Posts by Simon Grigg
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Charming. Abso-fucken-lutely charming.
I think you miss the point. In Indonesia there is little real bigotry against homosexuals, and this has nothing whatsoever to to with the Islamic mores of the masses here. Homosexuality and transsexuality are both legal and widely accepted in Indonesia, perhaps more so than many Western nations, and what did or did not happen in any part of the Islamic world is rather beside that point (Iraq is a very long way from Java both physically and in every other way), which was, as much as anything, a ploy by the authorities to illustrate just how normal, despite his narrowly held fundamentalist ravings, Top was.
He was no Islamic super-hero, no twisted moral leader, and a hypocrite who killed people.
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If they'd been successful at that, Midway would have looked a lot different.
Indeed and that's why I think it was a very smart military move. American military planners knew this but were largely ignored. Pearl was a known target.
To win the coming Pacific war they had no choice but to attempt a knock out blow against the US. They were well aware of the industrial potential of the United States and when they missed the carriers various Japanese opined that the war was lost.
The Pacific fleet was just about all the US had militarily then. It had a tiny army and the Army Air Force largely consisted of a few squadrons of ancient P-26 and a handful of B-17s and underpowered P-40s. What military industry it did have was almost totally employed by the British under Lend Lease or the Direct Military Purchasing Commission. It it hadn't been for that it may have taken the US several years to turn it's industrial might over to rearming.
The Japanese succeeded in knocking the UK out of the Pacific and SEA and were only defeated in doing so to the US by the lucky accident that the carriers were out of port.
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As for Munich, the British government in the late '30s was a mixture of Hitler-admirers and those who'd gone through the last war and were so traumatised by it they were determined to avoid another war at all costs. Hitler smelled weakness.
Which I think is the crux of the matter. That and the fact that the UK military was rather in awe of what they perceived as a reconstituted German military machine. Historians have of recent begun to revisit both Versailles and Munich and neither is quite seen in the light it was, say, a generation ago. The generation ruling the European nations was the very one who had spent their youth at Ypres.
There was little evidence at the time that Hitler had designs beyond the Czech rump..it's easy in hindsight to see he did..and the British felt that they were unable to defeat him militarily (the RAF at the time was flying Hawker biplanes, the Luftwaffe had Bf109b & ds). I'm not saying that Munich was the right thing to do, but the decision was understandable.
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Keir, I wasn't trying to justify Japan's attack or their appalling activities in. most especially, China, but just trying to point out that the attack on Pearl Harbor or something similar was neither unexpected nor as unprovoked as the US historical mythology would have one believe. As the US and the UK consciously boxed in Japan, the empire was inevitably going to strike back somehow..it had no choice.
The other crime of Pearl Harbor (and The Philippines) was also that the US were so unprepared for the coming attack. At least the British had the excuse that they felt they were able to rely on their own (misplaced) sense of imperial destiny and invincibility.
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Pearl Harbor was arguably an aggressive act,
Yes but it was an act that didn't happen in isolation.
I think most Americans erroneously see it as something that those nasty Japanese simply sneakily did out of the blue. Hence the war crime aspect. Japan and the US had been heading towards it one way or another for quite some while
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blows against the empire...?
no Krakatau, no IslamBut, volcanoes, earthquakes or whatever, holding this country transfixed right now is the first release from the Noordin Top autopsy. It seems that the fundamentalist terror hero of parts of central Java (where his poster keeps appearing in the streets, and the police tear it down to have it appear again) had either been sodomised, or had been keeping explosives up his butt.
Either way the media is loving this as it the public, and it's gone a long way to destroying the post death mystique of this prick.
The police clearly took some pleasure, if you will, from releasing this as quickly as possible (and other such inevitable jokes doing the rounds).
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(again, disclaimer about it being rather daft and all, but.)
No, it's not daft at all, and Britain has some reason to be proud, Dunkerque and The Battle of Britain were moments that allowed the nation to hold its head very high (even if the victory in Sept 1940 was slightly exaggerated, the imbalance and other factors favoured the RAF over the Germans..it was still quite something).
You failed to mention the Battle of The Atlantic in that roll call of pride. It still daunts me how so many men could endure so much largely without complaint and oft overlooked.
Only slightly related....I've never been totally convinced that, based on what they knew at the time, Munich was such a major miscalculation on the part of the British government and should not be used a reason to subtract from that sense of national chest puffery, as it often is.
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Thanks Mark, yes fine here.
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But for all that, who knows what any of us would've done if we were in such a position. It's very hard to pass judgement
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The fact that almost every family had someone serving in the military does not mean everyone had actual knowledge.
Not less than 2/3 of the German Army was in the east at any time after 1941, and all army groups travelled with specialist squads who were there for one reason only. Many of the SS led massacres in the East were undertaken by normal army units under secondment. The SS murder squads operated under the protection of the army. Most of the roundups in the east were done by normal army units.
If an army unit did not have direct involvement, they would have to be living in a vacuum not to have knowledge of what was happening daily around them, and in their name.