When I was in high school, my mom brightly suggested my dad and I should go see the movie Gallipoli. Dad looked over at me with horror for a second, trying to figure out what to say, other than “that does not sound uplifting.”
The US is frantically shoveling weapons around the planet: ammo for Israel, ammo for Ukraine, drones and missiles for secret drone bases in Africa, and – now, there are significant naval forces moving toward Yemen because the Yemenis made the only move they could, and tried to block trade.
Gervasi performs a detailed case study regarding how the cruise missile and Pershing II were sold to the American public. Warning: if you’re not already a cynic, this may be hazardous to your mental state.
I recently managed to find (ebay!) a book I have been looking for for quite a while: Tom Gervasi’s 1986 The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy. (ISBN 0-06-015574-4)
The UN Convention on Genocide [un.org]
Over on Daily Kos, I encountered someone proclaiming officially that it is anti-semitism to conflate the actions of Israel with the actions of nazis. I’d like to noodle around that idea a bit, because it makes me quite uncomfortable.
I used to play a lot of Diplomacy with the rest of my high school military history club.
In the last week, for obvious reasons, there has been a lot of discussion using words like “war”, “terrorism”, “war crimes”, “human shields”, etc.
I’m going to declare this up front: I have no private knowledge about this topic; my beliefs are formed by a lot of study of the topic since 1978, a lot of strategy gaming, and a lot of news reading. Naturally, any commentary about nuclear strategy is going to be either a) ignorant except for open source material or b) muzzled by secrecy. I.e.: Those that talk about this stuff are ignorant, those that aren’t ignorant are silent.
Dan Arrows does some really interesting stuff about Germany, and fascism, from an actual German perspective. I find his view to be accurate within my existing understanding of history, and his perspective is valuable.