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96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

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“Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.”

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color!”—the British production “Hitler in Color.” A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.

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brookstonalmanac · 3 years ago

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Events 7.1

AD 69 – Tiberius Julius Alexander orders his Roman legions in Alexandria to swear allegiance to Vespasian as Emperor. 552 – Battle of Taginae: Byzantine forces under Narses defeat the Ostrogoths in Italy, and the Ostrogoth king, Totila, is mortally wounded. 1097 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Crusaders led by prince Bohemond of Taranto defeat a Seljuk army led by sultan Kilij Arslan I. 1431 – The Battle of La Higueruela takes place in Granada, leading to a modest advance of the Kingdom of Castile during the Reconquista. 1520 – Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés fight their way out of Tenochtitlan after nightfall. 1523 – Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos become the first Lutheran martyrs, burned at the stake by Roman Catholic authorities in Brussels. 1569 – Union of Lublin: The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania confirm a real union; the united country is called the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Republic of Both Nations. 1643 – First meeting of the Westminster Assembly, a council of theologians ("divines") and members of the Parliament of England appointed to restructure the Church of England, at Westminster Abbey in London. 1690 – Glorious Revolution: Battle of the Boyne in Ireland (as reckoned under the Julian calendar). 1766 – François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, is tortured and beheaded before his body is burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France. 1770 – Lexell's Comet is seen closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of 0.0146 astronomical units (2,180,000 km; 1,360,000 mi). 1782 – Raid on Lunenburg: American privateers attack the British settlement of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. 1819 – Johann Georg Tralles discovers the Great Comet of 1819, (C/1819 N1). It was the first comet analyzed using polarimetry, by François Arago. 1837 – A system of civil registration of births, marriages and deaths is established in England and Wales. 1846 - Adolphe Sax patents the saxophone. 1855 – Signing of the Quinault Treaty: The Quinault and the Quileute cede their land to the United States. 1858 – Joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's papers on evolution to the Linnean Society of London. 1862 – The Russian State Library is founded as the Library of the Moscow Public Museum. 1862 – Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, second daughter of Queen Victoria, marries Prince Louis of Hesse, the future Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. 1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Malvern Hill takes place. It is the last of the Seven Days Battles, part of George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. 1863 – Keti Koti (Emancipation Day) in Suriname, marking the abolition of slavery by the Netherlands. 1863 – American Civil War: The Battle of Gettysburg begins. 1867 – The British North America Act takes effect as the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia join into confederation to create the modern nation of Canada. Sir John A. Macdonald is sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada. This date is commemorated annually in Canada as Canada Day, a national holiday. 1870 – The United States Department of Justice formally comes into existence. 1873 – Prince Edward Island joins into Canadian Confederation. 1874 – The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, the first commercially successful typewriter, goes on sale. 1878 – Canada joins the Universal Postal Union. 1879 – Charles Taze Russell publishes the first edition of the religious magazine The Watchtower. 1881 – The world's first international telephone call is made between St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, and Calais, Maine, United States. 1881 – General Order 70, the culmination of the Cardwell and Childers reforms of the British Army, comes into effect. 1885 – The United States terminates reciprocity and fishery agreement with Canada. 1885 – The Congo Free State is established by King Leopold II of Belgium. 1890 – Canada and Bermuda are linked by telegraph cable. 1898 – Spanish–American War: The Battle of San Juan Hill is fought in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba. 1901 – French government enacts its anti-clerical legislation Law of Association prohibiting the formation of new monastic orders without governmental approval. 1903 – Start of first Tour de France bicycle race. 1908 – SOS is adopted as the international distress signal. 1911 – Germany despatches the gunship SMS Panther to Morocco, sparking the Agadir Crisis. 1915 – Leutnant Kurt Wintgens of the then-named German Deutsches Heer's Fliegertruppe army air service achieves the first known aerial victory with a synchronized machine-gun armed fighter plane, the Fokker M.5K/MG Eindecker. 1916 – World War I: First day on the Somme: On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 19,000 soldiers of the British Army are killed and 40,000 wounded. 1922 – The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 begins in the United States. 1923 – The Parliament of Canada suspends all Chinese immigration. 1931 – United Airlines begins service (as Boeing Air Transport). 1931 – Wiley Post and Harold Gatty become the first people to circumnavigate the globe in a single-engined monoplane aircraft. 1932 – Australia's national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, was formed. 1935 – Regina, Saskatchewan police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police ambush strikers participating in the On-to-Ottawa Trek. 1942 – World War II: First Battle of El Alamein. 1942 – The Australian Federal Government becomes the sole collector of income tax in Australia as State Income Tax is abolished. 1943 – The City of Tokyo and the Prefecture of Tokyo are both replaced by the Tokyo Metropolis. 1946 – Crossroads Able is the first postwar nuclear weapon test. 1947 – The Philippine Air Force is established. 1948 – Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Quaid-i-Azam) inaugurates Pakistan's central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan. 1949 – The merger of two princely states of India, Cochin and Travancore, into the state of Thiru-Kochi (later re-organized as Kerala) in the Indian Union ends more than 1,000 years of princely rule by the Cochin royal family. 1957 – The International Geophysical Year begins. 1958 – The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation links television broadcasting across Canada via microwave. 1958 – Flooding of Canada's Saint Lawrence Seaway begins. 1959 – Specific values for the international yard, avoirdupois pound and derived units (e.g. inch, mile and ounce) are adopted after agreement between the US, the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries. 1960 – The Trust Territory of Somaliland (the former Italian Somaliland) gains its independence from Italy. Concurrently, it unites as scheduled with the five-day-old State of Somaliland (the former British Somaliland) to form the Somali Republic. 1960 – Ghana becomes a republic and Kwame Nkrumah becomes its first President as Queen Elizabeth II ceases to be its head of state. 1962 – Independence of Rwanda and Burundi. 1963 – ZIP codes are introduced for United States mail. 1963 – The British Government admits that former diplomat Kim Philby had worked as a Soviet agent. 1966 – The first color television transmission in Canada takes place from Toronto. 1967 – Merger Treaty: The European Community is formally created out of a merger with the Common Market, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Atomic Energy Commission. 1968 – The United States Central Intelligence Agency's Phoenix Program is officially established. 1968 – The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is signed in Washington, D.C., London and Moscow by sixty-two countries. 1968 – Formal separation of the United Auto Workers from the AFL–CIO in the United States. 1972 – The first Gay pride march in England takes place. 1976 – Portugal grants autonomy to Madeira. 1978 – The Northern Territory in Australia is granted self-government. 1979 – Sony introduces the Walkman. 1980 – "O Canada" officially becomes the national anthem of Canada. 1983 – A North Korean Ilyushin Il-62M jet en route to Conakry Airport in Guinea crashes into the Fouta Djallon mountains in Guinea-Bissau, killing all 23 people on board. 1984 – The PG-13 rating is introduced by the MPAA. 1987 – The American radio station WFAN in New York City is launched as the world's first all-sports radio station. 1990 – German reunification: East Germany accepts the Deutsche Mark as its currency, thus uniting the economies of East and West Germany. 1991 – Cold War: The Warsaw Pact is officially dissolved at a meeting in Prague. 1997 – China resumes sovereignty over the city-state of Hong Kong, ending 156 years of British colonial rule. The handover ceremony is attended by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Charles, Prince of Wales, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. 1999 – The Scottish Parliament is officially opened by Elizabeth II on the day that legislative powers are officially transferred from the old Scottish Office in London to the new devolved Scottish Executive in Edinburgh. In Wales, the powers of the Welsh Secretary are transferred to the National Assembly. 2002 – The International Criminal Court is established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. 2002 – Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937, a Tupolev Tu-154, and DHL Flight 611, a Boeing 757, collide in mid-air over Überlingen, southern Germany, killing all 71 on board both planes. 2003 – Over 500,000 people protest against efforts to pass anti-sedition legislation in Hong Kong. 2004 – Saturn orbit insertion of Cassini–Huygens begins at 01:12 UTC and ends at 02:48 UTC. 2006 – The first operation of Qinghai–Tibet Railway is conducted in China. 2007 – Smoking in England is banned in all public indoor spaces. 2008 – Riots erupt in Mongolia in response to allegations of fraud surrounding the 2008 legislative elections. 2013 – Croatia becomes the 28th member of the European Union. 2020 – The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement replaces NAFTA.

