As the ww2 generation passes on, it's easy to forget the degree of utter, total mobilization that went on in the British Isles during the war. I'm always struck by how easy it is to hike into some remote part of the UK and learn that the parish school was a training ground for Italian resistance fighters or that some park in remote scotland was where they trained commandos. Perhaps its because the country is quite small, and they had to use every inch, but it always seems remarkable.
I think the notion of odd, but brilliant, boffin is deeply embedded in British culture. Or was, until at least the 2000s. The Great Egg Race on TV being a fine example.
Perhaps that's why the UK has so much more sympathy for Ukraine than the US.
Yes the US fought in WWII with a lot of human investment, the amount of direct threats to American soil was much smaller than the UK and the memories of the war are those of the fights in the jungles and not of American children fleeing bombs in major cities
It helps. I think Boris Johnson was very happy to play the Churchill role.
The more interesting question is always why America suddenly forgot all its usual rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and liberating random countries (sometimes against their will) in this particular case, and whether it has anything to do with propaganda and bribery operations.
That can totally explain the lack of desire to get involved.
That doesn't explain the victim blaming though.
Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal because he refused to capitulate to a stronger enemy.
War is crazy and brutal and engaging in one is going to get people killed. But I don't understand how we can expect some other country to just give up and yet we don't expect ourselves to do the same when somebody attacks us.
Hence my only explanation is that no living person in America truly knows how it feels to be invaded.
That some other country gets over 55% of its budget from the West and almost all its materiel. Total direct “aid” over 320 billion so far. Total costs to the West much higher still.
And the result for Ukraine is more territory lost, more destruction, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. No one would and could stop them from continuing the war on their own but imagine what that would look like.
And the result for the West is a stronger, hostile Russia with deepening ties to China, North Korea etc. Strategic failure.
>Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal
No. What we saw was a noisy attempt by the US to salvage its strategic failure in Ukraine/Russia. Russians weren’t fooled. It failed.
Hundreds of thousands of casualties for Russia too. Haven't they considered just stopping?
Ukraine as client police state is not a casualty free environment either. Really the war started when pro-Russian security services killed over a hundred protesters at Euromaidan, back in 2014.
Someone who genuinely cared about Russian lives, rather than just the regime or contrarianism, would want the Russians to pull out immediately like the Americans out of Afghanistan.
We don’t have to speculate. They’ve just presented to Ukraine and published their conditions for ceasefire or settlement.
The reaction suggests Ukraine/the West would rather continue. Of course, demands will only increase.
> Really the war started with Euromaidan
Sure it wasn’t when Ukrainian nationalists burned 42 people to death in Odessa?
>regime, pull out
Ah, but Ukraine/the West were given so many opportunities to settle this peacefully. Even the March 2023 settlement (which has been published) was dangerously generous, for said regime. But peace was not on Western leaders’ mind. They wanted something else.
(Preposterous to compare Ukraine/Russia with Afghanistan/US.)
I'm not talking about whether you guys should give him money.
But it's totally normal for a country to try to defend itself.
I honestly don't understand why people seem to ignore this angle and just keep talking about budget and money and foreign interests and nato and what not.
Ok, you don't want to give Ukraine money for their defence, FINE, do not give them money!
But why do you have to frame it as zelenski is corrupt, traitor, murderer, boogyman or whatever.
No normal leader of a country being invaded would be expected to surrender their country. They would have been hanged by their own people.
What I find infuriating about this discourse is the double standard. At the same time the american right is absolutely going bezerk over "immigrant invasion" and when some other people suffer an invasion "nah, I don't see the problem, they will just get along fine if they surrender".
You're free to spend your money as you wish, but it's the total lack of empathy (about this and other causes) that rubs me the wrong way.
> You're free to spend your money as you wish, but it's the total lack of empathy (about this and other causes) that rubs me the wrong way.
