CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, read by John Cleese. I knew CS Lewis was brilliant, but had no idea he was a comic genius as well. And Cleese is perfect.
I wonder if the superlative quality of their music may be the result of this. On the same theory that people in hot countries like spicy food.
There is a hint that the aggressiveness isn’t just a matter of sound. Note that he calls “Indo-Germanic” a language family most of us call “Indo-European.”
German sounded perfectly nice when my Grandmother spoke it to me, much nicer than when my Grandfather spoke English.
Then there’s upper and lower German with very different sounds.
The harshness can be ameliorated somewhat by who’s ‘speaking’ it.
Cleese is a funny one, funny as in ironic, even though I’ve used bits from the series to illustrate the absurdity of today, he doesn’t yet understand how his work
was used to chip away at the foundations of British society, the hungarian phrase book sketch is as much a nice jibe, at an absurd Kafka like hearing as the dissing of the class of emigres that where driven to settle in Britain, like Dr,Gorkas parents there was broad satire about the perceived exaggeration of Chinese communism and the like, without the mediating influence of Church and Flag and Family, Britain has descended into that place, that Enoch Powell, noted around the same time,there was also broad dismissal of figures like Margaret Thatcher and Reginald Maudling, because they sound funny, so now when its clearly unsafe to walk around in the major cities, he says well that’s just the way it is, not realize he did Screwtapes work for him, reads but doesn’t understand,
this culture migrated to the States, with SNL, where Gerald Ford was held up to ridicule but a much more dangerous figurelike Carter, was given a pass, Reagan was more immune to the kind of satire to a degree in the early 80s, they were cautioned not to go all in, but you could detect this all the way from the beginning with Carlin’s opening act,
Really depends on the accent, South German accents are much softer.
Note that he calls “Indo-Germanic” a language family most of us call “Indo-European.”
“Indo-Germanic” is something of an archaism. I don’t myself use it in my writing. But it is correct as far as it goes, albeit old-fashioned and lacking specificity. It tells us, correctly, that the Germanic languages collectively comprise a sub-group of the Indo-European languages group.
My distant US ancestors had cool Germanic first names, but all in my generation and my parents generation have/had very ordinary American first names. My grandparents spoke German mostly in their youth and middle years, and then all that stopped. I don’t recall a discussion of it, but I suspect that anti-German sentiment during WWI was a big factor. The movie East of Eden comes to mind, where that sentiment is a sub-plot.
My last name had an ö in Germany, but the umlaute was dropped here in the US in the late 19th century. I still struggle with that sound. I met a cute lady named Böbe, who normally tells people to pronounce it Bee-bee, but for me she pronounced correctly. So now I try to get it right, but probably butcher the pronunciation. She’s German, I thought? No, Hungarian. A lady named Ute, she’s German.
An old science friend of German ancestry did a post-doc in Germany and had picked up some of the jokes about the German language. In particular, the concatenated words.
“Barber” translates to hareundschniptinclipptin
“Shark” translates to schwimminundfeastinbeastin
miguel:
Well said.
thanks just some thoughts I have been developing over time
was the british invasion, an overall good thing I wonder in general, not only in music but also television,
the preceding generation came across as rough hewn, heck they had only survived the Depression and the subsequent war, the mass bombing of their cities, why were they so surly, to the generation which followed it,
you get that tone in pink floyds the wall, ‘we don’t need no education’ well in point of fact you do need education, so you know what came before, the good and the bad, what has become increasingly true, ‘they do like thought control’ other remarks about pudding and meat, when for many in the earlier generation, it was rare that they would have either because rationings and the like, even in the immediate post war era, it was not all’tea and crumpets’ yes the sloughing off of Empire was good in some ways, although honestly the way the partitions went I might have to second guess the point,
the subsequent generation thought ‘the past was another country’ well most of the world disagrees outside their doorsteps, Britain wasn’t wracked like America was with Vietnam, a long drawn out conflict so Carnaby Street happened, so did the Canute moment of the Periphery taking over the Metropole, Borneo and Aden were sideshows in the big scheme of things,
miguel:
I have encountered analyses similar to yours by other writers commenting on the negative side of Monty Python in general and Cleese in particular.
Ned Willmott — a highly respected British military historian, and a good friend, now deceased — once referred to the British (in a book about WW2) as a “curiously philistine race.”
I don’t know of him, but Michael Burleighs survey of the period, some of the younger Brother Hitchens, observations informed my view, yes hes’ not everybody’s cup of tea, admittedly,
we see this pattern in America, the Depression and the War didn’t strike us in the same way, the easier affluence that hid this soft generation, that arose where woodstock was the apotheosis, this dark eden, that plays like record player,
with vietnam as the other side of the reel, even 50 years later, the reason for it seems obscure, certainly the first hand scribes got the story largely wrong, Halberstam and the rest of the 5 0 clock follies, this was where Marcuse and the rest of the Frankfurt school, planted their crop, Allan Bloom was the first to notice it, in Closing some 30 years later, Chris Rufo has followed the trail, so did D’Souza before him,
all of these Old Gods as Jonathan Cahn and Naomi Wolf has noted, these faiths that were the reason for the Crusade and the Reconquista for good or ill, Macron the current WEf manque made much of the Algerian interlude, this was part of his appeal as if you could wave away 130 years of history, DeGaulle tried in his own way, he turned more toward the Arabs, thats how we end up with the Osirak reactor, the tide returned with the residents of the former colonies, first the harkis, the one sympathetic to the pied noir, then the rest,
intentions count as much as result, there is a point where unmediated Reason can be a solvent, not a building block,
Glenn Reynolds reflecting on recent (and future) Supreme Court gun decisions and on how there are way too many federal laws and regulations which function as laws: Crime and Punishment in the 21st Century.
those that push the new wisdom like the late halberstam, are celebrated, he went on his category error about Vietnam, to escavating the horrid 50s, from his view, maybe like Ginsberg he believed it was an era of madness, his last volume
came out on the eve of September 11th celebrating the Wisdom of Bill Clinton till history came knocking again, now other mariners like Daniel Ellsberg, well they were celebrated by his colleague Neil Sheehan, I recall, and according to Moyar they got maybe half of the story, did the Wisemen know what they were getting into,
not any more than the critics, who celebrated the sanguinary Ho Chi Minh, and later Arafat, both enabled if not direct tools of Suslov, of Sakharovsky, and other players,
the Bond series, unlike much of the other work, did celebrate a confident Britain albeit one confused about its exact place in the world, Deighton was a little more unclear
see Billion Dollar Brain, the way Colonel Stok was if not celebrated not regarded with dread in Funeral, Le Carre, maybe because he was too close to where the sausage was made,
didn’t see any point in the East/West battle
as it was carried out, the Circus was relying on Mundt a former Nazi, against Fischer who was considered a more idealistic creature, Leamas girlfield, was an idealist who gets swallowed up in the Maw of the East,
This was true largely across the pond with Heinrich Boll and Gunther Grass and some of his earlier work,
An old science friend of German ancestry did a post-doc in Germany and had picked up some of the jokes about the German language. In particular, the concatenated words.
I learned a series of them in rockets.
warhead = loudenboomer.
liquid fueled = Liquidsquirtenkind
Nuclear warhead = ergeschplitenkind loudenboomer.
Guidence system = sterenverk
Good news from Canada. Will Trudeau panic like Macron in France and call a snap election?
Liberal stronghold falls in Toronto by-election: Trudeau in big trouble
A Liberal stronghold for thirty years and one of the ridings that helped squeak out a minority government for Trudeau in the last election, swung Conservative in last night’s Toronto-St. Pauls by-election. This is most certainly a sign of things to come in the next general election, scheduled for late 2025.
A breakdown of the stunning Tory win in Toronto–St. Paul’s
Liberals had held the seat since 1993
Conservative candidate Don Stewart captured the longtime Liberal stronghold of Toronto–St. Paul’s in a byelection Monday that could have far-reaching implications for the Canadian political landscape.
With a federal election looming in 2025, the unexpected Tory win raises questions about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s future at the helm of the Liberal Party — and whether any Liberal-held seat is truly safe from being flipped.
My experience with extensive spoken “German” was Pennsylvania Dutch, which was described to me by a German acquaintance as *very* low German. Maybe because it was spoken by people I loved, it never sounded “aggressive” to me.
I think that Yiddish would sound aggressive, except that all the Jewish comedians’ routines using it as a comedic prop has mentally softened the sound, much as hearing PD from my grossmutter.
The news is so bad in Oakland California that even the NY times can’t spin it positively. https://archive.is/ywzv8
Oakland’s Mayor Had Enough Troubles. Then the F.B.I. Came Knocking.
Sheng Thao was already facing a recall election as residents remain frustrated over crime and homelessness. She said on Monday that she had committed no crimes.
I enjoyed watching that.
I am a oddball in hardly doing and reading European history yet know nothing of any other language. That is exactly how I view and hear German yet have a vast German miniature army ( 1813-15)
For TommyJay.
There was a young lady named Ute
Who drove around town on her scooter
Her hair in the breeze
She was entirely at ease
Everyone said she’s a beauty
I couldn’t help myself.
buddhaha,
Feli from Germany has done several videos on Pennsylvania Dutch vs. German (low and high), as well as Yiddish. Here are two examples, but you may find some of her other videos fun also.
Interesting topic. I wrestle with that notion myself. I’m a big fan of free speech and the common folk keeping the elites (politicians, generals, religious leaders) honest through mockery and humor (it’s not a coincidence that I use Groucho’s character from “Duck Soup” as my nomme de gare). For that reason, and their hilarity, I hold the Pythons in high regard. But I do wonder if the Boomers didn’t go overboard with tearing everything down in the ’70s ,and onward. I generally prefer more anti-establishmentarianism than less, but when there is no establishment whatsoever what is there to stand on? People need some firmament upon which to construct civilization.
miguel’s mention of early SNL is an apt example. When they were making fun of Ford I was fine with it, even though much of it was mean-spirited and dishonest. Rather than being a bungling oaf, Gerald Ford was one of the most athletic (the most athletic?) Presidents we’ve ever had, and he was no fool. When one looks at the privileged childhood of the wealthy Chevy Chase compared with the difficult childhood of Leslie Lynch King Jr., Chase’s depiction of Ford is a bit ugly, and certainly unfair. And, as miguel also highlights, when Carter beat out Ford in the election, suddenly mocking the Emperor’s lack of clothes fell out of fashion at 30 Rock. I’m in favor of all elites getting a bit of mockery, but the Boomers often chose and avoided targets based on politics. Or maybe I missed the recurring SNL skits showing Che Gueverra as a violent, egotistical homophobe.
There really is no argument that ’70s counterculture did much to tear down Western culture. It’s also true that some of the culture deserved to be torn down. But it also advanced cynicism and nihilism as traits to be lauded, in and of themselves. How much of the current, gaping flaws in today’s culture stem from 3 generations of children being raised in the culture they created* in their wake? As regards the Pythons specifically, at least one had to be fairly well read and knowledgeable of the pinnacles of Western culture in order to appreciate much of their humor; Proust recitation, Beethoven’s hearing loss, Icelandic sagas, the Artuhurian legend. I was studying Latin when I saw “The Life of Brian,” and the extended scene of John Cleese’s Roman centurion chastising the vandal’s improper grammar literally caused me to fall out of my seat in the theater. Yet it made me no less desirous to continue my studies. It felt special to be “in” on the joke and none of my friends (who were not studying Latin) understood the scene. Just like neo’s beloved Tom Lehrer, one has to be cultured to get Python. I don’t think I’d credit the Pythons or Lehrer with bringing down civilization. I think they are/were talented critics and proponents/opponents of the vagaries of human nature, but too much mockery is a dangerous thing.
*and profited from.
Re: John Cleese
Cleese is now devoting much of his energies to opposing woke and cancel culture. He’s also gotten into trouble for prefering the England of his day:
_____________________________________
Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more. Since then, virtually all my friends abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it….
I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it.
if I used this nic, of Cuban vaudevillian, Leopoldo Fernandez, few would know what we’re talking about, he was in the Jack Benny/Groucho Marx vein, he played this character in a sort of rolling night court type situation, where he was up against an imperious and a host of players, the situations were often absurd, as he kept getting into absurd schemees he was often involved with,
I guess it’s a matter of degree, or as they say in Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everythingLehrer was genuinely witty, and I grant Python is as well, now the so called Woke, I hate that word, make it impossible for Python or Brooks or other iconoclastic works to be done, well seinfeld wouldn’t survive the first round today, there seems to be precious little humor in Islam Chevy Chases impression of Ford seems to have stuck, it did cause him searing pain and addiction to pain killers, so there is that, Dan Ackroyd did an endearing Carter, Animal House is on point, small touches like the louche English professor played by Donald Sutherland, but the other fraternity had a point as well they were holding up standards, of a sort, John Vernon who was Canadian was an easy stuffed shirt there was some editorial commentary about Vietnam and Watergate in the afterward seemed gratuitous
the Blues Brother that I only recently got into recently was wonderfully absurd how it seems every soldier sailor and policemen in the Great lakes were on their tail in the end,
Ghostbusters followed after that, and it was probably more on point despite it’s bizarre premise,
Larry Storch–F Troop–was a stand up comedian and had a bit about German. “German could start a fight in an empty room!”
“Obergeifreiterwehrmachter….and that’s a Corporal!”
Clears throat noisily.
Mark Twain has a couple of versions of his essay, “The Awful German Language” including its spelling and word structure. Hilarious. Available on line.
I can remember Ackroyd playing Jimmy Carter’s hemorrhoids with nothing more than facial expressions.
Ron Nessen, Ford’s second press secretary, actually hosted SNL, and played along with some of the “Ford is clumsy” jokes. He said he didn’t enjoy it much, but comics should make fun of the president, no matter who he is. Later, after the election loss to Carter, Nessen wrote that he read comments from the SNL cast who admitted they were trying to make Ford lose the election.
This offended Nessen, and nowadays it seems so quaint that he would expect fair play from people in the entertainment world.
Conservatives are always harrumphing about how they understand there is such a thing as human nature and they know what it is.
Then, when humans are being human, i.e. taking everything too far, conservatives are confused. How could this happen? Then the inevitable search for the guilty and punishment of the innocent.
_______________________________________________
Eddie Morra: [at a party]… Well sure, you’d get a short-term spike, but wouldn’t that rapid expansion devalue the stock completely in two years?
Kevin Doyle: No, ’cause there are safeguards!
Eddie Morra: Against aggressive overexpansion? There aren’t because there are no safeguards in human nature. We’re wired to overreach.
Look at history, all the countries that have ever ruled the world – Portugal, with its big, massive navy… All they’ve got now are salt cods and cheap condoms. [crowd laughs]
And Brits? Now they’re just sitting in their dank little island, fussing over their suits.
No one’s stopping and thinking, ‘Hey, we’re doing pretty well. We got France, we got Poland, we got a big Swiss bank account… You know what? Let’s not invade Russia in the winter, let’s go home, let’s pop a beer and let’s live off the interest.
Because cycles have always happened usually in an 8-10 year cycles its a very reductionist explanation of portugal circumstances the spanish and the brits beat them to it the won the booby prizes in africa, mmt tries to pretend thats a real thing but sooner of later gravity brings you back down
I too have my reservations about Portugal and England in the above quote.
But, who can deny that if the Nazis had stopped somewhere before invading Russia or even invading Poland they would have been better off.
I am persuaded that humans will overreach. It’s in our nature. Consider Christianity’s overreach into a viciously intolerant religion as it gained power.
Yesterday’s civil rights movement was quite right in correcting the real and terrible racism of America’s past. It succeeded but … it didn’t stop there. It morphed into anti-racism, i.e. real racism towards whites.
Likewise feminism. It didn’t stop at voting rights, equality in the workplace, and freedom for women to live outside traditional roles. Now it is an anti-male force which insists on domination. Misandry.
it sounds more clever than it is, like the liberty mutual slogan, ‘you only pay fpr what you need’ what do you consider optional coverage, brilliant advances like the intricacies of derivatives are not immune from the laws of economics, no matter how James Cramer says it, something has to fill a vaccuum in the West, if Rome had not fallen, Christianity would have had it’s place, in the East, the fall of Persia, didn’t lead to the rise of Islam, but the latter did fill the space, In India which was Englands set piece, taken by Clive from the French, Aden was taken from the Ottomans Morocco over time was owned by the French the British and the Spanish, now Morocco has taken over at least two of those countries turnabout,
suffragism like Susan B Anthony was probably needed, but then marxists like Bette Freidan got involved, and whatever you might call Gloria Steinem, and the milk turned decidedly sour,
same with the civil rights movement, Plessy was a horror that was not easily remedied because the statutes did not make it easy,
Brown had to happen, perhaps not in the way it happened,
MC: Is there a clever thought in there to which I might respond?
Aspire to excellent writing!
William Manchester held the notion that Christianity had already been watered down by the local tribes, in his intro to the renaissance, in the East the Papacy at some level replaced the political authority of Rome, a necessary evil some of what transpired later, like the disposition of the Cathars, the Crusades, perhaps was overreach, did Jesus intend a great edifice like Vatican City became probably not,
other reform movements exceed their limitations for good or ill, probably the latter,King was remarkably brave and considering the circumstances was quite moderate, those that came after, were intemperate and often corrupt from Jackson to Sharpton, to Ta neisi Coates, in his own mind, the leaders of the anti war movement, had decided at one point, that every institution was as fraught with peril as the state of race relations, thats a charitable impression so every institution had to be dismantled, and rebuilt, now it just so happens that other parties and factions thought the same things, like the Frankfurt school for instance, they had failed at igniting the Revolution in Germany and hence the Nazis took power, then they tried again in the country that welcomed them
Re: Slice o’ life
Today I got a free teeth cleaning!
I have a very nice, professional, high-priced dental group taking care of my mouth. If the dentist advises a procedure, you go into a private talking area with an agent to work out the details. It’s like buying a used car.
Each appointment I’m fighting off all these attempts to upsell me on something. The dentist usually likes to start these conversations with me while I’m upside down in the chair. I wish I could use that negotiating tactic with people.
Anyway today, after a lengthy teeth cleaning, the hygienist went to get my dentist for the quickie exam which goes with the cleaning. But my dentist wasn’t available. so she brought a young female dentist in to pinch hit.
The first thing she did was to lightly stroke my left arm down to my elbow. I don’t like to be touched by strangers, not even young women, so I shrank away. Her response, which I’ve seen before, was to lunge forward to keep contact. Which doesn’t make me feel more comfortable.
Then she goes into a thing about how she’s not sure I want her to be my examining dentist. Me cranky old white guy and she young hispanic female dentist?
