Wow. For some reason what gets me most is the... blue skies.
I've always had decent imagination to turn black and white people into color, and the same with buildings, etc.
But somehow I always mentally kept the skies as gray... as if the death and destruction of the war warranted overcast dreary weather, for years on end.
The idea that WWI was fought on many days that were brilliantly sunny somehow makes it even more depressing in a way.
I remember visiting Auschwitz (1) on a beautiful summer day. It's actually quite pretty. (That's assuming you filter out the gates, the wires, the interiors.) Hell is what was done there, not a cinematic filter.
Birkenau (Auschwitz 2), on the hand, was purpose built (Auschwitz 1 was a repurposed barracks) and that really does look like Hell, even on a nice day. Every last part of it screams "this was designed for obscene purposes".
I love all these colorizations, especially videos (easy to find on YT).
One thing I've been wondering about: Is it possible that the ML algo turns the faces into more "modern" faces because it's presumably trained on later color footage?
It's an inherent problem of all ML systems to extrapolate from training data only.
You can get dramatically different results depending on your training data set.
The only real issue with that is treating any of the outputs as "realistic" representations in terms of "close to the original scene". It's just a modern interpretation and the viewer needs to keep that in mind at all times.
To be fair to you, northern France, like the UK, will have many more grey and cloudy days than it will clear blue skies so in the main your imagination is probably right more often than not.
The article states that all the pictures required posing due to long exposure time, so I don't think "hand held" was an option. That being said, if you're gonna pose, you can just pose longer when it's cloudy.
For anyone that hasn't seen They Shall Not Grow Old, I highly recommend it.
Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) spent years working with the British government to digitize and colorize their old footage of World War I. They also added in sound using the actual military equipment that was used in the field during the war. They also hired lip readers to figure out what each person was saying and added in dialogue.
It's really incredible and makes the war (which was only 100 years ago) feel much more modern than old black and white footage.
The audio comments made by soldiers throughout the film are also actual comments from veterans, taken from old BBC interviews. The film is a masterpiece.
Prokudin-Gorskii's photograph of a simple railway bridge has always struck me the most of any early color photograph. The quality is such that it could have easily been taken today with a good camera.
The shot was created in 2004 using software to combine digitized negatives. IMO it is hard to say exactly how much of that impression is to be attributed to software capabilities, the colors in the Wikipedia version are definitely touched up. (Great shot though, hands down.)
The ones from the Russian Empire are much higher resolution (stunning!) than the WW I photos, any idea if this has to do with the original photos themselves, or the scanning process?
I'd assumed it was due to the 3-step process (taking 3 photos quickly with red, green, and blue filters). Rather than have it all together on one colour film which was still quite new.
It's interesting you can see the effect this has on moving water, where it has an oil-slick rainbow sheen.
I thought 1917 was a pretty good representation of what it must have been like. If you remember, it was filmed as if it was a long, continuous shot, and the way the actors would walk from what was a (literal) “hellhole,” to a beautiful, green, field, was jarring.
The thing that struck me, was the quality of these trenches. It’s possible the photos were propaganda, so they only took pictures of the “good” trenches, but every picture you see of allied trenches looked like ditches.
That said, a quick shufti at the casualty figures[0] shows that the absolute worst place to be, during the war, was in a German trench.
> It’s possible the photos were propaganda, so they only took pictures of the “good” trenches, but every picture you see of allied trenches looked like ditches.
It's not really propaganda, German trenches were on average much better than allied ones. The reason was that the allied side considered itself on the offensive, and saw no reason to makes the trenches more livable since they expected to leave them as soon as possible to advance in newly reconquered territory.
> The reason was that the allied side considered itself on the offensive, and saw no reason to makes the trenches more livable since they expected to leave them as soon as possible to advance in newly reconquered territory.
There is a certain irony in that, considering that almost every Allied soldier who set foot on German soil – with a few minor exceptions – did so as prisoner of war.
There was a huge difference between the German and British trenches. The idea on the British side was that comfortable (read "liveable") trenches would suck the fight out of the men. Even the officers' dugouts were rather crude. The Germans, conversely, realised early on that aerial reconnaissance combined with poor mobility, unbelievable amounts of artillery and machine guns meant that the trenches were going to be a thing for a good long time, and you might as well settle in and be as safe as you can until the next spell of horror.
The Germans were also rather deep inside France, and thus more content to build systems of defensive fortifications. The British and French were of the mindset that the next offensive would have them making territorial gains, and so whichever trenches they currently occupied were only temporary.
