Right Reason

Robert Citino on Dunkirk

 

Robert M. Citino, one of the foremost German-military historians today, has an interview, "Why the Germans Blew It at Dunkirk,” at Bloombery View about Dunkirk, both the actual event and Christopher Nolan’s movie about said event.

 

On the topic of the infamous Halt-Order, Mr. Citino says:

Remember, Hitler's May 24 Haltbefehl ("stop order") did not stop the Panzers from attacking the Dunkirk beachhead. They were already stopped by virtue of a "close-up order" from the commander of the Panzer Group, General Ewald von Kleist, on May 23rd. Kleist's Panzers were badly strung out and worn down as a result of the high-speed chase across northern France. Some of the other army commanders wanted to keep moving forward. The Army Group commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, backed Kleist, while the Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, disagreed with Rundstedt, and actually took the Panzer Group out from under his command. It was a mess of the worst sort! When Hitler flew to the front on May 24, it seemed as if the commander he respected the most, Rundstedt, was being sidelined. It also seemed (and this was actually true) that decisions of the highest order were being taken by commanders without looping in Hitler at all -- and that was something the Führer was determined to stop. That was the origins of the May 24 "halt order" -- an attempt by Hitler to reassert his control over events at the front.

 

Mr. Citino also speaks about the Wehrmacht’s command-structure, which is a reoccurring theme in his works:

Many students of World War II still hold to a myth of German efficiency, the notion that the Wehrmacht command was infallible. The Germans had a tradition of allowing commanders a great deal of latitude while on campaign, allowing them to seize opportunities that might otherwise be lost. That tradition was responsible for a great deal of their success. But often, German commanders worked at cross-purposes with one another, requiring a strong hand on the rudder, if you will. Virtually every "blunder" attributed to Hitler in World War II originated in a conflict within the German officer corps that only Hitler had the authority to sort out.

On Dunkirk, Mr. Citinio approves of the movie:

It’s impressive. 'Dunkirk' makes points about the human experience of war -- the almost anonymous and randomized killing, the chaos, the confusion -- but it also makes a far more directed point about the nature of modern war, the interplay of air/sea/land. And, as a German military historian, I would say that the movie provides the best treatment of a Stuka attack ca. 1940 that I have ever seen.

Many of the weaknesses many have identified with Dunkirk, including the anonymity of the characters and the movie's sheer loudness, are, to me, the movies greatest strengths. War does not care about whether its soldiers have interesting ties to home or about their back-story. It just places its soldiers in hell. Moreover, as anyone who has ever fired a rifle knows, war is loud, so very loud.

Dunkirk is truly a movie about Dunkirk. It’s about an organization’s struggle for existence in an almost hopeless situation. Those who have little interest in Dunkirk, or for that matter the cacophony of modern warfare, might have very little interest in Mr. Nolan’s film. But for those who are, Dunkirk is awesome.

Hunter S. Thompson and The Great Gatsby

Today is the 92nd anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. One of the lesser known factoids about The Great Gatsby is Hunter S. Thompson's inspiration from the work and this is covered in an article about him from The New Yorker, "Believer": 

There is a lot of edge in the Thompson style, and this gets him compared with people like Lenny Bruce and H. L. Mencken, indignant savagers of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He also seems, by virtue of the “outlaw” accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called “The Death of the American Dream,” a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck. Still, it pleased him to remember that Fitzgerald had once thought of calling “Gatsby” “The Death of the Red White and Blue.”

Art on a Languid Evening

I've been feeling a bit languid this evening. One of the things that I've been doing instead of the editing that I should have been doing is looking at pieces of art on Wikipedia. It is fitting that today is the anniversary of Vincent van Gough's birth. However, despite the occasion, I have not been looking at van Gough's art, but mostly art from the Danish Golden Age and the German Romantic Period.

I've included some that have caught my eye below:

 

"View from the Artist's Window" by Martinus Rørbye (1825)

 

 

"Cemetery Entrance" by Casper David Friedrich (1825)

 

 

"Midday" by Casper David Friedrich (1822)

 

 

"Medieval City on a River" by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1814)

J. Strauss: Radetzky-Marsch

 

 

 

The Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert is always something special. That many of the concerts are on YouTube displays the magnificent possibilities of the internet to diffuse information, and along with it culture, to everyone across the world.

The Radetzky-Marsch is a wonderful outro for that concert. 

Tall, Dark and Gruesome

 

 

 

Magic Card Sells for $19,400

 

Polygon reports the story: 

A rare and controversial Magic: The Gathering card sold for $14,900 on eBay, and the seller says he'll donate half of the proceeds to charity, according to the auction site's listing for the mythical Tarmogoyf card.

