Sigh In A Storm

Does Erdogan think we just woke up one day and decided it was better to take on Turkish faith and identity, and not our old Slavic and Christian identity?

Our great-grandmothers still bore tattoos that gained popularity amongst Bosnian-Croat woman to protect themselves from conversion and sexual slavery. Young girls were tattooed with crosses and other southern Slavic motifs (likely originating in paganism) because tattooed girls would not be converted to Islam or kidnapped and made slaves in the Empire.

I would imagine death did await some of those women who refused to lose links to their Slavic and Catholic heritage. Since they were "tainted" and useless as Muslims and slaves.

Southern Europeans fought the Ottomans for a reason. They invaded our lands. Croatians, Hungarians, Serbs, etc. Or do those battles not count as any sort of colonialism to this fucking roach, Erdogan?

Big volume #FencepostOfTheWeek

10 years later the Hamas fandom, with PLO protests President Biden when he commemorates the murders. In the name of Palestine and because of their obsession with Jews in a movement that has become a fandom.

The brochure might have read as a shocking smear that distorted history had it not been an integral part of a massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that entered a particularly active stage in 1967. Its language reflects its epoch – one marked by Cold War tensions, propagandistic jargon that permeated all aspects of Soviet public life, and virulent demonisation of Israel and Zionism. Alleged Zionist-Nazi collaboration and false equivalence between the two were among the campaign’s centerpieces. Designed by the KGB and overseen by chief Communist Party ideologues, the campaign had achieved numerous successes. For a significant portion of domestic and some foreign audiences, it succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid. It contributed to the adoption of the notorious 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which held Zionism to be a form of racism and paved the way for the demonisation of Israel within that organisation. In the course of the campaign, hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles were published in the USSR, with millions of copies entering circulation in the country. Many were translated into foreign languages – English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and numerous others. In 1970 alone, the comparison between alleged Zionist and Nazi racism – just one of the campaign’s numerous memes – merited 96 mentions (Pinkus 1989:256). Demonisation of Zionism continued in films, lectures, and radio broadcasts. Anti-Zionist cartoons, many of an obvious antisemitic nature, were a regular feature of Soviet publications.

Then in 2001, latterly obscured by the 9/11 attacks and the Global War on Terror, there was the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa. It was a Judenhass horror-show leveraging every single nazi comparison or Soviet academic 'creation' from the prior article in ways that stayed embedded in progressive movements and spaces and zombie-revive to this day:

Somerset, Southwest England

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)