Seldom All It Seems

I love not farming

I respect the hell out of farmers and I'm glad that's someone's dream. because it's sure not mine

I would not be taken in by the tradwife influencer grift about milking a cow in a sundress. I have been around cows. my uncle was a dairy farmer. I love not milking a cow. I love getting milk from a store. I love getting vegetables and fruit and meat and bread from a store.

would I rather it be a local farm's store or a local bakery or butcher shop? yes! maybe when I make more money!

So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:

April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.

Many people, including  workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.

Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.

Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.

Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.

Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…

June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.

June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.

June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.

Content Warning for video: blood

“Tell the world…”

I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.

Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)

The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.

After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.

And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.

What the fucking hell.

I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.

The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”

And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.

It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.

To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.

And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.

Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.

And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.

When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.

That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.

Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how it’d treat dissent, how it’d treat people who’re used to the idea and practice of freedom.

What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.

The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didn’t use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played — I know every word of China’s national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.

China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly — if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, I’d say this — the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you can’t find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You can’t talk about it in a roundabout away. You can’t change some elements of time/place/person and pretend it’s fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a “discussion”; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.

The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.

The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And there’s nothing more a government like China’s fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils can’t continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, I’m already in violation of its Article 38. It doesn’t matter I’m writing it in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter I’m a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.

Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.

Youth of today forgot the ancient power of youtube lyrics videos

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin spent two and a half years writing Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History, with the goal of creating "a source of basic information about Judaism and Jewish life." It was published in 1991. I bought this copy a few months ago.

I have not been able to read it, because the first piece I opened it to struck me so fucking hard.

I wanted to post it here first. And also, I'm afraid every piece in here will hit me that hard.

This one is pretty short; just over a page. I'm going to transcribe the whole thing here. Anything in bold is emphasis I'm adding.

United Nations Resolutions 242 And 338 Since its passage on November 22, 1967, Security Council Resolution 242 has been regarded by the international diplomatic community as the basis for a lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors. Feelings about "242" in Israel tend to be more mixed, particularly because of the resolution's insistence on "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent [*Six-Day War] conflict." Arthur Goldberg, a deeply committed Jew, was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time the resolution was passed. Goldberg subsequently insisted that the resolution never intended to bring about a complete Israeli withdrawal from every inch of land occupied in 1967. Goldberg noted that the resolution spoke of Israeli withdrawal "from territories," and not from "all the territories." Lord Caradon, the former British representative to the U.N. and a diplomat much less friendly to Israel than Goldberg, confirmed the American ambassador's view. "It would have been wrong," Caradon explained to the Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, "to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to…." Nonetheless, Resolution 242 clearly calls for a substantial Israeli withdrawal from the areas captured in 1967. And, in fact, when Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, he agreed to withdraw from all areas conquered from Egypt, with no territorial modifications whatsoever (see Camp David). The resolution has another clause, insisting on the right of every state in the region to "live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." Unfortunately, this clause has long been rejected by almost all of the Arab states, although in 1988 Yasir Arafat of the PLO announced that he accepted it (see preceding entry). Resolution 242 also speaks of the need for "a just settlement of the refugee problem." The neutral word "refugee" was used rather than "Palestinian refugees" to underscore the two refugee problems in the Israeli conflict: Palestinian-Arab and Jewish. More than 700,000 Jews have fled the Arab world since Israel's creation in 1948, in comparison with the estimated 550,000 Arabs who fled the territory that became Israel. Neither Jewish nor Arab refugees have ever received financial compensation for their confiscated property. Resolution 338, issued in the final days of the *Yom Kippur War -- October 22, 1973 -- simply calls for a cease-fire, an implementation of Resolution 242, and a "just and durable peace in the Middle East." Although "338" is far less ambitious in scope than "242," the two resolutions are always mentioned in tandem in international documents. SOURCE AND FURTHER READING: Leonard Davis, Eric Rozenman, and Jeff Rubin, Myths and Facts 1989, pp. 45-51; the resolutions themselves can be found on pp. 294-295.

I never knew that.

I knew that a full-on empire had fallen in World War One. (At least two actually, but I'm talking about the Ottoman Empire here.) And that instead of the winners taking those lands, the League of Nations had talked to representatives of all the peoples living on them, divided them up into independent nations, and ordered Britain and France to run them until they'd all established their own governments and infrastructures.

I knew that a lot of those peoples - Jews, Yazidi, Druze, Armenians, Circassians, Syriacs, Turkmen, etc - were indigenous to those lands and had been treated like compleeeeeete GARBAGE under 1,300 years of imperialism.

I knew that some of the major players in the Arab world had actively supported the League of Nations' mandate that Jews be encouraged to migrate back to their homeland, and that everyone have equal rights there.

I knew that the more conservative side of the Arab world had wanted, even expected, to go back to a pan-Arab empire across the whole land, and were fucking pissed at being told that in this one piece of it Jews were going to be welcomed, and collaborate equally in the government. Gross.

I knew that conservative leaders spent DECADES explicitly telling Britain this land had been Arab-owned for 1,300 years, needed to continue being Arab-owned, and the Jews could just go back to being systemically marginalized a totally protected minority we swear!

I knew that all the Arab League countries had invaded in 1948, the moment Britain left, to reclaim the land for the Arab world.

I knew that the Arab League had sent volunteer armies to start the process in 1947.

I knew that, subsequently, even more Jews had fled countries across the Arab World than Arabs had fled Israel. Because all those countries were systemically stripping them of their citizenship, their civil rights, massacring them - the usual.

I knew Palestinian refugees were called that because they'd never gotten to have Israeli citizenship.

(They'd certainly had never gotten to have Palestinian citizenship, because the British-installed leadership of Arab Palestine had flatly refused anything but control of the entire country. It rejected sharing Palestine with Jews, and it rejected the UN's offer of a separate 90% Arab Palestine next door to a 55% Jewish country. So Palestine didn't end up declaring independence until 1988.)

I knew Israel had offered to negotiate the return of those Palestinian refugees with the Arab League, on the condition that it also negotiate compensation for the Jewish refugees from its own countries. Which the League refused to do.

I knew all of this because I've been fact-checking everything anyone on any "side" says since just after October 7.

I've learned a fuckton of history.

But I'd still only ever heard of 242 being used to demand a "right of return" for the Palestinian refugees, plus their millions of descendants.

I'd never heard any hint that the U.N. at one point opposed anybody attacking Israel.

Much less that the U.N. thought the Arab League should negotiate any compensation for the largest ethnic cleansing in history.

All of that aside, my best friend J has a silly, fun in-story crack theory about why AOS Kirk is so fundamentally dissimilar from TOS Kirk in ways that even Mirror Kirk isn't, and it made me giggle, so I'm sharing it!