Links - 8th June 2020 (3)

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Ireland election: the cuddly winners - "The thing I have noticed about Korean cinema and drama, which makes it different and also compelling, is its unpredictability. You're never really sure what's coming next. The characters are also not simplistic. They're often very complex. They're not heroes, they're not villains. It all makes it feel so much more human, so much more real."

BBC World Service - The World This Week, The war that wasn't - "‘Over the last few decades, we're used to the Royals washing their dirty linen in public. What we're not as used to is the Queen doing it. It was very clear that his behavior and her behavior, the approach they have taken, has hurt very close members of his family.’
‘Is this a crisis for the British Royal Household given as it comes after the recent problems surrounding the activities of Prince Andrew?’...
‘Their response to that was brutal, which was to remove him from public life’"
Of course there're still people who claim Prince Andrew was given a pass

Frank McDonough On The Rise Of Adolf Hitler | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "The famous phrase was, America gave the money. Russia gave the blood. And Churchill gave the speeches."

The Bombing Of Dresden | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘How enthusiastic were the people of Dresden for Nazism? And how far do they go along with things like the anti semitic persecution and the acceptance of forced laborers?’
‘Now I think it's incredibly difficult to, to gauge enthusiasm because this was, they were living in a terrorist state basically. They were being, all citizens were living under the threat of death. Telephones were being bugged, conversations were being monitored. If you didn't give the Hitler salute in the street you could be beaten up by SS thugs. Anyone could be taken in the middle of the night, taken to cells, beaten up, executed for simply lose talk or demoralizing talk… It was forbidden for Jewish people to keep diaries, again on pain of death... [Victor Klemperer] kept this day to day diary from 1933 right the way through to his death in 1959, which gives the most extraordinary overview from the Jewish point of view of what was happening in the city… He was forced to have his cat put down because the Nazis said the Jews were not permitted to keep pets"

George Morton-Jack On Indian Soldiers in WWI | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Partly what rose the war to such importance in the Middle East is the declaration of a jihad in 1914, by the Ottoman Empire. The leader of the Ottoman Empire at the time, the Sultan of Turkey, who is the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, and with Turkish political and also German political pressure, he declares a jihad against the allies, meaning that all Muslims across the world are called to rise up and fight the Allies’
‘How close to succeeding did that come?’
‘The Jihad of 1914 can be seen more for what problems it caused the British and how it was used as propaganda by the Turks and the Germans. And looked at that way, we start to see its ripples all around the world. So, we have for example, in Germany itself, prisoner of war camps for Indian Muslim soldiers, which are schools of revolution where the Germans try and indoctrinate Indian Muslim soldiers in ideas of the jihad, so the Indian soldiers will then volunteer and fight for the Germans, or serve them as secret agents. As some Indian soldiers indeed did... … the Jihad leads to all sorts of attacks on British interests, in particular infrastructure, oil pipelines. In Iran where the British government is a majority shareholder. And at the same time, the Jihad was used by the Turks as a reason and also motivation for its attacks on the Suez Canal from 1915. And also, there's an idea behind the defense of Gallipoli… the Jihad declared by the Ottomans in 1914 is a fundamental part of the First World War. And that's not something which people have included in the way they might traditionally see it... … There were a number of desertions within the Indian Army in the First World War, in particular in France, and also in Iraq among Muslim troops. And, as far as we can tell, the sources indicate that a lot of this is religiously motivated, with Indian soldiers not being comfortable as Muslims fighting the Central Powers, including the Turks, as, as fellow Muslims... On the other hand, there are also several Indian mutinies. Some of these are related to religion and an unwillingness, again to fight Muslims in Iraq. But there's an interesting mutiny that took place in Burma… they mutinied because they they objected to their treatment as racial inferiors to white men, and they were put in prison for the rest of the war."

Historian Rebecca Clifford On Holocaust Orphans | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "They really had a very deep distrust of adults. Which wasn’t surprising because they hadn't had too many adults to stick around in their lives at that point. But they had great faith in each other. They knew each other well. And so they behaved in a group. The kind of role that normally would exist between a mother and a child, for example, a child and his or her parents, that was fulfilled by the group in the case of the younger children. And actually in the end, you know, psychoanalysts, like Anna Freud believed very deeply that normal development in a child came from a healthy relationship with a mother. These children deeply challenged that because they had not had any relationships with their mothers. So the assumption on the part of kind of you know, standard psychoanalytic theory was well, they must necessarily then have, have, you know, psychological problems. In the end, actually, ,they they didn't. And so Anna Freud really had to revise her own thoughts and say, well, the group has stepped in here and has played the role of the mother and the father. And the children. Yes, they had some strange behaviors, but they overcame them quite quickly."

