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Russian occupying forces tortured a minor girl and a boy and brutally killed them in Izyum, Kharkiv Region, according to the results of an exhumation carried out by Ukrainian law- enforcement agencies.

This was stated by the Head of the Presidential Office, Andriy Yermak, during an online speech he gave on Monday, Nov. 28, at the Possible Scenarios for the Prosecution of Russia for the Crime of Aggression conference.

“The atrocities we are facing are shocking. When our law-enforcement agencies carried out an exhumation in Izyum, they found a minor girl who was first raped and then brutally killed. They found a boy whose genitals were cut off before he was executed. We discover such terrible things every time we liberate a new settlement,” said Yermak.

He underlined that that behind all crimes lie one huge crime – the so-called mother crime of aggression – without the investigation of which and the punishment of the guilty the truth will never be gotten to.

“There is no doubt that Russia bears full responsibility for what was committed. Russian soldiers and their commanders who committed war crimes will be brought to justice. However, this is not enough. Russian officials must be brought to criminal responsibility for the crime of aggression,” he added.

Yermak also said a special international tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine will enable justice to be restored  and punishment to be meted out to those guilty of committing terrible acts.

According to official information of the Prosecutor-General’s Office of Ukraine, more than 47,900 war crimes were committed and more than 8,400 civilians died, including 440 children, during Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. At least 46,000 houses and tens of thousands of civil infrastructure facilities have been destroyed. Among other things, 1,400 institutions for children have been destroyed and at least 11,400 young Ukrainians taken forcibly out of the country.

Izyum was liberated from Russian occupation on Sept. 10 in the course of a large-scale counter-offensive undertaken by Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv Region. According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces killed and tortured hundreds civilians of civilians during their six-month occupation, and mass graves of Ukrainians were found there.

The post Victims of Rape, Castration Found During Exhumation in Liberated Izyum appeared first on Kyiv Post.

It was 2002, and Justin Rose was on a losing streak. The 20-year-old South Boston native had washed out of the University of Maine after just one semester, held a string of terrible jobs, and had just gone through a bad breakup with a girlfriend. He was hawking cellphones at the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, when a Marine walked into his store. Rose went into his standard pitch but lost the sale. The Marine Corps recruiter did not. Three weeks later, Rose shipped out to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina, for basic training.

The war in Afghanistan was about to enter its third year, and the war in Iraq was looming on the horizon. “I’ll see you in a couple years,” Rose told his parents. He’d be on active duty, a rifleman, and probably see service overseas. At least that’s what the recruiter told him. “It turned out, I was actually a communications guy in the Marine Corps Reserves,” Rose recalled. “So I came home 13 weeks later.”

A few years would pass before Rose shipped out for his first deployment, arriving in October 2005 at Camp Lemonnier in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. His unit had been cobbled together from Marines based, like him, in Massachusetts. The rest hailed from California and Kansas. One of those Midwestern Marines was Jase Derek Stanton.

As part of the Third Provisional Security Company, Rose and his fellow Marines manned the guard towers and entry control points for the largest American outpost on the African continent. They had only been in-country for about a month when one of the Marine reservists from Kansas got drunk, vomited several times, and passed out on the ground outside his quarters. The next thing that Marine recalled, according to a summary in court documents, was waking up to find his pants pulled down and Stanton on top of him, touching his penis. The Marine shoved Stanton away and returned to his own quarters, but didn’t report the assault. A few weeks later, he would wake up to find Stanton assaulting him again. This time, he reported it. But that didn’t stop Stanton, who was acquitted at court martial. And neither did the Marines.

On New Year’s Eve 2005, Justin Rose headed to Camp Lemonnier’s cantina for celebratory $2.50 beers with his fellow Marines before heading back to his “hooch” around 1:30 a.m. Sometime after daybreak, Rose woke up to find someone stroking his penis. Disoriented for a moment, he lept down from his raised bunk and gave chase as a man dressed in red dashed out of his quarters and into another tent. He found Stanton, dressed in red, feigning sleep in his bed; Rose was certain Stanton was the attacker. So Rose did what he had been trained to do. He went to his team leader, a young corporal, and reported the assault. The first question he heard was: “Are you sure you’re not making this up?”

