I thought Claude’s message was tasteful and showed grace to this douchecanoe. His refusal to treat his children properly is what has made this a reality show. Him staying quiet did so as well.
I wish him the worst and I hope his words choke him someday.
Oh, he's an actual monster
Last note, a quote by the esteemible Ta-Nehisi Coates in his extraordinary book, "The Message", which you all should read, and a reflection.
"Your oppression will not save you."
Ethnonationalism will not save you.
bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
And by Armenian poet and activist @sophiaarmen.bsky.social, whose family is from Van, Armenia, Anatolia:
Who Remembers the Palestinians?
We do
and I ride the bus to the Nakba protest with them
each day
and my soorj, this morning
We are drinking it with them
You, genocider—
Who remembers you?
I'll end this thread with two poems and then a quote, the first by the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish:
Who Remembers the Armenians?
I remember them
and I ride the nightmare bus with them
each night
and my coffee, this morning
I'm drinking it with them
You, murderer -
Who remembers you?
Ehnonationalism does not make ANY of us safer.
Enshrined and dignity for every single ethnic and religious group, with all rights and liberties guaranteed to all under a truly fair economic and political system are what actually make us safe.
Reject ethnonationalism and its recorded evils.
When Palestinian activists call for freedom
"from the 🌊 to the 🌊," it is a fundamental call for equal rights, liberties, and political realization for ALL peoples, as well as the Right of Return for the indigenous.
We need this from Afghanistan, to Anatolia, to Syria, to Morocco and all of SWANA.
Pursuing an ethnonationalist project, of any kind, invariably does not make any group safer.
The natural human state is to have our rich diversity of ethnicities and cultures, and not to avoid camaraderie and cultural influence from one another.
This, along with indigineity, must be respected.
The Palestinian cause is against the settler-colonialism of Z*onism and its ethnonationalism and apartheid, well-documented at this point by the world's highest humanitarian organizations.
A system that harkens back to the Ottoman's treatment of the Armenians.
www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ca...
Now, in the case of Palestine, it is about just that, the land itself and its inhabitants.
Palestinians are in fact a historically heterogeneous, primarily Arab, indigenous group to the land historically called Palestine. Both an ethnicity and a historic nationality, both distinct facets.
Ethnonationalism, by the core of its design, beckons its worshipers to shun the fact of the heterogeneity.
The FACT that NO ethnic group needs an ethnostate to proper. And in fact ethnostates cause far, FAR more harm than any good.
They systemically cause ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The truth is that SWANA, and virtually all the countries within it are very heterogeneous.
Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Persians, Lors, Armenians, Azeris, Palestinians, Bedouins, Amazigh, and various other indigenous Semitic, Indo-Iranian, North African, and Turkic and other peoples belong to the region.
You'll notice a pattern from all these examples.
Ethnonationalism begets ethnonationalism, and the horrific systemic violence that comes with it.
I've honestly only scratched the surface here, and there are so many other examples in SWANA and worldwide.
In perhaps its most horrific manifestation, Saddam's Anfal Genocide, for instance, killed estimates of 100-200,000 Kurds indigenous to Northern Iraq, adjacent to his persecution of Shia Iraqis: www.aljazeera.com/features/202...
While Pan-Arabism began under the Ottoman Empire while Arabs were increasingly downgraded in the empires standing, it greatly increased in the 20th century in the face of Z*onism, spurring Arab ethnonationalism and allowing Ba'athist figures like Saddam to rise. www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/...
The Nakba has been ongoing to today, concentrating populations in the West Bank and Gaza and attempting to violently expel and murder them, and with millions of Palestinian refugees worldwide today, still waiting on the Right of Return to their homeland. www.unrwa.org/palestine-re...
In the establishment of their new "safe" ethnostate, Z*onist militias ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians from their villages across Palestine.
Known as the "Nakba," or "catastrophe" in Arabic.
Of note, "Shoah" means "catastrophe" in Hebrew.
www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-p...
The end of the British Mandate of Palestine harkened that British "bequeathing" onto I*rael onto the Z*onists. Jewish refugees from Europe had already arrived decades prior, embraced by the indigenous Palestinians.
But ethnonationalism would take hold of them.
www.britannica.com/place/Palest...
Z*onism was already well in development before the Shoah, beginning in the late 1800s and catalyzed by Herzel, but post-Shoah, more sincerely believed they could only be safe as a people with their own state.
It was increasingly the accepted norm, after all.
In the most horrific example, the Jewish Holocaust, the Shoah, its monstrous architect was evidently influenced by the Ottomans' multiple genocides. In Europe, he and the Nazis murdered over 6 million Jews, as well as 250,000-500,000 Romani and Sint and queer people. meforum.org/middle-east-...
And thus there was no justice for the Turkish-led genocide.
Ethnonationalism was not recognized for the horrors it caused among the world powers.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing were acceptable tactics to nation-building.
Today Armenia is still under genocidal threat from Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Sidenote, I HIGHLY recommend "The Righteous and People of Conscience of the Armenian Genocide," which chronicles the Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Europeans, and Americans who rejected the ethnonationalist fervor and saved as many Armenians as they could. www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-rig...
Today, in "Turkey," Turkish ethnonationalist fervor demands systemic genocide denialism, and has persecuted my people, the Kurds, for speaking our language and practicing our culture, sparking the long-term resistance and conflict. www.culturalsurvival.org/publications...
Because there was no justice for the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks murdered in their genocides, and no Right of Return for those displaced, ethnonationalism has been allowed to flourish in Anatolia, with no virtually no justice for its indigenous victims. www.middlebury.edu/projects-for...
The Ottoman/Young Turk genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks paved the way for Kemal Attaturk's ideologies and the modern Turkish ethnonationalist state. www.britannica.com/place/Turkey...
