#Turco-Mongol

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Lev Gumiliov, el “último eurasianista”

Por Maxence Smaniotto

Traducción de Juan Gabriel Caro Rivera

Publicado en la revista Rébellion 98

Una vida de exilio

Entre las enseñanzas del emperador Marco Aurelio existe una que nos parece ilustra particularmente bien la personalidad de Lev Goumilev: “En ninguna parte un hombre se retira con mayor tranquilidad y más calma que en su propia alma; sobre todo aquel que posee en su interior tales bienes, que, si se inclina hacia ellos, de inmediato consigue una tranquilidad total. Y denomino tranquilidad única y exclusivamente al buen orden”.  Todo en los antecedentes de Goumilev parecía predisponerle a que se convertiría en un historiador y pensador que, tras varias décadas de ostracismo y sufrimiento dentro de su natal URSS, exploraría a fondo el origen de los pueblos de Rusia y el Asia Central, hasta el punto en que hoy en día es considerado una de las autoridades más influyentes en ese tema.

Hablemos primero de su familia. Lev Goumilev nació en 1912, hijo del poeta Nicolai Goumilev y Anna Ajmátova. Su padre, que se alistó en la caballería durante la Gran Guerra y fue condecorado dos veces con la Cruz de San Jorge. Fundó junto con el poeta Sergei Gorodetski la Corporación de Poetas. Esta agrupación estuvo en el origen del movimiento acmeísta y se oponía fuertemente al movimiento simbolista que en ese entonces dominaba la poesía rusa, criticándolo por su hermetismo y su gusto por lo oculto. Nicolai Goumilev fue detenido por la CEKA en 1921 y fusilado sin juicio, acusado de “agitación monárquica”, mientras que Anna Ajmátova, que se había divorciado de Nicolai en 1918 y se había vuelto a casar y se le prohibió volver publicar desde 1922. Lev Goumilev quedó huérfano a los nueve años y fue considerado por las autoridades soviéticas como el hijo de unos contrarrevolucionarios, lo que le acarreó una serie de persecuciones durante el resto de su vida. Siempre tuvo una imagen muy idealizada de su padre, al que defendía constantemente, mientras que no sentía mucho aprecio por su madre Anna. Anna había perdido rápidamente el interés en cuidar de su hijo, dejándolo con su madrastra en un pequeño pueblo del oblast de Tver, Bezek, a 400 kilómetros de Moscú. Lev pasó allí toda su infancia y adolescencia, es decir, de los seis a los veinte años. No abandonó Bezek hasta 1929 para irse a vivir Leningrado en condiciones muy difíciles. “Privado de sus derechos civiles” debido a sus orígenes familiares, su carrera académica resultó especialmente complicada. Aunque eso no le impidió encontrar los medios para participar en expediciones arqueológicas en Siberia, Crimea y Asia Central a principios de 1930. En ese entonces el joven Goumilev ya mostraba una profunda fascinación por los grandes espacios, los pueblos nómadas y los climas duros, que influirían profundamente en su visión de la historia. En cierto modo, toda su vida estuvo marcada por esta doble vertiente existencial, la cual se reflejó en su obra: por un lado, el sufrimiento material y, por otro, el exilio interior de un hombre que nunca dejaría de cuestionarse el destino de la humanidad.

La policía soviética nunca dejaba de visitar la casa de Lev y fue detenido por primera vez en 1933, para ser luego liberado dos días después. Su segundo encarcelamiento se produjo en 1935, en plena Gran Purga, y sólo fue excarcelado gracias a una carta que su madre escribió directamente a Stalin (rogándole, por cierto, que liberara a su nuevo marido). Fue encarcelado por tercera vez en 1938, esta vez como consecuencia de la defensa pública que hizo de la obra de su padre tras el hecho de que un profesor se burlara y la denigrara en una conferencia universitaria. Acusado de haber formado un grupo subversivo – formado por tres miembros – que tenía por objetivo asesinar a Stalin (!), Goumilev fue interrogado, insultado y torturado antes de ser condenado a diez años en un Gulag, pena que más tarde se redujo a cinco años de trabajos forzados en el norte de Siberia. Fue liberado en 1943 y, haciendo caso omiso de sus sentimientos personales hacia el régimen, se alistó como voluntario y partió hacia el frente europeo en 1944. Como soldado del Ejército Rojo, sirvió como artillero y luchó hasta llegar a Berlín tras participar en la campaña de la Pomerania. Goumilev siempre decía que se alistó en el ejército por patriotismo, no porque apoyase al régimen que había matado a su padre y le había enviado al Gulag. Además, sus antecedentes penales y su filiación le impidieron recibir cualquier clase de condecoración militar. Sin embargo, el hecho de haberse convertido en veterano de la Guerra Patria le dio cierto respeto y le permitió continuar sus estudios con tal de preparar su doctorado, el cual se centraba en la formación de los primeros kanatos de Asia Central.  Pero esta calma duró poco. En 1949 fue detenido de nuevo en el marco de una serie de purgas y, una vez más, lo condenaron a vivir en un Gulag cerca a Omsk, donde pasó siete años de su vida.

Goumilev demostró un estoicismo excepcional y una resistencia sin parangón que lo mantuvo firme todo ese tiempo. De día trabajaba y de noche escribía las notas que constituirían los esbozos de su primer libro dedicado a la historia de los xiongnu, un pueblo de habla túrquica que era antepasado de los hunos. Este libro, titulado Los Xiongnu, sigue considerándose una obra de referencia sobre el tema, aunque no ha sido muy traducido en el extranjero, sólo cuenta con ediciones en italiano, turco y polaco. El XX Congreso del PCUS y la llegada al poder de Nikita Jrushchov marcaron el inicio de un periodo de distención dentro de la URSS. Goumilev fue liberado y, de regreso a Leningrado, donde trabajaba como bibliotecario, inició una correspondencia con dos de los fundadores del movimiento eurasiático: Petr Savitski, exiliado en Praga – al que conoció durante un breve viaje a Checoslovaquia – y Georges Vernadski, que se había convertido en profesor universitario en los Estados Unidos. El contacto con el pensamiento euroasiático animó a Goumilev no sólo a proseguir sus trabajos, sino también a ampliarlos, desarrollarlos y añadirles un gran número de conceptos tomadas de la geografía, la etnología, la historia de las religiones, la biología y la paleo-climatología que estaba en consonancia con la metodología desarrollada por los euroasiáticos de las décadas de 1920 y 1930. Y aunque a partir de ese momento comenzó a tener una vida más estable, su situación académica continúo siendo precaria. Sus trabajos fueron frecuentemente censurados, criticados y condenados al ostracismo. También se le negó la posibilidad de dar conferencias universitarias a pesar del apoyo de algunos de sus colegas y antiguos directores que desde hacía mucho tiempo reconocían sus capacidades. Muchos de sus libros, sobre todo los más importantes desde el punto de vista teórico, fueron rechazados por las editoriales soviéticas. No fue sino hasta finales de la década 1980, en el clima de la Perestroika, que sus obras fueron finalmente publicadas, convirtiéndose rápidamente en un éxito.

Lev Goumilev murió en San Petersburgo en junio de 1992 a la edad de 80 años. A pesar de las dificultades que tuvo que afrontar a lo largo de su vida, escribió diez libros y más de doscientos artículos, es muy conocido en Rusia y en el mundo postsoviético, incluso entre el gran público. Ha sido citado por jefes de Estado como Vladimir Putin, Nursultan Nazarbaiev, quien fue presidente de Kazajstán, y Askar Akaev, expresidente de Kirguistán. Además, sus obras siguen siendo citadas por muchos intelectuales y políticos de la República de Tartastán. Una universidad kazaja (la Universidad Nacional Eurasiática de Astana) lleva su nombre y su antiguo apartamento se ha convertido en una casa museo. Sus ideas fueron retomadas por Said Buriatski, ideólogo islámico de las guerrillas del Cáucaso, con tal de oponerse a Moscú y legitimar la creación de una confederación musulmana del Cáucaso Norte separada de Rusia. Sus obras se reeditan con regularidad y su pensamiento ha influido e inspirado a un gran número de pensadores y artistas. Aunque sus libros son poco traducidos en el extranjero, su obra ha sido objeto de análisis y monografías en Italia (Luigi Zuccaro en 2022, Dario Citati en 2015 y Martino Conserva en 2005), Estados Unidos (Mark Bassin) y Francia (por Marlène Laruelle, quien las ha abordado de una forma innecesariamente polémica).

La revalorización de los pueblos nómadas del Asia Central

La primera parte de las obras de Lev Goumilev está íntegramente dedicada al estudio de los pueblos turco-mongoles del Asia Central. No se trata de estudios especulativos o místicos sino, por el contrario, del fruto de varios años de estudio realizados durante expediciones arqueológicas que permitieron al investigador ruso estar en contacto directo con los descendientes de los pueblos que estudiaba. El resultado de estos estudios y experiencias sobre el terreno es una obra polifacética y abundante cuyas características ya pueden verse en su “trilogía de la estepa”. En sus tres primeros libros (Los Xiongnu, publicado en 1960; Los antiguos turcos, en 1967; En búsqueda de un reino imaginado, en 1970) Goumilev mostró mucho interés por la historia de los pueblos turco-mongoles que, durante siglos, dominaron las estepas de Asia Central y crearon inmensos imperios que se extendían desde Corea hasta las puertas de Europa. El investigador ruso se esfuerza por devolverles una dignidad cultural e histórica despreciada durante mucho tiempo por la historiografía rusa, a la que Goumilev y los eurasiáticos acusan de haber sido influenciada por Occidente y su concepción de la civilización, ya que para ellos estos pueblos eran considerados como bárbaros. Frente a esta corriente historiográfica, que no veía en estos pueblos más que una sucesión de tiranías y destrucciones, Goumilev no sólo rehabilita sus estructuras culturales, sino que subraya las distintas facetas de cohabitación entre los pueblos rusos y turco-mongoles que, más allá de sus relaciones conflictivas, pasaron por periodos de simbiosis, alianzas e intercambios recíprocos. El punto de vista desde el que Goumilev abordó la historia del pueblo xiongnu en el primer volumen de su trilogía, Los xiongnu, era totalmente inédito en su época, ya que trató de distanciarse lo más posible de la historiografía china, única fuente que existía en ese entonces sobre este proto-imperio turco. El Imperio Medio estaba constantemente en guerra con el Imperio Xiongnu, los cuales eran considerados como los antepasados de los hunos. Goumilev, en cambio, optó por una perspectiva “des-chinificada”, rehabilitando a lo xiongnu como sujetos históricos; este enfoque ya había sido adoptado por el historiador y académico francés René Grousset en L'Empire des steppes: Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlan, que desde entonces se ha convertido en un clásico sobre el tema.

