Quotulatiousness

May 4, 2023

Fierce fighting on Gallipoli … before WW1

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bruce Gudmundsson outlines the operations of Ottoman Empire forces defending “Turkey in Europe” against Greek and Bulgarian invasion (in alliance with Serbia and Montenegro) in 1913:

In the English speaking world, the name Gallipoli invariably evokes memories of the great events of 1915 and 1916. A location of such strategic importance, however, rarely serves as the site of a single battles. Two years before the landings of the British, Indian, Australian, and New Zealand troops on the south-west portion of the the peninsula (and the concurrent French landings on the nearby mainland of Asia Minor near the ruins of the ancient city of Troy), Ottoman soldiers defended the Dardanelles against the forces of the Balkan League.

By the end of January of 1913, the combined efforts of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria had driven Ottoman forces from most of “Turkey in Europe”. Indeed, the only intact Ottoman formations on European soil were those trapped in the fortress of Adrianople, those holding the fortified line just west of Constantinople, and those that had recently arrived at Gallipoli.

Soon after arriving, the Ottoman forces on Gallipoli began to build a belt of field fortifications across the narrowest part of the peninsula, a line some five kilometers (three miles) west of the the town of Bolayir. At the same time, they occupied outposts some twenty kilometers east of the line, at the place where the peninsula connected to the mainland.

The general situation in (and around) the Gallipoli Peninsula, 31 January 1913.

On 4 February 1913, the Bulgarians attacked. On the first day of this attack, they drove in the Ottoman outposts. On the second day, they broke through a hastily erected line of resistance, thereby convincing the Ottoman forces in front of them to evacuate Bolayir. However, rather than taking the town, or otherwise attempting to exploit their victory, they withdrew to positions some ten kilometers (six miles) east of the Ottoman earthworks.

While the Ottoman land forces returned to the earthworks along the neck of the Peninsula, ships of the Ottoman Navy operating in the Sea of Marmora located, and began to bombard, the Bulgarian forces near the coast. This caused the Bulgarians to move inland, where they took up, and improved, new positions on the rear slopes of nearby hills.

On 9 February, the Ottomans launched a double attack. While the main body of the Ottoman garrison of Gallipoli advanced overland, a smaller force, supported by the fire of Ottoman warships, landed on the far side of the Bulgarian position. Notwithstanding the advantages, both numerical and geometric, enjoyed by the Ottoman attackers, this pincer action failed to destroy the Bulgarian force. Indeed, in the course of two failed attacks, the Ottomans suffered some ten thousand casualties.

Though the Ottoman maneuver failed to dislodge the Bulgarians from their trenches, the two-sided attack convinced the Bulgarian commander to seek ground that was, at once, both easier to defend against terrestrial attack and less vulnerable to naval gunfire. He found this on the east bank of a river, thirteen kilometers (eight miles) northeast of Bolayir and ten kilometers (six miles) north of the place where the Ottoman landing had taken place.

April 24, 2023

Canada won’t meet its defence spending targets, and Trudeau is totally fine saying this to our allies, if not to the public

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadian defence freeloading has been a hallmark of Canadian government policy since 1968, and as The Line confirms in their weekend dispatch, it should be no surprise that Justin Trudeau is okay continuing his father’s basic policies:

A story we’ve been watching in recent weeks was the remarkable leak of sensitive U.S. national security documents onto the dark web, and from there, widely across social media. A young member of the Air National Guard has been arrested and now faces serious charges. News reports suggest that he had access to classified material at work and began sharing it privately with a small group of online friends, apparently simply to impress and inform them, with no broader political agenda. Some of those friends, in turn, appear to have leaked the documents further afield. It took months before anyone noticed, but once picked up by several individuals with large followings — including some who are none-too-friendly to the U.S. and Western alliance — the story exploded and the full scope of the leak was finally discovered.

This is, for the U.S., a huge embarrassment and a diplomatic nightmare. For us, it was simply a fascinating story. This week, though, we suddenly had the coveted Canadian Angle: the Washington Post claims to have reviewed one of the leaked documents, apparently prepared for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, that assesses Canada’s military serious military deficiencies, and also reports that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has privately told fellow NATO leaders that Canada isn’t going to hit NATO’s two-per-cent-of-GDP spending target.

