The New Civil War (ongoing): The Lesson of pre-WWII Germany

One of the enduring questions from World War II is about how we got to that place. How did Nazism happen? Why didn't anyone put a stop to it before it happened?

We actually know the answer to all of those questions. We know them from an intellectual sense, anyway. We know that normal people, regular people, people just trying to live their lives and get by, people who were not Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, we know that those people didn't do anything to stop it. For whatever reason. Probably mostly because they just wanted to be left alone to live their lives and it all didn't concern them anyway. How can we blame them? They were "good" people, right?

That's not what we decided after the fact. That's not what the world decided, and that's not what they decided about themselves. For decades, the general consensus has been that they were complicit in the rise of Nazism for nothing more than that they stood by and let it happen. None of them spoke out.

Hey, I get it. Speaking out is hard. It messes with your life and, sometimes, there are consequences. And there were consequences in pre-WWII Germany. Some of the people who did speak out just... disappeared. And that served to keep everyone else quiet, as it was intended to.

And that's what happens when you don't speak out against injustice and evil. Injustice and evil not only continues but it gets worse.

So we know what they should have done, all those people in Germany, and, yet, we wonder why they didn't do it. Couldn't they see? And we tell ourselves, "If I was there, I would have spoken up!"

Really? Would you have? Would you?
I think there's a really easy way to know the answer to that question:
Are you speaking up now? If you're not, well, you would have been one of those Germans who just went along because you just wanted to be left alone to live your life. Or whatever.

Yes, we are in that same state as pre-WWII Germany. The state where white supremacists are growing in number and strength and boldness, and the have a man in our highest office #fakepresident who is supporting them. If you are not speaking out against them and what is happening, you are quietly joining them on their side of the line.

And, yes, there is a line.There has always been a line, but Trump #fakepresident very clearly and explicitly drew it when he failed to condemn the terrorist attack in Charlottesville. He made it clear that he is standing with the Nazis, white supremacy, the Alt-Right. He made it clear enough that they knew it and rejoiced. When you have David Duke singing your praises and are not sickened by it, well, something is wrong. And if you can side with the guy that Duke is praising, well, something is wrong.

Because this is where we are:
If you are still in support of Trump #fakepresident, you are explicitly in support of the white supremacy agenda. You are in support of Nazis. There's no waffling around the edges of things any longer as you try to proclaim how you're not really racist and that you just support Trump's #fakepresident economic agenda. [And, by the way, Trump #fakepresident has no economic agenda other than to enrich himself while he's in office. If that's not abundantly clear to you at this point, your ability to support cognitive dissonance is amazing.] If you are still in support of Trump #fakepresident, you are one of the Germans who stood silently by while Hitler committed genocide.

But genocide? Really?
Ethnic cleansing is a goal of the white supremacist groups. What do you think that means?

At any rate, the line has been drawn. This is the time to disavow Trump #fakepresident and step across the line and stand with those who oppose Nazism. In all its forms. If you're still with Trump #fakepresident, your message is loud and clear: You're okay with Nazis and white supremacists running things, which, you know, makes you a Nazi and white supremacist.

Remember:
Today is a good day to punch a Nazi in the face.

I wish I could say I meant that figuratively.

The New Civil War

240 years ago, we fought a war that we say was a war for freedom. For independence. But it was only a war for white freedom and white independence. From other white men. At least, that's what it became because the Founding Fathers couldn't work their way through the issue of slavery.

So we had to have another war 150 years ago to finish the first war and state that freedom is for everyone. Freedom is for everyone, no matter their skin color.

Evidently, not everyone got that memo, so, now, here we are again in the midst of another Civil War, the New Civil War. Sure, this time it's not being fought on the battlefield with guns and bullets (yet) because this war is more like a spiritual war. Last time, the Civil War was fought with actual bodies, but, this time, it's being fought for the Soul of America and what kind of soul it will be, and it's mostly being fought in the information realm.

Will we be an America filled with hate and fear, or will we be an America filled with respect and tolerance?
The irony? Those who claim to belong to the religion of love -- and not just love, unconditional love -- are the ones preaching hate and fear the loudest. I suppose they think "god" is racist, too, just like them. I don't think you can come to any other conclusion if you look inside their churches.

Of course, the "Christians" tend to forget that it is the Jews who are "God's" chosen people. I don't seen anywhere in the Bible where it says "God" changed his mind about that, so, maybe, white people shouldn't be so stuck on themselves about how cool and important they are.
But I digress... [Actually, I do digress, because that's for an upcoming post. Sort of.]

