Quotulatiousness

August 11, 2020

The Vanishing Aral Sea

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 May 2017

The History Guy examines the Aral Sea and the confluence of geography and history.

The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.

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The History Guy: Five Minutes of History is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are presented in historical context.

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David Warren offers an unusually contrarian view of the Bronze Age collapse

Filed under: History, Humour, Middle East, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sea Peoples? Faugh, Mr. Warren isn’t buying any of that old rope. It wasn’t earthquakes, famine, plagues, or even multiple waves of heavily armed undocumented immigrants landing on the shores … it was mere “progress”:

Migrations, invasions and destructions during the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1200 BC), based on public domain information from DEMIS Mapserver.
Map by Alexikoua via Wikimedia Commons.

When did the Bronze Age end, and the Iron Age begin? The ages of plastic, silicon, and graphene may have succeeded even the latter, but I’m still not comfortable with iron. Neither were the Cypriots, nor the Egyptians, incidentally — some thirty-something centuries back. Before even that, iron was freely available in a globalized world. I once took a modified fishing boat from Cyprus to Mersin; I wouldn’t encourage swimming it. But the voyage is not far, and too quick with a motor. Even in a row boat, it would have been easy to smuggle ferrous materials, either way.

Yet for centuries, such “highly sophisticated” societies as those of Cyprus and Egypt, stuck with copper and bronze; with gold and silver adornments. The rest of the world might have been with the progressive agenda, but they were not. I speculate that they didn’t like the way iron rusts; there’s something cheap about it. But whatever the objection, they stood their ground. There are old iron objects to be found in both places, but few.

Much later, when the “lifestyle” advocates for the new fashionable metal had won out, and the tide of iron was flooding, it is interesting that the craftsmanship of objects is relaxed. Even ceramics become dull, boring, repetitious; skills are forgotten. We have craftsmen who obviously don’t give a damn any more, just like today. We have the encroaching realm of “productivity,” quantity. Soon these places are easy to knock over, by the conquering savages always lurking about.

We have conservative societies, overwhelmed by technology; and no longer trading on their own terms. In the larger Minoan sphere, we have barbarization. Dynastic Egypt will survive only in Coptic fragments. Greeks, Romans, and finally Arabs will be trashing the place. Ancient civilizations fall.

I regret “progress.” We should resist it heart and soul.

Egypt’s Colonial and Zionist Troubles | The Suez Crisis | Prelude 1

TimeGhost History
Published 10 Aug 2020

Recently independent Egypt, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, navigates the turbulent waters of the Cold War, seeking national autonomy, while negotiating its relations with the British Empire, United States, and the Soviet Union. The question is, how will Egypt realize its self-determination with these powers vying for dominance in the region?

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Image Research: Ian Irungu, Shaun Harrison & Karolina Dołęga
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Mikolaj Uchman

Visual Sources:
National Archives NARA
Library of Congress Geography and Maps Department
Tropenmuseum
Wellcome Images
National Army Museum of New Zealand
Imperial War Museum: HU70788,
National Photo Collection of Israel
Fortepan – ID 32790
Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Music:
“Descending Mount Everest” – Trailer Worx
“Dreamless Nights” – The New Fools
“March Of The Brave 10” – Rannar Sillard
“Break Free” – Fabien Tell
“The Unexplored” – Philip Ayers
“It’s Not a Game” – Philip Ayers
“Foreign Signs” – Philip Ayers

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 hour ago (edited)
Welcome to the first episode of our series on the Suez Crisis! It’s a 7-episode wild ride through secretive international collusion, clashing nations, and imperial anxieties. It’s a watershed moment in a variety of entangled histories: decolonization, the Arab-Israel Conflict, the rise of America as a superpower, the growing power of the UN, and much much more. It’s a lot to take in, but we hope that we’ve made this series as digestible (and enjoyable!) as possible. Thanks to our TimeGhost Army members for choosing this series. Want to be part of the effort that makes stuff like this happen? Join us at patreon.com/timeghosthistory or https://timeghost.tv.

Cheers,

Francis.

Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Adam Wakeling discusses George Orwell’s essay in the postwar magazine Polemic:

In the bleak post-war Britain of October 1945, an essay by George Orwell appeared in the first edition of Polemic. Edited by abstract artist and ex-Communist Hugh Slater, the new journal was marketed as a “magazine of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics.” Orwell was not yet famous — Animal Farm had only just started appearing on shelves — but he had a high enough profile for his name to be a boon to a new publication. His contribution to the October 1945 Polemic was “Notes on Nationalism,” one of his best and most important pieces of writing. Amidst the de-Nazification of Germany, the alarmingly rapid slide into the Cold War, and the trials of German and Japanese war criminals, Orwell set out to answer a question which had occupied his mind for most of the past seven years — why do otherwise rational people embrace irrational or even contradictory beliefs about politics?

As a junior colonial official in Burma, the young Eric Blair (he had not yet adopted the name by which he would be known to posterity) had been disgusted by his peers and superiors talking up the British liberty of Magna Carta and Rule Britannia while excusing acts of repression like the massacre of Indian protestors at Amritsar in 1919. As a committed socialist in the late 1930s, he openly ridiculed those who claimed to be champions of the working class while holding actual working-class people in open contempt. And he had watched the British Communist Party insist that the Second World War was nothing more than an imperialist adventure right up until the moment when the first German soldier crossed the Soviet frontier, at which point it instantly became a noble struggle for human freedom.