To wit:

    “Widespread defense shortfalls hinder Canadian capabilities,” the document says, “while straining partner relationships and alliance contributions.”

    The assessment, which bears the seal of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Germany is concerned about whether the Canadian Armed Forces can continue to aid Ukraine while meeting its NATO pledges. Turkey is “disappointed” by the Canadian military’s “refusal” to support the transport of humanitarian aid after February’s deadly earthquake there, the document says, and Haiti is “frustrated” by Ottawa’s reluctance to lead a multinational security mission to that crisis-racked nation.

Your Line editors just sort of sighed heavily and rubbed their temples when they read that. It was, to us, nothing we didn’t know already. It was actually almost some kind of a relief to know that the PM will at least say privately what he won’t admit publicly: we aren’t living up to our pledge, and don’t plan to.

The Post says that Trudeau told NATO that there won’t be much more military spending in this country until the political situation here changes. We aren’t sure if he meant the priorities of the voters or the composition of our parliament. It doesn’t matter — it’s true either way. We are disappointed, but again, in no way surprised, to see Trudeau seeing this as an issue that he’ll just accept as-is, as opposed to attempting the hard work of showing actual leadership. He’s always been more about the easy path of demonstrative gestures instead of working hard to achieve real change.

But hey. In this, he has a lot of company. The Tories under Harper were marginally better on defence, but not nearly good enough. We have little faith — next to none, really — that PM Poilievre would do any better on defence. What bums us out the most about this issue is that we recognize and even agree that the choice to neglect defence and shovel those dollars instead into other, more popular vote-buying files does indeed make political sense. It’s what the voters want. We wish it were otherwise. We’ve spent big chunks of our careers trying to change their minds. Our record to date is one of total, utter failure.

Still, never say die, right? So we’ll make this point: we understand and accept the criticism sometimes made by Canadian commentators, who argue that the two-per-cent-of-GDP target is arbitrary and somewhat meaningless. We don’t entirely agree — targets are useful, and two per cent seems reasonable. But we’d be open to an argument that Canada could still punch above its weight in the alliance, even while spending less, if we could deliver key capabilities.

But … we can’t. We probably could, once upon a time, but we can’t even do that now. The air force is a mess. The navy is a mess. The army is a disaster, and couldn’t even send Nova Scotia all the help it asked for after Hurricane Fiona. Sending a token plane or ship on a quick foreign jaunt is symbolism, not above-weight-punching. And the symbolism taps us out.

So we have to pick what we’re doing here, fellow Canucks. We can meet the two-per-cent target. We can find other ways to meaningfully contribute. Or we can do neither of those things, and admit it, but only in private. Right now, alas, we’ve chosen that third option. We see no sign that’ll be changing any time soon.

Pierre Trudeau discovered that Canadian voters are all too willing to accept “peace dividends” in the form of shorting defence spending to goose non-military spending, and few prime ministers since then have done much more than gesture vaguely at changing it. Worse, it’s also quite accepted practice for defence procurement to prioritize “regional economic benefits” over any actual military requirement, which often means Canada buys fewer items (ships, planes, helicopters, tanks, trucks, etc.) at significantly higher prices as long as there’s a shiny new plant in Quebec or New Brunswick that can be the backdrop for government ministers and party MPs to use as a backdrop during the next election campaign. Military capability barely scrapes into the bottom of the priority list on the few occasions that the government feels obligated to spend new money on the Canadian Armed Forces.

Worse, every penny of “new” spending on the military gets announced many times over before any actual cheques are issued, which helps to disguise the fact that it’s the same thing all over again — sometimes for periods stretching out into years. The Canadian military has a well-deserved reputation for keeping ancient equipment up and running for years (or decades) after all our peer nations have moved on to newer kit. It’s a tribute to the technical and maintenance skills of the units involved, but it probably absorbs far more resources to do it over replacing the stuff when it begins to wear out, and it reduces the number available to, and the combat effectiveness of, the front-line troops when they are needed.

