A new documentary about the history of forced psychiatric treatment in Spain
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://time.com/6997172/teen-torture-max-abuse-documentary/
“They are often a last resort for parents struggling with children with behavioral problems, suicidal thoughts, and substance abuse issues. Depending on the state, these rehab centers—a multi-billion-dollar industry—have few regulations, and there are no overarching federal standards governing them. Many are faith-based facilities designed to convert teens into born-again Christians and are therefore exempt from regulation in some states.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-About_Ranch
https://helpingsurvivors.org/troubled-teen-programs/turn-abo...
Natural result of that is catch-22, parent can't actually stop teenage kids from such activity except through what amounts to torture. As always either way, the parent is damned.
Welcome to America where you must watch the kid every second until they turn 18, except at the moment they turn 18 they must be booted from the house to figure everything out all at once with nothing more than a minimum wage job, a gun, and rents that reach the stratosphere.
This must be a regional thing?
I live in New England and I always see kids out and about with no adults around supervising. Especially from 1-3PM on weekdays when school lets out. Maybe a side-effect of walkable infrastructure.
Increasingly this is what the tyranny of the majority is in the western world. People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would. Almost every single one of them has a cell-phone and the second they see something they disapprove of they can call CPS at the drop of a hat and make your life a living hell, even if you are 'innocent' of even whatever BS they made up.
As always, it's just a smug attempt at moral superiority. They want the intoxicating power rush from threatening and imposing on parents, with none of the responsibility, and the state is all too happy to provide it to them. Just punish and then rest soundly knowing you have no kids of your own for which you could be prosecuted.
From what I've witnessed, the most common complainants were authoritarian mothers who treat their own child(ren) as helpless irrespective of biological age, and teachers, usually with families of their own, who treat non-violent "quirks" beyond their comprehension as a sign of malfeasance. In both cases, lack of familiarity with children is not the issue. Instead, their previous "successes" with raising/teaching children cement a narrow and selective expectation for how children must or must be made to behave. The motivation in either case is a desire for control. The ideological/cultural angle is, at best, a sincerely held rationalization, but is more likely an instinctual employment of thought-terminating cliches/kafkatraps to justify getting their way or make dissenters look/feel unreasonable.
This isn't quite true. A person's adult child isn't going to be taken away by CPS.
I am not in any way affiliated with the author, it's just one of the few books with real content that I've read in a long time.
Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse, and then turning around and claiming its to "save them", so the abuse isnt reallllly abuse.
Most of these camps cited are christian. And the people running them? Dogmatic christian fundamentalists. And these are the same types that run "pray the gay away" camps too.
And my inflammatory, albeit true comment also goes right back to the heart of the article:
"Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls."
Extremist Roman Catholic "values", demonization and imprisonment of 'unruly women', anti-LGBTQ. Same damned thing, again and again.
When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
Because it's not.
I've been interrogating this sort of question for most of my life. I am a queer agnostic who grew up in a religious part of the South and saw shades of this kind of abuse firsthand, mostly around queerness.
At first, I did blame religion, but with the benefit of hindsight, I realized something. In the context of queerness, almost nobody I ran into growing up hated queer people because they heard their preacher say so and thought it must be true. They hated them because they were massively insecure. They were terrified of being labeled gay. They were terrified of guys hitting on them. They were terrified of hitting on a woman who turned out to have been born as a man.
Religion isn't the problem. Instead, religion gives these sorts of insecure people a trump card that requires very little interrogation. However, if these folks weren't Christian or weren't even religious, I have no doubt that the underlying insecurities would remain, and simply manifest in a different way.
Once I realized this, it was actually a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. In particular, I was no longer confused as to why my friend groups that were majority Christian continued to be nice to me and treated me with respect, despite me being a atheist queer at the time. It opened the door to connecting with them on a deeper level of understanding, as well as leading to me dabbling with my own forms of non-Christian spirituality.