Stigma and Shame

Serving in the U.S. armed forces is dangerous, especially for women. Despite being a minority, making up only 16.5 percent of the military, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted — a rate far higher than that of men. Years of analysis of the issue, handwringing, and incremental reforms have failed to stem what has been called an “epidemic.”

But sexual assault of men in the military is also widespread and vastly underreported. Each day, on average, more than 45 men in the armed forces are sexually assaulted, according to the latest Pentagon estimates. For women, it is 53 per day, according to a September 2022 Pentagon report that uses a new euphemism “unwanted sexual contact” as a “proxy measure for sexual assault.” Nearly 40 percent of veterans who report to the Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, that they have experienced military sexual trauma, or MST — sexual assault or sexual harassment — are men.

Men, civilian or military, are less likely to report sexual assault, to identify experiences they have had as abusive, and to seek formal treatment for such harms. A 2018 study of active-duty, reserve, and National Guard personnel noted an overall lack of awareness of sexual assault of men in the military, an inclination to blame or marginalize male victims, and substantial barriers to reporting sexual assault — including stigma, a lack of confidence in leadership, and feeling “trapped” by the physical confines of deployment. The 2022 Pentagon report found that about 90 percent of men in the military did not report a sexual assault they experienced in 2021; about 71 percent of women failed to report such an attack. “Underreporting of MST,” according to a 2019 study by researchers from the VA’s Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center in Colorado, “may derive from men’s concerns about stigma, shame, rape myths, lack of past empathic response to disclosures of MST, and the perceived implications of reporting MST for one’s masculinity and sexuality.” For these same reasons, they noted, male MST survivors are at “elevated risk for a vast array of adverse health outcomes.” The trauma of sexual assault can, for example, result in depression, anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, anger management issues, self-blame, and low self-esteem, among other ill effects.

A decade ago, most veterans who submitted compensation claims for sexual assaults during their military service were denied benefits by the VA. In the years since, the VA has granted claims for military sexual trauma at an increasing rate. More than 103,000 veterans, of all genders, are now formally recognized by the VA as having been sexually traumatized during their service.

From 2011 to 2021, the total number of MST claims filed by men skyrocketed more than 119 percent, from 1,352 to 2,969, according to statistics provided to The Intercept by the VA. By the end of June, more than 2,550 male veterans had filed claims in 2022, almost double the number in 2011 and already 85 percent of last year’s total.

Over the last decade, the number of claims granted by the VA has grown from just 27.8 percent of all claims submitted for compensation by men in 2011 to 68.5 percent last year. Despite the precipitous growth, male claims have consistently been rejected at a higher rate than those of women, and the grant rate has lagged an average of 13 percent below that of women. The VA had no answer for the disparity, telling The Intercept via email that “it would be speculative to provide an explanation as to any difference in the grant rate.”

Trust Betrayed

After being assaulted, Justin Rose was made to recount the details again and again, to his squad leader, his platoon sergeant, Jase Stanton’s squad leader, and a chaplain. The trust he placed in his noncommissioned officers to keep his story quiet was quickly betrayed as word spread across the camp. Rose was branded the Marine who had been groped and hadn’t done anything about it. He became the target of jokes and tried laughing along, but inside he was in agony and began questioning himself. Why hadn’t he done anything about it? Why hadn’t he kicked Stanton’s ass? He did the right thing, on paper at least, but it didn’t feel right. “A real Marine would have fought back,” he later wrote. He began to blame himself for his assault and his failure to react as others — and even he — expected. “My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it,” he recalled.

