german paras

dickens and london

What remains of the London that Dickens knew? Not much. The characters are gone and the life-breath of what gave them reason does not exist anymore. .
London is more or less still Victorian if we consider the buildings, above is my house in London and if you live in a typical London house left over from the Victorian period then you will obviously understand that time much more.As someone said "The past is still with us in ;London just look around".
 The man who made Victorian London live was Dickens. . Maybe without Dickens we'd be left solely with what remains, the architecture.
Writers and critics tend to think that Dickens had an incredible imagination as regards his characters but when asked if he imagined and invented his characters he replied "All my characters are people I actually met" .
This is obvious if we consider that unlike today London was a city where "ways to be" or to think were not forthcoming as with the television/publicity generation of today where most ideas and reasons to be are "second hand".thye point is thatr media "role models" didn't exist so what seems to us far fetched today as regards the writers characters was simply the norm then.
There are many who try to intellectualise Dickens into more than what he was but the most important thing is to realise that he was first and foremost a great writer of observation. He wrote about London because that was what he knew and was expert on and it wasn't really a choice.
At the same time as Dickens there was Karl Marx.
Basically Marx was the moral counterpart to Dickens as the real Marxist is to the Neo-Lib today. Like the Neo Lib do gooder of today Dickens sought to highlight injustice but didn't know what the real cause was. Marx on the other hand understood the cause of economic misery. Dickens knew the suffering but not the cause. The cause was that workers were basically slaves to capitalists. Marx said "When England was the wonder of the world it was also the workhouse of the world". Marx added that the American slave in the cotton states of America was healthier and fitter than a "free" Londoner in the Rookery
From Thomas Beames The Rookeries of London (1850): "…the worst sink of iniquity was The Rookery, a place or rather district, so named, whose shape was triangular, bounded by Bainbridge Street, George Street and High Street, St Giles… the colony, called The Rookery, was like an honeycomb, perforated by a number of courts and blind alleys, cul de sac, without any outlet other than the entrance. Here were the lowest lodging houses in London, inhabited by the various classes of thieves common to large cities… were banded together… Because all are taken in who can pay their footing, the thief and the prostitute are harboured among those who only crime is poverty, and there is thus always a comparatively secure retreat for him who has outraged his country's laws. Sums here are paid, a tithe of which, if well laid out, would provide at once a decent and an ample lodging for the deserving poor; and that surplus,which might add to the comfort and better the condition of the industrious, finds its way into the pocket of the middleman…"
London's poor tried to scrape a living doing jobs which one can only imagine the Devil himself thought up. River Men made their living from fishing from drowned bodies, and Scavangers searched the sewers and rubbish tips for coins or rope to sell on. London's docks expanded rapidly. Smaller boats, mainly carrying cargoes such as coal and grain from other British ports, still used riverside wharves, but congestion on the Thames was such that purpose-built docks were needed to handle the big ocean-going vessels. Whole new villages and communities grew up to serve the docks, but poverty was endemic because the wages were extremely low.
London became an increasingly stratified city, with a relatively prosperous West End and a poor East End.
Model dwellings to house the poor began to appear - the American philanthropist, George Peabody, left substantial funds for their construction - but never enough to make any serious dent in the growing problem of the slums. In workhouses, families were split up and made to wear drab clothing deliberately intended to destroy individuality. A standard workhouse haircut also made them instantly recognizable if they went out in public. Inside they worked pointlessly at stone-breaking and oakum-picking. The situation gave rise to many philanthropic initiatives, such as the founding in 1878 of William Booth's Salvation Army, which set up soup kitchens and hospitals to help the very poor. Ultimately, the extreme poverty in London was to have massive and worldwide repercussions: Karl Marx's observations on its causes and solutions were to become the basis for Communist-inspired revolutions in several parts of the world. Marx understood the link between work and profit and spent most of his days in the British museum reading room building up his theories on what he thought would without doubt become a world revolution.Dickens on the other hand had little idea of what would be the result of people living in absolute poverty in the city of London.
