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HEY GAL posted:
Can love bloom on the battlefield?
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Aug 2, 2016 11:02
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 18:46 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:Those who want to post, let them fight, and those who do not want to post in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live. Screeds posts like yours, shitposters trade their downs for, Effort posts like yours and like my mothers, God made crowns for
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Aug 3, 2016 17:18
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Yeah, keep the Lakota chat in the thread, we're all really just history nerds with overlapping niche interests, so go for it! I've got another between the wars Labour foreign policy post to do - but should I copy the previous one over here? I think it ended up on the last page.
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Aug 5, 2016 08:41
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Ok, I'll pop them in here while I try and Labour Party Foreign affairs, 1924-31 I don't know much about the 1919-1939 situation with British foreign affairs, except those brief, messy periods of the first, second and (kind-of) third Labour governments, 1924, 1929-31 and the ill-fated "National Labour" of 31-35. I guess, really, that covers a good whack of the period, thinking about it. It's one that defies easy explanation, and also one with remarkably few concrete statements of intent on foreign policy. There's a certain sense of paralysis on foreign affairs that characterises the actions taken by Labour governments at the time, and one that i'd put down to: War weariness - still incredibly massive in Britain right up until 1939 A significant block of highly regarded pacifists (not "normal" COs in the early years, but men like Philip Snowden and George Lansbury, who had led the anti-war Union of Democratic Control during ww1, and older COs like Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, conscripted at the age of 47 in 1918) Inexperience - the Labour Party had gone from a vocal minority to an almost-majority in the space of six years (50-odd seats in 1918, 142 in 1922, 191 in 1923) and it's MPs were a mix of old liberals, socialist organisers, union men and political thinkers - with little foreign policy experience Turbulent politics. Not a single one of the Labour governments commanded an absolute majority in the House - they could be (and were) defeated by coalitions - and in 1924 didn't even have a majority in any sense. They concentrated on domestic issues and fought against the Tories. Emerging consensus politics among Labour MPs - this is still the age when actual real-life communists are elected to the House as Labour MPs, and they're sharing with socialists, democratic socialists, liberals and members of the landed gentry, all within the same party. A lot of this period is about where Labour will go - a party to govern, or, as it was, a parliamentary means of achieving a decidedly non-parliamentary aim. There's other issues as well - and the 1931-35 is such a clusterfuck of coalition politics that it's hard to unpick why any of it happened, but if you think that 1924 can be characterised by ideals expressed through inexperience, you won't be far wrong. Part One: 1924 Stanley Baldwin is the Prime Minister, but he's looking for a mandate to introduce massive tariffs and generally float a protectionist economic plan, all very much part of the Tories stated desire to move away from the vague Liberal consensus that had prevailed since Asquith took power. He feels he needs to call another election and no doubt win a massive victory. He fails to do so, and December 1923 returns a hung parliament, that the wily old Asquith decides to hand to Labour - both as a punishment to the Tories for rejecting free trade, but also in the hope that Labour become so incompetent that the Liberals are returned to their former glory as the second (or first) party (it backfires in the long term, and the Liberals begin their slow slide into political irrelevance, as always happens when they try something clever - see our recent coalition for details). The government will last less than a year, but in that time they blitz domestic policy and do well on the world stage - Conservative historians will say their most notable achievements are abroad, but anyone who believes things like "people should have houses" and "the rich should pay more tax than the poor" tends to think otherwise. So Labour are in power, and Ramsay MacDonald is the first Labour PM. He's had a broad anti-war stance since the Boer War, arising from his socialist principles, and resigned the Chairmanship of the Labour Party in 1914, refusing to support war credits. He has, in a bold and ballsy move, also taken on the role of Foreign Secretary, perhaps not trusting Arthur Henderson (wartime leader of the Labour Party and man with the most foreign policy experience, and a man Lenin described as "As stupid as Kerensky") just quite enough to give him the job. It's about a 10 month government, but with some significant foreign policy agreements. Germany Ramsay's main platform for foreign policy related to Germany. He'd described Versailles as a victor's peace that would cause trouble, and realised that Germany's ability to make reparations payments was dependent on the state of the German economy, rather than the French attitude of "who gives one merde". The French and Belgians are still occupying the Ruhr, perpetuating a crashing German economy and (well, we all know about the Ruhr occupation, to be honest). His main contribution to resolving the crisis was as a negotiator. By all accounts a fairly charismatic fellow, he latched onto the Dawes plan (US lends money to Germany, who pays off the British and French, who pay it back to the US), but identified a crucial problem in implementing it that the American led reparations commission had missed, that the French would never accept it in a million years. He spent most of the year he was in power hosting talks and playing the reasonable man, bringing French and Belgian representatives over to Britain and, in August, hosting a pretty massive conference in London to build a broad "Allied" consensus on accepting the Dawes plan and ending the occupation of the Ruhr. He cleverly stacks the deck on who to invite, bringing aboard the French and Belgians, and then roping in half the representatives of the Commonwealth to show a "united" front - when they're mostly civil servants who more or less do as he asks them to. France are eager to punish Germany for defaulting on the reparations, but they're also much more interested in remaining firm allies with Britain - and so MacDonald's benign hardline stance on accepting the Dawes plan becomes a fairly easy sell. Herriot is gently pressured into accepting the Dawes plan and a raft of concessions on Versailles aimed at - and this is the crucial thing - making Germany better able to still pay off a huge reparations debt. There's a lot of discussion about whether the occupation was justified, what it did to German politics or showing that Germany could get away with defying Versailles, but to the Labour government, it was an example of French Imperialism - remember, this is a government of Socialists - and it would lead to increasing militarism, rearmament and probably, more war. Ramsay Mac wanted French troops out of the Ruhr and a Germany that could look after it's own people, just as Labour believed their own calling as a socialist-democratic party in parliament was to look to the needs of the people of Britain. The Empire Secretary of State to the Colonies for 1924 is an ex-union organiser and the man who could well have brought down capitalist government in Britain forever but decided not to do so, Jimmy Thomas. There's still bits of Britain where the old men will spit when you say his name, but as Colonial Secretary he was pretty much a non-entity, in place for only 10 months. Most of the 1920's Imperial crises had happened under the previous administration - The Irish War of Independence had peaked in 1921, India had flared up and now simmered resentfully after the Amritsar Massacre and Egypt had become independent in 1922. The Dominions had won a great deal of independence de jure in 1923, when they were "allowed" to set their own foreign policy - they had been for a while - and the Empire began to turn into the Commonwealth. With only ten months on the job, and the Empire going through a period of quiet after a huge degree of unrest, there's not much to report here. The Army Shockingly a year where (as