Military History Mk. III: One that I know of is an archaic word for dick, another is

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Military History Mk. III: One that I know of is an archaic word for dick, another is

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Yo Hey Gal, can you recommend Golo Mann's Wallenstein? I read a bit of it years ago and remember being really impressed and I'd like to try it again, but I have no idea about how historically accurate it is. It reads more like a novel, after all

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 09:18

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:15

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Comstar posted:

Why did the 30 years war go on for so long?

It helps when you don't think of it as s single war with clear-cut war goals and opponents and whatnot, but instead of a hilarious clusterfuck of several wars at once that just happened to coincide. Sometimes it's also like a TV show that tries to draw out its running time as much as possible with hilarious twists and turns thrown into the mix (looking at you, Restitutionsedikt).

Hey Gal posted this once already I think, but look at it:

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 13:54

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

HEY GAL posted:

that break in the very end for bavaria was when their entire army--yes, the whole thing--committed treason along with their Elector

Yeah, after Swedish and French troops were utterly destroying Bavaria and torching Bavarian cities left and right and the elector's good buddy Ferdinand II had died while his son and successor expressed no interest at all in finally negotiating a drat peace :mad:

Also we entered the war like half a year later again, so the treason wasn't too bad I think

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 15:21

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

HEY GAL posted:

still though, you're just fine and nice while if some people i won't name try to negotiate a ceasefire with Saxony they get halberded to death, i see how it is

bigotry pure and simple

Look at Bavaria's conduct during the Napoleonic wars, opportunism is the way of my people

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 17:51

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

shallowj posted:

that's interesting. you've said before how executioners are dishonorable, and i assume execution by one is extremely dishonorable? more so than the actual crime that was committed. do you know if crime in general is dishonorable? i assume it's not, if disputes to preserve honor are themselves often illegal. is it generally more-so the punishment for a crime that dishonors someone?

It's not necessarily being killed by an executioners that is dishonourable, it's more the way of execution applied. Beheading was way better than being hanged, for example, and that is why nobles have the right to the former except when they've really hosed up, then they get sometimes hanged with a silk rope (or even depending on the magnitude of their crime, even worse, i.e. like a commoner). Different crimes call for different execution methods, too: the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina from 1532 doles out eight different methods of execution (burning, beheading, quartering, the breaking wheel, drowning, impaling and burying alive) and also gives the possibility of culprits being dragged to the execution site by horses or tortured with red-hot pincers beforehand. This is all depending not only on the variety of the crime, but also the severity of it, and sometimes it seems that there were also mystical and allegorical reasons for which punishment was called for which crime. Crime in general is not dishonourable, but acting contrary to what is expected of you by society is. Depending on how you were executed this could mean posthumous dishonourment too, but this was more directed against your surviving family who would have to deal with the fallour, not you - being drawn-and-quartered for example was an extremely severe method of punishment normally reserved for high treason, but in most cases you'd get killed beforehand: it's not you experiencing as much pain as possible that's the important part of it, but the public display of your body being ripped apart by horses and the body parts then being dragged around for a bit, which again means your honour being publicly shattered.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 18:15

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

lenoon posted:

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

That's an awesome shot, wow

# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 14:59

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

HEY GAL posted:

Someone just posted this in the map thread

note the clear superiority of The Empire, specifically Bohemia, and the part where nobody gives a poo poo about England.

Edit: You might even call it..."the heart of Europe"

Prussia is the rear end-end of Europe, map checks out

# ¿ Aug 6, 2016 21:45

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

HEY GAL posted:

actually i think almost everyone i study was a better person than nixon and everyone who hung out with him

metternich, kemper boyd, any thoughts?

I don't know enough about Nixon to say how he ranks in the "would I hang out with him y/n" department

I bet Frederick II would be insufferable though. With him it's probably all "Yeah, I need to invade this country for reasons", randomly starting to play on his flute, making bad jokes about non-Prussians and non-enlightened Lutherans, being smug about being :airquote:

friends

with Voltaire and starting to cry because he thought of his father

I'm not a fan, in case you didn't notice :v:

but on the other hand:

Kemper Boyd posted:

Basically anyone pre-Napoleon is better than the politicians who came afterwards. The nation state is a hosed up cookie.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 21:52

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

This article quotes some Assyrian medical texts that seem to describe symptoms we would associate with PTSD today. Also I found this in-depth reddit discussion about the possibility of PTSD amongst Roman soldiers.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2016 11:10

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Arbite posted:

Also, what would :HRE: look like?

# ¿ Sep 20, 2016 15:06

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Hey guys, do you sometimes wonder whether studying history has a point (I know I asked myself that during the third semester)? Well, at least HEY GAL and other people studying 17th century can breathe more freely now, because the German foreign minister just said that Syria needs a Peace of Westphalia of its own (only in German, I'm afraid). Gonna save the world with our mad old stuff-reading skills :cool:

(but seriously, the Peace of Westphalia is actually a pretty good analogy as far as these things go)

# ¿ Sep 21, 2016 21:09

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

JcDent posted:

Go Lithuania! I have no f-in clue why we call Germany like we do.

It's of unclear origin:

quote:

In Latvian and Lithuanian the names Vācija and Vokietija contain the root vāca or vākiā. Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Būga associated this with a reference to a Swedish tribe named Vagoths in a 6th-century chronicle (cf. finn. Vuojola and eston. Oju-/Ojamaa, 'Gotland', both derived from the Baltic word; the ethnonym *vakja, used by the Votes (vadja) and the Sami, in older sources (vuowjos), may also be related). So the word for German possibly comes from a name originally given by West Baltic tribes to the Vikings.[19] Latvian linguist Konstantīns Karulis proposes that the word may be based on the Indo-European word *wek ("speak"), from which derive Old Prussian wackis ("war cry") or Latvian vēk�ķis. Such names could have been used to describe neighbouring people whose language was incomprehensible to Baltic peoples.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2016 12:30

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

I just remembered that I did a D&D effort post years ago about a MilHist topic, but I'm not sure if I even knew that this thread was a thing back then, so I'm reposting it here because maybe you'll be interested and maybe you'll tell me the myriad ways in which I got it wrong :v:

quote:

This is the old harbour of Heraklion, Crete's largest city and a popular destination for thousands of tourists every year. What many of them don't know however is that this city was victim to one of history's most brutal and certainly longest sieges: for 21 (!) years, it was continually under attack by the Ottomans.

What happened? In 1644, Crete had been under Venetian rule for more than four centuries; during the last decades, however, Venice had lost much of its once great influence throughout the eastern Mediterranean to the Ottoman Empire, which had cast its eyes on Crete already for a long time. Greece, Rhodes and Cyprus had already fallen, and so everybody knew that it wasn't a question of if the Ottomans attacked, but when. In 1644, a fleet of the Knights of Malta (who had been driven out of their original stronghold of Rhodes a century before) attacked an Ottoman convoy on its way from Alexandria to Constantinople. Amongst the captives brought to Candia (as Heraklion was called back then) were members of the Sultan's personal harem who had been returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca. Enraged, Sultan Ibrahim (he would later on be called "the Mad") ordered the execution of all Christians in his Empire but thankfully got convinced by his ministers to drop the idea. Instead, he gathered a strike force of 60,000 men, sending them towards Crete in an attempt to finally add the island to his possessions. In June 1645, the troops landed in the west of Crete and slowly made their way to the already strongly fortified capital city of Candia. On May 1st, 1648, all of Crete save its capital had been conquered by the Ottomans, and the siege of Candia began.

Candia in 1651

Venice had no possibility of defending Crete against such a powerful force on its own, and so its last � well, only resort was the heavy recruitment of mercenaries, mostly German veterans of the Thirty Years' War. About 30,000 of them got drafted (not always voluntarily) into the Cretan defence force; many of them found themselves eventually within Candia, where the city's water supply had been cut off by the Ottomans. The city would have been lost quickly if it hadn't been for the yet unbroken Venetian naval power: Venice's fleets somehow managed to successfully blockade the Dardanelles, a narrow strait in what is today's NW Turkey connecting Constantinople to the Mediterranean. The constant and for the most part successful naval war there greatly impeded the supply of the Ottoman troops on Crete and gave Venice the possibility to keep up the supply line to Candia. What followed was an absurd war that never left the immediate surroundings of Candia: When Venice managed to successfully block the Dardanelles and ship enough fresh troops to Candia, the Ottomans had to retreat; when it went the other way round, the Venetians lost their ground again and saw the Turks approaching the city. During the winter, when heavy storms made the Mediterannean impassable, no new supplies reached either party, and every year many would starve. Every couple of years, the plague would rage across Crete and kill many. Princes and powers all over Europe sent a continual stream of mercenaries towards Candia, but other than that few cared about this seemingly never-ending war, neither in the Ottoman Empire nor in Europe.

