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I really have a problem to give an account on the differences between social democrats and austromarxists, because that ideological wankery always put me off to the point that I'd evade reading about it. Both wanted to get in power by parlamentary means, but the real split where each breaks into a different party is post 1918. For Austro-Hungaria, you also have to consider that the socialist party had to bridge national differences, which it was unable to do so in the end. So it broke down into different factions along national lines. Yet, the aspiration of the party was always international, with a strong orientation towards the socialist party in Germany (in the sense, there are no nations, only workers that get shafted everywhere). The more radical left that formed the communist party post 1918 never managed to get larger support, as it was seen as a dead end, because every other potential political partner felt threatened by their goals, so there was also a socialist undercurrent that wanted to separate the more radical elements within the party before the war in order to gain potential partners. I'd say was the relative size of the different portions of nationalities in Austro-Hungaria and the lacking political inclusion that made the Monarchy such a mess. One might also consider that democracy and compromise were unproven and distasteful ideas in the eyes of many back then. Another factor might have been the division of labout within the country that put lots of industrial potential in czechoslovak territories, but kept them misrepresented. (You should visit Moravia, especially you Hegel.) The whole state went apart with great centrifugal force, since the establishment was completely unwilling to make any concessions. If crownprince Rudolf had lived (many people mused that the was driven to suicide by this conservative faction) and became Emperor things might have looked different. That's something that does not entirely depend on a single person, but he could have been a symbol or some kind of lens that the supporters of such a solution could have used. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jan 22, 2014 |
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Jan 22, 2014 10:57
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a travelling HEGEL posted:He may have been the best least bad logistician of his age. (It's partially because he was the largest landowner in Bohemia.) Shhhhh  the Ottomans would like you to acknowledge their legendary logistic skills.
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Jan 24, 2014 12:34
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It's something that I came across recently. First, hungarian nobles complain to the Kriegsrat in Vienna that scorched earth tactics don't work against the Ottomans. On another occasion, I read the dates how fast Suleyman the Magnificient moves against Belgrade. He sets out from Edirne with +100.000 men and over 200 pieces of artillery and reaches Belgrade within a few weeks.  He failed to take it, but nonetheless. Btw, there's a short chapter in Majoros, Ferenc (2000): Das Osmanische Reich where he mentiones that Wallenstein almost ended up having battle with a Beylerbey that was looking to exploit the disorder in the Empire. Spoiler: nothing happens, because both leaders worry about the strength of the enemy and the weakness of their own position. So both disengage during the night. Apparently Wallenstein was worried about the size of the enemy's cavalry, while the turk thought the Imperial Infantry superior to his own. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Jan 24, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 13:09
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I was under the impression that the Ottomans had a lot of dedicated looters in their army, or is this just the sickly 19th century Ottomans I'm thinking of? You're thinking about the Akinci. They served as light cavalry and reconaissance, but their main purpose was to strike fear into the enemy and force them to divert troops. They were payed in loot. By the 2nd half of the 16th century, they were mostly made up of crimean tartars. Their raids struck very deep into Empire territory. Over the Brenner pass, and also into Italy. The city of Vicenca was so scared about them reappearing that they almost bancrupted the city so that they could issue ships for the battle of Lepanto. They stole anything of value, took slaves and then burned and killed anything that couldn't be brought back. Back then they were called "Renner und Brenner" which means runners and burners. You can visit "Wehrkirchen" in Austria which are fortified churches (I live about 3min away from one of these), there's also caves everywhere near the border of Hungary that were used by the peasants in order to hide from these fuckers. They're not the reason why Ottoman logistics were so great, but Jannissary education produced excellent officers that were picked and schooled according to their talent. There's an example of an inventory list of a fortress at the danube in Serbia in the book that I mentioned. The quartermaster lists everything in the place with great detail, down to pillowcases, kitchen pots and forks. There's many of these inventory books left. The Ottomans were very systematical about building and maintaining supply depots along their regular routes of attack into Hungary. The timar system also kept local nobles in check and the peasants relatively happy. You practically don't have larger peasant revolts under Ottoman rule, the Janissaries killed off the banditry that plagued the balkans for centuries, while hardly interfering with the locals - because they're payed well and cared for if they're disabled or make it to the retirement age (if). Everything looks pretty good, up until the beginning of the 17th century, when economic crisis strikes Spain (choking on the silver of the new world) and with it the Ottomans. It's one or 2 decades before that, that the state apparatus slowly descends into incredible nepotism, good rules get abolished or ignored, anarchy and wild intrigue etc (and a few batshit insane sultans that liked to shoot canons at people sunday boating close to the palace). Things really turn to poo poo when the state is forced to debase it's currency and the Janissaries don't get their pay (they're a standing army btw). By then being a Janissary is hereditary, you're allowed to marry. All kind of shady folks manage to get into the corps, because :benefits:. By then they're hardly more than a self-service outlet that barely differs from simple bandits. Wait, they're worse at fighting. Sometimes the corps just sets fire to Constantinople, because they feel their pay is too low and needs a rise. Looting the grand viziers palace also seemed to be a favourite of the corps. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jan 24, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 21:19
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:Many representations of landsknechts were idealized physical types. Some weren't. I live here all my life and never been to the Albertina so far. Well. These are indeed ideal representations of the baroque Kraftmensch. These guys look like bears. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 11:14
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A good read / movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman_in_Berlin If you have Merridale's book "Ivan's War", there's also a chapter about the rapes. I'm sure the Red Army also had strict rules about consuming alcohol.
