Does history ever make you sad, Veeky Forums? Not specific events or people, per say, but sometimes the grand scheme of it.
Looking at paintings of things like the Napoleonic Wars, the anglo-zulu war, various rebellions and conflicts, exploring the new world-the sheer masses of men serving at a time when one's country could literally be ripped out from under them.
It makes me a bit sad to see, I'm not sure why.
The reality is that we as a society have turned around in the course of one generation the way that humanity lives. The World Wars have lead to an amazing era of peace and prosperity and when you look back at history it hasn't been real nice most of the time, I mean slavery was like 100 years ago and now we fuck around with iphones on the toilet
Result I guess
Reading about history has made me realize that instead of seeing violence as a means to an ideological or strategic ends, it's more likely that ideology and national interests are a means to justify violence.
Destruction of baghdad library and the end of the abbaside empire
Sometimes. Occasionally sometime in an audiobook will hit me kind of hard unexpectedly. I remember listening to "Japanese Destroyer Captain" and about halfway through the book it starts getting REALLY dark. Characters start getting killed left and right. Every mission starts feeling like a pointless suicide mission. The author starts getting more desperate, occasionally even delusional, sometimes even describing hallucinations. And you can't help but cringe anytime a character from Hiroshima is introduced. It affected me more than I was expecting it to.
The other time was when I was listening to SPQR. In one brief segment, the author describes epitaphs written on Roman tombs. Some were surprisingly touching. One was for a young girl who had died very young. Despite the girl's short life, you could tell from the inscription that the parents loved that girl and were devastated by her death. Another was for a Roman woman who'd been a simple housewife. I don't remember enough to quote it, but it was very beautiful.
I know this is blasphemy to say on Veeky Forums but thinking of all the territory Germany lost between ww1 and lost ww2 puts me in a somber mood
*post ww2
>watch TTC's History of the Renaissance
>listen to the History of Rome
it's like listening to a prophesy
I, like most of Veeky Forums, is into history because of my sadistic tendencies.
Stories of assholes and dumbasses wiping out hundreds, thousands, millions of people because they thought it was the right thing to do at the time gets me off.
I do when I think about the sheer amount of stories untold. Think of the huge swaths of prehistoric time. The founding of villages. The beginning of civilizations. The friendships. The wars. Even the historic gaps we know little to nothing about. The Minoans. The early Europeans. The early Bantus. The early Ethiopians. How many generations are now lost to time?
These gaps of history are not only gaps. There were people who lived out their entire lifetimes within these periods. They lived and loved and fought and struggled and eventually died. Without them, we wouldn't be here to tell other tales.
Thinking of all the history that has been lost gives me the feels. Things that either they didnt write down, outright lied or were destroyed along with their civilizations.
Also the interesting stories of some commoners that may have happened and will never be known.
The fact that they were real people with inside jokes and hobbies and relationships makes me feel
Roman graffiti speaks more about the past than most books written by historians.
Links pls
?
I read a book about a Korean family living in Japan-controlled Korea during the 30s and 40s. The son, who has been strongly anti-Japan and pro-Korean nationalism in the entire book, volunteers in the end to become a kamikaze pilot for the Japanese because food is starting to get scarce and the families of kamikaze pilots are the only ones guaranteed steady rations.
It's little stuff like that which really makes me sad in history. Bigger atrocities, it's too easy to just think of as numbers.
It's a famous old piece of roman graffiti.
>VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1812: Caesius faithfully loves M[…name lost]
Greek Muslims. I don't mean Turks and Arabs in Greece, I mean the community of Grecophone Muslims that have lived in Istanbul, western Turkey, and other parts of the Mediterranean since the 15th century. Their origin is a sad one. Many Greeks converted to Islam after the fall of Constantinople. Their conversion was not forced (The Ottomans didn't care what religion their slaves and vassals practiced). Rather, after the inner wall of the city was infiltrated, and the Hagia Sophia was stormed, they felt that God himself had abandoned them. Their sense of identity and spiritual center was so closely tied to that city, its defeat shattered them, mind, heart, and soul. Contemplating that experience made me sad.
the utterly massive amount of people who have been tortured, damaged, and killed for pointless wars since the dawn of humanity is pretty depressing desu
what is spqr
the book i mean
im curious
The 6 million jews who died during the holocaust gives me feels, to think about all those innocent people needlessly killed. Terrible.
total holocaust death toll is 12 million
why does everyone only think of jews
It's made me realise how boring modern life is.
