• 2 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle


  • Tons. This on is from Oct 30 in The Nation:

    The German state’s show of support has led to an outright banning of most pro-Palestine protests. […]

    The reasons for the bans seemed unambiguous: German police said that there was an “imminent danger” that the assemblies will result in “inciting, anti-Semitic slogans,” as well as “glorification of violence.”

    Preemptively. Because antisemitism and “glorification of violence” might occur. And by antisemitism they mean things like this:

    On October 13, Berlin police declared uttering the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” forbidden and indictable. That same day, Berlin’s education senator, Katharina Günther-Wünsch, sent a letter to all Berlin school principals offering them the option to ban students from wearing “pro-Palestinian symbols such as the keffiyeh.” “Any act or expression of opinion that can be understood as advocacy or approval of the attacks against Israel,” she wrote, “constitutes a threat to school peace and is prohibited.”



  • What you’re saying is absolute horseshit.

    They banned many many protests in Germany (before they happened, at the permit phase). The excuse the authorities give is usually vague security concerns, and they always argue that something antisemitic or glorifying violence might be said. And they explictly define any fundamental critique of Israel as antisemitism and any positive mention or symbol of any armed resistance group as glorifying violence, but only for pro-Palestinian groups. You can show support for the IDF as much as you like, in fact providing not just symbolic support, but support in the form of actual lethal weapons is facilitated at the highest levels of the state. That is legal and encouraged. Saying “Palestine will be free.” gets you detained.



  • Looking at someone being tortured and your first thought is “must have done something to deserve this”. That’s fucked up.

    And then you immediately tell everybody else this thought. “This guy probably deserved it!” You did not take a couple of seconds to check whether your theory is contradicted by the article. You victimized the guy again with your baseless accusation, but you did not think or care about that.

    Your excuse for this? Can’t accept the IDF soldiers being ontologically evil. Yeah me neither pal, it’s a childish concept. There are actual material reasons for the cruelty. If you want to steal someone’s land, you need to drive them out, and being cruel is a tried and true method to achieve this. No need to invoke good and evil, and no need to invent your own reality.

    But of course, you do not afford the same to Hamas. No elaborate theory-crafting in this instance. There you have no problem declaring them just plain evil.

    What flavor evil are you?






  • Reportedly the Russian factory workers are being paid quite well. And the lack of quality is just a myth I think. There’s no indication that’s actually true.

    The real reason prices in the West are so high is that there’s a shortage, and shells are supplied overwhelmingly by private contractors, and so the price has multiplied thanks to supply-and-demand market logic.

    You may think the Efficient Free Market Knows Best™, so shouldn’t they increase production? Think again. They’re making record profits right now. Meaningfully increasing production involves building new factories for billions of dollars/euros, which might be ready in a year or two. By then the war will be over and they would have overcapacity, which would be inefficient and prices would plummet. Why would they do that to themselves?

    So they’re in a great negotiating position vis a vis desperate Western governments. They want guaranteed profits, of the same sort they’re making right now, or else the shortage continues.


  • If you had read the article you would know the guy grew up in what was then Poland during the Holodomor, not Ukraine. You probably have double genocide brainworms, and this excuses nothing. (Nazi apologia count: 1)

    You ignored where I quoted how the guy was at the consecration of a fucking Waffen-SS memorial in 1976, you know, at age 50. Instead you keep repeating how young he was (Nazi apologia count: 2)

    You also ignored that the guy is definitely a war criminal, being part of the Waffen-SS in Slovakia, instead you paint him as the victim. Oh how hard it must have been during the Slovakia uprising, for, *checks notes*, the poor Waffen-SS soldier on massacre duty. Come on, you got to be kidding me. (Nazi apologia count: 3)

    Then there’s some bullshit about how “Nazis gave them hope” (do you hear yourself?) and “impossible situation”, apparently that’s a valid excuse to join the Waffen-SS in your book. You know who didn’t join the Waffen-SS? Literally almost every other Ukrainian. (Nazi apologia count: 4, 5)

    Can I see this promotion of multiculturalism and tolerance please? And how is it possible that this very tolerant man put up a Waffen-SS memorial at age 50? I don’t believe you, you’re making this shit up. But I see this fun quote by him about multiculturalism:

    “I kept telling Peter [Lougheed]: ‘broaden the base, involve the ethnics, like Ukrainians and Germans, that no one is enlisting,’” Savaryn said in an interview with the Edmonton Journal, the mouthpiece of Alberta’s Conservatives.

