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Forgotten History

I bet you have piles of books.
I follow the wonderful translations from ancient Chinese of the Stratagems of the Warring states by Jennifer Dodgson:
https://jenniferdodgson.wixsite.com/warringstates

Each one of them is a tasty treat but today this intrepid translator tweeted this gem and I was mightily amused:

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This was related to the following puzzle: what is ailing this person?

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Here is the original tweet:
 
An intriguing tale.

Believing they were secretly working for Germany, members of a subversive “fifth column” were actually the targets of an extraordinary British intelligence operation.


IN APRIL 1943, Nancy Brown sat down with three friends in a London apartment to describe a German bombing raid she had witnessed a few weeks earlier in her hometown of Brighton, on England’s south coast.

“Someone said: ‘Oh, look at those planes,’” she explained, “and they looked out to sea and saw some big black planes flying in over the top of the water—couldn’t hear a sound—and just as they got to the end of the pier they seemed to turn their engines on and they flew straight up like that, branched out, and started machine–gunning and cannon–firing and dropped a lot of bombs!”

This was a “tip-and-run” raid, when Luftwaffe fighters would fly in from France below the British radar, strafe coastal towns, and then get out before the Royal Air Force could scramble to take them on.

Brown, a fresh-faced woman in her early twenties, had been in a café when the raid started. “I’d no sooner sat down in Ward’s to have my coffee when suddenly: ‘Crack! Crack! Crack!’ And everybody dived to the back of the shop because they felt quite sure the bullets were coming in at the windows and we were all huddled together,” she said. “And then Boomp!”—she banged the table—“Boomp! Boomp! And the windows blew in and out and the doors blew in and out. And when we came out we could see great columns of smoke coming up.”

Attacks like this were quite common at this stage of the war. What made Brown’s experience unique was that she thought the German bombing raid was the result of her work. Nancy Brown believed herself to be a Nazi informant. She had been recruited by the two women with her, and they reported to the man whose apartment they were in, Jack King.

We know what Nancy Brown said because she was one of the targets of an extraordinary British intelligence operation. “Jack King” was, in reality, Eric Roberts, a 35-year-old Englishman and married father of three who lived in the pleasant commuter suburb of Epsom, southwest of London. Until 1940, he had been a clerk at Westminster Bank and a source of some frustration to his employers, who found him altogether lacking in seriousness. ...

https://www.historynet.com/mi5s-diabolical-ruse-to-flush-out-nazi-supporters-in-britain.htm
 
Germany also had a colonial past.

Germany has handed back the human remains of indigenous people killed during a genocide in colonial Namibia more than 100 years ago.

A Namibian government delegation received the skulls at a church service in the capital, Berlin.

The bones had been sent to Germany for now-discredited research to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans.

Tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people were murdered in response to an anti-colonial uprising.

It is thought that 75% of the Herero population and half of the Nama population died.

The skulls of some of the victims were sent to Germany where racial anthropologists studied them as part of an attempt to justify a theory about the superiority of Europeans.

There are thought to be hundreds of Namibian skulls in Germany and on Wednesday more than 25 remains were handed back.

Skulls from Germany's other African colonies, including modern day Cameroon, Tanzania, Rwanda and Togo, were also used in the discredited studies.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-45342586

Follow up.

Germany has officially acknowledged that it committed genocide during its colonial-era occupation of Namibia, and announced a financial support gesture.

German colonisers killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people there in early 20th Century massacres.

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Friday acknowledged the killings as genocide.

"In light of Germany's historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness," he said. Mr Maas added that Germany would, in a "gesture to recognise the immense suffering inflicted on the victims", support the country's development through a programme worth more than €1.1bn (£940m; $1.34bn).

The agreement will reportedly see funding paid over 30 years through spending on infrastructure, healthcare and training programmes benefiting the impacted communities.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57279008
 
Thats a very good article.

(says she who found Gravitys Rainbow unreadable).

But can anyone write about others experiences without taking them over? Do we have to stick to our own?
 
Thats a very good article.

(says she who found Gravitys Rainbow unreadable).

But can anyone write about others experiences without taking them over? Do we have to stick to our own?
I have Gravity's Rainbow right here, next to me. Have had it a few years.
Haven't read it.
 
