Ithobaal

Members of the Politburo and the National Congress of the Communist Party of China on a bus ride to the construction site of the Shisanling Reservoir, where they'll partake in the building of the dam, 25 May 1958.

Rare photo of Joseph Stalin in 1936-12-23. The photo was taken in the hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace at the All-Union Conference of the wives of the command staff of the Red Army

Dolores Ibárruri &Fidel Castro

Letters reveal that Tolkien’s conception of Orcs is fundamentally human, albeit humans that represent the worst sort of infantryman. In one 1954 letter, in fact, Tolkien goes so far as to describe orcs as fundamentally “‘rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.” In another, he remarks that in real life, orcs would be present on both sides of any conflict. But Lord of the Rings, after all, is intended to be romantic fantasy in the classical sense, akin to Arthurian sagas or mythology, and in such stories “good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels.” Yet if orcs are essentially people, then that opens up a serious can of worms. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and while he professed himself allergic to the sorts of didactic Christian allegories produced by his friend C.S Lewis, he was deeply interested in the moral dimensions of his work. And as a Catholic, the notion of an entirely irredeemable species bothered him. Tolkien’s dilemma was this: The world of Middle Earth, though full of various minor gods and spirits, is organized along roughly monotheistic—and thus, for Tolkien, Christian—lines, with an Creator God, angels both ethereal and fallen, and a devil. This devil could not have created orcs evil out of whole cloth, Tolkien decided, because according to his understanding of Catholicism, evil can’t truly create anything of its own: it can only pervert and ruin existing materials. Similarly, by being of the world created by God and with the tacit permission of God, orcs therefore are his children as much as anyone else’s — meaning that salvation is as possible for them as anyone else.

But I think this dynamic becomes even more interesting with reference to art from Eastern Europe wherein you have a massive body of artistic and cultural critique produced by the West about how all these people are poor benighted victims of communism and how all their dissidents are so brave and valiant and subversive- a series of stereotypes about the victims of a 'totalitarianism' that are ironically so totalizing that the West has no real idea how to engage with these people after they got their deepest wish and saw East European state socialism be dismantled.

US stance in favor of democracy helps get the Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, the public, and elite opinion to back US policy. It helps ameliorate the domestic debate, disarms critics (who could be against democracy?), provides a basis for reconciliation between "realists" and "idealists"… The democracy agenda enables us, additionally, to merge and fudge over some issues that would otherwise be troublesome. It helps bridge the gap between our fundamental geopolitical and strategic interests... and our need to clothe those security concerns in moralistic language... The democracy agenda, in short, is a kind of legitimacy cover for our more basic strategic objectives.

Howard Wiarda [1]

Support for democracy.... is becoming the new organizing principle for American foreign-policy.

State Department policy document, 1987 [2]

But the truth is there is no "investing" in Albania, they are just stealing our land and trying to make this the new Palestine. But this is not gonna happen, we are not gonna stay silent.

The truth is that this is just a privatisation of our beaches, of our land, of our beautiful Albania that Albanains have been living there for generations, and now they just have no Albania anymore, they have no homeland, people are being forced to leave Albania because the job market has crashed down and there is nothing to live out of.

They have built fences around the Vlora beaches so that the locals cannot go inside. Once we broke them, but now they have rebuilt them, and on top of that, the police is protecting the fence and is going against the locals. But the locals pay their wages, and all this has to tell us that the city is so corrupt and all that they are doing is illegal.

US stance in favor of democracy helps get the Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, the public, and elite opinion to back US policy. It helps ameliorate the domestic debate, disarms critics (who could be against democracy?), provides a basis for reconciliation between "realists" and "idealists"… The democracy agenda enables us, additionally, to merge and fudge over some issues that would otherwise be troublesome. It helps bridge the gap between our fundamental geopolitical and strategic interests... and our need to clothe those security concerns in moralistic language... The democracy agenda, in short, is a kind of legitimacy cover for our more basic strategic objectives.

Howard Wiarda [1]

Support for democracy.... is becoming the new organizing principle for American foreign-policy.

State Department policy document, 1987 [2]

"Arterialised blood returning from the gills of the tadpole by the anterior bronchial veins." Outlines of comparative anatomy. 1841.