#european on european violence

[jaratedeguadalupe]

he will not in fact, cover them up

[kleefkruid]

Gotta say, locals perfectly understanding you up until the moment it inconveniences them: very 'tourist anywhere in Europe' experience

[musicallisto]

tumblr communists' reaction to the situation in venezuela, especially those from the US or western europe, is extremely bizarre. OF COURSE the united states is responsible for a good portion of the political turmoil latin america has suffered in the past century (countless coups to set up puppet governments, the somoza dynasty in nicaragua, the chicago boys in chile, etc) and i hate american imperialism as much as you do, but refusing to acknowledge the violent dictatorship and repression that's currently going on in venezuela is a stupid and lowkey infantilizing take... like, you know a leftist man, thrust in any position of power, no matter how "progressive" he may call himself, can (and more often than not WILL) be greedy and corrupt. you know a socialist government can be authoritative and violate human rights. you know this right.

[autismvampyre]

the fucking arrogance and blatant nationalism in the way europeans declare polce brutality a "US problem" as if americans are the only people with a corrupt system

my leftist swedish mother actually agrees with ACAB with the addendum that it's only the Americans, we're not like that here

let the brutal forced used on greta thunberg, a swedish teenager protesting climate change, by dutch police be a testament to the lie of european "democracy" and how it is democracy in name and nothing else.

let the immigrant kids who are brutalized, humiliated and oppressed every day in sweden by cops who "protect and serve" serve as a reminder of how incredibly flawed we are.

let the 700% increase in death by cops in sweden in the last ten years show us how we are no better than the americans we condemn.

we are not better. you are buying into propaganda if you think this doesn't apply to your country too

[thisgingerhasnosoul]

I've been trying and trying and trying to get back into fandom shitposting and metas and writing—escaping and finding some enjoyment in being here, but I just… can't. Fandom seems so unimportant now. What's the point of getting invested in any it? None of it's real, none of it truly affects our lives. And it doesn't change the real world; it doesn't change that so many people have died and are dying still—or that those I thought would protect Jews are engaging in the very tactics the Nazis and so many before them used to justify their genocides against us. I'm struggling to find the motivation to do anything besides wallow in the pain of losing family members, the slaughter of my people, and the danger posed to me, personally, within the diaspora. To be honest, finding any joy in life feels futile and wrong.

And this is why I'm so angry at all the random goyishe fandom blogs posting about how evil white Israeli colonizers control the world and are lying about what happened to them (but also how it would totally okay if had happened, since they deserve it). Because these supposed progressives? It's all performative bullshit for them. It doesn't affect their lives in any actual way. They can post about how (((Israelis))) are the real baby killers; they can deny the murder of Jewish children and rape while in the same breath claiming it would be justified if it was true. They can parrot every Nazi talking point in all but name, from Blood Libel to Holocaust Denial to the Elders of Zion, and still believe they are on the side of social justice. Then they can go back to their petty fandom drama feeling good about themselves and forget all about it, while everyone I love and everyone like us suffers the consequences of their actions for years to come. We'll live with the trauma and the pain and the loss—and they'll go on with their lives feeling morally superior to the people they intentionally, callously hurt.

Just... fuck them.

[blondiest]

would be SO cool if we could make 2024 the year we stop acting like fanfic writers and fanartists should be held to the standards of representation and political savviness that people expect from published, paid work, and accept that fanfic and fanart are not some kind of fucking praxis but rather a hobby that people do for fun.

[grecoromanyaoi]

seeing posts that talk about the usa as like. an unheard of dystopia that has unique hardships that arent experienced anywhere else. like I Need You To Understand What People's Lives Are Like Pretty Much Everywhere Else

[silvermoon424]

“Lol I think your food is kind of gross"

“DEAD KIDS YOU HAVE DEAD KIDS THEY GET SHOT AND ARE DEAD THEY ARE DEAD KIDS”

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: A young killer experiences intense pleasure whenever she hears the sound of human pain.

mod Z thinks this weirdly looks really cool and starring Jasmine Savoy Brown before Scream 5?!

Mod Sus was pretty interested when listing this movie for the blog. Later on they went POGGERS when seeing this was partially a finnish movie (torille).