#Events

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mountainmaster489 · 5 years ago

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Hi, @reve13, I promised to tell you about the Russian holidays, I hope it comes in handy and will be fun😉:

1. The very first in the year and the most widely celebrated holiday is the Novyy god (New Year).

It's celebrated on the night of December 31 to January 1. New Year holidays (weekends) last from January 1 to January 8. New Year is a secular holiday loved by almost all the inhabitants of the country, regardless of nationality or religion.

According to tradition, a few days before the New Year it is customary to install and decorate the fir-tree, as well as the house. As a rule, when the New Year is celebrated, close people gather at the New Year's table, usually on the evening of December 31 of the outgoing year.

The coming of the new year and the actual beginning of the celebration is marked by the Kremlin Clock striking twelve, i.e. midnight Moscow Time preceded by the New Year Address by President of Russia and followed by the playing of the National Anthem of Russia.

The most popular dishes of the New Year's table in Russia are "Olivier" salad (Russian salad), "Selyodka pod Shuboi" salad (Herring under a fur coat), Kholodets (aspic), caviar, champagne, tangerines, etc. Popular hot dishes include a roasted pig, roasted meat chunks, goose with apples, chicken stuffed with buckwheat and mushrooms, sour cream hare, venison, lamb, whole fish, etc...

Gifts to Russian children and adults are brings by Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost). This is a character of Slavic fairy-tale folklore. In its origins, he is a pagan personification of the forces of nature (winter and frost) and a wizard. Ded Moroz is depicted as an old man in a colored - blue, blue, red or white coat, with a long white beard and a staff in his hand, in felt boots. He rides three horses. Usually comes accompanied by his granddaughter, Snegurochka (Snow Maiden), who helps him. Snegurochka is also a fabulous folk character. At holidays, acts as an intermediary between children and Ded Moroz. Sometimes portrayed as a little girl, sometimes an adolescent. She wears long silver-blue robes and a furry cap or a snowflake-like crown. They can also be accompanied by forest animals.

We also have very popular fireworks. After midnight, it may resemble a small colorful war, hee hee.

2. Christmas in Russia (Russian Orthodox Church), commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, is celebrated on 7 January in the Gregorian calendar. Christmas is considered a high holiday by the Russian Orthodox Church. On Christmas Eve, 6 January, there are several long services, including the Royal Hours and Vespers combined with the Divine Liturgy. The family will then return home for the traditional Christmas Eve "Holy Supper", which consists of 12 dishes, one to honour each of the Twelve Apostles. Devout families will then return to church for the "всенощная" All Night Vigil. Then again, on Christmas Morning, for the "заутренняя" Divine Liturgy of the Nativity. This holiday is important for religious Orthodox Christians.

3. St. Valentine's Day is a holiday of Catholic origin, which is celebrated on February 14 in many countries of the world. Named after one of two early Christian martyrs with the name Valentine.

Those who celebrate this holiday give their beloved and dear people gifts, flowers, sweets, toys, balloons and special cards (often in the shape of a heart) with verses, love confessions or wishes of love - Valentine. This holiday gained popularity in the 90s in Russia. It is not a public holiday or a day off, but rather widely celebrated by young people.