April 23, 2023

The Biggest Offensive in Japanese History – WW2 – Week 243 – April 22, 1944

World War Two
Published 22 Apr 2023

Japan Launches Operation Ichigo in China, their largest offensive of the war … or ever, but over in India things are not going well for the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima. The Allies also launch attacks on the Japanese at Hollandia, while over in the Crimea, the German defenses at Sevastopol are cracking under Soviet pressure.
(more…)

April 19, 2023

Time to remove US nuclear weapons from Europe?

Filed under: Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander has long advocated getting the final few American “tactical” nuclear weapons off European soil and makes the case for doing it now:

It may seem like a strange thing to propose while there is the largest land war in Europe since 1945 going on, but as it is something I’ve been a supporter of for a few decades I might as well be consistent: we are long overdue to remove American nuclear weapons from Europe.

It is 2023. Just look at this map.

[…]

The Soviet Union stopped existing over three decades ago.

Even though we’ve decreased from 7,000 warheads down to 100 … there really is no reason to keep what remains in Europe.

  1. Gravity bombs on continental Europe – that require tactical aircraft to deliver them – are the least survivable, reliable, or timely way to deliver a nuclear weapon.
  2. There is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. I don’t care what some theorist proposes to defend their pet theories, you lob one nuke an order of magnitude larger than the Hiroshima bomb and only a foolish nation would let their strategic nuclear forces stay unused and in danger.
  3. Gravity bombs are not a first strike weapon and are a poor second strike weapon. As such, you have to consider that the the time gap from approval to flash-boom would be so long the war would be over before your F-XX pickled their nuke over their target – even if the aircraft made it off the ground.
  4. If they are NATO weapons, you not only have to get NATO to approve their use, but host nation to as well … in addition to the USA. Do you really think the Russians would not leverage their influence with the useful idiots in the Euro-Green parties, former communists, and general black-block anti-nuke activists to politically of physically stop the use of the nukes, especially in BEL, NLD, DEU, and ITA? Add that to point 3 above.
  5. Especially with the weapons in Turkey – the risk of these bombs having a bad day due to human or natural causes is non-zero. In the days of mutually assured destruction, those non-zero odds were manageable, but there is no reasonable person in the third decade of the 21st Century who can with a straight face explain to you why any tactical, operational, or strategic use justify their presence. They deter no enemy, but puts every friend in danger.
  6. Look again at the map above. Exactly what target set are you going to “service” at that range (non-refueled)?
  7. If things go nuclear in Europe then the right weapons are either British, French, and if they must be American are sitting in a silo in CONUS, a SSBN in the Atlantic, or a B-2 in Missouri.

April 15, 2023

Do the Germans Know About Operation Overlord?

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

World War Two
Published 14 Apr 2023

We are getting closer and closer to D-Day and the potential liberation of Nazi Europe. But how much do the Germans know about this? Is the leak inside the British Embassy in Ankara enough to thwart the efforts of Operation Bodyguard, Operation Fortitude, and everything else the Allies are doing to deceive Adolf Hitler? Let’s find out. This is the story of Cicero.
(more…)

March 14, 2023

Turkey has always been the awkward ally in NATO, but for how much longer?

Filed under: Europe, Middle East, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Strategika, Zafiris Rossidis examines the shift of Turkish sentiment away from its longstanding role in the NATO alliance and toward a more Russian-friendly and more independent stance in international affairs:

Turkish flag.
Photo by Burak Su via Wikimedia Commons.

A poll conducted in December 2022 by the Turkish company Gezici found that 72.8% of Turkish citizens polled were in favor of good relations with Russia. By comparison, nearly 90% perceive the United States as a hostile country. It also revealed that 24.2% of citizens believe that Russia is hostile, while 62.6% believe that Russia is a friendly country. Similarly, more than 60% of respondents said that Russia contributes positively to the Turkish economy.

Turkey began to distance itself from the United States as early as 2003, when it refused the passage of American troops to Iraq. In 2010, it destroyed the U.S.–Israel–Turkey triangle, breaking up with Israel. In 2011, Turkey implemented a policy in Syria that was hardly in line with U.S. interests. The final distancing took place in 2016, with the July coup, for which Turkey blamed the United States.

Turkey considers itself very important to the United States but declares that Ankara can live without Washington. This concept has become the point of departure for Turkey in its quest to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire. Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu declares that the Turkish government will design the new world order with the help of Allah, and Western powers will eat the dust behind almighty Turkey (December 8, 2022).

