/r/badhistory

Photograph via snooOG

Badhistory is your one-stop shop for casual dissertations on the historicity of everything from bestselling books to zero-budget adult films!

Where History used to be written by Snappy

/r/BadHistory is your one-stop shop for casual dissertations on the historicity of everything from bestselling books to zero-budget adult films.

Unofficial BadHistory Discord Server

BadHistory Book Club

Rule Summary

Rule 1: Posting Requirements

Rebuttal posts should follow the basic outline of:

  • A summary of or link to the material your post discusses.

  • A comprehensive rebuttal to the material.

  • A basic bibliography of sources for your rebuttal.

Do not post direct links to non-archived, unlocked threads on Reddit. Posts must cite the material they discuss or they will be removed.

You're not allowed to make posts on this sub if you're using a new account to do so. Comments aren't restricted. Please contact the mods for an exemption in case you want to use an alias. Please see the full rules for the details.

▬▬▬▬

Rule 2: No Questions or Debunk/Debate Request

These are no longer allowed as posts. There will be a monthly sticky post where you can make these requests.

▬▬▬▬

Rule 3: Debunk/Debate Response Requirements

Top level comments in the weekly debunk /debate post "Saturday Synopsis" need to comply with theses rules:

  • A summary of or preferably a link to the specific material you wish to have debated or debunked.

  • An explanation of what you think is mistaken about this and why you would like a second opinion.

Do not request a debunking for entire books, shows, or films. Use specific examples (e.g. a chapter of a book, the armor design on a show) or your post will be removed.

In serious top-level responses to debunk/debate posts, you should make a genuine attempt to provide an explanation of your opinion on the subject. Single-sentence rebuttals and statements do not add to the discussion and can be removed without notice.

▬▬▬▬

Rule 4: Civility & Bigotry

  • The use of slurs of any type is prohibited.

  • Sundry bigotry--racism, sexism, homo-/transphobia, etc.--is unacceptable.

  • Do not insult other users.

  • Genocide denial and apologism is strictly forbidden.

  • Do not call for violence against others.

  • If you make a post, you're expected to engage with reasonable criticism and questions about it.

▬▬▬▬

Rule 5: Modern Politics

We request that users keep their posts and comments a sincere attempt to engage with the historical record and avoid making overt attempts to advocate for a personal agenda. If it feels like you're "talking politics", you probably are. Posts cannot be about politics from the last 20 years, and also cannot use comparisons against current day politics.

This rule is suspended for the bi-weekly free-for-all meta threads.

▬▬▬▬

Rule 6: Anti-Pedantry

r/BadHistory is a strictly Pro-Pedantry subreddit. Posts failing to meet the following criteria will be summarily removed:

  • Do not complain that someone's critique is too pedantic.

  • Do not argue that a work, as fiction, is beyond historical criticism.

▬▬▬▬

Rule 7: Citing Wikipedia

Beyond extremely basic material, like spellings of names, questions of general geography, or (in most cases) the date of an event, Wikipedia is considered an unreliable source and is generally not an acceptable source of information.

▬▬▬▬

This is just a summary of the rules, the full rules can be found here


Badhistory has a wiki


/u/NMW on Second-Opinion Bias and Our Sub's Mission


Cards Against History - Custom BadHistory Cards Against Humanity Set


Related Subreddits:

/r/badhistory

313,687 Subscribers

10

Mindless Monday, 18 March 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

147 Comments
2024/03/18
12:00 UTC

93

A Ted-Ed talk gets Byzantine history wrong

Hello, those of r/badhistory. Today I am reviewing another Ted-ed talk called The rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okph9wt8I0A

My sources are assembled, so let us begin!

0.06: The narrator says most history books would tell us the Roman Empire fell in the 5th Century CE. And the evidence for that is? Are we talking about works of popular history or those of an academic nature by reputable scholar? How do we know whether or not the majority of secondary sources make a distinction between he collapse of Rome in the west and its survival in the east? The claim is far to broad to be made with any degree of certainty.

0.26: The narrator states the Byzantine Empire began in 330 CE. This is…. very controversial from an academic perspective. Yes, the new capital of the Empire was established when Constantinople was founded on the site of Byzantium, but there are many different arguments as to when the Byzantine Empire emerged as it’s own distinct entity. One assertion is that the Byzantine Empire only became truly ‘Byzantine’ when it adopted Greek as the language of government, as opposed to Latin. After all, in 330 Rome was still functioning as a unitary state, and the division between east and west had not permanently occurred yet. The video presents a disputed perspective and makes us believe it is fact.

0.45: The narrator says that in 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome and Empire’s western provinces were conquered by barbarians. Besides using the term ‘barbarian’ unironically, the video here makes the mistakes of conflating the occupation of Roman territory by various Germanic peoples with the city of Rome itself being attacked. Before the foundation of Constantinople, Rome had no longer been the capital, so the sack of the city would not really lead to the disruption of necessary for the territorial integrity of the state to be compromised. Rather, the settlement of Germanic peoples on Roman territory had been a gradual process that had began before the sack of Rome, and long after.

0.49: The narrator states that while all that was going on, Constantinople remained the seat of the Roman Emperors. No, there were still two monarchies. One was based in Constantinople, and other was at Ravenna at this time.

1.57: The narrator says that sharing continuity with the classical Roman Empire have the Byzantine Empire a technological advantage over its neighbors. Ah, the technology ladder. I have not seen that concept used in a while. Often, a state having more complex technology at this time did not really translate into a practical advantage because such technology could be incredibly specialized. For example, although the Byzantine Empire had mechanical lions in its throne room, this did not mean it could deploy legions of troops mounted on said lions in battle. Militarily speaking, the opponents of the Byzantine Empire used the same types of weapons and armor and usually fought in the same way, and so there was a great deal of parity.

Even when a new technology did give a benefit, it was usually limited in effect. The development of Greek Fire allowed the Byzantines to break the naval supremacy of the Umayyad Caliphate during the siege of Constantinople in 717-718, but it did not mean the Byzantine Empire became dominant on land. Nor did it mean that Greek Fire alone alone could counter the material and manpower superiority of the Umayyads.

3.35 to 4.03: The narrator just jumps through three points here – The sack of Constantinople in 1204, the recapture of the city in 1261, and then the fall of the Byzantine Empire proper in 1453. The issue here is they just gloss over 250 years without providing the necessary details to give the audience the ability to understand why the Empire declined over time. The point of the video is to educated, but no one is receiving an education. It would have been very easy to describe how being threatened by multiple states from multiple angles limited the ability of the Byzantines to concentrate their forces for an extended period of time, or how the breakdown of the frontier in Anatolia gradually robbed the Empire of the means necessary to maintain its position there. Similarly, it completely ignores the role the many civil wars played in destroying Byzantine military capability.

And that is that.

Sources

The Armies of the CaliphsMilitary and Society in the Early Islamic State, by Hugh Kennedy

A Byzantine Government in Exile: Government and Society under the Laskarids of Nicaea, by Michael Angold

A History of the Byzantine State and Society, by Warren Treadgold

Three Byzantine Military Treatises, translated by George T Dennis

Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West 450-900, by Guy Halsall

35 Comments
2024/03/18
10:14 UTC

33

Free for All Friday, 15 March, 2024

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

625 Comments
2024/03/15
12:00 UTC

344

A Ted-Ed talk literally gets almost everything wrong about Celtic history

Hello, those of r/badhistory. Today I am reviewing a Ted-ed talk called The Rise and Fall of the Celtic Warriors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmYQMJi30aw

My sources are assembled, so let's begin.

0.08: From the very start, the video does not provide us with an accurate account of the meeting between Alexander and the Celtic emissaries, but a purely fantastical one. From an educational stand-point, this is incredibly harmful. If the point of a video is to teach the audience about history, that history actually needs to have happened in the manner it is described.

In this case, the narrator says Alexander was relaxing next to the Danube river, and the animation shows him lounging back and generally chilling out next to the water, However, Alexander did not do this. Rather, according to Arrian, Alexander conducted a sacrifice on the banks of the river after a battle, and then returned to his camp. It was in that camp that the meeting took place with the Celts.

0.22: The narrator states Alexander had never seen anything like those tall, fierce-looking warriors.

Uuuuugggghhhh

There is no evidence to support such a statement. I am definitely not arguing Alexander had seen such warriors before, only that we don’t have enough proof to make a claimweaither This is what Arrian specifically said about the Celts:

‘These people are of great stature, and of a haughty disposition’

That’s it, that’s all he said. We are not told if that great stature was something Alexander had no experience with, only that their size was significant enough to be noticeable.

0.27: The narrator says the Celtic emissaries had huge golden neck rings and colorful cloaks. This is again is a fanciful fiction rather than an accurate description of the meeting. Arrian never mentions what the Celts were wearing. There is nothing wrong with speculating what they could have worn by drawing on other forms of evidence, but the audience needs to understand that what is being said is purely conjecture, rather than factual. As it stands, people who watch this video are simply being lied to.

0.30 to 0.40: The narrator says Alexander invited the Celts to feast with him, and that the Celts said they came form the Alps. Nothing in the primary sources says they they did this. According to Strabo, the Celts dwelled on the Adriatic, while Arrian said they lived near the Ionian Gulf. We do not know if it was the Celts who explained where they were from, or if it was just the author of each source describing where they believed they were from. Similarly, although Arrian says the Celts were ‘inhabiting districts difficult of access’, that does not mean they necessarily lived in the mountains. That difficulty of access could be because it was heavily forest, or simply a matter of distance.

0.47: The narrator states the Celts laughed when Alexander asked them what they feared the most, and then replied they feared nothing at all. This is a straight-up false. Strabo and Arrian inform us that the Celts never laughed, they just simply answered the inquiry, and the answer was they feared the sky or the heavens falling on them.

1.01: The narrator says by the time of Alexander the Great the Celts had spread across Europe, from Asia Minor to Spain. This is also wrong. The Celts never spread to Asia Minor, or Anatolia, until more than forty years after Alexander died.

1.19: The narrator states that the Celts spoke the same language. Uhhhh, no. There were different Celtic languages. These included Lepontic, Celtiberian, and Gaulish. There are also models distinguishing those of the British Isles from those of Continental Europe. Many of those languages may have been mutually intelligible, but that does not mean they were the same.

1.22: The narrator says each Celtic tribe had its own warrior-king.

Sighs

There is no way we have enough evidence to make such an all-encompassing claim. Doing so is badhistory. First of all, we would have to define the position of each leader in EACH DAMN COMMUNITY! Was the leader a ‘king’ in the hereditary sense, or chosen from a range of candidates? Perhaps some tribes elected their leaders, and the position was not really a kingship in the sense of being a monarchy. Similarly, we don’t know if every leader functioned as a warrior, or were more judicial and consultative in their position. The Celts were a collection of peoples spread across a huge area, they cannot be generalized in such a way!

1.28: ‘The tribes fought each other as enthusiastically as they fought their enemies’. STOP MAKING SUCH BROAD ASSERTIONS WHEN THE EVIDENCE TO BASE THEM ON IS FRAGMENTARY AND OFTEN TRANSMITTED THROUGH FOREIGN WRITINGS!

1.35: ‘Unusually for the time, the Celts believed in reincarnation.’ THIS WAS NOT UNUSUAL FOR THE TIME PERIOD BECAUSE DIFFERENT CULTURES IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD BELIEVED DIFFERENT THINGS!

Inhales and calms down

Reincarnation was present in Vedic writings in India at this time, and also in various Greek philosophical traditions. Reincarnation was central to Buddhism, and was called Samsara. THE PERSON WHO WROTE THIS VIDEO DID ZERO RESEARCH! THEY ARE NOT JUST WRONG, THEY HAVE ACHIEVED NEGATIVE WRONGNESS! TIME AND SPACE ARE CURRENTLY COLLAPSING INTO A CENTRAL VORTEX WHERE NOTHING CAN EVER BE CORRECT EVER AGAIN!

Inhales and calms down again

1.57: The narrator says the greatest treasure a Celtic warrior could possess was the severed head of a foe. While head-hunting was a practice noted by classical authors, we again must be careful not to ascribe it to all the Celtic peoples. It would be more accurate to say specific Celtic cultures that the Greeks and Romans interacted with practiced it.

2.42: the narrator states the Celts worshiped many gods, and priests called druids oversaw this worship. Our evidence from the existence of the druids comes from Roman and Greek writings. But here is the thing: We don’t know if they were common to all Celtic societies. We can say with certainty that were a feature of the Gallic, British, and Gaelic Celtic groups, but we do not know if they were an aspect of Galatian society in Anatolia, for example.

3.28: The narrator says that, rather than unite against the Roman legions in response in response to this defeat (the Roman conquest of Northern Italy), the Celts maintained their tribal division. Okay, that is just stupid. Would a Celt in Southern Britain, and a Celt in Northern Spain, really be able to agree that the Romans in 200 BC were going to become a mortal threat to them and they should join forces? Would the Galatians have reason to feat the Romans at this time? Would the Gallic Celts have perceived the Romans as state they did not have the capability to counter?

The mistake here is called presentism, which is where we project our contemporary views and values on to the past. In this case, we can make the mistake of viewing the growth of Rome as an imperial power as inevitable, and assume people from the time period had the exact same understanding. In this way, we believe they consistently made the ‘wrong’ choices at the time when they should have known better.

3.36 The narrator explains that, after taking over Northern Italy, the Romans conquered Spain soon after. It was not ‘soon after’. After Northern Italy was fully incorporated at the start of the 2nd Century BC, but Spain was not completely subdued and occupied until the reign of Augustus. It was a gradual process that took over 150 years.

4.16: The narrator states that, when the Romans finally invaded Britain, Queen Boudica fought against them. Again, the chronology is incorrect. Boudica’s rebellion occurred in 60-61 AD, but the Romans had begun the invasion Britain back in 43 AD, 17 years before. The uprising of took place in territory the Romans had already conquered.

4.34: The narrator says that by the end of the first century CE only Ireland remain unconquered. It should be noted that though Rome did campaign in Northern Scotland, they never incorporated the highlands

4.41: The narrator states that in Ireland the ways of the ancient Celts survived untouched by the outside world long after Rome itself lay in ruins. This is garbage. Pure garbage. No words in the English language can accurately capture how much the assertion exists as low effort, intellectual-trash. During the period of Roman rule in Britain, Ireland constantly interacted Rome through trade networks. One Irish people, the Scoti, eventually settled in Caledonia, showing they were not cut off at all. Travel and exchange was possible between the regions, and we have solid evidence for it.

My god, this video is an abomination.

Sources

The Anabasis of Alexander, by Arrian: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46976/46976-h/46976-h.htm

The Ancient Celts, by Barry Cunelife

The Geography of Strabo: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44886/44886-h/44886-h.htm

India: The Ancient Past - A History of the Indian Subcontinent from c. 7000 BCE to CE 1200, by Burjor Avari

The Library of History, by Diodorus Siculus: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/home.html

38 Comments
2024/03/14
09:26 UTC

157

What South Arabia is and isn't: a critical review of "The Himyarite Kingdom: the Forgotten Empire of Pre-Islamic Arabia".

Through the r/academicquran subreddit I was made aware of the following video: The Himyarite Kingdom: The Forgotten Empire of Pre-Islamic Arabia.

A necessary preamble:

Let me be clear: I think this is a pretty good introduction into an area of history that I care about deeply – in fact, I wrote my dissertation on South Arabia during Late Antiquity, and am very grateful that the Kings and Generals channel devoted a nearly 20 minute video to the subject. Before I start my nitpick, I think the broad strokes are generally pretty good. But when we zoom in a bit, the documentary tends to generalize and exaggerate certain things, and there are some significant mistakes in other places.

First of all, I won't really be saying anything about the pronunciation of the Sabaic names, titles, etc, for the simple reason that we don't really know much about how they were pronounced. The pronunciation of the consonants can be gleaned from comparisons with other Semitic languages (and some Greek and Latin sources), but since the South Arabian script never consistently depicted vowels, our understanding of word structure, stress, and so forth.

Let's have a look:

  • 0:00 – 0:30: "When the modern country of Yemen is brought up, it brings about stereotypes of tragedy, poverty and brutal civil war. However, Yemen must be seen beyond the headlines, for it has a rich history of religious, political, and mercantile convergence on the maritime Silk Road(s) (sic?)". Hard agree. I'm not a huge fan of the term "Silk Roads", as I think it tends to be a bit too Sinocentric, but maybe that is just me.

  • 0:35 - 0:40. Okay, everything he's saying about the Himyarite kingdom is more or less accurate, but the map portraying the extent of the Aksumite kingdom is rather out of proportion. It's very dubious that Aksum's power stretched as far north as what are now southeast Egypt. Also, the Aksumites did not hold any political control in South Arabia beyond the second half of the 3rd century and the beginning of the 6th century AD.

  • 2:55 - 3:00. The Minaeans were less of a kingdom and more of a confederation of allied city states, perhaps somewhat similar to the Delian league. Anyway, their power was firmly based in what is now northern Yemen and there is no evidence that they ever exerted political control along the entirety of the coastal plain, wrapping around the Bab-el-Mandeb onto the Indian Ocean board, as the map seems to suggest. The Qatabanians zone of the control should be projected further west.

  • 3:11: "Two other poorly mysterious and poorly attested states". In fact, the history of the Qatabanians is rather well-known. The corpus of Qatabanian inscriptions is not insignificant (although smaller than the Sabaic corpus). Absolutely true with regards to Hadramawt, though.

-3:19: "The kingdom of Aksum across the Red Sea in Ethiopia was an ever-present powerhouse in the region". I think this is somewhat too simplistic. The Aksumites certainly laid claims over South Arabia, but describing Aksum in the pre-4th century AD as "an everpresent powerhouse" is kind of stretching the limits of the imagination here.

-4:06: To their credit, the Kings and Generals channel decided to represent the Himyarite ruler Karibil with a little portrait and a flag. The flag spells out 𐩧𐩺𐩣𐩠. There are two problems here. Firstly, they mistook the letter 𐩢 (ḥ) for 𐩠 (h), and Himyar should be spelled with the former. Secondly, the South Arabian script is written from right-to-left (excepting a very small corpus of very early inscriptions, which are also written boustrophedon). So this 𐩧𐩺𐩣𐩠 reads rymh while it should read 𐩢𐩣𐩺𐩧, i.e., ḥmyr.

While on this matter: the Himyarite kings never called themselves "kings of Himyar/the Himyarites". They adopted the title mlk s¹bʔ w-ḏ-rydn, "king of Sabaʔ and ḏū-Raydān", with the former referring to the Sabaeans and the latter to the Himyarites' home region. That being said, the term "king of the Himyarites" is attested, but only after the Aksumite occupation in retroactive reference to the last indigenous pro-independence Himyarite ruler.

4:10: The Minaeans had already entered a period of irreversible decline in around 150 to 100 BC. The Himyarites emerged in 110 BC and would not play a significant political role in South Arabia until about a century later.

4:33: This map is again very misleading. While I think there's a good case to be made for an Aksumite presence in South Arabia, there is no evidence of any direct political control, again, before the early 6th century AD.

4:55-4:59: "One king named Shamar Yarish is said to have finally broken up the independence of Saba and driven out the Aksumite kingdom from the coast". I am not sure what "breaking up the independence of Saba" is supposed to mean in this context. The Himyarite kings considered themselves to be legitimate Sabaean rulers.

5:03: "Eventually, the Himyarite kingdom had become powerful enough that its Kings began styling themselves Kings of Arabia".

I think this is the most egregious mistake. The term ʕrb/ʔʕrb, normally transcribed ʕarab/ʔaʕrāb, appears in a handful of very late inscriptions and its meaning is disputed. The term appears in a few dozen Late Sabaic inscriptions and seems to be used in the sense of "mercenaries" or perhaps "Bedouin". In any case, there is no evidence that the term "Arabia" was understood in pre-Islamic Arabia to be a coherent geographical or cultural entity, let alone that the Himyarites conceived themselves to be the rulers of such an area.

5:30-5:40. Nothing bad to say here, love that they included the part about Soqotra and Hoq.

6:17: "[Zafar] was reminiscent of Iram (accidentally pronounced Imram) of the Pillars".

OK, OK, I'm sort of cheating here because this is clearly folklore. Nevertheless, it's kind of interesting. The phrase Iram ḏāt al-ʿimād occurs at several places in the Quran, although Muslim exegetes were not really sure about what or where it was. Some thought it was Damascus, others thought it was Alexandria, and it's really from the 9th century onward that Muslim scholars consistently begin to identify it with a South Arabian location, although further east, in Hadramawt. Interestingly, Zafār was not one of those – maybe because it's not in a particularly deserted area, although it was frequently associated with other pre-Islamic legends.

7:09: "The two other Abrahamic religions were going strong by the Himyarite Golden Age". I have personally never heard the term "Himyarite Golden Age" being used like this, but let's assume that we're talking about the period post-unification (c. 350 AD) up until the Aksumite invasion (c. 510 AD). By this time Judaism and Christian communities were both present in South Arabia.

8:25: "Many sects of Christianity considered heretical by the Eastern Roman Empire found sanctuary deep within the Arabian deserts, where they were out of reach of the Roman Church's religious oppression".

While I don't really have much of a problem with this, it is kind of a shame to see this kind of stereotypical characterization of Yemen: large parts of the country, particularly the central and northern highlands, aren't really that much of a desert at all. Surely, those parts also exist, and it's really on the edges of the Ramlat as-Sabʿatayn where the first South Arabian states emerge. It's a small detail, but worth pointing out.

8:40: "In addition, various Arab tribes still worshipped a pantheon of indigenous deities, such as the solar god Shams".

The usage of the term "Arab" may be anachronistic – there's no evidence the inhabitants of South Arabia considered themselves "Arab" during this time, but skipping past that. Interestingly, all evidence of polytheist worship disappears in the late 4th to beginning of the 5th century AD. While it's very possible that elements of pre-Islamic South Arabian polytheism continued, there's no good evidence for that in the epigraphic record.

8:45-8:50: "Moreover, faraway merchants from the Buddhist, Hindu and Zoroastrian lands of India and Persia likely left a significant religious imprint on Himyarite society as well".

There is no evidence for this at all. More specifically, we know that there were Indian traders in South Arabia, but to argue that they "left a significant religious imprint" borders on the fantastical.

8:50-55: "It's also possible that popular religions along the Silk Road, like Manichaeism, were also present".

Possible, again, no evidence.

9:40: "Hanafiyya, or the ones that had maintained monotheism during the Jahiliyya, or Period of Ignorance, are attested in Islam".

This is now veering more into theology, which makes me somewhat uncomfortable as it's not my area of specialization, but let's have a swing at it: the Prophet Muhammad is described in the Quran as ḥanīf. As with much of Quranic etymology, this term, too, is kind of unclear. Traditionally, Muslim scholarship has understood the term to come from a root meaning "to incline; to bend" in the sense of those who "inclined away from idolatry". The term was understood to refer to Muhammad and the monotheist Prophets who preceded him.

Because I don't want to venture into the realm of polemics and apologetics, I will just say that the etymology of the term is unclear and controversial and has been the subject of many studies.

10:00: "Others have embraced the notion that Judaism was the religion involved".

This is no longer very controversial. The Himyarite elite rather clearly pivots towards Judaism in the 5th century AD, and the pro-Jewish orientation of the Himyarite kings has been confirmed by some recently deciphered inscriptions. Before this period, the Himyarites had adopted a broad monotheistic faith system that was void of any explicit Jewish or Christian references, but most prominently featured the single deity rḥmnn, "The Merciful", likely derived from an Aramaic source.

10:58: "There is also a third theory, that of a general monotheism between the disparate Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Pagan and hybrid denominations that populated South Arabia".

Again, somewhat overstating all of these different religious elements. I personally don't really understand why people want to see the influence of Zoroastrianism everywhere, when, especially in the case of South Arabia, the evidence for competing Christian and Jewish sects is right there.

11:26-11:35: "This can also be linked to the fluidity of religion which was not exclusionary and enabled other practices. This is also a difficult theory to prove due to its general nature. Whatever the truth, scholarship has emerged and all provide a testament to the religious diversity of Himyarite Yemen".

Nail on the head. This is great.

11:45-11:55: "The son of Abu Karib (who was allegedly murdered because of his contact warfare was Hassan Yu'hamin al-Himyari".

Not great. The Himyarites did not the Arabic style personal names, certainly not with the Arabic definite article. Later Muslim historians called the son of Abū Karib that way, but in the epigraphic record he is known as Malkīkarib Yuhaʾmin (Mlkkrb Yhʾmn). We don't know anything about how he died either, that is Muslim period folklore.

12:03: "He continued the tradition of the Himyarites working in alliance with the makhaleef or the autonomous tribal ruler-kings of the region."

The Himyarites did indeed promote affiliated tribes on the edges of the Central Arabian area as suzerains rulers. The term maḫālīf is not actually attested in the pre-Islamic corpus, although the closely related term ḫlft appears. It just means "regent" or "governor" though. Note the parallels with Arabic ḫalīfa, whence our Caliph.

12:19-12:23: "[S]ome sources claiming he was greedy and keeping the spoils of war from the local allies known as the ayqals. These ayqals organized a coup with resulted in his assassination".

Again, this is all the stuff of medieval legend. We know frustratingly little about how succession worked in pre-Islamic South Arabia.

Problematic too is the term ayqals. So this should be aqyāl or aqwāl, itself a plural of the South Arabian term qayl, which means "prince". These were normally the highest ranking officials of the South Arabian tribes that formed a constituent element of the Himyarite confederacy.

13:15: "The coastal city of Najran".

Najran is located about 300 kilometers east of the Red Sea coast. To be clear: Paris is closer to the English Channel than Najran is to the Red Sea.

14:10-15:00.

Most of the stuff about Yusuf Asʾar Yaʾṯar's reign derives from late antique Christian hagiographic and Islamic-period historical sources. It is a good thing that the video acknowledges that these sources should probably be taken with a significant measure of salt.

The degree to which the Roman Empire was involved in the Aksumite-Himyarite conflicts is also disputed. George Hatke's dissertation goes into quite some detail about this and makes what I believe to be a convincing argument that Aksumite irredentism goes as far back as the 3rd century AD, that the conflicts between Himyar and Aksum should be studied on a local rather than (semi-)global geopolitical perspective, and the argument of religious persecution is a political fabrication.

15:40-15:50: "One of the last kings of Yemen, Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, asked for help from the Persians, and king Khosrow sent some troops to him under a man named Wahraz"

This period of South Arabia's history is extremely unclear. We really don't know what happened in South Arabia after the end of Abraha's reign, and basically everything we know from this period depends on contemporaneous sources (such as the Church History of Philostorgius, which was also mentioned in the video) or from later, Muslim-period sources.

Although it is apparent that the Persians indeed sought to establish dominance over South Arabia, it is unlikely that they were ever able to establish a lasting political presence in the region. At most, their power is unlikely to have ever asserted control beyond urban centers such as Aden and Sanaa.

16:57-17:02: "Paganism also faded from the region, with people letting go of Shams, al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat".

As mentioned before, all evidence for polytheism disappears from the epigraphic corpus at the end of the 4th century AD. Furthermore, al-Lāt, al-Uzzā and Manāt are typically associated with Central and Northern Arabia, and although there are some inscriptions that mention al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzā from the edges of the South Arabian cultural area, their worship never seems to have been widespread there, even in the pre-monotheistic period.

17:02-17:05: "The Rahmanism or Judaism of the Himyarites seems not to have survived, though the Teimanim Jews of Yemen survive in large numbers today".

Well, depending on how controversial you want to get – the suggestion that early Islam incorporated elements from South Arabian monotheism has been argued since as far back as the 1950s, when Jacques Jomier suggested that the Quranic Raḥmān refers to the South Arabian deity, and that its inclusion in the Quran was an attempt by Muhammad to merge the two main monotheistic deities of the Arabian Peninsula.


These small-to-medium issues notwithstanding, this is a fantastic video which I would recommend anyone with an interest in (pre-Islamic) South Arabia watch. Preferably, they would also read my comments afterwards.

Oh, and here are some sources in case people want to make sure I didn't just make up most of this stuff. I'd be happy to provide more specific sources, in case people are wondering.

  • Dugast, F. & I. Gajda. 2015. "Contacts between Ethiopia and South Arabia in the first millennium AD"
  • Gajda, I. 2009. Le royaume de Ḥimyar à l’époque monothéiste.
  • Hatke, G. 2011. Aksumite relations with Ḥimyar in the sixth century
  • Hatke, G. 2013. Aksum and Nubia – Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa
  • Hatke, G. 2020. The Aksumites in South Arabia – An African Diaspora of Late Antiquity
  • Pregill, M. 2021. The Jews of Arabia, the Quranic milieu and the Islamic judaism of the Middle Ages
  • Schiettecatte, J. & M. Arbach. 2014. "Political map of Arabia and the Middle East in the 3rd century"
  • Schiettecatte, J. & M. Arbach. 2020. Chronologies des rois de Main
  • Stein, P. 2010. Himyar und der Eine Gott – Südarabien in den letzen zwei Jahrhunderten vor dem Islam
  • Robin, C. 1996. Sheba II
  • Robin, C. 2008. Les Arabes de Ḥimyar, des Romains et des Perses
  • Robin, C. 2015. Le judaisme de l'Arabie antique
23 Comments
2024/03/12
12:42 UTC

102

Shailja Patel and David Love blame a child conscript to the Hitler Youth

Ah Twitter, the perfect spot where not only can people parrot ignorant narratives, but demonstrate it to a wide audience. The conversation in question here came after Benedict XVI passed away. Of course, given Ratzinger's stances on abortion, LGBT rights, and the child abuse crisis in the church, many people weren't exactly charitable. Author Shailja Patel starts us off by blaming Benedict for the excommunication of a 9-year-old girl whose family provided an abortion. I can't really go too far given that this event took place in 2009, but suffice it to say, this is wrong, given that said girl WAS NEVER FUCKING EXCOMMUNICATED, and said excommunication applied ONLY TO THOSE PEOPLE WHO PROVIDED THE ABORTION, people whose excommunication was ULTIMATELY ANNULLED. Especially since it was ONE BISHOP who the Council of Bishops in Brazil and L'Osservatore Romano CONDEMNED. But I digress. Surely someone will offer some bits of wisdom...
https://twitter.com/davidalove/status/1609525584215904256

"Just to add to that, the retired pope was a member of the Nazi Youth."

https://twitter.com/shailjapatel/status/1609527287195598849

"Truly loathsome man."

...or not. Yes, apparently not only does dear old Papa Benny excommunicate children, he also was a Nazi. Why? Because he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth...never mind the fact that joining the Hitler Youth was COMPULSORY and LITERALLY EVERYONE IN FUCKING GERMANY WAS MANDATED TO JOIN IT...Fuck's sake, can't you assholes find a better way to demonize a guy?

So did Benedict join the Hitler Youth? Yes...because it was COMPULSORY. Look no further than the United States Holocaust Museum:

"When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, the Hitler Youth movement had approximately 100,000 members. By the end of the same year, membership had increased to more than 2 million (30% of German youth ages 10-18). In the following years, the Nazi regime encouraged and pressured young people to join the Hitler Youth organizations. Enthusiasm, peer pressure, and coercion led to a significant increase in membership. By 1937, membership in the Hitler Youth grew to 5.4 million (65% of youth ages 10-18). By 1940 the number was 7.2 million (82%)."

Yes, Ratzinger was in the Hitler Youth, but he really didn't have a choice. Everyone eligible boy was to be involved. In December 1936, the Nazis passed the Law on Hitler Youth. The law's second ordinance, from 1939, specifies that those aged 10-14 join the "German Young People" while those 14-18 join the Hitler Youth, the younger end being how old Ratzinger was when he joined. The law's only exceptions were for the handicapped, Jews, and foreign nationals of non-German descent. Gee, why would someone born in 1927 be a member of the Hitler Youth during WWII? Could it be that he was MANDATED TO DO SO???

Now, you could argue that sure, Ratzinger has no blame, but what of his family? Surely a family that was present during this period was indoctrinated by the Nazis? Perhaps the Ratzingers were sympathetic, at least to an extent? Wrong. Ratzinger's father, a local policeman, confronted Nazi mobs, even in the face of harassment, seeing their ideals as anabomination against Germany's Catholic heritage. He saw Hitler as the antichrist, according to a biographer, and was subscribed to anti-Nazi newspaper Der Gerade Weg, a paper whose founder was murdered by the Nazis not long after their rise to power. He even lost a cousin who suffered from Down Syndrome to Aktion T4. The Simon Wiesenthal Center itself even makes this distinction. Love and Patel can't be remotely bothered to make a good faith argument. Instead, demonizing a former conscript. They could debate his views on abortion and gay marriage, his 2006 remarks on Islam at Regensburg, or even his moral failure regarding the sexual abuse crisis, but nah, let's invoke Godwin's Law because there's no better approach.

In conclusion, Benedict XVI was a complex man who lead a complex life. He had his failings, but to argue that he is at fault for being forced into an evil organization that literally everyone his age had to deal with, while his family suffered extensively at the hands of said organization, is nothing more than tasteless and repellent, and says a lot about the character of these critics in particular.

25 Comments
2024/03/12
01:53 UTC

183

That pesky Voltaire quote that never happened

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”-Voltaire

This has been a rather favorite posting of:

-Contrarians

-Conspiracy theorists

-racists/anti-Semites

the goal being of course to insist that "my narrative is actually TRUE and HONEST!!!!" <insert annoying wojak here>. You'll find it in many places, with politicians, Youtube commenters, and more citing it. After all, who better to have on your side than a French philosopher who was a strong advocate of freedom of speech?

Well...ideally anyone but a Neo-Nazi pedophile (then again, Voltaire's "free-thinker" beliefs went in some...unfortunate directions)...

Yes, that's right. Rather than an iconic French philosopher, the originator of this fine quote is NOT a revered free-thinker, but a degenerate who belongs in the lowest dregs of society (the irony, of course being lost on him). Meet Kevin Alfred Strom, who originated the quote in a 1993 essay titled "All America Must Know the Terror that is Upon Us" (no, I am NOT using the fucker's website or downloading that shit):

“To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: who is it that I am not permitted to criticise? We all know who it is that we are not permitted to criticise. We all know who it is that it is a sin to criticise. Sodomy is no longer a sin in America. Treason, and burning and spitting and urinating on the American flag is no longer a sin in America. Gross desecration of Catholic or Protestant religious symbols is no longer a sin in America. Cop-killing is no longer a sin in America – it is celebrated in rap ‘music’.”

How convenient, then, that someone who admires a dictator who sought to replace Christianity would be outraged over desecrating Christianity. How convenient that a man whose ideology goes against the very existence and well-being of so many Americans and those who fought for this country is outraged over treason and flag desecration. How convenient that someone who downloads child porn is outraged over sodomy. How convenient that a man who criticizes "degeneracy" is himself a degenerate in ideology and behavior.

Voltaire has plenty of good quotes, but this one is not one of them. It also reeks of a sort of entitlement. Do visually impaired children hold power over me, and society as a whole, because society judges me when I criticize them? If I make insensitive comments about someone with a mental handicap or illness, is there a cabal of the mentally ill and handicapped that makes society turn on me and destroy my reputation? This quote is a convenient little platitude to recite when criticized for bigoted and/or conspiratorial remarks, but it doesn't really hold up under scrutiny.

EDIT: Voltaire wasn't a paragon of tolerance, and this unfortunate commonality with Strom and his ilk is deeply troubling. However, their attempts to use his status to legitimize their beliefs is what is being attacked. I cannot stress enough how hurtful and dangerous his anti-Semitic views were.

21 Comments
2024/03/10
19:59 UTC

28

Mindless Monday, 11 March 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

855 Comments
2024/03/11
12:00 UTC

163

r/AsianParentStories sends Confucius and his lame philosophy into the Phantom Zone

Before I get into the bad history, I would like to start with an introductory note/disclaimer.

r/AsianParentStories is a subreddit discussing the trauma that Asian children have received from their parents. While I strongly disagree with some of the conclusions that they reach through their venting, which I can elaborate on with further detail if requested, their experiences obviously should not be delegitimized. As such, none of my claims are meant to be personal attacks against these individuals.

And as for the following threads, I do concur with a decent portion of the criticisms against Confucianism itself (Mohism >>>>>), but there were still some sections that unfortunately contained bad history.

Section 1: Confucianism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

https://np.reddit.com/r/AsianParentStories/comments/z8gghi/any_asian_here_who_hates_apologist_assholes_who/

Not to mention how Confucius plainly states that if you "gently" criticize your parents/elders and they abuse you, too fucking bad for you, shut up and take it like a "superior man," as Confucius would say (Analects 4.18, Book of Rites 10.18). But also, apparently, you SHOULD NOT criticize them, because it's mean and "improper" and causes them to lose face (Analects 1.13, 4.26, 8.2; Book of Rites 2A.2).

The last four passages condemn excessive/improper criticism, not the idea of remonstrations in general.

Confucianism technically created peace by confusing peace for quiet. It appeals to those who have power because it preaches "know your place and stay there". Which is easy to accept when you're at the top, but not so much if you're lower down the social totem pole

It is true that in many imperial dynasties, Confucianism would be used to ensure loyalty among its citizens and officials by emphasizing the virtue of xiao (filial piety) to a far more substantial degree than the "old" generation (including Confucius, Xunzi, Mengzi, etc.) had done.

But due to its emphasis on benevolence, rulers during the Warring States period would actually dislike Confucianism, which explains why with the exception of the State of Lu, Confucius never actually secured a high-ranking position within any of the regional powers. Instead, many of these leaders opted for more "Legalist" methods which would be conducive to their goals of maximizing power and wealth, with figures like Shang Yang or Li Si playing important roles in the Qin state apparatus, for instance.

However, there is still some misogyny in the culture that still persists thanks to old Kong Fuzi. The preference for male children to female children, especially in the “one child policy” China had going on for a bit, leading to a skewered gender ratio. Serves them right. Female children were abandoned or aborted. You can see the effects of this in America if you notice that the majority of Chinese adoptees are women. My university especially has a lot of female Chinese adoptees.

Without Confucianism, it is pretty likely that the preference for sons would still exist when one looks at the actual reasons why such a viewpoint would even be present in the first place. Indeed, the fact is that in many other societies around the world, it is unfortunately not uncommon to see a preference for male children.

The way the ancient Chinese treated women back then was an abomination in our history, especially with the foot binding practice.

Foot binding did not exist in China until the Song dynasty.

Regardless, although the revival of Confucian thought in the form of Neo-Confucianism did indeed make aristocratic Chinese society more patriarchal than before, blaming Confucius himself (or ancient China for that matter) for a development he had no direct role in is absolutely absurd.

This unfortunately has been seen time and time throughout history. People who claim to be oppressed end up becoming the oppressors. We saw this with McCarthyism, the Soviet and Maoist revolutions, French revolutionaries beheading opponents, American revolutionaries owning African-American slaves, the lost goes on. Shit replaced by even more shit

One of these is not like the others.

I’ve been thinking, there were rulers who banned Confucius’ teaching during their reign…any chance they were just ACs like us who were pissed at their parents?

No, Qin Shihuangdi did not burn all of those books because he had daddy issues.

Do you think Confucius gave a flying fuck about the 90% of ancient China's poor rural peasant population? Hell, he was the asshole who practically endorsed ancient China's feudal system (Analects 3.14). Which for 2,000 years kept countless peasants living in total fucking poverty (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041350/life-expectancy-china-all-time/).

When Confucius praised the Western Zhou dynasty, he was specifically referring to the fengjian system, which was not a institutional structure that lasted for two millennia.

And since the user brings up life expectancy, it is important to realize that this number would not increase for practically every country until the advent of modern medicine and agricultural techniques.

Section 2: Crashing Confucius's birthday party

https://np.reddit.com/r/AsianParentStories/comments/xphb0n/happy_2573rd_to_the_worlds_greatest_narcissistic/

that instead of studying useful science or mathematics and learn from other cultures, that we should isolate ourselves from the world and burn ourselves out in academics by studying the good ol' days when we enslaved others and treated women like shit and had no access to modern medicine so that we get fucked over by modernized 19th century European imperial powers and carry the resulting generational trauma and pass those horrors onto our children

And here is the section that inspired me to write this post in the first place.

that instead of studying useful science or mathematics

I suppose that inventing paper, gunpowders, compasses, printing, cast iron production, silk, and porcelain is not real science.

I suppose that independently deriving the concept of zero, π, Pascal's triangle, linear algebra, and Horner's method is not real mathematics.

and learn from other cultures

If South Asia, Central Asia, and the Pacific Ocean all suddenly dematerialized in 5000 BC, then this claim would have been true.

we should isolate ourselves from the world and burn ourselves out in academics

As noted in the previous section, China was certainly not isolated throughout its entire history. However, I suppose that they do have a point when it comes to certain dynasties and certain periods of such entities, with foreign trade outside the tributary system being restricted during the Ming dynasty, for instance.

so that we get fucked over by modernized 19th century European imperial powers and carry the resulting generational trauma and pass those horrors onto our children

It is always interesting to hear people solely mention European empires in this context.

No mention of the Mongol conquest? Or the Manchu conquest? Or the Jurchens conquering Northern China from the Song dynasty, resulting in the traumatic loss of the Central Plain? Or the Uyghurs sacking the Tang capital at Luoyang?

Nevertheless, the reasons for the fall of the Qing Dynasty have been discussed ad nauseam both on this subreddit and on r/AskHistorians, but to summarize the academic consensus, it is far more accurate to blame political/economic institutional factors than to blame "Confucianism."

And Confucius was naive enough to actually believe that all parents actually gave a shit about their kids (Analects 2.6 https://ctext.org/analects/wei-zheng#n1123).

This quote merely claims is that generally parents worry about the illnesses that their children may contract. At no point does it make any assertion about the non-existence of bad parenting.

And then there's this crazy-ass quote, and then people say Confucianism is not a religion, even though Confucius is literally banning heresy like the Catholic Church banned science and the Taliban bans education (Analects 2.16 https://ctext.org/analects/wei-zheng#n1133)

At the time of Confucius, there was no such thing as heretical philosophies that were in opposition to Confucian thought, which makes sense because Confucianism itself did not even exist yet as a school of thought! So it would be mistaken to apply this quote towards alternative forms of belief such as Mohism or Buddhism.

Therefore, there has been a great deal of controversy over the meaning of Analects 2.16, with one interpretation from Bi Baokui and Bian Dishi claiming that the ultimate meaning of the quote is to look at a problem comprehensively from both perspectives rather than one side. Here, the argument is that heresy or attacking heresy would require oneself to have an orthodox viewpoint in the first place, which is considered to be injurious or harmful.

Section 3: 'No hate like Confucian love, no pride like Confucian humility'

https://np.reddit.com/r/AsianParentStories/comments/10fkuwf/no_hate_like_confucian_love_no_pride_like/

Political cult leader and megalomaniac Ol' buddy Confucius here displaying how humble and modest he is by calling non-Chinese tribes "uncivilized" and calling himself the "superior man." I guess now we know why East Asian APs can be so racist.

For the era in which Confucius was raised (Spring and Autumn period, or the first half of the Eastern Zhou dynasty), "civilized" folk were distinguished from "barbarians" based on differences in custom, not on phenotypical differences. Evidence for a more "exclusive" viewpoint really only emerges in the Northern Song period.

Indeed, it is only fair to point out the sinicization of various groups such as the Rong people, who helped sack the Western Zhou capital in 771 BC and yet were still eventually assimilated into Chinese culture, or the Xianbei who founded the Northern Wei Dynasty.

It is absurd to suggest that Confucius's viewpoint is the reason why modern-day Asian parents may be racist, given that the notion of racism/race as understood in the modern world did not arise until about two millennia after his time.

And there are people out there, young East Asians included, who actually take his political cult philosophy seriously, and think Confucius gave a flying fuck about them. Then again, some people thought Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot gave a flying fuck about them, so why am I surprised

The idea that people may study Confucianism in a serious manner should not be surprising, especially considering the fact that some Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire or Leibniz, for example, saw the it as an ideal model that could replace the absolute monarchies of their day. Accordingly, they had high praise for the man. The same process occurred for many of the Founding Fathers as well. Note that of course, these facts do not necessarily justify Confucian doctrine, and that by the 19th century, the opinion of Western intellectuals on China had soured.

As for the last claim, historical events generally make more sense if one assumes that authoritarian figures do genuinely believe in the ideologies they espouse, which is something that is supported by primary sources that document the private conversations of these dictators.

References

《论语》“攻乎异端,斯害也已”本义考辨

Boyer, Carl B., and Uta C. Merzbach. A History of Mathematics. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1991.

Davis, Walter W. "China, the Confucian Ideal, and the European Age of Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas, 44(4), 523-548, 1983.

Deng, Yinke. Ancient Chinese Inventions. Translated by Wang Pingxing. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2005.

Kuhn, Philip A. Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864. Harvard University Press, 1980.

Lin, Man-Houng. China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856. Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.

Pines, Yuri. "Beasts or humans: Pre-Imperial origins of Sino-Barbarian Dichotomy," in Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World, edited by Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran. New York, NY: Brill, 2005.

Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2012.

Wang, Dave. The US Founders and China: The Origins of Chinese Cultural Influence on the United States. Education abut Asia, 16(2), 2011.

Wu, Tung. "From Imported 'Nomadic Seat' to Chinese Folding Armchair," Boston Museum Bulletin, 71(363), 1972.

Zhang, Taisu. The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

71 Comments
2024/03/09
09:28 UTC

23

Free for All Friday, 08 March, 2024

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

617 Comments
2024/03/08
12:00 UTC

151

"Crazy how every Apollo lunar landing flight could've ended in tragedy" - Except they didn't

No longer content with clogging up the twice-a-week community threads, I have finally had the time and incentive to go after actual BadHistory. In the name of The Volcano, the Graph and Jared Diamond, I commend the following to oblivion.

Ahem . . . Anyway: on the social media network formerly known as Twitter, a user by the handle of [REDACTED] recently made a tweet (or whatever they're calling it now) which stated that it was, "Crazy how every Apollo lunar landing flight could've ended in tragedy". They then support this claim with the following list:

"A11: Low propellant on landing

A12: SCE to Aux

A13: We all know this one

A14: Abort computer failure

A15: 1/3 Parachute didn't deploy

A16: Landing almost aborted due to CSM issue

A17: Lunar rover fender bender"

With the notable exception of Apollo 13, none of those missions came close to, "tragedy" for the listed reasons; assuming tragedy entails the death of at least one crewmember. In fact, most of them weren't even all close to an abort as I will detail.

Apollo 11: While Eagle was forced into a manual landing after the initial landing site was observed to be too rugged, the LM in fact had about 45 seconds of propellant left at cutoff. The, "low level" indicator was in fact in error (Apollo 11 Mission Report 9-24). However, even if we assume that Apollo 11 did in fact run out of propellant during descent, the ascent module retained its own, separate supply of propellant and an emergency abort-to-orbit would've been executed automatically or by the astronauts.

Apollo 12: This appears to be a rather cryptic (and unhelpful) reference to an issue encountered during Apollo 12's ascent on November 14th, 1969. During its launch, the Saturn V vehicle was struck by lightning. While the crew reported a great deal of warning lights activate, the launch vehicle itself had a separate system guidance system (the instrument unit) and were not affected (Bilstein 375). Moreover, a launch abort was still possible throughout the flight (Apollo 12 Mission Report 9-2).

Apollo 14: Again, another unhelpful reference that appears to be drawn from issues with Antares. The problem herein is that the LM's computers had never failed to begin with! Rather, the issue was with a physical switch, and a solution was created prior to actual descent (Apollo 14 Mission Report 14-29). While said work around precluded any automatic abort during descent, manual abort was still possible. Ironically, I would contend that a more serious issue with this mission occurred during a temporary loss of landing radar towards the end of descent!

Apollo 15: I'm not sure why this is cited, as the CM were explicitly designed to be capable of safely landing with just two main parachutes. This very redundancy precluded there being any, "tragedy".

Apollo 16: Claiming that the mission was nearly aborted does not really mean it was close to ending, "in tragedy", and "almost" is not qualified here.

Apollo 17: To be blunt, this inclusion is baffling. While Apollo 17's LRV did indeed lose a fender extension during the first surface EVA, it was successfully replaced by maps and clamps (Apollo 17 Mission Report 9-3). However, Apollo 16 also lost a fender extension during its second surface EVA. Apollo 16's fender extension was not replaced and, while the mission did not end in, "tragedy", it did kick up a considerable amount of dust (Apollo 16 Mission Report 8-2). Amusingly, I'll note that our intrepid Twitter (or whatever) concentrated on the loss of fenders when the rovers had more serious issues with steering. In any event, surface EVAs with the rovers were designed in such a way that the crew would never stray so far from their LMs that they could not walk back to them if the rovers broke down (Extraterrestrial Surface Transport Vehicles (Rovers) 1).

While I can concede that any and all missions to space can end in, "tragedy", misrepresenting how and why with less-than-truthful "facts" is ultimately unconstructive. Aside from completely omitting how such things were ultimately avoided outside Apollo 13 by good engineering, [REDACTED] also provided some outright dishonest examples that pose as grave a danger as any other form of misinformation.

Works Cited:

Bilstein, Roger E. Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1980.

Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, "Apollo 17 Mission Report". March 1973

Manned Spacecraft Center “Apollo 11 Mission Report”. November 1969

Manned Spacecraft Center “Apollo 12 Mission Report”. March 1970

Manned Spacecraft Center "Apollo 14 Mission Report". April 1971

Manned Spacecraft Center “Apollo 16 Mission Report”. August 1972

NASA Office of the Chief Health & Medical Officer "Extraterrestrial Surface Transport Vehicles (Rovers)" 2023

21 Comments
2024/03/08
06:43 UTC

146

A Youtube channel gets Persian history wrong again

Hello, those of r/badhistory! Today I am reviewing a short video called Historical Warfare: The Cardaces, by a Youtube channel called Ancient History Guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU_HzIGE6lU

0.27: The narrator says an alternative meaning for the term Cardaces was ‘foreign mercenaries.’ The problem here is that that alternate meaning is being presented without dispute, meaning the audience could take it as fact. It gives an incorrect understanding, when what it should do is provide the necessary information for the audience to obtain the understanding that the definition of the term has been subject to debate within academia, and that there are many interpretations about the origin and exact use. This article from the Encyclopedia Iranica has a good overview of the discussion:

https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kardakes

One part that is particularly relevant is:

‘The evidence of the historians makes it clear that the term kárdakes in Achaemenid (and Seleucid) times refers to some not exclusively Persian elite infantry, but in any case refers neither to the ordinary Persian conscripts nor to foreign mercenaries, as some scholars had assumed.’

So why did the narrator make suck a claim? I would posit it comes from laziness. It seems all they did was just look up the term on Wikipedia, and use the definition provided there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardaces

0.43: The narrator says the majority of the Persian infantry were composed of light units. This is not an example of an explanation failing to represent a lack of strict academic consensus, as it a case of simply ignoring the facts altogether. The misrepresentation of Achaemenid military forces has been something I have discussed at length in previous reviews, so I will just say that both literary and artistic evidence from the period shows this was not the case at all.

0.54: The narrator says that, as exemplified by the Battle of Thermopylae, when compressed into a tight space and facing heavy infantry, lightly armored Persian infantry would be demolished. This is a very simplistic account of the battle, and reduces it to a simple contest of two infantry types. Now, a literal reading of Herodotus may support that:

‘and when the Medes were being roughly handled, then these retired from the battle, and the Persians, those namely whom the king called "Immortals," of whom Hydarnes was commander, took their place and came to the attack, supposing that they at least would easily overcome the enemy. When however these also engaged in combat with the Hellenes, they gained no more success than the Median troops but the same as they, seeing that they were fighting in a place with a narrow passage, using shorter spears than the Hellenes, and not being able to take advantage of their superior numbers.‘

Similarly, Diodorus Siculus says:

‘But since the Greeks were superior in valour and in the great size of their shields, the Medes gradually gave way; for many of them were slain and not a few wounded. The place of the Medes in the battle was taken by Cissians and Sacae, selected for their valour, who had been stationed to support them; and joining the struggle fresh as they were against men who were worn out they withstood the hazard of combat for a short while, be as they were slain and pressed upon by the soldiers of Leonidas, they gave way. For the barbarians used small round or irregularly shaped shields, by which they enjoyed an advantage in open fields, since they were thus enabled to move more easily, but in narrow places they could not easily inflict wounds upon an enemy who were formed in close ranks and had their entire bodies protected by large shields, whereas they, being at a disadvantage by reason of the lightness of their protective armour, received repeated wounds.’

However, an important aspect of the methodology of studying history is to read primary sources critically. This means not automatically accepting that what is said is 100% accurate. This might be because:

1: The author of the primary text might be unintentionally affected by their own biases

2: The author of the primary source might deliberately leave out information, or dismiss conflicting information for a variety of reasons and so not include them

3: The author only has access to a limited range of information with which to write their account

4: The information the author has access to is itself unreliable

Now, I very much like the Achaemenid dynasty and think they had a very competent military establishment, so there is a risk I could be using ‘critical analysis’ as a means of dismissing Herodotus and Diodorus because it clashes with my own interpretation. I want to emphasize this is not the case, and my skeptical attitude towards the idea that the Persians had difficulty because the type of warrior they fielded comes from additional information Herodotus himself provides:

‘The Lacedemonians meanwhile were fighting in a memorable fashion, and besides other things of which they made display, being men perfectly skilled in fighting opposed to men who were unskilled, they would turn their backs to the enemy and make a pretence of taking to flight; and the Barbarians, seeing them thus taking a flight, would follow after them with shouting and clashing of arms: then the Lacedemonians, when they were being caught up, turned and faced the Barbarians; and thus turning round they would slay innumerable multitudes of the Persians; and there fell also at these times a few of the Spartans themselves. So, as the Persians were not able to obtain any success by making trial of the entrance and attacking it by divisions and every way, they retired back. ‘

This account presents the battle as being more fluid than just being one solid mass of infantry versus another in confined area. The Spartans had enough space to conduct a feigned retreat and then turn on their pursuers, and this suggests that battle was moving back and forth, and there was enough space for the struggle to be at times one of manoeuvre. This would mean local success would sometimes come from command, control and tactics, rather than the individual equipment of each soldier. Similarly, Herodotus does not mention the Persian infantry being inferior in terms of armor, or because being defeated because they were ‘light’ troops. And while Diodorus Siculus does state this, it is also important to note that his account does not necessarily point to Persians being lightly armored. If we look at his passage in closer detail, we note his description of the weapons and armor of the troops fighting only comes after he says:‘

The place of the Medes in the battle was taken by Cissians and Sacae’

In that context, it could be plausible to argue that it was the Cissians and Sacae who had the ‘small round or irregularly shaped shields’, not Persians. The evidence would also support this assertion, as written and artistic source shows that Persian infantry used tall wicker shields that covered most of their body in battle, and Herodotus specifically notes that such equipment actually benefited them in melee. During his account of the Battle of Mycale, he says

‘Now for the Athenians and those who were ranged next to them, to the number perhaps of half the whole army, the road lay along the sea-beach and over level ground, while the Lacedemonians and those ranged in order by these were compelled to go by a ravine and along the mountain side: so while the Lacedemonians were yet going round, those upon the other wing were already beginning the fight; and as long as the wicker-work shields of the Persians still remained upright, they continued to defend themselves and had rather the advantage in the fight ‘

1.33: The narrator says that, basing their reconstruction of one source, we can assume the Cardaces used the hoplon. The source in question is that of Arrian. In his account of the Battle of Issus, the translation of Arrian says:

‘Foremost of his heavier troops he placed the Greek mercenaries, 30,000 of them, facing the Macedonian phalanx; next, on either side, 60,000 of the Kardakes, who were also heavy-armed troops; this was the number which the ground where they stood allowed to be posted in line.’

The error made here is one of methodology. As much as possible, never rely on a single source. Try to use a variety of evidence, not just written, but also pictorial and archaeological. The Alexander Sarcophagus shows Persian infantry using such shields:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd19xe8ddoas41.jpg

But that does not necessarily mean those infantry depicted were Cardaces.

2.09: The narrator says the use of the hoplon separates the Cardaces from the rest of the Persian infantry. This statement is dubious as, as I just mentioned, we have depictions of Persians with such shields, but their exact identity is not known. If the men shown on the Alexander Sarcophagus were not Cardaces, then the use of a hoplon does not separate such a class of soldier at all, as such infantry could thereby use a variety of equipment.

2.22: The narrator says the Cardaces were also probably armed with the Persian version of the dory spear. This is one of those times where my tendency to quibble over the exact meaning of a word is justified. There is no ‘probably’, as there is not enough evidence, to my knowledge, to make that assertion with such surety. When it comes to evidence about Persian spears, we know that in the 5th century BC that those used by infantry had rounded butts at one end, and that (according to Arrian) in the 4th Century BC this was still the case for the personal guard of Darius III, but that is about it. Artistic evidence like the Alexander Mosiac:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Persians_detail.JPG

Unfortunately do not give us enough details to come to any such conclusion about the design of the spear, as we cannot see if that have the sauroter that was characteristic of the dory. This lack of concrete proof means it cannot be ‘probably, and so the Persian dory is hard to find.

2.55: The narrator says most depictions of the Cardaces showed they wore little to no armor. Which depictions are these? We already know that the images of Persian infantry on the Alexander Sarcophagus lack a clear identity. There are no depictions of Cardaces explicitly shown on Greek vases or Persian seals or coins, a far as I know. It seems the narrator is just making things up at this point.

Sources

The Achaemenid Persian Army, by Duncan Head

The Anabasis of Alexander, by Arrian: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46976/46976-h/46976-h.htm

The Anabasis, by Xenophon: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm

The Histories of Herodotus, Volume 2: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2456/2456-h/2456-h.htm

The Library of History, by Diodorus Siculus: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/home.html

Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War, but Kaveh Farrokh

14 Comments
2024/03/05
13:07 UTC

77

Byzantine literature was awesome

Four years ago, Overly Sarcastic Productions put out a video on Anna Komnene and the Alexiad, History-Makers: Anna Komnena. The video begins with the following passage:

"The Byzantine Empire has a well-deserved A+ in art class but their written work is a little... ehhh? Thing is, most Byzantine literature reads like a modern textbook – sure it's informative, but the writing is drier than chalk-dust and it could stand to lose a couple hundred pages too. But there's one defiant Byzantine historian out there who did something, plot twist, cool."

Shortly afterwards, the narrator goes on to say that the Alexiad represents "everything Byzantine literature could and should have been." I did not watch beyond this, so will give no judgement on the rest of the video. This post is not intended to dunk on Anna Komnene or the Alexiad. She was cool. That book is cool. Instead, I intend to clear up the misconceptions and assumptions made in that initial statement of the video and demonstrate that Byzantine literature as a whole was far from "drier than chalk-dust".

Why is Medieval literature dry?

It's easy to mistakenly believe that Byzantine literature (and indeed Medieval literature as a whole) is only composed of dry historical and religious writings. After all, those are the works of highest importance to historians and are also the ones most easily accessible to non-specialists in translated form.

Our understanding of Medieval European literature is hampered by that we neither know how many manuscripts were produced, nor how many have survived. In other words, we have no real sense of what percentage of Medieval works we have[1]. There is also a preservation bias at work. It is worthwile to consider the source of surviving Byzantine manuscripts—they have largely been recovered from monastic archives[2,3] and thus reflect what monks and nuns would have deemed important to keep. Scholars are aware that there are large gaps in the record[2]. As an example, Byzantine historical biographies are typically on either emperors or saints. It has however been conjectured that an entire third genre of biographies—histories of individual aristocratic families—once existed but that they were deemed unimportant for the monastic archives and have thus become completely lost[3].

People who contrast "boring" Medieval literature with the exciting, epic, and fantastical tales of Antiquity also fail to consider one important aspect: the tales of Antiquity have in many cases only survived until our time because they continued to be copied, read, and enjoyed in the Middle Ages. The Byzantines certainly read the works of Homer, for instance. There is even an interesting 14th-century "Byzantinized" version of the Iliad, written by Constantine Hermoniakos. In this version, most of the Pagan elements are removed and contemporary stuff (such as Bulgarian and Hungarian soldiers) is added to ground the story for readers in Hermoniakos's time[4].

Byzantine fiction examples

I believe the most convincing way to demonstrate that Byzantine literature was far from boring is to provide a reading list of sorts. Here are seven original works of Byzantine fiction that I think make the case for a quite vibrant literary scene, each standing far apart from dry chronicles:

  • Diogenes Akritas (12th cent.) Epic poetry. Probably the most well-known work of Byzantine fiction, follows the career of a Byzantine border guard during the Arab-Byzantine wars. The titular hero is of mixed Byzantine-Arab descent and there are allusions to Greco-Roman myth. Translation: Mavrogordato, 1956 (out of print)

  • Drosilla and Charikles (12th cent.) Romance and adventure. A romance in the literary tradition of Ancient Greece, with some Christian elements. This one includes prophetic dreams, pirates, and Parthian and Arab armies. Translation: Burton, 2004

  • The Timarion (12th cent.) Satire and adventure. While traveling from Thessaloniki to Constantinople, a man named Timarion is dragged to Hades by two demons and forced to persuade the judges of the underworld to be returned home. Timarion meets many souls in the underworld, including real figures from both Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Translation: Baldwin, 1984 (out of print)

  • Velthandros and Chrysandza (13th/14th cent.) Romance and adventure. This is pretty much a fantasy tale, set in a pseudo-realistic Anatolia, and features mystery, action, danger, and intrigue as Velthandros unites with his predestined lover, Chrysandza. Translation: Betts (1995)

  • An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds (14th cent.) Epic poetry, social commentary, satire, and comedy. This is essentially a Byzantine version of Animal Farm; it takes place during a convention of talking animals, each representing powerful figures and positions in Byzantine society. The convention is presided over by the lion, a subtle stand-in for a contemporary basileus. The animals' discussion gets heated and eventually erupts into a battle. Translation: Nicholas & Baloglou (2003)

  • Journey to Hades, or, Interviews with Dead Men about Certain Officials of the Imperial Court (15th cent.) Comedy and satire. Written by a court official under some of the last Palaiologos rulers, this one sees the courtier Mazaris die prematurely and find himself in Hades, where he meets former colleagues. This has a lot less narrative going on than the Timarion but is quite fun as it openly critiques the recently dead and still living of the imperial bureacracy in the author's time. Translation: Barry (1975) (out of print)

  • The Achilleid (15th cent.) Epic poetry and romance. A romantic tragedy that involves some Homeric figures (most notably Achilles), though the characters and story bear little to no resemblance to Homer's original works (that's right, Byzantine fan fiction). Greek deities Eros and Charon make appearances, as do lions and jousting knights. Translation: Smith (1999) (out of print)

References

  • [1] Buringh (2011) Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database, pp. 1–3
  • [2] Parani (2008) "Intercultural Exchange In The Field Of Material Culture In The Eastern Mediterranean: The Evidence of Byzantine Legal Documents (11th to 15th Centuries)", in Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean 1000–1500: Aspects of Cross-Cultural Communication, p. 352
  • [3] Frankopan (2018) "Aristocratic Family Narratives in Twelfth-century Byzantium", in Reading in the Byzantine Empire and Beyond, p. 334
  • [4] Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991), p. 921; Merry (2004) Encyclopedia of Modern Greek Literature, p. 172.
11 Comments
2024/03/04
19:28 UTC

256

Was the Trojan War fought in Finland? Is the Baltic Sea the cradle of Greek civilization? Was Odysseus from Denmark? No, no, and no.

Here's an article with some innocently bad history: "Was the “Odyssey” originally set in the Baltic?" This theory was first advanced by an Italian nuclear engineer and "amateur historian" named Felice Vinci in 1995. It reappeared because, I dunno, maybe it's a slow news cycle.

For starters: I know that the historicity of the Trojan War is shrouded in myth, and figuring out where particular islands or kingdoms were located involves a lot of speculation. What I'm treating as historical fact here isn't the exact events described in the Homeric epics, but the following facts:

  • The scholarly consensus that the real Troy was located in western Anatolia (now the Marmara region of Turkey), and that at some point during the Bronze Age, it was violently razed.

  • These epics were told by Ancient Greeks.

  • They were set in the parts of the world that the Ancient Greeks knew about.

  • Basic details about Mediterranean geography and climate.

  • Facts about Ancient Greek culture, and about the Northern European cultures that Vinci conflates with the Ancient Greeks.


Bad Geography 1: Finnish Troy

Vinci identifies Troy as the contemporary Finnish town of Toijala, based on the fact that they sound similar. It's an obscure place, so obscure that I couldn't find out when it was named. In fairness, the proto-Finns seem to have lived in Finland since the Stone Age, so it's possible that there was a settlement in roughly this area called Toijala. Not particularly likely, but possible.

But if we're going off of cities with a similar first syllable, why not Trondheim? That's an even closer fit! Or what about Tórshavn? Or Tripoli? Or Taranto? Or Tokyo? Those all sound similar.

Of course, it wouldn't be enough for an ancient place to have a name that sounded like "Troy." In the Iliad, Troy is often called Ilios (Ἴλιος), not just Troy (Τροία, "Troia"). So where does that name come from? Vinci doesn't have an explanation.

Fortunately, actual historians and linguists do have an explanation. The ancient Hittite city that is accepted as the historical Troy is referred to in Hittite records by two names: Truwiša and Wiluša. These two names are accepted as the sources of the Greek toponyms "Troia" and "Ilios."


Bad Geography 2: It doesn't get cold in the Mediterranean

The Trojan cycle mentions snow on shields, foggy weather, the fact that Odysseus tells Eumaeus that he nearly froze to death at Troy, and the fact that Eumaeus lends Odysseus a cloak.

Of course, the Mediterranean can get cold. This week, as I'm writing this, the forecast low in the Marmara region is 1° C. It would've been even colder during the late Bronze Age.

And actually, this appeal to cold weather goes against Vinci's core claim:

During the Holocene Climate Optimum, from roughly 7500 to 5500 BC, northern Europe was much warmer than it is now, generated rich harvests, and hosted a vibrant, proto-Greek Bronze Age civilization.

So ... there was a Greek civilization in the Baltics because the Baltic Sea was much warmer when Vinci thinks the Greeks lived there ... and his proof of this is that the Iliad makes Troy sound too cold to have been in the Mediterranean? What??


Bad Geography 3: The random name game

There are places mentioned in the Trojan Cycle that Vinci arbitrarily connects to modern locations because the modern name sounds vaguely similar. A few examples:

  • Chios, which is traditionally claimed to have been Homer's birthplace, is a real Greek island that exists. But according to Vinci, the ancient Chios was actually Hiiumaa, an island in Estonia.

  • Pylene, which is briefly mentioned in the Iliad, is identified with the northern German town of Plön (Plön didn't get its name until the early 7th century, AD).

  • The Hellespont, now called the Dardanelles, is actually the Gulf of Finland, because the adjective "wide" appears, and Vinci doesn't think the Dardanelles is wide enough to warrant this description.


Bad geography 4: the mountains of Denmark

Historians and classicists still aren't sure whether the modern Greek island of [Ithaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_(island\)) is the same Ithaca that Odysseus spends the whole Odyssey trying to get back to. Vinci has his own proposal: "Ithaca" refers to the Danish island of Lyø.

This is wrong for a simple reason: Lyø's geography. Like the rest of Denmark, Lyø is flat. In Book 9 of the Odyssey, Ithaca is explicitly said to be mountainous, and dominated by a peak called Neriton.


Bad military history

The Trojan Cycle mentions fighting at night, which Vinci says would've been possible only at northern latitudes, where the days are longer.

Of course, nighttime combat is as old as warfare itself. In the days before night vision it would've been difficult and risky, but the risk could pay off: attacking at night would've given the attacker a good chance to catch the enemy by surprise.

And a longer day defeats the entire point of nighttime combat: using the cover of darkness to attack your enemy. Ancient writers wouldn't have called a battle under the northern midnight sun a "nighttime battle" ... because, y'know, you'd be fighting during daylight.

Here's one example of nighttime combat from Book 10 of the Iliad: Odysseus and Diomedes raid the Trojans' camps under the cover of night. Search for "night" on that page, and notice how many times it's emphasized that the night is dark. You know, the kind of visibility that would be perfect for a covert raid.


Bad linguistics

Let's get back to the naming of Troy/Toijala. Toponyms are important, but what about personal names? The consensus is that the Finno-Ugric languages arrived in Finland long before the events that inspired the Iliad are thought to have occurred. So, if Troy was in Finland and had a Finnic name, then the Trojans should have Finnic personal names too, right?

Well, they don't. Take Priam, the king of Troy. His name is a Hellenized version of Priya-Muwa, an Indo-European (specifically, Anatolian) name that means "exceptionally courageous." Priam's name is important here because while other Trojan characters (4eg, Hector) have names that are purely Greek, Priam's name can be traced to a non-Greek, but still Indo-European, root. In other words, the Trojans weren't Greeks, but they sure don't seem Finno-Ugric. They probably were Anatolians. As in, they lived in Anatolia.


Bad anthropology

The craziest claim here, of course, is that Greek civilization was flourishing in Scandinavia and the Baltics around 7000 BC. I don't think this needs serious rebutting (the entire human race was in the neolithic era, at most). But let's talk about the Greek migrations themselves.

It's universally accepted that the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (today Ukraine and southwestern Russia) until they started migrating outwards in waves. The exact timing of when this migration started is debated (the earliest year is ~8000 BC, the latest is ~5000), but the early Greeks were among the last groups to leave the Steppe, and when they left, they went straight to Greece. They probably didn't know that Scandinavia or the Baltics existed.

Another bewildering move of Vinci's is conflating the Ancient Greeks with the Norse, based on how Homeric ships are described:

the boats in the Odyssey having two prows so they can be pointed in either direction, just like typical Viking longships

Of course, the Homeric Greeks and the Vikings lived about 2000 years apart from each other by mainstream chronology; nearly 9000 years by Vinci's chronology. The oldest known longship--the kind of ship that Vinci had in mind--was just found in Norway, and it dates back to about 700 AD.


A very bad map

If you want a laugh, here's Vinci's map of the Odyssey. Besides Troy being in Finland, here are some other bangers:

  • When Homer talks about Egypt, he actually means northern Poland.

  • "Libya" was the Greek name for Latvia.

  • Copenhagen was built on top of the OG Mycenae, Agamemnon's capital; the Greeks build a new Mycenae and named it after the original city when they migrated south.

  • Odysseus shacked up with Circe on Jan Mayen island.

Edited to fix a link.

54 Comments
2024/03/04
16:54 UTC

28

Mindless Monday, 04 March 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

816 Comments
2024/03/04
12:00 UTC

88

Sun Who? OSP and the Art of War

History-Makers: Sun Tzu & the Art of War

So I’ve done a breakdown of a Blue OSP history video before, and while I don’t think two instances is enough to warrant this disclaimer, I’ll just stay on the safe side and clarify I don’t have any kind of axe to grind, big fan of the channel, and I think the first half of the video is pretty decent. I always like seeing the dubious historicity of Sunzi acknowledged, particularly his absence from supposedly contemporary texts.

Blue’s characterization of Spring and Autumn warfare as simplistic ‘throwing chariot-mounted aristocrats at each other’ is rather unfair; the strategies and tactics recorded of this period often show great sophistication in the context of Bronze Age societies without standing armies. Rather than a radical rethinking of traditional Chinese warfare, it’s probably more accurate to think of Sunzi as a [contested! we’ll touch on that later] codification of a centuries-long process of change, in which bureaucratic state building slowly replaced feudal domains, conscripted peasant infantry armed with halberds and crossbows eclipsed chariot-riding nobles, and cold-hearted calculations of advantage sidelined ritual propriety.

Blue spends the rest of the video trying to interpret Sunzi through a Daoist lens. This is problematic for a number of reasons. One of the most obvious is that when Sunzi refers to Dao, its meaning is very much contrary to how Daoists would use it in similar contexts; in Ch. 1, it’s used to refer to the obedience of the ruler’s subjects and their willingness to die at his command. Tellingly, he then goes on to give advice for how to fight wars without the Dao that makes the subjects indifferent to life or death; you march deep into enemy territory, plundering their lands along the way, then trap your own army on death ground to offer battle so they have no choice but to fight to the death. One would not expect a Daoist text to treat the Dao as something dispensable, but here, it is merely one advantage to be had among many, alongside superior numbers, better generals, discipline, terrain, and so on.

Next we come to probably one of the most misunderstood passages in the text. The following is from the Ames translations cuz I’m pretty sure it’s what Blue is using here, beginning of Ch. 3.

It is best to keep one's own state intact; to crush the enemy's state is only a second best. It is best to keep one's own army, battalion, company, or five-man squad intact; to crush the enemy's army, battalion, company, or five-man squad is only a second best.

So to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy's army without fighting at all.

Therefore, the best military policy is to attack strategies; the next to attack alliances; the next to attack soldiers; and the worst to assault walled cities.

Blue brings up the last two passages in reverse order as examples of Sunzi supposedly preferring Daoist 'effortless action', so I’ll summarize the work of John F. Sullivan on them in the same order.

Sunzi is reputed to have lived in the Spring and Autumn period; in any case the text appears to predate the introduction of cavalry by Zhao and the partition of Yue by Chu and Qi in the late 4th century BC. Our main source for much of this period is the Zuozhuan, a commentary on the Annals of the domain of Lu. The Zuozhuan contains extensive discussions and descriptions of warfare, and was recognized many centuries later as a foundational text for Chinese military theory [bingfa]. Referencing this historical context will help us understand what Sunzi is likely referring to through this passage.

In this and other texts, the character Ames translates as ‘strategies’ [mou] need not be understood as something as grand-scale as the ‘strategies’ conjures for english speakers, but could more plainly be rendered as ‘plans’, and this character often appears in reference to plans made on the tactical level, for instance just before a battle. Attacking the enemy’s plans shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an alternative to fighting, but as a way to ensure that you fight with the greatest possible advantage.

We can see an example of this in the famous tale of Cao Gui. The lord of Lu formed up to offer battle to Qi at Changshao. Cao Gui counseled his lord not to meet Qi’s advance, but to stand his ground as the Qi troops repeatedly beat their drums, advanced, then shied away. By refusing to fight when the enemy wished, the Lu troops stayed fresh and wore out the Qi, who were completely defeated when Cao Gui finally counseled an attack. This is an example of defeating an enemy’s plan.

Likewise, ‘attacking allies’ need not be understood as complex pre-war diplomatic maneuvering, but direct physical attacks on the lands and troops of enemy domains. The Zuozhuan is replete with examples, as wars in the Spring and Autumn period were rarely if ever an affair of one domain against another. Often these wars were fought by one of the greater domains -Jin, Chu, Qin, Qi- against another along with numerous minor domains being press-ganged onto either side. These minor domains were the typical battlegrounds of these wars; Jin and Chu repeatedly invaded and wasted each others’ allied domains in an attempt to force them out of the alliance. This strategy was often effective; as Sullivan recounts, Zheng domain was invaded 11 times and forces to change sides 7 times as a result in the decade following Chu’s victory over Jin at Bi.

Attacking allies could also occur on the battlefield itself. At Youshen, Jin and Chu did battle, with Jin attacking Chu’s allies of Cai and Chen, stationed on the Chu right wing. Cai and Chen quickly took flight, leading to the collapse of the Chu right; at the same time, the Chu left was drawn into a pincer and defeated while the center held back. This direct physical attack on the less committed members of the alliance hastened victory on the battlefield; it did not replace the need for fighting.

Classical Chinese is a pretty terse language, so we can’t absolutely exclude that Sunzi means these in the more ‘grand strategic sense’, but there’s no particular reason to think the text does, and plenty of more ‘down-to-earth’ readings supported by contemporary texts. Furthermore, in Ch. 3, when Sunzi explains how to predict victory and defeat in war, he never mentions evaluating enemy alliances, which is what the pre-war diplomacy interpretation of ‘attack allies’ would lead us to expect.

Next, when Sunzi is referring to ‘subduing the enemy army without fighting’, it’s important to look at the specific character being used. [Zhan] at this time had the specific meaning of battle, a large scale engagement in which both sides had completed their deployment into battle formation before fighting began. War and battle are not synonyms, though; while there are only thirty-some odd battles across the centuries covered by the Zuozhuan, there are plenty of raids, invasions, attacks, defeats, annihilations, captures, and sieges. The blood shed in these actions could easily eclipse that of a pitched battle, but crucially, it would be less evenly shared [in the wrong direction in the case of sieges].

Dovetailing with the discussion of ‘attacking allies’, Sullivan gives the example of Jifu, where Wu attacked Chu and defeated its allies before the men of Chu were in formation. The commentary notes that the Annals don’t call this action a ‘battle’ because Chu had not finished deploying; instead, the text says Wu 'defeated' these allies. On the other hand, Song and Chu did battle at the Hong River; Duke Xiang of Song patiently waited until the men of Chu crossed the Hong and deployed into battle formation before ordering his advance; as a result, his outnumbered army was crushed and he suffered a mortal wound. What Sunzi wants to avoid with battles then is not bloodshed, but rather danger; he’s perfectly happy to slaughter the enemy when they have no chance of fighting back.

Furthermore, Xunzi’s comments on Sunzi shouldn’t necessarily be taken as proof the text was considered a work of philosophy in the sense we use it. Xunzi curtly dismissed it in his dialogue on military affairs with Lord Linwu. The latter talks about Sunzi and Wu Qi as fighting generals who used shiftiness and deception to obliterate their enemies, but Xunzi counters that a good ruler possessing [ren] cannot be deceived by their tricks, and that trying it is like throwing an egg against a rock or stirring a boiling pot with one’s finger. Xunzi was concerned with how a ruler should govern his domain, and warned readers against relying on deception over [ren]. One philosophical oeuvre Sunzi is in conversation with is that of the Mohists [followers of Mozi], who, believing in an ethos of universal love, advocated peace by emphasizing defensive warfare, especially fortifications. Sunzi of course warns against assaulting walled cities, and its core strategy -invading and pillaging the enemy domain, drawing them into an ambush or attacking an army on death ground- is designed to bypass the strength of the strategic defense. Sunzi is showing that offensive -> warfare is still possible in an environment of increasingly sophisticated defenses.

Despite what the memes would have you believe, Sunzi’s Art of War is actually a text about fighting wars. It was composed in an era engulfed in war, in which the demands of war drove great changes to the domains waging war. In this context, the work argues for the primacy of advantage over ritual propriety and for the position of an independent, professional general at the head of the war machine, someone who can disregard the ruler’s commands in pursuit of advantage and risk their whole army on death ground. In this sense, it’s far less trivial than its critics often argue, but far harder to swallow.

brief bibliography, i'll add more later

https://www.academia.edu/49971099/Interpreting_Sun_Tzu_The_Art_of_Failure

https://www.academia.edu/43351646/Sun_Tzu_s_Fighting_Words

https://www.academia.edu/41954527/Who_was_Sun_Tzus_Napoleon

A.C. Graham Disputers of the Tao

Mark Edward Lewis’s Sanctioned Violence in Early China

Robin McNeal Conquer and Govern

Christopher Rand Military Thought in Early China

6 Comments
2024/03/04
03:07 UTC

16

Saturday Symposium Post for March, 2024

Monthly post for all your debunk or debate requests. Top level comments need to be either a debunk request or start a discussion.

Please note that R2 still applies to debunk/debate comments and include:

  • A summary of or preferably a link to the specific material you wish to have debated or debunked.
  • An explanation of what you think is mistaken about this and why you would like a second opinion.

Do not request entire books, shows, or films to be debunked. Use specific examples (e.g. a chapter of a book, the armour design on a show) or your comment will be removed.

1 Comment
2024/03/01
20:00 UTC

33

Free for All Friday, 01 March, 2024

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

651 Comments
2024/03/01
12:01 UTC

43

Mindless Monday, 26 February 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

870 Comments
2024/02/26
12:00 UTC

78

A critique of a PodCast in which the Cromwell Tank was "Cat Food"

Hello everyone, and here I present to you a critique of probably the worst history podcast I’ve ever subjected myself to.

The podcast itself is over 2 hours long, and I gave up less than halfway through, but I think we’d reached the end of the actual commentary on the tank in question by then anyway, and I couldn’t justify spending more time on it.

I’ve given approximate time stamps for each point of contention.

And without further ado, here’s why the Cromwell was an awful tank (apparently, or according to a couple of beery Australians).


05:24

After some intros, our story really begins with something that reeks of David Fletcher. Now David Fletcher is a bit of treasure and an internet meme as “Tank Santa”, and yes we works at The Tank Museum at Bovington and yes, he has an MBE, but his work as a serious historian is at the very best, dated.

06:55

The British Railways Act of 1927 is classic Fletcher. The idea that not having lorries heavier than 5 tons having a meaningful impact on tank design and development is a huge red herring.

Britain was one of the most heavily motorised societies in the world in the 1930’s and its not like the Germans were driving around with 350hp V12’s.

07:13

It’s a bit of bizarre claim that tanks were powered by either tractor engines or train engines. This seem to be a bit of confusion from the fact that tanks were often euphemistically referred to as tractors in the interbellum, and the fact that the Soviet V-2 engine was designed by a locomotive company. The latter was absolutely not a “train engine”. Honestly, the idea that anyone in the 1930’s was building aluminium block V12’s to power locomotives is obviously absurd.

07:20

No, “low powered engines” did not determine British armoured doctrine classifying tanks as either infantry or cruiser tanks.

There is a grain of truth in this in that the slow moving A11 Matilda had thicker armour and a tedious top speed of 8mph while the A9 Cruiser Mk1 had thinner armour and a respectable top speed of 25mph. Both being powered by commercial engines.

The evolution of the concept of infantry and cruiser tanks is complex, and at one time the British recognised up to four separate categories of tank, including Light, Cruiser, Medium, and Infantry tanks. The latter sometimes referred to as assault tanks, while there was a degree of interchangeability between light, medium, and cruiser tanks.

At this point we must note that most tank engines were not commercially produced engines, but either purpose built tank engines or modified aero engines. Virtually all German tank engines were purpose built, US tanks favoured radial aero engines, and pre-war British tanks like the Vickers 6-ton and Medium Mk II used the purpose built Armstrong Siddley V8.

Its also worth noting that Rolls Royce were approached with a proposal to adapt the Kestrel for use in tanks, but since Rolls Royce were swimming in cash from the RAF, they told the tank boys to go forth and multiply.

07:43

No the British did not stop using light tanks almost immediately. The Vickers Mk VI light tank continued in front line service until at least the end of 1941, Tetrarchs were used in 1944, and of course M3 ‘Stuart’ light tanks were used by the British through to the end of the war (although at times they were used as cruisers).

08:00

The description of the 2pdr as “adequate” is really not an accurate portrayal of the efficacy of the weapon in the opening stages of the war. It was arguably the best tank killer on the battlefield, short of an AA gun, and able to defeat the armour of any Axis tank.

Yes, it became obsolescent fairly quickly but this is not what’s being claimed here.

08:59

It’s not that HE hadn't occurred to the British but that a high velocity weapon optimised for anti-armour will necessarily have poor high explosive performance, while a low velocity weapon optimised for HE (and smoke) will necessarily have poor armour piercing performance.

This isn’t exactly rocket surgery and in the early stages of the war, no one had a good general purpose weapon so AP and HE guns were either mounted on different vehicles (PzIII had a 37mm AP analogous to the 2pdr, while PzIV had a low velocity 75mm howitzer) or to mount 2 different guns in the same vehicle, with the larger gun in the hull and the AP gun in the turret (see Char B1, M3 Medium, initial Churchill variant).

What made the 75mm M3 a good tank gun was that it could do both roles reasonably well, although its AP performance was below that of the 6pdr and its HE charge was found lacking in Normandy, emphasising the need for the OQF 95mm Howitzer.

11:25

And we’re onto the Liberty V12, dear Lord send me beer.

Let’s be clear, the reason the Liberty V-12 was selected was because that’s what J Walter Christie used in his tanks, from which all cruisers were derived. Yes it was an old aero-engine but it also produced a very respectable 300-350hp and it was a tried and tested platform.

The assertion that it was unsuitable for use in a tank because aircraft only flew for short periods of time is unsupported by fact. The basic engine itself was fine, and again, many tanks were powered by aero engines, including such dismal failures as <checks notes> Centurion

No the fact that the Liberty used individual cylinder sleeves instead of a single block does not mean the engine shook itself apart. There is literally no evidence that such a thing ever happened, and while Liberty’s did suffer a variety of problems for a variety of reasons, none of them were related to not having a single block.

Single aluminium blocks by the way, came to prominence as a result of the Curtis D-12 engine, which propelled the Curtis R3C-2 to success in the Schneider Trophy, as it afforded a better power to weight ratio. Something of considerably less importance to a tank than a racing ‘plane.

For the sake of clarity, most of the problem encountered with the Nuffield Liberty Mk III when used in the Crusader. In order to fit the Liberty into the shallower Crusader hull, Nuffield had to reduce the depth of the sump and construct external oil galleries.

This would have been alright, but a poor re-design of the engine fan lead to constant breakdowns, while the positioning of the air cleaners externally on the rear of the engine deck meant that the induction system was overwhelmed with dust and sand with obviously less than optimal effects on engine reliability.

All of this was exacerbated by a number of other factors including a lack of pre-production testing, poor QA before export, pilfering of parts and tools along the supply lines, and a lack of spare parts and a shortage of workshop capacity in theatre.

12:45

Lord Nuffield gave money to Oswald Moseley. Fair enough, that’s not something to be proud of but the conspiratorial tone that he continued to fund fascists after 1932 is a bit weird. The presenter even admits he has no evidence that Nuffield continued to fund Moseley after this (which was before Hitler came to power) but hey, he’s going to stick to conspiracy theory because of reasons.

14:45

I’m a bit uncertain about the whole shadow factory thing, because by my understanding he wanted nothing to do with it, but accepting it at face value, to say Nuffield “nearly cost the Battle of Britain” is self-evidently absurd, since the RAF ended the battle with more fighters than it started with.

14:45

Again with the fascist conspiracy theory. Lord Nuffield was a secret Nazi who was deliberately sabotaging Britain’s war effort. I mean Reeeeaaallly?

18:14

“Nuffield Inserted his Liberty engine into a great many godawful cruiser tanks”

Really? The Cruise Mk III/IV was pretty good and gave solid service in the western desert. Crusader did indeed have a multitude of problems, but Covenanter used a completely different engine (in any case the root cause of the failings in both Crusader and Covenanter was rushed production and an absurd 18t weight limit, forcing numerous design compromises).

So by “a great many” we can assume they actually mean one (1).

15:20

And we’re back to the Liberty shaking itself to pieces (never happened) and having poor power for its size and weight. None of this is true. Indeed cars equipped with Liberty engines set land speed records in 1926 and 1928.

As a sidebar, there is something deeply weird about the conspiratorial tone regarding William Morris, Lord Nuffield. Apart from designing some cracking wallpaper, Morris was in charge of one of the foremost British automotive manufacturers of the day. It would have been slightly odd if he’s had nothing to do with British AFV production during the war.

But more, Nuffield Mechanisation & Aero’s initial offering were the Wolesley aero engines, which were not exactly an outstanding success.

Its very hard to reconcile the idea that Lord Nuffield had some sinister influence over the establishment given his failure to procure meaningful contracts for his aero engines, the market for which was far more lucrative than paltry scraps thrown at tank development.

16:07

“Churchill, a tank no one would ever want”. Wait, what?

Granted, being ordered straight off the drawing board (like Crusader and Covenanter) caused a lot of problems initially, but after re-work, Churchill became a very effective AFV. It performed well initially at Alamein and continued to give good service through Tunisia and Italy.

Indeed, it excelled in Normandy, where it fought exactly the type of battle in exactly the type of terrain it was designed for. If 21st Army Group had a problem with Churchill, it was that they didn’t have enough of them, forcing them to use Shermans in a role they were quite unsuited for.

16:56

There’s two things here, firstly calling the Meteor an engine that won’t eat into aero engine production and secondly that it was finally an engine that could power a decent tank.

Taking the last point first. Valentine was a decent tank. Matilda II was a decent tank. Cruiser Mk I was a decent tank. Cruiser Mk IV was a decent tank. Churchill was a decent tank. Hell, even Covenanter became a decent tank, although far too late in the day. Some of these weren’t just decent, some of them were outright really damned good.

None of these required a Meteor engine. This all seems to be based on the conflation that the Crusader was the only British tank ever and/or that all British tanks were the same as the Crusader.

Secondly, the claim that Meteor would not eat into Merlin production is demonstrably false, and this is something our podcasters will even bring up themselves later on.

As mentioned previously, Rolls Royce had already been approached with the proposal that the Kestrel be used as a tank engine, but the RAF with its considerably larger budget was easily able to monopolise production.

And so it was with Meteor/Merlin. Theoretically Meteors could be built with substandard Merlins, but in practice, the RAF and USAAF’s appetite for was so voracious that shortages of Meteors remained a major problem, and one the main reason the Centaur and Cavalier were countenanced and Cromwell production significantly delayed.

19:10

I think we’ve realised why matey-boy has such a hate boner for Nuffield. Seems his dad’s tractor once broke down.

21:55

Apparently no-one had figured out how to use a triple differential until now. Someone should tell that to Vauxhall, who installed the Merrit-Brown system on the Churchill in 1939

24:05

As promised back at 16:56, suddenly we don’t have enough Merlins to go around! ShockedPikachuFace.png

27:50

The Challenger was much better than indicated here. It was still lower than the Sherman, and had the same speed as Cromwell, and mounted a 17pdr. The short production run of 200 hulls was due to dissatisfaction with its armour, and the fact than US made Tank Destroyers were abundantly available.

Its probably worth mentioning here that the US pressured the British to abandon domestic medium tank production entirely due to a perceived oversupply of US built mediums. In fact, this perception was erroneous and its fortunate that the British did not concede entirely to this demand.

28:37

Ah, good old Tiger 131. There seems to be some confusion here. What makes the Tiger 131 action special is not that a 6pdr had knocked out a Tiger, but that the action allowed for a complete and intact Tiger to captured.

Of course “plinkng away” at the frontal armour of a Tiger is not ideal, though post war tests conducted on the 22nd May 1945 indicated a 6pdr with standard AP could defeat the Tiger’s drivers’ plate (102mm at 10 degrees, but not the nose plate (102mm at 25 degrees) from a distance of 650 yards, but Tigers also have back and sides, and the 6pdr was quite easily able to deal with a Tiger from these angles.

A 5 Corps Intelligence Summary dated February 1943 (152 Field Regiment’s war diary) of a knocked out Tiger recorded five 6pdr hits at approximately 650 yards. 3 in the turret, 2 in the side. All successful penetrations.

Soviets tests of 6pdr against a Tiger was capable of punching straight through the turret armour of a Tiger (that is to say, and out the other side) from up to 800m

Indeed, the 6pdr seems to be a chronically underestimated weapon, both by contemporary German intel assessments and modern pop historians.

Its probably worth reflecting on the fact that the US adopted it as their standard towed anti-tank gun, and the US was not much known for adopting British kit unless they had a very good reason to do so. The 6pdr and the Merlin stand out in this regard.

29:25

And its Exercise (not “operation”) Dracula. Oh laaaaaaawd send beer, send beer now. Probably the most widely, and I suspect sometimes deliberately, misinterpreted tank trial in history.

Experience with Crusader in the desert, where a modest 1,000-1,500 overhaul interval (along with other factors) had overwhelmed in-theatre workshop capacity Director, Royal Armoured Corps (DRAC - see where the name comes from?) was determined that any new cruiser would have an overhaul interval of at least 3,000 miles.

The exercise was thus a part of the pre-production trials of Cromwell, with the decision being made to terminate the exercise once one example of each type (Cavalier, Centaur, Cromwell, M4A4 and M4A2), had reached 3,000 miles.

A minor nitpick - this was not a “2,000” mile test and you don’t have to drive 2 or 3 times around the UK to clock up that mileage. My car has ~75k miles on it, but I haven’t driven it around the world 3 times. That’s not how mileage works guys.

Its self evidently obvious that the M4’s outperformed the British cruisers, but this is not surprising given that the M4 was by this time a mature weapons system and the British cruisers were still in pre-production trials. Identifying problems so that they can be sorted out is absolutely the entire point of pre-production trials, and it was the absence of such trials that lead to so many problems with the ‘class of ‘38’ - Covenanter, Crusader, and Churchill.

The fact that pilot models in pre-production trials didn’t perform as well as a mature system is probably the least surprising thing since a bear wandered off into the woods with a newspaper tucked under his arm.

Yet its astonishing how many people fail to acknowledge this very basic and essential fact, and instead misinterpret the exercise of the superior reliability of US tanks.

33:00

Flat armour. Like, OK it does have a lot of flat faces, but it does also have a sloped glacis. Incidentally, the reason a vertical visor and sloped glacis combo was maintained on both Cromwell and Comet was because the BESA mounting required a vertical surface. And the hull mounted BESA was regarded as absolutely essential.

Considering how many volksgrenadiers were hiding behind bushes with panzerfausts late in the war, this was almost certainly the correct decision.

It does have to be acknowledged that Cromwell’s armour was slightly less effective than the M4’s, but really what difference is that going to make in practice? What is the armour of an M4 going to bounce that the armour of a Cromwell is not?

Captains Harkness & Wright analysed British tank casualties in 1945 and found that against 75mm KwK40 guns, Shermans had 26 penetrating and 7 non penetrating hits, while Cromwell had 6 and 2 respectively.

The same report found that Sherman crews were slightly less likely to be killed or wounded (0.68 vs 0.73), but Cromwell crews suffered fewer casualties per tank (1.48 compared to 1.31).

The sum total of which is that the two tanks were not significantly different in terms of vulnerability and crew casualties.

33:35

Wether or not to have return rollers is a complicated question. A lot of tanks do not use them, including the T-34 through to T-64 Soviet tanks, as well as Tiger and Panther (just off the top of my head).

Interestingly there was a concern that the return rollers on the Comet resulted in too high track tension so tests were conducted on examples without them.

The tests concluded there were no issues with track tension with return rollers, but deleting them did lead to an increase in “track slap”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that having or not having return rollers is good or bad, or else every tank would always have had them.

35:20

“They wanted a medium and ended up with a scout” is actually a pretty fair comment as Cromwell’s were frequently employed as recce troops given its very high mobility. But…

Why are we talking about the IS-2? This was a heavy tank, the likes of which did not fit western allied doctrine, so why compare it to a medium.

And the ‘Easy Eight’ Sherman did not see action until December 1944 while the first 76mm equipped M4’s first saw action in Cobra albeit in small numbers.

Simply pointing at random other tanks and saying they prove Cromwell was rubbish seems like a strange way to formulate an argument.

36:25

Implying that the Sherman was highly valued because its what the Guards’ Armoured were equipped with is a very strange thing to say. The majority of British armoured units were equipped with Shermans, Guards or otherwise.

The insinuation that the Guards were an elite formation able to commandeer the best equipment just isnt how the British Army works. They might well have the poshest officers, and conduct more than their fair share of ceremonial duties, but other than that, they’re just line regiments.

And yes, in case you were wondering, units within Guards Armoured were equipped with Cromwell.

36:50

7th Armoured were involved in the “Battle of Caen”.

There was no “Battle of Caen” and to use this phrase betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire Normandy campaign, and Montgomery’s strategy for it. It doesn’t put these guys in bad company though, its almost certain that Eisenhower didn’t understand it either.

37:25

I’m not sure what the relevance of a “purge” of 7th Armoured Officers is to Cromwell, but really, given their performance so far its very much a case of WorldsSmallestViolin.gif

38:30

Apparently Cromwell’s mobility allowed 7th Armoured Division to run away? I just can’t even. Its such a ridiculous thing to say I just can’t formulate a response.

42:45

Through to about 50:00 Villers Bocage. Everything here is awful. Awful everything. From saying Wittman’s Tiger bounced SIX shots from a Firefly (which would be at least one minute at maximum rate of fire) to describing Wittman’s action as being like Fury.

54:10

“All Cromwells were a complete waste of time, money and manpower”

Well, I can’t argue with the sheer logical reasoning of that argument, so that’s me out.


And that brings me to the end of the commentary.

I hope by surfacing this here it will serve as a warning about beery, middle-aged white guys who have read one (1) history book.


Bibliography:

David Fletcher - The Great Tank Scandal

PM Knight - A13 Cruiser MkIII/IV - A Technical History

PM Knight - A13 Covenanter - A Technical History

PM Knight - A15 Crusader - A Technical History

PM Knight - A30 Challenger - A Technical History

PM Knight - A34 Comet - A Technical History

War Diary, February 1943, 152 Field Regiment

Selected pages from Exercise Dracula (available at https://worldoftanks.com/dcont/fb/document/draculamaintopt.pdf)

Robin Neillands - The Battle of Normandy 1944

David Fraser - And We Will Shock Them

Nigel Hawthorn - Monty, Master of the Battlefield 1942-1944

Soviet penetrations trials, Churchill MkIV 6pdr against Tiger CAMD RF 38-11377-12

Wright and Harkness - Analysis of British Tank Losses March to May 1945

17 Comments
2024/02/25
14:14 UTC

40

Free for All Friday, 23 February, 2024

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

574 Comments
2024/02/23
12:00 UTC

38

Mindless Monday, 19 February 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

642 Comments
2024/02/19
12:00 UTC

30

Free for All Friday, 16 February, 2024

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

454 Comments
2024/02/16
12:00 UTC

233

TERFs vs. Historiography: How Eliza Mondegreen Lies About the Historical Discussion Around Medieval Queerness

If you’re a trans person on the internet like I am, you’ve probably come across some Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists or Terfs for short. If you’re also like me, you’ve probably heard them also make wild claims about queer history and queer academia. The article I’m reviewing today are but a snippet of the wider Terf rhetoric around history and the social sciences, but they reveal some interesting truths about their beliefs and ideology; namely, a pervasive laziness and anti-intellectualism.

For the most part, this post will not cover the factual accuracy of whether or not X person in the ancient world was trans or if trans people existed in the medieval period. As you will soon see, that is a bit besides the point. The author also doesn’t discuss much the accuracy of such claims, preferring to dismiss them offhandedly. Therefore, there is little to say about how accurate her history is. This post is more about historiography and how it is misportrayed here for an anti-trans political agenda.

Eliza Mondegreen is someone I’ve written about before on r/ftm (It’s on my profile if you would like to read it). That write-up was much more casual than this one aims to be. I hope to also showcase here how she is also incorrect academically. She is a grad student working on a thesis in Montreal. She doesn’t use her real name because she’s afraid of her institution punishing her. (1) She styles herself as a “researcher on transgender and Detrans online communities.” She has over 6000 subscribers on substack and over 23,000 followers on twitter. (2)

“What is her research,” You might ask? Well, it’s going into Reddit and mocking trans people on twitter. (3) She also presented this “research” at the Genspect conference in Denver this year. (4) I’ll leave that presentation for the sociologists to dissect.

Recently, she wrote an article for the website “Unheard” titled, “Trans activists have a new target: the Middle Ages.”(5) Being a historian myself, I took an interest in seeing what her views on history and historiography were. I suppose since she already claims to be an ‘expert’ on one thing I enjoy (online trans communities), might as well see if she has similar expertise about another thing she and I enjoy (history). Admittedly, my focus is more on Modern Middle East and Florida history, but I am somewhat familiar with some of the gender research on the Medeval Period as well as the historiography behind it. On her substack she promoted the article as “shooting fish in a barrel”.(6) I’m here to tell you that the arrogance she displays there is quite unfounded.

She begins,

“In what is sure to be one of the academic highlights of 2024, The English Historical Review has published a creative writing exercise: “The Trans Middle Ages: Incorporating Transgender and Intersex Studies into the History of Medieval Sexuality”, with a rich discussion of how “transmisogyny operated as a distinct form of othering within medieval Byzantine gender frameworks.” If your first thought was “what Trans Middle Ages?” or “how did ‘transmisogyny,’ a term coined in 2007, operate several centuries earlier?”, you’re not alone.” (5)

She’s not exactly wrong here. Historians can sometimes have problems ‘modernizing’ ancient peoples in ways that seem reasonable on the surface, but in context make little sense. People call all types of ancient figures “socialists” for various reasons, but this makes about as much sense as calling Caesar a Neoliberal. Ideologies and identities tend to be temporal; any attempt to use ideas invented thousands of years later to describe something always comes up short.

The dishonesty here is in omission. She leaves out parts of the text that discuss this exact issue. She then implies the article she linked does not address this idea of ‘modernizing’ historians, but that is not true. The author, Dr. Tess Wingard (a trans woman herself), does address this, as any good academic should:

“Moreover, there remains substantial disagreement over whether systems of gender and sexual relations in medieval societies can usefully be described in terms of contemporary feminist and queer notions of heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality, and indeed whether the idea of a persistent sexual identity is even applicable in this period. Many medievalists hold that premodern European societies had no concept of a fixed binary sexual orientation…Other scholars, and I count myself among them, argue that while medieval cultural conceptions of sexuality do centre acts rather than identities, they nevertheless, as Amy Burge writes, ‘[privilege] a relationship between a man and a woman whose desire for each other is represented as both natural and inevitable’ in ways which closely resemble the modern organising logics of heteronormativity. In practice, if not in theory, medieval societies are organised along a de facto hetero/homosexual binary. Furthermore, this second group argues that we can use the critical lens of heteronormativity to draw out useful observations about the interrelationships between knowledge, power, gender and sexuality in medieval societies in ways that might otherwise be obscured by a total methodological rejection of the concept of heteronormativity.”(7)

Why did she decide to exclude this part of the article? She quotes from other parts of the article so she clearly took at least a cursory glance at it, she cannot claim ignorance of the text’s existence. It’s clear that if she did read the whole article, she did not fully understand it. Perhaps a more uncharitable view is that she skimmed the article for quotes that seem inaccurate on their face so as to demonize queer academia for her audience.

The condescending tone Eliza takes towards academia here primes the reader to assume Dr. Wingard did not do the bare minimum in logical analysis of her arguments. Again, this is not true. Dr. Wingard, as I have shown, in fact was extremely aware of the limitations and criticisms of her argument. She dutifully takes these into consideration and rebuts them, but her rebuttal is silent in Eliza’s telling of the story.

“This alt-history version of the Middle Ages had its ups and downs. Alongside persecution, the author argues that “medieval societies associated trans and genderqueer identities with proximity to, rather than distance from, the divine”, casting the Middle Ages as a kind of “queer utopia” and rendering medieval religion “fundamentally queer”. Apparently, a genderqueer analysis is “indispensable” to “understanding the connections between gender and faith in the Middle Ages”.”(5)

The author does not argue any of these. This article is mostly an overview of transgender studies. The only argument Dr.Wingard definitively brings forth is the validity of this genre of academic thought. She makes no claims to the validity of any of the theories mentioned. Almost all of the quotes from this paragraph Eliza uses are from sources cited by Dr. Wingard. Dr. Wingard utilizes these to chart the new turn in queer history towards trans-ness and trans identity. She cites how these sources are different from older historiographical trends. Most of the quoted words aren’t Dr.Wingard’s.

The first citation is from a collection of essays titled Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, as is the phrase ‘fundamentally queer’. ‘Queer utopia’ is not how Dr. Wingard describes medieval times. In fact she says this quote is “[a]t one extreme” of an argumentative spectrum between queer identities being persecuted or deified during the medieval period.(7) The quote is actually from Bill Burgwinkle. The last quote is Dr. Wingard’s own words, but is a summary of Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography.(7) None of these quotes are exactly what Dr. Wingard is arguing.

These are subtle changes, but are crucial to the framing of this article. By omitting certain parts of the text, she frames Dr. Wingard as having simply asserted these ideas as true. Eliza paints her as an irrational actor too stuck in the “gender craze” to think straight. In reality, Dr. Wingard is quite level headed. She doesn’t fully agree with some of her peers’ conclusions about the Middle Ages being a paradise for queer people, but she does argue that their work and perspectives are important to understanding the role of gender in the Middle Ages. She’s using these works as a lens, not as the definitive theory of how to ‘correctly’ view gender in the Middle Ages, as Eliza implies.

“The author holds as axiomatic the idea that trans people “have always existed in all human cultures”. There are only “specifically historicised forms of trans experience”. This would indeed be impossible to prove but useful if only it were so.”(5)

The author holds that Trans historians hold this axiomatic idea, not herself necessarily.(7) She might hold that belief, given she counts herself a trans historian that uses the trans lens of analysis. However this is in the section of the paper that is reviewing the work of trans historians and the values they have. The author is not making a claim about her own beliefs, rather about the beliefs of trans historians.

Identifying Trans people across time can be difficult to prove, yes, but not impossible. We can’t go back in time and see what people’s internal emotions and beliefs are, but we can deduce some of this. A site in Iran has evidence of cross-sex customs as far back as 3,000 years ago. (8) Dr. Wingard discusses this,

“[One] axiom holds that individuals whose gender identity does not line up with their assigned gender at birth have always existed in all human cultures. These individuals have sought to ‘live authentically’ within the affordances of the prevailing gender norms of their societies through adopting new names, clothing, occupations, gendered behaviours and social relations, and in some cases through pursuing methods of body modification akin to primitive forms of gender-affirming surgery…Furthermore, trans studies asserts that the experiences of historical subjects whose gender identity does not line up with their assigned gender at birth can be usefully interrogated through the category of trans, even if they lived before the invention of the modern diagnostic/political categories of transsexual (coined 1923) or transgender (coined 1965). In this respect, trans studies borrows heavily from the tradition of lesbian history, particularly Judith Bennett’s concept of the lesbian-like: each school favours the reflective, critical use of trans or lesbian as a category of historical analysis both out of pragmatism and to confront historiographical biases.Trans historians… accept that historical subjects’ experiences of their gender identity will have been shaped by the societies and eras in which they lived and that trans medieval research must be attentive to specifically historicised forms of trans experience, they assert that gender variance itself is a trans-historical phenomenon worthy of analysis.”(7)

Eliza goes on to list several cases where scholars have argued certain figures are trans or best understood as trans, before stating:

“But there’s a dark underside to these absurdities. For the vast majority of human history, the concept of gender identity — much less transgender identities — didn’t exist. This isn’t to say that no one before the 20th century ever felt somehow wrong in the body he or she was born in or that no one ever wished that they’d been born a boy instead of a girl.”(5)

As mentioned previously, Dr. Wingard acknowledges this and claims the use of the term “trans'' is a pragmatic choice. It is designed to combat biases that might otherwise obscure our view of the past.(7) Not mentioning the article she’s reviewing discusses this problem is extremely dishonest. Her commentary borders on plagiarism; she never cites Dr. Wingard for having these ideas. Her omissions actively imply Dr.Wingard is oblivious to such a critique. If Eliza read this paper in full, she took Dr. Wingard’s ideas and claimed them as her own. That is plagiarism.

On the other hand, if she did not steal Dr. Wingard’s ideas regarding issues with modern perspectives, instead coming to the same conclusion on her own, Eliza is being lazy and didn’t fully read the article. Most of the phrases she quotes include the word “queer”. It is likely she searched the article for the term “queer” and cited everything she found, hence why she attributes quotes to Dr. Wingard that are actually from other sources. Anecdotally I tried this out myself on my phone and found when I got to the quotes she used, it was easy to assume Dr. Wingard was making these claims herself, given you didn’t read the quotes in the context of the paper. I find this to be the most likely outcome. She publishes at a blistering pace, so it’s nigh impossible to be thorough. It’s sloppy, sloppy work.

If this was someone who was not in academia I might be inclined to be less harsh, but she says she is a grad student. She has more education than I do. I know that it’s unacceptable to attribute a quote of someone to the person citing said quote, especially in this context of an academic overview. Any bibliography website can tell you how to cite this correctly. (9) I know this is not an academic paper and only a website article, but Eliza should know better. Her smug elitism towards Dr.Wingard and academia as a whole frustrates this even more. How can you possibly claim to criticize queer historians when you yourself can’t even properly discern which words are the author’s and which aren’t?! It’s maddening.

Eliza states that, “”Trans” is something else, though: the product of new medical technologies and new ways of thinking about identity that change the meaning of such pains and desires [to be another gender].”(5) Again I refer to Dr.Wingard’s discussion of transness as a temporally bound idea.(7) It seems all these supposed ‘concerns academics don’t think of’ have already been thought of in depth. It’s unfair to Dr.Wingard for Eliza to claim,”Trans activists in the academy have abandoned their training in historical methods…”(5) when this article is all about the epistemology of historical methodology. The methods employed by Dr. Wingard are standard practice in the historical field. There is no substantial deviation from other scholars in terms of historiography, and where there are minor disagreements in historiographical methods, Dr. Wingard notes and discusses them.

Eliza claims, “There’s a lot of sexism involved (you know a female historical figure is at risk of being transed if she was in any way unconventional for the time and place when she lived).”(5) Echoing much of what I have said previously, Dr. Wingard addresses this problem too:

“At this juncture it is vital to stress that the transgender turn in medieval studies does not seek to discredit or replace older historiographical approaches to the study of gender and sexuality that are philosophically and politically rooted in feminism, lesbian studies or queer theory…Indeed, many trans historians integrate queer and feminist methodologies in their work and clearly indicate their scholarly debt to these older traditions of historiography. Trans studies is not the enemy of feminist, lesbian or queer studies; these fields are natural and complementary allies whose shared mission is to broaden the possibilities of historical research on gender and sexuality.”(7)

This quote from Dr. Wingard directly contradicts the thesis of Eliza’s article. Eliza espouses “[Activists] opted for rampant and shameless historical revisionism, turning the past into quicksand.”(5) Yet again, the full Dr Wingard article completely dismantles this argument in so direct a fashion you might be mistaken for believing Eliza’s article was written first.

It’s also worth mentioning the conflation between academics and activists. To Eliza they are synonymous. Julia Sereno has an article on medium that goes into the origins of this conflation in the anti-trans movement and its ideological purposes. (10) I will defer to her work on the subject, but know that whenever Eliza uses academia or activists, she considers them one in the same.

“Why are these activists unwilling to acknowledge the newness of what they have created? Surely it would have been possible to argue that — having progressed so far from our benighted past — we have discovered bold new ways of being and doing that deserve recognition and protection. Why not own their invention, rather than impose it on those who came before them?” (5)

Frankly, I’m a bit concerned Eliza is not reading the same article I am. Dr. Wingard goes into painstaking detail on why trans studies are additive, not destructive. She doesn’t shy away from the fact that this field is relatively new. Parts I and II both delve into the history of queer studies starting with the 1980s. The first lines of the article are,

“With the forty-fifth anniversary of the publication of John Boswell’s landmark work Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) rapidly approaching, the study of medieval sexuality is surely losing its claim to the moniker of an emerging field, if indeed that moment has not already long past.”(7)

The narrative woven by Eliza here is patently false.

This next section is a bit of a tangent, but it is useful in understanding this article and terf rhetoric on the whole. Eliza uses an allusion to George Orwell’s 1984, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” to chastise Dr. Wingard’s historical revisionism. She alludes to this quote with her substack title, “We've always been at war with Byzantine transmisogyny and other things that didn't really happen.”(6) She cites Orwell quite often, a quote is even in her twitter bio (The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment)(2). This is fairly common with terfs, you can’t go two feet in their online spaces without someone shouting about how pronouns are ‘literally 1984’. She believes that trans inclusive language like saying ‘trans women are women’ is somewhat totalitarian, ascribing it akin to Ingsoc claiming ‘Freedom is slavery’.(11)

Yet she does not seem to have a firm grasp on what Orwell was actually claiming about totalitarianism and language. Admittedly, she does correctly echo Orwell’s critique of the political usage of the term “Fascism” in modern parlance.(12) Her own words are almost identical to Orwell’s in his 1946 essay POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”(13) Yet, elsewhere in this Orwell essay, we see how Eliza’s comparison of trans-inclusive language to totalitarian language is quite fraught. Orwell states,

“[The] mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”(13)

The main argument put forward by Orwell is that language has become less precise, and in 1984 and Animal Farm, this vagueness is twisted to suit a totalitarian regime. At the surface level, Eliza’s claim that “transwomen are women” destroys the meaning of the word ‘women’ seems plausible under an Orwellian critique. (14) After all, it seems the word “woman” becomes more vague if the definition is expanded to include trans people. However, what is actually happening here is the opposite of what Orwell dislikes about political language; there is a move from being imprecise to being more precise.

By including trans women in the definition of being a woman, we are encompassing more of what the population experiences. We gain a precision on what a woman is and is not by including those on the historic periphery of womanhood. We gain knowledge about what it means to be a woman by examining trans women and their experiences as genuine womanhood. The same goes for phrases like “people who can get pregnant”, as simply using the word “female” in its place introduces more vagaries than it dismisses. Some females cannot give birth, so why should they be in a category with people giving birth? Some genetic ‘males’ (XY SRY gene deletion) can give birth, so why exclude them? If we are to follow Orwell’s critique of vagueness vs precision, and that vagueness can lead to an authoritarian exploitation of language, then we must conclude that inclusive language is not authoritarian because it adds precision to language. As pithy sounding as “a woman is an adult human female” is, the vagaries it begets ultimately can lead to totalitarianism, as we’ve seen with so much of the draconian measures lauded by the anti trans movement. (15)

The only thing Orwell appears to agree with Eliza on is that trans inclusive language can sometimes be inelegant and rely on tired phrases. Indeed, the terms used can be somewhat clunky and unintuitive. However, as Orwell says, this can easily be remedied. In the aforementioned essay, he asks us to consider using less stock phrases and canned metaphors. Ironically, Eliza uses a piece of Orwell’s work in a way he would vehemently dislike. He wants writers, especially political ones, to think deeper about the language we use in our writings.(13) He wants our words to have actual meaning; we shouldn’t just regurgitate empty platitudes. Perhaps in the future better language will be invented to better encompass the ideas and groups of people described in this passage, ones that are elegant and eloquent. Language that would make Orwell proud. What would that look like? Nobody can say for sure, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility.

Eliza concludes her piece,

“There is something totalitarian about this act of rewriting and how it abolishes the possibility that other perspectives once existed. If we can’t acknowledge that we have created a new way of being human — being “trans” — we destroy our ability to look with curiosity on that creation and consider alternative ways of constructing ourselves as individuals and societies in the future. We leave ourselves with no solid ground to stand on, and no way out of our current prejudices and hyperfixations.”(5)

I defer to my previous points ad nauseum. Dr. Wingard states explicitly that trans history is not a destructive endeavor but an additive one, Dr. Wingard actually encourages different ways of thinking and curiosity explicitly in the text, etc. etc.

I do want to focus on her use of totalitarianism here, though. She claims queer theory is totalitarian because it “destroys our curiosity and our grounding we have”.(16) Indeed, elsewhere Eliza has compared ‘gender ideology’ to early 20th century totalitarianism. (17) She even states she got involved with the gender critical movement because of her fascination with totalitarianism and language. (18) However, this is not what totalitarianism is. Queer theory is all about curiosity; queer theory is a libertarian ideology. The connection drawn between queer theory (also portrayed pejoratively as ‘gender ideology’ by Eliza) is tentative at best.

It’s first useful to define totalitarianism and libertarianism from a philosophical perspective. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a fantastic resource on totalitarianism, and specifically describes the context in which Eliza is trying to employ the word in her work,

“The term “totalitarianism” is also sometimes used to refer to movements that in one way or another manifest extreme dictatorial and fanatical methods, such as cults and forms of religious extremism, and it remains controversial in scope.”(19)

Essentially, authoritarian ideologies impose strict doctrine and extreme hierarchies upon those that submit to them. If anyone ideologically is not in lock step, they are excluded.

Libertarianism, in contrast, is described by the IEP as,

“…[T]he belief that individuals, and not states or groups of any other kind, are both ontologically and normatively primary; that individuals have rights against certain kinds of forcible interference on the part of others; that liberty, understood as non-interference, is the only thing that can be legitimately demanded of others as a matter of legal or political right…”(20)

It is important to note that though in modern parlance libertarian usually refers to a specific ideology founded by the likes of Hayak in the 1970s, I am using it here as a descriptor for many different ideas and belief systems dating back further to enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke in the 1700s.(20) I am also using libertarianism as a foil to totalitarianism. The libertarian tenets of self ownership and bodily autonomy are naturally anathema to totalitarianism’s dogged paternalism and strict hierarchy. It makes sense, then, to use a scale with totalitarianism on one hand and libertarianism on the other to weigh whether or not any given ideology is more totalitarian than it is libertarian.

As such, if we are to look at the tenets of queer theory, where does it fall upon the spectrum between totalitarian and libertarian? The 1996 article “queer theory” by Annamarie Jagose explains,

“Broadly speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability–which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect–queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. Institutionally, queer has been associated most prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery.”(21)

In short, Queer theory’s main core beliefs are that society’s current ideas about sex and gender are not always naturally rooted; that hierarchies and norms about sex, the human body, and the human mind are not as strict and organically dogmatic as some might claim. Taking this, it is clear from Queer theory’s anti-hierarchical stance and its investigation of individuals using their bodies to subvert norms that it is not, in any way, an authoritarian ideology. Authoritarians do not want individuals to use their bodily autonomy to defy hierarchies. Authoritarians do not enjoy the investigation and dismantling of hierarchies. Those are practices of libertarians. Therefore, queer theory is a libertarian ideology.

So why does Eliza hold queer theory as authoritarian? It is clearly a mischaracterization. Why does she insist this is the case? She claims anyone in academia who questions queer theory is silenced, that queer language is about walking on eggshells and restricting speech.(22) If this were true, the very author of the article Eliza is reviewing would be in trouble for not fully agreeing that medieval times were a “queer utopia”. No such cancellation has happened. This gets to the crux of the issue with Eliza’s rhetoric and claims: she has not honestly and genuinely engaged with her opposition. Nor do I believe she ever really intends to do so.

The whole of terf rhetoric is vague dishonesties combined with inflammatory remarks. Eliza’s piece is a perfect example of this phenomenon. She states trans and queer activists aim to destroy the very foundations of history as a field, as if to sacrifice it to their cause. Yet, nothing in Dr. Wingard’s article remotely suggests her work nor the work of her colleagues aims to destroy the field of historical study. Eliza claims these academics dispose of tried and true methods of historiography in favor of their own frameworks which are intrinsically flawed. This is not the case; it is stated explicitly that older methodologies are just as valid as using a queer lens. Eliza claims trans historians who use queer theory are erasing women in history. Dr. Wingard discusses why queer theory does not do this. The list goes on. Eliza is strawmanning Dr. Wingard and queer academics on the whole. Not once does Eliza take any of their positions seriously. All she does is scorn them. It is pitiful that someone who claims to be extremely academic would show such incuriosity towards those she disagrees with.

I know this is a subreddit for history, and most of this post does not discuss historical inaccuracies as the usual posts on here do, but it is also good to be reminded of the importance of the historical method. Many of us spend our whole lives plunging deep into esoteric documents tucked away in some dusty archive somewhere or reading through extremely dense studies on an obscure event only a dozen or so people are even familiar with. We take great care to interact with and discuss honestly the sources we base our discipline on. We think honestly about our own shortcomings and biases and how those might affect the work we do. We understand how one single source might be looked at in a dozen different ways, and how there is a speck of truth through every lens we look at a source through. Sometimes, we might even get a bit too pedantic, arguing about wether this or that word in a source or paper means this that or the other. We do all this because we care about history. I know I wrote this piece because I care about history.

What infuriates me to no end is when people like Eliza come along and claim they know history and everyone that disagrees with them doesn’t. She takes the work of someone who took hundreds of hours to make something genuinely insightful and belittles it by reducing it down to nothing. She creates for it a completely different thesis which is then dismissed in 5 minutes. All of this in service of an ideology which seeks to completely erase an unpopular minority. “Why should she take Dr. Wingard seriously? She’s just an insane trans rights activist saying everyone was trans in the Middle Ages! See what gender ideology is doing to your history, to your kids?! They need to be stopped.” And so on.

Ironically, Eliza is doing exactly what she accuses queer historians of doing: destroying the curiosity that drives historical research. It is all projection. Queer historians are looking at this moment in history and wondering, “If people think this way about themselves today, did people think the same way in the past?” Then they search for evidence of just what people were thinking about themselves in the past. But Eliza thinks these people shouldn’t do that, that it is a fool’s errand. There is nothing of interest to be found down this road. It’s self-evident trans people didn’t always exist so there’s no point in debating it. (23) The spark of curiosity that might bring about a better understanding of our world is stamped out. There is no debate or discussion to be had. It is a sad reality that some wish to cast aside an entire line of research just because they don’t like a particular 1% of the population that supports it.

Edited: some minor spelling mistakes

Sources:

  1. https://youtu.be/TJew30KNxqk?si=k7iZMPQ1SoBpfXP9

  2. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen?s=21&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  3. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1687564044234850304?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  4. https://youtu.be/42N1U0NP3Zo?si=bSYahTYTeHOM4Gr_

  5. https://unherd.com/thepost/trans-activists-have-a-new-target-the-middle-ages/

6.https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/weve-always-been-at-war-with-byzantine

7.https://academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ehr/cead214/7529096?login=false

  1. See https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2018-12-30/ty-article-magazine/.premium/ancient-civilization-in-iran-recognized-transgender-people-study-suggests/0000017f-e0fc-d7b2-a77f-e3ffb5fb0000#:~:text=Ancient%20Civilization%20in%20Iran%20Recognized,Suggests%20%2D%20Archaeology%20%2D%20Haaretz.com

  2. See https://library.csp.edu/apa/secondary

  3. See https://juliaserano.medium.com/the-dregerian-narrative-or-why-trans-activists-vs-276740045120

  4. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1288650241248497664?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  5. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1350128676227194880?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  6. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

  7. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1706681870686020046?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  8. https://twitter.com/genspect/status/1659005735127195651?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  9. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1577274022731337728?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  10. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1717706594316603727?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  11. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1645447083250315264?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  12. https://iep.utm.edu/totalita/#SH2b

  13. https://iep.utm.edu/libertar/#SH5a

  14. https://australianhumanitiesreview.org/1996/12/01/queer-theory/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=queer-theory

  15. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1422569677990072321?

s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA

  1. https://twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1645444373084004353?s=46&t=hYQMmsnAfKSvu4ElEHIqBA
74 Comments
2024/02/13
17:57 UTC

528

Whitewashing a mass murderer: Jonas Noreika, the Holocaust in Lithuania, and the "double genocide" theory

Context

"Double genocide theory" states that Eastern Europe had two equal and opposite genocides in the 1930s and 1940s: the Holocaust on the one hand, and Soviet repression on the other hand. This theory has become a bitterly divisive topic in much of Eastern Europe.

Before I go any further: Soviet crimes did happen. The Soviet invasion of the Baltic states was illegal and unprovoked, and the Soviets' rule of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia was brutal. All of these things are true, horrible, and should be commemorated.

But "Double Genocide" goes beyond historical facts, by equating Stalin's misrule injustice and cruelty with Hitler's genocide. In function, it's a way for countries with histories of Holocaust collaboration to deflect guilt. Lithuania-based scholar Dovid Katz describes "double genocide" as:

a tool of discourse, sophistry, casuistry, to talk the Holocaust out of history without denying a single death.

One of the consequences of this theory is that it helps states rebrand local Holocaust perpetrators as "freedom fighters."

This leads us to today's story: Lithuania's Jonas Noreika, aka Generolas Vėtra – "General Storm".


The Story of Jonas Noreika

Jonas Noreika was an anti-Soviet militant from the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF). He posthumously holds the Cross of Vytis, First Degree, Lithuania's highest civil decoration. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis in 1943. When World War II ended and Lithuania was reannexed by the USSR, Noreika became involved in the anti-Soviet resistance movement. The Soviets captured him and executed him for treason in 1947.

Today, he's honored chiefly for his resistance against the Soviets, but it's also claimed that he resisted the Nazis. There are streets and a high school bearing his name. There was, until recently, a plaque commemorating him in downtown Vilnius. The state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania (LGGRTC) claims that, besides fighting the Soviets, Noreika also "actively contributed to the rescue of Šiauliai Jews." (Šiauliai County was the district that the Nazis made Noreika governor of).

This is a lie. Noreika was an outspoken anti-Semite before the war, and an active and enthusiastic participant in the Holocaust. He forced Jews into ghettos, stole their property, subjected them to torture, slavery and starvation, and finally had them shot by the thousands. The Plungė massacre is Noreika's most infamous crime, but not his only one.

There were many people like Noreika in Lithuania (and all of Eastern Europe) during WWII. The highest estimate of direct Holocaust participants in Lithuania is 23,000 individuals, 5,000 of whom have been named.

But what makes Noreika's story notable is that his own granddaughter, investigative journalist Silvia Foti (née Silvia Kučėnaitė), is leading a campaign to expose her grandfather's crimes. She has collected an impressive number of documents, written by Noreika and bearing his signature, that connect him to the murder of Lithuanian Jews.


Why Defend Noreika?

So, why would anyone defend Noreika, a documented Holocaust perpetrator? This is rooted the Baltic states' resentment over their colonization by the Soviets, and the importance of the post-WWII insurgency, which was waged until 1956, in the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian national identities.

One of the Soviet Union's main charges against the Baltic guerillas--also called "Forest Brothers"--was that they were entirely a Nazi remnant. Given the scale and extent of Baltic collaboration with Nazi Germany, this charge is serious, and there was certainly an overlap between former collaborators and the Forest Brothers.

Reality, of course, is a bit more complicated. The ugly truth is that indeed, many prominent postwar independence activists participated in the Holocaust: this includes Noreika, Juozas Lukša, and probably Adolfas Ramanauskas. This fact taints the movement's legacy.

But it's false to call the independence movement a wholesale rebranding of former Nazis. Many--indeed, most--pro-independence activists weren't involved in the genocide. Calling them a mere Nazi stay-behind operation is false for the following reasons:

  • 150,000 people took part in the postwar anti-Soviet resistance, many times greater than even the highest estimates of the number of Holocaust collaborators. And when one remembers that many prominent collaborators fled West in 1944-45, the mismatch between the number of partisans and the number of ex-collaborators gets even greater.

  • Some independence activists, like Domas Jasaitis and his wife Sofija Lukauskaitė, are recognized by reputable organizations as having rescued Jews.

  • Many of the Forest Brothers were children when the Holocaust in Lithuania was taking place.

Unfortunately though, the Baltic states have responded to Soviet charges with a gross and dishonest over-correction: the Lithuanian government has whitewashed the entire movement, and categorically denies that any of its prominent leaders participated in the Holocaust. Hence the glorification of Noreika.


What Noreika's Defenders Say

There are a few recurrent red herrings that Noreika's apologists use.

I'll start with the worst alibi: the LGGRTC admitted that Noreika established Jewish ghettos, but claimed that he put Jews in ghettos for their own protection. Really. They say this on page 3 of the report. I dunno if it's even worth rebutting that, but ... their "evidence" that the ghettos were Noreika's way of protecting Jews is this:

  • That ghettos in Lithuania had Jewish "councils" (so did the ghettos in Poland)

  • That a senior SS officer told the Jews that the only way he could protect them from pogroms was if they moved into ghettos (pogroms committed by whom? And we're trusting an SS officer?)

  • That Lithuanian Jews complied with orders to move into ghettos (as if they had a choice).

A less outrageous strategy is to split hairs over what Noreika's exact position in the occupation government was. For example, the LGGRTC states that Noreika wasn't the governor of Telšiai County (page 4), where Plungė is located. But whether Noreika had official authority in Telšiai doesn't disprove anything. Lithuania is a small country. People can travel.

Another strategy is to quibble over dates. For example: the Plungė massacre took place July 13-15, 1941. Noreika, the LGGRTC claims (page 4), wasn't appointed governor of Šiauliai until early August. The implication is that Noreika couldn't have orchestrated the massacre because he lacked nominal authority. This too is ridiculous. Militias like the one that Noreika led could, and did, participate in the Holocaust without the Nazis' permission.

There's also the matter of Noreika's imprisonment by the Nazis, one of his defenders' go-to "proofs" of his innocence. It's true that he was sent to the Stuthoff concentration camp (page 4). But he wasn't imprisoned for helping Jews. He was imprisoned for resisting German attempts to organize Lithuanian militiamen into a formal SS legion. This was a power struggle between himself and the Germans. There's no evidence of any principled opposition to Nazism, other than not wanting to be directly subordinate to Germany.

Then there's the "innocence by association" argument. For example, in 1943, when Noreika had turned against the Germans, he seems to have interacted with some Lithuanian anti-Nazi activists who did save Jews, like Domas Jasaitis and Sofija Lukauskaitė. Jasaitis is quoted speaking favorably of his work with Noreika, and saying that they worked well together. But when Noreika worked with Jasaitis, it wasn't to protect Jews. It was to prevent the Germans from mobilizing Lithuanian conscripts. Even if Noreika knew about Jasaitis's actions to protect Jews, there's no evidence that Noreika was involved in it, approved of it, or would've tolerated it if he'd discovered it in 1941.

Another ploy is to discredit the evidence against Noreika by pointing out that much of it came from KGB archives. Here's Professor Adas Jakubauskas making that argument (in Lithuanian). The forgery argument has been used by the Lithuanian right many times to dismiss evidence that Lithuanian nationalists participated in the massacres of 1941 as Soviet lies. But if the KGB had wanted to slander Noreika as a mass murderer, they wouldn't have used internal documents to do it. These were classified records, not propaganda leaflets.

And every inconsistency in the KGB's archives can be explained by bad bookkeeping, conflicting reports, typos, and unintentional misunderstandings. Every governmental archive has these problems. As historian Saulius Sužiedėlis writes about the primary documents on the Holocaust in Lithuania:

Indeed, there are inconsistencies and gaps in the historical record. Perhaps, some of these are intentional since the Soviet authorities were keenly interested in discrediting "bourgeois nationalism" and engaged in considerable disinformation, especially during the 1970s and eighties. But there is no evidence that any of the significant documents on which recent studies are based have in any way been altered or forged.

And we don't have to rely on KGB archives to know what kind of man Noreika was. We have his own writings.


The Evidence against Noreika

I mentioned Noreika's granddaughter, Silvia Foti, earlier. Foti has extensively researched her grandfather's life using primary sources, including sources that her own mother had copies of. These include two books that he wrote in the 1930s:

These don't prove on their own that Noreika participated in the Holocaust, but they tell you where his sympathies lay. And they can't have been Soviet forgeries: Foti's mother owned original copies that Foti's grandmother, Noreika's wife, brought with her when she emigrated to Chicago.

But the most damning evidence that Foti has is a collection of orders that her grandfather signed while serving as governor of Šiauliai. These orders include:

  • Forcing Jews into the Šiauliai ghetto (only a tiny handful, out of more than 2,000, survived).

  • Ordering all Jewish property to be confiscated.

  • Ordering Jews to be put to work as slaves, 4eg chopping firewood.

Foti also has found a memo that was sent to Noreika from one of his subordinates, which reports the murder of all 160 Jews in the town of Žeimelis. This is arguably her strongest piece of evidence, because it is a pre-Soviet document that directly connects Noreika to the Holocaust.

So, to sum it up: we have a man who was an avowed anti-Semite and fascist before World War II. He was given authority when the Nazis occupied Lithuania. He enforced the Nazis' orders against the Jews. He established a ghetto whose inhabitants were almost totally exterminated. He was a thief and a slave-driver. Under his supervision, his minions murdered Jewish civilians. He did this in a country where 95% of its prewar Jewish population was murdered, the highest rate in Europe. This isn't the profile of a secret Holocaust rescuer; it's the profile of a mass murderer.


Conclusion

The story of Noreika is a reminder that people want national heroes, they want those heroes to be spotless, and sometimes they'll ignore all facts to get it this way. This is true everywhere: Latin America with Bolivar, Turkey with Ataturk, the USA with the Founding Fathers. But history is messy, and it's possible for someone to serve both a good cause (fighting the illegal occupation of your country) and a despicable one (the Holocaust).

If I can editorialize: what Noreika is accused of is so grotesque, and the evidence against him is so strong, that rehabilitating him is impossible. There's no excuse for his crimes.

And the Lithuania that Noreika and his allies wanted to build wouldn't have been free. We have Noreika's own words as proof. His ideal Lithuania would've been a totalitarian state with minorities exterminated and dissent illegal. It would've been a Nazi client state at best, or outright annexed at worst. It would've been nothing like the democratic Lithuania that exists today. It's tragic that Lithuania had to wait 45 years for its freedom, but it's fortunate that Noreika's Lithuania never came into existence.

And I'll give credit where credit is due: Lithuania is gradually coming to terms with its painful past. The process is slow, and there have been setbacks, but progress is being made:

What's sad is that Lithuania has plenty of national heroes who deserve praise. According to Yad Vashem, Lithuania has the second-most Holocaust rescuers per capita of any country in Europe. There were people like Domas Jasaitis who truly resisted the Holocaust while also supporting an independent Lithuania. And, of course, there were countless ordinary people who nonviolently rose up against Soviet rule in the late 80s and early 90s.

An important fact about history is that it's possible for two things to be bad. The Soviets were wrong for invading Lithuania in 1940, wrong for arbitrarily imprisoning, deporting, and executing Lithuanian citizens, and wrong for denying it its independence after World War II. But the redirection of public fury against Lithuanian Jews--a well-documented historical fact--was shameful. As a democracy, Lithuania is responsible for confronting its past, instead of using Soviet oppression as an excuse to pretend that men like Noreika were heroes.

EDIT: Fixed links to the LGGRTC's publications.

147 Comments
2024/02/12
23:25 UTC

36

Mindless Monday, 12 February 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

741 Comments
2024/02/12
12:00 UTC

295

The 1932 German presidential election discourse on Twitter

(PLEASE NOTE: This post is not a statement on current elections, in the US or the rest of the world. Just a rant about the superficial way people on Twitter talk about this specific event.)

It's election year in the United States and as usual the debates about "voting for the lesser evil" start flaring up again. And, of course, what best way to argue your point about a contemporary event than by decontextualizing an apparently similar historical event? I am, of course, talking about the 1932 presidential election in Germany, which saw among its candidates:

  • Paul von Hindeburg (around 53% of the votes)
  • Adolf Hitler (around 37%)
  • Ernst Thalmann, of the KPD (around 10%)

This during the second, and decisive, round of votes. The first round also included Theodor Duesterberg, one of the leaders of the veterans' association Der Stalhelm, who received 6,8% of the votes and decided to retire; the Stalhelm decided to support Hitler in the second round, who gained around 2 million votes, while Hindenburg gained around 700.000. Hindenburg was still able to come on top of the second round, in part also thanks to the support of the center-left SPD, the German socialdemocratic party.

Now if you frequent that hellsite commonly know as Twitter, you'll also know that discourse about this election is relatively frequent. Here's for example a tweet with more than five thousand likes, from a user arguing that if it comes to Hindenburg vs Hitler, you definitely should vote Hindenburg. As you can imagine, many people disagreed with the sentiment (see for example this tweet with more than two thousand likes) arguing that, well, it was Hindenburg who nominated Hitler chancellor, so why would you vote for him if you're anti-Hitler.

This second group of people more often than not comes from an anti-liberal (in the US political sense) position, and want to argue that what the SPD did - choosing to vote for the lesser evil - was a mistake. But here's the thing: these people are speaking from hindsight. They already know that Hindenburg would, a few months later, nominate Hitler as chancellor. However, in early 1932, it was actually not that crazy to assume that Hindenburg was the safest bet to block that from happening. And not because he was a progressive man, far from it: he was a staunch conservative and an anti-democratic, actively seeking to restore monarchy. So, if you're a socialist in 1932, he's certainly not one of your idols. But he also despised Hitler. He did not want to make him the chancellor. Yes, of course I know he did later, but when Bruning's time as chancellor was over, in May 1932, he nominated von Papen (from the Zentrum party), and in November 1932, despite Hitler being open to negotiations with other parties as long as he was chancellor, Hindenburg persisted in his denial and nominated von Schleicher instead.

But why, instead of voting for the guy who - even before making Hitler the chancellor - wasn't exactly an herald of left-wing values, didn't the SPD push to vote for Thalmann? Surely if he became president it would have been better right? Well, here's the thing: this was one of the most doomed elections in the history of voting. None of the candidates were big fans of democracy; this also includes Thalmann, who was a stalinist and really believed in the whole dictatorship of the proletariat thing. Not only that, but at the time communists all over Europe, and especially in Germany, considered socialist / socialdemocratic parties basically the same as the Nazis. So, you can see why the SPD and its base wasn't exactly the biggest fan of Thalmann, and sure you might argue that the German communists were justified in their belief, given how the SPD-led government approved the brutal repression of the spartacist uprising, in 1919, which famously led to the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

But. Even if the SPD in 1932 accepted to fully support Thalmann in his presidential bid, their voter base was around 20% of the electorate. So even if we assume that historically no SPD voters went for Thalmann anyway, and assume that in this made up scenario they all vote for Thalmann, that only makes around 30% of the votes. Hitler got 37%, and at the second round of voting in the presidential election, whoever gets the relative majority of the votes wins.

But let's go even deeper in our assumption and imagine that somehow Thalmann magically manages to drum up enought support to be able to get enough votes to beat both Hitler and Hindenburg and become the new president of Germany. We're in the realm of speculation rather than history here, but: while the SPD and the KPD combined still had decent popular support, the conservative elites in Germany at the time were very strong, especially in the army. It's very difficult to believe that his rise to the seat of president would have been smooth, or even that it would have happened at all even if he won the vote (remember that in late-Weimar years, democracy wasn't particularly popular).

So was there nothing that could be done to stop Hitler? Well, no. Plenty of things could have gone differently in the 14 years before this election. But this specific moment in history? Absolutely no good endings to be found here unless you willingly ignore most of the context around it.

tl; dr: stop studying history on Twitter and go read some of the millions of pages that have been written about Hitler's rise to power by reputable historians.

Sources: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back

Gustavo Corni, Weimar. La Germania dal 1918 al 1933 (no English translation, but Corni is an Italian historian who specializes in the history of contemporary Germany and has written plenty of books about it)

56 Comments
2024/02/10
16:29 UTC

25

Free for All Friday, 09 February, 2024

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

542 Comments
2024/02/09
12:00 UTC

27

Mindless Monday, 05 February 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

741 Comments
2024/02/05
12:00 UTC

27

Free for All Friday, 02 February, 2024

It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!

Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!

544 Comments
2024/02/02
12:00 UTC

Back To Top