Tag: history

Parents and staff demand Toronto District School Board STOP allowing students to opt out of drag queen storytime events

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The directive came at a time when school boards found themselves at the centre of tensions over how to mark Pride month, including debates on whether to raise the rainbow flag. Drag queen storytime, in which drag queens share books and songs with 2SLGBTQIA+ themes, became a particular flashpoint for protesters in Canada and the U.S.

“(The storytime opt-out policy) panders to the dangerous and wrong-headed belief that a drag queen reading a story hurts children,” Ain wrote in his June 15 letter. “It is dangerous as it ‘others’ 2SLGBTQ+ people, including the storyteller, and almost certainly some of the students and staff.”

Since then, the 2SLGBTQ+ Community Advisory Committee (CAC), which had already wrapped up its meetings for the academic year, has reconvened twice to discuss the issue.

“A communication providing parents the ability to opt out of drag queen storytime activities at school, while based on guidance from the Ministry of Education, rightfully raised concerns about emboldening environments and acts of hate,” said TDSB trustee Debbie King, who is the CAC co-chair.

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According to my partner, what is really going on here is the activists are ‘queering the space’; that is, causing continuous chaos in the school and school system. Their logic is ridiculous because that furthers the ‘queering’ of the minds of all involved. I think I got that right. This is the shitty reasoning that lies behind woke activism. Basically, there will never be an end to it. It’s based on the Mao Zedong notion that ‘permanent revolution’ is somehow a good thing. ABN

“Unstoppable Duo?” Prospect Of An Unlikely Trump-RFK Ticket Remains A Hot Topic

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As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. draws unusual bipartisan support in the race for the White House, there is a swell of sentiment that he should be former President Donald Trump’s running mate.

“They would be an unstoppable duo,” Carla Gericke, both a Republican and Libertarian out of New Hampshire, told The Epoch Times, “I think it’s literally the ticket to reunite this fractured country of ours.” 

Texas realtor Trisha Psencik Hope told The Epoch Times that while she is “Trump all the way” regardless of who his running mate will be, her top pick is RFK Jr., mostly because of the strong stance he took against COVID vaccine mandates. 

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This is my ideal ticket as well. No other combo would bring USA back to its roots better than this. Two salty Americans reaching across our ridiculous political divide would reunite USA and remind many of what is good about this country and why we should keep it. Four years of Trump followed by eight years of Kennedy would provide enough time to fix major problems within the federal government while removing those who abuse it through corruption and malfeasance. ABN

Poland: The Nation and Its Faith

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…It was at that post-war time that the communists sought to strip the Church of the influence that it exercised over the nation, so they restricted the clergy as much as they could, prompting the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński,[6] to stand up to the authorities with the by now famous vociferous protest addressed to the government, ending with the words: “We [the Church] must not sacrifice the divine sacrum on the profane altar of Caesar [the state]. Non possumus [we cannot]”

Rather than being killed like his spiritual predecessor Bishop Stanislaus, Cardinal Wyszyński was imprisoned for a few years. It was at that time that the Polish Catholic Church, absent the Polish nobility and gentry who had disappeared as a class and whose members had either fled the country in fear of communists or who been deprived of their economic and political leverage, assumed the role of the Polish nobility, the Polish aristocracy, the Polish gentry. And what an irony of history it was! The priests were for the most part recruited from the peasantry, i.e., the social class that according to Marxist tenets was to be liberated from the influence of the “opium of the people” and at the same time the social class that for centuries had been thought of by the nobility of not being capable of sustaining nationhood!

At that post-war time, irrespective of whether you were a believer or not, so long as you were anti-communist (and most were), you naturally supported the Church, identified with the Church, and used the Church in your resistance against Marxism-Leninism, against atheists in the positions of power, against the party comrades imposed by Moscow, many of whom were Jewish. Religious instruction was banned from schools but was carried out by parishes. The voluntary attendance was nearly 100%; not because all parents were ardent believers: it was a form of protest, a form of expressing national identity, a sign of resistance — a pronounced, if silent, statement of non possumus. (By comparison, in today’s Poland, attendance at religious instruction, which meanwhile has been reintroduced in schools, has significantly dropped and continues to drop.)

…The northern territory between Poland and Rus’ was occupied by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a pagan political entity, that ruled over vast lands of otherwise Christian Rus’ after the latter had been partly destroyed, partly subjugated by many Tartar invasions. Lithuanian pagan dukes — mainly through dynastic marriages — managed to bring under their control what we know today as Belarus, almost all of Ukraine and huge chunks of today’s Russia. Lithuanian rulers were heathen almost till the end of the 14th century. As such, they were the target of religious-cum-ideological military raids carried out by the Teutonic Knights (a German military order), who had settled on a northern piece of Polish territory at the invitation of a Polish prince and had subjugated Old Baltic Prussians in the land that is today part of north-eastern Poland and makes up the whole of Russia’s Kaliningrad Region.

The Lithuanian rulers also got caught in the ideological-cum-religious cross-hairs of the Polish Kingdom. Since the Teutonic Knights threatened both Poland and Lithuania, it was a good idea to combine the forces of the two states (along with all those vast Rus’ territories under Lithuanian rule!) to fend off the German assaults. By mutual consent, the grand duke of Lithuania became king of Poland (1386) on condition, of course, that he and his heathen subjects let themselves be baptized. A new body politic emerged, powerful enough to defeat the Teutonic Knights in a series of wars, of which the Battle of Grunwald (1410) described by Henryk Sienkiewicz in the novel The Teutonic Knights/Krzyżacy and skilfully shown in the movie under the same title became part of the nation’s collective psyche as iconic.

