There are always choices in politics, as there is in life. You can vote for things stay the same (status quo), to get regress (conservative), or to make an effort to change for the better (progressive).
Now really, if things stay the same they never improve and therefore they eventually become regressive.
Conservative politics regresses farther than status quo politics. Not only is it not content with the current state of affairs, but conservatism try to revert the politics body to some antiquated – and fictional – past in which everyone fights for themselves and everyone -mainly the rich – are content.
Then the questions arises: do we regress back forty years, or one hundred? Which golden age of inequality do we which to emulate? Is it inequality of wealthy, or inequality of wealth and of civil rights?
Choices.
If we choose progress, is it incremental, or deep structural change? Who, besides people who promote inequality of wealth and of civil rights, benefits from incremental change. Incremental progress merely creates a new regressive status quo.
Progress – real progress – ensures that everyone has rights, and that everyone’s well-being is accounted for.
Choices.
I recently went on vacation, and my reading choice was Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (a natural choice for reading while on vacation). I haven’t finished, and although it is true that the United States – even three years after this article Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt – we are not totalitarian it is also true the totalitarianism can appear in any country.
Here’s a brief quote from the paperback edition of copyright1968:
Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements , their most conspicuous eternal characteristic is their demand from total, unrestricted , unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member.
Knowing that we are not a totalitarian country, try to not join a movement that demands unconditional loyalty, and we might never be totalitarian.
I intended to send this message by email, although I may still have posted it here for the world to see. However, a search for how to contact Erica Green produces only places like LinkedIn. The article to which I want to respond, “Wider Definition of Judaism Is Likely to Aid Crackdown on Colleges” lists no way to contact you and is behind paywall.
In this syndicated article you suggested that most Jewish organizations are in favor of defining Judaism as more than a religion. The administration’s most recently executive order would, as you pointed out, would define Judaism as a race or a group of national origin. You did not mention that the Nazis of the Third Reich used this same definition to describe Jews. Nor did you include any viewpoint of any Jewish organization not vested in maintaining the brutal status quo in Israel.
The goal of the executive order, the administration tells us, is to combat anti-semitism. Especially anti-semitism on college campuses; thank you for providing a brief overview there and pointing out that this would cause ‘enormous confusion’ on college campuses. Although you failed to question any Jewish organization other than the conservative Zionist Organization of America, which you pointed out that Kenneth L. Marcus (the head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, who has been pushing for this kind of legislation or order for years), as an investigator reporter you also failed to say where the definition of anti-semitism originates from.
Your bio on the New York Times article – which again, contains no contact information – mentions that you’re an investigative journalist. You can easily find out that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) promoted the definition of anti-semitism that the administration has instructed the Department of Education to now implement, and also find out that the IHRA has used the same definition against human rights activists in Britain.
Essentially, you took no time to investigate what you’re writing about . As a person that concerns me. As an American that concerns me. As a Jew who reads your writing about anti-semitism, that concerns me.
For those of you keeping score at home, more weapons do not make us safer. Our insecurity increases when we add in nuclear weapons, or submarines powered by nuclear reaction.
How we’re going to pay for this is a great question. Why we’re paying for this is just as an important a question. And who’s making money off this?
On a day that should have ended the war to end all wars “early on November 11th [1918], the Germans met the Allies near Paris to sign an Armistice ending the fighting. The agreement set 11:00am Paris time as the moment the truce would begin – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.”
But, as the World War I Centennial Commission adds:
The fighting continued until the last possible moment. As a result, there were 10,944 casualties, including 2,738 deaths, on the war’s last day. Most occurred within a period of three hours. The last soldier to be killed in World War I was Henry Gunther, an American of German descent, who was killed just sixty seconds before the guns fell silent.
The agreement between the armies to stop fighting – the armistice – lasted long enough to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
It sounds like a great excuse to have a three day weekend, but in reality what happened was A Peace to End All Peace.
November 9-10 is the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The Atlantic, in “The Echoes of Kristallnacht,” writes that the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, just before midnight on 1938 sent a telegram to every police unit in Nazi Germany: “In shortest order actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Firefighters stood by as synagogues and Jewish-owned homes, schools, and businesses burned to the ground. Within a day, 91 Jews had been murdered, and between 20,000 and 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps,” writes The Atlantic.
And interviewee in the film by Leo Baeck Institute, about which “The Echoes of Kristallnacht” is based, said about those who ‘made it to America’: “America did not exactly make it easy. That’s a myth—the open arms of the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now.”
Now in the United States we have an increasingly tough immigration system that includes concentration camps where more than 10,000 children separated from their family are waiting to ‘come to America’ or to be turned away – sent back to where they wanted to escape from.
It’s sadly possible that Americans (the kind from the United States) don’t know this. It’s even more possible, sadly that Americans (the kind from the United States) don’t know about Kristallnacht or the Holocaust that followed it. This year Oregon became the 12 State to mandate teaching the Holocaust, writes Elaine Povich for PewTrusts. The map the PewTrusts provides of which states do require Holocaust education shows a huge gap through the middle of our country. (A few months later Washington also passed a bill requiring Holocaust education). For instance, Povich writes that “A survey last year showed that two-thirds of U.S. millennials were not familiar with Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp complex, located near Krakow, Poland. More than 1.1 million people were gassed, shot or starved at Auschwitz, including nearly a million Jews.”
Thirteen States out of fifty means 26% of States require Holocaust education. That’s a failing grade.
