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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:He also sucks poo poo on every other level of military history. He is not. His article on the Paraguayan War was actually pretty well made and informed for an Anglo historian. HEY GAL posted:no, that was a thing It's also a thing on a lot of places in the Latin American countryside as well. I live in Northeast Brazil and my family has several tales of people who died or got grievously wounded in those, and I actually had an uncle who died in a knife duel due to a debt of what amounts in converted value today to barely eighty dollars....
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 16:56 |
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# ? Jun 1, 2024 05:39 |
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:It's also a thing on a lot of places in the Latin American countryside as well. I live in Northeast Brazil and my family has several tales of people who died or got grievously wounded in those, and I actually had an uncle who died in a knife duel due to a debt of what amounts in converted value today to barely eighty dollars....
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 17:00 |
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Kemper Boyd posted:He was right tho when he wrote about how the Union should have hanged a bunch of Confederate war criminals tho. Ehhh not really. I mean I'm all about puncturing the lost cause bullshit and love annoying people who care by calling it the War of Southern Treason, but not killing everyone was probably the best decision. It's easy for us to sit here in 2016 and fantasize about how awesome it would have been if radical reconstruction had gone through with vigor and him crow never happened etc but from the vantage point of the 1890s it was probably the right choice. Killing leadership would have done nothing to integrate the south and would have created a poo poo ton of martyrs for revanchist CSA types to fixate on. The south in 1865 wasn't Germany in 1945. This wasn't a foreign occupation of a country that had a blatantly criminal regime, it was a civil war involving an institution that, while abhorrent, was legal when the war started. Even ignoring slavery brutal recriminations after civil wars never go well. Look at all the modern ones that were really only put to bed after decades of low intensity combat by blanket amnesties and reconciliation commissions Hanging Jeff Davis et al would have been a great way to have a first gen klan that metastasized into a serious guerrilla insurgency lasting for a long time and all the ugliness that comes from fighting it. Instead of a south that's (sometimes grudgingly) fully part of the US by WW1 you have a conflict that is still very much a contemporary issue.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 17:11 |
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HEY GAL posted:i guess it's like the bowie knife or the arkansas toothpick, if you live in the country a big working knife is useful both for utility reasons and to duel a guy if you're mad at him On the Afghan frontier, they took the philosophy of "that's not a knife, THIS is a knife" to the limits:
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 17:16 |
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Didnt we pretty much invent the concept of war crimes after the fact in 1945 because the Nazis werent criminals per se? (By whose laws, Nazi Germany)? Meanwhile Im pretty sure armed rebellion by US citizens against the US government is a crime, namely treason.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:12 |
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feedmegin posted:Didnt we pretty much invent the concept of war crimes after the fact in 1945 because the Nazis werent criminals per se? (By whose laws, Nazi Germany)? Meanwhile Im pretty sure armed rebellion by US citizens against the US government is a crime, namely treason. There were international agreements (Hague and Geneva) regarding the nature and conduct of war that existed before WWII, which would form the basis of war crimes. Up until now, following orders of superior officers was an acceptable defense for illegal actions. During WWII this was changed, for the express purpose of being able to charge German war criminals. However ethically appropriate, changing the law and applying it retroactively is always dodgy at best, as was done before the Nuremberg trials.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:16 |
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feedmegin posted:Didnt we pretty much invent the concept of war crimes after the fact in 1945 because the Nazis werent criminals per se? (By whose laws, Nazi Germany)? Meanwhile Im pretty sure armed rebellion by US citizens against the US government is a crime, namely treason. Hague Convention was 1899.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:17 |
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feedmegin posted:Meanwhile Im pretty sure armed rebellion by US citizens against the US government is a crime, namely treason. If you're referring to the Civil War that really isn't what happened.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:32 |
feedmegin posted:Didnt we pretty much invent the concept of war crimes after the fact in 1945 because the Nazis werent criminals per se? (By whose laws, Nazi Germany)? Meanwhile Im pretty sure armed rebellion by US citizens against the US government is a crime, namely treason. The problem is never 'have there been legal and moral precepts about how war should be waged' it's 'how selective is the interest of the belligerent powers in applying them?'.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:38 |
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Setting aside the question of if there were legal grounds for killing them, in mm arguing that doing so would have been counter productive and left the US more divided and for longer.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:41 |
Wasn't there, in any event, more overwhelming public pressure for reconciliation than you might see in certain other civil wars that for example stem from more traditional causes?
