NY Times Confirms Ukrainian Soldiers Wearing Nazi Symbols, Gen-Z Supports In-Home Gov Video Surveillance, India Arms Citizens As Potential Conflict with Pakistan Escalates (The Five for 06-06-23)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Lots of news today. Let’s dive in.
[one]
As shoplifting becomes an increasingly large problem in much of America this year, yoga clothing brand lululemon has fired two employees over confronting thieves.
The company's CEO, Calvin McDonald, said Friday during a CNBC interview that Lululemon has a strict policy dictating how retail employees should respond to shoplifters.
"We have a zero-tolerance policy that we train our educators on around engaging during a theft. Why? Because we put the safety of our team, of our guest, front and center. It's only merchandise," McDonald said. ("Educators" is what Lululemon calls its employees who work in stores.)
Employees are trained to step back and let the theft occur, he said. The company uses cameras and other technology to help address theft, in addition to working with law enforcement, he said.
"We take that policy seriously because we have had instances — and we have seen with other retailers, instances — where employees step in and are hurt, or worse, killed. And the policy is to protect them. But we have to stand behind the policy to enforce it," McDonald said.
And he's not kidding about enforcement. Recently, two former Lululemon employees in Peachtree Corners, Georgia said they were fired from the retailer after calling the police to report a robbery. One of the employees reportedly filmed the incident.
The police later caught the three robbers, and they were arrested and charged with theft by shoplifting and theft by receiving stolen property, according to a report from NBC News.
McDonald said that during this specific incident, the employees "knowingly broke the policy" and "engaged with the thieves," including following them out of the store. Because of their actions in breaking the policy, they were terminated, he said. He also said that Lululemon employees are allowed to call the police.
One one hand, the employees did take a couple of steps outside the store, but didn’t move beyond firmly telling the shoplifters to stop. The employees do not appear to be in danger. (See the video).
As multiple journalists on Twitter pointed out, the concern for “employee safety” doesn’t appear to extend to the ultra-low-wage workers, some of whom are children, who make the high-priced yoga apparel.
[two]
As the 2024 election heats up, The Five will be keeping tabs on the major comings and goings. Don’t expect a lot of commentary here, as situations change by the day.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is up to 20% of Democratic support, according to a poll yesterday from the Washington Post. Despite double digit support, the Democratic party does not plan to hold a debate between Biden and RFK Jr.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey returns to the network he built (then left) to endorse RFK Jr, in two tweets.
Elsewhere with RFK Jr. YouTube deleted a Mike Tyson podcast (which was re-posted by Twitter) in which the Democratic candidate laid out a case that his father, also a Presidential hopeful, was killed by the CIA.
On the right side of the aisle, there’s a good bit of buzz around Senator Tim Scott’s handling of his appearance on The View, which is not an easy to show be a guest on.
Mike Pence is officially jumping into the primary. He jumped on a motorcycle at an event in Iowa, apparently trying to transform his straight-laced-Midwestern-governor image into something a little more edgy.
[three]
Ukraine…really likes Nazi symbols.
Yahoo reports (a repost from the New York Times, which is paywalled):
In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.
The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II.
That relationship has become especially delicate because Russian President Vladimir Putin has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion.
Ukraine has worked for years through legislation and military restructuring to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history and espouse views hostile to leftists, LGBTQ movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” — a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.
The NYT writer is somewhat self-contradictory here, claiming Putin wrongfully declared Ukraine a “Nazi state” and then in the next paragraph…spelling out Ukraine’s recent history of Nazism that the government is fighting against.
Just a few months ago, this was a “conspiracy theory” on Twitter that now has solid evidence backing it up (to the point where the corporate press can’t ignore it).
As a reminder, my wife and children are partially Jewish, so you’ll have to forgive my skepticism that Concentration Camp Guard symbols simply mean “Ukrainian Pride” now and not “exterminate Jews.”
I suppose there’s a valid argument that Ukraine can’t afford to deal with internal issues while a war is going on, but when the conflict subsides…we will see how the nation deals with this.
