Notices by Weltschmerz à Gogo (thatweltschmerz@kolektiva.social)

@woodbark Vielen Dank! Ja, ich habe schon bei Syndikat-A versucht, aber bisher kein Glück. Und ich habe einen Bewerbungstermin für eine Förderung am 1.12.

Daneben habe ich gehört, dass Frau Hillebrandt ein bisschen lockerer diesbezüglich als Herr Becker sei. Ich drucke die Daumen...

@woodbark That makes sense -- groups like JN and Freie Sachsen, yeah?

@woodbark Oh wow, that's great, thanks a lot! I will check this out

@woodbark Funny, I hadn’t heard of him, but he almost looks a bit like Rocker

https://www.salisbury.edu/faculty-and-staff/txgoyens

@woodbark Oh wow, good question. I just peeked ahead at the last few chapters of the memoirs, and they seem to end around 1951, so there's most likely nothing about it there. He died in 1958, and his health wasn't great in his last few years, so I suspect his published output was pretty minimal around that time, though I have to admit that I'm not all that up on his writing after he went to the US (which I believe was in 1937, but don't quote me on that).

@woodbark @priryo Thanks, I wasn't familiar with Prof. Bantman. I think I may compile a few questions and hit her up at some point.

If you happen to come across that Landauer contact, I'd be grateful to hear about it.

@woodbark

It's "funny", because, while some on the Polish far right claim that their country is run by Germany and Russia, there's a not-insignificant number of people on the German far right who believe that their country is run by the US (and sometimes also Russia). And in the US, because there isn't a bigger, richer country to blame, there are a lot of people who believe that their country is run by "the deep state". It's all culturally and historically specific, yet the pattern remains more or less the same.

The head of Poland's recently ousted "Law and Justice" Party has been kvetching that, now that he's out of power, freedom and democracy are under attack, and Poland is at risk of being ruled by a foreign power.

So unimaginative.

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From the article:

Polish opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński, head of the Law and Justice (PiS) party that was removed from power last month, has called on Poles to join a protest next week against the actions of the new government.

“On 11 January, a demonstration will be held in Warsaw in defence of freedom of speech, freedom of the media and simply in defence of democracy, because we have a real problem with democracy today,” said Kaczyński on Wednesday.

The demonstration – titled “Protest of Free Poles” – will take place outside parliament, where PiS lost its majority in October’s elections before being replaced by a new government, led by Donald Tusk, in mid-December.

Kaczyński claimed yesterday that the new administration aims to “fulfil the expectations of the EU”, including implementing Brussels’ planned new migration pact. They want to “reduce our country to an area inhabited by Poles and ruled from the outside”, declared Kaczyński.

#poland #LawAndJustice #democracy #Kaczynski

https://notesfrompoland.com/2024/01/04/polish-opposition-leader-kaczynski-calls-for-demonstration-in-defence-of-democracy/

@futurebird

I was a bike messenger in NYC for about a week ca. 2000/01. I quit when I realized that, even in that short amount of time, I had already mostly stopped yelling at drivers -- making them actually hear me and recognize that I was there -- and was getting used to just adjusting my actions to compensate for their dangerous behavior. I thought, "I'm already getting complacent, and going to wind up paralyzed or dead like this". So I dropped it. It was fun while it lasted, but I hadn't yet figured out how to actually make it pay, so no great loss.

From the press release:

A series of hoax swatting threats had been made over the summer targeting numerous religious, educational, and public institutions in the United States, to include Jewish synagogues and African American churches. The group suspected of perpetrating the hoaxes was known to have called in bomb threats and swatting attempts at Jewish facilities, including at least 25 synagogues in 13 states between July 2023 and August 2023.
"Swatting" is a term used to describe criminal activity by an individual or group who knowingly provides false information to police suggesting that a threat exists at a particular location so that police respond with tactical units, or what’s commonly known as a SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force—in concert with law enforcement in Southern California and New York, as well as community organizations—compiled information that led to the identity of the individual believed to have created the server that hosted the suspected swatting network. The server that hosted that network, which has since been taken offline, included members who espoused extremist views, to include the glorification of highly publicized mass killers.
The suspect was arrested on the morning of December 12 by members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force and will be charged at the state level by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office with two of the local swatting hoaxes. The local swatting attempts occurred at synagogues in Tustin, California, and in Fullerton, California. The suspect’s name will not be released because the individual is a minor.
#antisemitism #racism #swatting

https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/losangeles/news/juvenile-arrested-for-conducting-swatting-attacks-targeting-synagogues-and-other-institutions/layout_view

Brad Will presente
(June 14, 1970 – October 27, 2006)

We’ve really gotten to the point where the term “far right” should probably be retired in most cases, as it often seems to obscure more than it reveals. Calling Mark Collett simply “far right” is really insufficient. His views and objectives are straight up eliminationist and genocidal. And Home Secretary Enoch Po— sorry, Suella Braverman is providing him with raw material. Fucking gross.

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[H]er intervention also received support from established far-right groups in the UK. Mark Collett, a former protege of the BNP leader Nick Griffin who now leads the Patriotic Alternative group, was among those to endorse Braverman’s address. “Suella Braverman has basically admitted multiculturalism has failed and that mass immigration is a threat to the west,” he wrote on a Facebook post. “This is a good thing.

“Now I know that many nationalists will complain that this is just a pre-election stunt and that it is nothing more than a desperate attempt to win back voters. I don’t know whether that is entirely true. What I do know, is that what she said is a good thing for nationalism.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/30/far-right-figures-praise-bravermans-migration-comments-and-vow-to-capitalise-on-her-intervention

@AnarchoNinaWrites @Judeet98 @deilann Es wäre besser Fremdsprachen zu normalisieren als sie zu befürchten.