The Britain that Marx was exiled to was the US of its day. The Union Jack already flew over a large part of the world, and during Marx’s lifetime more colonies would be conquered. British capitalism was the power of the world’s first great globalisation.
The world’s goods were increasingly carried in British ships. World finance was centred on the City of London and what Disraeli, the Tory politician, called its “mighty loan managers, on whose fiat the fate of kings and empires sometimes depend”. And if economic power was not enough, British capitalism could always depend on the Royal Navy to open up routes for trade.
Britain was also changing within. The 1851 census recorded that 51 percent now lived in the towns. No other major economy would achieve this before the 20th century. London was the world’s greatest city, with a population of 3.8 million by 1881. In the countryside the peasantry had all but disappeared. Aristocrats owned the land and rented it to farmers.
But the landowners were themselves capitalists. They developed their properties for profit. The dukes of Bedford, Norfolk and Westminster earned huge rents from the areas of London that Marx walked around.
Even if they still used ancient titles and enjoyed fancy dress, they merged with the lords of finance and industry to create a ruling class that was united.
But if capitalism allowed the accumulation of wealth that Marx analysed in Capital, it also brought misery, some of which he experienced. In its first years in the capital the Marx family lived a life of “bourgeois misery” in lodgings in Dean Street, Soho.
London concentrated not only wealth but poverty and degradation. There were said to be 3,000 brothels in metropolitan London at this time.London Brothels could give satisfaction to nearly any perversion a French visitor said.
There were many times when the Marx family was reduced to living on bread and potatoes. “I live in pawn,” Marx said. It was only help from Engels in Manchester that enabled them to survive.Engels was the owner of a factrory but syupported the ideas of Marx.
Even so it was a life of ill health, the death of children and low morale until they finally managed to escape to HampsteadH in north London in 1856. Yet his personal troubles still continued. His wife, Jenny, had a stillborn child, and later she caught smallpox.
They would also have to deal with what happened as capitalism in Britain and other countries shifted towards monopoly and state intervention. These were possibilities he wrote about, but only after his death would the trends become clearer.
There is another dimension to Marx’s time in London—his contact with the working class. Some accounts minimise this, making Marx an academic seeing the world from the British Museum. But no serious socialist develops that way.
Engels led the way in 1843 when he not only observed factory conditions in the north but made contact with radical Chartists. Engels dedicated his book on the condition of the working class “to the working classes of Great Britain”.
Reading it, Marx saw a description of the working class as a political force the like of which he had not yet met in Germany or France.
In Europe before 1848, movements of protest drew on artisan and craft workers. But in Britain the working class movement was different. It drew on large numbers of factory workers who barely existed in the rest of Europe.
The potential power of these “first born sons of modern industry” could be seen in the 1840s in their support for the Chartist movement for working class political rights.
But it could also be seen in the world’s first general strike in 1842, and it could be seen in their fight for union rights. The British trade unions in the 1840s were better organised than trade unions in the rest of Europe.
Marx first briefly visited London and Manchester with Engels in 1845, and made contact with the Chartists. When he returned in 1849 there were new contacts, and in 1850 The Communist Manifesto was published in English in the Red Republican newspaper.
Marx’s direct links with the British working class movement weakened in the 1850s. They grew again in the 1860s when he became secretary of the First International.
These more engaged years were the context for major developments in his political analysis. Here we find Marx thinking through issues like that of racism, as he considered the anti-Irish culture that existed in parts of the working class. Here too in 1871, when defending the Paris Commune, he saw that socialism could not just be about seizing state power. Workers had to make it for themselves.
Even the completion of the first volume of Capital in 1867 reflected the greater urgency of these years of more active engagement.
Theory does not thrive on air, least of all the air of the British Museum. Liebknecht was right—it was in Britain and London that Marx found the “bricks and mortar” for his work.
ere Marx found what he was looking for, what he needed,” said the German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht. “The bricks and mortar for his work Capital, which could only have been written in London.”

