#russia : the last feudal empire

[rz-rosszogg]

Today we will discuss an important issue, of how societies organise themselves.

And that is done by something called Socioeconomic systems.

Looking back historically at the societies of the world, from conception until now, the Socio-economic arrangement has always determined welfare and survival of all societies. These systems also brought hope and direction to people.

So, from the birth of society, as soon as the first crops of sustainable life were discovered in the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, and a few hundred years later were planted in the rich black soils of South Eastern Europe...to begin with in the huge lower Danube valley of Dobrodja (in today's Bulgarian lands), agriculture was born on a massive social scale. Hunting and gathering was largely abondoned, as ineffective to sustain a society that wanted a better life, than living in caves, in fear of all around.

So, Civilization was born, some argue 20 to 30,000 years ago, by the birth and development of agriculture. The world never looked back. And Eastern Europe became the most powerful centre of culture and development...number of Empires were born, in that rich black soil by of Bulgaria. For example, the Goths, the Slavs, the Celts, were all born as initial communities in that lower Danube land of Bulgaria. Of course from there, they spread all over Europe, Asia and North Africa. So, that was the second stage of known world historical systems. The first stage was individual survival against nature lasting perhaps 10,000 years, the second stage was the birth of agriculture and hence communal living in cooperation..and then, came the 3rd stage of the Socio-economic systems on Earth, called Feudalism. A system of communal cooperation based on slavery, where a single family can rule over a whole mass of people, working together, organised and more efficient than ever before. But under strict rule of an overseer, who also was a slave, totally commited to the ruling family. That stage lasted over a thousand years...and then Capitalism was born, in the 17th century, in Holland. Quickly spreading to Spain, Portugal, Britain, France.. all of Europe.

In Capitalism, it's no longer a human agency that rules, but the interest of the Capital...where the money went, the ruling power went with it. Europeans realised that if they had better weapons, they can enslave all others to work for them. But things turned out more complex than that. People in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere rebelled, didn't have money worshipped as a god...and didn't work as prescribed by European overlords. So, Capitalism came back home to Europe, putting the local European populations in factories and dirty living conditions. And these were the seeds, which gave birth to the next system, a transitional system called Socialism, on the way to build the future, all progressive and freedom based Socioeconomic system called Communism...where for the first time there would be no bosses, No Class Systems, but real social equality, prosperity, justice, etc.

Of course, the ruling class of Capital has fought hard, to keep it's rule...but eventually now, we see Socialist policies all over the world, what once were hard core Capitalist societies.

Socioeconomic changes happen when the previous system becomes inefficient, ineffective to deliver a better life for all.

Usually it takes between 700 to 1,000 years for a new Socioeconomic system to evolve.

But eventually the new better systems do evolve, and improve with living experience.

In the meantime, if we don't murder everyone, we can start building the future world for our grandchildren.

Pity that Socialism was tricked in Eastern Europe and Russia. But it is good experience, from which we learnt much for the next time, a forward looking modern nation starts to build Communism. Guess China, Vietnam, Russia and many others, are already doing it.

In Communism, if my neighbour is struggling, so am I. Let Peace and Love rain tears of joy over everyone on Earth.

Presently, the Palestinian people need All the tears of the world, to feed their soul, and propel their bravery.

[lightdancer1]

Wrapped up the last book:

This book stopped in 2001, so it didn't have to deal with the impolitic reality that the fragile post-Soviet democracy turned into a pro-Russian dictatorship under the misrule of one Viktor Orban. It did, however, cover the entire span of Hungarian history from the migration to Europe and the Battle of Lechfeld, which settled the brief age of Magyars as one of many migrant horse nomadic Asian cultures that rampaged over Europe and marked the transformation of them, like the Estonians and Finns, into a very self-consciously European and Europeanized culture.

The reality of Magyar culture, like that of Finland, Estonia, and the Basques is that they are small islands of non Indo-European culture in a vast sea of Indo-European languages. This in turn has been something that the Hungarians are always very consciously aware of as well, and it accounts in no small part for old model feudal Hungary preserving Latin as the official language of the Hungarian assemblies into the mid-19th Century. Latin was more easily understood by the Indo-European cultures around them than Magyar, which like Finnish looks like a sneeze when written and unlike Finnish tends to sound like one in speech (but not nearly as bad as Welsh in reading or trying to speak Kartuli, f'rex).

This accounts for much of the self-imposed view of Hungarians of their culture, of their successes, and their failures. Until the Treaty of Trianon the kings and magnates of Hungary led a state that would go on to account for over half the territory of the future Habsburg Empire, and some of the kings, like Matthias Corvinus and Isvtan I/Stephen went on to fame, most of them fitting outside Hungary into the generic grey blur of Central and Eastern Europe that isn't Habsburg, German, or Russian.

Hungarians managed to preserve the huge state on paper, even if the institutions became increasingly sclerotic in a kind of inverse mirror of Poland. No Liberum Veto, instead overmighty subjects without whom Hungary could not be governed, but with whom it underwent a time of serfdom matching anything in the broader expanse of Muscovite and Romanov Russia.

Nationalism became the bane of this state as it did the rest of the world and this one more than most, and Trianon is to it what Sevres is to Turkey, the ever-ready excuse that ultimately played a minor role in the rise of Orban and in the willingness of Hungary to join with Hitler.....and the Hungarian view of periodic uprisings on behalf of freedom as it defined it under Kossuth and Imre Nagy in 1956 also co-existed with a pattern of Hungarian freedom ridden down by Cossacks or gunned down by canister fire from Soviet tanks.

This is a part of the modern duality of Hungary, a state consciously aware that most of its neighbors were once peasants farming the fields of Hungarian magnates, and aware of a democratic-bulwark tradition that has seen great heroism producing a string of disasters matching much of the tradition of Poland when the Slzachta finally buried the commonwealth and the peasants took up where their overlords left off.

9/10.

[herukapadmajungiansworld]

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOUR EMPLOYEES AND INVESTORS WILL CONSTANTLY BE ASKING ARE WE THERE YET

I think I've figured out what's going on. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated.1 Don't Get Your Hopes Up. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, the harder it is to bait the hook with prestige. And that is almost certainly mistaken. So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. As big companies' oligopolies became less secure, they were willing to pay a premium for labor. You can see it in old photos. If you're friends with a lot of the worst kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts. And what's especially dangerous is that many happen at your computer.

And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. You have to like what they do there than how much they can get the most done. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. Design This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but that if someone wanted to design a language explicitly to disprove this hyphothesis, they could probably do it. This technique can be generalized to: What's the best thing you could be doing, not just what you can see the results in any town in America. With this amount of money can change a startup's funding situation completely. There I found a copy of The Atlantic. Whereas it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.2 That's ok. I think you have to do all three. But more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

But what if the person in the next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.3 They all know about the VCs who rejected Google. The writing of essays used to be.4 You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.5 He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong place, anything might happen. The people who've worked for a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. It was supposed to be something else, they ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. By 2012 that number was 18 years. The first thing you need is to be willing to look like a fool.6 Google they have a fair amount of data to go on. John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman.

Many of the big companies were roll-ups that didn't have clear founders.7 Empirically, the way to the bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations, you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them anyway. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake as the people who list at ABNB, they list elsewhere too I am not negative on this one was the only way to get lots of referrals is to invest in students, not professors. It will actually become a reasonable strategy or a more reasonable strategy to suspect everything new.8 Never say we're passionate or our product is great. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be disappointments early on, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.9 Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. VCs think they're playing a zero sum game.

I spend most of my time writing essays lately. Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If smaller source code is the purpose of comparing languages, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. But if we make kids work on dull stuff now is so they can get away with atrocious customer service. In fact, here there was a kid playing basketball? Of course, figuring out what you like.

Go out of your way to bring it up e. The industry term here is conversion. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. At least if you start a startup, people treat you as if you're unemployed.10 But hacking is like writing. Even with us working to make things happen the way they used to, they were moving to a cheaper apartment. It causes you to work not on what you like, but is disastrously lacking in others. I do in the rest of the world. Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program.

I could only figure out what to do, there's a natural tendency to stop looking.11 Economies of scale ruled the day.12 One is that this is simply the founders' living expenses.13 I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I think I know what is meant by readability, and I think they're onto something. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.14 Everyday life gives you no practice in this. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on anything they don't want to want, we consider technological progress good.

Notes

Samuel Johnson said no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Which is precisely my point. If they were regarded as 'just' even after the egalitarian pressures of World War II the tax codes were so new that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but except for money. They don't know enough about the new top story.

The image shows us, they tended to make money. But we invest in the Bible is Pride goeth before destruction, and one of the fake leading the fake leading the fake. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that 15-20% of the aircraft is.

But because I realized the other writing of Paradise Lost that none who read a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. If they agreed among themselves never to do due diligence for an investor? The best technique I've found for dealing with the other.

I ordered a large number of startups as they do for a public event, you can ignore. If you want to help the company, and a few of the Facebook that might produce the next Apple, maybe the corp dev is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors decide whether to go to die.

If you walk into a big company CEOs in 2002 was 3.

Or rather, where w is will and d discipline. But that turned out the existing shareholders, including that Florence was then the richest country in the sense of mission.

In Shakespeare's own time, because they can't afford to. The company may not be able to raise their kids in a company in Germany. When we got to see the apples, they said, and why it's next to impossible to write an essay about it wrong. That will in many cases be an open booth.

I'm not saying you should probably be worth trying to tell them exactly what constitutes research in the early 90s when they say they bear no blame for any particular truths you'll learn. As Jeremy Siegel points out that there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs. Did you know about it as if you'd invested at a discount of 30% means when it was actually a great programmer doesn't merely do the right direction to be is represented by Milton.

But a lot of the next round. It's hard to say exactly what your body is telling you. In Russia they just kill you, they tend to be very unhealthy. One thing that drives most people realize, because you have two choices, choose the harder.

Though Balzac made a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay talks about programmers, but one by one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. Or rather, where it sometimes causes investors to act. Eric Raymond says the best hackers want to trick admissions officers. And no, unfortunately, I mean efforts to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a truly feudal economy, you better be sure you do in proper essays.

The top VCs thus have a better education. Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or some vague thing like that. You need to fix. But the question is not much to maintain their percentage.

Kant. Loosely speaking. The real decline seems to them to lose elections. Some types of startups where the recipe is to say incendiary things, they can grow the acquisition offers most successful founders still get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but they get for free.

World War II to the frightening lies told by older siblings. That's one of the most general truths. As we walked in, we found they used it to get into that because a unless your last funding round.

But this seems an odd idea.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Shiro Kawai, Garry Tan, Chris Small, and Nikhil Nirmel for sharing their expertise on this topic.

[zwischenstadt]

Banaji on the unique political economy of the Russian empire, particularly the dominance of the emperor over the nobles

"Russian absolutism, from the period of Muscovite consolidation in the late fourteenth century on, was almost the opposite of this, and here Weber’s intuition is more accurate than Anderson’s. Anderson reads Russian absolutism on a European model, assimilating the boyars to the feudal aristocracies of Western Europe and describing the Russian autocracy itself as an ‘Absolutist State of a type which was common to most European countries in the same epoch ’. This essentially feudal reading of tsarism contrasts sharply with Trotsky’s repeated emphasis on the ‘historical peculiarities’ of Russia’s development or fails to explain why Trotsky himself characterised the Russian state as a ‘bureaucratic autocracy’ or ‘bureaucratic absolutism’, an ‘intermediate form between European absolutism and Asian despotism’ and one that was ‘possibly’ ‘closer to the latter of these two’. The Russian nobility was, as Weber described it, ‘entirely powerless in relation to the ruler’.

"The Crown could indeed risk a behavior toward the nobility, even toward the bearers of the most famous names and owners of the largest properties, which no Occidental ruler, no matter how great a potentate, could have permitted himself toward the lowliest of his legally unfree ministeriales."

The conducting wire that runs through the early history of the Muscovite state is the subordination of the aristocracy (the boyars and the Moscow nobility) in relation to the ruler. 161 160 and their integration into a class of servitors who, as Andrej Pavlov notes, lacked not only political freedom but even the last vestiges of economic independence During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ‘the Moscow monarchy succeeded in eliminating alodial holdings and making secular land tenure a form of possession conditional on state service’. the means of production became virtually extinct’. it entirely dependent on the monarchy’. boyars but to the dvoriane.’ its land on royal sufferance’. boyars holding large vótchina estates in the central regions of Muscovy The principle of compulsory service, namely that ‘all land must serve’, formally introduced in 1556, would effectively mean that ‘private property of The opríchnina uprooted and led, in the end, to a ‘profound transformation of the aristocracy that rendered ‘The future belonged not to the ‘During the three centuries separating the reign of Ivan III from that of Catherine II the Russian equivalent of the nobility held This was the feature of Russian despotism that struck every observer from the West and, of course, the Russian intelligentsia itself of the nineteenth century."

