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mariacallous · 6 months ago

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In Germany, it is in hushed, angst-infused tones that observers now utter the words “Weimarer Verhältnisse,” or Weimar conditions. This refers to the chaos and violence that political extremists sowed during Germany’s 1918 to 1933 Weimar Republic, an experiment in democracy that ended with the Nazis grabbing power. Postwar Germany has gone to extreme lengths—in every field of its culture, economy, and society—to proscribe any return of the precarious conditions that witnessed fierce street battles between the communist left and Nazi right and enabled Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party to capture so much of the German vote that it could come to power in 1933—and from there shut down the democratic state and impose a fascist dictatorship.

This is why Germans today are so deeply distressed about the shocking spate of violence against candidates and campaign volunteers involved in the run-up to the EU-wide European Parliament elections on June 6 to 9. And there is some evidence that the phenomenon, while most intense and sustained in Germany, is not confined to the Federal Republic. In Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico was the victim of an assassination attempt on May 15. France, Poland, the Netherlands, and other countries have also seen violence against politicos surge—although its perpetrators are not generally as closely associated with the extreme-right scene as in Germany.

The Dutch political historian Ido de Haan underscores that the far right’s ascendance across Europe is at the root of the problem: “The larger context for this violence is mostly the hard right’s ascendance across Europe,” he told Foreign Policy. He pointed out that the far right leads or participates in governments in Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, and most recently the Netherlands, too. The far-right parties, including in Germany, are expected to score particularly well in the EU vote, and headline-grabbing attacks could play into their court, he said.

Indeed, Germany appears to be the epicenter of the phenomenon—and female personnel are particularly vulnerable. On May 4, a prominent Social Democrat, Matthias Ecke, was hanging posters in Dresden when attacked by four teenagers, at least one a known right-wing radical, and badly beaten, landing him in the hospital with broken bones. That week, a female Green party campaign worker in the same city was assaulted. In Berlin on May 7, a former mayor, Social Democrat Franziska Giffey, was assailed and hurt. In 2023, aggressive behavior toward political figures and officials in Germany surged: 3,691 incidents, 80 of them involving physical violence. The numbers show that the lion’s share of perpetrators are extreme rightists. The party bearing the overwhelming brunt of abuse: the Greens.

The hard right has long seen leftists as its primary political enemy, but several years running now it is the Greens party—with its high-profile climate policies and progressive identity politics—that presents an oversized target. The far right brands the environmentalists as elitist, cosmopolitan, and more concerned about the natural world than the human beings living in it. They are pigeonholed as the party that wants to ban and outlaw things like combustion-engine automobiles, domestic flights, and new oil and gas heating systems. But all of the democratic parties are objects of hate for the hard right, and they are singled out as such with purpose and strategic calculation.

“In Germany,” de Haan said, “these cases and others constitute interference in the electoral processes,” which he argued is, for the moment at least, unique in Europe. The Greens and other leftist parties are targeted in an indirectly organized, tactical effort to obstruct their campaigns and undermine democracy, he said. “The extreme right’s aim is to deny the legitimacy of democratic processes. It wants to assert itself as the most visible and consequential political force prepared to stand up and do something dramatic about the system’s perceived failings.”

“These attacks are aimed at destroying the very basis of democracy,” agreed the left-liberal daily Tageszeitung, “at the political commitment of people in their city and community. If everyone is too afraid to run for office, the perpetrators will have won.”

In contrast, the Fico assassination attempt in Slovakia appears to be more similar to past political violence in Slovakia carried out by underworld protagonists or political enemies. The assailant was a lone perpetrator, frustrated with government policies and thus appears “closely related to the specific conditions in Slovakia,” explained Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian at the University of Regensburg. Therre is a “supercharged polarization, a public debate full of hate speech, ubiquitous accusations of corruption and illegitimacy against political opponents, and the big conflict over Slovakia’s geopolitical position: West or East,” Brunnbauer told Foreign Policy.

Experts in Germany say the prominence and expansion of political violence has everything to do with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) itself, an extremist party with convictions that often dovetail with those of full-fledged neo-Nazis, the likes of whom are at home within its ranks. “The AfD is a party with violence in its DNA,” said Heike Kleffner, an author of several books on the German right and head of a counseling center for victims of right-wing violence. “Its language, proclamations, and accusations condone and even call for violence against its political foes,” she said.

So incendiary is the party that several AfD branches in eastern Germany and the national AfD youth section are the subject of German intelligence service observation. The AfD’s politics are so much more radical than those of its far-right peers in the European Parliament’s Identity and Democracy group, an alliance of populist right-wing parties that includes Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally, that the alliance expelled the AfD from its ranks on May 21. A new German study found that 28 AfD members serving in German legislatures had been convicted of violence-related crimes, including verbal violence and incitement to hatred.

Kleffner pointed out that right-wing attacks against democratic officials are not new, although their scope has expanded. In 2019, Walter Lübcke, a Christian Democrat politician in Hesse, was gunned down by a neo-Nazi after expressing sympathy with refugees. In 2015, the liberal-minded then-candidate for mayor of Cologne was stabbed in the throat while campaigning.

In response, the AfD denies that it has anything to do with street violence. And it points out that it is also the victim of political violence. On May 22, an AfD politico, Mario Kumpf, was punched in the face at a supermarket in Saxony. Most recently, on June 5, another local AfD official was attacked with a knife in Mannheim, a city in western Germany. But neither the AfD’s number of victims nor the severity of their injuries is on par with those of the democratic parties—and the attacks are not part of a larger political strategy.

The threat of injury has already impacted Germany’s political culture. Candidates and campaigners travel in groups. Party insiders say that they are finding it harder to get new people to run for office.

“No one can say what the threshold is at which democracy tips over,” Holger Münch, head of Germany’s federal investigative police agency, told the German media. “But when 10 percent of office and mandate holders say they are considering quitting because of the hostility and another almost 10 percent say they no longer want to run for office again because of the hostility, this is clearly too high.”

The spike in violence and the dramatic headlines have renewed calls for police departments to do more, and even for the state to ban the AfD. The German government passed a Democracy Promotion Act that would finance initiatives that promote “diversity, tolerance, and democracy” with around 200 million euros a year.

Historians such as Brunnbauer say that the violence on the German political scene is nothing like the pandemonium that raged in Weimar Germany. But others point out that then, as now, the hard right utilized violence to achieve political goals. The hate speech, injunctions to take action, and demonization of political opponents jacks up the animosity that like-minded toughs dole out in fists and clubbings on the street.

“The consensus that existed in the old Federal Republic that [political violence] is unacceptable under penalty of political ostracism has been shattered,” opined the Tageszeitung. More violence could shatter the new normal, delivering democracy in Germany a blow that may not equate with the conditions of Weimar Germany but which looks enough like them to set off alarm bells.

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justforbooks · 29 days ago

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Exhuming Dracula’s Ancestors

What Vampires Reveal About Our Latent Fears 🎃🎃🎃👻🧛‍♂️

In 2014, an archeological team in Sozopol, Bulgaria unearthed a skeleton in a stone tomb held down with an iron sickle, each one of the teeth from his open jaw pried out. Similar remains have been found decapitated, their cackling skulls now placed between their bony legs, looking upwards through absent eyes at the scholars who uncover them.

“Ways to protect against the return of the dead include cutting off the heads or legs, placing the deceased face down to bite into the ground, burning them, and smashing them with a stone,” explained archaeologist Dariusz Polinski of Nicholas Copernicus University, describing a different excavation to The Daily Mail in 2022. The Bulgarians called such beings Nachzehrer, but the undead are most iconically remembered as vampires, as cannibalistic revenants returning to feed upon the living.

The Sozopol find isn’t the only so-called “vampire corpse” from the Middle Ages to be discovered in this city by the Black Sea, or even the only one from Bulgaria. Several other supposed vampires, dating from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, have been found throughout Sozopol and Bulgaria, and they’re not uncommon in Romania, Hungary, or the Balkans. Examples include a padlocked child entombed in Poland and a Venetian woman with a brick placed in her mouth. In 2023, roadworkers expanding a highway in northeast Poland uncovered a mass grave of Vjesci, as the local language calls them, containing around 450 decapitated women, men, and children dating back around four centuries.

The vampire is as iconic a monster as has existed, yet to look upon these piles of twisted bones is to remember their origins, for long before the revenant was a literary creation of Irish novelist Bram Stoker, it was something else, something less familiar. Something alien, strange, bestial, and feral.