leopold lll

Leopold III ( 3 November 1901 – 25 September 1983) reigned as King of the Belgians from 1934 until 1951, when he abdicated in favour of the Heir Apparent, his son Baudouin.
Leopold III was born in Brussels as Prince Leopold of Belgium, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and succeeded to the throne of Belgium on 23 February 1934 following the death of his father, King Albert I.
He was invested as the 1,154th Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece in Spain in 1923, the 355th Grand Cross of the Order of the Tower and Sword in 1927 and the 833rd Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1935.
When World War II broke out in September 1939, the French and British governments immediately sought to persuade Belgium to join them. Leopold and his government refused, maintaining Belgium's neutrality. Belgium considered itself well-prepared against a possible invasion by Axis forces, for during the 1930s Leopold had made extensive preparations against an invasion of his country, historically a battlefield in wars between French and Germans.
On 10 May 1940 the German army invaded Belgium. On the first day of the offensive the Belgian fortifications were penetrated before any French or British troops could arrive and the country was overwhelmed by the numerically superior Germans.Many Belgians just run away in reality.
Nevertheless, the Belgian perseverance prevented the British Expeditionary Force from being outflanked and cut off from the coast, enabling the evacuation from Dunkirk. After his military surrender Leopold stayed on in Brussels to face the victorious invaders, while his entire civil government fled to Paris and later to London.

french guard infantry at waterloo

britains deetail chasseur

alpine chasseurs

crusadea

atlantic alamo

romans

atlantic alamo

bazooker by atlantic

Bazooka is the common name for a man-portable recoilless rocket antitank weapon, widely fielded by the U.S. Army. Also referred to as the "Stovepipe", the innovative bazooka was amongst the first-generation of rocket propelled anti-tank weapons used in infantry combat. Featuring a solid rocket motor for propulsion, it allowed for high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) warheads to be delivered against armored vehicles, machine gun nests, and fortified bunkers at ranges beyond that of a standard thrown grenade or mine. The universally-applied nickname arose from the M1 variant's vague resemblance to the musical instrument called a "bazooka" invented and popularized by 1930s by U.S. comedian Bob Burns.
During World War II, German armed forces captured several bazookas in early North African encounters and soon reverse engineered their own version, increasing the warhead diameter to 8.8 cm (amongst other minor changes) and widely issuing it as the Raketenpanzerbüchse "Panzerschreck" ("Tank terror").
Due to the novelty and easy recognition of the name, the term "bazooka" continues to be used informally as a genericized term to refer to any shoulder-fired missile weapon

custers laststand by atlantic

crockett by atlantic 54mm

Injustice has always been a part of American systems of life, at the present we have the ongoing rascism thats lasted fifty years against the Palestinians but this tradition of falsity clothed in a Fathers of democracy cloak started long ago.Its history is obscure and its glossed over with pregnant phrases such as manifest destiny or if not that cloaked in history that never existed. It is no wonder that at present the film about J.Edgar Hoover the most famous closet queen and transgenderdresser has woken Americans up to the faxct that nearly evderything is a lie.The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830.
The Removal Act was strongly supported in the South, where states were eager to gain access to lands inhabited by the Five Civilized Tribes. In particular, Georgia, the largest state at that time, was involved in a contentious jurisdictional dispute with the Cherokee nation. President Jackson hoped removal would resolve the Georgia crisis. The Indian Removal Act was also very controversial. While Native American removal was, in theory, supposed to be voluntary, in practice great pressure was put on Native American leaders to sign removal treaties. Most observers, whether they were in favor of the Indian removal policy or not, realized that the passage of the act meant the inevitable removal of most Indians from the states. Some Native American leaders who had previously resisted removal now began to reconsider their positions, especially after Jackson's landslide re-election in 1832. Affected tribes include the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.
Most European Americans favored the passage of the Indian Removal Act, though there was significant opposition. Many Christian missionaries, most notably missionary organizer Jeremiah Evarts, protested against passage of the Act. Future U.S. President Abraham Lincoln also opposed the Indian Removal Act. In Congress, New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen and Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee spoke out against the legislation. The Removal Act was passed after bitter debate in Congress.
The Removal Act paved the way for the reluctant—and often forcible—emigration of tens of thousands of American Indians to the West. The first removal treaty signed after the Removal Act was the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830, in which Choctaws in Mississippi ceded land east of the river in exchange for payment and land in the West. A Choctaw chief, thought to be Thomas Harkins or Nitikechi, was quoted in the Arkansas Gazette as saying the 1831 Choctaw removal was a "trail of tears and death".The Treaty of New Echota, signed in 1835, resulted in the removal of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. The Seminoles did not leave peacefully as did other tribes; along with fugitive slaves they resisted the removal. The Second Seminole War lasted from 1835 to 1842 and resulted in the forced removal of Seminoles, only a small number to remain, and around 3,000 were killed amongst American soldiers and Seminoles.
In the 1823 case of Johnson v. M'Intosh, the Supreme Court handed down a decision which stated that Indians could occupy lands within the United States, but could not hold title to those lands
the last big challenge to fascist imperialist actions was of coutrse the big horn portrayed abover by atlaNTIC