Jairus Banaji, "Theory as History"

Banaji goes on to discuss how this form of politics was inherited from the Byzantine Empire, but was even more extreme in terms of the Emperor's control over the aristocracy. He also discusses other large commercial empires throughout history, pointing out that this kind of arrangement was actually very rare- you found many mixtures of aristocratic, imperial, and bureaucratic power, but not any others where the emperor controlled the elite so directly. He points out that many people *think* this is how China's historical empires operated, but that this is incorrect- the emperor often operated as a sort of chief representative of the aristocracy, not an absolute command-and-control ruler over it.

TBH I think people have a point when they say that the USSR recreated Czarism in an essential sense. The Russian Federation has become increasingly like this (with the presidency replacing the Czar here) since its inception, as well.

[historyman101]

Question to all in the Napoleonic Era/Marshals fandom:

What about this period interests or fascinates you the most? How were you first introduced to it?

I’ll start.

My introduction to the Napoleonic Wars was back when I was still in grade school (around ages 10-12). I had grown a fascination with history in general but especially with military history, starting first with the American Revolution and the American Civil War. When I was learning about the Civil War and the tactics both armies used, I naturally came to study the Napoleonic art of war, and thus came face to face with the “big” man himself.

One thing that amazed me about Napoleon is how he literally came from nothing and rose to be (for a short period of time) the most powerful man in the world. His life was a true rags-to-riches-to-rags story, or as Stanley Kubrick once said, “an epic poem in motion.” Not only that, but his impact on war is all but incalculable.

Before Napoleon, warfare was a very different affair in Europe. Campaigns could often go on for long periods and armies often moved very slowly. Outcomes of wars very rarely rested on decisive battles. But Napoleon, utilizing the lessons drawn from the French Revolution, turned all that its head. He emphasized speed, maneuvering, and destroying the enemy’s will to fight.

Many of his reforms last to this very day, such as the Corps d’Armee system, the use of mobile artillery, and theories on maneuver warfare. That combined with his charisma and his ability to inspire confidence and loyalty in his soldiers, his marshals, and the French people left me enraptured with him.

Apart from his influence on war, his influence on society and culture is something that’s felt to this day. A lot of people decry him as a tyrant (some even compare him to Hitler, which is wholly unfair) and a traitor to the revolution, but I think that does a big disservice to all the good he did for his country. He supported the French Revolution and saw why it was necessary but also recognized the instability and violence it brought. He obviously loved France and the French people and only wanted the best for them. A lot of his reforms to France and his empire were based off the Revolution, and served as underpinnings for Europe today. His Civil Code for example is the basis of legal codes for much of Europe.

Andrew Roberts, a British historian, put it better than I could:

“The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

Apart from Napoleon himself, his marshals, generals, and opponents are all fascinating characters, practically living legends. I’ve already explained why Poniatowski interests me, but there are countless others like Marshal Davout (who never lost a single battle!) and Marshal Ney (who single-handedly led his corps to safety after almost being destroyed in Russia). The Marshals came from almost every background (more than half were middle or lower class) and were perhaps the best example of the meritocratic system Napoleon wanted for his empire.

My dream is to see the whole era of history dramatized for TV, something like a more historical Game of Thrones. The era has all the trappings for a great epic, complete with larger than life characters, action, war, intrigue, love and sex.

AND THEN I RAMBLED SOME MORE.

[dex-xe]

Have you ever thought that when the ghosts were alive The world map would look different? Some of the ghosts might think that Australia or Canada is still part of the British Empire or captain and pat thinks that Russia is The Soviet Union.

Oh lawd,, I’m obsessed with this as an idea. I’m a history and politics student who has spent significant time looking at historical geopolitics so I’m gonna do a bit of a deep dive now into what each of them would’ve known about the world. Apologies Anon but you’ve started a rave in my brain on this subject :P

It’s very long so I’ll put a little keep reading button so I don’t annoy people in the main tag!!

---

im talking: Ghosts related questions, theories or headcanons yall have, your favourite characters/scenes/episodes/friendships + why, general comments on anything Ghosts you wanna say

Link to inbox: Max’s Ghost Post

Robin - Robin’s knowledge of the world would’ve been practically non-existent. He lived during the Stone Age but we don’t really know when, but he wouldn’t have known where he was in the world or what was happening elsewhere at all. Living in (what I assume is now) Surrey, he probably wouldn’t have even known about the sea or that he was on an island.

Plague Ghosts - The Plague ghosts are interesting because their world view would’ve been so limited. They wouldn’t have known about the Americas, Asia, Africa or Australia etc. Mick going to London would mean he would probably have known slightly more, if simply knowing vaguely about France or the Holy Roman Empire. They would’ve lived in a feudal system under the control of a Lord, so not much life outside the farming life style.

Humphrey - Humphrey’s worldview would’ve been dominated by the conflict of the Church and conflict between the monarch and the Pope. He would’ve known about discoveries of food and stuff in the Americas. It’s unlikely he would’ve lived to see the Europeans arrive in Australia. So he would’ve never knew about it which is mad.

Mary - Mary would’ve been the last ghost where the HRE was at its power. King James VI was committed to peace in Europe but the 30 Years War would’ve been in her life time too. She would’ve known about the Americas probably and the existence of British production in the new world.

Kitty - Kitty probably would’ve lived at the end of the 1700s, she might’ve just about seen the French Revolution in 1789 which she (being aristocratic) would’ve known about (and her family probably would’ve feared a similar thing would happen in Britain) but obvs Kitty being Kitty probably wouldn’t have fully known about it or been taught about what was happening. Also, she would’ve seen US independence in 1776 so that would’ve been important at the time too.

Thomas - Thomas lived in the early 1800s and would’ve experienced a similar world to Kitty. French Revolution and US independence would’ve been when he was very young if not just before his birth. The big situation in his life would’ve been Napoleon’s chaos in Europe. But with Thomas’ being an aristocratic, uppity poet he would’ve known but probably not had much interest or care for the world.

Fanny - Fanny would’ve seen the scramble for Africa in full force and the Empire’s expansion. She would’ve seen the Empire at its highest with the whole “sun never sets on the British Empire” situation. This would’ve completely defined the way Fanny viewed the world.

Captain - The Captain’s worldview was wayyyyy different to ours even though he didn’t live that long ago. He was born probably around 1900 so would’ve seen the rapid changes in WW1 and everything afterwards. Colonialism and the aftermath of the scramble for Africa were HUGE in this time as have been seen with the Captain’s view of the Empire. Then obviously the Great Depression and everything happening in Germany and Europe and then WW2.

Pat - Like you said Anon, Pat would’ve lived at the time of the Soviet Union. He was born in around 1945 so saw the world from an entirely post-WW2/Cold War perspective in which East-West relations would’ve dominated his worldview. I imagine being an educator of sorts and from what we see of him in the show he was probably rather knowledgable of the world and current affairs and the like. He would’ve seen the decolonisation of Africa in the 1950s/60s but yeh,, the Cold War/Soviet Union would’ve been his big worldview.

Julian - Julian’s worldview would’ve been quite close to ours. He would’ve seen the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of Germany in 1990, and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. But, the East-West divide would still have played a huge role in his perspective cause it obviously didn’t just go away straight after the end of the Cold War. The main thing that would’ve been different was Yugoslavia, in which countries began declaring their independence starting in 1991. It’s entirely possible Julian would’ve actually been in discussions regarding the future of the Balkans in Parliament or on committee etc.

So yeh,, sorry for the ranting anon but this is so fascinating to me!! You’re such a genius anon for thinking of stuff like this!!

[no-name-mutt]

And (Working Title)

Mostly unedited here. Probably many mistakes.

Ji-Woo Suzuki was six generations removed from her ancestor Shimazu Nariakira, a galvanizing feudal lord of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Shimazu Nariakira’s most famous quote was words that Ji-Woo worked to install firmly into her life.

"if we take the initiative, we can dominate; if we do not, we will be dominated."

  After years of war, scheming and destructive cajoling, Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910. Korea was considered a part of Japan until the end of WWII and subsequently,  the fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945.

 During this time, Ji-Woo’s great grandmother, Jeong-Ja was forcibly betrothed. Jeong-Ja (ji-young ja) was eleven years old. Jeong-Ja was arranged to marry Sora Nariakira. Sora abhorred the thought of marrying a Korean woman. Sora, as with most other Japanese people during this time, saw Koreans as second class citizens to the Japanese. In their marriage, Sora took every opportunity to order Jeong-Ja like a slave. One late night, Sora forced himself upon her and Jeong-Ja became pregnant.

 A daughter was born, Hina Nariakira. While Korea was under Japanese control, it was initially illegal to change your name. As it were, Koreans that refused to change their names, were unable to enroll in school, receive mail or even receive meal rations. Eventually the colonial bureaucracy allowed the changing of names, and as much as 84% of Koreans changed their names. Speaking the Korean language was banned and Korean newspapers and printing houses were forced to close. Nearly 200,000 ancient and historical documents were burned. Korean youths were volunteered and conscripted into the Japanese army. Shinto shrines were built, and became places of forced worship. Japanese colonial policy became a clear policy of unlimited cultural erasure. 

Hina attended school and became a voracious reader and journal keeper. Hina, as a product of her environment, became fluent in both Japanese and Korean. From an early age, it was evident that Hina was highly intelligent. Her vocabulary in both Korean and Japanese quickly surpassed Jeong-Ja’s and Sora’s respectively. Though Sora was quick to forbid speaking Korean in the household, Jeong-Ja taught her in private.  

Sora frequently had Hina recite aloud his military orders. If there was ever a word that he didn’t understand, he would strike her. This was a sign to make the order as comprehensive as possible, though his reasoning was always, “Do not waste my time with pointless words!” 

Life for Jeong-Ja and Hina was of unceasing malaise. Their only solace was in each other. 

From reading Sora’s military orders, Hina became familiar with impending military movements, encampments and strategies. Hina learned of an upcoming landing of US Ships to discuss treaty possibilities. Hina devised a plan in which Jeong-Ja and her would flee their home to seek refuge with the US Navy. Somehow, discovering their plan, Sora attempted to stop the two from fleeing.

In a frenetic haste, Hina jumped on to Sora’s back, holding on to him with an arm around his neck. He drew his Manchukuo manufactured pistol, the Sugiura, and started firing wildly. Hina kept a dull pen-knife for protection and stabbed him three times in the chest, and twice in the neck. In a matter of seconds, Sora had fired every bullet in his pistol, one of which struck Jeong-ja in the head. She died instantly. Hina fled to the US Navy ship, covered in blood and alone.

The Korean peninsula has been in an imperial theater of war since the late 1800s. It remains a strong strategic naval position and is between three of the strongest and most hostile countries; Russia, China and Japan. 

Hina found herself as a refugee, aboard a US battle cruiser. From Hina’s journal, we know that while aboard the ship, she was raped multiple times by a Japanese-American Navy captain. Hina became pregnant. Clinton James Suzuki was a rising star among the ranks and arranged his marriage with Hina. He thought that having a baby out of wedlock would be detrimental to his military career. Hesitant, and silently unwilling, Hina agreed to the marriage. Through this, Hina became a US citizen.The wedding was expedited and facilitated onboard the cruiser. As her belly grew, so did her hatred for Clinton Suzuki.

Hina silently imagined his death in whatever setting they found themselves in. If he choked while eating, she wouldn’t save him. If he had fallen overboard, she wouldn’t call for help. If he slipped and fell down the stairs, she would elect to simply walk away. When the two arrived back in the US, there was to be a Navy welcoming parade in port. All of the seamen were to be standing with their wives (if they were married) on the dock as the Navy cruisers came back to port. Though Hina’s husband would have preferred to not be seen with his very young and very pregnant immigrant wife, he thought it would be a great opportunity to rub shoulders with those higher in command. 

As the ship was coming into port, the anchor was dropped, and four inch thick mooring lines were lashed from the anchor to the ship to the dock. Hina’s husband was the first one out on the dock behind the commanding officers, hoping that it would impress a lieutenant, admiral or anyone with any sort of authority. She happily let him stand as far away as possible from her. 

As the last mooring line was being lashed, a massive and potent rogue wave rocked the ship, and snapped the thick cable. The cable whipped downward and cut him cleanly in half from the right collar bone, down through the groin. His body fell apart like a sliced melon. Hina was silently imagining him drowning in the bay, but she never could have envisioned that. For a second she was stunned, and then started to laugh hysterically. She was finally free.