According to a RAND Corporation volume on Turkey, there are four scenarios for the future of Turkish strategic orientation: 1) Turkey will remain a difficult partner for the United States; 2) Turkey will become democratic and unite with the West; 3) Turkey will be between East and West, but have better relations with powers such as China, Iran, and Russia, than with the U.S. and the EU; and 4) Turkey will completely abandon the West.

From the evidence in the case of the Russian–Ukrainian war, Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran justify the Russian invasion since NATO and the EU have designs on their neighborhood. Above all, they are united by a common hatred for the West. They are frenemies and they know it: on the contrary, the U.S. tends to invest in frenemies as if they were true friends.

The U.S. observed the rapprochement of Turkey and Russia without renouncing the traditional alliance with Turkey, which today has no longer such importance. Turkey was useful when it was an “enemy” of the USSR and the U.S. made far too many concessions for the sake of this useful enmity. In short, there is some inertia in the modification of the principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as of course “the friend of a friend is my friend”. Turkey’s role in NATO worries the U.S., as Ankara–Moscow relations have acquired some shared strategic characteristics.

?he attraction between the two countries lies in their equally authoritarian governance models and the fact that their strategic culture and operational codes bear similarities: Both countries are revisionist, aggressive, and assertive in their regions; both countries claim to be encircled, which they use as a pretext for their unilateral actions; and both countries have militarized their foreign policy, waging hybrid warfare, resorting to proxy warfare, and blackmailing countries that offer resistance. Russia and Turkey cooperate on natural gas and oil pipelines; Russia has sold weapons such as the S-400 missile system to Turkey; Russia has provided technical assistance in the construction of Turkey’s nuclear plants; the two nations have collaborated in Central Asia (i.e., Azerbaijan); they import and export each other’s commodities; and Turkey has illegally transported Russian fuel to China and Iran, thereby bypassing sanctions on Russia, to mention only a few.

But the big issue for U.S.–Turkey relations against the backdrop of the Russian–Ukrainian war has four strands: First, the issue of the important role Turkey plays in the grain export agreement, which if cancelled will create a food crisis in Africa. Second, Turkey’s blackmailing of the NATO candidacies of Sweden and Finland. Third, the Turkish application to purchase the F-16 and the possible conflict between Congress and the Biden administration over the administration’s request to grant Turkey the license to do so. Finally, Turkey’s non-adoption of NATO sanctions against Russia. The possibility of Erdoğan using a strategy of tensions with Greece (e.g., multiple violations of Greek airspace, aggressiveness in the Aegean, weaponization of immigration, threats of bombing Athens with the new “Tayfun” short-range ballistic missile) to rally the electorate around his party and detach it from any opposition — all recent polls have AKP trailing the opposition — prior to the June election is one explanation for Turkey’s behavior that is being considered by the U.S., which nonetheless is angered that Turkey is the only NATO country that has not adopted the sanctions against Russia.

November 26, 2022

Britain’s experiment with mass immigration since 2014

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West considers the legacy media’s quick dismissal of conservative concerns about rising immigration from poorer European countries in 2014 with the reality only eight years later:

“Xenophobia” by malias is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It was a sort of mini-publicity stunt by Vaz, but all for a good cause: a response to fear mongering by the Right-wing press who warned that we’d be “flooded” by Romanians, and predictions by MigrationWatch that’d we have 50,000 new arrivals a year from the A2 countries (as Romania and Bulgaria were called).

Twitter that day was full of journalists and other public intellectuals laughing about how we were going to be “swamped”. Why would Romanians, after all, want to come here, to this miserable rainy island?

“We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January,” Vaz concluded.

Various publications, with the ill-founded confidence so often found in the journalist trade, soon declared that the Romanian influx was a conservative fantasy.

“Eastern European invasion comes to nothing”, the Independent declared on the day, just a tad prematurely you might say.

