91-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Perishes in Mariupol, Ukraine, Basement

 

As she lay dying in a Mariupol basement, freezing and pleading for water, Holocaust survivor Vanda Semyonovna Obiedkova wanted to know only one thing: “Why is this happening?”

Ill and emaciated during the last two weeks of her life, the 91-year-old could not even stand up. She died on April 4, not peacefully of old age in her own bed, but as a victim of the horrific 21st-century war that has engulfed her hometown.

“Mama didn’t deserve such a death,” says Obiedkova’s daughter, Larissa, through tears, just hours after arriving with her family in a safe location.

She had watched helplessly as her mother’s life ebbed away, remaining at her side until the last moment. After her mother passed away, Larissa and her husband risked their lives to bury Obiedkova, amid non-stop shelling, in a public park less than a kilometer from the Azov Sea.

“The whole Mariupol has turned into a cemetery,” says Rabbi Mendel Cohen, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mariupol and the Ukrainian port city’s lone rabbi. Obiedkova and her family had long been active members of Mariupol’s Jewish community, the matriarch regularly receiving medical aid from Cohen’s synagogue.

“Vanda Semyonovna lived through unimaginable horrors,” the rabbi says. “She was a kind, joyous woman, a special person who will forever remain in our hearts.”

Full story here

Poland is Bad No Matter What It Does: Washington Post

 

Poland is bad no matter what it does. 

Poland has gained admiration around the world for its help to Ukrainian refugees. 

Camp Anti-Poland is uncomfortable with this, and so criticism must follow. 

Mateusz Mazzini in the Wa Po says that Polish patriotism will interfere with the education of Ukrainian children stuck in Poland while their country is at war. 

Mazzini touches on important and complex matters, and that's good. 

The problem is, his only point, and the Washington Post, his publisher's only point, is to bash Poland, not to spark an intelligent and compassionate discussion on a difficult topic. 

I'd love to see such a discussion. It won't emerge from Western mainstream media, which, for its own reasons, as explored in my book Bieganski, is largely anti-Polish. 

Mazzini is writing about refugee schoolchildren; the Washington Post is publishing on refugee schoolchildren, but neither care about refugee schoolchildren. They just want to use refugee schoolchildren to bash Poland. And that is wicked. 

Excerpts from the article: 

Now, with a massive influx of Ukrainian students in Polish schools, this historical revisionism has suddenly become awkward. One of the key sources of Ukrainian national identity was a serf rebellion against Polish nobility who had reduced Ukrainian peasants to near-slavery and forced educated Ukrainians to learn and speak Polish in the areas of Ukraine it controlled. That is hard to reconcile with the stories of Polish virtue and victimhood that the current Polish government prefers.

On the other hand, during World War II, Ukrainian nationalists tried to exterminate ethnic Poles in the Wołyń area, killing some 50,000 Polish inhabitants. Poles retaliated, although on a much smaller scale, murdering a few thousand Ukrainians. The Wołyń massacre was a delicate and difficult topic for decades in Polish-Ukrainian relations, also because the Soviet domination over both countries blocked any meaningful debate about it. Now it could become a major point of contention, as PiS-reformed curriculums, again, emphasize Polish heroism and the tragedy of Polish victims, leaving little room to even discuss the Ukrainian perspective.

The more fundamental problem is that the official Polish version of history is based around excluding rather than including non-Poles. It’s possible to push such a history in a country that just has one major national group within its borders. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, Poland has two nations rather than one for the first time since World War II.

Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism and White Nationalism

 

Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism and White Nationalism

Richard Weikart's New Book Cuts Through Political Manipulation of History

 

Suffering is a commodity. Two recent events demonstrated this. On March 27, 2022, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Many prominent African Americans, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wanda Sykes, condemned Smith's choice to resort to violence. Race hustlers, though, depicted Will Smith as a victim of white supremacy. The Guardian ran a piece calling reaction to Will Smith an example of "downright racist … anti-blackness … inequality in plain sight." "Race scholar" and Loyola Marymount University Professor Maia Niguel Hoskin wrote that the slap "is about … White supremacist culture designed to police the behavior of Blacks." Others focused on Jada Pinkett Smith as a victim. "How a black woman’s hair grows out of her head has been a constant battle in this country … while at the same time celebrating white women for fitting your styles … Humiliating a black woman fighting for equality is not a ha-ha moment. Making fun of a black woman a week after we saw Ketanji Brown Jackson’s ambush" proves that "racism always finds a way," wrote columnist Jeneé Osterheldt.