But it sort of brings me to my point, and the point is this:
All of this is still about slavery and race. Still.
I mean, Fuck. What the fuck, people? It's been 150 fucking years since the Civil War. It's time to get over it and quit idolizing your fucking moments to racism and slavery. Tear that shit down.
Look, if Germany can do it, so can you.

And my other point, which is that you can't actually talk to those people, and it's time for liberals, those on the left -- whatever you want to call the people who aren't part of the 25-33% of the country who make up these hardcore Conservative GOP asshole Trump-followers -- to stop trying to reach over to the 25-33% of the country who make up these hardcore Conservative GOP asshole Trump-followers and convince them of the wrongness of their ways. They're NOT going to be convinced. Ever. You're wasting your time and, frankly, everyone else's time, too.

Look, these "people" know that Trump is a lying pile of shit -- which is an insult to lying piles of shit, but they don't make words that go low enough to accurately describe what Trump is (and my mind just isn't degenerate enough to make that kind of stuff up) -- and they have repeatedly shown that they don't care. They don't know or care anything about what "America" means or stands for (the fact that there were people who got upset about NPR's presentation of The Declaration of Independence on fucking Independence Day is proof enough of that). They have repeatedly shown that all they care about and, thus, all they know is some deranged fantasy where white people rule the world and they get to lay waste to it as they please without suffering any of the consequences. They are not going to be talked out of that delusion.

The truth is that this is a war. An actual war, and we on the Left need to start treating it as such. This is really not a time for debating. We're long past that. The world is teetering on the brink, a lot of brinks, actually... Maybe it's better to say that world is currently finely balanced on the head of a pin. Anyway, we're all teetering on the edge of destruction, environmental destruction even if there weren't other things, and we have to stop letting asshole idiots make the decisions. Decisions which have as their sole goal of making them more rich and damn the consequences because they won't be around to suffer them.

I'm not saying we need to arm ourselves and take to the streets or anything like that (though it would be disingenuous not to point out that a significant portion of those on the Right have been stockpiling weapons for decades), but it is time to quit pussyfooting around and trying to engage in conversations. Get the fuck out and do things like voting. It's not hard! [There is no reason that Ossoff should have lost in Georgia or that Measure C should have failed here in Sonoma county other than that Liberals didn't get out and vote. And that's just messed up. At that point, you're basically just -- and I'm going to be crude here, even for me -- bending over and taking it.]

Here's the deal:
If you're Liberal or anti-Trump or whatever you want to call yourself and you're whining about how things are going, but you're not doing anything about it, then shut the fuck up! Seriously, if you're not going to take action and do simple things like voting, then you don't have the right to complain. It's time to take this shit seriously. It's not a game.
For all intents and purposes, this really is a war. The New Civil War.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 8)

One thing I've come to know is that you can't say you're from the South without automatically being linked to racism. It's a thing I hate, and it's, unfortunately, a thing that is almost completely legitimate. And it's not just racism, it's like all the "-ism"s. Or "-ist"s. And I don't want to switch this topic to sexual orientation, but I just want to point out that virtually all of the places that are acting like petulant children in regards to marriage equality are in the South.

Before I get to the issue of the Confederate flag, let's talk about why we're even talking about the Confederate flag: Dylann Roof.

Generally, I would not be one to talk about someone who has not been convicted of a crime as if he is guilty of the crime, but I think it's pretty safe to say that Roof is guilty of the nine murders at the church in Charleston, South Carolina. Actually, it's not even Roof I want to talk about. Roof stated quite plainly that he wanted to kill some black people, that he felt like it was up to him to do something about "it," whatever "it" was, and he went and did that. Even if they were so nice and welcoming to him that he almost changed his mind.

That Roof is a white supremacist and racist isn't in question.

What is in question is the racist tendencies of many people (Republican Presidential candidates) who responded to the attack by trying to call it something than what it actually was (a racially motivated mass shooting). So let's look at that:

Rick Perry, former governor of Texas and a Republican, called the shootings an "accident" and blamed the incident on drugs.

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and a Republican, basically blamed the victims and said the incident could have been prevented if only they had been armed. Because, yes, the answer is always more guns.

Rick Santorum, another Republican presidential hopeful, called the attack an attack against freedom of religion and Christianity and not motivated by anything to do with race. He's not the only conservative to espouse this view and to call for more pastors to arm themselves for the coming war against religious freedom.

