So hey, you should all follow Clickspring on Youtube. He's seriously amazing, and he's currently building his own Antikythera mechanism. There's modern tech used (lathes and mills etc), but he also does a lot of research into how it might have been constructed 2000 years ago using the technology at the time, and tries to replicate it.
He does some seriously great video editing and it's overall extremely high quality content.
The use of bagpipes on the front lines had actually been banned following World War 1 due to heavy casualties, but this was far from the only time their drone would be heard during World War 2. Famously, Jack Churchill went into battle with a set of pipes and a basket-hilt claymore.
Perhaps more notable, though, was the presence of pipers at the second Battle of El Alamein.
The plan was for the British forces to send infantry through the minefield, because they were too light to set off the anti-tank mines. They were to create bridgeheads at a weak points in the German lines. Engineers and sappers would follow clearing mines and marking paths for the tanks.
The allied forces in the battle were the 2nd New Zealand Division, the 9th Australian Division, the 1st South African Division, and the 51st Highland Division.
The 51st Highland Division contained battalions from the Seaforth Highlanders, The Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, the Black Watch, the Gordon Highlanders, and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
The attack started around 11pm on the night of October 23, 1942. It started with an artillery barrage of almost 1,000 guns. The shelling lasted for five and a half hours with almost 530,000 rounds fired. After 20 minutes of general bombardment, the artillery started targeting specific axis positions to support the British advance.
The battalions moved through the minefields by regiments. They advanced in a line a mile and a half wide with the soldiers keeping about five meters between them to reduce the effects of machine gun fire. The darkness made it difficult to stay in formation and to stay with their regiments.
Because of the darkness and the smoke and sand in the air from the artillery, the soldiers could hardly see the men on either side of them. Almost every group of the 51st Battalion was assigned a piper. The pipers played regimental tunes so the members of each regiment could stay in formation.
Another company of the Black Watch was accompanied by Piper Duncan MacIntyre of the Black Watch. At one point of the advance, his company came upon a German machine gun nest. As they approached, MacIntyre, who was playing "Highland Laddie," the regimental march, was wounded.
He continued playing during the assault until he was again shot and fatally wounded. It is said he continued to play until he ran out of breath. The next morning his body was found with his pipes under his arm and his hands on his chanter.
In many of the groups the bagpipers were at the head of the regiments. There are also reports of them walking and playing beside the tanks. As a result the bagpipers suffered high casualty rates during the battle. After the battle, and for the rest of the war, bagpipers were delegated to positions behind the front lines.
I have always had a huge amount of admiration and respect for battlefield musicians. The courage required to go into battle with almost no ability to defend oneself is mind-boggling.
These are the songs Bill Millin played on D-Day. He had an opportunity to meet the German commander responsible for the section of beach (Sword beach for those wondering) he landed on, and asked the German why he wasn't shot that day. The German commander responded that he thought the piper was mad, and told his men to ignore him.
Any recs on heavy music featuring bagpipes or is there no band metal enough to pull it off
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
oh i'm sure there's some metal band out there using a bagpipe... early ac/dc? lol
flogging molly and the dropkick murphys surely use pipes in some tunes.
another neat thing i learned while learning about wartime bagpipers is that some commonwealth units would also adopt pipers, and in fact the legendary Gurkhas have pipers in their regiments.
if anyone can find any examples at all of pipers in combat scenarios following the second world war or if you know any stories, even apocryphal, i'd love to hear about it
My college marching band featured pipers and highland dancers dancing with broadswords and we played at the gladiatorial combat arena known as an “American football stadium.”
There was a hill that lead into one end zone and the pipers would lead the team down it onto the field, with the team captains wielding large axes.
With a wry smile, Ronneberg described it as "the best skiing weekend I ever had".
Operation Gunnerside is a fascinating story, involving, but not limited to, a frantic search for a Norwegian patriots glasses before fuses could be lit.
