Եվարդյան @haravayin_hogh Twitter profile

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Եվարդյան

@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Book excerpt 🧵on the Islamisation of the Javanese, the de-facto ruling race of Indonesia & nearly half its population. Over the 20thC Java went from a fundamentally pagan/Vedic society Muslim in name only, to an Islamic one now rapidly jetissoning its old culture & way of life.

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@haravayin_hogh

20 days

Few if any Classical Greeks didn't also give Persians high praise - their Empire was an object of awe, later pity, but not hate. Even Alexander revered Cyrus' tomb. If you want an example of a race that the Greeks hated to the marrow of their bones, look to the Phoenicians.

Dr. Michael J. Taylor

@DrMichaelJTayl1

21 days

The Greeks hate the Persian Empire like Ivy League students hate Goldman Sachs. They complain its a terrible, opulent, soulless place, but inevitably sell out and go work there. Themistocles, Alcibiades, Iphicrates, Chares, Xenophon, etc. ect.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Thread w/excerpts from Toynbee's 'The Abortive Scandinavian Civilisation'. Specifically, his thesis that the Norse, in the aftermath of Rome's fall & the Germanic migrations, had developed an embryonic Civilisation all of their own -which was snuffed out by Christianity.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

The man behind this account is incredibly talented. Somehow he manages to curate everyday photos that should be incredibly banal, yet invariably evoke undercurrents of mystery & horror. Taken as a collection they're quite beautiful. One of the 5 best accounts on this site.

MythoAmerica 🌲

@MythoAmerica

1 month

wake up.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

Started reading this after noticing it inspired several @Paracelsus1092 threads. I'm sure he's posted on much of the 3rd world examples in it, but a different study especially stood out to me... the Rednecks of Rednecks, the remote Appalachian valley of "Duddie's Branch". 🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Thread w/excerpts reviewing one of my favourite non-fiction books ever, J. Jayne's "Origins of Consciousness.." by David Stove. Jaynes posited that human consciousness & internal monologue developed within *historical times*, evolving from involuntarily hallucinated voices.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

4 months

@TheManlet_King Nearly all England's castles were deliberately "slighted" (original word's meaning, i.e demolished) by multiple rulers in the early modern period. Henry VIII and Cromwell especially.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Another Scandinavia thread, this time excerpting Stoddard, a once world-famous American author. Writing (1924) on Europe during its unstable interwar period. Stoddard was deeply pessimistic over Europe's future, but he saw Scandinavia's recent history as a source of hope.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

14 days

Thread on Alexander's invasion of the Persian Empire from the Iranian POV. In particular, how its last Emperor, Darius III, responded to the crisis. Post-conquest Iranian resistance was also far more widespread than recognised. Excerpts from E. Badian's paper "Conspiracies".🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Finally finished re-reading this great fat tome about a week ago. Didn't bother excerpting to 𝕏, was purely for pleasure, a well-known topic, & many Byzantine-themed accounts exist here already. There was one argument by Treadgold that really stood out to me this time however:

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Thread w/excerpts on Paglia's article on bodybuilding. It's a book review of a memoir by "the shy son of two English professors" who suddenly & inexplicably became obsessed with getting 💉huge. 🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Thread w/excerpts of "The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor". On the Turkish conquest & cultural transformation of Anatolia, Byzantium's former heartland. This process culminated under the Ottomans, who founded an Empire uniquely ruled by white/European Muslims.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Looking forward to reading this extremely understudied & important topic. How does a large population identifying as one ethnos become completely assimilated to another? In the past 500 years such largescale transformations have only rarely occurred in the Old World.

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@haravayin_hogh

9 days

Thread w/excerpts of Israel Shahak's "Jewish History, Jewish Religion". Shahak was an award-winning organic chemist & Classical Liberal. Born in Poland, his family moved to Israel as displaced persons in 1945. For this book, he received death-threats for the rest of his life.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

Thread w/excerpts from Zubok's "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union". The author believe's the USSR's dissolution was not inevitable, & US pressure had little to do with it. Rereading this, I'm still astounded by Gorbachev's naivety & hubris - unshaken even to the very end.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Indonesia is of course, one the world's most artificial states. Even its national "Indonesian" language is the mothertongue of almost no-one, being a creole form of Malay, growing massively after promotion as a Lingua Franca under the Dutch. This unintentionally spread Islam:

