Dealing with the dishonorable and the inconvenient (5)

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor | 11:15 AM · Mar 17, 2026:
"Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York."
(2:49) https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2033925083853385985

Also posted at
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EFxwT7V03VE
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/zohran-mamdani-delivers-irish-history-195338...

Cyprus leader calls for frank discussion on 'colonial' UK bases (BBC)

The UK's two military bases on Cyprus are a "colonial consequence" on the island and talks on their status and future need to take place, Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides has told the BBC. "When the situation is over in the Middle East we are going to have an open and frank discussion with the British government," he said as he arrived for an EU leaders' summit in Brussels. Under the 1960 treaty establishing Cypriot independence from Britain, the UK was given sovereignty of bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia... Any potential negotiations on the future of the bases would be very complicated given the founding agreements involved the UK, Greece, Turkey as well as representatives from the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities. Asked if he wanted the bases to go, the Cypriot leader said: "We have a clear approach with regard to the future of the British bases... I'm not going to negotiate publicly"...

It’s time for the UN to formally recognise the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity (Guardian)

This is not about assigning collective guilt to present generations. But injustice does not simply fade with time – it requires deliberate effort to address and redress...

FWIW, I had good experience with another online course offered free by U of Alberta via Coursera. ("Indigenous Canada")
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University of Alberta: https://www.coursera.org/learn/holodomor
"... new, free online course, "Famine as Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine", is now available worldwide on Coursera.

Developed by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, the course offers a comprehensive, research-based exploration of the Holodomor — the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine of 1932–33 — within the broader global history of famine and genocide.

The course is fully online, self-paced, and accessible to learners worldwide at no cost.

... delivered online in thirteen {14} modules through the University of Alberta’s partnership with Coursera and is available to both University of Alberta students for credit and a global public audience."

>4 margd:

Is it as depressing as it sounds? I'm watching psychopathic leaders committing crimes against humanity in real time this month.

>5 librorumamans: Holodomor was pretty bad. If my experience with the "Indigenous Canada" course is any guide, it covered agreements and treaties, working west and north, chronologically. Indigenous perspectives were interesting. It was a longer course than "Famine as Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine", so I appreciated that when I had to take a second swipe at it, I was allowed to pick up where I left off. Lots of Metis and Ukrainian-Canadians in the Canadian Prairie, the reason, I assume, for the concentration of studies at U Alberta. I think understanding Holodomor might help put current events in context, but like you, I find there's plenty enough to depress, so I'm not sure whether I'll take the Holodomor course or not.

'Dignity restored': Remains of 63 Khoisan people reburied in South Africa (Africanews)

South Africa on Monday reburied the remains of 63 Khoisan people, among southern Africa's oldest indigenous communities, some of whose bodies were shipped to European museums over a century ago. The remains were laid to rest at a historic monument in Steinkopf, in the Northern Cape province, during a ceremony attended by President Cyril Ramaphosa. Rows of freshly dug graves lined the site as the wooden coffins, some draped in traditional clothing, were laid side by side. Traditional leaders offered prayers, marking a farewell rooted in ritual. "This is not merely a burial. It is a restoration of dignity long denied," one of the leaders, James Mapanga, said...

UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’ (Guardian)

The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”. The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.” Voting in favour were 123 states, while Argentina, Israel and the US voted against. There were 52 abstentions, including the UK and members of the EU...

In act of reparation, Franciscan sisters return land to Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin
Dan Stockman | November 3, 2025

"The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration have sold their spirituality center to the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. This is the first Catholic institution to return land to a Tribal Nation in the name of reparations for colonialism and residential boarding schools, according to officials involved in the sale.

The Lac du Flambeau band settled on this land in 1745, but it was stolen from them under an 1842 treaty so unfair a court in 1976 declared it "unconscionable."

The nearly 2-acre parcel is on Trout Lake near Arbor Vitae, Wisconsin, about three hours northwest of Green Bay and about 15 minutes east of the Lac de Flambeau Reservation. The Marywood Franciscan Spirituality Center property, home to a main lodge, meeting center and four cabins, was appraised at $2.6 million. The sisters sold it to the tribe for the same price they paid for it in 1966 — $30,000, or just over 1% of its current value..."

https://www.globalsistersreport.org/act-reparation-franciscan-sisters-return-lan...