Orwell’s most personally searing experience, though, had come in Barcelona in 1937. The previous year, he had travelled to Spain to fight in the Civil War on the Republican side. His poor relationship with the British Communist Party led him to enlist in the militia of an anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Even while it was fighting a bitter winter campaign in the Aragon mountains, the POUM was subject to a relentless propaganda campaign by pro-Soviet Republicans who insisted it was a secret front for fascism.

Over May and June 1937, the POUM and the other independent left-wing organisations in Barcelona were brutally suppressed by the Republican Government and Soviet-backed Communists. Orwell saw his friends and comrades smeared, arrested, and in some cases shot. He only made a narrow escape back into France himself. Upon his return to Britain, he found the British Communist Party resolute in its line that the POUM was a fascist party. Admitting that there could be a difference of opinion among left-wing groups with respect to the Soviet Union, or that the Spanish Communists could have acted unjustly, was unacceptable. And when Orwell published his own account of the events in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, few were interested in reading it. The betrayal of the POUM weighed on Orwell’s mind through the Second World War, and Animal Farm provided an outlet for his anger. But those bloody spring days in Barcelona also informed “Notes on Nationalism.”

“Notes on Nationalism” is not an ideal title, as Orwell was not talking only about loyalty to country. Rather, he used nationalism as a short-hand for any type of group loyalty — to a country, but also to a religion, a political party, or an ideology itself. A nationalist may be defined by his membership of a group, or by his opposition to one, which Orwell called “negative” nationalism. Orwell used anti-Semites as an example of the latter, as well as the “minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.” He then set out to explain how everyone — no matter how reasoned and level-headed — is capable of irrational and biased thinking when our sense of group identity is challenged.

He identified three characteristics of “‘nationalistic’ thinking.” First, obsession — the ideologue’s need to filter everything through an ideological lens. Entertainment is not entertaining unless it is orthodox. Second, instability — the ability of the ideologue to go from believing one thing to quickly believing another to follow the party line. And thirdly, indifference to reality. One of the most interesting aspects of “Notes on Nationalism” is the “inadmissible fact” — something which can be proven to be true and is generally accepted but cannot be admitted by the adherents of a particular ideology. Or, if the fact is admitted, it is explained away or dismissed as unimportant.

The ideas explored in “Notes on Nationalism” run through much of Orwell’s writing, most obviously his anti-totalitarianism and hatred of hypocritical pieties. But central to his argument is how nationalistic thinking exposes our inescapable biases. “The Liberal News Chronicle,” he wrote, “published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.” This anticipated the doublethink of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which atrocities “are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.” The first step down the deceptively short road to totalitarianism is believing that our political enemies pose such a grave threat that defeating them takes precedence over truth, consistency, or common sense.

Napoleon’s greatest foe

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published 18 Jan 2018

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Possibly I did too much research for this one. Trying to stay on-topic when the subject is so vast and so interesting was not easy, hence the rather long video. I didn’t mean to say quite so much about what an utter £$%&*! Napoleon was, but he was so thoroughly vile that it proved impossible not to include some details about the man who won his promotion in the army by mowing down civilian protesters in the streets of Paris with grapeshot from his artillery batteries. Anyway, here are tales of bravery and virtue, as well as horrendous some of brutality, lies, and death.

Correction: The battle against the Russian fleet is called Svensksund (Swedish sound, as in channel), not Svenksund. I missed out an S in my haste.

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QotD: Our culture shapes what we can see

One of the things I keep trying to explain to my “woke” colleagues, when they stand tall and righteous and put their shoulders back and say that Heinlein was racisthomophobicsexist or that great authors of the past should have been better than to follow the prejudices of their time, is that when you’re immersed in your time, you don’t see the prejudices and the blind spots.

I have a little more insight into how culture shapes what’s possible to think, because I changed my culture as an adult. While this can be done (obviously) and immigrants should be encouraged to do it, (or go home), the acculturation is never complete. What happens is that you acquire a sort of cultural double vision. Depending on how far your acculturation goes, you’ll see the defects in thought or at least the unquestioned assumptions in one of the countries better, but also have a strong feeling of being outside enough to see some flaws in your dominant culture. In my case, for instance, I see the flaws in Portugal very clearly, like the obsession with speed over diligence or being decisive over being right, but I still see some in the US which is why sometimes I say “what people born and raised here don’t see.”

I have, of course, even more insight, due to being a conservative in the US, in a culture and profession (the arts/publishing) that is not only majority left, but majority extreme left. For many years, the only way to stay at least plausibly under cover was to see what they were seeing, and what they expected.

But without that, most people are blind to the … ah, unconscious or unthinking parts of their culture. Heck, even with what I’ve been through, I still tend to accept a lot of things unconsciously, unless I step back and go “Now wait a minute.”

Sarah Hoyt, “Slouching Into Shackles”, According to Hoyt, 2018-04-27.

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