The "What If" Scenario of History

Looking back on history, it can often be easy to overlook

But in the case of Operation Sealion, Nazi Germany's planned invsion of Britain -- averted by defeat in the Battle of Britain -- historical distance should actually increase the sense of the urgency Britons must have felt while fighting the air battle against the Luftwaffe.

The documented plans for the occupation of Britain revealled a plan to lull Britons into a false sense of security, then oppress them brutally.

It seems clear that econommics was at least one of the weapons to be used against the populace in occupied Britain. The exchange rate set by the Nazi government was to be extravagantly favourable to the British Pound.

One can see this in the true-life occupation of the Channel Islands (occupied as a prelude to the attempted invasion of Britain).

This was to be followed by systematically hunting and killing those whose names were found in the pages of the "Black book" -- German emigres like Sigmund Freud and Britain's literary and intellectual elites.

Even authors as otherwise unthreatening as Virginia Woolf were to be killed by Nazi death squads operating in Britain.

The "what if" scenario is one that has proven popular in history as in fiction. The "what if" scenarios presented by history are all the more unsettling because of the looming prospect of reality.

John Baglow: Entitled to His Own Facts, History, Maybe Even Reality

It should be stated right off the bat that John "Dr Dawg" Baglow is not a complete idiot.

In fact, Canada's progressive blogosphere seems to view him as their best and brightest. And while they delight in keeping company with people who delight in calling other people stupid, it's amazing the kind of idiocy that their "best and brightest" can produce.

This particular tale begins with a stray dimwit on Blazing Cat Fur claiming that "there was no extermination in Germany".

Referring, of course, to the Holocaust.

Enter Jay Currie drawing attention to that particular comment in a blog post about the censorious nature of many Canadian academics. At which point Baglow utters this mind-numbingly stupid remark:

John Baglow. Claiming that there's "little evidence" that any of the exterminations that were part of the Holocaust took place in Germany.

There is no possible way he could have even possibly been more wrong.

Numerous commenters attempt to bring various points to Baglow's attention: that the planning of the Holocaust took place on German soil, and that killings took place at the concentration camp at Dachau.

Points to which Baglow responds in incredibly obtuse fashion:

Baglow goes on to appeal to a page from the Nizkor project disputing that the gas champers at Dachau were ever used for any killings.

Another commenter points out that camps like Auschwitz were within the borders of Germany as defined after the annexation of Austria. Mark Bourrie points out that his wife's granfather was killed at a Sachenhausen satellite camp.

Natasha from Moose and Squirrel provides a better source on the Dachau camp, one that notes that enough prisoners were killed at Dachau that the Nazis had to draw up special protocols for body disposal.

It also notes the work of Dr Sigmund Rascher, who conducted medical experiments at Dachau that are well-known to have been fatal to the subjects.

Yet another commenter points out that the gas chambers at Dachau had actually been used, and also notes that Baglow's thesis would also have to omit the thousands of Jews who died on the famed "death marches" of concentration camp prisoners to camps in central Germany.

(Daniel Goldhagen's landmark work on the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners, also notes that these were not, by any means, direct routes. Rather they were winding routes, planned to pass through as many German towns and villages as possible, so the German populace could see these Jews on their death marches.)

But the greatest problem for Baglow may come from his very own Nizkor source:

When Baglow wants to argue that none of the Holocaust exterminations took place on German soil, he may want to avoid relying on a source that seems to express some sympathy for, of all individuals, Ernst Zundel.

(Evidently sharing Baglow's hostility to Israel should do nothing to mitigate that.)

One should wonder precisely how it is that someone who is otherwise as intelligent as John Baglow could be so utterly and inexcusably remiss.

It doesn't take a top Holocaust historian to point out the number of ways in which Baglow is wrong. And yet Baglow somehow felt a need to take a stand on an historical error that anyone with a lick of sense had to know that they couldn't defend.

Unless one considers the tendency of many of Baglow's cohorts to argue in a manner along the lines of Stephen Colbert's famed concept of truthiness.