You are not talking to an American, but to a Russian imperialist, and a very stereotypcal one at that. Extremely cynical and utterly devoid of decency, because for generations, the most moral and decent people have ended up in penal camps. As for the rest rest - you just saw a fine specimen. All that cynicism is meant to give the impression of independent thinking (primarily to themselves), but at the end of the day, they're just parroting state propaganda and goosestepping to the tune coming from the Kremlin. And when their country inevitably degrades once again to the point where little children are forced to prostitute themselves for food as the economically unsustainable imperialistic wars backfire, they will blame you and me for it, because it's always someone else's fault. This self-destructive loop has been going on for many centuries and is the main reason why no one in Europe bordering Russia can stand them. People sincerely dream of an ocean between Europe and China.
From time to time, some countries in Europe have tried to reason with Russian imperialism. Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" offers a vivid depiction of how that went: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465031471
Thanks, mopsi, I'm flattered. Have to say, though, I don’t think your valiant and steadfast defense of Ukraine’s e-turf makes as much of a difference as you think it does. Therefore I’d like you to consider putting your feet where your fingertips are: https://www.ildu.com.ua Every warm body makes a difference!
Your understanding of matters of war and state is juvenile. I encourage you to ignore the spectacle (to follow it is an almost complete waste of time anyway), and read some old books about even older wars.
>just keep talking about budget and money and foreign interests and nato and what not.
Because that’s what it’s about. War is a murder machine with an enormous appetite. Moral justifications are usually post-hoc, seldom driving, and certainly never exclusive.
I personally don't care about ukraine nor ukrainians; I have no stake in the game.
But I think all humans are fundamentally the same and when I see a bunch of humans fighting for their freedom I can understand them. I understand their motivations.
I also understand the imperialistic motivations. I understand russian need for status and pride and their relationship with their grandiose past. I understand all these emotions. All these emotions are exploited by various interests, sure, but nevertheless without those emotions of the masses war couldn't happen.
What irks me is when people do not want to put themselves in the clothes of somebody else at all, an d just conclude that one group of people is not entitled to have a given emotion. So Ukraine is not entitled to defend themselves because <insert_some_rational_reason> but russia is entitled to defend their separatists because <insert_some_rational_reason>.
It's the double standard that irks me.
I think we can agree that war is shit and everybody would be better off without it.
But, no, that's not the proposed alternative. The proposed alternative is that a group of people, in this case the Ukrainians, effectively surrender and become diminished. Future generations of russians will look at them and say "we're justified in treating you ask shit because after all we won and you lost". This happened over and over in history. Hell, this is why most white supremacists think they are the chosen ones, because whites conquered.
So how should I judge the people who want to defend themselves? I honestly cannot blame them from trying their best.
No, you’re still not getting it. This “double standard” is a figment of your imagination, it doesn’t exist. Roughly every country on Earth acknowledges Ukraine’s right to self-defense. A large number of them is materially supporting Ukraine.
They are free to defend themselves till the bitter end. No one is stopping them. And, theatrics aside, support isn’t ceasing either.
But they’re not winning. There’s no right to that.
If you cared about Russian and Ukrainian lives then you would be arguing for Russia to leave immediately. Only Russia can end this war, by retreating back to the internationally recognised borders.
Russia has "vital interests" that the whole world is, according to Russian imperialists such as yourself, obliged to bend over backwards to accommodate.
Well, guess what, we Europeans have vital interests too. Our vital interest is a free and independent Ukraine. Russia is not the only country with interests, you know!
Cried wolf situation, I suppose. Because the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq was illegitimate and failed, therefore supporting Ukraine is bad (ignoring the totally different facts of the different situation).
Also the exact same politicians and party that was so fucking Gung Ho at bombing the middle east (not even picking a country!) that you were "Unamerican" for not believing straight up lies by the administration (that nobody went to jail for) are the ones crying about defending a Sovereign nation being unilaterally invaded in Europe.
They are also tee-ing us up to attack Iran, and have provably spent money attacking Houthis despite knowing that Europe would take care of themselves.
They are full of shit and they know it. They do not care.
Never-mind that, there's every indication this one is in fact yet another bad one.
The Taliban didn't return to power in Afghanistan, because the war was unjust according to international law, or morally repugnant or any of that. That has never mattered. And it won't ever matter.
The Taliban won because American strategy was defective from the start. While great victories with thousands of Taliban getting massacred were common, none of those contributed the destruction of the Taliban or any other strategic objective. There had been minimal effort to learn from the failures of Vietnam and the idea of learning from British victories against the insurgents in Malaya and South Africa was unthinkable.
