Quotulatiousness

May 18, 2018

QotD: The purpose of propaganda

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

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1960.

May 16, 2018

Miracle on the Vistula – Polish Soviet War I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1920 Part 1 of 4

Filed under: Europe, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 15 May 2018

In 1920 the Bolshevik Russian Red army has more or less routed the Russian counter-revolutionary White armies. Their attention now turns to the West. Lenin wants to take the communist revolution to Germany, France and the United Kingdom. To get there he has to go through Poland though, and he hasn’t counted with Józef Piłsudski, the leader of the Polish Republic.

Most of the amazing colorised pictures in this episode are from Olga Shirnina, who has made a name as one of the best colouring artists there is, especially (but not only) covering Russian historical characters, Check out her website for some amaaaazing eye candy https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com Olga, thanks for letting us use the pictures!

Click here for the rest of the Between 2 Wars series: http://goo.gl/enXJWf

Join the TimeGhost Army at https://timeghost.tv
or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Photo Colouring by: Olga Shirnina
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

April 30, 2018

Russian Civil War and Russian Wars I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1919 Part 2 of 4

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

TimeGhost History
Published on 29 Apr 2018

On what was only recently the Eastern Front of World War One there is no end to war. Russia is at war with itself while it tries to reconquer the former territories of the Russian Empire. These new countries are also at war with themselves and each other, while they fight the Bolshevik Russian armies invading their young borders. Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, wherever you look in Eastern Europe there is war, more war… endless war.

Join the TimeGhost Army at https://timeghost.tv
or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

April 17, 2018

Yes Prime Minister – Official Secrets – Expelling the Russians

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Politics, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Navyblue95
Published on 29 Dec 2016

April 15, 2018

Rise of the Nations I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1918 1 of 2

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost
Published on 14 Apr 2018

After the War to End All Wars, there’s more of two things. More nations and more wars. Wars of independence, civil wars, ethnic wars, ideological wars and just plain old wars. In the first Prelude to the Between 2 Wars series, covering the years 1919-1939 from WWI to WWII chronologically, we look at the rise of nationalism out of the ruins of The Great War. Indy Neidell and Spartacus take you on a historical journey through 20 years of dawn, light, and dusk back into the darkness of war.

Join the TimeGhost Army on : http://timeghost.tv
Or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson & Indy Neidell
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Camera and Edit by: Spartacus Olsson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

From the comments:

TimeGhost
20 hours ago (edited)

PLEASE READ BEFORE YOU COMMENT (AVOIDS REPEATING FEEDBACK): The first episode of Between 2 Wars focuses on what happened after The Great War. Out of respect for those of you that are anxiously waiting for the TGW series finale later this year, we’ve avoided any references to WWI as far as possible. This episode is a prologue to future episodes that go into more detail of the actual events starting in 1919. The episode focuses in broad strokes on the rise of nationalism and the conflict that this creates, as well as the situation in Germany and Russia at the end of 1918. Here some notes on feedback we have already received:

1. We will avoid text and pictures at the same time when Indy speaks in the future.

2. There is an error in the map on the Balkan peninsula, we missed to turn off the country layer for modern Macedonia, this country does not exist at the time as it is part of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece in 1919. Our apologies. [Iceland is also labelled as “Island”.]

3. Some borders are drawn as the modern countries (e.g. Finland) although this is not correct at the time. This is a conscious decision to avoid an impossible dilemma. As pointed out in the video borders are in a state of flux in 1919, or even more often; just recently created. In cases where there is border contention that is not relevant to the current events of the video we have to choose between the following scenarios: A) Draw the border as one or the other side saw it – leads to controversy that we would like to avoid. B) Draw the contended area in as contended – doing that for one place leads to us having to do that for the rest of the world, we don’t have the capacity for that. C) Accept that we can’t solve this as the basis is not an exact fact base, but political problems that are way out of our program scope. We have tried other solutions, but C was the only one that worked (B would be the right thing to do, but we just can’t afford to invest the time it requires).

4. Some borders are not exactly right even when they are drawn for the events we speak of. This is due to 3. as well, but also because borders shift even within the year we speak of so that it becomes impossible to choose exactly the right line. We try our best to hit the least erroneous approximation, but it won’t always be perfect.

March 26, 2018

Kalashnikov vs Sturmgewehr!

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 17 Sep 2016

http://jamesdjulia.com/item/3024-394/ (MP-44)
http://jamesdjulia.com/item/3020-394/ (Type 56 AK)

The German Sturmgewehr and the Soviet Kalashnikov are widely and rightly considered the two most influential and iconic of the modern military rifles. While the German rifle certainly influenced the Soviet design, the two were designed with different intentions and goals. The Sturmgewehr was an attempt to blend the roles of rifle and light machine gun, while the Kalashnikov was intended to blend the roles of rifle and submachine gun – and yet they both reached largely the same practical reality.

Which do you think was the better system?

