#Stalin’s regime

[dalliancekay]

Aziraphale vs Shostakovich

For a long time now I wanted to write something about Aziraphale's choice to listen to Shostakovich at the beginning of S2. Shostakovich is not an 18th century composer as some joke about Aziraphale being stuck in the past. He's not a romantic, sweet composer either. But a composer who wrote most of his work in the middle of 20th Century. Under the oppressive Soviet regime of Stalin and more.

There's so much about...the way he lived and worked, in constant fear, that just, begs to be compared to how Aziraphale feels. I just never felt I knew enough about Shostakovich to make a post about him and do it justice. I still don't. But. I was listening to this classical music and history course today - not focused on Symphony No. 5 (1937) that Aziraphale was listening to, but Symphony No. 13 (1962) - written in the brief 'Thaw' of Khrushchev, who condemned Stalin's just ended, rule of terror. The professor (Robert Greene - all his courses are amazing btw) nails it when he describes how Shostakovich's career felt:

There's a lot more in the whole chapter but I was struck by how Aziraphale copes and has coped with living in fear, in terror for 6000 years (and much more, since we see him worried in Before the Beginning too). Not just for himself, but like everyone in Russia, for his loved ones too.

Imagine. Living in terror of your friends being taken away. Your spouse. Your parents.. Of you being found a traitor and executed. Afraid of talking to anyone, about anything. Constantly having to praise the regime you live in or you will disappear. Never knowing who is watching. Who is listening.

Constantly. Afraid. Of. A. Knock. At. The. Door.

[deadpanwalking]

What did you think of the first episode of The Regime? I'm not sure what to make of it yet.

Neither am I—I really hope that it comes into its own and doesn't rely as much on the Veep and Succession house blend. Kinda digging Elena and Herbert's Kronk and Yzma thing, though.

[thatpoorfraulein]

I fucking HATE communism if you are a commie GO AWAY

/very VERY srs

[madonnamadeofasphalt]

You know, whatever you say about the Soviet Union, they did, on average, change dictators more often than democratic Russia does. Mostly because they kept giving all the power to senile alcoholics who'd already had their first stroke, but who am I to judge, if that's what it takes for Russian politicians to respect some kinda term limits, then so be it

[guhhhhhhhhhhh]

This week on a whim I decided to start a book filled with interviews discussing what it was like to live through the fall of the USSR and trying to reconcile that past with the 'present' situation in Russia (the book came out in 2015 I think) and I'm so glad I picked it up, because this is the first thing I've read in a long time that has genuinely changed me as a person and the way I think about my life. There are so many touching tales about humanity and hope and cruelty and having to live and cope with bitter disappointment and unchangeable situations outside of your control and it speaks so much to what it feels like to be alive today, even though the interviews took place in the 90s/early 2000s and I've never lived through anything like what the people in this book have experienced. I'm not even halfway through this book, the audio version is nearly 24 hours long!! But it's been consuming me with Thoughts and I just needed to get some of them out

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

.

[half-life-crisis]

#ITOLDYou! #Podcast S-2 #SeasonPremiere!  #Understanding the #witting & #unwitting #insider #threats. They are #responsible for all this #geopolitical #insanity.

#Watch here https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dal8pIpcH9E…

#Learn More https://halflifecrisis.com/hlc-articles/understand-the-insider-threats-against-the-usa…

#Identify if #YOU are that #insiderthreat!

[playingonedchess]

reminder for the millionth time: never read tumblr recomended posts about politics

[lightdancer1]

My favorite thing about this:

Is the Iranian regime crying like a bunch of little bitches that their shooting at another country got a full-scale reprisal for the first time since 1988 and their technology that helps Russia in its bid to murder 44 million Ukrainians was utterly feckless in stopping it. Classic Khameini, talk shit, get hit, cry like a bitch.

[madwickedawesome]

cause of death people refusing to ever factor historical nuance and complexity

[catgirlstalin]

one of the lesser known policies enforced by stalin during his totalitarian regime was mandatory, daily petting sessions. under the looming threat of severe punishment, expulsion from the party, and even execution, the entire politburo would be forced to come together and engage in the act of petting the head of their supreme leader, sometimes even scratching behind his ears. these sessions would often last several minutes up to even one or two hours in extreme cases, and individual members were often too terrified to be the first to stop, out of fear that he might stop purring

[dalliancekay]

Singing

I feel, we as a fandom, don’t talk enough about Aziraphale's singing.

