History: Wait, what? This really happened?

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Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Jim Barris posted:

There were no redeemable factors to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and this milquetoast bullshit about 'black and white hero or villian' is dumb as hell. There was no aspect in which Reagan was good; it was all bad.

If you like secretly funding terrorists, insane economic policy, regressive social policy, ignoring aids cause it was a 'gay problem', and lifting the restrictions on children's advertising which led to inane poo poo like Transfomers. If you like all of those things he was a good president.

I fully agree with you about there being no good whatsoever to Reagan's presidency but we need to be careful not to start hating someone for their actions, that's just as bad as the stuff Reagan did (sorry for the sermon there but that's a peeve of mine).

Anyways, I found this on Wikipedia and thought it was pretty funny.

quote:

James William "Honest Dick" Tate (January 2, 1831[1] � unknown) was the State Treasurer of Kentucky. He was nicknamed "Honest Dick" because of his good reputation and rapport with his colleagues. The nickname turned ironic, however, when Tate absconded with nearly a quarter of a million dollars from the state's treasury in 1888. He was never found.

This is also one of the most fascinating lists on Wiki, I mean, look at some of these dates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_surviving_veteran

quote:

Dewey Beard (1857�1955) - Native American from the Lakota tribe and the last survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Mexican-American War
Owen Thomas Edgar (1831�1929) - USN

American Civil War
Albert Woolson (1847�1956) - Union.[32]
Pleasant Crump (1847�1951) - Confederate (last verifiable veteran).[33]

Spanish-American War
Jones Morgan (c. 1882�1993)[48]
Nathan E. Cook (1885�1992)[49]

Ivan Beshoff (1885�1987) - Sailor on Russian battleship Potemkin. Fled to Ireland and opened a fish and chips shop.[51]

Juan Carlos Caballero Vega (1900�2010) - Pancho Villa's driver.[54]
Feliciano Mejia (1899�2008) - Last living member of Emiliano Zapata's Ej�rcito Libertador del Sur [55][56]
Antonio G�mez Delgado (1900�2007) -Last living Member of Pancho Villa's Divisi�n del Norte[57]

March on Rome
Vasco Bruttomesso (1903�2009)[74]

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 04:44

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 16:38

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

VanSandman posted:

No! No no no no no! Hating someone for their actions is the only legitimate reason to hate someone, when their actions caused and continue to cause the suffering of millions.
Tell me, why do you hate? Based on whatever vibe a person is giving off?

What I was trying to say what "don't hate people"

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 05:12

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Throatwarbler posted:

Reagan "raised taxes", that is he oversaw an increase in tax dollars received by the federal government both in absolute amounts and as a percentage of GDP. I think that probably counts as a positive to people who can only hope that Obama would be so gutsy.

It would be nice if all that money went into stuff that actually helped someone/anyone instead of giant orbital laser batteries and weapons for Latin American nun raping death squads, I suppose, but yeah no one bats 1.000 as you say.

Wait, was this directed at me? Like I said, i'm in full agreement that Reagen's presidency was a disaster and not a single positve thing came out of it.

Tojai posted:

This is the best thread on SA by far. I love getting to read about all this stuff I never learned.

Unfortunately I'm not a big history person, so I have nothing to offer, but a few requests.

Could someone tell me more about Iran Air Flight 655? I was just a kid when it happened and don't really remember it, but what I've read has been astonishing. I know it's "what if" territory but I simply cannot imagine what would happen if this were to occur now. Speculation is obviously just that, but how would Iran react if this happened now? What if another country destroyed a US passenger plane?

I can't really add more to anything about Iran Air 655 beyond what you probibly already know bt if you can try to read up on the way the US leadership reacted to it, it's pretty disgusting.

As for how the US would react there was KAL Flight 007 which -while South Korean- was carrying 62 Americans including a member of Congress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAL_Flight_007

Here's a list of shot down civilian airliners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 05:35

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

AgentF posted:

You read it here first, folks. Hating someone is just as bad as selling weapons illegally and drug trafficking in order to fund terrorists.

Meh, not trying to start a moral argument here but I think that all those things murder, torture,letting the poor suffer,etc start from hate.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 05:46

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Slantedfloors posted:

And when the act of hating Reagan gets a nun raped in Central America, you'll have an argument for equivalency.

