Posted on 01/26/2012 6:46:31 PM PST by the scotsman
Your great uncle was a fine and brave man, I’d shake his hand if he were alive today. My great-grandfather fought at Passchendeale.
I am not being rude for the hell of it. Apologies if I am coming across as so.
Scotland, England and NI are countries. I understand your argument, but they are legally semi-independent countries within (and that consitute) a larger state (the UK, which is a state, not a country). Their subsuming to the UK dosent mean that are not countries in their own right.
Again, apologies for any nippyness.
Thank you.
My great grandfather’s name is inscribe on this memorial since his and thousands of other young men’s bodies were obliterated or never found.
The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme battlefields bears the names of 72,194 officers and men of the United Kingdom and South African forces.
These men died in the Somme battle sector before 20th March 1918 and have no known grave. The date of 20th March was the day before the German Army launched a large-scale offensive, codenamed “Operation Michael”, against the British Army Front in the sector of the Somme.
Over 90 percent of those commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial died in the 1916 Battles of the Somme between July and November 1916.
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/somme/memorial-thiepval.htm
No apologies necessary; we’re grownups. We agree to disagree.
Thank you very much, Sir.
You wrote in a very elucidating manner about Luther’s obscure quote, its appropriation by the Hitlerites and the importance of religion to many (non-Communist) members of the Resistance movement.
As somebody who lost a great-uncle to the Nazi terror, I would like to say thank you :-)
P. S.:By the way, Mr. kearnyirish is - I’m sorry to say - not right in stating that the German national identity didn’t evolve until the foundation of the Second Empire in 1871.
In fact, our national identity as a people sharing a common language and culture, as well as a monarch, evolved largely in the eleventh century A. D.
I recently read Metaxas's excellent new biography of Bonhoeffer, where the author discusses these issues. I was under the impression that Luther was a central figure in unifying the various German dialects into a single language because he needed a unified language into which to translate the Bible.
At any rate, Metaxas's book is exceptional, and clearly demonstrates that the leading opposition to Hitler came from religious Lutherans and Catholics. He also shows that it was Hitler's intention all along to rid "greater Germany" of Christians (one of his intellectual father Nietzsche's two "slave religions") once he no longer needed them for political purposes.
Nazism was founded on a Darwinian ethic, survival of the fittest, with all the attendant brutality such an ethic elicits. Marx applied this to what he called the "class struggle," and Hitler applied it to what he considered a racial struggle ("Mein Kampf" means "my struggle"). Both resulted in practice in the same kind of brutality and tyranny.
Yes, and Mr. Metaxas, whose book I haven’t read yet, but intend to, is absolutely right about the commom German language, which Luther created.
It served to strengthen the bonds within a people which was, in spite of a common political allegiance (to the Holy Roman Empire) culturally still relatively heterogenous - though not more so than 16th century France or Spain.
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