Out Of Shame

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.

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

Heres a not so friendly reminder, as an lgbt metis person, i dont give a single fuck what your blog is themed or if this is too painful for you to look at. Reblog this post. Reblog this post with the sources of the 751 children who were found.

Your compliance and silence as well as the compliance and silence of your ancestors is what allowed these schools to open and kill first nations children. The children of MY people.

Dont follow me if you cant reblog this post or the one with sources to your political blog or your most popular blog. Add trigger warnings if you must but if your political blog is only focused on the harms you personally face like being lgbt then you need to see some bigger pictures and stop being afraid of angering your racist mutural or actually saying some shit about racism. If you can reblog some antifa graphics or add blm to your bio to be a surface level ally, you can reblog some sources on the genocide first nations people faced and still face today.

They were CHILDREN.

I’d like to add this photo I took last night in Victoria of the statue of Captain Cook. Though I myself am not indigenous, I 100% agree that these murderers, kidnappers and rapists shouldn’t have huge statues and plaques that decorate them and say how “great” they were.

Here’s another photo of the legislative assembly from yesterday. Later on there were more items, candles and signs at the memorial, as well as a big poster with 1505 painted on it but I didn’t get a picture

People need to see this. Not just quickly glance at the photos and keep on scrolling. They need to see this.

I went to a “Cancel Canada Day” event and burst into tears - not because I was surprised to learn of the unmarked graves (survivors told us they were there. Our government pushed it aside, and we let them), but because seeing all the people gathered in mourning drove it home: They. Were. Children.

This is my country’s legacy - and it’s not history. The last schools closed during my lifetime. My Father went to school with students who lived at the local residential school, after it was changed to a boarding house (read: holding centre) for indigenous youth who went to local schools.

She will finally be allowed to rest and taken off of life support.

Her family’s fundraiser is nowhere near its goal, and now they have tremendous NICU costs to look forward to based on how her son was able (or unable) to develop under the duress of all those life saving drugs they pumped his mom full of.

Please allow this mother’s spirit to rest and support their family as they’re finally allowed to grieve poor Adriana being used as an incubator for the state.

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Its walls are worn out, and the cold seeps through every night as if we have no shelter at all.

Rodents are everywhere, getting close to our little food and frightening my children in their sleep.

I try to stay strong for them, but fear and exhaustion weigh heavily on my heart each day.

We are in desperate need of help… any kind hand that can restore a sense of safety and give my children a chance to live with dignity.

✅Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is (#514)✅

then, the (incomplete) victory over european fascism (don't look at Spain and Portugal and Greece) was methodically distanced from the true victors, the soviet people. They suffered an invasion and destruction of the majority of their industrial base, save for the industry relocated to the east, more than 20 million dead soviet workers who pushed the fascists from Moscow to Berlin, ending in an artillery barrage the magnitudes of which had never been seen, the symbolic raising of the red banner over the Reichstag and an enveloping of the city that forced many nazi officials to commit suicide. It was also forgotten how the Yugoslavs liberated themselves, managing to keep fascist forces constantly tied up during the war, how the Italian partisans captured Mussolini and hung him in public, the many uprisings throughout Europe and the concentration camps before the frontline reached them, the exiled brigadiers and republicans who first fought fascism in Spain and was later forced to fight fascism again, unable to return to their homes and under threat of being imprisoned. The indigenous resistance against colonialism in east and north Africa and southwest Asia, and the tens of millions Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Malaysians, Indonesians, Papuans, Thais, Bengalese, Indians, Filipinos, etc, who suffered both Japanese and western occupation. All of these struggles forgotten and erased, reduced to the USamerican, British, and sometimes French armies. Armies who advanced to witness a fraction of the suffering enabled and financed by their own states barely a decade prior. Even minor members of the western allies, such as Brazil, are often forgotten.

After the Holocaust was reduced to an unexpected and unprecedented event with no connection to reality, and after the struggle against fascism was reduced to the involvement of two or three countries, barely any fascists were punished. Anyone who wasn't a top official could claim to be simply following orders, even someone as important like Speer used this defence, he was allowed to live free and publish an autobiography in which he paints himself as the good Nazi, the mere architect caught up in a madman's rise. As if he ignored the plans for a future Berlin would be built by slave labor from the concentration camps, as if the minister of armaments from 1942 to the end did not know about the reliance companies like Krupp or Volkswagen had on slave labor. As if he didn't listen to Goebbels' speeches about total war and extermination and did not understand his armaments would be used. Some fascists were even integrated into the scientific and military spheres of the western allies, others given citizenship and a cushy home in places like Canada. Japanese fascists who had experimented on and tortured countless Chinese and Korean civilians and POWs to research chemical warfare were offered amnesty in exchange for the knowledge they gained doing these experiments. After German reunification, more eastern queer people were imprisoned than fascists were incarcerated or executed at the Nürnberg trials.

After fascists were exonerated and shamelessly integrated into the western states, and after some time passed, the war was turned into a cultural product. Countless war movies were produced, almost always showing usamerican soldiers in the European or Pacific front fighting a mindless horde with hakenkrauzs on their armbands all lead by a single man, or group of men, ontologically evil. It was too complex to examine the actual reasons for the war. Hitler was simply a charismatic devil who had duped Germany into following him (crucially, he was only charismatic for germans. No true American patriot fell for his tricks). Gradually, the figure of Hitler was transformed into a devil in human form who had appeared in München in 1932 to cause evil and fight freedom.

