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Subdeacon Joe

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    Soviet campaign of persecution against Indigenous medicine people / shamans in North Asia

    in SASS Wire Saloon

    Posted

    Soviet campaign of persecution against Indigenous medicine people / shamans in North Asia (Nentsy people is my guess from what they show here). Text at right reads, "Don't allow shamans and kulaks." (The latter a term for well-off peasants that Stalin weaponized in the 30s, in genocidal campaigns against "the kulaks" and enforcing collectivization that sucked all the grain out of Ukraine, resulting in the Holodomor, "Great Hunger").

    I can't exactly make out the rest of the text but it appears to say "Choose the worker's [party] in Tuzemen Soviet." [Edit: Tuzemen means "Native," so basicly this means "Native Council," within context of Bolhevik Soviets.] Many thanks to Policarpo Corvalán Aravena for this, and for the pdf I'll quote from in Comments: Bulgakova, T., Sundström, O. (2017)
    "Repression of shamans and shamanism in Khabarovsk Krai: 1920s to the early 1950s." It begins with this 1931 quote from Innokentii M. Suslov: "Shamanism is and will be an obstacle to socialist construction. The struggle against shamanism cannot and must not be conducted in isolation from the general construction. The struggle against shamanism is a part of the socialist construction itself."

    "In the 10th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1921, it was decided that the indigenous peoples of the North should be assisted, by the Party, to take the leap from a “primitive,” “pre-class” society to a socialist one. The economic, political, and cultural level of the indigenous societies was to be raised through the implementation of Soviet administration, law, and economics as well as through the development of schools, newspapers, and other cultural institutions. 
    ...
    "legal restrictions with the aim of marginalising the influence of purported shamans and some of their activities were established in the 1920s. There are, however, also examples of, and above all many narratives about, arrests and even executions of shamans in the 1930s. 

    "Nanai shamans, like other shamans of the indigenous peoples of the Lower Amur, were called the enemies of the people, and many of them were executed during the repressions in the 1930s. An entire era of Nanai spiritual life and Nanai world-view was liquidated together with them. (Bereznitskiy 2003: 215, our translation)

    "The Sakha scholar P. N. Il’yakhov-Khamsa (1995: 22) also contends that “mass arrests” of shamans took place and that Evenk shamans were arrested and shot without inquiry or trial, accused of being “deceivers of the people.” He exemplifies the purge of shamans with Konstantin I. Chirkov, who was disfranchised (Ru. lishenets) and arrested in February 1932, charged with being a kulak." [Here we see the overlap of the "kulak" persecution with the suppression of Native culture. The state confiscated this man's herds and hunting rifle too.]

    "There are several examples of so-called shamans who in the 1920s both assisted the Red Army during the Civil War and who took leading positions in the new Soviet local administration. The Soviet North was vast, and conditions most likely varied between the different parts of the area. There is, for instance, evidence that the persecution of shamans was quite severe in Yakutia already during the Civil War. N. D. Vasil’eva (2000: 27–28) concludes that in the first years of the 1920s shamanic ritual objects were forcefully confiscated and destroyed, and shamans were “subjected to political discrimination and morally discredited.” Some shamans were also brought to public court trials. But there is no evidence of such severe punishments, such as executions, that Orthodox priests were subjected to at the time (see Pospielovsky 1988: 1–18; Corley [ed.] 1996: 14)."

    See comments for more, in which they explain that some Indigenous groups, including the shamans [saman, actually, in Nentsy] cooperated with the Soviets, hoping for a change in the colonial relations with Russia. 

    Bulgakova, T., Sundström, O. (2017) "Repression of shamans and shamanism in Khabarovsk Krai: 1920s to the early 1950s." In: Andrej Kotljarchuk & Olle Sundström (ed.), Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research (pp. 225-262). Huddinge: Södertörns högskola. Södertörn Academic Studies
    http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-143114

     

     

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    "The thing is, a big talent steals; a small talent borrows."

