Comments on: Wednesday, 7 September 1938

By: Airminded · Tuesday, 13 September 1938

Airminded · Tuesday, 13 September 1938 — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:00:31 +0000

[...] In the letters columns, it’s turning into a war. The Times has two columns of them (p. 8) on that leader from last week on the annexation question. There are those who are disgusted by The Times’s [...]

By: Airminded · Monday, 12 September 1938

Airminded · Monday, 12 September 1938 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:33:07 +0000

[...] and reactions in France, the United States and Italy (most of p. 14), more on Nuremberg and the Czech autonomy proposals (p. 15), and four letters to the editor (p. 18). It’s becoming hard to escape the [...]

By: Airminded · Saturday, 10 September 1938

Airminded · Saturday, 10 September 1938 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:57:32 +0000

[...] yesterday, The Times has a number of letters (p. 11) about its secession leader. John Fischer Williams, a prominent international lawyer, can’t understand why the Czech [...]

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:03:37 +0000

Well, they weren't quite dead and buried, though. In 1936, the founder of Plaid Cymru, Saunders Lewis, and two other men set fire to a RAF bombing school being built at Penyberth, for which they were imprisoned and (inevitably) became heroes to other Welsh nationalists. And I've seen the Welsh example, even more so than the Irish one, used to help explain the minorities question to befuddled Britons, though how illuminating it was is hard to know ...

By: Airminded · Friday, 9 September 1938

Airminded · Friday, 9 September 1938 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:42:15 +0000

[...] in this respect, The Times’s leader on Wednesday was unhelpful, at least according to a letter appearing in the Manchester Guardian today (p. 20). [...]

By: Leinad

Leinad — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:31:22 +0000

Of course, the bloke on the bus has the luxury of having all his ethno-religious conflicts dead and buried some two-three hundred years earlier (on the big Isle at least). The other problem the Czechs and Slovaks face winning over UK everyman is the amount of wierd consonants in their names. Hard to take a country seriously when it starts with ‘Cz’, much less go to war over it. President Ben-what?

Got to laugh at the Mail:

‘Everybody knows that Czecho-Slovakia was founded in 1919 etc’ – I bet they did…

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:14:21 +0000

And they didn’t have our fancy GIS software and ethnicity datasets to make such maps with a few mouse clicks either! 1919 is probably a good guess, though the Czechoslovakian state may have undertaken a comprehensive census more recently than that.

Yes, Ossetia. Kosovo and Bosnia too. The map is striking. One could see how the man on the Clapham omnibus might look at it and wonder how the Sudetens ended up in Czechoslovakia in the first place, and why they shouldn’t just be given to Germany right now — especially if it will prevent a world war.

By: Airminded · Thursday, 8 September 1938

Airminded · Thursday, 8 September 1938 — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:58:59 +0000

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By: Leinad

Leinad — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:38:04 +0000

Seconding the Ossetian thing. I also wonder where the above map came from, and by extension what demographics back then were like – I’m guessing this stuff would have been thrashed out pretty heavily back in 1919, but in my condescending present-ist way I can’t help be impressed with the attention to detail.

Oh, and good stuff vs The Netherlands the other night Brett – you’re looking the goods in behind the strikers with with Kewell.

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:56:07 +0000

I’ve been enjoying this process immensely: the map of ethnicities is particularly striking, given how many modern nations have these kind of ethnicly overlapping borders. And, of course, the whole Ossetian thing…