by wj
lj mentioned in comments to the previous thread that he's been at a conference this past week. Well, I'm doing the same. In Kigali, Rwanda. And was inspired.
I suspect that, for any of you who are over 50, when you hear "Rwanda" the next word that comes to mind is "genocide." But it should be remembered that that horror was over 30 years ago. Which is to say, all of the population under 40 was necessarily uninvolved. And it raises the question: If your country (or ethnic group, or other kind of group) does something horrible, how long should the country/group be held responsible for it? Especially when the group is one you are born into, rather than voluntarily joined.
I have to say that the folks here in Kigali have been delightful. It's pretty clear that they lack experienced hosting a conference, even so small a one as this. But with luck, we will help give them that experience. And they are certainly trying hard to change perceptions.
The same question, of course, hits closer to home. For how long do we hold all Americans to blame for slavery, which was abolished a century and a half ago? How long do we hold the British, etc. to blame for the slave trade? How long do we hold the Japanese to blame for their behavior in the middle of the 20th century? How long do we hold Cambodians to blame for Pol Pot? I could go on; every country and ethnic group has something in their past somewhere.
Reparations are a different, but similar, issue to assigning guilt. Should those who were not even born at the time be expected to pay another group whose members were also not born when horrible things were done?** And how does one decide what would be "reasonable compensation"? Total (inflation adjusted?) amount lost? Something symbolic, to acknowledge that harm was done? And what about cases where genocide was sufficiently successful that no heirs are available. Or what about cases like Cambodia, when all the harm was done internally?
** Obviously cases where ongoing harm has been done are different. But again, once the harm has stopped, what is appropriate?
Open thread! (Because one is overdue.)
How long to blame?
At least as long as there are significant attempts at whitewashing and/or justification.
As long as one major party refuses to go after prominent members that tout the virtues of slavery and how the blacks had it better then or under Jim Crow (even putting that in school textbooks) and courts church leaders that do the same...
As long as it is an actual crime in Turkey to speak honestly about the Armenian genocide...
Feel free to add examples from other places.
It took Germany decades to come around on Nazi crimes (before that either denying or at least heavily downplaying* them or claiming that they were all committed by a tiny number of people in complete secrecy).
A nice way to put it concerning the sins of the (fore)fathers in relationship to the descendants:
"We were not responsible but we still have a responsibility" (= it was not us who did it but it falls on us to deal with the consequences and to prevent it from happening again, of which an important part is to not forget and to fight it being actively forgotten and/or distorted)
*in an infamous example a defense lawyer for one accused of crimes at Auschwitz interrupted the court (can't remember whether it was the judge or prosecutor speaking) protesting that it was 'only'/'at maximum' 2 million not 6 million dead Jews and obviously saw that as an exoneration of his client.
Posted by: Hartmut | June 10, 2024 at 09:16 AM
Stealing the land from Native Americans is an ongoing crime.
Posted by: Snarki, child of Loki | June 10, 2024 at 02:23 PM
But that's inside the borders, not abroad, and thus does not count. It also depends on who does the stealing and how (at private gunpoint: no; by lawyer and/or by state: OK).
Posted by: Hartmut | June 10, 2024 at 03:09 PM
Stealing the land from Native Americans is an ongoing crime.
Nope, not ongoing. Unless someone has stolen some recently, and managed to keep it quiet. Do you know of such a case?
Posted by: wj | June 10, 2024 at 03:30 PM
But it should be remembered that that horror was over 30 years ago. Which is to say, all of the population under 40 was necessarily uninvolved. And it raises the question: If your country (or ethnic group, or other kind of group) does something horrible, how long should the country/group be held responsible for it? Especially when the group is one you are born into, rather than voluntarily joined.
Who raised these people? To what extent can someone who is raised by a parent or guardian (or teachers) who were alive and involved be considered isolated from the actions of those responsible for their nurture? How many of the folkways and cultural attitudes that are foundational or constitutive of their worldview and sense of identity are entangled in the messy politics of dominance and collective violence?
I don't think we can talk about these sorts of events as individuated historical moments any more than I think we can talk about climate as a simple aggregate of individuated weather. People have social ecologies that they are born into, and those social ecologies tent to replicate themselves.
I don't think that a discourse of blame and a focus on injuries and reparations can really get at the heart of the matter. How we really need to be thinking of this is as a social terraforming project and the creation of a new social ecology with a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the individual and their societies (and, ultimately, with all of the life on this spaceship).
