Quotulatiousness

August 20, 2021

“They were there to debate Afghanistan, a far-away country of which it turns out that we know even less than we thought”

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The British government recalls Parliament to debate the situation in Afghanistan (not that there’s much to be done at this late stage, but formalities are at least being observed in a perfunctory manner):

The House of Commons was full, for the first time since last March. Members of Parliament had been brought back from their holidays, from West Country campsites and from Greek resorts, in a repatriation operation that puts the Foreign Office to shame.

They were there to debate Afghanistan, a far-away country of which it turns out that we know even less than we thought. It was only last month that Boris Johnson was assuring MPs that “there is no military path to victory for the Taliban”, although we now know that path was straight along the road to Kabul, as fast as their trucks could carry them.

Now Johnson was back to explain that things had turned out to be a bit more complicated than he thought. Or perhaps a bit simpler: we’ve gone, they’re back. Parliament was getting eight hours to discuss this, although it was too late to do very much about it. It wasn’t so much shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted as holding a long discussion about the history of equine care as the stallion in question disappeared over the horizon.

Still, the atmosphere was jolly. Many of these MPs haven’t seen each other in over a year. There was a first-day-of-term feel to things. With Parliament’s Covid restrictions lapsed, the Conservatives were wedged in together in the small, windowless chamber, barely a facemask in sight. The government’s instructions are still to wear masks in crowded places, but the Conservatives view Covid as some sort of socialist conspiracy that will go away if they ignore it. Or maybe they just feel that rules are for the little people.

Labour MPs had at least nodded to social distancing, sitting about 18 inches apart from each other. This is, admittedly, easier when there aren’t very many of you. The opposition benches were a sea of masks. Only the Democratic Unionists, who like the Tories see illness as a sign of moral failure, were a lone island of uncovered faces.

Johnson’s statement was, as ever, a masterpiece of bare adequacy. It eloquently just about dealt with the matter in question, magisterially pretty much covering the bases. The speechwriters, one sensed, must have been working on the words late into the previous afternoon. They had gone through as many as one draft as they tried to come up with something that, if it didn’t deal with every complex nuance of the Afghan tragedy, at least asked the question that Johnson lives by: “Will this do?”

The situation in Afghanistan was a “concern”, the prime minister explained, with what might, in another context, have been a brilliantly comic understatement. Over the past 20 years, the British had worked for a better future for the people of Afghanistan. “Some of this progress,” the prime minister said, “is fragile”, which is certainly one way of putting it.

What had gone wrong with our intelligence services, several people asked, that they had so comprehensively failed to see this coming? Be fair, replied Johnson, even the Taliban had been surprised by the speed of their own advance.

On the US Naval Institute Blog, CDRSalamander notes the only speech in the House of Commons during that debate that grabbed and held the attention of the entire body:

Let’s back away from the problem at hand a bit … and then back up further. I mentioned it earlier, but let’s bring it up again; national humiliation. There are different aspects of this growing humiliation that are already manifesting itself, the first of which is how others look at us.

Let’s start with our closest friend and take a moment to listen to a speech earlier today in the British House of Commons by Tom Tugendhat, MP.

    The mission in Afghanistan wasn’t a British mission, it was a Nato mission. … And so it is with great sadness that I now criticise one of them. … To see their commander-in-chief call into question the courage of men I fought with — to claim that they ran. It is shameful. … this is a harsh lesson for all of us and if we are not careful it could be a very, very difficult lesson for our allies. … to make sure we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, but that we can work together with Japan and Australia, with France and Germany, with partners large and small, and make sure we hold the line together.

That is our closest friend outlining a loss of confidence. That is just one datapoint from a friend, but it is safe to say that it is probably somewhere in the center of opinion.

What are those nations who are not our friends thinking? I don’t think I need to spend all that much time on discussing how emboldened they are. It is self-evident to anyone who reads USNIBlog.

On the ground, troops of 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment are actively involved in escorting British and Afghani civilians from safe houses to Kabul airport for evacuation:

At least one NATO country hasn’t forgotten the civilians who have been left behind during the precipitate withdrawal by US troops.

