#The Latin american Siege

[thedemonlady]

ALISSA WHITE-GLUZ (ARCH ENEMY - ARGENTINA 2022)

[afro-elf]

my friend anas @anas-kamal has a message he wants me to share specifically with black people with love from gaza ❤ he has been using his small instagram platform and fluency in spanish from his studies in venezuela and bolivia to reach out to people in all parts of the world and dispel myths about gazans

https://www.instagram.com/anas_ayesh_2?igsh=djh1NGU3eWVncjBt

he knows there has been a lot of propaganda and false rhetoric about gazans and palestinians hating black people and vice versa. he wants you all to know, as many of us do, it is not true. palestinians and black people all over the world share a history of struggle and friendship. anas himself says that the black colleagues and friends he made in university always made him feel relaxed and described them as having "humble and kind hearts".

it breaks my heart that while this kind man sits in a tent in the cold he still feels the need to assure the world he holds no hate for anyone but it is his kindness that drives him to do it ❤

anas is a medical student at the latin american school of medicine (ELAM) who has been stuck in gaza since visiting his family at the beginning of the genocide, losing his scholarship and opportunity to continue his studies. the siege has taken away his dream of being a doctor and caring for his people. his campaign is vetted and i've spoken to him personally 🍉🍉🍉

anas's precious life is in all of our hands ❤❤

€1,623/€25,000 or $1,762/$27,152

[gothhabiba]

An Appeal to Our Food and Hospitality Community to Take Action Now for Gaza

Dear Industry Friends, 

We have come together as chefs, farmers, media makers, business owners, beverage professionals, and food workers from across our industry to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. support for Israel’s war crimes. We must break the silence around the genocide in Gaza. As of today, more than 7,000 Palestinians have been massacred in less than three weeks. Nearly half of them are children. Over 8,000 bombs have been dropped on Gaza, killing a Palestinian every 5 minutes. After hospitals run out of fuel,  the death toll will rise exponentially. Every second we choose to stay silent, without demanding that our government stop arming Israel with billions of our tax dollars, we allow another massacre to take place. 

We can prevent this violence by refusing to allow our government to fund and arm Israel’s decades-long military occupation. History has shown us that peace and safety for all in the region cannot come from the violent subjugation of Palestinians. We grieve the loss of all innocent life. However, violence begets violence, and we know this latest eruption did not occur in a vacuum. For 75 years, Palestinians have been killed, imprisoned, tortured, and robbed of their land and homes. In Gaza, 2.2 million people — more than half of whom are children — have been living under an inhumane siege for almost 17 years, and are cut off from the world, without access to water, food, or basic amenities needed to live a dignified and healthy life. For those living in Gaza, the last decade has been a slow genocide. 

As cultural stewards in this country, we have the power to counter the dehumanization of Palestinians. Israel has long weaponized food, erasing Palestinian people while claiming their cuisine. Here in the U.S., the appropriation of Palestinian foods as “Israeli” has led to more than Israelis profiting off of Palestinian culture; it is an erasure that has had real implications for Palestinians. It allows us to negate their cultural currency, and turn our attention away with more ease when we see Palestinian death. 

We must join our voices with Palestinians pleading for justice and protection right now. The situation is dire, and no amount of media coverage has discouraged Israel from its policy of ethnic cleansing and land theft as the U.S. government continues to protect Israel from global pressure for a ceasefire. We have been called upon by Palestinian civil society to join their struggle for freedom by joining the global movement for divestment and cultural boycott of Israel until it ends its horrific human rights abuses.

We ask our fellow food and beverage community to take a stand against genocide and ethnic cleansing and commit to three actions with us:

Call your congressional representatives to demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to unconditional U.S. funding of Israel. 

Divest from products, events, and trips that promote Israel until it dismantles its apartheid system and military occupation. 

Invest in events and projects that promote justice for Palestinians, whether connecting to a local organization to learn how to support, or amplify Palestinian voices and support them to share their food and culture on their own terms.

We recognize that this may be difficult given the frightening pressure put on us to remain silent. McCarthyist tactics cannot marginalize and divide us – we know we are not alone as the whole world is rising up against injustice and genocide. Thousands of artists worldwide have publicly endorsed BDS and the cultural boycott of Israel, including musicians, DJs, filmmakers and actors, visual artists, Black artists, Latin American artists, and countless others across all fields and continents. This is in spite of efforts made by Israeli government-linked lobby groups to suppress this solidarity. 

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We are all in this industry to affirm life and dignity for everyone. As those who care for others, it is our moral imperative to actively contribute to the care that Palestinians need right now as they struggle to survive and get free. Food and beverage colleagues – it’s time for our community to extend our hospitality and join the movement for a Free Palestine.

Add your name – sign the pledge

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Statement issued by the Palestinian factions regarding the zionist aggression and the genocide war against our Palestinian people

O our steadfast Palestinian people, O masses of our Islamic and Arab nation, O free people of the world everywhere,

Amid the escalating genocide war and starvation waged by the Nazi enemy against our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and its threats to expand the aggression and war on Rafah, which shelters about a million and a half citizens, posing a threat to Egypt's sovereignty and national security, the ongoing violations in the West Bank and occupied Al-Quds, and the extremist Nazi government's insistence on executing annexation, expansion, and forced displacement plans, and liquidating the refugee issue through the systematic targeting of "UNRWA," the Palestinian factions call on our people, the masses of our Arab and Islamic nation, and all the free people and supporters of justice and rights in the world to launch the widest popular campaign to reject aggression and demand an end to the war and thwart genocide and starvation plans.

We urge Arab and Islamic governments to take urgent action and apply the necessary political pressure at the international level to stop the aggression and confront the enemy's plans.

We also call on Arab, Islamic, and international parties and forces that support the Palestinian people to take their role and fulfill their duties to protect the Palestinian cause and not leave the Palestinian people alone to face all this zionist terrorism and racism filled with hatred and instruments of killing and destruction.

We make a call from the heart of Palestine, amidst the siege and destruction, to consider Friday, 16-2-2024, as a global national day to support the Palestinian right in all Arab and Islamic countries, and Saturday and Sunday, 17/18-2-2024, as global days to support the Palestinian people in all European, Western, Latin American, and East Asian countries.

The movement of masses, parties, and currents in various countries around the world is capable of creating pressure and impact, capable of changing the positions of governments and countries to contain this zionist Nazi terrorism.

