In 1919 at least 19 African American soldiers were lynched in the US, some for wearing their army uniforms in public, as they were perfectly entitled to do. In 26 American cities, black communities were attacked and people murdered in the streets, during the so-called and now forgotten “red summer”.
Similar events took place in Britain, and are just as lost to popular memory. There were nine so-called race riots across Britain in 1919. Black men who had worked on ships and in the factories, along with those who had fought for Britain at the front, were attacked by white mobs, and they and their families driven from their homes. In Liverpool, Charles Wooten, a sailor who had served Britain in the war, was killed by a mob in the Liverpool docks. His murder can only be described as a lynching.
A century on, if we as a nation are serious about remembrance, then the process of remembering must not come to an end this November. As well as remembering the service of the non-white soldiers and auxiliaries of the first world war, we have also to remember what happened to them and their dreams of justice in the months and years after the armistice.
A young Indian woman and girl raise funds in England for Indian soldiers fighting in the WWI – 1916
This actually hit me pretty hard because you *never* see any of this stuff in media/films- people in general don’t know that a LOT of Indian soldiers fought and died in WWI but they don’t get recognised *at all*.
why are straight white guys so obsessed with world war 2
like i’ll talk about my interest in history and i’ll have guys be like “yeah i’m a history buff too i love world war 1 and 2″ like cool i was talking about ancient history. like the conversation was literally about ancient egypt.
my fave thing is replying “oh, cool. i just can’t get into it. i like everyday life and religion and art. personally, i find war boring.” and let me tell you it’s a journey to watch them try and understand that killing thousands of people indiscriminately doesn’t hold my attention.
yup it’s always the “oh you’re just not into history” and the response of “yes i am im just into ancient history” and you’re ready to throw 38 greek myths at them just to shut them up about the kinds of bombers the britsh were using in the second world war
except like. they really dont give a single fuck about wwi/ii. they care about the weapons and machinery. do they care about the events and the people? do they care about why wars were actually important? in my experience, very, very rarely.
I think that gets to heart of it: they’re not history buffs in any real sense. What they are is war fanboys. They collect and curate technical information about wars just like any other fanboy collects and curates technical information about the subject of their fandom. It’s basically not real to them; knowing what exact metal the buttons of SS uniforms were made of is of no greater significance to them than knowing the exact height of the captain’s chair on the starship Enterprise – it’s just another shiny technical fact for their collection.
As somebody who is actually very interested in the social history surrounding both WWI and WWII, but couldn’t give two shits about uniform buttons and bomber construction, this is pretty accurate. These guys will say they’re interested in history but know practically nothing about how WWI altered the course of psychology and perceptions of PTSD/mental health, or about how African American civil rights activists spearheaded the Double V Campaign to combat fascism and bigotry both abroad and on the home front, calling out how non-Black Americans were supposedly standing for freedom and liberty whilst still imposing segregation back in the United States, etc.
The social history of wars in the 20th century is fascinating, but that’s not what these guys care about. As @prokopetz says, they’re not interested in history, they’re military fanboys.
why are straight white guys so obsessed with world war 2
like i’ll talk about my interest in history and i’ll have guys be like “yeah i’m a history buff too i love world war 1 and 2″ like cool i was talking about ancient history. like the conversation was literally about ancient egypt.
my fave thing is replying “oh, cool. i just can’t get into it. i like everyday life and religion and art. personally, i find war boring.” and let me tell you it’s a journey to watch them try and understand that killing thousands of people indiscriminately doesn’t hold my attention.
yup it’s always the “oh you’re just not into history” and the response of “yes i am im just into ancient history” and you’re ready to throw 38 greek myths at them just to shut them up about the kinds of bombers the britsh were using in the second world war
except like. they really dont give a single fuck about wwi/ii. they care about the weapons and machinery. do they care about the events and the people? do they care about why wars were actually important? in my experience, very, very rarely.
I think that gets to heart of it: they’re not history buffs in any real sense. What they are is war fanboys. They collect and curate technical information about wars just like any other fanboy collects and curates technical information about the subject of their fandom. It’s basically not real to them; knowing what exact metal the buttons of SS uniforms were made of is of no greater significance to them than knowing the exact height of the captain’s chair on the starship Enterprise – it’s just another shiny technical fact for their collection.
“WAR isn’t worth one life,” Harry Patch – the man nicknamed “the last fighting Tommy” – said before his death on July 25, 2009.
Mr Patch, who was the last British
First World War soldier to pass away, became a symbol of dignity and
unswerving honesty about the horrors of the trenches.
