“I just like the stories, Mom!!!” Lol

I love that book. I still have a copy. That said, it is an incredibly sanitized version of what the Greeks actually believed because every bit of the sex is cut out and it’s basically 90% sex.

for reasons

you kill puppies?

I’ve always thought the mid-late Roman Republic was more interesting than the imperial era, and the Gracchi are easily the most fascinating chapter. Noble aristocrats becoming populist ideologues, the increasingly bitter struggle over creaky governmental norms (like their weaponization of the tribunal veto to shut down the city), the introduction of political violence. Very instructive for our current era, imho.

off topic.

Look up the old BBC series ‘I, Claudius.’ Based on the Robert Graves novels, Featuring Brian Blessed as Augustus and Patrick Stewart as Sirjanus

If it’s “Game of Thrones”-like intrigue the people want, a miniseries about the Severan dynasty would kick ass. Let’s see what we get in just three generations or so:

-Year of the five emperors, with Septimius Severus coming out the victor and establishing the dynasty after a five-way civil war.

-Two brothers, co-emperors, who can’t stand the sight of each other with their mother mediating between them, with one eventually killing the other WITH THEIR MOTHER IN THE ROOM.

-Caracalla then gets killed while on campaign by the brother of a soldier he had executed.

-A grandmother putting a specific grandson on the throne, then changing her mind, having him and her own daughter KILLED and replaced with another grandson & his mother.

-The first grandson being, quite probably, the first trans emperor/ruler in ancient history, with immensely, uh, interesting consequences.

-The “Good” grandson becoming a successful and celebrated emperor, only to be killed by his own troops after trying to buy off peace with the Germanic tribes, thereby kicking off the crisis of the 3rd century which would need several miniseries in and of itself to really tell all its tales…

British history podcast is very nice for the history of Brittania. It covers the whole period and is very accurate.

I finished that one. It’s the GOAT history podcast.

If her name is Leda, she’ll be cool with it.

But babe, you said you were a carbonari sandwich!!

Maps to the west, assicles, etc.

disclaimer at the start of their videos which is basically a politer version of “Nazi punks fuck off”.

The whole scene has been doing that since what 70 years or so now. After the war some groups of people started seriously wondering about what civilisation is, how it’s very much not rooted in whether or not you wear a suit or not, and started looking for roots. The old Germanic roots were at that time actually out of the question: The Nazis had appropriated and bent them to their brand of insanity, but Karl May existed and with the US there were actual Indians in Germany in the form of GIs. Cultural exchange happened, pretty much unnoticed by the general population, and with that came knowledge: Tradition is not the praying to the ashes, but the passing of the fire, that exchange helped people find genuine embers, small as they were. Once people started to flame the symbols of those embers Nazis came along and wanted to be part of it and promptly were told to fuck off – not just out of a general antifascist stance but also because Nazis, in particular, were the ones who poisoned the little that was left after Christianisation. Then time moved on and a lot happened. Baudrillard, for one. Bear with me:

You might’ve noticed that Heilung doesn’t have Germanic symbology front and left and centre – it’s not about the, or any, symbology. They’re not Asatru or something, their costumes and historical references go back further than the Norse (pretty much as far as they can). About the closest you get is song titles written in runic alphabet and some consistent choices in graphic design looking quite like Nordic carvings – but none of that is religious stuff as-such.

From what I can tell Nazis don’t actually try to get a piece of that particular pie: It’s not to their liking. They like their symbols, their flags to rally around, their fetishes, to distract themselves from realising what they’re actually doing. The “Nazi punks fuck off” part is there for people stumbling across it, vibing with it, and wondering whether it’s kosher. Yes, yes it very much is. They’re plain and simply modern shamans who happen to be history nerds, and western esotericism has been post-structural for long enough now that the lack of symbolic system shouldn’t really surprise, c.f. e.g. Chaos Magick. They write and perform rituals to speak to parts of the psyche that what we call civilisation may have forgotten, but certainly not the genome. That, you know, one great being that was always there.

Check out Brothers of Metal!

I used to date a girl that had basically grown up in the antique shop that her father owned. It was amazing - we would watch Antiques Roadshow and she knew what everything was and almost exactly what the experts would say it was worth every time. After her father died she ended up with a ton of stuff in her house, and one day I went over there to find she had put up an “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” poster from the 1930s featuring good ol’ Adolf above the fireplace. She wasn’t pro-Hitler or anything, just thought it was an interesting bit of history. I was like “babe, c’mon, we want to keep our friends”.

The opposite is kind of weird too. My late Jewish father was absolutely obsessed with the Holocaust. He had virtually every book ever written on the subject. There was a room in the house my mother and I called (much to his chagrin) ‘The Holocaust Room’ because of the vast number of books on the Holocaust there were inside it.

He did have sort of a reason for his obsession. He was in London from age 7 on through the war because his parents didn’t evacuate him and he spend the years 1939-1945 waiting for the Nazis to invade and put him in a concentration camp. So it made sense to me, but it was still going pretty overboard.