I explain that I agreed for her to do the exam, but that I don’t like to be touched by strangers. An interesting conversation to have in these confused times with a thirty year-old woman.
Finally, everything is finished up. I get up to go and my hygienist explained that I had built up credit and this cleaning was free!
I don’t believe I had any credit. I’m pretty sure I was being bought off to avoid some crazy sexual harassment suit.
Well. I’m an honest fellow. I stay bought.
@Huxley
But, who can deny that if the Nazis had stopped somewhere before invading Russia or even invading Poland they would have been better off.
I can, and for good reason. I’m often in the awkward position of praising Hitler’s abilities and judgement in spite of viewing him as an evil monster who was far too full of himself, and that his abilities and judgement were often flawed. But I think this is one of them.
The truth is, Hitler probably would’ve turned on the Soviet Union and tried to conquer up to the mythical A-A Line or the Urals regardless of what happened sooner or later, but as the situation developed the exact timing of this backstab was forced on him and the German military by their failures to force Britain to submit and subsequent losses in personnel and resources fighting the Battle of Britain and the war in the Med.
Halder’s War Diaries supposedly attest to a more than 150 minute speech by Hitler on March 30th, 1941, in which he declared the necessity of Barbarossa, but on somewhat surprising grounds.
“General meeting at Fuehrer Office. Address lasting almost 2 1/2 hours. Situation since 30 June, Mistake of British not to take advantage of chances for peace, Account of subse-quent events. Italy’s conduct of war and policies sharply criticized. Advantages for England resulting from Italian reverses.
England puts her hope in the U.S, and Russia. Detailed review of U.S. capabilities. Maximum output not before end of four years; problem of shipping. Russia’s role and capabilities. Reasons for necessity to settle the Russian situation. Only the final and drastic solution of all land problems will enable us to accomplish within two years our tasks in the air and on the oceans, with the manpower and material resources at our disposal.
So in essence (at least according to Halder) the risk of Anglo-American mobilization (even with the US not yet in the war directly) meant that the Nazis and their allies faced a losing war as it was, and the failure to get the Soviet Union into the Axis (as is borne out by the documents we have of the Hitler-Molotov meetings in the winter of 1940-1) underline that by this theory, the Nazis felt that either they threw the dice and tried to conquer the Soviet Union and take its resources, or they didn’t and fought a long, losing war against the superior resources of the Atlantic World with their East exposed to an untrustworthy and militarily growing “Ally” that might backstab them.
NOW, it should be said: Halder was a remorseless liar and war criminal and we can confirm after the war that he edited parts of his diary and other documents to help make himself look better. And I cannot 100% claim this is not the case here, though the main “tell” I see is his supposed paraphrasing Hitler that the Romanians were “not good at all” and that Antonescu had expanded the military rather than improving it with measured reductions, given how Hitler in general had a very high opinion of Antonescu.
However, this dovetails with a bunch of better evidence from sources that couldn’t be so easily faked like Goebbels’s diaries and administrative reports about a food crisis throughout occupied Europe that the Axis were dependent on Soviet cereals to fix, as well as depleting fuel stocks (ditto but for the Caucasus oil being the source of their dependence).
It also is written in a different metric than many of Halder’s other writings, which I do think indicates it was likely a transcription or shorthand of what Hitler was saying.
Also I partially hate to be “That Guy” but also don’t, but the Axis didn’t invade the Soviet Union in the Fall (neither did Napoleon). They started their campaign in Spring with the hopes (rather optimistically) that it would be over in Fall. For Napoleon this KINDA Worked out, in that he took Moscow and came close to destroying the Russian military in the field at Borodino, but couldn’t clinch the deal either by wiping the Russian military or capturing the Tsar’s court and so he and his troops were forced to retreat in the sweltering Summer heat from a burned Moscow (it wouldn’t be until later that the snows came, which helped destroy his military and made the defeat as decisive as it was but only after the defeat was sealed).
So going into the USSR was probably the best of a series of bad choices the Axis had after Hitler bungled the Axis-Soviet talks for Soviet entry and alliance (and over frankly very petty terms).
I am persuaded that humans will overreach. It’s in our nature. Consider Christianity’s overreach into a viciously intolerant religion as it gained power.
I mean the early Church was already prone to intolerance and bitter schisms even early on, much like its Jewish parent (and I say this as a Christian and proud champion of the Abrahamic influence). Though basically replacing the Roman Imperial Cult and taking over its infrastructure for repression and dogmatic spreading didn’t help (as a former Roman re-enactor, if I hear another person peddle the “Tolerant Polytheism/Tolerant Romans” tripe again…).
well from what I know of Mein Kampf, his pet peeves were the Jews and the Slavs, many of which were in the East, now he decided for reasons to expand operations in Yugoslavia, which did not turn out well, that delayed the Russian invasion, by an interval, than General Winter started fighting back, he was always going to kill as many of the first two categories, in the West they were probably a llittle surprised the French and Dutch auxiliaries were even more bloodthirsty than the Nazis themselves, same with the Ustache and the OUN
for many of the German officer corps they went along with the little corporal because Alsace Lorraine, the impositions of Versailles, as usual Keynes got part of the story, but not the most important part, we overvalue the hyper- inflation which was certainly a shock by the devaluation that happened after 1931 was critical, we know how after the war we made allowances for Gehlen for Wolf and a host of other characters for reasons,
huxley, we also have a group dental practice. The male dentist is very sensible, and the woman is always trying to sell something extra. Do I need braces at age 75? But so far neither one has stroked me. You must be more attractive than I am. 🙂
huxley:
Please, please read John Updike’s short story, “Tristan and Iseult.” It’s in The Afterlife and Other Stories.
@Miguel Cervantes
well from what I know of Mein Kampf, his pet peeves were the Jews and the Slavs, many of which were in the East,
MK is useful but it should be be seen in counterpart with Hitler’s
Unpublished Second Book, meant as a sequel to MK, which specified the threats of “Finance Capital” and capitalism, and how the Nazis needed to unite Europe, build up a navy, and destroy the US.
He certainly hated most Slavs and all Jews but I think looking MK alone leads to misconceptions on his demonology.
now he decided for reasons to expand operations in Yugoslavia, which did not turn out well, that delayed the Russian invasion, by an interval,
Yugoslavia had a coup that threw out the government under the Prince Regent that adhered Yugoslavia to the Axis (with the coup financed and supported by the British but with some after the fact Communist support, more reason for the Nazis to believe the Soviets were starting to betray them). The actual invasion went smoothly but the after effects did not. Of course a lot of this was started by Mussolini picking a fight with Greece while losing the Med War.
Though honestly we’re not sure it delayed the invasion of the USSR for various reasons, like the land not being firm enough.
than General Winter started fighting back,
Sure though this had more to do with how Halder and co had badly botched planning for Barbarossa and how the Axis as a whole were massively overconfident in what they would be able to do in a campaigning season.
he was always going to kill as many of the first two categories,
Agreed.
in the West they were probably a llittle surprised the French and Dutch auxiliaries were even more bloodthirsty than the Nazis themselves, same with the Ustache and the OUN
The Ustasha legitimately surprised them, and the OUN they used and then tried to dispose of soon after the invasion, but they actively worked to recruit the most merciless among their auxiliaries in the West and elsewhere and still struggled to compete with as bad as the likes of Jaeger and Heydrich.
for many of the German officer corps they went along with the little corporal because Alsace Lorraine, the impositions of Versailles,
I think this gets overstated. The German Officer Corps had been a sewer for ultranationalist, quasi socialist, anti-capitalist, murderously anti-Slavic and anti-Gypsy, and somewhat anti/Jewish sentiment for decades. They had lost Alsace-Lorraine and had Versailles imposed on them in large part by their brutality and attempts to fight a crusade against capitalist democracy and a host of others in WWI. They disagreed with Hitler on method, intent, and how socially radical and anti-monarchist he was (as well as classism and his Austrian-Bavarian yokel rep) but they believed very similar things on the whole.
as usual Keynes got part of the story, but not the most important part, we overvalue the hyper- inflation which was certainly a shock by the devaluation that happened after 1931 was critical, we know how after the war we made allowances for Gehlen for Wolf and a host of other characters for reasons,
Keynes I believe was one of the most destructive of the self-hating, arrogant, holier than thou intellectuals the devaluation was crucial, as was hyperinflation, but Keynes’s leeriness at patriotism and the British cause led him to being conned about things like German economic duplicity (such as lying about the results) and what they had already hoped to do.
It is somewhat telling that the work that made him famous was a horribly incompetent, credulous, and wrong accounting of German reparations payments that he was forced to roll back due to how it showed he had been duped.
To the extent Hitler’s reasoning is reflected in Turtler’s excerpt, Hitler might well have been having sleepless nights over being in a losing situation.
The only way out was to beat Russia–RUSSIA!–handily. Anybody west of Prague ever look at a map? I think it was Keegan who said attacking Russia was like attacking into a fan–the triangle kind. For every mile forward, your front expands by several times that or you’ll be flanked.
He had his famous panzergrenadier divisions, but they needed gas. Everybody else was supplied by horses once the rail head was reached.
So the overreach was, in fact, starting the war. The general staff knew they didn’t have resources to match the total of the likely combination of adversaries. Going to make do with the Aryan supersoldier and the famed German engineering.
But maybe they figured the French caving on the Rhineland in 36 and the Brits’ peace in their time in 38 meant the fight wouldn’t be that bad.
Balck, the best German general nobody ever heard of said in his autobio about poor Germany, always surrounded by enemies and forced to strike first. Plus, if Carl’s realm hadn’t been divided, Europe would have been better off.
Guys like this were running around loose.
You can google earth Poland and see that if Hitler had managed to make it Slav-free, he’d have had all the lebensraum–the kind with flat fields and good soil–he could use. Stop there.
So, yeah, overreach, but excusable in a sense if the enemy’s various reactions had been as predicted.
Mussolini said, once that the English, “Once a race of magnificent adventurers are now a line of tired rich men’s sons.” Must have been reading about Bertie and Jeeves and missing the change in tone when Bertie referred to “The code of the Woosters”. Or wishful thinking.
huxley,
It’s rare I find an opportunity to type this in regards to you; but you’ve got it all backwards. Or upside down. What I mean is, you’ve put the horse behind the cart.
“… when humans are being human, i.e. taking everything too far …”
Human nature for some humans, perhaps, but they are the minority. I would wager most humans are reluctant to take things even as far as half way. Ask everyone you know, aged 60 or older, if they could be 20 again and relive another 4, 5 or 6 decades would they take fewer risks, or more? I think most people regret being too meek, not going far enough. And I think they are right.
Some people do go too far, but that percentage of homo sapiens is too small to attribute their behavior to, “human nature.”
Based on the examples you cite, a better aphorism would be; greedy people will take any available tool/system and deploy it in their quest for conquest/money/fame.
Christianity. Did Jesus or His apostles “go too far?” No. “Shake the dust off your feet, etc, etc.” Did their immediate followers living under the yoke of the Roman Empire go too far? No. But when Christianity gained enough traction to be a useful tool/system some humans bent on power used it for their selfish purposes.
Civil rights. Did Dr. King go too far? Rosa Parks? No. But when their cause became dominant, corrupt people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton used it to gain power, money and fame.
Feminism. Did the Suffragettes go too far? Susan B. Anthony? No.
George Washington stepped aside after two terms. Kings and Queens abdicate thrones for love. The vast majority of military leaders heed their nations’ call to return rather than crossing the Rubicon with their forces.
Some people are corrupt and greedy and those people will use whatever is advantageous for personal gain, but they are a minority, thank God, and rarely have anything to do with the true nature of the causes they have cloaked themselves in.
I think Lord Acton said it best, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,
Someone else said, every cause eventually becomes a racket, Keynes took certain things that were obvious, Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not handler Versailles right, and then overgeneralized, deficit spending can be useful in peace time, then they made it into a hammer that threatens to drown the world,
the French post Napoleon 3rd overreached as is their want, the tripartite alliance that was supposed to prevent war, greated a bigger one, that takes nothing away from Kaiser Wilhelms Megalomania, but the result wasn’t helpful Ferguson thinks it was the pity of the war, as his first big popular non academic texts, the ones about he Rothchilds came later,
we were lucky with Washington but then the Revolution was more an evolution, when it throughs caution to the wind, as the French and Russian ones, some 120 years apart, Inherit the Wind, the revolutionary power that rises is terrifying for a time,
Regarding the post topic,
I mostly agree with the narrator; it’s the hard consonant sounds and gutturals. However, as many have already pointed out; German can sound soft and typically does in most situations. It truly sounds beautiful when my German wife speaks it.
Italian makes a point to try to ensure words beginning with consonants follow words ending in vowels and words beginning in vowels follow words ending in consonants, which makes if flow smoothly. Other languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese) do similar things with their masculine, feminine and neuter nouns and articles. And, of course, German does this also (gender), but regardless of gender too many of the German article declensions end in consonants to help with flow. Der, die, das, dem, den and des. 5 out of 6 end in consonants.
I find English rather harsh and primitive sounding, as Italian pop star Adriano Celentano demonstrated with his hit song, “Prisencolinensinainciusol.”
there is speculation that the mirror universe in star trek is the Roman empire extending to the stars, I think that is a reach, just like the planet where the Roman Empire endured to 20th Century technology, all things are possible in the multiverse, ‘is this the best of all possible worlds’ in Moliere’s jibe about Leibniz, probably all things considered, consider how many things could have gone wrong just in the last hundred years, is it really the best, thats an interesting question
I once asked German friends if English sounds to them like butchered German (since so often we make fun of German as being funny English). Yes, they said, it does!
Kate,
I think you can get a sense of what English sounds like to non-English speakers by listening to Old English. This recitation of the opening of “Beowulf” is a good example: https://youtu.be/CH-_GwoO4xI?si=PER1d8gIbBQK3IHj
Regarding human nature, when I read this by Andrew Klavan twelve years ago it hit me almost precisely as he describes it hitting him: https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-joke
I first laughed a bit. Then didn’t laugh. Then laughed more. I couldn’t get it out of my head and within about a week it became one of my favorite jokes. Yet, almost no one I’ve told it to has laughed.
huxley, it’s not human nature to go too far, but it is human nature to ask for an orange for a head.
@Richard Aubrey
To the extent Hitler’s reasoning is reflected in Turtler’s excerpt, Hitler might well have been having sleepless nights over being in a losing situation.
Agreed. To be honest he was in an unenviable position to begin with and had screwed himself badly exploiting it. His cunning and bravado had worked well up to that point and he was not the worst at seizing opportunities, but he was also not the Greatest Of All History he thought he was.
To be honest I feel his best option was a Four Legged Axis; Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and either Japan or China. Bits the bullet, swallow the pride and racial issues and agree to Molotov’s terms in the Winter of 1940 to secure the resources needed to defeat or at least repulse the Western Allies and subdue Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. You can betray each other later if you want.
But Hitler’s bungling over the negotiations screwed that.
The only way out was to beat Russia–RUSSIA!–handily. Anybody west of Prague ever look at a map? I think it was Keegan who said attacking Russia was like attacking into a fan–the triangle kind. For every mile forward, your front expands by several times that or you’ll be flanked.
I feel Keegan and the others overstate this much. Russia is and was formidable, but it was not invincible. Moreover, while the fronts were always going to be gigantic and the commitments massive, flanking was dependent on the enemy being able to get resources and troops there. Bigger issues were the risk of being “flanked from behind/below” from rebellions or partisans; which is what happened to a large degree.
But a lot of people like going off on the Axis with comparison to Napoleon’s Grand Armee and Charles XII’s Swedes and whatnot, but they pointedly overlook WWI, when the Central Powers beat the tar out of the Russian Empire and its Allies and won the war on the Eastern Front under the command of Hindenburg and Proto-Hitler Ludendorff. Moreover, Russia has a generally mediocre track record when it comes to major wars. We usually remember the major victories but not its defeats like umpteen Mongol raids on Moscow or WWI.
So the Axis had better cause than we often think to believe they could beat the Soviets soundly. After all, their victories over Russia had helped create the Soviet Union in the last war.
The big issue I see is how in WWI they were helped by the Russian command going on the offensive to try and meet their allied commitments (especially to the Serbs and Montenegrins) and protect the industrial hearths in the Vistula, while Ludendorff and Hindenburg also played power politics and divide-and-conquer much better. The Axis did not and were exceptionally brutal to the public at large, which helped recruit for the enemy.
He had his famous panzergrenadier divisions, but they needed gas. Everybody else was supplied by horses once the rail head was reached.
Yup. And it is telling that the German military was already suffering gas shortages (and they’d become critical in 1942), and even before Barbarossa the Germans were undergoing limited de-mechanization. Ditching some tanks, trucks, and whatnot for mules and horses.
So the overreach was, in fact, starting the war.
From our point of view that is true. I am not so sure it wa so absolute though. Then again I am one of those weirdos that does think the Axis could have won WWII, albeit it was always a slim chance.
The general staff knew they didn’t have resources to match the total of the likely combination of adversaries.
Not really. They knew they were going to be outgunned and outnumbered and out produced but they did believe they could muster enough resources for a crucial victory. Which worked up to a point. Indeed one of the major problems with Barbarossa was Halder believing the lessons of Poland and France and the general conduct could be transposed to the European USSR, and his decision to commit one of history’s great insubordinations but shifting Barbarossa from focusing on Ukraine and the Caucasus in the South to focusing it on Moscow in Army Group Center without Hitler’s knowledge until after the war.
Going to make do with the Aryan supersoldier and the famed German engineering.
But maybe they figured the French caving on the Rhineland in 36 and the Brits’ peace in their time in 38 meant the fight wouldn’t be that bad.
Indeed.
Balck, the best German general nobody ever heard of said in his autobio about poor Germany, always surrounded by enemies and forced to strike first. Plus, if Carl’s realm hadn’t been divided, Europe would have been better off.
Balck was remarkable but I remember his autobiography having a bunch of holes and lies, and in particular about his servile currying of favor with Hitler and weighing results.
Guys like this were running around loose.
Agreed
You can google earth Poland and see that if Hitler had managed to make it Slav-free, he’d have had all the lebensraum–the kind with flat fields and good soil–he could use. Stop there.
I disagree. For starters, good soil was important and desired but it put a limit on how far the Reich could go. Moreover it wasn’t the most important of the limited resources, with things like oil, ores, and the like. For that you need to go further East to the Caucasus and Ukraine.
Moreover, it is obscenely difficult to defend the Vistula and Poland’s Eastern Frontiers because of the lack of natural boundaries, especially after centuries of deforestation. I am generally loathe to give much credit for the idea of the “Eternal Struggle of Germans and Slavs” but it was a vulnerable faultline.