Hina easily found translator work. Although Hina adhered to strict ideals of frugality, she made enough as a single mother to comfortably support her newborn son Kaito Suzuki. Kaito Suzuki stood an average five foot nine inches. His hair was short, poofy, and straw like. His arms and legs were thin and underdeveloped, though his torso was somehow, rather round. Kaito had a round face, unremitting acne and eyebrows in need of a good trimming. He attended public school. He was unremarkably below average. He found little interest in extracurricular sports and clubs; instead, he spent most of his time skipping class, smoking pot and hanging out with his like-minded friends. After barely graduating high school, Kaito was given an ultimatum, either find work or attend college. In the end, Kaito decided to move out of his mother’s house and found work as a second shift janitor at night and weekend garbage collector. 

Kaito Suzuki and Ji-Woo I(the first) first met when she decided to stay late at the commercial real estate office where she worked. Kaito was just starting his shift, starting by collecting the garbage around the office.  Ji-Woo I was a quiet, mild mannered individual. She came from a good home and an affluent community. Ji-Woo I was going through a “rebellious” phase and began making a flurry of short-sighted decisions all revolving around Kaito. The two developed addictions to different drugs and made small time scams in order to fund these new habits. Ji-Woo I unexpectedly became pregnant. The night they found out, Kaito grabbed her car keys and said he was going out for cigarettes and never returned. Hina was the only person in the delivery room when the daughter was born. Ji-Woo I was emotionless. She stared emptily at the crying newborn girl. Ji-Woo I looked to Hina in silent disdain. Hina nodded in affirmation. When Ji-Woo I was released from the hospital, Hina drove her to the airport and handed her some money. Neither Hina nor the newborn baby girl ever saw her again.

Hina decided to name the baby Ji-Woo II, after her mother. (Whom despite the situation, actually quite liked.)

As a baby, she cried constantly. Even in sleep, she murmured and wept in unsilence. Ji-Woo would stop crying only momentarily if she were fed pureed sweet potatoes or ripe apricots. 

When Ji-Woo was six months old, she stopped breathing for nearly two minutes. Hina panicked, rushed to the emergency room. But by the time Hina arrived at the the hospital and Ji-Woo was breathing again and after that point, Ji-Woo never cried again. It’s as if she were an entirely different baby. Ji-Woo excelled in school and surpassed all of those around her. She had few friends throughout her youth. It wasn’t until her mid twenties when she learned how to simply “get along” with those around her. 

Ji-Woo took a master’s degree in Japanese History. Then continued on to get a doctorate  in Korean History. After a few bored years of teaching, Ji-Woo left to attend law school.

Everything about Ji-Woo was professional. Her skin was fine, with a healthy touch of melanin. She had high cheekbones and slightly sunken cheeks. A slightly upturned, pointed nose, symmetrical eyebrows. A single asymmetrically placed mole populated her face. She was beautiful. Equally strong and delicate, like the skeletal system of a great predatory bird. Her hair was long, to her lower back, though it was always pulled taut into a perfect braid. She wore simple, gold Tiffany earrings. She purchased them for herself. Ji-Woo’s wardrobe consisted mostly of well-fitting dress suits that obeyed her movements like a harshly conditioned army. There was never a loose thread out of place. Not even so much as a single piece of lint dared to adhere itself to her. She had an athletic, hidden, muscular build that I couldn’t help but to admire.

As a lawyer, Ji-Woo was ruthless. She constructed such pithy arguments, the opposition was often left speechless. And on a few occasions they were left literally stammering. Ever professional, Ji-Woo never showed any form of celebration or elation in victory. She spoke clearly, with seriousness and a dose of harnessed emphasis. Ji-Woo’s days were neither ‘good days’ nor ‘bad days’. She took on the day’s obstacles as if she had rehearsed them wholly the day before (though probably didn’t need it.).

The first time that I saw Ji-Woo Suzuki I was somehow dragged into a meeting of which I had no reason for being in attendance. I was struck by her. Though I prayed I could stay hidden, as a fly on the wall. Ji-Woo Suzuki led a team of class-action specific lawyers. Without ever speaking with her, one would simply assume she was the unquestionable leader. Only after an introduction, Ji-Woo Suzuki would offer to call her “Ji”, as a favor to you. It was not uncommon for people to reply to this offer by thanking her. Though, they were often left deciding whether to continue calling her Ji-Woo out of respect or interpreting her offer as an order. Most people continued to call her Ji-Woo or Ms. Suzuki.

I was staring at her. She was unpacking her case notes. People in the room started conversing. She uncapped a Montblanc rollerball and began to write. Just then, she stopped writing, wrinkled her brow in confusion and looked up directly at me as if to ask, “Who are you, and why are you here?” Her look was sharp, piercing but gentle. A needle and thread. 

She looked right through me. And that was the first time I knew, 

I was going to marry Ji-Woo Suzuki.

The meeting must have ended. I assumed so because the room had started to clear out. I hadn’t really been paying attention, not that I should have been. I wasn’t even supposed to be there in the first place! 

I pretended to collect my things slowly trying to match Ji-Woo’s pace so we could incidentally leave the conference room at the same time. This was quite difficult because I had no belongings to pack up, nor a briefcase to put them in. So I took out my phone from my pocket and pretended to reply to an email. I looked up again and she was already pushing her chair in (when did that happen?!). She moved with intent. I hurriedly shoved my phone into my pocket and jumped up to meet her in the doorway. 

“Hi”, I said, giving my best impression of someone far more casual than myself.

Ji looked at me quizzically, replied dryly with “Hello” and continued past me. Just like a fighter-jet breaking the sound barrier, she was gone, leaving only a potent echo. I must’ve blacked out, because the next thing I knew, she was already halfway down the hall. A paper came loose from her briefcase and she didn’t seem to notice.

This

 was

 my

 chance. 

I fast-walked down the hall as coolly as possible, “hey wait!” I called out. But she was already rounding the corner down the hall. I picked up the piece of paper, in perfect cursive writing it read,

I see you, do you see me?

5:00pm

My temple wrinkled in confusion. I looked up again and she was gone. The heart in my chest reminded me of its presence with a mighty thump. I felt myself sweat. Was this meant for me to find? I returned to the copy room and returned to my work. 

But all I could think of was one Miss Ji-Woo Suzuki. One moment she was there, and then she was not. 

In the periphery, 

of where I wanted to be. 

I felt invigorated. Anxious and curious. 

Piqued.

I got back to the copy room and looked at my digital casio watch, 2:04pm.

My inbox of “to be copied” was now spilling out. I assumed position in front of the plastic, off-white monstrosity. 

First, I’ll take the source material in my left hand! Then! I read the copy instructions and made the proper adjustments and number of copies. After the copies were completed I placed a single paper clip on the ream and set it in the pick up box. Organized alphabetically. To most people, the job would seem boring, though I would argue that there are quite a lot of nuances to it. For example: Eighteen copies of pages one through three, six copies of pages four through ten, and that’s an easy one. 

A page goes in, the scanning light travels from right to left, and left to right, pages come out. I know the machine inside and out. I know because I have had to take it apart and reassemble it, not without hiccups, of course. I went home that day with a black ink stain on my chest. Like I was blasted by a shotgun, and bled black. The skin on my belly was still stained where the ink and bled through the shirt. 

Occasionally pieces of dust or folded paper would cast a shadow on the rest of the page. It caused a ghastly, black, pixelated shadow to print on the copies. Sometimes the shadowed copies were fine to pass along, sometimes, they were better discarded. 

At five pm, I stood outside of Ji-Woo’s office. I was nervous to enter. She sat behind a sleek mid-century desk with her legs folded. Her slate gray dress suit and Mac Pro reminded me of a brutalist era sculpture I saw once as a teenager. I didn’t understand the sculpture then, though maybe I do now. 

She had nice legs, I absolutely understood that. I caught glimpses of her toned calf muscles through the gap of her desk as I paced as casually as possible in front of the open doorway. 

After a few paces back and forth, I heard her call out to me, “You can come in, you know.” I froze. Then somehow came to find myself sitting in the chair across from hers. The desk remained between us. I didn’t know what to say, at that moment, I couldn’t be sure if I knew how to speak. 

“I noticed you today in the Carter vs. Amadeo-Hastings meeting.” She said. 

“No… I mean, yes, I was there. Just trying to learn what it’s all about.” Do you think she bought it?

“Are you interested in practicing law?”

“Uhm, yeah, interested? Definitely.” 

I actually had only worked at the office for about a month. I was still fairly unclear on what business the office conducted, let alone the ‘partners’. Before, I worked at the busiest copy center in Seattle. I got let go after I yelled at a customer, “Stop breaking my shit!” and in my defense, they were going to break the

Konica Minolta c754e! Those things aren’t cheap, and the replacement parts take three weeks to get to the states. 

 “Would you like to go to dinner with me?” She asked. 

    I felt a draft in the back of my agape mouth. Ji-Woo liked a breeze in the office. I found that out later that night when she told me at dinner. 

We continued to see each other after work every Tuesday and during the day on Saturday. This was when Ji-Woo allowed herself recreational time. I learned a lot about Ji-Woo’s schedule during this initial period of dating. I found her structure and stoicism quite sexy. She made all of the reservations at restaurants. And not just nice restaurants, she even made reservations for tacky hole-in-the-wall places that she knew I would like. A few times she would order for me. Like a mind reader, she would always order exactly what I wanted yet never in a demeaning way. She seemed to know exactly when I wanted to speak for myself and when I was comfortable with her ordering for me. 

After about a month, midday on a Friday, she sent me an email. The subject line simply read, 

“Tomorrow Night 4/16/2019”

Hi Kentaro, 

Please meet me at my house tomorrow night at 6:00pm. We’ll go to dinner. I’ve made reservations at 7:30. Casual attire.

Ji

This was more or less the usual date query. Though, interestingly, she signed it at just Ji. Futhermore, she would usually ask to meet at six with reservations about the time it took to get to the restaurant. Surely we weren’t going somewhere that was an hour and a half away. 

That night, I was talking to an old friend of mine, Leo, on the phone. I was telling him about Ji-Woo and I. About how I eagerly awaited those Tuesdays and Saturdays. And about the one time I asked her out on a whim on a Friday night. She declined. I was upset for a while. But respected her need for personal space, and strict schedule. “It’s just how she is”. 

 I told Leo that we hadn’t had sex. “That’s good dude, she’s probably a Sazae Oni” he replied sarcastically. I didn’t understand his reference, but as his tone implied, it was a snide comment I’d best ignore... but didn’t. 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked sharply. 

“Sa-zae Oh-ni!” He said louder and slower in syllables, as if it were common knowledge. He continued, “They’re these folk tale snail mermaids that preyed on Japanese pirates. They would pretend to be in distress, but when the pirates brought them onboard, the sazae oni would chop off their balls and hold them ransom for gold. They’re like, obsessed with gold or something.” A weird silence filled the phone line as I looked around the room, waiting for him to finish. 

He started again, “ok, it doesn’t matter. You’re the Japanese one, should you know what a sazae oni is?”

I held my lips taught, annoyedly. 

“Well, is she someone you’d bring home to meet your mother?” He asked me. I thought about this for a while. I imagined a cartoon caricature version of my mother asking me, “Why would you want to be with someone that is so serious all the time?”

Up until this point I had never even seen the inside of her apartment. Whenever I was to meet her there, she would already be outside the gate waiting for me. 

That Saturday night I took a cab to her apartment building as I usually did. It started to rain on the way over and fog grew in density the closer I got to the apartment. I didn’t check the forecast beforehand, and I didn’t have an umbrella. I arrived at the gate and Ji-Woo wasn’t around. I checked my phone for any missed messages from her, but there were none. 

    I buzzed her intercom. “Hi, I’m here. Are you there?”

    “Still getting ready, come up.” 

She buzzed me in. This was it, I was finally going to see where(and how!) she lived. 6th Floor, apartment 6F. Embarrassingly, I panted a bit when I got to her floor. I stood on her doormat, it said ‘Welcome’. I was slightly damp, everywhere. I wore an old grey knit sweater. I had washed it so many times the collar was getting tiny holes. Faded blue jeans and shabby sneakers. I checked my casio, 6:00pm exactly. “Yes! Perfect timing” I exclaimed silently as I clenched my fist in victory, then knocked on the door insouciantly. “Come in!”, I could hear Ji-Woo shout from behind the door. I opened the door, slowly. I floated in like an astronaut, opening the hatch to an alien planet. I opened it to a small foyer. There was a modern-looking coat rack which I hung my soggy jacket on. To the right was an inviting, lamp-lit living room. There was one of those long arched floor lamps spilling its light on an Eames Lounge chair. I imagined Ji-woo perched on it, with a warm beverage, reading a dense book. Floor to ceiling bookshelves and floor to ceiling windows lined the rest of the room, I realized it was a top floor corner apartment. Black and white photographs and pen drawings hung on the wall. There were blankets draped on the modern couches. It felt uncharacteristically cozy. The furniture all flowed perfectly, like it was a team of designers’ life’s work. 

