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poemshubs · 27 days ago

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20th Century Russian Poet: Eduard Bagritsky

Eduard Bagritsky (1895-1934) stands as one of the most significant and distinctive figures in the realm of Russian poetry in the early 20th century. His literary journey, marked by vibrant expression and the emotional depth of his poetry, offers a profound reflection of the struggles, triumphs, and tragedies of his time. As a key figure of Russian poetry in the interwar period, Bagritsky’s life and work symbolize a confluence of cultural, political, and literary shifts within Russia and across the world. In this article, we will explore Eduard Bagritsky’s life, his role within 20th-century Russian poetry, his major works, and the lasting impact of his contributions.

Early Life and Background

Eduard Bagritsky was born on November 3, 1895, in the city of Tsukrova, in what was then the Russian Empire, to a Jewish family. From an early age, he exhibited an interest in poetry and literature, which would come to define his adult life. His formative years were marked by the cultural influences of the Russian Empire’s Jewish population and the modernist currents that were sweeping across Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bagritsky’s early education was shaped by a turbulent historical context. He was raised during a time of significant political, social, and cultural change. The early 20th century saw Russia in the midst of intense political upheaval, including the fall of the Tsarist regime, the rise of the Bolshevik revolution, and the subsequent development of Soviet Russia. These events would deeply influence the way in which Bagritsky engaged with poetry and art.

Despite the hardships that marked his early life, Bagritsky pursued his interest in literature with dedication. In 1914, he moved to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where he enrolled in courses at the Technological Institute. However, his passion for poetry led him to abandon his formal education in favor of dedicating himself entirely to writing. At this time, he also became involved with the symbolist and futurist movements, which would shape his poetic voice.

The Context of 20th Century Russian Poetry

To understand the full impact of Eduard Bagritsky’s work, it is essential to place him within the broader context of 20th-century Russian poetry. The early part of the 20th century was a period of immense change in Russia, not only politically and socially, but also in terms of its literary traditions. The Russian literary world was in the midst of profound experimentation and transformation, as writers sought to adapt to the changing conditions of modernity.

Russian poetry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was heavily influenced by the Symbolist movement, which had been introduced by poets like Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Bely. The Symbolists sought to break from the realist tradition, using abstract imagery and metaphysical themes to evoke deeper spiritual truths. Bagritsky, who initially gravitated towards Symbolism, eventually moved away from its abstract tendencies, seeking instead to connect his work to the political and social realities of his time.

By the time Bagritsky began his poetic career, however, Russian poetry had also been shaped by the rise of the Futurist movement. Poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov sought to revolutionize language itself, using avant-garde techniques to challenge conventional forms and structures. Bagritsky, though not directly associated with Futurism, absorbed the influence of its radical experimentation with language and style.

The revolution of 1917 and the subsequent rise of the Soviet Union would also play a major role in shaping the trajectory of Russian poetry. The October Revolution led to the creation of a new social and political order, which brought with it a new set of ideological imperatives for poets. The question of how to write poetry in a time of such political upheaval and social change became a pressing concern for many poets. Some, like Mayakovsky, aligned themselves closely with the Soviet government, using poetry as a tool of political propaganda. Others, like Bagritsky, maintained a more ambivalent stance, wrestling with the complexities of the new regime.

Bagritsky’s Poetic Vision

Eduard Bagritsky’s poetry was marked by its emotional intensity, vivid imagery, and an ability to convey the struggles of the human condition against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world. His style evolved over time, reflecting both his personal experiences and the broader currents of Russian poetry.

Romanticism and Symbolism

In his early works, Bagritsky’s poetry was heavily influenced by Romanticism and Symbolism. He was deeply concerned with issues of individual identity, inner conflict, and the search for meaning in a chaotic world. His early poems often featured melancholy themes and complex imagery, which were characteristic of the Symbolist movement. These poems were reflective, exploring the tension between the individual and the broader social and political forces that shaped the world around him.

One of Bagritsky’s most notable early poems, “The Road,” exemplifies the Symbolist influence on his work. The poem presents a symbolic journey, in which the poet travels through a landscape that represents the inner turmoil and confusion of the individual. The poem’s rich use of metaphor and symbolism reveals Bagritsky’s fascination with the hidden dimensions of reality, which was a central concern of Symbolism.

The Rise of Modernism

As Russian poetry continued to evolve in the early 20th century, so too did Bagritsky’s style. By the 1920s, he was moving away from the abstract idealism of Symbolism and embracing more modernist approaches to language and form. This shift was partly influenced by the revolutionary fervor that had swept through Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Bagritsky became increasingly interested in the ways in which poetry could engage with social and political issues.

However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Bagritsky did not adopt a purely ideological approach to his poetry. While some Russian poets embraced the new Soviet order and aligned their works with the goals of the Communist Party, Bagritsky remained more detached. His poetry did not serve as direct political propaganda but instead reflected a more nuanced understanding of the revolutionary moment.

This more ambivalent stance is evident in poems such as “The Orphan,” in which Bagritsky presents the figure of the orphan as a symbol of loss and disillusionment in a time of upheaval. Rather than offering a simplistic celebration of the new Soviet order, Bagritsky’s poetry grappled with the complexities and contradictions of the political landscape.

Bagritsky’s Themes: The Personal and the Political

Throughout his career, Bagritsky’s work engaged with a wide range of themes, from personal loss and longing to broader political and social concerns. One of the most powerful aspects of his poetry was his ability to intertwine the personal and the political, using his individual experiences to explore larger societal issues.

The theme of alienation is central to many of Bagritsky’s poems, reflecting his sense of dislocation in a rapidly changing world. This sense of alienation was not only a result of the political upheavals of his time but also a reflection of his Jewish heritage. Bagritsky’s status as a Jewish poet placed him at the margins of Russian society, and his work often explored the tensions between his individual identity and the broader cultural and political forces that shaped his life.

The Poetic Voice and Language

Bagritsky’s language was marked by its vividness and intensity. He had a unique ability to evoke powerful images and emotions through his words. His poems often use bold metaphors and striking visual imagery to convey complex emotional states. At times, his language can be stark and direct, while at other moments it becomes more lyrical and symbolic.

The emotional range of Bagritsky’s poetry is one of its defining features. From the melancholy and introspective tone of his early works to the more urgent and politically charged poems of the 1920s and 1930s, Bagritsky’s voice resonates with the struggles of his time.

Major Works and Their Impact

Eduard Bagritsky’s most significant works include The Road, The Orphan, Hymn to the Sun, and The Last Poem. These poems, along with many others, showcase the evolution of his poetic style and thematic concerns. While Bagritsky’s early works were marked by Symbolist influences, his later poems engaged more directly with the social and political landscape of Soviet Russia.

Bagritsky’s Hymn to the Sun is one of his most celebrated works, written during the 1920s when he was grappling with the complexities of Soviet Russia. The poem is both a personal and political meditation, symbolizing the struggle between light and darkness, hope and despair. The poem reflects the poet’s ambivalent attitude toward the revolution, offering neither uncritical praise nor total condemnation.

Despite the political challenges of his time, Bagritsky maintained a commitment to artistic independence, producing works that captured the emotional depth of the human experience. His poems offer a profound commentary on the struggles of the individual within the broader context of historical change.

Bagritsky’s Legacy

Eduard Bagritsky’s contributions to Russian poetry continue to be studied and appreciated today. His ability to weave together personal, political, and universal themes in his poetry has ensured that his work remains relevant and resonant for readers around the world. While his poetry was not always aligned with the political orthodoxy of his time, his voice remains a vital part of the 20th-century Russian literary canon.

Bagritsky’s tragic early death at the age of 39, caused by illness, robbed the world of the full extent of his poetic potential. Nevertheless, his work endures, standing as a testament to the emotional and intellectual struggles of a poet caught between the forces of tradition and modernity, personal identity and political allegiance.

Conclusion

Eduard Bagritsky’s poetic legacy is inextricably linked to the tumultuous period of Russian history in which he lived. His work offers a window into the emotional and intellectual climate of early 20th-century Russia, a time of political revolution and cultural transformation. As a 20th-century Russian poet, Bagritsky’s work transcends the political ideologies of his time, offering profound insights into the complexities of the human condition. Through his vivid imagery, emotional depth, and thematic exploration of alienation and identity, Bagritsky has earned his place as one of the most important figures in the development of modern Russian poetry.

#poem #poetry

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mariacallous · 1 month ago

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Northvolt’s story seemed like a fairy tale. Peter Carlsson, an ambitious and entrepreneurial former Tesla executive, founded the Swedish battery maker in 2016 to secure European strategic autonomy in a critical industry at the center of the green transition.

The company seemed to do everything right: It entered the market just as electric vehicles (EVs) were regularly hitting the roads; it struck critical partnerships with regional automakers such as Volkswagen and BMW; and it attracted generational talents, including Paolo Cerruti, who were determined to prove that Europe could use innovative science and engineering to solve climate change.

It was an attractive tale—one so compelling that the company raised more than $15 billion from investors and governments.

Like many classic fairy tales, though, the ending was tragic. A big, bad wolf in the form of China huffed and puffed and blew the battery market’s walls down, whittling away Northvolt’s local market advantages. The company’s engineers struggled to deliver a quality product at scale, forcing partners such as BMW to search for alternatives. A company that seemed fated for greatness became doomed: On Nov. 21, Northvolt announced that it would file for bankruptcy, becoming one of Europe’s greatest start-up failures of all time.

This rise and fall can teach us a moral lesson: Policy agility is key. In a ferociously competitive marketplace, Europe’s deliberative industrial policy model can no longer effectively mobilize its vast talent, wealth, and unified market. As the Northvolt story reveals, fixing this crisis requires reshaping institutions that are no longer prepared to secure victory into accelerated engines of energy creation.

