@centaurself / centaurself.tumblr.com
I HAVE A PROPER REFERENCE SHEET NOW!!! i commissioned @centaur-fanart for this, and they were an absolute joy to work with, and im so glad because i look absolutely beautiful
if the text looks weird its because i put that on there after the fact, dont blame them for that
this is the definitive me! after 9+ years, ive finally, fully, figured myself out, and im so glad
seriously go and commission them, their art is amazing
Got commissioned twice to turn this character into a kangaroo-taur! Super happy with how the rendering came out
commission for @yetanotherother (Luma) i guess after so many hugs i ended up becoming a taur as well
jesus fucking christ
[Image ID: An unattributed Tumblr text post warped by the "underwater" feature. It reads "I keep seeing this around, especially now around Yom HaShoak, and it's starting to really piss me off, "Never again means never again for anyone." NO THE FUCK IT DOES NOT." End Image ID.]
Tags from a reblog of this post (tag author requested to not be attributed due to the potential for harassment): #theres actually a whole (academic) article about this #how in israel the phrase is generally understood to mean 'never again the victims' #whereas in the diaspora its understood to mean 'never again for anyone' #and how the phrase was PROBABLY coined by anarchist communists who specifically meant like 'dismantle the systems [like nationalism] that led to this in the first place' #idk if this person is israeli but its usually israelis you see responding like this #and its because they straight up have no idea the rest of the world doesnt see it like that #combined w the at this point pretty infamous disdain for holocaust victims and survivors for being 'weak' #it doesn't mean 'in your honour we will never let this happen to anyone else' it literally means #we will never again be like YOU who failed to protect yourself #like thats literally what they think it means. worth knowing
Hi, leftist Israeli here!
Yes, there is plenty of truth in those tags. Unfortunately.
From Israel's founding through the mid-70s the predominant persona / propaganda / idea of the "good" Israeli was ~
Secular Jewish farmer, any sex but must be strapping-strong and educated. A resistance fighter who killed Nazis in Europe by the dozen and now works to tame the Holy Land. Hates "diseased" marshes. Hates "dirty bloodthirsty" Arabs. Hating the British is optional but recommended. A brave Sabra!!
a "bad" Israeli was any of the following:
not Ashkenazi (ie not white-passing).
disabled in any form whatsoever unless it's a Cool War Scar from killing Nazis and even then you better not have any "trauma", gross
talks about the concentration or death camps. ever
religious freaks only allowed if they hate Arabs and swear to keep to their freak selves in seclusion
unwilling to pop out as many kids as possible
a pacifist
etc.
Israel also worked hard to lionize the actions of ALL Jewish / Zionist resistance movements. Some of them *were peaceful* and *did NOT call for attacking Palestinians*. But Israel has worked hard to put only militant groups front and center of its history lessons, such as Irgun and Lechi. The IDF has always been lionized, in spite of various peace and tolerance movements over the last seven decades.
Ironically, this attitude absolutely crippled historians' ability to document the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of survivors were shamed and bullied into silence. So many "gen X" Israelis speak of how their parents one day "just broke down" in their old age and started talking about their Holocaust stories. As well as stories of life before. Whether as a cosmopolitan Berliner or shtetl Polani. Whether from a shift in culture allowed them to speak, or they simply needed to come clean before death, I dunno. But for every story shared, we must have lost scores. It's a travesty on top of travesty. Shame on Ben Gurion and his cadre.
So yes, "never again" meant "the Jewish people will never be weak again because Israel will defend them*" (*only the ones that are Good) for decades.
There were major social shifts after the Yom Kippur War and also in the wake of the anti-war movement in America. Also, the demographics of Israel changed -- Sefaradi and Yemenite Jews were here for decades already, as well as Palestinian Jews who had been for centuries. But they finally were able to gain political capital and force their way into the national conversation.