"You are bidding for a piece of Magic the Gathering history," the item's description reads. The owner and seller, Pascal Maynard, drew the card in the recent Grand Prix Las Vegas event, which took place last month. "I opened this Foil Modern Masters 2015 Tarmogoyf Grand Prix Vegas Stamped in the Top 8 and it created a huge story in the community, which you can probably find on the internet via #GoyfGate #FoilGoyf #MakeMagicHistory."

His decision to choose Tarmogoyf sparked some debate and controversy within the Magic community, as the hashtags above imply. 

As interesting as the story may be, it's the card that snatches my interest. One of the reasons why Magic: the Gathering has been such a successful game is that it's cards are so imaginative. Although each new set of cards certainly deserves not for introducing new mechanics and factors into the game, each also brings along with it new art work and new flavor brief texts, all enmeshed together. Just those those factors can make a fantasy world open up to a day-dreaming mind. Behold the Tarmogoyf:

Gorgeous. That flavor text alone wants me to immediately go out and buy a new Magic deck, just to see what new fantastical worlds Wizards of the Coast has thought up.

Two Moral Estimations of Dogs

 

The Old Shepard's Chief Mourner by Edwin Henry Landseer

 

Buffon: A Life in Natural History by Jacques Roger, translated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi and edited by L. Pearce Williams, is a biographic epic about a naturalist that history has largely forgotten. Today, le comte de Buffon receives no credit for laying down the basic principles of uniformitarianism in the middle of the eighteenth century, nor does he get credit for studying man from the point of view of natural history alone. He has been largely consigned to oblivion.

In the course of the book, M. Roger compares Buffon and Darwin's view of animals by comparing how they would have thought of dogs. It's something I can't help but excerpt here:

It was therefore necessary to make the comparison by studying man as we study animals: from the outside, by comparing them "only by the results of the natural operations of both of them." 

This point is essential, because it signifies two things. The first was that all man's "operations" are "natural," including, we shall see, speech, intellectual activity, and the creative innovation that gives rise to civilization. The second was that Buffon refused to humanize animals The ancient and venerable temptation, illustrated by touching stories of helpful dolphins or thankful lions, was one that many evolutionist naturalists of the nineteenth century could not resist. As a prime example, Darwin gave to animals in general and to his dog in particular the majority of human feelings, including, shame, humiliation, and a sense of gun. Buffon would never go that far. Beyond that, Buffon and Darwin clearly had different life experiences, which perhaps served as a basis for their theoretical positions. For Darwin, the dog was the companion of the solitary hunter setting out with his gun on his shoulder, searching for sucks or partridge, the loyal servant who obeyed at the sound of its master's voice and fetched the bird brought down on the wing. The dog in Buffon's eyes was the pack dog, which man watched, directed, or sent forth from the height of his horse. Darwin's dog slept close to the fireplace, and the living room must have smelled like dog. Buffon's dog slept in their kennel. The relationship could note have been the same. (Roger 1997: 159-160)

Deathstars in Moscow

 

 

 

Reload. Flip the switch. Reload. Trigger it.

Propagandacast #597: Death on Rails

 

 

WFB: Peanut Butter Freak

 

 

From the New York Time's "Peanut Butter With Sticking Power: How Red Wing Became William F. Buckley Jr.'s Favorite Peanut Butter" by David Segal:

Throughout a life of erudite jousting and patrician bonhomie, William F. Buckley Jr. was known as a conservative, a writer, a publisher, a talk-show host, a novelist and an avid sailor. But friends and family would say this biographical summary is incomplete without three more words: peanut butter freak.

Mr. Buckley didn’t just devour the stuff; he rhapsodized about it, telling readers in a 1981 column in National Review, the magazine he founded, that when he first married, he told his wife that he “expected peanut butter for breakfast every day of my life, including Ash Wednesday.”

This lifelong passion was nurtured during Mr. Buckley’s years in an English boarding school, when his father sent twice-a-month care packages that included grapefruits and a large jar of peanut butter. To his astonishment, British pals who shared in his bounty loved the grapefruit and spat out the peanut butter.

....

Regardless, the closing of the Fredonia factory can be seen as the head-on collision of this ardent free marketeer’s two great loves: capitalism and peanut butter, or at least one production line of one brand of peanut butter. It’s unlikely that this would have presented a real quandary to Mr. Buckley, if only because at the time of his death, he had a stockpile of Red Wing that his son described as large enough “to see the most determined survivalist through the next Armageddon.”

But the younger Buckley didn’t keep it all.

“The night before his funeral,” he said of his father, “into his coffin I slipped my mother’s ashes, his rosary, the TV remote control — and a jar of Red Wing peanut butter. I’d say no pharaoh went off to the next world better equipped.”