Anna Bikont once gave a talk at Wheeling Jesuit University about her book on the killings in Jedwabne. After meticulously detailing what happened (& the cover up), she took questions. The first comment was “but we Poles are such a friendly people. We would never do that.” Kinda proved her point.
I had no chance.
"In the Polish town of Jedwabne, where historians agree that townspeople killed most of their Jewish neighbors during World War II, a brand-new “information center” denies the crime." www.jpost.com/diaspora/ant...
For sure and Soviet behaviors too. But, as you said, these are simply not comparable to the planned German war of annihilation.
Marxist professors in undergrad and grad school indoctrinated me to become part of the woke elite.
Guess I’m going to have to revise my class on the Second World War in the light of these new findings.
Willpower will just have to compensate for these material deficiencies. It always has in the past, right?
Hook'em.
On this day, in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.
Profit seems to almost always be more desirable, unfortunately.
Interesting stuff. Geoff Megargee once told me that based on some references by Allan Bullock, he thought there might be a fourth volume of the Halder war diary. Maybe that will turn up. Would be nice if some of the documents/maps for auction were simply donated to an archive.
The only AI I recognize.
We gotta bring back the productive kind of national shame. Not the throwing up your hands and going “what can you do, we suck” kind but the “I’ll be GODDAMNED if I let the fucking FRENCH have better TRAINS” kind
Twice.
I hope you're right.
A book cover with diagonal text for the title, reading From Incarceration to Repatriation in black, with alternating red and yellow triangle shapes in the background.
FYI Team #MilitaryHistory! Praise for @susangrunewald.bsky.social's book: an "important contribution to our understanding of WWII, the Soviet postwar recovery, the penal system(s) of the Soviet Union, & the Cold War" AND "a noteworthy piece of scholarship."
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....
"So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents. "
This is on my list too. A legitimately great song.
Paying someone to insert typos is the new humanities.
Amazing.
"A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it."
"What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own."
And can I add forced deportations and scorched earth retreats to the list?
And was deeply complicit (if not the primary cause) of the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians and an anti-partisan policy that murdered Soviet civilians en masse.
That seems oddly specific for someone from the greater Niagara region.
Thanks for that.
If you're looking for some recent work on the German-Soviet War (and really, who isn't), Cornell University Press has a 40% off & free shipping sale right now. Enter 09EXP40 for the sale price. @cornellupress.bsky.social @bethanywasik.bsky.social
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...
I completely agree with this.
It’s been a looooong time since I read it, but my general recollection is that is solid on military events, glosses over German criminal acts, and goes into detail on his POW status in the Soviet Union. As German memoirs go, it could be much worse. But as I said, it’s been a long time.
He's a really good writer and his stuff on baseball is as good as it gets.