John Nichol On The Lancaster, A WW2 Bomber | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "What is interesting because, and it is almost a curious or a foolish thing to say, the only people that you can interview are those who survived. Now that probably sounds quite a curious thing to say. But all of the people that I spoke to in the many years I've been speaking to them all talked about their love for their crew, how they worked together as a team. And I think that almost certainly had something to do with their survival. Because you never really hear much about I hated my crew. I never got on with them, we never socialized together. There's a couple of occasions in the book where people and a couple of members of their crew are actually dismissed, simply because they're not getting on. Now, in actual fact, some of those who are dismissed then went on to have incredible careers and win awards with other crews. But that bond of being together in that aluminium tube in the heart of that flak, you have to have total trust in all of your friends around you if you're going to survive..."
We remember the the heroism of the men of the Battle of Britain. Rightly and we celebrate that, and I think if I remember the numbers correctly, 544 men were killed during the Battle of Britain. 544, an astonishing number, over the what is it, four month period of the Battle of Britain. On one night, in Bomber Command, on one raid to Nuremberg, more men died on one night than died in the whole of the Battle of Britain. So more men from Bomber command in one night than the whole from Fighter Command over the whole of the Battle of Britain. And that tells its own story, that tells you the real dangers involved...
‘They feel desperately let down that somebody would see, still say 75 years on, that what they did was wrong. As I said that it was the only way of prosecuting the war. And there have been myths that have grown up and I think possibly Dresden is one of these greatest myths. Dresden was horrific. And you don't need to exaggerate what would, what happened in Dresden, to know that it was horrific. But if you just look at some of the myths that have grown up, you just have to go online to see that, people say Dresden was attacked and it shouldn't have been attacked because the war was nearly over. Well, in February 1945, people did not know that the war was nearly over. They know it now. But they didn't know it. The Germans were still getting V2 rockets in the air killing thousands of people. They'd had the Battle of the Bulge that winter, where there had been terrible defeats and terrible setbacks. In September the year before, there’d been terrible defeats at Armand. And the Germans were getting their jet fighters airborne, they were still putting up huge resistance in various parts of Europe. So you did not know that the war's over. And even if you thought it might be over, when you're fighting a total war, you fight the war until the enemy surrenders. And that's the brutal reality of war. And people said Dresden wasn't a legitimate target. Dresden was nominated as a strong point against the advance from the Russians from the east. Dresden was, again, I've got a few quotes in the book, Dresden called itself part of the industrial heartland of the German military production machine. It was producing everything from bomb sights for weapon systems, to engines and other crucial parts of the war machine that was still being, Germany was still fighting. So. We didn't know the war was over. It was a legitimate target. And still it was horrific’...
'They felt abandoned in the aftermath, and they felt abandoned all the way through. You know, they didn't get a memorial until, what was it, 2013 I think. The memorial, the Bomber command memorial in Green Park was splashed with paint only 12 months ago. So Arthur Harris's statue is regularly attacked with paint, so they feel hurt. They feel hurt, to know that people still question what they did'"
Women & The Crusades | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Is there any evidence that any of these women actually got involved in any of the fighting?’
‘Again, sources are a little bit untrustworthy when it comes to this. Certainly, the western sources do not really want to highlight women in fighting roles. They want to preserve, because they're coming from an ecclesiastic official perspective, most of them. You know, they want to, they want, these text are being circulated to kind of tell the story of crusading and inspire others in the West to take up the cross. So they don't necessarily really want lots of stories about women fighting. And but what we do get is women fighting in extremis. Women who are say, for example, defending the camp at the siege of Damietta. In, during the fifth Crusade, they are, you know, they repulse a Muslim attack because they're the only ones left defending the camp. And, and you know, God lend lends them strength beyond their natural, natural weakness of their sex in order to do that. So that's kind of okay. So, in emergency circumstances, it's okay. And usually when women are described as doing that, they're, they're sort of being told that they are, we're being told that they're taking on masculine roles. So they, you know, that they're described almost as being like men when they do it. There's one interesting example of a, from a Western perspective of women at the siege of Acre on the Third Crusade who, when a Muslim ship is captured, we're told that the women put them to death using knives instead of swords. And this is seen to be a shameful and painful death, because women don't have the strength to do this effectively… the only ones really that we have about women fighting as warriors come from an Islamic perspective. And again, a source like for example, Imad Al-Din [sp?], for the Third Crusade tells us that there were Frankish women wearing armor on the battlefield and we didn't even know they were women, until we stripped the dead. And then it was realized that some of them were women. But that comes just after a big long story about how an entire ship of prostitutes came over to support the crusade with lots of very graphic descriptions about said prostitutes. So whether we can kind of trust that source or whether it's telling us more about, you know, what they thought of the Franks and their kind of morality in their, you know, the way in which they allowed women to have these strange and unusual roles is also open to question...
