Ukrainians present Russian prisoners of war to the press.
NY Times
Misstep by Ukr. This is against Geneva I think? Although bit of a grey area.
Albeit better than shooting them, as was the customary practice in 1941.
Mainly the comnmisars at that point. It became more general as things 'progressed'.
Maybe, although the latter survival as a prisoner of the Germans was limited, as the couldn’t be arsed to feed their captives.
The order was to shoot comissars and communists from the outset. That was interpreted as shooting Jews as well, because the Germans operated on the basis that all Jews were communists.
The order was to shoot female soldiers as well, on the basis that they were whores in uniform. The Germans usually interpreted that order as raping them, before making them. dig their own graves.
The Germans are extremely lucky that the USSR did not entirely wipe them out. Stalin had the means and arguably the moral right. Destroy Germany as a nation forever (the concept was also discussed in the West, including on the fringe the sterilisation of all German males, or turning Germany into an agrarian nation forever)
I guess he was happy with 2m rapes and the acquisition of East Germany
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
And the modern parallel is people trying to understand Putin in terms of 5D chess rather than the possibility he believes his own propaganda (aka his own facts).
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
Which made quite a change then as for the vast majority of Christians at the time (and even a small majority of Christians today) the will of God expressed on Earth came via the Pope
I'm glad some people are calling out the Corbynism of Gove and others.
Michael Gove is taking a "Jeremy Corbyn approach" in his bid to seize oligarchs' homes without compensation, government insiders have warned, as some in Whitehall resist proposals to confiscate Russian-owned assets.
A government source warned against undermining "the right of an individual to own their own property" as part of the crackdown on those linked to Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, following the invasion of Ukraine.
An ally of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, also warned against any move that infringes on property rights.
Last week, The Telegraph disclosed that Mr Gove was pushing to seize lavish UK homes owned by Putin's allies. It followed independent research which suggested that £1.5 billion worth of property has been bought by Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin since 2016.
The Housing Secretary is drawing up plans to allow the Government to confiscate oligarchs' homes without paying compensation.
But the proposals are being resisted within Whitehall by figures who point out that they go much further than traditional sanctions that result in such assets being frozen - meaning they cannot be sold or mortgaged - and individuals being banned from entering the country.
Asset freezes do not involve a change in ownership or confiscation.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
Which made quite a change then as for most Christians at the time the will of God expressed on Earth came via the Pope
Charles Walker, Con, Broxbourne Paul Blomfield, Lab, Sheffield Central Ben Bradshaw, Lab, Exeter Alex Cunningham, Lab, Stockton North Kate Green, Lab, Stretford and Urmston Harriet Harman, Lab, Camberwell & Peckham Margaret Hodge, Lab, Barking Barry Sheerman, Lab, Huddersfield Alan Whitehead, Lab, Southampton Test Rosie Winterton, Lab, Doncaster Central
Douglas Ross, Con, Moray
Wayne David, Lab, Caerphilly
Labour heavily over-represented. Why?
Because the Conservatives pushed out all their older MPs at the last election, in the Brexit bonfire of talent and experience.
And. The 1997 effect still hasn't fully played itself out.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
History is built on key facts.
That is what makes history different from philosophy or political science. You can analyse historical fact but it is still historical fact with a chronological narrative at its core
I've just finished The End, by Ian Kershaw. It's about the last months of Nazi Germany, and Kershaw wrestles with the question of why did ordinary Germans hold out so long. To my mind, that question is at least as interesting - and important - as simply reading a narrative of what happened.
Did he or you come to a conclusion? I agree it’s a very interesting question and it’s an undoubted fact that large numbers of Germans kept the faith almost unto the end. My not very insightful reading is that the more formative years spent under Nazism, the deeper the commitment/delusion.
There were various reasons. The leaders were too compromised by their own crimes to negotiate a surrender, but still controlled a powerful apparatus of terror, which stifled dissent among ordinary people.
The main reaosn, in his view, was that most Germans were fighting in the East, and (quite correctly) feared terrible retribution from the Red Army, after what they had done in the Soviet Union.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
"Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall." - Indiana Jones.
My impression of Indiana Jones is that for an archaeologist he takes a remarkably cavalier attitude to preserving the integrity of a site.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions.
Genuine LOL.
That is so funny
I wonder if he'd consider going into stand up with me?
We could come on and I would say something bland and uncontroversial like 'water is wet.'
Then he could shout 'No! Boris has declared water is dry! Therefore it is the driest thing ever!'
And I could reply, 'but it's still wet...'
We would have to spend time with each other, which we haven't done for years, but we could make a fortune very fast.
All you'd have to say is that it was what 2019 voters voted for and you'd get agreement.
Though I notice the 2019 manifesto talked about bolstering alliances and institutions, including NATO, yet for some reason it is a ok to say that the UK should not meet its obligations in respect of the ex-Soviet members of NATO because they should never have been admitted in the first place.
It's almost as though the suppsoed commitment to the party's positions is actually entirely flexible to personal interpretation.
We have a commitment to Nato, however there is no question expanding NATO well beyond its original role of protecting western Europe and North America from the Soviets to expanding even beyond Poland and Romania etc right up to the borders of Russia did not help avoid the current situation.
If there was no question of Ukraine joining NATO and had it kept its nuclear weapons, as in my view it should, Putin would not have invaded it
Given what has happened to other countries bordering Russia you can guarantee that the Baltic States would have been annexed by now had they not been members of NATO.
Are you okay with that?
They declared independence in 1991 from the USSR knowing the risks, they were not in NATO at the time even if they are now
The Baltic States joined NATO in 2004. Given that the war in Georgia was in 2008, and the conflict with Ukraine started in 2014, don't you think it is likely that Russia's eye would have turned to the Baltic States had they not been in NATO.
Would you have been okay with that? Just fine with you? Russia's might is right?
As I said they took that risk when they declared independence from Russia before Russia left the USSR.
NATO was created to protect western Europe and North America, not going so far into Eastern Europe as to absorb all the states neighbouring Russia
I just don't understand what you are trying to say. I've asked a very simple question and your reply does not address my question at all.
Is it fair to say that, yes, you would be perfectly happy with Russia annexing the Baltic States, and you regret the fact that we have helped to keep them as free and democratic countries by sending the British Army to help defend them?
You don't believe in democracy at all.
I would not be perfectly happy with it but I would have reservations about starting WW3 over it, in a way I would not to defend the UK and western Europe, the USA and Canada or even Poland.
However they are in NATO now so based on its mutual self defence principle I accept we now must defend them in a way we do not have to defend non NATO Ukraine, even if we can impose sanctions on Russia over the invasion
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
Theologians have grappled over religious questions for thousands of years, and what was heresy became orthodoxy and vice versa - it makes total sense that most people, even very learned people, will genuinely believe in their faith but won't have a very good grasp of that faith's details. I recall seeing someone on the question of whether Constantine was truly a Christian, and their take was that he was and probably thought of himself so, but wouldn't necessarily have been sure what that meant in all respects.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Not for my degree it wasn't, that was only a minor part of it
That's why I put the caveat in.
It generally isn't at most of the most academic universities, they are taught by leading researchers for whom in depth study of the facts is the key on which analysis is built. Theory comes from the facts not before the facts
It really isn't, but I realise you might not know that having been at Warwick. Not that you would accept it if you did, having stated it the other way to start.
How are academics trained? A PhD.
What's the bedrock of the History PhD? The literature review. Only when that is completed are you let loose on other source material.
And that is because it's the most important part of it. Until you know what other views there are, you can't realistically analyse them or material in light of them.
And that is the key to historical practice.
No it isn't. Reading literature is the heart of English literature not history.
Source material is the basis of history. Without archival source material it is just literature, not history
Hyufd, you have an undergraduate degree from a university whose quality of teaching has been questioned by colleagues of mine whose judgement I trust.
You do not have a PhD. You have never published anything. You have never taught.
When you have those, come back to me and let me know if your views have changed.
In the meanwhile, please just understand - for once - that you are wrong. Archival research is important (speaking as somebody who's done it in several countries) but it is not quite the bedrock of history you seem to think it is. All other considerations aside, until you have studied the literature you don't know which sources to look at.
An unwavering commitment to slavishly following the line of a bunch of third rate criminals who call themselves the cabinet isn't a substitute for actually knowing what you're talking about. As you are showing here, and as you are showing so often, e.g. on lecturing Richard Tyndall on the qualifications needed to be an engineer.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
History is built on key facts.
That is what makes history different from philosophy or political science. You can analyse historical fact but it is still historical fact with a chronological narrative at its core
I've just finished The End, by Ian Kershaw. It's about the last months of Nazi Germany, and Kershaw wrestles with the question of why did ordinary Germans hold out so long. To my mind, that question is at least as interesting - and important - as simply reading a narrative of what happened.