Сompetition for Valentine's Day is All-Russian Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness (The Day of Saint Peter and Saint Fevronia). This holiday is celebrated on July 8th. Its symbol is a white daisy. The history of the spouses of Peter and Fevronia is the embodiment of the unquenchable love and loyalty. This date are trying to popularize , because many Russians dislike the foreign Valentine's Day, which is called commercial.

4. Defender of the Fatherland Day (День защитника Отечества) is a holiday observed in Russia on 23 February.

Officially, as the name suggests, the holiday celebrates people who are serving or were serving the Russian Armed Forces (both men and women, both military and civilian personnel), but unofficially, nationally it has also come to include the celebration of men as a whole, and to act as a counterpart of International Women's Day on March 8. Because the majority of men in Russia undergo mandatory short military service.

The holiday is celebrated with parades and processions in honor of veterans, and women also give small gifts to men in their lives, especially husbands (or boyfriends, fiances), fathers, sons and brothers. As a part of the workplace culture, women often give small gifts to their male co-workers. State day off.

5. International Women's Day is celebrated on the 8th of March every year. It appeared as a day of women's solidarity in the struggle for equal rights and emancipation. State day off. The celebration of March 8 in Russia includes the established tradition of giving women flowers and other gifts.

6. Maslenitsa (Мaсленица) is an Eastern Slavic religious and folk holiday, which has retained a number of elements of Slavic mythology in its ritual, celebrated during the last week before Great Lent, that is, the eighth week before Eastern Orthodox Pascha. The date of Maslenitsa changes every year depending on the date of the celebration of Easter. The traditional attributes of the Maslenitsa celebration are the scarecrow of Maslenitsa (which burn), making visits, sleigh rides, dressing up, bonfires, snowball fights, the capture of the Snow Fortress, festivities. Russians people bake pancakes and tortillas. It is customary to eat them with various fillings and share with friends.

7. The Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Easter (Paskha/Пасха) according to the Orthodox calendar, and so it can occur in April or May. Russians celebrate Easter with decorated eggs, special foods, and customs. The day before Easter all churches hold night services and organize religious processions around churches. By that time, kulich, the traditional holiday baking symbolizing the body of Christ, had been already baked and Easter eggs painted. The morning starts from visiting neighbors and giving away Easter eggs. The common phrase you can hear on that day is: "Khristos voskres!" (Christ is risen!), which is to be followed by "Voistinu voskres" (Truly He is risen! This traditional greeting followed by hugging and triple kissing is called "kiss of peace". Christian Easter feast lasts seven days and is called the Holy Week or Sedmitsa.

8. Spring and Labor Day. 1st May Day in its present form arose in the middle of the 19th century in the labor movement, which put forward the introduction of an eight-hour working day as one of the main requirements. In today's Russia, the holiday has lost its original political character. Some political parties and labor unions may have demonstrations on this day, but most Russians use Spring and Labor Day for gardening or spending time with their families. It is also common for people to have picnics or barbecues. Men may give spring flowers, especially tulips and lilacs, to women, and parents may buy balloons and ice-cream to their children to celebrate the end of the cold season in Russia. 1 May is a public holiday.

9. Victory Day. May 9, Russia celebrates the victory over Nazi Germany, while remembering those who died in order to achieve it. On 9 May 1945 (by Moscow time) the German military surrendered to the Soviet Union and the Allies of World War II in Berlin. Victory Day is by far one of the biggest Russian holidays. It commemorates those who died in World War II and pays tribute to survivors and veterans. Flowers and wreaths are laid on wartime graves and special parties and concerts are organized for veterans. In the evening there is a firework display. A huge ground and air military parade, hosted by the President of the Russian Federation, is annually organized in Moscow on Red Square. Similar ground, air and marine parades are organized in several other Russian cities. It’s a public holiday.

10. Russia Day (День России/Den Rossii) National Day, celebrated on 12 June. On this day, in 1991, Russian parliament formally declared Russian sovereignty from the Soviet Union.

11. Unity Day (День народного единства/Denʹ narodnava yedinstva) is a national holiday in Russia held on November 4. It commemorates the popular uprising which expelled Polish–Lithuanian occupation forces from Moscow in November 1612, and more generally the end of the Time of Troubles. The day's name alludes to the idea that all classes of Russian society united to preserve Russian statehood when there was neither a tsar nor a patriarch to guide them.

Celebrations of these days are accompanied by: Flag hoisting, parades, fireworks, award ceremonies, singing patriotic songs and the national anthem, speeches by the President, entertainment and cultural programs.

#mikhail arbatov #feilong #liu feilong #feilong liu #mikhail/feilong #mifei #mikhailxfeilong #frabatov #viewfinder #finder series #you're my loveprize in viewfinder #ayano yamane #manga #south park style

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unhonestlymirror · 2 months ago

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Not all Lithuanians may like cepelinai, but every Lithuanian loves Superkoloritas.

P.S. I think I didn't explain it before, so: Liet's nickname is @/tavotevas because it translates as "your dad". In Lithuanian national anthem, they call Lithuania "Tėvynę mūsų" - "our fatherland".

#hetalia memes #hws lithuania #aph lithuania #they are so💗💗💗#Lithuania #superkoloritas

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focusas · 4 years ago

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eurofan78 · 4 years ago

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Lithuania celebrated King Mindaugas Coronation Day (aka Statehood Day)

Lithuania celebrated on Monday the Statehood Day, or King Mindaugas Coronation Day, with official ceremonies, concerts and other festivities that culminated in the traditional singing of the national anthem all over the country and abroad.

Lithuanians on July 6 commemorate the coronation in 1253 of Mindaugas as the first and only king of Lithuania. The day been officially celebrated as the Statehood Day since 1990 when the country regained its independence after almost 50 years of Soviet occupation.

