FyI the picture of the suffragettes and the sign "Lips that touch liquor shall not touch ours" is most likely satirical.
I've seen it in many places, with a lot of different, contradictory claims. Often, websites claim one of the women is Carrie Nation, but they never agree which woman is Nation, and they never have a source.
According to the Thomas Edison National Historic Park Archives, this is a still from an Edison motion picture produced around 1910. They do not know the title of this film.
I didn't read the article and I'm sure nothing said was worth engaging. Fascists mistaking satire for reality is par for the course. In 100 years, reactionary propaganda hasn't changed one bit.
Unfortunately, he kind of did, but in a totally accidental way. I think the message of the book (and Vonnegut's real experience) totally stands on its own regardless.
But the number of deaths in the book are now known to be inflated and inaccurate. Vonnegut based his research on a leading historian who was considered an expert on Dresden, David Irving. Decades later, Irving is infamous for being a Nazi apologist who uncritically accepts Goebbels's propaganda at face value and any numbers he comes up with should be thrown in the garbage can. But Vonnegut didn't know that at the time. I'm sure for Vonnegut, living through the bombing, the larger number felt more accurate.
A quick googling (don't cite me) puts the numbers at around ~25,000 dead vs. ~135,000 dead.
Apparently I am a masochist. But it was worth it to read the theory bombing from Wellsy on page 2. It's a long-ass comment and it's impossible to copy/paste on this shit phone.
Although this game of body counts won't amount to much other than morbid fascination.
In part, because such violence and death is abstracted entirely from the conditions in which they occurred and thus given significance.
Made so abstract is like family conflict scales that measure every incidence of violence as if all kinds of violence are considered morally equal by all persons.
I could speak of death tolls in a war but leave implied whose deaths were the 'bad' deaths and the others were a necessary sacrifice of the conflict. To which every ruling class readily spills the blood of it's people.
Indeed that lesson has been all too tardily learned by the people and their leaders. One great source of the strength of the ruling class has ever been their willingness to kill in defence of their power and privileges. Let their power be once attacked either by foreign foes, or domestic revolutionists, and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill, and kill, and kill. The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the small value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionists to shed blood.
The French Reign of Terror is spoken of with horror and execration by the people who talk in joyful praise about the mad adventure of the Dardanelles. And yet in any one day of battle at the Dardanelles there were more lives lost than in all the nine months of the Reign of Terror.
Should the day ever come when revolutionary leaders are prepared to sacrifice the lives of those under them as recklessly as the ruling class do in every war, there will not be a throne or despotic government left in the world. Our rulers reign by virtue of their readiness to destroy human life in order to reign; their reign will end on the day their discontented subjects care as little for the destruction of human life as they do.
CNN and MSNBC are going to spend the next 2 years giving Trump free advertising and when he gets reelected they will blame leftists. We are stuck in a time warp
In the short run, the S&P 500 is at a major crossroads. Either this correction recovers, and we see a melt-up into the New Year and moderately beyond, or we get a holiday wake-up call.
Either it will rain or it won't. This consultation will be $500,000.
No army in history has ever used human wave tactics. It is only something that people accuse their opponent's army of doing. Wasting lives, in of itself, isn't a strategy.
When it comes to WWII, the American public perception of the Eastern front has been essentially been written by the losing German generals. Halder, Donitz, etc., all wrote memoirs that were popular in the US while the cold war froze out the Soviet perspective. And what do you know...the generals realized they did everything right, Hitler was holding them back, and the only reason Germany lost was because Russia cheated by fighting back.
The German army before WW2 was constrained to a tiny size by the Treaty of Versailles so the German army spent a disproportionate amount of resources to keep an elite force with skilled officers. The Soviet Army was enormous and there was no experience and no trust in their officers and many were purged. The Soviet Army made mistakes during the war but they learned from those mistakes and made new strategies to compensate for their temporary weaknesses. Within a year, the veteran German officers were dead and the Soviets had experienced leaders and competent logistics.
Unlike the German Army, the Soviet officers had little experience (both generals and lower rank officers) and they could not be relied upon to take the initiative. Therefore, tactics were kept as simple as possible and the objectives of tactical maneuver took place at a "higher" level, with sophisticated strategy and multiple simultaneous battles which shocked and incapacitated their enemies. The Soviet doctrine placed a lot of emphasis on defensive battles, fortifications, and using superior firepower to not waste Soviet lives and instead efficiently drain the opponent's ability to wage war.
To an individual soldier in a battle, I think it could feel like human wave tactics, but as you say, the same is true of Gettysburg and the Somme.
Steven Kotkin knocks down many of these sorts of myths one by one in this fantastic lecture. He is a respected mainstream historian and anti-Stalin and anti-communist so it gives you an idea how much mainstream historians reject the framing.
Lol absolutely. A completely imaginary identity as said by the post above.