And potentially relevant with respect to Russia today.
To me the generational aspect seems reversed or at least different, ie in Russia the old seem most likely to keep faith with the state and its narrative while in the Third Reich the young were most fervent.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
Which made quite a change then as for the vast majority of Christians at the time (and even a small majority of Christians today) the will of God expressed on Earth came via the Pope
I think the Eastern Orthodox Church might have disputed that statement.
"That fucker thinks he can take on the Red Army? I fucked Germany, I think I can take a flesh lump in a fucking waistcoat."
I second that. The whole movie is great - dude playing Beria was fantastic, even though it's a comedy - but Jason Isaacs was having so much fun as Zhukov.
A word for Michael Palin. He's ace at tortured self-justification. See also Brazil.
I want us to take a more open response to that too, but I am a bit baffled why its something the French Interior minister would be writing to the British Foreign Secretary about.
I'm glad some people are calling out the Corbynism of Gove and others.
Michael Gove is taking a "Jeremy Corbyn approach" in his bid to seize oligarchs' homes without compensation, government insiders have warned, as some in Whitehall resist proposals to confiscate Russian-owned assets.
A government source warned against undermining "the right of an individual to own their own property" as part of the crackdown on those linked to Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, following the invasion of Ukraine.
An ally of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, also warned against any move that infringes on property rights.
Last week, The Telegraph disclosed that Mr Gove was pushing to seize lavish UK homes owned by Putin's allies. It followed independent research which suggested that £1.5 billion worth of property has been bought by Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin since 2016.
The Housing Secretary is drawing up plans to allow the Government to confiscate oligarchs' homes without paying compensation.
But the proposals are being resisted within Whitehall by figures who point out that they go much further than traditional sanctions that result in such assets being frozen - meaning they cannot be sold or mortgaged - and individuals being banned from entering the country.
Asset freezes do not involve a change in ownership or confiscation.
Fuck 'em. Let's just imagine a scenario where the Ribbentrops had a London pied a terre in 1939. Sod this Bombing Ukrainian civilians is up for negotiation but property rights is non negotiable, esp for Pig Dog's tennis partners, shit.
I want us to take a more open response to that too, but I am a bit baffled why its something the French Interior minister would be writing to the British Foreign Secretary about.
Please tell me Priti Patel will never be foreign Secretary.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
Ukrainians present Russian prisoners of war to the press.
NY Times
Misstep by Ukr. This is against Geneva I think? Although bit of a grey area.
Albeit better than shooting them, as was the customary practice in 1941.
Mainly the comnmisars at that point. It became more general as things 'progressed'.
Maybe, although the latter survival as a prisoner of the Germans was limited, as the couldn’t be arsed to feed their captives.
The order was to shoot comissars and communists from the outset. That was interpreted as shooting Jews as well, because the Germans operated on the basis that all Jews were communists.
The order was to shoot female soldiers as well, on the basis that they were whores in uniform. The Germans usually interpreted that order as raping them, before making them. dig their own graves.
The Germans are extremely lucky that the USSR did not entirely wipe them out. Stalin had the means and arguably the moral right. Destroy Germany as a nation forever (the concept was also discussed in the West, including on the fringe the sterilisation of all German males, or turning Germany into an agrarian nation forever)
I guess he was happy with 2m rapes and the acquisition of East Germany
Mass sterilization? Wow. I know we also toyed with the idea of forcibly teaching the Germans cricket and instilling in them a sense of fair play, which they might have found preferable.
Ukrainians present Russian prisoners of war to the press.
NY Times
Misstep by Ukr. This is against Geneva I think? Although bit of a grey area.
Albeit better than shooting them, as was the customary practice in 1941.
Mainly the comnmisars at that point. It became more general as things 'progressed'.
Maybe, although the latter survival as a prisoner of the Germans was limited, as the couldn’t be arsed to feed their captives.
The order was to shoot comissars and communists from the outset. That was interpreted as shooting Jews as well, because the Germans operated on the basis that all Jews were communists.
The order was to shoot female soldiers as well, on the basis that they were whores in uniform. The Germans usually interpreted that order as raping them, before making them. dig their own graves.
The Germans are extremely lucky that the USSR did not entirely wipe them out. Stalin had the means and arguably the moral right. Destroy Germany as a nation forever (the concept was also discussed in the West, including on the fringe the sterilisation of all German males, or turning Germany into an agrarian nation forever)
I guess he was happy with 2m rapes and the acquisition of East Germany
And, there were politicians, for example in Czechoslovakia, who genuinely argued for the extermination of the German population. Nobody disputed that ethnic cleanisng of millions of Germans across the East was justified.
Stalin's complete callousness towards his own people probably saved the Germans from worse retribution. He wanted an Eastern German workforce.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
Which made quite a change then as for most Christians at the time the will of God expressed on Earth came via the Pope
Bzzz! That's Theology, not History!
Off to re-education camp for you, sonny.
He's never seemed to have an answer for why people fought against and deposed popes if they believed as strongly as he thinks they did that they were expressing god's will. From what I can tell while the power of the papacy, particularly at certain points, was certainly massive, that didn't prevent frequent dispute and conflict even with them viewing the role in such a way.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
Which made quite a change then as for the vast majority of Christians at the time (and even a small majority of Christians today) the will of God expressed on Earth came via the Pope
I think the Eastern Orthodox Church might have disputed that statement.
In the 16th century the vast majority of Christians were Roman Catholic, not Eastern Orthodox.
Even today 50.1% of Christians are Roman Catholic, 36% are Protestant and 11% are Orthodox.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
"Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall." - Indiana Jones.
My impression of Indiana Jones is that for an archaeologist he takes a remarkably cavalier attitude to preserving the integrity of a site.
I want us to take a more open response to that too, but I am a bit baffled why its something the French Interior minister would be writing to the British Foreign Secretary about.
Please tell me Priti Patel will never be foreign Secretary.
And with that horrible thought, good night.
Sorry, brain fart on my part - I meant say why 'wouldn't they write to the foreign secretary instead and got confused.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
History is built on key facts.
That is what makes history different from philosophy or political science. You can analyse historical fact but it is still historical fact with a chronological narrative at its core
I've just finished The End, by Ian Kershaw. It's about the last months of Nazi Germany, and Kershaw wrestles with the question of why did ordinary Germans hold out so long. To my mind, that question is at least as interesting - and important - as simply reading a narrative of what happened.
Did he or you come to a conclusion? I agree it’s a very interesting question and it’s an undoubted fact that large numbers of Germans kept the faith almost unto the end. My not very insightful reading is that the more formative years spent under Nazism, the deeper the commitment/delusion.
There were various reasons. The leaders were too compromised by their own crimes to negotiate a surrender, but still controlled a powerful apparatus of terror, which stifled dissent among ordinary people.
The main reaosn, in his view, was that most Germans were fighting in the East, and (quite correctly) feared terrible retribution from the Red Army, after what they had done in the Soviet Union.
It documents the bizarre mass suicides in German towns as the Third Reich collapsed. Sometimes entire families would shoot themselves. Sometimes a bunch of teachers in one staff room would jump in a river to drown. Or all the workers in a pharmacy.
There were a lot in the East which you can ascribe to dread of Soviet revenge. But also many in the West who knew the Brits or Americans were coming. So what happened to THEM?
The writer's thesis is that the Germans became overwhelmed with a fear of the revenge that would be wrought upon them (even by the western Allies) but also a fearful shame at the sheer crime of Nazism, to which they would have to admit their culpability.
It's a fascinating idea, and he is persuasive. It is, in an odd way, encouraging. Beneath the madness of Nazism, the human soul and Christian conscience lay waiting, easily revived.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History primarily.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History.
Though of course about 2/3 of the global population are Christians, Muslims or Hindus, far more than are pure Marxists, Capitalists or Anarchists
How do you teach about the Reformation, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, dissolution of the monasteries or Anglo Irish relations without discussing religion?
You don't teach the Bible or the Koran.
You teach the break with Rome, the English Civil War and the battle over Crown v Parliament's power, the confiscation of the vast wealth of the monasteries by the Crown and the Norman settlements, plantations in Ulster, Cromwell, Home Rule, the Irish War if Independence and civil war and the Troubles.
You might have some minor discussion about the emphasis on more Roman Catholic icons and ceremony in the Anglican worship style favoured by Charles as opposed to the simpler, more evangelical style of the Puritans but that is about it
Well, I don't teach about the Koran for any of those, I will concede that.