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Եվարդյան

@haravayin_hogh

3 months

In light of a 𝕏 personality interviewing the ex-CEO of Blackwater, thought I'd get up a thread on the topic of soldiers for hire. Specifically, the fate of the Greek mercenaries who fought with the Persians against Macedon. Excerpts from Badian's seminal article 'Harpalus'.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Looking forward to reading this extremely understudied & important topic. How does a large population identifying as one ethnos become completely assimilated to another? In the past 500 years such largescale transformations have only rarely occurred in the Old World.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Indonesia remains near-invisible globally as a country that's just competent enough to have stable government & avoid wars, but far too poor to project power/culture abroad. However, as E. Asian birthrates collapse & demand labour, this will change. So its Islamisation matters.

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@haravayin_hogh

30 days

Paradigm-changing book in QT. Key argument is the Dark Ages, loss of most ancient texts & collapse of literacy in Europe was triggered by the Arab/Muslim conquests, blocking access to papyrus & Mediterranean trade. Standard textbooks have finally warmed up to Pirenne's thesis.

Hero of Justice

@SpiritOfEnnui

1 month

Book thread: Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne This book covers the confusing period of history immediately following the dissolution of the Western Roman empire in 476. It makes for a nice light read at just under 300 pages.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

This was because the Malays were by far the most Islamicised culture of SE Asia on European arrival. Malay had even adopted the clunky Arabic script, whilst Java & others continued using their native Vedic syllabaries. Portuguese & Dutch took over the Malay Sultanate first.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Outside Malaya, Islam only had a fragile foothold amongst elites. Islam came to the Archipelago barely a century before Europeans. In fact, the last Hindu empire of Java, Majapahit, fell to Muslim Demak's invasion in 1527, whilst the Portuguese had a nearby base in Malacca.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Even by the 1930s, on the eve of WW2 & Independence, these Islamic conversions remained extremely superficial. The vast peasant majority of Java's population remained Pagan in practice- "Abangan". This intensified class conflict with the pious Muslim bourgeoisie -"Putihan/Santri"

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Some Javanese aristocrats even saw Java's embrace of Islam as a "Civilisational Mistake". Works were written mocking & ridiculing Mohamed, mixing European literary & native folk traditions. One prophesised a mass-conversion to ✝️, auguring a rebirth of the Javanese people.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Neither the Portuguese or Dutch were much interested in spreading Christianity or conquest in Indonesia for centuries, content with holding coastal forts. Meanwhile their trade dominance & adoption of Malay displaced Javanese, whilst spreading a language equated with Islam.

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

Thread w/excerpts of "Disorderly Liberty". Anyone claiming "real Libertarianism🐍has never been tried" has never heard of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For over a century, its government, by design, atrophied to almost nothing, until it was extinguished by outsiders.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

20 days

@dominbydigdug Notable how similar negative Greco-Roman descriptions of Phoenicians/Levantines resemble Medieval antisemitic tropes: Greedy, cruel, untrustworthy, flatterers, cowardly, learned in the occult, etc. As late as the 4thC AD too - Ammianus & Emperor Julian describing Antiochenes.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Finally there was the Westernising Javanese aristocracy, the "Priyayi". Like the Abangan peasants, their Islam was mostly nominal, but for different reasons. Dutch scholarship had revived their pride in Java's pre-Islamic heritage.

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@haravayin_hogh

26 days

@sshghfs Very common Australian phenotype - just needs ear-strechers & a nose ring for completion

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@haravayin_hogh

20 days

@lafaussepiste Partially, but they were societies that were deeply alien to each other. Both Greeks/Persians despised merchants & commerce -for Phoenicians it was core to their existence. Greeks found Punic religion disgusting - can assume it was mutual. See Momigliano for further reading.

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@haravayin_hogh

4 months

Literary attaq🧵w/excerpts of Nabokov's devastating critique of Dostoevsky. When I first read N's book as a Dostoevsky-fanboy teen, it annoyed & even upset me. Especially because Nabokov's barbs are incredibly accurate, insightful & funny to read. I still like Dostoevsky btw.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

The new Islamic political parties were in turn opposed by the Indonesian Communists. Representing the syncretist "Abangan", the Communists often incorporated anti-clerical & indigenous folk motifs into their propaganda. Whilst hating each other, both groups opposed Dutch rule.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

This chapter is presented both as a sequel & comparison to Toynbee's "The Abortive Far-Western Christian Civilisation". For a time, Ireland culturally bloomed under its own independent Church, which even proselytised in direct competition against an infant Roman Catholicism.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Muslim hatred & fear of the Abangan masses of Java abandoning Islam in droves was the main motivation for the 1965 massacres, which killed bwtn 500K-2mil people. Had events transpired differently, Indonesia might not be any more Islamic today than Kazakhstan, Turkey or Albania.

