World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2021Adolf Hitler is not happy, and yet phase one of Fall Blau has accomplished all of its goals and done so ahead of the timetable. However, the Soviet Army in 1942 is not the same as that in 1941, and is not waiting around this time to be captured by the hundreds of thousands, and if things continue then the Axis might just be wasting a ton of gas to take a ton of empty space.
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July 11, 2021
Fall Blau – A Victim of Its Own Success? – 150 – WW2 – July 10, 1942
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July 7, 2021
Poland’s Forgotten Spy War against the Nazis – WW2 – Spies & Ties 05
World War Two
Published 6 Jul 2021The Polish played a big part in cracking the Enigma codes. From there, the Polish spy and intelligence operation became even bigger.
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July 4, 2021
Fall Blau Begins, Stalin Caught off Guard Again – 149 – WW2 – July 3, 1942
World War Two
Published 3 Jul 2021It’s that time of the year again — the time when the Axis Powers drive deep into the Soviet Union. Fall Blau is the name of this year’s huge offensive, and it begins this week, making great gains from the very beginning, but the Axis Powers are also making big gains this week in North Africa, taking Mersa Matruh and pushing to within 100 km of Alexandria. Can nothing stop them?
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June 27, 2021
Fall Blau Starts … or Does it? – WW2 – 148 – June 27, 1942
World War Two
Published 26 Jun 2021Fall Blau, the huge Axis summer offensive in the Soviet Union, is supposed to being this, but is postponed to next. The smaller Operation Fridericus II does begin though, and what does Josef Stalin make of that and the intelligence he’s received? Meanwhile in North Africa, after the fall of Tobruk, the British 8th Army gets a leadership change, but Erwin Rommel is still on the move eastward into Egypt. Where will the Allies try to hold him? Half the world away, the Allies begin to establish a base at Milne Bay, New Guinea. It’s a start, a small one, but a start.
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June 20, 2021
Tobruk: A second siege? – WW2 – 147 – June 20, 1942
World War Two
Published 19 Jun 2021Two convoys head from opposite ends of the Mediterranean to supply Malta, hoping to run interference for each other, and the Battle of Sevastopol continues as the Axis slowly wear down the Soviet defenders, but the big news is Erwin Rommel’s continued advances in North Africa, defeating the 8th Army again and again. Can the Allies hold Tobruk? Will they even try? Watch and find out.
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June 13, 2021
Sevastopol Must Fall! – WW2 – 146 – June 13, 1942
World War Two
Published 12 Jun 2021It’s a week of starts and stops. The Battle of Sevastopol kicks into high gear, and the Battle of Gazala enters its third phase. And what is going on in the Pacific just one week after Midway?
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June 8, 2021
History Summarized: Ancient Egypt
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 3 Feb 2017This video was commissioned by our loyal Patron Karl Erik L. Hoftaniska! To become our Patron and get access to sweet rewards, hop on over to PATREON.COM/OSP
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised about the things I learned about Egypt in the process of making this video. The feeling of learning cool new things never gets old.
Coming soon in Blue’s History Summarized line-up will be the next part of his Abrahamic Religion series: Judaism!
In the meantime, WOO EGYPT!Have a question about anything mentioned or not mentioned? Leave a comment! Blue will do his best to answer.
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June 7, 2021
Germany to Strike Strongest Fortress in the World – WW2 – 145b – June 6, 1942
World War Two
Published 6 Jun 2021Midway isn’t the only fight right now. Germany is trying to crack the mighty fortress of Sevastopol and take the whole Crimea. In North Africa, Rommel is routing the Allies, but in Malta the arrival of ever more fighter planes bodes well for the Allies.
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May 30, 2021
Rommel’s Desert Dash – The Whole Bloody Afrika Korps! – Gazala – WW2 – 144 – May 30, 1942
World War Two
Published 29 May 2021Erwin Rommel begins his surprise new offensive with “Rommel’s Moonlight Ride”, bringing all of his mighty mobile units to the fray in North Africa, while in the Pacific, dozens of warships and tens of thousands of men set sail from Japan — their mission? Attack the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island, but above all, destroy the US Pacific Fleet!