But unfortunately from your point of view it is a little difficult to explain the break with Rome without explaining Henry's Biblical scholarship, especially his highly literal interpretation of Leviticus 20:21.
I was taught that the Reformation was all power politics - strangely little about religion. And religious belief among the powerful.
The fact that Henry *believed* that he was Right... and that he was taking a side in an existing struggle that had been going on for hundreds of years.. links to the Lollards, Becket, Sir John Oldcastle. All that came from my own reading....
That again is Marxism, which is what the SHP was based in. Marxist historiography specifically dismisses religion as either irrelevant or misguided (in my more cynical moments, I think that's because they find it raises too many uncomfortable parallels with their own zealotry) and insist everything is about classes and economic power.
Which is not a useless insight - much historical development is about wealth creation and how wealth is distributed - but is also not actually correct in many cases.
It certainly made a complete nonsense of the period. Even the simple fact that not being a total believer was anathema back then. Henry would never, in his entire life have met anyone who didn't Believe - or at least think that they Believed.
Or at the very least, admit that they didn't.
There is a recorded case of atheism from the Stuart period (he got, quite literally, burned) but I don't know of any in Tudor times. Equally, I will confess I am not particularly expert on the Tudors (give me the fifteenth century any day) and it's more than possible there's a very famous case I simply don't know about.
"Or at the very least, admit that they didn't." - indeed.
What I was trying to express was that Henry and everyone else he was dealing with were, by todays standards, hard core deep religious believers. In the sense that they *believed* that if they did The Wrong Thing they were damning themselves to hell, and even (according to some clerics) the whole country, if the King Did Wrong.
I think it's a good rule of thumb to assume that most people actually believe in the religion that they profess. They may have a very bad grasp of its precepts, but I don't think you can. make sense of Henry VIII without acknoledging that he thought his will was the will of God.
Theologians have grappled over religious questions for thousands of years, and what was heresy became orthodoxy and vice versa - it makes total sense that most people, even very learned people, will genuinely believe in their faith but won't have a very good grasp of that faith's details. I recall seeing someone on the question of whether Constantine was truly a Christian, and their take was that he was and probably thought of himself so, but wouldn't necessarily have been sure what that meant in all respects.
People will compartmenatlise, and so fervently believe in a religion, at the same as cheerfully violating its teachings.
Everyone obsesses about Viktor Orban but Eastern Europe is coming up with some top draw leaders.
Volodymr Zelenskyy - Enough said Nicolae Ciuca - prime minister of Romania. Former general who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maia Sandu - President of Moldova. Harvard graduate who speaks Russian Spanish and English as well as Romanian Kiril Petkov - Prime minister of Bulgaria. Has a masters in Economics from Harvard
Also Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who should be President of Belarus.
Ukraine does have a curious liking for celebrities as politicians, but overall it does seem that with a couple of exceptions, the new Democracies in former communist states are really good at choosing leaders. Far more so than us...
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
But they aren't indisputable, are they? Putin disputes them. But who decides that? A politician, or a historian? Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election? Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
You can see the dear little thing is bleeding through his warm blanket 😢
Fuck it. What matters is English law property rights.
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
History is built on key facts.
That is what makes history different from philosophy or political science. You can analyse historical fact but it is still historical fact with a chronological narrative at its core
I've just finished The End, by Ian Kershaw. It's about the last months of Nazi Germany, and Kershaw wrestles with the question of why did ordinary Germans hold out so long. To my mind, that question is at least as interesting - and important - as simply reading a narrative of what happened.
Did he or you come to a conclusion? I agree it’s a very interesting question and it’s an undoubted fact that large numbers of Germans kept the faith almost unto the end. My not very insightful reading is that the more formative years spent under Nazism, the deeper the commitment/delusion.
There were various reasons. The leaders were too compromised by their own crimes to negotiate a surrender, but still controlled a powerful apparatus of terror, which stifled dissent among ordinary people.
The main reaosn, in his view, was that most Germans were fighting in the East, and (quite correctly) feared terrible retribution from the Red Army, after what they had done in the Soviet Union.
It documents the bizarre mass suicides in German towns as the Third Reich collapsed. Sometimes entire families would shoot themselves. Sometimes a bunch of teachers in one staff room would jump in a river to drown. Or all the workers in a pharmacy.
There were a lot in the East which you can ascribe to dread of Soviet revenge. But also many in the West who knew the Brits or Americans were coming. So what happened to THEM?
The writer's thesis is that the Germans became overwhelmed with a fear of the revenge that would be wrought upon them (even by the western Allies) but also a fearful shame at the sheer crime of Nazism, to which they would have to admit their culpability.
It's a fascinating idea, and he is persuasive. It is, in an odd way, encouraging. Beneath the madness of Nazism, the human soul and Christian conscience lay waiting, easily revived.
A lot of Soviet soldiers (especially women) would kill themselves, rather than be taken prisoner by the Germans. Which was rational.
Kershaw's view is that rates of suicide were no higher than normal in Western Germany, but well above normal in the East. Which was also rational.
I want us to take a more open response to that too, but I am a bit baffled why its something the French Interior minister would be writing to the British Foreign Secretary about.
You must be in a constant state of bafflement, then. The French interior minister is responsible for people who happen to be in France (clue in job title). There are Ukrainian people in France who want to be in the UK.
Ukrainians present Russian prisoners of war to the press.
NY Times
Misstep by Ukr. This is against Geneva I think? Although bit of a grey area.
Albeit better than shooting them, as was the customary practice in 1941.
Mainly the comnmisars at that point. It became more general as things 'progressed'.
Maybe, although the latter survival as a prisoner of the Germans was limited, as the couldn’t be arsed to feed their captives.
The order was to shoot comissars and communists from the outset. That was interpreted as shooting Jews as well, because the Germans operated on the basis that all Jews were communists.
The order was to shoot female soldiers as well, on the basis that they were whores in uniform. The Germans usually interpreted that order as raping them, before making them. dig their own graves.
The Germans are extremely lucky that the USSR did not entirely wipe them out. Stalin had the means and arguably the moral right. Destroy Germany as a nation forever (the concept was also discussed in the West, including on the fringe the sterilisation of all German males, or turning Germany into an agrarian nation forever)
I guess he was happy with 2m rapes and the acquisition of East Germany
Mass sterilization? Wow. I know we also toyed with the idea of forcibly teaching the Germans cricket and instilling in them a sense of fair play, which they might have found preferable.
There is a semi-urban legend that the Nazis suppressed cricket.
Everyone obsesses about Viktor Orban but Eastern Europe is coming up with some top draw leaders.
Volodymr Zelenskyy - Enough said Nicolae Ciuca - prime minister of Romania. Former general who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maia Sandu - President of Moldova. Harvard graduate who speaks Russian Spanish and English as well as Romanian Kiril Petkov - Prime minister of Bulgaria. Has a masters in Economics from Harvard
Also Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who should be President of Belarus.
Ukraine does have a curious liking for celebrities as politicians, but overall it does seem that with a couple of exceptions, the new Democracies in former communist states are really good at choosing leaders. Far more so than us...
No. Naive
It is easier for innocent young nations to throw up heroic leaders because their circumstances demand heroes. It is much rarer in decadent old liberal democracies, because the politicians must abide by the will of the voters, and are necessarily hemmed in by checks and balances
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
Ukrainians present Russian prisoners of war to the press.
NY Times
Misstep by Ukr. This is against Geneva I think? Although bit of a grey area.
Albeit better than shooting them, as was the customary practice in 1941.
Mainly the comnmisars at that point. It became more general as things 'progressed'.
Maybe, although the latter survival as a prisoner of the Germans was limited, as the couldn’t be arsed to feed their captives.
The order was to shoot comissars and communists from the outset. That was interpreted as shooting Jews as well, because the Germans operated on the basis that all Jews were communists.
The order was to shoot female soldiers as well, on the basis that they were whores in uniform. The Germans usually interpreted that order as raping them, before making them. dig their own graves.
The Germans are extremely lucky that the USSR did not entirely wipe them out. Stalin had the means and arguably the moral right. Destroy Germany as a nation forever (the concept was also discussed in the West, including on the fringe the sterilisation of all German males, or turning Germany into an agrarian nation forever)
I guess he was happy with 2m rapes and the acquisition of East Germany
Mass sterilization? Wow. I know we also toyed with the idea of forcibly teaching the Germans cricket and instilling in them a sense of fair play, which they might have found preferable.
There is a semi-urban legend that the Nazis suppressed cricket.
There was a decidedly un-PC story in Tales from the Long Room, of cricket-loving British officers smuggling out Goering from Nuremburg, because he was an excellent wicket keeper.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
But they aren't indisputable, are they? Putin disputes them. But who decides that? A politician, or a historian? Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election? Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
They are indisputable. Russian forces are in Ukraine. Putin sent them there. NATO expanded into Eastern Europe after the Cold War.