far as i remember) Britain didn't fight some kind of crazy Imperial war, the operations of the Army continue under MacDonald as they had under Baldwin. Except for - I believe - some fighting on the North West Frontier (a phrase that can be used from 1860-now, every year, no problem), the main Army deployment was the British Army of the Rhine. Overall, MacDonald was happy to keep the restriction on Military Expenditure proposed under the ten-year plan (Britain won't be involved in another war for ten years) and enacted under the sweeping austerity program of Geddes' Axe. This was a very broad restriction on Government expenditure that Labour's domestic policy sought to overturn (and did fairly successfully), but they held to restricting government spending on the military. It rose - slightly - during the MacDonald government, but was kept broadly inline with the Tory policy of austerity, falling from £190 million in 1921 to £111 million in 1923 - Ramsay upped it insignificantly to £114 million for the year 1924. Somewhere along the lines of £40 million of this total was spent on the British Army of the Rhine. It had been reduced in strength between 1920-24, but still made up somewhere along the lines of 10,000 men of all ranks, with a contingent of tanks and supporting equipment. Two brigades of battalions made up of (now) volunteer soldiers are rotated in and out - a few in 1924 are not replaced. The British forces seem to have largely got on well with the Germans, and in some cases returned home pretty pro-German and anti-French, which would raise some problems later. MacDonald's government left it mostly alone, and there's few indicators that it was given much thought beyond it's implications for negotiations around the Dawes plan. Several Labour MPs continued to agitate for disarmament, others prepared to support an armed revolution, and the newly formed Communist Party (with MPs soon to be sitting as Labour members - Shapurji Saklatvala would win on a Communist slate in the 1924 election) openly called for mass mutiny. Navy Big news here - 1924 sees the formation of the Fleet Air Arm, and it's 15 year history as part of the RAF before 1939 sees it attached to the Navy permanently. It was officially for RAF squadrons flying from aircraft carriers and other ships - HMS Hermes, the first officially designed from day one carrier, is commissioned in 1924, but again, it's inception and financing predates MacDonald's first year. It's flying the fairly cute Fairey 3, and does the fairly standard mediterranean and colonial tour, including an exciting interlude with pirates. The standard policy would have been stasis on naval issues generally, with the Washington treaty fairly freshly signed, and a general freeze on navy spending. Right, phew, that's all I can think of about 1924, time for 1929.... OH NO WAIT The single most important foreign policy issue for a party of socialists in Britain in 1924 was undoubtably Russia. The Soviet Union is 2 years old, Britain has pulled out it's Army and Navy after immediately disproving the "war to end all wars" bullshit by deciding to just carry on the First war but against a new and exciting foe, and relations have certainly not yet normalised. Ramsay Mac officially grants recognition to the USSR on the first of February, to howls of protest from the Tories and the right wing press. This is massive. It's the British Empire formally recognising the existence of the USSR, and it's a socialist government doing it. It's real world-wide-revolution stuff, It's coincidentally after the death of Lenin, who was a very controversial figure in the Labour party at the time. There's a fairly even split between pro- and anti-bolshevik factions in Labour that dated all the way back to 1919, after Labour had called for a revival of the Second International, and Lenin had responded by calling the Comintern. His screed against non-parliamentary socialists won him back a few Labour moderates, but the biggest foreign policy crisis for Ramsay Mac came from within - the Daily Mail. Days before the 1924 election (Labour had refused to prosecute the editor of Workers Weekly for calling for soldiers to refuse orders in case of another war - something half the Labour party had been doing from 1914-1920, which caused a vote of no confidence), the Daily Mail published the Zinoviev letter, an entirely fraudulent, completely fabricated letter from Zinoviev to the Communist Party in Britain. It essentially called for worker's agitation, led by the Labour party and Communist party, to cause an uprising that would lead to the establishment of Leninism in Britain. By the end of 1924 the secret services had concluded that the letter was complete bollocks, but the damage was done. Labour were already on the way out, but the Tories successfully spun it as a crisis, and they won the election. Labour didn't actually do too badly, and the real losers were the Liberal party who were savaged by the conservatives and continued their drift into pointless irrelevance. Baldwin, the new tory PM, cancelled all diplomatic efforts towards Russia and the rest of the world followed him. Russia became more isolationist, and Lenin's worldwide revolution was replaced by Socialism in one country. I take this as conclusive "proof" that no-one will ever be able to convince me of otherwise, despite the fact that it is complete bollocks, that the Tories were directly responsible for Stalinism. COs in 1924 About 30 CO MPs now sit in the House of Commons - many of them having been released from prison in 1919. Head CO Clifford Allen remains Chairman of the Independent Labour Party and exerts a huge degree of influence over parliamentary labour, and attempts to move it leftward. Another key figure, Fenner Brockway, stands against Winston Churchill (in his "Constitutionalist Party" phase) in 1924, and misses out by 2,000 votes. COs in important roles: Charles Ammon - Secretary to the Admiralty Morgan Jones - Secretary to Board of Education Manny Shinwell - First Sec for Mines John Muir - Sec to Paymaster General Herbrand Sackville - Hereditary Peer in Waiting (believe it or not) Next time - they're everywhere! Edit: Oh man! I forgot about Geneva! Ramsay Mac put a fairly radical proposal to the League of Nations alongside his French counterpart, Herriot, in 1924. The Geneva Protocol called for compulsory international arbitration, a massive disarmament conference and the incredibly radical idea that anyone who didn't listen to the league would be named the aggressor and subsequently opposed by the other members of the league. It was, unfortunately, too huge an idea - after being approved provisionally by the League, the Tories then torpedoed it after Ramsay left power, ostensibly due to fear of conflict with America, but equally likely to have been seen as an international restriction on when and where Britain could do whatever it wanted. Labour's inter-war foreign policy, part 2: 1929-31 After Labour lost power in 1924, the Conservatives essentially set about dismantling what it could of their policies and advancing their own, more bellicose foreign policy. With the 1926 General Strike, and the Tories increasing ability to alienate the workforce fresh in the minds of the electorate, the 1929 general election returned Ramsay MacDonald to power, though again without an outright majority in the commons. In five years the Conservatives had managed to piss off America (Britain has it's own sphere of interest and it's called the whole world, gently caress you you upstart colonials, oh and also we want you to legislate that we always have to have a cruiser force twice as big as yours, wait what do you mean that's ridiculous?), slightly pulling away from the League of Nations by refusing to fund it and alienate the commonwealth by demanding their backing on foreign policy issues despite their new-found independence. Phew. The big change with regards to foreign policy comes in Russia. Baldwin had completely severed relations after the All-Russian Cooperative Society raid in 1927, where the British police raided the trading organisation on suspicion of spies, found a few, cack-handedly revealed that Britain had been spying on Russia and basically led to nothing but the USSR adopting better encryption. Of course, the first thing MacDonald does policy wise? Reestablishes relations with Russia. Arthur Henderson is now Foreign Secretary, and he enjoys a broad brief from a hands-off Mac, who is busy battling against rising unemployment. He plans a three point strategy that becomes Labour's election pitch on foreign policy: International Peace - a general arbitration platform, with key support to the League, attempting to prop up it's already