A Guardian commentator suggested the year before that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians arriving might actually fall following accession, and that “all the ‘invasion’ predictions … have more in common with astrology than demography.”
[…]

As it turned out, in the year to September 2015, 206,000 Romanians and Bulgarians took out a National Insurance number, meaning they were registering to work here. By late 2017, there were 413,000 Romanian and Bulgarians living in Britain, suggesting 90,000 had arrived each year since January 2014, while just 6,200 Britons had made the opposite journey.

By mid-2018, there were more than 400,000 Romanians in Britain, making them one of the largest national minorities in England. The real figure is hard to tell, because the British state has lost the capacity or will to count the number of foreign residents, and it may be higher.

[…]

The scale of immigration in the 2000s and 2010s led to the rise of Ukip, the referendum and the political chaos that followed; what follows now we can’t yet say, but no one has seemed to have learned the lesson: that in the 21s century, because of easier travel, smartphones, smuggling networks and establishment communities in the West, the sheer scale of potential migration is astronomical. Yet people often have a very 20th or even 19th century understanding of how much people are able and willing to move, which makes them vastly underestimate the potential numbers arriving.

The Turkish Cypriots of north London are a case in point, the example Paul Collier used in Exodus to show the huge extent of potential migration between countries with different levels of wealth. 

Because of colonial links, North Cyprus had free movement with Britain and so provided a test case: as a result, there are now more Turkish Cypriots in Britain than in Cyprus. In fact, not only did the majority of Turkish Cypriots move, but back in their homeland they become outnumbered by arrivals from a third, even poorer country, mainland Turkey, who are permitted to settle there.

In a theoretical world of open borders, Britons would be outnumbered very quickly; infrastructure would start to buckle under the strain, and governments would find it difficult to increase the necessary number of houses, schools, hospitals and other services for this expanded population, because society would now lack the social capital and cohesion to make the personal sacrifices. People would begin to lose faith in the police, a difficult role in such a transient and diverse society, and politics would become increasingly unstable and aligned along ethnic lines.

August 20, 2022

How Turkey Fought a WW1 Peace Treaty – The Greek-Turkish War 1919-1923

The Great War
Published 19 Aug 2022

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 meant that it got its own peace treaty like the other three Central Powers. But the emerging Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal resisted the Treaty of Sevres and occupation by various Entente Powers. Their successful resistance led to the creation of modern Turkey and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
(more…)

QotD: The improbable survival of the Byzantine empire

The [Eastern Roman] Empire was faced by a triple threat to its existence. There were the northern barbarians. There was militant Islam in the south. There was an internal collapse of population. Each of these had been brought on by changes in the climate that no one at the time could have understood had they been noticed. It would not be until after 800 that the climate would turn benign again. In the meantime, any state to which even a shadow of Lecky’s dismissal applied would have crumpled in six months. Only the most courageous and determined action, only the most radical changes of its structure, could save the Empire. And saved the Empire most definitely was.

The reason for this is that the Mediaeval Roman State was directed by creative pragmatists. Look for one moment beneath its glittering surface, and the Ancient Roman Empire was a ghastly place for most of the people who lived in it. The Emperors at the top were often vicious incompetents. They ruled through an immense and parasitic bureaucracy. They were supreme governors of an army too large to be controlled. They protected a landed aristocracy that was a repository of culture, but that was ruthless in its exaction of rent. Most ordinary people were disarmed tax-slaves, where not chattel slaves or serfs.

The contemporary historians themselves are disappointingly vague about the seventh and eighth centuries. Our only evidence for what happened comes from the description of established facts in the tenth century. As early as the seventh century, though, the Mediaeval Roman State pulled off the miracle of reforming itself internally while fighting a war of survival on every frontier. Much of the bureaucracy was shut down. Taxes were cut. The silver coinage was stabilised. Above all, the senatorial estates were broken up and given to those who worked on them, in return for service in local militias. Though never abolished, chattel slavery became far less pervasive. The civil law was simplified, and the criminal law humanised – after the seventh century, as said, the death penalty was rarely used.

The Mediaeval Roman Empire survived because of a revolutionary transformation in which ordinary people became armed stakeholders. The inhabitants of Roman Gaul and Italy and Spain barely looked up from their ploughs as the Barbarians swirled round them. The citizens of Mediaeval Rome fought like tigers in defence of their country and their Orthodox faith. Time and again, the armies of the Caliph smashed against a wall of armed freeholders. This was a transformation pushed through in a century and a half of recurrent crises during which Constantinople itself was repeatedly under siege. Alone among the ancient empires in its path, Mediaeval Rome faced down the Arabs, and kept Islam at bay for nearly five centuries. Would it be superfluous to say that no one does this by accident?