    On the left there was another closet. Then further down, it opened up to the dining room. “In here” She shouted, from that direction. 

    I kicked off my tattered sneakers and the uppers deflated like popped balloons. I took one step toward the kitchen and I was struck with the most extraordinary smell. It was rich, minerally and spicy. I let my nose lead the way. 

She stood at the stove. She was wearing a loose knit navy sweater that was well loved and jeans. Her sleeves were pushed up. She was wearing a nice apron. Her hair was pulled back, not in a braid, but in a perfectly round bun. 

    The dining table was set for two. Plates, silverware, a wine glass for her and a beer glass for me. There were two candles and a decorative bowl. The bowl was filled with some unknown liquid that looked like molten gold. I wanted to stick my finger in it but didn’t. 

    She turned and saw me, and I saw her. “I didn’t mean that casual.” she said jokingly. Lately she has been making more and more jokes, but only during our dates. It was comfortable, and usually pretty funny. 

“It smells so good, what is it?” I said. I walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter by the stove. She leaned over and planted a kiss on my lips. I was so surprised that it was over before I could react. There was a battle in my head between the heavenly smelling food and the thought of the kiss. 

“It’s almost ready. Get us drinks from the fridge.” She instructed me. The fridge was filled with different sized glass containers. They all stacked neatly, each with a label of what it was and a date. There was a bottle of white wine and a fancy looking beer with today’s date. I took them from the fridge and opened them. She looked as though she were a professional chef. She moved with tempered urgency and precision. “Budae-Jjigae. Budae is ‘army’ or ‘army base’, jjigae is ‘stew’. It’s a recipe my grandmother taught me... a long time ago.” She stopped what she was doing and looked off into space. 

A few seconds later, she regained consciousness from her memory and started to plate the food. It was finished. 

It was delicious. It was perfect. It was obvious that Ji-Woo had made this dish many times and was able to recreate it perfectly. “How many other romantic interests had she made this for?” I wondered, but quickly spurned the thought. I wasn’t shy, and got a hearty second helping. 

I wiped my mouth and leaned back in my chair, and polished off the last of my beer. I wanted badly to unbutton my pants and relieve the pressure on my waistband. Instead, we got up and cleaned the kitchen together. 

Later on, we found each other on the sofa near the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I was elated. Warm, with a full belly. Calm, sleepy, but present, I closed my eyes and relished. 

“Do not fall asleep.”

Ji-Woo instructed me. “I will be right back.” She said. 

Insubordinately, I was falling asleep when from down the hall, I heard her call me, “Come here, I need to show you something.” I sleepily approached the room at the end of the hall. A bedroom. As I got closer to the doorway, I could see a mirror’s reflection in the bedroom. It truly was a bed-room. A queen size mattress and two small side tables with lamps were the only furniture. Warm, golden light spilled out of the bedside lamps that reflected off the polished hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A single, brand new candle was lit on the nightstand. But there was no lighter or matches anywhere. How was it lit?

    Ji-Woo lay on the bed, one leg crossed over the other. Her right arm supported her posture. Her hair was down. It was now I could fully realize the length and volume of her hair. It flowed down her back and fanned out perfectly behind her like a ginkgo leaf. The low lighting in the room accented her dark makeup. Her eyeshadow shimmered subtly.

She was wearing a lacy bodysuit of lingerie so scant, it could hardly be described as clothing. A lacy and delicate fabric choker connected to thin straps perfectly obfuscated her nipples. Ethereal panties suspend a pair of elegant garters. The fabric adhered to her slender, toned body as if it were made custom. 

She eyed me fervently,

And I was very awake then.

After it was over I felt euphoric and peaceful,

Unburdened. 

I turned over, towards her in bed.

I put my head on her chest.

 And I heard nothing.

[wisecollectorofbooks]

Blood Heir - Amélie Wen Zhao

❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️

Originally reviewed on Goodreads January 7, 2020, presented here with minor edits.

This was a very interesting book. I remembered only after I started listening to it that there had been a controversy surrounding it a few years ago, and having listened to it completely... I don't understand much of the controversy. I say this from the perspective of a white American woman, true... but this is a book that is based in a land very much like the Eurasian continent, with the main country based very heavily on pre-Russian Revolution Russia. I feel like a lot of the views that the book was somehow disrespectful to African slaves under US slavery are forgetting, or maybe are not familiar with, the pre-Communist practice of serfdom in the Russian empire, a form of debt bondage and indentured servitude that kept the Russian poor in a different form of bondage, true, than US and western European slavery of Africans, but which has often been compared to slavery given the ownership of poor people by the wealthy landowners, lack of freedom of movement. As Peter Kolchin described in his phenomenal book looking at slavery in the US and Russia, Russian serfdom was, in terms of the ability and occurrence of selling people at the owner's will, no different from the US's chattel slavery of Africans, though in terms of other treatment, there were significant differences. This serfdom lasted longer in Russia than it did in the rest of feudal Europe, where it began fading out after the Black Death waves. Under Russian serfdom, "unfree" peoples could be sold between landowners with the land that they worked, and at one point, 80% of the people who lived in the Russian empire were serfs. Peasant revolts occurred throughout Russian history, and there are reasons why Lenin was so successful in getting followers among the working classes of Russian before and during the Revolution. And now, even though "legalized" slavery no longer occurs in the US and Russia, there is still an on-going slave and servitude system, particularly of south east Asian women to other parts of the world, and the subjugation of minority peoples in China and elsewhere. This book, to me, draws on the Russian imperial history as well as events and practices on-going even now in Asia. To ignore that slavery in the US - as absolutely horrendous as it was and the outcomes of it that we are still struggling with to this day in the US - was and is not the only example of human depravity, is to de-legitimize the experiences of those other victims and survivors of slavery and bondage. Writing a book set in one context, incorporating different experiences of slavery and exploitation, is not ignoring another context, is not disrespecting the memory of another horrendous experience. It would be like... writing a book that draws on the horrific experiences of comfort women under imperial Japanese rule during WWII and having someone claim that it is disrespecting and insulting the victims of Catholic priests who molested children in the US, Ireland, and elsewhere. Similar awful things can and do happen in multiple places, and not incorporating all of them into a story doesn't mean that the author is somehow de-legitimitizing or disrespecting those that were not included. It means that that is not the story the author is telling. The rest of my thoughts are hidden for spoilers:

Things that I liked:

This was a really interesting take on the Anastasia story. While the lead character's name was similar, this was itself an entirely new story in its own right. The characters were really well developed, all of them. There was one character in particular that just broke my heart when they died.

The world building was excellent. I felt like I was there for the story; it was incredibly well-written, and the details were so well-presented. There is a fine balance between telling and showing in storytelling, and the author managed it excellently.

I enjoyed watching the characters grow and evolve. Ana, for all that she had a traumatic childhood, is a noble woman, a princess, and so her view of her country and her people, even with her own experiences, do not often reflect the reality of what is happening in her country. She's been so focused on her own revenge, that of course she needs to be exposed to and learn the reality, in order for her to succeed. She is a good foil for Ramson.

And Ramson... some of my favorite parts of the story are the flashbacks of him and his childhood best friend. In many ways, that story, in the background of the book, was the most heartbreaking of all to me. I didn't expect him to become one of my favorite characters, but over the course of the book, he did.

Things that I didn't like as much:

I listened to this on audio, so this may have been more a result of the format, but there were some problems with pacing. There were points in the first half that felt really slow, that I contemplated stopping or skipping ahead (though I did neither). It did help build the tension, but I feel like the pacing got better in the second half of the audiobook.

There are points in the story where Ana's naivete was so frustrating that I wanted to shake her. As much as I enjoyed her character development, at points she just did the absolute dumbest thing that she could out of anger or spite, grasping the idiot ball and running with it, that even though the results of those actions continued the story to its end... it was super annoying.

I didn't know what to expect going into this book; I've read a lot of YA fantasy recently that was thoroughly disappointing, but I ended up really enjoying it. I'm glad that I kept going with it, and I look forward to the next one.

[kshitij1997]

Hello again!

This story goes more complex as I write it :D

Building from the cliff-hanger last time, I have a major responsibility of bringing this story justice. We shall meet a lot of new people this time, some of them we know from the movies, some we don't. I hope it turns out as satisfying and gripping as I intended.

All frozen and Tangled characters belong to Disney, all I own is this head-cannon and the original characters.

With that, let's continue!

Chapter 5- Of parents, their children and the legend of Flynn Rider

Even as the king and queen of Arendelle announced the arrival of princess Elsa, they were more worried about the kidnapping of princess Eva Rapunzel, which was a scandal that was starting to make the crown of Corona look bad. King Reginald deployed a massive force to look for the princess and her abductor across Europe, which was christened 'The Golden Knights'. While The Golden Knights were supported in Corona by the backing of the king, they were seen as invaders in the rest of Europe, as a legitimate threat to the sovereignty of various kingdoms in the continent. Things came to a head as The Golden Knights grew throughout Europe, with some opportunists recognizing the possibility of grabbing power. The kingdoms feared that The Golden Knights would enable the local people to hedge more power, instigate revolution and crumble the hard-earned peace after nearly three decades of war. Such was the state of early 19th century Europe, rapidly industrializing and rife with mistrust and caution even among royal families related by similar blood.

It was left to Iduna and Agnarr, who had already conceived their second child, to come to Corona's rescue; who promptly called a conference between all the European nations in the only non-aligned country on the continent, Switzerland. Nearly every country's monarch came, except for the Tsar of Russia and the Emperors of France and Great Britain, as their respective health had started to fail. They had sent their chief advisers. As for the Ottomans, they refused to attend as a gesture of defiance. With queen Iduna presiding over the meeting, king Agnarr began to speak. "Your most royal majesties, lend me your ears." Said Agnarr, as he addressed the conference "The pope has been kind enough to grant us this neutral ground in order to decide how the business of looking for princess Eva must be conducted in the continent, or beyond. Now, king Reginald saw it fit to summon a huge force to look for his daughter. It is our moral duty to help our fellow monarch in this time of distress." The Arendellian king proceeded to continue his speech when he was rudely interrupted.

"This is such a crock of shit." Spat the duke of Weselton "I personally cannot believe the energy put into searching for a lost girl of a godforsaken kingdom."

"What are you trying to say, honourable duke?" snarled king Reginald, even as Agnarr tried to calm him down.

Ignoring the implied death threat in the question, the duke continued " Every time a problem arises in Europe, it always comes from fucking Corona. Be it Napoleon deposing the former king or queen of Corona, or the king threatening war in the middle east either for restitution in Serbia from my biggest partners there; the Ottomans, or for exotic medicine for his cursed fucking wife, or now, when he sends an invading force into my fucking fief to look for his damn litter. It has been two months already, give up, let us live in some fucking piece already, and conceive again. It's not as if the princess was to be the heir anyway. Moreover, you and your wife obviously know how to-" the duke's rant was cut short as king Reginald lunged towards him, kicked him once in the gut and once under the belt, and then proceeded to throttle the life out of him.

"I'll POUND YOU TO FUCKING PIECES, YOU FUCKING WEASEL!" roared king Reginald, the six-foot three king more than a match for the five footer duke. He would have made good on his threat, had he not been held back by the kings of Arendelle, the Southern Isles and Austria-Hungary. Agnarr finally managed to pull Reginald away and slapped him in the face "What the fuck is wrong with you, Reginald?!" Agnarr screamed to Reginald in the face, and Reginald was ready in sock him in the face, when-

"SILENCE!" thundered queen Iduna and banged the dais with her hands, which stunned everyone into being quiet. "WE WILL NOT REACH AN ACCORD IF WE CONTINUE TRYING TO ANTAGONIZE THE KING OF CORONA WHEN HE FACES THIS TOUGH TIME! MOREOVER, SUCH UNPARLIAMENTARY LANGUAGE AND VIOLENCE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED IN THIS SOLEMN GATHERING!" Iduna finished her tirade, then began again "I shall at once direct king Agnarr and king Reginald towards a period of recess, during which time they shall settle their differences peacefully and reach common ground again. As for the duke of Weselton, his disgusting behaviour and efforts towards instigating discord in this meeting, are grounds enough for me to expel him from the conference with prejudice." Iduna finished as she settled down.

