So tired of people pretending there was some magical fairy land Jews could’ve fled to in the face of exile and annihilation so they can avoid cognitive dissonance.
idk who needs to hear this but not every time someone is killed in an armed conflict it is a war crime. not every war crime is a genocide. and that kid is not a war criminal. that is a child soldier. And this is probably an unpopular take but these terms have meanings that get increasingly watered down so maybe do not toss them around that lightly.
israeli forces shot and killed another palestinian journalist. yes, again. it’s ghufran hamed warasneh, who was 31 years old and had just started her job a few days before israel shot her in the chest and killed her. and yes, they did also attack her funeral.
Yes it is true. Immigrant detention camps are “gassing people” (spraying disinfectants in unventialeted areas of these camps). These chemicals cause skin burns and severe eye damage. (sourcesxx)
I rewatched part of the dream sequence from “Jungle Moon”, and it really paints Pink in a worse light now that everything else has been revealed.
In the dream, Dr. Maheswaran/Yellow Diamond explicitly states, “Yes, I know there’s organic life on the surface [of the Jungle Moon]. It’s an invasion. … You will stick to my orders, and you will destroy them!”
Fast-forward to “Now We’re Only Falling Apart”. Rose says, “All this life that’s been growing wild here on Earth… none of it will survive my invasion. We’re not creating life from nothing; we’re taking life and leaving nothing behind.”
Pink heard Yellow say that invasions inherently bring about destruction. Pink should have known colonizing Earth would entail the destruction of life.
Even if you want to argue that Pink didn’t know about Earth’s organic life (which she should have), she should have known it was a potential hazard. In fact, she did know this, and she went ahead with Earth colonization anyway.
Pink’s realization isn’t treated like a moment of “only now do I see that it’s bad to commit genocide”; it’s treated as a moment of “this is brand-new information, and I wouldn’t have undertaken colonization had I known”.
Now, it’s possible Pearl was an unreliable narrator in “Now We’re Only Falling Apart”. The notion that she was is substantiated by “Can’t Go Back”.
However, I don’t think that’s what the narrative is going for. I think they’re really going for this idea that Pink was just naïve and didn’t mean any harm.
In essence, Pink Diamond went to Earth knowing she might have to commit genocide. She went anyway.
Remember the episode “The Test”?? Where it turns out that one of the first adventures the gems had together with Steven was actually the test they prepared to see if he was ready to join them?
Okay, the thing is: what if everything that happened in the show was just the test the DIAMONDS made for Pink Diamond? What if Steven gathers them together on a party and convinces them to turn back the corrupted gems and the diamonds burst out in laughter and finally tell him oh, Pink, all of that was just a test, we wanted to see if you can do it?? Then it turns out that Homeworld is actually a place where everyone lives freely and happily and feels comfortable with each other and all that happened was just a huge stage show the diamonds put to prepare Pink Diamond for her own times of rule?
Consider:
It would fit right within this huge parallel between Pink Diamond and Steven the crew is making right now
Actions of the pearls are a very important indication imo - like if they were really slaves they are painted to be, they would obviously feel more uncomfortable and the relationship between Pink Diamond and our Pearl would be a very uncomfortable inequal slave/master romance - but it would all make sense if Homeworld is actually a place of joy and freedom! Pearl actually never was Pink Diamond’s slave, that’s why she was able to fall in love with her in a healthy way the show portrays it in. That would also explain why Pearl’s comment in the last episode - “Im only here because Im bringing your things and I am one of your things” - is so dismissive and not in any way how a real person who used to be a slave/thing in this place would say it. I would be tired too of having to act for thousands of years like I was ever an unhappy slave, she’s just done by now.
The gag order!! Of course love of Pearl’s life wouldn’t put a gag order like that on her, indicating that she actually sees her as nothing more than a thing she can impose orders on however she pleases. It was just a thing Pearl and the Diamonds came up with after Rose chose to be with Greg to explain why Pearl didn’t tell Steven that he was Pink Diamond immediately, they wanted to make the test harder for Steven!
The positive portrayal of the Diamonds. We are obviously supposed to identify with them and see them as people and there is zero awareness of the fact that they are also ruthless dictators in the show’s portrayal of them. That’s because they really aren’t - it’s just a part of the test they try to make Steven face. But sometimes it’s very hard to act like this when you were just happily singing with your lover Blue Peal and talking to her about how much you love her and then suddenly you have to act like she is your slave - that’s why Blue Diamond is always so sad. She just wants to be able to tell Pink already about her (equal and nice) marriage with Blue Pearl!
And the most important point: considering all the stupid choices they made so far, I think this is a very plausible theory! Share your thoughts!
Listen, I’m not in the greatest headspace right now, so I’m probably going to miss some points I want to make here, but:
“it turns out that Homeworld is actually a place where everyone lives freely and happily“ Homeworld would still be an oligarchy even if everything else were a test for Pink. Dunno how freedom can proliferate under an oligarchy.
