tumbling into the vally

Asks that got perfectly cut off in my notification list and will not be opened because anything that comes after this combination of words put in that order is, by definition, victim blaming Nazi/Holocaust apologia and is irrelevant. Imagine typing this out. "Better behave, Jew, or we'll do it again." Absolutely the fuck not. If you want to genocide Jews you will now find yourself dealing with the IDF, and that's the meaning of "Never Again". Cope harder.

"how dare you say we piss on the poor" in response to someone misinterpreting your post

"_ isnt gonna fuck you" for suck up behavior

"woah. should we tell everyone? should we throw a party?" for who the fuck cares

"and what if the world was made of pudding" for when would this ever matter.

"and sharks are smooth both ways" for a group of people heatedly arguing with 1 guy who is fucking with them all

“30-50 wild hogs” for someone making ABSURD excuses for violence.

“what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament” for how do you know that without being a part of it.

“anyone in this thread smoke weed” for the shit you people are saying is so off topic this might as well be a general discussion forum

“dogs are boys and cats are girls” for ooh ur mindset did not grow past 4th grade, huh

“color theory in a childrens hospital” for bending over backwards to not agree that YEA, that thing Came Off Weird

“you are a tar pit” for someone finding any reason to respond with outrage.

“is the __ in the room with us right now?” for I Don’t Think That’s Real.

“bean soup? im allergic to beans!” for ik this doesn’t work for you, but that’s not a flaw. not everything can be for you.

When my zayde (z”l) was being treated for cancer, there was a time that my dad had to call Hatzolah when it was Shabbat. He told me that not only did they respond quickly, THREE (3) paramedic units showed up at the door. Apparently they wouldn’t radio each other because that’s not part of pikuach nefesh, but by god they were going to get to my zayde to help him one way or another.

I went by there late that day because it was on my route. There were police vans slowing traffic and the street the attack happened on was barricaded, but the people in the neighborhood were going about their day, doing errands, etc. I felt like I was looking at a scene out of 1930s Germany - they attack the Jewish neighborhood, but people still need groceries, they still run into each other on the street and have a chat, etc. I felt profoundly connected to the youth of my Holocaust surviving grandparents in a way they never ever wanted me to feel.

(Jewish) pride month day 1: Dana International

Dana International is an Israeli pop singer and LGBTQ+ rights advocate. In 1998, she became the first transgender artist to win the Eurovision song contest. She has performed at many pride events and has advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Israel and abroad.

Also literally the only evidence of the kingdoms of isreal even existing is the bible, which has been changed for political gain many times. To quote a book called "The Bible Unearthed"

[In archaeological excavations] not only was monumental architecture missing, but even simple pottery shards. The types that are so characteristic of the 10th century in other sites are rare in Jerusalem. The most optimistic assessment of this negative evidence is that 10th century Jerusalem was rather rather limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical country hill village. This modest appraisal pattern meshes well with the rather meager settlement pattern of the rest of Judah in the same period. It is highly unlikely that this sparsely inhabited region of Judea and the small village of Jerusalem could have been the center of a great empire stretching from the Red Sea in the south to Syria in the north.

(The Bible Unearthed, Simon & Schuster, chap. 5, p. 133-134)

If you see a community of people missing from a chunk of history (Queer/trans/religious ect) and your immediate thought is "oh they didnt exist then" instead of "oh shit these people had a bunch of their history erased" you have fallen for genocidal propaganda

and ended with

the only evidence of the kingdoms of isreal even existing is the bible, which has been changed for political gain many times

i could try and ask you if you see the contradiction... but instead, behold! the Tunnel of 'Hizqiyahu!

(tho the name used by most Goys is the tunnel of Siloman, named, in typical Goyish fashion, after the Goys who found it in modern times, rather than after the Israelite king who ordered its excavation)

here is a fun fact about old times. you see, it was impossible for people to figure out how to dig a tunnel from one point to another in a straight line, because - think about it - how would they know if they're going to the roght direction while underground? this tunnel was meant to bring water into Yerushalem from the Gi'hon fountain outside, and they actually did this clever thing to dig it properly - they had two groups of people excavating, one from each end, but in a half-circular shape. like this:

the general idea is, if you go this way instead of going straight, then even if you're off, the two groups will meet EVENTUALLY.

