Quotulatiousness

December 4, 2019

The British Blitz Spirit is a Myth – WW2 – War Against Humanity 005

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

World War Two
Published 3 Dec 2019

Strategic bombing was used to destroy the popular support for their governments war effort, and the British boosted that their resistance to bombing was an unique trait. But both are false, based on lies and propaganda.

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Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Joram Appel and Francis van Berkel
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Joram Appel
Edited by: Karolina Dołega

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

Colorizations by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/

Sources:
– Imperial War Museum: D2168, D1623, D2956, 36206, D1587, D2154, D2157, HU36143, HU 36199
– Deutsche Fotothek, 0000436
– Noun Project: Natural Disasters 1674928 By Claudia Revalina, ID
noun_prisoner 63221 By carlotta zampini, IT, Bomb by P Thanga Vignesh
– Toni Frissell, Abandoned boy, London, 1945
– Battle of Britain, film from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
7 hours ago (edited)
Having spoken to many British people while researching this episode, I realised that many in the United Kingdom still grow up with the idea that the perseverance in the face of constant bombing was something uniquely British, and that the so-called “Blitz Spirit” caused people to proudly face Hitlers bombs and transcend class-differences, and that bombing actually boosted their morale. However, research – half of which was done by Francis who is from Britain as well, shows that this idea is mainly based on propaganda. Furthermore, it is still considered controversial to doubt Churchill’s war cabinet’s policy of mass bombing German cities to force them out of the war. However, the effectiveness of this too has been proven to be based on falsehoods and lies. The true effectiveness of strategic bombing was already known to Churchill’s advisors during the war. Feel free to enter discussion about this in the comment section, but keep it civil and back up your arguments with examples and sources wherever possible.

Cheers,
Joram

Defund the BBC? Well, if you can’t just sack, burn, and salt the earth it stands on, defunding might help

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Hector Drummond wonders if the Overton Window has moved far enough that the BBC might lose its sacred status:

In a notorious talk given to Conservative Future in 2009, Sean Gabb made the following radical recommendation:

    On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street … You must shut it down – and shut it down at once.

I have for many years been torn between thinking this a good idea, and thinking that it would result in such uproar that the government would immediately fall, and be replaced by a new government who would restore the BBC. But the question was purely abstract anyway, because no Conservative government would even contemplate doing such a thing. No Conservative government was even going to contemplate taking away the licence fee.

But finally, after three years of disgraceful conduct — well, extra disgraceful conduct — the future of the BBC is finally an issue that that can be broached. It’s finally an issue that can be talked about without people throwing up their hands in horror and demanding you be thrown out of wherever you are. People will listen sympathetically if you suggest that the BBC can’t go on like it has been. People will join in enthusiastically if you say that Channel 4 is a disgrace that should no longer be state-funded. Well, not if you’re in the common room. But in the ordinary pubs around the country they will. They will at the dinner parties that are being held outside the M25. And even some inside it.

So what should be done? The conventional conservative/libertarian idea is that the BBC should be moved to a subscription model. The more radical Gabb idea is not one that has ever been talked about much. In fact, it’s an idea that until recently would have shocked most people, even most conservatives. (If you read to the end of the Gabb article, you’ll see that the young conservatives were themselves outraged by Gabb’s idea). But actually it’s a very good idea. Because here’s the thing. If you privatise the BBC, it may do very well for itself, and then it would be free to spin the news far more outrageously than it currently does.

More recently than Dr. Gabb, Richard Delingpole made a suggestion that I stole for my headline:

So the idea is no longer so alien. Particularly amongst younger people, who just don’t watch the BBC any more. They generally don’t watch much TV at all, they prefer YouTube and TikTok (which are filled with rubbish, it has to be said, but that’s another story), but they especially don’t watch the BBC (or channel 4). So most young people won’t even notice if the BBC is closed down, although about thirty sociology undergraduates will eventually tweet about it once their lecturers tell them what’s happened, and then the Guardian will have a fit and try to make it a big story, but there’ll be no BBC to amplify that, so it won’t be that effective. And the other channels are unlikely to shed too many tears over the shutdown of a subsidised rival (although I expect that the news staff will as they’re all lefties now).