Don't ask me what that is. I mean, I am on board for figuring it out, but we haven't yet seen the shape of this future us. I'm just committed to the need for change, and for staying engaged with those on the other side of the changes.
We are currently headed for that change, but in a faster and more violent way than is ideal, driven on by the momentum of the weight of our past collective actions and the gravity of our current situation.
Something must be done to lighten that load.
Soon.
Posted by: nous | June 10, 2024 at 04:14 PM
Well, we never gave it back, did we?
My understanding is that the remarkable reconciliation between the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda was achieved through a serious reckoning with the events. Victims were able to address their perpetrators directly. There was an honest, and difficult, recognition and acceptance of responsibility for harmful actions, which is to say, mass murder.
There has not been, to my knowledge, any similar program attempted here in the US, regarding either the multi-generational calamities visited on either American blacks or native Americans. Perhaps Reconstruction, in the case of blacks, but that ended pretty quickly, to be followed by 100 years of Jim Crow. Probably the same for any number of other demographics who have been on the receiving end of systematic discrimination here for that matter, although the experience of blacks and native Americans are arguably the worst and most persistent cases. Note the "arguably" in that sentence.
Many of the arguments for reparations for American blacks are based not on slavery, or at least not solely on slavery, but on the 100 years of de jure and to-this-day persistent de facto discrimination - policies and actions that have made it difficult for African Americans to build generational wealth, and to establish a solid presence in institutions of power here. So, not just about whose great-great-grands were slaves, but whose parents and grandparents could not get a mortgage, or a college education, or accede to positions of leadership in business or government.
So the "how long ago" part, in that case, is not so very long. And in the case of native Americans, "how long ago" is "now".
I'm personally not in favor of reparations, because I think that would be the end of efforts to actually recognize and address the discrimination that black folks still live with here. Basically, if reparations are paid, my sense is that the resulting sentiment would be "you got paid, now shut up".
The belief that black people are, somehow, inherently inferior is alive and well in this country. Or, if not inherently inferior, then the claim is that black people are the authors of their own misfortunes, and they basically need to shape up. The fact that so many of the disorders that have plagued the American black communtiy for generations are also now endemic in the poorer white communities here in the age of trickle-down doesn't seem to have registered with many folks.
I'm against reparations, not because they are not justifiable, but because, net/net, they would be more harmful to the black community than not. Because people don't really want to address the root problem, which is the persistent belief that black people are somehow different, and somehow undeserving of treatment as equals.
Posted by: russell | June 10, 2024 at 06:19 PM
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
I'm not a spiritual person by any means, but I do believe that organized, murderous, beyond-vicious cruelty by a society leaves a psychic mark, or a karmic burden, on the cultures that practice it.
If everyone just nods and agrees that, well, it happened a long time ago and all the direct original instigators, participants, and beneficiaries are dead, so there is no point in striving for justice... then there is very little dis-incentive for the next batch of sadistic, murderous, thieving savages to do it again.
That may be a reason there always are more sadistic, murderous, thieving savages ready to try their luck again: because entire nations, or protected elites, are often the perpetrators and beneficiaries, there is hardly ever a punishment to fit the crime.
Posted by: CaseyL | June 10, 2024 at 07:02 PM
Nope, not ongoing. Unless someone has stolen some recently, and managed to keep it quiet. Do you know of such a case?
https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/plains-treaties/dapl
https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-plunder-never-stops
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/22/native-hawaiians-wait-decades-return-colonized-land-state-failure
https://nativegov.org/resources/allotment-legacies-guide/
Posted by: liberal japonicus | June 10, 2024 at 07:52 PM
Didn't just want to do a drive by. Needless to say, I don't really agree with the premise of the post, that somehow now is the time to determine the time limit on guilt and reparations. The ordering is interesting-questions about blame precede questions about reparations. Unconscious, I'm sure, but that ordering basically stacks the deck. Imagine we discuss reparations first and then talk about when guilt has sufficiently been discharged. I think that the discussion might look different.
If your partner had cheated on you (or vice versa), what steps would be necessary to move on? Add to that the fact that for a relationship, one can simply separate. In this case, there is no other place to go.
