#prerevolutionary

[projectdivaar]

@lifeofafangirl1

You've heard of snakes on a plane, now get ready for horse on a spaceship

[newhistorybooks]

“This deep dive into the 1785 Parisian archives offers readers an illuminating panorama of same-sex encounters in the prerevolutionary French capital. By translating and contextualizing over two hundred police records, Jeffrey Merrick has provided anglophone scholars and students of the history of sexuality with an extraordinary resource.”

[marxistlesbianist]

We hear a great deal about the crimes of communism but almost nothing of its achievements. The communist governments inherited societies burdened with an age-old legacy of economic exploitation and maldevelopment. Much of precommunist Eastern Europe, as with prerevolutionary Russia and China, was in effect a Third World region with widespread poverty and almost nonexistent capital formation. Most rural transportation was still by horse and wagon.

The devastation of World War II added another heavy layer of misery upon the region, reducing hundreds of villages and many cities to rubble. It was the communists and their allies who rebuilt these societies. While denounced in the U.S. less for leaving their economies in bad shape, in fact, the Reds left the economy off Eastern Europe in far better condition than they found it.

The same was true of China. Henry Rosemont, Jr. notes that when the communists liberated Shanghai from the U.S.-supported reactionary Kuomintang regime in 1949, about 20 percent of that city’s estimated 1.2 million were drug addicts. Every morning there were special Street crews “whose sole task was to gather up the corpses of the children, adults, and the elderly who had been murdered during the night, or had been abandoned and died of disease, could, and/or starvation” (Z Magazine, October 1995).

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

Michael Parenti, Black Shirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

[chicagosavant]

old writing—playing with ideas…

(It’s a bit of mosh right now, and my brain is stuck between my 2nd century Artorius Castus, and my dear sweeties of late 18th c, PreRev Paris, and somehow trying to tie the two together. So, an intro-concept of sorts to:

1001 Parisian Nights…

“I was gleaming fire when I was caused to exist…”

~Soul, since I was made–(the Black Book of Carmarthen, VI)

“Have these dreams always followed you?” In the firelight’s ruddy glow, Thomas’s expression is quizzical.

A log pops in the leaping flames. Caroline watches the spray of embers lift upon a warm draft, following the ash as it settles weightlessly upon the hearth stones, dying to dust in a last molten flicker. “In some form. In some way, I suppose.  I think there are some tales so old, their truth has been lost in the retelling.”

They seek a haven here, from the violence subsuming Paris, threatening to drag them each, lady-physician and ambassador, in its wake. Outside, beyond the cramped chambers, effigies of Louis and his Austrian queen roar upon the pyres set by agitators.  Every spark, every cinder whipped up to the murky skies is cast upon the current of wrath sweeping over the city. From a summer too hot and dry to replenish precious flour needed for the grain stores, to an autumn whose nights promise a winter pierced with the whimpers of starving children, the bonfires burn high and quick in collective foment, forming a constellation of stars through the maze of streets within the old city walls. 

Fear and anger blaze together, consuming the tinder of the Crown’s impotency. The year before, Frenchmen had all but been ready to free their Dutch comrades from the shackles of the Stadtholder. Ultimately, Versailles had balked at facing England, avoiding a conflagration which promised to devour the whole of Europe. Now, the people are rising again, demanding an Estates-General come the spring. A reckoning of centuries, the old orders–monarchy, nobility, and clergy–will answer to commoners for the abuses done against them.

In these two rooms, though, overlooking a dark alley that cuts through the ramshackle neighborhoods crowding the Ile de la Cite, Caroline and Thomas retreat to this place where they are enraptured in memory. A spring twilight their minds paint with the dusky shadows of rose and gold captured in the clear waters of a quiet pool. Making love beneath a canopy of orange blossoms, their heavy sighs lost to the chorus of nightingales perched amid the branches from whence lacy white petals fell, landing in the bubbling waters of a stream, to collect at the banks of a rocky rise.  A craggy hillside claimed by the locals of Vaucluse to house the tomb of Petrach’s impossible love. 

Settled comfortably into his armchair, Thomas is as close to the fire’s warmth as safety allows. His preference when the nights fall earlier, and temperatures drop with the dark. Curled at his feet upon the lambskin throw, Caroline tips her head back against his knees, peering up at him while he gently the uncoils the knot at her neck, combing the sleek black tresses lose. “These tales of great kings and wizards, their heroes, sweeping battles and tragic sacrifices…”

Her words fade on a sigh, eyelids drooping. A tingling thrills over her scalp where his touch sweeps through her hair, warmth that soaks down her spine, leaving her limbs heavy.

