Latest news with #fascism
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hundreds gathered in KC to denounce last weekend's white nationalist march
Hundreds of people gathered near the Plaza Saturday evening protesting against masked white nationalists who held a rally outside the WWI Museum and Memorial last weekend. 'Hey, hey, ho, ho, Nazi scum have got to go,' they chanted. The protesters met at 5 p.m. at Mill Creek Park and walked about two miles through Westport, down Southwest Trafficway and back through the Plaza, according to Ed Hererra, who protested at the event. This comes after scores of white nationalists called the Patriot Front, 'an avowedly fascist nationwide organization' met in Kansas City on Saturday, May 24. They covered their faces and chanted, 'Life, liberty, victory' and 'Reclaim America.' Some of them carried shields and other flags, including confederate and upside down American flags. The group formed in the aftermath of the deadly 'Unite the Right' march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, according to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. Sgt. Philip DiMartino of the Kansas City Police Department said Saturday's protest lasted about three hours and it dispersed peacefully.
CBC
4 days ago
- General
- CBC
Recognizing the signs of fascism today
An extended conversation with professor and author Timothy Snyder about his decision to leave Yale University to teach in Canada, telling CBC's Eli Glasner why understanding history is the most important weapon in the fight against rising fascism.
Bloomberg
5 days ago
- General
- Bloomberg
If America Doesn't Want Harvard, Somebody Else Will
In the 1930s and 1940s, America played a crucial role in keeping academic inquiry alive. By welcoming thousands of researchers fleeing fascism in Europe, it enhanced its national brainpower and fostered breakthroughs of immense value to people everywhere — from the digital computer to the discovery of DNA. Now it's in the process of throwing that priceless legacy away. If wiser minds don't prevail, one can only hope Europe and others will step into the breach.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
How the word ‘womyn' dragged the National Spelling Bee into the US culture wars
We're living through turbulent times, to say the least. Authoritarianism and fascism threaten the United States. The conspiracy thinking, paranoia and manufactured outrage so characteristic of QAnon and the big lie about the 2020 election have colonized our political discourse like a fungus. Even the National Spelling Bee, a cultural institution which will be celebrating its centennial this year and which is generally exempted from the far right's paranoid vitriol, hasn't been immune. Earlier this year, a foofaraw erupted when right-wing outlets reported on the acceptance of 'womyn' as an alternate spelling of 'women' in the regional-level wordlist which the National Spelling Bee issues each year. The reason 'womyn' was included in the wordlist wasn't some shadowy feminist plot by the Bee's organizers. The competition simply allows any word in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary, unless it is obsolete. 'Womyn' is in the dictionary, along with tens of thousands of other words, such as 'pointless', 'culture' and 'war'. With zero self-awareness, an anti-trans podcast host raged that the Bee's uncontroversial decision to allow 'womyn' was a manifestation of 'fabricated issues' and 'totally manufactured outrage.' On Fox News, she snarled, 'How lucky are we to live in the United States of America, where the spelling of women, never mind the definition, has become a national debate.' Samantha Poetter-Parshall, a Kansas state representative, joined in the criticism, calling the inclusion of womyn an instance of 'crazy indoctrination of our children.' A parent quoted in reportage on the faux scandal shared Poetter-Parshall's concern, asserting, 'This is supposed to be about spelling and language, not ideology.' George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm, 1984, and the essay Politics and the English Language, would be startled to hear such a complaint. Orwell deeply understood the intimate relationship between language, thought, and politics. He keenly observed how 'in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.' In our time, imprisoning and attempting to deport legal residents of the US for their political views and sending legal residents and gay people fleeing persecution in Venezuela – and potentially US citizens – to prisons in El Salvador where torture is widespread based on flimsy evidence from disgraced police officers is called 'securing our homeland'. The announcement of economically ruinous tariffs which have wiped trillions off the stock market is called 'liberation day.' Orwell believed that 'to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.' To combat the creep of Orwellian language, he argued that we should 'recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end,' aiming to always use 'language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought'. In its emphasis on linguistic precision and its heartfelt delight in words, the National Spelling Bee is already political in Orwell's sense. The Bee also has an implicit politics of appreciation for cultural and linguistic diversity. Though most spellers are American, the competition has an international flavor: it regularly features participants from Ghana, Canada, Jamaica, South Korea, China, and Nigeria, and spelling bees have sprung up in countries like Zimbabwe too. The welcome which the Bee extends to logophiles from all over the world inculcates in kids an appreciation of other cultures and promotes a cosmopolitan worldview. Spellers study words from Latin, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and German; this cultivates their love of linguistic variety. What's more, the fact that the South Asian community regularly dominates the upper echelons of the competition reaffirms the importance of immigration to our society. These days, even if many Americans reject the Trump regime's ugly attitudes and practices, xenophobia and racism are rampant, hearkening back to the bad old days of the Know-Nothing Party and the Chinese Exclusion Act. The US government has become increasingly hostile to international travelers: there have been a spate of horrific stories of tourists, visitors, and legal residents from Germany, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere who have done nothing wrong being arrested, detained, and held for weeks by Ice, or being refused entry to the US and deported. In such a context, the National Spelling Bee's steadfast commitment to multiculturalism is all the more essential. Despite its unfortunate Covid-induced cancellation in 2020 and some turbulence from rule changes and regional sponsor attrition in 2021 and 2022, the National Spelling Bee has been a relative constant for students in an age of extreme dislocation and upheaval. In these politically polarized times, it offers Americans an opportunity for joy and collective uplift. It celebrates education, attention, focus, dedication, and quiet, patient effort. It teaches students grit, discipline, and linguistics. It reminds us of the importance of the human in an age of AI. It reinforces the importance of good sportsmanship and fair play. It promotes respect and friendship towards humanity at large. It invites us to honor and remember the values that ought to unite us all. The National Spelling Bee is a reminder of what America has been – and what it must continue to be. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Scott Remer is a professional spelling bee tutor, freelance writer, and the author of the textbooks Words of Wisdom: Keys to Success in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Sesquipedalia!: A Rigorous Vocabulary Study Guide, Regional Bee Ready!, and A Few Final Words of Wisdom.
New York Times
7 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
‘Are the Bricks Evil?' In a Village Built for Nazis, Darkness Lingers.
One morning this January, Susanne Bücker, a family doctor in Berlin, woke up worried. National elections were approaching, and President Trump's most vocal advocate, Elon Musk, was publicly supporting Germany's far right party, the Alternative for Germany (or AfD), whose leaders have spouted Nazi slogans and downplayed the Holocaust. Dr. Bücker sent a letter to her neighbors. 'Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,' she wrote, expressing her fear that fascism was again taking root in Germany. Over the next few weeks, about 40 neighbors got together, lighting candles in their front gardens as part of a nationwide 'chain of lights' protest against hate and hanging pro-democracy signs in their windows. 'I think we have a special responsibility,' Dr. Bücker, 62, said recently over a cup of tea. 'Because we live on an estate that was built by perpetrators, for perpetrators.' Their quiet little neighborhood, Waldsiedlung (or 'Forest Estate') Krumme Lanke, is a sought-after place to live in the German capital. Named after an adjacent lake, its residents compare it to a fairy-tale village: Little peaked-roof cottages with wood shutters are built into a dense green forest crisscrossed by mossy paths. Whole swaths are carless. Children play in the gardens, while dogs run free on a sloping meadow. In the summer, a short walk in flip-flops and a bathing suit leads to the lake. But life here also means channeling Germany's brutal past: The neighborhood was built in the lead-up to World War II as an 'elite community' for the S.S., or Schutzstaffel — the elite guard of the Nazi Reich, whose responsibilities included carrying out the Holocaust. The S.S.-Kameradschaftssiedlung (or S.S. Camaraderie Estate), as it was initially known, was one of the few housing developments built by the Nazis in Berlin. During the war, the roughly 600 small apartments, rowhouses, duplexes and single-family cottages housed S.S. members and their families, according to rank. The settlement was designed to embody the Nazi Blut und Boden ('blood and soil') ideology, which touted Aryans' quasi-mystical relationship with their ancestral land. War was in the blueprints: The cellars were designed to double as bomb shelters, and the tree cover was useful for thwarting airstrikes. As a commemorative sign in the village now acknowledges, 'The peaceful atmosphere that the settlement, embedded in the landscape, conveys to the unbiased observer today makes it difficult to recall its history.' It is a history that is still being unearthed — much like the original tenants' pots, pans and swastika-marked coins that residents (or their dogs) have dug up over the years — and evokes Germany's nearly century-long quest to both remember and forget. 