[thyandrawrites]

Fuck him up, baby

[gingerswagfreckles]

Anyone who tries to say that the rape and intentional murder of civilians is justified on either side of the Israel/Palestine conflict owes me a 5 paragraph essay on the derailed Israel-Saudi peace deal and how the timing of these attacks potentially relate to that. If you have no idea what I'm talking about maybe you should sit the fuck down.

[mirkobloom77]

‼️🇵🇸🇮🇱🇪🇺 European Council sanctions four Israeli settlers for violence against Palestinians

🔸 Source: Al Jazeera

[tianshiisdead]

this is a HETALIA post that will end with a conclusion about hetalia. thx

i dont want to focus too much on global south victimhood or this or that, i dont want to take away agency from the global south, but its kind of heartbreaking to me how you can run through the entire history of this or that western country with colonialism, imperialist wars, and the flow of money as a footnote, but the histories of those countries they ravaged are forever ripped by that same imperialism.

I guess i was thinking about this, about history and nation personifications and what counts as ‘political’. To be honest, its impossible for me to totally separate nation and history from politics, to completely cleanse away the mentions of anything bad or scary or painful, you may treat it gently or grimly or comedically but it’s always going to be there as long as you see these nations as nations, as history (ie not an AU). And of course, that history of the global south which so deeply intertwines with colonialism/imperialism is almost always labeled as political, always seen as sensitive.

However… I think it’s telling that much of the fandom who engages with western characters (and I should put a quick disclaimer that there is nothing wrong with that in and of itself) are able to shrug the colonialism away and simply choose not to engage. Just like history books on western nations can cleanly sweep each war, each colony, each invasion under a quickly brushed aside footnote, it’s not hard to look away from where the money and resources come from. Total empire, colony influence on the metropole, they do exist, but what are they compared to the influence on the colony itself? To build the framework of a nation personification of a formerly colonized country, to make even the most basic decisions on their age and birth and identity becomes difficult without delving into the imperialist violence that formed their modern state. To give a recount of any country ravaged by imperialist wars, it’s impossible to avoid giving name to the violence that left the nation reeling into modern day.

So, yes, it’s very telling to me how easy it is to brush aside ‘politics’ when speaking only of western nation personifications.

[lilithism1848]

[haggishlyhagging]

It has taken me a surprisingly long time to appreciate the degree of misunderstanding within this magnet for fantasy, this image of a heroine with superpowers—as witches are portrayed in all dominant cultural productions going. Half a lifetime to understand that, before becoming a spark to the imagination or a badge of honor, the word "witch" had been the very worst seal of shame, the false charge which caused the torture and death of tens of thousands of women. The witch-hunts that took place in Europe, principally during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, occupy a strange place in the collective consciousness. Witch trials were based on wild accusations of night-time flights to reach sabbath meetings, of pacts and copulation with the Devil—which seem to have dragged witches with them into the sphere of the unreal, tearing them away from their genuine historical roots. To our eyes, when we come across her these days, the first known representation of a woman flying on a broomstick, in the margin of Martin Le Franc's manuscript Le Champion des dames (The Champion of Women, 1441-2), appears unserious, facetious even, as though she might have swooped straight out of a Tim Burton film or from the credits to Bewitched, or even been intended as a Halloween decoration. And yet, at the time the drawing was made—around 1440–she heralded centuries of suffering. On the invention of the witches sabbath, historian Guy Bechtel says: "This great ideological poem has been responsible for many murders." As for the sexual dimension of the torture the accused suffered, the truth of this seems to have been dissolved into Sadean imagery and the troubling emotions that provokes.

In 2016, Bruges' Sint-Janshospitaal museum devoted an exhibition to "Bruegel's Witches," the Flemish master being among the first painters to take up this theme. On one panel, he listed the names of dozens of the city's women who were burned as witches in the public square. "Many of Bruges' inhabitants still bear these surnames and, before visiting the exhibition, they had no idea they could have an ancestor accused of witchcraft," the museum's director commented in the documentary Dans le sillage des sorcières de Bruegel. This was said with a smile, as if the fact of finding in your family tree an innocent woman murdered on grounds of delusional allegations were a cute little anecdote for dinner-party gossip. And it begs the question: which other mass crime, even one long past, is it possible to speak of like this—with a smile?