slightly decaying mechanisms and replace them with proper means to arbitrate disputes. Normalised relations with Russia Disarmament - pointing out that the cost of the League for 700 years equals one year's military expenditure. Pretty simple cost-saving exercise here. Again, this is a party increasingly dominated by ex-Conscientious Objectors, run almost entirely by members of the old Union of Democratic Control (the parliamentary anti-war group in ww1). They're being elected on a stated platform of disarmament, if not absolute pacifism. The British public (narrowly) elected a socialist government that promised in the run up to the election would pursue peace and disarmament, simple as that. The pretty good leaflet "Labour and the Nation" is swiftly passed around the civil service after the slightly surprising 1929 election victory. There is no canvassing of the civil service to see if they can help them formulate a policy, and no Tories are invited to the party. This is, for the first time, a Labour party policy that will be pursued. It has, after all, just received a mandate from the people... Henderson's foreign office requires no acts of parliament (at least I don't think a single act was necessary), and it doesn't require extra money. In fact, it's policies are aimed at actively saving the government money. The combination of these factors and domestic troubles means that for two years, It's all Arthur's show. International Politics Ramsay Mac goes to the 1929 Hague conference and argues generally for the adoption of the Young Plan, another grand american financing scheme to help Germany recover from being a liberal country with an economy in the shitter to (ideally) another socialist-liberal country with a pretty powerful economy which everyone can be best friends with. He manages to soothe French rumbling about the timing and date of reparations payments, while pushing a protectionist platform of money only rather than reparations in kind, which were undercutting the British coal market pretty hugely (hey! free german coal!). Philip Snowden (George Baker's hero), ends up being a linchpin of this protectionist policy as he slowly becomes fiscally ever more conservative as his control on the budget grows. He comes down on a very right wing-style position, and it's only MacDonald's friendly relations with the French that stop it from being a disaster. The foreign office are very annoyed, and start to shut out the treasury ever more. He also manages to negotiate for the withdrawal of Entente forces from the Rhine, bringing back not only the British Army (good saving there), but fairly stunningly the French and Belgians as well. The Labour delegation are pretty much immediately swept off to Geneva where the foundations of the League of Nations buildings are being laid, and the Tenth General Assembly is beginning. Interestingly, the Labour delegation includes outright pacifists, including Helena Swanwick, suffragist and NCF member. She would later commit suicide at the outbreak of the second world war. Various Labour historians credit the delegation with renewing the spirit of international arbitration and disarmament at the conference, but how much of that is cronyism and how much is honest is unknown to me. Ramsay Mac pushes for the Commonwealth to move further out of British imperial control, and signs the "Option" clause, adding the commonwealth dominions to the league and binding them not to British foreign policy but to the League of Nations and the international court - absolutely confirming them as independent nations, though true independence would come later (in the 1931 Statute of Westminster). It was a catalyst for the wider acceptance of the League of Nations as an arbitration body, and there was a general move towards accepting the League as the ultimate legal body for international disputes. It incorporated and codified the Kellogg-Briand pact, essentially renouncing war as a means of settling disputes, and led to the League of Nations Codification assembly (the next year) which sought to properly lay down how to resolve specific disputes (but failed to do so). The foreign office also try to abolish tariffs worldwide and set up a finance branch of the League aimed at resolving international financial crises, but their attempt was shot down by Snowden. Thawing relations with Russia and improving them with the USA was another key Henderson goal, and MacDonald spoke eloquently around America on naval reduction, economic policy and anglo-US relations, apparently to a receptive audience. Ambassadors with Russia were exchanged again in late 1929, and by 1931 relations were almost on normal terms - possibly helped by the decision of the CPGB to refrain from wide recruitment in Britain and return to the safety of their increasingly irrelevant vanguard party politics. Defence Spending In the context of Labour's desperate attempt to stave off the effects of the depression, and provide money for massive public works projects (failed), they slashed the defence budget by about 7 million within about four months of regaining power. The government was still spending about 100 million annually on the military, but the cut was a reversal to a slow incremental increase since 1924, returning it to OG Ramsay levels of economic commitment. The Navy 1930 saw the London Treaty which we all know fairly well, extending the terms of the Washington Treaty and further restricting tonnage for cruisers, submarines and destroyers. It was well regarded in Britain as both a cost-cutting measure and a step towards disarmament. Henderson personally saw it as a major breakthrough in US-Japan-UK relations, and his team were extremely self-congratulatory over the whole affair. In terms of the Milhist thread though, the treaty led to the final death of the submarines-with-huge-weapons trend, sorry, Surcouf fans - Uncle Arthur's to blame. The Empire With the dominions pushed out of the nest of mother, probably mere seconds before they upped sticks and told her where to shove it, the military problems of the empire went back to being ones that local governments dealt with - non-violent independence movements in Samoa, India and elsewhere. The colonial secretary, Sidney Webb, hardcore fabian and author of clause 4 (the bit of the Labour party constitution that says we're socialists), doesn't do much in this period except override the civil service and provide the legal means for a colony to become a dominion - Gandhi comes over to London to the Round Table Conferences, and argues for constitutional reform and dominion status as a stepping stone to independence. The Army The British Army of the Rhine returns home to a complete lack of a heroes welcome, but at the very least Labour fulfils it's promise to have them home for Christmas 1930. Their job done, there's a pause in any real attempt to retool, retrain or expand the returning Battalions, which are divided again into home and colonial service and sent back out. While there's no significant rearmament, 1930 sees the slow beginning of the official mechanisation process. British military forces are involved in conflicts in China, the Aden conflict (RAF led) continues to sputter on but mainly involves locally organised militia and biplanes, and would incidentally carry on pretty much constantly until the establishment of the Republic of Yemen some 30 years later. Palestine rumbles on, but trouble on a wide scale would only really come in 1936. The RAF With government spending on the military frozen, the RAF struggles to justify it's existence but finds a good role (that Henderson and the War Office support) as a cheap way to "police" (i.e. bomb) the far flung outposts of the empire. It's the age of top of the rang biplanes though, so all this is done with the help of the Handley Page Hinaidi (ugly), and the Hart, Osprey and Demon, some of the near-to-last biplane fighters in british service. Interestingly, Ramsay Mac's government managed to see the Supermarine entries to the Schneider Trophy in 1929 and 1931. The end Faced with crisis upon crisis at home, Henderson's far sighted foreign policy platform is ended by the virtual collapse of the MacDonald government. When he proposes cuts to state benefit as an austerity measure, his party divides - half to his new "National Labour" and half remaining true to their socialist principles (christ, how many times have I written that particular phrase when working on the anti-war movement!) and sticking with the Labour name. Henderson finds himself leading the latter. MacDonald goes to the polls - in coalition with the Tories - and wins in a landslide. Foreign policy would be markedly different under a conservative-dominated government.
