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Teriyaki Hairpiece
Dec 29, 2006

I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.
I'm pretty sure what the original poster meant was that in a one-party state, you go out and interact with people and they're all part of some little club and possibly know each other personally from their meetings.

As in, you live in a small-ish community, you're personally against the Party in your heart, and you take a propaganda poster off an electric pole. A policeman sees you, conks you on the head, and takes you to jail. He's a Party member, and so is his friend who runs the jail. They figure out some bullshit to charge you with and keep you (poorly) in jail. Eventually you go in front of a judge and explain all the terrible wrongs that were done to you. Which were wrongs, and were supposedly illegal by your country's code. However, the judge is a Party member as well, and he knows the policeman and the jailer from their annual all-members local dinner.

The guy was saying that this could happen to you in the '20's, and the "Party" was the KKK. Which is pretty valid.

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Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

cheerfullydrab posted:

I'm pretty sure what the original poster meant was that in a one-party state, you go out and interact with people and they're all part of some little club and possibly know each other personally from their meetings.

As in, you live in a small-ish community, you're personally against the Party in your heart, and you take a propaganda poster off an electric pole. A policeman sees you, conks you on the head, and takes you to jail. He's a Party member, and so is his friend who runs the jail. They figure out some bullshit to charge you with and keep you (poorly) in jail. Eventually you go in front of a judge and explain all the terrible wrongs that were done to you. Which were wrongs, and were supposedly illegal by your country's code. However, the judge is a Party member as well, and he knows the policeman and the jailer from their annual all-members local dinner.

The guy was saying that this could happen to you in the '20's, and the "Party" was the KKK. Which is pretty valid.

That's just garden-variety nepotism and monopolization of power, without any of the ideological trappings of fascism.

What prevents the party in this situation from being communists? Or Mormons?

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


Cyrano4747 posted:

Hah yeah Marpingen. Peak Kulturkampf

Blackbourn has a book on it that I hazily recall as being pretty good.

Oh cool, I'm putting that on the list. I read The Conquest of Nature and it was great.

Teriyaki Hairpiece
Dec 29, 2006

I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

That's just garden-variety nepotism and monopolization of power, without any of the ideological trappings of fascism.

What prevents the party in this situation from being communists? Or Mormons?

Well the KKK also had elaborate trappings and ceremonies, a racist agenda of nativism and protectionism, and no hesitation to use extrajudicial violence.

There's nothing from preventing the party in that situation from being communists or Mormons. I'd imagine small-town Utah is terrifying.

Tevery Best
Oct 11, 2013

Hewlo Furriend

cheerfullydrab posted:

I'm pretty sure what the original poster meant was that in a one-party state, you go out and interact with people and they're all part of some little club and possibly know each other personally from their meetings.

As in, you live in a small-ish community, you're personally against the Party in your heart, and you take a propaganda poster off an electric pole. A policeman sees you, conks you on the head, and takes you to jail. He's a Party member, and so is his friend who runs the jail. They figure out some bullshit to charge you with and keep you (poorly) in jail. Eventually you go in front of a judge and explain all the terrible wrongs that were done to you. Which were wrongs, and were supposedly illegal by your country's code. However, the judge is a Party member as well, and he knows the policeman and the jailer from their annual all-members local dinner.

The guy was saying that this could happen to you in the '20's, and the "Party" was the KKK. Which is pretty valid.

A political - or, at least, politically motivated or related to politics - in a one-party state is not exactly a trial, it's more of a show. The judge is not actually sentencing, he's handing you a verdict that has been made well in advance by someone higher up in the Party chain of command. The witnesses, the judge, the lawyer, the prosecutor all have a part to play and it is not at all related to any personal links between them. It is purely institutional.

Furthermore, you, the accused, also have a part to play, and it will be well rehearsed before the big day. You will not air any grievances in front of a live audience. If you do, the investigative officer in the back will motion to the judge to immediately halt the proceedings, cart you back to jail for a day or two, then come back and resume, with you no longer trying to make a fuss.

(Disclaimer: this is most directly applicable to Stalinist trials and may vary elsewhere. Nazi People's Tribunal, for example, was all about the judge independently calling you a bad person and not really letting you speak before sending you to the gallows. I can post some more about Stalin-era show trials in Eastern Europe if there is interest.)

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

bewbies posted:

Not really. The common explanation is that the 20s Klan was really just sort of a celebration/defender of conservative WASP sensibilities, and as such it attracted a lot of otherwise (sort of, for the period) reasonable conservative middle class folks. They were all pretty horrified when the guys in the deep south started lynching and beating people and left in droves very quickly after the violence started.

Buncha posers who found the Klan through Birth of a Nation :jerkbag:

I don't know if any of y'all have ever seen it, but the scene where Bedford Forrest figures out that the KKK should dress like ghosts is incredible

Cyrano4747 posted:

Also the KKK in the north targeted groups beyond blacks that people up there were deeply concerned about. They were huge in nativist circles and really beat the anti Irish and Italian drums. They were big into fretting about the papist hordes who bore a deeper allegiance to Rome than Washington.

The sad thing is that all this anti-Catholic/Irish/Italian/Mason sentiment is repeating itself with Muslims.

Tevery Best posted:

(Disclaimer: this is most directly applicable to Stalinist trials and may vary elsewhere. Nazi People's Tribunal, for example, was all about the judge independently calling you a bad person and not really letting you speak before sending you to the gallows. I can post some more about Stalin-era show trials in Eastern Europe if there is interest.)

That one dude who made sure his family was safe and then proceeded to make a mockery out of the show trial by making it an actual trial ruled

Grand Prize Winner
Feb 19, 2007


Nebakenezzer posted:

The sad thing is that all this anti-Catholic/Irish/Italian/Mason sentiment is repeating itself with Muslims.

Well yeah, Muslim/Catholic animosity goes back a long way, but why are they specifically mad at the Irish and the Italians now?

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Well yeah, Muslim/Catholic animosity goes back a long way, but why are they specifically mad at the Irish and the Italians now?

uskok wars revanchists, it's a huge problem

GO FUCK YOURSELF
Aug 19, 2004

"I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who beat you, and pray for them to beat the shit out of the Buckeyes" - The Book of Witten

Tevery Best posted:

(Disclaimer: this is most directly applicable to Stalinist trials and may vary elsewhere. Nazi People's Tribunal, for example, was all about the judge independently calling you a bad person and not really letting you speak before sending you to the gallows. I can post some more about Stalin-era show trials in Eastern Europe if there is interest.)

I want this so badly.

bewbies
Sep 23, 2003

Fun Shoe

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Well yeah, Muslim/Catholic animosity goes back a long way, but why are they specifically mad at the Irish and the Italians now?

Lots of Irish and Italians came over from Ireland and Italy respectively the previous 50 years or so, and they talked funny, and ate different foods, and "didn't integrate", and were rapists and murderers, and took are jobs and so on.

Now of course Irish and Italian cultures are cornerstones of America and people of Irish and Italian descent are screaming the same things at the Mexicos and the Islams that the WASPs used to scream at their great grandparents :patriot:

Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

cheerfullydrab posted:

Well the KKK also had elaborate trappings and ceremonies, a racist agenda of nativism and protectionism, and no hesitation to use extrajudicial violence.