Thomas clears his throat, pinching her ear.

“Ouch!” She winces upright, twisting around to face him. “You can never just let me drift off, can you?”

Her accusation melts away before the ghosting of his smile, a brightening that chases the melancholy of his gray gaze. “You were saying something about sweeping battles and tragic sacrifices. It didn’t seem like the opportune time to slip into sleep.”

With an impatient sigh, she picks up her previous thought. “There was always an Arthur, a Merlin, a…Gawain and Mordred.  But for every poet who celebrated Arthur’s feats in verse, every bard who lamented the tragedy of Guinevere and Lancelot, and every scholar who tried to find a warlord amid the heath-covered cliffs of Cornwall, not a one ever realized this tale didn’t start with Arthur as a king.”

“And how did it start, little doctress?”  His humoring irks her. To her amazement, he doesn’t burst out into laughter at her reply.

“With a queen.  And Arthur as her servant, her hero, and her ally.” The gravity in his expression compels her to admit, “That is where my dreams start, Thomas. With a queen, not a king.”

He greets her remark with a silent scrutiny that deepens the thought lines between the auburn crescents of his brows. Like she’s a miscast chess piece, and he’s puzzling how she ended up on a board of checkers. 

“Would you say something, please?” She grits out, feeling herself flush. “So I don’t feel like I just spouted some drivel worthy of the more deluded of my patients. You told me yourself, you’ve shared some of these dreams, these…memories at times since we-we impulsively did this–”she thrusts out her right hand, palm up, so the scar running in a pinched, pink line across the width of the skin is clearly visible–”last year.”

Disquiet darkens his gaze. “Do your brother and sister of know this?”

“Some,” she murmurs low. “These visions have disturbed all our dreams over the years.” Caroline notices how he curls the knotted, crippled fingers of his right hand around the same healed laceration marking his own palm. She reaches for his hand, spreading open his long fingers.  Steadying their disjointed trembling with the pressure of her palm resting in his, she says, “And yes, they know of this as well.”

He gives her a wry look. “There are no secrets between you, Catherine, and Edward, are there?”

How could there be? Since she was a child, her brother and sister have been her world.  A cornerstone of affection since she was rescued from a future of indentured servitude. Later, an asylum of acceptance in an era which didn’t accept women who dared challenge the institutions of medicine and science to practice in a role deemed strictly for men.

“No.” The word floats into the serenity of the room, filled with the crackle of the burning logs. What she was hoping of Thomas by revealing that, she’s not sure.

In that moment, for some reason his expression lightens, a fresh awareness rising in his mind. Giving a tender squeeze to their twined fingers, he shifts toward her, caressing her cheek with his sound left hand. “Well, it’s decided.  You’re no longer allowed to go abroad at night, into the streets of Paris.” Turning to the warmth of his touch, she peeks from beneath one quirked brow. “Your patients,” he explains, “the staff at the charity hospitals, will simply have to comply with my command.  From here on, I have you every night to myself.  No more panicked hammering at our door at the witching hour.  No more urgent summons by Dr Beaulieu, because he requires your expertise with an anomaly of feminine pathology.  You are to serve as my personal bard during the nights through this wretched fall, and even more wretched winter.”

“At your command?” she asks with mock indignity. “I don’t put poetry to music.”

His gaze bright with mirth, Thomas says in that drawl born of the West Country, and Virginian sun, that moves over her senses like velvet, honey, and smoke, “No, but like Sherehezade’s caliph, I intend to exercise my privilege to far more than merely your repository of dreams.”  Oh, he could infuriate her. His entitlement, the presumption of her affections. About to castigate him, Thomas stymies her with a light touch upon her parted lips. “And in between hearing you sigh my name–”her attempt at insult comes out a shaky breath, his fingers tickling over her mouth, moving behind her head, and drawing her closer to capture her lips in his–”I expect one wicked weave of a story.  One that might even provide some clues as to what the Comte St Germain covets so much in your person, little doctress.”  

[cocteautwinslyrics]

imagine ure in prerevolutionary russia writing with a square root

[grandhotelabyss]

I know it's too early to be considering The Invisible College II: Electric Boogaloo, but nevertheless — I think an ancient Athens-Renaissance London-prerevolutionary Moscow trajectory would be incredible, along the lines of your review of Steiner's 'Tolstoy or Dostoevsky' book, tracing the ley lines of the epic/novelistic in parallel to the dramatic/tragic*.