I'm not talking about hating Reagen specificly, I'm just saying it's not good to hate anything at all really, I mean,to continue on your example it was Reagan's hatred of Communism that led him to fund the Contras,which in-turn allowed that nun to be raped.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 06:06

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Tojai posted:

Is there anything specifically you would recommend? I've pretty much just read over the wikipedia page for government reaction. I noticed the US never apologized or really acknowledged responsibility and that seems pretty lovely.

Nah, I don't have any idea where to start,I mean, Wikipedia says the captain of the US ship put out a book but it's most likely pretty biased to say the least.

fake edit

http://www.newsweek.com/1992/07/12/sea-of-lies.html quick googling came up with this article, at first glance it seems fairly decent.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 16:02

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Patter Song posted:

Eagleton is a great example of the pretty vicious discrimination against people with minor mental illness. Now, granted, I don't think that a history of mental illness is a great quality in a Vice President, but it was exhaustion.

(It says a lot about psychiatric treatments of fifty years ago that they used electroshock therapy to treat his exhaustion. I suppose that's one way to wake someone up.)

McGovern would've almost certainly lost even without the Eagleton debacle, but it highlighted his "Not ready for prime time" reputation and the amateurishness of his campaign.

Related to that Ross Perot's 1992 running mate, James Stockdale was viewed as "the sort of guy who would be be a good next door neighbor, but not the guy you would want next in line to the Presidency"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpX-5jQjQ0

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 22:18

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Phanatic posted:

Stockdale was brilliant. The man's got the Medal of Honor and *four* Silver Stars, and he has Masters degrees in International Relations and Marxism from loving Stanford. He was one of the first US combatants in the Vietnam war, flying a strike mission during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and was shot down and taken prisoner in 1965; during capture, angry Vietnamese broke his legs and back. He didn't want them to parade him on television as an example of how good they treated prisoners, so he sliced his head up with a razor blade. When they put a hat on him to cover up the wounds, he beat himself in the face with a wooden chair. He wasn't released until 1973. He spent *four years* in solitary confinement.

The guy was a loving warrior-philosopher. I'm going to quote Dennis Miller here, because he's dead-on:

I watched that debate when I was at ASU, and my classmates wasted no time in ridiculing this brave, intelligent man they knew nothing about. I was loving embarassed for my entire generation.

Woah, thanks for posting this, I knew he was a smart man and had won the Medal of Honor but I never realized the details.

SoundMonkey posted:

There's a site where you can download cockpit voice recordings from a bunch of air crashes. You probably shouldn't find it, there's only so many times you can hear "PULL UP *crying* TERRAIN TERRAIN <nothing>" before you're a bit

The NTSB has all its accident reports online, as someone else mentioned, and those ARE some pretty awesome reading for people who are into that kind of thing.

The hijacking and crashing of Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 reads like a bad movie.

David Burke had just been fired from his airline job for stealing $69.00 from the company. He asked his supervisor to please keep him on and give him a second chance but the man refused.

Burke knew his supervisor took a flight home from LA to San Fransisco every day so he purcahseda ticket and boraded the plane with a hidden revolver.

quote:

Burke scrawled a note onto an air-sickness bag which read:

�It's kind of ironical, isn't it? I asked for leniency for my family, remember? Well, I got none, and now you'll get none.�

As the aircraft reached its cruising altitude of 29,000 feet, Burke calmly vacated his chair and made his way to the lavatory, dropping the air-sickness bag in his supervisor's lap as he passed. Moments later, he emerged with the handgun, and immediately shot Thompson. The sound of the gunshot is picked up on the cockpit voice recorder, and seconds later the sound of the cockpit door opening is heard. A female, presumed to be a Flight Attendant, advises the cockpit crew that �we have a problem.� The Captain replies with �what kind of problem?� Burke then appears at the cockpit door and announces �I'm the problem,� simultaneously firing two more shots that fatally injure both pilots.

Several seconds later, the CVR picks up increasing windscreen noise as the airplane pitches down and begins to accelerate. A final gunshot is heard as Burke fatally shoots himself. Airspeed continues to build until 13,000 feet, when traveling at a velocity of 1.2x Mach, the aircraft breaks apart and the Flight Recorders cease functioning.