The Siege of Candia, date unknown

After 18 years, the Ottomans finally had enough. After reassuming control over the Dardanelles and ending the war against Austria that had bound a lot of troops, soldiers were shipped en masse to the island. In 1666, the offensive against Candia began. But the Venetians hadn't been idle during all these years as well: in the meantime, the city had been turned into possibly the best fortified spot on the planet. It was protected by seven forts, corresponding walls, trenches and sheltered pathways, subterranean tunnels connecting the sites and countless entrenchments, bastions, strongholds, casemattes, caponiers, hornworks and ravelins. Candia had become a masterwork of modern fortifications and an inspiration for countless military architects of its time (one of the survivors of the siege, the mercenary Georg Rimpler, later went on the become one of Europe's leading experts on the field, being hired by the Austrian emperor in 1682 to reorganise Vienna's defences. A year later, Vienna was attacked and besieged by the Ottomans and only managed to hold out until its relief because of his work. Rimpler himself died in Vienna during the siege. Poor guy had some really bad luck.). The Ottomans got nowhere with their offensive, losing almost 20,000 men in the process. They soon recognised that conventional warfare would lead them nowhere, so they went underground.

Never before a mining war of such extent had been seen, and it wouldn't be surpassed until WWI 250 years later. An army of slaves and soldiers dug trenches, tunnels and mining ducts. On the besieged side, thousands of inhabitants and galley slaves dug tunnels as listening posts, for counter mines or to reconnect to isolated outposts. The technical achievements of the miners on both sides were remarkable: to avoid suffocation by mine gas or too much CO2, enormous bellows were constructed and spread throughout the tunnel complex in order to ensure a supply of fresh air. A network of pumps and tubes was to combat the constant ingress of ground water. Orientation was only possible by compass. Beneath the ground, a ghostly subterranean war commenced; the miners died by the thousands. When the Ottomans had reached a part of the city's fortifications, they would then try to destroy it by detonating up to 170 tons of powder underneath it. The Venetian troops on the other hand would try to destroy those mines with their own counter mines beforehand. Sometimes they were lucky enough to get their hands on an Ottoman mine before its detonation; they would then construct new tunnels and fill up their own, so that the blast of the explosion would be deflected towards the Ottomans. Below some especially contested sectors, multiple �stories� of tunnels would zigzag through the earth. When two tunnels met, bloody fighting ensued. The miners suffocated, got buried, crushed or burned alive, got shot, stabbed or blown up, or they drowned.

Ottoman forces attacking one of Candia's fortresses

The fighting didn't cease above ground, either. Both Ottomans and Venetians invented or improved a multitude of new weapons. The constant mine explosions and bombardment from outside had turned the entire area into a hellish landscape of ruins and cratres. Fires burned everywhere, and the stench of sulphur and burnt or rotting meat was nearly unbearable, as was the noise of the constant barrage of shots and explosions. Both sides had snipers continually watching the area, their victims dotting the landscape. The mercenaries slept in foxholes and shot-up ruins. Inflation and Venetian greed had diminished their salary to almost nothing. As a consequence, many hungered or even starved. Scurvy or the plague killed countless soldiers. The situation in the military hospitals was so terrible that even slight injuries could end in a painful death. Some desperate soldiers defected to the Ottomans, but had to realise that their enemies didn't have it any better. Even firewood was unattainable, as it was used for tunnel support. We know of an officer who was sentenced to death for stealing one plank of wood. Rats and mice were highly sought after delicacies, and after a while even cannibalism ran rampant. The body fat of dead Ottomans was used as ointments for aching feet, and many Venetian soldiers collected skin parts as trophies. By now, most of the mercenaries had been pressed into service; thousands of soldiers from all over Europe were captured and sent to Candia, never to return.

The siege, 1667/68

What's especially horrid is that during all that time, the supply line to Venice never was broken. It would have been no problem to deliver enough food or medicine for everyone; instead, the officers lived in luxury while their subordinates were starving. Large banquets were held regularly, musicians played to roast and wine, and the generals and admirals payed more attention to their personal intrigues than to the war. Many of Venice's noblemen had decided to make Candia part of their Grand Tour, but weren't ready to do without their usual luxuries even there. The ongoing fight for Candia had been stylised as a heroic last stand of the good Christian Venetians against the abominable pagan Turks; in some parts of Europes, even something like a �crusader spirit� became en vogue, even if those romantic sentiments were utterly unsuited for the brutality of the trenches and tunnels. At one point, 600 French noblemen under the leadership of a duke landed in Candia together with their entourage; inspired by medieval stories of knights and courageous battle, they threw themselves into the fight to impress their lovers and rebuke the Ottomans; some of them stormed into the trenches wearing laced shirts instead of proper armour. The soldiers only called them the �600 fools�. It turned into a fiasco, of course; the Ottomans slaughtered half of them and almost all of their entourage. The rest of the noblemen then sailed back to France. Amongst the killed was the duke; when the Ottoman commander was asked to give back his corpse, he sent five bags full of heads to Candia, telling the messengers to find the right one. It turned out to be a lie; the duke's head wasn't in there.

This painting depicts Dutch and French ships battling an Ottoman fleet off the coast of Smyrna, 1649

In June and July 1669, a French fleet comprising 58 warships and 17 transport ships with 6,000 soldiers arrived in Candia. The plan was to start a massive naval bombardment with the fleet's 1,100 cannons aiming at the Ottoman camps; the fresh troops would then lead the excursion and repel the enemy forces. On 24 July, the French ships bombarded the Ottomans continuously for three hours, when suddenly the powder magazine of the fleet's vice-flagship La Th�rese caught fire and exploded immediately, utterly destroying the ship. In the ensuing confusion, the French commander ordered the bombardment to cease and sailed to the nearby island of Dia. The excursion never got anywhere as a result, and so the French leadership opted to withdraw from the city, having suffered more than 2,000 casualties in only a couple of days. The leadership of the allied forces in Candia begged them to stay, but to no avail: when the French set sail in August, they left behind an utterly exhausted force of 3,600 men against an overwhelming force of 60,000 Ottoman soldiers. The miners mutinied, and the mercenaries threatened to turn on their officers if this war wouldn't end at once. When the generals got word of additional Ottoman forces being transported towards Crete, they finally decided to surrender the city after 21 years and 128 days of constant fighting. The military operations during the last three years of the siege numbered 60 assaults, 90 excursions, 5000 mine detonations and 45 larger subterranean battles. 30,000 European Christians and 120,000 Ottomans had died. Candia had become the symbol of Christian resistance against the Ottoman juggernaut, and its defeat led to great fear and confusion in Europe. Pope Clement IX is said to have fallen ill immediately after hearing news of the city's fall, dying shortly afterwards. The Ottomans held Crete until 1898.

Also re: Nazis trippin' balls:

Fangz posted:

What do people make of this article?

"High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history"

http://www.theguardian.com/books/20...py_to_clipboard

I skimmed the book this article is based on, and I wasn't exactly impressed tbh. While Ohler to my knowledge doesn't present anything factually wrong, he not only says nothing that wasn't known to experts beforehand but chooses to present it in a very sensationalistic way, complete with long more-or-less fictional passages thrown into the mix and bad puns like "Sieg High" and "High Hitler" aplenty. This isn't my main problem, though (trying to present historical stuff in a manner more accessible to non-historians is always good imo, even though in this case the book's become too "flippant" for my tastes) - instead it's his fixation on drugs being the main driving force behind pretty much everything the Nazis did that bothers me. He even claims that Hitler committed suicide because he couldn't cope with his drug supply being cut off, lol. But maybe I'm just too tainted by academia to enjoy any book with less than 5 footnotes per page, who knows

# ¿ Sep 26, 2016 09:49

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Pistol_Pete posted:

I suspect that I now know what the inspiration for Cadia was, though....

I know, right? Another example of the well-known subtlety displayed by Games Workshop in their products :v:

# ¿ Sep 26, 2016 18:26

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Ice Fist posted:

Ugh, at this point I might as well provide the thread some entertainment and attempt a translation

Hail, Fortune! Die throwers be praised

I think that's the jist of it, but I imagine I've made some mistakes with tense or person.