Rand Paul, another Republican hoping to become President, also blames religion, but he blames it on a lack of religion. If only we, as a nation, weren't so heathen and doing things like having children out of wedlock, then poor Roof wouldn't have done what he did. He fails to mention racial issues at all and conveniently overlooks that it's in religion and church that we retain the greatest segregation in America. In other words, churches are the greatest breeding places of racial hatred in the US.

Lindsey Graham, another Republican presidential hopeful (does this sound familiar yet?), seemed to echo Santorum's theory by saying that Roof was just out to kill Christians. It was just coincidence that he happened to kill black ones. [BULLSHIT]

I could go on but, really, what's the point? It's all more of the same and all Republicans trying to divert the issue.
Why?
That's actually a good question that boils down to only one real answer: They are okay with the status quo.

Now, there could be any number of reasons they're okay with the status quo. For instance, maybe they think racism is too big of an issue, too hard to deal with, and, so, they would rather pretend that everything is okay than to look at the issue. Looking at the issue means you have to do something about it. Or, maybe, they're okay with it for no better reason than that they are okay with it. As in, nothing needs to be better because there shouldn't be racial equality to begin with.

I don't know these guys personally, so I'm not going to try to guess. However, when someone is running a white supremacist website, professes a dislike for black people, and states his intent to kill some, then, when he does that, it's almost certainly (you know, like 99.99%) a racially motivated crime. Occam's Razor and all of that. To try and change the dialogue afterward is, at best, irresponsible.

All of which brings us to the issue of the Confederate flag.

Look, I am all for the 1st Amendment. Seriously. I will defend your right to be a racist asshole and spew racist assholery as quickly as I will defend my right to call you a racist asshole for saying racist assholery, that includes your right to have your own Confederate flag on your own property. However, I cannot be behind a state government being allowed to fly a symbol of racist assholery over a state capitol building. There is no "heritage" that excuses the government for making any kind of statement that supports racial hatred, and, I'm sorry, but the Confederate flag is a symbol of racial hatred. Just ask the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, who use the Confederate flag as their symbol because Nazi symbology is illegal.

Somewhere in my schooling, I picked up that the Confederate flag is a bad thing. Being schooled in the South, I'm not quite sure where I picked that up. It certainly wasn't a thing they tried to teach us. If it was, the Confederate flag wouldn't be so prevalent. And, yes, I did grow up watching The Dukes of Hazard, but that's as close as I got to any ties to that flag (and I'm sorry John Schneider -- I know it cuts into your income stream -- but I agree with the pulling of your show from TV).

One of my cousins (on my dad's side) and I, during high school, had frequent arguments about the Civil War. He hated Lincoln and the "war of Northern aggression." That's what he always called it and tried to make it about "states' rights," but the only "right" that was in question was the "right" to have slaves. Point being? We went to school in the same city and we both came through it with radically divergent views.

It's time to move past the Confederate flag. Or, to put it another way, it's time to lay the Confederate flag to rest. It's time for the government, including each individual state government, to get behind "all men are created equal." We can never expect the citizens to start believing in that while the leaders are still claiming racial hatred, through flying the Confederate flag, as a "heritage."

It's Not You I Have a Problem With...

...It's people.

Back in 1964 a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death near her home in Queens. Reportedly, that murder was "witnessed" (not necessarily seen but heard) by dozens of people and none of them called for help or reported the crime. The entire attack, during which Genovese was raped and repeatedly stabbed, took about half an hour. It wasn't until then that a neighbor finally came to see what was going on, only to find Genovese dying and her attacker gone.

Although it turned out that the neglect of the people that "witnessed" the crime wasn't as bad as it was reported to be (for instance, neighbors heard the disturbance but thought it was only a lovers' quarrel or something so never went to see what was happening), the bystander effect (which is a very real thing where people do nothing because they are waiting for someone else to do something) has come to be known as Genovese Syndrome.

It all has to do with "diffusion of responsibility," which is to say that the more people who are present, the less likely any one specific one of them will do anything as far as standing up for someone else. It's the same kind of behavior that possible made what the SS did in Germany leading up to and during WWII: People are disappearing but no one is going to say anything because, hey, at least it wasn't me. Right? Someone else can do something about it. Not me.

