the brutal senseless horrific inhumanity of humans, >81 years ago:
dw.com/en/bundestag-marks-81-y…
the brutal senseless horrific inhumanity of humans, now, here in straya:
thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2026/0…
Editorial
Hatred and silenceAccording to police, the bomb was packed with screws and ball bearings. Weapons such as this are called fragmentation devices. They are designed to cause as much damage as possible, the shrapnel ricocheting out from the blast.
“It had the potential to explode and injure many people,” Western Australian Police Force Commissioner Col Blanch said, “or kill them.”
Footage shows a man in black throwing the bomb into a crowd of peaceful protesters demonstrating at an Invasion Day rally in Perth. He turns immediately and runs down a balcony. He is wearing a black mask and his shirt appears to carry the co-opted cross of the Eureka flag.
At the same time as the bomb was allegedly thrown into the crowd of mostly Indigenous people and their allies, Noongar Elder Hedley Hayward was speaking. Without knowing what had happened, he said: “Today we stand together, united, and we will not be silenced.”
Soon after, police arrested a 31-year-old man. His name was suppressed by a court. He was charged with committing an unlawful act with the intent to harm and with making or possessing explosives under suspicious circumstances.
Two days after the incident, the Joint Counter Terrorism Team finally confirmed they were investigating a “potential terrorist act”.
Fabian Yarran, an organiser of the rally, said the response was too slow. There was a reluctance to see this as an alleged hate crime. “The police, government and media response in the 24 hours following the incident has been inadequate, consisting solely of investigations and charges for less serious, non-terror and non-hate offences.”
Daniel James, a Yorta Yorta writer and broadcaster, made a similar point. The response to this attack on First Nations protesters was the special silence of indifference, the shared commitment to ignore at all cost the treatment of First Nations people.
“The Forrest Place incident deserved sustained attention, not because it was sensational, but because it ruptured the illusion of safety that the majority of Australia prefers to maintain,” he wrote. “That it failed to do so tells us how the country now manages discomfort: by smoothing it into process, deferring to institutions and moving on before its implications are allowed to linger.”
When W. E. H. Stanner first described the Great Australian Silence, he was talking about a culture of forgetting, a national tendency to avoid this country’s history. This is something else, something worse. It is a lack of empathy for the present.
Australia is a country divided. It celebrates its nationhood on the day of First Peoples’ dispossession. It does this through a cruelty it dresses up as ignorance.
Court proceedings are now under way. Not much can be said, but much can be felt. Peace is needed in this country, across all communities. It won’t come through silence.
the brutal senseless horrific inhumanity of humans, now, over the pond:
thepinknews.com/2026/01/30/mon…
GOP candidate for governor of Tennessee wants to execute the parents of trans kidsTennessee Republican Monty Fritts has been widely condemned this week after he openly called for the state to execute the parents and guardians of transgender youngsters.
The 62-year-old gubernatorial candidate made the shocking remarks during a guest spot on a Christian Nationalist podcast earlier this week.
A clip shared by the anti-fascist group Right-Wing Watch on Thursday (29 January) sees Fritts not only call for the state-funded execution of trans and non-binary children’s parents, but of anyone who helps to provide life-saving gender-affirming care to under-18s, such as doctors.
“I think we need a law in Tennessee that would allow for capital punishment for those who commit an assault on the sanctity of life,” he said in the 40-second clip.”I think that anyone who would try to disfigure a child through hormones or surgery, you might be eligible to capital punishment.
“I know that’s gonna make people’s ears ring, but that’s a gross, great sin,” he said.
In the US, gender-affirming care for trans youth typically refers to puberty suppressant medication, commonly called puberty blockers. They are widely considered to be safe and, in some cases, life-saving among most major medical institutions.
Virtually no trans under-18s have undergone invasive gender-affirming surgeries, despite false claims from Republican lawmakers that they are common. A 2024 Harvard study found that cisgender minors are far more likely to undergo gender-affirming surgeries than their trans peers.
Fritts’ comments were made in reaction to backlash that arose earlier this month after he was heard in a leaked audio recording calling for capital punishment to be used against people who had undergone or provided an abortion.
He made the remarks last August while attending a Washington Country Republican Party meeting entitled “God, Guns, and Guts,” according to journalist Rachel Wells.
The GOP lawmaker has garnered numerous controversies since September last year when he announced his intention to run in the 2026 Tennessee gubernatorial election.
Less than a month following his announcement, Fritts faced backlash for opposing an expansion to the state’s private-school scholarship program to reach more applicants from lower-income backgrounds.
“If I get elected, I plan to suspend it or end it,” he said according to Tennesse Lookout, calling the move “fiscally irresponsible.”
Tennessee is a political stronghold for the Republican Party, which holds the vast majority of the state’s Congressional seats.
In June 2025, the US Supreme Court voted to uphold the state’s law banning gender-affirming care for trans youngsters. The decision was branded a “painful setback” by many within the community.
#racism #transphobia #transmisia #hate #bigotry #RWNJs #fascism
