case is the European colonization of the Americas, where over centuries many indigenous peoples were displaced or killed as Europeans took their land.

(…)

What makes settler colonialism a potent political concept is that, as the Cornell definition says, it is “a system rather than a historical event.” In other words, the displacement of the indigenous population is not something that happened centuries ago but something that is still being perpetrated today, by all the non-indigenous inhabitants of the land and by the culture and institutions they have created.

The Southern Poverty Law Center makes this point clearly in its magazine Learning for Justice: “Understanding settler-colonialism means understanding that all non-Indigenous people are settler-colonizers, whether they were born here or not. Understanding settler-colonialism as both a historical position and a present-day practice helps students see how they fit into a settler-colonial system—and how that system shapes the impact of their actions, regardless of their intent.”

This principle makes today’s anticolonial ideology more radical than the anticolonial movements of the post-World War II era. At that time, national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia were directed mainly against European powers that did not settle the territories they ruled. When the Viet Minh fought the French in Vietnam, or the Congolese National Movement fought the Belgians in Congo, they wanted to reclaim national sovereignty from foreign rulers who had no connection to the country other than the right of conquest.

Freeing a settler-colonial society is a very different prospect, since it would presumably mean expelling many millions of people who were born in the land they are said to have colonized. Modern Jewish settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, English settlement of North America in the 1600s. If the descendants of those first arrivals are still considered settlers in 2023, then the word no longer has its ordinary meaning. Instead it is a permanent, inheritable marker of guilt, like “bourgeois” as a class label in the Soviet Union.

Under the workers’ regime, a bourgeois was not a person who owned a certain amount of property, but anyone whose background indicated that they might be hostile to the working class. That put them outside the realm of moral concern, and they could be killed for any reason or none. The reaction of many anticolonial activists to the massacre of Israelis suggests that a similar logic is at work today.

Even advocates of anticolonial ideology know that there is no prospect of actually “decolonizing” the U.S. The most they hope for is symbolic expressions like Native American land acknowledgments, which have become standard practice at many academic and arts institutions. These statements are often historically ill-informed, but they are not really about historical facts. They advance a political thesis: that in a just world, every territory would be occupied only by the people who belong there.

Ironically, while anticolonialism conceives of itself as a progressive, left-wing ideology, this understanding of the relationship between people and land is similar to that of fascism, which was also obsessed with the categories of native and alien. The Nazi slogan “blood and soil” conveyed the idea that German land could only truly belong to its primeval inhabitants.

Anticolonialists would of course reject this analogy. But they are proudly indebted to Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born French writer whose analysis of anticolonial struggle was born from the Algerian rebellion against French rule in the 1950s. For Fanon, a psychologist, anticolonial movements must be violent, not only because they lack other means of achieving their goals but because violence itself is redemptive and therapeutic. “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence,” Fanon wrote in his classic 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth.” “For the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities.”

When Western sympathizers excuse or endorse the actions of Hamas, it is because they see it in these terms, as a liberation movement fighting a settler-colonial regime. And it is true that Hamas frames its struggle in terms of indigenous rights and redemptive violence—though sympathizers usually overlook the fact that it understands these things in religious fundamentalist terms, which are totally incompatible with other left-wing commitments like LGBTQ rights.

The group’s charter, adopted in 1988, declares that only Muslims are indigenous to the land that is now Israel, so Jews can never belong there: “The land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.” Likewise, it states that “peaceful solutions…are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement” and that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

Hatred of settler colonialism, like hatred of capitalism among communist revolutionaries, believes that it is morally impeccable because it is grounded in genuinely moral instincts: indignation at violence and oppression, hope for freedom and equality. It seems perverse that such instincts should lead to approving the mass murder of children and the elderly.

But like other totalizing ideologies, anticolonialism contains all the elements needed for moral derangement: the permanent division of the world into innocent people and guilty people; the belief that history can be fixed once and for all, if violence is applied in the right way; the idea that the world is a battlefield and everyone is a combatant, whether they realize it or not.

Most observers of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, regardless of whose “side” they are on, don’t fall into these traps. But those who do are increasingly vocal—a bad sign for the future of peaceful coexistence, and not only in the Middle East.”

“Since the “decolonization” agenda is meant only to target Western nations and peoples, you rarely hear of the conquests and empire-building of the non-Western world, which is conveniently forgotten behind a narrative of pervasive victimization.

All of human history is a story of never-ending layers of conquest and defeat and of migration and exile. If it were to be undone, we’d need to extirpate almost all peoples everywhere, including those who are currently portrayed as the hopelessly oppressed.