So yeah, religion isn't the problem. It's merely a mechanism that allows shitty people to be shitty.
Or, put another way, if a person's religion conflicts with their values (including prejudices), which one is more likely to give first?
This is literally an example of individuals choosing their religion based on their own values. Folks on one side of the schism might criticize folks on the other side of the schism for not being true Christians, but it's ultimately a dispute over "Thou shalt not lie with another man," versus "Love thy neighbor."
> religion itself is the problem
Religious flamewar isn't allowed here, so please don't post like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
---
Edit:
It also looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological/political/religious battle. That's not allowed here (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), and we ban accounts that do it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
I read the article, and discussing the article. And as hackers, im curious as how to fix the problems.
It's not hard to understand where the line is if you've reviewed https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and genuinely want to use HN as intended.
And even if it did, they didn't say it here. This is not the place for religious ideology. I passionately hate my neighbours who listen to music really loudly in their garden all the time, but I don't call for their eradication on public fora unless there's a really, really specific relevance (like here, for example) and I also don't campaign against them on GitHub, my local supermarket, local government meetings, or other places where people are trying to do other things.
There are places for me to rant about my neighbours. There are entire discussions about noisy neighbours, my vicinity, local customs and manners etc. If I wanted to rant about them, those would be the place to do it. But I don't, because I wouldn't actually gain anything from it. I'm not going to single handedly change the law on nuisance, and all a hate campaign could achieve would be, well, more hate. I want solutions, or quiet, and I won't achieve either of those by telling random strangers how terrible my neighbours are.
I'm sure you can think of the easiest solution to the hypothetical neighbour problem. It's not ideological and doesn't involve changing the hearts and minds of hundreds of people, none of whom are currently concerned about my neighbours.
It might look like I'm trivialising your point, but I promise, I'm not. Noisy neighbours, or an itchy foot, or even a literal broken fingernail, are a more immediate problem than 'we must rid the world of Christians', unless they are currently holding you hostage.
And the reason I'm bothering to write such a long-ass reply at all is because there is currently far too much intolerance and ethno-religious hatred being propogated and spread around the world. We know where this leads. It always leads the same way, there is no possibility of a happy ending. We have tried 'that religion is the problem, let's persecute them' repeatedly and we end up in the sort of fascist dystopia we were reminded of literal moments ago in the article.
It's not ok to do it to Jews or Muslims, which means it's not ok to do it to Christians. And it's not ok to let people spread those messages in bad faith, which means I've got to call out those spreading the same message in presumed good faith.
My neighbours are just annoying me, I can deal with that. Christians are just kinda weird but whatever, we've all got our foibles. Racists, dogmatics and puritans can believe whatever they want, I just won't listen to it.
And I invite you to step away from the brewing culture war too. It's more fun discussing tech and stuff.
This is the original programming. You might visualize it complete with a bug tracker, version control, patches, feature updates and programming languages. We can only see it when absurd enough but it gets much more absurd than this and the software may run for thousands of years.
I remember reading and seeing videos about training child soldiers. The weak or injured ones were killed as hunting targets and the more they killed the higher their rank. In the final ceremony that completes the training they had to shoot their parents. It was a great honor and they truly enjoyed it.
We have to remember death is nowhere near the worse punishment. It might be the nicest thing on the list.
Perhaps it is even worse if people don't notice they are in a similar program because it has been refined to such extend.
Imagine if you left the house without clothing. Like a default human, like any other species, or if you like, how god put you on this earth.
Or say, who decided you must use language? Not just that, you must say the correct things at the correct time.
If you get the dress code wrong, fail to speak or construct the wrong sentences well conditioned people from all over the world will come to beat you back in line.
We force the little ones to sit on designed to be uncomfortable chairs the whole day, the entire week. They must sit, not move, shut up and listen.
Someone once "rescued" a small child living on a garbage heap. Gave him foster parents and put him in school. The kid escaped, he went back to playing in the garbage. When asked why he said he wanted to play with his friends. With a look on his face as if he was talking to a crazy person. It was obvious he didn't want to sit, shut up and not move.... forever?
