Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2018

Celebrity chef accused of cultural appropriation

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Food, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall explains why, despite jerk chicken being something like the national dish of Jamaica, accusing Jamie Oliver of culturally appropriating it makes no sense whatsoever:

Well, here’s a recipe for that jerk chicken which does seem to be close to being the Jamaican national dish.

    Ingredients
    8 -10 pieces of legs and thighs
    1 lemon/lime
    Salt and pepper to season
    ½ tablespoon cinnamon powder
    1 sprig of fresh thyme
    3 medium scallions (green onions) chopped
    1 medium onion coarsely chopped
    2-4 habanero pepper chopped
    1 1/2 tablespoon Maggi or soy sauce
    1 tablespoon bouillon powder optional
    3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
    6 garlic cloves chopped
    1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
    1 tablespoon allspice coarsely ground
    1 1/2 tablespoon fresh ginger chopped
    1 tablespoon coarsely ground pepper

As far as I can tell those ingredients coming from, in order – the chicken, SE Asia via land cultural exchange to Europe and then the Americas by the Portuguese and Spanish. Sure, some evidence of Polynesian delivery but on West Coast only. The lemon, SE Asia, salt everywhere, pepper India or perhaps Indonesia. Cinnamon, SE Asia but introduction to European thus Caribbean cuisines through Ancient Egypt and thus into Greece. Thyme, the Levant and Ancient Egypt, scallions at least as far back as Ashkelon and further east than that. Onions, definitely Eurasian, habaneros definitively Latin American. Soy sauce, think we’ll allow Nippon to claim that, maybe China. Bouillon powder, industrial civilisation somewhere. Sugar, Indian subcontinent, garlic central Asia we think. Nutmeg and allspice the Spice Islands, now Indonesia. Ginger, South and SE Asia.

So, someone who makes this is accusing us of cultural appropriation if we make it?

Oh Aye?

All of which is, of course, to misunderstand the basic point about human beings. We’re apes, ones with a special and remarkable talent. We’ve this readin’ an’ writin’ stuff meaning that when we spot something that works we’re able to tell other people about it. In a manner rather more efficient than just teaching junior to do what we’ve learned to do. This is the secret of our success. That things once learned can be passed onto millions, billions, of other people. If we had to go reinvent the wheel each generation then we’d not all be rolling around in cars now, would we?

The very essence of our being the successful tool using species we are is that we copy. Appropriate that is. So insistences that we don’t “culturally” appropriate are demands that we stop being us, stop being human. Well, you know, good luck with that, however delightful the concept of cultural appropriation is as a method of having something else to shout about.

August 20, 2018

The Opium War

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jeffrey Chen reviews Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War:

The war had a name even before its first shot. The first recorded use of the moniker, the ‘Opium War,’ was in an 1839 piece in the London Morning Herald; within months it would be echoed across the benches of Parliament and across the carronades of the fleet sent to punish the Chinese crackdown on British trade. The war’s nomenclature revealed from the beginning the multivalent views the British public held towards the war: it was at once the “unjust and iniquitous” Opium War — to use Gladstone’s well-known phrase — as well as the patriotic ‘China War,’ as its proponents wanted it to be called. The historiography of the war is similarly divided among varied lines. Some see the war as reflective of China’s failure to catch up to Western technologies; others emphasize the British desire to avenge their slighted national honour as the prime motive for the conflict. A wide array of scholars have placed a central focus on the role of opium, while some prefer to see the war in the context of imperial and economic expansion. Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War is a worthy addition to these voices.

