Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2008, 06:16:49 AM
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This thread is for items of interest we run across about moments in history. For example, I have never really understood WW1. On this day in 1914 the British declared war on Germany, and the NY Times today has its article from then. For me, it helps give a sense of what people then thought they were up to. Here it is:
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England Declares War on Germany
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British Ship Sunk
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French Ships Defeat German, Belgium Attacked
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17,000,000 Men Engaged in Great War of Eight Nations
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Great English and German Navies About to Grapple
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Rival Warships Off This Port as Lusitania Sails
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State of War Exists, Says Britain, as Kaiser Rejects Ultimatum
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MUST DEFEND BELGIUM
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King George Issues Call to Arms and Thanks the Colonies for Their Support
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ENVOY LEAVES BERLIN
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British Foreign Office Makes Final Announcement One Hour Before Time Limit
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VOTE $525,000,000 Fund
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England Takes All Foreign Warships Building in Her Ports -- Two From Turkey
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JAPAN TO AID ENGLAND
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To Smash the Kiel Canal Probably English Fleet's First Attempt Against Germany
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Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES
Kaiser Hurls Two Armies Into Belgium After Declaring War: Liege Attack Repulsed: German Guns Are Reported to be Bombarding Both That City and Namur: Belgians Rush to Arms: Parliament Acclaims King's Appeal and Votes $40,000,000 for National Defense: French Border Clashes: Stronger German Forces Crossing the Border Near Marsla-Tour and Moineville: Russians Attack Memel: Seacoast Town of Germany Defeats Attempts of Enemy to Capture It
Over 17,000,000 Fighting Men of Eight Nations Now Engaged in the Colossal European War
Cunarder Slips Out; Will Pick Up British Cruisers as Escorts:
German Warships Near: Liner to Head for Newfoundland, Where Other English Ships Will Meet Her: French Cruisers Outside: Wireless Code Messages From Telefunken Station at Sayville Aid German Cruisers: To Be Sent to Washington: The Dresden Reported Off Cape Cod in an Attempt to Cut French Cable: Our Destroyers Put Out: Liner Olympic Sails in Under Convoy of Cruiser Essex -- German Warships Outclassed
German Fleet Sinks a British Mine Layer: Scoutship Pathfinder Is Chased by the Kaiser's Warships But Makes Its Escape
Two German Warships Taken, Another Sunk: French Fleet in the Mediterranean Reported to Have Won a Victory
Conspiracy Scare on the Vaterland:
Talk of Plot to Blow Her Up Brings Launches With Searchlights, and 50 Policemen
British Declaration of War With Germany, Following Rejection of Her Demand
England Calls All Unmarried Men From 18 to 30 to Serve King and Country in This Hour of Need
London, Wednesday, Aug. 5-- War is on between England and Germany. An ultimatum to the German Government that the neutrality of Belgium must be respected was rejected by the Kaiser's Government and the British Foreign Office announced last night that a state of war existed.
The time limit for Germany's reply was set at midnight, but the Foreign Office announced that as Germany had given his passports to the British envoy at an earlier hour, the state of war existed from 11 o'clock.
King George has issued his proclamation mobilizing the army and has sent a message to the colonies thanking them for their hearty support in the hour of national emergency.
The Government has assumed control of all the railways and the Admirality has taken over all the foreign warships now building in English ports. The House of Commons has voted a fund of $525,000,000 for the emergency.
England Cool in Great Crisis
England is facing this, the greatest crisis in her history, with calmness and courage. Sir Edward Grey's exposition has made it clear that the war is none of her seeking, and that she goes into it because her honor and her self-preservation alike compel her to do so. There is neither any sign of panic nor flame of war fever. All parties and all classes present a united front. The few exceptions are not worthy of mention. The protests that the Labor members of Parliament and a few Liberals have made in the House of Commons do not represent the prevalent feeling either in the ranks of labor or among the avowed pacifists. The peace-at-any price advocates are submerged beneath the huge majority who would have welcomed peace with honor but prefer war to dishonor.
Liberal newspapers like The Westminster Gazette, The Daily Chronicle, and even The Daily News accept the situation as inevitable.
"Here we stand, and we can do no other. The Germans will recognize that famous phrase," says The Westminster Gazette, "and understand that it expresses the feelings of the vast majority of the British people."
The demeanor of the crowds last evening and this morning began to betray growing excitement . A procession of a thousand young men marched along by Whitehall and up the Strand, cheering. It was headed by a squad carrying the Union Jack of England and the tricolor of France. As it passed Trafalgar Square there was some booing, but the cheering outweighed it. Fleet Street last evening was jammed by crowds watching the bulletins. Occasionally they sang "The Marseillaise" and "God Save the King."
Soon after the announcement of Germany's declaration of war against Belgium was displayed on the bulletin board- the crowds, evidently believing no greater news was likely to come, quietly dispersed, and by 11 o'clock Fleet Street was as quiet as usual.
Would Smash Kiel Canal
Premier Asquith's statement in the House of Commons yesterday that the German Government had been asked to give satisfactory assurances on the question of Belgium's neutrality by midnight was generally regarded as meaning that England was prepared to strike at once if the reply was unfavorable.
The German fleet is concentrated for the defense of the Kiel Canal. Its destruction will be the first object of the British fleet. Germany's compliance with the British ultimatum was not expected. Germany, according to a statement emanating from her London embassy, would have consented to refrain from using Belgian ports and would have confined her violation of neutrality to the inland districts if Great Britain would agree to hold aloof. It is obvious that a compact on such lines would have been useless to Great Britain. Belgian neutrality is strategically important in two ways -- by sea to Great Britain and Germany and by land to Germany and France. If England abandoned it in its land aspect, nobody, not even the Belgians, would have been willing to defend it when it was threatened in its sea aspect.
It seemed unlikely from the start that Germany would desist, because it was a matter affecting the military plans of her General Staff. The whole German theory of war is to make plans years ahead and have everything down to the last railway siding ready for their execution, and to carry them out without deviation. It is probable that the present plan was made as long ago as when Anglo-German hostility was an axiom, and there was no question in German minds of so shaping their strategy as to keep Great Britain neutral.
German Ships in Peril
As was anticipated, Germany's first naval effort was to deal a heavy blow to the Russians in the Baltic, but as yet there is insufficient evidence that it succeeded or that the Russian fleet was rendered powerless. Germany's most urgent need, according to experts, is to assemble all her available naval forces on the west, principally in the North Sea, but, these experts say, the Germans are not likely to seek battle, hoping the strength of their adversaries may be reduced by the action of mines and torpedoes.
Two German cruisers seem to be in peril. The battle cruiser Goeben, on the way from the Mediterranean, is reported to have passed Gibraltar, steaming westward. She will not venture through the English Channel, and must travel homeward via the west coast of Ireland and north of Scotland. An attempt certainly will be made to intercept her, and the need of carrying assistance to her may bring about a fleet action. The German cruiser Brealau is reported to have shelled Bona before proceeding westward toward Gibraltar. Her position seems perilous in the extreme.
Control of Railway Lines
The Governmet took over the railways to complete the co-ordination of the railway facilities, in view of the military and naval requirements and the needs of the civil communities. The staff of each railway remains as before. Supreme control is vested in a committee composed of the General Managers of the chief railways.
The Acting Chairman is H. A. Walker, manager of the London & Southwestern, who is well known among American railway men. The committee was formed some days ago. The Great Eastern is not represented, possibly because its General Manager, H.W. Thornton, is an American.
News Flashed to Navy
When the announcement of the state of war was made by the Foreign Office, and the quietness of the Summer night was suddenly broken by the raucus cries of the news venders, the streets were practically empty. The ordinary troops of theatregoers were conspicuous for their absence. Midnight was considered the fateful hour when orders would be flashed by wireless to the British Navy to begin operations.
Reports which had spread during the evening that German warships had sunk a British mine finder and chased the destroyer Pathfinder, were taken as another instance of Germany's method of taking an unfair advantage and acting before war actually was declared.
Sir John Jellicoe, who has been long regarded as predestined to head the fleet in case of war, has taken supreme command, with Rear Admiral Madden as Chief of Staff. Sir John Jellicoe, who is familiarly known as "J. J.," is a typical, keen-faced officer, distinguished for his personal courage as well as for scientific gunnery. He has the German decoration of the Red Eagle. Lord Kitchener is taking the Administrative part of the work of the War Office, where Lord Haldane is assisting Mr. Asquith.
The only panicky note which struck the English press hard came from The Evening News, which came out in a poster headed "Treachery" and stating that Lord Haldane's German sympathies made his apointment to the War Office a matter of suspicion to France. The New York Times correspondent saw Lord Haldane at Whitehall yesterday afternoon walking toward Westminster. When accosted he said there was nothing he could say.
Lord Haldane did yeoman service when at the War Office, and a Liberal paper says the worst news Germany could receive is that he has returned to the department.
England's war with Germany is likely to be purely a naval conflict for the time being. Germany will keep her fleet sheltered at Wilhemshaven and trust to her submarines and torpedo boats to reduce the strength of the British investing fleet. The reported sinking of a mine-layer probably is due to this. The feature of the Anglo-German war will be the strewing of the North Sea with floating mines.
Asquith's Impressive Speech
The first chapter of the critical events of the day was unfolded when Premier Asquith read his statement in the House of Commons. The Premier read in a firm and measured voice, and his hand shook as he held the typewritten copy. His words were listened to in a silence that was almost uncanny, so tense and overwrought was the crowded House.
After he had read the telegrams exchanged between London and Berlin and London and Brussels, Mr. Asquith's announcement of the ultimatum to Germany demanding an answer by midnight was greeted with prolonged applause. There was a strange note of solemnity in the deep cheers that rolled up from all sides like thunder waves beating on a rockbound shore. Plainly enough the telegrams had eaten deep into the feelings of the audiences, revealing Germany's disregard of the law of nations in browbeating Belgium.
Until yesterday afternoon a strong minority of the Liberal Party was in favor of British neutrality. Sir Edward Grey's speech reduced the minority to small proportions. Today's events almost extinguished it.
Even the Labor members, despite their sworn devotion to neutrality, were unfavorably impressed by this sample of German methods. A Scotch Radical member, who hates war, said: "Germany leaves us no alternative but to fight. We are standing for public law; she is trampling upon it.
"It is another struggle in the incessant conflict between right and force, wherein the rival champions in the last generation were Gladstone and Bismarck. Mr. Gladstone, who was a most peaceful statesman, said he would spend every shilling of the British exchequer and employ every soldier in the British Army in the defense of the independence of Belgium."
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http://www.westminster-mo.edu/news/news/Pages/FreedomWithoutWallsCelebration.aspx
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Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank, dies at 100
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied the Nazi occupiers to hide Anne Frank and her family for two years and saved the teenager's diary, has died, the Anne Frank Museum said Tuesday. She was 100.
Gies' Web site reported that she died Monday after a brief illness. The report was confirmed by museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostar, but she gave no details. The British Broadcasting Corp. said she died in a nursing home after suffering a fall last month.
Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II.
After the apartment was raided by the German police, Gies gathered up Anne's scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944.
Gies refused to read the papers, saying even a teenager's privacy was sacred. Later, she said if she had read them she would have had to burn them because they incriminated the "helpers."
Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Gies gave the diary to Anne's father Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.
After the diary was published, Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside the accolades for helping hide the Frank family as more than she deserved -- as if, she said, she had tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.
"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press days before her 100th birthday last February.
"The Diary of Anne Frank" was the first popular book about the Holocaust, and has been read by millions of children and adults around the world in some 65 languages.
For her courage, Gies was bestowed with the "Righteous Gentile" title by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. She has also been honored by the German Government, Dutch monarchy and educational institutions.
Nevertheless, Gies resisted being made a character study of heroism for the young.
"I don't want to be considered a hero," she said in a 1997 online chat with schoolchildren.
"Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."
Born Hermine Santrouschitz on Feb. 15, 1909 in Vienna, Gies moved to Amsterdam in 1922 to escape food shortages in Austria. She lived with a host family who gave her the nickname Miep.
In 1933, Gies took a job as an office assistant in the spice business of Otto Frank. After refusing to join a Nazi organization in 1941, she avoided deportation to Austria by marrying her Dutch boyfriend, Jan Gies.
As the Nazis ramped up their arrests and deportations of Dutch Jews, Otto Frank asked Gies in July 1942 to help hide his family in the annex above the company's canal-side warehouse on Prinsengracht 263 and to bring them food and supplies.
"I answered, 'Yes, of course.' It seemed perfectly natural to me. I could help these people. They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn," she said years later.
Jan and Miep Gies worked with four other employees in the firm to sustain the Franks and four other Jews sharing the annex. Jan secured extra food ration cards from the underground resistance. Miep cycled around the city, alternating grocers to ward off suspicions from this highly dangerous activity.
In her e-mail to the AP last February, Gies remembered her husband, who died in 1993, as one of Holland's unsung war heroes. "He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard," she wrote.
Touched by Anne's precocious intelligence and loneliness, Miep also brought Anne books and newspapers while remembering everybody's birthdays and special days with gifts.
"It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts," Anne wrote.
In her own book, "Anne Frank Remembered," Gies recalled being in the office when the German police, acting on a tip that historians have failed to trace, raided the hide-out in August 1944.
A policeman opened the door to the main office and pointed a revolver at the three employees, telling them to sit quietly. "Bep, we've had it," Gies whispered to Bep Voskuijl.
After the arrests, she went to the police station to offer a bribe for the Franks' release, but it was too late. On Aug. 8, they were sent to Westerbork, a concentration camp in eastern Holland from where they were later packed into cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz. A few months later, Anne and her sister Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen.
Two of the helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, were sent to labor camps, but survived the war.
Around 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the 1940-45 Nazi occupation. Of those, 107,000 were deported to Germany and only 5,200 survived. Some 24,000 Jews went into hiding, of which 8,000 were hunted down or turned in.
After the war, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and lived with the Gies family until he remarried in 1952. Miep worked for him as he compiled the diary, then devoted herself to talking about the diary and answering piles of letters with questions from around the world.
After Otto Frank's death in 1980, Gies continued to campaign against Holocaust-deniers and to refute allegations that the diary was a forgery.
She suffered a stroke in 1997 which slightly affected her speech, but she remained generally in good health as she approached her 100th birthday.
Her son Paul Gies said last year she was still receiving "a sizable amount of mail" which she handled with the help of a family friend. She spent her days at the apartment where she lived since 2000 reading two daily newspapers and following television news and talk shows.
Her husband died in 1993. She is survived by her son and three grandchildren.
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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By MODRIS EKSTEINS
We are now more than 65 years away from the end of World War II, but that global conflict and its precursor, the so-called Great War of 1914-18, continue to fascinate and torment us, even as the veterans who fought in them retreat to another realm. What is striking about the current spate of books and movies about these conflicts is that for many in the West, they no longer seem to represent the unequivocal victory of good over evil, right over wrong, liberty over tyranny. A plethora of historical reassessments of the aerial campaigns against German and Japanese cities question not only the moral but also the political validity of the carpet-bombing of civilians. In his recent film, "Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino turned all tables when he had Jews behaving like Nazis, and in the massive HBO mini-series "The Pacific" a Marine's reference to "yellow monkeys" reverberates through the entire series.
All wars, but these two in particular, with their mass effort and mass death—the first great democratic wars of history—are now freighted with the toxic irony that came to pervade the 20th century and continues to afflict us still. If today we question traditional narratives, no longer trust our leaders and have lost all faith in grand ideas, the gnarled roots of such skepticism lead back through the World Wars of the last century.
In "And the Show Went On," Alan Riding, former Paris bureau chief of the New York Times, tracks a period of particular moral murkiness. He focuses on French writers and artists—the whole lot might, in an act of leveling, be called artistes—and their response to the German invasion of France in 1940. Mr. Riding is less interested, though, in the broader historical implications of his theme than in the human stories that emerge when the imagination is confronted by a violent reality.
For the French the defeat in 1940, and the next four years of German occupation, remain the most sensitive and sensational of all historical topics. Before his execution in February 1945, the openly collaborationist yet highly talented writer Robert Brasillach remarked: "Whatever their outlook, during these years the French have all more or less been to bed with Germany." But, as recently as May 2008, French president Nicolas Sarkozy continued to claim the high ground: "The true France," he asserted, "never collaborated." A nation that has always cherished its intellectuals, that rightly prides itself on its cultivation of the arts, is still tortured by the notion that the thoughtful, sensitive and most intelligent "Marianne" ever slept with the arrogant and brutal "Fritz." Mr. Riding shows that she did, and with considerable relish at that. As the vivacious actress Arletty put it so unforgettably in pondering her predicament during the occupation: "My heart is French but my ass is international."
And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris
By Alan Riding
Knopf, 400 pages, $28.95
.For most of us, Mr. Riding's conclusion is hardly news, certainly not the headline stuff it was in the early 1970s when the historian Robert O. Paxton of Columbia University exploded the myth of a broad French opposition to the occupying Germans—and a broad refusal to collaborate. Until Mr. Paxton's research was published, the French had lived under the comfortable illusion that the true France, as President Sarkozy would have it, had been intrepid members of the Resistance, supporters of Charles de Gaulle and the Free French and anti-German through and through. The can of worms that Mr. Paxton opened has been spoiling the air at the elegant Deux Magots café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain ever since.
RoBut what constituted collaboration or resistance? Any attempt to define those terms conjures up all the fundamental problems of our modern and postmodern world, a world not of fixity but of fluidity. Where do we put the philosopher-playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, who continued to publish during the occupation and later reinvented himself as a great résistant? Or the remarkable novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, an avowed anti-Semite who nevertheless insisted that he hated the Germans just as much? Or that artistic provocateur, Jean Cocteau, who was at the very center of social life in occupied Paris but later felt abused by the accusation that he had collaborated, claiming ingenuously that "People are always thrusting me into scandals." Notoriety or flattery often seemed more appealing to this group than truth. And what about those world-renowned entertainers Édith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and Sacha Guitry, who clearly needed the bright lights as much for psychological as economic reasons? Piaf's subsequent signature song "Non, je ne regrette rien" ("No, I regret nothing") reverberated with double meaning. Where, too, should we slot a pan-European like Alfred Fabre-Luce, whose dream was a united Europe and who saw in German conquest, faute de mieux, a step toward that dream?
Mr. Riding is very good at pointing to the complexities and ambiguities of the situation. He retraces much of the ground that Frederic Spotts covered in 2008 in "The Shameful Peace," but the two authors, while both expatriate residents of France, take opposed positions. Mr. Spotts has nothing but scorn for those who compromised between 1940 and 1944, whatever the reason. Mr. Riding, by contrast, finds the behavior of most French thinkers, painters and performers all too human. Many vacillated. Many were concerned merely with survival. Many who joined the Resistance later had been quick to cooperate earlier. The entertainment industry hardly skipped a beat. More plays and movies were produced in those four years than in any comparable four-year period in the French past. The Germans were delighted; such frenetic activity was exactly what they wanted, and they probably exercised less control in France than in any other territory they occupied.
R
.The divide in France on the painful subject of the German occupation during World War II is in part generational and in part political. Because of the difficulty of defining collaboration and resistance, the two sides have found little common ground. Robert O. Paxton initiated the French debate with his landmark "Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-44" (1972). Among more recent books, the British historian Julian Jackson's "The Fall of France" (2003) and "France: The Dark Years, 1940-44" (2001) are exceptional for their industry and integrity.
Irène Némirovsky's enormously successful novel "Suite Française" (first published in English in 2006) gives one a poignant sense of the ambiguities inherent in the situation after June 1940: "Their conversation," she wrote of her characters, "was pessimistic, almost despairing, but their voices light-hearted."
Because it is so troubling, very little of the remarkable work of Ernst Jünger, who accompanied the German occupiers of Paris, has been trans lated into English. The French, however, have always been fascinated by him—his diary for the years of occupation is available en français—and upon his death in February 1998, at age 102, Le Monde titled its obituary "Le Siècle de Jünger," identifying the 20th century with him.
Jean Galtier-Boissière may have kept the most readable French diary during those dark years. Alas, this too has not been translated into English. A brilliant editor, he had founded the satirical monthly Le Crapouillot during the Great War. In its issue of January 1931, devoted to Berlin, the journal announced that, by comparison with the German capital, Paris was tame and chaste—countering the impression that both Alan Riding and Frederic Spotts wish to leave.
On the aesthetics of Nazism, the most intriguing recent contribution is Roger Griffin's "Modernism and Fascism" (2007), which takes the analysis of Nazism far beyond Frederic Spotts's more narrowly focused study "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics" (2002). Albert Speer's memoir, "Inside the Third Reich" (1970), remains invaluable, as do the various translated volumes of Joseph Goebbels's diaries. Goebbels was of course the Nazi "minister of enlightenment." The sculptor Arno Breker, whose massive show at the Orangerie in Paris in 1942 attracted much attention, is the subject of a fascinating section in Jonathan Petropoulos's "The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany " (2000).
Film has probably been a more suitable medium for delving into the anguish and complexity of the Nazi occupation than the written word. Alain Resnais's "Night and Fog" (1955), Marcel Ophüls's "The Sorrow and the Pity" (1969), Louis Malle's "Lacombe, Lucien" (1974) and Joseph Losey's "Monsieur Klein" (1976) are a few of the outstanding cinematic contributions.
—Modris Eksteins
.Contradiction would be the offspring of fear and confusion. The writers Ramon Fernandez and Marguerite Duras—the one a convinced collaborationist, the other a member of the Resistance—were neighbors on the Rue Saint-Benoît. While sharing the same cleaning woman, they would intentionally ignore each other's social gatherings, be they of noisy fascists or furtive résistants. In comparable fashion, the writers Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and André Malraux, while political foes, remained personal friends. After a visit to Germany in 1935, Drieu had embraced Nazism, whereas Malraux supported the anti-fascist Popular Front in France. These differences notwithstanding, Drieu would become godfather to one of Malraux's children, and Malraux would seek to protect Drieu after the liberation in 1944.
Unlike Mr. Spotts, Mr. Riding refuses to judge. Instead he cites Anthony Eden, Britain's wartime foreign secretary: "If one hasn't been through the horrors of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does which has been through all that." The logical extension of Mr. Riding's carefully constructed and sympathetic account would be a similar retelling of the other stories of Europe, without the usual polemical and self-righteous tone. In Eastern Europe, where the only choice was between two totalitarian options, communist or fascist, the dilemma was even more horrific than in France. It was easiest not to think about it and just play according to the rules in force that day.
For some the most fascinating chapter in Mr. Riding's evocative book will be the one on Florence Gould, whose tale highlights the moral conundrums of the time. Born in San Francisco of French parents in 1895, she married the enormously wealthy Frank Jay Gould, heir to a railroad fortune and owner of a consortium of hotels and casinos on the Riviera. The Goulds remained in France during the war: he in the south, she principally in Paris, where she ran a vibrant and sumptuous "literary" salon, visited by all sides in the conflict.
In a city where shortages were the norm, her gatherings never lacked for Dom Pérignon or petits fours. Ernst Jünger, the brilliant German soldier and writer, was one of her closest companions (though Mr. Riding rejects the widespread assumption that they were lovers). Florence—even the name evoked angels of mercy and an identity beyond borders—represents, some might say, the more modern Marianne, so feminine, so attractive, yet so cosmopolitan. "I may not know much about literature," she said, "but I know a lot about writers." While Mr. Spotts dismisses her as little more than a spoiled and vulgar tramp, Mr. Riding imbues her with considerable charm. Her long career as hostess and patron, both during and again after the war, lends credence to the latter judgment.
Engrossed in the immediacy of his story, Mr. Riding rarely pans to the wider view. If he had done so, he might have noted that at the heart of the 20th-century tragedy, pumping the blood of Modernism as a broadly based cultural mode and mood, was not Paris or France; it was Berlin and Germany. Many of the impulses for creative destruction—industrial, technological, scientific and intellectual—emanated from this heartland of the European continent. But at the same time the violence that the French were inclined to blame exclusively on the alien intruder, le Boche, had a powerful resonance within.
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Roger-Viollet / The Image Works
Maurice Chevalier on a visit arranged by occupation authorities to French prisoners of war in Germany in the winter of 1941-42.
.If Friedrich Nietzsche postulated, with some reason, that he was dynamite, Louis Aragon, the French poet and novelist, gave this abstraction a more practical dimension when he said that he could imagine nothing more beautiful than the "splendid and chaotic heap" produced by a cathedral and some dynamite. In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, in 1929, André Breton stated: "The simplest Surrealist act consists in going down into the street, guns in hand, and shooting at random, for as long as possible, into the crowd." This violent motif, this rage against tradition, deeply embedded in French painterly and literary imaginings, predated 1914, let alone 1940. The whole aim of artistic and literary modernism since the tail end of the 19th century had been to break down boundaries, definitions, laws and categories. Artists and intellectuals—the advance guard—were at war with the status quo before the military started fighting in either war.
Correspondingly, the appeal of Hitler and the Third Reich to some of the French and indeed European intelligentsia was based on this anger, resentment and craving for change. But the appeal was fortified by the importance Nazism assigned to the arts. On his only visit to Paris, on June 23, 1940, Hitler asked to see the Garnier opera house before any other building and admitted, according to the sculptor Arno Breker who accompanied him, that he wanted to be "surrounded by artists." With this emphasis on artists and aesthetic considerations, what Nazism did was to accelerate a process whereby politics would be turned into spectacle, an art form for the masses, and art in turn would become inseparable from politics. As reluctant as we may be to admit it, Hitler helped usher in our world.
—Mr. Eksteins is professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto. His forthcoming book, "Solar Dance," deals with the posthumous success of Vincent van Gogh.
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http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?125097-Crimean-War-Photos-%281854-1856%29
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This is my review of a new exhibition about Churchill at the Morgan. Great man.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/arts/design/churchill-the-power-of-words-at-the-morgan-library.html?emc=eta1
Ed
Exhibition Review
Successes in Rhetoric: Language in the Life of Churchill
‘Churchill: The Power of Words,’ at the Morgan Library
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: June 8, 2012
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Courtesy of the Churchill Family
Churchill: The Power of Words The exhibition, at the Morgan Library & Museum, includes a portrait of him from about 1895.
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Courtesy of the Churchill Archives Center
A cable to Churchill after D-Day.