In recent decades, Holocaust survivors' role was changed from "embarrassment to be locked in the attic" to "noble, helpless martyr (support the military of this will be YOU!!)". In Zionist circles, they get trotted out once a year to schools and synagogues to talk about the most traumatic experiences of their lives before being sent back home to a dark room and empty fridge*.
*I'm exaggerating a little. But not as much as I wish. We care for our senior citizens and we love them. But the Israeli government willfully neglected Holocaust survivors for many decades. Through the 70s at least, if they didn't have a family to support them, most of them did live and die alone in abject poverty.
I do beg of those who are appalled -- please do be appalled! But Israeli society has been changing and continues to change. We're trying so hard to dismantle the machismo and jingoism baked into the culture. Trying to integrate our communities in places like Yafo and Haifa. Welcoming refugees from places like Sudan and Somalia rather than locking the south-western border.
The Oslo accords, the assassination of Rabin, the rise of the modern Likud -- there's more recent history. Netanyahu has been a disaster for the cause of peace and justice, but it can be done. I truly hope to see a peaceful and united Palestine/Israel in my lifetime.
To the modern moderate Israeli, "never again" has returned to the liberal weak-ass idea "The Holocaust* will never happen again" *by which we mean that authoritarianism and fascism is okay as long as we can pretend it isn't there!! or use it as an excuse to invade a foreign country!! There's more layers, but the core of "never again" is *waves hand* meh.
To a leftist Israeli "never again" means "no genocide again, not on our watch, not here, not anywhere". We stand for Gaza, for Palestinian equality and independence, we have stood against the fascism in our own government for manyyears.
As much as I want to argue for the many good qualities of Israel (which do exist. don't you dare argue that an entire country of people is 100% All Evil Zionazis. allow for complexity for Satan's sake). It is vital to acknowledge the evils of our past so we may better understand and fight its expression in the modern day. I've had to do a lot of work to unlearn my rightwing upbringing. And I've spent uncounted hours reflecting on my place in Israeli society, my past in the IDF, my future as a leftist activist. History is full of dark and light and colour all. It's never too late to learn from it.
Reply to tags from @boy-yuri
image transcription with light editing for ease of screenreader:
# this is absolutely fascinating.
# thank you for sharing and also thank you for fighting for change! I imagine neither of those have been easy, especially recently.
# I'm also extremely curious about Israeli propaganda preferring secular Jewish people over religious Jewish people. Never would have guessed that.
# Wonder what the reasoning is behind that.
End transcription.
The political movement which is known today as Zionism was born during the nascency of the Nationalist movements in Europe during the late 19th century. Laws codifying the meaning of citizenship were being written and re-written. It was also a peak time for the 'science' of ethnicity, race, and phrenology. The Zionist political movement was and is an extension of the nationalist imperialist and racist fervor of its time. It took its name, ציון, from a name for Israel which has been preserved in Jewish culture for ~3000 years.
Zionism was made by and for secular, "educated", modern Jews. "Modern" by the standards of the day, of course. Linguists, journalists, politicians, and others. Jewish socialists and nationalists imagined a Nation-State for the Jewish Race, just as France was the Nation-State of the French Race. (Race being of course. an inherent and natural category in humans. just look at them SKULLS /sarc).
It also came during a time at which Hassidism was growing in power due to a streak of especially brutal state-sponsored pogroms in Eastern Europe and in Russia. Hassidism was spiritual, religious, rural; the mirror opposite image to the sophisticated urbanite Jew which the Mitnagdim and Zionist political movements sought. The former being still very much orthodox / religious, but elitist and scholarly / academics and Rational Science inclined.
While of course many Israelis, then and now, were always religious to some degree; the "founding fathers" of the Israeli state were Very Secular. They saw Jews as a Nation and a Race in a very specific early-20th century way. Ben Gurion, Ben Yehuda, and others who held major political and social influence over the early state were secular.