Rose returned stateside, remained on active duty, and was promoted to corporal before being called to testify at Stanton’s court martial. But before the trial, he was contacted by Stanton’s military attorney who grilled him about his drinking at the cantina and how close a look he got of his fleeing assaulter. “When you’re in the Marines and an officer calls, you just answer the questions. In hindsight, now that I’ve been a company commander and have been involved with court martial hearings, I realize that was probably improper,” Rose told The Intercept.

“My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it.”

The defense dissected his testimony, twisted it around, and used it to attack his credibility. Rose recalled that the defense counsel said his drinking of three beers at the cantina, hours earlier, had clouded his mind; that he had failed to get a clear look at the man who assaulted him; and that his failure to confront Stanton called into doubt whether the assault even occurred. Rose and four fellow Marines who provided evidence against Stanton were instead accused of colluding to ruin his career.

“The main consensus was that we were trying to conspire against Stanton for cultural and social differences,” Rose told The Intercept. “He was a Midwesterner from a religious background, and we were from the Northeast and not accustomed to his kind of Christian fundamentalism.” The military judge ruled in Stanton’s favor and he walked free.

“By the time it was over,” Rose later wrote, “the Marine Corps had failed me three times: It had failed to take my claims seriously; then made my attacker out to be the victim and me the criminal; and finally failed to provide adequate support and resources in the aftermath of my assault — whether through access to sexual-assault counseling or something as simple as believing my story.”

Rose had had enough. He found that he couldn’t wear the same uniform as the man who had assaulted him and the many others who allowed Stanton to get away with it. “The military justice system said that I was a liar for something that I had no reason to lie about. If I was going to lie about anything, it certainly wouldn’t be that I was sexually assaulted and didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “It ended up being the reason that I left the Marine Corps. It shook my confidence in myself. It was a point of self-doubt. It was a point of shame.”

In 2007, the same year he left the Marines, Rose joined the Massachusetts National Guard. He would deploy to Afghanistan in 2011, where he saw combat and suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving as a Security Forces platoon leader for a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Uruzgan Province.

Stanton served in the Marines for several more years before leaving the corps and getting involved in Kansas politics. He worked as the campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate John Rysavy and as a field coordinator for the Republican senatorial campaign of Todd Tiahrt, a 16-year member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2010, Rysavy lost his primary, capturing just 2 percent of the Republican vote. In 2014, Tiahrt lost in the Republican primary, failing in a bid to reclaim his House seat from Mike Pompeo, who was later become U.S. Secretary of State.

Politics was not, however, Stanton’s only pursuit.

String of Assaults

Over the next decade, Stanton would be implicated in a string of sexual assaults. In 2007, after he had been acquitted at court martial, Stanton’s reserve unit — based out of Kansas City, Missouri — took part in one of its monthly weekend trainings. One night, according to court records obtained by The Intercept, he and other Marines went out drinking and after the bar closed, headed back to their base to sleep. Stanton attempted, multiple times, to grope two of the men. One of them, after repeatedly telling Stanton to stop, threatened to hurt him and later reported the incident, according to court documents.

In Johnson County, Kansas, in July 2008, Stanton attended a farewell party for a member of the military being deployed to the Middle East. One party-goer drank heavily and passed out, after which Stanton laid him out on a couch, pulled off his pants, and performed oral sex on him, according to the court records obtained by The Intercept. After a friend of the victim contacted the police, Stanton was charged with aggravated sodomy and aggravated sexual battery and resigned from Tiahrt’s campaign.

During the investigation, the Johnson County prosecutor contacted Rose and interviewed him about his assault by Stanton, though Rose was never called to testify. In the end, Stanton was convicted but served no prison time. Instead, he was given probation and required to register as a sex offender — but failed to properly do so.

While Rose and others had information about Stanton’s past that they shared with civilian authorities, the civilian world had no formal record of Stanton’s military legal proceedings. As the deputy attorney of nearby Riley County, Kansas, Bethany Fields prosecutes major crimes like murder, rape, and other forms of sexual assault, but she had no documentation on Stanton. “The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it,” she told The Intercept. She also failed to find any records of Stanton’s court martial for the assaults at Camp Lemonnier.

