Rant: just watched 1984 After many years

The version with Edmond O’Brien is scary.

Think he meant “slave”...

Walk away from whatever you are taking. Total value of the Dow? Utterly silly over caffeinated analysis— where you get this shite? Steiffel “investments” with the adenoid punk reading his printed notes.

Coronavirus! oh no— the stock market. Maybe in china— so that is the take of the continual free cheap labor demonrats who are ...in the media. Read, get off the tube.

“Indeed, I have read the book about twenty times, and seen all of the various different film / t.v. versions...”

Glutton for punishment much? Most depressing book/movie in history.

I did read Brave New World several times. Not depressing except in the existential sense, I guess. Loved lines like those of the “worship ceremony”:

“It was as though an enormous negro dove was hovering benevolently over the now prone or supine dancers.”

The only tragic figure was the white raised among savages.

Orwell saw communism up close & personal during the Spanish Civil War which resulted in his gritty gray dystopia; the Thought Police were known then as the NKVD and the 3rd International.

Huxley was born into & lived the life of a privileged Oxford don and intellectual.

Saw the 1955 movie on youtube for the first time in decades. Postwar British austerity was no picnic but this film must have made patrons emerging from the cinema glad to be living in it.

But then again, neither Orwell nor Huxley could have predicted today’s Islamic onslaught against civilization. A Muslim dystopia would be worth writing about except that it already exists in several spots around the world.

Individual freedom is always a delicate & temporary condition.

That is some crazy way out of date stuff there. IMF? WorldBank....EU is breaking up, great profits to be made. You been in a bubble since, what 1949?

Think English is not your first language either...from the East.

Caffeine, or maybe coke? Avoid it.

Truly a nutter. He ought to listen to Levin... that Leftist Fascists are entirely possible, and have existed in history.

Why Mussolini disliked the socialist hitler-— on opposite parts of the Leftist spectrum.... Far left— commies, middle left nazis... center left mussolini style fascists. Right wing fascists...Juan Peron.

The anti-FA are in fact Leftist Fascists/neoCommunists, point in fact. They are the Sturmabteilung of the demonrat party of hitlery/obamaumao branch. And they are Bernie bots, unter mensch, ne’er do wells-— hoods and facemask easy targets.

Prior to World War One, Imperial Russia, as the greatest Slavic nation, had cast itself as the protector of the Slavic nations of Eastern Europe. After the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungry and his wife in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914, Austria moved to punish Serbia for the act. Russia mobilized to defend Serbia, a Slavic nation. Germany mobilized to defend Austria against Russia. But there was a problem. Russia was allied with France. So, when war came, Germany would have to fight two powerful armies on two separate fronts. German War planners had anticipated this possibility and developed the Schlieffen Plan:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan)

If you click on the link, you get a fairly long and detailed explanation of the plan. For our purposes, let’s just say that the German plan was to hold off the Russians in the east while winning a quick victory over the French in the west through maneuver warfare then swing forces back to the east to defeat the Russians. Needless to say, this did not go as planned. Britain joined the fight after Belgian neutrality was violated and the French Army was able to rebound at the Marne. Trench warfare began.

So the answer to your first question is that Russia went to war because it had pledged to defend Slavic states from outside attack. Russia’s army was mixed: a relatively small professional core and a huge conscript army. Russian soldiers fought because, at bottom, their country said this cause was important enough to fight for and they were patriots enough to respond to their country’s call to arms. Once blood is spilled, a war cause takes on its own life and logic; it becomes very difficult to stop fighting back and/or admit defeat. It is easier simply to announce a new offensive effort at the front, send out another draft call, and refill the ranks with more soldiers to fight on.

The Russian casualties were so high because World War One was the first great war of the Industrial Age. Europe had spent the 19th century developing the social and control mechanisms needed for Mass War. This was scaled up warfare where armies went from perhaps one army of tens of thousands of soldiers to multiple armies each numbering in the hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of soldiers. About the middle of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution began to build real momentum. This not only accelerated the rapid evolution of equipment designs but also improved the quality of the equipment items being produced and the quantity of equipment that could be manufactured in a given period of time.

World War One saw the first widespread use of a number of new weapon systems on land, at sea, and in the air. Among these were: semiautomatic pistols, bolt action rifles, light automatic rifles, medium and heavy caliber machine guns, poison gas, antiaircraft guns, light, medium, heavy, and siege field artillery, tanks and other armored vehicles, dreadnaught battleships and battle cruisers, submarines, and antisubmarine destroyers, aircraft for scouting, fighters and light, medium, and heavy bombers. Complementing the weapons system were the development of improved telephone, telegraph, teletype and wireless radio communications to allow the effective command and control of these huge armies and their many weapons. Supporting it all was a logistics infrastructure that could efficiently manufacture and move the mountains of food, medicine, clothing, vehicles, and ordnance these armies ceaselessly consumed.

Every combatant nation had access to these technologies. But how much they had in hand/available and access to expertise in their use was very unevenly distributed. Unfortunately for the Russian Army, it was not as well supplied with these weapons or as experienced in their use. The Russians had very heavy casualties because the Central Powers were able to capitalize on their massive industrial capacity to create the artillery and ammunition needed along with the expertise they developed in using them on the Western Front.

The Russians attacked and continued attacking even in the face of massive casualties because they had created this huge army at considerable political and financial cost and needed to do something with it in order to fulfill their political promises and treaty obligations. (It should be noted that the western allies had military missions in Russia to make sure they (the Russians) did exactly that.)

It was the perfect scenario to create a meat grinder: Russian commanders (with allied encouragement) shove the soldiers in from behind while the Germans cranked the handle.

As I noted in my previous post, Germany needed a victory and a cessation of hostilities in order to shift forces from one front to the other. Had Russia maintained a huge, threatening but disengaged ground force on the Eastern Front to deny Germany a victory and a cessation of hostilities, it might have accomplished tying down German forces while also saving tens of thousands of Russian soldiers lives. However, while it is easy to write “threatening but disengaged,” it might be pretty hard to pull off it off convincingly with an enemy as skillful as the Germans. In some respects, sending Lenin to Russia can be seen as a move by the Germans to forestall this possibility and ensure the Russians simply disengaged entirely.

I cannot comment on the behind-the-scenes money questions you pose until I see what is being said in the movie. Do you have an Internet link to it? (It needs to be at least subtitled in English.) After I watch it, I can come back to you with my thoughts.