mhalila

mhalila, 2 months ago

Next, I was sent a link to the Wikipedia page of Robert Louis and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson's short story collection the Dynamiter (1885). Because the titles include "Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady" and "Zero's Tale of the Explosive Bomb", I had to read it. I was regaled with, among other things, a horror story about Mormons where Utah was depicted as Mordor, complete with the Eye of Sauron. Very silly, occasionally racist, but enjoyable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_New_Arabian_Nights:_The_Dynamiter

mhalila, 2 months ago

Nine for Mormon Men doomed to die,
One for Brigham Young on his dark throne;
In the Land of Utah, where the raptors lie.

One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in polygamy bind them;
In the Land of Utah where the raptors lie.

mhalila, 2 months ago

I commemorated the tumblr holiday by reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, specifically the 1917 Yale edition on Wikisource. It's interesting enough, and I didn't know so many Shakespeare quotes you see flying around are from it. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar_(1919)_Yale

mhalila, 2 months ago

I needed to recover after Katie-Kate, so I went back to my comfort zone and read about the Spanish navy after the Armada. This was entirely fascinating, covering everything from forest conservation to the social status of sailors in 17th-century Spain. If I had to sum it up, it's a great account of how early modern European states constantly teetered on the edge of bankruptcy until the invention of central banking.

mhalila, 2 months ago

We saw Zone of Interest, and it was amazing. I've read quite a lot about the Third Reich, but it occurred to me that I actually knew very little about Rudolf Höss. Well, I fixed that.

John Primomo's biography excruciatingly details what Höss did at Auschwitz. None of it was new to me, but the sheer inhumanity of both the atrocities and the people who perpetrated them, Höss above all, is still profoundly disturbing. It's a good book, but I mean I can't exactly recommend it to anyone!

mhalila, 2 months ago

Höss was caught after the war and sentenced to death in Poland. Before he died, he not only freely gave testimony at the Nürnberg trials, but also wrote an autobiography of sorts. He admitted what he did, and his defence was that he was following orders. It's basically the same thing his boss, Adolf Eichmann, tried in Israel, and which for some reason I still don't understand, Hannah Arendt chose to believe. It's a lie, told by fanatical Nazis trying to save their skins and their families.

mhalila, 2 months ago

Primomo, a retired judge, takes apart Höss's defence with forensic precision. While Höss admitted to his role in the Holocaust, he constantly lied about his personal involvment, and went to his death an unrepentant antisemite.

This book really underlines how totally wrong Arendt was about the Nazis being "banal". That was the lie they told afterward. These people really, truly believed in what they were doing. They even enjoyed it.

The parallels to today are terrifyingly obvious.

mhalila, 2 months ago

I want to say a lot more, but it's late and I should probably get some sleep instead. So I'll skip to the end of the story.

The Poles condemned Höss to death, took him to the ruins of Auschwitz, and hung him there.

I absolutely oppose the death penalty. But I find it very difficult to say that hanging Höss at Auschwitz was wrong.

mhalila, 2 months ago

Maybe the one thing I do need to say is that having read this, I am again stronglt reminded that the idea that you can take the memory of the Holocaust, probably the most horrifying crime ever perpetrated by human beings in the entire history of this planet, and use it to justify the ethnic cleansing of another people, is depraved beyond words.

mhalila, 2 months ago

mhalila, 2 months ago

Sitten onneksi jotain vähän kevyempää: luin Karin Bojsin ruotsista käännetyn tietokirjan Euroopan esiäidit. Arvioni siitä ilmestyy kohtapuoliin Bibliofiloksessa. Jenny Kangasvuo kirjoitti teoksesta hyvin Antroblogiin: https://antroblogi.fi/2024/01/karin-bojs-euroopan-esiaidit/

mhalila, 1 month ago

Kevyemmällä lukemistolla jatkettiin, nimittäin Matti Laineman teos A.E. Nordenskjöldin matkasta Koillisväylällä pisti silmään kirjasto Oodissa, ja se oli tällaisena vanhanaikaisena matkakertomuksena ihan viihdyttävää yöpöytälukemista.

mhalila, 1 month ago

I've now read Jane Ward's exceptional Tragedy of Heterosexuality, and I kinda think everyone should. It's about the sheer misery of heterosexuality. This is "are the straights okay", the book. It looks at marriage guides, pickup artists and the entire heterosexual repair industry, and suggests ways toward a heterosexuality not based on hating women. This really is a great book.

mhalila, 1 month ago

Standout quotes include:

"straightness can be understood as a fetish for normalcy"

"heterosexuality works best when men and women learn to say and do things that they don't actually want to say or do, for the sake of heterosexuality"

"It's not that it "gets better" for queer people; it's that heterosexuality is often worse."

mhalila, 1 month ago

My critique of the book is mainly that reading it as a historian, I feel that the overall argument would be much stronger if heterosexuality was set in its historical context. The whole concept of heterosexuality was invented in the 19th century, and the bourgeois gender roles that underpin it aren't much older. They've since been forced on people through state biopower, in the service of nationalism and especially natalism, underpinned by misogyny.

mhalila, 1 month ago

In my opinion, if we see compulsory heterosexuality as part of the massive Enlightenment-nationalist project to engineer entire societies to assuage middle-class anxieties, and realize that it begins to decisively fall apart as soon as the project to subordinate women to men financially fails, then I think we see heterosexuality in its proper context, and understand why it's so fucking miserable. I don't want to be reductionist, but its core, heterosexuality is about men dominating women.

mhalila, 1 month ago

It's also in this context that we can properly understand why any kind of "deviant" sexuality or gender is such a mortal threat to male and white supremacist conservativism. It's not a coincidence that the current return of fascism is to a large extent being built on total hostility to all queerness. They fully well understand that queer liberation is a mortal threat to their patriarchy.

mhalila, 1 month ago

So I really feel quite strongly that in order to properly fight fascism, we need to rehistoricize gender and sexuality, and not accept the totally ahistorical projection of 19th-century middle-class patriarchal values as "natural" and timeless. When we recognize gender essentialism and compulsory heterosexuality as technologies of power, we can get on with the serious work of liberating all of us from them. Yes, even the straights.