Ukraine

This is called an incitement to commit genocide. It's a war crime.

These guys will be dragged to The Hague, or they'll be cowering in sponsored exile as guests of sympathizing asshole regimes, or they'll be dead (likely by their own hand).

If the Kremlin’s intentions weren’t already clear enough, here is former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev saying today that the concept of an independent Ukrainian identity must "disappear for good" pic.twitter.com/hqnPvXq4oA

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) March 4, 2024

Genocide:

A crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.

Genocidal Intent:

The mens rea (mental element) for the crime of genocide. "Intent to destroy" is one of the elements of the crime of genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention. 

Today's Today

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazi's "final solution" to the Jewish question—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.

Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind. The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the scale of Nazi crimes.

Liberators and Survivors

Ukraine

Erasing a people's history is killing their identity. Killing their identity is an efficient, wholesale method of genocide.

Now imagine the books pictured here are:

• Black American History
• Native American History
• Catholic American History
• Cuban American History
• [insert your group here] History

Stand up and get in the fight.

Today's Tweet

Follow the thread - the Russian attempt to annihilate Ukraine isn't the only thing going on.

1/24
If, for whatever reason, you have lingering questions about Russia’s intentions in this war, let me remind you of what we know. This is the missile that killed dozens of civilians at a train station in Kramatorsk, as they attempted to flee the bloody war. #velshi pic.twitter.com/McgXIVxf6u

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) April 10, 2022

Today's Today

The Armenian Genocide "started" on this date in 1915.  And of course it didn't - it started way before then because history isn't just some randomly jumbled string of unrelated events.

Writing in the late 1890s after a visit to the Ottoman Empire, the British ethnographer William Ramsay described the conditions of Armenian life as follows:

We must, however, go back to an older time, if we want to appreciate what uncontrolled Turkish rule meant, alike to Armenians and to Greeks. It did not mean religious persecution; it meant unutterable contempt ... They were dogs and pigs; and their nature was to be Christians, to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing that belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was sacred or safe from violence – capricious, unprovoked violence – to resist which by violence meant death!^[34]

But we can kinda fix the date by noting that something happened 24APR1915 that pretty much signaled a change in the Turkish Government policy regarding "the Armenian problem".  

So, 1st there was this:

Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed en masse by Young Turk government authorities on the night of 24 April 1915.

And before long, there was this:

Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote, "Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation"

And this:

Decapitated heads of Armenians placed on stakes.

And this:

Armenian Christian women crucified

Maybe we can thank The Cosmic Muffin it never fucking works in the end, but there's always somebody - usually followed closely by a big buncha of rubes - willing to blame every difficulty (real or imagineered) on a hapless minority, and to mask their own lust for blood, power and treasure by tapping into a base human brutality in order to try just one more time to kill his way to glory.

So why do we keep saying, "never again" when history is just chock full of this kinda shit?