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all english 17th c reenactors are garbage
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Jul 31, 2017 19:03
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HEY GAIL posted:all english 17th c reenactors are garbage Learning how land combat was done from the English of all people strikes me as a peculiar move in the first place.
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Jul 31, 2017 19:27
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HEY GAIL posted:all english are garbage Agreed
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Jul 31, 2017 19:29
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Ensign Expendable posted:Agreed Am English, can confirm.
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Jul 31, 2017 20:04
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Perestroika posted:Serious answer: His theory is that the first rank of a pike formation would die "instantly" once it moved into range (because apparently they wore armour only for funsies), so pike formations would just never actually attack each other. They'd just sort of amble up until they were almost in range and then just kind of stand there awkwardly waving their dicks at each other. And apparently the only reason why anybody used pikes in the first place was the hope that the enemy would just up and break in the face of a serious-looking (but not actually serious) charge, like with a bayonet charge in napoleonic warfare. This is precisely the kind of theory I'd expect from a person who not only has never, ever been in a fight, but who also cannot fathom personally being in a fight. Engaging in some kind of standoff like that, at the tactical level, is a pretty dumb way to just beg someone else to seize the initiative and kill the hell out of all of you.
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Jul 31, 2017 20:28
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mlmp08 posted:This is precisely the kind of theory I'd expect from a person who not only has never, ever been in a fight, but who also cannot fathom personally being in a fight. Engaging in some kind of standoff like that, at the tactical level, is a pretty dumb way to just beg someone else to seize the initiative and kill the hell out of all of you.
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Jul 31, 2017 20:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:As a general overview work it's decent, but some of the specific claims he makes are way out of favor. It's been a long time since I read it so I'm hazy on the particulars, but the one that always leaps to mind when this discussion comes up is the Sonderweg. Shirer goes long on that explaining the lead-up to Nazism, which makes sense as it was the general belief from the 40s-60s. I asked this in the German D&D thread earlier but is the Sonderweg still supported by modern historians in any real way? Specifically in regard to the present German state, maybe also the European Union in its German-derived bureaucratic qualities?
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Jul 31, 2017 20:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:I love Gurren Lagan but it is essentially juche in action, but with giant fighting robots and the discovery of teleportation so somebody can get punched really hard in the face It's a terrible education system, it creates lots of people who have memorized the terms "Nietzsche", "Kant", "Utilitarianism", and maybe a one-line summary of those various philosophies, and those people them spit them out word-salad style into anime scripts. I don't know what show you watched, but if it ended up coherent and interesting that's pure random chance Most coherent political critiques in anime tend to have a left-wing anti-authoritarian bent, although on occasion there's the odd right-wing one. Gate's not really that bad in those terms, it's basically no worse than a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bad show because it's got lovely animation, creepy too-young female characters, and is boring, but it's not really fascist icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 20:44
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icantfindaname posted:I asked this in the German D&D thread earlier but is the Sonderweg still supported by modern historians in any real way? Specifically in regard to the present German state, maybe also the European Union in its German-derived bureaucratic qualities? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Fran%C3%A7aise All the elements are there--the virulent nationalism, the cross-class appeal (primarily the lower middle class and well to do high school students), the disquieting conjunction of extreme authoritarianism and a contempt for the law. Advocates of this cult happened to take power in Italy, Japan, and germany due to contingent events that had little to do with structural causes--right before von Papen and the rest of those idiots handed power to Hitler, his polls were falling. also, in what way is the EU "German"? bureaucracy isn't unique to Germany. Unless you're trying to insinuate that the EU will lead to Fascism? Is this a retread of the old "Fascism is the last stage of capitalism" bullshit? Because that's false prima fascie. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 20:52
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HEY GAIL posted:also people who've never handled a pike assume it's impossible to move quickly with one in your hands. not just lindybeige, i've heard this from actual historians as well, almost all of them until the very newest scholarship will call pike blocks "ponderous" etc. they're wrong, it's like...ten pounds. you can run with one if you feel like. Pikes != spears from Asia, but I watched a guy spinning about wildly and doing flips and crap and stabbing and swinging with a 20-foot long spear like it was nothing. Sure, martial arts forms are mostly about show, precision, etc vs no-poo poo warfighting, but pikes only seem especially cumbersome in the context of fighting in an area where common sense would dictate that of course you're not using a pike, like room clearing.