En su libro Los Xiongnu, Goumilev propone tres grandes temas a seguir en su enfoque intelectual y metodológico: restablecer a los pueblos de las estepas como sujetos de la historia, descentrar radicalmente las narraciones sobre los mismos y emanciparlas del eurocentrismo que tiende a dividir a los pueblos en “civilizados” y “bárbaros”, y presentar una concepción cíclica de la historia de los pueblos, una historia íntimamente ligada a su entorno y su clima.  En el siguiente volumen, Los antiguos turcos, se nota una evolución en su metodología al analizar la formación del primer imperio turco, de cuya disolución surgieron dos kaganatos (reinos) que tuvieron una enorme extensión territorial: desde Crimea hasta la actual Vladivostok. En este libro Goumilev critica enérgicamente las doctrinas maniqueístas, las cuales se convirtieron en la religión oficial del Imperio uigur, acusándola de haber instaurado en la cúspide del Estado una actitud destructiva hacia el mundo y la realidad debido a que imponía la idea de distanciarse de la mundanidad con tal de alcanzar la pureza espiritual. En su opinión, este alejamiento del mundo desarticuló las estructuras sociales y apartó a los uigures de sus valores ancestrales, lo que provocó el colapso del Imperio. El último volumen de la trilogía de Goumilev sin duda es el más interesante, empezando por su título: En busca de un reino imaginado. Lo terminó de escribir en 1970, pero no se publicó hasta 1987 e inmediatamente después fue traducido al inglés por la prestigiosa editorial de la Universidad de Cambridge. El tema es realmente sorprendente. Se trata de un intento de comprender la realidad histórica oculta tras la leyenda del Preste Juan. Según esta leyenda del siglo XII – que apareció en pleno apogeo de las Cruzadas – existía un reino cristiano más allá de Persia, en el Asia Central, que era gobernado por un rey-sacerdote, el Preste Juan, descendiente de los Magos. En aquella época, esta leyenda era tomada con mucha seriedad, ya que los europeos buscaban una alianza en esa zona con tal de luchar contra los turcos que en ese entonces dominaban el Oriente Próximo y amenazaban los reinos cruzados. Este libro es interesante por varias razones. En primer lugar, por su enfoque: Goumilev realiza una descripción muy detallada de su época que abarca tanto los imperios, reinos, pueblos y personajes que existían desde Europa hasta el Asia Central y como ellos interactuaban entre sí. Además, examina las mentalidades de esta época, sus deseos y sus visiones del mundo, sin limitarse a los meros hechos históricos. Esta metodología recuerda a la obra maestra de Fernand Braudel, Le monde et la Méditerranée à l'époque de Philippe II, fruto de veinte años de investigación.

La visión que Goumilev tiene de Europa y de la civilización occidental es también sorprendente: contrariamente a la vulgata de la época, que veía a Occidente como un modelo a imitar, el investigador ruso describe una Europa subdesarrollada, atrasada y provinciana. Esta crítica es objetivamente errónea, ya que éste fue el siglo de la caballería, de las primeras universidades, de la invención del molino, de los trovadores y de los grandes proyectos de salud. La tesis central del libro es que Goumilev cree que el Preste Juan existió, al igual que su reino, que identifica con el kaganato mongol de Kara-Kitaj, cuyo fundador, Yelü Dashi, era cristiano nestoriano. El nombre de Juan podría ser una transliteración del nombre de pila de uno de sus hijos, Elías, que unos cientos de kilómetros conocido como Yohanna y luego como Juan.

Una última observación. Es necesario matizar la turcofilia de Goumilev. Si bien es cierto que hubo periodos en los que las relaciones entre los pueblos turco-mongoles y rusos fueron mucho más complejas de lo que la historiografía oficial ha afirmado durante mucho tiempo, no es posible hablar de una armonía total o relaciones simbióticas. Afirmar, como hizo posteriormente Goumilev, que los pueblos eslavos – y más concretamente los rusos – nunca estuvieron sometidos al yugo turco y mongol, e insistir en que siempre hubo complementariedad, hace más parte de la fantasía que de la realidad histórica, ignorando la existencia de trece guerras libradas entre otomanos y rusos y que estuvieron a punto de convertirse en catorce de haber estallado un conflicto entre ellos en 1947 y de nuevo en el 2016. El panturquismo sigue siendo una amenaza muy grande para Irán, China y Rusia, y las relaciones entre Moscú y Ankara están dictadas sobre todo por las circunstancias, no por una amistad natural heredada de siglos de simbiosis. Como señala Igor Delanoë, director adjunto del Observatorio Franco-Ruso, “las élites rusas y turcas comparten el deseo de crear un orden mundial policéntrico que supuestamente daría a Moscú y Ankara la oportunidad de convertirse en polos de poder afirmando su liderazgo a escala regional o incluso mundial en el caso de Rusia. Esta atracción por un mundo multipolar les está llevando a explorar formas alternativas de asociación que privilegian los intereses nacionales y se basan en gran medida en un enfoque transnacional desprovisto de confianza”. En otras palabras, las relaciones entre la “Tercera Roma” y la “Sublime Puerta” siempre se han caracterizado por la rivalidad y, hoy en día, por frágiles alianzas de circunstancias.

La teoría de la etnogénesis y la pasionaridad

La “Trilogía de la Estepa” representa, en cierto modo, la base de las siguientes obras de Goumilev. Después de terminar el tercer volumen, este historiador ruso se dedicó a perfeccionar sus puntos de vista teóricos con tal de publicar su obra más importante, un verdadero behemoth (casi ochocientas páginas), la famosa Etnogénesis y biosfera de la Tierra, presentada en 1974 como tesis doctoral a la Universidad de Leningrado. El comité examinador lo rechazó por considerar que la obra sobrepasaba los objetivos de una tesis doctoral normal. Fue por esa razón que el manuscrito fue depositado en los archivos de la universidad y solo gracias al boca a boca se convirtió en uno de los textos más consultados de la misma hasta que finalmente se publicó en la URSS en 1989. Rápidamente fue traducido al inglés y publicado en los Estados Unidos. Etnogénesis y biosfera de la Tierra es un libro absolutamente asombroso. Goumilev intenta responder la siguiente pregunta: ¿qué impulsa a ciertos pueblos y personajes a realizar hazañas que superan los logros de sus predecesores? ¿Cómo nacen, se desarrollan y declinan los pueblos y las civilizaciones? Se trata de una morfología de los pueblos y de la historia en su conjunto que Goumilev explora en su libro, prestando especial atención a la región euroasiática. En este sentido, Etnogénesis y biosfera de la Tierra (por la amplitud de sus temas, la riqueza de su pensamiento y la profundidad de su análisis) es comparable a libros como La decadencia de Occidente de Oswald Spengler, la Muqaddina del historiador árabe medieval Ibn Jaldún o el monumental Estudio de la Historia de Arnold Toynbee.

El punto de partida de la teoría de la etnogénesis de Goumilev es el estrecho vínculo entre un pueblo determinado y su entorno. Los cambios climáticos, que son cíclicos, influyen en el desarrollo de los pueblos, por lo que el autor recurrió ampliamente a la paleo-climatología en sus investigaciones, escribiendo numerosos artículos sobre el tema, uno de los cuales fue traducido al francés y publicado en 1965 en la prestigiosa revista Cahiers du Monde Russe, bajo el nombre de Les fluctuations de la mer Caspienne. Variations climatiques et histoire des peuples nomades au sud de la plaine russe. Según Goumilev, para que un pueblo pueda conquistar una vasta zona geográfica y fundar un imperio, deben darse ciertas condiciones climáticas y medioambientales: la presencia de pastos para el ganado, las variaciones del paisaje, la presencia o ausencia de cadenas montañosas, fuentes de agua, el tipo de clima, etc. Goumilev introduce también el concepto de “etnos”, que no puede traducirse como “etnia” porque no tiene una dimensión biológica o racial. Más bien, etnos se refiere a un grupo de individuos que se han adaptado al medio en el que viven generación tras generación y que los lleva a adoptar características propias de su entorno. El historiador ruso escribe: “Este grupo de individuos desarrolla un sentimiento de pertenencia basado en una lógica de ‘Nosotros/Los Otros’, es decir, percibiéndose a sí mismos como diferentes de los demás”. Cada etnia está formada por individuos que comparten un conjunto de valores, es decir, una cultura que se ha transmitido de generación en generación. La interacción entre el entorno y la comunidad de individuos da lugar a un “comportamiento estereotípico” que define las conductas comunes entre sus miembros. Inscritos en la cultura de la comunidad, estos estereotipos de comportamiento son inconscientes, automáticos y bastante dinámicos, ya que pueden cambiar con el tiempo y según el contexto, por lo que tienen una función adaptativa.

El etnos puede estar formado por diferentes subetnoi, unidades que no son lo suficientemente estables y desarrolladas como para ser definidas como un etnos. Los subetnoi pueden surgir cuando las comunidades se separan del etnos, como sucede con ciertas sectas o corrientes religiosas que desarrollan rasgos de comportamiento y estereotipos diferenciados, como los yezidíes o los molokanes. También hay que señalar que los entornos excesivamente monótonos difícilmente favorecen el nacimiento de nuevos etnoi; Europa y el Cáucaso, con sus paisajes diversos, han visto nacer un número impresionante de etnoi. Mientras que el subetnoi es la unidad más pequeña del etnos, el superetnos es su manifestación más desarrollada y se corresponde, en cierta medida, a las diferentes civilizaciones. Según Goumilev, el Imperio ruso y la Res Publicae Christiana son superetnos formados por diversos etnoi que comparten rasgos comunes. Esto no significa que los etnoi de un superetnos sean siempre armoniosos y pacíficos entre sí; pueden surgir conflictos, a veces sangrientos, entre ellos. En el caso de la superetnia rusa, el autor identifica las siguientes etnoi: Grandes Rusos, Bielorrusos, Ucranianos, Tártaros de Kazán y varias subetnoi, entre los que podemos contar a los cosacos del Don, los Viejos Creyentes y los Pomori. Los tártaros musulmanes no están incluidos, ya que están adscritos a la superetnia musulmana. Goumilev menciona también el ejemplo de Francia, que estudia varias veces porque representa un caso básico. La etnia francesa se compone de subetnoi como los bretones, provenzales, alsacianos, vascos, normandos, etc., todas ellas pequeñas etnias que en su día se fusionaron para formar la etnia francesa y que ahora tienen más en común que rasgos distintivos. Cada etnos pasa por diferentes fases, todas ellas caracterizadas por un “imperativo de comportamiento”, es decir, una misión:

Fase ascendente → el etnos es joven, dinámico y mantiene una relación viva con el entorno (imperativo de comportamiento: “Sé lo que debes ser”).

Fase de acméica → el etnos sigue siendo muy activo, pero tiene una relación menos dinámica con su entorno (“Sé lo que eres”).