Therefore, we appeal to all forces, parties, trade and parliamentary unions everywhere to take their role, fulfill their responsibility, and affirm their alignment with the Palestinian cause and stand by the Palestinian people who are subjected to the most horrific massacres, crimes, and destructive wars.

We call on our people to unite and stand together against the projects of displacement and the liquidation of the Palestinian cause, to hold onto our land, preserve it, and head to the areas we were expelled from on the path of return to Palestine.

We praise the legendary patience and steadfastness of our people, their support, and embrace of the resistance and its heroic performance. We also call on our people in the West Bank, Al-Quds, and the occupied Palestinian lands to mobilize and confront the occupation in all arenas.

We praise the valiant performance of the resistance on multiple fronts, especially in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, and call for its continuation until the aggression is repelled from our people.

Mercy for the martyrs, healing for the wounded, freedom for the prisoners, victory for our steadfast people and their valiant resistance.

The Palestinian Factions

Thursday: 05 Sha'ban 1445H

Corresponding to: 15 February 2024

Source: https://t.me/PalestineResist/29420

[fatehbaz]

[T]he lands that they reside on [...] are currently under siege from these different extractivist development initiatives.

There are about 46 Garifuna communities along the Caribbean coast of Honduras and on the island of Roatán, and because these are coastal communities located on lands that are highly coveted now for their touristic potential, tourism investors have taken an interest. There’s a lot of land speculation and land-grabbing taking place related to tourism, but also related to agro-industry and agricultural development, specifically African palm. [...]

---

Garifuna have this really complicated history. They are a Black Indigenous people of African, Arawak, and Carib ancestry. They arrived in Honduras in 1797, initially in Roatán, after they were exiled from the island of Saint Vincent. And then from there, they established all these communities along the Caribbean coast of Honduras.

They have been in Honduras since before Honduras gained its independence from Spain in 1823. And I think that’s really significant, because what we see happening is that Garifuna are often positioned as outsiders to Honduras or as recent arrivants. [...]

What is so fundamentally problematic about Garifuna identity [...] for the Honduran state? [...]

There are Garifuna communities in Belize and Nicaragua and Guatemala, and of course, a large Garifuna diaspora in the U.S. [...]

The other point that’s important to mention here is that this sort of exteriorization of Blackness is very much related to Honduran history. So after Honduras gains independence from Spain, like many other countries in Latin America, it is attempting to carve out a unique national identity [...]. It is exclusive of Blackness. Of course, that has all sorts of political and material consequences for Black Hondurans, including the Garifuna, the English-speaking Black population or the Creole population, and even the Miskito population, which also has African ancestry. [...]

---

The development projects that are underway on the Caribbean coast, and that are leading to land dispossession, are projects promoted not just by the state but multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. They’re promoted as projects that will create development, that will bring progress and prosperity to Honduras, but often at the expense of Indigenous and Black peoples’ rights. Lands with the largest concentrations of forests, water, white sand beaches, fertile soil — those are largely concentrated in Indigenous and Black territories. So that development or that promise for a more prosperous future is contingent on the extraction of those resources from those communities.

---

Words of Christopher Loperena. As interviewed by the Graduate Center at CUNY. “’The Ends of Paradise’ Explores the Struggles of Honduras’ Black and Indigenous Peoples.” Published by the Office of Communications and Marketing, online in the News section of CUNY’s Graduate Center. 16 March 2023. [Some paragraph breaks and contractions added by me, for accessibility/readability.]

[give-me-a-movie-camera]

I was watching I Love Lucy on Pluto TV last night and it completely slipped my mind that yesterday marked Desi Arnaz’s 106th birthday.

His was a classic Riches-to-Rags, Rags-to-Riches Cinderella tale. Desiderio Alberto ‘Desi’ Arnaz y de Acha III was born 2 March 1917 in Santiago de Cuba, Oriente Province, Cuba, the only son of wealthy landowner Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Alberni II (a prominent Cuban politician, who, to date, was the youngest mayor of Santiago de Cuba from 1923 to 1932) and his wife, Dolores ‘Lolita’ de Acha y de Socías (one of the most beautiful women in the Caribbean, the daughter of a businessman, one of three founders of Bacardi Rum Limited, the world's largest privately-owned spirits company). Desi was of the small but vastly privileged, upper-class y de Acha, the descendent of Cuban nobility of whose colonial ancestors originated from Santander, Provincia de Cantabria, Cantabria, Spain. (His grandfather, Dr Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y Alberni I, was assigned to the first United States volunteer cavalry in Cuba, the ‘Rough Riders’ under the leadership of ‘Hero of Cuba’ Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War on 1 July 1898. To legend, they sieged San Juan Hill on horseback, and though the forged conquest did not belong primarily to Roosevelt, for the conflict was an integrated effort between the white volunteer regiment and the 1,250 black Buffalo Soldiers, the famed battle gained Cuba her independence from Spain—a victory for the people, the Cuban people).

At the height of the Cuban Revolution of 1933, Desi and his family were forced to flee their Motherland, leaving their riches behind. Following a brief election, the government collapsed with the removal of President Gerardo Machado y Morales from office in August of 1933. The opposing anarchists seized all political leaders and stripped them of their power. Among them, Desi’s father, imprisoned by the regime, before his brother-in-law, Alberto de Acha, intervened on his behalf, thus making his escape to Miami, where he was to remain in exile. Having lost their holdings to the rebels who confiscated their property (their palatial home, a cattle ranch, two dairy farms, and a vacation villa on a private island in Santiago Bay), his father sent for Desi and his mother, who took refuge in Key West, Monroe, Florida in 1934. When Desi washed upon the shores of the Americas, his father had established an import-export company, where the family of three took up frugal lodgings in the company warehouse and dined on cans of cold beans. Desi came to live in New York City and Los Angeles for about one year, where he tightened his belt for survival and scrambled for employment as a struggling musician. Following an engagement as a guitar player for a Latin-American band at the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach, and a cursory stint with the Xavier Cugat Orchestra in 1937, he made his Broadway debut in the Rodgers and Hart musical Too Many Girls, where he reprised the role for RKO's major motion picture of the same name in 1940. During the course of filming, he fell head-over-heels for the Apricot Queen, Lucille Désirée Ball. The couple eloped on 30 November 1940 in Greenwich, Fairfield, Connecticut. By 1949, at the age of thirty-two, Desi established himself a renowned nightclub entertainer as conga-playing band leader for the travelling self-titled Cuban orchestra.