Since I'm on a roll with these analogies, another one I'd make is musical temperament/tuning systems. I've recently been fooling around with Japanese scales
https://www.musicnotes.com/blog/japanese-scales-in-music-theory/
and have been wondering how they were/are precisely tuned. Reading about this and about tuning systems parallels my thoughts about how Western legal systems deal with Native rights. Here's a fun link and a quote
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/the-tuning-wars-equal-temperament-destroys-everything
When I interviewed the American composer Lou Harrison in 2002 his benevolent demeanour – John Cage meets Santa Claus – shattered as I broached the subject of tuning. 'Equal temperament destroys everything and is not for the human ear,' he snarled as though the fault were mine. Terry Riley thinks equal temperament is emblematic of what he considers to be the West’s driven aggression and imperialist tendencies: 'Western music is fast because it’s not in tune,' he says.
The rest of the page has what may seem like a lot of hyperbole, but when you start dealing with it, you realize that there is probably something there.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | June 11, 2024 at 12:07 AM
If you pose that question ("how long...?") in Germany, you'll be immediately placed within the extreme right to neo-nazi spectrum, lol. Though there has been an interesting twist recently, in that the consensus has been fractured somewhat by offical Germany's unqualified support for Israel in its actions after October 7th and the reaction to this position.
I think people generally like to move on with their lives, but that doesn't mean forgetting or drwaing a line. Intergenerational trauma is an important factor as is the acknowledgment of guilt on part of the perpetrators.
How to deal with the injustice decades or centuries later is a tricky one, especially because there has been so much of it - "the West" having been built to a great extent on land theft, resource extraction and exploitation of labour.
Posted by: novakant | June 11, 2024 at 09:11 AM
If you believe that people have a duty to do the right thing, which might mean fixing something that is wrong, that doesn't mean you are blaming them for what is wrong - any more than you are blaming people cleaning up after a natural disaster for that natural disaster.
I don't buy the framing, at least not when the people who perpetrated a wrong are no longer around. (If they are still around, blame away!)
It kind of reminds me of the "Don't blame shootings on guns" that some 2A zealots put forth on occasion. I don't even know what "blaming guns" is supposed to mean.
Beyond all that, consider who benefits from the legacy of the wrong and who continues to suffer from it, regardless of who perpetrated it.
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | June 11, 2024 at 10:06 AM
The thing about reparations is that there is not enough money in the world to truly repay the harm done in the examples wj calls out. Money does not make people whole.
We need to look, candidly and with humility, at how we treat people. Historically, but also now.
This stuff is not all in the past.
Posted by: russell | June 11, 2024 at 11:51 AM
Well, we never gave it back, did we?
True. I suppose the English (most of them) have an ongoing grievance with the French over Runnymede, too. The Normans never gave the land back either.
Seriously, everybody (save, perhaps, a few folks in Patagonia) are living on land that someone in the past invaded and settled. Or, more often, took over and ruled as well. If ancient wrongs were never "corrected", and they weren't, everybody has grounds for a blood feud with pretty much everybody else. Hence my question originally: How long is long enough? Or, to use Casey's terminology, how long does that psychic mark last?
My personal feeling is, two weeks is too short, and two millennia is too long. Perhaps we can narrow that range a bit.
Posted by: wj | June 11, 2024 at 12:57 PM
The ordering is interesting-questions about blame precede questions about reparations. Unconscious, I'm sure, but that ordering basically stacks the deck. Imagine we discuss reparations first and then talk about when guilt has sufficiently been discharged.
The reason for bringing up guilt first is that, until you establish who is guilty, you can't justly demand reparations. To put it close to home, are you, lj, liable to pay reparations to Koreans (or their descendants) for Japanese atrocities during WW II. Your ancestors may have been from Japan, and you may live there now, but your parents and grandparents (I'm guessing, I admit) were in the US at the time. So, are you guilty? What do you owe?
So, guilt first, then reparations, then discuss when guilt has been sufficiently discharged. Because you can't talk about discharging something until you establish that it exists.
Posted by: wj | June 11, 2024 at 01:10 PM
How to deal with the injustice decades or centuries later is a tricky one, especially because there has been so much of it - "the West" having been built to a great extent on land theft, resource extraction and exploitation of labour.
Trying to figure out if you are really unaware that the same is true around the world. To take just one non-western example, check out the development of the caste system in India. Every time a new set of invaders arrived, a new top caste was created for them. Land theft? Check. Resource extraction (or monopolization)? Check. Exploitation of labor? Check.
Posted by: wj | June 11, 2024 at 01:18 PM
The thing about reparations is that there is not enough money in the world to truly repay the harm done in the examples wj calls out. Money does not make people whole.
We need to look, candidly and with humility, at how we treat people. Historically, but also now.
I'd endorse that. With hsh's caveat: "if the people who perpetrated a wrong are . . . still around, blame away!"
