Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged 1942

Rss Feed Group items tagged

rerobinson03

Biden Poised to Raise Taxes on Business and the Rich - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Now, under President Biden, they have a shot at ushering in the largest federal tax increase since 1942. It could help pay for a host of spending programs that liberal economists predict would bolster the economy’s performance and repair a tax code that Democrats say encourages wealthy people to hoard assets and big companies to ship jobs and book profits overseas.
  • he package, which follows on the heels of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid bill, is central to the president’s long-term plan to revitalize American workers and industry by funding bridges and roads, universal pre-K, emerging industries like advanced batteries and efforts to invigorate the fight against climate change.Mr. Biden plans to finance that spending, at least in part, with tax increases that could raise upward of $2.5 trillion in revenue if his plan hews closely to what he proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Aides suggest his proposals might not be entirely paid for, with some one-time spending increases offset by increased federal borrowing.
  • iberal economists say this year could be different, thanks to the unique political and economic circumstances surrounding the recovery from the pandemic recession. With Mr. Biden’s signing of a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, financed entirely by federal borrowing, forecasters now expect the economy to grow this year at its fastest annual clip since the 1980s. Republicans and some economists have begun to warn of overheating growth spurring runaway inflation, which could reduce the salience of warnings that tax increases would cause growth to stall.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr. Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000.
  • “The purpose of the tax system is to both raise enough revenue for what the government wants to do, and to make sure that as we’re doing that we are encouraging activities that are in the national interest and discouraging ones that are not,” said Heather Boushey, a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers.Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden of Oregon, is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Mr. Biden’s campaign proposals.
  • A report from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation this month showed that multinational companies paid an average U.S. tax rate of less than 8 percent on their income in 2018, down from 16 percent in 2017. The report also found that those companies did not slow their practice of booking profits in low-tax havens like Bermuda.
magnanma

BBC - History - World Wars: Breaking Germany's Enigma Code - 0 views

  • Fewer people still knew that this piece of spook hardware was invented by a German (based on an idea by a Dutchman), that information about it was leaked to the French, and that it was first reconstructed by a Pole, before it was offered to Britain's codebreakers as a way of deciphering German signals traffic during World War Two
  • the Zimmermann telegram - a message from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Mexico City informing him of plans to invade the United States. On being notified of these plans, officials in Washington were understandably perturbed, and hastened to effect the entry of the US into the war.
  • Dr Arthur Scherbius had developed his 'Enigma' machine, capable of transcribing coded information, in the hope of interesting commercial companies in secure communications. In 1923 he set up his Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft (Cipher Machines Corporation) in Berlin to manufacture this product, and within three years the German navy was producing its own version, followed in 1928 by the army and in 1933 by the air force.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Despite providing some otherwise inaccessible information, it was some time before Ultra made any significant contribution to the war effort. Although, thanks to the information from the Poles, the British had learned to read parts of the Wehrmacht's signals traffic, regular decrypts only became possible in the Norwegian campaign
  • The Germans were convinced that Enigma output could not be broken, so they used the machine for all sorts of communications - on the battlefield, at sea, in the sky and, significantly, within its secret services. The British described any intelligence gained from Enigma as 'Ultra', and considered it top secret. Only a select few commanders were made aware of the full significance of Ultra, and it was mostly used only sparingly, to prevent the Germans thinking their ciphers had been broken.
  • Enigma allowed an operator to type in a message, then scramble it by means of three to five notched wheels, or rotors, which displayed different letters of the alphabet. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of these rotors in order to reconstitute the coded text.
  • A break-through came in March 1941, however, when the German trawler Krebs was captured off Norway, complete with two Enigma machines and the Naval Enigma settings list for the previous month. This allowed German Naval Enigma to be read, albeit with some delay, in April, by codebreakers at Bletchley.
  • Although he was dissuaded by his experts, the Germans redoubled their efforts to tighten Enigma's security, and the Bletchley Park codebreakers, realising what they were up against, wrote to British Prime Minster Winston Churchill complaining that they were not being given enough resources. Churchill replied with a famous 'Action This Day' memorandum: 'Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this had been done'.
  • In February 1942 the Germans hit back by introducing a new fourth wheel (multiplying the number of settings another 26 times) into their Naval Enigma machines. The resulting 'net' was known to the Germans as 'Triton' and to the British as 'Shark'. For almost a year Bletchley could make no inroads into Shark, and Allied losses in the Atlantic again increased alarmingly.
  • By D-Day in June 1944 Ultra was no longer so important. But still no one wanted the Germans to sense that Enigma was being read. When, a few days before the Normandy landings, an American task force captured a German U-boat with its Enigma keys
  • By how much did Ultra intelligence, gained from reading Enigma ciphers, shorten the war? Harry Hinsley, based at Bletchley during the war, suggests it was a significant asset.
magnanma