Those are facts and historians tell future generations about them using source material. '
Anyone who writes without using any source material is not a historian but an author of fiction or a philisopher.
January 6th saw Trump supporters storm the Capitol. Again a fact regardless of whether it was justified or not.
I want us to take a more open response to that too, but I am a bit baffled why its something the French Interior minister would be writing to the British Foreign Secretary about.
The point has been made before, but it is perhaps worth repeating. The trouble here is that everyone is getting their news on this conflict from one side. I may be wrong, but I think it is a big error to start believing that Ukraine are pushing back Russia. They are perhaps delaying the advance, but in response the Russians are resorting to more destructive forms of attack, and are unconcerned about incurring significant losses in doing so. The real fight will take place after Russia have 'won', and attempt to implement its goal of a subservient regime in Ukraine. It is likely to be a terrible war that involves a lot of death, and lasting for years. Better to be prepared for that, than hold on to the hope that the victory will happen next week, however seductive that idea is.
While I'm sure there's an element of that, it's also fairly definitely the case that Russia has captured perhaps two of Ukraine's dozen largest cities, and outside the South of Ukraine, progress has been extremely slow.
Russia has the resources to keep grinding, particularly in the East of the country. But it is by no means clear that they have the resources to garrison Kyiv and the Eastern cities, and to continue their thrust deep into the West of the country towards Lviv.
Furthermore, Russia probably has some fairly serious resupply issues. There are the obvious ones like fuel, ammunition and food. But there is also the question of how easily losses of planes and helicopters can be replaced.
Being the defender brings enormous advantages. You don't need petrol. You don't need tanks or trucks. You don't need to patrol streets. All you need is a hiding place, some tinned food, and some crude weapons. And right now the Ukrainian defender have a lot more than crude weapons.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
But they aren't indisputable, are they? Putin disputes them. But who decides that? A politician, or a historian? Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election? Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
HYUFD should decide! As divinely-appointed arbiter of all things!! The Ayatollah of Epping speaketh!!!
I want us to take a more open response to that too, but I am a bit baffled why its something the French Interior minister would be writing to the British Foreign Secretary about.
You must be in a constant state of bafflement, then. The French interior minister is responsible for people who happen to be in France (clue in job title). There are Ukrainian people in France who want to be in the UK.
The descent of Killing Eve to arch, self referential tosh trying far too hard is disappointing.
It was overrated shit from the start, is my take
I've always been irritated at the portrayal of assassins as being stylish and glamorous. Those that are good at their job are nondescript people who don't attract attention.
I see the threader has NOW been written by that intellectual hero, Niall Ferguson. I am tired of PB writers shifting identities, please make it stop
OGH must have quite a hefty PB fund if he can afford Niall Ferguson's fee, he rarely writes for free
I suspect they've got that idiot salamander painter @LadyG to do a pastiche of Ferguson, because they were known lovers, in the late 1990s, and she probably feels cheated, to this day
Everyone obsesses about Viktor Orban but Eastern Europe is coming up with some top draw leaders.
Volodymr Zelenskyy - Enough said Nicolae Ciuca - prime minister of Romania. Former general who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maia Sandu - President of Moldova. Harvard graduate who speaks Russian Spanish and English as well as Romanian Kiril Petkov - Prime minister of Bulgaria. Has a masters in Economics from Harvard
Also Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who should be President of Belarus.
Ukraine does have a curious liking for celebrities as politicians, but overall it does seem that with a couple of exceptions, the new Democracies in former communist states are really good at choosing leaders. Far more so than us...
No. Naive
It is easier for innocent young nations to throw up heroic leaders because their circumstances demand heroes. It is much rarer in decadent old liberal democracies, because the politicians must abide by the will of the voters, and are necessarily hemmed in by checks and balances
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
History is built on key facts.
That is what makes history different from philosophy or political science. You can analyse historical fact but it is still historical fact with a chronological narrative at its core
I've just finished The End, by Ian Kershaw. It's about the last months of Nazi Germany, and Kershaw wrestles with the question of why did ordinary Germans hold out so long. To my mind, that question is at least as interesting - and important - as simply reading a narrative of what happened.
And potentially relevant with respect to Russia today.
To me the generational aspect seems reversed or at least different, ie in Russia the old seem most likely to keep faith with the state and its narrative while in the Third Reich the young were most fervent.
On the day of the 2018 World Cup Final my boys and I were sightseeing in Red Square, enjoying the party atmosphere, near Lenin's mausoleum on a Sunday morning.
Then a parade of elderly Muscovites appeared, maybe 50 strong carrying banners and icons, only this wasn't a Religious parade. The Icons were of Stalin and the banners Communist ones. The crowd parted and watched, and the guards at Lenins mausoleum opened the barrier for them.
For all of Moscow's modernity, consumerism and beauty, it was a strange relic of a ceremony.
"That fucker thinks he can take on the Red Army? I fucked Germany, I think I can take a flesh lump in a fucking waistcoat."
I second that. The whole movie is great - dude playing Beria was fantastic, even though it's a comedy - but Jason Isaacs was having so much fun as Zhukov.
A word for Michael Palin. He's ace at tortured self-justification. See also Brazil.
And as cameos: the first guy NOT to get shot in the Siberia camp after they learn of Stalin being dead is superb. So is the guy who was betrayed by his son, and the eye contact between them when he gets back home
Last night, an alleged FSB whistle-blower letter was published that damned Russia's military performance in Ukraine and predicted a disaster for the RU in the next weeks and months. I wasn't sure if it was authentic - as Ukraine had previously leaked fake FSB letters as psy-ops. This letter appeared different though: it came via a reputable source (founder of http://gulagu.net), and it was way longer than a forger would choose to make it (the longer the text, the more risk of making an error). I showed the letter to two actual (current or former) FSB contacts, and they had no doubt it was written by a colleague. They didn't agree with all of his conclusions, but that's a different story. Here's the text, worth reading: https://www.facebook.com/vladimir.osechkin/posts/4811633942268327
www.deepl.com will be your friend to translate, but tl;dr:
Famine assessed to be extremely likely, FSB did not know about the war. FSB reportedly leaked the location of the Chechens to Ukraine, so they got torn apart, Kadyrov not happy. Medvedchuk is a coward, he ran away On casualties: I don't know how many. Nobody knows. Definitely the death toll is in the thousands. Maybe 10 thousand, maybe 5, maybe only 2. Even the headquarters do not know exactly. But it should be closer to 10. Now even if we kill Zelensky and take him prisoner, nothing will change. The level of hatred towards us is Chechnya there. And now even those who were loyal to us are against it. We have a conditional deadline of June. Conditional - because in June we have no economy, nothing left. There is simply no way of winning, and if we lose, we're screwed. We 100% repeated the beginning of the last century, when we decided to kick weak Japan and get a quick victory, then it turned out that the army was a disaster. Donbas was set up to try and draw western ire away from the Crimean annexation, but now this has re-opened that. Somebody will convince him, either they lower the sanctions or go to war. And if they refuse? Now I don't rule out that then we will get into a real international conflict like Hitler did in 1939.
Nukes:
Naryshkin are now digging the ground to prove that they have secretly built nuclear weapons there. Kadyrov is angry for a reason. He has created an image of himself as the most powerful and invincible. And if he falls once, he will be brought down by his own people.
I would only add that I do not believe that VV Putin will press the red button to destroy the whole world. First of all there is not only one person who makes a decision, at least somebody will jump out. And there are many people there - there is no "sole red button". Secondly, there are some doubts that everything is functioning successfully there. There are always bravura reports - things are always wrong there.
Everyone obsesses about Viktor Orban but Eastern Europe is coming up with some top draw leaders.
Volodymr Zelenskyy - Enough said Nicolae Ciuca - prime minister of Romania. Former general who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maia Sandu - President of Moldova. Harvard graduate who speaks Russian Spanish and English as well as Romanian Kiril Petkov - Prime minister of Bulgaria. Has a masters in Economics from Harvard
Also Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who should be President of Belarus.
Ukraine does have a curious liking for celebrities as politicians, but overall it does seem that with a couple of exceptions, the new Democracies in former communist states are really good at choosing leaders. Far more so than us...
No. Naive
It is easier for innocent young nations to throw up heroic leaders because their circumstances demand heroes. It is much rarer in decadent old liberal democracies, because the politicians must abide by the will of the voters, and are necessarily hemmed in by checks and balances
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
But they aren't indisputable, are they? Putin disputes them. But who decides that? A politician, or a historian? Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election? Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
They are indisputable. Russian forces are in Ukraine. Putin sent them there. NATO expanded into Eastern Europe after the Cold War.