And the situation in Ukraine gives every indication of being similar. The Ukrainian side conducts ambitious operations, some of them impressive successes, but ever since the summer of 2023, victory only seems to be getting more distant as time goes by.
What American-Vietnam war and American-Afganistan war had in common was counterinsurgency of the opposing forces embedded with local population (VietCong embedded with local south Vietnamese villagers; Taliban embedded with Afghan villagers). This broke the war for Americans. (If we are pedantic we can observe a similar situation in the second American-Iraqi war with similar outcome for Americans)
This situation is not present in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Why, because Russia can grind out a village a week? Ukraine is inflicting disproportionate losses and is supplied to the hilt by Europe, while Russia's moving closer every day to a Potemkin economy.
Ukraine is inflicting massively disproportionate losses. Meanwhile, Ukraine does very aggressive conscription while Russia mostly deploys volunteers and only resorted to reservists in 2022 in an emergency. It doesn't really add up, does it.
And the collapse of the Russian economy will happen any day now for the past 3 years.
After 20 years of being told the military leadership of the western world had COIN all figured out, you're going to have to give people something more than a prayer that the enemy's economy will collapse all of a sudden. Proud ignorance of the basic facts of the field or of the enemy won't procure much public support any more.
Of course Ukraine conscripts, they're in a war for their survival. They aren't drafting anyone under 25, by the way, so it's not as dire as you seem to think. And Russia's beating people and throwing them in pits if they won't sign contracts to go to Ukraine, so it's not all roses over there.
It's not at all unreasonable to think that Ukraine can continue ceding ground and shredding Ladas full of mobiks until Putin kicks the bucket, or the Russian economy collapses. A healthy economy doesn't have a 20% key interest rate for 8 months straight, you know. We've already seen one large-scale mutiny in the Russian armed forces, too, so who knows what else might happen?
You haven't proposed any sort of alternative to continuing to arm and fund Ukraine. What's your idea, cut them off and say "good luck?" How does that benefit anyone besides Russia and the minority of Ukrainians who don't want to fight?
edit: if you're thinking that I care about the financial cost of arming Ukraine, I don't. This is the best money we've ever spent and the only time I've respected our MIC, and I wish we were sending more weapons and more financial support. Every time Ukraine spends $100,000 of aid destroying a piece of Russian armor, that's saving us god knows how much in money spent on deterrence.
The average American (like the average citizen of almost any other country) doesn't care about this in general and needs leadership to sway their opinion one way or another. If the leaders don't care, they hold enough power and visibility to make it moot and get people to care about other things, like inflation, price of eggs or immigrants stealing their jobs.
People have this thinking nations have these widely shared opinions when they don't, the politics and visible leaders are the ones shaping public opinion.
I think your main point is valid, but the pedantic in me struggles with your wording. I think the point you are tring to make is this:
Nations don't have a single shared opinion even if they have a single shared action.
It frusrates me that the people of Russia allow their country to continue its aggression even in the face of such staggering losses. I can't understand their thinking. Then I remind myself that there is not just a single brain called Russia. There is not even just a single brain in the leadership of Russia.
I suspect that the percentage of US voters that support Ukraine is pretty high. A quick internet seach tells me that Pres. Trump's current approval rating is well below 50%. But I suspect support for impeachment is very much lower than that and support for a coup is practically non-existent.
It makes sense to me that the same holds in Russia. Tens of thousands of Russians each month lose a husband/son/father/brother in this war. Some may blame Ukraine and want revenge. Some may feel some patriotic or nationalistic justification for their loss. Others may hate Putin for it. Still others may convert to pacifism. But there seems little evidence that there is any will to do what it takes to challenge the power that keeps sending thousands more to their death. A very small percent of the population can continue to inflict this horror on all of Russia.
I would love to believe that there are voices even within Putin's hearing that quietly but consistently advocate for peace and somehow don't get removed. Imagine that there are people who make a point of never publicly falling out, but once a week hand deliver a note about improved GDP if Russia ended the invasion. Or they verbally suggest seaside resorts that could host old-fashioned vacations if they weren't in a war zone. Or they ponder out loud how much better the domestic auto industry could be if some of the military spending were diverted. Imagine the combined efforts of a few people to make sure Putin gets one subtle peacemaker message each day.
