Revenge, Retaliation And Destruction

The terror attack by Hamas on Isreal was, for a few brief hours celebrated by some Islamists and Palestinian supporting mobs worldwide ....

Some Celebrated The Hamas Attack October 2023

... while the civilised world was just shocked at the barbarity of the terrorists actions. Hamas, despite all the evidence, has since denied the atrocities that the world saw being committed (no links here, the scenes are too horrific) ... they apparently think we are all as stupid as their followers.

1938 Revisited

The announcement by President Putin of Russia that he recognised the breakaway Russian backed Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk as separate states, was in one sense, only a confirmation of the facts on the ground ....

Russia Has Recognised The Rebel Regions As States

..... Russia had backed the Russian rebels in those two Ukrainian provinces since 2014, and was never going to allow the Ukrainian forces to recapture the land currently held by the rebels.

Twilight Of The Trump

Well is anyone surprised?

Trump - His Legacy?

I mean of course that the Trump Presidency is ending in violence, bloodshed and political chaos?

All Quiet On The Western Front

I had an email asking if I was 'avoiding Brexit and UK politics', having had so much to say about it until the last 18 months?

 

British Politicians Often Fail In Europe

 

Well the answer is 'Yes', I am avoiding it.

Whats In A Name?

In Peru and across Latin America, names based on well-known historical figures are very popular. In neighbouring Ecuador, for example, the president's name is Lenin Moreno.

Lenin Moreno Not Alone There Are 18,464 More ...

That country alone has over 18,000 people named Lenin registered since 1950, comparatively the United States, with 20 times the population of Ecuador, has fewer than 1,700 Lenin's.

Ideological Clashes

I am a sucker for these types of weird electoral battles and name coincidence stories ....

Hitler Versus Lenin - A Battle Of Wills

So when I read that an unusual mayoral race was under way, it reminded me of other odd reports that I have posted on before.

Small People Are No People At All

....Well that's the sentiments of many. As Randy Newman sang ..... Short people got no reason to live, they wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet. They have nasty little ideas. Don't want no short people 'Round here
 

Captain Mannering Had A Small Person Complex With Sergeant Wilson

... reflecting the idea that small people cant be trusted, and that small men in particular are prone to the 'Napoleon Complex'.

History By Numbers

In a story that's going to wind up at least one reader that I can think of, the Dutch pharmacist and retail chain Kruidvat has been forced to apologise, after it unwittingly sold a colour-by-numbers book that upset some customers.

We Don't Do History By Numbers

The book was supposed to show 'famous people', and such significant historical figures as Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln.

Risk Taking Strategies

Whenever we face something new, its natural to look it carefully over, test it, and then use it if it proves useful to us.

Avoiding Change Can Be A Good Strategy .....

 

However, when we are faced with changes at work, changes often imposed by someone 'who knows better than you', about how you should work, if you don't embrace it wholeheartedly, you are accused of being 'resistant to change' ... as though its a bad thing.

 

Food Of The Gods

With elections in the air, and the UK about to vote for its own Benevolent (Elected) Dictator, the question that popped into my mind was what do dictators like to eat? Well normally who cares, but as we have dealt with their pets it seems a suitable to finish off on their eating habits .... a recent book 'Dictators' Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants' has divulged the tyrants choice of meals.

Now That's A Chicken Fit For Any Dictators Table

 

Interestingly, as most modern dictators (of the peoples revolutionary kind), were of peasant stock, their food choices often reflected this (a bit like me with my love of Beans on Toast!). 

 

• Antonio Salazar of Portugal, loved sardines (that dish reminded him of his impoverished childhood, when he had even had to share one between him and a sibling).

World Turned Upside Down

When Communism ended (although not it seems totalitarianism), in Eastern Europe, it might have been expected that there would  be some sort of swing to the right, but maybe not quite as far as seems to be the case. After all the old USSR had fought a bloody four year campaign against Hitler's Nazi Germany, which had scarred the collectivity memory of a generation of post war Russians in the USSR.

To many of the former population of the Soviet Empire, it would seem almost sacrilege to embrace the ideology of the Nazi's, in what after all was the heartland of the Soviet Union. However it seems that their children don't think in the same way. Rather in fact, such is the low esteem with which the Communists and their ideology are held by many of the younger people of the post communist Russian society, that they seem happy to embrace elements of Nazism and the symbols of its ideology.
 