The duke was beside himself with anger "I get kicked out of the meeting for calling a spade a spade?! All right….in front of all the kings of Europe I say this, your kingdom will regret this decision, Iduna."

"Leave of your own volition before you are defenestrated." Iduna said with a voice ice-cold, as the marshals prepared to throw out the troublemaker. Anticipating a painful recovery if he were thrown out from the windows, the duke beat a hasty retreat.

"Swine" muttered king Christian of the Southern Isles under his breath.

The gathering continued more or less smoothly after the duke's departure as Agnarr and Reginald were able to calm down and join the conference again. To remove any troubling feudal implications from the Golden Knights, it was agreed to change it from an armed force to a humanitarian one; a landmark decision as no prior organization like that had ever existed. While its primary objection was to still locate the lost princess and hopefully bring her kidnapper to justice, the Golden Knights now became a proto salvation army, setting makeshift camps, soup kitchens and clinics in princess Eva's name all over Europe. Resistance was still met; but it never broke out into open revolt.

Some questioned where queen Sophia was in all this. European society expected her to be the distraught and helpless parent praying for her child's safety, rescue and return. However, queen Sophia was not most people. She had been down this road before, wallowing in her misery and praying for fortune to reverse its unkind ways. But now she knew better. As Iduna and Agnarr went to support her dear Reggie, she stayed back in order to care for baby princess Elsa. It was she who nursed the curiously cold child. When she discovered her secret as Elsa's emotions became more prominent, she embraced her presence even further. The baby ice princess was unusually intelligent for her age, always understanding when Sophia was sad, or happy, and acted accordingly, making snowflakes and loud gurgling noises, which melted the queen's heart. As for the public, queen Sophia turned her attention to public welfare, instituting public laws that protected the wages of the emerging working class in the cities, and creating a vast chain of clinics, hospitals, and orphanages and institutions, all this in princess Eva's name. Soon, it led to Corona having the most public-centred and public-friendly policies in Europe, which brought both the king and queen respect from across the continent. When asked why this sudden change, she simply answered,

"When a mother loses a child, all that love has to go somewhere. And what are the citizens of this great kingdom if not my metaphorical kids." It was a masterstroke of an answer that endeared her to the public, along with adding princess Eva's name in all her ventures. Princess Eva soon acquired a mythical status, a figure who was sacrificed to bring prosperity to the people of Corona.

As good natured and effective Sophia's take care demeanour was, it couldn't keep away the outside world from drastic change. In this din and pandemonium of all these things, the thirteenth child of king Christian was born without incident. It was a young boy, who took after his polish mother in terms of hair and eyes and took after the king in his nose and general face. His mother planned to name the prince Janus, after the great Polish king Jan Sobieski, who had led the charge of the winged hussars, ousting the Ottomans out of Vienna and protecting Europe from Ottoman dominance and suppression back in 1683. However, the king of the Southern Isles didn't care much for the name, believing it was too effeminate and silly for a prince, and had him christened to the more publicly acceptable Hans. His mother seethed at this utter disregard for her culture and identity to such an extent that, even as the baby prince was only beginning to recognize those around him, she decided to make sure prince Hans was raised Polish first. The fact that the Russian Empire, Corona and Austria-Hungary took every opportunity to carve out new territory from her ancestral home of Poland didn't help soothe her rage.

As for Sophia's policies, while they did a lot to bring the ever-increasing middle class out of poverty, it brought new problems along with them. Consider the Rhineland, the new industrial heartland of Corona. Even as the kingdom was modernizing, the climate of Northern Europe had started to change. As a result, the rains in the kingdom had started to dwindle, leaving agriculture not a very viable option for the populace. The cities of the Rhineland had started to burst at the seams with new arrivals from the countryside as a result, and the cities had become saturated with people from all walks and varieties of life as a result, from artisans, scholars and philosophers to the bargemen, dockworkers, other various blue collar jobs and veterans from the Napoleonic wars. There were a lot of orphans from the Napoleonic wars in Rhineland, and the cities had various orphanages built to accommodate them. However, while it was comparatively easy to build new spaces for those orphans to live in, trying to raise them into model members of society was a different beast all together. Soon, there were scores of kids doing odd jobs like selling trinkets, sweets or little items like candles and matchsticks on the street, sometimes sneaking into factories and demanding work from the factory owners, who readily gave them work, quietly ignoring the child labour laws the Monarchy of Corona had set up. Some found their real home on the street, joining a gang to get a piece of the action.

Two such children with these stories were Eugene and Mabel, a couple of nine-year olds who had become friends in one such orphanage. However, the two couldn't be further different from each other. Mabel believed in the good in people and honesty, raising money on her own in order to afford to go to those new-fangled schools being set up in the country. To raise said money, she often sold odd titbits on the road to pedestrians and passers-by. Eugene didn't believe in such lofty ideals, choosing instead to believe in standing up for himself and being on the never-ending hustle. Eugene was part of a gang of 10-year-old robbers led by a brutish eleven-year-old boy named Markus, and they regularly held up carriages and coaches inside and outside the city. Eugene got into the gang through his presence of mind and wit, and his ability to look innocent. It was Eugene who came up with the shivering dodge, the lucifer dodge and the scaldrum dodge. The shivering dodge was bit of play-acting, making oneself shiver by bathing in cold water, when one could get their hands on it, or wearing their thinnest clothes to make sure they shiver. Then one would go around the streets of the city, pleading for money for a warm coat or a hot beverage. As for the lucifer dodge, one carried some trinkets, and pretended to be pushed when a rich toff passed by, throwing one's merchandise on the ground. Looking at their ruined shop, they would pretend to bawl their hearts out and people would throw some coins in sympathy. Lastly, the scaldrum dodge, which Eugene found disgusting, but fell back onto in desperate times. It involved bruising oneself, by rubbing vinegar open soapy arms making them look like nasty blisters. It was uncomfortable and dirty, but at least one could get to spend a few days in the hospitals that were set up recently. Moreover, one could lay low in the hospital to stay away from watchful eyes of the law, which was beginning to crack down on gangs like theirs.

It was a clear contrast to what Markus preferred to do; garrotting. A typical garrotter used to hide in the horse-drawn carriages that carried people around. During the ride, the garrotter choked the passenger by his knuckles, being careful not to crush the windpipe and kill the unfortunate sod but enough to render them unconscious, then robbing the unconscious passenger and paying the carriage driver who was in on it. Another favourite money-maker of his was to nick purses at a public execution, to disappear into a crowd of spectators and ending up with enough wallets and cash for weeks. Last but not the least, there was always the smuggling of tea, China and other such valuables along the shipping routes of the Rhine river into all of Europe, and into Arendelle's canals and the dark sea up north as well. Markus' ways were rewarding but dangerous, as it was clearly a crime punishable by death.

Eugene's scams were far safer and as a result ,they were decent money makers, and soon a lot of kids were doing it for some pocket cash, but they had to pay tribute to Markus and Eugene, who were the clear two leaders of the gang. It was a strange camaraderie between the two of them. For to the world, Eugene went by his own name, but for Markus, he was Flynn.

"The fuck kind of name is Eugene anyway, huh? What are ya, bent?" Markus cackled once during such a talk. "The fuck does that mean, asshole?" Eugene grinned.

"It's not just the name, the whole damn act that you put, you know." Markus said.

"Brings in the dosh now, don't it? And without the noose threatening me neck" Eugene replied.

"True, but that's the street life I chose." said Markus. He loved the streets and saw no future for himself beyond that.

"You make me sad, you bastard. I see myself living in a big house, with the love of me life beside me, and an army of servants to lord over."

"Like the mansion at the outside the city huh? With your little trick?"

"Sure. However, she ain't no trick. Her name is Mabel."

"I know who she is, and I also know she don't like me."

"Well , you ain't no choir boy, punk."

"Yes and thank fuck for that."

"Ha! You twat!" Eugene laughed.

"Right back at ya, fuckin' romantic actor!" Markus laughed back.

Markus may have been an oaf, but he was right about how Mabel felt about him "That guy's a bad influence."

"A 'bad influence'? The fuck does that mean, Mabel?"

"It means he's rubbin' off you the wrong way, Eugene. In addition, if you want to cuss like a sailor, go to the barge and earn your keep."

"Bad influence, in addition, money well spent on books, eh?"

"It's our job innit? To become better and rise up?"

"Aye, that's what I'm doing, Mabel."

"Yeah, for the big house, huh?"

It was well-known throughout the orphanage how Eugene claimed that he would own that mansion one day. He used to get starry eyes when he started talking about it. If there was a child in Eugene, he came up in times like this.

"Hmm" rued Eugene.

"Speaking of that mansion, I got a job there, as a seller from the mansion." Said Mabel with a smile.

"Fuckin' result, that's damn neat!" shouted Eugene excitedly as he hugged Mabel.

"Eugene!"

"Sorry, got excited in the moment."

"That's all right, I think it's swell too. But if I want to study, I got to earn quick and stop working." finished Mabel.

"Don't worry about dosh, I always have some."

"Sure, but no more scams alright? They're cracking down on stuff like that."

"I swear I'll be sharp, Mabel."

"As for Markus, look I don't think he's that bad, but he's certainly an idiot. You gotta take care of him, make sure he doesn't land in any scuffles."

"Okay. I'll do it."

"Promise?"

"Sure"

"Look at you, taking charge." Mabel grinned.

"Look at you, moving up and caring for Markus." Eugene laughed.

"Hey Mabel, call me Flynn from now on."

"No" giggled Mabel as she gave him a small peck on his cheek.

This happy mood was not to last, as it became clearer to Eugene that Mabel was becoming miserable a few months later, towards the end of the year. It was a mansion in all but name as her employer was a hard-hearted taskmaster, resorting to abuse if his targets were not met, and poor Mabel suffered the worst of it, both physical and emotional. As for Markus, his life had become tougher as the law was coming down on his operation, and it was becoming tougher to buy off the bargemen, the carriage drivers and the law as a result.

"Those sons of bitches, they dare PISS IN MY HAT?!" screamed Markus on one such day.

"Zip it Mark" Eugene tried to calm him down.

"If those bargemen don't straighten up, I'll set their fuckin' ships ablaze, you hear me, Flynn?" Markus growled.

"You realize that they can wring your neck in one go, right? Don't be stupid. Talk to them, reach an accord and put this shit to bed." Eugene spoke.

"Reach an accord? Another expression from Mabel, eh Flynn?" Markus snapped

"Don't joke about her right now, she's in terrible shape. I gotta help her too somehow."

"Then go with her, don't worry about me, I'll talk to them." Markus said

"Yeah, burning their fuckin' ships?!" Eugene exclaimed incredulously

"Hey, I was just hurtin' and blowin' off some steam there, alright Flynn? Even I know better than to engage those seven-foot giants in a mosh pit." Markus replied.

"Alright, fine. I'll go with Mabel. Just don't blow your head open, Mark." said Eugene as he went on his way to Mabel.

What he saw Mabel, it wasn't a pretty sight.

There she was, in torn rags, bruised all over, beaten half to death and possibly molested, or worse.

"Eugene!" she cried as she collapsed into his chest, his vest quickly becoming wet from her tears and her blood as she sobbed.

"Who did this?" Eugene growled, even if he had half guessed who it was.

"They abused me and….threw me out in the middle of winter to fend for myself." Mabel wept, as she caught her breath.

"The people at the mansion?"

"Yes"

"I had to do something I never thought I would do, even in the direst of situations." Mabel cried.

"What?" Eugene asked, dreading how she might answer.

"I stole a week's supplies, planning to escape from that torturous place. I thought I could get out of the city, after selling what I could, then go as far away as possible from there. But I was caught. Those bastards, they beat the life out of me, and stripped me naked and-." Mabel couldn't finish her sentence as she crumbled into sobs again.

Eugene tried holding on to her, tears ebbing out of his eyes, but Mabel pushed him away, clearly hiding something she either couldn't tell Eugene out of shame, or at a loss to explain what had been done to her. Eugene considered going to the law, but decided against it, as it wouldn't change anything. He was jolted out of his thoughts when Mabel began again,

"Eugene, you've always been good to me, thank you so much for that. But I'm afraid I must get out of this city, and never come back."

"Wait, don't go! I'll make sure they pay, I promise." Eugene pleaded.

"I can't stay here after what happened, I must leave." Mabel pleaded back.

"Eugene choked back a lump that threatened to become a bawl when he said "Alright, but at least take some cash." He gave her his day's cut of his operation, two Corona Marks, which would have been enough to sustain someone for a month.

Mabel embraced him in gratitude before scurrying out of sight. Eugene sighed "Maybe, someday, she'll come back."

