cryptoleft

Writer, podcaster, and commentator on foreign affairs and politics. Runs /dropglobalnews

Urbanist thinking about open places, open access, and open web. She/her.
/urbanism + https://zora.co/@miawintam

Reporter, writer and analyst. I cover energy, climate change and geopolitics. Contact me via my website www.alexanderckaufman.com and subscribe to kaufman.nyc.

Yes, thanks for this. Thinking about how in all of these cases civilians were herded into “safe zones” that actually served as traps for mass slaughter

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

This is a useful analogy, I’m glad you posted it. I feel like the failure to reckon with history’s less examined tragedies is what dooms us to repeat them. Everyone always wants to come everything to Nazi Germany and it’s such an extreme case that it fails to capture the moment. This is the first thing I’ve seen comparing the prison to the internment camps, but that feels like a strong analogy. Recently @mazmhussain and I were discussing historical analogies for Gaza. He brought up the Herero genocide in Namibia, I was raising the 2009 slaughter in Sri Lanka.

Human emotional memory fade at the third generation, if only we had a discipline to log and learn we could call it history.