Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TimeGhost History" channel.

  1.  @spartacus-olsson  There was a distinct ENGLISH ethnicity - they had mostly stopped referring to themselves as Saxons, although Celtic people still did so. But the idea of a distinctly English cultural identity goes back as far as Bede, writing in the 7th century. You cannot erase that history or the many, many, many period sources for it. The idea of the nation-state did not yet exist, but the idea of a distinct cultural identity most certainly did. There was no deliberate ethnic cleansing, but there was an ethnic change in the upper classes that resulted from William removing all the existing nobles and replacing them with his followers. The ethnic change wasn't really a deliberate policy so much as a side effect. Language and culture are a part of ethnicity as much as genetics or region of ancestry. The Norman nobles did eventually merge with their subjects culturally, but that didn't happen overnight. I would agree that by 1200 at the latest speaking of distinct Saxon and Norman ethnic identities in England is mistaken.
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  2.  @voiceofraisin3778  The Americans got the idea from the camps run by the Spanish government in Cuba. But none of those had the same purpose as the Nazi camps. The governments who set up the earlier camps were fighting guerrilla uprisings that were supported by the local population. They responded by removing the population from their homes and putting them in camps where they were no longer able to provide refuge and food or other supplies to the guerrillas. That sort of thing has been happening since the ancient world, and the camps were in some ways a step toward more humane treatment in that in earlier wars the government would have just either massacred the people they suspected of aiding the rebels, or burned their homes and expelled them from the area without a care as to where they went and starved to death. The latter approach had been the traditional practice of the US government toward both Native Americans and Confederate guerrillas - the federals depopulated whole counties in Missouri where they had trouble controlling guerrilla activity. The Nazi and Soviet camps were something entirely different: they weren't meant to isolate people from rebels they were supporting - there wasn't any such rebellion going on in Germany or the USSR in the 1930s - they were giant prisons for domestic political opponents in which those opponents were deliberately starved, tortured, and worked until they were either dead or completely broken in body and spirit. Their larger purpose was to deter any thought of dissent against the ruling party's ideas and policies.
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  3.  @spartacus-olsson  So naked force and right of conquest become something else solely due to the passage of time? How long would the British have had to keep control of Palestine before they had the established and upheld regional control of legislation and administration? And why did this not give the British a legal right to control Ireland, which had been under English rule longer than the Levant was under Ottoman rule? Why do the Ottomans get a pass for doing the exact same thing Britain and France were doing? And what happened to the established and upheld regional control of legislation and administration of Germany in Upper Silesia or Kaliningrad? Should the Soviet-imported inhabitants of these regions be expelled so they can be returned to their former owners? If you want to say that right of conquest is obsolete today in favor of human rights of whoever currently inhabits the land, I'd agree, but that change was a novel and far from universally accepted notion in 1917 - in fact, I'd argue that the aftermath of WW1 was one of the earliest times anyone attempted to put the principle into practice. And you still have the question of why Palestinians who left Israel in 1948-49 have rights that Germans expelled from Eastern Europe around the same time don't have. If we say the Germans lost those rights when they lost the war, can't Israelis say the same about the Palestinians?
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  4. Have you considered the possibility that the situation might possibly, maybe be slightly more complex than that analysis allows for?
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  5. It was absolutely an Anglo-Saxon defense against a primarily (but by no means exclusively) French invasion in terms of the ethnic and linguistic background of most of the direct participants. However in terms of the issue at stake they would have seen it as a defense of one claimant for the English throne against another claimant for the English throne. That is partly because William advertised his venture that way, while privately promising his followers that there would a complete replacement of the existing English upper class by them. However this was not any sort of planned change in the ethnic identity of England on William's part, certainly not any sort of nationalist project, he just had no other way to pay his mercenary followers. The armies were by no means homogeneous. Very few of them would have been able to understand the language(s) spoken by the other side, and their personal reasons for being there were very different. The English army was about half fyrd, a militia of free farmers from the local region who were fulfilling a legal obligation to the crown. They were not from a military class and were entirely English in culture and language. The rest were housecarls, personal household guards of the king and the great lords who were professional soldiers, more akin to the buccellarii or scholae palatinae of late Rome than to true feudal armies, some foreign but most English (although no doubt many of them had Danish ancestry). They weren't fighting for England or for Saxon rights, they were fighting purely out of personal obligation to the man who employed them. William's army had some men who were his feudal vassals, but the vast majority were mercenaries, some from Normandy, some from Brittany, and most of the rest from other parts of France, who were fighting purely for the promise of payment in the form of lands and titles to be stripped from their English holders (and which William had no legal authority to expropriate even after he won the throne).
