When you hear people about saving our democracy, remember this. 🤔

MOTHER NOTICED ME

Deanie Parish. WASP pilot. In front of her Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. 1940′s

"Nellie"

Loango people from Brazzaville, modern-day Republic of the Congo

French vintage postcard

Capitulo 1:ヨーロッパの雰囲気が漂う五稜郭/Goryokaku a hallmark with European airs. - Sean bienvenidos a una nueva entrega de cultura e historia japonesa, en este caso vamos a hablar sobre Goryokaku, localizado en Hakodate en la prefectura de Hokkaido al norte de la isla de Honshu. - Toponimia de Hokkaido en, el siglo XIX se llamaba Ezo, último reducto del shogunato contra el nuevo orden creando una república (1868-1869). Hay que destacar que Japón estubo cerrado al mundo durante 260 (1603-1868), este periodo se le conoce como periodo Edo, bajo el régimen militar Tokugawa. - En 1854 finalizaron los tratados de amistad con Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña, Rusia. Hakodate se convirtió en una ciudad portuaria abierta al mundo exterior y en 1858, concluyendo el tratado comercial y al año siguiente se convirtió en puerto comercial. Hisaburo Takeda, estudio en Europa y se formó en fortalezas tipo estrelladas de traza italiana, en 1864 se completaron las contribuciones de la fortaleza. - Espero que os guste y nos vemos em próximas publicaciones. - Welcome to a new installment of Japanese culture and history, in this case we are going to talk about Goryokaku, located in Hakodate in the Hokkaido prefecture north of the island of Honshu. - Toponymy of Hokkaido in the 19th century was called Ezo, the last stronghold of the shogunate against the new order creating a republic (1868-1869). It should be noted that Japan was closed to the world for 260 years (1603-1868), this period is known as the Edo period, under the Tokugawa military regime. - In 1854 the friendship treaties with the United States, Great Britain, and Russia ended. Hakodate became a port city open to the outside world and in 1858, concluding the commercial treaty and the following year it became a commercial port. Hisaburo Takeda, studied in Europe and trained in Italian star-type fortresses, in 1864 the contributions of the fortress were completed. - 日本の文化と歴史の新しい記事へようこそ。今回は、本州の北、北海道の函館にある五稜郭について話します。 - 19 世紀の北海道の地名は蝦夷と呼ばれ、共和制を樹立する新秩序（1868～1869 年）に対抗する幕府の最後の拠点でした。 日本は 260 年間 (1603 年から 1868 年まで) 鎖国していたことに注意してください。この期間は、徳川軍事政権下の江戸時代として知られています。 - 1854 年にアメリカ、イギリス、ロシアとの友好条約が終了しました。 函館は対外に開かれた港湾都市となり、1858年に通商条約を締結し、翌年には商業港となりました。 武田久三郎はヨーロッパに留学し、イタリアの星型要塞で訓練を受け、1864 年に要塞の建設を完了しました。 source/ソース:photos internet/写真インターネット

And its terminal

KIZHI ISLAND - RUSSIA

anakin skywalker's relationship with the jedi order begins and ends with his mother.

the first time he meets a jedi, he's slave, and his first reaction is him saying, “no one can kill a jedi." and that means so much! because he is a slave, and even at age nine, he very explicitly knows that he nor his mother have no control over their own life or their own death. in the next breath, he asks, "have you come to free us [the slaves]?" for nine-year-old anakin, who lives and dies by his master's will and whim (and knows that very, very well), a jedi's power is intrinsically intertwined with a mastery over life and death which he has never had.

and qui-gon says no. and anakin asks him, "why else would you be here?" and that's never, ever answered to anakin's satisfaction. there must be a higher power and a higher goal, here, because up until qui-gon dispels this notion, the jedi have been the highest power anakin can conceive of. ultimately, anakin's freedom does not come from the jedi––he wins his freedom after having it gambled as valuable property—and his entrance into the jedi order comes with leaving his mother behind, his mother behind in slavery, in real and present and explicit danger. but the jedi did have the power to free his mother: anakin knows this, anakin asks this, and anakin is never answered—why didn't the jedi free the slaves?

anakin's most pivotal, most consequential meeting with the jedi order is his first meeting, and he's very much completely rejected by them, for things he can't control: his mother, his age. he is nine years old, has been freed from a lifetime of slavery maybe forty-eight hours before, and taken half-way across the galaxy with people he barely knows to meet an order he thought was myth with powers and rules he does not understand and have not been explained to him. when he is told he is afraid––of course he is.

