#galician history

[demolina]

 → history + maría pérez la balteira

requested by anonymous 

María Pérez Balteira is the best known of the medieval soldaderas and, of course, the main female character in galician-portuguese medieval lyric poetry. Contemporary troubadours, secularists and minstrels made her the target of their collective jokes. Jokes that were recorded in the medieval songbooks and which were considered as they were, without separating or omitting any words in their proper measure, many of them being exaggerated expressions. — Joaquim Ventura, O contrato de María Pérez Balteira con Sobrado 

[zsofiarosebud]

24, 9 or 2 for the history ask??

Hi anon!

24: I'm going for two Galician historical figures that I learned about recently and I'm astonished by their importance: Constanza de Castro and the Count of Gondomar. The first was a medieval lady who stood almost alone against castilian armies in a castle near my birthplace; the second was a Galician intellectual from the Elizabethan Era who collected a lot of rarities and he even may had got a copy of the first folio by Shakespeare at the time.

9: The Last Emperor by Bertolucci may be my personal favourite. But it depends on if you count Citizen Kane as historical or not (?). Master and Commander is not historical per se, but very reliable on historical matters and an excellent film.

2: Of course, it would be (unfortunately) because of the Way, O Camiño de Santiago, a pilgrimage from medieval times based on a LIE about relics being hidden in our main cathedral. We galicians have very strong opinions on that, positive and negative ones (guess my stance).

Also maybe being the place of origin of Fidel Castro's family (?).

Thank you anon!

[illustratus]

Leonor Telles before the corpse of Count Andeiro by Alfredo Roque Gameiro

[all-the-stars-hills-milky-way]

🍂 5-11-2024

Went to school

Got 9,8 in a Spanish History test

Took a Spanish Literature test

Motivated myself navigating through studyblr

Studied Galician for a couple of hours

🎧 Listened: Tough love by Gracie Abrams

📺 Watched: football and MasterChef

👣 Walked: 2,8km

[displayheartcode]

Today I learned that there’s an entire encyclopedia on Eastern European Jewish history and culture

[reallunargift]

*thinks about D. Teresa and the political upheaval when she took a Galician lover*

*thinks about D. Pedro and the political upheaval when he took a Galician lover*

*thinks about D. Leonor Teles and the political upheaval when she took a Galician lover*

*thinks abou

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Canada's most infamous Nazi these days had an endowment at the University of Alberta. As Jeremy Appel points out, U of A's Chancellor from 1982 to 1986, Peter Savaryn, was a Ukrainian SS veteran. Savaryn co-founded the U of A's "Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies" which has been a centre of fascistic historical revisionism since the 1970s.

The program was an incubation chamber for SS veterans and their offspring and sympathisers. These U of A scholars fought against claims of Ukrainian SS crimes against humanity in the mid-1980s during the Deschenes Commission investigation into Nazi war criminals. The political purpose was to deflect and deny Ukrainian fascism and its role in the Holocaust, while positioning Ukrainian Nationalists as caught between the Nazis and Soviets, instead of being fascist allies and Holocaust collaborators. Their greatest success in Canada was pushing the most extreme interpretation of the 'Holodomor' (Ukraine's 1932-33 famine) as a deliberate genocide against Ukrainians by Stalin and the Soviet Union. This is not to deny the mass deaths in that period, but minimizing of the role of Ukrainian fascists in the Holocaust while accentuating their own victimization is a deliberate political strategy -- one that was about asserting far right intellectual hegemony over the Ukrainian community in Canada as much as possible. As a descendent of Ukrainian-Canadians myself, I'm very aware of how successful this effort has been.

As Nazis, they buried the truth, lied to their children and grandchildren, and advanced a new post-Soviet Ukrainian nationalism on fascist foundations and myths. The U of A's role in this was instrumental.

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

happy Galician Slaughter anniversary to every polish person with peasant ancestors!

[patchesjam]

Nope not Portuguese, Filipino. 330 years of being a Spanish Colony tends to have lasting impacts.

damn me and my eurocentric brain i was thinking the romance languages :( but yeahhh i'm sure it does.

[0liverspace]

Studying one of your favourite historical figures is one of the best things an history enjoyer can experience 🙏

[immaculatasknight]

Time to rethink

[rcsadimare]

i think one of my posts got eaten already lmao

[illustratus]

The Coronation of Inês de Castro (details) by Gillot Saint-Evre

[prose2passion]

There is even a Galician novel based on the theory of his Galician origins: https://rodrigocostoya.com/obra/portosanto/ Obviously, a problematic figure to claim for your cultural heritage, so I'd rather not have anything to do with him.