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This is an excellent read. It brings Poland into a new focus while also illuminating the religious and ethnic complexity of Eastern Europe. Highly recommended. Above are a couple of excerpts that can stand alone. ABN

What happened to the signers of the Declaration of Independence?

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This is the Price They Paid

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the revolutionary army, another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the revolutionary war.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners, men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.

Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.

Vandals or soldiers or both, looted the properties of Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. The owner quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.

Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.

Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Standing tall, straight, and unwavering, they pledged: “For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

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A Realistic View of Slavery & Slave Trading

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White people commonly respond to demands for reparations for slavery and slave trading by pointing out that it was whites who abolished these things.[1] I don’t know whether they notice that this doesn’t get them the credit from their antagonists that they seem to expect; they certainly don’t appear to see why this is.

The reason they get no credit is that black people don’t see the abolition of slavery and slave trading as quite the boon for humanity that white people do. If Africans had wanted slavery and slave trading to be abolished, they could have abolished them themselves very easily, just by ceasing to indulge in them. Instead, they met white attempts at abolition with fierce resistance. This was quite natural. Slavery was their way. As for slave trading, it gave them a good profit, and they saw nothing wrong with it.

No, the reason black people go on about slavery and slave trading is not that they deplore them but that they see that white people deplore them, who might therefore be made to feel so guilty about their forefathers’ involvement as to give black people large amounts of money in restitution.

Indeed, if we set the white record on slavery and slave trading against the black record, it stands out as a shining example. The transatlantic slave trade lasted only a fraction of the time that Africans spent selling each other to Arabs, and the number of slaves bought by whites — perhaps ten or 12 million — was a fraction of the number bought by Arabs. As for the length of time Africans spent selling each other to other Africans, and the numbers involved, these were much greater still. The intra-African slave trade still predominated in the nineteenth century, when a European explorer reported that slave-hunting in Africa went on far more to supply the domestic than the foreign market.[2]

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This is a strongly written piece. I am putting it up because it’s probably largely true and because white people get so much criticism, we need to hear other sides. I could say this about many of the essays I post. ABN

Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History — Laurent Guyénot

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I am sure that many readers can relate if I say that learning about Byzantium feels like discovering the sunken civilization of Atlantis. You can read a thousand books about the “Middle Ages”, even do a Ph.D. in “Medieval Studies” (as I did), and hardly ever hear about Byzantium. And then, one day, when you thought you knew your basics about the turn of the first millennium AD, you read something like this:

At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time. The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976-1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.[1]

The same author informs you that, in 1018, the same Basileios (or Basil) II was “the most powerful and victorious ruler in the Christian world,”[2] reigning from a city whose walls could contain the ten biggest cities in Western Europe. Vladimir the Great (980-1015), whom the Russians consider the founder and patron saint of their nation, wedded Basil’s sister, adopted his faith, and built a Church of Hagia Sophia in Kiev. The young German emperor Otto III (996-1002), himself half-Byzantine by his mother, was about to marry Basil’s niece when he died at the age of 21. Everything in the Ottonian court was modeled after Byzantium, with their title kaiser borrowed not from the Latin caesar, but from the Greek form kaisar.

At this point you may start to wonder if you have not accidentally stumbled into an alternate history. At least you suspect that you have been missing something in your “medieval studies,” that your picture of the “Middle Ages” has a huge hole in the middle, or, rather, that it is only a fragment of a much bigger image, the larger part of which has been torn off and thrown away. You begin to look for it in the proverbial dustbin of history. Before you know it, you are on the path of “Byzantine revisionism”.

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Rabbis explain what’s going on in France

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source

I am fairly new to the idea that Christianity was founded by Jews as a ruse to trick the Roman Empire. Also new to the idea that Judaism is largely founded on the deceit of Jacob, who tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright as firstborn son. These two ideas seem to be at the root of a lot of widely-recognized difficult Jewish behavior—often having ulterior motives, chutzpah based on that, ethnic nepotism and great skill in crime. The Old Testament explains all you need to know about Jewish vengeance. Note that I am describing bad Jewish behavior, with which I have considerable experience, not all Jewish behavior. I am quite sure the sociopathic Arenda system in Eastern Europe is a fundamental part of the long history of Jewish-Christian conflict. The system was set up by so-called ‘Polish nobles’ but run mostly by Jews who held and enforced leases. From the Jewish point of view, this system was a ‘Golden Period’ of Jewish history, when Jews acquired great wealth and saw a population increase unprecedented in human history; clear indications of good diet and leisure. From the serfs’ point of view, these same markers were clear indications of who was reaping the benefits of their slavery. (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak has some information on the Arenda system. Most Jewish authors completely gloss over it, another trick, imo.) Our POS elitists, whoever they happen to be, have created the dystopia of diversity the West has become. And also, they do all they can to prevent our understanding what is happening, a clear throwback to the age of serfdom when a wrong word could get you killed. As we continue our descent into raw tribalism, I present these ideas and the video above for readers’ consideration. Much more on this topic can be found in the work of Laurent Guyénot, who has written extensively on these subjects. ABN