#historians' dispute
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Denazification, truth and reconciliation, and the story of Germany's story
Germany is the “world champion in remembrance,” celebrated for its post-Holocaust policies of ensuring that every German never forgot what had been done in their names, and in holding themselves and future generations accountable for the Nazis’ crimes.
All my life, the Germans have been a counterexample to other nations, where the order of the day was to officially forget the sins that stained the land. “Least said, soonest mended,” was the Canadian and American approach to the genocide of First Nations people and the theft of their land. It was, famously, how America, especially the American south, dealt with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Silence begets forgetting, which begets revisionism. The founding crimes of our nations receded into the mists of time and acquired a gauzy, romantic veneer. Plantations — slave labor camps where work was obtained through torture, maiming and murder — were recast as the tragiromantic settings of Gone With the Wind. The deliberate extinction of indigenous peoples was revised as the “taming of the New World.” The American Civil War was retold as “The Lost Cause,” fought over states’ rights, not over the right of the ultra-wealthy to terrorize kidnapped Africans and their descendants into working to death.
This wasn’t how they did it in Germany. Nazi symbols and historical revisionism were banned (even the Berlin production of “The Producers” had to be performed without swastikas). The criminals were tried and executed. Every student learned what had been done. Cash reparations were paid — to Jews, and to the people whom the Nazis had conquered and brutalized. Having given in to ghastly barbarism on an terrifyingly industrial scale, the Germans had remade themselves with characteristic efficiency, rooting out the fascist rot and ensuring that it never took hold again.
But Germany’s storied reformation was always oversold. As neo-Nazi movements sprang up and organized political parties — like the far-right Alternative für Deutschland — fielded fascist candidates, they also took to the streets in violent mobs. Worse, top German security officials turned out to be allied with AfD:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html
Neofascists in Germany had fat bankrolls, thanks to generous, secret donations from some of the country’s wealthiest billionaires:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/billionaire-backing-may-have-helped-launch-afd-a-1241029.html
And they broadened their reach by marrying their existing conspiratorial beliefs with Qanon, which made their numbers surge:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-fringe-groups-are-using-qanon-to-amplify-their-wild-messages
Today, the far right is surging around Europe, with the rot spreading from Hungary and Poland to Italy and France. In an interview with Jacobin’s David Broder, Tommaso Speccher a researcher based in Berlin, explores the failure of Germany’s storied memory:
https://jacobin.com/2023/07/germany-nazism-holocaust-federal-republic-memory-culture/
Speccher is at pains to remind us that Germany’s truth and reconciliation proceeded in fits and starts, and involved compromises that were seldom discussed, even though they left some of the Reich’s most vicious criminals untouched by any accountability for their crimes, and denied some victims any justice — or even an apology.
You may know that many queer people who were sent to Nazi concentration camps were immediately re-imprisoned after the camps were liberated. Both Nazi Germany and post-Nazi Germany made homosexuality a crime:
https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/
But while there’s been some recent historical grappling with this jaw-dropping injustice, there’s been far less attention given to the plight of the communists, labor organizers, social democrats and other leftists whom the Nazis imprisoned and murdered. These political prisoners (and their survivors) struggled mightily to get the reparations they were due.
Not only was the process punitively complex, but it was administered by bureaucrats who had served in the Reich — the people who had sent them to the camps were in charge of deciding whether they were due compensation.
This is part of a wider pattern. The business-leaders who abetted the Reich through their firms — Siemens, BMW, Hugo Boss, IG Farben, Volkswagon — were largely spared any punishment for their role in the the Holocaust. Many got to keep the riches they acquired through their part on an act of genocide.
Meanwhile, historians grappling with the war through the “Historikerstreit” drew invidious comparisons between communism and fascism, equating the two ideologies and tacitly excusing the torture and killing of political prisoners (this tale is still told today — in America! My kid’s AP history course made this exact point last year).
The refusal to consider that extreme wealth, inequality, and the lust for profits — not blood — provided the Nazis with the budget, materiel and backing they needed to seize control in Germany is of a piece with the decision not to hold Germany’s Nazi-enabling plutocrats to account.
The impunity for business leaders who collaborated with the Nazis on exploiting slave labor is hard to believe. Take IG Farben, a company still doing a merry business today. Farben ran a rubber factory on Auschwitz slave labor, but its executives were frustrated by the delays occasioned by the daily 4.5m forced march from the death-camp to its factory:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben
So Farben built Monowitz, its own, private-sector concentration camp. IG Farben purchased 25,000 slaves from the Reich, among them as many children as possible (the Reich charged less for child slaves).
Even by the standards of Nazi death camps, Monowitz was a charnel house. Monowitz’s inmates were worked to death in just three months. The conditions were so brutal that the SS guards sent official complaints to Berlin. Among their complaints: Farben refused to fund extra hospital beds for the slaves who were beaten so badly they required immediate medical attention.
Farben broke the historical orthodoxy about slavery: until Monowitz, historians widely believed that enslavers would — at the very least — seek to maintain the health of their slaves, simply as a matter of economic efficiency. But the Reich’s rock-bottom rates for fresh slaves liberated Farben from the need to preserve their slaves’ ability to work. Instead, the slaves of Monowitz became disposable, and the bloodless logic of profit maximization dictated that more work could be attained at lower prices by working them to death over twelve short weeks.
Few of us know about Monowitz today, but in the last years of the war, it shocked the world. Joseph Borkin — a US antitrust lawyer who was sent to Germany after the war as part of the legal team overseeing the denazification program — wrote a seminal history of IG Farben, “The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben”:
https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben
Borkin’s book was a bestseller, which enraged America’s business lobby. The book made the connection between Farben’s commercial strategies and the rise of the Reich (Farben helped manipulate global commodity prices in the runup to the war, which let the Reich fund its war preparations). He argued that big business constituted a danger to democracy and human rights, because its leaders would always sideline both in service to profits.
US companies like Standard Oil and Dow Chemicals poured resources into discrediting the book and smearing Borkin, forcing him into retirement and obscurity in 1945, the same year his publisher withdrew his book from stores.
When we speak of Germany’s denazification effort, it’s as a German program, but of course that’s not right. Denazification was initiated, designed and overseen by the war’s winners — in West Germany, that was the USA.
Those US prosecutors and bureaucrats wanted justice, but not too much of it. For them, denazification had to be balanced against anticommunism, and the imperatives of American business. Nazi war criminals must go on trial — but not if they were rocket scientists, especially not if the USSR might make use of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Recall that in the USA, the bizarre epithet “premature antifascist” was used to condemn Americans who opposed Nazism (and fascism elsewhere in Europe) too soon, because these antifascists opposed the authoritarian politics of big business in America, too:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/premature-antifascist-and-proudly-so/
When 24 Farben executives were tried at Nuremberg for the slaughter at Monowitz, then argued that they had no choice but to pursue slave labor — it was their duty to their shareholders. The judges agreed: 19 of those executives walked.
Anticommunism hamstrung denazification. There was no question that German elites and its largest businesses were complicit in Nazi crimes — not mere suppliers, but active collaborators. Antifacism wasn’t formally integrated into the denazification framework until the 1980s with “constitutional patriotism,” which took until the 1990s to take firm root.
The requirement for a denazification program that didn’t condemn capitalism meant that there would always be holes in Germany’s truth and reconciliation process. The newly formed Federal Republic set aside Article 10 of the Nuremberg Charter, which would hold all members of the Nazi Party and SS responsible for their crimes. But Article 10 didn’t survive contact with the Federal Republic: immediately upon taking office, Konrad Adenauer suspended Article 10, sparing 10 million war criminals.
While those spared included many rank-and-file order-followers, it also included many of the Reich’s most notorious criminals. The Nazi judge who sent Erika von Brockdorff to her death for her leftist politics was given a judge’s pension after the war, and lived out his days in a luxurious mansion.
