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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Re: that quote from Nimitz, the "Hero of Midway": talk about the HAM SANDWICH RACE
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Feb 6, 2022 13:57
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Dreddout posted:Mike Duncan claims there's no evidence for this on his podcast. In fact he adds that the allies wanted the reds to win the civil war. wtf units like the czech legion are very well documented and actual survivors of the campaign would talk about having been in that campaign what's his angle? that there was no concerted intervention?
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Feb 15, 2022 23:59
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also the establishment of the soviet union was a *huge* deal to european labour movements parties shattered in the wake of the great war and the third international was one of the big alternatives for a while. the KPD, a party openly taking orders from moscow, was a major force in german politics soon after being utterly crushed in the failed german revolution. the french communists under thorez were quickly established as a 10% party with a credible programme for taking over the government. the italian communists were strong enough that italian elites decided to go with the fascists. in the US and UK the soviet revolution didn't find many adherents, but it had huge consequences in terms of crackdown and even in britain they did an actual general strike before chickening out. revolution was very much in the air in the years following the bolshevik seizure of power
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Feb 17, 2022 09:00
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they should be proud to sacrifice for a great empire like ours, much like i, count Inbred von Richenfield have over the years
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Feb 18, 2022 10:41
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this picture does not look like what he's talking about those poles are very thin and if these are prisoners they're very poorly secured or trussed up in a frankly inexplicable way. the picture looks more like dummies to me
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Aug 10, 2022 00:56
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just the figure of oswald is weird and suspicious and almost certainly involved with the US security state i don't know much else, but everything about the guy screams "asset", from his sojourn to the soviet union to his incredibly odd fair play for cuba stuff to his sudden and effortless association with people way out of his social league who were also themselves incredibly spooky
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Sep 5, 2022 11:07
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the US state pre-civil war had a completely disproportionate amount of southern slaveholders in its elite, and sympathy was very high for the southern cause. in addition to this, before lincoln took office the military readiness of the Union was facing outright sabotage by southern sympathisers. lincoln no doubt made some mistakes and bad calls, but his general strategy seems to have been mostly limited by the actual power of his position, not incompetence or malice. seconding the recommendation of the radio war nerd US civil war series, as far as i can tell it's very very good
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Oct 14, 2022 10:35
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probably they occupy paris after an extended battle, france's government collapses in a series of coups and revolutions and france has to bow out of the war. this means that the entente can be shoved off the continent (they would also have to knock italy out, but lol) and threaten the suez canal to make up weight against the blocade, but it's not inconceivable that the war could end on reasonably favourable terms for the germans in, like, 1919 or 1920. whether they at that point would have the capacity to seriously intervene in russia without risking revolutionary violence in their own country is not clear, nor is the political stability of germany after an even longer period of war and deprivation, but it's not imo *inconceivable*.
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Nov 30, 2022 13:20
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Weka posted:Isn't black pete supposed to be a Moor? Stupid Hollanders can't even do racism right. nah zinterklaas is the moor, black pete is presumably his slave Orange Devil posted:Speaking of Zwarte Piet, even the most backwards places' official Sinterklaas committees are phasing out the previous standard look for a new look. The "obvious white person smeared with soot" look is set to be the new standard (as opposed to fully black with red lipstick and big golden earrings). I expect the last holdouts to give way in the next 2 or 3 years at most, at which point it will have been 15 years since the current protests began. the soot look (or, like, a particularly filthy kid playing with ink) has been the standard for the black pete character in norway since at least the fifties. he plays a much smaller cultural role here than in the netherlands, but among people of my age he's still a reference people get - the dutch version genuinely surprised me when i learned of it
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Dec 22, 2022 23:39
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Is the war in Ukraine starting to give off just the slightest "Spanish Civil War" vibes or is it just me? not a lot of "non-intervention" going around, so how do you mean?