Spartak Moscow Fans Fly Swastika

Now admittedly, football fans and followers of Nationalist or Neo-Nazi groups, are not entirely representative of all of Russian youth, but the fact that the outward signs of the Nazi regime are publicly tolerated, to a degree that they wouldn't be in Western Europe, is still very surprising.

I have reported before on the rise of Nazi ideology in places where it should be least likely to do so, but even so it still takes me by surprise. We truly live in a world turned upside down .... 

One Day In Vienna

History loves coincidences and in one of these, there was one day in Vienna in 1913 when one mans diary could have been the most dramatic in history - what a great story it could have been. Imagine if you will, a man with money and time on his hands, who moved in the correct circles, and was a habitué of the Cafe's and Salons of the oldest imperial capital in Europe.

Old Vienna 1913 - Capital of the Hapsburg Empire

After getting up and bathing he leaves his town house and decides to walk into the city centre, and as it's fine day, a lunch in a street Café in the industrial sector, which is on his way in to the town. He chooses a simple hearty midday meal of Gulasch and Semmelknödel, followed by Liptauer, he chats with the the local foundry and sheet metal workers. One of whom, a young man, introduces himself as 'Josip Broz' (history later came to know him as the Yugoslavia dictator, Marshall Tito. He would later also come know Stalin well, but not yet).

Leaving the street Café, he drops in to a Beer Keller where he knows that Russian political radicals gather .... he enjoys listening to their wild ideas, especially one called 'Marxism', which is hotly debated, and he quickly falls into the discussions by the simple ruse of standing a round of beers (these Russian émigrés are always broke) .... he listens as the one known only by his code name of 'Stalin', and 'Nikolay Bukharin', discuss their treatise 'Marxism and the National Question'.

But getting bored by the endless political polemics, he moves on to a coffee house, bumping into another of these radicals, the far more intellectual 'Leon Trotsky', Marxist theorist, and editor of the 'Russian' newspaper 'Pravda'. All the while, unable to guess that 'Stalin' would later order the deaths of both of the other men.

Then boring of that particular paranoia , our imaginary diarist leaves the Coffee house and moves on to a regular 'artists salon', hosted by a rich Viennese Jewish matron, who is trying to break through into imperial social circles, and whom is surrounded by the up and coming, or struggling artists of the old quarter .... amongst these is a young man called 'Adolf Hitler', a landscape painter who has failed to get the commissions he feels he deserves. His bitter rants against those who fail to notice his manifest destiny, bore the diarist (he would also know about Stalin and Broz, but not until two wars later).

 ...... Finally moving on from the artists salon, he goes to a late night Café, where he meets up with a friend to  share a few glasses of schnapps. He discusses the meetings of the day with the friend, who is called  'Sigmund Freud', maybe they discuss the motivations of the men he had bumped into earlier that day ...

.... all the while never guessing that our diarist had just met men would shape the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and change the world forever ..... that he had spent the day with some of the movers and shakers of Europe for the next century.

A fantasy? Perhaps, but perfectly possible, as in 1913, all these men were in Vienna for at least one month. 

UK Self Defence Force

The world must be a safer place than ever before, and the UK safer than at any time since Wellington was supreme commander. That's the only conclusion one can draw from the fact that every UK 'defence review' (usually at the behest of the 'Chancellor of the Exchequer') in the last 60 years has concluded that the British Armed forces would somehow be better for being pruned, and would always result in a "forward-looking, modern fighting machine", or words to that affect.

The Army has been cut decade after decade.

We now have been left with a 'self defence force' rather than an army .... as its been cut to its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars, with most analysts considering that at least 100,000 men is the minimum size for a national army.

The shame is great, and to think it was a Conservative government that dealt the British Army the mortal  blow that Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin couldn't.

The Seeds of Anger

One of the noticeable aspects of the latest financial crisis is that the super rich are comparatively unaffected .... no bankers jumping out of windows in this collapse.


Steinbeck's 'The Grapes Of Wrath'

Oh no, in this crash the rich have carried on getting richer. For example in 1979, the top 1% of Americans took just 8% of the nation's wealth, but now the same group take 25%.

 

Voting Rights and Wrongs

There are two essential parts to any democratic system and those are that

(a) The people can vote for whomever they want (within some limitations on parties advocating violence against other citizens), and

(b) People who exercise their vote, do so with the knowledge that they are responsible for the end results.