Not every Nazi was pensioned off — many continued to serve in the post-war West German government. Even as Willy Brandt was demonstrating historic remorse for Germany’s crimes, his foreign ministry was riddled with ex-Nazi bureaucrats who’d served in Hitler’s foreign ministry. We still remember Brandt’s brilliant 1973 UN speech on the Holocaust:
https://www.willy-brandt-biography.com/historical-sources/videos/speech-uno-new-york-1973/
But recollections of Brandt’s speech are seldom accompanied by historian Götz Aly’s observation that Brandt couldn’t have given that speech in Germany without serious blowback from the country’s still numerous and emboldened antisemites (Brandt donated his Nobel prize money to restore Venice’s Scuola Grande Tedesca synagogue, but ensured that this was kept secret until after his death).
All this to say that Germany’s reputation as “world champions of memory” is based on acts undertaken decades after the war. Some of Germany’s best-known Holocaust memorials are very recent, like the Wannsee Conference House (1992), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), and the Topography of Terror Museum in (2010).
Germany’s remembering includes an explicit act of forgetting — forgetting the role Germany’s business leaders and elites played in Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi crimes that followed. For Speccher, the rise of neofacist movements in Germany can’t be separated from this selective memory, weighed down by anticommunist fervor.
And in East Germany, there was a different kind of incomplete rememberance. While the DDR’s historians and teachings emphasized the role of business in the rise of fascism, they excluded all the elements of Nazism rooted in bigotry: antisemitism, homophobia, sectarianism, and racism. For East German historians, Nazism wasn’t about these, it was solely “the ultimate end point of the history of capitalism.”
Neither is sufficient to prevent authoritarianism and repression, obviously. But the DDR is dust, and the anticommunism-tainted version of denazification is triumphant. Today, Europe’s wealthiest families and largest businesses are funneling vast sums into far-right “populist” parties that trade in antisemitic “Great Replacement” tropes and Holocaust denial:
https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/Europe%E2%80%99s%20two-faced%20authoritarian%20right%20FINAL_1.pdf
And Germany’s coddled aristocratic families and their wealthy benefactors — whose Nazi ties were quietly forgiven after the war — conspire to overthrow the government and install a far-right autocracy:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/25-suspected-members-german-far-right-group-arrested-raids-prosecutors-office-2022-12-07/
In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about denazification. For all the flaws in Germany’s remembrance, it stands apart as one of the brightest lights in national reckonings with unforgivable crimes. Compare this with, say, Spain, where the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco were housed in a hero’s monument, amidst his victims’ bones, until 2019:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_S%C3%A1nchez#Domestic_policy
What do you do with the losers of a just war? “Least said soonest mended” was never a plausible answer, and has been a historical failure — as the fields of fluttering Confederate flags across the American south can attest (to say nothing of the failure of American de-ba’athification in Iraq):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification
But on the other hand, people who lose the war aren’t going to dig a hole, climb in and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. Just because I think Germany’s denazification was hobbled by the decision to lets its architects and perpetrators walk free, I don’t know that I would have supported prison for all ten million people captured by Article 10.
And it’s not clear that an explicit antifascism from the start would have patched the holes in German denazification. As Speccher points out, Italy’s postwar constitution was explicitly antifascist, the nation “steeped in institutional anti-fascism.” Postwar Italian governments included prominent resistance fighters who’d fought Mussolini and his brownshirts.
But in the 1990s, “the end of the First Republic” saw constitutional reforms that removed antifascism — reforms that preceded the rise of the corrupt authoritarian Silvio Berlusconi — and there’s a line from him to the neofascists in today’s ruling Italian coalition.
Is there any hope for creating a durable, democratic, anti-authoritarian state out of a world run by the descendants of plunderers and killers? Can any revolution — political, military or technological — hope to reckon with (let alone make peace with!) the people who have brought us to this terrifying juncture?
[Image ID: The Tor Books cover for ‘The Lost Cause,’ designed by Will Staehle, featuring the head of the snake on the Gadsen ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, shedding a tear.]
Like I say, this is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about — not just how we might get out of this current mess, but how we’ll stay out of it. As is my wont, I’ve worked out my anxieties on the page. My next novel, The Lost Cause, comes out from Tor Books and Head of Zeus in November:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause
Lost Cause is a post-GND utopian novel about a near-future world where the climate emergency is finally being treated with the seriousness and urgency it warrants. It’s a world wracked by fire, flood, scorching heat, mass extinctions and rolling refugee crises — but it’s also a world where we’re doing something about all this. It’s not an optimistic book, but it is a hopeful one. As Kim Stanley Robison says:
This book looks like our future and feels like our present — it’s an unforgettable vision of what could be. Even a partly good future will require wicked political battles and steadfast solidarity among those fighting for a better world, and here I lived it along with Brooks, Ana Lucía, Phuong, and their comrades in the struggle. Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this.
The Lost Cause is a hopeful book, but it’s also a worried one. The book is set during a counter-reformation, where an unholy alliance of seagoing anarcho-capitalist wreckers and white nationalist militias are trying to seize power, snatching defeat from the jaws of the fragile climate victory. It’s a book about the need for truth and reconciliation — and its limits.
As Bill McKibben says:
The first great YIMBY novel, this chronicle of mutual aid is politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful even amidst the smoke. Forget the Silicon Valley bros — these are the California techsters we need rebuilding our world, one solar panel and prefab insulated wall at a time.
We’re currently in the midst of a decidedly unjust war — the war to continue roasting the planet, a war waged in the name of continuing enrichment of the world’s already-obscenely-rich oligarchs. That war requires increasingly authoritarian measures, increasing violence and repression.
I believe we can win this war and secure a habitable planet for all of us — hell, I believe we can build a world of comfort and abundance out of its ashes, far better than this one:
https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization
But even if that world comes to being, there will be millions of people who hate it, a counter-revolution in waiting. These are our friends, our relatives, our neighbors. Figuring out how to make peace with them — and how to hold their most culpable, most powerful leaders to account — is a project that’s as important, and gigantic, and uncertain, as a just transition is.
Next weekend, I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con:
Thu, Jul 20 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause— Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)
Fri, Jul 21 1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)
Fri, Jul 21 12h: Signing, AA09
Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/19/stolpersteine/#truth-and-reconciliation
[Image ID: Three 'stumbling stones' ('stolpersteine') set into the sidewalk in the Mitte, in Berlin; they memorialize Jews who lived nearby until they were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.]
#pluralistic#stolpersteine#historians' dispute#Historikerstreit#nazis#godwin's law#mussolini#berlusconi#italy#antifa#fascism#history#truth and reconciliation#the lost cause#denazification
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Omg I love how i got fired up for my stupid quest to brave the civil bureaucracy then realized it's Saturday. Fine *rolls over in bed w my epub of aurelius' meditations*
#got halfway thru them ages ago and then they were mentioned in a contemporary historian's prologue and i was like damn so true#she said something extremely cool about aurelius seeing beauty in putrescence (the ripe olive on the point of rotting)#but idk if i dig the point she was making (that the romans had what to us is a deeply alien worldview)#i mean that may well be the case idk enough about rome to dispute it. in fact i might agree (w many asterisks)#but i'm not sure if aurelius talking about rotting olives is your exhibit A there
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if u guys want to see the whole rant here it is btw. it is very long and also stupid
#also i have seen some historians beginning to dispute that lesbians were not criminalised#it just wasnt done as directly as it was to gay men#idk why they are so dismissive of the misogyny and homophobia lesbians have always faced but whatever!
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i typically enjoy an edward seymour dunk, the only one i think was kind of messed up was when he was like ‘hey, my mom just died, should we have a period of court mourning or something’ and the council was like ‘absolutely fucking NOT.’