Manitoba's indigenous people have had their injustices and challenges, not least evacuations due to wildfires in recent years, so good to see its Premier, Wab Kinew (NDP), welcome a mother and sick child from Gaza: https://www.facebook.com/reel/776882718543761

Brutal Mau Mau camps in Kenya were an extension of Britain’s colonial prison system – historian traces their roots (Conversation)

During the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 and 1960, the British colonial government confined an estimated 150,000 Kenyans in a sprawling network of “emergency” detention camps. None of those held in the camps had been found guilty in a court of law. Instead, they were detained on suspicion of supporting the uprising... Revelations about the extreme violence employed in some emergency detention camps made the continuation of British rule untenable. Particularly key was the Hola massacre of 1959. Guards beat 11 detainees to death and the colonial government attempted to cover up the crime. Outrage at these events shattered Britain’s grip on the colony, and Kenya achieved independence in 1963 under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta... My research shows that this emergency detention system was shaped by an earlier network of “ordinary” detention camps. These were established in 1926 and processed more than 400,000 people before the uprising. These camps, intended as a milder alternative to prison, evolved into a poorly regulated system characterised by exploitation, overcrowding and weak accountability. These findings challenge the idea that the detention system of the 1950s was exceptional. Instead, it was rooted in long-standing colonial practices, shaped by economic incentives, administrative gaps and coercive labour systems... the brutal 1950s detention system didn’t just emerge from nowhere – it was built on a foundation of state violence and disorder that had been normalised for decades... the brutal 1950s detention system didn’t just emerge from nowhere – it was built on a foundation of state violence and disorder that had been normalised for decades...

>5 librorumamans:

I'd tread carefully on that topic and consider the source(s). Neither Alberta nor the Canadian Ukrainian diaspora have a brilliant record in dealing with fascism. The fact that the latter erected memorials to Waffen SS on Canadian soil is a shame Canada should not have to bear.

"Holodomorology" and its dubious claims are being pushed by the likes of those who equate Stalin and Hitler, the 1930s famine with the Holocaust. It all boils down to anti-Communism AT ANY COST... as usual.

Zimbabwe's iconic stone birds were taken by colonialists. Finally, they're all back home (BBC)

Zimbabwe's flag, banknotes and coat of arms all feature a stately looking eagle, sitting majestically on a plinth. Known as the Zimbabwe Bird, it has long been a symbol of national identity, but behind it lies a complex tale of displacement, colonial plunder and restitution. The bird is one of several ancient, treasured sculptures that were taken from Zimbabwe by colonialists and spent decades outside the country's borders. It was only this week that - after 137 years away - the final displaced bird arrived home, a moment Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa described as "the return of a national icon". The grey, soapstone carving was repatriated from neighbouring South Africa - it wound up there having been ripped from its column, then sold to British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. On Tuesday, South Africa repatriated the bird, along with eight sets of human remains, previously exhumed in Zimbabwe by colonial researchers and donated to a South African museum. The body parts were taken during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries for "a misguided colonial pseudoscience" South African Minister of Culture Gayton McKenzie said at a ceremony held to hand over the remains and the bird. "These are not abstractions, but people... removed from their graves, their communities, and their homeland under the logic that their bodies were data," he said...

Man in his 80s becomes first in France to formally apologise for family's slavery links (Reuters)

A man in ​his 80s on Saturday issued what is believed to be the first formal ‌apology by someone in France for their family's role in transatlantic slavery, saying he hoped others - including the government- would follow. Pierre Guillon de Prince's ancestors, based in Nantes, France's largest port for transatlantic slavery, were shipowners who transported ​around 4,500 enslaved Africans and owned plantations in the Caribbean...