Being in occupied territory also meant that the Germans had a huge supply of slave labor from Belgians and Frenchmen, which they weren't shy about using.[1]
Even to the extent that the Entente occupied hostile territory (which was much rarer), they had a much greater respect for human rights. The British, French and Americans had strong liberal democratic traditions, whereas Germany was a highly autocratic and militaristic society verging on totalitarianism by the time the war started.
> That said, a quick shufti at the casualty figures[0] shows that the absolute worst place to be, during the war, was in a German trench.
I am not sure how you reach that conclusion. If you add the British and French casualty numbers, you roughly get the German casualty numbers (the Germans also fought the Russians and the British and French also fought the Ottomans). According to the Wikipedia article on the western front [0], the entente had more casualties.
The Germans (just the Germans) lost two million dead, and many more wounded. If you add the other Axis powers, then it looks even worse.
Consider, also, that there were numerous fronts in the war. The Russians lost almost as many as the Germans, but they were on a totally different front from the European allies, so maybe we could say the Russian trenches were the worst, but I'll bet that they had a lot of Cossack cavalry; which, I suspect, didn't do so well against machine guns.
The Ottomans had a huge civilian death toll, but that included the "Armenian Issue," which people like to fight about (My wife actually had a neighbor that was a survivor of that "Issue," and he called it "genocide").
The short of it, was that no single nation suffered as many casualties as Germany. It's notable that they suffered so few direct civilian casualties (but look what happened from secondary causes). Boy, did that change in WWII.
The only nation that came close to Germany for total deaths was Russia.
Then, of course, we had the good ol' 1918 Pandemic, and everybody took that in the shorts.
"I'll bet that they had a lot of Cossack cavalry; which, I suspect, didn't do so well against machine guns."
From an article about calvary use in WW1 (on the same site as had the German front color photos):
"Generally the troops can retreat faster than they can advance, so in an age when "breakthrough" machines (tanks, armored cars) either did not exist or were even slower than walking men, cavalry was given the task or harassing a retreating army in an attempt to turn their retreat into a rout and prevent them forming a defensive position further back. So cavalry was not meant to be charging into the teeth of machine guns, but rather charging into groups of men as they fell back, hoping to break whatever discipline they had left.
"Throughout the Western Front of both sides had large bodies of cavalry on "standby" when they launched big offensives, in the hope that they could break the enemy line and the cavalry could turn a little tear in the line into a huge opening. However, from 1914-early 1917 the offensive strategy used on the Western Front undermined the ability of cavalry to fulfill this role - week-long artillery barrages gave the opposition time to prepare secondary lines of defenses and bring up reserves to fill those lines. So rather than charging into a disorganized mass of retreating men they found freshly build trenches and machine guns - exactly what they were meant to prevent. Therefore the cavalry had little use. However German lancer units were more usefully employed in the war against Russia because the battle was more fluid and less encumbered with barbed wire trenches that tied up the Western Front."
World War I resulted in huge change in governance of the world. By its end the monarchies of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires had been swept away. If you include the Chinese Revolution of 1911 that ended the Ming Dynasty, only the British and Japanese Empires still were ruled by monarchs and royal families.
World War I ended the legitimacy of the divine right to rule others by virtue of noble birth.
Edit: this hasn’t been well received. To sum up: you can’t just say “Monarchy bad. Destruction of monarchy good”. You have to look at consequences and actual effects in the world. All of the countries listed had abjectly horrific 20th centuries. Britain and the western European countries which kept their monarchies objectively had much gentler centuries.
————————-
That did not end very well for virtually any of the countries involved. Only the former Ottoman Empire really escaped any kind of widespread hell.
The former Russian Empire was under a totalitarian system for 70 years. The Austro-Hungarian empire first had to deal with the holocaust and Nazi conquest and then Soviet conquest. The Chinese had to deal with the Great Leap forward and Maoism. And the Germans had Nazism, the Holocaust, and years of turmoil in between the end of the war and the end of WWII. They also had their country split in half and the eastern part made poorer.
The British and Japanese now have a token monarchy. The same applies to most countries that still have one: the monarch is not the source of power.
What exactly was gained? Monarchical power was already on the way out. The French Revolution had clearly undercut the power of monarchs and they did not hold real power by the start of WWI. And abrupt lack of monarchy rather than gradual evolution seems to have led at minimum decades of torment in most of the places you name.
You could make an argument about ending colonialsim but WWII and Japanese conquest Of European colonies did a lot more on that front. WWI expanded several empires.
