Wednesday, December 17, 2008

marxist nerd adult comedy here

from an email list i won't name because i don't know who would or wouldn't want their identity revealed. and Human Subjects is the order of the day, people.
>From Engels: "Hungary, Poland and Russia are the only countries in Europe where invasion is impossible in winter."

Wow. If only Hitler had read some more Engels!

-(Poster 1).

^^^
(Poster 2): Actually, I'm kind of glad he didn't (smile).

19 comments:

wobblie said...

To be fair, Operation Barbarossa began in June. It was the failing to win a quick and decisive victory, thus getting bogged down in the Russian winter, that ultimately did them in.

lex dexter said...

you really do rock the military history, huh, wobs?

the Red Army freaks me out.

wobblie said...

I recently finished Deutscher's bio of Stalin, so the topic of the invasion of Russia is still pretty fresh in my mind.

lex dexter said...

oh my god, Deutscher's Stalin bio! was it great?

i envy you, you dude-who's-not-in-grad-school, you!

RK said...

Weren't there some issues with rough terrain (mountains) that contributed to the inability to exact that swift victory?

gabbagabbahey said...

or, you know, he could have (and presumably did) read about Napoleon doing the same thing.

I wouldn't really have considered Engels a 'go-to guy', to use your parlance, on military history.

wobblie said...

lips: The Stalin bio pales relative to the Trotsky volumes, but it was still an engaging read. It's hard to give a fair hearing to the 20th Century's totalitarian par excellence, but if there's one person who could do it, it's Deutscher. The copy I found was completed prior to Stalin's death, so I'm curious to know if there's an updated version. Bonus fun fact - did you know David Horowitz, back in his "radical" days, wrote a bio of Deutscher?

rk: The real thing which impeded the Germans was trying to achieve an decisive victory over a front which stretched some 2000 miles, combined with the German military grossly underestimating the capacity of the Red Army. Eastern Europe and European Russia is, geographically speaking, a prime invasion route - pretty much flat, which is why to this day Russia freaks out about having NATO "at its doorstep," so to speak.

GGH: check and mate.

wobblie said...

Eastern Europe and European Russia are... jeebus, and I call this my native tongue.

lex dexter said...

wobs,

i live for nuggets like that Horowitz nugget. it's amazing how many former Trotskyists have drifted rightward, or in Hitchens' case, just-plain-weird-ward. this is also true of the "New York" school of abstract expressionist painters, and of that school's great theorist, Clement Greenberg.

the last issue of the New Left Review features a former Althusser student and leading light in contemporary political philosophy named Alain Badiou who tracks a similar trend of former French "Maoists" who have come to support Sarkozy.

lex dexter said...

gabba,
Engels' being an unlikely military strategist was the inspiration of the original (quoted) post, i think.

Poor Engels. Even _the Origins of Marriage, Family and the State_ (or whatever it's called) hasn't gotten much play in the U.S. since first-wave socialist-feminism.

wobblie said...

Nor is his The Condition of the Working Class in England acknowledged as one of the classic public health texts.

Wilbur said...

Oooh, military history? Awesome. Pop quiz: name a famous WWII Axis or Red Army commander. I'll go first: Zhukov. Battle of Stalingrad.

RK said...

Heinrich Himmler-- Schutzstaffel and Gestapo commander.

Wilbur said...

Oh damn, RK! You went for the THROAT, DAWG! Himmler was a pig farmer before the war.

wobblie said...

Aren't we macabre today! Goering, Luftwaffe.

lex dexter said...

[just an aside - i cannot believe Dave3544 hasn't yet entered the fray. this is his wheelhouse, too.]

wobblie said...

Really? I never figured Dave as much of a WWII man. But then again, there's really not much to argue about in that regard, eh?

dave3544 said...

The Desert Fox.

http://www.tisinc99.com/wwi049396.html

Wilbur said...

Nice one, Dave...I was wondering when Rommel was going to get some props around here. He was - at least to some effect - involved in the plot against Hitler, ya know...Forced to take cyanide pills for it, too.