Eastern Europe has always had the richest tradition surrounding fears of the undead, whether the Greek vrykolakas, the Polish upiory, or the Romanian pricolici and strigoi (there are differences amongst all these types). Variations abound—some legends accumulate all of the expected vampiric accoutrements, from the aversion to garlic and mirrors, to the allergy concerning sunlight and the stake through the heart.

James Frazer, in his 1890 anthropological classic The Golden Bough, notes that “in very obstinate cases of vampirism it is recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic” or maybe to rather “Extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave.” What all versions of these folktales share, however, is a sheer sense of the vampire’s otherness, its alien and inhuman alterity. Also crucial to remember that the vampire was never merely a motif, trope, metaphor, or symbol—the vampire was believed to be real.

For example, there’s one Jure Grando, a Croatian stonemason and rumored warlock who rose from the dead and terrorized his former neighbors until his corpse could be decapitated in 1672. Then there is Peter Blagojevic, a Serbian vampire who returned from the grave to murder nine villagers before his remains could be staked in 1725, that event being witnessed by a Hapsburg envoy from the distant, cosmopolitan capital. Or the incident of Miloš Čečar, from the same Balkan hamlet as Blagojevic, a retired soldier and farmer attacked by a vampire and cursed to return as the same.

Before any of those middling cases there was the fifteenth-century Wallachian tyrant Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes, he of the “Order of the Dragon” and son of Prince Dracule, Stoker’s inspiration for his 1897 Dracula. Sadistic, cruel, Machiavellian, and sociopathic, for as a Hungarian papal legate reported after a massacre that took 40,000 lives in 1464, Vlad was partial to “breaking…[victims] under the wheels of carts; others…were skinned alive up to their entrails; others places upon stakes, or roasted on red-hot coals placed under them,” and of course, others were “punctured with stakes.” An especially notable adept at cruelty in an age marked by the likes of Cesar Borgia and Ivan the Terrible, Vlad’s infamy includes tales of him nailing turbans to the heads of Ottoman diplomats and impaling a squeamish boyar above his compatriots so he wouldn’t be bothered by the stench, but ironically there were no accounts of Tepes being a vampire until Stoker’s fiction, though stories of him casually dipping bread into blood as if it were olive oil has the vampiric about it.

The vampire as it’s developed over the past century of popular culture, from Dracula onward, is different from the folkloric eastern European creature—a gloaming animal of the night, subaltern to humanity—though elements have obviously been preserved. Stoker’s titular count is arguably as super-human as he is monstrous. “I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome,” the Transylvanian count tells Jonathan Harker, the English solicitor organizing the sale of London real estate to the undead aristocrat. “Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.” Where the skeletons in that Bulgarian basement were of people understood (fairly or not) by their neighbors as feral, rabid, and wild, Dracula is urbane and sophisticated, cosmopolitan and sexy.

Endlessly beguiling, evocative, intoxicating, and charismatic, Dracula is the rare monster whom somebody would actually want to imitate, actually want to be. Nobody desires to be Frankenstein’s monster, hobbled together from putrid, stinking cadaver sections, or a mummy wrapped in bandages, whereas Dracula remains a gothic touchstone for a reason. A blood drinker, for sure, but that’s in service of his eternal youth, an amoral selfishness based in Romantic ideas of art and beauty. Stoker’s vampire is less Vjesci than Miltonic Lucifer, less Nachzehrer than he is a Byronic Hero.

The original, folkloric vampire still endures, however, invited into our homes (as they must be). David Slade’s 2007 adaptation of the comic books 30 Days of Night in which shrieking, bloodied and empurpled vampires speaking in a guttural tongue descend upon an Alaskan town during the winter solstice to feed unhampered by sunlight—Mike Flanagan’s 2021 Netflix series Midnight Mass, a powerful meditation on faith that features a silent, demonic vampire—even the creatures in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer that ran from 1997 until 2003. The most enduring of such representations remains, of course, Count Orlok in German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 Nosferatu, still the greatest horror movie ever made (and, to much excitement, remade this year by Robert Eggers).

An irony in claiming that Nosferatu preserved the substance of the original vampire in a manner that Dracula didn’t, as the former is based on the narrative of the later, to the point that Murnau’s character is only named “Orlok” because Stoker’s widow wouldn’t allow the (then copywritten) name to be used. Regardless of the plot, however, Orlok is a different beast from how Dracula would come to be depicted; this vampire—as played with chilling efficacy by Max Schrek—is gaunt and angular, creeping and corpuscular. Murnau never lets you forget the score when it comes to the vampire’s vocation—“Blood is life! Blood is life!” reads a title card, the white words floating in their black void. Orlok’s sharpened teeth, bald pate, pointed ears, and those long fingers tapered with talons is filmed in shadow and darkness while being framed in long, disorienting perspective. In his creaking ascent to pierce the throat of a virginal innocent, Orlok recalls as much of the Bulgarian burial field as he does Bella Lugosi or Christopher Lee.

Stoker’s source material didn’t obscure the regional specificity of the vampire, even while he greatly amended the original, so that the Irish novelist’s revision of that folklore would be the most audacious reinvention of a monster until George Romero discovered (Caribbean) zombies. Still, “We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England,” as Stoker’s Dracula says, “Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.” Never should it be in doubt that in borrowing from eastern European folklore, Stoker saw fit to maintain the original setting of those legends for a specific purpose.

To a western European audience, eastern Europe was a backwards, superstitious and mysterious region, whether on the flat plain of the Hungarian Steppe covered in fescue grass or the gnarled, craggy Carpathian Mountains, in the sunflower fields of Ukraine or the primeval darkness of Białowieża Forest between Belarus and Poland. In Stoker’s imagination, eastern Europe is a dark land of haunting carriage rides through steep passes, of gypsy wagons and astringent slivovitz. “The phrase Eastern Europe is an outsider’s convenience,” writes Jacob Mikanowski in Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land, “a catchall to conceal a nest of stereotypes.” For Stoker’s readers, and all those in his stead, this tremendously complicated region—encompassing languages Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic (among others) and worshipping in sects Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, and pagan (among others)—was a cipher for primitivism, savagery, barbarism, superstition.

Though, maybe more charitably, when Stoker, who grew up as Catholic child in British-occupied Dublin, looked east he may have understood much of what it is to be from a peripheral, colonized land. In that reading, eastern Europe is a broad gloaming place between east and west, pressed between the imperial ambitions of Austrians, Ottomans, and Russians, where Dracula’s final feeding on a decadent West as he traipses through London has its own anti-colonial implications. If that interpretation appears a stretch, at least reflect on how variable the ideology of the vampire legend has been, useful to both the right and the left. With its uncomfortable resonances with the antisemitic blood libel myths, the vampire story was often been appropriated by fascists, though a communist like Karl Marx could also be positively gothic, as in Das Kapital where he describes his subject as “dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.”

The original vampire, I would venture was about something different entirely, for if there is any fear that the returning dead embody it’s a fear of the past, of history, of tradition. Return to those reports of vampirism detailed earlier, because the year when Grando was decapitated, Isaac Newton was at work on his Principia; as Blagojevic and Čečar were staked, a young Benjamin Franklin was at work in his brother’s print shop.

As Voltaire had noted, there was a certain irony that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century, the veritable Age of Reason, would see the greatest proliferation of the vampire legend, but maybe that indicates that the legend’s endurance has as much to do with modernity as it does with mere superstition. To fear a vampire is to rightly fear the past, to see in the revenant the return of that which is buried and better left dead.

Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, in their 1975 biography of Vlad the Impaler, argue that “we all know deep down that Dracula represents… that which should have remained hidden but does not.” The vampire is the cold hand of our ancestors, forcing us to reckon with them when their most charitable act would be to remain dead. Nicolas Ceausescu, the Stalinist dictator of Romania, was beguiled by Vlad the Impaler, seeing in him a model strong man, and honoring him (among other ways) by affixing his mustachioed visage to a postal stamp. During the 1989 revolution that toppled him, Ceausescu attempted to escape to Snagov, where Dracula was supposedly buried, “evidently seeking solace and support” as McNally and Florescu drolly note. Arrested by the revolutionaries, Ceausescu and his wife would be tried and summarily executed three days before Christmas; lacking a stake, the partisans simply used bullets instead.

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#just for books #Dracula #Bram Stoker #Vampires #Halloween #Scary Stories #Vampire Corpse

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duckprintspress · 5 months ago

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Celebrating the History of the Stonewall Riots

June 28th 2024 was the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, a turning point event often seen as the birth of the modern gay rights movement. To celebrate, we’ve assembled a short list of our favorite non-fiction books about queer activism – plus two websites that are good resources as well! The contributors to this list are Kelas, Meera S., E. C., Tris Lawrence, and three anonymous contributors.

