ICYMI: Douglas Todd: Hate crimes against Catholics almost tripled. Do Canadians care?

2022/10/20 Leave a comment

The Canadian Catholic church and its members, many of whom are Indigenous or immigrants, were last year buffeted by a horrendous 260 per cent spike in hate crimes.
Of note, from a small base of 42 in 2020 to 155 in 2021. Suspect largely due to the discovery of possible unmarked graves and greater attention to the Catholic Church’s involvement in residential schools:
Catholics were subject to a far higher escalation in police-reported hate incidents than any other religious or racial group, according to a Statistics Canada study.

Source: Douglas Todd: Hate crimes against Catholics almost tripled. Do Canadians care?

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Ancient world’s multicultural secrets revealed by handwriting analysis of scrolls

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Advanced techniques to analyze the Dead Sea Scrolls and Eastern papyri are revealing vibrant secrets about daily life in the ancient world.

Around 2,100 years ago, a Judaean scribe deftly swirled a stylus to dab the final strokes of black ink onto a piece of parchment.

His work, a copy of the biblical Book of Isaiah from the Old Testament, would soon be complete in the form of a seven-meter-long scroll. But was he finishing his own work—or someone else’s?

Though the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 70 years ago, sophisticated computing techniques are now revealing the invisible hands that wrote the famous texts and Professor Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen thinks he knows the answer.

“My simple idea was to use paleography—their handwriting,” he said.

Paleography is the scientific study of ancient handwritten texts. The goal of the paleographer is to identify the location and time of writing. Texts come on parchment but also pottery, metal, cloth and even casual graffiti as discovered on the walls of Pompeii.

Muscle movements

“The way you write, the way I write, is very person-specific,” Prof Popović said. “It is your muscle movements and it is very individual.”

Working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert Prof Lambert Schomaker and other team members as part of the HandsandBible project, he developed new machine learning computing methods to analyze ancient handwriting digitally.

“The beauty of the technology we have now is that you can make high spectral images and go down to the pixel level, and then make all sorts of calculations which you can boil down to movement,” Prof Popović said. “Through their handwriting, we can, as it were, shake hands with them.”

Researchers spent many long hours painstakingly tracing Hebrew letters to teach a computer model what was ink and what was not. The results were 3D models of manuscript texts that include more than 5,000 dimensions of calculations.

Isaiah scroll

Back in a lab in the Netherlands, Maruf Dhali, one of the team members, was puzzled by the results the computer model was producing.

It showed that, roughly halfway through the text of the Isaiah scroll, the handwriting changed enough to indicate another scribe took over. While statistically significant, it was barely perceptible visually.

The researchers considered other options. Could he have changed his pen? Or had he perhaps stopped writing and picked up again much later?

“They write so alike, but the most likely explanation really is that there are two different scribes,” said Prof Popović. “One scribe is so good at imitating the other that, with the naked human eye, you can’t really see that.”

While scholars had previously debated whether or not there were multiple writers of the Isaiah scroll, this was the first robust evidence that two scribes had produced it.

Could the AI be wrong? Less likely, according to Prof Popović.

“The human paleographer, the expert, is much more of a black box,” he said. “We don’t really know what goes on in our minds. Of course, we have this expertise, but we cannot explain all of our paleographic reasoning.”

By using a trained computer, he says, paleographers are challenged to better explain the observations they make with human eyes.

Time machine

The ability to drill down to the handwriting of individual scribes and connect them with various works opens up a whole new way for researchers to look at texts, as well as understand their scribal culture.

For instance, there is evidence that some Dead Sea Scroll scribes were just learning how to write. A scribe was discovered who wrote both Hebrew manuscripts and Aramaic (an which was the lingua franca of the Middle East 2-3 000 years ago) ones, giving researchers new insights into their language abilities.

“Another example is how we look at those scribes—is there also some individuality or space for them to maneuver?” said Prof Popović. “We see there is variation there, so they were not just slavish robots copying what they were told to copy.”

With this paleographic approach, these scrolls even act like a sort of time machine.

“We can see a little part of what was the cultural evolution that became the Bible,” he said. “It’s the same sort of scribal culture. The way they write here was also how they worked two to three centuries before.”

Ancient writers

Prof Maria Chiara Scappaticcio has also been using texts to reveal new details from the lives of ancient people.

Stemming from the era when Rome controlled Egypt between 30 BCE and 641 AD, she and her team have been traveling from Berkeley to Berlin to catalog fragmentary papyrus rolls that contain Latin as part of the PLATINUM project.

They have been combing through the papyri using techniques like ultraviolet photography. In this way, they have been able to discover new texts, as well as better understand the meaning of existing ones.

The fragments are revealing much about the daily lives of ordinary people, according to Prof Scappaticcio.

The team has been working on “documents between private people who were lending things, letters between soldiers asking for new shoes, etc.,” she said.

Ancient multiculturalism

But the texts also gave the team a chance to better understand the lives of Roman Egyptians and how their identity mixed with Roman culture of the time.

“Multiculturalism and multilingualism are key words of our reality,” said Prof Scappaticcio. “It was actually almost the same thinking about antiquity, with the necessary caveat due to the chronologic distance.”

Researchers found texts of the Aeneid, the Latin epic verse penned by Virgil glorifying the foundation of Rome, being used in local language instruction.

“In the peripheral areas of the Empire, Latin was the language of power,” she said. “Rome imposed its power, and literature was one of the instruments through which to do that.”

Through their research, her team was even able to uncover the first text showing Arabic transliterated as Latin, as well a literary work by Seneca the Elder (father of the better known Roman philosopher by the same name) thought to have been completely lost.

The team has assembled an exceptional number of texts in this new study. “In 2023, we will publish a corpus of roughly 1,500 Latin texts on papyri,” Prof Scappaticcio said.

A previous collection, from 1958, contained a mere 300 texts. The goal is to allow a broader range of scholars to access Latin works written and circulating from the fringes of the Roman Empire.

“I hope it will be a point of departure, using this corpus as a tool to investigate Roman orientalism,” she said. “It was an open society and a lot of aspects flowed from one culture to another. It was not so much different from today.”

Source: Ancient world’s multicultural secrets revealed by handwriting analysis of scrolls

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: What a Report of Extreme Racism Teaches Us

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

Controversial but raises valid concerns:

It’s time for a few words on what we might learn from a Black volleyball player’s claims about what happened at a match she participated in at Brigham Young University this past August. I have refrained from commenting on this for a spell, in case there were further revelations. As there have been none yet, I shall proceed.

Rachel Richardson, a Black member of Duke’s volleyball team playing in a match at Brigham Young University, claimed that she and other Black teammates were “targeted and racially heckled throughout the entirety of the match,” such that they had to face a crowd amid which slurs “grew into threats.”

But a sporting match such as this one is attended by thousands and is well recorded, both professionally and also by anyone in attendance with a cellphone. To date, no one has offered evidencethat corroborates Richardson’s claims of racist verbal abuse, either independently or as part of an investigation by B.Y.U. There is nothing comparable in the security footage or in the television feed the school took of the match. No one at the match representing either school has described hearing such a thing happening. No witnesses have been reported as coming forward.

To be clear: It is possible that some racist spectator shouted a racial slur at Richardson at some point during the match. But it seems apparent that no rising tide of slurs and threats occurred during that match — that would be clear in the recordings. And Richardson’s having possibly exaggerated what happened casts into doubt whether there were any slurs at all, given that people leveling such words tend to do so with the intention of being heard by others, and no one present has come forward and explicitly said they heard it. Richardson and her representatives have presented no explanation as to why recordings via modern technology do not reveal what she claimed.

We cannot know why Richardson made this claim. Maybe she misheard common volleyball chants, as some have suggested. Or perhaps there were members of the crowd who did in fact resort to racist slurs that others either did not hear or are not willing to corroborate. But it’s hard not to sense that all of this is discomfitingly ambiguous — the likelihood that Richardson’s basic claim of being continuously heckled with racist slurs from the stands seems rather infinitesimal.

But this is why the B.Y.U. story is important. The message from this story is not just that interpretations of events will differ, or that in some fashion racism persists in America even if the details on this case are murky. We must also engage with the unfortunate possibility that the B.Y.U. story may be a demonstration of a pattern, one that we must be aware of to have an honest debate about racism in America today.

I have long noticed, in attending to episodes of this kind in our times, that claims of especially stark and unfiltered racist abuse, of the kind that sound like something from another time, often do not turn out to have been true. Accounts of this kind, I have realized, should be received warily. Not with utter resistance, but with a grain of salt.

The people making such claims appear to be thinking of horrors of the past and claiming that what supposedly happened to them shows that those horrors persist. It is difficult not to notice, for example, the parallel between Richardson’s claim and Jackie Robinson’s being called the N-word from the stands in the 1940s.

But while we have not remotely reached a point where racism does not exist, we have reached a point where some people are able to fabricate episodes of racism out of one unfortunate facet of being not Black, but human — crying wolf and seeking attention. This kind of thing was probably less likely when actual episodes of this kind, including lethal ones, were ordinary. Who would, on top of legalized segregation and lynching, make up racist violence? It would have seemed too trivializing of what actual people regularly went through. But today? Things are, while imperfect, quite different.

The classic, and perhaps officially inauguratory, example — and this is in no way to equate Richardson’s possible exaggeration to the prior, extraordinary event — was Tawana Brawley’s claim in 1987 to have been kidnapped and raped by a group of white men and then left in the woods wrapped in a garbage bag, covered with feces and scrawled with racial slurs. The sheer luridness of that scenario was always a clue that Brawley staged the whole thing, which she was proved to have done. A U.S. Justice Department report concluded that in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, Officer Darren Wilson did not callously shoot Michael Brown dead despite his having his hands up in surrender, despite Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson’s claim to that effect.

White lacrosse players at Duke did not rape a Black stripper at a party, despite the 88 Duke professors who published a newspaper ad implying the lacrosse players were guilty. And of course, the actor Jussie Smollett’s story that MAGA-hatted homophobic racists jumped him in the wee small hours and put a noose around his neck has not held water. Nor is it an accident that the scenario sounds less like real life than something that would have happened on the television soap opera “Empire” that Smollett was starring in.

Cases like these are not eccentric one-offs. It is painful to have to write that they are a pattern. The incidents could fill a whole book, and they have: “Hate Crime Hoax” by Wilfred Reilly, a Black political scientist, covers over 400 cases primarily in the 2010s that were either disproved or shown to be highly unlikely. It isn’t that discrimination never happens. But the more extreme and ghastly the story, the less likely I am to believe it.

It is a kind of good news. Today’s hoaxes are often based on claims of the kinds of things that actually happened to people and went unpunished in the past. That today such things are sometimes fabricated shows, oddly, that in real life, progress has taken place.

My point is not remotely to ignore claims of racism. It is to be wary of the especially bizarre, antique-sounding cases. And so: Indeed, the racially offensive trash talk by the Los Angeles City Council members that surfaced this week was egregious, but talk like that, when speakers are unaware anyone else will hear, is common, sad though that is. That story does not disprove my point, because it happened in an ordinary rather than outlandish manner. Grotesque, racist private talk certainly still persists.

While we must always be maximally aware that racism does still exist, we must also know that not all claims of racist abuse hold water and that being aware of this does not disqualify one from being an antiracist. True antiracists know that Black people exhibit the full scale of human traits and tendencies, including telling tall tales — and yes, even about matters involving racism.

Source: What a Report of Extreme Racism Teaches Us

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

The Open Secret of What Works—and What Doesn’t—for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – By Elizabeth Weingarten

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Good and informative study:

The 1960s heralded all kinds of innovations—lava lamps, bubble wrap, the birth control pill, and the BASIC programming language, just to name a few.

Today, most of us use more modern versions of the inventions the 1960s produced.

With one notable exception: corporate antibias and diversity training. “There are dozens, if not hundreds, of studies [of these programs], most of them showing that diversity training has no effects,” says Alexandra Kalev, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and coauthor with Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin of the new book Getting to Diversity.

And yet, despite the stack of evidence, “it is hard to find a Fortune 500 company without a diversity and harassment training these days,” they write.

When antibias trainings first emerged, they were rooted in mainstream psychological beliefs at the time: that attitudinal change precludes behavior change. In other words, you need to change what you think before you can change what you do.

Many corporate trainings were a by-product of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 legislation to stop racial discrimination, Dobbin and Kalev explain. Eager to prove that they were on the right side of history, organizations swiftly developed recruitment and training programs for Black employees and “race relations training” for others on staff, despite there being no federal mandate to do so. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made sex discrimination illegal, organizations expanded these trainings to cover sex discrimination.

In their new book, Dobbin and Kalev explore not only why these trainings have endured despite the evidence, but also what works to make progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion inside organizations. Their book is informed by two big questions: “What goes on within companies to prevent women and people of color from flourishing in the way that white men with the very same qualifications flourish?” And, “How can firms tear those barriers down and work toward true inclusion?” To answer them, Dobbin and Kalev use data from over 800 companies captured between 1971 and 2015, as well as interviews with managers from another 100 companies conducted after 2007. The result is a book that is tailored for anyone who is craving actionable, evidence-based advice about how to create effective programs.

The week they published their book, I spoke with Dobbin and Kalev about why we continue to rely on unconscious bias training, the most impactful interventions for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) progress, a DEI “stealth program,” and why organizations tend to lay off more women and people of color during recessions. Our conversation, edited for clarity and length, is below.

What have we learned from the past few decades of studying the effectiveness of diversity trainings?

Kalev: For decades, there has been so much research, and most of it shows that diversity training has no effect. Usually, the effects examined are short term changes—understanding of certain concepts, or plans for future behavior or, attitudes. Some studies find positive short-term effects, and some of them find negative effects.

What we’ve learned is that it’s very hard for people to be forced to change their attitudes. They act with reactance, needing to take control over their decisions and regain autonomy. We’ve learned that trying to suppress stereotypes makes those stereotypes more accessible. We’ve learned that the message of multiculturalism makes white men feel excluded. And when it comes to attitudes, we gain them through the life course, so no single afternoon session will undo that.

The barriers to diversity are diverse. Different companies, departments, groups, and industries have different barriers. If you bring on an over-the-counter diversity training, what are the chances you’ll be spot on with what’s going in your organization?

Nothing I told you is a secret. That research is not the innovation of our book. It’s out there and ignored.

Why do so many organizations opt for trainings that aren’t supported by evidence?

Dobbin: Part of it is that it’s easy to do. It’s an easy way to show that you’re trying to do the right thing, and it’s conspicuous because every person in the organization is exposed to it. Part of the reason it remains popular is that it doesn’t change what executives and managers have to do from day to day. Business can go on as usual.

“Part of the reason trainings remains popular is that it doesn’t change what executives and managers have to do from day to day. Business can go on as usual.”

We also tend to think, erroneously, that our behavior is driven entirely by our values and our ways of thinking about the world. So, if you can change people’s values and ways of thinking about the world, you can change their behavior. But often it goes the other way. If you change their behavior, you can often change how they think about the world.

The main indicator you look at to understand whether a program is working, or not, is how it impacts the numbers of women and people of color in management. Why is this so important? 

Kalev: Our data looks at several decades, and we look at the change in the number of managers from each demographic group over time. Getting to management means that you succeeded in getting promotions, that you get opportunities, you feel included, your talent is visible, you’re able to show your skill. We think that looking at the numbers actually includes all other dimensions of diversity and inclusion, because the number of people of color, or women or whatever underrepresented group in management is the bottom-line outcome of all other dimensions.

You find the two most impactful programs are formal, democratized mentoring systems and having a diversity manager or task force. Let’s talk about mentoring systems first. Why do they work?

Dobbin: We think mentoring systems work so well because they do several things at once. They help managers to see the obstacles that people of color and white women face in moving up the ladder. They make managers aware that there are fixable structural problems that they could begin to address, or at least they could look out for. Part of it is just making one person higher up in the organization aware of you, aware of your strengths and your aspirations. People mostly get superior jobs in an organization because somebody’s noticed them—they need mentors and sponsors to move up.

What are the most important components of a mentoring program?

Kalev: You want to have a formal program. Mentoring does occur informally, but it excludes women, people of color, other underrepresented groups that don’t have those natural networks. You want to have someone in charge of the program to make sure it is actually happening. You want to match based on interest. People might think for cultural comfort you would want to match based on demographic identities, but there are not enough potential mentors, like Black female mentors or Asian American women that can serve as mentors. So there’s simply not enough senior people from underrepresented groups to mentor. And those who are underrepresented senior leaders are usually overloaded with diversity related tasks.

Probably the most important reason to match by interest is that you want the relationships to break down the segregation, those glass walls between people like white men, for example, and women or people of color. You want to create matches that are actually cross-cultural, but based on interests, because that’s what we do in organizations: we work in functions like finance or AI, based on disciplines or interests.

Finally, you want to make sure that mentoring is open to everybody, not only to the potential stars, because those who you think are stars have already succeeded. Those that you don’t recognize as stars are exactly the ones who need the chance. Not everyone can be promoted, but you want to give everybody the opportunity to show their skill.

You also talk about an intervention I wasn’t familiar with, perhaps because it’s not typically seen as a tool to enhance DEI: self-managed teams. This is a group of employees inside an organization charged with managing and executing on their work without being guided by a manager. You call them a “stealth diversity program.” Why can they have such a positive impact?

Kalev: Usually work in modern organizations is divided by color and gender lines. For example, men and women can work side-by-side, but the woman is the assistant, which reproduces stereotypes, because we don’t see women outside of supporting roles.

Self-managed teams were designed to increase productivity from workers. But an unexpected consequence of them, or maybe expected if you think about it, is that they put together people that never worked together to collaborate, to be dependent on each other to design a product that will have the best consumer interface, or the best technology. They have to solve problems together.

That’s one of the best ways to reduce stereotypes, to propel awareness. It’s a different type of awareness, right? Because now I see you as a person. And because I’m dependent on you, in this task, I also devote more cognitive resources to evaluate you and cannot treat you as a category.

During recessions, firms are more likely to lay off women and people of color, and also less likely to hire them. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about why you think that is the case.

Kalev: There’s a structural bias component and an individual bias component. For the individual bias component, basically, when the ship is going down, you want to have the ones you trust most to manage the ship. Even when women and people of color reach management, they are still suspect. In times of stress, we rely more on our biases.

We think mentoring systems work so well because they do several things at once. They help managers to see the obstacles that people of color and white women face in moving up the ladder.

And then there is a structural bias component. Women and minorities are usually the later comers. So I would have a lower tenure in management than my white male colleague. And many of the layoffs and downsizings are “last to come first to go.”

Women and minorities are also still in marginalized jobs, such as in human resources, public relations, even in management. So women and minorities are more likely to be in units that are more likely to be axed.

One of the things that I was surprised by in the book was that having a diversity task force or diversity manager was such an impactful intervention. That’s because I’ve seen so many companies appoint someone a diversity manager, or create a task force, but then give that person or group virtually no budget or power to do anything. I’d love to hear why I’m wrong and why these interventions can be powerful.

Dobbin: We interviewed hundreds of diversity managers who would often say, “I have no power, I have no budget. I feel like I’m not doing anything.” But a number said there are a few things they can do, and one of the things that’s most effective is “I just ask a line manager why they made that decision.” Essentially what diversity managers do is they activate social accountability in people, and the knowledge that someone might ask you about your decisions.

Diversity managers usually have access to the human relation information system, and they’re looking at the numbers, and they’re looking at them by department, and they’re looking at hiring slates. One thing they frequently do is talk to managers after, say, a seasonal round of hiring or promotions. And they’ll ask, “So it seemed like half the applicants were women, but you didn’t find any women that you wanted to hire. Should we be searching somewhere else? Is there something wrong with the candidates we’re getting?”

There’s this sociological idea of the looking-glass self, which is when you put yourself in the perspective of somebody who’s observing you. You’re looking in the mirror at your own behavior and asking, How does this look to someone observing my behavior? How does it look if I interviewed 15 men and 15 women and hired seven men and one woman? It’s not the same as a grievance procedure where you’re being threatened through a formal complaint process. This is just social influence—what are the norms, and how is this going to look to someone else?

Source: The Open Secret of What Works—and What Doesn’t—for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – By Elizabeth Weingarten

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Nadeau: L’insulte fasciste

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

Le mot « fasciste » est de retour sur toutes les lèvres. Pour parler du monde dans lequel nous vivons désormais, convient-il encore ? Nombreux sont ceux qui, de plus en plus, voient dans la situation présente des correspondances avec les crises successives qui plombèrent les années 1930. Est-il anachronique de penser qu’un passé peut revenir nous hanter sous une forme recomposée ?

Au fil du temps, l’étiquette « fasciste » s’est décollée de la bouteille où on a mélangé trop de réalités politiques différentes. Aujourd’hui, ceux qui sont les plus susceptibles de faire sortir les mauvais génies de cette bouteille en refusent l’étiquette. Ils la savent infamante, c’est-à-dire de nature à les déconsidérer en société.

Il serait naïf de croire que le fascisme est mort avec Hitler dans un bunker ou au crochet de boucherie où fut pendu le corps de Mussolini. La guerre n’était pas terminée que bien des adorateurs des droites radicales — lesquels n’avaient pas toujours le Duce et le Führer comme modèles — cherchaient déjà à la faire regermer, plantant ses vieilles idées délétères en de nouveaux terreaux.

George Orwell prévenait que le fascisme reviendrait sur la place publique en portant un chapeau melon et un parapluie roulé sous le bras, selon l’image de l’homme respectable en son temps. Au Canada, le leader fasciste Adrien Arcand lui donnait en quelque sorte raison. Les crânes rasés, les uniformes et les démonstrations de force appartenaient au passé, disait Arcand après-guerre. L’avenir de l’extrême droite dépendait désormais de sa capacité à se parer des apparences de la respectabilité, prévenait-il. À cette fin, il fallait la présenter cravatée, puis trouver à investir les médias pour se faire valoir ainsi endimanché.

Le ridicule et la naïveté des antifascistes, clamait Pier Paolo Pasolini, étaient de continuer de traquer l’extrême droite dans ses formes anciennes. Le fascisme avait muté à mesure que la société de consommation prenait de l’expansion, plaidait-il à raison.

Comme le ridicule ne tue pas plus d’un côté ou de l’autre du spectre politique, les esprits de droite les plus radicaux exigent aujourd’hui d’être exonérés de l’étiquette de fasciste, sous prétexte qu’ils ont changé de costume. Ils ne précisent pas qu’ils ont bel et bien conservé, au creux de leurs poches et dans la doublure de leur veste, un même fond d’idées.

La Hongrie d’Orban, habituée de piétiner les droits démocratiques, est enthousiaste au possible devant les avancées de Georgia Meloni, la nouvelle tête de la droite radicale italienne au passé fasciste avoué. Vincenzo Sofo, une des figures fortes de Fratelli d’Italia, le parti de Meloni, est le mari de Marion Maréchal, l’égérie de l’extrême droite française, par ailleurs petite-fille du fondateur du Front national. Sa tante, Marine Le Pen, a multiplié par le passé les révérences de son parti, le Rassemblement national, envers le régime autoritaire de Poutine. En Suède, contre toute attente, l’extrême droite a refait son nid. Au Brésil de Bolsonaro, la dictature des militaires et ses bourreaux sont célébrés. Tout ce beau monde s’est montré ravi des pirouettes antidémocratiques proposées par Trump. Ces mouvements se portent assistance mutuelle, dans une sorte de fraternité d’idées qui n’a nul besoin d’organisations dûment constituées pour être constatée.

Les néofascistes se présentent comme des anticonformistes valeureux bravant les élites. Dans les faits, ils défendent encore et toujours la même vieille hiérarchie sociale. Les inégalités, ils les tiennent pour naturelles, tel un simple reflet du mérite individuel. Dans leur univers brutal et darwinien, où la loi du plus fort règne, chacun est livré à la merci de ses propres malheurs. Et tous sont vendus à l’illusion qu’il faut se battre les uns contre les autres pour survivre.

Ces régimes d’idées qui veulent en finir, une fois pour toutes, avec les modèles de la social-démocratie, favorisent une fiscalité à l’avantage des puissants, en prenant pour bouc émissaire les immigrants. Devant le paravent d’un nationalisme doctrinaire, l’obsession de l’immigration est ramenée à l’avant, comme aux heures les plus sombres des années 1930. La menace fabulée d’un « grand remplacement » habille désormais le vieux mannequin de la xénophobie la plus obscène, comme pour détourner l’attention du catastrophique démantèlement progressif des services publics et de menaces planétaires autrement plus profondes.

Les ayatollahs du nationalisme identitaire ont sans cesse à la bouche les mots « culture » et « civilisation ». Jamais pour autant on ne les entend parler plus de cinq secondes de littérature, de théâtre, de danse, de cinéma, de patrimoine, ni du fait d’ailleurs que l’écrasante majorité des artisans de ces sphères sont opposés à leurs pensées carrées. Jamais on ne les entend rappeler que cette civilisation, certes chrétienne, occidentale et aristocratique, a été aussi cosmopolite, qu’elle a produit la pensée critique, que son histoire a été traversée de puissants appels à l’égalité, la justice, la démocratie, l’humanisme, la tolérance. Ce versant les laisse indifférents.

Au nom d’un ressentiment populaire contre les élites qui pillent allègrement la terre, les néofascistes séduisent. Ils jouent pourtant double jeu. D’une main, ils flattent la chèvre au cou tandis que, de l’autre, ils arrosent le chou. Leur rébellion de surface, qui souffle sur les braises d’une grogne générale, ne remet jamais en cause le système économique et sert l’autorité de ceux qui en sont déjà les maîtres.

Les néofascistes s’assurent de prendre le relais de l’ordre établi, en promettant de le pousser plus loin. En se laissant de la sorte porter au pouvoir, au gré de la peur et du ressentiment, ils entendent parvenir à piloter à leur tour un système néolibéral déjà hégémonique, lui offrant tout au plus un supplément d’âme avec ses appels opportunistes à la nation, seule forme de fraternité qui les émeut. Et à vouloir mieux foncer sur cette vieille voie, ils nous conduisent tout droit à un renouveau du pire.

Source: L’insulte fasciste

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Et si le discours de la CAQ nuisait à l’intégration des immigrants?

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Obviously:

Le discours de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) sur les immigrants fait usage d’un vocabulaire alarmiste et de propos faux, qui le rendent défavorable à l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants au Québec. En effet, son discours attribue à la population immigrante des stigmates répulsifs au processus qui fait de l’étranger une partie intégrante de la société d’accueil. D’abord, disséquons le discours pour ensuite présenter le défi auquel fait face le Québec en matière d’intégration des immigrants.

Le chef de la CAQ, François Legault, a affirmé au cours de l’été dernier que l’immigration serait un facteur de la « louisianisation » du Québec. Or l’histoire ne permet pas de faire une telle hypothèse. En effet, la Louisiane française, vaste territoire d’Amérique du Nord, faisait partie de la Nouvelle-France entre les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Sa « louisianisation » s’est faite non pas par des immigrants, mais de l’intérieur, par des échanges de territoires entre colonisateurs français, espagnols et anglais. Ruinée par la guerre de Sept Ans (1756-1763), la monarchie française céda une grande partie de la Louisiane aux Espagnols, puis, au début des années 1800, le premier consul Napoléon Bonaparte céda définitivement aux États-Unis la partie restée française.

Selon d’autres propos tenus par le chef de la CAQ, l’immigration conduirait la « société québécoise au suicide ». Or l’histoire du peuple canadien-français, puis québécois, est faite de lutte, de résistance, de résilience, de solidarité et de sa capacité à rester lui-même par l’assimilation de nombreuses influences venues de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur. Ce qui fait la vitalité du Québec, écrit Fernand Dumont dans Raisons communes, « tient à une plus étroite proximité avec l’existence réelle des gens d’ici en même temps qu’à une plus grande ouverture aux quêtes extérieures ».

Ailleurs, M. Legault fait un lien entre immigration et violence. Cette affirmation doit être relativisée si l’on considère les données sur la criminalité au Québec de l’Institut de la statistique du Québec (2021) et celles de l’Enquête sociale générale sur la sécurité de Statistique Canada (2014). Lorsqu’on considère les types de violence (agression sexuelle, vol qualifié, voies de fait, etc.) commis ou subis par la population immigrante et la population non immigrante, les taux d’incidence sont tantôt similaires tantôt différents. On ne saurait donc faire un lien direct entre immigration et violence.

Quant à Jean Boulet, ministre sortant de l’Immigration, il a déclaré pendant la récente campagne électorale que « 80 % des immigrants s’en vont à Montréal, ne travaillent pas, ne parlent pas français ou n’adhèrent pas aux valeurs de la société québécoise ». Une telle affirmation ne concorde pas avec la réalité, comme l’a démontré Le Devoir. Elle relève sans doute du sens commun ou de préjugé.

Au total, le discours de la CAQ n’est que la stigmatisation des immigrants. Celle-ci peut produire au sein de la population une représentation sociale négative de l’immigrant puis finalement compromettre l’altérité. Or dans une société pluriethnique, la relation humaine est fondamentalement basée sur l’altérité, c’est-à-dire sur le rapport à l’étranger. Lorsque les discours politiques au sein de cette société tendent à encourager la recherche des similitudes avec l’étranger, celui-ci est inclus dans la société, et son intégration est effective. Réciproquement, lorsque les discours recherchent surtout des différences, l’étranger risque d’être exclu de la société d’accueil. C’est la posture que la CAQ a adoptée durant la campagne électorale.

Le Québec est une terre d’accueil d’immigrants qui viennent de partout dans le monde. Pays d’expression française dans un océan anglophone, le Québec a un grand défi : être une société qui garde son identité nationale (par sa langue et sa culture) tout en étant une société qui devient de plus en plus pluriculturelle. Je crois que le Québec est capable d’élaborer et de construire un modèle d’intégration dans la perspective de ce qu’il est, de son projet de société particulière, en y incluant des étrangers qui arrivent et qui deviennent aussi de nouveaux citoyens. Dans les discours ambiants sur l’immigration ailleurs dans le monde, la spécificité du Québec est d’être une société plutôt réceptive au discours inclusif.

Source: Et si le discours de la CAQ nuisait à l’intégration des immigrants?

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We are much safer here, say Indians in Canada

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Of interest. Reader experiences, of course, may vary:

As India witnesses an alarming rise in cases of hate crimes racism, and vandalism across North America, students and Indians in Canada say they feel much safer and that there is no rise in crimes against them.

“There is no rise in crime against Indians in Canada. It is extremely peaceful. Overall, it is much safer in Canada for Indians than it was in the previous century when our forefathers came. Canada is a peaceful nation,” Balbir Gurm, community activist and founder of Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships, told IANS.

The New Delhi-Ottawa ties have been under duress lately due to the recent vandalisation of Hindu properties and religious shrines, hate crimes, and a referendum to garner support for the secession of ‘Khalistan’ from Punjab in India.

Last month, the BAPS Swaminarayan temple in Canada was defaced with anti-India graffiti, and in July, a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at a Vishnu Temple in the Richmond Hill neighbourhood of Canada was desecrated.

Indian-origin Sikh Joti Singh Mann, a radio host based in Brampton, was attacked by three people in August this year, and Kartik Vasudev, a 21-year-old student from Uttar Pradesh, was shot dead in Toronto as he stepped out of a metro station in April.

Echoing Gurm’s views, Sara Wasson (name changed), a student of Brock University in Ontario, said that she “feels much safer in Canada than in India. This is such a peaceful country with fun-loving and helpful people”.

“This is a friendly country. At 20, I have a job here and I am not dependent on my family to pay for my university education. Canada makes me feel independent and confident, and I am happy to be here,” said Ashwin Malhotra, a student who works part-time at a departmental part-time at a departmental store in Ontario.

There are over 622,000 foreign students in Canada, with Indians numbering 217,410 as of December 31, 2021, according to figures released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

A recent report by Bengaluru-based research firm Redseer Strategy said that as many as 217,410 Indian students applied for Canadian education in 2021.

“What we are seeing is an aberration and not the norm. I feel that overall racism is decreasing in Canada against Canadians of Indian-origin. Today we can vote, be MPs, own property, and become members of any profession we choose,” Dr Gurm said, highlighting that the majority of Canadians are very accepting of all peoples.

“Everything’s peaceful here. No commotion happening here, seriously. Also, the Bhagavad Gita Park thing is a misunderstanding,” Divya Shankaran, who permanently moved to Canada three years back, told IANS. 

While there was much hue and cry over vandalism of a sign board at a park in Canada’s Brampton that has been named Bhagavad Gita Park, the Mayor of the town clarified saying that the cops had investigated the matter and it was just a matter of “maintenance and reprinting work”. 

Though there is no country-wise break-up of the numbers, Indians are the top immigrant group to take up residence in Canada this year. 

In 2021, nearly 100,000 Indians became permanent residents of Canada as the country admitted a record 405,000 new immigrants in its history, according to an Economic Times report. 

During 2021-2022, over 210,000 permanent residents also acquired Canadian citizenship, the report said. 

Source: We are much safer here, say Indians in Canada

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McWhorter: A Language Test That Stigmatizes Black Children

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Good example of a systemic barrier:

It can be hard not to notice that a suspiciously large number of children, of seemingly normal human linguistic capacity, are officially designated as language impaired. In 2019, two researchers set out to determine just how common this phenomenon is. Examining nationwide data, they found that each year, 14 percent of states overrepresent the number of Black children with speech and language impairments.

Just what does “language impaired” mean, though? Much of the reason this diagnosis is so disproportionate among this group and has been for decades is that too many people who are supposedly trained in assessing children’s language skills aren’t actually taught much about how human language works. And it affects the lives of Black kids dramatically.

The reason for that overrepresentation is that most Black children grow up code switching between Black English and standard English. There is nothing exotic about this; legions of people worldwide live between two dialects of a language, one casual and one formal, and barely think about it. Many Germans, Italians, Chinese people, South Asians and Southeast Asians and most Arabs are accustomed to speaking different varieties of language according to different forms of social interaction. So, too, are Black Americans. Black children, along the typical lines of bidialectal contexts like these, are much more comfortable with the casual variety of Black speech, only faintly aware that in formal settings there is a standard way of speaking that is considered more appropriate. Black English grammar is often assumed to be slang and mistakes. But it’s actually just an alternate, rather than degraded, form of English compared to the standard variety.

Here are the kinds of phrases that so many Black kids know and use effortlessly, phrases that are richer than standard English in many ways: “He be singin’”; “He done sung”; “He had sung and then he had gone quiet.” All three sentences are examples of how Black English expresses shades of actions in ways that standard English leaves more to context. “He be singin’” refers to someone singing regularly; you wouldn’t say that if someone were singing right in front of you. “He done sung” doesn’t simply refer to the past but to the fact that his having done so was something of a surprise, or something people urgently needed to know. Used on verbs one after the other in sequence instead of in the past-before-the-past pluperfect way that we use it in standard English, “had” in Black English indicates that one is telling a story; it is a narrative marker. None of this is broken. It is just different.

Now, suppose a kid raised in this dialect were asked on a test: “This bird is blue. What about this one?” “It red” would be marked wrong. Never mind that putting it that way is the way one would do it in the most standard version of Russian. If the kids tested see a girl with scissors and say “The girl cuttin’” instead of “The girl is cutting,” they are not just doing what Tolstoy would have thought of as normal but evidencing signs of linguistic impairment, as it is called.

The test asks the kid: “This is Jack. Whose dog is this? It is ______.” The kid may say “Jack dog” — in Black English, it is permissible to leave the possessive “-’s” out. Hence the late Black comedian Robin Harris’s classic routine about his girlfriend’s children saying, “Dem Bebe kids!” Apparently Harris had a linguistic impairment?

Imagine 7- or 8-year-old Black kids asked to repeat the sentence “My mother is the nurse who works in the community clinic.” If they happily say, spontaneously expressing it in the English they are most comfortable with, “My mother the nurse work in the community clinic,” they could be marked as linguistically deficient.

You don’t have to imagine this. Many of these questions are right from the CELF (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals)-5 test, which is commonly used to assess children for disability status. And while the test includes modified scoring guidelines for students who may not have grown up speaking standard English, many test administrators do not abide by them. And even when they do, it can sometimes lead to underidentification of true language impairment when those test administrators cannot distinguish between language differences and language deficits. (This would help explain why the researchers also found that an estimated 62 percent of states underdiagnose Black children with these impairments.)

Tests like this one tend to be central to assessments of children as language deficient. The CELF-5 is used quite often. The dialect issue has been shown to be of key importance in overdiagnosis, which isn’t surprising given that, as Professor Catherine Crowley, from the program in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Columbia University’s Teachers College, tells me, in one subtest of the exam, 20 out of 33 of the constructions in the CELF-5 are used differently in Black English.

Imagine something else: If Black English were standard and a test asked white kids: Which is correct? “He ain’t be wearing that kind of shirt” or “He don’t be wearing that kind of shirt”? What would they answer? By the established parameters of Black English — and again, it is important to note that there are established parameters; this isn’t just slang — the correct answer is the second option. In that alternate universe, missing the distinction could get kids sent to a specialized classroom where they wouldn’t be taught according to their abilities.

I remember my mother, a child psychologist, talking as far back as the 1970s about Black kids being treated as linguistically deficient for being bidialectal; she resisted diagnostic tests as a result. Yet here we still are. Tests like this stay in place.

There are many areas in which I remain skeptical of the systemic racism analysis — for example, I am unconvinced that it’s systemic racism to require social workers to perform well on standardized tests. However, these speech evaluation tests imposed on children are something else. They can shunt kids away from mainstream opportunity when they have done nothing but grow up immersed in Black English as their linguistic comfort zone. Being born Black makes you more likely to suffer this abuse, whether it means your language impairment requiring special attention goes undiagnosed or your perfectly fine Black English is labeled a problem. Growing up with nonstandard English in general, as one study demonstrates about Filipino kids growing up in the United States from early childhood, can also lead to similar results.

It won’t do. But linguists can only have so much effect here. I have spent three decades listening to educators, psychologists, other linguists and speech pathologists giving talks about this lack of fit between speech evaluation tests and linguistic reality, and little seems to change except people in education circles being aware of and dismayed by the problem. Speech pathologists seeking to meaningfully participate in antiracism must start not just questioning but resisting en masse these outdated tests that apply a Dick-and-Jane sense of English on real kids who control a variety of coherent and nuanced Englishes.

Yes, all kids need to learn standard English in order to be able to access mainstream sources of achievement, not to mention to be taken seriously in specific contexts. This may not be fair. But the idea of standard English as a menacing, racist “gatekeeper” (which I have covered here) makes for good rhetoric yet will help no one in the real world. Certain dialects will be treated as standard as inevitably as certain kinds of clothing are considered more fashionable than others.

But for kids to be designated as linguistically deficient right out of the gate, based on notions such as that if they don’t always use the verb “to be” they don’t understand how things are related, makes no sense. It constitutes a dismissal of eager and innocent articulateness. And as such, it is an arrant and thoughtless injustice that must be stopped.

Source: A Language Test That Stigmatizes Black Children

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Diversity Minister condemns CRTC for not severing ties with consultant under fire for tweets

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Needed but questions remain regarding how Canadian Heritage and CRTC decisions to provide funding to the Community Media Advocacy Centre were made. Recommended by officials (“activists on a pension”) and/or pushed by the political level:

Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen says he is “surprised and disappointed” by the federal broadcasting regulator’s decision not to ban an anti-racism organization that employs Laith Marouf, a consultant who has been widely condemned for a series of derogatory tweets about “Jewish white supremacists” and francophones.

The Minister made his comments on Friday to the Commons heritage committee, which had summoned him so he could explain how his department’s anti-racism unit had granted the organization, called the Community Media Advocacy Centre, a contract to run an anti-racism project in which Mr. Marouf was to play a key role.

CMAC has been paid over $500,000 to participate in proceedings held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Canada’s broadcasting regulator. Most of the money was provided by the Broadcast Participation Fund, an independent body set up by the CRTC to administer payments to public-interest groups taking part in those proceedings.

The Broadcast Participation Fund told The Globe and Mail in a statement on Friday that it was “currently reviewing the CMAC matter.” The fund is paid into by broadcasting companies, which have no influence over who receives the money.

Opinion: Ahmed Hussen demands to know how someone else let his government partner with an apparent antisemite

A spokeswoman for the CRTC said on Thursday that the regulator would not ban CMAC from its proceedings because it would be inappropriate “to establish lists of parties that may or may not participate.”

At Friday’s committee hearing, Mr. Hussen told MPs that he had been warned by Liberal MP Anthony Housefather about Mr. Marouf’s offensive tweets on July 19th or 20th – a month before the Minister spoke out publicly.

Facing sharp questioning from MPs, the Minister admitted that the Heritage Department’s vetting process failed when it decided to pay $133,000 to CMAC to run the anti-racism project.

Mr. Hussen apologized to Jewish and francophone communities, which he said Mr. Marouf has “continuously attacked with his hateful comments.”

He said it was “completely unacceptable” that “this individual fell through the cracks” and was approved to run a government-funded project. The Heritage Department, which he said approved the funding before he became Diversity and Inclusion Minister, has now cancelled the initiative and is asking CMAC for its money back.

“The antisemitic, hateful and xenophobic comments made by Laith Marouf … I condemn them in the strongest possible terms,” Mr. Hussen said. “The fact that the Community Media Advocacy Centre received federal funding while employing Mr. Marouf is unacceptable and should quite frankly never have happened.”

CMAC describes itself as a non-profit organization supporting the “self-determination of Indigenous, racialized and disabled peoples in the media through research, relationship-building, advocacy and learning.”