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Aug 5, 2016 09:19
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Inter-War British Foreign Policy Part 3: 1931-35 the ...urgh... "National Labour" Government In 1930, Labour are divided. All the achievements of Part 2 of this series are achieved in the brief bright period of 1929-30 and achieved with a minority government. It's a very unstable situation. With the economic depression absolutely loving the British economy, half of the Labour party is pushing massive expenditure, public works and make-work programmes (some kind of "new deal" some might say), Ramsay Mac and Philip Snowden are pursing a different path. They're pushing for massive, drastic reductions in government spending - and, as always when someone wants to push austerity, those cuts are aimed directly at the poor, largely in reductions in the already marginally established welfare state. Arthur Henderson - architect of the foreign policy successes in the previous years - leads the rebellion against it, and, taking half the cabinet (and a couple of COs) with him, threatens to resign. It brings down the government. But Ramsay Mac stays exactly where he is. Going to talk to the King, MacDonald decides to form a "National Government" with the Conservatives and the Liberals. Henderson has MacDonald and Snowden expelled from the party. They form "National Labour" - a party that is supported by no-one, except the tories. It was a deeply cynical move that cemented him in power, but at the cost of losing his Labour support. In October 1931, he leads an unholy alliance to a majority victory. He has 13 ex-Labour MPs with him - this is a tory government in all but name. The Tories take over domestic policy (and make a pigs loving ear out of it), and MacDonald throws himself, increasingly lonely, stripped of support and friends and surrounded by people who hold him in fairly open contempt, into foreign policy. If we can characterise previous policies as a conciliatory period, I'd say that Ramsay taking over from Henderson signals the beginning of Appeasement proper. This post doesn't include the Army, Navy and Air Force sections, because I'd have to really look them up - I'll dig it out for an addendum later. International Politics Ramsay spends, I'd say, the majority of his first two years as PM in the National Labour government, organising and leading delegations to international conferences. He leads a disarmament-focused platform at the Second Geneva Naval conference in 1932, which builds on the 1927 conference. He aims to build a broad consensus on a reduction in naval spending, tonnage and fleet numbers. Reduction in Army sizes is discussed, but it's pretty much pointless at this point - most of the participating nations have reduced their militaries so heavily that further reduction would lead them to be three or four guys standing in a field shouting at each other. Ramsay pushes increasingly harsh restrictions on air forces, but again - most airforces are so embryonic that it means little. He's also standing on a platform of involving Germany in their own defence, aiming to counterbalance French worries with German aims. I really like how this period (we're still pre-Hitler) is basically Vicky 2 - all about that battleship prestige. It becomes a part of the World Disarmament Conference, a series of conferences initially chaired by Arthur Henderson (see part 2), but now increasingly bogged down in details. MacDonald concerns himself with backing FDR's limits "offensive" weapons, and then spends half of his time at the conference attempting to precisely define just exactly what the hell this means. Unlike Henderson, who seems to have considered the global questions, MacDonald and his delegation stick to British interests. Strategic Bombers and Submarines (Britain's supposed only weakness) should be banned. In fact, Aircraft should be strictly limited there are some insane sounding proposals floating around that all civilian aircraft that could be converted into military aircraft, and since this is the early 30s this basically means all aircraft should be placed under League control but the destruction of Henderson's 1924 plan for League military alliances makes this utterly pointless. The World Disarmament conference rolls on into 1933, with MacDonald making fairly frequent trips to Geneva as he essentially abandons control over domestic policy and pushes an increasingly unworkable 1920s-era disarmament platform. It achieves gently caress all. MacDonald is completely unwilling to offer the French any form of blank check or unquestioned military support, and the French are unwilling to give Germany any concessions. Ramsay still believes in the Germany of the 1920s, but already we have signs that Germany does not want an army, but an army on parity with the French and British forces. After 28 months of discussion and with MacDonald increasingly sidelined in the process by Tory-appointed civil servants and diplomats, the talks break down. The upshot? Precisely gently caress-all of any real importance. Except one thing Germany withdraws from the conference, and then from the League. Oops. MacDonald's role is not pivotal, but the confused nature of the platform put forward by his delegation is one of the important reasons the talks collapsed. He pushed for disarmament, but refused to back up France which could have secured French arms limitations. He focused, and instructed the delegation to focus, on minutiae that were solely in British interests (who cares about tanks? How would they get them across the channel?) In the end, though, I suppose it was pointless there was no way newly dictatorial Germany would have agreed to any of it. The situation is officially out of control and we all know the rest. The remilitarisation of the rhine, the march towards war, and the last weird days of appeasement. Could the National Government have done a thing about it? I don't think so. Everyone was stripping the British military of people, equipment and funds. The Tories were as equally opposed to war and remilitarisation as the pacifist inclined Labour party but more for financial reasons. By 1935, Ramsay is on the way out. His health is rapidly declining and his speeches in Parliament are becoming literally incomprehensible. Pressure, and age, have rendered him very vulnerable but he's still pretty much ideologically pushing for demilitarisation. This is the absolute perfect time to go to Italy and try bring Mussolini on board. The Stresa Conference. Aims? Confirm Locarno (the post-war borders of Europe settlement), prevent Anschluss, drive more wedges between Hitler and Mussolini. It achieves: loving nothing really in the long term. MacDonald has recently presented a united front with the French, but his united front is a weird one proposing talks on German arms limitation, but.... very meh. He's suckered in by Mussolini and leans towards supporting an invasion of Abyssinia. His overall aim is to secure an explicit agreement containing Germany, with France, Britain and Italy allying to make sure Germany couldn't rearm. He actually gets signatures! It's great! Perhaps it might even work.... But then MacDonald retires, and his policies are reversed. Britain's new foreign policy appeasement plan engages more with Germany directly, instead of trying to build a consensus to contain them. The Anglo-German Naval treaty is signed in June this is full on real appeasement, and it undoes much of the good of bringing Mussolini into a wider anti-German consensus. Britain (the Tory Baldwin leading the charge on this) has changed it's foreign policy to a weirdly isolationist version of international appeasement work directly with Germany, gently caress Italy and France. MacDonald, his poorly thought through foreign policy and mental health in tatters, retires in May 1935, and by 1936 he's responding positively to the reoccupation of the Rhine, and by 1937 he's dead. The last vestiges of Labour foreign policy died with him.
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Aug 5, 2016 11:58
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HEY GAL posted:17th century best century  Yep, checks out.
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Aug 5, 2016 12:51
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Anyone got any ideas as to the accuracy of Atonement's fantastic long tracking shot of the Dunkirk evacuation? edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QijbOCvunfU
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Aug 5, 2016 13:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:Thanks for this. I basically did a spit take when I learned that Britain's first labor prime minister 1) endorsed hardcore austerity and then 2) managed to stay prime minister by making a coalition government with everybody but his own party. Like certain recent events, it's like a surrealist is riffing on politicals. Senility, whatever that means? Dementia? Depression? I don't know. He was getting old, his health was declining, he legendarily worked ludicrous hours and he took everything very personally. Add to that the National Government situation - believing that he was and could save the country by taking an unpopular line, and that after a period of austerity, he could put britain back on the track to utopian parliamentary socialism - and what must have seemed like an abandonment from his friends? I think that was what did it, to be honest. Ramsay Mac had been the first real politician - not the first real leader, or the first socialist, or the best, or anything like that - of the Labour party. It was his actions that won Labour it's first seats, after negotiating that the Liberals wouldn't contest some Labour target seats. He had been the one to bring Hardie's Independent Labour Party into a Parliamentary context. He had been one of the glorious 29, who walked arm in arm into the Commons* to announce that now, finally, the working people of the Empire had political representation, that Labour, and Socialism were going to be the new political order, some immanent day to come. He was the first who could play the game. And then, from his point of view, the party that he had created, all of his comrades (when comrades really meant something) abandoned him, and he never really recovered. Apparently by 1935 he was standing in Parliament and making nonsense speeches, but I've been through a fair few of his contributions in late 1934 and 1935, and I can't find anything that's absolutely crazy. He's certainly a lot more flowery than he had been, and more circuitous - in fact he speaks a lot like a modern politician dodging a question. He starts to call them all "Sir" a lot, and by March 1935 he is speaking very little. It's slightly amazing to realise that Labour's foreign policy from 1929-31 was being run by a very competent minister with a wide ranging brief and a free reign, and then from 31-35, at this absolutely critical time, British foreign policy is being run ex cathedra by a man who is slowly slipping into severe mental illness. The only slightly odd thing I can find is this: Hansard posted:Mr. LANSBURY (by Private Notice) asked the Prime Minister whether the statement made yesterday by the Secretary of State for the Dominions to the effect that the General Election would not come for some yearsperhaps three years from nowis to be regarded as an authoritative declaration that the Government have decided upon an extension of the life of this Parliament in order to postpone the General Election? And odd because that's just not a politicians answer in the commons - why leave yourself open to attack? Lansbury, incidentally, would take over the Labour party after Henderson, and, as a really hardcore christian pacifist, would be a major figure in the appeasement movement. Oddly enough, there's a certain type of (conservative) historian who blames him for appeasement altogether, while I'm more inclined to put the responsibility for foreign policy 1935-40 on the party that planned and enacted it - the Tories under Baldwin and Chamberlain. edit: * this may have only happened in my mind as I'm sure I read it somewhere but I can't find any evidence for it whatsoever
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Aug 6, 2016 00:08
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HEY GAL posted:here is an article about a conscientious objector. it's also relevant to my interests, since it's about a man whose honor was taken away from him and who "says he cannot diehe literally cannot leave this earthuntil [it] is fully restored." Thanks for this - what a story! "Shoot, you son of a bitch", wonderful. Really interests me that he pursued that honourable discharge, most of my guys took pride in the fact that they were dishonourably discharged from a dishonourable institution. Edit: also it seems like he was at Leavenworth in 1919, possibly during the great strike which is really the stand out moment of the American CO movement. lenoon fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 08:40
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HEY GAL posted:you're welcome, glad you liked it! Maybe. It was the No Conscription Fellowship line that a dishonourable discharge is a mark of honour, and they drove that pretty hard in their newspapers and periodicals. I guess without a group or a solid backup telling you that what you did was honourable, you'll look for that from the Army itself. But then again, now that it's sat ticking over in the back of my mind, what greater victory for the Objector over the military can there be? He's fought for them to legally admit that what he did, and what thousands of other Americans did was honourable. What a victory over the military, over militarism itself! I think that's the principle that's at play here. He wanted recognition as an honourable man, and not from society, or from other COs, or peace organisations, but through sheer bloody mindedness, and stubborn refusal, principle and argument, from the Army itself, that they would acknowledge his refusal to fight as the honourable actions of an honourable man. "Shoot, you son of a bitch" goes up there with the Frenchmen for steadfast refusal. I'll work out some way of putting it into my commentary to Soul of a Skunk (now 1/10ths done!).
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Aug 9, 2016 12:43
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Tias posted:What frenchmen? Sorry, forgetting that it's all a bit niche! I covered the Frenchmen (with help) in one of the George Baker posts - here
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Aug 9, 2016 13:04
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That's a good point - got a bit over excited there. I do like this guy, carrying his blackjack to scare away "punks" and all.
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Aug 9, 2016 13:32
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Trin Tragula posted:Daniel Radcliffe is a box office star and shows he's a good enough actor to play Kipling's son in My Boy Jack while he's the right age to do it. My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few. 
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Aug 9, 2016 16:25
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War movies seem to achieve good levels of accuracy in segments. Like the tense waiting followed by insane carnage of the beginning of saving private Ryan or the hour and a half of cock jokes in Hitler my part in his downfall, or when the barbed wire comes alive in deathwatch.
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Aug 9, 2016 18:06
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feedmegin posted:I will note that as Oxford colleges go Keble is historically quite proley. It's built out of bricks for heaven's sake, and it had only been around for half a century at that point! Proper, gentleman's colleges at least pre-date the existence of the United States. Keble grad spotted. edit: You're all richer than Cambridge, which is clearly the proletarian part of oxbridge
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Aug 10, 2016 11:34
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I always regretted my choice because it was only 200 years old and that really bums me out. Still, it's nice to take Americans round - yes, this library is older than your country. You see this drain? Yep, that too.
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Aug 10, 2016 12:03
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FAUXTON posted:Legwear ain't poo poo but britches and hose Britches ain't poo poo but hose and tricks
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Aug 10, 2016 23:49
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SeanBeansShako posted:*Lights the lenoon signal* Awoken from my slumber! Literally in bed though so this is off the top of my head and brief (by my rambling standards). Yes, union relations in ww1 were incredibly lovely. The unions were anti-conscription and initially anti-war, but largely bought off by the fact that unions were given representation on conscription tribunals and did a good job of passing Union men exempt from service. There were waves of potentially serious strikes from 1917 onwards, and striking workers in Glasgow nearly started a communist revolution in 1919, when the army was deployed to the city and tanks roamed sauchiehall street, while the highland regiments were discreetly posted far far away. Wartime strikes were often dealt with on a personal level - Lloyd George visited a few hotspots in his time as minister of munitions, but a fair bit of war crucial industry was under direct state control and (ideally, though in practice this lasted all of ten minutes) staffed by non-union labour. Serious strikes were threatened with conscription, though to my knowledge this was only carried out in some rare and scattered cases in Britain - it was common on the continent. While there was industrial unrest in ww2, the unions got on board a bit more for a couple of reasons - socialist opposition to Hitler and Union involvement in the Spanish civil war amongst them (show me a 1930s union that isn't socialist and didn't send its young men to Spain!). But it wasn't a case of "union laws restricting production" or "the government not tolerating the union bullshit". Instead, the unions were settled by concrete promises of more power - and a better life for workers - after the war. Churchill, pragmatist that he was, brought the ultimate union man into his coalition government and gave him near limitless power over the work force. Ernie Bevin. Trade union organiser, well respected, total hardass Labour man. Used his powers to totally regulate the workforce towards maximising efficient war production and simultaneously built up the unions to the most powerful they'd ever been. He famously boasted that he wanted to settle the union position "from now until 1980", and he did - it took forty four years, to be precise, for his pro-union organisation to be dismantled. Bevin, Bevan, Attlee and Morrison. Churchill's answer to potential Labour unrest during the war. It backfired on him spectacularly, and we ended up getting the NHS out of it to boot. Edit: The idea that the government *could* try a direct confrontation with the Unions during either war is pretty funny. These aren't unions as we understand them today, really, where there are short strikes and there's discontent and they might be led by hardcore socialists. These unions are massive, they provide Proto-welfare-state levels of care and support to their members, they are led by men who want to a) do right by their members and b) abolish the capitalist state. The Triple Alliance in 1914 (the three main unions one not the German Austrian one), had something like 5,000,000 members vote against conscription. The government cant afford a direct confrontation with them - and would nearly collapse when it did try in peacetime (until the general strike was betrayed, betrayed I tells ya!). What would they do? Strip a thousand men off the western front and ship them back home to try and force their brothers and fathers and sisters and wives back into the factories? It was impossible - the unions were bought and bribed with promises, exemptions and concessions, except in those few cases were unions stood alone and on the Clyde. By WW2, they were well aware - it's why Churchill abdicated literally all responsibility for labour relations to Bevin with the emergency powers act. lenoon fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Aug 12, 2016 |
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Aug 12, 2016 00:24
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Did you take pics of the tools? Palaeolithic archaeology was my previous life before the CO stuff
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Aug 13, 2016 11:49
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You know what're really loving great? Castles. The star fort's older, more rugged, significantly cooler and posed-for-maximum-dramatic-effect, sister. None of this piling earth to create something some pikemen are going to bash their heads along while stealing alcohol and consulting astronomic charts for which branch of spit heretical lutherism they're going to follow today. no, sorry, star forts are really cool, as is the 30yw Pick a cool cliff, hill or coastal location, pay some guy called Something de Something, or Bloke of Saint's Name to come along and design a building meant to: 1. Ruthlessly terrorise your own people 2. Kill everyone who comes near to it 3. Stand as a mighty bulwark against rebel forces 4. Inspire 18th century poets 5. Still be used 900 years after construction Castles are great. And where are the best castles in the world? North Wales. Edward the First, wanker king of England, finally settles the Welsh issue by invading, colonising and annexing Gwynedd (and then he went homeward, tae think "that was well done, eh?") in the late 13th century. Realising this is a nation of people who will for centuries gain enjoyment and exhilaration from running head first into packs of guys 2-3 times heavier than them, and possessing both a wicked amount of spearmen and capable of winning any slam poetry competition with naught but a sigh, Edward builds seven of the greatest castles that will ever be built on the planet (in the 13th century) that remain so goddamn perfect in their execution of cutting edge military-political theory that they are now known as a World Heritage site. They're a political statement, an architectural wonder and, more than any battle, contributed to the cementing of English reign over Wales and therefore the greatest tale of injustice by occupation that the world has ever known (700 years and counting provided we ignore the Tudors and various other bits of British history). Welcome to Harlech, my favourite of all the Welsh castles.  