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

For those wanting in a history of 20thC Germany that treats the rise of the Nazis as a non-supernatural event, in which its leaders acted according to prosaic state incentives, *without crossing the line into Nazi Apologia* -read AJP Taylor. Nobody could call him a Germanophile.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

WW2 & Japan's conquest of the East Indies suddenly wiped out both the Dutch & the pro-Western "Priyayi" aristocracy from Javanese society. Islamist "Santri" then took their place as the leading collaborators, the Japanese using Kyai preachers for mobilisation & propaganda.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Combined pressures on Javanese Islam from both the upper & lower classes led to a fierce counter-reaction. The most successful were the Wahhabi-like "Modernists", who sought to 'purify' local Islam, reject traditional Kyai preachers, & instead rely solely on the Quran.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

This was Indonesia's Islamisation turning-point, which in the 2000s took an irreversible trajectory. But even after 1965, it wasn't inevitable. In fact, during the late 60s/early 70s, the massacres produced a massive backlash, including even mass-Christian conversions. End PT1🧵/

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Meanwhile, with the Dutch & Javanese aristocracy both gone, the Indonesian Communists were left as the Islamists' sole opponents. The Japanese in Indonesia were bypassed by the Allies during WW2, holding it at the war's end. Dutch lost all prestige & soon lost control postwar.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

As Sukarno's fragile PNI government worked more & more closely with the anti-clerical Communist PKI, the Abangan masses began abandoning Islam explicitly. Foreigners observed the de-Islamisation of both cities & countryside, whilst a minority became increasingly strict Muslims.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

🧵Short thread on a few *odd* conversations I had with a Pakistani postgrad that I've since thought about a lot. Didn't know him, but regularly shared a research library. Asked me for directions. He looked Iranian, asked him his origin. Said he'd flown from Pakistan *yesterday.*

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Indonesia gained independence in the midst of countrywide communal violence between Islamists & Communists (PKI). Order was imposed with difficulty by the (mostly Japanese-trained) Indonesian Army, with the PNI as its political party. Separatists in Ambon were also crushed.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Formerly neutral signifiers of personal faith became sectarian class markers, such as the headscarf. During the 50s, the Abangan abandoned it as its use became associated with hardline Islamists. A few parties went beyond even the PKI, such as Permai, which was openly pagan.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

Tried to find Gazaway's book mentioned by Edgerton, but there doesn't seem to be available on internet archive or Liьgeո. So, if anyone could DM where to obtain a copy, much appreciated.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Parallel trajectories of both Irish & Scandinavian cultures being able to develop in isolation from an aggressively expansionist Romanism. Partially due to geography, but also in being cut-off from the Romance world by the neighboring migrations of more primitive pagan peoples.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Compared to the earlier struggle of the Celtic Church against Romanism, which was purely for "hearts & mind", the Pagan Vikings had no qualms over openly warring against such an alien civilisation.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

The military handed power over to a liberal parliamentary government, but hatreds between Santri Islamists & Abangan only continued to worsen. Between the Islamic parties & the Communists, the establishment PNI had little organic base, increasingly relying on Communist support.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

By the mid 60s, Sukarno & even PKI's leaders, realising religious-secular tensions were on the verge of provoking civil war, attempted to moderate the PKI's anti-Islamic rhetoric. But grassroots momentum had taken a life of its own, with plays entitled "The Death of Allah", etc.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Nonetheless, the peasant constituencies of Marxist Permai & PKI still felt they were entitled to a traditional Islamic funeral. Refusal of clerics to perform rites led to riots. An local elder grumbled: "You can't even die anymore but what is becomes is a political problem".

