It’s always interesting that China is considered “Ancient” in terms of its history
But Europe and America are never considered, Green, Wet Behind the Ears, Fresh as Hell, Still Fucking Up, Busted, Mythology (I use this term), or Laughable
I encourage people to use these terms
I also encourage people to use the terms
Tired
Moldy
Trite
to refer to European and American history
The stories are over done and over used
American and European history are now tropes.
They’re tropes.
Fairy Tales.
Mythology.
Unless you’re talking about who actually built those countries, who actually brought civilization
Unless you’re willing to talk about all the damn ignorance, religious wars, out right murder and criminality of their so called governments and churches
We just talking about big old fucking fairy tales.
And I don’t want to get down like that.
Join me
Let’s do this
But that other post is right, really, it’s not “ancient” history.
History doesn’t die, it still lives and is reflected in the culture
Unless you know, the White colonists who still live in the place continually suppress, erase, and disnify that history.
(via biyuti)
One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?
Noam Chomsky, “Media Control” (via siegfriedandfreud)
Three or four million Asians killed by the US — and three Southeast Asian countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) shattered for several generations — is nothing to US Americans, not even worth a footnote. In World War II, 20 million Chinese were killed, many in concentration camps every bit as brutal as those in Germany, subject to human experimentation for developing chemical and biological weapons, yet I guarantee you that most US Americans have no idea this happened in a war in which the US and China were ostensibly fighting as allies and indeed the Chinese land war was every bit as critical to securing Japan’s surrender as the US naval campaign. Any German who believes that only 300,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust is rightly condemned as a history-denying racist, and for me the same logic applies to US Americans.
(via zuky)
(via jemimaaslana)
zuky:
The (First) Opium War (1839–42) Qing dynasty
China at this time, had many important trading products that European countries needed such as china, silk and tea but Europe in the other hand, only had silver that Chinese people were interested in. The British wanted to increase the cooperation and trading with China and come up with an idea; to illegally export opium to China. The Chinese government tried to stop the trading but the consumption of opium had already started and the consumption also grew rapidly among the citizens which became a very uneasy problem to solve, a total of 36353 coffins were exported from the United Kingdom to China.
Great Britain made demands for the trading but a war broke out when China didn’t accept the conditions. China lost the war and a preliminary treaty was created; to hand over Hong Kong to Great Britain, pay 6 million dollars to Britain and also opening the trading port of Guangzhou. However, none of the countries accepted the terms of condition and the war didn’t come to an end. In august 1842, U.K had occupied Nanjing and China was forced to make peace and accepting the demands.
1. Open up 4 more ports for every nation and foreign merchants are allowed to live and build in the 5 cities with open ports.
2. Britain was going to obtain Hong Kong.
3.China should pay for the British costs of the war, which was 21 million dollars.
(The photo was taken right after the war, the amount of drug-addicts was around 2 million in China)
This is a piece of history everyone needs to understand in order to understand the current shape of the world, and that’s a great historical photo, but I’m never satisfied with these little write-ups on tumblr. Probably because my standards are unrealistically high, coming from a family in which Chinese history was the regular topic of kitchen table conversation throughout my childhood.
Basically, Once Upon A Time In China (well, just a short time ago in the 19th century), the Qing dynasty was in its death throes: imperial corruption had been eating away at society for a century, so that widespread crushing poverty gripped the masses while the elite lounged and slumbered in extreme opulence.
So arrogant and corrupt were the Manchu rulers that they allowed China to be carved up by European colonialists right under their noses. Different colonial powers took bites out of China called “spheres of influence” with full extraterritoriality (i.e. no need for colonizers to obey the laws of China, only the laws of their countries of origin) and trading laws which amounted to the pillaging and plundering of China.
Despite all that, Europeans wanted more. In particular, Great Britain wanted more tea for less, so they came up with the plan of shipping opium into China. Like the US crack epidemic, China was a ripe target for such a strategy. Many desperate, impoverished people hit the opium pipe and an already-weakened country was further weakened. The US began shipping Turkish opium to China in the 1820s.
Under tremendous domestic pressure and real threats of revolt, the Qing dynasty was forced into action: they attempted to stop the flow of opium into China by force. In a pivotal incident in 1838, a famous Qing commissioner dumped 20,000 chests of opium from a British ship into the sea in Guangzhou. At that point, I wouldn’t say that war “broke out”; I would say that Britain attacked.