He saw Shoah more than once. It’s 566 minutes long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)

It’s the same as gay conservatives.

You don’t want to overthink it else your brain explodes.

Actually him and not a cute or buff girl with his name? None.

The WW1 trenches are also very rich with inspiration, and the Napoleonic era Sharpe books have influenced quite a few Black Library books if you want more to read

Yeah, it wasn’t necessarily in civics or history class for me, but I do remember a few transphobic and sometimes racist things that my teachers said or did in elementary and middle school. I remember one time all the 7th graders were gathered together and explicitly told to not use the internet for research because someone found that men could get pregnant. Mind you, they didn’t mention transmen at all but presented it in another way. I left feeling so hung up on how one would go about transplanting a uterus into a male and why they made a scandal of something I had never heard of that seemed impossible and impractical. I only had the epiphany of what that was really about a couple years ago. /tangent

Right?

“If you have an interest in a period of history in which bad people lived, it’s probably because you secretly idolize them.”

I want to talk to you about the Greek mythology thing for a second: Are you now, or have you ever been a swan?

This post is laying the groundwork to say someone is somehow morally compromised for having certain interests. Those interests have been common interests for decades.

Right now, there’s 100 percent a mood that people who are morally compromised deserve to be mistreated.b

The end result of posts like these is nerds being bullied in the same way they used to before the whole anti bullying attitude started. Only this is even worse because the victims get told they are POSes who deserve it.

The Roman one specifically applies to basically every male history nerd. Same with WW2.

She has no place in any history of philosophy

I’m a simple plucked chicken, I got no time for that philosophizing.

Sounds like you’re ready for a lecture on the Philosophy of Cynicism as practiced by Antisthenes and his student Diogenes. The latter of whom famously lived in a clay pot…

OK, so here’s the short version:
Heinrich VI. who presided over the assembly of nobles in Erfurt had his belief in god’s favor shaken to its core by all the lords he invited literally drowning in shit inside a church. He then became Emperor after his predecessor Friedrich I. had drowned in a river while on a crusade, shortly before reaching Jerusalem - another proof that god wasn’t on the Holy Roman Empire’s side.
His lack of faith, on which his own power as god-appointed Emperor was founded, was noticed by everyone around him. So the lords denied his attempt to instate a hereditary monarchy and removed themselves from his court, putting them in a position where they could deny or demand payment for following his commands.
Driven by a deep longing to prove he was still in god’s grace, and to regain absolute power, he believed that his role on earth was to reunite the Eastern and Western church and become the prophecized “Emperor of Peace” who would bring about the end times. To this end, he started campaigning and preparing for another Crusade that would not only reconquer Jerusalem, but also the Byzantine Empire.
His death from Malaria while besieging Messina as staging ground for his crusade put an end to those plans for now, but not to the ideas behind the crusade he had popularized.
When the fourth crusade was launched just 5 years later, the most experienced crusading knights would have been veterans of his misguided campaign, and when it became clear that they couldn’t pay for the passage to the Holy Land, they would have been the ones to propose to conquer the Byzantine Empire instead as another valid target, just as their former Emperor had proposed. As we all know, the following sack of Constantinople destroyed the will of the church and the Christian states to unite and put any real effort into another crusade from that point on.
The next German Emperor didn’t even participate in the Fifth crusade and delayed participation in the Sixth for so long he got excommunicated. From then on, any further crusades were called by individual kings, not the pope in the name of all Christendom.
The Muslim rule over the middle east was secure for the coming centuries, the Byzantine Empire never recovered, and the Ottoman Empire rose into the power vacuum and eventually conquered it.

Which leads us to Baghdad. The center of Islamic culture during its heyday and for centuries after, a shining beacon of civilization more developed than the attacking Crusader states. You have to understand what such a history does to the self-image of the inhabitants. And at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia, it was easy to see the region as the center of the world. Due to the aforementioned rise of the Ottoman Empire and its incorporation of today’s Iraq, the land became part of one of the greatest Empires in history.
Until after a period of declining importance and influence, the British conquered the Ottoman Empire as well as Baghdad and drew their own borders in the sand, the US-lead league of nations sanctioned the new borders imposed on the people, and called the cobbled-together country “Iraq”, an entity with no regard for its history or former glory, and under western rule for the first time in a millennium.
It’s a logical conclusion that Iraq would eventually unite with their neighbors and throw off the British rule, but also that without historic precedent (due to being part of a Muslim empire for so long), they wouldn’t have the experience to establish a stable democracy. One coup d’etat followed another, which always pushes the most ruthless leaders to power. And that was the Baath party. They promised freedom and a new, pan-Arabic union that would end western rule, which the pan-Islamic unions of the past had failed at.
But also within the party, the most ruthless used the chaos to rise to power, and Saddam Hussein solidified his position by first killing those Baathists that didn’t support him, then thousands of his own citizens, and then starting a war, which threatened US influence in the region enough to eventually topple him - in a war that created so much anger and suffering that one man, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, saw no other way to vent his anger than to throw his shoes at the leader of the western world.