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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Looking at someone being tortured and your first thought is “must have done something to deserve this”. That’s fucked up.

    And then you immediately tell everybody else this thought. “This guy probably deserved it!” You did not take a couple of seconds to check whether your theory is contradicted by the article. You victimized the guy again with your baseless accusation, but you did not think or care about that.

    Your excuse for this? Can’t accept the IDF soldiers being ontologically evil. Yeah me neither pal, it’s a childish concept. There are actual material reasons for the cruelty. If you want to steal someone’s land, you need to drive them out, and being cruel is a tried and true method to achieve this. No need to invoke good and evil, and no need to invent your own reality.

    But of course, you do not afford the same to Hamas. No elaborate theory-crafting in this instance. There you have no problem declaring them just plain evil.

    What flavor evil are you?







  • gnuhaut@lemmy.mltoEurope@feddit.de2024 Oslo Freedom Forum Videos
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    10 days ago

    So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct.

    It is not. The article is from 2013. Back then, that linked worked and shows exactly what the article is saying: he’s the only staff member listed. That was 8 years after the founding btw.

    And since the guy is clearly rich and has lots of political connections, you’d figure he’d have sued EF by now if there was anything incorrect in that article.


    Oh you launched into a whole defense of working with the far-right. Figures.

    Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too

    Yeah they care about human rights when they can weaponize them to pressure or topple governments that resist exploitation. Which is what the Oslo Freedom Forum is all about.

    Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

    That or he’s pissed that they took his father’s Telco empire, and now he wants to topple the Venezuelan government and get his “birthright” back. We may never know.

    Also you avoided the whole part of in the article about what he was up to before the HRF. That guy was clearly an activist conservative bigot at the very least, and so he naturally evolved into a Mr. Human Rights Guy. He doesn’t just take money from far-right dipshits, he himself is a reactionary.


  • gnuhaut@lemmy.mltoEurope@feddit.de2024 Oslo Freedom Forum Videos
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    https://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451

    Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member. The Oslo Freedom Forum is his brainchild, a confab he has sought to brand as “a Davos for human rights.”

    Founder and only staff member is this son of a Venezuelan oligarch. Sounds like a completely normal human rights group.

    The Electronic Intifada has obtained Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms filed by the Human Rights Foundation that include previously undisclosed information about its donors.

    The forms show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Based in Northern Virginia, Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement.

    Don’t disclose all their big donors. Kinda sus.

    “Since the fund handles money from multiple donors and donors names aren’t disclosed, contributions made through the Donors Capital Fund are difficult to trace,” the Center for American Progress noted in its 2011 landmark report “Fear, Inc.” “Potential donors are required to open a minimum $1 million account to utilize the fund’s services.”

    In 2009, Donors Capital Fund channeled $60 million to various conservative causes and from 2009 through 2011 a whopping $21,318,600 “to groups promoting Islamophobia,” according to the Center for American Progress.

    Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

    But a look at the early stages of Halvorssen’s career, which he spent as a conservative operative combating gay rights initiatives, feminism and multiculturalism on US college campuses, suggests otherwise.

    That checks out.





  • Reportedly the Russian factory workers are being paid quite well. And the lack of quality is just a myth I think. There’s no indication that’s actually true.

    The real reason prices in the West are so high is that there’s a shortage, and shells are supplied overwhelmingly by private contractors, and so the price has multiplied thanks to supply-and-demand market logic.

    You may think the Efficient Free Market Knows Best™, so shouldn’t they increase production? Think again. They’re making record profits right now. Meaningfully increasing production involves building new factories for billions of dollars/euros, which might be ready in a year or two. By then the war will be over and they would have overcapacity, which would be inefficient and prices would plummet. Why would they do that to themselves?

    So they’re in a great negotiating position vis a vis desperate Western governments. They want guaranteed profits, of the same sort they’re making right now, or else the shortage continues.


  • If you had read the article you would know the guy grew up in what was then Poland during the Holodomor, not Ukraine. You probably have double genocide brainworms, and this excuses nothing. (Nazi apologia count: 1)

    You ignored where I quoted how the guy was at the consecration of a fucking Waffen-SS memorial in 1976, you know, at age 50. Instead you keep repeating how young he was (Nazi apologia count: 2)

    You also ignored that the guy is definitely a war criminal, being part of the Waffen-SS in Slovakia, instead you paint him as the victim. Oh how hard it must have been during the Slovakia uprising, for, *checks notes*, the poor Waffen-SS soldier on massacre duty. Come on, you got to be kidding me. (Nazi apologia count: 3)

    Then there’s some bullshit about how “Nazis gave them hope” (do you hear yourself?) and “impossible situation”, apparently that’s a valid excuse to join the Waffen-SS in your book. You know who didn’t join the Waffen-SS? Literally almost every other Ukrainian. (Nazi apologia count: 4, 5)

    Can I see this promotion of multiculturalism and tolerance please? And how is it possible that this very tolerant man put up a Waffen-SS memorial at age 50? I don’t believe you, you’re making this shit up. But I see this fun quote by him about multiculturalism:

    “I kept telling Peter [Lougheed]: ‘broaden the base, involve the ethnics, like Ukrainians and Germans, that no one is enlisting,’” Savaryn said in an interview with the Edmonton Journal, the mouthpiece of Alberta’s Conservatives.