The veteran, of Combe Down, a small village near Bath, was born on 17 June, 1898 – while Queen Victoria was still on the throne.
He
was conscripted into the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in 1917 and
trained as a machine gunner – having left school at the age of 13 to
train as a plumber.
Despite not breaking his silence about the
Great War until after his 100th birthday, Mr Patch became famous for the
unerring humanism of his words.
In
recorded excerpts of his memoirs, he said: “I had no inclination to
fight anybody. I mean why should I go out and kill somebody who I never
knew? For what reason?”
Mr Patch found himself en route to Reims on his 19th birthday and installed in the trenches in July, 1917.
He arrived in time to witness the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as the mud-soaked offensive, Passchendale.
His
brother had been injured in Mons while serving with the Royal Engineers
and Mr Patch said he knew he did not want to take to the deep trenches,
surrounded by filth and exploding shells.
He said: “I think every
man who went on the front line at some time or another was scared. And
if any man tells you he wasn’t scared then he’s a damn liar.
“When
it came to the point where we went into action I was scared stiff
because I thought the first time I go over the top – you don’t know how
much longer you are going to live.”
Questioning the “war to end all wars”, he said before his death: “It
wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a
couple of lives let alone thousands.”
After the conflict he
returned to plumbing and raised his family in the West Country. When he
died in his sleep at a nursing home in Wells, Somerset he was Britain’s
oldest man.
“HANDICAPPED”
Soon after the Eleventh Hour passed,
Before the trench-scarred earth could feel the plow,
Parades were held to mark our victory,
And monuments erected for the dead.
But beneath each waving, patriotic, flag,
The new-born century’s hope had turned to fear.
And for the over hundred thousand men
Who had returned from fighting Over There,
And kept their lives, but lost their limbs or sight,
There were no words of praise nor time for grief.
Our nation’s future called for confidence,
With new assembly lines to build, and run –
The wheels of Progress must forever roll.
We could not risk our young Democracy
By dwelling on injustices, or loss.
And wounded bodies, now, were question marks:
How could you be a man, and be in pain,
Or one iota less than strong and free?
And in those places where the blood spilled out
Could foreign and seditious thought seep in?
The orders came from generals to the ranks:
Remember that you’re in the Army, still.
Your duty to the country is to fight,
And ‘normalcy’ the ground you must retake.
Recovery must be both swift and sure,
And you must show your cheerful gratitude.
You must not think that you have paid enough.
Now, this is voluntary. You are free
To take the jobs we will retrain you for,
Or lose your benefits, and all your pay.
Photographers would come to capture them,
With smiling Red Cross nurses by their beds,
Their bodies framed as emblems to inspire.
One word appeared with growing frequency
Meant just for them, in captions underneath.
Before they’d left for war, they’d seen it used
For those defective children who can’t learn
And by the colored men who spoke of hate:
A word that meant “a burden, and a shame” –
A burden they must strive to never be.
In days gone by, it had a different weight:
A sporting word to even up the odds,
Where fathers bantered, laughed, and put down bets
(The air thick-scented with horses and the turf).
But now, those golden memories felt like lies,
For none of them gave their consent to this.
The exhortations to recall their pride,
And rhetoric that spoke of useful work,
Were not enough to quell their growing rage:
The sense that, now, their race through life was fixed.
Me. A poem excerpted from my book The Monsters’ Rhapsody: Disability, Identity, & Culture (Lulu.com 2016)
There is a claim within the Disability community that “Handicapped” is offensive because, in 1504, in order to deal with all the disabled veterans in his country, after the English Civil War, King Henry VII declared that if you were disabled, it was now legal to beg for your living. So the word “handicapped” comes from the phrase “cap-in-hand.”
Snopes.com, along with many other abled bloggers, have gleefully debunked this folk etymology, pointing out that an earlier meaning was actually applied to extra strong horses in a race, and therefore, disabled people should stop being so cranky about it, and realize that people are actually giving them a compliment (continuing the habit of invalidating the experiences of the disabled).
But the actual shift in the meaning of the word “handicap” from “extra challenge given to the stronger competitor” to “A derogatory term for a disabled person,” did, in fact, happen primarily around the disabled veterans returning from war, and a nation’s distress over what to do with them all.
It wasn’t the early 16th Century, and it wasn’t by a king’s royal decree. It was the early 20th Century, and it came about through the tangled interactions of intense nationalist propaganda, toxic masculinity, professional charity, and military bureaucracy… with the rise of the eugenics movement thrown into the mix.
But projecting all that humiliation you’re going through in the present, all that anger and disillusionment, into the past– into the last days of the knight in shining armor– is one way to hold on to a sense a of dignity and worth when the rest of the world would like to pretend you don’t exist.
