Malificandy - Salt, Spite, & Everything Slight

Adobe is going to spy on your projects. This is insane.

“For a thousand years the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christian in a Christian Europe, non-Muslim outsiders in an Islamic Middle East. But this chapter is not primarily about antisemitism. It is about what gives rise to it. Antisemitism is only contingently about Jews. Jews are its victims but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within a culture. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society. Recall Girard’s point: the scapegoat is the mechanism by which a society deflects violence away from itself by focusing it on an external victim. Hence, wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews they would start killing one another. That is what happened in Europe in the seventeenth century and again in two world wars in the twentieth, and what is happening today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn regions in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To understand the emergence of the Jew-as-scapegoat we must focus on certain key historic moments. The first is 1095 when Pope Urban II delivered his historic call for the First Crusade. In 1096 some of the Crusaders, on their way to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe: in Cologne, Worms, and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than be seized by the mob and forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry, and the portent of worse to come. From this point onwards Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen by many not as human beings at all but as a malevolent force, as an evil presence, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the fourteenth century cost many millions of lives. It was an age in which Jews lived in fear. That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fé, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity it ranks among one of the most sustained chronicles of hatred in history… …Eventually Europe moved on, but not before two events that were to have significant consequences centuries later. The first took place in Spain, where, under threat of persecution, Jews had been living in fear from 1391, Spain’s Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned and Jews massacred, until their expulsion in 1492. Many, under threat, had converted. Some were suspected of maintaining Jewish practice in private and became victims of the Inquisition. Others, though, embraced the new faith and achieved positions of prominence in Spanish society. It was then that a new phenomenon appeared: the persistence of prejudice after its overt cause had been removed. The ‘new’ Christians were still hated by some, now not for their religion but for their race. Legislation was introduced to protect Limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’. The first such statue appeared in Toledo in 1449. Originally opposed by the Church, it received the approval of Pope Alexander VI in 1496 and lasted well into the nineteenth century. It was the first appearance in history of the racial antisemitism that would flow through mainland Europe four and a half centuries later. The second significant development was Martin Luther. Initially favorably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds. In 1543 he published a pamphlet entitled On the Jews and their Lies that became a classic in the literature of hate. Synagogues should be burned. Jewish homes should be destroyed. Jews should be made to live in a single room or stable to know that they were no more than ‘miserable captives’. Their prayer books and Talmuds should be confiscated and their rabbis forbidden to teach. They should be forbidden to travel and given no legal protection until the world was rid of what he called 'our plague, pestilence, and misfortune’. The pamphlet was reprinted several times during the Nazi era, and its suggestions paralleled by the Nuremberg laws. Luther’s outburst ensured that hostility to the Jews would persist after the Reformation, and it left a lasting impression in countries where Lutheranism held sway. The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews. This had a lasting effect on Holland in the sixteenth century and England in the seventeenth, as well as on the Pilgrim Fathers in America. These were among the first places to develop religious liberty. It is at this point that the story takes a remarkable and tragic twist. Western Europe in the eighteenth century turned to the Enlightenment in the belief that reason could overcome the prejudices of the past. In the nineteenth century this was followed by Emancipation, through which minority religious groups, among them the Jews, were granted civil rights in the new nation states, held together not as in the past by religion but by citizenship and civil law. Yet prejudice persisted, as it had done in post-expulsion Spain. Among its practitioners were some of Europe’s leading minds. Voltaire called Jews 'an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by who they are tolerated and enriched.’ He added, generously, 'Still, we ought not to burn them.’ Immanuel Kant spoke of Jews as 'the vampires of society’, and called for 'the euthanasia of Judaism’. Georg Hegel saw Jews and Judaism as paradigms of a 'slave morality’, unable to conceive or practice a religion of love. By rejecting Christianity, Jews had been stranded by history and were left as a 'fossil nation’, a 'ghost-race’… …Friedrich Nietzsche castigated Judaism as the 'falsification’ of all natural values. His great originality is that, instead of criticizing Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for having given birth to it in the first place. Anyone who blames religion for creating hate should consider these examples…philosophical antisemitism from Voltaire to Heidegger is a little-known phenomenon but a devastating one. As European culture became secularized and religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial antisemitism, the consequences were lethal. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews, because you can change your religion. But you cannot change your blood or your genes. Antisemites could therefore only work for the elimination of the Jews. The result was the Holocaust.”

— Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015. (p. 76-80). (via eshusplayground)

REBLOG IF THIS RELATES TO YOU:

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It’s maddening to find out that the scholar who first developed the idea that “Zionism is Settler Colonialism”, Fayez Sayegh, was a member of the Syrian Nazi Party during and immediately after the Holocaust, was an active participant in the Red Scare, using it to demonize Israel as a manifestation of a Global Communist Threat™️ through the height of the Cold War (true to his Nazi roots, accusing Israel of Judeo-Bolshevism) before switching to a Colonialism narrative when Post-Colonialism came in vogue in the 60s. And yet, the people I hear parroting the talking points of this anti-Communist, Ultranationalist Fascist-turned-scholar are the people who are constantly talking about how Liberal Progressives aren’t Communist enough and actually enemies because “Liberals will always side with Fascists”. Maddening.

If you’ve ever noticed how the “Zionism = Settler Colonialism” narrative eerily shares the core components of the far right’s Replacement Theory (that there are 1. Jews 2. conspiring to invade a given place and 3. replace the population with Jews), this is why; it’s because the idea that Zionism is Settler Colonialism came from a literal Nazi.

It is very literally Nazi propaganda.

All I’m seeing with these responses to what’s going on at these protests, especially at Colombia, is that y’all would have hated MLK. I mean you prove this during every protest, but everything having to do the Civil Rights Movement y’all would have detested. You would be the ones standing outside harassing Black children as they go to school. You are exactly the same as your ancestors.

A complaint known to the Anglo-Saxons as aelfsgotha (hiccough, or heartburn) was attributed to fairy agency, or perhaps to elfin possession. A Latin charm used to expel it, when translated, runs: "Almighty God, expel from thy servant N. through the laying on of this writing, all attack of the Castalides from his head, from his hair and from all parts of his body". The "Castalides" were the Muses of Classical myth, but the name is used here as a Latin equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon word aelf, "an elf". (W. Bonsor, "Magical Practices against Elves", Folk-Lore, XXXVII, p. 350 ff.)

-The Fairy Tradition in Britain, Lewis Spence, pg. 167

I haven’t yet seen a tumblr post with these resources so I am making my own and hoping it shows up in the tags. I ASK EVERYONE WHO SEES THIS TO PLEASE REBLOG THIS.

THE INDIAN CHILD WELFARE ACT (ICWA) IS UNDER ATTACK. AND WE NEED HELP TO PROTECT IT USING THE RESOURCES BELOW.

I am not going to go into heavy detail on the bill, on its history, anything like that, the resources have a lot of information, but as a little bit of background:

It is a bill passed that forbids Native children from being adopted by non-Native families. This is for a good fucking reason, there have been historically large scoops of children taken from their Native families, at a much higher rate than white children (see the 60s scoop in Canada). These children are often abused in these homes, and their entire culture is taken from them (many end up not even knowing what tribe/nation they came from), hence the point of why they were taken in the first place (forced assimilation). Now, this does still happen through the foster care system, but this has protected in the case of adoption. It makes it that only Native families can adopt Native children.

White people hate this and have been smearing it for years (think of the whole Lexi Choctaw/Alexandria P. situation, which was so fucked how they used that little girl). Now, the state governments of Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana have taken it to the Supreme Court to be ruled unconstitutional. This case is called Haaland v. Brackeen. Because white people … really want to steal Native children. This is being heard by the court, oral arguments start WEDNESDAY. ICWA could be overturned in the matter of weeks or even days.

PLEASE USE ALL OF THESE TO PROTECT ICWA:

Petition that will involve you sending messages to your Congressional leaders through their text automated system, only available to those in the US (BUT NOTE YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE A CITIZEN, OR ELIGIBLE TO VOTE TO SIGN, JUST NEED TO BE IN THE US):

https://resist.bot/petitions/PCCPGW 

Petition to send a message to President Biden and leaders at the Department of Justice, this does have a place to put in your country so seems like it may be available for those outside of the US but I am unsure (consider also donating to the Lakota People’s Law Project if you are able to):

https://action.lakotalaw.org/action/protect-icwa

Petition to be sent to the Attorney General and Secretary of the Department of the Interior, since it is through change.org it likely can be signed from outside of the US:

https://www.change.org/p/protect-the-indian-child-welfare-act

PLEASE SIGN AS MANY AS YOU ARE ABLE TO. PLEASE REBLOG IF YOU SEE THIS. PLEASE HELP US PROTECT ICWA.