Last night the Lemkin Institute announced a Red Flag Alert for genocide for trans and intersex people in the UK.
The Lemkin Institute issues Red Flag Alerts when developments occur in countries and regions that exhibit several red flags for genocide. We understand red flags as immediate developments that have the potential to radicalize and/or bring together destructive historical trajectories and move a society further towards a mass atrocity event aimed at destroying one or more collective identities. Our Alerts focus especially on developments that we feel are not being adequately appreciated for their genocidal potential by the global public and media, and that therefore need reconsideration within a genocide prevention framework.
We all know that the British, and majority of world governments don't give a toss about genocide, but it's still important for organisations like the Lemkin Institute to say it. We won't be going quietly.
How did killing(genociding?) the entire echidna tribe make you feel?
her feathers ruffled just from the way the stranger even spoke to her, she knew how those who wouldn’t understand would perceive her. nothing but a monster, she saw herself that way at times, killing those echidna’s wasn’t something she wanted to do, but to keep sonic safe as well as the emerald---she felt as though at the time she had no choice.
they didn’t want to listen to her.
“you think i wanted to harm them? i had a son to protect at the time, i would have done anything to make sure that he survived. i wanted nothing more than to be able to come to a peaceful agreement, but with an arrow through my body, it was hard to do that. i still hate myself for what i did, is that what you want to hear from me?” her voice had more depth to it than a moment ago. “i heard that there was a father amongst that group, had i known that when i did i would have let them kill me so that his son wouldn’t have to grow up with the anger that he had.”
Piecing together Prime Minister Netanyahu’s public declarations and speeches, it is clear that Israel has only one goal for the Gaza…
His framing of this as an existential threat to Israel is common in the context of any genocide, be it in Haiti, Germany, or Rwanda. Peter R. Neumann, Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London, says
“The most dangerous word in narratives of radicalisation is the word genocide. If you are convinced that your enemy wants to not only attack but completely eradicate you, your people and your identity, then any kind of “defense” becomes legitimate.
Therefore, we should shudder that Netanyahu has doubled down on civilizational, racist discourse. It is frightening that recent pronouncements do not always refer to Hamas but to some collective and vague Other.
Today, Netanyahu equated Palestinians with the Amalekites and reminded them of the biblical injunction to fight them. For those unfamiliar with Old Testament scripture, two verses later the Bible says this,
When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deut 25:19)
Netanyahu has all but announced his plans for genocide.
Fairly light-hearted audio, but this little clip really encapsulates “late” classic Who. I love most of this... and really I do. It’s a powerful moment.
But.
...I was a bit distracted by one of his confessions.
[ETA: The following essay has been sitting in my drafts folder for a year. I had tagged it “I’ll probably delete this by morning.” I was fearful of aggressive fan pushback, and I’m not entirely sure I agree with myself. But I made some good points, so I’m just gonna leave it here as one particular perspective.]
In classic Who, while the Doctor often failed to save people, failed to stop the humans he associated with from committing mass murder, sometimes resorted to killing individual attackers in self-defense or to save others, and frequently employed the “hoist by their own petard” gambit to trick villains into doing themselves in if/when they tried to do others in, I couldn’t remember a case where he deliberately wiped out “an entire race.”
That was always a bridge too far for the classic Doctors, something that is very much a thing that nuWho, and to some extent the EU, have introduced to the character.
So I looked it up. And found the thing I’d blotted out. And I’m once again reminded why I like so many fans back in the 80s felt that my beloved show had gone off the rails after Colin Baker became the Doctor.
It certainly wasn’t Colin’s fault; he was doing a stellar job with what he was given. But I remember our collective horror from Twin Dilemma onwards, culminating in the trial and Terror of the Vervoids where he did, supposedly, kill off an entire race (along with a bunch of other wildly out of character things whose reality was somewhat unclear. Like, was Peri’s death real, an alternate timeline, or fake? Were the stories presented by the Valeyard true, or fabrications he wanted to pass off as truth? That was a very confusing year).
But it seemed like his killing of the Vervoids might have been “what really happened.” And that was a bold and questionable act to put upon the character, much like having the Doctor strangle Peri and then have her stay with the person who’d physically assaulted her (it was originally a kid’s show, remember, and it was still watched mostly by teens and young people).
Yes, the Doctor was a flawed character. Yes, he was inconsistent, in an all-too-human way, eschewing violence one serial and resorting to it the next. But the classic Doctor’s character traits were like common law, building up a composite picture over decades. There were tendencies. And there were boundaries he had never crossed, or at least fought tooth and nail not to cross.
Twenty-plus years in, it felt fake and hollow to introduce new, out-of-character “crimes” simply in order to play the “your hero isn’t a hero after all” card and put him on trial for it.
It’s something that modern media does often for shock value. Reboots can’t leave heroic and decent characters alone; they must be given flaws that violate the earlier conceptions of them, as if we’re just too cynical to believe in someone who really and truly has an ethical center. The final years of classic Who were difficult on fans for many reasons, but this was one that distressed me the most.
So of course. The Sixth Doctor had to have a story retconning that powerful defining moment in Genesis of the Daleks that all of us remember, when the Doctor couldn’t even bring himself to destroy a race of artificial life forms designed to be the perfect purveyors of galactic genocide, because he asked himself “Have I the right?” and said no, he couldn’t do it. Even to save countless lives, it was a bridge too far.
And then, in season 23, the scriptwriters wanted to have the Doctor doing all the things he’d never done in the previous two decades, apparently because they’d run out of ways to do Doctor Who other than to violate it.
I’m still not over it. Really I’m not.
It doesn’t bother me as much in nuWho. It’s a full reboot. And it treats that change-of-character with the weight it deserves. Rather than simply doing it for shock value, RTD posed the question, “what, if anything, would drive the Doctor to violate his ethics and do what he’d fought all his lives to avoid doing?” I felt like the Time War was a sufficiently humongous, awful, no-win situation with sufficient gravitas that one could almost believe it.
It was still a bold and questionable move, one that I personally had a hard time accepting. It’s one of the biggest reasons the new show didn’t grab me, despite my liking Eccleston (and now Capaldi has finally drawn me in). But narratively, I could see it. I could see the new show was treating it as problematic, and that the Doctor was treating it as problematic, and he was haunted by it. (I like the additional retconning that he dropped the name of “Doctor” when he was no longer behaving like the Doctor).
I still object to having it retroactively imposed on classic Who. And yes, I know, season 23 was part of classic Who, but just like the debates of some fans today, I felt it was the wrong direction to be taking the show back then. After five Doctors and 20 years, that was “new Who,” not “classic Who,” when we were watching it. It had to earn the right to change the show that much by tackling it responsibly and giving us good stories. And... for the most part, it didn’t. Big Finish has, maybe? But it didn’t. The stories just weren’t good enough.
Give me my flawed Doctor. My arrogant Doctor. My inconsistent Doctor. My Doctor who screws up and makes the wrong decisions and is callous or insensitive or just plain naive at times. Yes, give me the Doctor who will kill off a Fendahl or a Dalek or even a squad of Silurians if he must in order to thwart their plan to kill off millions.
But don’t take away the man who will ask, “Do I have the right?” Don’t ever take away “There should have been another way.” Don’t take away the man who looks for alternate means to stop villains that don’t involve punching or fighting or killing, when he can avoid it.
...and to think I was going to write a post about how much I love this audio. Which I do. But this has been burbling in the back of my mind off and on, and it never really goes away.