Please don't condemn all Russians. And please don't condemn all USians. And certainly please don't condemn all Americans. I don't know how much the average American cares, but I for one hope it is more than zero.
Boris Johnson contributed to untold damage to the UK with covid and brexit.
But his actions with Ukraine were unimpeachable. As a populist leader throwing immediate public support (I think he was the first foreign leader to go to Kyiv, certainly one of the first) it kneecapped the Useful Idiots like Farage.
It was actually Ursula von der Leyen who was first, arriving in Kyiv the day before Johnson's visit (neither of them were aware of the other's travel plans, for security reasons).
It is fair to say that Boris did end up forming a particularly strong bond with Zelenskyy, though if you wanted to be cynical you might perhaps point out that two of his three subsequent visits to Kyiv coincided with some of the trickiest moments in the Partygate scandal, and allowed him to get out of events that would likely have proven embarrassing for him.
Various infantry bunkers laying about are also a reminder, but what really gets me are the bonkers last-ditch defensive weapons you can still find in places, like preset positions for flame fougasse batteries:
I think we are seeing similar tactics and mobilization in Ukraine. They had to invent and be practical on the battlefield without the overwhelming numbers of the Russian empire.
I would love to see something like The Great Egg Race back on TV instead of another series of Celebrities doing things Badly. Robot Wars is the closest we've been I suppose.
What i find even more remarkable is how every town, village, school and institution have memorials for those who lost their lives in the Great War. Usually there is another plaque attached in memory of WW2. It's hard to imagine the scale of deaths.
The tragedy is how little was accomplished by the sacrifices of ww1. It had none of the moral clarity of ww2 nor did most of the deaths achieve any strategic purpose.
On the other hand i knew an old scientist who had quite a few interesting and amusing stories to share about his efforts in WW2. One of them was about his attempts to perfect a formala. Several factories exploded before they succeeded.
There was moral clarity in West and South Europe. But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism. Everyone else was trying to find the least bad option, which usually meant choosing a side and switching it at least once.
> ... in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.
That is unambiguous and clear. They kept their word.
It is tragic in the end that after the war they handed Poland over to Stalin. Poland still had its independence threatened but after having supplied and helped Stalin all that time, it was awkward having to declare war against him as well.
That’s fair. It sort of like on “paper” they fulfilled their obligation, shot a few rounds and quickly ran away. And like we mentioned even in the end they gave Poland over to Stalin. So they won the war, but officially the reason they got into it was not redressed. Not until the Soviet Union fell, years later.
That’s true. Abandoning the Czechs was embarrassing. That was probably a factor in then choosing to at least do the right thing for Poland. Otherwise it started to look really embarrassing for them: here are these great powers and they do not keep their word. That looked very weak.
The political situation in the 1930s was thoroughly messed up. Britain and France may have had mainly good intentions, but their policies did not prevent the disasters.
Great Britain should have made a pact with the Soviet Union against Hitler much earlier.
Poland was in an extremely difficult situation. But the decision to invade Czechoslovakia with the Germans was certainly not a good idea.
> Britain and France may have had mainly good intentions, but their policies did not prevent the disasters.
They had an absolute lack of appetite for fighting since the WWI was not long ago. I don't know if the Germans were smart enough to understand that and fully took advantage of it or were just lucky. For the Germans it worked with Czechoslovakia so they figured it would work with Poland as well.
Stalin I think is more interesting. He was prepared to "defend" the Czechs as well. He just needed permission to take his armies across Poland and Romania. He quickly switched sides after the agreement and signed the Soviet-German agreement.
> In 1925, a flying school was established near Lipetsk (Lipetsk fighter-pilot school) to train the first pilots for the future Luftwaffe
Reading that it's like reading some alternative universe fan-fiction. So that makes Stalin's position interesting. He was supposed to be allied with the French and the British officially but non-officially was assisting the Germans.
I don't know if the eastern european countries besides maybe ussr count. Many many polish, ukrainian and lithuanians enthusiastically helped the germans in carrying out the holocaust.
