Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Truce (1914)
From:
Jim Carroll
Date: 31 Dec 13 - 12:01 PM
"These are the historians quoted in this discussion."
To repeat - Max Hastings is not a historian - he is a journalist for a tabloid newspaper with an interest in military history.
What are you trying to mislead us about his qualifications - it is you who has insisted throughout that we can only believe the evidence of "real historians"
These are the "historians you have cited and have demanded that we abandon everything we believe and reject all the long standing and established historians.
None of them (apart from the tabloid journalist who you keep insisting is a historian, backs your arguments in any way, and even if they did, you have given no reason why their words is any better than anybody else's.
It certainly give you no grounds for claiming that the veterans whose experiences you have rejected out of hand were lying as you disgustingly accused them of - Tommy Kenny, Partrick McGill, Siegfried Sassoon, Liddell- Hart..... surely sewer-level, even by your appalling standards
You are the one who has constantly hidden behind "qualified historians" - now go and find some proper ones who back your case and can be trusted
Jim Carroll
Richard Holmes, Peter Hart, David Stephenson, Fritz Fischer, Dan Todman, Gary Sheffield, Max Hastings, Malcolm Brown, Stuart Halifax, Catriona Pennel, Margaret MacMillan:
Peter Hart specialised in Ireland and the IRA – no mention of WW1 in his CV
Richard Holmes is an establishment military historian with no speciality in World War One other than to present visual images of warfare in general
In June 1991 he was appointed Aide-de-Camp to the Queen, holding the post until February 1997.[16][17] In January 1994 he was appointed Honorary Colonel of the Southampton University Officer Training Corps,[18] and in that February, he was appointed Brigadier TA at Headquarters Land Command.[19] In 1995, he became Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield.[6]
From 1997 until his retirement in 2000, Holmes was Director Reserve Forces and Cadets, as well as having the distinguished honour of being Britain's senior serving reservist.[20] In the 1998 New Year Honours he was promoted to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) (Military Division).[21] From September 1999 to 1 February 2007 he was Colonel of the Regiment of thePrincess of Wales's Royal Regiment (successor to The Queen's and Royal Hampshire Regiments).[22] On 19 September 2000 he was awarded the Volunteer Reserves Service Medal.[23]
Fritz Fisher:
claimed that WW1 came out of Imperial expansionism on the part of Germany – ie – it was an Imperial war (as I have been saying – nothing else)
Dan Todman took his degree in economics – he taught history at Sandhurst – he is an establishment historian who taught on behalf of the British army - his career depends on his presenting the British army in the best light
Gary Sheffield agrees with Fisher that the war was an Imperialist conflict - a response to Germany's rocking the Imperial boat.
His main interest is the conduct of the war – not its causes
Max Hastings is a tabloid journalist
Malcolm Brown - no CV available – not the noted or particularly well-known historian you have been demanding from the rest of us
Stuart Halifax does not respond to any searches – a totally unknown historian.
Cartiona Pennell has written only about the British and Irish responses to the aftermath of WW1 – nowhere is there any evidence that her knowledge and opinions extend further.
I am a historian of 19th and 20th century British and Irish history with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the First World War and British imperial activity in the Middle East since the 1880s. I am intrigued by the experiences of ordinary people and communities in global war, as well as the on-going (and often bloody) relationship between current conflict and the past, particularly in Ireland, Lebanon, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
I am also very interested in the relationship between war, experience, and memory.
"Pennell, Catriona (2012). A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland."
And last, but not least -
Margaret McMillan
Who wrote
"Europe did not have to go to war in the summer of 1914. MacMillan's skill as both a historian and a storyteller is to bring her narrative into a kind of slow-motion where we witness a horrible accident taking place before our very eyes. "Very little in history is inevitable," she surmises coolly. "Yet in 1914 Europe did walk over the cliff into a catastrophic conflict which was going to kill millions of its men, bleed its economies dry, shake empires and societies to pieces, and fatally undermine Europe's dominance of the world. The photographs of cheering crowds in the great capitals are misleading."
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