And in any case the second and third German Reichs needed the resources of Europe from Central Europe to the Urals in order to help build a world winning nav force:
So, yeah, overreach, but excusable in a sense if the enemy’s various reactions had been as predicted.
Agreed.
Mussolini said, once that the English, “Once a race of magnificent adventurers are now a line of tired rich men’s sons.” Must have been reading about Bertie and Jeeves and missing the change in tone when Bertie referred to “The code of the Woosters”. Or wishful thinking.
Agreed. Especially given the problems Mussolini knew with his proxies, like Al-Husseini getting his teeth kicked in in the Palestinian Mandate.
Rufus T. Firefly:
By human nature, I don’t mean humans will do “X” 100% of the time and in 100% of situations, but that humans have a strong tendency to do “X,” however much we might wish otherwise.
The classic conservative argument against the left is that selfishness is human nature and the leftist notion that humans will reliably put the needs of the group over their own self-interest is false.
The most brilliant pop exploration of how phonemes can sound like language even if they are nonsense.
I’m getting better at hearing French, but it comes slowly.
You must be more attractive than I am. 🙂
Kate:
That’s not they way I’m betting, but thanks anyway. 🙂
@miguel cervantes
<blockquote I think Lord Acton said it best, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,
Agreed.
Someone else said, every cause eventually becomes a racket,
IIRC that was Eric Hoffer.
Keynes took certain things that were obvious,
Many things that seem obvious aren’t.
Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not handler Versailles right,
Versailles is a classic problem of something designed by committee that satisfies nobody. Clemenceau and Lloyd George made their mistakes, as did Wilson (personally I favor Clemenceau’s reading of the situation most, but then I am biased), but ultimately there were going to be many die hards among the Central Powers that would never accept defeat. Kemal Mustafa and Ludendorff are indications fo them/
and then overgeneralized, deficit spending can be useful in peace time, then they made it into a hammer that threatens to drown the world,
Agreed, and to be fair to Keynes he DID say that there were times that the government should run surpluses, especially during peacetime. He either overlooked or undercounted the idea that deficit spending would be such an attractive tool it would be used with little end.
the French post Napoleon 3rd overreached as is their want,
Indeed, from France to the Rhine. And it ultimately cost him and his dynasty their throne and France much.
the tripartite alliance that was supposed to prevent war, greated a bigger one,
I disagree. The Triple Entente was probably supposed to prevent war (with some question marks regarding France and Russia), but the Triple Alliance was meant to grease the skids towards war. And as much as I like dumping on Wilhelm II this wasn’t his problem. Bismarck was bent on trying to goad the French into another war and for the past couple decades of his public life he was borderline imitating a washed up rockstar trying to provoke the French to relive his glory days, apparently ignoring how the French had learned.
that takes nothing away from Kaiser Wilhelms Megalomania,
Wilhelm’s megalomania was an important driver but I don’t think the result of it.
but the result wasn’t helpful Ferguson thinks it was the pity of the war, as his first big popular non academic texts, the ones about he Rothchilds came later,
I found Ferguson’s Pity of War to largely ring hollow for me. It isn’t the worst text out there (See: Sleepwalkers or worse), but I do think he seriously downplayed the importance of people like Hoetzendorff and Gaslee. A rare one.
we were lucky with Washington but then the Revolution was more an evolution, when it throughs caution to the wind, as the French and Russian ones, some 120 years apart, Inherit the Wind, the revolutionary power that rises is terrifying for a time,
Agreed there. And I keep wondering what we will see now. I fear we are at the abyss edge again…
I think the role of Franz Xaver Josef Conrad von Hötzendorf is paramount to blundering the world into world war. His army wasn’t nearly as good as he thought and the Russians were logistically a lot better than he thought even though the Germans had warned him about both. Perhaps a modicum of less drumbeating out of this bozo might have tempered Austria. Nope, this dope wanted preventative war with Italy and Serbia.
@ huxley > “how phonemes can sound like language even if they are nonsense.”
Listen to toddlers just beginning to talk.
It is obvious from their facial expressions that they expect you to understand what they are saying, the vocal inflections are clearly patterned after English structure, and yet there are no recognizable words in their patter.
And yes, the song is brilliant.
Reminded me of these stories from a few years back.
So English tees are basically the equivalent of those Chinese character tattoos people love to get without actually knowing what they mean, only the tees can be easily removed…”
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/04/whats-deal-t-shirts-random-japanese-writing/
“Browse any clothing store and you’ll more than likely find at least one t-shirt covered in characters using the Japanese writing system. And if you can actually read Japanese, you’ve probably noticed that what’s written is often gibberish. Rather interestingly, the reverse is also popular in Japan, where one can find many a t-shirt with random English words instead. So how did this all start and why isn’t anyone bothering to check the meanings?”
Another interesting facet of human nature.
In re today’s video: I know some German, and AesopSpouse is reasonably fluent due to his mission there in the seventies, and I agree with most of the observations in the comments: any language sounds aggressive if you use it that way; any language sounds beautiful if you use it that way.
However, as a musician, I find it much easier to sing Italian, French, and even Welsh, than to sing German, and they are more pleasant to listen to as well (with all due respect to Brahms et al.).
English is the worst.
Open Thread prerogative: a very important article by Alex Berenson, which is on X because that was the deal he made with Musk to get access to the documents in the Twitter archives.
Biden Administration operative to suppress criticism of Covid vaccines on X, newly released internal documents from X show.
Top officials at Twitter (now X) viewed the men – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer director, and Andy Slavitt, the operative, who had officially left a senior White House post just weeks before – as speaking for the administration in their censorship demands, the documents show.
The new documents raise constitutional and legal concerns about the Biden Administration’s social media censorship efforts, as well as Pfizer’s role in banning criticism of a product that made up almost half its sales in 2021.
Within days, the Supreme Court is expected to decide Murthy v Missouri, a landmark lawsuit over the administration’s efforts to control debate on social media. The new documents provide crucial perspective on the Missouri case, showing how far would-be censors went in 2021 to prop up public confidence in the Covid jabs. The documents also show the power the White House had over Twitter, which badly wanted to avoid a confrontation with it.
I find it much easier to sing Italian, French, and even Welsh, than to sing German, and they are more pleasant to listen to as well (with all due respect to Brahms et al.).
English is the worst.
I don’t sing at that level, but as a listener I agree with your statement. It seemed a cruel irony of history that so many brilliant composers were native German speakers. And even foreigners tend to write their pop music lyrics in English, although English is not a great language for singing. Mark Steyn wrote a brilliant essay on the limits of rhyming the English word, “love” with its foreign counterparts. https://www.steynonline.com/7463/the-language-of-love
German may or may not sound harsh, but there is no arguing Dutch is the silliest sounding language.
huxley,
I disagree that selfishness is human nature. Immature people are often selfish, but any human paying proper attention to the world, and other humans, matures out of that. If selfishness were human nature why would any woman have a child? Why would any man share his wages with his family? Look at most professions we all aspired to as kids; mother, nurse, policeman, fireman, soldier, teacher… We understood maturing into human adults meant serving.
Covetousness and envy are harder traits to mature out of.
Rufus T Firefly:
Swedish is the silliest tounge, especially in the the kitchen. 🙂
If y’all think High German sounds harsh, listen to some Arabic.
Turtler
Couple of notes:
In WW I, the Russians had a revolution brewing. Stalin had better control. They’d made huge strides in industrialization, due in large part to western managers and engineers in the Thirties.
I don’t do rivet counting, but one guy made an interesting observation: If the French had deployed a thousand of the Ma Deuce, the German move in 1940 would have stalled. It was designed to be an anti-tank weapon for the armor of the time. And you can hump it.
Which leads to a story dated from pre-Barbarossa times; As a trust-building measure, officers from one military visited the other’s military establishments. One group of Russians, being shown a German tank factory, admired courteously the products and inquired where the heavies were made. These are the heavies, said the Germans. Russians looked dubious. Germans didn’t make the connection.
Russia and Germany split Poland in 39. If Hitler had stopped there, he’d have had his living space and if he hadn’t betrayed the Pact, he wouldn’t have had to defend anything.
The late Dennis Showalter wrote on Kursk and Tannenberg. In each, he detailed the professionalism and preparation of the German army. Likely looking at the pre-war ideal, but it was clear they were readier than any opponent at least at the start.
Quantity, said Stalin, has a quality all its own. That goes for distance, as well. Every step forward demands more resources to bring up other resources. While retreating shortens supply lines. Even a second lieutenant knows this.
The fact remains, the Germans were hoping for some kind of a military/political miracle. Their professionals knew better but allowed themselves to be fooled, led into wishful thinking, hoped for the best to the extent they expected it.
But there was the Oxford Union declaration of 1933 which might have been a factor.
@Richard Aubrey
In WW I, the Russians had a revolution brewing. Stalin had better control.
Agreed, though this came at the direct cost of an even more timid, doctrinaire, and hidebound military and a discontent, traumatized, and in some cases like Ukraine decimated population.
They’d made huge strides in industrialization, due in large part to western managers and engineers in the Thirties.
Sure but they were also making gigantic strides in industrialization through the turn of the century. Indeed in 1905 the Russian Empire was either the fastest industrializing country on Earth or close to it, and this was picked up and acknowledged (albeit with problems) by the German and Habsburg leadership. But industrialization could only offset problems of leadership and doctrine so much, and so the Russian troops fighting a forward deployment war generally got beaten. This led to Revolution, Civil War, the Soviet era, and about 20 some years of more or less colossal waste of time, resources, and lives trying to develop and often failing or mis developing the country (there is no good reason for Norilsk to exist, certainly not in the way it does, ditto the White Sea Canal). They kicked out Western capital and experts in 1918-9 and wound up having to invite them back about a decade later. It is really hard for me to understate the squandering on a massive level.
If there are two things the Soviets did that “helped” to some degree it was the focus on militarization and heavy industry for the planned world war (they intended to start). Which had certain benefits. But it came as a package deal with wretchedly cruel leadership, dozens of millions of peacetime deaths, and forward deployments even more reckless than the Tsarist leadership in 1914 did and with greater immorality to boot, spreading the military out thinly near the borders where they could and would be penetrated, enveloped, and cut to pieces by the Axis.
I don’t do rivet counting, but one guy made an interesting observation: If the French had deployed a thousand of the Ma Deuce, the German move in 1940 would have stalled. It was designed to be an anti-tank weapon for the armor of the time. And you can hump it.
Ma Deuce’s deployment would be dependent on where it was deployed to make a difference. Frankly the German offensives in 1940 should have stalled far short of what they actually achieved in either Norway or the Continental West, if not both. But daring German leadership and decent command control plus spectacularly inflexible and hidebound Western Allied leadership (plus a fundamental refusal by many of the leadership to fight it out) resulted in things like the Danish military and Social Democrats in Parliament pressuring their King to capitulate, the Brits, French, and Poles teaming up with the Norwegians to devastate the German surface fleet and retake Narvik only to get word of what was happening later and evacuate, letting Northern Norway fall to the Nazis again by default, the Allied leadership falling for a ruse and overcommitting to the North only to get flanked, and so on. And I am just summarizing some of the points.
My point is, if those 1,000 Ma Deuce get sent North with what were viewed as the cream of the cream Western Allied troops to try and repulse what they believe are the main thrust of the Axis in Belgium, they’re not going to do much good as Rommel and co sweep around the flank and trap them against the sea. Ditto if they get sent with the French expedition to the Netherlands, and so on.
And even if they do have an effect there’s no guarantee things like the French going wobbly will stop it.
And that’s before we talked about how the Germans have some fairly easy counters to MGs positions with artillery, fairly responsive air power, and combat engineers.
War material is important but wars are ultimately fought by men with weapons, not by weapons themselves. And frankly the truly fatal problems the Western Allies faced in 1933-40 was not their equipment. And indeed many of the weaknesses in their equipment were reflective of failures of leadership such as the failure to rearm (or in the case of Denmark and its idiotic “Unarmed Neutrality” arm at all, at least after its defeat in 1864 to the Germans).
And even in spite of all this the Germans should not have done half as well as they did, and sometimes it came down to truly absurd and horrifying coincidences like the Anglo-French GHQ not acknowledging one recon pilot’s report of a massive German traffic jam in the Ardennes.
Which leads to a story dated from pre-Barbarossa times; As a trust-building measure, officers from one military visited the other’s military establishments. One group of Russians, being shown a German tank factory, admired courteously the products and inquired where the heavies were made. These are the heavies, said the Germans. Russians looked dubious. Germans didn’t make the connection.
To be fair I am not sure either were particularly fooled. The cooperation between the two went vastly beyond simple trust building visits, especially since between Seeckt’s secret alliance with the Soviets in I think it was 1923 and about 1936 (if not 1940) the assumption was that German and Soviet forces would fight alongside one another against mutual enemies like the Western Allies and the cordon sanitaire nations, and they kept well abreast of each others’ doctrines and equipment (in part because they had to as each others’ key trade partners and strategic partners).
Russia and Germany split Poland in 39. If Hitler had stopped there, he’d have had his living space
No, no he would not.
Firstly: Hitler was never in a position to simply “stop there” after splitting Poland in the same way he was at least theoretically (notwithstanding probable economic collapse) after the Rhineland, Saarland, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia.
A: because the carve up of Poland was part of a grander bargain for the carve up of Eastern and Central Europe as a whole from the White Sea to the Black Sea; some of which involved Hitler being willing to give support to Stalin in places like Finland and Romania. If he reneges on the deal he is left with enemies and rivals on all sides except arguably due South and North.
B: Germany is still fundamentally a boxed in continental power, and Hitler learned at least some of the lessons of WWI fairly well. He stop with the division of Poland, he is ruling over a basket Empire under Western Allied blockade and bombardment with the never ending risk they will sweep in to further asphyxiate his resources by say occupying Narvik. His dream of a German Reich withers under multiple Hunger Winters.
C: As a matter of belief and ideology Hitler did not believe in stopping, as shown by his references about existence being a state of war for limited resources and how alliances not intended to wage war are foolish. And while less limiting or concrete than A and B they also show how it wasn’t just practicality that helped push him forward (though there was plenty of that, at least for a certain ground of practical). I have never yet found if Hitler actually studied the WWI German plans for a “Polish Border Strip” in spite of how eerily similar some aspects of their versions of the plans are with his, but he’d have quickly realized some of what they did: in order to have a defensible “Polish Border” they’d need to fix the Eastern Flank somewhere Southeast of the Belarusian Forest and marshes.
and if he hadn’t betrayed the Pact, he wouldn’t have had to defend anything.
That assumes Stalin would not have betrayed the Pact, and to be blunt while I despise having to play devil’s advocate for Hitler, one could ask the Finns, Latvians, Poles, Romanians, Estonians, and Lithuanians how his track record with pacts was. Stalin’s Soviet Union was easily the most messianic and warmongering of the interwar powers with the POSSIBLE exception of the various Japanese cliques, and unlike those he had fairly united leadership. He had spent the 1920s and 1930s in significant border conflicts with many of his neighbors like Afghanistan and Estonia. He had signed many guarantees for peace and border integrity such as the Treaties of Tartu and the Peace of Riga, and then broke them in cooperation with Hitler.
I reject the idea Barbarossa was a “defensive” or “preemptive” war as the Nazis tried to sell it; the Soviet military was still recovering from the purges and reforming and was not competent for offensive action, and Stalin at least for the time being had little interest in turning on Hitler. However it would be a fool to believe there was no chance that Stalin would betray the pact and attack Germany; and it would be a politically clueless fool to believe so after helping to seize domestic totalitarian power by playing up the Soviet scare (real and perceived).
I do blame Hitler for torpedoing the Pact and particularly the chance to get the Soviets as members of the Axis, but I do not blame him (at least practically; he obviously deserves blame from a moral and legal sense) for not “stopping” after Poland or assuming Stalin’s good graces might not last forever.
The late Dennis Showalter wrote on Kursk and Tannenberg. In each, he detailed the professionalism and preparation of the German army. Likely looking at the pre-war ideal, but it was clear they were readier than any opponent at least at the start.
Agreed, and I am a fan of Showalter (and he was more than capable of showcasing the flaws of that prewar professionalism, like the truly jaw dropping failure to prepare for Belgium in 1914 for about a decade).
Quantity, said Stalin, has a quality all its own. That goes for distance, as well. Every step forward demands more resources to bring up other resources. While retreating shortens supply lines. Even a second lieutenant knows this.
Largely true, and this is one reason why the German logistics staff were the only people to make coordinated and consistent objections to the Pie in the Sky fantasy that was the operational plans for Barbarossa (Goebbels expressed skepticism about if the objectives could be met but this didn’t really reach to the level of objection).
The fact remains, the Germans were hoping for some kind of a military/political miracle.
Yes they were, especially against the West. Their plans against their major continental opponents ranged from moderately to significantly more practical but were still on the optimistic side.
Their professionals knew better but allowed themselves to be fooled, led into wishful thinking, hoped for the best to the extent they expected it.
Not really. SOME of their professionals knew better, particularly in the logistics. But the German General Staff had a long history of overoptimism. Indeed the 1866 War with the Habsburgs and their Allies (usually viewed as a stellar acid test for the General Staff and a signal victory for Prussia) nearly turned the other way because of how the General Staff failed to calculate enough food for their troops, leading to a soft mutiny mid war that Moltke the Elder had to personally iron out. The centerpiece of German strategic planning in the leadup to WWI was a series of very rough draft conceptual plans that even I am not sure how to describe but which were very obviously half baked, not formally managed, and failed to account for things like proper portage and food for the “Strong Right Flank” through Belgium but which were more or less carried forward through Groupthink.
And it was a “professional” like Halder that took the already conspicuously overoptimistic debacle that was the starting operational plans for Barbarossa and made them worse than even Hitler’s first draft by trying to Yolo for Moscow. And it was Goering – probably the single most accomplished Air Force man in the world at the time (as an accomplished air ace and heir to the Red Baron as squadron command) – who told the Nazi leadership he could probably force Britain to capitulate by bombings, with the failure there helping to force Hitler to either ally with or destroy the Soviets in the very immediate future. Obviously these are focusing on the low points (in contrast to the admittedly contentious but ultimately successful plan for Sickle Cut and the brilliant rush work of Operation 25, the plan to invade Yugoslavia), but the fact remains that we have systematic overconfidence. And ironically that wasn’t always fatal. It was just the combination of tin eared diplomacy, ongoing wars, and exceptional brutality (especially our East) turned a tough uphill climb to a probable doom.
