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10 Jun, 4 tweets, 1 min read
History Nerds: am trying to watch the David Starkey series, "Monarchy", but in ep1 he basically pays off the Romans leaving Britain & then makes out the Anglo-Saxons (displacing the actual Britons) were basically metropolitan Whigs with aesthetic pretensions. Does it get better?
I do not think I have more eagerly awaited the Normans now than I have with David Starkey boosting the Anglo-Saxons....the revenge of the Franks is the revenge of Rome! Not a word about the Celts on any fringe.
It annoys me the Starkey rejects the Roman (correct) use of Britain - this weird anti-Roman/Norman sense - and then goes for "English" even when what he is describing is not at all English but Celts/Gaels etc.
Starkey goes on about the English from Alfred onwards having created a nation state (what the Franks were not?) and having "one church" - as if the Anglo-Saxons were not part of the Catholic world? This is just ridiculous.

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More from @GrayConnolly

Gray Connolly Profile picture
9 Jun
There is nothing better for clearing your feed of 'woke vets' than discussing why ~20 years of 'eating soup with a knife' etc has not worked and was never going to work. If you will the ends, you will the means - or, if not, you should not waste lives & resources trying
UBL noted that people back 'the stronger horse' and clearly in Afghanistan, not just the Pashtu, but others, all knew that the West (via ISAF) was going to leave sooner or later & was the weaker horse. There was also the sheer absurdity of what was trying to be done there.
I may write a longer thread here. Basically unless you are willing to colonise (including by use of immense violence) a territory in Afghanistan's position, for a number of decades, and create a client culture as well as class, it is all pretty hopeless. It always was.
Read 4 tweets
Gray Connolly Profile picture
8 Jun
Growing up, in our local parish, was Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly KBE CB DSO, battalion commander in WW2 & Commonwealth Brigade commander in Korea. He was a daily Massgoer & Volunteer at Sydney's Mathew Talbot Hostel, looking after the homeless. He was always known as "Tom"
Edward Kenna was awarded the Victoria Cross for his extraordinary heroism in World War II. Post-war, he returned to Hamilton in Victoria where he worked for the local council and played football.

awm.gov.au/collection/P10…
Captain Charles Hazlitt Upham won VC & Bar in WW2 & returned to a successful farming life in New Zealand. His name was in the local phone book and, so I was told, local children would drop by to meet the Uphams for afternoon tea & to ask him about the War for their school project Image
Read 6 tweets
Gray Connolly Profile picture
7 Jun
Amazing the philosophical and ethical controversies created by all these Carls - Barth, Jung, Schmitt, Hempel. Probably the most problematic of names really. My take.
Anglos hate philosophy. Europeans feel they should be interested in philosophy whereas Anglos fall asleep. Anglos who are Philosophers feel a certain enduring insecurity because they know 'home' thinks they are weird & they know that 'foreigners' have no respect for them.
Brings to mind the maxim from the 90s ABC series "The Late Show" that the British legal series, "Rumpole of the Bailey", is not a patch on the German version, "Das Rumpolshe".
Read 4 tweets
Gray Connolly Profile picture
5 Jun
OTD in 1944, Operation OVERLORD commences with a massive naval and air bombardment of German positions, concurrent with Allied paratrooper and glider landings in occupied France, as well as Allied landings on the beaches and cliffs of Normandy. #DDay Image
Captain "Mad Jack" Churchill wades ashore on #DDay with his 'Claymore' sword in hand, ready to face the Hun! Image
It is always good to have a piper on hand on #DDay to get the lads' minds focused on the job at hand Image
Read 8 tweets
Gray Connolly Profile picture
3 Jun
Noting this by @sophieelsworth - as one of the 2 or 3 non Bolsheviks who occasionally goes on the ABC [@parnellpalme is largely sound vs @TerryBarnes5 who is a Whig...], you do actually get a fair run, it is just that the ABC's focus is (well) to your Left
theaustralian.com.au/business/media…
To be fair to the ABC: it feels it is under a perpetual siege from the sort of libertarian meth-addict/crack-head wing that thinks the ABC wil be privatised (it is the mirror of the Greens thinking Australia will go off fossil fuels & exporting resources). Then there is Hendo.
One worries that the ABC will now massively over-correct in a weird way - it will go from 'lunatics running the asylum' to trying to rebalance by having some Coalition MP on to discuss hanging employees who want to work from home or miracle new cures they read about on Facebook.
Read 7 tweets
Gray Connolly Profile picture
31 May
Seeing a lot of very bad Vietnam War takes: the Vietnam War was an allied military assistance mission to the Republic of South Vietnam & in a place that did matter, strategically. There are many arguments for the Vietnam War that cannot be made for the Iraq & Afghanistan wars.
There was always a legitimate Augustinian case for the military effort in Vietnam as it was assisting an already free government in South Vietnam to resist a foreign communist insurgency (the subsequent 2+m refugees bear this out). This was not Iraq or Afghanistan (at all).
The more affluent Baby Boomers concocted the hippy/protest culture to evade conscription for Vietnam. As soon as conscription for Vietnam ended, so, too, ended Boomers protesting that war & so did most of that Hippy culture. The Vietnamese's war still went on. Never be fooled.
Read 4 tweets

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