Cripple. History Major. Irritable and in constant pain. Vaguely Left-Wing.
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2·2 days agoI live to serve!
(though honestly I don’t think about the Galactic Empire that much - nice stormtroopers, but that’s about it for me)
Yes Cassian, this imperial sympathizer right here
11·4 days agoAs unlikely as you think, but:
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The Brits did not have the benefit of knowing just how constrained the German military was, and all of their prior estimates had just fallen apart in France, so a bit of preparation was not, perhaps, entirely amiss.
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These women performed minor mundane military tasks on the homefront, like their male counterparts in the Home Army, freeing up troops of the regular army.
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It helped keep morale up - the Women’s Home Defense Corps were created because when the Home Guard was made, a bunch of women tried to sign up too. Apparently having women in such a MANLY organization was out of the question, so after the Home Guard made it clear that they were not going to change their mind, a Labour MP created a separate org for women to join.
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Both - though it must be noted that it coexisted in tension with conservative norms and dress at the time.
41·4 days agoThey had Gelatinous Cube for dessert that night, the remains are hard to get off the plates with anything less.
We got Death Star!
We got Death Star!
[Wilhelm Scream]
Based grandparents, part of the Great Crusade saving millions from Nazi rule. o7
I ask from the comm a moment of nostalgia for shooting Nazis instead of asspatting them 😔
The only thing that can stop a bad Jedi with a laser sword is a good Jedi with a laser sword
Modern estimates tend closer to 3-5 million, but 1984 was before the opening of the Soviet archives to researchers.
Still happens but you have European and US Jewish settlers spitting on the Christians
Considering most Israelis were born in Israel, and Mizrahi ancestry is about as common as Ashkenazi, I would seriously caution against calling Israelis “European and US” settlers unless you’re on some seriously racist shite.
Fascism and racism being immensely popular in Israel doesn’t mean you should adopt racist notions in response.
couldn’t help yourself could you
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-origins-modern-gay-rights-movement-wwi-180963283/
In the winter of 1915, a German soldier died in a field hospital in Russia. The soldier, whose name is missing from the historical record, had been hit in the lower body by shrapnel when his trench came under bombardment. Four of his comrades risked their lives to carry him to the rear. There, he lay for weeks, wracked by pain in the mangled leg and desperately thirsty. But what troubled him most was loneliness. He sent letters to his boyfriend whenever he could manage it.
“I crave a decent mouthful of fresh water, of which there isn’t any here,” he wrote in his final letter. “There is absolutely nothing to read; please, do send newspapers. But above all, write very soon.”
This soldier, who had to keep his relationship hidden from those around him, was just one of the approximately two million German men killed in World War I. His suffering is not unlike what many others experienced. What his loved ones made of that suffering, however, was different, and had enormous consequences.
His boyfriend, identified in surviving documents only as “S.,” watched the man he loved go off to serve in a war that he did not fully endorse, only to die alone and in pain as S. sat helplessly by hundreds of miles away. S. told their story in a letter to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which published it in April 1916.
The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was then the world’s leading homosexual emancipation group, boasting a membership of about 100 people. The soldier’s story took a cruel twist at its very end: S.‘s loving replies were lost in the chaos of the war and never reached the soldier.
“He died without any contact from me,” S. wrote.
After the war, many believed the slaughter had been for nothing. But S. saw a lesson in his partner’s suffering and death.
“He has lost his bright life … for the Fatherland,” wrote S. That Fatherland had a law on the books that banned sex between men. But the sodomy law was just the tip of the iceberg: S. and men like him generally could not reveal their love relationships in public, or even to family members. Homosexuality meant the loss of one’s job, social ostracism, the risk of blackmail and perhaps criminal prosecution.
S. called it “deplorable” that “good citizens,” soldiers willing to die for their country, had to endure the status of “pariahs.” “People who are by nature orientated toward the same sex … do their duty,” he wrote. “It is finally time that the state treated them like they treat the state.”
Many veterans agreed with S. When the war ended, they took action. They formed new, larger groups, including one called the League for Human Rights that drew 100,000 members.
In addition, as I argue in my book, the rhetoric of gay rights changed. The prewar movement had focused on using science to prove that homosexuality was natural. But people like S., people who had made tremendous sacrifices in the name of citizenship, now insisted that their government had an obligation to them regardless of what biology might say about their sexuality.
They left science behind. They went directly to a set of demands that characterizes gay rights to this day – that gay people are upstanding citizens and deserve to have their rights respected. “The state must recognize the full citizenship rights of inverts,” or homosexuals, an activist wrote in the year after the war. He demanded not just the repeal of the sodomy law, but the opening of government jobs to known homosexuals – a radical idea at the time, and one that would remain far out of reach for many decades.
Ideas of citizenship led activists to emphasize what historians call “respectability.” Respectability consisted of one’s prestige as a correctly behaving, middle-class person, in contrast to supposedly disreputable people such as prostitutes. Throughout the 20th century, gay rights groups struggled for the right to serve openly in the military, a hallmark of respectability. With some exceptions, they shied away from radical calls to utterly remake society’s rules about sex and gender. They instead emphasized what good citizens they were.
In 1929, a speaker for the League for Human Rights told an audience at a dance hall, “we do not ask for equal rights, we demand equal rights!” It was, ironically, the ghastly violence and horrible human toll of the World War I that first inspired such assertive calls, calls that characterized gay rights movements around the world in the 20th century.
It would take nearly a century for these activists to achieve one of their central goals – the repeal of sodomy laws. Germany enjoyed a 14-year period of democracy after World War I, but the Nazis came to power in 1933 and used the sodomy law to murder thousands of men. A version of the law remained in force until the 1990s. The United States struck down its sodomy laws only in 2003.
Whilst in Egypt Forster “lost his R [respectability]” to a wounded soldier in 1917[59][60] and had a short-lived but emotionally powerful affair with an Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammad el Adl. The pair met in 1917 and quickly developed an interest in each other. Their relationship began to end in 1918, as el Adl prepared to marry. El Adl and his wife had a son, who they named Morgan. After returning to England in 1919, Forster visited el Adl in 1922 and found him deathly ill with tuberculosis.[61] After el Adl’s death, his widow sent his wedding ring to Forster.[3] Forster kept el Adl’s letters for the rest of his life.[61]
Very cool!
Someone can probably do a better job of tracking down what location this particular photo was in than I can. The source I posted mentions Honolulu in passing, but in reference to a different photo of the same person.
Because they INVENTED THE DOME
More seriously, empires of the past are often fascinating because of the combination of traits they display in tandem with the diverse ways they can be examined, both positively and negatively.
Empires of the past are, typically, relatively well-recorded and demonstrate a wide array of the capabilities of humankind when well-organized. Obviously, for people who like the funny little fellows with weapons and armor, empires are always fun, because you kind of fucking die if you’re an empire which can’t marshal decent military forces; but empires have a vast array of appeal beyond that. The organizational and government complexity of the Inca providing both benefits and obligations; the insistent lawgiving of the Romans; the architectural marvels of the Egyptians; the intense artistic patronage of the Hellenic empires; the rise of theory of government in Han China; the trading instruments of the British Empire; and so on.
And these aren’t limited to the stated, nor does one need to restrain oneself to thinking about one. Think about the architecture of the Romans and the lawgiving of the Inca, or the art of Han China and government theory in the Hellenic Empires - in both cases, you’ll find plenty of fascinating material. There’s always something to learn, with beauty, horror, and most consistently, fascinating insight into the myriad ways human beings see ourselves and execute great undertakings.