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

March 11, 2018

Soviet Leaders in 7 Minutes (History)

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

Austin Olney
Published on 19 Apr 2016

Learn about the leaders of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Lenin
1917-1922
Joseph Stalin
1922- 1953
Georgy Malenkov
1953-1955
Nikita Khrushchev
1953 – 1964
Leonid Brezhnev
1964 – 1982
Yuri Andropov
1982 – 1984
Konstantin Chernenko
1984 – 1985
Mikhail Gorbachev
1985 – 1991

Music – Goldeneye 64 Menu

March 9, 2018

Peace In The East – The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk I THE GREAT WAR Week 189

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 8 Mar 2018

Germany and the Russian Bolshevik Government sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending hostilities on the Eastern Front. Previously Germany had resumed the war in the East to put pressure on the Bolsheviks to accept the dictated terms. The Western Front Caucasian theatre were far from peaceful though.

March 6, 2018

Lenin & Trotsky – Their Rise To Power I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: History, Politics, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 5 Mar 2018

Felshtinsky, Yuri: Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Ltivosk. The Collapse of the World Revolution. November 1917- November 1918, Milford 2012: http://amzn.to/2oILHmK

Swain, Geoffrey: Trotsky and the Russian Revolution. New York 2014: http://amzn.to/2CY0gqF

Swain, Geoffrey: Trotsky. Edinburgh 2006: http://amzn.to/2FoRnfb

Wolkogonow, Dimitri: Lenin. Utopie und Terror. Berlin 2017

Vladimir “Lenin” Ilyich Ulyanov and Leon Trotsky are two of the most well known communists today. But how did they meet and how did they rose to the top of the Bolshevik movement? And how did they manage to overthrow the Russian Empire? We take a look at their lives and their early days until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

March 5, 2018

The economic failure of Iain Banks’s Culture stories

Filed under: Books, Economics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR points out the weak spot in the Culture series of novels:

There’s a lot of buzz about Iain Banks’s Culture universe lately, what with Elon Musk naming his drone ships in Banksian style and a TV series in the works.

I enjoyed the Culture books too, but they were a guilty pleasure for me because in a fundamental way they are bad SF.

They’re bad SF because the Culture’s economics is impossible. That ship hits a rock called “Hayek’s Calculation Problem” and sinks – even superintelligent Minds can’t make central planning work, because without price signals and elicited preferences you can’t know where to allocate resources. What you get is accelerating malinvestment to collapse.

This is what happened to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Hayek predicted it fifty years in advance. Huge factories in Siberia destroyed wealth by producing trucks nobody needed from resources that would have been better spent on other things – but nobody could know that because there weren’t any price signals. Eventually the SU wore out its pre-Communist infrastructure, fell down, went boom.

The problem is epistemic and fundamental – can’t be solved by good intentions or piling on computational capacity. An SF writer is every bit as obligated to know what won’t work in economics as he is not to make elementary blunders about chemistry and physics. The concept of “deadweight loss” matters as much as “entropy”.

Banks’s lifelong friend and fellow Trotskyite Ken McLeod actually managed not to flunk this. In a long and revealing interview about the genesis of one of his early series (the “October Revolution” books IIRC) he once revealed that for years he read free-market economics on the know-your-enemy principle, then woke up one day realizing he couldn’t refute them. Subsequently his books took a decidedly libertarian turn. This demonstrates that Marxists can clean up their shit; alas, Banks never made it that far.

March 4, 2018

From Caporetto to Cambrai I THE GREAT WAR Summary Part 12

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

The Great War
Published on 3 Mar 2018

The popular narrative of World War 1 usually ignores the constant evolution of warfare and the end of 1917 was definitely a short time period where a lot of changes came together, the 2nd Russian Revolution, the Battle of Cambrai and the Battle of Caporetto all illustrated that 1918 would be a rather different year in World War 1.

March 2, 2018

Ludendorff’s Window Of Opportunity I THE GREAT WAR Week 188

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 1 Mar 2018

German victory in the East, chaos in the British High Command, stable fronts in the Balkans and Italy, the US still not in full strength; German General Erich Ludendorff has a window of opportunity for his spring offensive and he intends to use it. Within the next weeks the German Army will launch their biggest offensive of WW1: Operation Michael.

February 27, 2018

The Czechoslovak Legion’s Odyssey Through Russia I THE GREAT WAR Special

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

The Great War
Published on 26 Feb 2018

The Czechoslovak Legion wanted to return home or continue the fight for independence even when peace on the Eastern Front was declared. But they needed to cross the whole of Civil War torn Russia for this.

February 23, 2018

Operation Faustschlag – Germany Advances In The East Again I THE GREAT WAR Week 187

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

The Great War
Published on 22 Feb 2018

Germany has had enough with the stalling tactics by the Bolsheviks and is unleashing its military might on the Eastern Front again to show who is in charge. Within the first days of Operation Faustschlag, the German Army marches on Kiev and the Baltic region. At the same time, the plans for a German spring offensive in the West are getting more pronounced.

February 17, 2018

Cuban Missile Crisis – I: The Failed Checkmate – Extra History

Extra Credits
Published on 15 Feb 2018

An eye for an eye, a missile for a missile — that’s how the saying goes, right? So thought the Soviet Union and the United States in the early fall of 1962, kicking off a 13-day staring contest that scared the world.

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