Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2023

Jeremy Clarkson’s The Greatest Raid of All

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

North One
Published 4 May 2020

Due to copyright restrictions, some music and scenes have been altered or removed in this upload. You can find the original unaltered documentary here: The Story Of The …

Jeremy Clarkson tells the story of the audacious commando raid on the German occupied dry dock at St Nazaire in France on March 28th 1942. Made for the BBC in 2007 by North One.
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September 17, 2023

The Ballad of Chiang and Vinegar Joe – WW2 – Week 264 – September 16, 1944

World War Two
Published 16 Sep 2023

The Japanese attacks in Guangxi worry Joe Stilwell enough that he gets FDR to issue an ultimatum to Chiang Kai-Shek, in France the Allied invasion forces that hit the north and south coasts finally link up, the Warsaw Uprising continues, and the US Marines land on Peleliu and Angaur.
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Why Operation Market Garden Failed and Its Devastating Consequences

OTD Military History
Published 5 Apr 2023

Why did Operation Market Garden fail and what were the consequences of this failure? This video covers the operation, the reasons for the failure, and its devastating aftermath. The impact Market Garden had on the Dutch during the Hunger Winter and Allied soldiers during the Battle of the Scheldt is explored.

There is footage of the 101st US Airborne, 82nd US Airborne, British 1st Airborne Division, and the troops of the British XXX Corps featured in the video.
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September 16, 2023

The many, MANY failed VW Beetle Reboots!

Filed under: Business, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Big Car
Published 22 Oct 2021

I recently made a video on the many, many times British Leyland tried to update the Mini. The lack of an update helped to make the original Mini an iconic shape. The same has happened to many other iconic cars, and the Volkswagen Type 1 or Beetle falls into the same camp. Why did it take 36 years until the Beetle would get a replacement, and how did a car made as a Nazi show of strength end up in a Disney film?
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September 13, 2023

At the end of the Axis’ Destiny – War Against Humanity 114

World War Two
Published 12 Sep 2023

The imperial dreams of Germany and Japan are in tatters. But the expansionist beasts do their best to drag their enemies down with them. Across Europe the cycle of resistance and retaliation continues. Paris is free but Warsaw burns. V-1s rain down on innocent civilians in London. The Japanese cleanse West Borneo of opposition. The genocide of the Jews continues. For so many people, liberation is now so near yet so far away.
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September 11, 2023

How the Russian Army Collapsed

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

The Great War
Published 9 Sept 2023

As 1917 began, the Russian army was larger and better-equipped than ever before. Within weeks, the Tsar and his dynasty were gone, and by the summer, the Russian army was disintegrating before the eyes of its generals — but how exactly did one of the most powerful armies in the world collapse?
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September 10, 2023

Bulgaria at War with Everyone – WW2 – Week 263 – September 9, 1944

World War Two
Published 9 Sep 2023

This week the USSR invades Bulgaria … who’ve also declared war on Germany, and who are still at war with the US and Britain, so Bulgaria is briefly technically at war with all four at once. Finland signs a ceasefire, the Germans are pulling out of Greece, the Warsaw and Slovak Uprisings continue, Belgium is mostly liberated, and across the world, the Japanese enter Guangxi, and there are American plans to liberate the Philippines.
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September 7, 2023

How Britain Helped the Communist Revolution – War Against Humanity 113

World War Two
Published 6 Sep 2023

Fight the Nazis or fight your countrymen? From Marshal Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia to the ELAS fighters in Greece, that is the animating question among the Balkans resistance movements. For many, the question is already answered. It is Mihailović and his Chetniks and EDES, EKKA, and the Greek royalist government who must be out-maneuvered first. British foreign policy has so far failed to change this state of affairs, can Churchill get his SOE officers to stop these civil wars?
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September 3, 2023

The War is Five Years Old – WW2 – Week 262 – September 2, 1944

World War Two
Published 2 Sep 2023

Five years of war and no real end in sight, though the Allies sure seem to have the upper hand at the moment. Romania is coming under the Soviet thumb and Red Army troops are at Bulgaria’s borders, the Allies enter Belgium and also take ports in the south of France. A Slovak National Uprising begins against the Germans, and the Warsaw Uprising against them continues, but in China it is plans for defense being made against the advancing Japanese.
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The Saalburg: A Roman Fort on the German Frontier