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Yousuf Karsh
A 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill.
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Churchill Archives Center
A New York doctor's 1932 approval of Churchill's medicating with a "naturally indefinite" amount of alcohol "at meal times."
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Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge
An 1890 letter from Churchill to his mother.
The orotund proclamations will be unavoidable at the new exhibition “Churchill: The Power of Words,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, because at the center of the gallery is a semi-enclosed theater. And from it, however muted, will emerge recordings of Winston Churchill’s voice, speaking to Parliament, to British radio listeners and to American audiences, breaking on the ear like waves, rising and falling with every breath, sometimes suspended unexpectedly in midair, other times rushing forward with renewed vigor.
If you enter that small theater to hear excerpts from eight of his landmark speeches more clearly, you will also see the words on screen, laid out in poetic scansion (“The whole fury and might of the enemy/must very soon be turned on us”), just as Churchill wrote them, to match the rhythms of his voice.
But ignore the sound, if you can, and leave it for last. For it is best first to be reminded just how important those speeches by a British prime minister really were, and what difference they made.
This isn’t a history exhibition, so you won’t be able to take their full measure; you won’t fully grasp how washed up Churchill’s political career was in the mid-1930s; how few in England were prepared to recognize what was taking place in Germany; how few were also prepared to think the unthinkable about war, scarcely 20 years after the continent was so stained in blood; and how visionary Churchill was, in knowing what would happen and in understanding what price would be paid.
So you won’t really be able to understand that there was a period — between Germany’s beginning to bomb England in 1940 (killing more than 40,000) and the United States’ entrance to the war at the end of 1941 — when England might well have fallen or made generous accommodation to German demands, had Churchill not been a master of words and ideas, rallying his “great island nation” as prime minister with promises of blood, toil, tears and sweat.
But you will see enough to get a sense of what his wartime leadership meant. And what the rest of this fine exhibition accomplishes is to show how Churchill’s words can seem the expression of a life force, mixing mercurial passions and extraordinary discipline, passionate devotion and exuberant self-promotion, extravagant indulgence and ruthless analysis. The show, which opened on Friday, helps put a life in perspective that even during the years after the Sept. 11 attacks has been energetically celebrated as an ideal and just as energetically derided by critics for its intemperate character.
More than 60 documents and artifacts have been gathered by Allen Packwood, the director of the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge, England, for this exhibition, also drawing on the holdings of Churchill’s house at Chartwell, Kent. There are few opportunities to see these documents on public display, even in England, though many have been digitized as part of the museum at the Churchill Center and Museum in London.
There are letters from Winston’s difficult childhood, when his wealthy American mother and neglectful, titled father sent him to boarding school at 8. (An early letter home from 1883 or ’84 is scrawled with a child’s “X’s” — kisses rarely returned by any but his beloved nanny.) And there is a report card in which the child, not yet 10, is described as “a constant trouble to everybody.”
But we see the adventurer and historian begin to evolve, courting danger in battle and then writing its history. (“I am more ambitious for a reputation for personal courage,” he wrote his mother in 1897, “than of anything else in the world.”) There are drafts of speeches that are mapped out like poetry, a sample of Churchill’s amateur landscape painting, his Nobel Prize in Literature from 1953 “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory.” (The onetime Prime Minister Arthur Balfour described Churchill’s three-volume history of World War I as a “brilliant autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.”)
Perhaps the most remarkable document here is a New York doctor’s prescription from Jan. 26, 1932. Churchill had been on a lecture tour when he was hit by a car at Fifth Avenue and 76th Street and needed medical assistance.
“This is to certify,” the doctor writes — this in the midst of Prohibition — “that the postaccident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times.” The quantity, the doctor continues, is “naturally indefinite,” but the “minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters,” or just over 8 ounces.
That “naturally indefinite” quantity would become one of Churchill’s trademarks, along with his cigars and the rhythms of his voice, which was heavily used in his political career. He was a candidate in 21 parliamentary contests between 1899 and 1955, losing 5 of them. But all of this — even the elaborate touch screens showing every document in the exhibition, along with other documents and transcriptions of handwriting — would inspire purely specialized interest had it not been for Churchill’s speeches and writings from the mid-1930s into the 1950s.
This was a rhetorical achievement, almost a musical one, in which Churchill’s innate optimism provided a kind of elevating promise even as he was trying to map out the scope of cataclysm. It was also a strategic achievement, for in his speeches we can see him demonstrating that there were choices to be made. And it was a political achievement because before the United States was involved in World War II, America had to be addressed as well, made to understand the stakes.
Churchill shaped a notion of the “English-speaking peoples” that proved fundamental because he understood that the English literary and political traditions had defined the very character of liberal democracy that was coming under threat. Churchill’s speeches declared an allegiance of language and of ideology. They also helped shape that allegiance, celebrating a particular heritage and its possibilities, while emphasizing its vulnerabilities and the need for its defense.
The achievement is a little like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, defining the stakes of the Civil War while reshaping the America’s conception of itself. There are a few comparisons between Churchill and Lincoln in these documents, which seem thoroughly appropriate. (President Roosevelt framed some lines by Lincoln as a 70th-birthday gift for Churchill in 1944.)
Churchill was attentive to the long line of historical ideas. And his ability to conjure that tradition for support is another reason individual setbacks were less crucial for him. Something larger was at stake. It wasn’t just a matter of opposition; it was a matter of what was being championed, even if the British Empire was in its twilight and the United States was beginning to bear the standard.
This was a reason Churchill urged the United States to claim European territory in the late days of the war, to prevent Stalin from gaining too much control. It was Churchill, in the wake of the war, who saw what was on the horizon. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he said in his famous 1946 speech in Fulton, Mo., “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” There would be no respite for the war-weary.
All this is latent in this marvelously compact and suggestive show. It also demonstrates why attempts to displace Churchill from a central position in recent history are misguided. Flaws and failings are plentiful in individual lives, as in cultures and civilizations, but there are more important things deserving recognition: traditions that run deep and wide, that justly inspire advocacy and allegiance and that might even lead, as Churchill promises, to “broad, sunlit uplands.”
A version of this review appeared in print on June 9, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Successes In Rhetoric: Language In the Life Of Churchill.
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Good stuff, Guro.
http://www.churchillmemorial.org/Pages/default.aspx
Here is the link to the National Churchill Museum, in case you are interested.
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I read he made boxing popular in Ireland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Mendoza
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This looks like a pretty cool show:
http://www.history.com/shows/big-history/videos
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Certainly a different take on the birth of the Tea Party!
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The civilian hero of Gettysburg - John L. Burns - born 1794. Fought in 1812 first. Switched his musket for a more "modern" carbine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Burns
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http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/02/looking-back-earl-warrens-extra-judicial-assignment/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+scotusblog%2FpFXs+%28SCOTUSblog%29
From the article:
When Lyndon B. Johnson initially asked Earl Warren to chair the commission to investigate John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Chief Justice respectfully declined. His reasons: “First, it is not in the constitutional separation of powers to have a member of the Supreme Court serve on a presidential commission; second, it would distract a Justice from the work of the Court, which had a heavy docket; and, third, it was impossible to see what litigation such a commission might spawn, with resulting disqualification of the Justice from sitting on the case.” Concerned that the wild conspiracy stories circulating around the world might lead to nuclear war, Johnson insisted. He said it was Warren’s patriotic duty “in this hour of trouble.”
On the first day the Commission met, Warren, who was a close friend of Kennedy’s, told his staff: “I enter into it with great feeling of both inadequacy and humility because the very thought of reviewing these details day by day is really sickening to me.” Despite such misgivings, Warren dutifully set up the Commission in offices diagonally across the street from the Supreme Court – on the fourth floor of the Veterans of Foreign Wars building — so that he could carry on his full Court duties during the grueling ten-month investigation.
During its third meeting, on December 15, 1963, the Commission discussed the problem of how to deal with the press. Although as governor of California he had embraced the Fourth Estate, Warren had grown used to keeping reporters at arm’s length since he had become head of the judiciary a decade before. Warren emphatically told the other members present at that meeting that he would refuse to speak to TV reporters: “I never have [appeared on television] and I don’t propose to do it here…. I am going to treat this as much in a judicial way as I possibly can, and that in the first place is not to talk.” He also declined to hire a press specialist, which Commission staffer Howard P. Willens says in retrospect “was probably a mistake.” Instead, Commission members issued a short press release after every meeting and mostly dodged the cameras and microphones that besieged them.
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An 1848 Matthew Brady photo of Dolly Madison 1768-1849. James died in 1836 a decade too soon to be a subject for photography. I think Zach Taylor may have been first President who was photographed.
One thing I notice is how small their upper body frames seem to be in those days. Of course she was 80 here but even photos of younger people seem to reveal this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DMadison.jpg
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Raped all women 8 to 80. Then became more discriminant. With torches searching at night while frenzied with vodka looking for the prettiest.. In gangs in packs. After much vodka. Vodka the Wermackt did not destroy in hopes the Russians would be stuporous to fight. Instead the fire water guzzling made them fight even harder with no stops with great desire and rage sexual appetite. Rape the girls ifn front of mothers fathers sons daughters husbands they when they would then often shoot afterwards. Some women would offer herself to a single Russian hoping he would protect her from to protect her from gangs. When the women would begin starving the "rape" would morph into more like prostitution to "pay for food, or cigarettes.
Thinking they could save themselves old women would throw the younger girls to the "wolves" thinking they would be spared. Any Russian women were in the area and watched events unfold just laughed. German "whores" must have deserved it.
Maybe ten percent killed themselves out of shame. When German soldiers came home they were shamed and left. Women who did survive were to suffer this the rest of their lives. They wouldn't speak of it. The shame. The pain that is relived when one remembers and recounts. Watching loved ones being violated. Watching the few loved ones who bravely tried to fight back get shot dead.
The criminals many would not care one iota. Some would boast. Some would get smashed drunk and go on hunts in wolve packs pulling prey right off the streets in front of crowds. Pull them from their hiding places in the ruble, in the alley way , in the lofts. After all, Russians who suffered even worse deserved revenge on what was done to them and their people. To desecrate your enemy is to enjoy the spoils of war.
We all have mothers. Most have sisters, aunts, daughters, women we admire, our teachers, our caretakers, our nurses, children of our friends wives our friends, other mothers. The horror . The horror .
It should never happen again. But we all know it will. Civilization is only one step away from coming apart at the seems and it is again every man and woman for themselves.
*****Various waves and situations of rapes in Germany at end of WW2:
Suppressed History, Buried Crimes »
German Woman Breaks Silence about Red Army Rapes
March 10, 2010 by Ironlight
An 80-year-old German woman has broken an old taboo of silence over the rapes she endured at the hands of Soviet soldiers in the second world war with a searing book about the crimes of the Red Army as it marched towards Berlin.
By Allan Hall in Berlin
Published: 2:05PM GMT 28 Feb 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
“Why Did I Have To Be A Girl” by Gabriele Koepp is the first book published about the rapes under a victim’s real name. Mrs Koepp was one of an estimated two million German girls and women raped by Soviet soldiers, encouraged by their leader Josef Stalin to regard the crime as a spoil of war after Hitler’s invasion had left 26 million Russians dead.
“Frau. Komm,” was a phrase that women dreaded hearing from Red Army soldiers. In the weeks after the city fell the rape epidemic was so bad that even the Catholic church countenanced abortion for some victims.
Even today, Mrs Koepp has trouble sleeping. “I was hardly more than a child. Writing this has not been easy, but I had no choice: who else would do it?”
Mrs Koepp told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine at the weekend that it was on the evening of January 25 1945, when she was 15, that her mother told her to pack quickly as she had to flee.
They lived in Schneidemuehl, in the former German region of Pomerania which is now a Polish town called Pila. She and her sister left the next day aboard a cattle train that was supposed to head towards Berlin. But it went in a different direction and the engine was soon blown up by Russian artillery. “The freight car door was locked,” she said. “I managed to climb up and crawl out of a high window. My sister was left behind: I have never seen her again.”
Her ordeal of multiple rape in a nearby village went on for two weeks until she was taken in at a farm and hid from the Soviets.
She was reunited with her mother 15 months later in Hamburg but says her mother was cold to her when she tried to talk of her pain and shame. British historian Antony Beevor chronicled the mass rapes in his 2002 book about the Soviet onslaught on Germany. Mrs Koepp’s book will be translated into English at the end of the summer.
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AT THE MERCY OF MONSTERS
Tuesday March 2,2010
By Paul Callan
http://www.express.co.uk
GABRIELE Koepp was just 15 with blue eyes and blonde hair woven into plaits – a pretty schoolgirl whose face shone with innocence. But on the morning of January 26, 1945, she crouched trembling with terror under a table in a farmhouse.
Outside she could hear the Russian soldiers, their voices slurred with drink, shouting for women. “Frau komm, frau komm,” (“come here woman, come here woman”) they bellowed in heavily Russian-accented German. It was a cry that thousands of women would learn to dread.
Suddenly some of the soldiers stumbled into the kitchen and a handful of old women refugees, fearful they would be attacked, dragged Gabriele out, thrusting her towards the Russians. She was immediately raped by every soldier. It was not the first time. The day before she had been caught by two Russians, hurled to the ground and violated.
So it went on for two weeks until she was taken to another farm and hidden from the sex-crazed soldiers. Now aged 80 Gabriele still remembers those terrible days and in particular how she was betrayed by the old women. “I despised those women, I still do,” she said. “I have no tears but I feel hatred rising up inside me.”
It is a boiling hatred that has lasted 65 years since the Allies, including fierce Soviet forces, smashed their way across Europe… But as they advanced the Russians unleashed an orgy of sickening self-gratification as soldiers of the Red Army embarked on a lengthy campaign of rape, looting, murder and depravity.
Now Gabriele Koepp has written a book of searing honesty called Why Did I Have To Be A Girl, about the rapes carried out by the Red Army as it advanced towards Berlin. The book is unprecedented, being the first time a German woman has broken the lengthy taboo by writing about being one of the estimated two million victims of rampaging Soviet soldiers.
What sickened many at the time was that the soldiers were actively encouraged to rape German women by Russian dictator Josef Stalin. When one of his commanders protested Stalin exploded: “Can’t you understand it if a soldier, who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death, has fun with some woman or takes a trifle?” To Stalin German women were merely the “spoils of war”.
Gabriele was such a “spoil” for those 14 days when she was relentlessly and repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers, so much so that she cannot even to this day, say the very word. “My life has been some 29,200 days,” she said. “But really it was destroyed in those 14 days of the … I cannot say the word. I was innocent when it happened.
“There is a debate going on in Germany at the moment about the so-called expellees from land that once belonged to Germany, the loss of the homeland, etc, but that is [comparatively] nothing to me. I live with what happened to me all the time. There are days I cannot eat because of it, even now all these years later.
“Writing of what happened hasn’t made anything easier for me but I had to do it. Who else would?” Gabriele studiously avoids detail and writes in the book of “the place of the terror”, the “gates of hell” and calls the rapists “brutes and scoundrels”. She avoids the word “rape” and adds with some fear in her eyes: “I cannot even say that word.”
The book is a searing scrutiny of the agony that to this very day the Russian establishment continues to deny. Gabriele was one of an estimated two million German girls and women, some as young as six and as old as 80, who were raped by Soviet soldiers… Their justification was that Hitler’s invasion of Russia had left 26 million dead and revenge would be sweet. Much of the rape and murder by the Russians took place as they approached Berlin.
Berliners had prayed that the Western Allies would reach their city before the Russians, but General Eisenhower, the overall commander- in-chief, had decided the Russians should reach Berlin first on account of their own huge losses.
But as early as 1944 terrible reports were seeping through to Berlin from the moment the thrusting Red Army entered East Prussia and Silesia.
By the time the Soviet troops entered Berlin there was terror on the streets. The rapes usually started in the evenings after the soldiers had drunk large amounts of vodka. That familiar cry of “frau komm” soon echoed around the rubble-strewn streets.
Any woman found, whatever her age, was savagely thrown to the ground and brutally attacked. Filthy drunken soldiers hunted in packs, some women were raped by as many as 20 men.
One of the worst mistakes of the defeated German authorities had been their failure to destroy Berlin’s considerable stocks of alcohol as the Red Army drew nearer. Erroneously, they thought a drunken enemy could not fight. But the Russians fought even harder, as well as having their desires inflamed.
Nor did the Soviet women soldiers do anything to stop their male comrades. One Berlin woman was being raped in succession by three men when three others arrived, one of them a woman. When the German woman appealed to her to intervene she merely laughed out loud. There were tragic attempts to resist the soldiers. A 13-year-old boy started flailing at a soldier who was raping his mother in front of him. When the Russian finished he turned to the boy and shot him…
AS night closed in the screams of women being attacked could be heard all over the city. It is estimated that up to 10,000 of the women who were raped died, mostly from suicide. Some could never talk about it and for the young such as Gabriele, it would prove a lifelong horror.
For many men returning home learning that their wives had been raped was traumatic… Many marriages broke up…
Eventually communist leaders became deeply embarrassed by the reports of Soviet behaviour and made complaints to the Kremlin which admitted nothing and even claimed it was all Western propaganda designed to “damage the high reputation of the Red Army”.
The Red Army war memorial in Berlin is dominated by a huge figure of a Russian soldier. There is an expression of heroic triumph on his sculptured face. In one hand he holds a child, while the other wields a sword that smashes a swastika.
But to German women of the wartime generation, including Gabriele Koepp, there is another name for that memorial: “The tomb of the unknown rapist.”
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History Of “The Victors” Which You Will Never Hear
They raped every German female from eight to 80′
Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed new book about the fall of Berlin, on a massive war crime committed by the victorious Red Army.
Wednesday May 1, 2002
The Guardian
“Red Army soldiers don’t believe in ‘individual liaisons’ with German women,” wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. “Nine, ten, twelve men at a time – they rape the women on a collective basis.”
The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour.
Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that “many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers”. Numerous examples of gang rape were given – “girls under 18 and old women included”.
Marshal Rokossovsky issued order No 006 in an attempt to direct “the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield.” It appears to have had little effect. There were also a few arbitrary attempts to exert authority. The commander of one rifle division is said to have “personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spreadeagled on the ground”. But either officers were involved themselves, or the lack of discipline made it too dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with submachine guns.
Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht’s invasion, had given the idea that any cruelty would be allowed. Even many young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to disapprove. “Our soldiers’ behaviour towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!” said a 21-year-old from Agranenko’s reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,” she recounted later. “It was an army of rapists.”
Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.
The subject of the Red Army’s mass rapes in Germany has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened. The handful prepared to speak openly, however, are totally unrepentant. “They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed,” said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that “two million of our children were born” in Germany.
The capacity of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either happy with their fate, or at least accepted that it was their turn to suffer after the Wehrmacht had invaded Russia, is striking. “Our fellows were so sex-starved,” a Soviet major told a British journalist at the time, “that they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty – much to these grandmothers’ surprise, if not downright delight.”
One can only scratch at the surface of the psychological contradictions. When gang-raped women in Königsberg begged their attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men appear to have felt insulted. “Russian soldiers do not shoot women,” they replied. “Only German soldiers do that.” The Red Army had managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate [what is your definition of liberation?!] Europe from fascism it could behave entirely as it liked, both personally and politically.
Domination and humiliation permeated most soldiers’ treatment of women in East Prussia. The victims not only bore the brunt of revenge for Wehrmacht crimes, they also represented an atavistic target as old as war itself. Rape is the act of a conqueror, the feminist historian Susan Brownmiller observed, aimed at the “bodies of the defeated enemy’s women” to emphasise his victory. Yet after the initial fury of January 1945 dissipated, the sadism became less marked. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, its soldiers tended to regard German women more as a casual right of conquest. The sense of domination certainly continued, but this was perhaps partly an indirect product of the humiliations which they themselves had suffered at the hands of their commanders and the Soviet authorities as a whole.
A number of other forces or influences were at work. Sexual freedom had been a subject for lively debate within Communist party circles during the 1920s, but during the following decade, Stalin ensured that Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in with dogma designed to “deindividualise” the individual. Human urges and emotions had to be suppressed. Freud’s work was banned, divorce and adultery were matters for strong party disapproval. Criminal sanctions against homosexuality were reintroduced. The new doctrine extended even to the complete suppression of sex education. In graphic art, the clothed outline of a woman’s breasts was regarded as dangerously erotic. They had to be disguised under boiler suits. The regime clearly wanted any form of desire to be converted into love for the party and above all for Comrade Stalin.
Most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women. So the Soviet state’s attempts to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of “barracks eroticism” which was far more primitive and violent than “the most sordid foreign pornography”. All this was combined with the dehumanising influence of modern propaganda and the atavistic, warring impulses of men marked by fear and suffering.
The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for labour. “Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them,” he noted. “One girl said to me in tears: ‘He was an old man, older than my father’.”
The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29, 1945 the central committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union) informed Stalin’s associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. “On the night of 24 February,” General Tsygankov recorded in the first of many examples, “a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women’s dormitory in the village of Grutenberg and raped them.”
In Berlin, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, despite the warnings they had heard from Goebbels. Many reassured themselves that, although the danger must be great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the city in front of everybody.
In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.
Yet within a couple of days, a pattern emerged of soldiers flashing torches in the faces of women huddled in the bunkers to choose their victims. This process of selection, as opposed to the indiscriminate violence shown earlier, indicates a definite change. By this stage Soviet soldiers started to treat German women more as sexual spoils of war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.
Rape has often been defined by writers on the subject as an act of violence which has little to do with sex. But that is a definition from the victim’s perspective. To understand the crime, one needs to see things from the perpetrator’s point of view, especially in the later stages when unaggravated rape had succeeded the extreme onslaught of January and February.
Many women found themselves forced to “concede” to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda’s, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort: “Frau ist Frau” (or, “a woman is a woman”).
Women soon learned to disappear during the “hunting hours” of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.
Estimates of rape victims from the city’s two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.
If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it was either a father trying to defend a daughter or a young son trying to protect his mother. “The 13-year old Dieter Sahl,” neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event, “threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot.”
After the second stage of women offering themselves to one soldier to save themselves from others, came the post-battle need to survive starvation. Susan Brownmiller noted “the murky line that divides wartime rape from wartime prostitution”. Soon after the surrender in Berlin, Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German film-maker who researched the subject in great detail, wrote of “the grey area of direct force, blackmail, calculation and real affection”.
The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation in which Red Army officers settled in with German “occupation wives”. The Soviet authorities were appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army officers, intent on staying with their German lovers, deserted when it was time to return to the Motherland.
Even if the feminist definition of rape purely as an act of violence proves to be simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency. If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. It also suggests a much darker side to male sexuality than we might care to admit
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2587193/Secret-desert-camp-used-First-World-War-hero-Lawrence-Arabia-discovered-intact-rum-jars-campfire.html
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Ulysses S. Grant's Lifelong Struggle With Alcohol
Originally published by America's Civil War magazine. Published Online: June 12, 2006
Despite Ulysses Simpson Grant's stature as one of the leading figures in American history, many mysteries remain about the man.1 Throughout his lengthy career Grant battled accusations that he was overly fond of the bottle, but did his alleged excessive drinking make him an alcoholic? For that matter, did he really drink that much more that the average man of the nineteenth century?
There was some precedent for alcohol abuse in Grant's family. Noah Grant, Ulysses' paternal grandfather, who came from a prominent New England family and had served in the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War, turned to alcohol after the death of his first wife. His alcohol consumption became so uncontrollable that it led to his financial ruin and premature death. Noah Grant's addiction became so bad that after the death of his second wife he abandoned his son, Jesse.2
Because of Noah's failure, Jesse Grant was forced at a very young age to make his way in the world alone, toiling as a laborer on local farms until he eventually found work at the home of Ohio Supreme Court Justice George Tod.3 His exposure to Tod's lifestyle and his memories of his father's destructive alcoholism bred in Jesse a fierce determination to succeed in life.4 At age sixteen, Jesse apprenticed himself to a tanner to learn a trade and soon began a business of his own. Eventually, through hard work and good business sense, Jesse became successful, and married Hannah Simpson in 1821. On April 27, 1822, not long after the couple settled in Ohio, their first son, Ulysses, was born.5 Even with continued business success and the birth of four more children, Jesse and Hannah Grant remained dedicated to the ideal of earnest labor and education. Both were stern and intolerant of those who were not willing to work hard and stay sober.6
Driven by his belief in hard work and desire to see his son succeed–and no doubt impressed with the austerity of a military education–Jesse Grant procured an appointment to the United States Military Academy for Ulysses. At West Point, Grant received passing grades but did not revel in the Spartan military lifestyle. Like many other young cadets, Grant became exposed to alcohol, but there is no evidence that he overindulged during his time there.7
In early nineteenth-century America alcohol consumption was an accepted facet of everyday life. Many Americans consumed liquor because they believed it was nutritious, stimulated digestion, and relaxed the nerves. Liquor was also consumed to help wash down food that was often poorly cooked, greasy, salty, and sometimes even rancid.8 By 1830, the annual per capita consumption of alcohol by Americans had climbed to more than five gallons.9 The small, professional army that Grant joined as a second lieutenant after his graduation in 1843 mirrored this widespread societal use of alcohol.
After graduation Grant was assigned to the Fourth Infantry Regiment at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, outside St. Louis. While there, he had an opportunity to become familiar with the family of his West Point roommate, Frederick Dent. During one of his visits to the Dents, Grant met Frederick's sister Julia. A relationship soon developed between Ulysses and Julia, with Grant spending as much time as possible with the young lady. These visits frequently caused Grant to be late for dinner at the post's officers' mess. Interestingly, the fine for being late to dinner was one bottle of wine.
The presiding officer for the mess was Captain Robert Buchanan, a rigid disciplinarian who enforced the rules with a stiff impartiality. The fourth time Grant was late returning to the post, Buchanan informed him that he would again be fined the requisite bottle of wine. Grant, who had already purchased three bottles of wine for the mess, had some words with Buchanan concerning the fine and refused to pay. This trivial confrontation was the beginning of a long-running feud between the two.10
Grant received a reprieve from his unpaid mess bills when rising tensions with Mexico caused his regiment to be transferred to Texas. The Fourth Infantry became involved in military operations against Mexico in 1846 and became one of the most heavily engaged regiments of the war.11 Even so, the regiment also experienced all of the boredom, inactivity, and drinking that was a feature of any army on campaign. It was during such lulls that Grant was known to drink with his peers.12 However, these episodes were confined to moments of boredom and monotony and were common among many of his fellow officers. Grant emerged from the Mexican War with two brevet promotions, a solid reputation, and a bright future.