    in SASS Wire Saloon

    Posted

    "When I was just starting in movies, I got a reputation for being a scene stealer. Once I was in a film with a famous star and had to stand behind him in one scene. 'Now watch that Quinn,' this star told the director, 'I don't want him stealing the scene behind my back.' The director parked me in a chair and I just sat there. Next day, when we were looking at the rushes, the star said 'See, I told you! Look at him!' The director exclaimed, 'But he's only sitting there!' 'Only?" rejoined the star. 'Maybe so, but he's thinking!'
    Anthony Quinn was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1915, during the Mexican revolution, in which his father was allegedly a soldier in the army of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. After the revolution, the family moved to Los Angeles, California, where Quinn's father eventually secured a job as a cameraman at Selig Film Studios. Quinn often accompanied his father to work, and became acquainted with such stars as Tom Mix and John Barrymore, with whom he kept up the friendship into adulthood. Quinn's first job in Hollywood was tending animals at the Selig Studio. Quinn's father died when Anthony was 9 years old. He grew up in East Los Angeles, shining shoes and selling newspapers. For extra cash, he entered dance contests and sold the statues he won.
    He was one of the few actors to move easily and successfully between starring and supporting roles throughout his career. In both categories, the Irish-Mexican Quinn played a vast array of characters and ethnicities, including American, Arab, Basque, Chinese, English, French, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hun, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Mongol, Native American, Filipino, Portuguese, Spaniard and Ukranian.
    "One of the reasons I did all the Greeks and Arab parts I did was because I was trying to identify myself as a man of the world. I lived in Greece, in France, Iran and all over the world, Spain, trying to find a niche where I would finally be accepted."
    IMDb reports that Quinn had appeared in more movies with other Oscar-winning actors than any other Oscar-winning actor - a total of 46 Oscar-winning co-stars (28 male, 18 female).
    "I steal from everyone. Picasso did it. Modigliani did it. So did da Vinci. Rufino Tamayo stole from the Mayan civilization. The thing is, a big talent steals; a small talent borrows."
    Before he launched his acting career, Quinn worked odd jobs as a butcher, a boxer, street corner preacher and a slaughterhouse worker. He also won a scholarship to study architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he developed a close relationship. 
    "I think I'm lucky. I was born with very little talent but great drive."(IMDb)
    Happy Birthday, Anthony Quinn!

     

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    • Like 4
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    Funny Photos - add some.

    in SASS Wire Saloon

    Posted · Edited by Subdeacon Joe

    6 hours ago, Alpo said:

    Aussie cooking?

     

     

    photo upside-down.jpg

     

    Turn them out  (yes, if you want to be pedantic you are turning it off of the back of the baking tin), carefully cut them apart, put a scoop of ice cream in the cups.  Or maybe fill them with pudding and whipped cream.

     

    What it looks like is the dough spread more than expected. 

     

    https://carolscookies.com/blog/make-chocolate-chip-cookie-bowls/

     

     

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    A US Army Mark 31 Quadruple. 50cal mount

    in SASS Wire Saloon

    Posted

    An unusual sight on a US Navy warship. A US Army Mark 31 Quadruple. 50cal mount alongside a twin 20mm Oerlikon mount. The weapons were mounted on the Essex class aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-16).

     

    Continuing on with belt-fed ammunition, let's talk about an experiment that tested the quad .50 aboard warships. 

     

    The test was to determine the effectiveness of the .50 cal mount at sea and test it's use as an anti-kamikaze weapon. 

     

    Six mounts were installed on Lexington in May of 1945 and operated alongside the other anti-aircraft weapons. The mount was the standard Army model, featuring its own self contained power system, and was not significantly modified for use on a Navy ship. 

     

    After a few months of operation, the US Navy found that the weapon had several advantages. 

     

    - Utilizing a powered mount, the quad .50 was found to be more accurate as the operation was smoother when tracking targets compared to the hand-directed 20mm Oerlikon. 

     

    - The use of belt-fed ammunition allowed the quad .50 to typically fire for the entire duration of a typical air attack before needing to reload. This was seen as a major advantage over the 20mm which had to pause between bursts to reload its drum magazine. 

     

    - The self contained power system was seen as particularly advantageous. While the 20mm was a manually-directed weapon, the sighting system required an external powersource which was supplied by the ship. In the event of a ship losing power, the 20mm mounts lost their sighting system. The quad .50 used its own generator and battery pack to produce power. This allowed the mount to remain in action even if the ship lost power. 

     

    Of course there were disadvantages as well. 

     

    - The .50 cal machine gun round lacked the necessary stopping power needed to intercept aircraft, requiring more hits. 

     

    - The reload time was about 2x to 3x greater than the 20mm Oerlikon. During a major sustained air attack, the .50 would have larger pauses between firing to reload.

     

    - The barrels on the .50 cal mounts were designed for Army use. They had significantly less barrel life compared to the 20mm weapons. 

     

    - The mounts were temperamental at first and required greater maintenance. However, this may have been due to unfamiliarity with such systems. Later reports state the weapons became highly reliable as the crew learned how to maintain them. 

     

    Overall, the Navy judged a single quad .50 mount to be roughly equivalent to a twin 20mm mount. However, they would not pursue the installation of the quad .50 on warships. 

     

    Instead, they called for the development of a quad 20mm mount featuring belt-fed ammunition. Such a weapon system was seen as the best way of combining the various advantages of both systems into one platform.

     

    We will take a look at the 20mm quad mount projects in future posts. 

     

    Photo from Navsource

     

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    Accidentally discovered a new way to clean brass

    in SASS Wire Saloon

    Posted

    4 hours ago, High Plains Smokey said:

    kinda like cleaning your black powder rifle in the bath tube, can't end well.  :)

     

    Just do it when you plan to give the tub a good scrub down anyway.  

    Although, I found that the "scrubbing bubbles" type cleaners do a very good job of getting rid of the residue without much effort.

    TO KEEP ARMS AND POLISHED METAL FROM RUST

    in SASS Wire Saloon

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