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#ask: ottoman history
autumnmobile12 · 1 year
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This line is probably just a random direction the writers chose, but geographically speaking, it was the Ottoman Empire that lay south of Wallachia.  At the time Castlevania takes place, the Ottomans (chiefly Islam) were very open and tolerant of other religions compared to their European neighbors and granted asylum to cultural minorities.  So not only is Trevor’s suggestion of heading south a means of escaping Dracula’s Horde, it’s also a means for Sypha’s people to escape religious persecution.
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Sypha’s grandfather refers to their people as the Codrii Speakers.  The Romanian word codru means ‘forest’ and codrii means ‘woods.’  So Sypha’s people are woodland Speakers.
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By the time Vlad III Dracula ascended the throne for the second time in August 1456, a comet had been sighted over Wallachia.  Based on the description by observing astronomers at the time and the calculations of moving celestial bodies, it is believed this was Halley’s Comet.  The historical Dracula interpreted the sighting as a good omen and later incorporated the famous comet in coins minted during his reign.  (Google searches show me none of the historical Dracula’s coins survive today, if he minted any specific to his reign at all.  My source for this one is a book published in 1989: Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by Florescu and McNally, pg. 83.  So make of this one what you will.)
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The capital of Wallachia moved around a few times.  When the principality was first founded in 1310, it was located at Curtea de Argeș.  During the majority of Vlad III Dracula’s lifetime, it was at Târgoviște.  In the autumn of 1476, it is believed he moved the capital to Bucharest for economic and military purposes and it remains to be the capital of Romania today.  (Plus, in the context of the series, Târgoviște was a ruined city by 1476, so no wonder the ruling government cleared out.)
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scorpion-flower · 1 year
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the reason why Daniel even played Vlad was because there were some people at Netflix who insisted on having a Romanian do the job
they messed up a lot in the series with the given information, those foreign historians are wrong, but the series is told from the turkish perspective, I am bitter but I am also thankful for giving a Romanian the chance to portray one of the heaviest names in history, as he should've been from day 1.
Daniel was a monster, in the best way possible, on screen
Loooool, so it wasn't even because the guys making the show were trying to be accurate this time around?
Yes, I am totally expecting to see a lot of propaganda in s2 too, how Vlad was a monster who had a pathological hate against the Ottomans, but nothing about how that monster was created and why he hated them.
I am rolling my eyes everytime I see someone calling the series unbiased, when it's crystal clear to me that they only care, as you said, for the Turkish POV.
Anyway, the only thing we can hope, is that one day, other countries (especially under-represented countries) will be given the chance to show their history on such large platforms as well. Casting a Romanian to play Romania's most well-known historical personality was a good move.
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I actually showed this to a university class.
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Remember when I said that I ended up watching Magnificent Century due to an assignment?
Well, the thing was about Turkish soft power, and we wanted a good allegory/meme to explain the main concepts.
There wasn't much given that what few soft power cartoons are around center on the US, Russia or China.
Obviously, me being me, I couldn't NOT also make this about dinosaurs.
Btw, the final exam had a question involving this presentation.
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mkstrigidae · 2 years
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not quite a love confession, but i feel like you would be a great person to go to a series of small and weird museums with
This is genuinely one of the best compliments I have ever gotten- anon, you GET me. I have an actual, literal list of weird museums I want to visit, and it grows every time i discover the existence of a new one. Hit me up if you're ever on the east coast of the US and we can make a road trip schedule, starting with the mothman museum in point pleasant WV. I'm a pretty damn good baker, so I am the queen of road trip snacks :D
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opencommunion · 29 days
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"Like all foreigners, the Jewish settlers sailed first to Alexandria, took a ferry to Jaffa, and were taken ashore by small boats. This mundane arrival at the shore appears in the settlers’ statements as aggressive and alien treatment: ‘Aravim Hetikifu Ottanu’ – ‘the Arabs assaulted us’ – is the phrase used to describe the simple act of Palestinian boys helping settlers to small boats on the way to Jaffa; they shouted because the waves were high and asked for baksheesh [tips] because this was how they managed to live. But in the settlers’ narrative they were assailants. Noise, presumably a normal feature of life in the Jewish townships of Eastern Europe, becomes menacing when produced by Palestinian women wailing in the traditional salute of joy to the sailors returning safely home. For the settlers this was the behaviour of savages, ‘with fiery eyes and a strange garroted language.’ Whether the topic is their language, their dress or their animals, reports back to Europe concerning the Palestinians were all about unpleasantness and weirdness. ... Again and again, Zionist settlers behaved as a people who had been insulted – either objectively in the form of a physical attack, but more often simply by the very presence of Palestinians in Palestine. ... The Zionist settlers instituted retaliation for ‘theft’, which was how they characterised the rural tradition of cultivating state land, a practice that was legal under Ottoman law. Picking fruit from roadside orchards became an act of robbery only after Zionism took over the land. The words shoded (robber) and rozeach (murderer) were flung about with ease when Palestinians involved in such acts were described. After 1948 these terms would be replaced with ‘terrorist’ and ‘saboteur’. ... Cleansing the land of its farmers and tenants was done at first through meeting in the Zionist madafa and then by force of eviction in Mandatory times. The ‘good’ Palestinians were those who came to the madafa and allowed themselves to be evicted. Those who refused were branded robbers and murderers. Even Palestinians with whom the settlers sometimes shared ownership of horses or long hours of guard duty were transformed into villains once they refused eviction. Later on, wherever Israelis would control the lives of Palestinians, such a refusal to collaborate would be the ultimate proof for Palestinian choice of the terrorist option as a way of life. ... Following the 1967 war ... both Israeli academics and Israeli media commonly used the term ‘terrorism’ when referring to any kind of Palestinian political, social and cultural activity. ‘Palestinian terrorism’ was depicted as having been present from the very beginning of the Zionist project in Palestine and still being there when academic research into it began in earnest. This characterisation was so comprehensive and airtight that it assigned almost every chapter in Palestinian history to the domain of ‘terrorism’ and absolved hardly any of the organisations and personalities that made up the Palestinian national movement from the accusation of being terrorists."