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Jul 31, 2017 20:55
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That's when you switch to your assault pike. I can definitely agree with the weight thing. Part of my job involves hauling around sections of steel pipe from spear to short pike length (8'-15' or so). Anyone with an average physique could hoof it pretty fast if they needed to while carrying one.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:07
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HEY GAIL posted:In my opinion, not really. I'm strongest in intellectual history (and Disinterested isn't here) so I'll stay in that area: there's a small library of books out there (i like this one) describing how the mental ingredients for Fascism were found throughout Europe. Remember that the earliest Fascist movement wasn't even the Italian one, it was French, and it happened as a reaction to the Dreyfus Affair: Well, the Sonderweg is associated with left-liberal intellectuals throwing bits of Marxism and liberal idealism together, both in Germany and Japan(Masao Maruyama i'm looking at you). Japan specifically is pretty interesting I think because something nearly-identical to the Sonderweg thesis exists with Japan as well, and is more or less the standard narrative on the country as of 2017 in middlebrow Anglophone liberal discourse. No bourgeois revolution and modernization from above, therefore they have a feudal, conservative mindset. This is basically what the American and British left-liberal commentariat has been repeating for the last 30 years as what's wrong with Japan. In fact I would say Germany and Japan basically switched places, with a remarkable degree of parallelism. Cold War liberal triumphalist modernization theory ideas were dominant re:Japan in the 1960s and 70s, and then Sonderweg-y critical ones became dominant from the 1990s to today. The exact opposite happens with Germany icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 21:09
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icantfindaname posted:I asked this in the German D&D thread earlier but is the Sonderweg still supported by modern historians in any real way? Specifically in regard to the present German state, maybe also the European Union in its German-derived bureaucratic qualities? Not really, no. A couple of decades ago there was a camp that would point out how Germany developed somewhat differently than other big linguistic-cultural areas that coalesced into large, centralized nations in the late medieval and early modern periods (e.g. England, France, Spain) and how this could explain some of its 19th century peculiarities, but even that camp was very clear that it wasn't an explanation for Hitler. More recently you will find people arguing that this seeming pattern in the development of centralized western states is more illusory and that England, France, and Spain all have such huge differences between them that it's hard to make an argument about how they represent a "normal" path that Germany deviated from. At this point anyone that's hemming and hawing over it is using such a watered down form of it that they're essentially just stating that Germany had its own unique developmental path, which can really be said of any country or culture in Europe during the time in question. The notion of the Sonderweg itself is basically a cultural artifact of the world wars. It comes out of a very 1940s mindset that there was something perverse about Prussian militarism that not only started 2 world wars (and 3 major European conflicts in living memory, not even counting the smaller poo poo like Prussia vs. Denmark) but led to the Holocaust. This is just my personal take, but I think it was the reaction to a lot of people raised under the progressive ideals of the long 19th century who didn't want to accept that modernity wasn't only a steady march towards a utopian future, but could quite possibly detour into the horrors of world war, much less genocide. Either way, the need to diagnose what was wrong with Germany was strong, and an expiation that placed it far in the past was very attractive for a number of reasons. Not only did it provide a comforting (albeit totally bullshit - see France's history of 19th century anti-semitism) narrative about how this was a unique German problem that couldn't possibly have happened in England/France/America/etc, but it also provided a narrative for Germans that helped not only collectivize guilt, but push responsibility far into the past as well. It's the national version of "I was abused as a kid, which is why i beat my wife." If you can say that Germany was set irrevocably down the path to authoritarian militarism as far back as the early modern period then while individuals might still be responsible for poo poo they personally did during the Nazi years people who were simply fellow travelers shed a lot of that burden. It was also an attractive narrative because it suggested that the problem had been found and, once defined, it could be cured through thoroughly rehabilitation of the culture and government. This plays in big when you get into educational reform after the war and the reconstruction of the schools, which is my own personal fixation. Now if you REALLY want to get into the weeds and talk about the current government you MIGHT be able to argue that some of the specific forms of the German Basic Law, government, etc. are that way because the people involved in them believed that they needed to correct for 500 years of "normal" development that never happened. But, again, that's getting way, way off the mark of what the actual thesis of the Sonderweg is.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:12