#like i get it; you hate him; no argument there#but that's also the king's grandmother...? maybe unclench a little#it's a testament to how fed up they were with him tho lol#i truly have to wonder about that one; had they decided that court mourning was papist or something? symbolic colors?#i'll check back maria hayward to see if there was one for kparr; i think there was??#interestingly parallels how there wasn't one for john seymour when jane was queen; either#altho a historian recently has disputed the date; he thinks he died 1535 which would explain it but idk how far i rate that
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Rejected Horrible Histories skit...
Edward II of England: "Don't ask, don't tell!!!" (wearing 1327 sign, turns around, poker up his arse )
Death: WHOOOAAAAAHOHOHOHOOOOO!!!!!!! 😭 (laughs for 15 minutes straight) *gasping* "agh, you're through to the afterlife! "
#horrible histories#stupid deaths#edward ii#rejected because historians are disputing this more and more#it was likely propaganda
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Park Soo-hong, love felt before death... 10 billion KRW held up with 'wife Cheering'
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another thing w ancient history is like. high school classes WILL sometimes tell you things that are not correct. I remember being explicitly told that the textbook we used for classical art was out of date but since it was on the syllabus everything it said was considered 'right' for the purposes of the exam.
once when i was in uhh middle school i think? a teacher told us the 'the Romans sowed the fields of Carthage with salt' thing which i later found out is a myth that was fully debunked in the 1980s (no ancient source mentions this, it starts cropping up in the 19th century). i've seen the 'Caligula made his horse a senator' myth crop up a lot in pop history sources (the primary source on this one is actually Suetonius saying it never happened). & like that's not even getting into things ancient sources say did happen but are disputed by historians lmao.
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Imagine if like 3000 years into the future, shit hit the fan pretty bad at some point but society has been rebuilt to the point of doing archeology, digging up 21st century art in whatever forms still remain, and every once in a while finding an improbably well-preserved, mummified body, and the only complete and whole written text preserved from the era is some trashy murder novel from 2002 which has been somewhat well translated into a contemporary language. And the novel features a scene where someone goes into a morgue to identify a badly mauled body, which they only recognise from the cadaver's unusual tattoos.
And that becomes the commonly accepted explanation to the mystery of 21st century tattoos, depicted in some way in much art and found on many mummified remains - these ancient people got distinct permanent markings on their bodies specifically as a means of helping to identify their bodies in case that they die under mysterious circumstances. Some fragmented digital data of the era includes social media posts of parents lamenting their adult children's new tattoos, and people defending the choice to get tattoos, which seem to vaguely support this - clearly nobody would want their child to be one whose corpse is discovered face down in a ditch, but naturally if someone knows that they'll eventually be found dead in Miami, then getting distinct markings on yourself is only the responsible thing to do.
Some historians fucking hate this pop culture history myth of the true purpose of the tattoo, but only having one preserved written source to go by, they just don't know enough about the era to dispute it. The 21st century was bat shit insane, after all.
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A writer’s guide to the historical method: how historians work with sources
In this post, I provide a brief overview of how historians engage with different types of sources, with a focus on the mindset of a historian. This insight could be valuable for anyone crafting a character whose profession revolves around history research. It may also prove useful for authors conducting research for their book.
Concept of historical source
The concept of historical source evolves over time.
Initially, the focus was mainly on written sources due to their obvious availability. However, as time has progressed, historians now consider a wide range of sources beyond just written records. These include material artifacts, intangible cultural elements, and even virtual data.
While "armchair historians" may rely on existing studies and secondary sources, true professional historians distinguish themselves by delving directly into primary sources. They engage in a nuanced examination of various sources, weaving together diverse perspectives. It's crucial to recognize the distinction between personal recollection or memory and the rigorous discipline of historical inquiry. A historical source provides information, but the truth must be carefully discerned through critical analysis and corroboration.
Here's a concise list of the types of sources historians utilize:
Notarial source
Epistolary source
Accountancy source
Epigraphic source
Chronicle source
Oratory and oral source
Iconographic source
Diary source
Electronic source
Example: a notarial source
These are documents drafted by a notary, a public official entrusted with providing legal certainty to facts and legal transactions. These documents can take various forms, such as deeds, lawsuits, wills, contracts, powers of attorney, inventories, and many others.
Here we are specifically discussing a lawsuit document from 1211 in Italy.
A medieval lawsuit document is highly valuable for understanding various aspects of daily life because in a dispute, one must argue a position. From lawsuits, we also understand how institutions truly operated.
Furthermore, in the Middle Ages, lawsuits mostly relied on witnesses as evidence, so we can access a direct and popular source of certain specific social situations.
Some insight into the methodology of analysis:
Formal examination: historians scrutinize the document's form, verifying its authenticity and integrity. Elements such as structure, writing style, language, signatures, and seals are analyzed. Indeed, a professional historian will rarely conduct research on a source published in a volume but will instead go directly to the archive to study its origin, to avoid transcription errors.
Content analysis: historians proceed to analyze the document's content, extracting useful information for their research. This may include data on individuals, places, events, economic activities, social relations, and much more. It's crucial to compile a list of witnesses in a case and identify them to understand why they speak or why they speak in a certain manner.
Cross-referencing with other sources: information derived from the notarial source is compared with that of other historical sources to obtain a more comprehensive and accurate view of the period under examination.
Documents of the episcopal archive of Ivrea
Let's take the example of a specific legal case, stemming from the documents of the episcopal archive of Ivrea. It's a case from 1211 in Italy involving the bishop of Ivrea in dispute with Bongiovanni d'Albiano over feudal obligations.
This case is significant because it allows us to understand how feudal society operated and how social status was determined.
The bishop's representative argues that Bongiovanni should provide a horse as a feudal service. Bongiovanni denies it, claiming to be a noble, not a serf. Both parties present witnesses and documents supporting their arguments.
Witnesses are asked whether the serf obligations had been endured for a long time. This helps us understand that in a society where "law" was based on customs, it was important to ascertain if an obligation had been endured for a long time because at that point it would no longer be contestable (it would have become customary).
The responses are confused and inconsistent, so witnesses are directly asked whether they consider Bongiovanni a serf or a noble. This is because (and it allows us to understand that) the division into "social classes" wasn't definable within concrete boundaries; it was more about the appearance of one's way of life. If a serf refused to fulfill his serf duties, he would easily be considered a noble by bystanders because he lived like one.
Ultimately, the analysis of the case leads us to determine that medieval justice wasn't conceived with the logic of our modern system, but was measured in oaths and witnesses as evidentiary means. And emerging from it with honor was much more important than fairly distributing blame and reason.
Other sources
Accounting source: it is very useful for measuring consumption and its variety in a particular historical period. To reconstruct past consumption, inventories post mortem are often used, which are lists of goods found in households, described and valued by notaries to facilitate distribution among heirs.
Alternatively, the recording of daily expenses, which in modern times were often very detailed, can lead to insights into complex family histories and their internal inequalities - for example, more money might be spent on one child than another corresponding to their planned future role in society.
Oral source: in relation to the political sphere, it is useful for representing that part of politics composed of direct sources, that is, where politics speaks of itself and how it presents itself to the public, such as a politician's public speech.
However, working with this type of source, a historian cannot avoid hermeneutic work, as through the speech, the politician aims to present himself to a certain audience, justify, persuade, construct his own image, and achieve results. This is the hidden agenda that also exists in the most obvious part of politics.
Iconographic source: it concerns art or other forms of "artistic" expression, such as in the case of an advertising poster. They become historical sources when it is the historian who, through analysis, confers upon them the status of a historical source. Essentially, the historian uses the source to understand aspects of the past otherwise inaccessible.
The first step in this direction is to recontextualize the source, returning it to its original context. Examining the history of the source represents the fundamental first step for historical analysis.
Diary source: diaries are a "subjective" source, a representation of one's self, often influenced by the thoughts of "others," who can be close or distant readers, interested or distracted, visible or invisible, whom every diary author can imagine and hope to see, sooner or later, reflected on the pages of their writing.
Furthermore, they are often subject to subsequent manipulations, and therefore should be treated by historians only in their critical edition; all other versions, whether old or new, foreign or not, are useful only as evidence of the changes and manipulations undergone over time by the original manuscripts.
Electronic source: historians use Wikipedia even if they often don't admit it out loud.
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#writing advice#writing help#writing reference#writing tips#creative writing#fantasy worldbuilding#fantasy writing#worldbuilding#worldbuilding tips
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જ⁀ 𝐀𝐁𝐈𝐃𝐄 in me as I 𝐀𝐁𝐈𝐃𝐄 𝐈𝐍 𝐘𝐎𝐔
side comments: wanted to write for our Nanook and Yaoshi some spoilers of course, violence, Nanook's is kinda dark, reader is known to be the 'arbitrator' or 'mediator.
Whenever a tale, record or paper regarding the elusive and ancient Aeons of the vast cosmos, you, the Arbitrator always weave into each battle, dispute and archive.
You unified and ruled each contestation and difference and have lingered amongst the Aeons yet was never considered one yourself: like a fine mist braiding through the folds of the universe, unravelling and sewing it together.
And by 'it', you meant the Aeons.
While the Aeons were born and bound to the ideologies they arose from with a passionate frenzy, you merely existed- and for what purpose? Historians debated if you were a presence higher than that of Aeons: a mystic authoritarian figure whose one wave or snap of their fingers would bring an undisputed settlement, like a court judge.
However, others consider you to be less of a judge and more of a mediator. A force that ensures the Aeons keep within their bounds and do not screw the universe over entirely. Some reckon that you are an Aeon whose gaze never spared a glance. There are even theories that suggest that Lan is your pupil of sorts. In addition, some pay no mind to you at all in the grand ever-present scheme of Aeons and their ploys.
Regardless of what myriad debates, theories or conjectures rise among devout followers, skeptics, historians and the average being, an indisputable fact remains. No matter the conflict, you are always found amongst the lines in the story or perhaps only mentioned at the very end. A peculiar and reiterating occurrence that even a child could predict.
Alas, only the Aeons themselves will know who you are to them
𝐍𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐎𝐊 - the destruction
Nanook believes you are a nuisance at best. However, you choose your disputes carefully and at times, unpredictably.
Out of every Aeon you have come between, Nanook is by far the one seen most often.
Behind your back, they scoff at mentioning of your name and title and more so at the Aeons who share an ounce of respect for your inexplicable ability or deem you a 'peacemaker'.
However, your trait of never showing favour towards one Aeon or another is like a double-edged sword.
Nanook could hardly recount the myriad amount of times they had benefited from your mediation.
What dumbfounds Nanook is that beings think of you as powerful.
You quite frankly aren't, you're simply a 'good talker.'
And they loathe that.
You know their mind and toy with it, rendering with their plans only for them to alter it. You thrive on their vexations and revel in the might of their aggravation and disgust. Instead of annihilating sparks of life, you force them to cherish it within the palms of their savage hands.
Do you find pleasure in their abhorrence? Seeking it out for laughter's sake?
Nevertheless, Nanook knows you are not shallow or in any resemblance towards Aha.
In addition, Nanook knows you are neither a peacemaker nor a chaos-bringer.
There are moments when you come to Nanook and observe them acutely; having experienced your prying eyes for millennia, they remain steadfast and silent in your presence. Only then can Nanook appreciate you, not for your skill, however, for a delectable and insatiable opportunity to deliver their final gift to humanity: destruction.
For now, Nanook will reign havoc on the planets you grow fond of while quietly vying for a sliver of your attention in hopes of ultimately standing victorious in the eternal game of interastral tug of war.
Perhaps Nanook will then adore you for all the delight you brought to a now, empty universe.
𝐘𝐀𝐎𝐒𝐇𝐈 - the abundance
Yaoshi believes you are in mortal terms: ‘god sent.’
In comparison to Nanook, Yaoshi does not harbour ill will.
On the contrary, they are fascinated by you.
Why do you come between the Aeons? Do you have preferences? What pleases you?
Yes, there are times when you settle disputes and foil the plans of The Abundance. However, it does not matter! Yaoshi will continue to spread the blessings of eternal life and never-ending spings out into the universe while they watch you from afar.
However, the Aeons are selfish, cunning and self-absorbed. They will gladly swallow any opportunity that comes their way. Hence, Yaoshi's 'curiosity' grows beyond the confines of the word itself.
If you can thwart the plans of Nanook- what else can you do?
Yaoshi admires the growth and sprouting of life from their fingertips: how a flower blossoms vibrantly, staying in said form for eternity.
Thus, Yaoshi can only lick their lips and quell their ever-growing hunger.
What wonder would it be to see you bloom and bring waves of life with a mere sway of your arms or snap of your finger? Worlds can be born and no harm shall tread upon the universe- such a reality can now be achieved...
For now, Yaoshi will whisper sweet words of praise in your ear like honey; gradually drowning you in each sugary drop until they can dress you up in whatever they may fancy. You'll be the star of the universe, you'll be the epitome of ardency and everlasting life. Worshiped and praised: the universe will string together songs of your benevolence!
Alas, Yaoshi must limit their daydreaming... work must be done to accomplish their ultimate dream and it has only just begun.
masterlist
I might do a part two with the other Aeons... probably Lan and Xipe. I honestly wanted to get this out of my drafts.
#honkai star rail#honkai star rail angst#honkai star rail x reader#nanook x reader#nanook#yaoshi#yaoshi x reader#hsr x reader#hsr fanfic#the abundance#astral express#trailblazer#writing ᝰ.ᐟ
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You and Me (A Whole Lot of History)
Based on this request: "y/n is a historian with access to old schematics so kaz hires her for a job. he keeps inventing reasons to find her afterwards until he’s forced to admit his feelings"
masterlist
You only get to study about half a chapter of your textbook before you’re interrupted by a criminal. It’s not like you mind having to put down the heavy tome you’ve been leafing through; estate law of centuries past is not your idea of some fun light reading, but you’ve been helping to piece together some fragments of an old mansion from pre-Unsea Kerch, and you’d really like to be able to decide if the master of the house your tattered documents keep referring to is the eldest son or the second eldest.
It all depends on very specific details that refuse to make themselves known to you. So no, having an excuse to stop all this isn’t terrible, you’re just a little distracted by the fact that you’re in a private study room in the historical library of Ketterdam, and you know for certain that you locked the door that has just been opened.
You know who’s just broken into your study space. Not personally, that is, but just as well as any resident of the Barrel knows the one they call Dirtyhands– through bated breath, in stolen whispers of expensive heists and bodies left behind, no traitors tolerated and none allowed to live. The fact that Kaz Brekker has taken it upon himself to enter your study room of all the empty ones still available in the library is not promising, to say the least, although you have absolutely no idea what you’ve done to appear on his radar.
You are, in fact, quite possibly the last person Kaz would even be aware of. You’re a historian, specializing in a few select centuries and powerful families in the Kerch area. This means that you spend most of your time in old and crumbling buildings, not out in shady dealings or shootouts or any of the other places Brekker tends to frequent.
This doesn’t seem to stop Kaz from closing the door behind him and taking a seat opposite your desk. He folds his hands in front of him, idly contemplating the textbook you’re still supposed to be perusing, but remains frustratingly silent.
It falls to you, then, to pick up a conversation, which is unfair considering the fact that he’s the one who’s barged in on your space. “That door was locked for a reason, you know,” you point out.
Kaz arches a dour brow. “Yes. I opened it.”
He’s not making this easy for you. “Why?” You ask.
Instead of answering you, Brekker jerks his chin towards the book in front of you. “What’s that about?”
There is no earthly reason one of the most notorious gang leaders in the Barrel should be asking about the homework you’re doing for your job. Still, he has, so you must answer, no matter how confused you are about it. “Inheritance disputes of the fourteenth century Kerch nobles. Why, are you interested in checking it out after me?”