Church of Scotland apologises for role in slavery (BBC)

The Church of Scotland has issued a formal apology for its historical role in slavery. The apology was adopted at the church's General Assembly in Edinburgh on Saturday. Before the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, some members of the Church of Scotland offered a theological justification for chattel slavery. The apology said that the Kirk is "grieved beyond telling by the extraordinary suffering we have inflicted – through our actions and our inaction – on our brothers and sisters". It adds: "We repent, committing ourselves to changing course and bearing fruit worthy of repentance." The Kirk has also recognised that historically some of its members would have benefited from direct and indirect participation in the slave trade...

If you're interested in the question of slavery, you need to read this:
https://www.amazon.com/White-Gold-Giles-Milton/dp/0340794704

>15 John5918: And some of Church of Scotland's members would have been hurt indirectly - the poorer ones who were cleared from the land by new sheep-farming landowners, enriched by the slave trade ... :(

Entangled histories: the Highland Clearances and the transatlantic slave trade
Harvey Dimond | 19 Jan 2024

"The Highland Clearances – known as Fuadaichean nan Gàidheal in Gaelic (the eviction of the Gaels) – is the name given to two waves of forced displacements of tenants in the Scottish Highlands and Islands (known as Gàidhealtachd in Gaelic) between the 1750s and the 1860s.

... what is less well recognised is the entanglement of the Highland Clearances with the transatlantic slave trade within the larger global web of the British Empire. The land acquired by a new generation of landowners – those who pushed the Highlanders off their ancestral lands – was often purchased from the proceeds of slavery from plantations in Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana, many of which were owned by Scots.

The phenomenon of 'absentee ownership' – where plantation owners did not live in the West Indies – is a notable feature of Scotland's involvement in Caribbean plantocracies, which has allowed for cultural amnesia about the nation's role in the slave trade. During this period, both in the Caribbean and in the Highlands, we see a determined focus on intense resource extraction from the land through the brutal exploitation of people – administered by the same culprits. ..."

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/entangled-histories-the-highland-clearances-a...
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How Profits From Slavery Changed the Landscape of the Scottish Highlands
Nora McGreevy | November 17, 2020

"Money earned through enslavement played a key role in the eviction of Highlanders in the 18th and 19th centuries ... some landowners made their money from the direct enslavement of individuals on British plantations; others benefited indirectly by inheriting money or marrying into families that had profited from enslavement ..."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-investigates-how-enslavem...

Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery (NCR)

Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the role the Holy See itself played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican's record a "wound in Christian memory." Past popes have apologized for Christians' involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave "infidels." History's first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, ("Magnificent Humanity"), which was released Monday...

Alt National Park Service 15h · {5/27/2026, Facebook}

We want to bring attention to something that happened last month that hasn’t gotten nearly enough coverage.

On April 23, a DHS contractor building Trump’s border wall bulldozed 60 feet of the Las Playas Intaglio* a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the desert floor of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. It is sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation. The site had been flagged by a cultural protection monitor. Contractors were specifically told to avoid it. The tribe wasn’t notified until five days later.

Destroying a Native American sacred site on federal land is a federal crime. It can carry fines and prison time. The Trump administration waived environmental and cultural protections to speed up wall construction, but those waivers don’t cover this. What happened on April 23 meets the legal threshold for criminal charges. None have been filed. The problem is that prosecution requires DOJ to act, and this DOJ isn’t going to.
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New Photos, Videos Show Border Wall Construction Damage to Ancient Archeological Site in Arizona (News Release)
Center for Biological Diversity | May 5, 2026
https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/new-photos-videos-show-bor...
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1,000-year-old Arizona archeological site damaged during border wall construction
Nina Kravinsky | May 11, 2026
https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/natural-resources-energy/2026-05-11/1-000-yea...
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Border Wall Construction Destroys 1,000-Year-Old Arizona Geoglyph
Ground News | {7 May 2026}