The earliest phase of the seventh-century Arab expansion was truly explosive, and then it continued at a slower but still impressive clip.

Indeed, it is one of the most sweeping acts of conquest and successful exercises in colonialism in world history. This wasn’t the Mongols driving all before them and then receding to leave little in their trace, or the Normans getting absorbed into the England they conquered. No, the Arabs followed up their military conquest with a cultural imperialism still felt today.

The Arabs would gobble up Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. They chipped away at the Byzantine Empire and launched a no-kidding effort to conquer it wholesale that fell short after two epic sieges of Constantinople. They basically took all of the Persian empire. Eventually, they assembled an empire with the greatest territorial extent since the Romans, encompassing 80 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa and reaching to the south of France.

(…)

Its armies “appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and even into southern France.” Everywhere they conquered, they put in place “Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading, learning, thinking, building, and praying.”

And of speaking and writing. The caliph Abd al-Malik imposed Arabic as the official language of the empire, an act of the highest cultural significance, since Arabic and Islam were so intertwined. “Arabization,” Jones writes, “was gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in almost every part of the old caliphate in the twenty-first century.”

Once they had Islam foisted on them, these territories, by and large, never went back, except in the cases of Spain, Portugal, and Sicily.

In the Levant, in particular, as the archaeologist and historian Alex Joffe writes, there was an imperial project that included bringing in new people. Settlers came of their own volition or were moved there by political authorities, Joffe notes, including Egyptians in the early 19th century and Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen at the hands of the Ottomans later in the century.

A Hamas official once said, “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

Should all this shuffling of population be reversed? Should the land conquered by the Arabs so long ago go back to the Byzantines or Persians, or their legatees? What do Ben and Jerry think?

Obviously, the decolonizers don’t care about any of this, or the fate of the Kurds, Assyrians, and Amazighs, peoples who have suffered more recently from the Arabization of the broader region.

What they really favor is another act of Arab colonization to eliminate the Jewish people, who must succumb, finally and completely, to the long tide of Islamization and Arabization “from the river to the sea.” This isn’t a principled adherence to the rights of indigenous people or a respect for ancient homelands, but Lenin’s notorious formulation, “who whom,” in a different context.”

#israel #gaza #hamas #palestine #war #antisemitism #anti zionisim #racism #wokeism #decolonisation #montefiore #simon sebag montefiore #Lowry #rich lowry #settler colonialism #fanon #franz fanon #marx #karl marx

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thesketchyheartist · 4 months

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01/31

Tomino- Mobile Suit Gundam Episodes 1, 2, 8; Lamarre- Introduction My reactions immediately after the episode:

Post episode 1: The characters' eyes instantly remind me of that Korean YouTube video "Guess who?". I can't remember the creator, but the way the eyes have those reflection orbs in a solid color eyes (no pupils). I did not have subtitles, but looking at the fandom's wiki, I am displeased to find out the female lead's real name is not a playful nickname, insult name, or a name to play with words; It's Fraw Bow but I thought it said "frow brow" or "frow bow" which sounds awfully loke "frown brow" to imply her nagging attitude. Something inside me can't help but cringe when she cried and the main character and male lead has to literally slap her out of her trauma. Like, okay man, if you had your parents and grandparents killed in front of you, just a nice little b**ch slap is what you need. Overall, nice way to introduce the characters and their background. Although the enemies' reason for war sounds too similar to America's (actually any colony's) war for independence. The narrator said people were shocked, but it was not like America did not have a lot of street fights and actual battles, too. Not to justify the violence and the need to make battle suits, but they put too much praise for Amoro to step up and fight at a young age. I should say, I would not be surprised if someone else had a different reaction.

Post episode 2: So, another small detail I noticed is the shape or rather the rendition of noses. The shading underneath the nostrils is like a shading in manga or in comics. As these are animated faces, the details are simple, and the younger characters have a rounder face. Also, I don't think they blink, which is funny considering how detailed their eyes are. An important thing I noticed: a side character, wiki calls "Kai", runs back to the White Base by himself. Sayla criticizes him for being a "coward". While I know there must be more to the story, I can't help but wonder is it truly a cowardly move to escape with your life or a clever strategy to survive. At the same time, this is the first time we also meet Sayla, so perhaps it speaks more about her own character than Kai's.

