#historical erasure

[alwaysbewoke]

[a-vita-absum]

‘ if Charles dies now he'll be the shortest reigning monarch'

This is Lady Jane Grey erasure and I will not have it

[itsstede]

Disclaimer: this is not really show related but queer pirates related. Also, I’m neither a historian nor a social scientist and fairly recently started to see certain things differently, such as historical erasure.

I’m reading a book by Rebecca Simon, ‘The Pirates’ Code. Laws and Life Aboard Ship’.

Of all things it features Stede Bonnet’s flag on the cover:

Normally I am quite open to author’s views and interpretations. But with this book I have a very strange feeling.

It’s not really that well written to be honest, but it contains a lot of various sources which I wouldn’t find on my own. I mean, that’s why read books: someone compiled stuff in a coherent way, enjoy getting new knowledge.

Here and there the author mentions that some evidences and sources are most probably fictionalised. Like with pirates’ flags for example. Okay, yup, fair, thanks for pointing that out. BUT THEN I get to Sex, Sexuality and Relationships chapter.

Where the author says, yeah, homosexuality, close relationships and romance existed among pirates, and then explains it with ‘tight quarters with no privacy and no women lead to sexual tension’ and ‘the preferred sexual partners were younger boys who were on the crew’. I don’t think pirates were some magical sparkly unicorns but they were most certainly humans who are capable of human feelings.

In the bit about Anne Bonny and Mary Read the author insists that it is ‘extremely unlikely that they were in a romantic and sexual relationship’ because they ‘were married to men on the ship and were pregnant at the time of their trial.’ What? Why is it unlikely?

There are other smaller bits which look fine but leave you with this feeling that the author tries really hard to blur some things, unnecessarily so.

And in the end, there’s this rather weird bit in the first pages of this chapter:

I dunno. This 👆 feels weird. It looks okay (does it?), but I can’t shake off the feeling. Am I seeing things?

[historyhermann]

A Sparkling Gem All Can Enjoy: The Uniqueness of "City of Ghosts"

On March 5, City of Ghosts, an animated series created by Elizabeth Ito, formerly a supervising director of Adventure Time, premiered on Netflix. This series was positively received for its pacing, humor, voice cast, and animation style. Even though it has been over a month since it premiered, the show continues to be relevant, tackling topics which expose uncomfortable truths about our society.

Reprinted from The Geekiary, my History Hermann WordPress blog, and Wayback Machine. This was second article I wrote for The Geekiary. It was originally published on May 26, 2021.

Set in Los Angeles, City of Ghosts is about four kids who are part of the Ghost Club: Zelda, Thomas, Eva, and Peter. All four travel across the city, interviewing ghosts about their lives, adding the recordings to something called the "Ectopedia." Beginning in the first episode, the Ghost Club meets at a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, sitting under a table, discussing how to find the ghosts.

Each episode focuses on a part of Los Angeles not often talked about, part of what Wired calls a "multicultural mélange." This includes Jo, a Filipina chef who owns a café in Boyle Heights, Sonya, the owner of a vegan café who teaches children poetry in the evenings, and Yulissa, a teacher at a music school who is trying to teacher her kids Oaxacan music. The show, which is for those age 5 and up, proposes a new way of thinking about history, ethnicity, and cities, while remaining educational in an engaging way.

The series tackles cultural appropriation, gentrification, discrimination, and historical erasure, while remaining what some call a "lovely…vision for children’s entertainment" and a "gentle love letter" to L.A. itself. For example, in the third and fourth episodes, the Ghost Club learns about Leimert Park and the Indigenous people of L.A., the Tongva. In the latter case, there is discussion of colonization, extraction, development, and language erasure by White settlers of areas where the Tongva lived. The Ghost Club then expands their map of the city to include all the Indigenous names, while Jasper (voiced by Honor Calderon) connects with the land and their heritage, learning to speak Tonga in the process. Other episodes focus on skateboard culture, the horrors of Japanese incarceration in World War II, a marionette puppet theater, and a whistling ghost who speaks in Zapotec.