There's nothing from preventing the party in that situation from being communists or Mormons. I'd imagine small-town Utah is terrifying.

None of those things define fascism more than fascism existing as a reaction to communism.

Maybe the original poster maybe understands fascist as just being conservative and racist, but the last 2 pages have been cyrano and disinterested giving the Klan a hard comparison to actual fascist movements and explaining the differences.


As an aside, is fascism at all compatible with a rural focus and powerbase like the Klan has?

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

As an aside, is fascism at all compatible with a rural focus and powerbase like the Klan has?

Sure. The Nazis had tons of early support in Thuringia, for example, which wasn't exactly the urban center of Germany in the 30s. poo poo, it's still not.

The best explanation I heard of for who the supporters of the Nazis were was from Christopher Browning, and I think it frequently applies to reactionary populist politics in general. It's one place where you actually can draw a line between the fascists of the 30s and Trump.

The phrase I always remember is that Hitler's voters tended to be "the losers of history." Not losers in the Trump sense, but losers as in people who came out on the bad side of major structural changes in society and the economy. For the people marching with the NSDAP in the late 20s there was a significant rural chunk who had been bypassed by industrialization and felt themselves marginalized in an ever more urban society. Big changes like industrialization and, more recently, globalization are usually net benefits for society as a whole, but there are always going to be people who had their lives disrupted in a very bad way, which makes them more amenable to people who say they want to disrupt the current order and create a society that lets them flourish.

Panzeh
Nov 27, 2006

"..The high ground"

Cyrano4747 posted:

Sure. The Nazis had tons of early support in Thuringia, for example, which wasn't exactly the urban center of Germany in the 30s. poo poo, it's still not.

The best explanation I heard of for who the supporters of the Nazis were was from Christopher Browning, and I think it frequently applies to reactionary populist politics in general. It's one place where you actually can draw a line between the fascists of the 30s and Trump.

The phrase I always remember is that Hitler's voters tended to be "the losers of history." Not losers in the Trump sense, but losers as in people who came out on the bad side of major structural changes in society and the economy. For the people marching with the NSDAP in the late 20s there was a significant rural chunk who had been bypassed by industrialization and felt themselves marginalized in an ever more urban society. Big changes like industrialization and, more recently, globalization are usually net benefits for society as a whole, but there are always going to be people who had their lives disrupted in a very bad way, which makes them more amenable to people who say they want to disrupt the current order and create a society that lets them flourish.

The Nazis' major electoral successes came from cannibalizing the right-wing parties in the 30s rather than going to particularly new voters. The Communist comeback in the 1930s came at the heels of recruiting heavily from the unemployed, particularly the urban unemployed in some of the strongholds. Most of the smaller right-wing parties that lost a bunch of seats in the Reichstag were middle-class in nature, rather than rural.

Teriyaki Hairpiece
Dec 29, 2006

I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.
Rural portions of East Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania were all big voters for the NSDAP. Didn't work out well for them.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Panzeh posted:

The Nazis' major electoral successes came from cannibalizing the right-wing parties in the 30s rather than going to particularly new voters. The Communist comeback in the 1930s came at the heels of recruiting heavily from the unemployed, particularly the urban unemployed in some of the strongholds. Most of the smaller right-wing parties that lost a bunch of seats in the Reichstag were middle-class in nature, rather than rural.

Yes, the Nazis had plenty of middle class voters. I wasn't saying that they were an exclusively rural party, but they did have a significant rural constituency.

Tevery Best
Oct 11, 2013

Hewlo Furriend

GO gently caress YOURSELF posted:

I want this so badly.

What I am about to write is mostly based on political trials in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, between 1947 and 1956. It is less applicable for what happened in the USSR, both in the same timeframe and earlier, during the Great Purge and so on. But it has to be said that much like anything else in the Eastern Bloc, the concept of the show trial was adopted without dissent by the ruling elites, and it was modelled precisely on what had been developed in the Soviet Union in the years since the October Revolution. The Soviets had already perfected the art of the trial and made sure their vassals did not muck it up.

The first thing that has to be understood about a show trial is that their primary purpose is not to find out whether or not the accused is guilty, which is obvious enough, but neither is it to eliminate dissidents, political opponents, or old enemies1. The goal of the show trial is to illustrate a political claim or statement to educate the others. For example, the purpose of a trial could be to show that deviating from the Party line inevitably leads to treason, or that rejecting the principle that class warfare intensifies as socialism succeeds means that eventually you will sell yourself to imperialist interests. The message varies based on the current needs and other political considerations.

The trial is always widely publicised, although just how widely depends on its significance. You can get great trials of important personages that are followed in all the major newspapers and radio, or you can have a local trial of a guerilla leader conducted in a regimental military courthouse.

Now, seeing as this whole affair is supposed to be "educational" in nature, it is no surprise that it was a carefully staged theatre. Everyone played a specific part: the audience, the judges, the prosecutors, the defence attorneys, the witnesses, and the accused. The only real bystanders were the militia bailiffs.

It has to be stressed that the judge - contrary to what may seem natural - was not the director of the trial. In fact, being the judge was super easy. All you had to do was remember what to ask about and what not to ask about and then read the verdict someone else wrote for you.2 The actual power was with the investigative officers sitting in the audience. They were there to make sure everything goes to plan and they could stop the trial at any moment with just a gesture or a note sent to the judge. Usually this happened when someone messed up their lines or the accused started to think they were taking part in an actual trial. After a break - typically a couple days - the trial resumed, in most cases without further issues.

The trials tended to have many writers. Most of it was naturally written by the officers in charge, but the main ideas came from upstairs. We do not know of any procedures of writing the script, but it required great precision. Crafting half-truths and lies into accusations was difficult, and many considerations had to be made for future accusations. It was a lot like Chekhov's gun: if a defendant mentioned Mr X in passing, Mr X was probably the next person to be tried, it was a clear signal that Mr X was not cool. A good trial was supposed to either call back on the one before it or announce the next one.

The easiest way to do that was with witnesses. The guys who testified in one trial would occasionally (admittedly in lower-tier shows) get immediately arrested without even leaving the courtroom. You could also go the other way and have the defendant just-sentenced testify as a witness in the next trial over. The best ones were those with death sentences, since they didn't know how long they had and couldn't just go "you know, I'll just wait out the rest of my sentence, thanks". Sometimes the really good witnesses were called for so many trials they lived until Khrushchev's Thaw and got an amnesty. Those who were not useful for any further trials were unceremoniously hanged or shot.3

Going back to the people in the room, the defence attorney also had it quite easy. You had to remember a few simple rules: never try to suggest your client is not guilty. Point out any mitigating or extenuating circumstances, but make it clear they do not absolve your client. Shift the blame to your client's fellow defendants. Under no circumstances mention any "irregularities" during the investigation, no matter how hard your client may bid you to do so. Naturally, only a chosen few lawyers could serve as defence in political trials - plenty of trials were really far-fetched and having the defence attorney just rip the accusation to bits where everyone could see it would be inconvenient.