Almost, it's “Hail, Fortune! The die rollers salute/greet you“ which suspiciously sounds like a P&P thing :v:

Apparently gladiators in ancient Rome used to greet the Emperor with “Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant“ (Hail, Emperor! Those destined to death greet you) before murdering each other, but I don't know if this is anything more than a legend

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 07:21

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Disinterested posted:

Though the posts may not appear here, would goons prefer effortposts on the subject of:

Intellectual underpinnings to the inept medieval papacy's powergrabs
Italian medieval lawyers trying to lawyer themselves up an independent state apparatus

, man (though everything connected to the papacy is especially cool :v:

)

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 08:34

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Drop the -s after Weltraum, it sounds weird. Also I wouldn't translate “Knecht“ as “lad“ - in today's usage it means “farmhand“, and in earlier times it additionally meant “foot soldier“ in contrast to cavalry (Ritter), though outside of the Landsknechte I think this meaning disappeared along with the Middle Ages or so.

I'd suggest “Raumknechte“, you can drop the Welt- from Weltraum (cf. Raumschiff, 'space ship') and make it sound less clunky. It still sounds kinda weird I think, but to non-German ears it should be perfectly serviceable :v:

# ¿ Mar 22, 2017 13:12

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

bewbies posted:

FUNNY YOU ASK, my very last meeting at my job this week was talking about "subterranean warfare", which some expert on subterranean warfare predicts will become the new blitzkrieg.

...that is obviously an overstatement but underground stuff does seem to be expanding pretty rapidly. The biggest reason is combat moving into cities - cities have a whole lot of underground passages and that provides a very useful potential avenue for maneuver. It isn't really combat engineering in the traditional sense and no one in the US at least has any idea what to do in that kind of environment so it will likely become a big capability development area in the next few years. There are also about a zillion tunnels and things on the Korean peninsula so people have been predicting giant underground battles there for years.

Also I thought that the nuke tests on ships didn't do nearly as much damage as they thought it would but I could be misremembering that.

I think I posted about the siege of Candia in the last thread, subterranean warfare was pretty big there. To quote:

quote:

Never before a mining war of such extent had been seen, and it wouldn't be surpassed until WWI 250 years later. An army of slaves and soldiers dug trenches, tunnels and mining ducts. On the besieged side, thousands of inhabitants and galley slaves dug tunnels as listening posts, for counter mines or to reconnect to isolated outposts. The technical achievements of the miners on both sides were remarkable: to avoid suffocation by mine gas or too much CO2, enormous bellows were constructed and spread throughout the tunnel complex in order to ensure a supply of fresh air. A network of pumps and tubes was to combat the constant ingress of ground water. Orientation was only possible by compass. Beneath the ground, a ghostly subterranean war commenced; the miners died by the thousands. When the Ottomans had reached a part of the city's fortifications, they would then try to destroy it by detonating up to 170 tons of powder underneath it. The Venetian troops on the other hand would try to destroy those mines with their own counter mines beforehand. Sometimes they were lucky enough to get their hands on an Ottoman mine before its detonation; they would then construct new tunnels and fill up their own, so that the blast of the explosion would be deflected towards the Ottomans. Below some especially contested sectors, multiple �stories� of tunnels would zigzag through the earth. When two tunnels met, bloody fighting ensued. The miners suffocated, got buried, crushed or burned alive, got shot, stabbed or blown up, or they drowned.

I cannot imagine how nasty a subterranean war would get nowadays. Or it's just robots duking it out instead?

# ¿ Mar 24, 2017 13:24

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Did you know that historians are all a bunch of useless shits who get their knowledge exclusively from books and write about nothing but war? Yes, *all* of them - at least if you believe this guy, a Republican stock trader who went into insane screeching mode when the BBC dared to show black people in a documentary about Roman Britain, got roasted bad by historians from all over the board and now spends all day ragetweeting about how every single historian is an idiot bitch fucker who has no idea how things work in the ~~real world~~. It appears that he's even writing an entire book in which he's proposing bold statements such as “historians are no rocket scientists“ and “working as a debt collector for the mob makes you a better historian than doing archival research“ (!?). Come for the insane rants, stay for hot takes like these:

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/910082341703471104

# ¿ Sep 22, 2017 10:35

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

I've done something vaguely similar to Hey gals work except that instead of 17th century mercenaries I worked with 18th century priests, and for the most part Google Maps is pretty poo poo for that sort of thing, actually. In my case I was lucky as virtually all of my dudes come from Bavaria, and the Bavarian government offers easy online access to really detailed maps both current and historical (which came in pretty handy when I had to find locations that were abandoned at a later date), so I had that tab open pretty much all the time to see whether a village named x could be found. In some cases you have to get creative though, especially when your sources get creative likewise with the spelling, and ofc place names can change over time as well (like what is today Merching in Bavaria used to be called “Bayermenching“). Here Google books was a great help, since people in the late 18th/early 19th centuries really loved their detailed topographic works. I'd estimate that in about 15-20% of cases I still was unable to pin down the exact location, especially when it was some generic name like Neustadt which appears dozens of times all over Germany.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2017 13:17

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

HEY GAIL posted:

i found it not that bad if you're willing to spend a lot of time checking misspellings

i bet my czechs are undercounted though

Maybe it's better in the Saxony/Thuringia area but at least in my case it would happen often that I would look for, say, an “Arnhofen“ and Google either gives me something that's way out of the region I'd expect it to be or nothing at all. In a lot of cases the Bayern Atlas would give me a much better answer. This was especially bad when it came to tiny hamlets or isolated single farms that sometimes aren't even mapped by Google and only appear on the satellite imagery there

# ¿ Sep 22, 2017 13:45

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Don't mind me, just dropping this insanely metal picture from the 30YW depicting the "horrors of war" here

(It's from this book cover if you're interested, click on the button with the red e to read the book)

# ¿ Nov 24, 2017 10:02

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

SeanBeansShako posted:

Haha, cute.

Oh well drat .

shine on your little drunk monkey bastard son.

Only somewhat related, but there is a gorilla in a zoo in Berlin right now who in 1959 came to Europe after being traded to the barkeep of a Marseille pub by a thirsty sailor in lieu of payment :v:

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 11:01

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Archaeologists found the early medieval grave of a man in Italy who had at some point lost one of his hands and replaced it with a loving knife prosthesis. There is no :black101:

big enough

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 19:06

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

iirc that thread was really good until it got taken over by clueless posters barging into the thread and raving about that loving Polish bear again and again

In PYF there�s also a �favourite historical fun fact� with plenty of cool posts; it�s been somewhat dormant for the last couple months though

# ¿ May 1, 2018 14:53

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Trin Tragula posted:

It's exactly the sort of thing that needs an English translation. I'm a fair way in and if nothing else it's refreshing to read someone whose thoughts for e.g. describing the political and military background of the long 19th century reach first and most comfortably to figures like Moltke the Elder and Bismarck instead of Disraeli and Lord Raglan. It's mostly generals-and-politicians, but ones who simply haven't had enough English-language attention.

(Along those rebalancing-the-score lines, also check out Jonathan Boff's "Haig's Enemy", about the career of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.)

Fun fact: Crown Prince Rupprecht probably would have had a real shot at restoring the monarchy after WW2, if the thousands of people shouting �Vivat Rex!� at him at his return to Munich in 1946 (iirc) were any indication, but the Americans wouldn�t allow it

# ¿ May 2, 2018 22:21

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

feedmegin posted:

You mean specifically the BavarIan monarchy not Germanys right?

Yeah. Bavarian federalist and even separatist sentiment has always been strong, and especially so immediately after the war. It honestly was a commendable achievement of everybody involved to keep Bavaria within the Federation (even though the state hasn�t formally accepted the German constitution to this day)

# ¿ May 2, 2018 22:51

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

HEY GUNS posted:

to be baptized five days after birth is unusually quick; Stanley Kozlowski may have been in poor health as an infant

Is it? At least during the Baroque it wasn�t uncommon for Catholics to be baptised very soon after birth no matter the health (and sometimes even before birth :haw:

). Three days afterwards was �normal� iirc, and sometimes it even happened on the same day. Which is why the mothers were almost never present at the baptism of their children because they were ritually prohibited from entering the church for a while after giving birth. I know that at least in southern Germany/Austria/northern Italy this was common until the late 19th/early 20th century, I�m pretty sure St John XXIII was one of those same-day baptisms for example and he was born in 1881.

# ¿ May 3, 2018 07:12

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

ChubbyChecker posted:

"All my money is spent"?