Fase de resquebrajamiento → el etnos se encuentra menos organizado en su relación con el entorno (“Que las cosas no sean como antes”)

Fase de inercia → el etnos ha acumulado todo el conocimiento técnico que ha podido y ha desarrollado sistemas de valores que se vuelven estáticos (“Sé como eres”)

Fase de obscurecimiento → se encuentra caracterizada por la rigidez y el etnos ya no produce nada en cuanto a técnica y valores comunes (“Confórmate con lo que tienes”)

Fase homeostática → el etnos y su entorno se empobrecen irremediablemente (“Recuerda lo bueno que era antes”).

Goumilev también plantea la cuestión de las relaciones entre los etnoi. Distingue cuatro tipos de relación:

Coexistencia: los etnoi interactúan sin mezclarse y permanecen separados. La coexistencia puede adoptar la forma de simbiosis (dos etnoi se necesitan mutuamente), ksenia (cohabitación cordial pero neutra) y quimera (los etnoi son totalmente opuestos e incompatibles, lo que provoca conflictos e incluso masacres mutuas).

Asimilación: los miembros de una etnia se integran en otra y olvidan sus orígenes.

Mestizaje: hibridación en la que persiste el recuerdo de los respectivos orígenes.

Fusión: cuando miembros de etnias diferentes se unen para formar una nueva etnia.

Pero, ¿qué desencadena el nacimiento de los etnoi y el paso de una fase a otra de sus ciclos? Aquí es donde Goumilev expone su teoría más controvertida, fascinante y extraña a la vez: la “pasionaridad”, que se corresponde a grandes rasgos con la energía vital desplegada por un pueblo en determinados momentos de su ciclo histórico. En su opinión, existen tres tipos de individuos: los pasionarios, que se caracterizan por la disponibilidad, el compromiso, la determinación y la capacidad de aceptar sacrificios por el bien de la comunidad; los armónicos, más equilibrados y racionales, inclinados a la autoconservación; y, por último, están los subpasionales, que son hedonistas, obsesionados con la autoconservación y plagados de neurosis. Las comunidades donde los pasionarios son numerosos y dominantes son dinámicas, creativas, conquistadoras y dotadas de una energía que las impulsa a todo tipo de empresas. Esta es precisamente la pasionaridad de la que habla Goumilev, la energía que está en el origen de todos los procesos de etnogénesis. En las dos primeras fases, denominadas ascendente y acmeica, los individuos pasionarios son la mayoría. En las fases tercera y cuarta, las de inercia y resquebrajamiento, los armónicos son la mayoría. En cambio, los individuos subpasionales dominan las últimas fases, las de decadencia.

Lo absolutamente sorprendente de esta teoría de la pasionaridad es el supuesto origen cósmico de esta energía. Para apoyar sus hipótesis, Goumilev se basa en diversos estudios astrofísicos y paleo-climatológicos con el fin de observar posibles concordancias entre los ciclos solares, los cambios climáticos en determinadas épocas y las fases de etnogénesis en el curso de la historia. Según el investigador ruso, los ciclos solares producen un excedente de energía en la Tierra que altera los procesos bioquímicos de los seres vivos, incluidos los humanos. Esto explicaría por qué surgen y se abren paso en la historia individuos y grupos pasionarios. Esta teoría fue parcialmente validada por investigadores de la Universidad de Omsk a finales de 1990 y principios del 2000, y por la paleo-climatología, que demostró que los periodos de expansión mongola y tártara en Asia Central coincidieron con periodos de insolación que permitieron ampliar las zonas de pastoreo.

Lev Goumilev y el eurasianismo

Ya hemos visto cómo Goumilev mantuvo correspondencia epistolar con dos de los fundadores del movimiento eurasiático en la década de 1920. También está claro que el principal objeto de estudios de este pensador era Eurasia. Por lo tanto, conviene concluir este breve relato de su vida y sus investigaciones mencionando algunos de los puntos de convergencia y divergencia entre su pensamiento y el del movimiento eurasiático, al que se refirió explícitamente cuando se describió a sí mismo en una entrevista en televisión titulada “el último eurasiático”. En primer lugar, es importante tener en cuenta que Goumilev representa una especie de puente entre el eurasianismo clásico – que surgió en la diáspora rusa de la década de 1920 y cuyos principales exponentes son Nikolai Troubetskoi, Petr Savitski y Georges Vernadski – y el neo-eurasismo cuyo exponente más famoso es Alexander Dugin. Mientras que los autores clásicos basaban su pensamiento en datos lingüísticos, geográficos, históricos y étnicos, los neo-eurasiáticos proponen dos componentes que los primeros pasaron por alto: el aspecto místico, con el concepto de la Tercera Roma, y el aspecto geopolítico, que se convirtió en uno de los principales problemas de la política internacional rusa a mediados de 1990. No es de extrañar que gran parte de la obra de Goumilev se haya traducido al turco: los círculos euroasiáticos de Turquía (intelectuales, pero también políticos y militares) insisten en que Ankara debe rechazar la occidentalización y aliarse con Rusia para la creación de un mundo multipolar.

Aunque bautizado e identificado como ortodoxo, Goumilev no era un practicante. Influido por los fundadores del eurasianismo, en los que vio un importante medio para repensar la coexistencia de los pueblos que conformaban el Imperio ruso, y cuya voluntad de subrayar los estrechos vínculos que existían entre el medio ambiente y el pueblo, influyó a su vez en la nueva generación de eurasiáticos, pero casi todos ellos se vieron obligados a enfrentarse a él después. Sin embargo, el aspecto místico está prácticamente ausente de la obra del pensador ruso, que también evitó toda consideración política y geopolítica, debido a que las juzgaba, con razón, fuera de su competencia. Otro punto que une a Goumilev con los eurasiáticos clásicos y los neo-eurasiáticos es su implacable crítica del eurocentrismo y, en general, de Occidente, que a su juicio era el exponente de una ideología materialista y agresiva que ponía en peligro a las otras civilizaciones. Para los eurasiáticos y Goumilev era importante centrarse en el estudio de Oriente como un medio para volver a la Tradición y renovarla. Y a pesar de que algunas de sus hipótesis son excesivamente aventuradas y tiene todo tipo de opiniones tajantes que parecen reflejar más sus inclinaciones personales que una verdad objetiva, el pensamiento de Lev Goumilev sigue siendo extremadamente rico, estimulante y profundo. Sus teorías sobre la etnogénesis pueden ayudarnos a comprender mejor el presente, especialmente la geopolítica, desde una perspectiva apolítica, situando nuestras reflexiones dentro de una dinámica histórica en la que las constantes históricas de lo que Fernand Braudel llamaba “la larga duración” tienen mucho más peso e interés que los meros acontecimientos. En definitiva, Goumilev es una lectura obligada para todo aquel que quiera hacerse con las herramientas necesarias para reflexionar sobre los orígenes de los pueblos y los ciclos históricos que jalonan su existencia.

Lecturas para profundizar en el autor:

Citati D., La passione dell’Eurasia, 2015, edizioni Mimesis.

Bassin M., Ethno-paysages et ethno-parasites: l’écologie de l’ethnicité chez Lev Goumiliov, https://revues.univ-tlse2.fr/slavicaoccitania/index.php?id=2083&file=1

Laruelle M., L’idéologie eurasiste russe, ou comment penser l’empire, éditions l’Harmattan.

Laruelle M., Lev Goumilev: biologisme et eurasisme dans la pensée russe contemporaine.

Goumilev L., Les fluctuations de la mer Caspienne. Variations climatiques et histoire des peuples nomades au sud de la plaine russe, 1965, Les Cahiers du Monde Russe.

Fuente: https://rebellion-sre.fr/lev-goumilev-le-dernier-eurasiste/

[dominadespina]

LAZAREVIC SISTERS V

Olivera Lazarevic

Early Life

Olivera Lazarević, also often referred to in Byzantine and Greek sources as Maria, was the fifth child and youngest daughter of Knez Lazar and his wife Milica.

She was likely born around 1372/1373 and raised in her father’s capital, Kruševac, receiving the same education as her elder sisters, under the guidance of their mother and maternal aunt, Nun Jefimija.

Like most in her family, she was a fanatic of the arts and literature. Though she was never an artist in her own right, she acted as a patron of it.

There is a folk legend that in her youth, Olivera caught the attention of the Serbian knight, Miloš Obilić, who happened to be a frequent visitor at her father’s court and was considered one of the family.

This attraction led to a marriage proposal by Obilić, yet he was refused by her father, using her young age as an excuse.

Marriage to Sultan Bayezid I

Following the Battle of Kosovo in the summer of 1389, and the death of Sultan Murad I and execution of Knez Lazar, the Serbs abided themselves in a vassalage to the Ottomans due to the Hungarian attacks, who wanted to take charge of Serbia and the advancement of the Ottomans.

To officialize this "ending" vendetta, a proposal was made to the then regent, Milica, of a union of peace with the newly crowned Sultan Bayezid, son of Sultan Murad. Although the mother tried to fight and prolong her final decision, by the end of that same year, her youngest daughter was betrothed to the new Sultan.

The Serbian lords, who were quite unhappy about this betrothal, involved themselves in some sort of intrigues to make Bayezid suspicious in order to prevent this union. However, it obviously did not prevail.

It is unclear if the wedding reception took place in late 1389 or in the spring of 1390. As stated by Konstantin Kostenecki in his biography of Stefan Lazarević written in 1431, he reports that after the Ottoman ambassadors and Milica agreed on the marriage, Stefan appeared before Bayezid with his sister Olivera and the marriage took place. As far as we know, the proposal was accepted in late 1389.

Nonetheless, one thing is for sure, and that is the fact that the reception took place no later than the spring of 1390. This is because the joint action of the Serbs and Turks against the Hungarians in northern Serbia, southern Hungary, and eastern Bosnia took place already in the spring or at the latest in the summer of that year, meaning by the spring of 1390, Olivera was married to the same man who gave orders for her father’s execution.

The wedding seems to have been kept quiet as it appears to have taken place in a mosque, following a Muslim ceremony. Many Serbian lords and people were unhappy about their Orthodox Christian Princess marrying a Muslim, even if it brought some temporary peace to Serbia.

According to Ducas, a 15th-century historian, on top of many talents of silver from Serbia's mines, Bayezid received "a tender virgin."

It is possible that after this marriage Olivera took the epithet of "Despina" (meaning female despot, or mistress), or more plausible it is a title she had already acquired as a royal princess during her father's reign, and thus she became known as "Despina Hatun", Hatun being the Turco-Mongol title meaning "Lady."

It appears that for the rest of her life, she was referred to by this epithet instead of her actual name.

A Woman of Great Influence

Despite the unfavorable circumstances in which this political marriage began, it is noted by historical and contemporary historians that Bayezid loved and valued the counsel of his wife, Despina. It is accepted that the couple welcomed three daughters together; the eldest bears an unknown name, the second in line is Pasa Melek, and the youngest is Oruz.

Her legendary beauty, noble background, and education played a key role in Bayezid’s favoritism of her over all his other consorts and in his trust in her counsel.

