Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
vyelkin
Jan 2, 2011

Dreylad posted:

Canadians and Australians were both brought over to support the BEF.

But seriously I don't recall ever hearing about German colonial troops in Europe, it was mainly the British and French

Allied naval dominance probably means that even if the Germans wanted to bring colonial troops back to Europe, they couldn't. They used colonial troops in their colonies, but I think that's about it.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

exmachina
Mar 12, 2006

Look Closer

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Which is still less stupid than how the Kings of Hanover became Kings of England in the first place. Monarchy is loving stupid

By act of parliament? Also because no Catholics plz

exmachina
Mar 12, 2006

Look Closer
The best king was Bernadotte, a French Republican who became king of Sweden. He had to hide a tattoo on his chest that said "death to all kings"

Endman
May 18, 2010

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die


vyelkin posted:

Allied naval dominance probably means that even if the Germans wanted to bring colonial troops back to Europe, they couldn't. They used colonial troops in their colonies, but I think that's about it.

Germany, cursed to always and forever be a second rate power because they can't boat good

Dreylad
Jun 19, 2001

Endman posted:

Germany, cursed to always and forever be a second rate power because they can't boat good

otoh their navy helped trigger a socialist revolution after ww1 so it's impossible to say if it's good or bad

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




exmachina posted:

The best king was Bernadotte, a French Republican who became king of Sweden. He had to hide a tattoo on his chest that said "death to all kings"
A cool tattoo doesn't make him good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Square

At least king Haakon VII of Norway used his power to tell the nazis to go to hell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haakon_VII_of_Norway#Resistance_during_World_War_II

Polgas
Sep 2, 2018


With one hand he saves gebs. With the other he commits goblin genocide. A true neutral.

Can someone explain to me what happened during the spanish civil war? And some book recommendations about it? It's hard to find anything that doesn't immediately descend into blaming the communist or anarchist factions for losing the war without any context.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

exmachina posted:

The best king was Bernadotte, a French Republican who became king of Sweden. He had to hide a tattoo on his chest that said "death to all kings"
That's the opposite of a good king. Class traitor and poser in one.

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




When Norway voted to abolish nobility Bernadotte threatened to veto it. He wanted to suspend the norwegian constitution, a move so despotic that even the russian tsar told him not to do it. The best thing you could say about Bernadotte as king was that he, unlike other swedish kings, avoided a war with Russia.

Falukorv
Jun 23, 2013

A funny little mouse!
his tattoo is most likely fake though, first mentioned in a Parisian play as a plot point but no evidence of it anywhere else (although the tattoo from the play got repeated in written histories after the fact).

But we do have published letters from him published in English and french papers where he states: “As a republican by principle and conviction, I will unto my death fight all royalists”. That is 100% real.

Falukorv has issued a correction as of 15:09 on Apr 16, 2022

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.
Bernadotte:
I will not give up one single inch of--

[He pulls a card from his pocket, looks at it, it says YOU ARE KING OF SWEDEN on it, he puts it back]

Bernadotte:
SWEDISH territory!!!

i say swears online
Mar 4, 2005

someone like that appointing a successor makes him worse than louis xiv

genericnick
Dec 26, 2012

I'm going to finish listening to the dumb Revolutions podcast, but god, liberalism does things to your brain. I have no idea about the Kronstadt rebellion against the USSR, but how do you go from the facts as reported:
  • It started because someone claimed the reds were attacking when that wasn't true
  • The leadership hosed off to Finland after telling their dudes to sabotage all equipment
  • There was talk about the rebellion in foreign papers before it happened

That there definitely wasn't any foreign meddling because the UK was reopening trade relations? Definitely not something that happens in the real world, trading with a country you try to regime change.

MeatwadIsGod
Sep 30, 2004

Foretold by Gyromancy
What idolizing Lafayette does to a mf

Endman
May 18, 2010

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die


Is the Revolutions podcast terrible lib poo poo or something?

Riot Bimbo
Dec 28, 2006


it's pretty good but mike duncan is succumbing to brain worms big time

Lord of Pie
Mar 2, 2007


exmachina posted:

The best king was Bernadotte, a French Republican who became king of Sweden. He had to hide a tattoo on his chest that said "death to all kings"

He did eventually die so it's not like he abandoned all his principles entirely

John Charity Spring
Nov 4, 2009

SCREEEEE

Endman posted:

Is the Revolutions podcast terrible lib poo poo or something?

short answer is yes

Crusader
Apr 11, 2002

Lord of Pie posted:

He did eventually die so it's not like he abandoned all his principles entirely

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Endman posted:

Is the Revolutions podcast terrible lib poo poo or something?