Kaz scoffs. “No. I just want your information, not that book.”
You feel yourself leaning back slightly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Trust me, whatever information you’re after won’t be found from me.”
Kaz shakes his head once. “No, actually, I think it will be.”
He reaches for something under his coat, and you’re hit with the brief terror that he’ll get a gun or something and you’ll die here and now, but then his gloved hand comes back out into the light carefully holding a rolled up piece of paper, which he smooths out onto the desk before you. You tuck your textbook away so you can get a better look at the thing, more curious now than afraid.
It turns out to be a copy of house blueprints. As you study it, you realize that you recognize the place. You were there recently for a project for your employer, checking up on the preservation of a few rooms. “Is this the old van Haarst mansion?”
Brekker’s eyes flash, reminding you of the slick of oil on water. “You know about it?”
“Yeah,” you say, peering further at the blueprints. “I’ve worked there before.”
Kaz nods, looking pleased. “I’d like to buy your services. I need information on this building and your silence on the matter. Are you interested?”
Your brow furrows. “What information do you need?”
To answer you, Brekker tosses a stack of kruge onto the table. You can see the numbers on the edges, and know even without counting that this payment will be far more than what you’d earn even for a year at your job. This is the deal, then. He’ll only tell you more if you accept his money, and if you accept his money, you agree to whatever he wants.
Honestly, not the worst bargain. Ghezen knows you’ve had worse supervisors on other jobs. At least you can trust Brekker to be honest so long as you are too.
You put the stack of bills into your bag, and turn back to the blueprints with renewed interest. “Are you trying to get in or get out?”
“Both,” Kaz tells you. “I’m assuming you’ve heard rumors of Marysa’s Diamond?”
You choke out a laugh. “Have I ever.”
Marysa’s Diamond is like the Saints in flesh for historians. The van Haarst family was exceedingly rich, and one of their matriarchs, Marysa van Haarst, was said to be in possession of an incredible gemstone, the diamond named after her. It disappeared when the family abandoned Kerch for Ravka following the death of three of Marysa’s sons, and no one has seen it since.
You blow out a low breath. “You think it’s in the old house somewhere? Historians have been all over the place, we would have found it if it was there.”
“It wasn’t always,” Kaz tells you. “It’s been moved there. I have good information that the van Haarst house will act as a safe house for the stone while it’s being moved from hand to hand. They’ll keep it there overnight. I will be entering the estate with a team and taking it.”
He goes silent, as if waiting for any objections. You don’t really care about the morals of the affair, though. You have your money and you get to be the foremost expert on a historical favorite of yours. Robberies happen every day, not something to get teary eyed over.
When you don’t speak up, Kaz continues on. “They’ll be keeping the stone in a place no one can find. There will be a window of exactly one bell in which the old owner leaves the house and is replaced by the new owner, carefully staggered so the stadwatch aren’t alerted by too many people in the estate after hours. That means it would have to be a damn good hiding spot. If you were hiding a gemstone in this house, where would you put it?”
You consider the blueprints before you again. There are a thousand and one places you could hide something in there– tucked inside the grand piano, in a safe, under one of a hundred carpets– and there’s no way Brekker’s men could find it in time.
However, that means the person meant to be picking up the diamond wouldn’t be able to find it as well. They would have to find somewhere in the estate hidden to everyone else but the recipient of the gemstone.
The answer occurs to you in a flash. “Oh,” you say, “Secret room.”
Brekker blinks at you. “What?”
You point at the map. “It’s totally going in the secret room. I mean, they don’t want it to be found by anyone else, right? That’s, like, the whole point of a secret room.”
Were it not for the fact that he’s, well, Dirtyhands, you’d swear his voice turns sarcastic. “That was my understanding of a secret room, yes. Where is it?”
Were it not for the fact that he is in fact Dirtyhands, you would roll your eyes. “There’s an entrance off of the secondary hallway leading off of the dining room. Unlock the door using a little latch under the bottom of the ugly painting of the old duchess of Belendt.”
He stares at you. “How do you know that? It’s not on any map.”
You lift a shoulder. “I wanted to know why they’d keep such a foul portrait around. The elites of that time period were huge on perfectionism, every one of their paintings had to be absolutely glorious or it would get removed from their sight. That’s why there are so many old paintings in the surrounding villages, actually, the nobles would just leave these expensive oil paintings outside the castle because they couldn’t take the sight of them anymore. There was no reason they’d let such a dreadful portrait stay unless it was hiding something.”
You had been focused on the map in your hands during the majority of this little speech, fondly recalling little anecdotes from your history classes, but you remember yourself soon enough. You look up and Kaz is staring at you, almost fascinated.
You feel your cheeks heat up. “Sorry, I’m rambling. Got distracted.”
He shakes his head brusquely, although there’s a hint of pink on the tops of his cheekbones that wasn’t there before. “No, no. It’s important information. So we should be aware of any suspicious paintings?”
“Yeah,” you muse, “just look for the bad ones. Pretend you’re an art critic or something.”
The edges of Kaz’s dour glare turn themselves up into something of a humored smirk. “Will do. Thank you for the advice, L/N.”
You nod. “Have fun with the heist. Hey, if you see any older books on the history of the family, would you mind grabbing one or two for me? I’ve been trying to do some research for ages, but the library keeps stalling on getting resources to me, no matter how many requests I send.”
Kaz’s brows draw close together. “That would be unbelievably risky. We can’t take more things than we need or we could be caught.”
You grin. “I know, I’m kidding. Just a joke.”
Kaz’s expression lightens microscopically. “Yes, a joke.”
He leaves soon enough, pushing his chair away from the desk and rolling up the blueprints with a crisp snap of the paper. He warns you to keep your mouth shut about the plans, but you’re not sure that he does it with the fire you expected of a notorious gang leader. Instead, the words are soft, like he’s cautioning a friend.
You don’t hear from him again, not for a while. You’re not sure when this mysterious diamond deal is going down, and you doubt the unlucky men Kaz will grift can go to the stadwatch about this. In fact, you have no idea if it’s happened at all until about a week later. You had gone about your day like normal, not suspecting a thing until the moment you unlocked your door.
And there, centered perfectly on your desk when you get back home despite the fact that you never gave keys to your apartment to anyone, are three books. Aged, cracked covers, gilded writing. You hesitantly pick up one and read the title under your breath: A History of the Bendtsen Family, 1200-1500. Another: The van Almelos of the Belendt Region: Two Centuries of Political and Economic Legacy.
Kaz. He actually got the books. Never mind that you were joking, never mind that he knew that, Kaz Brekker went out of his way to risk a heist just so he could help you out with a research project. Saints. And they say chivalry is dead.
You don’t expect to get the chance to thank him for it until he randomly crosses your path not two weeks later. He’s alone again, miraculously turning up outside your company door just as you leave to walk home. Kaz informs you that he’ll need your services again, exchanging some kruge for more words. This time, he wants details on an office building down the street, one that used to be a city hall. You’re able to take him in yourself thanks to access granted to all historians for historic places, and turn a blind eye when he grabs a few documents regarding interport commerce.
He walked you to your door that night, lingering over the threshold like a teenager not wanting to leave a first date. He shows up again after a month, using an excuse that’s less polished and more finicky. The next time, he doesn’t have an excuse at all. It’s just him, standing in front of you. No money, no plan. He just wanted to see you.
Kaz calls it ‘checking up on an investment,’ but you get the feeling that it’s not something he usually does. He walks with you by the water, he buys you drinks at a bar not even in his own pocket. It’s unusually sweet, so you can’t bite back your questions anymore and confront him about it when he hovers in front of your door for the dozenth time.
“What is this about, Kaz?”
He blinks at you in surprise. “What?”
You gesture between the two of you. “All of this. This isn’t for a job anymore. Why?”
Kaz looks away. It’s rare for him to not have a perfect poker face. Perhaps it’s yet another sign that this means something more, something that you can’t help but wish for. “I wanted to make sure you were safe. I’ve called on you for several jobs that can risk the players involved in the game.”