On 02.04.2008, Russian State Duma confirmed that 7 million (adults and unknown number of children) died because of artificial starvation in 1932-1934 (Holodomor). Majority of them are Ukrainians. However, Russian Federation refuses to confirm the starvation and FSB agents jail or kill everybody who spreads information about Holodomor. If you are from RF - beware.
Not even close so don't try. There were some powerful positions in the ussr occupied by jews. I'm not sure what role they had in the purges etc. Stalin was definitely not a great lover of jews.
On the other hand in the countries i mentioned above many locals participated in a genocide and murdered their neighbors with their bare hands.
> But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism.
WWII in Eastern Europe was a war for the survival of the Slavic peoples whom the Nazis declared to be the Untermensch[0] (Belorussians, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians – all of them) and were determined to fully exterminate them all following the extermination of the Jews and the Roma people.
The scale of extermination of the Slavs went far beyond the mass murdering of them in concentration camps, and included rounding up villages and burning them along with the villagers down with the use of flamethrowers, with no remorse because the Nazis considered the Slavs sub-humans[1][2][3][4].
Neither Czechoslovakia, nor Poland, nor the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had communism of any shape or flavour.
How do Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland fit in that picture?
WW2 was a complex war. The big picture for the European part was that the two main powers divided Europe in their spheres of influence, fully intending to fight each other for overall supremacy after a while. Some countries joined their designated side voluntarily, some joined under a threat of invasion, and most of the rest were invaded. The ones I listed were the ones where the USSR was the initial aggressor.
Instead of shifting the goalposts, please do yourself a favour and read up on the Untermenschen and the convoluted hierarchy of the sub-humans in the Nazi racial ideology. As an example, since the Nazis harboured particular hatred towards the Poles, the Poles were at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and only complete obliteration of the Polish ethnicity was deemed acceptable.
One joins an alliance of convenience, sometimes in very unfavourable circumstances, to avoid the worst – the demise of one's own people and to guarantee their survival. Making a deal with the devil is a well-known adage that aptly describes such an unfortunate event.
Nazis considered the Finns (and the Estonians by extension) to be racially pure, with Latvians and Lithuanians being somewhere in between either redeemable or tolerable (frankly, I can't recall the exact details).
> WW2 was a complex war.
WWII was no more complex than the WWI, and it had a single, overarching objective – the repartitioning of the world. The main difference between the two was that the WWII was infused with a vile racial ideology, used to justify the pursuit of Lebensraum and the total annihilation of peoples whom the Nazi Party targeted with hatred, based on their crackpot so-called racial studies.
A clear view of WW II in all its complexity is important. The current tense geopolitical context makes that even more so. Have you noticed how the current head war criminal in Moscow is glorifying his WW II predecessor?
Moreover, Germans decided that Slavs are untermensch because of Holodomor henocide of Ukrainians ([Little] Russians) by Russians (Great Russians). The confusion between [Little] Russians (now Ukrainians) and Great Russians (now Russians) caused Germans to think that Russians performed genocide of their own nation, killed millions of their own mothers and children, which is biggest sin in Germany (and many other nations).
> Ukrainian nationalists had also joined the Nazis.
This occurred in all occupied territories didn’t it? France, Holland, Belgium etc.
It also occurred in some that weren’t occupied. Spain for example, and don’t look too hard at the British Royal Family (for this reason and various others).
"This separatism at certain moments reached extremes that no one could forget, particularly not the Russian people, knowing that the vast mass of the Nazi-armed and organised armies coming from Russian territory were Ukrainian. The Vlasov army was a Ukrainian army. Today we can even read the history of Ukrainians turning entire villages to blood and fire, including French ones. A good part of the repression of the maquis in central France was carried out by Ukrainians. "
"He (Himmler) oversaw the creation of the SS-Volunteer Division "Galicia" in October 1943 from Ukrainian volunteers, but that same month he said that Vlasov made him "genuinely anxious."
It's worth pointing out explicitly that WW2 didn't have the moral clarity that it does today either. The vast majority of the western world was perfectly content to let Hitler run Europe and Japan to run Asia.