The prosecutor had to prepare the accusation. The bill of indictment in a Stalinist show trial did not act like it would in a real trial, where it is prepared beforehand, once the investigation is concluded, and the proceedings are supposed to prove it true or false. Instead, it grew as the trial and investigation went on. In high-profile cases, they were read and edited by Party authorities. Even country leaders often worked on indictments in particularly important trials. The needs of the indictment determined what direction the investigation would go in - i.e. what testimony was beaten out of the witnesses and the accused. The prosecutor would also help make everything go right in court.

The defendants had a very difficult part. They were supposed to admit guilt (at least eventually), since a guilty plea was considered prime evidence under Stalinist legal doctrine, and co-operate with the prosecutor to make sure that guilt is proven just right. Of course, they had to be broken in first. Threats, torture, anything else the investigation would think of. Very few people managed to resist and most of them only found shallow graves after "accidentally" falling out the window or down the stairs. Once the defendant was broken in, they had to learn what exactly their guilt was, and what they were to testify. It was pure bollocks, obviously, but a good writer would make sure the defendant's story had plenty of detail (which the defendant would literally learn by heart). To make it easier, it would also be something that did not require huge deviations from what actually happened - this also let the prosecution call in witnesses who would actually testify the truth, with the fake part of the testimony revealing innocuous events as actual conspiracies. "Did you see the defendant speak with Mr. X on that day?" "Yes, very briefly, about the weather." *audience audibly gasps as earlier testimony revealed talking about the weather was actually a CIA code*

The whole judiciary was supposed to be completely servile to the interests of the Party, but outwardly it continued to pay lip service to rule of law. Torture, violence and other forms of forcing the accused to testify were routinely banned every year or so, but nobody even pretended to care. But Party leadership knew - again, from the Soviet example - that just letting the secret police run rampant could come back to bite them. Although it was technically illegal to snoop on Party members, secret services did not exactly mind and plenty of Party brass were investigated, while others were made to snitch. The torturers often boasted that anyone could fall into their hands at any moment - and it was true. Whatever the power held by the locals, the key positions in the terror apparatus were always manned by Soviet inserts, on whose word anyone could be put in jail pretty much instantly. The Party leaders would do everything to get on their good side - while occasionally dropping a few cops under the bus to show that the law was harsh, but fair.

Here's a few examples of period show trials in Poland:

- March 1951: Jehovah's Witnesses tried for trying to overthrow the government.
- March 1951: Activists of Labour Faction (pre-war left-wing party) tried for co-operating with the Gestapo. The accusation was completely made up, but easy to prove, as prisons were full of Gestapo men on death row and the government had seized plenty of authentic Gestapo forms and seals.
- May 1951: The Politburo decides to run a heavily-publicised trial of Gryfice county authorities, who would use violence to force the peasants to join agricultural cooperatives. Collectivization in Poland was a massive flop and local governments would commonly use violence and coercion to push it through, but Gryfice county was chosen as a scapegoat due to being a bit more brutal than others. The trial was supposed to discipline the security services and show the fairness of Party rule. Several defendants were sentenced to jail.
- July-August 1951: four Army generals and five other high-ranking officers accused of trying to start a conspiracy within the army. This trial came as a result of a purge ordered by Stalin, who ordered satellite parties to remove the "right-wing-nationalist deviation" within their ranks. It effectively resulted in local power struggles coming to a head. In Poland, the big losers were Wieslaw Gomulka, the second most important man in the Party, and Marian Spychalski, Communist guerilla leader turned Army general. The Generals' Trial was supposed to be an overture for Spychalski's. It produced four life sentences, the rest were jailed for many years as well.
- Spychalski was arrested in May 1950 and subjected to a uniquely brutal investigation. However, he was not broken: he held on until May 1956, when he was released during De-Stalinisation.
- Gomulka was arrested in August 1951, but he wasn't beaten or tortured. His file contains a very interesting note by Boleslaw Bierut, the "Polish Little Stalin", which illustrates the process of crafting a show trial very well:

quote:

About Gomulka. What was Gomulka in light of the facts known thus far? Can we make an accusation of equivalence between him and Spychalski? Gomulka - downfall from opportunism to factionalism and betrayal - hence falling down, not an enemy who comes to the [Communist] movement with hostile intentions from the very beginning and just conceals their hostile face and intentions more or less capably. The task of the investigation is first and foremost to reveal Gomulka's hostile activity, everything - its main displays, aims and motives, connections etc. - investigating its way of development. Key questions: conspiracy in the Party and against Party, hence key periods are 1943-1944, 1947-1948 (esp. 1948, contents of his contacts with Spychalski, pushing him [to admit] that he knew of a number of Spychalski's criminal acts.
However, Spychalski's trial was a necessary pre-requisite of Gomulka's - and with him never breaking down, Gomulka was left to rot in jail until further notice. Then he was released in 1956 and succeeded Bierut as Party leader and the most important man in the country.

1Of course, many show trials do end up in a death sentence. But if all you seek is to kill an enemy, you don't need any elaborate proceedings. You can just pull them off the street and shoot them in a prison back yard. Hell, you can even preserve a veneer of legitimacy by calling up a quick kangaroo court. Many former anti-Nazi partisans in Poland were killed in the so-called "shitter trials:" the prototypical court convened in the accused's cell, taking up all the seating space, forcing the accused to sit on the toilet for the duration. The prosecutor would read out all the evidence (typically some witness statements), the judge would pronounce the verdict, the accused would be often strung up on that same afternoon. If there even was a defence attorney, they frequently didn't bother to show up.

2The judge's job was so simple and the number of trials so great that from July 1950 onwards you didn't even need to have higher education to preside over a trial in Poland, just a 15-month crash course.

3From a letter of the Polish Chief Military Prosecutor to the Public Security Ministry, September 1946: "Reports by Military Prosecutors indicate that executions of death sentences frequently take place in highly inappropriate conditions which do not correspond to the seriousness of an act expressing the will of the state revealed in a legally binding verdict. Specifically, executions often take place in prison, nearly in view of other inmates, with the convicts being killed by a surprise shot, often to the neck, and the bodies being buried nearby."

my dad
Oct 17, 2012

this shall be humorous
A very cool post. Thanks.

Koesj
Aug 3, 2003
Goddamn.

Didn't these waves of trials (I think there were distinct ones at least?) end up with a big 'ol purge of the security services to cap it off and tie up loose ends?

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice
Can anyone do me a favour and link me the effort post on WWII aircombat and how it was a constant battle of compromises and the "energy bank"?

I have a question, what exactly do "wingmen" "do"? How do they defend the lead pilot or vice versa? The Germans as I understand it used groups of two, the Soviets and Japanese used triples. I don't recall what the British and Americans used. If someone tries to go after the lead plane or the wingmen do the other wingman break off to try to intercept?

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Raenir Salazar posted:

Can anyone do me a favour and link me the effort post on WWII aircombat and how it was a constant battle of compromises and the "energy bank"?

I have a question, what exactly do "wingmen" "do"? How do they defend the lead pilot or vice versa? The Germans as I understand it used groups of two, the Soviets and Japanese used triples. I don't recall what the British and Americans used. If someone tries to go after the lead plane or the wingmen do the other wingman break off to try to intercept?

the tl;dr is that wingmen guard their boss's six and generally concentrate on watching the rest of the fight around them. They aren't really supposed to be trying to kill anyone who isn't trying to kill their boss. The general idea is that you have one guy concentrating on trying to shoot airplanes and another guy concentrating on keeping track of the fight around them so they don't get jumped. Think of it kind of like a RIO in an F14, only it's a dude in a second airplane and it's his eyeballs instead of radar.

hogmartin
Mar 27, 2007
There's also the finger-four formation which was developed before the war, and it seems like almost everyone used it (the Germans and US certainly did). It's a pair of pairs, two two-plane elements. Hold your hand out flat; the middle finger is the flight leader, index is first element wingman. On the other side, the ring finger is the second element lead and the little finger trailing behind is the second element wingman. The idea is basically to have two offensive planes (flight and 2nd element leaders) and two providing cover (the wingmen on the outside of the formation).

GO FUCK YOURSELF
Aug 19, 2004

"I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who beat you, and pray for them to beat the shit out of the Buckeyes" - The Book of Witten

This is a great post, thanks!

EDIT: who was running the "shitter trials"? I assume the Nazis, based on inference, but do you have more info on those?

GO FUCK YOURSELF fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Jul 26, 2016

swamp waste
Nov 4, 2009

There is some very sensual touching going on in the cutscene there. i don't actually think it means anything sexual but it's cool how it contrasts with modern ideas of what bad ass stuff should be like. It even seems authentic to some kind of chivalric masculine touching from a tyme longe gone

HEY GAL posted:

coward, thief, dishonorable, dog/bird (both mean dishonorable)

Got any good resources on honor in this time period? I see a lot of stuff online that's like-- honor as it pertains to gender or ethnicity or some specific institution, but they always seem to assume that you know the basics or that the basics are too arbitrary to discuss?? Like, is honor a binary, you have it or you don't thing, or are there degrees of it, is it measurable, does it transfer from one place to another across religious or political lines? Super basic stuff

RC and Moon Pie
May 5, 2011

Nebakenezzer posted:

Buncha posers who found the Klan through Birth of a Nation :jerkbag:

The second Klan formed in the fall of 1915 on top of Stone Mountain in Georgia. Birth of a Nation was one inspiration, as was the lynching of Leo Frank, which had taken place not too far away in Marietta in August. Frank is the only known American lynching of a Jewish individual.

The second Klan was insanely popular as a social organization. Indiana, for example, had one-third of its white male population on the membership rolls in the mid-1920s and even the governor was a Klan member. Indiana is where the Klan fell when in 1925 Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson was convicted of rape and murder.

Though the remnants of the Klan earned their well-deserved reputation, it's a bit bizarre to go back through newspaper archives and see not only the Klan out and about, openly on the front pages of newspapers, but that they weren't always committing terror acts. White supremacy was always a major tenet, of course.

sullat posted:

Weren't there thousands of lynchings between 1900 and 1920? Sounds like a movement that was happy to use violence. Not to mention the race riots that burned down a number of prominent black communities.

Southerners didn't need the Klan to lynch anyone. They did that perfectly fine on their own. I haven't (yet) seen any contemporary articles of that era attribute lynchings to the Klan, mainly because no southern jury was going to convict those responsible - if anyone was even charged. Many officers gave brief attempts to upholding the law and protecting prisoners, but once threats from angry mobs began or keys were "stolen", it was easier just to say the crimes were committed by parties unknown and let it go.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Raenir Salazar posted:

Can anyone do me a favour and link me the effort post on WWII aircombat and how it was a constant battle of compromises and the "energy bank"?

I have a question, what exactly do "wingmen" "do"? How do they defend the lead pilot or vice versa? The Germans as I understand it used groups of two, the Soviets and Japanese used triples. I don't recall what the British and Americans used. If someone tries to go after the lead plane or the wingmen do the other wingman break off to try to intercept?

There's also the famous Thach Weave; two Wildcats fly along, when a Zero gets in behind one, they break apart in opposite directions. Whoever the Zero follows turns a slightly wider turn, while the wingman turns in slightly harder, giving him a shot at the pursuing Zero. Very defensive formation. Though how it works if you get attacked by two Zeros I have no idea.

Monocled Falcon
Oct 30, 2011
Anyone know how accurate the usual casualty figures for the Soviet army on the eastern front are?

I'm reading Robert Forczyk's Red Steamroller and finding it rather odd how German units will be scrambling around to keep any kind of front together, but then, at the end of the chapter when overall loses are tallied the soviets will have 3-4 times more causalities then the Germans.

Perhaps it reflects different standards, like tank loses?

xthetenth
Dec 30, 2012

Mario wasn't sure if this Jeb guy was a good influence on Yoshi.

PittTheElder posted:

There's also the famous Thach Weave; two Wildcats fly along, when a Zero gets in behind one, they break apart in opposite directions. Whoever the Zero follows turns a slightly wider turn, while the wingman turns in slightly harder, giving him a shot at the pursuing Zero. Very defensive formation. Though how it works if you get attacked by two Zeros I have no idea.

A bit more detail that should hopefully explain things. The idea is that each guy is watching the other guy's tail. When he sees an enemy on the other guy's tail, he turns in, and the other guy is looking at him and matches that turn. That way they turn their noses at each other and can both clear their partner's tail. (Incidentally it was intended for wing pairs to do, but in its debut at Midway one of Thach's flight got taken out immediately and his wingman had a bad radio so Thach and the guy with a working radio from the other pair started weaving with each other while Thach's wingman was wondering what the hell was going on). And as far as getting directly attacked by multiple enemies, that doesn't happen very easily because trying to hold a lead in a deflection shot naturally sucks you in behind your target. So an expectation of the enemies being confined to the area behind their target and in the line of fire of the target's partner is pretty reasonable. As far as I know, the USN was the only service to train hard for full deflection shots (IE perpendicular courses), and the Zero's relatively long nose didn't lend itself to the job. Also although you might be able to do something with a pair with one getting on the tail of an enemy and a second diving on the intersection of the weave, that'd be really tricky to pull off even with good radio comms and without losing a guy or two in the first few weaves.


Monocled Falcon posted:

Anyone know how accurate the usual casualty figures for the Soviet army on the eastern front are?

I'm reading Robert Forczyk's Red Steamroller and finding it rather odd how German units will be scrambling around to keep any kind of front together, but then, at the end of the chapter when overall loses are tallied the soviets will have 3-4 times more causalities then the Germans.

Perhaps it reflects different standards, like tank loses?

That and the attack hurts. If the defenders are scrambling to keep any kind of front together, that means they still have a coherent front and haven't shattered, which is when all of a sudden the attacker's disadvantage goes away and the guys with the still working supply lines and intact formations get to mop up.

dublish
Oct 31, 2011


GO gently caress YOURSELF posted:

EDIT: who was running the "shitter trials"? I assume the Nazis, based on inference, but do you have more info on those?