The Qing dynasty had never shown any interest in developing naval power, but they did have canons along the coast. However, the British gun-boats had bigger canons with longer range. What happened was that the British were able to bomb the coast of China with impunity while remaining out of range of Chinese canons. With no choice in the matter other than total destruction, the Qing court conceded to Britain’s demands, handing over Hong Kong, opening up to even deeper plunder, and beginning a series of Unequal Treaties. The Qing dynasty was overthrown in 1911 and the period of the Opium Wars is now known in China as “the Century of National Humiliation”.
That’s what you need to know about the Opium Wars. That’s why Hong Kong remained under British rule until 1997. That’s why China is fucking sensitive about European and North American demands and interference. That’s why Mao Zedong became such a huge hero to the Chinese people: he defeated the colonialists and kicked them out. This history continues to underlie relations between China and the West.
(via karnythia)
Did you know that Egypt, has the fewest pyramids in Africa?
Did you know that Sudan, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe have more pyramids (225 pyramids in Sudan alone) then all of Egypt.
There are remains of pyramids in South Africa, all the way along the Eastern and Northern parts of Africa and archeologists now believe that they may have found the remains of pyramids in West Africa. Why are we only taught that what is now known as Egypt (that tiny strip of land) is the only place where pyramids are in Africa, when in fact the ENTIRE continent of Africa (nearly 400 pyramids not just the six in Egypt) And Archeologist now believe that the pyramids in southern Africa may be the OLDEST pyramids in the world, followed by The Sudanese and Ethiopian pyramids, the West African pyramid ruins, and the North African Pyramids of so-called Egypt. (And im not even going to get into the fact that there are younger pyramids stretching FROM Africa in China, Italy, Europe and South America) WOW Im Amazed
neffera tiy maat bringing one truth at a time Yaaaaaa
(Source: sarakstar, via deluxvivens-deactivated20130417)
Why Vikings and Scots and THE REST OF EUROPE should not be portrayed as only white folk!
An African king named Gormund ruled Ireland during the Anglo-Saxon period in England reports the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Halfdan the Black was the first Africoid king to unite Norway.
When the British Isles were invaded by the Vikings some of these Norse raiders were Africoid. In fact, different varieties of ‘Viking’ Africans lived in Scandinavia during the middle ages and are frequently mentioned in Viking sagas.
There were Black Huns! The dictionary describes the Huns as “a fierce barbaric race of Asiatic nomads who led by Attila, ravaged Europe I the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.” The Gothic writer Jordannes described their infamous leader, Attila the Hun as having “a flat nose and swarthy complexion.” He describes the types of Huns he had seen as “of dark complexion, almost black… broad shoulder, flat noses and small eyres.”
The African Moors dominated southwest Europe during the
Middle Ages for 700 years: 711-1492 A.D. African Moors ruling southwest Europe centuries, darkened whites in this area, especially Portal, which was “the first example of a Negrito (African) republic in Europe?”Moors ruling Scotland in the 10th century mixed with whites until the black skin color disappeared.
Black Celts (Silures) & Black Vikings vexed with the Scandinavia people. A prominent Viking of the eleventh century was Thorhall, who was aboard the ship that carried the early Vikings to the shores of North America. Thorhall was “the huntsman in summer and in winter the steward of Eric the Red. He was a large man and strong, black, and like a giant, silent, and foul-mouthed in his speech, and always egged on Eric to the worst; he was a bad Christian.”
Another Viking, more notable than Thorhall, was Earl Thorfinn, “the most distinguished of all the earls in the Islands.” Thorfinn ruled over nine earldoms in Scotland and Ireland, and died at the age of seventy-five. His widow married the king of Scotland. Thorfinn was described as “one of the largest men in point of stature, and ugly, sharp featured, and somewhat tawny, and the most martial looking man. It has been related that he was the foremost of all his men.”
The black blood type is common even in Nordic Europe where intermixing has been happening since antiquity.
Black slavery lasted in England for about 400 years (1440-1834), during which time much intermixing occurred.
(more at the link)
In other words: yes, there should be PoC in movies that take place in Europe in any time period.
(via hamburgerjack)
Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn’t some feminist myth; it’s what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. That’s right: without women’s inventions, we wouldn’t be able to carry things or store things or tie things up or go fishing or hunt with nets or haft a blade or wear clothes or grow our food or live in permanent settlements. Suck on that.