Alas, but there was no joyful end to Mabel's plight, as a rival gang member, jealous of Eugene, followed Mabel and beat her up again, and robbed her at knifepoint. He didn't even spare her shawl, which she used for covering herself, leaving her further bruised, in tatters and only a few matchboxes to keep her company as it started snowing on Christmas eve.

Eugene was ignorant of this misfortune as he scurried back to Markus, who'd been done for.

It had started well for Markus, as he had managed to find common ground with the carriage drivers and most of the law enforcers, but he made the mistake of going alone without muscle to back him up. The bargemen took the opportunity to anger Markus, who lunged at them with his razor. But it was over in an instant for poor Markus, as the bargemen broke his neck with one smack of their hand, and law enforcers shot him in the head for good measure. There Markus lay dead, his face blackened and bloody onto the snowy streets.

Eugene stepped back from the corpse in horror at the realization; he'll have to turn rat to save himself.

And so he did, in the snowy, dark night of Christmas eve 1820.

He went straight to the magistrate's office, cut a deal with law enforcement to let him go, after ratting out everyone from the three rival gangs to the corrupt law enforcers and bargemen. It was mayhem in the city that night, as the rival gangs were dealt with extreme prejudice, and the other bargemen, law enforcers and carriage drivers were arrested and dealt with savagely. Even the smuggling cargo ships were set ablaze or sunk.

It was an emotionally drained and tired Eugene who started to arrange for his departure from the city on Christmas morning when he glanced at something, or someone that would stand as a sheet of flame in his memory forever.

There lay Mabel, cooped up in a street corner, under nearly half a foot of snow, frozen to death.

Evidently, the poor girl had burned up the few matchsticks that she had left to keep warm. She had also tried in vain to knock on the doors and beg to be taken in for the night. Tragically, the Christmas spirit of giving didn't apply to a supposed bottom-feeding orphan like her.

But now, a crowd had started to gather around the frozen corpse, the people now showing sympathy to the lost soul according to their convenience. Eugene moved away from the scene in disgust. He hated it, he hated them all, he hated this fucking city. Fuck them, fuck them all.

As he moved towards the outskirts of the city, his aggrieved rage renewed when he saw the big house again. It all started here, for him, for Mabel, for all of them.

Once, staying in that house was all that he ever wanted.

Now, the mere sight of that monstrosity made him retch.

He sneaked into the house's kitchen, lit some coals alight, and let them loose onto the flammable powdered flour. As for good measure, he barred all the escape routes once he came out, cut loose one of the tethered horses, and rode off into the dawn as the house started burning in earnest, and the screams of people being charred to death could be heard in the distance.

It was pandemonium with all this chaos in the city, with rumours of a certain Flynn Rider exposing the criminal gangs, the corrupt officials and the bargemen. It was further rumoured that it was the same Flynn Rider burnt down the house that rumoured tortured little children for amusement and made them work almost to death, directly in violation to the Monarch's laws.

And thus, on Christmas day 1820, the legend of Flynn Rider came to be.

Whoa, this was a painful chapter to write.

As I can see, this is shaping up to be a neat Tangled-Frozen crossover, I promise I'll get to everyone in time.

Hang in there, people!

As always, constructive feedback is always welcome.

[autodidact-adventures]

Siberian History (Part 3): Before the Russians

The Göktürks established the First Turkic Khaganate in the 500s AD, succeeding the Rouran Khaganate as the dominant power of the Mongolian Plateau.  They rapidly expanded their territory in Central Asia.  The First Turkic Khaganate ended in 581, splitting into the Eastern & Western Turkic Khaganates.  These were conquered by the Tang Dynasty in 630 and 657 respectively.

The Turkic Khaganate & its neighbours in 570.

The Turkic Khaganate at is greatest extent in 576.

The Western & Eastern Turkic Khaganates in 600 AD.

The Second Turkic Khaganate began in 682.  The Uyghurs (and others) rebelled in 742, and conquered the khaganate in 744.  They then established the Uyghur Khaganate , a tribal confederation that the Chinese referred to as the Nine Clans, and led by the Orkhon Uyghur.

The Second Turkic Khaganate in c. 700 AD.

The Uyghur Khaganate & areas under its dominion, at its greatest extent, c. 820 AD.

The Uyghur Khaganate traded with China and spread throughout the Yenisei Valley.  They built great tumuli, adorned with monoliths, over their dead.  Although they were originally pastoral nomads, the Uyghurs became agriculturists.  They irrigated wide areas of land with canals that have been used by more modern peoples since then.

In 839, a minister named Kürebir seized the throne of the Uyghur Khaganate after the legitimate ruler was forced to commit suicide. In that year, there was also a famine and an epidemic, leading to much instability.  A very severe winter killed much of the Uyghurs' livestock.

In 840, Kulug Bagha (one of the nine Uyghur ministers, and a rival of Kürebir) fled northwards to the Yenisei Kyrgyz and asked them to invade the khaganate.  They did this, and the Uyghur Khaganate fell, replaced by the Yenisei Kyrgyz Khaganate (which lasted until 925).

The Yenisei Kyrgyz Khaganate.

The Yenisei Kyrgyz were able farmers and skilled in handicrafts, including metalware.  They continued a brisk trade with the Tibetans and Chinese.  Their writing system was runic, and survives in fragmented inscriptions on clay vessels, tombstones, and stone idols decorated with symbols of the sun.

During the 1200s, Genghis Khan's cavalry charged into the Transbaikal region and swept westwards across Siberia, pillaging the local tribes and wreaking havoc on them.  Very quickly, their dominion was extended over much of Asia (including parts of China & India), and all of Sibera (except the extreme north).

The Mongols continued westwards, passing the southern spur of the Altai Mountains to the plains of Central Asia.  They overran Russia, which consisted of a number of feudal principalities at that time.

In 1240, while advancing towards Europe, the Mongols captured the city of Kiev.  They razed it to the ground and massacred the people. Ögedei Khan, Genghis Khan's third son and his successor, died in 1241, and only that brought the Mongol onslaught to an end.

Within the administrative division of the Mongol Empire, Western Siberia and Russia both belonged to the Golden Horde.  The Golden Horde began as the north-western sector of the Mongol Empire, and it was a Mongol khanagate.  It became a separate khaganate after the Mongol Empire fragmented in 1259.

The Golden Horde was too decentralized to last.  Russia freed itself from the Mongol yoke in 1480, and the Horde's succession states were established.

[historical-revolution]

The Russian Revolution

Probably one of the most shocking and important events of the 20th century the Russian Revolution shows us two sides of extreme politics and how much influence the common people have over the establishment.

What was the Russian Revolution?

The Russian Revolution was a series of events between 1905 and 1917 ( however this has been a topic of historical debate) that brought down the autocracy of the Russian Tsar and lead to the rise of a strict communist rule in Russia for the next 70 years.

Who were key figures?

Tsar Nicholas II

Tsar Nicholas reigned from the 1st November 1894 to his abdication on the 15th of March 1917

He was unfortunately a weak and out of touch autocrat kept in the dark about the state of his country and was ill equipped in mind and temperament to rule the Russian empire through the early 20th century. He loved his wife Empress consort Alexandra and his children dearly hardly being able to part from them, Unfortunately his obliviousness and stubbornness to change caused him to lose his throne, The Tsar along with his wife and children were brutally executed in 1918 by the Bolsheviks

Vladimir Lenin

Lenin was leader of the newly formed Soviet State from 1917 to his death in 1922. Lenin was a staunch Marxist and revolutionary who formed the Bolshevik party which eventually overthrew the Tsarist government in the February revolution of 1917. He was a very well educated and manic man who believed strongly in the Marxist worldview.

Grigori Rasputin

Rasputin is probably one of the most infamous and mysterious figures in all of modern history, a lowly peasant monk became one of the most politically powerful men in all of Russia. It was his close relationship and power over the Russian royal family that brought their downfall as well as his own.

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky was a key figure in the Bolshevik party although his beliefs weren’t as radical as Lenin’s. He was a well educated and highly rational intelligent man who initially sided with the Mensheviks in 1905 before switching to the Bolshevik party where he frequently clashed with Lenin’s extreme ideas.

So what caused this revolution?

Historians generally believe these were the issues that brought about the Russian Revolution...

Discontent Urban workers

Russia had just hit the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century behind the rest of the world by about 150 years or so. The concept of factory work was new and therefore working conditions were terrible many workers got sick and severely injured. As a result they eventually got sick and tired of working 12 hours a day and barely being able to survive and support their family and so they rebelled and easily had hatred towards the autocracy

Discontent Peasants

Russian peasants still lived under feudalism in the 20th century, when there was poor harvest and lack of food year after year and their young working men were forced to fight and be brutally slaughtered in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and then in the First World War in 1914 they pretty much had enough of the establishment and combined with them being uneducated easily indoctrinated

The social structure promoting privilege and autocratic rule

Only 1.1% of the population controlled the population and lived in luxury while everyone else lived in feudalistic conditions. The peasants and working classes also had no legal protection no government body to represent them to the nobility and have their point of view considered. The newly educated urban worker also had to deal with limited civil liberties and disgustingly low wages. The Tsar and the other nobels refused to consider social and political change that may make the scales of Russian power more equal. To add to this the Tsar wasn’t a very charismatic or competent leader

What were the main events?

The revolution of 1905

Also known as Bloody Sunday this revolutionary event started as a protest march and petition the first strike was at the Putlov steelworks in St Petersburg on the 16th of January. The protesters hoped to achieve a guarantee of civil liberties such as freedom of speech, Measures to alleviate poverty, the introduction of an income tax, better working conditions such as a eight hour work day. However Nicholas II opposed every bit of that aim, he believed the Tsar’s word was law he made all decisions as a result he used censorship and his secret police to quash any ideas of political reform during his reign. The Revolution of 1905 was no exception and became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ when a bunch of the Tsar’s soldiers went into the protest killing 92 people the backlash was two political parties against the status quo the Mensheviks and the more radical infamous Bolshevik party lead by Lenin.

The October manifesto and the Dumases

After everyone started calling the Tsar ‘Nicholas the bloody’ the government thought it was a good idea to give the people what they want or at least appear to. So the October manifesto was written as a sort of constitution. The Tsar also created the Dumas a representative government of which he had complete control. The first two Dumas in 1906 and 1907 were critical of the autocratic government and were quickly disbanded. The Tsar had been given the chance to hear the people and make social and economic amendments that benefited the majority. Instead he chose to remain ignorant of the people’s discontent. Before the third Duma was created the Nicholas altered electoral law and significantly reduced the representation of peasants, land owners and urban civilians. As a result these Dumas were more conservative and in favour of the Tsar. The third Duma was allowed to run its full term from 1907 to 1912 as was the fourth Dumas from 1912 to 1917.

World War One

The outbreak of WW1 put huge pressure on a country that was not equipped to deal with modern warfare let alone on that immense scale. Initially the country banded together to support the motherland the nobility and the impoverished alike this was not to last. In late August 1914 the Germans issued a devastating assault, the Russian army had lost 3.5 million men by the end of 1915. The war was the tip of the iceberg for a already discontent nation yearning for change, the massive economic toll the war took on the people was devastating with Fathers, sons and even horses being lost to what seemed to be a pointless war.

The first revolution of 1917

On the 8th of March civilians hungry for bread took to the streets of Petrograd (St Petersburg) supported by 90,000 men and women on strike, the protesters clashed with police and refused to leave the streets. By the 10th of March the protest had spread to Petrograd workers, mobs destroyed police stations, several factories elected deputies to the Petrograd council of workers following a model devised during the 1905 revolution. The army garrison was sent to quell the uprisings, there were some occasions where they opened fire killing demonstrators. Despite this the protestors stood their ground and eventually the army grew frustrated and began supporting the protesters. The imperial government had no choice but to resign and a provisional government was established, the Tsar formally abdicated three days later ending four hundred years of tsarist rule.