This "warm and huggable" series has subtle, but significant, LGBTQ representation. In the beginning of the second episode, Thomas, the artifact specialist of the Ghost Club, voiced by Blue Chapman, a transgender child actor, says they use they/them pronouns. In an interview with Vulture, Ito confirmed that Thomas is non-binary, saying she hoped to expand their story more in the future. She expressed her joy that Netflix was fine with Thomas being non-binary. She also revealed that some dialogue in the first episode were re-recorded so that fellow actors would be using the right pronouns for Thomas. Additionally, in the fourth episode, Jasper is shown with two moms.

Despite the diverse storytelling in this unique series, Ito has hinted that the show will not come back for a second season. She has written that people should not get their "hopes up for more City of Ghosts," and that her "well of motivation is running low." Even so, there has been calls on social media platforms, like Twitter, for the series to return, something which Ito supports. Whether Netflix picks up the series for a second season or not, it remains a sparkling gem that all can enjoy.

© 2021-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[edenfenixblogs]

Oh wow. This is really antisemitic, @iblewrichardspeck

You are deeply antisemitic person.

And guess what? Having a Jewish grandfather doesn’t change that.

Your knowledge of Jewish history and culture is nonexistent to the point that I won’t even bother to confront most of it.

I encourage my allies to step in and address your nonsense with reason and links to credible sources.

Two huge standout points of your lack of knowledge that I want to point out though:

Most Jews in Israel are NOT in fact European or Ashkenazi. Do literally one Google search.

“Jews have always had a right to safety in their homeland.” I want you to know that I am pretty well regarded as a person who keeps their cool in situations like this. So I want to be explicit that my ability to stay calm right now is an act of superhuman will. I want to scream at you and cry because of the amount of death and pain you are erasing with this outright, easily disproven lie. Jews do not and have not ever had safety in their homeland of ISRAEL. Nor have Jews ever had safety in any of the locations where we have made a home. Judaism and jewish life has never “thrived” anywhere, at least not for the last 2000+ years. We have always been a target of attack and displacement and genocide. Always. Without exception. The idea that Israel somehow took all the Jews of the Middle East away from their homes where they were peacefully chilling out is nonsense. The middle eastern (who are the majority btw) Jews in Israel came to Israel after being expelled from their nations of origin or murdered for refusing to leave. Poland? Yeah. It had a swell Jewish community about 1200 years ago. It’s a shame about the centuries of ghettoization and you know that pesky genocide you might have heard about. Ethiopia? You mean the place where Jews had to be smuggled out of by Israeli covert forces because of the danger they were in there?

I don’t know if I believe that your grandfather was Jewish. Maybe he was. Maybe you made him up to legitimize your own antisemitic views.

But if he was really Jewish, I’m sure he’s wildly disappointed in you.

I won’t be blocking you because I want you to see this and change your views in a deeply fundamental way. And I want you to apologize. I’m 99.99999999% sure you won’t. You’re too steeped in your hatred. But who knows. People can change. I hope you do. Because right now, your attitude, beliefs, and behavior are rancid. I will not be responding to further messages from you.

Allies or fellow Jews with bandwidth can take it from here. Adios. Shalom.

[sighing-is-a-song]

Happy Pride! Let’s get some things str8

Trans people had nothing to do with the first pride 😁

Black Butch Cis lesbian Stormé DeLarverie started threw the first punch that started the stonewall rebellion. I say rebellion and not riot because that is how Stormé herself referred to it:

“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn't no damn riot.”

Two cis gays and two cis lesbians, Craig Rodwell. Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes, proposed Pride. And then Cis bisexual Brenda Howard organized it. She is even called “the mother of Pride.”

Furthermore Marsha P Johnson was NOT trans.

And Sylvia Rivera doesn’t like being called trans.

