#History discourse

[eurydiceauxenfers]

I know we all love the Ides of March here and I know how very cathartic it would be if our own current wannabe dictator experienced some serious deja vu. I get that most of you are not being serious here when you say you want an Ides of March repeat, but for those who are, let me seriously explain something to you.

Caesar’s assassination did not save the Roman Republic, it was its final death blow. Do you know what happened immediately after the Stabbening?

Caesar’s supporters turned him into a martyr and whipped his populist power base into a violent bloody mob. The second Triumvirate enacted a bloody war and purge against Caesar’s enemies before turning on each other like Cadmus’ dragon teeth warriors, until eventually Octavian emerged on top and officially ended the Republic. And throughout it all, the common man suffered.

I’d also like to remind you that the men who stabbed Caesar were not protecting our Enlightenment inspired Democratic Republic. They were protecting Roman Republicanism. They were not rebels, they were wealthy, elite men, fighting to preserve their own power base and wealth. Ultimately the entire downfall of the Republic was centered on one issue: land reform. The elites of Rome sought to forcibly buy out land from yeoman farmers and consolidate it into large villas, forcing the previous owners out into poverty to be replaced with cheap slave labor. Populists like Caesar fought to enact land reforms to protect the small farmers. He also funded a lot of public infrastructure and welfare projects as well as the arts.

Caesar was more of a “leftist” (whatever the fuck that even means for someone who lived thousands of years before the development of feudalism let alone capitalism and socialism) than the men who stabbed him. He was also a dictator and tyrant, unbelievably corrupt and a callous ruthless opportunist to his core (not to mention, like all Romans, a genocidal, colonizing racist). The Ides of March is not a guide, it’s a cautionary tale.

[phillipjbenson]

Not to get too heavy into discourse, but I think one of the most quietly infuriating trend I've seen is the way white liberal women have appropriated a lot of First Nations and African spirituality, knowingly or unknowingly, in an attempt to create a pseudo-counter culture "Witch/Wiccan/Pagan" aesthetic that is... Uh, not much of anything.

Like, it means nothing, other than being another form of cultural appropriation in a poorly thought out attempt to stick it to Patriarchal expectations. (Also, it's giving JK Rowling type behavior, which I wouldn't want to be caught dead with but w/e)

I think if white women who identify with the whole "witchy" thing really wanted to be both subversive to Western Imperialism while also not further mauling an already displaced people's culture, they should start reviving long dead euro-pagan stuff.

For starters, you'd be stealing things from Nazis, an always morally correct thing to do. Secondly, you'd be well within your rights to, as both the ancient celts/gauls/germanics are long since gone, and they're so far removed from modern times that reviving their traditions would be pioneering a new culture, not stealing from one that is still kicking. Thirdly, ancient european people's culture was bitchin'. Like, google a carnyx and tell me that isn't the coolest damn shit you ever seen. I need people to start bringing it back.

In short, to all the white women with dream catchers and voodoo dolls, stop being a problem and start painting yourself in woad and being a solution.

[revans-rubber-duckie]

Bestie....

The Eastern Roman Empire is not the Holy Roman Empire. Objectively, the HRE was made in retaliation to the ERE depending on when you want to consider it's formation. In either case, it was named for a distinction from the Empire of Constantinople.

Constantine did not make Christianity the state religion. He only legalised it. He also did not officially convert until his death bed (which admittedly probably has more to do with absolution of all sin at baptism than it does his actual beliefs but who's to say) so take that as you will. He was no more a warmonger than any other emperor at the time. The high "pagan" numbers is probably because Christianity was a minority and recently persecuted faith. And also the official state religion was still that of the Romans pantheon. Also he originally named it New Rome. It took a minute for him to rename it again. On a side note, he's from the fourth century.

The lack of Christian population may or may not be because of the three days of slaughter following Constantinople'e fall. Or perhaps the population exchanges where the remaining Christian subjects were exchanged for Muslim. Or, perhaps, even, the genocide by the Ottoman Empire and the treatment of non-Muslim subjects during its ~300 year rule of the area.