The October Revolution

The provisional government set up was still run by the nobility who hoped to prevent this revolution going any further and although the socialist soviets who represented the lower classes had a voice and control over some militia the government still had capitalist and aristocratic interest at heart. This period of dual power was very chaotic for Russia as a whole there were many strikes during this time. When Lenin called for an end to Russia’s involvement in WWI and the leaders of the new government decided to keep fighting this unpopular war the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions were able to exploit virtually universal disdain towards the war effort as justification to advance the revolution further. The Bolsheviks turned workers' militias under their control into the Red Guards (later the Red Army) over which they exerted substantial control. the Bolsheviks led an army of workers and soldiers in Petrograd that successfully overthrew the Provisional Government, which gave all its authority to the Soviets the was capital being relocated to Moscow soon afterwards. The Bolsheviks had secured a strong base of support within the Soviets and, as the now supreme governing party, established a federal government dedicated to reorganizing the former empire into the world's first socialist republic, practicing Soviet democracy on a national and international scale. The promise to end Russia's participation in the First World War was honored promptly with the Bolshevik leaders signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918. To further secure the new state, the Cheka was established which functioned as a revolutionary security service that sought to weed out and punish those considered to be "enemies of the people.” Soon a civil war broke out between the red army (Bolsheviks) and the White army ( counter revolutionaries) and other less extreme socialists this lasted many years until the Bolsheviks took complete control and therefore rebranded themselves as the communist party, paving the way for the for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922.

Sources:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910046

https://youtu.be/KOK1TMSyKcM

https://youtu.be/VHQWpcpJVM0

https://www.netflix.com/title/80145290?s=i&trkid=13747225

https://youtu.be/zXHybEb4b_o

https://www.netflix.com/title/80158770?s=i&trkid=13747225

And my own Essay lmao

[padawan-historian]

The Female Game: An Analysis of the Stormborn Dragon

SPOILER warning for Season 8, Episode 1-3 and more of a SPOILER WATCH for Season 8, Episode 4 (no plot related details, but . . . a teaspoon of character and tone vibes from the episode).

Now I know we are still wrapping our heads around what we witnessed last night on Game of Thrones. But there was one discussion that caught my attention – Daenerys character development (or lack thereof) and how women are represented on the show:  

i hate that ambition in women is always used as a bad trait.

All her hard work and talk of breaking the wheel for nothing. All this talk of her being different and just and “see you for who you are” for absolutely nothing.

They should rename season 8 to “the tale of how we trashed a character’s development, made her an army of haters, just so we could make Jon Snow a hero: A study on Daenerys Targaryen.”

they really are setting up “Mad Queen” Dany and I’ll be honest, I don’t blame her at this point.

If a man acted that way it would be perfectly fine.

every single woman on game of thrones deserves better.

Ever since Game of Thrones graced the stage seven years ago, a number of fans, critics and activists have voiced concerns about the way the show portrays violence (especially sexual violence) towards female characters. However, those concerns have slowly evolved into larger conversations about the way these heroines are portrayed in comparison to power. Westeros – and most of the known world in the show – are under a patriarchal system. Men have inheritance rights, new wives join their husbands’ families and male children are given precedent over their older sisters and female relations in the line of succession (they call this primogeniture). Attempts at female rule are rare and even more rarely achieved without a healthy dose of fire and blood (search The Princess and the Queen on YouTube for more context and a juicy history lesson!).

Suspicion and hesitancy towards female rule is common in our real world (i.e. 2016 election) and is, unfortunately, not a new phenomenon. Prominent theologian, wrote in his 1558 piece, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, that, “To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire aboue any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reueled will and approued ordinance, and finallie it is the subuersion of good order, of all equitie and iustice”(Knox).  Across Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism there exist exclusionary mindsets in regards to women in power dating back to antiquity. However, there are also examples of women overcoming the restrictions and barriers of their societies, such as the prominence and elevation of women within certain patriarchal systems (including Egypt, the Tang Dynasty of China, the Mongolian Empire and beyond) . Even today, within many Native American and West African communities, femaleness is connected to spiritualism – unseen forces are often defined as female, such as goddesses and masked spirits, and are often interpreted by priestesses, prophetesses, healers, fortune tellers, and female shamans. However, the dominant culture that defines our 21st century world is, largely, patriarchal and continues to prosper through the oppression of women – and, to an extent, men. 

Power is power – and there is power in subjugation.

(Sidney Note: The glass ceiling metaphor should be viewed with some context – as should my statement above ^^ While times have changed and we now have female executives, college presidents, directors, governors, ambassadors and presidential candidates there are still inequities that exist. The metaphor implies that women and men have equal access to entry- and mid-level positions (Eagly and Carli). They do not. Rather than a ceiling to break through, women often have to struggle through a labyrinth, a maze filled with dead ends, false leads and towering walls. The labyrinth is even more suffocating for minority and marginalized women.

But back to the Game of Thrones universe . . . While most of the main characters have divided the fan base at some point in time (remember how we used to hate Cersei and then we felt bad and now . . . we kind of hate her again?) the discourse around Daenerys has been relatively consistent. While some see the Dragon Queen as an entitled, power-hungry tyrant slowly turning into the Mad Queen, others view her in a more sympathetic light. Daenerys – like many women – exist within a labyrinth. At the end is the Iron Throne. But the roads, for much of her life, were determined for her. Her (thankfully) deceased brother Viserys sold her in exchange for military support. Even after his golden death, Dany was still trapped in the maze, struggling to navigate the seemingly endless corridors. She has been raped, abandoned, deceived and . . . perhaps, most damning of all, she has been wrong.

Dany has made some questionable choices throughout her reign and while this is nothing new when it comes to GOT characters, what is new is that she is in a position of considerable power. Besides Cersei and, at one time, Grandma Olenna, Daenerys is one of the most powerful women in the series. Her dragons carry the weight of nuclear weapons and, after taking several fiery walks, hatching (or incubating) three ancient creatures an liberating a city from the chains of slavery . . . well, you can see why she thinks her destiny is to sit upon the Iron Throne.

Recently, the discourse about the portrayal of women in cinema has lit a fuse within the feminist movement. While I will say that some people tend to over analyze the actions of every character - relating them back to contemporary issues, it’s no state secret that female characters are often held to a very unhealthy set of standards:

Be strong, but not emasculating.

Be desirable, but not whorish.

Be charming, but not condescending.

Be ambitious, but not too ambitious.

The criticism about her representation in the show I think comes from a place of genuine concern. These fans want her to succeed because, seven hells, this woman has been through A LOT. And while there is a dose of sexism in the discourse, I do think that some of the backlash towards the show and creative team is unwarranted.

Daenerys Stormborn is NOT the protagonist in the traditional sense. She is a principle character who is heavily featured in both the books and Martin’s 5 novels. If you look at the charts below, people (who are more tech savvy than me) created comparison charts to help determine principle characters:

You may not like that Jon is painted as the hero or that Tyrion is featured prominently, but EVERY character has faced failures and loss in this series.

The freedom to lead is not freedom from failure.

No character is entirely good or entirely bad – Dany included. From white savior to female icon, Daenerys has been a polarizing character since season 1. She has made choices that, even when justifiable, were not . . . the most diplomatic solutions. She has a temper. She can be impulsive. But she is also affectionate with her friends. She is nurturing towards her dragons (in the books, her ancestors used whips to direct their dragons). She is also a queen . . . living in a patriarchal system that Aegon Targaryen established almost 300 years prior. She is single handedly trying to undo 300 years of patriarchal feudalism. That’s a pretty ambitious goal!

While Westerosi politics are similar to our own, they do not have cemented democratic institutions. The Night’s Watch is probably the closest example we have of a meritocracy (rule by merit or ability). The majority of the kingdom falls under the rule of one monarch who distributes semiautonomous authority through bonds of vassalage.

Change requires sacrifice . . . and compromise.

When was the last time you saw a high fantasy where, at one point, there were 5 women in positions of power? The closest moment in European history where that was a thing was when Catherine the Great of Russia, Madame de Pompadour, the Mistress of the King of France, and Empress Maria Theresa of the Holy Roman Empire combined their forces to fight against Fredrick II of Prussia during the 7 Years War (Fred was kinda a misogynist and coined the phrase The League of the Three Petticoats to describe the three women). Even in early English history, women who fought for power, like Isabella of France and Margaret of Anjou, were dubbed as she-wolves or reckless, power-hungry queens. Hmmm . . . sound familiar?

Now Dany does have a temper. But so did Robert Baratheon. She can be impulsive. She has a sense of entitlement, as do most monarchs and presidents. She is compassionate, loyal to her friends and nurturing towards her dragons (in the books, her ancestors used whips to direct their dragons). She likes to be in control, but she is also willing to listen to others. But she does get angry and she does have insecurities. She is also a human and – like most humans – she is a bundle of idiosyncrasies, conflicting ideas, blinding anxieties and soaring dreams.

Are there problems with the series? Yes.

Have female (and male) characters been portrayed in ways that are questionable? Yeah.

Would a more socially conscious director craft a different narrative or create a more dynamic story? Maybe.

Are you still gonna watch the next episode this Sunday? Most likely.

If you look for flaws, you will find flaws – because, this story was not created by you. So write your own story, whip up a fanfic or make a headcannon!

And besides, there are plenty of real world issues surrounding women that you can (and should) put your energy towards.

[herukapadmajungiansworld]

[milkboydotnet]

Our work absent the condition of revolution is in lieu of such activity is the preparation for revolution itself. As it so happens to be, the common practice of so-called Marxist-Leninists and even some Maoists, have yet to important the qualitative advancements of the Maoist synthesis generally to the consideration of their political activity. A Maoist vanguard engages its mass work to attempt to build a hegemony in leadership of the popular masses broadly in their struggle, a hegemony which allows for the general tactical and strategic mobilization of the subjective force among the broad populace. Such hegemony must simultaneously create the conditions for a subtraction of a concentrated bloc to engage in the forceful resistance with the State. Such a process maps generally those universal principles of Mao’s conception of People’s War. The model which has consistently led to a slow stagnation and degeneration of previous Communist forces has been the mechanical application of the line of October Road. Consistently even this line has been held as the only possible and legitimate condition for revolutionary upheaval in the metropoles. Nearly one century later it seems quite difficult to see the insistence upon this as legitimate in and of itself. Instead today we’re faced with the difficulty of conceiving of revolution properly demarcated from the old dogmatism which the parties who never fully grasped the Leninist real politic, that is the rational kernel from the Leninist husk imported to the metropoles by the Communist Parties from Comintern policy. The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Party implements the Leninist politic that presupposes an actuality of revolution (an actuality which is visible in the key storm centers for revolution in the weakest links of imperialism) through an applied line of universality of people’s war. In the current condition such an implementation is first and foremost one which builds the party as a key political form of militant cadre schooled in advanced Marxist theoretical formulations. What is often missing from such lines of thought is the inability to look at the general in relation to the particular, that is connecting the radical reality of a world revolutionary conjuncture with its particularized manifestation in one country, the connection and intertwining of national, regional, and global forces in an overall protracted people’s war on a world scale and an eventual assault on the citadels. Soviet Russia’s October Road manifested itself as an overall anomaly after the failure of social-democratic political trend throughout Europe to manifest a sufficient upheaval in the crisis of World War. It is only from the outbreak of revolution in Russia itself and the break from Social Democratic opportunism in Germany by Communists led by Rosa Luxembourg, that there became new condition broadly in Europe that had the potential to turn the whole imperialist war into civil wars between the proletariat allied with the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. It is untrue and erroneous position in the first place which looks at the revolution conjuncture in the Russian Empire and closes the borders around it. The Bolsheviks emerged as a force, a historical tandem part of the whole of European Social-Democracy, representing its most revolutionary wings. Russia historically has always been a country peripheral to the European system, a backwards preserve for the commodity production system of capitalist Europe, a semi-feudal Empire that bridged the West to the East. It was a country imperialist and dominated by imperialism. As Lenin understood it was a weak link in the chains of Imperialism. These conditions objectively set a particular distinct path for the possibility of revolution in Russia, and moreover such conditions were never fully understood by the Bolshevik Party itself. The contingency of its victory upon the smashing of Russian state forces in world war opened up an otherwise weak proletariat to extend itself outward and conquer a country in Civil War. It however did not do this from an assault and only could utilize a strategic defensive that stuck to the core of Russia and maneuver tactically to a respite in war with imperialist forces to consolidate its forces and lead a strategic offensive. In so much the Bolsheviks’ seized the moment for the smashing of the Tsarist state in their assault on the Winter Palace, they were correct. In so much in the preparation of this Party in this assault and the perpetuation of revolution continuity after, their line had errors. They didn’t fully grasp the importance of the large and robust peasantry in making revolution, treating them as auxiliary. Trotsky’s Red Army became reliant on a formal dictatorship over the peasantry through the years of War Communism, which relied upon commandist methods in relation to the broad masses. Trotsky refused to synthesize Marxist politics with military science, and in fact the military of the Red Army was run along bourgeois lines of efficiency in the end, this became famously pitch struggle between Trotsky and the Military Opposition. The military opposition was representative of the poor peasant line broadly among the Red Army which was resistant against command, especially as such command enlisted Tsarist expertise, etc. Military Opposition of course in the end represented more of a poor peasant tendency rather than any coherent political line in reform of the Red Army and had the hallmarks of such small petty-bourgeois politics in regards to the need of a center of command and People’s Army; however simultaneously the inability for the Bolsheviks themselves to raise a People’s Army under the basis of a Marxist military command and science (and only in the last instance its political command). It would mean the Red Army itself could only steel itself through the process of revolution and civil war. In opposition to this the line of People’s War in its Universal applicability first sees how irreversibly the objective condition in the world conjuncture has at its basis the fundamental contradiction between Imperialist and oppressed nations, where such oppressed nations are peripheralized in relation to the whole world system and simultaneously being proletarianized. These geographical spaces become the storm centers of world revolution itself, where revolution is possible today provided the development of a vanguard party, a united front of the broad masses, and a people’s army. Imperialism as neocolonialism means that such centers become focal points for the whole of the international proletariat’s struggle, and the whole of world imperialists bare their force upon such centers despite their own contradictions in maneuvering for world position. The whole of the imperialist system becomes engaged against these centers, they become engaged in a world’s people war which can no longer in this era singularly cut off its site at their countries’ borders. In a country like the United States it becomes our responsibility in such conditions to play a strategic role in the world revolutionary process itself. The universality has first its global picture and its particular focus. We’re in the first place rearguard detachments of the entire Communist movement, placed in a specific context where the balance of class forces does not make the possible condition of revolution possible currently. We’re however simultaneously in the particular moment able to attempt to build a revolutionary hegemony for revolution itself. The creation of such hegemony around a revolutionary proletarian class broadly among the popular forces in the country is the condition itself for any viable revolution as People’s War in the United States. The creation of such hegemony will inevitably lead to informal and formal repression from State forces, simultaneously such attempts to build hegemony will partially (though through the objective features of capitalism primarily) begin creating a polarization and/or fracturing of class society as well. Revolution in the US will be connected to the hemispherical uprising of those countries in the global south in historical sphere of US hegemony, in some places the connection will be indirect and others very direct. The Mass Line is, as we’ve demonstrated above, a method and a politics in regard to the masses. It however never supplants the maximum politics of Communism itself and supplant the lessons proven time and time again in the course of struggle. The building of a people’s militias is of one thing which is necessary in the accordance to any mass line activity, the formation of broad self-defense organizations against the state is in a matter of fact the only basis by which one can firmly break the control of the state and the bourgeois civil society. From within the context of actual legitimate power, that is of an effective force which orients, polarizes, and subtracts a hegemony away from the state. The development of the course of mass work among the people is not towards the ends of 'survival' limitedly, but it is in the end towards self-defense and finally the creation of a dynamic of dual power. The development of mass work is first and foremost an attempt to build mass organizations broadly among the masses that can be effective combat organizations, wagers of class war. Not simply a soup kitchen line. There is in fact a deep connection between the line of October Road, that is the line of Marxism-Leninism, and this narrow economism, as in the end eventually the attempt to simply await the conditions and moment for revolution and 'seize' opportunity narrowly morphs itself into into the perpetuation and mystification of revolution among the broad masses and insists upon an ineffective practice that never clearly engages in the necessary work of fomenting antagonism against the state. In fact it consistently shies away from it, it will consistently talk about revolution, about self-defense even, but will make sure each of its rallies’ plans are given to local authorities ahead of time, so that each of its marches are given police escort. It never contends to actually build a communist hegemony, to fight an internal cultural revolution for the leadership of our class as more as it attempts to fight for small scraps of scattered individuals produced in the poverty of our current conditions. Only through the line of People’s War can today’s Communists emerge to attempt to lead a Proletarian Revolution today. Only through the Maoist conception of Mass Line can we engage in mass work as Communists and not movement managers and agents of capital, in the last instance. Only through a perspective that unites the Mass Line with the general strategic line of Communism can we ever hope to make revolution.

Notes on Mass Line, Communist Organization, and Revolution

[berniesrevolution]

You will not be surprised to be told that Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, contains a series of attacks on diversity, immigration, feminism, and “identity politics.” You may, however, be surprised to be told that the book contains high praise for Ralph Nader, quotes from Studs Terkel, laments the disappearance of the anti-capitalist left, and presents Jeff Bezos as one of its central villains. Carlson has written a book that is as staunchly nationalist as one would expect. Yet it’s also a little bit socialist.

Carlson’s basic framework would commonly be described as “populism.” There are the people, and then there are the “ruling class” elites. The rich and powerful care only about themselves. They do not care about Middle America, and have presided over the opioid epidemic, the hollowing out of industrial towns, and exploding inequality. Meanwhile, ordinary workers suffer. At times, he almost sounds like Bernie Sanders. His analysis is persuasive, well-written, and often funny. It’s also terrifying, because elsewhere in the book, Carlson makes it clear: he wants a white-majority country, thinks immigrants are parasitic and destructive, misses traditional gender hierarchies, and dismisses the significance of climate change. Carlson’s political worldview is destructive and inhumane. Yet because it has a kernel of accuracy, it will easily tempt readers toward accepting an alarmingly xenophobic, white nationalist worldview. Carlson’s book shows us how a next generation fascist politics could co-opt left economic critiques in the service of a fundamentally anti-left agenda. It also shows us what we need to be able to effectively respond to.

First, let’s look at the parts that are most right, and perhaps most unexpected. In an analysis almost identical to that of leftists like Thomas Frank, Carlson says that Republicans and Democrats are now both beholden to corporate power. Sometime in the 1990s, Carlson says, he began wondering “why liberals weren’t complaining about big business anymore,” and had started celebrating “corporate chieftains” like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the Google guys. Ralph Nader should be a hero to all liberals, spending his days “greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims” from a retirement home. Instead, he is “reviled,” even though “every point Nader made was fair” and “some were indisputably true.” Suddenly “both sides were aligned on the virtues of unrestrained market capitalism… left and right were taking virtually indistinguishable positions on many economic issues, especially on wages.”

The “prolabor” Democrats, Carlson says, were “empathetic and humane” and “suspicious of power.” But today they have disappeared, and the party of the New Deal is now a party of Wall Street. Carlson points out that Hillary Clinton won wealthy enclaves like Aspen, Marin County, and Connecticut’s Fairfield County (the hedge fund capital of the country). “Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1,” and while “Seven financial firms donated 47.6 million to Hillary,” they gave Trump “a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup.”

As a result, Carlson says, Democrats are now largely silent on labor issues: “When was the last time you heard a politician decry Apple’s treatment of workers, let alone introduce legislation intended to address it?” Corporations make vaguely “socially liberal” noises, like decrying gun violence and being pro-LGBT, and as a result escape criticism for mistreating their workers or contributing to economic inequality. Carlson cites Uber, which has prominent liberal Arianna Huffington on its board and has had to commit to reforming its “bro culture.” And yet it still treats its drivers like crap:

“[Uber is] running an enormously profitable business on the backs of exploited workers… An obedient business press [has] focused on the ‘flexibility’ Uber’s contractors supposedly enjoyed. … [But] Feudal lords took more responsibility for their serfs than Uber does for its drivers… Uber executives weren’t ashamed… They sold exploitation as opportunity, and virtually nobody called them on it.”

What happens, Carlson says, is that corporations “embrace a progressive agenda that from an accounting perspective costs them nothing.” They are, in effect, purchasing “indulgences from the church of cultural liberalism.” Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In and Mark Zuckerberg is floated as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, but Facebook is an evil corporation to its core. Sean Parker has admitted that Facebook was engineered to be addictive, that its designers thought: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?… We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once it a while.. To get you to contribute more content.” Carlson notes that the company commits “relentless invasions of the public’s privacy,” and that epidemiologists have linked the product “with declining psychological and even physical health.” Carlson writes:

“Evidence has mounted that Facebook is an addictive product that harms users, and that Zuckerberg knew that from the beginning but kept selling it to unknowing customers. Those facts would be enough to tarnish most reputations, if not spark congressional hearings. Yet Zuckerberg remains a celebrated national icon.”

We know Facebook is manipulating people’s emotions to sell advertising, and yet we still get headlines like “How To Raise The Next Mark Zuckerberg.” Or look at Amazon. Jeff Bezos supported Hillary Clinton for president, yet “no textile mill ever dehumanized its workers more thoroughly than an Amazon warehouse.” Carlson asks: “when was the last time you heard a liberal criticize working conditions at Amazon?… “Liberals and Jeff Bezos [are now] playing for the same team.” Successful businessmen “pose as political activists,” and pitch their products as woke. That way: “affluent consumers get to imagine they’re fighting the power by purchasing the products, even as they make a tiny group of people richer and more powerful. There’s never been a more brilliant marketing strategy.” He goes on:

“The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak. For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Corporations can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.”

Carlson mocks the “socially liberal” Davos elite who hand-wring about inequality while reaping its fruits. He points to the example of Chelsea Clinton, who talked nobly about her values (“I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t… That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life”) before buying a $10 million, 5,000 square foot apartment in the Flatiron District that spanned an entire city block. Chelsea Clinton’s career, for Carlson, shows how contemporary believers in “meritocracy” benefit from an unjust and nepotistic system: Clinton was paid $600,000 a year as a “reporter” for NBC despite appearing on the network for a sum total of 58 minutes. The bubble of privilege that many elites inhabit was exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which suggested that “Things in America are Fine.” (The slogan was actually “America Is Already Great.”) Carlson is not wrong here: Hillary Clinton herself was so out of touch that she is still saying things like “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

Carlson also says that there has been a troubling tendency for both sides to embrace the military-industrial complex. Key Democratic figures supported the Iraq War (e.g. Feinstein, Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Edwards, Reid, Schumer). It was New York Timesreporters who contributed to scaremongering about Saddam in the leadup to the war, the New York Times op-ed page where you can find contributions like “Bomb Syria, Even If It’s Illegal” or “Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late,” and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who said that Iraq War had been “unquestionably worth doing” because it told Middle Easterners to “suck on this.” Barack Obama (who was given the Nobel Peace Prize, Carlson says, for “not being George W. Bush”) killed thousands of people with drones, including American citizens, prosecuted whistleblowers, kept Guantanamo open, and failed to rein in the vast global surveillance apparatus. Hillary Clinton pushed aggressively for military action in Libya, which destabilized the country. There is a D.C. consensus, Carlson says, and it is pro-war. Some of the book’s most amusing passages come when Carlson flays neoconservative hacks like Max Boot and Bill Kristol, who have now become allies of the Democratic Party in paranoia about Russia. Boot’s career, he says, publishing articles like “The Case for American Empire” and advocating invasion after invasion, shows us how “the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, breaking things along the way.” The hawkish consensus is no joke, though, and Carlson says he misses the liberal peaceniks, who “were right” when they warned that “war is not the answer, it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.”

To many on the left, everything Carlson says here will be familiar. The phenomenon he’s pointing to, by which Democrats and Republicans both became free market capitalists,  has a name: neoliberalism. Larry Summers was quite open about it when he said that “we are now all Friedmanites.” Carlson’s point about how corporations whitewash exploitative practices by appearing socially progressive is one leftists make frequently (see, for example, Yasmin Nair’s essay “Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit” and Nair and Eli Massey’s “Inclusion In The Atrocious“). The foreign policy stuff is a little off: it’s not that Democrats used to be pacifists, since the Vietnam tragedy was initiated by JFK and expanded by Lyndon Johnson. Empire has always been a bipartisan project, antiwar voices in the minority. Aside from the suggestion that this is new, it’s accurate to say that American elites have largely embraced the projection of American military power.

But Carlson is not going to be joining the Sanders 2020 campaign. His book has a dark side: a deep suspicion of cultural progressivism, inclusion, and diversity. Carlson believes that liberal immigration policies have been imposed because they serve elite interests (Democrats get votes and Republicans get cheap labor for Big Business). As a result, the fabric of the country is fraying. He writes:

Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime… If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace… [W]e are told these changes are entirely good… Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.

To some people, what Carlson writes here may not seem racist. And like many conservatives, he resents having what he sees as common sense treated as bigotry. I don’t think there’s any way around it, though: Carlson’s problem is that the United States looks different, that it’s not “European” any more and has no “ethnic majority.” He’s explicitly talking the language of ethnicity: it’s destabilizing that we’re not a white-majority country anymore. This isn’t simply about, say, the “Judeo-Christian ethic” or embracing the “American idea.” If that were the case, then it would be hard to make a case for why we shouldn’t let in the Catholic members of the migrant caravan, who love American culture and want to march across the border saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The problem is that they are not European, that they change the look of the place, that they disrupt the “ethnic majority.” Europeans are the real Americans, the ones that hold the fabric of the nation together, and minorities, people who are different, threaten to undo that fabric.

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