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:56 |
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Disinterested posted:Wasn't there, in any event, more overwhelming public pressure for reconciliation than you might see in certain other civil wars that for example stem from more traditional causes? HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jul 27, 2016 |
# ? Jul 27, 2016 18:58 |
HEY GAL posted:compared to the civil wars i'm familiar with? no Go on.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 19:01 |
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feedmegin posted:Meanwhile Im pretty sure armed rebellion by US citizens against the US government is a crime, namely treason. You're not wrong, but trying to heal a country after a civil war it's best to forget this. For every rich slaveowner general you accuse of treason, there's a thousand people you'd also have to call traitor who were just defending their homes. Better "let's move past this" than inflict further injury (hello treaty of Versailles.)
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 19:02 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:But was something similar to the Thatch Weave used in Europe? If you were in an American or British formation and the Germans were chasing you what did you do to protect the Boss? Did you break off and slow turn or break off and tried to turn around to intercept? I don't hear much about the Thach Weave in Europe. I doubt that means it wasn't used, but it most certainly wasn't as useful/popular in that theater. As for "providing cover", that's basically it. Whoever it providing cover follows the lead (Or maintains an energy advantage above) and watches for the enemy. If they decide to "bounce" their target, they go in an participate in the fight. PittTheElder posted:Is this what the British used? I am immediately reminded of the stupid trench run scene in Star Wars, and I know most of the space battle choreography was ripped off from British WWII films. It always infuriates me that the wingmen don't actually bother to do anything, they sit there waiting to die. Yes. The British loved the V formation, although to an unnecessarily high degree. They trained/flew in a very tight flight, so much so that the wingmen were forced to pay a lot of attention to their flying or else they'd collide with the lead plane. They sorted it out quickly enough, thanks to the Battle of Britain, IIRC. Eventually, the Finger Four was adopted. darthbob88 posted:That's a different thing. The term I've heard for that CAS circle of death is just "circle of death". Never heard its actual name, but that's the gist of it, yeah!
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 19:08 |
TheLovablePlutonis posted:It's also a thing on a lot of places in the Latin American countryside as well. I live in Northeast Brazil and my family has several tales of people who died or got grievously wounded in those, and I actually had an uncle who died in a knife duel due to a debt of what amounts in converted value today to barely eighty dollars.... There's also a ton of videos from Latin America and the Caribbean of machete fights, sort of the modern equivalent to sword duels. They're pretty interesting to watch, as you see a sort of "street fighting" version of sword fighting, minus the ability to stab. Lots of flailing and near-simultaneous hits.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 19:08 |
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lol at everyone in this thread wondering why people that just went through 4 years of brutal warfare would be hesitant to kill more people
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 19:10 |
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chitoryu12 posted:Lots of flailing and near-simultaneous hits.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 19:11 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Ehhh not really. I mean I'm all about puncturing the lost cause bullshit and love annoying people who care by calling it the War of Southern Treason, but not killing everyone was probably the best decision. It's easy for us to sit here in 2016 and fantasize about how awesome it would have been if radical reconstruction had gone through with vigor and him crow never happened etc but from the vantage point of the 1890s it was probably the right choice. His idea was to hang a few chosen people who were almost guaranteed to cause trouble later on. Like Forrest.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 19:32 |
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If you were going to hang Forrest it would have to be over Fort Pillow not treason. Even then it's probably not worth the trouble. No one knows in 1865 what he's going to get up to in a few years, and meanwhile do you want the headache of a trial for a crime committed during wartime to black troops, a group that many in the north weren't fans of. What went down in the south re: Jim Crow, segregation, the klan, etc over the next century was hosed up but just offing some notable assholes doesn't change that. The south was hosed up because it had to deal with the legacy of two centuries of basing its economy on slave labor and the impoverished, uneducated, culturally shunned underclass that resulted. Those are inequalities that take centuries to efface. gently caress, just look at Dalit in India or native / afrocarribean populations across Latin America. Change like that takes a loooooong time to happen and involves more than just legal emancipation or punishing a few people. Edit: what I'm getting at is that as much as it might have felt good to string Forrest up it doesn't change anything and has a chance of backfiring in a bad way.