If one were to open any history book and look up Byzantine Empire/Eastern Roman Empire in the 15th century, prior to the fall of Constantinople, they would learn it was an Empire in name only and was steadily declining. There was nothing oppressive about it. It was barely holding on.

And I don't know how to break this to you, but Istanbul is just Constantinople* in a Turkish accent.

*It's the Turkish form of the colloquial Greek meaning "to the city," which is what majority of the Greek speaking population called it.

I’m going to Constantinople, that shit better not be Istanbul

[otto-bot]

So, just for reference, you believe that the civilian centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserved to be enveloped in atomic hellfire due to the Japanese government? Do you also believe the US made a mistake in not glassing Tokyo as well?

No absolutely not. No civilians ever deserve to die because of their government. What I said was that any of the alternatives to force Japan’s surrender (blockading, firebombing, invasion, or any mix of the three) would, and I say this with 100% certainty, result in more civilian casualties than the atomic bombings caused, both from the immediate explosion and after effects like radiation poisoning and homelessness.

If there was a way to have forced Japan’s unconditional surrender without the use of the atomic bombs, I would be criticizing the US for not doing it, but sadly there wasn’t.

[pieisnotreal]

The way historyblr discourse went from "was historical figure gay or bi?" To "don't try to shoehorn ancient people's into modern definitions of sexuality" to "don't you dare call this person gay of I head you Say Gay I'm gonna piss in your shoes we avoid that talk here" is concerning

[rideroftherange]

Those Scythian girls will drive a man to madness.

As we watch Elon Musk become Emperor of Mankind despite the excruciating preponderance of evidence that he is the most cringing and pathetic insect on this wretched planet I am wondering what kind of insecure cloying piece of shit Alexander the Great must have been

[anqueerism]

I think it's about time that we put away the "chewsday" and "bo'ol o' wa'ah" jokes.

It's frankly quite an overused and tired joke, but not only that, it's incredibly classist.

In the UK, accents are and always have been very heavily entwined with the country's class system. There is an extremely long and storied history of certain accents (such as the popularly-mocked cockney) being brutally ridiculed, suppressed in the public sector, and even banned from media and broadcasting while others like RP were promoted and even required.

This has lessened over time, but it still holds pretty true: Your accent is one of the main indicators of your class and your breeding, and will directly impact the way that people treat you.

These are historically marginalised and oppressed accents in the UK, so when you mock them— especially as someone who does not live in the UK— you are, in fact, directly mocking those people to whom the accent belongs.

Personally, I have a very sensitive history surrounding my accent. I was born into a working-class family, but my father was a social climber and intensely embarrassed about his own status. Because of this, he had an intense fixation with ensuring that I fit every classist mould of an upper-class child. I was heavily abused by my teachers as a child into speaking in a Received Pronunciation accent (which they regarded as the "proper" way to speak), and was physically beaten into learning to write in an "educated style."

It took me until I was about sixteen or seventeen to even begin feeling comfortable to speak in my natural accent in the comfort of my own home. When in groups or in front of crowds, I still revert to a softer RP accent. I still have chronic pain in my hands from the beatings I received, and I still refuse to write on paper because it causes PTSD flashbacks.

All this to say: As an American, or generally anyone from outside of the UK, you do not have the right to mock historically marginalised British accents. It is not funny. You are pressing on a bruise that is not yours to press on, and then mocking people when they tell you that you pressing on that bruise hurts.

If you want to mock an English accent, mock RP. Traditional, Broadcasting, Aristocratic, or Modern. Those are historically upper-class accents, which (for most people) have no heavy history attached to them. I would say it's fair game.

But when you mock the accents of the poor working class who have been unequivocally brutalised in this country for centuries and then go on to mock us when we try to tell you why we don't like you doing it, you just sound like a complete and utter asshole.

[dedusmuln]

yeah you support trans people but are you normal about trans men who choose to get pregnant

[clearwingedmaven]

Alright, so. I've got little time and some ideas, so I'll do a brief thought process on the death of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, and the fandom as a whole.