But then German and especially Prussian operational doctrine and Grand strategy was in some ways contingent on hoping for some kind of military/political miracle through the offensive, because otherwise they would not last. Even as far back as the 1300s and 1400s the ancestors of the Hohenzollern had experienced the cost of trying to fight too reactively to an enemy with superior resources, which led to them being beaten down by a Polish-Lithuanian Alliance (followed up by urban civilian uprisings), with the Teutonic Order and then the Hohenzollern forced to submit humiliatingly as vassals to Poland. Attempts by previous Margraves of Brandenburg to defend everything in the 1500s and 1600s resulted in them losing basically everything, first to the Habsburgs and Wallenstein and then to the Danes and especially Swedes (financed and largely armed with French Gold and supported by Swedish naval superiority). These were the kind of stories that would be learned by centuries of Germans (and especially the Brandenburg-Prussia leadership), and helped inform Soldier-Elector Fred Wilhelm (Frederic the Great’s abusive father) with his response to a Swedish invasion in 1679 by gathering as many sleighs as he could and sweeping around to cut the Swedish army off so it filtered of hunger and cold. His son fairly skillfully balanced British and French interests (and their vast naval and financial assets) to help turn Prussia into a continental power by aggressively invading Saxony and Silesia, but nearly collapsed twice from defeats to his army near Berlin only to be saved by mostly raw luck. Which presaged the actual defeat at the hands of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic French (and underlined the limitations of counting on rich overseas Allie’s with big pockets and naval superiority).
The century or so after Jena and Auerstadt is probably the most important in modern German military history as far as doctrine goes as the likes of Gneisenau and co went over the debacle of 1806 and tried to piece out what was wrong, helping to gradually reform the Prussian military and government into a nation at arms able to evict the French occupation (at least after it was weakened by the British and Iberians in Spain and the Russians in Russia), and then had their successors hone it into a force able to wage war against its neighbors and its own people to cement Prussian hegemony over Germany and Hohenzollern and military hegemony over Germany. And this mostly worked (with some hiccups like the aforementioned “the army ran out of food” near Miss in 1866). But in large part by a mixture of mass mobilization, clever technological and doctrinal work, and calculated diplomatic alliances and aggression so they would only fight a certain number of enemies at one time and they would do it quickly before the other powers had a chance to change this. But they were still costly, involved tolerating enemy naval superiority over their shores (especially with the Danes and French), and began to fall apart as more countries took the threat of a United Germany seriously. And their longtime Russian ally reacted to Bismarck trying to goad France into a war in the 1880s by threatening to invade.
Hitler and his generation were exceptionally reckless and repulsive gamblers, but they were also from a military tradition that emphasized looking for or trying to create miracles. And frankly when facing enemies from the Atlantic and an uncertain Russia they needed some of that.
But there was the Oxford Union declaration of 1933 which might have been a factor.
It was a factor but nowhere near as much. I have rarely seen it mentioned in the private writings of the German military or Nazi Party leadership (though it did not come across as well). Far more important was Hitler’s assessment of Western weakness to other powers like the Turks and to how Britain and France dealt with Mussolini and Himself. Hence his much quoted statement about how he had met the enemy and they were “worms” regarding Munich. And in some ways it was truer than even he had expected given the spectacular French collapse of will in 1940 and how narrowly Britain remained in the war.
Was the Russian spring offensive in the north (Kharkhiv) a feint, a way to fool and fix Ukrainian reserves, or a Vladdy failure?
I don’t know, however a few things that don’t favor Vlad have resulted:
a) Ukraine now has permission to use western supplied long range precision missiles and
JDAMS on Russia
b) Ukraine will be allowed to engage Russian warplanes over Russia with western SAMs.
Unintended consequences, Vladdy?
Soltzhenitsyn thought the okrana enabled stolypins death and that might have made a difference they were also the ones behind the spreading of the protocols without which mass antisemitism wouldnt have gained such an audience (my speculation) there had been another revolution over the war in japan see belys petersburg so it wasnt surprising of course this was before the azev revelations and his ties to thr okrana
Now to cut the british and french govts some slack they had seen verdun passchandeale ypres they didnt want to go through that again
Rufus T. Firefly:
My impression is that your comments keep shifting the onus to me as though I’m arguing that humans are 100% overreaching or 100% selfish.
I’m not. I’m recognizing that overreach and selfishness are substantial forces in human behavior, often, though not always, more powerful than risk avoidance and altruism.
Relying on the better angels of our nature to always prevail is foolish.
Besides degaulle was there any other top french officer with strategic sense and/or were they still hung up on the dreyfus
affair
Lets put it this way how often do those in financial or govt leadership know their limitations you can look at subprime or derivatives you can look at engagements in south asia or the near east you can look at fauci or the people behind the tuskegee experiment
huxley,
I’m “arguing” in fun, and I assume you are also, but I do not agree that selfishness is “human nature.” Whether one believes in evolution or divine creation, baking selfishness into our DNA or souls is not a recipe for perpetuating the species.
I also disagree with your claim regarding over reach. Do you not agree with my contention that most older adults, reviewing their lives, wish they had been less meek, taking more chances? If over reach is our default mode then, when examining our lives in our dotage we’d wish we had been less aggressive, less impulsive. It’s neo’s favorite poet, Robert Frost’s “road less taken.” We tend to take the safe road and that’s why it is the road most taken.
It’s the pyramid structure of most every human organization. Many wish they were on the top, but few have the nature to dare to risk all to get there.
In “standard usage” English (e.g., not a specialist term tied to something like chemistry, computers, physics, biology, or mathematics), the longest word in “common” usage is supposed to be: antidesestablishmentarianism”
or some variant thereof. That one is only 28 letters, a third of his extreme example.
The longest legit “standard usage” word that is not a common word (Thank you, Robert Heinlein… It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary but rarely anywhere else) that I am aware of is: floccinaucinihilipilificator
And it’s only 27 letters long, though the feminine version adds 2 more letters. It’s a really longwinded way to refer to someone who belittles things routinely.
P.S., it’s pronounced pretty much like it looks like it should be pronounced, and you can break it into about three or four sound-segments for that purpose. And it’s one of those fun words whose feminine form is -trix, hence the two extra letters. 😀
Treppenwitz… amusing, French also has a term for it, that sounds much nicer: “l’esprit de l’escalier”… The spirit of the stairs..
=====
}}} you get that tone in pink floyds the wall, ‘we don’t need no education’ well in point of fact you do need education,
Well, one of the issues here is that it is, in fact, justifiably criticizing the rather obnoxious form of the brit school system, which, by all indications rewarded bullying, class consciousness, and what qualifies to me as a pretty fascistic undercurrent. The UK school system was much more about rote regurgitation than about learning to think critically and argue for a position. The US school system, until around the 1990s, was far far better in almost every way, even though it was steadily trending downward starting in the 1960s. By around the late 1980s, the PostModern disease had gotten its long-term foothold and started replacing the classical Greek traditional concepts with multiculti and moral relativism, the initial foundations of “woke”. Add to this the resurgence in “Racism everywhere, and not a thought to think” in the 1990s, and you have the recipe for today’s abortion on all levels…
I’m going to repeat my assertion, offered many times, that the nature of the issue is, in general, PostModern Liberalism, and it began following WWI.
Classical Liberals, as of 1910, were so proud of what Western Civilization had done, it felt like it was benefiting all mankind, bringing light and hope and wonders to everyone — electric lights, steam power to replace muscle power, and the wonder of human flight… And all the things that seemed to promise for the future.
Then WWI happened. And to the horror of those Classical Liberals, they saw what a flawed humanity could do with many of those same wonders, killing millions of people trying to gain mere hundreds of feet of ground.
The UK lost 900,000 men, and had as many as another 1.5m wounded.
France lost about 1.4m men, and suffered another 4m wounded.
Russia lost around 2m men, and suffered about 4.5m wounded.
Germany lost 2m men, and suffered about 4m wounded.
All told, all nations lost about 9.5m men and suffered 22.5m wounded.
Anyone can see, those number just flat out feel insane — even with the casualness towards death that was much more common before WWI, they still boggle the mind.
I assert to you that a certain percentage of classical liberals just lost it, and turned on Western Civilization like a woman scorned. The result was PostModern Liberalism — centered around PostModernism as a concept.
A careful examination of the precepts of PostModernism can easily reveal how utterly PostModernism is a direct attack at the very basic, foundational elements of Western Civilization — the twin gestalts of The Greek Inheritance of Thought and Ideal aligned with the notions inherent in the Judeo-Christian Ethos. It was these two concepts which, allied together, led to Western Civilization being so amazingly successful. It gave humanity the tools to rise above our base natures and to aspire to more. But classical liberals, turned to postmodernists, saw only the downside to those gifts, not the upside. The obvious fact that slavery being abolished is a purely Western Civ notion, and only Western Civ could come up with it of all the major, successful creeds so far developed by humanity is lost to them. The notion of an empathic society, which cares about the suffering of individuals, is also unique to Western Civ.
These don’t matter to them, because we can also use the same tools to kill people in mass numbers, when we fail to rise up to what we can be. And because humans are not perfect, well, “Western Civ should be destroyed”. Not because they have anything better to offer.
And this is why I assert: PostModern Liberalism is a social cancer. Literally, not Figuratively.
There is no saving it, no living with it, no hope for its redemption. This is a battle to the death — either of PML or of Western Civilization. And it may be too late. I certainly hope not. But it’s going to be a long uphill battle for Gen-Z to step up and take charge. And I’m not certain they are ready, even yet, to grasp the evil they face. It feels like some of them do see it. But I think very few grasp the burden it entails.
It all started in the 1930s, as PML began to get a solid footing, as did PostModernism in general. You could see it in their capture of certain common outlets for ideology and thinking, as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” was Stalin, Hitler, and Stalin… yes, the two of them were MotY three times between 1930 and 1940. You could also see it in the lies from various merdia outlets made during the 1930s about what was happening in the USSR, which was every bit as nasty and vile as what the Nazis did LATER… the USSR killed from 5m to 10m of their own people in their forced collectivization efforts. And you can pretty much bet they killed quite a few Jews, as well, in that same time frame, and even more when they took over parts of Poland and Eastern Europe.
Fast forward, again, to McCarthy. The Venona Papers have utterly vindicated what McCarthy said, which was that the US State Department was literally riddled with Foreign Spies. But the merdia, captured largely by the PML, which saw Marxism as a positive anti-western force, couldn’t have the USSR cast in a bad light. So they attacked him with everything they had, vilifying him, mocking him, and making him out to be ignorant and stupid. In the time since, they have conflated him with the blatantly anti-American actions of HUAC, which had nothing to do with him — he was a Senator, and the “H” in HUAC refers to “House”. And they took separation of bodies a lot more serious back then.
Forward once more to Vietnam, and again, the PML set out to destroy the USA as the preeminent form of Western Civ. They did everything possible to undermine what was going on in Vietnam. Yes, we took the wrong side in the first place, thanks to the idiot French, but that was beside the point. We had a side, and they were doing everything possible to undermine it, and they did. The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the NV, and they were preparing to surrender after it… then they heard how the US media was playing it… and fought on…
I’m going to also offer the article which put me onto this line of thinking, once more… It has little of what I have said, but it did put me into the frame of mind from which I began the journey:
Decently well said on the whole, but a few things.
I’m going to repeat my assertion, offered many times, that the nature of the issue is, in general, PostModern Liberalism, and it began following WWI.
I disagree, or at most it is one of the problems. Moreover I do think it began to a large extent well before WWI, though obviously WWI gave it wings. But the roots lay deeper. Marx and Engels both grew up earlier, as did many of the sort of Neo-Absolutist pathologies and the dream of an authoritarian, supposedly modern “Managerial State”. Wilson couldn’t shut up about this for most of his life.
Classical Liberals, as of 1910, were so proud of what Western Civilization had done, it felt like it was benefiting all mankind, bringing light and hope and wonders to everyone — electric lights, steam power to replace muscle power, and the wonder of human flight… And all the things that seemed to promise for the future.
Agreed there. But also not all of that promise is – from our perspective – good.
Then WWI happened. And to the horror of those Classical Liberals, they saw what a flawed humanity could do with many of those same wonders, killing millions of people trying to gain mere hundreds of feet of ground.
To be fair the fighting was usually few miles of ground, but yeah.
The UK lost 900,000 men, and had as many as another 1.5m wounded.
France lost about 1.4m men, and suffered another 4m wounded.
Russia lost around 2m men, and suffered about 4.5m wounded.
Germany lost 2m men, and suffered about 4m wounded.
All told, all nations lost about 9.5m men and suffered 22.5m wounded.
Nah, it was worse than that. Significantly worse. That MIGHT account for all the combatant deaths (and I stress combatant deaths) though I think even then it is probably low. But it doesn’t factor in the fact that at *least* comparable number of civilians died during the war, as well as the aftershock conflicts that while distinct clearly follow from it (with the wars of the Russian Revolution being the largest and most devastating). So we’re looking at something like 20-60 million dead between 1910 and 1925, which just makes it worse.
Anyone can see, those number just flat out feel insane — even with the casualness towards death that was much more common before WWI, they still boggle the mind.
Agreed, and again if anything the true numbers are even worse when you realize that 10 million doesn’t even work as a basement figure for total deaths.
I assert to you that a certain percentage of classical liberals just lost it, and turned on Western Civilization like a woman scorned. The result was PostModern Liberalism — centered around PostModernism as a concept.
I feel like this is true but that there were deeper pathologies involved. The dream of the authoritarian managerial state- whether in its Marxist (or supposedly Marxist) or Absolutist flavor – was already entrenched deep and would cause no shortage of problems. Moreover, while we like to focus on the Classical Liberals or Postmodern Liberals I think it is important to emphasize that the non-Liberals were at least as much of a problem, both in their own right and as a result of inspiration. To a man like Mussolini, Lenin, Ludendorff, or Kemal the only real “problems” with the massive death tolls of WWI was that the leadership didn’t go about it the “right” way and didn’t lead to the “right” results, or that they weren’t for the “right” cause. It does not take much to realize what a problem this would be down the line.
A careful examination of the precepts of PostModernism can easily reveal how utterly PostModernism is a direct attack at the very basic, foundational elements of Western Civilization — the twin gestalts of The Greek Inheritance of Thought and Ideal aligned with the notions inherent in the Judeo-Christian Ethos. It was these two concepts which, allied together, led to Western Civilization being so amazingly successful. It gave humanity the tools to rise above our base natures and to aspire to more. But classical liberals, turned to postmodernists, saw only the downside to those gifts, not the upside. The obvious fact that slavery being abolished is a purely Western Civ notion, and only Western Civ could come up with it of all the major, successful creeds so far developed by humanity is lost to them. The notion of an empathic society, which cares about the suffering of individuals, is also unique to Western Civ.
Largely agreed with some caveats that aren’t necessary here.
These don’t matter to them, because we can also use the same tools to kill people in mass numbers, when we fail to rise up to what we can be. And because humans are not perfect, well, “Western Civ should be destroyed”. Not because they have anything better to offer.
Agreed. But it’s also worth noting that to many – such as Wilson and others – the desire was less to “destroy” it so much as to “fundamentally transform” it. That you could do so much better.
And this is why I assert:
PostModern Liberalism is a social cancer. Literally, not Figuratively.
There is no saving it, no living with it, no hope for its redemption. This is a battle to the death — either of PML or of Western Civilization. And it may be too late. I certainly hope not. But it’s going to be a long uphill battle for Gen-Z to step up and take charge. And I’m not certain they are ready, even yet, to grasp the evil they face. It feels like some of them do see it. But I think very few grasp the burden it entails.
Agreed. I also feel that in many ways this is made worse by the culture of dependence we have seen seeped in. Our deficit is insidious to me not so much because of the sheer amount of it (though that IS bad enough) but so much as what it goes into and how it has bred a dependence, a societal Stockholm syndrome. People will gladly bugger the next generation fiscally for the dream (increasingly naive) that they will get Social Security payments until they die, and devil take the hindmost.
It all started in the 1930s, as PML began to get a solid footing, as did PostModernism in general.
Disagree. D’Annunzio’s Fiume nightmare and the Bolsheviks were easily the most post-modernist of the interwar totalitarian regimes and they both emerged in the late 1910s and 1920, and drew much earlier.
You could see it in their capture of certain common outlets for ideology and thinking, as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” was Stalin, Hitler, and Stalin… yes, the two of them were MotY three times between 1930 and 1940. You could also see it in the lies from various merdia outlets made during the 1930s about what was happening in the USSR, which was every bit as nasty and vile as what the Nazis did LATER…
Agreed.
the USSR killed from 5m to 10m of their own people in their forced collectivization efforts.
Crank those numbers up by something like 2 to 3 times and you’d get it.
And you can pretty much bet they killed quite a few Jews, as well, in that same time frame, and even more when they took over parts of Poland and Eastern Europe.
Oh yeah. Like, take a look at the fate of the “Jewish Autonomous Oblast.” Also, take a look at the Doctor’s Plot.
Fast forward, again, to McCarthy. The Venona Papers have utterly vindicated what McCarthy said, which was that the US State Department was literally riddled with Foreign Spies. But the merdia, captured largely by the PML, which saw Marxism as a positive anti-western force, couldn’t have the USSR cast in a bad light. So they attacked him with everything they had, vilifying him, mocking him, and making him out to be ignorant and stupid. In the time since, they have conflated him with the blatantly anti-American actions of HUAC, which had nothing to do with him — he was a Senator, and the “H” in HUAC refers to “House”. And they took separation of bodies a lot more serious back then.
Agreed, though to be fair McCarthy made a bunch of accusations there.
Forward once more to Vietnam, and again, the PML set out to destroy the USA as the preeminent form of Western Civ. They did everything possible to undermine what was going on in Vietnam.
Agreed.
Yes, we took the wrong side in the first place, thanks to the idiot French, but that was beside the point.
Sorry, but I’m going to have to refuse that. Part of it may be my more colonialist/imperialist biases or Francophillia, but I think many people arguing we “picked the wrong side” in Indochina overlook just what we knew (or didn’t know) of the factions and conflicts. There’s a reason why while much of the OSS team that embedded with Ho Chi Minh and the early Viet Minh during the Pacific War came to oppose the idea of a continued French colony, only their leader came to champion Uncle Ho. And the rest of the team took to making secret reports back noting they believed their leader had “Drunk the Cool Aid” and basically been taken in by the charisma and posturing of Uncle Ho, in spite of knowing he was a Communist. It also overlooks how the Communists drew first blood even before WWII was done, attacking the Free French Jedburgh commando teams at Nape and going on to betray and purge the supposed Broad Nationalist Provisional Government in Hanoi during 1945.