It was the New York case that really prompted the psychological study of this social condition, and it has been repeatedly shown in tests that the likelihood of someone to offer help of any kind to someone is in inverse proportion to the number of people present. For instance, one of the studies dealt with a woman falling down and being "hurt." When there was only one person present, that person would offer assistance to the woman about 70% of the time. [70%! What the freaking heck! That means that 30% would just walk past! Wait... this sounds like a familiar story.] As more people were involved to witness the woman fall, the less likely it was that anyone would offer help, so, with two people, someone offered help only 40% of the time.

To me, this is insane behavior, and it gets worse the more complicated the situation is, like if someone is being aggressive or attacking someone else. Also, it is this same root phenomenon, just reversed, that leads to mob behavior.

To make things even more interesting (or baffling about how humans have managed to survive for so long), there were some recent studies done on how this phenomenon affects online behavior. In the studies, two people were planted in chat room situations: one to bully and one to be bullied. In these simulations, only 10% of the other people in the chat rooms would come to the defense of the person being bullied. 10%! Let me put that another way: During these simulations where one person would bully and verbally abuse another person, 90% of the participants would act as if nothing was going on. 90%!

These were basically anonymous environments where there could be no actual repercussions from the abusive person, and only one person in ten would do the right thing. After all of the media coverage of online bullying and teenagers committing suicide over it, this is amazing to me. Not in a good way.

I get it. People pretty much suck, but this takes the suckitude of people to a whole new level. I don't know; maybe, science is wrong. Maybe we didn't survive as a species because of our ability to work together. Maybe we survived by always throwing the other person under the bus. Um, I mean the tiger. Or the bear. Or whatever. Or, maybe, we've just gotten worse over time because of our tendency to breed assholes. I suppose the past doesn't matter that much in that respect. What I do know, though, is that if we don't start, as a species, looking out for the other guy, globally, pretty soon, there won't be any of us left. Globally.

Abandoned Places: Vulture Bunker

Travelling back to the Bay of Puck in Poland (remember the torpedo testing base?), we find another World War II era military installation. The Bay of Puck is formed by the Hel peninsula, a sand bar with delusions of grandeur. It actually plays host to several towns and is a popular tourist destination despite the fact that there are times that the peninsula becomes an island, unattached to the rest of Poland. However, it was of strategic importance during World War II, so the Nazis fortified the sucker with the Vulture bunker. Or series of bunkers. Basically, as soon as Germany took Poland, they fortified Hel with these bunkers -- the walls very from four to ten feet thick -- and construction on them was finished in 1939. The bunkers never saw combat.

After World War II, the Polish military put the bunkers to some use, but, at this point, they've mostly been empty and unused for decades.

Photos by Tomasz Jakubowski and used under the linked license.

Your bonus photos today are various abandoned houses in Virginia:

The "Dump House":

The "House of Five Black Doors":

And a church house (okay, a church, so a House of God):

Abandoned Places: Orphanages

Orphanages are not buildings I can say I'm sorry to see closed down. Despite any good intentions ever ascribed to having them or opening them or whatever, I don't think you will find one in existence that doesn't have horrible stories associated with it. Which is not to say that I think it's better to leave kids to live on the streets; I don't believe that all. I do believe that when an orphanage can be shut down because a better system has been put in place it is a good thing. So...
Mostly, this will just be a series of photos of abandoned orphanages. There are too many stories to try to recap them, and they are all too similar too choose between. Let's just say that none of the stories are good, and many of the buildings are supposed to be haunted. You can imagine the rest.

This is St. John's in Goulburn in Australia:

This is the Greek orphanage in Buyukada, Turkey. It is one of the world's largest wooden buildings:

The Philadelphia Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum (orphan asylum is such a curious and ominous word, don't you think?):

Photos courtesy of  Opacity.

A Kindersanitorium (another interesting term) in Germany:

Photos courtesy of  Opacity.

Newsham Park Hospital in England. Previously Liverpool Seaman's Orphan Institution. Now abandoned:

And I don't know what this one is. Evidently, I didn't save my links or didn't put them in the correct place.

Abandoned Places: Istvántelek Train Graveyard

Also called the Red Star Train Graveyard, Istvantelek is located in Budapest, Hungary. The trains are housed in buildings just off the active railway. Buildings that are falling apart as are the trains within. Many of the cars have been sitting in the same place for over 40 years, and several of them may have actually been used to transport Jews to Auschwitz during the Nazi occupation.

Above photos credited to Jakob Christensen.

Here are some other abandoned trains and train graveyards.

In Bolivia:

In England:

In Germany:

In Australia: