Do What's Right.

Day: 13 May 2024

Students – once again – are leading the way. Now we must all join them and stand up for Palestinians

Osita Nwanevu in the Guardian writes »

The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.

 

Last Updated on May 23, 2024

Book banning is one of the first signs that a democracy is losing

Michael Harris writing in The Tyee »

Shortly after Adolf Hitler passed legislation in 1933 that put him above the law, even if he violated the German Constitution, the National Socialists began compiling their first list of books “deserving to be burned.”

In May 1933, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels organized a huge bonfire of books at Berlin University. The books were deemed to be “unacceptable to the party.” Students danced around the fire as they tossed books into the flames: great works by Thomas Mann and Einstein, H.G. Wells, Freud, Zola and Proust. Book burnings took place in 34 university towns and cities in Germany. The regime also raided bookstores and libraries to confiscate “un-German” material.

Last Updated on May 23, 2024

© 2024 Downshift

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