Erasing the accomplishments of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals to fit your narrative is not cute or “woke.” It’s disrespectful and downright homophobic. All of you spreading misinformation should be ashamed.

[moonlightsapphic]

Yeah and so the movie was 75% finished before it was completely shut down. What a loss to the community, and I can't imagine how heartbreaking it must've been for Nate and all the people working on it. Nimona (2023), later picked up and adapted by Netflix, is a phoenix risen from the ashes and it had to fight to be here despite the book's (and She-ra's!) prior success.

Fuck Disney.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." -- George Orwell, "NIneteen Eighty-Four"

Unethical, dishonest and sinister.

When multiple historians called out the 1619 Project's pervasive historical fraud, known compulsive liar, Nikole Hannah-Jones justified it as "reshaping public memory." That is, it isn't true, but it should be true, and people should believe and insist that it's true.

Dublin Pride has since added some text to their page to handwave the dishonesty. However, anyone using the site and its assets as a historical reference - and why wouldn't they, when it's the official site for Dublin Pride - will be reproducing the images they want them to have, not the ones that are factually accurate. So any news sites that source from their site will be, knowingly or not, perpetuating Dublin Pride's rewrite of their own history.

[gotreesgo]

Going to fuck around and write an article titled Men Are Disgusting and Women Don’t Exist: How Oppositional Sexism Creates Distinct Forms of Queerphobia and Encourages Infighting in the LGBTQ+ Community so that people can finally realize why we should be punching up and not fucking sideways

[daisyachain]

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should

[uzaydenizanasi]

Palestine isn't fucking politics dipshit it's a human issue it's GENOCIDE it's about people's LIVES

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Just blocked someone because they complained that Steven Spielberg is "a white WW2 nerd who only wants to tell white stories."

Like.

Bitch.

[hedgehology]

Historians will still call them besties.

🛒omg they were tomb mates! sticker by hedgehology

[shardsofswords]

When it comes to antisemitism among western gentile antizionists (and I'm making it very clear i'm not talking about palestinians themselves here. I'm not demanding scholarship from people who are actively being bombed. I don't feel the same about those of you who are fine and safe and simply not willing to acknowledge your own bigotry) there is a common throughline in the belief in the myth that israelis are all just wealthy americans/europeans/have dual citizenship and can leave anytime, and the vehement opposition to both the idea that jewish people are in some way indigenous to the Levant, and that a non insignificant of people genuinely fled antisemitism and would have died if they hadn't left for Israel.

And I think these things come from the same root. Which is the desire for a narrative where there's foreign bad guys colonizing a land, who could leave anytime and have no reason whatsoever to be there.

And underneath that narrative is a silent assumption, one that confuses me greatly. Namely, that if some portion of israelis did have a good reason to want to go to Israel, both because of a longstanding cultural and historical connection to the land and because they were escaping antisemitism elsewhere, that would somehow make the act of mass murder and supression of palestinians... less bad? As if the existence of jewish people living in the region of palestine, and the state of israel carpet bombing gaza are inevitably connected, and the first can't happen without the second, and therefore, if the first is in some way justified, the second must also be. Except it very clearly isn't justified. It's an active genocide, and for that to be true israelis must have no reason for living in israel at all. The problem becomes not the ongoing mass murder of palestinians, but the presence of israelis, because these two are now one and the same.

Now, it has to be said, a big driving factor of this sentiment is because this narrative, that jewish presence in the middle east recquires that mass murder of palestinians, is one the Israeli government has pushed itself for decades. It justifies its horrific violence by saying that this is absolutely necessary for jewish people to exist safely in the middle east. Or in fact anywhere in the world, because it's also a core zionist idea that jewish people will never be safe anywhere but in a jewish state. This conflation of two seperate things wasn't invented by antizionists.