Firstly, getting this out of the way. Sherlock Holmes was not the first modern fandom. That honor most likely goes to Charles Dickens and his work, especially the Pickwick Papers. There is evidence and record that fan merchandise, like joke books, tobacco, and shoe horns, were made with Pickwick Papers characters, especially Sam Weller.

However, Sherlock Holmes is probably our first instance of a global fandom where consequences quite literally created a literary and cultural firestorm. This isn't an exaggeration.

ACD's relationship with Holmes is... strange. Of course, he wanted to kill off Holmes, and move onto other books. (Historical novels, mainly, or Spiritualist manifesto), but there was always a love hate relationship, and we see that most predominantly through fan letters.

Almost immediately after Holmes’s death in 1893, there was shock. Scandal. Mourning. Fans exchanged letters in newspapers, trying to reach out to other fans to figure out what just happened, and what to do next. Holmes was dead. And for all anyone knew, so was the series.

So how'd they cope?

By creating communities. Discourse communities, to be more apt. They exchanged letters, asked questions, and talked through newspapers. Each one plucked from 1893 and 1894 show grief and confusion: for a fictional character.

People even started seeking out Joseph Bell, the man who inspired Holmes, in order to try to fill the void. There's even record of fans venturing to Reichenbach Falls in costume to pay tribute to their fallen hero. And this kept happening. For years. The world lost not just a character, it was their friend.

Keep in mind! Victorian literature was a family affair. Many people would gather around and read stories and books together, so the firestorm went further.

Until, it made ACD change his mind, and bring back Sherlock Holmes. (Can we call it bullying? Perhaps. I call it a unique circumstance of cultural phenomena.)

So where does it leave the fandom?

Ah, that's the question. This fandom, uniquely, has a distinct honor of being one of the oldest living discourse communities, an exchange of reader response, engagement, and including even more material.

So to the fans: from the fanfic writers, to the game makers, to the cosplayers, to the fans of adaptations near and far, to the editors, to the artists, to the dreamers and thinkers...

It is, given the nature of the fandom, that you are all a part of history, as part of one of the oldest(and still going!) Fandom discourse communities.

Keep that in mind. And keep going. 🙂

[rideroftherange]

And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.

And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.

This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.

Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.

Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.

Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.

https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/

[whereserpentswalk]

Just saw a "feminist" video essay (by someone who just happens to only talk about feminism in relation to cishet white able bodied women) say that the Hays Code was good for women because it "prevented them from sexualizing women by preventing onscreen depictions of sex". Never before has a video said something that made me vocalize my disgust of it's takes, but this did it.

I didn't think I would have to say this but if you defend the Hays code you are horrible and not in any way progressive. And if you don't know what it is please look it up because it's probably the most important piece of history when it comes to all media analysis in the western world.

[infiniteglitterfall]

I do realize this is a real niche post but I cannot tell you how many damn times over the past 10 months I've seen gentiles tell Jews some version of, "Your own holy book SAYS God doesn't want you to have a country yet!"

And it's such an incredibly blatant and weirdly specific tell that they're not part of something that grew from progressive grassroots, but something based on right-wing astroturfing.

1. Staying in your own lane is a pretty huge progressive principle.

Telling people in another group that their deity said they couldn't do X is, I think, as far as you can get from your own lane.

2. It's also very clearly Not In Your Own Lane because I've never seen anyone actually be able to EITHER quote the passage they're thinking of, OR cite where it is.

It's purely, "I saw somebody else say this, and it seemed like it would make me win the debate I wasn't invited to."

3. It betrays a complete ignorance of Jewish culture and history.

Seriously? You don't know what you're referencing, its context, or even what it specifically says, but you're... coming to a community that reads and often discusses the entire Torah together each year, at weekly services... who have massive books holding generations of debate about it that it takes 7 years to read, at one page per day....

And saying, "YOUR book told you not to!"

I've been to services where we discussed just one word from the reading the whole time. The etymology. The connotations. The use of it in this passage versus in other passages.