Ilan Pappé, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (2014)
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gremlingottoosilly · 3 months
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loser! könig with bimbo reader who likes so indulge in his interests.. maybe she wants to ride him while watching/facing tv while he tells all the little facts in her ear?
Nothing gets this man harder than having his precious bimbo girlfriend bouncing on his cock while he is infodumping her about something that he likes. And he likes a lot of things! From war history - just ask this man about first World War or whatever Ottoman empire was doing in he region a couple hundreds years ago, and you will have your answer. He is like a child, sometimes, even in such perverted setting - your pussy is leaking on his pants as you ride him and he doesn't even falter as he stumbles across his words while saying some dates and names. He never had anyone to listen to him so intently - he could literally just recite a TV guide to you, and you'd still be your adorable, dazzled self, surprised at every word he is saying like it's the gospel. He knows you don't know a lot of things - dumb thing, you barely finished high school and slept your way through some mediocre college but it's okay, he is your prophet now. If you have a question, he has extensive knowledge to answer it. And if you want to listen about his hobbies or interests, he will gladly pull out his phone with tons of pictures and examples. Konig knows you're too fucked out of your mind every time his cock gently massages your cervix or slams on your gummy inner walls to actually listen to him, but he doesn't mind. Even when you forget everything he told you while he is playing with your clit, he isn't afraid of repeating it to you -- his precious girl deserve to be knowledgable, after all. Such a good, pretty girl, and just for him.
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rotzaprachim · 6 months
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one of the things I think a lot of goyim esp western based don’t clock about Jews is that a lot of the places we lived before mass immigration to the US&west and the creation of the state of Israel not only often pretty violently killed or expelled us, but were and are sights of continual warfare and dislocation that was and continued to be fucked up by external and internal conflict, by the direct actions of the British ottoman French American and Russian imperialisms….. Jews only became a “western” people through the acts of violent dislocations from our homelands we’d often lived in for hundreds and thousands of years.
We lived in Afghanistan. We lived in Yemen. We lived in Iraq. We lived in Serbia. We lived in Bosnia & Herzegovina. We lived in Belarus. We lived in Ethiopia. We lived in Algeria. We lived in Morocco. We lived in Syria. We lived in Iran. We lived in Kurdistan. And we lived in Ukraine. We often have complicated histories with these places, varying extents to which we identified with them or with the nationalisms that drew their borders, but we lived there, and in so many ways, from our language to stories to food, we carry them with us and are hurt by the loss of their memory in our lives, pushed into the diaspora of the diaspora. None of this justifies the often profoundly violent antisemitisms we found there, nor should it allow for simple rounds of flag waving - our communities were almost always older than the modern states, and many institutionalized Jewishness as something irreconcilable from the modern National Citizen. But we lived there. Inextricably we are a part of their history, just as they are a part of us.
Any simplistic takes about how Israeli jews should just LEAVE AND GO HOME without understanding the contexts of why that isn’t possible not only whitewashes histories of violent antisemitism but also the CURRENT ongoing realities in many of the countries we lived in, and it comes off not only as callous to Jews but to the people who continue to live there, after our links were severed. Any antizionism that doesn’t seriously reckon with these histories is incomplete. “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” The American goy asks. I think of my friends and community. To Odessa? Or to Baghdad? To Aleppo? Or to Herat? YOU TELL ME.
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Being a Jew or a Muslim in the world has gotten much scarier in the past month, and the number of takes being normalized on the Internet that are actually just blatant hatred of Jewish and/or Muslim people is deeply worrying, so here's a list of clarifications about the Israel–Palestine conflict:
The Jewish people have a right to exist in the land of Israel. The Jewish people trace our history in the region back thousands of years, and there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Israel since the Bronze Age.
The Palestinian people have a right to exist in the land of Israel. They have existed in this region, on his land, for hundreds of years.
Claiming one people has the right to exist here but the other people does not means you hate that group of people. If you believe Palestinians have the right to an autonomous state in the land of Israel but the Jews do not, you are a Jew-hating antisemite. If you believe the Jews have a right to an autonomous state in the land of Israel but the Palestinians do not, you hate Palestinians.
Zionism is the ideology that the Jewish people have the right to build a national homeland in the land of Israel. Since the foundation of Israel, being a zionist purely means you believe that Israel has the right to exist. As such, being “anti-zionist” makes you antisemitic.
The Jewish people did not colonize the land of Israel, like, ever. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years, and the major waves of immigration to Israel - called the Aliyot - were during the Ottoman and British occupation of the Levant.
Saying “the Jews are all white European colonizers” is deeply misinformed, antisemitic, and racist. There are Jews - many of whom live in Israel - from Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Sudan, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Georgia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and most of the rest of the Middle East & north Africa.
Wait but why are there so many "white" (Ashkenazi) Jews in Israel and around the world? Well in 1933 there were 9.5 million Jews living in Europe. In the years 1933–1945, the Nazis genocided 6 million of them. Currently the Jewish population of Europe is around 1.3 million, and today there are still half a million fewer Jews than there were before the Holocaust. Most of the Ashkenazi survivors of the Holocaust immigrated to Israel, and many others immigrated to countries like the US.
Following the 1948 Israel–Palestine war, roughly 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. In the years before and after the war, 900,000 Jews were expelled from various Muslim countries.