Louis XIV (5 September 1638 – 1 September 1715), known as Louis the Great (French: "Louis le Grand") or the Sun King(French: le Roi-Soleil), was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre.^[1] His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days. As such, it is one of the longest documented reigns of any European monarch.

Louis began his personal rule of France in 1661 after the death of his chief minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin. An adherent of the theory of the divine right of kings, which advocates the divine origin and lack of temporal restraint of monarchical rule, Louis continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralized state governed from the capital. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalismpersisting in parts of France and, by compelling the noble elite to inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the Fronde rebellion during Louis' minority. By these means he consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that endured until the French Revolution.

France was the leading European power and fought three major wars: the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession—and two minor conflicts—the War of Devolution and the War of the Reunions. Louis encouraged and benefited from the work of prominent political, military and cultural figures such as Mazarin, Colbert, Turenne andVauban, as well as Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Lully, Le Brun, Rigaud, Le Vau, Mansart, Charles and Claude Perrault, and Le Nôtre.

Upon his death just days before his seventy-seventh birthday, Louis was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV. All his intermediate heirs—his son Louis, le Grand Dauphin; the Dauphin's eldest son Louis, duc de Bourgogne; and Bourgogne's eldest son and his second eldest son, Louis, duc de Bretagne (the older brothers of the future Louis XV)—predeceased him

ww2 war british by lone star

from flames of war,
 link below
Khaki drab Battledress and “Battle Bowlers”, the iconic British helmet, are the trademarks of the WW2 British soldier, the “Tommy”.

 The British Battledress uniform was officially introduced just before WW2 in 1937. It had taken the British Army from 1932 till then to design, test and approve the new uniform. Not all units had received them prior to the BEF heading to war in France in 1939 and some units of the BEF were still wearing a uniform seen in the previous war.

Also in 1937 the webbing equipment issued to the British soldier was redesigned (called the “pattern ’37” funnily enough) and this along with the Mk II helmet, a variation of the WW I design, was what your average Tommy wore into battle.

This Tommy is shown just as you would see him in France 1940 and the main features to note are the chest mounted gasmask bag and the lack of an entrenching tool. It was quickly found that wearing the gasmask bag on the chest wasn’t too comfy when you dove for cover so after this campaign it was shifted to a side bag. He carries the trusty Lee–Enfield SMLE Mk III rifle which was also the same as used in the previous war in France and to go with it, that fearsome long bayonet!

The colour of British webbing and equipment gives rise to many moments of angst as to what’s the “correct” colour and it shouldn’t really! You have a wide latitude to choose from. The webbing, as originally issued to the soldier, was a pale khaki colour and was meant to be coated with “Blanco” a green boot polish type substance used to protect it from the elements and help camouflage the soldier. In practice this meant that it varied from a medium green to light green and pale khaki for those troops who didn’t have time before being sent into combat to, put any Blanco on, didn’t have time to put much of it on or had even just faded over time.