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

In 1965, as Indonesia was experiencing mounting multiple domestic & international crises, Sukarno, under the strain of pressure, vomited & fainted in public. The Communists, seeing their chance, attempted a coup, which miserably failed. Their many enemies now smelled blood.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

Paternity was unknown in the town. Children's typical response to question of their father's identity was "Hain't worth knowin'". Conversation was unknown. Ignorance of the outside world was absolute: One villager answered vaguely about a "king" Kennedy when asked of US leader.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

PKI's adoption of the Civilisational anti-Islamic rhetoric of 19thC Javanese aristocrats, mentioned earlier in this thread. Alongside this, the PKI also used traditional theatre for its propaganda, ridiculing pious Muslims with crude & often obscene humour.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

Edgerton mentions Gazaway's experience of Duddie's Branch as a oddly vibrant contrast to several other societies, equally or less pathological, that nonetheless suffered from extreme stress, widespread suicide, vanishing birthrates & impending extinction. Lifeforce a mystery.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

In contrast to Ireland's syncreticised Christianity, Toynbee describe's Scandinavia's cultural growth as akin to a recipe 'stewing in its own juice'. Meanwhile any trace Christian or Romanised-German influences vanished, during Thule's 'heavy winter dream'. Quoting Olrik.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

Even the local children's behaviour seemed to signify profound mental retardation. Apparent inability to play even simple ball games. The sudden illegal connection of electricity was thus a mystery to the visitor, eg: locals would simply abandon their cars after they broke down.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

Despite all described, the Duddie's Branchers had a deep love for their village & were perfectly contented with their way of life. Emigration elsewhere was unheard of and the communitay appeared stable, self-confident & set to endure, deeply unlike Western societies today.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

@Paracelsus1092 They lived without toilets or indoor plumbing, street-shitting, usually washed into the local stream, which was their sole water supply. Town was mostly unemployed and the main food-source was welfare, with the inhabitants constantly hungry. All children were thin & malnourished.

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

@Paracelsus1092 Whole families slept in the same bed, plagued by cold, cockroaches, rats & other vermin. Residents ate with fingers & rarely washed bowls or cups in the feces-polluted river. Tuberculosis and other diseases were endemic. The whole village stank of BO, filth & dried urine.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

A key difference. Ireland was Christianised by Romano-Briton missionaries. This soon before Celtic Britain would be exterminated forever by the Anglo-Saxons. That is, outside of a few highland holdouts in Wales, remote Scotland, & 'The Old North'. Scandinavia remained pagan.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Typical election chaos of the 50s period. Though PNI as a whole hated the Communists, Sukarno himself courted them for support as an independent. Communist mockery of both Muslim passivity & prayer positions in phrase translating as "Those Who hold their Palms out for Rain".

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Tonybee claims this Nordic slumber was abruptly broken by the holy wars of Charlemange against the Saxons. The bloody Frankish conquest of a pagan Germanic nation, geographically & culturally closely akin to the Norse, eliminated the last buffer between Romanism & Scandinavia.

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

A key to understanding Gorbachev, ignored by both Western & Russian historiography: "He was the last true Leninist believer". Gorbachev believed in the myth (for schoolchildren) of Lenin as a kindly man, only forced to rule through terror by extreme circumstances. As an adult.

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@haravayin_hogh

28 days

@CitizenNill True but Latinamericans are kind of throwing stones from within the glasshouse here

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@haravayin_hogh

4 months

New🧵on Stoddard's 1917 WW1 book, this time looking at the Romanian Kingdom's irredentist ambitions. Romania's WW1 history always stood out to me, because although it's military performance was terrible, it finished as both the biggest and most unexpected winner of the whole war.

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@haravayin_hogh

4 months

Thread w/excerpts from Lothrop Stoddard's analysis of European national situations & goals during World War 1, ongoing when he wrote. His judgements have especial historical interest as it was written after the Russian Revolution of March 1917, but before the Bolshevik coup.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

@Paracelsus1092 Inbreeding after extreme population bottleneck?

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@haravayin_hogh

5 months

Thinking about similar places today. Branchers despite their squalor retained, however misplaced, a sense of self-worth & belonging. The big changes that have made life intolerable for marginals now are diversity, mass-media & most of all, obesity. Related