"afraid to lose her?" yoda asks of shmi, and that line right there echoes off the great chasm that stands between anakin and the jedi order for his entire life. anakin, at such a tender age, is intimately aware that shmi is in clear and present immediate physical danger at all times. yoda is speaking hypothetically, existentially. anakin is not. anakin's fears are grounded deep in reality, of lifelong slavery, and yoda is one of the many standing before him who have the power to help and free his mother. so why not?

anakin's entire career as a jedi is founded on shmi, who told him, "don't look back," who anakin left behind as a slave, so in turn anakin tells his mother, "i'll come back and free you." but ten years later and shmi is still not free—as far as anakin knows.

it hangs over the narrative of aotc until anakin is holding his dead mother's body in his arms. by then, anakin is too late to free his mother, and it morphs: “I will learn to stop people from dying.”

it’s not a rational plan, or a reasonable goal, but it’s an understandable reaction that traces its origin directly back to anakin always having been very acutely aware that he has no control over life or death, especially since he was born as a slave. and no doubt! anakin’s skills drastically increase in the three years between aotc and rots. he goes from unceremoniously having an arm cut off by dooku to being able to relatively easily best him in a duel.

but from shmi’s death onward, every potential death of a loved one is now, in anakin’s mind, the same death played over and over. if he is running through every potential situation as a chance to re-do shmi’s death, he is the only unknown variable. as much as padmé’s death is complicated by their child’s fate hanging in the balance, it is, once again, shmi’s death.

there’s no wonder that anakin turns towards palpatine—who has manipulated and groomed him since age nine, from right when he left his mother—because yoda unknowingly recites the same lines in the script anakin has been feverishly relieving for years. yoda says: the jedi cannot help. his response was the same to padmé that is was to shmi: make peace with this, there is nothing to be done. but why? why not? why didn’t the jedi free the slaves, all those years ago? why can’t they save padmé?

the irony, of course, being that for all of the hellfire and fury anakin brings down on the order, he’s left with exactly the same as where he started. there are slaves. there is death—pointless, pointless death. shmi’s dead, padmé’s dead, his child’s dead. the republic rots away into the empire, because the empire had long before calcified in the bones of what had been a republic.

later, much later, palpatine demands the same thing from vader: i will torture your son, you will watch, and you cannot do anything—make your peace. and finally, finally, anakin shatters the cycle he and the galaxy are trapped in. he saves luke, leia lives, as anakin’s greatest triumphs, because it is the end of the old and beginning of something new. no more slaves. no more death.

POLITICAL AND CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE GFFA | Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia (2017) An overview of the Republic Senate, the Separatist Senate, Military Officers, and Criminal Organizations that make up the political landscape of the galaxy far, far away.

Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. Warming up

F-105D - Hill AFB - December 5, 1981

the end of capitalism is impossible (no, it is nigh)

or at least that is what people think.

people can imagine the end of the world easier than the end of capitalism.

they cannot fathom a society that doesn't need money. where people create things and do jobs not only because they enjoy them, but because their needs are actually being met by the civilization they're in.

i don't think people realize the state of our world. well. maybe they do, but they don't think deeply on how unnecessary and destructive it all is.

we produce things - food, entertainment, even lives - which we immediately discard. i mean this very literally. people do in fact do this with children.

some people lack so much self awareness that they don't really think about what it means to bring a child into this world. somehow they've forgotten how shitty it was for them. somehow they've forgotten how hard it was for their parents. or how our world has gotten progressively worse.

the climate crisis has reached a tipping point. our governments have not as been as useful as they could be. our technology is mostly used for nonsense and not furthering humankind/the planet.

we could be so much more.

ofc i am a disabled trans man of color. i work to make a living. i have not been lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family. or even a family that is particularly loving, if i'm being honest.

but i have been blessed in other ways. just as i have been cursed in other ways. some of them are connected. like my intelligence is a blessing and curse. as is my physical beauty. as is my awareness of these matters. my calling too.. to be involved in the spiritual world and cultivation..

many people before me have seen ways to end capitalism. even now we have those solutions.

i can't imagine advanced aliens live the way we do. that they use their technology to destroy and take. to subvert their own kind.

but maybe in their past they were like that.

i just hope we can get to a future where we're beyond this

You know what I despise just as much as Imperial apologists? Separatist apologists. People claim that the CIS did nothing wrong, that they were the "real heroes of the Clone Wars", that their benevolent movement was hijacked by evil people, but in reality, the CIS was intentionally designed to be an evil force by evil people. Sure, there were some "good" folks on the Separatists' side, but in the end, they CHOSE to align themselves with some of the most despicable people in the galaxy. Also, they tend to forget that the CIS was created by Sith as a means of weakning the Jedi Order.

While I certainly don't think the Separatists were heroes of any kind, I don't think that the actual politicians in the CIS were intentionally aligning themselves with people they believed to be despicable. It's made pretty clear in "Heroes on Both Sides" that the CIS parliament seems to have no clue that their whole army is being led by the corporate alliance. They call out that the whole point behind the CIS was to free themselves from being connected to the corporate alliance the way the Republic is, and they believe that they've SUCCEEDED at that. So it's less that they've intentionally aligned themselves with evil people doing evil things so much as they were completely and utterly duped and manipulated into a position where they've ended up unknowingly supporting the very evil they claim to be against.