Chen’s portrait of the Opium War places the role of British traders and their lobbying efforts in the foreground by arguing that it was British knowledge of China, as transmitted via the merchant class, that contributed to the ‘making’ (in the sense of both manufacture and execution) of the war. Chen asserts that it was the decade-long campaign of bellicose editorials and pamphlets on the part of the Canton merchant intelligentsia, as well as an accumulation of knowledge on the details of China’s coastal defences and overall military strength, that made it possible for Britain to both conceive of and win the war. The book casts, as its main actors, the ‘Warlike Party,’ a group of British merchants in Canton who lobbied for military intervention to expand the Canton System of trade, and the ‘Pacific Party,’ who opposed the war and criticised the diffusion of opium as an illicit and immoral drug. By narrowing his focus towards the production of knowledge, Chen also elevates the importance of language. A chapter of the book is devoted to a summary of the ‘Barbarian’ controversy – the disagreements and narratives spun around the British choice in translating the Chinese character 夷 (Yí) as ‘Barbarian,’ rather than ‘Foreigner.’

Chen’s account is thus of a battle as much between China and Britain as an internal conflict within the British public sphere. Though Chen is careful to nuance his depiction of the war by overlaying the many causal factors detailed by existing scholarship, his book makes two main arguments, which, in the words of the author, are new to the field: firstly, that the decisive factor in the war’s escalation was due to the machinations of the Warlike Party; and secondly, that the Canton System represented a ‘soft border’ through which the British were able to secure intelligence on the Qing state, without a reciprocal exchange of knowledge.

Written in engaging, lucid prose that presents its ideas clearly, if repetitively, Chen’s monograph is studded with riveting selections of his primary source research, drawn from the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge’s Jardine & Matheson archive. These quotations are often reproduced at generous length from the Warlike Party’s Canton Register and the Pacific Party’s Canton Press, and they provide a revealing account of the vigorous rhetorical strategies employed by the two camps.

August 17, 2018

Thomas Clarkson: The First Abolitionist

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

Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 26 Jul 2018

The brutal and cruel transatlantic slave trade lasted for more than 300 hundred years. In 1785, Thomas Clarkson, a man you’ve probably never heard of, firmly held to his belief that no man can rightly claim ownership over another. That year he vowed to end the transatlantic slave trade. This is his story.

August 16, 2018

Three Great British Wartime Deceptions

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Italy, Middle East, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lindybeige
Published on 15 Aug 2018

http://www.audible.com/Lindybeige or text ‘Lindybeige’ to 500 500 for a free thirty-day trial and one free audio book.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

Tales of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in World War One, El Alamein in WW2, and of the extraordinarily successful failure that was Operation Camilla in East Africa. One man with terrific hair rambles for over half an hour about ruses of deceit against the enemies of the Empire.

Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.

▼ Follow me…

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.

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website: http://www.LloydianAspects.co.uk

August 14, 2018

German Submarine Warfare in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 13 Aug 2018

Find out more about War2Glory: https://war2glory.com/

Submarines played a vital part in Germany’s WW1 strategy. They would disrupt allied shipping despite the British Naval Blockade and ensue fear across the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea.

Sean Gabb’s view of Anglo-American relations from 1945 to today

Filed under: Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

He seems such a nice, mild-mannered chap but who else but a virtual bomb-chucking anarchist could title an article “Death to America?”

My view of America is tinged with a paranoia born from jealousy and resentment. I believe that American self-respect has, for at least the past hundred years, required the destruction of England as a great and independent nation. The Americans speak a language that did not emerge among themselves. They live within a system of law and within a set of constitutional assumptions that are also not co-existent with their nation. If their country were a minor power, they could, like Haiti, or Australia, or America before the 1870s, accept the fact of inferiority. If it were to vanish from the earth, they could look on the originator of their language and institutions with sentimental affection, as the Byzantines did on Athens and Rome.

Their problem is that, before 1940, England was a strong competitor. Since then, it has been generally subordinate, but never with full willingness. Therefore, the Americans have mixed occasional humiliation, as at Suez, with continual meddling in our politics. Our foreign policy has, since 1945, been largely set by Washington. Our leaders are mostly American Quislings, and these have systematically promoted American culture at the expense of our own. It may be that the accumulation of blocking powers by our new Supreme Court is an imitation to be welcomed. But the importation of American political correctness is not to be welcomed. Nor, I suggest, should we welcome the official replacement of English with American words and expressions — see, for example, the use of “train station” for “railway station”. This may appear, in itself, a trivial complaint. Repeated across the whole administrative and educational machinery, it has the effect of making our own recent past into a foreign country.

