The Long War

By -
I was perusing the history shelves of the Waterstones in Cardiff the other day and was struck by the composition of the section on German history. Now the Germans emerge into the written historical record at least by 102 BCE, when Gaius Marius defeated two German tribes at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae. In 9 CE "Hermann the German" defeated another Roman army at the Battle of Teutoberg Forest. The Germans, of course, took over Western Europe as the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century CE. (Westerncentrism note: The Roman Empire lived on until 1453 in Constantinople, the residents of whom, right until the end, addressed each other as "Romanii.") Germans have been a leading factor in most of European history since then.

As far as I could tell from the contents of the shelves of Waterstones, through those 21 centuries of German history, the Germans were fighting in World War II during about 95% of that period.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more