It's late 13th century and it is a real beauty of a fortification. Concentric walls, circular towers, a wall leading down to the sea and as if that wasn't loving enough, it's built on a column of rock that is so goddamn perfect for a castle I'd be surprised if Mesolithic hunter gatherers hadn't stopped and quailed at the thought of what would be built there 8,000 years later. edit: But Harlech isn't only a fortification, it's a symbol. Harlech is the seat of Bendigeidfran, a legendary king of the Mabigonion, and the birthplace of Wales' very own Helen of Troy, Branwen fetch Llŷr, the woman who accidentally starts a war so big that it depopulates Ireland and Wales. This is an important place in Welsh oral history, a place of legend and magic, where Bendigeidfran's head is kept (alive and well) for seven years before, for some reason I'll never understand (most likely because the story comes from the post-Roman period, but before the cementing of Wales and England as separate nations), asking to be buried somewhere on Hampstead Heath in London, presumably where he could watch the women's bathing pool. It's so important - and strategic - that placing a huge english castle there is a devastating blow to the tale, and slowly crystallising idea of what it means to be "Welsh" in the 13th century.  Look at the loving gatehouse, the first wall and towers now ruined and turned into the edge of the car park, but underneath that little bridge for tourists is a twenty meter chasm that's slowly been filled over 700 years with soil and stones but when the castle was built would have been a fall onto certain death on jagged slate below. The gatehouse forms it's own keep that could be sealed off at will, so not only are you fighting over a moat, over a curtain wall, over another set of curtain walls, but you've then got a stone keep covered in arrow slits, murder holes, crooked passages and right-angle corridors to try to get into. It's a stylish Tonbridge gatehouse and what we castle nerds call double-d's, a fancy Norman style, but this isn't the namby-pamby Tonbridge style gatehouse you'd see in, well, Tonbridge, this is the huge, thick, brutal gatehouse you need to subdue a rebellious population who want nothing more than to be free   Inside you've got all the mod cons, fireplaces and toilets for all your warmth and making GBS threads needs. It's built as a place Edward, should he need to, can come and visit and stay in, but usually it's going to be handed to a Constable whose job is to defend the castle, if necessary brutalise the surrounding population but on no account consider himself a Marcher Lord or a Baron. The Constable relies on the fact that his house is a goddamn castle and is so intimidating in it's sheer physicality that no two-bit welsh peasant is going to try and overthrow the newly legitimised English reign. The accommodation is pretty great, lots of personal space, as a garrison of less than 40 men is placed in the newly finished castle. 40. The inside of the keep is stylish as all get out, with numerous large picture windows to add that lovely draughty and cold castle feel during the grey and wet Welsh winter, which runs September-July. Not even content with making it look fantastic, the architect has put the only doors into the keep above ground level, and they are small. Really small. You have to stoop to enter, and on the inside there's three holes for that greatest of all door locks, the stout oak bar. No-one is getting into this keep, from either side. Harlech survives the  From the walls now, you can see the sea but it's retreated to a mile or two away. When it was built, the sea would splash against the walls of the seagate, and it was this masterstroke in design that let the castle withstand a lengthy siege. But then even the area around the castle is perfect for defensive operations - when Edward himself comes to relieve the siege he's ambushed and his baggage train is seized and he has to flee back to Conwy. One hundred years later, there's another Welsh rebellion and Harlech is besieged by the Once and Future King of Wales, Owain "the man, the myth, the legend" Glyndwr, he who wanders the Brecons still, until he will return and take Leanne Wood for his bride and usher in the diwedd y byd and the sgwrio saesneg. It stands for four years, the garrison legendarily reduced to "three shields, eight helmets, six lances, ten pairs of gloves, and four guns". It's captured by Owain and turned into his residence, only for another siege, one again so lengthy - this time using cannon as well - that the defenders, rather than give up or give in, literally die of exhaustion. Sixty years later, it's involved in another ludicrous conflict over the fate of Wales, the War of the Roses and there's another incredibly ludicrous siege when it's the very last stronghold held by the Lancastrians in Wales during their their darkest period, and it takes an army of quite possibly 10,000 men to make another tiny garrison surrender, after months of starvation. This is the famous "Men of Harlech" period, a song sung by Englishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen around the world when they were determined to subjugate tiny nations throughout the 19th century, the irony lost on some. As if that wasn't enough of an awesome history of being a fantastic fortress perched on a rock in the rear end-end of nowhere, it was the absolute last Royalist castle held during Civil War 2: this time it's about Protestantism, and those in charge of "slighting" the castle - making it useless for military purposes - were reportedly so struck by it's form and beauty that they only knocked down the outer walls and some of the battlements. And who owns Harlech now? 700 years of being fought over for the fate of Wales, and it's now been made accessible, visitable and incredibly interesting for a new generation of proud Englishmen to wonder over their King, and a new generation of proud Welshmen and women to wonder at what a people we were to have such castles built over us. And who is responsible? Our good friends that we, as Welsh people, would never betray, leaving us once again wholly in the hands of the English....  Oh gently caress. lenoon fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Aug 15, 2016 |
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Aug 15, 2016 11:23
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HEY GAL posted:yeah, the star fort is cool and good, but nothing looks really badass against a sky that's threatening to rain like a medieval castle Definitely true. Sorry about the joke at your guys expense though, they are actually super cool. I wanted to make that post because it's a holiday picture dump, and I'm crazy bored at my desk. edit: and Bendigeidfran isn't really buried on Hampstead Heath, his head (alive and talking until the moment it was buried) is actually under the absolute greatest symbol of Norman repression and appropriation - The Tower of London. lenoon fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Aug 15, 2016 |
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Aug 15, 2016 11:36
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Caernarfon is the fanciest, most palace-like of the north wales castles. It's fantastic, but all style over brutal substance in my opinion. It's definitely the big one to visit though, and incredible in it's own way. Chester is an excellent squat little thing, and had loads of work done to it to keep it relevant as a defensive stronghold until the Jacobite rebellion I think. There's definitely a couple of must-visit castles for the medieval history nerd to go and see in England - Chester among them (those paintings!)
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Aug 15, 2016 13:18
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bewbies posted:Is there a useful measure of how much a medieval castle cost in modern terms? Cathedrals too, for that matter. They seem to me like they must've been projects on the order of the Hoover dam or the international space station or something WARNING: TOTAL CRAP BELOW Inflation calculators are terrible this far back, but let's pretend that measuring worth is a) useful and b) accurate: quote:In 2010, the relative value of £8,000 0s 0d from 1300 ranges from £4,938,000.00 to £1,899,000,000.00. As the purchasing power comparison doesn't even touch Wales' last great castle (the £121,000,000 it cost to build the Principality Stadium), let's toss it out and go or the Economic cost of Harlech as a Project, which seems right but I've no idea how the economy works. I don't know how accurate that is in terms of a comparison in economic terms, at all, but the Welsh chain are the ultimate deterrent of the day, so I'll just compare them to the cost of the UK's current military deterrent replacement costs, at (a severe under estimate of) £25 billion for a new batch of world-destroying missiles and the submarines that carry them. Beaumaris cost an astonishing 15,000 and isn't even nearly finished, Caernarfon cost even more at about 25,000 and Conwy around 15,000 as well. So we have a round total for the big four (not the only castles Edward built or extended in north Wales) of about 63,000 at the time. Putting that into measuringworth we get: quote:labour cost of that project is £818,100,000.00 So, let's for no particular reason at all say that it cost £14,960,000,000.00 in today's money to build four castles in North Wales, in order to serve as a military deterrent, a control and a taxable base to control one area of North Wales, support English colonisation efforts and hand over a nice little self contained regional base of power to Edward's son. Cheaper than Trident. Let's just build castles all over our possible future enemies that we'd want to reduce to radioactive dust possibly. And those aren't the only castles in the area! There's at least 450 medieval castles (or remains of them) in Wales. It's a ludicrously over-fortified area. A substantial whack of the income of Wales, England and bits of France was spent on building and rebuilding and loads of castles that were so ridiculously expensive that Edward could barely garrison any of them. It's not even his major war, but kind of a rumbling sideshow/brushfire war to his major aim of fighting lenoon fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Aug 15, 2016 |
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Aug 15, 2016 15:24
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P-Mack posted:O/T, but I want to share the joy that is history with my 5 year olds. Before I force them to read Shattered Sword, can anyone recommend any good books or TV documentaries for youngish kids? One of my daughters loves the Percy Jackson books, so something about ancient Greece would be perfect. Horrible histories might be a bit old for them book wise, but the TV show pitches a little younger (I think) and is absolutely fantastic. Crazy, anarchic, costumes and modern language, and 99% true. Really good stuff Edit: Cyrano4747 posted:It also doesn't help that the US has to worry about half naked burned up little girls running past a news crew. I'm pretty sure no one besides us who is actually in the habit of projecting force internationally gives two solid fucks about the media the way we do. This is a circuitous way of saying "don't want to get caught out indiscriminately targeting civilians with incendiary weapons since the Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons Geneva Protocol of 1980" Edit 2: no wait that's equally cumbersome lenoon fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 07:57
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Just want to say that These mine posts are loving great and pretty much the perfect posts for the thread
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Aug 16, 2016 23:11
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HEY GAL posted:how do italians become afraid, in his opinion? passionately
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Aug 19, 2016 11:48
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Fangz posted:Watching the guy manhandle a tank shell in that video... How dangerous is that activity? Do bad things happen if you drop the thing? It's The Machine Gunners, which is a great book. It has a sequel which is basically "kid learns about socialism"
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Aug 19, 2016 14:10
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Christ that Warsaw post. gently caress the SS, gently caress the Nazis, putain de guerre.
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Aug 20, 2016 19:44
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HEY GAL posted:i am a reenactor who also is getting her doctorate in 17th century milhist. it'll be about a regiment that went to italy from 1625 to 1627 and then everyone ran out of money and left, it's great. the Ugly Graph is for an article, not that dissertation. my dad posted:
edit: and nobody will convince me otherwise (oh god.... am I proto-goon George Baker?)
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Aug 22, 2016 10:44
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I liked writing that castle post. So have another, far shittier, castle. NOTE: this post contains a lot of Llywellyns. All Welsh Kings are called Llywellyn. It also contains a few Dafydds and the odd Gruffudd. All Welsh Kings not called Llywellyn are called Dafydd, Gruffudd or Rhodri. This continues to this day. Criccieth. The best castles in Wales were built by the English. The other castles in Wales were built by the Welsh. Criccieth is in the latter group. Edward's castles are mighty strongholds of well-designed killing floors, bulwarks, towers and wards protected by other wards, spiralling staircases and crammed full of every expensive defensive trick that the medieval mind could conceive. Welsh castles are squat, usually square and often a bit shoddy. Put simply, Criccieth is a cargo-cult castle. Building begins in about 1225, with Llywelyn the Great, Prince of Powys and Gwynedd, brother-in-law to King John, celebrating his increasingly tight grip on Wales and not-at-all-chafing-honest-guv as a semi-vassal of England. He's been busy balancing his desire to control north Wales with placating both the English King and his legendarily greedy and acquisitive Marcher Lords to the south. It's a delicate balancing act, and it requires control over strategic locations and resources. Part of this plan is to build a stronghold that can exert control over the north part of Cardigan bay. Building castles is not a new art to North Wales, but it's not got a long pedigree, and architects and masons will have to be brought in (as Edward does), or the plan and even stonework of the castles will not be very good (as Llywelyn finds out). Wales has a tradition of mobile, semi-fortified llysoedd, the noble court, that moves with the King and sets up every couple of months in temporary almost roman-style fortifications that are now, with very few exceptions, lost. But in the early years after the Norman expansion into Wales, a few adventurers and minor warlords did make it up to Wales, and Criccieth especially. There they built the classic norman flat pack motte and bailey. The idea catches on. Criccieth is a pretty good place for a castle - and all of Llywelyn's castles guard a particularly useful point:  Criccieth guards the north coast of Bae Ceredigion (Cardigan Bay), and the large inlet at Porthmadog - just as Harlech does. Criccieth nabs the best position - closer to the bay and more accessible from it, while Harlech, while unassailable in any practical term, struggles to provide a way to transit men and material to and from the bay. The other castles marked on the map are more of Llywelyn's, and you can see from the modern road positions that they guard simple and accessible ways through a fairly formidable (by British standards) mountain chain - Snowdonia. These castles are made to guard and control, much more strongpoints from which to fight rather than castles from which to rule. Criccieth itself starts out in 1240-ish as a set of walls enclosing a small courtyard, a single line of fortification that is the absolute simplest point a medieval castle can possibly be. In this aerial shot, most of the original castle isn't there:  The masonry of the original walls is pretty uneven, and draws from local sources:  The castle presents it's strongest face to the world, with two D-shaped towers (oooooh yeah castle nerds you know you want those double-Ds), but Llywellyn's architect has probably seen some, or heard of them, rather than seeing the plans or consulting them in any useful way. So, originally, the towers are short, probably only two stories - the post-holes in the picture below are likely to mark the top of the original towers.  In it's early history, Criccieth does very little. Llywellyn makes treaties with the English kings, and fights against the often virtually independent Marcher Lords, and does so with great success, raiding and burning deep into English territory, until an Irish army (possibly entirely of mercenaries), comes in and sacks towns towards the south of Cardigan bay, far from Llewellyn's recently built castles. The English continue to encroach on his territory (and are beaten back), but never his heartland strongholds, so Criccieth sits virtually unused. Llywellyn himself walks straight into history with all the grace and ridiculousness of a Crusader Kings 2 character, including making alliance pacts with English lords who then sleep with his wife (and are executed), reforming succession laws to delegitimise bastards all over the country, a series of peace treaties broken immediately after the reputation malus lapses, and finally dying probably of a stroke, but actually of a broken heart after his (now forgiven) wife dies in 1237. Criccieth is used by his immediate heir Daffyd as a prison for Llywellyn's bastard, who would later be propped up as a pretender King of Wales and end his days imprisoned in another one of his father's castles. The castle has a peaceful few years until it falls into the hands of Until the five years are over. A welshmen-on-tour run of stunning victories not seen again until 1911 when the Five Nations were crushed under the lyrical stylings and rugby power of 15 men who normally worked eight hour days in the pit and relaxed by smoking cigarettes and having black lung, comes to a fairly damp squib when Llywellyn is forced, grumbling, to swear fealty to the English King. This lasts about five years, until the first great rebellion and the entrance of King Edward, wanker-in-chief. Luckily, thinking ahead, Criccieth has been expanded to two whole wards with a second gateway - a proper, but not great, concentric defence. Take a look at the aerial shot again. You should be able to see the problem. The gatehouse is great, but the second