Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2020

Appeasement – How the West Helped Hitler Start WW2 | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 1 of 4

TimeGhost History
Published 26 Feb 2020

With the increasing aggression of Italy, Japan, and Germany in the 1930s, the League of Nations is becoming increasingly ineffective in regulating international disputes. Britain and France adopt a diplomatic strategy of appeasement to hold off all-out war and buy some crucial time. But will it work, and can Adolf Hitler’s territorial ambitions be contained?

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel and Spartacus Olsson
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: Tom Meaden, Izzy Wilson, and Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Sources:
Bundesarchiv_Bild:
102-08806, 102-08810, 102-09042,
119-5243, 146-1970-052-24, 146-1985-108-27A,
183-1987-0922-500, 183-R03618,
Photo from color by klimbim.

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Norman Stewart
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Split Decision” – Rannar Sillard
– “Death And Glory 1” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “Death And Glory 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to look back at Anglo-French foreign policy in the 1930s and be shocked at how many mistakes politicians like Neville Chamberlain could make. This video will probably only add to that judgement, it more or less charts all the times Hitler could have been stopped but wasn’t. But put yourself in the context of the time. Memories of the Great War are only twenty years ago old, and the public has no appetite for another massive conflict. The global economy is only just showing signs of recovery after the Great Depression, and Britain and France barely have the industrial capacity to fight a modern war. So, imagine you’re Chamberlain (or any other politician of the time), are you really going to commit your country to war over a territorial disagreement between Germany and Czechoslovakia? The invasion of Poland in September 1939 shows that appeasement was a mistake. But maybe it was an understandable one? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Cheers,
Francis.

Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU)

Brendan O’Neill explains why Toby Young’s FSU is so important right now:

The beautiful thing about the mad reaction to Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU) is that it proves why the union is so necessary. No sooner had Young unveiled his censorship-busting union than the illiberal liberals were out in force to mock it and ridicule it and to insist that, actually, there is no free-speech crisis in the UK. It’s a right-wing myth, they claim. There is no widespread censorship. People aren’t being shipped off to gulags for expressing an opinion. Apparently, the free-speech “grift” – God, I hate the word “grift” – is just a bunch of pale, male and stale blokes pissed off that they can no longer say the N-word or talk openly about women’s boobs. Freedom of speech is not under threat, the Young-bashers claim, and anyone who says it is is probably just an Islamophobe, transphobe or some other breed of phobe itching to spout bile with “no consequences”.

This rank denialism, this blinkered insistence that free speech is not in danger in 21st-century Britain, is exactly why we need the FSU and as broad a discussion as possible about the importance of the liberty to express oneself. Because the fact that so many inhabitants of the chattering-class bubble can’t even see that free speech is dying right now confirms how naturalised and uncontroversial the new censorship has become. They don’t even see it as censorship. They see it as perfectly normal, and good, in fact, that certain views cannot be expressed in public life or on social media. That’s how cavalier the new war on heretical opinion has become. At least in the past, from Torquemada to the McCarthyites, authoritarians were honest about being censors. Today’s self-elected moral guardians of correct opinion are so hubristic, so taken with their own mortal rectitude, that they don’t even see themselves as enemies of freedom, but rather as decent, unimpeachable maintainers of a natural intellectual order.

Things have come to such a pass that these people will literally seek to censor you in one breath and then express alarm at being called censors in the next breath. Hence the Guardian could publish a piece last week claiming that the idea that there is a culture of censorship in British universities is a “right-wing myth” while simultaneously defending censorship on campus. In an act of extraordinary moral contortionism, Evan Smith mocked the “idea that there is a free-speech crisis at British universities” and then, without missing a beat, he defended the policy of No Platform and the creation of safe spaces because “the university cannot be a place where racism and fascism – as well as sexism, homophobia and transphobia – are allowed to be expressed”. The Orwellianism is staggering. “There is no censorship on campus. Except the censorship I approve of. Which is not really censorship.” That is what is being said here. The intellectual dishonesty is almost impressive.

This Orwellian denialism of the existence of censorship by people who actually support and enact censorship cuts to the heart of the free-speech crisis in the UK. The reason the illiberal liberals and woke McCarthyites and Twittermobs don’t consider themselves to be censors – even as they gleefully agitate for the censorship of feminists, secularists worried about Islamist extremism, and right-wing people opposed to mass immigration – is because they have convinced themselves that certain forms of speech are not free speech. That certain beliefs should not be afforded the liberty of expression. You hear it in their telling, baleful mantra that “Hate speech is not free speech”. And if “hate speech” is not free speech, but rather some kind of toxin, a pox on public life, then crushing it is not censorship. It is more like an act of public health: cleansing the public realm of diseased thoughts that are liable to harm certain groups. These people see themselves not as censors, but as public-health activists delousing the community of germs spread by evil men and women.