Sean Gabb, “The Mediaeval Roman Empire: An Unlikely Emergence and Survival”, SeanGabb.co.uk, 2018-09-14.

June 15, 2022

Istanbul: City of Spies – WW2 – Spies & Ties 18

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

World War Two
Published 14 Jun 2022

Neutral Turkey appears to be an island of peace in a sea of war. But if you look a little closer though and there’s another story. Assassins ply their deadly trade. Spies slip in and out of occupied Europe. The Allies and Axis battle for influence. The secret war is in full swing.
(more…)

January 5, 2022

History Summarized: The Ottoman Empire

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 Oct 2018

Leave it to the furniture boys to pioneer a Comfort-First attitude towards Imperialism.

Join Blue in investigating the history of the Ottoman empire, and find out why “The Sick Man of Europe” is more than their nickname implies.

Further reading: Osman’s Dream by Caroline Finkel

Famous Turkish Song — Gunduz Gece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UcbH…

PATREON: www.patreon.com/OSP

MERCH LINKS:
Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…

Find us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!

December 27, 2021

Prince Philip was born in Greece, but was never “of Greece”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Aris Roussinos outlines the surprisingly complex history of Prince Philip’s family in Greece and explains why His Royal Highness could never really be considered Greek, despite the tabloid nickname “Phil the Greek”:

HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Canadian Regiment, presenting the 3rd Battalion with their Regimental Colours, 17 April 2013. (via Wikipedia)

Though most people know that Prince Philip was born in Greece and almost immediately exiled, the precise circumstances of this leaving of his native country are surprisingly obscure. How many are aware, for example, that if Ataturk had lost the 1921 Battle of the Sakarya River, outside Ankara, not only would modern Turkey not exist, but neither would Princes Charles, William and Harry?

The existence of our future kings is the chance product of the tumult accompanying the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is a dramatic illustration of the Butterfly Effect, whereby random events on one corner of the European continent totally reshaped timelines on the other: indeed, we could declare the prime mover in the events that placed the Duke of Edinburgh as our Queen’s consort to be an aggrieved Greek monkey.

On 2 October, 1920, Prince Philip’s uncle, King Alexander of Greece, was taking the air in the grounds of the royal palace of Tatoi, outside Athens. His German Shepherd dog, Fritz, attacked a Barbary Macaque belonging to a member of his staff. As the King rushed to extract the screaming monkey from Fritz’s jaws, the macaque’s furious mate sunk its teeth into the king’s leg. Alexander contracted sepsis, and died just over three weeks later, throwing Greece into a succession crisis, and totally reordering the subsequent history of the Near East. As Churchill later wrote, “it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite”.

King Alexander’s septic leg, like the rest of the Greek royal family, possessed not a drop of Hellenic blood — something Prince Philip reportedly made clear to a Greek visitor to Buckingham Palace who dared to claim ethnic kinship with his host. Back when the small Balkan nation finally won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, in 1831, the European Great Powers had decided on the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty to rule the poor and volatile Greeks. When the Wittelsbach King Otto was forced from his throne by the revolution of 1862, the Great Powers reconvened, and chose the 17-year old Prince William of Denmark, Prince Philip’s grandfather, as Greece’s new king. As he would later instruct his children, “You must never forget that you are foreigners in this country, but you must make them [the Greeks] forget it.”

After the disastrous war against the Turks, six military leaders were tried and executed by firing squad, and Prince Philip’s father Prince Andrew, was accused of disobeying an order while in command of a Greek corps:

As the historian Michael Llewellyn-Smith noted in his excellent book on Greece’s Asia Minor campaign Ionian Vision, “whether or not Andrew had been guilty of insubordination, it was an absurd charge to bring fifteen months after the event, given that he had not been relieved of his command at the time.” On 3 December, Andrew took the stand. A staff officer, Colonel Kalogeras, stated that Andrew had refused to attack despite direct orders. Colonel Sariyannis and General Papoulas both attested that if Andrew had carried out Papoulas’ orders, the Greeks would have won the day at Sakarya. Andrew was unanimously found guilty of disobedience and abandoning his post and sentenced to be stripped of his rank and banished permanently from Greece.