Seems to me we have many bug reports to fill and that patches are welcome. Our cult is far from perfect.
You seem to believe that these are adverse, uncommon, and unintended outcomes rather than part of the machinery of the troubled teen industry, the school-to-prison pipeline, poverty, and capitalist/protestant propaganda in general. Involuntary commitment would be a threat and weapon in the current political environment, as in the thread OP where the same was used in Francoist Spain.
Perhaps you should investigate your own biases and emotions toward the people chewed up and spit out by society before calling out a comment as "emotional" and "anti-social".
If we were to involuntarily take someone into society's care, the process must be benign with a good outcome. As things currently are, the exact opposite (or a system so thoroughly financialized as to be almost the same) is present. The capacity to reverse this seems non-existant.
Most calls right now to reinstitute involuntary commitment are the same thought process that results in the societal rot present in how we deal with poverty, homelessness, and addiction; they just want them even further removed from themselves so they don't have to witness it.
Ireland, for instance, had the highest rate of psychiatric institutionalisation in the western world in the 60s (some Warsaw Pact countries were likely higher). It was rapidly phased out in the 80s and early 90s. Homelessness (though a persistent problem since the 19th century) remained rather low until the early tens, then rose rapidly. I've never heard of anyone attributing this to the mental hospitals closing 30 years previously (this seems to be a uniquely American belief); it is generally attributed largely to _shortages of housing_ (itself due to the near-total collapse of the construction industry for a decade after the financial crisis).
While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis. (This is true of drugs as well, which is part of the reason "harm reduction" often works better in Europe--a credible threat of involuntary hospitalization.) This was the original plan in the 1970s in the US, to transition to out-patient care, but it didn't pan out. The mental hospitals were closed, but rather than shift the funding to out-patient clinics and treatment, the funding was simply pulled altogether. And because of the civil rights law overcorrection, addressing this is more than simply re-establishing the funding. California, for example, restored hundreds of millions of funding in the past decade, but for various legal and inertial reasons, cities and counties simply won't force treatment plans on even the most desperately ill patients, even when they're harming themselves or others. Sadly, we're slipping back into using the penal system to house the mentally ill; there's much less political and institutional pushback than increasing the use of conservatorship and civil commitment.
The problem has been well understood for more than 40 years. Here's a 1984 piece from the NY Times that could be written the same today: Richard D. Lyons, "How Release of Mental Patients Began", https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me...
See also, Natasha Tracy, "In Defense of Mental Illness Conservatorship—Despite the Britney Spears Case", https://natashatracy.com/mental-illness-issues/mental-illnes...
Where are you getting that? Which countries? Certainly in Ireland and the UK, I'm pretty certain that it is all but impossible to force outpatient treatment, and I think this is generally more or less the case in Western Europe as a whole. Involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals is still, marginally, a thing, but very rare.
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/social-care-and-your-rights...
Easy to find stories people being threatened with these laws into accepting treatment:
https://www.mentalhealthforum.net/forum/threads/threatened-w...
If you're wondering why human rights treaty organizations are so involved with these laws, and with the similar laws concerning children, look up how the holocaust started. But ... you don't really want to know the connection there.
she was lucky she wasn't imprisoned or executed
Edit: clarification
okay she threw molotov cocktails, she was lucky she wasn't imprisoned.
Throwing Molotov cocktail is trivially an criminal offense. OP is making it clear that framing it as she was a “free spirit” is ridiculous.
This is a protest against a fascist regime we're talking about. I don't know the exact context of any of this because I'm not Spanish, don't speak the language, and don't really know all that much about the nuance of 1968 Spain. I'm fairly sure you're just as ignorant of this as I am but the difference is that I'm withholding strong judgement one way or the other instead of jumping on one detail.