Following the war and a brief period of occupation duty in Mexico, Grant returned to St. Louis and married Julia on August 22, 1848.13 After his honeymoon, Grant began his Regular Army duties. His first posting was to the isolated garrison at Sackets Harbor, New York, where Grant learned garrison duty was a far cry from his adventures in Mexico. While at Sackets Harbor, he was one of many officers who coped with the inactivity of peacetime by cycles of frequent drinking. Worried about his increasingly heavy drinking, Grant joined the Sons of Temperance in the winter of 1851 and became an active participant in the temperance movement. During the remainder of his stay at Sackets Harbor, his involvement with the Sons of Temperance seemed to alleviate the urge to drink.14
Grant's next post, Detroit, Michigan, took him away from the moral support of the Sons of Temperance and reintroduced him to the heavy drinking that was a feature of army life. Grant soon began to confront accusations that he drank too heavily. One of these accusations arose when he brought charges against Zachariah Chandler, a local storekeeper. Like most merchants, Chandler was often too busy minding his store to take the time to clear the ice from the sidewalk. One night, while passing in front of Chandler's home, Grant slipped and fell on the ice and injured his leg. He angrily filed a civil complaint against the storekeeper. During the subsequent court case, Chandler said in reference to Grant, 'If you soldiers would keep sober, perhaps you would not fall on people's pavement and hurt your legs.'15 Grant won his complaint, but the case grabbed the attention of the military community in St. Louis and only fed rumors among the officers that Ulysses S. Grant was overly fond of the bottle.
In the spring of 1852 Grant's regiment was ordered to Fort Vancouver, Oregon. After leaving Julia and his children with his in-laws in Missouri, Grant traveled to New York City for transport to Panama via the steamship Ohio.
Grant, then serving as the Fourth's quartermaster and responsible for many of the logistic matters that were involved in transporting an infantry regiment, shared quarters with J. Finley Schenck, the captain of Ohio. Schenck later said that Grant was a diligent worker and would continue to conduct his duties after Schenck had gone to bed. The captain remembered that Grant would come in and out of the cabin throughout the evening to drink from whiskey bottles kept in the liquor cabinet.16 This pattern continued until Ohio arrived in Panama. However, from the time of his coming ashore in Panama to his arrival at Fort Vancouver, Grant was kept so busy with his military responsibilities that he had no time to be idle, and there were no further problems with drinking reported.
Not long after arriving at Fort Vancouver, however, Grant began to battle the boredom and loneliness that came with prolonged separation from his family. Like other officers at the post, Grant turned to the bottle to help pass the time, and many men stationed at the fort later recalled seeing him drink.
Unfortunately for Grant, his small stature and frame ensured that he would start to show the ill effects of alcohol after only a few drinks. Grant's reputation was further tarnished because he had a tendency to be intoxicated in front of the wrong people. One of those who witnessed his drinking while at Fort Vancouver was future general George B. McClellan. Becoming intoxicated in the presence of officers like McClellan, considered to be among the Army's best and brightest, spread the question of Grant's drinking habits to increasingly important people within the Army.17
In September 1853 Grant was transferred to Fort Humboldt, California, to fill the captaincy of the Fourth Infantry's Company F.18 He was to find the fort more foreboding than any other post he was assigned to during his pre-Civil War career. Since the fort was located in an isolated area of northern California, Grant's military life became slow, tedious, and monotonous. He watched his subordinates do most of the routine work and the Indians in the area remained peaceful. Things were so boring that Grant spent much of his time at Ryan's Store, a local trading post that served liquor.19
The time that Grant passed at Ryan's did not go unnoticed by Fort Humboldt's commander, Lt. Col. Robert Buchanan. This was the same Robert Buchanan with whom Grant had argued at Jefferson Barracks many years previously. Buchanan still harbored a strong dislike for Grant. He used his position as the post commander to make life unbearable for the captain and helped spread rumors that Grant was intemperate.20
Made miserable by Buchanan and missing his family, Grant began to consider resigning his commission. One night he imbibed more than usual, and when he reported for duty the next day, he appeared to still be intoxicated. Buchanan became furious and put Grant on report for drunkenness while on duty, instructing him to draft a letter of resignation and to keep it in a safe place. After a similar instance of late-night drinking a short time later, Buchanan requested that Grant sign the letter of resignation he had drafted earlier or he would be charged with drunkenness while on duty.21
Facing a court-martial, Grant decided that it was time to resign. On April 11, 1854, he sent his signed letter of resignation to the secretary of war.22 Grant had served in the Army for fifteen years, performed well, and gained valuable experience. During those fifteen years, he had occasionally indulged in periods of drinking, but these generally had been confined to social occasions or when he had little to occupy his time and was separated from his family. There is no indication that prior to his resignation Grant drank more than was typical for a man of the time. Unfortunately, Grant incautiously allowed others to see him when inebriated, and he left the Army with a reputation as a heavy drinker.
With Colonel Buchanan, Fort Humboldt, and his army career now behind him, Grant turned his attention to farming. For three years he tried to make a living from the land before giving up in 1858. After the failure of the farm, he unsuccessfully attempted a number of jobs, and was eventually forced to return to his father's home and work in the family tanning shop in Galena, Illinois.23
Despite such disappointments, Grant was content. Reunited with Julia and busy with the demands of supporting his family, he had neither the time nor the inclination to drink and was able to lead a sober life.
After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the former army officer proffered his services to the recently appointed commander of Ohio's militia, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. When he did not get a response from McClellan, who no doubt remembered Grant from Fort Vancouver, Grant offered his services to Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon in St. Louis. Again, he received no response.24 Evidently, Grant was haunted by his reputation as a drunk.
Frustrated, Grant returned to Galena to help process paperwork and muster local volunteers into service. Although he had hoped for a regimental command, this time spent mustering in raw recruits was important–it brought him to the attention of Congressman Elihu B. Washburne. Realizing his capability as a soldier and organizer, Washburne persuaded Illinois Governor Richard Yates to appoint Grant colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry Regiment. The Twenty-first had been a problem regiment, but Grant quickly brought discipline to the unit and turned it into an effective fighting force. Having proven his ability as a colonel, Grant was promoted to brigadier general in July 1861.25
Grant then went to see Maj. Gen. John C. Fremont, commander of the Army's Western Department, hoping to obtain a command in Missouri. Most members of Fremont's staff wanted him to ignore Grant, but Major Justice McKinsty, Fremont's aide, argued on Grant's behalf. Grant got the position, and it proved to be the break he needed. He rapidly moved through a series of departmental commands, and in early 1862 led the Tennessee expedition that forced the capitulation of Forts Henry and Donelson, vital Southern strongholds on the Tennessee River.26
While his victories at Henry and Donelson earned Grant higher command, they also carried the accusations of his drinking to a wider audience. Reporters and officers jealous of Grant's fast rise, as well as disillusioned civilians, used the perception of Grant as a drunkard in an attempt to explain the horrific losses suffered at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862.
Shocked by the casualties of what up to that point was the war's bloodiest battle, many newspaper reporters wrote articles critical of Grant's command. These criticisms fed the rumors that Grant, who many believed had been forced from the Army because of his love of the bottle, had been caught drunk and off guard by Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston's surprise attack.
The losses suffered by both sides at Shiloh had more to do with the nature of nineteenth-century warfare than the nature of Grant's relationship with liquor, but rumors of his affection for spirits now became generally accepted. Those who were jealous of Grant's success helped spread the rumors. While it was true that Grant had begun to drink again after avoiding alcohol in the years before the start of the war, there are no reported incidents of him drinking excessively prior to the start of the Vicksburg campaign in late 1862. Major John Rawlins, a close member of Grant's personal staff who took it upon himself to keep Grant temperate, went to great lengths to defend Grant against accusations that he had been drinking during the battle.
Despite the persistent rumors of his Shiloh drunkeness, Grant pressed on. In November 1862 he began his campaign to capture the Mississippi River port of Vicksburg, the key to Southern control of the river. Unable to quickly defeat the Confederate forces, by May 1863 Grant had been forced to begin a protracted siege of the city. It was during this lengthy siege, and while he was again separated from his family for a prolonged period of time, that the most well-documented instances of Grant's drinking took place.
The first occurred on May 12, 1863. Sylvanus Cadwallader, a newspaper reporter who had attached himself to Grant's staff and was following the progress of the campaign, was sitting in the tent of Colonel William Duff, Grant's chief of artillery, carrying on a casual conversation. Suddenly, Grant stepped in. Duff pulled out a cup, dipped it into a barrel that he had stored in his tent, and handed the cup to Grant. Grant drank the contents and promptly handed the cup back to Duff. This procedure was repeated two more times, and Grant left the tent. Cadwallader then learned that the barrel contained whiskey. Duff had been ordered by Grant to keep the barrel handy for his exclusive use.27
Less than a month later, Cadwallader recounted the most infamous tale of Grant's drinking during the war. It began on June 3 during an inspection tour to Satartia, Mississippi, on the Yazoo River. The siege was agonizingly slow, and Grant had been separated from Julia since April. To alleviate his boredom, he had decided to travel up the Yazoo. During his trip, Grant encountered the steamboat Diligence carrying Cadwallader downriver from Satartia. Grant decided to board Diligence, and according to Cadwallader: 'I was not long in perceiving that Grant had been drinking heavily, and that he was still keeping it up. He made several trips to the bar room of the boat in a short time, and became stupid in speech and staggering in gait. This was the first time he had shown symptoms of intoxication in my presence, and I was greatly alarmed by his condition, which was fast becoming worse.'28 For the next two days, Cadwallader tried unsuccessfully to stop Grant from drinking and did his best to keep him from trouble. By the time Grant finally arrived back at his headquarters, he had sobered up.29
The final incident occurred in July after the surrender of Vicksburg when Grant traveled to New Orleans to discuss operations with Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks. On September 4, Grant, Banks, and their respective staffs rode out to review the troops stationed in New Orleans. Banks had given Grant a large, untamed charger as a gift, and Grant elected to take the horse on the inspection. The animal proved very spirited, and following the inspection Grant had the horse moving at a fast gallop on the return trip into the city when the horse lost its footing and fell, severely injuring the general. Almost from the moment that the unfortunate beast slipped, rumors began circulating that the general had been drunk during the ride. However, there was never any evidence to prove that an intoxicated Grant caused the horse to fall.30
From the New Orleans incident until the end of the war in April 1865, there are no stories of Grant's drinking to excess. Rumors of alcohol abuse continued to hound him, but no evidence suggests that Grant ever repeated his bender of June 1863.
While the severity of Grant's drinking problem was clearly magnified by rumor, it does seem clear from his drinking that Grant had inherited some of his grandfather's fondness for the bottle. Yet, unlike his grandfather, Grant was largely able to control his drinking thanks to the help of people close to him and his own willpower and sense of duty.
Grant seemed to experience his greatest temptation to drink during long periods of inactivity or when he was away from his family. When he became commanding general of the Army, he was able to bring Julia and his oldest son to his headquarters. Julia had always been Grant's strongest supporter in his battle with alcohol, and with her present, Grant stayed sober.
By today's standards, Grant could be considered an alcoholic, but he was able to control his addiction. As Grant biographer Geoffrey Perret explained: 'The entire staff, as well as most of Grant's division and corps commanders, was well aware of his drinking problem. [Brig. Gen. John A.] McClernand tried to make capital out of it and one or two other officers expressed their disgust at Grant's weakness, but to the rest, it did not matter. A few were alcoholics themselves, but the main reason it was tolerated was that when Grant got drunk, it was invariably during quiet periods. His drinking was not allowed to jeopardize operations. It was a release, but a controlled one, like the ignition of a gas flare above a high-pressure oil well.'31
Grant learned how to cope with his addiction to liquor by learning when he could take a drink. Although difficult at times, Grant was able to control his sickness and rely on his ability as a natural leader to achieve victory on the battlefield. As historian James McPherson explained: 'In the end…his predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general. His struggle for self-discipline enabled him to understand and discipline others; the humiliation of prewar failures gave him a quiet humility that was conspicuously absent from so many generals with a reputation to protect; because Grant had nowhere to go but up, he could act with more boldness and decision than commanders who dared not risk failure.'32 Consequently, Grant was able to overcome personal failures and adversity and become a well-respected and adored man in later life.
1 Lyle W. Dorsett, 'The Problem of Ulysses S. Grant's Drinking During the Civil War,' Hayes Historical Journal (hereinafter referred to as Problem), vol. 4, no.2 (1983): 37.
2 Ibid., 39.
3 Geoffrey Perret, Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President (hereinafter referred to as Soldier & President), (New York: Random House, 1997), 7.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 Ibid., 9.
6 Dorsett, Problem, 39.
7 Mark Grimsley, 'Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Times, a Special Issue,' (hereinafter referred to as Life and Times) Civil War Times Illustrated, February 1990, 21.
8 W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press 1979), preface.
9 Ibid., 8.
10 William Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant, Politician (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1935; reprint, New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co. 1957), 1011.
11 Grimsley, Life and Times, 24.
12 Dorsett, Problem, 39.
13 Grimsley, Life and Times, 24.
14 Gene Smith, Lee and Grant: A Dual Biography (hereinafter referred to as Lee and Grant) (New York: McGraw Hill Co., 1984), 64.
15 William E. Woodward, Meet General Grant (New York: H. Liveright, 1928), 125.
16 Charles G. Ellington, The Trial of U.S. Grant: The Pacific Coast Years, 1852-1854 (hereinafter referred to as Trial) (Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1987), 170; Perret, Soldier & President, 92.
17 Perret, Soldier and President,100.
18 Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters (New York: Library of America, 1990), 139.
19 Ellington, Trial, 178.
20 Laura Ann Rickarby, Ulysses S. Grant and the Strategy of Victory (New York: Silver Burdett Press, 1981), 45.
21 Smith, Lee and Grant, 65.
22 William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981), 55.
23 Dorsett, Problem, 42.
24 Grimsley, Life and Times, 27.
25 Stewart Sifakis, Who Was Who In The Civil War, vol. 1, Who Was Who in the Union: A Biographical Encyclopedia of More Than 1500 Union Participants (New York: Facts on File, 1988), 161.
26 Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1960), 38.
27 Sylvanus Cadwallader, Three Years With Grant, ed. Benjamin P. Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 71.
28 Sylvanus Cadwallader, Three Years With Grant, ed. Benjamin P. Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1955; reprint Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, 1996), 103.
29 Sylvanus Cadwallader, Three Years With Grant, ed. Benjamin P. Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1956), 10210.
30 Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1968), 225.
31 Perret, Soldier & President, 262.
32 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
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http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-gestapo.htm
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Escaped slavery with others by hijacking a gun boat and dressing up as whites and sailed out of Charleston harbor.
Served for the Union as a civilian advisor and met Abraham Lincoln in 1862 helping to convince the President and Sec of War Stanton to allow Blacks to fight for the Union.
Later became a Republican Congressman and served several terms.
Wrote legislation that led to the first *mandatory* public schools in the country.
Wrote legislation that would have essentially provided for racial integration of the military but it was never "considered" roghly 80 years before the military was integrated.
Gotta love the next quote from him. How times have changed:
Smalls identified with the Republican Party, saying it was
"The party of Lincoln which unshackled the necks of four million human beings." In his campaign speeches he said, "Every colored man who has a vote to cast, would cast that vote for the regular Republican Party and thus bury the Democratic Party so deep that there will not be seen even a bubble coming from the spot where the burial took place." Later in life he recalled, "I can never loose [sic] sight of the fact that had it not been for the Republican Party, I would have never been an office-holder of any kind—from 1862—to present."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smalls
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On the 100th Anniversary of World War I, here is the war explained as a bar fight.
Germany, Austria and Italy are standing together in the middle of a pub when Serbia bumps into Austria and spills Austria's pint. Austria demands Serbia buy it a complete new suit because there are splashes on its trouser leg. Germany expresses its support for Austria's point of view. Britain recommends that everyone calm down a bit. Serbia points out that it can't afford a whole suit, but offers to pay for the cleaning of Austria's trousers.
Russia and Serbia look at Austria. Austria asks Serbia who it's looking at. Russia suggests that Austria should leave its little brother alone. Austria inquires as to whose army will assist Russia in compelling it to do so. Germany appeals to Britain that France has been looking at it, and that this is sufficiently out of order that Britain should not intervene. Britain replies that France can look at who it wants to, that Britain is looking at Germany too, and what is Germany going to do about it?
Germany tells Russia to stop looking at Austria, or Germany will render Russia incapable of such action. Britain and France ask Germany whether it's looking at Belgium. Turkey and Germany go off into a corner and whisper. When they come back, Turkey makes a show of not looking at anyone.
Germany rolls up its sleeves, looks at France, and punches Belgium. France and Britain punch Germany. Austria punches Russia. Germany punches Britain and France with one hand and Russia with the other. Russia throws a punch at Germany, but misses and nearly falls over. Japan calls over from the other side of the room that it's on Britain's side, but stays there.
Italy surprises everyone by punching Austria.
Australia punches Turkey, and gets punched back. There are no hard feelings because Britain made Australia do it. France gets thrown through a plate glass window, but gets back up and carries on fighting. Russia gets thrown through another one, gets knocked out, suffers brain damage, and wakes up with a complete personality change.
Italy throws a punch at Austria and misses, but Austria falls over anyway. Italy raises both fists in the air and runs round the room chanting. America waits till Germany is about to fall over from sustained punching from Britain and France, then walks over and smashes it with a barstool, then pretends it won the fight all by itself.
By now all the chairs are broken and the big mirror over the bar is shattered. Britain, France and America agree that Germany threw the first punch, so the whole thing is Germany's fault. While Germany is still unconscious, they go through its pockets, steal its wallet, and buy drinks for all their friends.
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Way cool....
http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/2014/apr/image-opacity-slider-master/index.html?ww2-dday
How to make the 'magic' work...
1. Left click
2. Hold and drag your mouse cursor from left to right - gently! - on the original photos
3. Picture updates to the same scene today as it appears today
4. Drag your mouse cursor back (from left to right) and you return to the scene as of 1944
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second post
The World the Great War Swept Away
In 1914, Europe was prosperous and what followed was unimaginable.
By
Peggy Noonan
Updated Aug. 7, 2014 7:39 p.m. ET
In this centennial year of the Great War some things have not been said, or at least I haven't heard them. Among them:
All the smart people knew the war would never come. The continent to which war came was on such an upward trajectory in terms of prosperity, inventiveness and political culture that it could have become—it arguably already was—a jewel of civilization. And the common man who should have wept at the war's commencement instead cheered.
John Keegan went into these points in his classic history "The First World War," published in 1998.
His first sentence is beautiful in its simplicity: "I grew up with men who had fought in the First World War and with women who had waited at home for news of them." His father and uncles saw combat, his aunt was "one of the army of spinsters" the war produced.
His overall assessment is blunt: "The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict." Leaders who lacked "prudence" and "good will" failed one after another to stop an eminently stoppable train of events that produced a conflagration. That was tragic not only in terms of loss of life, and psychological, physical, emotional and even spiritual injury to survivors, but because the war destroyed a rising, bettering world: "the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent." It of course also left "a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense" that it guaranteed the world war that would follow 20 years later, which by Keegan's calculation was five times as destructive of human life. Auschwitz and the other extermination camps "were as much relics of the First as the Second world war." "They have their antecedents . . . in the fields where the trenches ran."
World War I didn't do nearly as much material damage as World War II. No big European city was destroyed in World War I, and the Eastern and Western fronts ran mostly through forests and farmlands, which were quickly returned to use at the war's end. "Yet it damaged civilization, the rational and liberal civilization of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilization also."
Prewar European governments, imperial ones included, paid formal and often practical respect "to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government." Confidence in those principles all but collapsed after the war: "Within fifteen years of the war's end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise." To Russia came communism, to Germany Nazism, to Italy fascism and Spain Francoism. All these infections spread from a common wound: the dislocation and death of the great war.
The world swept away had been a rising and increasingly constructive one, where total war was unimaginable: "Europe in the summer of 1914 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on international exchange and co-operation that a belief in the impossibility of general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms."
Informed opinion had it that the disruption of international credit that would follow war "would either deter its outbreak or bring it speedily to an end." And the business of Europe was business. Industrial output was expanding; there were new goods and manufacturing opportunities, such as the production and sale of internal-combustion machines. There were new profit centers, new sources of raw materials, including precious metals. Populations were increasing. Steamships and railways were revolutionizing transport. Capital was circulating. "Belgium, one of the smallest countries in Europe, had in 1914 the sixth largest economy in the world," thanks to early industrialization, new banking and trading methods, and industrial innovators.
Europe was increasingly international—independent nations were dealing and trading with each other. "Common Christianity—and Europe was overwhelmingly Christian by profession in 1914 and strongly Christian in observance also"—found frequent expression in philosophical and political pursuits, including the well-being of labor. Movements to restrict working hours and forbid the employment of children were going forward. European governments were spurred by self-protectiveness: Liberalized labor laws were a way to respond to and attempt to contain the power and appeal of Marxism.
"Europe's educated classes held much of its culture in common." They knew Mozart and Beethoven and grand opera. " Tolstoy was a European figure," as were Victor Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Dickens, Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante. High-school students in England were taught French, and French students German. Study of the classics remained universal, scholars from all the countries of Europe knew Homer, Thucydides, Caesar and Livy. All shared the foundational classics of philosophy, Aristotle and Plato.
Europe as a cultural entity was coherent and becoming more so. By the beginning of the 20th century tourism "had become a middle-class pleasure" because of railways and the hotel industry that followed.
But Europe was also heavily armed. All countries had armed forces, some large and costly ones led by influential, respected figures. What do armies in peacetime do? Make plans to kill each other just in case. Keegan: "[A] new era in military planning had begun; that of the making of war plans in the abstract, plans conceived at leisure . . . and pulled out when eventuality becomes actuality." What do soldiers who've made brilliant plans do? Itch to use them. Europe's armies came to see their jobs as "how to assure military advantage in an international crisis, not how to resolve it."
Soon enough they had their chance.
As you read of the war and its aftermath, you are always stopped by this fact: There is no recorded instance of masses of people gathering together to weep the day it was declared. They should have. The beautiful world they were day by day constructing was in jeopardy and ultimately would be consumed. Yet when people heard the news they threw their hats in the air, parading and waving flags in every capital. In Berlin "crowds thronged the streets shouting, cheering, singing patriotic songs." In London the same. In St. Petersburg thousands waved banners and icons. In Paris, as the city's regiments pushed off, "an immense clamour arose as the Marseillaise burst from a thousand throats."
Western Europe hadn't had a big and costly ground war since 1871. Maybe they forgot what war was. Surely some would have liked the drama and excitement—the interruption in normality, the break in the boring dailiness of life. Or the air of possibility war brings—of valor, for instance, and shown courage. Camaraderie, too, and a sense of romantic engagement with history. A sense of something to live for—victory.
Once a few years ago a reporter who had covered wars talked about this with a brilliant, accomplished, famously leftist editor in New York. At the end of a conversation on a recent conflict the reporter said, quizzically: "Why is there so much war? Why do we do that?"
"Because something's wrong with us," the editor replied.
I told him it was the best definition of original sin I'd ever heard.
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The "peace" silver dollar which was minted between 1921 and 1935:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_dollar
Here is another picture of the model for this coin. Quite beautiful I might add:
http://heritagecoingallery.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1010/2015/02/Teresa-de-Francisci.jpg
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJX0MJotVyE&feature=share
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A lot of the info here surprised me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVzfOmt4Tg&feature=youtu.be
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11948049/The-Battle-of-Agincourt-why-should-we-remember-it.html
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" A good archer could easily shoot fifteen arrows a minute, so five thousand archers could loose 75,000 arrows in one minute; over one thousand a second!"
Wow :-o
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I read that the autopsy on his remains by the Soviets listed this as well but it was unclear how true or accurate that was or if it was made up for propaganda purposes. Now another source which confirms it:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/adolf-hitler-one-testicle_56765819e4b06fa6887daf84
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https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/fall-constantinople.html?src=fba&type=int&page=who
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FDR's vice president from 1932 to 1941 actually opposed FDR's push for expanded Presidential power including his push to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court so he could pack it with liberals He was oldest ex VP when he died at 98 in 1967. JFK visited him shortly before he was shot. I wonder if it was really to see him or meet with "Miss Wool" who was there at the time. In any case after reading this no one would ever recognize him as a Democrat today. He actually sounds like a Republican!!! From Wikipedia:
***In 1932, Garner ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination. It became evident that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York, was the strongest of several candidates; but although he had a solid majority of convention delegates, he was about 100 votes short of the two-thirds required for nomination. Garner cut a deal with Roosevelt, becoming his Vice-Presidential candidate.
Garner was re-elected to the Seventy-third Congress on November 8, 1932, and on the same day was elected Vice President of the United States. He was the second man after Schuyler Colfax to serve as both Speaker of the House and President of the Senate. Garner was re-elected Vice President with Roosevelt in 1936, serving in that office in total from March 4, 1933, to January 20, 1941.