By wiping out entire families, by inducing a reign of terror and by pitilessly repressing certain behaviors and practices that had come to be seen as unacceptable, the witch-hunts contributed to shaping the world we live in now. Had they not occurred, we would probably be living in very different societies. They tell us much about choices that were made, about paths that were preferred and those that were condemned. Yet we refuse to confront them directly. Even when we do accept the truth about this period of history, we go on finding ways to keep our distance from it. For example, we often make the mistake of considering the witch-hunts part of the Middle Ages, which is generally considered a regressive and obscurantist period, nothing to do with us now—yet the most extensive witch-hunts occurred during the Renaissance: they began around 1400 and had become a major phenomenon by 1560. Executions were still taking place at the end of the eighteenth century—for example, that of Anna Göldi, who was beheaded at Glarus, in Switzerland, in 1782. As Guy Bechtel writes, the witch "was a victim of the Moderns, not the Ancients."

Likewise, we tend to explain the persecutions as a religious fanaticism led by perverted inquisitors. Yet, the Inquisition, which was above all concerned with heretics, made very little attempt to discover witches; the vast majority of condemnations for witchcraft took place in the civil courts. The secular court judges revealed themselves to be "more cruel and more fanatical than Rome" when it came to witchcraft. Besides, this distinction is only moderately useful in a world where there was no belief system beyond the religious. Even among the few who spoke out against the persecutions such as the Dutch physician Johann Weyer, who, in 1563, condemned the "bloodbath of innocents"—none doubted the existence of the Devil. As for the Protestants, despite their reputation as the greater rationalists, they hunted down witches with the same ardour as the Catholics. The return to literalist readings of the Bible, championed by the Reformation, did not favor clemency—quite the contrary. In Geneva, under Calvin, thirty-five "witches" were executed in accordance with one line from the Book of Exodus: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18). The intolerant climate of the time, the bloody orgies of the religious wars—3,000 Protestants were killed in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572–only boosted the cruelty of both camps toward witches.

Truth be told, it is precisely because the witch-hunts speak to us of our own time that we have excellent reasons not to face up to them. Venturing down this path means confronting the most wretched aspects of humanity. The witch-hunts demonstrate, first, the stubborn tendency of all societies to find a scapegoat for their misfortunes and to lock themselves into a spiral of irrationality, cut off from all reasonable challenge, until the accumulation of hate-filled discourse and obsessional hostility justify a turn to physical violence, perceived as the legitimate defense of a beleaguered society. In Françoise d'Eaubonne's words, the witch-hunts demonstrate our capacity to “trigger a massacre by following the logic of a lunatic.” The demonization of women as witches had much in common with anti-Semitism. Terms such as witches "sabbath" and their "synagogue" were used; like Jews, witches were suspected of conspiring to destroy Christianity and both groups were depicted with hooked noses. In 1618, a court clerk, whiling away the longueurs of a witch trial in the Colmar region, drew the accused in the margin of his report: he showed her with a traditional Jewish hairstyle, "with pendants, trimmed with stars of David."

Often, far from being the work of an uncouth, poorly educated community, the choice of scapegoat came from on high, from the educated classes. The origin of the witch myth coincides closely with that—in 1454–of the printing press, which plays a crucial role in it. Bechtel describes a "media campaign" which "utilized all the period's information vectors": "books for those who could read, sermons for the rest; for all, great quantities of visual representations." The work of two inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer (or Henricus Institor) from Alsace and Jakob Sprenger from Basel, the Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1487 and has been compared to Hitler's Mein Kampf. Reprinted upward of fifteen times, it sold around 30,000 copies throughout Europe during the great witch-hunts. "Throughout this age of fire, in all the trials, the judges relied on it. They would ask the questions in the Malleus and the replies they heard came equally from the Malleus." Enough to put paid to our idealized visions of the first uses of the printing press! By giving credence to the notion of an imminent threat that demanded the application of exceptional measures, the Malleus Maleficarum sustained a collective delusion. Its success inspired other demonologists, who became a veritable gold mine for publishers. The authors of these contemporary books—such as the French philosopher Jean Bodin—whose writings read like the ravings of madmen, were in fact scholars and men of great reputation, Bechtel emphasizes: "What a contrast with the credulity and the brutality demonstrated by every one of them in their demonological reports."

-Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women are Still on Trial

[maddy-ferguson]

there's very few things i find as abhorrent as white men accusing men of color and immigrants of being the ones who rape/sexually assault women and commit femicide it's so insidious and it's a despicable way to shield themselves from feminist critique