I do know that throwing a bunch of tea you don't own in the sea is also trivially a criminal offence. Kicking the shit out of an SS-officer is also trivially a criminal offence. etc. etc. You can have a long discussion about when violence is or isn't justified. I don't know enough about this specific situation to have a strong opinion. But pretty much everyone agrees that at some point you need to look beyond the law and trying to reduce this to just a matter of the law is massively naïve at best.
Oh, word? It's dope you know the inner thoughts of everyone involved.
| Throwing Molotov cocktail is trivially an criminal offense.
Article didn't say she threw them herself, 'a few' of a group she was part of did. Glad you're taking the maximalist, guilty until proven innocent, position on conviction by association in the Franco Regime.
My point is the story is disjointed and sad, but there is little cohesive theme aside from pure tragedy, and the narrative presented makes no sense.
You: "help", "That’s >- presumably <- why her parents sent her to a reform program."
The article: | [her parents] were so conservative they wouldn't even let Mariona wear trousers.
| "For them, it was a scandal, a stain on the family," she says. "After that, they wouldn't let me out."
| [after she ran away] They immediately reported her as an underage runaway to the authorities, and the moment Mariona was about to board a boat back to Barcelona, she was arrested.
| Mariona wasn't given any explanation [for sending her away] - she only remembers her parents' rage.
| her [second] escape was short lived. Within hours she was bundled into a car with her father and an uncle, and driven back to Madrid.
| Now aged 20, she vowed to never live with her parents again.
| "We suffered a lot too," [her father] told her when she asked him about the family decision to have her locked up in Madrid.
Her parents only care about themselves, 50 years ago and today, if you can't see that, there's something wrong with you.
~~
You: "My point is the story is disjointed and sad, but there is little cohesive theme"
The purpose of the article and the film, as written in the article, which you did not read:
| Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls.
| The film has contributed to a groundswell of calls for the interned women to be formally recognised under the law as victims of Spain's dictatorship.
| "Women come and tell their stories – it's like a door opened to something unknown, and that's very powerful," says Marina. "People think what happened in their own home was an isolated incident. We try to say: this history isn't individual, it was systematic."
| Her mother Mariona still doubts her memory sometimes.
| But, she says, "seeing it all reflected in the film, that gives it the weight of truth."
>>Oh, word? It's dope you know the inner thoughts of everyone involved.
Based on disclosed facts, actions taken (that are not in dispute), and statements by the perpetrators themselves before and after the fact, we can conclude that her parents do in fact care more about their own 'suffering' and 'status', more than their daughter's physical and emotional well-being.
You, on the other hand, just made shit up from whole cloth, but are too pathetic to stand on business and disagree directly.
If I could assign remedial reading comprehension lessons to anyone on Earth, today, I would choose you.
I would sure as hell hope people start throwing Molotov cocktails when someone like that comes into power.
Please don't call a 17-year old person a child. It's not as if on the night between 17 years, 11 months and 30 days, and 18 years humans undergo some sort of metamorphosis.
The study that appeared to show them stopping development at 25 did not have any participants older than 25.
The difference between an 18-year-old and a 24-year-old is much more comparable to the difference between a 24-year-old and a 30-year-old.
We should be treating teenagers much more as adults-in-training, in the sense of meaningfully giving them the tools to succeed as adults, rather than treating them like pure innocent children who must be sheltered from absolutely everything hard, scary, or taboo.
However, as it stands we generally do not do that—hence, in this case, she was indeed a child, and should have been given compassion, better tools, and better chances, not locked up.
After 50 years, they seem to decline.
(And probably also drive, it always stuck us in Europe pretty weird you allow minors to drive in the USA as the car can be a very lethal tool).
So if 17 can't be called a child, what can? You have to draw the completely arbitrary like somewhere. Do you chose the legal 18 (in the US)? The Hebrew 13? Some other metric?
Your comment is treating her with full agency (i.e. "she shouldn't have done anything bad or disruptive") and completely ignoring the agency of the institutions that harmed her (i.e. "what did she expect in response?").