Like most Vice Presidents in this era, Garner had little to do and little influence on the President's policies. He famously described the Vice-Presidency as being "not worth a bucket of warm piss". (For many years, this quote was euphemized as "warm spit".)[4][not in citation given]
During Roosevelt's second term, Garner's previously warm relationship with the President quickly soured, as Garner disagreed sharply with him on a wide range of important issues. Garner supported federal intervention to break up the Flint Sit-Down Strike, supported a balanced federal budget, opposed the Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937 to "pack" the Supreme Court with additional judges, and opposed executive interference with the internal business of the Congress.[5]
During 1938 and 1939, numerous Democratic party leaders urged Garner to run for President in 1940. Garner identified as the champion of the traditional Democratic Party establishment, which often clashed with supporters of Roosevelt's New Deal. The Gallup Poll showed that Garner was the favorite among Democratic voters, based on the assumption that Roosevelt would defer to the longstanding two-term tradition and not run for a third term. Time magazine characterized him on April 15, 1940:
Cactus Jack is 71, sound in wind & limb, a hickory conservative who does not represent the Old South of magnolias, hoopskirts, pillared verandas, but the New South: moneymaking, industrial, hardboiled, still expanding too rapidly to brood over social problems. He stands for oil derricks, sheriffs who use airplanes, prairie skyscrapers, mechanized farms, $100 Stetson hats. Conservative John Garner appeals to many a conservative voter.[6]
Some other Democrats did not find him appealing. In Congressional testimony, union leader John L. Lewis described him as "a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man".[7]
Garner declared his candidacy. Roosevelt refused to say whether he would run again. If he did, it was highly unlikely that Garner could win the nomination, but Garner stayed in the race anyway. He opposed most of Roosevelt's policies, and on principle, opposed presidents serving third terms. At the Democratic National Convention, Roosevelt arranged a "spontaneous" call for his renomination, and won on the first ballot. Garner got only 61 votes out of 1,093. Roosevelt chose Henry A. Wallace to be the Vice Presidential running mate.[8]****
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digital PDF file form of a transcript of the interview of Nat Turner in 1831. It is bit hard to tell how much is actual his verbatim language or from the interviewer but by all accounts he was of extraordinary intelligence and his acts incredibly ruthless and brutal but I am sure no less ruthless than what was done to slaves in 1831.
From what I have read this is the best account available about what happened:
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=etas
The movie of this seems to be getting some good reviews so far but too early to know if biased sampling.
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http://www.wnd.com/2010/11/222637/
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CCP: please post those at http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1879.0
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http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-poland-saved-the-world-russia-15657
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Farnam Street: B.H. Liddell Hart and the Study of Truth and History
________________________________________
B.H. Liddell Hart and the Study of Truth and History
Posted: 04 May 2016 04:00 AM PDT
B.H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970) was many things, but above all, he was a military historian. He wrote tracts on Sherman, Scipio, Rommel, and on military strategy itself. His work influenced Neville Chamberlain and may have even (accidentally) influenced the German army’s blitzkrieg tactic in WWII.
What’s beautiful about Hart’s writing is his insight into human nature as seen through the lens of war. Hart’s experience both studying wars and participating in them — he was a British officer in World War I and present for both World War II and a large portion of the Cold War — gave him wide perspective on the ultimate human folly.
Hart summed up much of his wisdom in a short treatise called Why Don’t we Learn from History?, which he unfortunately left unfinished at his death. In the preface to the book, Hart’s son Adrian sums up his father’s approach to life:
He believed in the importance of the truth that man could, by rational process discover the truth about himself—and about life; that this discovery was without value unless it was expressed and unless its expression resulted in action as well as education. To this end he valued accuracy and lucidity. He valued, perhaps even more, the moral courage to pursue and propagate truths which might be unpopular or detrimental to one’s own or other people’s immediate interests. He recognized that this discovery could best be fostered under certain political and social conditions—which therefore became to him of paramount importance.
Why study history at all? Hart asks us this rhetorically, early on in the book, and replies with a simple answer: Because it teaches us what not to do. How to avoid being stupid:
What is the object of history? I would answer, quite simply—“truth.” It is a word and an idea that has gone out of fashion. But the results of discounting the possibility of reaching the truth are worse than those of cherishing it. The object might be more cautiously expressed thus: to find out what happened while trying to find out why it happened. In other words, to seek the causal relations between events. History has limitations as guiding signpost, however, for although it can show us the right direction, it does not give detailed information about the road conditions.
But its negative value as a warning sign is more definite. History can show us what to avoid, even if it does not teach us what to do—by showing the most common mistakes that mankind is apt to make and to repeat. A second object lies in the practical value of history. “Fools,” said Bismarck, “say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by other people’s experience.”
The study of history offers that opportunity in the widest possible measure. It is universal experience—infinitely longer, wider, and more varied than any individual’s experience. How often do people claim superior wisdom on the score of their age and experience. The Chinese especially regard age with veneration, and hold that a man of eighty years or more must be wiser than others. But eighty is nothing for a student of history. There is no excuse for anyone who is not illiterate if he is less than three thousand years old in mind.
[…]
History is the record of man’s steps and slips. It shows us that the steps have been slow and slight; the slips, quick and abounding. It provides us with the opportunity to profit by the stumbles and tumbles of our forerunners. Awareness of our limitations should make us chary of condemning those who made mistakes, but we condemn ourselves if we fail to recognize mistakes.
There is a too common tendency to regard history as a specialist subject— that is the primary mistake. For, on the contrary, history is the essential corrective to all specialization. Viewed aright, it is the broadest of studies, embracing every aspect of life. It lays the foundation of education by showing how mankind repeats its errors and what those errors are.
Later, Hart expounds further on the value of truth, the value of finding out what’s actually going on as opposed to what one wishes was the case. Hart agrees with the idea that one should recognize reality especially when it makes one uncomfortable, as Darwin was able to do so effectively. If we forget or mask our mistakes, we are doomed to continue making them.
We learn from history that men have constantly echoed the remark ascribed to Pontius Pilate—“What is truth?” And often in circumstances that make us wonder why. It is repeatedly used as a smoke screen to mask a maneuver, personal or political, and to cover an evasion of the issue. It may be a justifiable question in the deepest sense. Yet the longer I watch current events, the more I have come to see how many of our troubles arise from the habit, on all sides, of suppressing or distorting what we know quite well is the truth, out of devotion to a cause, an ambition, or an institution—at bottom, this devotion being inspired by our own interest.
[…]
We learn from history that in every age and every clime the majority of people have resented what seems in retrospect to have been purely matter-of-fact comment on their institutions. We learn too that nothing has aided the persistence of falsehood, and the evils resulting from it, more than the unwillingness of good people to admit the truth when it was disturbing to their comfortable assurance. Always the tendency continues to be shocked by natural comment and to hold certain things too “sacred” to think about.
I can conceive of no finer ideal of a man’s life than to face life with clear eyes instead of stumbling through it like a blind man, an imbecile, or a drunkard—which, in a thinking sense, is the common preference. How rarely does one meet anyone whose first reaction to anything is to ask “Is it true?” Yet unless that is a man’s natural reaction it shows that truth is not uppermost in his mind, and, unless it is, true progress is unlikely.
Indeed, in the 125 short pages of the book, Hart demonstrates the above to be true, with his particular historical focus on accuracy, truth, and freedom, explaining the intertwined nature of the three. A society that squashes freedom of thought and opinion is one that typically distorts truth, and for that reason, Hart was a supporter of free democracy, with all of its problems in full force:
We learn from history that democracy has commonly put a premium on conventionality. By its nature, it prefers those who keep step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on those who may disturb the “conspiracy for mutual inefficiency.” Thereby, this system of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity—and entails the exclusion of first-rate ability, if this is combined with honesty. But the alternative to it, despotism, almost inevitably means the triumph of stupidity. And of the two evils, the former is the less. Hence it is better that ability should consent to its own sacrifice, and subordination to the regime of mediocrity, rather than assist in establishing a regime where, in the light of past experience, brute stupidity will be enthroned and ability may preserve its footing only at the price of dishonesty.
Hart’s clear-eyed view of the world as an examiner of human nature and the repetition of folly led him to conclude that even if authoritarianism and coercion were occasionally drivers of efficiency in the short-run, by the quick and determined decision-making of a dictator, that in the long-term this would always cause stagnation. Calling to mind Karl Popper, Hart recognizes that freedom of thought and the resulting spread of ideas is the real engine of human progress over time, and that should never be squashed:
Only second to the futility of pursuing ends reckless of the means is that of attempting progress by compulsion. History shows how often it leads to reaction. It also shows that the surer way is to generate and diffuse the idea of progress—providing a light to guide men, not a whip to drive them.
Influence on thought has been the most influential factor in history, though, being less obvious than the effects of action, it has received less attention— even from the writers of history. There is a general recognition that man’s capacity for thought has been responsible for all human progress, but not yet an adequate appreciation of the historical effect of contributions to thought in comparison with that of spectacular action. Seen with a sense of proportion, the smallest permanent enlargement of men’s thought is a greater achievement, and ambition, than the construction of something material that crumbles, the conquest of a kingdom that collapses, or the leadership of a movement that ends in a rebound.
Once the collective importance of each individual in helping or hindering progress is appreciated, the experience contained in history is seen to have a personal, not merely a political, significance. What can the individual learn from history—as a guide to living? Not what to do but what to strive for. And what to avoid in striving. The importance and intrinsic value of behaving decently. The importance of seeing clearly—not least of seeing himself clearly.
Hart’s final statement there calls to mind Richard Feynman: “The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Finally, Hart admits that the path of studying history and studying truth is not an easy one. Truth is frequently cloaked, and it takes work to peel away the layers. But if we are to see things clearly, and we must do so if we’re to have a peaceful world, we must persevere in the hunt:
It is strange how people assume that no training is needed in the pursuit of truth. It is stranger still that this assumption is often manifest in the very man who talks of the difficulty of determining what is true. We should recognize that for this pursuit anyone requires at least as much care and training as a boxer for a fight or a runner for a marathon. He has to learn how to detach his thinking from every desire and interest, from every sympathy and antipathy—like ridding oneself of superfluous tissue, the “tissue” of untruth which all human beings tend to accumulate for their own comfort and protection. And he must keep fit, to become fitter. In other words, he must be true to the light he has seen.
Still Interested? Check out the short book in its entirety.
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Sponsored by: Slack - Making teamwork simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.
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More US bashing about the nuclear bomb:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-stone-kuznick-hiroshima-obama-20160524-snap-story.html
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2nd post of day. Photographic firsts:
http://hyperallergic.com/83097/20-of-the-first-photographs-of-things-from-people-to-hoaxes-to-the-moon/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/08/09/101-year-old-man-tells-glenn-beck-what-he-remembers-about-the-1929-stock-market-crash/
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"Young" chick caught on film. She is reported to have been born in 1804:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/68977/footage-shows-earliest-born-person-ever-captured-film
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Amazing!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/science/shipwrecks-black-sea-archaeology.html?emc=edit_th_20161112&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
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Before Pete Maravich:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Eaton
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http://archaeologyhub.info/archaeologists-discover-remains-egyptian-army-biblical-exodus-red-sea/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork
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wow.
how did they keep this secret?
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:-o :-o :-o :-o
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"Wow. How did they keep this secret?"
I am reminded of the witty line from the movie "Lake Placid" (Working from memory) :
"How is it that I do not know that?
"That's because they hid it from you , , , in books."
Here the Egyptian Antiquities Museum.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/opinion/the-february-revolution-and-kerenskys-missed-opportunity.html?emc=edit_th_20170306&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=0
The February Revolution and Kerensky’s Missed Opportunity
[Red Century]
John Quiggin
RED CENTURY MARCH 6, 2017
Aleksandr Kerensky reviewing the troops in 1917. Credit Keystone/Gamma, via Getty Images
Brisbane, Australia — The February Revolution is one of history’s great “What if” moments. If this revolution — which actually took place in early March 1917 according to the West’s Gregorian calendar (Russia adopted that calendar only later) — had succeeded in producing a constitutional democracy in place of the czarist empire as its leaders hoped, the world would be a very different place.
If the leading figure in the provisional government, Aleksandr Kerensky, had seized on an opportunity presented by a now-forgotten vote in the German Reichstag, World War I might have been over before American troops reached Europe. In this alternative history, Lenin and Stalin would be obscure footnotes, and Hitler would never have been more than a failed painter.
By February 1917, after more than two years of bloody and pointless war, six million Russian soldiers were dead, wounded or missing. Privation on the home front was increasing. When the government of Czar Nicholas II announced the rationing of bread, tens of thousands of protesters, many of them women, filled the streets of St. Petersburg. Strikes broke out across the country. The czar tried to suppress the protests by force, but his calls to the army were either met with mutinies or simply ignored.
By the beginning of March, the situation was untenable: Nicholas abdicated, bringing an end to the Romanov dynasty.
The vacuum created by the collapse of the autocracy was filled in part by a provisional government, formed from the opposition groups in the previously powerless Duma, or Parliament, and in part by workers’ councils, called soviets. At the outset, the initiative lay with the provisional government, which seemed to embody the hopes of a majority of the Russian people.
The most immediate of these hopes, the replacement of autocracy by constitutional democracy, was inscribed in the very name of the party that came to power after the February Revolution. The Constitutional Democrats, or Cadets, who had emerged from a failed revolution in 1905, were moderate liberals with substantial support from intellectuals and the urban middle class. Prince Georgi Lvov, a middle-aged aristocrat, became the prime minister, but he was generally seen as a figurehead. The Cadet leader and foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, was the dominant figure in the early days of the revolution.
The Cadets were the most moderate of the parties that jostled for power in the wake of the February Revolution. To their left were the Social Revolutionaries, who, despite their radical-sounding name, were a relatively moderate and democratic group, focused mainly on breaking up the big feudal estates and redistributing land to the peasants. Even more confusingly from a modern perspective, the real revolutionaries were known as Social Democrats, a term now used by European parties of the moderate center-left.
The Social Democrats were further divided into two also misleadingly named factions. The smaller, dominated by Vladimir Lenin, went by the name Bolsheviks (or majority socialists), while the larger group, which included most of the notable leaders other than Lenin, were the Mensheviks (minority socialists). In claiming the mantle of majority for his group when it won a minor procedural vote, Lenin foreshadowed the determination and ruthlessness that would propel him to supreme power.
Those were only the biggest groups. Anarchists, syndicalists and a specifically Jewish leftist group, the Bundists, all competed with, fought against and sometimes allied with one another.
When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, most of these groups, despite their opposition to the czarist regime, had supported what they saw as a defensive war caused by the aggression of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. In this, they were similar to a majority of European socialist and social-democratic parties, which abandoned their professed internationalism and rallied around the flags of their national governments.
Among the minority of political leaders who opposed the war, the most important was Lenin, along with the leaders of the left-wing strand of the Mensheviks, Yuli Martov and Leon Trotsky, all of whom were in exile. From faraway Zurich, Lenin could do little but write denunciations of the “social chauvinists” who supported the war.
As the war dragged on, however, support ebbed among both the political class and the Russian people. The Brusilov offensive of 1916, hailed as a great victory at the time, ended with as many as a million Russians killed or wounded, with nothing of substance in the course of the war changed. Czar Nicholas’s decision to take personal command of the Russian armed forces produced even greater disasters, discrediting both Nicholas and the monarchy as a whole.
The rapid collapse of the regime was, therefore, not surprising. But having come so suddenly to power, the provisional government faced the usual problem of revolutionary regimes: how to satisfy the often contradictory expectations of the people who had put them in power.
The provisional government rapidly introduced reforms that would have seemed utterly transformative in peacetime, instituting universal suffrage and freedoms of speech, assembly, press and religion, and addressing the demands of the many national minorities who made up much of the Russian empire’s population. But none of this delivered the three things the people wanted most: peace, bread and, for the peasants, land.
Of these failures, the most important was the failure of peace. The war continued, and in April it emerged that Milyukov had sent a telegram to the British and French governments, promising continued Russian support. He lost office shortly thereafter, and the Socialist Revolutionary leader Kerensky emerged as his successor.
Despite the obvious lessons of Milyukov’s fall, Kerensky, too, continued the war. After touring the front, he succeeded in rallying the weary troops for yet another offensive. Despite some initial successes, the Kerensky offensive stalled, with heavy loss of life, repeating the grim pattern of World War I.
The zenith of Kerensky’s authority came with the July Days, a mass demonstration undertaken by the Bolsheviks but defeated by forces loyal to the government. With the failure of the July Days protest, Kerensky consolidated his position by becoming prime minister, replacing Lvov.
At almost exactly the same time, far away in Berlin, the socialist and social-democratic parties repented of their decision to endorse the war. Germans were almost as war-weary as Russians, with terrible casualties and widespread shortages caused by the Allies’ blockade. A resolution in the Reichstag, the German Parliament, passed by a large majority, called for a peace “without annexations or indemnities” — a return to the situation that had prevailed before war broke out.
By this time, however, Germany was effectively a military dictatorship. Power lay with the High Command, run by the generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, both of whom were later to play prominent roles in bringing Hitler to power. Unsurprisingly, Ludendorff and Hindenburg ignored the Reichstag motion.
What is surprising, to anyone who has absorbed the standard victor’s view — according to which the Allies were fighting a defensive war to liberate small states — is that Britain was disingenuous about its war aims, while France declined to state them at all. The reason is that those aims were too discreditable to avow openly. In a series of secret treaties, they agreed in the event of victory to carve up the empires of their defeated enemies.
From the Russian viewpoint, the big prize was the Turkish capital, Constantinople, now called Istanbul; this was promised to Russia in a secret agreement in 1915. The subsequent publication of this and other secret treaties by the Bolsheviks did much to discredit the Allied cause.
Kerensky could have repudiated the deals made by the czarist empire and announced his willingness to accept the Reichstag formula of peace without annexations or indemnities. Perhaps the German High Command would have ignored the offer and continued fighting (as it did when the Bolsheviks offered the same terms after the October Revolution at the end of 1917). But the circumstances were far more favorable in July than they were at the end of 1917. As the Kerensky offensive demonstrated, the Russian Army, while demoralized, was still an effective fighting force, and the front line was far closer to the territory of the Central Powers. Moreover, Kerensky commanded credibility with the Western Allies that he could have used to good effect.
Kerensky’s determination to continue the war was a disaster. Within a few months, the armed forces were in open revolt. Lenin, who was transported across Germany in a sealed train with the High Command’s acquiescence in the hope that he would help to knock Russia out of the war, seized the opportunity. The provisional government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. This Bolshevik Revolution consigned the February Revolution to historical oblivion.
After accepting a humiliating treaty imposed by the Germans, Russia was soon embroiled in a civil war more bloody and brutal than even World War I. By its end, the Bolshevik government, launched as a workers’ democracy, was effectively a dictatorship, enabling the ascendancy of a previously obscure Bolshevik, Joseph Stalin, who would become one of the great tyrants of history. On the other side, the German High Command’s rejection of peace similarly led to defeat, national humiliation and the emergence of the 20th century’s other great tyrant, Adolf Hitler.
We cannot tell whether a positive response from Kerensky to the Reichstag peace initiative would have achieved anything. But it is hard to imagine an outcome worse than the one that actually took place. The years of pointless bloodshed that brought Russia two revolutions turned out to be merely a foretaste of the decades of totalitarianism and total war to come. Kerensky’s failure was one of the great missed opportunities of history.
John Quiggin is a professor of economics at the University of Queensland.
This essay is part of a series about the legacy and history of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution.
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http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/viking-age-toy-boat-norway-04678.html
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http://gizmodo.com/the-woman-who-survived-the-titanic-britannic-and-olym-1510790217
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? he was an veteran of fighting for Napoleon and a Jewish butcher?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Rose
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Could have been avoided. See the movie Pork Chop Hill where at the end of the movie it is pointed out millions of (S Koreans) live in freedom due to American resolve. But in Vietnam it was just the opposite:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447285/last-days-vietnam-war-victory-squandered-congress
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http://www.businessinsider.com/winston-churchill-iron-curtain-college-speech-2017-5
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http://www.businessinsider.com/winston-churchill-iron-curtain-college-speech-2017-5
I know someone who teaches there. )
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:-D
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Putin claims his grandfather was a cook or chef who served Rasputin. Lenin, and Stalin. As author Montefiore notes which would be the most historical chef in history.
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I mean since we only seem to find time to denigrate the United States:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-archaeology-skulls-idUSKBN19M3Q6?il=0
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/08/06/the-secret-history-of-hiroshima-supports-trump-on-nuclear-weapons/
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More to be released on September 4:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/503396/true-identity-jack-ripper-may-have-just-been-confirmed
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a registered Republican .
and her favorite magazine was National Review:
Information about the next few years is sketchier. Ms. Peters became a United States citizen in 1978 and later told The Trenton Times that she had registered as a Republican and donated $500 to the conservative magazine National Review, saying it was her favorite publication.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/world/europe/stalins-daughter-dies-at-85.html?mcubz=3
Interesting the daughter of a tyrant didn' t become a Democrat! Guess she knew somethings todays' self righteous do not.
:wink:
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https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2001/9/the-fabrication-of-aboriginal-history
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http://www.thedailyberries.com/scientists-just-found-deep-ocean-seriously-unbelievable-im-still-shock/
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https://theconversation.com/fall-of-troy-the-legend-and-the-facts-92625
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https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2003/4/the-war-to-begin-all-wars
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The U.S.-China Trade Dispute: Rehashing the First Opium War
By Ian Morris
Board of Contributors
Ian Morris
Ian Morris
Board of Contributors
Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to the United Kingdom, addresses a crowd gathered in London's Trafalgar Square for a Lunar New Year celebration on Feb. 16, 2018.
(JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images)
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.
Many of the attitudes on display in the current trade dispute between the United States and China call to mind the sentiments that led to the First Opium War in the 1830s.
As China continues to gain stature on the global stage, the resulting shift in wealth and power worldwide will present just as many crises as the British Industrial Revolution did in the 19th century.
If Washington and Beijing fail to consider the motives and limitations of the other side, they may be doomed to repeat the same mistakes that brought the United Kingdom into conflict with China nearly 200 years ago.
The strategist Edward Luttwak likes to speak of the "autism of great powers," by which he means their inability to see issues from anyone else's perspective. Changing planes a few days ago in Chengdu in southwest China, I saw what he meant. On the front page of China Daily, I read the headline "Flexibility Needed on U.S. Trade Issues." The column that followed was almost painfully restrained. China, it seemed to be implying, was the only grown-up in the room, and the outcome of the negotiations with the United States would depend entirely on Chinese decisions. Li Daokui, a former member of the central bank's monetary policy committee, insisted that Beijing must "maintain a balanced frame of mind ... rather than be irritated by the White House's statements or the U.S. president's messages on Twitter."
On the front page of the China Daily's business section, however, the Chinese ambassador to London sounded very irritated indeed. "Unilateralism is on the rise, protectionism is rampant, populism is spreading," Liu Xiaoming lamented. "Trade protectionism is becoming a weapon in the hands of a certain country to provoke trade disputes that put the global economy at risk."
In the United States, discussions of the current arguments over trade overwhelmingly present the issues purely from a U.S. perspective, apparently forgetting that the Chinese view is just as important. Western analysts above all often seem unaware that trade with the West is one of the most sensitive issues in the modern Chinese identity. Every schoolchild learns that it was Western traders who shattered the Qing dynasty, China's last imperial government, ushering in the "century of humiliations," which ended only after Mao Zedong's victory in 1949. The view from Chengdu — or any other of China's booming cities, for that matter — is always suspicious that Westerners will try to bully China over trade. Contemporary arguments are merely the latest act in a longer drama, in which the West continues a tradition of exploiting China and denying it its rightful place in the sun. Chinese leaders cannot afford to take a purely transactional approach to trade negotiations with the United States, because they know that this is not how their citizens will see things. No government concerned with its own domestic survival can be seen as weak on trade with the West. The view from Chengdu matters.
How timely, then, that historian Stephen Platt has published a new book, Imperial Twilight, taking a fresh look at the beginning of modern China's trading relationships with the West in the infamous First Opium War of 1839-42. As recently as the 1990s, the First Opium War was rarely discussed in the West outside academic circles, and few English-language overviews of it were available for the general reader. As China's economy has boomed across the past quarter-century, though, awareness of the conflict's importance has grown, and today several excellent books describe what happened. What makes Platt's book stand out is that it focuses not on the war itself but on its background, and particularly on the personalities who turned a trade war into a shooting war. Many of the attitudes in the 1830s — both Chinese and Western — foreshadow those on display in recent years, and at almost every turn, the 19th-century actors provide striking lessons in how not to run a trade negotiation.
No Chinese government concerned with its own domestic survival can be seen as weak on trade with the West.
How It Started
The basic story is well-known. European merchants had disappointing experiences in China in the 17th century but found new paths to profit in the early 18th century. Tea was the most lucrative route, displacing silk as the biggest moneymaker before 1725. In that year, Britain's East India Company bought over 90 metric tons (100 tons) of tea; by 1805, the amount had grown to 1,814 metric tons. The volume became a problem, because the only item Chinese officials would accept in exchange for tea was silver, which the company had trouble providing in such quantities. Chinese merchants had little interest in exchanging their own silver for other British goods, and so the company steadily drained its reserves. Twice, in 1793 and in 1816, Britain sent embassies to try to convince the Chinese emperor of the excellence of British goods, in the hope of preserving the profits from the tea trade while ending the pressure on their silver. China rebuffed both efforts.
Yet British traders had found another solution, almost as soon as the tea trade began. Unlike Chinese trade officials, who were interested only in silver, ordinary Chinese citizens had a taste for another British import: opium. In 1719, the novelist Daniel Defoe already could imagine Robinson Crusoe carrying a shipment of the drug from Siam to China, remarking that it was "a Commodity which bears a great price among the Chinese, and which at that Time, was very much wanted there." Fortunately for British merchants, the world's best opium came from Bengal, which came under British rule in the 1750s. By the 1820s, the silver that Chinese consumers were spending on opium more than matched the amount the British handed over to buy tea. Chinese consumers bought more than 900 metric tons of opium from British dealers in 1831 alone.
A Trade War With a Military Resolution
The relationship was splendidly transactional and made plenty of people rich. But there were two big problems: First, the trade was fueling a Chinese opium epidemic every bit as bad as the opioid epidemic plaguing the United States today, and second, opium was illegal in China. It was up to the Chinese government to decide what to do about these facts, and heated internal debates ensued. Some officials — particularly those who personally profited from the drug trade — argued that neither legality nor public health was important enough to warrant disrupting trade with the West. The best strategy, they proposed, was to ignore the issue. Meanwhile, some scholars — particularly those excluded from the inner circles of government — argued that morality outweighed profit and wrote essays urging the ruling elite to end the epidemic by simply shutting down all trade with the West. One member of this camp, Bao Shichen, produced a series of pamphlets in the 1820s trying to convince officials that it would be easy to win a trade war with the United Kingdom, which would quickly cave if cut off from Chinese tea.
By the 1820s, the silver that Chinese consumers were spending on opium more than matched the amount the British handed over to buy tea.
