From now on, I won’t be able to update this blog anymore
I don’t have any more interest to update this blog about Malaysia, especially with recent events and confusing times as covering them would be controversial. I wanted to do a change of something, sadly the idea to change for this blog is pretty much gone. The days of hype, the days you guys giving me submissions, thank you for those 4 years of making this blog happy.
In other words, I will be doing a new blog, a blog of me writing stuff like stories and more. Maybe that blog will have some facts about Malaysia.
Its mean, admin Bears, the one running this blog! Guess who has survived the year of SPM 2019?
Man, how long have I abandon this blog, 2 years? You guys do really love to reblog from time to time huh.
You must be wondering, what is gonna happen to this blog. Are they gonna have any updates later on? Am I gonna abandon this blog from now on? The answer is, honestly I don’t know.
Not many useless country facts bloggers are active anymore like in the past. We’re now busy with our lives and most of the time we chat through whatsapp. At the same time, I wanted to expand my creativity of writing and maybe photography as a blogger with the side of spreading the Malaysian culture to the world.
Plus, with Malaysian politics going hell, I’d doubt I want to insert more Malaysian Political memes anymore without being back lashed again. I, at least I want to blog something to fill in the free time.
So, what do you guys think about the fate of this blog. I might revamp the entire blog in order to fit the current year. But bear with me for changes.
Today, 16 May, is European Romani Resistance Day, commemorating the Roma people who fought the fascists during World War II. The date was chosen due to a Holocaust survivor stating that on 16 May 1944, there was a rebellion of Roma detainees at the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp. However subsequent research by the Auschwitz Museum discovered that this date was most likely incorrect. It was actually in early April that a number of Roma prisoners refused orders from the SS to leave to work in Germany. Instead a Polish prisoner was ordered to make a list of Roma able to work to be transported later. By 2 August 1944, those Roma able to work had been transported elsewhere, when the SS came to take the others to the gas chambers. The prisoners armed themselves with crowbars and fought back, but were eventually overcome and gassed. Pictured: a Romani resistance fighter during World War II https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1717878201730656/?type=3
On this day, 12 May 1940, 20-year-old Austrian Jewish Edinburgh University student Edgar Lion was arrested by British police. His friends wouldn’t see him or hear from him for years. Lion was taken to a police station, then shipped to the Isle of Man alongside thousands of other Jewish detainees where they were locked up in hotels surrounded by barbed wire. He was then taken to a dockyard and told to choose between two ships. He chose the one on the left, and so was taken to Canada – the other would end up in Australia. In Canada, Lion was then interned alongside 2,300 other Jewish refugees in internment camps alongside German Nazis who had also been interned. Here the refugees were forced to perform harsh and boring physical labour for almost no pay: in Lion’s camp, Sherbrooke, detainees could choose to make fishing nets or socks. The refugees were held in camps in appalling and unsafe conditions for nearly three years. Learn more about struggles of Jewish people in Britain at this time in our podcast episodes 35-37 about the anti-fascist 43 Group: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/02/17/e35-37-the-43-group/ Pictured: Jewish detainees making fishnets https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1714495302068946/?type=3
This is a summarized post for those who want to be informed. Obviously it does not cover everything, but it is in a simple format and highlights important points and is easy to understand.
Everyone has to do their own research. Not everything will be handed to you. There are many websites and sources out there, you have to look for them. The issues between Israel and Palestine is not an easy cut deal, there are many different factors that play into everything that is happening right now.
To all my followers who are citizens of the EU and of voting age, please consider signing and sharing this EU citizens’ initiative requesting that the European Commission stop upholding intellectual property rights regarding COVID vaccines and treatments and make them a public good instead.
In order for the European Commission to read these proposals this initiative needs a lot more people signing that it has now, so every person counts.
Please reblog if you support this. Likes don’t mean much on this hellsite, and they especially mean nothing for this sort of thing!
screenshot taken: 27/04/2021 (Belgium is THE ONLY COUNTRY that reached the goal yet!!)
The nazi Condor Legion destroyed Gernika on a market day following the orders of Francisco Franco. The town was full of people from the surrounding areas who attended the market as well as the refugees come from Durango after the bombing of that town.
The city was burning for 3 days and 3 nights, inspiring Pablo Picasso to paint his masterpiece “Guernica”.
The town had no strategic value, and was bombed to strike the Basque army psychologically since the town guarded the Tree of Gernika, an almost sacred symbol for Basque people, a representation of the Basque old laws and identity.
Despite the horror, when dust settled, the fascists discovered that the tree stood standing. Just like Basque people.
To all my followers who are citizens of the EU and of voting age, please consider signing and sharing this EU citizens’ initiative requesting that the European Commission stop upholding intellectual property rights regarding COVID vaccines and treatments and make them a public good instead.
In order for the European Commission to read these proposals this initiative needs a lot more people signing that it has now, so every person counts.
Please sign if you are a European Union citizen, pass it on to your friends and family, share on other social media, and whether you are an EU citizen or not please reblog (liking does nothing on this site, reblogs help )
On this day, 25 April 1974, Portugal’s right-wing Estado Novo dictatorship was overthrown by a military coup by low ranking army officers who had formed the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA). When officers loyal to the dictatorship ordered the troops to open fire, a mutiny by rank-and-file soldiers effectively prevented a counter-revolution. The events would become known as the Carnation Revolution, as few shots were fired and people adorned troops with red and white carnations which were in season and being widely sold on the streets at the time. The collapse of the regime was then followed by a working class uprising which lasted over 18 months. Urban workers took over their workplaces and rural workers took over land and farmed it collectively. The key factor in the unpopularity of the regime was the long-running colonial war against independence movements in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Principe which had been raging since anti-colonial uprisings in the early 1960s. After the revolution these former colonies all soon achieved independence. Learn more in our podcast episodes 41-42: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/08/13/e41-42-the-portuguese-revolution/ Books and other items commemorating the events are available in our online store: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/portuguese-revolutionhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1702294433289033/?type=3
TheCarnation Revolution (Portuguese: Revolução dos Cravos), also referred to as the 25 April (Portuguese: 25 de Abril), was a military coup began on 25 April 1974 in Lisbon, Portugal, and which overthrew the dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo. The revolution started as a military coup organized by the Movimento das Forças Armadas (Armed Forces Movement, MFA), composed of military officers who opposed the regime, but the movement was soon coupled with an unanticipated and popular campaign of civil resistance. This movement would lead to the fall of the Estado Novo and the withdrawal of Portugal from its African colonies.
The name “Carnation Revolution” comes from the fact no shots were fired and when the population started descending the streets to celebrate the end of the dictatorship and war in the colonies, carnation flowers were put into the muzzles of rifles and on the uniforms of the army.
The Portuguese celebrate the national holiday of Freedom Day (Portuguese: Dia da Liberdade) on 25 April every year to celebrate these events.
Today is Armenian genocide remembrance day. On april 24, 1915 started mass deportations of hundreds of Armenian intelectuals and community leaders, who were (most of the time) eventually killed. Armenian women and children were systematically r//ed and forcibly converted into islam. There were more than 2 milion Armenians in ottoman empire prior to ww1, 1,5 milion of them were viciously killed. Three millennia of Armenian civilaziation in eastern Anatolis was fully destroyed. Turkey today refuses to acknowledge genocides of christian minorities in early 20th century.
Do you know that mass ethnic cleansing of Armenians in ottoman empire inspired Lemkin to coin the term ‘genocide’?
Last year in september azerbaijan allied with turkey initiated a war against Armenia. More that 5000 Armenians were murdered, thousands of Armenia families had to live their ancestrial land to not get murdered. There are hundreds of vids on internet where armenian p.o.w.s are tortured. Recently azerbaijan opened a “museum” displayind dead or dying Armenians and kids were allowed to visit it.