July 2, 2021

Japan’s Institutionalization of Rape – WAH 037 – June 1942, Pt. 2

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 1 Jul 2021

During the occupation of South-East Asia, Japan builds a large system of institutionalised rape to “keep their soldiers happy”. Meanwhile, Allied refugees from Burma find a safe haven in India, but for some, hardship continues.
(more…)

May 14, 2021

100,000 Dead British Subjects in Burma – WAH 034 – May 1942, Pt. 1

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 May 2021

A large number of European and asian inhabitants of South-East Asia are locked up in Japanese prison camps, while in Burma, a big refugee crisis claims the lives of thousands. In Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor, gassing Jews on an immense scale begins.
(more…)

May 8, 2021

QotD: That time the global elites were against diversity

There was simply no debate back then [in the aftermath of the Great War] that a mass influx of European refugees to Africa would have been a conquest, not a “humanitarian crisis” that Africans, with their ample space and nutrient-rich soil, had some kind of responsibility to sit back and accept. And to be clear, many of the European refugees who would have trekked across Sörgel’s newly reclaimed land were genuinely in need. They were impoverished, homeless, destitute. And a lot of them were fleeing political violence. Those folks were as poor, wretched, and persecuted as any Honduran is today. But in fully rejecting Atlantropa as a goal to be pursued, the international community took the position that “it sucks that you’re impoverished and mistreated in your home country, but it ain’t Africa’s problem. Stay where you are.”

See, in those days, the elites believed in keeping people in their own damn land. Hard as that might be to fathom now, that used to be a mantra of the progressive internationalists. There was a die-hard belief that the key to world peace was the separation of people, the segregation of populations by race, religion, and ethnicity. That was the entire point of the Greek/Turkish population exchange of 1923, overseen by the League in the name of keeping Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims separated for the sake of peace. As UNC Chapel Hill history professor Sarah Shields wrote in her 2016 essay in the Journal of the History of International Law, the prevailing belief at that time was that “Muslims and non-Muslims could not live together peacefully, and modernity required rejecting a diverse past in favor of a nation-state along European (unmixed) lines.”

Separation was the future, diversity was the past. Damn near 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were sent from the land of their birth to the land where they could live with those of a similar faith. Many of the other population transfers and redrawn boundaries that followed World War I were based on that same concept of giving people their “own” homeland based on characteristics like religion or ethnicity. It was simply taken as fact back then that nations function better with some level of homogeneity. That was canon back then. By the time the U.N. came around, that notion was still very much a guiding principle, as the internationalists realized that a vision of a multireligious, multiethnic Palestine was unrealistic and unattainable. And the Jews and the Arabs realized that too, which is why they started slaughtering each other, because they couldn’t bear to live in a partitioned state. Being separate but equal was not enough. They wanted to be separate and separated.

David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.

April 20, 2021

QotD: The Atlantropa project

Filed under: Africa, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ever heard of Atlantropa? Probably not. It was a nutty scheme hatched by a nutty guy, and it never had even the remotest chance of ever coming to pass. In the 1920s, Europe was suffering from a myriad of post–World War I problems. There was a refugee crisis, the result of the shifting borders and population transfers that occurred at the war’s end. There was an energy crisis, and a serious shortage of natural resources. And, of course, there was the economic depression. Several years before a madly gesticulating Austrian with a wacky mustache would rise to power with his own solution to the continent’s ills, a plucky architect from Bavaria named Herman Sörgel proposed a different one: Drain the Mediterranean! Dam the Med and partially drain it, in order to form a contiguous body of land between Europe and Africa. A new continent that would be called Atlantropa. To Sörgel, this would cure Europe of all that ailed her. The dammed Mediterranean would create hydroelectric power plants to relight Europe’s recently dimmed lamps, and the elimination of pesky ocean crossings would allow millions of European refugees to stream into Africa, where they would take their rightful place as lord and master. Better still, this newly conquered African land would be ripe with fertile soil, minerals, and a plethora of natural resources for the taking.

Oh, Herman Sörgel, you pie-in-the-sky dreamer! You were the Elon Musk of your day (but slightly more grounded). The idea never took off, not just because of the fact that it was batshit insane, but also because, at that time, the left’s intellectual elite — the League of Nations crowd, the “forward-thinkers” — understood that you don’t cure one nation or one continent’s refugee problem by sending all of the huddled, wretched refuse to another people’s nation or continent. Back then, the left understood that this would pose serious problems for the host nation or continent. And the left was right. Atlantropa would have been a nightmare for native Africans, and eventually, there would have been a Rhodesia- or South Africa-style reckoning.