Still other experts insisted that the problem was not the opium itself but the deficit its purchase created. "To an individual it may seem like opium is a major problem while silver is a minor one," a scholar named Wu Lanxiu pointed out. "But from the perspective of the empire as a whole, it is opium that is minor. Silver is the major problem." From this standpoint, the solution was obvious: legalize opium and put a tariff on it, requiring Western traders to hand back some of the silver they were taking in. "By such means," Wu added, "we can trade in all the goods of the world but still keep our silver in our country. In [10] years, the economy will recover."
In the end, the emperor went for a different solution. He declared war on drugs, and in 1839 sent Lin Zexu to Guangzhou as his drug czar. Lin confiscated a staggering 1,542 metric tons of opium from Western (mostly British) merchants. The British drug cartel responded by pressuring the government back in London to demand that Beijing repay them the full street value of the lost narcotics. When the emperor refused, a squadron of the United Kingdom's most up-to-date warships descended on Guangzhou in 1840, brushing aside the Celestial Empire's junks and blasting its coastal towns into ruins. The one-sided war dragged on for two more years, until China gave in after the United Kingdom threatened to cut off its rice supply. That move would have meant starvation for thousands.
'If Only' History
The First Opium War is a horrifying tale of mistrust, misunderstanding and miscalculation, and Platt does a superb job in Imperial Twilight of bringing the central characters to life. We meet dreamers and idealists, such as the missionary Thomas Manning, whose obsession with opening China to British trade drove him to sneak into Tibet from India, armed with little more than a waist-length, jet-black beard and a dyspeptic Chinese interpreter, to engineer an audience with the 7-year-old Dalai Lama. At the other end of the spectrum, we get to know the mercenary British and American traders in Guangzhou who resorted to playing leapfrog at all hours of day and night to fill their time.
Some of Platt's villains, such as the Scottish drug lords William Jardine and James Matheson, are worthy of a soap opera, while others take the banality of evil to new depths. Lord Melbourne, the British prime minister, for example, unleashes the Opium War on China with apparently less thought than a modern head of state might put into a tweet. Platt offers pathos aplenty as Charles Elliot, the British superintendent of trade in Canton, comes to pieces under Chinese pressure in 1839, eventually beginning to doubt his own sanity. Good men do bad things, the best intentions pave roads to hell, and golden opportunities are missed. In short, Imperial Twilight is a ripping yarn.
But its powerful thesis is what makes the book so interesting for readers today. "It is important to remember just how arbitrary and unexpected the outcome of this era really was," Platt says. The war was "not part of some long-term British imperial plan. ... Neither did it result from some inevitable clash of civilizations." Rather, it was the individuals who drove everything — which explains why Imperial Twilight is overflowing with such colorful characters. In the age-old debate over the historical roles of very important persons and vast impersonal forces, Platt comes down firmly on the side of the former. He speculates:
"If Charles Elliot had not let his panic get the best of him when he so dramatically overreacted to Lin Zexu's threats. Or if Lin Zexu himself had been more open to working with, rather than against, Elliot; if they had cooperated on their shared interest in bringing the British opium smugglers under control ... we might be looking back on very different lessons from this era."
And just in case we misunderstand his message, Platt closes with a coda on the business relationship between the Chinese merchant Houqua, possibly the richest man on earth in the 1830s, and the American John Murray Forbes, which "had always been informal, based on trust and affection." If a few of these VIPs had made different choices, Platt implies, everything could have been different — and better.
Imperial Twilight is a masterpiece of what I like to call the "if only" school of history, which holds out the tantalizing prospect of a world that, with wiser decisions, could have been made perfect. Edmund Morgan's magnificent American Slavery, American Freedom is a classic of the genre, insistently hinting that if a few people in 17th-century Virginia had chosen differently, the cancers of slavery and racism would never have entered the U.S. bloodstream. So too, in a different way, is Niall Ferguson's book The Pity of War, arguing that the United Kingdom could have avoided entering World War I. The war then would have been a European conflict but not a global one; the British Empire would have survived; and fascism and communism never would have taken off.
In the right hands — like those of Platt, Morgan and Ferguson — this kind of exploration produces superb history, explaining why actors acted as they did, while also showing that they did not have to do so, and could in fact have made a better world. Yet I so often end up feeling that the narratives the authors provide not only fail to bear out their theories, but in fact reveal that vast impersonal forces still constrain the choices of VIPs in ways they can rarely understand, let alone control.
Recognizing the Past in the Present
In the early 19th century, Britain's Industrial Revolution was upsetting the balance of global power, just as China's takeoff is doing in the early 21st. It was not inevitable that Britons would use their financial and military muscle to exploit the shifts in 1840, but the revolution constantly threw up situations where bullying was a tempting option — and where China's rulers were tempted to overreact and push back, to defend what they thought the commercial and diplomatic balance ought to be. We might think of each crisis as a roll of the dice. In 1802, 1808, 1814, 1816 and 1831, arguments over trade and respect brought the United Kingdom and China to the brink of violence, but diplomacy and compromise headed off conflict each time. Platt is right that cooler heads could have prevailed in 1839, too; on the other hand, however, hotter heads could equally well have prevailed at any time. And even if 1839 had passed peacefully, crises would have just kept coming. British merchants would have kept pushing to open China to their trade. (In 1859, in fact, their demands would bring on a second shooting war.) Compromises would not have satisfied the Jardines and Mathesons. The likelihood that no British government would ever have decided violence was its least bad option seems vanishingly small.
Vast impersonal forces still constrain the choices of VIPs in ways they can rarely understand, let alone control.
Imperial Twilight seems to me to hold two lessons. The first is that as the East-to-West shift in wealth and power of the early 19th century goes into reverse, the early 21st century will present just as many crises as Platt's story documents. Platt is surely right that character matters and that the particular decisions of the politicians and businessmen at the center of the 19th-century crises were crucially important. The same will almost certainly be true in the 21st century. Even so, character was and will be only one among many forces at work, and regardless of how this year's crisis ends, more will probably follow as China continues to gain stature in the world and U.S. governments debate how best to respond. If history is any guide, these crises will only get worse, and the risk of violence will only increase.
Second, individuals in the 1830s based their actions as much on their sense of history and identity as on careful calculations of self-interest. The same will almost certainly be true in the current decade. The view from Chengdu matters, and the surest way to repeat the mistakes of the past is to forget how heavily the dead hand of the past weighs on interpretations of the present. If either President Donald Trump or President Xi Jinping has a reading list, I would recommend he add Imperial Twilight.
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Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same neighborhood in 1913. They perhaps went to the same cafes and didn't know each other?
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Café_Central
Vladimir Lenin and the Archduke Ferdinand are two more people of note in the area around that time.
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https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/12/the-power-line-show-ep-100-historians-in-cars-andrew-roberts-on-history-and-churchill.php
Two conservative historians discuss Churchill. Very worthwhile.
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https://www.livescience.com/64865-crusader-mummy-loses-head.html
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/17/nile-shipwreck-herodotus-archaeologists-thonis-heraclion?fbclid=IwAR1wDkDduuHYZKsp1-Yow7inWrnBuGrHzOOBWK-8dOe6aHLDX893yZIjM8k
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second post
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/shall-defend-common-history/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=stripes&utm_content=03082019&fbclid=IwAR0tNq5Pc8YBV1ObT11wRVKiK8-Y8MBX2Mg_WOOPKWy7xczrcPZk_sD8DuI
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April 16, 2019
Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary
By Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali
In 2007, when “Khrushchev’s Cold War” was published, the Soviet archives were generally more open to Western scholars. Authors Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali had access to incredible materials – from the minutes of Politburo meetings to internal Kremlin documents the CIA would have given anything to see at the time. Their book is still of value, and not just historical value. It is a window into how an adversary thinks, as opposed to how it wishes to be perceived.
An example: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev vehemently rejected U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” initiative. Eisenhower’s idea was that both the U.S. and Soviet Union would permit the other to conduct flights over each other’s territory to help keep track of intercontinental ballistic missile deployments. The logic was that rather than using hit-or-miss intelligence, both sides could have not only a high degree of certainty of what was there but also targeting data. That would create mutual deterrence.
Khrushchev publicly stated that he would not permit the United States to spy on the Soviets. The assumption drawn was that the Soviets would not give up their first strike option; they expected a nuclear exchange under any circumstances and were not giving up any possible advantage. The truth uncovered in Politburo minutes was that Khrushchev feared that the U.S. would discover how few ICBMs the Soviets had and that, worse, on-the-ground inspectors might discover how unreliable their ICBMs were prior to 1964. Rather than a sign of aggressive confidence, his rejection was a desire to hide the truth of Soviet weakness. In the end, it didn’t matter. American U-2s and early reconnaissance satellites gave the U.S. a clear idea of Soviet capabilities.
In his own time, the picture of Khrushchev was of an aggressive ideologue, with an explosive and unpredictable temper. What emerges in “Khrushchev’s Cold War” is a highly pragmatic figure desperately trying to hold the Soviets’ restless empire together while fending off what he saw as overwhelming American power. In Germany, Khrushchev urgently wanted the U.S. to recognize East Germany as a sovereign country; he feared that a Hungarian-style insurrection in Germany would undermine Soviet control. He saw the Americans as the architect of the Polish and Hungarian insurgencies, fed by the fact that neither country was able to develop a viable economy under the Soviet system. But a U.S. intervention in either was impossible. It was not impossible, however, that the Americans and their allies would intervene in East Germany. And given Khrushchev’s nuclear position, this could lead to disaster.
Khrushchev was not the lunatic he appeared to be at the United Nations when he took off his shoe and banged it on the table to show his displeasure with a speaker. He was painfully aware of Soviet weakness, and almost all of his moves were intended to hide or counter that weakness. Meanwhile, he was also aware that he did not have absolute control of the Politburo, whose members he had to consult at every step, and that other members might be more adventurous. Khrushchev was playing two hands: One bluffing the Americans, the other bluffing the Politburo hard-liners into thinking he was one of them.
It turns out that the conventional wisdom of Soviet power during Khrushchev’s reign was wrong. The analysis of his motives was, therefore, inaccurate and the assumption that he had Stalin-esque power was untrue. Another way to put it: Khrushchev sought to protect the Soviet Union using a bluff – a bluff that worked so well that it almost led the U.S. to create a Soviet disaster. He almost bluffed too well.
George Friedman, chairman
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
By Tony Judt
For two years I’ve been trying to find a post-World War II fact about Europe that my colleague Jacob Shapiro didn’t already know, but every attempt elicited the same response: “Tony Judt talked about that in ‘Postwar.’” It’s been about that long since he reviewed “Postwar” on this website, so I think an appropriate amount of time has passed to highlight it again.
Judt’s ability to craft a compelling narrative while swarming the reader with facts is something to behold. He’s especially good at exposing your misconceptions about Europe after 1945. There are some sections where he dives deep into fashion or film where I lost interest, but the explanation of countries’ strategic thinking is superb.
One of the more remarkable elements is how unique the postwar period was. It’s difficult to appreciate things like that when you’re living them, but Judt’s perspective makes so much of what has happened in the past few years seem almost inevitable. In particular, I’m thinking of the United States’ growing skepticism about the trans-Atlantic alliance and, to a lesser extent, the European Union. The postwar period and years after the Soviet Union fell made it easy to forget how deep the roots of American isolationism are, and how uninterested Americans generally are in being the world’s policeman. And yet Western European policymakers and intellectuals are still debating whether Trump’s foreign policy is a passing phase. If history is a reliable guide, it isn’t.
Relatedly, there are some aspects of the United Kingdom’s relationship with Europe that are jarring in the light of Brexit. For example, Judt notes that British officials worried that failing to join the European Economic Community would doom Western Europe to domination by Germany, a reality that arguably happened as soon as the euro was created but that has certainly happened since then.
A final thought – the only place I found myself questioning Judt was in his accounting of the resilience of Nazism in West Germany. It’s difficult for me to square the Germans whom Judt describes with the Germans I interact with today and what I know about recent German history. On one hand, Judt’s interpretation makes sense: A third of voters backed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in Weimar Germany’s last free and fair elections in 1932. But that’s not the same as saying “X percentage” of German voters were “Nazis,” enthusiastic or otherwise, as we think of Nazis today. I would assume that a great many Germans were official party members not because they believed in the cause but because membership was a prerequisite for various privileges, then basic rights and, in extreme cases, survival. It becomes clear later that he’s arguing that the Germany that exists today was built in the 1960s during the baby-boomer generation’s backlash against Germany’s fascist past, which helps me make sense of 2019 Germany but doesn’t change my suspicion that he somewhat overstates the Nazis’ support.
Ryan Bridges, analyst
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http://sciencevibe.com/2018/02/25/divers-found-worlds-largest-underwater-cave-full-maya-secrets/?fbclid=IwAR0h2_hYOzT9lFHYrp6kzSVjIhh9xV2k7_hinLNgxHIcCJ8BxrBmJdtRCQM
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and warned no one.
https://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2013/08/special-post-for-august-15-part-1.html
NHK (source) is Japan public television.
"NHK documentary's announcement from [2011], says that the top officers of Japanese imperial army knew in advance the impending US attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and did not do anything."
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkev97
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One veteran patient told me he was in the Enola crew but got the flu or some illness so was not called in for the bomb run.
Another told me he was on a naval vessel and could see burned people running around on the shore line some time after the attack.
probably after Japan surrendured
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https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/80_years_ago_first_day_of_the_winter_war/11081924?fbclid=IwAR2sb27-7U_IAIvx4JwqEsZ6Oy3gqAZcFTa65P-UesR9w4wHNud_xBxnFmc
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https://www.archaeology-world.com/greek-farmer-accidentally-discovers-3400-year-old-minoan-tomb-hidden-under-olive-grove/
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What We’re Reading: Empires Past and Present
By: George Friedman
The Mantle of Command
By Nigel Hamilton
Historical works about the early phases of World War II are frequently dominated by the personal relationship of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The short version of that relationship is that the two had an excellent working relationship despite their massive egos and that the countries they led had compatible war goals.
Nigel Hamilton’s “The Mantle of Command” paints a very different picture. The relationship was cordial but mistrustful, and their goals at the beginning of the war were wildly incompatible. Churchill wanted to save the British Empire. Roosevelt wanted to break the empire and replace it with independent liberal democracies. These goals, regardless of whether they were achieved, necessitated very different strategies.
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese sent their fleet into the Indian Ocean, wreaking havoc on the Royal Navy there and creating an opportunity to conquer India. The Japanese were pressing overland from Burma and raising an Indian army from a mass of captured soldiers. The American solution, in keeping with its strategy, was to urge the British to allow the Indians to govern themselves immediately, with the promise of independence after the war, and to recruit the Indians to defend India. Churchill absolutely rejected the idea, demanding instead that the U.S. Navy enter the Indian Ocean and engage the Japanese there. Roosevelt refused partly because of the wreckage of Pearl Harbor, and strategically because the U.S. was interested in maintaining the buffer of the Pacific Ocean and had no interest in India. In the end it didn’t matter; the U.S. victory at Midway crippled the Japanese navy and ended its adventure in India.
At the beginning of the war, the British failed to understand that gaining the U.S. as an ally meant the end of their empire. They had common enemies, but they were fighting to defeat them for entirely different reasons. Roosevelt’s vision, as expressed in the Atlantic Charter, demanded the rise of liberal democracies and thus the end of the British Empire. It was successful in the latter but not the former. The Soviet Union was certainly not a liberal democracy, and given the politics of the Cold War, the U.S. had its fair share of missteps too. The only consistent thing was U.S. hostility to the British Empire. In 1956, for example, during the Suez Crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower compelled the British to give up the Suez Canal, and with it, any illusions of global hegemony.
What this book points out is that wars are fought in part according to the subjective wishes of leaders. But at their heart, wars are fought for geopolitical reasons. The United States was born from opposition to imperial Britain, which later died by American hands. Churchill discovered that Roosevelt was in some ways dangerous to Britain’s geopolitical imperatives. Roosevelt had the power to undermine Churchill’s most clever plans. And the outcome, whether Roosevelt intended this or not, was to reduce Britain to an element in the American alliance system.
The war was fought with the Axis, but the American Revolution was still going on.
George Friedman, chairman
________________________________________
How to Hide an Empire
By Daniel Immerwahr
The United States is an empire in practice if not in name. Compared with those that came before it, it may be an “accidental empire,” formed by the path of least resistance and circumstance more than vulnerability, imperialist ideology or the thirst for resources. It may be merely a “pointillist empire,” constituted by a constellation of tiny, far-flung protectorates and military footholds rather than large-scale colonies. And the U.S. empire may be a more benevolent one, or at least one more rooted in mutual interest and somewhat more respectful of other sovereignties — more willing even to leave when asked — compared to its 18th- and 19th-century counterparts.
But with 16 overseas territories and troops regularly deployed to a hundred more locations across the world, the U.S. is certainly an empire — and it has been since the settlement and pacification of the west left Americans craving new frontiers and outposts with which to defend them. (Native Americans might argue that the United States has been an empire from the start.)
Daniel Immerwahr’s “How to Hide an Empire” provides a concise and lively overview of how the U.S. empire took shape. I found it valuable, in part, because I’ve found myself thinking increasingly about the extent to which the abundant geographic and resource advantages the U.S. enjoys, combined with the peculiarities of the U.S. political system and social attitudes, shape (or more often hinder) U.S. attempts to execute anything resembling a grand strategy. The U.S., in other words, is less vulnerable than perhaps any country in the history of the world. It can make mind-numbing strategic blunders, swing between interventionism and isolationism, get bogged down in overseas engagements, wreck its economy and so forth, without ever fundamentally exposing itself to existential consequences. Sometimes it exposes itself to none at all.
One result of this is that U.S. strategy is rooted in relatively few fixed guiding principles, often leading to dramatic swings in policy from one administration to the next, especially in the absence of a Soviet-style threat as an organizing principle. It will experiment with foreign policies driven by moral principles, ones driven by political attitudes, and ones driven by a diffuse, oft-conflicting array of stakeholders. Most prove temporary. The ones that stick around sometimes have obvious strategic value. But just as often they survive largely as a result of expediency, path dependency, or the mere fact that undoing them isn’t worth anyone’s time and effort. The history of the U.S. empire very much reflects this.
Phillip Orchard, analyst
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Only decades after the Black Death, an effective instrument against further plagues was introduced: the quarantine. Visitors of the exhibition find out that the Venetian port of Ragusa (today Dubrovnik) introduced in 1377 the first specially designated isolated areas for sailors, passengers and goods coming from supposedly plague-contaminated areas. They were kept in isolation for 40 days. The name quarantine, which comes from quaranta, or “forty” in Italian, has continued to this day to be used to describe the segregation of people. With the coronavirus pandemic featuring so prominently in the news, the word has become a part of daily life.*
*https://www.timesofisrael.com/german-exhibit-on-black-death-goes-virtual-and-viral-shows-how-jews-were-blamed/
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toilet paper ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper
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https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-brief-history-of-the-codpiece-the-personal-protection-for-renaissance-equipment?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_052420&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&cndid=50142053&hasha=52f016547a40edbdd6de69b8a7728bbf&hashb=e02b3c0e6e0f3888e0288d6e52a57eccde1bfd75&hashc=9aab918d394ee25f13d70b69b378385abe4212016409c8a7a709eca50e71c1bc&esrc=bounceX&utm_term=TNY_Daily
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/28/the-veterans-were-desperate-gen-macarthur-ordered-u-s-troops-to-attack-them/
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https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/hydaspes.html
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https://www.history.com/news/why-is-the-south-known-as-dixie#:~:text=Emmett's%20ditty%20is%20now%20generally,have%20coined%20the%20word%20itself.&text=In%20the%20years%20before%20the,%E2%80%9D%E2%80%94written%20on%20one%20side.
from 1916 version :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff58W_m2ipk
One of the Great Abe's favorite songs
A "hit" in its day
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=135&v=K_L5acJht3g&feature=emb_logo
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http://www.clanrossi.org/mainfiles/History%20and%20Origins%20of%20the%20Swedes.htm?fbclid=IwAR31wye3ldpQ5vZQjzThBHsBQzrodiDxCBBoUupMbzg6GuML8ZNDUwTxILY#:~:text=Most%20of%20the%20written%20history,Troy%20were%20discovered%20in%201870
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https://imgur.com/DwYlg6d
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clever analogy
like it
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_net_worth
these numbers are not too accurate
we know Clinton net worth is over 100 million and Obamster has cashed in and it more like 75 million or more by now
but what I notice is the weight is Republicans towards the bottom and Democrats higher up .
The last President not to be rich appears to be Harry Truman
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lea_Deutsch
saw good movie yesterday
Lea and Darig
about the Yugoslovian "Shirley Temple"
she was Jewish
and could sing dance act
a child prodigy they called her
can read more about her here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lea_Deutsch
of course she lived around the time of Hitler - so you know the ending
for all my fellow Jews who are shutting down the conservative half of the country
it is you shitholes who should be ashamed
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Wilson was planning to be more
conciliatory to the Germans after WWI
but he got fever i March 1919 which may have led to his capitulation to the French British Russia who wanted reparations from Germany and led to the Versailles Treaty as it and from that we know the rest:
https://www.history.com/news/woodrow-wilson-1918-pandemic-world-war-i
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Wilson was planning to be more
conciliatory to the Germans after WWI
but he got fever i March 1919 which may have led to his capitulation to the French British Russia who wanted reparations from Germany and led to the Versailles Treaty as it and from that we know the rest:
https://www.history.com/news/woodrow-wilson-1918-pandemic-world-war-i
I would only quibble with this part of it:
"we know the rest."
Mostly 'we' don't know our history. Most of what I know about the 1913 period
(https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/1913-the-year-it-all-went-wrong-federal-reserve-income-tax-17th-amendment-rockefeller-foundation-and-the-adl/)
the 1918 period, the 20s, the depression, WWI and WWII I learned recently in conjunction with participation here on these pages. I hate to say it, but most folks have no clue of the economics of 2017-2018, much less 100 years ago. Yet it still is relevant!
Wilson was perhaps the worst President possible. Interesting that we learn recently this hero of the Left was openly and totally racist. I wonder if Crafty's friend :wink: Jane Harmon has disowned Wilson yet.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/jane-harman
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Hi Doug,
"and from that we know the rest"
Actually in this case W Wilson was likely right
he did not want to be hard on the Germans after WW1
he went into the Versaille meetings with the intention of holding very firm that we should be more gracious
to Germany after WW 1
(reminding me of Lincoln's intentions to the South before he was shot.)
some historians now believe that Wilson came down with the flu and was so disoriented and broken down from the illness and likly even a bit disoriented hypoxic etc. that. he simply wound up giving up on all his intentions of demanding Germany not be punished
as a result other allies had there way in punishing Germany
when I stated we know the rest :
we know that this , the humiliation of Germany after Versaille gave rise to the conditions ripe for Hitler and Nazis
If Wilson did hold firm we may never have seen either.
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https://allthatsinteresting.com/edith-wilson
Good thing the above couldn't happen now!
Hi Doug,
"and from that we know the rest"
Actually in this case W Wilson was likely right
he did not want to be hard on the Germans after WW1
he went into the Versaille meetings with the intention of holding very firm that we should be more gracious
to Germany after WW 1
(reminding me of Lincoln's intentions to the South before he was shot.)
some historians now believe that Wilson came down with the flu and was so disoriented and broken down from the illness and likly even a bit disoriented hypoxic etc. that. he simply wound up giving up on all his intentions of demanding Germany not be punished
as a result other allies had there way in punishing Germany
when I stated we know the rest :
we know that this , the humiliation of Germany after Versaille gave rise to the conditions ripe for Hitler and Nazis
If Wilson did hold firm we may never have seen either.
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".Good thing the above couldn't happen now!"
it's a cat fight behind the scenes between the doctor and the Jewish man's wife.
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".Good thing the above couldn't happen now!"
it's a cat fight behind the scenes between the doctor and the Jewish man's wife.
Both dumber than a box of rocks.
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The Other Day of Infamy in 1941
The Soviet-Japanese pact signed 80 years ago today was part of Stalin’s plot that led to Pearl Harbor.
By Sean McMeekin
April 12, 2021 6:14 pm ET
Joseph Stalin stands behind Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka as he signs the Pact of Neutrality, April 13, 1941.
PHOTO: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
On April 13, 1941, Japan’s foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a neutrality pact, valid for five years. Although less notorious than the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviets and the Nazis, which plunged Europe into war, the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact had similar consequences in Asia.
As the London News Chronicle observed in reporting on the agreement: “What better guarantee [for Stalin] against Japanese hostility than that Japan turn south and cross swords with the United States? Moscow will feel secure in the Far East only when the Japanese and American navies engage.” Matsuoka and Stalin vowed Japan and the U.S.S.R. would “annihilate Anglo-Saxon ideology” and build a “new world order.” Matsuoka, a nationalist surprised to have signed a treaty with Japan’s Communist archenemy, later called Stalin’s neutrality pact an “act of diplomatic blitzkrieg.”
For years, there had been a tug-of-war in Tokyo between army and navy over strategy. The army’s “strike north” scheme envisioned a rapid conquest of Siberia to eliminate the Communist threat. Japan’s admirals, by contrast, war-gamed seizing resource-rich U.S. and European territories in Southeast Asia, in case Japan was ever cut off from American resources—especially oil—in retaliation for its 1937 invasion of China.
While many historians view the attack on Pearl Harbor as the inevitable outgrowth of U.S.-Japanese tensions, until April 1941 Japan’s factions remained in delicate balance, as did its relations with the Soviet Union, Britain and the U.S. Matsuoka’s brief on his European trip was to ascertain Hitler’s intentions: Would he invade Britain across the English Channel, or turn east and attack Soviet Russia?
Had Hitler told Matsuoka the truth and asked for help, it is likely that Japan would have attacked Siberia in coordination with Germany’s Operation Barbarossa, sparing Pearl Harbor. By refusing to trust Matsuoka but letting Ribbentrop drop hints about his plans, Hitler gave Matsuoka motivation to betray him by agreeing to a deal with Stalin, almost out of spite. Matsuoka was drinking heavily with Stalin when he signed the neutrality pact and was still sozzled when Stalin saw him off at the Moscow train station: Witnesses noted that Matsuoka “laughed with glee.”
