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Post by silverwolf on Jan 31, 2008 21:45:13 GMT -5
In my periodic net-surfing, I've come across a very intriguing pattern concerning other people's opinions about our favorite Field Marshal. They either (for the sake of simplicity) love or hate him. There really is no middle ground (such as respect) which, in my opinion, is just a tad bit odd.
There also seems to be a growing number of people who are apparently determined to portray him as a mediocre tactician, an abysmal strategist, and a man who really was a Nazi (Hitler supporter) till the day of his death. Unfortunately, this has me a wee bit confuzzled...
So, comments, anyone? Or can anyone explain this phenomenon?
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Post by jilldragon on Feb 3, 2008 21:19:47 GMT -5
My thought is that it's a backlash against the post-war attempt by the Allies to deify Rommel, which I suppose is understandable in a way but I think they're going too far and trying to demonize him. I read an article in a popular military magazine that went on about how, not only was Rommel a bad general, he was a egomaniac who only cared about self-agrandizment and didn't give a ---- about his soldiers.
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Post by Qualerei on Feb 5, 2008 15:42:06 GMT -5
Right, a bad general. *snickers* As if anybody would believe that ! Besides, it's always easy to judge afterwards. Oh, well, it's like the Spanish saying that Napoleon was a dictator ; we just don't pay attention
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Post by machiavelli-imp on Jun 5, 2009 22:04:34 GMT -5
David Irving appears to have started the 'popularisation' of the backlash: no-one really listened to the jealous remarks from people like Streich (and Allied generals of course) until *someone* went and put them in a book. Yet even Irving can't deny that Rommel cared about his men and had periods of tactical brilliance: his main gripe is the 'cavalier' attitude towards logistics and his pig-headedness. Of course with the invention of the internet and things like The Pit of Voles (aka Wikipedia) there is now a stream of armchair generals (whether real or some spotty kid playing too many computer games) who think that they are entitled to spew out their opinion as The Right and Only One just because they read a few books and are now Experts. I get terribly cranky about this because I've seen it on supposedly sensible sites like axishistoryforums.org - if you can't trust one 'fact' there, what about the rest - and it is the reputable sites like these whose information propagates about the internet fastest. In general though, I have a firm belief that most people are terribly stupid when it comes to history: there's only a 'good' and a 'bad' side and they can't cope with anything in-between. It doesn't help that this is the way most school (in Australia) teach the subject. If Rommel were here he would probably smack me on the head and tell me to stop being such an intellectual snob. (I'm trying to think whether I would mind...)
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Post by Kalender on Jun 12, 2009 8:09:10 GMT -5
Don't you think that this backlash is just there for the scandale ?
Like : "Look, i discovered something new, Rommel was MEAN ! and ate children."
And truth to be said, there are a few not-so-glorious stuffs about Rommel that happend to be true. I do not think this made him a bad man, but they are there, and it makes it easy for petty historians to try and make a name for themselves.
Rommel's not the only one. I recently read a criticism about a Heydrich's biography : it juste an historian rambling on how bad, horrible and bla bla bla Heydrich is. It's true. But : a) it's so ---- easy I'm not going to buy a book to know this, b) it's not the job of an historian to judge. The poor guy didn't have ANY good criticism.
The second thing is that history is always the ground for politics. Rommel was a man with an incredible aura. For someone to say : "He was a nazi. He really was. All along. Bla bla" may actually want to use it : "If he was a nazi, and was a good man, then nazis were good men". Or, on the contrary, it will be a way to attack the german people ("Look, he too was bad, your all bad !"). I think there are plenty of other ways to use the memory of Rommel, juste like some use the Holocaust.
Behind revisionnism, there is only a lack or knownledge or politicals goals.
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