What the Americans want is for England to be discussed mainly in the past tense. They will study our literature, and sometimes our history. Some of their higher classes will put on Anglicised airs and graces, much as the Romans turned hellenophile after they had plundered and enslaved Greece. But to see their preferred model for living Englishmen, look at the characters played by Wilfred Hyde-Whyte, or the character of Alfred in Batman — polite, reliable, elderly, and, above all, ineffectual.

Though I dislike the European Union, I believe that the long term interests of my country lie in a close relationship with France and Germany, and in an amicable working arrangement with Russia. We have an obvious commonality with France and Germany of economic and strategic interests. We are of approximately equal weight. None is able to dominate the others. Each must work in compromise with the others. Any talk of “hands across the Atlantic” is either self-deception or a lie. Except perhaps between 1922 and 1940, there has never been an equality between England and America. Any close relationship between these countries has otherwise rested on the domination of one by the other — a domination with at best a limited overlap of interests. Though roles have changed, so it was at times before 1914, and so it has been since 1940.

August 13, 2018

Blasphemy in modern Britain

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Once upon a time, blasphemy was prosecuted by the Crown as an attack on the very basis of English law: “[blasphemy] law is needed to uphold the national law, which is based on Christianity. Thus, targeting Christianity is targeting the very foundation of England.” The last successful prosecution was in 1977. Modern prosecutions for blasphemy do not get filed under the old law, but the mechanism of the police, the courts, and the media are directed against those who dare to insult one particular faith:

Religious freedom is one of the core principles of any modern liberal society. As a secularist, I defend the right of religious people to send their children to faith schools, have their children circumcised, or wear the burqa. This does not mean I approve of any of these practices; they should be permissible but not protected from criticism. We should be free to ridicule, lampoon, chastise, critique, etc. every aspect of religious belief that we tolerate.

This is, more or less, what the U.K.’s former Conservative Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson wrote in his now infamous newspaper column in the Telegraph last week. Yet all hell has broken loose. It was greeted by near-hysterical outrage and shrill denunciations of Johnson’s alleged dog whistle racism; reports of civil war in the Tory Party over the matter; the now ubiquitous demands for an apology for causing offence (or else), which was backed in this instance by the Prime Minister. Boris’s is now the subject of an internal Party inquiry. It’s worth untangling this sorry tale as a snap-shot of today’s offence culture and how chilling it can be to a free society.

Johnson has been ‘called out’ as Islamophobic for arguing against – yes against – a ban on the burqa and for defending – yes defending – the right of any “free-born adult woman” to wear what she wants “in a public place, when she is simply minding her own business”. His column is predominantly an excoriating critique of Denmark’s betrayal of its own “spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of Viking individualism” by its decision to impose a state ban on the burqa or niqab (although he is not being indicted for caricaturing Danish culture). He rightly notes that being opposed to a ban should not be interpreted as approval and goes on to say – albeit in a somewhat crass manner – that “Muslim head-gear that obscures the female face… looking like letterboxes… like a bank robber…is absolutely ridiculous”.

As similes go, no doubt Boris could have been more tactful. I am no fan of BoJo-style private school wit. Indeed, I can understand that veil-wearing Muslim women – whom myriad journalists throughout the country have stopped on streets to ask if they like being compared to criminals or inanimate objects – would find the analogy offensive. But should all political comment on religion have to pass an offense test to be allowed? I am pretty sure that my two aunts – who are Catholic nuns – would be pretty offended if they heard my atheist mates’ denouncing as backward mumbo-jumbo a religion that believes the host and wine is literally the body and blood of Christ. But that’s the deal – a free society affords religious tolerance for nuns, imams, rabbis; and conversely liberty for others to stick the metaphorical boot into their beliefs.