Stanton’s probation meant that he was facing prison time if he was convicted again, but after failing to provide full information when registering as a sex offender, he disappeared from the radar of the criminal justice system until resurfacing a few years later in Fields’s Riley County.

“The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it.”

On June 7, 2015, two soldiers, one 19 years old and the other 22, from the Army post at Fort Riley, were drinking at Tubby’s, a sports bar in Manhattan, Kansas, where they met Stanton. At closing time, the men went back to Stanton’s home where he poured shots and fixed them mixed drinks. The teenager passed out and woke to find Stanton “was sitting on top of him and was sodomizing him,” according to court documents. He scrambled to his feet and fled to the bathroom. When he emerged, he saw his friend passed out with his pants and underwear pulled down to his knees. The 19-year-old soldier pulled his friend’s pants up and attempted to contact his superiors and then family members, but couldn’t reach either. He then called the Army’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention hotline and arranged to meet with a SHARP representative at a nearby Starbucks. The teenage soldier was unable to wake his friend and left him at Stanton’s home. Both victims went to the hospital separately and received sexual assault examinations that revealed “a foreign DNA profile that matched Stanton.”

Stanton later texted a friend that he had a “three-way while that moron Boston kid [the 22-year-old] was asleep in the living room.” At trial, Stanton explained that he meant that he, according to summary documents, “messed around” with a friend and the teenage soldier, even though he had initially told a police detective that he had not had sexual intercourse with the teen. Arrested on June 9, 2015, Stanton was charged in Riley County with aggravated criminal sodomy.

A decade after being assaulted by Stanton at Camp Lemonnier, a decade after being doubted by the Marine Corps and accused of lying at court martial, a decade after Stanton had walked free, a detective from Kansas — where testimony about prior acts of sexual misconduct is admissible in court — called Rose to say that he was building a case against Stanton.

At trial, Stanton testified that he and the teenager had engaged in consensual oral and anal sex. The teenager countered that he had been unconscious. “At no point did I knowingly or intentionally hurt anyone,” Stanton maintained.

The 22-year-old victim did not appear at the trial — but Rose did. Then an Army captain with a wife and 2-year-old child, he flew to Kansas to tell his story once more. It was his 34th birthday.

This time, Rose’s testimony along with the victims of the 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2015 assaults was enough to sway the judge, who noted a distinct pattern. “They involved alcohol, they involved partying, usually asleep or perhaps passed out. … Most of them were in the military,” observed Judge Meryl D. Wilson.

“It’s very troubling — this is not the first time you had taken advantage of someone,” said Wilson. “The sad things about these situations is it doesn’t just impact you.” Wilson found Stanton was guilty of one count of aggravated criminal sodomy for his assault of the teenage soldier and sentenced him to 49 years in prison. He was also sentenced to 18 years (to be served concurrently) for failing to properly register as a sex offender in Kansas.

Pentagon Dysfunction

Last July, an investigation by The Intercept found that sexual assault of U.S. military personnel in Africa was far more common and widespread than the Pentagon reported to Congress.

The Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office compiles annual reports that claim to include all allegations of sexual assault involving U.S. military personnel. Between 2010 and 2020, the Pentagon listed just 73 cases of sexual assault in the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, area of operations. Yet criminal investigation files, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, show that military criminal investigators logged at least 158 allegations of sexual offenses in Africa during that same period.

The case files revealed that these charges of sexual misconduct involving U.S. military personnel occurred in at least 22 countries in Africa, including 13 nations that do not appear in the annual Department of Defense reports. Some of the allegations accuse members of the military, while others recount attacks on U.S. personnel by civilians on or near U.S. outposts. For 2006, the year that Justin Rose reported his assault by Jase Stanton, the Defense Department’s official annual report doesn’t even offer a breakdown of such attacks by country.

