when foreigners casually drop ‘bombing of kyiv’ these pics always come to mind. this is what #RussianColonialism did to chechnya and grozny when they tried to leave the empire in 2000. a war crime of horrific scale, but the rest of the world was like ‘meh’, so moscow continued
This startlingly modern-looking photo was collected in China 123 years ago, and its delighted diner shatters our preconceptions about how stiff & formal Victorian era photos should be. I've cleaned & enhanced this remarkable shot and - although I don't usually colourise photos - I thought adding a little colour on this ocassion would make the subject look even more contemporary!
I disagree that you dress like Cary Grant. In this thread, I will list some of the ways in which your dress differs and why such important details matter. 🧵
@nectar Hello, could you explain to my why, when I check on my card activity, the only points that are added are my final receipt total. Bonus points are never added. Is this correct?
This is how Hungary is revisiting the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia today: as a missed opportunity to reclaim southern Slovakia (the "highlands" as seen from the Hungarian point of view.) It's laughable, but also terrifying. There is a distinct Putin flair in this narrative.
The following is the google translation from extracts of the article in Magyar Nemzet quoted under. The English is not perfect, but it's understandable enough:
"But at the same time, 1968 has – should have – a specifically Hungarian point of view. Our future depends on liberating our soul and spirit, purifying our thinking, reclaiming our history. It is our sacred right and duty to formulate and make the interpretation of reality from the Hungarian point of view dominant. There is always room for an honest confrontation with our own mistakes, but we must throw off the shackles of unjustified, self-inflicted guilt in relation to 1968 as well. ... While the Soviet army was undoubtedly an occupier in Prague, the Hungarian national guards could not, from the Hungarian point of view, conceptually be occupiers of the Hungarian-inhabited areas of the Highlands that had been torn apart in Trianon, the overwhelming majority of whose citizens welcomed the Hungarian boys as liberators with bursting joy.
On August 21, 2018, Hír TV broadcast the extremely important documentary Piros rózsa, which brought to light the facts hidden by self-defeating guilt-mongering: the Hungarian national guards, although they did not know where they were being taken and what awaited them there at the time of the alert, they found them immediately the word with their highland blood. It's a bit sweet and commonplace, but friendships and even loves were forged during those months, while the Hungarian bakas were stationed there. There was even a soldier who met his future wife there. The first decision in Vienna thirty years earlier, which corrected the Trianon peace decree by drawing a fair ethnic border with the international patronage of four powers, was not far off in time. Many people still remembered the heady days when the Hungarian National Guard, led by Governor Miklós Horthy, marched on a carpet of flowers to the Southern Highlands, liberated after twenty years of oppression and slavery and returning home under the rule of the Holy Crown."
That many Slovak Hungarians saw Horthy as a liberator in 1938 is true. But I have never heard of them welcoming the Warsaw Pact troops of 1968 as liberators, even Hungarian soldiers. This is simply not true.
"Indeed, even in 1968, the red-white-green flags that had been hidden until then were flying on the houses as a sign of hope and trust in a sea of villages, many people fell in tears on the necks of the Hungarian soldiers, and there were those among the elders who enthusiastically set out to re-post the 1938 border. Let's not forget that the class section of our brothers in the highlands was already cruelly oppressed during the first Czechoslovak rule, and in 1945 the Freemason dictator Edvard Beneš issued his decrees classifying Hungarians and Germans as collectively guilty and depriving them of their rights, on the basis of which hundreds of thousands were exterminated and deported from their homeland."
Beneš, a freemason dictator...? Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians exterminated...? An emphatic no.
"And let's not forget that these decrees are still in force today, as confirmed by both the Prague and Bratislava parliaments in 2007; this is how it can happen that today, in 2023, the Slovak state is still taking land and forests from their Hungarian owners with the cynical argument that they could not end the robbery process immediately after the Second World War, so they are forced to end it now.
Yes, fifty-five years ago, the Hungarian army was forced by a foreign will into an enterprise with a dubious outcome - but our horizon does not have to extend to Prague. That is the case of the Czechs. Our case is the Highlands, which - let's remind ourselves of this on the eve of our national holiday on the 20th of August - our King St. István, together with the rest of Hungary, recommended to the protection of Our Lady.
Yes, we know that there is no possibility here and now to finally remedy the Trianon villainy aggravated by the capture of the three more villages: Oroszvár, Dunacsúny and Horvátjárfalu in 1947, that is, the so-called Bratislava bridgehead, and there is no point in flailing about, "picking up". But this still makes it our sacred duty to believe in the truth with faith, to wait and build with patience, to work for its future validation, just as the Jewish people did not stop believing and acting for two thousand years in order to one day have Israel again."
The Beneš decrees AGAIN. Throw them out by the main door of the EU, they come back by the window...
"In light of this, we must make ourselves aware that we don't have to judge our history from a Czech or Slovak point of view, but exclusively from a Hungarian point of view. According to this, our national guardsmen entered usurped Hungarian land in 1968, and there they met Hungarian hope and Hungarian loyalty. Therefore, Hungary and the Hungarian nation have nothing to be ashamed of."
It is quite simply not true. I led an oral history study in Komárno, and I analyzed at length the mixed feelings of the Slovak Hungarian community vis-à-vis Orbán's Hungary. This "loyalty" is exaggerated.
"Shame on the cowardly and servile treasonous Kádár regime, which - just like its inglorious predecessor, Béla Kun, who surrendered the liberated part of the country after the victorious highland campaign in 1919 and thus rendered the heroic blood sacrifice in vain - did not dare to take a piss for the enforcement of the national interest. However, if the Hungarian leaders of the internationalist red dictatorship had only had a tiny bit of national feeling and a little courage, they could have tried to turn the forced participation to the advantage of the Hungarian cause."
I never thought I would experience one day any sort of sympathy and gratitude for Gustáv Husák, but one lives to learn.
"Maybe - maybe! - Even in 1968, a fair, ethnically-based border adjustment would have been possible, and colored Hungarian areas could have returned home. Instead, the Hungarian-eating Slovakian chauvinist Gustáv Husák, imprisoned by his comrades in Prague from 1954 to 1960, the cruel persecutor of Miklós Duray, who died last year, and other brave fighters of the Hungarian cause, became the all-powerful master of Czechoslovakia. Those two months in 1968 were fleeting hope, but still hope from a Hungarian perspective. And if we learn from it for the future, then it was not in vain."
If Orbán has decided to embark on this kind of militaristic, revanchist, revisionist narrative, this is really worrying for Central Europe and the EU. Link in comments, as well as two articles of mine on life in Hungarian-speaking Komárno in southern Slovakia.
Sadly, beneath sheds, BBQs and decking is this century's hedgerow, as the real thing is no more.
Poor Baby Billow's mum had to give birth under a covered patio set.
When disturbed (then left alone as advised) she ran off with her precious babies. But tiny Billow got left behind.