and indeed when they did meet it was a matter for celebration for completing the digging, and so a sign was made to document the celebration:

and FUN FACT, btw. while Hebrew scripture HAS changed to adapt the Assyrian Aramaic alphabet after the Assyrian empire took over the land, its grammer has hardly changed in over a millenia - making the text perfectly readable for modern Hebrew natives with the aid of a simple letter key:

and so we have:

(original text on the left, same text using the newer letterset on the right)

תמה הנקבה וזה היה דבר הנקבה בעוד מנפימ החצבמ את הגרזנ אש אל רעו ובעוד שלש אמת להנק[ב נשמ]ע קול אש אכ רעו כי הית זדה בצר מימנ ומ[שמ]אל וביום ה[שלמת ה]נקבה הכו החצבים אש לקראת רעו גרזנ על [ג]רזנ וילכו המימ מנ המוצא אל הנקבה במאתיימ ואלפ אמה ומ[א]ת אמה היה גבה הצר על ראש החצבי[מ]

(in square brackets we have letters that are inferred, because the sign IS a millenia old and is a little worn)

this text describes the process that i just did. two groups coming towards eachother from opposite ends:

and so finished is the tunnel, and such is its tale, while the excavators were lifting their axes (mining) one towards the other, when there remained three Amas* before the stone between them shattered, heard each the voice of the other, for only a thin side (of stone) was left between the two. and in the day of the tunnel's completion, the excavators hit with their axes one towards the other and the water went through from the source to the sink in the length of two-hundred and a thousand Amas. and a hundred Amas was the height of the stone above the excavators' heads (where they met)

*an Ama is an old unit of measurement in the region

this is a lousy translation made on spot by a Hebrew native (me), looking it up i see that Wikipedia has a slightly different (yet similar in meaning) translation

... i take it that i didnt get to you with this one, did i. after all, it is a Jewish site, explained by Jews. i doubt you've even read this far. well, just in case-

behold! the Arch of Titus!

unlike the previous thing i showed you, this thing isn't Jewish, but rather 100% Roman, baby!

then why am i showing you this?

well. the Romans were the ones who ended the Hashmonean regime as an independant power in the region - knowingly, the last time when Jews got to be an independant regime in the Eretz before Israel. and this arch just so happened to be made by the Romans as a mean to document this very event:

what we're seeing here is a visual description of the Romans forcing the Jews off - and what is this that they're carrying? the menorah (THE menorah, with the seven arms) which was a central item for the Jewish civilization (to put it lightly, and shortly).

so! is a Roman piece of art, made BY the Romans, FOR the Romans, describing the Jewish civilization that they kicked off, reliable enough for you? one thing is right, this describes the Hashmonean kingdom, not the united Israelite one, but if your best argument is that you can trace our civilization back only ~2090 years instead of ~2160, then well. i just find it a bit of a weak argument.

of course, these two examples just so happened to be things that i care about. if you'd like, i can pull put some more - and i'm sure other people on jumblr will have better sources than i do! feel free to ask! i'm just not as much of a history nerd as some other people are, and also - English is jot my first language, and quite frankly, writing this post trying to convey it in English has given me a bit of a headache (hey if anyone in jumblr/israblr happened to know how to say תבליט in English i'd appreciate if you let me know in an ask or smth, google proved quite useless).

TL;DR:

If you see a community of people missing from a chunk of history and your immediate thought is "oh they didnt exist then" instead of "oh shit these people had a bunch of their history erased" you have fallen for genocidal propaganda. Good job becoming the strawman of your own post.

If there were, one day, a Palestinian state and it treated its Jewish citizens as second class citizens, legislated against them, forcibly removed them from their homes and robbed them of many rights, then I would call that state an apartheid state too

Luckily, we do not need to wait for this to happen! The Arabs already treated their Jewish citizens as third class people, to the extent that they cant have apartheid in those areas BECAUSE THERE ARE NO JEWS LEFT.

There are NO Jews living in area A, under Palestinian leadership. Jews who mistakenly end up there get murdered, aided by Arab cops. The only Jews in Gaza are the ones who have been kidnapped there and held for ransom.

So yeah, a Palestinian state would not be apartheid, it would just ethnically cleanse and genocide the Jews for daring to exist.