 

A similar process of victim-mongering occurred after Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the Supreme Court. My Facebook page was flooded with memes depicting Jackson as a helpless Little Match Girl facing off against big, scary, white male dragons.

 

In fact, of course, Smith is worth an estimated $350 million. He is one of the most profitable and popular film stars who has ever lived. Jackson is the child of two professionals. She attended Harvard and married surgeon Patrick Jackson, a Boston Brahmin and descendant of a Continental Congress delegate and also a relative of Oliver Wendell Holmes and former House Speaker Paul Ryan. She is a millionaire. White male Joe Biden guaranteed her elevation by vowing, in a political promise to help him win an election, to nominate only black women to the SCOTUS. Ilya Shapiro, a white man, tweeted that Sri Srinavasan, an Indian immigrant, was the best qualified person to be the next SCOTUS nominee. Shapiro was suspended from his job for this tweet. Neither alleged "white male privilege" nor the first amendment guarantee of free speech protected Shapiro from workplace retaliation for expressing his opinion. Senate questions for Jackson were brief and mild compared to the trials-by-fire endured by conservative nominees Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

 

Slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy are all too real and unspeakably evil. But rushing to attribute criticism of Will Smith or the Senate questioning of Ketanji Brown Jackson to past evils is not warranted by the facts. People made those connections because they commodify suffering to gain political ends. In this approach, suffering belongs exclusively to African Americans. Race hustlers are currently depicting war-ravaged Ukrainians as enjoying white privilege, as Joy Reid did in her March 7, 2022 broadcast.

 

Evil, like suffering, is also commodified. Powerbrokers rush to monopolize the evil Nazis committed to serve their own narrative ends. This commodification and monopolizing of evil interferes with our desire to understand.  

 

Americans have been struggling for ninety years in their effort to tell the Nazi story accurately. This effort is recorded, inter alia, in Peter Novick's 2000 book, The Holocaust in American Life, Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, the This American Life episode "Before It Had a Name" and the documentary "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust." It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when Hollywood moguls were fearful of making accurate films addressing Nazism. There was a time when Holocaust survivors and those who recorded their stories, both in the US and in Israel, were ignored and silenced. In the Soviet Bloc, the unique victimization of Jews under Nazism was suppressed to near invisibility. There was a time, even after the publication of Mein Kampf, when mainstream American and British magazines focused on the interior decorating of Hitler's homes. In these articles, Hitler was referred to as "charming."

 

Protesters Turn Pond Near Russian Embassy into a "Pool of Blood."

 

Source

Thanks to Jerzy for sending this in. 

From the above-linked article: 

In Vilnius, a "blood pond" appeared next to the Russian embassy. This is an expression of opposition to Russia's aggression against Ukraine and the recent events of, among others, in the city of Bucha. Previously, the Russian Embassy in Vilnius had to change its address to ul. Ukraine's heroesThe Russian Embassy in Vilnius is located near two ponds. One of them has become a reservoir full of "blood". As an expression of opposition to Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the Lithuanians organized an action aimed at "drawing the world's attention to the invasion and the genocide committed," said Paulius Vaitekėnas, a representative of the Vilnius City Hall.The action was agreed with environmentalists and services. "Bloody Pond" in Vilnius was created using a special paint. It is harmless to the environment and has no adverse effects on plants or animals, as reported by the authorities.

Kicked Off of Facebook for a 25-Word Description of the Katyn Massacre

 I was kicked off of Facebook for a 25-word description of the Katyn Massacre. You can see the "offensive" post, below. 

Facebook friend Sue Knight remarked on the similarity of the execution methods invading Russians used against some Ukrainians in Bucha, and the Katyn Massacre. 

I agreed with Sue and commented that, yes, the methods were the same. I was immediately kicked off of Facebook. 

If there were any way to contact Facebook, I would ask you to contact them and protest. But there appears to be no way to contact Facebook. 

It greatly disturbs me that a 25-word description of the Katyn Massacre is enough to get the poster kicked off of Facebook.