Tag: World War I

German soldiers celebrating Christmas in a trench.

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After the First World War’s initial opening phase of movement ended, the belligerents on both sides of the Western Front dug in to shelter from modern weaponry. What began as hastily-prepared rifle pits were formed into continuous lines of trenches across France and Belgium that stretched from the English Channel in the north to Switzerland in the south. Trench warfare on an unprecedented scale had begun.

The enduring image of the First World War comes from the Western Front: Opposing trench lines separated by the devastated interim space of mud, corpses, and shell craters that was no man’s land. (more…)

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Correlli Barnett
The Collapse of British Power
Frome & London: Butler & Tanner Ltd., 1972

Correlli Barnett is one of the rare British historians who views the Second World War as a disaster rather than in the usual flummery proclaiming that it was Britain’s “finest hour.” Barnett frames the scale of the calamity by illustrating Britain’s situation thusly: (more…)

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This week’s episode of The Writers’ Bloc features two men from the nations of the former Yugoslavia, host Nick Jeelvy with guest Dr. Tomislav Sunić, discussing the breakup of the country and the lessons today’s dissidents can learn from it, and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

“We are Making a New World” (1918) by Paul Nash, Imperial War Museum

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English original here

Traduit par Le Fauconnier

Une lecture Nationaliste Blanche de l’ouvrage de Dominique Venner:

Le Siècle de 1914: Utopies, guerres et révolutions en Europe au XXe siècle, Paris, Pygmalion, 2006 (more…)

Cecil Rhodes

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Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here, Part V here, Part VI here, Part VII.1 here, Part VII.2 here, Part IX here

The Superpowers Eclipse the European Nation-States

Despite the intense political rivalry among the European Great Powers, Europe in the nineteenth century managed to avoid the widespread destruction of the twentieth century’s two World Wars. (more…)

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Do not believe the poster of this 1952 film. Do not. Wait ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, isn’t the pleasant, bubbly, Technicolor singfest that is promised, although the song with all its nostalgic sentiment is there. Its appearances, however, evoke sadness and regret, much like old family photos tend to.

The action begins in the 1890s aboard a train chugging to Chicago, carrying Ben Harper (David Wayne) and Nellie (Jean Peters). (more…)

E. E. Cummings

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At the time of his death in 1962, modernist writer E. E. Cummings was the second most widely read poet in the United States after Robert Frost. William Carlos Williams ranked Cummings and Ezra Pound as “beyond doubt the two most distinguished” contemporary American poets. Pound titled his own global selection of poetry of various ages and cultures Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry (1964).  (more…)

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Part 1 here,  Part 2 here

You can watch The Big Parade in its entirety here.

Released in 1925, The Big Parade would go on to become the 2nd largest-grossing film of the entire silent film era. Only Birth of a Nation made more money. The Big Parade was so popular that it played in some theaters continuously for a year and at the Astor Theater in New York for two years. (more…)

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Part 1 here, Part 3 here

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is in the public domain. You can watch it here.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is best remembered today for being the film that launched the career of Rudolf Valentino. (more…)

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I took a rare day off on Memorial Day, but it had nothing to do with mourning dead American soldiers. Naturally, this didn’t stop me from being bombarded by the endlessly treacly and corny “conservative” online finger-wagging about how I need to honor all the dead soldiers who ostensibly shed their blood to protect my freedoms. (more…)

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David Lean (1908–1991) directed sixteen movies, fully half of them classics, including three of the greatest films ever made: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and, greatest of them all, Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Lawrence of Arabia is repeatedly ranked as one of the finest films of all time, and when one compares it to such overpraised items as Citizen Kane and Casablanca, a strong case can be made for putting it at the very top of the list. (more…)

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“Socialism” is intrinsic to the “Right.” When journalists and academics refer in one breath to “liberalism, neoliberalism, and the Right-wing,” that attests to their ignorance, not to the accuracy of any such bastardization. Even at its most basic level of understanding, it seems to have been forgotten that in Britain there were Tories and Whigs in opposition. Now, Toryism has become so detached from its origins (more…)