(I find it grimly ironic how many conventional narratives of the Vietnam War play up Ho Chi Minh’s imitation of the rhetoric behind the US Declaration of Independence and admiration of it in his declaration of the Orwellianly named “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” while COMPLETELY IGNORING the context: that it was a betrayal of a previous agreement to make a constitution and broad coalition government at a certain date, and that it coincided with Communist purges of the Royalists, Vietnamese KMT, pro-French elements, Trotskyites, and most that did not submit to his will. If people wish to compare the declaration of the DRV to Jefferson, it’d be like if Jefferson and a bunch of Phrygian Capped paramilitaries walked into the Constitutional Convention, declared the creation of a Jacobin American Republic and Constitution, and proceeded to SHOOT or Guillotine anyone who objected and could not get away.)
We had a side, and they were doing everything possible to undermine it, and they did. The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the NV, and they were preparing to surrender after it… then they heard how the US media was playing it… and fought on…
Agreed.
I’m going to also offer the article which put me onto this line of thinking, once more… It has little of what I have said, but it did put me into the frame of mind from which I began the journey:
What We Lost In The Great War
It is an interesting article worth taking seriously, but with some truly massive flaws. In particular I think it greatly overlooks the problems deeply rooted at the time. In particular, it massively underestimates just how deeply several of the pathologies already rooted (and how some dress rehearsals that – with intensification and development – would help give rise to “Dekulakization” and the Holocaust were already playing out). And above all, how many people and indeed REGIMES truly wanted war.
I might have to analyze it more later.
yes western intelligence is often terrible at gauging future foes, dulles on lenin, helliwell on ho chi minh, the whole country team in Cuba on Castro and his family Bearden on Bin Laden and the Taliban,Marshall Plan aid was supposed to be for French economic develop but the Grand Charles decided otherwise, then it was left to Ramadier, and other parties to prosecute the war, so thats a first order problem, yes the anticolonialist bent among State was probably wrong, as well, Korea was a shock, shouldn’t have been, but with the Asia experts like Chubb Stuart Service and co, no surprise they couldn’t find snow in Alaska, the legacy of such thinking comes from the likes of Bruce Cummings, who dotes on the Kim Dynasts, its been 70 years plus, maybe some judgement should be made, the late Chalmers Johnson was of a similar mindset, pretending that Mao was the premier Antifascist,
Did McArthy make mistakes probably, then again who else decided to read the vast report on Marshall warts and all, he was the head of one of the missions that went to try to settle the Chinese Civil War, but because of the afore mentioned experts, he took the wrong cues, that’s one card from the deck,
as to Vietnam, its arguable that Diem’s counterinsurgency was more effective that Halberstam and Sheehan presented, according to the records that Moyar was able to dig upin the Russian and Chinese archives,
as Napoleon was wont to have said ‘don’t interrupt when the enemy is destroying himself’ or our allies,some think with perfect hindsight Diem was not the man for the job, because they found him in that Maryknoll seminary, but Lansdale who knew a damn more about insurgency then most of these clouws did,
the way the war was fought and opposed, by largely marxist elements, was to turn into a grindling abbatoir, much like the Western Campaign did to the Russian Main Army in the first war, Westmoreland was a very conventional general, who really thought you could fight a conventional war in the East, that is certainly the message that he conveyed to the Pentagon and the White House, so when in the fall of ’67, his aide de camp General Graham, got the troop movements from Sam Adams they ignored them, hence Tet, and then you had Cronkite misreading things, then McCarthy, Kennedy and the Chicago convention,
About the German video: I had not been aware of ‘Treppenwitz’ before, but I appreciate the narrator’s almost recursive allusion to the concept as he ended the video.
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Has anyone else ever seen this? It is the most brilliant thing I’ve come across in a very long time.
https://youtu.be/SBxpcGfznos?si=pG8hqEJCRQUHqF3n
CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, read by John Cleese. I knew CS Lewis was brilliant, but had no idea he was a comic genius as well. And Cleese is perfect.
I wonder if the superlative quality of their music may be the result of this. On the same theory that people in hot countries like spicy food.
There is a hint that the aggressiveness isn’t just a matter of sound. Note that he calls “Indo-Germanic” a language family most of us call “Indo-European.”
German sounded perfectly nice when my Grandmother spoke it to me, much nicer than when my Grandfather spoke English.
Then there’s upper and lower German with very different sounds.
The harshness can be ameliorated somewhat by who’s ‘speaking’ it.
Cleese is a funny one, funny as in ironic, even though I’ve used bits from the series to illustrate the absurdity of today, he doesn’t yet understand how his work
was used to chip away at the foundations of British society, the hungarian phrase book sketch is as much a nice jibe, at an absurd Kafka like hearing as the dissing of the class of emigres that where driven to settle in Britain, like Dr,Gorkas parents there was broad satire about the perceived exaggeration of Chinese communism and the like, without the mediating influence of Church and Flag and Family, Britain has descended into that place, that Enoch Powell, noted around the same time,there was also broad dismissal of figures like Margaret Thatcher and Reginald Maudling, because they sound funny, so now when its clearly unsafe to walk around in the major cities, he says well that’s just the way it is, not realize he did Screwtapes work for him, reads but doesn’t understand,
this culture migrated to the States, with SNL, where Gerald Ford was held up to ridicule but a much more dangerous figurelike Carter, was given a pass, Reagan was more immune to the kind of satire to a degree in the early 80s, they were cautioned not to go all in, but you could detect this all the way from the beginning with Carlin’s opening act,
Really depends on the accent, South German accents are much softer.
Israel Update, where Biden’s perfidy is once again exposed, (1:06:08):
https://youtu.be/lykMdXuxR2Q?si=DcKsiIjwPZruabNn
Note that he calls “Indo-Germanic” a language family most of us call “Indo-European.”
“Indo-Germanic” is something of an archaism. I don’t myself use it in my writing. But it is correct as far as it goes, albeit old-fashioned and lacking specificity. It tells us, correctly, that the Germanic languages collectively comprise a sub-group of the Indo-European languages group.
My distant US ancestors had cool Germanic first names, but all in my generation and my parents generation have/had very ordinary American first names. My grandparents spoke German mostly in their youth and middle years, and then all that stopped. I don’t recall a discussion of it, but I suspect that anti-German sentiment during WWI was a big factor. The movie East of Eden comes to mind, where that sentiment is a sub-plot.
My last name had an ö in Germany, but the umlaute was dropped here in the US in the late 19th century. I still struggle with that sound. I met a cute lady named Böbe, who normally tells people to pronounce it Bee-bee, but for me she pronounced correctly. So now I try to get it right, but probably butcher the pronunciation. She’s German, I thought? No, Hungarian. A lady named Ute, she’s German.
An old science friend of German ancestry did a post-doc in Germany and had picked up some of the jokes about the German language. In particular, the concatenated words.
“Barber” translates to hareundschniptinclipptin
“Shark” translates to schwimminundfeastinbeastin
miguel:
Well said.
thanks just some thoughts I have been developing over time
was the british invasion, an overall good thing I wonder in general, not only in music but also television,
the preceding generation came across as rough hewn, heck they had only survived the Depression and the subsequent war, the mass bombing of their cities, why were they so surly, to the generation which followed it,
you get that tone in pink floyds the wall, ‘we don’t need no education’ well in point of fact you do need education, so you know what came before, the good and the bad, what has become increasingly true, ‘they do like thought control’ other remarks about pudding and meat, when for many in the earlier generation, it was rare that they would have either because rationings and the like, even in the immediate post war era, it was not all’tea and crumpets’ yes the sloughing off of Empire was good in some ways, although honestly the way the partitions went I might have to second guess the point,
the subsequent generation thought ‘the past was another country’ well most of the world disagrees outside their doorsteps, Britain wasn’t wracked like America was with Vietnam, a long drawn out conflict so Carnaby Street happened, so did the Canute moment of the Periphery taking over the Metropole, Borneo and Aden were sideshows in the big scheme of things,
miguel:
I have encountered analyses similar to yours by other writers commenting on the negative side of Monty Python in general and Cleese in particular.
Ned Willmott — a highly respected British military historian, and a good friend, now deceased — once referred to the British (in a book about WW2) as a “curiously philistine race.”
I don’t know of him, but Michael Burleighs survey of the period, some of the younger Brother Hitchens, observations informed my view, yes hes’ not everybody’s cup of tea, admittedly,
we see this pattern in America, the Depression and the War didn’t strike us in the same way, the easier affluence that hid this soft generation, that arose where woodstock was the apotheosis, this dark eden, that plays like record player,
with vietnam as the other side of the reel, even 50 years later, the reason for it seems obscure, certainly the first hand scribes got the story largely wrong, Halberstam and the rest of the 5 0 clock follies, this was where Marcuse and the rest of the Frankfurt school, planted their crop, Allan Bloom was the first to notice it, in Closing some 30 years later, Chris Rufo has followed the trail, so did D’Souza before him,
all of these Old Gods as Jonathan Cahn and Naomi Wolf has noted, these faiths that were the reason for the Crusade and the Reconquista for good or ill, Macron the current WEf manque made much of the Algerian interlude, this was part of his appeal as if you could wave away 130 years of history, DeGaulle tried in his own way, he turned more toward the Arabs, thats how we end up with the Osirak reactor, the tide returned with the residents of the former colonies, first the harkis, the one sympathetic to the pied noir, then the rest,
intentions count as much as result, there is a point where unmediated Reason can be a solvent, not a building block,
Glenn Reynolds reflecting on recent (and future) Supreme Court gun decisions and on how there are way too many federal laws and regulations which function as laws: Crime and Punishment in the 21st Century.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-145979659
those that push the new wisdom like the late halberstam, are celebrated, he went on his category error about Vietnam, to escavating the horrid 50s, from his view, maybe like Ginsberg he believed it was an era of madness, his last volume
came out on the eve of September 11th celebrating the Wisdom of Bill Clinton till history came knocking again, now other mariners like Daniel Ellsberg, well they were celebrated by his colleague Neil Sheehan, I recall, and according to Moyar they got maybe half of the story, did the Wisemen know what they were getting into,
not any more than the critics, who celebrated the sanguinary Ho Chi Minh, and later Arafat, both enabled if not direct tools of Suslov, of Sakharovsky, and other players,
the Bond series, unlike much of the other work, did celebrate a confident Britain albeit one confused about its exact place in the world, Deighton was a little more unclear
see Billion Dollar Brain, the way Colonel Stok was if not celebrated not regarded with dread in Funeral, Le Carre, maybe because he was too close to where the sausage was made,
didn’t see any point in the East/West battle
as it was carried out, the Circus was relying on Mundt a former Nazi, against Fischer who was considered a more idealistic creature, Leamas girlfield, was an idealist who gets swallowed up in the Maw of the East,
This was true largely across the pond with Heinrich Boll and Gunther Grass and some of his earlier work,
An old science friend of German ancestry did a post-doc in Germany and had picked up some of the jokes about the German language. In particular, the concatenated words.
I learned a series of them in rockets.
warhead = loudenboomer.
liquid fueled = Liquidsquirtenkind
Nuclear warhead = ergeschplitenkind loudenboomer.
Guidence system = sterenverk
Good news from Canada. Will Trudeau panic like Macron in France and call a snap election?
Liberal stronghold falls in Toronto by-election: Trudeau in big trouble
A Liberal stronghold for thirty years and one of the ridings that helped squeak out a minority government for Trudeau in the last election, swung Conservative in last night’s Toronto-St. Pauls by-election. This is most certainly a sign of things to come in the next general election, scheduled for late 2025.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2024-06-25/liberal-stronghold-falls-toronto-election-trudeau-big-trouble
More from the CBC
A breakdown of the stunning Tory win in Toronto–St. Paul’s
Liberals had held the seat since 1993
Conservative candidate Don Stewart captured the longtime Liberal stronghold of Toronto–St. Paul’s in a byelection Monday that could have far-reaching implications for the Canadian political landscape.
With a federal election looming in 2025, the unexpected Tory win raises questions about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s future at the helm of the Liberal Party — and whether any Liberal-held seat is truly safe from being flipped.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-byelection-eric-grenier-tory-win-1.7245852
Great Shawn Ryan Show featuring CIA Targeter Sarah Adams. What the open border and our permissive attitude mean.
https://youtu.be/3C48x9mHLfI?si=E4ahKaOrbC4UQhEy
Bob Wilson, good news indeed from Canada!
My experience with extensive spoken “German” was Pennsylvania Dutch, which was described to me by a German acquaintance as *very* low German. Maybe because it was spoken by people I loved, it never sounded “aggressive” to me.
I think that Yiddish would sound aggressive, except that all the Jewish comedians’ routines using it as a comedic prop has mentally softened the sound, much as hearing PD from my grossmutter.
The news is so bad in Oakland California that even the NY times can’t spin it positively.
https://archive.is/ywzv8
Oakland’s Mayor Had Enough Troubles. Then the F.B.I. Came Knocking.
I enjoyed watching that.
I am a oddball in hardly doing and reading European history yet know nothing of any other language. That is exactly how I view and hear German yet have a vast German miniature army ( 1813-15)
For TommyJay.
There was a young lady named Ute
Who drove around town on her scooter
Her hair in the breeze
She was entirely at ease
Everyone said she’s a beauty
I couldn’t help myself.
buddhaha,
Feli from Germany has done several videos on Pennsylvania Dutch vs. German (low and high), as well as Yiddish. Here are two examples, but you may find some of her other videos fun also.
https://youtu.be/BKHeA6g-c80?si=EfskpcW7rEuzAhKE
https://youtu.be/bgZSzlynJQ0?si=2Er6uvvEIP8p_nEs
miguel y (und?) IrishOtter49,
Interesting topic. I wrestle with that notion myself. I’m a big fan of free speech and the common folk keeping the elites (politicians, generals, religious leaders) honest through mockery and humor (it’s not a coincidence that I use Groucho’s character from “Duck Soup” as my nomme de gare). For that reason, and their hilarity, I hold the Pythons in high regard. But I do wonder if the Boomers didn’t go overboard with tearing everything down in the ’70s ,and onward. I generally prefer more anti-establishmentarianism than less, but when there is no establishment whatsoever what is there to stand on? People need some firmament upon which to construct civilization.
miguel’s mention of early SNL is an apt example. When they were making fun of Ford I was fine with it, even though much of it was mean-spirited and dishonest. Rather than being a bungling oaf, Gerald Ford was one of the most athletic (the most athletic?) Presidents we’ve ever had, and he was no fool. When one looks at the privileged childhood of the wealthy Chevy Chase compared with the difficult childhood of Leslie Lynch King Jr., Chase’s depiction of Ford is a bit ugly, and certainly unfair. And, as miguel also highlights, when Carter beat out Ford in the election, suddenly mocking the Emperor’s lack of clothes fell out of fashion at 30 Rock. I’m in favor of all elites getting a bit of mockery, but the Boomers often chose and avoided targets based on politics. Or maybe I missed the recurring SNL skits showing Che Gueverra as a violent, egotistical homophobe.
There really is no argument that ’70s counterculture did much to tear down Western culture. It’s also true that some of the culture deserved to be torn down. But it also advanced cynicism and nihilism as traits to be lauded, in and of themselves. How much of the current, gaping flaws in today’s culture stem from 3 generations of children being raised in the culture they created* in their wake? As regards the Pythons specifically, at least one had to be fairly well read and knowledgeable of the pinnacles of Western culture in order to appreciate much of their humor; Proust recitation, Beethoven’s hearing loss, Icelandic sagas, the Artuhurian legend. I was studying Latin when I saw “The Life of Brian,” and the extended scene of John Cleese’s Roman centurion chastising the vandal’s improper grammar literally caused me to fall out of my seat in the theater. Yet it made me no less desirous to continue my studies. It felt special to be “in” on the joke and none of my friends (who were not studying Latin) understood the scene. Just like neo’s beloved Tom Lehrer, one has to be cultured to get Python. I don’t think I’d credit the Pythons or Lehrer with bringing down civilization. I think they are/were talented critics and proponents/opponents of the vagaries of human nature, but too much mockery is a dangerous thing.
*and profited from.
Re: John Cleese
Cleese is now devoting much of his energies to opposing woke and cancel culture. He’s also gotten into trouble for prefering the England of his day:
_____________________________________
Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more. Since then, virtually all my friends abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it….
I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it.
–John Cleese
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/29/john-cleese-receives-backlash-for-implying-london-is-no-longer-english-because-of-immigrants/
if I used this nic, of Cuban vaudevillian, Leopoldo Fernandez, few would know what we’re talking about, he was in the Jack Benny/Groucho Marx vein, he played this character in a sort of rolling night court type situation, where he was up against an imperious and a host of players, the situations were often absurd, as he kept getting into absurd schemees he was often involved with,
I guess it’s a matter of degree, or as they say in Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everythingLehrer was genuinely witty, and I grant Python is as well, now the so called Woke, I hate that word, make it impossible for Python or Brooks or other iconoclastic works to be done, well seinfeld wouldn’t survive the first round today, there seems to be precious little humor in Islam Chevy Chases impression of Ford seems to have stuck, it did cause him searing pain and addiction to pain killers, so there is that, Dan Ackroyd did an endearing Carter, Animal House is on point, small touches like the louche English professor played by Donald Sutherland, but the other fraternity had a point as well they were holding up standards, of a sort, John Vernon who was Canadian was an easy stuffed shirt there was some editorial commentary about Vietnam and Watergate in the afterward seemed gratuitous
the Blues Brother that I only recently got into recently was wonderfully absurd how it seems every soldier sailor and policemen in the Great lakes were on their tail in the end,
Ghostbusters followed after that, and it was probably more on point despite it’s bizarre premise,
Larry Storch–F Troop–was a stand up comedian and had a bit about German. “German could start a fight in an empty room!”
“Obergeifreiterwehrmachter….and that’s a Corporal!”
Clears throat noisily.
Mark Twain has a couple of versions of his essay, “The Awful German Language” including its spelling and word structure. Hilarious. Available on line.
I can remember Ackroyd playing Jimmy Carter’s hemorrhoids with nothing more than facial expressions.
Ron Nessen, Ford’s second press secretary, actually hosted SNL, and played along with some of the “Ford is clumsy” jokes. He said he didn’t enjoy it much, but comics should make fun of the president, no matter who he is. Later, after the election loss to Carter, Nessen wrote that he read comments from the SNL cast who admitted they were trying to make Ford lose the election.
This offended Nessen, and nowadays it seems so quaint that he would expect fair play from people in the entertainment world.
Conservatives are always harrumphing about how they understand there is such a thing as human nature and they know what it is.
