Roman history is amazing. Everybody hears of Julius Caesar and maybe Trajan and Hadrian but then pretend that nothing happened after that. Like poof, it was dead, inevitable, Franks and Caliphates are now a thing.
Then when you realise how much Rome had to screw itself over to even get to that point while being struck by famines, massive migratory invasions, the huns while still being in a moderately good shape… That’s the good stuff. The story of the fall is a marble being chipped away slowly while telling a beautiful story until there is nothing left of the Western Roman Empire. If Rome had a favorite hobby it would be waging war on itself.
Eastern Roman Empire was alive and kicking until the 1450’s and if you think there’s not much there then look up Justinian’s restoration. They even had horseback archers like the mongols and huns for a while that had to train for many years. Hell, even look at a map that goes back some years pre-caliphate period.
Even as recently as 1912 there were people in the Aegean islands that identified as Roman. I wish there would be a series that would cover the history of Rome properly and not just “CaEsAr KiLlEd gAuLs aNd sExEd cLeOpAtRa” for the billionth time.
It's really a shame that even figures such as the Gracchi brothers (or really any of the pre-Caesar Populares figures) are hardly ever brought up as well, although I guess I can't be too surprised that radical social reformers are being left out.
I’ve always thought the mid-late Roman Republic was more interesting than the imperial era, and the Gracchi are easily the most fascinating chapter. Noble aristocrats becoming populist ideologues, the increasingly bitter struggle over creaky governmental norms (like their weaponization of the tribunal veto to shut down the city), the introduction of political violence. Very instructive for our current era, imho.
I recently got through “The storm before the storm” by Mike Duncan. Very entertaining, if nothing else, seeing every “that doesn’t sound good” pay off.
Even during “the Decline and Fall” there was plenty going on that was just people living their lives – it’s not like every place was being pillaged and everyone was being slaughtered all at once. And there were plenty of centuries before then full of fascinating history with lessons for today, and that’s just the stuff that we know about.
I wish, so much of history (and especially people talking about history) is just recounting Greco-Roman history or trying to embody it. Even American nationalism feels like Roman nationalism v4.3.
I’m rather sick of everyone and everything trying to connect themselves to something roman or greek, then stopping dead. Everyone and their dog has a latin motto, multiple fields are all but written in latin, and that pantheon is the first and often only stop for mythology names; you’d think Caligula was still out there banging his worries away.
I want an HBO miniseries on Scipio Africanus vs Hannibal.
Then I want another HBO mini-series on the Flavian dynasty. The eruption of Vesuvius, the first (?) Jewish rebellion, and the questionable conquest of Brittania all happened under Titus. I would love to see a dramatic reenactment of the Romans absolutely losing their minds at how fucking cursed their empire suddenly was.
If it’s “Game of Thrones”-like intrigue the people want, a miniseries about the Severan dynasty would kick ass. Let’s see what we get in just three generations or so:
-Year of the five emperors, with Septimius Severus coming out the victor and establishing the dynasty after a five-way civil war.
-Two brothers, co-emperors, who can’t stand the sight of each other with their mother mediating between them, with one eventually killing the other WITH THEIR MOTHER IN THE ROOM.
-Caracalla then gets killed while on campaign by the brother of a soldier he had executed.
-A grandmother putting a specific grandson on the throne, then changing her mind, having him and her own daughter KILLED and replaced with another grandson & his mother.
-The first grandson being, quite probably, the first trans emperor/ruler in ancient history, with immensely, uh, interesting consequences.
-The “Good” grandson becoming a successful and celebrated emperor, only to be killed by his own troops after trying to buy off peace with the Germanic tribes, thereby kicking off the crisis of the 3rd century which would need several miniseries in and of itself to really tell all its tales…
This is so true, the Severan dynasty is so much more intriguing politically than the Julio-Claudians.
Personally though, I’m sick of historical/fantasy political thrillers. I just want a sort of black comedy set around the Year of the Four Emperors and the Flavians. It’s actually absurd just HOW MUCH goes wrong for Rome, with a lot of it just due to natural phenomena or things out of their control.
In was way WAY deep into Greek and Roman Mythology in middle and highschool. I read so many books and stories about them. I’d consider myself straight.
I read Metamorphoses by Ovid in middle school. Not in the original Latin, but I still read it. I also read any and every Greek myth I could get my hands on, and consider Apollo to be the true villain of Oedipus Rex.