Are Boris’s critics demanding respect for all religious practices regardless of whether they consider them backward, wrong-headed, or oppressive? Should we bite our lip in case we offend? We seem to have forgotten that we once all declared #JeSuisCharlie – a brief but inspiringly unapologetic defense of free speech after cartoonists for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were brutally butchered in Paris for daring to publish cartoons deemed offensive to Islam. Should they have shut up until they learned to become more tactful?

Naturally, cheap sectarian Tory-bashing has driven some of the outrage. Supporters of the Labour Party, recently afflicted by an anti-Semitism scandal that is still rumbling on, were quick to denounce the “gross Islamophobia” in the article, even though criticism of the burqa has been commonplace in Labour and feminist ranks over the years. Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (and Boris’s shadow until his recent resignation), declared on BBC’s Question Time in 2013 that “I wouldn’t want my four-year-old looked after by somebody wearing a burka. I wouldn’t want my elderly mum looked after by somebody wearing a burka. They need to be able to show their face. I wouldn’t mind if they worked in records in the hospital.”

Tank Chats #34 Chieftain | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published on 31 Mar 2017

The thirty-fourth Tank Chat, this time presented by Curator David Willey after some help from Eli. https://youtu.be/T33hp0J-LAw

Britain’s Main Battle Tank for twenty years, Chieftain was one of the first true Main Battle Tanks, designed to replace both medium and heavy tanks in front line service.

To find out more, buy the new Haynes Chieftain tank manual. https://www.myonlinebooking.co.uk/tan…

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Or donate http://tankmuseum.org/support-us/donate

August 11, 2018

Second-hand bookshops

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An old Theodore Dalrymple article on the disappearing treasures (to some of us, anyway) of the second-hand book trade:

My love of money is so far unrequited, perhaps because I do not love it quite enough, which is to say to the exclusion of all other possible objects of adoration and devotion. Likewise I remain firm in my admiration of those who do not work exclusively or even principally for money; and among the latter must surely be English provincial sellers of second-hand books

Theirs is indeed a dying trade, and entering their shops – now, alas, fewer and fewer – one cannot help but wonder whether it ever truly lived. As long as I can remember, which is now quite a long time, they have been cold with a kind of irredeemable cold, an absence of warmth upon which no paraffin heater, no pre-war single bar electric heater (of the kind favoured by booksellers), no clement weather, can make the slightest impression. When you take a book from a shelf of one of these bookshops you get a puff of cold air in the face, as well as of dust, as if you had opened a mediaeval tomb complete with a curse against grave-robbers. One associates dust with dry heat, but this, at least where English provincial second-hand bookshops is concerned, is a mistake. They contrive to be cold, dusty and damp at the same time.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that in so materialistic an age as our own people can be found who not only spend, but want to spend, and cannot conceive of not spending, their working lives in such conditions, and all for little monetary reward. True, they are more or less protected by their avocation from the seamier and more violent side of modern society; burglars and armed robbers in even the worst areas for crime do not think to break into second-hand bookshops; and the comings and going of governments do not trouble them. Not for them, either, the shadow-boxing of modern party politics, in which one political mountebank sets himself up as the last bastion against the depredations of another, in truth not very dissimilar, mountebank. Rather they concern themselves with the eternal verities of light foxing, cocking, small tears to dust jackets, and the like. The worst that can happen to them is a gentle slide into insolvency as rents rise (all such shops are now found in the unlikeliest places because they can survive only where rents are low) and readers decline – both in number and in discrimination. For my money (of which, incidentally, they have taken a lot down the ages) they are the unsung heroes of our culture.

Their lives are precarious. For example, the other day I went into one such bookshop in the North of England, run by a husband and wife team, and bought for a sum that nowadays no one – no bourgeois that is – would hesitate to lay out for lunch, a slimmish volume published in 1857, that was in almost pristine condition. The lady was almost pathetically grateful: she said that by my single purchase I had paid half her rent for the day. I felt as if I had almost done a good deed.

