Shortly before he died in 2013, Chinua Achebe — often considered Africa’s greatest novelist — was asked if his view of colonialism had changed in the half-century since he wrote Things Fall Apart, his famous first novel critical of British rule in his homeland of Nigeria. “The legacy of colonialism is not a simple one,” he explained to the interviewer, “but one of great complexity with contradictions — good things as well as bad.”
Tests carried out on remains of young communist who confessed to arson attack that proved a gift to Hitler
When flames enveloped Germany’s parliament on the evening of 27 February 1933, six days before national elections, it was a political gift to Adolf Hitler, the recently appointed chancellor. The arson attack on the Reichstag by an “enemy within” secured his re-election and gave him the pretext to grab the dictatorial powers he craved.
Whether that gift fell into the Nazi leader’s lap by chance or was placed there via a covert false-flag operation has been the subject of bitter historical disputes ever since. Now, 90 years later, the body of the young communist whom historians have traditionally regarded as the sole perpetrator of the attack has been exhumed in the hope of finding a definitive answer.
It was a mild winter’s morning at the height of the Cold War.
On January 17, 1966, at around 10:30am, a Spanish shrimp fisherman watched a misshapen white parcel fall from the sky… and silently glide towards the Alboran Sea. It had something hanging beneath it, though he couldn’t make out what it was. Then it slipped beneath the waves.
At the same time, in the nearby fishing village of Palomares, locals looked up at an identical sky and witnessed a very different scene – two giant fireballs, hurtling towards them. Within seconds, the sleepy rural idyll was shattered. Buildings shook. Shrapnel sliced towards the ground. Body parts fell to the earth.
This is like porn to me.
When she used her compact camera to capture the view from her window in the German city of Kiel one December afternoon in 1931, Rosi Posner was doing more than just taking a snapshot. In the foreground is a brass menorah, the candlestick used to mark the Jewish festival of Hanukah; in the near background, the chilling image of a swastika flag flying prominently from the Nazi headquarters that had opened up opposite her flat earlier that year.
John F Kennedy’s killer was “too crazy” to work with the KGB and the Soviet security agency cut ties with him a year before the assassination, newly declassified documents show.
The National Archives and Records Administration made public some 13,173 documents related to the 1963 assassination on Thursday, which many longtime JFK-watchers hoped would shed more light on what the US government knew about Lee Harvey Oswald.
The two outlaws spent their nights carousing in the bordellos of a far west mining town where they were holed up, on the run from the law. One night, one of the fugitives got into a brawl at an after-hours restaurant. Lawmen arrived and ordered everyone into the street, but the drunken bandit drew his gun. He fired a single shot; an officer died.
The 1905 scene did not play out in the US, but in the Chilean port of Antofagasta – a boom town that at the time was as wild as any in the old American west – and it was detailed in a judicial report recently rediscovered in the country’s national archives.
The White House has ordered the release of documents on the murder of US President John F Kennedy, but said some files will stay sealed.
Some 12,879 documents were posted online on Thursday after President Joe Biden issued an executive order authorising their disclosure.
A 1992 law required the government to release all documents on the 1963 assassination by October 2017.
The death of the US president spawned decades of conspiracy theories.
Sixty years later, it’s still the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war
At the beginning of 1962, President John F. Kennedy had high hopes for a peaceful year with the Soviet Union, the United States’ most dangerous adversary. On December 30, 1961, Kennedy issued a statement offering his good wishes for the new year to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet people. Ten months later, in October of 1962, the US and the Soviet Union were on the brink of war.
Julio Loace was 24 when, in the summer of 1962, soldiers from Havana turned up at his sleepy rural village to say he and his family had to leave the plot of land where they reared cows and planted black beans. A house would be built for them, he was told, beyond a new perimeter.
Soon after, lorries hauling ominous objects as long as trees drove through his village under cover of darkness. The ground trembled under their weight.
“They were huge,” Loace, now 86, said from a rocking chair while chickens pecked outside his house. “Nobody had ever seen equipment so big.”
Erich Maria Remarque’s great novel was turned into a harrowing 1930 film – but the rising Nazi Party couldn’t stand its anti-war message
In December 1930, Joseph Goebbels led an attack against the landmark anti-war film, All Quiet on the Western Front. Based on the controversial, hugely successful novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a First World War veteran, it depicts the bleak, traumatising reality for Germans in the trenches. In the story, a group of school chums enlist – all hyped up on the glory of war – and perish one-by-one.
The American-made film, directed by the Russian-born Lewis Milestone, was critically acclaimed in the United States, Britain, and France; by the time it reached Germany, All Quiet on the Western Front had won Academy Awards for Outstanding Production and Best Director.
Coming soon…
Netflix’s German-language All Quiet on the Western Front is a haunting revelation
The First World War is reimagined as a symphony of mud, teen angst and terrible beauty in All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s stunning German-language retelling of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel. As with Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Hollywood adaptation, it faithfully communicates Remarque’s message about the futility of the conflict. To this Berger adds production values that have the blood-in-ears rush of a hyper-stylised video game. Violence may be hell, but Berger bathes it in a pulsating shimmer. Oh, what a lovely-looking war he has conjured.
“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme rather nicely.”
That quip has often been attributed to Mark Twain. I’ve never been able to verify the attribution, but it does sound like him. I’m inclined to pair it with Santayana’s observation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A gloss on that observation: “Those who know the past are condemned to watch others unwittingly repeat the avoidable errors of the past.”
The University and the greater Charlottesville, Virginia, area in which it is located has taken it upon themselves to be defined not by academics, or history, or any other trait. Rather, those in charge of local government and University administration prefer to be defined by a single characteristic: the August 12, 2017, “Unite the Right” rally.
One week ago was the five-year anniversary of the rally, and Charlottesville residents and University students and alumni were reliably accosted by “never forget”-style messages, being told that everyone needed to “do more” to atone for what happened there.
Julius Franklin Howell (January 17, 1846 – June 19, 1948) joined the Confederate Army when he was 16. After surviving a few battles, he eventually found himself in a Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland.
More at the link.
h/t Mauser 98
The board of the cemetery housing the remains of Canada’s first prime minister has voted against relocating a statue of him at his gravesite citing his alleged flawed history.
One night while digging through some of my own family history, I came across a copy of my great-great-great grandfather’s diary. One the pages, aptly titled “I Shot a Man for Seventy-Five Cents,” instantly caught my eye. It’s not every day you find one of your family’s great patriarchs nearly killed a man over some pocket change.
Now this story is every bit as hair-raising as it sounds—and I’m half-tempted to share it—but for now let’s just say that it piqued my curiosity. For the better part of an evening, I pored over page after page of this diary, eager to know my grandfather and better understand what made him into the tenacious man he was.