As Colbert has so often described it, truthiness encapsulates an inherently selfish intellectual methodology in which one is not only entitled to their own opinions, but also entitled to their own facts.

When one is entitled to their own facts, one is entitled to their own history -- one divorced from any inconvenient facts. One in which the Soviet Union did not oppress religion adhering to a communist doctrine that held that atheism and communism were inseparable. One in which National Socialism is divorced from the socialism. One in which the exterminations of the Holocaust took place entirely outside of German borders.

One that bears only a passing resemblence to actual history -- and sometimes not even that.

It makes clear the enterprise of groups such as the Progressive Historians -- a group intent on twisting history to their ideological designs. At least a few of them even seem to understand that the historical revisionism of tomorrow is best accomplished today.

Baglow and so many of his cohorts seem to take this particular concept of entitlement even further: they are entitled to their own reality. Things are as they say they are because they say they are. And no amount of evidence will be allowed to convince them otherwise.

The truth is that John Baglow is not really a Holocaust denier. Not in the same sense that Ernst Zundel is. But it's clear that Baglow is more than willing to deny some of the details of the Holocaust out of a historical ignorance that, from someone as otherwise intelligent as Baglow, can really only be wilful and self-assumed.

After all, Baglow is not a complete idiot. But in his urge to try to score points against the opposing ideological camp, he has argued something truly idiotic.

Those things happen. But until he's willing to admit the extent of his error, there's no reason why he should be simply courteously allowed off the hook.

John Baglow conducts himself without intellectual honesty or intellectual dignity. Thus, he receives no quarter. None.

This Day in Canadian History

December 23, 1944 - HCMS Clayoquot torpedoed by U-Boat

On December 23, 1944, a German U-Boat torpedoed the HCMS Cloyoquot, a Canadian Navy minesweeper.

The ship was torpedoed by U-806, just outside the approaches to Halifax harbour. The ship's crew would struggle to save it for several hours before it finally sank. Eight Canadian sailors were lost. The remainder were eventually rescued by the HCMS Fennel.

The allied forces in Europe relied heavily on war materiel manufactured in Canada and the United States. As a result, the shipping lanes between Canada and Britain were of paramount importance, and a key factor in the winning of the European war were the efforts of the Canadian navy in staving off the menace of German U-Boats.

Strikes as far deep into Canadian waters as that which sunk the Cloyoquot were made possible by what today seems like an intuitive innovation -- that of the schnorkel, a tube that extended from the U-Boat up to the surface, which allowed it to take in oxygen and expel exhaust, allowing it to stay submerged for longer periods of time.

It seems surprising today that a snorkel was once considered so innovative.

But for such a simple innovation, it proved extremely effective. In some cases, U-Boats were able to embark upon extended voyages in which they remained submerged for up to 65% of the time.

Canadian ships had first encountered U-Boats during the First World War, and had proven unprepared for them. At the time Canada had only one cruiser, and was largely reliant on the British fleet. Broad portions of Canadian waters were designated as part of the Empire's North American and West Indies Station.

To make matters worse, Canada's lone cruiser was actually a relic of a bygone era, only serving to exacerbate Canada's dependence on British protection.

U-Boats operating in Canadian waters during that war were so successful that it was believed that Germany had actually established a secret submarine base somewhere on the Canadian coast.

Despite these successes -- and the hyesteria inspired by the notion of German bases and spies operating in Canada -- the threat of submarine warfare was underestimated, even as the spectre of war again began to stir in Europe.

During the early years of the war, the limited effective range of U-Boats allowed Canadian Frigates and Bangor-class minesweepers (like the Cloyoquot) to provide Canada with comparatively luxurious security against the U-Boat threat.

If the danger posed by the U-Boats wasn't firmly understood by Canadian military brass it was, if anything, possibly exaggerated by Canadian journalists, who made wartime icons of the Gillespie Children of Russel, Manitoba, who survived a U-Boat attack. They also made a martyr of Hamilton, Ontario's Margaret Hayworth, a child who did not. Seafaring Canadians would quickly begin to fear that they, too, could be victims of the heavily-moralized U-Boat threat.

