February 25, 2023

Saturday, February 25, 2023. 🇺🇦 Annette’s News Roundup.

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A year after Russia’s invasion: The world paid tribute yesterday to Ukraine.

Our President kicked off the world’s support and admiration for Ukraine with his arrival in Kyiv on Monday. In doing so, he positioned the United States as the leader of the free world. He also pledged ongoing support for Ukraine.

A year after Russia’s invasion: How Ukraine endured.

A year after Russian troops poured over the Ukrainian border and reached the gates of the capital Kyiv in a full-scale invasion Moscow hoped would bring swift victory, one of the most striking aspects of the war so far is that Ukraine has survived.

As the shock of the most deadly conflict in Europe since World War Two wears off, Ukrainians’ defiance is sometimes taken for granted.

But a combination of planning, courage, tactics, overseas military and financial assistance and Russia’s battlefield failings has meant that, far from capitulating within days as many had expected, Ukraine has kept the enemy at bay.

That said, Russia has stabilised positions in the east and south of Ukraine after suffering major setbacks late in 2022, and has begun to make incremental gains ahead of what Kyiv fears will be another big offensive.

Russian President Vladimir Putin seems determined to dig in, sanctions against Moscow have not yet had a devastating impact on the economy, and Russia's army still has resources to throw at the conflict.

For now, though, Russia has met its match in a smaller, more nimble adversary led by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy – the public face of Ukraine’s war and a rallying figure for his besieged people – and “iron general” Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, who leads the troops.

There is no sense of complacency in Kyiv. The United States estimates that up to 100,000 people have been killed or wounded on each side, and trench warfare in the east is attritional and deadly.

Russia has hit critical infrastructure, meaning no power or heating for millions of Ukrainians during winter. Missiles have struck civilian buildings, including in Dnipro where at least 44 people were killed when an apartment block was flattened last month.

“The situation has become tougher,” Zelenskiy said in a sombre evening video address in early February.

Ukraine expects Russia to step up its attacks, and is hurrying to get hold of heavy weaponry from abroad including tanks, plus more ammunition and longer-range missiles, to counter the threat.

Next on Zelenskiy’s wish list are fighter jets, with some allies expressing a willingness to supply them but his key partner, U.S. President Joe Biden, saying no. (Reuters).

President Zelenskyy spoke on the anniversary of the Russian attack.

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An overview of the Death and Destruction during the war.

The numbers from the past year are staggering.

Approximately 200,000 Russian troops and 100,000 Ukrainian troops killed or wounded, according to estimates by Western intelligence agencies. At least 7,000 Ukrainian civilians killed, according to official data, although the real number is believed to be far higher. More than 14 million Ukrainians uprooted from their homes.

Missiles have slammed into the country almost constantly, entire Ukrainian cities have been destroyed, upwards of 65,000 war crimes have been documented, mass graves have been uncovered.

Vladimir Putin has been embarrassed, while NATO has been rejuvenated — but neither side can claim victory, as the war slides into a second year of stalemate.

Here in Washington, the war in Ukraine has precipitated an expansive aid program: the U.S. has sent almost $75 billion in military, financial, and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv over the past year. (Source. Wake up to Politics).

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UN Resolution to End Ukraine War: How Countries Voted and Who Abstained.

The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Thursday, the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, in favor of a resolution calling for an end to the war and demanding that Russia leave Ukrainian territory. The nonbinding resolution advocates for peace, reaffirms support to Ukraine’s sovereignty and highlights the need for accountability for war crimes.

A large majority — 141 countries — voted in favor of the resolution, while 32 countries, including Asian heavyweights China and India, abstained from voting. Seven countries, including Russia, voted against the resolution.

Nearly a year ago, in March 2022, a similar resolution was adopted by the United Nations. The number of supporters of an end to the war was the same, at 141. However, 35 abstained and five backed Russia.

Countries which voted against the resolution: Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria.

Countries which abstained: Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Congo, Cuba, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, Togo, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zimbabwe. (The Washington Post).

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Florida? Now Virginia. Institutional racism and Government Censorship start to spread in the GOP ecosphere.

2nd state's governor calls for review of AP African American studies course.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is reviewing College Board's Advanced Placement African American studies course, following nationwide debate over the curriculum that erupted after the course was rejected by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

"After numerous reports about draft course content, the governor asked the Education Secretariat to review the College Board's proposed AP African American Studies course as it pertains to Executive Order 1," said Gov.

Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter in a statement to ABC News.

Critics of such policies, including educators, scholars and parents have expressed concerns that the moves amount to censorship and halt discussions about race, racism and diversity in classrooms. (ABC News)

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This 👇 is Harvard Professor, Skip Gates’ response to Florida’s Governor. Maybe Virginia’s Governor should read it too.

Who’s Afraid of Black History? by Henry Louis Gates.

Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.

“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” Governor DeSantis said. He also decried what he called “indoctrination.”

School is one of the first places where society as a whole begins to shape our sense of what it means to be an American. It is in our schools that we learn how to become citizens, that we encounter the first civics lessons that either reinforce or counter the myths and fables we gleaned at home. Each day of first grade in my elementary school in Piedmont, W.Va., in 1956 began with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, followed by “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” To this day, I cannot prevent my right hand from darting to my heart the minute I hear the words of either.

It is through such rituals, repeated over and over, that certain “truths” become second nature, “self-evident” as it were. It is how the foundations of our understanding of the history of our great nation are constructed.

Even if we give the governor the benefit of the doubt about the motivations behind his recent statements about the content of the original version of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African American studies, his intervention falls squarely in line with a long tradition of bitter, politically suspect battles over the interpretation of three seminal periods in the history of American racial relations: the Civil War; the 12 years following the war, known as Reconstruction; and Reconstruction’s brutal rollback, characterized by its adherents as the former Confederacy’s “Redemption,” which saw the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, the reimposition of white supremacy and their justification through a masterfully executed propaganda effort.

Undertaken by apologists for the former Confederacy with an energy and alacrity that was astonishing in its vehemence and reach, in an era defined by print culture, politicians and amateur historians joined forces to police the historical profession. The so-called Lost Cause movement was, in effect, a take-no-prisoners social media war. And no single group or person was more pivotal to “the dissemination of the truths of Confederate history, earnestly and fully and officially,” than the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, of Athens, Ga. Rutherford was a descendant of a long line of slave owners; her maternal grandfather owned slaves as early as 1820, and her maternal uncle, Howell Cobb, secretary of the Treasury under President James Buchanan, owned some 200 enslaved women and men in 1840. Rutherford served as the principal of the Lucy Cobb Institute (a school for girls in Athens) and vice president of the Stone Mountain Memorial project, the former Confederacy’s version of Mount Rushmore.

As the historian David Blight notes, “Rutherford gave new meaning to the term ‘die-hard.’” Indeed, she “considered the Confederacy ‘acquitted as blameless’ at the bar of history, and sought its vindication with a political fervor that would rival the ministry of propaganda in any twentieth-century dictatorship.” And she felt that the crimes of Reconstruction “made the Ku Klux Klan a necessity.” As I pointed out in a PBS documentary on the rise and fall of Reconstruction, Rutherford intuitively understood the direct connection between history lessons taught in the classroom and the Lost Cause racial order being imposed outside it, and she sought to cement that relationship with zeal and efficacy. She understood that what is inscribed on the blackboard translates directly to social practices unfolding on the street.

“Realizing that the textbooks in history and literature which the children of the South are now studying, and even the ones from which many of their parents studied before them,” she wrote in “A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries,” “are in many respects unjust to the South and her institutions, and that a far greater injustice and danger is threatening the South today from the late histories which are being published, guilty not only of misrepresentations but of gross omissions, refusing to give the South credit for what she has accomplished … I have prepared, as it were, a testing or measuring rod.” And Rutherford used that measuring rod to wage a systematic campaign to redefine the Civil War not as our nation’s war to end the evils of slavery but as “the War Between the States,” since as she wrote elsewhere, “the negroes of the South were never called slaves.” And they were “well fed, well clothed and well housed.”

Of the more than 25 books and pamphlets that Rutherford published, none were more important than “A Measuring Rod.” Published in 1920, her user-friendly pamphlet was meant to be the index “by which every textbook on history and literature in Southern schools should be tested by those desiring the truth.” The pamphlet was designed to make it easy for “all authorities charged with the selection of textbooks for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions to measure all books offered for adoption by this ‘Measuring Rod,’ and adopt none which do not accord full justice to the South.” What’s more, her campaign was retroactive. As the historian Donald Yacovone tells us in his recent book, “Teaching White Supremacy,” Rutherford insisted that librarians “should scrawl ‘unjust to the South’ on the title pages” of any “unacceptable” books “already in their collections.”

On a page headed ominously by the word “Warning,” Rutherford provides a handy list of what a teacher or a librarian should “reject” or “not reject.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the Constitution other than a compact between sovereign states.”

“Reject a textbook that does not give the principles for which the South fought in 1861, and does not clearly outline the interferences with the rights guaranteed to the South by the Constitution, and which caused secession.”

“Reject a book that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion.”

“Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.”

And my absolute favorite, “Reject a textbook that glorified Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, unless,” she adds graciously, “a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and vilification before 1865.”

And what of slavery? “This was an education that taught the negro self-control, obedience and perseverance — yes, taught him to realize his weaknesses and how to grow stronger for the battle of life,” Rutherford writes in 1923 in “The South Must Have Her Rightful Place.” “The institution of slavery as it was in the South, far from degrading the negro, was fast elevating him above his nature and race.” For Rutherford, who lectured wearing antebellum hoop gowns, the war over the interpretation of the meaning of the recent past was all about establishing the racial order of the present: “The truth must be told, and you must read it, and be ready to answer it.” Unless this is done, “in a few years there will be no South about which to write history.”

In other words, Rutherford’s common core was the Lost Cause. And it will come as no surprise that this vigorous propaganda effort was accompanied by the construction of many of the Confederate monuments that have dotted the Southern landscape since.

Is it fair to see Governor DeSantis’s attempts to police the contents of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African American studies in classrooms in Florida solely as little more than a contemporary version of Mildred Rutherford’s Lost Cause textbook campaign? No. But the governor would do well to consider the company that he is keeping. And let’s just say that he, no expert in African American history, seems to be gleefully embarked on an effort to censor scholarship about the complexities of the Black past with a determination reminiscent of Rutherford’s. While most certainly not embracing her cause, Mr. DeSantis is complicitous in perpetuating her agenda.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Addressing these “ravages,” and finding solutions to them — a process that can and should begin in the classroom — can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum, a process in which Black thinkers themselves have been engaged since the earliest years of our Republic.

While it’s safe to assume that most contemporary historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction are of similar minds about Rutherford and the Lost Cause, it’s also true that one of the most fascinating aspects of African American studies is the rich history of debate over issues like this, and especially over what it has meant — and continues to mean — to be “Black” in a nation with such a long and troubled history of human slavery at the core of its economic system for two and a half centuries.

As a consultant to the College Board as it developed its A.P. course in African American studies, I suggested the inclusion of a pro-and-con debate unit at the end of its curriculum because of the inherent scholarly importance of many of the contemporary hot-button issues that conservative politicians have been seeking to censor, but also as a way to help students understand the relation between the information they find in their textbooks and efforts by politicians to say what should and what should not be taught in the classroom.

Why shouldn’t students be introduced to these debates? Any good class in Black studies seeks to explore the widest range of thought voiced by Black and white thinkers on race and racism over the long course of our ancestors’ fight for their rights in this country.

To read this whole article as it appears in the New York Times, click here.

Dr. Gates is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. He is the host of the PBS television series “Finding Your Roots.”

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Andrea Mitchell simply asked Vice President Harris about what she thinks DeSantis doesn’t know about Black History. DeSantis went ballistic. See below. 👇 I doubt MSNBC lost a viewer.

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Ask people what they think of Trump’s Family Separation policy. Then you will know who they are. Ask politicians too.

The Secret History of Family Separation.

Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Yet a mountain of evidence shows that this is explicitly false: Separating children was not just a side effect, but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer.

Over the past year and a half, I have conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of internal government documents, some of which were turned over to me only after a multiyear lawsuit. These records show that as officials were developing the policy that would ultimately tear thousands of families apart, they minimized its implications so as to obscure what they were doing. Many of these officials now insist that there had been no way to foresee all that would go wrong. But this is not true. The policy’s worst outcomes were all anticipated, and repeated internal and external warnings were ignored. Indeed, the records show that almost no logistical planning took place before the policy was initiated.

It’s been said of other Trump-era projects that the administration’s incompetence mitigated its malevolence; here, the opposite happened. A flagrant failure to prepare meant that courts, detention centers, and children’s shelters became dangerously overwhelmed; that parents and children were lost to each other, sometimes many states apart; that four years later, some families are still separated—and that even many of those who have been reunited have suffered irreparable harm. (The Atlantic).

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Today has been announced as a “Day of Hate” by many Neo-Nazis groups, including Goyim Defense League, Active Clubs, National Socialist Movement and White Lives Matter in NYC. No, this is not from the Onion. 🧅

Neo-Nazi Groups Organizing Antisemitic 'National Day of Hate,' Police Warn.

Neo-Nazi groups across the United States are planning a national "Day of Hate" against Jewish communities on Saturday, according to antisemitism watchdogs and police documents.

A leaked internal memo by the New York City Police Department's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau, online organizers are "instructing likeminded individuals to drop banners, place stickers and flyers, or scrawl graffiti as a form of biased so-called action."

Jewish groups and police urged Jews to remain vigilant during the Sabbath. There will be additional patrols around synagogues in New York and New Jersey. (Newsweek)

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Citizens and suppliers are fighting for medication abortion.

The Underground Abortion Pill Network Is Booming.

At least 20,000 packets of abortion pills were shipped to people in the United States in the six months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, two sources with knowledge of the situation told VICE News. 

The suppliers of these estimated 20,000 packets are neither abortion clinics nor abortion telehealth organizations, but instead operate outside of the U.S. legal health care system. The demand for their pills, as well as their success at shipping them out undetected, are evidence of the thriving underground abortion network that has sprung up since Roe’s demise devastated access to abortion clinics. 

People have always self-managed abortions and will always self-manage abortion. We'll have to continue to fight back against all of the bans and restrictions that are being implemented on people,” said Christie Pitney, a licensed nurse practitioner, a midwife with Forward Midfwery, and co-founder of Abortion Freedom Fund, a fund for telehealth abortions. Referring to self-managed abortion, she added, “it’s just going to grow more and more.”

However, just because an estimated 20,000 abortion pills were mailed out does not necessarily mean that 20,000 abortions have already occurred off the grid. Some of these pills may have been requested by people who were looking to stock up in case of a future unwanted pregnancy.

The estimate comes as abortion rights advocates brace for a potential nationwide ban on mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in a medication abortion in the United States. Anti-abortion activists filed a federal lawsuit in Texas asking to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone; the judge overseeing the lawsuit, appointed by former President Donald Trump, has a history of conservative views on issues like abortion as well as a demonstrated willingness to wade into national policy fights. (Vice).

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The Vice President yesterday led a meeting in the White House to support abortion rights after Dobbs, and to support access to FDA approved mifepristone.

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Composer Jason Robert Brown comments on the Nazis who picketed his musical, Parade, now on Broadway.

About the protests outside of Parade.

Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt during the opening night curtain call for "Parade" at New York City Center, Nov. 1, 2022. The musical then moved to Broadway.

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"For the past couple of months, lots of people have been saying to me how important it is that we’re bringing Parade to Broadway right now, how the world needs to see this story at this moment in time. Honestly, I’ve been kind of skeptical; the story’s been there all along. But I have to acknowledge in light of last night’s events that there’s something about Ben Platt, a Jewish star, leading this American story about prejudice and scapegoating, right there in our weird little corner of the National Cultural Conversation, that really counts. Clearly it affects our audience. Obviously it’s affecting the other side as well. The Conversation was brought right to the stage door last night. That’s where we are now. הֹוָ֗ה עֹ֭ז לְעַמּ֣וֹ יִתֵּ֑ן יְהֹוָ֓ה ׀ יְבָרֵ֖ךְ אֶת־עַמּ֣וֹ בַשָּׁלֽוֹם “) ( The Hebrew words mean, “God bless the people.”- Jason Robert Brown blog).

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