It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, November 01, 2022
Tens of thousands demonstrate in Budapest against Orbán’s education policy
Tens of thousands of Hungarians took to the streets of the capital, Budapest, on Sunday to demonstrate against the education policy of right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's government.
According to the organizers, around 80,000 people have gathered, including students, teachers and union leaders. The march ended in front of the Budapest University of Applied Sciences.
The demonstrators have demanded nine measures for the sector, including better salaries for teachers, curricula without ideology and the right of educators to strike, reports 'HVG', which has broadcast the demonstration.
Related video: Thousands protest to demand higher wages in Hungary
Sunday's protest was also directed against the control exercised by the government over the state media and a large part of the private media, as well as against Orbán's good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, reports the DPA agency.
This Sunday, Orbán criticized those who "shoot from the shadows and the heights of Brussels" against Hungary and warned that "they will end up in the same place as their predecessors", in reference to the Soviet Union.
"Let's not worry about those who shoot at Hungary from the shadows of the heights of Brussels," Orbán has stated during an event for the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, militarily put down by the Soviet Union, and has warned that "they will end up in the same place as their predecessors."
"We are tolerant when we have to be and we fight back when we can. We will draw our swords if the opportunity arises and we will resist the long years of oppression that may come," he said.
While forced labor still exists throughout the world, one place where it’s especially pervasive is the South China Sea — especially in the Thai fishing fleet, according to a 2016 investigation by the New York Times. Partly this is because in a typical year, Thailand’s fishing industry is short about fifty thousand mariners, according to the U.N. in 2014. As a result, tens of thousands of migrants from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are whisked into Thailand each year to make up this chronic shortfall. Then, unscrupulous captains buy and sell the men and boys like chattel.
With fewer fish close to shore, maritime labor researchers predict that more boats will resort to venturing farther out to sea, making the mistreatment of migrants more likely. The work aboard the fishing boats is brutal. And in this bloated, inefficient, and barely profitable national fleet at a time of rising fuel prices, captains require crew members to simply do what they are told, and have little patience for complaints, no matter how long the hours, how little the food, or how paltry the pay. In short, these captains rely on sea slaves.
The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C, got onboard a Thai distant-water vessel using enslaved labor. There, three dozen Cambodian boys and men worked barefoot all day and into the night on the deck of a purse seiner fishing ship.
The third episode of the podcast series The Outlaw Ocean, from CBC Podcasts and the L.A. Times, tells the harrowing stories of sea slavery. Listen to it here:
Rain or shine, shifts run eighteen to twenty hours. At night, the crew cast their nets when the small silver fish they target — mostly jack mackerel and herring — are more reflective and easier to spot in darker waters. During the day, when the sun is high, temperatures topped a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but they work nonstop. Drinking water is tightly rationed. If they are not fishing, the crew sort their catch and mend their nets, which are prone to ripping.
One boy, his shirt smudged with fish guts, proudly showed off his missing two fingers, severed by a net that had coiled around a spinning crank. Their hands, which virtually never fully dried, had open wounds, slit from fish scales and torn from the nets’ friction. Infections are constant. Captains never lack amphetamines to help the crews work longer, but they rarely stock antibiotics for infected wounds.
On boats like these, deckhands are often beaten for small transgressions, like fixing a torn net too slowly or mistakenly placing a mackerel into a bucket for sablefish. Dispatched into the unknown, they are beyond where society could help them, usually on so-called ghost ships — unregistered vessels that the Thai government has no ability to track. Deckhands typically do not speak the language of their Thai captains, do not know how to swim, and, being from inland villages, sometimes had never seen the sea before.
Virtually all of the crew had a debt to clear, part of their indentured servitude, a “travel now, pay later” labor system that requires working to pay off money they often had to borrow to sneak illegally into a new country. The debt just becomes more elusive once they leave land.
There is this modern assumption, especially in the West, that we got rid of slavery. But debt bondage is still very much present. Like the Cambodian boys held captive, killed if they try to escape. This is what modern day slavery looks like. And until we modernize our understanding of that, we won’t know how to identify it, much less do anything about it.
vowed this week to cut provincial ties with the World Economic Forum, calling it an “offensive” organization that seeks to control democratic governments.