Most Hollywood buffs would do well to remember the Power Couple formed by Desilu Productions—a celluloid empire built on the backs of Lucy and Desi’s American Dreams, despite the public scandals and tumultuous marital woes. But at the crowning glory of their golden existence, there are those who neglect Desi's legacy and his reluctant resignation to his fate as the Man Behind the Curtain, to remain in Lucy’s shadow so long as he lived. Lucy, of whose celebrity distinction was of higher standing than her husband’s. Desi, though undoubtedly talented, who was not exempt from the unjust ostracization and societal prejudice that plagued him as a Cuban Spaniard immigrant in racially-charged Hollywood. For those who clutched their pearls at the prospect of Middle American households who might've dismissed acceptance of the world’s first interracial couple on television, Lucy and Desi defied those expectations and dissolved racial barriers in an era dominated by cultural strife. Audiences of all races, colour, and creed came together to shower the Ricardos with adoration and praise, because they came to understand the Ricardos epitomized the human experience, no matter that they didn't reflect the typical post-war domestic demographic. Against all odds, the world fell in love with the All-American Ricardos… white, Hispanic, or otherwise. Lucy and Desi, to be envied by all... America's Sweethearts.

On his 106th birthday, we remember Desi for the pioneer he was, as the Mastermind behind the nation’s most Beloved Redhead.

Behind every great woman lies a greater man.

Perhaps Desi speaks for us all when he declared his everlasting love, in his own words... ‘I Love Lucy was never just a title.’

💓 Happy Heavenly Birthday, Desi.  💓

       𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・

[legend-of-zelda-voices]

Compilation Post

Patricia Summersett +Dubs

Part 2

(Some pictures on the right aren't LU, but they are by jojo56830)

First Role as Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Other LoZ Roles: Princess Zelda (TotK)

LoZ-Related Roles: Hyrule Warriors

Main LU character: Wild's Zelda (Flora)

Alternate LU Voice for: (None)

Some characters with the same voice:

ENG: Grendel's Mother (Beowulf: The Game), Servillah & Diadora (Suikoden: Tierkreis), Smurf Voices (The Smurfs 2), Galina Voronina (Assassin's Creed: Syndicate), Hope Jensen (Assassin's Creed: Rogue), Ash (Rainbow Six: Siege / Arknights), Laura (Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card), Bianca (Guardian Tales)

LA ESP: Catalina (Catalina la Catrina: especial Día de Muertos), Ladybug/Marinette (Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Chat Noir), Chihiro/Arrietty (Ghibli Movies), Katniss (The Hunger Games) FRA: Zia (The Mysterious Cities of Gold), Iris Amacitia (Final Fantasy XV: Comrades), Jinx (Arcane), Nausicaa/Kiki/Arrietty (Ghibli Movies) ITA: Scootaloo (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Blyth Baxter (Littlest Pet Shop), Talia (LoliRock), Holly Togram (Altered Carbon: Resleeved) DEU: Aloy (Horizon Zero Dawn), Masako (Naruto Shippuden the Movie 4: The Lost Tower) EU ESP: Hailey Anne (Yokai Watch 3), Jackie (Milo Murphy's Law), Aja (3Below: Tales of Arcadia) RUS: Voice (Belozubka), Miss Martian (Young Justice), Penny (Bolt)

...

In the game:

Breath of the Wild (ENG)

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (ENG)

Zelda's Resentment

Silent Princess

Despair

True Ending

Breath of the Wild (Dub Comparison)

Yū Shimamura (Japanese), Patricia Summersett (English), Jessica Ángeles (Latin American Spanish), Adeline Chetail (French), Martina Felli (Italian), Julia Casper (German), Nerea Alfonso (European Spanish), Maria Ivaschenko (Russian)

Original Post

_______________________

Singing

"Video Game Symphony" from More of the World Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"Asleep" from More of the World Album

Original Post with Lyrics

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"I'm Comin' Over" from Act One Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"Last Day" from Act One Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"If We Go Back" from More of the World Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"Rain and Robin" from Act One Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"Old Prayer" from More of the World Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"Grand Superior" from Act One Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"Bed Bug" from Act One Album

Original Post with Lyrics

---

"Songs" from the Other Dub Voice Actresses

Jessica Ángeles: The Hanging Tree, Mi Secreto Amor, Marinette Y La Panadería

Nerea Alfonso: Running with the Wolves, Empress of Fire, Young Folks

Maria Ivashchenko: Song of the Lizard, It's Snowing in Madrid...

Original Post Mini-Compilation

---

Some songs I didn't make original posts for:

Zelda A Capella, Life and Death, Montreal River

_______________________

Part 1 - Click Here

[tallochar]

Italian here.

American high school / middle school sitcoms did not feel relatable at all to me growing up.

No school I ever went to had lockers, unless it was for gym class but even then it was more likely to have some benches with hooks upon them at the top of the structure that you put your bag and clothes on.

We did not move from class to class, unless it was to go to either gym or art class (and in high school one of the pioneering computer classes where they taught us to blind type and to use stuff like word and excel) for equipment needs.

There was one classroom that was your class' for the whole year, you'd get the number on the first day and memorize it and always went there.

Your classmates where the same all year round and there would be 10 minutes intervals between lessons that the students spent in the class or going to the bathroom while waiting for the next teacher to show up. Usually, unless you transferred out or someone transferred in, those in your class would stay in your class every year, they just changed the number and letter of the class name (the number represented your year of schooling and the letter was for your assigned class group. They also reset from elementary to middle school and from middle to high school).

There was no mess hall (there was in elementary school as far as my memory goes but only in my first school because it was "full time" aka had afternoon lessons which made it special and not the norm, and then I got moved to another school and no more mess hall or school lunch), though my high school had a small bar where they sold some pre made paninis and stuff and would be under siege during the 30 minutes long break and then very quiet in-between.

We were considered "lucky" because most schools did not.

For that matter, there was no lunch at school because by 1pm we would all be going home, unless you were the real unlucky class who had gym from 13 to 14 and then you would finish "late".

There were little to no clubs, at least where I went in school, but I was in theatre club and we would come back after lunch for that.

Also high schools were divided by type of study (I went to the tourism address but my school was for tourism, economy and... something else I do not remember anymore) so there was a basic core of subjects everyone had but if you went to the Classic school you would also be learning like latin and greek and stuff, if you went to a trade school like me you'd learn trade related stuff, scientific schools were for specific scientific subjects, art school was... well, for art stuff. My hometown had a Nautical high school that sent the students out on boats in the later years and taught weather study among other things, but somewhere like, say, not a coast city probably would not have one. I distinctly remember one of the school I visited boasting about their orthodontist study department and how their students would learn how to mold teeth.