I'm going to continue to reblog this post with more clarifications about the I/P conflict. Feel free to reblog w/ stuff you wanted to add, and feel free to send me questions/comments in my asks. Stay safe everyone ❤️
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hussyknee · 9 months
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Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani records the lives of a number of individuals including one named Tuways who lived during the last years of Muhammad and the reigns of the early Muslim dynasties. Tuways was mukhannathun: those who were born as men, but who presented as female. They are described by al-Isfahani as wearing bangles, decorating their hands with henna, and wearing feminine clothing. One mukhannathun, Hit, was even in the household of the Prophet Muhammad. Tuways earned a reputation as a musician, performing for clients and even for Muslim rulers. When Yahya ibn al-Hakam was appointed as governor, Tuways joined in the celebration wearing ostentatious garb and cosmetics. When asked by the governor if he were Muslim Tuways affirmed his belief, proclaiming the declaration of faith and saying that he observes the fast of Ramadan and the five daily prayers. In other words, al-Isfahani, who recorded the life of a number of mukhannathun like Tuways, saw no contradiction between his gender expression and his Muslimness. From al-Isfahani we read of al-Dalal, ibn Surayj, and al-Gharid—all mukhannathun—who lived rich lives in early Muslim societies. Notably absent from al-Isfahani’s records is any state-sanctioned persecution. Instead, the mukhannathun are an accepted part of society.
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Far from isolated cases, across Islamic history—from North Africa to South Asia—we see widespread acceptance of gender nonconforming and queer individuals. - Later in the Ottoman Empire, there were the köçek who were men who wore women’s clothing and performed at festivals. Formally trained in dance and percussion instruments, the köçek were an important part of social functions. A similar practice was found in Egypt. The khawal were male dancers who presented as female, wearing dresses, make up, and henna. Like their Ottoman counterparts, they performed at social events.
- In South Asia, the hijra were and are third-sex individuals. The term is used for intersex people as well as transgender women. Hijra are attested to among the earliest Muslim societies of South Asia where, according to Nalini Iyer, they were often guardians of the household and even held office as advisors.
- In Iraq, the mustarjil are born female, but present as men. In Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs the guide, Amara explains, “A mustarjil is born a woman. She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man.” When asked if the mustarjil are accepted, Amara replies “Certainly. We eat with her and she may sit in the mudhif.” Amara goes on to describe how mustarjil have sex with women.
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Historian Indira Gesink analyzed 41 medical and juristic sources between the 8th and 18th centuries and discovered that the discourse of a “binary sex” was an anachronistic projection backwards. Gesink points out in one of the earliest lexicography by the 8th century al-Khalil ibn Ahmad that he suggests addressing a male-presenting intersex person as ya khunathu and a female-presenting intersex person as ya khanathi while addressing an effeminate man as ya khunathatu. This suggests a clear recognition of a spectrum of sex and gender expression and a desire to address someone respectfully based on how they presented.
Tolerance of gender ambiguity and non-conformity in Islamic cultures went hand-in-hand with broader acceptance of homoeroticism. Texts like Ali ibn Nasir al-Katib’s Jawami al-Ladhdha, Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani, and the Tunisian, Ahmad al-Tifashi’s Nuz’ha al-‘Albab attest to the widespread acceptance of same-sex desire as natural. Homoeroticism is a common element in much of Persian and Arabic poetry where youthful males are often the object of desire. From Abu Nuwas to Rumi, from ibn Ammar to Amir Khusraw, some of the Islamic world’s greatest poets were composing verses for their male lovers. Queer love was openly vaunted by poets. One, Ibn Nasr, immortalizes the love between two Arab lesbians Hind al Nu’man and al-Zarqa by writing:
“Oh Hind, you are truer to your word than men. Oh, the differences between your loyalty and theirs.”
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Acceptance of same-sex desire and gender non-conformity was the hallmark of Islamic societies to such a degree that European travelers consistently remarked derisively on it. In the 19th century, Edward Lane wrote of the khawal: “They are Muslims and natives of Egypt. As they personate women, their dances are exactly of the same description as those of the ghawazee; and are, in like manner, accompanied by the sound of castanets.”
A similarly scandalized CS Sonnini writes of Muslim homoerotic culture:
“The inconceivable appetite which dishonored the Greeks and the Persians of antiquity, constitute the delight, or to use a juster term, the infamy of the Egyptians. It is not for women that their ditties are composed: it is not on them that tender caresses are lavished; far different objects inflame them.”
In his travels in the 19th century, James Silk Buckingham encounters an Afghan dervish shedding tears for parting with his male lover. The dervish, Ismael, is astonished to find how rare same-sex love was in Europe. Buckingham reports the deep love between Ismael and his lover quoting, “though they were still two bodies, they became one soul.”
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Today, vocal Muslim critics of LGBTQ+ rights often accuse gay and queer people of imposing a “Western” concept or forcing Islam to adjust to “Western values” failing to grasp the irony of the claim: the shift in the 19th and 20th century was precisely an alignment with colonial values over older Islamic ones, all of which led to legal criminalization. In fact, the common feature among nations with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation isn’t Islam, but rather colonial law.
Don't talk to me I'm weeping. I'm not Muslim, but the grief of colonization runs in the blood of every Global South person. Dicovering these is like finding our lost treasures among plundered ruins.
Queer folk have always, always been here; we have always been inextricable, shining golden threads in the tapestry of human history. To erase and condemn us is to continue using the scalpel of colonizers in the mutilation and betrayal of our own heritage.
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autumnmobile12 · 1 year
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In 1462, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed the Conqueror, decided to try his luck expanding his lands into Europe, invading through Wallachia.  In the past, many of Vlad III Dracula’s predecessors would have either stood aside and let the Ottoman forces pass through their land unhindered, or they might have committed Wallachian soldiers to the invasion force out of self-preservation.  Dracula instead chose to resist and, in the face of the Ottoman’s significantly larger and better trained army, he conscripted every able-bodied citizen he could.  This included men, women, and children aged twelve and older.  Making use of terrain they knew better than their enemies, the Wallachians resorted to guerrilla war tactics, scorched earth, and even early germ warfare.  When Wallachian soldiers became ill, they were often sent into enemy camps in an attempt to spread the disease and weaken the Ottoman forces.