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Jan 5, 2023 12:34
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the most compelling reason i've read for the officer purges is that the red army remained somewhat opaque to the Party leadership and that armies in general are kind of reactionary institutions to begin with. you have this big power base of often career military guys, many with tzarist backgrounds and many of whom have suspect communistic fervour, over which you don't really have control. add to that that the guy who really mastered the institution was trotsky, whom you've chased halfway across the world, and you have ample grounds for paranoia. additionally, by necessity a lot of these officers maintained contacts with foreign officer classes to stay up-to-date on recent developments in doctrine, including in some cases (such as tukhachevsky) that of nazi germany. there's a lot of things which would concern a rational person, and the bolshevik way of handling worry was often rather proactive. this obviously doesn't justify the brutality and arbitrariness of the purges, but it does imo make sense that an organisation like the communist party of the soviet union under stalin would be deeply worried about the army starting something and want to take measures. the political officers didn't really cut it, and ideally you don't want a separate officer class at all because they're inherently reactionary. so they made the point in an extremely ugly way.
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Jun 27, 2023 08:37
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bolshevism was an ultramodernist position - there was a real conviction that they'd discovered the fundamental laws of historical development and through scientific investigation could reorder society under rational lines. it's an almost millenarian impulse, and forged under the conditions that vyelkin has noted estimating the number of counterrevolutionaries based on some kind of statistical inference is par for the course; misunderstanding the incentives of the junior officers involved is less forgivable
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Jun 27, 2023 17:42
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Raskolnikov38 posted:i'm not sure if he's written anything about internal soviet dynamics but vladislav zubok's failed empire's central thesis is that the soviets inherited and continued aspects of tsarist foreign policy i think a fair amount of foreign policy effectively amounts to playing the geographical and demographic hand you're dealt certainly one could make parallels between the warsaw pact and imperial russia's "gendarme of europe" policy, but a lot of the basic outlook is more or less determined for you
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Jun 27, 2023 23:56
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nuclear weapons are, i feel, meaningfully distinct from mass conventional bombing raids
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Jul 26, 2023 22:03
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stasi-levels of surveillance are basically quaint to everyone with a computer on the internet. our saving grace is that western states are not technically allowed to use a lot of this stuff on "real people", i.e. citizens of western countries, but that nicety is going away as soon as something sufficiently important comes along
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Aug 30, 2023 11:53
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official russian imperial ideology held that there were a bunch of slav-taxa and a big russian-taxon within that. the big russian-taxon included white russians (belarusians), great russians (russia-russians basically) and little/small russians (ukrainians) among others iirc what they would consider little-russian is meaningfully distinct from the galician identity which forms a good deal of the present official ukrainian national project, in particular wrt religion (galicia was mainly catholic whereas little-russians were to my knowledge mostly orthodox). there was also a clear idea that little-russians/ukrainians were distinct from great-russians to some extent, but not as distinct as e.g. russians and south slavs. the national question in the russian empire was a genuinely difficult problem for the russian revolutionaries and they ended up with a pretty spacious interpretation in the bolshevik nationalities policy. by my understanding - which may be wrong - it's sort of like seeing danes, swedes and norwegians as "brother peoples" within the broader germanic context. there are meaningful differences between the three, but everybody agrees that scandinavia is a Thing and that all these groups have a lot of commonalities, and that e.g. germans and dutch people are a part of a greater outgroup.