Posted by: wj | June 11, 2024 at 01:22 PM
There's a lot of discussion in current history scholarship surrounding the historicity of the caste system before British rule:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734
Going back to your first post, wj, I'm just finishing up another quarter of my Climate Migration class, and we are already in the first phase of a new Migration Era that will likely be at least as disruptive to the established balance of power as was the one that helped to usher out the Roman Empire.
I think the legal structures underpinning the discourse of guilt and reparations are going to be severely strained by the pressures of mass displacement, mass desperation, and mass death that we are headed towards. We keep arguing over who is at fault, and to what extent, and all of those fights are wasting our safety margin for taking action.
It's not reparations, it's finding and starting out on a path that has a better future for all of us than the hellscape of mass death and authoritarianism that we are headed for right now.
Migration Era is a much more productive way of thinking about our current world than seeing our moment as the start of the New Barbarian Invasions.
We need new institutions and new institutional models to deal with the mess our current institutional models have created.
Posted by: nous | June 11, 2024 at 02:45 PM
Trying to figure out if you are really unaware that the same is true around the world. (...)
The fact that the elites of other countries colluded with colonial powers and that there are bad people everywhere is a bit beside the point considering the magnitude of exploitation "the West" committed.
Not everything is the same, but it seems this right-wing talking point never gets old.
Posted by: novakant | June 11, 2024 at 04:16 PM
The thing about "being held responsible", and the more specific remedy of reparations, is what is the goal? You kind of have to decide what you want to accomplish before you start handing out apologies, cash, and land. Of course you can say "who are the opressors to decide" which is fair enough. For example, the American enslaved would very much like tomhave a discussion about reparations, but even that has been a bridge too far, so far. Getting the opressors to agree to accept the concept is the biggest hurdle so far, let alone talking about what the goal is.
Posted by: Cheez Whiz | June 11, 2024 at 11:17 PM
The reason for bringing up guilt first is that, until you establish who is guilty, you can't justly demand reparations.
That's what I said, but then you immediately ask
are you, lj, liable to pay reparations to Koreans (or their descendants) for Japanese atrocities during WW II.
So you aren't asking about guilt or innocence, you are leaping right to the reparations, which contradicts what you initially say.
If you want me to take up the example, assuming you are talking about the more recent issues of Japan and Korea rather than the Imjin Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea_(1592%E2%80%931598)
if I were living in the US and considering my grandparents came to Hawaii in 1899 and 1904 respectively, it would be a little bizarre to start dunning me for an appropriate amount to send to Korea.
Now that I live in Japan, it might be a little more appropriate, but if they are just asking me and not popping the question to Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, which were wartime zaibatsu, it would be a little off.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2752197
[and taking advantage of my frontpager status, I can point out that Japan did pay reparations to Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Basic_Relations_Between_Japan_and_the_Republic_of_Korea
It's still a sore point, but arguing about that is quite different than arguing if they should be paid at all]
But you didn’t acknowledge the other point that I made, which is that before any of this reckoning takes place, the offending party has to stop. You can ask about Japanese reparations because the Japanese have left Korea. They are no longer occupying the country, no longer press ganging Koreans or forcing women into brothels. Yet when you talk about Native Americans, land is still being occupied, people are still being dispossessed and disenfranchised. The whole mote and log quote comes to mind here.
It reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s line of knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’. It seems to me that the reason for jumping immediately to questions of reparations is to do a reductio ad absurdum to attempt to relieve guilt. And in looking for who said that, I came across this
https://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/the-price-of-everything-and-the-value-of-nothing/
Being able to quantify things, to measure things, to compare and analyse can make it easy to miss the underlying issues. Focusing on the price makes it easy to miss the real value – and can turn what should be complex decisions based on combinations of ethics, morals, culture, empathy, philosophy and understanding of society into much simpler games based on numbers and calculations.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | June 12, 2024 at 02:40 AM
The last quote in LJ’s comment reminds me of this—
https://igp.sipa.columbia.edu/sites/igp/files/2023-12/How-Economics-Can-Tackle-the-Wicked-problem-of-Climate-Change.pdf
The more technical version—
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350178X.2022.2040740
I won’t pretend I read either all the way through, but the gist of it is that some economists, notably William Nordhaus, have helped the cause of climate denialism by trying to reduce everything to economic calculations of costs and benefits and doing a very bad job of it. Nordhaus famously calculated that a 6 Celsius degree increase would reduce GDP by around 8.5 percent or something like that. He used a quadratic model for damage, so a 6 degree decrease would do the same. The Ice Age was about 4 or 5 degrees cooler.