Mr. Marouf denies he is antisemitic or racist. He said in an interview that CMAC is currently in discussions with the Heritage Department about the contract. CMAC and Mr. Marouf had already started the project when it was terminated.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in August that the government has launched a complete review of funding for CMAC. He added that it was unacceptable “that federal dollars have gone to this organization that has demonstrated xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.”

Mr. Hussen told MPs that CMAC would be blocked from applying for any future funding. He said he has introduced tighter vetting procedures for such contracts, including an obligation to check social media profiles for hateful speech. And he said his department’s contracts now include a clause that allows them to be terminated if hate speech comes to light. He said he has paused all new departmental contracts until more checks are made.

Jewish groups, including the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, called on the CRTC to follow the government’s lead in severing ties with Mr. Marouf and CMAC, and to ban the organization from taking part in regulatory proceedings.

“Laith Marouf’s hateful statements should have disqualified him, and CMAC, from access to any government funding, let alone to money from an anti-racism program,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “It is imperative that the values promoted by the government be reflected in the orientation and work of their partners outside government.”

Conservative MP Kevin Waugh told the heritage committee that CRTC chairman Ian Scott and Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez should both be summoned to appear before the committee to explain their organizations’ links to CMAC.

Rachael Thomas, a Tory MP, and Melissa Lantsman, deputy leader of the Conservative Party, issued a statement saying “Canadians deserve answers” from Mr. Rodriguez.

Source: Diversity Minister condemns CRTC for not severing ties with consultant under fire for tweets

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Paul: Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us

2022/10/08 Leave a comment

Lessons and warnings from history:

The power of some classic realist novels, like Zola’s “Germinal” and Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” lies in the way they wholly capture their era. Others endure because they continue to feel remarkably prescient, like Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and William Dean Howells’s “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” which took on the perils of surviving financially in Gilded Age New York.

Then there are novels that are simultaneously very much of their time and yet almost clairvoyant about the future.

Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” which is being rereleased this month with a revised translation of James Cleugh’s original by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, is one of those books. It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week. It’s all there: The ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth. The ways in which tribalism — referred to in “The Oppermanns” as “anthropological and zoological nonsense” — is easily roused to demonize others. The ways in which warring factions can be abetted by the media and accepted by a credulous populace.

The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time. In “Buddenbrooks” fashion, the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.

“How do you know when to sound the alarm?” asked Cohen, who also wrote an introduction to the new edition, when I reached him by phone on book tour in Italy. It’s easy to slam someone for overreacting, he explained. But we would do well to remember the instances in which a strong reaction is justified: “There’s an enormous bravery that comes with writing about the present, an enormous risk and an enormous thrill. You have to ask yourself: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ And also: ‘What if I’m right?’”

Feuchtwanger was willing to place that bet, working off fury as well as considerable access to journalistic, governmental and undercover sources within Germany. But unlike much overtly political fiction, his book is imbued with all the humor, humanity and sweep of a 19th-century epic. The result, Fred T. March noted in his 1934 review in The Times, “is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.’”

Consider the misbegotten assumptions Feuchtwanger took on then that continue to threaten today:

Populist ignorance cannot prevail in an enlightened world. Just as New Yorkers scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump, lead buffoon of the tabloid ’80s, could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, so do the bourgeois intelligentsia of “The Oppermanns” chortle over “Mein Kampf,” a work they find impossible to reckon with in the land of Goethe: “A nation that had concerned itself for centuries so intensively with books, such as those they saw around them, could never allow itself to be deceived by the nonsense in the ‘Protocols’ and in ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Direct engagement confers legitimacy. When Edgar Oppermann, a doctor, faces antisemitic attacks in the newspapers, his boss advises silence. “The whole of politics is nothing but a pigsty. Unless one cannot help doing otherwise, one should simply ignore them. That’s what annoys the pigsty crowd most.” To confront the forces of illiberalism is only to sully oneself, Edgar believes. Those in the press who propagate such lies “ought to be put into an asylum, not brought before a court of law.”

Technology will out disinformation. At each turn, the Oppermanns and their milieu have trouble believing that propaganda will take hold. “How could they expect to get away with such a monstrous, clumsy lie?” Gustav Oppermann, the central figure in the novel, asks himself after the Nazis blame the burning of the Reichstag on communists. “Nero might have put over such cheap stuff in burning Rome. But things like that were impossible today, in the era of the telephone and printing press.” Of course, the era of Twitter and TikTok has shown that advances in technology still amplify falsehoods.

If you ignore it, it will go away. In the novel, two bourgeois Germans foresee a grim future but fall back on complacency. One describes the first world war as “only a curtain-raiser” with “a century of destruction” to follow, predicting, as he puts it, “a military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice.” His companion merely replies: “All right, if that’s your opinion. But perhaps you’ll have another cognac and a cigar before it happens.”

It’s up to the next generation. The novel’s most tragic figure is the teenage Berthold Oppermann, a student guilty only by ethnicity and familial association. Berated by a Nazi schoolteacher for delivering an allegedly anti-German paper, Berthold says he is “a good German” and refuses to apologize. “You are a good German, are you?” his Nazi teacher sneers. “Well, will you be so good as to leave it to others to decide who is a good German and who is not?” While classrooms today are a far cry from those in Nazi-era Germany, one needn’t reach far for contemporary parallels, with students increasingly operating in an atmosphere of fear and conformity — of their peers, depending on location, on the right or the left — while the adults too often abdicate responsibility, whether out of complicity or fear.

The situation was inevitable. In the Oppermanns’ world, escalating problems are viewed as uniquely German, unique to their time and to a particular regime. “Our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness,” explains a lawyer at one point. “That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country.”

Wrong again.

As for Feuchtwanger, the same year that “The Oppermanns” was published, the German Jewish author was stripped of his citizenship and had his property in Berlin seized and his books burned. He was banned from ever publishing in Germany again.

By the time the book was published, Feuchtwanger had already settled in France, where he was later imprisoned following the German invasion. He ultimately escaped to the United States, where he lived for the last 17 years of his life.

Is this still the same country where he’d find refuge?

Source: Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us

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