I guess that it is a matter of counterfactual history whether the Armenian genocide, or something like it, would have occurred if it were not for the disruption of the war.
And the seeds for the recent and ongoing trouble in the Middle East were sown in the division of the former Ottoman Empire immediately after the war, as described in David Fromkin's book, "A Peace to end all Peace." (best history-book title ever!)
Oh thanks. Yes I forgot about the Armenian genocide. Also I suppose the ethnic cleansing of turks in Greece and the Greeks in Turkey. Plus the middle east situation.
a lot of things changed as a consequence. The USA definitely came out on top. A lot of colonies were "liberated". For the most part Europe became democratic (which it clearly wasn’t before)
Are the deaths justified? Of course not. But the world would be very very different.
Its true, basically all of the old European and Eurasian empires were dissolved.
As for democracy, the period between WWI and WWII was quite the opposite with the rise of fascism across Europe.
Modern European democracy largely came later after WWII.
WWI was a net boost to colonialism with European powers given nominal control of the former Ottoman empire; European colonialism was still going strong (and arguably still is) well through the middle of the 20th century.
US influence in Europe was only drastically increased after the implementation of the Marshall Plan after WWII, and obviously only in Western Europe.
It was a classic case of prisoner's dilemma: several powers solving a mini-max problem. What happens if I arm myself, what if I don't? Of course, the thorny question is what happens if I don't arm myself and my neighbor continues arming. But then, after arming and arming and arming for decades, at some point the question becomes what happens if I attack first vs what happens if my neighbor attacks first.
Unfortunately, in all these questions, when you contemplate the best outcome and the worst outcome, in 1914 history did not show any scary examples of really bad outcomes. All involved parties have been involved in various sorts of interborder conflicts where the worst outcome was not truly devastating. Russia had suffered a pretty bad naval defeat at the hands of the Japanese a few years back, France has lost some territories to Germany a few decades back, but all in all, all major European powers had experienced only success in their recent history.
Today, 100 years later, we have different answers to the same questions. Answers that will inevitably include nuclear holocaust. Does this mean we'll never see a major war again? I don't know what the future holds in store. I"m thankful that there was no major war during my lifetime, I can only hope there won't be one during my kids' lifetime.
By every single concrete measure, you're simply mistaken in saying that. In terms of death toll, sheer human misery and displacement, destruction, impoverishment, post-war political catastrophe (the Iron Curtain being just one part of this) and possibly even psychological scarring, World War II was so much worse for Europe than the first War.
If we look at physical infrastructure alone, the vast majority of Europe at the end of the first war was mostly intact. At the end of WWII, even this wasn't the case, whole cities and large parts of the continent's man-made landscape had been shattered into twisted ruins.
I am sincerely curious to see how you would qualify such a statement that WWI was worse for Europe than WWII.
I am with you on the second point; WW2 in Europe was a continuation of WW1, while concurrently there was an Asia-Pacific war starting with Japanese incursions into Korea and Manchuria.
I noticed that too, no doubt posed, as the story said, due to the slow exposure required. Probably in a rear training area or perhaps 2nd or 3rd line trench. The trench with the men aiming rifles didn't look like it had ever been shelled so unlikely they were facing the French or British.
Yeah it’s crazy to see how important horses were while by the end of the war dog fights by airplanes had become common. Between the tanks, machine guns, gas, and planes it was the first major mechanized war.
Hemingway has some good writing about this and the horror of it all. Especially as previous tactics were being used with mechanized armies - just complete slaughter.
Construction workers don't just wear them for reassurance either.
They protect the most vulnerable part of your body. You might not immediately go tell tales of it if you get hit in your helmet by anything but a small caliber or shrapnel (a large caliber will still inflict significant head trauma), but your chances of survival are way up from pretty much zero.
Also there might be all kinds of stuff flying around on a battlefield, and even if it isn't necessarily lethal, it's nice to not get hit in the head by a rock or whatever.
In the first world war they apparently shielded the wearer effectively from debris caused by artillery shells that would have otherwise killed them. Here's an interesting video about the statistics behind it (and how they were misinterpreted at first): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IQE0uZUMys
They probably aren't that effective at stopping bullets coming straight on, but they will protect against ricochets, shrapnel, falling debris, and so on.
Soviet tank crew wore padded helmets inside their tanks to protect their heads from impacts with the sides and equipment, e.g. while crossing rough terrain or from ill-considered sudden movement
Its interesting the impact of child hood malnutrition on the British soldiers which resulted in the officers being a taller than the men so we're easy to pick off
I feel like when I look at these photos in colour, they are more impactful. Like when it’s in black and white I think that’s Long time ago. But in colour I feel it’s not so long ago.
