#hungarian peoples republic

[workersolidarity]

History of The Hungarian People's Republic Part I

After WWI, Fascist Capitalist dictators were installed in Eastern European countries with the support of the Western Powers, including the United States.

In Hungary, as in Germany, Fascist forces mustered up enormous resources to disseminate anti-Communist and anti-Jewish propaganda to lay blame for Hungary's troubles on these populations.

This is just a small part of the incredible detail the Finish Bolshevik goes into while analyzing the history of the Hungarian People's Republic.

There's so much more and if you prefer to read rather than watch videos, here's the like to Part I:

[telogreika]

Say cheese

[scavengedluxury]

The side entrance of the Hungarian State Opera, looking towards Andrássy Avenue (then People's Republic Road), Budapest, 1976. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[mapsontheweb]

Hungary in 1918-1919

Nicolas de Lamberterie, 2020

"Történelmi atlasz - Középiskolásoknak", József Kaposi, 2016

by cartesdhistoire

Defeats on the front, rising prices, and the agitation of foreign peoples created a troubled situation in Hungary, and in January 1918, a general strike paralyzed activity in Budapest. At the instigation of certain former Hungarian prisoners freed from Russia by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and converted to Bolshevism, mutinies took place, and a new general strike of a political nature extended to the entire country on June 20.

On the night of October 29 to 30, Count Mihály Károlyi became the head of government of a de facto independent Hungary: it was the Aster Revolution which established the Hungarian Democratic Republic (November 16).

The head of the inter-allied military mission, the Frenchman Fernand Vix, demanded a retreat of the Hungarian armies by 100 km, an ultimatum which led to the fall of Károlyi and the formation of a government in the hands of the journalist Béla Kun, who had returned from Russia where he had been a companion of Lenin: the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed on March 21. To face the armed offensives of its neighbors, the government formed a People's Army which, after some successes against the Czechs, was defeated by the Romanians who advanced on Budapest. Béla Kun left the capital on August 1, two days before the arrival of Romanian and Serbian troops supported by French forces (missions led by Berthelot and Franchet d'Espèrey, respectively).

The Bolsheviks' rise to power was poorly received in the provinces and among the Allies. In the southeast of the country occupied by French troops, a national government was formed in June in Szeged whose army was entrusted to Admiral Horthy who, at the time of Béla Kun's fall, already controlled the entire South and West of the country. After negotiating the departure of the Romanians with the Entente, Horthy entered Budapest at the head of his army on November 16. The assembly elected him regent of Hungary on March 1, 1920.

[mercurymessiah]

“Peter” or “Pietro”?

I was contemplating Peter’s name, along with its origins. In the comics, he’s originally Pietro which is the Italian version. But both variants derive from the Greek word Petros, meaning “stone” or “rock”, which I find ironic considering Peter is opposite to that.

It got me thinking that whilst it’s normal for people to have foreign names contrary to their nationality, Peter is originally from Sokovia. Although it’s a fictitious place, it’s in between Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which are very much real countries. Meaning it’d be apart of the West Slavs. So this information lead me down a rabbit hole of looking through translations of Peter’s name in languages that relate to him.

Czech: Petr, Péťa (diminutive)

Slovak: Peter, Peťo

Hungarian: Péter, Petya, Peti (diminutive).

I found that Hungarian is the second most spoken mother tongue in Slovakia (9.4% of the population) so I researched that as well.

Both his biological parents (Magda & Erik) were born in Germany, so I searched up the German translation but it also came up with just Peter.

I tried digging up Wanda’s name too, but it appears that it’s very one-dimensional. I couldn’t find any different versions of it, but I did discover its Polish in origin. Of course, I hunted down the Polish translation for Peter’s name in contrast to hers. Interestingly, I discovered there was quite the variety.

Polish: Piotr. Diminutives/hypocoristics include Piotrek, Piotruś, and Piotrunio. (Piotr has several name days in Poland)

Erik (in the movie-verse, as far as i’m concerned) lived in Poland when he formed a new family and even spoke the language as well. Despite it not being his mother tongue, I reckon he would affectionately call Peter “Piotr” under certain circumstances. I like to think so at least.

Amongst all the research I did though, the most challenging was finding Romani translations. I know it’s apart of Peter’s identity, so I wanted to include it. However, I came up short. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find Romani translations like most other languages. It became really frustrating too since my research kept leading me to Romanian or Roman, even when I made sure the spelling was correct. I found myself disappointed with this dead-end but it also taught me how underrepresented Roma is and how we should keep that in mind.

Nonetheless, I still did some more research on it even if I couldn’t find translations to Peter’s name. I’m aware that the Romani language is diverse, and so I stumbled upon Carpathian Romani. Also known as Central Romani and Romungro Romani. It also happens to be native to Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which we know as the countries surrounding his birthplace.

Apparently, nearly all Romani speakers are multilingual, so I find it credible that Peter would be able to speak this particular dialect, along with Slovakian or Czech (in theory). Whilst I couldn’t find a new variant of “Peter” or “Petros” for this language, I at least have some deeper understanding of his connection to it.

In conclusion; the discussion about whether “Peter” or “Pietro” is better doesn’t really matter, since they’re essentially the same name. Besides, Peter being called all types of versions of the name by different people in his personal circle sounds very appealing me. With his friends, he’s Peter. For Wanda, he’s Pietro. And potentially he’s Piotr for Erik.

[mariacallous]

Even as a growing number of foreign governments commit to protecting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) people, others are actively marshaling their resources against them. From the Hungarian government’s legal and political attacks on LGBTQI+ people to Iraqi legislation that punishes those who “promote homosexuality” and increases criminal penalties and fines for same-sex relations, the negative trends are significant and concerning.

In many places, politicians blame LGBTQI+ people for a wide array of societal ills to boost their popularity at home and their geopolitical interests abroad, distracting from the real economic, social, and political challenges their countries face. In Georgia, for example, the ruling party may have used anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric to manipulate the political landscape ahead of elections. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, a country long considered relatively welcoming for LGBTQI+ people in the Middle East, one activist described a political leader’s rhetoric as “the manufacturing of a moral panic in order to justify a crackdown, and to deviate public attention away from their unpopular policies.”

Although human rights are seen by some as a lower-priority foreign-policy issue for the United States than so-called hard security threats, the failure to protect them abroad can have significant negative consequences for U.S. interests. Now more than ever, the United States needs to push back against foreign-government repression of LGBTQI+ rights while also doing this work at home. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it recently, this matters “not just because we have a moral imperative to do so,” but because doing so “helps strengthen democracy, bolster national security, and promote global health and economic development.”