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Feb 18, 2014 14:54
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When I did my time in the army, a few of my comrades were issued an older variant of the Stg77 that had a selective ejection port. Actually the port was left and right, and you could switch it by fixing a small plate. The scope would still be awkward though.
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Feb 18, 2014 15:29
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10 or 15 years ago you could ask your grandparents around here what happened when the Red Army came. I really have trouble to put this in the right way, but the stuff that you have a hard time to believe or have sourcing problems is told first hand in basically every family that managed to talk about it. And we're talking about a country that was officially "liberated" from the Germans, not about Germany itself. So you can take a wild guess about Berlin.
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Feb 18, 2014 17:56
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Fangz posted:There were 4 million US troops in the European theatre and the accepted number of rapes there (accepted in the West, anyway) is apparently about 10k. Logistically, it is possible, for sure. But that doesn't mean the 2 million figure actually has any backing. And if people use the fact that it's allegedly 2 million to argue that there is a qualitative difference - 'rape on an industrial scale', draw conclusions about e.g. STAVKA being opposed to it or not, then the number - and where it comes from - starts to matter. Carefully read again what I wrote: JaucheCharly posted:...basically every family that managed to talk about it. The emphasis is on "managed". If you're really interested in a number or where it came from, then you can lend out the titles that were mentioned. There is a whole complex of books that probably are only available in German. At the library of my uni, there are numerous books about the occupation here.
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Feb 18, 2014 19:08
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ArchangeI posted:To my knowledge, there hasn't been a single documented case where an SS-guard who demanded a transfer to another assignment was denied or punished. They had nothing to fear. This. The same goes for people who were in the Einsatzgruppen. You may decline your assignment and the worst that could happen is that you lose face in front of your comrades or get branded as "you don't have the stomach for this line of work". There's really a red line running through the complex of extermination, and that is that no matter where you look, the men picked to lead or get their hands dirty were people of 2nd or 3rd choice. Shady and unsteady characters - "verkrachte Existenzen". Look at the kind of people higher up in the hierachy like Kaltenbrunner, Globocnik and Stangl, then take a guess who did the work on the ground. Nobody would have given these people another chance in civilian life or in the Wehrmacht. Every other way to start a career or further their position was blocked to them, so they sign up where things look good. East. Special assignment. You might make a career. There's really all kinds of opportunists you can imagine. Lots of Austrian Nsdap members. People that were in the party, but found that the good jobs were already taken when Austria got annexed. Naturally, the party didn't pull alot of highly talented or educated people, but ambitious they were. The war in the east set off some kind of "gold rush" for careers. Opportunists, fanatical Nazis and Adventurers, but however you twist and turn it, you don't get into these places unless you want to. Anyway, you don't become a member of the SS by chance. Don't fall into the trap of believing what propaganda might suggest, namely that the grip that it had on people, or the control that the party liked to display: the knowledge about the extermination was deemed unfitting for the public by the leadership and Hitler was ever worried about public opinion. Of course everybody knew and spoke about it. If you happen to find a book about the field post of the east in a library, lend it out. People write about stuff that will make your hair stand up like recounting a picknic (and ofc, you find all kinds of varied response to events). That stuff was regulated by censorship, but people still talked about it openly, and also when they were on leave. Anyway, opportunism. That war was like a force of nature, and people are no different than we are today. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 21:34
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You'd be surprised how much intelligence work is just people reading foreign newspapers and then writing bland reports about what's going on in country A. Something else: I'm quite sure you have superbly capable people reporting all kind of things, but what gets selected as valid info is probably more often than not heavily dependant on the worldview of the decision makers. What could possibly go wrong if you put people like Wolfowitz and Cheney in positions of power? It's a paradoxon that the needs of these people will be catered to, much in a sense of not only decision makers "hearing what they want to hear" to justify policy X or really any pretext of power politics, but also "telling the bosses what they want to hear" for reasons of career or what have you. One of the more radical examples for this is probably the pretext of the invasion of Iraq. Anyway, this reminds me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwXF6UdkeI4 Power Khan fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 11:01
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The years of the G.W Bush presidency are probably comparable to a binge, not on good schnaps, but poorly distilled moonshine. Getting loaded on being the only superpower left on the block. An Empire in the making, right?