The WEF is known mostly for organizing hyper-elite conferences in Switzerland, which is part of why it’s a frequent target of conspiracy theories holding that it’s a secret illuminati pulling the strings on the world’s government. Not helping the conspiracy theory is the fact that the WEF has a weird habit of claiming just that.
But the group doesn’t really have any ties to the Alberta government, save for the Alberta Health Services’ involvement in a WEF-aligned health think tank alongside the likes of Harvard and the Mayo Clinic. Anyway; that membership abruptly ended this week with Smith’s announcement.
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(Meanwhile, it was only eight years ago that Smith (who was then leader of the Alberta Wildrose Party) was openly bemoaning the fact that the WEF had cancelled a planned conference to be held in Alberta. The cancelled WEF event was “highly embarrassing” and a “black eye” for the province, said Smith.)
NATIONAL POST
Busy ER departments leading to added healthcare costs and workloads: University of Alberta study
Emergency room doctors in Edmonton and across the country are sounding the alarm about the dire state of ER wait times.
“Anywhere from two to seven hours depending on which emergency department you are going to and currently I’ve seen wait times across the country even approaching 18 to 20 hours,” said pediatric emergency physician Dr. Rod Lim.
“We’re seeing emergency departments closed and we’re seeing wait times reach dangerous levels across the country,” emergency physician Dr. David Carr added.
A new University of Alberta study finds those busy emergency rooms have led to higher costs because of the need for additional care after the initial emergency room visit.
“As they get busier they have less time to spend with the patient directly,” said study author and U of A business professor Mohamad Soltani. “As an alternative, what they do is they order more tests that can be helpful in diagnosing the case.”
Compounding the problem is a shortage of staff such as nurses, resulting in greater workloads for those frontline staff in the ER.
But Soltani stresses there are things patients can do to alleviate some pressure.
“For the patient side, we propose that the next time you are going to the emergency room, just give it a second thought,” Soltani said.
“Do you really need to go to emergency room? Or do you have some other channels where you can seek care?”
Edmonton ER doctor Warren Thirsk said more robust changes are needed in the health-care system.
“We need better planning, we need to admit that we have run the system too lean, we need to come up with plans that take into account the crux of the health-care system as people, so its people who look after people,” Thirsk said.
He said these wait times and staffing shortages are the worst he’s ever seen and health-care professionals and patients end up paying the price.
“Knowing that we can’t help people like we were trained to do — like we would want our family members to be looked after — is painful to see day after day,” Dr. Thirsk said.
Emergency room doctors in Edmonton and across the country are sounding the alarm about the dire state of ER wait times and services. Now, a new study out of the University of Alberta is showing overburdened emergency rooms are also leading to hidden costs and workloads. Chris Chacon explains.
Canada’s ER crisis: Doctors urge governments to stop finger-pointing and find solutions
Teresa Wright - Yesterday- Global News Healthcare workers listen as Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones makes an announcement at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital, Thursday, August 18, 2022.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Canada’s ER crisis: Doctors urge governments to find solutions for ‘dangerous’ wait times Duration 2:08 View on Watch
Emergency room doctors say patients are experiencing “dangerous” wait times in ERs across the country and it’s time federal and provincial governments stop pointing fingers over the “crisis” in health care and instead come up with solutions.
Hospitals across Canada are experiencing a “perfect storm” of pressures that have resulted in overcrowded emergency departments and wait times that can sometimes stretch to up to 20 hours, Dr. Rodrick Lim, medical director and section head at London Health Sciences Centre’s pediatric emergency department told Mercedes Stephenson in an interview on The West Block.
“The thought of anyone waiting longer than they have to in a waiting room and something happening to them because of that is every health-care worker’s nightmare,” Lim said.
“It's just something that we don't want to think about but, unfortunately, there are stories (about this happening) coming across the country right now.”
Front-line workers in hospitals across the country have been sounding the alarm about what they call a “crisis” in their ERs, due to a combination of factors that has forced many hospitals to close their emergency departments temporarily over the last several months.