I wholeheartedly agree it wasn't prosperous, but not being safe? Where did you take that from?
But I see a lot of comments here about what Fanquismo was and wasn't, and I believe it comes out of ignorance about Spanish history. Many comments here make it look like this was a choice between Franquismo/Fascism and personal freedom and democracy. It wasn't. It was a brutal struggle between Fascists and Communists, and good people that wanted freedom were caught in the middle right since the beginning. The choice wasn't between Fascism or Democracy, the choice was just between two major evils: Fascism or Communism and that's why it divided Spanish society
It can be argued that when this happened (1968), the bloody and brutal Spanish Civil War (that started with major violent acts from the communists' side after fair elections, BTW) was long over and the country should already be way on the path to democracy (and I agree if that was the point being made), but let's not pretend that she joined good company and proper people that just wanted to liberate Spain.
People commenting here really need to read about the Spanish Civil War to understand how it went down. Communists were so destructive that in the middle of the war, they started fighting and killing each other instead of fighting against the Fascist forces. Major atrocities were committed on both sides. POWs were routinely rounded up and executed, both by the Communists and by the Fascists.
The only group that seemed to have some sense when it came to defend basic humanity were the anarchists (although they did have a lot of other issues). Read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell for a beautiful and sad description of a small part of this conflict.
There's this old 6 episodes TV Series from 1983, that really gives a good perspective of how awful it all was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_I6C-VbFvI
This is simply false. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 with Franco's fascist coup against a democratically elected government. Check your own ignorance before accusing others.
"The defeat in the elections and its consequences led to disenchantment with parliamentarism and radicalization within the Socialists. The increasing militancy within the Socialist workers was followed by Francisco Largo Caballero's adopting a revolutionary Marxist rhetoric which justified revolutionism as a way to combat rising fascism, uncharacteristic of European social democratic mainstream and the reformist traditions of the PSOE.[69] The CNT adopted a similar rhetoric in the wake of the elections, threatening with a revolution if "Fascist tendencies" would win the elections.[70] Open violence occurred in the streets of Spanish cities, and militancy continued to increase,[71] reflecting a movement towards radical upheaval, rather than peaceful means as solutions.[72] A small insurrection by anarchists occurred in December 1933 in response to CEDA's victory, in which around 100 people died.[73]
[...]
Fairly well armed revolutionaries managed to take the whole province of Asturias, murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university at Oviedo.[75] Rebels in the occupied areas proclaimed revolution for the workers and abolished the existing currency.[76] The uprising was crushed in two weeks by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco."
Anyhow, Franco was a fascist trash and allied with Hitler and Mussolini. Revolutionaries were mainly anarchists (NOT communists). In fact it's because of Stalin and the communists following him starting an infighting with the anarchists led to the fascist victory.
If the revolutionaries have won, Spain would have been an experimental socialist/anarchist republic. We don't know if ot would have been ended up like USSR. Maybe.
In 1968 though the flight was pretty much about fascism vs democracy.
Oh, last point: Torture is torture.
I tend to agree with that, because nothing shouts "experimental socialist/anarchist republic" like "murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university".
Playlist of the miniseries from the same channel:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxZAPogJjW_h2JbgYOgO3GZiI...
The Spanish Civil War (1983)
Ah yes, good old "it hurts me more than it hurts you".
people supporting a totalitarian fascist regime, blaming the victim...
"Shouldn't fight against the regime, violence is bad mmmkay"... "she threw molotov cocktails, she deserved it"...
what is happening, i feel like i'm taking crazy pills
Businesses are set up like tiny little fascist dictatorships. They are always trying to pay less taxes, evade regulations, layoff workers, monopolize, destroy competitors etc. They don't know anything about the public sphere, or common good, or government, or democracy, or rule of law etc. They suck at that, it goes against all their training and instincts.