All 44 passengers and crew aboard PSA Flight 1771 died as the aircraft crashed into a Farmer's field in the Santa Ana Hills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1771

And then there was the Bojinka plot which is one of the most ambitious terror plots I've read about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot

# ¿ Jul 15, 2011 09:44

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Ugh, double post.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2011 10:00

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Darryl Lict posted:

My cousin died on that flight. What a horrific way to die.

Wow, I'm sorry.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2011 11:14

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

SnipeShow posted:

I hope a request isn't too off topic. I've always been interested in the involvement of near mythical figures in insurgencies and revolutions. For example, Fidel Castro was often portrayed as near supernatural or blessed (in my opinion), with a supposedly untrained white dove landing on him after he took control of Cuba, and the CIA trying to remove his beard, the source of his charisma.

I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of other figures like this, preferably from the 20th century. It's interesting seeing how the myth, the man, and the state of the country can contribute to a revolution.

Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for but the history of the Taiping Rebellion sounds pretty close as well as the
Mahdist War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdist_War

# ¿ Jul 25, 2011 04:30

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Schweinhund posted:

All the talk of blunders reminds me of that History Channel show, History's Greatest Blunders I think it was called. I used to hate that show because it seemed like they ran out of blunders after a while. So they would do shows like "December 7th, 1941. It was a peaceful morning in Pearl Harbor when everyone thought they weren't going to be attacked by the Japanese, but they BLUNDERED and sure enough they were attacked and all their ships got sunk!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Elphinstone%27s_Army

This taks the cake for blunders, read Flashman if you want a good but fictional depiction of it.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2011 20:22

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Phanatic posted:

Or read this if you want a good non-fictional account of British involvement in Afghanistan in general.

Read it earlier this year, loved it.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2011 20:47

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

So I was reading the 'Dead Presidents' tumblr ( http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com well worth reading if you have a intrest in American History ) and learned that a certain coffin has a long and weird story

quote:

It was approximately 1:00 PM when a man called Vernon B. O�Neal of O�Neal�s Funeral Home and asked for the best casket that O�Neal had available. The man on the phone, simultaneously calm and tense, needed the coffin quickly and O�Neal had a slight problem. Of the 18 people who worked at O�Neal�s Funeral Home, 17 of them were out to lunch. After all, it was a beautiful Friday day for November in Texas.

O�Neal picked out a solid-bronze coffin with white satin lining tagged at a sales price of $3,995 from his storeroom and waited for three more of his employees to return from lunch. The bulky Handley Brittania casket from the Elgin Casket Company weighed over 400 pounds when it was empty and O�Neal certainly couldn�t lift it into his Cadillac hearse by himself. Once he had it loaded, he rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital on the most important delivery of his career.

The man who had ordered the casket, Clint Hill, was a Secret Service agent and less than an hour earlier he had climbed on to the back of a moving limousine to try to get to the subject he was charged to protect. He was unsuccessful. The casket was for the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

...After Kennedy�s body was placed in the coffin, preparations were made to leave Parkland Hospital and take the President back to Air Force One at Dallas�s Love Field so that they could transport him back to Washington, D.C. As the Secret Service and the President�s aides (many of whom were longtime, close friends of JFK) wheeled his casket towards the exit, they were stopped by Dr. Earl Rose, the medical examiner for Dallas County, Texas. In 1963, it was not a federal crime to kill the President of the United States. Because of this, there was no federal jurisdiction for John F. Kennedy�s murder � only local. Despite the scale of the crime to the nation, it was technically just another murder in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 (because of the laws at the time, on a purely legal basis, the murder of Dallas police offer J.D. Tippit about 45 minutes after Kennedy�s shooting was a far more serious crime than the President�s assassination). Because of this, Dr. Rose informed the men escorting the President�s body that they needed to leave it in Dallas. Rose noted that he needed to autopsy the body before they took it anywhere. To Dr. Rose, a homicide victim was a homicide victim and he had a job to do.

The Secret Service was incredulous and President Kennedy�s loyal aides were even angrier. In the corridor of Parkland Memorial Hospital, things got tense. Rose found himself in a shouting match with the Secret Service and some of Kennedy�s aides. Even the doctors at Parkland sided with the Secret Service and pleaded with Rose to release the body so that they could take the President back to Washington. A justice of the peace arrived, with the power to overrule the medical examiner. But he didn�t. The justice of the peace said that Kennedy would have to be autopsied in Dallas and ensured the Secret Service that it wouldn�t take any more than three hours.

