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Andy Cancer posted:This makes sense. Thanks. Pretty much anything by Leni Riefenstahl is worth seeing. She's up there with D.W. Griffiths, Fritz Lang, and Orson Welles in terms of important filmmakers. She revolutionized using unusual camera angles, and basically invented smash cuts, extreme close-ups, tracking shots... The Blue Light is a genuinely good film, and Der Sieg des Glaubens and Triumph of the Will are the reason we still today think of the Nazis as a terrifying and unstoppable lockstep group of well-trained and perfect super-soldiers, rather than a mostly disorganized and over-sized street gang run by a bunch of barely competent thugs who were constantly at one another's throats. Question of my own that may be a little off topic for this thread: I've been reading and really enjoying Richard J. Evans' trilogy about the Third Reich, and it led me to take a detour and read Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad which I enjoyed immensely. Are there any works in English on the entire "Great Patriotic Conflict," told from the Soviet standpoint rather than the American? Or just any good books about the USSR of that period? Something kinda like John Toland's The Rising Sun would be awesome, if it exists... Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Oct 16, 2013 |
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Oct 16, 2013 04:44
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:For the love of god, I was using over simplistic terms to try and explain something I didn't understand.. In a thread called "ask me about Nazi Germany" One of the best books I read was Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, which, though is it primarily a discussion of the siege of the city and its consequences, did a really really good job explaining the differences in military psychology between the German and Soviet forces, and the vastly different goals they had in mind. Basically, the loose structure and high casualty nature of the Russian army meant that you were never attached to a single unit for very long, and were very likely to be executed by your own forces if there was a hint of treason. However, since you were fighting for your family and your country against genocidal maniacs who would rape and murder your family, you got back on the line and picked up the group's rifle when the guy who dropped it fell, and kept shooting until you died. There would be desertion, sure, and there would be mutiny, but if you did either, you'd never see your family again, and it's very likely they'd all be executed. Get back on the line like a good Stakhanovite and do your duty, citizen! You might not like Comrade Stalin, but you don't want your family to die, do you? This notorious Russian duty bound fatalism stands in stark contrast to the German exceptionalism that Hitler was preaching. Germany was boasting about how wonderful their unbeatable military machine was; Russia was training dogs with bombs strapped to their backs to run underneath tanks to blow them up. Another important bit to keep in mind is that Russia used a different gauge of railroad track than Germany (Russia's tracks were 5 foot across, Germany's were 4' 8 1/2"). This seems like it should be such a minor thing, but it was utterly crippling when it came to moving supplies quickly. You either had to completely redo the lines, or had to somehow adjust the wheels on the train. Which was exactly Russia's plan when they were building the railroads in the first place... The Germans were wasting precious fuel and in some cases even using horse drawn carriages to transport materials to the front lines. edit: Another good book on this aspect of Soviet psychology is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which is literally just that, one day in the life of a guy in a Russian prison camp. He'd been a POW in WW2, and was imprisoned as a spy after the war was over, though there is little to no evidence he gave the Germans anything while imprisoned by them. The work he is forced to do is awful, but the men in the work gang have one another; disloyalty to the group is unthinkable. It is the only way they can survive the brutal treatment from the guards and the commandants above. The book is soul crushingly depressing and amazingly good, and if you can imagine what this guy's life must have been like during the war... There's no way he would have ever considered joining the German forces. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 16:48
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Ensign Expendable posted:This is hard, as he is a fantastically lovely writer. Yes, yes he is. If he could just stay on subject for more than a paragraph he'd be bearable, but he just meanders all over the drat place. It's like listening to an old uncle ramble about politics... His speeches are much more readable, as vile as his ethos can be. That said, I highly recommend the film Downfall, if anyone here hasn't seen it, which was partially based on the memoirs of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge. Hitler was just a guy. A human being, flesh and blood. Not a god, not a monster, just an ambitious guy in the right place at the right time saying the right things to the right people. Consider this: Jean-Louis Dessalles, in his book Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language, writes: quote:"The second reason