Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day: "Our future is in the rear-view mirror and gaining on us."
posted earlier: edited: 6/10,10/28/18: edited 1/27/19: Today is the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. 1.1 million people, primarily Jewish, were gassed and incinerated by the Nazis in the prison camp. Approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered in Nazi concentration camps in efficient factory-precision during World War ll, between 1939 and 1945. Before the Holocaust, the pre-war Jewish population (and as early as 1933) in Europe was approximately 9.5 million. By 2012, Europe's Jewish population was approximately 1.4 to 1.6 million. The world's Jewish population in 2016 was approximately 14.2 million people. About half of the world's surviving Jews live in the U.S. - Sources: BBC/ NerLeElef-Judaism Online/ Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum web site/ Wikipedia/ Jewish Virtual Museum. The second largest number of prisoner deaths/murders committed by the Nazis were inflicted by starvation, disease, executions: …“at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody,” as part of the overall 5.7 million POW deaths in WW-2 in the Pacific, the European, African, and other theaters. “This figure represents a total of 57% of all Soviet POWs" that were imprisoned in Nazi camps. - Wikipedia Please give to the Jewish World Service: 45 West 36th Street, 11th Floor/ New York, New York 10018/ 212-792-2900
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Happy Martin Luther King Day (posted earlier): ..."when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" - Excerpt from: I Have A Dream: Martin Luther King/ Intellectual Properties Management. “24 years ago I, uh, was the only white guy in a six-man cell in L.A. County Jail. There were nine or ten guys in the cell -- three or four of us sleeping on the floor. A couple of months ago I was watching a CNN -- Lisa Ling -- special on L.A. County Jail. About 1 out of 4 guys were white. It was good to see real proof of the evolution of integration in our society.”
The Northern Ireland Effect (a version posted earlier): The Harland and Wolf Shipyards built the Titanic and the RMS Britannic and was one of the most successful yards in the world. Catholics made up approximately three percent, or less, of the workforce in the late 60s, though they represented more than a third of the population of Belfast. This socio-economic effect was representative of employment in the private sector in Belfast, a free enterprise system run primarily by the British and by Northern Ireland Protestants, an infrastructure of opportunity and oppression that evolved over hundreds of years. The Catholics were primarily the descendants of the indigenous Irish population; the Protestants mostly from lowland Scot and English colonists. As each people evolved separately but together in Ireland -- and eventually what became Northern Ireland -- Catholic neighborhoods suffered greater unemployment, less opportunity, and so the dole: then greater poverty, a lesser education; poverty-driven alcohol abuse, violence, crime, rebellion, etc., generation after generation. Though both people are white, the difference in evolution of the Catholics and Protestants was dramatic. In America, the evolution of poverty, violence, in black neighborhoods (the descendants of slavery and Jim Crow laws); Hispanic barrios identified by language, color; Native American reservations, where many of the indigenous people of the United States are contained (during and after hundreds of years of rebellion and war) and live in often-isolated poverty-stricken communities, and (by variation) rural whites in formerly coal-driven economies, in often-isolated areas of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, suffer the Northern Ireland effect. The Northern Ireland Effect wasn’t, isn’t ethnic, racial, generated by a lack of ambition or weak work ethic, and people do survive and succeed... 1/21/19: “If success is the, uh, tenth rung on a ladder, ah, whatever it might be, money, social status, what have you, a lot of people start at the first, the lowest rung. But, plenty start higher up, um, at seven, eight, or nine, and so their ascension isn’t really much to brag about. As time goes by the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The, ah, climb gets easier for the former and harder for the latter -- no pun intended.”
I had family that immigrated from Scotland to Northern Ireland, later from Northern Ireland to America, and family that came from Ireland to the U.S., Catholics and Protestants. In 1990, after defeating America's best chess-playing computers,
Russian, Anatoly Karpov finally met his match in an Irish computer by the name of Sluggo. "Though surrounded by an internal landscape of devastation, insulation from the pain of lost dreams, a battered though unbeaten fighter will hold on to a pin-prick of hope -- In that gray Limbo a spark of hope is the only light to read by. Happy New Year."
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Kevin O'Kendley is the owner of Carbuncle Moon, and the author of all original material -- cartoons, blogs, shorts, essays, articles -- on the website (there has been a very limited editorial input in some of my work). All quoted sources are noted. I am responsible for all posts. The only blogs not time-dated are those advertising nonprofits. All nonprofits are vetted, investigated, though after the summer of 2018 my vetting has lapsed: (6/1/21).
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