President Gitanas Nauseda said on Monday that King Mindaugas "gave a symbolic start to the State of Lithuania and opened the door to Europe".

"It is because of his efforts that a small country by the rivers of Nemunas and Neris entered Western civilization as an independent actor – and continues to be there to this day," Nauseda said at a flag-raising ceremony in Daukanto Square in front of the Presidential Palace.

"Despite many historical upheavals, we kept a strong hold on national identity," he said. "We have always been and we will continue to be open to those who love freedom and respect the laws of our country."

The program of celebrations included concerts and exhibitions in many municipalities. As part of the celebration in Daukanto Square at noon, the Honorary Guard of the Lithuanian Armed Forces performed a rendition of "On Fire" by The Roop, Lithuania's entry to the Eurovision Song Contest 2020, and NATO's air policing fighter jets flew over the capital to congratulate the nation on the Statehood Day.

People all over Lithuania and members of expatriate communities gathered to sing the national anthem at 9 p.m. Vilnius time.��

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aerinisback · 5 years ago

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14, 19 and 30 ;)

Thank you @kayden-vescovi for asking!

🇱🇹

14. Do you enjoy your country’s cinema/or TV?

When I was young, I really enjoyed watching Lithuanian TV shows for kids more than Russians TV shows. However, some of the TV series were so weird. For example, as you all know the ‘Sherlock’ is releasing every 3 years. In my country we had TV show called ‘Giminines’(relatives) which was releasing every 20 years. The series were showing the life of families after 20 years. I can’t wait for season 3 which will be released in 10 years.😂😂😂.

19. Do you like your country’s flag and or/ emblem? What about the national anthem?

🇱🇹 these combination of colours I see every where even in the shoes store in London. (Nobody knows where Lithuania is but everyone can find it😂).

The national anthem, uhh, I don’t remember the middle part. The last time I was singing it, was 5-6 years ago. However, every time the national anthem plays when our country gets a gold on the Olympic or World Championship, I start crying( I am proud of my country, even if I don’t like it)

30. Do you have people of different nationalities in your family?

We don’t have any Lithuanian relative. My family came mostly from Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and also we have Jewish blood. Briefly , we are all came from Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth😅 😅

P.S

I don’t speak Polish

#questions

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sole-cuore-amore-e-droga · 6 years ago

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Tel Aviv 2019: Straight outta Lithuania to Eurovision with a rampaging mess that gave a lukewarm conclusion

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Oh dear.

When it comes to my country to choose, they’re often chosen to be overlooked by the Eurofan community, especially because of our insanely long procedure of choosing, that would often cause everyone to hear the songs live more times than they’re supposed to. And it seemed to be a similar case this year because while not as long as usual, we still had 7 shows + an additional week break (that allowed me to watch some more Destination Eurovision! Woo!), and a big pile to songs to swim through, usually submitted by all ranges of songwriters who’re willing just to get their names known to the world creditswise (looking at you Ashley Hicklin and co.) and often are paired with our talent show rejects that fade away as soon as they come in if their song and their chances crash out before the final (see Germantė Kinderytė - she didn’t make it to the lives of The Voice Lithuania, had a killer song though that didn’t make it to the semis thanks for the jury annihilating her pointswise TWICE and only ended up lucky the televoters’ 10 was enough to get her through. Another example: Benas Malakauskas, who got lucky to be on the selection for two years in a row, but did not go beyond the AUDITIONS in said talent show! Yet progressed to the second round at farthest both of his years). And even then, you’re never sure if these songs ARE even on the lineup. Last year we had angry Erica Jennings pulling her song out of the comp just because of having to hear the juries critique others so abrasively (at least abrasively I guess?) one show in, but then it suddenly re-emerged back, but instead sung by Monika Marija - fresh off her The Voice Lithuania victory. This year we had some names pulling off for no reason, some names pulling for A reason (like Sasha Song who couldn’t turn up for the live recording of Heat 4 because of his song not sounding the best way possible, and was fined for it lol), and some names being added last minute or even changed unexpectedly (Tomas Sinickis, you heard of him? Now he underwent by Tommy Modric... yes the footballer Modric). Which is as crazy as MIIIIHAAAAIIIII deciding not to compete in the Romanian NF because “it’s all rigged and me a tryhard won’t feel too safe enough to finally win on this one” oh boo-hoo, think of the kids who never liked your sorry ass anyway. And think of the kids in general before showcasing your half-naked or mostly-naked body in front of them.

Excuse me for my long ass paragraph number 1, BUT we were actually so dang dramatic this year that I cannot contain myself without letting y'all know why this NF deserved a much better winner to come out of it rather than THAT that actually came to be. I'm a native so I know every single detail. So if ya wanna know why exactly I'm underwhelmed, read 'em up. If you wanna know that I'm just underwhelmed, just skip ahead to the review, idc. Did you make your choice? Well then. Let's delve into the details:

• The first clear competitor, Monika Marija, releases a song that people really want to see in the selection but she assures everyone it’s not THE song. Then she shows her other one, and people honestly want the first one back, but grow to adapt to it.

• Lineup reveal happens with her in it, wbk. Along with some other interesting names like Jurgis Didžiulis (off InCulto), Jurgis Brūzga and etc.

• First show is filmed and broadcasted as normal. But, after the broadcast, a pissed-off parent is mad at his son’s result on Facebook (and the result seemed fair enough to me actually despite liking the song because it’s such a second-hand NF tier entry that isn’t meant to last that I’d even see fizzle out in... A Dal for example).

• Also a minor lulz related to one contestant’s song lyrics sounding like Russian swearwords (you know the ones the kids are yelling on CS:GO) but that was fixed

• Lineup changes that include Sasha Song, the second-most-recent X Factor Lithuania season winners at the time 120 (yep that’s the band’s name) and some other guy who came and went last minute without a word from him back as to why lol. (As well as one of the lost starlets of 2018, Emilija Valiukevičiūtė, was initially announced in the first lineup reveal but fizzled out by Heat 4 as well.)

