‘One day in East Africa’, woodblock prints by Toshi Yoshida (1980).

I deleted my account. I'm not one to push such things on people. All big companies are bad and we each have our own cost/benefit analysis. It was easy for me to delete it. But aside from "facebook is a bad actor" I didn't have a problem deleting it because...facebook is just... bad.

Once upon a time it was that cool new thing on the internet to find those high school friends you hadn't seen in 15 years. Then it was a decent way to keep up with what your friends were doing, maybe even arrange to meet for a drink or a show or whatever. And then...? I don't even know what it's good for now. You don't need facebook to find people on the internet now, if you really want to, and THE ALGORITHM and all the other shit on that website, which still has the worst user interface on the internet, meant that it stopped being useful for really anything. Once upon a time you could post something like "hey, anyone want to grab a coffee later" and your friends would see it. Now no matter what I do I can't make it just show me posts by people in a timely fashion.

Set up a group message, add a bunch of family members to it, send them a pic of your kids now and then. No need for facebook.

The Free Music Archive was founded in 2009, the year Barack Obama was inaugurated as this country’s first black president. As a project directed by the legendary Jersey City radio station WFMU, it was to be a “library of high-quality, legal audio downloads,” a place where artists could share their music and listeners could enjoy it for free. Now, following a funding shortage, the FMA plans to close sometime this month.

“The future is uncertain, has been my mantra lately,” says Cheyenne Hohman, who’s been the director of the Free Music Archive since 2014. The shutdown date was initially the 9th, but has since been pushed back to November 16th because the FMA is in early talks with four different organizations that are interested in...

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I spent a few days in Berlin last week.¹ One of things you notice as a visitor to Berlin is the remembrance of the Holocaust and the horrors of the Nazi regime. There’s the Jewish Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the Topographie Des Terrors, which is an excellent (and free) exhibition detailing how the Nazi terror machine worked.

At the massive train yard at the Deutsches Technikmuseum, they have a dedicated exhibition on how the German rail system was used to transport Jews to concentration camps, including a freight car used in the transports that you could walk into and try to imagine, in some small way, you and your children cheek to jowl with 80 other people, on the way to be murdered. A powerful experience.

Outside a train station, there was a sign listing concentration camps: “places of horror which we must never forget”.

Just as important, the language they used on the displays in these places was clear and direct, at least in the English translations. It was almost never mealy-mouthed language like “this person died at Treblinka”…like they’d succumbed to natural causes or something. Instead it was “this person was murdered at Treblinka”, which is much stronger and explicitly places blame on the Nazis for these deaths.

As the exhibition at the Topographie Des Terrors made clear, the German response to the Holocaust and Nazi regime wasn’t perfect, but in general, it’s very clear that a) this happened here, and b) it was terrible and must never happen again.

On Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, a man radicalized by the President of the United States and right-wing media walked into a synagogue and killed 11 people.

With overt anti-Semitism growing in the US (as well as other things like the current administration’s policies on immigration and jailing of children in concentration camps), it’s instructive to compare the German remembrance of the Holocaust to America’s relative lack of public introspection & remembrance about its dark history.

In particular, as a nation the US has never properly come to terms with the horrors it inflicted on African Americans and Native Americans. We build monuments to Confederate soldiers but very few to the millions enslaved and murdered. Our country committed genocide against native peoples, herded them onto reservations like cattle, and we’re still denying them the right to vote.

These things happened in our history in part because powerful people needed an enemy to rally everyone against. It’s an old but effective tactic: blacks, Indians, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Irish, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese — they are here to take your jobs, steal your money, rape your women! It’s what slaveowners did to make their forced labor camps socially acceptable to polite Southern society, it’s what the Nazis did to make murdering Jews acceptable to the German people, it’s what the US government and settlers did to commit genocide against Native Americans, and it’s what Donald Trump is doing now. The monuments, exhibitions, and museums I saw in Berlin last week formed a powerful rejoinder to this type of fascism. I think the US really needs to grapple with its history in this regard…or it’ll just keep happening again.

Update: An earlier version of this post stated that one of the victims of the Pittsburgh shooting was a Holocaust survivor. She was not. (thx, vanessa)

1. I’ll be posting more about the trip later in the week, I hope.↩

Tags: Berlin   Donald Trump   Germany   Holocaust   museums   politics   racism   slavery   USA

As the title says, we're saying goodbye and deleting our Facebook page for Tofugu (and for WaniKani and TextFugu/EtoEto too). It's not just because of the recent #deletefacebook movement or the revelation that 50 million US Facebook users got their...