I don’t think that is why thing turned out how they did. I think Gilroy wanted to use as much of his original 5 season plans but truncated. That inevitably runs into a problem, and thus the whole season feels thematically disjointed. I really wish they had re-written more and just chosen a throughline for the season. They could even do the time jumps, just don’t make each arc clearly feel like a piece of a different season with different ideas going on.
That’s why changing our own language in order to avoid being called antisemites is a bad move. That’s not to say do fucking tropes and shit, but people like me in the States cannot let them shape the narrative and the rules of engagement
I came across a documentary on the German spy ring the Red Orchestra with the synopsis being focused on how they are totally not communists
The Gestapo labeled them as communists and traitors for their efforts to put an end to Hitler’s reign – a theory that was upheld by allied secret services until recently.
Historians now officially recognize the Red Orchestra as one of the largest and most efficient Nazi resistance groups, with members who held a variety of political and religious beliefs. Forty percent of the members were women.
First of all what the fuck do they mean “officially”? And who are said historians? Are all prior historians not official? But the more egregious thing is the implicit framing here of Communist and traitor being equal. Like this is treated as a proud rehabilitation like oh thank god this resistance was not communist so now we can feel bad they got murdered by Hitler, otherwise Hitler was in the right.
But also, the leadership was full of communists, had intense links to other communist parties, was particularly looked into by the Nazis because of their ties to the French Communist Party which the Nazis feared was being directly aided by the USSR
The Gestapo’s purpose in running this particular funkspiel was to discover Soviet links to the French Communist Party, the French Resistance and the Red Three.
Yes the group was more informal, was cell based, and did have members of different political beliefs and religious backgrounds, but that was NEVER disputed by the older view. Here is a West German theologian who got a bunch of shit in germany for this statement
And no matter whether it suits us today or not, we shouldn’t hide the fact that there was also such a thing as a ‘Red Orchestra’: communists who were also involved in this struggle and also fell as victims of Nazism. No matter what their ideological background was and what one might think of their particular motivations and actions: these people didn’t want to be part of what the Nazis wanted; they wanted to set a limit to their depraved and ruinous regime, to put an end to it. […] Had they succeeded, it might have rendered a large amount of further human as well as material sacrifices unnecessary. But they didn’t succeed. And this was not just their own fault, but was also because so few in Germany were willing to join and help them with determination, before it became safe to do so, and that they received so little understanding or meaningful assistance from outside
A bunch of modern scholarship does “correct” the idea that they are a Soviet spy ring, something the Soviets and DDR never claimed. The reality is that the idea of a self conscious “Red Orchestra” organization that was centrally led was false, and them being a section of soviet intelligence is not true, but like…their network was almost entirely reliant on other communist parties in occupied countries, and cells did operations directly with the NKVD and red army. Like Hans Coppi who fucked up an exhibition mocking the soviets, and later met with NKVD who parachuted into Germany.
A BUNCH of leaders of those various cells were communists, and the infrastructure of the KPD was instrumental. Of the 400 members it is like a full quarter are Communists openly, more than any other group. Shit like this is why I dislike documentaries, they are narrative driven and sorta require a framing of “new evidence” or interpretation. They rarely add nuance
Heert repeating the orders at him again like he is a child causes such a good reaction shot from moustache man
Read the YA book “rebel rising” which is about Jyn. It peters off, but the first half 2/3 is focused on her and Saw and is fucking fantastic. Pretty much letting Saw proselytize about how a rebellion requires violence and that people will only fight once the empire has created a pile of bodies so high it dwarfs them, and someone needs to create that be it dead imps those fighting back cause, or civilians the empire slaughters, but either way the rebellion will stand atop corpses. The latter half is weak teen romance, though then it picks back up with Jyn depressed in prison and waiting for death. That shit gets dark for a star wars novel
Cassian was there with the empire. Remember it was a penal unit, he was jailed for attacking a trooper with a stick, spent time in prison, got sent as a penal battalion according to him though Luthen says he was a unit cook. He was 100% on the side of the Empire as prison labor. The Mimbanese had been Republic aligned and trained by clones, but fought against the Empire sometime later. The scenes are too dark to make anything out, but the costumes for them have them using retrofitted or broken clone armor.
Yeah it was never about their luck. I think people focus on the Vader hallway scene for the EPIC shit and not that it is another moment driving home how collective the sacrifices are. We already saw Cassian and Jyn die and as the camera rises above the planet, the bridge of the Profundity is burning, the plans are handed off and a dozen troopers die in a desperate act to just barely slip them through a doorway, one trooper even fucking goes to elbow vader with no weapon, literally just making Vader kill him to buy a second longer.
They didn’t get lucky, they just bought time with their blood
I mean Castro talked about Cuba in pretty similar terms. The USSR collapsing did not kill socialism, but it did orphan AES. They had to make compromises, they had to retreat in places. All current AES save for China are in worse circumstances today, or at least more precarious after a period of worse circumstances.