Those are facts and historians tell future generations about them using source material. '
Anyone who writes without using any source material is not a historian but an author of fiction or a philisopher.
January 6th saw Trump supporters storm the Capitol. Again a fact regardless of whether it was justified or not.
But whether is was justified or not is entirely the point of studying history. Not just reciting a list of things that happened.
@haynesdeborah US Secretary of State @SecBlinken met with his Ukrainian counterpart at the Ukraine-Poland border today and then he took a couple of steps into Ukraine as "a symbol of support", @DmytroKuleba says
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
But they aren't indisputable, are they? Putin disputes them. But who decides that? A politician, or a historian? Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election? Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
They are indisputable. Russian forces are in Ukraine. Putin sent them there. NATO expanded into Eastern Europe after the Cold War.
Those are facts and historians tell future generations about them using source material. '
Anyone who writes without using any source material is not a historian but an author of fiction or a philisopher.
January 6th saw Trump supporters storm the Capitol. Again a fact regardless of whether it was justified or not.
But whether is was justified or not is entirely the point of studying history. Not just reciting a list of things that happened.
No it isn't.
That is journalism or debates of political theory or politics.
It is not history which is based on telling future generations about core facts of past times. There can be analysis of facts too but analysis is not history without source material
Melenchon is a proper old fashioned Germanophobe. Also this
'But what is most striking about the far-left leader is how he’s systematically refrained from ascribing any responsibility to Russia over the war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, not to mention the killing fields of Syria. Only the west is ever held guilty for anything. This hasn’t changed, even after chemical weapons were used this month and Russia vetoed a UN-sponsored investigation into the crime.'
The point has been made before, but it is perhaps worth repeating. The trouble here is that everyone is getting their news on this conflict from one side. I may be wrong, but I think it is a big error to start believing that Ukraine are pushing back Russia. They are perhaps delaying the advance, but in response the Russians are resorting to more destructive forms of attack, and are unconcerned about incurring significant losses in doing so. The real fight will take place after Russia have 'won', and attempt to implement its goal of a subservient regime in Ukraine. It is likely to be a terrible war that involves a lot of death, and lasting for years. Better to be prepared for that, than hold on to the hope that the victory will happen next week, however seductive that idea is.
While I'm sure there's an element of that, it's also fairly definitely the case that Russia has captured perhaps two of Ukraine's dozen largest cities, and outside the South of Ukraine, progress has been extremely slow.
Russia has the resources to keep grinding, particularly in the East of the country. But it is by no means clear that they have the resources to garrison Kyiv and the Eastern cities, and to continue their thrust deep into the West of the country towards Lviv.
Furthermore, Russia probably has some fairly serious resupply issues. There are the obvious ones like fuel, ammunition and food. But there is also the question of how easily losses of planes and helicopters can be replaced.
Being the defender brings enormous advantages. You don't need petrol. You don't need tanks or trucks. You don't need to patrol streets. All you need is a hiding place, some tinned food, and some crude weapons. And right now the Ukrainian defender have a lot more than crude weapons.
Was wondering that myself. How on Earth do they propose to take Lviv? Giving that NATO will be supplying the defenders across the very close border?
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
HYUFD, there are NO facts in science, merely hypotheses which have not been refuted.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Not for my degree it wasn't, that was only a minor part of it
That's why I put the caveat in.
It generally isn't at most of the most academic universities, they are taught by leading researchers for whom in depth study of the facts is the key on which analysis is built. Theory comes from the facts not before the facts
It really isn't, but I realise you might not know that having been at Warwick. Not that you would accept it if you did, having stated it the other way to start.
How are academics trained? A PhD.
What's the bedrock of the History PhD? The literature review. Only when that is completed are you let loose on other source material.
And that is because it's the most important part of it. Until you know what other views there are, you can't realistically analyse them or material in light of them.
And that is the key to historical practice.
No it isn't. Reading literature is the heart of English literature not history.
Source material is the basis of history. Without archival source material it is just literature, not history
Hyufd, you have an undergraduate degree from a university whose quality of teaching has been questioned by colleagues of mine whose judgement I trust.
You do not have a PhD. You have never published anything. You have never taught.
When you have those, come back to me and let me know if your views have changed.
In the meanwhile, please just understand - for once - that you are wrong. Archival research is important (speaking as somebody who's done it in several countries) but it is not quite the bedrock of history you seem to think it is. All other considerations aside, until you have studied the literature you don't know which sources to look at.
An unwavering commitment to slavishly following the line of a bunch of third rate criminals who call themselves the cabinet isn't a substitute for actually knowing what you're talking about. As you are showing here, and as you are showing so often, e.g. on lecturing Richard Tyndall on the qualifications needed to be an engineer.
I am amazed you passed on the free hit of HUYFD clearly having no fucking clue what you meant by literature review.
I want us to take a more open response to that too, but I am a bit baffled why its something the French Interior minister would be writing to the British Foreign Secretary about.
You must be in a constant state of bafflement, then. The French interior minister is responsible for people who happen to be in France (clue in job title). There are Ukrainian people in France who want to be in the UK.
So who you gonna call?
Are there? Already?
Of course. By train in would take you just over 2 days to get from Lviv in Ukraine to Paris. And the European railways have been laying on trains for free to take refugees all over the continent. There were refugees in Paris days ago.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
But they aren't indisputable, are they? Putin disputes them. But who decides that? A politician, or a historian? Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election? Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
They are indisputable. Russian forces are in Ukraine. Putin sent them there. NATO expanded into Eastern Europe after the Cold War.
Those are facts and historians tell future generations about them using source material. '
Anyone who writes without using any source material is not a historian but an author of fiction or a philisopher.
January 6th saw Trump supporters storm the Capitol. Again a fact regardless of whether it was justified or not.
But whether is was justified or not is entirely the point of studying history. Not just reciting a list of things that happened.
No it isn't.
That is journalism or debates of political theory or politics.
It is not history which is based on telling future generations about core facts of past times. There can be analysis of facts too but analysis is not history without source material
That's strange. I could swear I've heard historians argue about the causes of, and justifications of, the first world war. And about source material being contradictory...
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
History is built on key facts.
That is what makes history different from philosophy or political science. You can analyse historical fact but it is still historical fact with a chronological narrative at its core
I've just finished The End, by Ian Kershaw. It's about the last months of Nazi Germany, and Kershaw wrestles with the question of why did ordinary Germans hold out so long. To my mind, that question is at least as interesting - and important - as simply reading a narrative of what happened.
And potentially relevant with respect to Russia today.
To me the generational aspect seems reversed or at least different, ie in Russia the old seem most likely to keep faith with the state and its narrative while in the Third Reich the young were most fervent.
On the day of the 2018 World Cup Final my boys and I were sightseeing in Red Square, enjoying the party atmosphere, near Lenin's mausoleum on a Sunday morning.
Then a parade of elderly Muscovites appeared, maybe 50 strong carrying banners and icons, only this wasn't a Religious parade. The Icons were of Stalin and the banners Communist ones. The crowd parted and watched, and the guards at Lenins mausoleum opened the barrier for them.
For all of Moscow's modernity, consumerism and beauty, it was a strange relic of a ceremony.
In 1989 my wife and I visited Moscow and St Petersburg and I took a very large video camera with me
At Moscow customs I was taken on one side and made to demonstrate the camera fearing I could have a problem
After a moment or two I was told by a dour border guard to carry on as they were the cameras they use !!!!!
Then in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg I was directed away from our party and escorted down lots of corridors with some trepidation. After what seemed miles I stood in front of double opening doors and told to go in
In front of me were maybe a 100 or so members of their Pioneer Corp being addressed by a leader and I was told to film the ceremony. At the conclusion I was escorted back to my wife and group who later said they had been very worried by events
We agreed it seemed very different to what we expected especially the openness
Last night, an alleged FSB whistle-blower letter was published that damned Russia's military performance in Ukraine and predicted a disaster for the RU in the next weeks and months. I wasn't sure if it was authentic - as Ukraine had previously leaked fake FSB letters as psy-ops. This letter appeared different though: it came via a reputable source (founder of http://gulagu.net), and it was way longer than a forger would choose to make it (the longer the text, the more risk of making an error). I showed the letter to two actual (current or former) FSB contacts, and they had no doubt it was written by a colleague. They didn't agree with all of his conclusions, but that's a different story. Here's the text, worth reading: https://www.facebook.com/vladimir.osechkin/posts/4811633942268327
www.deepl.com will be your friend to translate, but tl;dr:
Famine assessed to be extremely likely, FSB did not know about the war. FSB reportedly leaked the location of the Chechens to Ukraine, so they got torn apart, Kadyrov not happy. Medvedchuk is a coward, he ran away On casualties: I don't know how many. Nobody knows. Definitely the death toll is in the thousands. Maybe 10 thousand, maybe 5, maybe only 2. Even the headquarters do not know exactly. But it should be closer to 10. Now even if we kill Zelensky and take him prisoner, nothing will change. The level of hatred towards us is Chechnya there. And now even those who were loyal to us are against it. We have a conditional deadline of June. Conditional - because in June we have no economy, nothing left. There is simply no way of winning, and if we lose, we're screwed. We 100% repeated the beginning of the last century, when we decided to kick weak Japan and get a quick victory, then it turned out that the army was a disaster. Donbas was set up to try and draw western ire away from the Crimean annexation, but now this has re-opened that. Somebody will convince him, either they lower the sanctions or go to war. And if they refuse? Now I don't rule out that then we will get into a real international conflict like Hitler did in 1939.