Nemets

@Peter_Nimitz

2 years

In its emphasis on specifically celebrating racial & sexual diversity, USA’s culture elides the far more noticeable physiognomic & somatotypic diversity that more accurately characterizes its subjects as a result of dishonest self-idealization & ignorance of transmogrification.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Back to the Norse. Skipping a long section by Toynbee on a few narrow Viking-defeats. Toynbee claims granting a hypothetical Viking victory of just a few of these battles easily have snowballed to the complete elimination of Christianity from Europe, Varg Vikernes' dream.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Paglia reflects on the memoir's potential as a college text, to be invoked as a talisman for smoking out sanctimonious Leftist schoolmarms & Rightist pharisees alike. Paglia's whole philosophy is summed up between the vertical highlights. Cute reference to Western chemistry. 🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Skipping Toynbee's lengthy exposition on the Saxon Wars, turning now to his description of the Norse military response, dawning the Viking Age. He makes a fascinating argument that as the Celts briefly verged on enveloping & strangling Greco-Roman Civilisation, so did the Norse.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Toynbee, concludes his passage on the narrow-but nonetheless-irreversible failure of the nascent Scandinavian Civilisation to militarily overpower Christendom. He stops to make some intriguing comments on the oddly similar outlooks between the Norse & the Ancient Greeks.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

2) A Celtic mass-migration under the warlord @HyperBowiean ('Brennus' was possibly a title, nobody's sure) nearly overran Macedon & Greece itself in the 280s BC. Mostly because Macedon was exhausted by endless post-Alexander civil-wars. But they were diverted to Turkey instead.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

To clarify for those unfamiliar with Classical Antiquity: 1) Celts/Gauls actually sacked Rome in its earliest history, when it still a minor Citystate warring with other Italians. Livy claims only the sacred geese chimping pout alerted soldiers at the Citidel to Gallic presence.

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@haravayin_hogh

9 days

Crucial excerpt. Practically all Jewish stereotypes in the Anglosphere derive from modern secularised Jewry, & have nothing to do with any Jewish community before 1800. Humour/Satire -banned by Rabbis. Secular learning -banned by Rabbis. Most of the Old Testament -unknown.

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@haravayin_hogh

9 days

European absolutist states would not tolerate executions carried out by parallel legal institutions, such as Rabbinical courts. When these states were temporarily weakened, traditionalist Rabbis were able to take revenge on ✡️heretics - e.g. poisoning Bar Mitzvah practitioners.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

After Viking assaults had finally been blunted, the vast expanse of Scandinavian colonisation abroad was lost forever via Christianisation. Consider that William the Conquerer, who permanently removed England from the Scandinavian world & into the Latin one, was of Nordic blood.

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@haravayin_hogh

9 days

A key point to understanding this book: Shahak's descriptions are mostly about traditional (not liberal/reform) Jewish religious communities, who were the only kind of self-identifying Jews that existed before the 1800s. They were hermetic enclaves of totalitarian theocracies.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Thread on how ex-Yugoslavia & the Balkans emerged in the 90s as world leaders in cigarette smuggling, arms trafficking & hub for the international drug trade. There were endemic factors, but as usual the US greatly exacerbated the problem. Excerpts from M. Glenny's "McMafia". 🧵

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@FistedFoucault

1 year

Feeling a lot of disrespect on this site for being a cigarette smuggler

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Treadgold posits a cause for Byzantium's turn in fortunes both ancient, yet eerily contemporary: Its elites simply lost interest in expansion or great projects. Deprived of constructive outlets & without external danger, the state's newfound wealth only tempted corruption,

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

@Peter_Nimitz I frankly don't find any topic on earth more boring or overhyped than AI. It's all a big nothing.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

[meta-twitter note insert]: Previous book-quotes are my own photos, because the sole digital web copy is a photocopy, and on those pages half the letters were faded out. Taking photos & editing them takes f# ages, but much of that PDF is barely readable.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Nordic successes of the early 20th Century were & are virtually invisible to a casual reader of the news cycle. Between Colonial Crises abroad, Balkan Wars, WW1 & the Russian Revolution, Scandinavia's quiet solving of some potentially very serious problems had gone unnoticed.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Beautiful quoted passage by Orlik. On the death of Icelandic literature & Free State, "falling into a sleep of centuries, full of disturbing dreams". Conclusion. There's an alt-history Appendix discussed in which the Vikings crushed Christendom, but this thread is long enough.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Further comparison between the Viking Age & the Archaic Age of the Greeks. This comment on their similar racial temperament stood out: "A combination of self-confidence with pessimism & of exaltation with melancholy" Even children notice these shared strains in their myths.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Namely his explanation for Byzantium's sudden & incredibly steep decline. Over a mere century it went from Basil II's tightly-run & unified realm, ringed by either vassals or cringing & defeated enemies, to one on the verge of collapse, riddled by corruption & political anarchy.