The recent past has been a race to find energy sources, support economic growth, and produce weapons in order to project power. The war in Ukraine has been largely defined by Europe’s reliance on Russian oil, the United States’ energy independence and geopolitical agility as a result of its fracking boom, and Russia’s ability to continue its oil sales to alternative markets.

Furthermore, demand for energy sources is only growing as construction of new artificial intelligence data centers and further industrialization in the global south accelerate, while climate volatility requires resilient energy grids and redundant sources of power to cover the resulting volatility.

Batteries and EVs are just the latest skirmish in a long string of economic battles over energy. Previously, the battle was with China over solar technologies, which Beijing decisively won by the 2010s. Before that, it was automobile efficiency and the struggle against Japanese conglomerates such as Toyota in the 1980s. Nuclear energy—and nuclear weapons—defined the struggles of the Cold War. Germany’s desire for Russian oil fields and the U.S. energy squeeze on the Japanese empire helped drive World War II.

Having lost the combustion engine race with engines that consistently lacked the reliability of their international competitors, China is increasingly dominant in the EV and battery markets. Its consumers registered nearly 60 percent of all electric vehicles worldwide in 2023 and manufactured nearly 80 percent of the world’s batteries, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Upstream, the country is also processing around 80 percent of the critical minerals that are required to make batteries.

Through a comprehensive system of industrial policies, researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimate that China has subsidized the entire value chain of its EV industry by nearly a quarter trillion dollars from 2009 to 2023.

Everyone agrees that the energy system and the automobile market is changing and needs to change, yet somehow the West just can’t get its brain wrapped around making it happen. Remember the Chevy Volt? Just ask Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, about his recent trip to Shanghai, from which he reportedly brought back Xiaomi cars to Detroit for “test-driving”—industry speak for reengineering, the process of learning and copying another firm’s product.

Western firms are falling behind, and that will have ripple effects far beyond cars. The global automotive industry represents nearly 4 percent of the entire world’s GDP and is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Within that industry, EVs are growing at an astounding pace in what is an otherwise mature sector, with the IEA reporting 35 percent year-on-year growth in 2022 and fully electric battery cars accounting for 70 percent of these sales.

EV production is also notorious for simplicity: Some estimates put EVs as having 90 percent fewer moving parts than a traditional combustion engine. Fewer parts mean fewer jobs, and different engine structures require different skills.

In the United States alone, up to 9.7 million jobs depend on auto manufacturing, nearly all focused on internal combustion. The changing market dynamics were brought to sharp focus by the 2023 United Auto Worker strikes, which were prompted by the union’s concerns about the EV transition. The result was wage increases and commitments from automakers to convert existing plants to EV production rather than building new facilities with potentially fewer workers and lower wages (or, put another way, higher efficiency).

Meanwhile, Tesla’s almost entirely nonunionized workforce marches onward, along with the rapidly growing number of Chinese EV makers, including investments in Mexico that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump now seeks to cut off.

Tensions are different but equally complex in the European Union. Automakers face pressure from strict EU emissions regulations that push for rapid EV adoption while simultaneously dealing with concerns about Chinese EV competitors undermining their supply chains. Hungary already received more than $8 billion in investment from China’s largest battery manufacturer in 2023, and Germany’s governing coalition collapsed in early November mostly due to continued stagnation in the country’s manufacturing engine.

China’s role in the EV industry is not a black swan; it’s a big, lumbering, so-called gray rhino that has been slowly and steadily marching toward the West’s camp for some time. Gray rhinos are highly visible risks that are predictable well in advance, but never seem to attract attention and solutions because they are not that interesting. They are known knowns, and that means that nobody gets excited about them.

The Chinese government was incredibly transparent about its intentions. More than 10 years ago, China hands such as the U.S.-China Business Council were ringing the alarm bells about China’s “strategic emerging industries,” with three of the seven listed industries in a 2013 report from the organization supporting EVs: “Energy efficient and environmental technologies,” “New Energy,” and “New-energy vehicles.”

Beijing literally announced it for everyone to see, attracted immense investment in these areas, and then facilitated and coerced technology transfers to progress their capabilities. Now Western automakers are seemingly surprised.

Instead of understanding how the winds were changing, policymakers and auto executives failed to see a future where technological and consumer trends from a foreign market could overtake U.S. and European momentum. Foreign investment flowed into these fields in China, technologies were co-developed, scientists were trained, and subsidies were leveraged for short-term gains.

How did governments and top executives miss this? The West still struggles with understanding China’s impact on industries worldwide and seeing how different sectors impact a strategic outcome. For this reason, I’ve been working with Lux Capital on a collection of resources that we’ve dubbed riskgaming, to force executives to make decisions in areas that break the traditional and often arbitrary boundaries that Western society has built, revealing the silos that executives operate in and how they lead them away from collaboration.

I designed a game, “Powering Up: China’s Global Quest for Electric Vehicle Dominance,” to give executives an intense, firsthand experience at dealing in a business environment that lacks the structures that Western executives are used to. Players experience how the system used by the Chinese Communist Party measures success of its members in government and guides players toward the outcomes that it often wants: win-win cooperation where the Chinese partner wins more.

The game focuses on letting players experience the critical role of China’s market in the global EV industry and learn how a company’s engagement in the Chinese market is central to improving its competitiveness in the EV category, as well as how the Chinese government’s support for the EV industry impacts global markets. All players make money and witness the critical role access to information plays in China’s political economy—yet, rarely do any players feel “good” about their outcomes.

Now that dozens of U.S. congressional staff, policy analysts, business leaders, and journalists have played the game, I’ve learned a few key lessons. First, generalists dramatically outperform specialists. Managing risk and opportunity across decisions that combine the Chinese political economy with global business is tough for those who lack wide experience.

Second, negotiation skills must be empathetic to others’ diverse interests. Some of the worst performers have been analytical players who assume that everyone will do what’s best for the industry or their home countries rather than what’s best for themselves as individuals.

Finally—and I’ve seen this in run-throughs I’ve conducted in Washington, London, and Tokyo during the past few weeks—many players wait too long to collect more information before committing to a decision. Time doesn’t stop—and far too many people have analysis paralysis.

As the United States, European Union, and others who embraced globalization and liberal democracy are now realizing, the highly structured world of international laws, “all else held equal” financial models, and separation of commerce and government were new ideas to appear on the timeline of world history. It looks increasingly like they were blips and anomalies in history, not the end of it.

Thanks to bankruptcy laws, Northvolt will likely find funding to continue production. But how will the United States, the EU, and other partners compete with Chinese EVs more broadly?

Breaking down the issue into timelines, assets, incentives, and trade-offs, the challenge seems to be the gap between political expectations and engineering realities. By simply using China’s history to anchor the time requirement for the West to gain a similar ecosystem to 10 years, that means consistent policy efforts through two-and-a-half U.S. presidential terms of supporting automobile industry reform, battery production development, and an expansion in both critical mineral production and processing.

Meanwhile, the Chinese EV industry will continue to build on its novel technologies and the immense supply chain that is already exceedingly greater than that of the West. With only one rare earth mineral processing facility in the United States, a vast amount of time, money, and social debate over environmental, health, and investment trade-offs in chemical processing is required to advance this industry.

Yet Western governments say that they don’t want to lose the ability to control their energy infrastructure, and companies don’t want to lose their ability to make money.

What if they already have?

With tariffs—the tool most often discussed today—the United States is raising the drawbridge while it’s behind. The likely result is a near-term automotive industry that mirrors China’s more than many would like to admit: Access to the U.S. market will require IP sharing, in-country investment, and other political kowtowing costs to enter.

The hope of this strategy, I can only assume, is to someday chip away at the Chinese advantage while the West grows a comparable industry. Like the tale of the Red Queen in the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

That’s a nonstarter. Instead, the West should be looking to leapfrog China into the next generation of energy technologies. Europe and the United States lost solar panels, and now they’ve mostly lost electric vehicles and its supply chains (Tesla notwithstanding).

So, what’s next? Will it be expanded nuclear fusion, hydrogen, alternative battery structures, geothermal, microwave energy transmission, or some other developing technology? Focusing on research and the rapid development of new firms will ensure that the next fairy tale will have a Hollywood ending—not a Grimm one.

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honouredsnakeprincess · 3 months ago

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Personally, I think it's a tad condescending for you to assume I mean fascism as a hyperbolic description of your empire. I do not.

First, you have two large, mainstream parties which have both concluded that American support for genocides abroad ought to be the unquestioned norm, so long as it supports some nebulous strategic interest, even if it goes against the will of the actual electorate.

Second, these two parties cooperate regularly in order to foil even relatively moderate social-democratic political movements, and so the only permissible state ideology is quite far right. Sanders is allowed to hold office as a token gesture, but he will never be permitted to actually wield power, despite the fact he is still ultimately more loyal to the American empire than he is to social-democracy!

Third, both parties seem to have independently recreated something of their own fuhrerprinzip, which isn't even really required for fascism, but they did it anyway. Any vote not for your preferred right wing lead is a vote against America and freedom and all good things on this earth! If you don't support Trump/Harris, you're supporting that monstrous Trump/Harris, who will take away your freedom.

To elaborate, while your electoral system certainly disincentivizes third parties, it does not actually preclude them from being a meaningful part of the political process, and third parties have played kingmaker during several crucial elections in the 20th century. If you wanted to 'force Biden left', a left-wing (or even just center-right, given the state of American politics) faction that he is forced to negotiate with in order to become president would have been more effective than whatever the fuck you lot have been doing these past couple of years!

I think that even if you'd nuked those evil, evil russkies into oblivion in the 1980s, Trump probably still would have won, considering the wave of reactionary populism sweeping the liberal consensus in recent years. The Russians did not create that, Trump did not create that, this is a response to heightening economic contradictions, fears of immigration, reactionary movements preying upon perceptions of economic instability, and the active and deliberate suppression of even moderate left political thought within the American empire.