I cannot find it but I am pretty sure it was Indian Prime Minister Narashima Rao who explained why he made a neoliberal turn and betrayed all his campaign promises as “the USSR died on me”
I already knew this, but this has reaffirmed the reality for me more than ever. We cannot afford to condition our support for Palestine on Anti-Zionist Jews. This was something I particularly learned from Finkelstein but also generally during the Great March of Return. I appreciate anti-zionist Jews, but I’m sorry it does not matter if they oppose Israel. Frontloading protests with them conditions Palestinian humanity based on their empathy. If every single American Jew agreed with Bibi, the calculus would be the exact fucking same.
The irrational essence of Gentile anti-Semitism is inferred inductively from the irrational essence of The Holocaust. To wit. Hitler’s Final Solution uniquely lacked rationality — it was «evil for its own sake," «purposeless" mass killing; Hitler’s Final Solution marked the culmination of Gentile anti-Semitism; therefore Gentile anti-Semitism is essentially irrational. Taken apart or together, these propositions do not withstand even superficial scrutiny. 29 Politically, however, the argument is highly serviceable.
By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure. Arab hostility, African-American hostility: they are “fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action” (Goldhagen).30 Consider Wiesel on Jewish persecution: «For two thousand years … we were always threatened… For what? For no reason." On Arab hostility to Israel: “Because of who we are and what our homeland Israel represents — the heart of our lives, the dream of our dreams -when our enemies try to destroy us, they will do so by trying to destroy Israel.” On Black people’s hostility to American Jews: "The people who take their inspiration from us do not thank us but attack us. We find ourselves in a very dangerous situation. We are again the scapegoat on all sides… We helped the blacks; we always helped them… I feel sorry for blacks. There is one thing they should learn from us and that is gratitude. No people in the world knows gratitude as we do; we are forever grateful. "31 Ever chastised, ever innocent: this is the burden of being a Jew. 32
The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred also validates the complementary Holocaust dogma of uniqueness. If The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of the Jews, the persecution of non-Jews in The Holocaust was merely accidental and the persecution of non-Jews in history merely episodic. From every standpoint, then, Jewish suffering during The Holocaust was unique. Finally, Jewish suffering was unique because the Jews are unique. The Holocaust was unique because it was not rational. Ultimately, its impetus was a most irrational, if all-too-human, passion. The Gentile world hated Jews because of envy, jealousy: resentment. Anti-Semitism, according to Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter, sprang from "gentile jealousy and resentment of the Jews’ besting Christians in the marketplace . . . large numbers of less accomplished gentiles resent smaller numbers of more accomplished Jews. "33 Albeit negatively. The Holocaust thus confirmed the chosenness of Jews. Because Jews are better, or more successful, they suffered the ire of Gentiles, who then murdered them.
In a brief aside, Novick muses «what would talk of the Holocaust be like in America" if Elie Wiesel were not its “principal interpreter” ?34 The answer is not difficult to find: Before June 1967 the universalist message of concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim resonated among American Jews. After the June war, Bettelheim was shunted aside in favor of Wiesel. Wiesel’s prominence is a function of his Ideological utility. Uniqueness of Jewish suffering/uniqueness of the Jews, ever-guilty Gentiles/ever-innocent Jews, unconditional defense of Israel/unconditional defense of Jewish interests: Elie Wiesel is The Holocaust.
This is from Finkelstein’s paper of the same name, not the book though parts are carried over directly.
The handicapping of anti-genocide activism in an attempt to not be cammed antisemitic is a problem. I get that optics are important, but what have good optics actually accomplished materially for Palestinians? Nothing by more slaughter.
It is worth noting that China doing this is not an immediate consequence of the split. Afghanistan in late 70s, same with UNITA. Khmer Rouge is earlier, but the other stuff is mostly post-Cultural Revolution shift in policy. Like you said “79-89” which is effectively the fall of the Gang of Four and the ascendance of Guofeng and then Deng all the way to the end of the USSR as a stable actor.
Not to say Mao didn’t make the shift to the US, he and Zhou 100% did, but China going completely off-kilter foreign policy wise really kicks in in 79
Could we please finish one major war before starting another?!?!
Oh like news media. I thought you meant popular media fiction stuff
Do you have examples?
This is still not good, but thank god it was at least GC and not regular PFLP. They are very separate organizations and have been since inception
I know I shouldn’t be shocked, but like no news sources but Pravda refer to him as a neo-nazi despite that being literally the truth. Even pravda says “former”. The funniest is the “humanitarian activist” shit
Cardenas is smiling down on her
And enabled Irish Independence, however incomplete.
and WW1 was the first war in which mass casualties came from combat more than disease…but we entered at the perfect time to ship thousands of men across the sea with the fucking plague. They had to dump bodies off at sea constantly
There almost certainly WAS something those episodes are written to build for, which they just didn’t do cause of time, but without finding a satisfying reason for keeping that thread in at all.