History of FIFA - The first FIFA World Cup™ - FIFA.com - 0 views

  • The success of the Olympic Football Tournament intensified FlFA's wish for its own world championship. Questionnaires were sent to the affiliated associations, asking whether they agreed to the organisation of a tournament and under what conditions.
  • Following a remarkable proposal by the Executive Committee, the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam on 28 May 1928 decided to stage a world championship organised by FIFA. Now, the organising country had to be chosen.
  • These arguments were decisive. The FIFA Congress in Barcelona in 1929 assigned Uruguay as first host country of the FIFA World Cup ™. The other candidates had withdrawn.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Participation did not only involve a long sea journey for the Europeans; the clubs would have to renounce their best players for two months. Consequently, more and more associations broke their promise to participate and it took much manoeuvring by Rimet to ensure at least four European teams
  • The first FIFA World Cup opened at the brand-new Estadio Centenario in Montevideo on 18 July 1930. It was the beginning of a new era in world football and the inaugural event proved a remarkable success, both in a sporting and a financial sense.
  • FIFA chose Italy ahead of rival candidates Sweden to host the second FIFA World Cup and this time it took qualifying matches to arrive at the 16 finalists. Unlike in 1930 there were no groups and only knockout rounds
  • The FIFA World Cup should have taken place for the fourth time in 1942 but the outbreak of World War Two meant otherwise. Although FIFA maintained its Zurich offices throughout the conflict, it was not until 1 July 1946 in Luxembourg that the Congress met again.
  • As the only candidate, Brazil was chosen unanimously to host the next FIFA World Cup, to be staged in 1949 (and postponed to 1950 for time reasons). At the same time, Switzerland was given the option for 1954.
saberal

Opinion | The Holocaust Stole My Youth. Covid-19 Is Stealing My Last Years. - The New Y... - 0 views

  • I’m doing everything I can to stay connected, to make an impact. So even now, amid Covid, I tell my story to schools and to audiences the museum organizes for me, by Zoom.
  • I was born in 1933 in a small town called Chodorow, now Khodoriv, about 30 minutes by car from Lvov, now Lviv, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine. We lived in the center of town in my grandfather’s house. The Russians occupied the town from 1939 to 1941, then the Germans from 1941 to 1944. My father was well liked in town by Jews and non-Jews. One day in early 1942, one of the guys came to him and said, “Moshe, it’s going to be a big killing. Better find a hiding place.” So my father built a place to hide in the cellar. My grandfather didn’t want to go. He was shot in the kitchen; we heard it.
  • Eventually, with the help of Stephanie’s 16-year-old son, they expanded the space a bit and added a way for the kids to look out. That is where I spent the next two years.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • So when the coronavirus came, I thought, “I’m a miracle. I will make it. I have to make it.”
  • I am scared that I am not going to be in the shape I was a year ago. When this started in March, one of my grandchildren, who lives in New Jersey, went to Maine with his wife; they never came back. They have a baby boy now, and I have only seen him on Zoom. This child will never know me. That’s a loss.
  • I understand the fear people have, and I understand you have to take care.
  • But there is no comparison of anxiety, of the coronavirus, to the terror I felt when I was a child. That was a fear with no boundary.
anonymous

Pope Pius XII: Vatican records show he knew Nazis were killing Jews during Holocaust - ... - 0 views