Certainly, you hold elections, but you can only ever vote for one party (or maybe the other, but then you're unamerican!) Certainly, you allow economic 'freedom', but people who think that a free market is a feature not present under fascism need to go read up on the economic policies of Hitlerite Germany in the years leading up to the war. Certainly, you can criticize the government, and your right to do so is constitutionally protected (until the police decide it isn't, at which point the government will Back the Blue even over its own decrepit constitutional documents). Certainly, all people are equal under the law (if you ignore the racial caste system), but the Republicans are working to change that, and the Democrats are working to make sure they don't stop them!

Certainly, with its abundance of civil and social and economic liberties for the upper class, with its racially segregated cities and functional single-party state, with its broad consensus in the halls of power that trans women are dangerous predators, with its legions of homeless who could be trivially aided but must remain as a warning to the working class, with its rising cost of living and the need for yet more people to blame, with its media pundits encouraging audiences to entirely disconnect from reality in favour of their preferred sort of propaganda, with a government that has concluded that for the sake of killing Palestinians, they will ignore the voice of their own citizenry, and with millions of people willing to defend it (or an idealized and delusional vision of what they think it could be), America will never fall to fascism.

Worry not! Harris will defend your interests!

I'm not saying there are parallels, but...

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lightdancer1 · 2 years ago

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But that said in terms of Crusading as a concept:

One of the more signal and often neglected aspects of it beyond just the Muslim view is the entire existence of the sequence of Northern Crusades. Like Karl der Grosse's war on the Saxons this also has the very direct resonance of including the more familiar Orthodox-Catholic feuding between Alexander Nevsky, lord of Veliki Novgorod, and the Teutonic Knights......and the conquest and Germanization of the Baltic Tribes of Prussia. Which had very obvious impacts on the history of Germany more broadly.

And more than either, the last major holy wars between very literal paganism (not just the rhetorical trick used by Christians and Muslims at convenience) and Christianity in medieval Europe. The first Grand Duchy and then Kingdom of Lithuania, far larger than its modern counterpart, was the last pagan state left in Europe on a grand scale (Pagania, its successor, lingered for a bit longer like some of the smaller Byzantine enclaves after the fall of Constantinople in 1453).

The Northern Crusades evolved into the lengthy sequence of Northern Wars that would seal the rise of the Romanov Empire at the Battle of Poltava, where Russian hegemony in Ukraine was sealed and the Swedish dream of empire finally crashed and burned and where the Swedes went from swaggering warlike imperialists to navel-gazing reactionaries to eventually the modern relative hippies they are now.

Even in relatively over-emphasized corners of history, and this is true in every single section of one of the more wide-ranging fields, there are always corners that stand room for further exploration.

#lightdancer comments on history #medieval history #northern crusades

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alexaloraetheris · 2 years ago

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Finally watched Goncharov (which was hell to find, but yo ho ho!) and excellent homoerotic subtext aside, what really shot me straight in the heart was... Katya's whole arc. The way she falls apart no matter how hard she tries to hold her life together. She's a working class Russian woman who runs from her homeland because she blames herself for the crime that wasn't actually her fault. She meets a rising mob boss in the foreign land and he's the first familiar thing she sees and she clings to him. She becomes the mob wife, and builds the empire, but any power she has is dependant on her leverage on her husband, and their marriage is slowly but inexorably falling apart. She seeks solace in Sofia and Yelena, one of which is manipulating her, and the other is just being paid to listen to her and pour her drinks. The man her husband is fighting a bloody yet emotionally charged war with is the only one who actually listens to what she's saying, and he's doing it in his own interests as well.

I mean, what the hell else was she supposed to do in the end? Her life had fallen apart for a second time, and this time she sees the writing on the wall. The clock is literally ticking right before her eyes, she feels her time running out. And all that anger, rage, betrayal and alienation that's been building up throughout the movie, and even earlier, culminates in that bullet.

And like so many things in her life, it misses the target. She shoots her husband, the source of her 'power', and her truest love, and she misses.

She 'dies' for the second time, possibly for real, and she has to restart her life, whatever it might be, just wait for it to fall apart again.

Just. The whole tragedy of Katya's arc... God, it hits me straight in the kidneys. Like, she gritted her teeth through so fucking much, she held the entire empire by her bare bleeding hands, and it still fell apart. Like, the tragedy of it all... Fuck. I mean, the movie is a mess of all the things Mateo couldn't NOT shove in but Katya felt like she was written specifically to make me cry.

#goncharov #unreality #katya goncharov

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1arkspur · 4 years ago

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Jewish History Time!!!!!! 🕥

Hiiiiii

The Yiddish term for town, shtetl commonly refers to small market towns in pre–World War II Eastern Europe with a large Yiddish-speaking Jewish population. While there were in fact great variations among these towns, a shtetl connoted a type of Jewish settlement marked by a compact Jewish population distinguished from their mostly gentile peasant neighbors by religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetl was defined by interlocking networks of economic and social relationships: the interaction of Jews and peasants in the market, the coming together of Jews for essential communal and religious functions, and, in more recent times, the increasingly vital relationship between the shtetl and its emigrants abroad (organized in landsmanshaftn).

No shtetl stood alone. Each was part of a local and regional economic system that embraced other shtetls (Yid., shtetlekh) and provincial towns. Although the shtetl grew out of the private market towns of the Polish nobility in the old commonwealth, over time a shtetl became a common term for any town in Eastern Europe with a large Jewish population: towns not owned by noblemen in Poland, as well as towns in Ukraine, Hungary, Bessarabia, Bucovina, and the Subcarpathian region that attracted large-scale Jewish immigration during the course of the nineteenth century.

For all their diversity, these shtetls in Eastern Europe were indeed markedly different from previous kinds of Jewish Diaspora settlement in Babylonia, France, Spain, or Italy. In those other countries, Jews had lived scattered among the general population or, conversely, inhabited a specific section of town or a Jewish street. Rarely did they form a majority. This was not true of the shtetl, where Jews sometimes comprised 80 percent or more of the population. In many shtetls, Jews occupied most of the town, especially the streets grouped around the central marketplace. Poorer Jews would live further from the center and the frequently agrarian gentiles would often be concentrated on the peripheral streets, in order to be closer to the land that they cultivated.

This Jewish life in compact settlements had an enormous psychological impact on the development of East European Jewry—as did the language of the shtetl, Yiddish. Despite the incorporation of numerous Slavic words, the Yiddish speech of the shtetl was markedly different from the languages used by Jews’ mostly Slavic neighbors. While it would be a great mistake to see the shtetl as an entirely Jewish world, without gentiles, it is nonetheless true that Yiddish reinforced a profound sense of psychological and religious difference from non-Jews. Suffused with allusions to Jewish tradition and to religious texts, Yiddish developed a rich reservoir of idioms and sayings that reflected a vibrant folk culture inseparable from the Jewish religion.

The shtetl was also marked by occupational diversity. While elsewhere in the Diaspora Jews often were found in a small number of occupations, frequently determined by political restrictions, in the shtetl Jewish occupations ran the gamut from wealthy contractors and entrepreneurs, to shopkeepers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, teamsters, and water carriers. In some regions, Jewish farmers and villagers would be nearby. This striking occupational diversity contributed to the vitality of shtetl society and to its cultural development. It also led to class conflict and to often painful social divisions.

The experience of being a majority culture on the local level, sheer numbers, language, and occupational diversity all underscored the particular place of the shtetl as a form of Jewish Diaspora settlement.

Shtetls developed in the territories of the old Polish Commonwealth, where the nobility encouraged Jews to move onto estates in order to stimulate economic development. The eastward expansion of the commonwealth after the Union of Lublin in 1569 coincided with a growing market in Western and Central Europe for timber, grain, livestock and hides, amber, furs, and honey. Eager to develop their estates, the nobles needed competent managers and entrepreneurs—as well as regular markets and fairs. Jews were suitable instruments, especially because they could never become potential political rivals. thus developed the arenda (leasing) system, in which landlords leased key economic functions to a Jewish arendar (agent). Arenda usually included extensive subleasing, which further encouraged Jewish immigration to the landed estates. The manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages—largely in Jewish hands—was particularly important as it gave landlords an important hedge against falling grain prices in export markets.

Noble magnates established private market towns and sought to attract Jews to reside in them. Economic competition from Christians in older cities in western and central Poland, as well as Jew-hatred fanned by the church and by guilds, also stimulated Jewish migration to the shtetls in the less-developed eastern regions of the commonwealth (today’s eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania). These new towns—all centered on a market square—reflected an emerging symbiosis of nobles, Jews, and the surrounding peasantry. One side of the market would often feature a Catholic church, built by the local landlord as a symbol of primacy and ownership, with a synagogue on the other side. The weekly market days brought together Jews and peasants and created a web of relationships that were both economic and personal. Usually the landlords granted charters that precluded market days and fairs on the Sabbath or on Jewish holidays. The shtetls—with their synagogues, schools, ritual baths, cemeteries, and inns—also served as a base for the numerous dorfsgeyer, that is, Jews who would fan out to the villages as carpenters, shoemakers, and agents. Many Jews who lived lonely lives in the countryside as taverners, innkeepers, or leaseholders could come to the shtetl for major holidays and important family occasions.

While some shtetls date from the sixteenth century, the peak of shtetl development occurred after the 1650s, following the ravages of gzeyres takh vetat (the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising) and the Swedish invasion. The nobility made a concerted effort to recoup their economic standing by establishing new market towns. The development of these shtetls coincided with an enormous demographic increase of Polish Jewry. While the Polish–Lithuanian Jewish population stood at perhaps 30,000 in 1500, by 1765 it had expanded to about 750,000. A striking feature of this Jewish settlement was its marked dispersion. By the 1770s, more than half of Polish Jews lived in hundreds of private towns owned by the nobility: about one-third lived in villages. In many Polish cities, Christian guilds and the Catholic Church fought to curtail Jewish residence rights.

