Ithobaal

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.

Outcasting Armenians by Talin Suciyan.

Scapegoat now states that women have no history but, if we did, it would be “a history of rape: the pogrom against the female body. The constant juxtaposition cuts short the breath that one would normally use to assess each claim, as it comes, before moving onto what follows. It turns my stomach in a way I suspect was not intended. A sudden comment on Chinese footbinding caps off, for instance, many paragraphs on the patriarchal oppression of women in Gaza. An abrupt swerve into Jew-on-Jew pimping follows many paragraphs on the pornographic core of National Socialism. A patronizing assessment of Palestinian women’s role in the resistance melts into yet another survey of state-sanctioned prostitution across the centuries. Dworkin has set herself the task to prove, inexorably—through a widening gyre of montage-based equivalences—that the “woman-hate” in men’s hearts really is everywhere, left and right. This hate will remain until women rise up across borders and draw new borders for themselves by seizing a homeland—an “Israel”—away from men. Her mission is carried out quite well. I just consider it fascistic, not least in its insistence on female innocence. Dworkin’s account of history is dazzlingly erudite and stunningly stupid at once: men have wrought it all. Even if your definition of “history” is strictly military, this is unpardonable stuff: armed struggles have always featured women leaders, such as, in the case of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abla Taha, Latifa Howari, Sarah Joudeh and Leila Khaled. Dworkin doesn’t mention these or any other Palestinian women militants and reckons that feminism is not currently possible in the Arab world: “in the sensibility of contemporary Arab women, the Palestinian male is the romantic figure,” not the Palestinian woman. Tellingly, the whole question of Palestinian women’s anti-Zionist struggle is dealt with only indirectly, merged with a discussion of “the heroism of Algerian women fighters” between 1954 and ’62 whose purpose is to ram home the lesson that national liberation movements always betray their women. Besides, when women participate in struggle, it’s “because they can be used and useful” and “get a temporary pass from complete servility.” Also, “the subsuming of the individual in the nationalist struggle is an easy process for women, who have little experience with a social reification of a singular identity.” These women are fodder for revolutionary movements, Dworkin misogynistically opines, because they have no self. All the litanies of rape-related facts in previous Dworkin books like Intercourse have palpably been dress-rehearsals for the remix in chapter three. “Rape,” she raps here mid-infodump, “is murder’s heartbeat.” It’s an undeniably dope line. What’s odd is how, while the wretched of the earth are always women, “Pogrom/Rape” rests on the leftfield assertion that “Israeli men get raped.” Dworkin alleges that “the rape of a defeated foe, soldier, male” is “part of the Arab code, coexisting with the obligation of the father or brother to kill the sister for sexual impurity.” She extrapolates further, on the strength of the book Arab and Jew (1987) by former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau chief David Shipler, that Palestinian men are engaged in a “revenge vendetta through male-male rape.” It is in fact purely on this basis—that is, unevidenced testimony cited by Shipler from a former Haganah paramilitary veteran (and, later, IDF/IOF colonel) Rafi Horowitz, recalling the Arab Legion systematically gouging eyes and mutilating genitals—that Dworkin delivers her chilling verdict: “the revenge rape of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of annihilation.” It’s her concluding point, and given that rape, for Dworkin, is the supreme justifier of bloody preemptive defense, there can be no mistaking what is being justified here.

This helmet was made using the skin of a porcupine-fish that was killed and then carefully dried. The front edge is lined with vegetable fiber and human hair, and it's equipped with coconut-fiber ties that were used to fasten the helmet onto the wearer's head.

Above: another porcupine-fish helmet from Kiribati

Helmets with this design are also known as te barantauti, and they were created as part of a traditional costume that was worn by the warriors of Kiribati (an island nation located in the South Pacific). Most of the surviving examples date back to the mid-1800s.

Above: a porcupine-fish helmet displayed with a high-backed cuirass, wrist-guard, and spear, c.1800s CE

Te barantauti were typically worn with body armor that was crafted from coconut-fiber and stingray skin, along with braided wrist-guards covered in shark's teeth, high-backed cuirasses, and wooden swords, spears, and daggers studded with stingray spines and shark's teeth.

Above: wrist-guards and cuirasses from Kiribati, c.1800-1880 CE

In some cases, the warrior's helmet was crafted from coconut-fiber instead. The same material was also used to construct sleeves, belts, and "overalls" that effectively covered the rest of the body.

Above: a coconut-fiber helmet with a full set of armor

The porcupine-fish helmets provided very little protection -- they were primarily created and used as a way to intimidate enemies during ritual combat.

As this article explains:

The men of Kiribati were famed for their fierceness, and when it came time for battle, they dressed the part, in head-to-toe armor made from coconut fiber and stingray skin. Their weapons were wooden swords lined with sharks’ teeth.

The crown jewel of Kiribati armor, though, was a spiky helmet made from the porcupinefish. A member of the blowfish family, a porcupinefish looks like an adorable big-eyed cartoon character—until it’s threatened. Then, it sucks water into a cavity between its body and skin and inflates to several times its normal size, stiffening the spines that usually lie flat.

Porcupinefish helmets, known as te barantauti, were made by capturing one of these agitated, puffed-up porcupinefish, killing it, peeling the skin away from the body, and drying it. The spiny skin that remained was reinforced with coconut-fiber padding and fashioned into a brittle helmet.

Though the helmets offered little in the way of actual protection, they instantly made their wearers appear bigger, taller, and more formidable.

For Kiribati warriors, this intimidation was more important than protection from death. That’s because in traditional Kiribati culture, a person who took someone’s life—even in a fair fight—paid with their most prized resource: their land. So instead of going for the kill, warriors sought to wound and humiliate their enemy. Fish-skin and coconut-fiber offered just the right amount of protection.

Above: a shark-tooth spear from Kiribati, c.1800s CE

Unfortunately, most of the surviving helmets, weapons, and pieces of armor are now housed in Western museums:

Over the years, dozens of these helmets made their way into museums across the globe, while few remain in Kiribati. The Smithsonian actually has three, the British Museum five, and Sweden’s Världskulturmuseerna “at least eight,” according to their digitization curator Magnus Johansson. One te barantauti even wound up at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, in the tiny town of St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

Over the last four decades, since Kiribati gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1979, the armor has taken on a new meaning—as a potent symbol of local culture. It features on tourist trinkets, but also stamps and school mascots. “The armor is not just a garment to me,” says Rareti Ataniberu, an I-Kiribati craftswoman. “It is a piece of art, a craft.”

Above: an armored warrior from Kiribati, mid-1800s

Sources & More Info:

Hakai Magazine: Kiribati’s Porcupine-Fish Helmets were More about Drama than Defense

Atlas Obscura: The Mystery of the Puffer-Fish Helmets of Kiribati

Pacific Presences: Fighting Fibres: Kiribati Armour and Museum Collections

Time Magazine: Why Indigenous Artifacts Should be Returned to Indigenous Communities

The Museum of New Zealand: Te tauti from Kiribati

The Museum of New Zealand: Rere (Knife or Short Sword) from Kiribati

Source: This Soviet World (1936) by Anna Louise Strong