And Then I Danced: Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality by Mark Segal

On December 11, 1973, Mark Segal disrupted a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News when he sat on the desk directly between the camera and news anchor Walter Cronkite, yelling, “Gays protest CBS prejudice ” He was wrestled to the studio floor by the stagehands on live national television, thus ending LGBT invisibility. But this one victory left many more battles to fight, and creativity was required to find a way to challenge stereotypes surrounding the LGBT community. Mark Segal’s job, as he saw it, was to show the nation who gay people are: our sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers.

Because of activists like Mark Segal, whose life work is dramatically detailed in this poignant and important memoir, today there are openly LGBT people working in the White House and throughout corporate America. An entire community of gay world citizens is now finding the voice that they need to become visible.

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

A provocative manifesto, Whipping Girl tells the powerful story of Julia Serano, a transsexual woman whose supremely intelligent writing reflects her diverse background as a lesbian transgender activist and professional biologist. Serano shares her experiences and observations—both pre- and post-transition—to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole.

Serano’s well-honed arguments stem from her ability to bridge the gap between the often-disparate biological and social perspectives on gender. She exposes how deep-rooted the cultural belief is that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive, and how this “feminine” weakness exists only to attract and appease male desire.

In addition to debunking popular misconceptions about transsexuality, Serano makes the case that today’s feminists and transgender activist must work to embrace and empower femininity—in all of its wondrous forms.

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg

In this fascinating, personal journey hrough history, Leslie Feinberg uncovers persuasive evidence that there have always been people who crossed the cultural boundaries of gender. Transgender Warriors is an eye-opening jaunt through the history of gender expression and a powerful testament to the rebellious spirit.

Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Ka’ahumanu

In this groundbreaking anthology, more than seventy women and men from all walks of life describe their lives as bisexuals in prose, poetry, art, and essays

Queer Budapest, 1873–1961 by Anita Kurimay

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-si cle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961.

Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality’s political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary’s–and Europe’s–modern incarnation.

The Stonewall Reader by New York Public Library

June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library’s archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Jason Baumann, the NYPL coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.

Bonus – Two Great Websites:

Stonewall National Museum Archives & Library

Making Queer History

View this list, and our other queer non-fiction book recs, as a shelf on Goodreads!

See a book you need to own? Buy it through our affiliate shop on Bookshop.org!

#duck prints press #stonewall #stonewall riots #queer history #queer nonfiction #rec list #book recommendations #queer books #queer books recommendations

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literary-illuminati · 2 years ago

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Book Review 5 - The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabrielle and David M. Perry

Okay, the Harper Collins strike is over, so I can finally post this! As you might notice, the wait has meant I have ended up writing far too much of it. Turns out people really are telling the truth when they say writing negative reviews is funner and easier.

Anyway, I did not like this book! It’s an ungainly thing, torn halfway between wanting to be pop history and wanting to be an intervention in the discourse, and entirely too short to do either well. Insofar as is it history, it’s far less revolutionary than it seems to think it is, and the subjects it actually focuses on either already fit entirely into the pop understanding the book is positioning itself against, or else entirely about symbolism and architecture and generally abstracted from (being partial and small-minded) the stuff I’m actually interested in.

All that said the first and fundamental is pretty simple – it’s just altogether too short to do what it wants to. The book tries to be a history of the European Middle Ages – a thousand years of history for an entire continent (more than, given the repeated digressions about the Middle East and also the Mongols one time) – in 200 pages. Which is just, like, I mean I don’t want to say impossible, but I can’t really see any way you’d do it. Which means what we actually get is a series of snapshots, scattered across space and time – just specific, particular dynamics or situations that rarely have much to do with each other. I’m pretty sure the only specific place we ever return to after focusing on it is Ravenna, and that’s for a big, dramatic bookend starting the age with Galla Placidia and ending with Dante. Also the return is really more about Italian city states as a whole. Which is to say only Florence gets any detail at all.

A necessary causality of the snapshot approach is that there’s wide swathes of the period that just, aren’t mentioned in the slightest. Which again, fair, but also it’s a bit much for one of the lacuna to be the entire Holy Roman Empire, right? (Okay, not the entire, there’s repeated off hand mentions of Emperors, and also talk of how the Italian city-states fought the Empire. Just never any description whatsoever of what it, like, was. Except for the specific disavowal of saying it started with Charlemagne, which was never followed up on.) Which is still better than what Poland or Hungary or Lithuania or Kievan Rus got – if any of them were even mentioned, it was only off hand. Which does end up giving the impression that Medieval Europe included Jerusalem but not Krakow – to be fair, something a lot of actual Medieval people might have totally agree with. But given the amount of time spent on the Crusades to the Levant and the Albigensian Crusade, not even mentioning the bloody Christianize of the Baltic in passing feels negligent to the point of being actively misleading.

Also it’s weird, given the books whole focus on connections and commerce between Europe and the rider world – the steppe is right there! You don’t need to wait for the Mongols!

Speaking of – they give a bunch of apologia for the Mongol Empire that’s – well, basically the same stuff all empires get, brought safety to the roads and allowed free movement and trade, brought people together, spread culture and technology, enlightened and cosmopolitan, etc. Which I mostly just find funny because of how obvious it is the authors would, uh, probably not endorse the same sentiment for any more recent imperial projects.

But okay – it’s not that you can’t tell a useful history in what might seem to be way too little space – John Darwin tries to tell a literal history of the world from the 16th century in ~500 pages and I’d still say After Tamerlane is absolutely worthwhile reading. You just need, you know, discipline. Focus. A firm idea of your thesis and an obsession of what’s relevant to it (or just be entertaining and full of fun memorable trivia). So, what are Perry and Gabrielle actually trying to do here?

Honestly, it’s a little bit unclear? The thesis they present is that the Dark Ages didn’t exist – they insist on referring the whole Medieval period as ‘the Bright Ages’ through the entire book, it’s incredibly annoying – and that the Medieval period get a horribly unjustified bad wrap as uniquely cruel and provincial and barbaric and full of disease, illiteracy, superstition, etc. They explicitly position themselves as being a reaction to the vision of the past you see in Game of Thrones or Vikings (I’d say ‘or the Witcher’ but again, for the purposes of this book Eastern Europe doesn’t exist). Instead, they fill the book with hand picked examples of medieval beauty, sophistication, and connection to the wider world with the quite explicit contention that everything good about the Renaissance (and later) was really just outgrowths of the Medieval, and it was only the bad stuff that was new.

(At the same time, they also do not like white nationalists, and go out of their way at length on numerous occasions to remind you that Nazis are bad. Those digressions do always leave me wondering who they’re for – no actual Deus Vult type is going to get more than five pages into it, and they rarely get much deeper that surface level refutation of things no one else is likely to actually believe.)

Anyway – look, the central, overriding problem of the book is that it’s not nearly as revolutionary as it seems to think it is. Very problematic, when it has such a high opinion of itself for being so. The assorted trivia the book uses as shocking examples of how cosmopolitan and tolerant the period was mostly just, well, fit perfectly fine into the popular imagining of the Medieval era? Like ‘royals and elites imported foreign luxury goods and status symbols at great expense; missionaries, adventurers and religious emissaries travelled across Eurasia to preach, trade and try to find someone to help them invade Muslims ; women often wielded significant political influence by virtue of royal birth of marriage, and were active political players’ – are these statements shocking to literally anyone? Basically all of that literally happens in Game of Thrones!

Part of that is that the book keeps almost committing to a really radical thesis – not to say pure unreconstructed romanticism, but close to it – and then always has an attack of professional ethics and cringes away from it, and just awkwardly brings up how, to be sue, there were serfs and slaves and atrocities, but nonetheless when you think about it the later Crusader States really were fascinating sites of cultural exchange, or whatever.

Psychoanalyzing the authors is bad form, of course, but like – reading this book the overriding sense you get is that they’re proud progressives, and have dedicated their lives to studying the Medieval era. But in the contemporary discourse people on their side use ‘Medieval’ as an insult to mean patriarchal, or brutal, or cruel, and the people who like the Medieval era are all in the Sack of Jerusalem Fandom. The sheer angst and righteous indignation they have about this state of affairs just about oozes through every page – honestly if I’m being maximally pithy and uncharitable, you rather get the sense that the real aim of the book is to make ‘being really into Medieval history’ a less reactionary-coded interest to bring up at professional-class dinner parties.