So part of the problem was that Nordhaus’s attempt at quantifying the harm in economic terms was wildly off, like Herman Kahn trying to figure yor the economic impact of a global thermonuclear war, but maybe the more fundamental problem is trying to put everything into terms an economist can understand. Hard not to do this in our technocratic age but we are running into the limits of that type of thinking.
Posted by: Donald | June 12, 2024 at 10:39 AM
Depending on the discount rate used, the cost of "completely destroying the Earth in 1000 years" is just pocket change.
Posted by: Snarki, child of Loki | June 12, 2024 at 10:58 AM
Going back to your first post, wj, I'm just finishing up another quarter of my Climate Migration class, and we are already in the first phase of a new Migration Era that will likely be at least as disruptive to the established balance of power as was the one that helped to usher out the Roman Empire.
We are, indeed. My guess is that India will be the major country which gets trashed first. And probably worst. (Of course some island nations will disappear around the same time. Except as nominal locations of offshore accounts.) Bangladesh will be flooding progressively, and that's a huge population with pretty much nowhere else to go.
But, as you say, the disruption will be pretty general. Either your traditional agriculture will be no longer effective, so it's move or starve. Or, if your farmers are flexible enough, and have the resources, to adapt, then you are where everybody is going to want to move to. The only ones (potentially) helped will be those close to the pole, who may gain new agricultural land and need more people to farm it. Think Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, and the southern bits of Argentina and Chile.
Posted by: wj | June 12, 2024 at 01:25 PM
Don't forget the lush tropical forests that sooner or later will cover Greenland and Antarctica. And both places will have an abundance of fresh water, which will be a highly priced commodity (I assume Coca Cola and Nestle are already competing for the exclusive rights of access).
Posted by: Hartmut | June 12, 2024 at 03:43 PM
My guess is that India will be the major country which gets trashed first. And probably worst. Bangladesh will be flooding progressively, and that's a huge population with pretty much nowhere else to go.
Some experts put the Indus Valley in Pakistan ahead of Bangladesh on their "at risk" lists. In addition to recent year floods, Pakistan has joined the small club of countries that have at least briefly reached the fatal wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C. India is also a member of the club.
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh together are 1.84 billion people.
Posted by: Michael Cain | June 12, 2024 at 04:36 PM
Anyone here read Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Ministry for the Future"?
It starts with a wet-bulb heatwave in Uttar Pradesh,from the POV of someone caught in it.
I cannot shake that scene.
Unfortunately, humanity has never ever been able to change its ways voluntarily.
It will take the deaths of many, many tens of millions, within a short period of time, before enough of our species thinks seriously enough about climate change to put a stop to the industrialized processes that are pushing it along.
Posted by: CaseyL | June 12, 2024 at 05:05 PM
Yes to Ministry for the Future. It's one of the reasons that I started teaching my Speculative Journalism class (though for the purposes of the class, I use the L.A. atmospheric river chapter and Bacigalupi's "The Tamarisk Hunter" as my first week hooks).
I always make sure to tell my students that it's not that we can't change, but that we lack the will to do so in time to prevent greater suffering than is necessary.
Posted by: nous | June 12, 2024 at 05:31 PM
Just stumbled over this from yesterday:
* Disappointment in Oklahoma: “A historic quest for justice by the last two known survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre ended with a state court ruling on Wednesday. The Oklahoma Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of their lawsuit, the final legal stop for Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110.”
Posted by: Hartmut | June 13, 2024 at 03:37 AM
From SCOTUSblog this morning:
This was pretty obviously what should have happened when the case first went to trial, but that one particular federal district court, and the Fifth Circuit court of appeals, have lost their minds.Posted by: Michael Cain | June 13, 2024 at 11:04 AM
Since it's an open thread, here's this, ht to a BJ commenter:
And I thought conscience exemptions that allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control pills, or employers to get out of covering them in employee health insurance, were among the most enraging facets of this phase of formerly moderh life.
Tumbrels would be far too good for these people.
Posted by: JanieM | June 13, 2024 at 11:47 AM
Tumbrels would be far too good for these people.
Amen. Thrice amen.
Posted by: Girl from the North Country | June 13, 2024 at 05:20 PM
I personally don't feel any guilt at all for crimes that happened in the US or were done by the American government before I was born. I do think that those crimes should be acknowledge honestly, that we need to fix and change whatever it was that allowed the crime to happen and do reparations if needed as part of that fixing and changing.