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In the brief glimpse we have of Isaac’s past, we see his tormentor wears a white tunic with a red cross, the Cross of St. George, which is famously associated with Europe’s Crusades against Islam.  As if his life wasn’t miserable enough, Isaac was likely born in a frontline Ottoman province and was captured/enslaved, and possibly orphaned, by Christian soldiers.  Yikes.
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The ruler of Wallachia was known as a voivode, which we often translate as ‘prince,’ but a more accurate meaning is military governor or warlord.  Serving under him was a council of boyar lords and advisors known as the princely council, or sfatful domnesc.  These officials, the dregători, managed everything from court logistics to military endeavors to lawmaking.  Whether or not the Judge was a direct member of the council or an assistant to one of the members is up for interpretation.  As for his reference to ‘doing just well enough that he was sent back to Lindenfeld,’ the Judge maybe, on account of the voivode and other claimants to Wallachia’s throne consistently overthrowing/murdering the shit out of each other, found himself on the wrong end of a regime change and found it prudent to skip town while the going was good.  Or, you know, before somebody important found out about his ‘little pleasures.’
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Straying into headcanon territory with this one, but a lot of it is backed up by historically accurate presentations of how a medieval household was generally managed.  Firstly, a medieval household was huge, and an estate of this size would have been maintained by a large staff, including but not limited to:  the steward, a stable master, one or more groundskeepers, a cook, laundresses, personal attendants of family members, page boys running messages all over the estate, and one or more nursemaids watching over the infants and younger children.  This is broad speculation, but I will point out that in England around the same time, it was common for high-ranking nobles to employ an average of 240 to 500 people.
In a Wallachian household, the education of a boyar’s son would have been handled largely by the women of the house, as well as the occasional tutor for more specified subjects.  This would have included etiquette, penmanship, arithmetic, politics, history, etc.  So Trevor’s domestic education likely would have been overseen by his mother, aunts, and possibly his grandmother.  Combat training would have been supervised by his father and uncles.
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In short, I like to imagine some of the people from Dănești were survivors from his family’s estate and knew him as a child.
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catsvrsdogscatswin · 11 months
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Since there’s a bit of a hiatus in Dracula Daily right now, I thought I’d take the opportunity to ramble about what I know of vampiric folklore and history in Europe because I cannot contain my infodump and it’s actually really interesting.
Painting it in very broad strokes, the earliest folkloric creature we would recognize as a vampire was acknowledged in Europe in the 1100s and earlier as a human corpse that physically rose from their grave and returned to their former home/village to drink blood. (A 12th-century English text, The Life and Miracles of St. Modwenna, mentions two examples of this type of vampire.) These vampires’ victims did not become vampires as well, but sickened and died, usually from wasting diseases. What caused the original person to become a vampire was variable, but usually involved being, just, an absolute jerk when they were alive, or an increasingly convoluted series of ways in which they attracted bad luck/evil while they lived, after they died, or as they were buried.
This is where the traditions of stuffing a stone in the potential vampire’s mouth, decapitating them and putting the head in the grave between their knees, burying them facedown, cutting off their hands or feet, burying them in a too-small grave, piling stones atop the grave, or burying them with broken legs came from. All of these are regional or historical variations on ways to quite literally prevent the presumed vampire from digging their way out of the grave and causing trouble: an “And stay down there!” maneuver that we’ll see survive into modern pop culture in the form of a stake through the heart.
This was the predominant form of vampirism up until roughly the 1700s: someone nasty in the village died, and after a while, would start reappearing to their family or loved ones at night, slowly draining their lives away as they fell to a wasting disease like tuberculosis or leprosy. Once the villagers caught on, they would exhume the body, find it suspiciously preserved and with blood trickling from its mouth, and then take steps to neutralize the vampiric threat by beheading, staking it through the heart to literally pin it in the grave, stuff a stone in its mouth, or a combination of all three. 
(You may have heard of the Venetian mass-burial plague pit an archeological team discovered: one of the skeletons had a brick shoved in her mouth. She was the only body treated in such a way, implying that she was thought to have been a vampire: hypothetically even the vampire that caused this local upswing of the plague.)
A cultural shift happened in the 18th century, however, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire gained territory in Serbia and other portions of the Balkans. Since they were neighbors with the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarians kept a heavy military presence in these new territories, and the emperor of the time (Charles VI, I believe) asked the occupying forces to collect reports on the local customs and folklore and send them back.
A number of the reports they sent back included vampire stories.
Now, this was the Age of Enlightenment: many countries were pulling away from old superstitions and following the new methods of science. Belief in vampirism was a rural thing, and widespread plague situations had faded enough that they really weren’t relevant anymore and had fallen out of a lot of people’s memory. 
But the thing was... science was still new, and this whole vampirism thing sounded just plausible enough to be extremely interesting. The Austro-Hungarians sent all sorts of scientists, doctors, and clergy members to collect and dissect and discuss these stories, and for a short spate of time vampirism was the hot new discussion topic in esoteric circles. And for then and a while after, if you wanted case studies, debates, and just about any reference material on vampires, you knew you’d find it in Austro-Hungary’s library.
Eventually the scientific community all concluded that this vampirism thing was just silly peasants not understanding the process of decay, but the arts crowd -particularly the Sturm und Drang folks in Germany- remained very interested in this exotic new creature steeped in mystery and death. Sturm und Drang translates to “storm and stress” and if I had to describe their style in modern terms, I would say (roughly, and with affection) “a love of edgy tragedies.”