From the moment she arrived until his last breath, she remained his main and favorite wife, and had influence on her husband's politics, which played in favor of her people.

Despina was, of course, blamed for having introduced European customs, wine, and mass partying into the once "pious" Ottoman court, and for "whispering in her brother’s favor." However, these criticisms were mostly due to the fact that she was a Christian wife and remained one even though she had influence over her husband. This of course, played a role in the Muslim Ottomans distain of her.

Though it is unknown if Despina reciprocated the same sentiment towards her husband, it is noted that wherever Bayezid went, he could not separate from the Serbian Princess, and thus he took her everywhere with him, suggesting that throughout their marriage she was willing to be a loyal companion to him.

According to Serbian sources, her biggest accomplishments were to partake in Bayezid’s decision to transfer a vast portion of Vuk Branković’s lands (her brother-in-law through Mara) in 1397, following the man’s death and place them under the governance of her younger brother, Stefan.

The other was to save her brother from Bayezid’s wrath in 1398 when he was accused of conspiring with the King of Hungary. Stefan came to the Sultan after the failed attempt of his mother to defend him. It is believed that Olivera was the one who stepped up, and her brother was forgiven upon admitting his fault.

Captivity

Following the aftermath of the Battle of Ankara in 1402, a battle which Bayezid and his sons, Mustafa and Musa, lost and were taken as captives, Timur sent his generals to plunder Bursa, taking many treasures from the palace with them, including Bayezid's concubines. Eventually, they made their way to Yenisehir, where Despina was hiding with two of her daughters.

Despina and her household were brought to Timur and later to Bayezid, who was being kept captive in a tent. Although they were treated with respect at first, events occurred that led to Bayezid being humiliated and kept in an iron cage, while his wife was forced to perform menial tasks at festivities.

Unable to bear the insult made towards his wife, Bayezid committed suicide in his iron cage and was temporarily buried in Akşehir, where he had passed.

Timur is believed to have felt great guilt because of this and released Bayezid’s entourage. He married Despina’s daughters to the son of one of his generals and the other to his grandson, Ebu Bakr Mirza. Both daughters moved to Samarkand where they lived with their families.

Later in 1403, Despina was released along with her stepson, Musa, during the transfer of Bayezid’s body to his personal mosque in Bursa. It is assumed she attended his second funeral.

As the Advisor of the Despots

Following her release, nothing is known or recorded about Despina's whereabouts until the 1420s. It is believed by some that she might have stayed in Bursa or somewhere nearby with her youngest daughter until she grew tired of the battle for the throne going on between Bayezid’s sons and later moved to Serbia.

Or, she might have stayed until the time her youngest daughter was married off.

After her return to Serbia, she took her place at her already widowed brother's side as his comforter and trusted advisor. However, she never lived at court but instead had her own residence in the courtyard of Belgrade.

She was extremely popular, respected, and valued in her homeland. Even during her lifetime, the Serbs referred to her as “Esther” due to her sacrificial marriage to a persecutor of the Christians.

During her stay in Dubrovnik, it is plausible she met with her sister and brother-in-law, Sandalj Hranic, though some historians believe she was there for diplomatic reasons, possibly to acquire information on her brother-in-law to inform her younger brother; the now Despot Stefan Lazarevic.

In 1427, her younger brother passed away, but this did not end her influence. Soon after, she acted as an advisor to her nephew, Durad Brankovic, and from 1430 onwards, moved with his family to Smederevo, the new capital.

Murad II, the Ottoman Sultan at the time, must have believed that since Stefan Lazarevic had died without any children to proclaim as heir, then the state should pass from Stefan to his step-grandmother, Olivera, and thus to himself.

As a result of this situation and threat to their state, historians believe it was Despina who planned Mara Brankovic's marriage to Murad in order to prevent the Ottomans from advancing. And thus, the marriage was concluded in 1435 in the Ottoman capital.

Though this marriage, unlike Olivera's own marriage, did not prevent Ottoman expansion in Serbia.

In 1441, while her nephew Durad was in exile, she traveled from Dubrovnik to Bar, where it is believed she was able to convey secret diplomatic letters to her nephew.

Later Life

Nothing is known about the later life of Despina from 1443 onwards; they lost track of her.

The last time she is mentioned alive is in a 1443 document, in which her sister, Jelena, names her as her executor in her will. She left money to Despina in order to build a burial place for her and to distribute some of the money to the poor.

After this, nothing more is recorded; it is unknown when, where, and how she died.

Issue

Unkown Hatun

Pasa Melek Hatun

Oruz/Uruz Hatun

( Sources: Osmanlı Sarayı’nda Bir Sırp Prenses/ Mileva Olivera Lazarevic by Mustafa Çağhan Keskin, КЋЕРИ КНЕЗА ЛАЗАРА ИСТОРИЈСКА СТУДИЈА ПОГОВОР by Jelka Redep, Dve srpske sultanije : Olivera Lazarevic (1373-1444) : Mara Brankovic (1418-1487) by Nikola Giljen, “КЋЕРИ КНЕЗА ЛАЗАРА ИСТОРИЈСКА СТУДИЈА ПОГОВОР” by Jelka Redep, Dve srpske sultanije : Olivera Lazarevic (1373-1444) : Mara Brankovic (1418-1487) by Nikola Giljen, The European Sultanas of the Ottoman Empire by Anna Ivanova Buxton )

[coimbrabertone]

A Self-Indulgent Blogpost About My Motorsports Fiction

So, this weekend, MotoGP had a good sprint while the main race was a snoozer, and NASCAR ended with a twenty-eight-car pileup followed by a plate merchant winning the race.

Which makes me not really want to talk about either of them.

I could talk a bit more on Andretti - Michael revealed today that stepping back was a personal decision after forty years of being involved in Indycar, half as a driver, half as a team owner - but I don't really have a ton more to say on that either.

So, what do I want to talk about?

Well, I kinda want to talk about my writing.

I've kinda wanted to do that for a bit now, but I always thought that one: it was a bit self-indulgent to promote my fanfic on here too much, and two: I wasn't sure if people would particularly care. Well, I talked to some friends about it, and they encouraged it, so I figured...why not?

Thus, today I'll be talking about my motorsports fiction, my racing fanfics that I primarily post on AO3. I've completed one story Life at the Speed of Formula One, I wrote a 1950s Grand Prix one-shot called A Beautiful Race, and I'm currently writing two stories: An 1980s CART Indycar story called The Fastest of the Prancing Horses, and a 2000s NASCAR story called Racing in the Golden Age.

For this blogpost, I will mainly be talking about LatSoF1 because it is finished and because as my first real motorsports story, it more or less set the mold for the rest.

The link:

So...where to begin but the tags?

I have this story labeled under two fandoms, Original Work and Formula 1 RPF, why is that?

Well, it boils down to the fact that I don't quite think it fits firmly into either category. It is an original work about Formula One, but it's not really RPF either.

RPF, for those unaware of fanfic terms, means Real People Fiction.

In my stories, however, I've decided to fictionalize living people, particularly those central to the plot. There's a few reasons for this, one is that I felt odd having my OC (original character) interacting with real drivers - and admittedly a part of that is that I didn't really want this to read like a self-insert fic, where my Mary Sue gets to race with Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel and all that - especially when I'm going to tackle things like tabloid rumors and opinions on homosexuality and driver feuds in these things.

The long and short of it is that I feel more comfortable having fictionalized driver Felipe Alvarez as an antagonistic figure rather than Fernando Alonso himself.

Does that matter to people reading it who are just going to connect the dots and see Alvarez as Alonso anyway? Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Let's get back to establishing the context.

The story begins in 2007, with Kazakhstan-born ethnic-Russian driver Tamara Shchegolyayeva signed to Williams banked by Kazakhstani oil and gas companies.

Let's unpack that a bit.

Why 2007?

The initial idea of the story, before it branched off into something larger, was to cover the tight and dramatic 2007 championship battle from the perspective of someone in Formula One but outside of the proper title battle. Almost like a third-person view on the title challenge from a first-person perspective.

Tamara Shchego-what's it?

Okay, so admittedly Kazakhstani driver with a really long name probably isn't the most believable package for a late-2000s Formula One driver, but I think that's part of what made this idea interesting to me.

I'm a geography and history nerd, so I'm drawn to off-the-wall places where so many different cultures and histories intertwine. Kazakhstan has the Silk Road, the Mongol Empire, Russian Imperialism, and Soviet Communism all in its history. Its people are like a microcosm of all of Asia with East Asian, Turco-Persian, and Indo-European phenotypes all present, with people ranging from literal nomads to Kazakh Muslims to ethnic Russians.

Thus, I decided that it would be interesting to write a protagonist from there.

However, Formula One is also...Formula One. So how does a person from there get to the cynical, cutthroat world of big money global motorsport?

Well, I made her the daughter of a petty oligarch and sponsored by oil money.

This also allowed me to explore a number of things. The legacy of Russian Imperialism, the question of where she belongs - I placed her ancestry right on the tripoint border of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, had her born in Kazakhstan, and had her grow up and live in Monaco - the morality of oil money, the morality of sponsorships in general, and, eventually, of being a gay woman in a male-dominated, conservative, globe-spanning sport.

I won't pretend I covered these areas perfectly - and at least in some cases, I wrote Tamara as having complicated, potentially problematic feelings on things - but I think it was at least interesting.

Fictionalized Drivers.

My general rule with people in the story is that the more involved in the plot they were, the more I'd differentiate them from the drivers they were based off of.

Thus, German Nico Rosberg became Finn Tommy Koskinen. The background was generally the same - Finnish father, German mother, raised in Monaco - but by distinguishing him from the driver he was based off of in these ways, I felt more comfortable having him interact with Tamara, to show his opinions, to have a teammate dynamic with her.

This extended to Anthony Harrison, probably the most fictionalized of the drivers. Based loosely off of Lewis Hamilton, Anthony is the son of a black American army mechanic and a white Englishwoman, growing up in that background to become a top Formula One prospect with McLaren.

He enters the plot as a fellow rookie to Tamara, and eventually, the two of them bonding leads to tabloid rumors that they're a couple. A bit of drama that Tamara wants no part in, but foreshadows a later storyline that turns her career upside.

Kazakhstan and Russia.

I mentioned before that Tamara struggles a bit with representing Kazakhstan as an ethnic Russian, but as part of her caught between two worlds storylines, I also had her struggle with her Russian identity as well. She's got it in her blood, but she wasn't born there, didn't grow up there, and has no love for the regime there.

This got more complicated because, in real life, Russia escalated the war in Ukraine a month after I started this story.

One of the cited reasons was Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine.

That made writing about a Russian from another post-Soviet country awkward, and I wanted to find a way to address it within the context of this story.

Thus, during the 2008 season in LatSoF1, I talked a lot about the Russian invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia within Georgia, where Putin and Medvedev tried more or less the same tricks. Using Russian minorities in those countries to justify naked landgrabs.

