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Dumb "x was worse than y" culture war posts aside, I would actually like to read an effortpost on the Bengal famine and its causes.
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May 27, 2020 15:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is probably more academic than you’re looking for and isn’t about the battles etc but Liulevicius’s War Land on the Eastern Front is a really good look at the culture effects of that war and how it shaped German perceptions of the East after the war, something which laid a lot of the groundwork for the poo poo you see in the 40s. It's actually for my Dad because his side of the family are Polish and he's got very interested in the history of Poland (usually, the oppresssion/invasion thereof regrettably) as something to read about, so tbh something not about the battles might be right up his street - thanks!
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May 27, 2020 15:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Liulevicius’s War Land on the Eastern Front This is an excellent book.
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May 27, 2020 15:55
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I’d love to read more about this. Phanatic posted:Can you point me towards further reading? This has some interviews from the period if you can handle the overwhelming self congratulatory tone: https://sill-www.army.mil/firesbulletin/archives/2003/SEP_OCT_2003/SEP_OCT_2003_FULL_EDITION.pdf I have some reports I can access at my office whenever it is I'm allowed to go back there; will post later.
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May 27, 2020 15:59
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Nebakenezzer posted:Wait, in North Africa? Seriously? I'd love to know more; I always thought Indian troops would be used mostly in SE Asia. Would they not be RCAF personnel? So the Indian divisions of North Africa and Italy have been mentioned. The other African campaign was in East Africa. Honestly, the Italian forces in East Africa resisted better than the ones in Libya, but whatever. The Brit force was about 30% Indian, 30% colonial African, 20% (segregated) South African, 20% British. The Indian units involved were the famous 4th Indian division and the less famous 5th Indian div that were sent to North Africa. The 1st South African division was also sent to North Africa. The African divisions were further reorganized and all deployed to India and Burma. They were counted as British soldiers for bookkeeping purposes. The Brits were in scattered regiments and other small formations and went every which way, I can't keep track of them. In Burma there ended up being around 9 Indian Divisions, 3 African divisions, and 2 British divisions. So yes, majority Indian.
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May 27, 2020 16:27
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The RAF also had West Indian volunteers, Polish, Czech, South African and for a brief time even enough non Canadian Americans to fill out a few Squadrons. TLDR; the UK pretty much owes everyone who fought the Nazis and the other Axis powers and it is incredibly lovely how our current toxic political situation just gives everyone the finger and I die a little bit every day seeing this.
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May 27, 2020 17:03
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Would they not be RCAF personnel? SeanBeansShako posted:The RAF also had West Indian volunteers, Polish, Czech, South African and for a brief time even enough non Canadian Americans to fill out a few Squadrons. Just to clarify, you had 'official' RCAF, RAAF, RNZAF, RSAF etc. forces operating as their own entity as part of the wider Allied air operations (albeit often under RAF upper-level command). Then you had individual RAF squadrons which were operationally British but manned by pilots (and often ground crew and staff) from one particular dominion, colony, ally or representing one of the Free forces of an occupied country. These had varying degrees of official status. For instance 242 Sqdn. was a regular RAF fighter squadron but the majority of the pilots were Canadians who had been allocated together while the official RCAF contribution was still gathering pace. Belgian fighter pilots made up about half of the roster of 609 Sqdn. and transport/bomber pilots were similarly filtered to a couple of Coastal Command squadrons which, while being RAF, had a strong Belgian contingent. Free French pilots were dispersed to two fighter squadrons and there was a dedicated all-French Bomber Command squadron. Then you had the squadrons officially dedicated to a nationality, like the Eagle Squadrons, 302 and 303 (Polish) Squadrons and 312 (Czechoslovak) Squadron. Then you have all the folks from all over the place who served in standard RAF squadrons in the general mix. SeanBeansShako posted:TLDR; the UK pretty much owes everyone who fought the Nazis and the other Axis powers and it is incredibly lovely how our current toxic political situation just gives everyone the finger and I die a little bit every day seeing this. 
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May 27, 2020 21:45
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Isn't not thanking them mainly sour grapes about losing the empire?
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May 27, 2020 22:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:Isn't not thanking them mainly sour grapes about losing the empire?