Maybe he's not much into whatever pop/rock sensation is currently in most humans earphones*, but we know that he used to be a music tutor and therefore surely knows many great tunes.

On top of that, his music taste isn't as ancient as some might think... yes he likes classical music, but contrary to some opinions of it, not all of it is from 18th century. The symphony (number 5) he buys from Maggie at the beginning of S2 was written in 1937 by Dimitri Shostakovich who had a turbulent life (it being the 1930s AND trying to survive in Stalin's cruel regime).

The piece the Bentley plays for Azi when he asks for music on his way to Edinburgh is one of my favourite pieces of music called Danse Macbre by Saint-Saëns, the opening of which Wikipedia describes thus:

The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times (the twelve strokes of midnight) which is accompanied by soft chords from the string section. The solo violin enters playing the tritone, which was known as the diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") during the Medieval and Baroque eras, consisting of an A and an E♭—in an example of scordatura tuning, the violinist's E string has actually been tuned down to an E♭ to create the dissonant tritone.

Aziraphale is also clearly aware of the film and the music + songs from The Sound of Music (1965) and Aziraphale, living in Soho as he does, I bet is a great lover of not just drama in theatre, but also musicals.

Therefore it is not a huge reach to conclude he would knows some fabulous songs to sing while making himself a pot of tea and a cup of coffee for Crowley on one the countless idyllic mornings in their cottage. Nor is it a stretch to assume that he loves to sing Crowley to sleep, playing with his hair as he does so, much like we all love to see in art and fics that this wonderful fandom provides.

So my question is, what does Aziraphale love to sing? Is it Maria from West Side Story? Singing in the Rain?

Does he love Jesus Christ Superstar (much like he loves his collection of misprinted Bibles)? Did he and Crowley go see Hamilton?

I also think they would have a huge collection of instruments in their cottage, perhaps even a beautiful grand piano... that, of course, they both can play. *but neither is the Bentley, who plays Queen to Crowley basically indiscriminately, even though he tries to play other things when driving. Whether he tried to play music in his car before the 70s, I'm not sure we know?

[dontforgetukraine]

The exhibition at Washington’s Ukraine House dedicated to the Holodomor genocide. Source: UkrInform

---

Washington’s Ukrainian House has opened an exhibition showcasing the survival meals that kept Ukrainians alive during Holodomor: oak bark soup, potato peel pancakes mixed with grass and flax seeds, and grass bread, according to UkrInform. The Holodomor, a famine that struck Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, stands as one of the most devastating events in Ukrainian history, resulting in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. The Soviet regime orchestrated this artificial famine under Joseph Stalin, who implemented extreme grain procurement policies that led to widespread starvation. The policies aimed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and resistance to Soviet control. In 2006, Ukraine officially recognized the Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian people. The designation has been supported by numerous countries, although it remains contested by some, notably Russia. During this period, the Soviet government confiscated grain and other food supplies from Ukrainian peasants while imposing impossibly high quotas for grain production. As a result, millions were left without food or means of survival. Historical estimates of the death toll vary widely, with figures ranging from 3.5 million to as many as 10 million victims. Activists in Washington have recreated some of the meals that Ukrainians ate to survive in order to draw Americans’ attention to the tragic page in Ukraine’s history.

“At the exhibition’s center, visitors can see a soup made from pinecones, twigs, and oak bark. We also recreated potato peel pancakes mixed with grass and flax seeds. In some regions of Ukraine, flour was mixed with grass to bake flatbreads"

The exhibit is open at the Ukraine House in Washington DC until the end of November.

Source: Oak bark soup, potato peels, pancakes with grass: Holodomor survival meals on display at exhibition in Washington

[mariacallous]

Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.

In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”

His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.

These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.

[forevergulag]

the tankies dont want you to know this: under stalin’s regime, citizens were forced to refer to stalin with she/her. punishable by death

[warningsine]

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”. In a video from the prison in January, he had appeared gaunt with his head shaved.

The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death.

In early December he had disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he had called political retribution for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.

A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.

The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.

Putin has recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term in office. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin and could surpass him if he runs again for office in 2030, a possibility since he had the constitutional rules on term limits rewritten in 2020.