  • The long-awaited opening of Pope Pius XII’s wartime records lasted only a week before the coronavirus outbreak shut down the Vatican archives. But that was long enough for documents to emerge that reflect badly on the pontiff accused of silence during the Holocaust, according to published reports.
  • German researchers found that the pope, who never directly criticized the Nazi slaughter of Jews, knew from his own sources about Berlin’s death campaign early on.
  • But he kept this from the U.S. government after an aide argued that Jews and Ukrainians — his main sources — could not be trusted because they lied and exaggerated, the researchers said.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • They also discovered that the Vatican hid these and other sensitive documents presumably to protect Pius’s image, a finding that will embarrass the Roman Catholic Church, which is still struggling with its coverup of clerical sexual abuse.
  • “If Pius XII comes out of this study of the sources looking better, that’s wonderful. If he comes out looking worse, we have to accept that, too.”
  • Pius XII, who headed the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958 and is now a candidate for canonization, was the most controversial pontiff of the 20th century. His failure to denounce the Holocaust publicly earned him the title of “Hitler’s pope,” and critics have for decades asked for his wartime archives to be opened for scrutiny.
  • The pope’s defenders have long argued he could not speak out more clearly for fear of a Nazi backlash, and they cite his decision to hide Jews at the Vatican and in churches and monasteries as proof of his good deeds.
  • The chain of events goes back to Sept. 27, 1942, when a U.S. diplomat gave the Vatican a secret report on the mass murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. It said about 100,000 had been massacred in and around Warsaw and added that an additional 50,000 were killed in Lviv in German-occupied Ukraine.
  • The archive included a note confirming that Pius read the American report. It also had two letters to the Vatican independently corroborating the reports of massacres in Warsaw and Lviv, according to the researchers.
  • The research team also found three small photographs showing emaciated concentration camp inmates and corpses thrown into a mass grave. A Jewish informer had given them to the Vatican ambassador, or nuncio, in neutral Switzerland to send to the Vatican, and the Holy See confirmed reception of them in a letter two weeks later.
  • It has long been known that the Catholic Church — possibly with covert U.S. assistance — helped ex-Nazis, like the Holocaust bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele or Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, flee to South America. These men were anti-communists, and Rome and Washington considered communism their enemy.
  • Other questions Wolf wants to research are Pius’s relations with U.S. political and intelligence networks during and after the war, his role in promoting European unity, and his thoughts about allying with Muslims in a campaign against communism.
  • Answers to these and other questions could also influence a drive by conservative Catholics to have Pius declared a saint.
lilyrashkind

The US Funded Universal Childcare During World War II-Then Stopped - HISTORY - 0 views

  • When the United States started recruiting women for World War II factory jobs, there was a reluctance to call stay-at-home mothers with young children into the workforce. That changed when the government realized it needed more wartime laborers in its factories. To allow more women to work, the government began subsidizing childcare for the first (and only) time in the nation’s history.
  • Before World War II, organized “day care” didn’t really exist in the United States. The children of middle- and upper-class families might go to private nursery schools for a few hours a day, says Sonya Michel, a professor emerita of history, women’s studies and American studies at the University of Maryland-College Park and author of Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy. (In German communities, five- and six-year-olds went to half-day Kindergartens.)
  • Defense Housing and Community Facilities and Services Act, known as the Lanham Act, which gave the Federal Works Agency the authority to fund the construction of houses, schools and other infrastructure for laborers in the growing defense industry. It was not specifically meant to fund childcare, but in late 1942, the government used it to fund temporary day care centers for the children of mothers working wartime jobs.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • They also provided up to three meals a day for children, with some offering prepared meals for mothers to take with them when they picked up their kids.
  • “The ones that we often hear about were the ‘model’ day nurseries that were set up at airplane factories [on the West coast],” says Michel. “Those were ones where the federal funding came very quickly, and some of the leading voices in the early childhood education movement…became quickly involved in setting [them] up,” she says. 
  • This was during the Cold War, a time when anti-childcare activists pointed to the fact that the Soviet Union funded childcare as an argument for why the United States shouldn’t. President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”
  • When the World War II childcare centers first opened, many women were reluctant to hand their children over to them. According to Chris M. Herbst, a professor of public affairs at Arizona State University who has written about these programs in the Journal of Labor Economics, a lot of these women ended up having positive experiences.
  • As the war ended in August 1945, the Federal Works Agency announced it would stop funding childcare as soon as possible. Parents responded by sending the agency 1,155 letters, 318 wires, 794 postcards and petitions with 3,647 signatures urging the government to keep them open. In response, the U.S. government provided additional funding for childcare through February 1946. After that, it was over.
  • For these centers, organizers enlisted architects to build attractive buildings that would cater to the needs of childcare, specifically. “There was a lot of publicity about those, but those were unusual. Most of the childcare centers were kind of makeshift. They were set up in [places like] church basements.”
  • U.S. history that the country came close to instituting universal childcare.
Javier E