Then, when humans are being human, i.e. taking everything too far, conservatives are confused. How could this happen? Then the inevitable search for the guilty and punishment of the innocent.
_______________________________________________
Eddie Morra: [at a party]… Well sure, you’d get a short-term spike, but wouldn’t that rapid expansion devalue the stock completely in two years?
Kevin Doyle: No, ’cause there are safeguards!
Eddie Morra: Against aggressive overexpansion? There aren’t because there are no safeguards in human nature. We’re wired to overreach.
Look at history, all the countries that have ever ruled the world – Portugal, with its big, massive navy… All they’ve got now are salt cods and cheap condoms. [crowd laughs]
And Brits? Now they’re just sitting in their dank little island, fussing over their suits.
No one’s stopping and thinking, ‘Hey, we’re doing pretty well. We got France, we got Poland, we got a big Swiss bank account… You know what? Let’s not invade Russia in the winter, let’s go home, let’s pop a beer and let’s live off the interest.
–“Limitless” (2011)
https://youtu.be/NtNeMIrUSCM?t=1630
Because cycles have always happened usually in an 8-10 year cycles its a very reductionist explanation of portugal circumstances the spanish and the brits beat them to it the won the booby prizes in africa, mmt tries to pretend thats a real thing but sooner of later gravity brings you back down
I too have my reservations about Portugal and England in the above quote.
But, who can deny that if the Nazis had stopped somewhere before invading Russia or even invading Poland they would have been better off.
I am persuaded that humans will overreach. It’s in our nature. Consider Christianity’s overreach into a viciously intolerant religion as it gained power.
Yesterday’s civil rights movement was quite right in correcting the real and terrible racism of America’s past. It succeeded but … it didn’t stop there. It morphed into anti-racism, i.e. real racism towards whites.
Likewise feminism. It didn’t stop at voting rights, equality in the workplace, and freedom for women to live outside traditional roles. Now it is an anti-male force which insists on domination. Misandry.
it sounds more clever than it is, like the liberty mutual slogan, ‘you only pay fpr what you need’ what do you consider optional coverage, brilliant advances like the intricacies of derivatives are not immune from the laws of economics, no matter how James Cramer says it, something has to fill a vaccuum in the West, if Rome had not fallen, Christianity would have had it’s place, in the East, the fall of Persia, didn’t lead to the rise of Islam, but the latter did fill the space, In India which was Englands set piece, taken by Clive from the French, Aden was taken from the Ottomans Morocco over time was owned by the French the British and the Spanish, now Morocco has taken over at least two of those countries turnabout,
suffragism like Susan B Anthony was probably needed, but then marxists like Bette Freidan got involved, and whatever you might call Gloria Steinem, and the milk turned decidedly sour,
same with the civil rights movement, Plessy was a horror that was not easily remedied because the statutes did not make it easy,
Brown had to happen, perhaps not in the way it happened,
MC: Is there a clever thought in there to which I might respond?
Aspire to excellent writing!
William Manchester held the notion that Christianity had already been watered down by the local tribes, in his intro to the renaissance, in the East the Papacy at some level replaced the political authority of Rome, a necessary evil some of what transpired later, like the disposition of the Cathars, the Crusades, perhaps was overreach, did Jesus intend a great edifice like Vatican City became probably not,
other reform movements exceed their limitations for good or ill, probably the latter,King was remarkably brave and considering the circumstances was quite moderate, those that came after, were intemperate and often corrupt from Jackson to Sharpton, to Ta neisi Coates, in his own mind, the leaders of the anti war movement, had decided at one point, that every institution was as fraught with peril as the state of race relations, thats a charitable impression so every institution had to be dismantled, and rebuilt, now it just so happens that other parties and factions thought the same things, like the Frankfurt school for instance, they had failed at igniting the Revolution in Germany and hence the Nazis took power, then they tried again in the country that welcomed them
Re: Slice o’ life
Today I got a free teeth cleaning!
I have a very nice, professional, high-priced dental group taking care of my mouth. If the dentist advises a procedure, you go into a private talking area with an agent to work out the details. It’s like buying a used car.
Each appointment I’m fighting off all these attempts to upsell me on something. The dentist usually likes to start these conversations with me while I’m upside down in the chair. I wish I could use that negotiating tactic with people.
Anyway today, after a lengthy teeth cleaning, the hygienist went to get my dentist for the quickie exam which goes with the cleaning. But my dentist wasn’t available. so she brought a young female dentist in to pinch hit.
The first thing she did was to lightly stroke my left arm down to my elbow. I don’t like to be touched by strangers, not even young women, so I shrank away. Her response, which I’ve seen before, was to lunge forward to keep contact. Which doesn’t make me feel more comfortable.
Then she goes into a thing about how she’s not sure I want her to be my examining dentist. Me cranky old white guy and she young hispanic female dentist?
I explain that I agreed for her to do the exam, but that I don’t like to be touched by strangers. An interesting conversation to have in these confused times with a thirty year-old woman.
Finally, everything is finished up. I get up to go and my hygienist explained that I had built up credit and this cleaning was free!
I don’t believe I had any credit. I’m pretty sure I was being bought off to avoid some crazy sexual harassment suit.
Well. I’m an honest fellow. I stay bought.
@Huxley
I can, and for good reason. I’m often in the awkward position of praising Hitler’s abilities and judgement in spite of viewing him as an evil monster who was far too full of himself, and that his abilities and judgement were often flawed. But I think this is one of them.
The truth is, Hitler probably would’ve turned on the Soviet Union and tried to conquer up to the mythical A-A Line or the Urals regardless of what happened sooner or later, but as the situation developed the exact timing of this backstab was forced on him and the German military by their failures to force Britain to submit and subsequent losses in personnel and resources fighting the Battle of Britain and the war in the Med.
Halder’s War Diaries supposedly attest to a more than 150 minute speech by Hitler on March 30th, 1941, in which he declared the necessity of Barbarossa, but on somewhat surprising grounds.
https://archive.org/details/HalderWarJournal/page/n487/mode/2up?q=%22war+against+russia%22&view=theater
So in essence (at least according to Halder) the risk of Anglo-American mobilization (even with the US not yet in the war directly) meant that the Nazis and their allies faced a losing war as it was, and the failure to get the Soviet Union into the Axis (as is borne out by the documents we have of the Hitler-Molotov meetings in the winter of 1940-1) underline that by this theory, the Nazis felt that either they threw the dice and tried to conquer the Soviet Union and take its resources, or they didn’t and fought a long, losing war against the superior resources of the Atlantic World with their East exposed to an untrustworthy and militarily growing “Ally” that might backstab them.
NOW, it should be said: Halder was a remorseless liar and war criminal and we can confirm after the war that he edited parts of his diary and other documents to help make himself look better. And I cannot 100% claim this is not the case here, though the main “tell” I see is his supposed paraphrasing Hitler that the Romanians were “not good at all” and that Antonescu had expanded the military rather than improving it with measured reductions, given how Hitler in general had a very high opinion of Antonescu.
However, this dovetails with a bunch of better evidence from sources that couldn’t be so easily faked like Goebbels’s diaries and administrative reports about a food crisis throughout occupied Europe that the Axis were dependent on Soviet cereals to fix, as well as depleting fuel stocks (ditto but for the Caucasus oil being the source of their dependence).
It also is written in a different metric than many of Halder’s other writings, which I do think indicates it was likely a transcription or shorthand of what Hitler was saying.
Also I partially hate to be “That Guy” but also don’t, but the Axis didn’t invade the Soviet Union in the Fall (neither did Napoleon). They started their campaign in Spring with the hopes (rather optimistically) that it would be over in Fall. For Napoleon this KINDA Worked out, in that he took Moscow and came close to destroying the Russian military in the field at Borodino, but couldn’t clinch the deal either by wiping the Russian military or capturing the Tsar’s court and so he and his troops were forced to retreat in the sweltering Summer heat from a burned Moscow (it wouldn’t be until later that the snows came, which helped destroy his military and made the defeat as decisive as it was but only after the defeat was sealed).
So going into the USSR was probably the best of a series of bad choices the Axis had after Hitler bungled the Axis-Soviet talks for Soviet entry and alliance (and over frankly very petty terms).
I mean the early Church was already prone to intolerance and bitter schisms even early on, much like its Jewish parent (and I say this as a Christian and proud champion of the Abrahamic influence). Though basically replacing the Roman Imperial Cult and taking over its infrastructure for repression and dogmatic spreading didn’t help (as a former Roman re-enactor, if I hear another person peddle the “Tolerant Polytheism/Tolerant Romans” tripe again…).
well from what I know of Mein Kampf, his pet peeves were the Jews and the Slavs, many of which were in the East, now he decided for reasons to expand operations in Yugoslavia, which did not turn out well, that delayed the Russian invasion, by an interval, than General Winter started fighting back, he was always going to kill as many of the first two categories, in the West they were probably a llittle surprised the French and Dutch auxiliaries were even more bloodthirsty than the Nazis themselves, same with the Ustache and the OUN
for many of the German officer corps they went along with the little corporal because Alsace Lorraine, the impositions of Versailles, as usual Keynes got part of the story, but not the most important part, we overvalue the hyper- inflation which was certainly a shock by the devaluation that happened after 1931 was critical, we know how after the war we made allowances for Gehlen for Wolf and a host of other characters for reasons,
huxley, we also have a group dental practice. The male dentist is very sensible, and the woman is always trying to sell something extra. Do I need braces at age 75? But so far neither one has stroked me. You must be more attractive than I am. 🙂
huxley:
Please, please read John Updike’s short story, “Tristan and Iseult.” It’s in The Afterlife and Other Stories.
@Miguel Cervantes
MK is useful but it should be be seen in counterpart with Hitler’s
Unpublished Second Book, meant as a sequel to MK, which specified the threats of “Finance Capital” and capitalism, and how the Nazis needed to unite Europe, build up a navy, and destroy the US.
https://archive.org/details/hitlerssecondboo00hitl
He certainly hated most Slavs and all Jews but I think looking MK alone leads to misconceptions on his demonology.
Yugoslavia had a coup that threw out the government under the Prince Regent that adhered Yugoslavia to the Axis (with the coup financed and supported by the British but with some after the fact Communist support, more reason for the Nazis to believe the Soviets were starting to betray them). The actual invasion went smoothly but the after effects did not. Of course a lot of this was started by Mussolini picking a fight with Greece while losing the Med War.
Though honestly we’re not sure it delayed the invasion of the USSR for various reasons, like the land not being firm enough.
Sure though this had more to do with how Halder and co had badly botched planning for Barbarossa and how the Axis as a whole were massively overconfident in what they would be able to do in a campaigning season.
Agreed.
The Ustasha legitimately surprised them, and the OUN they used and then tried to dispose of soon after the invasion, but they actively worked to recruit the most merciless among their auxiliaries in the West and elsewhere and still struggled to compete with as bad as the likes of Jaeger and Heydrich.
I think this gets overstated. The German Officer Corps had been a sewer for ultranationalist, quasi socialist, anti-capitalist, murderously anti-Slavic and anti-Gypsy, and somewhat anti/Jewish sentiment for decades. They had lost Alsace-Lorraine and had Versailles imposed on them in large part by their brutality and attempts to fight a crusade against capitalist democracy and a host of others in WWI. They disagreed with Hitler on method, intent, and how socially radical and anti-monarchist he was (as well as classism and his Austrian-Bavarian yokel rep) but they believed very similar things on the whole.
Keynes I believe was one of the most destructive of the self-hating, arrogant, holier than thou intellectuals the devaluation was crucial, as was hyperinflation, but Keynes’s leeriness at patriotism and the British cause led him to being conned about things like German economic duplicity (such as lying about the results) and what they had already hoped to do.
It is somewhat telling that the work that made him famous was a horribly incompetent, credulous, and wrong accounting of German reparations payments that he was forced to roll back due to how it showed he had been duped.
To the extent Hitler’s reasoning is reflected in Turtler’s excerpt, Hitler might well have been having sleepless nights over being in a losing situation.
The only way out was to beat Russia–RUSSIA!–handily. Anybody west of Prague ever look at a map? I think it was Keegan who said attacking Russia was like attacking into a fan–the triangle kind. For every mile forward, your front expands by several times that or you’ll be flanked.
He had his famous panzergrenadier divisions, but they needed gas. Everybody else was supplied by horses once the rail head was reached.
So the overreach was, in fact, starting the war. The general staff knew they didn’t have resources to match the total of the likely combination of adversaries. Going to make do with the Aryan supersoldier and the famed German engineering.
But maybe they figured the French caving on the Rhineland in 36 and the Brits’ peace in their time in 38 meant the fight wouldn’t be that bad.
Balck, the best German general nobody ever heard of said in his autobio about poor Germany, always surrounded by enemies and forced to strike first. Plus, if Carl’s realm hadn’t been divided, Europe would have been better off.
Guys like this were running around loose.
You can google earth Poland and see that if Hitler had managed to make it Slav-free, he’d have had all the lebensraum–the kind with flat fields and good soil–he could use. Stop there.
So, yeah, overreach, but excusable in a sense if the enemy’s various reactions had been as predicted.
Mussolini said, once that the English, “Once a race of magnificent adventurers are now a line of tired rich men’s sons.” Must have been reading about Bertie and Jeeves and missing the change in tone when Bertie referred to “The code of the Woosters”. Or wishful thinking.
huxley,
It’s rare I find an opportunity to type this in regards to you; but you’ve got it all backwards. Or upside down. What I mean is, you’ve put the horse behind the cart.
Human nature for some humans, perhaps, but they are the minority. I would wager most humans are reluctant to take things even as far as half way. Ask everyone you know, aged 60 or older, if they could be 20 again and relive another 4, 5 or 6 decades would they take fewer risks, or more? I think most people regret being too meek, not going far enough. And I think they are right.
Some people do go too far, but that percentage of homo sapiens is too small to attribute their behavior to, “human nature.”
Based on the examples you cite, a better aphorism would be; greedy people will take any available tool/system and deploy it in their quest for conquest/money/fame.
Christianity. Did Jesus or His apostles “go too far?” No. “Shake the dust off your feet, etc, etc.” Did their immediate followers living under the yoke of the Roman Empire go too far? No. But when Christianity gained enough traction to be a useful tool/system some humans bent on power used it for their selfish purposes.
Civil rights. Did Dr. King go too far? Rosa Parks? No. But when their cause became dominant, corrupt people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton used it to gain power, money and fame.
Feminism. Did the Suffragettes go too far? Susan B. Anthony? No.
George Washington stepped aside after two terms. Kings and Queens abdicate thrones for love. The vast majority of military leaders heed their nations’ call to return rather than crossing the Rubicon with their forces.
Some people are corrupt and greedy and those people will use whatever is advantageous for personal gain, but they are a minority, thank God, and rarely have anything to do with the true nature of the causes they have cloaked themselves in.
I think Lord Acton said it best, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,
Someone else said, every cause eventually becomes a racket, Keynes took certain things that were obvious, Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not handler Versailles right, and then overgeneralized, deficit spending can be useful in peace time, then they made it into a hammer that threatens to drown the world,
the French post Napoleon 3rd overreached as is their want, the tripartite alliance that was supposed to prevent war, greated a bigger one, that takes nothing away from Kaiser Wilhelms Megalomania, but the result wasn’t helpful Ferguson thinks it was the pity of the war, as his first big popular non academic texts, the ones about he Rothchilds came later,
we were lucky with Washington but then the Revolution was more an evolution, when it throughs caution to the wind, as the French and Russian ones, some 120 years apart, Inherit the Wind, the revolutionary power that rises is terrifying for a time,
Regarding the post topic,
I mostly agree with the narrator; it’s the hard consonant sounds and gutturals. However, as many have already pointed out; German can sound soft and typically does in most situations. It truly sounds beautiful when my German wife speaks it.
Italian makes a point to try to ensure words beginning with consonants follow words ending in vowels and words beginning in vowels follow words ending in consonants, which makes if flow smoothly. Other languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese) do similar things with their masculine, feminine and neuter nouns and articles. And, of course, German does this also (gender), but regardless of gender too many of the German article declensions end in consonants to help with flow. Der, die, das, dem, den and des. 5 out of 6 end in consonants.
I find English rather harsh and primitive sounding, as Italian pop star Adriano Celentano demonstrated with his hit song, “Prisencolinensinainciusol.”
If you’re not familiar with the song, please do go over and learn more about it here and watch the accompanying video. It’s the most Italian, most ’70s thing you’ll ever see: https://www.npr.org/2012/11/04/164206468/its-gibberish-but-italian-pop-song-still-means-something
“It’s the most Italian, most ’70s thing you’ll ever see.”
Of course, there’s always Italian Spiderman: https://youtu.be/UhHhXukovMU?si=ydzEmXPpZyYoWQi8
there is speculation that the mirror universe in star trek is the Roman empire extending to the stars, I think that is a reach, just like the planet where the Roman Empire endured to 20th Century technology, all things are possible in the multiverse, ‘is this the best of all possible worlds’ in Moliere’s jibe about Leibniz, probably all things considered, consider how many things could have gone wrong just in the last hundred years, is it really the best, thats an interesting question
I once asked German friends if English sounds to them like butchered German (since so often we make fun of German as being funny English). Yes, they said, it does!
Kate,
I think you can get a sense of what English sounds like to non-English speakers by listening to Old English. This recitation of the opening of “Beowulf” is a good example: https://youtu.be/CH-_GwoO4xI?si=PER1d8gIbBQK3IHj
Regarding human nature, when I read this by Andrew Klavan twelve years ago it hit me almost precisely as he describes it hitting him: https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-joke
I first laughed a bit. Then didn’t laugh. Then laughed more. I couldn’t get it out of my head and within about a week it became one of my favorite jokes. Yet, almost no one I’ve told it to has laughed.
huxley, it’s not human nature to go too far, but it is human nature to ask for an orange for a head.
@Richard Aubrey
Agreed. To be honest he was in an unenviable position to begin with and had screwed himself badly exploiting it. His cunning and bravado had worked well up to that point and he was not the worst at seizing opportunities, but he was also not the Greatest Of All History he thought he was.
To be honest I feel his best option was a Four Legged Axis; Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and either Japan or China. Bits the bullet, swallow the pride and racial issues and agree to Molotov’s terms in the Winter of 1940 to secure the resources needed to defeat or at least repulse the Western Allies and subdue Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. You can betray each other later if you want.
But Hitler’s bungling over the negotiations screwed that.
I feel Keegan and the others overstate this much. Russia is and was formidable, but it was not invincible. Moreover, while the fronts were always going to be gigantic and the commitments massive, flanking was dependent on the enemy being able to get resources and troops there. Bigger issues were the risk of being “flanked from behind/below” from rebellions or partisans; which is what happened to a large degree.