• And it turns out Monika Marija chose both of her latest releases (including the first one she said she won’t enter) to participate because her fans want it so and she felt like it, although fans were more attached to the 1st one she entered.

• Jurgis Didžiulis brings Erica Jennings with him - yep, the same lady who withdrew because of the jury has grew some thick skin over a year and joined the lineup too. Among other things.

• Second show had a major televoting issue that affected the scores massively (basically only a few hundred votes were missing lol), and had the issue affected any of the nonqualifiers enough for them to qualify, they’d be added to the semis as a wildcard. So naturally, someone of the NQs complained about it BUT it turned out it did not affect anyone anyway. Another act got pissed for being mistreated by juries too by the way.

• Sasha Song withdraws last minute for reasons above, and his fine is 2000 euros. Well, now you have to know that if you, fellow Lithuanian, want into Eurovizijos, you need to be a bit rich to accept circumstances like these, otherwise you’re totally fucked.

• Heat 3 happens as normal BUT Heat 4 brings in some fire as it turns out that one of the contestants’ stepfather was offering his company’s services (like, those outside children play parks’ assets) for televotes to her dear stepdaughter’s song, with her EVEN NOT SEEING ANYTHING WRONG WITH IT. LRT, as clever as they are, decide to null her televotes in protest. Shame tho as the song was good, and way better Laurell Barker submission than the ones she got on ESC this year.

• One contestant, Alen Chicco (also from X Factor Lithuania, may or may not even be from the same season that was won by 120), causes a bit of controversy by having a black man on his performance

• During the semi stage, Monika Marija asks her fans not to vote for the 1st song she submitted to the selection, but rather support her 2nd song that won the semi comfortably, way after the folks were attached to her 1st song already and claiming it’s better for Eurovision (no it’s not), but it backfires spectacularly when the jury has enough guts to make her qualify with it, even if the televote for it was rather low.

• But before semi 2 happened and Monika Marija sang her weaker song, a contestant with the name of Migloko resorts to middle-finger the audience during her performance for no reason in semi 1.

• Monika Marija succesfully goes on to withdraw one of her songs (the one from semi 2) just to not split her fanbase even further when it comes to the final, therefore not lose. Also has to pay a fine of 2000 perhaps.

• Jurijus Veklenko, which was one of the front-runners along Monika Marija, was accused of having his song published on Soundcloud a year too early, but as a demo version, therefore not commercially viable enough for ESC rules. Later he was let off easy by LRT, but decided that EBU should investigate and report if they think it’s not fine, but if he was allowed to compete with that, he was possibly not in danger afterall.

• And since Monika Marija has got only 1 song, her final spot she got with that other song was given up for the aforementioned Alen Chicco.

• Finally, Monika Marija was still THE front runner of all this, having a sizeable amount of a fanbase enough to support her, even more so than the eventual winner... yes, she did happen not to win in the end. U mad?

And even if Monika Marija would have honestly been an anticlimactic winner, this next guy is even more so, because although shocking, his song is pretty much by-the-numbers Eurovision NF pop you’re gonna get, although not as cheap as the one written by constant NF failures that submit their stuff for countries like Moldova, Belarus, Romania and Malta (that until Malta ditched their NF). And the one that ended up winning is the said person whose song was uploaded a year too early as a demo - Jurijus Veklenko, but for now, he’s pretty much needed to be addressed as Jurijus. No wait, he’s back to being Jurijus Veklenko, but he dropped the “us” from his name, that’s odd. (By the way, he’s the only ounce of Ukraine you’ll ever have this year - his father is of that nationality, hence why the ever-so-Slavic Veklenko surname)

“Run with the Lions” is the song name, and for a title as anthemic as this, the song... not so much. Like I said, it’s pop, and it’s good that it’s pop, but it’s just pop. I doubt that Jurijus’s songwriter team did anything to distinguish the demo from its final product, hence why it was so easily autodetected somehow. Like, the structure is there, the lyrics are there (but what even ARE they? “if you wanna see, just open your eyes”?? “if you want a voice, just open your mouth”????), but where’s the depth, man? I really felt like I needed more of this song, especially in the choruses. Like, some additional background instruments like strings wouldn’t have hurt? In fact, this song has a slight revamp (I’m saying “slight” because no marginal changes had been done) that adds up some acoustics in the background of the 2nd verse and only changes one line (”there’s no need to be afraid” now is “you don’t have to be afraid”. Wow, revolutionary. What about “You don’t got to hide away”?? Why repeating “You don’t” twice in the prechorus???!!!... ooh I’ll be here all day if I only talked about nitpicks)... and it yet still feels too little. Thankfully the choruses have someone shouting something like “huh huh hoo” synthetically to liven it up somehow.

Yet somehow, out of nowhere, I admit liking this? Our boi is capable of singing live - both high and low; his voice and the song fit in delightfully with each other; and while basic, the melody is pleasant, non-offensive, non-ear-grating... perhaps the problem of it all is that it’s too inoffensive? Something that flows away in the wind and passes you by without you knowing. Something that you’re told that it’s not background filler and you were just not paying attention to the actual music that was playing. Something so algorithmic, you’re easily able to make your ears cancel it out as it were just some sort of white noise!

Yeah, I don't think I want to describe us all that much. It's a pretty okay pop song, it's nothing groundbreaking (bar the message of being free to do all you can do), I enjoy the sound of it, it doesn't annoy me, I can fully be down to supporting Jurijus and his voice. Too bad it's in a year AND a semi where MoR pop songs DON'T dominate - we're way past those ages. To stand out, it needs to be anthemic, it needs to have a stage presence, it truly needs some X factor, and our staging nor our song offers it. And guess what, various other people are still mourning over the loss of Monika Marija, which I find perfectly reasonable, but who would have to lend us their final spot instead if she won? Armenia? Romania? Denmark? So many questions, so little time left to answer them all.