    Or maybe you mean that he was president of the “World Congress of Free Ukrainians”? Because I can already smell the fascist OUN stink coming off of this org. Oh yeah here it is.


  • This article is dumb AF. Dude was a fucking 18 year old infantryman when Nazi Germany surrendered. This article tries to portray him as some high-level Nazi and tries to smear the monarchy by implication.

    Hmm, let’s read the article. (Savaryn is the guy):

    Originally from Ukraine, he served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS – the so-called Galicia division – during World War Two.

    And:

    Savaryn rarely spoke publicly about his wartime experiences, but admitted in an interview to joining the Galicia division in 1944 after much of the unit was encircled and destroyed during the Soviet liberation of Ukraine.

    Rather than fighting to free Ukraine from Soviet rule, the Galicia division retreated deeper into German-occupied Europe. Savaryn confessed to hunting down partisans during Slovakia’s uprising against the Nazis in 1944.

    According to the Military Historical Institute of Slovakia, “If we compare them to regular Wehrmacht units, the way they behaved, the cruelty and the pillage by the Galicia Division was much worse. The Galician Division was the most cruel, the worst of all.

    Just an “18 year old infantryman” my ass. Was he sorry for what he did?

    In his memoirs, Savaryn refers to the Galicia division as “the Knights of the Golden Lion” – a reference to an old Galician kingdom’s coat of arms adopted by the Ukrainian SS men as their unit’s insignia.

    Also pictured in Savaryn’s memoirs is his presence at the consecration of the Galicia division memorial in Edmonton’s St. Michael’s Cemetery in 1976 by Catholic Cardinal and Ukrainian nationalist Josyf Slipyj. The memorial lies close to the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex.

    I guess not.

    Now get fucked with your Nazi apologia.



  • They trade with all of them, so it’s not like they have to choose.

    Germany sells a ton of weapons to Israel, and they also buy weapons and surveillance tech from Israel. German foreign policy is basically copy-pasted from Washington, and they are all-in on the US empire (which the German capitalists benefit(ted) from massively, at least up to recently), so every reason the US has to support Israel also applies to Germany.

    It also allows them to transfer their guilt/responsibility to Muslims, which are convenient punching bags for politicians to use in order to gather votes from the Islamophobic German public. And it makes (made?) them look good: they can pretend to have learned from the Nazi past, and pretend not be antisemites by getting approval from (Zionist) Jews, which, in the past, actually improved their image domestically and internationally (in the all-important West at least). And, like I said before, it gives them an air of moral superiority and righteousness to pretend they’re totally reformed, no longer Nazis, seen the error of their ways (swear to god!). And they can lord that over their enemies, and use it to convince the public to support military aggression in the name of defeating another Hitler, or preventing another Holocaust (which is Germany’s special responsibility, you see!).

    With what Israel is doing right now, and social media showing the utter horror, it no longer looks very good internationally, but domestically, pro-Israel sentiment among the German public (and even more so institutionally and and in the press) is still incredibly high, so saying the most unhinged pro-Israel shit is actually genuinely popular. And with the repression of pro-Palestinian voices that’s not going to change anytime soon either. People are genuinely afraid to speak up, lest they get fired, smeared, blacklisted, or arrested. German language media is like US media from 30 years ago in terms of uncritical pro-Israel views.


  • When the old Nazis of the Adenauer govt started supporting Israel (and the genocide convention), they did that not out of genuine guilt, but because the US said so, and so they could use it as in their anti-communist propaganda (“See we are morally superior and you’re doing all these terrible things <insert atrocity propaganda here> over there in the east. Maybe we need to do something about that!”).

    Perhaps later generations actually started to feel ashamed for their opas, but they too used this as justification. “Oh we’re sooo repentant, that makes us so much better than all you unrepentant sinners and btw it means we definitely need to bomb Belgrade.”

    And now they’re using it to pummel Palestinians (and also all Muslims, both in Germany and elsewhere), because those have not accepted they’re also filthy sinners/antisemites, and the Germans can put all their opas’ sins on that scapegoat and be cleansed. And who better to put this on and punish, than the people they already hate, and whose resources they want to steal.

    tl;dr It was originally fake abuser logic, and now se Germans have it internalized, because it makes them feel superior and can be used as a weapon.

    They don’t need get rid of their guilt, they can just stop abusing it for their selfish desires.