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Milestones

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Eulalia said:
It was a small group, in fact, of Black Power enthusiasts of a Marxist bent who'd staged a coup. At least one of them, Bernard Coard, had some reputation as a political activist in UK, though not at all violent. It was using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut - well, a handful of nuts.
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"Well, if you have a sledgehammer handy and don't care what happens to the nut, why not?" General, later Field Marshall Slim in the Burma theatre!
 
Loxuru said:
October 25th is Saint Crispian’s day. So, lots of fighting in history.

On October 25th 732, the army of Charles Martel defeated the Arabs near Poitiers. This was a real turning point, stopping further Arab invasion into Europe. Moreover, Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, established the power of his dynasty in southern France.

On October 25th 1415, Saint Crispian’s day, Henry V and his band of Happy Few defeated the French knights at Agincourt. Lousy tactics of the latter (the retreating English were near starvation, and could have been forced to surrender without fighting), made their charges butchered by English bowmen. With this turn of fortune, Henry V enforced France to accept the Treaty of Troyes, which foresaw a personal union of both kingdoms. Henry would become King of France, after the ruling king of France, Charles VI, would have died. To seal the union, Henry married Charles’ daughter. Henry died however before his old father-in-law. His crown prince, the future Henry VI, still a baby then, would inherit the madness of his grandfather Charles VI. Back in England, there was a York family who still had to settle a bill with the ruling Lancasters, and seized the opportunity. The ensuing instability in England allowed the French to put Charles VII on the throne and take back control of their country.

Saint Crispian was less favourable to the six hundred Happy Few, when, on October 25th 1854, the British Light Brigade charged a line of Russian artillery in the valley of Balaclava, during the Crimean War. Unclear orders, confusion about the target and the eager of the cavalry for action, made the Light Brigade charge the wrong enemy position, because their intended objective was not visible from where they stood. The confusion had also seized Captain Louis Nolan, the officer who had passed the written order to Lord Lucan, commander of the cavalry division. From above, from where Nolan came, the positions had been clear, down in the valley, they were not. As the brigade marched, Nolan suddenly realized that they were heading into the wrong direction. But before he could inform Lord Cardigan, the leader of the brigade, he was killed by shrapnel. With canons on the left, canons on the right and canons in front, the brigade rode into the mouth of death. They reached the Russian lines, but were driven back by Russian cavalry. Actually, the charge was nothing but a skirmish that lasted about fifteen minutes, but the commanders were public figures in Britain, where a debate started about the responsibility for the deadly mishap. The debacle was ultimately turned into a victorious propaganda pamphlet by the poet Alfred Tennyson.

On October 25th 1983, American troops invaded the small island of Grenada in the Caribbean. Something about a ruler they did not like.
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Grenada was invaded because the new rulers were leftists and the Reagan administration feared another Cuba. In fact, there were Cuban construction troops on the island, and Fidel Castro applauded the "revolution". It all seems tragic and silly today, especially since Reagan's policies (to his credit but with significant help from Gorbachev, without whose intelligence and realism the pressure of the Reagan military buildup which the Soviet Union could not replicate would probably not have worked) ended the Cold War, and without Soviet subsidies--chiefly oil "traded" for sugar for which the market was glutted--Cuba almost went under and Castro had to allow tourism and small private enterprises like restaurants (and prostitution) to get hard currency. I recall reading the story of a woman who lived in the same apartment block as a neurosurgeon. To survive she went on "dates" with visiting tourists and made more money than he did. If I recall she had children to feed.
Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega (who is the current authoritarian president) were another fixation of Reagan, and funding the "contras" trying to overthrow him led Reagan to sell guns to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon. Without telling Congress, he illegally passed the money to the "contras"--hence the Iran-Contra affair. (Ortega was eventually ousted, but won election years later and now is acting like Xyulo - wanted by criminal international court in The Hague to keep his job.)
When this broke in 1986, the negotiator, Bud MacFarlane, attempted suicide. Reagan himself said "in my heart, I didn't trade guns for hostages".
It made me think back to 1980 and poor old pitiful weak-kneed Jimmy Carter. The press asked him whether the failure of his high risk military mission to rescue the embassy hostages in Teheran--his Secretary of State had resigned in protest--had led to his loss to Reagan in the 1980 elections. "I was the President. I thought it was a good plan. I'd do it again."
(I believe it was Jimmy Carter who persuaded Ortega to accept his earlier defeat at the polls and build up his party to win a fair election again.)
 
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Marcius said:
One hundred and forty years ago today, on 25 October 1881, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano (yep, covering all the saints', erm, bases) María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga.