There seems to be a sort of lively beauty that's no longer present, like we've lost our spirit.
yes, sometimes the sheer scale of suffering dawns on me combined with disgust at humanity's capacity for evil and the fact "good people" usually have a meme understanding of it and nothing will change
however feels are fleeting and go away eventually if you consciously stop making the connection
This
All those people who lived in abject terror, in chains, striped of their rights and dignity, and eventually robbed of their very lives by monsters whose cruelty knew no limit.
Always found Anne Frank's death particularly tragic because she's both a symbol of murdered innocence, a mere child who did nothing to earn the fate she got. Worst of all, unlike most, she actually stood a chance at making it. She was deported from Westerbork mere days before the start of Operation Market Garden and the liberation of the Netherlands, and died just as the Allies finally got their bridgehead over the Rhine with Operation Plunder.
All those men who despite their many differences stood up and counted themselves among the right, cut down in the flower of their youth, to smite the unholy perversion known as National Socialism, and it still wasn't enough to save just one girl..
All that courage, acts of valor beyond what could've been asked of them, enduring death and misery on a scale previously unknown. Racing toward Berlin as fast their feet could carry them, because every day the Third Reich continued to draw breath was countless more innocents added to the bodycount. And they still weren't fast enough.
Really quite sobering if you think about it.
Must've been crushing for some of those survivors from 1st Airborne who read her diary after the war and realized she might've lived if only they had held that bridge at Arnhem just another 24 hours. That her death was in part caused by their failure.
The American Civil War reads like a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy to me. From the failure of the Founding Fathers to resolve the question of slavery and sew the seeds for division. To the foolhardiness of men like John Brown and Preston Brooks whose actions led America on the road to war. To how the men so jovially marched off to war, not realizing the disaster that awaited them. To how whole families turned were torn apart as towns, counties, whole states turned on one another other. To how whole rivers ran red with the blood of Union and Confederate soldiers. To its apocalyptic conclusion with the last stand of the Confederacy at Appomattox and Lincoln's killing at Ford's Theater.
Worst of all is how it left a wound in the American psyche that never healed. Even 150 years after its conclusion, the Civil War still inspires the most guttural hatred and contempt in people, North and South, black and white. It is the loose fabric that threatens to pull our country apart and no doubt it will eventually succeed. And that we have ever accomplished, all that we are, will be undone in a cataclysm more terrible than the last one. We traded one slavery for another.
If I could use a musical score to describe how I felt about the Civil War, it would be Battle of the Heroes by John Williams. A fiery, apocalyptic, and tragic fight to the death.
Ah man the feels. The second worse thing about the Civil War to me is how the courage and skill of both sides was so utterly wasted. Their bravery was worthy of a better cause, not squandered on a fratricidal bloodbath.
All those good, innocent, and decent people. Being bully and beaten. Led in lines to their deaths. Crying out in agony for someone, anyone, to save them from this Hell. But those who answered the call were just out of reach.
I'm not sure why, but "After the Drop" from Medal of Honor Frontline's soundtrack always reminded me more of the tragedy of Anne Frank than the tragedy of Market Garden (although as far as I'm concerned, the two are one). An American paratrooper slogging his way across the ruined Dutch country at twilight, starring across the wasteland and seeing Anne, looking right at him in despair from behind a row of barbed wire. Assaulted by such horrible visions, this man of virtue runs faster and faster to try and reach her. Ignoring the bullets and shells landing right by him. But he's never fast enough.
youtube.com
If only the likes of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson had been there to draw their swords against the tyranny of the Nazis and say "here I am. Send me." If only they had been there to step in front of a cowering Anne Frank with the same fearless defiance they had showed countless times and shielded that poor soul from the first SS trooper who tried to touch her. If only they had been there to charge the gates of the Hell known as Auschwitz, and their men would have followed them. If only they had been there to shout "no more" and introduced the Third Reich's cowardly excuses for soldiers to the roar of the Rebel Yell.