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  6. You can't understand nuclear weapons in the early 1960s in isolation, they were seen as one component in a comprehensive national defense strategy. For the US, nuclear weapons were seen as a counterbalance to the massive Soviet superiority in conventional weapons in Europe - the Soviets wouldn't dare use that massive superiority to overrun West Germany and France for fear of provoking nuclear retaliation. If the Soviets could effectively retaliate with a nuclear strike of their own, that would deter the US from launching a nuclear strike in any circumstances, which meant the nuclear deterrent against a Soviet conventional attack was now off the table. This made the prospect of a massive conventional war in Europe much more likely. That, and not the unlikely event of an actual Soviet strike on American cities, was the threat that Kennedy and his administration were so concerned about during the crisis. That's something the western public never understood about the Reagan-era buildup of short and intermediate ranged nuclear missiles in Europe in the 1980s. The point of those weapons was to have a force that could be used against a Soviet conventional invasion force without provoking a general nuclear exchange, because they didn't have the range to hit the USSR itself. Of course, the idea of their country becoming a "limited" nuclear battlefield was understandably very unpopular with the German people for reasons that should have been obvious. As it tuns out, the Soviet leadership never really had much stomach for starting a massive conventional war in Europe, but the western leaders had no way to be sure of that.
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  7. It was never a conflict of words. From before the day WW2 ended it was about a Soviet boot on the neck of eastern Europe backed by the most massive peacetime military establishment the world had, or still has, ever seen. Tanks running over protesters in East Berlin, Budapest, and Prague were never just words.
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  8. I also kinda feel that way about torchlight marches shouting antisemitic slogans, and "rallies" in which uniformed thugs beat and murder people for disagreeing with them or just being the wrong ethnicity.
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  9. That's always been the standard commie playbook - it worked the same way in Nicaragua and for that matter in St. Petersburg. Insinuate yourself into a broad-based coalition of revolutionaries, and while your supposed comrades are working to overthrow the reactionary government you're spending your efforts putting yourself into position to stage a communist coup and hijack the revolution once the old government is out of the way. That's why, for example, the Contras in Nicaragua contained more ex-popular front members than former Somozistas - they were people who had been purged by the communist Sandinistas once they were no longer needed for the revolution.
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  10. You're a liar, you were never in the Army and you never invaded Serbia. And where is this mythical American air base in Serbia that the intervention was supposedly an excuse for?
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  11. I don't think the Church has the same influence. Also monarchism is less of a real possibility.
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  12. They're auto-generated and apparently the program tries to interpret everything as English.
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  13.  @sirgreil  The Franks were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the Gauls they came to rule, much more so than the Saxons and the Britons. There was very little genetic change in the population of what is now France resulting from the Frankish conquest. One thing to keep in mind is that in the areas that had been part of the Roman Empire the ethnic identity of "German" tribes came to mean very little. The Franks and Goths of 500 AD were not all, and possibly not even mostly, descended from the Franks and Goths of 200 AD. All of these wandering bands picked people from all the areas they passed through and left many of their own people behind there as well. Successful leaders like Alaric and Clovis attracted pretty much anyone who could use a sword and speak enough German to get by - including many inhabitants of the Empire who were completely Romanized culturally. We don't even know all that much about the languages they spoke before the migrations, including whether and to what extent the various German dialects were mutually intelligible - that latter point still being the subject of much debate. That was probably less true of the Anglo-Saxons who settled in England since their path there was comparatively short and simple.
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  14. Those who do not want to be put down like rabid dogs should not become Nazis.
