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Smashing snap! The gods for whom the deceased is shaking her sistrum are Ra-Horakhty and Osiris.

Stela of Neskhonsu, sistrum player of Amun-Re

* Ptolemaic period (332-30 BCE)

* Wood

* Egyptian Museum, Turin

Turin, June 2023

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We’re not responsible for the mistakes of our forebears; we’re responsible for fixing them

Every country has skeletons in its closet that some people would rather not talk about. Canada is currently shaken by the discovery of hundreds of literal skeletons of children in residential schools that used brutal methods to “Christianize” and “Westernize” First Nations children. Shockingly, the last residential school was only closed in 1996!

In the United States, the history of slavery has been brought to the forefront with this year’s celebration of Juneteenth and the government’s decision to make it a national holiday.

World History Encyclopedia now increasingly covers Early Modern history, in particular the early history of the United States, as well as the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Inevitably, we have published an increasing number of articles on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the realities of slavery in the New World. Unfortunately, we’ve also seen an increase of negative comments on social media, particularly when talking about slavery.

It would appear that some people feel offended when they are reminded of the history of slavery. Some of our readers attempt to relativize, question and generally diminish the importance of slavery. 

For example, we commonly read things along the lines of: “So many empires in history have used slaves, America is not unique!” I think we’ve all learnt in primary school that someone else’s wrongdoing does not justify our own. “But what about the Chinese and Irish, they were mistreated, too?” Of course they were mistreated, and recognizing slavery does not mean we cannot recognize other people’s plight, too. “African kingdoms provided the slaves, the Europeans didn’t steal them!” That’s absolutely true, yet when we talk about human trafficking today, we consider the buyers to be just as guilty as the sellers. 

Why is it that to some of our readers the horrors of slavery appear so offensive to their identity? Why would anyone want to minimize the impact of slavery? Let’s be fair, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon: Many Turks get enraged by mentioning the Armenian Genocide and French President Macron faced protests for recognizing (not apologizing) that France’s involvement in Algeria was problematic. All over the world there are people who see history as a threat to their nation… usually the same people who also like to use history to aggrandize their nation’s accomplishments.

I am surprised by this: Growing up in Germany, I have experienced how a horrific period in the past can resonate in the collective consciousness. However, I’ve never seen this horrible past as a stain on my personal or national identity, or something to hide. Quite the opposite, Germany has taken the horrors of Nazism, vowed to work globally to stop them from ever occurring again, and created a new and even more powerful national identity as “the good guys of Europe.” 

Some US commentators want us to believe that the recognition of current racial inequalities being caused by slavery is somehow anti-American. Others say: “My family had nothing to do with slavery, why should I feel responsible?” It is entirely true that we are not responsible for the mistakes our ancestors made. That does not mean we should ignore them, though.

For that same reason, we should also not hold historical grudges. I’ve personally talked to Middle Easterners who refer back to the crusades to justify their critique of the West, and Quebecers who hate Anglo-Canadians for the oppression of French culture in Canada’s history. The people alive today are not responsible for past atrocities, so why hold a grudge? We can do better.

All of us alive today are responsible for learning from history and working together to fix the mistakes of the past that still reverberate in the cultural, economic and political landscapes of the present. The true power of history is revealed when we use it to understand the current situation and apply these learnings to build a better future. That means facing historical horrors with honesty, examining how they still affect us today, and acting upon them constructively and with mutual respect.

Jan van der Crabben CEO, World History Encyclopedia

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Kinda feel like there's some untapped meme/reaction image potential from old horror movie trailers...

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sea slugs. I stacked them sorry

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Medusa the Undefeated

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[ID: Image of HIM from Powerpuff Girls standing next to overlay text: “Queer Is the abnormal, the stranger, the dangerous. … Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the normal.” /ID] Quote from “Toward the Queerest insurrection” by the Mary Nardini Gang.

Full text: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-toward-the-queerest-insurrection  Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X28GTa8Zrs 

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A little something I found on Twitter. Pls share

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Submitted by @iceyfoxsblog​

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If there's one thing I love about humanity it's this shit

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saying the US or Israel aren't "real" nations/countries on the basis of them being settler colonial states is such a stupid distinction to make. How do you think other nations staked out their territory? They didn't just spring up fully-formed with borders like they are now--and that doesn't make settler colonialism any better, but you can't just ignore internal colonization/genocide just because it takes place in what you consider to be the "natural" domain of this or that state.

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“Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression. It is not accidental that the Family Protection Act, which is virulently anti-woman and anti-Black, is also anti-gay. As a Black person, I know who my enemies are, and when the Ku Klux Klan goes to court in Detroit to try and force the Board of Education to remove books the Klan believes ‘hint at homosexuality,’ then I know I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”

—

Audre Lorde   (via marxist-mermaid)

Quote is from “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions.” 

(via tilathebun)

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me_irl

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Oh wise vintagegeekculture, might I ask your opinion on Michael Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh"?