As a result, German fascism and the Holocaust are nothing more but a historical fact you look at with morbid curiosity, to feel disgust, maybe anger, and sigh in relief that it would never happen again. There is no reflection on how it was allowed to happen, how antisemitism was used, like it had commonly been used throughout history, to blame for economic downturn and how the expropriation of jewish property, the enslavement of other minorities alongside them (Slavs, non-jewish poles, homosexuals, roma, communists...) and the rapid stimulation of a military industry was used to save an recessing economy. No examination of how the Nazi party appealed to the German petit-bourgeoisie and monopolies like the aforementioned Krupp, Volkswagen, or IG Farben, by attacking communists and trade unionists, who were beginning to organize at a bigger scale and actually threaten german capitalists. Instead, some even try to paint the nazis as communists or as similar to them, through terms like totalitarianism, which was popularized by Hannah Arendt, a fascist sympathiser who also saw fit to label decolonial struggles as totalitarian.

Even more insidious than this is how Hitler has been mutated into a shorthand for evil, an entity beyond a single man who personifies the collective hatred of minorities by Europeans, a condensation of centuries of hatred and exploitation into an angry man between 1932 and 1945. By doing this we can rest easy knowing there will never be another Hitler because we are so civil now. It was Hitler's speeches that guided every SS member's hand to execute tens of thousands. It was Goebbels' propaganda that clouded the judgment of the millions of Wehrmacht soldiers who looted and massacred their way through Europe. It was Himmler's threat that coerced countless germans to spy and tattle on their neighbors. It was Göring who convinced the Luftwaffe pilots to bomb and terrorize civilians. It was Dönitz who made the Kriegsmarine target civilian ships and ruthlessly pursue trade convoys. And it was ultimately Hitler who controlled these men, and no German had free will or political conviction between 1932 and 1945.

Dr. Alan Hart helped pioneer the use of chest X-rays to diagnose tuberculosis. Hart was married to a woman and practicing medicine in San Francisco in 1918 when he was outed as a trans man by a former colleague. Dr. Hart was chased out of town on the back of headlines like “Girl Poses as Male Doctor in Hospital" (he was not posing, of course) and spent much of his life moving from town to town to escape various forms of transphobia. Hart was also a novelist, and wrote of one of his characters, "When it came to outrunning gossip he found he couldn't do it," which was Hart's experience as well—he moved seven times in nine years all around the U.S. in search of safety, but it always proved fleeting. He did manage to get a graduate degree in radiology, though, and helped show how chest X-rays could show very early signs of tuberculosis, thus allowing patients the opportunity to rest and get adequate nutrition sooner, which contributed to better outcomes. Chest X-rays continue to be an essential diagnostic tool; mobile chest X-ray machines that can be carried via backpack now serve rural communities, so Hart's popularization of this diagnostic method continues to save lives.

While it's true that Hart was publicly outed once and moved all over the country for a while, by the time he died, he had served as the director of hospitalization and rehabilitation for the Connecticut State Tuberculosis Commission for over a decade. Nor was he exclusively hounded or excluded from society at home in Oregon, either -- there are regular mentions of him (under his chosen, male name, or occasionally simply as an "Albany man") and his second wife in his hometown newspaper, The Albany Democrat, throughout the 20s and 30s, reporting when they were in town for social visits, promoting his novels, and even reporting on his graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with his graduate degree. Nor does it seem most people saw him as a woman pretending to be a man for most of his life, despite the press his 1918 outing received -- a reviewer of one of his novels even once remarked that Dr. Hart, while a good writer, didn't seem to know much about women! (Having read a bit of Hart's fiction, I don't think this is true, but to each their own, I suppose)

I mention this because I think it's important to emphasize that trans people -- even trans people who have experienced dramatic setbacks in their lives, like Dr. Hart's 1918 outing -- have not only always existed, but always persisted through trouble and often managed to live very fulfilling lives that were not exclusively marred by transphobia. Nor did everyone around them feel that they were simply "posing" as their gender. Even in 1918, people in Hart's hometown expressed disgust at the way the press way treating the story, and the local newspaper did an exceptionally sympathetic interview with him that allowed him to express his own feelings on the situation and affirm that transitioning was the best choice he could have made! In fact, he was very clear he was not ashamed of his choices, saying:

So, I wanna be clear: I use this page to platform fundraisers specifically for people and causes of Black African descent. We often don't even consider that Black people exist across the globe, and have to deal with the same suffering and political conflicts in tandem with pre-existing antiblackness. Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Cuba, Palestine, etc. I want to use my position to amplify their voices, to give them the spotlight and space to be seen in a world that often neglects their existence.

That being said!

My peers (of all backgrounds) and I have been sharing fundraisers for Gaza for at least three years. And I recognize that that's a while, but folks being tired of hearing about it doesn't prevent suffering from occurring. It doesn't stop people from experiencing horrors under genocide. So often I get asked on my personal page, why no one is listening or helping, and I don't have anything to tell them. I don't know what to say anymore.

Because I see what they're saying, I do see how it feels like my peers and I are basically circling fundraisers between ourselves at this point. I see how the world treats them, and I don't know what more I could possibly say to convince people to care, after everything we've witnessed. What could I possibly say, if that's not enough?

We could use your help. But much more importantly, the people of Gaza could use your help! Even if you can't donate, reblog a campaign post shared by your peers every now and then. Pick one family's campaign and commit to sharing that one, if nothing else. Anything is better than nothing. Everybody on here claims to have some sort of marginalization and struggle that they wish to be witnessed and acknowledged, so I know you understand and empathize.