Significant nursing shortages is one of the biggest concerns, which has led to bed closures in both emergency departments and within medical units in hospitals. This means fewer available beds and personnel to care for patients at a time when hospitals are also seeing a significant influx of sick Canadians. Many have no choice but to go to ERs as they are unable to access primary care thanks to a national shortage of family physicians.
Meanwhile, health workers already burned out from working flat-out during the last two-and-a-half years of the pandemic are now left short-staffed amid a surge in patients due to waves of COVID-19 continuing and an unusually early start to the respiratory virus season.
The situation is particularly acute in children’s hospitals in many parts of the country, including Ontario, where pediatric units seeing an early spike in RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) cases are warning parents of significant wait times.
“It's a tough situation… We are seeing quite a surge in RSV earlier than we traditionally see it,” Lim said.
“At the current time, there's a tremendous strain on both emergency departments, inpatient wards and ICU capacity across the country.”
Dr. David Carr, an emergency physician and clinical investigator at the University Health Network in Toronto, says emergency departments are a kind of barometer of the health system, and there are some “alarming signals” right now.
No Quick fix for Ontario ER rooms shuttered due to staffing shortages
With so many nurses retiring early and quitting their jobs due to burnout, emergency departments are not able to admit patients as there aren’t enough nurses to open the beds needed to accommodate them, he said.
It’s leading to a “cascade” of overcrowded ER waiting rooms, in which physicians have nowhere to see patients.
“We've now really shifted to just seeing patients in waiting rooms and in some cases outside of the waiting room because there's just no physical space,” Carr said.
All 13 of Canada’s premiers argue more federal funding is what’s needed to help their ailing health systems, but Ottawa says it wants to see better results from the billions already flowing to the provinces and territories for health care before increasing health transfers.
Lim says it’s time for the buck passing to stop and for all levels of government to focus on finding ways to ease pressures for health workers and patients alike.
“We're going to have to really have a serious conversation about health care and the amount of resources that are required and the amount of planning that's required,” he said.
“The sooner we can have an intelligent, comprehensive conversation around it, the better the solution will be.”
Possible fixes will be complex and need to involve short- and long-term plans, Carr added, including paying nurses more and lifting the freeze on nursing salaries in Ontario.
But long-term initiatives won’t help with the immediate pressures facing ERs in Canada, he said.
“Recognizing foreign-trained graduates and increasing class sizes for health-care professionals will help,” he said.
“But let's recall, this is not going to help this winter. And this winter is frightening both of us considerably.”
Nova Scotia·Q&A
Protestors in Iran driven by desperation, says Halifax woman
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Mitra Mansouri witnessed protests sparked by the death of a 22-year-old woman who had been detained
CBC News ·
Demonstrators chant slogans during the March of Solidarity for Iran in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. Demonstrations have taken place inside Iran and around the world following the mid-September death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest in Tehran by the county's morality police. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
While Mitra Mansouri was in Iran over the past month, she says she witnessed women and young people saying they have nothing to lose in their fight against the country's Islamic government.
"With the young people, especially students and women, they have the power of hopeless because they don't have any hope for their future," Mansouri told CBC Radio's Mainstreet on Thursday.
Mansouri moved from Iran to Canada 14 years ago, and now lives in Halifax.
Amini fell into a coma after she was detained and died in hospital on Sept. 16, sparking international condemnation.
Mitra Mansouri moved to Canada from Iran 14 years ago. She now lives in Halifax. (Mitra Mehr/Facebook)
Mansouri spoke with CBC Radio's Preston Mulligan on Mainstreet Thursday. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What was your own experience like growing up in Iran, and did you ever worry about the morality police targeting you for anything?
Yes. If you are talking about my previous experience when I was living in Iran — yes, all the time. Me and my colleagues, my classmates, [we were] always under pressure, scared of the morality police and it was a very daily experience for [all] people in Iran.
Give me an example of what behaviour you might worry could offend the morality police.
I remember when I was married for just two years, me and my husband were walking in a park together and the morality police stopped us and asked, "Who is walking with you?" And I said, "This is my husband."