You shake your head. “You’ve gone out of your way to make sure no one knows about me. It’s just us, Kaz. You did that on purpose.”
“Yes,” he admits at last, “I did. I wanted something for myself. Something that wasn’t as bad as the rest.”
He risks a glance over at you, and his shoulders square slightly when he realizes you aren’t trying to fight him on this, or worse, leave. “You’re good, Y/N. Good things don’t last long around here. I want to make sure you do. I want you to stay forever.”
With me, he means. He wants to keep you in his life. His eyes flicker to your hands, and although you know he won’t take them, not yet, he wants to. That’s why you finally put together the pieces. Kaz Brekker is not good at verbalizing his feelings. Perhaps he never will be. This is the best shot he can give you, and he could not even say the word ‘love’ if it ripped his heart out with bleeding fingertips.
You've had so much over the years, and it has never been enough. Not once, not ever. A thousand coffers could empty themselves, a hundred men die and be reborn. It has never once stopped you. This, by contrast, is nothing. A canal rat's promise, most likely broken before the night is through. You know it, Kaz knows it. This is nothing.
Yet it is the most true thing you have ever had, the one solid stone in a wall about to come crumbling down. It is small, barely there at all, but still worth it. Maybe that is why you stay, for the hope. For him. It is enough.
grishaverse tag list: @rogueanschel, @cameronsails, @deadreaderssociety, @mxltifxnd0m, @story-scribbler, @retvenkos, @eclliipsed, @mayfieldss, @gods-fools-heroes, @bl606dy, @auggie2000, @baju69, @crazyhearttragedy
#kaz brekker#kaz brekker imagines#kaz brekker x reader#kaz brekker oneshot#grishaverse#grishaverse imagines#grishaverse x reader#grishaverse oneshot#shadow and bone#shadow and bone imagines#shadow and bone x reader#shadow and bone oneshot#kaz#kaz imagines#kaz x reader#kaz oneshot
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Ah wait, I've got something for you in relation to white American fetishisation of Scotland and other European countries (because unfortunately it's not just Scottland, it's everyone.)
(And this is just an opinion, I have no science to back this up. That must be stated first and foremost.)
To achieve American Whiteness ment that many Europeans immigrating to the states had to shed their cultures in order to be accepted by Anglo European decendents. If you weren't the 'right' type of white then you weren't good enough and were often pushed out.
As such, these people, too, were forced to shed their cultural identity in order to make a living here.
Now, these diverse cultures are celebrated (to a point.) There's celebrations that come from these iterations of faith, foods and dress that come from these homelands, but they're strange derivatives of themselves. Xerox of a xerox of a xerox, made only by a cultural machine that doesn't really understand or want you, but loves the aesthetic of some small component of you, so it takes that, all while simultaneously craving it could be more.
And so NOW that it is no longer 'bad' to be decended from these places, NOW people try to claw their way back, like they're attempting to undo the damage the previous generations did to themselves in order to fit into White American Society, but they have no idea how and so it becomes a crass and ugly thing, often monetized by the same origional Anglo European sphere of influence that put them in this predicament anyway, and then further pits them against NEW people trying to make it here in the states.
(And to that last point, I have to recommend reading an amazing comic in the Nib by Dawson, Why Did They Come, in order to touch on how fucked up that whole thing is (not that we don't already know.) https://thenib.com/why-did-they-come/
But yeah... to summarize- immigrants now seen as acceptably white in the states originally WASN'T and so these people bleached themselves culturally to achieve the Anglo vibe, and now generations later, their decendents cling to fabrications of a culture they were denied in the most grotesque ways imaginable because they know nothing else.
It's like white bread trying to reintroduce culture to itself to become whole wheat again, only to end up giving itself mold.
Some great points there, particularly around the bastardisation of forgotten traditions etc.
I'd be keen to see some evidence of Scottish immigrants to the US being perceived the same way as, for example, Irish or Italian immigrants who eventually became accepted into 'American Whiteness'.
Also while many Scottish immigrants who moved to America were poorer, I've never heard of them facing the same challenges as other European immigrants who were perceived as non-white. I expect a large part of that was being part of the British Empire. There was also a disproportionate number of Scots were plantation owners who owned slaves in the south.
And while some historians dispute it's origins, I think it's mostly accepted the KKK was founded by descendants of Scottish immigrants , or at the very least, founded by people who drew heavily on that aesthetic.
So even if modern Americans who fetishise Scotland are saying they can finally start celebrating their "native homeland's" traditions again - I think there's an element of 'wanting to be seen as victims with a rich history' about it.
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✩ Bookshopist Moonboys ✩
Part 2: "A, b, c, d-"
Moon Knight System x Reader
Summary: How the boys have been setting in at the shop
Warnings: Google translate Spanish, a bit angsty at the end with Marc’s self-doubt, coarse language, Marvel depiction of DID
Word Count: 1.4K
A/N: Gave the boys particular fonts so the dialogue isn't confusing. Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading :)
Steven
Marc
Jake
<- Previous | Masterlist | Next ->
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Steven navigates through the labyrinth of bookshelves with a pile of novels in hand. Lightly caressing the spines of various books, his eyes skim over the authors’ last names.
Humming the familiar tune that’s become a staple in their shifts, Steven starts, “A, b, c, d-”
A heavy Chicago accent interrupts his rhythm, “M, z, i…”
Steven sighs, ‘not this again’, he thinks, trying to drown out his headmate he continues, “E, f, g-”
“Q, l, u…” abruptly interrupts his thoughts again.
“H-”
“Y”
“I-”
“T”
“Bollocks, Marc, quit it!”
“Quit what? I’m just reciting the alphabet like you”.
“A-huh, sure you’re being a real help”
“You’re very welcome”
“Look bruv, I need to put these away, and I can’t do it with you distracting me every two seconds”
“Should've thought about that before you ate my food”
“For the last time, I didn’t eat your food!”
“A-huh suree~ First, you stole my wife, and now my food? Your old pals at the British Museum would be proud”.
“Oh for the love of- I’m sorry about Layla!”
“Ahem..”, a frail voice interrupts their dispute, peering down Steven is met with the comforting face of an old woman, “Sorry to bother you luv, can you point me in the direction of the cooking section?”
Cheeks warming up, Steven points towards the aisle, “Just go strain down here and turn right at si-fi, then a left at parenting, and it should be on your left”.
She smiles kindly up at him, “Thanks honey”, then plotters along with a slight wobble in her step.
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It’s been 3 months since they started the job, and Steven’s loving every minute of it. His presence is appreciated, and he’s surrounded by others who share similar interests. Plus, he doesn’t have an aggravating boss breathing down his neck every second, which is a bonus.
The shop has a decent history and mythology selection. Since the Thor incident in 2011 and the revelation that god exists, people have become more intrigued by mythology. There’s lots of debate amongst mythologists and historians, arguing if the term ‘mythology’ is even correct anymore. Steven remembers reading a post by The Daily Bugle, stating, "Thor is a glorified space alien, and gods don’t walk amongst us." Little did they know.
The aftermath of the past decade and the revelations it brought have given way to more accessibility to novels regarding gods and deities, something that Steven has taken full advantage of.
In his first month of employment, he had managed to procure almost all the Egyptology books in store. Marc and Jake are constantly nagging him about it, stating they don’t have the room nor income to accommodate the influx of novels. Steven’s still trying and failing to convince Marc to turn their storage unit into a personal library, receiving the same answer in return, “We’re not turning the storage unit into your book-hoarding man-cave. We got this job to earn money, not spend it all on your addiction”.
After noticing Steven had managed to clear through all the Egyptology books, you felt the need to enlighten him with some bookshop wisdom. “You know…”, You say whilst ringing up Steven’s latest purchases, “You can order more Egyptology novels from our supplier. We don’t always have enough room to keep them on hand, but I know there’s a few we can get posted in if you're interested?”.
