#History Repeating Itself

[dionysian-mystery]

Wikipedia / Image from pinterest / Machiavelli / George Santayana / Thucydides / Image from pinterest / Abba - Waterloo / J. M. Barrie - Peter Pan / Fibonacci spiral / Catherynne M. Valente

[ohsexyhalder]

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), 2025 - Episode 6

[rain-rainynights-side]

everywhere i look, the world is fading into black and white as dystopian ideals become my reality. i knew i'd be a fool to believe a utopia is possible in a world that basks in blood and gore and glory. but i used to think things could only get better and history wouldn't repeat itself. it turns out i was a bigger fool than i thought

[contemplatingoutlander]

Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?

(Illustration: Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post)

This opinion column by Robert Kagan reminds us that history appears to be repeating itself. Trump's America First movement is an echo of the 1930s/1940s isolationist, neo-fascist America First movement that tried to keep the U.S. out of WWII. This is a gift🎁link, so you can read the entire article, even if you don't subscribe to The Washington Post. Below are some excerpts:

Many Americans seem shocked that Republicans would oppose helping Ukraine at this critical juncture in history....Clearly, people have not been taking Donald Trump’s resurrection of America First seriously. It’s time they did. The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain. [...] This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. [...] Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.”  [...] Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power. [...] Like those of their 1930s forbears, today’s Republicans’ views of foreign policy are heavily shaped by what they consider the more important domestic battle against liberalism. Foreign policy issues are primarily weapons to be wielded against domestic enemies. [...] The GOP devotion to America First is merely the flip side of Trump’s “poison the blood” campaign. It is about the ascendancy of White Christian America and the various un-American ethnic and racial groups allegedly conspiring against it. [emphasis added]  

Use the gift link above to read the entire article. It is worth reading.

____________ Illustration: The above illustration by Brian Stauffer originally drew me to this article. It does a great job of succinctly illustrating the Trump GOP's rightward march towards isolationism (and Putin-style dictatorship). [edited]

[leclerking]

Ngl i think Charles should just team up with Max and commit crimes against Ferrari atp

[secondchoice-ragdoll]

[theazkabandreamer]

I can imagine James and Lily laughing from the afterlife as they watch their one-year-old grandson, James Sirius zooming about the house on his toy broom which he got from his Uncle Ron for his birthday and Harry chasing after him, making sure he doesn’t hurt himself.

The ugly vase which Petunia sent Harry gets smashed, but there are no complaints from Harry and Ginny.

“That’s my boy,” Harry said, ruffling his son’s hair.

[skeleticals]

do you think the first 24 people that came to the island were living happily in a community just like the current one ... do you think that one day, the federation managed to divide them and so the members decided to build up the walls so they didnt have to look at the other side eye to eye... do you think that after whatever happened to them, they wished they had sticked together... do you

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Ignoring trauma sometimes lets it perpetuate

I promise this will get to a larger social justice message, though it goes over adoption. Light general labeling of trauma. No specifics.

So as an adoptee, I often see people try to argue a few type of things about adoption:

Adoption is Always Good ™

Only Birth parents are evil

Birth mother good/angelic

All exporting countries are evil (and therefore importing countries are good)

Adoptive parents are angelic and always good.

Agencies are always good

Foster Care is evil

There is no way to end adoption, as a system.

But Adoptees are Lucky and Foster Care children are all Evil™

And usually people want to be and stay ignorant about adoption history as a whole, because it's really difficult to face the whole of humans being shitty in one go. I mean, who wants to listen to hours of humans r*ping, stealing children (in the literal sense), child slavery, imperialism, all of the major systems of hating (poverty, racism, etc) etc all to crush entire cultures and then come out of the other side and survive with the core belief, but Adoption Always Good ™ and Adoptee are lucky, but those Foster Care children aren't and oh well, we're hopeless.

It's much, much easier to not listen to 300+ years of history of oppression and come out with "But Adoptees are Lucky and Foster Care children are all Evil™" than it is to face that maybe adoption absorbs the world's trauma and is an excuse to ignore it.

And probably this is why I ended up wanting to write at least a little about trauma. It's not the C-PTSD, but fundamentally, if you continue to try to airbrush everything with a Good and Bad brush and don't want to face the particulars, it's going to repeat again and again.

Mother homes? Invented in the 18th century. Baby Boxes, invented in the 18th century. But because people wanted to ignore the problems with these things and what was reported, they repeat it over and over again.

Baby Boxes, now also came up in the 2000's. Did the minister know about the Baby Boxes from the 18th century and the systemic problems about it? No. So the same issues from the 18th century repeated yet again. Because people wanted to ignore the trauma involved.

Child trafficking from China with others imperializing the country, congratulations... it was repeated from Korea, and then exported to Africa with some really inhumane upgrades along the way, but because we ignored it, it repeated again with some really terrible upgrades. Instead of pay for your child, let's upgrade it to steal your child because you're a single mother. Let's upgrade it because your child is disabled and you can't read, let's pretend to be a charity and then steal your child because you're in a war zone and can't fight back and now what you thought was free, isn't free at all, you have to pay for your child's treatment to get your child back.