Sometimes when I'm feeling a little blue I'll remind myself I am not crouched in a foxhole (in freezing or burning weather) with people across the field trying to shoot me.
Usually makes whatever's bothering me seem insignificant. Photos like these remind me that scenario has been real for many, many people.
That's what got me too. I see these trenches, dug deep and filled with wooden constructions, backed by layers of rocks that were moved and placed there. All done, I imagine, mostly by hand and perhaps with the help of beasts of burden.
And then I think of the number of soldiers involved - I guess if each dug a hole and nailed some boards, such trenches could be built quickly. After all, man power scales not just by power, but by number of people as well.
(And then I start thinking about the logistics to feed all these soldiers, and my head starts to spin.)
I study WW2, and at the start you're unsettled by the number of casualties (in the realm of 70 million through 1945.)
But over time you also realize the entire industrial output of the Allies was used to defeat the Axis, and you become completely disgusted at the monumental waste.
Historians agree that the Axis never had a chance of winning in the longterm (aside from extreme luck), and WW2 was a result of US isolationism. Had the US promised to send 2 million troops to Europe as in WW1, Germany would not have bothered with most of their adventures.
We've had relative peace since 1945 thanks to US military investment, but one passive speech from the Whitehouse can undermine that deterrent, as Jimmy Carter did before.
The US didn't have 2M active duty troops available to send to Europe in 1939. We were still in the Great Depression. Even if there had been political will to oppose the Axis Powers at that time, the funding and materiel simply didn't exist.
> World War I was a significant turning point in the political, cultural, economic, and social climate of the world.
Prior to WWI, Western Europeans saw themselves as the God-ordained masters of the world. They carved up Asia(including China and Africa into zones of influence. They were typically the senior military partners in any alliance they entered into.
After the horrors of WWI, it was over. WWII was just the final chapter of WWI. Now, Instead of being the senior military partners, they would be the junior partners (see NATO and the Warsaw Pact). They would lose their colonies. They would at best, be one region of the world among many in terms of global power.
I am always amazed that Brave New World is taught as dystopic. Maybe it's over the top in its anti-reactionary elements, but considering that everyone except for a single suicidal (not saying it's because he was viviparous, some of my best friends have been born viviparously...) misfit has a pleasant life, one would think utilitarians should be as fond of Huxley as others are of Rand.
I strongly agree with you. Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence of automation/robots/computers, the darker aspects (e.g. the population of deltas) stop being plausible within the universe.
The TV show had to invent a lot of extra nonsense to introduce conflict. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Brave New World is that things are so stable, human needs are met so consistently, that life ceases to be a struggle; without a struggle, life becomes meaningless. That interpretation is alluded to in the TV show, but I won't spoil it.
We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.
> We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.
I never thought that this idea was even conceivable. Brave new world is orders of magnitude more terrifying than 1984. It describes a complete dead end, the last throes just before the thermal death of mankind. Heck, even the novel "Atomised", that describes the disappearance of homo sapiens, is not as grim as brave new world. How can you seriously read brave new world as utopian?
Very easily. Taking utilitarianism to be maximisation of happiness and well-being, how many people in Brave New World are happy? unhappy? Is there any lack of well-being, outside of the savage reservations?
As to "more terrifying", 1984 features actual repression (albeit mostly operative only for ~13% of the population). On the other hand, the Brave New World achieves stability voluntarily, via consumerism.
It's worth reading Marcuse (and Adorno) for their criticisms of precisely the kind of world laid out in Brave New World, and even as they were speaking from the 50s and 60s, their points were intimately related to society at the time, and even today's society. Marcuse called it 'one dimensionality' and highlighted the dangers of total administration, while Adorno lamented the 'culture industry'. They precisely answer to the simple utilitarian position, and precisely the repression that arises. Contra Orwell's idea of "war is peace, peace is war", Marcuse argued that now the contradiction is not so obvious, but hidden in the noun itself. We speak of 'freedom', but the word 'freedom' itself has been overloaded with things which are characteristically unfree. The view of repression as simple, brute force violence and surveillanace is only scratching the surface. It ignores autonomy, the dangers to democracy, the loss of critical capacity, and alienation.
It's worth noting that even J.S. Mill recognized some problem with pure utilitarianism, and tried to interject with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He recognized the problem, but could not solve it with pure philosophy that starts from the sole measure of the good as being pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill's account is thus inconsistent, but what he was getting at was incredibly important, and it's a bit of a shame to see this classification of society in terms of the number of people happy versus unhappy repeated in 2020, when Mill saw a problem with it in the early 19th century.