There were a number of poems and works spawned from this flurry of interest, but this Austrian version of the vampire still shared a common theme: more like a revenant than anything else, coming for their loved ones first, and a lot of their horror was tied up in how blasphemous and unChristian their very existence was. Less emphasis was placed on getting rid of the vampire and more was placed on the artistic allure of vengeance from beyond the grave and the vampire’s inherent exotic mysticism and threat.
Stoker, in fact, directly references an example of this in Dracula! On May 5th, when Dracula’s telling the coach driver that he knew they were trying to get Jonathan out of there before he showed up, because he himself drove fast enough to intercept them, one of the other passengers whispers to his friend “Denn die Todten reiten schnell,” which translates roughly to “For the dead ride fast,” a quote from Burger’s Lenore.
Lenore is a poem about a young woman whose fiancé died in the Seven Years’ War (connection with Austro-Hungary). In her despair, she curses god (old-school invitation for vampirism), and the following night, her lover knocks on her door to take her on horseback to their marriage bed (vampires attack their loved ones first). He takes her on an increasingly terrifying ride through the night, prompting the above quote, which ends in a graveyard, where he is revealed to be a skeleton and Lenore dies.  
Lenore was written in 1774, and although William is not technically a vampire, the poem is an example of the old-school vampire type. The vampire is a physical reanimated corpse that does not create more of its kind, but causes the people around them to die/waste away, and attacks their loved ones before anyone else. The transition to what we finally would recognize as a modern vampire started with Carmilla and was solidified in Dracula.
Written in 1872, Carmilla is a blending of both old and modern vampiric tropes. It uses the then-expected setting of the Austrian Empire, all of the titular vampire’s victims wasted away and died rather than rising as vampires themselves, and Carmilla’s coffin was filled with blood when she was unearthed. However, she was also able to shapeshift into a cat and walk through walls -no longer just a revenant- and she could walk around during the day without harm. She also does not target the people she knew and loved in life first: Carmilla is a vampire centuries old and her current victims are chosen indiscriminately. The vampire as a folkloric creature was evolving.
And, side note, while it was used partially as a narrative device to show how evil and unnatural Carmilla was, she was also gay. Gay as fuck. People who lost their shit at 
“Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper: ‘Yes, I too can love’” 
will go absolutely mental at Laura going
“It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever.’"
Anyway. Queerness is baked into the concept of the modern vampire from the very beginning, what of it.
With Carmilla as the springboard, though, Stoker was free to finally create Dracula, which was essentially the turning point between modern and archaic vampire depictions. He took all of the old stuff and reworked, revamped (heh), or added to it to get the foundation of the stereotypical vampire we know today.
He shifted the geographic vampire hotspot further over from Austria-Hungary, landing it in neighboring Transylvania. Dracula’s victims weaken and die and seem to be inflicted with a strange wasting disease, but can also turn into vampires themselves. Driving a stake through his heart and cutting off his head is no longer an attempt to pin him in his grave and keep him from rising, but merely to destroy him. He was dead, yes, and very unholy, but he also had powers beyond merely being a risen corpse, and his power set became the standard for future vampire media.
Hence, Dracula becomes the foundation for the modern concept of a vampire, which is why pop culture usually treats it as the beginning point of vampirism in general.
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Gotta check something because I have the sneaking suspicion I might be alone in this corner of Tumblr.
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aqlstar · 1 month
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you were probably asked this before, but by saying "certified Palestinian Jew" do you mean your ancestors lived in Israel before immigration became popular, or do you mean a Jewish Palestinian? (I'm assuming the former tho)
Neither, actually. I put it there to point out the absurdity of the idea of a Jewish Palestinian in a modern sense, as well as the absurdity of the modern distinction between “Palestinians” and citizens of neighboring Arab countries. (As you correctly assumed.)
My father’s family immigrated to the US from Ottoman and British controlled “Palestine” (Haifa, specifically, which is now in Israel). They were Arabic-speaking Christians who had lived in that region as far back as they could trace their family history.
Since UNWRA tracks Palestinian refugee status patrilineally, by that standard, behold: me, a Palestinian Jew!
The irony is that they never once identified as Palestinian- they were Syrian through and through, as were all their neighbors and friends.
This is an anecdotal example of the declaration made in the 1919 Palestine Arab Congress which I’ll link the wiki page to below.
One major claim of the Congress was
"We consider Palestine nothing but part of Arab Syria and it has never been separated from it at any stage. We are tied to it by national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic, and geographic bounds."
In short- my Syrian (actually Assyrian Syrian- but that’s a whole other can of worms) family has been retroactively labeled Palestinian by political actors seeking to isolate the Arabs in Palestine and thereby promote conflict. Hope that answers your question 😊 Please feel free to discuss or ask me further questions.
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writingwithcolor · 9 months
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Creatures of Folklore Who Represent Cultures Preventing Wars Throughout History
Anonyomous asked:
Hi! I’m writing a story which is set in a fantasy version of our world. The main difference between our real world and my fictional version is that the spirits and fairies of each culture and folklore exist, and that the majority of them basically stop war from happening because they react very badly (and potentially violently) when invading forces etc try to start battles. 
I’m doing a lot of research into the histories of the various cultures that will be featured in the books set in this world so I can hypothesise how they might have developed without, for example, violent colonialism, and where trade and so on might have flourished in its place. However, it’s possible for colonialism to happen through more insidious ways, such as assimilation. In one of my books, I’m intending to use this as part of the plot, where Japan will try to colonise the Ryukyuan Kingdom through assimilation, but will be stopped by the Ryukyuan Kingdom making allies with other nations (amongst other tactics), but I was wondering if you had any advice for respectfully handling the colonialism that very much did happen in real life in a fantasy setting where it didn’t manage to occur, without erasing the history and ramifications etc of what actually happened?