After all this time, many liberals still think rational arguments will save them. They won’t just tolerate, but eagerly anticipate a massive platform for volatile conspiracy theories known to motivate violent behavior. Dems may be right that this will help them win elections – but at cost, to the rest of us, of certain people being more enraged at whichever other part of the populace they choose to blame.

(DM if you need help w/paywall)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/03/donald-trump-charges-election-republicans/
#trump #conspiracy

@abolisyonista @academicchatter This has come up for me when I’ve cited a book by Amiri Baraka that he published when he was still going by LeRoi Jones. What I was told was to cite him as Amiri Baraka and note in the bibliography “(published as LeRoi Jones)”, or something similar.

Cops in Marseille have now killed a 27-year-old protester with a flash-bang grenade. Not a whole lot more info at the moment.

https://www.lamarseillaise.fr/societe/a-marseille-un-homme-de-27-ans-mort-durant-les-emeutes-BF14447341

#france #nahel #Marseille #acab

Something that people (particularly, but not exclusively in the US) don’t seem to recognize with respect to the dangers of that German reactionaries pose today is that they have a recent memory of living in a state that actually collapsed, and I think that we who live in big, rich, predominantly anglophone countries just don’t have any similar lived experience. The actual existence of the UK was never threatened by the Troubles, and Scottish independence hasn’t even won an electoral majority (yet?). The last time the US was threatened with a real, fundamental systemic collapse was over 150 years ago. January 6 was very serious, and yet it still came nowhere close to actually undoing the transfer of power. I think most Americans still can’t actually envision what a collapse would look like. (I admittedly don’t know much about the impact of the Quebec separatist movement, but from south of 54°40’, I have never perceived that Canada was really on the brink of falling apart.)

In Germany, not only are there lots of living people who remember the collapse of the East German state, but it’s also not so long since there were a handful of people around who had lived in 1. the Kaiserreich, 2. the Weimar republic, 3. the Nazi state, 4. the GDR, and 5. the reunified Germany of today. That’s five very different kinds of states that some people experienced in recent history without ever going anywhere. So people have a much clearer sense that, yes, whole states do, in fact, come and go. I think that’s something we have a much harder time envisioning in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, etc.

Starting from that kind of shared understanding – that a state that exists today need not exist tomorrow – is a really useful rhetorical framework for helping people feel empowered to take (sometimes drastic) action, or at least envision something to work toward. When Björn Höcke calls the Federal Republic of Germany a “failed state,” as he has done since at least 2015, citing what his supporters believe is a failed border regime, he’s also telling them “you know what comes next…”.

The right has also adopted a number of slogans and tactics from the iconic protests during the last days before the Berlin Wall fell. In 1989, “Wir sind das Volk!“ (“We are the people!”) was a slogan directed against the East German government’s pretense of representing “the masses” in an old-school Marxist way, and it was a demand for actual popular decision-making power. Today, it also echoes the ethno-nationalist language of the 19th/20th century “völkisch” movement and the Nazi regime. In other words, when today’s reactionaries use that slogan, they’re a) invoking language that was deployed under three different German states that don’t exist anymore, and b) engaging in obviously extremely racist sloganeering that they can easily pass off simply as a demand for more liberty, in the tradition of non-violent East German protest – a movement largely regarded as unassailable today.

Another example: at the height of the pandemic, big groups of reactionary dumbfucks would go on “walks” through cities without masks, which was prohibited at times. They knew that arresting/fining them all would be both logistically impossible and a very bad look that would prop up their rhetoric that they’re living under a dictatorship. Moreover, those “walks” were also deliberately meant to evoke the peaceful demonstrations in the late GDR just before it collapsed.

At the same time, the Reichsbürger (“citizens of the Reich”) movement is still picking up speed and plotting, sometimes in great detail, ways to actually induce the collapse of the German republic. They’re a lot like certain elements of the militia movement in the US, but in a much smaller country and, again, with a real recollection of states falling, as well as a serious interest in making that happen again.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist here. There’s not going to be an overnight revolution in Germany, but I do think that, despite having had generally more or less centrist governments and seemingly a fairly liberal policy toward refugees at the national level, the danger from the far right is at least as great there as it is anywhere in the West, if not greater.

#Germany, #AfD, #reactionaries, #GDR, #DDR, #FailedState

For those who aren’t aware, there’s a major, increasingly violent confrontation going on in the town of #Lützerath, Germany right now between a large encampment of environmental activists and police, who are acting on behalf of mining company RWE. The following is my translation of the report posted here: https://kolektiva.social/@Osterholzsoli/109689651470230669

Recommend following
https://climatejustice.social/@LuetziTickerEN for ongoing updates in English

#acab

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Numerous people seriously injured due to police violence, one with life-threatening injuries, after a large demonstration. This is current information from street medics: the medics confirm that, despite ongoing their discussions with police, they continued beating an injured person.

The injuries caused by police officers include:

- Numerous broken bones in a wide range of body parts
- At least one person unconscious
- Many targeted blows to the neck with fists and clubs
- At least one dog bite that had to be treated in a hospital
- Many injuries due to pepper spray
- Numerous other injuries, including at least one case of bruised ribs…

Ambulances and one rescue helicopter had to take the severely injured climate activists to the hospital.

Please share this information. Lützerath will remain and the street medics will keep you updated.

#Lützerath