Image via Google Maps street view

The majority of my own collection has been bought at used book shops, especially Gryphon Books in Port Hope and Willow Books and Books Galore in Port Perry. I haven’t been travelling much outside my immediate local area for the last several years, so Abebooks has been a very useful addition to my virtual book-buying range. I note, with mild sorrow, a few of my other favourite book shops have disappeared: especially the best military used book store in Ontario, Grenadier Books in Port Perry (moved to Montreal after the death of the founder), and the Book Vault in Stratford (the seasonal tourist traffic wasn’t enough to cope with rising rent).

QotD: Reductio ad Hitlerum

Filed under: Britain, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

The poverty of peoples’ collective memory and imagination is such that the first minute any politician strays from the path of universalism, commentators reach for the most shocking (and only) historical comparison they can think of.

Ed West, “It’s absurd to compare Amber Rudd’s immigration speech to Mein Kampf”, The Spectator, 2016-11-07.

August 10, 2018

The Black Day Of The German Army – The Battle of Amiens I THE GREAT WAR Week 211

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Middle East, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 9 Aug 2018

Ludendorff and his generals didn’t think the Allies had it in them, but this week they attack with the might off several hundred tanks near Amiens, the Black Day of the German Army.

August 9, 2018

Scottish schools’ proposed gender initiative will encourage gender uncertainty in 5-year-olds

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Joanna Williams explains why authority figures actively undermining one of the few certainties in a young child’s world is bound to cause much more harm to many children:

Education Scotland, regional NHS boards and the Scottish government jointly came up with this new gender initiative’s daft – sorry, draft – guidelines, which are set to come into effect from 2019. The plan is to tell children: ‘Your sex is what you are told by a doctor when you are born. Most people are told they are a male child (a boy) or a female child (a girl).’ But this ridiculous statement contradicts everything children will later learn in biology lessons. Babies are not ‘told’ they are a particular sex in some odd conversation between parents and midwives on the labour ward. The overwhelming majority of babies actually are male or female, boys or girls. Sex is not a lottery. It doesn’t depend on how the doctor happens to be feeling at a certain point in time. It is there in the child’s genitals and in their chromosomes. Telling children that sex is simply something that is arbitrarily announced by a doctor is a lie.

But propagating this lie and encouraging children to believe that sex is a random declaration allows teachers to go on to tell children: ‘Your gender is what you decide.’ In other words, children will be told to ignore the evidence they see before them every time they go to the toilet or get undressed. Ignore what the nasty doctor said. And ignore what family members have wickedly led them to believe. Not only does this undermine parents, it also heaps a lot of pressure on to the shoulders of five-year-olds. Most find it difficult enough to decide what to have for breakfast. Their brains are full of Minecraft, superheroes or Friendship Fairies. They worry about dinosaurs coming back to life and unicorns not being real. It is hard to see how telling children this age that one of the few things they know for certain isn’t certain after all can do anything other than cause distress.

But the problematising continues. ‘People might think they know your gender because of the clothes you wear or the things you like to do’, children will be told. But, of course, these people are wrong: ‘You are a unique person, you know who you are.’ This confuses two separate issues – gender stereotypes and actually being a boy or a girl. It also seriously underestimates children. The youngest children distinguish between boy stuff and girl stuff; they know whether they are a boy or a girl and which clothes and toys they are supposed to like. But while some children might police gender stereotypes with enthusiasm, others do not. They know, better than the Scottish government it seems, that you can play football and still be a girl or dress up as a princess and still be a boy. Even those keen to enforce gender conformity at age five may well rebel by the time they are 15. And so what if they don’t? If a boy enjoys being a boy and wants to grow up into a man, is that really so bad?