Again, tempers flared and the men in the hallway at Parkland were close to fisticuffs as the medical examiner, Dr. Rose, literally blocked the casket�s path with his body in order to keep it inside the hospital. When the President�s close aide, Kenny O�Donnell, appealed to the medical examiner and the justice of the peace for compassion for Jackie Kennedy and an exception for this case so that they could return the dead President to Washington and get Jackie out of Texas as quickly as possible, the justice of the peace, Theron Ward, refused.

�It�s just another homicide as far as I�m concerned,� said the justice of the peace.

O�Donnell lost his temper, �Go gently caress yourself! We�re leaving. Get the hell out of the way.�

With that, the Secret Service and all the President�s men pushed forward. The medical examiner, the justice of the peace, and several Dallas policemen were forcibly shoved out of the way by Secret Service agents who were ready to draw their guns, if necessary. Jackie Kennedy was close by, her hand softly guiding the President�s bronze casket as it was removed from the hospital and placed in the hearse which raced en route to Love Field and Air Force One...

During the flight home from Dallas, Lyndon Johnson had summoned Cabinet members, diplomats, Members of Congress, current White House aides, former White House aides, and anybody else who had any inkling of what powered the Executive Branch, to meet him at the White House upon his arrival for consultation, directions, and mutual support. Upon arriving at the White House, Johnson briefly spent a moment by himself in the Oval Office before leaving and walking with aides to the neighboring Old Executive Office Building. LBJ didn�t feel right with immediately setting up shop in the Oval Office just hours after President Kennedy�s death. Instead, Johnson decided to use his Vice Presidential office in the OEOB for the meetings he planned on holding that night.

Before those meetings began, however, President Johnson took a moment for a brief pause in his frenetic assumption of the Presidency. Requesting a few minutes of privacy, LBJ sat down at his desk in the OEOB and wrote two short letters which became the first pieces of correspondence of the Johnson Administration � letters which the young recipients couldn�t even read yet:

�Dear John�It will be many years before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you particularly to know that I share your grief�You can alwasy be proud of him. Affectionately, Lyndon Johnson�

�Dearest Caroline�Your father�s death has been a great tragedy for the Nation, as well as for you at this time. He was a wise and devoted man. You can always be proud of what he did for his country. Affectionately, Lyndon Johnson�

...

The history of Vernon O�Neal�s casket did not end that night at Bethesda when President Kennedy was transferred to a different coffin. Gawler�s Funeral Home took possession of JFK�s original casket after they placed him in the undamaged casket that their mortuary team had brought to Bethesda Naval Hospital following Kennedy�s autopsy. Whether it was as a morbid souvenir or simply due to confusion about what to do with it, Gawler�s stored JFK�s original coffin in a warehouse in Washington, D.C. In January 1964, less than two months after JFK�s burial, Vernon O�Neal submitted a bill to the federal government for $3,995 for the casket that Secret Service Agent Clint Hill ordered in Dallas and JFK was transported to Washington in.

The government felt that O�Neal�s bill was �excessive�, particularly since he had merely delivered the casket to Parkland Hospital in Dallas and had not performed any other funeral services such as embalming, chapel services or transportation of mourners. O�Neal lowered the price by $500, but the government still had an issue with the $3,495 price tag. What Vernon O�Neal actually wanted was the casket itself. O�Neal had received offers of $100,000 by parties interested in collecting and displaying the casket as a unique relic of the slain President. For the Kennedy Family � still reeling from the assassination and its aftermath � the last thing they wanted was a spectacle surrounding a bloodstained coffin that JFK had spent just a few hours in. At the family�s urging, the federal government paid O�Neal (he received $3,160 for his services on November 22, 1963) and the General Services Administration took possession of the object in 1965.

In September 1965, the House of Representatives passed a bill which required the government to preserve any objects related to the Kennedy Assassination which might contain evidentiary value. Several days later, Representative Earle Cabell from Texas sent a letter to Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (who had replaced Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department a year earlier). In his letter, Congressman Cabell suggested that the casket had no value for anyone other than �the morbidly curious�. Since the Kennedy Family �did not see fit to use this particular casket in the ultimate interment of the body�, Cabell felt that it was �surplus� material owned and controlled by the federal government. To shut down those who might be �morbidly curious�, Cabell recommended that the casket �be declared the proper property of the USA and, as such and in keeping with the best interest of the country, be destroyed.�

The Kennedy Family agreed with Congressman Cabell�s sentiments and Attorney General Katzenbach ensured everyone that the casket had no evidentiary value, no good reason for display or storage, and that it was the property that the government had the right to dispose of in whichever way it sought fit. On February 18, 1966, several members of the Air Force picked the casket up from a secure building at the National Archives just a few blocks from the White House. The casket was placed in an Air Force truck and transported to Andrews Air Force Base � the very place that the casket had originally landed in Washington with President Kennedy inside of it less than three years earlier. At Andrews, the Air Force team from the 93rd Air Terminal Squadron loaded the coffin on to a C130 transport plane.

To dispose of the casket, the Air Force had decided to take it to a place that JFK had once considered being buried: the Atlantic Ocean. Kennedy loved the sea and was said to have considered being buried at sea when he died. Of course, we know that Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery instead, but for many reasons, the Atlantic Ocean was the perfect place for the disposal of the casket that had brought him back to Washington following his assassination.

The Air Force wanted to ensure the integrity of the casket and not allow it to become a souvenir by someone who happened to come across it floating in the ocean or washing up on the shore. The C130 flew about 100 miles east of Washington, D.C. and descended to about 500 feet above the water. Before taking off, the Air Force had drilled over 40 holes into the casket and filled it with three 80-pound sandbags. It was also secured inside of a wooden crate and sealed shut in a manner so that it wouldn�t break apart upon hitting the water.

At approximately 10:00 AM, the C130�s tail hatch was opened and the casket was pushed out of the aircraft. Parachutes softened its fall and the coffin began to sink instantly. The airplane circled the drop zone for about 20 minutes to make sure that the coffin didn�t resurface, but they had no reason to worry. The Air Force had chosen an area of the Atlantic that saw very little air or sea traffic, and the casket settled in about 9,000 feet of water. The Kennedy Family was relieved that they no longer had to worry about a bloody casket going on display somewhere for the �morbidly curious�.

Coincidentally, in 1999, President Kennedy�s son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. was killed when the plane he was flying crashed near Martha�s Vineyard. After his body was recovered and identified, JFK Jr.�s remains were taken out into the Atlantic Ocean � just a few hundred miles from the drop zone of his father�s original casket � and buried at sea.

http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/6658190407/burial-at-sea-the-odyssey-of-jfks-original-casket

# ¿ Jul 29, 2011 19:05

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

When the hell did the Tuskegee Airmen fight ships? Was that scene in the Pacific?

This movie is hurting my brain.

Just checked Wikipedia and it says..

quote:

The Tuskegee Airmen were credited by higher commands with the following accomplishments:
15,533 combat sorties, 1578 missions
One hundred and twelve German aircraft destroyed in the air, another 150 on the ground
Nine hundred and fifty railcars, trucks and other motor vehicles destroyed
One destroyer sunk by P-47 machine gun fire
A good record of protecting U.S. bombers,[46] losing only 25 on hundreds of missions.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2011 06:30

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Blistex posted:

Look for some manner of point in the movie that lets the Hollywood audience know that the Germans are the bad guys. Every lovely Hollywood WWII movie has it. A good example is in U571 when the Uboat crew machinegun a lifeboat. Age of Heroes has the SS make a snuff film, and lot of other examples that are escaping me right now.

My guess will be. . .

Luftwaffe commander orders his men to shoot pilots who have bailed out.
Germans shown specifically targeting Jewish aircraft (don't ask me how).
Luftwaffe officers saying "friend of the family" a lot or the Germans laughing at the thought of blacks flying.
Luftwaffe pilots shown to be getting visible erections while watching American pilots die.

Mark my words, they will have a scene or possibly several to make sure all the retards in the theater know that the Nazis are the bad ones, and that scene will either make you cringe or laugh.

Like this

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9065208279671830683

"But sir, there's a baby carriage!"
"I know"

# ¿ Jul 30, 2011 06:52

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Effingham posted:

"Armies of the reesh"? THE REESH??

It's a parody

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f99n4pFJZE (maybe mildly :nws:

)

Lest we forget all the Americans who died in the Crusades.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2011 01:47

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

I like the direction of 'bad historical films' this thread is going in.

Here's Titanic. No, not the 1997 one but the 1943 version made in Nazi Germany.

The Nazi leadership, apparently feeling there was no better way to use wartime resources then to make movies decided to make a epic film about the Titanic. Joeseph Goebbels was so enthusiastic about the movie that he had a few Kriegsmarine officer sent to the set to serve as advisors. Unfortunately for the crew and cast the officers instead spent their time groping the actresses. The director - Herbert Selpin - protested but was arrested by the Gestapo without warning and the next day "committed suicide" in his jail cell.

Anyway, on to the movie itself, I'll let Wiki tell the plot

quote:

The movie opens with a proclamation to the White Star stock holders that their stocks are currently falling. The president of White Star Line J. Bruce Ismay promises to reveal a secret during the maiden voyage of the Titanic that will change the fate of the stocks. He alone knows that the ship can break the world record in speed and that, he thinks, will raise the stock value. He and the board of the White Star plan to lower the stocks by selling even their own stocks in order to buy them back at a lower price. They plan to buy them back just before the news about the record speed of the ship will be published to the press.

The issue of capitalism and the stock market plays a dominant role throughout the movie. The hero of the film is fictional German First Officer Herr Petersen (played by Hans Nielsen)He begs the ship's rich and snobbish owners to slow down the ship's speed, but they refuse. The passengers in first class are shown to be sleazy cowards while Petersen, his lover Sigrid Olinsky (Sybille Schmitz), and other German passengers are shown as brave and kind.

Peterson manages to rescue many passengers, convince Sigrid to get into a lifeboat and saves a young girl, who was obviously left to die in her cabin by an uncaring, callous British capitalist mother. The film ends with the British Inquiry into the disaster, where Peterson testifies against Bruce Ismay, condemning his actions, but Ismay is cleared of all charges and the blame is placed squarely on the deceased Captain Smith's shoulders. The epilogue states that "the deaths of 1,500 people remains un-atoned, forever a testament of Britain's endless quest for profit."

The movie is on Youtube if anyone is curious.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2011 06:13

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Howard Beale posted:

Oh I gotta see this now. It sounds amazingly terrible.

We repaid the favor in 1975 by making a movie about The Hindenburg, in which the airship is blown up by a disgruntled ex-Hitler Youth with a bomb. The plot was based on a popular (to some, at least) sabotage theory and the ex-Hitler Youth was a fictional character based on the crewmember suspect, so it's not like the filmmakers just pulled this story out of their rear end. But the theory is flimsy and the movie is pretty bad just the same. It's fun to watch George C. Scott play a Nazi, though.

George C Scott as a Nazi sounds really out of character for him.

Anyways, people will make movies out of the dumbest things, case-in-point Britanic

The Britanic was a British medical ship that hit a mine and sank in Wolrd War One with very few losses.

Anyways, this 2000 made for TV movie has the ship sabotaged by the chaplain who is a evil German spy, also there's some plot about Irish crewmembers stageing a mutiny.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2011 18:09

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 16:38

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

SlothfulCobra posted:

I've seen so many renderings of decaying bodies but I've never expected them to actually look like that. Wow.

Speaking of the horrors of war, one of my teachers in middle school (not for history) once told me that soldiers in Vietnam had to shoot babies that had bombs strapped to them by the Vietnamese. I've never seen anything even mentioning something like that since.

I'd imagine that such a thing never really happened, (I mean, the logistics alone don't make any sense) but it doesn't seem like the type of thing that he'd just make up. Has there ever been something remotely like that in history?

Google just gets me a bunch of various forum posts repeating what your teacher said with things like "Back in 'Nam my friend had to..." etc. Nothing reputable though.

Closest thing I can think of was two mentally handicapped women had bombs strapped to them by Iraqi insurgents.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22945797/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/handicapped-bombers-kill-dozens-iraq/

# ¿ Aug 3, 2011 17:02

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > History: Wait, what? This really happened?

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