Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2019

Little Wars TV Talks to Lindybeige!

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

Little Wars TV
Published on 23 Jul 2019

Nikolas Lloyd, known on YouTube as “Lindybeige,” was a guest speaker at Historicon 2019 and we had the chance to chat with him. His eclectic military history channel is one of our absolute favorites and we had a blast in this wide-ranging interview. We ask him about his favorite generals, how he started wargaming, which Hollywood movie is most faithful to history, and much more!

If you aren’t familiar with the channel, check out Lindybeige here: https://www.youtube.com/user/lindybeige

In this interview, we reference the video “The Wargamers Who Won a Real War,” about the Battle of the Atlantic. You can see that video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVet8…

Thanks for watching, and we hope you’ll subscribe here for more of the best historical wargaming videos on YouTube!

September 6, 2019

Germany Commits Suicide by Cancelling War Reparations | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1931 Part 3 of 3

Filed under: Economics, Germany, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 5 Sep 2019

Contrary to popular belief it is not so much reparations themselves that puts the first stepping stone in place for the Nazi to rise to power. Instead it is the cancellation of war reparations, or more correctly put; the measures that “The Hunger Chancellor” Heinrich Brüning implements to get reparations cancelled that pushes Germany over the financial brink and into the hands of Hitler and Goebbels.

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Subscribe to our World War Two series: https://www.youtube.com/c/worldwartwo…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns and Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Iryna Dulka
Colorization by Daniel Weiss

Thumbnail: Goebbels colorized bu Olga Shirnina, aka Klimbim

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Sources:
Ruth Henig, The Weimar Republic 1919-1933
Theo Balderston, Economics and Politics in the Weimar Republic
Kolbe, The Weimar Republic
Harold James, The Causes of the German Banking Crisis of 1931
Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to Hitler

Sources images: Bundesarchiv

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
49 minutes ago (edited)

OK, so this video is about Naziism to some degree, it’s also a serious look at how Germany started transitioning into Naziism – this is not speculation, it’s not even very controversial, it just happens to not fit with many popular superficial misconceptions. Now, we love it when you guys debate under our videos, even when it’s in disagreement with something we or somebody else said, but before you do so please save us some time and read our rules and consider if your post is against our rules. If you think it might be, consider editing or just not posting it — otherwise you’re just wasting our time and your own — because no matter what, we will moderate this.

If your going to post that the Versailles Treaty was to blame you might want to read this instead: https://community.timeghost.tv/t/why-the-treaty-of-versailles-didnt-cause-naziism-answering-a-guy-on-youtube/1858 — that’s Indy’s extensive answer to that claim.

If you’re going to claim “Naziism was Left Wing” well you can do that, we don’t suppress opinions, not even silly ones, but we suggest that you read this instead: https://timeghost.tv/national-socialism-an-extreme-left-wing-ideology/ that’s Spartacus’s explanation why it is not considered so by historians (and why it’s not really that important).

If you’re going to praise Naziism or celebrate Communism, or propose that any other form of lethal extremism is a great idea — just don’t, we do remove any promotion for lethal anti-democratic ideologies, and will probably revoke your positing privileges.

If you’re going to start peddling conspiracy theories about Jews controlling [insert your crazy idea here] or “it was the Jews” — definitely don’t do that or it will be last thing you post here.

If you’re going to say that stopping German Communism is what caused Naziism — well you can do that … it’s pretty much wrong or at least a gross misrepresentation, and you’ll look like an idiot to anyone who knows their factual German history, but you can do that if publicly proclaiming ignorance is your thing — we would however suggest waiting for our next video on Germany’s elections in 1932 for a more correct take on that instead.

Browning M2 .50cal “Ma Deuce” | HEAVY MACHINE GUN

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

Matsimus
Published on 22 Jul 2019

The Browning heavy machine gun was designed towards the end of World War I. Development of a large-caliber machine gun in the USA was initiated at the direct request of General Pershing, the commander of US expeditionary corps in Europe. He requested a large-caliber machine gun, capable of destroying military aircraft and ground targets such as armored cars and tanks. The task of developing such a gun was passed to John Browning. The task of developing ammunition for this new weapon was passed to Winchester Arms company.

This machine gun is similar to John Browning’s earlier M1919 machine gun, that was chambered for a standard rifle cartridge. In around 1917 Browning started to redesign his weapon for a larger caliber. His new machine gun was chambered for much larger and much more powerful 12.7×99 mm (.50 caliber) cartridge, that was developed alongside this weapon by Winchester. That’s why sometimes this weapon is simply referred as Browning .50 caliber machine gun. After the John Browning’s death in 1926, the design of this weapon was finalized by other designers.

This machine gun entered service with the US armed forces in 1933 and was manufactured by Colt. Design of this weapon proved to be extremely successful. Since the 1930s it has been used extensively to the present day. This remarkable weapon has seen service during countless wars all over the world. Only during WWII nearly 2 million of these HMGs were produced. It has been in production longer than any other machine gun and its production still continues. Furthermore the M2 machine gun has been in use longer than any other small arm in the US armed forces inventory, except the M1911 pistol, that was also designed by John Browning. The M2 machine gun is currently manufactured by General Dynamics and US Ordnance companies. Since the 1930s this weapon is license-produced by FN Herstal of Belgium. Currently the M2 is used by about 100 countries all over the world. It is the primary heavy machine gun of NATO countries.

The M2 is typically used as a vehicle weapon or helicopter armament. It can be also used from a tripod. This heavy machine gun is highly effective against infantry, unarmored or lightly armored vehicles, boats, light fortifications and helicopters. It is closer in power to a small cannon.

This weapon is typically used with standard ball, tracer, armor-piercing, armor-piercing incendiary, or armor-piercing incendiary tracer rounds. There is also an M962 SLAP-T (Saboted Light Armor Penetrator) round, fitted with a tungsten penetrator.

The M2 is fed from disintegrating belt. Spent cartridge cases are extracted down. It can be adapted to feed from the left or right side of the weapon by reinstalling some parts. This conversion takes two minutes. The charging handle can be also changed from right to left hand side.

The M2 has slow and rapid firing modes. It can fire full-auto, as well as single shots. This weapon fires from a closed bolt.

When used as a crew served weapon, the M2 is mounted on an M3 tripod. This tripod weights 20 kg. So the complete weight of the machine gun on tripod is 58 kg. When fired from the tripod this HMG has an effective range of 1 830 m. Maximum effective range is 2 000 m.

The M2 comes with standard iron sights. However various types of telescopic and night sights can be installed using appropriate mountings.

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QotD: The horrors of war

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s no point in pretending that war isn’t horrible — flag-draped coffins are, in fact, a rather pristine symbol of those horrors. There’s a good reason societies honor their warriors.

An aside: I’ve long thought that prettifying World War II for domestic consumption contributed to both the media shock of Vietnam and the generation gap. WWII and Korea vets, who knew war first-hand, didn’t understand just how shocked their doted-on boomer kids were. “The Good War” wasn’t any more pleasant when you were experiencing it.

Virginia Postrel, “Horrors of War”, Dynamist.com, 2004-04-27.

September 5, 2019

Phony Trudeaumania has bitten the dust

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Nico Johnson discusses the dangers of family dynasties in democratic countries:

When future political historians look back at the 21st century, Justin Trudeau’s election as a Liberal leader may be regarded as a bland footnote. Despite all the hope Trudeau brought Canadians in his once seemingly eternal, post-election honeymoon, his leadership inevitably toppled into a swamp of sticky scandals and hurried apologies.

Justin Trudeau may still be re-elected. However, the Conservatives can rest easy in the knowledge that Trudeaumania, at least for this current Trudeau, is well and truly dead.

What is noteworthy, however, is the atmosphere of surprise and confusion that has clouded commentators’ judgements surrounding the downfall of Trudeau. In the corridors of Ottawa’s broadcasters, it may have appeared absurd that natural political decline should apply to their darling Prime Minister; the leader of the “woke world.”

Trudeau’s appearance of invincibility, which still makes these commentators swoon (note the SNC-Lavalin coverage) was first created in those blue-skied months following his leadership election in 2013.