Nukes:
Naryshkin are now digging the ground to prove that they have secretly built nuclear weapons there. Kadyrov is angry for a reason. He has created an image of himself as the most powerful and invincible. And if he falls once, he will be brought down by his own people.
I would only add that I do not believe that VV Putin will press the red button to destroy the whole world. First of all there is not only one person who makes a decision, at least somebody will jump out. And there are many people there - there is no "sole red button". Secondly, there are some doubts that everything is functioning successfully there. There are always bravura reports - things are always wrong there.
hmmmmmmm.....
"Is there a possibility of a local nuclear strike? Yes. Not for military purposes (it won't give anything - it's a weapon of breaking through defense), but in order to intimidate others. At the same time, the ground is being prepared to turn everything to Ukraine - Naryshkin and his SVR are now digging the ground to prove that they secretly created nuclear weapons there. Fuck, they are now pounding by what we have long studied and disassembled: you can't draw evidence on your knee here, and the presence of specialists and uranium (Ukraine is full of depleted isotope 238) is about nothing. There's a production cycle that you can't do it imperceptibly. You can't even make a "dirty" bomb unnoticed, and the fact that their old nuclear power plants can produce weapons-grade plutonium (stations such as EW-1000 give it in minimal quantities as a "by-product" of the reaction) - so the Americans introduced such control with the connection of the IAEA, that sucking the topic is stupid."
You can see the dear little thing is bleeding through his warm blanket 😢
Fuck it. What matters is English law property rights.
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Perhaps one of my favourite quotes of all time. The whole play is brilliant but that passage particularly is not only brilliant but hugely important.
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Historiography is interesting but only takes you so far. With my own Master's degree, I've read most of the relevant secondary sources, but what's more interesting is reading letters/archives and other primary sources.
Exactly, history without primary sources and archives as its origin is not history at all
You can use facts to tell lies about history though, which is why you can't reduce it to facts alone.
Analysis too but built on facts
I know this is veering towards philosophy, but what is a fact? And who decides? Putin has instructed that the "facts" that Ukrainians are being terrorised by pro-Nato Nazis, that there is no War, that his troops are welcomed as liberators, are taught in schools. And don't just say they aren't facts. Anyone can say that. Putin provides other facts. How do you decide? And who is best placed to decide which are more reliable historical facts? A Tory Minister? Or a historian? Cos you are veering towards the same arguments as Putin here. That there is an approved set of true facts dictated by politicians.
The facts are Putin invaded Ukraine, the date he invaded Ukraine, the troop movements towards Ukraine and NATO expanded eastwards after the Cold War and Putin is a Russian nationalist and there are a few Russian sympathisers in the parts of Ukraine closest to Russia.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
But they aren't indisputable, are they? Putin disputes them. But who decides that? A politician, or a historian? Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election? Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
They are indisputable. Russian forces are in Ukraine. Putin sent them there. NATO expanded into Eastern Europe after the Cold War.
Those are facts and historians tell future generations about them using source material. '
Anyone who writes without using any source material is not a historian but an author of fiction or a philisopher.
January 6th saw Trump supporters storm the Capitol. Again a fact regardless of whether it was justified or not.
But whether is was justified or not is entirely the point of studying history. Not just reciting a list of things that happened.
No it isn't.
That is journalism or debates of political theory or politics.
It is not history which is based on telling future generations about core facts of past times. There can be analysis of facts too but analysis is not history without source material
That's strange. I could swear I've heard historians argue about the causes of, and justifications of, the first world war.
Only based on the core facts and source material eg the increased military build up of European powers, statistically proved, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, a fact, the Triple Alliance and Entente Cordiale, a fact etc.
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
You're absolutely correct and absolutely incorrect. Typical "Leon"
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Not for my degree it wasn't, that was only a minor part of it
That's why I put the caveat in.
It generally isn't at most of the most academic universities, they are taught by leading researchers for whom in depth study of the facts is the key on which analysis is built. Theory comes from the facts not before the facts
It really isn't, but I realise you might not know that having been at Warwick. Not that you would accept it if you did, having stated it the other way to start.
How are academics trained? A PhD.
What's the bedrock of the History PhD? The literature review. Only when that is completed are you let loose on other source material.
And that is because it's the most important part of it. Until you know what other views there are, you can't realistically analyse them or material in light of them.
And that is the key to historical practice.
No it isn't. Reading literature is the heart of English literature not history.
Source material is the basis of history. Without archival source material it is just literature, not history
Hyufd, you have an undergraduate degree from a university whose quality of teaching has been questioned by colleagues of mine whose judgement I trust.
You do not have a PhD. You have never published anything. You have never taught.
When you have those, come back to me and let me know if your views have changed.
In the meanwhile, please just understand - for once - that you are wrong. Archival research is important (speaking as somebody who's done it in several countries) but it is not quite the bedrock of history you seem to think it is. All other considerations aside, until you have studied the literature you don't know which sources to look at.
An unwavering commitment to slavishly following the line of a bunch of third rate criminals who call themselves the cabinet isn't a substitute for actually knowing what you're talking about. As you are showing here, and as you are showing so often, e.g. on lecturing Richard Tyndall on the qualifications needed to be an engineer.
I am amazed you passed on the free hit of HUYFD clearly having no fucking clue what you meant by literature review.
Absolutely mortifying for him.
You can review previous works of history but those works also have to be based on source material to be history.
Otherwise you are not writing a work of history which should also include source material you will have analysed, including at PhD level research in the archives
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
You're absolutely correct and absolutely incorrect. Typical "Leon"
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
You're absolutely correct and absolutely incorrect. Typical "Leon"
The Swiss don't do Prime Ministers.
It has a President of the Confederation
Point stands - how many Presidents of the Confederation can anybody name?
First. Someone at the gathering reckoned laying Melenchon is a safe bet.
That's the great thing about betting - it is all based on punters having different views.
Like History, except apparently in the minds of certain Tory supporters.
You are entitled to your own views, not your own facts. History at its best is empirical and factual above all
The irony of that post, Hyufd, is that my view is based on the facts, and yours is based on your political opinions.
No, your view is based on your opinions. Too many history departments have been infected with Marxist interpretations of history since the 1960s rather than traditional empirical fact based history.
If this Conservative government is doing conservative things in education all to the good, that is what it won a majority for in 2019. If you want to change things you will need to elect a Labour led government as you failed to do in 2019
"Empirical fact based history" if it means anything would have to mean that the past is taught without reference to values, concepts of better and worse, right and wrong, and taught from no particular point of view in idea, time or place.
The problem with Marxism (I am a conservative about education) is not that it is interpretative but that it is too narrow and distorts the past by over imposing a theory about what it has to mean.
Marxism is just one way of many of analysing past events. It's easy to do if you know it well enough. My old roommate's parents were a Stalinist and a Trot. (They divorced, natch). But he'd heard the theories from so young that he was able to learn historical facts and interpret them all through competing Marxist lenses. Without being a believer in the slightest. He got a first. In the days when precious few did. Does the Whig view of history hit the bin, too?
If we teach Religious education in schools as though Christianity , islam hindu etc has some validity to it to be given the status of being taught in school (when its clearly not true) then i cannot see why more humanistic forms of thinking like marxism ,anarchism and capitalism cannot be taught as well. To any logical person they all make more sense than believing in a vindictive man in the sky
You don't teach Theology in History either.
I did not say you do not teach Marxism at all but if it is taught it should be in A Level Politics and Philosophy not History.
Same as the place to teach Christianity, Islam and Hindu is primarily in Religious Studies not History
Good luck teaching the Tudor period without teaching theology.
My A level was in British and European history 1870 to 1945. How do you teach that without Marxism and Nazism playing a central role?