What Oppenheimer really knew about an atomic bomb ending the world - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • In a chilling, existential, bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question: Did Manhattan Project scientists think there was even a minute possibility that detonating the first atomic bomb on the remote plains of New Mexico could destroy the world?
  • physicists knew it wouldn’t, long before the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, about 210 miles south of the secret Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory.
  • “This thing has been blown out of proportion over the years,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The question on the scientists’ minds before the test, he said, “wasn’t, ‘Is it going to blow up the world?’ It was, ‘Is it going to work at all?’”
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • In the movie, one scene has J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory, seeking to reassure his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves, on the eve of the test. Upon investigation, Oppenheimer tells him, physicists have concluded that the chances the test detonation will destroy the world are “near zero.” Realizing the news has alarmed, not reassured, the general, Oppenheimer asks, “What do you want from theory alone?”“Zero would be nice,” the general replies.
  • no physicists or historians interviewed for this story recalled coming across any mention of such a conversation between Oppenheimer and the general in the historical record.
  • Still, the discussions and calculations persisted long after the Trinity test. In 1946, three Manhattan project scientists, including Teller, who would later become known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, wrote a report concluding that the explosive force of the first atomic bomb wasn’t even close to what would be required to trigger a planet-destroying chain reaction in air. The report was not declassified until 1973.
  • At a conference in the summer of 1942, almost a full year before Los Alamos opened, physicist Edward Teller raised the possibility of atomic bombs igniting Earth’s oceans or atmosphere. According to Rhodes’s account, Hans Bethe, who headed the theoretical division at Los Alamos, “didn’t believe it from the first minute” but nonetheless performed the calculations convincing the other physicists that such a disaster was not a reasonable possibility.
  • “I don’t think any physicists seriously worried about it,” said John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology.
  • “Did the actual exchange happen at that moment? No, I don’t think so,” said Alex Wellerstein, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and author of the 2021 book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.”“But were there discussions like that? I believe so,” he added.
  • A 1979 study by scientists at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory examined the question of whether a nuclear explosion might trigger a runaway reaction in the atmosphere or oceans. In page after page of mathematical equations, the scientists described a complex set of factors that made atmospheric ignition effectively impossible.
  • As outlandish as the notion was to many scientists, the nuclear research organization CERN felt obliged to deal with the fear, noting on its website that “some theories suggest that the formation of tiny ‘quantum’ black holes may be possible. The observation of such an event would be thrilling in terms of our understanding of the Universe; and would be perfectly safe.”
  • Dudley’s essay also recounted a story that on the day of the test, “as zero hour approached” Gen. Groves was annoyed to find Manhattan Project physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi making bets with colleagues about whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, “and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico ― or the entire world.” (Some experts have suggested Fermi’s actions may have been more of a joke, or an example of gallows humor.)
  • Fascination with this doomsday scenario may stem, at least in part, from a misunderstanding of what physicists mean when they say “near zero.” The branch of physics known as quantum mechanics, which deals with matter and light at the atomic and subatomic scale, does not rule out any possibilities.
  • For example, if a boy tosses a rubber ball at a brick wall, there is an exceedingly remote — but still valid — possibility that instead of watching the ball bounce back, he could see it pass through the wall.
  • Aditi Verma, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan, put it this way: “What a physicist means by ‘near zero’ would be zero to an engineer.”
  • In the 2000s, scientists encountered a similar problem of terminology as they prepared to generate high-speed particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Talk surfaced that the activity might generate a black hole that would devour Earth.
  • Probably the easiest to grasp is the fact that, even under the harshest scenarios, far more energy would be lost in the explosion than gained, wiping out any chance to sustain a chain reaction.
  • In other words, any black hole created by the collider would be far too small to pose any risk to the planet.Scientists say such disaster scenarios are sometimes the price of crossing new thresholds of discovery.
  • “You don’t often talk in certainties,” he said. “You talk in probabilities. If you haven’t done the experiment, you are hesitant to say ‘This is impossible. It will never happen.’ … It was good to think it through.”
  • Rhodes added that he hopes the “Oppenheimer” movie will not lead people to doubt the scientists on the Manhattan Project.“They knew what they were doing,” he said. “They were not feeling around in the dark.”
Javier E

