johnfabian
6d ago
In an effort to improve my German, I'm reading Zweig's 'Die Welt von Gestern', The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European.
Has there been some recent fascination with the book? I looked it up in the Toronto library system and all 8 copies are signed out, with multiple holds past that. Unusual popularity for a book from the 1940s.
Churchill in this message was actually reusing some of the same words he had used in a message to Anthony Eden two days previously (in the context of learning about the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
"There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners' camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death." link
Ironically enough he torpedoes two denialist claims in this short message. No wonder they pretend it doesn't exist.
johnfabian
3mo ago
It's hard to say exactly how much has filtered through to him on social media - I always hope that people in the public eye don't look at this kind of stuff, but you have to expect they do. The team itself always treated him very differently from Formenton - they gave him the A, he played a big part of media/promotion, etc. They clearly tried to establish without saying directly that he wasn't at fault. I think that makes the "guilty before even accused" behaviour worse, really. But it was also from a pretty small wedge of the fanbase, I wouldn't say all or even most of the "prog side" jumped in on this
johnfabian
4mo ago
At present Israel could take the rest of the Arab world by itself with little difficulty. It's no longer 1970; they've far outstripped their immediate contemporaries in ways they did not expect. If they had anticipated the economic state of their rivals they would not have ceded all the land they did for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, etc.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Finished Prit Buttar's Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany's Eastern Front, 1944-45. The endgame of the Eastern Front tends to get short shrift in popular history with the exception of the capture of Berlin, and this is a very interesting book about a very messy series of campaigns. A must-read for lovers of war crimes.
Currently reading a collection of dissident (leftist) Soviet author Varlam Sharlamov, called Sketches of the Criminal World. More grim stuff, but quite darkly humourous at times.
johnfabian
4mo ago
I think it was likely that political pressures in Israel meant that a primarily non-violent response would not have been acceptable. Yes, Israel could have used the rush of international sympathy as diplomatic capital, but Israelis want a lot of Palestinians to die for this, and would vote for whoever promised that.
johnfabian
5mo ago
So no correlation. If you really really want to squint, there's a slightly positive correlation (which I did not expect).
johnfabian
6mo ago
One of the combat experiences about WWI is that the effect of chemical weapons in the battlefield environment were awful, but not decisive. With both sides prepared for the possibility, it raised the upper bound on human suffering without making your chance of victory any more certain. Chemical weapons were always fickle allies; they were very sensitive to changes in weather, they did unpredictable things, and ultimately if you were trying to use them to achieve some breakthrough you were inundating the areas you hoped to yourself capture.
There were various uses of chemical weapons against populations who could not fight back by the Germans and Japanese (moreso the latter), which was in many respects their "ideal" use case. But given the ability of both sides to be able to both manufacture large amounts of chemical weapons and deploy them against enemy civilian populations, and their marginal battlefield use, ultimately neither side saw them as practical.
But contingency planning and a German air raid led to the accidental discovery of chemotherapy, so that was cool.
johnfabian
6mo ago
There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause.
While this idea was not pursued with respect to targeting French cities, it was employed in the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. Learning from experiences from the Blitz and the early years of strategic bombing, it became to be understood that attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure were in some respects more effective than targeting enemy manufacturing. Mass civilian casualties, and both damaging transport infrastructure and then deluging it with fleeing/wounded civilians, had larger downstream effects on military capabilities than directly targeting military elements themselves. The apogee of this mentality was the firebombing of Dresden, which was deliberately designed to cause maximum chaos in the German rear to limit their ability to co-ordinate a response to concurrent Soviet offensives.
johnfabian
6mo ago
Really, if Lenin was as influential and powerful of a figure as he was claimed to be, then Russia would've gotten off much lighter at Brest-Litovsk; he was the one pushing for peace, and Trotsky ended up convincing the rest of the Bolsheviks to follow his harebrained "neither war nor peace" strategy instead.
johnfabian
9mo ago
certainly I've heard of various otherwise dim-seeming elite athletes having savant-like memory (LeBron James and Steven Stamkos are two that pop to mind)
johnfabian
9mo ago
Golf and tennis are unusual in that we evaluate players based on their performance in a few selected events rather than over the course of an entire season, even though it's doubtful that this is an accurate representation of overall ability.
One of the things about golf is, especially for the majors, anyone who gets in is basically good enough to win if they put four of their best rounds together. And in a field of around 150 players somebody generally comes close to doing that. That's why there are plenty of golfers who were career journeymen with only one or two career wins who randomly win a major.
It was a testament to Tiger Woods' insane dominance that he was winning a majority of the tournaments he played from ~2005-09, because that meant that his average four rounds was consistently better than the rest of the fields' best four rounds.
johnfabian
6mo ago
There have been criminal/civil prosecutions for hockey violence in the NHL. They usually involve pre-meditated acts where the victim was unable to consent to fight. Two recentish examples would be when Marty McSorley hit Donald Brashear with his stick, and Todd Bertuzzi sucker-punching Steve Moore, both incidents where the aggressor attacked a player unawares.
johnfabian
8mo ago
My aunt and uncle had a place in Florida for the past decade until they sold in June this year. Like a lot of retired Canadians they live half up north, then go somewhere warm in winter. It wasn't the only factor in their decision to sell, but the forthcoming election was another push to convince them to get out. They felt in general people had gotten a bit more aggressive, rude, and generally unhinged in their time there. Aggressive driving seemed to be up as well as casual/threatening handling of guns. They didn't live in an expensive part and if you just walked around the neighbourhood you could see a number of sort of gauche displays of political affiliation. They decided that it was best to leave before you leave with bitterness.
johnfabian
11mo ago
My impression is that generally "the Holocaust" refers to the Nazi mass murder of Jews in general, with "Shoah" just being a Jewish term for the same.
When historians refer to the extermination camps exclusively they speak of "the Final Solution"; the period of mass executions prior to the establishment of the extermination camps I see frequently referred to as "the Holocaust/Shoah by bullets."
johnfabian
1d ago
The beats of these two stories are basically structured like bad late-night TV jokes. Like you can imagine Jay Leno saying "Hey folks, you heard this story about the Indian getaway driver?"
johnfabian
3mo ago
At the start of the 20th century, if you were forced to pick a country that you think would carry out a Holocaust-level atrocity in the next fifty years, everyone would have picked Russia. (Not necessarily with Jews as the target, they were just the most obvious target). No other state in Christian Europe was nearly so repressive.
johnfabian
3mo ago
You actually support Diocletian's reforms? umm, yikes.
johnfabian
3mo ago
The communists needed the liberals much more than the other way around. If the western allies had refused to help the Soviets at all and the Germans beat them, Berlin and Hamburg and Frankfurt are still piles of radioactive ash come September 1945.
johnfabian
6mo ago
The difference being that 95%+ of that figure was Iraqis killing other Iraqis without American involvement (besides setting the dominoes falling in dismantling Saddam's government)
It would have been another story if American forces had killed a million Iraqis themselves
johnfabian
6mo ago
In the short run: Jacques Parizeau, leader of the Parti Québecois (the provincial separatist party) and premier of Québec announces victory in the referendum means secession from Canada. He probably immediately starts a tug of war between himself, the federal government, and Lucien Bouchard (head of the Bloc Québecois, the federal separatist party). The PQ leaders were "hard" secessionists in favour of quick and if necessary, unilateral secession; the BQ leaders were largely "soft" secessionists who wanted a negotiated exit with specific details determined by further referendums, and envisioned a Québec that was still largely within Canada's economic sphere.
This would've presumably created a three-way media battle, with each side claiming the referendum results as validation of their own perspective. Indigenous groups and anglo-dominated neighbourhoods/cities would announce their own secessions. The Canadian military would've likely secured important federal property but not be required to take any aggressive position. The western-based Reform party and the out-of-power Progressive Conservatives would likely demand a new federal election if PM Chrétien did not form a unity government.
In short it probably would've been a mess with no one side having a clear advantage in popular support. Any slow-moving legal proceedings would've doubtlessly favoured the government of Canada. I think there was little chance of serious violence; very high chance of a kind of political gridlock between the various factions. Antagonism and generally shit-slinging between anglo and French-Canadians would've reached a zenith and maybe pushed the needle towards more support for secession. On the other hand, political uncertainty and economic chaos might push support back towards federalism instead. Hard to say.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Appreciate your work.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Several of the ones I wanted to read appear to have been immediately deleted by their authors.
johnfabian
10d ago
Somewhat related, Scottie Scheffler has been on the biggest tear golf has seen since prime Tiger; in late March/April he won four out of five tournaments in a row and narrowly missed winning the fifth - some $20ish million in winnings. All this while his wife was 8+ months pregnant; I can't find speculation as to what the precise due date was but comments from him seemed to suggest late April so now she's overdue. He is skipping the big money event this week but more to the point he was very vocal that if his wife went into labour he would step off the course mid-round. He said this also applied if he was leading in the last round of the Masters (which he won comfortably). Now it's not a team sport (besides I suppose the caddy) but the question is essentially would he potentially compromise his individual legacy as a golfer to be with his wife during labour.
There's an obvious political motive to this. From a casual scanning of the academic literature historians generally do not consider the Holodomor a genocide (but this doesn't really change the moral aspect of it much).
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