for not extrapolating a cultural origin for language from the genealogy of languages lies in the mechanism of linguistic propagation. If a language dies out through lack of speakers, the genealogical branch (a fictitious one, of course) containing all the languages it could have given rise to ‘disappears’ with it. The place of this branch is taken by other branches. If one starts from a pool of 100 languages, the genealogical trees which ramify from them are in fact in competition with each other. Even with a constant stock of 100 languages, it is extremely unlikely that all of the original hundred will continue for all time to have descendants. Given a long enough time, the random outcomes of successful filiations will mean that all languages eventually have the same ancestor. If we invert the reasoning, the fact that it might be possible to rediscover a mother language, in the sense of an ancestor of all the languages spoken nowadays, would not prove that such a language was the only one spoken in its day. In other words, the hypothesis of the mother language is perfectly compatible with the fact that there may always have been a considerable number of different languages spoken simultaneously on the Earth. If this is so, the argument for a mother language loses all validity and cannot lead to any conclusion about the cultural invention of language." So it is with Hitler. He was not destined, nor was he the product of utterly unique circumstances, because as others have mentioned, similar demagogs appeared in France and America and Italy and Spain and the UK and most of the other powerful countries around the same time. We are only talking about Hitler because he was successful on an unimaginably grand scale. That we know who the Nazis are, and the Neo-Nazis who exist today, are the result of him. We know the names of many others who were not as successful, and we do not know the names of those who failed miserably and whose movements died in the cradle. Of the millions of things that could have gone wrong for him, they did not long enough for him to start a war and kill or enslave millions and millions. Some of this was due to his skill as a leader, a speaker, and a politician, some of it was due having the right people working for him, and some of it was just plain old luck or coincidence. He didn't have to be a demon to do that. He loved Eva Braun and his dogs very much. He was very polite to women and children, and was a vegetarian. He enjoyed reading military histories, watching Disney and Charlie Chaplin films, and sketching out little drawings of the Seven Dwarves. But none of these humanizing traits excuse his actions and their consequences.
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May 9, 2014 20:39
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Yeah like a full third or something. Italy's war is one long series of comedic errors. Is there a good book anyone can recommend on this? Even a good biography on Mussolini would be fine, as his super villainish escapades sometimes seem too bizarre to have actually happened. But then someone shows you a picture of his head quarters, and yep, that is, in fact, a gigantic statue of his head on the front there... 
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May 13, 2014 00:53
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Baron Porkface posted:Elaborate please. I know bits and pieces, which is why I was asking for something a little more authoritative, so please correct any of the mistakes in the following. Mussolini loved Nietzsche. Loved him to death. Got a complete set of his works as a 60th birthday present from Hitler. And like any good Nietzchian, he believed he was the man who should be in control, and most everyone else was just a sap. So, in his attempt to start up a new Roman Empire with himself as Caesar (which causes all sorts of continuity problems with his buddy Hitler's 3rd Reich), after taking power and cementing his role as dictator for life, Il Duce ("The Leader") Mussolini decides that the place to kick off his grand imperial conquest is the mighty land locked East African nation of Ethopia, well known for its abundant natural resources and ease of holding. He used a lot of mustard gas and phosgene to do so, for which he was rightly condemned, and which he regarded as a sign of hypocrisy by the other European nations, who had themselves used it during their own conquests of Africa and during WW1. Hitler was the only one who supported Mussolini in this, and thus an alliance was made between the two countries. Mussolini personally regarded Hitler as a puffed up yutz, but a useful one, kinda like that kid whose parents always bought him the latest video games and always had a ton of ice cream in the fridge so you'd always find excuses to hang out with him even if you didn't actually like him very much because he was always going on and on about how much he hated the Jews when you didn't really care and actually found them more useful than the Christians some of the time. Unfortunately for Hitler, Mussolini was more like that Kramer-esque neighbor who's always dropping in to borrow your stuff and getting you embroiled in stupid schemes. Basically, because Mussolini was jealous that Hitler had successfully invaded and conquered Poland, Mussolini decided to do that same thing in Egypt. Unfortunately, the Italian army sucked. Sucked big time. Sucked so hard that they barely knew how to use the WWI surplus gear they'd been handed, and told to follow a sucky plan that their Great Leader had come up with all by himself. We're talking Cobra level incompetent here. So Hitler rolls in and bails out his good buddy, because that's what the Pact of Steel does. But this is even more embarrassing for Mussolini! The last thing the Glorious New Roman Empire needs is that lousy Hun Erwin Rommel saving their asses... So Mussolini decides he's going to conquer Greece, because dammit, Mussolini knows what the borders of the Roman Empire used to look like, and he's going to have his empire, crap rifles, shoddy tanks, and rickety biplanes be damned. It went about as expected, and Hitler rolled in again to conquer the Balkans completely off schedule. At this point in 1943, the cult of personality is turning against him, and Mussolini's broadcasts are said to be actively demoralizing the troops. The Italian Fascist council votes to have him imprisoned and reinstate the King. And here comes Hitler again to bail out his buddy, sending valuable troops to smash his best friend out of prison and reinstate him as the head of Northern Italy, which was still under German control. The war continues to go poorly, and by 1945 Mussolini is out of favors. Hitler is a little too busy crouching in a bunker and waiting for the Russians to destroy Berlin and can't help him anymore. While trying to board a plane to go hide with Franco in Spain, Mussolini is captured by the Italians and gunned down alongside his mistress. The bodies were then dumped on the side of the road, and strung up upsidedown at a gas station by the local villagers.
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May 13, 2014 05:48
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Mr. Sunshine posted:They weren't going to run a 20th century society - or rather, the nazi definition of "20th century society" was so far removed from what we have as to be virtually alien. The native slavs were to live in pre-industrial villages, without schools, hospitals or electricity. What machines they needed for agricultural work would be supplied by the Germans. Each village or region would be encouraged to develop its own religion, language and culture, to keep them fractured and isolated from each other. The German overlords would live in fortified, supermodern cities connected by highways and railroads. Each year, a select few peasants would be allowed to visit these cities, so that they could marvel at all the wonders, and bring back tales to their fellows about the superiority of the German race. The miracle of eugenics! 
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Sep 11, 2014 16:31
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moths posted:Something I've always wondered about is why weird occult paranormal stuff is so persistently attached to Nazis in pop culture. It looks cool, it's interesting in a pop culture and televisual way that grim and gritty things like concentration camps and troop movements just aren't, and it further dehumanizes the Nazis so that we can tell ourselves that Good & Devout Christians could never ever be responsible for such atrocities.
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May 5, 2015 17:43
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Susan Zuccotti wrote a book, Italians and the Holocaust, that I haven't read, but that comes up regularly in discussions of the subject.
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May 6, 2015 19:52
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Because the almighty Kim does not wish it, and the glorious childlike empire will continue to be protected by her servants onto eternity. Like a loving mother, she doles out what is fair to her citizens, and instructs them not to believe the propaganda issued by those horrible baby executing foreigners who wish to fool you into thinking that a higher standard of living exists outside of the motherland's borders. (But seriously, because China doesn't want to deal with immigrants, South Korea can only handle so many per year with the generous benefit package they issue any migrating northerners, and a lot of people in NK are actually quite invested in their country beyond our "LOL Kim the Eternal Emperor" image, and don't want to see their standard of living go up in smoke, in a combination of "What would I do?" and "What was it all for, then?" depending on where they are on the socioeconomic ladder. Plus Korea is a horrible mountainous country ill suited to anything, which makes for terrible fighting. David Halberstam's The Coldest War will give you a really good idea of how much the Korean War sucked the first time. It'd be yet another quagmire like Iraq and Afghanistan, only this time butted right up against China.)
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May 15, 2015 05:50
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feedmegin posted:Also, if there is anything North Korea could actually manage to nuke, it's an invading army. Also, we just did Iraq and Afghanistan and those were both fuckfests. That would be in keeping with their cold war era tactics. If I remember correctly, this was one of the planned strategies of the USSR, which planned on nuking an area to "soften it up" shortly before invading with ground troops.
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May 16, 2015 05:03
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