Women have continued to be involved in the creation and advancement of civilization throughout history, whether you know it or not. Pick anything—a technology, a science, an art form, a school of thought—and start digging into the background. You’ll find women there, I guarantee, making critical contributions and often inventing the damn shit in the first place.
Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school. Hurdles like not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Example: look up Lise Meitner some time. When she was born in 1878 it was illegal in Austria for girls to attend school past the age of 13. Once the laws finally eased up and she could go to university, she wasn’t allowed to study with the men. Then she got a research post but wasn’t allowed to use the lab on account of girl cooties. Her whole life was like this, but she still managed to discover nuclear fucking fission. Then the Nobel committee gave the prize to her junior male colleague and ignored her existence completely.
Men in all patriarchal civilizations, including ours, have worked to downplay or deny women’s creative contributions. That’s because patriarchy is founded on the belief that women are breeding stock and men are the only people who can think. The easiest way for men to erase women’s contributions is to simply ignore that they happened. Because when you ignore something, it gets forgotten. People in the next generation don’t hear about it, and so they grow up thinking that no women have ever done anything. And then when women in their generation do stuff, they think “it’s a fluke, never happened before in the history of the world, ignore it.” And so they ignore it, and it gets forgotten. And on and on and on. The New York Times article is a perfect illustration of this principle in action.
Finally, and this is important: even those women who weren’t inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical “women’s work”—they also built this world. The mundane labor of life is what makes everything else possible. Before you can have scientists and engineers and artists, you have to have a whole bunch of people (and it’s usually women) to hold down the basics: to grow and harvest and cook the food, to provide clothes and shelter, to fetch the firewood and the water, to nurture and nurse, to tend and teach. Every single scrap of civilized inventing and dreaming and thinking rides on top of that foundation. Never forget that.
from a post by Reclusive Leftist on women’s erasure in history.
her comments relate specifically to an article by the NYT thanking “the men” who invented modern technology, but pick absolutely any academic field of study, and women’s contributions are minimized, if not outright ignored.
literature has been a huge part of my life for a long time, and i grew up reading the classics—which, of course, are typically books written by white men, depicting their experiences. i was taught that the first “modern novel” was Don Quixote, written in the early 1600s by a guy (Cervantes). i don’t think i know of a word to accurately describe my mixture of outrage, shock, and pride, when i discovered later that actually, the first modern novel was written 600 years earlier—by a woman! (it’s The Tale of Genji, written by a Japanese lady-in-waiting who was known as Murasaki Shikibu.)
this might not seem important, but if you’re a woman you know just how vital this knowledge is. even now, when women are being told that we can do anything we set our minds to, the historical, literary, and scientific figures we learn about are all men. it’s a much more insidious way to discourage women from aiming high—because what’s the point in putting in so much hard work if it’s not even going to be remembered after you’re dead?
(via sendforbromina)
“ it was illegal in Austria for girls to attend school past the age of 13. ”
This part struck me because it is parallel to laws passed in America to prevent slaves from learning. First they claimed that slaves and Black people period were too stupid to learn, physically incapable of any higher intellectual pursuits or understanding…But JUST IN CASE let’s pass some laws making SURE they never learn.
Seems the same shit has happened with White women throughout the Western world. First, it’s taught that women cannot think…BUT JUST IN CASE…
There aren’t any laws specifically to prevent me from teaching a dog, cat, chicken, horse, pig, goat to read and write? Why, because it’s accepted as pure-d-fact that they CAN’T! There is no need to have a law about that. Just like there’s no need to have a law against me flying without a permit via flapping my arms really, really hard. There is no need to pass laws against truly known impossibilities. No need for “BUT JUST IN CASE” regs.
(via witchsistah)(via witchsistah)
Me and WonderKat are talking history and it’s like, just think about the Roman Legion
You think that super fucking diverse group of soldiers
From an empire that went here to there
Wasn’t full of ALL KINDS OF FOLKS?
FROM ALL OVER THE PLACE?
You think everyone stayed home?
You think they didn’t go to different lands and settle?
You think all Romans were White, when the Romans gave out citizenship like they did?
I mean, you think back in the day, trading, mixing, knowing the people of Greece, North African -you think those people were White?
Really?
Go look through the lineage of emperors again
And the popes
Go look at the paintings and reliefs before they got white washed and re-branded
Just go look
Go look at those urns
Folks were capable of using color approrpiately
Think about that.
Seriously, think about that.
Then think about restoration projects, the people behind them and if they’re truly doing “restoration” or “revisions”
(via karnythia)