But honestly I could have forgiven almost all of this if the anecdotes and snapshots the book did focus on were informative and interesting. And this is almost entirely pure personal preference, I fully acknowledge but – the things that the book chose to focus on just really weren’t, to me?

Which is to say that The Bright Ages is incredibly interested in architectural and monumental symbolism, especially of the religious variety – there are whole chapters overwhelmingly dedicated to exploring the layout of churches and how their architecture and lighting was meant to convey meaning, or detailing at great length a specific monumental cross in northern England. These are used as synecdoches for broader topics, of course but, like, an awful lot of word count really is dedicated to describing how Gala Placedia’s chapel in Ravenna must have wowed people. And even as far as using them as synecdoches – the way that monasteries, bishops and the royal household in Paris competed to have the most impressive church/chapel as a way to convey religious authority is genuinely interesting, but I’d honestly have rather heard a lot more of the actual politics and sociology or how sacred authority and legitimacy was gathered around the Capetians in the later middle ages and a lot less about how specifically impressive the royal chapel on the palace grounds was. There’s a massive amount of symbolic and artistic detail, a fair amount of time spent charting great thinkers and proving that there was too such a thing as a Medieval intellectual, and almost none at all on, like, political and social and (god forbid) economic history. Which are, unfortunately, the bits of it I’m actually interested in.

The book isn’t just architecture of course, but much of the rest is either very basic – yes, the vikings were traders as well as raiders and travelled shockingly long distances, yes there was intellectual interchange between Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across the Mediterranean, yes the Church acted as a vital sponsor of learning and scholarship. I’m sure these are new information to like, someone? - or so caught up in historiographical arguments and qualifications that it loses sight of the actual subject – I swear the book spent more time saying that it’s wrong to call it a Carolingian Renaissance because that implies there were actual dark ages before and after than it does explaining why anyone actually would.

Beyond that – okay, so as mentioned this book is really consciously progressive. Which, beyond a certain antiquarian distaste for how desperately they’re trying to get across ‘see, our field of study is Relevant! And Important! Please please please give us tenure/prestige/funding’ I wholly support. (I mean, like, I do think Medieval Studies deserves tenure/prestige/funding. Just slightly unbecoming to so transparently be grasping for it, and also more than a bit self-defeating) - but, like, the book’s politics are weird? Or weirdly surface level and slightly confused, given how much of the book is focused around them.

Like – the book spends a massive amount of time and attention combating the myth that women in the middle ages were all cloistered and politically mute and totally powerless. But the sum total of what it actually says is ‘did you know: elite women in the aristocracy and church exercised political influence? And a lot of the Christianization of western Europe happened through highborn christian women marrying pagan kings and raising their children Christian?” And while I suppose ‘elite women have influence even in patriarchal societies’ is a useful fact for someone to learn, I’m not sure examples that more or less cash out to ‘queens could have power by manipulating their husbands and sons’ is a particularly novel or progressive take, you know? More broadly – it’s a weakness of the book’s framework of jumping across countries and centuries between anecdotes that we never get any sense of gender roles and how power and influence were gendered systemically, so much as single (or if you’re very lucky, two or three) particular women with a vague gesture that they’re kind of typical. Not to complain about a lack of theory, but there’s really basically zero theory.

The book’s choices of examples for women to focus on are also – okay, not to be all ‘why didn’t you talk about my faves’, but insofar as you’re talking how women were able to exercise power, it’s really very odd that you never talk about any women who, like, ruled in their own right? C’mon, you mention the Anarchy offhand to introduce Eleanor of Aquitaine but don’t even say what it was about, let alone talk about the Empress Matilda? (I’d say the same thing about Matilda of Tuscany and the investiture Controversy, but it’s not like the book actually talks about the Investiture Controversy beyond the absolute basics, so). The final result is a book that talks a lot about how elite women had influence, and then the influence they actually bring up is almost always of the most stereotypically feminine-gender variety imaginable.

All that really pales to how confused the book seems when it talks about Christianity. Which it has to, of course, fairly constantly – it’s a book about Medieval Europe. But it’s kind of horribly torn between two imperatives here – on the one hand, it desperately wants to fight back against the whole black legend of the tyrannical, book-burning, Galileo-murdering, science-suppressing hopelessly venal and corrupt, all-powering Magesterium. But on the other, they really don’t want to come off as supporting, well, the heretic murdering and antisemitism or being the sort of guy online who posts memes of the Knights Templar. So you see this somewhat exhausting two-step where they go on at length about all the beautiful architecture and scholarship preservation the church did interrupted every so often by this concession about how of course it wasn’t all good and obviously pogroms and burning heretics wasn’t great, but- (The chapter on the vikings is much the same, except with a much clearer ‘it’s important not to romanticize these people because the people who do that are white nationalists, but also see how tolerant and far-ranging and cool they are?’)

Discussing the Church is also a place where the book’s whole allergy to social structure and institutions really serves it poorly. I at a certain point stopped keeping count of the number of times where the book called out that the centralized, papal-centric Church was a creation of the high middle ages, and not at all how things worked for most of the period. But then they just never actually explain how they worked instead, or really even how things changed to so enshrine the Pope’s power. They talk about how convents could be wealthy and powerful landholders and their abbesses’ wield significant power, but never even gesture at explaining how they interfaced with the institutional church. It’s really very frustrating.

Of course Christianity still gets far better treatment than Judaism or Islam – there’s a chapter which goes into some detail on the life of Maimonides in the process of extolling Medieval scholarship and talking about how classical learning was never really lost and the Renaissance is fake news. But despite the gestures to the presence of Jewish communities throughout Europe there’s essentially zero, like, description of how they actually functioned, or were organized, or (aside from the occasionally mentioned pogroms) how they interacted with their christian neighbours. The treatment of Islam is much the same – there are some mentions of the Islamic wold and its intellectual traditions, but essentially just to rehash the same points about the Islamic Golden age and Ibn Sina and all the other bits of trivia everyone probably picked up keeping up with the culture war during the Bush Administration. But again, only the most passing mentions of, like, politics or organization or even theology. It felt gratingly cursory, given the emphasis placed on the fact that eg Al Andulas was clearly part of Medieval Europe

Underneath all this is just the fact that The Bright Ages is almost an entirely a history of the elite. Peasants, serfs and slaves only exist in the for the sake of concessions about how of course things weren’t all good. The book has almost no interest in the lives of the lower classes, and barely seems to realize this. It starts to really, really grate, especially when you’re making all these implicit judgments about how the Medieval era was compared to what came after – in which case, the lives of, like, 90% of the population are rather important! Like unironically peasant life is fascinating! What did life actually look like of the overwhelmingly majority of people? If you want to give a sketch of the entire era, it’s kind of important.

I’m almost certainly being unfair here – basically everything about the book’s sensibilities grated on me, so I can’t say I was trying to be especially charitable. But really – the book’s perfectly fine light reading, but as intentional propaganda is hamfisted and it’s unclear who it’s for, and as an actual history it’s just...bad. It’s useful as a way to get a sense of the discourse, I guess, but otherwise I couldn’t really recommend it.

#Book Review #The Bright Ages #Matthew Gabrielle #David M. Perry #history #sorry this is so long

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mecachrome · 3 months ago

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Can you please gif oscar talking about Lily from the new cosmopolitan interview?

hi anon! wasn't sure if you wanted the hungary ment too so i just did both moments hope it helps *__*

#ask

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blackswaneuroparedux · 2 years ago

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The historian must enter into the dialectic of the actual and the potential contained in every critical moment of the past. Memory is the real psyche or life force and nothing is genuinely more alive than the historian’s disciplined rejoining of the past; apprehended in the right way, history becomes palpable.

- John Lukacs

A fine modern historian whose writing was influenced by his upbringing in war torn Hungary and as a devout Catholic. Lukacs was an iconoclast who brooded over the future of Western civilisation, wrote a bestselling tribute to Winston Churchill, and produced a substantial and often despairing body of writings on the politics and culture of Europe and the United States.

A proud and old-fashioned man with a cosmopolitan accent, and erudite but personal prose style, Lukacs was a maverick among historians. In a profession where liberals were a clear majority, he was sharply critical of the left and of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. But he was also unhappy with the modern conservative movement, opposing the Iraq war, mocking hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller as the “Zsa Zsa Gabor of physics” and disliking the “puerile” tradition, apparently started by Ronald Reagan, of presidents returning military salutes from the armed forces.