A March 2020 report by a military advisory committee lamented the “difficulty in obtaining, uniform, accurate, and complete information on sexual offense cases across the military.” Last November, The American Prospect reported that Pentagon officials were long aware that the military’s system for reporting sexual assaults was dysfunctional, leading to underestimates of the scale of the problem. This may help explain the wide discrepancy between the Pentagon’s annual figures and the AFRICOM files obtained by The Intercept. Earlier this year, in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Reps. Katie Porter, D-Calif., and Jackie Speier, D-Calif., took the Pentagon to task for its failures in tracking sexual assault. “Poor data management makes it difficult for DoD leadership to understand the scope of the problem or respond effectively,” they wrote.

The Pentagon notes that survivors of sexual assault are often reluctant to come forward for a variety of reasons, including a desire to move on, maintain privacy, and avoid feelings of shame. Yet troops say that even when they do speak out, they often face a military culture and command structure that doesn’t take their allegations seriously and a military justice system that provides little accountability. Just 225 of 5,640 eligible cases went to court martial and only 50 of those resulted in convictions for nonconsensual sexual offenses, according to 2020 statistics. That conviction rate represents 0.88 percent of the cases.

This year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order making sexual harassment, for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.

The effects of poor accountability and shame surrounding sexual assault while on active duty can continue far beyond one’s period of military service. “Despite successes in ensuring access to care for men who experienced MST, ongoing stigma related to experiencing sexual trauma in men also may be a barrier to seeking care,” Randal Noller, a VA spokesperson, told The Intercept. “We are looking at every avenue to help address this concern and inform men who experienced MST that VA believes them, that they are not alone, and we are here to help.”

Last year, in the face of increasing congressional pressure, Austin recommended that decisions to prosecute cases of sexual assault be taken out of the chain of command. In December 2021, Congress passed significant military justice reform that did so, which may prevent retaliation and lead more survivors to report sexual offenses. This year, President Joe Biden also signed an executive order making sexual harassment, for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.

“Changes Will Happen”

Today, Jase Stanton is incarcerated at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas. Barring parole board intervention or credit for “good time,” his earliest release date is January 1, 2059 — 53 years to the day that he assaulted Justin Rose.

Stanton did not reply to text messages sent via an app that allows communications with inmates or to a letter sent to him by The Intercept.

“In the years since then, I came to realize that it wasn’t the assault that had the most enduring effect on me,” Rose said. “It was people’s refusal to believe that one man would assault another man. It was the mockery from leaders that I had trusted and the implication that, if it had happened, I must have done something to invite it.”

Rose, now a major in the Army Reserve, still grapples with feelings that, somehow, he remains at fault. “There is guilt on my behalf. I didn’t present a convincing enough case,” he said of his testimony at Stanton’s 2006 court martial. “And these two soldiers down at Fort Riley paid for it. What he did to them was substantially worse than what he did to me, and that’s a shitty feeling — that I didn’t do anything to help them.”

But Bethany Fields, the Riley County prosecutor, credits Rose’s willingness to testify in 2015 as having a major influence on Stanton’s conviction and lengthy prison sentence. “The case got delayed a couple times, so we had to call and tell the earlier victims that the dates had changed, but Justin stuck with me. That was huge,” she said. “In this case, the issue was consent. We had DNA, so there was no question that the act happened. The issue was whether or not the victim consented. Because we had Justin and others come in and say, ‘This happened to me and I didn’t consent,’ ‘I saw him do this and that person didn’t consent’; because we had all these other people who said they had been sleeping or drinking or passed out and didn’t consent, it made for a much stronger case.”

Fields believes that testifying about these traumas will help to hasten change. “The more the word gets out about this type of assault, the more that people are willing to talk about this, the more people speak out,” she said, “the more changes will happen and the less victims we will have in the future.”

Rose said that he’s seen a shift in military culture since his assault at Camp Lemonnier — and that it’s been driven by survivors.

