Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
The Finnish Government will not make changes recommended by the UN Human Rights Council to reform the ‘Trans Act.’ Rebecca Dallison, Amnesty UK’s Campaigner told Gay Star News:
‘Despite strong international pressure, Finland has decided to reject recommendations from the Universal periodic review in the UN Human Rights Council to reform the Trans Act. ‘Not only has the Finnish Government chosen to turn its back on trans people, but it has also failed to provide any justification for this regressive decision.’
This means trans people will continue to be sterilized if they want to have their gender changed legally. Sakris Kupila is the 21-year-old medical student leading the fight for trans people to choose their gender identity.
They describe this process as a violation:
‘The psychiatric diagnosing process felt like I was handing my dignity, identity, and future over to doctors, nurses and officials that would thoroughly examine me and judge whether or not my sense of self-was real or not’
‘The requirement of sterilization is a violation of bodily integrity.’
let’s not kid ourselves. if jews desecrated a christian cemetery, there would be riots. jews would get murdered. but because it’s a jewish cemetery there is no uproar. the world could care less.
belarus is doing this shit for apartments. they’re disturbing jewish gravesites for apartments. karma is a fucking bitch and I hope they get to experience it in full force because this? this is beyond despicable.
THIS is the person trump claimed is going to “protect America,”…… this should honestly scare anyone who has a sense of basic human decency, the president of the U.S should not be willingly letting people like this back into the real world.
the thread came with a lot of source links so if anyone wants to read them, here they are:
As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, can I say “fuck you” for throwing Soviet Jews under the bus to serve your disgusting agenda? A majority of Jews and Romani in Europe died in the Holocaust, which ramped up enormously while Hitler and Stalin were fucking allies. Maybe the 3 million Polish Jews who died during the Holocaust might still be alive if Stalin never made a deal to chop it in half with Hitler. Did you consider that? At best the Communists cleaned up their own mess for allowing millions of us to die.
You might also want to read up about Soviet Oppression of Jews. There was a reason why so many Soviet Jews tried to get out of the country for decades. It wasn’t because they didn’t like the weather.
You do not have our permission to use our dead to erase the oppression of our fellow Jews. You don’t get to exploit the Holocaust to erase the sins of Stalinism.
If you use genocide as a litmus test about whose hands are clean, you might want to take a look at all the people who died because of Stalin’s crimes. The death toll is in the millions.
That is all true and anyone who defends Stalinism is either an idiot, a racist or a crazy on person.
One more remark though: Jews have a very rich communist history, they played a huge role during the Revolution – including after it was hijacked by Bolsheviks. Even before, in the end of the 19th century they were the biggest members it revolutionary organizations, they fought for equality for everyone – of education gender, labor, land (they understood that as the marginalized group they would suffer as long as the lower-class majority continued to live in unbearable conditions; because the fury and frustration this majority felt would be directed at them), protection of them as Jews, freedom of movement for Jews as they lacked it, freedom of choosing a job as well as they were restricted in it, and so on. They wanted a revolution, they threatened to start a revolution and they participated actively in the revolution. In Bolshevik party they has a whole section for them, they supported a lot of Bolshevik policies concerning education (literacy rised up greatly), gender equality in education and job, taking the land from landlords and giving it to people and so on, all nice things. Unfortunately there were also tons of ugly things and even more of them after Stalin took the power.
Stalin hated Jews with passion, during his time it was when an active and bloody persecution of them started again, if in Imperial Russia there were pogroms and a suffocating restrictions of everything, then in Stalin’s era and later there were GULAG’s and executions. Mostly it came to it after the WWII, when Stalin stopped holding himself back I guess, it was the worst time with him in general as many people died horribly or were imprisoned for life for nothing, including a huge number of Jews.
Many Jews either tried to flee or hide – my best friend’s family is a good example. Her great-grandfather was arrested one night and lived for years and died in a camp. His family – great-grandmother and kids – changed their surname from a Jewish one to a Russian one. Then changed it again. They hid their identity and married to Russians. My friend’s grandmother already didn’t hold into her Jewish identity and my friend’s mother identifies as Russian as well as my friend. Though by all accounts my friend is 100% Jewish. And she’s not alone, I have many friends like this, it’s easy to see because Jews have distinctive features and people recognize them. Some of them don’t remember their Jewish ancestors that much, they just know there were Jews before, other know – like my friend. And most lost their Jewish identity.