Lukacs completed more than 30 books, on diverse subjects including his native country and 20th century American history, as well as the meaning of history itself. His books include “Five Days in London,” the memoir “Confessions of an Original Sinner,” and “Historical Consciousness,” in which he contended that the best way to study any subject, whether science or politics, was through its history.

He considered himself a “reactionary,” a mourner for the “civilisation and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western.” He saw decline in the worship of technological progress, the elevation of science to religion, and the rise of materialism. Drawing openly upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about a “tyranny of the majority,” Lukacs was especially wary of populism and was quoted by other historians as Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Lukacs feared that the public was too easily manipulated into committing terrible crimes.

Hitler and Stalin were Lukacs’ prime villains, Churchill his hero. Lukacs wrote several short works on Churchill’s leadership during World War II, focusing on his defiant “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech as the Nazis were threatening England in May 1940. Lukacs wrote that the speech was at first not well received and that instead of having a unified country behind him, Churchill had to fight members of his own Cabinet who wanted to make peace with the Nazis.

One Churchill book attained unexpected popularity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Rudolph Giuliani, then New York City’s mayor, held up a copy of Lukacs’ “Five Days in London,” declared he had been reading it and likened New Yorkers to the citizens of London.

Quietly published in 2000, the book jumped into the top 100 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list. But Lukacs was not entirely grateful. He noted that “Five Days in London” had little to say about how Londoners endured the Nazi assault, and he rejected comparisons between London in 1940 and New York City in 2001.

“The situation was totally different,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. “As a matter of fact, it was much worse in England.”

He wrote about how the postwar era signaled the end of an age of civility. Modernity, he argued, had run its course since the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, and a new barbarism would take its place.

Lukacs’ ideas defied easy classification. He was for a time a darling of conservatives, but he rejected the notion that people could be defined as hewing to the political left or right.

The Cold War, he argued, had never been a conflict between communism and democracy; rather, it was a struggle between Russia and the United States. At the same time, he insisted that economic conditions never determined human belief.

Born Jan. 31, 1924, in Budapest, Lukacs Janos Albert had a Catholic father and Jewish mother, making him technically a Jew, although he was a practicing Catholic for much of his life. For the Nazis, who occupied Hungary in 1944, being half Jewish was enough to be sent to a labour camp.

By the end of 1944, he was a deserter from the Hungarian army labor battalion, hiding in a cellar, awaiting liberation by Russian troops. Within months of living under Soviet control, he fled the country on a “dirty, broken-down train” to Austria. In 1946, he arrived by ship in Portland, Maine, his youthful affinity for communism shattered.

Lukacs was a visiting professor at Princeton University, Columbia University and other prominent schools but spent much of his career on the faculty of the lesser-known Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic school (all girls until 2003) in Philadelphia where he taught from 1946 to 1994.

He called himself a “reactionary” because he was a traditionalist and a persuasive advocate of the necessity of historical knowledge to make any sense out of most things, and because he lamented the transformation of science into a false religion and the over-commercialisation of economic progress, and was viewed as curmudgeonly. He was, in fact, unimpressed with much that was modern but not a pessimist; he never resented disagreement, and was always good-natured in debate. He was an important historian of great integrity and originality, and certainly one of the greatest American historians of modern Europe.

A pessimist by definition, he often expressed personal contentment. He wrote warmly about his enjoyment of romance, friendship, books, teaching and the rural life, the “pleasure of fresh mornings, driving alone on country roads, smoking my matutinal cigar, mentally planning the contents of my coming lecture whose sequence and organization are falling wonderfully into place, crystallizing in sparks of sunlight.”

“Because of the goodness of God,” he concluded in his memoir, “I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.”

He died at age of 95 years old in 2019.

#lukacs #john lukacs #quote #history #academia #second world war #world war philosophy #ideas #university #hungary #britain #churchill #america #cold war #europe

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sharpened--edges · 1 year ago

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For the first time after the Great Purge, [after 1948] Stalin had a great number of high and highest officials executed, and we know for certain that this was planned as the beginning of another nationwide purge. This would have been touched off by the ‘Doctors’ plot’ had Stalin’s death not intervened. A group of mostly Jewish physicians were accused of having plotted ‘to wipe out the leading cadres of the USSR.’ […] The most dramatic new element in this last purge, which Stalin planned in the last years of his life, was a decisive shift in ideology, the introduction of a Jewish world conspiracy. For years, the ground for this change had been carefully laid in a number of trials in the satellite countries—the Rajk trial in Hungary, the Ana Pauker affair in Rumania, and, in 1952, the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia. In these preparatory measures, high party officials were singled out because of their ‘Jewish bourgeois’ origins and accused of Zionism; this accusation was gradually changed to implicate notoriously non-Zionist agencies (especially the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), in order to indicate that all Jews were Zionists and all Zionist groups ‘hirelings of American imperialism.’ There was of course nothing new in the ‘crime’ of Zionism, but as the campaign progressed and began to center on Jews in the Soviet Union, another significant change took place: Jews now stood accused of ‘cosmopolitanism’ rather than Zionism, and the pattern of accusations that developed out of this slogan followed ever more closely the Nazi pattern of a Jewish world conspiracy in the sense of the Elders of Zion. It now became startlingly clear how deep an impression this mainstay of Nazi ideology must have made on Stalin—the first indications of this had been in evidence ever since the Hitler-Stalin pact—partly, to be sure, because of its obvious propaganda value in Russia as in all of the satellite countries, where anti-Jewish feeling was widespread and anti-Jewish propaganda had always enjoyed great popularity, but partly also because this type of a fictitious world conspiracy provided an ideologically more suitable background for totalitarian claims to world rule than Wall Street, capitalism, and imperialism. The open, unashamed adoption of what had become to the whole world the most prominent sign of Nazism was the last compliment Stalin paid to his late colleague and rival in total domination with whom, much to his chagrin, he had not been able to come to a lasting agreement.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 1951/2017), pp. 30–32.

#hannah arendt

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hydralisk98 · 2 months ago

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Animated dolls playing dice on rollers! ’(thread 16^12 (article 0x25/?))

Mainline follow-up to this article:

Research dive

Getting inspired some for analog computing roots of the androids clades through those programmable wirebox, automatic card feeds & control panel stuff... as well as the whole of computation history.

Learnt about Pacific Cyber/Metrix (PCM for short) today, could get really handy as inspiration for 16^12 Angora hardware designs due to the tribble-based machines they made...

Anyways, back to the worldscape summary for 4524:

Civilizations

Shoshones

Poland

Morocco

Assyria

Mayas

Incas

Brazil

Babylon

Austria

Portugal

Korea

Carthage

Persia / Iran

Netherlands

Burgundy

Vietnam

Angola

Inuit

Sumer

Samoa

Scotland

Minoans

Mycenae

Hittites

Cree

Dene

Hungary

Ottoman Turks

Tatar Crimea

Blackfoot

Corsica

Moravia

Sinhala

Sami

Lithuania

Latvian

Songhay

Levantine (Yiddish?)

Nubia

Basque

Aremorici

Georgia

Armenia

Catalonia

Canton

Sweden

Czechia

Oman / Swahili

Major Religions

Pohakantenna (Shoshones, Blackfoot, Dene, Hurons)

Angakkunngurniq (Inuit)

Druidism / Al-Asnam (Aremorici)

Chalcedonian Ba'hai / Gnosticism / Arianism (Austria, Portugal, Brazil)

Hussitism (Poland, Moravia, Slovakia, Georgia)

Calvinism (Scotland, Burgundy)

Chaldeanism (Assyria, Morocco, Cree, Sumer, Babylon)

Tala-e-Fonua (Samoa, Sami, Canton, Czechia, Korea)

Daoism / Jainism (Chola / Sinhala, Vietnam)

Zoroastrianism (Iran, Minoans, Mycenae, Hittites)

Ibadiyya [Bantu + Ibadi Islam*] (Angola, Sweden)

Canaanism (Carthage, Netherlands)

"Kushite" Pesedjet (Nubia, Songhay)

Intiism (Incas, Coast Salish, Levant)

Tzolk'in (Mayas, Tatar / Crimea, Lithuania)

Contemporary trade blocks

Shoshone Union ("Hispanic"-tier cosmopolitan Americana-equivalent)

Inuit Assembly

Esperanto Pact as "Brazil" (industrious Burgundy, Scotland, Austria, Portugal... form under the Esperanto auxiliary language creole banner)

Nisian Conglomerate (Morocco + Assyria, collapses in 2000 and emulates soviet union history)

Polish Commonwealth

Samoan Trade Federation

Punic Confederation

Zapatista Authority (authoritarian "enlightened despotism" state turnt communal republic, history likewise to holy roman empire but revolutionary?)