But a lot of people like going off on the Axis with comparison to Napoleon’s Grand Armee and Charles XII’s Swedes and whatnot, but they pointedly overlook WWI, when the Central Powers beat the tar out of the Russian Empire and its Allies and won the war on the Eastern Front under the command of Hindenburg and Proto-Hitler Ludendorff. Moreover, Russia has a generally mediocre track record when it comes to major wars. We usually remember the major victories but not its defeats like umpteen Mongol raids on Moscow or WWI.
So the Axis had better cause than we often think to believe they could beat the Soviets soundly. After all, their victories over Russia had helped create the Soviet Union in the last war.
The big issue I see is how in WWI they were helped by the Russian command going on the offensive to try and meet their allied commitments (especially to the Serbs and Montenegrins) and protect the industrial hearths in the Vistula, while Ludendorff and Hindenburg also played power politics and divide-and-conquer much better. The Axis did not and were exceptionally brutal to the public at large, which helped recruit for the enemy.
Yup. And it is telling that the German military was already suffering gas shortages (and they’d become critical in 1942), and even before Barbarossa the Germans were undergoing limited de-mechanization. Ditching some tanks, trucks, and whatnot for mules and horses.
From our point of view that is true. I am not so sure it wa so absolute though. Then again I am one of those weirdos that does think the Axis could have won WWII, albeit it was always a slim chance.
Not really. They knew they were going to be outgunned and outnumbered and out produced but they did believe they could muster enough resources for a crucial victory. Which worked up to a point. Indeed one of the major problems with Barbarossa was Halder believing the lessons of Poland and France and the general conduct could be transposed to the European USSR, and his decision to commit one of history’s great insubordinations but shifting Barbarossa from focusing on Ukraine and the Caucasus in the South to focusing it on Moscow in Army Group Center without Hitler’s knowledge until after the war.
Indeed.
Balck was remarkable but I remember his autobiography having a bunch of holes and lies, and in particular about his servile currying of favor with Hitler and weighing results.
Agreed
I disagree. For starters, good soil was important and desired but it put a limit on how far the Reich could go. Moreover it wasn’t the most important of the limited resources, with things like oil, ores, and the like. For that you need to go further East to the Caucasus and Ukraine.
Moreover, it is obscenely difficult to defend the Vistula and Poland’s Eastern Frontiers because of the lack of natural boundaries, especially after centuries of deforestation. I am generally loathe to give much credit for the idea of the “Eternal Struggle of Germans and Slavs” but it was a vulnerable faultline.
And in any case the second and third German Reichs needed the resources of Europe from Central Europe to the Urals in order to help build a world winning nav force:
Agreed.
Agreed. Especially given the problems Mussolini knew with his proxies, like Al-Husseini getting his teeth kicked in in the Palestinian Mandate.
Rufus T. Firefly:
By human nature, I don’t mean humans will do “X” 100% of the time and in 100% of situations, but that humans have a strong tendency to do “X,” however much we might wish otherwise.
The classic conservative argument against the left is that selfishness is human nature and the leftist notion that humans will reliably put the needs of the group over their own self-interest is false.
Which I agree with.
Adriano Celentano, “Prisencolinensinainciusol”
https://www.npr.org/2012/11/04/164206468/its-gibberish-but-italian-pop-song-still-means-something
Rufus T. Firefly:
The most brilliant pop exploration of how phonemes can sound like language even if they are nonsense.
I’m getting better at hearing French, but it comes slowly.
You must be more attractive than I am. 🙂
Kate:
That’s not they way I’m betting, but thanks anyway. 🙂
@miguel cervantes
<blockquote I think Lord Acton said it best, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,
Agreed.
IIRC that was Eric Hoffer.
Many things that seem obvious aren’t.
Versailles is a classic problem of something designed by committee that satisfies nobody. Clemenceau and Lloyd George made their mistakes, as did Wilson (personally I favor Clemenceau’s reading of the situation most, but then I am biased), but ultimately there were going to be many die hards among the Central Powers that would never accept defeat. Kemal Mustafa and Ludendorff are indications fo them/
Agreed, and to be fair to Keynes he DID say that there were times that the government should run surpluses, especially during peacetime. He either overlooked or undercounted the idea that deficit spending would be such an attractive tool it would be used with little end.
Indeed, from France to the Rhine. And it ultimately cost him and his dynasty their throne and France much.
I disagree. The Triple Entente was probably supposed to prevent war (with some question marks regarding France and Russia), but the Triple Alliance was meant to grease the skids towards war. And as much as I like dumping on Wilhelm II this wasn’t his problem. Bismarck was bent on trying to goad the French into another war and for the past couple decades of his public life he was borderline imitating a washed up rockstar trying to provoke the French to relive his glory days, apparently ignoring how the French had learned.
Wilhelm’s megalomania was an important driver but I don’t think the result of it.
I found Ferguson’s Pity of War to largely ring hollow for me. It isn’t the worst text out there (See: Sleepwalkers or worse), but I do think he seriously downplayed the importance of people like Hoetzendorff and Gaslee. A rare one.
Agreed there. And I keep wondering what we will see now. I fear we are at the abyss edge again…
I think the role of Franz Xaver Josef Conrad von Hötzendorf is paramount to blundering the world into world war. His army wasn’t nearly as good as he thought and the Russians were logistically a lot better than he thought even though the Germans had warned him about both. Perhaps a modicum of less drumbeating out of this bozo might have tempered Austria. Nope, this dope wanted preventative war with Italy and Serbia.
@ huxley > “how phonemes can sound like language even if they are nonsense.”
Listen to toddlers just beginning to talk.
It is obvious from their facial expressions that they expect you to understand what they are saying, the vocal inflections are clearly patterned after English structure, and yet there are no recognizable words in their patter.
And yes, the song is brilliant.
Reminded me of these stories from a few years back.
https://www.neatorama.com/2017/03/25/Do-Japanese-People-Understand-The-English-Words-Written-On-Their-T-Shirts/
“This video from Fuji Television shared by NeKo JGT shows that many Japanese people wear tees with English words on them because they look cool and not because they know, or care, what the tee actually says.
So English tees are basically the equivalent of those Chinese character tattoos people love to get without actually knowing what they mean, only the tees can be easily removed…”
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/04/whats-deal-t-shirts-random-japanese-writing/
“Browse any clothing store and you’ll more than likely find at least one t-shirt covered in characters using the Japanese writing system. And if you can actually read Japanese, you’ve probably noticed that what’s written is often gibberish. Rather interestingly, the reverse is also popular in Japan, where one can find many a t-shirt with random English words instead. So how did this all start and why isn’t anyone bothering to check the meanings?”
Another interesting facet of human nature.
In re today’s video: I know some German, and AesopSpouse is reasonably fluent due to his mission there in the seventies, and I agree with most of the observations in the comments: any language sounds aggressive if you use it that way; any language sounds beautiful if you use it that way.
However, as a musician, I find it much easier to sing Italian, French, and even Welsh, than to sing German, and they are more pleasant to listen to as well (with all due respect to Brahms et al.).
English is the worst.
Open Thread prerogative: a very important article by Alex Berenson, which is on X because that was the deal he made with Musk to get access to the documents in the Twitter archives.
A short excerpt from the beginning of a very long post (you can do that on X now):
https://x.com/AlexBerenson/status/1805325255990460927
Can CNN really get away with this?
https://notthebee.com/article/cnn-wont-allow-people-to-stream-thursdays-debate-on-youtube-or-other-social-media-sites-for-commentary
On the other hand:
https://notthebee.com/article/cant-wait-for-thursday-daily-caller-put-together-a-highlight-reel-of-trumps-best-debate-moments
And on the gripping hand:
https://notthebee.com/article/someone-needs-to-tell-bidens-team-to-stop-listing-reasons-to-vote-trump
One more from my favorite news aggregator — didn’t we all suspect something like this at the time?
https://notthebee.com/article/remember-when-the-fbi-shared-the-photos-of-the-docs-trump-had-at-mar-a-lago-yeah-they-added-the-cover-pages-themselves-for-show
AesopFan,
I don’t sing at that level, but as a listener I agree with your statement. It seemed a cruel irony of history that so many brilliant composers were native German speakers. And even foreigners tend to write their pop music lyrics in English, although English is not a great language for singing. Mark Steyn wrote a brilliant essay on the limits of rhyming the English word, “love” with its foreign counterparts. https://www.steynonline.com/7463/the-language-of-love
German may or may not sound harsh, but there is no arguing Dutch is the silliest sounding language.
huxley,
I disagree that selfishness is human nature. Immature people are often selfish, but any human paying proper attention to the world, and other humans, matures out of that. If selfishness were human nature why would any woman have a child? Why would any man share his wages with his family? Look at most professions we all aspired to as kids; mother, nurse, policeman, fireman, soldier, teacher… We understood maturing into human adults meant serving.
Covetousness and envy are harder traits to mature out of.
Rufus T Firefly:
Swedish is the silliest tounge, especially in the the kitchen. 🙂
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qj8PhxSnhg
If y’all think High German sounds harsh, listen to some Arabic.
Turtler
Couple of notes:
In WW I, the Russians had a revolution brewing. Stalin had better control. They’d made huge strides in industrialization, due in large part to western managers and engineers in the Thirties.
I don’t do rivet counting, but one guy made an interesting observation: If the French had deployed a thousand of the Ma Deuce, the German move in 1940 would have stalled. It was designed to be an anti-tank weapon for the armor of the time. And you can hump it.
Which leads to a story dated from pre-Barbarossa times; As a trust-building measure, officers from one military visited the other’s military establishments. One group of Russians, being shown a German tank factory, admired courteously the products and inquired where the heavies were made. These are the heavies, said the Germans. Russians looked dubious. Germans didn’t make the connection.
Russia and Germany split Poland in 39. If Hitler had stopped there, he’d have had his living space and if he hadn’t betrayed the Pact, he wouldn’t have had to defend anything.
The late Dennis Showalter wrote on Kursk and Tannenberg. In each, he detailed the professionalism and preparation of the German army. Likely looking at the pre-war ideal, but it was clear they were readier than any opponent at least at the start.
Quantity, said Stalin, has a quality all its own. That goes for distance, as well. Every step forward demands more resources to bring up other resources. While retreating shortens supply lines. Even a second lieutenant knows this.
The fact remains, the Germans were hoping for some kind of a military/political miracle. Their professionals knew better but allowed themselves to be fooled, led into wishful thinking, hoped for the best to the extent they expected it.
But there was the Oxford Union declaration of 1933 which might have been a factor.
@Richard Aubrey
Agreed, though this came at the direct cost of an even more timid, doctrinaire, and hidebound military and a discontent, traumatized, and in some cases like Ukraine decimated population.
They’d made huge strides in industrialization, due in large part to western managers and engineers in the Thirties.
Sure but they were also making gigantic strides in industrialization through the turn of the century. Indeed in 1905 the Russian Empire was either the fastest industrializing country on Earth or close to it, and this was picked up and acknowledged (albeit with problems) by the German and Habsburg leadership. But industrialization could only offset problems of leadership and doctrine so much, and so the Russian troops fighting a forward deployment war generally got beaten. This led to Revolution, Civil War, the Soviet era, and about 20 some years of more or less colossal waste of time, resources, and lives trying to develop and often failing or mis developing the country (there is no good reason for Norilsk to exist, certainly not in the way it does, ditto the White Sea Canal). They kicked out Western capital and experts in 1918-9 and wound up having to invite them back about a decade later. It is really hard for me to understate the squandering on a massive level.
If there are two things the Soviets did that “helped” to some degree it was the focus on militarization and heavy industry for the planned world war (they intended to start). Which had certain benefits. But it came as a package deal with wretchedly cruel leadership, dozens of millions of peacetime deaths, and forward deployments even more reckless than the Tsarist leadership in 1914 did and with greater immorality to boot, spreading the military out thinly near the borders where they could and would be penetrated, enveloped, and cut to pieces by the Axis.
Ma Deuce’s deployment would be dependent on where it was deployed to make a difference. Frankly the German offensives in 1940 should have stalled far short of what they actually achieved in either Norway or the Continental West, if not both. But daring German leadership and decent command control plus spectacularly inflexible and hidebound Western Allied leadership (plus a fundamental refusal by many of the leadership to fight it out) resulted in things like the Danish military and Social Democrats in Parliament pressuring their King to capitulate, the Brits, French, and Poles teaming up with the Norwegians to devastate the German surface fleet and retake Narvik only to get word of what was happening later and evacuate, letting Northern Norway fall to the Nazis again by default, the Allied leadership falling for a ruse and overcommitting to the North only to get flanked, and so on. And I am just summarizing some of the points.
My point is, if those 1,000 Ma Deuce get sent North with what were viewed as the cream of the cream Western Allied troops to try and repulse what they believe are the main thrust of the Axis in Belgium, they’re not going to do much good as Rommel and co sweep around the flank and trap them against the sea. Ditto if they get sent with the French expedition to the Netherlands, and so on.
And even if they do have an effect there’s no guarantee things like the French going wobbly will stop it.
And that’s before we talked about how the Germans have some fairly easy counters to MGs positions with artillery, fairly responsive air power, and combat engineers.
War material is important but wars are ultimately fought by men with weapons, not by weapons themselves. And frankly the truly fatal problems the Western Allies faced in 1933-40 was not their equipment. And indeed many of the weaknesses in their equipment were reflective of failures of leadership such as the failure to rearm (or in the case of Denmark and its idiotic “Unarmed Neutrality” arm at all, at least after its defeat in 1864 to the Germans).
And even in spite of all this the Germans should not have done half as well as they did, and sometimes it came down to truly absurd and horrifying coincidences like the Anglo-French GHQ not acknowledging one recon pilot’s report of a massive German traffic jam in the Ardennes.
To be fair I am not sure either were particularly fooled. The cooperation between the two went vastly beyond simple trust building visits, especially since between Seeckt’s secret alliance with the Soviets in I think it was 1923 and about 1936 (if not 1940) the assumption was that German and Soviet forces would fight alongside one another against mutual enemies like the Western Allies and the cordon sanitaire nations, and they kept well abreast of each others’ doctrines and equipment (in part because they had to as each others’ key trade partners and strategic partners).
No, no he would not.
Firstly: Hitler was never in a position to simply “stop there” after splitting Poland in the same way he was at least theoretically (notwithstanding probable economic collapse) after the Rhineland, Saarland, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia.
A: because the carve up of Poland was part of a grander bargain for the carve up of Eastern and Central Europe as a whole from the White Sea to the Black Sea; some of which involved Hitler being willing to give support to Stalin in places like Finland and Romania. If he reneges on the deal he is left with enemies and rivals on all sides except arguably due South and North.
B: Germany is still fundamentally a boxed in continental power, and Hitler learned at least some of the lessons of WWI fairly well. He stop with the division of Poland, he is ruling over a basket Empire under Western Allied blockade and bombardment with the never ending risk they will sweep in to further asphyxiate his resources by say occupying Narvik. His dream of a German Reich withers under multiple Hunger Winters.
C: As a matter of belief and ideology Hitler did not believe in stopping, as shown by his references about existence being a state of war for limited resources and how alliances not intended to wage war are foolish. And while less limiting or concrete than A and B they also show how it wasn’t just practicality that helped push him forward (though there was plenty of that, at least for a certain ground of practical). I have never yet found if Hitler actually studied the WWI German plans for a “Polish Border Strip” in spite of how eerily similar some aspects of their versions of the plans are with his, but he’d have quickly realized some of what they did: in order to have a defensible “Polish Border” they’d need to fix the Eastern Flank somewhere Southeast of the Belarusian Forest and marshes.
That assumes Stalin would not have betrayed the Pact, and to be blunt while I despise having to play devil’s advocate for Hitler, one could ask the Finns, Latvians, Poles, Romanians, Estonians, and Lithuanians how his track record with pacts was. Stalin’s Soviet Union was easily the most messianic and warmongering of the interwar powers with the POSSIBLE exception of the various Japanese cliques, and unlike those he had fairly united leadership. He had spent the 1920s and 1930s in significant border conflicts with many of his neighbors like Afghanistan and Estonia. He had signed many guarantees for peace and border integrity such as the Treaties of Tartu and the Peace of Riga, and then broke them in cooperation with Hitler.
I reject the idea Barbarossa was a “defensive” or “preemptive” war as the Nazis tried to sell it; the Soviet military was still recovering from the purges and reforming and was not competent for offensive action, and Stalin at least for the time being had little interest in turning on Hitler. However it would be a fool to believe there was no chance that Stalin would betray the pact and attack Germany; and it would be a politically clueless fool to believe so after helping to seize domestic totalitarian power by playing up the Soviet scare (real and perceived).
I do blame Hitler for torpedoing the Pact and particularly the chance to get the Soviets as members of the Axis, but I do not blame him (at least practically; he obviously deserves blame from a moral and legal sense) for not “stopping” after Poland or assuming Stalin’s good graces might not last forever.
Agreed, and I am a fan of Showalter (and he was more than capable of showcasing the flaws of that prewar professionalism, like the truly jaw dropping failure to prepare for Belgium in 1914 for about a decade).
Largely true, and this is one reason why the German logistics staff were the only people to make coordinated and consistent objections to the Pie in the Sky fantasy that was the operational plans for Barbarossa (Goebbels expressed skepticism about if the objectives could be met but this didn’t really reach to the level of objection).
Yes they were, especially against the West. Their plans against their major continental opponents ranged from moderately to significantly more practical but were still on the optimistic side.
Not really. SOME of their professionals knew better, particularly in the logistics. But the German General Staff had a long history of overoptimism. Indeed the 1866 War with the Habsburgs and their Allies (usually viewed as a stellar acid test for the General Staff and a signal victory for Prussia) nearly turned the other way because of how the General Staff failed to calculate enough food for their troops, leading to a soft mutiny mid war that Moltke the Elder had to personally iron out. The centerpiece of German strategic planning in the leadup to WWI was a series of very rough draft conceptual plans that even I am not sure how to describe but which were very obviously half baked, not formally managed, and failed to account for things like proper portage and food for the “Strong Right Flank” through Belgium but which were more or less carried forward through Groupthink.
