On this day, 8 February 1943, Lepa Svetozara Radic, a 17-year-old anti-Nazi partisan from Bosnia-Herzegovina was captured by the Germans. She was to be hanged, but as the noose was tied around her neck her captors offered her her life if she gave up the names of her comrades, but she responded that she was not a traitor and her comrades would reveal themselves when they avenged her death.
By 11 February German soldiers reported the execution had taken place and that the “bandit” had “shown unprecedented defiance”.
Learn more about working class resistance to Nazism in episode 4 of our podcast, on your favourite podcast app or here on our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/04/04/wch4-anti-nazi-youth-movements-in-world-war-ii/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1344670492384764/?type=3
I’ve been reading Martin Kitchen’s book ‘fascism’, who has an interesting theory about the rise of fascism. The theory is incredibly complex and those that love dense theory should probably read it themselves, but I’ve put together a little adaptation of my own (that Kitchen would probably criticize on many points):
1. First you got your early fascist fringe groups, founded mostly by frustrated middle class men. Since the violent language of fascism is considered impolite in middle class circles, the first public supporters are frustrated working class men. At this stage there are sometimes attempts at a fascist coup.
2. With increasing power, the basic language of fascism is gradually normalized. Within this period, fascists spread the idea that there is a threat (jews, immigrants, muslims, etc) that could destroy all you love. Sometimes part of the tone is anti-capitalist but in that case the target is not the whole middle and upper class but a segment of it (’the jewish capitalist’, ‘the cultural-marxist elite’) so the middle class supporters can feel safe knowing that they will not be a target. Being a fascist is not yet socially acceptable in middle class communities at this point.
3. If there is an economic crisis or great economic uncertainty, the working class shifts to the left. But the middle class starts to consider fascism an acceptable option. Democratic politicians seem to fail to protect them against financial loss, scary foreigners and the growing of the left, so one strong leader who is going to restore traditional values and punish the rebellious sounds attractive. Most fascist supporters are lower-middle class who have property and could realistically lose that property and become poor. Being a fascist becomes socially acceptable in middle class communities.
4. Once a part of the middle class openly accepts fascism, there is often a very quick development where the economic upper class (rich capitalists) start embracing fascism as well and pumping their money into its election campaign. The media also joins in at this point. If fascism ever had an anti-capitalist tone as part of it’s anti-establishment image, it now drops this tone. With a small but weaponized segment of frustrated working class men, a large middle class voter base, media support and MONEY, it becomes almost impossible to stop the fascists rise to power.
5. Once voted into power (either alone or in a coalition), fascism suppresses left-wing movements and dismantles democratic systems. Disagreement within the fascist group itself is removed during this road to dictatorship.
6. At some point, the dictatorship reaches a point of no return. It is so powerful and controls such a large amount of unquestioningly obedient violence and intelligence agencies that only massive armed struggle can destroy it.
So in short:
Middle class founders with working class fight club
Normalization of fascism
Economic crisis, middle class openly support fascism
Capital and media support fascism, it becomes very difficult to stop
Voted into power, removes political enemies & moves toward dictatorship
Strongly established dictatorship can only be removed by force
Kitchen argues that this process can only take place in a late capitalist state with high levels of economic uncertainty, where the political left is large enough to scare the middle class but not strong enough to resist fascism.
I would add that a conservative right-wing that responds to crisis by expanding state force and dismantling human and civil rights does a big part of making the road from being voted into power to full dictatorship easier.
I’d argue that a lot of European states are currently at 3 or 4 with a lot of the road to dictatorship being paved by the established right-wing, while some states already have fascists in their coalition (step 5) and the US has a significant number of fascists in positions of political power (also step 5). How much of the system has been dismantled towards dictatorship varies.
Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that these processes are not always strictly linear and there are always competing fascist movements. Often a brutish loud fascist movement will be the first to normalize fascist language while a more polished, educated and polite fascist movement will be the one to win the support of the middle class and achieve power.