[argyrocratie]

"In “Memory Voids and Role Reversals,” Palestinian political science professor Dana El Kurd writes of her jarring experience, hearing of the October 7th massacres by Hamas while visiting the Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She notes the historic irony of Holocaust survivors seeking security from future oppression by expelling another people from their homeland by the hundreds of thousands, ghettoizing them in enclaves enforced by military checkpoints, and controlling them with collective punishment.

The irony of a state formed as the “antithesis” to the ghetto using ghettoization as a strategy of control is not lost on Palestinians. This infrastructure of coercion went hand in hand, of course, with ever-present physical violence — imprisonment, home demolitions, air strikes and more.

She quotes Aristide Zolberg’s observation that “formation of a new state can be a ‘refugee-generating process.’”

This is not only true of Palestinians. The Westphalian nation-state, which has been the normative component of the international system since the Treaty of Westphalia, necessarily entails (especially since the post-1789 identification of nationalism with the nation-state) the suppression of ethnic identity to a far greater extent than the expression of any such identity. Every constructed national identity associated with a “State of the X People” has necessarily involved the suppression and homogenization of countless ethnicities present in the territory claimed by that state. At the time of the French Revolution, barely half the “French” population spoke any of the many langue d’oil dialects of northern France, let alone the dialect of the Ile de France (the basis for the official “French” language). The rest spoke Occitan dialects like Provençal, or non-Romance languages like Breton (whose closest living relative is Welsh). The same is true of Catalan, Aragonese, Basque, and Galician in Spain, the low-German languages and now-extinct Wendish in Germany, the non-Javanese ethnicities of Indonesia, and so on. Heads of state issue sonorous pronouncements concerning the “Nigerian People” or “Zimbabwean People,” in reference to multi-ethnic populations whose entire “identity” centers on lines drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference.

When I say official national languages were established through the suppression of their rivals, I mean things like the residential schools of the United States and Canada punishing Native children for using their own languages. Or schools around the world shaming students with signs reading “I Spoke Welsh (or Breton, or Provencal, or Catalan, or Basque, or Ainu, or an African vernacular instead of the English, French, etc., lingua franca). And so on.

And when we consider the range of artificial national identities that were constructed by suppressing other real ethnicities, we can’t forget the “Jewish People” of Israel. Its construction occurred part and parcel with the suppression of diasporic Jewish ethnic identities all over Europe and the Middle East. The “New Jewish” identity constructed by modern Zionism was associated with the artificial revival of Hebrew, which had been almost entirely a liturgical language for 2300 years, as an official national language. And this, in turn, was associated with the suppression — both official and unofficial — of the actually existing Jewish ethnicities associated with the Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic languages.

The centuries-old languages and cultures of actual Jewish ethnicities throughout Europe were treated as shameful relics of the past, to be submerged and amalgamated into a new artificially constructed Jewish identity centered on the Hebrew language. 

Yiddish, the language spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe — derived from an archaic German dialect and written in the Hebrew alphabet — was stigmatized by Zionist leaders in Palestine and by the early Israeli government. According to Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language, the “very making of Hebrew into a spoken language derives from the will to separate from the Diaspora.” Diasporic Jewish identities, as viewed by Zionist settlers, were “a cultural morass to be purged.” The “New Jew” was an idealized superhuman construct, almost completely divorced from centuries worth of culture and traditions of actual Jews: “Yiddish began to represent diaspora and feebleness, said linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann. ‘And Zionists wanted to be Dionysian: wild, strong, muscular and independent.’” 

This “contempt for the Diaspora” was “manifested . . .  in the fierce campaign against Yiddish in Palestine, which led not only to the banning of Yiddish newspapers and theaters but even to physical attacks against Yiddish speakers.” From the 1920s on, anyone in Palestine with the temerity to publish in Yiddish risked having their printing press destroyed by organizations with names like the “Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language,” “Organization for the Enforcement of Hebrew,” and “Central Council for the Enforcement of Hebrew.” The showing of the Yiddish-language film Mayn Yidishe Mame (“My Yiddish Mama���), in Tel Aviv in 1930, provoked a riot led by the above-mentioned Battalion. After the foundation of Israel, “every immigrant was required to study Hebrew and often to adopt a Hebrew surname.” In its early days Israel legally prohibited plays and periodicals in the Yiddish language. A recent defender of the early suppression of Yiddish, in the Jerusalem Post, argued that Diasporic languages threatened to “undermine the Zionist project”; in other words, an admission that actually existing ethnic identities threatened an identity manufactured by a nationalist ideology.