And then there is the famous saying, "Ask two Jews, get three opinions." There is a culture of questioning and discussion and debate throughout Judaism.

You think maybe, in the decades and decades of public discussion about whether to buy land in Eretz Yisrael and move back there; whether it should keep being an individual thing, or keep shifting to intentional community projects; what the risks were; whether it should really be in Argentina or Canada or someplace instead; how this would be received by the Jews and gentiles already there, how to respect their boundaries, how to work with them before and during; and whether ending up with a fuckton of Jews in one place might not be exactly as dangerous for them as it had always been everywhere else....

You think NOBODY brought up anything scriptural? Nobody looked through the Torah, the Nevi'im, the Ketuvim, or the Talmud for any thoughts about any of this?? It took 200 years and some rando in the comments to blow everyone's minds???

4. It relies on an unspoken assumption that people can and should take very literal readings of religious texts and use them to control others.

And a sense of ownership and power over those texts, even without any accompanying knowledge about what they say.

It's kind of a supercessionist know-it-all vibe. It reads like, "I know what you should be doing. Because even if I'm not personally part of a fundamentalist branch of a related religion, the culture I'm rooted in is."

Bonus version I found when I was looking for an example. NOBODY should do this:

There are a lot of people who pull weird historical claims like "It SAYS Abraham came from Chaldea! That's Iraq!"

Like, first of all, a group is indigenous to a land if it arose as a people and culture there, before (not because of) colonization.

People aren't spontaneously spawning in groups, like "Boom! A new indigenous people just spawned!!"

People come from places. They go places. Sometimes, they gel as a new community and culture. Sometimes, they bop around for a while and eventually assimilate into another group.

Second: THE TORAH IS NOT A HISTORY TEXTBOOK OMFG.

It's an oral history, largely written centuries after the fact.

There is a TON of historical and archaeological research on when and where the Jewish culture originated, how it developed over time, etc. It's extremely well-established.

Nobody has to try to pull what they remember from Sunday school for this argument.

[he13na]

I wasn’t going to say anything, but seeing people get chastised over saying “Rest in Peace” for Michelle Trachtenberg instead of using the Hebrew phrase? Yeah, I need to.

My great-grandfather was Jewish. He married a Catholic woman who loved him, and instead of erasing his traditions, she embraced them. She honored both Jewish and Catholic holidays. She handmade decorations for both. We still have them. We still carry that love, even if we aren’t practicing. Because being Jewish isn’t just about practice—it’s about family, history, and remembrance.

And that’s why this whole discourse hurts.

Most people saying “Rest in Peace” aren’t trying to erase Jewish mourning traditions. They aren’t trying to be disrespectful. They’re just expressing love in the only way they know how. And instead of taking a moment to teach, to connect, to build bridges—some of you would rather tear people down for not already knowing.

But here’s the thing: Judaism has survived through remembering. Through teaching. Through welcoming people in rather than shutting them out. My family held onto our Jewishness through love, not through pushing people away. Maybe—just maybe—that’s something to think about before deciding that someone’s sympathy isn’t “correct” enough.

Because in the end? What matters isn’t the exact words used. It’s that she is remembered. And that people care. 💙

[rideroftherange]

Civilizations might be able to build vast sums of knowledge on things that work, things that don’t, and things that we just don’t quite understand.

But every individual only learns about what they encounter in their lifetime. So it makes sense that young folks have uncomplicated taste in music and learned that ugly people deserve to be bullied from school. Pretty sure it’s been that way since music and education were invented…

You know, studying history for the length of time that I have, combined with the amount of life experience I've acquired, has really driven home that nothing ever really dies

Young people listen to Creed and unironically believe in physiognomy, truly anything and everything is on the table

[owoatmilk]

if I had the privilige of being part of a messy friend group in a dark academia story, I would simply live my best life and not pick fights and also not commit murder.

I'd drink tea and wear sweaters and read books and hang out in expensive country houses and be unproblematic. sorry but I'm built different. richard could never be me.