I am American as all-get-out. Stranger Things is practically a documentary about my rural childhood;there were a million little sense memory triggers in that series for me. Sothere is probably a cultural context to that very very English essay thatdiscusses a very very English relationship to lulling sentimentality and class and the countryside that I willfully concede that I am simply not grasping. The English seem tothink entirely in terms of debating sentimental imagery: “Mother London” vs.the “Ploughman’s Lunch” and “Little Britain.” Althought it is a serious issue,listening to British debates on Brexit often felt like hearing to the “Darmokand Jalad at Tanagra” aliens from TNG having a loud argument about who’s Momloves them more.

But…from my perspectiveas an outsider and foreigner, I think the general point Moorcock makes iscorrect: Fantasy was created by men like Tolkien and Lord Dunsany who wereviolently hostile to the modern world and so their work very studiously avoidedtalking about the modern world except in opposition to it (for instance, theonly person to push industrialization and scouring the countryside is anasshole wizard; the only person who talks like T.S. Elliot’s Londoners is the despicableSméagol). Lord Dunsany was a great writer, but seems like a thin-bloodedaristocrat, like a Brit Ashley Wilkes from GoneWith the Wind, who even in the 1970s, wrotehis stories with a quill pen and wore an ascot tie to book readings.

Moorcock is right whenhe says that fantasy often avoids reflecting the world around us, and thatbeing overly sentimental about the past serves the interest of reactionaries(note that he did not call Tolkien and Dunsany and the rest reactionaries…atleast in a way that was visible in their work – he did say that about Adams andLewis though). The most important quote in that essay is “Ideally fiction should offer us escape and force us, at least, to askquestions; it should provide a release from anxiety but give us some insightinto the causes of anxiety.” I mean, fantasy as a genre was so detachedfrom “real world” issues that when someone like Tad Williams started to includesomething as fundamental as economics into his fantasy worlds starting in the1980s, people treated him like a total genius (Which Tad Williams IS,incidentally - these days, people only really know Tad Williams, if they knowhim at all, as the inspiration for George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones).

One of the great themesof Moorcock’s work is the way that authoritarians use sentimental imagery ofthe past to manipulate people. If you read Epic Pooh, also read his other book,“The Dreamthief’s Daughter,” the opening third to half is set in Nazi Germany.It’s actually more helpful to understand the point of this essay to read “Dreamthief’sDaughter,” since, in the words of Francois Truffaut, “the only way to critiquea movie properly is to make another movie.” Dreamthief’s Daughter starts with a“Good German,” von Bek, who is horrified that his Germany was taken over byNazism, how they replace “self respect with a kind of strutting self-esteem.”At one point, our hero has to hide in the German countryside, and he mentionshow sinister the small storybook German towns he passes through seem, romanticized by fascists after Hitlercame to power, as they were pushed front and center as the “true Germany.”

Of all the books everwritten about the Nazis and arch-reactionaries, Moorcock gets it the most rightin “Dreamthief’s Daughter.” They were boring failsons, not supervillains.Rudolf Hess was described as the most irritating person to sit next to on thebus to a con and who believed magic and ghosts were real; von Bek said that “inmy many adventures, I showed true courage only once: in not throwing RudolfHess out of my car.” Von Bek’s comments on Hitler himself: “An evening withHitler was like an evening with an extremely boring maiden aunt.” He was alsothe first person I can think of to point out how reactionary fascists oftenhave really bad taste, too: drawing imagery from bad comic operas and Americanmovies about Rome. That last bit should be all too familiar to people whonotice how many American reactionaries love the hell out of the movie 300 (amovie I really like too, incidentally, but it’s okay to enjoy something if you understand it).

Also, “Dreamthief’sDaughter” had a great finale: imagine a flight of dragons coming out to fight theBattle of Britain.

The point, that fantasycan be infantilizing, is a good point, but Moorcock is the weirdestpossible person on the face of the earth to make it. Moorcock got famous bywriting about brooding angsty albinos who cry all the time for the benefit ofteenage heavy metal fans and dungeon masters in Reeboks. I love his stuff but that’s who he is,that’s the stuff that pays his mortgage, that’s his audience. His stuff is good but it reminds me ofthose White Wolf games in the 1990s that look silly and dated in retrospectbecause they trowel on the angst and transgression and put on airs (White Wolf,incidentally, was named after Moorcock’s greatest hero, Elric the White Wolf…andin the 1990s, White Wolf’s publishing arm dedicated itself to reprinting someof Moorcock’s less widely seen novels, a service for which I thank them verymuch). I am actually legitimately surprised that Moorcock never wrote a “sad sexy vampire” novel. God, can you imagine the kind of satire that the anarchic MAD magazine of the 50s would do of the Elric stuff? Elric screaming his soul is black at the breakfast table, while threatening to kill himself over a hangnail.