This is not about me or the others from the flotilla. There are thousands of Palestinians, hundreds of whom are children, who are being held without trial right now, and many of them are most likely being tortured, says Greta Thunberg.
What we have been through is only a small, small part of what Palestinians have experienced. On the walls of our prison cells, we saw bullet holes with bloodstains and messages carved into the walls by Palestinian prisoners who had been there before us.
When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.
Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.
It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground. They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.
They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little Wh0re) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Wh0re Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.
The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.
Why are certain countries so obsessed with flags?
pathetic.
The world would be a much better place if we took the concept of countries and removed the borders. Then we can start getting over the whole US and THEM thing, which isn't helping us to move on from our petty ideologies and prioritise advancing us as whole planet.
I’m sure that the concept of “us” and “them” outdates the concept of countries.
If we got rid of countries then the people over that hill or across that river would become “them”.
Yep. It's fair to say countries are in the way, but it's not the whole game.
Right, but then rich people can no longer exploit other regions if everyone is considered equal! Think about the shareholders for a bit :/ (I'm sarcastic, in case it is not clear :D)
The main problem here is that people flocking to positions of power are often the ones that do it for the wrong reasons. Until that part is sorted out, we will keep having leaders that will enforce things that are best for them and their closest ones. Some form of anarcho-communism would probably help this, but the current globalisation effort will make it very hard to implement. The best thing we can do as individuals is to just improve our social circle, and try to rely on as many local things as possible.
But... Open borders?!?
*Clutches pearls *
This is an admirable goal but we are very, very far from it becoming a reality for a whole host of reasons.
So what? We should just settle for the status quo then?
Obviously not, but maybe we should focus on more tangible goals at the moment like stopping an active genocide, stabilizing American politics, and quelling the billionaire problem at the moment.
I expect eating the rich will solve all of the above :)
To this day, individuals are making their own fake borders when they can't seem to get their own borders created
https://news.sky.com/story/inside-the-whites-only-settlement-in-arkansas-the-group-building-a-fortress-for-the-white-race-13399875
It’s not all bad
Nationalism and the flagshagging that comes along with it have always been baffling things to me.
It's a replacement for morals
I can only imagine how hollow and sad someone's existence must be when that's all they have.
Not sure if you're serious, but flags (aka standards) were THE most important part of the crusades 1.0 (my mom's surname comes from a standard-bearer's heroics not letting their flag touch the ground in a battle)
Not saying it means fuck all, but you're witnessing a watered down version of the same in this fisher price version of the crusades.
Standards weren't exactly flags in the modern sense, which IIRC started in the early modern era, but it's the same idea.