They might have been relics of a bygone era, but maybe, just maybe, their courage might have prevailed where others failed.
It really deactivates my almonds whenever people just don't know their basic history - I work with a bunch of high school graduates at a supermarket, and goddamn it just baffles me how little they retained from school. I don't mean to act pretentious, but this one girl a little younger than me was talking about getting a Mandala flower tattooed on her arm, but she pronounced it "Mandela", as in Nelson Mandela. I corrected her, which was dumb and autistic but whatever, and she was adamant that that was the name and it was derived from the American Civil Rights movement. I then realized she confused Nelson Mandela with Martin Luther King Jr., and assumed that the similarly named flower was a form of reparations for slavery(????????).
As we continued on in the day, I stupidly pressed onward asking her if she knew basic 20th century events; World War 1 and 2, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War, Vietnam, stuff that really anybody should at least know the basics about, and she just had no idea about any of it. She never knew there was a first world war, she just assumed it started at two, and that it was over who had control of America, and had never even heard of the atomic bombings. The cold war was lost on her, and she thought that Russia was still a communist nation and that Lenin was still alive as the de-facto head of state. It was after she said this that another two people walked into the room and displayed the same level of ignorance as she asked them for help, despite the fact that I know that two of these people's grandparents were submariners and another was an SS officer.
That's what makes me sad. I just hate that all the bloodshed in human history amounted to the majority of people not even being remotely aware of it. I mean, I can't really blame them, and I don't want to sound like I'm propping myself up as a genius, because I am an amateur historian in every sense(with special emphasis on amateur). I just wish people knew a bit more I suppose.
those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it
and those who do learn from the past are doomed to watch powerlessly as those who don't learn from the past repeat it
I would really recommend Maus to anybody in this thread, heart wrenching book.
perhaps they shouldn't have started 2 world wars then
Less so than it used to. I know the world looks bleak, but that seems to be if you pay attention to the media alone. Violence is still and may always be a thing; but it seems to be going steadily down.
That being said pic related; World War One makes me particularly sad. Have some art I made because it makes me so sad.
(You)
You're so edgy and cool user-kun.
[spoiler]and always remember ironic shitposting is still shitposting[/spoiler]
We will do better.
I fucking hate mart sharters tbqh
It explores the history of Rome from the mysterious beginnings to Caracalla's edict of universal citizenship for all free men living in the empire.
Very sad
There is no glory left in Greece its a shithole since 1204, we had a small chance to save it, but we fucked up.
i guess when young women and girls are killed in massacres throughout history.I can understand men in war and even young teenagers as they can be little shits and even in history.But ive never understood the logic if your an armed man with a terrified girl at your feet.Rape sure take as her as your own but why outright kill them...?
i once sat next to a girl in high school who thought oxygen had a boiling point hotter than the sun....they are frightfully common...
I remember reading an inscription from Roman Britain that was a poem about the futility of death, and it was dedicated to a daughter who died aged 8 or 9.
Another was an inscription in the temple of Isis in Pompeii. The temple was restored by a freedman I think, but he dedicated the inscription to his son (who would be able to hold public office, unlike him). It was so touching that he would do this for his son, but it was some years before the the eruption of Vesuvius, so in the grand scheme of things it was pointless since his son died before reaching adulthood or getting into politics.
>I mean slavery was like 100 years ago
Only for 'murrican savages, the civilized people gave it up like before the crusades
>the civilized people gave it up like before the crusades
>Britain
Abolished in 1833
>Netherlands
Abolished in 1863 (while the American Civil War was still ongoing)
>France
Abolished in 1848
>Spain
Abolished in 1867
>Ottoman Empire
Abolished in 1882
All well after the end of the Crusades
en.wikipedia.org
>we had a small chance to save it
desu you never had a chance.
you won the war of independence when you were literally on the verge of getting BTFO solely because of western help. and then you thought you were tough shit and that you could solo turks. but the truth is you were nothing without western help.
in fact, you're lucky turks stopped at constantinople instead of going all the way to ataturk's hometown
i believe England has had a ban on owning slaves since the Norman conquests as William the conqueror banned and heavily taxed it so as a quirk of history there was no slaves on the British isles throughout the middle ages.hence they imported them to the colony's during the empire.
