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I’ve got 3-1 to the Hitler Youth with Beckford scoring first. 125-1. Worth a squid, I reckon.
No. These arguments don’t stand, I’m afraid. There are some logical aberrations to account for. Let’s examine them point by point:
The idea that history is written by the winners of any given conflict. It’s certainly common wisdom. A sort of pub-level approach to reasoning. Taking Minim’s example of the Tudors and the Plantagenets, how is it that, if history was rewritten, that we know the other side of the coin? Surely, if it were so, there would be no example to give. We would only know the hunchback who murdered small boys and nothing of the gentle, kind, well thought of, intelligent Richard. How would we know of Britain’s betrayal of the Cossacks at the close of the Second World War? How come we know about Dresden? We won that war, didn’t we? The facts of the matter are that we get to know all about all sorts of nasty things that winners have done down through the centuries.
Secondly, Pete’s idea that the invention of a descriptive term for something is equivalent to the invention of the thing itself.
@pete wrote:
The term “concentration camp” was first used by the British military and administration to refer to the camps set up to house non-combatants in South Africa
If this were true it would mean that homosexuals were invented around the dawn of the twentieth century. Just because something was called something else previously, it doesn’t mean the thing didn’t exist. Silliness.
Now, Pete does make one good point. He comes up with a definition for concentration camps that we can work with: a place set up to house [pesky] non-combatants in times of conflict. Britain’s concentration camps were set up to deal with [pesky] Boer families who were aiding Boer fighters during the Second Boer War, which ran from late 1899 through to early summer 1902. It follows, if we can show that other nations used similar tictacs at an earlier time than this, we can effectively show that Britain did not and could not have invented concentration camps – let alone extermination camps, which was the original bone-headed thesis, given that the thread was originally about Auschwitz.
So, how does 1838 sound? That would pre-date Britain’s use of the camps by at least sixty years. The offending nation, though I think not the true inventors themselves – just the first example that comes to mind, was the United States of America during the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation. They rounded up about thirteen thousand Cherokees into concentration camps and kept them there for four months while they burned and looted their lands. Then they forced the Indians, men, women and children to march a thousand odd miles to their new reservation. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, died, both in the camps from murder and disease and on the forced march. Altogether a story tragically remiscent ofthe Boers’.
Any casual googling will show you that modern historians are happy to call these camps concentration camps. Most of the dead, because their deaths were caused by disease, exhaustion and malnutrition, were the old, the infirm, women and children. Non-combatatants to use the modern parlance.
So, how is it that Britain invented the concentration camp, then?
And I told you, Pete, there’s no need for your snidey threats.
@pete wrote:
The winners always write the history
What a remarkably thick-headed response. You claimed the British ‘certainly’ invented concentration camps during the Boer War and I provided examples of other nations using them in earlier conflicts. Are you suggesting that the British winning the Second Boer War allowed them to invent these earlier instances in some way that you can expand upon? Or is it, as I suspect, that you are the sort of person that just doesn’t like being proven wrong and will spout any old rubbish to try and avoid having to admit it? Is it a sort of ‘I’m the king of these here boards’ face-saving operation? Will you modify your views when the subject arises away from the boards in future or will you keep to the same line in the face of the facts because it fits some sort of cod philosophy that you hold to?
Oh, and there’s no need to remind me that you know where I live and how tough and scary you are. I remember from last time.
Actually, not so certainly. It’s a myth that the British invented concentration camps. Earlier camps were instituted by the United States in order to control Phillipino and Indian natives, by Spain to control unruly Cubans and by the Russians to deal with Polish rebels even as far back as the eighteenth century.
In any case, the British ones in the Second Boer War, while they were places rife with disease and misery, were hardly on the German model of planned, systematic genocide. Perhaps, in order that a distinction can be drawn, it would be best to think of the German ones as extermination camps.
I think all the crop circle stuff has gone way beyond UFO lore into a thing in of itself. I mean, what spaceships are tantric tulip mandala shaped?
What’s more interesting, I think, is that the circle makers are so aware of the literature that follows their art that their work can be considered authentic additions to the landscape. In the same way that we feel no need to let the grass grow over a white horse.
Fantastic stuff.
Ha! easily the funniest thing I’ve seen all day.
Apart from the telly, my front room walls are solely adorned by Pollocks.
Wait just one cotton picking moment, WooHoo.
@shihogiri wrote:
to be = statement of existence:wink:
That won’t do, I’m afraid. And stop being so familiar. What you have written, put properly, is It is a statement of existence. It is is a form of the verb To be. I’m sure we all remember our verb tables from school: I am, You are, He/She/It is, They are, I was, You are, He/She/It was, They were… etc
Further, not only have you used what you were trying to define in its own definition, akin to defining the word Cat as a cat, you’ve merely added to the facets and increased the complexity of that which you aim to define. For example, do flying spaghetti monsters exist? I’ve never seen one. Yet is it okay to pen the line It is a flying spaghetti monster? I think it is. Surely, then, the verb To be encompasses more than just existence…
And the rub of it all is that you still have to frame your revised definition without using the verb To be.
@shihogiri wrote:
I’m amazed how popular poetry is on here and I have to wonder why. One of the wonderful things about language is its ability to convey precise meaning in a succinct and often pithy manner and yet poems seem to exist to obscure meaning or make it ambiguous leaving the reader wondering what the writer is going on about. Also what constitutes ‘good’ poetry? I’ve read some poetry that’s commonly regarded as brilliant, but personally find it…uninspiring.
So can anyone explain the allure of poetry? Is it the appealing idea that writing poetry suggests a sensitive, ‘windswept and interesting’ author? What is it that make you write an ambiguous poem with obscured meaning when you could just say what you mean.
Have you ever tried to explain the verb ‘to be’ without recourse to the verb ‘to be’? This idea that language can ever be unambiguous and straightforward in almost any use is difficult to accept. Every utterance or scribbling is contextual if broken down far enough. I think poetry, and art in general, is a marvellous way to tackle the intricacies of existence and the human condition because it celebrates and uses that ambiguity.
Wisdom from Mr Frankie Paul:
Bugger. I’ve run out of drugs. Still, the walk to get some more will do me good. Especially if I take some booze with me for the journey. I’ll call it my detox day.
