Quotulatiousness

January 3, 2021

The Formation of the United Nations! – WW2 – 123 – January 2, 1942

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

World War Two
Published 2 Jan 2021

At the ongoing Arcadia Conference, 26 nations sign the Declaration of the United Nations. Otherwise it is very much a week of motion and changes in motion: in the USSR the Soviets are on the move in the center and the Crimea, the Japanese are slowing their movement in China, the Americans are finishing their movement in the Philippines, and the Axis are moving backward in North Africa. The Luftwaffe also decides that Malta must be eliminated as a base for the Allies.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Mikolaj Uchman

Sources:
– Election1960 from Wikimedia
– Battleship by Anand Prahlad from the Noun Project
– Supermarine Spitfire by Joel Wisneski from the Noun Project
– Afrrs from Wikimedia
– National Portrait Gallery
– Bundesarchiv

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon ranks with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

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

James E. Hartley on why Koestler’s 1941 novel should be seen as a prescient guide to modern-day “wokeness”:

The puzzling thing about wokeness is not that it is fashionable among a small subset of the Campus Left. One should never be surprised by what is fashionable among college faculty and students. The curious question is how these ideas broke out of the academic asylum and met acquiescence among a large group of people who should have known better.

The answer is found in a book which should have never fallen off the radar: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First published in 1941, it was — along with 1984 — one of the great books about totalitarianism written in the 1940s. Widely praised when it was published, the book was enormously influential in fostering the consensus view of post-war anti-communism. In 1998, Modern Library published a list of the 100 best English novels of the 20th century; Darkness at Noon was ranked eighth, five places above 1984.

The plot of the novel itself is fairly simple. The story begins with the imprisonment of Nicholas Rubashov, one of the heroes of the communist revolution in a country which is clearly the Soviet Union. Decades after the revolution, Number 1 (read: Stalin) has assumed power. Rubashov is imprisoned on the absurdly false charges of plotting to kill Number 1. The entire novel takes place in prison, as Rubashov is interrogated and eventually comes to voluntarily confess at a public trial to crimes he did not commit. He is then shot.

The novel explores the philosophical puzzle of why Rubashov would join with what has obviously become a murderous cult run by a totalitarian who is solely interested in amassing enough power to stamp his will upon the whole country. Rubashov, a devoted communist to the end, abandons his principles and bit by bit comes to accede to demands of the new generation who are seeking scapegoats and ritualistic confessions of guilt.

What is the nature of the new generation? One of the Party officials interrogating Rubashov explains:

    There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community — which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.

The individual does not matter. The group matters. What is good for the group is by definition good, regardless of whether it is good for the individual. As the interrogators make abundantly clear, no individual has the right to stand in the way of the group. The Party represents the group, and thus no individual has the right to oppose the Party.

First Arab – Israeli War 1948

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

Kings and Generals
Published 31 Aug 2019

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Previously in our animated historical documentary series on modern warfare we have covered the Six-Day War of 1967, also known as the Third Arab-Israeli War http://bit.ly/30NfTOy This new 3d documentary will explain the events of the First Arab-Israeli War, which was fought in 1948-1949.

Creation of Israel: http://bit.ly/2ZApWFi
Arab countries after the World War II: http://bit.ly/2ZBW0bX
First Arab – Israeli War of 1948 – Political episode: http://bit.ly/2zyjAvs

Support us on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/KingsandGenerals or Paypal: http://paypal.me/kingsandgenerals

We are grateful to our patrons and sponsors, who made this video possible: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Jlq…

The video was made by our friend Leif Sick, while the script was written by Matt Hollis.

This video was narrated by Officially Devin (https://www.youtube.com/user/Official…)

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Sources:
Efraim Karsh – The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948
Benny Morris – A History of the First Arab-Israeli War 1948
Ahron Bregman – Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947

Production Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound: http://www.epidemicsound.com

#Documentary #ArabIsraeliWar #ColdWar

QotD: Literary stasis in the Byzantine empire

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Undoubtedly, the Mediaeval Romans – now exclusively Greek in their language – made little effort to be original in their literature. They had virtually the whole body of Classical Greek literature in their libraries and in their heads. For them, this was both a wonderful possession and a fetter on the imagination. It was in their language, and not in their language. Any educated person could understand it. But the language had moved on – changes of pronunciation and dynamics and vocabulary. The classics were the accepted model for composition. But to write like the ancients was furiously hard. Imagine a world in which we spoke Standard English, but felt compelled, for everything above a short e-mail, to write in the language of Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible. Some of us might manage a good pastiche. Most of us would simply memorise the whole of the Bible, and, overlooking its actual content, write by adapting and rearranging remembered clauses. It would encourage an original literature. Because Latin soon became a completely foreign language in the West – and because we in England were so barbarous, we had to write in our own language – Western Mediaeval literature is often a fine thing. The Mediaeval Romans never had a dark age in our sense. Their historians in the fifteenth century wrote up the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in the same language as Thucydides. Poor Greeks.

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

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