Do fox spirits have citizenship? 
You mean well with this concept, but there are multiple key problems. 
One major issue with cordoning off spirits and folklore creatures by “patron” culture and have them fight said patrons’ battles is that there’s a lot of overlap. It’d be hard for there not to be a conflict of interest. 
For example, everyone knows about the kitsune fox spirit from Japan. But the story of the fox spirit was introduced to Japan and Korea by China, where they are called húlijīng. These foxes are remarkably similar, with their characteristics and stories almost borrowed wholesale. Are they all the same “species?” If so, when small differences emerge in the countries’ folktales, how do you resolve this? Do these spirits also morph and specialize, or does one interpretation win out? How about when kingdoms are unified, like the Korean Three Kingdoms–do separate versions of the kumiho reverse-evolve into a single variant? What side do they pick when these kingdoms and empires try to battle? If they live apart from humans or aren’t very friendly with them, why would they have a reason to care about invasions when they have no reason to be allegiant to said borders, or whatever name they’re called in whichever country whose land they live on?
Folkloric beings are never static, and are influenced over time by cultural shifts and exchanges, including shifting borders. Human history is stuffed cover-to-cover with events of what we called “conquest” then and “occupation” or “colonization” now. And through these changes, cultures diverged and came together, creating new stories. In other words: not even fairy tales are immune to colonization. 
Leigh can explain the rest. 
~ Rina
The Problem with Retconning War
A very simple question for you:
How are you going to rectify every single historical war that’s ever existed?
Like, the whole plot of the Trojan War as we know it is that the gods of the same culture were on different sides! And the gods made the war last as long as it did. Alexander the Great was a colonizer. Romans were definitely colonizers. Ottomans and Mongols, also colonizers. It wasn’t to the scale of modern colonialism, but it happened. If you look at census records from the 1800s of Indigenous populations in North America, you’ll find that the men 20+ have way lower numbers because they died in war! 
I’m not of the opinion that the basic state of humanity is war and we are barely contained by base instincts. But I’m also not so far in the other direction that I believe humans lack any sort of warring instincts. It shows up in chimps and other primates, so it shows up in humans.
In a way, it sounds like you’ve taken a very Christian-fundamentalist-centric view of things, which is: humans need religion to be “contained”. That humans are amoral without some sort of religion or folklore or spirits telling them to not do a “bad thing.”
This is ignoring how people have been using religion to justify wars since religion was invented. As Rina said, there can be overlap in groups’ beliefs and deities so there’s the side-picking issue, which as I mentioned is the whole plot of the Trojan War. Even when humans write about gods meddling in war, they have the gods not all be on the same side.
Humans have war. Humans try to take over other groups because they want the resources that group has. Alliances shift. Territories shift.
This is also treating humans as a monolith—there are populations within the colonized groups that agree with the colonizers because they get benefits. Claiming that all colonized groups hate all aspects of their colonialism all of the time is deeply ahistorical and flattened. Sometimes the benefits were only for a small group, but sometimes the benefits were far-reaching. It’s in the India tag on WWC, varying views of the Mughals. 
Also, how will you handle the Christianization of Europe? How will you handle all of this folklore that only got written down via monks and nuns making notes and modifying beliefs to fit the Bible? Will any area with only Christianity’s records written down not have folklore? 
And how will you handle folklore drift? Religions are not static. If you look at Greek myths, there are ten to thirty versions of each story and those are just the ones that survived. Each city-state had its own mythology, using the same gods, modified to fit the local needs.
And what about folklore that deals with war and thrives in war? What about the gods of war and destruction? I know Norse mythology is Christianized beyond recognition, but even in its Christianized form half of it is about war. Would the Valkyries, whose whole purpose is to find valiant soldiers slain in battle, not want war? Their whole purpose is war.
Also, on top of it—how will you handle revolution?
You say yourself, colonialism could still happen subtly. Colonialism and injustice can still happen. Will these subjugated spirits force an already disadvantaged group to exclusively use a rigged system to try and politely ask for their rights back? Or would these spirits want to be free and support the means necessary to take it back?
War has happened to upend the divine right of kings. War has happened to free slaves (Haiti). War has happened for basic workers’ rights (some union strikes have resulted in war). 
You’re basically removing a whole toolbox in the fight for a better world. Yes, not being able to colonize because of fantasy AU sounds fine, until you realize that pretty much all of human history from the Romans has been created via war to some degree.
You’re basically just saying “violence is bad and humans need fantasy babysitters to not dive into it”, which really doesn’t sound that great once you sit with it. It removes human agency, removes human nature, and ignores the entire history of the planet.
-Leigh (Lesya)
Marika interjecting here:
We had an ask (Linked here) envisioning a story set in a de-colonized Hawai’i and the socio-political issues with that. Same problem.
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thebisexualdogdad · 10 months
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fic where Maddy Perez falls for East highlands resident bad boy and they hook up after a group project
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Maddy Perez x Male!reader
Maddy certainly wasn't the only person in school to have a thing for you, in fact you had already made your way through most of the cheerleading squad but unlike them Maddy refused to let you know she was insanely attracted to you.
"Looking good Perez, when are you going to let me take you out," you asked her one day in history class when she was wearing her cheer uniform for that night's football game.
"Never gonna happen Y/N," she said rolling her eyes but really she was imagining how good your head would look underneath her skirt.
Then there was that time at a party when you surprised everyone by actually showing up.
"What are you doing here? Don't you prefer getting drunk on cheap beer behind the liquor store," Maddy jokes, finding you in the kitchen as you start drinking some very expensive whisky directly from the bottle.
"Maybe I just wanted to see you," you say, offering her the whisky, "you look hot by the way."
Maddy quickly grabs the bottle and chugs some of it hoping to hide the blush forming on her cheeks, "too bad I'm not interested in letting you get in my pants but I'm sure you'll find someone else to get lucky with."