This allowed me to solidify Tamara's position as someone who was born in Kazakhstan and is of Russian descent, and loves the people of both countries, but does not love either regime.

And come 2009 and 2010, the final two seasons featured in the story, and she gets away from depending on either country for sponsorship.

So, that's a whole lot of background out of the way, now...let's talk about how I wrote the story itself.

Writing Races.

LatSoF1 was my first real racing focused work and therefore in the early days, there were some adjustments to how I wrote things.

I decided on two races a chapter being the norm, thinking it would be an efficient way to get through the season without getting bogged down too much in yapping about a fictionalized version of a real race.

And to a degree, it did its job.

However, I did also end up more or less skipping the Malaysian Grand Prix that first year as I jumped to the race results. I don't think I'd do that now. I'd write about how the race was going overall and what Tamara was doing and then end on the results.

How did I get the results? Well, to keep things grounded in reality, I based Tamara's 2007 results on what Alexander Wurz achieved in that 2007 Williams irl. I can get the results real quick on Wikipedia, maybe go to Racing Reference for an obscure race or if I need more detail, and another thing that helped a lot for LatSoF1 specifically is the old F1 season review videos. I watched the reviews for 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 in the making of LatSoF1.

For CART stuff more recently, it's been a bit harder to find some specific information for like qualifying sessions from 1989. Some of that stuff is preserved on VHS rips on youtube and I've used those before, but what I've found to be helpful is actually some skills I picked up as a history major in college: old newspapers.

The LA Times and Chicago Tribute have tended to be my personal favorites because they have a significant digitized backlog, and don't require signing up to read through it like the New York times.

Hell, earlier this very day I was looking for some information on the Galles-Kraco merger ahead of the 1989 season - I wanted to know if Kraco stayed in the Compton garage or if they moved in with the Galles team in Albuquerque - and finally found the information in a brief mention at the bottom of an LA Times article.

This one, to be exact:

Thank you very much LA Times for making random stories from June 1989 accessible.

So yeah, sometimes it's easy and I can just get what I need off of Wikipedia and work from there, other times I need to go digging deeper, but the point remains: I find the real results and use them a s a baseline.

All that being said, it would be a bit boring to just slap my OC's name on a real driver's results and call it a day, so once I find what I need, I tend to change things around a bit.

First thing that comes to mind from LatSoF1 is the 2007 European Grand Prix, where Mark Webber finished third, just barely holding off Wurz.

In LatSoF1, Tamara got him in the last corner and took a podium finish.

That being said, I made sure not to get too carried away either.

At the end of 2007, Tamara finished on 18 points with two third places (Canada and Nürburgring) being the highlights of her season. In comparison, Nico Rosberg - and indeed Tommy Koskinen - finished 2007 on 20 points, whilst Wurz irl finished on 13.

Five points gained on real life is hardly Mary Sue behavior imo, so i don't consider that too obscene.

Who did I take those points off of? Well, I tried to keep that pretty even-handed as well, switching Mark Webber's third for Martin Weaver's fourth place in Europe.

Tamara also took Ralf Schumacher's eighth place in Australia from Roland Ziegler. Another eighth in Turkey off of Robert Kubica/Piotr Kaminski, a third eighth place in Italy off of Jenson Button/James Buxton, and a fourth eighth place in Brazil off of Jarno Trulli/Ivan Tripoli.

Pretty even-handed overall. No one driver was bullied for his results, and I didn't cause any massive swings in the championships.

Speaking of all those drivers I just named...

Fictionalized Names.

How did I come up with driver names? It varies.

Some names, particularly for people who didn't feature too much in the story, were just playing around with their real name. I'd put Martin Weaver for Mark Webber and James Buxton in that category.

Other names are little inside jokes I have with myself. I can't think of any from LatSoF1 off the top of my head, but in my CART story, real life driver Rich Vogler is renamed after Saints Row 2 antagonist Dane Vogel.

Why? Because I love Saints Row 2 and that popped into my head when I saw Vogler. Vogler-Vogel, it makes sense.

A good amount of names are ripped from players I had in Football Manager saves. Piotr Kaminski (Robert Kubica) I had at Cracovia in a save on FM21, and later on that same manager moved to Napoli, where I had a Japanese winger named Yoshikazu Higashiyama. I loved that player so much I used his name for Kamui Kobayashi once I included him in the story.

And other names are in reference to other drivers. In the late 2000s, Red Bull had a fetish for drivers named Seb: Sebastien Bourdais, Sebastien Buemi, Sebastien Loeb, Sebastien Ogier, and of course Sebastian Vettel.

In LatSoF1, that's replaced with a fetish for drivers named Max, in reference to their current boytoy Verstappen: thus, it's Maximilien Lecroix for Bourdais, Maximilien Longpre for Buemi, and Maximilian Renner for Seb Vettel.

Oh, and I made Longpre a Luxembourger in place of Buemi who is Swiss. Why? Because I like throwing in a comparatively underrepresented country every once in awhile.

Fringe Benefits.

On a lighter note, this is something I enjoyed about LatSoF1 a lot: it was a Formula One story, but being set in the near past, there was so much little stuff I could touch on. Tamara would have thoughts on geopolitics, video games, TV shows, other racing series, other sports, she'd get to tour a nuclear reactor at one point, she's get to rock some cool outfits, and she'd build up a bit of a car collection.

It was cool!

Most of the stuff I wrote before LatSoF1 was like historical fiction or Star Wars stuff, so it was nice to just be able to write about a person who, outside of an extraordinary job, is more or less just a regular person.

When I was getting into MotoGP for the first time, I could write a scene about her discussing MotoGP with some Italian engineers.

When I was watching Chernobyl, I got to have her tour a Soviet nuclear reactor in Saint Petersburg.

When I wasn't loving Formula One as much as I used to, I had her dabble in sports cars and Indycar during a bit of a sabbatical I had her in.

Speaking of, that brings me to...

What I'd Do Differently Now:

I started LatSoF1 in January 2022 and finished it in June 2023. I still consider it to be one of my best works and I'm proud of it, however, part of writing - and this is for everyone, not just me - is that you're always learning more. I'd say my writing back then was good, but I think it's gotten better now - certainly not perfect, but better - so...what would I do if I was doing it now?

The first two things are more technical:

One: I think I'm better at breaking up big blocks of text now, alternating between paragraphs and short lines, which I think makes for a more readable experience.

Two: I was getting better at this as I was writing LatSoF1, but I still think I could've been better about dialogue. I think dialogue is a bit of a weakness in my writing, one I'm working on, but a weakness nonetheless.

I probably could've done a better job with dialogue in LatSoF1.

Beyond that...I struggle at having my protagonists do things that are out of my character. Part of that is inevitable - write somebody long enough, particularly in first person, and parts of you will bleed into that character whether you like it or not - but it also led to me dropping one and a half plotlines.

One and a half? Let me explain.

There is a part of LatSoF1 after the 2008 season where Tamara loses her sponsorship in F1 and goes on a bit of a downward spiral. I initially had the idea that she'd develop a drinking problem during this point and eventually recover for it, to the point where she wouldn't drink podium champagne and would always just spray it before handing it off to the team.

I chickened out on this because I didn't feel comfortable writing about someone struggling with alcoholism given that I don't drink.

Then we move onto the half.

I initially wanted Tamara to be a bit more promiscuous once she comes out, and she'd have a few different girlfriends and maybe a few one-night stands throughout the storyline. It the end, I chopped this storyline way down.

Roksana is her first girlfriend, she has a one-night stand with Daniella, and then she's with Ysabella for the rest of the story.

Alexis was supposed to be another girlfriend, but in the end she's just the Ferrari PR that follows Tamara around for that little half a season she did there.

Again, my only romantic experience has been monogamous, so I chickened out of writing something I didn't know.

Now, who knows if writing out of my comfort zone would be any good, but I do wish I tried.

As I move on from LatSoF1 and onto new projects, I'm trying to be better about writing outside of my comfort zone. Right now with the CART story I have Vincenza Taghzouti becoming more assertive and combative in the media, arguably taking a bit of a villain role as she battles the American "boys club" of established drivers.

Meanwhile in the NASCAR story, Lilith Zilinskas has been more promiscuous and had a bit of a self-destructive streak for awhile, and now is dealing with her ex-girlfriend reentering her life...with a daughter, no less. This lets me explore some of the themes I chickened out of doing with Tamara, and also adds in a bit of a parenting aspect in the current day that I've never touched on before.

I'm excited to see how these attempts play out, and I hope that by the end of them, I'll have sufficiently differentiated my three protagonists.

Anyway, this has been a long and self-indulgent blogpost, but I very much enjoyed writing it. Please feel free to ask questions below, because I could go on much, much longer about my writing if given the chance.

[whencyclopedia]

The Empire of Timur the Lame, c. 1404 CE

A map illustrating the empire and campaigns of Timur (from the Chagatai word for iron) at its biggest extent before his death in 1405. Timur the Lame (Timur-i Leng from Persian, Tamerlane as it had evolved in English or Timūr Gurkānī, son-in-law following his marriage into Genghis Khan's family) was a 14th-century (1336 – 1405) Muslim conqueror of a Turco-Mongol descent who, at the peak of his Central Asian Timurid Empire, had defeated the major powers of the day - the Mamluks, Ottomans, the Sultanate of Delhi, and the Golden Horde and invaded, among others, Persia, Mesopotamia, Russia, Georgia, India, Syria, and Turkey. After his death preparing to invade the Ming Dynasty of China, the empire, which was never more than an expression of his personal ambition and dominance, quickly fell into disputes and civil wars and crumbled.

Image by Simeon Netchev

[lepartidelamort]

L’espoir renaît : 17 djihadistes calibrés par l’armée syrienne !

BACHAR seul et vrai président de la Syrie LIBRE !

Il a fallu quelques heures pour que la résistance syrienne écoute l’appel lancé ici même pour le retour de Bachar al Assad à la présidence de la Syrie libre !

Pas moins de 17 djihadistes ont été méthodiquement exécutés par l’armée syrienne dans la région de Latakié !

Ces gorets ont été saignés dans les règles de l’art.

Je connais mes lecteurs et je sais qu’ils apprécient ce sang à sa juste valeur.

Dernières nouvelles : Au moins 17 terroristes soutenus par Erdogan sont éliminés par les forces de la résistance syrienne dans le gouvernorat de Lattaquié.

Après toutes ces journées à endurer l’intolérable pendant deux semaines, enfin un rayon de lumière.

Confessons – hélas – que les Français ont un tableau de chasse bien moins spectaculaire par comparaison en dépit des crimes dont se sont rendus coupables les baiseurs de chèvres chez nous.

Il est trop tôt pour anticiper la suite, mais qui peut croire que les Alaouites vont laisser ces chiens de djihadistes occuper leur pays sans réagir, a fortiori si ces baiseurs de chèvres se livrent aux pires exactions ?