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  15. Purges and terrors like this have always been a risk in large societies with powerful governments. Wherever great power exists, the temptation to abuse it has existed. 1500 years before the Inquisition, Rome had the purges of Tiberius/Sejanus, Caligula, and Nero, which went about the same way.
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  16.  @thaneofwhiterun3562  The entire European carrier fleet consists of three aircraft carriers operating a bit over 100 aircraft, most of which can only be V/STOL planes, plus three amphibious assault ships. The US operates 11 carriers carrying over 800 heavier and faster aircraft, plus nine amphibious assault carriers and numerous smaller amphibious assault ships. The US operates a total of 69 nuclear attack submarines, with more on order, while all of Europe sans Russia can muster 13 smaller, slower, and less capable ones. The US operates 21 Ticonderoga-class cruisers which no other navy on the planet has any equivalent to, plus 71 destroyers and many smaller ships. Europe can muster a grand total of six destroyers and a few dozen smaller and much less capable frigates. All of this information is public and you can find it in Wikipedia or wherever else you want to look.
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  17. There is only one Lizard King, and his name is Jim.
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  18. Khruschev survived partly because he was to low level to get caught up in the early stages of the purges (before 1937) and because he was very enthusiastic about denouncing other people. When he did attain higher authority he always exceeded the quotas he was given for arrests and executions.
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  19.  @TimeGhost  Call it idiocy all you want, you don't live in Charlottesville. One group came to my hometown, held a torchlight rally - marching by a statue of Thomas Jefferson, a legendary proponent of tolerance and liberal democracy - during which they shouted anti-semitic and literal Nazi slogans ("Blood and Soil!"), and the next day proceeded to riot and beat counter-protestors until they eventually murdered a young woman who was doing nothing but walking down the street. The group that did that was not Antifa or any other left-wing group. I am neither a leftist nor associated with Antifa, but I hate Nazis, and when people wear Nazi symbols, wave Nazi flags, shout Nazi slogans, and behave exactly like the S.A., I have no hesitation in calling them Nazis. And we have a serious Nazi problem in the US right now, as does much of Europe.
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  20. William claimed that Edward had promised the throne to him, but Edward had no legal authority to do that. William really had no claim but right of conquest. There was also a little charade with a captive Harold, years before he took the throne, swearing on a saint's relic (though not to his knowledge) to support William's claim, but again, Harold had no authority to give the crown away, picking the new king was the prerogative of the Witan, the assembly of nobles. William did have the support of the pope, which was certainly helpful, but again, in no way legally binding.
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  21. What would the purpose of such a US attack have been? What would the US stand to gain from it? You have to look at these weapons and issues in the larger strategic context. No one at that time was viewing them in isolation from other events and other strategic factors.
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  22. That is for the people of Ukraine to decide. They seem to think it is.
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  23. What intelligent person who had the slightest first-hand experience, or even secondhand knowledge, of Soviet communism would ever choose to live under it?
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  24. Dead ones?
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  25. It's getting like that again in Europe and to a lesser extent in America as well.
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  26. Uncle Junior definitely thinks the world of JFK.
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  27. Nobody will listen, Kassandra.
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  28. How did not having such a complex work out for Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia, et. in the 1940s?
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  29.  @LiamE69  The General Secretary Bomb?
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  30. The ability to survive a first strike. And 300 nuclear warheads is not remotely near enough to "obliterate the earth". It is hopeless to try and understand nuclear policy and the balance of power without understanding the intended use of those weapons and the larger strategic context within which they existed. Leaders at the time did not view them chiefly as weapons of mass destruction to be hurled randomly at cities around the globe to kill as many human beings as possible.
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  31. It was the same half-measures nonsense that plagued the Johnson and Carter administrations. If you're going to invade Cuba, just f$#@ing invade Cuba and do it right. If you're too worried about offending people by invading Cuba, don't invade Cuba. Kennedy foolishly thought that by half-assing the invasion, changing the site, refusing to commit US naval or air cover, and so forth he could avoid looking like an aggressor. So he doomed the invasion to failure and came off looking like an aggressor anyway. As if anyone in Cuba was ever going to see it as anything but a US invasion. Nixon was 100% right about Kennedy and what a terrible president he was going to be, and in the event turned out to be.