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May 27, 2020 22:40
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The Norwegian air force still have fighter squadrons that use the RAF numbers. 331 and 332 at least
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May 27, 2020 23:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:I don't think that was happening in the 1700s. "Anything you dislike plus capitalism" isn't fascist. Fascism isn't "whenever someone hires a paid thug," fascism has a definition. edit: The narrative that "fascism is capitalism in crisis, once the contradictions have been heightened" was developed after the fact. From the point of view of the 1840s this was not supposed to happen, and was not predicted. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:45 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 23:38
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BalloonFish posted:Then you have all the folks from all over the place who served in standard RAF squadrons in the general mix. Now I got the "1/4 of the RAF was Canadian" from Six War Years, and I probably should have added the second bit, which is "at the end of the war in Europe." Is this true, or is this, I don't know, counting all the Foreign nationals in RAF service? I thought the quote was a good illustration of Britain's flagging manpower. Since the RCAF/RAF were flying the same types and under the same structure anyway, I figured it just made sense that one would tap the other's recruitment/transfer pool if Britain's was tapped.
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May 27, 2020 23:59
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Mr Enderby posted:Dumb "x was worse than y" culture war posts aside, I would actually like to read an effortpost on the Bengal famine and its causes. Someone did a really good effort post about this famine, but I can't find it right now. Behind the Bastards did a great two-parter on it that I'd recommend ("How Winston Churchill and Frederick Lindemann Starved India") and here's a couple of shorter summaries I had bookmarked: Slim Jim Pickens posted:It was the result of British scorched earth operations early in the Burma campaign, and subsequently, a refusal of the British administration to actually deliver famine relief. The parallel to the Irish famine lies in how the British attempted to organize early relief efforts via market-based solutions. India as a whole was a food-sufficient colony, but rather than releasing local stocks as general relief, the British flooded the market in an attempt to lower prices. This grain was simply bought up by the richer strata of Bengali society, while the rural villages continued to starve, as they were far from provincial markets and were too poor to afford grain anyways. Shalebridge Cradle posted:Churchill directly ordered that food not be sent to India, and that the local government was not allowed to use its own money or ships to import more. The US and Australia offered to help, and they were either ignored or told not to get involved by his cabinet. tl;dr: Wiston Churchill knew what was happening, didn't give a poo poo, and his racism/imperial callousness killed millions of Indian people while he ordered the country to continue exporting grain to Britain. He's 100% a mass-murderer on-par with Stalin or Hitler, he just did a better job wrapping it in terms we consider more acceptable ('the free market will provide', or 'personal responsibility') so it gets brushed under the rug. This Mark Twain quote comes to mind: quote:THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
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May 28, 2020 00:24
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Mr. Grapes! posted:At the end of the war the Germans were still fighting hard in the East while forces tripped over each other trying to surrender to the US and UK. I always understood it that the average German soldier didn't really HATE the Western powers, they were more just 'misunderstandings' that led to war, while against the USSR it was an idealogical do-or-die struggle and serving Stalin would have been an abhorrent idea for them. For all that the Wehrmacht was not free of Nazi indoctrination, Wehrmacht soldiers and officers weren't exclusively die-hard anti-communists. The Soviet Union ran 'antifa' schools to recruit from among German POW and the Bund Deutschee Offizieren was formed by Wehrmacht officers and German communists to support the Soviet war effort. One of its founding members, Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, even proposed perhaps somewhat optimistically a 40,000-strong fighting force of ex-POW fighting against Nazi Germany. After the war ended, a lot of Wehrmacht veterans served in the Nationale Volksarmee. While the Wehrmacht as a whole would probably have leaned towards the western allies, it members were fully capable of switching a dutiful but halfhearted belief in genocidal German authoritarianism for a dutiful but halfhearted belief in slightly less genocidal Soviet authoritarianism.
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May 28, 2020 00:29
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ok sure but Uncle Joe's crimes extended well past the holodomor, which seems pretty analogous.
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May 28, 2020 00:30
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SlothfulCobra posted:Isn't not thanking them mainly sour grapes about losing the empire? More like general ignorance really, a tiny minority of lovely people are bitter but general populace knows sweet FA except SPITFIRE AND HURRICANES.
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May 28, 2020 00:33
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Fly Molo posted:tl;dr: Wiston Churchill knew what was happening, didn't give a poo poo, and his racism/imperial callousness killed millions of Indian people while he ordered the country to continue exporting grain to Britain. He's 100% a mass-murderer on-par with Stalin or Hitler, he just did a better job wrapping it in terms we consider more acceptable ('the free market will provide', or 'personal responsibility') so it gets brushed under the rug. It is fair of course that Churchill was a lion against Hitler during WW2, perhaps pivotal to victory - or at least victory as we recognized rather than an American-supplied Soviet Union marching to Paris. But that's about all the good you can say for him, I figure.
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May 28, 2020 00:43
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I am by no means pro Churchill, but he was also quite personally brave, perhaps TOO brave.
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May 28, 2020 00:51
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Yeah but you can say the same about Hitler or Stalin too. It's hardly exculpatory.
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May 28, 2020 01:59
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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HEY GUNS posted:edit: The narrative that "fascism is capitalism in crisis, once the contradictions have been heightened" was developed after the fact. From the point of view of the 1840s this was not supposed to happen, and was not predicted. Again though this just isn't true. For one thing Marx died in the 1880's, the Manifesto was written in 1848, Das Kapital was written/published in three parts, one in 1863 the other after Marx's death in 1885, and the last in 1894. Some of the most important stuff written was way after the 1840's, you had decades with the most important writings coming in later in the 1860s and later not in the 1840's. Breaking it down further, "Fascism wasn't supposed to happen" I don't think holds up to casual scrutiny, especially when you say that fascism has a specific definition which also isn't true, one of the first things that comes up when you search for definitions for fascism is "fascism is difficult to define", the best comprehensive definition as I understand it is Umberto Eco's definition of Ur-Fascism which also clearly points out that fascism can take many forms, and have various different characters to it, it may have some features at some times, and not others. For example its easy to imagine fascism devoid of ultranationalist undertones, i.e corporatism. As it's already been pointing out, once you give a definition for what fascism is, its easy to slot into and plug into existing frameworks, which is the point of a good "theory" is being able to adapt it to changing circumstances, defining marxist thinking as being some kind of prototypical Seldon's Plan I don't think is how anyone has ever actually engaged with or treated marxism as a socio-economic political theory? There are a lot of things that the Standard Model of physics can't predict, this doesn't make the standard model bad just because it isn't a theory of everything, we adapt theories to the new observations and data and make a new theory. It's why you have like, Marxist-Leninism or Maoism is because of failures of earlier iterations of socialist thought and later thinkers made contributions and adjustments to account for observation; which as I understand it is actually good because it shows that the framework is flexible, much like the Standard Model or the theory of evolution. But most importantly the idea that this has anything to do with the attack on the USSR by Nazi Germany is contradicted by the historical record.
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May 28, 2020 01:59
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So is there like a points scoring system for when something becomes fascist or what, because it seems like it would not be difficult to construct a description of fascism that encompasses all historical governments and potentially all plausible future ones. Like call me a liberal or whatever if you want, but I kind of feel like Mussolini and Hitler probably are not actually the axis of human potential. (Get it? Axis?) e: Orwell seems to have encountered this problem as well https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc Nessus fucked around with this message at 02:23 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 02:08
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I guess my view of Churchill is that he definitely did a lot of horrible poo poo I don't think I would rank him as one of the top 3 monsters of the 20th century.
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May 28, 2020 02:13
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Nebakenezzer posted:Now I got the "1/4 of the RAF was Canadian" from Six War Years, and I probably should have added the second bit, which is "at the end of the war in Europe." Is this true, or is this, I don't know, counting all the Foreign nationals in RAF service? I thought the quote was a good illustration of Britain's flagging manpower. Since the RCAF/RAF were flying the same types and under the same structure anyway, I figured it just made sense that one would tap the other's recruitment/transfer pool if Britain's was tapped. I believe this stat would be counting the RCAF as part of the RAF' - if only because in 1945 the RCAF had 250,000 personnel and at VE Day the Air Ministry reports that 'the RAF' had 1.07 million personnel including Dominion, Empire and Allied officers and airmen. It's a bit like the political relationship between Canada and the UK themselves in WW2 - nominally independent, practically independent in many ways but joined at the top levels of administration. The RCAF was its own entity, responsible for its own administration, procurement, training, tactics and operations (although British influence loomed large over all of this). But once the RCAF began participating in the war it became, to all operational intents, part of the RAF. RCAF squadrons operating outside Canada had RAF squadron numbers (in the 400 sequence) and were integrated into RAF Groups - for instance all the RCAF bomber squadrons were put into their own No.6 Group of RAF Bomber Command. It was a Canadian unit officially titled 'No.6 Group, Royal Canadian Air Force' but it was numbered in the RAF Bomber Command sequence (it wasn't, for instance, 'No.1 Bomber Group, RCAF') and was operationally controlled by Bomber Command as a British force. The overseas squadrons were administered by RCAF Overseas Headquarters, which was the liaison point with the Air Ministry and handled the RCAF's personnel and staff administration. But while RCAF Overseas gained more and more control over its affairs during the war it never had operational control over RCAF units - that was always the job of the RAF command structure. But even that's not as simple as it appears, because the Air Ministry and the RAF Commands had plenty of Dominion officers working away there, many in high Air Staff Roles, as RAF personnel. Dominion and colonial forces in WW2 had very different levels of autonomy. For instance the RCN was, like the RCAF, it's own self-sufficient force that was placed under Admiralty control for the duration. Meanwhile until 1941 New Zealand's maritime force was the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy - a subset of the British navy under direct Admiralty command but with its own allocated ships, which usually featured a crew where the big majority of the seamen and senior rates were New Zealanders under the command of British RN commissioned officers. In 1941 the NZ force was elevated to the same status as the RCN, RAN, RIN etc. so from then on it had its own administration, could commission its own officers, had its own 'HMNZS' ships and so on but was still under British control at the top operational level.
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May 28, 2020 02:31
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I mean Darwin didn’t know of DNA either that doesn’t make his writings invalid.
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May 28, 2020 02:48
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HEY GUNS posted:Fascism is palingenetic populist ultranationalism/ultraracism, and cannot exist before the existence of populism or nationalism. Like Communism, it's a reaction to the industrial and social developments of the 19th century, and has not existed before the 19th century. Yes, but also no. You think you get to say people weren't expecting fascism, and so couldn't respond to it, but all the factors of fascism (attacking political opponents, cult of toxic masculinity, suborning private enterprises to state needs, worshipping death) all existed already, alone and in other constellations. So it's not a matter of "Uuuh fascism was a thing before fascism nyah" as "people knew about and responded to all that was part of fascism already and so weren't caught with their pants down" - except of course millenarian marxists-leninists who thought stuff could only play out according to a very fixed script, but they didn't compose all of socialism at the time - not even close.
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May 28, 2020 07:05
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HEY GUNS posted:Fascism is palingenetic populist ultranationalism/ultraracism, and cannot exist before the existence of populism or nationalism. Like Communism, it's a reaction to the industrial and social developments of the 19th century, and has not existed before the 19th century. But the rest of the left stopped taking those guys seriously during the 1880s well before the rise of fascism.
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May 28, 2020 12:37
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VictualSquid posted:Yes, the ultra teleological accelarationist branch of Marxism is obviously refuted by the existence of Fascism. Is there any type of Marxism that doesn't lean heavily on teleology? Because going by the internet marxists of CSPAM, even using the T-word is a cue for them to break out the hysterics.
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May 28, 2020 13:10
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Fly Molo posted:Someone did a really good effort post about this famine, but I can't find it right now. Behind the Bastards did a great two-parter on it that I'd recommend ("How Winston Churchill and Frederick Lindemann Starved India") and here's a couple of shorter summaries I had bookmarked: Thanks for finding these!
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May 28, 2020 13:46
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Nebakenezzer posted:Is there any type of Marxism that doesn't lean heavily on teleology? Because going by the internet marxists of CSPAM, even using the T-word is a cue for them to break out the hysterics. More or less every single one that isn't the tankie liche-cult traditional variant. Marx' analysis of labor value is the sensible part, not the commie nostradamus poo poo.
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May 28, 2020 14:15
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah but you can say the same about Hitler or Stalin too. It's hardly exculpatory. I didn't say it was! It's certainly a positive character trait, though. Nessus posted:So is there like a points scoring system for when something becomes fascist or what, because it seems like it would not be difficult to construct a description of fascism that encompasses all historical governments and potentially all plausible future ones. read ur-fascism if you haven't, it's short and it's a pretty good actual framework
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May 28, 2020 14:20
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Nebakenezzer posted:Is there any type of Marxism that doesn't lean heavily on teleology? Because going by the internet marxists of CSPAM, even using the T-word is a cue for them to break out the hysterics. Originally I was considering writing that the teleologic marxists got banished to 19th century CSPAM, but I considered that to be obvious.
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May 28, 2020 14:45
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VictualSquid posted:All types that aren't based around CSPAM or similar forums. Not according to CSPAM But yeah because I'm not them I am aware that "terrible Marxist" is not inherently contradictory Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 18:01 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 15:40
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Let's leave CSPAM in CSPAM.
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May 28, 2020 15:53
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Anyone care to recommend a book on the Burma campaign of WWII?
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May 28, 2020 16:44
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Cessna posted:Anyone care to recommend a book on the Burma campaign of WWII?
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May 28, 2020 16:47
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The Jungle is Neutral by Chapman.
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May 28, 2020 17:17
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My own suggestion, Burma The Longest War 1941-45 by Louis Allen that is a general overview of the entire conflict.
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May 28, 2020 17:24
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Cessna posted:Anyone care to recommend a book on the Burma campaign of WWII? Everything above are good recommendations. I also really enjoyed Keane's Road of Bones: The Siege Of Kohima, which is obviously focused on one battle, but does a great job with the gritty feel of the twilight of the British Raj, and the last over-extension of the Imperial Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere.
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May 28, 2020 18:41
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It's American focused and it extends beyond the Burma campaign, but Barbara Tuchman's "Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945" is good.
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May 28, 2020 18:56
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Read The Longest War and then read Slim's memoir.
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May 28, 2020 18:57
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