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Published: 2020-05-14 11:53:12 +0000 UTC; Views: 2795; Favourites: 185; Downloads: 24
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Railway WhitherAn almost random snapshot taken as a result of my love for train rails, taken somewhere in Central Europe, gave me the chance to fall into some kind of philosophical thoughts with regard to the true significance a photograph might have on people. As it is well known that beauty of an image is eventually that evaluated by the eyes of the beholder so its significance does not seem to be much different. It is quite often the consequence of the cultural background of the people who observe the image and many times also of their mood. I spare you, my friends, from a full development of this kind of thinking that unavoidable leads to melancholy but in this case, I certainly was with my mind somehow confined to the geographical area in which the image was taken and to the Holocaust day commemorated not too long time ago. In addition, a documentary movie demonstrating that no one of Allied Forces during the WWII has made the slightest effort to disrupt the killing machine of the Third Reich by bombarding the railways used by the Nazi regime to transport millions of people to their extermination in well organized and known Death Camps, confronted me again thru a strong connection to the heavy heritage left on my people - the Jewish people.
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Comments: 74
brilliantly gorgeous diamond photo!!!!Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β
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All the crimes of Nazism were committed in the name of preserving the heritage, the identity of a people. The evil that can arise, when a cause, even noble, takes the wrong way...
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Awwwβ¦ this is amazing my dear Rikiβ¦.
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WOW!!! Breathtaking shot!!!! i love that sky!!!!!
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Dave thanks a lot my friend
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you're so welcome Riki my friend 
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On the British side, Churchill pressed for action against opposition and derogatory remarks from some under him.Β I think there was at least one attack on a specific target within a camp.
As for the liberation of the camps and the position of the locals, "Band of Brothers" showed local civilians brought in to dig and move bodies.
I remember a photo from the British liberation of Belsen. Three German civiian men, looking middle-aged or older, stand in coats amidst the horror. They have all taken off their hats. A very small thing, but the beginning of saying, "We are human. They were human."
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I feel like that sometimes, but also there is the problem of politicians behaving like generals "always fighting the last war". Humans have a strong tendency to assume a situation fits what they're used to: one sees this in analysis of major accidents. People like Baldwin and Chamberlain in Britain, Briand and Daladier in France, were not stupid. They looked at the immense slaughter of the First World War, when no-one showed weakness, and said, "We must do everything we can to avoid this happening again." With the exception of Daladier, who understood Munich was a betrayal, Hitler was assumed to be a rational man who indulged in extreme posturing to get what he wanted. With deeper understanding they'd have realised this was wrong, but these were rational men with a tendency to assume others were rational. Yes, I agree, a closer understanding of History would have corrected this, because it's full of acts of extreme cruelty and irrationality: the Nazis were different because they were MORE rational (to an evil end) than most of these people and because they could kill on a far greater scale. Even some German generals didn't realise how unlimited Hitler's ambitions were until he overran the whole of Czechoslovakia.
It seems to me many US leaders have a particular difficulty understanding how different other countries are. It's a lack of imagination.
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Chamberlain was anything but weak: he was just the wrong man at the wrong time and as a rather cold, reserved, remote and rational man, he was poorly-placed to understand the Nazis. In 1940, though, when after the fall of France Churchill was under a lot of pressure within his own Tory party to make peace, Chamberlain, by then a dying man, backed him to the hilt and this may have been decisive.
I didn't know the Hoare story. Very funny and revealing!
A factor in France was that the birth-rate had been falling for some time. Add the carnage of the First World War, and you got a country of old men (women didn't have the vote till the 1940s), disinclined to take risks and trusting in old methods. Their top generals in 1939-40 were retirement age, men who had done a good job twenty years earlier.
Not only socialism (in the sense of centralised state planning of the economy and just about everything) is tried repeatedly and doesn't work. Those in the US and UK who deregulated banking and loosened controls before the 2008 smash hadn't learnt from 1929 and neither had the bank CEOs. In fact the crash of the mighty UK bank Overend & Gurney in the mid-19th century sounds eerily like 2008, except the banking system wasn't so interconnected, so one collapse didn't have the same domino effect.
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Hi! I have an unfair advantage. I'm a History graduate, though most of what we're discussing was not part of my university studies. I'm also politically involved and you really can't not ask yourself both about how and why the Nazis rose to power and about the failure of other countries to frustrate them once they were in power.
A nugget for you - maybe you know - there is evidence that Stalin was ready to join an anti-Nazi front until 1938, when he concluded after Munich that Britain and France would not fight and adopted Plan B, the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
You're thoughtful and well-informed yourself. On the Dreyfus Affair, it wouldn't have happened as it did without the Franco-Prussian War, but the Papacy and the organised French Catholic Church (not all Catholics) had been in bitter conflict with liberalism, secularism and republicanism since the fall of Napoleon. Jews were willy-nilly identified with the non (anti) Catholic side and were an easy target. So I think something like the Dreyfus Affair might have happened anyway. The affair did in the end solidify the secular republic and enable non-clerical Conservatives to co-operate with socialists and radicals. It also demonstrated that the Army was not above reproach and set justice above convenience of state, not a bad thing.