- A Department of Homeland Security contractor bulldozed a roughly 60-foot swath through a 1,000-year-old intaglio in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge on Friday, causing irreparable damage to the ancient site.
- The destruction occurred as part of President Donald Trump's $46.5 billion border barrier expansion project, which requires clearing land for a secondary wall near the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Despite discussions between refuge managers, archaeologists Rick and Sandra Martynec, and contractors to protect the site, O'odham runners alerted elder Lorraine Marquez Eiler to encroaching construction the day before destruction occurred.
- Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an elder of the Hia-ced O'odham Indigenous people, described the damage as "an emotional subject," emphasizing the site's deep ancestral significance to her community.
- The incident mirrors previous DHS border construction impacts on sacred sites, including a burial ground in Organ Pipe National Monument, raising concerns about the effectiveness of environmental protections for tribal heritage.

https://ground.news/article/border-wall-construction-destroys-1-000-year-old-ari...

How an enslaved, shipwrecked African became the US's first great explorer (BBC)

Nearly 500 years ago, a Moroccan man walked thousands of miles from Florida to the Pacific Coast, becoming the first known outsider to see the American West. In 1528, a man from Morocco washed up on the coast of present-day Texas, more dead than alive. He had spent the previous month adrift in the Gulf of Mexico alongside a group of Spanish sailors on a flimsy lifeboat lashed together with tree trunks, horse hide and what was left of their tattered clothes. When a storm stranded the castaways on a barrier island near Galveston, they unwittingly became the first people from the Old World to enter the American West – and when they did, they were each starving, exhausted and naked... And yet, we don't even know his real name. Known variously as Esteban de Dorantes, Esteban the Moor or – most commonly – Estevanico, this enigmatic individual was one of the first documented Africans, Arabic speakers and Muslims to step foot in what is now the United States, arriving nearly 40 years before the first European settlement. Between 1528 and 1536, he walked roughly 2,250 miles (3,620km) west from Florida to the Pacific Coast of Mexico, completing what is widely believed to be the first recorded crossing of North America in history and predating Lewis and Clark's overland expedition to the Oregon Coast by nearly 300 years...

The Africa exception: the slavery reparations debate was once ‘unthinkable’. Now it is unavoidable (Guardian)

Last month, at commemorations marking the 25th anniversary of France’s Taubira law recognising the trafficking of enslaved Africans as a crime against humanity, Emmanuel Macron did the unthinkable: he became the first French president to publicly utter the word “reparations”... Compelled by shifting geopolitical realities and Africa’s growing demands for economic sovereignty, Macron invoked “reparations” 10 times as part of a pre-emptive attempt to shape the terms of engagement before the African Union (AU) adopts its common position on reparations and Ghana hosts a global reparations conference this month... This goes to the heart of what I call the Africa exception in global reparations. The west has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to pay reparations for the loss of what it once considered its African property – but never for the loss of the African person... The Africa exception is not simply a moral failure. It is a structural feature of an international legal order that, since the 1928 Chorzów factory case – a dispute between Germany and Poland that established reparations as the mandatory consequence of wrongdoing between sovereign states – has provided reparations to those it recognises as sovereign, but never to Black people and countries. This is because it refuses to go beyond flag independence and recognise its former “property” as sovereign... Slavery is ancient. As black feminist scholars such as Jennifer L Morgan and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf have shown, what was unprecedented was the racialised system of chattel enslavement that reduced African people to property in perpetuity through partus sequitur ventrem – the principle that status follows the womb. Codified in Virginia in 1662, it made enslavement hereditary through Black women’s wombs, regardless of paternity. As the US president Thomas Jefferson, father of six enslaved children, wrote in 1819: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital.” Just as Africa became the world’s site of capital accumulation, Black women’s wombs became the site of capital reproduction. Without sovereignty over our wombs, what meaningful sovereignty can we claim? By reducing Black people to property in perpetuity, racialised chattel enslavement positioned Black people as the world’s ultimate non-sovereigns...

Zelensky ignites fury by honouring Ukrainian WWII fighters who massacred Poles and Jews (France 24)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to name a military unit after a World War II-era militia infamous for massacring Poles and Jews has led to a sharp spike in tensions between Kyiv and Warsaw... “During the Second World War, Nazi Germany made use of the Ukrainian nationalists as foreign levies, and therefore exploited the very strong desire for independence in the Ukrainian community to draw them into policing – and policing the ghettos in particular”...