“There was a perception, as a male sexual assault victim, that you wanted it. And if you didn’t, you could have fought back harder. And that creates a culture of silence,” he said. “Today, you see a lot more people being open about their stories. People are willing to come forward. They’re not ashamed of what has happened to them. And because of that, things are changing.”

The post In U.S. Military, Sexual Assault Against Men Is Vastly Underreported appeared first on The Intercept.

After numerous game delays and pandemic setbacks, the video game industry finally felt like it was back in full swing in 2022. While the PlayStation 5 still remains largely elusive for many, the year certainly left no shortage of consoles to choose from with Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PCs giving gamers plenty of options. Along that line, a wider variety of highly anticipated titles were released this year than the last. Some of those entries, like Gotham Knights and Sonic Frontiers, didn’t quite live up to expectations, while others, which we’ll get to, exceeded them.
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On the business side, 2022 opened with a boom as Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in January, amid continued allegations of CEO Bobby Kotick’s discrimination, sexual harassment, and creation of a toxic work environment. Later that month, Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired Bungie for a billion, further ensuring that both Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation would continue their attempts to outdo each other with exclusives—good news for gamers, though less so for developers who are now forced to cater to a certain type of gamer. Alongside new partnerships, there were some breakups too. Electronic Arts withdrew its license with FIFA following a 30-year partnership. E3 was also canceled this year, leaving developers and studios to find other outlets to get word of their upcoming games out.

Video game adaptations remain an attractive prospect for the film and television industries, and 2022 definitely highlighted the successes and failures of that effort. Sony’s Uncharted left critics mixed but did respectable numbers worldwide, launching a new franchise for Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 grossed nearly the same as Sony’s film, with the added superlative of being the highest-grossing domestic video game film. Paramount quickly announced a third film for 2024 along with a Knuckles spin-off limited series for Paramount+. Gran Turismo was greenlit at Sony with Neil Blomkamp, Warner Bros. greenlit Mortal Kombat 2 with Simon McQuoid returning to direct, and Emma Tammi signed on to direct Five Nights at Freddy’s for Blumhouse. Universal released the first trailer for an animated Super Mario Bros. Movie, which aims to replicate Sonic’s success next April.

On the TV side, Netflix’s Resident Evil was canceled after one season despite the rather ingenious idea to set it after the events of the games rather than adapt the games themselves. But all hope is not lost on the small screen. A God of War prequel is in development at Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix will try their hand at a Horizon prequel. If HBO’s The Last of Us sets the high bar its trailer suggests it will, surely more television adaptations will gain traction.

As for the best games of 2022, it seems developers had the apocalypse on their minds. You’ll notice an ongoing theme of world-ending events and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Yet, amidst all of that human-caused wreckage and suffering, there’s hope to be found, as even some of the bleakest adventures highlighted the importance of connections, family, and friendship. While the notion of escapism feels somewhat slighter with so many end-of-the-world stories, it seems that the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the ever-present threat of intolerance and attacks on human rights have encouraged game developers to emphasize the importance of staying connected, and fighting together, whether that be through co-op modes or narrative.

Here are TIME’s favorite games of the year:

10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge

Cowabunga! The Heroes in a Half-shell take to the streets in this arcade-style action side-scroller inspired by the 1987 cartoon series. Shredder’s Revenge is a healthy slice of pixelated nostalgia that brings back the voice cast of the cartoon series, while also offering modern updates like a deeper 2D environment and a killer soundtrack. Shredder’s Revenge supports both single player and multiplayer as you choose between Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, April O’Neil, and Master Splinter and take on the Foot Clan, Bepop, Rocksteady, Krang, and, of course, Shredder. As you battle enemies from the sewers and city streets of New York to Dimension X, picking up health boosts from pizzas along the way, Shredder’s Revenge has just one flaw: it’s over all too quickly. Thankfully, each character has their own playstyle and special skillset, giving it a replay value lacking in most arcade-style games.