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icantfindaname posted:Well, the Sonderweg is associated with left-liberal intellectuals throwing bits of Marxism and liberal idealism together, both in Germany and Japan(Masao Maruyama i'm looking at you). Japan specifically is pretty interesting I think because something nearly-identical to the Sonderweg thesis exists with Japan as well, and is more or less the standard narrative on the country as of 2017 in middlebrow Anglophone liberal discourse. No bourgeois revolution and modernization from above, therefore they have a feudal, conservative mindset. Are any scholars making this argument? Because the "middle brow Anglophone liberal discourse" frequently cribs off of poo poo that academics stopped taking seriously decades ago. THe same could be said for the German Sonderweg - you will not find it difficult to find any number of history enthusiasts, secondary school teachers, public figures, and authors of mass market histories who will say with all the authority they can muster that Germany was doomed as of Martin Luther. That doesn't make them in any way correct, however.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:17
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Cyrano4747 posted:I think it was the reaction to a lot of people raised under the progressive ideals of the long 19th century who didn't want to accept that modernity wasn't only a steady march towards a utopian future, but could quite possibly detour into the horrors of world war, much less genocide.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:18
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I can definitely agree with the weight thing. Part of my job involves hauling around sections of steel pipe from spear to short pike length (8'-15' or so). Anyone with an average physique could hoof it pretty fast if they needed to while carrying one.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:Are any scholars making this argument? Because the "middle brow Anglophone liberal discourse" frequently cribs off of poo poo that academics stopped taking seriously decades ago. THe same could be said for the German Sonderweg - you will not find it difficult to find any number of history enthusiasts, secondary school teachers, public figures, and authors of mass market histories who will say with all the authority they can muster that Germany was doomed as of Martin Luther. That doesn't make them in any way correct, however. Modern academic scholarship doesn't support it, no. It focuses more on institutional analysis, and the way the Japanese state has developed But I do think the contrast between the two cases among the middlebrows is striking. Germany gets praised as Leader of the Free World and the best-run country on earth at the same time that the same set of commenters and journalists are arguing that 2017 Japan is basically a fascist state using arguments nearly verbatim-identical to Sonderweg stuff There is a hint of Sonderweg stuff in modern critiques of Germany's domination of the EU, but I don't really agree that it has much weight in the modern English-language popular consciousness I think it's driven more by a a desire to explain and support contemporary narratives of a country's success or failure, specifically Germany's economic success in the EU post-Cold War and Japan's problems in the same period icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 21:21
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HEY GAIL posted:Yeah, even now you have people who resist the idea that Fascism wasn't traditionalist, it was modern, even revolutionary. That's why even though i'm a liberal I can't call myself a "progressive," I reject the premise that something's good just because it happens later than something else. Lots of times, the passage of time brings something worse. I agree with you, but I would add the caveat that fascism very frequently and very self consciously wrapped itself in traditionalism. It appealed a lot to people who were getting left behind by the changes in society and, while it didn't necessarily offer a return to the19th century, the better future that it promised was often pictured as one that would be built on the aspects of that traditional society that had made it strong and, most importantly, would have the same "winners" and support for traditional constituencies as before. This is, of course, complicated because the version of Fascism sold to Italian veterans is substantially different than the version sold to Thuringian farmers. You have some places where those trappings of traditionalism are laid on much thicker than in others.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:23
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HEY GAIL posted:tbh i think it really has to do with the part where once a historian writes the famous books, they're old... I'm not sure historians are necessarily getting bent out of shape on weight as opposed to size. However, if they think about the modern construct and how awkward it would be day to day to wander around with a 20+ foot long pike without properly acknowledging that pike forces weren't running around a modern city or fighting in modern bunkers, it would be easy to assume they're cumbersome. But give me a field or even an old-growth forest without a ton of obnoxious bushes and saplings, and I can get a bunch of dudes with pikes to move around the field of battle pretty well.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:24
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mlmp08 posted:I'm not sure historians are necessarily getting bent out of shape on weight as opposed to size. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere (probably Hey Gail) that they would cut down their pikes to go into cities for looting and general menacing of civilians, basically making them short spears. That said, there's a big difference between recognizing something as cumbersome in an urban area and just assuming they were too unwieldy to use for their stated purpose in open fields. I mean, I wouldn't want to try to get an Abrams through my neighborhood but goddamn if it won't tear some poo poo up in a flat, open desert.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:I agree with you, but I would add the caveat that fascism very frequently and very self consciously wrapped itself in traditionalism. It appealed a lot to people who were getting left behind by the changes in society and, while it didn't necessarily offer a return to the19th century, the better future that it promised was often pictured as one that would be built on the aspects of that traditional society that had made it strong and, most importantly, would have the same "winners" and support for traditional constituencies as before. look at the way the alt-right has been coopting synth music. It's "futuristic' because a computer made it but it also reminds people of the 80s, which might have been Richard Spencer's childhood but it's a distant golden age that's farther back than anything his cultists can remember https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/d7jw7v/fashwave-neo-nazi-music https://thump.vice.com/en_uk/article/mgwk7b/fashwave-trumpwave-far-right-appropriating-electronic-music
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Jul 31, 2017 21:30
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What Cyrano said. It's dead in academic life but it has a profound cultural cache with casual observers, from journalists and non Academic historians, to ordinary people. As for the difference with Japan, it's probably attributable to a combination of racism, fears of economic world domination in the 80s in the United States, poor Japanese relations in the present with other expanding Asian economies, relative lack of Western expertise and knowledge about Japan, and Japan's own revisionism about the subject and lack of an imposed denazification esque project of any size. Then again, there isn't really as much of a Sonderweg thesis about Japan, as much as there is a different post war narrative. I will note that commentators like Buruma who engage in comparative history of both countries war memory do, however, often emphasise that Japan imported a lot of German ideas in the later stages of its modernisation program and have speculated this may have helped Japan move towards a similar path to Germany, but there are numerous chicken and egg problems with that hypothesis.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:31
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icantfindaname posted:Modern academic scholarship doesn't support it, no. It focuses more on institutional analysis, and the way the Japanese state has developed What publications are you talking about, exactly? If this is mass market journalism then the people writing them probably aren't experts in those fields and they're writing for an audience that they can only assume has a high school education. Wander over to ask some scientists what they think of mass media coverage of their poo poo sometime.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:You see this earlier, too. I recall the assaults on Redoubts 9 and 10 at Yorktown were done with unloaded muskets for this very reason - or maybe loaded but with strict orders not to reload? Either way, the gist was that the officers understood that reloading took time and they needed to close distance so it was hand to hand all the way. I think their muskets were unloaded and Hamilton actually gave them the orders to unload (Hamilton would thus be accurate with their lyrics here), as it guaranteed that nobody would impulsively fire as they were sneaking up on their target.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:32
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I think fascism is extremely reliant on an insane vision of the past (though really every ideology has a theory of history that feeds it) even as it is being very radical. But I think fascism is in the end not strongly and prescriptive ideological and there's almost nothing it won't poo poo away or uproot for the sake of sustaining its movement, and it's methodology - the most important thing about it - is intensely radical and revolutionary.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:36
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It's also worth noting that if I say 'Germany is pursuing a number of it's traditional foreign policy objectives' that is not the same as me saying 'Germans are uniquely fitted by their history towards authoritarianism and conquest' even if one argument can sometimes drift to the other.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:39
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Disinterested posted:I think fascism is in the end not strongly and prescriptive ideological and there's almost nothing it won't poo poo away or uproot for the sake of sustaining its movement
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Jul 31, 2017 21:39
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HEY GAIL posted:xenophobia? the death thing:? the weird art thing? whatever the hell was going on in male fantasies? gonna have to disagree with you here. besides, "it's a desideratum to poo poo on everything else except your movement, which is permanent racist revolution" is itself a belief. These are beliefs but they're not very doctrinal. You don't find that the Nazi leadership has a fairly tight and technical theoretical underpinning with a lot of shared buy in unlike, say the Soviets. Look elsewhere to Italy and that argument can be made even more forcefully.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:What publications are you talking about, exactly? If this is mass market journalism then the people writing them probably aren't experts in those fields and they're writing for an audience that they can only assume has a high school education. Wander over to ask some scientists what they think of mass media coverage of their poo poo sometime. Yes, it's pretty much news magazines and op-eds. The NYT, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New Republic, etc Still worth pointing out I think, it's not like those publications are irrelevant. I think it's fair to say this sort of coverage is more influential than dumb sensationalist stories about scientific advances
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Jul 31, 2017 21:41
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icantfindaname posted:Yes, it's pretty much news magazines and op-eds. The NYT, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New Republic, etc They're not irrelevent and they certainly shape public opinion, but they're also not where you want to be looking to find learned analysis on technical details of pretty much anything. This is one of the things I like about German newspapers for what it's worth - if a big controversy crops up in the public that involves history somehow you tend to see a lot of op eds (and even just letters to the editor) written by prominent intellectuals. poo poo, the Historikerstreit kicked off with Nolte and Habermas dueling across the pages of the FAZ and Die Zeit.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:45
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TaurusTorus posted:Well you see, historical texts speak of "push of pike" and that means its just a shoving match of haft against haft. I've now seen a fair bit of ECW reenactment and I think it's fair to say "this is what English reenactors actually believe". They make it hard to see how any pikemen might have even been capable of dying at the push.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:48
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Disinterested posted:These are beliefs but they're not very doctrinal. You don't find that the Nazi leadership has a fairly tight and technical theoretical underpinning with a lot of shared buy in unlike, say the Soviets. Look elsewhere to Italy and that argument can be made even more forcefully.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:50
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Saying pikemen were engaged in a shoving match is essentially a claim that pikemen were engaged on warfare highly ritualized to be bloodless.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:51
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Disinterested posted:Saying pikemen were engaged in a shoving match is essentially a claim that pikemen were engaged on warfare highly ritualized to be bloodless. 
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Jul 31, 2017 21:54
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HEY GAIL posted:It's not tightly theoretical, but I think we can speak of a loose body of Fascist thought, and attempts to indoctrinate. They might not be as doctrinare as the soviets but there are definitely recurring patterns of thought that show up in multiple fascist movements. The so called 'fascist minimum'. It's definitely a way to do fascist history, I just think I'm in the end more compelled to view fascism through the lense of its method and social circumstances because it is just that much more incoherent and lacking in intellectual tradition. Idk, what does Cyrano think.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:55
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HEY GAIL posted:is that not, in the end, the essence of reenacting Actually I think you'd definitely start pike murdering if you thought you'd get away with it. Some people are there to play dress up, you're there to imaginatively re enact murders you wish you were committing in another century.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:55
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Disinterested posted:Idk, what does Cyrano think. (seriously though, it's precisely the ideas that interest me, because it's the ideas that we see show up again and again, in disparate times and places. how many of them are necessary for the movement you're looking at to be called fascism? for instance, as far as i can tell the american alt-right has no death cult. which is fascinating! i had thought that wanking yourself raw over a beautiful death was one of the central planks of the thing, but these guys don't seem to believe that!) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 21:56
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Disinterested posted:Actually I think you'd definitely start pike murdering if you thought you'd get away with it. 
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Jul 31, 2017 22:02
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HEY GAIL posted:something about old guns, probs But if I just say, truncatedly, that fascists are who the liberal establishment makes a pact with to sure up the state against an indissoluble social problem, I can try to slice it that way. Communism? Dysfunctional democracy? Just dial a thug and before you know it he'll have clubbed the communists and the Democrats to death! Then again I guess I could be all Hegelian and treat fascism like a universality (not a universal ideology, but an ideology capable of reinventing itself in every era).
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Jul 31, 2017 22:05
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HEY GAIL posted:something about old guns, probs I think a number of the alt-right are the "techno cult" types who believe that we need to develop AIs and eventually upload our minds into the cloud for immortality. Basically atheists who accidentally reinvent religion.
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Jul 31, 2017 22:06
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