There’s no excuse for those who excuses Stalinism. Though I also saw a lot of people excusing Nazism using Stalinism and it’s no better. As my history professor (who specialized on the history USSR during Stalinism) told me when I asked her: Stalin was as bad as Hitler, if not worse. Because Hitler killed off and used genocide against those people who he clearly named an enemy, while Stalin killed off people who he considered a part of Soviet Union’s population, so his own people.
There’s no excuse for any of them but I wish people stopped excusing either of them using the other one as an argument. That’s manipulative, erases history and fucked up.
And while Jews had a rich communist history and played a huge role in the Revolution they also were one of the most persecuted groups in the USSR during and after Stalin’s rule. They only had a very short moment of relative piece and they endured a lot.
Just wanna add that Stalin was a fucking terrible person but the idea that all communists belong to a Stalinist monolith is a joke. SO MANY communists denounce Stalin, and I’d wager that most don’t even follow the same ideology that was endorsed by him.
The USSR at its core was still as capitalist and exploitative as the Tsars were. After Lenin died, Stalin flipped on and betrayed his people, and reversed any progress that had been made in the prior years. The only good thing he’d go on to do was kill Nazis, and that’s it.
And for those comparing Antifa to Stalin: don’t even kid yourself. Anarcho-communists hate Stalin’s guts. Anarcho-communism at its core is anti-authoritarianism in that it denounces the notion of a traditional state.
Fuck tankies.
Actually that’s true about anarchists, if you know an anarchist who loves Stalin, that person is lying to you and to him/herself, he/she is not an anarchist.
I can’t say that the whole Lenin’s little “experiment”, how he called it, was that successful as it really fucked a lot of things up, I do not believe that Lenin really understood what exactly he was doing to people and economy, but Stalin is a whole new other story – the dude it just plain Evil. I mean, even my family has a history of relatives “taken” in the middle of the night by people in black in black cars – after that the family who were fist prominent party members never owned a party ticket ever again because this accident opened their eyes. And if you had no party ticket in the USSR you had problems with finding a good job and so on.
And about Nazis – Nazis were killed mostly not thanks to Stalin but despite Stalin’s involvement in making decisions (and killing off all experienced army generals right before the war). After years of studying history and talking to people who studied it their whole life I truly believe that the main responsibility for fighting off Nazis belongs to the Soviet people – meaning all the people from all over the USSR who fought that war either on the front line or worked on the home front building and providing the army, moving whole huge industrial complexes from the West to the East of the country and so on. Stalin often was wrong in his estimations and failed to predict the moves of the enemy, he had wrong priorities and also implemented some draconian laws that only helped to get more soldiers killed. People though persevered through all of that.
We’d usually just block you, Anon, but we’re going to use your message as a reminder of where the violence is coming from in 2017. Off the top of our heads, here’s what the year has looked like so far:
January 20, 2017: A right-wing extremist shoots a protestor at a Milo Yiannopoulos event at the University of Washington. January 29, 2017: Alexandre Bissonnette walks into a mosque in Canada during evening prayers and opens fire, shooting 17 people and killing six of them.
January 2017: Over 40 Jewish centers in the U.S. receive bomb threats.
March 12, 2017: a mosque in Ypsilanti, MI. is set on fire by arsonists.
March 20, 2017: James Jackson arrives in Manhattan with a sword and stabs the first black man he sees to death. He later tells authorities he “intended to kill as many black men as he could.”
March 24, 2017: Yelling “I hate Muslims!” a man in Minneapolis stabbed a Somali man in an attempt to kill him.
March 26, 2017: A racist mob attacks a 15-year-old Polish boy in Gloucestershire and, when a local Asian shopkeeper tries to intervene, attack him as well with crowbars and baseball bats, then attempt to run him over with a car.
March 31, 2017: A 17-year-old Iranian/Kurdish boy is nearly beaten to death by a mob of eight people in Croydon after he revealed to them that he was a refugee.
April 6, 2017: A Charlotte store is set on fire by an arsonist who leaves a warning message for the shop owner that he “did not want any refugee business owners and that they would torture the owner if they did not leave and go back to where they came from,” according to police. It was signed “White America.”
MAY 5TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
April 30, 2017: A white man storms a pool party in San Diego and shoots four black women, two black men, and one Latino man while allowing white attendees to leave. One victim dies while the other six sustain critical injuries.