So, lots of painting and :fuck:, too. :devil:
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And I thought Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, the third Marques, Lord Salisbury was overkill. You might as well be named with an irrational number with unending decimal places, and everyone can call you, say, "three-point-one-four". (I guess Europeans prefer commas to decimal points, though, so maybe it wouldn't work.)
 
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Marcius said:
One hundred and forty years ago today, on 25 October 1881, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano (yep, covering all the saints', erm, bases) María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga.

So, lots of painting and :fuck:, too. :devil:
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You can't say enough about old Pablo. In World War I, as a Spaniard he didn't fight, while many of his artist friends were killed. (Marie Curie, as a Pole, ran a mobile X-ray unit and tried treating wounds with radium.) In World War II, he stayed in the south of France in "deep depression". I recently read that Audrey Hepburn, though Belgian, had moved to the Netherlands where her mother felt they would be safer, and at 14 was a runner for the Dutch underground. David Maccullough planned to write a biography of Picasso, but as he did research he was so disgusted ("repelled by him" was his term) that he wrote about Truman instead.
 
Marcius said:
One hundred and forty years ago today, on 25 October 1881, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispín Crispiniano (yep, covering all the saints', erm, bases) María de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso was born in Málaga.

So, lots of painting and :fuck:, too. :devil:
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Now that is one hell of a middle name. I'll bet filling out forms requiring his full name was fun. :buenrollo:
 
wulf said:
Takes me back to my childhood school days when we were taught to 'duck and cover'. Yeah... right. :rolleyes:
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That reminds me of those creepy "protect & survive" Public Information Films that were broadcast throughout most of the 70s and early 80s (until 1986 when Chernobyl told us all that most of this advice wasn't going to be worth a squirt of piss in the long run)

To be fair, even when I was a young teen in the late 70s, I knew that the majority of this stuff was just wishful thinking

There were quite a number of these films that were broadcast regularly and in some kind of sequence. Some guy on Youtube has collected these together in more or less the right order and edited them into a single video which appears cringeworthy today but forms an important historical document of civil defence planning at the height of the Cold War;
 
Darkprincess69 said:
That reminds me of those creepy "protect & survive" Public Information Films that were broadcast throughout most of the 70s and early 80s (until 1986 when Chernobyl told us all that most of this advice wasn't going to be worth a squirt of piss in the long run)

To be fair, even when I was a young teen in the late 70s, I knew that the majority of this stuff was just wishful thinking

There were quite a number of these films that were broadcast regularly and in some kind of sequence. Some guy on Youtube has collected these together in more or less the right order and edited them into a single video which appears cringeworthy today but forms an important historical document of civil defence planning at the height of the Cold War;
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Even though I lived through that period, I cannot recall watching these films. We lived in a very rural area but surrounded at about 20miles distance with three USAF bases. Too far from a town to hear sirens, too near military targets to have any chance of survival. So we ignored the threat.
 
Darkprincess69 said:
That reminds me of those creepy "protect & survive" Public Information Films that were broadcast throughout most of the 70s and early 80s (until 1986 when Chernobyl told us all that most of this advice wasn't going to be worth a squirt of piss in the long run)
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Similar to us in Eastern Germany, "Put a rain cape over you and then take a shower" is enough when the evil imperialists attack us. But something must have gone wrong with my socialist upbringing. I have probably doubted the official propaganda since my grandparents told me that we were not liberated by the Russians but by American troops.
 
Heineudo said:
Similar to us in Eastern Germany, "Put a rain cape over you and then take a shower" is enough when the evil imperialists attack us. But something must have gone wrong with my socialist upbringing. I have probably doubted the official propaganda since my grandparents told me that we were not liberated by the Russians but by American troops.
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In my family's case (members of the German-Austrian minority in Romania), the "liberation" was even worse. Romania was overrun by Soviet troops from September to November 1944 - exactly 77 years ago! But because Romania had a short civil war in those times, it turned around between allies and enemies, so that there were only battles between retreating German-Austrian-Hungarian troops on the one side and Soviet troops on the other on Romanian territory. Up to January 1945, not so much changed for the civilian population.
But then, an order from Stalin arrived that the whole German-speaking population of Romania - capable for working - has to be deported for forced labour and reparations into the Soviet Union - as a revenge for the Russians who were before deported by the German Nazis for forced labour to Germany.

(The terrible irony in this history is that even ALL these poor Russians who were deported to Germany during the war and survived as forced labourers in Germany were later returned to the Soviet Union and there in Stalin's times regarded in the Soviet Union as "traitors", often with the remark - sometimes even in their passports: "You should not have worked for the Germans in war - you should have killed yourself as Soviet heros! Now you are traitors!")