Thats a very good article.

(says she who found Gravitys Rainbow unreadable).

But can anyone write about others experiences without taking them over? Do we have to stick to our own?

It is a good article, and I think the point is we've reached the stage where we should be helping out writers who would want to tell their own, local stories rather than make preferences for outsiders telling those stories instead. I suppose the danger is that then those stories become compartmentalised - there are too many people who would never think to read a book by an African author, but might tackle Pynchon. Don't ask me what the solution is! You can lead a horse to water...
 
The Times has a feature on concentration camps on Alderney in World War Two.

It's behind a paywall and it's grim reading.

Arbitrary beatings, burnings, torture by the SS and other German guards.
A starvation diet and 12 hours days of forced labour with a small break for lunch - half a litre of cabbage soup.

Most victims French Jewish civilians, some Spanish civilians, or Russian, Ukrainian, Polish troops.

Number of deaths unknown, estimates are anything between 900 and 3000.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/exposed-the-nazi-horror-camp-on-british-soil-qq0qw70wx
 
Alderney is the nicest Channel Isle and the people are all too aware of its sad history.

(Ive known people from there but never had an opportunity to go)
 
I dont know how widespread the knowledge of this is, i had certainly never heard of it.

Today marks the 100 year anniversary of the 'Tulsa Massacre' in which over 300 black Americans in an affluent area were killed and much of the area was burnt to the ground.

"The Tulsa race massacre took place May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of White residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US.[10]Alternatively known as the Black Wall StreetMassacre, the Greenwood Massacre, the Tulsa Massacre, the Tulsa pogrom, or the Tulsa race riot,[11][12][13][14][15][16] it marks one of "the single worst incident(s) of racial violence in American history".[17] The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district – at that time the wealthiest Black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street".[18]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
 
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I only know about the Tulsa Massacre because it was dramatised in the tv series sequel to the Watchmen and also the horror series Lovecraft County. When I watched the Tulsa Massacre episode of the Watchmen, I had to go online and find out if it was real. I was absolutely shocked to find out that even the biplane strafing the citizens as they fled was all real. I had never heard of it before and wondered why?
 
I only heard about the Tulsa massacre from a poster on here (it might have been somewhere within this very thread). When I Googled it I was shocked that it there wasn't greater awareness of it. :(
 
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I only heard about the Tulsa Massacre from Watchmen on TV too - you can bet President Biden apologised for it this week because of that show, because if it hadn't opened with a representation of it, it would not be in the public consciousness a hundred years later.
 
I learned about it back in the Sixties and Seventies during the period when racism and racial injustice were prominent issues in the American scene. Since then the incident (like other similar riots, the Tuskegee syphilis study, southern lynchings, etc.) faded from the spotlight and hence from public consciousness.
 
I learned about it back in the Sixties and Seventies during the period when racism and racial injustice were prominent issues in the American scene. Since then the incident (like other similar riots, the Tuskegee syphilis study, southern lynchings, etc.) faded from the spotlight and hence from public consciousness.

I suppose a UK equivalent would be mentions of the Chinese opium scandal of the 1800s over here, which seems to be gaining traction recently.
 
Or the 'Peterloo massacre' which got quite a bit of publicity recently

That's because Mike Leigh made a film about it. These bits of scandalous history wax and wane, and let's face it, it's a rare nation that doesn't have shame in its past. Doesn't excuse it, but the way it keeps on happening never seems to change us, more's the pity.
 
I don't think there's much chance of forgetting blasted Henry and his wives they're on tv every five minutes. I am rather sick of them.

But yeah, I know what you mean. That new drama looks like they are trying out something different.
 
Henry VIII actually gives birth from under his codpiece in episode 3. You know... like what happened in history.
 
I don't think there's much chance of forgetting blasted Henry and his wives they're on tv every five minutes. I am rather sick of them.

But yeah, I know what you mean. That new drama looks like they are trying out something different.
Is it like the 'blaxpliotation' films of the 70's?
 
That's because Mike Leigh made a film about it. These bits of scandalous history wax and wane, and let's face it, it's a rare nation that doesn't have shame in its past. Doesn't excuse it, but the way it keeps on happening never seems to change us, more's the pity.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it?
 
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