Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"men are thought to be virtuous in so far as they conform themselves to the dictates of reason." Perhaps true of the Enlightenment, but of Homeric Greece, or modern Islamism?

"Therefore, only if 'the doctrine of necessity' is true can a person rightly possess merit or demerit for his actions, since his actions are those that are caused by his character, wants, desires, motives, and so on. Everyone who ascribes responsibility must beleive in 'the doctrine of necessity.'" Smells like sophistry!

"This was not a succession. This was a paradigm shift, which coincided with the espousal by the United States of a distinctive vision of world order."

"The balance of world politics in 1919 resembled the unipolar moment of 1989 far more than the divided world of 1945."

"But no man dared look upon his face, for it was like the face of an angel" The Young King - was that a defence of monarchy?

"British inventions of the 20th century (you do not need to remember the dates of births and deaths.)" - So why put them in?

"Wartime suffering was at the root of what one left-wing intellectual described ominously in 1929 as 'the wild and brutal atmosphere of hatred and revenge which is still the dominating current of Eastern Europe.'

"On 24 October the revolution began when thousands of students went onto the streets of Budapest to demand peace, indrpendence, and a Károlyi government." The failed revolution we don't commemorate.

"By the autumn, as the German army was forced back on the Western Front, it was clear that the last days of the Habsburg Empire were approaching."

"The US army scattered over a million copies of a 'prisoner leaflet' that included a list of the ample rations served in its POW camps"

"However, at the societal level, massive wartime deprivation, the result of total mobilisation and the British blockade, had a lasting and decisive impact on the ethnically mixed communities of east-central Europe."

"'World history' had 'proven again and again that England takes everything from her vanquished and treats the poor, robbed people just as slaves'" Reichsbank pamphlet.

"'The importance of coal, iron and food was unknown before the war'" Ludendorf

"The handbook has been written to ensure anyone that can read English at ESOL entry level 3 [B1] or above should have no difficulty with the language." This makes it ideal for the first year or my Civilisation course :-)

"The wagons are already waiting for our Germans at the station at Nagydorog." Reminds me of my mother-in-law talking about 'our Jews' in 1944.

"In fact, the Machivellian Minister President [Tisza] 's real aim was to secure Hungary's territorial integrity and privileged position." Bit of a theme, this.

"The Germans' [U-boat] campaign was another illustration that ruthlessness and flouting international law brought worse than nothing." Worse still is that they will make all the same mistakes again more energetically in the 1980s. Interesting that Watson has adopted a German perspective and yet the Germans do not come out of it very well.

"For [the Kaiser] 'the war is the struggle between two world views: the Teutonic-German for morality, right, loyalty and faith, genuine humanity, truth and real freedom, against the Anglo-Saxon, the worship of Mammon, the power of money, pleasure, land-hunger, lies, betrayal, deceit and - last but not least - treacherous assassination!'".

Lost in translation - "Even his weenie is trembling from fear". The original Hungarian was probably 'kuki' or ''futyi", but 'weenie' killed it dead for me, brutally hurled from from Rácpácegres to somewhere in the US. "little penis" would have been better?

"...unlike continental powers, Britain neither grew nor stored large stocks of wheat, but instead fed its population through constant imports."

"Criminally inadequate rations, beatings and overwork...accounted for many.of the perhaps 140,000 and 230,000 men who died respectively in German and Austro-Hungarian-Hungarian captivity.' The ways in which first world war anticipates the second is a major theme of this book, but these figures shock me: worth comparing with labour camps under Communism.

"Hungarians...are more interested in seeing us starve to death than the English are." - Mayor Weiskirchner of Vienna

Background for Maria's 'The Rebels': "Others, abandoned by the adult world, formed gangs with fantasy names like 'the Black Hand' or 'the Apaches' and theived from bread wagons or coal yards to survive'. "

Difficult to imagine that Watson has anything worse to say about the Hungarian aristocracy than this: they put their pigs before their people. "When... Sturgh appealed for stricter measures to control food in December 1915, conjectures that they could not be more difficult to introduce than the recent decree to raise the age of military service to forty-two, he was missing the point.'

"Semaine rued his participation in a new 'lunatic' way of war, 'which money and America have created, simply to destroy everything and not to advance with a single man.'

"...three quarters of the shells fired by British artillery were of shoddy North American manufacture...three fifths of British medium calibre shells...did not explode."

"The defence had a natural advantage, for having been pushed closer to it's railhead it could usually add troops quickly to plug the gaps or retake lost positions. By contrast, reinforcements for the attackers were slowed by the need to carry up supplies and munitions across broken land, in which they were vulnerable to enemy shellfire."

"A United States of Europe' under German control would, in the longer term, offer the opportunity to compete with the world's other great economic blocks: the United States and the British and Russian Empires."

"Study of a Prussian Having its Morning Hate" - Punch anticipates George Orwell

"...in peacetime [Germany's] population had been reliant on imports for 19% of the calories it consumed. The country had an even greater need for external sources of protein and fats, 27% and 42% of which respectively came from abroad." Leibensraum?