Hi, Germany 🇩🇪 here again.
[Thread.]
In the 1970's West Germany suffered from severe series of domestic terrorism.
The Rote Armee Fraktion RAF.
Their attacks on capitalism, targeted Bankers, Politicians, Embassies. To finance, they were committing robbery, killing police.
... /1

Here is my collective thread on Aurangzeb, the Mughal.

will elaborate in this thread how aurangzeb committed mass murders, destroyed temples, imposed jaziya on hindus, publicly ban study of vedic literature and forced hindu women to marry muslims.

Source : Maasir-i- Alamgiri

Page 53, Shikan khan, faujdar of mathura was sent to demolish a temple in malarna.

Page 55 - Aurangzeb ordered his officers to demolish the Kashi Vishvanath temple.

page 106 - Great temple of Kahndela at rajasthan was demolish by Darab khan and Tahawwar khan while a group of rajputs was executed by the mughal army.

Page 60 - The temple of Kesho rai was demolished on the order of aurangzeb and a mosque was built over there in the holy onth of ramzan.

The temple was built by a Bundela Rajput chief and the ruler of the kingdom of Orchha, birsingh devo bundela.

Page 108 - Gwalior, Aurangzeb ordered to issue the law of islam and to collect the jaziya from the infidels or non-muslims.

This week, 33 years ago, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was assassinated in a French-backed coup. He aspired to an egalitarian, feminist society, and an economy built on self-sufficiency, ecological regeneration, and independence from Western powers.

As debt crises mount across Africa, his ideas are more vital now than ever. I wrote about Sankara's legacy in these two pages from The Divide:

Today, Sankara's legacy is inspiring a new generation of revolutionary thinkers and activists across the continent and beyond. As Sankara himself put it, with uncanny prescience, “You can assassinate revolutionaries, but you cannot kill ideas”.

Sankara knew his assassination was coming. Speaking to African leaders at the OAU, he said "I would like this conference to clearly declare that we will not repay the debt; we must do it together, to avoid being assassinated individually..."

"...If Burkina Faso is the only one to refuse, I will not be here at the next conference."

On this day in 1945 Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was the largest concentration and death camp. 1.1 million people, 90% of them Jews, were murdered there. Today it is an international day of commemoration, to honor the memory of all victims of Nazi extermination.

A few things to keep in mind on International Holocaust Remembrance Day:

1) The Soviet liberation of Auschwitz is a deeply symbolic event, but it is worth noting that allied forces were liberating Nazi camps until May of 1945. Unspeakable suffering and death continued for months

I bring this up because the popular perception of events is informed by primary school practices which present them with clean start and stop dates. Useful for repeating dates, but less useful for having an understanding of what forces you unleash and what it takes to unwind them

When we talk about the lessons of the Holocaust, too many fall into the trap of "if it's not identical to Auschwitz, it's not worth invoking the Holocaust."

The seeds for the Holocaust were laid long before Auschwitz was opened, and the Holocaust continued after its liberation.

2) Every year on this date you can reliably expect a debate on what it is we are commemorating. A small but loud group of people use this date as an opportunity to play suffering olympics. Resist the urge to engage with these fools.

A brief thread on the life, religion, and language of Omar ibn Sa’id, author of the only known Arabic-language autobiography of an enslaved person in the United States.

Omar ibn Sa’id was a Fula man from what is now Senegal. He studied Islamic sciences and mathematics under prominent scholars before his enslavement in 1807 at age 37.

In his autobiography, he writes that he was taken “to a place called Charleston in the Christian language.”

He escaped from his first enslaver, but was recaptured and jailed. He wrote in Arabic on the walls of his cell, attracting the attention of the Governor of North Carolina and his brother, who took Omar to their home, where he remained until his death in 1864.

He continued to write short Arabic theological and philosophical texts through his life - his autobiography in 1831, letters, annotations in his Bible, and passages from the Qur’an.

He converted to Christianity in 1820, but his relationship to Christianity was always ambiguous

He writes more about Jesus after his conversion, but the language he uses is consistent with Islamic views of Jesus - المسيح (Messiah) and سيدنا (our master), but not ربنا, our Lord

As the Qanon prophecies fail and the cult-members struggle to resolve their cognitive dissonance, it's a good time to revisit the history of paranoid, conspiratorial political movements in American history - the "paranoid style" that has dominated since the Revolution.

1/

After all, the very first skirmishes of the US war of independence were based on a conspiracy theory: that the levy on tea was a prelude to a sellout of the colonists to transnational mercantalist interests. US politics have always been conspiratorial.

2/

I found @zacharykarabell's @politico history of the Know Nothing party especially useful, as it tells the story of what happens when surging, paranoid, fractious political movements

The American Party was a secret 19th century organization founded on a conspiracy theory: that Irish immigrants were secretly planning a takeover of the US on behalf of the Pope.

4/