January 12 2024

This winter has been very mild up until this week. We hardly had much snow like normal, it was maybe an inch at most, but this week we were plunged into a deep freeze, which is more typical of the Canadian winters I’m used to. On my way to school my hair and eyelashes frosted up, my scarf and jacket hood too. Thankfully of all the stops I make on the journey to school, only one is non-heated and that one I only wait at for five minutes and the walk is not long at all (I am a very fast walker, but a slow runner).

Majority of my school days open with History and this day was crazy, sort of. By crazy I mean comments made, there weren’t fights or rioting in class. Maybe one day one will break out. There were less students than usual, this may be due to people dropping as the deadline for dropping classes without penalizing was coming up, or because of the extreme cold. Either way we were praised by our professor and I was pleased, judge me all you want but I need praise. The lecture. Opened with a brief talk about South Africa and the ICJ, he made sure to tell us the difference between the ICJ and the ICC: the latter charges individual while the former charges states. A guy in the class who was wearing a keffiyeh (spelling?) brought up Nelson Mandela to highlight the connection between Palestine and South Africa; the quote about how South Africa will never be truly free until Palestine is free. This then continued with my professor stating that the way this whole thing will proceed in the court will be very interesting and that he cannot definitively state that what Israel is doing is genocide, but apparently Hamas is genocidal against Jews.

When we finally started the lecture properly we learned about more “reasons” for genocide which includes nationalism; that inclusion and exclusion are synonymous, as in when one happens so does the other. According to some historians, not named, they believe that there was a genocide committed against monarchists in western France. If you include political ideology in your definition of genocide then this is accurate. Personally, I’ve never heard of this happening but I wouldn’t be surprised that monarchists in post-revolution France were hurt.

So this next part of the lecture gets spicy. We were talking about semantics and metaphors being utilized in genocide and one of them was gardening/medicine/agriculture. The metaphors being shaped like “the survival of some plants while others will be exterminated” and likening certain groups to a contagion/disease. With the gardening metaphor we were shown several quotes as examples and here where the ones that caught my interest:

“You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one. You need to spray chemicals to kill them all.” (Chinese official in Xinjiang Province) This official is noticeably left unnamed. When reading this quote he asked if we knew the Xinjiang province, then proceeded to very briefly mention concentration camps, forced sterilization, and other forms of violence committed against the Uyghur population. Does anyone know who said this quote?

“Desiccate the seedlings of counterrevolution, pull them out by their roots, exterminate every last one of them.” (Kim Il Sung) I understand this as an example of the garden metaphor but is this genocidal? This seems like the standard attitude against counterrevolution in every state revolution has happened, both communist and fascist.

We then went over hygienic/sanitation metaphors but there was nothing of note there, just the standard fascist rhetoric we are all familiar. This was all given to emphasize the fact that language has power. Almost like how Israel calls Palestinians cockroaches and the children of darkness. Funny how that works.

He then talked about ultra nationalism and then i got confused because he brought up Putin. Here’s what I wrote verbatim in my notebook:

“I’m confused. The conversation now is that because Putin is an ultranationalist therefore Ukrainians cannot exist? What did he imply that? That you can’t be Russian speaking Ukrainian? Is that not something from Ukrainians killing those in the Donbass?”

What I meant was, he claims Putin believe Ukrainians shouldn’t exist and that no Russian can speak Ukrainian, but wasn’t that rhetoric used to commit horrible violence to Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east? Why is nobody talking about that? While i would love to ask him about it during office hours I’m terrified at what will happen if I do.

After this we moved on to the History of genocide and looked at the violence of Chimpanzees and the peacefulness of Bonobos, both our closest relatives. Chimpanzees I guess are more patriarchal and incredibly violent, something about that Y chromosome, says my professor. Bonobos, on the other hand, are very matriarchal and the hornist creatures on the planet (he said this lol). To diffuse conflicts Bonobos will straight up just have huge orgies and there is no discrimination (they will bang both females and males). Why is this horniness relevant? because there is something to be said about genocidal repressive regimes and sex. Germany before the Nazis was actually fairly sexually free but then that all changed under the Nazis (they put gay men in concentration camps). Putin has recently banned LGBT “propaganda” while he is doing his invasion of Ukraine. The connection between sexual repression and genocide/violence is interesting, He made sure to state explicitly that he is not advocation free love as a solution for the world’s problems, but it is something to think about.

We then looked at Palaeolithic genocides very quickly as class was coming to an end; what happened to the Neanderthals? Did they die off due to a skill issue or were they mass slaughtered? I recently heard that Neanderthals practised cannibalism and that might be the reason why they died out, because I guess humans didn’t really do that on mass like they did.

After class I went to the library to do my usual stuff, mainly writing these posts. Listen, they’re school related so I think it’s fine. I also use the time to do other class work and figure out how I am going to survive this year. I technically have a schedule but one of my classes is completely online asynchronous (prerecorded) so trying to fit that in is difficult for me. I do have executive functioning problems due to ADHD so, yeah, it can make studying hard. After this long ass break between classes I went to one of my Psychology classes (I’m taking three). Nothing super interesting happened material wise but because of the low student turnout my professor sent around an attendance sheet and said that we would all get a extra point on the midterm due o our commitment to showing up during shitty weather. That’s what I’m fucking talking about! This is why I don’t stay home because of a sickness or the weather (this is not admirable behaviour).