Zeitgeist Spam

Photo by Peter Mitchell (this is us all right now)

Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust (one indicator of the ignorance and meanness level that means we might well have 4 more years -at least- of Trumpian fascism ...)

According to survey of adults 18-39, 23% said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure

A general view of the main gate of the Nazis’ former Auschwitz concentration camp in Oświęcim, Poland. Photograph: Łukasz Gągulski/EPA

 

Harriet Sherwood

@harrietsherwood

Wed 16 Sep 2020 05.01 BST for The Guardian

 

Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

{JBR: Who taught these people? THEY weren't ignorant, they were purposeful}

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online.

“The results are both shocking and saddening, and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) which commissioned the survey.

Taylor added: “We need to understand why we aren’t doing better in educating a younger generation about the Holocaust and the lessons of the past. This needs to serve as a wake-up call to us all, and as a road map of where government officials need to act.”

The survey, the first to drill down to state level in the US, ranks states according to a score based on three criteria: whether young people have definitely heard about the Holocaust; whether they can name one concentration camp, death camp or ghetto; and whether they know 6 million Jews were killed.

The top-scoring state was Wisconsin, where 42% of millennial and Gen Z adults met all three criteria, followed by Minnesota at 37% and Massachusetts at 35%. The lowest-scoring states were Florida at 20%, Mississippi at 18% and Arkansas at 17%.

Nationally, 63% of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and more than one in three (36%) thought 2 million or fewer had been killed.

Eleven per cent of respondents across the US believed that Jews had caused the Holocaust, with the proportion in New York state at 19%, followed by 16% in Louisiana, Tennessee and Montana, and 15% in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada and New Mexico.

Nationally, 44% of those questioned were able to identify Auschwitz-Birkenau, and only 3% were familiar with Bergen-Belsen. Six out of 10 respondents in Texas could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.

However, almost two-thirds (64%) of American millennial and Gen Z adults believe Holocaust education should be compulsory in schools. Seven out of 10 said it was not acceptable for an individual to hold neo-Nazi views.

The Claims Conference, whose mission is “to provide a measure of justice for Jewish Holocaust victims”, set up a taskforce to oversee the survey. It included Holocaust survivors, historians and experts from Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Data was collected from 1,000 interviews nationwide and 200 interviews in each state with young adults aged 18 to 39 selected at random.

Susana Thénon - from Ova Completa (tr. Rebekah Smith)

The following poems come from Rebekah Smith’s forthcoming translation (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) of Susana Thénon’s 1987 book Ova Completa. Ova Completa is Thénon’s final, most radical collection, and is a virtuosic performance of stylistic innovation, language play, dark humor, and socio-political insight. in her misuse, abuse, breaking, and recreating of language, Thénon confronts her moment in history with derision, discontent, and poetic brilliance. She writes obliquely of femicide, Argentina’s last dictatorship, the war with Britain over the Malvinas / Falkland Islands, the heritage of colonialism, drawing on surrealist tradition to fully inhabit the time and place in which it was written, while maintaining a perspective frame both by humor and terror.

---

Kikirikyrie

god help us or god don’t help us
or god half help us
or he makes us believe that he’ll help us
and later sends word that he’s busy
or he helps us obliquely
with a pious “help yourself”
or cradles us in his arms singing softly that we’ll pay for it
if we don’t go to sleep immediately
or whispers to us that here we are today and oh tomorrow too
or tells us the story of the cheek
and the one about the neighbor and the one about the leper
and the one about the little lunatic and the one about the mute who talked
or he puts in his headphones
or shakes us violently roaring that we’ll pay for it
if we wake up immediately
or gives us the tree test
or takes us to the zoo to see
how we look at ourselves
or points out an old train on a ghost of a bridge
propped up by posters for disposable diapers

god help us or not or halfway
or haltingly

god us
god what
or more or less
or neither

---

_____

you
who’ve read Dante in folio
you let yourself drift
through those little drawings
so-called illuminated miniatures
and you swallowed it all
all
from ay
to bi

but it’s a lie

that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish
made on purpose to make you waste time
calculating in which circle
the bones of your soul
will end up