Thank you! It will take a while for me to read up on these lines. In the meantime, I'll note that if Huxley had been a utilitarian himself, he would probably not have written Island[1].
> "If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle – the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
Stasis is interesting. First, it makes sense that if they are in a local utilitarian optimum, they won't be changing much. Secondly, IIRC, Mond states they have plenty of inventions they haven't deployed, based on A/B testing. Not only does that imply people doing creative work inventing, but also that the status quo is not a static quo, and they'll happily introduce, say, new technically-complex pasttimes, as long as they clearly improve the metrics they're measuring. (I'll reread the book later today or tomorrow to see if memory serves. I don't think I've read it in this century.)
For personal and collective initiative and creativity, not only does someone have to write the feelies in the orthodox world, there are always the islands for people with too much initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002
(Island life sounds a bit like Dante's first circle. The savage deliberately chooses not to go there. I think it a poor choice, but then again, if I had been Zhivago, I would emigrated to Paris with Tonya, saving a good deal of trouble.)
As far as consumerism goes, I will just remind you that we are discussing in the clear on an anglophone forum. Aren't we all supposed to line up behind the Washington Consensus that consumerism is the key to prosperity?
Mr. Foster is doing creative ontogenic work with the intention of introducing improvements to the status quo (and Huxley takes a sideswipe at "They will outbreed Us"[2]):
> "Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre," Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. ... "But of course they've done much better," he rattled on, "in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It's quite astonishing, when you're used to working with European material. Still," he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), "still, we mean to beat them if we can. I'm working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet."
and there is other creative work to be done, are other changes to introduce:
> Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head.
> "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."
(As Huxley wrote 30 years before the Cleese + Ronnies sketch[3] his idea of social destiny may have been a bit more predetermined than our twenty-first century bien-pensant ideas on the subject.)
[2] Körner notes that no matter what kind of Darwinist: Social, Economic, Academic, etc., they may be spotted by their constant undarwinist worry that the unfit will outbreed the fit.
>Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence of automation/robots/computers, the darker aspects (e.g. the population of deltas) stop being plausible within the universe.
Others commented on the 'utopia' part, I'll just note that your observation was accounted for.
Already in the novel it was noted that reducing working hours was trivial, well within the capacity of the powers that be. It wasn't done because deltas did not want it. The speaker might have been biased on that last part* , but should be well-informed on the first given his high-ranking position.
* It could be that the speaker did not asses delta desires correctly, or that the actual reason involved social stability.
> "Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them."
(Note the implicit english attitude to ireland, or compare some of our current deltas' attitudes to quarantine.)
Humans as soulless automatons, grown in test tubes, segmented into castes, given happy pills and sex0rz for social control was specifically meant as a parody of the "utopian" views of assclowns like HG Wells and the other 19th century socialist weirdos in the Bloomsbury group. It is, of course, the dystopia we most obviously inhabit in the West.
Fear not; tiring of it, it appears we're going to try Orwell's dystopia next.
"[27 March] Crocuses now full out. One seems to catch glimpses of them dimly through a haze of war news.
Abusive letter from H.G. Wells, who addresses me as 'you shit', among other things.
The Vatican is exchanging diplomatic representatives with Tokyo. The Vatican now has diplomatic relations with all the Axis powers and - I think - with none of the Allies. A bad sign and yet in a sense a good one, in that this last step means they have now definitely decided that the Axis and not we stands for the more reactionary policy."
I like Adam Cadre's review of Brave New World because he broadly agrees with you: The book is by a grouchy reactionary trying to paint the great big social movements of the 1920s as being utterly horrible, and who never realizes that a good number of the things he's describing are desirable.
It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-out version) and Brave New World are fairly transparent takes on the USSR, just at different periods: Brave New World was the socially revolutionary USSR of the 1920s, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four was the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s, once Stalin had consolidated power and begun the Terror.
(Yes, Brave New World is also about the utter horrors of consumerism. Books can be about more than one thing, especially if the author has a lot to say and a whole novel's worth of didactic authorial mouthpieces to use to to beat it into your skull.)
I've always had decent imagination to turn black and white people into color, and the same with buildings, etc.
But somehow I always mentally kept the skies as gray... as if the death and destruction of the war warranted overcast dreary weather, for years on end.
The idea that WWI was fought on many days that were brilliantly sunny somehow makes it even more depressing in a way.