#16^12 #maskoch #maskutchew

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digitalfountains · 1 month ago

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Manon Von Gerkan by Carlotta Moye

- Cosmopolitan Hungary, February 1999

#manon von gerkan #carlotta moye #cosmopolitan hungary #february 1999

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brookston · 7 months ago

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Holidays 5.7

Holidays

Basket of Gold Day (French Republic)

Beaufort Scale Day

Be Best Day

Box Camera Day

Cystinosis Awareness Day

Defender of the Fatherland Day (Kazakhstan)

Dien Bien Phu Victory Day (Vietnam)

Experience the Awesome Stomach-Churning Wonder of a Thrill Ride Day

Fire Escape Ladder Day

Gamma Day

Hamburg Harbor Day (Germany)

Homeland Defender Day (Kazakhstan)

Homespun History Day

International Day of Planetariums

International Harm Reduction Day

International Tell Your Crush Day

Jumatul Bidah (Bangladesh)

Jumat-ul-Wida (Jamu and Kashmir, India)

Lithuanian Press Restoration, Language and Book Day (Lithuania)

Love’s Baby Soft Day

Lusitania Remembrance Day

Martyr’s Day (Lebanon, Lithuania)

National Avery Day

National Barrier Awareness Day

National Brain Donation Awareness Day

National Child and Youth Mental Health Day (Canada)

National Childhood Depression Awareness Day

National Dinosaur Day (Australia)

National Kugel Day

National Masturbation Day [original date, now 5.28]

National Mural Day

National Nuzzling Day

National Packaging Design Day

National Skin Self-Examination Day

National Teacher Appreciation Day

National Tourism Day

Paste Up Day

Privy Diggers Day

Provider Appreciation Day

Radio Day (Bulgaria, Russia)

Second Planting (Elder Scrolls)

Unity in Diversity Day

Very Hungry Caterpillar Day

Victory in Europe Day (Commonwealth nations)

World AIDS Orphans Day

World Athletics Day

World Wide Day of Genital Autonomy

Food & Drink Celebrations

National Cosmopolitan Day

National Roast Leg of Lamb Day

Vienna Lager Day

Independence & Related Days

Sierra Leone, Gold Coast & Gambia become British West Africa (Proclaimed; 1821)

1st Tuesday in May

National Concert Day [1st Tuesday]

National Foster Care Day [1st Tuesday]

National Golf Day [1st Tuesday]

National Teacher Day [Tuesday of 1st full week]

Poem on Your Pillow Day [1st Tuesday]

Taco Tuesday [Every Tuesday]

University Mental Health & Wellbeing Day (Australia) [1st Tuesday]

World Asthma Day [1st Tuesday]

Weekly Holidays beginning May 7 (1st Full Week)

National Hug Holiday Week (thru 5.13)

Festivals Beginning May 7, 2024

Anifilm (Liberec, Czech Republic) [thru 5.12]

Eurovision Song Contest (Malmö, Sweden) [thru 5.11]

The NAMA Show (Dallas, Texas) [thru 5.9]

Tennessee Strawberry Festival Dayton, Tennessee) [thru 5.11]

Feast Days

Academic Anxiety Relief Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Agathius of Byzantium (Christian; Saint)

Agostino Roscelli (Christian; Saint)

Benedict II, Pope (Christian; Saint)

Curmudgeons Day (Pastafarian)

David Hume (Writerism)

Domitian of Huy (Christian; Saint)

Dooley the Armadillo (Muppetism)

Felix Saturnin Brissot de Warville (Artology)

Flavia Domitilla (Christian; Saint)

Frigga’s Blot (Pagan)

Gisela of Hungary (Christian; Saint)

Harriet Starr Cannon (Episcopal Church (USA))

John of Beverley (Christian; Saint)

Junius Brutus (Positivist; Saint)

Liudhard (Christian; Saint)

Nicola (Christian; Saint)

Nones of May (Ancient Rome)

Peter Carey (Writerism)

Peter Lorre Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Robert Browning (Writerism)

Rose Venerini (Christian; Saint)

Scurvy Awareness Day (Pastafarian)

Serenicus and Serenicus (Christian; Saints)

Stanislaus, Bishop of Cracow (Roman Martyrology)

Terry Allen (Artology)

Thargelia (Ancient Greece & Ionia Feast to Apollo; Everyday Wicca)

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (Writerism)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Fatal Day (Pagan) [10 of 24]

Perilous Day (13th Century England) [18 of 32]

Prime Number Day: 127 [31 of 72]

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Umu Limnu (Evil Day; Babylonian Calendar; 21 of 60)

Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [16 of 30]

Very Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [26 of 60]

Premieres

Alice, by Tom Waits (Album; 2002)

Blood Money, by Tom Waits (Album; 2002)

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges (Folklore; 1957)

A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan (Historical Novel; 1974)

Business as Usual, by Men at Work (Album; 1982)

California Gurls, by Katy Perry (Song; 2010)

Can-Can (Broadway Musical; 1953)

Chief Charlie Horse (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1956)

Dave (Film; 1993)

The Fifth Element (Film; 1997)

Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth), by George Harrison (Song; 1973)

Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth (Short Stories; 1959)

Hare Brush (WB MM Cartoon; 1955)

Iron Man 2 (Film; 2010)

Jupiter’s Legacy (TV Series; 2021)

Ladies of Liberty, by Cookie Roberts (History Book; 2008)

The Land of the Lost (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1948)

Lucky Pink (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1968)

Mother Hen’s Holiday (Color Rhapsody; 1937)

Much Ado About Nothing (Film; 1993)

The Mummy (Film; 1999)

Paint It Black, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1966)

Paradise (Film; 1982)

Pinball Wizard, by The Who (Song; 1969)

The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, by Roger Waters (Album; 1984)

The Saint in the Sun, by Leslie Charteris (Short Stories 1963) [Saint #37]

Sanjuro (Film; 1963)

Schubert Dip, by EMF (Album; 1991)

Shall We Dance (Film; 1937)

Sherlock Holmes (Film; 1922)

The Sorrows of Opera, by Darius Milhaud (Opera; 1926)

Superman: Unbound (WB Animated Film; 2013)

Super Size Me (Documentary Film; 2004)

Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, by Ludwig Van Beethoven (Choral Symphony; 1824)

Twice Shy, by Dick Francis (Novel; 1982)

Van Helsing (Film; 2004)

Wrath of Man (Film; 2021)

Today’s Name Days

Gisela, Helga, Notker, Silke (Austria)

Dujam, Duje (Croatia)

Stanislav (Czech Republic)

Flavia (Denmark)

Helma, Helme, Helmeles, Helmi (Estonia)

Helmi, Kastehelmi (Finland)

Domitille, Gisèle (France)

Gisela, Helga, Notker, Silke (Germany)

Bathsheba, Bathsheeba, Beersheba, Bersave, Bersebe, Varsavia, Verseve, Virsaviya (Greece)

Gizella (Hungary)

Augusto, Flavia, Fulvio, Gisella, Maria, Stanislao, Villano, Virginia (Italy)

Henriete, Henrijs, Jete, Tīna (Latvia)

Butautas, Danutė, Rimtė, Stanislovas, Stasys (Lithuania)

Mai, Maia, Maiken (Norway)

Benedykt, Bogumir, Domicela, Flawia, Florian, Gizela, Gustawa, Ludmiła, Ludomiła, Sawa, Wincenta (Poland)

Elizaveta (Russia)

Monika (Slovakia)

Benedicto, Gisela, Juan (Spain)

Carina, Carita (Sweden)

Ahern, Cooper, Dexter, Gisela, Gisella, Giselle, Gisselle, Hearne, Herne, Heron (USA)

Today is Also��

Day of Year: Day 128 of 2024; 238 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 2 of week 19 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Saille (Willow) [Day 24 of 28]

Chinese: Month 3 (Wu-Chen), Day 29 (Xin-Wei)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 29 Nisan 5784

Islamic: 28 Shawwal 1445

J Cal: 8 Magenta; Oneday [8 of 30]

Julian: 24 April 2024

Moon: 0%: New Moon

Positivist: 16 Caesar (5th Month) [Camillus]

Runic Half Month: Lagu (Flowing Water) [Day 13 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 50 of 92)

Week: 1st Week of May

Zodiac: Taurus (Day 18 of 31)

#calendar #Holidays

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mariacallous · 6 months ago

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In the days before South Africa’s May 29 election, there was a euphoric atmosphere in parts of the cosmopolitan but largely Zulu port city of Durban. People who would usually pass each other anonymously could be overheard telling each other, “We are going to fix the country!” There was, though, an ugly underside to this, with current President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is from the smaller Venda ethnic group, often dismissed in vulgar ethnic terms.

The African National Congress (ANC), after 30 years of comfortable rule, took a heavy blow in this election. It secured only 40.2 percent of the vote nationally and took its hardest hit in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where Durban is located. There, it came in far behind the newly formed uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party—whose figurehead is former President Jacob Zuma. MK finished first with almost 46 percent of votes for the national assembly, taking a large number of votes from the ANC—which won around 17 percent—and many from the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party.

KwaZulu-Natal is South Africa’s second-most populous province—and it is notorious for political violence—including open armed battles fought through the late 1980s and early 1990s, assassinations, and major riots in July 2021.

The electoral success of Zuma’s new party in the recent election has raised fears of further violence.

Organized around the charisma of Zuma, who was the staggeringly corrupt president of South Africa from 2009 to 2018, the MK party takes its name, meaning “spear of the nation,” from the armed wing of the ANC formed by Nelson Mandela and others in 1961. The party lays claim to that history and has adopted a militaristic posture.

Apartheid was, of course, not brought down by that army, which was, in military terms, a failed project. Before Western opinion turned at the end of the Cold War, apartheid was rendered nonviable by the mass democratic politics that began with a series of strikes in Durban in 1973, a popular movement that does not appear in Zuma’s militaristic misrepresentation of political history.

MK endorses an extreme version of the authoritarian populism that has surged in elections around the world. It is best described as ethnically inflected nationalism; while the party has an anticolonial dimension in so far as it seeks to build a counter-elite, it is also socially predatory and deeply conservative on social issues. Zuma has suggested doing away with same-sex marriage, which has been legal in South Africa since 2006; elevating aristocratic tribal authorities over elected representatives; holding a referendum on the death penalty; hiring more police officers; and introducing conscription.

Like other authoritarian populist parties in South Africa and elsewhere, Zuma’s party also takes a hard-right line on immigration. This is a matter of serious concern in South Africa, where African and Asian migrants are often targeted by the state and, periodically, by violent mobs.

MK also has a clear ethnic dimension. This is in sharp contrast to the ANC, which was founded in 1912 with an explicit commitment to build a national sense of African identity that eschewed the politicization of ethnic identities. It remains an ethnically diverse organization led by a member of an ethnic minority group.

Like figures such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, MK is also enthusiastically pro-Putin. Some MK supporters have been seen wearing T-shirts with side-by-side images of Zuma and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But unlike forms of right-wing populism elsewhere, MK also promises economic inclusion in a country where impoverishment and inequality are rampant, along with the effective provision of basic services. It proposes nationalizing banks, mines, and insurance companies; expropriating land and placing it under the control of the state and traditional authorities; and providing free education and full employment.

Due to this platform, newspapers outside South Africa have sometimes referred to Zuma’s party as being “far left.” But the left in South Africa has not rallied in support of MK’s proposals for expropriation and nationalization—largely because Zuma’s record during his nine years as president was dire in terms of creating jobs; providing basic services, decent health care, education, and public housing; and achieving long-promised land reform.

Indeed, corruption during Zuma’s presidency did massive damage to the state, its institutions, and its publicly owned companies and was so extreme that a single family took in just under 50 billion rand (then around $3.2 billion) from public budgets in what came to be known as “state capture.” Zuma’s presidency was also marked by a sharp increase in state repression, including the massacre of 34 striking miners by South African police in 2012 and frequent assassinations of grassroots activists.

A number of commentators across the political spectrum have reduced Zuma’s popularity and electoral success in KwaZulu-Natal to “tribalism,” sometimes with the implication that atavistic forces are at play. The recourse to this deeply colonial idea of the “tribe” is unfortunate. But the ethnic element in Zuma’s politics cannot be overlooked either.

Zuma has sought to stoke ethnic sentiment since he was tried for rape in 2006, when, along with chanting, “Burn the bitch,” in reference to his accuser, some of his supporters wore T-shirts with the slogan “100% Zuluboy.” In the lead-up to the recent election, it was common to hear people in Durban speak of the need to achieve the unity of the Zulu people.

KwaZulu-Natal has a long history of violent ethnic mobilization. Mpondo people from the neighboring Eastern Cape province have been sporadically attacked and driven from their homes for more than a century, including when ethnic sentiment escalated as Zuma ascended to the presidency in 2009.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was open war between Inkatha, then a conservative Zulu-nationalist organization backed by the apartheid state, and the United Democratic Front, a popular anti-apartheid organization that allied itself with the ANC in exile. It is estimated that around 20,000 people were killed between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The apartheid state saw Inkatha as a conservative ally against the Soviet-linked ANC and an ally equally opposed to the ANC’s vision of a unitary democratic state.

The war came to an end when, in secret negotiations between the last apartheid president, F.W. de Klerk, and Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi on the eve of the first democratic election, huge concessions were made to Inkatha, most notably via the massive transfer of land in KwaZulu-Natal—around 11,000 square miles, almost the size of Belgium—to the Zulu monarchy. This boosted the power of what is termed “traditional authority” over democratic authority, as people living on the land must pay rent to a trust headed by the Zulu king and are governed by customary law administered by traditional leaders.

The end of the war did not bring peace, though. The province swiftly became notorious for political assassinations within the ANC, between the ANC and other parties, and against grassroots activists. Many hundreds of people have been killed. The problem of assassinations was never seriously dealt with in the province and, as a result, has been steadily making its way into other parts of the country.

In the latter years of Zuma’s presidency, he sought to protect himself against mass outrage at brazen corruption by cynically spinning his government’s kleptocracy as “radical economic transformation.” This was taken up outside of the state by armed so-called business forums that shook down established businesses at gun point and by local party gangsters who appropriated public land for private profit. The capacity for violence developed in this milieu includes access to professional assassins and, in some cases, local militias.

In July 2021, when Zuma was briefly jailed for being in contempt of court, KwaZulu-Natal was ripped apart by riots in which 354 people were killed. The riots were sparked by a breakdown in the social order as supporters of Zuma, some dressed in military fatigues, openly attacked migrants from elsewhere in Africa in downtown Durban while the police stood down. There were also more covert attacks on trucks on the main road to Johannesburg, and many were left burnt. Again the police stood down.

The riots began with the mass appropriation of food in a carnival atmosphere. In the main, there was not much sense that this was a political event, and many participants were clear that they were not motivated by support for Zuma. But the riots soon took on a more ominous tone, and infrastructure was systematically destroyed by groups of armed men acting with military precision. Zuma’s daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla celebrated the destruction on social media.

Now that the country is suspended between an election result that fundamentally changes its politics and the outcomes of the ongoing high-stakes negotiations to form national and provincial governments, the atmosphere in Durban is more febrile than euphoric.

False claims are being pushed through social media with a startling velocity, with Zuma-Sambudla taking a leading role in the promotion of conspiracy theories. There has been a particular focus, repeated by Zuma in various public statements, on the Trumpian move of declaring, without evidence, that the elections were rigged. The general view is that Zuma and his supporters are making this claim to set the stage for violence, although it is not quite clear what their intentions are.

It is common to hear people say that when the new provincial government comes into power, migrants will be “dealt with” and ethnic minorities will “know their place.” It is not uncommon to hear talk of secession, of an independent Zulu kingdom. There are widespread fears of coming violence, something that a number of grassroots activists say is inevitable. Mqapheli Bonono, one of the most prominent grassroots activists in Durban, said: “There will definitely be violence. We don’t know when or where, but for sure it’s coming.”

Migrants have already been threatened and intimidated. Last Wednesday, an MK organizer was gunned down in Durban. Although there is not yet any evidence of a specific motive, it is being reported by some media as a political killing. It is widely assumed that this is the beginning of an internal struggle for positions and power within MK. Some ethnic minorities fear that they may have to move out of the province. Some have returned to rural family homes outside the province while they wait to see how things play out.

Ramaphosa wishes to establish a national unity government so the ANC can continue to govern the country. It is not yet clear if this will work or if MK will participate in such an arrangement. In KwaZulu-Natal, it is possible that a deal between other parties could keep MK in opposition despite it winning the largest share of the vote. If MK is not part of the deal struck to form a national government, tensions will inevitably escalate. This will be dramatically compounded if the party is kept out of government in KwaZulu-Natal by an alliance of other parties.

