Quotulatiousness

June 19, 2020

“Hill 3234” – The Soviet-Afghan War – Sabaton History 072 [Official]

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 18 Jun 2020

It happened during the last stage of the Soviet-Afghan War.

Already withdrawing its forces, Soviet High Command needed to display its might one last time by recapturing the vital Satukandav Pass. But to achieve that goal, the commanding heights surrounding the pass had to be held against continuous Mujahideen attacks.

In the Battle for Hill 3234, an outnumbered force of Soviet paratroopers held their own against relentless attacks from the Afghan rebels.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “Hill 3234” on the album The Last Stand here:
CD: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandStore
Spotify: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandSpotify
Apple Music: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandItunes
iTunes: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandItunes
Amazon: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandAmz
Google Play: http://bit.ly/TheLastStandGooglePlay

Watch the Official Lyric Video of “Hill 3234” here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1Xkp…

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory

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

Sources:
– Abramov Andrey, ALDOR46, Fdutil, P.Fisxo; from Wikimedia
– E.Kuvakin
– Erwin Franzen
– Archive of S.V. Rozhkova
– Photos of 350th airborne regiment, courtesy of the 5th airborne company trooper Sergey Novikov
– Archive of the 345th airborne parachute regiment
– Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
1 day ago
They were only 39
They were told to hold the line…

I’m sure most of you know the rest of those lyrics. And after watching this episode of Sabaton History, you also know the real historical events behind those words.

What some of you might not know though, is the story of the guitar solo in Hill 3234. As usual when Joakim had written the song, he sent it out to the rest of the band. Much to his surprise though, this time Thobbe Englund – lead guitarist at the time – sent a file back within the hour. Thobbe had just plugged his guitar in and hit play. He was literally listening to Hill 3234 for the first time when the solo spontaneously popped into his head, and he recorded it on the spot. And to make this solo even more special: it is that very first recording Thobbe made that ended up on the album!

Not one single re-take.

Talk about a blessing from the Muses…

The economy isn’t all huge corporations and government

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

Paul Sellers reminds us that the economy is far more than just the big names that get mentioned in the financial pages:

An example of the kind of one-man businesses Paul is talking about.

Independents in micro-businesses are few and far between and often hard to discover, despite the internet’s ever-increasing web of enterprises. The backbone of British industry is made up of small, independent people striving to retain a measure of individualism, independence and entrepreneurialism in their lives. Statistics from 2019 show that in Britain there were 5.82 million small businesses responsible for 99.3% of the total business output in the UK.

Small businesses here comprise those with 0-49 employees and digging deeper still into what might at first seem more irrelevant than relevant is that the niche that small businesses fill in the real world of enterprise. Over 76% of businesses are operated by one-man bands; single-person enterprises who operate alone comprise almost 4.5 million men and women. With an additional 1.15 million micro-business (1-9 employees) around 95% of businesses here operate on a strength of under just 10 people. So over 99% of small to medium business enterprises, that’s zero to 249 employees, but only 0.6% have a workforce of 50-249 employees. Less than 4% are small businesses with 10-49 staff members and get this, over 95% operate as micro-businesses with 0-9 employees. What does this tell you about businesses output? What it tells me is how little of this is newsworthy by the mass media manufacturing companies (Like BBC News and ITV, Sky and so on) who constantly tell us about how many this massive company or that massive company is laying off and how little this really affects our economy because the little guys still get out into their little micro-shops and make what cannot work work.

Anglo-Dutch Wars | 3 Minute History

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

Jabzy
Published 25 Apr 2015

First, Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars. I left out the Fourth War because it really wasn’t connected to the previous 3.

Also – I hope you don’t mind I used ‘Netherlands’ throughout the video despite the fact the term didn’t come until much later.

June 18, 2020

The origins of Antifa

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kyle Shideler outlines the history of Antifa from the Weimar Republic to the streets of cities all over the western world:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

With riots and civil unrest metastasizing across the United States, the president declared he intends to designate Antifa as a terrorist group. Predictably, the talking heads rushed out to declare that Antifa doesn’t really exist, and even if it did the president couldn’t possibly target it using that legal designation. They argue Antifa is an amorphous blob of discontents, not a functioning organization, and certainly not one which could be designated and targeted for concentrated counterterrorism enforcement.