With the collapse of the Polish Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century, the world’s largest Jewish community passed under Russian, Prussian, and Austrian rule. The anti-Russian Polish revolts of 1830–1831 and 1863 severely weakened the Polish nobility, and thus their Jewish partners. Nobles also suffered from the abolition of serfdom. The building of railroads and the rise of major urban centers helped create new regional and national markets that undercut the economic base of many shtetls. New peasant movements questioned the Jewish role in the rural economy and started cooperatives that undercut the shtetl. Moreover, progressive urbanization of peasants and the movement of Jews to the great cities that commenced in the second half of the nineteenth century meant that Jews became a minority in many towns where they had formerly predominated. In Galicia, shtetls suffered from economic pressures, but on the whole, Jews—especially after 1848 and 1867—benefited from a more liberal political regime. This was not the case in the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire.”

#israel #Jewish #Jumblr #Yiddish #Yiddishkheit #know ur history or else ur gonna be dumb afffff #israeli conflict #land #this is why we need Jewish communes and everyone in the universe who isnt already - to be hippies

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kneedeepincynade · 2 years ago

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Normally I just leave a small introduction here and tell you the same old things as the post is machine translated,that the translation is at the bottom,that the collective is on telegram and bla bla bla,but now I want to tell you something different.

Have hope,the new world is almost born,we can see it poking its head out,the unipolarity is almost dead,the us empire is crumbling and the new anti imperialist block is rising,the bricks,the north Koreans the Africans, the revolution against the western world is here,have faith comrades,the long night that has fall upon us since the fall of the USSR is almost over.

⚠️ PROGETTO DI ALLINEAMENTO TRILATERALE GUIDATO DAL PARTITO COMUNISTA CINESE TRA CINA, RUSSIA E COREA DEL NORD - PARTE 1 ⚠️

🇷🇺|🇰🇵|🇨🇳 Artyom Lukin, Professore Associato presso l'Istituto di Studi Orientali dell'Università di Vladivostok, ha pubblicato un articolo riguardante la crescente cooperazione tra Federazione Russa e Repubblica Popolare Democratica di Corea (DPRK), un'intesa - secondo l'esperto - inserita nel Progetto di Allineamento Trilaterale guidato dal Partito Comunista Cinese tra Cina, Russia e Corea del Nord.

🗺 L'autore non presenta previsioni sul funzionamento futuro di tale allineamento, ma afferma che un "blocco cinese-russo-nordcoreano guidato da Pechino" avrà un profondo impatto sull'equilibrio di potere nel Nord-Est Asiatico ed, essenzialmente, nel mondo intero, dato che la Repubblica Popolare Cinese si accinge a superare definitivamente gli Stati Uniti nel prossimo decennio.

🇷🇺|🇺🇦 Fin dall'inizio della Crisi in Ucraina, la DPRK ha sostenuto la Federazione Russa, così come la Repubblica Popolare Cinese, attraverso il viaggio di Li Zhanshu, ha espresso sostegno e comprensione per le azioni intraprese dal Governo di Vladimir Putin per salvaguardare la sicurezza nazionale della Russia, in vista di un sempre più aggressivo allargamento ad Est da parte della NATO.

🇨🇳|🇷🇺 Il 9 settembre, il Presidente del Comitato Permanente dell'Assemblea Nazionale del Popolo Cinese aveva affermato:

💬 "Russia e Cina impediranno congiuntamente l'espansione della NATO. [La NATO] sta mettendo insieme strutture atte a perseguire una strategia per frenare il nostro sviluppo attraverso due oceani, quello Pacifico e quello Indiano. [...] Combatteremo contro la loro egemonia e la loro politica di potere"

🇨🇳|🇷🇺 Inoltre, la Cina - negli ultimi mesi - ha approfondito il partenariato strategico con la Federazione Russa, portando ad un livello ancora più alto la cooperazione in ambito economico e militare tra i due paesi, come affermato da Vladimir Putin al Forum di Valdai.

🧾 Fonte

🌸 Iscriviti 👉 @collettivoshaoshan

⚠️ TRILATERAL ALIGNMENT PROJECT LEADED BY THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY BETWEEN CHINA, RUSSIA AND NORTH KOREA - PART 1 ⚠️

🇷🇺 | 🇰🇵 | 🇨🇳 Artyom Lukin, Associate Professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Vladivostok, published an article regarding the growing cooperation between the Russian Federation and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), an agreement - according to the expert - included in the Trilateral Alignment Project led by the Chinese Communist Party between China, Russia and North Korea.

🗺 The author makes no predictions about the future functioning of such an alignment, but states that a "Beijing-led Chinese-Russian-North Korean bloc" will have a profound impact on the balance of power in Northeast Asia and, essentially, the entire world. , as the People's Republic of China is about to definitively overtake the United States in the next decade.

🇷🇺 | 🇺🇦 Since the beginning of the Crisis in Ukraine, the DPRK has supported the Russian Federation, as well as the People's Republic of China, through the journey of Li Zhanshu, has expressed support and understanding for the actions taken by the government of Vladimir Putin to safeguard the national security of Russia, in view of an increasingly aggressive enlargement to the East by NATO.

🇨🇳 | 🇷🇺 On 9 September, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's National Assembly said:

💬 "Russia and China will jointly prevent NATO's expansion. [NATO] is putting together structures to pursue a strategy to curb our development across two oceans, the Pacific and the Indian. [...] We will fight theirs. hegemony and their power politics "

🇨🇳 | 🇷🇺 In addition, China - in recent months - has deepened its strategic partnership with the Russian Federation, taking economic and military cooperation between the two countries to an even higher level, as stated by Vladimir Putin at the Forum by Valdai.

🧾 Source

🌸 Subscribe 👉 @collectivoshaoshan

#socialism #china #italian #translated #china news #communism #collettivoshaoshan #western imperialism #russia #north korea #chinese communist party #USSR #hope #american imperialism #bricks

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edwad · 3 years ago

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To what extent do you think that a belief that communism would follow from the collapse of capitalism is an ideological assumption vs a conclusion based on empirical investigation?

i think it depends on the nature of the belief. lots of people seem to think that communism is inevitable due to iron historical laws and i think that's pretty silly, projecting a historically situated set of political preferences onto history itself. there's no reason why communism has to happen or even why capitalism had to happen. these developments can really only be understood retrospectively. i think this is "ideological" in a sense, and (among marxists) generally has something to do with an overly deterministic rendering of marx's work. i think elements of this are in marxs work, for sure, but that's definitely not all there is and i think many of his bold historical claims serve a propagandistic function rather than being honestly descriptive.

easy example would be the manifesto, where he makes some very strong claims about this stuff, like this one:

"The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

this begins with an attempt at describing a tendency based on a set of political economic assumptions which are falsifiable in all the ways that people like to make a fuss about, but it ends with a passionate claim about a historical inevitability. the latter claim doesn't necessarily follow from the former, and it would have to be shown why the bourgeoisie as the "involuntary promoter" of modern industry leads to an inevitable victory of a competing class (putting aside the complicating fact that a victorious proletariat is a non-proletariat), rather than a purely economic tendency of self-collapse. this kind of deterministic reading would actually run into conflict with the first sentence of the manifesto regarding history as a history of class struggles since no class struggle would be necessary for capitalism to end, and this is even how certain people read marxs later work like capital, where the "expropriators are expropriated", which is "accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital" rather than as a result of violent class struggle.

but if we were read this bit of the manifesto more generously (probably too generously), there is something to be said about how the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat as equal inevitabilities is not necessarily the same as saying that they are in fact totally inevitable. they are either inevitable or they are not, but equally so. this could also comes into conflict with rendering of marx as an economic determinist, since the laws of capitalist production could lead to the dissolution of the system on their own, without any inevitable victory on the part of the proletariat, negating their assumed equality. it should also be noted then, that in order for this generous reading of this section to work (if it can), the "fall of the bourgeoisie" would likely have be taken as being of a particular sort. if the sun exploded tomorrow and ended capitalism forever, it could not be described so narrowly as the "fall of the bourgeoisie" but of the elimination of human life altogether. by fall, we would have to refer to it in the sense of the outcome of a competition between classes.

elsewhere in the text, marx also leaves room for a more open-ended approach, when he talks about the historical struggle between classes as "a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." floating the possibility of a "common ruin of the contending classes" expresses a very different kind of analysis than the purely economic determinism which can be teased out above. for there to exist a possibility which does not simply belong to the historical chain of revolutionary usurpations of power would suggest that the same could be true for us today. even if it's not exactly at the level being presented, this would in a sense be able to better account for things like the aforementioned explosion of the sun, or some other forces which exist and which we are unable to overcome (like a potentially catostrophic climate event). regardless, this attitude of historical openness is very different than what is found elsewhere in the text, and i think it can be located in various other forms later on in marxs life as well.

by 1882 when marx is writing the preface to the russian edition of the manifesto, he says

"The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?