And as an aside, there are COUNTLESS Jewish organizations working to give Gazans/West Bankers more rights and access to health, aid, etc, when 1) these people are NOT our obligation, they are NOT Israeli citizens, and 2) they work incredibly, desperately hard to harm Jews. Jews in Israel are doing 5x the work that you are doing, on issues that we did not create, to people that would love to murder us. And how do I know that? Look at O7. Look at the intifadas.

You understand that discrimination ≠ apartheid? That word has meaning. Presumably being SA you would understand that there is a huge gap between just discrimination and legally having a completely different set of laws you are under.

It would be impossible for someone under apartheid to serve in the government. Thats just....not how apartheid works.

Israel offered citizenship to the Arabs when they won the WB back in 67. As most Arab policy, thousands rejected it, since they refuse anything positive that comes from Jews, willingly creating more suffering for themselves. People who want citizenship are more than welcome to apply, just as in every other country in the world.

Israeli Arabs are free to live wherever they want in Israel, there are zero laws dictating which plots of land they can rent/buy. I have plenty of Arab neighbors. For religious reasons, many communities live in the areas with their common religious folk but that is not legally mandated. Is it apartheid when families choose to live near each other???

The Israeli government provides services to all legally recognized towns/cities etc. If I build a house outside zoning laws then sure, they won't supply the proper infrastructure. But no one is forcing certain sections of the population to live in specific areas and then under-funding them.

Now, does that mean that the Israeli government is perfect? Ofc not. There are plenty of communists that don't have the resources they need or the assistance or whatever. That doesn't mean it is apartheid, just as when there are poorer neighborhoods in *any* country.

At no point were Arabs stripped of Israeli citizenship, nor are Gaza and the West Bank the least valuable land in I/P. There are also major elements to the conflict which don't really have parallels in the history of South Africa, namely the role of other Arab/Muslim countries and the history of Jews in the Arab/Muslim world.

A brief (and, by necessity, incomplete) history

--Islam in founded in the 7th century CE. It begins as a religion of conquest expanding from the Arabian Peninsula, and there are many longstanding Jewish communities in the lands they conquer, some of which are wiped out in horrific ways, with the rest allowed to remain as second class citizens. Thus, from the beginning, this is a relationship of conquest and oppression with the Jews as the conquered and oppressed.

--Eventually, the Arabic Muslim Caliphates fall and are replaced by the non-Arabic but still Muslim Ottoman Empire. Jews are still second-class citizens. The complexities of Arab Nationalism and Islamic Nationalism are one of many elements that I don't have time to get into, but that are crucial to understanding the situation.

(The Crusaders briefly conquer Jerusalem from the Ottomans, but that's not important right now.)

--At no point in the 1300 years of Muslim rule, nor of the 600 prior years of Roman and Byzantine rule, is Palestine a distinct land with a distinct political identity. It is a part of a larger empire, and suffers significantly from colonial neglect and exploitation.

--Meanwhile, the Jewish community, having been forcibly exiled by imperial conquerors, is spread throughout the world, but always maintains a cultural connection to Israel, and there is always a Jewish presence in Israel.

--In the 19th century, the modern Zionist movement is formed. This is far from the first Jewish attempt to return to the homeland or to regain some degree of sovereignty, but it is the first that will actually result in that sovereignty.

--The early Zionists purchase land from absentee landlords. This is almost always the least valuable land, often unfit for human habitation, as the Ottoman Empire blocks other purchases. However, much of this land is only poor because of the millennia of neglect, and proves to be extremely fertile and valuable once it is rehabilitated.

(Ecological repair on the scale is an unprecedented project, and the early Zionists certainly made mistakes, but that's another issue I don't have time to get into.)

--WWI happens. The British make deals with both Arabs and Jews to give them independence if they join the fight against the Ottomans, while plotting with the French to betray them both. When the Allies win, the Ottoman Empire is disbanded. Their imperial holdings were divided into zones of influence which the British and French would take over with the official goal of guiding them towards independence, though of course the reality was more complicated.

--This is the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. The British certainly don't create the tensions between the Arabs and Jews, but they do make everything worse.

--The highest ranking Muslim in Palestine, who the British treat as the leader of the Arabs, is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini. He and Adolf Hitler get along quite well, having similar views on the Jews.

--There is quite a lot of violence in this period. By the end of it, the Zionist consensus is that Jewish safety requires Jewish rule.