Andrew expected to be executed in his cell at any moment. However, in the background, the Greek revolutionary General Nikaloaos Plastiras, a future three-time Prime Minister of Greece, had been negotiating with the British government, which had broken off formal diplomatic relations with Greece since the execution of the Six. They agreed that Andrew would be permitted to leave Greece on a British warship.

And so, a few months after his birth, Prince Philippos of Greece left Mon Repos, Corfu and Greece on the British destroyer HMS Calypso, along with his mother and father and into a life of exile. Philippos was, famously, carried onto the warship in an orange crate instead of a cot. His father Prince Andrew settled into a life of exile in France, writing a book Towards Disaster, translated by Philip’s mother Princess Alice, which aimed to justify his actions at Sakarya as necessary to avoid a pointless loss of life in a losing battle. When the monarchy was restored in Greece, Andrew refused a commission for Philip in the Hellenic Navy, saying “Never the Greek Navy! In the Greek Navy after a bit they would throw him out – that’s what they did to me, not once, as you know, or twice, but three times!”

Instead, Philip served gallantly in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and was awarded the Greek War Cross for his actions at Cape Matapan. While his son Prince Charles became a benefactor of the Greek monastic republic of Mount Athos and frequent visitor to Corfu, and who is widely considered to be a Phillhellene with a strong mystical attachment to the Greek Orthodox faith of his grandparents, Prince Philip described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction”. For despite his nickname as “Phil the Greek”, he felt no great affection for the country and the uneasy crown it offered its foreign rulers. As he once said of the land of his birth and the mercurial people it contains, “I certainly never felt nostalgic about Greece. A grandfather assassinated and a father condemned to death does not endear me to the perpetrators.”

December 11, 2021

QotD: In praise of getting stinkin’ drunk

Filed under: Health, History, Humour, Middle East, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A lot of this has come to mind because I’ve been reading an interesting new book — Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. Using history, science, myth and popular culture, Slingerland defends getting drunk. Drinking has always played a role in “enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.” There is archaeological evidence that brewing precedes baking.

Slingerland admits the problem of problem drinking. Yet he convincingly argues that the downside of booze has been addressed at length over the last 30 or 40 years. It’s time, he observes, for some pushback against the “puritanical discomfort with pleasure lurking in the background of scholarly discourse.” Slingerland decries “our current age of neo-prohibition and general queasiness about risk,” and exports “the simple joy of feeling good.”

Slingerland, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia in Canada, then goes even further, positing that by causing humans “to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal … intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups.”

That is to say, without Budweiser and red wine, civilization might not have been possible. For our ancestors, intoxication was “a robust and elegant response to the challenges of getting a selfish, suspicious, narrowly goal-oriented primate to loosen up and connect with strangers.” Brewing vats and drinking vessels were found at a 12,000-year-old site in Turkey. When humans began to sow crops and domesticate livestock, it allowed us to get over distrust and work in larger numbers, giving rise to towns and then cities. Slingerland: “It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers and trippers who emerged triumphant.”

Mark Judge, Drunk: The Vital Pleasure of Getting Hammered”, SpliceToday, 2021-09-01.

July 15, 2021

Goodbye Lenin, Hello Jazz! | B2W:ZEITGEIST! I E.22 Winter 1924

Filed under: History, Media, Religion, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 14 Jul 2021

The winter of 1924 sees the death of not only Vladimir Lenin but also the Ottoman Caliphate. However, it also sees something fresh and completely unique enter the American mainstream. George Gershwin has given the Jazz Age a soundtrack.
(more…)

May 20, 2021

The Birth Control Movement and Eugenics – A Curious Link | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.18 – Winter 1923

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, Greece, Health, History, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 19 May 2021

In the winter of 1923, a controversial activist takes a Catholic doctor to trial for libel. The proceedings capture a much bigger moment in the history of the interwar period: the controversial — but inherent — link between birth control and eugenics.
(more…)

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress