“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
Quote from Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary from 1942-45:
Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn’t able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn’t personally to blame and that I hadn’t known about those things. I wasn’t aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.
Fun History Fact: The overwhelming majority of cowboys in the U.S. were Indigenous, Black, and/or Mexican persons. The omnipresent white cowboy is a Hollywood studio concoction meant to uphold the mythology of white masculinity.
Thank you.
I will always re-blog this
I think it was high school when i overheard some white girl put on her best semi-disgusted and confused voice and go “why do so many Mexicans dress up like cowboys?” and I had to be the person to tell her.
Why do you think the whites say buckero? Cause they couldn’t say vaquero.
I dunno if I reblogged this before but fuck it, y’all gon learn today.
Teach the children.
also, cowboy culture was hella gay. like, write-poems-about-your-cowboy-partner gay.
IF people acknowledge it, they play the necessity card– there weren’t any women out on the range, so they had to “resort to men.” this claim completely erases 1) the romantic (not just sexual) writings of actual cowboys, 2) the acknowledgement of cowboys’ potential homosexual activity by writers at the time, and 3) the possibility that some men would deliberately become cowboys with the intent to seek out homosexual encounters.
no one wants to admit it, but cowboy culture was just. so inherently gay.
Im here for the gay POC cowboys
Guys: “vamoose,” “hoosegow,” “calaboose” it’s all Spanish.
The “ten gallon” hat Yeahhhhhh, whites couldn’t pronounce “tan galan” (the phrase “[so] handsome”) so they gave it a name that makes no fucking sense and has inspired generations of great visual puns
wait….are any americans aware that the cia overthrew the democratically-elected premier of iran in 1953 because he wouldn’t concede to western oil demands….and how that coup was the reason for the shah’s return to power, the iranian revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship…..like, america literally dissolved iranian democracy and no one knows about it???
No. No we don’t know about it.
Americans aren’t told this shit.
The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.
Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.
The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.
“All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.
!!!
I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.
She’s 60. She never heard of this.
As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.
He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods. Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.
And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”
And she just looked floored.
“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “
She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.
“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.
And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”
She lived through it.
American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.
FUN FACT: in hebrew, “feet” is a euphemism for genitals.
so if you ever see “washing feet” in the bible, it, uh. yeah.
(source is my old bible class textbook which i don’t have on me anymore 😦 )
HOLY SHIT WHAT
I MEAN CORRECT ME IF IM WRONG BUT I SWEAR TO GOD I REMEMBER READING A STORY IN THE BIBLE WHERE JESUS CLEANED THE ‘FEET’ OF A LADY PROSTITUTE INFRONT OF HIS TWELVE DISCIPLES WHO GOT SERIOUSLY GROSSED OUT. THEM GETTING REALLY SUPER GROSSED OUT BY THAT NEVER MADE SENSE TO ME UNTIL NOW.
Time for Bible Lessons With An Ex-Fundie Because All Of This is Wrong!!
The feet-washing custom was exactly what it sounded like. You come into a house in the Roman era Middle East after walking around in your sandals and shit and your host offers to wash your feet with a bowl and a towel and some perfume if we’re REAL fancy. It was a hospitality custom.
And the story isn’t about Jesus washing the feet of a prostitute, the prostitute in the story washed Jesus’s feet while he was a guest in someone’s house. She heard he was there, got super fucking emotional (the Bible says she was repenting of her sins but I like to think that she was a super huge fan) busted in the door with a vial of incredibly expensive perfume, and cried over his feet to wash them and dumped perfume over them AND DRIED THEM WITH HER HAIR, which was over-doing it to the max but hey, I won’t judge a Middle Eastern hooker’s foot fetish if she doesn’t judge me
So the guy who was hosting Jesus (Simon, a Pharisee) was sitting there like “what the fuck” and thinking to himself “if Jesus had ANY idea who this bitch is he’d drag her crusty ass” and then Jesus, using his telepathy Jesus powers, goes
YO I HEARD THAT, SIMON
YOU NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP BECAUSE WHEN I CAME INTO YOUR HOUSE YOU DIDN’T OFFER ME SHIT
NOT EVEN A MOIST TOWELETTE FOR MY FEET
AND THIS WOMAN IS A LOVELY LADY AND SHE HAS DONE BETTER BY ME THAN YOU HAVE SO SIT THE FUCK DOWN
and also that hooker wound up being the sister of Lazarus
you know, that guy Jesus raised from the dead
moral of the story: if you wash a homeless middle eastern guy’s feet with your hair and drench them in Dolce and Gabbana he’ll return the favor and resurrect your brother
never forget white people did nothing first neither the best, they sleep and eat false propaganda,
Ugh, why the shit does that have to turn into a race thing? Why does EVERYTHING have to turn into a race thing?
because white people have made sure that everything is about race
as proved by the fact that when you say explorer, you think of a bunch of white guys walking the world and discovering it ~exotic wonders~ even though Zheng He travelled through Asia, to the Middle East, and even East Africa. But you’d likely never heard of him before.
