Futurism of the 1920s

.

Futurism of the 1920s - 1920s > .

Retrofuturism: The Future That Never Came - pics > .

Retrofuturism - pics >> .

6 Inventions & Discoveries of the 1920s - 1920s > .

Radio in the 1920s - 1920s > .

The Advent Of Electrical Recording In The 1920s > .

"Futurism" is what people believed the future would be like at a given time. Similarly, "retrofuturism" is futurism of the past. Most people think of Victorian futurism (steampunk) and 1950s/1960s futurism (atompunk). 1920s futurism sits right in the middle, mostly forgotten.

Science and Invention magazine - August '20 to August '31 .

Science and Invention was originally called The Electrical Experimenter and published by the Experimenter Publishing Company from May 1913 to August 1929; the title changed from The Electrical Experimenter to Science and Invention in August 1920. It was published and edited by Hugo Gernsback, an electrical engineer who started publishing and editing his first magazine, Modern Electrics, only five years earlier. Modern Electrics was an overnight success. Gernsback, who had moved to New York City from Luxembourg in 1904, first became successful after starting his own business, the Electro Importing Company, which imported and sold high quality electrical components from Germany. The Experimenter Publishing Company, a subsidiary of the Electro Importing Company, and its subsequent publications under the direction of Gernsback were the result of the experience he gained while publishing a catalog listing the Electro Importing Company’s products. Gernsback also felt that there was a “general ignorance of technology amongst the American public” and set out to correct this imbalance by publishing a periodical that would disseminate technical and scientific information to the public.

The magazine’s final issue was the August 1931 issue after which it was sold to Popular Mechanics (1902) and absorbed into that magazine.

Geopolitics & Military Books (Modern)

.Review: The Gates of Europe (Ukraine) by Serhii Plokhy - CaRe > .

The Bookshelf - CaRe >> .

Geopolitics, Military Book Reviews - MilPow >> .

Guardian (1821)

.Brief history of the Guardian: liberalism, war and emerald jewels - Guardian > .

The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference".

Traditionally affiliated with the centrist to centre-left Liberal Party, and with a northern, non-conformist circulation base, the paper earned a national reputation and the respect of the left during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). George Orwell writes in Homage to Catalonia (1938): "Of our larger papers, the Manchester Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty". With the pro-Liberal News Chronicle, the Labour-supporting Daily Herald, the Communist Party's Daily Worker and several Sunday and weekly papers, it supported the Republican government against General Francisco Franco's insurgent nationalists.

The paper's then editor, A. P. Wadsworth, so loathed Labour's left-wing champion Aneurin Bevan, who had made a reference to getting rid of "Tory Vermin" in a speech "and the hate-gospellers of his entourage" that it encouraged readers to vote Conservative and remove Attlee's post-war Labour government. The newspaper opposed the creation of the National Health Service as it feared the state provision of healthcare would "eliminate selective elimination" and lead to an increase of congenitally deformed and feckless people.

The Manchester Guardian strongly opposed military intervention during the 1956 Suez Crisis: "The Anglo-French ultimatum to Egypt is an act of folly, without justification in any terms but brief expediency. It pours petrol on a growing fire. There is no knowing what kind of explosion will follow."

On 24 August 1959, The Manchester Guardian changed its name to The Guardian. This change reflected the growing prominence of national and international affairs in the newspaper. In September 1961, The Guardian, which had previously only been published in Manchester, began to be printed in London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian .

Guardian’s 200th anniversary: “A newspaper has two sides to it,” as former editor CP Scott wrote in his essay commemorating our first 100 years. “It is a business, like any other … But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community … It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence.” This conviction was present from the start: the prospectus that announced the Guardian’s founding in 1821, in response to the Peterloo massacre, asked how the “great diffusion of Education” in the country, which had excited a “greatly increased interest” in politics, could be “turned to beneficial account”.

Guilty Men (July, '40)

Publications ..

Guilty Men was a British polemical book written under the pseudonym "Cato" and published in July 1940. Guilty Men was written by three journalists: Michael Foot (a future Leader of the Labour Party), Frank Owen (a former Liberal MP), and Peter Howard (a Conservative). They believed that Britain had suffered a succession of bad leaders who, with junior ministers, advisers and officials, had conducted a disastrous foreign policy toward Germany and had failed to prepare the country for war. After Victor Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club, had been persuaded to publish the book, the authors divided the 24 chapters among themselves and wrote it in four days, finishing on 5 June 1940. Gollancz asked for some of the rhetoric to be toned down, fearing the reaction it might provoke, but he rushed it into print in four weeks.

It was under a pseudonym because the writers were employed by Lord Beaverbrook, who banned his journalists from writing for publications other than his own. Beaverbrook, who was active in the Conservative Party, was also a vocal supporter of appeasement, though he was not mentioned in the book.

There was much speculation as to who was Cato. At one time Aneurin Bevan was named as its author. In the meantime, the real authors had some fun reviewing their own work. Michael Foot wrote an article, "Who is This Cato?" Beaverbrook was as much in the dark as anyone but joked that he "made do with the royalties from Guilty Men". The authors earned no money from the book as their literary agent, Ralph Pinker, absconded with the royalties.