If MK does form a government in KwaZulu-Natal, the country will have its second-most populous province governed by a political force directly opposed not just to the national government but to the principles and legal foundations on which the country was founded.

The militaristic posture of Zuma’s party escalates fears of violence, and Zuma himself often makes implicit threats of violence via dog whistles. Speaking in English, he has warned that he should not be “provoked.” Speaking in Zulu, he has said: “Abasazi singo bani” (They don’t know who we are).

The idiomatic meaning here is clear, but, in literal terms, South Africans know exactly who Zuma and his party are.

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brookstonalmanac · 7 months ago

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Holidays 5.7

Holidays

Basket of Gold Day (French Republic)

Beaufort Scale Day

Be Best Day

Box Camera Day

Cystinosis Awareness Day

Defender of the Fatherland Day (Kazakhstan)

Dien Bien Phu Victory Day (Vietnam)

Experience the Awesome Stomach-Churning Wonder of a Thrill Ride Day

Fire Escape Ladder Day

Gamma Day

Hamburg Harbor Day (Germany)

Homeland Defender Day (Kazakhstan)

Homespun History Day

International Day of Planetariums

International Harm Reduction Day

International Tell Your Crush Day

Jumatul Bidah (Bangladesh)

Jumat-ul-Wida (Jamu and Kashmir, India)

Lithuanian Press Restoration, Language and Book Day (Lithuania)

Love’s Baby Soft Day

Lusitania Remembrance Day

Martyr’s Day (Lebanon, Lithuania)

National Avery Day

National Barrier Awareness Day

National Brain Donation Awareness Day

National Child and Youth Mental Health Day (Canada)

National Childhood Depression Awareness Day

National Dinosaur Day (Australia)

National Kugel Day

National Masturbation Day [original date, now 5.28]

National Mural Day

National Nuzzling Day

National Packaging Design Day

National Skin Self-Examination Day

National Teacher Appreciation Day

National Tourism Day

Paste Up Day

Privy Diggers Day

Provider Appreciation Day

Radio Day (Bulgaria, Russia)

Second Planting (Elder Scrolls)

Unity in Diversity Day

Very Hungry Caterpillar Day

Victory in Europe Day (Commonwealth nations)

World AIDS Orphans Day

World Athletics Day

World Wide Day of Genital Autonomy

Food & Drink Celebrations

National Cosmopolitan Day

National Roast Leg of Lamb Day

Vienna Lager Day

Independence & Related Days

Sierra Leone, Gold Coast & Gambia become British West Africa (Proclaimed; 1821)

1st Tuesday in May

National Concert Day [1st Tuesday]

National Foster Care Day [1st Tuesday]

National Golf Day [1st Tuesday]

National Teacher Day [Tuesday of 1st full week]

Poem on Your Pillow Day [1st Tuesday]

Taco Tuesday [Every Tuesday]

University Mental Health & Wellbeing Day (Australia) [1st Tuesday]

World Asthma Day [1st Tuesday]

Weekly Holidays beginning May 7 (1st Full Week)

National Hug Holiday Week (thru 5.13)

Festivals Beginning May 7, 2024

Anifilm (Liberec, Czech Republic) [thru 5.12]

Eurovision Song Contest (Malmö, Sweden) [thru 5.11]

The NAMA Show (Dallas, Texas) [thru 5.9]

Tennessee Strawberry Festival Dayton, Tennessee) [thru 5.11]

Feast Days

Academic Anxiety Relief Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Agathius of Byzantium (Christian; Saint)

Agostino Roscelli (Christian; Saint)

Benedict II, Pope (Christian; Saint)

Curmudgeons Day (Pastafarian)

David Hume (Writerism)

Domitian of Huy (Christian; Saint)

Dooley the Armadillo (Muppetism)

Felix Saturnin Brissot de Warville (Artology)

Flavia Domitilla (Christian; Saint)

Frigga’s Blot (Pagan)

Gisela of Hungary (Christian; Saint)

Harriet Starr Cannon (Episcopal Church (USA))

John of Beverley (Christian; Saint)

Junius Brutus (Positivist; Saint)

Liudhard (Christian; Saint)

Nicola (Christian; Saint)

Nones of May (Ancient Rome)

Peter Carey (Writerism)

Peter Lorre Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Robert Browning (Writerism)

Rose Venerini (Christian; Saint)

Scurvy Awareness Day (Pastafarian)

Serenicus and Serenicus (Christian; Saints)

Stanislaus, Bishop of Cracow (Roman Martyrology)

Terry Allen (Artology)

Thargelia (Ancient Greece & Ionia Feast to Apollo; Everyday Wicca)

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (Writerism)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Fatal Day (Pagan) [10 of 24]

Perilous Day (13th Century England) [18 of 32]

Prime Number Day: 127 [31 of 72]

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Umu Limnu (Evil Day; Babylonian Calendar; 21 of 60)

Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [16 of 30]

Very Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [26 of 60]

Premieres

Alice, by Tom Waits (Album; 2002)

Blood Money, by Tom Waits (Album; 2002)

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges (Folklore; 1957)

A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan (Historical Novel; 1974)

Business as Usual, by Men at Work (Album; 1982)

California Gurls, by Katy Perry (Song; 2010)

Can-Can (Broadway Musical; 1953)

Chief Charlie Horse (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1956)

Dave (Film; 1993)

The Fifth Element (Film; 1997)

Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth), by George Harrison (Song; 1973)

Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth (Short Stories; 1959)

Hare Brush (WB MM Cartoon; 1955)

Iron Man 2 (Film; 2010)

Jupiter’s Legacy (TV Series; 2021)

Ladies of Liberty, by Cookie Roberts (History Book; 2008)

The Land of the Lost (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1948)

Lucky Pink (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1968)

Mother Hen’s Holiday (Color Rhapsody; 1937)

Much Ado About Nothing (Film; 1993)

The Mummy (Film; 1999)

Paint It Black, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1966)

Paradise (Film; 1982)

Pinball Wizard, by The Who (Song; 1969)

The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, by Roger Waters (Album; 1984)

The Saint in the Sun, by Leslie Charteris (Short Stories 1963) [Saint #37]

Sanjuro (Film; 1963)

Schubert Dip, by EMF (Album; 1991)

Shall We Dance (Film; 1937)

Sherlock Holmes (Film; 1922)

The Sorrows of Opera, by Darius Milhaud (Opera; 1926)

Superman: Unbound (WB Animated Film; 2013)

Super Size Me (Documentary Film; 2004)

Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, by Ludwig Van Beethoven (Choral Symphony; 1824)

Twice Shy, by Dick Francis (Novel; 1982)

Van Helsing (Film; 2004)

Wrath of Man (Film; 2021)

Today’s Name Days

Gisela, Helga, Notker, Silke (Austria)

Dujam, Duje (Croatia)

Stanislav (Czech Republic)

Flavia (Denmark)

Helma, Helme, Helmeles, Helmi (Estonia)

Helmi, Kastehelmi (Finland)

Domitille, Gisèle (France)

Gisela, Helga, Notker, Silke (Germany)

Bathsheba, Bathsheeba, Beersheba, Bersave, Bersebe, Varsavia, Verseve, Virsaviya (Greece)

Gizella (Hungary)

Augusto, Flavia, Fulvio, Gisella, Maria, Stanislao, Villano, Virginia (Italy)

Henriete, Henrijs, Jete, Tīna (Latvia)

Butautas, Danutė, Rimtė, Stanislovas, Stasys (Lithuania)

Mai, Maia, Maiken (Norway)

Benedykt, Bogumir, Domicela, Flawia, Florian, Gizela, Gustawa, Ludmiła, Ludomiła, Sawa, Wincenta (Poland)

Elizaveta (Russia)

Monika (Slovakia)

Benedicto, Gisela, Juan (Spain)

Carina, Carita (Sweden)

Ahern, Cooper, Dexter, Gisela, Gisella, Giselle, Gisselle, Hearne, Herne, Heron (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 128 of 2024; 238 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 2 of week 19 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Saille (Willow) [Day 24 of 28]

Chinese: Month 3 (Wu-Chen), Day 29 (Xin-Wei)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 29 Nisan 5784

Islamic: 28 Shawwal 1445

J Cal: 8 Magenta; Oneday [8 of 30]

Julian: 24 April 2024

Moon: 0%: New Moon

Positivist: 16 Caesar (5th Month) [Camillus]

Runic Half Month: Lagu (Flowing Water) [Day 13 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 50 of 92)

Week: 1st Week of May

Zodiac: Taurus (Day 18 of 31)

#Holidays

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