'Hannah Arendt called it the 'banality of evil,'' said Matthias Donath, a historian specializing in Berlin's Nazi architecture, in an email. Recently, Mr. Donath's research made headlines when he was able to draw a direct line from Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke to Auschwitz, where former village resident Joachim Caesar was the head of agricultural operations. 'The residents found ideal living conditions — an idyll,' he said. 'And at the same time, they planned monstrous crimes.' How the residents here have reckoned with the past — or not — has followed larger cultural trajectories. For decades, it was swept under the rug. 'One method of survival in a destroyed and morally devastated Germany was repression,' Mr. Donath said. As a result, some of the village's residents are unaware of its history, until neighbors tell them about it. 'Some people say, 'It's 80 years ago, it has nothing to do with me,'' said Susanne Güthler, 67, a teacher of disabled children who moved here with her family in 2000. 'For me, it's the opposite. I want to know what happened, here in my house. It's intimidating, to hear about families drowning themselves in the Krumme Lanke, or hanging in the attic. But you can't move forward with silence.' As time passes and the last eyewitnesses die, physical locations are increasingly important to remembering the Holocaust. 'Place is a connection,' said Christoph Kreutzmüller, a historian and the chairman of the Active Museum, Fascism and Resistance, a Berlin citizens' action group organized in 1983 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nazis' seizure of power. 'People want to find out where they live.' Not much is known about daily life on the S.S. estate, though it was certainly a place where quality of life was predicated on plunder. 'If you would go to the Forest Estate in 1943, how many women would you see wearing fur coats?' said Mr. Kreutzmüller. 'Probably, they all had fur coats, and they all came from murdered Jews.' Historians agree that as the Red Army approached, some families fled while others likely died by suicide. 'The S.S. estate was not a place to hide,' said Hanno Hochmuth, a historian with the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, during a recent walk through the development. 'The soldiers may well have come upon a peaceful estate — you don't see any bullet holes — then opened the doors to find dead bodies, or floating in the Krumme Lanke lake.' After the war, the abandoned homes were given a new purpose: Now located in Berlin's American sector, they were used as shelter, with preference given to victims of Nazi persecution, including resistance fighters and refugees. The family-friendly layouts, which had been designed to encourage families to produce as many future Nazis as possible, quickly overflowed with the displaced. Street names were changed. Some of the older current residents arrived around this time. Gisela Michaelis still lives in the 900-square-foot rowhouse she first moved into when she was 5 years old, in 1945, along with her mother, two older brothers and two younger sisters, after the family fled the advancing Red Army, in the east. Her father, who fought for the German Wehrmacht, never returned from the war. 'There were endless children here,' said Ms. Michaelis, 85, a retired accountant. She and her friends would roam the estate, illegally gathering kindling from the forest, testing their courage in the cellars, or pilfering apples and pears from the gardens of empty houses. 'It was a beautiful childhood.' Some families of defeated S.S. operatives probably also returned. 'This was typical of postwar Germany,' said Mr. Hochmuth. 'Persecutors, bystanders and victims, all living door-to-door without too much struggle. There was a tendency to forget, to want to start over.' Michael Joachim moved to the estate with his family in 1946, when he was 3, and remembers both a happy childhood and the stories his father would tell about the families who preceded them: 'That neighbor went into the Krumme Lanke with his whole family. That one hung himself from the rafters in the attic.' Mr. Joachim, 82, a retired school principal, recalled a quiet Jewish couple who lived in what is now Dr. Bücker's house. 'I can still see him in my mind's eye, gray-haired and stooped,' he said. 'Only later did I think, 'What kind of a fate must they have had?'' Mr. Joachim and his wife converted to Judaism in the 1990s, thanks to an affinity for Jewish life and culture that dates back to his childhood, when his father would listen to a weekly American-sector radio program dedicated to the subject. He later served as the chairman of the Representative Assembly of the Jewish Community of Berlin. When assembly members would visit his home, the location never raised any eyebrows. 'For me, it's a conquering of the past,' he said, 'that a place that was created for the Nazis has been totally taken over by other people.' The first real research into Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke was published in the 1980s, around the time a grass-roots approach to re-evaluating history, known as 'Dig Where You Stand,' was gaining traction in West Germany. It included details of how the estate was funded — the S.S. did not want to pay for it, so a semipublic housing company called GAGFAH built it for them. Raking leaves beneath her cherry tree, Ingrid Fiedler, 86, said she knew nothing of the estate's history when she moved into her little duplex in 1985. At the time, she worked for the GAGFAH housing company, which still owned and ran the estate. One sunny autumn day, she and her husband went for a bike ride around the lake. As they rested on a bench, another couple asked if they knew where the 'S.S. estate' was. Ms. Fiedler had heard of it, but didn't know where it was. 