Pour notre plus grande honte, des rats venus de France figurent dans le lot de leurs oppresseurs.

J’ai un défaut : la loyauté.

Cela fait 14 ans que je soutiens farouchement la Syrie nationaliste et son seul et unique leader Bachar al Assad. Durant toutes ces années, j’ai passé des heures et des jours à expliquer la juste cause de la Syrie libre face aux Ottomans et à leurs hordes d’égorgeurs qui menacent l’Europe. Je n’ai aucune intention de changer de position et certainement pas parce qu’Ali Baba et ses quarante voleurs ont pris Damas sur un malentendu.

Il est grand temps d’élever nos standards moraux et de faire preuve de ténacité dans l’adversité, même quand elle est extrême.

Je n’ai jamais abandonné Adolf Hitler, je n’ai pas l’intention d’abandonner Bachar al Assad. Et au delà d’Assad, la cause essentielle : la destruction de l’abrahamisme et le salut du monde aryen.

Nous devons regarder le monde d’un regard neuf. Les Arabes, ni aucun peuple, ne sont condamnés à subir le joug du fanatisme abrahamique, et sûrement pas le joug des juifs. C’est le grand combat de notre temps : pulvériser les juifs, redresser l’aryanisme.

Ici, à notre modeste échelle, nous sommes prêts à porter assistance au peuple de Syrie – la résistance – assiégé par les bêtes de Jolani et du tyran Erdogan. La Syrie a été éduquée par 60 ans de baasisme. Il serait illusoire de croire qu’il n’en reste rien sur place, surtout une semaine après ce putsch djihadiste.

Tous les contacts sont utiles, toutes les initiatives sont nécessaires. D’autant que les nations arabes ne perçoivent pas la situation d’un bon oeil face au Grand Turc. Nous allons voir un front anti-ottoman se forger. Nous avons potentiellement là le moyen d’une amitié nouvelle face à la menace turco-mongole conjointe, d’autant plus qu’elle est armée et encouragée par le juif, ennemi des nations.

Et puisque j’y suis, je pense sincèrement que la Russie a vocation à reprendre Constantinople. Ce trou à cafards doit être oblitéré et les Russes, restaurateurs de l’empire romain d’Orient, ne pourront pas éternellement esquiver leur destin.

Ils devront tuer les Turcs, en MASSE.

Nous sommes tous des Syriens – en tenue kaki avec une très grande soif de sang.

Démocratie Participative

[caesarsaladinn]

we all know about the euphemism treadmill where nice words pick up the associations of slurs, but I'm curious about the reverse process. at what point does a slur fall so far out of use that it loses its emotional associations and returns to being a normal word?

an example might be "lame," which I think is about halfway through this cycle--it's still a pejorative thing to call a person and you shouldn't use it, but in practice, I have only ever heard it used to refer to horses or one dead Turco-Mongol general.

or "bad," which originated as an insult for male effeminacy, but nobody these days would be shocked and wounded to be called a bǣddel. it's just a normal word again.

[communist-ojou-sama]

those interested might like to know that the variety of persian that loaned extensively into hindustani and the turkic languages and was the administrative language of basically every turco-mongolic steppe empire was closer to the more conservative variety of persian spoken in afghanistan (فارسی داری) than the persian of iran

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Dec 12, 2023

Towards the end of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine Part Two, our marauding anti-hero burns a copy of the Quran, along with other Islamic books, as a kind of audacious test. “Now, Mahomet,” he cries, “if thou have any power, come down thyself and work a miracle.” Two scenes later, he is dead.

We might see this as a cautionary tale for our times. After all, it isn’t only Turco-Mongol conquerors who find themselves punished for Quran-burning. Last week, the Danish parliament voted to ban the desecration of all religious texts following a spate of protests in which copies of the Qur’an had been destroyed. Inevitably, the new law has been couched as a safety measure. This burning of the book, claims justice minister Peter Hummelgaard, “harms Denmark and Danish interests, and risks harming the security of Danes abroad and here at home”.

He has a point. Even unconfirmed accusations of Quran-burning can be sufficient to prompt extremist violence. In 2015, being accused of defiling the holy book, Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a ferocious mob in Afghanistan while bystanders, including police officers, did nothing to intervene. Many filmed the brutal murder on their phones and the footage was widely shared on social media. In 2022, a mentally unstable man called Mushtaq Rajput was similarly accused and tied to a tree and stoned to death in Pakistan. Earlier this year in Iran, it was reported that Javad Rouhi was tortured so severely that he could no longer speak or walk. He was sentenced to death for apostasy and later died in prison under suspicious circumstances.

But while we might anticipate that the desecration of the Quran would be proscribed in Islamic theocracies, it is troubling to see similar laws being passed in secular nations such as Denmark. The government had not been so faint-hearted when faced with similar problems in 2005. After cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Jyllands-Posten, a global campaign from Indonesia to Bosnia demanded that the Danish authorities take action. The government stood firm and the judicial complaint against the newspaper was dismissed.

In a free society this is the only justifiable response, albeit one that takes considerable courage. And the climate of intimidation that has descended since is a product of our collective failure to defend freedom of speech against the demands of militants. When the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, one would have hoped for a unified front on behalf of one of our finest writers. Instead, much of the literary and political establishment abandoned or even censured him. In the Australian television show Hypotheticals, the singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, implied that he would have no objections to Rushdie being burned alive.

That a work of fiction such as The Satanic Verses could not even be published today gives us some indication of the extent to which we have forsaken the principle of free speech. If we are so squeamish about the burning of Qurans, why were so many of us indifferent to the burning of Rushdie’s book on the streets of Bolton and Bradford? Yusuf Islam’s remark about the author’s immolation might have been flippant but, as Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”

The ceremonial burning of books in Germany and Austria in the Thirties has ensured that the act will always have a unique charge, and a disquieting, visceral effect. It is why, for instance, the most memorable scene in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan is when the villain Steerpike sets fire to his master’s library. It is a gesture designed to repudiate the very heights of human achievement, to hurl his victim into a spiral of despair. When Rushdie saw his own novel publicly incinerated, he confessed to feeling that “now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible”.

The burning of the Quran leaves many of us similarly troubled. We do not need to approve of the contents to sense that the destruction of a book is symbolic of a desire to limit the scope of human thought. When activists post footage of themselves gleefully setting fire to copies of Harry Potter, one cannot shake the similar suspicion that they would happily substitute the books with the author herself.

But while many of us find the burning of books instinctively rebarbative, to outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian. And to reinstate blasphemy laws by specifying that only religious books are to be protected is fundamentally retrograde. Of course, such laws already exist in most Western countries in an unwritten form. In March, a��14-year-old autistic boy was suspended from his school in Wakefield, reported to the police, and received death threats after he accidentally dropped a copy of the Quran on the floor, causing some of the pages to be scuffed. He may not have committed a crime, but many people behaved as though he had.

And the same unwritten laws are in force in the fact that few would be brave enough to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after the massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Five years later, the schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris simply for showing the offending images during a lesson on free speech. Closer to home, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is still in hiding after showing the images to his pupils and stirring the ire of a righteous mob.

The failure of the school’s headmaster, as well as the teaching unions, to support this man against the demands of religious fundamentalists is revealing. Why must those who claim to be defending the dignity of Muslims treat them as irascible children? At the same time, as Sam Harris recently pointed out, there is an oddity in the fact that so many Muslims do not appear to be alarmed that “their community is so uniquely combustible”.

The bitter reality is that terrorism works, particularly when so many governments across the Western world are seemingly willing to fritter away our bedrock of liberal values. This has been actuated, in part, by an alliance of two very different forms of authoritarianism: ultra-conservative Islamic dogma and the safetyist ideology of “wokeness”. The latter has always claimed that causing offence is a form of violence, and the former has been quick to adopt the same tactics. This is why protesters outside Batley Grammar School asserted that the display of offensive cartoons was a “safeguarding” issue, and the Muslim Council of Britain criticised the school for not maintaining an “inclusive space”. The same censorious instincts have been updated, and are now cloaked in a more modish language.

In a civilised and pluralistic society, the burning of a holy book might provoke a variety of responses — anger, disbelief, or just a shrug of the shoulders — but it should never lead to violence. Back when The Onion still had some bite, the website satirised this “unique combustibility” through the depiction of a graphic sexual foursome between Moses, Jesus, Ganesha and Buddha. The headline said it all: “No One Murdered Because Of This Image”.

Freedom of speech and expression still matters, and if that means a few hotheads and mini-Tamburlaines might burn their copies of the Quran then so be it. It is unfortunate that we have reached the point where Islam must be ring-fenced from ridicule or criticism, whether due to fear of violent repercussions or a misguided and patronising effort to promote social justice. But for this state of affairs we ultimately have only ourselves to blame, and in particular our tendency to capitulate to religious zealots when they seek exemption from the liberal consensus.

==

[mathlann]

Ranting and Hating

Listening to SlyFlourish talk about the Muskrat thing and like, nothing against what he said in his vid more about the idgits in his comments bringing up Lovecraft. But the thing that specifically gets my goat about the tri-monthly discourse about "the assholes who inspired/made our hobby" is that the whole "nuance/people are complicated" answer more and more feels like such a thought-terminating phrase in these spaces. Because a lot of (white) fans verbally separate themselves from the chuds and shrug shoulders about Lovecraft or whoever, but then will run off with the same tainted toys and get mad when you don't want to play with them. But like??? You have to actually do the work of understanding that the Gygaxs, and the Ron E Howards, and the Lovecrafts of the world offenders on the same level as "yeah he called his secretary toots but..." Like that shit was ideological and it is bone-deep. You can't separate art from the artist if you can't even identify the fucking signature you know?

Idk its just been a particularly crazy making week sitting in the OSR space specifically between this and the Questing Beast thing because i do think there's a specific "ttrpgs are inherently leftist" meme brainrot running through every conversation I see when the chuds kick up shit. Like some of the same people making fun of Musk or pontificating as to why Chuds seem to flock to the space in the first place "when they obviously aren't welcome" will also be the same people to run up books with fantasy worlds where there's like, 5 different vaguely European analogue cultures, maybe a barely-elaborated on vaguely arabic/persian or turco-mongol one if you want to be diverse, and the rest of the world either "Here there be Savages" if its human only, or with Orcs/Goblins/Lizards filling out the map. And all the people live in their own ethnostate complexes and have broadly applicable personality types with very little cultural variations or transfer and who view all their neighbors with a "natural" hostility.

