Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"German intellectuals were overwhelmingly united in attributing enmity to unscrupulous self-interest." If Ferguson's contention that Britain allied itself to French and Russia because those countries were threats to it's empire, and Germany not; then the intellectuals were right :-(

Déjà vú? "Yet in an early demonstration of the lack of solidarity that was to plague the Habsburg war effort until 1918, the Magyar government took the view that the refugees were a purely Austrian problem and refused to assist. Many were stopped at border posts although they often simply crossed at other at other points. Tens of thousands were ejected from Magyar lands. Others stayed but we're not made welcome."

The Tsarist army regarded this campaign as a war for racial unity...this dream looked forward to the bloody racial, the Generalplan Ost, which the Nazis would embark upon in the same region only a quarter of a century later."

"Regular Habsburg officers in Galicia condemned the Magyar 'as cowardly and without discipline' and cursed, especially its cavalry as 'the greatest evil of all'". Looks like hearsay to me, especially after the detail of Habsburg atrocities in Serbia. Not enough to take it at face value, and put it down to linguistic difficulties.

"In 1914 the army felt itself to be in what historian Oscar Jászi termed a 'double war', waged not only against external states but also ethnic groups inside the Empire's boundaries."

"The history of east-central Europe and the Balkans as the continent's 'bloodlands' did not begin with Fascist and Communist regimes later in the twentieth century."

"Some 162 regiments officially had two languages, twenty-four used three, and there were even a few regiments from areas so mixed that four languages had to be recognised. Any new officer arriving at a regiment had three years to learn it's languages." Which didn't leave much time for military stuff ;-)

"Under Schlieffen, who was intensely secretive about his plans and contemptuous of Australia-Hungarian military capabilities, contracts between the Chiefs of the General Staff were by 1905 limited to an annual exchange of Christmas cards." Out of Blackwater, surely?

"...in Hungary... in the month after Franz Ferdinand's murder...Every man spied on his neighbour, no matter how placid and peace- loving." I thought all that started under Communism.

"They had sold their car, their television set and their radio to buy a tiny cottage and garden..." Communist economics explained.

"A husband's funeral is a wife's true wedding!" Makes you wonder if Czech widows also put their names on their husband's gravestones.

"Behind his words there was more than joy at seeing children run and grass grow; there was a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a Communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass grew or children ran."

"History is as light as an individual human life, unbearably light, as light as a feather..." Forrest Gump?

"An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself for the rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic consent, which has nothing to do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor." What do teachers consent to?

"They're bureaucrats. All they need is a note in their files...then...they're covered."

"Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made by not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise."

I used to say literature is art not life because nobody goes to the toilet in literature: cancel that.

"minister president" I prefer this translation of 'miniszterelnök' to primeminister.

"Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies." Facebook, etc. ?

"Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

"She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. Nut he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them...He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked women." Better.

"The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence." All these self conscious epigrams, like Wilde in Dorian Gray, no wonder they both ended in France.

"...we are quite willing to attribute our failure to lack of knowledge rather than the absence of causality."

"So, it might then be argued, there is a kind of circularity in Hume's science of man. As long as we focus only on the explanation of the idea of causality, everything seems in order, but that is only because we are surreptitiously presupping a prior notion of a single self or mind." How can we not suppose this? cf Descartes, R.D.Laing

Interesting style, didactic and narrative in short sentences: like a school teacher.

By fighting Germany in 1914, Asquith, Grey and their colleagues helped ensure that, when Germany did finally achieve predominance on the continent [now, within the EU], Britain was no longer strong enough to provide a check to it." Sobering.

"By contrast, Britain's national debt had increased from 30.5 per cent of GNP in 1913 to a CRUSHING 178% in 1928." (My capitalisation) Now you don't.

"The ratio of debt to national income had been even higher for Britain in 1815: close to 200 per cent. Yet Britain had become the nineteenth century's successful economy - and its most stable polity - despite that burden." Now he sees it.

"Keynes was being too trusting" - but Keynes was right, financial chaos led to democratic chaos, the rise of Nazism and an even worse war in Europe. Whether the damage was self-inflicted or not seems of secondary importance.