Even better, it's "all my money has been gambled away" :v:

# ¿ May 11, 2018 08:47

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Libluini posted:

I was talking about the spelling, "verspillt" isn't used in modern German, except apparently for Luxemburgian

Edit:

I don't know enough about Luxemburgian to say if "verspillt" has both meanings, like our "verspielt"

Everybody knows that the Bavarian "verspuit" is best anyway :cool:

# ¿ May 11, 2018 12:07

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Tias posted:

So I know I promised an effortpost on British antifascism, but it's probably not going to happen, because it's really not something I know a lot about, and i couldn't scrounge the litterature I needed

However, I have started a multi-part effortpost on the Swedish and Scandi neo-nazi movement, so if you want to venture into C-Spam (and I sure won't hold it against you if you don't), go check it out!

That was a cool post, thanks!

Would there be any interest in a similar effortpost detailing the history of right-wing extremism in Germany and Austria? This is something I�m interested in and yet know too little about, and writing up stuff is always a great incentive to learn new things

# ¿ May 11, 2018 19:01

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

I�m currently writing up an effort post that hopefully details where the constant bickering and political conflicts between Prussia and the rest during the Empire came from and how they fell out. I spend way too much time talking about pre-1871 though because that�s where my expertise is so you gotta deal with it :hehe:

# ¿ May 12, 2018 16:04

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

MANime in the sheets posted:

Yes please. I know there was all kinds of fuckery inside Germany, from the Crown Prince marching to his own drum to the various states quibbling constantly with Prussia and each other pretty much from the unification through WWII, but I don't know much about the details. I assume it's the same petty bullshit that the VA Confederate states had during the ACW.

Okay, this got way longer than I initially intended. I wanted to spruce it up a bit with pictures and whatnot but then I realised the Eurovision is on, so I fear that you�re on your own now! :v:

So, Germany has a long federalist history going all the way back to the early HRE. Various attempts by the Emperors to enforce central rule fell short every time, and both the eventual tripartition of the Empire along denominational lines and the other European powers playing watchdog so that no unified Germany would ever emerge made sure that things stayed that way.

Cue to the last seven decades of the HRE. After the accession of the throne in 1740, Frederick II pretty much kickstarted a Cold War between Prussia and Austria that every now and then also would turn hot; Protestant Prussia and Catholic Austria suddenly competed fiercely over power and influence in Germany, something whis hadn't really happened before where Austria had been the predominant power within the HRE for centuries. This was especially bad for the so-called "Third Germany", i.e. the innumerable other and smaller principalities and territories other than the big two, ranging from middle powers like Bavaria to things like the Imperial Valley of Harmersbach, where about 2000 peasants let themselves be governed by a literal innkeep. Much like the unaligned world during the 20th century Cold War, navigating the political minefield that now existed was both a huge opportunity (by securing political, military or financial support by one of the great powers) and a huge risk (by getting on the wrong side of one of the powers and getting invaded) for those smaller powers, who nevertheless as a general tendency were more likely to side with the Hapsburgs, mostly because Frederick didn't give two shits about the intricacies of the complex political framework that was the HRE, whose rules and traditions, at least in theory enforced by the Hapsburg Emperor, were in many cases the only things saving the smaller territories from getting swalloped up. One of their defence mechanisms was developing a strong "national" identity. It is this time and the political and cultural context of the 19th century, where German federalism and its multitude of highly localised identities really came into being.

The most powerful amongst the "Third Germany" was Bavaria, a country which shared much of its culture, going from religion to language to cuisine with its Austrian neighbours, which was the reason why its rulers felt especially threatened by Austrian expansionism. There were a lot of political intrigues and outright war between the two of them, and more than once the Wittelsbachs and the Hapsburgs almost reached a deal where they would exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, which however due to Prussian and French fuckery never went through. This precarious situation is one of the main reasons why Bavaria developed an especially strong local identity; the second-most powerful "Third Germany" states were Saxony and W�rttemberg, which for various reasons needn't worry as much about being absorbed into a culturally similar and much more powerful neighbour.

This situation endured even after the end of the HRE. Even though a ton of tiny principalities and imperial/ecclesiastical territories had been absorbed by various larger powers, the German Federation still consisted of 41 different states, and the conflict between Austria and Prussia still simmered on. The emerging romantic movement talked and wrote a lot about a mythical past and the importance of being connected to the soil you lived on, which was an important factor in further driving and shaping local identities, as was international tourism, which began to gather real economic importance especially in Bavaria and the Rhineland from the 1850s on. Nationalism was all the rage, and this didn't only affect the rising desire to unify all Germans in a common nation state, but also reinforced said local identities and "patriotisms". Bavaria had the added problem of having to construct a new overarching national mythos and identity after it had absorbed lots of culturally quite different areas in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, namely parts of Swabia and Franconia.

There's a last point I need to talk about here, and that's religion. While religious conflict had been almost fully channelled into passive-aggressive bickering and legal quarrels after 1648, the cultural gap between Catholicism and Protestantism grew ever wider during the 18th century, wider than it had ever been before. During the late 18th century, this changed however, when Prussia took on the mantle of the leading Protestant power from Saxony, which was close to Austria politically speaking and had never had the ability or the interest to get offensive when it came to religious matters. Prussia however infused the political conflict with Catholic Austria with a religious aspect, most visible during the Seven Years' War which was styled by Frederick's propagandists as a war for Protestant survival against Catholic onslaught.

This religious conflict reached a new level during the 19th century, when in the wake of the trauma of 1789 and secularisation, the Catholic Church went anti-modernist, and it went hard, with e.g. Pope Gregory XVI condemning liberal ideas like freedom of press, freedom of thought, gas lamps and railroads. Another facet of the intra-Catholic development was the effort by clergy and laity alike to create a strong and united Catholic front against any perceived threats from the outside; this gave rise to "ultramontanism", i.e. the idea that all Catholic life was international in nature with the Pope as its global centre. Early conflicts between Prussia and the Church came to a head during the so-called "Cologne Confusions", when Prussian forces in the freshly annexed Rhineland arrested the archbishop of Cologne. This created for a large uproar amongst German Catholics and was an important factor in them permanently identifying Prussia as the enemy, an impression which didn�t get better when Bismarck immediately tried to crush the Catholic Church in Germany after 1871.

Okay, we're finally getting to the second Empire. Through a bunch of shrewd political moves and three bloody wars, Bismarck managed to not only throw Austria out of Germany, but also to definitely establish Prussia as the dominant political power in Central Europe by crushing the militaries of all other German powers. Amongst pan-German nationalist circles there was a great deal of joy when a German nation state finally became reality in 1871 (even though Austria's absence continued to be a sore point), but in those smaller territories to Prussia's south, the mood was much more subdued. Nationalist verve and the dynamics of the unfolding political situation had forced their hand, but due to Catholic worries about Prussian dominance and the strong local identities that had emerged in the meantime, many people were highly critical of the new Empire. Even then, Bavaria almost refused to stay out of it, and Bismarck had to pretty much bribe King Louis II with enormous amounts of money to accept the incorporation into a Prussian-led Empire. Even though the letter which formally asked King Wilhelm I of Prussia to take the Imperial Crown was written by him on behalf of the other German states afterwards, Louis still absolutely hated it and refused to attend the coronation festivities, sending his younger brother Otto instead, who wrote from Versailles:

Letter from Prince Otto to his brother Louis II, February 2nd, 1871 posted:

O Louis, I can't begin to describe to you how immeasurably sad and painful this ceremony was for me, how every fibre of my being shuddered and revolted at what I had to see. It did, after all, go against everything for what I burn and which I love and dedicate my life to [...] Such a sad sight it was, seeing our Bavarians bowing to the Emperor; my heart wanted to break. Everything so cold, so proud, so pompous and ostentatious and heartless and empty [...]
Finally I managed to find my way through the crowd and out of the hall. In it I felt so cramped and anxious, only outside in the fresh air I felt at ease again. The ordeal was finally over.

He wasn't alone in this; many Catholic peasants resented the new Empire, and I remember reading about cases where people outing themselves as pro-Prussian in Bavarian inns during the months after the coronation were likely to get a good thrashing. Protestants however mostly rejoiced at the new Empire, which for the first time in German history represented an Empire in which Protestantism was the dominant religion. This is also why it was mostly Bavaria where resentment was the highest, because both Saxony and W�rttemberg were majority Protestant.