Nope, it was the commies. Can't afford to leave a popular rival around as an alternative to your rule, after all.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

xthetenth posted:

A bit more detail that should hopefully explain things. The idea is that each guy is watching the other guy's tail. When he sees an enemy on the other guy's tail, he turns in, and the other guy is looking at him and matches that turn. That way they turn their noses at each other and can both clear their partner's tail. (Incidentally it was intended for wing pairs to do, but in its debut at Midway one of Thach's flight got taken out immediately and his wingman had a bad radio so Thach and the guy with a working radio from the other pair started weaving with each other while Thach's wingman was wondering what the hell was going on). And as far as getting directly attacked by multiple enemies, that doesn't happen very easily because trying to hold a lead in a deflection shot naturally sucks you in behind your target. So an expectation of the enemies being confined to the area behind their target and in the line of fire of the target's partner is pretty reasonable. As far as I know, the USN was the only service to train hard for full deflection shots (IE perpendicular courses), and the Zero's relatively long nose didn't lend itself to the job. Also although you might be able to do something with a pair with one getting on the tail of an enemy and a second diving on the intersection of the weave, that'd be really tricky to pull off even with good radio comms and without losing a guy or two in the first few weaves.

A good explanation (not that I'm really qualified to judge, but makes sense), and interestingly enough I know there's a memoir out there from a Japanese carrier pilot who survived the war, and wrote about how insanely frustrating it was to fly against it:

fe: from the wikipedia page:

quote:

For the first time Lt. Commander Tadashi Nakajima encountered what was to become a famous double-team maneuver on the part of the enemy. Two Wildcats jumped on the commander's plane. He had no trouble in getting on the tail of an enemy fighter, but never had a chance to fire before the Grumman's team-mate roared at him from the side. Nakajima was raging when he got back to Rabaul; he had been forced to dive and run for safety.

BattleMoose
Jun 16, 2010

Raenir Salazar posted:

I have a question, what exactly do "wingmen" "do"? How do they defend the lead pilot or vice versa? The Germans as I understand it used groups of two, the Soviets and Japanese used triples. I don't recall what the British and Americans used. If someone tries to go after the lead plane or the wingmen do the other wingman break off to try to intercept?

So you have the "lead plane" and the "wing man." As two formations of aircraft approach each other in combat, the "lead planes" will initiate their attack, pick a target enemy aircraft and have a go at them. It is the sole purpose of the wingman to cover the lead planes rear end, and to engage with any enemy aircraft that targets his "lead plane." As already mentioned the Germans used a finger four formation, two lead planes and two wingmen and they would try to stick together. Of all the formations tried, the finger four proved most effective.

Thatch Weave:
At the beginning of the war, the wildcat was totally and completely outclassed by the zero in terms of manoeuvrability. If a wildcat would try to dogfight against a half competent zero pilot, they would lose. The was the "energy doctrine" too, which was to dive into the combat, take a few shots, leg it and repeat.

The thatch weave was developed to try and limit the manoeuvrability advantage of the zero. Basically the idea is that the zero *will* get onto one of the planes tails, in so far as how manoeuvrable the zero was, the was an unavoidable outcome. What the the thatch weave allowed for, was that once the zero was on one of the planes tails, it would also be in the gun sights of the other plane involved in the weave. Hardly an ideal scenario but it seemed to work until the US got the hellcat.

EDIT:
Its worth mentioning that while the lead/wingman concept proved effective, it caused a lot of animosity amongst the pilots. The lead planes, because of the formation, would get many more kills than the wingmen and get much more credit and wingmen would feel like they weren't getting sufficient credit for their efforts. Consider how much value we place on "ace pilots" which are only measure by their number of kills.

Ithle01
May 28, 2013
Surely, no one would let something as trivial as their ego or personal opinions get in the way of fighting a war properly.

(this is a joke, I know what thread I'm in)

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

xthetenth posted:

A bit more detail that should hopefully explain things. The idea is that each guy is watching the other guy's tail. When he sees an enemy on the other guy's tail, he turns in, and the other guy is looking at him and matches that turn. That way they turn their noses at each other and can both clear their partner's tail. (Incidentally it was intended for wing pairs to do, but in its debut at Midway one of Thach's flight got taken out immediately and his wingman had a bad radio so Thach and the guy with a working radio from the other pair started weaving with each other while Thach's wingman was wondering what the hell was going on). And as far as getting directly attacked by multiple enemies, that doesn't happen very easily because trying to hold a lead in a deflection shot naturally sucks you in behind your target. So an expectation of the enemies being confined to the area behind their target and in the line of fire of the target's partner is pretty reasonable. As far as I know, the USN was the only service to train hard for full deflection shots (IE perpendicular courses), and the Zero's relatively long nose didn't lend itself to the job. Also although you might be able to do something with a pair with one getting on the tail of an enemy and a second diving on the intersection of the weave, that'd be really tricky to pull off even with good radio comms and without losing a guy or two in the first few weaves.


That and the attack hurts. If the defenders are scrambling to keep any kind of front together, that means they still have a coherent front and haven't shattered, which is when all of a sudden the attacker's disadvantage goes away and the guys with the still working supply lines and intact formations get to mop up.

To further this look at the distribution by time of German casualties. I don't know the exact proportion off the top of my head but it's something nuts like 60% in the last year of the war. Routs are when poo poo gets the ugliest.

Tevery Best
Oct 11, 2013

Hewlo Furriend

Koesj posted:

Goddamn.

Didn't these waves of trials (I think there were distinct ones at least?) end up with a big 'ol purge of the security services to cap it off and tie up loose ends?

Depends on where you go, but by and large there weren't really waves of trials, more like periods in establishing Communist rule. Up until 1948 or so you have the trials aimed at eliminating armed resistance to the new regime or destroying legal opposition (depending on where you go: Poland had a lot of the former and little of the latter, but, for example, Czechoslovakia never had a massed anti-Nazi underground force, but actually managed to hold a single real election), then you have a brief window when the focus shifts to eliminating independent organisations and spreading terror across the populace as well as trying to push unpopular reforms through (this is when you get trials against the Church figures, jailing people for saying there might be a war soon or "denigrating the great achievements of Soviet science" by telling Lysenko jokes, arresting peasants who resist collectivisation and so forth). At some point Stalin realizes Tito is essentially flipping a giant big bird to any demands he makes and orders all the vassal parties purged of the "right-wing-nationalist deviation" and these are the highest-profile trials for a while, then it's back to beating up on the Church (as by now it is usually the only at least semi-independent organization) and random people.

As for security purges, it depends. Obviously the USSR had a huge purge after Stalin died and Beria lost the power struggle. But other countries did not necessarily follow. In Poland, there was something of a purge, but not due to the terror ending - it would go on for another year and a bit - but because in 1954, a defector named Józef Światło, former deputy chief of Ministry of State Security Department X (in charge of battling supposed provocateurs, agents and spies within the Party itself), started to spill the beans in Radio Free Europe. This caused the Ministry to get dissolved, with the secret police rolled up directly into the government and the militia, the internal security armed forces and prisons were moved over to a new Ministry of Internal Affairs. 6,500 officers lost their jobs, but only a handful of ranking officers were ever tried (and never faced capital punishment).

This unwillingness to purge was related to the fact that most of the secret police agents were not going to ever be a threat individually. In 1953, half of them only had eight grades of school or less. This means that the only people with a real capacity to harm you were few and you could easily keep an eye on them.

GO gently caress YOURSELF posted:

This is a great post, thanks!

EDIT: who was running the "shitter trials"? I assume the Nazis, based on inference, but do you have more info on those?

No, it was the Communists. The Nazis weren't big on trying people in occupied countries.

There's not much I can add here, because it's just as simple as that. You get rolled up, take some beatings, then a few weeks later a bunch of suits walk into your cell, sit your rear end on a hopefully-empty bucket reeking of excrement, then tell you that during the last five or so years you spent in the woods shooting Nazis and trying not to die you were actually a well-off reactionary enforcer for the Gestapo, then you die, unless they need you for something. I'm fairly sure (meaning: I think I recall reading so, but can't remember for sure) they'd roll up for those trials in the wee hours, so that you get the added indignity of getting dragged out of bed and standing trial half-naked. Or just naked.

As an aside, most anti-Nazi underground soldiers were tried for collaboration with the Gestapo. You see the same phenomenon all around the Eastern Bloc: anyone who was not with the Communists during the war was revealed as a Nazi ally, regardless of how utterly bonkers and cynical such an accusation was. In most countries, you could tie them in to actual collaborators (Father Tiso's government in Slovakia, Arrow-Crossers in Hungary, Iron Guard in Romania and so on), but Poland never had a large collaborationist base, so they just went for actual Gestapo men they had in prison for war crimes - and many, many of them were useful enough to avoid having to answer for their crimes. The most glaring example was Erich Koch, gauleiter of East Prussia and Reichskommissar for Ukraine, sentenced to death for killing 400,000 Poles... and never executed. Years later, you had Solidarity people actually land next door to him after the martial law was introduced. Nobody really knows why he wasn't hanged, but it must have something to do with his usefulness to the security apparatus. On the other hand, he was also over the years repeatedly probed about hidden Nazi gold and art stashes, including the Amber Room. Because, you know, priorities.

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

swamp waste posted:

Got any good resources on honor in this time period? I see a lot of stuff online that's like-- honor as it pertains to gender or ethnicity or some specific institution, but they always seem to assume that you know the basics or that the basics are too arbitrary to discuss?? Like, is honor a binary, you have it or you don't thing, or are there degrees of it, is it measurable, does it transfer from one place to another across religious or political lines? Super basic stuff
In general, it's like..."if people think well of you," but there are also certain places in life that are honorable by definition (soldiers, guilds) or dishonorable by definition (executioners, shepherds, tanners). How that works out is different for different sexes, different Staende, and different stages of life: an honorable woman, unless she is a farmhand or working-class woman and it's 19th century germany, must be chaste (see The Village In Court for more of this--what I'm translating as farmhand is the level below the peasants--these people don't have their own property, they do agricultural work for peasants. For a woman from that group to be honorable and valued she has to be a strong worker and a reliable companion, nobody cares about her bastard kids if she's got any). Soldiers don't have to be chaste (lol), but journeymen and full guild members should. But apprentices don't have to; in fact, it's fine and good for them to visit official city brothels.

So, for a soldier to be honorable he needs to be brave and able to deal with physical hardship, and to perform "deeds worthy of fame." Wounds are honorable. Scars are good, since they're a visible record of your brave deeds. (It's extremely cool that Pappenheim is covered with hundreds of them.) But here's where interactions with other people become problematic, he also has to be willing to react to any challenges to his honor or status with flamboyant displays of violence. If you call me a liar I have to threaten you in response, instantly, or else maybe I am one. This is a thing from the lowest musketeer on up to Torstensson, Baner, Wallenstein. And this doesn't just lead to conflicts with civilians, I've seen a common soldier draw down on his superior since he didn't like the orders he was given, and fight him in the street. (When you consider that the way high officers make decisions is a lot more communal and collegial than it will be later, with a room full of guys discussing a thing instead of receiving orders from the commander in chief, you can see where problems might arise!)

(Interesting byproduct of this--uniforms aren't a thing yet, right? Maron Lorenz, in Rad der Gewalt, theorized that one possible reason for officers in particular to fight civilians is that the civilians have no way of knowing an officer's rank at a glance. If you don't know someone, you might be insulting him without meaning to, when you treat him out of keeping with his status.)

Dishonor is weird. It's not just the opposite of honor, it's more like a physical pollution. Members of an honorable group can't touch members of a dishonorable group without getting dishonor, for instance. Or touch the bodies of people who died by suicide, or touch a dead animal that died of natural causes.

Edit: If you're a soldier at least, it transfers across religious and political lines easily--there are tons of stories of these guys respecting their counterparts on the enemy side, or doing nice little gestures for their enemies. Like Gustav Adolph sent Tilly his personal surgeon when the latter got mortally wounded, for instance. There's a common assumption that if you're badass enough who the hell cares about all the things that divide them.

Edit 2: This system of beliefs is why Felix Steter is so disruptive for the Mansfeld Regiment--he's not just "insulting people," which would make him an rear end in a top hat in the 21st century but nothing more. He is directly threatening their honor. When he walks into his hauptmann's room and says "Why are you partying with a dishonorable man, why do you drink with him," he's starting something that if his hauptmann lets it continue might make him less honorable. Since honor is what others think of you, insults aren't just insults for these people.

HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Jul 26, 2016

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

HEY GAL posted:

uskok wars revanchists, it's a huge problem

...huh. I've just discovered the history Guy Gavriel Kay ripped his latest novel off from, I guess. :shobon:

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

feedmegin posted:

...huh. I've just discovered the history Guy Gavriel Kay ripped his latest novel off from, I guess. :shobon:
that may have been where wallenstein got malaria, or it could have been later

lenoon
Jan 7, 2010

Dishonour as a physically polluting force is really common in anthropological studies. It's one of many cases where it's not absence but improper activity, in the same manner as ritual purity, and can be accrued through context specific actions, and lost through improper (not the same thing as say morally improper behaviour) actions that breach your context. Things that can be dishonourable in one sense can be honourable in another - employing magic and magicians is a really common example in ethnographies

Jobbo_Fett
Mar 7, 2014

Slava Ukrayini

Clapping Larry

Raenir Salazar posted:

Can anyone do me a favour and link me the effort post on WWII aircombat and how it was a constant battle of compromises and the "energy bank"?

I have a question, what exactly do "wingmen" "do"? How do they defend the lead pilot or vice versa? The Germans as I understand it used groups of two, the Soviets and Japanese used triples. I don't recall what the British and Americans used. If someone tries to go after the lead plane or the wingmen do the other wingman break off to try to intercept?


I don't think anyone's mentioned it, but the Energy bank refers to the amount of potential energy you have in a given situation. This "energy" that you have is what you can use to convert into speed to chase, run away, or simply to perform some form of combat maneuver. The basic concept is that a plane with a 1,000 meter height advantage over his target can enter a dive in order to gain speed and catch (up to) its opponent. In turn the opponent in this example has the choice of using his potential energy to dive and run away, or choose to fight (whether by gaining altitude or maneuvering).

The compromise, I imagine, refers to whether or not you want to spend more time climbing in order to get more potential energy. Tactical considerations like having one flight high in a sort-of overwatch position, while a low flight acts as bait, or the current weather, or even the mission objective all come into play. There's no sense in being 3k meters above the planes you're trying to escort, for example.


With regards to wingmen, there have already been mentions of tactical formations. The basic function of the wingman is to cover the (squadron/flight) lead. Try to stay on his six o'clock, and make sure he is covered/protected from any enemies that may arrive.

The Germans pioneered the Finger Four formation, putting it to good use during the Spanish Civil War. As the name implies, and others have explained, it follows the general shape of your four fingers. The advantage of such a formation was that the flight could split into two groups while still being able to protect itself. It should be noted that almost, if not all, countries used the Finger Four during World War 2. Those that didn't use it originally used a formation called "The Vic" or "V" formation. The downside to this was that you had one lead plane and 2 wingmen, which limited its tactical capabilities as the flight didn't have the same amount of protection.

That doesn't mean that the Vic or V is useless; it was still employed against bombers by German fighters because each plane was going after a bomber, and therefore didn't need to cover eachother (because you do that against fighters).

Another formation, that I don't believe has been mentioned, was the "Combat Box" used by bomber formations (I believe only the allies used the combat box) where each flight in the formation was at a different altitude, with something around a 150 meter difference between the highest and lowest flights. The idea was that, thanks to the different altitudes, there was less chance of shooting friendly aircraft, while also increasing coverage of the defensive guns.

And then you have close air support aircraft that had their own formation when near/over their target. I forget if it has a specific name, but the example I remember involved a flight of 4 Bf-110s. Now, imagine them flying in a horizontal circle at the 12, 3, 6, and 9 positions. Each plane would fly in a (counter)clockwise manner and circle their target. One plane would break off and commence an attack run against its target and then egress to a safe distance before returning in the circle, repeat until out of ammo, target destroyer, enemy aircraft, etc. The formation allowed them to mutually support eachother and present themselves as a constant threat to any forces below. Shooting at the incoming plane means the other(s) may attack you, not shooting lets them attack freely, what if two aircraft attack at the same time, etc.



As for lead + wingman both being separately engaged, I think that ends up depending on the current situation. Are both being chased? Is anyone damaged, friend or foe? Can you break contact and try to run? I don't think there's a definitive answer on who should break and help the other, but I may be wrong on that :shrug:

lenoon
Jan 7, 2010

I left Conscientious Objector History about a month ago - and am now immersed once again in very old stone tools, but I did promise some write-ups, so here they are!

Women in the Conscientious Objector movement
Part 1: Context and the NCF


Writing this up is fairly difficult to do, really. We know, perhaps, more generalities about what pacifist women were up to around the country from 1916-1919, than we do about the men. What did the guys in Dartmoor really do all day? How did they live, what did they talk about? While the day-to-day lives of women on the socialist, pacifist and religious fringe of the British political spectrum would have been fairly normal woman-in-ww1 experiences, which we know rather well through general social history. Where we do know a lot about women, it's because they were the (very!) prominent few. Usually suffragists, usually middle class and always white, there was a hard core of women who essentially ran the entire pacifist movement, with a little help from the philandering Bertrand Russell. As a result, I'll say a little about the conditions that led to women taking over, and then focus on individuals who were exceptional, but their activities can be seen as a guide to what thousands of other women were doing - albeit usually on a local, rather than national, scale. I'll focus largely on the No-Conscription Fellowship, the main British pacifist organisation, which from it's foundation by Lilia and Fenner Brockway in 1914, welded religious and socialist objectors into one, fractious and occasionally ungainly, political force.

Context

The narrative of British women in WW1 is that the war provided opportunities for work, the men had marched gaily into the charnel house of the western front, and as a result, the kindly government allowed them to come work for king and country in the factories, or as cheery nurses, bus conductors, or whatever. It's a middle class narrative (try telling miners, or fishermen's, wives that the war gives them "the opportunity" for work), and it's one that tends to group all women together as an amorphous blob of willing war workers. Worse, it posits that the granting of the vote in 1918 was a result of hard work - all those beastly suffragettes needed to do was stop their agitation, and work hard and the caring paternalistic government would reward them! Of course, all war narratives have a pacifist analogue, and it's worth saying that we certainly shouldn't ascribe to the opposite - that the war gave women the opportunity to take over socialism and pacifism in the country, as all the men were busy. It's the same argument - that Conscientious Objectors, the erstwhile leaders of the anti-war movement, were by mid 1916 all in prison, so the women had the opportunity to take the lead.

This is total crap. Women had been active in the peace movement, in the socialist movement and the religious left long before the war. 1916 (when the men were arrested) does not show a change in the intensity, or level of their activities, but a shift in focus. Before, they had worked alongside men in order to pursue peace, disarmament and socialism. From 1916 onwards, they did it on their own. Nothing else had changed. Women were not magically "promoted" by the absence of men. They stepped up into possibly unfamiliar, but largely identical roles as they had held since the formation of pacifist and socialist movements in Britain. The only place they weren't, yet, was parliament.

But still, we shouldn't ignore the wider context of Conscientious Objection in the women's story. In 1914, the peace and socialist movements were dominated by men, but women were present - often in supporting roles, but equally often in major positions. Our major players (below) were nearly all highly active in the wider political world. They formed and sat on anti-conscription committees. When conscription came into force, all that changed was that military-service aged men disappeared from them. Women had to take on more work, but importantly, the roles they did take on were not new. There were "promotions" and some women became the defacto leaders of the movement, replacing imprisoned men. On a national scale, it's more that the scale of women's involvement was revealed by the absence of men, rather than encouraged by it.

Women in the peace movement almost all had some kind of pre-war affiliation to the suffrage movement. Either through the non-violent National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, or the Women's Social and Political Union (deeds, not words!), or the Independent Labour Party, various socialist parties, anarchists, early communists, etc etc - all groups determined to deliver the vote to women. The Suffrage movement and it's fellow travellers was producing hundreds of politically active, highly motivated women, training them (occasionally in jujitsu) and unleashing them on the wider world to campaign for social justice. When the war began, the dedicated suffrage movement split, with the WSPU abandoning the struggle to campaign for Britain, leaving about a third of the suffragettes to continue agitating for women's rights, peace and socialism. They knew what they were doing, and were embedded in political parties that were actively campaigning against the war. They were involved at every level of pre-conscription peace agitation, and for many, it was simply a natural extension of their work before the war for the vote.

Women in the NCF

Anyway! On to the women themselves. The No-Conscription Fellowship was the main anti-conscription and pro-peace movement in Britain. Formed in 1914, it was initially only for men who would probably be conscripted if it was ever introduced - it rapidly expanded to include "associate members" who could be anybody at all, and eventually basically dropped the associate membership category. It's founding committee was mostly men:

A. Barratt Brown, Alfred Salter, Aylmer Rose, Bertrand Russell, C.H. Norman, Catherine Marshall, Clifford Allen, Edward Grubb, Fenner Brockway, John P. Fletcher, Morgan Jones, Rev. Leyton Richards, Will Chamberlain.

But not all. Just "behind" the national committee (who would, almost to a man, be arrested in 1916, and mostly released in 1918-19), were the women who, for want of a better phrase, actually did the work, and had always done the work. Catherine Marshall, Lydia Smith, Joan Beauchamp, Ada Salter and Clara Gilbert. Not "women in the NCF", but "The NCF". Nothing - not a single thing that the NCF did from 1914-1920 could have been done without these women. Without their efforts, The COs that were sent to France to be executed would be buried under a CWGC stone in France. George Baker would have been in prison until mid 1920, and there'd be precisely gently caress-all CO history for me to have worked on for two years. They were more than important - they were the movement.

Catherine Marshall
1880-1961

Catherine Marshall was the key linchpin of the organisation of the NCF. From 1908 she had been highly involved in the Suffrage movement, eventually sitting on the NUWSS national committee, before resigning in disgust in 1915 after their failure to support the Women's Peace Conference in the Hague
(next time, folks!). She made essentially a horizontal step into the peace movement, and became (at the time) the only female member of the NCF national committee. Her name had been made internationally as an organiser in the suffrage movement, rather than a campaigner.

Marshall moved the thrust of the NCF's political agitation out of meetings and off of the pages of newspapers, and into the Houses of Parliament, and from 1916 was instrumental in changing the NCF from a campaigning organisation to one that dedicated itself to tracking and monitoring conscientious objectors, as well as presenting organised parliamentary campaigning for their release. Her reach in the political sphere was immense. The catalyst for this change was the arrest of the NCF national committee (except her!) in April 1916. Realising that she not only had the skills to organise the movement, but also the resources, numbers and nation-wide reach - possibly, a level of political power that no other woman had ever had on these wild fringes of British politics - Marshall organised a systematic campaign to agitate for their release, and, eventually, turned this formidable political machine onto the wider release of all COs. She organised parliamentary meetings, briefed MPs on questions they were to ask in Parliament, apparently had Lloyd George hanging on her every word (possibly helped by the fact that the Welsh Wizard had a very deserved reputation as a ladies man), and it was Marshall that stormed into Parliament with the news that Hague had confirmed the death sentences on 34 COs in France. She set up regular briefing meetings with General Childs who had responsibility for Conscientious Objectors, where he accepted that the NCF had significantly better, and more up to date information than the War Office - a relationship that saved many COs from potentially life-threatening levels of abuse and mistreatment.

By the end of 1917, she had reached the point of burnout, however. Truly, Madly, Deeply, in love with the charismatic Clifford Allen (Chairman of the NCF), she had worked herself towards a mental breakdown. Her last significant contribution to the NCF was securing Clifford, and hundreds of other COs release on the grounds of ill-health. A broken man, Allen was released in November 1917 critically ill. They went to recuperate together in Scotland, both barely better by the end of the war.

Lydia Smith

Lydia was a schoolteacher and suffragette at the beginning of the war, and her family background in christian pacifism led her to become the secretary of the Brighton NCF in mid 1914. She was quickly passed up to national head office, where she joined the press team and was put in charge of propaganda distribution and press briefings. While working on the Tribunal, the newspaper of the NCF, she experienced a very rapid promotion to editor after the arrest of Hubert Peet, though a man's name would remain as the editorial credit until the end of 1917. Nevertheless, from May 1916 onwards, The newspaper, the propaganda, the leaflets, the press briefings, the letters, the pamphlets, the leaflets, everything put out by the NCF around the country, passed through her editorial desk.

Using her imprisoned brother as a source, Lydia wrote and published exposé after exposé on the conditions COs were being held in, the daily routine of their lives and their ongoing agitation for release (thank god, it's all very useful stuff). Lydia's time as editor of the Tribunal (both as the secret editor and the censors-be-damned-im-putting-my-name-on-it editor) saw it at it's most anti-government, it's most vociferous and the peak of government repression. After a year of police harassment, arrest without charge and frequent raids, the filth broke into the NCF offices and the National Labour Press, destroying the print works and confiscating paper, leaflets, writing materials and absolutely anything they could get their hands on. The crime? Lydia had featured an article by Bertrand Russell which listed all the incidents of strike breaking the US army had been put to. The police gloated that they'd finally won.

A week later, the Tribunal appeared once again. This time hand printed, in it's thousands, from a secret press that Lydia had bought and hidden weeks earlier (no-one knows where). "HERE WE ARE AGAIN" read the headline. It was printed on the secret press for over a year - 2,000 issues, smuggled out by Lydia and Joan Beauchamp who, as women were considered beneath the notice of the watching police. Eventually, she was arrested and tried for refusing to disclose either the publisher or the location of the newspaper - serving no time whatsoever, as, again, the police and magistrates believed that she couldn't possibly be running the whole operation. She continued writing and editing, smuggling issues in and out of a secret location, until 1919 when, with the return of the men, she was given what amounted to a "thanks for holding the fort, toots!" and a final issue in which to say goodbye. The Tribunal would never reach the same level of blindingly accurate commentary and vociferous campaigning. The next editor would let it slide into recrimination and factionalism.

One of the saddest of all articles in the Tribunal is the obituary of Royle Richmond. A CO in his mid-20s, he'd died of heart failure in prison, after refusing to take a medical exam which might have saved him from conscription altogether. The obituary is written by a friend, who makes much reference to the ballad of Reading Gaol, and a surprisingly large amount of references to the body beautiful. The homoerotic subtext couldn't be much clearer. Below the obituary comes a small dedication from the staff of the NCF, a few lines about his abilities and qualities as a good comrade and how he will be missed by the movement. The editor of the Tribunal has signed it off herself, "Lydia Smith". Someone, years later, has penciled in on my copy "his fiancée".

Next up: more women in the NCF!

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System Metternich
Feb 28, 2010

But what did he mean by that?

lenoon posted:

Dishonour as a physically polluting force is really common in anthropological studies. It's one of many cases where it's not absence but improper activity, in the same manner as ritual purity, and can be accrued through context specific actions, and lost through improper (not the same thing as say morally improper behaviour) actions that breach your context. Things that can be dishonourable in one sense can be honourable in another - employing magic and magicians is a really common example in ethnographies

I think I mentioned it here before, but a clear example of this would be a Basel-based craftsman who got drunk and sat down in the inn along with the wrong guy, in this case the city's executioner. Having drinks with a supremely unhonourable person like the executioner meant that the craftsman was immediately thrown out of the guild which again meant that the poor guy's life was shattered. No guild would readmit him, the people would avoid him due to the "taint" of having drinks with he executioner, and the only way out left was suicide (which again meant dying in a state of dishonour and being denied a Christian burial).

e: just looked at the Zedler encyclopedia, and under the lemma "Hencker" (1735) they openly state that eating or drinking together with an executioner wouldn't mean dishonour, but they say it in a way that maked me think that this was a recent development and probably also one that hadn't quite yet reached the wider population

System Metternich fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Jul 26, 2016

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