Right now I will just conclude with me saying that I like this. It's inoffensiveness is pleasant, and in any other year we'd be the perfect filler songs for the final, like we were in the past. Cool cool.

Approval factor: Anything that will make me forget how much of my nerves did I waste over stanning someone in our selection while knowing that Ieva will win is a good noodle in my book. Jurijus wasn’t exactly one of my favourites (you’ll see why when you hit the unfortunately long NF corner section), but that’s perfectly fine, seeing that I can finally be a proud supporter of my own country’s song.

Follow-up factor: we're a completely and utterly random nation, sending anything our juries found amusing the most at the time. So don't bother about follow up consistency every being good or bad. We're just going with our own flow and... that's basically it. Though we could, on an occasion, do better with picking songs, that's for sure. And maybe finally we will not have a song that's littered with "oh oh oh, yeah yeah yeah" kind of sounds... like seriously, "Run with the Lions" has a bridge that mostly consists of "ooooooohhhhhhh" and then one actually non-interjective line at the end. (At least in Tel Aviv you'll be hearing the backings murmuring "run with the, run with the, run with the lions" during it, and that's something.) I love it that we never change in our random tactics, I'd just love it more to see some actual change in the song quality, y'know? THEN will it be a good follow-up.

Qualification factor: I’m so devastated at saying this, but foreigners say that we’re probably going down to deat meat levels this year. But I still have hope in us qualifying. Believe it or not, the people out there still don’t buy into the Lithuanian diaspora power, and genuinely believe that our harmless tune is chanceless. I only understand that it cannot work its magic when we send something risqué and incredibly opinion dividing (but most people dislike it anyway), but just look at our results on the years when we were generally received bad when we were just boring. “C’est ma vie” qualified. “Something” qualified. Back when Donny Montell was such an unknown in the Eurovision lore because 2012 was his first year and his song was considered “dated”, he still qualified. See something here? We still can, and WILL, be able to pull through possibly, and I don’t doubt it that diaspora will lap up our mediocre song because Lithuania. Patriotism strong! (Oh and a handful of votes for Jurijus for being so hot.)

NATIONAL FINAL BONUS

I already discussed the Eurovizijos drama in lenghty detail, so expect me not to re-iterate everything down here shortly, but what you need to know off it is that it had every single drama aspect you’d ever want - faulty line-ups, voting frauds, televoting malfunctions, forced plagiarism accusations, too-early-published-song accusations, late entry withdrawals, qualifier replacements, technical difficulties allowing to repeat a performance and some contestants being visibly pissed off by the jury (and to some extent, the overall) results. A total jumble <3 Never change, Lithuania. (except for the godawfully smug-ass HoD, I started to get tired of him AND his bald head doing this to us. It's been 10 years, retire already.)

So it’s better to talk about all the non-dramatic things I liked about our NF this year! From songs to performances, from shits and giggles to something serious - I’m taking you for a hefty ride.

• First and foremost, I actually didn’t mind one of the Monika Marija’s songs? Yeah, “Light On” was a good and polished pop track that has THAT power to get you good, with them strong sublime female vocals. Even if it kind of sounded like an Ikea store version of "Stay with Me" by Sam Smith. Not that there's anything bad with it, but any kind of plagiarism cases have and will always be barred from Eurovision if noticed by the organizers. This is not 100% dead-on ripoff, but there are shades of knock-offery here and there. And it's even a better "Stay with Me", and with a better message - Monika Marija reminisces of that one time she was almost dying herself, but she's here, she's survived, and you musn't hang her off the lifeline. At least it's "Light On" that got all the love in the NF in the end and not the painfully mediocre "Undo" ripoff wailfest "Criminal". It was so slow and plodding and I never got why so many people loved it. If "Undo" was a product, "Criminal" would have been its "made in China" counterpart. Anyway, here's "Light On". And please don't spam me messages with how much this would have been a contender for top 10 over Jurijus. :P In Eurovision it's an added bonus if your faves do well - the fact that they were in Eurovision is the most important thing, and I perfectly understand why do you miss it here on ESC grounds. Just... I'm tired of "MM top 10, Jurijus bottom 3 in semi", okay? Monika Marija can try our NF again. She’s very talented, and there’s a possibility that we’ll see her in ESC in the end anyway. Pave the way for our Polyglot Queen, Eurovision 20xx! ^^

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• Now here's for once a cool Lithuanian artist that didn't come from a TV talent show! Antikvariniai Kašpirovskio Dantys ("antiquarian teeth of Kashpirovsky") is probably one of the coolest Lithuanian bands that I know - doing absolutely any kind of genre they're pleased with - from folk to rock to ska to acoustic pieces - I admire them for being so diversive! Too bad they entered with one of my lesser favourite tracks in their entire discography - "Mažulė" (one of the many ways to say "baby", as in, trying to call your lover cute, female gender case. Can also mean "baby girl" in this context). I have nothing against this kind of track they thrown in the selection, ska music and Eastern musical elements are gooooooood, plus I finally got to know what is a "forró" that doesn't mean "hot" in Hungarian - it's a music style popular in Brazil! However, the chorus could have at least sounded more "party"-ier. It doesn't really excite me to dance the window-cleaning dance to it. (Oh yeah and do you remember that this song is about a car, not an actual lover? They're basically confessing their love to an automobile. How they're protecting it from vandals, how did they dream of getting the car since young age, how wouldn't they change their car for any other. Romantic, I'd say.) However I am happy for the over 30 year olds that find this song completely and totally amusing when I can't quite seem to. I do say that I like those elements, the brass and all that. It was the only Lithuanian song in the sea of English ones in the final (just like A Dal was, but inverse - almost all songs in Hungarian but one English (and a bit Russian), and that's an achievement. AKD should be proud of themselves for impacting both our nation AND the international viewers which found fun in this! Respect. Maybe they'll win our NF soon if they keep on winning the audiences, or they'll probably GTFO forever. IDK, the latter is more plausible, sadly. They're so unique that they cannot be just a thing for more editions - just one for a try out, and that's enough.