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Feb 24, 2024 01:14
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i say swears online posted:are icelanders czechs or slovenes here i don't know enough slav lore to say but probably some weird holdover from the novgorod period
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Feb 24, 2024 01:25
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keep in mind that iceland is one of those countries that exist because the brits found it convenient to have a small country in a particular location
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Feb 24, 2024 01:29
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the degree of homogeneity in us culture and dialect is honestly astonishing to me it's a country spanning a continent with a population of 300 million with a difference of attitude and language which i find completely approachable as a citizen of a polity almost a hundred times smaller
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Mar 3, 2024 03:59
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StashAugustine posted:https://twitter.com/alex_orlov_/status/1764249660678414555?t=mi7Rv5g7HDack-uJnCkQYw&s=19 lenin was a huge fan of the theremin, possibly the coolest instrument of all time
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Mar 4, 2024 21:51
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vyelkin posted:in 1962 Khrushchev went to an art exhibition as an overture to civil society and he responded by calling modern art dogshit, and then a few weeks later to try and cool the whole thing down he invited 400 artists to come hear him speak, including Ernst Neizvestnyi, and then this happened: one does have to acknowledge the purity of this reaction, even if it reveals some Problematic things about the one who has it
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Mar 4, 2024 23:09
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the soviets took art so seriously, even when they had no taste at all
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Mar 4, 2024 23:11
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purges as a political mechanism are mainly there to keep the political organisation focussed and loyal to the leadership. i don't think there's much indication that a trotsky-like permanent revolutionary struggle would've helped much, but certainly it's possible to imagine that the politburo could not have ruled as effectively as it did without a degree of terror and internal discipline. there's also the general politisation of all spheres of social life as people try to abolish market or pseudo-market forces, which leads to weird manifestations like lysenkoism. this is imo an issue socialists should be thinking about, because resource allocation and public discourse become real problems when you abolish the generalised low-grade violent discipline of a market system. that said, there was a serious problem with elite generation in the soviet union, particularly in its later phase. it's not obvious to me that more purging would've made this better - it manifestly failed to get rid of kruschev (if he's a part of this issue, which is at least arguable) and placed a psycho reactionary like beria very nearly in charge of the whole endeavour - but something should've been different.
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Apr 16, 2024 20:48
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academia follows the general funding flows like anything else and i'm sure that there's plenty of careers to be made in soviet-colonial studies or whatever, but ime academics do tend to at least at some point in their careers care about professional standards that said explicit anticommunism is a huge selling point in western academia and has been since at least 1917
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Apr 17, 2024 22:00
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imo a lot of the penetration of e.g. hannah arendt (a fine intellectual in her own right, but there are many fine intellectuals with nowhere near her impact) is specifically because she produces a plausible account of illiberal social movements where the "illiberal" part is the main motivating force, thus providing a reason to say that the soviets are basically as bad as hitler. this creates the groundwork for a unified bourgeois theory of politics, which is tremendously useful in the context of the cold war
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Apr 17, 2024 22:06
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vyelkin posted:as long as there's right-wing money funding research there will always be a place for tim snyders and anne applebaums and richard pipeses, but it's not the 1960s anymore and it's just as naive to think they're the only game in town as it would be to think they don't exist at all. Hell, Snyder for instance doesn't even bother writing academic work anymore, he's a pure "public intellectual" now because he gets savaged by reviewers whenever he tries to do bad history it's not just right-wing money in the sense of explicit pressure groups and billionaires etc funding research, it's the whole research council/grant structure and the refined modern career track model which at least in my field has what i think is a pretty clear mainstreaming and application-oriented effect basically there has to be a broader interest in the results you're aiming to produce, which leads to a very strong structural conformist bias. i don't think this is particularly new (the positivism debates remain very relevant imo) but i think that it is very real and leads to overproduction of work that suits the political climate relative to its strict academic merit. part of this is the death of the intellectual natural scientist (there is no gould, lewontin or haldane in our time, let alone an einstein or a monod) as a species, but i think that another part of it is the almost complete disappearance of the opposition intellectual and the near extinction of marxists from most relevant sections of the academy - particularly history, economy(!) and sociology.
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Apr 19, 2024 18:00
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Some Guy TT posted:
he was more of a franco-style reactionary than an actual fascist. every finn i've met who wasn't specifically ideological likes him on some level, but generally not without hemming and hawing a little bit
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May 3, 2024 17:06
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:18 |
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the mythology of ww2 in europe is deeply pernicious in ways which i have only relatively recently started to fully comprehend
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May 4, 2024 14:02
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