If this is true of Yiddish — the native language of the Ashkenazi Jews who dominated the Zionist settlement of Palestine — it’s even more so of the suppression of Jewish ethnic identities outside the dominant Sephardic minority. Golda Meir once dismissed Jews of non-Ashkenazi or non-Yiddish descent as “not Jews.” 

Consider the roughly half of the Israeli population comprised of Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern communities (including those living in Palestine itself before European settlement). Although the Mizrahim are trotted out as worthy victims when they are convenient for purposes of Israeli propaganda — the majority of them were expelled from Arab countries like Iraq after 1948, in what was an undeniable atrocity — they are treated the rest of the time as an embarrassment or a joke, and have been heavily discriminated against, by the descendants of Ashkenazi settlers. For example former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described Mizrahim 

as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.” Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”

Current Prime Minister Netanyahu once joked about a “Mizrahi gene” as his excuse for tardiness. And an Israeli realtor ran a commercial appealing to “there goes the neighborhood” sentiments by depicting a light-skinned family having their Passover celebration disrupted by uncouth Mizrahi neighbors.

Nationalism and the nation-state are the enemies of true ethnicity and culture, and built on their graves. There’s no better illustration of this principle than the Zionist project itself."

-Kevin Carson, "Zionism and the Nation-State: Palestinians Are Not the Only Victims"

[zvaigzdelasas]

[CBC is Canadian State Funded Media]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday senior bureaucrats are reviewing the Deschenes Commission report — a 1980s-era independent inquiry that looked at alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada — with an eye to making more of it public. Governor General Mary Simon also said today Rideau Hall is sorry for honouring Peter Savaryn — a former chancellor of the University of Alberta who served in the same Nazi unit as Yaroslav Hunka — with the Order of Canada [in 1987].[...]

The vice-regal office is also examining the Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals previously awarded to Savaryn, who also served as president of the Ukrainian World Congress, a group that represents the Ukrainian diaspora.[...] The first [part of the report], which included recommendations to make it easier to extradite war criminals, was released publicly. The second was marked secret and the names of alleged Nazis in Canada were never released. Jewish groups, including B'nai Brith and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre (FSWC), have said the second part should be unredacted and disclosed publicly so that Canadians can learn more about the country's shameful history of admitting an untold number of Nazi collaborators after the Second World War.[...]

"There are top public servants looking very carefully into the issue, including digging into the archives," Trudeau told reporters. "We're going to make recommendations."

Reports suggest as many as 2,000 Ukrainian members of Hitler's Waffen-SS were admitted to Canada after the war — after some British prodding. The commission said the number is likely lower than that.[...]

Quebec Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said it's a delicate issue because the government doesn't want to "bring pain to a lot of Eastern European communities." Hunka, for example, has framed his war service as a fight for Ukrainian independence. The unit he fought for, the 1st Galician division, is also memorialized by Ukrainian expatriate groups at different sites across the country.[...]

The Deschenes report has also concluded that allegations of war crimes committed by this division have "never been substantiated."

That finding conflicts with what the post-war, Allies-led Nuremberg trials concluded about SS units like that one.[...]

"We have to recognize we have a horrible past with Nazi war criminals. We opened our country to people after the war in a way that made it easier to come if you were a Nazi than if you were a Jew," Housefather said.[...]

Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman, the party's deputy leader, said Canadians need to know more about the country's "dark history" of "letting Nazis through the door to live here in peace and security." Lantsman represents the Toronto-area riding of Thornhill, a riding with one of the country's largest Jewish communities. In an interview with CBC News, Lantsman said the party supports revisiting the Deschenes report and its findings in some way.[...]

Asked if it might be too painful for some communities to revisit alleged Second World War-era crimes, Lantsman said "history is painful but that doesn't mean we don't need to reckon with it."[...]

Quebec Conservative MP Gérard Deltell, Poilievre's environment critic, said Wednesday he's not open to revisiting the issue right now.[...]

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he supports releasing the commission's report.

4 Oct 23