TL;DR: This Remembrance Day, remember more than those who died in battle. Remember, too, the ones who lived, and came back changed.
1944 – Snowball the cat tries to take over a machine gun in Normandy so she can shoot some Nazis herself.
Blessed post. Good kitty
i want someone to read that headline in an old timey reporter voice
Okay fun fact: cats were actively deployed to trenches and ships to help deal with rodent infestations in both world wars, and they had the curb cutter effect of keeping the men’s spirits high.
One cat, Simon, was given the rank “Able Seacat Simon” after dutifully killing rats and mice that were destroying the HMS Amethyst’s food supplies. The ship had come under fire during the Chinese civil war and many of its crewmen had died. The cat had been gravely injured, too, but he picked out the shrapnel himself – seriously – and went straight to killing the rodents that were overrunning the ship. He unfortunately passed from his injuries two weeks before he was scheduled to receive the Dickin Medal. To this day, he is the only cat to receive this award.
Here’s another WW1 trenchcat, who would have been ratter, mouser, companion and gas warning – not AFAIK by dying, like a canary, but since cats reacted to the smell of gas long before it was strong enough for humans to notice, the troops had a bit more time to get their masks on, and the cats went into gasproof boxes.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the other side of No Man’s Land…
Meet Percy, mascot of HMLS (D20) “Daphne” with Lt Drader. Both survived the War, and Percy retired to live out his peacetime life in the Drader family home.
(Here’s a video clip; given how noisy, hot and smelly early tanks were, Percy seems remarkably unfazed.)
A US Army tank cat, Mustard of the 321st, with a Renault FT light tank and its driver Sgt Postal…
A Royal Artillery kitten (the battery mascot)…
Pincher of HMS Vindex on what looks like a Sopwith Pup scout…
Togo, ship’s cat of HMS Dreadnought (though I’ve also seen “HMS Irresistible”)…
Ship’s cat of HMS Queen Elizabeth atop 15″ main battery…
And speaking of big ships and big guns…
“Make nice all you like, Human. I despise you. I wanted a billet on a battleship, not this tinpot destroyer…” (Ching, of HMAS Swan.)
I can’t believe Wonder Woman is more historically accurate than Dunkirk.
There’s also a shot where we see Senegalese colonial troops.
For a superhero movie with gods and magic, Wonder Woman actually represented a lot of aspects of WWI quite well. And if anyone wants to learn more – there’s a BBC documentary on Netflix called The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of the Empire which is really worth checking out for learning more about POC who fought in WWI.
1944 – Snowball the cat tries to take over a machine gun in Normandy so she can shoot some Nazis herself.
Blessed post. Good kitty
i want someone to read that headline in an old timey reporter voice
Okay fun fact: cats were actively deployed to trenches and ships to help deal with rodent infestations in both world wars, and they had the curb cutter effect of keeping the men’s spirits high.
One cat, Simon, was given the rank “Able Seacat Simon” after dutifully killing rats and mice that were destroying the HMS Amethyst’s food supplies. The ship had come under fire during the Chinese civil war and many of its crewmen had died. The cat had been gravely injured, too, but he picked out the shrapnel himself – seriously – and went straight to killing the rodents that were overrunning the ship. He unfortunately passed from his injuries two weeks before he was scheduled to receive the Dickin Medal. To this day, he is the only cat to receive this award.
Here’s another WW1 trenchcat, who would have been ratter, mouser, companion and gas warning – not AFAIK by dying, like a canary, but since cats reacted to the smell of gas long before it was strong enough for humans to notice, the troops had a bit more time to get their masks on, and the cats went into gasproof boxes.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the other side of No Man’s Land…
Meet Percy, mascot of HMLS (D20) “Daphne” with Lt Drader. Both survived the War, and Percy retired to live out his peacetime life in the Drader family home.
(Here’s a video clip; given how noisy, hot and smelly early tanks were, Percy seems remarkably unfazed.)
A US Army tank cat, Mustard of the 321st, with a Renault FT light tank and its driver Sgt Postal…
A Royal Artillery kitten (the battery mascot)…
Pincher of HMS Vindex on what looks like a Sopwith Pup scout…
Togo, ship’s cat of HMS Dreadnought (though I’ve also seen “HMS Irresistible”)…
Ship’s cat of HMS Queen Elizabeth atop 15″ main battery…
And speaking of big ships and big guns…
“Make nice all you like, Human. I despise you. I wanted a billet on a battleship, not this tinpot destroyer…” (Ching, of HMAS Swan.)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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