That one is based on the melody of Tri Martolod, a traditional Breton song.
Rhan9 on
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
The world's oldest intact shipwreck has been found: 2400 years old in the Black Sea deep in the anoxic zone. It's a Greek trading vessel of a type known now only from pottery. The rest of the data will be published later this week.
The team also found dozens of other shipwrecks since the low oxygen levels at the bottom of the Black Sea helps preserve wrecks. It's an archaeologist's dream down there...if one can get there.
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
The world's oldest intact shipwreck has been found: 2400 years old in the Black Sea deep in the anoxic zone. It's a Greek trading vessel of a type known now only from pottery. The rest of the data will be published later this week.
The team also found dozens of other shipwrecks since the low oxygen levels at the bottom of the Black Sea helps preserve wrecks. It's an archaeologist's dream down there...if one can get there.
Depending on the definition of "intact" check out 1177 BCE they discovered an intact trading vessel from more than 3000 years ago.
The world's oldest intact shipwreck has been found: 2400 years old in the Black Sea deep in the anoxic zone. It's a Greek trading vessel of a type known now only from pottery. The rest of the data will be published later this week.
The team also found dozens of other shipwrecks since the low oxygen levels at the bottom of the Black Sea helps preserve wrecks. It's an archaeologist's dream down there...if one can get there.
Depending on the definition of "intact" check out 1177 BCE they discovered an intact trading vessel from more than 3000 years ago.
The Uluburun shipwreck can definitely not be defined as "intact" in any way shape or form. They basicly found the cargo and some remains of the bottom spars. Only by comparison to later boatfinds is it even possible to make sense of it. The black sea find however seems pretty darn well preserved.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Sabaton has also produced songs taking inspiration from the Russian 588th Night Bomber Regiment and pilots from nazi-occupied countries that gave service in the Battle of Britain. Not incidentally, they're two of my favorite songs from the band.
I'm reading James Loewen's Sundown Towns and came across a weird historical tidbit:
In 1870, fully one third of the population of Idaho was ethnically Chinese. White riots, murders, terrorism, arsons, local ordinances and governmental policy would all contribute to forcing Chinese-Americans into Chinatowns all across the American west coast (for mutual protection) years before the same thing happened to African-Americans. But the fact that Idaho of all places used to be 33% Chinese was kind of a shocking statistic to me (currently 1.2% Asian, up from 0.5% in 1970).
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
We're talking about a regime that would strap rural peasants and captured soldiers to the top of pack animals that pulled their seige engines to city walls, making the defenders decide whether to let them roll up or kill their friends and/or family members to keep the mongols at bay.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
This is Field Marshal Semyon Budyonny, thrice Hero of the Soviet Union & Full Cavalier of St. George
As a cavalry commander in the industrial era, comrade Budyonny's military record was mixed, but he has arguably the most brass-balled passage in any wiki article:
Later, as the Great Purge continued, the NKVD came to interrogate and arrest Budyonny; Budyonny's response was to arm himself with his service Nagant M1895 revolver and call Stalin to demand he have the agents removed. Stalin complied and the event was not discussed again.
I've been thinking about how unique the separation between the Medieval Sovereign and the Catholic Church was in history.
Monarchs since the beginning of agricultural states usually styled themselves as either living gods, like the Emperors of Rome, China, and Japan, or as head priests like the Pharoh of Egypt.
When the Germanic hordes invaded the Roman Empire and styled themselves as Catholic Kings, crowned by the Pope, they created a separation between the head of state and the head of religion, and the governance structures of the feudal state and the church. Simultaneously, you can see in the Eastern Roman Empire the Roman Emperor still holding dominance over the patriarch of Constantinople and still holding significant theological sway.
I'm not sure if I'm making an incorrect thesis though, anyone want to weigh in?
