November 4, 2009...12:04 am

The Watering Hole: November 4 – Suicide or Revolt?

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments.

On this date in 1918 sailors of the German Navy instigated a post mutiny revolt in order to offset a plan by naval leaders to engage their forces in what would have lead to a certain bloodbath in interest of establishing the glory of the German nation by sacrificing all naval forces based in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel in an assault against a superior British naval force. Basically, the sailors decided to have no part of this as surrender talks were already in progress. The Kaiser abdicated on the 9th in reaction to events that occurred around this event.

This may all seem well and good in the history of world politics, but by the end of the revolt in 1919, the groundwork for Hitler’s rise had been laid in the SA. Hitler found his place with the rise of the NAZI party and establishing the SS. Families, not just Jews or Gypsies, sold heirlooms merely to survive in the 1920’s.

The instability in Germany fed directly into the events that led to WWII in Europe. Rampant inflation amongst the traditional Germanic people merely added icing to the cake. The SA and SS added fuel to this inferno. The Mann in the Straße or the man in the street felt hapless. With the collapse of of the world economy between 1929 and 1931, war became inevitable.

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6 Comments

  • RUCerious
    November 4, 2009 at 5:50 am

    Would that be rampant inflation?
    I remember seeing photos of people taking wheelbarrows of money to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread.
    On a more personal note, while I was in Nam, fraggings were way more frequent than the Army ever admitted…just sayin.
    Enlisted ranks have this self preservation thingy….

  • nwmuse
    November 4, 2009 at 6:59 am

    Have you all read about this “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”?
    I just read this:

    Secret copyright treaty leaks. It’s bad. Very bad.

    The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:

    * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
    * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
    * That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
    * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

  • Zooey
    November 4, 2009 at 6:41 pm

    Wow. What a quiet day. :|

    I hope I can be around tomorrow.

  • Zooey
    November 4, 2009 at 6:52 pm

    muse, that doesn’t look good at all. Is it in place, or potentially in place?

  • 5thstate
    November 4, 2009 at 8:00 pm

    Zooey, The ACTA is under negotiation at the moment, not in place.
    It’s actually an international effort, not an exclusively US initiative.

    Here’s a link for a less hyperbolic (but rather technical ) article.

    http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php

    what nwmuse’s excerpt suggests seems on the face of it, utterly unworkable and not in the interest of even the most powerful internet industry player (whoever that may be).
    However, no doubt there are ‘interests’ who’d like more control over the internet and the implications smack of a ‘back channel’ attempt to oppose net neutrality via an obscure trade agreement that will of course have legal status, before the issue is brought up in public in Congress ( which it will be, next year).

    So if it isn’t really as bad as the post headline suggests, I’m sure it’s still bad enough–it’s surely ‘anti-neutrality’.

  • Zooey
    November 4, 2009 at 8:41 pm

    Thanks, 5th. That’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? Didn’t the ‘net people get Obama where he is today?

    (BTW, you landed in the spam bin again. Sorry!)


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