--In 1948, the British look at the mess that Palestine has become under their rule and decide they don't want to deal with it anymore. They hand the matter to the newly formed United Nations.

--The UN does a demographic study and then draws up the Partition Plan, which would turn the Arab-majority areas into an Arab state of Palestine and the Jewish-majority areas into the Jewish state of Israel, with Jerusalem and the surrounding land becoming and international city. The plan also gives Israel the Negev desert, because the only people who live there are the Bedouins, and the UN does not give a shit about the Bedouins.

--The Arab League, consisting of several Arab governments but not a Palestinian representative, reject this plan, stating that if the Jews attempt to declare independence over any part of what they consider Arab land, they will attack. They make it clear that this will be a war of extermination.

--Again, this is 1948. Several of these Arab governments were allies of the Nazis.

--The Jews declare Independence. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia declare war.

--Living in a war zone is awful, and many Arabs flee.

--Israel wins the war-that is, it still exists when the Arabs are tired of fighting. The ceasefire line (later called the Green Line) becomes Israel's defacto borders. Gaza and the West Bank are not within these borders, but are controlled by Egypt and Jordan respectively, who annex them. Arabs living within the new borders become Israeli citizens. Arabs who are outside these borders when the war ends become the responsibility of the countries in which they now live or of the newly formed UNRWA. Many of them do face apartheid conditions under the rule of other Arab countries.

--Jews who are inside the Green Line when the war ends become Israeli. Jews who are in the areas Egypt and Jordan now control also become Israeli, as they are expelled form their homes and the newly formed State absorbs them. Over the following decades, Jews will be ethnically cleansed from the entire Arab/Muslim world. Israel absorbs them as refugees.

--The Green Line runs through Jerusalem, making it a divided city.

--In 1967, the Arab countries again try to destroy Israel. Israel wins son conclusively that, six days after the war starts, they control not only Gaza and the West Bank, but some land on the other side of the Jordan river, the Golan Heights, and all of the Sinai desert. Israel annexes East Jerusalem, reuniting the city, and the Golan Heights. The rest of the conquered land is not annexed, leaving open the possibility that it can be returned to Egypt and Jordan in peace treaties.

--It takes a decade for an Egyptian president to agree to a treaty with Israel. Israel returns the Sinai, but Egypt refuses to take back control of the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian president is promptly assassinated for negotiating with Israel.

--Later, Jordan makes a similar deal. They take back the land east of the river and agree to peace with Israel, but they don't want the West Bank, which remains under Israeli military rule and largely in limbo.

--Finally, in the 1990s, the Oslo Accords are signed. These facilitate a Palestinian government with control over certain parts of the West Bank with a plan to transfer control over all of the Palestinian territories (give or take some land swaps) to the control of the Palestinian Authority. This is the most self rule Palestinians have had and the most significant step towards Palestinian self-rule ever.

--The plan stalls for several reasons, including the Israeli Prime Minister being assassinated and the Palestinian president organizing a wave of suicide bombings and other terror attacks.

--Israel withdraws for Gaza. Hamas manages to win the first election, after which they murder all their political opponents and use the land as the world's largest terrorist base.

Prev here tackles the historical approach to partition (that modern colonial horror) far better. Prev, I agree that the histories don’t match up. I’ll also go further: while the Southern African region had seen its own share of war and imperialism before European colonialism and eventual apartheid, we just don’t have a population that experienced the kind of persecution and cyclical displacement that the Jewish population faced. Even pre-WWII, the stakes of a homeland for Jewish people were just always going to be higher than for most other groups of people.

Have the surrounding states not helped? Yes, of course. Is any other nation necessarily obliged to help a territory they don’t administer? Or a region they do administer but one that wants autonomy to the point of conflict?

This I think is where it gets murky. If you look at other times when this happened: the bantustans and apartheid forced removals, the partition of India, you’ll note that that there were swathes (sometimes the majority) of people who got no say. People who supposedly spoke for them and/or opposing interests made a decision, and everyday folk lost something like what statehood is today, something like what citizenship is today, and also had to endure not ever being able to move freely around the land of their birth. (This ignominy: being viewed as a trespasser in your own lands, being stopped and checked, asked for papers, having movement arbitrarily curtailed etc. is one of the reasons why dignity is a constitutional right in South Africa).