There was nothing inevitable about the world-altering neutrality pact. Matsuoka, who had long opposed Soviet expansionism and favored the Axis, began to doubt what he had done once he sobered up. Stalin had charmed him into violating his own principles. After Hitler attacked Russia on June 22, 1941, Matsuoka advocated tearing up the neutrality pact and declaring war on the Soviets. After failing to convince the cabinet, in July 1941 he was forced to resign in disgrace.
By then the revolution in Japanese foreign policy was a fait accompli. To capitalize, Stalin activated his top asset in Washington, Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White. White was enlisted in Operation Snow, a Soviet plot to get America to impose draconian export controls that would provoke Japan into attacking the U.S. White was also the main author of the insulting “Hull note” handed to Japan’s ambassador on Nov. 26, 1941, which furnished Tokyo’s pretext for the Pearl Harbor attack.
Precisely as Stalin intended, the neutrality pact with Japan secured his Far Eastern frontier, just in time to save Moscow from the German onslaught in December 1941. Well-informed about deteriorating Japanese-American relations by his spy in the German Embassy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, Stalin had begun transferring armor and troops from Siberia to his European fronts months earlier, in September 1941. Sorge, we now know, had advance knowledge of Japanese plans to attack U.S. and British positions in the Pacific once negotiations broke down—knowledge Stalin could have shared with Churchill and Roosevelt but didn’t.
Stalin withheld the intelligence from his accidental allies against Hitler because he wanted Japan to attack them. As he had told Matsuoka, “As for the Anglo-Saxons, Russians have never been friendly to them, and do not want now to befriend them.” Though in July 1941 Stalin had demanded from Roosevelt a pledge that Japanese “encroachments in Siberia not be tolerated,” when Roosevelt’s envoy asked Stalin that September whether the U.S. could count on Soviet help if hostilities developed with Japan, Stalin smiled and responded that “Russia might be neutral.”
Stalin was good to his word. Despite bellyaching about their Allies’ failure to open a “second front” against Hitler, the Soviets refused for four years to help them in any way against Japan. Stalin even interned as prisoners of war hundreds of American pilots who bailed out on Russian soil after bombing raids on Japan.
Japan took an indulgent attitude toward U.S. Lend-Lease vessels that ferried 8.24 million tons of war materiel through Japanese territorial waters to Vladivostok, Russia, between December 1941 and August 1945. Japanese admirals didn’t mind their American enemy wasting precious resources on the neutral U.S.S.R.
Unfortunately for Japan, Stalin was loyal only as long as he needed to be. After the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, Stalin ripped up the pact—nine months early—and invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Korea. The invasion was supplied and fueled almost entirely by U.S. Lend-Lease aid. Softened up by four years of war waged by “Allies” whom Stalin refused to help, Japan had already transferred one million troops home from the Asian mainland, enabling the Red Army to conquer in a few weeks an area larger than France and Germany combined.
By encouraging Japan to attack the “Anglo-Saxon” powers instead of the U.S.S.R. in 1941, Stalin did pull off a diplomatic blitzkrieg. By supplying Stalin’s armies unconditionally despite Stalin’s refusal to join the war against Japan, Roosevelt helped Stalin plant the red flag in northern Asia, paving the way for Mao’s triumph in China and the enduring standoff in Korea. While hardly an anniversary to celebrate, April 13, 1941, was a day of infamy as consequential in Asia as Pearl Harbor.
Mr. McMeekin is a professor of history at Bard College and author of “Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II,” forthcoming April 20
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Wow, I did not know any of this.
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Stalin
got the upper hand against Roosevelt I perceive
and the Japanese
in the above good history lesson
only through brute strength and sacrifice of more men and civilians that any other country did he overcome Hitlers double cross
I read Stalin almost resigned and asked if he should when the German tanks were heading to Moscow
it seems the Russes had the best spy network in Europe and America
I guess the Chinese do now.
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I see the prof is from Bard, just like Walter Russell Mead.
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Germany, May 8, 1945
By: George Friedman
On May 8, 1945, Germany formally declared defeat in World War II. As others have said, there was one war in Europe that began in 1914 and ended in 1945, with a 20-year truce in between. Both wars pitted Germany against France, Russia and Britain with increasing involvement of the United States. It is not an overstatement to say that it was a war of Germany against the rest of Europe, with lesser European powers scattered in minor coalitions with one side or another. The wars began in the deep structure of Europe, but they were initiated on a broader scale by Germany and ended when Germany surrendered. The two wars might collectively be called the German War, laying the groundwork for asking how much of the Germany that was crushed in 1945 remains today. It’s therefore safe to say that 76 years ago, the Germans collapsed and, with that, the European war that began in 1914.
Germany did not unite as a country until 1871. The unifying principle was not religion or culture, as there were significant variations, but a common language that enveloped a common myth of the German past, a myth quite at odds with its reality. Emerging from this complex mix was a single powerful reality. Germany created an extraordinary economy. It passed France quickly and then surged past Great Britain, becoming the economic powerhouse of Europe.
The economic surge threatened to exhaust German raw materials, turning the country into a hostage of its suppliers. It was also exhausting the appetite for German goods in Europe. There were scant markets in play, but Germany was forced to both look beyond Europe and box European competitors out of Europe’s markets. That problem was not economic but political, and the political problem was ultimately military.
Max Weber, a famous and still admired sociologist, said during unification that Germany had become a nation-state too late. France and Britain had empires from which to draw. Germany had only Europe. Thus, he said, economics dictated that Germany secure its own empire. He did not mention that the good parts had been taken, the rest were of lesser value, and empire therefore meant war. His thinking became common, and Germany began building a navy.
Europe was attentive to but not horrified by German unification. It was stunned at the speed at which Germany became an economic power, but most saw ways to take advantage of it. But as it became Europe’s dominant economic power, and as it began to modernize its military, concern grew. Germany sought to create a continental alliance. The Austro-Hungarians bought in but were not the key. Russia, with its vast resources, ultimately said no. France and Britain were not prepared to be Germany’s junior partners.
Germany understood the military panel. Russia, France and Britain were reaching clear understandings. A simultaneous attack by France and Russia, accompanied by a British blockade, would break Germany. The only counters to this were to curb their economic and military power, thereby reducing the military threat but leaving them dependent on the others’ goodwill – never a good position to be in. Alternatively, the Germans could take military action, forcing at least one of the three powers to capitulate. Its choice was to crush France, execute a holding action against Russia, and then deal with British naval power at a later date. The key to Germany’s reality is that if alarm over its economic power grew, the pressure on the triple alliance to act would grow, and Germany would lose its agency. Therefore, it executed its plan before the others could strike. Germany would have won, I think, if it had made a deal with Russia. Instead, it was forced to fight three armies, and it lost.
The description of World War II is the description of World War I. It was the same war. Germany surged economically after Hitler came to power. It had a need to expand, and the same coalition of forces – Russia, France and Britain – were potential enemies. Political solutions were tried, but the same need to avoid a two-front war trapped Germany into the same strategy. After various political maneuvers, it attacked France, this time defeating its army, occupying it and forcing Britain off the Continent. It then attacked Russia, once again underestimating the Russian ability to survive defeats and casualties that would break other countries. And totally left out of the equation was the United States, so great that Hitler declared war on it, forcing it into war.
May 8, 1945, found two significant powers in Europe, neither of which were fully European. One was the Soviet Union. The other was the United States. Germany was no longer a united nation-state but an occupied territory. Its economy was a wreck, its military not fully under German command.
Territorial Control in Germany, 1945
(click to enlarge)
In 1989, nearly 120 years after the first unification, Germany reunited. Its economy, surging before and continuing to surge after reunification, is today the leading power in Europe, particularly now that Britain has left the European Union. Germany has learned from its past. Its strategy is not to maintain military force. It searched to find a basis for working with the Soviets. Its historic competitor, Britain, is out of the EU, and the economic alliance of which it is only one member pivots around German economic power. Germany has sought to avoid the threat of war while dominating Europe by making certain that Russia is not hostile and that France doesn’t seek alliance with it.
Some 76 years after its surrender, Germany is again the economic pivot of Europe and the fourth-largest economy in the world. It underestimates no one, but the truth is that no one underestimates Germany. Britain has seceded from the German-led union. Russia courts Germany, and the Germans have mastered coyness. France searches for its place in the sun, which is often blocked by Germany. And the United States lurks in the distance happily indifferent to Europe’s problems.
Each had a mortal fear of the other. Now each has mild unease. And geopolitics is not shaped by good intentions, of which there are many. May 8, 1945, was certainly a comma in history. It remains to be seen if it was a period.
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creepy similarity
reveals
thoughts of domination
no accident where 13 yo Stalin positions himself in this picture over larger classmates and teachers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Stalin#/media/File:18920000-gori-church-school-students-and-teachers-including-stalin.jpg
Just saw this on a history channel about Hitler past weekend. He was about 9 yo before he turned inward after his brother's death from measles in 1900 age 11:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/04/research.secondworldwar
both men were beaten as children by their fathers and with mother trying to protect them
do we have anyone in the government today we can find such photos?
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Your post of some coincidences reminds me of this, within the timeframe of the story:
1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771
"Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, one Adolf Hitler."
- I wish they had let him paint. Let all that evil get expressed on the convas.
1913 was a strange inflection point in US history also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1913_in_the_United_States
Income tax amendment
Federal Reserve created
Women's suffrage
Direct election of Senators
First packaged cigarette
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"1913 was a strange inflection point in US history also."
Yes
It had one good event though not earth shattering .
It was the year my father was born.
Ahhh, if only he lived to be 108........
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_LncVnecLA
the honesty is in stark contrast to the bullshit we hear from the Left (and sometimes on the Right) American politicians of today
we are lied to every single day
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/the_hagia_sophia_a_center_of_knowledge_about_islam.html
too long ago for reparations from Turkey?
thus no $$$$$$
and so, no publicity blitz on the MSM about it.
pre Muslim:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia#/media/File:Saint_Sophia,_Constantinopolis.jpg
post Muslim :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia#/media/File:Ayasofya_Mosque_Istanbul_1890.jpg
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https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/medieval-map-of-europe-in-1444.html
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/medieval-map-of-europe-in-1444.jpg
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Look at the early life segment.
The first thing noted is her father was slave holder.
I notice this about Wikipedia - all the histories are altered and mention of slavery one way or the other is written in all of them.
Even when it has almost no importance.
Every past life is reflected upon and analyzed in racial terms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Grant
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There was a really nicely done History Channel documentary on Grant and this was mentioned as part of it. In context it communicated to me as highly relevant in understanding the trajectory of Grant's life.
PS: Your post and mine would be better placed in the American History thread.
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Funny how the MSM avoids Kampala’s family history of slave ownership.
Look at the early life segment.
The first thing noted is her father was slave holder.
I notice this about Wikipedia - all the histories are altered and mention of slavery one way or the other is written in all of them.
Even when it has almost no importance.
Every past life is not reflected upon and analyzed in racial terms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Grant
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yes
I saw the HC life of Grant
yes it was very good
I remember Grant being considered a so so general and a corrupt drunk
in the 60s etc.
The corruption seems to have been more the grifters around him (like today)
then he.
I do want to read one of the newer biographies of him
I love how Mark Twain helped him in the end write his biography so he would leave money for his family
throat cancer is a really rough way to die even today
I cannot imagine what it would have been like then
from the cigars and ETOH
not like today -> HPV. :-o
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https://bigthink.com/the-past/ancient-rome-life-routine/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR37Q0TDeDl_IyEcbODM0eZ0Lz4janrHRCw_MIO0TnrdHN1lWaBkaKta-X8#Echobox=1644249684-1
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https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-other-side-of-history-daily-life-in-the-ancient-world
I was mailed a flyer that I could get this for 25 dollars
(sale ended 1/27 though)
Was interested but never got around to it.
fascinating stuff if you like me like history
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9y7z1qndQ&t=459s
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also
researched and developed gas for the Germans in WW1 and later cyclon B for the Germans
https://economarks.com/on-ammonia-weapons-of-mass-destruction-and-chemist-clara-immerwehr-haber/
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Haven't watched the whole thing yet, but seems interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8XG-nbM3BE&t=4s
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm7nNm4F5LI&t=364s
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https://www.history.com/news/neutral-countries-world-war-ii?cmpid=email-hist-inside-history-2022-0516-05162022&om_rid=&~campaign=hist-inside-history-2022-0516
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:-o
A figurative and real giant of his day :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raiden_Tameemon
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https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/a-just-discovered-papyrus-reveals-how-the-great-pyramid-was-built/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3fmoXUJFe2M58680QT1MK2UUkVKQIxDpeeZ5pHiOTz4P23eTRIdLU2s4M#Echobox=1662147441
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https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatinterviews1
From the article:
"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.
"Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.
"We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
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Nice find. I'm now trolling with it on FB as "CRT in 1923".
Marc: Post first said "Twitter"-- which I have corrected to "FB". I don't do twitter.
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Nice find. I'm now trolling with it on Twitter as "CRT in 1923".
"Critical Race Theory in 1923", exactly. I was looking at it from another angle, the economics he was selling and the economics of which he later governed. What was it and why was it appealing? He was redefining the word socialism to fit his sales pitch. He was a master salesman - before he had the power to coerce.
One thing he did not call his agenda was fascism, but it's not "capitalism" if it's all under state control. cf. US 2022
What does redefining words and naming things what they are not remind us of today?
Then he throws in the racism, Jew hatred and blame. Emotion is so much more powerful than ligic. Reminds us of the blame game today, only we hope they won't put millions of us in furnaces when they achieve full power. Can't say that's a difference because they weren't told where it was leading then either.
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https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/pearl-harbor-anniversary/2022/12/07/id/1099473/
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Japanese war crimes on Chinese and Russians
The US apparently allowed them to cover it up.
I never heard of this:
"During the final months of World War II, codenamed Cherry Blossoms at Night, the plan of Unit 731 was to use kamikaze pilots to infest San Diego, California, with the plague.[39] The plan was scheduled to launch on 22 September 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier.[40][41][42][43]"
Doesn't mean the government would have approved this though.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDalWfVjNF8
last surviving senior officer
died 1967.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Boxhall
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo-nah-se-tah
https://turtledove.fandom.com/wiki/Mo-nah-see-tah?file=Monahsetah.jpg
black slavery and suppression were NOT kept out of history
we all knew about this growing up
at least from 60s on (my age group)
what was kept out of history was the infidelity and rape that existed in the past
sounds like Thomas Custer and George Custer raped this girl
new to me
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wondered where in the world this nickname came from:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/morally-and-medically-appalling-gender-clinic-case-manager-blows-the-whistle-on-permanent-harm-done-to-kids
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https://nypost.com/article/president-garfields-assassin-charles-guiteau-was-one-of-historys-first-incels/
I remember Pres. Garfield's 1st Lumbar vertebrae showing the path of the bullet
was on display at the Army Forces Institute of Pathology museum *part of Walter Reed at the time * circa 1978-9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Guiteau#/media/File:Path_of_Bullet_that_wounded_President_James_A._Garfield_-_Duncan_K._Winter_drawing_-_NCP_001860.jpg
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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/white-house-jail-historians-see-093000221.html
ignore what the LEFT is doing
and only comment on Trump
compare their phony view to a REAL historian like VDH :wink:
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https://www.yahoo.com/gma/secret-audio-tape-reportedly-among-013705352.html
I don't buy it
first the grassy knoll was to the side of Kennedy
don't we know both shots came from the rear
and if anyone can convince they see a sniper in the image
I will buy them a whopper
with fries
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American History thread a better fit , , , Deep State too? :-o
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https://www.google.com/search?q=d+day+barage+at+normandy+youtube&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&ei=XCJ-ZKS7Avqh5NoPuuuYyAk&ved=0ahUKEwik2aO-2qz_AhX6EFkFHbo1BpkQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=d+day+barage+at+normandy+youtube&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIHCCEQoAEQCjoKCAAQRxDWBBCwAzoICCEQFhAeEB1KBAhBGABKBQhAEgExUIsEWJ8TYIMVaAFwAXgAgAGLAYgB8AaSAQMzLjWYAQCgAQHAAQHIAQg&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:ba24a679,vid:0wg5x5WaZPo
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/dont-erase-the-anglo-saxons/?bypass_key=WXZjODRnY09BM08wU0dLRFIwYldhUT09OjpaVXhZVFhaNWNXbFBaWHBHZVhScGVXRkNhMEUyUVQwOQ%3D%3D&lctg=547fd5293b35d0210c8df7b9&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202023-06-09&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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Classic genocidal moves by the left.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/dont-erase-the-anglo-saxons/?bypass_key=WXZjODRnY09BM08wU0dLRFIwYldhUT09OjpaVXhZVFhaNWNXbFBaWHBHZVhScGVXRkNhMEUyUVQwOQ%3D%3D&lctg=547fd5293b35d0210c8df7b9&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202023-06-09&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Tribe
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Khazar_wars
Arab–Khazar wars
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arab–Khazar wars
Part of the Muslim conquests
Geophysical map of the Caucasus area with major settlements and regions, overlaid with green for Umayyad territory, yellow for Khazar territory, and red for Byzantine territory
Map of the Caucasus region c. 740, following the end of the Second Arab–Khazar War
Date 642–799
Location
North Caucasus (esp. Dagestan), South Caucasus (esp. Republic of Azerbaijan, Iranian Azerbaijan)[1]
Territorial
changes South Caucasus falls under the control of the Caliphate. Northward Muslim expansion is stopped at Derbent.
Belligerents
Rashidun Caliphate (until 661)
Umayyad Caliphate (661–750)
Abbasid Caliphate (after 750) Khazar Khaganate
Commanders and leaders
Abd al-Rahman ibn Rabi'a †
Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik
al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah †
Sa'id ibn Amr al-Harashi
Marwan ibn Muhammad
Yazid al-Sulami
Alp Tarkhan
Barjik †
Tar'mach
Hazer Tarkhan †
Ras Tarkhan
Bulchan
vte
Arab–Khazar wars
vte
Early Muslim expansion
The Arab–Khazar wars were a series of conflicts fought between the armies of the Khazar Khaganate and the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphates and their respective vassals. Historians usually distinguish two major periods of conflict, the First Arab–Khazar War (c. 642–652) and Second Arab–Khazar War (c. 722–737);[2][3] the wars also involved sporadic raids and isolated clashes from the mid-seventh century to the end of the eighth century.
The wars were a result of attempts by the nascent Caliphate to secure control of the South Caucasus (Transcaucasia) and North Caucasus, where the Khazars were already established since the late 6th century. The first Arab invasion began in 642 with the capture of Derbent and continued with a series of minor raids, ending with the defeat of a large Arab force led by Abd al-Rahman ibn Rabi'a outside the Khazar town of Balanjar in 652. Large-scale hostilities then ceased, apart from raids by the Khazars and the North Caucasian Huns on the autonomous Transcaucasian principalities during the 660s and 680s. The conflict between the Khazars and the Arabs (now under the Umayyad Caliphate) resumed after 707 with occasional raids back and forth across the Caucasus Mountains, intensifying after 721 into a full-scale war. Led by distinguished generals al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah and Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, the Arabs recaptured Derbent and the southern Khazar capital of Balanjar; these successes had little impact on the nomadic Khazars, however, who continued to launch devastating raids deep into Transcaucasia. In a major 730 invasion, the Khazars decisively defeated Umayyad forces at the Battle of Ardabil (killing al-Jarrah); in turn, they were defeated the following year and pushed back north. Maslama then recovered Derbent, which became a major Arab military outpost and colony, before he was replaced by Marwan ibn Muhammad (the future caliph Marwan II) in 732. A period of relatively-localized warfare followed until 737, when Marwan led a massive expedition north to the Khazar capital Atil on the Volga. After securing submission by the khagan, the Arabs withdrew.
The 737 campaign marked the end of large-scale warfare between the two powers, establishing Derbent as the northernmost Muslim outpost and securing Muslim dominance of Transcaucasia. At the same time, continuing warfare weakened the Umayyad army and contributed to the fall of the dynasty in the 750 Abbasid Revolution. Relations between the Muslims of the Caucasus and the Khazars remained largely peaceful thereafter, apart from two Khazar raids in the 760s and in 799 resulting from failed efforts to secure an alliance through marriage between the Arab governors (or local princes) of the Caucasus and the Khazar khagan. Occasional warfare continued in the region between the Khazars and the Muslim principalities of the Caucasus until the collapse of the Khazar state in the late 10th century, but the great eighth-century wars were never repeated.
Background and motives
The Caucasus as a frontier of civilizations
Old geophysical map of the environs of Derbent, with the fortifications of Derbent outlined
Roderich von Erckert map of the Sasanian fortifications of the Caspian Gates at Derbent
The Arab–Khazar wars were part of a long series of military conflicts between the nomadic peoples of the Pontic–Caspian steppe and the more settled regions south of the Caucasus. The two primary routes over the mountains, the Darial Pass (Alan Gates) in the centre and the Pass of Derbent (Caspian Gates) in the east along the Caspian Sea, have been used as invasion routes since classical antiquity.[1][4] Consequently, defence of the Caucasus frontier against destructive raids by steppe peoples such as the Scythians and the Huns came to be regarded as one of the chief duties of imperial regimes of the Near East.[4] This is reflected in the popular belief in Middle Eastern cultures that Alexander the Great had barred the Caucasus with divine assistance against the hordes of Gog and Magog. According to historian Gerald Mako, the latter were stereotypical "northern barbarians" as conceived by the settled civilizations of Eurasia: "uncivilized savages who drank blood, who ate children, and whose greed and bestiality knew no limits"; if Alexander's barrier failed and Gog and Magog broke through, the Apocalypse would follow.[5]
Starting with Peroz I (r. 457–484), the shahs of the Sasanian Empire built a line of stone fortifications to protect the vulnerable frontier on the Caspian shore; when completed under Khosrow I (r. 531–579), this stretched over 45 kilometres (28 mi) from the eastern foothills of the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea. The fortress of Derbent was the strategically crucial centre point of this fortification complex, as seen in its Persian name Dar-band, lit. 'Knot of the Gates'.[6][7] The Turkic Khazars appeared in the area of present-day Dagestan in the second half of the sixth century, initially as subjects of the First Turkic Khaganate; after the latter's collapse, they emerged as an independent, dominant power in the northern Caucasus by the seventh century.[7] As the most recent steppe power in the region, early medieval writers came to identify the Khazars with Gog and Magog[8] and the Sasanian fortifications at Derbent as Alexander's wall.[7]
The Khazars first campaigned in Transcaucasia during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 as subjects of the Western Turkic Khaganate, who allied with the Byzantines in the Third Perso-Turkic War. The Turks sacked Derbent in 627, broke through the local Sasanian defences, and joined the Byzantines in their siege of Tiflis. 40,000 Khazars or Turks joined the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (r. 602–641) in his 628 invasion of Persia proper, which proved decisive, ending the war in a Byzantine victory.[9][10] For several years afterwards, as Sasanian power collapsed, the Khazars or Western Turks exercised some control over Caucasian Iberia (approximately present-day Georgia), Caucasian Albania (the modern Republic of Azerbaijan) and Adharbayjan (modern Iranian Azerbaijan); Armenia, the western half of Transcaucasia, was in Byzantine hands. However, after the death of the Khazar or Western Turkic ruler in an internal conflict c. 630 – c. 632, Khazar activity in eastern Transcaucasia ceased.[11][12] Tong Yabghu, the Western Turkic khagan, was assassinated by a rival faction around 630; the extension of Turkic-Khazar control into Transcaucasia was abandoned, and the region returned to Sasanian influence by 632.[13]
Opposing armies
The eastern Caucasus became the main theatre of the Arab–Khazar conflict, with the Arab armies aiming to gain control of Derbent (Arabic Bab al-Abwab, 'Gate of Gates') and the Khazar cities of Balanjar and Samandar. Their locations have yet to be established with certainty by modern researchers,[a] but both cities are referred to as Khazar capitals by Arab writers and may have been winter and summer capitals, respectively. Due to Arab attacks, the Khazars later moved their capital further north to Atil (Arabic al-Bayda) in the Volga Delta.[14][15]
Arabs
Like other Near Eastern peoples, the Arabs were familiar with the legend of Gog and Magog, who appear in the Quran (Yaʾjuj wa-Maʾjuj). After the early Muslim conquests, their perceptions incorporated many of the cultural concepts of their new subjects.[16] The nascent Muslim caliphate regarded itself as heir to the Sasanian—and, to a lesser extent, Byzantine—tradition and worldview. The Arab caliphs also adopted the notion that, according to Mako, it was their duty "to protect the settled, i.e. the civilized world from the northern barbarian". This imperative was reinforced by the Muslim division of the world into the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb), to which pagan Turkic steppe peoples such as the Khazars were consigned.[17]
While their Byzantine and Sasanian predecessors simply sought to contain the steppe peoples through fortifications and political alliances, historian David Wasserstein writes that the Arabs were "expansionists interested in conquest"; their northward thrust threatened the survival of the Khazars as an independent polity.[18] Historian Khalid Yahya Blankinship agrees, highlighting that "the early Muslim caliphate was an ideological state" dedicated to the doctrine of jihad, "the struggle to establish God's rule in the earth through a continuous military effort against the non-Muslims".[19] The early Muslim state was geared to expand, with all able-bodied adult male Muslims subject to conscription.[20] The manpower pool was enormous, with historian Hugh N. Kennedy estimating that 250,000 to 300,000 men were inscribed as soldiers (muqatila) in the provincial army registers c. 700.[21]
Arab armies of the early Muslim conquests contained sizeable contingents of light and heavy cavalry,[22] but relied primarily on their infantry; Arab cavalry was often limited to skirmishing early in a battle before dismounting and fighting on foot.[23] The Arab armies resisted cavalry charges by digging trenches and forming a spear wall behind them.[24] This tactic indicates the discipline of the Arab armies, particularly the elite Syrian troops which were a de facto standing army. According to Kennedy, against nomadic peoples such as the Khazars, the Arabs' high degree of training and discipline "gave them the advantage over their enthusiastic but disorganised enemies".[25]
In the 8th century, Arab armies were often accompanied by local forces provided by the various local potentates, who not only were under Arab suzerainty, but often enough had suffered themselves by Khazar raids. Thus in 732 the presiding prince of Armenia, Ashot III Bagratuni, is known to have renewed an agreement for the employment of Armenian cavalry with the Arab army for three years, in exchange for 100,000 silver dirhams per year.[26]
Khazars
Black-and-white sketch of a pear-shaped jug, featuring a rider in mail armour and bearing a lance, holding a barefoot captive from the head
Ewer from the Treasure of Nagyszentmiklós, showing an early medieval armoured steppe warrior with a captive
The Khazars followed a strategy common to their nomadic predecessors; their raids might reach deep into Transcaucasia Mesopotamia and Anatolia but they were, according to historian Peter B. Golden, not aimed at conquest. Rather, Golden writes, they were "typical of nomads testing the defenses of their sedentary neighbors" and a means of gathering booty, the acquisition and distribution of which was fundamental to tribal coalitions. According to Golden, for the Khazars the strategic stake of the conflict was control of the Caucasus passes.[27] Albania was probably regarded by the Khazars as rightfully theirs, a legacy of the last Byzantine–Sasanian war.[28] According to historian Bori Zhivkov, "It is no surprise that they fought fiercely with the Arabs precisely for these lands up to the 730s".[28]
The sources do not provide details of the composition or tactics of Khazar armies, and the names of Khazar commanders are rarely recorded.[29] Although the Khazars adopted elements of the civilizations to their south and possessed towns, they remained a tribal, semi-nomadic power. Like other steppe societies originating in Central Asia, they had a mobile form of warfare and relied on skilled, hardy cavalry.[30] The rapid movements and sudden attacks and counterattacks of the Khazar cavalry are emphasized in the sources;[31] in the few detailed descriptions of pitched battles, the Khazar cavalry launched the opening attacks.[32] Heavy (cataphract) cavalry is not recorded, but archaeological evidence attests to the use of heavy armour for riders and (possibly) horses.[33] Khazar infantry must be assumed (especially during siege operations), although it is not explicitly mentioned.[33] Modern historians point to the use of advanced siege machines to indicate Khazar military sophistication, equal to that of other contemporary armies.[34][35] The less-rigidly-organized, semi-nomadic nature of the Khazar state also worked to their advantage against the Arabs; they lacked a permanent administrative centre, whose loss would paralyze the government and force them to surrender.[30]
The Khazar army was composed of Khazar troops and those of vassal princes and allies. Its overall size is unclear, and references to 300,000 men in the invasion of 730 are clearly exaggerated.[36] Historian Igor Semyonov observes that the Khazars "never entered into battle without having a numerical advantage" over their Arab opponents, which often forced the latter to withdraw. According to Semyonov, this attests to the Khazars' skill in logistics and their ability to gather accurate information about their opponents' movements, the layout of the country, and the condition of roads.[37]
Connection with the Arab–Byzantine conflict
To an extent, the Arab–Khazar wars were also linked to the long-lasting struggle of the Caliphate against the Byzantine Empire along the eastern fringes of Anatolia (a theatre of war which adjoined the Caucasus). The Byzantine emperors pursued close relations with the Khazars which amounted to an alliance for most of the period in question, including the marriage of emperor Justinian II (r. 685–695, 705–711) to a Khazar princess in 705.[38][39] The possibility of the Khazars linking with the Byzantines through Armenia was a grave threat to the Caliphate, especially given its proximity to the Umayyad Caliphate's metropolitan province of Syria.[1] This did not materialize; Armenia was left largely quiet, with the Umayyads granting it wide-ranging autonomy and the Byzantines refraining from actively campaigning there.[40] Given the common threat of the Khazar raids, the Umayyads found the Armenians (and the neighbouring Georgians) willing allies against the Khazars.[41]
Byzantinist Dimitri Obolensky suggested that the Arab expansion against the Khazars was motivated by a desire to outflank the Byzantine defences from the north and envelop the Byzantine Empire in a pincer movement, but this idea is rejected as far-fetched by modern scholars. As Wasserstein says, it is a scheme of extraordinary ambition which "requires us to accept that Byzantium had succeeded already at this primary stage in persuading the Muslims that it could not be conquered" and the Muslims possessed "a far greater knowledge and understanding of the geography of Europe" than can be demonstrated for the time in question. Mako agrees that such a grand strategic plan is not borne out by the rather limited nature of the Arab–Khazar conflict until the 720s.[42][43] It is more likely that the northward expansion of the Arabs beyond the Caucasus was, at least initially, the result of the onward momentum of the early Muslim conquests. Local Arab commanders of the period often exploited opportunities haphazardly and without an overall plan, sometimes pursuing expansion even against direct caliphal orders.[44] From a strategic perspective, it is more probable that the Byzantines encouraged the Khazars to attack the Caliphate to relieve mounting pressure on their eastern frontier in the early eighth century.[41] Byzantium profited from the diversion of Muslim armies northwards during the 720s and 730s, and the Byzantine–Khazar entente resulted in another marriage alliance between future emperor Constantine V (r. 741–775) and Khazar princess Tzitzak in 733.[45][46][c] Gaining control of the northern branch of the Silk Road by the Caliphate has been suggested as a further motive for the conflict. Mako disputes this claim, however, saying that warfare declined at the time of greatest Silk Road expansion, after the mid-eighth century.[49]
First war and aftermath
First Arab invasions
Old map of western Eurasia and northern Africa showing the expansion of the Caliphate from Arabia to cover most of the Middle East, with the Byzantine Empire outlined in green
The expansion of the Muslim Caliphate until 750, from William R. Shepherd's Historical Atlas.
