Resistance can take many forms – from education to litigation, from within a small community to throughout the globe. Though I have omitted highly important figures like Yuri Kochiyama and Fred Korematsu, I wanted to spotlight lesser-known individuals who resisted injustice in a variety of ways. They demonstrate that we too can act against oppression and inequality, however we are able.
“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?”
ancient guy: i want all the dicks of persia in my ass, i love dicks, give me dicks until i drown modern historian: well what you have to keep in mind is that ancient cultures had different ideas of how to show affection and express themselves, so it’s actually probable he was talking about his brotherly affection for his people
The way a group of eighty year olds judges people for not vaccinating their fuckin kids warms the cold black ashes of my heart.
I remember the camp where I went as a kid had these SCOURING, painful showers. The water pressure was such that it was like getting blasted by a firehose, only less entertaining.
You had to walk through the shower room – there was no option – it was built that way. The showers were usually not on because they were horrible and painful and we all just disobeyed the rule about showering before getting in the pool.
I was an adult before I found out why there was a shower room like that, and that when my mom was a child, no one dared to disobey the shower rule, and all the showers were horrible and scouring. It was for getting as much dirt and stray poo and whatever off you, as an anti-polio measure.
One of my most vivid auditory memories is hearing the sound of my grandmother’s leg brace, which she had worn for most of her life as the result of the polio epidemic in the 1920s.
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.
!!!
Before the Discovery Channel went to shit, there were documentaries about this, I remember watching one. And all kinds of other stuff they don’t teach us in school.
I think I recall like half a paragraph about it in high school, but then mine was apparently strange because we went more into depth about the Native genocide and Japanese internment camps and other awful things than anyone I’ve ever talked to. The ‘wait they didn’t teach you that’ conversations I’ve had..
“Is it ok to wear makeup?” (the answer was: “everybody wears perukes, because it’s xviith century England, and that’s also altering one’s appearance, so it’s fair to say that yeah.”)
That one anon that just NEEDS to hear your opinion on a character.
Hard-hitting question.
“I have a psychic dog, is that sick or what? Also my entire family is dead because this is xviith century England.”
And then, of course, there’s questions that are at the same time very set in their time period, and also somethign you might as well see on the front page of reddit: “help, I discovered my wife is my daughter, should I tell her if I know it might kill her?”; “help, I married a woman who’s now taking all my money and abusing the shit out of me, all I want is a nap”; “is it chill to throw witches in ponds or nah?”.
What an amazing history lesson. What a fine collection of politely-presented earlie shytpostes. Juicy, juicy 300-years old drama.
I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
Steel Phoenix Studios 