This is absolutely fascinating. A rare recording of Hitler’s normal speaking voice: Hitler’s secretly recorded conversation in Finland.
Marshal Mannerheim, celebrating his 75th birthday on 4 June, 1942, received a surprise visit by Adolf Hitler. Thor Damen, a sound engineer working for the Finnish Broadcasting Company, tossed a microphone on the parcel shelf of the ceremonial carriage, allowing for the two men’s conversation to be covertly recorded.
When I tell people that you can learn a lot while playing video games, I invariably get laughed at. But it is true. Today, for example, from a World of Warships promotion, I learned about Unsinkable Sam, a cat that reportedly survived three ship sinkings, sailing during World War II with the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy.
Sam first survived the sinking of German battleship Bismarck and got picked up by the crew of the destroyer HMS Cossack. When Cossack sank, Sam survived that too and got transferred to the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. Which was of course sunk by U-81. After that, Sam spent the rest of his life ashore, which was just as well, as he’d probably expended enough of his nine lives at sea.
Sam survived the war and lived to be 14 years old. There’s even a portrait of him at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London.
In power, socialism swelled the state and destroyed not just the “bourgeoisie” but the small-business owner, the family farmer, the artisan. All of this shocked non-Leninist socialists who hoped to end exploitation and alienation and break through to social democracy while still insisting on their class approach. These Marxists repudiated the Soviet Union as not socialism but a deformation, because of Russia, or Lenin, or Stalin.
After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder, but freedom. Nowhere did he say there should be collective farms formed by secret police coercion, mass deportations to frozen wastes, terrible famine. Of course, Marx had insisted that wage labor was “wage slavery,” private capital “exploitation” and “alienation,” the market “chaos,” and therefore that, to achieve lasting abundance and freedom, capitalism had to be “transcended.” The tragedy began unfolding with the very invention of “capitalism.”
Self-styled socialists in the nineteenth century, initially, had employed other terms – “the anti-social system,” “the system of bourgeois property” – but then hit upon this single all-encompassing notion whose essence (property relations, a mode of production), if replaced, would supposedly alter not merely the economy but the entire world, delivering abundance, social justice, and peace. The invention of “capitalism” was a stunning achievement for the socialists, in a way, but a tragedy for humanity, and ultimately, for the entire left, too.
Unlike Leninists, Social Democrats were never sure whether this “capitalism” would implode on its own, could be peacefully overcome inside parliaments by large worker-majority parties, or in the end required revolutionary intervention, but it had to go. Those Social Democrats who came to believe that “capitalism” was amenable to becoming more humane – capitalism with a human face – opened themselves up to accusations of being accomplices to exploitation and imperialism.
Once markets and private property were named and blamed as the source of evil, statization would be the consequence. A few socialists began, painfully, to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property, but they were denounced as apostates. Compounding the tragedy of the left, traditional conservatives committed the gross error of inviting the fascists and Nazis to power in no small part because of the leftist threat and the hard-nosed view that differences between anticapitalist democratic socialists and Leninists were delusion. To top it all off, Social Democrats and Communists fought a bitter civil war over workers' allegiance.
Without Stalin there would have been no socialism, and without socialism, no Stalin.
— Stephen Kotkin, Stalin – Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929 – 1941
A judge in the US has decided to allow an expedition to the Titanic to retrieve the early Morse code transmitter it had on board when it sank. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is opposed to the expedition.
When RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, crew members sent out numerous distress signals to any other ships in the vicinity using what was then a relatively new technology: a Marconi wireless telegraph system. Now, in what is likely to be a controversial decision, a federal judge has approved a salvage operation to retrieve the telegraph from the deteriorating wreckage, The Boston Globe has reported.