"You're breaking my heart Perez," you say playfully.
"Didn't know you had one," she cracks.
"If you ever let me take you out on that date you'd see there's more to me than just being a devilishly handsome bad boy," you say leaning in close to her.
Maddy gulps, taking another swig of whisky to stop herself from fucking you right there on that counter.
You and Maddy continued this game until you eventually got partnered up for a history project.
How the hell was she going to retain her self control and not jump your bones when you were going to be spending so much time together alone in her bedroom.
Well technically you could have done this project at the library but Maddy was horny and thinking with her pussy, not her brain.
So here you are, in her room on day three of working on your project with Maddy looking at you like a four course meal after you drove her home on your motorcycle.
Her body was still humming from the vibrations and holding onto you so tightly.
"Maddy? Earth to Maddy," you laugh, snapping her out of her trance, "I think we've got enough research notes to start working on the essay."
"Yeah, right, let me get my laptop," she says, taking a seat at her desk and turning her laptop on.
You grab the small ottoman she uses at her vanity mirror and take a seat next to her, a little too close for Maddy to stay focused on the essay.
"You want me to type? You seem to be making a lot of typos there Perez," you laugh.
Maddy pushes the laptop in front of you and stands from her chair, "I need some water do you want anything?"
"Vodka would be nice," you grin.
"I'll get you a soda," she says before leaving her bedroom.
When she returns her glass of water is nearly empty from her trying to cool herself down and she hands you the soda.
You crack it open and take a drink, setting it on the desk as you keep working.
"Can you hand me the textbook, there's something I want to look up," you ask a few minutes later and when she grabs the book she knocks your dark soda over and it spills right onto your white shirt.
"Oh shit I'm so sorry," she says running to her bathroom to grab a towel to clean up her desk.
But when she steps out of her bathroom you're standing there shirtless.
"Mind if I wash this in your sink? Its sticky and I don't want it to stain," You ask.
"Uh, yeah, yeah that's fine," she says, glazing over your abs as you walk past her to her bathroom.
She cleans up the soda and hears the water running in the bathroom, she has to get it together.
She sits on the edge of her bed and puts her head in her hands, how the hell did you have this much of an affect on her.
"Hey it's okay, it's just a shirt," you chuckle when you come back into her room.
You left your shirt hanging in the bathroom to dry and now there's some stray water droplets running down your stomach.
Fuck.
You walk over to her and Maddy can't fight the urges anymore, her hands go to your neck and she pulls you down into an intense kiss.
"Woah, Maddy," you say in surprise, pulling away from her.
"You've been hitting on me since the sixth grade, you really don't want this?" She scoffs.
"I want this more than you know, I just want to make sure you want this," you say.
"I want this Y/N, I really want this," she says bringing you back in for another kiss.
You sink down to your knees in front of her, kissing down her neck and playing with the hem of her shirt.
"Take it off," she orders and in seconds her shirt is gone.
You keep kissing down her body until you reach the top of her jeans.
You look up at her and she nods her consent before raising her hips in the air so you could tug her jeans down her legs.
"God you're beautiful Maddy," you say, kissing along her thighs, "and so wet already."
"I hate that you turn me on this much," she groans right as your tongue licks her through her panties.
"If you want me to stop just tell me to," you say.
"Don't you fucking dare stop," she says sternly and you smile, pulling her panties to the side and tasting her directly.
You moan and Maddy feels it deep in the pit of her stomach, your tongue working her in ways no other guy ever had before.
One her of legs goes over your shoulder, giving you better access.
Her arousal drips down your chin and you slip a finger inside with ease, Maddy moaning above you.
A second finger enters her and you pump them slowly, using your other hand to pull the hood of her clit back and suck it between your lips.
"Holy shit," Maddy cries out, she had been holding this in for so long she can't even feel embarrassed about how quickly she came because it felt so fucking good.
"Damn Perez, I wasn't even down there for a full five minutes," you say cockily.
"Shut up and fuck me Y/N," she demands and you happily stand up, dropping your jeans to reveal the massive boner poking through your boxers.
"You got any condoms?" You ask, stroking yourself through your boxers which only turns her on more.
"Top left drawer in my bathroom," she says.
You go to her bathroom again and find the box of condoms, grabbing one and when you return her bra and panties are gone, leaving her completely naked and now in the center of her bed.
"Have I told you how beautiful you are?" You say, letting your boxers join the rest of your clothes on the floor and putting the condom on.
"Didn't I tell you to fuck me already?" Maddy states and you smirk, joining her in bed.
You settle on top of her, kissing her and she moans at the taste of herself on your tongue.
Reaching down you tease her with the tip of your cock, lathering it with her arousal before easing it inside.
Maddy clearly doesn't want to wait any longer so you quickly rock your hips in a steady rhythm.
Her nails dig into your back, her bed creaking underneath you.
You suck harshly at her neck, one of your hands going to play with her chest.
Maddy moans loudly when you roll one of her nipples between your fingers, legs wrapping around your waist so you can hit deeper inside her.
"Oh fuck me, right there, right there," she chants.
Once again it doesn't take long for her to cum, this one hitting her even harder than the first.
"Do you want me to pull out?" You ask her, slowing your movements giving her a few aftershocks.
"No, keep going until you cum," she says, grabbing your ass.
You smirk and pick your pace back up, she's squeezing your ass and within another minute you're cumming inside her.
"Fuck Maddy," you grunt, your hips moving more frantically through your release.
"That felt so fucking good," she says, groaning when you pull out of her and feeling so empty.
You roll over next to her, taking the condom off and throwing it in the trash next to her bed.
"So does this mean you're finally gonna let me take you on a date?" You tease.
"I'll tell you what Y/N, if we get an A on this project, I'll go on a date with you," she replies.