Across a range of issues, it’s clear that anti-LGBTQI+ policies and rhetoric can cause significant damage to many of the United States’ top foreign-policy priorities.

To start, efforts to repress LGBTQI+ rights are often a canary in the coal mine for more severe persecution to come. A 2022 report found, for example: “From Nazi Germany to genocide in Darfur to the breakup of former Yugoslavia, the imposition of ‘moral’ codes that directly assault sexual and gender identities and freedoms came before widespread state-led physical violence and atrocity crimes.”

The targeting of LGBTQI+ people can also be a precursor to, or occur alongside, abuses against other vulnerable populations. The Taliban-promoted sexual assault of and life-threatening attacks on LGBTQI+ people, for example, have occurred concurrently with brutal restrictions on women’s and girls’ participation in education, work, and other aspects of public life. Likewise, vicious torture of gay men in the Russian Republic of Chechnya has taken place against a wider backdrop of long-term human rights abuses by Chechen authorities.

Erosion of LGBTQI+ human rights can also signal and exacerbate the breakdown of democratic norms and institutions, including restrictions on independent media and judicial review, serving as a bellwether for the state of civil society more generally. Russia’s recent detention and prosecution of LGBTQI+ people have paralleled its crackdown on independent journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society.

Countries in which the human rights of LGBTQI+ people are less respected also frequently have greater levels of corruption, partly because discriminatory legal regimes create barriers to reporting wrongdoing by corrupt officials, making LGBTQI+ people an easy target for extortion. Corruption, in turn, compounds other pressing problems: It degrades the business environment, drives migration, and impedes responses to public health crises and climate change. States with endemic corruption are also more vulnerable to terrorist networks, transnational organized crime, gang-related criminal actors, and human traffickers. This is, in part, because threats to transparent and accountable governance are among the root causes of radicalization, and restrictions on LGBTQI+ and other civil society organizations reduce the capacity of those groups to mitigate the conditions conducive to violent extremism, terrorism and other criminal activity.

Not only are anti-LGBTQI+ policies a drag on economic growth, but they are also detrimental to public health. Punitive laws fan the flames of stigma and discrimination, in turn making vulnerable communities reluctant to seek life-saving and public health-protecting services. Across 10 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, HIV prevalence in countries that criminalize homosexuality is five times higher among men who have sex with men than in countries without those laws.

Taken together, the failure to protect LGBTQI+ people’s human rights can create disastrous effects for U.S. interests. State-sponsored discrimination and violence undercut the United States’ tremendous investments in international anti-corruption efforts, counter-terrorism programs, economic development, and public health. And, as the COVID-19 pandemic made clear, a disease threat anywhere can quickly become a disease threat everywhere. The same can be said for terrorism, corruption, and economic instability. When governments target LGBTQI+ people, they also increase the chances that the symptoms and consequences of this repression will spread in their communities and across borders.

Given the stakes, it is crucial that the United States uses the tools and powers it has to promote accountability for human rights abuses and mitigate their harms to U.S. citizens and businesses.

In this respect, the recent heightened repression by the Ugandan government is illustrative. In May 2023, Uganda signed into law the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA), which mandated the death penalty for certain “serial” offenses and a 20-year prison sentence for the mere “promotion” of homosexuality. Although the legislation was decried by human rights advocates, it was lauded by some of Uganda’s geopolitical partners as evidence of shared interests. Shortly after the legislation was passed, the late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Uganda and made the unfortunately common—and demonstrably inaccurate—claim that homosexuality is a Western import. He also identified opposition to Western support for LGBTQI+ people as “another area of cooperation for Iran and Uganda.” In similar fashion, an editorial on the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad website summarized the law as “a geopolitical victory [for Russia], which they see as the direct result of years of their hard, methodical work [on a] global anti-LGBTQ hate campaign.”

The AHA was the final, egregious straw amid an ongoing decline in respect for human rights, including of LGBTQI+ people, and democratic backsliding in Uganda, and the United States’ response was swift and comprehensive. Underscoring the link between the violation of the human rights of LGBTQI+ people and broader harms to American interests, U.S. President Joe Biden described the law as part of an “alarming trend of human rights abuses and corruption.” The United States issued a business advisory; updated the U.S. Travel Advisory and Country Information Page for Uganda; expanded existing visa restrictions to include those repressing vulnerable populations, such as human rights advocates, LGBTQI+ people, and environmental defenders; supported the World Bank’s decision to pause Uganda’s access to new funds; and imposed sanctions on the Commissioner General of the Uganda Prisons Service for widespread violations of human rights, including credible reports of physical abuse of political opposition and LGBTQI+ people. President Biden also determined that Uganda did not meet the eligibility requirements of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), “on the basis of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

Although the law remains in place, these actions and international attention have had effect: Uganda’s government has not conducted widespread roundups of or ordered death sentences against LGBTQI+ people. But violence, abuse, and evictions have increased in the country, and arrests of LGBTQI+ people have persisted and likely risen under an earlier, colonial-era law that criminalizes same-sex conduct.

As the situation in Uganda demonstrates, the United States has options to respond to foreign governments that fail to uphold their human rights obligations. These measures can be unilateral, as is the case for issuing travel advisories or removing trade preferences, or multilateral, which could involve working with the United Nations, the World Bank, or other multilateral institutions. They can also be affirmative, as opposed to punitive—for instance, expanding humanitarian and development assistance for human rights defenders and mobilizing private sector capital to support businesses that operate consistent with international non-discrimination standards.

As with all diplomatic efforts to address wrongdoing, the choice among these options will vary depending on circumstances, such as whether a government is launching a new campaign against LGBTQI+ people or has an older but little-enforced criminal law on its books. Inevitably, the importance of raising human rights concerns will be weighed against other U.S. priorities, and human rights will not always prevail. However, increasingly, LGBTQI+ issues are being integrated into bilateral relationships, even when doing so is not easy and when quiet diplomacy is the only option. In all circumstances, consultation with LGBTQI+ civil society must be prioritized in weighing the benefits and risks of action to ensure that efforts do not contribute to backlash or negative repercussions for LGBTQI+ people on the frontlines of global human rights movements.

In a recent State Department convening on LGBTQI+ rights in U.S. foreign policy, Secretary Blinken made our commitment clear, telling civil society leaders: “Our promise is this: We will be with you every step of the way. We’ll persevere with you. We’ll listen to you. We’ll learn from you. We’ll help resource and support your fight. And we’ll bring our strength together with yours so that finally together we can build a world where all people are genuinely free—free to be who they are, free to love who they love.”