Semester I: Homer & the Greek tragedians; plus maybe Aristophanes/Plato/some of the Romans

II: Shakespeare; plus maybe Marlowe, Jonson, Montaigne, and other environs

III: Dostoevsky/Tolstoy; plus a smattering of Chekhov/Gogol/Pushkin

*For those who haven't read it, one of John's best paragraphs: "But Steiner has a bigger point to argue, namely, that these modes—epic and tragedy—are not merely aesthetic but metaphysical, ethical, and political, bearing within themselves two very different attitudes toward life. In the Homeric-Tolstoyan epic, we find a land-based evocation of natural rhythms, of the vast movements of the seasons, an ultimately hopeful sense that vitality surges on through and past the individual, who would do well to join him- or herself to the motions of the earth. In the Shakespearean-Dostoevskian tragedy, on the other hand, we see a deracinated court-and-city world of mistrust, suspicion, demonic urges, weird passions, perverse convictions, pervasive violence, cruel comedy, an underground perspective that ends in chastened humility before the suffering mystery of things."

Thank you! This is superb; I hope you write syllabi for a living! I'd already planned to get to Shakespeare and the Russians, but this is an exciting structure, a path through the whole tradition I'd never conceived in quite these terms. I will absolutely keep it in mind.

(And for the rest of you, have you enrolled in The Invisible College yet? It's in session all year round. Please join me for the current semester, Modern British Literature from Romanticism to Modernism, to be followed by a summer of Ulysses and Middlemarch, and then a fall semester on the American Renaissance culminating in Moby-Dick. The first lecture, "William Blake: The Poetic Genius Is the True Man," is free to all.)

[elektramouthed]

 Once they abandon their initial extremism, revolutionary elements become irremediably reformist. The well-nigh general abandonment of the revolutionary spirit in our time is a soil in which reformisms of survival thrive. Any modern revolutionary organization must identify the seeds of transcendence in the great movements of the past. In particular, it must rediscover and carry through the project of individual freedom, perverted by liberalism; the project of collective freedom, perverted by socialism; the project of the recapture of nature, perverted by fascism; and the project of the whole person, perverted by Marxist ideologies. This last project, though expressed in the theological terms of the time, also informed the great medieval heresies and their anticlerical rage, the recent exhumation of which is so apt in our own century with its new clergy of “experts” (2). People of ressentiment are the perfect survivors people bereft of the consciousness of possible transcendence, people of the age of decomposition (3). By becoming aware of spectacular decomposition, a person of ressentiment becomes a nihilist. Active nihilism is prerevolutionary. There is no consciousness of transcendence without consciousness of decomposition. Juvenile delinquents are the legitimate heirs of Dada (4).

Raoul Vaneigem, from Revolution of Everyday Life (tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith)

[idontwannabeyourmama]

"In the mid-twentieth century, the post-Holocaust world, it is common for men to find meaning in nothing: nothing has meaning; Nothing is meaning. In prerevolutionary Russia, men strained to be nihilists; it took enormous effort. In this world, here and now, after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after Vietnam, after Jonestown, men need not strain. Nihilism, like gravity, is a law of nature, male nature. The men, of course, are tired. It has been an exhausting period of extermination and devastation, on a scale genuinely new, with new methods, new possibilities. Even when faced with the probable extinction of themselves at their own hand, men refuse to look at the whole, take all the causes and all the effects into account, perceive the intricate connections between the world they make and themselves. They are alienated, they say, from this world of pain and torment; they make romance out of this alienation so as to avoid taking responsibility for what they do and what they are. Male dissociation from this life is not new of particularly modern, but the scale and intensity of this disaffection are new. And in the midst of this Brave New World, how comforting and familiar it is to exercise passionate cruelty against women."

Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

[historycuba]

Social organization

In contrast to the prerevolutionary years, Cuba is attempting to create a society in which neither class nor circumstances of occupation, income, race, or sex define social opportunities and rewards. The most significant challenges for the Revolution since the collapse of the Eastern bloc are providing equal access to political and economic opportunities without creating a privileged group in society or loss of conscious socialist goals, and simultaneously moving the economy toward diversification and industrialization.

[masterofd1saster]

CJ free speech - fantastic essay by Matt Taibbi

is one of the best essays I've ever seen on free speech.

Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!,” defiance is in our DNA. Now disagreement is seen as a threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices. In the open he said this! I was telling Tim Pool about this backstage, and he asked, “Was black ooze coming out of his mouth?” Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.” What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment, yes, but more importantly: us. Complainers. That’s our shared experience. We are obstacles to consensus.