‘Then the firing started’: the Soweto uprising remembered 50 years on (Guardian)

The day of 16 June 1976 began peacefully in Soweto. Student leaders at high schools across the sprawling Johannesburg township, to which the apartheid regime had exiled hundreds of thousands of black South Africans, took charge of the morning assemblies. They led their fellow students into the streets and began to march toward Orlando stadium. The students were protesting against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Their teachers barely spoke the white minority language and the students did not want to learn the oppressor’s language. They were tired of the intentionally substandard Bantu education, tired of being second-class citizens. By the end of the day, dozens would be dead. The mood of the young protesters started off joyous, people who marched that winter day remembered. They sang struggle anthems, including Senzeni Na?, which asks in Xhosa: “What have we done {to deserve this}?” “Our worst-case scenario, of course, was that they were going to throw cans and cans of teargas at us,” said Sibongile Mkhabela, then an 18-year-old pupil at Naledi high school and one of the march organisers... Accounts of what happened next differ. Some say a white police officer threw a teargas canister into the crowd. Moloto remembered police dogs being released to attack marchers. “Now, women students were panicking and then we took stones to retaliate,” he said. “And then the firing started”... Among the first to die were 15-year-old Hastings Ndlovu and 12-year-old Hector Pieterson. The photograph taken by the local journalist Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying Hector’s limp, bloodied body, Hector’s sister Antoinette running beside them, face twisted in anguish, became the day’s defining image...

Worth listening to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger singing about the Soweto uprising - https://youtu.be/IfMMeIo8p9M - particularly the last song beginning around 15:40. If ever you find yourself in South Africa, visit the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto. When I was there twenty odd years ago Antoinette was around and we were able to meet and talk to her.

Great Zimbabwe: debunking the myth of tyrants and forced labour (The Conversation)

For more than a century, Great Zimbabwe has stood at the centre of a powerful story about the Zimbabwe culture. This remarkable African civilization flourished in southern Africa during the Middle Ages, constructing more than 200 dry-stone palaces, locally known as madzimbahwe (houses of stone). These towering monuments, immense gold wealth, and an array of exotica including glass beads and glazed ceramics from distant lands, have often been interpreted as proof that southern Africa’s early states were ruled by authoritarian kings. Leaders who exercised near-absolute control over their subjects. In archaeology textbooks, museum exhibitions, and even political discourse, the image of Great Zimbabwe – rivalled in size and grandeur only by the Egyptian pyramids – has often been reduced to one of a despotic African kingdom ruled from above by divine kings. This idea about African civilisations has often been mobilised to excuse modern forms of political despotism. But what if this story about the Zimbabwe culture is wrong – or at least incomplete? Our new research in Mberengwa in south-central Zimbabwe is starting to challenge these long-held assumptions. As an anthropological archaeologist, I use both excavated remains and the study of human cultures to understand how societies organised themselves. Far from revealing a rigid, centralised political system, evidence from Mberengwa suggests the opposite. Governance within the Zimbabwe culture may have been far more collective and negotiated than imagined. Rather than monuments built solely through coercion, we may instead be looking at societies where power flowed through multiple layers of community organisation. Where ordinary households retained significant autonomy. This challenges simplistic views. It reveals a more diverse history of governance that included consultation, negotiation and collective decision-making...

Global framework for reparatory justice adopted at landmark conference in Ghana (Guardian)

A global framework for reparatory justice has been adopted at a conference in Ghana. Heads of state and government and other officials formally approved the strategy on Friday at a gathering in a hotel in the capital, Accra, which was the first major meeting since the adoption of the landmark United Nations (UN) resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. The document lays out a 19-point global framework for reparatory justice. They include resolving to ensure fair and adequate compensation for Africans and people of African descent affected by legacies of enslavement, colonialism, genocide and apartheid, and resolving to expedite the return of cultural property, human remains, archives and heritage to their countries of origin. The framework also calls for multilateral measures to address sovereign debt burdens, including debt relief, to address lasting socioeconomic impacts of enslavement, colonialism and related historical injustices...