A French Civil War in 1937? – WW2 feat. Hearts of Iron IV [sponsored]

World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2020

This video is sponsored by Paradox Interactive. Indy shares his thoughts on what he thinks would have happened if the French would have decided to meddle in the Spanish Civil War – triggering a Civil War.

Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance is now available! You can play Hearts of Iron IV for free until next Sunday, the 1st of March! Discover it here: https://pdxint.at/39Re5ld

Watch our first collab video with HoI4 about the Spanish Civil War here: https://youtu.be/7QE1hvH8ZVU
Watch our Between Two Wars episode on the Spanish Civil War here: https://youtu.be/ncUkPavahCU
Watch our Between Two Wars episode on the French February Revolution in 1934 here: https://youtu.be/tLm1gWnlcYw

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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Directed by: Wieke Kapteijns
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Guido Becker
Gameplay scenes: Sietse Kenter

Colorizations by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…
Daniel Weiss

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Tuesday night’s Democratic debacle debate

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn reports on the casualties from the latest Democratic presidential debate:

Henry Kissinger’s famous line on the Iran/Iraq war was that it’s a shame they can’t both lose. In Tuesday night’s primary debate they somehow contrived for everyone to lose, including both the Democrat Party and the media. It reached its peak of perfection early on when all seven candidates began shrieking over each other and, as with some hideous atonal aleatoric modernist cacophonous symphony, its very unlistenability seemed an impressive feat of organization.

Five insipid moderators sat there like dowagers declining to catch the eye of the shrieking nutter on the Piccadilly Line as Elizabeth Warren ate up all the opening airtime with charges that Michael Bloomberg would make you kill your babies (she’s not concerned about the baby-killing, only that it shouldn’t be Bloomberg ordering the hit). Realizing that the show was in danger of degenerating into Screech White and the Six Dwarves, her comrades belatedly began screaming along, shredding the alleged “rules” even as the hopelessly inept moderators gamely persisted with all the usual bland over-formatted props of leaden telly debates – like making a big deal about interactively selecting random Twitter-submitted questions about the besieged Syrian city of Idlib.

Mayor Pete looked earnestly into the camera and declared, “I stand with the people of Idlib.” Which, translated out of of Demoblather, means: You guys are screwed. Still, the ability to adlib a line about Idlib is not to be disdained.

In other news, Joe Biden got tough with China: “They must play by the rules. Period. Period. Period.” Actually, I think “period period period” is an ellipsis… Which is oddly Bidenesque. But he was assessed by the experts to have delivered a killer performance – if only because he appeared to know what state he was in and which office he was running for, and did not claim to have been arrested on the streets of Soweto while trying to see a South African prisoner in a gaol cell nine hundred miles away. Great job, Joe!

On the other hand, he did assert that, thanks to Bernie’s crazy pro-gun Second Amendment absolutism, 150 million people had been killed since 2007. Which would be half the population of America. And is 149,997,230 people more than the coronavirus, and roughly a thousand times the entire population of Idlib, so you’d think somebody would have noticed it.

Winston Churchill Biography: In the Darkest Hour

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

Biographics
Published 13 Feb 2018

We imagine Winston Churchill with his signature cane, drinking scotch whiskey, and puffing on a Cuban cigar. His mouth is downturned, and his voice is gruff and his words pointed. This is the image Hollywood portrays but it is a mere caricature of the flesh and blood version. Who was Winston Churchill? In Britain’s “darkest hour,” Churchill led his country from the brink of Nazi conquest by forging an alliance with the U.S. and Russia. He had many critics, and made mistakes on a grand scale. Yet, above it all, possessed an unwavering belief in his own power. To his beloved country he offered his “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org

Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Crystal Sullivan
Producer – Samuel Avila
Executive Producer – Shell Harris

Business inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com

Biographies by the book, get Winston Churchill’s biography from Amazon: http://amzn.to/2EAfh7b

QotD: Clichés of bad travel writing

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The poor-but-oh-so-happy sentiment pops up without fail in any crappy travel magazine version of a visit to Myanmar, Laos, or Nepal (and probably any other desperately poor and badly governed country), in which “the people” are always gleeful, generous, and colorful. I’m not exactly sure what it is about being ruled by insane dictators that makes people so damn nice, but here’s an idea: If you’re a Western travel writer, or, say, German tourist, and you’re going to an impoverished country full of hungry people in which you clearly stand out as someone with money to spend, people might be extra nice to you.

Kerry Howley, “But the People Are So Friendly“, Hit and Run, 2005-08-18.

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