Post episode 8; We were not assigned episodes 3-7, so my reaction may lack context. Spoilers permitted at your own expense: Kai in the span of 4 episodes became part of the military. I think it's because of the low supply of personnel as mentioned in episode 2. Also, you notice how his eyes are more of the "cunning" type to imply he is like Amaro's foil. In the WWI/WWII times, Kai would be the opposite of the ideal soldier, but during this episode he comes out as someone who is brave. I hope he does get some character development (when he goes into puberty and/or trauma, his eye shape might change). Also, Char calling Garma as someone who is too privileged makes fun of past Japanese leaderships during WWII.

These episodes altogether reflect the post-WWII sentiments Japan had. While weapons of unsurmountable force can and does tip the balance of a stalemate in their favor, the sheer power of these weapons compare to the power the atomic bomb had when it was first used. Japan recognized that if Japan ever came up with a power that outranks even Western weapons, they will use it for good because they were once the victims of a power that was used for the greater good...of America. While some may see this as humiliation, and they would not be wrong to frustrated veterans and civilians, it is also important to see this as equally humbling as humility for the silenced and hidden.

The animation and art style reminds me of the first Pokemon anime. While fictional creatures and fictional mechs are not alike at all, the animation reminds me of stopmotion, smooth but patterned to make a fluid-like movement.

also yesterday my birthday. this anime older than my parents.

-01/30/2024

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starryfree · 1 month

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Y’all I don’t want a war but I defs think it’s gonna be needed to end America and their western regine 😭🗡️🗡️🗡️ *pretend I’m stabbing them*

America has always done this tho provoke other countries and act all tough and then play as the victim or saviours when they arent. I just want them to end 🇮🇱 included. There is no place for colonialism(the mindset and practices) in todays world

Girlie the fbi’s gonna get you (and me 😭).

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mariacallous · 3 months

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Alexei Navalny, the most formidable critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his corrupt circles, who survived a poisoning and endured brutal persecution for years, died in the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony. The Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District claimed that Navalny “felt unwell” after he went on a walk and “almost immediately lost consciousness.” Prison officials said that a resuscitation was unsuccessfully attempted.

Navalny has long been a thorn in Putin’s side and was relentlessly smeared by the Kremlin’s cheerleaders. Even after his demise, Russian propagandists couldn’t feign any dignity or humanity. Head of RT Margarita Simonyan posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the so-called “victims” of Navalny’s corruption investigations keep calling her, wishing for him not to rest in peace. She hypocritically claimed she couldn’t join them in those wishes, but only because she is observing an Armenian Lent.

In 2021, Simonyan described Navalny as “a traitor of the Motherland” and argued that like any traitor, he deserves to die. Referring to the Skripals and Litvinenko, Simonyan asserted that any method is acceptable when it comes to the people she deemed to be “traitors.”

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that “Russia needs to answer all the serious questions about the circumstances of his death." Simonyan sniped back, “Russia owes nothing to no one, let’s start with that.”

Since in Russia “death of natural causes” can mean many different things, especially with respect to the opposition leaders and journalists, Simonyan immediately started to stir up rumors of foul play—not by Putin, but his enemies. She wrote, “Everyone has long forgotten him, there was no point in killing him, especially before the elections, it would be beneficial to completely opposite forces.”

Simonyan shared a post from a Telegram channel “BP Online” that said, “This is the retaliation for the interview. Thankfully, it wasn’t [Tucker] Carlson.” Despite Putin’s displeasure with the way Carlson’s interview with him had unfolded, the former Fox News host is a darling of the Russian state media, where he is described as the only American they wouldn’t want to kill.

This feeling is clearly mutual. On Monday, while he was at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Carlson was asked by Egyptian journalist Emad El Din Adeeb why he never pressed Putin about the freedom of speech in Russia and why he “did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.”

Carlson coldly replied, in part, “Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.” He openly endorsed the elimination of inconvenient opposition figures and journalists, falsely alleging that this kind of a domestic policy is common everywhere.

Other Russian propagandists also pushed the idea that Navalny’s death was somehow beneficial to the West, implying that foul play was involved. Writer Nikolai Starikov posted on Telegram, “Navalny departed from life at a very convenient time for the Western puppeteers” and argued that this may have been done to undermine the PR effect of Carlson’s interview and to prompt the U.S. Congress to approve the aid to Ukraine. Starikov claimed that Navalny’s wife Yulia is at the Munich Security Conference on the same day, which is “part of the plan.”

Despicably, Starikov claimed that Navalny’s widow “is barely holding back her smile.” His revolting post was boosted by Vladimir Solovyov, a notorious state TV host who for years maligned Navalny as a “traitor,” smeared his followers as “Satanists” and proclaimed that he deserved the death penalty. Now, in light of an untimely death of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Russian propagandists are both enjoying it and pretending that anyone but Putin is to blame.