'The next day at work, my colleague said, 'Don't you know you live there?' That was news to me,' she said. The discovery didn't change how she felt about her home. 'I lived through the Hitler time,' she said. Now she worries about the ascent of the far right. 'If people keep voting this way, we're going to have it all again. I don't want that.' In 1992, Berlin made the estate a historically protected site, as an example of a Nazi-era housing development built in the 'Heimatschutzstil,' or 'homeland protection style,' of architecture. But reluctance to grapple with the past lingered: When the historian Karin Grimme researched the estate in the 1990s, she did not find a single interview partner. In the 2000s, the estate was privatized — sold, divvied up and resold — and historical information, including old tenant contracts, was probably thrown out. 'We don't have it,' said Matthias Wulff, a spokesman for Vonovia, the company that bought GAGFAH and now serves as the landlord for the estate's 300-odd apartments, calling it 'disappointing.' In 2009, despite the objections of some local politicians and residents, who feared that drawing attention to the estate could turn it into a rallying point for neo-Nazis, the city district erected a door-sized sign with historical information at the entrance to the estate. The Berlin journalist Peter Nowak, who has written about the estate, said the placard's snowy unveiling was sparsely attended. 'I had the feeling they just weren't very interested,' he said. One exception was Dora Dick, a Jewish refugee and Communist activist who had escaped the Nazis, returned from exile in England after the war, and spent the rest of her life in the estate. Mr. Nowak recalled one interview in which Ms. Dick, then in her late 90s, pointed to the piano in her apartment and told him that the S.S. family who'd lived there had tried to sue her to get it back. Among current residents, Elmar Bassen and Caroline Frey know more about their home's past than most. The woman who sold them the house in 2011 was a journalist. After they toured it, she pressed a book titled 'Medicine Without Humanity' into their hands and told them that a Nazi doctor named Joachim Mrugowsky had lived in the house. Dr. Mrugowsky, the chief of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-S.S., was tried in Nuremberg and executed for his war crimes, which included putting poison on a bullet, shooting concentration camp prisoners in the thigh and then documenting their efforts to gag themselves as they died. He also experimented on human subjects for a typhus vaccine. 'When we heard that, we thought, 'Can we do that? Can we move here?'' said Ms. Frey, who used to run a music magazine. 'It was like, 'Are the bricks evil?'' Sitting in their eat-in kitchen, a vinyl box set by the Berlin cult band the Beatsteaks prominently on display, Mr. Bassen, who is studying to become a human rights lawyer, and Ms. Frey, a schoolteacher, said that after much soul searching they decided to forge ahead. The building, they reasoned, couldn't be held responsible for the deeds of its first inhabitants. And maybe their own liberal worldviews were just what the place needed. The couple, both 55, have been happy here, as has their 9-year-old foster son, Juan. They were glad to join the new neighborhood initiative's rejection of the AfD ahead of the national elections, in which the party made historic gains. 'We hung signs from our windows to make it clear, in this estate, that we are against this, we find it horrifying,' said Ms. Frey. 'We want to remember, because remembering this horrifying thing might help it not happen again.' Still, while living in Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke has a way of making the past feel very present, 'we don't think about it every day,' she said. Like many residents, the couple said that the tangled legacy of this village as a peaceful, healthy place for families, created to enable a genocide, remains irreconcilable. The conflict is dyed into the fabric of modern life in Germany. 'I don't know if it's something Americans can understand,' said Henning Müller, 41, who lives here with his wife, Milena Fernando, 40, and their two young children. 'Here in Germany, we have this nice life. And at the same time, this dark history is part of your everyday.' Four years ago, when Ms. Fernando, who works in administration at the Jewish Museum Berlin, learned that her family could take over an acquaintance's lease on an airy three-bedroom converted attic, she jumped at the chance. The family was glad to move out of their cramped one-bedroom in the city, where prices were skyrocketing and apartments were scarce. Now their children are growing up not too dissimilarly from Gisela Michaelis or Michael Joachim, or even from the first children who ever lived here — 'families like us, with kids who learned to swim in the Krumme Lanke,' Ms. Fernando said. 'It's a crazy thing to imagine, that S.S. members lived a normal family life here, then went to work at the concentration camps. It's hard to grasp.'