Literally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself.
Churchill stands virtually alone as one with moral clarity on the Nazis.
USSR allied with them. France was fine seeing everyone else get rolled. Poland signed a nonaggression pact. The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.
How about instead, you tell me who you think went out of their way to combat Nazism?
> Literally not one country initiated combat against Nazi Germany before being attacked itself.
The UK and France both declared war at the same time after Germany invaded Poland.
I think the UK fired the first bullets -- or rather depth charges, on Sep 3rd. That resulted in damage and no deaths. A few hours later Germany attacked a UK passenger liner and killed over 100 civilians - not just Brits but also Canadians and Americans.
The day later the RAF bombed a German naval port, causing little damage, but again attacks.
France had the Saar offensive within days, so France fired the first shots between France and Germany. Nazi invasion of the Benelux and France was inevitable, but technically France attacked Germany before Germany attacked France.
> The British parliament were generally happy to let Hitler have his way.
Britain was mobilising throughout the late 30s. Declaring war at Munich could well have resulted in a British loss - the RAF wasn't really capable of running the Battle of Britain, it barely survived even with the extra year of preparation. On the other hand Nazis were less prepared too. Who knows what that would have done - perhaps a coup against Hitler would have succeeded. On the other hand perhaps there would have been no support for war - leading to a resignation of Chamberlain, Halifax becoming PM who was even more stronger into appeasement, and a swift truce hammered out, with no the UK abandoning Poland.
Churchill was of course more wary of Hitler, but Chamberlain is the one who declared war.
This is pretty much a complete and comprehensive description of what's now called the Phoney War for being pretty much nonexistent beyond the bare minimum required to "check the box" for England and France's "defense" of Poland (which, to be clear, waiting for your ally to be directly attacked == not doing anything until you are attacked)
Not that I think any of this is indefensible, to be clear, but it is obvious in the moral clarity of today that offensive action against Nazi Germany would have been justified. The reason no one engaged in it was because it wasn't morally clear at the time.
I don't understand when you consider the first attack by Germany on the UK? The invasion of Poland?
Even if you ignore early engagements in September 1939, from April the UK was involved in fighting in Norway - losing over 4000 troops in the process.
The war wasn't waged particularly well by France or the UK in 39/40, being too late to be involved in Finland and failing to successfully defend Norway, but it was certainly waged in Norway. The failures led to the fall of both Daladier and Chamberlain, but thousands of British troops had been killed before Churchill became Prime Minister.
Yes I would say "waiting until I'm legally obligated to act, and even then doing such a minuscule job of it that it's called 'The Phoney War'" are clear evidence of a lack of moral clarity.
It seems like you believe I'm arguing that no military action was underway prior to Churchill. I'm not. I'm arguing that (effectively) no one had "moral clarity" about the Third Reich other than Churchill.
I don't think it has anything to do with moral clarity. The western allies didn't hesitate to attack because they weren't sure whether Hitler was such a bad guy after all. They feared another repetition of wwi and worse, because the increased effectiveness of aerial bombing would bring the horrors of the trenches to the home front. This fear drove all of the capitulations to Hitler by France and the UK in the 1930s, and continued as late as 1944, when much of the British leadership still feared to land armies in the killing fields of northwest Europe.
If you believe that today WW2 was "morally clear," what you are saying is that it was clearly worth overcoming all of those risks and that fear (understandable as it is).
They did not do that and instead were spurred into action only when they themselves were attacked, ergo obviously it was not morally clear at the time.
Okay, well I disagree with your dimensional analysis. To me moral clarity is being confident about who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Taking action to do something about it is another matter. To me it's morally clear that Ukraine is in the right in the current war, but I have taken no personal risks to put my life on the line for that belief.
To an extent you are right. ww1 made much more sense at the time then it does today. And it wasn't as clear during ww2 that it was in fact the greatest conflict of good vs evil ever.
The extent of the German and Japanese atrocities only became clear after the war and they were so great that even the Soviet Union were on the side of the angels.
I wouldn't say they were perfectly content. It was more that they were cowardly and apathetic.
WWI makes no sense (or perhaps, we understand it better) because over a hundred years have passed, and the highly emotive propaganda of the time no longer persuades us. If you were listening to your pastor thundering in the village church about (say) nurses in Belgium in 1914 you might not have had the emotional distance, or education in cold politics, to recognise that what was really going on was the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the fight for hegemony in the empires that remained. (Not to diminish the crimes in Belgium, btw, but they were part of a bigger picture that would have been hard to read in 1914.)
I took a photo of the statue years ago. A friend told me that he knew an old gent who has been in the commandos and was a model for one of the figures in the statue. But he had never seen the statue. So I was able to give him a copy of the photo to pass on to him.
Fancy having a statue of yourself and never bother going to see it!
The picture at the top shows the monument itself, but it's even more impressive in context as it's on top of a treeless moorland hill, surrounded by incredible views.
There are still remnants of the Atlantik wall in the Netherlands.
The Germans demolished the entire coastline- and made hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
An invasion of the Netherlands was never likely considering it is a swamp in which tanks cannot operate with rivers and canals every few kilometers.
Ironically the very last place in Europe that was liberated because the Allies bypassed it in their drive to the Ruhr.
I was at a picnic recently that happened to be on VE day, it really struck me that now London is only about 35% or so English as the ww2 generation would've known it, almost no one has a particularly good reason to bother paying attention. I'm sure I was the only person there who knows who Barnes Wallis was.
And yes I miss the boffins. They do still sort of exist but that type of mind has been strangled by the last few decades drive towards left-brained processes where everything basically has to be nailed down before the work actually starts.
That latter point is one reason why we're struggling so much - we owe a great debt to the generations who built all the infrastructure and housing. We didn't pay it off, we now can't really do anything at scale other than extract rent. The victorians were building a HS2 every few years.
Not sure the WW2 generation would be all too comfortable with you looking around and making a snap judgement based solely on appearances that some of the people around you have a lesser right to call themselves ‘English’ than you because you assume none of them know who Barnes Wallace is.
If there's so much social housing in London and so many people born overseas living in London, they can hardly help living in the social housing. Not sure that's a good or bad thing.
There's an episode of the 1970s BBC documentary series "The Secret War" about the miscellaneous technology projects that sound obviously crazy now, or may have been cancelled to soon:
The whole series is worth a watch, including episodes on radio location finding, radar and radar jamming, Jet engines, the V1/V2 rockets, and Ultra/Enigma etc. Many of the participants (both British and German) are interviewed - including Albert Speer.
It is interesting how the Germans made all these spectacular high tech weapons (V1, V2, rocket planes etc) and yet it was the less flashy Allied tech advances that made the difference (cavity magnetron, early computers, proximity fuses etc).
Electronic warfare in WWII was a competition and it looks like the US/UK had the upper hand because, in retrospect, they won the war. Germans were ahead in some areas, not least magnetic tape
Germany had a lot of top scientists and engineers. But I'm not sure I can see how mag tape would be a war winning weapon in the way that radar, early computers or proximity fuses were.
Of course, Germany booted out loads of Jewish scientists. Many of whom ended up doing important work for the Allies - not least on the atom bomb.
Near to where I live, there are the remnants of test concrete walls that were used to assess the best way to blow them up. Apparently people snuck over, took some samples of the concrete to recreate how it was made, and then constructed lots of sections of this wall—which they would then use to test their explosives against.
Stephenson enjoys the word. He also used it in Cryptonomicon. I keep a running list of new words I encounter and share them online occasionally. Someone once recognized I was reading Cryptonomicon just from a string of those new words, lol.
If you enjoy encountering new words and phrases such as 'theurgic vermin' then you might like China Miéville’s Kraken. I had to read it with a copy of the OED and Wikipedia to get the most from it.
Thank you for this. I was going nuts trying to figure out where I had read this before. Peace and love! For the uninitiated, the Neil Stephenson novel, "Anathem", is brilliant and extremely entertaining.
I am quite curious about the etymology behind the name ‘Panjandrum’, It is not explained in the article IIRC. Furthermore, the article writes about the improbability of homing/self-stearing devices, again IIRC flight navigation around this time already made use of known radio broadcasts for direction finding before the war (Amelia Earhart), did they research this or was it to unreliable.. because said war (jamming etc)?