At your words, his eyes light up and you swear stars were floating amongst his coffee eyes, “Really?!”
“Ahí van nuestros ahorros” Jake facepalms.
Surprisingly, Jake has found himself enjoying work at the quaint store. The tasks are relatively simple, mainly involving manual labour, finding books of customers, and putting through sales. At first, he’d been nervous about working at the shop. He was closing in on 40, and the only thing he’d ever served was vengeance and cunt.
Thankfully, everyone at the store was supportive and non-judgemental. You reminded him one shift, "Believe it or not Lockley, it's okay to be a beginner and make mistakes”. Plus having two supportive brothers and a cat that somehow knows whenever he's feeling down helped. On the topic of cats, Jake was delighted to know that he could bring Viejita into work. “Will be good to get you out of the house” he mumbled to the feline, “Can’t have you growing up socially awkward like your tío Steven”, “HEY!”
Similarly to Jake, Marc was surprised to discover the job wasn’t as tedious as he’d initially predicted. The atmosphere is calm, especially for a retail job, and requires little mental thought. It’s a welcomed change, especially as his employment no longer involves something trying to kill him - though some books in the backroom have had a few good whacks at it. Since they started, Marc's gotten back into reading comics and sci-fi, he’s however, trying to keep it a secret. Khonshu forbid Steven found out he’s hypocritically spending their income on books.
There’s an unspoken rule amongst employees that if a text perks your interest you’re able to ‘skim a few pages’ to further your knowledge of company merchandise. Obviously, this only applies if you do it without altering physical integrity. All of the boys take advantage of this, finding a quiet corner in the backroom during their break, huddling up with one of the cats whilst eating lunch and immersing themselves in a new story.
Over the last 3 months, all the boys have had some interesting interactions with customers. In the first week, Steven had a lady yell at him about the price of a plastic bag - as if he had any input on the pricing. Marc and Jake were plotting murder for the full duration of the interaction.
Marc had to awkwardly ask someone for ID because they wanted to buy ‘adult’ manga whilst their mum was present. He then had to explain to the mother why an ID was required.
And just the other day, Jake had a lady come in asking for a book, only she didn’t know the title, or the author, OR the contents. Only that another bookstore in the area had in four months ago. He spent the rest of his shift questioning humanity's intelligence and pondering how we’ve managed to survive this long.
However, at the end of the day, all the questionable customer interactions are worth it because they get to see you. Your presence is now an anchor in their lives. A lighthouse guiding them out of thunderstorms and eternal seas that threaten to swallow them whole. From your enthusiasm when discussing a book, to the adorable face you make when concentrating. Every second they spend with you they become more infatuated with your being.
“We should ask them out”
“And risk them saying no then having to work with them afterwards? Absolutely not”
“We don’t know that they’ll say no, piensa positivo hermano”
“Okay, I’m positive they’ll say no”
“...That’s a lame comeback and you know it”
“I’m with Jake - not on the comeback comment, but on the fact that we don’t know how they’ll answer”
“It doesn’t need to be a date, solo cafe y pasar el rato”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Marc sighs. Of course he wants to ask you out. Both Steven and Jake know that. He’s just worried you don’t reciprocate their feelings and only see them as friends. Or that he’ll somehow fuck it up for both you and his brothers. Maybe it would be better if he retreated back into the headspace, giving Steven and Jake the freedom to be with you without the burden of his pres-
Now it's Steven's turn to interrupt Marc. “Oi, we’re not havin’ any of that. We come as a package deal, remember? Burger, chips, drink ‘n’ everything. There’s no us without you, quite literally might I add.”
“Steven tiene razón, te respaldamos. Siempre.”
A small “meow” comes from his feet, looking down he’s met with the adoring eyes of Viejita.
“See even Viejita agree’s”
Mouth twitching up as his heart swells, Marc gives in.
“Fine... Just coffee”
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Tag list: @0-ramen-0 @sunnyskyapplepie
Leave a comment or send me a message if you want to be added :)
#steven grant#jake lockley#marc spector#steven grant x reader#marc spector x reader#jake lockely x reader#moon knight x reader#moon knight#moonknight
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The historical link between meat and colonisation in Israel
In her PhD thesis on the historical role of Tel Aviv under the British Mandate for Palestine, Dr Efrat Gilad shows that while Zionist technocrats promoted a diet of little to no beef, urban settlers enjoyed their steaks and stews. Furthermore, their love for meat led them to play a key role in the colonisation of Palestine. (23 March 2021).
In your thesis you studied colonisation in Israel through attitudes towards meat consumption. What gave you this idea and why was it a worthwhile one?
There were various indicators that meat would be a useful entry point to the history of Jewish settlers in Palestine. One indicator had to do with a surprising statistic I came across. In 2019, according to OECD statistics, the world’s leading beef consumers were Argentina, the United States, and almost tied for third place were Brazil and Israel. Israel is an anomaly on this list. The other countries that tend to lead in meat consumption are also global meat producers and exporters. Their meat industries evolved over centuries, beginning with European settlers who used cattle to colonise. As cowboys or gauchos drove livestock across vast territories dominating the land, producing and consuming meat became linked to national identity.
Israel, however, does not produce the majority of the beef it consumes; rather, it mostly relies on imports. While colonisation is part of Israel’s past and present, Jewish settlers did not drive herds of animals to dominate Palestine’s landscape as did the cowboys and gauchos of the Americas. The ecologies and economies of livestock in Palestine were vastly different than in the above-mentioned countries. This does not mean there is no historical link between meat and colonisation in Israel – my research actually shows that there is – but that the historical trajectory that led Israelis to consume as much beef as Brazilians was different, and thus required further investigation. My dissertation is the first comprehensive history of meat in Palestine/Israel grounded in extensive archival research.
Can you describe your research questions and the methodology you used to approach those questions?
As a historian, my methodology involves archival research and analysis of historical documents. Early on I noticed a gap between two types of sources. On the one hand, there was a clear correlation between the growing numbers of European Jews settling in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s and the soaring demand for meat. This was evident in many sources including data on livestock imports and slaughter, newspaper articles on the price of meat and its availability, the building of new slaughterhouses in Palestine’s cities, and multiple disputes between consumers, butchers and cattle dealers. On the other hand, when reading through sources produced by Zionist technocrats – such as economists, agronomists and nutritionists – I noticed a vastly different attitude to meat. While urban settlers were preoccupied with gaining more access to meat, Zionist technocrats seemed determined to convince Jewish settlers to adopt a diet of little to no beef.
My work then focused on three interconnected questions: Why did Zionist technocrats oppose meat consumption? How did urban settlers create systems to allow them access to meat in a country of limited supply (and in defiance of national experts)? And finally, how did urban settlers – in creating those systems – promote the colonisation of Palestine?
What are your answers?
First, I found out why Zionist technocrats opposed meat consumption, and this was entangled in ideas about climate, nutrition and economy. Zionist technocrats adopted an idea rooted in colonial medicine according to which consuming meat was harmful in Palestine’s heat. This was a significant finding because it highlights European Jewish settlers’ alienation from Palestine’s environment, and resonates with histories of other settler colonies, allowing us to think comparatively and transnationally about colonisation. The second layer in the discourse against meat was linked to the settler colonial economy. Beef consumption depended on Palestinian breeders and regional Arab livestock merchants, and increasingly also on overseas imports. This threatened Zionist leaders’ aspirations for a self-reliant Jewish settlement, which they believed was essential to its expansion. Thus, technocrats believed, high levels of beef consumption obstructed Zionist goals.