And enough of those people will nod their heads sagely and argue that worlds like that are when fantasy was better/more realistic/interesting. Like "oh everything is so frictionless now. Things aren't as fun if we have to let orcs be people the Lore™ is so without conflict." Never occurring to them that conflicts can exist for things other than "white man dont like green man kill kill" or whatever. Or that maybe someone like me, a bitch whose Ron E Howard analogue is "unga bunga cannibals trying to eat the white women" would understandably not feel comfortable engaging with your fan favorite sword-and-sorcery product if thats the shit you're pulling from and you don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. A "the guy who inspired this was racist" tag up front does jack and shit for me if you dont also take out the racism!!!! Yonow??? And some of them will act like it's the biggest sacrifice in the world to not have racial ability scores or tables for gnome-slurs or whatever. And im sorry if you can't engage with your game without that shit but then you can't scratch your head when chuds continue to pop up in your community.

[fashionbooksmilano]

Tsaatan

Gli uomini renna della Mongolia, Les hommes renne de la Mongolie, The Reindeer Men of Mongolia

Federico Pistone,  Fotografie Federico Pistone, David Bellatalla

Periplo edizioni Les Cultures, Lecco 2000, 109 pagine,  paperback, sopracopertina illustrata a colori,  testo in italiano, inglese e francese, ISBN  9788886113052

euro 25,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Gli Tsaatan, letteralmente uomini renna, sono nomadi sull’orlo dell’estinzione, fatalmente legati a tradizioni ancestrali. Sono ormai meno di duecento e sopravvivono in condizioni proibitive nel nord della Mongolia, al confine con la Siberia. Gli Tsaatan, che non sono mai entrati a contatto con la civiltà, sanno leggere e scrivere, e pongono l’istruzione al primo posto nella gerarchia dei valori sociali. Le renne sono il principale sostentamento (latte, carne, pelli) e anche per i bambini rappresenta l’unica occasione di svago: le cavalcano con consumata maestria lungo le vallate che si aprono intorno all’accampamento di urtz, le classiche tende. Gli Tsaatan mediano tradizioni mongole e turco-altaiche. Si affidano allo sciamano, venerano e temono gli spiriti del cielo e della terra e adottano antichi riti funebri. Questo volume narra del viaggio attraverso una terra aspra e sconfinata, la taiga, al fianco di uomini che custodiscono con commovente tenacia il valore della loro libertà.

orders to:     booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

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05/02/23

[aurevoirmonty]

"Evola décrit une tradition hyperboréenne, caractérisée par la position du dieu du ciel et l'absence relative de déesses. On trouve des dieux du ciel dominants similaires chez les peuples sibériens et turco-tatars, qui ont probablement été les premiers voisins des Indo-Européens. Chez les Samoyèdes, le dieu du ciel est connu sous le nom de Num, chez les Toungouses sous celui de Buga et chez les Mongols sous celui de Tengri. Les traditionalistes reconnaissent les attributs et les descriptions donnés au dieu du ciel par ces peuples ; il est décrit comme "haut/élevé" et "brillant". Les Yakoutes le connaissent sous le nom de "Seigneur Père Chef du Monde" et les Turko-Tatars sous celui de "Père"."

Joakim Andersen, Mircea Eliade et le chamanisme indo-européen, Geopolitika.ru (2024)

[fredborges98]

Não importa sua estatura física, o que realmente importa é sua estatura e postura moral!É que no fim ou final te faz a menor particula física ou metafísica ou o maior SER entre os SEUS!

Por: Fred Borges

Dedicado ao PERDÃO ao SENHOR,ao MISERERE*, as menores e maiores partículas do mundo, aos detalhes, aos simples e pequenos detalhes, muitas vezes desprezados, ignorados,anulados, mistificados, fanatizados, difamados ou distorcidos.

Deus, nosso Senhor está na nossa palma da mão e no coração, mente, em estado físico ( Bíblia) e metafísico ( Fé ou Esperança)!

Aos pedidos de perdão em todas ou nas que encontrei as línguas:

" Ainda que eu falasse a língua dos homens

E falasse a língua dos anjos, sem amor eu nada seria"Monte castelo

Canção de Legião Urbana

Pedido de desculpas em todas as línguas.

Sei que errei, "pardonare" Senhor, e agora tudo que me resta é pedir o seu perdão.

Como prova do meu arrependimento, peço desculpas não uma vez, mas várias e em todas as línguas que encontrei.

Afrikaans: "Jammer"

Albaneses: "Unë jam i keq"

Alemão: "Es tut mir leid"

Amharic: "Aznallehu."

Árabe: "Aasef".

Arménio: "Ts'avum yem."

Avar: "Tʼasałuha"

Azeri: "Üzgünüm"

Basco: "Sentitzen dut"

Lower Saxon: "Nix för ungood"

Bengali: "Āmi duḥkhita"

Bhojpuri: "hamake maf kara".

Bielorrusso: "Mnie vieĺmi škada"

Bósnio: "Oprostita".

Bretão "Eskuzit ac'hanon"

Búlgaro: "Sŭzhalyavam"

Catalão: "Em sap greu"

Cebuano: "Ikasubo ko"

Chamorro: "Dispensa yo' ".

Chinês (Mandarim): " Duìbùqǐ "

Chinês (Xangai): "Tevéchi".

Coreano: "Mian haeyo"

Crioulo haitiano: "Mwen regrèt"

Croata: "'Ao mi je"

Dinamarquês: "Jeg er ked af det"

Espanhol: "Perdón"

Esperanto: "Mi pardonpetas"

Estónio: "Mul on kahju"

Finlandês: "Olen pahoillani"

Frisiano (Norte): "Fertrüt me"

Frisian (Oeste): "Desculpe."

Friulian: "Scuse"

Gaélico da Escócia: "Gabh mo leisgeul"

Gaélico da Irlanda: "Gabh mo leiscéal"

Galego: "Síntoo"

Galês: "Mae'n ddrwg gen i"

Georgiano: "Me ukats 'ravad'"

Grego: "Lypámai"

Gujarati: "Huṁ dilagīra chuṁ"

Hebraico: "Slicha"

Hindi: "Mujhe maph kardo"

Húngaro: "Sajnálom"

Islandeses: "Fyrirgefðu"

Ilocano: "Pakawan"

Indonésio: "Maafkan aku "

Inglês: "I'm sorry"

Inuktitut: "Iikuluk"

Italiano: "Mi dispiace".

Japonês: "Gomen'nasai"

Kannada: "Kṣamisi"

Cazaquistão: " Keşiriñiz "

Lao: "Khony khoothdnoa"

Latim: "Ignosce mihi"

Letão: "Man žēl"

Lituano: "Atsiprašau"

Luxemburguesa: "Perdão".

Macedónio: "'al mi e"

Malaio: "Ma'af"

Malayalam:"KshamikyNum"

Maltês: "Skużani"

Manx: "S'doogh lhiam"

Maori: "Arohaina mai"

Mongol: "Uuchlaarai".

Navajo: "Dooládó' dooda da".

Holandês: "Het spijt me"

Norueguês: "Beklager"

Occitano: "Perdon"

Urdou : " Māf karna "

Uzbequistão: "Afu eting"

Papiamento: "Sori".

Pashto: "Zeh mutaasif yum."

Persa: "Moteassefam."

Filipino: "Ako ng paumanhin"

Polaco: "Przepraszam"

Romanche: "I ma displacha"

Romeno: "Îmi pare rău" ou "Scuzați-mă"

Russo: "Prastite"

Samoan: "Malie lou loto"

Sardenha: " Mi dispraghidu "

Sérvio: "'ao mi je" ou "Izvinite"

Sesotho: "Ntshwarele."

Shona: "Ndineurombo."

Siciliano: " Mi scusassi "

Sinhala: "Mata samāvenna"

Em eslovaco: "Je mi a ľúto"

Esloveno: "Oprostite"

Somali: "Waan ka xumahay"

Sueco: 'Förlåt' ou 'Jag är ledsen'

Suíço-alemão: "Es duet mr leid"

Swahili: "Samahani."

Tagalog: "Paumanhin".

Tamil: "Enna maniichudunga"

Tcheco: "Je mi to líto"

Telugu: "Maa kshamaapanalu"

Tetum: " Deskulpa "

Tailandês: "Kŏr tôht"

Tibetano: "Gawn-da."

Tigrinya: " Yiqreta "

Tonga: "Fakamolemole."

Tswana: "Ke kopa tshwarelo."

Turco: "Pardon"

Ucraniano: "Vybačte"

Veneza: "Scuxéme"

Võro: "Andis".

Yiddish: "Zay moykhl."

Xhosa: " Ndicela uxolo "

Yorùbá: " Pẹlẹ "

Yucatec Maya: "Ma'taali 'teeni'"

Zazaki: "Qusır de seyr meke "

Zulu: "Uxolo

E claro, mais uma vez, minhas mais sinceras desculpas.

"Podemos ser qualquer um, desde que não sejamos nós mesmos!"

O Algoritmo de Deus e dos Nódulos Coronariano e Pulmonares.

Perdão Senhor!

Estamos a maltratar nossos irmãos, a enfiar a faca no ventre de possíveis homens bons,bons de natureza, bons para natureza, bons por cultivar e alimentar a Terra.

Perdão Senhor!

Estamos a conduzir nossos seres-instituições ou organizações como se não tivessem vida, não tivessem gente, dentro e fora, pacientes com paciência, clientes, homens, mulheres e crianças, idosos como se não houvesse para todos o amanhã.

Perdão Senhor!

Por termos estabelecido em todas as épocas da história da civilização a escravidão, a negação da vida, da liberdade, da individuação, da socialização e da própria humanização.

Perdão Senhor!

Por ter elevado a carne acima do próprio espírito, por não valorizarmos a espiritualização, a reza, a oração, a meditação, a salvação, a renúncia, a resignação, o perdão, a indulgência,deixado dominar a carnificina, a morte da alma, a morte da calma.

Perdão Senhor!

Por colocar ideologias, doutrinas, dogmas, religiões, partidos, organizações secretas acima de vós, dos nós dos embarcados e embarcações, acima dos laços dos eternizados pelo amor, pela família, pela total ou parcial falta de senso e sensibilidade.

Perdão Senhor!

Por distorcer a matemática do algoritmo de vós e não oferecer possível solução, mas problemas e mais problemas, e isto ferir, maltratar, criar nódulos, enrijecer coronária, perdermos nossa identidade, nossa origem, nossa razão de ser- Servir.

Perdão Senhor!

Por podermos ser e não sermos, perdermos nosso senso de coletividade, coletivismo, de sermos e estarmos embarcados num mesmo barco rumo ao horizonte e acharmos que a terra é plana e a cortarmos com uma plaina.

Perdão Senhor!

Por esquecermos as nossas origens, por não valorizarmos pai e mãe, por não sermos gratos aos nossos antepassados, por não valorizarmos a essência e deixarmos nos guiar pelas dúvida, pelo ceticismo, egoísmo, egocentrismo, por não sabermos diferenciar preço de apreço ou valor e fazermos do fim um fim em si mesmo e não valorizarmos o durante, o meio, os eternos segundos de qualquer convivência, vivência, vividos, viventes, vigorados vigente, colunas e vigas, vicissitudes da vida em mim, em nós, em cada,em casa, no lar, no mar, nos rios, no micro, no nano mundo,universo inverso, reverso, paralelo, tangente, intangível, atingível ou inatingível, compreensível e incompreensível, visível ou invisível dos nossos destinos e desatinos, da nossa interpretação ardilosa,maliciosa, tendenciosa, nada científica, nada racional, eminentemente emocional.