So at 15 either you'd go touring schools to see what appealed to you and your parents and then either they decided for you or they let you decide.

(My mother was sure I would have been happier in Classic school, and she was very probably right, but she did not tell me because she wanted me to be free to choose what appealed to me the most and I choose tourism becaise I wanted something That Would Give Me Work Opportunities Right After and while in theory that was sound reasoning, in practice the tourism market in my home town was over saturated and this did not work out for me)

(My mother did not know that, she would have pointed it out if she did, she was just trying her best to let me do what I wanted most).

I think, but am not 100% sure, that this was due to an evolution of the fact that in the first half of the century a lot of family could not pursue higher education for a long time so instead of sending a kid further in school after mandatory middle school was over but needed them either home working or in the fields working so trade schools were set up to give the kids both further schooling and a trade to fall back on.

(My younger brothers went one to art school and the other to culinary school, and then both to culinary school after the one who went to art school decided to drop out of that to go to culinary school too).

It did make american high school based shows incredibly irrealistic and urban fantasy to me.

i feel like high school/middle school sitcoms set the unrealistic expectation of being able to have lunch time outside

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 10.28 (befre 1920)

97 – Roman emperor Nerva is forced by the Praetorian Guard to adopt general Marcus Ulpius Trajanus as his heir and successor. 306 – Maxentius is proclaimed Roman emperor. 312 – Constantine I defeats Maxentius, becoming the sole Roman emperor in the West. 969 – The Byzantine Empire recovers Antioch from Arab rule. 1344 – The lower town of Smyrna is captured by Latin Christians in response to Aydınid piracy during the Smyrniote crusades. 1420 – Beijing is officially designated the capital of the Ming dynasty when the Forbidden City is completed. 1449 – Christian I is crowned king of Denmark. 1453 – Ladislaus the Posthumous is crowned king of Bohemia in Prague. 1492 – Christopher Columbus lands in Cuba on his first voyage to the New World, surmising that it is Japan. 1516 – Second Ottoman–Mamluk War: Mamluks fail to stop the Ottoman advance towards Egypt at the Battle of Yaunis Khan. 1520 – Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Pacific Ocean. 1531 – Abyssinian–Adal war: The Adal Sultanate seizes southern Ethiopia. 1538 – The Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino is founded in what is now the Dominican Republic. 1628 – French Wars of Religion: The Siege of La Rochelle ends with the surrender of the Huguenots after fourteen months. 1636 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony votes to establish a theological college, which would later become Harvard University. 1640 – The Treaty of Ripon is signed, ending the hostilities of the Second Bishops’ War. 1664 – The Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot, later to be known as the Royal Marines, is established. 1707 – The 1707 Hōei earthquake causes more than 5,000 deaths in Japan. 1726 – The novel Gulliver's Travels written by Jonathan Swift is published. 1776 – American Revolutionary War: British troops attack and capture Chatterton Hill from the Continental Army. 1834 – The Pinjarra massacre occurs in the Swan River Colony. An estimated 30 Noongar people are killed by British colonists. 1835 – The United Tribes of New Zealand are established with the signature of the Declaration of Independence. 1864 – American Civil War: A Union attack on the Confederate capital of Richmond is repulsed. 1886 – US president Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty. 1891 – The Mino–Owari earthquake, the largest inland earthquake in Japan's history, occurs. 1893 – Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Pathétique receives its première performance only nine days before the composer's death. 1918 – World War I: A new Polish government in western Galicia is established, triggering the Polish–Ukrainian War. 1918 – World War I: Czech politicians peacefully take over the city of Prague, thus establishing the First Czechoslovak Republic. 1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.

[marxistcomedy]

The cyclic revival of “Roman Antiquity” and “European Aristocracy” and “the Roaring ’20s” and “the ’70s” and “the ’80s” in Western fashion and mass-media, always curated so as to avoid improper focus on imperial genocide or slavery, resembles nothing so much as the boom-and-bust cycle of the capitalist economic system that produces them.

In this quagmire of imagination, something like modern Tibetan fashion smashes this static prejudice, demonstrating in the present and before our very eyes how traditional cultures fluidly evolve as a society develops, carrying a link to the past forward into the future.

Fashion goes hand-in-hand with economic development for two obvious and intertwined reasons:

One cannot freely experiment with fashion while overwhelmed by the basic task of supplying all of the population with their minimum needs (because to whatever extent one does experiment, it will be deemed frivolous), and

one cannot confidently express and explore a self-identity while still under the yoke of propaganda extolling foreign superiority, a superiority reified by the presence of e.g. American military bases in one’s own soil. In other words, the pressure that leads people to internalize a “White Gaze” is enormous, and will negatively distort or sabotage any premature efforts through stifling shame and self-consciousness.

Consequently, as the fetters of imperialism loosen, we can expect rattling and motion.

Among Han Chinese, Guofeng music didnt come into vogue until Chinese people got wealthier. Korean and South Indian film have made spectacular strides. Similar stirrings can be found everywhere in Asia and in Latin America and in Africa and in the Middle-East. Indigenous culture is breaking free from the status of “being an artifact” — a conceptual protective cage of sorts, to preserve highlights from totalizing colonial siege (often in the far-removed museums of the colonizers themselves, in Britain or Germany) — and into modes of self-expression that feel historic and contemporary simultaneously, keeping pace with the people’s needs and wants.

The eradication of poverty world-wide will produce great cultural revival and diversification, and we cannot yet envision the bounty this will yield. Development under capitalism has meant commodification that optimizes for accumulation. Development under socialism means “consumerism” that optimizes for mass enjoyment. This is bewildering to the Westerner who conflates a correct opposition to the rapacity of capitalism with a rejection of development itself, as the corruption of some reimagined pure pastoral past. In the field of culture this attitude takes the crude form of fetishization, mourning the loss of “authenticity,” and it’s worse than gross: it’s incorrect.

As a media enthusiast, if I get to live several decades more, I hope I get to see the rise of a film scene broken fully free from the budgetary constraints that have historically equated “world film” to B-film or arthouse. Instead of hundreds of noisy and dull recruitment ads for the U.S. military, the biggest releases of the year everywhere in the planet might be high-budget epic portrayals of classic wars of liberation, seen from the perspective of Haiti, Peru, or Vietnam; or, less vengefully, stories of people coming together and overcoming differences to achieve hitherto unimaginable collective goals. Everyone will get the resources and production equipment necessary to do their heroes blockbuster justice; battering Western ideology like a piñata, and grounding every American myth to dust.