I'm posting real late, but I wanted to explain this one a bit
China's Emperor wasn't a god. Heck, two Chinese dynasties came from straight-up peasant stock, they'd have a hard time claiming any kind of divine heritage. What they did claim was the mandate of heaven, which is actually a pretty complex concept. On one level, it's a pretty basic, "Yo, I'm Emperor because I'm meant to be Emperor, and you're not Emperor because you're not meant to be Emperor, fuck you." But if the Emperor does a bad job and rules poorly, the Mandate of Heaven can be lost. The Emperor isn't just the head of the government, he literally acts as the center of the world - he sets the calendars, he officially marks the changing of the seasons and it's his job to prevent or manage famines and floods, etc. It's not like this was exactly religious, the Emperor didn't claim legitimacy through one particular religion... But it wasn't just a secular position either. Though he himself wasn't exactly divine, he was a conduit to the divine, and spiritual impurity could disrupt the realm. If the realm was disrupted and the Emperor lost the mandate of heaven to rule, the mandate may fall to a new family, whose success against the old emperor will conveniently prove the new mandate. (Rulers didn't even claim divine inheritance based off of their ancestor who founded the dynasty, because several Emperors adopted their heirs. Dynasties were the inheritance of a name, but they were not biologically contiguous.)
Obviously that's all a bit self-fulfilling, but it does create an interesting philosophy that the legitimacy of your rule comes through good stewardship, and that there is at some level a social contract between the ruler and the ruled. Through the Mandate of Heaven the people have a right to overthrow a bad leader (though obviously this is only ever officially acknowledged after a successful revolution). But it does also create a sense of continuity throughout very distinct dynasties and varying governmental structures - even if the geography and the rulers change, the mandate of heaven is still the same mandate, and China is still China, and if it's disunited now, it'll be reunited eventually. Anyway point being, the Emperor was not a god, though he was still a bit more than merely mortal.
In Japan being Emperor was... Actually mostly kind of a dull job. It had the ceremonial aspects of the Chinese Emperor x2, but most of the time it lacked the secular power. The Japanese Emperor was more specifically linked to a particular religion - Shinto - and claimed to be descended from the gods, but actually being Emperor was often not that desired of a job. There was a period there where being Emperor was basically just something you had to serve some time on, while your father the retired Emperor actually held real power - and freed of ceremonial duties enough free time to actually use it. Emperors were eager to retire themselves so that they could move on to real power! Then as the samurai gained power the Emperor lost even that, and the position became almost entirely religious - Sure, the Shogun and daimyo claimed ultimate loyalty to the Emperor, but they would also cut off his imperial budget if he didn't fall in line, and would load the office down with even more ceremonial duties to keep the sucker too busy to actually have a hand in policymaking! In a weird way it was actually kind of a separation of church and state - The Emperor was divorced from actual ruling of the state, and while the state claimed legitimacy because of their service to the Emperor, it was a very nominal sort of service. If you want to know, "Why were the Japanese Emperors never overthrown and replaced with a new dynasty?" the answer is because there's no point in overthrowing a dynasty that usually has no power anyway.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
The whole Shogun system is really interesting and quite darkly funny. Obviously we're all loyal to the rightful Emperor, but the current Shogun isn't, he disgraces the Emperor with his ways! I'll destroy him, for the Emperor's own good of course.
Then the Emperor says "thank you for destroying my apparently treacherous Shogun with your huge army that is currently outside my Palace. Would you like to be Shogun, as a reward?" well if the Son of Heaven insists who is this humble servant to refuse? Now I will get to the business of running everything, so Your Highness can turn your attention to more sublime matters above my station (read: sweet fuck all of importance)
The role of the japanese emperor is less that of a ruler and more that of a hereditary high priest.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
The role of the japanese emperor is less that of a ruler and more that of a hereditary high priest.
IIRC, the first European travellers to Japan called the emperor "pope" and the shogun "emperor".
Given the etymology of both titles, this seems rather more fitting, especially for emperor.
