The song “Aqualung,” the title track on a Jethro Tull album from 1971 bearing the same name, is quite familiar to those such as myself who were born in the middle of the Pleistocene epoch. Although it’s one of the best-known songs in Jethro Tull’s repertoire owing to its striking riff, its full meaning isn’t obvious. From a superficial reading of the lyrics, it seems to be about a bum checking out girls from a park bench while suffering from chronic bad health. (more…)
Tag: First World War
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2,746 words
Part 5 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 4 here)
A German war with Poland was now a certainty, but a new continental war involving Britain and France was not. The most important obstacle to the widening of the conflict was that Britain quietly viewed French participation as an indispensable precondition of her own involvement, and the French had not committed themselves to action against Poland. (more…)
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1,907 words
Part 4 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here, Part 5 here)
Hitler’s cancellation of military operations for August 26 left him with only five days before September 1, after which, according to his generals, a military campaign in Poland would no longer be feasible. If war was to be prevented, it had to be done within this time. (more…)
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1,852 words
Part 3 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)
By August 1939, everyone understood that a war between Germany and Poland was extremely probable. The great question was whether it might still be prevented from developing into a general European war. Hitler was under an important time constraint: since October rains transform Poland into a sea of mud, German military leaders warned him it would be unsafe to postpone the launch of hostilities past September 1. (more…)
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4,041 words
Part 2 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)
Given that both the United States and the Soviet Union were far larger and more powerful than Germany, and that the British themselves were still presiding over an enormous empire, one may wonder why Britain’s leadership was in such agreement on the supposedly urgent need to resist a far smaller power’s efforts to consolidate more of the German-speaking population of Central Europe within her borders. (more…)
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Part 1 of 5 (Part 2 here)
David L. Hoggan
The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, 2nd ed.
Newport Beach, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review, 2023David Hoggan (1923-1988) was an American historian who received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1948 with a dissertation on The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939. (more…)
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Hungarian translation here; Czech translation here
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
If I could choose to be anyone from the twentieth century, I would not hesitate for a moment to pick Ernst Jünger. (more…)
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6,951 words
Heinz Hermann Weichardt was born to a German father and a Jewish mother and spent his young adulthood in the Third Reich. In in his February 1995 memoir Under Two Flags, he gave a concise but very revealing account of his tribulations as a Mischling in the first degree. (more…)
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5,672 words
Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)
This excursus has prematurely broached The Gala Situation, so let’s go back to where we started, with Dalí beginning to apply his method: “For the next few years Dalí’s paranoiac process remained preoccupied with fetishist obsessions, including masturbation and his fear of heterosexual sex.”[1] (more…)
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3,882 words
Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
Introduction
It was perhaps the most famous description of a (space) alien in English literature. The narrator felt an “utter terror [grip] him” as a thing from a nightmare emerged slowly, slowly from the pit that its smoking spacecraft had cratered in the Earth. As its body “bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.” A pair of huge, fathomless dark eyes regarded him intensely, “steadfastly. (more…)
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Hungarian translation here; Czech translation here
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one above or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
If I could choose to be anyone from the twentieth century, I would not hesitate for a moment to pick Ernst Jünger. (more…)