As usual, the Twitterati don’t know what they are talking about. Reality is both simpler and more complex.

To begin at the beginning: Antifa — real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion — was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist “anti-fascist defense” units were associated with the KPD much earlier.

Anti-fascist Action’s sole purpose was to help the KPD combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic.

And yes, they fought the Nazis.

But they also fought liberal parties, conservative parties, and anyone and everyone who got in their way. While these early antecedents were short-lived, it is useful to view Antifa in this context. More than anything, Antifa exists to serve as a tool of revolutionary politics in a failed (or failing) state.

Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism. Autonomism is an anti-authoritarian anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade. Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the “black block,” where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed.

H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.

Black Death and the Failure of Pandemic Lockdowns – Pandemic History 03

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 17 Jun 2020

Starting in 1347 and for three centuries, the second plague pandemic provides ample time to learn how to deal with the recurring outbreaks. And yet, fears of ruining the economy, political expediency, and refusal to accept reality leaves those trying to implement protection measure to fight an uphill battle. The result is even worse economic consequences, and unfathomable death.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson, Indy Neidell, and James Currie
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Engineer: Marek Kamiński
Graphic Design: Ryan Weatherby

Visual Sources:
Wellcome Images
Patrick Gray on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/1360415…
Paul K on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliod…
Quinto Tiberio Angelerio and New Measures for Controlling Plague in 16th-Century Alghero, Sardinia digitalized by Google, original from Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Icons from The Noun Project by: Ben Mullins, parkjisun, Muhamad Ulum & Adrien Coquet

Music:
“A Far Cry” – Flouw
“Fire Building Ext 3” – SFX Producer
“Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
“London” – Howard Harper-Barnes.mp3
“Please Hear Me Out” – Philip Ayers
“Scream Female 3” – SFX Producer
“Scream Male 6” – SFX Producer
“Superior” – Silver Maple
“Symphony of the Cold-Blooded” – Christian Andersen
“Barrel” – Christian Andersen

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

Research Sources:
Quinto Tiberio Angelerio and New Measures for Controlling Plague in 16th-Century Alghero, Sardinia Raffaella Bianucci, Ole Jørgen Benedictow, Gino Fornaciari, and Valentina Giuffra
“The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death”, G. Geltner, Past & Present, Volume 246, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages 3–33
Encyclopedia of the Black Death, Joseph Patrick Byrne
“Epidemiological characteristics of an urban plague epidemic in Madagascar, August–November, 2017: an outbreak report”, The Lancet, Rindra Randremanana, PhD, *Voahangy Andrianaivoarimanana, PhD, Birgit Nikolay, PhD, Beza Ramasindrazana, PhD, Juliette Paireau, PhD, Quirine Astrid ten Bosch, PhD, et al
Yersinia pestis, the cause of plague, is a recently emerged clone of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, Mark Achtman, Kerstin Zurth, Giovanna Morelli, Gabriela Torrea, Annie Guiyoule, and Elisabeth Carniel
Insights into the evolution of Yersinia pestis through whole-genome comparison with Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, P.S.G. Chain, E. Carniel, F.W. Larimer, J. Lamerdin, P.O. Stoutland, W.M. Regala, A.M. Georgescu, L.M. Vergez, M.L. Land, V.L. Motin, R.R. Brubaker, J. Fowler, J. Hinnebusch, M. Marceau, C. Medigue, M. Simonet, V. Chenal-Francisque, B. Souza, D. Dacheux, J.M. Elliott, A. Derbise, L.J. Hauser, and E. Garcia
Distinct Clones of Yersinia pestis Caused the Black Death, Stephanie Haensch, Raffaella Bianucci, Michel Signoli, Minoarisoa Rajerison, Michael Schultz, Sacha Kacki, Marco Vermunt, Darlene A. Weston, Derek Hurst, Mark Achtman, Elisabeth Carniel, and Barbara Bramanti

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago
As you have seen in this episode collective learning takes time. Some of you might infer one to one parallels between the situation during the second plague pandemic and our current pandemic in 2020. That would not be entirely correct and definitely not our intention. History doesn’t as much repeat itself as it echos into the present. While there are similarities between all pandemics, and we continue to struggle to find the correct response and countermeasures, our times are very different from the medieval and renaissance world. Science has developed further, society has evolved, and we have much more than one form of response to disease available. Moreover the pandemic that started in 1347 is in relative numbers (percentage of lethality) the worst pandemic to hit humanity in known history.