MAY 10TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
May 5, 2017: A man walking his dog on South Beach in Miami is confronted by two men who call him a “fucking faggot,” then attack him, beating him unconscious. At one point in the attack, one of the attackers shouts
“all faggots need to die and we’re going to make sure they do!”
MAY 18TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
May 14, 2017: Vandals spray-paint hate graffiti on the home of a black family in upstate New York before attempting to set the house on fire while the family slept. Although the family escaped unscathed, their garage burnt to the ground and their house suffered some damage.
May 17, 2017: A homophobic mob break into the home of a gay couple and shoot and stab both men to death.
MAY 23RD: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
May 20, 2017: University of Maryland student and member of the “alt-Reich” facebook group Sean Urbanski walks up to 22-year-old Richard Collins III, who is black and who Urbanski does not know, and stabs him to death in an unprovoked attack.
May 27th: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
May 24, 2017: A barrage of doxxing, rape threats, and death threats received by trans comic book artist Sophie Labelle forces her to cancel an appearance and event at a Halifax book store, which also received bomb threats and threats of attacking the event. Labelle is forced into hiding.
May 26, 2017: Three men intervene on a MAX train in Portland when they witness another man verbally abusing two Muslim women with an Islamophobic tirade. The Islamophobe responds by pulling out a knife and stabs the three interveners, killing two of them.
MAY 30th: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
May 27, 2017: A white man drives his pickup truck through a campsite, targeting the Native Americans camping there while yelling racial slurs at them. He intentionally drives over two Native American men, killing one and injuring the other.
June 3rd: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
March 3, 2017: A Sikh man is shot and injured in front of his Seattle house by a white man waring a mask, who yells at him to “go back to your country!”
May 27, 2017: A 34-year-old Anthony Hammond lets loose with a flurry of racial slurs directed at a black man in a parking lot, then pulls out a machete and stabs the man before barricading himself in his apartment for several hours, until finally surrendering to police.
June 18, 2017: two men armed with baseball bats attack a group of Muslim teenagers, kidnapping a 17-year-old girl, who they beat to death, dumping her body in a pond.
June 1, 2017: A Princeton professor and racialized woman is forced to cancel a three-city lecture tour to promote her book about the Black Lives Matter movement after receiving over 50 death threats.
June 19, 2017: Shouting “I’m going to kill all Muslims!” 47-year-old Darren Osborne drives a courier van through a crowd of Muslims leaving a Finsbury mosque, killing one person and injuring ten others.
JULY 4TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
January 28, 2017: a First Nations woman walking with her sister is struck by a trailer hitch hurled from a passing vehicle. After struggling in hospital for several months, she succumbs to her injuries.
June 21, 2017: an Islamophobe approaches a Muslim man and woman sitting in a car stopped at a traffic light and knocks on the window. When the driver rolls down the window, the Islamophobe sprays the driver and passenger with acid, severely burning both.
JULY 16TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
February 21, 2017: a 24-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Chicago, IL.
February 26, 2017: a transgender woman is shot and killed in New Orleans, LA.
March 1, 2017: a transgender woman is stabbed to death in New Orleans, LA.
March 22, 2017: a 38-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Baltimore, MD.
April 21, 2017: a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Miami, FL.
May 17, 2017: a 34-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Fresno, CA.
July 2, 2017: a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Lynchburg, VA.
JULY 25TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
June 3, 2017: 38-year-old white supremacist Phillip Wade racially abuses a 57-year-old black man on an Oakley, CA. bus, then pulls a knife and stabs the man to death while the man is walking away from the confrontation. The victim is the third racialized person Wade has stabbed in the past six years and the second person he’s murdered.
July 16, 2017: A man attempts to pull the hijab off of a Muslim woman waiting for the tube in London, then hits her when she resists. He then pins her friend to the wall and spits in her face before leaving.
July 16, 2017: Arsonists set a mosque in Manchester ablaze.
July 18, 2017: A NASA researcher of South Asian descent has her car windshield shattered by a rock thrown through it by an assailant screaming “go back to your country!” She’s injured in the attack.
AUGUST 2ND: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
July 19, 2017: Two men exit a car and attack a racialized pedestrian with their fists and an iron bar.
AUGUST 7TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
August 5, 2017: A mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota is firebombed, narrowly missing killing & injuring dozens of members there for morning prayers.
