The history thread.

Has anyone read any biographies of significant people in history?

I have read biographies of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Mao Zedong, Stalin, Lenin, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Lloyd George, Charles De Gaulle, William Gladstone, King Henry VIII, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Sadly no but I applaud your reading of those.

He was an egomaniac and power mad, and of course a dictator who conquered other peoples and set up puppet regimes over them. But then again at the time political freedom as we see it today barely existed anywhere, except the beginnings of it in the new USA. In Britain at the time only about 2 percent of the population had the vote. And most of our navy were recruited via press gangs, where discipline was maintained through brutal punishments. So we have to set him in the context of his age.

He was feared by us not because he was any better or worse a leader than most others, but because he was so successful militarily that he represented an existential threat. He was certainly a military aggressor, but so were most leaders of powerful nations back then. India did not just fall into our laps after all. 

As far as tyranny was concerned he was not in anything like the same league as Hitler. He did not orchestrate mass murders or attempt genocide, nor starve prisoners to death. Domestically he introduced many reforms which were more positive than negative, and have stood the test of time, and brought to a close the turmoil of the revolutionary years. He also had the very human experience of genuinely loving a woman who showed every sign of not loving him back and who was repeatedly unfaithful to him and appeared to have a very high sex drive that he could not satisfy. Hitler by contrast probably loved no one except his mother whom he adored but who died when he was 19. Hitler was also a humourless individual, unless it took the form of sarcastic wit at the expense of his enemies. Napoleon on the other never tired of playing juvenile practical jokes on those around him at any opportunity..

Some French revere him for the greatness he brought to France, but his victories were bought with copious amounts of French blood. In short, he was a mixed bag, with both good points and bad points, but much of Europe lay prey to his armies and were looted to finance them. Resistance to French rule thus grew in the areas under his control which helped to ignite the beginnings of nationalist sentiments in places like Germany and Italy which were to bear fruit later.

I am interested in many areas of history from the Neolithic to the 20th century.
The medieval period is of particular interest and I never pass up the opportunity to visit castles.
Beaumaris in Anglesey is a particular favourite.

Hitler on the other hand actually was particularly short. Not that I think that tells us very much. He was an obsessive hypochondriac though in constant fear of his own death, until finally confronted with the fact that death was easier than anything else that might await him, which reality could no longer be delayed come April 30th 1945.

In World War 2 one fact often goes unreported or underreported. The Germans in the field were liberally supplied with pervitin tablets which were essentially amphetamines. As well as increasing energy levels and allowing soldiers to function with much less sleep, amphetamines tend to increase pleasurable sensations, however dark, whilst greatly reducing moral inhibitions and at the same time increasing paranoia whilst the lack of sleep often can result in auditory and visual hallucinations. This is a heady cocktail which probably lay behind so many false accounts of civilians shooting at soldiers from behind. In essence they were hearing things whilst already in a hyper state making them prone to paranoia, and with any normal inhibitions greatly weakened, with sadistic pleasures made more enjoyable. This drug probably had a hand in the willingness with which so many ordinary German soldiers perpetrated horrendous atrocities, which after the war and no longer drugged up  many went into denial about, also a typical reaction for anyone who has been involved in excesses when high on speed, when they have actually come down.

The Russians on the other hand supplied their soldiers with liberal quantities of vodka, which allowed them to go into battle making suicidal charges because the alcohol did its usual thing of inhibiting their fears and enhancing their rage and bravado. Alcohol of course also greatly reduces inhibitions and no doubt amongst many other motivations contributed to the fact that in the European theatre of the war, only the Russians came close to the Germans in their everyday willingness to commit atrocities.

The effects of alcohol on the Russians and speed on the Germans is a factor that needs to be better understood by historians of the war.

The British also handed out amphetamines in the form of Benzedrine.

www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/preview-world-war-speed/4337/#:~:text=On%20Secrets%20of%20the%20Dead,amphetamines%20in%20the%20military%20context.

The British copied the Nazis after finding Pervitin in a downed plane in 1940.
The Battle of Britain was fought with both sides on various forms of speed.
Cocaine and methamphetamines were experimented with for U-boat mariners and the armies of both sides used stimulants too.