Dimitri > Recent Status Updates

Nicolas like Louis XVI tought he was facing a rebellion not a revolution. He believed disorder could be quelled by force.
The Duma saw only themselves as capable of restoring order, but their political consessions had the opposite effect of transforming by 1 March the mutiny into a national contest between Duma & Petrograd Soviet.. with an irrelevant Tsar.

(Alltough) February Revolt is often depicted as a worker revolt it's important to emphasise that it was first & foremost a mutiny of peasant soldiers whom the authorities had billeted in overcrowded facilities in the Empire capital city. LIke kindling wood near a powder keg, these reservists born in the 1880s carried in their bones 3 centuries of serfdom, obeying only as long as there was mandatory punishment.

Time was running out in late '16: the opposition felt they were racing against the clock, the question was no longer if but when and IN WHAT FORM a revolution would occur, from above as a coup d'état directed by themselves or from below as a spontaneous and uncontrollable mass revolt.

Thus in the midst of war a new Russia was quietly taking shape within the semi patrimonal state, resembling the vigorous growing of saplings in the shade of an old decaying forest. The participation of citizens without rank in government institutions & the introduction of worker representatives into industrial management were symptom of a silent revolution, effectively to meet actual needs instead of utopian visions.

(Panzerkreuser Potemkin) was Eisenstein erst mit "Streik" herausgearbeitet hatte, kommt nun im ganzen wie in Detail voll zur Anwendung. Historisches Material wird als dialektischer Prozess betrachtet und in dialektischer Form dargestellt.

There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.

" The guilt of the industrialists and financiers, as Shea saw it, was that they had given Hitler the material means to rearm Germany, with full knowledge that Hitler planned to use these armaments to carry out his program of German aggrandizement by military conquest."


The sinews of war were easy to prove, the intent less so...

The Archduke's murder did not seem as important in summer 1914 as now, a year later. Even with the Russian declaration of war in the newspaper, war remained surreal. Wegener contrasts the extatic crowds in Berlin with the calm acceptance in his Holstein village, minus one eldest son of an officers family who hangs himself. In Berlin, there is no use for a war correspondent in the first few weeks. He learns Patience!

"It is difficult to put much faith in those who try to play Solomon when they burn down the city first and then set up court in the ruins."

For ordinary Germans, late 44-45 had proven "Nazi's are bad , m'kay?" And they had too urgent survival priorities to pay much attention to the trial.

If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping enough, not smoking, etc. You are doing all the things you should be doing anyway. A disease just makes it easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.

A psychotic break is the exact opposite of not taking up much space and being as little trouble as possible.

Without art you’re stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

To assess that one had opposed the extermination of the Jews, or that a fellow defendant had done so, was to admit knowledge of the mass killings and thus open oneself to liability as an accessory in a criminal conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity.

This partly mitigates Jacksons failed US style cross-examination ? Does it enable the SS in all its parts to be branded a criminal organisation?

On 5 March 46 the new denazification law was approved and as the ACC general subsequently reported to US assistant Secretary of War Peterson, "under this law we have the means of coping with the mass of membership cases, whatever may be the decision of the Tribunal with respect to criminal organisations."

Biddle's approach of sticking to the Charter and tempering it where necessary was probably the most important decision made by any member of the bench.

Ex. Designate an organisation criminal only if membership was voluntary and criminal activities penetrated through the whole organisation.

Jackson had been so worried about obtaining Allied agreement for the basic trial system that he had alloted no time for picking the defendants.

"This was a very strong formulation [in the draft agreement of May 45] of the promises that Roosevelt had given to Stalin at Yalta regarding the extradition of war criminals and Soviet nationals. Controversy over this question has reverberated right down to the current popularity of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. "

Hello 1977 :-)

Even when word reached London that Truman had decided there must be a trial, the initial reaction of Lord Simon was to press efforts to bring the United States over to the summary execution alternative.

The verdict at Neuremberg ignored the fact that the prosecution hadn't succeeded in proving that the German Wehrmacht in 1939 was preparing for a war of agression. Nevertheless [the following persons] were convicted of conspiracy and planning said war of agression.

I could see that the glowing ashes were the remains of the paper balls with which Parisians were reduced to heating their apartments. They were made from newspapers, board boxes and ... books whose literary value was considered inferior to their worth as fuel.

"I'm afraid you've made a bad bargain. She's certainly more valuable to the Germans than I am to the United States."
"The State department knows very well what you did. Suppose the British government, in the last war, had had a chance to exchange Edith Cavell. Don't you think they'd have jumped at it? And you are, after all, the Edith Cavell of this war. "

This raises the question whether, if Prussia had not launched its preemptive attack in 1756, France would have been willing to support the offensive war that 'the two empresses' were planning for the following spring.

As night fell over Oosterbeek, the 1st Airborne had survived its 6th day. The weather had prevented any resupply missions from being flown. Enduring bombardement & German attacks that had nibbled on all sides of the perimeter, the Red Devils hung on. Urquhart was hartened that the Polish Brigade had landed in Driel and pinned his hopes on the Poles getting over that night.

"Anyhow it was a characteristic Renaissance gesture, to sack and burn the city and palace but to save fine books from the flames"

"Iberian civil war follows, in recent centuries, a pattern. It is a war between constitutionalism and absolutism, liberty and tyranny, liberalism, often with a little Freemasonry thrown in, and clericalism, in brief, between Left and Right."

The late historian Fujiwara Akira asserted that a majority of Japanese military deaths during the Pacific war resulted from starvation, not hostile action. Put differently, army incompetence killed more Japanese soldiers than did the Allies.

In China, where Fujimara served, logistics was left to his infantry battailon rather than specialized transportation units.

A more recent % analysis concurs in general.

The classic short-term scénario to eliminate western bases in East Asia while occupying strategic points in the south "in turn would hasten the collapse of Chiang Kai-Shek's regime & end the China fighting. Japan would also cooperate with its Axis partners to compel Britain to surrender, which would shatter America's will to fight"

The army marched off to war with no means to defeat the US, much less a coalition.

With France defeated & Britain on the verge, Japan had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to isolate Chiang from western aid by severing his supply routes that ran through Indochina & [British] Burma. Improved ties with the Axis could prevent the US from interfering if the army moved south into those colonies.

The Wuhan* battles marked the limit of the Japanese Army's offensive capability to conduct large scale operations. By fall '38 it depended on Chinese puppets to control occupied zones, exploit the resources of the North & protect Japan's economic interests elsewhere in China.

*The city in Yangzi was the logistic cornerstone cum administrative base for Nationalist armies.

#3 To modernize and reequip the army to drive Caucasian influence from East Asia. Japan would maintain friendly relations with China until it defeated the USSR and then move south against the US.

#2 ...while at the same time the prime minister and the navy were seeking to expand into the southern regions. Neither the narrower military strategy nor the broader national policy resolved the competing and contradictory objectives of the services.

The "fundamental principles of national defense and national policy" prepared by Ishiwara Kanji, head of operations of the general staff, had been simple enough.