Perdão Senhor!

Por não sermos autênticos, intensos, dedicados, disciplinados e ao mesmo tempo flexíveis, enquanto o humano estiver acima das coisas, coisas materiais,e tudo acima de vós Senhor, nada valerá a pena, apenados estaremos, apenados morreremos.

Enfim perdão Senhor,

Por não fazer a VIDA VALER!

Por não estar o tempo inteiro contigo,pois se estivéssemos estaríamos protegidos, amados, abençoados, acolhidos, completos,íntegros, inteiros, não fragmentados, com nódulos, noduas, vazios, angústias, depressões,cremações infernais,ansiedades, pois se temos a vós Senhor, temos o Universo, as cores, e a fotos preto e branco,não precisariam ser preto no branco ou branco no preto de Sebastião Salgado, e não revelaria a rotina da escravidão antiga, moderna, contemporânea,ele foto revelada e atual, e no seus lugares, do preto e branco,estaria sempre no seu reino Senhor de cores, amores, fé, esperança, júbilo das almas, de almas lavadas, leves, levitando sobre a Terra numa era sem Apocalipse ou Armagedom ou Abadom**, enfim em PAZ!

*Miserere, também conhecido como Miserere mei, Deus (em latim: "Tende misericórdia de mim, Deus") é uma versão musicada a cappella do Salmo 51 (50) feita pelo compositor italiano Gregorio Allegri, durante o papado de Urbano VIII, provavelmente durante a década de 1630.

**Abadom (em hebraico: אֲבַדּוֹן, 'Ǎḇaddōn) é um termo hebraico que tem o significado de “destruição” ou "destruidor".

Na Bíblia hebraica, o termo figura seis vezes, todas elas na literatura de sabedoria em Jó 26:6, Jó 28:22, Jó 31:12, Salmo 88:11, Provérbios 15:11, Provérbios 27:20.

No Novo Testamento a palavra é aplicada apenas em Apocalipse 9:11.

Na Bíblia Hebraica, abaddon é usado como referência a um abismo sem fim, geralmente próximo a sheol (שאול).

No Novo Testamento, em Apocalipse 9, um anjo chamado Abadom é descrito como o rei do abismo sem fim de onde emerge um exército de gafanhotos (Apocalipse 9:11).

[philoursmars]

Marseille, le MuCEM et sa nouvelle collection permanente (à mes yeux, bien plus intéressante et mieux présentée que la précédente…)

Suite (et fin ?)

stèle funéraire androgyne "Kamenaia Baba" avec barbe, poitrine et robe. Ces stèles ornaient les tombes de populations turco-mongoles - steppes de la Mer d'Azov, Ukraine, sans doute IXe s.

Fernand Duplan - Ruoms, Ardèche, 1970

corbeau, tête - Ardèche, début XXe s.

marottes en carton - Vasles, Deux-Sèvres, XIXe s. ; Paris, par Pierre Imans, 1970

épis de faîtage : buste de soldat - Calvados, XVIIIe ; buste, Bourgogne, début XXe s.

voir 1

[irithnova]

Were the Mongols really that stinky?

Me trying to summarise/simplify notes I've found on the Internet. But also this is me trying to defend Mongolia ‼️😔✋🐴

(Editing this to re-work the Yassa and Mamluk part as the source I have used to explain it was most likely biased. )

The hygiene practices of the Mongols have been documented by the Mongols and foreigners alike. Apparently, according to some historical resources, the Mongols smelled so bad that you could actually smell them incoming, and that during battle, their stench actually helped them. This seems like a ridiculous exaggeration to be honest, and probably was written by people who were subjected by the Mongols and therefore were very butthurt. All soldiers on a campaign, no matter where they're from, can smell pretty bad.

It is said that the Mongols would not bathe, in fear of angering the water dragons which controlled the waters. This was recorded by the 15th century Mamluk Historian al-Maqrizi. It is true that the Mongols were a shamanistic people, however the mention of dragons is peculiar. The appearance of dragons in original Turco-mongol mythology is almost absent, and dragons are more used in Chinese and tibetan mythology.

In addition, do we really know if the whole "not bathing in running water" thing was truly what was happening with the Mongols, or was it another mistranslation after centuries and centuries of copying things and translating things? François Pétis de la Croix, a French historian of the 18th century, had access to Al-Maqrizi's original work. François came to a different conclusion to his findings - that bathing in running water was banned only during thunderstorms. Both because it was dangerous and also to show respect to Tengri.

Then, in the 20th century, George Vernadsky, who was a Russian-American historian, came to agree with François Pétis de la Croix's conclusion. He agreed that this law was not as restrictive as we may have originally believed. Further, let's remember that they were "banned" from using "running water". Surely that means they could have collected water in jugs and used that or something?

There is also issues with Al-Maqrizi's original source - he is not really regarded as a reliable one. His information on the Yassa was apparently given to him by a man called Abu-Hashim, who claimed that he saw the whole of the Yassa in the libraries of Baghdad during his political exile.

Abu-Hashim is an obscure historical figure and little is known about him and his works, if he even had any.

What Al-Maqrizi thought to be the Yassa was actually just a small list of punishment for offences from the Mongol Criminal law.

Al-Maqrizi also fails to admit that he borrowed pretty heavily from the scholar Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umar in his works on the Mongols. Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umar based his works off of Ata-Malik Juvayni, who was a respected official in the Ilkhanate. Further, Ata-Malik Juvayni wrote the book "History of the world conquerer". This was probably the most unbiased account of the Mongol conquests of Chinggis Khan at the time.

Considering this, you may think. Oh! So it was kind of based off of a reputable source. Must be legit then. But no, Al-Maqrizi, as we can further see in this post, omitted many things from the works he was influenced by, because he had a pretty sour bias against the Mongols.

Juvayni, in his work, records how bathing was banned during certain times of the day during spring and summer months, during which thunderstorms were common. Al-Maqrizi makes no mention of this.

It could be argued that Juvayni himself was biased in trying to make the Mongols look good. Some argue that this "bathing in midday was banned" fiasco was written in by Juvayni to demonstrate the mercy of Chagatai Khan when he pardoned a poor Muslim who was caught bathing in midday. But honestly that seems like a weird thing for Juvayni to lie about, even if it was to make Chagatai look good, so I agree with the original conclusion.

Let's also not forget that Al-Maqrizi lived during the time of the Egyptian Mamluks in 1364-1442. He definitely had a sour opinion of the Mongols, especially the Golden Horde and Ilkhanate, who were the products of the brutal conquest of Muslim-majority states.

It is rumoured that the some of the Yassa codes may have been used to administer affairs in with the Mamluks, however accounts of this are greatly exaggerated. However the Muslim Mamluks certainly knew of the Yassa and were very cautious and critical of it.

Al-Maqrizi, during this time, was very adamant and vocal about the Yassa being satanic, hmm I wonder why (hint: he had a sour opinion of the Mongols).

Considering all of this, can we truly believe what Al-Maqrizi said about the Mongols hygiene practices? Even other historians at the time had this strong bias against the Mongols, and we should really be taking what they say with a pinch of salt (probably like. 100kg of salt tbh)

In addition, I've seen a Mongolian answer this question online, and they said that in those times, Mongolias used ointments of animal origin to rub dirt off of the skin - similar to the inuits. Let's also remember that "running" water was not allowed to be used, and not allowed during thunderstorms. Running water was more often seen in nature settings for the Mongols in those times, and the fact that you weren't allowed to use running water during thunderstorms? Yeah honestly to me that just seems like respecting nature/Tengri and avoiding danger if anything.

So basically. They probably didn't smell that much worse than anyone else during the time!

DEFENDING MONGOLIA‼️ LEAVE HIM ALONE

[eruverse]

Kazmon! Also turkmon and tibmon ehe

😘

Kazmon:

Kazmon is in all honesty when you want to do Mongolia ships with his neighbors but keep it safe! Because really, basically NOTHING has happened between them 🤣 no bad stuff, but also not eeexactly wholesome stuff either. They are for the most part like cousins who sometimes visit each other and talk about stuff, they understand each other pretty well, but for the most part just coexist peacefully (aka ignore each other).

That’s the public face, but I think they secretly keep tabs on each other? Typically knows what’s going on in each other’s houses before the others outside their region do. But they don’t have many things to do with each other so they don’t meet up much. I headcanon that when they do meet up they will bond over many things tho because they have pretty similar hobbies mindset etc etc. And blood is thicker than water; this is a big part of them being somewhat attracted to each other. So I ship them for certain potential no one has really explored before.

Also even tho technically Kazakhstan is Mongolia’s descendant, and while Kaz respects Mongolia for their shared history and ancestry, Kaz is a proud dude himself and see each other as direct equals!!

Tibmon:

I can’t say much because I really don’t know anything about Tibet (he’s not a steppe nomad so I don’t care much LOL) but they’re pretty intriguing! I can see a deep friendship!

Montur:

My ultimate Turco-Mongol ship LOL. Two people who share an ancestor, drifted apart, and then rediscover each other again! Also they’ve been conquering each other or be conquered, nice. They’re equal and mutual and I love them for it. Montur to me is like travel lovers who are v chill with each other and will have fun whenever they meet but not much beyond that? They are massively fascinated by each other but it’s also all very relaxed, if you know what I mean!! None of them carry like, this deep feeling for each other and they don’t exactly miss each other when they’re apart. But will go at it like the most intense lovers when they’re together.

**

You will notice that I crossed the ‘I don’t really see them as romantic’ box in all the ships, and tbh that’s how I see Mongolia personally. I think he’s like, not much prone to actual romance? He can get into relationships for many kinds of reason and he can return advances, he can love others deeply, but I don’t think it’s romantic much in the end. He can be possessive and he loves challenges/fueled by spite, he wants to protect, provide and has massive ego, he likes it when people grovel on his feet LMAO but when I really think about it he’s not much into actual romance with any of his partners. When he’s into others, he is into their charisma, intensity, sexuality esp etc — but the desire to romantically own is quite absent? This is a working hc currently tho. So Mongolia is like aro or demi.

[diabolus-dixit]

En México hay un geopolitólogo, Alfredo Jalife, que desde luego es crítico contra las mierdas hechas por los zionistas, y a menudo lo acusan de antisemita.

Lo curioso es que Jalife es de origen libanés, y sus acusadores son jázaros (turco-mongoles convertidos al judaísmo): los no-semitas acusan a un verdadero semita (Jalife) de ser antisemita, al mismo tiempo que ellos masacran a verdaderos semitas (los palestinos).

Once again, end your NYT subscription