***

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: There are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it. America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls, and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police. In prerevolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

***

Thomas Paine’s central message was that the humblest farmer was a towering moral giant compared to the invertebrate scum who wore crowns and lived in British castles. Common Sense told us to stand up straight. Never bow, especially not to a politician, because as Paine explained—I want you to think of Kerry and Hayden and Cheney here—“Men who look upon themselves as born to reign, and others to obey. . . are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.” Oscar Wilde noted ours was the only country in the world where being a kook was respectable. Every other country shunned the tinkerer or mad inventor and cheerfully donated them to us, turbocharging our American experiment. We welcomed crazy, and the world has light bulbs, the telephone, movies, airplanes, submarines, the internet, false teeth, the Colt .45, rock and roll, hip-hop, and monster dunks as a result. 

***

To all those snoops and nosy parkers sitting in their Homeland Security–funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation: Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on me. And how can you impugn my patriotism, when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror.  I’m not the problem. We’re not the problem. You’re the problem.  You suck. Thank you.

Get on your feet and give Matt a standing ovation.

[itsnothingbutluck]

As the 25th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution approached, Abbas Milani realized that very little, if any, attention had been given to the entire prerevolutionary generation. Political upheavals and a tradition of neglecting the history of past regimes have resulted in a cultural memory loss, erasing the contributions of a generation of individuals. Eminent Persians seeks to rectify that loss. Milani’s groundbreaking portrait of modern Iran reveals the country’s rich history through the lives of the men and women who forged it. Consisting of 150 profiles of the most important innovators in Iran between World War II and the Islamic Revolution, the book includes politicians, entrepreneurs, poets, artists, and thinkers who brought Iran into the modern era with brilliant success and sometimes terrible consequences. The biographies and essays weave a richly textured tapestry of lives, ideas, and events that reveals the true story of these decades in the life of a nation. The two volumes are divided into sections on politics, economics, and culture, each accompanied by an introductory essay that places the individual stories in their broader historical context. Drawn from interviews, extensive archival material, and private correspondence, Eminent Persians is a treasure trove of original documents, many appearing in print for the first time. Detailed sketches of personalities and personal foibles offer a compelling and highly readable account of this remarkable period of history on a human scale.

[a-typical]

 There is something curious about the national flags of the planet Earth. The flag of the United States has fifty stars; the Soviet Union and Israel, one each; Burma, fourteen; Grenada and Venezuela, seven; China, five; Iraq, three; São Tomé e Príncipe, two; Japan, Uruguay, Malawi, Bangladesh and Taiwan, the Sun; Brazil, a celestial sphere; Australia, Western Samoa, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, the constellation of the Southern Cross; Bhutan, the dragon pearl, symbol of the Earth; Cambodia, the Angkor Wat astronomical observatory; India, South Korea and the Mongolian Peoples’ Republic, cosmological symbols. Many socialist nations display stars. Many Islamic countries display crescent moons. Almost half of our national flags exhibit astronomical symbols. The phenomenon is transcultural, nonsectarian, worldwide. It is also not restricted to our time: Sumerian cylinder seals from the third millenium B.C. and Taoist flags in prerevolutionary China displayed constellations. Nations, I do not doubt, wish to embrace something of the power and credibility of the heavens. We seek a connection with the Cosmos. We want to count in the grand scale of things. And it turns out we are connected—not in the personal, small-scale unimaginative fashion that the astrologers pretend, but in the deepest ways, involving the origin of matter, the habitability of the Earth, the evolution and destiny of the human species.

[arquipetrus]

Patria o Muerte por Berny Sackl Por Flickr: Sugar mill no 517 of Cuba, prerevolutionary name "Patria", now it's partly a museum. MINAZ no. 1747 to the left was built by Vulcan Iron Works (Wilkes-Barre) in 1920, constr. no. 3134, wheels 2-8-0. It worked at sugar mill Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Camaguey, before. MINAZ no. 1461 was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1920 (construction no. 54247), wheels 2-8-0. It worked in Contramaestre before. MINAZ no. 1836 to the right was built by Vulcan Iron Works (Wilkes-Barre) in 1922 (construction no. 3148), wheels 2-8-0 and worked at sugar mill "Orlando Gonzales" before.

[kaxen]

damn, since Parz's 30th birthday is kind of important…..

is he a spring, summer, fall, or winter baby

what holiday were people most likely to fuck during in prerevolutionary france

[bigscaryd]

This is Bayonetta with a dong woven into her beehive like a prerevolutionary French Court hairdoo.

building a creature i'll go first legs

legs

[lyubochkablogger-blog]

Филфак ЗабГУ в этом здании сейчас.Улица Бутина. Old Chita