Which makes the Meiji revolution interesting in contrast to the direction Europe went. It would be like if Italy unified with the Pope as nominal head of state.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Which makes the Meiji revolution interesting in contrast to the direction Europe went. It would be like if Italy unified with the Pope as nominal head of state.
Well, they needed someone with experience as a powerless figurehead...
Which makes the Meiji revolution interesting in contrast to the direction Europe went. It would be like if Italy unified with the Pope as nominal head of state.
If the pope was also the direct descendant of the high priest of the first temple of Jerusalem.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
In 1939, there was an effective Soviet occupation of Estonia.
Estonia had a small but highly influential Baltic-German community who had effectively run the country and owned most of it's land for about 700 years, but the majority of them were about to be deported, or evacuated, depends how you see it.
They could only take personal possessions, no furniture or anything. They also (for reasons unknown) were not allowed to bring pets (which is why quite a few of them stayed, with their dogs).
One exception was granted, to a family who owned a parrot. They argued, successfully, that as the Parrot only spoke the German used in the family home, to leave it in a solely Estonians-speaking environment was unreasonable and it could not be expected to put up with this. The parrot was allocated a space on a ship with the family accordingly.
The baltic-germans had been getting the rough end of the stick since the end of WW1. While they had been an appreciated part of the Swedish and Russian Empires, in the era of nationalistic awakening and empires collapsing into nationstates the baltic-germans had it rough.
On one side we had the red bolsheviks. For the bolsheviks, the baltic-germans were a personification of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. Their very ethnic group was the enemy. Then we had the british, to whom the baltic-germans were...well, german. They represented lingering imperial german influence.
Then we had the german state, torn between various political factions and in germany it was almost impossible to mention baltic-germans without having it associated with the Teutonic knights. As a result the german treatment of the baltic-germans was stepmotherly at best. To be used for political expediency, but not someone the western germans really cared about personally.
As a result the Baltic-germans were thrown under the bus during the baltic civil wars. While a Freikorps under Rudiger von der Goltz (the same goltz that had intervened in the Finnish civil war) was sent to the baltics his troops were mostly WW1 veterans motivated by lands and plunder and Goltz himself had ulterior motives. Goltz became sufficiently politically inconvenient that he was deposed due to political pressure from the british and the left-leaning government in germany. The Freikorps was sent back to germany, and a number of baltic-germans who had fought with the Freikorps were exiled with them.
The very same freikorps, feeling betrayed twice over by the german government, formed the core of many of the extreme rightwing movements that plagued germany during the 1920s and 1930s, including the nazi movement.
The remaining baltic-germans aligned themselves with the West Russian Volunteer army (a whiteguardist army) and helped secure the independence of the baltic states, though this proved to be merely a temporary reprieve. The baltic-germans, while still relatively wealthy and influential, were treated with suspicion from that point onwards (partly as a hereditary military class ready to take up arms, partly as puppets of german interests. Both reasons why they were seen as dangerous).
When the baltic-germans were treated as shit and exiled, without their possessions or even pets, this was very much as revenge for the humiliation that the baltic-germans inflicted on the red army during the civil war of 1919.
Fiendishrabbit on
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
History thread - I need your help. Are there any books that can give me an idea about how the geopolitical situation in Europe / Middle East came about in the 20th century?
History thread - I need your help. Are there any books that can give me an idea about how the geopolitical situation in Europe / Middle East came about in the 20th century?
Is that even the right question or way too broad?
Way broad. Are we talking about the beginning or end of the 20th?
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Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
Start by reading about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire I think. That's probably the most recent you can start and still get enough of the backstory.
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
Start by reading about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire I think. That's probably the most recent you can start and still get enough of the backstory.
Yep. This is where I'd start, or just a couple of decades before.
I've read extensively on the subject of the drawing of lines in the sand in the Mid East over the last few years, but there is no one silver bullet book I can give that covers the breadth of bullshit that's gone down there in the last 140 years.