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sci-fiworlds · 1 year

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Battlestar Galactica - Sci-Fi and the Terror Wars

Very sadly Stuart Miller's Alien Worlds magazine "will not be published again." Although short lived, I really enjoyed my time working with Stuart and am very proud to say I wrote for AW. In a field largely trapped in the 1990s (if not the 1950s), it was fresh, young and innovative, not afraid to seek new answers to old questions or even ask new ones. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the fact that Stuart was prepared to take a gamble and give new writers like me the chance to show what they can do. For those who don't know, I wrote a sci-fi/TV related column called Sci-Fi Worlds, my first piece was on Doctor Who and is available in issue 4 of Alien Worlds. Anyway, before I got the sad news about the magazine I had already written a second piece on Battlestar Galactica so I thought it might be a good idea to publish it here at BoA instead. Hopefully you'll find it thought provoking, even if you disagree with some of my views.

Unlike the new series of Doctor Who, the resurrected Battlestar Galactica is not a continuation of the classic story but rather a total re-imagining of it. Like its counterpart, the new series begins with 12 colonies of humanity getting savagely attacked and ruthlessly wiped out by the Cylons. A relentless and calculating race of war machines that appear hell-bent on the complete annihilation of all mankind. The Cylons' holocaust leaves only a handful of survivors. A ragtag fugitive fleet, 41, 402 people desperately trying to escape their cybernetic hunters and clinging to the hope of finding the legendary 13th colony called Earth.

But other than this shared back story, the two series have surprisingly very little in common. This is a good thing, because the original descended into little more than a childish action adventure, especially when compared to the more serious, adult drama and post 9/11 allegory which is the new series.

Perhaps the most interesting and, by far, the most disturbing parallel with 9/11, however, is how the survivors behave in the wake of the tragedy. Of course, just as in the wake of 9/11 in the real world, we witness incredible courage, as well as a stubborn determination to continue in the face of terrible adversity. But, we also sadly see how fear, fueled with a legitimate need for revenge, can bring out the worst in people, changing victims into criminals, the terrorized into terrorists, and moving society closer to the evil it is meant to be opposed.

Interestingly, the post-9/11 parallels are completely turned on their head in the third season. In the miniseries, as well as season one and two, the Cylons are clearly meant to represent Al Quada and fundamentalist Islam, whereas the humans clearly parallel America. However, in the shadow of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq, these roles seem to have been somewhat reversed during season three. The bad guy Cylons become the invading westerners and the humans take the place of the Iraqi insurgency.

Much of season three takes place on what the colonials name "New Caprica": a cold, remote and hostile world that most humans decide to settle on after abandoning their vain search for Earth. However, they are eventually found and, strongly echoing real world events in Iraq, invaded and occupied by the Cylons one year later.

Moreover, strongly paralleling the Iraqi Police Service created in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion, the Cylons establish the New Caprica Police: a group of human volunteers who work for the Cylon authority to establish law and order within the settlement. The NCP are considered nothing more than Cylon collaborators and traitors by the resistance who, again like their counterparts in Iraq, even go to the extremes of using suicide bombers in their campaign against the Cylons.

Another interesting parallel with Iraq, of course, is the role religion plays in the conflict on New Caprica. The Cylons worship what they call the "one true God," whereas the colonials have many different gods. This is perhaps a loud echo of the religious differences between a predominantly Christian America and Muslim Iraq.

It should be stressed that in earlier seasons the monotheist Cylons were obviously meant to conjure up images of Osama bin Laden and radical Islam. However, during their brutal occupation they more immediately brought to mind another band of dangerous religious fundamentalists... George Bush and the Christian Evangelical right that supported his mad crusade in the Middle East. Like the Cylons (or even bin Laden) they used God to justify their immoral war.

Similarly, many people sadly supported the 2003 invasion because they were beguiled into believing our troops were fighting to free Iraq from an evil dictator before he could develop weapons of mass destruction and threaten, paradoxically, international peace. Disastrously though much like the Cylons, far from peace all we've done is throw Iraq dangerously close to civil war and terrorized the Iraqi people.

Five years on from its relaunch, the writers of the re-imagined Galactica have to be congratulated. It would have been easy to write a more simplistic series with, like the original, everything presented in distinct black and white terms of good vs evil and no shades of grey. Instead, they created a highly compelling post 9/11 allegory, a mirror for our troubled times that shows the Terror Wars, warts and all. Hopefully, the rest of the series and the planed spin-off Caprica will be equally brave and thought provoking.

READ RICHARD THOMAS'S SCI-FI WORLDS COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

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