The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."

one of the interesting things about this is the first sentence where he talks about the aim of the manifesto as "proclam[ing] of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property", which is a one-sided framing of the problem and manages to put the "equally inevitable" proletarian victory to the side or simply subsumed into it. the latter probably makes the most sense, since he's here arguing that a russian revolution which would be made up of non-proletarian elements could have some revolutionary capacity toward communism, even if the proletariat on a world scale would still need to put in the work toward that aim. in each instance, he is talking to representatives of those elements. this is a political manifesto written to agitate and not simply a treatise of social science. this may get partly lost on 21st century readers, but the russian preface was written for the publication to be read by russian readers. the preface to the italian edition referenced italy as the first capitalist nation and asks its readers "Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?" etc.

it should be clear that there were real political stakes; that marx and engels were not simply describing something they saw around them. the empirical investigation was there in some sense and acted as a motivating force for action, but the particular calls on the revolutionary elements of each country which saw a translation captures the importance of political propaganda and revolutionary agency for the two authors. at times they felt a need to blur the differences between what must happen by iron historical law and what must happen or else we're ruined. this means that this famous document which has generated lots of ideas about what marxism is and how it relates to the historical struggle toward communism is full of theoretical ambivalences, and these exist in some way in many other texts by both marx and engels.

the tensions within and between texts give rise to misunderstandings about the need and possibility of communism, but i don't think that they are reducible to each other so that all claims about a future communism are necessarily ignorantly ideological. if there is a mass political will, and this is definitely what marx and engels were trying to generate with their work, then communism can be possible. the immanent tendencies of capital, which neither thinker really understood that well at the time of writing the manifesto (although it's held up fairly well in many ways), only add to the urgency of the need for such a movement. the destruction is all around us and will keep coming but we can't fall back on the inevitably of communism to save us without anyone ever having to lift a finger. the entire point is that we have to do it ourselves, otherwise the communist movement and its various mouthpieces (like marx and engels) would never even have to exist and communism could simply fall into our collective lap.

#communism

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tamamita · 4 years ago

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Asallamu alaikum, when you’re talking about how Islam is being liberalized from the west are you talking about muslims that are inclusive of queer and transgender people?

Waleikum Assalaam.

No.

I’m gonna give you guys an understanding of what I mean.

Islam could have progressed without the need of Western intervention. Before Imperialism and interventionism hit our homes, progressive ideas and philosophies were starting to flourish among many contemporary Musllms scholars. Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many other Muslim countries saw an era in which they enjoyed secular development and LGBTQ+ rights were starting to develop admist the socioeconomic development.

What caused the entire system to fall down was because of how the West intervened in various eras. From opposing Mosadegh to supporting the Mujahideens (Talibans) against the Russians in Afghanistan. With the cold war on the neck of every Muslim country, many of them fell either victims to the west or had many conservative or hardline Muslims finding a greater momentum and opportunities in the political game as they were used as paws for the imperialistic chessgame.

The Ottoman Empire was the last bastion of Islamic progressivism in its modern time as the West saw their increasing power as a threat to them. They appealed to the Arabs or the Al-Saud family, who rose up to oppose the Turks, thus causing the Middle East to fall into cesspool of Imperailist influence. We can also point to other various stuff, such as Sikot-Pykot, Sunnification of Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, and etc.

I’m not gonna go through the details. But the Muslim world was progressing. They were developing and prospering. But this was completely counteracted by the constant imperialism and interventionism, which caused a lot of Muslim to simply throw every ism out of the window as they were motivated by anger and frustration at how the system failed, thus giving the birth of many radicalized Sunni groups and the subsequent rise of anti-imperialist groups.

It’s a shed of hope, but we’re currently seeing some progression of LGBTQ+ rights in certain Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Iran. While it’s a long way to go. We need to constantly fight and liberate Islam from western neocolonial ideologies and we can’t do it by submitting ourselves to them.

#Anonymous

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somethingusefulfromflorida · 4 years ago

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World War Z was published in 2006, but takes place in 2009 at the earliest. Late in the book, astronaut Terry Knox states that the International Space Station took over 10 years to complete; it started construction in November 1998, and Chief of Staff Karl Rove Grover Carlson says that the Republican party barely eked back into power after a disastrous 2-termer who started a “brush fire war” in the Middle East (George W. Bush). He mentions an election year, but he doesn’t specify if it was the new president’s first or second term, so it’s either set right after 2008 or 2012. This was written before the Nintendo Wii was announced, but one chapter mentions that people brought their GameCubes with them as they fled their homes in search of safety in the frozen Canadian wilderness. This same chapter also mentions that they didn’t know how to pick survival gear; a park ranger finds a SpongeBob SquarePants sleeping bag frozen in the mud because its owner didn’t know the difference between a child’s indoor sleeping bag for slumber parties and a real insulated survival bag for camping.

The new president is never named, he’s just told be be pro-big business and anti-regulation, pushing a placebo zombie vaccine through the FDA to jumpstart the economy. When shit hits the fan, he is “sedated” and his vice president takes power; we’re never told what happened to the president, whether he was bitten or had a stroke, just that he was “sedated.” His Vice President is directly implied to be Colin Powell; he’s former military with family in Jamaica and black. He appoints Howard Dean to be his vice president to form a bipartisan coalition; he is never referred to by name, but it is clearly supposed to be Howard Dean. He was a rising star in the Democratic party from Vermont whose wife is a doctor and whose career imploded after he had a passionate outburst. In 2004, Howard Dean gave a speech where he started passinately screaming about how he was gonna start sweeping state primaries and ride a wave into the White House, punctuating his point by going “HHEEUEAHHGH!!” This was political suicide in 2004, and he was laughed out of the race. In the book, he is referred to only as “the Whacko” because of this. It is implied that he was Powell’s second choice for VP, his first being Barack Obama; the Whacko says that the Democrats wanted somebody else, somebody of the same skin color as the president, but that the country wasn’t ready for that. In 2004, Obama was a candidate for senate in Illinois, so popular and so well spoken that he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention before he even won his seat; then and there, pundits already had him pegged as the first black president, they could see the writing on the walls. The Whacko becomes president when Powell dies of stress, but he is consistently referred to only as the wartime Vice President, out of respect for his boss.

Also, the Attorney General is implied to be Rudy Giuliani; all that is said about him was that he was the mayor of New York and once tried to give himself emergency powers to stay in office after his term. Giuliani did exactly that after 9/11.

Other real life figures mentioned in the book

Fidel Castro; a ton of Cuban Americans flee the continent and return to the island during the zombie war, and he jumpstarts the economy by putting them to work as cheap laborers and slowly integrating them back into Cuban society. He rehabilitates his image by stepping down as dictator and democratizing the country, voting himself out of office before the “nortecubanos” could hang him for decades of war crimes.

Nelson Mendela, referred to by his birth name Rolihlahla, the father of modern South Africa, he personally invites Paul Redekker, a former apartheid era political analyst, to solve the zombie problem; in the 80s, Redekker created a plan for the white minority government in case the black majority ever rose up against them. In real life, Mandela lowered the temperature when he was elected president, saying that revenge against the apartheid government would do more harm than good. In the story, Mandela uses this as justification to reuse the apartheid era plan to handle the zombie outbreak instead. Redekker is so overcome by his compassion and forgiveness that he has a mental episode and dissociates, believing himself to be a black South African.

Kim Jong-il, the dictator of North Korea, he withdraws all troops from the DMZ and shuts the entire country down. After months of radio silence, it is revealed that the entire country’s population has vanished; all satellite imagery shows a desolate wasteland, no zombies, but no humans either. He presumably moved everyone into subterranean bunker systems where he not only control their lives as on the surface, but now their access to food, water, and air. He presumably became the god emperor he always wanted to be; either that, or the entire tunnel complex has been overrun, turning every man woman and child in North Korea into zombies. The South Korean government refuses to send a expedition into the North to figure out what happened, lest they open up one of the tunnels and unleash millions of zombies onto the surface.

Martin Scorsese, mentioned in passing only as “Marty,” a friend of world famous film director Roy Elliot, who himself is a thinly veiled pastiche of Steven Spielberg. Interestingly enough, the audio book features Martin Scorsese doing the voice of the conartist who created the placebo vaccine

One chapter has a ton of vapid celebrities hole together in a fortified mansion on Long Island, and takes great care to show each of them getting torn apart not by zombies but by regular people who storm the facility because they were stupid enough to broadcast their location on reality television. A redneck with a “Get’er Done” hat (Larry the Cable Guy) and some bald guy with diamond earrings (Howie Mandel) blow themselves up with a grenade. Rival political commentators, an annoying guy who talks about feminization of western society and a leathery blonde (Bill Maher and Ann Coulter) have end-of-the-world viking sex as the facility burns to the ground. A dumb starlet (Paris Hilton) is killed by one of her handlers and her little rat dog escapes on foot. A radio shock jock (Howard Stern) actually survives the war and restarts his show.

Michael Stipe of REM joins the army to fight the zombies

Another war veteran mentions how his brother used to have a bunch of Mel Brooks’ old comedy skits on vinyl record, and how he and his squad acted out the “Boy meets Girl” puppet skit with some human skulls. Mel Brooks is author and narrator Max Brooks’ father.

Queen Elizabeth II, refuses to evacuate England when the island is overrun by zombies. She intends to remain in Buckingham Palace “for the duration,” mirroring the fact that her parents refused to evacuate to Canada during World War II.

Vladimir Putin declares himself Tsar of the Holy Russian Empire, an ultra-orthodox religious state that has armed priests execute political dissidents under the guise of mercy killing people who have been bitten by zombies.

Yang Liwei, the first “taikonaut” (Chinese astronaut) has a space station named after him

While the main conflict is about government responses to the zombie pandemic, we see glimpses of a greater war torn planet.

A major plot line involves a Chinese Civil War which sees the entire communist politburo nuked out of existence by a rebel sub commander, as well as an attempted “scorched space policy” where the government planned to blow up their space station with scuttling charges to cause a cascade of space debris to encircle the Earth and prevent any other countries from launching missions in the future (this is known as Kessler Syndrome in real life, and was featured as the inciting incident of the 2013 movie Gravity). The People’s Republic becomes the United Federation.

Iran and Pakistan destroy each other in nuclear war; everyone thought it would be India and Pakistan, but they had very close diplomatic infrastructure in place to prevent such a catastrophe; Pakistan helped Iran build a nuclear arsenal, but as millions of refugees fled from India through Pakistan to the east, Iran had to blow up some Pakistani bridges to stem the flow of zombies, which led to a border war and eventually total nuclear retaliation.