They said "No, you are lying, he's not," and they took us to different cars and they started questioning us about, what is your name? What is your father name, grandfather name, your address, your uncle's address? And many, many different questions, just to recognize if we are really husband and wife or not.
Listen to Mansouri's full interview on CBC Radio's Mainstreet:
Mainstreet NS8:34What a Halifax woman witnessed during protests in Iran
Mitra Mansouri just spent a month in Iran, witnessing the unprecedented protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by the morality police for allegedly wearing her mandatory headscarf too loosely. Mitra spoke with guest host Preston Mulligan about what she saw during the unrest.
And it took one hour, this questioning, in two different cars and after that I was shaking because I was scared very much. They are not very kind, they are not very polite and … they want to scare you and our generation really wants to escape.
That's the point of it, as you say, just to intimidate and to scare you. How did that situation resolve? Were you let out of the vehicles and told to go on your way?
Yes. After one hour of questioning, they let us go because they recognized that we are really wife and husband, but imagine if we were not and we were just boyfriend and girlfriend. What would happen to us? ... Maybe they'd take us to prison?
The experience of normal life was from the beginning of the revolution until now, the government always has some reason to force people to obey the rules. The Islamic Republic is not just a political government, it is a religious government, and they rule in your private life as well. It means you can't be yourself in the Islamic Republic.
Tell us what you saw during your visit back to Iran this past month.
When I arrived in Iran, it was just two days after the death of Mahsa Amini. In the early morning, when I was in Tehran, I saw police motorcycles around the city. It was very early but it seems they are going to very specific locations to control the people — every smaller street or bazaar, market, shopping centre, everywhere you can see the military stand with their guns ready.
Thousands showed their support for Iranian protesters standing up to their leadership over the death of a young woman after she was held police custody, during a demonstration in The Hague, Netherlands, on Oct. 8. (Peter Dejong/The Associated Press)
Tell me about some of the other places you visited while you were there.
I had a trip to Kerman, another city in south of Iran, and it is normally a very calm city, but I was there for around one week and I saw, against the government, many demonstrations and people, especially young people, and women were out to show their feelings about how they don't want this government.
They want to get back their normal life and it was very surprising for me because Kerman was most of the time, a very calm city.
Tell us about what you saw of the protesters and what they were doing and their attitude.
I have an example. I saw a very young girl and she had pain in her back and I asked her, "Why do you feel pain?" And she said, "Last night, I was beaten by the police" and she was laughing. I asked her, "Oh, why are you laughing?"
She said "Because they can't understand. I have not married, I don't have any children and I don't have any future so I'm not scared for my life. I will fight to get back my normal life. Normal life means what I like to be."
With the young people, especially students and women, they have the power of hopeless, because they don't have any hope for their future. They [lost] their young years, they [lost] their wishes, their dreams and they want to change it. And I saw the power of the hopeless for this young generation and women.
The woman who you encountered who'd been beaten in the back, where was she going?
She was talking over the phone with other people for another demonstration in Tehran and as I said, she said, "I don't have anything to lose" and she was on the way to another protest.
It's really more than brave. I can't name it.
With files from CBC Radio's Mainstreet
IT STARTS WITH DRIVING ‘Alarming’ rise in Saudi divorce rate blamed on social media
New figures show that there were seven divorces per hour in 2020 in Saudi Arabia, with experts blaming unrealistic portrayals of life provided by social media.
Saudi divorce rates increased by over 12% between 2019 and 2020 [Getty]
Figures released by the Saudi General Authority for Statistics have revealed a dramatic rise in the rate of divorce in the Gulf kingdom.
The latest statistics show that in 2020, there were 57,595 divorces – amounting to 168 per day or seven per hour.
This represented a 12.7 percent increase on the rate of divorce in 2019.
Saudi lawyer Dakhil Al-Dakhil told the local Al-Yaum newspaper that there had been only 9,233 divorces in 2010 although in 2011 the number of divorces had gone up to 34,000.
Al-Yaum reported that one of the factors behind the alarming rise in divorce since 2010 was the effect of social media on society.