It’s not just the original population though: the displacement is an intergenerational scar, children and grandchildren raised in a state of loss and a liminal space politically: the self determination of a people stuck circling in a holding pattern. The displacement also causes impoverishment, and does strange things to people and groups. In South Africa we lump some of these twisted formations under the title “liberation politics.” Again, I am sure much of the issues around displacement are ones Jewish people in particular can understand.

There’s not any room for extreme views: neither that the West Bank should be settled and that Gaza should be annexed, nor that Israel should not exist. I’m not calling for one group to expel another. In South Africa, for example, a lot of black people wondered if all the white people should be forced to leave, if ever we could end apartheid. And if you judged it on rhetoric alone you’d think each side had no view of the humanity of the other. Turns out though, that the heightened state of fear, the burden of poverty and indignity, even the smaller burden of unfair privilege and global ostracism, just aren’t things most people opt into if they have a choice. If they have the chance at a life that’s more than a game of survival odds or ill-gotten gains.

Now, again, the wounds run back further in history in your region than mine. But I do feel like that when the stakes feel existential you’ll be hard-pressed to find people willing to move out of a defensive crouch. I think the apartheid aspects I mentioned (in particular holding people including children in detention, the restrictions on movement, the displacement through the means of Israeli settlers and the stated intent to settle more land that way) only compound the human misery. There’s good reason why the South African government consider the state there apartheid, why organisations like Amnesty International do too. The current situation mirrors many of the same hallmarks.

I was agreeing with OP.

To restate my point: While you can draw parallels between the issues faced by many Palestinians in the West Bank and the issues faced by Black South Africans under Apartheid (at least as long as you ignore any facts that don't fit), the history and legal situation are entirely different, and therefor calling Israel an Apartheid state is wrong.

Which was OP's point, which you came onto their post to be gross about.

As I pointed out, Arabs have never been forced onto the poorest land in the region. Jews were forced onto the poorest land because the government blocked any attempts to purchase better land. It's just that the land was only that poor because of colonial mismanagement, so the Jews were able to rehabilitate it, though quite a lot of people literally died to do so. (Turns out that, when you neglect Mediterranean land so badly that it turns into swamps, you end up with mosquitoes carrying malaria.)

You want to talk about restrictions on movement? There is exactly one place in Israel where movement is restricted by ethnicity: Jews are not allowed to visit the Temple Mount, because Muslim leaders' favorite way to incite violence against Jews is to say that we're going to desecrate the mosque that they built on the site which was the center of our culture for millennia before Islam existed, and they consider Jews entering the site to be desecration.

Meanwhile, there are places all over the Middle East and North Africa, including in the West Bank, where Jews are not allowed to enter, despite literal millennia of Jewish history. And why don't you go ahead a look up Palestinian Authority laws about selling property to Jews.

You say that there's no room for extreme views, but the only reason to push the claim that Israel is an Apartheid state (or to use other terms with specific legal meanings that don't apply to the situation but that South Africa and Amnesty International are nonetheless pushing, to the extent that the later is trying to literally change the definition) is to justify extreme positions.

To call Israel Apartheid is to suggest that, as with South Africa until the 90s, a fundamental element of the government and the country is illegal and invalid, and the only acceptable solution is for the government and the country to change on a fundamental level.

And people who make this claim inevitably connect it to the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, suggesting that it is wrong for the State's culture to be Jewish, rather than equally Jewish and Palestinian Arab, or just Arab.

That is, they think it's wrong for the state to have the culture or the indigenous people, and not the culture that was imposed on it through violent colonialism, and which continues to be the dominant culture in the entire region because of the legacy of that same violent colonialism.

I hate that I can’t escape into my fandom interests without stumbling upon people praising a literal terrorist organisation. Also anyone who’s actually watched ATLA knows comparing Aang (literally a pacifist) & his friends to a violent org that kidnapped & murdered babies is so off base it’s insane. (I mean there was literally an episode where they find out someone they were allying with - Jet - was happy to sacrifice innocent villagers to take out a Fire Nation base and all the characters explicitly REJECTED that. So in what way are any of them comparable to Hamas, who use innocent Gazans as cannon fodder all the time???) So that person is either supremely ignorant of what Hamas actually is, or has genuinely warped their reality to think brutally killing civilians is Cool and Fine actually - so long as Israelis get to die.