A friendly reminder that both the Irish potato famine and the Scottish highland clearances were little more than masked genocide in the name of the British crown that fundamentally changed the culture, language, politics, and wealth distribution of both countries in ways that can still be felt today. So I’m not saying Prince Philip was a terrible person but I am saying there’s a fucking reason why the Scots and Irish are probably digging out the good whisky tonight.
On this day, 9 April 1945, Georg Elser, a factory worker and folk musician who tried single-handedly to kill Hitler, was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp. Working in a weapons factory and then a quarry, he gradually built up an arsenal of stolen explosives, which in 1939 he planted in a pub in Munich, which he knew Hitler visited every year on 8 and 9 November to celebrate the Nazi putsch of 1923. Unbeknownst to Elser, that year Hitler left early and the bomb missed him by minutes, instead killed six senior Nazis, as well as accidentally a waitress. Elser was later arrested and tortured, but insisted he acted alone and refused to give up any other names, other than one of a communist who had already died. He was sent to the concentration camps, where he was killed on the orders of Himmler just a few days before their liberation. Learn more about German resistance to Nazism in our podcast episode 4: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/04/04/wch4-anti-nazi-youth-movements-in-world-war-ii/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1690238627827947/?type=3
On this day, 9 April 1948, the Deir Yassin massacre took place when around 120 fighters from the Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (content note: sexual violence). Over 100 to 150 or more Palestinians, including many women and children, were killed, among them people who had been decapitated, disembowelled, mutilated and raped. The incident led to many Palestinians fleeing in terror, and was a key event in the ethnic cleansing of the area, during which over 700,000 of the 900,000 Palestinian Arab residents of what became Israel were expelled or forced to flee from their homes. Learn more about the history of Zionism in our podcast episodes 17-18: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/12/16/e17-anti-zionism-in-israel-part-1/ Pictured: Zionist military briefing at Deir Yassin https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1690713431113800/?type=3
Today, our world lost a feminist icon. Nawal El Sadaawi was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician. In her book The Hidden Face of Eve, she described how she was subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), which she fought against ever since, because it was a tool to oppress women. FGM was only in 2008 banned in Egypt.
Nawal was born in 1931 as the second child in a family that had both progressive and traditional views. Nawal was circumcised herself when she was just 6 years old, yet her father also insisted that his children got an education. Nawal did realise at a young age that girls were regarded as less valuable than boys. When both her parents died young, Nawal was left with the care of a large family.
In 1955, Nawal graduated as a medical doctor from Cairo University. She specialized in psychiatry. She later became director of public health for the Egyptian government but had to leave this position when she published her non-fiction book Women and Sex in 1972. In this book, she railed against FGM and the sexual oppression of women.
While the government continued to work against her (for example shutting down the magazine Healthwhich she founded), Nawal never stopped her fight for women’s rights. In 1975, she published Woman at Point Zero (a novel based on the true story of a woman on death row) and in 1977, Nawal published the book The Hidden Face of Eve, where she talked both about her own experience with FGM and her experience as a village doctor witnessing sexual abuse, prostitution and honour killing.
In 1987, Nawal was arrested as part of a group dissidents under president Sadat. She spent 3 months in prison. When president Sadat was assassinated, she was released. They then censored her work and her books were banned. Because of her fight for women’s rights, in which she didn’t shy away from conservative believers, she received death threats, was taken to court and later went into exile in the USA. There, she continued her fight for feminism.
In 2018, a BBC presenter suggested that she tone down her criticism, to which she replied
“No. I should be more outspoken, I should be more aggressive, because the world is becoming more aggressive, and we need people to speak loudly against injustices. I speak loudly because I am angry. ”
While she gained much international recognition for her fight for women’s rights , she never got recognition from her home country Egypt, something she really dreamed off. In 1996, she returned to Egypt.
Very interesting to read: this interview she gave: Saadawi, Nawal El, and Adele S. Newson-Horst. “Conversations with Nawal El Saadawi.” World Literature Today, vol. 82, no. 1, 2008, pp. 55–58.