"You got yourself a deal," you smile, "now let's get back to work, we have an essay to write."
"Have you ever worked this hard on an assignment before?" She jokes.
"Nope but sex is an excellent motivation and it'll be even better at the end of it because I'm going to take you on the best date of your life."
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sissa-arrows · 4 months
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Albert Camus could not conceive of Algerian independence, nor could he conceive of himself as separate from French Algeria. It was his “red line in the sand,” the boundary which should not be crossed, the ultimate taboo. Algeria was the jewel in France’s colonial empire, so important that the French authorities considered it a region of France. It was not just a military conquest; it was an administrative one as well. Camus was defined and defined himself by colonial Algeria and could not live without it. Yet the paradox is that Camus persuasively uses the rhetoric of humanism while supporting French sovereignty over Algeria. Many of Albert Camus’ arguments are vastly identical to those trotted out today regarding Palestine.
“What is illegitimate in Arab demands ? The desire to regain a life of dignity and freedom, the total loss of confidence in any political solution backed by France, and the romanticism of some very young and politically unsophisticated insurgents have led certain Algerian fighters and their leaders to demand national independence. No matter how favourable one is to Arab demands, it must be recognized that to demand national independence for Algeria is a purely emotional response to the situation. There has never been an Algerian nation. The Jews, Turks, Greeks, Italians and Berbers all have a claim to lead this virtual nation. At the moment, the Arabs themselves are not the only constituent of that nation. In particular, the French population is large enough [c. 1/9], and it has been settled long enough [c. 150 years], to create a problem that has no historical precedent. The French of Algeria are themselves an indigenous population in the full sense of the word. Furthermore, a purely Arab Algeria would not be able to achieve economic independence, without which political independence is not real. French efforts in Algeria, however inadequate, have been sufficient that no other power is prepared to assume responsibility for the country at the present time.” — Algerian Chronicles
Camus is like the “Israeli left” and a part of the Western Left in general who cannot conceive the total liberation of Palestine. That’s why I said that if they actually cared they would have more “porteurs de valises” and less Albert Camus.
The porteurs de valises who were settlers totally conceived a free Algeria in their mind and they saw themselves living there as ALGERIANS and they did. They also acknowledged that as settlers they had bias and they worked on those bias (I made a post with the testimony of on of those men and how he realized that he had racist bias against Arabs and how he eventually realized that even if he was white his people were not French people but Algerians…) Most of those settlers who fought alongside our grandparents did not leave because they were kicked out at the independence. They left as refugees during the Black decade and had to fill the SAME paperwork as other Algerians. (I could talk about the 121’s Manifest but given that some of the people who signed it turned around and became Zionists I think the manifest was more about white people wanting a clear conscience they did put the right to not be an oppressor on the same level as the right to not be oppressed)
Camus on the other hand was racist he was a product of settler colonialism. You cannot steal, dispossess, oppress a people for over a century unless you don’t see them as fully human. He kept equating the resistance with the oppressor he kept pretending to condemn violence on “both sides” but when he was asked to sign the letter condemning the systematic use of torture by France against Algerians he refused to sign it. He also kept implying Algeria didn’t exist before France anyway. He also showed his lack of knowledge on history by claiming everyone had a right to Algeria anyway not just “Arabs” because Algeria had been part of the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Jews as a whole have zero rights over Algeria. Imazighen Jews had a right over Algeria because they were Imazighen not because they were Jews. If Turks, Italian, Greeks had a right over Algeria then we have a right over the south of France, over Spain, over Sicily, over Greece because some Roman leaders were Imazighen and because Al Andalus existed.
But what’s maybe one of my biggest issue with Camus, probably because that’s still happening to these days. Is how his position would require only Algerians to compromise. Settlers were simply asked to stop the killing and to pretend to see Algerians as equal humans that’s not a fucking compromise. Algerians on the other hand were asked to pretend that nothing had happened? Those white settlers who had killed your sons and nephews on May 8th 1945 in Setif and around? They never got punished for it. They never even expressed regrets they were proud of it. Algerians were asked to just forget about it to pretend it never happened. The guy who stole your father’s land and is making money from that land? In Camus’ Algeria he gets to keep that land in exchange he must pretend Algerians are equal. The Algerian has to pretend that land was never stolen that he doesn’t have a right to it. In Camus’ vision for Algeria only the Algerian is asked to actually make compromise so the white man gets to be cleaned of his sins.
To these days in the West, PoC are the one asked to make compromises all the fucking time (sometimes on a smaller scale sometimes not). “vote for the lesser of two evils it will be easier to fight and we will help”. Once the lesser of two evils is elected the people who told us to compromise don’t respect their part of the deal they actually call us out when we protest. Because those “deals” are not meant to save us all they are meant to save white people. Because the lesser of two evils doesn’t affect them and their lives so they will be able to afford staying comfortably at home and criticize us for still fighting.
That’s why what I resent the most about Camus is that “let’s make a compromise” attitude that actually only requires compromises from Algerians while settlers get to keep up with their lives the same exact way except they have to pretend they see us as humans. I would believe in the genuine intent behind these compromises (while still being against it) if reparation was mentioned for example but no, settlers get to live the exact same way as they did before they just get absolved of their crimes without ever getting justice. Meanwhile Algerians are asked to pretend nothing happened.
Just like I previously said that a settler colony cannot create settlers without racist bias and that they need to work on those bias, a settler colony also cannot create indigenous people who are not oppressed. Every single Algerian family has a fucked up story to tell about the horror of colonialism. Every single Palestinian family has a fucked up story to tell about the horror of colonialism. Every single Native of Turtle Island family has a fucked up story to tell about the horror of colonialism. I could go on, the point is you can’t ask people to just pretend it never happened because now the settlers are pretending to see you as a human.
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