[Guilty Men] attacked fifteen public figures for their failed policies towards Germany and for their failure to equip the British armed forces adequately. It is the classic denunciation of appeasement, which it defined as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying".

Guilty Men was published in early July ('40), shortly after Churchill took over as Prime Minister, the Dunkirk evacuation had shown Britain's military unpreparedness, and the Fall of France leaving the country with few allies. Several major book wholesalers, W H Smith and Wyman's, and the largest book distributor, Simpkin Marshall, refused to handle the book. It was sold on news-stands and street barrows and went through twelve editions in July 1940, selling 200,000 copies in a few weeks.

Guilty Men remains in circulation and was reprinted for its historical interest by Penguin Books to mark its sixtieth anniversary in 2000.

The book's slogan, "Let the guilty men retire", was an attack on members of the National Government before Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940. Most were Conservatives, although some were National Liberals and one was Ramsay MacDonald, the late leader of the Labour Party. Several were current members of Churchill's government. The book shaped popular thinking about appeasement for twenty years; it effectively destroyed the reputation of former Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, and contributed to the defeat of the Conservative Party at the 1945 general election. According to historian David Dutton, "its impact upon Chamberlain's reputation, both among the general public and within the academic world, was profound indeed".

Cato's "guilty men" were:

Neville Chamberlain
Sir John Simon
Sir Samuel Hoare
Ramsay MacDonald
Stanley Baldwin
Lord Halifax
Sir Kingsley Wood
Ernest Brown
David Margesson
Sir Horace Wilson
Sir Thomas Inskip
Leslie Burgin
Earl Stanhope
W. S. Morrison
Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guilty-Men-Brexit-Cato-Younger/dp/1785902415 .

Heldengedenktag, Berlin 1943

.

Nazi Day of the Dead - Berlin 1943 - mfp > .

24-6-17 Life Under Adolf Hitler: The First Years Of Nazi Germany - War Stories > .

22-10-6 Rise of Hitler, 1930s, Invasion of Poland | WWII. E 2 (subs) - Katz > .

22-10-3 Comparing Pootin to Hitler | Dream of the Great Past (subs) - Katz > .

Rise of the Nazis - doc | BBC Select > .

In March 1943, Hitler made one of his last public addresses during the annual Heroes Memorial Day ceremony in Berlin. Germany had just been defeated at Stalingrad and among the officers at the ceremony, one was planning to kill Hitler.

On 27 February 1934, the National Socialists introduced national holiday legislation to create Heldengedenktag ("Day of Commemoration of Heroes"), cementing the observance. In the process, they completely changed the character of the holiday: the emphasis shifted to hero worship rather than remembering the dead. Furthermore, five years later the Nazis abolished Buß- und Bettag as a non-working day and moved its commemoration to the following Sunday, to further the war effort.

On 21 March 1943, Adolf Hitler visited the Zeughaus Berlin, the old armory on Unter den Linden, to inspect captured Soviet weapons as part of his Heldengedenktag speech and ceremony in the wake of the catastrophic German defeat at Battle of Stalingrad. A group of top Nazi and leading military officials—among them Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz—were present as well. As an expert, Oberst Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff was to guide Hitler on a tour of the exhibition. Moments after Hitler entered the museum, Gersdorff set off two ten-minute delayed fuses on explosive devices hidden in his coat pockets. His plan was to throw himself around Hitler in a death embrace that would blow them both up. A detailed plan for a coup d'état had been worked out and was ready to go; but, contrary to expectations, Hitler raced through the museum in less than ten minutes. After he had left the building, Gersdorff was able to defuse the devices in a public bathroom "at the last second." After the attempt, he was immediately transferred back to the Eastern Front where he managed to evade suspicion.

Joseph Goebbels as Propaganda Minister, issued guidelines on content and implementation, instructing that flags no longer be flown at half-mast. The last Heldengedenktag was celebrated in 1945.

After the end of WW2, Volkstrauertag was observed in its original form in West Germany, beginning in 1948. The first central meeting of the German War Graves Commission took place in 1950 in the Bundestag in Bonn. In 1952, in an effort to distinguish Volkstrauertag from Heldengedenktag, its date was changed to the end of the liturgical year, a time traditionally devoted to thoughts of death, time and eternity. Its scope was also broadened to include those who died due to the violence of an oppressive government, not just those who died in war.

In 1919, the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) proposed a Volkstrauertag for German soldiers killed in WW1. It was first held in 1922 in the Reichstag. In 1926, Volkstrauertag became a feature on what Catholics considered Reminiscere (the second Sunday of Lent.) In the Weimar years, Volkstrauertag was not a legal holiday.

Volkstrauertag (German for "people's day of mourning") is now a commemoration day in Germany two Sundays before the first day of Advent. It commemorates members of the armed forces of all nations and civilians who died in armed conflicts, to include victims of violent oppression. It was first observed in its modern form in 1952.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstrauertag .

Nazi Propaganda ..