Interesting framing, but it reminds me of washerwomen in the US, matchgirls in England, and even earlier organized walkouts.
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I love telling the story of the Atlanta washerwoman’s strike in class…
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Crossposting here, for the history lesson that is included in the dialogue:
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The history textbook and lessons in this report led me to crosspost it here:
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And here is an article from the late 1970s about Soviet computing…
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Thanks! This has reminded me that Red Plenty has been on my reading list for a while.
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Oh, I need to get that book, too.
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It’s worth thinking about how few people who survived the Holocaust are still alive…
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I’ve only ever met one survivor. I was in my early 20s, smoking at a bus stop. A lady, maybe in her 60s, approached me and said I was too young to be taking up something that would make the rest of my life worse. She said that she smoked when she was young, but it was a stressful time. Then she showed me her forearm tattoo. I couldn’t really think of much else for the rest of the day. Haunts me still.
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I took a class on the Holocaust in undergrad, and the prof brought in a survivor… also went to the local Jewish museum and heard from the son of survivors.
It’s heard to hear about this event, but it’s absolutely critical that we learn about it, and survivors from other genocides, too. We have plenty of people who can speak to the Rwandan genocide, the acts of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, from Cambodia, etc… We have tons of resources on how these kinds of things happen, and the paths states take to get there, but far too often, people don’t want to hear it. But this is precisely what the study of history is for - fostering understanding on the how and the why, rather than pushing the idea that “it can’t happen here”…
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Its definitely important to look at what humans have done to each other. Pretending that it couldn’t happen here, or downplay the suffering of others only puts us all in the path of cruelty and destruction. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to go through some of these terrible events and survive it.
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I met Franciszek Gajowniczek back in 1989/1990. He gave a vivid account of the conditions in Auschwitz.
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This is precisely the problem. It’s so easy to convince ourselves that there must have been something uniquely evil and Satanic about the Nazis, but to carry that off, we have to ignore all the other genocides that have occurred. Look at the controversy generated by merely mentioning the Armenian genocide. The logical conclusion then is to start thinking that these things must have been overblown, no way humans could possibly do this to others. Then, it becomes far too easy to have it happen again by making the victims non-human. We can see it happening here now, and fuck yes, it could happen here!
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