Who was Oppenheimer? What you need to know before watching the film - 0 views

  • “He’s a genius,” Groves said, untroubled that Oppenheimer’s former girlfriend, wife, brother and sister-in-law had been members of the Communist Party, and that “Oppie” himself was a known sympathiser. “He knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”
  • Virtually none of the politicians born in the 19th century could comprehend the enormity of the Bomb. In 1940, when Winston Churchill’s scientific adviser Lord Cherwell sought authority to pursue Britain’s nuclear programme, the prime minister responded almost insouciantly that he had no objection to research on improved explosives, although he could see little wrong with those already in service.
  • In 1944 Churchill urged Roosevelt that the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr should be “confined” rather than permitted to vent publicly his revulsion towards Manhattan. After a meeting with Churchill, Bohr said with some bitterness: “We did not speak the same language.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • After Szilard lobbied Oppenheimer unsuccessfully to oppose the use of his terrible creation, he recorded a weird, curiously believable conversation. “Oppie” told the Hungarian enigmatically: “The atomic bomb is shit.” When Szilard asked what he meant by that, Oppenheimer replied: “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang — a very big bang — but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.”
  • Richard Rhodes, perhaps the best historian of the Bomb project, wrote in 1986: “Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.” Yet its fulfilment became his obsession.
  • Oppenheimer seemed untroubled by misgivings. He merely drove his team with a brilliance that inspired hero-worship from his colleague Edward Teller. “Oppie knew in detail what was happening in every part of the laboratory. He was incredibly quick and perceptive in analysing human as well as technical problems . . . He knew how to organise, cajole, humour, soothe feelings — how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.”
  • it was not him but the brutish Groves who was mandated by the US chiefs of staff to orchestrate the dropping of the two bombs, after the successful Alamogordo test. On August 6 Groves called Oppenheimer from Washington to report the destruction of Hiroshima. The scientist said: “Well, everybody is feeling reasonably good about it and I extend my heartiest congratulations. It’s been a long road.”
  • The general said: “Yes, it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.” Oppenheimer responded: “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.”
  • . In the weeks that followed, Oppenheimer became prey to spasms of remorse, although his attitude was always ambiguous, confusing to others and perhaps to himself.
  • When Teller asked him to work on further developments of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer said flatly: “I neither can nor will do so.” He left Los Alamos in October 1945, saying that pride in the laboratory’s achievement must be “tempered with concern . . . The peoples of the world must unite or they will perish.”
  • Curtis LeMay, the US air force chief who directed the firebombing of Japanese cities by B-29 Superfortresses that killed 300,000 Japanese before the first atomic bomb was dropped, said impenitently after the war: “Nothing new about death . . . We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo . . . than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
  • In 1954, amid McCarthyism sweeping the US, Oppenheimer fell victim to a witch-hunt and was stripped of his security clearance. This was later restored, and in the last years before his death from cancer in 1967, aged only 62, he regained a measure of his 1945 giant’s status.
  • Yet some liberals never forgave him for having disclosed the names of left-wing sympathisers and colleagues to the FBI. I met one such victim in 1965, his old friend Haakon Chevalier, a pretty broken man who had just published a book describing his intimate relationship with Oppenheimer. It was followed by profound disillusionment when he discovered that in 1942 “Oppie” had passed information to “the Feds” that later cost Chevalier his professorship at Berkeley.
criscimagnael

