On this day in 1918, the Finnish People's Delegation declared a socialist workers' republic (known "Red Finland"), at the start of the Finnish Civil War. The burgeoning working class movement was crushed by imperialist German forces.
Prior to 1917, Finland had been ruled as a Grand Duchy, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. With the collapse of the Tsarist state in the wake of February Revolution and a long-term increase in nationalist sentiment, Finland declared independence on December 4th, 1917, formally recognized by the Russian Bolsheviks on December 31st.
Due to industrialized Finland having a strong revolutionary labor movement, conservative and proletarian forces were immediately thrown into conflict.
Red Guard paramilitary units representing the labor movement found themselves in a cycle of escalation with loyalist "White" Guards, culminating in a mass uprising of Reds in Helsinki on January 27th, 1918, marking the start of revolution. The following day, the Finnish People's Delegation was formed by members of the Social Democratic Party. Bourgeois forces fled to Vaasa, where they set up their own "White Senate".
The war saw the Whites, under the leadership of General Mannerheim, receive support from the German Empire, which was more well-established than the Reds' primary ally, the newly-created Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Following an imperialist intervention by Germany on the side of the Whites in March 1918, the war ended in defeat for the Reds in May. Over 12,000 people perished from starvation and hunger while imprisoned in White-operated POW camps, and reparations were not paid to former victims of the White Terror until 1973.
Lessons of the Finnish Revolution of 1917–1918
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This is just commenting on inane twitter drama again but the whole GLBT street discourse and specifically about how supposedly(claimed by the person initiating discourse) the L is before G in the english acronym to signal that women arent second class in the community(and also because lesbians helped out during AIDS? strange detail), is very funny to me given how in my country the acronym doesn't even contain an L, its just HBTQ.
BGLT
Bisexual win
Sounds like a kind of sandwich.
bacon guac lettuce and tomato
I like this. Way smoother than LGBTQ.
Afaik that's true, and was a decision made at an early US pride parade or something in the late 80s or early 90s.
Afaik back in the day a lot of people really, really didn't want gay men and women forming a single cohesive movement, and solidarity during the aids pandemic was very important to creating the concept of an encompassing lgbt community as we know it today. Much of the world viewed it s gay men being punished for the crime of their existence so when a lot of women committed to mutual aid and support, when often no one else would, it was incredibly important for forging a common social and political identity.
Like imagine a very sick leather daddy looking despondent and being all "so, this is how i die" and then the butchest woman in the world rolls up on her hog and is all "you won't die alone" and they embrace each other and disco music starts playing softly in the background in a moving, emotional way, that's basically what happened.
Do people still remember how horrible aids was? I was just a kid during the tail end, and didn't even know what "gay" was, like i was in elementary school in the mid-90s throwing it around as an insult, so everything I know mostly came later, from reading people's accounts of the period. I've had a couple of conversations with young queer people who knew nothing at all about the history of the early gay rights movement in the us and to me it was shocking to realize that for many people this history doesn't exist and they don't know where many of their symbols and words come from. I guess now a lot of this stuff was two, three, four generations ago.
Does the H then stand for gay men and lesbian women or are lesbian women just not part of the movement in your country?
It's for both, it just stands for homosexual.
Lesbians generally still call themselves lesbian, while gay men typically use the Swedish equivalent for gay, "bög", or just say gay as if it was a Swedish word.
I can't claim to know the reasons for why the acronym became HBTQ, if it was just because homosexuell was the more common term at the time, or if it was to be clearer than having two B's.