kind of obvious in retrospect

[ratcreature]

But when looking for some random TV distraction that is not news, because those are so depressing and anxiety inducing, settling on a Thirty Year War documentary might not have been the best choice.

Comments

[ratcreature]

It didn't help that they added a sort of contemporary tie-in where they were interviewing historians and political scientists whether any parallels for ending present day complicated conflicts in Middle East with multiple parties, convoluted and shifting alliances, outside powers and sectarian divisions could be drawn. Which wasn't really a hopeful parallel for the present.

[marcelo]

That went from unfortunately triggering to deliberately unsettling... I see the ratings argument for that, but still.

[ratcreature]

It was unsettling throughout because the overall hook they chose was first person accounts of regular people that survived in writing, which otoh was also quite interesting and why I checked it out in the first place.

Like, back when I was in school and we covered this the diary of Peter Hagendorf (a footsoldier who survived through various campaigns for twenty-five years) hadn't been rediscovered yet, not that we necessarily would have been taught the on the ground perspective, but apparently they learned quite a bit from it.

I was really surprised by some of the details, like apparently he not only had his family with him in the baggage train but as he was shot at the beginning of the Sack of Magdeburg, he then sent his wife into the burning city to do his share of the looting which I wouldn't have guessed would have worked out, but apparently did. Of course while he survived his gun shot wounds, she later on dies of some pestilence along with most of his children (a son survives, maybe because he fostered him elsewhere, which he didn't seem to have tried with the daughters he mentions dying).

Unfortunately caring about protagonists like that only results in getting gut punched one you get to the parts where he matter of factly mentions raping some girl as part of looting and such. And he isn't a psychopath or anything, clearly caring about his family and children and struggling to deal.

It's like the real world prototype for the Crapsack Death World setting.

[marcelo]

Your icon for this post is very much my soul at this moment.

Yeah. The scary thing about history is that it shows us not just where we come from, but where we might go back to next (with the proviso that most everything still happens somewhere, so "we" is a bit variable in that phrase).

[ratcreature]

It's also a bit disconcerting to just look at which previous events just seem to resonate with the present moment, get attention and through what lense, not just for direct parallels but in a more amorphous sense.

I mean, obviously there is just the 1618/2018 anniversary aspect, but I remember 1998 when there were celebrations for 350 years of the 1648 peace treaty, and iirc the coverage was all about how it was a negotiated peace, the start of an international order, how the agreements between the confessions still have an influential legacy today... And of course there was some of a "The Thirty Year War was horrible" remembrance, but the narrative was a hopeful success story kind of thing, that after an awful episode we made some progress. The currently popular angle for looking a history seems to be "let's look at how catastrophe unfolded and established order broke down" and I don't think it's just because the dates being somewhat round for the beginning or the end respectively in this particular instance.

It's because the current moment seems fraught and unstable for many people and not unstable in a good way that something better may be happening next either. The ominous zeitgeist is that things are bound to get more awful first (with a wide array of choices for that) and then maybe it might get better again. Or not.

(It is also quite interesting to look at who celebrated that peace, or not, in Germany in the centuries in between, because how it was seen varied wildly over time and with confessional differences too.)

[marcelo]

That's a distressingly accurate description of the zeitgeist, yes. History doesn't repeat, but, gods, lets hope it doesn't rhyme. (I'm worried and at times semi-triggered about that, and I'm in Buenos Aires; I can't imagine how it'd feel over there).