I would expand point 5 to be about three steps, but its still alarmingly close to what we have seen
Yeah, or more. Establishing dictatorship tends to involve (without a strict order of events)
- suppressing political enemies
- suppressing people who could challenge the road to dictatorship from within your own movement
- supressing communication that disagrees with you (controling the media, setting up elaborate surveillance agencies, etc)
- getting unrestrained control of the political decision making process
- getting unrestrained control of the legal process (judges etc)
- ensuring unquestioning obedience of the forces of violence (cops, soldiers, etc)
Generally with a lot of little steps, each time testing obedience. Another terrible policy is announced. Do the cops follow orders? Who resists? Who publically disapprovs? Obedience is mapped and a next step is taken, and another.
What I expected moving to texas: oh hm, cowboy boot… steak..,? the ole’ prairie. youve been invited to,come lasso a tumbleweed,! ‘howdy there sherriff’ as a tramp stamp tattoo. Sweet teA hp potion… country girls make do
What I got when I moved to texas: i cant really leave the house bc theres about 20-30 of these big blue crabs that came up from their underground tunnels bc of the wet and rainy weather all standing on the patio having a fucking clawnference meeting
I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were. Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together. And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.
On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.
They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.
The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.
Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.
(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)
There’s a lot of bigoted historian dragging on my dash these days and it makes me happy.
Once again, more proof that we queers have ALWAYS been here, and it’s a CHOSEN narrative to erase them.
Lmao “they didn’t screw up”. They screwed up burials ALL THE TIME. ALL. THE. TIME. They also re-used coffins and ENTIRE TOMBS all. the. time.
If you think death was the most important thing to Egyptians you know LESS than nothing about Egyptians.
“now I’m not an expert about ancient Egypt”
yes, it shows
Screwed up burials. Re-used old coffins (honestly once you were past 100 years dead your coffin was fair game. Suck it). We’ve even got cases where a coffin had been made for the matriarch of the family, and then her teenage son dies before her. Because wood was expensive, and coffins took a long time to make, the family went ‘ok niankhamun is going in nesmut’s coffin’ and buried him that way.
Then we get to the Late Period archaising and oh boy do we have some fun. Due to the Egyptian habit of being nostalgic for what they considered better periods of their history (oh wait where have I heard that before?) they tended to try to copy ‘styles’ of art from other periods without knowing the full decorum. So, as is the case with the Late Period, it’d become a mish mash of ‘ok so this is Amarna style paunch art, but we’re using the feminine coffin pose from the New Kingdom, and our art grid is off by one so everyone looks elongated’. They literally write about themselves being proud of copying these older art styles.
I know this site likes to think in black and white terms, with a heavy amount of anti-intellectual bias, but reality is more complicated than you’d like, as is history. Knowing the full cultural context for why historical people did what they did is vital, because otherwise we assume they thought the same way we do about topics such as this, and that’s where you fall into the ‘bias’ trap. If you don’t look at something in Ancient Egypt and say ‘well what do the Egyptians themselves tell us about this’ and just immediately head to ‘well it’s this way now so archaeologists must have missed something what idiots’ then you’re doing a bad job of working with the material presented to you.
As for Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, well this site likes to twist their narrative pretty hard, as you can see from the above. Yeah, they’re mlm couple. That’s been the accepted narrative (bar a few outliers) for about 40 years, and it was even suggested way before that. Idk, might be a good idea to read something written after 1970 if you’re trying to get current thinking on the subject. Or you know, stuff published this century. Basing your ideas of what archaeologists think currently on publications from the 60s is as bad as assuming that scientists now have the same ideas about disease as they did in the 60s. Things move on.
Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep are not depicted as different sizes, thus making one more ‘feminine’. They’re depicted as the same size, because it’s not just your gender in Egyptian art decorum that determines your size but also your rank and power. Look:
Here they are embracing, in what is a depiction of a kiss. They’re the same size.
Here they are at the entrance. Same size.
Here they are kissing again. Same size.
One last time. Same size.