Acadian Expulsion (the Great Upheaval)
James H. Marsh | Last Edited July 15, 2015

"Soldiers rounding up terrified civilians, expelling them from their land, burning their homes and crops ‒ it sounds like a 20th century nightmare in one of the world's trouble spots, but it describes a scene from Canada's early history, the Deportation of the Acadians ..."

https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-deportation-of-the-acadians-fe...

>26 margd:

I recommend Antonine Maillet's novel Pélagie-la-charette (the Acadian French title) or, in English, Pélagie : the return to Acadie, winner in 1979 of the Prix Goncourt.

>27 librorumamans: Thanks. I look forward to reading it. My GX grandmother was Acadian, I think. Though locally famous in her later years ("The Little Woman", a midwife who variolated settlers and indigenous), there are many stories yet lots of uncertainties remain. It seems like her family returned to France during the Great Upheaval, and she returned to Ft Louisburg in Cape Breton, NS, with her French navy captain, only for him to drown, I assume in last battle with the British(?) Ironically, she then married a Scot, my GX grandfather, who was granted land in the beautiful Margaree Valley by the British King, I assume for service.

50 Years Later, Catholic Archbishop Who Witnessed Soweto Uprising Says Students Rekindled Fight Against Apartheid (ACI Africa)

Archbishop Buti Joseph Tlhagale who witnessed the 1976 Soweto Uprising firsthand has credited South Africa’s young people with reviving the struggle against apartheid, saying their actions renewed a freedom movement that had been weakened by years of political repression. Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the 16 June 1976 uprising, the Archbishop emeritus of the Catholic Archdiocese of Johannesburg in South Africa recalled arriving in Soweto as a newly ordained Priest and witnessing how student-led protests transformed the national mood at a time when many South Africans had lost hope... According to Archbishop Tlhagale, the students' actions rekindled resistance to apartheid and drew international attention to conditions in South Africa. “The fire became a huge one because of the students. They drew the attention of the world to what was happening in South Africa,” he said...

I was teaching in Uganda during the 1976 Soweto Uprising. I recall sitting around in the evenings with my fellow teachers, all Ugandans, and reflecting that in South Africa we would not have been allowed to do so, white and black together, and that students just like ours were being gunned down in the streets of Soweto as we chatted.

Germans are researching their Nazi past as the far right urges them to move on (CNN)

Millions of index cards, once restricted by German privacy laws and requiring a lengthy process to obtain, are now directly searchable online in German media, as of a few months ago, after the US National Archives published the surviving membership card files online. “What did your grandparents do in the Nazi era?” German news magazine Der Spiegel asks its readers. “Research your family’s NSDAP history here,” newspaper Die Zeit implores.The promotion of these online search engines comes at a time when Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party continues to enjoy strong support. Prominent voices from within the AfD have rejected Germany’s post-war Erinnerungskultur, or “culture of remembrance,” arguing that the country should move past its history of guilt and focus on national pride. Across the Atlantic, billionaire Elon Musk, at the time a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump, told an AfD rally last year that the country had “too much of a focus on past guilt” and that children should not be held responsible for the “sins of their great-grandparents.” The new searchable databases work against those calls, encouraging Germans to look more closely at their own families’ association with Nazism and prompting fresh reflections on how ordinary citizens came to normalize extremism... Some experts believe the databases are helping to drive a new phase of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany, a word meaning “coming to terms with the past.” Germany has gone through several such phases since the end of the Third Reich. This latest conversation, however, focuses specifically on family memory and on challenging the sanitized narratives families may have passed down about what their ancestors did under Nazism... Although there are circumstantial reasons why the surveys are being published now, Dack believes that the current wave of historical reckoning also functions as a civic and institutional backlash to the political rise of the far right. The party claimed a significant 20.8% of the vote in last year’s national election, making it the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament, where it has 152 seats. “The public promotion of these membership files carries a clear institutional warning… And that is that democratic institutions are fragile and radicalization is an incremental process”...