As late as in 1939, it had been recognized that the Canadian navy had been remiss in declining to outfit Canadian ships with SONAR, and that it would have to quickly be acquired in the case of hostilities.

At this point, Canadian military brass had been aware of -- if not appreciative of -- the threat posed by U-Boats.

While Canadian sailors would fight valiantly -- and, in time, very effectively -- against U-Boats, the initial reluctance to recognize the threat cost Canada dearly in the early days of the war. It may not be unfair to posit that the failure of military and political leadership to respond to the U-Boat threat may have even extended the length of the war by months, or perhaps even years.

The Inglourious War

As some have no doubt noted, Quentin Tarantino needed some serious balls to rewrite the history of World War II with Inglourious Basterds.

But in doing so, the film -- in which Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads his borderline-psychotic band of guerillas on a mission to assassinate Adolph Hitler -- sheds some light on one of the more inglorious aspects of war:

Psychological warfare.

The Basterds' Mission is primarily one of psychological warfare -- to leave behind them a wake of mutilated Nazis so long that their comrades will not be able to sleep at night, and will be able to think of little else other than the prospects of running across the Basterds on a road somewhere -- a misfortune very likely to be the last a Nazi soldier would ever suffer.

Psychological warfare is no newer an idea today than it was when it was in World War II. Although the techniques used for psychological warfare have changed over the centuries, the goal remains essentially the same: to get one's enemy spreading propaganda, self-custom-made to spread the maximum amount of debilitating fear possible.

More modern psychological warfare techniques often involve using the cultural fears of the enemy against them.

For example, in Nicaragua the US Central Intelligence Agency would kidnap enemy soldiers, kill them and leave them to be found with two puncture marks in their neck.

Terrified enemy soldiers would believe they were under siege by vampires. Their lost sleep at night would quickly become a marked advantage for the United States and their allies in Nicaragua (admittedly, not one of the proudest moments in US history).

In Inglourious Basterds the Basterds enjoy another psychological advantage over their Nazi enemies -- they are Jewish. And just as their actions against the Nazis they encounter (even the survivors) seem to carry strong connotations of revenge, the beliefs held by many Germans and Eastern Europeans that Jews had magical powers -- also invoked later in the movie -- certainly makes their job easier.

Particularly terrifying to the Nazis is Sargeant Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz, who likes to beat defiant Nazis to death with a baseball bat. So long as a few Nazis remain alive to see his baseball-inspired brutality, the Basterds tend to get the information they're after.

In World War II as it really occurred -- without the miracle hail mary play to kill Hitler -- psychological warfare centred largely around the concept of "total war". The idea was to inflict personal costs so grave on the enemy as a whole and weaken their resolve.

Entire cities -- in both Germany and Britain -- were bombed entirely to the ground in the effort to make the populace of either country fear their enemy's bombers so fully that they would lose sleep at night.

On the high seas, the submarine warfare conducted by German U-Boats was aimed at the same result.

Psychological warfare is being waged today with a broadened mandate to convince enemy combatants to surrender and to convince the civilian population that an invading or occupying force is not their enemy. These are the techniques being deployed in Afghanistan today.

Psychological warfare, especially as presented in Inglourious Basterds, is often a dirty affair. But it unquestionably contributes to the winning of wars.

A World War II History Moment

God bless Quentin Tarantino, he makes fantastic movies.

Few directors would dare rewrite the history of World War II, as Tarantino endeavours to this weekend with Inglourious Basterds, a film about a group of Jewish American soldiers who kill and scalp Nazis in a bid to assassinate Adolph Hitler.

Of all the countries occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II, Poland was most harmed. Of the 6,000,000 killed during the Holocaust, fully 3,000,000 of them were Polish Jews.

Just as the characters of Inglourious Basterds take matters rather personally and into their own hands, so did the Free Polish forces who escaped the annexation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Like their French counterparts, the Free French Army under General Charles de Gaulle, they fought honourably for the freedom of their country, even while their country was under a horrific occupation.

