Yesterday, X and I listened to this P3 documentary about Fadime Åžahindal, who is well-known in Sweden for enlightening the population on the issue of honour-related violence and honour killing. Because she was in love with a Swedish boyfriend whom she would not give up, she was excommunicated by her family, afterward vehemently beaten by her younger brother, fled her home town and received numerous death threats during several years. She contacted a variety of media because she desperately wanted to raise awareness regarding honour killings, which turned her family even more frantic in search of her. On the day when she and her boyfriend were to move in with each other, he died in a car crash. On January 21, 2002, Fadime was secretly visiting her mother and sisters in Uppsala. Her father arrived and shot her in the head, in front of her mother and two sisters. One of her sisters heard their father shout "Whore!" as he slayed her.

Fadime never blamed her relatives for what they were subjecting her to, neither for their excommunicating her. "They don't know better", she explained to a friend who asked her how her parents could do what they did to her. Instead, she pointed the finger at the culture her relatives were part of, where women were supposed to be compliant in every aspect, and viewed as lesser beings than men.

At the same time, her relatives only picked bits of "their" culture to teach their children. Fadime herself said that her family and she were part of the Kurdish culture; n her family home, the "fact" that men were much more worth than women was prevalent and dominant all through their days, but according to one of her friends who voiced her opinions she wasn't taught about "basic" stuff in regards to her culture, but her parents seem to have picked whatever bits suited them best. And so did Fadime. She fell in love with a man who just happened to be Swedish. She was deemed a whore - a stupidly used misnomer to say the least - and fell from grace in the eyes of her family. As Fadime decided to follow her heart and let love lead the way, her sisters were collectively looked upon as whores as well because of Fadime's acting. Her relatives held trans-international meetings where they decided her fate, and concluded that Fadime had to be murdered in order to restore the family's honour.

What strikes me as extraordinary is how Fadime time and time again, in some subtle veil of tranquility, managed to overcome some of her relatives' seemingly insane ways while living her own life as she wanted, while at the same time, she was hunted by her own kin who claimed to be following the laws of their culture to excuse their desire to kill her; they were themselves guilty of what they wanted to kill her for: living life as one wants.

There are many Kurds who aren't prone to honour killing - are they any less Kurdish? Hell no and bollocks to that. That would the simile of saying that I'm prone to give nazis leeway through my country while masquerading as neutral during wartime, just because that's what Sweden partly did for Germany during WW2.

Regarding how simple the process of holding meetings where the topic surrounds the extermination of life seems to some, I came to think of the following excerpt ((Pages 68-69.)) from Laurence Rees' "Auschwitz":

Recent research has demonstrated that such shocking documents do not represent a thought process that was merely expedient; there existed a strand of intellectual thinking within the Nazi movement that saw such population reduction as economically justified. Working to a theory of 'optimum population size', Nazi economic planners could examine any area and work out, simply from the number of people living there, whether the land would produce a profit or a loss. For example, German economist Helmut Meinhold of the Institute for German Development Work in the East calculated in 1941 that 5.83 million Poles (including old people and children) were 'surplus' to requirements. The existence of this surplus population meant 'an actual erosion of capital'. The people who constituted this excess population were 'Ballastexistenzen' - a 'waste of space'. At this stage such economists had not followed their own logic through - they were not calling for the physical extermination of these Ballastexistenzen in Poland. But these planners did note how Stalin had dealt with similar overpopulation in the Soviet Union. In the Ukraine during the 1930s a policy of deportation of the kulak (rich peasant) class and collectivization of the remainder had led to the deaths of around 9 million people.

Such thinking also gave an intellectual underpinning to the civilian deaths that were expected to result from the German invasion of the Soviet Union; to the Nazi planners, the fact that '30 million people' might die of starvation would not only be of immediate benefit to the advancing German army, it would also have a long-term benefit for the German people. Fewer people to feed in the Soviet Union would not only mean that more food could be transported west for the citizens of Munich or Hamburg, it would also facilitate the swift Germanization of the occupied territories. Himmler had already noted that most Polish farms were too small to support a German family and now, he no doubt believed, mass starvation would ease the creation of great German estates in the Soviet Union. Just before the invasion was launched Himmler spoke frankly to his colleagues at a weekend party: 'The purpose of the Russian campaign [is] to decimate the Slavic population by 30 millions.'

My mind wanders at the sheer horror of imagining people meeting up to collectively try and find out the best way to murder as though they were discussing weeds in the backyard.