If you're looking to get started, there was a spike in anti-semetic violence in Europe after the Franco-Prussian War that was bad enough that Zionism became a full fledged movement among European Jews and they started striking land deals with Ottoman officials for spreads in Palestine.
Then you get into the build up and aftermath of WWI including the Balfour Declaration giving Zionist Jews a major power backing, then the allies at Versailles forced the breakup of the Ottoman state, mainly along lines that France and England set in the Sykes-Picot agreement. Then the San Remo conference handed out the mandates for control of the former Ottoman territories, in a fashion that pretty much no natives of the region liked (especially the French getting Syria).
Then it really becomes a clusterfuck...
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Posts
Yeah, Gary Hart was very much in the Bill Clinton mold when it came to women.
But Lee Atwater was a piece of shit, deathbed repentance non-withstanding. His tricks are the tricks that have dragged the USA down into the gutter.
He does some seriously great video editing and it's overall extremely high quality content.
Also a separate playlist where he makes various tools that he use to construct the mechanism.
Bill Millin was a piper from Glasgow under the command of a man named Lord Lovat.
The use of bagpipes on the front lines had actually been banned following World War 1 due to heavy casualties, but this was far from the only time their drone would be heard during World War 2. Famously, Jack Churchill went into battle with a set of pipes and a basket-hilt claymore.
Perhaps more notable, though, was the presence of pipers at the second Battle of El Alamein.
I have always had a huge amount of admiration and respect for battlefield musicians. The courage required to go into battle with almost no ability to defend oneself is mind-boggling.
These are the songs Bill Millin played on D-Day. He had an opportunity to meet the German commander responsible for the section of beach (Sword beach for those wondering) he landed on, and asked the German why he wasn't shot that day. The German commander responded that he thought the piper was mad, and told his men to ignore him.
flogging molly and the dropkick murphys surely use pipes in some tunes.
another neat thing i learned while learning about wartime bagpipers is that some commonwealth units would also adopt pipers, and in fact the legendary Gurkhas have pipers in their regiments.
if anyone can find any examples at all of pipers in combat scenarios following the second world war or if you know any stories, even apocryphal, i'd love to hear about it
There was a hill that lead into one end zone and the pipers would lead the team down it onto the field, with the team captains wielding large axes.
Could never beat Wittenberg though...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45938874
Operation Gunnerside is a fascinating story, involving, but not limited to, a frantic search for a Norwegian patriots glasses before fuses could be lit.
Eluveitie uses bagpipes, hurdy gurdy and tin whistles, low whistles, flutes and violins.
Swiss folk metal, with most songs sung in gaulish.
If that's eccentric enough?
That one is based on the melody of Tri Martolod, a traditional Breton song.
The team also found dozens of other shipwrecks since the low oxygen levels at the bottom of the Black Sea helps preserve wrecks. It's an archaeologist's dream down there...if one can get there.
Depends on how you define "heavy" I guess. Runrig has some good stuff
The Mudmen too
Depending on the definition of "intact" check out 1177 BCE they discovered an intact trading vessel from more than 3000 years ago.
The Uluburun shipwreck can definitely not be defined as "intact" in any way shape or form. They basicly found the cargo and some remains of the bottom spars. Only by comparison to later boatfinds is it even possible to make sense of it. The black sea find however seems pretty darn well preserved.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Sabaton has also produced songs taking inspiration from the Russian 588th Night Bomber Regiment and pilots from nazi-occupied countries that gave service in the Battle of Britain. Not incidentally, they're two of my favorite songs from the band.
If 2018 has taught me anything, answering the question "Who owns the gift shop?" will be the death of America.
In 1870, fully one third of the population of Idaho was ethnically Chinese. White riots, murders, terrorism, arsons, local ordinances and governmental policy would all contribute to forcing Chinese-Americans into Chinatowns all across the American west coast (for mutual protection) years before the same thing happened to African-Americans. But the fact that Idaho of all places used to be 33% Chinese was kind of a shocking statistic to me (currently 1.2% Asian, up from 0.5% in 1970).
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
The early Khans were shrewd, not subtle.
We're talking about a regime that would strap rural peasants and captured soldiers to the top of pack animals that pulled their seige engines to city walls, making the defenders decide whether to let them roll up or kill their friends and/or family members to keep the mongols at bay.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
As a cavalry commander in the industrial era, comrade Budyonny's military record was mixed, but he has arguably the most brass-balled passage in any wiki article:
I'm posting real late, but I wanted to explain this one a bit
China's Emperor wasn't a god. Heck, two Chinese dynasties came from straight-up peasant stock, they'd have a hard time claiming any kind of divine heritage. What they did claim was the mandate of heaven, which is actually a pretty complex concept. On one level, it's a pretty basic, "Yo, I'm Emperor because I'm meant to be Emperor, and you're not Emperor because you're not meant to be Emperor, fuck you." But if the Emperor does a bad job and rules poorly, the Mandate of Heaven can be lost. The Emperor isn't just the head of the government, he literally acts as the center of the world - he sets the calendars, he officially marks the changing of the seasons and it's his job to prevent or manage famines and floods, etc. It's not like this was exactly religious, the Emperor didn't claim legitimacy through one particular religion... But it wasn't just a secular position either. Though he himself wasn't exactly divine, he was a conduit to the divine, and spiritual impurity could disrupt the realm. If the realm was disrupted and the Emperor lost the mandate of heaven to rule, the mandate may fall to a new family, whose success against the old emperor will conveniently prove the new mandate. (Rulers didn't even claim divine inheritance based off of their ancestor who founded the dynasty, because several Emperors adopted their heirs. Dynasties were the inheritance of a name, but they were not biologically contiguous.)
Obviously that's all a bit self-fulfilling, but it does create an interesting philosophy that the legitimacy of your rule comes through good stewardship, and that there is at some level a social contract between the ruler and the ruled. Through the Mandate of Heaven the people have a right to overthrow a bad leader (though obviously this is only ever officially acknowledged after a successful revolution). But it does also create a sense of continuity throughout very distinct dynasties and varying governmental structures - even if the geography and the rulers change, the mandate of heaven is still the same mandate, and China is still China, and if it's disunited now, it'll be reunited eventually. Anyway point being, the Emperor was not a god, though he was still a bit more than merely mortal.
In Japan being Emperor was... Actually mostly kind of a dull job. It had the ceremonial aspects of the Chinese Emperor x2, but most of the time it lacked the secular power. The Japanese Emperor was more specifically linked to a particular religion - Shinto - and claimed to be descended from the gods, but actually being Emperor was often not that desired of a job. There was a period there where being Emperor was basically just something you had to serve some time on, while your father the retired Emperor actually held real power - and freed of ceremonial duties enough free time to actually use it. Emperors were eager to retire themselves so that they could move on to real power! Then as the samurai gained power the Emperor lost even that, and the position became almost entirely religious - Sure, the Shogun and daimyo claimed ultimate loyalty to the Emperor, but they would also cut off his imperial budget if he didn't fall in line, and would load the office down with even more ceremonial duties to keep the sucker too busy to actually have a hand in policymaking! In a weird way it was actually kind of a separation of church and state - The Emperor was divorced from actual ruling of the state, and while the state claimed legitimacy because of their service to the Emperor, it was a very nominal sort of service. If you want to know, "Why were the Japanese Emperors never overthrown and replaced with a new dynasty?" the answer is because there's no point in overthrowing a dynasty that usually has no power anyway.
