Today I found out that the name Alexandra is found in Linear B, and it’s kind of blowing my mind because that means that name has been in use for at least 4500 years
I’m watching a doc about judy garland and wow gay men love her
fun fact gay men used to refer to themselves as “friends of dorothy” when it was still illegal to be gay because garland was so popular in the queer male community but ONE TIME the NIS was investigating homosexual affairs and they kept coming across the term and they thought there was some mysterious figure, some woman named dorothy, and they were like “we gotta find her and convince her to tell us which members of the navy are gay!” and essentially began a manhunt for dorothy from the wizard of oz
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.
why would they? why would they tell us that they are ACTIVELY destroying the world?
i was lucky enough to have a scholarship to an excellent private high school, and we had precisely one class that covered these events. public school? didn’t even mention them.
edit: oh, and the class was an elective, and only spring semester, because the same teacher did intro to law in fall semester. so basically only 24 kids a year in all of minneapolis, to the best of my knowlege, were informed of our deliberate destabilization of the middle east in the 80′s and 90′s.
it’s not like we could just spread the word on social media, either. there was no such thing.
it’s easy for millennials to look down on gen-x and boomers for being ignorant, but we just didn’t have the tools to acquire this information. we may not have believed everything we were told – hell, gen-x at least was famously cynical about the propaganda we were taught in school – but that didn’t mean we were able to find out the truth.
it’s up to you now, kiddos. don’t you say “it’s not my job to educate you” when we wouldn’t even know there was something to look for without posts like this. go forth and make truth known. fact-check everything. you’re the first generation that can.
I found out about the ugly stuff at home, from books and my very anti establishment family, then went to school and watched the teachers take wide narrative detours around genocides and illegal human experimentation and the CIA and war crimes and other assorted US government misdeeds, and i was one angry little doomsday child because i was sure they were doing it to deceive us for THE GOVERNMEMT, not just because they had also been given the revised facts themselves.
I was in the sixth grade during the first desert storm. I never said a word but i well remember being furious at teachers a whole lot of the time. i was also very very extra angry every thanksgiving.
I thought i was chill these days till i recalled this stuff and nope still ornery
I’m fascinated by the respect commanded by (ostensibly) ancient things. Especially when the supposedly ancient is, in fact, quite modern. A couple requests for my (not terribly numerous) readers:
What are some examples of this phenomenon that I don’t already know about?
What’s a good tag for this topic?
List of things along these lines that I’ve read about or posted before below the cut.
I’ve postedbefore about “nations” (in the sense of a state-sized population bound together by a common language and high culture) being comparatively recent.
I recently read somestuff that @nostalgebraist linked about the history of the study of literature / “the english major”.
I’m aware that yoga (in the way we understand it) is a 20th century phenomenon (related to nascent Indian nationalism?).
That whole thing about ancient greek and roman statues originally being painted (gaudily). Same thing about temples in Japan.
Ancient Chinese poetry actually just rhymed (and sound change is why it doesn’t, not some aesthetic consideration).
There’s a classic book about this sort of thing, Hobsbawm & Ranger (eds., 1983), The Invention of Tradition. (I haven’t read it myself.)
Scottish clan tartans are a well-known example.
Years ago, I went to a lecture by the historian Juan Cole in which he argued that modern Islamic extremist groups practice this extensively. The Taliban, for example, strictly and literally adheres to every obscure Islamic law they can find, even those that were never actually followed by anyone, anywhere, prior to the existence of the Taliban.
I second the Hobsbawm book. I haven’t read the whole thing but I’ve read excerpts and they were insightful.
Like Disexplications said, the middle east being traditional/conservative is thought of as a holdover from past centuries but is a recent reactionary movement. A hundred years ago it had a reputation for being completely accepting of same-sex relationships. The West saw it as a sexually uninhibited place, and showed up in a lot of old-timey Western smut. (shieks and harems, etc.)
Off the top of my head, pretty much everything to do with wedding ceremonies in the modern-day US is a recent invention that people think of as being part of their heritage.
On the topic of weddings and sexuality: the Western ideal of women as gatekeepers of sexual purity was pretty much a Victorian invention. Puritans harshly condemned premarital relations, but within marriage, they enjoyed healthy sex lives. There’s evidence that they considered female orgasm essential to conception as well.
In the early colonial period, sexual norms were enforced externally, through the family and the community. There was a legally enforceable framework of right and wrong that might have been oppressive, but at least it let you know where you stood. It was largely the collapse of Puritan theocracy that gave us the wilting Victorian female. Men who impregnated unmarried women were no longer required to marry them, so the burden of preventing pregnancy switched to individual women rather than their communities. Teaching girls to repress sexual desire at all costs was the (very crude) solution.
Source: *Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America*, which is an excellent read.
Lots of US holidays, like Thanksgiving and St Patrick’s Day, are younger than most people think they are.
On the flip side (not that you asked for this) player pianos are impressively old.
pink is for girls and blue is for boys is an extremely recent marketing thing, solidifying as tradition only in the 80′s. it seems like it goes further back because modern media about earlier times generally still adheres to the custom, even when it would be ahistorical.
“knitting is for old ladies” dates back to the 1950′s. up until ww2, knitting was just one of those chores you should probably know how to do, and while the bulk of sitting-down work often fell to grandmas, it was also common among men with jobs that required warm clothes and hours of sitting around, such as sailors, soldiers, shepherds and cowboys.
during ww2, knitting for the troops was promoted as the patriotic duty of people who stayed home, primarily women. afterwards, as rationing stopped and factory knits became cheap, some of those women stuck to it as a hobby, and everyone else kind of dropped it.
you can watch these women age in media from the 1950′s, when knitting was associated with fresh young expecting mothers, to the 1960′s and 70′s, when it was a Mom Thing, and thereafter it became a Grandma Thing, because it was the same women keeping it alive since the 40′s.
now, as that generation dies out, knitting’s been resurrected as part of the 21st century crafting renaissance. the fact that even so, it’s still widely seen as a female thing, and more specifically as an old lady thing, is simply due to us all growing up surrounded by media depicting the ‘greatest generation’ aging normally with their knitting in hand.
“we can’t call most historical figures things like gay or lesbian because those terms didn’t exist in their times/cultures and if you ever call them that you’re a bad historian and/or just projecting”
“while it is important to be aware of the differences in how sexuality existed in other time periods and cultures, and using modern terminology is generally inappropriate in an academic setting, our terminology is still a convenient way to speak about historical figures who would likely have those identities in our own time. a historian should always be conscious of those differences, but that does not mean that it is wholly inappropriate to use our modern terminology in a casual setting for historical figures who had same-sex relationships, especially since, for many queer people, these historical figures can be a source of inspiration as well as a connection to the past”
“Listen to me– all of you out there! You were told by this man– your hero– that America is the greatest country in the world! He told you that Americans were the greatest people– that America could be refined like silver, could have the impurities hammered out of it, and shine more brightly! He went on about how precious America was – how you needed to make sure it remained great! And he told you anything was justified to preserve that great treasure, that pearl of great price that is America!
“Well, I say America is nothing! Without its ideals– its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash! A nation is nothing! A flag is a piece of cloth! I fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile! I knew that liberty could be snuffed out here as in Nazi Germany! As a people, we were no different than them! When I returned, I saw that you nearly did turn American into nothing! And the only reason you’re not less then nothing– is that it’s still possible for you to bring freedom back to America!”
just moving along like everyone else 