Perhaps Justin, with his charisma and handsomeness, seemed like a breath of fresh air to Canadian progressives. Gone were those days of Ignatieff, the drooling philosopher, who rather spectacularly (considering his semi-illiterate predecessor) lost 43 seats forcing the Liberals into third-party status.

With Trudeau’s leadership, the Liberal party would have a candidate who seemed so perfect for Canadian political life that even a eugenicist would struggle to replicate it. With his status as an Anglophone-Quebecois, which managed to pacify the sensibilities of English Canada, whilst having his Quebecois heritage to maintain seat-rich Quebec—Trudeau must have seemed like a divine gift.

Yet even in those early days, Trudeau lacked noticeably in the fundamental requirements that statesmanship should necessitate. He had no political experience after being almost casually elected to the House of Commons. Nor did he possess any working experience, and had been entirely unknown to the Canadian public until the eulogy at his father’s funeral. To put it quite simply, Justin Trudeau would have never become Prime Minister of Canada if his father, Pierre, had not been one too.

September 4, 2019

Viewing WW2 as “the Air-Sea Super Battlefield”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

According to Phillips Payson O’Brien, it’s old-fashioned to view large land battles as being “decisive” in modern warfare:

Kombat (Russian: Комбат, lit. “battalion commander”) is a black-and-white photograph by the Soviet photographer Max Alpert. It depicts a Soviet military officer armed with a TT pistol who is raising his unit for an attack during World War II. This work is regarded as one of the most iconic Soviet World War II photographs, yet neither the date nor the subject is known with certainty. According to the most widely accepted version, the photograph depicts junior politruk (political officer) Aleksei Gordeyevich Yeryomenko, minutes before his death on 12 July 1942, in Voroshilovgrad Oblast, Ukraine.
Wikimedia Commons.

Allied victory in WWII is usually viewed through the lens of large land battles, from Stalingrad to Kursk to D-Day. However, battlefield losses of equipment in these “great” land battles were relatively small and easily replaceable. This column demonstrates that the real effort of the major powers was put into the construction of air and sea weapons. The Allies used their air and sea power to destroy the Axis’s in a multi-layered campaign. This was the true battlefield of WWII: a massive air-sea super battlefield that stretched for thousands of miles. Victory in this super-battlefield led to victory in the war.

Every aspect of WWII is discussed in a vast literature. Considering its diversity, explanations of why Germany lost the war are surprisingly predictable. It remains widely argued that the Nazis were beaten mostly by the Soviet Union’s powerful Red Army (Hastings 2005: 508, Kennedy 2013: 183).

From June 1941 to May 1945, German “power” was supposedly engaged and destroyed by the Russians. At some points, more than two-thirds of German infantry were engaged against the Red Army. The famous battles of the Eastern Front, such as Stalingrad and Kursk, supposedly caused the Germans’ crippling losses. The upshot of this lopsided deployment was that most German soldiers died in the East. Fighting against the Americans and British, conversely, is often portrayed as a secondary concern (Roberts 2010: 573).

What’s wrong with a focus on battles?

This battle-centric view, like much history of WWII, is old-fashioned. Historians of strategy have moved away from seeing battles as determinative. Nolan (2017) has argued that attrition losses are more important than battle losses in explaining outcomes.

The battle-centric analysis implies that infantry deployment is the best way to analyse effort. Yet, human-power was rarely the key factor in deciding combat in WWII. Equipment and specialised training mattered more. Possessing and operating the largest stores of modern weapons, not only tanks and artillery but also aircraft and naval vessels, determined the course of battles and the war.

If we reframe the discussion of the war to look not only at what equipment was made but also at how it was destroyed, it emerges that the war was decided far from the land battlefield (O’Brien 2015). The most striking sign of this is how little war production went to the land war and how much went to the combined air-sea war. This was the case for all the powers except the USSR.

Japan, the Bureaucratic War Machine | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1931 Part 2 of 3

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, History, Japan, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 3 Sep 2019

In Japan there has been a gradual increase of militarism since the Great War and in 1931 the country goes to war again when they invade Chinese Manchuria based on a false flag terrorist strike at the Mukden railway junction.

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

Subscribe to our World War Two series: https://www.youtube.com/c/worldwartwo…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Danile Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kaminsky

Sources:

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Sources:

James Fulcher, The Bureaucratization of the State and the Rise of Japan (1988)

Katō Yōko, “The debate on fascism in Japanese historiography”, in: Sven Saaler and Christopher W.A. Szpilman (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History (2018), 225-236.

Ethan Mark, “Japan’s 1930s crisis, fascism, and social imperialism”, in: Sven Saaler and Christopher W.A. Szpilman (ed)., Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History (2018), 237-250.

Penolepe Francks, “The path of economic development from the late nineteenth centre to the economic miracle”, in: Sven Saaler and Christopher W.A. Szpilman (ed)., Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History (2018), 267-278.

Sandra Wilson and Robert Cribb, “Japan’s colonial empire”, in: Sven Saaler and Christopher W.A. Szpilman (ed)., Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History (2018), 77-91.

Mark R. Peattie, “Nanshin: The ‘Southward Advance’, 1931-1941, as a Prelude to the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia”, in: Peter Duus e.a., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 (2010), 190-242.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
13 minutes ago
This is the third of several episodes that cover the developments in East Asia leading to World War Two. In this episode we look at how Japan by 1931 has developed to be on the brink of a fascist state without anyone specifically taking power or staging a coup. The democratic reforms from the past four decades are dying a death by a thousand cuts as the Japanese administration and military simply take one small decision after the other that erodes freedom, dials back democracy, and inevitably leads to war. It’s an anonymous, mechanic, gradual movement towards global conflict proceeding with clockwork precision.

This episode also sees the first change to the Between 2 Wars set as Astrid and Wieke have started adapting the set to the changing themes, while we move closer and closer to the outbreak of WW2 — we’d love to hear what you think!

English spelling – a bit mad, but perhaps the best system around

Filed under: Britain, China, History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published on 12 Nov 2015

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

Many people think that the English system of spelling is just mad. The random quirks of history have certainly played their part, and today we have spellings that follow so many different rules that at times it can seem just random. However, here I argue that actually the fact that our spelling does not match our pronunciation is a strength, not just a weakness.

I see from the comments that several viewers have misunderstood me, and have thought that I am saying that only when people are reading English do they recognise words in the same way as we recognise faces. No, this is how people read in all languages. This being the case, phonetic spelling is not such a great advantage, since people are not decoding the words using sound, and spelling based on derivation has advantages.

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

September 3, 2019

An alternative end to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, Arthur Chrenkoff wonders if Stalin’s greatest miscalculation wasn’t refraining from attacking the Nazi forces after they’d been fighting the Polish army for three weeks in 1939:

Military situation in Poland, 14 September 1939 (map does not show Slovak Army activity in southern Poland).
United States Military Academy, Department of History via Wikimedia Commons.

In late August, the Soviet Union signed the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact with Germany, effectively green-lighting Hitler’s invasion of Poland a few days later. The secret protocols attached to the pact stipulated for the division of Central Europe between the two powers, with the Soviet Union being rewarded for its cooperation with the Nazis with the gift of eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia, or the north-eastern Romania (as well as, it transpired later, the German non-interference during the Soviet invasion of Finland).

The Soviets were not naive (even if Stalin discounted all the indications of the coming German attack in 1941) to believe in a long-term friendship with Nazi Germany. There are strong indications that the Soviet Union intended to attack Germany, perhaps sometime in 1942, but Hitler beat it to the punch. The official Russian justification for the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact has certainly always been that the Soviet Union needed to buy itself extra time to prepare for this eventual showdown, since in 1939 it was still nowhere near ready (not least because of Stalin’s decapitation of the Red Army’s top leadership during the Great Terror a few years before).

But what if that was Stalin’s greatest miscalculation ever? By 17 September, when the Red Army crossed the eastern borders of Poland in accordance with the secret partition agreement, it was pretty clear to all that Poland was close to a military defeat (it would have hold on for longer, of course, without the Soviet stab in the back, but this would not have changed much without the Western allies’ military involvement, which never eventuated). While the German armed forces were winning, they were also overcommitted and overstretched. The German high command expected a quicker and easier victory and were taken aback by the ferocity of Polish resistance, despite clear German superiority in armour, air power and logistics. By the second half of September, some ammunition stocks were beginning to run low (particularly bombs) and motorised equipment, from tanks to trucks, has been significantly degraded through a combination of attrition and significant wear and tear in Polish autumn.

So what if the Red Army, instead of eventually coming to a halt along the previously agreed demarcation line, kept going west? There was no significant Polish military force to take into account and German army was tired and weakened after three weeks of hard fighting (losing a third of its tanks and 25 per cent of its air force in the process). While Wehrmacht had numerical advantage on the ground, this was only because the Red Army chose to invade Poland with half a million men, which was certainly enough to subdue the thinly-held eastern marches, but should they have needed it, the Soviets had reserves to draw upon to even out the field against the Germans. Even with their 33 committed divisions, the Red Army had a significant advantage over the German armed forces in the Polish theatre in terms of armour and air power (two to one for the former).

Who would have triumphed in this 1939 clash of the rival totalitarian war machines? We don’t know, of course, except that at the time of the invasion of Poland, Germany was militarily at its weakest point it would be until the final months of World War Two. Should the Red Army have proven victorious in September and October 1939, it would have likely ended up in Berlin in a matter of weeks, instead of years it eventually took. It’s a reasonable guess that Great Britain and France, faced with the Soviet invasion of the Reich and the looming defeat of Hitler, would have overcome their initial inertia and moved into Germany from the west so as to prevent having the communists proverbially water their horses in the Rhine. In this scenario, we would have ended up with a divided Germany and a divided Europe (though without much of the rest of Central and south-Eastern Europe in the Soviet camp) some six years earlier and without the tens of millions of dead, a ruined continent, and the Holocaust that accompanied World War Two as it actually unfolded.

Alas.

The Forgotten Soldiers of the Revolutionary War

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

Townsends
Published on 25 Jan 2018

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QotD: Fencing out the London poor

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943


I see that the railings are returning — only wooden ones, it is true, but still railings — in one London square after another. So the lawful denizens of the squares can make use of their treasured keys again, and the children of the poor can be kept out.

When the railings round the parks and squares were removed, the object was partly to accumulate scrap-iron, but the removal was also felt to be a democratic gesture. Many more green spaces were now open to the public, and you could stay in the parks till all hours instead of being hounded out at closing times by grim-faced keepers. It was also discovered that these railings were not only unnecessary but hideously ugly. The parks were improved out of recognition by being laid open, acquiring a friendly, almost rural look that they had never had before. And had the railings vanished permanently, another improvement would probably have followed. The dreary shrubberies of laurel and privet — plants not suited to England and always dusty, at any rate in London — would probably have been grubbed up and replaced by flower beds. Like the railings, they were merely put there to keep the populace out. However, the higher-ups managed to avert this reform, like so many others, and everywhere the wooden palisades are going up, regardless of the wastage of labour and timber.

George Orwell, “As I Please” Tribune, 1944-08-04.

September 2, 2019

The Inca Empire – Earth-Shaker – Extra History – #2

Filed under: Americas, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 31 Aug 2019

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Pachacuti, the Earth-Shaker, was the ninth leader of the Inca and the one who took the ambitions of the city of Cusco into an all-out military campaign to expand the empire — alongside bribing and engineering and negotiating their way to expansion.

Pachacuti turned out to be a good name for this ninth ruler of the Inca, because while the name did mean “earth-shaker” it was also a philosophical concept. In Quechua, the Inca’s primary language, a pachacuti was a historic event, a cataclysm that overturns space and time, remaking the world. It was a good title for the man who would forge the Kingdom of Cusco into an empire.

What You Didn’t Know About the 1968 Machine Gun Amnesty

Filed under: Bureaucracy, History, Law, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 11 Oct 2017

Sold for $23,000.

When the 1968 machine gun amnesty was announced in the US, it was treated with widespread suspicion among gun collectors. Some thought it would merely a pretense to find and arrest owners of unregistered machine guns. Others though it was just the first step in a prohibition and confiscation of machine guns. Both of these groups would prove to be wrong, however and the amnesty was in fact a true amnesty.

