Four young Germans beat The Ecke, the SPD's top candidate in elections for the European Parliament in Saxony, so badly in Dresden on May 3, that he had to be treated in the hospital for a broken cheekbone and eye socket. He had been out posting campaign posters. The shockwaves are still being felt, even as far away as Berlin.In an unusual step, Faeser called for a special meeting of state interior ministers last Tuesday evening at 6 p.m., where they discussed improving security measures for politicians.
The interior ministers didn't even have the chance to log in to their video conference when, at around 4:15 p.m., a man hit Berlin Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey (SPD) over the head with a blunt object that had been wrapped in a bag. She had been visiting a public library in Berlin's Neukölln district.
At 6:50 p.m., the ministers still hadn't logged out of their conversation when the Green Party politician Yvonne Mosler got attacked and spat upon while putting up posters in Dresden.
Is there any way of stopping all this?
There have been numerous attacks on politicians and volunteer election workers in recent days. Even the running camera of a Deutsche Welle film team that accompanied Mosler failed to deter the perpetrators. Society, it appears, has reached a new level of brutalization. Berlin politician Giffey has called it a "fair-game culture."
These are acts that are usually only in the headlines or public consciousness for a short amount of time. Taken together, though, they act like a corrosive solution: Drop by drop, act by act, they erode democratic structures. Will they corrode to the point that they threaten to collapse?
"Republican Gov. Greg Abbott... pardoning Daniel Perry, the former Army sergeant convicted in the fatal #shooting of a protester during a #BlackLivesMatter march...
“#Nakba and #Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, both mean ‘catastrophe’ in English, and because both are rooted in the 1940s, they are often equated or conflated.”
“Some Palestinians have chosen violence in response, and that’s tragic—a moral error, in my opinion—just as it’s a tragedy and moral error that some Jewish Israelis have turned their pain and fear into ethnic violence and hatred.”
After 75 years of failure, one would imagine that a people would learn what works and what doesn’t, both from their own experience, as well as the experience of others.
As happened 30 and 50 years before, in the months after #CampDavid and well into the #SecondIntifada, the rhetoric was as militant as ever, and triumphalist too.
Less-moderate voices hoped that violence could replicate #Hezbollah’s success in forcing a full #Israeli withdrawal from #Lebanon without Israel receiving anything in return
Rachel Maddow discusses her research into fascism, disinformation, and propaganda.
It's not merely an attempt to foster animosity towards a particular group. Fascist disinformation is to erode our democracy by convincing us that a specific group is perilous, untrustworthy, and should be disenfranchised.
What has transpired since 2016 with the former president is not just the vilification of ethnic minorities. He, along with Fox propaganda and other purveyors of disinformation, have escalated lies and disinformation into a violent domestic terrorist movement and a MAGA-driven fascist party. The presence of Republican fascists is a reality now.
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Fascism ... is about getting us to undo #democracy and we shouldn't stand for it.
A Green party politician in Dresden has been #attacked just days after another candidate was assaulted and hospitalized by a group of youths. It comes as the interior minister hosted an #emergency summit to discuss how to prevent political #violence amid rising threats against politicians.
“Violence” in medicine: necessary and unnecessary, intentional and unintentional
Johanna Shapiro, 2018. Phil. Ethics, and Hum. in Med.
"I further suggest possible explanations for the origins of these kinds of violence in physicians, including the fear of suffering and death in relation to vicarious trauma and the consequent concept of “killing suffering”; as well as why patients might be willing to accept such violence directed toward them."
"As has been noted, structural violence injures some, but protects and benefits others. Acknowledging that one is implicated in the suffering of others is a painful realization. To safeguard themselves, many physicians might prefer to avoid it."
"When physicians are unable to honestly confront and acknowledge suffering; when out of fear they deny their privilege and the way in which healthcare systems often disenfranchise the patients they are trying to serve; when they inappropriately indulge in violent language out of self-protection and a desire to establish a heroic, invincible image – all these result in harm to patients, families, staff, and colleagues."