Australia Wields a New DNA Tool to Crack Missing-Person Mysteries - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The technique can predict a person’s ancestry and physical traits without the need for a match with an existing sample in a database.
  • When a man washed up on the shores of Christmas Island in 1942, lifeless and hunched over in a shrapnel-riddled raft, no one knew who he was.
  • It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Royal Australian Navy began to suspect that he may have been a sailor from the HMAS Sydney II, an Australian warship whose 645-member crew disappeared at sea when it sank off the coast of Western Australia during World War II.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In 2006, the man’s remains were exhumed, but DNA extracted from his teeth yielded no match with a list of people Navy officials thought might be his descendants. With few leads, the scientist who conducted the DNA test, Jeremy Austin, told the Navy about an emerging technique that could predict a person’s ancestry and physical traits from genetic material.
  • In Australia, forensic scientists are repurposing the technique to help link missing persons with unidentified remains in the hope of resolving long-running mysteries. In the case of the sailor, Dr. Austin sent the sample to researchers in Europe, who reported back that the man was of European ancestry and most likely had red hair and blue eyes.
  • That alone wasn’t enough to identify the sailor, but it narrowed the search. “In a ship full of 645 white guys, you wouldn’t expect to see more than two or three with this pigmentation,”
  • This forensic tool, which has been slowly advancing since the mid-2000s, is similar to genetic tests that estimate risks for certain diseases. About five years ago, scientists with the Australian Federal Police began developing their own version of the technology, which combines genomics, big data and machine learning. It became available for use last year.
  • The predictions from DNA phenotyping — whether a person had, say, brown hair and blue eyes — will be brought to life by a forensic artist, combining the phenotype information with renderings of bone structure to generate a three-dimensional digital facial reconstruction.
  • “It’s an investigative lead we’ve never had before,”
  • In the United States, police departments have for years been using private DNA phenotyping services, like one from the Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs, to try to generate facial images of suspects. The images are sometimes distributed to the public to assist in investigations.
  • Many scientists, however, are skeptical of this application of the technology. “You cannot do a full facial prediction right now,” said Susan Walsh, a professor of biology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who developed some of the earliest phenotyping methods for eye and hair color. “The foundation of the genetics is absolutely not there.”
  • Facial image prediction has been condemned by human rights organizations, including the A.C.L.U., which suggest that it risks being skewed by existing social prejudices.
  • The same DNA was then linked to dozens of serious crimes across Western Europe, prompting a theory that the perpetrator was a serial offender from a traveling Roma community.It turned out that the recurring genetic material belonged to a female Polish factory worker who had accidentally contaminated the cotton swabs used to collect the samples.
  • “The families want any and all techniques applied to these cases if it’s going to help answer the question of what happened,” she said.
  • Such was the case with the mystery sailor. After his genotype was sequenced and his phenotype predicted, a team of scientists across several Australian institutions, including Dr. Ward’s program, used this information to track down a woman they believed to be a living relative of the soldier. They checked her DNA and had a match.
Javier E

Germany's Far-Right AfD Is Worse Than the Rest of Europe's Populists - 0 views

  • Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.
  • Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities
  • Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.
  • “They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”
  • Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.
  • this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.
  • The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.
  • The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.
  • While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.
  • they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”
  • She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)
  • The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union
  • Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”
  • “The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.
  • “By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”
Javier E

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today | Samantha... - 0 views

  • The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation
  • The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.
  • The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:
  • “The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”
  • Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception
  • his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo
  • By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.
  • For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures
  • In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.
  • he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew
  • She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision
  • in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.
  • Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975
  • while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.
  • Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state
  • It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.
  • Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich
  • She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another
  • All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it
  • right now Germany’s resolution forbids it
  • This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth
  • The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”
  • What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning
  • Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil
  • Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.
‹ Previous 21 - 31 of 31
Showing 20 items per page