#it was reported by a survivor at the time but doesn't tend to be mentioned

[thebisexualagendasblog]

All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?

i very much want to do that.

I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.

But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.

There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.

She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.

This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.

So is the German submarine U-55.

She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.

The second torpedo hits the engine room.

Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.

The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.

She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.

The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.

Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.

There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.

This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.

And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.

There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.

U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.

HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.

She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.

U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.

Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.

But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.

The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.

[unionizedwizard]

tumblr user unionizedwizard certified #1 shadowbringers + g'raha overthinker reporting for duty

i HAVE been thinking about sphene being the exarch's foil. because it is a very obvious case to the point they had to pick him up from SHARLAYAN as an emergency Relevant Character and also allowed him to come with us to living memory (you know it's about to get serious when they let him go anywhere with the wol)

so, obviously. both sphene and g'raha (as the exarch) were thrust into a horrific nightmarish situation where they were put in charge of a entire city/state facing an umbral calamity. both care deeply about the people they're trying to protect - their people. both have undergone (willingly or not) heretofore unknown scientific operations that irreversibly changed them, using cutting-edge technology, making them immortal and fusing them with an immensely powerful reservoir of aetheric energy, all in the name of duty and preserving hope for the future; both have become a symbol rather than a person. the alexandrians needed their queen, whose mere presence stopped them from succumbing to despair; the people from novrandt forced the exarch into a similar position (even though he kept repeating he would not stand for becoming a king of any sort); himself, on behalf of the ironworks & the entirety of the post-8th umbral calamity survivors, was willing to sacrifice himself to bring back the wol - because (and this is the really important part) of the wol's status as a symbol of hope and resilience. everyone here, the wol included, is dehumanized and worshiped and used for their good, self-sacrificial qualities, as well as their unyielding willpower.

sphene's memories were altered, muddled, to an extent that nobody really understands. the scientists who managed to create the endless are all gone, the average alexandrian forgot everything and everyone they've ever known, she herself knows she's not the "original" sphene but a copy - yet she doesn't seem to mourn this loss, and indeed i don't know to which extent she conceives of it as a loss, or a violation of her bodily autonomy (which it was! she never asked to be brought back, especially not this way, which would be a more than traumatic experience for ANYONE to go through!). in the same way, the exarch's memories encompass several timelines and realities, and he spent an entire century having to hide his identity, not being able to mention his own name, much less his purpose or homeland - i'd say this self-erasure is more than comparable with sphene's experience. not to mention that both sphene and the exarch were forced into "passive", static roles - i don't know how sphene felt about this because this is the tragedy of her character, that we don't know (and she herself doesn't know) the first thing about her, as an individual with preferences and feelings and memories.

also, this all adds up with g'raha's role in the deltascape part of ultima thule - the omicrons being, as AI mechanical soldiers, the missing link between sphene and himself. there's a pattern here, interrogating the relationship between mind, body, memory, duty, freedom and personal agency & autonomy, etc. the endless in general and sphene in particular are more than reminiscent of the omicrons on this point.

all of this to say: thinking about g'raha's gondola speech, i did not think he was talking about the scions, or even the wol. i see how this is a possible (and likely) interpretation to have, but i must confess i was surprised when i saw that this is what most people had understood. to me he was talking about the people from the First, and also the people from the 8th umbral calamity timeline, especially those with whom he'd worked for, presumably, months at a time. so many people who died after the Flood (we tend to forget that he arrived right after the Flood, in the immediate aftermath), not just because of the sin eaters but also because of the sudden and catastrophic environmental changes; all the people who could never adapt to the eternal light and, presumably, went mad (it's a real thing in real life even though night does come back eventually, so i imagine it must have been that but a lot worse in novrandt). all the people who died due to lack of medicine, because all the medicinal plants and recipes disappeared in the blink of an eye, not to mention the healers themselves; all the diseases and epidemics and interpersonal violence that arose as a consequence of the severe famine and lack of basic resources that plagued what was left of the star. and the unfathomable loss and trauma of losing millenia of culture and civilization and knowledge and biodiversity and entire families, entire tribes, cities, countries, being annihilated. g'raha has lived through this for a century, combined with the post-8th umbral calamity state of the Source. we know how much he cares for the people of the crystarium, and we only see the crystarium as a fully-developed, beautiful, and harmonious city-state; we haven't seen the century of work and planning and emergency managing and unfathomable grief and pain that went into it. in the same way, we see alexandria (and living memory) as they are now, but only glimpse a few moments of utter chaos during the alexandria dungeon.

so i'm just thinking of g'raha, seeing living memory, and being the only one among the party who truly understands. who can truly relate to sphene, and understand her. he's the only one present who has personally been through not one but two calamities, and had to deal with them on a day-to-day basis (while readying a completely crazy long-term plan). how many people that he knew, loved, wanted to protect... died of "preventable" causes during the century he was on the First, while himself was immortal - so that he could keep doing his duty, doing everything he could to save them eventually? all this happened in a manner which was truly unfair, and unfathomably evil, and - possibly the worst part - he knew this was still "the better path" (as he put it himself while trying to summon the wol). the survivor's guilt that both he and sphene must be dealing with is simply impossible to really understand, i think. we've seen the crystarium. of course he'd wish for all these unfortunate souls to endure and finally know peace and happiness. and of course, he didn't have a Living Memory, but of course he couldn't help but wonder how he'd have reacted in this situation.

and i do wish we could have had him interact with sphene, actually. it made sense that she was wuk lamat's foil and all, but i think it would have been interesting..........

[mylordshesacactus]

All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?

i very much want to do that.

I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.

But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.

There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.

She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.

This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.

So is the German submarine U-55.

She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.

The second torpedo hits the engine room.

Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.

The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.

She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.

The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.

Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.

There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.

This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.

And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.

There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.

U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.

HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.

She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.

U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.

Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.

But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.

The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.

[ntfahirek]

thank you for your research, i have admittedly not verified the image sources

it's important that visual representation of history is accurate

however, one visual misrepresentation, while rightfully exposed, does not discredit the event itself (as it is mentioned in one if the reports, the events at Tartura were not documented at the time)

that's what gives me the impression that the above correction is an attempt to deflect from the main message here: the Holocaust is not debated at all, the topic here is what happened since

but that photo is wrong, you say

well, why don't we remove it?

in fact, let's dismiss all 40 of them because of that one that doesn't belong, how about that? i know they are hard to look at

as the aftermath of massacres tends to look the same anyway (we have, sadly, produced way too many examples), and this post is not about the individual victims, i think we can do without them

what remains is a list of historical events that span 75 years

and the question:

did they happen?

to make up for my mistake, i've collected some sources for the curious: descriptions of the events with sourced photos and videos - whose legitimacy may of course be further debated

it took me a bit longer than a reverse image search, as i tried going beyond wikipedia at least on events in the past century to gather a variety of reports, all with the goal of helping redirect the focus where it's due

aiming for fairness, i've included reports from both sides where i could and it is up to the reader to decide what's credible for them and what is "propaganda" - any selection of information is hand picked, and thus can be biased

those wanting to split hairs might argue about whether certain elements belong on this list at all (it wasn't a massacre, just war! that school bombing happened in Egypt! the refugee camps were attacked by Lebanese militias, the Israelis only let them in!)

sure, let's discuss: in order to create The Historically Correct Post what should be removed from or added to this list and why?

what would be a historically correct title for this list?

what is the objective perspective to examine past events?

Tantura 2 3 4

Deir Yassin 2 3 4 5

Bahr al-Baqar 2

Sabra and Shatila

Hebron 2

Jenin

Gaza 2008 (Operation Cast Lead)

Gaza 2014 (Operation Proptective Edge)

Gaza 2023-

let the discussion begin.

"People did this because they didn't want to recognize other people as people" - a Holocaust-survivor whose name I didn't take note of

PS the suggestion of wanting "to create anti-Jewish sentiment"... where does that come from? Where are Jewish people even mentioned? Just NO. Let's not go there. Neither does Zionism equate Jewishness, nor is it a pre-requisite of being Jewish. Criticism of Israel is not an attack on every person of Jewish heritage. A Palestinian flag is not a hate symbol. Accusing Israel of committing war crimes is not antisemitism. Calling it an apartheid regime and an illegal occupation is not antisemitism. "A settler colonial project evolved into a fascistic ethno-state through mass displacement and genocide" is just my current impression and is very much up for debate - but that's not antisemitic, either. Incidentally it's not an infrequent take from anti-Zionist Jews (and non-white Jews, for that matter) all over the world.

This is for those people who try to pretend that October 7th was the start of it all (or that the events of that day exist in a vacuum). People need to be reminded of the history.