Then the Emperor says "thank you for destroying my apparently treacherous Shogun with your huge army that is currently outside my Palace. Would you like to be Shogun, as a reward?" well if the Son of Heaven insists who is this humble servant to refuse? Now I will get to the business of running everything, so Your Highness can turn your attention to more sublime matters above my station (read: sweet fuck all of importance)
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Given the etymology of both titles, this seems rather more fitting, especially for emperor.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
If the pope was also the direct descendant of the high priest of the first temple of Jerusalem.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Truly, it was a dark time in history.
(I don't actually know if this should be in [Chat] or not)
Estonia had a small but highly influential Baltic-German community who had effectively run the country and owned most of it's land for about 700 years, but the majority of them were about to be deported, or evacuated, depends how you see it.
They could only take personal possessions, no furniture or anything. They also (for reasons unknown) were not allowed to bring pets (which is why quite a few of them stayed, with their dogs).
One exception was granted, to a family who owned a parrot. They argued, successfully, that as the Parrot only spoke the German used in the family home, to leave it in a solely Estonians-speaking environment was unreasonable and it could not be expected to put up with this. The parrot was allocated a space on a ship with the family accordingly.
On one side we had the red bolsheviks. For the bolsheviks, the baltic-germans were a personification of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. Their very ethnic group was the enemy. Then we had the british, to whom the baltic-germans were...well, german. They represented lingering imperial german influence.
Then we had the german state, torn between various political factions and in germany it was almost impossible to mention baltic-germans without having it associated with the Teutonic knights. As a result the german treatment of the baltic-germans was stepmotherly at best. To be used for political expediency, but not someone the western germans really cared about personally.
As a result the Baltic-germans were thrown under the bus during the baltic civil wars. While a Freikorps under Rudiger von der Goltz (the same goltz that had intervened in the Finnish civil war) was sent to the baltics his troops were mostly WW1 veterans motivated by lands and plunder and Goltz himself had ulterior motives. Goltz became sufficiently politically inconvenient that he was deposed due to political pressure from the british and the left-leaning government in germany. The Freikorps was sent back to germany, and a number of baltic-germans who had fought with the Freikorps were exiled with them.
The very same freikorps, feeling betrayed twice over by the german government, formed the core of many of the extreme rightwing movements that plagued germany during the 1920s and 1930s, including the nazi movement.
The remaining baltic-germans aligned themselves with the West Russian Volunteer army (a whiteguardist army) and helped secure the independence of the baltic states, though this proved to be merely a temporary reprieve. The baltic-germans, while still relatively wealthy and influential, were treated with suspicion from that point onwards (partly as a hereditary military class ready to take up arms, partly as puppets of german interests. Both reasons why they were seen as dangerous).
When the baltic-germans were treated as shit and exiled, without their possessions or even pets, this was very much as revenge for the humiliation that the baltic-germans inflicted on the red army during the civil war of 1919.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I died from the flu three times.
3DS: 1521-4165-5907
PS3: KayleSolo
Live: Kayle Solo
WiiU: KayleSolo
Is that even the right question or way too broad?
Way broad. Are we talking about the beginning or end of the 20th?
Yep. This is where I'd start, or just a couple of decades before.
I've read extensively on the subject of the drawing of lines in the sand in the Mid East over the last few years, but there is no one silver bullet book I can give that covers the breadth of bullshit that's gone down there in the last 140 years.
If you're looking to get started, there was a spike in anti-semetic violence in Europe after the Franco-Prussian War that was bad enough that Zionism became a full fledged movement among European Jews and they started striking land deals with Ottoman officials for spreads in Palestine.
Then you get into the build up and aftermath of WWI including the Balfour Declaration giving Zionist Jews a major power backing, then the allies at Versailles forced the breakup of the Ottoman state, mainly along lines that France and England set in the Sykes-Picot agreement. Then the San Remo conference handed out the mandates for control of the former Ottoman territories, in a fashion that pretty much no natives of the region liked (especially the French getting Syria).
Then it really becomes a clusterfuck...
~ Buckaroo Banzai