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 23 May 2023

A brief tour of the principal buildings in the Saalburg, Germany’s most completely reconstructed Roman fort.
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September 2, 2023

Trial Run for D-Day – Allied Invasion of Sicily 1943

Real Time History
Published 1 Sept 2023

After defeating the Axis in North Africa, the stage was set for the first Allied landing in Europe. The target was Sicily and in summer 1943 Allied generals Patton and Montgomery set their sights on the island off the Italian peninsula.
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QotD: Ancient DNA

… you know I’m always up for the humiliation of a dominant scientific paradigm. I especially like examples where that paradigm in its heyday replaced some much older and unfashionable view that we now know to be correct. It’s important to remind people that knowledge gets lost and buried in addition to being discovered.

The wonderful thing about ancient DNA is it gives us an extreme case of this. Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement”, which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who … uh … made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice.

After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I’m sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle.

And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and … it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men’s female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.

I used to have a Bulgarian coworker, and I asked him one day how things were going in Bulgaria. He replied in that morose Slavic way with a long, sad disquisition about how the Bulgarian race was in its twilight, their land was being colonized by others, their sons and daughters flying off to strange lands and mixing their blood with that of alien peoples. I felt awkward at this point, and stammered something about that being very sad, at which point he came alive and declared: “it is not sad, it is not special, it is the Way Of The World”. He then launched into a lecture about how the Bulgarians weren’t even native to their land, but had been bribed into moving there by the Byzantines who used them as a blunt instrument to exterminate some other unruly tribes that were causing them trouble. “History is all the same,” he concluded, “we invaded and took their land, and now others invade us and take our land, it is the Way Of The World.”

Even a cursory study of history shows that my Bulgarian friend was correct about the Way Of The World. There’s a kind of guilty white liberal who believes that European colonization and enslavement of others is some unique historical horror, a view that has now graduated into official state ideology in America. But that belief is just a weird sort of inverted narcissism. I guess pretending white people are uniquely bad at least makes them feel special, but white people are not special. Mass migration, colonization, population replacement, genocide, and slavery are the Way Of The World, and ancient DNA teaches us that it’s been the Way Of The World far longer than writing or agriculture have existed. It wasn’t civilization that corrupted us, there are no noble savages, “history is all the same”, an infinite history of blood.

Land acknowledgments always struck me as especially funny and stupid: like you really think those people were the first ones there? What about acknowledging the people that they stole it from? Sure enough one of the coolest parts of Reich’s book is his recounting the discovery that there were probably unrelated peoples in the Americas before the ancestors of the American Indians arrived here, and that a tiny remnant of them might even remain deep in Amazonia. So: what does it actually mean to be “indigenous”? Is anybody anywhere actually “indigenous”?

Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.

September 1, 2023

Will the Resistance Smash Nazism or Build Communism? – War Against Humanity 112

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 31 Aug 2023

The hour of resistance is here. Across Western Europe, armies of resistance fighters rise up to meet the Allied armies and sabotage the Axis war machine. In Slovakia, a secret army fights to restore Czechoslovak independence. But against this hopeful backdrop, the Axis forces strike back hard. And, all around, the spectre of communism strikes fear in the Western Powers.
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August 31, 2023

The Double Agent Saving London From the V-1 – WW2 Documentary Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 30 Aug 2023

The Germans are assaulting London with waves of V-1 flying bombs. But Eddie Chapman, a career criminal, serial womaniser, and masterful double agent working for MI5’s Double Cross is fighting a secret battle to beat the bombs. When he’s done with that, he pulls the wool over the Reich’s eyes to help Britain beat the Kriegsmarine. This is Agent Zigzag.
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August 27, 2023

The Liberation of Paris – WW2 – Week 261 – August 26, 1944

World War Two
Published 26 Aug 2023

Paris is liberated by the Allies, a symbolic act that causes the world to rejoice. Something far more important to the course of the war, though, happens this week in Romania. The Allies continue to advance in the south of France and begin a new offensive in Italy, though the Pacific War has quietened down once again.
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