In the 1920s, if anyone had suggested that the specter of millions of European refugees streaming into Africa did not constitute an invasion, that person would have been dismissed as a lunatic, because of course it would have been an invasion. Those in favor of Atlantropa, and those against it, all got that point. The European refugees would not have been content to live like Africans, or to live under African rule. Europe’s refugee crisis would have become Africa’s domination crisis. So to the liberal elites, the best solution was to tell the refugees to stay put.

David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.

November 6, 2020

An American Globalist – Cordell Hull – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Americas, History, Japan, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 5 Nov 2020

Cordell Hull is the face of American diplomacy in 1941 as it navigates the precarious road to war against Imperial Japan.

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Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Mikolaj Uchman
Spartacus Olsson

Sources:
Naval History & Heritage Command
http://maps.bpl.org
FDR Presidential Library & Museum
Picture of MS St. Louis in Hamburg, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Herbert and Vera Karliner
from the Noun Project: Skull by Muhamad Ulum, Handshake by priyanka, Pickaxe by Luke Anthony Firth, oil barrel by BomSymbols

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Farell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

August 23, 2020

The right of asylum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall is writing here about the situation in the United Kingdom, with would-be asylum claimants risking their lives to cross the English Channel so they can legally claim asylum in Britain, but exactly the same situation should apply with claimants entering Canada from the United States:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

Everyone at even risk – let alone reality – of substantial discrimination in their home country has the right, the right, to asylum. This is one of those international things that we should indeed agree with too. Few of us have anything but contempt for those who wouldn’t let Holocaust fleeing Jews (and or gypsies, gays, whatever, it’s just that we have substantial documented evidence about Jews who were turned away) tarnish their national doormats. Few of us think those who abused such limitations are anything but heroes. I even know of one monk who married Jewesses multiple times to bring them out by train. Umm, married multiple people, not one many times. People working within the too restrictive rules even gave us one of the finest moments of TV ever.

So, asylum, good thing.

And here’s the next thing. That right is restricted. To claiming it in the first safe place you get to. This has some oddities, if you leave Sudan by plane and step off at Heathrow then the UK is where you can – righteously – claim asylum. If you come by land then you have passed through many safe places before reaching the UK. You don’t have the right to asylum in the UK and, to be strict about it, don’t even have the right to apply.

So, people drowning in the Channel because they have to make their asylum application once in the UK? This could be true of those who are being oppressed in France. It’s not true of anyone not being oppressed in France. So there is not that need to take the open boat the 26 miles.

Sure, there’s the desire, we all understand that. But that’s a desire, not a right to asylum.

Here in Canada, we had this arrangement with the American government under the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, which our Federal Court struck down last month — incorrectly, in my opinion — as being in violation of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court allowed six months for the federal government to act, but as we all know, the federal government is unlikely to do anything as politically radioactive as passing legislation that could — and would — be seen as anti-refugee.

QotD: Herbert Hoover and the American tourists

Count up the victims of World War I, and American tourists will be pretty far down the list. But victims they were. When the conflict broke out, thousands of Americans were overseas visiting the cathedrals of Florence or the museums of London. They woke up one morning to find the ships that were supposed to take them back had been conscripted into the war effort, or refused to sail for fear of enemy fire. The banks that were supposed to cash their travelers’ checks were panicking, or devoting all their funds to the war effort, or dealing with a million other things. The hotels that were supposed to house them were closed indefinitely, their employees rushing to enlist out of patriotic fervor. And so thousands of frantic Americans, stuck in a foreign continent with no money and nowhere to stay, showed up at the door of the US Embassy in London and said – help!

The US Consulate in London didn’t know how to solve these problems either. But Herbert Hoover, still high on his decision to pivot to philanthropy and public service, calls them up and asks if he can help. They say yes, definitely. Hoover gets in touch with his rich friends, passes around the collection plate, and organizes a Committee For The Assistance Of American Travelers. Then he gets to work, the way only he can:

    Within 24 hours, Hoover’s committee had its own stationery, and within forty-eight it was operating a booth in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel as well as three other London locations. Through his business connections, Hoover managed to bypass restrictions on telegraph service and open a transatlantic line to allow Americans to wire money to stranded friends and relatives. In a city suddenly flooded with refugees, he reserved for American travelers some two thousand rooms in hotels or boardinghouses. He issued a press release proclaiming that his Residents’ Committee was assuming charge of all American relief work in the city, and that in doing so it had the blessings of its honorary chairman, Walter Hines Page, the US ambassador to London.

… which is totally false. Hoover is starting to display a pattern that will stick with him his whole life – that of crushing competing charities. He begins a lobbying effort to get the US Embassy to ban all non-Hoover relief work, focusing on the inefficiency of having multiple groups working on the same problem. When the US Assistant Secretary Of War arrives in London to coordinate a response, he is met on the dock by Hoover employees, who demand he consult with Hoover before interfering in the US tourist issue. Eventually the Embassy, equally exasperated by Hoover’s pestering and impressed with his results, agrees to give him official control of the relief effort.

After two months of work, Hoover and his Committee have repatriated all 120,000 US tourists, supporting them in style until it could find them boat tickets. All of its loans and operating costs have been repaid by grateful tourists, and its budget is in the black. The rescued travelers are universal in their praise for Hoover, partly because Hoover has threatened to ruin any of them who get too critical:

    Other complainants were received with less patience, including a hotheaded professor of history from the University of Michigan, who wrote to accuse the Residents’ Committee of mistreatment. Hoover refuted his charges indignantly and comprehensively, copying his response to the president of the university and its board of regents. After a meeting with his employer, the professor returned Hoover an abject retraction and apology.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

July 16, 2020

Canada should welcome immigrants from Hong Kong with open arms

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, China — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The PRC communist government is clearly set on extinguishing the unique status of Hong Kong within China and a lot of Hong Kong residents are considering getting out before the gloves come off. Canada should join Britain and Australia in offering a safe refuge, regardless of the attitude of Beijing. Sadly, this probably won’t happen, as Justin Trudeau has demonstrated that he’s willing to kow-tow whenever his paymasters demand:

“Hong Kong night Panorama” by Andos_pics is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Britain has taken the lead by announcing that Hongkongers holding a British National Overseas (BNO) Passport will be allowed to live and work in the UK for five years, after which they can apply for settled status, and, one year later, citizenship. This could mean that almost three million people will be able to relocate to Britain if they so choose. In response to earlier British overtures along these lines, China made clear in no uncertain terms that Hong Kong is their concern, and that the UK should mind its own business, with China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian saying that the “UK has no right to lecture or interfere in China’s internal affairs …”.

However, a BNO Passport is only available to Hong Kong residents born before the 1997 transfer of the city back to Chinese control, which leaves around 4.5 million of the city’s residents — including many of the younger generation born after the handover occurred — unable to access that option.

This is why this sort of idea must be expanded on more broadly by all liberal democracies, who should consider granting special dispensations allowing Hong Kong residents who wish to emigrate to do so. The United States is considering following Britain’s example, and Australia has opened the door to citizenship for any Hongkongers with work or student visas. Hopefully, they are just the first of many.

It wouldn’t be the first time liberal democracies have taken in a large influx of exiles from specific countries.

Consider the influx of refugees which started with the Boat People, who originally were mostly South Vietnamese fleeing after the U.S. pulled out of the war and their country fell to the communist north. They, and many more from other southeast Asian countries who fled their homes in the 1970s and 80s, many ending up in Western nations. The United States took in the majority, with Canada, Australia, and a few others accepting large numbers as well.

There are some major differences however when it comes to opening our doors to residents of Hong Kong who wish to leave the increasingly oppressive rule from Beijing. Unlike many who flee war-torn or poverty-stricken nations searching for a better life, Hongkongers are among the most educated and wealthy people on the planet. Most important though, many of them love freedom, and have grown up in a society where many of the things we claim to value — rule of law, personal liberty, freedom of conscience, free speech, and a free market — are (or, at least, were) paramount.

Accepting Hongkongers into our countries would be good for us. It seems that in the last few decades, liberal democracies have been growing complacent about our hard-won freedoms. We have forgotten or ignored history, and seem not to realize that the foundations on which our freedoms are built need constant maintenance and defense.

May 15, 2020

Protecting the Innocent – Kids Evacuations – On the Homefront 003

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 14 May 2020

The European powers may be at war but there’s now thing they can agree on: their young must be protected. So, before the first RAF or Luftwaffe bombs were even dropped on cities, countries are drawing up plans to save as many lives of their youth as they possibly can.

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Hosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Isabel Wilson and Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
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Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Isabel Wilson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Sources:
USHMM
Bundesarchiv
IWM LN 6194, HU 36871, D 2238, D 10457, D 2592, D 5081, D 24903, IWM D 15530, D 2045, HU 3323, Art.IWM PST 3095, Art.IWM PST 13854, Art.IWM PST 15100, D 9211, D 824, D 257, D 5665, D 2224, D 1939A, F 4422
Portrait of John Anderson, courtesy Yousuf Karsh, Dutch National Archives
from the Noun Project: students by Piotrek Chuchla, mother by Mr. Minuvi, Pregnant by Wojciech Zasina, bag by Nabilauzwa, Gas Mask by Nico Ilk from the Noun Project, Underwear by The Icon Z, baby clothes by Llisole, espadrilles shoes by Edwin PM, socks by Анна Пасечная, Toothbrush by amantaka, Comb by Randall Barriga, towel by Pixelz Studio, handkerchief by Vectors Market, soap by Jae Deasigner, coat by Ilham Juliandi, Food by Atif Arshad

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Farell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle Of Complexity”
Gavin Luke – “Drifting Emotions 3”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “Prescient”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Andreas Jamsheree – “Guilty Shadows 4”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
5 hours ago (edited)
Welcome back to another episode of On the Homefront! Researching this episode about evacuations was a fun one to dive to because in the UK, we learn about about children evacuees during the war but of course what we’re not taught is the mass scale of this operation. For each of the millions of children displaced during the war, they each came away with it with their own story and I hope I’ve captured that here. Looking forward to reading your comments! Be sure to follow us over on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/world_war_two_realtime/ and let us know what other aspects of life on the homefront you’d like to hear about!

Cheers,
Izzy

April 30, 2020

Palestine, 1948 – the origins of the still-ongoing refugee issue

In Quillette, Benjamin Kerstein reviews a new book by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, which covers the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem that still hinders any kind of lasting peace between Israel and neighbouring Arab countries:

Arab attacks in May and June 1948.
United States Military Academy Atlas, Link.

Wilf and Schwartz’s comprehensive history of the refugee issue begins with the UN’s adoption in November 1947 of a plan to partition British Mandatory Palestine into an Arab state and a slightly smaller Jewish state. Violence erupted shortly after, and once the British left the territory, hostilities escalated into a full-scale war, during which fighting between the Zionist movement’s Haganah defense force and various Palestinian Arab militias was followed by an invasion by the surrounding Arab countries. Israel prevailed with truncated borders, but the Arab world remained steadfastly committed to the new state’s elimination. Refugees are a byproduct of every military conflict, but the exodus of the Palestinian Arabs would have uniquely consequential ramifications that continue to haunt the conflict and thwart its resolution to this day.

It is now fashionable for historians sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative to downplay the threat that the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine — the Yishuv — faced in the 1948 conflict. Wilf and Schwartz show conclusively that such attempts, be they sincere or dishonest, are simply untrue. The secretary-general of the Arab League, they note, openly stated that the war was intended to be genocidal, saying, “This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.” Meanwhile, the Palestinian Arabs’ most influential leader, the Nazi collaborator Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, said the Arabs would “continue to fight until the Zionists are eliminated, and the whole of Palestine is a purely Arab state.”

Correctly believing that their individual and collective existence were threatened, the Zionist militias, which eventually coalesced into the nascent Israel Defense Forces, sometimes destroyed villages and expelled their inhabitants, and there was a mass flight of Arabs from cities like Haifa and Jaffa. By the end of the war, what emerged was a Jewish state with a comfortable Jewish majority along with a substantial though not overwhelming Arab minority. The refugees, for the most part, were settled in camps in the surrounding Arab nations of Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza, which were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, respectively. Jordan alone granted the refugees citizenship and absorbed them into the general population. Elsewhere, however, refugees remained stateless, left to the tender mercies of the international community.

From the beginning, pressure was brought to bear on Israel to allow the refugees to return, and from the beginning Israel steadfastly refused to do so, believing that it would destroy Israel’s Jewish character and precipitate another, perhaps even more brutal war. Wilf and Schwartz reveal that this was in fact precisely the Arabs’ intention. The Arab media spoke openly of establishing a “fifth column” within Israel by repatriating the refugees, and the authors record Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi’s view that the Arab mood at the time made it clear that the right of return “was clearly premised” on “the dissolution of Israel.” In addition, the Palestinian leadership was initially unenthusiastic about the return of refugees, which they believed would imply a recognition of Israel’s existence to which they remained implacably opposed. For a society deeply rooted in concepts of honor, dignity, and humiliation, such an acknowledgement of defeat was simply unthinkable.

Contrary to the claims of Israel’s opponents, Wilf and Schwartz persuasively argue that the new state was under no moral or legal obligation to allow the refugees to return. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the concept of population exchange between belligerent national groups in conflict over territory was considered lamentable but inevitable. Consequently, the laws pertaining to refugees often forbade the opposite: States could not force refugees to return to places when to do so might cause further conflict or instability. Emphasis was therefore on resettlement in host countries, usually with a corresponding ethnic or religious majority. This held true for the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from Poland after World War II, and the almost contemporaneous exodus of both Muslims and Hindus to Pakistan and India, respectively. Importantly, it also applied to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees expelled from Arab and Muslim countries following the 1948 war, who were resettled in the new State of Israel.

Once the Arab and Palestinian position on return shifted from a fear of recognizing Israel to the idea of building a fifth column within the state to wage an indefinite war against Zionism, Wilf and Schwartz write, “The state of Israel … was being asked by the Arabs to perform an extraordinary act: it was called on to admit to its sovereign territory hundreds of thousands of Arabs, against international norms of the time, without a peace treaty, and while the Palestinians and the Arab world continued to threaten it with another war — even calling the refugees a pioneer force toward this end.”

Although anti-Zionists today insist that Israel’s refusal to accept a return of the refugees was a uniquely heinous violation of human rights and international law, it was entirely consistent with the moral and legal norms of the time.

December 19, 2019

Vive la Résistance! well, not really… French Resistance 1940 – WW2 – War Against Humanity 007

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 18 Dec 2019

Immediately after France is occupied by the Nazis in 1940, the French are divided about what to do; resist for collaborate? To put it mildly, it’s complicated.

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Written and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
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Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by: Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Sources: Bundesarchiv, Mémorial de la Shoah
Icons via the Noun Project: collaboration by Pause08, protester by Blaise Sewell, Dove by Luis Prado, confused by Llisole

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

Spartacus Olsson
16 hours ago
In the aftermath of WW2, everyone was probably pretty tired of the whole tragedy, and ready to just move on. Many of the people that I have met that lived through the war didn’t like talking about the war much. But somehow I had the privilege of getting many of the them that I met to open up and talk about it to me. Maybe not so much because of any personal quality I have other than being very persistent and curious — a pain in the neck is another way of putting it.

Anyway, we talked about many things, terrible things, great things, sad, and happy stories. But there was one thing I never heard anybody talk about, and that was indecision. Fear and regret, yes — everyone spoke of that, but not indecision. There was always an undertone of manifest destiny or complete meaninglessness.

But, when you think about it, how could you not be indecisive when faced with this kind of calamity? How can you not wonder if this is destiny, or just bad luck? How can you not be shocked into a stupor, at least at first? And even if you’re an ideologically convinced partisan or combatant, how do you know for sure what the right thing to do is? Well, when you start looking into it all, those questions were pretty much what gripped France in 1940 after the sudden, tragic loss of independence.

I think that indecision is not something we want to remember, perhaps we shouldn’t if we want to stay our course, perhaps we’re wired not to, so that we can focus better on what we finally decide. But for others who want to learn from our mistakes, and our successes — it is in the moment of indecision that we display our thinking, our reasoning, the true origin of our cause.

I should also tell you that I grew up in France, so this is in many ways the story of the adults around me when I was a child.

October 2, 2019

“When the next American Civil War starts…”

Filed under: Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Warren goes all soothsayery and predicts the course and outcome of a potential Red-versus-Blue armed conflict arising from the current Red-versus-Blue verbal conflict:

When the next American Civil War starts, I imagine it will look something like Hong Kong: a big melee spreading through all public spaces (I note that USA is bigger than Hong Kong). But there will be fairly limited casualties, at first, each of which will become the subject of unrestrained media outrage, until the media collapse under physical reprisals. Later, the better and better armed demonstrators, on both sides, will tactically “evolve.” The surveillance state itself will begin to disintegrate, and with it any hope of restoring public order, through agencies such as police, courts, and prisons. Things like border surveillance will be abandoned, with immediate consequences, but as the attraction of going to the States diminishes, no one will mind. More noticeably, the economy will break down. Because the American military was designed chiefly to defend against foreign powers, on a very large scale — and the threat will instead be domestic and scattered — the Army will be (at first) effectively neutralized. Isolated firefights between Democrat and Republican soldiers will escalate to firefights between ships and aeroplanes, but these will end fairly quickly as a Pentagon dictatorship seizes control. Within a year, I expect, though only a small part of their arsenal will prove useful, bullet-enforced curfews will restore relative peace to the streets. I don’t expect the death toll to be more than a few hundred thousand, at least from direct conflict as the guns come out. Interruptions of food supply, and the spread of disease, will cost much more — but possibly less (proportionately) than in the last Civil War, in which both sides were better organized.

That it will have spread to Canada, I cannot doubt, developing from the refugee crisis across “the world’s longest undefended border,” as snowflakes of all descriptions, by their millions, run for their lives, then resume their clashes up here. Mexico would also suffer from this “white flight,” except, the chaos from Mexican cartels’ energetic efforts to reclaim significant parts of Texas, California, and the Southwest, would have the paradoxical effect of ending the outbound refugee traffic there. For the most part, other foreign countries would avoid direct engagement. Instead, Islamist and Socialist regimes around the world would be busy consolidating their own local positions, sparking numerous “little wars” by their attempts at regional expansion. Each would be settled as the larger and more ruthless power won.

Still, I shouldn’t expect the anarchy to continue. Tyranny quickly fills a vacuum of authority (moral as well as material), and answers to the growing demand for safety. Nothing, of course, will be learnt from the adventure, and I should think that within a decade or less, resistance to the new President-for-Life will have all but evaporated.

July 12, 2019

The European Migration Crisis – WW2 – WaH 004 – June 1940

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 11 Jul 2019

When the Nazi German Reich invades western and northern Europe this creates a massive refugee and forced migration crisis all across Europe. In eastern Europe, The Nazis and the Soviets have already been forcing families out of their homes to be relocated, incarcerated and murdered for nine months by now.

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Written and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
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Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by:Spartacus Olsson
Map animations: Eastory

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Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

May 31, 2019

“Hearts of Iron” – The Battle of Berlin – Sabaton History 017 [Official]

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published on 30 May 2019

The Sabaton song “Hearts of Iron” (on the Heroes album) tells the story of a German commander who is ordered to relieve Berlin in face of an overwhelming attack from the east and the west. Berlin is almost fully surrounded, but instead of following orders from his superiors who have clearly lost touch with reality, he decides to use his men to get as many civilians as possible out of Berlin.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski

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Music by Sabaton.

Source:
– Colorization by Ruffneck88, Phot-colorization

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
1 day ago
This episode is one of the few which shows the humanity in the German army. As with all conflicts, this was not a binary where it was the “good guys” versus “the bad guys”. And before anyone else says it – some people will probably complain how we frame the Soviets as the bad guys. We chose to tell this story from a neutral perspective, but fact is that many German civilians feared what the Soviets would do to them, and preferred to live under American occupation. This might be considered anti-Soviet, but it simply is how many Germans viewed the Soviet army and one of the reasons why Wenck and his 12th created a corridor for the civilian refugees to escape into American occupied territories. We’re happy to have a reasonable and research-based discussion in the comments, but we won’t tolerate any extremism or revisionism.

Another note: while this episode is about a moment where the German army thought for humanity instead of against it, it nowhere near proves any sort of clean-Wehrmacht myth – and we won’t tolerate any comments of that sort either.

And with that, I will leave you. Enjoy the video!
Cheers!

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