France really made a pretty good recovery from the Franco-Prussian war, both in terms of the survival of the initially extremely shaky Third Republic, and the economy, arts and military: after all, one of the immediate causes behind the Dreyfus Affair was that the new French 75 was, I'm told the best light artillery gun around.
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was not popular with the then quite numerous French Protestants! It also had an effect in England, The Netherlands and North Germany, pushing these countries towards a more anti-French stance.
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You know a lot.
I agree absolutely about Alexander - a psychopath. Like many psychopaths, he had charm and charisma. Of course, he won battles, but you're probably right that his ruthless but more measured father would have stopped his conquests sooner and given some thought to how the empire was going to hold together after him. If Alexander hadn't died young, he'd have gone on fighting battles until either a gamble went wrong and he lost, or chance - a stray arrow or a fall from his horse - put paid to him, like Charles XII of Sweden, rather a similar character if less extreme.
"Stonewall" Jackson was a bit similar - brilliant, driven, terrible to have to co-operate with if you were another Confederate general, best by far when he didn't have to co-operate with anyone, hugely overconfident and taking big risks. I'm pretty sure if he hadn't died when he did, against a competent Union general, with luck not going Jackson's way, he'd have walked into a disaster.
I'm not a Marxist, but long-term underlying processes do exist and do have huge effect. For example, the predominance of Europe in world affairs could never have lasted into the 21st century, because its lead in exploitation of natural resources, technical education and so on was bound to be eroded as countries with bigger populations (USA, China, India) caught up - except of course, Russia, spanning Europe and Asia, was one of the potential superpowers. But without the two world wars, neither of which was inevitable, European predominance would have lasted longer, maybe till the 1970s instead of basically ending in 1943-4. Once printing and cheap paper had been discovered, the Catholic church could not maintain its unquestioned hold on thought. The Internet is inevitably undermining some traditional forms of organisation and the traditional office is bound to decline, though that turned out to be a lot slower than many people predicted.
Stalin was very clever and ruthless. He manoevred to get to the top and then made people fear him. He did regard conflict with Nazi Germany as inevitable, but didn't expect the Germans to attack anything like as soon as they did, so the Red Army was badly unprepared - weakened also by the purges, as you say and then instead of doing what the Tsarists did against Napoleon, retreating, minimising battles, waiting for the right moment, using Russia's big advantage in the huge distances and poor roads, they tried to fight where they stood, which was just what the Germans wanted.
Despite those long-term processes, individuals can make big differences and so deaths can. De Gaulle, for example, massively reformed the French political system and his work has lasted to today, only just starting to creak. After him, French politics was a different game. He also managed to get the French out of Algeria. However, by the time of the assassination attempts, I rather doubt if either his new political system or disengagement from Algeria would have failed. The "fronde des generaux" was a different matter as that would have brought in a military, stay-in-Algeria government with incalculable results. Back to the topic I know most about, with out two outstanding generals who rose to the top through successes in fighting, Fairfax and Cromwell, Parliament would have surely lost the English Civil War and maybe the English/British tradition of parliamentary government would be a footnote.
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Oh, you speak English in Texas, "but not as we know it, Jim." A Deep South accent can be harder for us to understand, especially the Black southern guys who speak very fast. I had a Texan taking the boat round the outer Everglades and I understood him fine. He spoke so slow, anything I didn't initially understand, I had time to think through!
Americans (this was all in the South) generally didn't pick me as English because their idea of the accent was Hugh Grant or Stephen Fry (or Tony Blair - despite being Labour, he spoke quite posh).
I like your point about language practice. You'd also have needed to learn the Russian for "Fuck off!".
In the lockdown, I'm learning Italian. No reason except it's a fun language.
Yes, of course, De Gaulle's decisions on Algeria made him a target, but the majority of French people were glad to see an end to the situation and crucially, when the military in Algeria tried a coup, the young national servicemen were having nothing of it.
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Southerners (US Southerners) tend to have a positive view of the Brits, maybe just because most of the Irish went to the North and Irish Americans traditionally hate Britain.
Yes, Sybil is recognisable, still is, while Basil could hardly exist in reality except very much toned down. Our class system is in decline and it's getting more like France of the US, where your status and life chances depend a lot on how much money you have (or your parents had) and not on their name or ancestry or accent. Blair was untypical in the upper reaches of the Labour Party: most of the top people in the cabinet had less classy accents or Scottish accents. A North of England accent is by definition not classy.
Years back I was involved in a charity that was raising funds for food and other relief for Bosnia. One Black English guy who was involved (probably had a Bosnian girlfriend) did a sponsored cycle ride from California to the Gulf of Mexico (don't know if he was going to be in the US anyway). He said people were very friendly, but in Texas they just hadn't seen cycle equipment like his. I suspect also their minds were blown by a Black guy with a posh English accent!
Aussies have a reputation for heavy drinking and also, shall we say, for being assertive and not shy. Bit like Texans. I do a lot of long-distance walking and getting into wild and remote places in the UK and Ireland, and the nationalities you repeatedly meet in such places are Australian and German.