It is, however, not true. when the israeli state says this, they're lying. And just because antizionists didn't invent the idea doesn't mean we don't need to unlearn it. Acknowledging that jewish people are connected to israel doesn't make what is happening to palestinians not genocide. Nuance doesn't mean "well I guess now it's a little bit okay to bomb refugee camps and cut an entire region off from water, electricity, and the internet" Genocide is bad. Always. Unambiguously so. No matter who's doing it.

"jewish peope are indigenous to israel" also, in fact, doesn't make it inaccurate to call what is happening in palestine "settler-colonialism" because it is. A lot of people- understandably, considering history- have a purely racial view of colonialism. The idea is that there is an ethnic group of people who is indigenous, and therefore has rights to the land, and another ethnic group who isn't, and therefore is an invader who has no right to the land. What this ignores is that what defines colonialism is the material and political reality of one group being pushed out by another. What is happening in israel is settler-colonialism because the state of Israel is, in fact, trying to permanty replace palestinian society with an Israeli one. That's what settler-colonialism is. Their ancestors living on that land centurie and millenia back doesn't change that.

This answer by user starlightomantic explains it better than I ever could. "they locate the crime not in the invasion but in the foreignness" is basically what I was trying to say a few paragraphs ago but way better. But basically, under this purely racial framework of colonialism "jewish people are indigenous to israel" sounds like "the land rightfully belongs to jews (and therefore pushing palestinians out is fine)"

And once again, of course, "jews are indigenous to israel" IS also being used by zionists and the israeli state to justify the ethnic cleansing of palestinians. And they're wrong. But part of antizionism is countering this kind of propaganda and in this case the part that's wrong isn't "jews have a special historical connection to israel" or "a lot of people came to israel because they were facing life threatening antisemitism elsewhere" but "jews being indigenous to israel/facing antisemitism makes the displacement, oppression, and mass murder of palestinians okay"

You don't have to try and prove that jewish people don't have a connection to israel. Because it doesn't change the fact that a genocide is happening and it needs to stop. Trying to argue these points does nothing for palestinian liberation and only helps to fuel the propaganda that all antizionism is antisemitim, or that the ultimate goal of antizionism is to drive all jews out of the middle east.

Stop wasting time falling for repackaged conspiracy theories and continue boycotting, protesting, and speaking out for palestinians. The genocide HAS to end.

[johnwicklover1999]

i think one thing that anti-theists like.. do wrong (?) is treat religions like they're monoliths, which is impossible. you might find that one denomination is larger than another, but there will pretty much always be other denominations, and varying interpretations within each denomination.

no religion is a monolith, and no religion ever will be one. that's because religion is a personal experience to the individual, who will have their own thoughts and feelings about their faith. that is how people are in regards to everything, because humans aren't a monolith of a species.

i understand it might be confusing, or even frustrating when a religion has many denominations and interpretations, but that doesn't work super well as a reason for wanting to rid of religion. in fact, just yesterday i was told by an anti-theist that 'ideally' the belief of magic would be rid of and traditional religion wouldn't change. i know for a fact that other anti-theists would disagree with that and present their own ideal outcome of anti-theism, because i often browse anti-theism tags to get an understanding of anti-theist beliefs (it's good practice to read up on some opposing opinions to get some standing ground! my dad taught me that.)

it is perfectly okay to be critical of religion, i myself am critical of some religious ideas from varying religions! but when you don't fully understand the religion you're criticizing, and you're getting your information from biased sources, or only reading about limited ideas then you don't have the information to accurately criticize any religion. the idea that all religions are strict monoliths is entirely false, and if someone believes that then their criticism isn't totally credible, especially when they can't acknowledge the good of religion.

in the end, individual religions can not be treated as if they are massive groups of people who all share the same ideas and the same beliefs, harmful or not. because that's literally just not true. if you want to improve religion then actually go forth and try to understand it and listen to different people discuss their religion and it's flaws, trying to get rid of religion will only hurt people. (and i very strongly believe that getting rid of religion will in turn hurt spiritually, and by extension culture.)