ward has been added only at the rear. Great for withstanding a siege if all you have to do is stockpile food in there and wait for the next supply boat, but less good for actually, you know, withstanding an assault. A square gatehouse/tower is built to back top of the picture, but again - this is cargo-cult design. Someone has said "it would be better to have a castle more like Caerphilly" (i.e. incredible), but not a lot of thought has gone into it. It can be easily attacked with catapult or ladder from three of it's four sides. The gate can be approached by the easiest road. The road you can see now is not to the gate Criccieth had at this point. The inevitable result is that after a minor siege (you know, a little starvation, some traded insults, some arrows, possibly competitive singing competitions), Criccieth falls to the English in 1283. Not one to waste a fortification when he sees one, and seeing Criccieth as a possible matching pair to Harlech to really gently caress over anyone trying to sail into Snowdonia (the Irish!), Edward has James of Saint George, master castle builder, take a look at Criccieth. By all accounts he is not a massive fan of what he sees. Renovations are quicker and cheaper than building a new castle, and a huge ward is added behind, all the walls are strengthened, an extra storey is put on the gatehouse and the tower in front, and a bastion is built to one side, often called an "engine tower", but who knows if siege engines were placed there. All in all, it's still a bit wonky and not the best castle in the business, but it is all there. Another barbican and perimeter wall around the base of the hill completes the picture, all for the less-than-princely sum of £300. The gatehouse in particular is now enormous, and it's walls have had an extra foot of width (at least) added on to them. You can really see the three-stage extension process here:  Madog's rebellion in the 1290s tries to take Criccieth, but caught between Harlech and Criccieth his army is unable to prevent fairly regular Irish resupply boats keeping the English garrison in mutton and arrows. Harlech withstands a much more intense siege, and Caerphilly is only kept bottled up, with seemingly no real attempt to reduce the garrison there. Of course, this begs the question why Madog didn't take the much easier, slightly shittier castle - but Criccieth probably isn't that much of a prize and, if it was taken, would provide a poor point to defend when the inevitable reprisal came (which is did). Between Madog's rebellion and the final destruction of the castle, it's ruled over by a number of Welsh constables swearing fealty to the Lords of England, including "Wales' strongest man ever" Hywel y Fwyall (all Welsh constables not named Daffyd or Gruffudd are names Hywel), who had fought in the battle of Poitiers and personally captured the King of France after cutting off his horses head with a single nonchalant flick of his battle-axe, a fact that nothing anyone can possibly say about who actually did it, if it happened, or even whether he was there at all can change, saesneg which was then honoured with a place of honour at the table of the English Kings until the Tudor period (actual real fact). Criccieth falls for the second and last time when forces under Owain Glyndwr, he-who-waits-in-the-coal, capture the castle and - having already not only captured the far superior Harlech but set up his court and parliament there - decide to tear down the walls and set it alight. Possibly pragmatic - but definitely symbolic. Glyndwr knows his history and his mythology, and is well aware this is an English castle born on a Welsh foundation. Again, another powerful symbol of English rule in Wales, but this time one he can afford to destroy. And, again, while the nation waits for the return of any number of Kings said to sleep under the mountains, one of which should probably wake up soon because North Wales in particular could really use them right now, the castles of Wales are kept safe by the hand of our greatest ally against the English, one whom we shall ne'er forsake lest our muse be once again forced to elude the traitor's foul knives, and our harps be once again hidden from the hand of Westminster:  Oh for gently caress's sake Wales lenoon fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 12:33
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cheerfullydrab posted:War movies belong here way more than war literature. Why wouldn't war literature be appropriate? Views of war, cultural understandings of war etc etc are as much a part of military history as talking about the width of a bullet or the thickness of a tiger's glacis plate.
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Aug 22, 2016 14:48
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CoolCab posted:
This is a good point. I write a lot about pacifists (and will finish the series of posts on women's role in the anti-war movement of ww1), but I wouldn't expect anyone to want to read my thoughts on pacifism as a modern day political ideology (which incidentally are surprisingly not in line with the guys I work on). History is always interesting, and the history of politics cannot be separated from the history of warfare, but yeah - jumping from here's cool thing you guys might like to "and here's why I think X ideology should be imposed world wide" is not for this thread.
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Aug 22, 2016 15:10
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HEY GAL posted:uh, "the global supremacy of the Spanish Empire," obviously I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
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Aug 22, 2016 15:21
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cheerfullydrab posted:I really don't want to say anything even slightly against your posting, because I think it's wonderful, but that's some bullshit. That kind of thinking makes out the past to be some exotic country that we can't even comprehend. There is no real separation of the past and the present, it's all just people being people. Every division of culture and generations and such is just arbitrary. Compare and contrast some of modern-day social media postings of sports celebrities with the writings of the mercenaries that pike lady is always quoting. Or youtube comments versus Roman graffiti. You can't just automatically excuse things that happened in the past because you've drawn an arbitrary dividing line between the people of today and the people of the Land of Ago. Not what I'm saying at all - to me they are pretty much indistinguishable, but my point was that if you wish to endlessly explicitly pass value judgements, then you're not going to jibe with the atmosphere of the thread. As I said "Jumping" from past to present is kind of bullshit - Like I said: Me, an idiot posted:
Which is a comment on the legality of an action in war, but not jumping to "and therefore your napalm droppin' daddy is a war criminal", which is a jump from present to past in the spirit in which I meant it. edit: I mean a value judgement absent context lenoon fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 15:45
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Disinterested posted:
Now try writing about differentiation in traditions and techniques in the production of material culture 2.5-1.5 million years ago, across several species and three separate genera of hominid, and you'll realise why I spent all day thinking about nice, easy, castles instead.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:26
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This discussion on projecting back into the past has got me wandering through the memory lane of my undergrad, when I was your pretty typical post-modern-Marxist-archaeologist trying to make sense of the past using 20th century derivations of 19th century economics in an increasingly 21st century world. I went to a pretty (post)modern faculty, but looming over everything and everyone was "Processualism". Modern archaeology, scientific archaeology, epitomised by Papa Binford. Some great and sensible theoretical leaps and accompanying practical improvements in how we actually do the science. But the great and infuriating thing that will endlessly drive me mad is the key underlying assumption that every human being ever is and was a perfectly resource accumulating rational actor, or basically exactly the same as a white male American anthropologist living in the 70s.
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Aug 22, 2016 18:56
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P-Mack posted:In terms of political repression and corruption yeah it wouldn't really be any better, but I think the death toll would be lower. Chiang was really awful, but I don't see him being creative and bold enough to enact truly crazy poo poo on the level of deep ploughing, close cropping, and backyard furnaces. I totally believe he'd massacre tens or hundreds of thousands of dissidents, maybe mismanage a famine to the tune of or two or three million, but Mao's death toll is in 8 freaking digits and that would take a real concerted effort to match. Crazy Autocrat in control of the entirety of China, might have played out tragically similar... but that's gay black hitler territory. How many people did the white terror in Taiwan kill? Can't be that many, right? I mean in "useless theoretical comparison that doesn't hold up to any scrutiny but is interesting" terms where you'd take the white terror death count compared to the average population of Taiwan between 47 and whenever it was in the 80s that it ended and then apply that proportion to all of China to see how many political dissidents per capita were removed of their capita in comparison between the two.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:15
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Fangz posted:Sensible stuff I think you're right - it was more an off the top of my head ridiculous comparison than any attempt to make a serious point of discussion.
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Aug 23, 2016 16:49
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Hogge Wild posted:What do you call it then? I'd argue there was precisely gently caress-all that could be done to stop them - so "letting them have it" is a weird Anglo-American centric version of the post war period. Oh it's ok, we let them have it, as opposed to the closer to reality "well, they took it and we can do nothing about it at all"
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Aug 24, 2016 13:34
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 18:46 |
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Would have been a big giant shitshow, but however it played out, it would have been politically and militarily, and probably economically, impossible for the Western Allies to contest the USSR's influence in Western Europe. No extension of the war is needed to see that there was bugger all that could be done about it, no matter how hard Churchill bleated.
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Aug 24, 2016 14:33
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