Tunisia is the first of the "Arab Spring" countries to vote for a new government and has just voted for the Islamist party 'Ennahda' as the biggest party in its constitutional assembly, how this turns out will become clear in the coming months. It may be a mistake that just leads to Sharia law and an Iranian style regime.

The people of Gaza voted for Hamas, and then complained that because they had democratically elected an terrorist organisation as its government, then the rest of the world should accept that this legitimised them and their policies .... wrong.


Voting For These, Is Hard For Democracies To Digest  

If Hitler, or Stalin were 'democratically' voted into office today, would this mean that we should all accept that the 'holocaust', or 'the Purges' were legitimate policy goals, or treat them as pariah states? Well most Hamas supporters believe in much the same policies towards the Jews as Hitler (who is popular in the Muslim world)  ....

As discussed earlier, having a democracy make you responsible for the standard of the government you have voted to represent you. The Tunisians are responsible for what they may end up getting by dabbling with Islamic politics, and the people of the Gaza strip have to live with the results of voting for a terrorist group as their government.

Too many of the deluded apologists for these nasty little regimes in the West forget this second responsibility when they bleat on about the democratically elected groups of the Middle East, and it might be better if responsible democracy rather than oil supplies governed US and Western policies in the Middle East.

Turkey And That Pesky 'Genocide' Question.

I have often compared Turkey with Sweden to indicate exactly how 'un' European Turkey actually is, and therefore its interesting to find a story involving both countries .... it concerns the Armenian Genocide in which millions of Armenians were murdered by the Turks in 1915. It was done because they were "Christians" and its not really a sin for Muslims to kill them (to be fair its not much of a sin to kill fellow Muslims either).

Various countries around the world have designated the event the 'worlds first modern genocide' i.e. an attempt to wipe out a peoples, which Turkey has denied on the grounds that there would have been Armenians still living in Russia and Persia so therefore it can't be classed as an attempt to wipe out the Armenians ..... but by that argument the *Nazis killing of millions of Jews could not be said to be a genocide because there would have been Jews alive in Russia, Britain and the US, in other words the Turks argument doesn't stand up.

And this week two more, Sweden and the US, have started down that road as well. In Sweden the parliament voted narrowly to describe as genocide the killing of Armenians in World War I. The Turkish government condemned the resolution, saying it was "based upon major errors and without foundation" and they have withdrawn their ambassador from Sweden. Oddly the Swedish government supports Turkeys accession to the EU, so described its own parliaments vote as "a mistake".

Last week in the US a Congressional panel's resolution described as genocide the killings of Armenians in World War I. Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country had been accused of a crime it did not commit, adding the resolution would harm Turkish-US relations.

Needless to say, the UK will never condemn the killings and certainly never describe them as 'genocide' even though there is a campaign to get parliament to do so.

Murdered Armenians

 

 

 

Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote "Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."

The result was this ......

*Like many Muslim states the Turks are somewhat ambivalent about Hitlers views.

Nazi Hunter Efraim Zuroff

The fascination by news organisations with the Nazi regime appears to be limitless, with recent stories about 'Mein Kampf' on sale in Muslim countries and sixty year commemorations of the start of the second world war in recent months.

Efraim Zuroff

This week the BBC ran a story about the 'last of the Nazi hunters' Efraim Zuroff .... a name I had not heard of before.

Hitler Was A Woman?

In a follow up to my recent posts on the demise of Hitler (it being yet another world war anniversary year), it was revealed this week, that the skull fragment that has been displayed in Moscow as being found alongside Hitler's jawbone, is in fact the skull of a woman.

One wonders if the KGB were so anxious to please Stalin, that they just sent him any old skull as that of "Hitler", which begs the question, where did his remains end up?

Eyewitness Hitlers Suicide

Its seventy years since the start of World War II and so we are having a spate of 'where were you' (obviously for the over seventies!) or 'on this day' stories etc.

Rochus Misch ... Living History

All very laudable, especially since so many of the younger inhabitants of the UK have such a loose understanding of world or UK history that they don't actually know who Hitler, Stalin, Churchill etc were (the Americans are just as bad). 

 

Naughty Popes

The Most Controversial Popes.

The Roman Catholic Popes in general have been as much politicians as religious leaders ...... so perhaps its not surprising that violent times produced violent Pontiffs. More modern times have led to more philosophical disputes, but through out history the Popes have always been controversial.

The Mediaeval Believe Was That Hell
Was For Emperors, Popes, and Princes.