In the end we are historians, not health professionals or epidemiologists. Our contribution can never be what to do about COVID 19, that is too complex an issue for us to digest. What we can contribute is a historical perspective on what went wrong back then, and how we developed from there. The main takeaway from the Black Death should from that long term historical perspective be positive. The response lay the foundation of modern health care in hospitals. It helped create the beginnings of professional, trained, and vetted doctors, it changed the view on sanitation, and it started to shift our collective view on disease from superstition and conspiracy myths to factual analysis and a scientific response.

And there in that very last point lies perhaps the one and only thing that we can say with certainty that we need to remember in 2020 — listen to the scientists, not the hacks and politicians on all sides that base their rhetoric on, self interest, political expediency, and populism.

Never forget!

Spartacus

PS apologies for the audio problems on my mic during the first half of the video — it was scratching against my jacket and no one noticed, sadly we can’t get it out in post.

The fall of olde timey “liberalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren on the way “liberalism” was dissected, consumed, digested, and excreted by progressivism:

From different angles, from Tocqueville to Schumpeter to a thousand reporters on the ground, it has been observed that liberalism defeats itself. I mean by this real liberalism, not the poison candy version that is offered to children by our academic Left. The real thing celebrates liberty as the central political good, and equality of opportunity versus equality of result. It frees up economies and societies, by cancelling hidebound rules and regulations. When much younger and under the influence of my father and his war-veteran generation (his was World War II), I considered myself a “liberal,” for views that activist mobs would now consider to be deeply “conservative,” or as they say, “fascist.”

Opposition to totalitarianism was a key to that generation. They weren’t shy about using arms. A true liberal was an enthusiast for the War in Vietnam, and other global initiatives. Liberals were “open society” in an explicitly anti-communist, 1950s way. They loved “civil rights,” and opposed the Nanny State, although incoherently. They wished to accommodate the women’s movement. Their instinctive suspicion of social programmes, and revulsion for “ideology,” were slipping away; or had already slipped, to a longer historical view.

To be tediously economic, they were intoxicated by the view that, “now we are rich we can afford to have some fun.” They had long been bored with the absolute moral judgements that their ancestors (to whom neither divorce nor contraception were thinkable) took for granted — based on a Protestant Christianity that had been abandoned by sophisticated intellectuals a century before. “Church versus State” was no longer an issue, and because it wasn’t, morality became a statist “construct,” even without action from the Marxists.

When Ross Douthat writes a book on “decadence,” he is treating it as a temporal trend: something that comes and goes through the decades. His arguments are themselves decadent: something for the chattering classes to play, in the spirit of badminton. It is a topic for upmarket wit; no horror lurks beneath it. The old Gibbonesque “decline and fall” narrative has evaporated with classical culture, and been replaced by a dry happyface from which the wrinkles of serious history are botoxed. The “whig view of history” survives, but only by cliché.

What isn’t defended, is soon killed off, in nature but also in metaphysics. Leftism flourishes today, not because it has won any argument, but by eating everything on the liberal side. Even the word, “liberal,” went down with a soft burp. It now represents the denial, or reversal, of everything that liberals once stood for. Gentle reader may prove this to himself, by reading old magazines.

June 17, 2020

Alcibiades, the first recorded iconoclast, but far from the last

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

James Heartfield on the modern day resurgence of iconoclasm:

“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

… far more often, the attacks on public symbols are indicative of a breakdown in social solidarity — often with alarming consequences. For activists seeking to win popular support, knocking down statues is a high-risk strategy that can provoke the opposite sentiments to those hoped for. The futurist Marinetti’s proposal to fill in the canals of Venice with concrete to make modern roads is a witty way to make a point, but not a sound policy.

Alcibiades was perhaps the first recorded statue vandal. One night in 415 BC he knocked all the stone cocks off the statues of Hermes in Athens. In 1497, the friar Girolamo Savonarola launched a Bonfire of the Vanities in which artworks, books and statues were destroyed out of a fear they would tempt people away from God. As any lover of old English churches knows, the furies of the Puritan revolution led to the destruction and defacing of Catholic saints’ statues and paintings.