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May 17, 2021
An older BBC dramatization on the slave trade that seems to have gone down the memory hole
At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin wondered why the BBC hadn’t gotten around to showing a 1970s historical series through the year-and-more of the pandemic lockdowns. He doesn’t mention the name of the series, and an unusually unhelpful BBC site search didn’t turn up a name but IMDB suggests it was 1975 and the series was called The Fight Against Slavery:
Fifty years ago, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.
– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. It included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.
– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.
– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, “dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy” apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s “racist” to value instrumental skill.)
“Politically correct” has meant “actually wrong” ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. “Structurally racist” is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist”, “punctuality is racist”, “politeness is racist”) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.
If I’d scrolled down to the comments, I’d have discovered that Natalie Solent had also dug up the name of the series:
Natalie Solent (Essex)
May 10, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Outstanding post, Niall. Was the BBC series you mentioned “The Fight Against Slavery“, written and narrated by Evan Jones? I have not seen it – given that I was ten or eleven in 1975 my parents probably thought I was too young too see it.However someone called “InternetPilgrim” has put up three videos of the series on YouTube. There is a link to Part I here, Part II here and Part III here, so I will try to remedy that lack soon.
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History Summarized: Africa
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Jul 2017THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY: https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg
It’s been brought to my attention that I made two mistakes: 1) Yes, I disappear at 18:26. Not sure how that happened. 2) At 12:25 I use a map of Africa that with some weird borders. That’s my bad. But if you look at a legit map of Africa, you’ll see the same straight lines in the places that I marked them.
(Remember: making mistakes is ok, so long as we learn from them)The Epic of Mwindo sure was cool, huh? This video is here to show you all about the lovely continent that it came from: Africa! And BOY are there a lot of misconceptions about it.
This video was produced with assistance from the Boston University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
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Shirts – https://overlysarcasticproducts.threa…
All the other stuff – http://www.cafepress.com/OverlySarcas…Find us on Twitter @OSPYouTube!
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May 8, 2021
QotD: That time the global elites were against diversity
There was simply no debate back then [in the aftermath of the Great War] that a mass influx of European refugees to Africa would have been a conquest, not a “humanitarian crisis” that Africans, with their ample space and nutrient-rich soil, had some kind of responsibility to sit back and accept. And to be clear, many of the European refugees who would have trekked across Sörgel’s newly reclaimed land were genuinely in need. They were impoverished, homeless, destitute. And a lot of them were fleeing political violence. Those folks were as poor, wretched, and persecuted as any Honduran is today. But in fully rejecting Atlantropa as a goal to be pursued, the international community took the position that “it sucks that you’re impoverished and mistreated in your home country, but it ain’t Africa’s problem. Stay where you are.”
See, in those days, the elites believed in keeping people in their own damn land. Hard as that might be to fathom now, that used to be a mantra of the progressive internationalists. There was a die-hard belief that the key to world peace was the separation of people, the segregation of populations by race, religion, and ethnicity. That was the entire point of the Greek/Turkish population exchange of 1923, overseen by the League in the name of keeping Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims separated for the sake of peace. As UNC Chapel Hill history professor Sarah Shields wrote in her 2016 essay in the Journal of the History of International Law, the prevailing belief at that time was that “Muslims and non-Muslims could not live together peacefully, and modernity required rejecting a diverse past in favor of a nation-state along European (unmixed) lines.”
Separation was the future, diversity was the past. Damn near 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were sent from the land of their birth to the land where they could live with those of a similar faith. Many of the other population transfers and redrawn boundaries that followed World War I were based on that same concept of giving people their “own” homeland based on characteristics like religion or ethnicity. It was simply taken as fact back then that nations function better with some level of homogeneity. That was canon back then. By the time the U.N. came around, that notion was still very much a guiding principle, as the internationalists realized that a vision of a multireligious, multiethnic Palestine was unrealistic and unattainable. And the Jews and the Arabs realized that too, which is why they started slaughtering each other, because they couldn’t bear to live in a partitioned state. Being separate but equal was not enough. They wanted to be separate and separated.