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBOX One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

9. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

All your favorite characters from Anakin to Rey, the battles that thrilled you, and the moments that made you fall in love with Star Wars are lovingly recreated here, in LEGO form. Despite covering the plot of nine movies, The Skywalker Saga is easily digestible and the perfect way to introduce younger gamers to the galaxy far, far away. Of course, that’s not to say adult fans won’t find plenty to enjoy here as well. With a treasure trove of Easter eggs, fun and varied combat, a greater emphasis on exploration, and local co-op, The Skywalker Saga really does marry all the best aspects of the Lego Star Wars games. It refines character movement (keeping in mind that these are block figures), as well as camera positions, allowing for a smoother use of force powers, blaster shots, and of course, lightsaber battles. While many of the games on this list are high-stress and challenging, The Skywalker Saga encourages relaxation and promises a good time.

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

8. Resident Evil Village: Shadows of Rose

Resident Evil Village’s DLC isn’t just bonus content but its own unique story that concludes the Winters saga that began in Resident Evil: Biohazard. Set 16 years after the conclusion of Village, Shadows follows Ethan’s daughter Rose Winters, who enters the mind of a conscious fragment of mold in search of a crystal that will remove the powers that left her a social pariah her entire life. How that works exactly isn’t important—it’s just your typical Resident Evil pseudo-science and dream logic. What is important is the sheer terror Shadows is able to create through this experience, which returns to the third-person perspective the previous two entries broke away from. While players traverse familiar areas from Village, since fallen into disrepair, the horrors found there are all new. The second act ups the ante with a return to House Beneviento that’s so stressful in the way it utilizes…well, better to just let you experience the horror for yourself.

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S, and PC. Nintendo Switch cloud version to come in early December.

7. Sifu

In Sifu, you play as the child of a martial-arts master who seeks revenge after the death of his father. A beat-‘em-up-style game inspired by Jackie Chan films, Sifu makes impressive use of its martial arts combat system that really highlights the importance of practice. One of the most novel elements of the game is the fact that each time you die, the character ages, allowing you to utilize more powerful attacks but reducing your overall health, to the point where your character can age beyond the ability to fight, forcing you to restart the level. It adds a whole new layer to risk and reward combat, and along with an emphasis on improvisation, crafting weapons from the environment, and even the option to talk some battles out instead of fighting, Sifu does more than throw wave after wave of enemy at you. It forces you to learn both discipline and adaptation in a way that makes every fight a different game of death.

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

6. The Last of Us Part 1

It may be a bit of a cheat, which is why it couldn’t be placed higher in good faith, but Naughty Dog’s third foray into the first installment of The Last of Us justifies itself as its own unique experience worthy of a spot as one of 2022’s best. It’s the same story you already know and love: Joel, a smuggler, escorts a teenage girl, Ellie, across the ruins of the United States, while struggling to stay alive against Cordyceps mutated humans and warring militia factions. From character development to environment design, vocal performances to combat, it’s the height of video gaming. Part 1 isn’t just a PS5 port; it rebuilds the game from scratch with current gen animation and graphics, and enhanced controls, making the experience, whether it’s your first time or a replay, all the more memorable. And it’s the perfect refresher course before HBO’s adaptation of the series debuts in January.

Available on PlayStation 5 and PC.

5. Stray

You play the entirety of Stray as a cat, doing all the things that cats do, including jumping on things, knocking stuff off shelves, scratching up carpets and doors, and meowing…a lot. As a stray who gets separated from his family after falling from the lush greenery of the outside world, you find yourself in a cyberpunk, walled city meant to protect the last remnants of humanity. But humanity has all passed on and left behind only their robot companions, who imitate the lifestyles of their former owners, including the class systems that led to humanity’s downfall. Accompanied by a helpful drone, you work your way from the slums to the upper levels, solving puzzles, performing side quests, and unlocking the history of the world you explore. You’ll find yourself surprised at just how invested you become.

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.