In the modern era, the temptation to destroy monuments has been strong. In the First World War, Britain’s local authorities changed German-sounding names of streets like Bismarck Road — now Waterlow Road — while bully boys attacked German-owned shops. In 1933, Nazi students in Germany organised bonfires of subversive books, while the Reich organised an exhibition of “degenerate” modernist art. The burning of books only served as a trial run for the extermination of people, as the symbolic slaughter failed to yield the results of a “cleansed” Germany.

People often make the point that there are no statues of Hitler in Germany — though those were not taken down by Germans, but by the Allied occupiers. You can still see Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld and grandstand in Nuremberg, where many of Hitler’s rallies took place, though not much else of his Nazi architecture survives. Mussolini’s architects, Giuseppe Terragni and Marcello Piacentini, did better — much of their absurdly grandiose work survives. The model of an Allied-led “denazification” was in the minds of the US-led forces that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. The destruction of his statue in Baghdad was largely staged by the allies.

Under the Maoist regimes in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, some of the worst atrocities after the Nazis were carried out. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” against the “four olds” led to the destruction of books and artworks. Later, there were showtrials and the politically incorrect were battered by the mob. In the wreckage of Cambodia, Pol Pot led a terrifying war on alleged capitalist-roaders and even intellectuals — who could be handily identified by the fact they wore glasses — that led to millions being killed. Pol Pot declared a “year zero” — that all civilisation before the Khmer Rouge took power would be cancelled. Tragically, the wholesale wiping out of Cambodian culture was only a prelude to the extermination of much of its population. The sentiment of wiping out the wrong history was repeated in the war that al-Qaeda-inspired regimes in Afghanistan and Mali conducted against books and statues that did not match their own Islamist views.

In Soviet Russia, when the communist-allied artists of the Proletkult organisation argued that all Tsarist culture should be expunged, the Bolshevik leader Lenin took them to task for “rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch”. Instead, he said, they should assimilate and re-work “everything of value in the more than 2,000 years of the development of human thought and culture”. Sadly, Lenin’s wise advice was lost on the Stalinist regimes that followed, during which the policy oscillated between futurist iconoclasm and maudlin Russian sentimentality. History got its revenge in eastern Europe when most of the ubiquitous Lenin and Marx statues came down in the 1990s.

The Tanks of Operation Barbarossa – WW2 Special

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

World War Two
Published 16 Jun 2020

We take a look at the types and numbers of tanks available to the German and Soviet armies on the eve of Barbarossa.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

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: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/

Sources:
RIA Novosti archive, image #2567 / Samaryi Guraryi / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Picture of Soviet KV-1 tanks on parade at the Palace Square in Leningrad, Russia, 1 May 1942, courtesy Boris Kudoyarov, Russian International News Agency
IWM HU 81216
Bundesarchiv
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
RIA Novosti archive, image #669663
from the Noun Project: Shield by Nikita Kozin, Game by Ecem Afacan
Pz.Kpfw. 35(t) of 6th Panzer Division Russian front, courtesy ConnorMac12 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
Reynard Deidel – “Deflection”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Max Anson – “Ancient Saga”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
23 minutes ago (edited)
This video is one of a number of specials we’re doing on the military context to Operation Barbarossa. You can check out Indy’s video about transport vehicles and logistics here: https://youtu.be/4lSCnOltYdY. If you want to help us make a complete documentary series on World War Two through more specials just like this one, you can join the TimeGhost Army on www.patreon.com/timeghosthistory or https://timeghost.tv.
Take care,
Joram

“We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the use of badges within the NHS to virtue signal and compel compliance in the unwilling:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

In Britain’s highly-centralized, almost Soviet-style healthcare system, the National Health Service, staff are being encouraged all over the country to wear little rainbow-coloured metal badges to show that they are homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual-friendly, and do not discriminate against them. The wearing of these badges is voluntary, but about 3,000 of the staff of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals, for example, now wear them. The self-congratulatory website of those ancient hospitals — St. Thomas’ is over 800 years old and Guy’s was founded in 1721, now combined into one administrative unit — says:

    The badges are just one way to show that Guy’s and St Thomas’ is an open, non-judgmental and inclusive place for people that identify as LGBT+ [which] stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender). The + simply means we are inclusive of all identities, regardless of how people identify themselves.