Al-Dakhil pointed to the role of social media influencers, telling Al-Yaum that they often gave impractical advice and portrayed life in a way that was too idealized and far removed from reality, giving Saudis unrealistic aspirations.
The lawyer also said that recent increases in the cost of living and the Covid-19 pandemic had also played a major role.
There has been an increase in divorce rates in the Arab world generally in recent years.
Pacific nuclear legacy overshadows US talks in Marshall Islands
Mon, October 31, 2022
Marshall Islands officials say they are ready to resume talks with the United States this week on renewing a long-standing economic and security deal, provided Washington addresses grievances stemming from the testing of nuclear weapons on the Pacific archipelago more than 70 years ago.
The United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands between 1946-58, and the health and environmental impacts are still felt on the islands and atolls that lie between Hawaii and the Philippines.
US special envoy Joseph Yun is scheduled to land in the capital Majuro on Thursday to resume negotiations on extending the 20-year Compact of Free Association, part of which expires in 2023. Marshall Islands negotiators first want the United States to pay more of the compensation awarded by the international Nuclear Claims Tribunal, totalling just over $3 billion, of which around $270 million has been paid so far.
Officials in Majuro broke off talks in September to renew the compact, a key international agreement between the United States, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.
The Marshall Islands said it would also be ready to resume talks with Yun if Washington tackled health and environmental issues stemming from their nuclear testing.
"We are ready to sign (a Compact extension) tomorrow, once the key issues are addressed," Parliament Speaker Kenneth Kedi told AFP.
"We need to come up with a dignified solution," he said. Kedi represents Rongelap Atoll, which is still affected by nuclear testing.
He was encouraged by an agreement signed in late September by US President Joe Biden and Pacific island leaders, including Marshall Islands President David Kabua, that included references to the US commitment to addressing its nuclear past.
However, until that happens, "it casts a question mark on all the promises Washington has made," Kedi said.
"If we can't resolve issues from our past, how will it be going forward with other issues?"
Thousands of Marshall Islanders were engulfed in a radioactive fallout cloud following the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test by the US military, and many subsequently experienced health problems.
Tonnes of contaminated debris from the testing was dumped in a crater on the Enewetak Atoll and capped with concrete that has since cracked, sparking health concerns.
Hundreds of islanders from the Marshall's Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utrik atolls have also had to relocate due to nuclear contamination. Many are still unable to return home.
A study issued by the US National Cancer Institute in 2004 estimated around 530 cancer cases had been caused by the nuclear testing.
"As Bikinians, we’ve done enough for the United States," said Alson Kelen, chairman of the Marshall Islands’ National Nuclear Commission, who believes the United States should pay the full amount of the compensation awarded.
"We're not asking to be rich. We're asking for funding to solve our nuclear problems ... really the funds are to mitigate and address the problems of our health, relocations and nuclear cleanups," Kelen said.
Of Course War-Profiteering Gas Companies Don’t Want to Give Workers More Power
The Australian government is facing a swarm of opposition as it tries to push through a massive 249-page industrial relations bill that would allow workers—at different companies—to collectively bargain for better pay.
Now, bosses from some of Australia’s richest mining, coal and gas companies say they will run a “multimillion-dollar” ad campaign to stop them.
The threat was levelled at the Labor government on Tuesday, adding to growing unrest from members of the crossbench in both houses of parliament, as workplace relations minister Tony Burke continues to push ahead with hopes to get it done by the end of this year.
If he’s successful, the bill would make a slew of changes to industrial law in Australia, and give workers—and their unions—substantially more bargaining power.
Among the most controversial elements of the bill is the introduction of multi-employer bargaining, which would offer workers from lower-paid industries—like childcare and cleaning—to negotiate together sector-wide, as opposed to having negotiations fenced off by their bosses.
The possibility has outraged all sorts of bosses, not least those who sit at the top of some of the most profitable businesses operating in Australia.
Across the resources sector, where profits over the last year are in the tens of billions, anger over the idea of ceding more power to workers is running “white hot”. Steve Knott, chief executive at the Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association, said that if the government doesn’t make “substantive” changes to the bill, some of the sector’s biggest employers would launch a multimillion dollar campaign against it.
“It would be like the mining tax campaign but on steroids,” Knott told The Australian, referencing the $20 million campaign launched by the industry in opposition to the resource super profits tax in 2010, which eventually left former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s government in ruins.
At the centre of most of the blowback to the bill are claims that, if passed, Australia would descend into the strike-induced chaos last seen across the nation in the 1970s. It’s a heavily-trodden line, often heard from opposition leader Peter Dutton, as well as the various industry and lobby groups that have taken the same position.
But there’s plenty of research that suggests the opposite would be true. Chris F. Wright, an industrial relations academic and associate professor at the University of Sydney, says Denmark offers itself as a useful case study.
There, where close to two thirds of the population are unionised and even more are covered by collective agreements made on the foundation Australia’s Labor government is trying to introduce, strikes are rare, the unemployment rate is lower than it is in Australia, and “excessive” wage growth is nowhere to be seen.
In Australia, wages have remained stagnant for the better part of the last decade, while inflation for the September quarter rose to 7.3 percent.
“Multi-employer bargaining systems have many other benefits,” he wrote on Twitter. “They can help to address gender pay inequity—according to the OECD multi-employer arrangements are ‘necessary to negotiate targeted raises in female-dominated and low-paid sectors’.”
“Multi-employer bargaining is also more effective at addressing skills shortages—because it encourages employers to cooperate over training, rather than poaching each other’s skilled workers [which is common in Australia],” he said.
But multi-employer bargaining only forms one part of the bill, and members of the Senate crossbench, who will have final say over the bill’s passage, argue that the government is trying to rush the bill through both houses without giving any mind to what unintended consequences it might bring with it.
In order to get the bill over the line, Labor will need support from the Greens in the Senate, along with at least one more independent member of the crossbench in just three weeks.
So far, One Nation has outright opposed the bill, while the Jacqui Lambie Network has reservations about how it could impact small businesses still recovering from the worst of the pandemic, and senator David Pocock is asking the government to break the bill up, so parts of it can be passed before Christmas, and others can be scrutinised for longer.
The government, however, has shown no signs of slowing down. Prime minister Anthony Albanese argued earlier in the week that there’s already been a considerable amount of consultation on the changes, and that his government will “consider practical changes”, but won’t pause for delays.
The message was repeated firmly by Burke later on Tuesday. Appearing on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing on Tuesday, he said he didn’t want workers suffering wage stagnation to wait “a day longer than we have to”, before hitting back at Knott over threats to launch a campaign against the government’s bill.
“People have been waiting for 10 years without their wages moving, and I don’t want to continue that delay. Let’s not pretend we don’t have a level of urgency here…wages at the moment in Australia [are] running at 2.6 percent, and inflation [is] running at 7.3 percent,” Burke said.
“A $20 million campaign is not going to stop this government’s resolve in getting wages moving,” he said.
“If they think they can simply buy advertising space, and we will suddenly turn a blind eye to the households where wages are not keeping up with standards of living, then they just don’t understand what’s happening around every kitchen table in Australia.”
Art exhibitions, films and city tours are casting a new spotlight on LGBTQ life in the now defunct state, capturing the imagination of generations born after the Berlin Wall tumbled on November 9, 1989.
“It was a high-wire act,” said East German art expert Stephan Koal about the life of Juergen Wittdorf, a long-closeted gay artist whose daringly homoerotic works decorated even official buildings of the Stalinist regime.
Koal has co-curated a major retrospective of more than 250 pieces by Wittdorf for what would have been his 90th birthday.
Although it’s being staged in a sleepy eastern Berlin suburb, the exhibition has been a surprise success with more than 20,000 visitors since it opened in September.
As sexual autonomy comes under fresh attack around the globe, even in EU members such as Hungary and Romania, Wittdorf’s work is seeing a renaissance four years after his death.
Part of that renewed interest comes from a contemporary understanding of the “courage” required for LGBTQ people to fly beneath the radar, Koal said.
“Gay people were an important part of an incredibly exciting subculture,” he said, along with overlapping groups of intellectuals, churchgoers, environmentalists and squatters that finally spilled onto the streets in East Germany’s peaceful revolution.
“The regime saw the gay scene as a threat.”
‘Bubbling beneath’
Born in 1932, Wittdorf was a long-time member of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)’s ruling SED party, living off official commissions for his art.
The communist state decriminalised gay sex in 1968 — a year before West Germany — but it remained a serious social taboo.
Years before that reform, Wittdorf pushed the envelope with graphically lustful works featuring young men’s bodies that he managed to pass off as Socialist Realist heroism.
One work that stands out is a print that hung in the official Academy of Sport in Leipzig featuring buff athletes soaping up together under the showers.
Karin Scheel, artistic director of Biesdorf Palace, which is hosting the Wittdorf retrospective, said the collection was a “nearly buried treasure” that explored the limits of social repression in an authoritarian state.
“In the GDR these were just depictions of athletes,” said Scheel, who co-curated the show. “Today we see it totally differently — under these prints there’s something huge bubbling beneath the surface.”
Wolfgang Winkler, 86, a retired librarian visiting the show who met Wittdorf a few times, said the role of LGBTQ people in East Germany’s churning underground had long been “underestimated”.
“History just swept it aside, what Wittdorf achieved with his work,” he said. “But for those of us who knew about it, it was a sensation.”
Berlin’s chief culture official, Klaus Lederer, who is also gay and from the east, hailed new efforts to correct the “erasure” of Eastern artists and their battles for freedom.
Although most gave way to gentrification and online dating, a few of the gay bars and cafes of East Berlin are still around, such as the Sonntags Club (Sunday Club) which is now a stop on popular tours of the Prenzlauer Berg district’s LGBTQ history.
Since 2021, an annual East Pride Berlin demonstration has paid tribute to the LGBTQ pioneers in the “resistance” behind the Iron Curtain as well as embattled communities in eastern Europe today.
‘Cheeky’
One of the stops is at the Gethsemane Church, a centre of anti-regime protest and the birthplace of the rights group Lesbians in the Church.
Sexual liberation also drives the new movie “In a Land That No Longer Exists” set in East Germany’s world of fashion in the summer of 1989.
Director Aelrun Goette, who was herself discovered as a model on the street in East Berlin, tells the story of Suzie, a teen who escapes a state-mandated factory job by posing for a style magazine.
There she meets the designer Rudi — based on GDR style icon Frank Schaefer, author of a rollicking memoir about his life as a gay punk in then bohemian Prenzlauer Berg.
Even as they work in the official clothing industry, Rudi leads Suzie into East Berlin’s wild, creative underground — a “niche” Goette said could be found in most dictatorships.
“Either you’re free everywhere or you’re not,” Rudi tells his protegee. “If you’re not, then the West can’t help you either.”
Goette said the time had come to tell a story about how “cheeky, insubordinate” East Germans liberated themselves, little by little then all at once.
The movie’s success has a certain symmetry with the first gay-themed feature film to be released in East Germany, “Coming Out”, which premiered the night the Wall fell.
The larger LGBTQ community can be dismissive toward its asexual members at times. That’s demonstrably unfair, as ace people have incredibly queer experiences of coming out and navigating life with a nonconforming sexuality. Nonetheless, claims that asexual Americans don’t really experience discrimination abound.
Well, it’s time to put that claim to bed, because acephobic rhetoric is alive and well in the Christian right. In fact, earlier this year, a wide assortment of right-wing Christian think tanks endorsed a letter demanding Congress’ top Republican prevent the federal government from codifying ace relationships.
According to a new report from LGBTQ Nation on acephobia from the American Christian right, far-right anti-LGBTQ think tanks such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, The Heritage Foundation, and the Family Research Council signed a letter petitioning Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Senate minority leader, to act against the Respect for Marriage Act. The groups feared it would “require federal recognition of any one state’s definition of marriage without any parameters whatsoever.” Among the feared results, the letter decried “platonic marriages.”
“[T]he proposed Act goes far beyond merely codifying same-sex marriage in federal law,” the letter declares, leaning on anti-LGBTQ “religious freedom” rhetoric. “It is a startling expansion of what marriage means—and who may be sued if they disagree—that threatens the freedom of numerous ‘decent and honorable’ Americans of different faiths, creeds, and walks of life who wish to live consistent with their deeply-held beliefs.”
How anti-ace sentiments thrive in the Christian right
According to LGBTQ Nation’s Tyler Songbird, the “platonic marriage” phrase isn’t a throwaway line. Asexual relationship structures have increasingly come under scrutiny by the American right. Songbird points to a Heritage Foundation report that claims abstaining from sex is mere “selfishness,” and a Witherspoon Institute thinkpiece that argues sex “has long been at the core of marital meaning.” That piece explicitly disparages “those who identify as ‘asexual’.”
“I think it matters deeply that we continue to define marriage as a sexual union,” the Witherspoon piece argues. “This ongoing thinning of marriage’s meaning leaves less and less of the concrete conjugal elements that can bind marriages together. Also, it seriously erodes the legal justification for the benefits, responsibilities, and protections with which the law endows marriage.”
Anti-ace sentiments abound in the Christian right. Conservative anti-LGBTQ talking head Christopher Rufo, a man intimately embedded with the Christian right think tank circuit, told Tucker Carlson that LGBTQ organizations “have taken moral power from within” Disney and obsessively track for “transgender, asexual, and bisexual characters” in the company’s shows. Evangelical Christian author Gene Veith condemned the “sex-free ‘friend marriage'” because “from a Biblical point of view, sex is what defines a marriage,” as “marriage creates a new family.”
Far more blatantly, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, known for his incredibly anti-trans documentary What Is a Woman?, argued in April that ace people simply have low libido or disinterest in romantic relationships caused by a “dysfunction of the brain.” He claims this is most commonly “a symptom of spiritual despair.” Walsh went on to state that asexual individuals simply don’t exist, and that it’s impossible to be asexual but romantically attracted to others.
“One of the latest LGBT innovations is to draw this incoherent bifurcating line between romantic and sexual, but the distinction, just like the distinction between sex and gender, is meaningless,” Walsh declares. “Romantic and sexual are the same thing. They are characterized the same way.”
These values permeate through evangelical Christian spaces. In the ace journal Aze, one arospec ace writer named Lynde describes the “double-edged sword” of purity culture while at an evangelical Christian college. Lynde was “protected” from purity culture’s sexual shame in college, she writes, but purity culture also prevented her from understanding the dimensions of her own ace sexuality—and she increasingly felt burdened by evangelical Christianity’s obsession with romantic relationships, young marriage, and seeking out sex through the latter.
Christian fascism and compulsory sexuality
In her work Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desires, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, writer Angela Chen identifies that ace people feel pressured to have sex via compulsory sexuality. This is “a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual,” where “not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong.” It’s easy to see where compulsory sexuality comes into play with the Christian right. The ultimate goal of evangelical Christian sexual politics is to control peoples’ sexuality (or lack thereof) and then force them to have sex in specific ways.
Rhetoric of family and procreation appear in religious right criticism of platonic marriage and other ace relationship structures because, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, sexless marriages challenge the nuclear family structure. In a society increasingly obsessed with white birth rates, there are plenty of reasons why a fascist Christian movement would want people to have as much procreative sex as possible. As long as the context is specifically controlled and religiously approved, that is. Otherwise, the more opportunities for those babies, the better, even if that baby’s existence has to be coerced out of others.
So yes, the far-right might not focus on ace identities as much as they do gay, lesbian, and transgender ones. But make no mistake. In the Christian right’s eyes, ace people are just as much of a threat to heteronormativity as anything else.
ANA VALENS - EDITORIAL STRATEGIST Ana Valens (she/her) is a reporter specializing in queer internet culture, online censorship, and sex workers' rights. Her book "Tumblr Porn" details the rise and fall of Tumblr's LGBTQ-friendly 18+ world, and has been hailed by Autostraddle as "a special little love letter" to queer Tumblr's early history. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her ever-growing tarot collection.