AUGUST 10TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:
August 8, 2017: A well-known Chicago neo-nazi starts an altercation at a concert, then pulls out a smuggled knife and stabs a man and a woman at the show.
AUGUST 12TH: EDITED TO INCLUDED:
August 12, 2017: A white supremacist in Charlottesville, VA. drives his car at high speed directly into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing one woman and seriously injured 19 other people.
In case you have trouble counting, Anon, that’s threefourfivesixseveneightnine teneleven twelve shootings, threefourfive six arsons, twothreefourseveneightnineten eleven stabbings, twothree four five mob beatings, over 40 41 bomb threats and an acid attack by bigots, Islamophobes, nazis and racists so far this year. EightNineElevenTwelveFourteenFifteenSixteenSeventeenEighteenNineteenTwenty twenty-one twenty-twotwenty-threetwenty-fourtwenty-fivetwenty-sixTwenty-seven Twenty-Eight people are dead because of these bigoted attacks and fifteen twenty-one twenty-twotwenty-threetwenty-fivethirty-fivethirty-seventhirty-nine fifty-eight were severely injured.
But it’s anti-fascists that people should be worried about, right?
“you should be branded as terrorists just as much as the KKK“
Diaspora Jews I’m really scared for you guys 😦 this is getting too real
Am I the only one confused as to why a post about a guy apparently wanting to shoot up a synagogue ends with statistics about anti-Muslim hate crimes and absolutely nothing about antisemitism
Yeah, that’s pretty damn confusing.
Especially since Jews are literally the #1 hate crime target in proportion to population in the US.
Shaun King wrote an article about this and did not mention that Jews were the target in any way. I really like and respect Shaun King, and he’s been really vocal about Bannon’s antisemitism in particular, which I sincerely appreciate, but dude COME ON.
North Dakota police with military-style equipment surrounded Native Americans gathered in prayer against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on Wednesday, disrupting their plan to cross sacred and treaty-protected land in protest of a project they fear will destroy their livelihood.
“ND authorities deploy armed personnel with shotguns and assault rifles, military vehicles, and aerial spray on peaceful Water Protectors gathered in prayer,” wrote the Sacred Stone Camp, in a Facebook post.
Officers with military-style armored vehicles and shotguns threatened the protesters, who call themselves “water protectors” for defending the Missouri River from imminent pollution, reported Unicorn Riot. Up to 21 were arrested, the channel reported.
Witnesses filmed the crackdown but said their access their Facebook was blocked. One participant, Thomas H. Joseph II, posted a chilling video narrating the mobilization and his getaway. Helicopters are heard as he says that tear gas is being dropped, and an officer loads his gun as protesters, some on horseback, chant, “We have no guns.”
In the video, Joseph said that “one guy’s about ready to blast us” but later added that no fires were shot.
“We gathered in prayer un-armed, prayed, sang songs, and attempted to leave,“ he later wrote in a Facebook post. “No threats, No vandalism, No violence was taken on our part.”
Police and private security personnel have been more aggressively cracking down on actions against the pipeline since the governor declared a state of emergency. The state is currently investigating an incident in which contracted private security film Frost Kennelsunleashed dogs during a nonviolent direct action, ending with six bitten, including a pregnant woman and a child, according to organizers at the action.
Alternative media outlet Unicorn Riot previously accused Facebook of censoring its livestream of police repression, saying they received a popup security alert when they tried to post the video.
“We will not let them stop our mission to amplify the voices of people who might otherwise go unheard, and broadcast the stories that might otherwise go untold,“ they told RT.
The pipeline, expected to transport over half a million barrels of oil a day through four states, has united over 300 tribes in resistance. Several lawsuits are pending against the company, which has retaliated with restraining orders. The White House halted construction on federal land, which makes up three percent of the pipeline’s path, but has not issued any other statement against the pipeline—motivating Facebook users to demand a response after Wednesday’s crackdown.
President Barack Obama met with tribal representatives on Monday but only made an indirect reference to the historic native gathering: “I know that many of you have come together across tribes and across the country to support the community at Standing Rock,“ he said. “And together, you’re making your voices heard.“
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I can’t inline the videos, but there are two videos if you follow the link
WATCH THESE. DON’T LET THIS STORY DIE OUT BECAUSE ITS BEEN GOING ON FOR A WHILE. REBLOG. SHARE TO YOUR FACEBOOK, be enraged. Pray.
A Middleground 