Quotulatiousness

February 24, 2019

Manstein Makes a Plan and Hitler has a Man Crush – WW2 – 026 – February 23 1940

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

World War Two
Published on 23 Feb 2019

German General Erich von Manstein has a cunning plan. And as it happens, it’s just how Hitler likes it. This week, the German war plans change quite drastically. In the meantime, the Soviet Red Army continues it push through the Finnish Mannerheim line, except for a stubborn Finnish pocket of resistance at Taipale.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: Eastory

Portrait colorizations by Norman Stewart.

Photos of the Winter War are mostly from the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive (SA-Kuva).
Photo of Sartre by Government Press Office Israel, https://www.flickr.com/people/6906147….

Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
2 days ago (edited)
While the Winter War seems to be coming to an end, new plans are being crafted in Germany to invade most of their neighbours. And before someone asks: the Swastika in the thumbnail is NOT used as a political statement of some sort. Just like in all of our earlier episodes, we use relevant symbols from the different armies and powers to illustrate the topic of the thumbnail. And yes, we are aware of regulation in Germany and Austria regarding the use of Nazi symbols, but as long as they are used in an historical context for educational purposes, which it clearly is, showing this symbol is allowed.

And before I forget: the release of this episode marks exactly half a year since we have started doing World War Two on 1 September 2018/1939. A lot has changed in these months, and there are still many exciting new things on the horizon. The series is about to enter a very eventful time, we are going to start with some new projects which you’ll hear about soon and there are more specials coming – which we hope to be able to bring to you on a regular basis as soon as possible. We hope you enjoy the episode!

Cheers, Joram

Another review of Curl’s Making Dystopia

Filed under: Architecture, Books, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Having read a few reviews of James Stevens Curl’s recent Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, I’m likely to add it to my booklist (when I have a budget for new books again, that is). Here, Michael Mehaffy shares his comments on the book:

Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, voted as Britain’s most hated building in a Channel 4 poll.
Photo by Ed Webster via Wikimedia Commons.

For most reform-minded urbanists today, the complicity of architectural Modernism in the urban fiascoes of the last century is not in dispute. A representative (and seminal) criticism was Jane Jacobs’ withering 1961 attack, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she described Le Corbusier’s “wonderful mechanical toy” that “said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement” — but as to how a city actually works, it told “nothing but lies.” Jacobs’s work was of course a major inspiration in forming the Congress for the New Urbanism, along with the work of other reformists like Leon Krier, Christopher Alexander and Vincent Scully.

In fact, the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism almost precisely inverts Le Corbusier’s 1933 Athens Charter: in place of the Modernists’ functional segregation, we would have mixed use; in place of their dominance of fast-moving vehicles (especially cars), we would have walkability and multi-modal streets; in place of wholesale demolition of historic districts and prohibition of historic styles, we would have preservation and renewal, and buildings that “grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.”

Yet in the last few decades, architectural Modernism has enjoyed a resurgence among some New Urbanists, as it has in the wider profession of architecture. For them, it’s reasonable to separate the urban mistakes of Modernism from its alleged architectural genius, which, as they see it, continues to offer inspiring building design ideas that can take their place happily within great new cities.

Of course, many critics would not agree — including many of the profession’s most prominent insiders. For them, the building-scale and urban-scale failures of Modernism have been of a piece, borne of a totalizing but defective theory of habitat, and even a dubious theory of architectural form itself. As the Post-Modernist Rem Koolhaas observed (in his 1995 book S,M,L,XL), “Modernism’s alchemistic promise, to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition, has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn’t work.” Nor was Koolhaas the first to attack the ideological foundations of Modernism. Similar criticisms came from earlier insiders like Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, wife of Bauhaus pioneer Lazslo, whose stinging 1968 essay on the Bauhaus labeled it “Hitler’s Revenge.” Its built works in the US carried, for her, “the browbeating symbolism of a negative ideology that was already bankrupt when the dying German Republic unloaded it on America.”

Yet for a movement that has been so frequently discredited, Modernism still has a curious grip on the profession even today. That’s because from the beginning, according to historian James Stevens Curl, the movement has been populated by “architectural bullies” who would stop at nothing to seize power, extinguish its competitors, re-write history, forbid all other styles (especially those with any ornament), and otherwise enforce a radical agenda — one that only seemed to offer all things alluring, progressive and historically inevitable. Beneath that marketable cover story, he says, the real agenda was an exhilarating quest for power and dominance, and especially later, for the wealth generated by a profitable industrialization of the human environment. Modernism sold, and no matter if it also sold out—cities, people, history, the future. For Curl, that approach was (and is) nothing less than “architectural barbarism.”

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Warners (Part 3/2)

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindsay Ellis
Published on 20 Apr 2018

Nothing is pure.

From the comments:

Special Agent Washing Tub
2 months ago

Me; * watching this and feeling my childhood shatter*
“Why does it hurt so much?”
Lindsay: “BECAUSE IT WAS REAL.”

QotD: Wine books

Filed under: Books, Quotations, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are three categories of wine book. The first are guides, like those of Robert Parker, which seek to offer practical help in the purchase and consumption of wines – though their effects are often contrary, adding feverishness to the acquisition (‘I’ve landed a 95-pointer!’) and self-consciousness to the drinking (‘Did you get black truffles on the nose?’). The second category consists of historical surveys and château profiles, the latter often little more than disguised puffery, since the author will have been given privileged access to the archives, and will have been vetted, if not actually chosen, by the château, will have been wined and dined until he – or, occasionally, she – is practically wearing the château’s label as a blazer badge. Famous wine houses are nowadays international businesses, and no less good at promoting themselves than Nike and Benetton. Thirdly, there are books of almost no practical value but which appeal to the nostalgic, fetishistic or cork-sniffing side of oenophilia: celebrations, anthologies, reminiscences of the wine country and its colourful characters, evocations of people and vintages often long since dead. The wine buff will often buy such useless treasures second-hand and will employ them to induce harmless reverie, rather like leafing through an old Sears Roebuck catalogue.

Julian Barnes, “Did You Get Black Truffles on the Nose?”, Literary Review, 1994-10.

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