Roderic Day, “Artifacts and Blockbusters” (emphasis mine)

[seewetter]

Mythic Creatures by Region & Culture

Part 9: Africa

Here is the overview of global creatures.

Cross-Cultural (across multiple but not all cultures)

Amadlozi of the Nguni people in South Africa; Anansi is Akan (which includes the Agona, Akuapem, Akwamu, Akyem, Anyi, Ashanti (!!!!!!!), Baoulé, Bono, Chakosi, Fante, Kwahu, Sefwi, Wassa, Ahanta, and Nzema) also found in African American lore; Asanbosam is Akan (which includes the Agona, Akuapem, Akwamu, Akyem, Anyi, Ashanti (!!!!!!!), Baoulé, Bono, Chakosi, Fante, Kwahu, Sefwi, Wassa, Ahanta, and Nzema) also found in Jamaican slave lore; Death; Jengu various peoples in Cameroon; Madam Koi Koi; Mami Wata; Mazomba; Mbombo; Mbuti Mythic Creatures; Mbwiri; Nandi Bear; Ninki Nanka; Nyami Nyami; Obambou; Obia also name for a creature in Latin American folklore (Garifuna of Bay Islands, Honduras); Ogun; Oshun; Shetani; Somali myth; Werehyena; Yumboes Wolof; Zār; Zuhri

allegedly African

Aegipan; Amphisbaena, in Greek myth, Perseus flies over Libya with head of Medusa…blood creates Amphisbaene; Catoblepas; Cerastes; Crocotta; Dingonek East Africa 1907-1918; Ethiopian pegasus; Forest Bull; Gold-digging ant; Griffon; Hypnalis; Leontophone; Lycaon; Macrobian; Pard; Pygmies; Rompo; Scitalis; Seps; Struthopodes maybe??; Syrbotae; Tarand; Theow; Wild Man, Wild Woman ; Wild Men, Wild Women; Yale

Angola

Kishi

Ashanti

Anansi; Asanbosam; Obayifo

Benin

Aido Hwedo, also in Haiti

Canary Islands (Guanches)

Guayota; Maxios; Tibicena; Witches of Anaga

Congo

Abada; Bunzi; Eloko ; Biloko; Jengu also known in Cameroon, called Bisimi with the Bakongo; Mfinda; Nkisi; Nkondi; Simbi

Dahomey

Aziza

Dogon

Nommo

Ethiopia

in the Quran, an Aksumite (Ethiopian) siege is averted by birds dropping stones: Ababil; Buda (Ethiopia & Eritrea, were-hyena & evil eye); Ethiopian superstition; Holawaka (Oromo, Ethiopia);

Igbo

Ibo loa also Haiti

Nkomi & Bakalai, Gabon

Koolakamba

Ghana

Abonsam, also Gold Coast; Adze, possessing "vampire" who stalks prey as firefly among the Ewe of Togo and Ghana

Gold Coast

Abonsam, also in Ghana

Kalenjin, Kenya

Kalenjin Mythic Creatures

Khoikhoi

Aigamuxa

Lingala

Mokele-mbembe

Lugbara (Congo to Sudan)

Adroanzi, "angels", benevolent children of the god Androa, but if you turn around to look at them you die

Malagasy

Kalanoro; Vazimba; Yateveo (Plant) alleged

Mozambique

Agogwe sighted by 2 Europeans in 1926-1927 but existed prior as a word & creature in indigenous oral traditions

Songhay

Hira; Zin Kibaru

Sotho, South Africa

Kammapa; Monyohe

South African Folktales Grootslang

Tswana

Matsieng

Uganda

Jok (among Acholi of Uganda and South Sudan); Lukwata (Baganda of Uganda);

West Africa

Adze, possessing "vampire" who stalks prey as firefly among the Ewe of Togo and Ghana; Ekpo Nka-Owo (Ibibio, Southern Nigeria); Wereleopard; Zin;

Xhosa

Amafufunyana (possession, schizophrenia); Uhlakanyana

Yoruba

Abiku; Egbere; Emere; Shango; Yemọja

Zambia

Ilomba among the Lozi people

Zanzibar

Popobawa

Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe Bird

Zulu

Inkanyamba; Isitwalangcengce; Lightning Bird; Tikoloshe; Uhlakanyana; Umamba; Usiququmadevu; Zulu religion

Ancient Egypt

Aani; Abezethibou, Testament of Solomon, acted during Book of Moses in Egypt; Abtu; Abyzou; Akhekh; Ammit; Anubis; Apophis; Ba (personality); Bennu; Griffon; Hieracosphinx; Isfet; Medjed; Mehen_Board_Game_Snake_God_Egypt; Meretseger; Nemty; Serpopard; Set animal; Sphinx; Taweret; Teka-her; Unut_Egypt_Rabbit-Snake-Lion_Goddess; Uraeus; Wadjet

allegedly Ancient Egyptian

Cynocephali; Phoenix

Notify me if there are mistakes or if any of these creatures, beings or figures should not be used in art or fiction. (Note that every artist & writer should consider whether use of these figures is appropriate whether someone has complained or not).

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

Dating Mexican silver is somewhat easier than most Latin American objects because of an assaying system established by royal decree in the viceroyalty of New Spain. However, few objects carry the full complement of required marks, and other means are needed to fully understand the silver. Stylistic analysis of the form and the delicate, flat, Mannerist strapwork decoration of this chalice suggest a fabrication date of about 1600. A published example of the crowned “M” Mexico City location mark helps date the paten to the same period.

The chalice is one of seven ecclesiastical items unearthed in St. Augustine, Florida (see History) in the late nineteenth century. Long thought to be Spanish and only recently recognized as Mexican, the vessels are a rare and early body of church silver made for Spain’s North American colonies. St. Augustine was colonized by Spain in 1565, making it the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the United States. The town’s strategic location on the Gulf Stream, where it protected Spanish vessels laden with South American silver en route to Europe, prompted Spain to provide financial support, which extended to the spiritual life of the inhabitants.

From the beginning, religious and daily life in St. Augustine were interwoven. Upon his arrival, founder Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519 – 1574) brought “eight church bells and four ornaments for celebrating Mass.” When Spain became responsible for the colony, funding for the clergy and the goods required for the celebration of Mass were included in the annual budget for Florida’s military garrison. Between the late sixteenth and later eighteenth centuries, most sacramental goods were purchased from Mexico. Proximity was a primary reason, for, in the age of sail, communication was slow. More compelling, however, was the financial incentive — revenues collected in Mexico provided the budget that sustained the Florida colony.

The early date of the chalice and its survival are remarkable given the many dangers through which it passed. How and when it came to be buried at some distance from the parish church of St. Augustine may never be fully determined, but the following events could account for some of its movements.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, St. Augustine was often attacked by English soldiers. During some assaults, such as South Carolina’s unsuccessful six-week siege in 1702, church goods were moved for safekeeping into a fortress called the Castillo de San Marcos. In 1763, when Florida was awarded to the British as a consequence of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War), all moveable church property was shipped to Havana, Cuba; an inventory from the next year records that these items included a “copón [cup] without a foot, silver and gilded on the inside,” a description similar to the chalice in this entry. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 returned Florida to the Spanish, and the ecclesiastical goods were repatriated. An inventory taken in 1787 mentions chalices but lacks details that could identify this example.

St. Augustine joined the United States in 1821, and the parish found itself without financial support due to the separation of church and state under U.S. law. This stressful period was compounded by a largely anti-Catholic Protestant population that had emerged during the years of British occupation and renewed Spanish ownership. Chief among this group was District Attorney Alexander Hamilton Jr. (1786 – 1875), who argued that property of the Roman Catholic Church under the Spanish crown should pass to the U.S. government. Such rhetoric may have prompted church members to quietly relocate the chalice along with the rest of the ecclesiastical silver.

In 1823 Hamilton ran for the office of Territorial Delegate of Florida. Minorcan Catholics, an ethnic Spanish immigrant group affiliated with St. Augustine parish from the time of British occupation, sent a petition to President James Monroe protesting that Hamilton had threatened his opponents with unfavorable decisions on land claims. The name of Bernardo Segui appeared at the top of the document. Segui served as president of the Board of Wardens, which was incorporated that year by the Florida Legislative Council as trustee-proprietors of parish property. He also owned a plantation house on the land purchased in 1871 by the donors of these two objects. It is on this land that the church silver was discovered in 1879.

Church officials had reason to fear the loss of their silver, for the attitude of the Protestant majority was unsympathetic to their culture; upon seeing the communion objects at St. Augustine church in 1827, author and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his diary that they appeared to him as “great coarse toys.” Church wardens had access to the church building and its furnishings, and it was not uncommon for them to house such items. Segui may have sought to protect the sacred silver items from falling into government hands.

This text has been adapted from "Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000," edited by Jeannine Falino and Gerald W.R. Ward, published in 2008 by the MFA. Complete references can be found in that publication.

Description

The chalice has a raised bowl with straight, slightly everted sides. The lower third is encircled with an applied molding that extends horizontally from the body; four small rings are soldered at equidistant points along the circle. The rings were originally intended to hold small bells that would have rung as the priest raised the chalice during Mass. Below is a cup form with stapwork decoration that bulges slightly before tapering to a short trumpet-shaped stem having two flat graduated rings along a narrow stem. A large baluster with additional strap decoration descends to smaller forms. The foot, now lost, has been replaced with a modern wooden base. The chalice, including the concealed central rod, has been gilded; some residual accretions from the period of its burial remain inside the bowl.

Marks

"M" crowned, the Mexico City location mark, visible at base of chalice bowl.

Inscriptions

None.

Provenance

By 1878, unearthed from property on Oneida Street, St. Augustine, Florida, by property owners William H. Keith (b. 1803 - d. 1885) and Harriet Lovett Keith (b. 1837 - d. 1917), St. Augustine and exhibited at Bigelow, Kennard and Co., Boston; 1880, placed on loan to the MFA; passed by descent and in 1928, given to the MFA. (Accession Date: August 21, 1928)

NOTE: It is not known when this object, along with six other pieces of ecclesiastical silver (MFA accession nos. 28.464 – 28.470) was buried. The cross (28.468) is inscribed with the date 1721 and the name of the Spanish governor and captain general of Florida, Antonio de Benavides (1718 – 1734). It has been suggested that the silver was buried after Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1821, in response to fears that the U.S. government might seize church property. See Jeannine Falino, Silver in the Americas, 1600-2000. American Silver in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA, Boston, 2008), pp. 465-466, cat. no. 370, and pp. 524-525, Appendix I.

▪︎ Cáliz (Chalice).

Culture: Spanish Colonial

Date: ca. 1600

Place of origin: Mexico City, Mexico

Medium: Silver gilt

[dhampiravidi]

PJO/HOO oc form (Jas Wayland; AU)

template adapted from this one!

Basic Information

Full Name: Jasmine "Jas" Kythereia Wayland DOB:  Sept. 15, 1990 (age 19 as of The Lost Hero) Gender: Cis Female Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Ethnicity: Black (African-American) & (Ancient) Roman Divine Relative: Aquilon (father), Hekate (maternal ancestor) Hometown: Stanford, California Previous Places: Athens/Athina, Greece (birthplace) Languages: English, Latin & Québécois French (fluent), Modern Greek (currently learning)

Appearance

Jas is a 5'3" (1.6 m) young woman. She takes after her mother, Kaya, so she has light brown skin (with warm undertones encouraged by lots of time in the sunshine), curling (shoulder-length) dark brown hair, even darker eyes & curvy hips despite her overall petite frame. Years of training have given her some muscle tone, visible in her forearms and thighs. She wears Camp Jupiter tank tops and breezy band t-shirts over shorts all year round, because she tends to get hot easily. For the same reason, she often ties her hair back into a small, rough ponytail. Jas only ever wears flip-flops or ankle boots, depending on her activities. Her accessories typically include stud earrings, black eyeliner, a leather bracelet & leather knee pads.

FC: Kat Graham

Background

Kaya Loren met Aquilon when she was teaching English & French to her Greek students, at the prestigious National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA). She thought he, who claimed to be a Canadian tourist, was a little suspicious initially, with his tendency to pop up whenever she was lonely. She didn't even feel particularly motivated to date him, because the Québécois version of French was so different from her European French (he claimed to only speak a bit of English). He won her over with his romantic gestures, good listening, and warm laugh. & then he revealed who he was (besides his English fluency), once he sensed she was pregnant with his child. She was more irritated than shocked. He advised her to return to the US, where she'd grown up, near Camp Jupiter, so their daughter could be safe. Kaya complied. He never told her that she was a legacy/descendant of a demigod child of Hekate since the Greek and Roman demigods were being kept apart in the modern day. When Jupiter confronted him over nearly exposing the big secret, Aquilon replied that he'd only been visiting his brother Favonius, the West Wind (which wasn't a lie). Aquilon would go on to dote on his only demigod child, sending her her beloved Imperial Gold short-swords as well as the occasional letter. Jas loved getting to speak to both of her parents, as she did living at the camp. She's currently studying Psychology at the camp's university.