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Mar 17, 2014 14:28
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:What happened to your name, Bloor? Oh, just using my steam name here for reasons of DayZ, and because Jauche is such a great word that is hardly used in regular conversations. The old name was taken from a Hunter S. Thompson novel and people would respond quite hostile to any of my posts when I had that picture of him in the tuxedo as my avatar. I was not aware that I'm such a horrible person, but hey.  Lesson learned: Avatars matter. So let's get back to war stuff. Why are you called WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL now? And why are you not making effort posts about 30 years war stuff? Nothing bad about ships, but it's not my thing. 1. Reading about Janissary stuff, I wondered how european states managed to curb the influence of a standing army on the political system? 2. What happened to all the mercenaries in the wake of the Peace of Westphalia?
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Mar 18, 2014 12:13
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SeanBeansShako posted:Yeah Jauche, I think you were just hanging around with some really uncool people. Arquinsiel, your avatar makes my eye twitch. Anyway, it was this thread or it's predecessor.  No really, it's harmless compared to the medieval history thread. So here's a mughal crab bow from the Grayson collection. These are the apex of bowyery and were in use well into the 18th to 19th century.  They are some kind of a mystery, as even the best guys today can't make them in the original configuration work effectively (which was reported by british archery enthusiasts in the 19th century). One can only wonder about the level of sophistication that these indian craftsmen possesed. They're the wootz steel of bowyery if you understand the analogy. Makes me wonder if we don't underappreciate the martial history of India. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 21:04
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Slavvy posted:This is really interesting. What sort of wood is that? Is it multiple laminated layers of different stuff, or what? It's a sinew-wood-horn composite. They used mulberry, mango or maple for such bows. The crosscut would basically look like this:  The main difference is, that the horn strip would be very narrow, not like in the picture. Strangely enough these bows contain a higher ammount of wood than other comparable composites (where the weight would be 1/3 glue and sinew, 1/3 wood, 1/3 horn). The whole bow will be wrapped in sinew and then be varnished. Wrapping the whole bow in sinew is unusual, as sinew and glue are relatively heavy, but the tradeoff is that the bow will store large ammounts of energy and be more stable. It's safer to use and can be strung for weeks without losing lots of power. From the point of construction this is an immense display of craftsmanship and precision. With the sinew wrap you cannot remove material in order to make the bow bend more evenly. You have to get it right from the beginning and you can only correct with heat. The strung bow would look like this, although with slightly more acute angles  And at full draw  If you compare the picture of my previous post, the lower one is a modern reproduction of a crab bow (also with natural materials)  You can see that it has a less reflexed grip and that the angles at the limb/ear transition are less acute. The modern reproduction is modified for stability and more simple construction. Less radical design. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Mar 19, 2014 |
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Mar 19, 2014 10:18
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Fangz posted:Modern re-enactors literally don't have the strength and training to make use of many historical war bows. We're talking people who trained so drat hard for so long their bones are deformed. Yes and no. These bows are somewhere up 100 to +120#. When you make clones with commercial intend for a modern audience, you have to scale them down. That's the hard part, as you really have to know how the parts are meant to work. Most people don't dare to string such an old bow and draw it. There's bows with completely stiff ears, but also with ears that are slightly working or ones where the ears will unravel when drawn. So how do these work? In this case I'm suspecting that the area where the splice of the ear enters the limb isn't stiff and is working slightly. To get this effect, you'd have to know exactly what drawweight the bow will turn out and then adjust the thickness and width. A modern bowyer has to experiment until he gets it right, that means building the same bow over and over until you get the right configuration. As this takes several months up to a year, you can see where this leads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-5v_Tx8NGw If you looks at this picture for example, the guy scaled the bow down carefully taking measurements from an original piece, but something is wrong. It's not even at full draw (although the position of the limbs indicate that), but stacking already so hard that he can't pull it any further (Stacking means that the bow gets unproportionally harder to pull, mostly indicating that you either reached it's maximum drawlenght or that something is wrong in your design). The angle between the string and the ear gives away that there is room for a longer draw (+90° is usually the point where things start to get unsafe). So, something isn't working as intended. Slavvy posted:I'm aware of that, I'm meaning that in an earlier post he said: It's entirely possible that the story is bogus and these bows were ritual weapons. I dug out "Indian Archery" in my uni's library and found no answer. They are from an era where there were already plenty of firearms around, but they still existed on the battlefield for a long time. They were made for mounted nobles or elite cavalry, peasants would have to use simple wooden or bamboo bows. The arrows would be short, around 26-28". Maybe they were used in a way that pistols were used in western heavy cavalry  Maybe they're just ritual weapons, but then why build them with such high drawweights? Even for hunting, half the drawweight is enough to kill any animal safe for elephants. Like Fangz said, the training to use such weapons accurately is excessive. I have never heard of a person who can shoot the original drawweights with a thumbring. Though there's plenty of guys around that shoot english warbows with mediterran draw. My favourite is the guy who looks like a bear and shoots a 180#. I forgot the name. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 09:10
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"Just" 15 pounds? How exactly are you built?! When I did my time, even carrying my 7# rifle, helmet and light pack wore on me when marching. These bows are pleasantly light. 500-700g. Faster rate of fire is surely a point. Modern fast shooters with 30# bows are bullshit, but a trained soldier can surely put down lots of arrows within a minute.
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Mar 20, 2014 09:34
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Ok, 7,9#. These are mostly plastic and a bunch of metal rods. When you strip them down, it's just https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_whd99H4uOo  I pulled a 70# bow and almost shat myself, but then, I'm a wee lad who shoots 42# Power Khan fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 09:53
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It feels like a laser gun when you hold it. Ah yes, expensive and weird hobbies. The last "real" gun that I held in my hands was this: 
Power Khan fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 10:16
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Phobophilia posted:Could you give details on how they pulled this off? You need to give the nazis more credit  (I'll try to roughly translate what the german wikipedia about Kriegsanleihen says):"Vielmehr wurden kurzfristig fällige Sparguthaben ohne Wissen und Einverständnis der Sparer mit Hilfe der Kreditinstitute beliehen, die zu Kreditsammelstellen des Staates wurden und die Gelder langfristig bei ihm anlegten. Dieser Kapitalkreislauf beruhte darauf, dass „die Einkommensempfänger die legal nicht verwendbaren Einkommensbeträge zur Bank tragen und die Kreditinstitute dieses Geld gegen die Hereinnahme von Schatzwechseln an den Finanzminister weiterreichen.“[4] Die „geräuschlose“ Umwandlung von Sparguthaben und Rentenversicherungsrücklagen in langfristige Schuldpapiere wurde ergänzt durch das „Eiserne Sparen“ und flankiert von Lohn- und Preiskontrollen (siehe auch geräuschlose Kriegsfinanzierung)." "With the aid of the credit institutes, short term savings were lent against without knowledge or consent of the depositors. These credit institutes were turned into (oh god, how do I translate Kreditsammelstellen?) credit accumulation institutions, which in turn invested the money in the long term. This circulation of capital was based upon the fact that the receivers of income carried the legaly not-usable sums of income to the banks, which in turn handed them to the minister of finance in exchange for treasury bills. This "silent" exchange of savings and pension insurance funds for long term bonds (Schuldpapiere?) was supplemented by "Eisernes Sparen" (I don't know the english analogy. Maybe "severe austerity"?) and flanked by wage- and price controlls (also see silent war funding)." Wow, that was hard. I have no clue about the correct financial vocables. Kinda explains why the capital stock was completely destroyed by the end of the war. One should also add that the nazis funneled large sums of money and materials from the occupied zones. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 08:46
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We've had this in the Rome thread, but the number of people who complain about the fact that somebody shat against the wall of their house is amusing. "“Secundus defecated here” three time on one wall."
