The Bad History Carnival includes a worthy, if older, link to a piece of historical nonsense I was thinking of writing about myself, so I'm glad John McKay had already put in the effort.
As an addendum, I've just spent several weeks reading through every copy of the Daily Mail from January 1945 to December 1946 (thank God for paper rationing; they were only 4 pages each), and aside from high politics the only stories regularly emerging from the British Occupation Zone of Germany were: how much are the Germans getting to eat, and to what extent are the troops allowed to fraternize with civilians (mixed opinions on both). Now and again there were reports about soldiers having been killed or injured which left open the possibility of sabotage or assassination, but the implication was clear that even if true this was the work of isolated fanatics acting spontaneously - nothing along the lines of what's currently taking place in Iraq.
Posted by Alan Allport at March 2, 2005 04:51 AMWhile it is useful to know your history, some folks interpret that to mean you can use history.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at March 2, 2005 07:23 AMFor a while back on the "Scottish Newsgroup" I got it in my head that it might be interesting to present facts or others' opinions without comment, to see where the conversation went. More often than not I was immediately pilloried by one or both sides because even the act of stating a fact (or, for example, a lengthy quote from Orwell) was politically intolerable and could not, as it seemed to them, ever be done without evil intent unless accompanied by an elaborate ideological apparatus which was aimed at cutting one's enemies off at the knees.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 2, 2005 07:47 AMI wrote my dissertation on the Politics of Hunger in post WW2 Germany. It all just came rushing back and I shuddered at the thought of those days of dusty files in the PRO
What was the gist of it Nigel?
Posted by: Alan Allport at March 2, 2005 02:47 PMBasic gist - for all the worry among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that the Germans might turn Communist, hungry people have a very limited interest in politics.
I looked through quite a few of the files of the British Military Govt and there were tit-bits about acts of resistance but, as you suggest, they were minimal in comparison to Iraq.