In fact, the amnesty was even more substantial than people recognize even today. It was not just an amnesty for possession of an unregistered machine gun, but also pretty much any crime associated with the gun. For example, it would legalize guns that had been stolen from military property rooms, and guns with defaced serial numbers. In fact, it even allowed felons to register machine guns, and retain the legal right to own them to this very day.

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QotD: The abolition conspiracy of the 1850s

Filed under: History, Law, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the “slave power conspiracy” was a misnomer. Oh, the Southern senators all voted together, but that’s not a conspiracy. “Conspiracy” implies an end, a goal, and the slave power simply didn’t have one. Their actions were purely negative, and if that meant absolutely nothing got done, well, so be it. They were deeply skeptical of federal power anyway; if vetoing anything and everything that might somehow affect slavery meant that the nation would simply drift along, directionless, that suited them just fine.

But there was another conspiracy afoot in the 1850s: The abolition conspiracy. You don’t hear about this one in high school history because the victors write the textbooks, but it was quite real. And this one really was a conspiracy, in that they had a clear goal: The end of chattel slavery. And it was a conspiracy in a more fundamental sense, in that it was illegal. The so-called “slave power conspiracy” was obstructionist to the bone, but it’s perfectly legal for legislators to vote against proposed legislation. It’s not legal to advocate armed insurrection but that’s what the abolitionists did.

On October 16, 1859, a lunatic abolitionist named John Brown led a partisan band in an attack on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He wanted to distribute the stolen guns to local slaves, thus sparking a race war. We know this because Brown was captured alive, and the great state of Virginia put him on trial, as they were legally required to do. Being a fanatic, and knowing that he was a dead man already, Brown took the opportunity to advertise his cause to the world …

At which point it became obvious that not only did Brown have the financial backing of several prominent Northerners, but he had the moral backing of a large segment of the Northern population. Brown became a martyr, literally — he was frequently compared to Jesus Christ in Northern periodicals. The important thing to note is this: Brown was captured in armed insurrection against the United States, and lots of the country was ok with it. This man simply decided that the legal processes could never result in the outcome he deemed morally necessary, so he took the law into his own hands — with the active connivance of prominent Northern financiers and intellectuals, and the avid approval of many Northern citizens.

Remember that, and Southern belligerency makes a whole lot more sense. The North was obviously ready to go to the gun in 1861, because they’d already gone to the gun in 1859. The “John Brown Moment,” then, is the point at which violence becomes inevitable, because one significant, influential segment of the country not only passively tolerates it, but actively cheers it.

Severian, “The John Brown Moment”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-16.

September 1, 2019

366 Days of Crushed Hopes, Suffering and Death – WW2 – 053 – August 31 1940

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

World War Two
Published on 31 Aug 2019

As the war turns one year old, there seems to be no end in sight. The Luftwaffe starts targeting civilian areas of London, the peoples of Eastern Europe switch country without moving houses, in occupied territory the population continues to be terrorized, and an end to the Chinese war that has been raging on for years now seems ever further away.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Map animations: Eastory

Colorisations by Norman Stewart and Julius Jääskeläinen https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Sources:
Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Military parade in Kishinev on the 4th of July 1940, ANRM, Fototeca, 24950 from http://anr.infoideea.ro/basarabia1940…

Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
6 days ago (edited)
Tomorrow, the war turns one year old, just like our channel. It doesn’t feel like a year, but when you think about what has happened all over the world since the Germans invaded Poland, it feels like a lifetime. Since then, our project has grown significantly, with new editors, community managers, and other people that help us out to make this series the best that it could be. We owe that to each and every one of you who stuck around and watched, shared, and engaged with our channel. We’re especially grateful to our supporters on Patreon and the TimeGhost website. It’s your support that makes this show possible and helps us to keep improving our quality. Our next goal is to raise enough money to go abroad and film on location, so that we can give you a real look of what it was like, and get in-depth knowledge from local historians. So please, support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory or at our website at https://timeghost.tv.

A big virtual hug from all of us,
The TimeGhost Team

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