You should reach out to that Bose chap, a nice uprising behind the British lines works wonders for a little Blitzkrieging.
You mean...You should reach out to that Bose chap, a nice uprising behind the British lines works wonders for a little Blitzkrieging.
@zanaikin
The interesting part about the drug thing; next to literally all of the belligerents distributed (or at least tolerated their use as long as it didn't affect their missions) some sort of drugs, especially amphetamines, for their troops. Of course, there was one major player for whom the lives of their own troops were worth less than the cost of drugs (or bullets sometimes for that matter), so they maybe didn't see a big need.
I like how you included the Germans giving their soldiers meth. Certainly an underexposed part of the war.
What other drugs were used as widespread though? I know all sides experimented with drugs, but Germany's orders in the millions is hard to come even close to =o
I find it interesting this is STILL a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarnak_Farm_incident
Clearly, the military doesn't care. Committing crimes because your brain is on psychoactive agents? Perfectly okay!
Pervitin is fairly exposed. I've stumbled across its mentions in so many books, albeit under many different nicknames and rarely discussed in detail. But logistical details are boring to most people, and it's just not as 'exciting' as Nazis and explosions.
Meanwhile, find me a single western WW2 documentary that discusses Churchill's crimes against humanity. The many, many organized despicable actions the allies conducted during the war barely receives a mention in most sources (i.e. the Allied bombing of neutral, civilian Tehran). But no, modern media would rather bury them in the dirt in their 'good vs evil' debate.
It's part of why I like writing this AAR. Exposing the war's many hypocrisies is a joy.
What other drugs were used as widespread though?
Churchill's crimes in Bengal are well documented in serious historical circles. Of course popular history is going to simplify the narrative, but academic history hardly sweeps the crimes of the Allies under the rug. I think that the reason it's not incorporated into the narrative of AARs is that doing so is a bit on the edge of board rules.What other drugs were used as widespread though? I know all sides experimented with drugs, but Germany's orders in the millions is hard to come even close to =o
I find it interesting this is STILL a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarnak_Farm_incident
Clearly, the military doesn't care. Committing crimes because your brain is on psychoactive agents? Perfectly okay!
Pervitin is fairly exposed. I've stumbled across its mentions in so many books, albeit under many different nicknames and rarely discussed in detail. But logistical details are boring to most people, and it's just not as 'exciting' as Nazis and explosions.
Meanwhile, find me a single western WW2 documentary that discusses Churchill's crimes against humanity. The many, many organized despicable actions the allies conducted during the war barely receives a mention in most sources (i.e. the Allied bombing of neutral, civilian Tehran). But no, modern media would rather bury them in the dirt in their 'good vs evil' debate.
It's part of why I like writing this AAR. Exposing the war's many hypocrisies is a joy.
I think Churchill is such an interesting figure, who really never gets a truly honest examination as people either underplay or over-exaggerate his actions and not many historians find the time to actually show the nuance of how the same traits that made him such a great wartime PM are the same traits that led to his decisions on Tehran, Bengal and Dresden.
Anyway, I daresay we'll see much worse committed by Germany "in the real life of this timeline" that'll put the Allied crimes to shame.
How are the programs against Opium, Footbinding, Illiteracy and other remnants of the feudal past going? Oh, and how is Chiang dealing with the writers and artists this time? Historically, he managed to turn almost all of them to the communist side with his repressiveness (yes, funny, I know, but they figured anything must be better than him... boy, were they in for a surprise!).
Churchill's crimes in Bengal are well documented in serious historical circles. Of course popular history is going to simplify the narrative, but academic history hardly sweeps the crimes of the Allies under the rug. I think that the reason it's not incorporated into the narrative of AARs is that doing so is a bit on the edge of board rules.
I read the decline and fall of the British Empire and I had to stop (which I never did before or since)'reading it for a while because it was so... brutal.
Thing is, though, I don't think a German unification of Europe would last long after Hitler's death; the Nazi regime was living on borrowed time economically already, and there's only so much a Skaver's economy would do. We might consider Hitler a hero in the future, but, like with Genghis Khan, we'd be wrong. I also do, full disclosure, consider the Nazis worse than every other European Empire, but any further discussion of their atrocities is probably against board rules.Oh Churchill is very interesting alright...
Any German victory is terrible for Europe, at least in the short run. As a historian I listen to once reminded: "in a thousand years, when fresh memories fade, people might praise a successful Hitler for uniting Europe just as we praise Genghis Khan today for rebuilding Euroasia links."
Well, from what (little) I've read, many Chinese writers and artists during the revolutionary period were leftist to begin with. I'm not sure Chiang would care much about them now, since artists by themselves have little actual power -- plus he's cleaned out many of his political rival.
At any rate, DH is a poor civil administration simulator P= (gosh, what I could do with HOI4 National Spirits and Stellaris ethos mechanics~)
Still, you'll like the next update -- The New CC Clique and Azad Hind.
Keyword: academic.
What % of the population actually crack open the books some of us read?
Modern propaganda does not use censorship but marginalization of inconvenient facts. Too many Britons still claim that India benefited from colonialism because the British gave them railroa, administration, yadda yadda, and then withdrew voluntarily, because that is how British schoolbooks try to portray it. Highlighting 'benefits' while marginalizing crimes as 'anomalies' rather than 'policy'.
Then I talk to Indians and they just smile thinly... "the British likes to pretend they gave us independence." There's a reason why BBC was promoting Gandhi while being forbade to run documentaries on Bose during the pertinent time period.
Thing is, though, I don't think a German unification of Europe would last long after Hitler's death; the Nazi regime was living on borrowed time economically already, and there's only so much a Skaver's economy would do. We might consider Hitler a hero in the future, but, like with Genghis Khan, we'd be wrong. I also do, full disclosure, consider the Nazis worse than every other European Empire, but any further discussion of their atrocities is probably against board rules.
I think Bose is often ignored compared to Gandhi because Bose and Azad Hind only saw a transformation in perception in India post-War. Most Indians during the war believed that he was a hypocrite due to his ant imperialism and yet his alignment with Imperial Japan, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Those powers were explicitly trying to gain an empire and he was aligning himself with them. Bose and the Azad Hind and the INA were also massive failures in terms of military matters so it's not like he was ever close to success.
And to be honest, as someone who studied Bose and India's road to independence with help from an Indian student (international arrival) and a British-Indian lecturer. I can't help but think those Indians you talked to have bought into the same kind of mythmaking which paints the British as tyrannical in America and forgets the truth of the Boston riots. I'd argue that just as with America Post-SYW that India at the end of WW2 had no real threats to itself if it became independent and could "afford" a chaotic independence that might not have been affordable without the Soviet Union being exhausted, China being in complete disarray and Japan's empire extinguished.
So in a nutshell:
History is depressing
It's just one mass death after another
Problems with that view:
Thus, I have to question how much of wartime claims are British "bending truth to fit their own convenient views"... especially when most wartime info on India come from UK administrator and generals (again, much of the INC leadership was under arrest).
- Most Indians didn't know much about Bose during the war, only what the UK was willing to tell them (which was nothing good).
- Much of the INC leadership that Bose associated with was under arrest during the war, styming proper discussions.
- The INA emerged so late the Allies were already winning (better to hedge bets on the victor).
- When Bose's supporters did finally get a voice during the INA trials, the outcry and mutinies that followed were certainly not one of "they're hypocrites".
Excerbating this is the Gandhi Clique suppression Bose's legacy until the 70s to give themselves more credit. Open discussion about Bose hasn't really surfaced until around 2000, steadily increasing since. It's like how mainlander Chinese were taught that the CPC did most of WWII fighting until recent decades, which is just blatantly untrue.
I don't think India's peaceful independence has actually helped India.. but this is a topic I'd rather discuss when it's pertinent. Your last sentence baffles me though as many Indian leaders were Pro-Soviet and was on good terms with China (at least ROC), so if anything, the chaos around them negatively affected India's bargaining position during the transitory period as it increased Britain's regional influence.
In my field I meet a lot of actual Indians (not Indian Americans). My preference is to always research through a multimedia, multicultural approach, then discuss the matter with people actually from that part of the world to learn what are the foreign biases involved.
I'll elaborate my thoughts sometime, but essentially, saying Indians thinking one way or another is an extreme simplification of a view. Especially a perspective on what the British were to India, and what they meant.
Suffice to say, let's start by saying Indian very much doesn't really tell you anything when you scratch past the surface. Churchill was, while simplifying it, essentially right when he said India is a geographical term. Is that the case now? Not really, but this is a new thing for India - a wide overculture. India isn't like China, where the wide nation was centralized at various times over a millenia. In China, multiple Chinese states and dynasties were unusual in that they were the end of one era and start of another, a chaotic, violent transition period. In the land of Bharat, separate nations, separate people, were the norm. A (mostly, since even Ashoka didn't iron the entire land together) unified state was such an incredibly rare thing, that it usually was the signifier that the end would soon come. The Wheel of Fate was that it couldn't hold together. Numerous old Chinese texts (the ones to survive anyways) refer to people who simply no longer exist, having been subsumed into the Han mass long ago. That never happened in India. In India, it was faith that was the main determinant. China had, has a cosmological principle of how they are and who they are in relation to the universe, but in the Land, faith was what was the common denominator. And different cultures, very much different cultures. Few if any cultures were ever absorbed into others like that. If anything only ever more were created, split off.
Zanaikin, I get this is your AAR, but it's more complicated than what you're laying out here.
The problem with saying Bose is viewed badly because Britain is that it ignores the fact that not all propaganda is wholly misleading. It is true that Bose was moving against an established Imperial power by siding with 3 "up and coming" imperial powers of which two were more brutal on a per year basis compared to the British. Bose may not have had ideas that were that bad, but it cannot be denied that when you denounce Britain but saddle up with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan that propaganda would be right to call you a hypocrite of the highest order. That alone even if argued from realpolitik perspectives does make Bose what the propaganda said he was. This also explains why the INC Bose clique was arrested, which while stymying discussion of his merits can't be seen too harshly when they are directly associating with a wartime enemy. I'll give you that these arrests were detrimental to Bose being heard out, but again Bose was a hypocrite and a traitor so it's hard to argue that those advocating on his behalf weren't also being the same type of hypocrites or traitors to India.
Well if the INA emerged so late, isn't that a failure on Bose's part to not get it up and running sooner? And on the INA trials, I did mention that the perception shifted post-War. Again here the threat of Japan was no longer omnipresent and so people forgot who the INA and Azad Hind had been aligned with and the nationalists began to downplay that heavily.
You can question the wartime claims, but unless you have good evidence to refute them then I'd argue you can't make an opposite conclusion without clear evidence.
Agreed on the Gandhi clique, the problem with Bose is that the BJP in India as a Hindu Nationalist party have a vested interest in playing up nationalist figures in the curriculum and the (modern) INC to also play up how hard done by they were by the awful British and downplay Bose and the associated crimes of Japan. I was going to say this further down, but you have to consider nationalist bias just as much as foreign bias. So just talking to Indians randomly (if this is not the case, I apologise, as you only mentioned talking to them without any elaboration) won't be any better in terms of bias.
I'll reserve comment on this whole paragraph until you get to your thoughts on India's independence in the updates to come, if that's okay with you? Suffice to say, my point is roughly that with the end of empires, and the Soviets and ROC being ambivalent/supportive that Indian's knew that they could safely become independent ASAP and risk chaos due to the lack of strong neighbours who would want to take their land.
I mentioned my response to foreign/nationalist bias above.
What I mean is that first, it's more than just three groups, but what I mean more is that the identity of India as a denonym, a signifier of one nation only, is a very new thing. And I also mean that it's not a very deep identity. And saying just because you talked to some Indians and read some books, that that's what Indians mostly think is just flat out wrong. And that's without factoring in the even further varied views of the migrants to other shores, which are still important because they often have family still in India. Besides a few niggles, AvatarOfKhaine is largely right (basically, about the BJP). India basically needed, back then, founding myths - not a sin, all nations do it. It's just appropriate to understand that that's what it is, myths.
An issue of whether the British were good is not, despite what old-school nationalists (molded in the 50s and 60s largely) want you to think, is still very much a passionate issue that often divides friends, generations, families, even now. If anything, it's becoming more pertinent than ever, after 50 years of independence, and coinciding with India, unnoticed somewhat, part of the mass movement around the world of popular, democratic revolt against old, stagnant establishment, and having a non-INC party in power for the first time. Basically, the old post-colonial legacy in India is finally dying - it took a while, but it is. It's humorously ironic actually, the younger generations, the non-INC generations are actually more supportive of what Britain did for India. And they would tell you Britain did a lot.
The recent dustups with China have only made more people look at the legacy of early INC stalwarts like Ghandi, Nehru, and the like, and finally taking a critical look, even trashing what they did, how they turned India on the eve of independence from the richest country in Asia into an economic basket case, and how they tiptoed the nation into living mass delusions, that led to disasters like the 1962 war, and the possibility it would happen again. And as far as the epic heroism of Bose, there never was any "conspiracy" to deny Bose his credit, besides Ghandists - it's always been known, he is, or was rather, a national hero. Even upto the 2000s, INA veterans were still feted. You know though, India had tons of veterans who fought against the INA too, fought for the British Indian Army, and many even, for the actual British Empire, believe it or not! Considered the INA traitors, they and their families, and a large swathe of society too - there never was a mass popular movement, or large majority ideology. And people are finally appreciating them, listening to their stories.
I'd know, since my family was filled with them. Veterans on both sides of that fence.
Look, again, I'm not trying to rain on your parade, and this is your AAR, so you're certainly free to write it how you see fit, but basically using Britain repeatedly as a giant punching bag is, I feel, detracting from the story a wee bit.