HOW to do reparation is a HUGE question.
BTW are you all aware of the Land Back movement? Now that many tribes are rolling in money, they are literally buying land. Actually even many tribes that aren't rolling in money have on-going efforts to buy back land. IN other cases, land has been returned as a gift or as a shared ownership or shared management arrangement such as Bears Ears National Monument. The National Bison Range is now part of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. INcluded in the concept of "land back" is "decolonization" or restoration of cultural activities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Back
Posted by: wonkie | June 13, 2024 at 07:44 PM
I'll have to remember Land Back as one of those keyword phrases for my students to research. Would go well alongside Just Transition, Circularity, Donut Economy, and Permaculture for climate change activism.
Posted by: nous | June 14, 2024 at 12:11 AM
The court unanimously holds in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that the plaintiffs lack a legal right to challenge the FDA’s actions regarding the regulation of mifepristone, the drug used in over half of abortion in the United States.
But that's not the whole story. In addition the the points Janie notes, the Court also laid out a roadmap for a case which would get mifepristone banned. Once someone with standing is found.
Of course, by that time the election will be over. So the ban won't be an issue this time.
Posted by: wj | June 14, 2024 at 03:22 AM
I suppose the English (most of them) have an ongoing grievance with the French over Runnymede, too.
Er, some mix-up there perhaps.
__
I don't want (and don't deserve) reparations from Germany. But I do want Germans in particular to treat the Holocaust as a great wrong and a great sorrow for all of us.
In general, I think the most important step is acknowledging that wrong has been done. Removing Confederate statues, for example, matters a lot.
Trumpists don't say when it was that America was previously 'Great'. It would be welcome if they identified a date after 1964 to hark back to.
Posted by: Pro Bono | June 15, 2024 at 11:30 AM
Removing Confederate statues, for example, matters a lot.
Those in particular. Most were erected not in the 19th but the mid 20th century in part as a counterreaction to the civil rights movement.
This was the equivalent of Germany* to-day officially erecting statues of well-known characters from the 3rd Reich (and I do not mean resistance fighters) and renaming streets in their honour**.
*hypothetically.
**here in Berlin we have the opposite. A lot of seemingly harmless street names can be tied to events we to-day feel ashamed of. E.g. Iltisstraße (polecat street) seems innocent but looking at the neighbouring streets it becomes clear that it is named not after the animal but after a warship Germany sent to quell the Boxer rebellion. We have a whole "African quarter" where all streets are named after locations and persons connected to our former African colonies (sometimes connected directly to atrocities).
The potential renaming is a constant debate and occasionally backfires. E.g. one street named after an infamous German colonialist was to be renamed after a historical African queen but it turned out the lady was deeply involved in the slave trade - Oops.
Posted by: Hartmut | June 15, 2024 at 01:06 PM
They’ve come after abortion. They’ve come after birth control. They’ve come after IVF. Now it looks suspiciously like far-right Republicans might have a new target: no-fault divorce. If a certain subsection of Republicans get their way, obtaining a divorce in the US might soon become a lot more difficult.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/15/republicans-no-fault-divorce
Posted by: GftNC | June 15, 2024 at 01:10 PM
I was following up on that Grauniad article on no fault divorce, and I came to this (which I had read last year, and forgotten):
In light of his aggressively misogynist and anti-gay views on public policy, it is likely not surprising that Johnson also advances a disturbing and sexist view of the private sphere. He has condemned no-fault divorce, the liberalized regime of divorce law that was won by feminists in the 20th century, and which allowed women to initiate divorce and to exit marriages without having to prove either infidelity or abuse to a court. Johnson says that women’s freedom to leave marriages, along with their freedom to elect out of motherhood when they choose, is responsible for mass shootings.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/08/mike-johnson-house-speaker-republican
Oh boy, lest we forget, the GOP is stuffed with the absolutely weirdest and sickest types. Their goal is the Handsmaidisation of America.
Posted by: GftNC | June 15, 2024 at 01:20 PM
I,for one, want Confederate statues to be kept, but moved to a more appropriate location.
Like "neck deep in a sewage treatment pond" or "target-holder at a rifle range".
Posted by: Snarki, child of Loki | June 15, 2024 at 01:24 PM
or "target-holder at a rifle range".
Preferably one frequented by amateurs (preferably with automatic weapons). Who will miss the target most times, and thus hit the statue.
Posted by: wj | June 15, 2024 at 07:21 PM