This language, which combines the unctuous with the bureaucratic, is typical of the way British hospital administrators express themselves nowadays. And if, as Buffon said, the style is the man himself, we may justly fear for a semi-totalitarian future.

By implication, the badges bully the staff, for if any of them refuse to wear one, their refusal is likely to be taken to mean that their minds are closed, judgmental (in the sense of being censorious, for even the attempt to avoid making judgments is itself based on a judgment), and exclusionary. It is to imply that they would deliberately treat any patients in the above mentioned categories differently and worse from all other patients. Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.

This is an insult to all those people who worked before the advent of the badges (or who now refuse to wear them) who strove and continue to strive always to treat patients to the best of their ability, irrespective of the many categories into which any individual patient falls. In my experience, the great majority of doctors have always tried to do this.

Let me give an example. Working as I did as a doctor in prison, I met many men who had done terrible things. I treated them, as a matter of course, to the best of my ability. I remember, for example, a man who had strangled three children and then impaled them on railings. Though I did not think he was a good man, and in that sense passed a judgment on him within the privacy of my mind, I treated him for his bronchitis exactly as I would have treated anyone else with bronchitis. I did not find this difficult in the least and do not claim any special merit for having done so, for it is only what all my colleagues in the profession did — as a matter not only of course, but of principle.

A couple of years ago, I read the diary of one of Marshal Pétain’s doctors during the latter’s imprisonment after World War II. The doctor had been a member of the Resistance and had no reason to love Pétain, to say the least: Pétain’s supporters would have had not a second thought about killing him if he had fallen into their power. Yet, as the diary makes clear, the doctor treated Pétain, who by then was demented, with the greatest humanity. Moreover, the doctor refused to publish his diary, despite the financial advantage of doing so, because he thought that publishing it would be to break patient confidentiality. It was only after his death, and more than half a century after Pétain’s, that the diary was published. The doctor’s adherence to his medical ethics was impressive, and he needed no badge to proclaim his virtue.

June 16, 2020

Plague and the Bronze Age Collapse ~ Dr. Louise Hitchcock

Filed under: Europe, Greece, Health, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Published 16 May 2020

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the series NAUE II SWORDS, GERMS, & IRON brought to us by none other than Dr. Louise Hitchcock and this episode is going to be about plague and the Bronze Age collapse. This episode will also be drawing on modern parallels such as “What Covid-19 Can Tell Us About the Bronze Age (12th cent) Collapse?”

It will dive into the Bronze Age and discuss was plague a contributing factor in decline of the Bronze Age and the birth of the Iron Age? How familiar were the ancient peoples with plague and epidemics and what do the ancient literary sources tell us? From discussing plague in ancient Mesopotamia to the Philistine Plague to a Hittite King who falls prey to a deadly disease we explore new thoughts, theories and research involving a period that we all love and a subject that could not be more relevant and that is plague.

Check out the awesome work of Dr. Hitchcock at these links below!

Academia profile where you can access her work that is free to the public. https://unimelb.academia.edu/LouiseHi…

Get her books here!

Aegean Art and Architecture: https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/a…
Minoan Architecture: A Contextual Analysis: http://www.astromeditions.com/books/b…
Theory for Classics: https://www.routledge.com/Theory-for-…
DAIS: The Aegean Feast https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail….
Tell It In Gath: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Israel. Essays in Honor of Aren M. Maeir on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday https://www.zaphon.de/epages/83179382…

Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ashlarblocks

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Image credits: Manna Nader, Gabana Studios Cairo

Hittite 3D City and intro footage credits: 3D reconstruction of Imperial Hittite Karkemish by Giampaolo Luglio, Turco-Italian Archaeological Expedition to Karkemish directed by Nicolò Marchetti (University of Boologna)

KARKEMISH (Carchemish) 1300 BC (3D) – The Southern Capital of the Empire Hittite https://youtu.be/RsTdoY__F4U

Music Attribution: Herknungr – Megaliths | Dark Neolithic Meditive Shamanic Ambient Music https://youtu.be/oc8FQwNjPu0

Footage of Ugarit Credit goes to Ruptly. Video Title : Syria: Ancient city of Ugarit freed from Islamic State control https://youtu.be/XKzbk0PFvg0

QotD: A thumbnail history of the English language

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Humour, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Languages are anything but static. Some change very slowly, like French — which owes much of its ponderousness to a government department specifically tasked with rooting out heretic words that creep in from the outside. Other languages undergo periods of very rapid change — the English of Chaucer (late 1300s) would be very confusing to Shakespeare (late 1500s and early 1600s). Two hundred years seems like a long period of time, but in the history of an entire country, it’s a drop in the bucket.