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 20:07 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you were going to hang Forrest it would have to be over Fort Pillow not treason. Even then it's probably not worth the trouble. No one knows in 1865 what he's going to get up to in a few years, and meanwhile do you want the headache of a trial for a crime committed during wartime to black troops, a group that many in the north weren't fans of. The South was hosed up because as soon as federal troops were withdrawn, local elites and prominent figures recaptured control of local and state government, often by force. In some areas, the collapse of Reconstruction involved ex-Confederate soldiers using ex-Confederate guns and cannons to forcibly expel fairly-elected governments and install their own, which quickly established Jim Crow laws and laid the foundations of powerful vote-rigging efforts to ensure that only the right sort of people (i.e., white supremacists favored by the established Southern elite) won elections. The changes at the end of the war, particularly the extension of the right to vote to non-whites, caused some major political shifts that tended to hurt the local rich elites and unseat established Southern politicians. As soon as the federal government started looking the other way, those established forces moved to reestablish control - first by pushing out the fairly elected governments through massive vote manipulation or outright armed insurrection, and then restricting non-whites' ability to vote as much as they could get away with in order to push those new voters back out of the electorate and restore the old political environment as much as possible. Even more than before, racism became a tool used by the elites to preserve their own power by suppressing demographics unlikely to vote for them. Don't get me wrong, almost all of them were definitely real white supremacists who honestly believed that non-whites were inferior, but suppressing and disenfranchising black voters was also a very effective way to roll back the major political changes that had taken place when black voters took to the polls.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 20:56 |
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Main Paineframe posted:The South was hosed up because as soon as federal troops were withdrawn, local elites and prominent figures recaptured control of local and state government, often by force. In some areas, the collapse of Reconstruction involved ex-Confederate soldiers using ex-Confederate guns and cannons to forcibly expel fairly-elected governments and install their own, which quickly established Jim Crow laws and laid the foundations of powerful vote-rigging efforts to ensure that only the right sort of people (i.e., white supremacists favored by the established Southern elite) won elections. The changes at the end of the war, particularly the extension of the right to vote to non-whites, caused some major political shifts that tended to hurt the local rich elites and unseat established Southern politicians. As soon as the federal government started looking the other way, those established forces moved to reestablish control - first by pushing out the fairly elected governments through massive vote manipulation or outright armed insurrection, and then restricting non-whites' ability to vote as much as they could get away with in order to push those new voters back out of the electorate and restore the old political environment as much as possible. Even more than before, racism became a tool used by the elites to preserve their own power by suppressing demographics unlikely to vote for them. Don't get me wrong, almost all of them were definitely real white supremacists who honestly believed that non-whites were inferior, but suppressing and disenfranchising black voters was also a very effective way to roll back the major political changes that had taken place when black voters took to the polls. Was there anything that could have stopped it?
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 21:25 |
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Grenrow posted:On the Afghan frontier, they took the philosophy of "that's not a knife, THIS is a knife" to the limits: I am at a loss as to what culinary use such a gigantic knife would be. Filleting massive tuna, maybe?
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 21:26 |
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You stab people with it so they don't take your livestock.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 21:36 |
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FAUXTON posted:I am at a loss as to what culinary use such a gigantic knife would be. Filleting massive tuna, maybe? It does an excellent job of butchering long pork.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 21:37 |
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Fangz posted:Hague Convention was 1899. Nobody tried at Nuremberg was charged with violating the Hague Convention of 1899. That Convention is an agreement between signatories. It makes no conduct illegal, does not prohibit waging wars of aggression, doesn't prescribe any sentences for violating it, and it certainly doesn't set up any courts. And it certainly doesn't touch on the issue of a country rounding up *its own citizens* and executing them en masse. According to Hague and Geneva, the only war crimes committed by anyone tried at Nuremberg were the treatment of POWs and the populations of other countries.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 21:38 |
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Was there anything that could have stopped it? The Radical Republic congress basically squashed it in the years immediately following the war through legislation and sanctions and whatnot, but they gradually lost interest as the party collapsed under scandal and corruption and their own latent racism and whatnot and as soon as that happened the Old South really started flexing its muscles again. The possible counterpoint to that was a more measured Reconstruction plan ala what Lincoln wanted that would've integrated more old southern politicians into the process but it is really hard to say if that would have worked any better.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 21:50 |
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A question I've always wanted to ask but always forgot to is about getting information about arrow production throughout history. It's impressive in my mind how well ancient civilizations made thousands of the things using the materials they had. Can anyone share information on how the mass production of it was done (no particular time period/military requested, just share what you know). Did armies try to also reclaim and re-use fired arrows that they could recover from the battlefield if they weren't too damaged by use?
Plan Z fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jul 27, 2016 |
# ? Jul 27, 2016 21:56 |
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sound the jauchecharly alarm
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 22:00 |
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Anyone here heard of a travel writer called "Abdul Rezak" or "Abdul Razak", who apparently visited what's now Oman and Muscat in 1442 (or thereabouts) and wrote an eloquent description of the overpowering heat? The only references I can find to him in other places are unsourced and look suspiciously like they might just be relying on this original bloke's off-hand reference to him; Mr Google is also being confused by a number of other people of the same name.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 22:01 |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd-al-Razz%C4%81q_Samarqand%C4%AB This guy, maybe?
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 22:08 |
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if that's not him the muslim thread might know, esp if his name is spelled a bunch of misdirecting ways in our alphabet
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 22:10 |
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When people (historians) describe the Nazi regime as 'criminal', it isn't so much a moral judgement as an observation that even within the terms the Nazis set for themselves as rulers of a totalitarian state there was nothing approaching a rule of law. The Nazi state was very much a free-for-all of corruption, violence, and power-plays.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 22:18 |
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FAUXTON posted:I am at a loss as to what culinary use such a gigantic knife would be. Filleting massive tuna, maybe? That's the peshghabz, it's purpose is for killing people, which it apparently does very well.
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# ? Jul 27, 2016 22:23 |
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more words i learned: bastand or bastant-satisfied. From basta, Italian, "enough" execution-enforcement.* In military jargon, "the enforcement of contributions." A guy who's not with the company this week because he's auf der execution is (in the best case scenario) shaking civilians down for cash and food. *not the execution of a legal punishment, to get executed is "justificieret werden" HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jul 28, 2016 |
# ? Jul 27, 2016 23:46 |
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Bingo. It's just what I've always said; when in doubt, ask my dad. Now, question number 2: how does a Royal Flying Corps lieutenant-colonel know who he is? There is an 1871 history book on the history of India as told by native historians that he might conceivably have read, available here at archive.org. Two complications: this book renders his name "Abdu-r Razzak", and has a significantly different translation of the relevant passage. (There is a bit of stuff in the introduction to Razzaq which mentions some other translations that have been made.)
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# ? Jul 28, 2016 00:38 |
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There was this story of a Dachau Staatsanwalt who started an investigation in accordance with the law for people he lerned had died at Dachau concentration camp. One of those maddening throwaway anecdotes in a history book that the author doesn't bother properly footnoting. I called the office of the camp memorial site over it, and/or the Dachau public prosecutor's office, I don't quite remember, and eventually got put through to a very cool and helpful guy who knew what I was blathering about and told me the deets but unfortunately I forgot all of it again. Balls of steel. Obviously there never was a law passed that quite stated that you could beat someone to death in a cellar at Dachau. This is the Something Awful Forums history-flavored vague hearsay thread, right? e: how did the proliferation of radio in the various air forces go? Did everyone have it on their fighters by 1939 or were there major air forces that went into the big one with pilots still communicating with hand signals? aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jul 28, 2016 |
# ? Jul 28, 2016 00:40 |
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Thanks for this extremely good answer! When you have a second for a follow-up question, were the women who traveled with armies honorable? You've mentioned them not being married to their partners a lot of times, but is that the rule or the exception? If they're not honorable, I guess the soldiers aren't tainted by their presence, because chastity isn't part of the soldiers' behavioral code?
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# ? Jul 28, 2016 01:25 |
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Trin Tragula posted:Bingo. It's just what I've always said; when in doubt, ask my dad. You'd be surprised what floats around in book collections. Maybe a different translation of it was in the school or home library, and provided beloved reading for a young boy.
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# ? Jul 28, 2016 01:31 |
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# ? Jun 1, 2024 05:39 |
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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 read a good paper on the subject of contagious dishonor/pollution amongst the vlax Roma which argued that it is probably an adaptive trait by which groups can more rigorously enforce social norms and laws. "Gypsy Law by Peter T. Leeson posted:The unusual beliefs that underpin Gypsy law solve these problems. They make worldly crimes ritual ones, leveraging fear of the latter to prevent the former. They incentivize collective punishment of antisocial behavior despite the high cost of monitoring/communication by making pollution contagious. And they bolster the penalties of such punishment by rendering non-Gypsies dangerously defiled. Not all gypsies have placed the same importance on ritual defilement, with Finnish Kaale standing out as an exception. This might be because there are relatively few economic ties outside the family group among them, meaning there are fewer reasons to enforce cooperation. Instead they are more likely to resort to blood feuds to settle disputes.
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# ? Jul 28, 2016 03:10 |