If you didn’t know, Germany has outlawed all Nazi imagery, period. If you wear symbols in Germany that Ukrainians wear into battle, you go to jail.
[four]
Despite recent conflicts between Russia and Uktraine, and China and Taiwan, the most likely countries to use nuclear weapons may still be India and Pakistan. The two regions have been in (or on the verge of) conflict since the 1800’s.
Now, India is arming citizens in the border towns of the Kashmir region, an area both nations claim to own, after an alleged attack by Pakistanis, although no evidence has been presented.
The Associated Press reports:
After seven Hindus were killed in early January in two back-to-back attacks in Dhangri village in disputed Kashmir, former Indian army soldier Satish Kumar described his sleepy mountainous village as an “abode of fear.”
Days after the deadly violence in the village in frontier Rajouri district, where homes are separated by maize and mustard fields, hundreds of residents staged angry protests across the Hindu-dominated Jammu region. In response, Indian authorities revived a government-sponsored militia and began rearming and training thousands of villagers, including some teenagers.
Kumar was among the first people to join the militia under the new drive and authorities armed him with a semiautomatic rifle and 100 bullets.
“I feel like a soldier again,” said the 40-year-old Kumar, who runs a grocery store since his retirement from the Indian military in 2018.
The militia, officially called the “Village Defense Group,” was initially formed in the 1990s as the first line of defense against anti-India insurgents in remote Himalayan villages that government forces could not reach quickly.
As the insurgency waned in their operational areas and as some militia members gained notoriety for brutality and rights violations, drawing severe criticism from human rights groups, the militia was largely disbanded.
But the January violence stirred unpleasant memories of past attacks in Rajouri, which is near the highly militarized Line of Control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan and where combat between Indian soldiers and rebels is not uncommon.
Brandishing his weapon inside his single-story concrete home on an overcast February day, Kumar justified his decision to join the militia as the “only way to combat fear and protect (my) family from terrorists.”
“I am a trained person and have fought against terrorists. But what is the use of (military) training if you do not have a weapon,” Kumar said. “Believe me, I felt almost incapacitated due to fear.”
On January 1, two gunmen killed four villagers, including a father and his son, and wounded at least five others. The next day, a blast outside one of the houses killed two children and injured at least 10 others. It is still unclear whether the explosive was left behind by the attackers. A week later, one of the injured died at a hospital, raising the overall death toll to seven.
“There was carnage in our village and Hindus were under attack,” Kumar said.
The police blamed militants fighting against Indian rule for decades in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory claimed by India and Pakistan in its entirety. But two months later, they are yet to announce a breakthrough or name any suspects, exacerbating fear and anger among residents in the village of about 5,000 where Hindus represent about 70% and the rest are Muslims.
The policy to rearm civilians comes after India stripped Kashmir of its semiautonomy and took direct control of the territory amid a months-long security and communications lockdown in 2019. Kashmir has since remained on edge as authorities also put in place a slew of new laws that critics and many Kashmiris fear could change the region’s demographics.
[five]
Oh boy…we need to talk to the kids about…Soviet Russia. China’s Great Leap Forward. Nazi Germany. And host of other nations that threw privacy out the window and then slaughtered their own people en masse.
A new Cato/YouGov poll finds that 30% of Gen Z favors government installed cameras in homes:
We don’t know how much of this preference for security over privacy or freedom is something unique to this generation (a cohort effect) or simply the result of youth (age effect). However, there is reason to think part of this is generational. Americans over age 45 have vastly different attitudes toward in-home surveillance cameras than those who are younger.
These Americans were born in or before 1978. Thus the very youngest were at least 11 before the Berlin Wall fell. Being raised during the Cold War amidst regular news reports of the Soviet Union surveilling their own people may have demonstrated to Americans the dangers of giving the government too much power to monitor people. Young people today are less exposed to these types of examples and thus less aware of the dangers of expansive government power.
It is also possible that increased support for government surveillance among the young has common roots with what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe in the Coddling of the American Mind: young people seem more willing to prioritize safety (from possible violence or hurtful words) over ensuring robust freedom (from government surveillance or to speak freely).
Until the next one,
-sth