They can seem like libertarians because they believe that they themselves should be able to do whatever they want whenever they want, but any activism is of the consumer-rights variety i.e. "I can do whatever I want with my property!"
Under Franco, the mean HNer would be upset that they couldn't buy (or create) whatever book they wanted or any piece of art they wanted. That's it. They'd even preface that objection with an "admission" that most of the books or art that Franco would ban were terrible and shouldn't be read or looked at.
Franco himself was weak, soft, and like the 3rd choice to rule fascist Spain. His position and his government was due to the tacit support of people very similar to HN users today. At least he's keeping the Russians away...
Yes, being raped and given electro-shock treatment IS BAD. It’s also very much not what her parents signed her up for by turning her into a reformatory.
Nobody here is defending a fascist regime. We’re just complaining about horrible editorializing.
Edit: these downvotes… SMH
/s
Can't say I'd have done the same choice, but it makes it more understandable.
Don’t those new violent dictators also tend to be more aligned with the people revolting?
Anyway, it kinda makes sense to me that the people advocating for change through violent means don’t suddenly stop being violent when they get to power.
Empirically, no.
"Popular dictator" is an oxymoron. The dictator is always focused on their own survival. They are never able to completely wipe out their opposition, and end up collaborating with the powerful, and repressing the weak, in order to retain power.
80% illiteracy. I think revolutions almost always go well because you usually have to be really terrible to cause one to happen.
Under the czar successful farming resulted in high taxes.
Under the communists, successful farming made you a kulak, you died / starved to death, and then everyone else did too.
With the revolution Russia became much closer to a normal country.
I don't think reforms of orthography were what mattered. What mattered was actually forcing people people to learn to read and also sending people out to teach them.
I don't see pre-1918 Cryllic as much more complicated that post 1918 Cryllic, but then I am of course literate and a Swede, so the only thing I find unusual is the symbol of softness, which is probably much less of a problem if you actually speak Russian.
When you have nothing to add, say nothing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democrac...
Or have the courtesy to do the reading.
The general principle is more than adequate as a counter to the comment I replied to. You should not assume that is what you would do if you lived in a dictatorship.
| You should not assume that is what you would do if you lived in a dictatorship.
No, one cannot. That said, there are people here that have made those decisions, and that are making them right now. It's strange that you have assumed of me that this could not be true. I will only say that I've made my decisions and my conscience is clear.
What you can decide right now what your principles are. One of mine is that resistance against a violent authoratarian state, including violent resistance, is morally justified.
Whether it is most effective or not is a matter for organizers, historians, and arm-chair quarterbacks like yourself.
Have you read the comment I replied to? it was saying that violence was definitely the right thing to do.
> One of mine is that resistance against a violent authoratarian state, including violent resistance, is morally justified.
Without even considering the consequences? I believe that one of the criteria for morally justifying violence has to be that the consequences or using violence as better than any available non-violent alternative. I think that is a fundamental different of values.
> and arm-chair quarterbacks like yourself.
I have lived in a country where 1) multiple groups of people were using violence to do what they considered to be fighting oppression, 2) I have come pretty close to bombs they planted, and 3) the end results not only included huge numbers of deaths, but also let the government get away with things such as disappearing journalists who opposed them. I am a lot less of an arm-chair observer than I guess you are.
Fallacious assumption. They don't need an excuse. They will invent one if they feel it is required.
"Look what you made me do" is the logic of abusers, large and small.
No amount of conspicuous rule-following will stop them from calling you a genetically violent degenerate, unworthy of compassion when it suits their ends. Nothing will stop them from revoking your right to exist at a moment's notice.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't do what it takes to survive, but harm-reduction and resistance are different things altogether.
Solidarity and primarily non-violent resistance are my preferences, and I believe they are also the preference of most people, until circumstances drastically deteriorate.