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• So, Alen Chicco. What’s so special to have him in the final instead of Monika Marija's weaker entry? Well, he's just a fantabulous persona, unique in every step he takes. And surely I was excited to see him preparing something for Eurovizijos after I read his name on the participants list. And then his entry did come. I wasn't quite sure what to think of "Your Cure" at first but the chorus is a pop beauty I hold up to myself somehow <3 now I find the song nice as a whole, the theatrical-like verses peak my curiousity though the prechoruses feel too drawn out a bit and could have had some big pauses be shortened or removed... yeah. But the most interesting thing is HIS LOOKS <33 his wardrobe and level of expressiveness is vast, I love it how eveything here was different each and every time he performed, and it all was always presented incredibly differently. I admire ONE (1) chameleon

which Alen Chicco are you today? ✨

• And that's almost basically it I have to show you concerning my faves? Yeah, I definitely had enough of our NF having this many songs too, I almost had no good favourites that made it to the semis and people would care about slightly if they'd be willing to. Nothing I could be excited over, nothing I could be passionate about as I was last year about my fave. Well I did like some qualifiers to semis but I don’t think they are THAT worth y’all’s attention all THAT much... However, I will definitely let you in on two of my personal non-finalist faves. Allow me to introduce the first band whose song is a guilty pleasure of mine only - it's Laimingu Būti Lengva ("it's easy being happy") with "Pasaulio vidury" ("in the middle of the world"). Now, it's not very competitive or anything, in fact the guys looked like hobos on their live performance and one of them was randomly shouting "heeeeyyyyy" a LOT of times, like a random heckler that's supposedly livening(??? is that a word???) up the performance, and they sang disappointingly... but the studio version, man. I dare you to not get hypnotized by the slow electric guitar feel. (You probably won't but idc.) I love it, I love the beats and how trappy but cool they sound on those verses, I love the slow soft rhythm, I definitely love the whole melodic execution, and the vocals actually sound alright on there (mainly thanks to autotune but yeah whatever). I have problems though - with a band like this, I barely see how can I get genuine enjoyment out of this song myself without having to slap myself in the back for admitting to actually like this. So I call it my "guilty pleasure" quite a lot of times. The song's structure is quite interesting, but it's mainly the repetitive verses and choruses smeared across the whole song at random. I get the song's point so much that I hate the band for hammering it into my head all this whole time - the song's protagonist met a red-haired and blue-eyed girl named Isabel in Portugal (the supposed "middle of the world"), they fell in love, that's it. But they emphasize it a lot that the girl was blue-eyed... not even I would if I had to write this song, and *I* have a blue-eyed people bias. The whole package was completely unappealing and with how they showed it it didn’t really look like something that even needs a staging or Eurovision at all, but I still keep this song to myself, and will definitely replay it a lot this summer. Just as much as the song that you'll actually get to watch the performance of down below - it's "Song of My Life" by Soliaris & ForeignSouls. It's cool, funky, catchy, vibey, laidback and summer-fun-infested. I cannot really describe separate parts all that much because all flows in so well. It's a good song to chill out and have a cocktail too. And it features a rap part that doesn't bother me at all! Good one, Soliaris. I didn't like your music back when you did mediocre 00s R'n'B, but you positively surprised me, both by returning to our NFs after like 9 years of absence AND bringing this gem. It didn't need an extreme staging - just some dudes having fun and that's it. And they brought it. It saddens me that these kind of songs don't stand a chance to qualify to the very final in our NF anymore, as they kind of would have in 2012 or so, but I'm still happy they exist. I only have had some issues with the lyrics laying out the words in sentences ("spend with me this beautiful night" bothered me a bit because if you translate it to Lithuanian in the exact same sentencing way, it'd make even more sense than it does to me now), but other than that, I fucking loved "Song of My Life". It might as well be my overall NF winner, haha.

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• Oh and how could I forget Tiramisu??? That's perhaps my biggest discovery of this year. They moved on from utter unknowns to... still unknowns, but more known for the Eurovision fandom that does care about Lithuanian NFs. Here you have an oddly titled song, "The Smell of Your Eyes" (and you thought Safura smelling lipstick was extreme - but to her credit, lipstick DOES have a faint odor, doesn't it?), which is both insane AND original, and insane original is obviously encouraged. And the whole song sounds pretty damn good for a band that no one heard of and that used to do jazzy-ish and inoffensive musical flairs before. Here we have slight influences of folk even! And the violins, too. A generally charming piece that draws you into a pagan forest. Too bad the staging was completely misunderstood - they definitely had to put on some guy with a cheap Iron Man mask to pretend to give the band some intensity... lousy move. It could've looked way better if it were more mysterious and forest-like and had a more enchanting camerawork. And a little more colors than emerald and forest greens, too. The video clip looked way better and more high-budget than the staging came to be. Observe:

Felt like everything beautiful was stripped of it because the music video could not be repeated on stage. Ah well. The televoters gave them love but the jury did not let them to improve, and down the Bermuda triangle of fallen female violinists from the 2019 season went a lady of the name Rima Tamo, together with Gabriella Laberge and Tilla Török (who did not even appear on stage at that time of need!). Here's a spooky fact for all these 3: female violinists that all featured on songs in E minor, performed 1st in their respective heats/semis, were really loved by televote but hated by the juries, missed out on the next stage of the NF by 1 place. Coincidence? A curse? Tiramisu were obviously disgusted by the jury trashing their staging so they talked about hating them on Facebook. What's worse that they could have actually qualified if they've gotten at least 9 more telepoints that could've pushed them to get 10 televote points in general rather than 8, all thanks to a televote count error that removed large portions of votes. And that way they could have been wildcard qualifiers instead because they would have still gotten 8 televote points with the actual televote numbers, but the organizers of the NF said that if the televote failure would have hurt anyone's place in the final, they would have wildcard-qualified instead. No one did not, so screw it. At least "The Smell of Your Eyes" remains THAT song - lots of folk, lots of violins, lots of effort put into it, and the people actually loved it for that. Just that it's so sad that the jury didn't let them improve overtime... just like Hungarian jury didn't let Leander Kills go further... a shame, really.

• And now, onto the non-entry-events and stuff that happened, besides some actual good jury shade (like the one time at least one juror says that “you wouldn’t win even if all the contestants got sick”, technical errors in the production (thanks to one of them, one of the semifinal acts actually got to perform again... but the televote didn’t give her votes anyway lmao) and the constant reminder of one of our charities which gives tickets to Eurovision for the best disabled person story.. I don’t know where that is but our NF somehow acquired a skit from an Austrian man that’s been exploring stuff in Israel (I think) because of Eurovision this year... and man did I think that this skit was rather... hmmm... middle-ground funny? Slightly too annoying but still kind of alright to look at? It was fun, but certainly odd to find out about that it even exists.

• After feeling so disappointed with Hungarian juries's decisions on the night of February 22nd, I left my room to watch our NF's final on our living room TV, hoping for everything just to end already because I did not expect anything good happening on this final. I haven't even decided to go back to watch A Dal and see AWS reprise their song a little less louder than when they competed last year. And then our NF gave me a complete and utter surprise - The Roop reprising THEIR Eurovizijos 2018 entry. If you've been long enough here on Tumblr to know me, you would probably guess that I'm a big fan of "Yes, I Do" by The Roop, which I wanted to see winning our NF so badly last year, but in the end... you finish the quote so I don't have to. And it's odd because this year I felt the exact similar way with Hungary as with Lithuania last year - I have clear favourites I root for in both of those but deep inside I knew there was gonna be a different winner I only find okay and nothing else. (The difference is that "Az én apám" has grown on me since, "When We're Old" did not at all.) So back to discussing the interval act instead. For this one guest number of the NF's, the song began on a piano, "pretend" played by The Roop's lead singer, and then he got his butt off from the piano chair (unlike Duncan in Tel Aviv), to the microphone stand, and the song continued off sounding like its original version that was sung in last year's NF. I still love this song and even loved that version with piano at the beginning, but why did it not take over the whole song though? Just to not let the audience fall asleep before the Carousel would've? (Yes by the way, we got guest acts from other countries performing on our NF as well! But Carousel were the only ones to have a guest appearance, the other acts were either unchosen or perhaps busy doing Tel Aviv preparations, lol.) Well, good for them. I may or may not still would love The Roop entering and winning our selection someday, if they ever decide to participate again. They could've this year but they did not return, so maybe in 2021? Let this girl dare to dream for once, Lithuania ^_^

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• I love when our NF has postcards, no matter at which stage of introduction they are on. In 2016 the postcards were present in every show (the ones for the final were the best), in 2017 they were only introduced in the round 3 of heats (sometime before the semis), in 2018 - from the 2nd round of heats onwards, in 2019 though they were only for the final... what’s the punchline for this paragraph? Oh, there IS none. I just confessed my love for our NF postcards. Just keep scrolling :)

• Okay so I know no one really pays attention to our heats because we have too many of them AND we have too many songs in them, and the eliminated ones always stop mattering to everyone right away. But I'm here to bring you a favourite meme of mine that hailed just from the heats alone: miss RÙTA, who could have done much better during her performance if she didn't constantly look like she's incredibly constipated. I don't know what makes her look like that - the lipstick? the grin? her over-dramatic entry about wordly disasters, "Paradox"? I may never know, but I will let you have a good look at it if you don't want to watch the whole video I linked. Personally, I liked the red staging this song had, and the song wasn't bad, but the singer felt agonizingly nervous and never got the chance to do better, sadly. Oh and look at that sleek tattoo, mmm.

• Oh and our NF featured a metal song but it’s so formulaic and by the numbers dad metal that I didn’t even support it all that much.... however I’ll let you listen to it if you’d really like. And there's this best alternative song of this year's NF that I've heard that also ended in the semis, and it's way better than Fusedmarc's alternative (despite having some ugly beatboxing skills). Check it out too if you will.

And thankfully, that’s that for another year. I’m getting so awfully tired to compress my own NF even further more, especially with my enthusiasm for the actual quality of this NF going down the shithole with every single heat show coming after each other just like that, with more mediocre songs after more mediocre songs. I’m also openly declaring that I have barely any energy left with continuting these writeups, seeing that there’s too many to go and most of them are STILL undercooked drafts. But I’m tryna pull through. I have another completely completed review underway afterwards - just a few edits here and there on it and I’m done with it, m8s! And then I’m piling up new paragraphs after new paragraphs on other reviews.

So I hope I let you know why do I think that the end result of ours is lukewarm - from a dramatic NF there should have been a slightly dramatic winner tbh, but in the end we got a pop song that only a few people like. Brutal. And with the biggest hopes in my eyes for our success I’d like to finish this off with two words. Sėkmės, Jurijau!

#eurovision 2019 #tel aviv 2019 reviews #lithuania 2019 #jurij veklenko #run with the lions #lithuania

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