I've got Welsh blood too. There's something in common.
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Yes, it seems from over here that two bad things come together: too many trigger-happy people with guns and an assumption by some white people that black people, unless they can see otherwise (like a uniform) are criminals or a threat. Plus in some cases, UK police, expect for a few bad apples, expect to be challenged occasionally by people who don't necessarily think the police are doing the right thing, whereas in the States, they can react very aggressively to that.
Discriminatory attitudes - especialy unconscious discrimination - are widespread and actually everybody has some kind of negative stereotype about someone. What you can do is realise it and say, OK, I've got a prejudice against X, so watch out for that affecting my judgment.
I'm very interested in how major accidents happen - both the mistakes way back that may eventually have facilitated a disaster and how people, especially people in authority, react when things start going badly wrong. It's obviously got a similarity with military crises. One case I was recalling recently was the Piper Alpha North Sea oil and gas disaster in 1988. The Piper Alpha platform had been constructed in 1976 for oil extraction only and great care had been taken with planning for safety. In particular, no location where numbers of workers would be was placed next to a high-risk location where an explosion might occur. The platform was later converted to take gas as well and this safety principle was disregarded, in that a high risk location was placed next to the control room. When a crisis developed, responsible staff crowded into the control room. An explosion then wiped them out. From that point on, as oil rigs do not have a military-style hierarchy from colonel down to corporal, no-one on the rig was in command. The other amazing and instructive thing that went wrong was that a manager of the whole complex of rigs could see Piper Alpha burning like hell, and could have shut off the supply (I forget if oil or gas or both), but didn't because his instructions stated before turning off he had to get permission from a senior manager on shore in Aberdeen. That was clearly not written with a disaster on that scale in mind, but the guy stuck to it. He made several efforts to get through to Aberdeen without success. When he finally did get through, the first thing the senior manager said was, "You have shut off the supply, haven't you?" Some 200 people died.
If you ever get to come to Britain with hiking in mind, you're welcome to come to me for advice: barretthunter007@yahoo.co.uk. We have some quite well-marked long-distance trails. The longest I've done is the SW coastal footpath, about 630 miles. Took me 35 days. I've not visited any battlefields outside Britain and the US, though I keep thinking I should do the Normandy beaches and the trench line of the First World War. I have visited a few British battlefields: Naseby and Marston Moor (Civil War) and Killiecrankie and Culloden (different Jacobite uprisings in Scotland) and in the States, Shiloh, Chickamauga and Kennesaw Mountain (your civil war). You preserve your civil war battlefields with a lot more respect and available information than we do ours.Β
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George Macdonald Fraser! Wow!
I haven't seen Gettysburg. I read it was too crowded (with tourists). Chickamauga is well laid-out.
I sympathise with Rosecrans, who was probably a better general than Bragg (see Missionary Ridge). He was given wrong information as the battle was about to start and acted on it. Also it was not inevitable the Confederate attack would be concentrated against the point he had weakened. Still, thanks no doubt largely to George Thomas, the Confederate losses at Chickamauga were not much lower than the Union losses and the Confederacy could less afford losses. Rosecrans' loss of nerve after the battle, though, was serious.
Whereas some military disasters are more culpable. Example the disposition of US fighter aircraft on Hawaii before Pearl Harbor. Example the Ardennes in 1940. Example the Horns of Hattin.Β Example the Teutoburger Wald. Classic example was Charles the Bold of Burgundy (also retrospectively known as Charles the Rash) who decided to conquer Switzerland in the 15th century (on the way to Italy) and marched a huge army into a Swiss pass with steep, wooded sides without checking out the wooded sides. The Swiss waited till his army was strung out along the pass, then sounded their horns (which panicked the horses) and charged out of the woods on both sides. A massacre and a total disaster for Burgundy.
Of the English Civil War battlefields, Marston Moor in Yorkshire (the bloodiest battle of the war and one of the most decisive) was pathetic when I visited, but may have improved since. Opposite the 19th-century memorial was a large tip full of broken-up cars etc. Made me angry. Naseby is better, especially if you want to visualise what it was like to be a Parliamentary soldier waiting for the Royalist charge, the Royalists on the ridge to the north (easy enough to pick out) and although Sulby Hedges, where Parliament's Oakey's Dragoons were lined up, is no longer a hedgerow, you can see where it was. The main thing that's changed is that whereas in 1645, Parliament's right and the King's left, Cromwell's cavalry and Langdale's, met on broken, uneven ground with a rabbit warren, it's now just ordinary fields and trees. I believe the first battle of the war, Edgehill, is quite well laid out.
I have been to a military site before it became such a site - Sarajevo.
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Nothing much to add to that except that there can be few people without some kind of history qualification who know as much as you do, at least military history.
The Bosnian lowland scenery wasn't unlike south-east or Midland England, until you looked at the towns (different architecture) or signs of prosperity or lack of it (poorer, though nothing like the poverty I saw in Bulgaria). My only sight of Germany was from a train and Northern Germany around Hamburg looked pretty much like south-east England. Bits of West Tennessee are not unlike southern England, again if you just look at the fields and not the towns or people.
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