A deal was cut with the religious / Hassidic Jews. They were given a "separate-but-equal" sort of political-legal standing. Shortly after the 1948 war, the ultra religious in Israel began conglomerating. Soon they had built their own independent and isolated shtetls and ghettos. The way that early Israeli law cut out a unique legal and social status for the religious, while also forcing them into the margins of society, has had Zero Modern Repercussions*. The racialization of that legal status, and of Sepharadi and non-white-passing Jews, has also had Zero Knock-On Effects**.
*it's been a disaster.
**it's been a disaster.
Modern propaganda is. Uhhhhhh. It's very different than it was seventy years ago. Shocker! A lot of the reason that the 21st century Israeli authoritarian right is also the religious right in Israel is directly due to influence from America.
There are several extremely influential sects of Christianity which require a massive religious war in the Middle East which involves a lot of Jewish people in order for Judgement Day to kick in. They want the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa to be destroyed and replaced with a third temple so that Jesus can return. I don't know the fine details of the theology, but I do know that these groups have poured billions of dollars into increasing religious fervor and supporting hardline Orthodox Jewish groups in Israel.
How I know all this is of course deeply ironic. In my school -- from age four through eighteen -- we were constantly taught Jewish history, and especially about the Zionist political movement. As I was raised religious, we got the Religious Flavored version, but the historical documents underneath are mostly the same. All those years of history classes in yeshiva... it turns out, when you show a kid (me) a primary source along with your interpretation of it, maybe that kid (me) will realize that your conclusions are pretty unsubstantiated. Or at least, grossly biased and directly contradictory to your purported values... Oops.
i am making a dolphin house in the sims 4
y'all aren't ready for how fuckin silly this looks
u know. dolphin house
*nods* dolphin house
i feel like being able to art would help a lot of my kin dysphoria
Dracotaur from a dream I had. She is holding her pet giant beetle and they live in an old abandoned tower together <3 No name for her yet and the design may be tweaked if I do more with her in the future.
(For $3 a month you can see exclusive sketches, sneak peeks at upcoming adoptables, and behind the scenes content of my comic hallowed hijinks! https://ko-fi.com/bethdehart )
"why are people excited for the transphobia in ttyd" because it means super mario gets to kill transphobes with hammers. game of the year
A starry pegasus ponytaur, I really like how this one looks. :) This was gonna be an adoptable but got pre-claimed! I'm so happy that it's gone to a good home <3
(For $3 a month you can see exclusive sketches, sneak peeks at upcoming adoptables, and behind the scenes content of my comic hallowed hijinks! https://ko-fi.com/bethdehart )
patron sketch for Micca
Do centaurs come in the same colors as real world horses? And do horse-part colors have any impact/correlation with human-part colors?
Absolutely! The world is your oyster with centaurs in general and in specific for colors, I love slapping whatever cool color configuration I see on the internet onto my centaurs horse-parts and if I really like them I move parts of the coloration up to the human-part!
A lot of my Rider culture is made up of paints, usually modeled off of american mustangs and you'll usually see I like to extend the white markings up onto the human bady, like the two flanking centaurs in the image above, it's 100% "I just think they're neat"
I do almost always extend the coloration to the hair, I find it helps with the cohesion of the centaur's design if their hair and tails match, though I tend to go with whatever crazy tail color the horse half has instead of the other way around..
For example Sunny and Irah both have white hair, Irah to match their overall white look and Sunny because he's based of of fjords and halflingers which have distinctive white manes and tails!
You can have a lot of crazy fun with colors! Turn appaloosa spots into freckles like the guy on the left! Give characters patches of white hair to match their pinto spots! The possibilities are endless and it pulls double duty of making the human half more uniquely centaur in feel and making the human half feel more like an extension of the horse body instead of just average human torso plopped on horse shoulders!
GLHF!
A Bird in the Hand
Monster Researcher Eclair (and Andie) study the Steppes clan Centaurs and Mountain Harpies.
Eracon, a druid, a character for DnD.
Category 5 horse moment
Don’t sneak up behind a centaur
more of my shiny horse man + baby version. he was a menace and threw rocks at other kids
hes innocent!!! those kids made fun of him