Floridians flee to Cuba, Wisconsinites flee to Canada, the federal government flees to Hawaii. Everything east of the Rockies is abandoned and ruled by warlords until the government sorts itself out and mounts an expedition to clear the continent of zombies by literally marching an unbroken line of soldiers stretching from Canada to Mexico across the wasteland to the Atlantic.

Israel withdraws from Gaza and the West Bank to become super isolationist, building a wall around the entire country to stop the zombies getting in (they were the first country to respond to the pandemic, and the most successful), but the religious right rebels against the secular left in a civil war that sees Jerusalem ceded to a unified Palestine.

It is an amazing, multifaceted story with so much going on that nobody recognizes. It was written as a response to the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. It’s about a geopolitical shift, a change in the status quo, a disaster from which the world never recovers; America before 9/11 was a very different place than American after 9/11. Iraq and Afghanistan changed everything, and we’re still feeling their effects to this day; the story uses the zombie apocalypse as the next big international disaster the world must adapt to. World War Z is World War III with zombies, and I think it would do a lot better if it were published today, now that we’ve had several decades to respond to the fall of the Soviet Union and the endless wars in the Middle East and a global pandemic.

#world war z #wwz #max brooks #book #novel

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gemsofgreece · 4 years ago

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Greek History 101

This is the third of the four-part Greek History Masterpost. We saw what happened in Ancient and Byzantine Greece and now it’s time to see what happened after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. This part deals with the early era of Modern Greek history, meaning the Ottoman occupation, the Greek uprising, the Independence War and the formation of the Modern Greek state. As previously, this post is mostly for Greeks of the diaspora who want to learn more about parts of their history that aren’t easily accessible abroad, native Greeks who want to improve their knowledge of the events in a simple way and everyone else out there who is curious and thinks Modern Greece is way too obscure compared to what they know about Ancient Greeks.

*Important note: As we proceed, we come closer to ourselves in time, which means incidents described might provoke a reaction from people more strongly than things that happened thousands of years ago. Provoking is NOT these posts’s goal. As I’ve said many times, I use only the English Wikipedia, not because it is ideal, but because I believe that it generally lies on middle ground more than other sources. This part is about the Greek Independence War, which Greeks consider one of the most important / great moments in their history, but I reassure you it wasn’t a walk in the park among flowers. It is going to get dark and I won’t refrain much from dark moments of the people involved.*

Parts:

Ancient History: Prehistoric and Ancient Greece (7000 - 146 BC)

Post-Ancient and Medieval History: Roman, Byzantine Greece and Latin states (146 BC - 1453 AD)

Early Modern History: Ottoman rule and the Greek Revolution (1453 - 1831)

Recent Modern History: Kingdom of Greece and the Hellenic Republic (1832 - now)

III. Early Modern History: Ottoman rule and the Greek Revolution (1453 - 1831)

Ottoman rule (1453 - 1820)

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks annex most of mainland Greece. The islands fall one or two centuries later. The Ionian islands are never taken. Several Latin states, as explained in the previous post, will be effectively defended by the Venetians and Genoese. Turks also leave the bigger mountains untouched. The Greeks who want to fight the Ottoman rule hide in the mountains and engage in guerilla warfare.

Many Greek intellectuals flee to Western Europe and take classical works with them. These will influence the Renaissance, the Enlightment and Philhellenism to a significant degree.

Greeks are allowed to practice their religion and engage in commerce, business and shipping, often reaching positions of power and privilege. On the other hand, the majority is exposed to tyrannical malpractices of the Ottoman empire’s peripheral administrative personnel.

Three new Greek elite classes emerge: a) the prókriti or kocabaşis, landlords bureaucrats and tax collectors, b) the Phanariots, businessmen and diplomats of Constantinople and, c) the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Greek Orthodox Church, gaining control over the entire Orthodox population of the empire.

The Ottomans require that male children from Christian peasant villages must be conscripted and enrolled in the corps of Janissaries for military training in the Sultan's army. These kids are subjected to brainwashing about their background and forced to convert to Islam. Greeks would often avoid the recruitment of their sons by marrying them in childhood or even crippling them.

Greeks rise up against the Ottomans many times, without success. Greeks side with Venetians and Russians in their wars with the Turks.

Βeginnings of the Greek Revolution

Wealthy Greek intellectuals throughout Europe start communicating with each other, envisioning a Greek revolution. Ottomans find out about Rigas Feraios’s attempts to organize an uprising for all the Balkans and have him arrested in Austria, where they strangle and throw him in Danube.

Nikolaos Skoufas, Emmanuel Xanthos and Athanasios Tsakalov, inspired by Feraios’ death, found in 1814 the secret organization Φιλι��ή Εταιρεία (Society of Friends). Alexander Ypsilantis, a Greek general in the Russian Army, becomes the leader of the organization.

The Society expands rapidly - it plans to launch revolts simultaneously in three different regions; the Peloponnese, Constantinople and the Danubian Principalities.

In order to raise all Christians in the Balkans, Ypsilantis announces that the Revolt has the blessings of Russia. This along with some strategic mistakes in the Danubian Principalities make Tsar Alexander I force Russia’s foreign minister, the also Greek Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, to struck Ypsilantis off the Russian Army. The revolt in Danube is then suppressed by the Ottomans.

The Ottoman Turks are outraged by this attempted uprising. The planned revolt in Constantinople is suppressed before it starts in what is known as the Constantinople Massacre of 1821. The Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V opposes to the revolt and anathematizes the Greek revolutionaries. The Sultan has him publicly hanged all the same. This causes outrage thoughout Europe.

The emblem of the Society of Friends and the three founders. The letters on the emblem (ΗΕΑ ΗΘΣ) stand for the phrase “Η ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ Η ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ” (=Freedom or Death) which eventually became the Greek National Motto.

Greek War of Independence (1821 - 1829)

In the Peloponnese, the priest Papaflessas, member of the Society, instills a fervent desire for an uprising to the Greeks, which grew more zealous after the failure of the other two revolts. On 17 March 1821, the Maniot Greeks declare war on the Turks. Greek irregular troops under commanders Petros Mavromichalis, Theodoros Kolokotronis, Nikitaras and priest Papaflessas himself take the cities Kalamata, Kalavryta and Patras. By the end of the month the Greeks control all the Peloponnesian countryside. Kolokotronis lays siege to Tripolitsa. In September 1821, the city falls to the Greeks and is subjected to pillage and atrocities. Greeks kill almost half of the Muslim population and the rest flee from the Peloponnese.

In Central Greece, Livadia and Thebes are taken by Athanasios Diakos in March. In April, Greeks lay siege to Athens. Turks defeat Greeks in Alamana and Elefthohori under Omer Vrioni. Diakos is captured by the Turks and is impaled. The revolution is put to risk but then warrior Odysseas Androutsos, famously with only a handful of men, defeats the Turkish Army in the Battle of Gravia. By the end of the year, Greeks have secured Peloponnese and Central Greece.

Admiral Konstantinos Kanaris arrives to Cyprus where he’s met with enthusiasm by the Greek Cypriots. Many Cypriots leave with him to join the war in mainland Greece and Cyrpus will aid Greece with supplies throughout the war. The Turks kill over 2,000 Cypriots in revenge.

On 11 April 1822, Turks slaughter 25,000 Greeks and sell as slaves another 45,000 on Chios island. The Chios Massacre shocks the Europeans. In revenge, Kanaris launches a fire ship attack and causes the Ottoman flagship to blow up along with 2,000 men.

Mahmud Dramali Pasha invades Morea in Peloponnese but his army is annihilated by Theodoros Kolokotronis at Dervenakia.

Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire, intervenes to aid the Turks against the Greeks. Ibrahim Pasha lands at the Peloponnese with 54 warships and 16,000 men, the second largest fleet in European history after Napoleon’s. Papaflessas falls in the battle against them. Kanaris and Kolokotronis fail to stop them too. Warriors Yannis Makriyannis and Demetrios Ypsilantis successfully defend Nafplion and Argos from Ibrahim Pasha. The Greek Navy under Andreas Miaoulis defeats the Turkish fleet in Corinth.

In April 1825 a third siege of Missolonghi city begins. Philhellenes from Europe and America travel to Missolonghi to join the besieged Greeks, including the British poet Lord Byron. After a year, the besieged have eaten all animals and feed on rats and lake algae. Famine and disease fall on the city. The Greeks secretly decide to get out of the city in the night, surprising the Turkish and Egyptian troops. The plan is for the men to attack the troops, giving a chance to the women and children to escape. It is also planned that Commander Georgios Karaiskakis and his men will also attack the Turks from the rear to distract them. The plan is betrayed to the Turks by a (possibly Bulgarian) deserter. Turks then give a misleading sign that Karaiskakis has already arrived and Greeks exit the city, only to find 35,000 Turks and Egyptians fully prepared. More than 8,000 Greeks are slain that night. Missolonghi’s fall has a huge impact on the Europeans.

Ibrahim then attacks the Maniots. The Maniots, including the women, confront him in battles and Kolokotronis attacks him from the rear, forcing him to retreat. In 1826, Reshid Pasha lays siege to Athens and Acropolis. British infantry joins the Greeks but the British try to stick to orderly attack while the Greeks are used to irregular guerilla warfare. This misunderstanding leads to disaster and the Ottoman Turks take Athens in 1827. This will be the last Ottoman victory.

Muhammad Ali builds a new fleet in Egypt and sends it off to join the Turkish and Ibrahim’s fleets in order to destroy Hydra island, the stronghold of the Greek Navy. British, French and Russians team up to assist Hydra and enjoy a complete victory in the Battle of Navarino in 1827.