What I'm pointing to is often people want to avoid the truth of unjust systems, often and especially when they are a part of them and they aren't blameless. And what I've learned in adoption is that it is *the* top dumping ground system for all of the failures of the other systems. This is why it's often better to label Adoption as Always Good. Because then you can ignore the A-Z of the horribleness of human nature itself, because your head feels at first you can't survive that. But I promise facing the horribleness of human nature can help you 100% call it out when it's happening and maybe even prevent it.

[entities-of-posts]

Why are all of your links in pinned post broken I'm frothing at the mouth let me in let me see the secrets let me in let me in let me in let me in let me in

I have no idea, they work for me, but they don’t work for some people… you can try manually searching for the tags which title the arcs, and either scroll to the end and then read back up or tack on the chrono function yourself. It’s build into the links, which might be what doesn’t work for you. Recurring characters also have their own tags.

I’ll tag this post with all the arc tags, so you can click on them, as the search function is terrible.

Of course, a lot of the lore is actually on discord now!

[fans-on-the-run]

"Of a long illness"

Back in the early 90's, I would see this phrase a lot. Usually in the author bios of books I read. The author 'died of a long illness'. And they never said what the illness was. But it wasn't hard to guess. AIDS, they meant AIDS. But they wouldn't say it because the taboo was still that strong.

So now I'll be watching Legacy.com's you tube channel, where they have the dead folks of the week obits. And what keeps getting repeated? "Died of an illness." "Of a short illness." Really now? What's the illness? Can I guess?

I think Covid has reached the same 'we don't speak its name' status that HIV/AIDS did. The same rug-sweeping is happening, right now. Right in front of us.

[spidergvven]

its really depressing that when conservative politicians call trans people groomers or claim that all immigrants are rapist gang members liberal progressives immediately understand that these are baseless lies meant to demonize an oppressed group but when rumors are published accusing palestinians of beheading babies and going on mass raping sprees (things that even the israeli military says there is no evidence of) its accepted completely unquestioned. like if you are going to accuse people of such things your source cannot just be "well everyones saying it happened"

[howifeltabouthim]

. . . the hope that all of us are travelling through concentric rings of knowledge towards some greater truth. And beneath that hope, the biggest lie: that things are getting better. Portentousness is only retrospective.

Chris Kraus, from I Love Dick

[rebelwheelsnycpoetry]

Why Don't We Learn From Our History?

by Michele Sommerstein

Why don't we learn from our history?

These books, composed by the victor teaching children, cold stats, facts and rhymes repeat after me: in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The end. repeating Never calling it invasion, genocide, theft, what it really is Oh, but so quick to call out other countries, when they do the same Quick to blame and closing the curtain on our own messes imperialism! presented as heroic And so, we never learned

Politicians gaining power by feeding the great divide “This group is why, you’re not getting all you deserve these people are why it’s hard” Why don’t the masses ever catch on? See the pattern? This history of scapegoating? ‘Cus we’ve seen this all before, the scapegoat du jour while the same politicians take more and more

Why do they not teach this?

Why don’t we know that there is plenty to go around? That it’s the wealthy powers that be, so quick to point the finger that take the most?

Why don’t we see them, feasting, laughing at us, nearly choking, on their excess tax free, as we fight each other for crumbs? Shaming the poor, for needing help, in a system that keeps them poor As they hand out even more corporate welfare galore to the already wealthy, finding money for war while cutting social services, ‘cus you know, “there isn’t enough funds.”

And they tell us, our worth is something we. must. earn. That our worth is something we can buy (can you afford it?) (that lawn, that house, that car) That our worth is theirs to decide determined by class, race, gender, sex and productivity ability and ability to make money Only then are you of “value” to them (while remaining disposable) That our worth is something they can take away So you better comply and behave, conform for if you don’t, it will only "justify" your oppression Calling you less than when we are all. born. of worth.

Pitting us against each other as if there was a nationwide shortage as if there was not enough rights to go around, they keep us down Saying maybe you can get your rights, but it’ll be on the backs of this group As if we all can’t be free as if someone must always be oppressed

This, that has happened all before and repeating but they never taught this in those books, and so we never learned

And the politicians, who swear they are not extremists while subtly normalizing white supremacist rhetoric with their dog whistles with their anti-immigrant lies Sure, they’re not outright calling for a white ethnostate, per se but… they also don’t want too many brown people here either Why don’t we see the connection? Why don’t we see them, delicately dancing like a foul preacher or snake oil salesman on the borders of this ideology?

Japanese internment camps who? Eugenics what?

Consequences, connections! Why do we not learn from our history?

Perhaps they only teach us what they want us to know… Perhaps, they only teach us, what they want us, to know. For when we grow, rise up, evolve it is a threat to the status quo, So keep it watered down Don’t encourage thinking Just memorize the stats & spew it out on test day A+… and repeat.

[violntfemme]

born to :3 forced to :) back to :3