And yeah, I'm a fairly firm 0 on the Kinsey scale. You know that Ron White bit about porn? Yeah, I'll admit to only really liking soft core, and predominately solo models. Also, that side of the business is apparently slightly less toxic, which is a bonus.
It’s not widely considered due to how the second half of WW1 ended up going, but Germany really wasn’t the bad guys in WW1. It was like every other war except WW2, both sides were kinda shit and kinda okay. And given that fact, it was clearly a mistake to let the victors write the treaty of Versailles to be so harsh, while the losers were still a quite formidable force. Though as a 21st century person, it’s hard to say how many of the German complaints about it were legitimate vs how many were an excuse to be fascists.
This is a pretty pessimistic way to view people who have an interest in… anything tbh. People view video game players in the same sort of negative light and it’s not healthy there either…
Yeah…I guess I shouldn’t have expected any less from a Tumblr x Lemmy post and comments, but here we are.
Leave it to Tumblr to read so much bullshit into a situation that it’s distorted to the point of unrecognizable then use it to classify people.
Leave it to Lemmy to take one look at said dumpster fire, be incapable of nuance or reason, and jump on the bandwagon of idiocy.
Basically if you reduce this down to a point that actually makes sense and holds up, all it’s saying is, “People who are obsessed with Nazism are to generally be avoided.”
But that’s too simple and obvious to go viral, so they gotta chuck a few reasonable but adjacent groups into the flames as well, then dogmatically stick to it.
Amazing how people on Lemmy are unable to understand an obvious joke post. Do we need to flag every satirical piece with a giant red “JOKE” button for you guys not to take it seriously?
What OSP are you talking about? Because even googling OSP WW2 returns four (arguably three) different results.
Offshore Patrol: A military contingent from the Philippines that was active during (and after) WW2
Osprey Elite: A book series
Osprey Publishing: Published the aforementioned book series. Also published another book series that revolved around WW2. All series seemingly being factual/historical books.
OSP-26 model flare gun from Russia?
I am really starting to hate acronyms the older I get.
I work in corporate IT and literally have received entire emails in acronyms and it makes me irate. People need to just start spelling things out again. Especially when CBT can mean 3 different things and 1 of them is cock and ball torture.
Acronyms are functionally worthless. There are only so many combinations you can use when sticking with the English language. It’s like 17,500 and something if you’re sticking with 3 letter acronyms. Even if you know exactly what the person is talking about there’s a non-zero chance that it could be sharing the acronym with something else you know. ESPECIALLY if you work in corporate IT such as yourself and have to deal with IT lingo and corpo lingo.
They’re a YouTube channel that presents over views of different historical times in a fun way, as well as different chunks of media analysis.
Good for “I want 30 minutes of learning about some of the historical forces at play in the fall of the Byzantine empire, but I don’t want to learn the intricacies of their tax collection hierarchy” type days.
This whole post is about WW2 (with a hint of greek mythology) and the acronym isn’t for anything directly involved of any of that but a niche YouTube channel?
Acronyms need to be taken out back behind the shed and obliterated with a shotgun.
My angy-ness not withstanding, that sounds like it falls squarely into the first group mentioned in the image.
OK, so here’s the short version:
Heinrich VI. who presided over the assembly of nobles in Erfurt had his belief in god’s favor shaken to its core by all the lords he invited literally drowning in shit inside a church. He then became Emperor after his predecessor Friedrich I. had drowned in a river while on a crusade, shortly before reaching Jerusalem - another proof that god wasn’t on the Holy Roman Empire’s side.
His lack of faith, on which his own power as god-appointed Emperor was founded, was noticed by everyone around him. So the lords denied his attempt to instate a hereditary monarchy and removed themselves from his court, putting them in a position where they could deny or demand payment for following his commands.
Driven by a deep longing to prove he was still in god’s grace, and to regain absolute power, he believed that his role on earth was to reunite the Eastern and Western church and become the prophecized “Emperor of Peace” who would bring about the end times. To this end, he started campaigning and preparing for another Crusade that would not only reconquer Jerusalem, but also the Byzantine Empire.
His death from Malaria while besieging Messina as staging ground for his crusade put an end to those plans for now, but not to the ideas behind the crusade he had popularized.