As part of the deal Bismarck prepared for the larger German states outside of Prussia, he negotiated various �reserve rights� with them. They varied depending on which state you were talking about. They were the most extensive in the case of Bavaria (no surprises there) and consisted out of a permanent vice presidency in the Bundesrat, its own post office, its own rail agency, its own diplomatic service outside of the Empire, and � probably the most interesting thing itt � its own standing army, and what more: The king got to remain commander-in-chief during times of peace. This wasn�t a given, seeing as the commander-in-chief of the armies of Saxony and W�rttemberg was the Kaiser, with the respective kings only being designated �Chef� (basically �boss� or �director�) of them.

Louis II never really felt happy in the new Empire, however. The feeling of having been robbed never left him, and his mounting mental issues didn�t help. He had his last public appearance in 1876 and receded into privacy, until he was declared mentally unfit to rule by his own cabinet in 1886 and died a mysterious death in the depths of Lake Starnberg soon afterwards (there are still quite a lot of people in Bavaria who maintain that it in fact had been a Prussian plot to assassinate him). His formal successor was his younger brother Otto, but as he had lost his marbles in the meantime too and spent his days tucked away in a secluded palace far away from the public eye, the actual successor was their uncle, Prince Regent Luitpold. Luitpold was far more amicable towards Prussia: Even though he had fought and lost against them during the war of 1866, he realised that the Prussian army was far more capable than the Bavarians and dedicated his later military career into reorganising the Bavarian army after the Prussian ideal. It was no surprise then that he worked as Bavaria�s representative at the Prussian military command during the German-French war. He never expressed too large an interest in politics and mostly appointed ministers that were sympathetic to Prussia. His unwillingness to seek conflict might be expressed in the fact that in 1890 he refused to host a Catholic convention in Munich, something which many of his subjects would have welcomed but which the Prussian government rejected.

Still, the relationship between Berlin and Munich never became really warm, probably also because Luitpold was forced to acknowledge the continuing negative sentiment amongst many of Bavaria�s Catholic lower and middle classes. This was for example reflected in the grand architecture of several large-scale building projects connected with the Bavarian reserve rights, e.g. the army museum or the ministry of transport.

Luitpold�s successor, his son Louis III, continued this ambivalent stance. While he wholeheartedly supposed Wilhelm II after 1914, domestically he had close ties to the Catholic Centre party, which wasn�t particularly well liked in Berlin, and his grand plans for Bavarian expansion after a victory in the war were less the ramblings of someone who drastically overestimated his own position but more the attempt to avert an even more powerful Prussia after said victory.

I�m not too sure about the other German princes, honestly. The Saxon kings were in a precarious situation because they themselves were Catholics ruling over a deeply Lutheran country, which occasionally led to domestic unrest and meant that they couldn�t go against Prussia too much. I know that King John (reg. 1854-1873) had been a proponent of a �Greater German solution�, i.e. a German nation state including Austria. King Charles of W�rttemberg (reg. 1864-1891) officially represented an anti-Prussian policy in the years before 1871, but it was an open secret that he was privately a friend of Prussia (much like it was an open secret that he had a gay love affair with an American he later ennobled under the title �Freiherr von Woodcock-Savage� which actually made sense and wasn�t the world�s most unsubtle innuendo but still, lmao). His nephew William II tried to distance himself from Kaiser Wilhelm, mostly because the Kaiser�s raving hard-on for everything military was seen as unsavoury and unbecoming. It�s also remarkable that William allowed the 1907 International Socialist Congress to take place in Stuttgart, which might also have been a subtle jab at Berlin.

The opinion of the common people always depended greatly on their own social standing, their religiosity and where they lived. Many Catholics both outside and inside of Prussia remained wary of Prussian dominance, and in return mostly Prussian Protestants emphasised that Germanness and Protestantism were one and that Catholics were second class citizens at best. While throughout the years and decades this rivalry slowly subsided as people got used to living in the Empire, it never really vanished altogether. It was especially the southern Protestant bourgeoisie that identified with Prussia and the German Empire the most, whereas Catholics and the lower classes were more likely to emphasise their local cultural identities that often were partially based on anti-Prussian sentiments, too.

I honestly have no idea about how all this expressed itself during WW1, though. I know that there was the occasional bickering between e.g. Bavarian and Prussian officers, but I can�t really say anymore. Does anyone here know?

# ¿ May 12, 2018 20:45

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

This is more denazification history (or rather the lack of it) than military history, but it's nonetheless pretty interesting and I thought it would fit best here. The Sch�tzen ('marksmen') of Tyrol can be traced back to the middle ages, when the peasants of the area got both representation in the Tyrolean diet and the right to carry weapons; this would later evolve into the "Landlibell" of 1511, in which Emperor Maximilian granted Tyrol the right to maintain a permanent militia whose principal purpose would be to protect Tyrol during times of war. When the double monarchy of Austria-Hungary fell in 1918, the Sch�tzen lost their military prerogatives and turned into a larger movement of local veterans' associations and from there on into folklore groups focussing on keeping their centuries-old tradition alive. Both in the Austrian north and the Italian south of Tyrol, the Sch�tzen are a vital part of local tradition and folklore and also wield quite a lot of political power; it is said that no Tyrolean politician would ever survive standing against the Sch�tzen and their demands (even though it is also said that in any given Tyrolean village only those enter the local Sch�tzen association who are too dumb to play music and too slow to join up with the local volunteer fire brigade); this is probably an important part of why both Tyrols are strong bastions of Catholic conservative politics with neither having had anything else than a conservative government since 1945.

For a group that's so deeply concerned with history and tradition, the official Sch�tzen chronicles turn weirdly tight-lipped when it comes to the years 1938-1945 in the north and 1943-1945 in the south, however. As late as last August, the official history of the Zaunhof Sch�tzen stated �During the war years 1938 [sic] - 1945, Adolf Hitler banned all clubs or associations, and so the Sch�tzen too had to cease", while their comrades in Achenkirch claimed that "[a]fter the invasion of Germany, the Sch�tzen get banned in North Tyrol as well; the carrying of flags, weapons or the traditional Sch�tzen clothing becomes illegal. Many of said flags and clothes get destroyed, while many Sch�tzen groups continue to exist underground". And it definitely seems believable at first - the Nazis disliked everything that didn't neatly fit into their own political and ideological structure, and their Italian fascist kin had made any kind of Sch�tzen activity illegal in South Tyrol as early as 1922.

Well, except...

Hitler with the Sch�tzen of Imst, 1938

Sch�tzen in Innsbruck, 1939

Gauleiter Franz Hofer meeting with representatives of the Volders Sch�tzen, date unknown

Sch�tzen parading through the streets of Brixen, 1944

Hmmm :thunk:

Yes, as it turns out the whole narrative of the proud Tyrolean Sch�tzen continuing to defend their Heimat against any foe and in this case the Nazis who would brutally suppress their old tradition is complete bunk. The Nazis were actually quite happy to instrumentalise an existing tradition if it fit into their ideas of racial purity and German fondness of their home, and the Catholic background of the Sch�tzen was nothing more than a thin veneer, quickly discarded once it became opportune to do so. No wonder then that among the first things the Nazis did after annexing South Tyrol in 1943 was to reinstate the Sch�tzen and make them part of the military defence plans they had set up for the area.

Denazification was woefully inadequate in Austria and virtually non-existent in South Tyrol. At both sides of the Brenner, the Sch�tzen came quickly to the conclusion that forgetting was the preferrable option here, and on top of that the bald-faced lie of Sch�tzen having to go underground in face of the Nazi onslaught emerged soon afterwards, a lie which was probably also propagated by the many Nazis that took on leading offices in various Sch�tzen groups after the war, like e.g. August Pardatscher, secretary of the South Tyrolean Sch�tzen union who had been one of Tyrol's highest-ranking SS officers.

Pardatscher (right) in Kaltern, 1958. He wears two iron crosses on his uniform as well as the close combat clasp in silver which was awarded for 25 instances of successful hand-to-hand fighting in close quarters. Next to him is Alois Pupp, governor of South Tyrol, commander of all South Tyrolean Sch�tzen and also a former NSDAP member.

The Sch�tzen only started to acknowledge their difficult past during the last five years or so. Well, when I say "acknowledge", I mean "ask a historian with a long history of writing romanticised depictions of Tyrolean history to write a history of the Sch�tzen under Hitler and then do absolutely nothing afterwards". The book was supposed to come out in 2015 but never saw the light of day, so I guess that not even a Sch�tzen-friendly historian like Michael Forcher was able to whitewash the whole affair enough to publish it.