Next, we might want to know what kind of education about the Holocaust is taught. Do we learn, for instance, that
the Holocaust was the largest genocide in history, but not the last one. More recent examples include the Khmer Rouge’s killing of about 2 million Cambodian dissidents between 1975 and 1979; the Hutu slaughter of about 800,000 mostly Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994; and the Sudanese government’s killing of 300,000 civilians in the Darfur region, beginning in 2003
Elaine Povich knows that. It was beyond the time-frame and scope of her article to acknowledge that Washington State also passed legislation mandating Holocaust education.
The bill Washington State passed was promoted by the Holocaust Center for Remembrance. Among the studies supporting the bill, as listed by the Holocaust Center for Remembrance website, is IHRA Research in Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust 2017.
I had previously come across this article from 2016, by Jonathan Ofr in Mondoweiss, about Britain’s equating criticism of Israel with anti-Antisemitism, and the organization that pushed it. The organization is the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance). I believe that Teresa’s May accepting of their argument made it British law, in a way.
I don’t know the relation between the Center for Holocaust Remembrance is International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. I know that the IHRA has a vague definition of anti-Semitism and conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
What happens when Holocaust education turns to the creation of Israel as a state? Does the legislation mandating Holocaust education require discussing the indigenous Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing they face, and the broken promises that led to this ethnic cleansing?
What is a Holocaust and what isn’t? Why do we learn about so few Holocausts? And why are we trying to create another one?
“Israeli High Court Upholds Expulsion of Human Rights Watch Director Omar Shakir Over Alleged BDS Support” ….
Why was this blog silent for a while? Why have I suddenly posted a few times this week?
All of us who write run out of ideas. We run out of time. The energy that could be devoted to writing goes somewhere else.
I have two computers. On my older on I have all my documents and games – it’s starting to run slow after several years. The newer one is mainly used for browsing the internet and syncing photos.
On my older computer, which is a PC, was for several years the computer I used to write blogs. It still is, because it has all my sources. And then one day (once upon a time?), basic functions on the blog – like “Write” a new blog – stopped working.
I got distracted in life. A master’s degree. Attempts to organize my sources into something longer than a blog ….
Last week I found the time an energy to want to write a short blog. I opened WordPress and once again I was stymied by the fact that the “Write” function never opened (like the server was pinging the request and receiving no response). I decided to log out of WordPress – there was no point in being logged in if I could do nothing. And then, to log back in to WordPress.
Passwords are always an issue. Do I autosave a password? Do I need a different password for the dozens of websites that has asked me for a password? What would I lose if some hacker gained access to my computer because of my password – do I have any resources to lose anyway?!?
It might be best to not tell you how, but I logged back in to WordPress. And lo and behold, if you’re religious, or voila if you feel French, basic WordPress functions like “Write” worked again.
Clearly, my computer had a some point done something like adding a script to my browser, which prevented WordPress from allowing me to do things until I logged out and logged back in. It reminds me of the time the internet stopped working in my apartment once – my roommate and I spent hours doing everything we could think of on the back side of the server, until it occurred to us to press the restart button on the router.
It’s encouraging to know that I can write from my computer that has my sources. How often will I write? What will I write about? I don’t know. If there was nothing more to life than WordPress, it would be a lot easier to say.
The Fifth of November has been remembered as the “Gunpowder treason and plot” since Catholics Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby, and others attempted to blow up the British Parliament with Protestant King James I and the lords of parliament inside.
Yasmeen Serhan in The Atlantic says that after the failed plot, the word guy developed to mean a grotesque person. Londoners celebrated the survival of the king by lighting bonfires. It has become an official day in Britain where people light bonfires and burn effigies (a ritual, Yasmeen says, that has expanded to effigies of Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, and Boris Johnson).
The reputation and portrayal of Guy Fawkes has changed over the centuries. He became the basis for V for Vendetta and is now viewed as a popular underdog fighting the government. The iconic mask worn by protesters around the world represents Guy Fawkes.
History, Yasmeen Serhan, says, has evolved from representing Guy Fawkes as a religious fanatic to a popular folk hero.
It’s not wrong to remember Guy Fawkes, even though his representation in history has completely changed. But as far as I can tell – from the popular Remember Remember the Fifth of November ditty – we’re supposed to remember the day because the establishment won and monarchy prevailed. (I’m not saying that if Guy Fawkes and co. has succeeded monarchy would have ended). Be careful of why you’re remembering Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby – are you doing it because the establishment told you to?
Looking up “November 4” on Google I’m lead to https://www.onthisday.com. The first mention is that in 922 Richarius became bishop of Luik, and next that in 1333 the Arno River flooded, causing massive damage in Florence as recorded by the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani (OnThisDay lists 208 important events in history on November 4).
In the interest of finding out more, I looked up Richarius. Wikipedia refers me to Saint Richarius, who lived in at the end of the 6th century. He had an interesting life as a pagan who was converted to Christianity by two Welsh missionaries he saved. He started a monestary, impressed king Dagobert I who gave him money which Richarius used to ransom prisoners in England, and had an interesting life according to his chroniclers who wrote about him a hundred years later.
Saint Richarius, who lived in the 6th century is not the Richarius who became bishop of Luik in 922. Also, last I checked (and according to the Wikipedia article that Wikipedia links to) England was not a country at the end of 6th century. The Anglo-Saxons were fighting the Danes.
I was curious about Luik, and whether it mentioned that Richarius became bishop in 922. It turns out that Luik is usual called Liège, a city in eastern Belgium. There is no mention of Richarius.
A lot of things happen every November 4. I’m sure that some person that might have been Richarius at some point founded a monestary in a city that has blossomed to 1,200 residents.
I’m fairly certain, though, that this same Richarius did not become bishop of Liège,
Check your sources.
The Dole Blog 