Sniping's a good job, mate!

Peregrine Falcon 🦅 Earth Odyssey S07E14 "Birds of a Feather"

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

Supporters of India's youth-led Cockroach movement said Tuesday they will continue their protest in New Delhi, refusing to leave their sit-in site a day after police used tear gas and batons to disperse thousands of them as they tried to march toward Parliament. Hundreds of protesters camped at Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site, under heavy police presence, saying they would stay until Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigns over alleged failures in India's examination system. "We are going to continue our protest," said Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, which emerged just two months ago. The movement, drawing students, professionals and families, marks a rare public challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi 's government in its third term, reviving criticism over its handling of dissent and its use of force to respond to protests. [...] Sona Bisht, a 20-year-old student who was part of the protest, said the confrontation strengthened her resolve. "If the government thinks that doing this with Gen Z, they can stop us, then that won't happen. We are here talking about education, talking about securing our future. And till the time our demands are not met, we will not move from here," she said.

"Definitions developed thus far about youth, like the Gen Z narrative, have largely been linked to roles attributed by the dominant system. The rulers have invented a whole range of terms — rebellious, irresponsible, apolitical, extremist, consumerist — not to understand youth, but to neutralize it. They know as well as we do that whoever wins over the youth wins over society. [...] Thus the question is not whether youth is powerful, but in whose interest this power is directed. Today’s uprisings — such as those in Nepal, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, and beyond — demonstrate that youth continues to emerge as a decisive actor. Young women like Deniz Ciya have proven this with their lives. These uprisings are not expressions of generational temperament. These „Gen Z uprisings“ are expressions of a social force confronting structural crisis inherent in the current system. [...] Recent youth uprisings — whether in the form of environmental justice protests, labor movements, or uprisings against authoritarian governments — are proof that youth worldwide are not only responding to a set of circumstances; they are consciously and collectively rejecting the narratives that seek to define them. Thus, it is crucial to analyze what transpired, and draw lessons from these uprisings, particularly in the context of building a global youth democratic confederalism. For the power of youth movements is interconnected, despite being geographically distant." — "Beyond "Gen Z": Defending Revolutionary Youth Spirit" by Lêgerîn

También no sé si sabian que Fede Bal y Carmén Barbieri son afrodescendientes. Carmen es nieta de Guillermo Barbieri, guitarrista de Carlos Gardel

Y bueno ya que hablamos del tango: es y siempre fue constituido por influencia DIRECTA afrodescendiente. Nada de le robamos esto o aquello.

I mean there *were* cases of nazis being smuggled into brazil, argentina, chile, and paraguay through illegal escape routes colloquially referred to as ratlines. That is a thing that did happen.

However, the way americans in particular seem to latch onto this fact to dismiss any latin american that pisses them off, either in a "well whatever your country gave refuge to nazis" sense, or in a "I'm directly implying your family were escaped nazis" sense (another example I remember seeing once was a post about US imperialism in latin america where a yankee replied that OP had no business bitching about imperialism because she was probably "a white brazilian called Helga or something") is a bit ironic to me, considering that:

The vast majority of german immigrants to these countries in the 20th century were jewish refugees fleeing the nazis

The US took in thousands more nazis after ww2 than the entirety of Latin America combined

A lot of the nazis that *did* escape to latin america did so with the direct help of US intelligence agencies

Nazis that escaped to the US were treated as valuable anti-soviet assets, and many of them were given cushy jobs by the US government. Most of the nazis who escaped to latin america spent their entire lives hiding from the authorities under false identities, and those who were discovered were extradited or jailed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Brazilians

"Between 1824 and 1972, about 260,000 Germans settled in Brazil,[6] the fifth largest nationality to immigrate after the Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards and Japanese.[6] (...)

The first German immigrants to Brazil arrived as early as the 16th century, although organized immigration began only in the 19th century. The causes of this process can be found in the frequent social problems that occurred in Europe and the abundance of land in Brazil. (...)

German immigration to Brazil began before the independence from Portugal and remained relatively constant until the 1960s. (...)

Until the unification in 1871, there was no German national state; the region was a mosaic composed of various principalities, counties, kingdoms, and duchies.[31] European powers regarded German fragmentation as a pillar of continental geopolitics, fearing that a unified Germany would disrupt the balance of power. In this context, the region became one of the main sources of emigration in the 19th century: between 1824 and 1914, approximately 5.4 million Germans left Europe.[32] Brazil attracted only a small fraction of this contingent (about 2% of the total), while the United States absorbed more than 90% of the flow. Despite this disparity, Brazil consolidated its position as the second most preferred destination outside North America, surpassing Argentina (0.85%) and Canada (0.84%) between 1871 and 1913.

(...)

The reasons behind this large-scale departure can be summarized through a combination of push and pull factors. Historically, there was already a strong migratory tradition directed toward North America since the 18th century, with estimates of up to 100,000 immigrants during the colonial period.[32] Between 1816 and 1914, this flow to the United States rose to 5.5 million people, prompting Brazil to attempt to “divert” part of this consolidated movement through active propaganda and subsidies.[33]

In the economic sphere, subsistence crises and severe inflation were decisive factors. In 1842, crop failures raised the price of grains by up to 300% and that of potatoes by 425% within just two years, provoking rebellions fueled by famine and transforming emigration into a survival strategy.[34][35] This situation was compounded by a problematic landholding structure: in southwestern Germany — in areas such as Hunsrück, the Palatinate, Baden, and Württemberg — inheritance legislation required the division of property among all heirs. The result was excessive fragmentation, with 75% of farmers lacking sufficient land for subsistence and more than 60% of properties measuring less than 5 hectares, in some cases shrinking to parcels of 1 to 2 hectares in Hunsrück.[34][36][37] Additionally, high taxation further aggravated rural precariousness, reaching between 30% and 40% of the income of poor peasants.[37] (...)

German immigration to Brazil also increased during specific conjunctural moments, such as in 1924, when the Immigration Act of 1924 imposed rigid quotas and monthly limits on immigrant entry into the United States. As a result, the proportion of Germans migrating to North America fell to 38.5%, redirecting thousands of immigrants to Brazil and Argentina.[40] Finally, the flow was reinforced by immigration networks, in which letters from already established relatives facilitated logistics and encouraged new departures through the phenomenon known as the “chain migration.”[41] (...)

In the first half of the twentieth century, German immigration to Brazil reached a numerical volume greater than that recorded during the entire nineteenth century. Between 1918, the end of World War I, and 1933, the year of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, approximately 80,000 Germans disembarked in the country.[11] During the crisis of the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation reached astronomical levels in Germany, peaking in November 1923, when one U.S. dollar was worth 4.2 trillion marks, wiping out middle-class savings and rendering industrial wages virtually worthless.[74][75] In 1924 alone, 21,016 German immigrants entered Brazil, making it the year with the highest number of German arrivals in the country, a volume driven by the severe economic crisis and hyperinflation.[76] The increase in immigration to Brazil was also influenced by U.S. legislation that imposed strict quotas and monthly entry limits; once these were quickly reached, German immigration was blocked in the second half of 1923 and in 1924, forcing surplus emigrants to seek alternative destinations. As a result, the number of German entries into Brazil in that year was nearly equivalent to that of the United States.[40]