Ireland makes me very sad indeed.
For a nation and people that had pretty much 0 impact on the world as a whole, everyone knows exactly where they are, who they are and often know a little about them.
Ireland seems to be one big "what could have been."
>small poor northern European island
> few natural resources
>left a larger, richer more powerful country's union relegating it forever to a irrelevant nation rather than a comparably well of backwater.
what potential to Ireland ever have?
I don't know if history makes me sad in the great scheme of things because how I think of it is that great scheme of things need a certain event to happen/ not happen and that's what I think about.
For example there being a concrete winner in the 100 year war. Imagine how different the world would be if either side won. But that would need to be set up by a significant event or series of events.
One of the things that makes me sad is Casere Borgia never uniting Italy, can you imagine Italy being an actual player in Europe since the 1500s
A few things could have been.
Had England not been so autistic, Ireland could have been actually the "Ireland" in "Great Britain and Ireland" as opposed to just west-england; had they given the Irish the autonomy they want then they could have had a very loyal little island of people who had proven to be excellent warriors and shrewd thinkers.
Ireland would have no real ambition since no ambitions outside of the island made any sense.
Even after leaving the UK, a Republic that Collins envisioned as opposed to the one the Civil War left them with would also have been a far more prosperous place.
Perhaps the British shouldn't have started it,.
poltava makes me a bit sad sometimes, i'm not even swedish but turning russia into a european great power fucked up so many things
what race was she, just curious.
Yes.
I get definitely too nostalgic when I think of the millions of people that have lived through different ages, who suffered, who got to make history. Some of them we remember; most of them we forgot. History becomes such an enormous subject, spanning over the centuries, and I get to live only a fraction of it. If only I could show the brave men who fought in every war what they achieved with their sacrifice, how the world would change.
Man, having this sort of perspective gives me all the feels. It's like I'm a tiny spec in an ocean of events.
Prussia gone, just like that
It's such a shame that history got erased like that. It helped no one, really.
Any pictures featuring the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans is sad to me desu, not just because I'm a byzaboo but because it was the physical continuation of the Roman Empire that was finally snuffed out. It's just something about technically ending such a long lasting dominion that is sad.
No.
>FIRE AT WILL
gotta read that irish literature, bro. their history is brutal but the impact they had on world literature, especially in the 20th century, almost makes up for it.
Book suggestions+quick explanation? I know they were good at preserving records due to hiding on an island but didn't think they impacted anything at all.
OP here.
Watching the clip of the singing scene is what made me make this thread. That specific scene.
It's seeing all the very battle-worn men desperately fighting for a country which is hundreds of miles from where they are. They're out of their comfort zone but fighting all the same in a strange land.
Not a bongboo or anything, but really just got bizarrely emotional at the sight.
The singing didn't really happen just so you know, it's a movie user
History is like an infinitely deep pool of sadness and misery and the deeper one dives, the more the crushing horror of it all unfolds. It's so easy to judge events from a distance and reduce them to a few paragraphs, especially war, but if you realize what that means, the terror of it all is overwhelming.
We're truly living at the best time there has ever been by far, even with all the garbage that is happening in the world.
Oh I know that. That was just the scene that got to me.
Hello newfriend
The ottomans certainly cared, Christians were a great source of income, and they used brainwashed former Christians to form the elite classes of the empire
Plus Constantinople was heavily depopulated by the time Mehmet finally took the city
>Greece will never look like this again
Fuck
The wrong side won the first world war tbqh
That painting hits me right in the heart user.
That statue was probably some man's opus magus, but there it is, lying dead and pale and rotting, the men who knew it long vanished.
Anything related to my gaulish ancestors
History really hates them...
Swift was Irish for a start, but then people like Yeats and obviously Joyce put left Ireland as a land of admirable literature. It's often conflated with British literature because they share the same language, but they're so different in spirit. You couldn't have a Joyce who wrote about London and expect the same work with a different setting and context. (also if you want to read Joyce start with Dubliners, then Portrait, and when you've read most of the Canon go read Ulysses)
the fall of the Roman republic from the Punic wars to the second Civil war makes me pretty melancholic because while Rome was yet to grow more magnificent and powerful, as a civilization it lost it's spark, the civic spirit and pride of a democracy of farmer soldiers who either became decadently rich, or destitute, hopeless peasants with no sense of country.
similarly, the fall of Rome itself and the start of the 'dark ages' is sobering because you read how desperately everyone clung to it, not just Romans but the people all over the empire, they didn't fight for Rome herself but the world they knew, and they felt was ending. And looking back at the long history before, the history of glory, tragedy and pain, inflicted and suffered, makes the bleak last years feel much worse.
aside from that, everything on this thread with geat collapses, genocides, cruel, pointless wars and normal, good lives and the work of smart, noble men gone to waste and forgotten, interrupted by a random event, a religious fervor or a political upheaval that amounted to nothing but more dead words. Roads leading to barren lots, pillars holding up empty air, rocks and dirt arranged and shaped with careful planning to last forever but amounting to little more than a mild interruption in the landscape. Spaces to live, to sleep, to eat, to play, to work, to celebrate or mourn... coming to be and being undone over and over, on top of eachother endlessly under each fine layer of dust.
...
Or what if the Irish were subjugated earlier on so the differences in culture would be much less so. e.g wales
or better get if the Irish had been unified and centralised centuries before English ambitions reached them, they could've been peacefully integrated. e.g. Scotland
If you showed them the world they were fighting for they would switch sides.
There is no 'grand scheme' you fucking ideologue.
>repeating the past is bad
Fucking progressives
>take them as your own
This is your mind on imperialism
>muh impact
Fuck off, pragmatist.
It's impossible to overstate how much the scholastic landscape of early Medieval Europe was shaped by the machinations the Irish. At points basically every learned person on the continent was Irish. This results in things like Frankish courtiers essentially boycotting the King's service until he employs some native Franks rather than relying on the Irish, and Italian synods coining the term "Irish porridge" to describe weird, esoteric theology.
Ireland was also incredibly important in the Viking Age. The continued military victories of the Irish against the Vikings made sure that their raids were a lot less devestating to other parts of Britain and Europe than they could have been.
Read
Paolo Delogu, An introduction to medieval history (London, 2002)
Katherine Simms, Medieval Gaelic sources (Dublin, 2009)
Kathleen Hughes, Early Christian Ireland. Introduction to the sources (Cambridge, 1972)
Daniel Mc Carthy, The Irish Annals: Their genesis, evolution and history (Dublin, 2008)
Brian Tierney & Sidney Painter, Western Europe in the middle ages: 300–1475 (New York, 1999)
Henry Mayr-Harting, The coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1972)
Francis J. Byrne, Irish kings and high-kings (Dublin, 2001)
Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Ireland, Wales, Man, and the Hebrides’, in Peter Sawyer, The Oxford illustrated history of the Vikings (Oxford, 1997)
Francis John Byrne, ‘The Viking Age’, in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, A new history of Ireland I: prehistoric and early Ireland (Oxford, 2005)
Peter H. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe AD 700–1100 (London, 1982)
Francis J. Byrne, ‘Ireland and her neighbours, c.1014–c.1072’, in Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, A new history of Ireland I: prehistoric and early Ireland (Oxford, 2005)
Marie Therese Flanagan, The transformation of the Irish Church in the twelfth century (Woodbridge, 2010)
Nice propaganda.
I see at least four female "historians" there
Fuck off, don't waste my time
Especially when turks had the helps of the soviets, meanwhile perfidious albion cut the hands of Greeks that seeked refugee on their ships. Oh well.