Although this work may have been in the spotlight during Pride month, it requires our focus year-round. Indeed, our national security depends on it.

[jeannereames]

Hello Professor Reames! How has the Macedonian Question influenced the historiography around Alexander?

The Macedonian Question & Ancient Macedonian Studies

(or, Come study ancient Macedonia! We cause riots!)

I’ll begin by explaining, for those unfamiliar, the “Macedonian Question” centers on who gets to lay claim to the name “Macedonia” and (originally) the geographical region, which is ethnically diverse but majority Slavic. It arose during the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-13, then returned after the breakup of Yugoslavia, from 1989 on.

I’ve been a bit chary about replying to this simply because it is (still) a hot topic, if not what it used to be even 10 years ago. Also…expect maps. Let me lead with three points:

1) The ancient Macedonians certainly weren’t Slavic. Slavs didn’t arrive in the area until the 6th century CE (AD), a millennia after Alexander lived. No ancient historian claimed they were Slavs, although some Slavic Nationalists used carefully edited quotes from ancient historians to support their own claims to the ancient Macedonians.

2) A lot of different peoples have passed through the Balkans and northern Greece (and even southern Greece) between now and 2300+ years ago. The Balkans have continued to be an ethnically contested area from antiquity to modernity, and who was “in charge” depended on what century it was.

3) Ancient concepts of Greek ethnicity didn’t ossify until around the Greco-Persian Wars. Prior to that, Greeks were more aware of/concerned with their citizenship/ethnicity in specific city-states (poleis) and/or language family groupings (Ionic-Attic, Doric, Aeolic).

Furthermore, these views were based on MYTH. To be Greek (Hellenic) meant to be descended from the mythical forerunner, Hellen, son of the equally mythical Dukalion (who survived the Flood…e.g., Greek Noah). There were other children of Dukalion, including a daughter Thyia. Thyia became the mother of Makedon, the mythical progenitor of the Macedonians.

So, by ancient criteria, Macedonians weren’t Hellenes (Greek). But they were kissing cousins. The ancients took these things seriously. That’s why I wanted to explain, so when the ancient Greeks said Macedonians weren’t Greeks, it didn’t mean what we’d consider it to mean today.

Back to the Macedonian Question … the issue of the Greekness of the ancient Macedonians got tied up in modern politics when Yugoslavia fell apart. During the First Balkan War and the division of Macedonia in 1913, “Macedonian Studies” didn’t exist yet. By the Third Balkan War (collapse of Yugoslavia), they did. And history was suddenly being pressed into the service of modern political agendas.

Now, let me back up and explain—as briefly as I can (so expect some judicious epitomizing)—the emergence of modern Greece and the First and Second Balkan Wars.

The Ottoman Empire began to collapse (not just decline) in the 1800s, and was essentially kicked out of Europe entirely by the First Balkan War and World War I. The last of it fell apart with the rise of Attaturk and the Young Turk Revolution, so Modern Turkey emerged in 1923.

Greece was part of that. The Greek War of Independence started in 1821, and Greece secured statehood in 1829/30, then became the Kingdom of Greece in 1832/3, which lasted until the military junta abolished it in 1973, after which it became the [Third] Hellenic Republic. From independence until the end of WWII, Greek borders expanded (see map below). Fun detail, the late Prince Philip, Elizabeth II’s husband, was a Greek (and Danish) prince.

The First Balkan War began in 1912, which was the Ottoman’s last gasp in Europe. The Austro-Hungarians wanted to make the Balkans a subject state, Russia wanted more control over the Black Sea, and Greece wanted to push north towards Thessaloniki and “Constantinople” (Istanbul). Ignoring Austro-Hungary, Serbia wanted to reconstitute “Greater Serbia” (14th Century Serbian empire)—which included a good chunk of Greece. And Bulgaria, with the strongest regional army, was eying the whole area south to the sea.

Oh, and let’s add in a dose of religious difference (Muslim vs. Orthodox Christian) just for snorts and giggles.

But this was basically about SEA TRADE access. So, for the three allies against the Ottomans, e.g., Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, Thessaloniki, Jewel of the Aegean, was the prize.

The war began October 8th, and by November 8th (1912), the three Balkan allies all hurried their armies to converge on Thessaloniki as the Ottomans withdrew. The Greeks got there mere hours ahead of the Bulgarians.

"Θεσσαλονίκη με κάθε κόστος!" (Thessaloniki, at all costs!) E. Venizelos

The war itself ended the next year (in part thanks to the Greek fleet in Thessaloniki), and Greece kept the city, and with it, still controls a lot of shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean. Shipping remains Greece’s second most profitable industry (after tourism).

Following the war’s conclusion, several issues arose, including how to partition the land—particularly the geographical region of Macedonia. The 1913 Treaty of London split it up between Bulgaria (smallest part), Greece, and Serbia (biggest part). Again, Greece and Serbia wanted to keep Bulgaria, with the most powerful army, from gaining substantially more land.

World War I intervened, and then the rise of Attaturk in Turkey and the “Megali Idea” in Greece. The Megali Idea, proposed at the Paris Peace Conference after WWI (map below), got Greece in trouble. It would have involved retaking not just the islands off Turkey’s coast, but chunks of the Turkish mainland, to match ancient Greek land claims. All THAT led to showdowns, with ongoing human rights abuses on both sides (including the Armenian Genocide earlier, which wasn’t related to Greece).

In 1923, Greece/Hellas and the new Republic of Türkiye agreed to an exchange of populations. So, Ottoman Turks/Muslims in Greece retreated to Turkey (were kicked out), and Greeks in Turkey retreated into Greece (were kicked out). About half those Greek refugees landed in Athens, whose population exploded overnight, creating an economic crisis. Many of the rest ended up in areas of northern Greece, where land from fleeing Muslims was to be had. Ergo, many new immigrants had very strong pro-Hellenic, anti-Muslim/anyone else feeling, and hadn’t been living for ages next to their (Macedonian) Slavic neighbors, who began to feel unwelcome. It also had negative effects on their Jewish neighbors, too. (The loss of Jewish life in WWII in northern Greece, especially Thessaloniki, is both shocking and heartbreaking.)

Keep in mind that the refugees on both sides had been living in their original countries not for a few decades, but for a couple centuries, or even longer in the case of the Greeks in Anatolia/Turkey. The first Greek colonies there date to the 700s/600s… BCE. There’s a good reason the Greeks and Turks hate each other, and it’s not just Cyprus. The atrocities at the beginning of the 20th Century were awful. Neither side has clean hands.

