The History Thread!

Here's an old article where American journalist Louise Bryant recalls her meetings with Enver Pasha while the latter was living in exile in Moscow. It's pretty interesting and kind of surreal, like if Hitler was just crashing on some dude's couch for a few years after WW-2.

Why is the South so obsessed with the Civl War.

We could have been Canada!!!. I've been noticing this attitude crop up a lot more lately. I expect it will be mainstream in a couple of decades, god help us. And where is Jullian when you need him? Did he get banned or something?

Edit: Also this is why the left never gains currency in this country.

edited 28th May '17 1:55:16 PM by JackOLantern1337

For the record: Julian did indeed get banned.

Not gonna lie, I kind of feel bad for the guy. Living life believing what he believes, that villains have nearly always won and that they get to write the history, that must be so depressing. I hope he's found some other forum to go all didactic on.

Edit: For the record I'm not questioning the reasons for his ban, nor denying that he could drown out all other discussion.

edited 28th May '17 2:04:32 PM by JackOLantern1337

I wonder what the world would be like today if the Nationalists had won the Chinese Civil War instead of the Communists.

Two words: Stalin apologist.

That erases whatever sympathy I have for him.

edited 29th May '17 2:28:15 AM by Krieger22

In my opinion a lot better. The US would certainly be more comfortable giving up Asia to the Chinese, especially since presumably their would not be the whole issue of Taiwan.

On the other hand, part of the reason the CPC have managed to retain power is that standards of living have generally gotten better ^note  assuming you're not one of the millions of people killed in disastrous reform programs instigated by a madman over the years, and the question of whether or not that would be the same under an empowered Nationalist government is one of those things that's hanging in the air.

Probably better if the US invested in China like it did in Japan or aided a reconstruction effort like the Marshal plan.

IIRC the US during the 30's and 40's had Sinophile tendencies so giving a lot of aid and investing in a post war China wouldn't be out of the table..

I don't know, the KMT was comically corrupt and most of its leaders had no idea what they were doing. Taiwan did alright but I don't think they'd really be able to effectively assert their control throughout all of China like the Communists did. They didn't have anywhere near that level of support due to trampling on the population for the last few decades. The fact that they lost the war in the first place despite overwhelming materiel superiority is a good example of that.

I also like how that Canadophile article scoffs at celebrating winning WW-2 but considers winning in hockey "a real accomplishment".

edited 29th May '17 12:49:04 PM by MonsieurThenardier

Yeah. Well he does brag about the Canadians getting off Juno Beach before us, as if it was some sort of fault to be assigned the harder beach. Canadians are the masters of humble bragging. Oh and god forbid we have a history that's more dramatic than Canada's. I mean he says it's a tale of compromise and conciliation and all that shit, but Canada never declared independence, but was organized within the British Empire. The people who began confederation did not have to worry about being hanged, to my knowledge the British were behind them 100 percent. Oh and FYI, compromise is mentioned in American history all the goddam time.

These dam articles are going to be all over the place next fourth of July.

Edit: Oh and I love the swearing about how we weren't a great power at the time, as if that's some kind of insult. Everybody knows the US was pathetically weak. If anything this is exaggerated to make us look better, the Revolution is nearly always taught as an almost comical mismatch and frequently compared to Star Wars.

edited 29th May '17 1:40:42 PM by JackOLantern1337

I'm writing an essay about the May '68 protests in France and the '89 protests in China and trying to draw parallels and differences between them.

Well the Chinese did not have a properly equipped riot police force, for starters. Dozens of French soldiers and hundreds of protesters weren't killed in those protests for seconds. At that point it's more like urban warfare than a protest.

edited 29th May '17 7:48:09 PM by MonsieurThenardier

Yeah, that's the thing. I feel like maybe I could tie it all together with how France ended the crisis by fulfilling its role as a democracy and China ended the crisis by acting as only an authoritarian state could.

I'm also going to try my damnedest not to let my opinions of the French and Chinese protests not color my writing.

(What I mean by that is that I have a weird feeling, as though the French revolts were a bunch of kids play-acting at a "revolution")

edited 29th May '17 11:53:12 PM by LinkToTheFuture

No it was a bunch of anarchist commie assholes nearly bringing the country to ruin. Our hippies were just kids playing revolution.

Maybe it was a mixture of both, but from my bit of research it seems to mostly be the kids playing Revolution in a kind of generational conflict...it's complex but when is history ever not?

Indeed. Frankly I'm amazed the West managed to survive the 1960's at all.

@Link: Regardless of his apologia for Stalinism, I think Julian would have been able to answer your comparisons fairly well (or at least develop an accurate historical analysis of the Mai 68 protests.

What I do know is that there was both a generational conflict, and a political one. There were young people back then (particularly in Paris) that were fed up with the political gatekeeping that Gaullism and De Gaulle had developed. It was also a general protest against things as diverse (but connected/semi-connected) as capitalism, American imperialism (which was fucking true back then, in light of what had happened and was happening in South American countries and so forth), and traditional institutions, values and order. The French society was perceived during those hardcore days as being out of touch with the youth, as well as being very asphyxiating for individual freedoms (as well as worker freedoms).

While your comparison between what happened in China years later and the Mai 68 protests has some parallels, it also has massive differences (both societies were asphyxiating for youth in those time periods, but the political dynamics and background were different). And while the Chinese protests were ultimately unsuccessful in pretty much every level, the French protests, while not politically successful^note there are people nowadays in European politics that were involved in the protests during those days, such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, but the powers that be/'The Man' won, in the end, they are considered by most French people as a turning point in cultural, social and moral customs within the French culture.

While there were certainly plenty of anarchists and communists involved, it is best to perceive the protests with a focus on the background of worker and students' dissatisfactions, and on the political dynamics within the then young Fifth Republic.

I will also note that, contrary to Jack's glib simplifaction, there were also left-wing non-communist politicians involved (such as those of the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left,of which a certain future President called Mitterrand was part of).

@Jack: it's easy to say they were violent during that brief period, but the Gaullist climate and the police forces were not soft either. There was also the post-Algerian independence climate in France, which probably led to the authority forces back then being overly violent against students in Paris, as a way to psychologically compensate for the fall fo the French colonies.

If people in positions of power enact violence (direct or indirect), they can't complain when people take their shit no more. This is true for both France and America (the difference being, as you said, that your hippies basically turned inward and/or into a spiral of drugs and cheap mysticism - as a consequence of them realizing they could not change the world the way they envisioned it - while the French folks either became slowly part of politics, became artists (the French New Wave movies, for example, are particularly good at diagnosing the malaise that was felt back then) or philosophers, or, in the case of the some others, continued to be working-class folks for the rest of their lives).

edited 30th May '17 10:17:48 AM by Quag15

I'd actually point out that the 1989 protests played a pivotal role in spurning the transformation of the PRC's economy from a stagnant Maoist one to the unregulated de facto-capitalist one the country possesses today. A major factor behind the protests were demands for a reformed economy, which was the one thing that the CCP took note of after crushing them due to many of the bigwigs being convinced that the PRC could really use all the extra cash that would flow into the country, not to mention themselves and their own factions.

Fair point. Still, when I was mentioning the 'poltical dynamics and background part', I was mentioning the differences between the multi-party climate in France (interpolitically speaking) and the 'one Party, one State, one Country' background and dynamics (intrapolitically speaking) in [PR] China.

edited 30th May '17 10:21:40 AM by Quag15

It is now 100 years to the day of the publishing of "Over There".

We listened to that in Social Studies.

A brief video on historical serial killers. It also briefly entails why it is so difficult to scour the historical records to locate possible evidence of this in the past. Part of it is the old class systems largely present in every society in one form or another.

I just had this idea. Where and when were sedatives first discovered?

IIRC somewhere around the 19th century when a dentist realized he could use laughing gas to sedate patients.

If you're more loose with the term sedative, history goes back to giving a lot of alcoholic beverage to whoever they needed to operate because alcohol would at least dull the senses enough, hopefully, to prevent the subject from dying out of shock.