Photo by Anna-Louise via Pexels
Happy New Year and welcome back to this bi-weekly installment of What Just Happened?!, a semi-comical digest of the most important news from the UK, US and the World. Look out for us every now and again, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The World
Dutch Books
A list of 425,000, predominantly Dutch, people investigated for (or otherwise suspected of) being Nazi collaborators is being made publicly accessible online. Of these almost half a million people about 1/5th have historically appeared before a court, many of the investigations concerned membership of the Dutch National Socialist Party (the largest Nazi aligned political group in the low-lands) and the list also includes some 20,000 Dutch who enlisted in the German Army while under Nazi occupation. A law limiting the public accessibility of this list has expired and the 32 million pages of the archive are being scanned in via a process that will take some years yet to complete. Throughout the 5 years of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands more than 100,000 Dutch Jews were murdered.
This digitization project is an interdisciplinary research initiative sponsored by the Dutch government and involving the Dutch National Archives (where the above discussed archives have been physically available for appropriate interested parties; their website currently includes a notice anticipating crowds and reminding prospective visitors to reserve seats in the reading room from January 1st), the Huygens Institute, the National Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (or NIOD); and an organization called WO2Net which exists to promote education, particularly of young people, about World War 2 (their website Oorlogsbronnen means “War Sources” in English).
Somewhat bizarrely, a last minute move by the Dutch Data Protection Authority seems to have ruled out the original intention behind the digitization and open-access project of having users be able to view archived records alongside the names of alleged collaborators. Since these archived records include plenty of private sensitive information (in addition to, in many cases, evidence of war crimes) such as religious affiliation etc. the decision appears to have been made to require special requests be submitted in order to view the archived records. The end result of this is that a list of almost half a million people is being made publicly visible, without the details as to whether or not they were found to be innocent, or any details of the alleged or actual crimes.
The Internet
“This time with Seoul” (South Koreans who Deserve to be in Jail)
Do Kwon, perhaps the most egregiously irritating and unlikable Crypto-Bro of all time (a title for which there is plenty of hot competition), has finally been extradited to the US and appeared before a Federal Court in Manhattan last week. The long and short of the story is that Kwon lied to “investors” and went well out of his way to deceive the public about the “mechanisms” for administering a “stablecoin” (claiming that an algorithm was taking care of things while he was actually funnelling millions of dollars into the scheme to maintain appearances); the whole thing is so absurdly stupid and foreseeable that it’s hard to have any sympathy with anyone involved.
The other South Korean who’s in deep shit this week is the President, on unrelated charges. Following on from a very brief declaration of Marshall Law (see WJH December 6th: “We’re going to need a bigger fire extinguisher”) the South Korean president has had a warrant issued for his arrest; this lead to a stand-off between the President’s security detail and the police, which as of What Just Happened going to press appears to have seen the police back down, for now.
The UK
On Conservatism and Oligarchism
Musk has recently committed quite the faux pas (to dramatically understate the severity of the offense) by calling for British Far-Right agitator and professional asshole Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Chirstopher Yaxley-Lennon but that didn’t sound sufficiently working-class to get the plebs riled up for a living) to be freed from prison, where he is currently hanging out in virtue of contempt of court, and for spreading libelous claims about people to spin up fear and hatred.
“Lawyers for the schoolboy, who successfully sued Yaxley-Lennon for libel, previously said Robinson’s false documentary claims had had “a devastating effect” on him and his family and forced them to move home”
Source: Politico.eu
The British conservatives, and political pundits generally, are growing quite frustrated with Elon Musk’s unsolicited chiming in on UK politics. Representatives of the UK government have been publicly lambasting Musk for peddling falsehoods and propounding on things which he knows little about.
This dovetails with Nick Clegg’s departure from a high-profile role at Facebook where he was involved in setting up an oversight board pertaining to content moderation, among other things. Clegg used to lead one of the major political parties in the UK, the Liberal Democrats, and has spent the past few years working with Meta. Will Meta be less of a cess-pit of Left Wing groupthink moving forward? For what it’s worth this publication believes that determining incitement of a riot to be sufficient grounds for deplatforming to be a reasonable position, and in no way shape or form constitutive of Left Wing bias… that said, Musk’s Twitter is so skewed towards fringe and extreme ideology at this point that it’s worth thinking about whether or not we’re all using the same measuring stick here.
The US
An Unfortunate Start to the New Year (The Enemy Within)
A radicalized Texan American committed a heinous crime in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve by intentionally killing 15 people and wounding dozens with a rented truck. The alleged culprit appears to have served in the US army for years, including an extensive deployment in Afghanistan, and worked as a consultant for Deloitte. The wafer thin glimmer of “good news” here, for those of us hell bent on hope and optimism, is that the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) set by the attacker don’t appear to have hurt anyone. Alarmingly, a few hours later another US soldier detonated a bomb in a Tesla CyberTruck outside a Trump tower in Las Vegas. This individual appears to have been a Green Beret, an elite special forces soldier, and to have earned many awards during his service.
One can make a reasonable case that it’s inappropriate to speculate about motivations, however, it’s obviously profoundly important to try and avoid soldiers and ex-soldiers committing domestic terrorist attacks, so here’s a thought: Trump pardoned the private military (Blackwater) contractors that were found guilty of massacring civilians in Iraq. To a self-respecting and earnest soldier who believes the US to be a force for good in the world, an admission from the head of state that murdering innocent civilians is acceptable (that facts don’t matter, that accountability isn’t important) might have seeded a pretty deep frustration with the state of affairs.
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