Anyway, there was a second Balkan War in 1913, which I’m ignoring, except for the map below. It amounts to Bulgaria getting pissy about their short shrift in the earlier Macedonian land division.

Then came fallout from World War II, when Greece got the Dodecanese from Italy, et al. But I want to fast forward to the collapse of The Berlin Wall in Eastern Europe, November 9, 1989, and Yugoslavia’s dissolution shortly after. That ushered in the Third Balkan War, or Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

Compared to the Bosnian Genocide and other shit going down with Milosevic, the return of the Macedonian Question seems minor. It involved the Yugoslavian province of Macedonia asking to be called “Macedonia” and Greece having a very public, international melt-down.

The entire dust-up confused much of the rest of the world. The number of times I’ve had to explain it to (non-Greek, non-Slavic) people, who just boggled…. I’ve also seen tourists stand in polite perplexity while Greeks went on a hand-waving tear about how Macedonia has been Greek for 4000 years!!! [I’ve got a t-shirt with that on it.] Btw, 4000 years dates before the first Helladic peoples even migrated into the peninsula. Anyway….

Greeks consider the name Macedonia theirs, on historical grounds. They didn’t object to the new country, but wanted it called Skopje, after the capital, or something, anything not “Macedonia.” Meanwhile, the (Slavic) Macedonians were enormously insulted and pointed to the fact they lived in a region called Macedonia, and their ancestors had been living there for centuries, so why couldn’t they call their new country by the name of the region it occupied? Stated fears of actual territorial expansion by either side were largely scare tactics and fringe rhetoric. It really was all about the name. But increasingly, that began to include claims on the ancient Macedonians, or cultural appropriation. The new Macedonian state (FYROM, then) didn’t do itself any favors with their choice of the (ancient) Macedonian sunburst for their flag and naming their airport after Alexander, et al.

That’s how ancient history got sucked into all of this in a way it didn’t the first time.

Now, let me repeat. The ancient Macedonians were not Slavs. The Thracians were not Slavs either, nor the Paionians, nor the Illyrians, nor the Celts north of them. You won’t find the Thracians called “Slavic” in Bulgarian Museums, even while they take very good care of their regional history.

By the 1990s, Macedonian history had emerged as something more than just “Alexander the Great and Philip,” and questions arose about who these people may have been. Were they Greeks like the Thessalians and Epirotes to their south and west? Or were they non-Greeks like the Thracians, Paionians, and Illyrians to their north? This was an academic (not modern political) question, and involved: 1) what did Makedoniste (“to speak in the Macedonian manner”) mean? Was that a dialect or a different language?; and 2) to what degree did ancient Greeks really consider them non-Greeks (e.g., barbarians)? The fact we had so little epigraphy from the area complicated the language question. And ancient Greek politics complicated the second question. Were the angry repudiations by Demosthenes & Friends a real, widely held sentiment…or just ancient Athenian nationalism and anti-Philip propaganda?

This was mostly nerdy stuff that should have remained safely ensconced at dull specialist panels at academic conferences.

Except …. Manolis Andronikos had found the Royal Tombs at Vergina in 1978, and Greece was bursting with pride (as they should have been). Macedonia was back on the map! Tourists still largely stuck to the Greek south, but The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sport saw an opportunity, even back then, to capitalize on tourism, so you can begin to see why it was important for “Macedonia” to remain Greek. Can’t have a country calling itself Macedonia and maybe confusing people about who Alexander and Philip had been, and where they’d lived (and syphoning off possible tourism dollars).

That may sound unduly cynical, but I’m actually with the Greeks on this, even if I’ve always rolled my eyes over the name thing. And, as noted above “Macedonia” was laying active claim to Philip and Alexander as if there was direct continuity between the ancient Macedonians and the modern ones. See below, the giant Alexander statue erected in Skopje (2011), the biggest in the whole city. It’s formal name these days is “Great Warrior,” by agreement with Greece in order to get to call themselves “Northern Macedonia” in NATO. But it’s Alexander.

Like I said, they weren’t doing themselves any favors, although those arguing in their defense liked to point out that Greece had started it, over the name.

Of course the increasingly heated rhetoric around the name, and ownership of Alexander and Philip, enveloped ancient history like the ash cloud from Vesuvius smothered Pompeii and Herculaneum. By the mid-1990s, “middle ground” wasn’t allowed. If one expressed any doubt about the Greekness of the ancient Macedonians, that was heard as, “You’re siding with the Skopjans!” This dispute was still going strong to the point there were riots and protests at the Balkan Studies’ 7th International Symposium on Ancient Macedon in Thessaloniki on October 16, 2002. These protests erupted over the presence of Kate Mortensen, Ernst Badian, and Daniel Ogden, albeit the protests involved different objections for each scholar. Badian, along with Peter Green and Gene Borza (not present), had long been in the crosshairs of the vehement “Macedonia was Greek!” crowd. But poor Kate got targeted because of her paper, “Homosexuality at the Macedonian Court,” and Daniel had the temerity to present about witchcraft at Philip’s court (UnChristian things!). There were some 40 police called in to protect the presenters. You cannot make up this shit.

Btw, by no means were all Greeks, especially not all Greek scholars, hostile to the (largely Anglophone) Macedoniasts who questioned the ethnicity of the ancient Macedonians. Olga Palagia and Gene Borza remained friends and even wrote articles together, but Olga was retired and had a certain freedom from pressure. Manolis Andronikos and Gene also remained friends until Manolis’s death in 1992. But there was an Official Party Line that had to be maintained, or risk losing an academic job or other position in the Ministry. This also got tied into the identity of the occupants of Royal Tombs I and II at Vergina. Greece’s official position is that these are Amyntas III and Philip II, respectively. This is far from a settled matter, however, especially outside Greece.

For more detail from somebody right in the middle of especially the early parts of the quarrel over who’s buried in “Philip’s Tomb” and the ethnicity of the Macedonians, check out Peter Green’s chapter 10, “The Macedonian Connection,” in Classical Bearings.

To return to the question about how it’s affected historiography, other than resulting in hostility towards non-compliant ancient historians (having their work essentially banned in Greece) and the occasional riot at an academic conference (!!), it also resulted in the production of TWO quasi-competing “Companions” to ancient Macedonia at the end of the first decade of the 2000s.