and you know something?
this famous inferno
has an admirable simplicity
it’s not for nothing, the master’s cunning

you get there and they tell you

you’re free
go ahead and do as you like

---

Y Vos También

there’s saccharine here
the flock of albatross
or what do I know
I mean about albatross
dollars
about albatrosdollars
I never saw a bird pishing that’s not saying much
the canadians pish even if you don’t see it
and the fish
the fish pish the sea
you’re a poet, no?
or Sappho hecho en Shitland
poetess
don’t you see she’s a woman?
come on woman
and if you don’t get the chance to talk to God
why ask him if I ever
I’ll tell you honestly
in fact
at some time or other I’ve stopped adoring you
but English is more practical
you make plans all over
in other words in the pudenda
do it                                         don’t
and even if you pronounce it poorly
they’ll still understand you
do it                                   don’t
or express yourself with gestures
if you’ve seen how you do it
how you learn to do it
how you don’t get used to
how you make do how you want
it how you
don’t

Disaster on Lake Travis! Boats go down during Trump parade!

 

There are two possible explanations for what happened:

Antifa submarine, or:

The Far Side weighs in on Lake Travis boat parade. Thanks Gary Larson! @bobphoto @statesman pic.twitter.com/mpjxch2WvX

— bobphoto (@bobphoto) September 6, 2020

a Michael Reinoehl question

Does anyone else find it odd that there doesn't appear to be any web presence for a Michael Reinoehl before 2020, in fact before the killing of Aaron Danielson? As one web site reported, they can't even find his birthdate.  

What's up with that?

From John Gossage, The Pond / Allen Ginsberg, "Conversation with My Dying Father" (for "father" substitute "country" or "currently existing ecosystems" if desired)

 

CONVERSATION WITH MY DYING FATHER

 

Wasted arms, feeble knees,
eighty years old, hair thin and white,
cheek bonier than I’d remembered,
head bowed on his neck,
eyes open now and then he listened,
I read my father Wordsworth’s
Intimations of Immortality Ode.
‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come
from God who is our home.’
‘That’s beautiful,’ he said, ‘but it is not true.

When I was a boy,’ he continued, ‘we had
a house on Boyd Street Newark New Jersey.
The backyard was a big empty lot full of bushes
and whole grass. I always wondered
what was behind those trees.
When I grew older, I walked around the block
and found out what was back there, it was
a glue factory.’

The FBI warned for years that police are cozy with the far right. Is no one listening? [JBR Answer: No. No one is listening. Because this is a white supremacist country]

REPOSTED FROM THE GUARDIAN, 29 AUG 2020

Mike German

 

For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.

I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.

A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.

If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.

In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.

But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.

The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”

More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.

Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. [JBR: Including Wisconsin, where we saw the white supremacist/five-o connection/brotherhood in action in Kenosha just the other day] Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.

Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.

A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.

A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.

In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.

...

[Note: I cut the article where I did because the rest is the usual bullshit "but most of the cops are good people" blah blah blah, an assertion for which we have very little evidence, to put it mildly]

This post follows my posting some Trane. I was 16 when that music was played. Now I'm turning 70. Nothing has changed and it's killing me. And I'm not even fucking black.

Trane and Co at the top of their game

Will I ever make another section of Noose? I don't know right now. I swore I'd do this til Trump was gone, but I'm out of heart, or energy, or just want to do something else with my time. I've been doing this mashup thing one way or another for 15 years. Perhaps it's time to just focus on piano, or learn to take photos, or something. This is a kind of argh moment. Do I just need a second wind? Or am I heading in a different direction? Whatever, the energy for it isn't 100% here yet. 

Noose question

Will I ever make another section of Noose? I don't know right now. I swore I'd do this til Trump was gone, but I'm out of heart, or energy, or just want to do something else with my time. I've been doing this mashup thing one way or another for 15 years. Perhaps it's time to just focus on piano, or learn to take photos, or something. This is a kind of argh moment. Do I just need a second wind? Or am I heading in a different direction? Whatever, the energy for it isn't 100% here yet.