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Although military parades may seem innocuous, it must not be forgotten that there is always the possibility that whoever has the force will exercise it. Attest to the thousands of calls to arms that have been produced to defend a country or an idea, or to question the current order. Who today would question the current scientific order would be Hiram Bingham III, the debatable inspiration behind the character of Indiana Jones.
The lyrics of La Marseillaise. It is shocking that in the 21st century the population is still called to arms so that the “impure blood (of the enemy) waters our furrows”, or that they sing at the top of their lungs that the invader wants to “behead your children”. In France, the debate about its revolutionary anthem is cyclical, but other countries have already chosen to revise theirs and give it another historical perspective. It is undeniable in the past of all states finds war. Some, like the Secession, were particularly cruel.
From Carthage to Wagner. The Wagner Group mutiny is the latest example of how mercenary units rise up against a government, something that has happened constantly since Antiquity. There are other cases in which it is a faction of the regular army that rebels, as in the 1944 conspiracy against Hitler. The führer overcame that attempt although he fell the following year; the scars of Nazism and the postwar period, however, still surface.
Indigenous conquest, Creole independence. The conquest of America –or invasion, according to historian Antonio Espino- would not have been possible without the indigenous people who had previously been armed by the Spanish. It is the thesis of the latest book by the historian Esteban Mira Caballos, who considers that the natives made the conquest and the direct descendants of the Europeans, the independence of South America.
The Picasso threat. Pablo Picasso was considered a national threat, but not for Spain but for France in the first decades of the 20th century, where the authorities believed that his paintbrush could be as dangerous a weapon as a rifle. After the uprising and the Civil War, the painter never returned to Spain, a country where the prevailing far-right and Falangist ideology clashed with his communist militancy.
The dark side of archaeology. One of the archaeologists who inspired the character of Indiana Jones was the American Hiram Bingham III, about whom, according to this profile, few positive things can be said. Fierce imperialist, plunderer and defender of child labor (indigenous, of course), he acknowledged in his diary that the discoverer of Machu Picchu was Agustín Lizárraga but, since he was mestizo, he believed he was entitled to ignore it and arrogate the discovery. In The Conversation.
How to save the neck. How to escape the deadly plague of the black plague of the fourteenth century? What would have been the best way to be safe from the Visigothic hordes that pounced on Rome in the year 410? Smithsonian Magazine proposes some ideas to survive some great catastrophes of which there is memory. “History is the most dangerous place on Earth,” he notes. (in English)
Disasters under the sea. The Titan disaster, the mini-submarine that imploded to the seafloor with five people on board last month, has many precedents. Sinkings of military submarines due to accidents have been especially dramatic. This is the case of the Russian Kursk (in 2000 with 118 crew members), the Soviet K-8 (1970, 52 crew members), the Americans Thresher and Scorpion (1963, 130 and 1968, and 99 men, respectively) or the Argentine ARA San Juan ( 2017, 44 crew members). The Hunley was the first submarine sunk in combat in 1864, during the Civil War, and was not salvaged until the year 2000.
In the history of civil submersibles there is a precedent that fortunately ended well. This is the Pisces III, a small submarine that in 1973 was used to lay communications cables and that at the end of August suffered an accident near the Irish coast that left it stranded on the bottom. Its two crew members rationed oxygen and were rescued thanks to an agonizing three-day operation with only twelve minutes of air left. It is considered the deepest rescue (almost 500 meters) ever carried out. Due to the implosion, the victims of the Titan were never given any choice.
