Luke > Recent Status Updates

"Some of my neighbors have stopped leaving their homes to avoid getting notice. I heard they're taking old ladies and kids too. Even if they have no idea what they've done."

-Cheongju, Chōsen, Empire of Japan, 1931 (Or perhaps Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 2026)

"But you and I have learned to use the mother tongue only at home or safe among friends, and many men learn not to speak it at all. They're taught that there's no safe place for them."

-BRYN MAWR COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS (1986)

"If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world," [Jan Masaryk, the Czech minister, the son of the founding father of the Czechoslovak Republic] finally said, "I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentleman, God help your souls!"

"... drove through streets decorated not only with the swastika but with the Union Jack..."

"There is no such thing as a moral filter that lets good books through and keeps bad books out."

-'WHOSE LATHE?' (1984)

"Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don't even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure."

-'A LEFT-HANDED COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS' (1983)

This lucrative trade in human freedom was handled by a special organization set up under the S.S. by Heydrich, the "Office for Jewish Emigration," which became the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue permits to Jews to leave the country.

And the roadsign points: Left to Indianapolis
Right to Brazil.
Now there's some choice.

[PLACES NAMES (1981)]

"The British need for tranquility is great. It would be profitable to find out what England would be willing to pay for such tranquility."

-Baron von Weizsaecker, head of the Political Department of the German Foreign Office, Nov 10, 1937

Regimented he was and sometimes terrorized, but so was everyone else—and centuries of regimentation had accustomed him, as it had all other [Americans], to being told what to do.

In making common cause with the lawlessness, indeed the gangsterism, of [ICE], the [US government officials] were putting themselves in a position in which they could never oppose future acts of [ICE] terrorism not only at home but even when they were aimed across the frontiers, even when they were committed against their own members.

No mention of Phillis Wheatley this late into the 19th c., and this book came out in 2012.

On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know during Hitler's life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler.

So GRAmazon just chose to give me activity notifications regarding my status updates involving Nazi Germany but not my ones involving queer love. You can't make this shit up.

Hindenburg made a short speech about the necessity for full co-operation in the interests of the nation, and we were then sworn in. The Hitler cabinet had been formed.

—Franz von Papen, January 30, 1933

*pumps fist* Ah yiss, love me some good narratively credible mutually shared competence in my queer romances.

"The Reich Youth Leader was Baldur von Schirach, a romantically minded young man and an energetic organizer, whose mother was an American and whose great-grandfather, a Union officer, had lost a leg at Bull Run; he told his American jailers at Nuremburg that he had become an anti-Semite at the age of seventeen after reading a book called Eternal Jew, by Henry Ford." Even Shirer can't safely objectify this one.

Whilst everyone continues to coo over PotS, I make my return to Butler with something a tad more complicated.

Worth remembering here, while Shirer fearmongers about 'men of unnatural sexual inclinations', that those marked with the upside down pink triangle were freed from the concentration camps only to be re-incarcerated under Allied-Germany laws.

I speak from Pennsylvania's death row, a bright, shining, highly mechanized hell. In this place, a dark temple to fear, an altar of political ambition, death is a campaign poster, a stepping stone to public office. In this space and time, in this dark hour, how many of us are not on death row?

From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

They demanded the impossible, the only thing that would save them from the systematic destruction of everything around them. They demanded the impossible, and that was the only thing they didn't obtain.

It is the early thirties. President Hoover has passed laws against migrants, particularly Mexicans, with the aim of easing the burden of the Great Depression of 1929 and, simultaneously, procuring the support of certain white communities in the country.

No Shikibu or Shōnagan? Skill issue, and certainly doesn't bode well for the rest of this.

In Pennsylvania, libraries are being closed and university appropriations are being cut so that prisons can be built

Sure hope Shirer doesn't keep up this running 'unemployed behavior' ad hominem commentary throughout the entire book, his argument's awfully emotional as is.

Overloading on the nonfic again, so of course the solution is to add yet another book in the form of a tried and true queer historical fiction writer to the stack, no?

Seeing the setup for the final denoument a mile away and man is it as languriously manipulative as the rest of this.

At bottom, the media is a multibillion dollar industry that serves the interests of the owners, investors, and stockholders, as in every other industry. So-called public interest is, at best, purely incidental.

[...]

In this context, reporters are mere products, purchased personalities packaged for the attainment merely of profit, and, as with any product, they are ultimately expendable.

The light, that strange light I am trying to describe, was falling softly but directly on the eucalyptus leaves and the colorful flowers of the bougainvillea to then filter weightlessly through the windows of the Registro Civil and, once inside, fall on the shining black hair and dark complexions, on the wooden floor and the uncomfortable chairs.

To the Duchess of Somerset belongs the credit of investigating the proper way of cooking guinea-pigs; but Lady Dorothy was one of the first to serve up a dish of these little creatures at luncheon in Charles Street.