When the fourth crusade was launched just 5 years later, the most experienced crusading knights would have been veterans of his misguided campaign, and when it became clear that they couldn’t pay for the passage to the Holy Land, they would have been the ones to propose to conquer the Byzantine Empire instead as another valid target, just as their former Emperor had proposed. As we all know, the following sack of Constantinople destroyed the will of the church and the Christian states to unite and put any real effort into another crusade from that point on.
The next German Emperor didn’t even participate in the Fifth crusade and delayed participation in the Sixth for so long he got excommunicated. From then on, any further crusades were called by individual kings, not the pope in the name of all Christendom.
The Muslim rule over the middle east was secure for the coming centuries, the Byzantine Empire never recovered, and the Ottoman Empire rose into the power vacuum and eventually conquered it.
Which leads us to Baghdad. The center of Islamic culture during its heyday and for centuries after, a shining beacon of civilization more developed than the attacking Crusader states. You have to understand what such a history does to the self-image of the inhabitants. And at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia, it was easy to see the region as the center of the world. Due to the aforementioned rise of the Ottoman Empire and its incorporation of today’s Iraq, the land became part of one of the greatest Empires in history.
Until after a period of declining importance and influence, the British conquered the Ottoman Empire as well as Baghdad and drew their own borders in the sand, the US-lead league of nations sanctioned the new borders imposed on the people, and called the cobbled-together country “Iraq”, an entity with no regard for its history or former glory, and under western rule for the first time in a millennium.
It’s a logical conclusion that Iraq would eventually unite with their neighbors and throw off the British rule, but also that without historic precedent (due to being part of a Muslim empire for so long), they wouldn’t have the experience to establish a stable democracy. One coup d’etat followed another, which always pushes the most ruthless leaders to power. And that was the Baath party. They promised freedom and a new, pan-Arabic union that would end western rule, which the pan-Islamic unions of the past had failed at.
But also within the party, the most ruthless used the chaos to rise to power, and Saddam Hussein solidified his position by first killing those Baathists that didn’t support him, then thousands of his own citizens, and then starting a war, which threatened US influence in the region enough to eventually topple him - in a war that created so much anger and suffering that one man, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, saw no other way to vent his anger than to throw his shoes at the leader of the western world.
That’s literally exactly what it’s implying but I am sure you’ll sleep well at night knowing you’re helping to destroy the U.S. by promoting rampant anti intellectualist propaganda. That’s why no one should listen to people like you.
It doesn’t imply anti-intellectalism from my view, the post says things like Prussian military history and specifically the treaty of Versailles type obsessions, which is quite a bit different than being interested in history like the printing press or indigenous displacement, Spanish Civil War, etc
The post itself says “there are plenty of valid reasons to be into WW2” and says it’s the caution zone, not that you can’t be into it. And anyway, I am pretty sure this wasn’t intended as a literal litmus test for fascist tendencies or something, but a jokey observation of how sometimes the person super into Wermact tactics and technology might probably like them too much
I’m interested in the subjects that I never learned in school, like Asian history or ancient Mesopotamian history. African empires seems interesting too, and I’m very curious about how the Polynesians came to be, seems wild.
I’ve noticed that, after a relative lull, people are getting bullied for traditional reasons again. However the bullies code those reasons as deplorable, so that they can imply their targets are just assholes.
Sure. A coworker of mine is a big true crime podcast fan, he must be planning a murder spree. I love the works of Philip K. Dick so I must want to live in some future despotic government on a steady diet of ersatz and drugs.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Are you suggesting that telling people to be wary of history buffs (after decades of examples of “history buffs” being code for wild bigot/racist) is actually just bullying people who like history? Because if so that’s a gross over exaggeration of what the post is saying. Or are you talking about the Greek mythology thing? Because the tumblr user who posted it is queer and so am I so that conclusion would also be pretty heavily flawed and wrought with heterocentric thinking.
This post is laying the groundwork to say someone is somehow morally compromised for having certain interests. Those interests have been common interests for decades.
Right now, there’s 100 percent a mood that people who are morally compromised deserve to be mistreated.b
The end result of posts like these is nerds being bullied in the same way they used to before the whole anti bullying attitude started. Only this is even worse because the victims get told they are POSes who deserve it.
The Roman one specifically applies to basically every male history nerd. Same with WW2.
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