And it was a “professional” like Halder that took the already conspicuously overoptimistic debacle that was the starting operational plans for Barbarossa and made them worse than even Hitler’s first draft by trying to Yolo for Moscow. And it was Goering – probably the single most accomplished Air Force man in the world at the time (as an accomplished air ace and heir to the Red Baron as squadron command) – who told the Nazi leadership he could probably force Britain to capitulate by bombings, with the failure there helping to force Hitler to either ally with or destroy the Soviets in the very immediate future. Obviously these are focusing on the low points (in contrast to the admittedly contentious but ultimately successful plan for Sickle Cut and the brilliant rush work of Operation 25, the plan to invade Yugoslavia), but the fact remains that we have systematic overconfidence. And ironically that wasn’t always fatal. It was just the combination of tin eared diplomacy, ongoing wars, and exceptional brutality (especially our East) turned a tough uphill climb to a probable doom.
But then German and especially Prussian operational doctrine and Grand strategy was in some ways contingent on hoping for some kind of military/political miracle through the offensive, because otherwise they would not last. Even as far back as the 1300s and 1400s the ancestors of the Hohenzollern had experienced the cost of trying to fight too reactively to an enemy with superior resources, which led to them being beaten down by a Polish-Lithuanian Alliance (followed up by urban civilian uprisings), with the Teutonic Order and then the Hohenzollern forced to submit humiliatingly as vassals to Poland. Attempts by previous Margraves of Brandenburg to defend everything in the 1500s and 1600s resulted in them losing basically everything, first to the Habsburgs and Wallenstein and then to the Danes and especially Swedes (financed and largely armed with French Gold and supported by Swedish naval superiority). These were the kind of stories that would be learned by centuries of Germans (and especially the Brandenburg-Prussia leadership), and helped inform Soldier-Elector Fred Wilhelm (Frederic the Great’s abusive father) with his response to a Swedish invasion in 1679 by gathering as many sleighs as he could and sweeping around to cut the Swedish army off so it filtered of hunger and cold. His son fairly skillfully balanced British and French interests (and their vast naval and financial assets) to help turn Prussia into a continental power by aggressively invading Saxony and Silesia, but nearly collapsed twice from defeats to his army near Berlin only to be saved by mostly raw luck. Which presaged the actual defeat at the hands of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic French (and underlined the limitations of counting on rich overseas Allie’s with big pockets and naval superiority).
The century or so after Jena and Auerstadt is probably the most important in modern German military history as far as doctrine goes as the likes of Gneisenau and co went over the debacle of 1806 and tried to piece out what was wrong, helping to gradually reform the Prussian military and government into a nation at arms able to evict the French occupation (at least after it was weakened by the British and Iberians in Spain and the Russians in Russia), and then had their successors hone it into a force able to wage war against its neighbors and its own people to cement Prussian hegemony over Germany and Hohenzollern and military hegemony over Germany. And this mostly worked (with some hiccups like the aforementioned “the army ran out of food” near Miss in 1866). But in large part by a mixture of mass mobilization, clever technological and doctrinal work, and calculated diplomatic alliances and aggression so they would only fight a certain number of enemies at one time and they would do it quickly before the other powers had a chance to change this. But they were still costly, involved tolerating enemy naval superiority over their shores (especially with the Danes and French), and began to fall apart as more countries took the threat of a United Germany seriously. And their longtime Russian ally reacted to Bismarck trying to goad France into a war in the 1880s by threatening to invade.
Hitler and his generation were exceptionally reckless and repulsive gamblers, but they were also from a military tradition that emphasized looking for or trying to create miracles. And frankly when facing enemies from the Atlantic and an uncertain Russia they needed some of that.
It was a factor but nowhere near as much. I have rarely seen it mentioned in the private writings of the German military or Nazi Party leadership (though it did not come across as well). Far more important was Hitler’s assessment of Western weakness to other powers like the Turks and to how Britain and France dealt with Mussolini and Himself. Hence his much quoted statement about how he had met the enemy and they were “worms” regarding Munich. And in some ways it was truer than even he had expected given the spectacular French collapse of will in 1940 and how narrowly Britain remained in the war.
Was the Russian spring offensive in the north (Kharkhiv) a feint, a way to fool and fix Ukrainian reserves, or a Vladdy failure?
I don’t know, however a few things that don’t favor Vlad have resulted:
a) Ukraine now has permission to use western supplied long range precision missiles and
JDAMS on Russia
b) Ukraine will be allowed to engage Russian warplanes over Russia with western SAMs.
Unintended consequences, Vladdy?
Soltzhenitsyn thought the okrana enabled stolypins death and that might have made a difference they were also the ones behind the spreading of the protocols without which mass antisemitism wouldnt have gained such an audience (my speculation) there had been another revolution over the war in japan see belys petersburg so it wasnt surprising of course this was before the azev revelations and his ties to thr okrana
Now to cut the british and french govts some slack they had seen verdun passchandeale ypres they didnt want to go through that again
Rufus T. Firefly:
My impression is that your comments keep shifting the onus to me as though I’m arguing that humans are 100% overreaching or 100% selfish.
I’m not. I’m recognizing that overreach and selfishness are substantial forces in human behavior, often, though not always, more powerful than risk avoidance and altruism.
Relying on the better angels of our nature to always prevail is foolish.
Besides degaulle was there any other top french officer with strategic sense and/or were they still hung up on the dreyfus
affair
Lets put it this way how often do those in financial or govt leadership know their limitations you can look at subprime or derivatives you can look at engagements in south asia or the near east you can look at fauci or the people behind the tuskegee experiment
huxley,
I’m “arguing” in fun, and I assume you are also, but I do not agree that selfishness is “human nature.” Whether one believes in evolution or divine creation, baking selfishness into our DNA or souls is not a recipe for perpetuating the species.
I also disagree with your claim regarding over reach. Do you not agree with my contention that most older adults, reviewing their lives, wish they had been less meek, taking more chances? If over reach is our default mode then, when examining our lives in our dotage we’d wish we had been less aggressive, less impulsive. It’s neo’s favorite poet, Robert Frost’s “road less taken.” We tend to take the safe road and that’s why it is the road most taken.
It’s the pyramid structure of most every human organization. Many wish they were on the top, but few have the nature to dare to risk all to get there.
In “standard usage” English (e.g., not a specialist term tied to something like chemistry, computers, physics, biology, or mathematics), the longest word in “common” usage is supposed to be:
antidesestablishmentarianism”
or some variant thereof. That one is only 28 letters, a third of his extreme example.
The longest legit “standard usage” word that is not a common word (Thank you, Robert Heinlein… It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary but rarely anywhere else) that I am aware of is:
floccinaucinihilipilificator
And it’s only 27 letters long, though the feminine version adds 2 more letters. It’s a really longwinded way to refer to someone who belittles things routinely.
P.S., it’s pronounced pretty much like it looks like it should be pronounced, and you can break it into about three or four sound-segments for that purpose. And it’s one of those fun words whose feminine form is -trix, hence the two extra letters. 😀
Treppenwitz… amusing, French also has a term for it, that sounds much nicer: “l’esprit de l’escalier”… The spirit of the stairs..
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}}} you get that tone in pink floyds the wall, ‘we don’t need no education’ well in point of fact you do need education,
Well, one of the issues here is that it is, in fact, justifiably criticizing the rather obnoxious form of the brit school system, which, by all indications rewarded bullying, class consciousness, and what qualifies to me as a pretty fascistic undercurrent. The UK school system was much more about rote regurgitation than about learning to think critically and argue for a position. The US school system, until around the 1990s, was far far better in almost every way, even though it was steadily trending downward starting in the 1960s. By around the late 1980s, the PostModern disease had gotten its long-term foothold and started replacing the classical Greek traditional concepts with multiculti and moral relativism, the initial foundations of “woke”. Add to this the resurgence in “Racism everywhere, and not a thought to think” in the 1990s, and you have the recipe for today’s abortion on all levels…
I’m going to repeat my assertion, offered many times, that the nature of the issue is, in general, PostModern Liberalism, and it began following WWI.
Classical Liberals, as of 1910, were so proud of what Western Civilization had done, it felt like it was benefiting all mankind, bringing light and hope and wonders to everyone — electric lights, steam power to replace muscle power, and the wonder of human flight… And all the things that seemed to promise for the future.
Then WWI happened. And to the horror of those Classical Liberals, they saw what a flawed humanity could do with many of those same wonders, killing millions of people trying to gain mere hundreds of feet of ground.
The UK lost 900,000 men, and had as many as another 1.5m wounded.
France lost about 1.4m men, and suffered another 4m wounded.
Russia lost around 2m men, and suffered about 4.5m wounded.
Germany lost 2m men, and suffered about 4m wounded.
All told, all nations lost about 9.5m men and suffered 22.5m wounded.
Anyone can see, those number just flat out feel insane — even with the casualness towards death that was much more common before WWI, they still boggle the mind.
I assert to you that a certain percentage of classical liberals just lost it, and turned on Western Civilization like a woman scorned. The result was PostModern Liberalism — centered around PostModernism as a concept.
A careful examination of the precepts of PostModernism can easily reveal how utterly PostModernism is a direct attack at the very basic, foundational elements of Western Civilization — the twin gestalts of The Greek Inheritance of Thought and Ideal aligned with the notions inherent in the Judeo-Christian Ethos. It was these two concepts which, allied together, led to Western Civilization being so amazingly successful. It gave humanity the tools to rise above our base natures and to aspire to more. But classical liberals, turned to postmodernists, saw only the downside to those gifts, not the upside. The obvious fact that slavery being abolished is a purely Western Civ notion, and only Western Civ could come up with it of all the major, successful creeds so far developed by humanity is lost to them. The notion of an empathic society, which cares about the suffering of individuals, is also unique to Western Civ.
These don’t matter to them, because we can also use the same tools to kill people in mass numbers, when we fail to rise up to what we can be. And because humans are not perfect, well, “Western Civ should be destroyed”. Not because they have anything better to offer.
And this is why I assert:
PostModern Liberalism is a social cancer. Literally, not Figuratively.
There is no saving it, no living with it, no hope for its redemption. This is a battle to the death — either of PML or of Western Civilization. And it may be too late. I certainly hope not. But it’s going to be a long uphill battle for Gen-Z to step up and take charge. And I’m not certain they are ready, even yet, to grasp the evil they face. It feels like some of them do see it. But I think very few grasp the burden it entails.
It all started in the 1930s, as PML began to get a solid footing, as did PostModernism in general. You could see it in their capture of certain common outlets for ideology and thinking, as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” was Stalin, Hitler, and Stalin… yes, the two of them were MotY three times between 1930 and 1940. You could also see it in the lies from various merdia outlets made during the 1930s about what was happening in the USSR, which was every bit as nasty and vile as what the Nazis did LATER… the USSR killed from 5m to 10m of their own people in their forced collectivization efforts. And you can pretty much bet they killed quite a few Jews, as well, in that same time frame, and even more when they took over parts of Poland and Eastern Europe.
Fast forward, again, to McCarthy. The Venona Papers have utterly vindicated what McCarthy said, which was that the US State Department was literally riddled with Foreign Spies. But the merdia, captured largely by the PML, which saw Marxism as a positive anti-western force, couldn’t have the USSR cast in a bad light. So they attacked him with everything they had, vilifying him, mocking him, and making him out to be ignorant and stupid. In the time since, they have conflated him with the blatantly anti-American actions of HUAC, which had nothing to do with him — he was a Senator, and the “H” in HUAC refers to “House”. And they took separation of bodies a lot more serious back then.
Forward once more to Vietnam, and again, the PML set out to destroy the USA as the preeminent form of Western Civ. They did everything possible to undermine what was going on in Vietnam. Yes, we took the wrong side in the first place, thanks to the idiot French, but that was beside the point. We had a side, and they were doing everything possible to undermine it, and they did. The Tet Offensive was a disaster for the NV, and they were preparing to surrender after it… then they heard how the US media was playing it… and fought on…
I’m going to also offer the article which put me onto this line of thinking, once more… It has little of what I have said, but it did put me into the frame of mind from which I began the journey:
What We Lost In The Great War
https://www.americanheritage.com/what-we-lost-great-war
@OBloodyHell
Decently well said on the whole, but a few things.
I disagree, or at most it is one of the problems. Moreover I do think it began to a large extent well before WWI, though obviously WWI gave it wings. But the roots lay deeper. Marx and Engels both grew up earlier, as did many of the sort of Neo-Absolutist pathologies and the dream of an authoritarian, supposedly modern “Managerial State”. Wilson couldn’t shut up about this for most of his life.
Agreed there. But also not all of that promise is – from our perspective – good.
To be fair the fighting was usually few miles of ground, but yeah.
Nah, it was worse than that. Significantly worse. That MIGHT account for all the combatant deaths (and I stress combatant deaths) though I think even then it is probably low. But it doesn’t factor in the fact that at *least* comparable number of civilians died during the war, as well as the aftershock conflicts that while distinct clearly follow from it (with the wars of the Russian Revolution being the largest and most devastating). So we’re looking at something like 20-60 million dead between 1910 and 1925, which just makes it worse.
Agreed, and again if anything the true numbers are even worse when you realize that 10 million doesn’t even work as a basement figure for total deaths.
I feel like this is true but that there were deeper pathologies involved. The dream of the authoritarian managerial state- whether in its Marxist (or supposedly Marxist) or Absolutist flavor – was already entrenched deep and would cause no shortage of problems. Moreover, while we like to focus on the Classical Liberals or Postmodern Liberals I think it is important to emphasize that the non-Liberals were at least as much of a problem, both in their own right and as a result of inspiration. To a man like Mussolini, Lenin, Ludendorff, or Kemal the only real “problems” with the massive death tolls of WWI was that the leadership didn’t go about it the “right” way and didn’t lead to the “right” results, or that they weren’t for the “right” cause. It does not take much to realize what a problem this would be down the line.
Largely agreed with some caveats that aren’t necessary here.
Agreed. But it’s also worth noting that to many – such as Wilson and others – the desire was less to “destroy” it so much as to “fundamentally transform” it. That you could do so much better.
Agreed. I also feel that in many ways this is made worse by the culture of dependence we have seen seeped in. Our deficit is insidious to me not so much because of the sheer amount of it (though that IS bad enough) but so much as what it goes into and how it has bred a dependence, a societal Stockholm syndrome. People will gladly bugger the next generation fiscally for the dream (increasingly naive) that they will get Social Security payments until they die, and devil take the hindmost.
Disagree. D’Annunzio’s Fiume nightmare and the Bolsheviks were easily the most post-modernist of the interwar totalitarian regimes and they both emerged in the late 1910s and 1920, and drew much earlier.
Agreed.
Crank those numbers up by something like 2 to 3 times and you’d get it.
Oh yeah. Like, take a look at the fate of the “Jewish Autonomous Oblast.” Also, take a look at the Doctor’s Plot.
Agreed, though to be fair McCarthy made a bunch of accusations there.
Agreed.
Sorry, but I’m going to have to refuse that. Part of it may be my more colonialist/imperialist biases or Francophillia, but I think many people arguing we “picked the wrong side” in Indochina overlook just what we knew (or didn’t know) of the factions and conflicts. There’s a reason why while much of the OSS team that embedded with Ho Chi Minh and the early Viet Minh during the Pacific War came to oppose the idea of a continued French colony, only their leader came to champion Uncle Ho. And the rest of the team took to making secret reports back noting they believed their leader had “Drunk the Cool Aid” and basically been taken in by the charisma and posturing of Uncle Ho, in spite of knowing he was a Communist. It also overlooks how the Communists drew first blood even before WWII was done, attacking the Free French Jedburgh commando teams at Nape and going on to betray and purge the supposed Broad Nationalist Provisional Government in Hanoi during 1945.
(I find it grimly ironic how many conventional narratives of the Vietnam War play up Ho Chi Minh’s imitation of the rhetoric behind the US Declaration of Independence and admiration of it in his declaration of the Orwellianly named “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” while COMPLETELY IGNORING the context: that it was a betrayal of a previous agreement to make a constitution and broad coalition government at a certain date, and that it coincided with Communist purges of the Royalists, Vietnamese KMT, pro-French elements, Trotskyites, and most that did not submit to his will. If people wish to compare the declaration of the DRV to Jefferson, it’d be like if Jefferson and a bunch of Phrygian Capped paramilitaries walked into the Constitutional Convention, declared the creation of a Jacobin American Republic and Constitution, and proceeded to SHOOT or Guillotine anyone who objected and could not get away.)
Agreed.
It is an interesting article worth taking seriously, but with some truly massive flaws. In particular I think it greatly overlooks the problems deeply rooted at the time. In particular, it massively underestimates just how deeply several of the pathologies already rooted (and how some dress rehearsals that – with intensification and development – would help give rise to “Dekulakization” and the Holocaust were already playing out). And above all, how many people and indeed REGIMES truly wanted war.
I might have to analyze it more later.
yes western intelligence is often terrible at gauging future foes, dulles on lenin, helliwell on ho chi minh, the whole country team in Cuba on Castro and his family Bearden on Bin Laden and the Taliban,Marshall Plan aid was supposed to be for French economic develop but the Grand Charles decided otherwise, then it was left to Ramadier, and other parties to prosecute the war, so thats a first order problem, yes the anticolonialist bent among State was probably wrong, as well, Korea was a shock, shouldn’t have been, but with the Asia experts like Chubb Stuart Service and co, no surprise they couldn’t find snow in Alaska, the legacy of such thinking comes from the likes of Bruce Cummings, who dotes on the Kim Dynasts, its been 70 years plus, maybe some judgement should be made, the late Chalmers Johnson was of a similar mindset, pretending that Mao was the premier Antifascist,
Did McArthy make mistakes probably, then again who else decided to read the vast report on Marshall warts and all, he was the head of one of the missions that went to try to settle the Chinese Civil War, but because of the afore mentioned experts, he took the wrong cues, that’s one card from the deck,
as to Vietnam, its arguable that Diem’s counterinsurgency was more effective that Halberstam and Sheehan presented, according to the records that Moyar was able to dig upin the Russian and Chinese archives,
as Napoleon was wont to have said ‘don’t interrupt when the enemy is destroying himself’ or our allies,some think with perfect hindsight Diem was not the man for the job, because they found him in that Maryknoll seminary, but Lansdale who knew a damn more about insurgency then most of these clouws did,
the way the war was fought and opposed, by largely marxist elements, was to turn into a grindling abbatoir, much like the Western Campaign did to the Russian Main Army in the first war, Westmoreland was a very conventional general, who really thought you could fight a conventional war in the East, that is certainly the message that he conveyed to the Pentagon and the White House, so when in the fall of ’67, his aide de camp General Graham, got the troop movements from Sam Adams they ignored them, hence Tet, and then you had Cronkite misreading things, then McCarthy, Kennedy and the Chicago convention,
About the German video: I had not been aware of ‘Treppenwitz’ before, but I appreciate the narrator’s almost recursive allusion to the concept as he ended the video.