5: We Asked a WWII Refugee If There Really Are Any Parallels Between Hitler and Trump
Dora Schimanko is an 84-year-old Austrian former refugee. After the Anschluss in 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, she and her Jewish family fled to the UK to escape persecution by the Nazis. “They could have persecuted us for being lefties or being Jewish – either case, we’d be damned,” she writes in her 2011 book Warum So Und Nicht Anders (Why it’s Like This and Not Any Other Way).
After returning to Vienna in 1946, Schimanko got involved with Austria’s communist party and started speaking at public events against fascism and far-right extremism. She also speaks as a witness of WWII in Austrian schools.
The rise of far-right parties in Europe, Donald Trump’s presidential win and his actions during his first few weeks in office have given way to a lot of talk about the return of fascism to mainstream politics. Comparisons with Adolf Hitler are never far away when we talk about authoritarian world leaders – or any world leaders, in fact: Republicans often compared Obama to the head of the Nazi party – but the analogy has been made often since Trump came to power.
We spoke to Schimanko to get her take.
Vice News
4: Land grab law ‘allows theft, stalls peace process’
Israel’s land grab law that retroactively legalises thousands of settlement homes in the occupied West Bank legitimises theft, violates international law and ends the prospect of a two-state solution, according to politicians, legal experts and human rights groups.
The so-called “Regulation Bill” instantly drew wide condemnation as it was voted in by members of the Knesset late on Monday with a 60 to 52 majority.
The law applies to about 4,000 settlement homes in the West Bank for which settlers could prove ignorance that they had built on privately owned Palestinian land and had received encouragement from the Israeli state to do so.
Three Israeli NGOs – Peace Now, Yesh Din and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel – and numerous Palestinians said they intend to petition the Supreme Court to cancel the law.
Aljazeera
3: WHAT SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC TAUGHT ME ABOUT DONALD TRUMP
DURING HIS INAUGURAL address, Donald Trump deployed rhetoric that was familiar to anyone who spent time in the Balkans in the 1990s. “You will never be ignored again,” Trump thundered, with Congress as his backdrop. He expanded on the idea a few days later, during a visit to the Department of Homeland Security, where he said, “To all of those hurting out there, I repeat to you these words, we hear you, we see you, and you will never, ever be ignored again.”
Trump’s message was a variation, directed at his largely white constituency, of the you-shall-not-be-beaten-again rhetoric used with malignant effect by Slobodan Milošević during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Trump is not Milošević and the United States is not Yugoslavia, of course, but the echoes between these paragons of national shamelessness reveal the underlying methods and weaknesses of what Trump is trying to pull off.
In 1987, Milošević was sent to Kosovo to soothe angry Serbs who felt threatened by Albanians who dominated the province. A low-profile communist official at the time, Milošević visited a municipal office and spoke to a crowd of unhappy Serbs who had gathered outside. Milošević was uncertain as he addressed them, but everything changed when he voiced a nationalist message they had never heard before: “No one will be allowed to beat the Serbs again, no one!” he said.
The Intercept
The Senate is scheduled to hold a full vote today on the confirmation of Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos. DeVos is perhaps Trump’s most contested pick among a group of controversial Cabinet nominees. DeVos is a longtime backer of charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools. She and her husband have also invested in a student debt collection agency that does business with the Education Department. On Monday, Senate Democrats took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to begin a 24-hour protest opposing DeVos. Last week, two Republican lawmakers, Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, announced plans to vote against DeVos, leaving Senate Republicans one vote short of confirming her. If the Senate vote is 50-50, Vice President Mike Pence would then cast the deciding vote—an event that has never happened to any other presidential nominee in history. We speak to Democratic Congressmember Maxine Waters of California.
Democracy Now
1: Putin approves change to law decriminalising domestic violence
Vladimir Putin has signed into law a controversial amendment that decriminalises domestic violence.
The amendment, which sailed through both houses of Russian parliament before Tuesday’s presidential signing, has elicited anger from critics who say that it sends the wrong message in a country where one woman dies every 40 minutes from domestic abuse.
From now on, beatings of spouses or children that result in bruising or bleeding but not broken bones are punishable by 15 days in prison or a fine, if they do not happen more than once a year. Previously, they carried a maximum jail sentence of two years.
The Guardian
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