Muslim state at the death of Muhammad Expansion under the Rashidun Caliphate Expansion under the Umayyad Caliphate
Byzantine Empire
The Khazars and the Arabs came into conflict as a result of the first phase of Muslim expansion; by 640, following their conquest of Byzantine Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, the Arabs had reached Armenia.[50][51] Arabic and Armenian sources differ considerably on the details and chronology of the Arab conquest of Armenia. In 652, apparently, the Armenian princes submitted to the Arabs; by 655, the Byzantine and Persian halves of Armenia had been subjugated.[51][52] Arab rule was overthrown during the First Muslim Civil War (656–661), but after its end the Armenian princes returned to their tributary status in the newly established Umayyad Caliphate.[53] The Principality of Iberia concluded a similar treaty with the Arabs, and only Lazica (on the Black Sea coast) remained under Byzantine influence.[51] Neighbouring Adharbayjan was conquered in 639–643;[54] raids were launched into Arran (Caucasian Albania) under Salman ibn Rabi'a and Habib ibn Maslama during the early 640s, leading to the submission of its cities. As in Armenia, firm Arab rule was not established there until after the First Muslim Civil War.[55]
According to Arab chroniclers, the first attack on Derbent was launched in 642 under Suraqa ibn Amr;[d] Abd al-Rahman ibn Rabi'a commanded his vanguard. Al-Tabari's History of the Prophets and Kings reports that Shahrbaraz, the Persian governor of Derbent, offered to surrender the fortress to the Arabs and aid them against the unruly Caucasian peoples if he and his followers were relieved of the jizya tax. Shahrbaraz' proposal was accepted and ratified by Caliph Umar (r. 634–644).[57][58] Al-Tabari reports that the first Arab advance into Khazar lands occurred after the capture of Derbent. Abd al-Rahman ibn Rabi'a reached Balanjar with no losses, and his cavalry advanced up to 200 parasangs—about 800 kilometres (500 mi)—north as far as al-Bayda on the Volga, the future Khazar capital. This dating, and the improbable claim that the Arabs suffered no casualties, have been disputed by modern scholars.[14][59] Based at Derbent, Abd al-Rahman launched frequent small-scale raids against the Khazars and local tribes over the following years; nothing of note, however, is recorded in the sources.[60][61]
Disregarding the caliph's instructions for caution and restraint, Abd al-Rahman or (according to Baladhuri and Ya'qubi) his brother Salman[61] led a large army north in 652, aiming to take Balanjar. The town was besieged for several days, with both sides using catapults, until the arrival of a Khazar relief force and a sortie by the besieged forces ended in a decisive defeat for the Arabs. Abd al-Rahman and 4,000 Muslim troops were left dead on the field, and the rest fled to Derbent or Gilan in northern present-day Iran.[62][63]
Khazar and Hunnic raids into Transcaucasia
Due to the First Muslim Civil War and priorities on other fronts, the Arabs did not again attack the Khazars until the early eighth century.[64][65] Despite the re-establishment of Arab suzerainty after the end of the civil war, the tributary Transcaucasian principalities were not yet firmly under Arab rule and their resistance (encouraged by Byzantium) could not be overcome. For several decades after the initial Arab conquest, considerable autonomy was left to local rulers; Arab governors worked with them, and they had small forces of their own.[66] The Khazars refrained from large-scale interventions in the south; pleas for assistance by Yazdegerd III (r. 632–651), the last Sasanian shah, were unanswered.[67] After the Arab attacks, the Khazars abandoned Balanjar and moved their capital further north in an attempt to evade the Arab armies.[68] However, Khazar auxiliaries and Abkhazian and Alan troops are recorded as fighting alongside the Byzantines in 655.[67]
The only recorded hostilities in the second half of the century were a few Khazar raids into the Transcaucasian principalities which were loosely under Muslim dominion, primarily in search of plunder. In a raid into Albania in 661–62, they were defeated by the local prince. A large-scale raid across Transcaucasia in 683 or 685 (also a time of civil war in the Muslim world) was more successful, capturing much booty and many prisoners and killing the presiding princes of Iberia (Adarnase II) and Armenia (Grigor I Mamikonian).[3][69] At the same time, the North Caucasian Huns also launched attacks on Albania in 664 and 680. In the first incursion, Prince Juansher was obliged to marry the daughter of the Hunnic king. Modern scholars debate whether the Huns acted independently or as Khazar proxies, but several historians consider Hunnic ruler Alp Iluetuer a Khazar vassal; if so, Albania was under a form of indirect Khazar rule during the 680s.[70] The Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya I (r. 661–680) tried to counter Khazar influence by inviting Juansher to Damascus twice, and the 683/685 Khazar raid may have been a reaction to those invitations.[71] According to Thomas S. Noonan, on the other hand, the "cautious nature of Khazar policy in the Southern Caucasus" made them avoid direct confrontation with the Umayyads and intervene only during times of civil war.[72] Noonan writes that this caution was because the Khazars were themselves preoccupied with consolidating their rule of the Pontic–Caspian steppe, and were satisfied with the "limited goal of bringing Albania into the Khazar sphere of influence".[72]
Second war
Photograph of an ochre-coloured medieval fortress on a green hilltop, with higher green hills in the background
Naryn-Kala, the Sasanian-era citadel in Derbent
Relations between the two powers remained relatively quiet until the early eighth century, when the stage for a new and more intense round of conflict was set.[72] At the turn of the century, Byzantine political authority was marginalized in the Caucasus: the civil war in the Caliphate ended in 693, and the Umayyads were able to inflict significant defeats on the Byzantines, who descended into a long period of turmoil. The Arabs began a sustained offensive against Byzantium that would eventually culminate in the great assault on the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, in 717–718.[73][74][75] In the same period, the Caliphate tightened its grip on the Christian principalities of Transacaucasia. After the suppression of a large-scale Armenian rebellion in 705, Armenia, Iberia and Albania finally came under direct Arab rule as the province of Arminiya. Only western Transcaucasia (present-day Georgia) remained free from direct control by either of the two rival powers, who now confronted each other for control of the Caucasus.[72][76]
The first Arab advance came as early a 692/93, with an expedition to secure the pass of Derbent; but the Arab forces were soon forced to withdraw.[77][78] The conflict resumed in 707, with a campaign by Umayyad general Maslama, a son of Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), in Adharbayjan and up to Derbent. Further attacks on Derbent are reported by different sources in 708 by Muhammad ibn Marwan, and the following year by Maslama, but the most likely date for Derbent's recovery by the Arabs is Maslama's 713/14 expedition.[14][79][80]
The eighth-century Armenian historian Łewond reports that Derbent was in the hands of the Huns at that time; the 16th-century chronicle Derbent-nameh says that it was defended by 3,000 Khazars, and Maslama captured it only after a resident showed him a secret underground passage. Łewond also says that the Arabs, realizing that they could not hold the fortress, razed its walls.[81] Maslama then drove deeper into Khazar territory, trying to subdue the North Caucasian Huns (who were Khazar vassals).[14][80] The Khazar khagan confronted the Arabs at the city of Tarku but, apart from a series of single combats by champions, the two armies did not engage for several days. The imminent arrival of Khazar reinforcements under the general Alp' forced Maslama to quickly abandon his campaign and retreat to Iberia, leaving his camp with all its equipment behind as a ruse.[82] At about the same time, 80,000 Khazars are reported to have raided Albania.[80]
In response, in 709 or c. 715, the Khazars invaded and raided Albania with an army claimed to be 80,000 strong.[83] In 717, the Khazars raided Adharbayjan in force. With the bulk of the Umayyad army occupied at the siege of Constantinople, Caliph Umar II (r. 717–720) reportedly could only spare 4,000 men to confront 20,000 invaders. The Arab commander Hatim ibn al-Nu'man nevertheless defeated and drove back the Khazars. Hatim returned to the caliph with fifty Khazar prisoners, the first such event recorded in the sources.[84][85]
Escalation of the conflict
Photo of both sides of a silver coin with Arabic inscriptions
Silver dirham, minted 707/8, possibly in Arab-ruled Caucasian Albania (Arabic Albanaq)
In 721/22, the main phase of the war began. Thirty thousand Khazars invaded Armenia that winter, and decisively defeated the mostly-Syrian army of local governor[e] Ma'laq ibn Saffar al-Bahrani at Marj al-Hijara (Rocky Meadow) in February and March 722.[88][89][90]
Caliph Yazid II (r. 720–724) sent al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah, one of his most celebrated generals, north with 25,000 Syrian troops in response.[91] The Khazars retreated to the area of Derbent (whose Muslim garrison was still holding out) at the news of his approach. Learning that the local Lezgin chief was in contact with the Khazars, al-Jarrah set up camp on the river Rubas and announced that the army would remain there for several days. Instead, he arrived at Derbent in a night march and entered it without resistance.[92][93] From there, al-Jarrah launched raiding columns into Khazar territory ahead of the bulk of his army. His army met a Khazar army at the river al-Ran, one day's march north of Derbent, after joining the columns. According to the Derbent-nameh, al-Jarrah had 10,000 men (of whom 4,000 were vassal princes); al-Tabari cites the Arab strength as 25,000. The Khazars, commanded by Barjik (one of the Khazar khagan's sons), reportedly numbered 40,000. The Arabs were victorious, losing 4,000 men to the Khazars' 7,000. Advancing north, the Arab army captured the settlements of Khamzin and Targhu and resettled their inhabitants elsewhere.[94][95]
Finally, the Arab army reached Balanjar. The city had had strong fortifications during the first Muslim attacks in the mid-seventh century, but apparently they had been neglected; the Khazars defended their capital by surrounding the citadel with a wagon fort of 300 wagons tied together with ropes, a common tactic among nomads. The Arabs broke through, storming the city on 21 August 722. Most of Balanjar's inhabitants were killed or enslaved, but a few (including its governor) fled north.[96][97][35] The booty seized by the Arabs was so large that each of the 30,000 horsemen—clearly an exaggeration by later historians—in the Arab army reportedly received 300 gold dinars.[98][99] Al-Jarrah is said to have ransomed the wife and children of Balanjar's governor, and the governor began informing him about Khazar movements. Muslim sources also say that the governor accepted an offer to recover all his belongings (and Balanjar) if he submitted to Muslim rule, but this is probably false.[98][100] At that time, so many Khazar prisoners were taken that al-Jarrah ordered some of them drowned in the Balanjar River.[98][99]
Al-Jarrah's army also reduced the neighbouring fortresses, and continued their march north. The strongly-garrisoned fortress city of Wabandar, with 40,000 households reported by the 13th-century historian Ibn al-Athir, capitulated in exchange for tribute. Al-Jarrah intended to advance to Samandar, the next major Khazar settlement, but cut his campaign short when he learned that the Khazars were gathering large forces there.[80][101][102] The Arabs had not yet defeated the main Khazar army, which (like all nomad forces) did not depend on cities for supplies. The presence of this force near Samandar and reports of rebellions among the mountain tribes in their rear forced the Arabs to retreat to Warthan, south of the Caucasus.[91][103][104] On his return, al-Jarrah reported on his campaign to the caliph and requested additional troops to defeat the Khazars.[103][104] This is an indication of the severity of the fighting and, according to Blankinship, that the campaign was not necessarily the resounding success portrayed in Muslim sources.[91] As Noonan comments, "though the [caliph] sent his best wishes, no further forces were dispatched" to the Caucasus front.[105]
Black-and-white sketch of a mountain defile, with a river crossed by a bridge
The Darial Pass c. 1861
In 723, al-Jarrah reportedly led another campaign into Alania via the Darial Pass. Sources say that he marched "beyond Balanjar", conquering several fortresses and capturing much loot, but offer few details. However, modern scholars consider this to probably be an echo (or, possibly, the actual date) of the 722 Balanjar campaign.[91][103][104] The Khazars raided south of the Caucasus in response, but in February 724, al-Jarrah decisively defeated them in a days-long battle between the rivers Cyrus and Araxes.[91] The new caliph, Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743), promised to send reinforcements but failed to do so. In 724, al-Jarrah captured Tiflis and brought Caucasian Iberia and the lands of the Alans under Muslim suzerainty.[104][106][107] These campaigns made al-Jarrah the first Muslim commander to cross the Darial Pass, secured the Muslim flank against a possible Khazar attack through the pass, and gave the Arabs a second invasion route into Khazar territory.[107][108]
In 725, the caliph replaced al-Jarrah with his own half-brother Maslama, governor of the Jazira.[80][104][109] Maslama's appointment is considered by modern historians to attest to the importance placed by the caliph on the Khazar front, since he was one of the most distinguished generals of the Umayyad empire.[104][110] Nevertheless, Maslama remained in the Jazira for the time being, more concerned with operations against the Byzantines. In his stead, he sent al-Harith ibn Amr al-Ta'i to the Caucasus front. Al-Harith spent his first year consolidating Muslim rule in Caucasian Albania: he campaigned along the Cyrus against the regions of al-Lakz and Khasmadan, and was probably also preoccupied with supervising that year's census.[104][110][111] The following year, Barjik launched a major invasion of Albania and Adharbayjan. The Khazars laid siege to Warthan with mangonels.[110][34][112] Al-Harith defeated them on the Araxes and drove them north of the river, but the Arab position was clearly precarious.[110][34][112]
Maslama assumed personal command of the Khazar front in 727. The Arab commander was faced for the first time with the khagan himself, as both sides escalated the conflict.[34] Maslama took the offensive, probably reinforced with Syrian and Jaziran troops. He recovered the Darial Pass (which had been apparently lost after al-Jarrah's 724 expedition) and pushed into Khazar territory, campaigning there until the onset of winter forced him to return to Adharbayjan.[113][34] His second invasion, the following year, was less successful; Blankinship calls it a "near disaster". Arab sources report that the Umayyad troops fought for thirty or forty days in the mud, with continuous rain, before defeating the khagan on 17 September 728. The impact of their victory is questionable, however, as Maslama was ambushed by the Khazars upon his return, and the Arabs abandoned their baggage train and fled through the Darial Pass to safety.[114][115] After this campaign, Maslama was replaced yet again by al-Jarrah. Despite his energy, Maslama's campaigns failed to produce the desired results; by 729, the Arabs had lost control of northeastern Transcaucasia and were again on the defensive, with al-Jarrah having to defend Adharbayjan against a Khazar invasion.[114][116][117]
Battle of Ardabil and Arab reaction
In 729/30, al-Jarrah returned to the offensive through Tiflis and the Darial Pass. Ibn al-Athir reports that he reached the Khazar capital, al-Bayda on the lower Volga, but no other source mentions this; modern historians generally consider this improbable, possibly resulting from confusion with other events.[117][118][119] Al-Jarrah's attacks were followed by a massive Khazar invasion[f] (reportedly 300,000 men), which forced the Arabs to again retreat south of the Caucasus and defend Albania.[121][119]
It is unclear whether the Khazar invasion was through the Darial Pass, the Caspian Gates, or both. Different commanders are mentioned for the Khazar forces; Arab sources say that the invasion was led by Barjik (the khagan's son), and Łewond identifies Tar'mach as the Khazar commander.[119][122][123] Al-Jarrah apparently dispersed some of his forces, withdrawing his main army to Bardha'a and then to Ardabil.[121] Ardabil was the capital of Adharbayjan, and most of the Muslim settlers and their families (about 30,000) lived within its walls.[119] Informed of Arab movements by the prince of Iberia, the Khazars moved around al-Jarrah and attacked Warthan. Al-Jarrah rushed to assist the town; he is next recorded as being at Ardabil again, however, confronting the main Khazar army.[121][124]
After a three-day battle from 7 to 9 December 730, al-Jarrah's 25,000-man army was all but annihilated by the Khazars.[125][126][124] Al-Jarrah was among the fallen; command passed to his brother, al-Hajjaj, who could not prevent the sacking of Ardabil. The 10th-century historian Agapius of Hierapolis reports that the Khazars took as many as 40,000 prisoners from the city, al-Jarrah's army, and the surrounding countryside. The Khazars raided the province at will, sacking Ganza and attacking other settlements. Some detachments reached Mosul in the northern Jazira, adjacent to the Umayyad heartlands in Syria.[127][128][129]
The defeat at Ardabil—news of which spread even to Byzantium—was a shock to the Muslims, who faced an army penetrating deep into the Caliphate for the first time.[127][130] Caliph Hisham again appointed Maslama to fight the Khazars as governor of Armenia and Adharbayjan. Until Maslama could assemble enough forces, veteran military leader Sa'id ibn Amr al-Harashi was sent to stem the Khazar invasion.[131][132][133] With a lance reportedly used at the Battle of Badr as a standard for his army and with 100,000 dirhams to recruit men, Sa'id went to Raqqa. The forces he could muster immediately were apparently small, but he set out to meet the Khazars (possibly disobeying orders to maintain a defensive stance). Sa'id encountered refugees from Ardabil along the way and enlisted them into his army, paying each recruit ten gold dinars as inducement.[127][132]
Sa'id was fortunate. The Khazars had dispersed in small detachments after their victory at Ardabil, plundering the countryside, and the Arabs defeated them one by one.[133] Sa'id recovered Akhlat on Lake Van, then moved northeast to Bardha'a and south to relieve the siege of Warthan. He encountered a 10,000-strong Khazar army near Bajarwan and defeated it in a surprise night attack, killing most of the Khazars and rescuing their 5,000 Muslim prisoners (who included al-Jarrah's daughter). The surviving Khazars fled north, with Sa'id in pursuit.[134][131][135] Muslim sources record a number of other, heavily embellished attacks by Sa'id on improbably-large Khazar armies; in one, Barjik was reportedly killed in single combat with the Umayyad general. Generally considered "romance rather than history", according to British orientalist Douglas M. Dunlop, they may be contemporary, but imaginative, retellings of Sa'id's campaign against the Khazars.[136][135] According to Blankinship, "The various battles fought and rescues of Muslim prisoners achieved by Sa'id in these sources seem to all go back to a single battle near Bajarwan".[137]
Sa'id's unexpected success angered Maslama; Łewond writes that Sa'id had won the war and received what glory (and booty) there was to be had. Sa'id was relieved of his command in early 731 by Maslama and imprisoned at Qabala and Bardha'a, charged with endangering the army by disobeying orders, and was released (and rewarded) only after the caliph intervened on his behalf.[138][139][140] Noonan points out that the jealousies between the Arab commanders, and their rapid turnover, adversely impacted their war effort, as it "inhibited the development and execution of a long-term strategy for dealing with the Khazar problem".[141]
Garrisoning of Derbent
Maslama took command of a large army, and immediately took the offensive. He restored the provinces of Albania to Muslim allegiance (after punishing the inhabitants of Khaydhan who resisted him) and reached Derbent, where he found a Khazar garrison of 1,000 men and their families.[140][142] Leaving al-Harith ibn Amr al-Ta'i at Derbent, Maslama advanced north. Although details of this campaign may be conflated in the sources with the 728 campaign, he apparently took Khamzin, Balanjar, and Samandar before being forced to retreat after a confrontation with the main Khazar army under the khagan. Leaving their campfires burning, the Arabs withdrew in the middle of the night and quickly reached Derbent in a series of forced marches. The Khazars shadowed Maslama's march south and attacked him near Derbent, but the Arab army (augmented by local levies) resisted until a small, elite force attacked the khagan's tent and wounded him. The Muslims, encouraged, then defeated the Khazars.[143][144][145] The Khazar commander Barjik may have been killed in this battle or campaign.[146][147]
Taking advantage of his victory, Maslama poisoned the water supply of Derbent to drive the Khazar garrison out. He re-established the city as an Arab military colony, restoring its fortifications[g] and garrisoning it with 24,000 troops, mostly from Syria, divided into quarters by their district (jund) of origin.[146][149][150] Leaving his relative Marwan ibn Muhammad (later the last Umayyad caliph, from 744 to 750) in command at Derbent, Maslama returned with the rest of his army (primarily the favoured Jaziran and Qinnasrini contingents) south of the Caucasus for the winter; the Khazars returned to their abandoned towns.[146][149][151] Maslama's record (despite the capture of Derbent) was apparently unsatisfactory to Hisham, who replaced his brother in March 732 with Marwan ibn Muhammad.[146]
That summer, Marwan led 40,000 men north into Khazar lands. Accounts of this campaign are confused. Ibn A'tham records that he reached Balanjar and returned to Derbent with much captured livestock, but the campaign also experienced heavy rain and mud. Reminiscent of descriptions of Maslama's 728 and 731 expeditions, the veracity of Ibn A'tham's account is doubtful. Ibn Khayyat reports that Marwan led a far more limited campaign on the region just north of Derbent, retiring there for the winter.[152][153] Marwan was more active in the south, appointing Ashot III Bagratuni presiding prince of Armenia; this effectively gave the country broad autonomy in exchange for the service of its soldiers in the Caliphate's armies. According to Blankinship, this unique concession indicates the Caliphate's worsening manpower crisis.[154][155] Around this time, the Khazars and Byzantines strengthened their ties and formalized their alliance against the Arabs with the marriage of Constantine V to the Khazar princess Tzitzak.[156][157]
Marwan's invasion of Khazaria and end of the war
After Marwan's 732 expedition, a period of quiet began. Sa'id al-Harashi replaced Marwan as governor of Armenia and Adharbayjan in spring 733, but undertook no campaigns during the two years of his governorship.[153][158] Blankinship attributes this inactivity to the exhaustion of the Arab armies and draws a parallel with the 732–734 quiet phase in Transoxiana, where the Arabs had also experienced a series of costly defeats at the hands of the Türgesh (another Turkic steppe power).[159] Marwan reportedly criticised the policy followed in the Caucasus to Caliph Hisham, recommending that he be sent to deal with the Khazars with an army of 120,000 men. When Sa'id asked to be relieved due to failing eyesight, Hisham appointed Marwan to replace him.[151][153]
Marwan returned to the Caucasus c. 735, determined to launch a decisive blow against the Khazars, but was apparently unable to launch anything but local expeditions for some time. He established a new base of operations at Kasak, about twenty parsangs (roughly 120 km or 75 mi) from Tiflis and forty from Bardha'a, and his initial expeditions were against minor local potentates.[160][161] Agapius of Hierapolis and the 12th-century historian Michael the Syrian record that the Arabs and Khazars concluded a peace during this period, which Muslim sources ignore or explain as a short-lived ruse by Marwan to buy time for preparations and mislead the Khazars about his intentions.[162][159]
Photograph of a ruined medieval stone-built fortress on a green hilltop in autumn, with the Caucasus mountains in the background
The medieval citadel of Anakopia in 2016
In the meantime, Marwan consolidated his rear. In 735, the Umayyad general captured three fortresses in Alania (near the Darial Pass) and Tuman Shah, the ruler of a North Caucasian principality who was restored to his lands by the caliph as a client. Marwan campaigned the following year against Wartanis, another local prince, whose castle was seized and its defenders killed despite their surrender; Wartanis tried to flee, but was captured and executed by the inhabitants of Khamzin.[161] Marwan also subdued the Armenian factions who were hostile to the Arabs and Ashot, their client. He then pushed into Iberia, driving its ruler to seek refuge in the fortress of Anakopia on the Black Sea coast in the Byzantine protectorate of Abkhazia. Marwan besieged Anakopia, but was forced to retire due to an outbreak of dysentery in his army.[163] His cruelty during the invasion of Iberia earned him the epithet "the Deaf" from the Iberians.[151]
Marwan prepared a massive strike against the Khazars for 737 to end the war. He apparently went to Damascus to ask Hisham for support; the 10th-century historian Bal'ami says that his army numbered 150,000 men, including regular forces from Syria and the Jazira, jihad volunteers, Armenian troops under Ashot Bagratuni, and armed camp followers and servants. Whatever the size of Marwan's army, it was the largest ever sent against the Khazars.[163][162][164] He attacked simultaneously from two directions. Thirty thousand men (including most of the levies from the Caucasian principalities) under Derbent governor Asid ibn Zafir al-Sulami advanced north along the Caspian coast, and Marwan crossed the Darial Pass with the bulk of his forces. The invasion met little resistance; Arab sources report that Marwan had detained the Khazar envoy and only released him (with a declaration of war) when he was deep in Khazar territory. The two Arab armies converged on Samandar, where a review was held; according to Ibn A'tham, the troops were issued new white clothing—the Umayyad dynastic colour—and new spears.[163][164][165] Marwan then advanced, according to some Arab sources, to the Khazar capital of al-Bayda on the Volga. The khagan withdrew towards the Ural Mountains, but left a considerable force to protect the capital.[166][167] This was a "spectacularly deep penetration", according to Blankinship, but of little strategic value; the 10th-century travellers Ibn Fadlan and Istakhri describe the Khazar capital as little more than a large encampment, and there is no evidence that it had been larger or more urbanized in the past.[168]