My second major finding shows how urban Jewish settlers ignored technocrats by generating a booming meat economy. Settlers first supported Palestine’s existing meat economy but gradually also created separate systems of import and slaughter. Because local supply chains of beef were deemed insufficient and firmly in the hands of Arab and Palestinian merchants, Jewish butchers and cattle dealers tapped into their connections to the European trade and created new networks of overseas cattle import. In creating their own meat infrastructures, especially in Tel Aviv, settlers worked to dominate Palestine’s meat trade. Whereas the literature often focuses on ideologues or rural “pioneers”, I show how urban settlers are historical agents who were perhaps oblivious or defiant of national ideologies pertaining to the meat trade but who nevertheless played a key role in a national endeavour: the colonisation of Palestine.
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After almost four centuries of peace and prosperity under Rome, Britain faced an onslaught from pagan aggressors. Only Ireland was spared. Historians dispute their intent but agree on their identity—the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes—and that they came to stay.
by NatGeoMaps
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"Set the scene for us: what is the ICJ, and why is the hearing taking place there?
The 1945 UN Charter — signed by all UN members, including Israel — affirms that the ICJ is the UN’s supreme legal organ. The Constitution establishes two powers for the Court: issuing advisory opinions, and ruling in cases between states. The Court’s verdicts are binding on the states that have signed the UN Constitution. A state can agree in an ad hoc manner that a particular dispute will be litigated by the ICJ, or invoke signed treaties containing a clause that establishes ICJ jurisdiction over disputes relating to those treaties.
Israel has always had reservations about the jurisdiction clause, and has refrained from agreeing to ICJ jurisdiction in all the hundreds of treaties it has signed, except one: the Genocide Convention. Article 9 of the Convention stipulated that if disagreements arise between the members over the Convention’s authority or interpretation, the ICJ is the place to hear them.
ICJ decrees are enforced by the UN Security Council. Chapters 6 and 7 of the UN Charter allow for a range of sanctions against countries that violate the Court’s ruling, such as economic sanctions, arms embargoes, and military intervention. The latter is rare but it has happened, for example in the first Gulf War.
Why did Israel sign up to ICJ jurisdiction in the Genocide Convention?
I’m not a legal historian; I can only guess. Israel was one of the initiators of the treaty, and historically one can understand why Israel would have pushed for such a treaty in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Secondly, I think that back then, the popular Israeli notion that we do not let gentiles judge us had not yet developed. We are talking about an era in which the international system had recently decided to establish a Jewish state. Maybe there was a little more trust in that system back then.
What constitutes a violation of the Convention?
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It is defined as an act of extermination, or creating conditions that will annihilate a particular group with the intention of eradicating that group or even a distinct part of it.
The Convention, which was integrated into Israeli law in 1950, states that a soldier or civilian who kills a person, even one, while aware that he is part of a system aimed at annihilation, is guilty of the crime of genocide. In Israeli law, the punishment for this is the death penalty. This also applies to those who conspire to commit genocide, those who incite genocide, and those who attempt to participate in genocide.
What is South Africa basing its lawsuit on?
South Africa bases its accusation on two elements. One is Israel’s conduct. It cites a great deal of statistics about the indiscriminate, disproportionate attacks on civilian infrastructure, as well as about starvation, the huge number of casualties, and the humanitarian catastrophe in the Strip — horrifying statistics that the Israeli public is barely exposed to, because the mainstream media here does not bring them to us.
The second and more difficult element to prove is intent. South Africa is trying to prove the intent through nine dense pages of references to quotes by senior Israeli officials, from the president to the prime minister, government ministers, Knesset members, generals, and military personnel. I counted more than 60 quotes there — quotes about eradicating Gaza, flattening it, dropping an atomic bomb on it, and all the things we’ve gotten used to hearing in recent months.
South Africa’s case does not rely only on the fact that some Israel leaders have made genocidal statements. It further charges that Israel has done nothing in response to these statements: it hasn’t condemned the statements, it hasn’t dismissed from office the people who expressed them, it hasn’t opened disciplinary proceedings against them, and it certainly hasn’t opened criminal investigations. This, as far as South Africa is concerned, is a very strong argument.
Even if we haven’t heard the IDF Chief of Staff or the General of the Southern Command say these things, and we don’t have an operational order that says, “Go and destroy Gaza,” the very fact that these statements have been made by senior Israeli officials without sanction or condemnation sufficiently expresses Israel’s intention.
South Africa also pulled a little legal stunt to get here, correct?
Yes. The jurisdiction of the Court is determined when a dispute arises between the parties over the interpretation or application of the Convention. South Africa sent several letters to the Israeli government saying, “You are committing genocide.” Israel responded, “No we aren’t.” So South Africa said, “Okay, we have a dispute over the interpretation of the Convention.” That’s how it got the authority.
What can we learn from similar ICJ cases in the past, such as those regarding genocides in Bosnia and Myanmar?
First of all, we know from these cases that the burden of proof on South Africa is significantly lower for obtaining an interim order than for ultimately proving that Israel is committing genocide. We also know that this case will continue for years: the Bosnia case took 14 years; Gambia v. Myanmar is still ongoing. But the procedure for an interim order is fast.
Gambia filed its case against Myanmar on behalf of the Organization of Islamic States. It asked for an interim order stating that Myanmar must cease its military operations [against the Rohingya people]. The Court ruled that at this stage of the hearings, it did not need to determine whether the crime of genocide had been committed. What it needs to decide is whether, without an interim order, there is a real danger that the prohibitions set out in the Genocide Convention will be violated.
An interesting interim order was issued in that case, which I think has a good chance of being issued to Israel as well — not in the context of military activity, but of incitement. The Court’s order also required Myanmar to take enforcement actions and submit reports to the ICJ and Gambia on what it was doing to prevent genocide. As for the cessation of Myanmar’s military activity, this matter went to the Security Council, where both Russia and China threatened vetoes, but Western countries imposed sanctions and a military embargo anyway.
So even if South Africa fails to make the Court issue an interim order to stop Israel’s military activity, it could be that in the context of incitement — which enjoys full immunity in Israel — the Court will say that Israel needs to do something.
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I know lawyers don’t like to wager on the results of court hearings, but if the ICJ does produce an interim order, what will that mean for Israel?
If the Court issues an order, the question is of course whether Israel will obey it or not. Knowing Israel, I expect that it will not obey the order, unless it can present the ending of hostilities as the result of its own independent decision, unrelated to the Court order.
There are good reasons for Israel to do this, because disobeying an ICJ order brings things to the UN Security Council. It’s true that the United States has a veto there, and therefore a resolution to impose sanctions on Israel would most likely be blocked. But vetoing an ICJ order regarding concerns that genocide is taking place would come at an enormous political price for the U.S. government, both domestically and internationally.
The Biden administration wants to portray itself as a government that sees human rights as one of its pillars. So it is likely that the United States would only veto such a resolution while imposing a significant cost on Israel in order to justify doing so, such as allowing the residents of northern Gaza to return to their homes, or entering into negotiations over two states — I don’t know.
But even if the United States doesn’t use its veto in that scenario, an interim order from the ICJ is likely to cause Israel serious problems.
There is such a thing as an international legal “deep state.” Jurists and judges listen to what important courts say. And when the ICJ, also known as the World Court, makes its rulings, national courts in most of the Western world take note. Therefore, if the ICJ rules that there is a danger of genocide being committed, I can imagine a British citizen turning to a British court and demanding that the UK cease trading arms with Israel. Another implication is that such an ICJ ruling would likely force the ICC’s chief prosecutor [Karim Khan] to open an investigation of his own.
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Within what time period is the Court’s decision expected?
There are no set rules, but in the Gambia v. Myanmar case, there was a decision within a month. It should be remembered that this [Gaza] case will continue after the hearing on the interim order. Israel will have to present evidence that will exonerate it from the claim that it is committing genocide, but in doing so could get into difficulties with the ICC. For example, it may explain that it bombed a certain place because it was pursuing a military objective, but it may thereby make admissions that create a basis for the claim that it used disproportionate force."
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#israel#palestine#icj case#genocide#didn't expect the interviewed to mention being the grandson of sociologist zygmunt bauman
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