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  32. Let's face it, who wouldn't nail M.M. in the White House if they had the chance?
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  33. I'm a bit irritated that Indy left out this crucial piece of information. The Red Army was about ten times the size of the US Army in 1948. Nuclear weapons were seen as a relatively inexpensive way to balance out that massive Soviet superiority in conventional arms. That policy continued throughout the Eisenhower administration; the conventional military was built up substantially from its late 1940s low point but it wasn't until the Vietnam War that it approached anything like the size of the Soviet military establishment.
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  34.  @archstanton6102  So was mine. :-)
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  35. Good. If we can convince the Third World to follow suit, we might someday work down to a population the planet can actually sustain, as opposed to refusing to do so and having the natural forces of the planet kill us.
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  36. York was Romano-British Eboracum and English Eoforwic before it became Danish Jorvik. ;-) Do they still have the Viking Center there? That was one of my favorite things I saw on my one trip to England (although nothing can compare with the British Museum, and the Imperial War Museum is right up there). I still have a souvenir coffee mug with a cartoon picture of Eric Bloodaxe that I got there.
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  37.  @TimeGhost  It's fine as long as you send most of your time in a hole in the ground and the chief danger is nasty stuff falling into the hole. Not so great once the war moved out of the trenches and the nasty stuff came at you from every direction. It also had the virtue of being cheap to manufacture since you could just stamp it out of a single piece of sheet metal.
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  38. They are against human decency. Unfortunately decency is only one part of human nature, and all too often it is not the part that governs our actions. We can certainly see that at work all over the world today, even if the expressions are less extreme than the worst of the 1930s.
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  39.  @amberbaker8652  I wasn't disagreeing with you. Human nature can be both wonderful and horrible, and usually the easiest path is the horrible one.
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  40.  @jon-paulfilkins7820  IIRC they mostly fought without armor because they'd been caught off guard by Harold's extremely rapid approach, and that was one reason the battle was so extraordinarily bloody.
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  41. The Pac-Man engine would be more appropriate for Japan gobbling up so many European and American possessions in the Pacific in the succeeding 6 months.
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  42. Ask now what your country can do for you... ask what it can do for ME!
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  43. Because he's a Hitler sympathizer.
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  44. Why bring race into this? This has nothing to do with race in the modern sense of the word.
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  45. You're ignoring the larger strategic context in both cases.
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  46.  @nicholashollis1522  I don't know about the OP, but for me it's more glad that someone actually recognizes the fact that the US isn't uniquely horrible. It's been very fashionable for some decades now to pretend that it is.
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  47.  @Ugly_German_Truths  "Actual Franks"? You mean no true Frankman? In the last 50 years or so the tendency has been to be very suspicious of alleged connections between documented later medieval populaces, the purported ethnicity of roving bands in the Migration Era, and populations described in Roman propaganda. The High Medieval and later Franks may or may not have had anything to do with the people called Franks in 3rd century Roman sources, and either of those may or may not have anything to do with the people led by Clovis who eventually conquered most of Gaul. It's very probable that Clovis' warbands had people from all over the Germanic-speaking world, many of them not even originally being western Germanic-speakers or originally Germanic-speakers at all, as well as many hangers on they'd picked up along the way from local populations within the Empire. And there's considerable debate about whether the Goths shared any real cultural affinity with Scandinavian or western Germanic people. Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and other English myths are not the only fantasies spun by 19th century romantic writers, there's a lot of nonsense that was cooked up by German nationalists in the same era. Celtic nationalism didn't help either. The exact relationship between Gaels, Britons, Gauls, and Germans will probably never be known unless someone invents a time machine.
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  48. It's neither a right nor a privilege, it is merely the power.
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  49.  Trp Account  That depends on what you're counting. The US has a few more warheads actually deployed, Russia has a few more in reserve, overall they're roughly in parity and both far in excess of the rest of the world combined.
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  50. Cheeburger, cheeburger, cheeburger. No Pepsi, Coke.
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