Fairly easily. Most of it pre 1918 was about Great Power rivalry.
You can study the causes of the Russian revolution without spending weeks on Marxism and Das Kapital either and you can also teach the Weimar Republic and WW2 without spending weeks on Nazi theories and Mein Kampf as well
Well, you can, but it would be a superficial treatment of the subject in both cases.
You don't need an in depth study unless doing it at degree level, or at most A level. Just an overview of the key facts
Why not? History is about more than key facts. It's also about trying to make sense of what people thought, why they thought that, and how those thoughts motivated them.
You see, you could argue that is a key fact in itself.
At degree level (or at least, degree level in an academically rigorous uni) it's much more about how people have tried to make sense of the past.
Not for my degree it wasn't, that was only a minor part of it
That's why I put the caveat in.
It generally isn't at most of the most academic universities, they are taught by leading researchers for whom in depth study of the facts is the key on which analysis is built. Theory comes from the facts not before the facts
It really isn't, but I realise you might not know that having been at Warwick. Not that you would accept it if you did, having stated it the other way to start.
How are academics trained? A PhD.
What's the bedrock of the History PhD? The literature review. Only when that is completed are you let loose on other source material.
And that is because it's the most important part of it. Until you know what other views there are, you can't realistically analyse them or material in light of them.
And that is the key to historical practice.
No it isn't. Reading literature is the heart of English literature not history.
Source material is the basis of history. Without archival source material it is just literature, not history
Hyufd, you have an undergraduate degree from a university whose quality of teaching has been questioned by colleagues of mine whose judgement I trust.
You do not have a PhD. You have never published anything. You have never taught.
When you have those, come back to me and let me know if your views have changed.
In the meanwhile, please just understand - for once - that you are wrong. Archival research is important (speaking as somebody who's done it in several countries) but it is not quite the bedrock of history you seem to think it is. All other considerations aside, until you have studied the literature you don't know which sources to look at.
An unwavering commitment to slavishly following the line of a bunch of third rate criminals who call themselves the cabinet isn't a substitute for actually knowing what you're talking about. As you are showing here, and as you are showing so often, e.g. on lecturing Richard Tyndall on the qualifications needed to be an engineer.
I am amazed you passed on the free hit of HUYFD clearly having no fucking clue what you meant by literature review.
Absolutely mortifying for him.
You can review previous works of history but those works also have to be based on source material to be history.
Otherwise you are not writing a work of history which should also include source material you will have analysed, including at PhD level research in the archives
Like Wile E. Coyote after realising he's gone over the edge of the cliff.
What's the bedrock of the History PhD? The literature review.
No it isn't. Reading literature is the heart of English literature not history.
This needs to be engraved in stone or something. Maybe we can get a t-shirt.
One of my old colleagues used to say that a month in the lab would save an hour in library. But this was chemistry, and trying reactions for 31 days IS more fun than reading why they won’t work...
Am I banging my head against a brick wall here? Everyone else has fled the battlefield.
Sorry Dixie. You are so completely in the right and HYUFD is so completely unwilling to accept he is wrong - ever - that it seems pointless to make any other comment.
History is never just about 'facts' or 'events'. It is always about how they were recorded and by whom, why they were recorded and how we interpret them based upon their causes and their effects (as well as the observer bias we ourselves exhibit). To try and separate the reasons for events and their effects from the actual event itself is pointless as it renders the event meaningless.
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
You're absolutely correct and absolutely incorrect. Typical "Leon"
The Swiss don't do Prime Ministers.
It has a President of the Confederation
Point stands - how many Presidents of the Confederation can anybody name?
Same with the Moderators of the Kirk of Scotland. So much superior to the Erastian C of E. But nobody can remember the Moderator, for thje same reason.
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
You're absolutely correct and absolutely incorrect. Typical "Leon"
The Swiss don't do Prime Ministers.
No, they are the last[1] surviving example of a directorial republic, invented, but no longer used, by Pennsylvania in 1776 and most famously the form of government adopted by the French Republic after Thermidor.
[1] San Marino is sometimes argued to be a directorial republic but I’d argue it’s closer to the duumviral model of the Roman Republic.
Am I banging my head against a brick wall here? Everyone else has fled the battlefield.
Sorry Dixie. You are so completely in the right and HYUFD is so completely unwilling to accept he is wrong - ever - that it seems pointless to make any other comment.
History is never just about 'facts' or 'events'. It is always about how they were recorded and by whom, why they were recorded and how we interpret them based upon their causes and their effects (as well as the observer bias we ourselves exhibit). To try and separate the reasons for events and their effects from the actual event itself is pointless as it renders the event meaningless.
I never said it was just about facts but without facts it is not history.
You can look at subjectivity in why historians might have written what they did but the core source material as obtained from archives in particular is as indisputable as any scientific fact
It’s no shame to admit that, though it is an important piece of the history of Hitler and Stalin dismembering Poland.
If Putin had his way it would be more forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre#Those_adopting_pre-1990_views ..In 2021, however, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the memorial complex at Katyn on its Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a place of federal to one of only regional importance.[136] Such decisions, says the preface to the site, are made in consultation with the regional authorities, i.e. the Smolensk Region administration. More important, the Ministry altered the descriptive text to say, once more, that the "Polish officers were shot by the Hitlerites in 1941"…
And was there any international reaction to this ?
That Germany continued to pander to Putin is shown to be even more reprehensible.
I suppose it shows that you could take Merkel out of the GDR but you could never take the GDR out of Merkel.
Am I banging my head against a brick wall here? Everyone else has fled the battlefield.
Sorry Dixie. You are so completely in the right and HYUFD is so completely unwilling to accept he is wrong - ever - that it seems pointless to make any other comment.
History is never just about 'facts' or 'events'. It is always about how they were recorded and by whom, why they were recorded and how we interpret them based upon their causes and their effects (as well as the observer bias we ourselves exhibit). To try and separate the reasons for events and their effects from the actual event itself is pointless as it renders the event meaningless.
Thank goodness for that. I'm out of this now. It is scary that there are probably quite a few in the Cabinet who think it is simply a series of approved facts. To be rote learned by all. Who'd want to study that for a start? No fun and zero intellectual challenge.
Am I banging my head against a brick wall here? Everyone else has fled the battlefield.
Sorry Dixie. You are so completely in the right and HYUFD is so completely unwilling to accept he is wrong - ever - that it seems pointless to make any other comment.
History is never just about 'facts' or 'events'. It is always about how they were recorded and by whom, why they were recorded and how we interpret them based upon their causes and their effects (as well as the observer bias we ourselves exhibit). To try and separate the reasons for events and their effects from the actual event itself is pointless as it renders the event meaningless.
I did not go to university but in my 78 years I have experienced a wealth of knowledge and to be honest even I can see @HYUFD is all over the place yet again
Comments
I guess he was happy with 2m rapes and the acquisition of East Germany
Off to re-education camp for you, sonny.
The main reaosn, in his view, was that most Germans were fighting in the East, and (quite correctly) feared terrible retribution from the Red Army, after what they had done in the Soviet Union.
However they are in NATO now so based on its mutual self defence principle I accept we now must defend them in a way we do not have to defend non NATO Ukraine, even if we can impose sanctions on Russia over the invasion
You do not have a PhD. You have never published anything. You have never taught.
When you have those, come back to me and let me know if your views have changed.
In the meanwhile, please just understand - for once - that you are wrong. Archival research is important (speaking as somebody who's done it in several countries) but it is not quite the bedrock of history you seem to think it is. All other considerations aside, until you have studied the literature you don't know which sources to look at.
An unwavering commitment to slavishly following the line of a bunch of third rate criminals who call themselves the cabinet isn't a substitute for actually knowing what you're talking about. As you are showing here, and as you are showing so often, e.g. on lecturing Richard Tyndall on the qualifications needed to be an engineer.
And with that horrible thought, good night.
Those are indisputable, regardless of what analysis you do afterwards .
Without facts there is no history, only literature and philosophy. Some facts in history are as indisputable as key facts in science or law
Stalin's complete callousness towards his own people probably saved the Germans from worse retribution. He wanted an Eastern German workforce.
Even today 50.1% of Christians are Roman Catholic, 36% are Protestant and 11% are Orthodox.
It is excellent and sombrely lucid
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Promise-Me-Youll-Shoot-Yourself/dp/0241399246
It documents the bizarre mass suicides in German towns as the Third Reich collapsed. Sometimes entire families would shoot themselves. Sometimes a bunch of teachers in one staff room would jump in a river to drown. Or all the workers in a pharmacy.
There were a lot in the East which you can ascribe to dread of Soviet revenge. But also many in the West who knew the Brits or Americans were coming. So what happened to THEM?