4. Elden Ring

No one ever said sword and sorcery would be easy. Directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki of Dark Souls fame, with story and world-building from George R.R. Martin, Elden Ring is the highest of high fantasy experiences. It’s also massive in scope, sometimes to the point of frustration, with so many side quests, areas to explore, armor and weapons to unlock and upgrade, and enemies to combat that you can all too easily find yourself lost from the main quest. That quest sees your custom created character on a mission to repair the Elden Ring and become the new Elden Lord. There’s a lot of trial and error, and in the spirit of Dark Souls, the combat is very demanding and difficult, but it’s also rewarding and encourages players to learn from their missteps. And because it’s an open-world experience, you can often find yourself in battle you’re not nearly ready for. While mileage may vary, the sheer ambition of Elden Ring makes it a standout.

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S, and PC.

3. The Quarry

Supermassive’s spiritual follow-up to Until Dawn is another triumph for horror gaming. Paying homage to the summer camp horror movies of the ‘80s, The Quarry features a group of camp counselors who decide to have one last hurrah before packing it in for the summer—only there’s a curse over the lands and a werewolf prowls the night. Featuring a recognizable cast of actors including Brenda Song, Justice Smith, Miles Robbins, and Ariel Winter alongside horror legends Ted Raimi, Lin Shaye, Grace Zabriskie, David Arquette, and Lance Henriksen, The Quarry offers hundreds of decision branches that affect the fates of the characters, their relationships, the places you can hide, the story you witness, and the outcome of the game. With likable characters you want to see survive the night, surprising twists, a co-op option, and great replay value, The Quarry is a dream nightmare scenario.

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S, and PC.

2. Horizon: Forbidden West

Post-apocalyptic hunter Alloy returns in this sequel to 2017’s Horizon: Zero Dawn. The wastelands of the western United States are free to roam in this expansive, open-world follow-up that’s twice the size of its predecessor, which means twice as many robots to hunt down, side quests to complete, and upgrades to find. Alloy, along with familiar and new allies, tries to put the world back together by restoring the A.I. Gaia and rebooting the Earth’s biosphere, decimated centuries ago by a human war against the machines. With smooth, intuitive combat and traversal, and graphics that showcase the power of the PS5, Forbidden West is a joy to play. But what makes it linger is its emotional heft, memorable characterization, and strong allegory about what happens when humans put their faith in greedy billionaires whose egos outweigh their technological knowhow.

Available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

1. God of War: Ragnarok

From its myth-shattering storytelling to deft tonal shifts, its emotional character arcs to its bone-breaking action, God of War: Ragnarok is what all action-adventure games should aspire towards. And in a year full of gorgeous games, Ragnarok is such a sight to behold it’ll make you want new glasses to see it all the better. Set three years after the previous installment, Ragnarok once again finds Kratos and his son Atreus attempting to find peace in Midgard, peace that is all too quickly shattered by the Aesir and the coming Ragnarok. While Atreus seeks to uncover his origins, Kratos fears the boy is leading them into a war with Odin that will have insurmountable consequences. As father and son travel across the nine realms with the sage Mimir, they encounter gods and monsters pulled from Norse mythology that test their strength, but more importantly their bond. For Kratos, it’s a story of seeking something more than war. And for Atreus it’s a coming-of-age story in which the consequences of growing determine what kind of god he’ll be. And for players? Well, it’s an epic and emotional saga that stands as the best game of the year.

Available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.

While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”

The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.” 

In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them. 

Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying? 

Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust. 

I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.

You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”

I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise. 

Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.

A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Image by

By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project? 

Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?

With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.

You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.

Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.

One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked. 

Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images) Image by

As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents. 

You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.

I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.

Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?

First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments. 

With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant. 

And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.

Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.

The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.

One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?

The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”) Image by

Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here? 

That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.

That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States. 

So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.

I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways. 

And there are similarities as well, which you write about.

I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.

That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.

Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.

Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past appeared first on The Forward.