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Mar 21, 2014 09:42
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:"On April 19th, I made bread." Good for you, bro. This is the precursor of the kind of person that posts everything they do on social media. "I just showered." or "Mhmm coffee"
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Mar 21, 2014 10:00
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Any word about Mao being extremely averse of bathing and washing? I've heard that in his late years he was so extremely smelly that his aides had to wash him while he was asleep. All this while he was crazy for really young girls, which he blessed with private "audiences".
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Mar 21, 2014 19:59
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Ah yes, his private Doctor wrote a book. http://www.amazon.com/The-Private-Life-Chairman-Mao/dp/0679764437
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Mar 21, 2014 20:56
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How exactly do you unload a musket once the powder got wet? Is it easy once you get the paper out?
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Mar 22, 2014 07:00
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I understood that the paper is in there to hold the bullet in place as it isn't a perfect fit as in modern rifles
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Mar 22, 2014 07:27
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I was asking about balls, but getting a minie ball out of a rifled barrel that fits tight sounds like a poo poo job.
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Mar 22, 2014 07:40
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A friend tried to chamber a spent blank 7.62 (you know, the blue ones) in his dad's K98. Trying to get that out without a ramrod was a nightmare.
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Mar 22, 2014 08:02
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Koramei posted:Krak des Chevaliers has been damaged in the civil war. I mean I guess that makes sense; just how effective is a thousand year old fortification today? How often does this happen? The whole idea smells of guys in beach sandals firing their aks over their heads
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Mar 24, 2014 07:21
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Grand Prize Winner posted:How do you reconcile that with your morals? Summing up this thread: Asperger's mixed with overboarding interest in warmachines/weapons/spread sheets/fortifications.
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Mar 26, 2014 10:25
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Slavvy posted:It isn't the practice he's talking about, it's the enthusiasm. War seems such a condition outside of the norm that we're used to in the western world. We've had numerous wars since WW2, but go and ask somebody which ones. We go to work every day, sit at our desks and take it for granted that it's like this everywhere. Water comes out of your faucet and you can drink it (at least here in Europe) or flush down your poo poo with the same water. You'll probably just grab some food if you're hungry or go for a walk in the park. People have no concept of war, unless they touch it. How many people in this thread fought in a warzone, were shot at, or were in a brawl where they feared for their life? Ok, some people long for extreme situations or emotions, but it is revolting and perverse. You often hear bomb this or shoot up that, but those words are light if you don't have to live with the conseqences. You don't show people in the evening news how war looks like, because it's poo poo, torn up bodies and rotten flesh. Utter waste of life and material. You don't show how the fallen look like or how the people that make it out alive have to live with what they've been through for the rest of their life. It's not easy to connect if you're so far removed, but we're no different people than our grandparents, and it's still the same world. I like to remember that, because every one of us will be drafted if industrialized nations ever again decide to go to war with each other. This "normal" state that we're in is fragile, and it can be over just like that if some rear end in a top hat decides that he can't back down. I live a few 100km away from the Ukraine, most of the males of my family fought there just 70 years ago. I don't want to join them. Fangz posted:It's basically like a horror movie. A dose of horror, a dose of good set design and costumes, plus a bunch of distance. Unlike fiction, history does not have to follow the constraints of conventional storytelling, this enables surprising and interesting stories. The older I get, the less fictional history becomes for me. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Mar 26, 2014 |
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Mar 26, 2014 11:53
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You should be very careful how you use the word truth in that context, if ever at all.
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Mar 26, 2014 15:12
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my dad posted:Well, I live in a country that was bombed by NATO, and have also experienced circumstances in which I feared for my life even outside of the mentioned bombing. See, that's what I meant. That stuff happened just on our doorstep and people hardly noticed. A coworker that I like is from Kosovo. Casually, he showed me a pic of him and his parents standing on a heap of rubble out on the countryside. He told me that it's what's left of their house. And: "Somebody else owns these grounds now". It's weird, but people that are traumatized sometimes say the worst things just like sidenotes. Like that he was there when his best childhood friend was shot dead by a bunch of guys. Or that grown men regularly would beat him and other children up just for fun. SeanBeansShako posted:Nobody quoted Robert E Lee talking about how much war sucks yet? We got a quota to fill people! Shoot.