The last battle takes place in Petra where Demetrios Ypsilantis defeats the Turks who surrender all their remaining lands in Central Greece. Demetrios finishes successfully the war his brother Alexander started.

The Greeks had formed a government for the still unrecognized First Hellenic Republic since 1822, which was spotted by a lot of infighting between intellectuals and captains. The intellectuals thought they should govern as the only ones who knew how to run a state properly while the war chiefs thought they were the ones who deserved to govern since they were the ones who had been willing to sacrifice themselves for the Independence. In the late years of the war and the early years of the Independent Greek State many of the war heroes are imprisoned or left forgotten in destitution. A few are also assassinated.

In 1828, the Greeks form a government under Count Ioannis Kapodistrias. Kapodistrias actively tries to create a functional state and redress the problems of the war-ravaged country and he is nowadays still considered one of the best politicians this land has ever seen. In a crescendo of the infighting, he is assassinated in 1931 by the brothers of the imprisoned war hero Petros Mavromichalis.

General Theodoros Kolokotronis’ pledge to serve in the Government of the First Hellenic Republic in 1822 only for the good of the country and never seek personal benefit.

End of Part III.

Part I

Part II

Part IV

#greece #europe #history #greek history #modern greek history #european history #greek revolution #greek war of independence #ottoman empire #world history

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jamespotterthefirst · 5 years ago

Text

Little Miracle

Pairing: Dr. Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Dr. Lilac Allende) Word count: 1,900 Warning: A few curse words.

Author’s Note: This is part of the canon scene where Ethan and MC watch over Dolores’s baby, from Ethan’s POV. I was inspired by the line from the book that says they “talked long into the night.”

Catch up here.

The sterile room of the NICU feels stifling that night, the fluorescent lights shining on them both almost blinding. Ethan had been in that room many times before, but never like this. Never with a strain on his mind and heart so painful, he thinks he might burst from it. Now, sitting in the love seat, counting each of the baby's breaths, he feels as though he is in a foreign place—a vastly terrible one where his dearest friend does not exist anymore.

The knot in his throat returns.

Dammit.

It threatens to constrict his breathing in the most debilitating way and he hates it. Urgently, he suppresses the flood of emotion at once, turning instead to glance at Lilac next to him.

The young doctor is not looking at him. In the silence that stretches between them, she stares at the linoleum floor, her tear-streaked face is pale, her eyes bleary and red. The weight of their previous conversation hangs over them and he is surprised to discover it is not an unpleasant one. Instead, her quiet presence at his side feels oddly… comforting. More so than the many glasses of scotch he was planning on drowning in had he not stayed.

Sensing his eyes on her, she glances up and offers him a tired smile which Ethan returns without hesitation. The moment lingers and before either of them can say anything, a soft cooing distracts them as the baby stretches.

An inexplicable warmth pierces through Ethan as he very gently offers Dolores' baby his hand. Small fingers close around his, weakly, yet powerful enough to steal his breath away.

“She named him after you,” she informs him tenderly, as though the words she is offering him are made of the most delicate crystal.

A small wave of shock courses through him as he looks at the name.

Ethan Hudson.

His throat tightens painfully yet again and all he can do is swallow.

“I...see she did.”

A small silence.

Her soothing, kind voice saves him from his thoughts when she comments, “You must have known Dolores a long time.”

Ethan busies himself with carefully removing his hand from the baby's grasp. Despite the painful ache in his throat, he finds the words. “Over ten years. When I first emailed her I only meant to check in. But she was recently divorced, feeling alone, so she insisted on coffee.” In spite of himself, he smiles at the memory of the lively yet persistent young woman who had been so determined to befriend him. “And then it turned into more emails and meeting once every couple months for Sunday roast.”

“She sounds like a good friend.”

She was, he thinks before his mind catches up with him. When it does, the past tense stabs him like a knife to the side.

“I didn’t make friends easily when I started here,” he begins, pausing only briefly to keep his voice from breaking. “So I was always grateful to her for that.”

The words finish ringing out in the quiet room and he swallows, suddenly exhausted from fighting back the excruciating pain of Dolores's death. As he falls silent, prickling eyes moving to the baby she fought so fiercely to protect, Ethan allows himself to mourn. The torrent of sorrow hits him is like the opening of a floodgate.

He is certain he will drown in his grief until a soft, warm hand slides over his, looking small and delicate against his own.

Ethan remains very still.

“I’m so sorry this happened,” she murmurs, the sincerity her voice offers something akin to a caress.

Ethan's eyes remain locked on their joined hands. Something about the sight and the feel of her soft skin against his tears away at his pride until all he wants to do is hold on to her desperately. Instead, he looks up to meet her eyes, unprepared for the quiet compassion in their depths. It hits him so abruptly that he is unable to look away, feeling something foreign stir in the depths of his chest, as consequential as the first blooms of Spring.

“Me too.”

As the seconds tick by and he becomes very aware that her hand remains on his, his pulse picks up, clamoring at his ears. With much effort, he forces himself to pull away.

“I think we need coffee.”

“I can get some,” she says, already rising to her feet, unaware of the scorching trail her touch left behind on his skin.

Ethan shakes his head. “No, I’ll go.”

He leaves the room in quick strides, grateful for the brief moment of solitude. Being alone, however, proves to be a small torment since he is unable to suppress thoughts of earnest, kindhearted eyes breaking down every barrier he had stubbornly built that evening. Steaming mugs of coffee in hand, he returns to the NICU with an eager haste he refuses to acknowledge, missing the tendrils of her soft companionship.

When he enters the room, Ethan finds her lovingly murmuring to the baby. “That’s it little tadpole. In and out.”

Lilac notices his arrival, offering him a sheepish smile at being caught. Cheeks blazing, she accepts the coffee gratefully. “This doesn’t taste like the cafeteria coffee,” she observes approvingly.

“This is from my private coffee machine. As soon as I got an office, I vowed never to drink that caffeinated dishwater again.” He watches her take this information in with knowing amusement. “Nobody knows I have it so…”

Quite seriously, she vows, “I won’t tell a soul.”

Ethan chuckles, shaking his head, the first true flash of amusement that evening.

They fall into a comfortable silence after that until the attending overseeing the case during the night shift strolls in to check on the baby. Satisfied with her findings, she quickly jots down the information on his chart.

“Our little miracle,” she comments quietly, both to the baby and to them, before leaving the room.

Ethan snuffs the urge to scoff at the word miracle. Lilac, of course, catches this and arches a brow at him.

“You don't believe in those,” she says, not as a question but as an undeniable observation.

Ethan hesitates to answer until he glances at her. There is no trace of judgment or derision on her lovely face, just fatigue from already spending several hours keeping watch.

“There is no scientific basis to account for them,” he allows. “Frankly, I'm a little surprised you believe in them despite choosing to spend your career with facts and empirical evidence.” He is careful to keep all sarcasm out of his tone though he doubts he is successful. Years of being a sardonic little shit are hard to break.

Lilac doesn't seem to mind, however, because she gives him an indulging sort of smile. “It is because I have studied science and facts that I am hesitant to dismiss their existence,” she explains. “Even with everything we know, there are some things science or reason cannot explain.”

“There are too many variables at play in a single minute, Rookie,” he counters. “When something occurs that we cannot explain away, it means a plethora of those variables aligned to create a perfect outcome.”

Lilac takes a careful sip of coffee, watching him over the rim of her mug. Not for the first time, he can see her mind working, formulating an argument. And like many times before, he longs to know the mystery of her thoughts.

“And getting that outcome despite all the innumerable possibilities,” she begins thoughtfully. “Isn't that a little miraculous?”

“No.”

Lilac laughs at the resolute way in which he shoots her down, though the sound is far from mocking.

“Are you then crediting what science cannot explain to coincidence and luck, Dr. Ramsey?”

He briefly pauses at that, thoughts stumbling. The haughty way in which she lifts the mug to her lips, concealing a smug smile, tells him she had intended to stump him. Instead of feeling annoyed, as he should, he feels a thrill of approval and something else entirely.

“Not at all,” he returns when he recovers. “I am merely pointing out that there is still much we don't know as a species. When something inexplicable takes place, the real cause is most likely attributed to something we haven't learned yet.”

Despite looking utterly exhausted, her eyes glint, as though she had expected that very answer.

“'If he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.'”

Ethan blinks.

“Are you seriously quoting Dostoevsky at me, Rookie?”

This time, she dissolves into self deprecating laughter. “Sorry,” she says, scrunching her nose in the most endearing of ways. “I studied him as an elective when I was in my undergrad program so it's hard to break out of the habit of being a pretentious ass.”

“A pre-med student with a penchant for world literature,” he observes, allowing himself to relax into the air of amusement her laughter catalyzes.

“I was downright insufferable.”

“So not much has changed.”

Lilac throws him what is meant to be an unamused glare, but she ruins it by losing the battle against a smile. Ethan grins, unable to help it.

“What else do you walk around quoting at people who disagree with you?” he asks, genuinely curious.

“Nothing as severe as Russian literature,” she quips. “I save that for the most stubborn of the people I argue with.”

Ethan rolls his eyes though he too fails to stifle a smile. He begrudgingly accepts that he enjoys bantering with her, though he would never admit it out loud.

“Be lucky I didn't quote Harry Potter at you,” Lilac continues sagely. “I am notorious for that, too.”

“There's nothing in the Potter books about miracles,” he points out.

Lilac shoots him a surprised look. “You've read them?”

“Yes, I read the few that were out when I was in high school. They had midnight release events at bookstores when a new one was published.”

She stares at him in stunned silence.

“You went to that? That is so…”

“Don't say–”

“Cute.”

The word sends a jolt through him, made worse by the sound of her tired but giddy laughter. Ethan allows her to enjoy the mirth, even if it's at his expense. If he was being honest, he thoroughly enjoyed it too, feeling his anguish ease with each passing moment.

