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Reposted by Eva Destruction

Dr. Damien P. Williams can't think of a fun display name right n

@wolvendamien.bsky.social

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

Martin Shuster
sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 ·
So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges."
As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime).
We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe).
This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better.
At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

January 30, 2026 at 1:24 AM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

After much trial and error, I have a wee online ordering site for my chocolates, if you're so inclined. #chocolate #food

big-top-sweet-shop.square.site

big-top-sweet-shop.square.site

January 29, 2026 at 3:02 AM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

When the Red Hot Chili Peppers tell you to giveitawaygiveitawaygiveitaway now, you giveitawaygiveitawaygiveitaway now

Random Muser @randommuser.bsky.social · 18d

When the Beastie Boys tell you no sleep till Brooklyn, you don’t sleep till Brooklyn

𝚌𝚛𝚢-𝚌𝚛𝚢 𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚜𝚎 @mandulorian.bsky.social · 18d

When Pixies tell you to gouge away, you gouge away

January 24, 2026 at 6:16 PM

Reposted by Eva Destruction

Mike Luckovich

@mluckovich.bsky.social

January 8, 2026 at 8:30 PM

Reposted by Eva Destruction

Ash Higgins

@ashhiggins.bsky.social

This. Is. Why. I. Paint.

"They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years - to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies - to write that for you." We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, "that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat.
People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via Al video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people."

October 4, 2025 at 4:52 AM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

RIP to Dr. Jane.
I catered a book signing for her. She posted up at the kitchen table, with a full glass of whiskey, and watched the swirl of guests. Always the watcher.
I told her I had a degree in Anthropology, to which she replied, "you're probably better off as a chef". She was sweet & funny.

Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · Oct 1

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

October 1, 2025 at 6:09 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

Wordle 1,565 2/6

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October 1, 2025 at 5:36 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

Please read this whole thread:

Gil Durán @gilduran.com · Sep 24

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

September 25, 2025 at 4:56 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

How the bananas intended for smoothies transformed into banana muffins with coconut crumb is a mystery for the ages.

Banana muffin with coconut crumble on top

Banana muffins with coconut crumble just out of the over. Yes, I over filled them.

September 21, 2025 at 7:39 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast...

Wordle 1,551 2/6

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September 17, 2025 at 8:19 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

Robert Redford was the original Brad Pitt

September 16, 2025 at 4:56 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

Golden Gate

Duchess of Doom @kilagreene.bsky.social · Sep 4

Yee. Haw.

two maps--of the US and the world--with the legend "tell me where you are from using only 2 words"

September 5, 2025 at 6:21 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

As a certified map nerd, I can spend hours on this kind of stuff.

Gary Hornseth @garyhornseth.bsky.social · Aug 30

A website that lets you select a country or state and move it around a Mercator projection map to yield better size comparisons.

thetruesize.com, created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice

Five rescaled maps of Minnesota on a Mercator projection map, covering 1) a large part of northern Greenland, 2) a large part of northern Scandinavia, 3) a part of central Europe, 4) a region of southern India, 5) a region of southeastern Australia.

September 1, 2025 at 1:53 AM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

And to make sure we can differentiate the two, these new units will wear brown shirts.

Adam Schwarz @adamjschwarz.bsky.social · Aug 25

Trump signs an executive order tasking Hegseth to establish "specialised units" within the National Guard to "deal with public order issues" across the US.

Using the US Military against the American public.

August 25, 2025 at 9:35 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

No one needs a fucking 14" screen on their car's console.
Look up and learn to fucking drive.

*This rant brought to you by having to drive in fucking Berkeley, at fucking noon, on a fucking Tuesday, behind 343957 fucking tesla assholes.

August 19, 2025 at 9:13 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

He.Got.Lost.

Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · Aug 6

This is what media sanewashing our insane president looks like, courtesy today of ABC, CNN and The NY Times:

August 6, 2025 at 4:26 AM

Reposted by Eva Destruction

Puff the Magic Hater

@mskellymhayes.bsky.social

He is personally responsible for killing millions of people by taking a chainsaw to programs that provided food and medicine to impoverished people.

Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · Aug 1

Man worth $370 billion says the way to solve poverty is “AI and robotics”

August 1, 2025 at 2:40 AM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

I'm guilty of murder
Of innocent men
Innocent women, innocent children
Thousands of 'em
My planes, my guns
My money, my soldiers
My blood on my hands
It's all my fault....

"I must not think bad thoughts" --X

July 25, 2025 at 5:06 AM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

I'm guilty of murder
Of innocent men
Innocent women, innocent children
Thousands of 'em
My planes, my guns
My money, my soldiers
My blood on my hands
It's all my fault
-- "I must not think bad thoughts" by X

Representative Val Hoyle @repvalhoyle.bsky.social · Jul 25

When Andrew Jackson sent Native Americans on the Trail of Tears, it was a policy choice.

When the British diverted food away from the Irish during The Great Hunger, it was a policy choice.

The starvation & death in Gaza is no different. This is a policy choice & our government is complicit in it.

Gaza suffering man-made mass starvation, says WHO chief

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issues warning, as more than 100 aid groups urge Israel to ease blockade

www.theguardian.com

July 25, 2025 at 4:52 AM

Reposted by Eva Destruction

Tyler, from the Internet

@tylerfromtheinternet.com

Keith Richards now has all the Highlander power

July 22, 2025 at 7:15 PM

Eva Destruction

@evadeestruction.bsky.social

RIP Ozzy. Glad you were celebrated one last time. Always the Price of Darkness. 🤘

Nicola Miller @nicmiller.bsky.social · Jul 22

🦇

www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath frontman and icon of British heavy metal, dies aged 76

The singer, who later became famous on reality TV show The Osbournes, dies less than three weeks after retirement concert

www.theguardian.com

July 22, 2025 at 6:25 PM

Reposted by Eva Destruction

Jehad Abusalim

@jehadabusalim.bsky.social

A detailed and heartbreaking report on how Israel systematically destroyed Gaza’s bookstores, printing presses, and publishing houses. It turned centers of learning and knowledge production into ruins and ashes.

Please share widely.

Institute for Palestine Studies @palestinestudies.bsky.social · Jul 14

Israel destroyed Gaza’s printing presses, publishing houses, and bookstores. These were homes to memory, knowledge, and cultural continuity. Ink and manuscripts turned to ash. Presses were silenced mid-sentence.

Report by Fatma Al Zahraa Sehwail:
www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1657...