What I WILL say about the Separatist politicians though is that every single one of them that we're shown seems to be very willfully ignorant. When Mina meets with Padme, she refuses to hear a bad word against Dooku, even though presumably Padme could say a lot of things about how Dooku allowed her to be nearly executed on Geonosis simply because she wouldn't join the CIS. And after Mina's assassinated, Lux tries to speak to some of the Separatist politicians who gathered for a peace summit to tell them that Dooku killed his mother and he's shot down cold for lying about it and then thrown out of the building. Mina and the other Separatists have been manipulated SO HARD into believing in Dooku and his promises that they can't believe anything or anyone that goes against what he says, even when it's someone they consider a friend or the child of one of their own.

That willful ignorance moves them far away from being "heroes" of any kind for me. I can appreciate that they had legitimate grievances against the Republic, that they believed they were doing what was right for their people, and that there was a lot of things that were clearly hidden from them. So they're by no means the ones most at fault for the war. But they SHOULD'VE been more willing to accept that Dooku (and by extension themselves and the entire Separatist movement) was not perfect when told or shown evidence by people they claimed to trust.

The other mark against the Separatists is that the King of Onderon that we're introduced to in season 5 is HORRIFIC. The guy who is explicitly said to be the new Separatist leader is terrible and the people hate him and much prefer the old King (who, by implication, was presumably more pro-Republic or at least served primarily back when Onderon was still a member of the Republic). And this was MINA'S PLANET. Mina is not someone who is represented as just some stupid vapid politician, she's supposed to be smart and kind, she's Padme's mentor. She's supposed to be someone who truly CARES, but her people are suffering under a Separatist installed ruler and there's no mention of that at all during her one episode. There's no indication that she was even aware or paying attention to it. So long as the war never made it to her planet, she seems to have been looking the other way. And we can probably assume similar stuff is happening on the other Separatist planets, too, that Separatist rulers have been installed who are willing to basically let Dooku and the Corporate Alliance do whatever they want with no regard for how it'll impact the actual people. And Dooku is going to be able to continue to manipulate and blind the Separatist politicians into not realizing what's going on or believing that this is just a temporary necessary evil of some kind.

The major advantage the Republic Senate has for me is that there IS at least a small group of people (small being relative, there's so many politicians in the Senate that a group of 2000 people is considered small) who DO recognize what's going on in their own government, and who are actively fighting against the corruption they can see and acknowledge. They don't believe their system is PERFECT, but they believe that it's still the best system available and worth fighting to make it BETTER and remove the people keeping it corrupt. The CIS doesn't have that. Every single person is so willfully ignorant to everything that they can't have people like Padme or Bail or Mon Mothma who can see the problems in their own government and actively work to make it better from the inside. And this just makes the Separatist politicians unknowingly part of the problem they don't even realize exists (or aren't willing to admit exists), which means that their people are just going to keep suffering while their elected representatives sit on their high horses and do nothing.

So I don't think they're EVIL, but they're not heroes either. Much like Anakin, they're manipulated by someone they should be able to trust and who presents himself as someone trustworthy, and they're not mindful enough to recognize the truth behind what they've gotten involved in or humble enough to listen when someone tries to make them aware of it. So yes, it was an evil force designed by evil people with the explicit purpose of weakening the Jedi AND the Republic enough for Palpatine to maneuver himself into power, but I don't for a MOMENT believe that the actual politicians involved in the CIS ever realize that until it's far too late. As far as they're concerned, it IS a benevolent movement and if they ever realize the truth of it in the aftermath of the war, then from their perspective it probably DID get hijacked by evil people. The Separatists are, in many ways, a tragic story. They SHOULD'VE been a good thing, they should've been a group of people genuinely working to try to create a new, better system for their people. They had the best of intentions, but much like Anakin, it's mostly just paving the road to hell.

I'd love more fics that look at the Rebellion era where you get both Republic and Separatist people having to work together and instead of the Separatists being all high and mighty about how THEY always knew the Republic was corrupt and everyone else was just too naive, there's some people who point out that the Separatist movement was literally run by the corporate alliance, that their entire ARMY was being run by the Techno Union and Trade Federation, that the Separatists were CLEARLY getting tax benefits from the Banking Clan that the Republic was NOT getting. I'd love more acknowledgement that yes, the Republic was corrupt, but that there were a LOT of people who knew that and were working to fix that problem, but that the Separatist movement wasn't some perfect idyllic government that didn't do anything wrong ever in their lives, either. The Separatist army did a lot of really fucking heinous shit to people and I'd love more Republic Rebels throwing that back at all those Separatist Rebel characters who get so high and mighty about knowing the Republic was corrupt. Like sure, great, you knew the Republic was corrupt, so did a LOT of people, many of whom were working to actually DO something about it. Come back to me when you're able to tell me you knew YOUR government was corrupt, too, then we can talk.