Photograph of people in shirtsleeves working amidst the excavated foundations of ancient buildings
Excavations at Samosdelka, identified by some archaeologists as the Khazar capital al-Bayda (Atil)[169]
The subsequent course of the campaign is only chronicled by Ibn A'tham and other sources drawing from his work.[170][h] According to this account, Marwan ignored al-Bayda and pursued the khagan north along the west bank of the Volga; the Khazar army, under the tarkhan (a high-ranking dignitary in Turkic states), shadowed the Arab advance from the east bank. The Arabs attacked the Burtas, whose territory extended to that of the Volga Bulgars and who were Khazar subjects, taking 20,000 families (40,000 people in other accounts) captive.[167][170][173] The Khazars avoided battle, and Marwan sent a detachment of 40,000 troops across the Volga under al-Kawthar ibn al-Aswad al-Anbari. The Khazars were surprised in a swamp; ten thousand Khazars were killed in the ensuing battle (including the tarkhan), and 7,000 were captured.[170][173] [174]
This appears to have been the only fighting of the campaign between the Arabs and Khazars,[170][175] and the Khazar khagan soon requested peace. Marwan reportedly offered "Islam or the sword", and the khagan agreed to convert to Islam. Two faqihs (experts in Islamic law) were sent to instruct him on the details of religious observance; the prohibition of wine, pork, and unclean meat is especially noted.[176][172][177] Marwan also brought a large number of Slav and Khazar captives south, whom he resettled in the eastern Caucasus; al-Baladhuri reports that about 20,000 Slavs were settled at Kakheti, and the Khazars were resettled at al-Lakz. The Slavs soon killed their appointed governor and fled north, and Marwan pursued and killed them.[177][178][179]
Marwan's 737 expedition was the climax of the Arab–Khazar wars, but its results were meagre. Although the Arab campaigns after Ardabil may have discouraged the Khazars from further warfare,[178] recognition of Islam or Arab supremacy by the khagan was evidently based on the presence of Arab troops deep in Khazar territory, which was unsustainable.[177][180] The withdrawal of the Arab armies, followed by the Muslim civil wars of the740s and the subsequent collapse of the Umayyad regime in the Abbasid Revolution certainly "left little political pressure to remain Muslim", according to Golden.[181] Even the credibility of the khagan's conversion to Islam is disputed by modern scholars; al-Baladhuri's account, which is probably closest to the original sources, suggests that it was not the khagan but a minor lord who converted to Islam and was placed in charge of the Khazars at al-Lakz. Blankinship cites this as indicating the implausibility of the khagan's conversion, since those Khazars who actually converted to Islam had to be moved to safety in Umayyad territory.[170]
The khagan's conversion is also contradicted by the fact that the Khazar court is known to have embraced Judaism as its faith. Dunlop placed this as early as c. 740, but the process is not well documented and was apparently gradual; it was certainly underway in the last decades of the eighth century, according to historical sources, and numismatic evidence indicates that it was probably complete by the 830s.[182][183] The conversion was primarily confined to the Khazar elites, and Christianity, Islam, and paganism remained widespread among the Khazar subjects,[184] and even members of the royal house are known to have professed Islam—and thus been barred from ascending the throne.[185] Many modern scholars believe that the Khazar elites' conversion to Judaism was a means of stressing their own identity as separate from (and avoiding assimilation by) the Christian Byzantine and Muslim Arab empires with which they were in contact, and was a direct result of the 737 events.[186][187]
Aftermath and impact
Whatever the real events of Marwan's campaigns, warfare between the Khazars and the Arabs ceased for more than two decades after 737.[155] Arab military activity in the Caucasus continued until 741, with Marwan launching repeated expeditions against minor principalities in the area of present-day Dagestan.[j][190][191] Blankinship says that these campaigns more closely resembled raids, designed to seize plunder and extract tribute to ensure the upkeep of the Arab army, than attempts at permanent conquest.[192] Dunlop on the other hand writes that Marwan came "within an ace of succeeding" in his conquest of Khazaria, and suggests that the Arab commander "apparently intended to resume operations against the khagan at a later date" which never materialized.[193]
Despite the Umayyad establishment of a more-or-less stable frontier anchored at Derbent,[76][192] they could not advance any further (despite repeated efforts) in the face of Khazar resistance. Dunlop drew parallels between the Umayyad–Khazar confrontation in the Caucasus and that between the Umayyads and the Franks at roughly the same time across the Pyrenees, which ended with the Battle of Tours; according to Dunlop, like the Franks in the west, the Khazars played a crucial role in stemming the tide of early Muslim conquest.[194] This view was also shared by the Soviet historian and Khazar expert Mikhail Artamonov,[195] as well as by Golden.[196] According to Golden, during the long conflict the Arabs "had been able to maintain their hold over much of Transcaucasia"; despite occasional Khazar raids, this "had never really been seriously threatened". In their failure to push the border north of Derbent, however, the Arabs were clearly "reaching the outer limits of their imperial drive".[197]
Blankinship considers the Caliphate's limited gains in the second war as disproportionate to the resources expended; Arab control was limited to the lowlands and coast, and the land was too poor to replenish the Umayyad treasury. The large garrison at Derbent further depleted the already-overstretched Syro-Jaziran army, the main pillar of the Umayyad regime.[192] The weakening of the Syrian army by its dispersion across the Caliphate's fronts was eventually the major factor in the fall of the Umayyad dynasty during the Muslim civil wars of the 740s and the subsequent Abbasid Revolution.[198]
Balanjar was no longer mentioned after the Arab–Khazar wars, but a people known as "Baranjar" was later recorded as living in Volga Bulgaria—probably descendants of the original tribe which gave the town its name and resettled there as a result of the wars.[199] Soviet and Russian archaeologists and historians such as Murad Magomedov [ru] and Svetlana Pletnyova consider the eighth-century emergence of the Saltovo-Mayaki culture in the steppe region between the Don and Dnieper Rivers as resulting from the Arab–Khazar conflict, since Alans from the North Caucasus were resettled there by the Khazars.[200]
Later conflicts
Map of Europe and the Mediterranean basin showing the polities of the year 814 in various colours
Map of Europe and the Mediterranean in the early ninth century
The Khazars resumed their raids on Muslim territory after the Abbasid succession in 750, reaching deep into Transcaucasia. Although the Khazars had re-consolidated control of Dagestan almost to Derbent by the ninth century, they never seriously attempted to challenge Muslim control of the southern Caucasus.[177] At the same time, the new Abbasid dynasty's hold on its empire was too tenuous for a resumption of the ambitious Umayyad offensives.[201] According to Thomas S. Noonan, "[T]he Khazar-Arab Wars ended in a stalemate",[202] followed by a gradual rapprochement that encouraged the growth of trade between the two empires: hoards of Arab coins in Eastern Europe suggest that the second half of the 8th century marks the start of the trade routes linking the Baltic and Eastern Europe, with the Caucasus and the Middle East.[203][204]
The first conflict between the Khazars and the Abbasids resulted from a diplomatic manoeuvre by Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775). Attempting to strengthen the Caliphate's ties with the Khazars, he ordered governor of Armenia Yazid al-Sulami to marry a daughter of the khagan Baghatur c. 760. The marriage took place, but she and her child died in childbirth two years later. The khagan, suspecting the Muslims of poisoning his daughter, raided south of the Caucasus from 762 to 764. Led by the Khwarezmian tarkhan Ras, the Khazars devastated Albania, Armenia and Iberia, and captured Tiflis. Yazid escaped capture, but the Khazars returned north with thousands of captives and much booty.[177][205] When the deposed Iberian ruler Nerse tried to induce the Khazars to campaign against the Abbasids and restore him to his throne in 780, the khagan refused. This was probably the result of brief anti-Byzantine Khazar foreign policy resulting from disputes in the Crimea; at this time, the Khazars helped Leon II of Abkhazia throw off Byzantine rule.[177][206]
Peace reigned in the Caucasus between the Arabs and Khazars until 799, and the last major Khazar attack into Transcaucasia. Chroniclers again attribute the attack to a failed marriage alliance.[177] Georgian sources say that the khagan wanted to marry Shushan, the beautiful daughter of Prince Archil of Kakheti (r. 736–786), and sent his general Bulchan to invade Iberia and capture her. Most of central K'art'li was occupied, and Prince Juansher (r. 786–807) was taken captive for several years. Shushan committed suicide rather than be captured, and the furious khagan had Bulchan executed.[207][k] Arab chroniclers attribute the conflict to plans by the Abbasid governor al-Fadl ibn Yahya (a Barmakid) to marry one of the khagan's daughters, who died on the journey south. A completely different story is reported by al-Tabari; the Khazars were invited to attack by a local Arab magnate in retaliation for the execution of his father, the governor of Derbent, by the general Sa'id ibn Salm. According to the Arab sources, the Khazars raided as far as the Araxes against troops led by Yazid ibn Mazyad (the new governor of Transcaucasia) and reserve forces led by Khuzayma ibn Khazim.[177][206][209]
Arabs and Khazars continued to clash sporadically in the North Caucasus during the ninth and 10th centuries, but the warfare was localized and far less intense than the eighth-century wars. The Ottoman historian Münejjim Bashi records a period of warfare from c. 901 to 912, perhaps linked to the Caspian raids of the Rus' at about the same time (whom the Khazars permitted to cross their lands unhindered).[210] For the Khazars, peace on the southern border became more important as new threats to their hegemony emerged in the steppes.[211] The Khazar threat receded with their progressive collapse in the 10th century and defeats by the Rus' and other Turkic nomads such as the Oghuz Turks. The Khazar realm contracted to its core around the lower Volga, removed from the reach of the Arab Muslim principalities of the Caucasus; Ibn al-Athir's reports of a war between the Shaddadids of Ganja with the "Khazars" in 1030 probably refers, instead, to the Georgians. The last Khazars found refuge among their former enemies; Münejjim Bashi records that in 1064, "the remnants of the Khazars, consisting of three thousand households, arrived in Qahtan [somewhere in Dagestan] from the Khazar territory. They rebuilt it and settled in it".[212]
Notes
On suggestions about its location, see Semyonov 2008, pp. 283–284
For more details, see Albrecht 2016 and the literature referenced there.
According to Thomas S. Noonan, the significance of this marriage should not be overestimated; Byzantium was more hard-pressed by the Arab attacks than the Khazars, both sides could provide little tangible help to one another,[47] and there is no evidence of further Byzantine–Khazar relations for half a century.[48] Noonan call the marriage "purely symbolic, a gesture of solidarity and no more".[47]
Nothing else is known about Suraqa ibn Amr other than his overall command of the 642 Derbent campaign and that he shared the nickname 'Dhu al-Nur' with his deputy, Abd al-Rahman ibn Rabi'a.[56]
The task of facing the Khazars during the Second Arab–Khazar War fell on the Umayyad governors of Arminiya and Adharbayjan, the two provinces being governed in tandem at the time and usually combined with the governorship of the Jazira province.[86][87]
Łewond reports that the Khazar invasion was preceded by the death of the khagan, leaving his widow Parsbit as ruler over the Khazars.[117] Consequently, Semyonov suggests that al-Jarrah's raid against al-Bayda may indeed have reached al-Bayda, or at least succeeded in killing the khagan, and that the subsequent invasion was launched as a campaign of vengeance.[120]
Later Arabic accounts of Maslama's fortification activity have deliberate echoes of the similar endeavours under Khosrow I, as well as the legendary Wall of Alexander against the Gog and Magog.[148]
Artamonov notes that most Arabic sources about the campaign are vague, with little detail, and that Armenian historians only mention Arab attacks on the lands of the North Caucasus Huns and the capture of Barachan (Balanjar).[171]
According to medieval Arab geographers, the land of the Burtas was 15–20 days' journey north of al-Bayda, putting it in present-day Mordovia.[172]
The Arabic sources list expeditions to extract tribute (a levy of slaves and annual grain supplies for Derbent) and impose obligations of military assistance against the principalities of Sarir, Ghumik, Khiraj (or Khizaj), Tuman, Sirikaran, Khamzin, Sindan (also known as Sughdan or Masdar), Layzan (or al-Lakz), Tabarsaran, Sharwan, and Filan.[188][189]
According to Semyonov, these events are mis-dated and should be attributed to the 730 Khazar invasion; Semyonov also suggests that Juansher's seven-year captivity coincides with the end of the second war.[208]
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Lilie 1976, pp. 157–160.
Noonan 1992, p. 128.
Noonan 1992, p. 113.
Mako 2010, pp. 48–49.
Artamonov 1962, pp. 176–177.
Gocheleishvili 2014.
Canard 1960, pp. 635–636.
Canard 1960, pp. 636–637.
Minorsky 1960, p. 190.
Frye 1960, p. 660.
Smith 1994, p. 34, note 175.
Dunlop 1954, pp. 47–49.
Noonan 1984, pp. 176–177.
Dunlop 1954, pp. 49–51.
Dunlop 1954, pp. 51–54.
Artamonov 1962, p. 179.
Dunlop 1954, pp. 55–57.
Artamonov 1962, pp. 178–179.
Mako 2010, p. 45.
Dunlop 1954, p. 57.
Noonan 1984, p. 178.
Noonan 1984, p. 179.
Wasserstein 2007, p. 375.
Dunlop 1954, pp. 59–60.
Noonan 1984, pp. 180–181.
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Blankinship 1994, p. 122.
Dunlop 1954, pp. 62–63.
Artamonov 1962, pp. 205–206.
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https://www.history.com/news/portugal-age-exploration?cmpid=email-hist-inside-history-onequestion-2023-0825-08252023&om_rid=
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_liberation_reprisals
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!!!
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https://www.history.com/news/ancient-railway-greece-diolkos?cmpid=email-hist-inside-history-2023-0913-09132023&om_rid=%20~campaign%20%3D%20hist-inside-history-2023-0913
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https://dirkdeklein.net/2023/02/13/roger-godfrin-sole-child-survivor/
:cry:
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A good topic for Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs":
After his eldest son died falling off a scaffold while holding up a severed head for the crowd
his younger son took over and it was he who finished off Marie Antionette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-Henri_Sanson
PS : what a charming family business !
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The only government sponsored organization in Europe formed and designed to save Jews during the Nazi reign of terror:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBegota
This counters the pervading image of Poles as being collaborators of the Nazis.
I came across this while reading up on Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit[1] (22 July 1878 or 1879 – 7 August 1942).
The man who went with his 190 + orphans to give them as much loving support as they all went to die in Treblinka.
He was offered a way out by Zegota but he refused and stayed with his children.
:cry:
Never again! That is why Israelis must fight.
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:cry: :cry: :cry:
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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/roman-emperor-actually-trans-woman-165908571.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9sLmZhY2Vib29rLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALoNbjTgqq14TrAho64aJ1JOrRPn_Rv9PPkhFh497zXaQoDqDQxpN_uJL7DcfJ_w-PWe8ooPc4LFigvz6GEEm_WOOx7miA5-1IGHRKeiEw0DHJioKSUGv1Q2QKGJuZjZySWH1OKr2a_rdSDvTGlhyATBYtOGrXYxb50QJ4ueqpp5
My friend the history teacher writes:
I was waiting for this to happen. This guy was insane and considered to be on the level of a Caligula or Nero.
He ruled from the age of 14 to 18 and was assassinated. He raped and tortured people. Threw live snakes at his guests.
Yes he dressed up like a woman and wanted a vagina. Bc he was fucking INSANE. The romans were very open minded about sexual stuff and even to them he was seen as a horrible deviant.
Alla
But here they portray him as some kind of a progressive and call him an Empress. They respect his choice of pronouns? And by the way, he only wanted to be called that when he was with the guy he was in a relationship with. Not all the time.
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more unbelievable than the tones down George Scott version in the movie 'Patton':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton%27s_speech_to_the_Third_Army
Can anyone imagine today's woke generals giving a speech like this?
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the movie may be wrong - > "“France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine,"
though some accounts back up at least part of it:
the evidence:
https://shannonselin.com/2015/05/napoleons-last-words/
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What Nigel Biggar says about the British Empire
Samizdata.net / by Brendan Westbridge (London) / January 10, 2024 at 03:02AM
We are constantly being told by that coalition of communists and racists that talk about “de-colonisation” that the British Empire was a Bad Thing and that therefore we whiteys should a) be ashamed, b) tear down any monuments to that empire and c) give all our money and wealth to the descendents of the alleged victims of that empire. This despite the fact that there is almost no one alive who had anything to do with said empire. There is no force for good like inter-generational guilt.
For some time Oxford Academic Nigel Biggar has been discomfited by this claim and these demands. In 2017, he was denounced by “fellow” academics for running an “Empire and Ethics” project. Last year saw the publication of his book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. This itself was something of a palaver with Biggar’s original publisher dropping the thing in what appeared to be a cancellation. Luckily there is still some competition in the publishing world and another publisher came to the rescue.
Biggar is at pains to point out that he is an ethicist not a historian. He deals in moral issues not historical ones; hence the title of the book. Well, that’s the theory but with over a hundred pages of footnotes it would appear he is quite good at the not-day job.
He examines the various claims that the “de-colonisers” make: Amritsar, slavery, Benin, Boer War, Irish famine. In all cases he finds that their claims are either entirely ungrounded or lack vital information that would cast events in a very different light.. Amritsar? Dyer was dealing with political violence that had led to murder. Some victims had been set alight. Anyway, he was condemned for his actions by the British authorities and, indeed, his own standing orders. Slavery? Everyone had it and Britain was the first to get rid of it. Benin? They had killed unarmed ambassadors. Irish famine? They tried to relieve it but they were quite unequal to the size of the task. In the case of Benin he comes very close to accusing the leading de-coloniser of knowingly lying. The only one of these where I don’t think he is so convincing is the Boer War. He claims that Britain was concerned about the future of the Cape and especially the Simonstown naval base and also black rights. I think it was the pursuit of gold even if it does mean agreeing with the communist Eric Hobsbawm.
He is far too polite about the “de-colonisers”. They are desperate to hammer the square peg of reality into their round-hole of a theory. To this end they claim knowledge they don’t have, gloss over inconvenient facts, erect theories that don’t bear scrutiny and when all else fails: lie. Biggar tackles all of these offences against objectivity with a calmness and a politeness that you can bet his detractors would never return.
The communists – because they are obsessed with such things and are past masters at projection – like to claim that there was an “ideology” of Empire. Biggar thinks this is nonsense. As he says:
There was no essential motive or set of motives that drove the British Empire. The reasons why the British built an empire were many and various. They differed between trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official and statesman. They sometimes differed between London, Cairo, Cape Town and Calcutta. And all of the motives I have unearthed in this chapter were, in themselves, innocent: the aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government. There is nothing morally wrong with any of these. Indeed, the last one is morally admirable.[/i]
One of the benefits of the British Empire is that it tended to put a stop to local wars. How many people lived because of that? Bthat leads us on to another aspect. Almost no one ever considers what went on before the Empire arrived. Was it better or worse than went before it? Given that places like Benin indulged in human sacrifice, I would say that in many cases the British Empire was an improvement. And if we are going to talk about what went before what about afterwards? He has little to say about what newly-independent countries have done with their independence. The United States, the “white” (for want of a better term) Commonwealth and Singapore have done reasonably well. Ireland is sub-par but OK. Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent have very little to show for themselves. This may explain why Britain needed very few people to maintain the Empire. At one point he points out that at the height of the Raj the ratio of Briton to native was 1 to 1000. That implies a lot of consent. Tyrannies need a lot more people.
The truth of the matter is that talk of reparations is rooted in the failure of de-colonisation. If Jamaica were a nicer place to live than the UK, if Jamaica had a small boats crisis rather than the UK then no one would be breathing a word about reparations or colonial guilt. All this talk is pure deflection from the failure of local despots to make the lives of their subjects better.
Biggar has nothing to say about what came after the empire and he also has little to say about how it came about in the first place – so I’ll fill in that gap. Britain acquired an empire because it could. Britain was able to acquire an Empire because it mastered the technologies needed to do it to a higher level and on a greater scale than anyone else. Britain mastered technology because it made it possible to prosper by creating wealth. That in itself was a moral achievement.
Of course, modern Britons don’t actually need to justify the Empire. As I pointed out at the beginning none of us had anything to do with it. You could argue (does anyone actually do this?) that we current-day Britons are the inheritors of the same culture and perhaps we should be ashamed about that. Except that I am not in the mood to condemn a culture that produced the rule of law, freedom of speech, property rights and the Industrial Revolution. Anyway, does anyone seriously think that modern British culture would be capable of giving birth to a second empire? Culture changes. The other argument is that many of us continue to be the beneficiaries of the Empire. At very least those who have started with nothing and yet are still on the hook for reparations are entitled to feel a bit miffed. But one only has to look around to see that most of Britain’s prosperity is much more recent in origin. Sure, that big house might have originally been built from a slaver’s profits but if a more recent person hadn’t kept the roof intact it would be a ruin by now.
A narrative about a rapacious British Empire is being used to first humiliate and shame modern Britons in preparation for their impoverishment and eventual extermination. OK, maybe I am getting ahead of myself here but I’ll bet you some of them of thinking that. There is certainly nothing in the “decolonisation” belief system to prevent it. Biggar’s achievement is to demonstrate that – if you do believe in intergenerational guilt – there is nothing to be ashamed of.
https://www.samizdata.net/2024/01/what-nigel-biggar-says-about-the-british-empire/
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Nixon to Trump
the corrupt media and DC :
https://spectator.org/trump-should-learn-from-watergate/
personally, I always felt that Nixon was railroaded by a bunch of partisan dirtballs
and never quite accepted their 'story'.
I was annoyed by their hypocrisy and virtue signaling then and more so now.
Especially when everyone but Nixon stood to benefit.
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Roosevelt/Truman had called for a truce with Nazi Germany before they entered Germany.
and called for Truce against Japan prior to dropping nucs......
if only Israel would call a truce just before finishing (mostly) off Hamas.....
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_hat
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https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
I never noticed this before... :-o
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Better in the American History thread.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/incredible-fresco-of-helen-of-troy-is-uncovered-at-pompeii/ar-BB1lrNnQ?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=9a777f82ea4c4bd795c519f4998478aa&ei=31
Helen looks like Kathy Griffin
:-o :evil:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_and_Adventures_of_Calamity_Jane_-_read_by_Amy_Gramour_for_LibriVox%27s_Short_Nonfiction_Collection_Vol.026.ogg
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That would be American History :-D