“Pearl actually never was Pink Diamond’s slave, that’s why she was able to fall in love with her in a healthy way the show portrays it in.” The show literally shows Pearl demanding her destruction when she realises she’s been acting out of line by having a crush on Rose Quartz.
There is absolutely nothing healthy about how Pearl fell for Pink/Rose.
“… if [the Pearls] were really slaves they are painted to be, they would obviously feel more uncomfortable….” how do you know what the Pearls feel? have you ever heard of emotional labour? the fact that they can generally keep their composure (except when pushed by their Diamonds) doesn’t mean that they’re at all comfortable with their position.
“Of course love of Pearl’s life wouldn’t put a gag order like that on her, indicating that she actually sees her as nothing more than a thing she can impose orders on however she pleases.“ Or maybe the dictator put a gag order on her slave.
“That’s because [the Diamonds] really aren’t [dictators].” We saw how devastated Jungle Moon was after Yellow’s colonization. she did, in fact, do bad things.
The last point with Blue Diamond/Blue Pearl—what? Is that supposed to be funny? Because I’ve got to tell you, it’s not.
In all, this theory is outright offensive on multiple levels.
I probably spend more time thinking about genocide than I should. But, if epigenetic inheritance is a thing, and it looks like it might be, then it’s coded into me, passed down from my Holocaust surviving grandparents.
When I was at Oberlin during the High Holidays, our Hillel would often add “folk prayers” to the service. I remember one addition to the “Al Chet,” the recitations of sins, which bothered me immensely. We asked for atonement for both the “sin of war” and for the “sin of aggressive war.” That didn’t sit right with me.
In what context is defensive war a sin? Saving the lives of your own people? I argued and debated about it with whoever would listen. My grandparents survived the Holocaust because the Nazi war machine was defeated by allied forces. If there were no armies to liberate the camps I wouldn’t exist. Is it a sin to stand by during times of genocide and do nothing?
As I began digging into books and articles about subsequent genocides the same questions haunted me. What would we do about the next one? The answer, repeatedly, was nothing.
I had to write a paper about the Cambodian Genocide in which 2 million plus people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge for not fitting a certain ideal. Then I read about the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda in which close to one million were murdered in a matter of months while the UN withdrew. The first genocide that occurred when I was old enough to feel I could do something about it was in Darfur and I went to DC and I marched and I wrote an article and nothing. We couldn’t even make the front page of the newspaper.
I don’t claim to be an expert on what’s occurring on the ground now in Syria. What’s clear is that half a million were dead when the UN stopped counting. We’ve known about this for years and done basically nothing.
There are all sorts of reasons not to intervene. We don’t want to get drawn into open conflict with Russia. We’re not sure of its efficacy. We don’t want this to turn into another Iraq.
And when I hear that last excuse I think back to Cambodia, because that occurred right after we pulled out of another costly, unpopular, unjustifiable war in Vietnam. We knew it was happening. Dith Prang and Sidney Shanberg gave us incontrovertible evidence. And the country, tired from war, did nothing, even though we in the United States were in large part responsible for the power vacuum that gave rise to the Khmer Rouge.
And Rwanda? That occurred after America pulled out of Somalia after the Battle of Mogadishu didn’t go as planned. Romeo Dallaire warned the UN what was going on and no one did a thing.
And now? If we do anything in Syria it will be late. Very late. Millions of refugees have already fled and I doubt many will return. What do they have to return to? Assad will likely still be in power and, if anything, will be even MORE brutal and oppressive to any perceived threat, real or imagined. And removing Assad will be difficult if not impossible with a nuclear armed and ornery Russia backing him. I see a lot of pithy memes going around about how expensive war is, but I keep thinking back to the problem of a war weary country coming out of an unjust war being too tired to engage in one that might just actually be just.
If Pearl Harbor weren’t attacked would the US have intervened? Would the Germans have won in Europe with essentially a one-front war against the Soviet Union? And what if Hitler didn’t double-cross Stalin and half of Poland were left in German hands? Would my grandparents and other survivors have stood a chance?
Samantha Power called Genocide a Problem From Hell and she’s dead on. Not just about the crimes against humanity, but about how to get mobilized to actually fight it. How do you fight it without doing ugly things like “regime change?” Can you do it without destabilizing the region further? Will imperial geopolitics ever allow the prevention of genocide not turn into a proxy war between larger imperialist powers?
I have no idea. All I know is that with this “problem from hell” If the choice were mine to make, I’d rather be damned for doing than not doing.
happy indigenous history month everybody go block herald_to_the_dark, dashes instead of underscores, for being a racist asshole! images under the cut, no archive links because you need to be logged in to see their blog and the archive websites hate that