(I’ve been to this tomb. Seen it in person. It’s very gay)
There are also loads of examples where women are not depicted as ‘small’, in fact that statement in and of itself is rather a generalisation than the actual rule. Here’s Menna and his wife:
Same size.
Here’s Inherkhau and his wife and children:
Same size.
And because I’m feeling petty, have one more. Here’s Irynefer and his wife:
Same. Size.
Idk about you guys, but doesn’t seem right does it? Really, size in these tomb paintings is all about the importance of the figure, in this case the deceased, rather than their gender. The only reason they would be not of the same size in the tomb is when one is as an Osiris. When that happens the figure who is larger, and yeah it’s usually the man because you rarely get women’s tombs because they’re buried with their husbands, is representative of the deceased being ‘honoured’ as an ‘Osiris’ (you become an Osiris after death in Egypt). The size of the person depicts their importance as the revered deceased and not because one is a woman. Take here for example the tomb of Sennefer:
You can see Sennefer as the revered dead on the right, being offered a lotus (I’ll get onto that in a sec) by his wife. She’s offering him rebirth. It is only this scene in which she is depicted smaller, because on the left (at an angle) you can see them both….portrayed as the same size. Here’s another image of them together:
It is only when she is offering to him as a revered, and more important, deceased person that she is smaller. Decorum dictates that the more important you are the larger you are, so the tomb owner will always be depicted as larger than pretty much everyone else. If Khnumhotep is offering a lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, it is because Niankhkhnum at that point is the revered dead. It has nothing to do with Khnumhotep being ‘feminine’. The narrative that one of them must be taking the ‘feminine’ role seems kinda….not good?
As for the symbol of a lotus flower? That’s nothing to do with ‘femininity’. At all. In Egyptian culture, the lotus flower symbolised power and rebirth, as in one creation myth, the mound grew from the waters of Nun, and from this mound grew a lotus flower. When this lotus flower opened it provided the first ‘man’ and that’s how mankind came into existence. This is why we have a statue of Tutankhamun emerging from a Lotus flower.
Khnumhotep offering this flower to Niankhkhnum is not symbolising his ‘femininity’ it’s offering him rebirth into the afterlife. A symbol that was extremely important in Ancient Egypt.
Oh and finally, Archaeologists from 1964, and up until the early 80s, thought they were brothers because that’s literally what they refer to each other as. They call each other ‘sn=i’ ‘my brother’. Yeah it seems obvious now that they’re not, but when you start translating something you’re not looking at anything deeper. If it says they were brothers, and they themselves have said this, why would we think differently? It was not until the mid 70s when we worked out that Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs (though they’re using Old Egyptian, but the flaw is the same) has limited words for family. We only have words for: father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, husband, and wife. There are no words for ‘uncle’ or ‘cousin’ or ‘nephew’. So we ended up having to go back and reassess some stuff, and it turned out where someone had said ‘so and so is my father’ they’re actually saying ‘so and so is my grandfather or uncle’ and the same goes for ‘son/nephew’, cousins are brothers and sisters. Yes, there was some absolute homophobia going on when it was first suggested that they might not actually be brothers, but lovers. There are some that still think this way. But the vast majority no longer hold this view, and haven’t since the 1980s.
Please stop believing that the homophobia of 1920s, or even 1970s, scholars is still the most current and widely held belief in Egyptology. By perpetuating this view, you harm those scholars, many of whom are LGBT themselves, who are trying to get out there and make themselves heard on this topic. They’re working tirelessly to change this perception and the narrative Tumblr likes to push is actively harming their work.
That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.
Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.
excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[
the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.
and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.
so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.
If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.
Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.
✌️✌️✌️
Plus, buying honey supports bee owners, which helps them maintain the hives, and if they get more money they can buy more hives, which means more bees!
I tell people this. About the honey and what to do to save bees. I also have two large bottles of honey in my cabinet currently. Trying to get some flowers for them to thrive on. Support your bees guys
… uh guys… the whole “Save the Bees!” thing is not about honeybees. It’s about the decline of native bees almost to the point of extinction. Native bees do not make honey. Honeybees are domesticated. Taking measures to protect honeybees is as irrelevant to helping the environment as protecting Farmer John’s chickens.
To help save native bees, yes, plant NATIVE flowers (what naturally grows where you live? That’s what your bees eat!), set up “bee hotels,” which can be something as simple as a partially buried jar or flower pot for carpenter bees, and don’t use pesticides. Having a source of water (like a bird bath or “puddles” you frequently refresh) is also good for a variety of wildlife.
Want to know more about bees that are not honeybees?
Every place has different types of bees. Every place has different types of plants/flowers. Those hyped-up “save the bees” seed packets that are distributed across North America are garbage because none of those flowers are native in every habitat. Don’t look up “how to make a bee hotel” and make something that only bees from the great plains areas would use if you live on the west coast.
This is every bee that has been observed and uploaded to the citizen science network of iNaturalist. You can filter by location (anywhere in the world! This is not restricted to the US!), and you can view photos of every species people have added. Here’s the page for all bees, sorted by taxonomy, not filtered to any specific location [link]. Have you seen a bee and want to know more about it, but you don’t know what kind of bee it is? Take a picture, upload it to iNat, and people like me will help you identify it–and it will also become part of the database other people will use to learn about nature!
Some native Texan bees I’ve met!
A sweat bee! [link to iNat]. These flowers are tiny, no larger than a dime.
A longhorn bee! [link to iNat] I don’t know where they nest, but I often find them sleeping on the tips of flowers at night (so cute!)
Meet your local bees! Befriend them! Feed them! Make them homes! Love them!
This is one of the native bees I met in Arizona! This handsome man is a male Melissodes sp., AKA a type of long-horned bee. I saved him when he was drowning in a puddle.
I love him
This is a great post all in all but I’d just like to note that colony collapse syndrome is definitely a thing, so domestic honeybees are absolutely in danger as well
Europen Honey Bees are an invasive species in the US and compete with native bees.
Native bee populations are specifically evolved to pollinate certain native plants. Most are unlikely to have a significant effect on the pollination of the non-native crops that people need to grow to survive. It’s true that honeybees will compete with native bees as well, and can be classified as an invasive species, but so long as native bees are supported and native flora is maintained, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to coexist. And while there’s a whole different argument to be had about the negative effects of growing nonnative crops at all, if they fail, as they likely would without the honeybees that a large percentage of farmers keep to pollinate their and other local crops, the effects on humanity will be catastrophic
Lest people think I am anti-honeybee (no? I love honeybees?? They are precious??), the above is correct. Like it or not, the way we grow our food (much of which is not native to where it’s farmed) absolutely requires pollinators like honeybees. We would have a hugely massive food crisis on our hands without honeybees.
But, because so much $$$ is tied into the continued production of food, governments and food production companies will do whatever they can to mitigate the effects of colony collapse and other honeybee health issues. What can you do to help honeybees? Buy and eat food. Easy, right?
What is being done to protect native bees? Well,
1) Scientists and researchers are feverishly trying to get them listed as protected species and absolutely failing (see @thelepidopteragirl’s post about colleagues of hers: [link]).
2) Scientists and researchers are trying to get pesticides known to have devastating effects on bees and other pollinators banned and absolutely failing ([link]).
3) Scientists and science communicators (like me now, apparently) are trying to spread this information about native bees and their importance so more people can do little things like plant native flowers (lookup North American species for your zip code here: [link]), change how often they mow their lawns ([link]), and vote out the assholes who are profiting by destroying our environment ([link]). Success on this one: TBD, and by people like us.
As a gift to the honeybee lovers out there, please accept this photo of one making out with a stinkhorn mushroom:
^An excellent post on the complexities of the “Save the Bees” movement
To add, honeybees are also having problems in, you know, Europe and Asia, where they are native!
I feel like that gets forgotten by many, as Tumblr is very USA centered.
DIY pallet garden with worm tower - GreenShortzDIY
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This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