Historian Hannah Skoda On Medieval Myths | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Women were so oppressed, that they never did anything of interest’...
‘No, it's not true... many women responded to [oppression] and reacted in incredibly strategic and intelligent and sophisticated ways. And there's been a kind of misunderstanding amongst many historians I think, for a long time as well that we can't really write proper histories of women because we don't have the documentation to do it. And again, that's just not true. There are lots and lots of documents, showing that, you know, women were individuals and they did all kinds of interesting things right across the social spectrum. So we know of really famous examples like you know, Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Blanche of Castille, we know of, of incredible peasant women who achieved amazing things like Joan of Arc. But we also know about women who, you know, didn't necessarily become particularly famous, but nevertheless, lived independent and really quite exciting lives in many ways. So, for example, we know that women were involved in the brewing industry in a really big way. And there are many examples of extremely successful brewsters who were women’...
'So women have much more agency than perhaps they've been given credit for'...
'St. Thomas… was the apostle who didn't believe that it was Christ when he first saw the risen Christ. He said he wouldn't believe him until he’d seen the marks on his hands to show that he'd actually been on the cross. So he gets known as Doubting Thomas, because he doubted when he was confronted with the figure of the risen Christ. They think about Doubting Thomas a lot in the Middle Ages, and they conclude that he's a really positive figure for Christians to look up to, because he embodies their kind of spiritual quest for understanding. So that suggests that actually, they think doubt is not a bad thing, that questioning and thinking and wondering about the nature of one's faith is actually in many ways something to be encouraged.’
‘But presumably, not outright’
‘Not too much. You have to get it just right.’"

Marie Antoinette | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Let them eat cake was attributed to all sorts of Queen, French Queens before. It was a common trope. So that's another thing of course is that it sticks because it sounds contemptuous in English. The French version qu’ils mangent du brioche sounds, meaning sort of do that if there isn't enough bread, if enough corn then, so make up on eggs. Now in French it's not caught on. People don't say that. It's only the English who say it because I think cake, the k in cake is so contemptuous isn’t it? Let them eat cake. Qu’il mange du brioche, no...
The most famous part of the trial, almost of her life was when David the painter and another man called a bear [sp?], went to the prison where her little boy was, and persuaded him that she had molested him, taught him to masturbate and worse, and shared a bed with him. This was put up at the trial’"

Confronting Evils | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘It's quite interesting because we're always told to remember the Holocaust because we're meant to learn lessons from it. But if it's not comparable with anything, what lessons can we possibly learn?’"

Andrew Roberts On Secrets Of War Leadership | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘What qualities did you find they had in common?’
‘It was very interesting the, what they don't have in common that you think they might. Charisma, for example, is a almost entirely artificial construct. It's something that people can create. Adolph Hitler himself was not in the slightest bit charismatic, but once you have Leni Riefenstahl doing your movies and Albert Spehr doing your rallies, and Joseph Goebbels in complete control of all of the propaganda in the Reich. And nobody being able to contradict him, you can create a charisma, and so nobody's born charismatic... neither was a sense of humor. There are lots of people, Margaret Thatcher the classic example, which, she would, you'd meet her at a drinks party and she'd start with, as her small talk would be, so how do you think NATO is going Andrew?… Neither really isn't this having a good character. And there are plenty of adulterers in this group, there are plenty of people who you certainly wouldn't want to spend any time with at all really. But the things that they do have in common… a powerful moment, usually in early adolescence, where their ideology became fixed. And it was often because of some important outside element, something that was going on in the world that affected them and, and created their assumptions, their global assumptions. And then in their mid to late 20s, usually, not always…, they have a powerful moment when they recognize their own capabilities. Their capacity for leadership, their capacity for doing something impressive or extraordinary... Reading is another one. An interest in history is another thing that they have, together. Study history, Churchill said to a young American in the coronation, at the time of the coronation, the luncheon in fact, of the coronation. He said study historym study history, for therein lie all the secrets of statecraft and many of these people - Hitler, it was his favorite subjects at school. Napoleon read voraciously in his school library, the studying of history. This was also true actually, of military history, of George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower is a very important aspect of leadership'...
‘I was so fascinated to read in your section about, your chapter about Hitler, how Mein Kampf was just incredibly dull. There was barely a notable sentence to pluck from it’
‘Yes, I think it has to be up there with Das Kapital as the most boring book ever written by somebody who was as influential as, as Karl Marx or Adolph Hitler’...
‘It wasn't necessarily vital for them to be great public speakers.’
‘No, no, several of them were not great orators... it certainly can't be said of Stalin or Napoleon’…
‘Many were workaholics. Thatcher, notably’"
‘Yes, putting in a lot of hours in the day. Again, Hitler is different here. Hitler was pretty lazy. In fact, he, he didn't like getting up early, he took long walks and, and basically enjoyed to have tea and, and would stop during the day. He enjoyed watching his, his lieutenants working hard and he would set them up against each other, in fact, in a deliberate way. Sort of survival of the fittest kind of thing. But but the rest of them were, were workaholics. And Napoleon would have a 16 hour day. The reason that Churchill had his naps was that he believed that he could get, squeeze an extra two hours out of the day at the end’"

“You’re Essentially a Prisoner”: Why Do Dubai’s Princesses Keep Trying to Escape? - "Though women in Dubai are increasingly becoming business and governmental leaders, the Emirates also enforces the law of male guardianship, which means that husbands and fathers control the destiny of their daughters and wives. Women can only work with permission of their husbands; must have a lawful excuse for any refusal to submit to sex with their husbands; and any unmarried woman, Emirati or expat, who appears at a hospital pregnant in Dubai can be arrested, including a woman having a miscarriage... any woman who divorces her Emirati husband and seeks to remarry must grant full custody of her children to her first spouse. In Dubai’s royal family, for women, life may be stricter. “You have the fancy title of being a princess, and of course you have people waiting on you [hand and foot], but you’re essentially a prisoner... You’re not supposed to socialize. You don’t have a normal life.”... Latifa took off her black abaya, applied makeup, and put on sunglasses. She also dropped her cell phone into a garbage can. Then, Jauhianinen says, the two of them drove to the border of Oman, where they met Jaubert, who would pilot the yacht, and one of his crew, who had brought along Jet Skis. They rode the skis about 15 miles out to their boat... This motley crew sailed for eight days, eating granola bars because there were too many roaches in the kitchen to cook. Nervously, via a slow-moving internet connection, they tried to get in touch with Western journalists who might spread the word that they needed protection. They thought the satellite connection they were using, which came from the U.S., would not be penetrated. But about 30 miles off the coast of Goa, India, with Jauhianinen and Latifa below deck in their bunk, they heard gunshots. They locked the door, but the Indian coast guard threw a grenade. Their cabin began filling with smoke. They made it up the stairs to the deck, staggering from coughing so hard. Upstairs, the sky was black, except for the tiny, red laser dots of the guns that Indian men were pointing at them.Lying on the deck, handcuffed, Latifa kept repeating, “I am seeking political asylum,” but the men wouldn’t listen. Soon a warship from the Emirates pulled up, and those men began to board the boat. “One of the crew members said, ‘These men are here to save us from the Indians,’ but of course that’s not what was happening,” says Jauhianinen.Dubai had gotten in touch with India and told them one of Sheikh Mohammed’s daughters had been kidnapped. “India is dependent on UAE remittances from their citizens making money in Dubai and sending it home—there’s seven-to-one Indians to Emiratis in Dubai”... the guards talked about Latifa as if she were a minor who didn’t know what was best for her or knew the meaning of freedom. To them, she had all the freedom a woman could possibly need while living in the UAE. It’s unclear if Jauhianinen or any of the crew would have been let out of UAE prison if it weren’t for a clever trick of Latifa’s: Before leaving, she posed in front of a white wall next to pink drapes, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, and recorded a 40-minute video explaining her reasons for wanting to leave Dubai... Between this viral video, now with 4 million views, and, some months later, a BBC documentary on Latifa—which spurred the United Nations to request that Sheikh Mohammed furnish proof-of-life of Latifa at once—Dubai began to feel pressure to publicly respond. (Jauhianinen was soon sprung from prison, though she says guards tried to scare her even upon release, saying, “What happened to Princess Diana was not an accident.”)... Unlike Saudi Arabia, the UAE is not known to often track down citizens who have left the Emirates. But they might make an exception for a princess. “People assume the richer you are, the more freedom you have, but it’s almost the inverse—the more powerful the family, the more they can force you to return to the country”"