English doesn’t just borrow words; it lifts whole phrases and grammatical ideas from other languages without so much as a by-your-leave. With the coming of the Saxons to Britain, Germanic languages crashed headlong into Brythonic and became Old English. Then the Vikings went for a multi-century beer run starting in the late 700s and left behind a bunch of Norse words, because who doesn’t invent a new language every time they go out carousing? In 1066, William the Bastard decided he didn’t like his name, and brought Norman French with him when he went to the town clerk’s office to have his name legally changed to William the Conqueror.

For the next two hundred years, the English upper classes spoke French and the lower classes spoke a zillion dialects of Middle English (travel was difficult for poor people, so regional variations survived). All legal business was done in French, which was often translated on the spot into Latin for the official records. A person couldn’t even submit a legal plea in English until 1362. But with the start of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337, Edward III decided that speaking French was très passé, and began encouraging English as a spoken and written language, with a little French thrown in, just to keep things interesting. And ever since, English has been debating how sophisticated it wants to be, while making rude gestures across the Channel at France and grumbling when the French sneer northwards.

Blake Smith, “A Brief History of English and Why it Matters”, Mad Genius Club, 2018-03-07.

June 15, 2020

Wokepocalypse Now

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

In Spiked, Andrew Doyle takes a very brief moment to say “I told you so” about Antifa and the other woke entities haunting the headlines these days:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

Those of us who have urged vigilance when it comes to the rise of identity politics and the cult of Social Justice have now been fully vindicated. For years we have warned about the ways in which the culture war had the potential to infect all public and political discourse. But we were dismissed as railing against niche politics confined to campus common rooms and the dark recesses of the internet. Now the culture war has exploded on to the streets of the UK. If that sounds like a fancy way to say “I told you so”, then so be it.

If we are to have any chance of preserving the liberal values upon which our society depends, we need to find a way to navigate the binary thinking that comes with ideologically driven movements. The first step is to acknowledge common ground. In all my life I have never met a single person who would not agree with the proposition that “black lives matter”, so that seems like a good place to start. It’s been many years since racism has been in any way tolerated by polite society, one of the undeniably positive outcomes of the political-correctness campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. A further point on which we can surely all agree is that racism exists and should be resisted wherever it occurs. This may seem obvious, but since any opposition to the cult of Social Justice is automatically taken as a denial of the fact of racism, it is worth making the point explicitly.

Those who would deny the existence of racism, or do not agree that black lives matter, or do not accept that racism is an evil that must always be confronted, are already beyond the scope of rational adult conversation. The vast majority of the population believe in our shared values of equality and fairness, although many Social Justice activists prefer to ignore this reality in favour of a fantasy Britain awash with fascists. We saw this in the way that Brexit voters were consistently smeared as xenophobic, even though such a label could only possibly apply to a tiny minority. We saw this in the myth that those who voted Leave were nostalgic for a colonial past, a virtually non-existent mindset that was assumed to be commonplace on the basis of no evidence at all. These kinds of prejudices, largely levelled against working-class people by bourgeois commentators, in turn generated the kind of resentment that almost certainly tipped the scales in favour of Brexit and ultimately led to the collapse of Labour’s “red wall”. These outcomes were in themselves taken as proof of Britain’s inherent racism, and so we find ourselves caught in this perpetual square dance of straw men.

All of which has been a boon for the intersectional, identity-based Social Justice movement, which is sustained on a view of society that bears little resemblance to reality. The latest protests have been infiltrated, and often stoked, by the presence of various groups who unite under the banner of “Antifa”. Like “Black Lives Matter”, these groups rely on the good nature of a public who are likely to interpret their name literally. After all, only a fascist would complain about anti-fascism. Even Mara Liasson, national political correspondent for NPR, fell for this basic rhetorical trick when she described the Normandy landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops as the “biggest Antifa rally in history”. Activist singer Billy Bragg posted an image of Winston Churchill captioned simply with “ANTIFA”. That protesters this week defaced the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square and branded him a “racist” shows the incoherence of much of what is going on.

To return to our common ground: not only is fascism vanishingly rare in the UK, but you would be hard pushed to find anyone who isn’t wholeheartedly opposed to fascism. We are all anti-fascist, which makes Antifa’s claim to be resisting a popular tyrannous force seem about 80 years out of date. The difference is that most of us understand that pepper-spraying a Trump supporter, or striking a UKIP voter over the head with a bike lock, doesn’t put us in the same bracket as those who fought actual fascists at Cable Street in 1936.

As I have argued in Standpoint, our failure to instil critical thinking in our educational systems has led to many of the problems we face in today’s society. To make the case for measured and reasonable discussion of these sensitive issues is to open oneself up to entirely unfounded charges of racism. In such circumstances, most people would rather acquiesce for the sake of an easy life. We have even seen those who have raised questions about the wisdom of permitting mobs to destroy public landmarks being accused of endorsing the slave trade. “How you feel about that statue is how you feel about slavery”, tweeted LBC presenter James O’Brien. “Don’t let anyone pretend otherwise”, he said. But the chances of finding anyone in the UK who would defend slavery are infinitesimal, and it is surely inconceivable that anyone making these allegations sincerely believes otherwise.

The Battle that Saved an Army | Arras 1940 | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 17 May 2020

Encircled by the Germans in North-West France, the Battle of Arras, 21st May 1940, was a successful Allied counter-attack which allowed French and British troops to be evacuated at Dunkirk. Curator David Willey, presents his talk on the WW2 Battle of Arras from home.

For more on the Blitzkrieg see David’s Tank Story Hall tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eysQa…

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QotD: The very first “road trip”

Filed under: Germany, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Germany’s love for the automobile began with a road trip from nearby Mannheim to the town of Pforzheim, less than 30 miles from Stuttgart. In 1885, Karl Benz had invented his first Motorwagen, a three-wheeled vehicle with a gas-powered engine of his own design. One of the first times he managed to get it started, he drove it straight into his laboratory wall.

By 1888, he had a working prototype, which had successfully driven down a road. The now-patented Motorwagen had no gears and could not go up hills, but it worked. One morning, Benz’s wife Bertha decided to take the car on its first extended road trip. With her two sons, she pushed the car out of the garage, until it was far enough from the house that they could get it started without waking her husband.

Bertha Benz had a destination in mind — her parents’ house in Pforzheim, about 65 miles from her home. Following roads meant for wagons, she and her sons started the drive — the first recorded road trip in a car.

There were challenges. A pipe clogged; Benz cleaned it with her hat pin. A wire shorted; she insulated it with her garter. They needed more fuel; she convinced a pharmacist to sell her an unusually large amount of the gas the car used. When the brakes started wearing out, she had them shod with leather at a cobbler. When she reached a hill, she had the boys push (along with local help).

By the end of the day, the Benzes had reached Pforzheim, where Bertha telegraphed her husband that they were safe. After a few days’ visit, they drove back home to Mannheim.

Ten years ago, Germany created an official Bertha Benz Memorial Route, marking her historic road trip. Part of Bertha Benz’s motivation was to sell potential customers on the advantage of automobiles; although it took another decade or so, people eventually bought into this transportation revolution.

Sarah Laskow, “An 1888 Road Trip Sparked Germany’s Romance With Cars”, Atlas Obscura, 2018-02-28.

June 14, 2020

Finland and France Join Hitler – WW2 – 094 – June 13 1941

Filed under: Africa, Australia, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 13 Jun 2020

Germany, Romania and Finland prepare for a gigantic invasion of the Soviet Union, whose own military is in a dire state. The Allies invade Vichy French Syria and prepare to relieve the Australians besieged at Tobruk.

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Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
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Sources:
– Imperial War Museum: E 7070, E 15182, IND 3143
– Mil.ru
– spbarchives.ru
– IDF Spokesperson’s Unit
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild_101I-443-1599-20

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