August 7, 2018

Flying Tanks! Tetrarchs and Locusts

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

Lindybeige
Published on 31 May 2018

Bovington Tank Museum, and The Chieftain again – ten minutes on the topic of air-portable tanks of World War Two.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

It is possible that (some?) Tetrarchs had holes in the sides of the turret for a drawstring that could pull the trigger of the smoke projector from inside the turret. However, you really wouldn’t want the rifle cocked and ready to fire unless you were just about to use it. White phosphorous is dangerous stuff and you would make no friends by setting it off by snagging your belt on the string as you climbed in the tank.

Hannibal graphic novel (in production): http://www.InSearchofHannibal.com

Many thanks to The Chieftain, my co-presenter, and to The Tank Museum at Bovington.

Two ideas have been posted in the comments for the name ‘Tetrarch’. One is that it has four equally-sized wheels on each side (which guide the tank, a bit like four rulers guide an empire). The other is that there was a very famous racehorse called ‘The Tetrarch’ that died in 1935. The tank was not designed originally for air-drops, but was presumably meant to be fast, so that makes sense.

Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.

▼ Follow me…

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.

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August 6, 2018

The Battle of Amiens

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Samizdata, Patrick Crozier explains why the Battle of Amiens should be far better known than it is:

On 8 August 1918 in Northern France, a mainly British force attacked on a 15 mile front and advanced to a depth of 7 miles. In so doing it inflicted 70,000 casualties on the Germans capturing 500 guns while suffering 44,000 casualties of its own. The Battle of Amiens as it became known, was the first clearly-successful, large-scale, Allied offensive operation on the Western Front. Ludendorff, the German commander, famously called it the “Black day of the German army”. But then again he was always a bit of a flibbertygibbet.

Although no one knew it at the time the Battle of Amiens heralded the beginning of the Hundred Days Offensive in which Allied success followed Allied success. By November the Germans realised that the game was up and sued for peace.

Amiens did not take place in a vacuum. At the Second Battle of the Marne which took place a few weeks earlier the Germans had attacked and the French and Americans had successfully counter-attacked. This brought to an end German hopes of a quick victory.

[…]

So why have so few heard of Amiens? Why doesn’t it occupy a similar position to Agincourt, Waterloo and El Alamein? Quite simply because it doesn’t fit the narrative. The lazy story we’ve all heard a million times tells us that the Western Front was all about incompetent generals and stalemate. Amiens and the Hundred Days Offensive show this to be nonsense.

A more accurate narrative might be that winning on the Western Front was never going to be easy but they got there in the end.

The battle also saw the Australian Corps and the Canadian Corps reprising their roles as “shock troops” of the British army (including an elaborate scheme to hide the presence of the Canadians from the German commanders):

Purists will be offended by Terraine’s failure to explain the role of the French army at Amiens (which extended the attack to the south), but more intriguing is the sidelining of Sir Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps. Indeed, Terraine’s focus on generals Rawlinson and Monash (although not incorrect in itself) seems to miss how important the Canadians were to the battle; it would be true to say that they made the Battle of Amiens. Their four divisions in line, deployed in the centre along the Amiens-Roye Road, formed the spearhead of the assault. At the end of the day they had driven eight miles into the position of the German Second Army.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Terraine’s article, with its focus on training and planning and the coordination of firepower and manoeuvre, prefigures much of the debates that would take place in the 1990s and beyond about the nature of change and development in the British Expeditionary Force (the ‘learning curve’). While the military effort of the ‘white dominions’ – Australia, New Zealand and Canada – has been widely praised (with Canadians being justifiably proud of their tag as the ‘shock army of the British Empire’), the humble British Tommy has often been left behind. Since Terraine wrote his article, however, much work has been done to rectify this imbalance.

August 3, 2018

Four Years of War I THE GREAT WAR Week 210

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 2 Aug 2018

As the war turns 4 years old, there is still no end in sight. From the Western Front to the Caucasus and the Middle East; in every theater the war is still raging on.

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