David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.
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May 6, 2021
Il Duce and the Fascist Abuse of History | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.17 – Harvest 1922
TimeGhost History
Published 5 May 2021The modern age is an age of modern things. But it is also an age when people yearn for times past. One of the main men to weaponize this yearning is Benito Mussolini, and this season, he moves to recreate the Roman Empire in his fascist image.
Get your own Indy Neidell Tie here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4Mi…
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
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: Francis van Berkel and Timothy Smith
Image Research by: Lucas Aimo
Edited by: Lucas Aimo
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
– Daniel Weiss
– Mikołaj UchmanArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
The only thing more interesting than learning about history is learning about how people in history learned about history.For starters, it is just interesting in itself. Anyone with a passion for history will want to hear about the circumstances of how a new discovery was made or how certain historical narratives were preserved over time. But more analytically, looking at how a society understood its history can tell you a lot about that society understood itself and the contemporary world around it. That second point is particularly true of the modern age. Ironically, it is a very modern “thing” to be so aware of history. Indeed, the modern age saw the birth of the museum, of nationalist histories, and even the concept of what “History” itself was (note the capital H).
It’s such a massive topic and one that perhaps isn’t suited to a single pinned comment. Interested in learning more? Maybe we’ll do another video on it someday. In the meantime, you can read up the works of Reinhart Koselleck … that should keep you occupied.
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April 20, 2021
QotD: The Atlantropa project
Oh, Herman Sörgel, you pie-in-the-sky dreamer! You were the Elon Musk of your day (but slightly more grounded). The idea never took off, not just because of the fact that it was batshit insane, but also because, at that time, the left’s intellectual elite — the League of Nations crowd, the “forward-thinkers” — understood that you don’t cure one nation or one continent’s refugee problem by sending all of the huddled, wretched refuse to another people’s nation or continent. Back then, the left understood that this would pose serious problems for the host nation or continent. And the left was right. Atlantropa would have been a nightmare for native Africans, and eventually, there would have been a Rhodesia- or South Africa-style reckoning.
In the 1920s, if anyone had suggested that the specter of millions of European refugees streaming into Africa did not constitute an invasion, that person would have been dismissed as a lunatic, because of course it would have been an invasion. Those in favor of Atlantropa, and those against it, all got that point. The European refugees would not have been content to live like Africans, or to live under African rule. Europe’s refugee crisis would have become Africa’s domination crisis. So to the liberal elites, the best solution was to tell the refugees to stay put.
David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.
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March 21, 2021
How Did the Zulus Go From Tribe to Empire? | Rise of the Zulus (1790-1828)
History With Hilbert
Published 28 Mar 2020Perhaps the most famous of Africa’s tribes, the Zulus rose to prominence under their King Shaka at the start of the 19th Century on the Eastern seaboard of what’s now South Africa. In the years following Shaka’s death his successors would have encounters with the Boer Voortrekkers and more famously, with the British culminating in the Anglo-Zulu War (1879) where they managed to decisively defeat them at the Battle of Isandlwana before themselves suffering defeat at the now infamous Battle of Rorke’s Drift. But in this video I’m not going to be talking about the much more well known story of the British Invasion of Zululand in the later 19th Century and the demise of the Zulu Empire, but rather about its origin and how it came about. In the 18th Century the Zulu as a people had only just become a separate entity, and certainly were not one of the major players on the scene before the time of Shaka. A series of factors played a role in their rise to power around the turn of the 19th Century, most notably the actions of Shaka himself as well as a shift in the way in which warfare was carried about by the tribes of the region and their interactions with European trading networks.
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#Zulu #SouthAfrica #History
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