    Or maybe you mean that he was president of the “World Congress of Free Ukrainians”? Because I can already smell the fascist OUN stink coming off of this org. Oh yeah here it is.


  • This article is dumb AF. Dude was a fucking 18 year old infantryman when Nazi Germany surrendered. This article tries to portray him as some high-level Nazi and tries to smear the monarchy by implication.

    Hmm, let’s read the article. (Savaryn is the guy):

    Originally from Ukraine, he served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS – the so-called Galicia division – during World War Two.

    And:

    Savaryn rarely spoke publicly about his wartime experiences, but admitted in an interview to joining the Galicia division in 1944 after much of the unit was encircled and destroyed during the Soviet liberation of Ukraine.

    Rather than fighting to free Ukraine from Soviet rule, the Galicia division retreated deeper into German-occupied Europe. Savaryn confessed to hunting down partisans during Slovakia’s uprising against the Nazis in 1944.

    According to the Military Historical Institute of Slovakia, “If we compare them to regular Wehrmacht units, the way they behaved, the cruelty and the pillage by the Galicia Division was much worse. The Galician Division was the most cruel, the worst of all.

    Just an “18 year old infantryman” my ass. Was he sorry for what he did?

    In his memoirs, Savaryn refers to the Galicia division as “the Knights of the Golden Lion” – a reference to an old Galician kingdom’s coat of arms adopted by the Ukrainian SS men as their unit’s insignia.

    Also pictured in Savaryn’s memoirs is his presence at the consecration of the Galicia division memorial in Edmonton’s St. Michael’s Cemetery in 1976 by Catholic Cardinal and Ukrainian nationalist Josyf Slipyj. The memorial lies close to the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex.

    I guess not.

    Now get fucked with your Nazi apologia.


  • The US has the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is actually stricter. The “Russian law” shit is just framing. Countries have a right to know who’s meddling in their shit, in fact meddling is illegal under international law. The fact that they feel this threatened by a mere transparency law speaks volumes.

    How would you like it if some politicans from other countries (let’s pretend it’s Russia since you seem very concerned about them) came to your capital and threatened “severe consequences” for even daring to want to monitor foreign influence. These protestors are basically demanding to surrender all sovereignty to EU/US/billionaire funded NGOs.

    Imagine living in country where core government functions, like writing laws, regulation, and social services are provided by NGOs which are beholden to foreign donors. No oversight by any local authority and definitely not beholden to the people. This is about as far from democracy as you can get, this will ruin a place.






  • They trade with all of them, so it’s not like they have to choose.

    Germany sells a ton of weapons to Israel, and they also buy weapons and surveillance tech from Israel. German foreign policy is basically copy-pasted from Washington, and they are all-in on the US empire (which the German capitalists benefit(ted) from massively, at least up to recently), so every reason the US has to support Israel also applies to Germany.

    It also allows them to transfer their guilt/responsibility to Muslims, which are convenient punching bags for politicians to use in order to gather votes from the Islamophobic German public. And it makes (made?) them look good: they can pretend to have learned from the Nazi past, and pretend not be antisemites by getting approval from (Zionist) Jews, which, in the past, actually improved their image domestically and internationally (in the all-important West at least). And, like I said before, it gives them an air of moral superiority and righteousness to pretend they’re totally reformed, no longer Nazis, seen the error of their ways (swear to god!). And they can lord that over their enemies, and use it to convince the public to support military aggression in the name of defeating another Hitler, or preventing another Holocaust (which is Germany’s special responsibility, you see!).

    With what Israel is doing right now, and social media showing the utter horror, it no longer looks very good internationally, but domestically, pro-Israel sentiment among the German public (and even more so institutionally and and in the press) is still incredibly high, so saying the most unhinged pro-Israel shit is actually genuinely popular. And with the repression of pro-Palestinian voices that’s not going to change anytime soon either. People are genuinely afraid to speak up, lest they get fired, smeared, blacklisted, or arrested. German language media is like US media from 30 years ago in terms of uncritical pro-Israel views.