“Did you dress up?” she asks, eyes alight with excitement.

“We are not speaking of this anymore.”

“You did, didn't you?” she manages to say through a wave of fresh laughter. “Who did you dress up as? Harry? Dumbledore? Snape?”

Ethan makes a disgusted sound. “Don't insult me.”

Her laughter is uncontrollable by now and he can't help but join. “Good answer,” she commends.

Bodies close on the love seat, they both relax further into their seats, contentment lingering in their fading smiles. Ethan allows himself one good look at her as she becomes momentarily distracted by her phone. The harsh lightning of the NICU washes her out, especially in her sleep-deprived, exhausted state, but somehow she still looks unfairly beautiful. Yet, there is something entirely different about her, though he is far too tired to decipher what.

Lilac glances up to catch him staring.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Her previous words echo in his mind.

“There are some things science or reason cannot explain.”

Ethan thinks of Dolores and the unwavering friendship she offered him despite being surly and unapproachable. He thinks of the unconditional love she held for a being she had not even met yet, so profound she gave her life for him. He thinks of Lilac, offering him compassion and companionship despite his every effort to push her away.

Lilac glances glances his way, beaming at him radiantly. As he returns the smile, his heart feeling ten times lighter than it did an hour ago, he admits to himself that she was right.

______

Author’s Note: I don’t know what that was but if you made it here, thank you!

I think I will skip the baseball game scene and go on to the fMRI scene. I might have that be slightly AU and have Ethan ask MC the questions. Let me know what you think <3

______

@dulceghernandez | @lion-ess24 | @emotionalswift2 | @the-soot-sprite |

#open heart #ethan ramsey #ethan x mc #playchoices #my writing

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

Text

Sunday, April 25, 2021

San Francisco Contends With a Different Sort of Epidemic: Drug Deaths (NYT) The drugs killed them in plain view—in front of the public library, at the spot on Powell Street where the cable car used to turn around. Others died alone in single-room apartments or in camping tents pitched on the pavement, each death adding to an overdose crisis that is one of the worst in the nation. Drug overdoses rose across the country during the coronavirus pandemic. But in San Francisco, they skyrocketed, claiming 713 lives last year, more than double the 257 people here who died of the virus in 2020. For officials in San Francisco, the epidemic of overdose deaths has been both humbling and alarming. Many believe that the city’s preoccupation with the pandemic has eclipsed concern over the drug deaths and blunted the urgency of the moment. “I can say for sure that what we are doing is not working and that it’s getting worse every single day,” said Matt Haney, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors who represents the Tenderloin, a district of low-income housing in the heart of the city that has seen the most overdoses. “I get offered drugs every time I step outside. It’s overwhelming.”

In historic move, Biden says 1915 massacres of Armenians constitute genocide (Reuters) U.S. President Joe Biden on Saturday said the 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide, a historic declaration that infuriated Turkey and is set to further strain already frayed ties between the two NATO allies. The largely symbolic move, breaking away from decades of carefully calibrated language from the White House, will likely to be celebrated by the Armenian diaspora in the United States, but comes at a time when Ankara and Washington have deep policy disagreements over a host of issues. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey “entirely rejects” the U.S. decision which he said was based “solely on populism”. Ties between Ankara and Washington have been strained over issues ranging from Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 defense systems—over which it was the target of U.S. sanctions—to policy differences in Syria, human rights and legal matters.

Ravaged by Covid, Brazil Faces a Hunger Epidemic (NYT) Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger—fome—in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything. A year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry. The virus is ripping through Brazil’s social fabric, setting wrenching records, while the worsening health crisis pushes businesses into bankruptcy, killing jobs and further hampering an economy that has grown little or not at all for more than six years.

Baltic states join NATO allies in kicking out Russians for spying (Reuters) Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on Friday joined a fast-growing list of NATO and EU members demanding the removal of Russian diplomats for alleged spying, in actions that have infuriated Moscow and look certain to provoke further retaliation. A spate of tit-for-tat expulsions has plunged ties between Russia and countries of the former Soviet bloc to their lowest point since the fall of Communism, prompting Moscow to accuse at least two of them of deliberately wrecking relations. Lithuania said it was sending two diplomats home and Latvia and Estonia one each. “The EU should have less undercover Russian spies,” Lithuanian foreign affairs minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told reporters.

Cashlessness may have gone foo far in Norway, government warns (Bloomberg) Norway’s government wants to make sure banks don’t stop providing cash, as the country becomes the world leader in abandoning physical notes and coins. The Finance Ministry has told the Financial Supervisory Authority in Oslo to put together a plan that will ensure banks continue offering cash services, according to a statement on Friday. That’s after the FSA’s own survey found that a number of Norwegian banks “claim that they are not responsible for offering cash services.” Banknotes and coins are used in only 3-4 per cent of all transactions in Norway, the lowest level of cash usage in world, according to calculations by Norges Bank. Neighbouring Sweden, another nearly cashless society, has also sounded the alarm amid concerns that the complete disappearance of paper money would pose a number of risks.

Italian Police Accuse Man of Getting Paid for 15 Years While Skipping Work (NYT) A hospital in Italy’s southern region of Calabria fired Salvatore Scumace for not showing up to work. For 15 years. Mr. Scumace, 67, was fired last year from the Pugliese Ciaccio Hospital in the city of Catanzaro, but the news made headlines in Italy this week when Italy’s financial police announced their investigation into his remarkable record of absenteeism. His case was uncovered as part of a wider investigation into absenteeism by public workers. Mr. Scumace is accused of earning an estimated 538,000 euros, or more than $645,000, for a job the police say he never performed over the course of his long and less-than-productive career as a hospital fire-safety employee. A chronic problem in some public sector jobs, the Italian police have cracked down in recent years on no-show employees, investigating dozens of cases around the country.

Coronavirus: India’s daily cases climb to new world record as hospitals overwhelmed (NBC News) India’s coronavirus infections set a new world record for the third consecutive day rising by 346,786 overnight, the health ministry said on Saturday, as overwhelmed hospitals in the densely-populated country begged for oxygen supplies. India is in the grip of a rampaging second wave of the pandemic, hitting a rate of one Covid-19 death just under every four minutes in Delhi, as the capital’s underfunded health system buckles. The government has deployed military planes and trains to get oxygen from the far corners of the country to Delhi. Television images showed an oxygen truck arriving at Delhi’s Batra hospital after it issued an SOS call saying it had 90 minutes of oxygen left for its 260 patients. India surpassed the U.S. record of 297,430 single-day infections anywhere in the world on Thursday, making it the global epicenter of a pandemic that is waning in many other countries. The Indian government had itself declared it had beaten back the coronavirus in February when new cases fell to all-time lows.

Debris From Indonesian Submarine Is Found, Ending Hopes of Rescue (NYT) Debris from an Indonesian Navy submarine that disappeared this past week with 53 people aboard has been found deep in the Bali Sea, confirming fears that the vessel sank and cracked, the navy’s chief of staff said on Saturday. The submarine, the KRI Nanggala-402, disappeared early Wednesday off the Indonesian island of Bali while conducting torpedo drills. Emergency signals to the vessel after it failed to make contact went unanswered. The Nanggala was built to withstand pressure of up to 500 meters deep, but sonar seemed to indicate that the submarine sank to a depth of about 850 meters, well below what is referred to as “crush depth.” At that depth, even the steel hull of a submarine would almost certainly fracture from the pressure.

Jerusalem tension triggers Gaza-Israel fire exchange (AP) Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired some three dozen rockets into Israel overnight Saturday, while the Israeli military struck back at targets operated by the ruling Hamas group. The exchange came as tensions in Jerusalem spilled over into the worst round of cross-border violence in months. The barrage of rocket fire came as hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli police in east Jerusalem. The clashes, in which at least four police and six protesters were injured, have become a nightly occurrence throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and show no signs of stopping. Jerusalem, home to holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, has long been a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2014, similar tensions erupted into a 50-day war between Israel and Gaza’s ruling Hamas militant group.

60% of the world is online (TNW) The new Digital 2021 April Global Statshot Report—published in partnership between Hootsuite and We Are Social—reveals that more than 6 in 10 people on Earth now use the internet. Internet users have grown by more than 330 million over the past year, reaching a total of more than 4.7 billion at the start of April 2021. There are 5.27 billion unique mobile users around the world, which means that more than two-thirds of all the people on Earth now have a mobile phone.

Can We Learn to Live With Germs Again? (NYT) For more than a century—since scientists first learned that unseen germs cause infection and illness—we’ve tended to think of sterile environments as the safe ones. And at the start of the outbreak, when we didn’t know any better, it was sensible to disinfect as much as possible, including our groceries, clothing and personal spaces. It took time for coronavirus researchers to figure out that the risk of surface transmission is low—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only recently pegged it at generally less than one in 10,000. Despite the now consensus recognition that air transmission, not surface spread, is more important, most pandemic sanitation practices have continued. We continue to annihilate every microbe in our midst, even though most are harmless. The New York City subway, for example, has been undergoing a 24-hour cleaning protocol that includes ultraviolet light and a variety of disinfecting solutions. But some health experts are watching this ongoing onslaught with a mounting sense of dread. They fear that many of the measures we’ve employed to stop the virus may pose a threat to human health in the long run if they continue. Their worries center on the human microbiome—the trillions of bacteria that live on and inside our bodies. They say that excessive hygiene practices, inappropriate antibiotic use and lifestyle changes such as distancing may weaken those communities going forward in ways that promote sickness and imperil our immune systems. By sterilizing our bodies and spaces, they argue, we may be doing more harm than good. “We’re starting to realize that there’s collateral damage when we get rid of good microbes, and that has major consequences for our health,” says B. Brett Finlay, a professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of British Columbia.

#headlines #news

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