Category: History

Revision

History, Wars & Other Fun Games

I have to say that I’ve always thought that WWII’s Operation Market Garden was actually a very successful military campaign, and not the horrible failure as it’s been painted.  And this guy agrees with me:

In fact, the operation succeeded at six of its seven principal objectives, a rate of achievement that would be considered remarkable in almost any other military context. The American 82nd Airborne Division, under Brigadier General James Gavin, faced the daunting task of seizing the great road bridge at Nijmegen across the Waal River, one of the widest river crossings in Western Europe. They did so after brutal urban combat and a daylight assault river crossing in canvas boats under direct enemy fire, one of the most audacious tactical actions of the entire war.7 The bridge was taken intact even after the Germans tried to blow it up. The 101st Airborne Division, led by Major General Maxwell Taylor, seized the majority of its assigned bridges and canal crossings in the southern portion of the corridor and held the vital road that the operation depended on, quickly dubbed “Hell’s Highway” by the soldiers who fought along it, against repeated and determined German counterattacks. British armored units of XXX Corps advanced deeper into occupied territory in a shorter period than in any previous operation in the Western campaign. The scale of what was accomplished tends to disappear in the shadow of Arnhem, but it was genuinely extraordinary, representing the successful coordination of tens of thousands of men, hundreds of aircraft, and an armored column driving north along a single road through hostile country.

I have read a ton of history on the topic — WWII is very much a period of history near to my heart — and I think that too often Market Garden is used a lot by American historians to have a go at Brit Field Marshal Montgomery.  (He’s too often caricatured instead of appreciated.  Not that I have a problem with that, in general terms, because he set himself up for it pretty much all the way through the war.  But we tend to forget that the reason Monty was so cautious a military commander was that he was faced with the stark fact that British and Commonwealth manpower’s losses were, to use the modern term, quite unsustainable.)

Going back to Market Garden:  it may well have been a bridge too far (Arnhem), but its only real failure was that even if it had been a total success, it’s doubtful that it would have been the war-ender that Montgomery believed it would be.

I await Reader Sage Grouch’s informed opinion on this.

Null Set

History

From that Yglesias twat:

Name one.

Seriously.  I have studied Nazi Germany extensively for well over half a century — both as an amateur historian* and as a serious student (as part of my Western Civ major) — and I’ve yet to come up with a single Nazi “idea” that can be called good.

And I don’t accept the red herring about aeronautics and blitzkrieg, for instance.  Those were engineering and military ideas conceived by Germans, not Nazis;  and in many if not most cases, they predate the NDSAP’s assumption of power in 1933.

If you exclude any “good” Nazi ideas that weren’t related to making war, propaganda or genocide more efficient, or furthering the Nazis’ obsession with race, you’re not going to find any.

Ich habe Dachau gesehen.

Oh, and please don’t even think of the “medical advances” made by using concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs, because that just turns my stomach.  Ditto the “miracle” of keeping their industrial centers going despite the Allied bombing, which they achieved only through extensive use of slave labor.

So as a piece of provocative writing, Yglesias’s little statement is cute — but it’s also specious.  The Nazis had no good ideas, and to even suggest they did is either malicious or moronic.

*I first read Shirer’s Rise And Fall back when I was in high school, and have re-read it maybe a dozen times since.  Ditto works from Erich Manstein and a host of other military figures.  Even that slimy little shit Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich  has been on my bookshelf.  And the lasting impression from all of them is that the Nazis were absolutely hopeless, at everything.

Turning Back A Page

History

As you may remember, I went back to university in my mid-fifties to get a college degree, ending up with a B.A. in Modern Western European History.  There’s no reason for having specialized in that as opposed to say Classical History (which I had studied before, many years ago), because to me, pretty much all history is interesting.

Anyway, one of the courses I took was on the French Revolution, delivered by one of my favorite professors, Michael Leggieri*.  He opened the course by giving a single lecture on what exactly the French were revolting against.  It wasn’t just the monarchy and the Church they hated so much (with, it should be said, considerable justification), but theirs was a reaction to the entire societal structure, which was largely still medieval and had the effect of not only grinding the noses of the common people into poverty, but preventing them from ever rising out of that miserable state.

Small wonder they went all French (i.e. overboard) and took a long trip down Guillotine Road.  I might have done the same, in their position.

Anyway, Leggieri’s lecture lit a spark in me (as so many did), because I had no more than a passing acquaintance with the period between the Dark Ages and said Revolution in Europe.

Sadly, Life intervened and I wasn’t able to devote much time to studying that period… until now.  I was chatting to New Wife the other night, and told her that I’d been doing a lot of reading while she was gadding about Seffrica with the Beloved Grandchildren.  When she asked me what I’d been reading and I told her (history, duh), she ordered me to go to Half Price Books and get more because Aren’t You Sick Of Reading About The Same History All The Time?

Well, no;  but the point was a valid one.

So off I went, and the first book to catch my eye should be a decent gateway, I think, into further study:  the New Cambridge Modern History VII:  The Old Regime 1713-63.  It’s seems like a fairly comprehensive study, I think (after but a cursory glance at the contents pages), but it should set the scene properly.  This work was first published in 1957 so it may be free of modernistic cant, but we’ll see.

And now, if you’ll excuse me… this book isn’t going to read itself.

*I see that Mike Leggieri has left U. North Texas and ended up at the University of Florida as Professor of War, Strategy and Statecraft at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.  They are lucky, because he’s one of the best — and that’s not just my opinion, either.  (He’s also very conservative, which helps.)

Stolen This, Taken That, Expropriated Another

Geography, History, Lies and Untruths

I’m getting heartily sick of all the bullshit surrounding this whole “stolen land” concept.  I was reminded of this while watching some Australian TV show (out of the corner of my eye:  New Wife was doing the actual watching) where the opening credits revealed that the show’s cast and producers were aware that the show was being filmed on lands that were originally the home of some unpronounceably-named tribe of Aborigines, and wanted everyone to know how they respected that “heritage”.

Given that Australia’s aborigines are amongst the most “unsettled” populations on the planet — they are nomadic to an extent almost impossible to describe — that struck me as a little rich.  Most of all, what got my goat was the tone of the statement:  semi-apologetic, cringing and guilty are the words that come to mind.

We have the same bollocks much in evidence Over Here.  The history of this entire world is a story of migration, settlement, wars over territory and Tribe A taking land from Tribe B — bloody hell, they’re still fighting the same wars in the Balkans — but it’s only recently that the arguments over who owns what have become a third-party issue rather than something that the involved parties settle between themselves.  Or, to put it in a more scholarly fashion:

Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who were displaced by force somewhere in their lineage. Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who displaced other people by force somewhere in their lineage. It’s an inevitable fact of human history. American natives fought with each other over land and resources, and some tribes, like the Dakota (Sioux), were notorious for attacking their neighbors. Europe’s history is rife with such, from the Vikings to the Norman invasion of Britain. In fact, few if any of the people of Europe today are the original inhabitants of the land they reside on now; the one exception may be the Basque of the Pyrenees Mountains, but even they, at some point, came there from somewhere else. The French people we know now derive their name from the Franks, a Germanic tribe, and as for the British Isles, that motley group of islands has seen so many invasions, from Picts to Celts to Romans, Saxons, Anglians, Jutes, and Normans, that it would be difficult to keep track as they go by.

Here’s the simple response to all the handwringing and aggrievement over the “stolen land” claims:  get over it, because you’re never going to get it back.  End of story.

And to a lesser extent, the same is true of “cultural appropriation”:  where White kids are somehow forbidden to wear their hair in those disgusting dreadlocks because Africans somehow have “ownership” of a hairstyle.  What bullshit.  It’s like saying that Black people can’t drink Scotch whisky because whisky is traditionally a product of the northern provinces of (lily-white) Britain, or that the Irish can’t eat chips because potatoes originally came from America.

Everyone borrows cultural artifacts and customs from everyone else.  That’s been the habit of mankind for millennia, and no cries of outrage can overturn it.

When it comes to land, the stronger group has taken it from its “original” (and sometimes not-so original) weaker inhabitants.  That this activity has become somewhat less egregious and bloody in recent times does not gainsay its basic premise — and where it has become more bloody, the weaker continue to learn its hard history — as the “Palestinians” are (re-)learning in their efforts to eradicate the state of Israel.  (They’re unlikely ever to give up, which simply means that Israel will be forced to teach them the same lesson again and again, ad infinitum.  As I’ve said many times before, the Arabs are lucky that the Jews have an inexplicable aversion to genocide, or else “from the river to the sea” could easily have changed to “from the Golan to the Suez”.  Vae victis  — a Latin expression — has particular currency here.)

So enough with the kowtowing (a Chinese expression) to the Perpetually Aggrieved.  Fuck off, all of you, and make the best of what you’ve got.  Heaven knows, most of what you can achieve comes courtesy of Western civilization.

You’re welcome.

Propaganda Effect

Bad News, History

This was a letter sent to the Daily Mail:

I feel my whole world has turned into a dystopian nightmare. What prompted me to write was that video made by Dawn French. She put on a babyish, whiny voice to mock the agony Jewish people are going through, and reduced the horrors of October 7, 2023 to ‘a bad thing’.

It was so awful it actually made me cry.

Every day I see celebrities such as Benedict Cumberbatch signing letters of protest saying Israel has no right to defend itself – and, honestly, it’s intolerable. Do they all hate Jews so much?

All sense of security in my life has disappeared. Who I once was has gone. This is being a British Jew today in the UK.

My mother’s family goes back five generations in England and I am a typical Yorkshire lass – and Jewish. Now I feel like a stranger in the only country I’ve ever known. Just because of my DNA.

Old friends start to withdraw, get too busy to see you or just ghost you. Other friends, in all industries, are losing contracts, not been hired, ignored by workmates, abused on social media.

You switch on news reports you know (first-hand) are at best biased and at worse false. Politicians such as David Lammy and many Labour backbenchers clearly hate Israel – which is the Holy land of the Bible and the Torah. Everywhere we Jews are lied about and (even worse) narratives are changed to fit centuries-old lies.

I have a friend who is a secondary school teacher. After October 7 she endured daily racial slurs by her students. Her union and the administration didn’t support her, so she felt she had no choice but to leave her job.

I know of two people whose clients have left them as they ‘can’t work with someone who supports that country’. Israel, the elephant in the room for all Jews. Whether we feel connected or not, wherever we live, we are all judged by that.

Worldwide, Jews like me are now realising just how the Holocaust happened. A constant drip of misinformation and prejudice set the groundwork for Kristallnacht and the camps. I still cannot believe that this is happening to us – to me – as British as Les Dawson and Yorkshire pudding. But it is.

Jewish friends constantly discuss where they will go when they have to leave Britain. Where would we be safe? This in 2025 in the UK. I am so afraid, depressed, let down, stateless and terrified for the future – especially for my teenage child.

“Jews like me are now realising just how the Holocaust happened.”

Says it all, really.  What was once pretty much a “German” or even “European” thing is now international.

As for me:  anger does not begin to describe how I feel about all this.  And I’m not Jewish.  All I can say is what I’ve always said:

If you come for the Jews, you have to get past me first.

Added:  you motherfuckers.

And by the way:  don’t bother telling me that your beef isn’t with Jews, but with Israel.  That little bit of maskirovka  doesn’t work any more.