I am sympathetic to the idea that this was intended as a misdirection
The flaws in the design seem reasonably obvious - any imbalance in the thrust of the multiple rockets on each wheel causing an unwanted steering effect. Also the high centre of gravity and narrow track width seem poorly chosen when stability would surely be desirable.
A mobile Catherine Wheel seems more designed to attract as much attention as possible...
Also by the way the Normandy beaches were NOT fortified with bunkers very much at all (unlike what you might have seen in Saving Private Ryan), just trenches and sandbags. A large portion of Omaha beach casualties were inflicted by a single machine gun nest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Severloh
> Also by the way the Normandy beaches were NOT fortified with bunkers very much at all
I'm not sure if you mean there were not many bunkers or they weren't very good fortifications, but there are quite a few bunkers, for example:
https://www.normandybunkers.com/bunker-sites
I mean, you might be able to make some kind of argument about the good outdoing the evil (I think it would be hard, but hey, I won’t call a line of argument impossible until I see it happen). But, the idea that it would be challenging to name a country that did less evil than GB is pretty ridiculous, right?
Most countries didn’t have colonial empires, so GB is pretty high up there (arguably not at the top) in the evil rankings.
Sure. The UK has done a lot, both Good and Evil. There are lots of countries which have done less Evil than the UK. There are some countries which have done more Good than the UK. I can't think of any country which is on both lists.
I don’t think it is really quantifiable. Like if I say France, how would anyone adjudicate that? In terms of “good,” both contributed in WW2, both made some contributions to the concept of liberal democracy…
Having a colonial empire involves countless horrible acts of evil.
GB was a little bit ahead of the curve on ending the slave trade (at least compared to particularly shitty countries on this issue, like the US). But is it also a problem that they themselves contributed massively toward, so kind of a mixed bag there.
Those empires didn't build that infrastructure out of the kindness of their hearts, they did so to more efficiently enslave the locals and extract their resources and to make life more comfortable for the colonizers occupying the territories.
Absolutely not one bit of it was done to improve the quality of life of colonized people. That it did regardless is a statement about the neutral moral dimension of technology, not the relative good of imperialism.
The USSR was terrible. Remarkably, the Nazis still managed to be substantially worse.
As one example there's the Hunger Plan. Hitler's defeat stopped him from executing it, though they had started. He planned to kill 35-41 million people in eastern europe via starvation and take the land for Germany.
The USSR equivalent, Holomodor, killed 3-5 million, and was fully executed. Horrendous. Not as bad as the hunger plan.
And that was not the only Nazi mass death plan....
That's a fair point. USSR soldiers did mass rape women in conquered territories (and even their own). And the Brits did have that famine in India that killed a lot as well.
Maybe the Nazis were worse, but wasn't really a good vs evil war.
Fair enough, but I'd say that half of Europe being free is better than none of Europe being free. I don't think there's much the UK could have done to help Eastern Europe.
The Europeans invented modern science and technology, with England contributing the most (particularly during the 19th Century).
Maybe most nations of the world would've followed a course of colonization and empire if they had been as dominant in wealth, technology and organizational ability as England was.
Isnt what hes saying super naughty? I know Kier Starmer changed his tune lately regarding immigration, I'm just not used to reading or hearing people talk aboit these things without an air of secrecy.
it's unfair to hold people from the past to our moral standards. I'm sure that in 50 years they will be appalled at some of the things we do. Society progresses. Hopefully.
I don't agree with the 'ideology' but I don't find it totally unreasonable or objectionable.
And surely even 'everyone who doesn't worship X and abstain from Y and live according to text Z is living in sin' is... That's just an ideology, that's fine, it's not terrorist until you do some sort of destructive act in its name or try to enforce it somehow?
Some context lost in the linked article I think, not having read into it.
The context is that the UK government has extremely wide reaching powers to fine or imprison based on online speech, with much of the wording of these laws being contrived as anti terror. So by classifying a position as terrorist ideology, they can apply these laws and chill opposition.
I think the notion of odd, but brilliant, boffin is deeply embedded in British culture. Or was, until at least the 2000s. The Great Egg Race on TV being a fine example.
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