This is their story, and the story of their greatest triumph.

Redemption of the Valkyrie

Some historical events can only really be understood with the perspective that comes with time.

World War II -- with its broad range of incredibly complex issues and events -- is certainly one of those events. One of the widely-disputed topics is the level of involvement of the German populace.

Books such as Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners dispute the notion that the German citizenry participated in atrocities such as the holocaust only under the duress of government coercion.

Even if the German populace's level of participation in the war was greater than previously estimated -- and according to Goldhagen's work it certainly was -- this doesn't overshadow the direct resistence that many Germans offered to Hitler's machinations, and even to his rule of the country.

Valkyrie is the story of the last of more than a dozen plots to depose Hitler and bring as peaceful an end to the war as possible.

The film opens with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), serving in Northern Africa, protesting the execution of the war. Germany has lost Northern Africa, and the forces deployed their could be better deployed in Germany's defense.

Upon being wounded in an allied attack -- he loses his right hand and two fingers off of his left -- Stauffenberg is reassigned to Germany, where he serves as a staff officer.

Stauffenberg becomes widely known for his criticism of the war and is quickly approached by a group of dissidents led by retired General Ludwig Beck about deposing Hitler. In a bombed-out church, Stauffenberg confesses his distress at the current state of Germany.

The only way for Germany to recover its soul, Stauffenberg concludes, is for Hitler to die and be replaced.

He hitches a plot in which Operation Valkyrie -- Hitler's plan to use the reserve army to quell a potential civilian uprising -- would be used to frame the SS and the Nazi party for a coup d'etat after the planned assassination of Hitler.

Stauffenberg quickly gains Hitler's confidence, but finds navigating the rest of the web of intrigue surrounding the Fuhrer's inner circle to be exceedingly difficult. As should be expected with any such plot, the eventual failure of the plot hinges on Stauffenberg's inability to control his fellow conspirators and sway the necessary individuals to his side.

As one would expect in a movie about a coup d'etat in a police state, a mood of fear hangs heavy over the entire film. As afraid as most of the characters seem of Hitler and his regime, they seem even more fearful once the coup begins. As frightening as Hitler and his cohorts were, most of the characters are even more afraid of what may replace him.

Whatever else it may be, it could be expected that a coup d'etat against Hitler and the Nazi party will not go entirely peaceably.

Yet even as Operation Valkyrie goes off without a shot, so nearly does the Nazis'$ counter-coup.

The film takes the audience from the thrilling triumph of deposing a despot to the dejection of a decisive defeat -- worse yet, a decisive defeat when the stakes are the highest, when the conspirators are fighting to redeem their entire country.

On the journey, the film even makes a brief stopover with bureaucrats deciding which orders to relay -- those coming from Stauffenberg in Berlin or from Hitler at his private residence -- and with a reserve commander trying to figure out which side of the conflict is the coup and which side is legitimate.

In the end, it takes direct communication with Hitler for the commander -- a "committed National Socialist" to, sadly, support the existing regime.

Valkyrie shies away from none of the terrible consequences of the defeated coup. Stauffenberg tells General Olbricht to look his executioners in the eyes as he is shot.

He does so, as does Stauffenberg himself after him. Simply, it isn't enough for the viewer to understand that the conspirators died for their principles. The film forces the audience to witness it, and know in unequivocal terms the price these brave men paid for their courageous act.

Valkyrie serves as a powerful and important reminder of the role the German resistance played, and the price they paid for it.

Sadly -- and perhaps even necessarily -- Germany still lives under the shadow of Hitler and the horrors perpetrated under his regime. The preoccupation with preventing a repeat of the events of the second world war -- especially the holocaust -- continues to permeate German politics to its very core.

Movies such as Valkyrie should serve as a reminder to the German people of the oppressive environment that Hitler created in the German state and used to perpetrate his historical acts. Even if the holocaust should never be forgotten, the war should one day be forgiven.

Most importantly, however, the German people have to someday forgive themselves.