Personality

Jas is an introvert. She spends lots of time with just one or two people, whether they're studying for an exam or the next War Games. Her favorite activities (reading, swimming & sword-fighting) all tend to be those that don't involve a crowd. However, she likes playing Siege &/or the Gladiatorial Fights, as those events force her to think quickly if she's going to win. Speaking of, her self-confidence jumps from 10 to 0 very quickly. She tends to get deeply frustrated when a seemingly easy task is hard & she equates taking a break with failure. Because of this, she is a hard worker. She's also incredibly loyal and protective when it comes to her friends. This is where her fatal flaw comes in. Jas can spot an enemy's weakness quickly, but it's almost impossible for her to find her strengths. While making a plan, sacrificing herself would be more logical than simply retreating. & in a relationship, she might never believe that her significant other loves her unconditionally. Her fatal flaw is her lack of philautia (self-love).

Demigod Stats:

Inherited Abilitie(s): cold tolerance, ice generation, Latin & French fluency, a knack for learning Greek faster than most, Weapon: dual shortswords (called gladii), named Frontinus I & II Mist Version: two long, bronze hairpins Best At: cleaning the aqueduct/sewer, gladiator fighting, siege, (some) Coliseum training (she sucks at using ranged weaponry) Worst At: deathball, construction, testing/fixing the catapults Rank: Senator/Centurion; Third Cohort

[back-and-totheleft]

Despite my many differences with Oliver Stone as an artist, I congratulate him on having managed both to present an unhysterical assessment of Latin American leaders and issues in South Of The Border, and also to get it seen in the US. The latter, especially, is achievement indeed.

A rare precedent is Costa-Gavras's Missing, which netted Oscars in 1982 with its horrifying story of the US State Department's involvement in the murder of one of its own citizens during the US-backed Chilean coup of 1973. In retrospect, it looks like the last gasp of those liberal Hollywood instincts that saw producer Bert Schneider thanking the Viet Cong leadership as he accepted his Best Documentary Oscar for Hearts and Minds in 1975.

Elsewhere the story is one of movies ignored, shelved, suppressed and sabotaged. Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire, set in Somoza's Nicaragua, barely squeaked on to US screens in 1983 amid rumours of studio nervousness – and political interference – when the Contras were at their barbarous high tide. Stone's Salvador was a critical hit you could barely find in cinemas. Ditto Haskell Wexler's Latino, in which Vietnam vet Robert Forster, sent to train the Contras, comes to see how his country is sponsoring mass murder overseas.

Even Missing has its antecedent in Costa-Gavras's career, State Of Siege, about the reasons behind the kidnapping of an American USAID official, which explicitly indicts Fort Benning's School of the Americas, a finishing school for aspirant tyrants. Scheduled as the inaugural screening at the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in 1973, it was withdrawn with the lame excuse that its themes might upset the Kennedy family. It was unavailable for almost 30 years after I saw it in 1981 at, of all places, the self-same Kennedy Centre.

It's the same story with documentaries. Good luck finding Blood Of The Condor, about the US Peace Corps' enforced sterilisation programmes among Bolivian Indians. Patrizio Guzmán's epic The Battle Of Chile (in which one cameraman filmed his own murder by a government soldier) is available – finally – from a US micro-distributor with great taste but little money. The Zapatista documentary A Place Called Chiapas never got serious American distribution; likewise The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, an account of the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002.

In a way, none of this is surprising. If your country's relationship with an entire continent can be boiled down to a hot-button list that includes Guatemala 1954, the Bay of Pigs 1961, the murder of Guevara in 1967, the overthrow of Allende and the subsequent, continent-wide kindermord of the Condor assassination programme, shame is the decent response. No wonder no one's talking – except Stone. Good for him.

-John Patterson, "Oliver Stone nails Latin America's troubled relationship with the USA," The Guardian, Jul 23 2010 [x]

[fatehbaz]

November 1985 marks a before and an after in Colombia. [...]

[A] squadron of [...] guerillas stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogota. [...] A belligerent military response [...] resulted in at least one hundred deaths. [...] For two decades, Colombia’s civil war had been raging on mountains and in jungles. Now, it had arrived in the country’s capital. A week later, on November 13, a sleeping giant stirred some two hundred kilometers west of Bogotá. After lying dormant for over 140 years, the Nevado del Ruiz exploded in two eruptions. From the Andean volcano’s crater surged boiling lahars, which descended the mountain at speeds of one hundred kilometers an hour. [...] This monstrous debris flow decimated almost everything in its path, engulfing the regional cotton-producing town of Armero and killing the majority of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants. [...] The government’s ensuing response to the Armero disaster was characterized by inefficiency, miscommunication, and corruption. [...] [M]onetary aid went missing. Unidentified child survivors were taken by authorities and put up for adoption. No effort was made to locate their relatives. [...]

---

In his 2016 book Endangered City, [...] Austin Zeiderman analyzes coverage of November 1985 in the Colombian print press. [...] [R]eporters used the language of forewarning to denounce the government for its failure to avert the convergent crises. Several columnists played with the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a pseudo-detective novel [...]. One 1985 headline [...] called the Armero landslide “a forecast apocalypse.” “We have become the land of tragedies forewarned,” so the article read [...]. Even as the siege and the eruption were treated as spontaneous catastrophes, so, too, were they framed as self-fulfilling prophecies. History was being written in the subjunctive. As the temporal breadth of the convergent crises expanded, they acquired the characteristics of “slow-onset disasters.” Rob Nixon, among others, has written of the difficulties in visualizing catastrophes that gradually unfold [...] over lengthy periods. [...]

In the context of the Anthropocene, artists are increasingly tasked with what Latin American studies scholar Joanna Page describes as “taking up the challenge of representing geological and cosmic time [...].” One such artist is Santiago Reyes Villaveces, who presently lives in the shadow of the Nevado del Ruiz, and whose work uses multimedia methods to explore the volcano. His video installation Orbit, currently on view at New York’s Instituto de Visión, tells a version of the November story.

The fall of 1985 is framed in an imperialist chronology, where disasters are continuities, not ruptures [...].

---

The protagonist of Orbit is a two-hundred-ton boulder that once sat at the heights of the Nevado del Ruiz. On the night of the eruption, it traveled over forty-five kilometers, and was deposited in the center of Armero shortly before midnight. Today, it is a landmark in a ghostly town that, like Herculaneum, stands in ruins. However, unlike its Italian counterpart, Amero receives no conservationist funding or legislative protection.

In the absence of state investment, the rock has become an unofficial monument to the dead. Every year, it attracts hundreds of tourists and mourners. [...]

---

The disaster industry is one branch of the export economies that dominate life in this mineral-rich region known as the macizo.

Correspondingly, there looms the specter of another disaster: the European invasion of the Americas.

In its inaugural exhibition, Orbit appeared in 2019 alongside seven other sculptural installations named Anus, Puddle, Navel, Brick, Fever, and Room Temperature. These works are made with gold, silver, copper, limestone, and rubber -- the same raw materials that drove the expansion of the Spanish empire. Centuries later, they still fuel the competition for resources [...].

---

Displayed in a museum setting alongside tools of measurement and unearthing, they create an “extractive viewpoint,” a phrase from scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris. [...] Gómez-Barris compares this vantage to the colonial gaze. Per her definition, it “facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation.”

The macizo region is thus placed in a matrix of colonial relations that operates on an accumulative timescale.

Rather than regard the Conquest as a finite event, work like Reyes Villaveces’s urges us to think, instead, of a “colonial presence” that has endured throughout the postcolonial period. In conjuring this notion of history as perpetuity, anyone who sees such art is challenged, with Ann Laura Stoler, “to refuse the quick resort to ‘before’ and ‘after’ -- and even to work against the wooden, if all too common, conceptual containers of ‘past’ and ‘present.’” [...]

---

[E]thnographer Beatriz Nates Cruz [...] argues that inhabitants of the macizo reside in multiple worlds that converge around symbolic landmarks and that operate according to their own discrete laws of space-time. [...]

Survivors of the Armero tragedy also return to the disaster site to stand awhile next to the departed. On each anniversary, the bereaved attend commemorations among the ruins and visit the rudimentary graves of their loved ones [...]. Darío Nova aims to foster reflection, spirituality, and healing. [...] More recently, he has led an initiative called Time and Memory that has seen participants use colorful string to frame features in derelict homes and place figurines on sills and mantles. These interventions make of Armero a museum curated by a grassroots collective that addresses a lack of governmental interest [...].

---

Confronted with this institutional indifference, we might return to the concept of negative gravity. We have seen how this phenomenon shapes a history of extraction, occupation, and conflict that propels state-making in Colombia. [...]

One of the remarkable things about disasters -- perhaps even their defining feature -- is that they cause the convergence of temporalities that usually coexist, but that do not necessarily intersect, or at least not in ways that are easily discernible. The 1985 eruption of the Ruiz volcano created a collision between this dimension of geological time, which spans billions of years and the expanses of space; centuries of imperialist expansion, capitalist accumulation, and national development; and the infinitesimal scale of a single human life span. All of this took place in a matter of seconds [...].

Survivors attest that time stops as disaster strikes. As these crises climaxed, the clock stopped ticking. But these disasters also accelerated the juggernaut of history that predated that November. They spliced experiences of time into a before and an after, causing it to move in new directions.

---

Images, captions, and all text above by: Rebecca Jarman. “Before and After? Temporalities of Disaster.” e-flux Journal Issue #135. April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[prontaentrega]

In the recent elections in Nicaragua, national dignity has lost the battle. It was defeated by hunger and the war; but also, it was defeated by the international winds which are blowing against the Left with greater force than ever. Unjustly, the just paid for the sinners. The Sandinistas are not responsible for either the war or hunger, nor can one attribute to them even the least bit of guilt for what has been happening in the East. Paradox of paradoxes: this democratic, pluralist, independent revolution that copies neither the Soviets, the Chinese, the Cubans, not anyone; it has paid for the dishes that others broke, while the local Communist Party voted for Violetta Chamorro.

The authors of the war and hunger are now celebrating the election results that punish the victims. The day after, the United States government announced the end of the economic embargo against Nicaragua. The same happened years ago following the military coup in Chile. The day after the death of President Allende the international price of copper rose, as if by magic.

In reality the revolution that overthrew the Somoza family dictatorship has not had even one minute of respite in 10 years. It was invaded every day by a foreign power and its hired criminals. It was subjected to an unceasing state of siege by the banker- and merchant-owners of the world. And notwithstanding all this, it turned out to be a more civilized revolution than the French, because no one was guillotined or shot; and it was more tolerant than the Northamerican because in the middle of the war, it permitted, with some restrictions, the free expression of the local spokesman for the colonial master.

from A Child Lost in The Storm by Eduardo Galeano.

The full text is only 5 pages long and goes into a little more stuff so i recommend reading all of it. don't wholly agree with his view of the East but still this was eye opening to me. No matter how peaceful or righteous you make the movement towards socialism you will still be cornered and harassed incessantly by the United States until you drop dead so they can suck you dry.

You mentioned Allende being a part of your journey towards M-L; if you don't mind expanding on this, I don't know a lot about it and I was curious which element of his story/Chile's history you meant in particular? His suicide? The coup itself? CIA intervention? The situation as a whole? Why did it impact your world view so much compared to other similar histories? Thanks!

the thing about allende is that he 'did everything right', so to speak. he was legally elected under a liberal democratic system, he made diplomatic concessions to try and appease the USA, he didn't suppress his opposition or form militias--and the CIA couped him anyway and installed a government that brutalized chile and chilean socialism for eleven years. learning about the coup and what came before and after totally shattered my youthful belief that you just had to be fairly voted into power and you'd have a mandate after that. the truth is, it's a game you just can't win. even if you win, you lose.

i don't think there's anything especially unique about allende's case--he's just the first one i learned about and hit especially close to home because i'm latin american (my home country has faced two coup attempts in my lifetime lol). if i'd learned about arbenz or sukarno first it probably would have had the same effect.

this realization also fundamentally opened my mind to reading lenin & other bolshevik theorists, because with the death of my belief in the possibility of winning by the rules of liberal politics came the death in my belief in the myth of the bolsheviks as anti-democratic oppressive tyrants and an interest in seeing what they did and believed that worked.

in summary, as engels wrote: