Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

The Herald

Dr Masimba Mavaza

Zimbabwean children abroad are being turned against their parents by those who have custody of them.

This ranges from a mother or father who has custody or social workers and foster parents. Some do this entirely out of spite and some do it mostly out of financial gain.

A lot of Zimbabwean divorced partners are eliminated from having relations with their children because of the implacable hostility of those partners with custody.

The normal prejudiced assumption is that a mother will give children kindly care, while a father swaggers off over the horizon.

As a marriage dissolves, some parents find themselves asking questions like, Should we stay together for the kids?

Other parents find divorce is their only option.

And while all parents may have many worries on their mind from the future of their children to the uncertainty of the custody arrangementthey may worry most about how the children will deal with the divorce.

In a rare case, a High Court judge in London ordered that a 10-year-old girl be removed from her mothers care because the girl had been systematically estranged from her father by her mothers ranting against the man.

Ruling that the mothers conduct was manifestly harmful for the daughter and contrary to her long-term interests, Justice Parker observed that the child had been manipulated into believing that her father did not want her; and she ordered that the girl should be taken into the care of social services as a half-way measure towards placing her in her fathers care.

The court heard that the girl was likely to be resistant to being reunited with her father without such interim measures.

The case torched a storm, with women groups complaining. The reality was it was a case which showed that men have always been made to look like devils; the word love has been removed from the lives of fathers and their children.

The High Court ruling stood out as an extraordinary moment, reversing normal prejudiced assumptions that a mother will give children kindly care while a feckless father swaggers off over the horizon.

While divorce is stressful for all children, some kids rebound faster than others.

The good news is that parents can take steps to reduce the psychological effects of divorce on children. A few supportive parenting strategies can go a long way to helping kids adjust to the changes brought about by divorce.

Research has found that children struggle the most during the first year or two after the divorce. Children are likely to experience distress, anger, anxiety, and disbelief.

But many children seem to bounce back. They get used to changes in their daily routines and they grow comfortable with their living arrangements.

Others, however, never really seem to go back to normal. This small percentage of children may experience ongoing possibly even lifelong problems after their parents divorce.

This is more so when the father marries another wife and kids have to leave with a stepmother. Still, the father is as good a parent as the mother.

The case to the men reflected a phenomenon that they see all too frequently the elimination of fathers from their childrens lives by unmitigated, unscrupulous demands on the childrens loyalty on the part of the mother with custody, along with the unremitting denigration and belittling of the father.

Most partners with custody of children go an extra mile to demonise the absent parent.

Even if the partner pays enough funds for the upkeep of the children, the children are always told that their father is playing around while the mother is suffering.

Fathers have been too often used as the scare crow, anything the child does, the child is reminded that a dragon with hands dripping of blood called father is coming.

Fathers have been made vampires and used to be the scaring devils of the house. In this aspect, the fathers are alienated from their children before they are divorced, by the time of divorce, the fathers are already viewed as evil ones who cannot stay with the children.

For those organisations, the only unusual feature of this case was that the harmful conduct of the mother was actually recognised by the court; and that, for once, officials did something about it.

It should be noted that conflicts of loyalty for the children do seem to be a common feature of high-conflict separations. Its a huge problem for many couples and the children are made to make the most emotional wrecking choice.

The controlling parent is likely to be the woman and the estranged, undermined parent is likely to be the man. There are of course some men who try to turn the children against their mothers. This is very rare, but indeed possible.

It is called implacable hostility.

Divorce creates emotional turmoil for the entire family, but for children, the situation can be quite scary, confusing and frustrating.

Young children often struggle to understand why they must go between two homes. They may worry that if their parents can stop loving one another that someday, their parents may stop loving them.

Primary school children may worry that the divorce is their fault. They may fear they misbehaved or they may assume they did something wrong.

Teenagers may become quite angry about a divorce and the changes it creates. They may blame one parent for the dissolution of the marriage or they may resent one or both parents for the upheaval in the family.

Of course, each situation is unique. In extreme circumstances, a child may feel relieved by the separation if a divorce means fewer arguments and less stress.

Divorce usually means children lose daily contact with one parent most often fathers. Decreased contact affects the parent-child bond and according to a paper published in 2014, researchers have found many children feel less close to their fathers after divorce.

Divorce also affects a childs relationship with the custodial parentmost often mothers. Primary caregivers often report higher levels of stress associated with single parenting.

Many studies suggest that mothers are often less supportive and less affectionate after divorce. Additionally, their discipline becomes less consistent and less effective.

For some children, parental separation isnt the hardest part. Instead, the accompanying stress is what make divorce the most difficult.

Changing schools, moving to a new home, and living with a single parent who feels a little more frazzled are just a few additional stress that makes divorce difficult.

Financial hardships are also common following divorce. Many families have to move to smaller homes or change neighbourhoods and they often have fewer material resources.

The failure rate for second marriages is even higher than first marriages. So many children experience multiple separations and divorces over the years.

Divorce may increase the risk for mental health problems in children and adolescents. Regardless of age, gender, and culture, children of divorced parents experience increased psychological problems.

It may trigger an adjustment disorder in children that resolves within a few months. But, studies have also found depression and anxiety rates are higher in children from divorced parents.

Children from divorced families may experience more externalizing problems, such as conduct disorders, delinquency, and impulsive behaviour than those from two-parent families.

In addition to increased behaviour problems, children may also experience more conflict with peers after a divorce.

Children from divorced families dont always perform as well academically.

However, another study published in 2019 suggested children from divorced families tended to have trouble with school if the divorce was unexpected, whereas children from families where divorce was likely did not have the same outcome.

Adolescents with divorced parents are more likely to engage in risky behaviour, such as substance use and early sexual activity.

In the diaspora, adolescents with divorced parents drink alcohol earlier and report higher alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, and drug use than their peers.

Adults who experienced divorce during childhood may have more relationship difficulties. Divorce rates are higher for people whose parents were divorced. Parents play a major role in how children adjust to a divorce.

Here are some strategies that can reduce the psychological toll divorce has on children:

Intense conflict between parents has been shown to increase childrens distress. Overt hostility, such as screaming and threatening one another has been linked to behaviour problems in children.

But minor tension may also increase a childs distress. If you struggle to co-parent with your ex-spouse, seek professional help.

Asking children to choose which parent they like best or giving them messages to give to other parents isnt appropriate.

Children who find themselves caught in the middle are more likely to experience depression and anxiety.

Positive communication, parental warmth, and low levels of conflict may help children adjust to divorce better. A healthy parent-child relationship has been shown to help children develop higher self-esteem and better academic performance following divorce.

When parents pay close attention to what teens are doing and who they spend their time with, adolescents are less likely to exhibit behaviour problems following a divorce.

That means a reduced chance of using substances and fewer academic problems.

Divorcing away from the familiar community is a new thing to Zimbabwean community who have been in the UK for less than two decades.

The society they are in promotes divorce. People are happy to announce that they have been in a 30th marriage. Marriage is now under attack and the children emerge as the worst victims of the sins of passion.

While couples agree that both parents should share responsibility for bringing up children and 85 percent agree that fathers are instrumental in bringing up children, the parent with custody never tells the child when the other parent has assisted.

They make it look like they are the only ones who are toiling to make ends meet. That consensus has been reflected in recent amendments to the Children and Families Act 2014 which now requires courts making child arrangement orders to presume that the involvement of both separating parents in the life of a child will further its welfare.

Read full story on http://www.herald.co.zw

However, this is the English Law, the Zimbabwean couples mix both English system and their own system. They pretend to know and in the anger of their lunacy the children suffer more.

Even so, a parent who does not put first the emotional needs of the children, but is primarily driven to exact revenge upon a former spouse or partner or to impose punishment by frustrating or thwarting their relationship with their children is, in the very nature of domestic life, almost impossible to control. Children are more often used as weapons to fix the other party and indeed the child suffers more than the offending parties.

There is a great insidious undermining or disparagement of the other parent by snide remarks or the lurid exaggeration of imagined fears which require the children to line up their loyalties with the apparently threatened or embattled parent.

In this onslaught of an absent parent, the young children voice a determined preference not to see or be involved with a parent who has been vilified by the other.

How can anybody be sure that the child is expressing true feelings that have been freely developed rather than a point of view which has been inculcated by a manipulative parent?

Where contact with children is being frustrated or denied and the children themselves are rejecting a parent with whom they previously had good relationships, specialists in mediation and child psychology should get involved without delay.

But the system which does not understand the cultural background of a Zimbabwean will hide behind the term the best interest of the child.

Most children are forced to stay with parents who are manipulative and always remind them that their fathers are horrible no brains and selfish.

Parents have portrayed marriages as the most horrible institution in life. It will not be a surprise to find out that in few years, marriage will be wiped out of the important issues of life.

Diaspora has all odds against them, no helpers who understand them, the church pastors are mostly self-centred and do not promote families.

Most of them are powered by money. Relatives who are backing home decides to take sides of those who pay them the most. Life as we know it, has been thrown into a quagmire.

Children are being turned against their parents. Who is going to help the Zimbabwean couple abroad?

Let us remember that:

The sincerity of a husband is known during the sickness of his wife. That of a wife is known during the financial difficulty of the husband. True love of children is known during the old age of the parents.

The true nature of siblings is known during distribution of inheritance.

The sincerity of friends is known during hard times.

The true relatives are known when one is far from his country, lonely or sick.

True love is known when there is no means of benefit and a true believer is known during times of hardship.

In all, life is the teacher itself. May we grow in wisdom, understanding and patience.

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

As the beating of drums echoed through a cinema in Sydney, almost the entireaudience, from the grey-haired man with a walking stick at the front to the teenager at the back, rose and sang the song that is now illegal in Hong Kong.

They had gathered for a screening of Revolution of Our Times, a documentary about the mass protests that gripped the city in 2019.

Ittakes its name from the political slogan that took hold at the time: "Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times."

But under Hong Kong's National Security Law, saying the phrase and now this film's title out loud is viewed as inciting secession, an offence that carries a nine-year jail term.

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Besides its name, the film has been clouded by Chinesepolitical pressure since its debut.

In July 2021, the film premiered on the last day of the Cannes Film Festival. It was only announced one day before the screening,as the host feared it would spark a backlash from Beijing.

Hong Kong passed a new film censorship law in October last yearforbidding films that could violate the national security law, meaning publicly screening the film in the city was officially banned.

But outside Hong Kong, global audiences are filling theatres to watch the documentary.

Since April 1, the Hong Kong diaspora hasbeen hosting private screenings in 23 countries including Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and across Europe.

In Australia, nearly10,000 people attended 53 screenings in Sydney, Melbourne, Cairns, Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, Moonah and Townsville during the three-week event.

Tickets sold out within 30 minutes of pre-sale opening, and organisers had to announce extra screenings to meet the huge demand.

As protest banners, yellow helmets and tear gas appeared on-screen, many in the audience shed tears.

The emotional weight of the film is not lost on director Kiwi Chow.

The 43-year-old, who still lives and works in Hong Kong, is keenly aware of the personal risks he has taken on by producing and releasing his documentary.

He has deleted all files related to the movie, and he occasionally dreams of being imprisoned.

"I've prepared for the risks [of being arrested]," he told ABC News.

"Even if I am arrested, I am willing to sacrifice and bear all the suffering."

Chow began making the documentary at a time when Hong Kong journalists, filmmakers, writers and artists were shackled bythe fear of committing "word crimes".

According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Hong Kong plunged to 148 among 180 countries and regions in its 2022 ranking of world press freedoms, a significant drop from 18th just two decades ago.

RSF describes Hong Kong's national security law, launched in 2020 in response to the mass pro-democracy protests, as "a pretext to gag independent voices", and warns its ambiguous phrasing could see it applied to any journalist covering Hong Kong, "regardless of their location".

Revolution of Our Times is not the only documentary effectively banned under Hong Kong's contentious laws.

"Part of what makes the national security law so effective is that there are some red lines, but there's also a lot of grey area," Thomas E Kellogg, executive director of the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University, said.

"This results in self-censorship among a lot of different players in Hong Kong, so that the government is able to achieve its goals in terms of censoring sensitive content without even having to do anything.

Chow said he "considered for a long while" before deciding to take the risk of making his film and using the controversial slogan for its title.

"From an [artistic] perspective, I think 'Revolution of Our Times' as a name can reflect the film itself. The film talks about the causes and consequences of the movement, so using part of the slogan as the film title, this is reasonable," he said.

He also wanted to use the name to send a message.

"Nowadays society doesn't allow you to say [Revolution of Our Times]," he said.

"I think it's becoming more necessary that we say it aloud," he said.

"When society tries to silence you and fill you with fear, my act of making Revolution of Our Times the title creates a new energy, namely, bravery and dissidence."

Before Revolution of Our Times, Chow co-directed Ten Years in 2015, another controversial political film that explored the future of human rights and social justice in Hong Kong as Beijing was tightening its grip on the city.

His second film, Beyond The Dream, a romantic drama about the daily challenges of living with mental illness, was amongthe top 10 best-selling movies at the Hong Kong box office the year that COVID-19 devastated the industry.

"For a long time, I always wanted to be closer to those who are suffering," Chow said.

"I want to know and learn more about them, and even speak up for them."

In Revolution of Our Times, Chow has put protesters fighting for political freedom at the centre.

Scenes are filled with the familiar yellow helmets and gas masks. Activists are seen making and throwing Molotov cocktails at police, while fully armed police shoot a teenage protester.

In one scene,a mother wearing a backpack stands in front of a group of police holding bulletproof shields and helmets, crying: "I don't want this to become the next Tiananmen Square!"

Chow also included prominent pro-democracy politicians and activists, many of whom are now either in prison or have left Hong Kong in fear of prosecution.

"When I watched it, I felt as if a generation [had] passed, as if I was back to Hong Kong, back to the time when there was still space for people to protest on the street," said Ted Hui, a Hong Kong legislator-in-exile who now lives in Adelaide.

"It felt like a long time ago."

Chow also closely followed a protester nicknamed Snake who was at the Polytechnic University during an intense siege between police and protesters in November 2019.

Aspolice surrounded the university and protesters tried to escape, Snake decided to stay and fight till the last minute.

"When I decided to dash out, I had to strip away my identity, as a student, as the son of my parents," he said.

"At that moment, I had only one identity. Even if I had to sacrifice my life, I dash out as a protester.

"The revolution of our times is not only for Hong Kong."

Chow said every time he listened to this part of Snake's interview during production, he would become tearful. He included the grab in the film's trailer.

"His words about his perseverance and determination are powerful, and he indeed kept his words, under my witness," Chow said.

Chow's motivation for making the film was not only to record the stories of the protesters, but also to heal the collective trauma that Hongkongers have suffered since 2019.

During the political turmoil, at least four young people took their own lives. It also sparked a new migration wave, with government data showing that more than 27,000 Hong Kong residents left the city in 2021.

Chiu Wan, a notable citizen journalist, compared the city's tumultuous transformationto the sinking of the Titanic. He describes Chow as "the violinist on the Titanic", determined to stay in the city and "comfort everyone".

In Australia, many audiences have found power from the movie.

Sica, a 33-year-old Hong Kong migrant who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, arrived in Sydney a year ago, having fled over fear of the National Security Law.

"I already started crying at the fifth minute of the film," she told ABC News.

"I almost lost my voice because of the crying."

Sica noticed the wide age range of the audiences, from elderly people to parents with teenage children.

"I think the film can help Hong Kong-Australians who were not in the city during 2019 to understand more about what happened."

Jane Poon, a leader of community groupAustralia-Hong Kong Link who helped organise the Sydney screening, said the documentary had brought people together in unexpected ways.

"The film connects the Hong Kong diaspora together. Through the film, we meet in the cinema and know each other," Ms Poon said.

"We didn't expect there would be such an effect at all before the screening."

Ms Poon'sgroup and other Hong Kong community organisationsare approaching Australiancinemas in the hopes there could be a public showcase of the film in Australia one day.

For Chow, he is both pleased and surprised to see how the film has empowered audiences across the seas.

"I hope this could motivate people to continue moving forward whether we are in Hong Kong or overseas, we will continue to speak up for social justice and resist fear," he said.

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

"The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders."Yehuda Bauer

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime and their collaborators murdered six million European Jews and five million non-Jews. The terms "Shoah" and "Holocaust" are used to label the persecution and extermination of European Jews at the hands of Nazis. The Shoah, meaning calamity in Hebrew or destruction since the middle ages, has been widely adopted since the 1940s to describe the genocide and persecution of European Jews specifically. However, the definition of the term Holocaust has been contested, in particular as to whether or not it should include the persecution of the other victims of Nazi Germany. The Holocaust often refers to the non-Jewish victims of Nazi Germany and is sometimes even extended to describe other genocides (for example,"Rwandan Holocaust"). Organizations such as Yad Vashem strictly limit the definition to include only the Jewish victims considering the intentionally specific targeting and elimination of European Jews.

The Holocaust was not limited to Germany, nor was it inevitable. Historians and social scientists have asked why the Holocaust happenedwhat were the structural and social conditions that made it possible?Historical and contemporary antisemitism was one of many factors that lead to the murder of the Jews during World War II. As is the case with all historical events, there were many complex factors, such as the rise of nationalism, world economic depression, the aftermath of World War I, the failure of democracy in Germany, and the lack of will by world governments to take in Jewish refugees.

Adolph Hitler was born to an Austrian family in 1889 and moved to Germany in 1913. He served in the German army during WWI and soon after became heavily involved in German politics. He was attracted to ideas of German-Nationalism, antisemitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-marxism.

Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on from 1933-1945, and Fuhrer from 1934-1945.

Nazi ideology was based on a set of racial ideals which were founded on the scientific principles of Social Darwinism. This Nazi ideology ranked society through purity of blood, establishing a hierarchy wherein the top were the purest, and all others were increasingly polluted through years of race mixing. Utilizing this hierarchical structure, Jews were least idealand were placed on the bottom, labeled the enemy of the State. The Nazis put forth ideas based on centuries-old concepts of antisemitism, including religious and economic forms of discrimination. They connected these historical ideas with contemporary concerns, blaming the Jewish people for German and European societal problems, including Germanys defeat in WWI.

After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Nazi party immediately began passing anti-Jewish laws with the goal of removing Jews from Germany. Originally, the idea was simply to get Jews to leave, but emigration was not an easy task, as Jews were asked to give up their homes, livelihoods, and businesses, charged exorbitant fees, and had few places of escape open to them.

Nazi policy shifted to direct violence against Jews and their property. A pivotal moment for this change took place on the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, when Nazis and their supporters took to the streets of Germany and Austria, burning and looting Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues, and arresting an estimated 30,000 men who were sent to the German concentration camps Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), the state-sponsored pogroms signaled to the world that Jewish life in Germany would never be the same.

By 1942, the German army occupied most of Eastern and Western Europe. Anti-Jewish laws were passed in all occupied countries. Jews were removed from the general populations and placed in ghettos, or were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (Himmler-lead death squads that made their way East towards the Russian front). At this time, the number of Jews inherited with each occupation became overwhelming, and the murder of innocent civilians, including women and children, upon the SS killing squads was taking its toll and a new solution had to be put in place.

On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee conference was convened by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, and attended by 15 high-ranking Nazi and German officials at a villa in Wannseea city on the outskirts of Berlin. They gathered to discuss and coordinate the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, which is code for the use of death camps to exterminate all 11,000,000 Jews of Europe.

Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II) began gassing operations in January 1942. The Auschwitz camps (I, II, and III), which have now become the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust, were responsible for the death of 960,000 Jews between 1940-1945. The more devastating number of deaths were sustained at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen and collaborative efforts of citizens in the occupied countries, as well as deaths in the ghettos and other concentration camps throughout Europe. Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945,by the Soviet Red Army. On May 8, 1945, the war was over but the aftermath of the events that took place continues to affect the present. This is especially the case as scholars and people continue to struggle with how this could have taken place and how the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators have been repeated through acts of mass violence and other genocides throughout the world.

The Jewish population of Germany prior to WWII (as of 1930) was 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, making them less than 0.75% of the total population. By the end of the Holocaust, six million European Jews were murdered.

In addition to the murder of European Jews, the Nazi government was responsible for the persecution of several other groups of people. Poles, Sinti, and Roma were viewed as racially inferior to the Aryans and were subjected to death and labor camps. They persecuted church leaders and Jehovahs Witnesses who refused to salute Hitler, served in the German army, or opposed Nazism in general. Homosexuals, specifically men, were viewed as a hindrance to the preservation of the German nation and were therefore subjected to concentration camps. People with mental and physical disabilities were also killed as part of a euthanasia program. In addition, Nazis also persecuted political opponents, revolutionary authors and artists, Red Army political officers, and Soviet prisoners of war, amongst many other people. In total, five million non-Jews were killed.

The first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis, who utilized veiled language, secret operations, and covered up their mass murders by burning bodies and destroying evidence. Their main purpose was to keep victims in the dark for fear of revolt and other factors that would hinder their goals for annihilation. Himmler, in his speech to his troops at Posen in October 1943, said, I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written.

Holocaust deniers maintain that events did not take place as they were written, and that Jews have propagated the myth in order to advance Jewish interests. In other words, Holocaust denial is a form of antisemitism as much as it is a part of the genocidal processto deny the deaths of those murdered acts as a double-dying, as it seeks to erase the victims from history.

Deniers will try to establish that there is no evidence to support the gas chambers or the numbers of dead. They will also cite the lack of orders in writing from Hitler. However, the Nazis left behind enough documentation to confirm their acts. Deborah Lipstadt, noted Holocaust scholar, wrote about her trial against British Holocaust denier David Irving in her book The Eichmann Trial: Though they [the Holocaust survivors] inundated us with offers to testify, we eschewed their testimony for strategic reasons. Survivors would have constituted witnesses of fact, attesting to the facts of what had happened. Because the Holocaust has the dubious distinction of being the best-documented genocide in history, we considered such testimony unnecessary. We did not want to suggest to the court that we needed witnesses of fact in order to prove the event.

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Jewish prisoners arrive at the Auschwitz concentration camp, mid-1944.German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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Wedding rings forcibly removed from prisoners and confiscated by the Nazis, May 1945.U.S. Army/National Archives

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An unidentified boy raises his arms as German soldiers capture Polish Jews during the Warsaw ghetto uprising sometime between April 19 and May 16, 1943.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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A Russian survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp identifies for the liberating U.S. troops a former camp guard accused of brutally beating prisoners, June 1945.U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons

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A young German woman reacts with horror as she walks by some of the approximately 800 prisoners murdered by SS guards near Namering, Germany, and laid there so that townspeople could view the work of their Nazi leaders, May 1945.National Archives

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Prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp cheer the approaching U.S. troops, April 1945.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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Very young Ukrainian nationalists (in cooperation with the Nazi SS) armed with clubs chase a Jewish woman through the streets of Lviv, Poland -- where at least 6,000 Jews were killed by militias and Nazi forces -- in mid-1941.Wikimedia Commons

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The entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, circa 1945.Stanislaw Mucha/German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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Some of the 2,141 prisoners just freed from their train, bound for an extermination camp, by U.S. soldiers near Madgeburg, Germany on April 13, 1945.U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons

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Child survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp soon after its liberation by Soviet forces in January 1945.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography via Wikimedia Commons

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Upon the liberation of Buchenwald, a man holds a noose formerly used at the concentration camp, April 1945.ERIC SCHWAB/AFP/Getty Images

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Jewish women and children just after their arrival at the Auschwitz concentration camp.STF/AFP/Getty Images

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A prisoner dying of dysentery at the Buchenwald concentration camp peers out from his bunk upon the liberation of the camp by Allied troops in April 1945.AFP/Getty Images

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Clothes that once belonged to prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp, recently liberated by U.S. troops, April 1945.U.S. Army/National Archives

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British liberators of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp force Nazi officials to exhume and properly bury the bodies of approximately 100 political prisoners killed there, October 1945.-/AFP/Getty Images

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German soldiers arrest a Jewish man in Warsaw, Poland following the ghetto uprising that had recently occurred there, April 1943.AFP/Getty Images

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U.S. soldiers survey some of the children's barracks of the recently liberated Dachau concentration camp, April 1945.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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Nazi guards round up arriving prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp's unloading ramp, circa May/June 1944.Lili Jacob/Yad Vashem via Wikimedia Commons

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A starving child lying on the street of the Warsaw ghetto, as photographed by a sergeant in the German armed forces, circa 1941.Heinz Joest/Vad Yashem/National Archives

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Construction workers build the brick wall meant to block off the Jewish ghetto portion of Warsaw, Poland, 1940.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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Crowds watch as British soldiers set fire to the last remaining hut at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp soon after its liberation in April 1945.Bert Hardy, British Army/Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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A young man sits on an overturned stool next to a burnt body inside the Thekla concentration subcamp outside Leipzig, Germany soon after its liberation by U.S. forces in April 1945.ERIC SCHWAB/AFP/Getty Images

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Prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp cheerfully collect bread rations upon their liberation by British forces in April 1945.Sergeant H. Oakes, British Army/Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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Victims' bones lie in the crematoriums of the Buchenwald concentration camp upon the arrival of U.S. troops in April 1945.U.S. Army/National Archives

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Female guards of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp soon after their capture by British soldiers in April 1945.AFP/Getty Images

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Eyeglasses of prisoners killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp, circa 1945.German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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An emaciated prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp soon after its liberation by U.S. forces in April 1945.ERIC SCHWAB/AFP/Getty Images

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Prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp's Boelcke barracks killed during a bombing raid, April 1945.James E. Myers, U.S. Army/National Archives

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SS commander Heinrich Himmler inspects the Dachau concentration camp, 1936.Friedrich Franz Bauer/German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, 1938.National Archives

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Starving inmate of Camp Gusen, Austria, 1945.National Archives

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German doctor Fritz Klein stands amid the corpses of prisoners in one of the mass graves at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp soon after its liberation by British troops in April 1945.British Army/Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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Polish prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp toast their U.S. liberators circa April/May 1945.Arland Musser/National Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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A Hungarian prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp not long after its liberation by U.S. troops in April 1945.ERIC SCHWAB/AFP/Getty Images

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German civilians, under direction of U.S. medical officers, are made to walk past a group of 30 Jewish women starved to death by SS troops so that they may bear witness, in Czechoslovakia, 1945.National Archives

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U.S. Army soldiers prepare to summarily execute SS guards of the newly liberated Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945.Arland B. Musser/National Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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Circa 1936, a Romani woman speaks with a German police officer (center) and infamous Nazi doctor Robert Ritter (right), whose pseudo-scientific research on the Romani people helped cause the Nazis to kill as many as 500,000 of them during the Holocaust.German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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General Dwight Eisenhower (center, wearing officer's cap) and other high-ranking U.S. Army officers view the bodies of prisoners who were killed during the evacuation of Ohrdruf, while on a tour of the newly liberated concentration camp in April 1945.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/National Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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Disabled children of the sort executed in the tens of thousands under the Nazis' largely eugenics-inspired Aktion T4 involuntary euthanasia program, at Schnbrunn Psychiatric Hospital, 1934.Friedrich Franz Bauer/German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons

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Malnourished forced laborers of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Jena, Germany soon after the arrival of liberating U.S. troops in April 1945.National Archives

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British troops force SS camp guards to load the corpses of prisoners onto trucks for burial during the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.Sergeant Midgley, British Army/Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons

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All but one of the 22 Nazi leaders prosecuted during the Nuremberg war crimes trials, October 1946.AFP/Getty Images

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Nazi leaders Hermann Gring (left) and Rudolf Hess -- both, at various points, the deputies of Adolf Hitler -- sit in the defendants' box during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, 1946.STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images

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A pile of human bones and skulls lies on the grounds of the Majdanek concentration camp soon after its liberation by Russian troops in 1944.AFP/Getty Images

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A member of a German paramilitary death squad prepares to shoot a Jewish man next to a mass grave in the Ukraine. When the photograph was found in a soldier's scrapbook, the handwritten caption read "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa."

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On January 19, 1942, Szlama Ber Winer made his escape. During transport from the Nazis' Chemno extermination camp to the Rzuchw subcamp, the 30-year-old Polish prisoner slipped out of the lorry and into the forest.

From there, Winer made his way to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, where he rendezvoused with the underground Oneg Shabbat group, which had made it their clandestine mission to chronicle the horrors that the Nazis had recently begun perpetrating upon the fellow Jewish residents of their city.

At the time, of course, the group had no idea of the full extent of what they were actually chronicling.

Before Winer escaped and contacted Oneg Shabbat, the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Poland, let alone the outside world, had received only scattered bits of information about what was now happening inside the newly completed camps in the forests outside Warsaw not to mention Krakow, Lublin, and much of eastern Poland.

But in his reports to Oneg Shabbat, Winer began to fill in the gaps. He spoke of Jewish deportees, including his own family, arriving at Chemno en masse, enduring beatings at the hands of Nazi officers, then dying in gas chambers before being dumped in mass graves step by step, like clockwork.

Under the pseudonym Yakov Grojanowski and with the help of Oneg Shabbat, Winer documented this revelatory testimony in what would become known as the Grojanowski Report, likely the first eyewitness account of the Nazis' extermination programs to make it beyond the walls of the camps and into the halls of power in Europe.

The report never traveled far enough.

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Holocaust Photos: 44 Heartrending Images Of Tragedy And ...

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

Here is the foundational narrative on which I was raised: In March 1933, my great-uncle Arthur Kahn walked out of his apartment in Wrzburg, Germany, for what was supposed to be a short Easter-break trip to see relatives. He was 21, training to be a doctor. He didnt know it, but his name had been placed on a list of students suspected of Communist ties. He had none, but he was arrested in Nuremberg. A few weeks later, he was transferred to Dachau, which had just opened as a prison. Adolf Hitler had been in power for 10 weeks. Within 24 hours of his arrival, Arthur was killedbelieved to be the first shot among a group of four Jewish men and the Holocausts first Jewish victim.

I learned about Arthur from the elder of his two surviving brothersHerbert Kahn, the man I called Opa. Arthur died on Passover; at the time, Opa was 12. During the second seder, when I was a child, the whole table would seem to brace itself for his palpable despair. I liked it better when Opa would sidle up and tell me stories. Arthur was a meticulous draftsman. He was a state chess champion. He had hoped to be a cancer researcher, just as the field was first developing.

Opa died three months before I graduated from college. It was a shock to realize that I was now older than Arthur had ever been. That summer, I tracked down the New York Times article that announced the Dachau murders. Its headline parrots the Nazi lie: Nazis Shoot Down Fleeing Prisoners. I read Timothy W. Rybacks book Hitlers First Victims, a meticulous account not just of the killings themselves, but of the prosecutor who tried to indict the men responsible for them at tremendous personal risk. He hadnt believed the official explanation. He couldnt overlook the obviousfour victims, all Jewish. The Nazis suppressed the case. The killers went free.

I became obsessed. I wanted to know where the police found Arthur in Nuremberghad he known he was doomed? And then: Did he like music? Did he write in diaries? Did he have a favorite book? I wrote to archivists and historians, searching for answers with a determination that bordered on compulsion. I struggled to explain what I hoped to find. Closure wasnt the right word. I felt too embarrassed to write closeness. Scholars invited me to tour their institutions. I scoured footnotes, submitting files concerning Arthurs fate to a translator so that I could read them. I took notes on the names of his torturers. I ransacked libraries. I filed research requests. I read about how he bled.

Between 2018 and 2021, I traveled to Germanyto the sites of Arthurs life and deathfour times. I felt drawn to these places, as if walking in his footsteps might tell me something about the person whose gruesome death had come to define his life. I needed to make present the person I had known as an absence. I wanted to see him.

Not long after the Axis powers surrendered, the Allies turned their attention to the business of commemoration. Across Germany, liberators tacked up posters showing stacks of Jewish corpses. Concentration camps such as Majdanek and Auschwitz and Dachau were secured and preserved. It was a practical choice. The land would be evidence in imminent war-crime trials. God had confronted Cain; the Allies heard the blood-soaked ground too. It was also the moral position. The camps would become three-dimensional keepers of the historical recordgeographical testimonies of the incontrovertible horror of the Holocaust.

Over time, concentration camps throughout Europe were restored and opened to the public. So were several Nazi headquarters and the estate in bucolic Wannsee where Nazi officials had feasted and drank together, plotting the Final Solution.

The public reckoning was slower. Germans still cast themselves as the wars true victims. Had the violence not devastated them too? Some concentration camps fell into disrepair, warding off potential visitors. In Dachau, the first memorial commemorating the Jewish genocide wasnt built until 1960. It was a Catholic chapel. The campslike Buchenwaldthat stood on East German land were better-maintained, but with an ulterior motive. The German Democratic Republic framed the war as a struggle between German fascists and Marxism. The extermination of the Jewish people was an afterthought.

Read: The other history of the Holocaust

But memorialization soon became a fixation on both sides of the Atlantic. A record number of German citizens tuned in to watch the melodramatic but affecting miniseries Holocaust in 1979. In 1980, Congress established the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which set about planning the development of a Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., as well as an annual national event to remember the devastation. One event begat two and then 10 and then thousands. In 1990, a writer for The New York Times took stock of Holocaust-memorial projects. The 1988 index she consulted listed 19 museums, 48 resource centers, 34 archives, 12 memorials, 25 research institutes, and five libraries. We remembered with a kind of desperation, as a bulwark.

I was born in 1992, part of Generation Never Forget. I was a toddler when the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors next to the National Mall. I read The Number on My Grandfathers Arm in kindergarten. I read Number the Stars in middle school. When, at age 11, I learned that a friend had zero grandparents who were Holocaust survivors, it was a revelation. How alien, I thought. How American.

Never forget was a promise we kept with ourselves and expected the world to keep, too. I believed in it like a vow I had taken. When I said it, I didnt hear the other, more vulnerable note. The one that sounded like a plea.

I went to a Jewish preschool, Jewish summer camp, then Jewish grade school and high school. Normal children in normal households have parents and grandparents who attend their school recitals and clap when the curtain falls. The people I knew had parents and grandparents who attended our school recitals and, when the curtain fell, whispered, Hitler didnt win. We were the real and durable survivalthe triumph hed wanted to wipe out. Even when we were little, we knew our stories. Our murdered great-grandparents, great-uncles, and great-aunts. The first cousins our parents never met. We knew whose grandfathers had been married before, had had first wives and first children murdered in the camps. I knew Arthurs historical distinction: the first. Over time, I collected a few more details about himhis brilliance, his good looks, his various romances.

But of course, most of what I knew concerned that terrible week in Aprilthe sequence of murder and heartbreak and burial. I knew Arthurs father, Levi, had paid to have his sons coffin released from Dachau. I knew it had arrived sealed shut. When did I learn the particulars? I dont remember ever being told them. We inherited these stories as we inherited our hair colors, the shape of our faces. The Nazis ruled that Arthur had been killed in an attempted escape, gunned down while he tried to flee. But I had been toldhad I ever not known?that Levi pried open the coffin. He saw that his son had been shot through the forehead. Levi and his wife, Martha, and their two surviving sons didnt leave for America until August 1939, two weeks before the war broke out. Arthurs death was supposed to be a freak act of violence, not an omen.

I arrived in Berlin for the first time in October 2018. I had been invited to visit German and Norwegian prisons with a mixed group of elected officials, advocates, wardens, and one other writer. I wanted to get a feel for the area and learn what I could about the first concentration camps, Dachau included. In Berlin, prison staffers explained the strict laws that governed the treatment of incarcerated people. The German constitutionadopted in 1949 and written to safeguard democratic processes in the aftermath of the wardeclares that human dignity shall be inviolable. In 1977, as a new generation began to grapple with the Holocaust, the Prison Act was passed, reversing an earlier legal principle holding that incarcerated people were not entitled to basic civic rights. The law established resocializationas opposed to punishment or protection of the publicas the purpose of prison. These lawsa kind of Never forget infrastructureinformed not just the nations approach to restorative justice, but the architecture of its penitentiaries. In the prisons I visited, rooms had bathrooms, with doors that closed. Incarcerated people cooked their own meals in communal kitchens. We toured a courthouse that had been operational since 1906 to observe a sentencing, but I kept losing focus. I was sitting in a German courthouse that had been operational since 1906.

For my second trip, in the late spring of 2019, I spent a week in Berlin on a fellowship. Researchers delivered lectures about the nations slide into fascism. We visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the bookstore, I found a doorstop of a book documenting the rise of Nazi concentration camps. I checked the indexKahn, Arthur, page 55. The book details how SS guards took over for state police, empowered to kill. After a nauseating description of the hours of torture that Arthur endured before his execution, it notes that Heinrich Himmler, the future mastermind of the Final Solution and the architect of the SS, held a press conference announcing the four Dachau murders.

In New York, I retrieved files of photocopied letters that Opa had sent historians, correcting the record about Arthur. Hed tracked down each mistaken mention of his brother in various histories of the Holocaust and organized his correspondence in order. In some cases scholars had confused the timing of Arthurs death. Opa chafed in particular at the books and articles that reinforced the Nazi claim that Arthur had been a political radical. In another folder, I found the letter that he sent in 1943 to the president of the Agudath Israel Youth Council, whod had a part in helping him secure safe transport to America. Once the United States entered the war, both Opa and his brother had enlisted in the Army. When he wrote the letter, he was still in basic training in Alabama.I would not mind to be sent over to Europe, he told the man in a new, unfamiliar language. There is nothing I would rather do than fighting Hitlerism.

From Fort McClellan, he recounted his travails as an observant Jew, including his struggle to find kosher food on base. He wrote about how he tried to squeeze ritual in when he could, sometimes reciting the morning service while he marched. He studied Jewish texts when he should have been sleeping. I manage to learn a bit, he wrote, and so never forget that I am a Jew.

In September 2019, I went back. This time, I retraced Arthurs steps as best I could. I orchestrated stops in Wrzburg, where Arthur studied; Nuremberg, where he had been arrested and later buried; Dachau, where he was killed; and Frankfurt and Munich, where I scheduled interviews and requested boxes of files from the state archives. I would end in Gemnden am Main, where the Kahn children had grown up.

I took the two photos I had of Arthur with me. In one, Arthur was caught mid-gesture. Hes wearing a coat and a brimmed hat, and is pointing just out of frame. The other is his student ID card, and the photo is serious. The ID lists addresses for his two apartments near the Wrzburg campus and the name of his father. But even the ID is tainted with catastrophe. Etched in faint pencil is a handwritten line that someone in the enrollment office must have added later. Arthur would not be returning to school. Hed died in a shooting.

The largest decentralized memorial ever createdgargantuan in scale, but miniature in its individual componentsis the work of the German artist Gunter Demnig. The pieces are called Stolpersteine, or stumbling blockssquare brass plaques that Demnig has been setting into the pavement since 1996. He has placed close to 100,000 in more than 2,000 cities and towns across Europe. The stones are installed in front of the last known residences of victims of the Holocaust. Each is engraved with someones name and a line or two that describes their fate.

Read: Escaping Nazis: The story of a girl who lived

Demnig is 74. He books deliveries of the stones back-to-back, sometimes stopping in multiple cities in an afternoon. He has said in interviews that he was inspired to embark on the project after hearing a French rabbi quote a line from the Talmud: True death is when someone is forgotten.

In Gemnden am Main, I saw the stone that had been laid for Arthurs sister. After Arthurs funeral, she fell in love with one of Arthurs best friends and married him. Fanny Weinberg, ne Kahn, and her son, Nathan, who was about to turn 6, were both deported to Minsk and murdered. (Her husband survived.) Ryback, the author of Hitlers First Victims, told me that he had realized that Arthur didnt have a stonenor did his nephewand he recommended that, as a living relative, I ask Demnigs office.

The town is small, with just one main street. The house that Arthur grew up in is a few doors up the road from a tourist office that advertises popular activities. A woman was sitting behind the desk there when I walked in. To one side of her was a wall covered in pamphlets. Arthurs face was on the cover of one. The woman explained that students had researched the lives of Jewish families in Gemnden. She cried as she spread the brochure across the counter. It bears the photo from the student ID. Arthurs face is lineless. Young.

I mentioned the Stolpersteine and wondered if she knew how to reach out to Demnig. She promised to introduce me to someone who could help. Sure enough I had an email waiting for me when I arrived back home. It was from the teacher whod advised the students who produced the pamphlet. We went back and forth, in emails translated from English to German and back. He would handle the coordination with Demnigs office. Would I be willing to make another trip?

In October 2021, after two pandemic-induced postponements, I returned to Gemnden to see Demnig place Stolpersteine for Arthur and Nathan. Fourteen descendants of Martha and Levi were there to meet him. To honor Arthur, Ryback came too.

Jrgen Endresthe teacherhad insisted on picking us up from the train. He stood outside the station with his students. Most had lived in the area all their lives. But two of them were newer residents. The girls had settled in Gemnden in 2015, refugees from Aleppo, Syria, who found haven in the place Opa fled.

Endres had planned an afternoon of performances and remarks for the occasion; he asked me to give a speech to close out the event. It was short, but it took me weeks to write. All that research, and I still knew most about Arthurs final moments. I hadnt found his diaries or letters hed written. I knew what happened to him. I will never be able to know who he was. He is frozen at 21, on the brink of becoming.

I decided to speak about how the past can shape-shift under manipulationhow historical truths can be overwritten with a careful editor. Its not just a matter of remembering or forgetting, but of how we tell our stories. The conclusion was the hardest to write. I didnt know how it endednot the speech, not the quest Id set out on. I settled on the truth: I am so proud to be a German Jew.

Fewer than 400,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive. Thousands have been interviewed as part of oral-history projects, including Opa. Their photos and memories have been recorded, but I wonder whether we asked too much of the remembering. It was supposed to add up to something. Never forget was supposed to be our guaranteeNever again.

Instead, the far-right Alternative for Germany has become a potent force in German politics. One of its leaders described Berlins Holocaust memorial as a monument of shame unbecoming for a nation with so much else deserving of commemoration. In 20 states in America, Holocaust education is a required part of public-school curricula, but that hasnt staved off a startling erosion in Holocaust awareness. About half of Millennial and Gen Z Americans cant name a single concentration camp. More than 10 percent blame the Jews for their own extermination.

Read: 75 years after Auschwitz, anti-Semitism is on the rise

The Auschwitz Memorial has 1.3 million followers on Twitter. Most of its posts are short descriptions of people who were deported to the camp. But it often has to break from its usual programming, compelled to weigh in on the latest statement from a politician comparing the demonization and annihilation of persecuted people to vaccine mandates.

In 2021, the American Jewish Committee released research about the state of anti-Semitism. One in four American Jews reported experiencing an anti-Semitic incident in the previous 12 months. In New York, anti-Semitic hate crimes went up almost 50 percent from 2020 to 2021.

A slogan cant bring about redemption. In searching for Arthurs life amid the wreckage of his death, Never forget started to feel inadequate. The work of historical excavation is not just to remember what happened. Its to sit with the gaps that no amount of research or reading can ever fill in. There are questions I will never answer about Arthur. There are millions of Arthurs.

Memorialization has its limits. I have recovered all I can about Arthur Kahn. Across the Atlantic, in Germany, a dozen students and their teacher now remember too. It mattered to me more than Id thought it would to see Demnig wedge the stones into the ground. Arthur was there once. And so were we.

Two weeks after I returned, I woke up to an email from Jrgen Endres. It had been hard coming back to New York. I felt the same as I had when Id visited Arthurs grave in Nuremberg in 2019. Bewildered. I hadnt wanted to leave him. Thats how I feel writing this now. I dont want to be finished.

The Stolpersteine installation had made the news, and one of the stories reached the chair of the historical museum in the town of Lohr am Main, 17 minutes from Gemnden.

I consider it a small sensation, Endres wrote, that another photo of Arthur Kahn was sent to us.

In a note to Endres, the museum chair described how hed found a letter about Arthur in the towns archives, bundled with a photo. The letter was dated 1993 and had been sent to the principal of the local high school from an alumnus named Walter Dotter, a retired state insurance worker. The letter rambles, repeats itself. I tried to keep the rather particular voice, the person who translated it for me said, a mix of genuine regret and an official tone, perhaps because he is writing to the director of his old school but perhaps also to avoid accepting guilt.

Dotter said that he and Arthur had been not just classmates, but friends. He wrote that Arthur was the best student of the class, popular and respected for his quiet manner. He was appalled to learn what had happened to him.

Arthur Kahn thus became the first victim of the Dachau murderers as a former student of the Lohr [School], Dotter continued. I therefore believe that I can assume this sad event is also worth a silent commemoration.

With the note, he enclosed the photo. I hadnt known that Arthur had studied in Lohr. Now I had the third photo of him Id ever seen. Its the kind of document I had been so desperate to track down. It proved what I had hopedthat there had been an Arthur before. I tried not to dwell on what happened next in the timeline.

The photo was taken at Arthurs graduation. Dotter had written that Arthurthe classs lone Jewwas named valedictorian. He stands on one side of the group, with a hand on his hip. There is not a Jew in the world who wouldnt assess the lineup, consider his classmates, and hazard a guesswho went Nazi?

All of the students are dressed in their finest. Arthur is wearing a suit and a pocket square. He smiles wide, almost blinking in the sun. There he is. The man I can almost remember.

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My Great-Uncle, The Holocaust's First Jewish Victim - The Atlantic

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

SEMBACH, Germany The United States commemorates the victims of Nazi atrocities every year during the Holocaust Days of Remembrance in April.

The theme this year was Determination, Hope and Honor. The Holocaust Days of Remembrance were observed this year from April 24 to May 1 with April 28 designated as Remembrance Day.

The event is commemorated in April each year because most of the concentration camps from World War II were liberated in April 1945.

This year 50 Soldiers, civilian employees and family members from U.S. Army NATO Brigade converged on Kaiserslautern, Germany April 29 to remember local victims of the Holocaust.

For Holocaust Remembrance Day we went on a memorial walk in downtown Kaiserslautern to see the stumbling stone project, said Sgt. Jacob Davis. The project features brass plaques set in the pavement

with the names of local residents at the time who were victims of the Holocaust and gives a little bit of their life story.

Davis said the event was particularly poignant for him because he has family members who were directly impacted by the Holocaust before and during World War II.

It means a lot to see units and organizations take the time out of our busy days to go and remember those people, not just Jews, but Romani, homosexuals and people with mental illness, said Davis. So it was good to see us include a diverse thought culture here. Especially the fact that we take time to remember the Holocaust and remember what freedoms we have and what freedoms we continue to have.

Sgt. 1st Class Ruben Avila, U.S. Army NATO Brigade equal opportunity advisor, and Staff Sgt. Daphne Pierre, the headquarters company equal opportunity leader, played key roles in organizing the event.

For the holocaust observance day the EO team identified a few families that were affected by the holocaust, said Pierre. The names of these families here given to each team to complete research and find out what happened to the families.

This day allowed Soldiers, civilians and families to take the time out of their busy schedule to remember the holocaust survivors and their loved ones who did not make it, she said. Each team was able to find the grid coordinate points for specific familys stolperstein.

Personally, I think the event went very well. We were able to connect with individuals we do not see or speak to on a daily basis. Everyone was able to have a teaching and learning moment about dangers of discrimination and hatred.

Davis agreed with Pierre and added that the event gave participants the opportunity to reflect on Soldiers role in society.

We had a good turnout, said Davis. We had a lot of people interested in learning more about the history behind the Holocaust and how we can do better, not just as the Army in equal opportunity and diversity, but as people.

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Days of Remembrance: Determination, Hope and Honor | Article | The United States Army - United States Army

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

In September 1941, German forces invading the Soviet Union took the city of Kyiv, in what is now the nation of Ukraine, and soon afterward perpetrated one of the most horrific acts of genocide in history. On September 29, they forced much of Kyivs Jewish population to go to Babi Yar, also known as Babyn Yar, a ravine located just outside the city.

After being ordered to undress, the victims were forced into the ravine, where they were shot by the SS and German police units and their auxiliaries. As the SS later reported to headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were executed over two days, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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The Babi Yar massacre was the apex of Holocaust by bullets, a term used by historians to describe the shooting executions perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, which continued even after they began killing European Jews on a massive scale with poison gas in death camps such as the Auschwitz complex in Poland.

What makes Kyivs Babyn Yar stand out within the Holocaust as a whole is that a metropolitan city in Europe lost virtually all of its remaining Jewish inhabitants to premeditated murder, for the first time in history, and more Jews died in it than in any other single German massacre, explains Karel Berkhoff, an historian and co-director of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure.

Babyn Yar is also the most widely known instance of a specific type of killing in the Holocaust: mass murder near the places where the victims were living, usually by shooting them.

A wave of shooting executions by Germans had started in the summer of 1941, in places such as Lithuania and Latvia as anti semitism escalated to violence, according to Edward B. Westermann, a professor of history atTexas A&M University-San Antonioand author of the 2021 book Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany.

As German forces created an occupation zone, Hitlers Nazi regime was able to carve out Lebensraum, or living space, to accommodate future German colonists, and at the same time eliminate a huge portion of the Jewish population of eastern Europe, according to Berkoff.

By the time Germans reached Kyiv in mid-September 1941, about 100,000 of the citys prewar Jewish population of 160,000 already had fled or joined the Soviet military to fight the invasion, according to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. That left 60,000 Jews who had been unwilling or unable to fleemany of them women, children, the elderly and people who were ill.

A few days after the Germans seized Kyiv, bombs that had been left behind by Soviet forces went off in several buildings that Germans were using, according to Berkhoff. About 200 of the occupiers lost their lives, and the Germans soon retaliated by arresting and executing several hundred people. But that wasnt enough.

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On September 26 the German Army and the SS concluded that Kyivs Jewish population wouldnt be confined in a ghetto, but instead annihilated at Babi Yar, a site that the Germans already had used to execute and bury Soviet officials. Two days later, on September 28, police posted 2,000 copies of a notice around the city and suburbs, ordering all Jewish residents to appear the next morning at an intersection in the citys Lukianivka district, with all their personal documents, money and valuables and warm clothing.

The thousands who showed up that morning may have expected that they were going to be sent to labor camps. Instead, they were organized into groups by the Germans, and ordered to walk to Babi Yar.

The fact that the victims were ordered to assemble and report to German authorities, and the fact that they had to march through the largest city in Ukraine on their way to the killing site, demonstrated the true extent of Nazi goals involving the destruction of the European Jews, Westermann says.

A woman stands at the "Crystal Wall of Crying" at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial at the northern edge of Kyiv, Ukraine, October 6, 2021.

Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images

When the Jews got to Babi Yar, the Germans seized their identification papers and burned them, making it obvious that no one would leave alive. Most of the victims were then chased through a gauntlet of Germans armed with rubber clubs and sticks, who beat them as they made their way to the ravine. They were ordered to undress and then lined up and shot with machine-gun fire standing up, or lying down. Infants were taken from their parents arms and thrown into the ravine.

The slaughter lasted the first day until about 5 or 6 p.m., but the Germans werent able to kill everyone. Those who remained were imprisoned in garages that night, until the executioners resumed their work the next day, according to Berkhoff. Bulldozers then covered the bodies with layers of soil.

It wasnt until nearly two months later that word of the massacre was published by the Jewish Telegraph Agency Daily Bulletin, which reported that the victims were systematically and methodically put to death.

The gunfire at Babi Yar wasnt over, though. The ravine was used over the course of the German occupation as a killing site until 1943 for both Jews and non-Jews with an estimate of 100,000 victims, Westermann says. All in all, as many as two million people were shot to death in mass shootings by Nazi forces.

After the war, the memory of the terrible events at Babi Yar didnt go away. But attempts to commemorate Kyivs Jewish victims were suppressed by Joseph Stalins regime. When the Soviet government finally greenlighted a monument to be erected in the 1970s, they dedicated the site to Kyiv residents and prisoners of war, and didnt mention Jewish identity.

Eventually, in independent Ukraine, a commission was established in 2016 to plan a full-scale memorial center. That site, still under construction, narrowly escaped damage from a Russian missile strike against a TV tower in Kyiv in March 2022.

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What Happened at the 1941 Babi Yar Massacre? - History

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

More than 75 years since V-E Daythe May 8, 1945, celebrations marking the end of World War II in Europe and the surrender of Nazi GermanyHolocaust survivors are still recording their stories for future generations. One recently found out her own story is still being written: At the age of 95, she finally learned the name her parents gave her.

Mary Wygodski of St. Petersburg, Fla., always knew she was named after her grandmother, but last year she learned that her birth name is Mera.

Ursula Szczepinska, Director of Education & Research at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, found that name listed in a birth register in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives, which emailed an image of it to Szczepinska, who could read the Polish and Hebrew on the document.

The truth came to light, after all these years, Wygodski tells TIME.

Part of Szczepinskas job is helping local survivors search for information about what happened to their relatives during the Holocaust, and she started searching for Wygodskis birth name to prepare her for an interview for the USC Shoah Foundations Dimensions in Testimony program last April. Through that program, Holocaust survivors are recorded answering hundreds of questions about their experience during World War II, and the result is an interactive installation that allows museum visitors to ask any question to a digital version of the survivor and then receive a response back in real time. In preparation for the recording, Wygodski received some questions in advance, and one of them was about her birth name, which she did not know. As the sole survivor of her immediate family during the Holocaust, she had no one to ask, and the question never came up.

Without this project and the preparation for the interview, we might never have known that [Mary] doesnt know her real name, says Szczepinska.

Born Mera Tabachowicz in 1925 in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), Wygodski lived in the Vilna ghetto and pretended to be her cousin Mila Kovner in order to stay in the ghetto under Meras uncles work permit. Mila had already been murdered at Ponary, a forest in Nazi-occupied Lithuania where as many as 75,000 people, mostly Jews, are believed to have been shot to death. Wygodskis uncles wife and other children were also murdered there. After the ghetto was liquidated, Mary survived three concentration camps, Kaiserwald, Stutthof, and Magdeburg. At Kaiserwald, she tried to end her own life by jumping into the Dvina River after being separated from her family.

Wygodski was in Magdeburg when it was liberated, and after the war moved to what was then Palestine, where she went by her Hebrew name, Miriam; Szczepinska found her name listed as such via the website of the Israel Genealogy Research Association. There, she met her husband Morton Wygodski, an engineer, and the two moved to Florida in 1957 where shes lived ever since. Shes a mother of two and has three grandchildren.

Wygodski also remembered being called Mercia by her parents and her friends, but Szczepinska concluded it must have been a nickname. Mary always thought her name was Mary because her name is listed as such on an identification card from Magdeburg and an identification card from a displaced persons camp in Belgium she lived in briefly after the war ended in 1945. She donated those cards to the Florida museum, and Szczepinska believes the camps anglicized Marys name.

Despite learning her birth name, Wygodski, who has turned 96 since the discovery was made, has no plans to start going by it.

I dont think it would be right, she says. People know me [by Mary].

She hopes the story of how she lost track of her birth name because of the death of her family during the Holocaust will raise awareness about preserving survivors memories. These days, seeing the news out of Ukraine reminds her of what she lived through during World War II, and she worries that Holocaust denial persists. As she puts it, Holocaust denial and distortion is the greatest threat for the shrinking population of Holocaust survivors.

She hopes by sharing the revelation that came up by telling her story, other survivors will be inspired not only to share more of their stories, to remind the world what they endured, but also in order to learn more about their own personal histories.

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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

In late March, political agreement was reached on the European Unions (EU) Digital Markets Act (DMA), closely followed a month later by the Digital Services Act (DSA). The implementation of the two acts over the coming months and years means that the EU is poised to reshape the digital landscape for millions, perhaps even beyond its borders. The final text of the DMA leaked on April 14 and is expected to pass a vote in early May, while the final details of the DSA are still forthcoming. Together, these bills promise greater openness and transparency for users, regulators, and researchers. Policymakers in the United States have identified similar challenges in the digital economy to those framed by the DSA and DMA and have proposed legislation that often parallels these EU initiatives. But US legislative action remains stymied by partisan debates and endless congressional hearings. While the transatlantic policy agenda is not exactly moving in lockstep, a window of opportunity may still be open with congressional focus on antitrust legislation. With US-EU cooperationincluding on digital policyheightened by the war in Ukraine and strengthened through cooperation in the Trade and Tech Council, these major recent developments in platform regulation will be watched closely, including by those outside the tech policy world.

The DMA is the EUs attempt to address the use of dominant market power by certain companies to stifle competition. European officials often use the expression breaking open, not breaking up to describe the DMAs approach to these digital behemothsallowing space for competing products and promoting interoperability to create a more open digital environment and not, for example, dividing Meta (formerly Facebook) into separate companies for Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

The DMA targets gatekeepers of core platform servicessearch engines, app stores, social networks, video-sharing platforms, communications apps, or cloud services. Gatekeepers are identified as companies with an EU market capitalization of at least 75 billion, or with 45 million monthly users (about 10 percent of the EU population). The list of gatekeepers skews heavilybut not uniquelytoward Silicon Valley companies. The DMA sets out rules for these gatekeepers: they will not be able to favor proprietary services over similar third-party ones or use data collected from third-party sellers to offer competing products, and would need to offer users choices for search engines, virtual assistants, or web browsers. Large platforms can no longer combine user data from across their services to target advertising without explicit user consent. New companies will be able to more easily enter a market if, for example, consumers and developers have access to app stores that do not charge a high developer fee. Transparency requirements also mean that companies who advertise on these platforms will have more access to their marketing and performance data.

The case of interoperabilitythe ability of different platforms and services to communicate with each otherhas been among the most debated aspects of the DMA and offers a good case study into ongoing disputes around some of these requirements. The DMA presents interoperability as a way to lessen gatekeepers control over communication services and allow consumer choice. Opponents claim that interoperability that is both user-friendly and privacy-protecting is technically impossible. Some argue that interoperability that breaks end-to-end encryption could in fact strengthen the gatekeeper, who could market encryption as an enticing reason to stay inside one system. Another argument claims that if users of a service with less privacy protection are allowed to communicate with users of a paid app offering greater privacy, the paid messaging service would lose its source of revenue if new, outside users essentially gain access for free. Beyond these debates, there are outstanding questions about what interoperability would look like in practice: When sending a message from encrypted Service A to non-encrypted Service B, would a pop-up warn you that your message is leaving an encrypted service? What level of transparency is needed for users to decide whether a potential weakening of privacy is a worthwhile trade-off? And would this be more difficult to scale in a US context, given that Americans have a much higher use of non-encrypted SMS rather than messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp? Such open-ended questions will have to be worked out in the process of implementing these new rules in practice.

Beyond these debates, there are outstanding questions about what interoperability would look like in practice.

The DSA updates the 2000 e-Commerce Directive governing online platforms and marketplaces to harmonize the laws across EU member states and create one set of rules regarding illegal content, including how users notify platforms of illegal content and the subsequent actions that platforms must take. What is illegal offline is already illegal onlinethe DSA aims at ensuring this concept exists in practice, too. The e-Commerce Directive laid out the liability regime for platforms, under which they have no general obligation to monitor for illegal content but are governed by a notice-and-action mechanism, meaning that once informed about illegal content, they must act or face liability. This would not change with the DSA. In contrast to the broader protections afforded by the US First Amendment, European countries have stricter speech laws, including hate speech laws or those outlawing, for example, Holocaust denial. Partly due to these differences in speech rules across EU countries, there are some outstanding questions about over-enforcement and preemptive blocking of content resulting in a takedown of otherwise legal speech.

Obligations in the DSA apply across online intermediaries, but special importance and extra requirements are given to very large online platforms (VLOPs) of over 45 million monthly users. These VLOPs have new due diligence obligations under the DSA and must assess different systemic risks that could be caused or exacerbated by their products or design. The DSA applies this notion to three main risks in the context of VLOPs: 1) the spread of illegal content; 2) negative impact on fundamental rights such as free expression and privacy; and 3) deceptive practices. These must be followed by risk-mitigating measures, such as content moderation approaches (like warning labels) or codes of conduct, which can then be assessed by independent auditors. The DSA also sets out parameters and procedures for crisis protocols, including the display of information by member state authorities in the event of a public health emergency or natural disaster.

The DSA also requires different levels of transparency from platforms for the public, regulators, or vetted researchers. These requirements mean platforms would provide data and information about their content moderation decisions, advertising, and the way algorithmic amplification shapes what users see. Redress mechanisms also mean that users will be able to request information about why their content was removed. This more systematic approach seeks to move away from separate debates over individual pieces of content, and transparency around internal algorithmic decision-making will allow more targeted understanding of how these algorithms present and personalize content and the harms that may result. There are outstanding questions about these algorithmic transparency requirements, including ensuring privacy of user data, and US observers have raised questions about whether such transparency requirements around platforms algorithms would be constitutional under the US First Amendment (in which mandatory transparency would be seen as a form of compelled speech). Overall, however, the DSA marks a shift from a more self-regulatory approach to one with more binding rules. The self-regulatory Code of Practice on Disinformation, for example, will evolve into a co-regulatory instrument with the DSA.

As the DMA and DSA near the finish line, the question turns to one of enforcement. The DMA will be enforced by the EU Commission, with the potential for fines and penalties of up to 10 percent of global turnover or 20 percent for repeat offenders. DSA enforcement includes fines up to 6 percent of global turnover. VLOPs will be supervised by the EU Commission, with a proportional supervisory fee of up to 0.05 percent of global annual income. National regulators oversee smaller platforms, and new digital services coordinators will have oversight and investigatory powers. Questions remain, however, about the DSAs proposed European board for digital services and the future relationship between national-level digital services coordinators and other national regulators.

The level of specificity in the final draft and the resources afforded to enforcement, keeping in mind that gatekeeper firms will likely also challenge enforcement in court, should be considered when thinking about the DMAs future impact.

One issue hanging over centralized enforcement at the EU Commission level for the DMA is personnel: an 80-member enforcement team was proposed in its initial draft, a figure now largely seen as inadequate. The European Councils chief economist is reported to have said that the EU Commission will be shorthanded for the first few years with regards to implementing the DMAa consequence of budgetary constraints. Debates around enforcement or under-enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation, where the data protection authorities in Luxembourg and Ireland lack the resources to pursue investigations, remain front of mind. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lacks similar enforcement capabilities, as the Build Back Better agenda, which would have allotted significant resources to the FTC, failed to move forward. The level of specificity in the final draft and the resources afforded to enforcement, keeping in mind that gatekeeper firms will likely also challenge enforcement in court, should be considered when thinking about the DMAs future impact.

In contrast to the EU, policymaking in the United States may seem like endless cycles of new bills that go nowhere and perpetual congressional hearings, with the November midterm elections dictating and narrowing the chances for passing major legislation. Nevertheless, one area of unexpected cooperation has been antitrust. Senator Amy Klobuchars focus on increasing competition has found a rare bedfellow with co-sponsor Senator Chuck Grassley and an apparently accommodating framework for Republican diatribes against so-called anti-conservative content moderation policies. In this context, two recent bills share a better chance than most of becoming law, and it is worth examining what approach they take to platform regulation and the changes they would enact.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act passed out of committee in the Senate in January 2022, despite some reservations from California Democrats who, while voting for the bill, have shown reticence toward bills targeting home-state companies, a pattern similarly observed in the House. It applies to platforms over a US market capitalization of $550 billion or those with 50 million monthly active US users (or 100,000 monthly active business users) and would address conduct that disadvantages competitors, such as self-preferencing, in which a platform like Amazon or Google favors its own products and services. What would this look in practice? Platforms would be sanctioned if they restrict interoperability or access to data, block users from deinstalling pre-installed apps, boost their own products in search rankings, or condition platform access on the purchasing of other products. The law would be enforced by the FTC, who along with the Department of Justice and state attorneys general would be able to bring lawsuits.

