Love is blind, and so is Bulgaria 😊

One more coalition before bed

Byziboos vs. Latinboos, FIGHT

John Brown once, on the frontier, was asked to help his neighbors drive off Natives so his ‘fellow’ whites could take their land.

John Brown answered, with characteristic fury, that he would sooner drive off white men who thought like that than raise a hand against Native folk who had done nothing wrong.

Your ancestors are in good company. Would that more of the US were like them, and not what we ended up with.

Came here to say this. Ain’t nomenclature fun.

I think it’s just a joke, rather than a real reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Civilized_Tribes

When you do everything ‘right’, and it still only take a populist demagogue to whip up the racists into an opportunistic frenzy to commit ethnic cleansing.

Explanation: The Confederacy was the side of the US Civil War which started a massive and bloody conflict in an attempt to preserve chattel slavery of Black folk in the Americas.

They lost. If there’s a hell, one hopes they’re ‘enjoying’ themselves.

Explanation: Not all Spanish Christians were onboard with the Conquistador policy of mass genocide and slavery in the Americas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomé_de_las_Casas

Arriving as one of the first Spanish settlers in the Americas, Las Casas initially participated in the colonial economy built on forced Indigenous labor, but eventually felt compelled to oppose the abuses committed by European colonists against the Indigenous population.[3] In 1515 he gave up his Native American laborers and encomienda. He then advocated, before Charles V, on behalf of rights for the natives. In his early writings, he advocated the use of African slaves to replace Indigenous labor.[4] He did so without knowing that the Portuguese were carrying out “brutal and unjust wars in the name of spreading the faith”.[5] Later in life, he retracted this position, as he regarded both forms of slavery as equally wrong.[6]

In 1522, Las Casas tried to launch a new kind of peaceful colonialism on the coast of Venezuela, but this venture failed. He then entered the Dominican Order and became a friar, leaving public life for a decade. He traveled to Central America, acting as a missionary among the Maya of Guatemala and participating in debates among colonial churchmen about how best to bring the natives to the Christian faith.

Travelling back to Spain to recruit more missionaries, he continued lobbying for the abolition of the encomienda, gaining an important victory by the passage of the New Laws in 1542. He was appointed Bishop of Chiapas, but served only for a short time before he was forced to return to Spain because of resistance to the New Laws by the encomenderos, and conflicts with Spanish settlers because of his pro-Indian policies and activist religious stance. He served in the Spanish court for the remainder of his life; there he held great influence over Indies-related issues. In 1550, he participated in the Valladolid debate, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were less than human, and required Spanish masters to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that they were fully human, and that forcefully subjugating them was unjustifiable.

Las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of Indigenous peoples, especially by trying to convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization. Although he did not completely succeed in changing Spanish views on colonization, his efforts did result in improvement of the legal status of the natives, and in an increased colonial focus on the ethics of colonialism.

Black and White, my love

“MacArthur, I’m starting to think you’re a dumb son of a bitch who doesn’t respect the office of the president”

N-next year, definitely…

It’s a white (and orange) man’s country now, I guess.

Fuck.

Actual fact: Americans don’t learn about John Brown because John Brown’s existence highlights a lot of ugly truths about American history, the American people at the time, and how corrupted the core of the American experiment really is.

John Brown is a very well known figure in the US, and widely taught about.

South Vietnam is overrun shortly after the coup of Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh potentially isn’t sidelined by hardliners in the North Vietnamese government, Vietnam becomes Communist but with much less bloodshed and, potentially, a less authoritarian and dogmatic regime.

Explanation:

Explanation: Alexander’s army famously mutinied near modern-day India because they were tired of campaigning and wanted to go home and see their families again. Macedonian soldiery were professionals, but in a system that operated under traditional warlord’s logic - you go home when the campaigns end.

Rome, on the other hand, eventually developed a professional system in which troops were constantly being rotated in and out of service, with a (more or less) definite start and end to one’s term of service. 20-25 years is a lot, but it’s also certain - the next campaign isn’t going to take you away from your home province indefinitely. As such, with the older, more likely to be exhausted soldiery being regularly dismissed to a pleasant (and paid) retirement, and the newer, hungry-for-loot-and-glory troops being constantly brought in, even during campaigning, the Roman Legions maintained a high level of enthusiasm for going on new campaigns, in most cases.

How dare the proletariat not vote for the party of the proletariat! Time to take democracy away from the proletariat!

Conquered People: “Can we be Mongols?”

Mongol Warrior: “No.”

Conquered People: “Can the Mongols be us?”

Mongol Warrior, suddenly wearing the national dress of the conquered: “Yes.”

Explanation: The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, the uncle of Pliny the Younger, invited the younger lad to go on a field trip to see the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, wherein Pliny the Elder intended to lead a rescue party for survivors during this unprecedented natural disaster.

Pliny the Younger opted to stay at home and do his homework.

Pliny the Elder would die due to his advanced age rendering him incapable of handling the toxic fumes and ash of the aftermath of the eruption, but the rescue party he led saved a number of survivors from the eruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker

A code talker was a person employed by the military during wartime to use a little-known language as a means of secret communication. The term is most often used for United States service members during the World Wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages. In particular, there were approximately 400 to 500 Native Americans in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was to transmit secret tactical messages. Code talkers transmitted messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formally or informally developed codes built upon their indigenous languages. The code talkers improved the speed of encryption and decryption of communications in front line operations during World War II and are credited with some decisive victories. Their code was never broken.