Same reason you never heard of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveller who, as early as the 10th century, went to the Volga area for diplomatic reasons. He wrote about it, much as Marco Polo would do later for his own travels, and is one of our sources on what viking were like (and by all accounts, he wrote about them more accurately than western scholars of the same period did)
Oh, or Ibn Battuta who travelled throughout Africa long before europeans did, and even went to Europe himself.
Everything is about race because white people keep telling everyone that their race is the only one who every got anything done.
i have heard of precisely zero non-european explorers ever in my life, and that fucking sucks. this exhibit is amazing and i need to learn more.
That boat is a frickin aircraft carrier comparatively. Holy crap. And no. Never heard a peep.
Zhenghe went to over 40 countries in Asia and Africa and probably went even further, but I didn’t encounter that in history books before. He brought gifts from China to every country he went to and everyone loved him. It was just like “Hey, I’m here with a water-helicarrier and a gift,” and the kings of every country were lilke “holy shit son well here have a giraffe.” There are paintings depicting him leading a giraffe as well. Check him out guys, he’s really cool
That is so awesome. Fuck western history. This is the real shit.
This, also keep in mind that the “American cowboy” has been exaggerated greatly by Hollywood and popular myth – it was really only a twenty/thirty year period in the mid-19th century that essentially ended around the American civil war when barbed wire was introduced and eliminated the need for them.
Trevor Hill is the gay socialist revolutionary we need right now.
I feel like “sucking dick and punching Nazis” should be an illustrated meme
On this day in 1943, gay anti-fascist resistance fighter Willem Arondeus led a group in bombing the Amsterdam Public Records Office to hinder Nazi efforts to identify Dutch Jews . Thousands of files were destroyed. Within a week, Arondeus and the other members of the group were arrested. Twelve, including Arondeus, were executed that July by firing squad. In his last message before his execution, Arondeus said, “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”
“Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”
^This!
These Nazi/Fascist assholes going around on social media calling marginalized people cowards, fragile, weak but I’m pretty sure if we can all put up with multiple intersections of oppression and abuse for decades on end or our entire lives, even, we can fight in a damn war against genocidal inhuman bastards.
Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.
Why can’t we have a movie about him?
He was often called “Sempo”, an alternative reading of the characters of his first name, as that was easier for Westerners to pronounce.
His wife, Yukiko, was also a part of this; she is often credited with suggesting the plan. The Sugihara family was held in a Soviet POW camp for 18 months until the end of the war; within a year of returning home, Sugihara was asked to resign – officially due to downsizing, but most likely because the government disagreed with his actions.
He didn’t simply grant visas – he granted visas against direct orders, after attempting three times to receive permission from the Japanese Foreign Ministry and being turned down each time. He did not “misread” orders; he was in direct violation of them, with the encouragement and support of his wife.
He was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, a year before he died in Kamakura; he and his descendants have also been granted permanent Israeli citizenship. He was also posthumously awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania (1993); Commander’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1996); and the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2007). Though not canonized, some Eastern Orthodox Christians recognize him as a saint.
Sugihara was born in Gifu on the first day of 1900, January 1. He achieved top marks in his schooling; his father wanted him to become a physician, but Sugihara wished to pursue learning English. He deliberately failed the exam by writing only his name and then entered Waseda, where he majored in English. He joined the Foreign Ministry after graduation and worked in the Manchurian Foreign Office in Harbin (where he learned Russian and German; he also converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church during this time). He resigned his post in protest over how the Japanese government treated the local Chinese citizens. He eventually married Yukiko Kikuchi, who would suggest and encourage his acts in Lithuania; they had four sons together. Chiune Sugihara passed away July 31, 1986, at the age of 86. Until her own passing in 2008, Yukiko continued as an ambassador of his legacy.
It is estimated that the Sugiharas saved between 6,000-10,000 Lithuanian and Polish Jewish people.
It’s a tragedy that the Sugiharas aren’t household names. They are among the greatest heroes of WWII. Is it because they were from an Axis Power? Is it because they aren’t European? I don’t know. But I’ve decided to always reblog them when they come across my dash. If I had the money, I would finance a movie about them.
He told an interviewer:
You want to know about my motivation, don’t you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. Some Japanese military leaders were just scared because of the pressure from the Nazis; while other officials in the Home Ministry were simply ambivalent.
People in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people’s lives….The spirit of humanity, philanthropy…neighborly friendship…with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation—and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.
He died in nearly complete obscurity in Japan. His neighbors were shocked when people from all over, including Israeli diplomatic personnel, showed up at quiet little Mr. Sugihara’s funeral.
I will forever reblog this, I wish more people would know about them!
I liked this before when it had way less information. Thank you, history-sharers.
Tucked away in a corner in L.A.’s Little Tokyo is a life-sized statue of Chiune, seated on a bench and smiling gently as he holds out a visa.
The stone next to him bears a quote from the Talmud; “He who saves one life, saves the entire world.”
I had no idea it existed until a few weeks ago, but it’s since become one of my favorite pieces of public art.
Chiune Sugihara. Original antifa.
Here’s what you can do when you *don’t* follow orders.
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