80.000 of the German minority members in Romania were suddenly arrested between 9th and 15th January 1945 by Soviet soldiers and transferred in train wagons to the Soviet Union. The Soviet soldiers had access to the Romanian population statistics and they had planned numbers of persons to be arrested. When they did not meet the Germans on their lists, they simply took their Romanian neighbours with them as substitutes. The children were sometimes left alone in the houses of their own parents. So, the most Romanians who were still able to that, fled in January 1945 from their liberators. The big Romanian forests were full of Romanian refugees in their own country, the Romanian cities were almost emptied when the Soviet troops entered.
About 20.000 of those Germans deported from Romania to the Soviet Union died in labour camps in the Soviet Union. The last deported returned from the Soviet Union together with the last German prisoners of war in 1955 - partly back to Romania, partly to West-Germany, when they knew that they had in the meantime some of their relatives in Western Germany.
Those were really terrible times!

By the way: My parents were not deported from Romania to the Soviet Union because - crazy and a bit funny - they were in January 1945 still in a Russian train on the way from Poland to Romania as a "deportation transport to be repatriated to their original home country" which was Romania. When they arrived in Romania, the Soviet-Russian troops had just finished the deportation of their German and Romanian neighbours from before the WW II to the Soviet Union and already left the town.
The remaining Romanians were just celebrating that their Russian "liberators" had left their city without taking them away!

True madness in history!
 
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old slave said:
Even though I lived through that period, I cannot recall watching these films. We lived in a very rural area but surrounded at about 20miles distance with three USAF bases. Too far from a town to hear sirens, too near military targets to have any chance of survival. So we ignored the threat.
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I do not recall any such films either. Nor any civil alert drills or directions whatever. I think, everyone was convinced that, if a bomb would be dropped, we would all simply be killed, or die soon.
 
Silent_Water said:
In my family's case (members of the German-Austrian minority in Romania), the "liberation" was even worse. Romania was overrun by Soviet troops from September to November 1944 - exactly 77 years ago! But because Romania had a short civil war in those times, it turned around between allies and enemies, so that there were only battles between retreating German-Austrian-Hungarian troops on the one side and Soviet troops on the other on Romanian territory. Up to January 1945, not so much changed for the civilian population.
But then, an order from Stalin arrived that the whole German-speaking population of Romania - capable for working - has to be deported for forced labour and reparations into the Soviet Union - as a revenge for the Russians who were before deported by the German Nazis for forced labour to Germany.

(The terrible irony in this history is that even ALL these poor Russians who were deported to Germany during the war and survived as forced labourers in Germany were later returned to the Soviet Union and there in Stalin's times regarded in the Soviet Union as "traitors", often with the remark - sometimes even in their passports: "You should not have worked for the Germans in war - you should have killed yourself as Soviet heros! Now you are traitors!")

80.000 of the German minority members in Romania were suddenly arrested between 9th and 15th January 1945 by Soviet soldiers and transferred in train wagons to the Soviet Union. The Soviet soldiers had access to the Romanian population statistics and they had planned numbers of persons to be arrested. When they did not meet the Germans on their lists, they simply took their Romanian neighbours with them as substitutes. The children were sometimes left alone in the houses of their own parents. So, the most Romanians who were still able to that, fled in January 1945 from their liberators. The big Romanian forests were full of Romanian refugees in their own country, the Romanian cities were almost emptied when the Soviet troops entered.
About 20.000 of those Germans deported from Romania to the Soviet Union died in labour camps in the Soviet Union. The last deported returned from the Soviet Union together with the last German prisoners of war in 1955 - partly back to Romania, partly to West-Germany, when they knew that they had in the meantime some of their relatives in Western Germany.
Those were really terrible times!

By the way: My parents were not deported from Romania to the Soviet Union because - crazy and a bit funny - they were in January 1945 still in a Russian train on the way from Poland to Romania as a "deportation transport to be repatriated to their original home country" which was Romania. When they arrived in Romania, the Soviet-Russian troops had just finished the deportation of their German and Romanian neighbours from before the WW II to the Soviet Union and already left the town.
The remaining Romanians were just celebrating that their Russian "liberators" had left their city without taking them away!

True madness in history!
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In my family, two Ukrainian men worked on the farm at that time, as my grandfather had to work as a train driver in Allenstein (Olsztyn, today in Poland in the Warmia-Mazury Voivodeship). After the liberation, our two workers on our farm went to Bavaria in the American zone of occupation. The two already suspected what would have happened to them otherwise.
 
Gibbs505 said:
November 4th, 2008 Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

Not much seems to have changed race wise.
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Weird! Already 13 years ago, there have already been three presidential elections, since, and yet it still feels as it happened yesterday.

What had changed is, that there is now a woman just one heartbeat away from presidency.

After all, the US did not revert to speaking Dutch during Martin van Buren's presidency either?
 
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