I know it’s dumb and I should let it go but it really bothered me. Also, if they think Hamas would welcome an Israeli that “hopped the border wall” with open arms then they really don’t understand anything about their ideology at ALL. If that user wants to know what REALLY would happen to Israelis who “hop the border wall” all they have to do is read about Avera Mengitsu.

It’s just killing me because I’ve lost so many fandom spaces to antisemitism. There’s nowhere safe for me to indulge my hobbies, no matter how unrelated they are, without coming across people foaming at the mouth with the desire to see Jewish people killed.

I don’t want to limit my social media usage to specifically Jewish spaces. I want an ESCAPE from thinking about the crap we’re dealing with all the time. But they’re all I have left.

If I were Israeli, and my government and army existed to protect me, I'd have something to say about that.

The turn-out-your pockets answer to the genocide question is pretty simple: there's not enough evidence. A lot of what happened in the war you can explain by it being difficult urban terrain against an enemy who doesn't care if their own civilians live or die and will happily steal humanitarian aid and either hoard it or repurpose it as weaponry. And, of course, the fact that Israel didn't march into Gaza for a trumped up reason like Putin marched into Ukraine: 10/7 started the war. Genocide it specifically about intent. There's not enough evidence Israel wants to destroy Palestinians and their civilization and not just Hamas, in part because of how deeply embedded Hamas is in the strip. If evidence becomes available that contradicts that, I'll reconsider. And I think we can remember events in this war can be horrific criminal acts without being a part of a genocide.

But it has to be a genocide specifically, doesn't it.

That's the much darker reality: people use "genocide" for this conflict and not say, Russia/Ukraine, where genocidal intent has more evidence, because the Jews are involved. It's about the Holocaust. It's about taking it away from us and appropriating it for themselves because we don't "deserve" it, we're not perfect victims, as if the Holocaust was a gift and not an immense trauma that's still in living memory. How lucky for the goyim that they can play make believe with the Holocaust instead of grappling with the ways it is still hurting Jewish families and communities. Honestly, if they want the Holocaust, they can fucking take it. Give me my six million back. Give me my family back.

Or shut the hell up about the Holocaust.

Something I really was not expecting from 28 years later was the commentary on zombies and how we have come to perceive them (culturally speaking) as completely deshumanized bodies that we can kill gleefully.

28 years later is constantly reminding you that its zombies are infected people, not mythical creatures completly removed from us. That doesn't make them less dangerous, or killing them in self defense (or even mercy-killing them) wrong. But it does give a sinister spin on the "zombies killer" warrior figure that a lot of zombie media come to present as a given.

The movie does that through two main narative devices. Humanizing the infected and deconstructing the ideology behind the zombies killer figure.

It humanizes the infected notably by:

Introducing the Alphas. They are an extra threats sure, but they are also capable of reasons.

The entire plot with the pregnant infected woman.

The fact the everyone in Great-Britain is treated the same by the outisde world, infected or not.

Isla's disease. Isla is sick from a mystery illness that impairs her mental capacities. Isla is not infected, but she is often confused and sometimes even physically lashes out in way that are violent (when she wakes up and break everything on her nightstand, in the same scene she also turns against Jamie). I don't think it is a coincidence that Isla is the only character in the entire movie that kills an infected with her bare hands, and then has trouble remembering it. It is also not a coincidence that she is the first one showing compassion on screen to an infected.

The fact that Dr Kelson treats infected and non-infected in the exact same way in death and does not immediately turns to killing the infected to defend himself from them.

It deconstructs the figure of the zombie killer by:

Having Jamie being a troubling figure and an even more troubling father figure. He insists on taking his son on his first killing trip three years before it is common to do so (something the movie points out explicitly twice). He says he likes the smell of rotting carcasses. He lies to make his son appear more heroic (I am not saying that Spike was cowardly or anything, but still Jamie does embelish how this first hunt went).

The community that sanctions this kind of attitude is very much coded as conservative in an uncomfortable way. It is for example, routinely visually compared with English history (through the display of medieval battles and images of the boers war). However everytime it is compared to the medieval era (the mythical chivalric) the images shown are very clearly extracted from movies and artistic depictions rather than rigourous reconstruction. The only real images shown are from most recent colonial wars in which England commited war crimes.