World War Two
Published 19 Sep 2024In the summer of 1940, Hitler was at the peak of his popularity as he conquered Germany’s enemies seemingly at will. But just how quickly did this approval decline as the war turned further and further against Germany? What did the Germans think of him by the end of the war? Is there any love left for Hitler in postwar Germany? Today Spartacus answers these questions.
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September 20, 2024
How Popular Was Hitler?
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I guess I’ve been reading a lot of Substack posts lately …
Substack helpfully sent me a pre-rolled draft post for “my” Substack … this is a very clever trick to get Substackers (like me) who primarily read other peoples’ posts to begin sharing their own posts. Here are the highlights:
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The Me163 Komet – Rockets Are Dangerous
HardThrasher
Published Jun 3, 2024The story of the Me163 is a complex and multifaceted one, and I have attempted here to draw together a number of different sources into a narrative covering the political, structural, scientific and operational history. Necessarily I will have missed things and probably got things wrong. Where I know a mistake has been made, you’ll find it in the pinned comment marked “snagging” – one obvious example is Winkle Brown flew a “sharp” start after the war ended on an Me163 in Germany, and a towed flight in the UK, which I missed.
The below then is an extremely limited subset of the resources I’ve pulled on:
Me163 Rocket Interceptor – Stephen Ransom and Hans-Herman Cammann – not for the faint of heart, a book with brilliant nuggets, a drunken editor and a lot of very pretty pictures. This was my primary source.
Rocket Fighter – Marno Ziggler – Now out of print, this is a Hitler Jugend‘s Own Adventure story most of which has some truth in it but a lot of which is Marno wishing to be in his early 20s and flying for the Führer again. You can find it online fairly easily.
The kids probably haven’t got a clue what a video tape is, never mind Betamax https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/vh… – Betamax vs VHS
Baxter, AD: Walter Rocket Motors for Aircraft, RAE Technote Aero 1668, September 1945 – a Technical note that’s incredibly hard to get hold of, but which I managed to find, quite by chance, in some papers I got years ago. Probably available from the UK National Archives still.
http://www.walterwerke.co.uk/walter/i… – a fantastic archive of all things Walter but it isn’t an https site as a warning.
https://hushkit.net/2019/03/29/the-li… – The coal powered bomber rammer P.13
https://donhollway.com/me-163/ – Bat out of Hell – great website for images of the Me163 as imagined in the Artists’ fever dreams
WW2 Gun Camera: 8th Air Force VS Mess… – Gun Cam Footage of the Me163 and Me262s being shot at and down by various USAAF pilots.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection… – Air and Space Museum have their usual, brilliant photos and terrible descriptions.
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QotD: The Matrix, Harry Potter and “The One Pop Culture Thing”
Part of the appeal of Harry Potter must be that can somehow be intellectualized, though — at least, if the number of people incorporating it, in all apparent seriousness, into college classes can be believed. Here again, I’m not talking the English Department, which might have a legitimate reason — to study the narrative technique or whatever (for certain stretched-farther-than-Trigglypuff’s-sweatpants values of “legitimate”, anyway). I mean classes like “PHIL 101: Harry Potter and Philosophy”, which started showing up first in goofy California colleges, then all over the damn place, somewhere around 2002.
That certainly seems to be the appeal of The Matrix, and indeed The Matrix stopped being The One Pop Culture Thing very quickly, I hypothesize, because it made “intellectualizing” it too easy. The Matrix is pretty much just Jean Baudrillard: The Movie, and while that’s fun and even useful — Baudrillard did have a point, despite it all — it’s just too clever … by which I mean, The Matrix did too much of the heavy lifting, so that you don’t get too many Very Clever Persyn points for noting that we’re all, just, like, simulations in other people’s minds, dude. Descartes can go fuck himself; Keanu Reeves has solved the mind-body problem with kung fu.
Also, Baudrillard-lite is everywhere now. We’re all Postmodernists, in the same way we’re all Marxists, so even the kids who slept through most of their one required Humanities course has at least vaguely heard of this stuff. A show like True Detective, on the other hand, hearkens back to much older philosophy — as tiresome as the wannabe-Foucaults were back in the late 1980s, as a culture we’ve pretty much forgotten about them, so the brooding wannabe existentialist douchebag seems new now. I just googled up “best true detective quotes”. Here’s a small sampling:
This is a world where nothing is solved. You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.
Also:
… to realize that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream you had inside a locked room — a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.
That “flat circle” thing is a direct quote from Schopenhauer, I’m pretty sure, and the idea of “eternal recurrence” came from Vedic philosophy via him to Nietzsche. Here, for instance, the Manly Mustache Man summarizes the plot of True Detective, season 1:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?
Here again, I don’t blame the average HBO viewer for having their minds blown by this (or at least pretending to), but people with PhDs should damn well know better. This is existentialism for dummies, but since they spent most of their off hours in grad school reading Harry Potter …
Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.
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