‘There's this interesting bit here about how wives could either refuse permission for their husbands go on crusade or actually had a legitimate right to go on crusade with their husbands.’...
‘Yeah, I mean, the marriage vow is an interesting one in the sense that it seems that from the early stages, women were not really encouraged to go on crusade. And there were concerns that if men were spending a long time away from their wives, that either husband or wife might be tempted into adultery, you know, these these trips to the Holy Land, you're looking at kind of two years, at least round trip, and it takes longer for some crusades. So both people have to be in agreement that during that time, they will not render unto each other anybody else the conjugal debt as it were. So it's almost like, you know, they have to agree to continence while the two of them are apart. And obviously, some Crusaders decide to take their wives with them. And if they do that might be seen as an indication that they were looking to find somewhere to settle, as opposed to think about returning. But some husbands and wives do go and return. But there is this constant worry about, you know, wives inhibiting men from going on Crusade, men being too worried about their wives and children that they might not take the cross. So the church puts in place these special protections. So you are entitled to the protect, if you take the cross, you’re entitled to the protection of the church for your land and property while, while you're away, and then a wife, if they experience some trouble, can appeal to the church for help while they're away’"
Alice Procter On Museums & Colonialism | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Not every community of origin is going to want all of their artifacts back. What's actually happening here is that in many cases, indigenous nations or colonized communities, are just asking museums to take better care of what they have. They're not necessarily saying we must have this back, you must stop holding these objects. And the idea that if you let go of one thing, you have to let go of everything is very dramatic, like it's a compelling argument to make, because it's such a huge terrifying thing to think that museums might cease to exist. But it's also just not realistic. There is so much room between those two extremes.’
‘I suppose another complication is that in some cases, there might be multiple people claiming an object, so it wouldn't be so simple as where it would go to after the museum.’
‘Yeah, absolutely. And there are definitely like some of the most famous examples of contested objects fall into those categories. When you talk about something like the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which is probably like one of the most archetypal contested objects, you're going to open an entire huge dialogue over who has the right to hold that piece’...
‘Do you feel that museums are still holding on too fast to their initial, perhaps you could say Enlightenment values that founded them?’"
‘I think in some cases, absolutely. I personally really dislike the term Enlightenment because it's one of these phrases that sort of gets thrown around. And there's this assumption that everyone, that it means the same thing to everybody. But it doesn't, you know. The creation of one person's Enlightenment is to another person, the destruction of their history and culture. You can't have Enlightenment without the history of the slave trade, the history of invasion and imperialism that comes alongside it. And when museums still use the idea of being Enlightened as part of their foundations, they're ignoring that fact. And they are sort of dismissing and neglecting to engage with that history.’...
'Something that I think we often forget to do in museums is read the labels really critically. There might be references to where the object came from. But look at the language that's being used in that space. Is something described as collected or acquired or donated by a certain individual, like, does that tell us anything about where the piece originally came from? Who gets space in these galleries? Is it the patrons and the donors or is it the makers who created these pieces, and that tells us so much really straightaway about who gets value and power in these rooms. Think about how pieces are displayed as well. When you have an object on a plinth on its own with lots of space around it, that encourages us to see it as a high value object. The more room, the more light, the more kind of information and emphasis that's placed on an individual piece, the greater the value is, according to the museum narrative'"
Relying on people to not demand "their" items back hardly seems sustainable. And considering that often museums take better care of the items than the people they supposedly belong to...
Throwing out the Enlightenment is a great way to undermine modernity and civilisation
Journalists are told to never let themselves become the story. Yet here, it seems we are supposed to be more interested about how museums acquired their objects and how "problematic" that is than the objects themselves
Simon John On The Medieval Statue Debate | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘One of the simplest, the most simplistic reading of the Crusades is that it's a religious conflict and Christian warriors going to win back the Holy Land. But there is, there is a reading, which I hope I'm not misquoting it, but Professor Geraldine Heng who's written a lot on on racism in the medieval world, I think is suggesting that actually we should see the Crusades as a racist endeavor. And, and that takes us into a whole different paradigm, particularly when we're talking about the statues, that the other statues we've been discussing which a lot of the discussions there are based on, on racism, questions about racism and slavery. So, so, so give me, give me a view on that as to where we should, where, how we should understand that’
‘So I think you're exactly right to kind of flag up this very important work by Professor Heng. I regard this as really important work and really important contribution to, you know, a subject that needs to be treated very carefully. So for me, one of the reasons why I think Geraldine Heng’s work is so important is because, to a large degree, it, it encourages us to turn the focus, not necessarily directly on to what people did or did think in the Middle Ages. That's part of it, but she asks us to kind of turn the focus on how modern historians have gone about approaching this topic, as well. So an argument that she makes that I actually, when I reflect on on what I see in medieval sources and so on, an argument that I find very convincing is that a form of racism did exist in the Middle Ages. But that modern historians, modern scholars writing about the Middle Ages have been very unwilling to refer to it in those terms. So she says that, you know, historians have used euphemisms essentially like pre modern chauvinism, xenophobia, to describe what actually we should we should call racism. So it's clear from you know, the start of you know, human history, humans have noted differences between different groups. And in some contexts, those differences have, have given grounds for discrimination in particular contexts. So what Professor Heng points out is that while in the Middle Ages, that the kind of key grounds for discrimination were indeed religion, and religious difference, in some contexts, those differences included kind of physical differences as well. So she calls it a kind of a bio political aspect to to differentiation. So in other words, particularly hated groups were ascribed particular physical characteristics as part of the process of discriminating against them. So yeah, in brief, I think we should, we should speak of racism in the Middle Ages. Racial difference was indeed construed in a way that doesn't necessarily map directly onto how it's construed today. But what Professor Heng would say is that if we use a different word, if we use a word or two other than racism, arguably what we're doing is an injustice both to the people, to the Middle Ages and our own conversation about the relevance of that period to our own modern day discussions on race.’"
Identity politics poisons everything. Ironically, we are told elsewhere that race was invented by European colonialists
Just as statues tell us more about the time they were put up than the time they are about, history can tell us more about the time it is written that the time it is about
Segway boss died in 'act of courtesy' - "A millionaire businessman who fell from a cliff while riding his Segway scooter probably died after trying to make way for a dog walker, an inquest has heard.Jimi Heselden, 62, reversed the machine to make way for another dog walker."
horrorpuppy on Twitter - "Characters that bring out the insecurities in men" *Captain Marvel, Rey, 13th Doctor, Last of Us 2 antagonist Abby*
"Characters that were universally embraced... it’s almost like quality of the project their in matters?" *Furiosa, Ellen Ripley, Leia, Sarah Connor*
Comment elsewhere: "Pretty sure it's not men who are insecure if someone cant handle when a garbage character is criticized."
Sean Ono Lennon on Twitter - "Those who want to see everything through a lens of race and class, judging individuals based on immutable characteristics, pretend to be fighting the very thing they are enacting. And none of us wish to speak up because we have been bullied into silence. Anyway how was your day?"
Top chess personalities slam ABC for questioning if chess is 'racist' - "After an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Sydney radio station posed the question if chess is racist, because its customary for the white pieces to move first, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and former Australian chess representative John Adams took to Twitter to slam the notion, calling it "bulls**t" and a waste of taxpayer dollars... "Trust the taxpayer funded national broadcaster to apply ideological Marxist frameworks to anything & everything in Australia!" "With all the drama resulting from COVID-19, I am amazed that the ABC is broadcasting on irrelevant topics!" Kasparov told those unhappy with the rule, that white pieces in chess move first, than they should pick up another game, instead of using taxpayer money to probe into the rule's origins."If you are worried that the game of chess is racist, please take up Go, where black moves first, instead of looking foolish by wasting taxpayer money at a state broadcaster to 'investigate'... "the response to the tweet showed that common sense is prevailing" during a time when anti-racism protests are sweeping nations worldwide... Two grandmasters, Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Anish Giri of the Netherlands, challenged the longstanding rule in a video posted to Carlsen's Twitter page in March 2019 as a part of the United Nations' International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination."
Chess champ's YouTube podcast taken down for referring to 'black against white' - "The series was removed because it contained "harmful and dangerous" content."
