Babel

Tag: History

  • Unnamed soldiers: secret heroes, great causes, death and glory

    Napoleon Crossing the Alps
    Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

    We all watched and maybe even loved stories of great heroes – kings, queens, generals – leading their armies to victory or glorious defeat. Each country or culture has its own such historical names that may have existed or not, and there are international names acknowledged and respected internationally. Nevertheless, we know about Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon and so on to name some less politically controversial names, but what do we know about all the nameless foot-soldiers that fought in the first lines?

     

    This post will be dedicated to these people and their portrayal in literature and in media, more or less contemporary. (more…)

  • Face to Face with Propaganda: Romania presented to the English-speaking world in 1985

    Blue communist graffiti on marble wallWell, I’m not going to comment much, for the ones who know how the (not only Communist) propagandistic wooden language sounds like, this post will be as clear as the day, for those who don’t – read my comments, and don’t take any quote literally!

    My source today will be from Prof. Andrei Oțetea’s A Concise History of Romania (English edition edited by Andrew MacKenzie), published at Robert Hall Limited, London. Here it goes…

    Romanian history is not a chronicle of kings and queens such as British children, learning the history of their own country, once had to commit to memory. True, there were Dacian kings, but the last of these, Decebalus, took his own life when his forces were overwhelmed by the Roman Emperor Trajan in A.D. 106. When the Emperor Aurelian withdrew from Dacia in A.D. 271 a long period of chaos followed until the separate principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia emerged in the fourteenth century. These to principalities merged under A.I. Cuza in 1859 and he may be said to be the first prince of Romania. His reign, however, was brief; he was deposed, and in 1866 Prince Charles de Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, an officer in the Prussian army, was elected Prince of Romania. He was crowned king in 1881. His descendant, King Michael, abdicated in 1947, so the reign of the Hohenzollern kings may be said to be a comparatively brief one. (pp 15-16) (more…)