The Open App Markets Act passed out of committee on an even stronger vote in February. It is slightly narrower in scope, targeting large app stores with over 50 million users like Apple and Google. The bills would loosen the restrictions on app developers, allowing the use of alternative payment systemsa significant blow to the commissions of app store ownersand access to the stores operating system. It would require parity in search results and prohibit the harvesting of data from third-party apps to build competitors. Users would be allowed to sideload appsthat is, download them from non-proprietary and alternative app storeswhich is currently unavailable on Apple devices.

As midterm elections approach, time is of the essence for the antitrust bills in Congress.

As in the EU, companies in the United States have predictably protested that these bills would undermine privacy and the integrity of the user experience. Valid critiques about the risks of sideloadingApple devices have less malware than Android devices, for example, which allow outside app downloadsor those raised by legal experts about potential blind spots in the laws can be hard to disentangle from lobbying talking points.

As midterm elections approach, time is of the essence for the antitrust bills in Congress. Despite the bipartisan support behind these bills, it is an open question to what extent these shared priorities might extend beyond November. There is strong opposition to the antitrust push among some Republicans, and the possibility that the anti-Big Tech agenda would shift from competition to a focus on the censoring of conservatives and debates around Section 230, creating lots of noise but leaving the basic business model untouched.

With the DMA and DSAalong with the GDPR and forthcoming Data Governance Act, Data Act, and AI Actthe EU is seeking to set the standard for digital legislation and take advantage of the so-called Brussels effect, in which companies often end up adopting EU standards worldwide. It is likely that decisions imposed on platforms in the EU would affect their operations globally, including in the United States. There is hope among US researchers that they will be able to piggyback on some of the transparency disclosures required by the DSA, regardless of whether similar requirements ever became law in the United States.

The coming months will see new debates and challenges arise regarding these pieces of legislation with the potential to change the online experience for hundreds of millions. The answer may not satisfy those eager to reshape digital marketplaces and peer under the hood of these powerful platforms, but only time will tell whether these transatlantic efforts will achieve their desired ends.

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What Changes Are Coming to the Transatlantic Digital Landscape? - German Marshall Fund

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Posted By admin on May 6, 2022

On April 4, Tesla CEO Elon Muskdisclosed to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that he had bought a major stake in Twitter, making him the largest company shareholder. After tumultuous several weeks of board membership decisions,unsolicited purchase offers, andpoison pill attempts, the Twitter board of directors voted unanimouslyto accept Musks $44bn offer to buy Twitter and take it private on April 25.

The decision is not final it requires both regulatory sign-off and shareholder approval but many are treating it as such. Already in the US, the decision has been met with celebration from the political right based on assumptions of what the policies of a Musk-owned Twitter would entail. Yet it is still not clear what those policies would be. Although Musk himself has not been shy aboutpromulgating his visionfor Twitter on Twitter itself, many of his statements have been contradictory.

For instance, Musk has repeatedly tweeted his support for freedom of speech, tweeting on April 26: By free speech, I simply mean that which matches the law. Therefore, he appears to draw the boundaries clearly: all lawful content should be permitted, and unlawful content should be removed. At the same time, however, Musk has also repeatedly voiced his hatred for cryptocurrency spam, tweeting on April 21 that we will defeat the spam bots or die trying, presumably referring to cryptocurrency spammers. These ideas all sound laudable to the average layperson yet they are contradictory, as it is perfectly legal to disseminate content advertising the money-making potential of an amazing new cryptocurrency coin.

In the end, the vast bulk of moderated content does not consist of politically controversial subjects such as misinformation or hate speech rather, it is spam, pornography, scams, and the like. It is doubtful Musk intends to defend the right of an individual to hawk diet pills online yet that would be a consequence of his stated free speech policy. A Twitter in which everything lawful is permitted would quickly become a morass of fake Ray-Ban advertisements, pornography, and copy-pasted cryptocurrency spam, contradicting Musks own commitment.

Even officially free-speech platforms such as GETTR and Truth Social have permanently banned users for their choice of speech although that did not stop GETTR from reportedly becoming overwhelmed by video game pornography and ISIL (ISIS) supporters that they struggled to remove. Spam, scams, and pornography are not the only areas in which the conclusions of free speech idealism contradict societys expectations. A more serious example is the fact that it is generally legal in the US to express online support for ISIL and similar groups or link users to recruiting websites, so long as it does not cross over into material support or inciting an act of violence. There have been attempts to advocate for changing US laws to prevent this, but doing so would potentially be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

The current aggressive social media takedowns of pro-terrorist content are not legally required. Although it is doubtful Musk will allow Twitter to become a haven for ISIL propaganda (despite the conclusions of his rhetoric), this example illustrates the complex nuances at play.

Of course, the US is only one nation out of almost 200, each with its own laws and regulations. Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial are both illegal in Germany (as well as Austria, Belgium, France, and other European nations). Russia has an illegalised speech that contradicts the Kremlins position on its invasion of Ukraine.In Turkey, it is a crime to insult the Turkish people, withrecognition of the Armenian genocidesometimes prosecuted under that law.And under itsNational Security Law, China can prosecuteprotesters in Hong Kong for chanting slogans as basic asLiberate Hong Kong. Dealing with China may prove especially difficult for Musk, with Teslas factory in Shanghai serving as a potential point of leverage.

Twitter reported receiving 43,400 legal removal requests in the first half of 2021, of which it complied with only 54 percent. If Musk intends to aggressively remove content that violates regional laws a possible interpretation of his existing statements it couldperversely lead to greater censorship in some countries.

What about the idea proposed by Musk to authenticate all real humans? Could that act as a shortcut to obtaining the benefits of a moderated community without actually needing to moderate? Stereotype holds that controversial speech such as spam, harassment, and misinformation come predominantly from fake accounts. Like most stereotypes, this is completely incorrect. Any American with a friend interested in multilevel marketing can attest that the use of real names does not prevent these acquaintances from spamming their personal network. Furthermore, the largest source of literal bots are likelyself-compromised accounts in which real users effectively rent access to their account to spammers an issue that authentication would not address. When South Korea enacted an online real name system from the 2000s until 2012, it only reduced online malicious comments by 0.9 percentage points (from a 13.9 percent base).

This real name policy also led to negative repercussions. Online databases of user identities formed a valuable target that led to repeated hacking attempts most notably when a 2011 SK Communications hack saw the theft of personal data for 35 million users, more than half of South Koreas population. And of course, real name requirements also have the potential to degrade freedom of speech, as pseudonymity and anonymity can be necessary to protect userswho engage in controversial speech, users who face threats and harassment online, dissidents, and others.

Though Musk himself has tweeted his dislike for online cancel culture, his real name policy would likely lead to a growth in its occurrence as users would no longer be able to separate their controversial opinions from their public personas. Despite Musks intentions, real name requirements could in fact further degrade online free speech, as critics of those with controversial opinions would be able to more effectively enact a hecklers veto. As such, it is far too early to conclude what policies Musk will promulgate at Twitter.

Like a politician elected on a platform of slashing taxes, increasing spending, and eliminating the national debt, Musk has publicly expressed popular goals that cannot be simultaneously enacted without a severe redefinition of their scope. Those contradictions also make it difficult to know what Musk will choose to prioritise when his goals inevitably conflict.

Will he restrict freedom of speech despite his public promises in order to root out crypto spam? Will he allow spammers, pornographers, and terrorists to overrun Twitter in pursuit of his free speech ideals?

Yet the same uncertainty can give us cautious optimism. In his time at Tesla, Musk has displayed mental agility and willingness to change plans when necessary for instance when discarding his focus on automation in 2018 to meet production goals. This adaptiveness also means that it is difficult to predict what Musk will truly do before he does it himself.

Many scenarios are possible. For instance, the conflicting nature of Musks promises could force him and his supporters to reckon with the complex nuances of social media policy. Perhaps Musk would conduct a few minor changes (eg, returning Trump to the platform) and declare victory on free speech, leaving Twitters moderation largely untouched. Musk has a track record of overcoming conventional wisdom and surprising the experts after all. But with the importance of Twitter and social media to the modern world, any failures can also have severe effects.

Past failures of social media have led tomass lynchings in India,communal violence in Sri Lanka,genocide in Myanmar, and more. Musk himself has acknowledged some level of social media responsibility for the indirect effects of their decisions on January 6, 2021, he tweeted a meme blaming Facebook for that days attack on the US Capitol.

It is also easy to imagine a scenario where Musks failure to achieve the impossible is blamed on the deep company and employee sabotage. If nothing else, Musks strong criticisms of Twitter employees may have poisoned his relationship with the experienced employees who would be crucial to actually root out the crypto spam he detests so much.

In the end, the nature of liberal free-market democracy relies on the free competition of ideas, in both the political and commercial marketplace. Although Musks promises are contradictory, societal progress relies on a willingness to challenge what is known and venture out into the realm of the unknown. Even if Musk fails, it is likely that he will at least have tried something new in the process and thereby taught us something via his failures.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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What to expect from a Musk-owned Twitter? - Al Jazeera English

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