The Twelve Labors of Hercules – Rules Lawyering – Extra Mythology – #2

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

Extra Credits
Published 2 Dec 2019

Hercules (or Herakles in the Greek) needs to finish the last five tasks on the list before he will have properly atoned for murdering his family, but it isn’t going to be so easy. The king, seeing that Hercules has completed the tasks declares that two of them are invalid since Hercules got outside help. And I guess that’s technically cheating? More sidequests abound and we meet a familiar face from an older Extra Mythology!

The flesh-eating horses might be the worst monsters we’ve had on Extra Mythology. Something about those eyes. D:

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

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

David Warren on discovering Erasmus as a teenager:

Erasmus makes an adequate hero for the adolescent boy. He was mine, for a time, even more than his friend Thomas More, who was forced on our consciousness in the late ‘sixties by Robert Bolt’s play-cum-movie (A Man for All Seasons). We were all herded from the High School to the Cinema, and rolled home in our yellow schoolbus full of something — youthful idealism — that could then be applied to various dubious causes. There was this Penguin with the title, Utopia. Without reading it, even in this pop translation, we became wise in our conceit, which is to say, conceited little wiseacres. I don’t “look back in anger,” however. That was for the ‘fifties. I look back through a fog of marijuana smoke, from the Age of Hippies.

Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) with Renaissance Pilaster
Hans Holbein (1497-1543) via Wikimedia Commons.

Drugs saved us. Had it not been for them, we might have accomplished worse horrors. By the ‘seventies, when a new nadir was being established for Western Civ, another, visibly duller generation was coming along. Ours was the first to be perpetually schooled (I would not say “educated”). I left high school, home and Canada, in the year of grace 1969, now half a century ago; and when I returned to settle in the 1980s, I found my old schoolmates still in college. To be fair, at least some were homemakers by then, or garage mechanics. It was so long ago that this word, “homemakers,” could still be used without feminist “irony,” if you came from a small town.

But the Erasmus who had appealed to me, as teenager, was the author of the Colloquies, and the Praise of Folly (a keepsake from his friendship with More). I imagined him gentle, humorous, wise, yet full of righteous fire. Too, apparently, a bit of a whiner. I was dazzled by his production of the first printed edition of the Greek Testament, and did not yet realize that it was a slapdash performance, rushed to beat the version of Cardinal Ximenes, already set in type but not yet bound — a proof that there is nothing new under the sun.

Erasmus’ obsessive struggle against the reputation of Saint Jerome, whose central rôle in the history of our Vulgate he tried to deny, and whom he presumptuously corrected on innumerable points — himself straying in and out of heresy — ended in repeated embarrassments for him. But to my adolescent mind, he must always be the hero, beating furiously against the hidebound.

What Life Was Like for the Home Guard During WW2

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forces TV
Published 8 May 2014

Scrapbooks revealing what the Home Guard was really like during World War Two have been published online.

The collection of maps, photographs and secret documents were compiled by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Morgan Crofton.

Now they are available for all to see thanks to work by the New Forest Park Authority.

The scrapbooks can be viewed online here – http://www.newforestww2.org

QotD: French anti-Americanism

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

The list of French anti-American writers is long: it is its own unique genre, one found nowhere else in such abundance. Already, in 1793, Talleyrand, in exile before he would become French foreign minister, wrote in Philadelphia that Americans possessed “neither conversation nor cuisine.” He also famously observed, “These Americans, they have 32 religions but only one dish, roast beef with potatoes.” The genealogy of contemporary anti-Americanism is traceable to the beginning of the nineteenth century, to a Catholic France arrayed against a Protestant America, and then to the twentieth century, when a socialist France confronted a capitalist America; always just beneath the surface is the idea of a civilized France set against a supposedly uncivilized America. French anti-American literature, which Jean-François Revel analyzed perceptively in Anti-Americanism, is faithful to an eternal code: our civilization versus their lack of culture; our spirituality versus their brutality. Beneath these changing ideological masks, we might perhaps discern a rivalry between two nations that claim to be “universalist.” Americans have seized the torch of human rights from France, or at least the claim to embody them.

Guy Sorman, “French Anti-Americanism, Rebooted”, City Journal, 2017-11-27.

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