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Mar 26, 2014 21:41
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Did the OKW have authority over the OKH in the Nazi command system? I mean, that would make sense wouldn't it but they had a huge rivalry right? Nazi command system is the wrong word, or at least you'd fool yourself by thinking that the military and the party was the same complex. Putting "Weltanschauungsgeneräle" in place was a gradual process that runs hand in hand with military misfortune. Hitler would plant more and more of "his" Generals in the OKW and OKH as the war progressed. The leadership of 1940 was pretty much independently minded - the old elites, looking to opportunities to get rid of Hitler. With the initial success in France, that was impossible. The OKH had authority in the immediate area of the front, everything behind that was at the command of the OKW. Like in the Wikipedia articles stated, *formally* the OKH was subordinate to the OKW. Don Gato posted:I've read that the reality was something closer to the latter, but the more I read about how Nazi Germany actually worked (or didn't, as the case may be) the more I feel that they really did stop everything and wait for Hitler to rubberstamp their orders. It makes about as much sense as some of the other weird poo poo they did, like the invasion of Crete. Not really. The concept of "Rahmenbefehl" is what you are looking for. Hitler would issue a general goal, it was your job to think up a way to archieve it. When doing so, you have to keep in mind what Hitler wants. So you pick the most radical solutions. Those orders were often very blurry, that wasn't an accident. You'd often have to come back and ask Hitler for his opinion how things are to be done, but also because those orders were bound to make different departments of the establishment to get into conflict. There were no clear hierarchies among the greater blocks of power, headed each by one of Hitler's Paladins, so when they get on each other's turfs, they'd have to consult Hitler to rubberstamp *their* plans. Hitler intruding into every detail is a later development that occurs at strenght at around 1943 if my memory doesn't fail me. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Mar 29, 2014 |
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Mar 29, 2014 07:08
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:
Say my new name! Btw, this is related: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schluckbildchen Seems to be pretty old supersition. A few years ago I saw such papers in a church on the countryside.
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Apr 1, 2014 07:19
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Fyi, there is a french baloon for artillery spotting on display at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna. From the Napoleonic Wars.
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Apr 1, 2014 16:58
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:I can understand the bats (they fly and can see in the dark), the birds (they fly), and the snakes (people used to think they spit their poison at people, for which you need good aim I guess), but otters? Is there some symbolic importance to otters I'm not getting? This is not the only recipe that involves otter body parts. I don't recall any special mystic attribute about Otters from Legends. At least none that I heard recently. Maybe it's more obvious, vipers are more or less the only really poisonous snakes around here. The bites also look particularly horrifying, as the poison causes necrosis.
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Apr 2, 2014 08:18
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I recall WW2 vets telling over and over that the spade was prefered to the bayonet, because getting stabbed there's a good chance that it doesn't incapacitate. Always the spade to the neck/head.
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Apr 2, 2014 20:42
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the JJ posted:I think the most recent head-of-state as real commander in chief, like, involved in planning and moving his physical location to be nearer the front was the last Russian czar What's everybody's favourite Schanze? Wolfsschanze
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Apr 4, 2014 13:18
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 20:41 |
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not my real name posted:I'm far from an expert or even an informed enthusiast, but isn't this pretty much the case though with the myth of the honorable Wehrmacht et al? Oh, no. The right wing doesn't have any interpretational sovereignity over this. The intended seperation of the former Wehrmacht soldiers from the crimes of the NS system is a what you mean, yes? That's something that takes place in the early 60s, when the economy in Germany stabilized and most of the POWs returned. What happened is that *if* people talked about it, the whole blame is put on the Nazis. It's by no means the case that the Holocaust was denied. "We saw nothing", "We knew nothing", "We were just soldiers" or *silence* would be common answers to the question what people did from 1933-1945. The Stalingrad Myth is really the most important piece in this puzzle, because it was made to be iconic for the suffering and senseless sacrifice of the common soldier, while completely drowning out questions as to how the Wehrmacht was involved in the Holocaust and the war in the east. "We all suffered, right?"
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Apr 4, 2014 21:02
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