The writer's thesis is that the Germans became overwhelmed with a fear of the revenge that would be wrought upon them (even by the western Allies) but also a fearful shame at the sheer crime of Nazism, to which they would have to admit their culpability.
It's a fascinating idea, and he is persuasive. It is, in an odd way, encouraging. Beneath the madness of Nazism, the human soul and Christian conscience lay waiting, easily revived.
Putin disputes them.
But who decides that? A politician, or a historian?
Was January 6 an insurrection, or a patriotic attempt to prevent a stolen election?
Should the President of the USA decide the facts?
And hasn't been for two weeks.
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
Kershaw's view is that rates of suicide were no higher than normal in Western Germany, but well above normal in the East. Which was also rational.
So who you gonna call?
It is easier for innocent young nations to throw up heroic leaders because their circumstances demand heroes. It is much rarer in decadent old liberal democracies, because the politicians must abide by the will of the voters, and are necessarily hemmed in by checks and balances
Who is the last Swiss prime minister you can name? I can't name a single Swiss prime minister, ever. Do they even have prime ministers? Yet, given its location and resources, it is arguably the best governed nation on the planet, taken as a whole, in the last century
Those are facts and historians tell future generations about them using source material. '
Anyone who writes without using any source material is not a historian but an author of fiction or a philisopher.
January 6th saw Trump supporters storm the Capitol. Again a fact regardless of whether it was justified or not.
Russia has the resources to keep grinding, particularly in the East of the country. But it is by no means clear that they have the resources to garrison Kyiv and the Eastern cities, and to continue their thrust deep into the West of the country towards Lviv.
Furthermore, Russia probably has some fairly serious resupply issues. There are the obvious ones like fuel, ammunition and food. But there is also the question of how easily losses of planes and helicopters can be replaced.
Being the defender brings enormous advantages. You don't need petrol. You don't need tanks or trucks. You don't need to patrol streets. All you need is a hiding place, some tinned food, and some crude weapons. And right now the Ukrainian defender have a lot more than crude weapons.
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
Then a parade of elderly Muscovites appeared, maybe 50 strong carrying banners and icons, only this wasn't a Religious parade. The Icons were of Stalin and the banners Communist ones. The crowd parted and watched, and the guards at Lenins mausoleum opened the barrier for them.
For all of Moscow's modernity, consumerism and beauty, it was a strange relic of a ceremony.
Last night, an alleged FSB whistle-blower letter was published that damned Russia's military performance in Ukraine and predicted a disaster for the RU in the next weeks and months. I wasn't sure if it was authentic - as Ukraine had previously leaked fake FSB letters as psy-ops. This letter appeared different though: it came via a reputable source (founder of http://gulagu.net), and it was way longer than a forger would choose to make it (the longer the text, the more risk of making an error). I showed the letter to two actual (current or former) FSB contacts, and they had no doubt it was written by a colleague. They didn't agree with all of his conclusions, but that's a different story.
Here's the text, worth reading: https://www.facebook.com/vladimir.osechkin/posts/4811633942268327
www.deepl.com will be your friend to translate, but tl;dr:
Famine assessed to be extremely likely,
FSB did not know about the war.
FSB reportedly leaked the location of the Chechens to Ukraine, so they got torn apart, Kadyrov not happy.
Medvedchuk is a coward, he ran away
On casualties: I don't know how many. Nobody knows. Definitely the death toll is in the thousands. Maybe 10 thousand, maybe 5, maybe only 2. Even the headquarters do not know exactly. But it should be closer to 10.
Now even if we kill Zelensky and take him prisoner, nothing will change. The level of hatred towards us is Chechnya there. And now even those who were loyal to us are against it.
We have a conditional deadline of June. Conditional - because in June we have no economy, nothing left.
There is simply no way of winning, and if we lose, we're screwed. We 100% repeated the beginning of the last century, when we decided to kick weak Japan and get a quick victory, then it turned out that the army was a disaster.
Donbas was set up to try and draw western ire away from the Crimean annexation, but now this has re-opened that.
Somebody will convince him, either they lower the sanctions or go to war. And if they refuse? Now I don't rule out that then we will get into a real international conflict like Hitler did in 1939.
Nukes:
Naryshkin are now digging the ground to prove that they have secretly built nuclear weapons there.
Kadyrov is angry for a reason. He has created an image of himself as the most powerful and invincible. And if he falls once, he will be brought down by his own people.
I would only add that I do not believe that VV Putin will press the red button to destroy the whole world. First of all there is not only one person who makes a decision, at least somebody will jump out. And there are many people there - there is no "sole red button". Secondly, there are some doubts that everything is functioning successfully there. There are always bravura reports - things are always wrong there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cydkTy6GmFA
Is he ashamed of his cowardice and trying to mask it? https://twitter.com/kgb_files/status/1500192166445989895
Not just reciting a list of things that happened.
"You are under arrest Sunshine - illegal immigrant. We now can't release you until the legal process is finished in 2034."
That is journalism or debates of political theory or politics.
It is not history which is based on telling future generations about core facts of past times. There can be analysis of facts too but analysis is not history without source material
'But what is most striking about the far-left leader is how he’s systematically refrained from ascribing any responsibility to Russia over the war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, not to mention the killing fields of Syria. Only the west is ever held guilty for anything. This hasn’t changed, even after chemical weapons were used this month and Russia vetoed a UN-sponsored investigation into the crime.'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/18/jean-luc-melenchon-germany-putin-french-presidential-race
Surprised that this would be Melenchon's moment.
How on Earth do they propose to take Lviv? Giving that NATO will be supplying the defenders across the very close border?
As for law ...
You only need a draw on the dice roll as any risk player knows.
(Misread prev. comment)
Absolutely mortifying for him.
And about source material being contradictory...
At Moscow customs I was taken on one side and made to demonstrate the camera fearing I could have a problem
After a moment or two I was told by a dour border guard to carry on as they were the cameras they use !!!!!
Then in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg I was directed away from our party and escorted down lots of corridors with some trepidation. After what seemed miles I stood in front of double opening doors and told to go in
In front of me were maybe a 100 or so members of their Pioneer Corp being addressed by a leader and I was told to film the ceremony. At the conclusion I was escorted back to my wife and group who later said they had been very worried by events
We agreed it seemed very different to what we expected especially the openness
"Is there a possibility of a local nuclear strike? Yes. Not for military purposes (it won't give anything - it's a weapon of breaking through defense), but in order to intimidate others. At the same time, the ground is being prepared to turn everything to Ukraine - Naryshkin and his SVR are now digging the ground to prove that they secretly created nuclear weapons there. Fuck, they are now pounding by what we have long studied and disassembled: you can't draw evidence on your knee here, and the presence of specialists and uranium (Ukraine is full of depleted isotope 238) is about nothing. There's a production cycle that you can't do it imperceptibly. You can't even make a "dirty" bomb unnoticed, and the fact that their old nuclear power plants can produce weapons-grade plutonium (stations such as EW-1000 give it in minimal quantities as a "by-product" of the reaction) - so the Americans introduced such control with the connection of the IAEA, that sucking the topic is stupid."
Everyone else has fled the battlefield.
The Swiss don't do Prime Ministers.
No it isn't. Reading literature is the heart of English literature not history.
This needs to be engraved in stone or something. Maybe we can get a t-shirt.
(Except for Zouma's cat, which presumably now has about 6 left.)
Otherwise you are not writing a work of history which should also include source material you will have analysed, including at PhD level research in the archives
History is never just about 'facts' or 'events'. It is always about how they were recorded and by whom, why they were recorded and how we interpret them based upon their causes and their effects (as well as the observer bias we ourselves exhibit). To try and separate the reasons for events and their effects from the actual event itself is pointless as it renders the event meaningless.
By now he must be halfway to China? Or Vlad-i-vostok?
Neil Henderson
@hendopolis
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2m
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: Don’t test us, @BWallaceMP tells Putin #TomorrowsPapersToday
https://twitter.com/hendopolis
[1] San Marino is sometimes argued to be a directorial republic but I’d argue it’s closer to the duumviral model of the Roman Republic.
You can look at subjectivity in why historians might have written what they did but the core source material as obtained from archives in particular is as indisputable as any scientific fact
That Germany continued to pander to Putin is shown to be even more reprehensible.
I suppose it shows that you could take Merkel out of the GDR but you could never take the GDR out of Merkel.
I'm out of this now. It is scary that there are probably quite a few in the Cabinet who think it is simply a series of approved facts. To be rote learned by all.
Who'd want to study that for a start?
No fun and zero intellectual challenge.
Even if Les Republicains lose the Presidential election they might still win the legislative election