The Sch�tzen aren't the only part of Tyrolean society that studiously avoided confronting its own Nazi past. Just a couple of years ago there was a (minor, as almost all media in Tyrol are closely connected to the government) scandal when the government of North Tyrol was shown to spend a lot of money honouring the memory of Tyrolean composers whose connections to the Nazi regime ranged from "conflicted" to "literally said that they want to kill all Jews". The latter composer, Joseph Eduard Ploner, was even called "the ideal Tyrolean" by the government-financed Institute for Tyrolean Musical Research. And one of Tyrol's most famous alpinists, the legendary Gunther Langes, was an SS member and a fanatical Nazi; in 1943/44 he led the Bozner Tagblatt, the only daily paper allowed by the Nazis in South Tyrol which was just full to the brim with war propaganda and really nasty anti-semitic stuff, but you would be hard-pressed to find much about that in German anywhere. Try his German wikipedia article:

quote:

During the Second World War, Langes, editor-in-chief of the Bozner Tagblatt, was considered a collaborator with the Nazi regime. For example, he was involved in the special mission "Claretta", which aimed at communication between Benito Mussolini and [his lover] Clara Petacci, who had been separatedat the time. On the other hand, Langes is said to have helped an Italian mountain guide, threatened by persecution by the Nazis, to flee to Switzerland.

That's literally all the German wikipedia has to say about Langes during that time. Contrast the (sadly unsourced, so take it with a grain of salt) Italian version:

quote:

At the outbreak of the Second World War, like many German and Austrian of his age, Langes was called up to serve in the territorial militia of the Wehrmacht. From September 1943 until August 1944, he was editor-in-chief of the Bozner Tagblatt, the only German-language daily of clear pro-Nazi inspiration, published in Bozen until May 1945. In the summer of 1943, at the fall of Fascism [in Italy], he became the trusted interpreter of General Josef Dietrich and then of the SS commander in Italy, Karl Wolff. He was entrusted with the delicate mission of creating a channel of communication between Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci who, after her release from Novara prison, had moved to Merano with her mother, father and sister. In October 1943 he organized, together with Wolff, the first stealthy meeting between Mussolini and his lover, at Villa Feltrinelli, which had become the seat of the Italian Social Republic a few weeks ago.

Forced to resign from the Bozner Tagblatt, after he had entered a collision course with the powerful Gauleiter and German military commissioner of Tyrol and Vorarlberg Franz Hofer, Langes asked to be assigned to operational roles instead. After a short stay in Berlin, at the head of the Reich Central Security Office, he was assigned to "Adria Kommando", a unit of the SS specialized in psychological warfare, based in Trieste.

A viciously anti-semitic article out of the Bozner Tagblatt issue of September 21st, 1943. The highlighted bit at the end reads: "The F�hrer has him [=Chaim Weizmann, a well-known zionist] and all Jews already given the reply that the result of this war will be the annihilation of all Jewry." At least online you won't find any mention of the nasty stuff Langes' newspaper put out on a daily basis.

I'll end this post with a funny tidbit I found: One of the composers honoured by the Tyrolean government was Sepp Tanzer, whose marches are still widely played by brass bands throughout Tyrol. This is Sepp Tanzer (crossed arms) with his musicians in 1943:

And this is literally the same troupe three years later (look at the flags):

System Metternich fucked around with this message at 01:51 on May 24, 2018

# ¿ May 24, 2018 01:48

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

I figure my ~~horrible wall of text~~ effort post about the world's first national socialist might also find some interest here, so I'll be super vain for a second and crosspost myself:

System Metternich posted:

Today I learned about the Marquis de Mor�s, a French aristocrat, cowboy, frontier ranchman, duelist, politician and arguably the world's first national socialist.

Antoine-Am�d�e-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa was born in 1858 in his family's palace in Cannes. He was the youngest in an old Sardinian dynasty which was forced to emigrate to France due to political unrest during the early 19th century. As was common for many Catholic aristocratic families of the time, men either became officers in the military or became priests. Antoine-Am�d�e-Marie-Vincent (who in the meantime had also inherited the titles of Marquis de Mor�s and Montemaggiore which led to him being best known simply as the Marquis de Mor�s) was no exception, and so (after his initial plans of joining the navy were dashed when he got sick right during the time of the navy's entrance exams) he went to St Cyr, France's leading military academy, to became an officer. One of his friends and classmates there would be a certail Philippe P�tain, French military hero of the First World War and leader of the collaborist Vichy government of World War Two.

De Mor�s in the uniform of a cavalry officer

After graduating from St Cyr and also a stint at Saumur, a military school for cavalry officers, de Mor�s was dispatched to the French colony of Algeria in either 1880 or 1881, where he and his men were to participate in the fight against Berber rebels. De Mor�s eagerly embroiled himself in state-sanctioned violence there, and also outside of the confines of warfare; he fought his first two duels there (probably against fellow soldiers who he felt had insulted his honour, although I couldn't find more info about it), both times killing his opponents. After his unit got recalled to its garrison, de Mor�s quickly got bored with military life and left during early 1882. This was probably also connected with his marriage to Medora von Hoffmann, the daughter of a rich New York-based banker who he had first met when she vacationed in Cannes the year before. Their wedding was an international event, and even then-Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII of Great Britain would number amongst their guests.

Medora von Hoffmann, later on often simbly dubbed "the Marquise"

Marriages between young men of nobility and the daughters from the rich bourgeoisie where anything but a rarity during these days; the aristocratic families got money and the bourgeoisie a good deal of social standing out of the deal. Here too, this marriage (which, to be fair, seems to have come from a genuine love between the two) proved to be a lucky strike for the Marquis. After he had abandoned his military career, de Mor�s dabbled in the securities market, which underwent enormous speculation at the time. When the bubble burst shorty afterwards, however, he had lost an enormous deal of money for which both his rich father and his even richer father-in-law had to spring in. After getting burnt like that in France, de Mor�s moved to New York and took a position in his father-in-law's bank.

His talents still wouldn't lie in high finance, however. De Mor�s grew frustrated with the lack of success and bored with his life of a representative son-in-law, to be proudly presented by his wife's father at cocktail parties to other members of New York's haute vol�e. Therefore it is no surprise that his meeting with his cousin Fitz-James should change his life. Fitz-James, who just came back from a hunting trip to North Dakota, was full of stories about the untamed wilderness, the rugged landscape and the simple and stern lives of the people there. De Mor�s was utterly fascinated, and just like that decided to quit his job and move to the Badlands of North Dakota, where he wanted to become a rancher.

The North Dakotan badlands

De Mor�s was nothing but a man of action, and so he and his wife did indeed go to North Dakota and started a ranch there, made possible by a generous 200,000$ grant supplied by his father-in-law and other bankers. In 1883, he founded a small village in what is today Billings County and named it after his wife; he also constructed a Catholic church and a 26-room house for himself and his family there, which locals quickly dubbed "Chateau de Mores". The small town of Medora grew quickly, with mostly people employed by de Mor�s on his ranch or in the beef plant he also constructed in the town living there; all the while, de Mor�s brought his aristocratic upbringing to the American west. Many people marvelled at the lavish lifestyle on display in their chateau, where he and Medora would regularly send out invitations to new gatherings and celebrations amongst fine porcelain, piano music and surrounded by numerous servants. All the while, de Mor�s also played the role of a frontier badass and liked to display his shooting and riding prowess for all to see.

De Mor�s in 1886

De Mor�s' plan was to circumvent the Chicago meat producers by directly transporting his beef in refrigerated train waggons to retailers further east. it wasn't the worst idea, but his lack of experience in business matters, his disinterest in the nit-and-grit of financing and negotiations and the simple fact that the meat market was already dominated by a relatively small number of very large and very powerful producers doomed the entire endeavour from the start. His ranch and meat plant were continually bleeding money (in addition to not properly understanding the market, he got continually scammed by other ranchers; to that came bad decisions like to purchase a "blood-drying machine" for ten grand which was used exactly once), all other attempts at setting up new businesses (amongst those attempts were a post carriage line, a railway company, a soap factory, salmon breeding, a tannery and even a shoemaker) failed and he also started to make enemies out of his ranchers neighbours when he started to surround his lands with barbed wire, directly violating the "open range" principle that was common then.

The locals soon grew annoyed with de Mor�s, whose deep pockets had initially made him popular. His antics as well as the arisocratic contempt he expressed for the "commoners" surrounding him earned him the name "crazy Frenchman", while his business practices infuriated not only his competitors, but also other ranchers on whose cooperation he depended. De Mor�s even ended up in a shootout with rivals where he killed a man, but he was eventually acquitted by the judge who ruled that he had acted in self-defence. Amongst the people he quarreled with would even be a certain Theodore Roosevelt, who had arrived in the area shortly after the de Mor�s family. Roosevelt nonetheless took a liking to the "crazy Frenchman" and would later go on to publicly defend him against accusations levied by the press.

Roosevelt (centre) posing for the camera in 1886, somewhere near Medora

For de Mor�s it was clear who was behind his continuing lack of success: the Jews! This wasn't exactly a surprising sentiment, seeing as anti-semitism ran deep amongst 19th century Catholics, and the new kind of rabid anti-semitism entirely divorced from religious reasoning had spread like wildfire throughout Europe since at least the 1870s. When his father-in-law, who had already pumped a good million dollars into the doomed venture, refused to supply de Mor�s with even more money, nothing was left for him but to pack up and leave the Badlands, returning again to France. Roosevelt wrote in the Bismarck Tribune:

quote:
Not broke. The Marquis is not broke. Neither in purse nor in family ties. He has lost money, but is far from banckruptcy or insolvence [...] The Marquis himself has a fixed income, from sources inherited. The father of the Marquis is a Frenche Duke respected throughout his country and able to save his son through any little difficulties like the Refrigerator Car Company failure.

He even mentioned the 18,000$ Medora's fur coat was supposedly worth. Still, it wasn't true: de Mor�s was totally broke, and now more than ever totally dependent on the continuous money stream sent his way by his father and his father-in-law. After his return to France in 1887, de Mor�s' father told him to do some travelling in Asia to get away from it all and maybe develop some new ideas about his future. De Mor�s and his family went to India (where he was hunting tigers with the Prince of Orl�ans) and Nepal for several months before coming back to France. On the ship that brought them home were also a lot of French military officers who came back from a tour in South-East Asia, where right at that time the French colony of Indochina had been formed after decades of bloody war against the local powers. De Mor�s was fascinated by their stories and developed the idea of building a railroad through the jungles of Vietnam, going from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Tonkin. He convinced the French government to support him and left for Indochina in late 1888, in his pocket an official army comission for the railroad construction.

French marine infantrymen near Tonkin, 1884

De Mor�s was haunted by bad luck during his newest venture, too. After a short stop in Hong Kong (where he is said to have duelled with the French eccentric and self-styled "King of Sedang", Marie-Charles David de Mayr�na) he quickly realised that building railway tracks through the impassable Vietname jungles was no easy thing to do. In addition to that, French political intrigue also negatively affected his mission. During the late 1880s, Georges Ernest Boulanger, a general of the French army, had developed an intense hatred of the Third French Republic. Boulanger took to the quickly developing field of popular politics (marked by elections and election campaigns in contrast to the aristocratic elites which mostly had done politics before) like a fish to water, combining wild diatribes against democracy with a seething hatred of all things German (due to the embarassing defeat of France at the hands of German troops in 1870/71). Boulanger drew an enormous amount of support both from anti-democratic royalists and radical traditionalist Catholics as well as socialist-leaning workers who were fed up with what they perceived as the weakness of the republic. In a sense, Boulanger was the world's first right-wing populist politician.

Boulanger, as photographed by legendary French photographer Nadar

It isn't surprising that Boulanger's dashing looks in uniform and his can-do, against-the-elites attitude made de Mor�s a huge fan of the general. At the same time, the French government was almost panicking; during Boulanger's height of popularity in 1889, they saw the serious possibility of him using his popular support to topple the government and install himself as military dictator. The new prime minister of the day eventually called Ernest Constans into his cabinet and made him secretary of the interior. Constans was a skilled politician and avid opponent of Boulanger (and largely responsible for Boulanger's eventual decline and fall), but until his appointment he had also been the governor of Indochina and hugely critical of de Mor�s' railroad project, which he saw as pointless and stupid. No wonder then, that Constans immediately cancelled the project and ordered de Mor�s to come back to France. Another one of his projects having gone up in smoke, de Mor�s returned defeated.

Back in France, de Mor�s fell in with a decadent crowd of aristocrats and gambled away so much of his remaining money that his family eventually took legal steps to separate him from his fortune, declaring him "incompetent and unable to handle money" (De Mor�s won the case against his father). In de Mor�s' head, feelings of hatred what he saw as a "Jewish cabal" controlling the economy and a weak democracy doing the Jews' (and Freemasons', of which Ernest Constans was one) bidding mingled with a general sense of betrayal. After he read �douard Drumont's two-volume bestseller Jewish France, he felt thunderstruck by the "revelations" he saw in there. He immediately contacted Drumont and offered him his cooperation, eventually joining up with Drumont's "Anti-Semitic League" and starting to write for the League's newspaper, the La Libre Parole.

A collage of Drumont and an 1899 issue of his newspaper. The various headlines read "The Traitor [=Albert Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who had wrongfully been accused of being a German spy] Convicted", "Ten Years of Detention and Degradation", "Down with the Jews!" and "Long Live the Army!"

De Mor�s' desire to be a man of action and not of words (he himself stated that "life is only valuable through action") led him to become even more active in the fight against his enemies. During 1890/91, he considered the huge success his hero Boulanger had had amongst the working-class areas of Paris and developed a vague political ideology of both extreme nationalism and anti-capitalism, grounded and combined by rabid anti-semitism. This wasn't exactly far-fetched, seeing as the traditionalist right in France had long harboured distrust and even hatred against Jews, whereas not a few French socialists identified Jews with the hated capitalist class. Maurice Barr�s, a right-wing journalist, admiringly called de Mor�s' brand of politics "national socialism". The term would stick.

De Mor�s admittedly rather vague political ideas nevertheless proved to be very popular. In 1891, he started what he described as his "shock troops" and would simply call "Mor�s and friends". The gang consisted of a wild bunch of anti-semitic anarchists, bored bohemians and workers of the Parisian meat packing plants, where de Mor�s' past as cattle rancher and meat producer managed to summon quite a bit of enthusiasm. De Mor�s and his disciples would clothe themselves in cowboy garb, wandering around the streets of Paris in red shirts and ten-gallon hats, vandalising Jewish-owned shops and terrorising the guests at the wedding of a Rothschild daughter. De Mor�s also invented vicious rumours of Jews selling rotten meat to the brave soldiers of Verdun on the orders of German intelligence; when a court ruled them to be wholly false and made up, this was entirely ignored by de Mor�s' many supporters. He seems to have been a charismatic public orator; for some of his speeches, up to 3,000 people came to cheer him on.

His love for fighting and duels only grew during this time. In 1892, he challenged Jewish MP Ferdinand-Camille Dreyfus to a duel, after Dreyfus had written in an article that de Mor�s wanted "Gaul for the Gauls, even though he had a Spanish title, a father with an Italian title, and an American wife who was neither Christian nor French." Dreyfus was wounded in the duel, but survived. Shortly afterwards, he was challenged to a duel by Jewish army officer Armand Mayer following a series of articles, in which de Mor�s had demanded to ban Jews from military service and written that:

quote:
In the Army there is an enormous majority which carries a feeling of instinctive repuslion towards to Sons of Israel. In them they recognise the usurer who consumes the ruin of the officer in debt, the supplier who speculates on the stomach of the soldier, the spy who traffics without shame in the secrets of national defence.

This time, the duel would end in death. Mayer, who supposedly wasn't in the best state even before the duel began, got his lung pierced by de Mor�s' sabre after only five seconds. He died the same day, and his funeral, conducted by the chief rabbi of France as part of a military funeral ceremony, drew tens of thousands of mourners. De Mor�s was shortly in the centre of national attention, but skillfully used it to only widen his appeal. he was tried for murder, but eventually acquitted. Thousands of his supporters cheered frantically when he emerged "victoriously" from the courthouse.

A contemporary depiction of the de Mor�s-Mayer duel from the title page of the Petit Parisien Illustr�

Emboldened by his recent successes, de Mor�s wanted even more. In 1893, he publicly called famous leftist politican Georges Clemenceau an English spy. Instead of challenging de Mor�s to a duel as intended, Clemenceau instead uncovered that de Mor�s had borrowed money from Corn�lius Hertz, a Jewish financier involved in the Panama scandal which rocked the French political establishment at the time and had been a large part of the Libre Parole's reporting for some time. Overnight, de Mor�s had not only lost all of his political friends, but also had become the laughingstock of the nation. Embarassed, he fled to Algeria the following year.

Back in the Sahara desert, where he had first gotten his taste for fighting and war, de Mor�s developed wild ideas about Anglo-Jewish finance controlling the world and corrupting the "Latin spirit". He reckoned that the local Muslims, which he had once fought, would be natural allies in France's fight against Anglo-Saxons and Jews and consequently set up the "Anti-Semite Party of Algeria". His political work there didn't amount to a whole lot, though; the local colonial authorities were for the most part friendly, but indifferent, and he never managed to regain his footing back in the motherland.

Frustrated, de Mor�s declared in 1896 that he would seek a "useful and glorious death". At the time, colonialist sentiments in France were running sky-high; proponents of colonial expansionism demanded a French Africa running uninterrupted from Dakar to French Somaliland (today's Djibouti), which was by nature in conflict with Charles Rhodes' vision of the British Empire going all the way from Cairo to Cape Town (in 1898, this conflict would come to a head with the Fashoda incident which almost led the two nations to war). During that time, the British also struggled with the Mahdi uprising in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan. De Mor�s envisioned a combination of French, Tuareg and Mahdist forces to oust the UK from Egypt and establish a French colonial empire throughout northern Africa, which the local Muslims would surely support out of their mutual anti-semitism.

De Mor�s decided to cross the Sahara in order to contact and convince as many Tuaregs as possible and also to eventually meet with the Mahdists in Khartoum. The French authorities advised him that an unexperienced explorer attempting to cross the Sahara during summer would surely end in death. The only concession de Mor�s would give was to start his trek from Tunis instead from southern Algeria.

'The Conquest of the Sahara' by Douglas Porch, p. 155 posted:
On March 20, 1896, he arrived in Tunis, and nine days later gave a public lecture in the Th��tre fran�ais which was attended by the commanding general of the Tunis garrison, several important officials of the Residency, and a crowd estimated at 2,000 people. They were treated to typical Mor�s fare, a call for a Franco-Islamic alliance to throw off the finanical yoke of England and open the Sahara to France: "That day will spell the ruin of England and put an end to the universal oppression of high finance." In a steadily rising tone, he painted for them a tableau of a Moslemn uprising in Egypt and India against Britain, so that from "Dunkirk to the valleys of the upper Nile officers will go off to serve to the cry of 'France and Liberty!'" Mor�s must have been an electrifying speaker, for the Th��tre fran�ais was by now fairly heaving with what the D�p�che Tunisienne described as an "enthusiasm which bordered on delirium." In this excited state the audience unanimously voted a motion of support for the Mahdi, who by that time had been dead for a decade.

De Mor�s set off to Khartoum in May, a time when temperatures in the Sahara were known to occasionally rise up to and beyond 120�F. He had coerced local authorities in supplying him with the necessary visas by threatening to publicly denounce them as agents of "Anglo-Jewish finance" and cabled to his anti-semitic friends back in Algeria that they were to seek reprisal amongst the "Jews of Algeria" should he die in the desert. De Mor�s also lied to both the authorities and the cameleers he had hires: While he publicly professed to only want to explore southern Algeria (the authorities didn't want him to enter Ottoman territory to the East in fear of him provoking an international incident), he instead started his journey from the Tunisian coastal city of Gab�s towards Khartoum.

When his cameleers learned about his real goal, they became extremely angry. On June 5, after reaching the small oasis of Mechiguig in southern Tunisia wher they were supposed to be paid off, they demanded more money. De Mor�s refused, and after a heated argument they left. Three days later, as arranged a number of Tuareg arrived, bringing with them some black porters and camels. Many of the camels were in poor condition, however, and de Mor�s almost immediately got into constant arguments with the Tuareg. On June 9, a number of his initial cameleers who had returned from the desert and the Tuareg accompanying him attacked de Mor�s. He tried to flee on his camel, but couldn't control the animal, and it would refuse to move. Frustrated, he the camel in the head with a revolver, upon which it fell on his rifle. De Mor�s was now limited to only his small handgun and soon was overwhelmed by his attackers, even though it was reported that his old skills as a shooter and duelist still served him well: He killed at least three of his attackers before being eventually shot himself and being left in the desert, where he died several hours later.

A propagandistic depiction of de Mor�s' death printed in the 1902 pamphlet L'assassinat de Mor�s ; un crime d'Etat ("The assassination of de Mor�s: A Crime of the State")

Two of his black porters managed to flee back to French Tunisia and brought news of de Mor�s' death with them. His body was recovered and buried in Tunis. His death sent shudders of outrage through the nationalist and colonialist press, which demanded bloody revenge exacted against the Tuareg as well as the English. The Archbishop of Tunis declared at his funeral that the "pirates of the desert" must be "eliminated", while Drumont (who had in the meantime forgiven his erstwhile friend for having received financial backing from a Jew) lauded him as a brave fighter against international Jewry. Medora, now widowed, started a movement to take his murderers (amongst whom she numbered also French officials in Tunisia) to court. No Frenchman got ultimately convicted, but two Tuareg were arrested and sentenced to death. In many other cases, the colonial authorities had done nothing against Tuareg who had been suspected of being complicit in the murders of French explorers (and indeed, sometimes did so with the implicit approval of the authorities who saw them as a good method of getting rid of annoying persons, of which de Mor�s certainly was one); this time they probably only made an exception in order to quell any further unrest spread by the late Marquis' wife.

Nowadays, de Mor�s is largely forgotten. Only the town of Medora, which still bears his wife's name, commemorates him in order to draw tourists eager to explore the life of the eccentric French aristocrat rancher having gunfights in the North Dakotan badlands (the tourist agencies' descriptions of his life mysteriously tend to remain silent about his later career, though). One thing is for certain, however: The world's first national socialist definitely had an interesting life.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Mor%C3%A8s

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Mor%C3%A8s

Marquis de Mor�s und seine Freunde

Blake, Michael: The Cowboy President. The American West and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, Lanham 2018.

Porch, Douglas: The Conquest of the Sahara. A History, New York 2005.

Hastings, Atherton: An Enterprise that Failed. Romantic Career of the Marquis de Mores, in: Wood County reporter (Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin), March 14, 1907, pp. 4-5.

Paxton, Robert: The Anatomy of Fascism, New York 2004.

System Metternich fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Aug 27, 2018

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 17:11

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

HEY GUNS posted:

why don't you post more, metternich

I'm content to watch and drop the occasional effort post, basically :v:

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 18:37

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:15

System Metternich: Feb 28, 2010; But what did he mean by that?

Squalid posted:

Appropriate fascism was founded by a rich failson, amazing how this trait has been carried on to the present day by his disciples.

Did later fascist specifically credit him for their own tactics and ideas, or is he more of a historical curiosity? Like did he directly inspire later movements or was he like one of those inventors who create some amazing new product but never market it, only for some more enterprising fellow to independently invent and popularize it later?

Not that I know of. As far as I can see he was somewhat influential in paving the way for the Dreyfus Affair which proved a turning point in France's political history and in itself laid the ground for the emergence of the Action Fran�aise, which some historians classify as the world's first fascist party, so there's that, but I don't think that he was anything of a direct inspiration; if I had to guess I would say that people like Drumont, Jules Gu�rin (de Mor�s' deputy in the League and later on one of the leading anti-Dreyfusiards) and Charles Maurras, the founder of the AF mostly remembered him fondly as one of the first ones to take action against those darn Jews, but nothing more.

I also would hesitate to classify him a "fascist". While he definitely is one of its progenitors, Paxton argues pretty convincingly imo that fascism cannot really be thought without WW1 and its aftermath (caveat: I'm only like halfway through his book yet, so correct me if I misunderstand his arguments). I guess the most one could say is that in the highly varied currents of political/cultural thinking (or "feeling", because fascism is way more emotionally charged than based on theoretical musings like e.g. marxism is) which emerged in Europe throughout the late 19th century and which would eventually combine into early fascism he was a relatively early and definitely very colourful representative.

sullat posted:

What makes him a national socialist as opposed to, say, an rear end in a top hat imperialist?

Those were Barr�s' words, not mine! :v:

I guess it's his combination of anti-capitalist rhetoric coupled with fervent nationalism as well as him explicitly fishing in proletarian waters for his political movement; also keep in mind that at the time this combination was still somewhat new and unheard of, so it's not surprising that Barr�s would choose to call him that, imo. He also distinguishes himself from the imperialist movements that came before, weren't necessarily tinged by anti-semitist conspiracy theories and were as much a project of the established elites as they were a product of mass politics. Later imperialist/colonialist movements were much more formed in his image, though, cf. for example the Pan-German League or the Navy League which from the 1890s on steadily underwent a process of self-radicalisation and increasing anti-semitism.

System Metternich fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Aug 27, 2018

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 19:34

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Military History Mk. III: One that I know of is an archaic word for dick, another is