Mike Duncan got away with it for years because he always covered revolutions in feudal societies

he's finally stepped up to the big boys club and his analysis is found wanting

John Charity Spring posted:

short answer is yes

genericnick
Dec 26, 2012

Endman posted:

Is the Revolutions podcast terrible lib poo poo or something?

I feel he gives a pretty good overview of what happens and who did what, but then has pretty terrible opinions about it.

Dreddout
Oct 1, 2015

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

genericnick posted:

I'm going to finish listening to the dumb Revolutions podcast, but god, liberalism does things to your brain. I have no idea about the Kronstadt rebellion against the USSR, but how do you go from the facts as reported:
  • It started because someone claimed the reds were attacking when that wasn't true
  • The leadership hosed off to Finland after telling their dudes to sabotage all equipment
  • There was talk about the rebellion in foreign papers before it happened

That there definitely wasn't any foreign meddling because the UK was reopening trade relations? Definitely not something that happens in the real world, trading with a country you try to regime change.

Literally hueing and crying over Kronstadt

Dreddout
Oct 1, 2015

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Revolutions seasons 4-9 are pretty good! Throughout them Mike gives a decent overview, and remains sympathetic to the revolutionaries.

Mike's cold war brain kicks in during the Russian revolution. The extent to which he's willing to interpret the reds actions in bad faith is striking.

Recently he's gone full animal farm and has stated the communists never intended to decentralize power. He doesn't mention the communist's line that doing so was political (and literal) suicide.

Not So Fast
Dec 27, 2007


Dreddout posted:

Revolutions seasons 4-9 are pretty good! Throughout them Mike gives a decent overview, and remains sympathetic to the revolutionaries.

Mike's cold war brain kicks in during the Russian revolution. The extent to which he's willing to interpret the reds actions in bad faith is striking.

Recently he's gone full animal farm and has stated the communists never intended to decentralize power. He doesn't mention the communist's line that doing so was political (and literal) suicide.

How true is stuff like factories still being run under war conditions and complaints along those lines that Duncan cited as contributing to the rebellion? Do those get solved by the NEP?

Endman
May 18, 2010

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die


Dreddout posted:

Revolutions seasons 4-9 are pretty good! Throughout them Mike gives a decent overview, and remains sympathetic to the revolutionaries.

Mike's cold war brain kicks in during the Russian revolution. The extent to which he's willing to interpret the reds actions in bad faith is striking.

Recently he's gone full animal farm and has stated the communists never intended to decentralize power. He doesn't mention the communist's line that doing so was political (and literal) suicide.

This is disappointing, but not really unexpected. Interpreting the Russian revolution in bad faith is one of the core pillars of "white dude who's into history" culture.

e: also lmao I didn't realise he just wrote a book on how Lafayette was the best dude ever

lobotomy molo
May 7, 2007

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

genericnick posted:

I feel he gives a pretty good overview of what happens and who did what, but then has pretty terrible opinions about it.

Duncan: kornilov was just misunderstood and trying to restore democracy, his aides were only joking about having kerensky killed. also western political leaders actually supported the Bolsheviks more than the whites, who they armed to kill the reds. i am very smart

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.
E: not exactly what I meant to post

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.
51,000 people were killed or sustained wounds in a mass shooting outside of the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Uniformed federal officials attempted to apprehend members of a paramilitary organization that had been robbing local farms and businesses and a large-scale shootout ensued.

Dreddout
Oct 1, 2015

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Not So Fast posted:

How true is stuff like factories still being run under war conditions and complaints along those lines that Duncan cited as contributing to the rebellion? Do those get solved by the NEP?

Couldn't tell you.

What I do know is that widespread suffering in the post-civilwar USSR was due to said civil war and not the mean old Bolsheviks deciding to be, and I quote Mike, "diabolical"

MeatwadIsGod
Sep 30, 2004

Foretold by Gyromancy

Fly Molo posted:

Duncan: kornilov was just misunderstood and trying to restore democracy, his aides were only joking about having kerensky killed. also western political leaders actually supported the Bolsheviks more than the whites, who they armed to kill the reds. i am very smart

I've seen someone else mention this take from Duncan earlier in the thread and it's so baffling that I actually want to hear him say this. Anybody know which episode this was from?

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

MeatwadIsGod posted:

I've seen someone else mention this take from Duncan earlier in the thread and it's so baffling that I actually want to hear him say this. Anybody know which episode this was from?

I dunno about the part about Kornilov, but the other thing:

quote:

around 32:00 of episode 10.84 - The End of the World

quote:

Now, I don't wanna underestimate Allied support for the Whites - they absolutely did pump supplies and guns to the White armies, but with the benefit of hindsight we know that the Allied interventions into Russia were never gonna be as wholehearted as any of the Russians expected.

In the winter of 1918 and 1919, the Allies had far bigger issues on their plate. The civil war in Russia was just not a high priority. Now it is the case that there were small groups out there, in France and in Britain and the United States, people like Winston Churchill for example, who really were pushing for an immediate all-out attack on Bolshevism, but they were in the minority.

At least as many British, French and American leaders liked and supported the idea of the Soviet socialist republics as they appeared in 1917 and 1918, certainly they much preferred the socialist reds to the reactionary whites, who no doubt intended to restore barbarous absolutism.

Mostly though, both the general populations and ruling classes of Britain, and France and the United States just did not have Russia very high on their list of interests. Everyone was sick of war, sick of fighting, sick of being trapped in destructive quagmires. The unrestrained jubilation that marked the end of World War 1 meant that it was going to be very tough to say "oh yeah, glad the war with Germany is over, now we're gonna plunge into the middle of the Russian civil war," so as we go forward we are never going to see the Allies make the kind of major commitments both sides of the Russian civil war expected them to make.

The expeditionary forces they landed in 1918 around the periphery tended to just stay put and not grow. There were some naval blockades, definitely major shipments of munitions, but the Allies were not, in fact, hell-bent on destroying Bolshevism. And they were absolutely ready to cut the cord if it looked like destroying Bolshevism was going to require them to get sucked even deeper into the Russian civil war.

two-time fee
Jan 13, 2022

vyelkin posted:

This is an important thing to remember any time you're talking about borders and borderlands in Eastern Europe. Up until 1945, there were basically no homogeneous nation-states in the region. Long periods of rule within the borders of a few large, contiguous empires with porous borders, much of which happened before the advent of modern nationalism, had led to extremely high levels of inter-ethnic mixing and migration throughout the entire region, and especially in cities. There was a large Jewish population throughout what's now Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania, and even if you only focus on the ethnic groups that today have nation-states to call their own, the spread of these groups across modern boundaries was immense.

Nineteenth-century nationalism led to the idea of national homes for sufficiently large ethnicities, and Wilsonian approaches to peace after WWI led to the idea of creating nation-states for them in Eastern Europe, but there's no way to draw a clean, ambiguity-free border across a place where ethnic groups have been migrating and intermingling for decades, if not centuries. No matter where you drew Poland's borders, they were going to include not just Poles but Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Lithuanians, and so on. And vice versa: no matter where you drew the borders of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, the USSR, they were all going to include Poles.

Here's a 1912 map showing the proportion of Polish population around this region, showing both the heavy concentration in what everyone agreed was Poland but also the substantial minority populations outside those borders and, in the process, also revealing the substantial minority of non-Poles within majority Polish areas:



One good example of how these kinds of dynamics could play out is given by how the USSR treated Central Asia in the 1920s. Based on Lenin's approach to the national question, which was that nations needed to go through a period of nationalist development before they could do real socialist development, the USSR tried very hard to draw ethnically-based borders for the national republics in Central Asia so that the Central Asian republics would more or less correspond to the major ethnic groups in the region:



Doing so took years of on-the-ground research by Soviet ethnographers to map which ethnic group lived in which village and painstakingly plot that on the map of the USSR so that when they drew the republic boundaries they would more or less correspond to the major ethnic groupings. The result can be seen on any map of Central Asia's borders. Straight lines only ever appear where there are big patches of desert with no people living in them, and borders aren't neat or tidy, they're squiggly and broken and irregular:



That's the level of painstaking work it took to try and establish borders based on ethnicity in the 1920s. And even then, this process primarily served the interests of what are referred to as the "titular nationalities," i.e., ethnic groups demographically large enough to get their own national republics. Smaller ethnic groups ended up contained within or across republic boundaries and were often discriminated against by the emerging elites within national republics. If this is something that interests you, there are two really eye-opening books on the subject: Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations is about the ethnographers who helped the Soviets come up with this system in the first place, and Krista Goff's Nested Nationalism talks about the tension between titular nationalities, sub-national ethnic groups, and the national republics.

So, even the most painstaking efforts to establish ethnically-defined borders around this era both required massive investment of time and resources, and still left behind problems afterwards because it's basically impossible to actually draw a delimited boundary around an ethnicity and say "this is now a nation-state". There's a dead giveaway in the name of the Curzon Line that it wasn't in any way close to this kind of painstaking process, in that it's named after George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, because he's the person who, as British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1919, proposed it as Poland's boundary to the assembled powers at Versailles. You can think of it more like the Sykes-Picot lines than a reflection of reality on the ground. The Curzon Line was intended to fix Poland based on one of Wilson's Fourteen Points:

But how the hell do you establish which territories are "inhabited by indisputably Polish populations" in a region that has had enormous levels of migration and inter-mixing over the past centuries, and when any definition is by necessity going to either include significant non-Polish minorities or exclude significant Polish populations or both? You can't, and that's why Curzon basically drew a line on a map and said "this is where Poland should begin" without knowing anything about the region or talking to any of the people involved.

As Teriyaki Hairpiece said, this problem was essentially "solved" through massive ethnic cleansing starting in 1939 and ending in the late 40s, when through a combination of wartime genocide and demographic annihilation and wartime and postwar forced migration and expulsion, the ethnically-intermingled former imperial borderlands were turned into more or less homogeneous nation-states by killing, deporting, or forcing into exile all the minority populations, at enormous cost to human life and wellbeing.

Basing any moral judgement about what modern countries do or don't deserve on any of this is extremely fraught and dangerous, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Quoted for future reference, thank you

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

https://mobile.twitter.com/Anne_MarieBrady/status/1516462361443540999

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.

quote:

The Yuin also had a whale fishery at Boydtown, just south of Eden, where the people adopted the European tools and boats into a tradition of hunting whales that had been operating for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years. Ritualised interaction with killer whales encouraged the mammals to herd larger whales into the harbour, where they would be driven into shallow water and harvested by the Yuin, who would then share the feast, not just with neighbouring clans, but with the killer whales themselves, who would receive the tongue.

The Yuin set up this interaction with the killer whales with a ceremony where a man would light two fires on the beach and pretend to limp between them as if he were old and frail. The Yuin believed that this encouraged the whales to take pity on the man and bring the bigger whales to the bay for his use. Europeans and Yuin combined to continue this operation for many years after first contact. It ended when a European man shot the lead killer whale. Unfortunately, the association between man and whale was broken in that instant.

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

granted we did try to commit a genocide against whales but sea shanties are fun ok

lobotomy molo
May 7, 2007

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

MeatwadIsGod posted:

I've seen someone else mention this take from Duncan earlier in the thread and it's so baffling that I actually want to hear him say this. Anybody know which episode this was from?

the other part (kornilov) was in episode 10.70. I don’t have a transcript handy, but a brief summary:
-kornilov was a patriot who loved russia, not some right-wing psycho. very favorable portrayal.
-the whole thing was just a big miscommunication with yakety sax playing in the background, not an attempted right-wing coup.
-sure an aide to kornilov said they’d seize power and off kerensky once he wasn’t useful any more, but that doesn’t seem likely and the aide was probably just talking poo poo
-kornilov didn’t really have his heart in it and his forces just kind of stopped. barely any mention of the Bolsheviks’ role in stopping his advance on St. Petersburg, they’re just a footnote

it’s just weird. like a switch flipped at episode ~50 and he went from relatively sympathetic portrayal of the bolsheviks to just ignoring all their victories and successes and ragging on them 24/7. another high point was when said they were basically just as antisemitic as any other side in the russian civil war, that was episode 10.87 iirc

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.

Some Guy TT posted:

granted we did try to commit a genocide against whales but sea shanties are fun ok

I do like sugar, and tea, and rum

i say swears online
Mar 4, 2005

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I do like sugar, and tea, and rum

if you think about it, gannon was trying to stop a monarchy from enacting the triangular trade

Ardennes
May 12, 2002

i say swears online posted:

if you think about it, gannon was trying to stop a monarchy from enacting the triangular trade

Gannon was enacting desert power against an oppressive imperium that only wanted to suck the land dry

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Casey Finnigan
Apr 30, 2009

Dumb ✔
So goddamn crazy ✔
so apparently both Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas were really into chopping wood. once they were rendered politically irrelevant.

how about King George? He liked chopping wood or what?

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply