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sarahbalick

Putin backs WW2 myth in new Russian film - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-37595972

putin myth russian film WW2

shared by sarahbalick on 11 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Putin backs WW2 myth in new Russian film
  • A new film showing Red Army soldiers outnumbered by invading Germans but battling on heroically has become part of the Kremlin's campaign to restore Russian pride.
  • State television showed Russian President Vladimir Putin watching the film last
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • week, alongside Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in the Central Asian leader's capital Astana.
  • The Kremlin promotes the idea of World War Two as a heroic victory that united the Soviet state against fascism - and still unites Russia today against a similar threat they say has resurfaced in Ukraine.
  • The 28 were immortalised - posthumously decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union - and Soviet children learnt about their last stand in school.
  • Yet historians say the story is not true.
  • According to the Soviet mythology, 28 soldiers from the Red Army's 316th Rifle Division, mainly recruits from the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet republics, stood unflinching against the advancing might of Hitler's Wehrmacht.
  • When, in June last year, Russian State Archive director Sergei Mironenko, citing historical documents, said the story was in fact a myth, he earned a sharp rebuke from Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky.
  • The USSR suffered the heaviest losses in the war - more than 20 million civilians and military - though scholars dispute the exact toll.
  • Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939 - the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocol, they agreed to carve up Poland between them.
  • Mr Putin and other officials have repeatedly talked about the need to counter the "falsification of history" or "rewriting history". They oppose interpretations of World War Two or other episodes of Soviet history that deviate from officially approved narratives.
  • Mr Medinsky, the culture minister, defended Panfilov's 28 Men, saying "even if this story was invented from start to finish, if there had been no Panfilov, if there had been nothing, this is a sacred legend that shouldn't be interfered with. People that do that are filthy scum."
  • t was accused of smearing the memory of WW2 veterans by asking whether residents of wartime Leningrad could have been saved by surrendering the city to Nazi forces.
  • Under this law, Vladimir Luzgin, a blogger from Perm region in the Urals, was fined 200,000 roubles ($3,200; £2,500) for reposting an article about the war on the Russian social network VK (VKontakte), the daily Kommersant reported in July.
  • The court said Luzgin had falsified history by stating "that the communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland, unleashing World War Two, or in other words, that Communism and Nazism co-operated honestly".
  • as justified.
  • the punishment of Luzgin w
  • n February 2013, President Putin ordered a single history syllabus for schools, offering a standardised narrative. A new state "History" TV channel was launched that year too.
  • In another incident, last year, the authorities in Sverdlovsk region banned the works of two British historians - Antony Beevor and John Keegan - saying they were imbued with Nazi propaganda. The Vedomosti daily described (in Russian) the order to remove the books from public libraries as "full of nonsense from start to finish".
  • Many Russians may not know how the state embroidered the tale of Panfilov's men - but many may not care either.
mollyharper

WW2 U-boat found with ship it sank off North Carolina - 0 views

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29721118

WW2 history

started by mollyharper on 23 Oct 14 no follow-up yet
lenaurick

An explosive surprise: German bomb found when dredging English naval base - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

history us paris germany ww2

shared by lenaurick on 24 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Crews working on an English harbor found an unexploded World War II-era German bomb containing 290 pounds of explosives.
  • The harbor is in the process of a lengthy and expensive upgrade. And as the dredger was digging up the harbor mud, the bomb got caught in its shovel.
  • The German-made SC250 bomb was used extensively in World War II, especially in the London Blitz. It weighs about 500 pounds. Read More
Julia Blumberg

Trailer for The History Channels Three Day Memorial Event on The World Wars - 0 views

www.tvguide.com/...orld-wars-trailer-1079956.aspx

history World Wars WW1 WW2

shared by Julia Blumberg on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • Julia Blumberg on 11 May 14
     
    should be interesting
Javier E

Chemicals in Your Popcorn? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chemicals-in-your-popcorn.html

chemical toxic cancer testing regulation

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • What do a pizza box, a polar bear and you have in common?All carry a kind of industrial toxicant called poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, that do two things: They make life convenient, and they also appear to increase the risk of cancer.
  • The scientists I interviewed say that they try to avoid these chemicals in their daily lives, but they’re pretty much unavoidable and now are found in animals all over the planet (including polar bears in Greenland and probably you and me)
  • PFASs are used to make nonstick frying pans, waterproof clothing, stain-resistant fabrics, fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, firefighting foam and thousands of other products. Many are unlabeled, so even chemists sometimes feel helpless.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Any testing is being done on all of us. We’re the guinea pigs.
  • PFASs are just about indestructible, so, for eons to come, they will poison our blood, our household dust, our water and the breast milk our babies drink.
  • Warnings of health risks from PFASs go back half a century and are growing more ominous. In May, more than 200 scientists released a Madrid Statement warning of PFAS’s severe health risks. It was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal backed by the National Institutes of Health.
  • Arlene Blum is a chemist whose warnings about carcinogens have proved prophetic. In recent years, she has waged an increasingly successful campaign against modern flame-retardant chemicals because of evidence that they also cause cancer, but she told me that PFASs “are even a bigger problem than flame retardants.”
  • Americans expect that chemicals used in consumer products have been tested for safety. Not so. The vast majority of the 80,000 chemicals available for sale in the United States have never been tested for effects on our health.
  • PFASs are “a poster child” for what’s wrong with chemical regulation in America, says John Peterson Myers, chief scientist of Environmental Health Science
  • Congress may finally pass new legislation regulating toxic chemicals, but it’s so weak a bill that the chemical industry has embraced it. The Senate version is better than nothing, but, astonishingly, it provides for assessing high-priority chemicals at a rate of about only five a year, and it’s not clear that the House will go that far.
  • Yes, of countless toxicants suspected of increasing the risk of cancer, obesity, epigenetic damage and reproductive problems, the United States would commit to testing five each year. And that would actually be progress.
  • For safety reasons, Europe and Canada already restrict hundreds of chemicals routinely used in the United States. Perhaps the danger of tainted brands and lost sales abroad — not the risk to Americans — will motivate American companies to adopt overseas limits.
  • Scientists are already taking precautions and weighing trade-offs in their personal lives. R. Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says he now avoids buying nonstick pans. Rainer Lohmann, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, told me that he is replacing carpets in his house with wood floors in part to reduce PFASs.
  • Simona Balan, a senior scientist at the Green Science Policy Institute, avoids microwave popcorn and stain-resistant furniture.
  • Dr. Blum says she avoids buying certain nonstick products and waterproof products
  • Some brands, including Levi’s, Benetton and Victoria’s Secret, are pledging to avoid PFASs. Evaluations of the safety of products are available free at the GoodGuide and Skin Deep websites.
rachelramirez

The New York Times' first article about Hitler's rise is absolutely stunning - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...ny-times-hitler

ww2 Vox history

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The New York Times' first article about Hitler's rise is absolutely stunning
  • On November 21, 1922, the New York Times published its fvery first article about Adolf Hitler. It's an incredible read — especially its assertion that "Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded."
  • But the really extraordinary part of the article is the three paragraphs on anti-Semitism. Brown acknowledges Hitler's vicious anti-Semitism as the core of Hitler's appeal — and notes the terrified Jewish community was fleeing from him — but goes on to dismiss it as a play to satiate the rubes
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Now, Brown's sources in all likelihood did tell him that Hitler's anti-Semitism was for show. That was a popular opinion during Nazism's early days.
g-dragon

The Armenian Genocide - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/-armenian-genocide-1915-195758

Armenian Genocide WW2

shared by g-dragon on 02 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • From the fifteenth century on, ethnic Armenians made up a significant minority group within the Ottoman Empire. They were primarily Orthodox Christians, unlike the Ottoman Turkish rulers who were Sunni Muslims.  Armenian families were subject to the and to heavy taxation. As "people of the Book," however, the Armenians enjoyed freedom of religion and other protections under Ottoman rule.
  • To make matters worse, other Christian regions began to break away from the empire entirely, often with aid from the Christian great powers. Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia...  one by one, they broke away from Ottoman control in the last decades of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
  • The Armenian population began to grow restless under increasingly harsh Ottoman rule in the 1870s.  Armenians started to look to Russia, the Orthodox Christian great power of the time, for protection.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • From the Turkish point of view, the Armenians were collaborating with the enemy.
  • Local massacres of Armenians became commonplace,
  • In the spring of the following year, a counter-coup made up of Islamist students and military officers broke out against the Young Turks. Because the Armenians were seen as pro-revolution, they were targeted by the counter-coup, which killed between 15,000 and 30,000 Armenians in the Adana Massacre.
  • the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War, and as a result, lost 85% of its land in Europe. At the same time, Italy seized coastal Libya from the empire. Muslim refugees from the lost territories, many of them victims of expulsion and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, flooded into Turkey proper to the discomfort of their fellow subjects. Up to 850,000 of the refugees, fresh from abuse by Balkan Christians, were sent to Armenian-dominated regions of Anatolia. Unsurprisingly, the new neighbors did not get along well.
  • Embattled Turks began to view the Anatolian heartland as their last refuge from a sustained Christian onslaught.  Unfortunately, an estimated 2 million Armenians called that heartland home, as well.
  • Enver Pasha ordered that all Armenian men in the Ottoman armed forces be reassigned from combat to labor battalions, and that their weapons be confiscated. Once they were disarmed, in many units the conscripts were executed en masse.
  • The Armenians quite rightly suspected a trap, and refused to send their men out to be slaughtered, so Jevdet Bey began a month-long siege of the city.  He vowed to kill every Christian in the city. 
  • this Russian intervention served as a pretext for further Turkish massacres against the Armenians all across the remaining Ottoman lands.
  • Abdul Hamid II intentionally provoked uprisings in Armenian areas
  • Red Sunday incident
  • Tehcir Law, also known as the Temporary Act of Deportation, authorizing the arrest and deportation of the country's entire ethnic Armenian population.
  • These acts set the stage for the genocide that followed.
  • Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly marched out into the Syrian Desert and left there without food or water to die. Countless others were crammed onto cattle cars and sent on a one-way trip on the Baghdad Railway, again without supplies. Along the Turkish borders with Syria and Iraq, a series of 25 concentration camps housed starving survivors of the marches.
  • In some areas, the authorities didn't bother with deporting the Armenians. Villages of up to 5,000 people were massacred
  • The people would be packed into a building which was then set on fire.
  • thrown overboard to drown.
  • In 1919, Sultan Mehmet VI initiated courts-martial against high military officers for involving the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
  • they were accused of planning the elimination of the empire's Armenian population.
  • The victorious Allies demanded in the Treaty of Sevres (1920) that the Ottoman Empire hand over those responsible for the massacres. Dozens of Ottoman politicians and army officers were surrendered to the Allied Powers
anonymous

How Japan's youth see the kamikaze pilots of WW2 - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-39351262

Japan asia history Culture

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • During World War Two, thousands of Japanese pilots volunteered to be kamikaze, suicidally crashing their planes in the name of their emperor.
  • Irrational, heroic and stupid: this was what three young people in Tokyo said when I asked them about their views on the kamikaze.
  • Decades after the war, opinions on the kamikaze pilots remain divided, partly because their legacy has been used repeatedly as a political tool.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • A survey of several countries in 2015 by Win/Gallup found that 11% of Japanese people would be prepared to fight for their country.
  • But is it true that all kamikaze pilots, who were mostly aged between 17 and 24, were wholly willing to die for their country? When I spoke to two rare survivors, now in their 90s, the answer appeared to be no.
  • The kamikaze are often compared in modern time to terrorists who carry out suicide missions
  • After the war Mr Kuwahara, who had been reluctant about his mission, said he felt liberated and that he needed to think about how to rebuild the country.
annabelteague02

MEIN KAMPF by Adolf Hitler: Volume 1, Chapter 6 - War Propaganda - 0 views

www.mondopolitico.com/...v1c6.htm

shared by annabelteague02 on 30 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Did we have anything you could call propaganda?
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 30 Oct 19
       
      from Hitler's point of view, Germany failed to have successful propaganda in WWI. interesting when you see the amount of propaganda he used in WW2
  • I regret that I must answer in the negative. Everything that actually was done in this field was so inadequate and wrong from the very start that it certainly did no good and sometimes did actual harm.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 30 Oct 19
       
      he seems very disgusted with the way germany handled herself in WWI.... also interesting when you think about how he took over Germany's government and completely changed it
  • it was the freedom and independence of our nation, the security of our future food supply, and - our national honor; a thing which, despite all contrary opinions prevailing today, nevertheless exists, or rather should exist, since peoples without honor have sooner or later lost their freedom and independence, which in turn is only the result of a higher justice, since generations of rabble without honor deserve no freedom. Any man who wants to be a cowardly slave can have no honor) or honor itself would soon fall into general contempt.
    • annabelteague02
      annabelteague02 on 30 Oct 19
       
      nationalism sentiment! also old values of honor appear to be very strongly ingrained in him
Javier E

China at the peak - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views

www.noahpinion.blog/...china-at-the-peak

china peak economy

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • We thus have the privilege of seeing a great civilization at its peak
  • How much greater would China’s peak have been if Deng Xiaoping had sided with the Tiananmen Square protesters, and liberalized China’s society in addition to its economy? How many great Chinese books, essays, video games, cartoons, TV shows, movies, and songs would we now enjoy if it weren’t for the pervasive censorship regime now in place? How much more would the people of the world have learned from Chinese culture if they could travel there freely and interact with Chinese people freely over the internet? Without a draconian autocrat like Xi Jinping at the helm, would so many Chinese people be looking to flee the country? Would the U.S. and China still be friends instead of at each other’s throats?
  • The key fact is that China’s meteoric rise seems like it’s drawing to a close
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • China’s drop was much much bigger; the Japan of the 80s was never the export machine people believed it to be. Both countries turned to investment in real estate and infrastructure as a replacement growth driver — although again, China did this much more than Japan did. Essentially, China did all the the things we typically think of Japan as having done 25 years earlier, but much more than Japan actually did them.
  • Yes, for those who were wondering, this does look a little bit like what happened to Japan in the 1990s
  • Already the country is not growing much faster than the G7, and as the ongoing real estate bust weighs on the economy, even that small difference may now be gone. The country’s surging auto industry is a bright spot, but won’t be big enough to rescue the economy from the evaporation of its primary growth driver.
  • Even if it manages to climb up to 40%, that’s still a fairly disappointing result — South Korea is at 71% and Japan at 65%
  • a re-acceleration would require a massive burst of productivity growth, which just seems unlikely.
  • That means China’s catch-up growth only took it to 30% of U.S. per capita GDP (PPP)
  • There’s one main argument that people make for a quick Chinese decline: rapid aging. But while I don’t want to wave this away, I don’t think it’s going to be as big a deal as many believe
  • This is another example of China’s peak being both awe-inspiring and strangely disappointing at the same time.
  • Now that China has hit its peak, will it decline? And if so, how much and how fast?
  • it seems likely that China’s growth will now slow to developed-country levels, or slightly higher, without much prospect for a sustained re-acceleration
  • when people contemplate Chinese decline, they’re not asking whether its economy will shrink; they’re asking whether its relative economic dominance and geopolitical importance will decrease.
  • If we just casually pattern-match on history, the answer would probably be “not for a long time”. Most powerful countries seem to peak and then plateau. Britain ruled the waves for a century.
  • U.S. relative power and economic dominance peaked in the 1950s, but it didn’t really start declining until the 2000s
  • Japan and Germany had their military power smashed in WW2, but remained economic heavyweights for many decades afterwards.
  • When the Roman Empire declined, it got a lot poorer. But in the modern economy, countries that decline in relative terms, and in geopolitical power, often get richer
  • he total fertility rate has been low since even before the one-child policy was implemented, but recently it has taken a nose-dive. Two years ago, the UN put it at 1.16, which is 40% lower than the U.S. and 22% lower than Europe
  • The country’s total population only started shrinking this year, but its young population started falling sharply 20 years ago, due to the echo of low fertility in the 80s. The most common age for a Chinese person is now about 50 years old, with another peak at 35:
  • The first reason is that power is relative, and China’s rivals have demographic issues of their own. The U.S., Europe, India and Japan all have higher fertility than China, but still below replacement level
  • demographics aren’t actually going to force Chinese power or wealth into rapid decline over the next few decades.
  • third of all, evidence suggests that population aging is really more of a persistent drag than a crisis or disaster.
  • Second, demographics won’t take away China’s biggest economic advantage, which is clustering and agglomeration effects. Asia is the world’s electronics manufacturing hub. It’s also by far the most populous region in the world, giving it the biggest potential market size
  • China will act as a key hub for that region, in terms of trade, supply chains, investment, and so on. China is shrinking, but Asia is not
  • As a result, there are suddenly many fewer Chinese people able to bear children, which is why the actual number of births in China has fallen by almost half since 2016:
  • we’d find that every percentage point of the senior population share that China gains relative to other countries might reduce its relative economic performance by about 1.15%. That’s not a huge number.
  • Now, if we look at the research, we find some estimates that are much larger than this — for example, Ozimek et al. (2018) look at specific industries and specific U.S. states, and find an effect on productivity that’s three times as large as the total effect on growth that I just eyeballed above. Maestas et al. (2022) look at U.S. states, and also find a larger effect. But Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) look across countries and find no effect at all.
  • On top of that, there are plenty of things a country can do to mitigate the effects of aging. One is automation. China is automating at breakneck speed,
  • A second is having old people work longer; China, which now has higher life expectancy than the U.S., is well-positioned to do this.
  • Finally, aging will prompt China to do something it really needs to do anyway: build a world class health care system
  • this would help rectify the internal imbalances that Michael Pettis always talks about, shifting output from low-productivity real estate investment toward consumption.
  • if not aging, the only other big dangers to China are war and climate change.
  • To realize its full potential, Altasia will need integration — it will need some way to get Japanese and Korean and Taiwanese investment and technology to the vast labor forces of India, Indonesia, and the rest
  • the most likely outcome is that China sits at or near its current peak of wealth, power and importance through the middle of this century at least.
  • Altasia has more people and arguably more technical expertise than China. And it’s the only alternative location for the Asian electronics supercluster.
  • War was the big mistake that Germany made a century ago, so let’s hope China doesn’t follow in its footsteps.
  • The story of whether and how that complex web of investment, tech transfer, and trade develops will be the next great story of globalization.
  • But I think the very complexity of Altasia will lead to its own sort of adventure and excitement.
  • for Western companies looking for new markets, Altasia will potentially be more exciting than China ever was. The Chinese market delivered riches to some, but the government banned some products (especially internet services) and stole the technology used to make others. Ultimately, China’s billion consumers turned out to be a mirage for many. The economies and societies of Altasia, in comparison, are much more open to foreign products.
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