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@haravayin_hogh

9 days

Ignorance within the Shtetls was so absolute that Rabbis were angrily denying the existence of America in 1803. Shahak sadly notes that many Jews remain nostalgic for this closed world (which was forcibly ended) and that Israel is in severe danger of caving into such fantasies.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Toynbee returns to the big picture, claims that Scandinavian & Christian Civilisations were so different, it was inevitable that one annihilate the other. Once the Norse conceded any diplomatic relations with Christian powers, they were doomed. Similar parallels exist today.

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

Early attempts at reforming the economy. Even by Soviet standards, Gorbachev & his inner-circle had scant literacy when it came to these matters. A hamfisted top-down attempt (ignoring advice of even Soviet economists) to improve production quality of consumer goods backfired.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

It will always be debated, but Athens really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in their mad expedition to conquer Sicily, whilst Spartan hostilities were ongoing. Scaled proportionately, such sheer hubris may only be equalled by Hitler's declaring war on both the USA/USSR.

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@haravayin_hogh

9 days

Rabbis wielded absolute power over all other Jews, who were encouraged to both fear & loath the wider world. Jews flouting Judaic laws were subject to harsh punishments, sometimes up to the point of the death penalty. Rabbis cooperated with gentile leaders in their enforcement.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

He comes in merely second, crushed. He returns to staid white-collar life, as if the previous (months? years?) were all just a fever dream. Paglia's WASP critique has dated badly, but the therapeutic cancer of "constructive" love relationships has become omnipresent. Mart won.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Vikings & the Orthodox/Byzantine world. At the time of the Rus' (Rurik's Nordic origins no longer in dispute), crucial to remember that without Christianisation, a Nordic language could have been imposed on Russia, as the Magyars imposed theirs on their Slavic/Latin subjects.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Reactions were not wholly limited to the passive recognition of grey & creeping new status quo, however. A few Norse poets, as representatives of their fading civilisation, were disgusted by "the strange & monstrous fact that the meek were fast inheriting the Scandinavian Earth".

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

As the most remote Scandinavian outpost, Iceland was the last to abandon the Old Gods. Mention at this point that Toynbee was a believing Christian (himself one of the last of his kind in the West), yet even he concedes the overwhelmingly negative effects of Iceland's conversion.

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@haravayin_hogh

1 month

Gorbachev had unwittingly began dismantling the USSR's "Beznal" system- a unique & complicated one based on a 2 kinds of money, used for different purposes & which were never mixed. Despite its drawbacks, it had ensured Soviet financial stability even in direst circumstances.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Curious digression. Unlike France or England, who were forced to concede the Northmen land to stop their raids, the cannier Byzantines redirected the Rus' against their own Bulgar enemies. They were then either expelled or recruited into the new Varangian Guard.

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@haravayin_hogh

6 months

@whyvert A little-known example. Local governments in Indonesia & Malaysia have been actively encouraging (technically) illegal migration of Muslim Filipinos to displace the native Christians of North Borneo. Either would prefer Malays or Javanese to colonise but there's little incentive.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

@Steve_Sailer Yes. Rickleffs mentions the invention of the steamship led to a enormous growth in the number of Indonesian Hajjis. It also led to a reverse momvement of many Persian & Arab merchants settling in Indonesia in the late 1800s, who were shocked at the nominal "Islam" they saw.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

A surreal intro for sure. "The claustrophobic heat is like 'Saigon summer' ... "First off, Fussell is kidney-punched by a double amputee, then humiliated by a hostile chorus chanting "new meat! new meat!". I guess the 80s predated gyms becoming a bland corporate officespaces.

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Lengthy quotation of Olrik by Toynbee. On the cultural diffusion of Romanism in Scandinavia, the conversion of wanderlust & thirst for adventure to vulgar money-making. Once existence of Christian powers was accepted, conversion was only a matter of time, however unenthusiastic.

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@haravayin_hogh

2 months

Turkmens were a primitive enemy that should have been trivial to fight off only a generation ago. Instead Greek factional squabbles allowed, and even actively facilitated, their initial flooding into Anatolia - dooming Byzantine society. We see identical elite behaviour today.🧵

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@haravayin_hogh

3 months

Finally "in the second a final stage", Papism pushed into Scandinavia itself. Toynbee comments the tide was turned only after after the militarist tactics of Charlemange's 'Holy War' had been been discarded. Infiltration from within instead rendered Norse culture 'abortive'.

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