However, I'm not going to second-guess a molotov thrown by a teenager's friend 50 years ago in Franco's Spain. Especially when the response to that incident was 3 years of psychological and medical torture. The scales are not balanced, and our focus should be on the people that actually wielded power for great evil, rather than ahistorical hypotheticals.
| [I]t was saying that violence was definitely the right thing to do.
| I believe that one of the criteria for morally justifying violence has to be that the consequences or using violence as better than any available non-violent alternative. I think that is a fundamental different of values.
You are demanding that individuals who are being harmed by ongoing state violence see all possible futures and choose the optimal one for most people (themselves excluded). In so doing, you hold individuals living under unceasingly violent regimes to a much higher standard than the regime itself, which is free to act in arbitrary ways. This is an utterly unbalanced position that demands passivity or flight.
| I am a lot less of an arm-chair observer than I guess you are.
I will not discuss my situation online, probably not for a decade. That said, I am sorry you had to live through what you did, and I am glad you made it out. I still weep for those who we've lost, even as I write this. We all deserve a better, kinder world.
As a point of reconciliation, and without pulling directly from current conflicts. I think that if every British agent in Sri Lanka perpetrating the ‘Divide and Rule’ Strategy had been exiled or killed in 1815 (with violence and malice aforethought), the history that you had to endure would have been orders of magnitude less bloody, do you disagree?
The generalissimo used forced labor not unlike the DPRK, made widespread use of concentration camps, and was quite fond of executing dissidents. All religions other than Catholicism were outlawed and all political parties were outlawed.
Why would opposition to a murderous dictator be a bad thing? It isn’t as though the protestors/rioters/rebels were the ones escalating the situation. The government was already killing people. This could easily be viewed as justified violent opposition in the pursuit of stopping more murder.
The ‘throw molotov cocktails’ are mentioned in the same sentence as ‘hand out leaflets’, which makes me feel the surrounding people were generally not panicking about the fire. Hard to say without reading the book though.
throwing molotov cocktails is in NO way "normal"
it's so sad that the allies killed so many Axis soldiers in WW2 right? wasn't very nice :(
> and when the police turned up, scatter in every direction.
Whoever they set out to burn alive was very likely defenseless.
Any other insights you'd like to add?
What do you believe the purpose of this article is? Do you think it is advancing a policy agenda, in which case which policies is it advocating for? Or is it perhaps just documenting what happened and the impressions of those effected by what happened?
1. Indicates this a human interest story
2. Is by definition of an accurate representation of the words of the person they are quoting
3. Is a reasonable overview of a complex story, given we understand that "free-spirited" is subjective and that, again, this is a human interest story and conveying the feelings of the people involved is part of the point.
If you would, that is probably the heart of our disagreement. If not, I guess it comes down to an agree to disagree on whether the subjective window of the personality trait 'free-spirited' can include 'active participant in violent resistance against a dictatorship'.
No? That’s a very good headline for an article about someone who believes that they were abducted by a Sasquatch. It would be a missed opportunity for a newspaper to NOT do.
I think you're right that the BBC is being irresponsible in putting "my mum was a 17-year-old free spirit" in the headline -- even though it's a quote, it does imply a level of BBC editorial agreement with the characterization. It makes her sound like she was just an innocent hippie or something.
On the other hand, this wasn't vandalism for vandalism's sake. It was political protest against a dictatorship. It's not like she was engaging in criminal acts for the fun of it or for personal gain, so the snippet you choose is similarly misleading without the context of why.
And of course it's armed conflict. But the point is that it's armed conflict against a fascist dictatorship killing over 100,000 civilians by most estimates -- which is what makes it considered legitimate violent protest by many people.
How do you think Franco got in power? By peacefully using his free speech rights and persuasive speeches? How do you think he stayed in power for all those decades? Do you think some people's free speech rights and avenues of protest might have been a teensy tiny bit curtailed?
B) She was imprisoned, and tortured, as the article discusses.
C) What POV would you prefer?
D) This was Franco's Spain, what do you imagine yourself doing at a time like that?