The original proposal (A Companion to Ancient Macedonia, Roisman and Worthington, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) had meant to include a number of high-profile scholars of both Greek and non-Greek background. But one of those was Loring Danforth (The Macedonian Conflict). When it came out that he was writing the chapter on modern Macedonia, the Greek contributors revolted en masse. (Some were genuinely furious, others had to, to keep their jobs.) Another Companion was put together with Robin Lane Fox at the editorial helm (Brill’s Companion to Ancient Macedon, Brill, 2011), and the Greeks (and a few others) jumped ship. That was a nice break for some younger Macedonian scholars, incidentally, who were then tapped to write chapters for the Roisman/Worthington volume—and very good chapters, I might add. But the end result is one heavily archaeological Companion (Lane Fox) and one heavily historical one (Roisman/Worthington), and which still has Danforth.

Between the arguments of the 1990s and now, however, one important shift has occurred: enough epigraphical data has emerged, and not just later [Hellenistic], to argue the ancient Macedonians did speak a form of Doric Greek. Many/most of us are now a lot more comfortable agreeing that the ancient Macedonians can be called “Greek” without feeling as if we’re selling our academic souls--even if we may still argue that’s not Philip in Royal Tomb II...an identification that some of the younger Greeks also aren’t sold on. And Philip in Tomb II was never the highly charged political issue that the Greekness of the ancient Macedonians was. It just got tied up in it for coming up around the same time. One Greek friend put it succinctly (paraphrased), “It felt like the non-Greeks, especially the Americans and Aussies, were trying to take away Philip and Alexander from us. Tomb II wasn’t Philip, and the Macedonians weren’t even Greeks.”

That may be a bit hyperbolic, but feelings don’t necessarily respond to logic, and Greece would like to have their bona fides.

So, a chunk of the tension from the 1990s has subsided. The Greekness of the ancient Macedonians is largely a non-topic in Macedonian studies today. We’re more interested in new and exciting things like revelations from recent archaeology regarding the sophistication of the Macedonian kingdom well back into the Archaic Age, the real impact of Persia and how early, and what exactly was going on up there before (and after) the Greco-Persian Wars. Or at least, those are certainly my burning questions about the Argead Kingdom up to Philip and Alexander.

[dailykafka]

++(adding on the last ask, sorry i just forgot to put this there) it's also the very very VERY weird way they keep talking like the jewish culture was completely erased from the rest of the Europe and the german speaking countries, like we didn't know how there were people fighting and resisting and trying to create communities before and after holocaust. this does NO erase holocaust, and that's one of the most enraging parts for me too: talking like the resistance of jewish people outside israel would somehow negate holocaust and antisemitism. this is fucking bonkers?

during the whole article i was thinking "why would the Germans have ownership of the works of an writer who is from PRAGUE? writing in german does not immediately imply this, and the fact that he was born in Prague does not negate the antisemitism he faced"

Kafka writing about his experience with oppression inside a country where antisemitism was so recurrent does not make him an symbol of the israeli state, and that's mainly what they're trying to affirm. by doing this they're trying to erase the way his works relate so much with the oppression other groups suffer inside other places, including the ones being attacked by the israeli state.

Yes, Israel's whole rhetoric is very deliberately constructed narrative which often raises uncomfortable questions.

And I also agree I think it's weird how there's complete exclusion of the country that Kafka was from (but then again, was he from Czech Republic (because that didn't exist back then) or was he from Austria? That existed in some sort). In any case, Kafka identified with the minority in the Austro-Hungarian empire (Hermann also), that is with Czechs.

What Kafka's nationality was is a tricky subject overall but the reality is that Prague is in Czech Republic so it is Czechs' "responsibility" to preserve Kafka in that city. Israel and Germany are just both weird about Franz Kafka and are trying to have hegemony over his legacy when none of them actually have tangible credibility.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 31, 2024

On Friday, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump begged the members of the audience to “vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine…. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

The comment drew a lot of attention, and on Monday, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham gave him a chance to walk the statement back. Instead, he said: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.” “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

Trump’s refusal to disavow the idea that putting him back into power will mean the end of a need for elections is chilling and must be viewed against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing majority said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” and that presidents should have a presumption of immunity for other presidential actions. 

John Roberts defends the idea of a strong executive and has fought against the expansion of voting rights made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that it is dangerous to permit minorities and women to vote suggests that there are certain people who should run the country. That tracks with a recently unearthed video in which Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance calls childless people “psychotic” and “deranged,” and refers unselfconsciously to “America’s leadership class.” 

The idea that democracy must be overturned in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation is at the center of the “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” championed by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s imposition of an authoritarian Christian nationalism on a former democracy, in turn, has inspired the far-right figures that are currently in charge of the Republican Party. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Kevin Roberts has called for “institutionalizing Trumpism” and pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term. Those who created Project 2025 are closely connected to the Trump team, and Trump praised its creators and its ideas. 

Today, The New Republic published the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book. Vance makes it clear he sees Kevin Roberts and himself as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Like others on the Christian right, Vance argues that “the Left” has captured the country’s institutions and that those institutions must be uprooted and those in them replaced with right-wing Christians in order to restore what they see—inaccurately—as traditional America.  

That determination to disrupt American institutions fits neatly with the technology entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they are the ones who should control the nation’s future. Vance is backed by Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel, who put more than $10 million behind Vance’s election to the Senate. In 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” 

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” he wrote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” 

Thiel set Vance up to invest in companies that made him wealthy and touted Vance for the vice presidential slot, and in turn, the Silicon Valley set are expecting Vance to help get rid of the regulation imposed by the Biden administration and to push cryptocurrency. Trump appears to be getting on board with comments about how the tech donors are “geniuses,” praising investor Elon Musk and saying, “We have to make life good for our smart people.” In a piece that came out Sunday, Washington Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku, and Josh Dawsey credited the influence of Thiel and other tech leaders for turning Vance from a Never-Trumper to a MAGA Republican. 

Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that the cryptocurrency industry is investing heavily in the 2024 election, with its main super PAC raising $202 million in this cycle. Three large cryptocurrency companies are investing about $150 million in pro-crypto congressional candidates. 

On Saturday, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.” He promised to end regulations on cryptocurrency, which, because it is not overseen by governments, is prone to use by criminals and rogue states. That regulation is “a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power,” Trump said. “They’ve done it to me.”

But the problem that those trying to get rid of the modern administrative state continue to run up against is that voters actually like a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights. In recent days, Minnesota governor Tim Walz has been articulating how popular that government is as he makes the television rounds.

On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies—he passed background checks for guns, expanded LGBTQ protections, instituted free breakfast and lunch for school kids—and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.” 

“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we're working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.” 

The extremes of Project 2025 have made it clear that the Republicans intend to destroy the kind of government Walz is defending and replace it with an authoritarian president imposing Christian nationalism. And when Americans hear what’s in Project 2025, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Trump has tried without success to distance himself from the document. 

He and his team have also hammered on the Heritage Foundation for their public revelations of their plans, and today the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down. The Trump campaign issued a statement reiterating—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 and adding: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should service as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.” 

The Harris campaign responded to the news by saying that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real—in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.” 

The reasoning behind the idea of a strong executive, or a “leadership class” that does not have to answer to voters, is that an extremist minority needs to take control of the American government away from the American people because the majority doesn’t like the policies the extremists want. 

When Trump begs right-wing Christians to turn out for just one more election, he is promising that if only we will put him into the White House once and for all, we will never again have to worry about having a say in our government. As Trump put it: “The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[xunzilla]

Having resolved to investigate the dubs vs. subs question, the DYEWSPH2TER SOCIETY watches the new Dungeon Meshi.

IZUTSUMI (DUB): The name of your race is pretty strange. I heard it came from your kind getting one of their legs chopped off for committing too much thievery!

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: She would not say that.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Why not?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: "Committing too much thievery"? She's a slave bought from a freak show and she speaks fluent Ciasslcal English?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Is the language of the island diglossic?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: They're ruled by the elves. But let's not get into translatology. (A horrid, ill-formed word: two parts Latin, one part Greek.) The manga renders Senshi's dialogue in an atrocious fantasy accent, but it makes clear a nuance of the original: he's a weird foreigner who lives alone in a cave and his only friends are orcs.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Does Izutsumi's country have a different language?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Izutsumi's country is fantasy Japan. Look at their names. "Shuro" is a mispronunciation of a name Laios is unfamiliar with.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: The dwarves' names also fit Japanese phonology. Senshi, Namari...

DICTIONARY: 鉛 なま̅り̅ nàmárí, lead (chemical element). Perhaps related to Goguryeo 乃勿 *namur; cf. Korean nap, OC (Zhengzhang) ra:b.

TYPESETTER: U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE should render above the characters ま and り, but on some systems may display as spacing characters following them. We apologize for our inability to reliably display simple linguistic text without platform-dependent markup in 2024. 😔👎💩

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Vowel length in Zhengzhang Shangfang's reconstruction of Old Chinese represents Type A syllables.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Izganda?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Is that an official name? The scan thought Laios and Falin Touden were Laius and Farlyn Thorden.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Lajos is a Hungarian masculine given name, cognate to English Louis. People named Lajos include Lajos Kossuth, who in 1849 presented the Hungarian Declaration of Independence. A bust of Lajos Kossuth was added to the Small House Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building in 1987.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: 1987?

ENCYCLOPEDIA: "A Gift to the People of the United States from the American Hungarian Federation"

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Did you think he was more important? At any rate, he was a nobleman.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: It sounds Greek to me.

HANPHECIUS HUMBUG: Hungarians don't have saunas.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Didn't you think he was Faroese? It's a fantasy west.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Why would Japan care about Hungarian names? But this is a stupid diversion. Where were we?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Dubs vs. subs.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Of course! A critical matter. A noble pursuit. In this fallen world, in which the noblest by nature are forced to toil in drudgery while petty-minded merchants build generational fortunes that their mediocre heirs piss away, many are unfortunately unable to read Japanese. So we debate dubs vs. subs.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: I grew up on 4Kids. I can't stand the English VA voice. The Japanese one is bearable.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Thank you for your valuable contribution.

VRISKA: why do you all have the same voice

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: We live in a bourgeois republic.

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: Let's grant that Izutsumi's country speaks a different language. "Committing too much thievery" is a clumsy phrase. "Thievery" sounds silly compared to "theft". And it's a vague Latinate verb that lets the noun carry the meaning - very indirect! We don't live in the kingdom of nouns.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Why couldn't Asebi, Toshiro's retainer, have been taught to speak like that? Toshiro went to the island for training. But would they pay real islanders to teach them the nuances of the language?

SIMPLICIO J. RHETORICUS: She was bought at the age of six; even if the circus had the same language as the island, that's well within at least the tallman critical period.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: She would've been taught out of dictionaries, which don't say anything about connotation.

VRISKA: okay not to be rude but can i say something about some of the papers i've read

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: I didn't pay that much attention to "thievery". It's simpler, more regular. For all I know "theft" might be too hard a word to put in a mass-market translation. "Committing too much theft" would still sound too classical. It seems like the wrong intent.

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Why couldn't a slave learn the acrolect?

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: How broad-minded. Would your escaped slave also write her own sermons?

VRISKA: oh my god shut up

VRISKA: what does the sub say

IZUTSUMI (SUB): That odd name for your race. I heard it's because lots of you got a foot lopped off for stealing.

VRISKA: the manga?

IZUTSUMI (MANGA): I hear that the reason your race got that name is because a bunch of halflings got punished for theft by having one of their feet cut off! Guess they had to deal with having half as many, huh?

VRISKA: yea the dub is bad

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: It could be a deliberate choice. I personally think that "thievery" is awkward, but it's a possibility to keep in mind. We'll see if what follows bears it out.

VRISKA: marcille sounds like a college republican horse girl

VRISKA: #notwrong

[workersolidarity]

Watch "History of the Hungarian People's Republic PLAYLIST" on YouTube

Fantastic work by our comrade The Finnish Bolshevik. It is a series on the History of Socialist Hungary.

If you'd prefer reading the series, you can find it here:

Western Historians would have you believe an "Imperialist" Soviet Russia just went around at the end of WWII invading Eastern and Central Europe and setting up Soviet "authoritarian dictatorships" under Russian control.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I will try to put together each part into seperate posts throughout the day or over the next few days, but I can't be sure I'll find the time to do that with all 10 or 11 parts.

Each part is not that long, roughly 30-40 minutes, and makes for easy viewing in chunks.

In the videos, The Finnish Bolshevik deep dives into the history of the Hungarian State, how Western Imperialist Powers installed a Fascist Dictatorship, the impact of World Wars 1 and 2 and their aftermath, Hungary's Socialist Revolution, and Hungary's transformation into a Socialist State becoming a satellite of the Soviet Union and much more.

[telogreika]

Hungarian people's army Female NCO in summer dress 1970s

[dragoneyes618]

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Hamas’s pogrom is not so much the attack itself – although it was horrifying – but the accompanying glee we see on the Western left, most obviously and appallingly on college campuses.

Jewish students were besieged at a library at Cooper Union by a crazed pro-Hamas mob. Jews at Cornell University were threatened with gruesome death. At Harvard, students chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for the genocide of Israeli Jews. At George Washington University, jihadist and genocidal language was projected on the library building. A Jewish student was attacked at Columbia University and Jewish students said that they don’t feel safe there.

To add insult to injury, more than 100 Columbia University professors signed a letter defending students who support Hamas’s “military action.” A history professor at Cornell proclaimed that he was “exhilarated” by what happened October 7. A Yale professor sneered that massacres of Israelis are fine because they are all “settlers” anyway and “settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.”

Colleges have long cultivated a simplistic ideology that bifurcates all of humanity into two buckets: the “oppressed” and the “oppressor.” This childish division of all human activity allows for zero nuance. If you’re oppressed, all is allowed, even atrocities. If you’re the oppressor, nothing you do is justified – you are guilty, whatever you do or don’t do.

According to this absurd ideology, Israel is an oppressor. Therefore, everything it does – even existing – is unacceptable.

On the other hand, Hamas is the voice of the oppressed, so anything and everything it does – from wanton massacres to explicitly admitting that it only cares about its fighters, and not for the people of Gaza who, it says, are the international community’s responsibility – is cloaked in righteousness.

Nothing is allowed to penetrate the alternative reality of this dogmatic ideology, which is why posters depicting kidnapped Israelis must be ripped down. Israelis are demons, you see, even the babies.

It is all depressingly reminiscent of an earlier time, between the two world wars, when Jewish students throughout Europe were terrorized by ideological fellow students.

“Polish universities became the stage of the most extreme antisemitic activities,” writes Celia Heller in her book On the Edge of Destruction. Polish universities in 1936 and 1937 had “Jewless” days and weeks. Radical students called for a quota on Jewish students and “ghetto benches” where Jews would be forced to sit. Administrations, weak then as now, caved.

Heller writes, “Violence was condemned in words, but encouraged in deeds through concessions granted to the perpetrators of violence at the cost of the victims of violence. Further violence was the result.” Radical students “took walks in the evening to hunt for the Jewish students.”

All the while, most students and faculty remained silent.

In 1920, under student influence, the Hungarian parliament passed the Numerus Clausus Act, which limited Jews to six percent of the student body of universities. There were continuous antisemitic student riots throughout Hungary in October 1928. Students attacked Jews at a university in Budapest in 1930.

Most notorious are the students of Germany, who were among the most radical elements of the interwar Weimar Republic and the early Nazi period, and an important constituency of the Nazi Party. German students conducted a campaign of intimidation against Jewish students and, infamously, burned more than 25,000 books in 34 university towns on May 10, 1933.

The National Socialist German Students’ Association expressed the need to “cleanse” and “purify” German language and literature from “Jewish intellectuals.” It was this thinking that was behind the book burnings.

The notions of “cleanliness” and “purity” were highly important ones in Nazi ideology. The Nazis desired a Judenrein (“pure of Jews”) Germany, and then Europe (and beyond – the Jews of the Middle East, too, would have been murdered if Rommel hadn’t been defeated at El Alamein).

Fast forward to today. A New York City public school student displayed a poster reading “Please Keep the World Clean” with an illustration of a Star of David in a trash can. A virtually identical poster was held by a Norwegian medical student in Warsaw. This is Nazi language.

Campus radicals today are also intimidating Jewish students while administrators issue mealy-mouthed statements. Students are in thrall to a totalizing ideology that brooks no dissent and burns with hatred for Jews.

American Jews feel that they have seen all this before, and they are right. Universities are once again incubators of moral rot and antisemitism.

[mapsontheweb]

Hungarian People's Republic, 1949-56.

by Stalker213311

[fatehbaz]

Caribbean cruise vacations have a long violent history. Earlier today, I came across one of the early print advertisement illustrations for the Caribbean cruise ship vacations offered by “the Great White Fleet.” And I pondered bananas.

Just as uncomfortable as it sounds. The story of the origin of the Caribbean cruise industry is, after all, also the story of the origin of the term “Banana Republic.”

In 1914, the Great War began as the planet’s powerful empires of old were collapsing, as British, French, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and Qing/Chinese powers were marred by internal revolt and global warfare. But in 1914, the United States completed their Panama Canal and consolidated power in Latin America and the Caribbean, celebrating the ascent of a “new” empire made strong, in part, by bananas.

As of 2022, bananas generate 12 billion dollars per year, with 75% of bananas exported from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The planet’s single biggest banana-producing company is Chiquita. The Chiquita brand was previously known as United Fruit Company, which had essentially monopolized the banana industry in Latin America. United Fruit Company has a bit of an image problem, following its theft of Indigenous land across Central America in the early 20th century; its role in provoking the killing of tens of hundreds/thousands of plantation laborers during the Banana Massacre of 1928; the company’s direct role in the CIA-backed toppling of the Guatemala government in the 1950s; and the company’s role in paying to harass and intimidate labor organizers in Colombia in recent decades.

But what of the “romance” and “adventure” of the Caribbean?

So it’s 1915 or 1916.

Middle of the Great War. Classic empires are disintegrating: Spanish empire, British empire, Austro-Hungarian empire, Russian empire, Ottoman empire, remnants of the Qing/Chinese state, etc. And whose empire is rising? United States, an empire expanding in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. After the 1898 Spanish-US war, as Teddy Roosevelt’s cartoon cavalry conquered Cuba, the Spanish Main belongs to the US of A. The US Navy controlled the Caribbean Sea, and was aiming to expand across the Pacific Ocean, to Hawai’i and beyond.

But the official US Navy isn’t the only fleet upholding the empire. The United Fruit Company had its own fleet.

The text of one of these Great White Fleet ads, from 1916, adorned with imagery of a blue-and-gold macaw and an aerial map of the Caribbean, reads:

“[W]here winter never comes and where the soft trade winds bring renewed health. [W]ith all the comforts and all the luxuries of life you enjoy aboard the palatial ships of the GREAT WHITE FLEET. Delicious meals a la carte [...]. Dainty staterooms, perfectly ventilated [...]. [A]mid the scenes of romance and history in the Caribbean. And with it the opportunity to win for yourself a treasure of health and happiness, of greater benefit than the fabled fountain of youth, sought by Spanish adventurers in the tropic isles of the Spanish Main.”

Who’s leading the charge?

The United Fruit Company!

From the May 1916 issue of Red Book. Image source, from Archive dot org:

Another:

Image source, from Archive dot org:

“There the Pirates hid their Gold -- and every voyage, every port, every route of the Great White Fleet through the Golden Caribbean has the romance of buried treasure, pirate ships an deeds of adventure [...].”

The Golden Caribbean.

The same region where Columbus murdered Indigenous people, where the US and France had just spent 100 years punishing Haiti with unending economic warfare afters slaves rebelled against colonization, and where the United Fruit Company would now set up shop.

The company’s plantations would expand across Central America, establishing brutal racial hierarchies and essentially controlling federal governments of Central American nations.

In 1928, over 30,000 laborers were on strike at banana plantations in Colombia. They demanded payment of actual wages, rather than the credits they were given which were mostly only redeemable at company-owned stores in company towns. The US government threatened to send the Marine Corps to intervene if the “subversive” workers would not return to UFC’s plantations. In December 1928, after martial law had been declared, General Cortes Vargas entered the town square of Cienaga (Magdalena) during Sunday gatherings, with machine guns, opening fire on the crowds, and killing perhaps 3,000 people.

In the late 1940s, the United Fruit Company intensified its ad campaigns led by propagandist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud???), who also practiced his skill at manipulative advertising when working to popularize the American Tobacco Company by showing women smoking “torches of freedom” and linking “women’s rights” to cigarette iconography.

Bernays, who explicitly wrote about his “counter-Communist” intention in the ads, was “drafted” in the war to topple ascendant leftist governments. After 1944 and after Arevalo’s labor reforms, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman took control of Guatemala in 1951, and took over 200,000 acres from United Fruit Company and returned them to poor families. Bernays launched propaganda attacks against Guatemala, helping to plant stories about Guatemala eventually carried in the Saturday Evening Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Reader’s Digest. In January 1952, Bernays personally led a tour of Central America, accompanying publishers and editors of Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Cincinnati Enquirer, Scripps-Howard, and Time magazine. When the CIA-trained military force led by Carlos Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala, with CIA aerial support, installing Castillo Armas as president, Bernays called them an “army of liberation.”

Bananas and Caribbean cruises aren’t the only culprits in expanding imperial power in Latin America, the tropics, and the Global South.

In 1914, the same year that the United States finished the Panama Canal and consolidated power in Latin America and the Caribbean, Richard Strong was a newly appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine. Strong was also appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work at United Fruit Company. Strong toured the company’s plantations in Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Cuba. In the coming years, Strong would also personally approach Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the Firestone company, which owned and brutally operated rubber plantations in tropical West Africa. Research in tropical medicine was thus inaugurated by and dependent on colonial/imperial plantations and racial/social hierarchies at United Fruit Company and Firestone sites across the tropical regions, planetwide. Strong is just one character that demonstrates the interconnectedness of academia, fruit plantations, rubber supplies, food distribution, motor vehicle industries, strike-breakers, military forces, imperial expansion, and other tendrils of violently-enforced racist power.

Today, in 2022, Chiquita maintains twenty thousand employees across 70 countries. 

I think about this as I eat a banana for lunchtime. I think about this when I see the Edenic portrayal of a Caribbean shore, a landscape baked not so much by the tropical sun but instead scarred by centuries of genocide, slavery, and plantation labor, where government officials gleefully report “with honor” on the massacre of thousands.

“Just a banana, it ain’t.”

Agreed.

[mariacallous]

Czech Radio (Cesky rozhlas) has suspended its ties with its Slovak counterpart STVR for an indefinite period of time over mounting fears of political meddling and interference in the Slovak public service broadcaster’s operations, the Sme daily reported on Monday.

A Czech Radio spokesman described the “forced demise” earlier this year of predecessor RTVS, and the creation, effective since July, of STVR in its stead as the “first step towards the nationalisation of the [Slovak] public broadcaster”, whose independence and impartiality now hang by a thread, the Slovak daily reported.

In July, Czech Radio head Rene Zavoral said he would have to wait to see “if the new [STVR] organisation will defend the principles of an independent, impartial and objective public service media” before deciding on whether or not to continue his organisation’s cooperation with its Slovak counterpart.

Czech Television (Ceska televize) is also closely monitoring developments in Slovakia’s media sphere, according to the investigative outlet Hlidacipes.org.

According to Sme, the Slovak public broadcaster is already facing increased political pressure and interference, with, among other instances of undue meddling, STVR management blocking a live interview with Matej Drlicka, the former head of the Slovak National Theatre recently dismissed by Culture Minister Martina Simkovicova, and instead airing a recording of it.

The move by Czech Radio will take off the Slovak airwaves its reporters who, until now, had helped cover foreign news in countries where RTVS did not have any or enough correspondents, including in geopolitical hotspots like Ukraine or the Middle East. All exchanges of news content will also end.

“Slovak Radio covers its foreign news from several sources, so it will continue to fully inform about events from the mentioned areas,” STVR responded, claiming the move doesn’t change anything in its long-term cooperation with its Czech counterparts.

The turmoil in Slovakia’s media sector is part of wider assault by the government of Robert Fico on the country’s institutions and judicial system since it won back power in last year’s parliamentary election. The three-party coalition, which includes the extreme-right Slovak Nationalist Party (SNS), appears determined to undermine the rule of law in the country, which is expected to bring it into conflict with the EU, in much the same way as the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban has found itself.

The Slovak government’s Act on Public Broadcasting, a controversial reform passed in June which gave the government greater oversight and control over the public broadcaster’s board, had already sparked large protests by the opposition, civil society and cultural sector. These have stepped up since the new culture minister, a divisive, hard-right, Russia-friendly former presenter put forward by the SNS, began driving the Fico government’s cultural and media power-grab.

Thousands of people protested on Monday in Bratislava against Simkovicova’s decision to fire, on dubious managerial grounds, Alexandra Kusa, the director of the Slovak National Gallery, as well as Drlicka of the Slovak National Theatre – both respected cultural figures in the country and abroad.

Another demonstration is planned on Tuesday evening against what is widely perceived as Fico’s increasingly authoritarian crackdown on free speech and his Orban-style attempts to put cultural institutions and public media organisations under political control.

Prominent Czech artists also penned an open letter criticising the ongoing “purge” in Slovakia’s cultural sector, vowing to come together to create a network offering jobs and positions in the Czech Republic for Slovak colleagues affected by the changes or forced out.