Antony Beevor | The Cambridge Union

Anthony Beevor speaking at the Cambridge Union Society.
As a historian, Antony received widespread praise for his vivid, compelling style and his treatment of the ordinary lives of combatants and civilians. Antony was a British Army officer before leaving to focus on his writing, with works including the critically acclaimed Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945.

[@lancelot1953]

Excellent presentation on a subject poorly understood and understudied. Thank you for sharing this great lecture with the YT community. Ciao, L (Veteran)

[@cambridgeunionsoc1815]

+lancelot1953 Glad you enjoyed it!

[@camieabz]

Headphones up to max here, and the sound is medium-ish. Pity.

[@DaveSCameron]

Superb story teller with a unique gift and only a small number of errors/ misunderstandings as opposed to the usual myriad whuch prompts one to digest 3 or more authors tomes to get a handle on any of the countless theatre's of warfare in 1931 - 1946/7. Thank you Mr Beevor.

[@MV-ix7tl]

Not sure why some are struggling with the audio and recording as it's good for me and I'm watching/listening via my phone.

[@Hannibal953able]

Fantastic military historian. I am very much looking forward to his newest book on the Ardennes Offensive.

[@paigetomkinson1137]

I very much enjoyed this lecture with Sir Antony Beevor. It was quite detailed in some areas, with him managing to add information off the top of his head, to what he had prepared to discuss. There is extensive knowledge in that head! I'd never heard about the cannibalism of the Japanese before, and I've been studying World War II fairly intensely for several years now, reading, watching documentaries, and listening to lectures like this. The lecture was very informative, and as usually the case with these sort of things, the question and answer session was fantastic. Some questions were things I'd thought I'd ask, and some were very different which made it all very interesting. Some in the comments here have mentioned the sound quality of the video. I have something I'd like to say about this, too. For quite some time at the beginning of the lecture, I was trying to figure out if there was an audience, or to whom he was speaking. Audiences in the United States must be very loud in comparison, because there's always a slight din while the speaker is talking. This audience was so incredibly quiet, that I wasn't sure until I saw someone returning to a seat in the front. That is amazing to me. Thank you Cambridge Union for sharing this important and interesting lecture with the world here on KZbin. The horrors of the war are waning in the public's mind, and it's lessons are frequently being applied incorrectly. It is vital that this story never stops being told, and that society understands the truth of dictatorship, fascism, propaganda, aggression and war; misery, pernicious hate, destruction, pain, and incalculable suffering.

[@sitting_nut]

no state was ever as barbaric and evil as british empire in terms of number, extent and duration, of its victims and atrocities. nobody else comes close. nobody. "historians " like beevor actively smudge that solid fact.

[@glutinousmaximus]

More on (Sir) Anthony here - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Beevor

[@apexxxx10]

*The Cambridge Union. Next time. A soundcheck! OK? Bangkok-Johnny CarSanook Media THAILAND*

[@billpiercejr.261]

Audio sounds ok to me.

[@andrews527]

Low volume, no captioning.

[@McIntyreBible]

25:05, the Japanese aspect of World War II

[@McIntyreBible]

1:11, Beevor's assumption of the beginning of World War II.

[@End-Result]

Interesting that Beevor casually discredits Preston's notion of Franco's repression as being a "genocide" or a "holocaust" because there wasn't a racial element (given that he fails to see the metaphorical significance of Preston's conceptualization of Franco's barbaric repression, he obviously isn't as much of a literary historian as he likes to think he is). There actually was a highly racial element, on various levels (the 1934 repression following the Asturias uprising, in which the colonial African Legion were first employed to brutally oppress the local working class population, was arguably the prologue to what came to be known as the second "Reconquista") and several Hispanists and historians of the civil war refer to this - primarily Helen Graham* and even Raymond Carr (who he mentions during the lecture). Being a military historian, Beevor should know that many of the generals who oversaw and ordered the enslavement and extermination of civilians in the Nationalist zones had seen action in the Rif War of the 1920s. The disastrous fallout of the war and later the growing political discontent during the emergence of the Second Republic precipitated an anger and resentment that fueled an obsession with regaining military prestige via colonial domination. To top this off, Western Andalucía - incl. Cádiz, Seville etc - was the first region to be conquered (Malaga and Almeria to the East fell later) and it is no coincidence that some of the most severe repressions and atrocities took place in what was the most racially & culturally diverse part of mainland Spain - not to mention politically radical (see Temma Kaplan's "Anarchists of Andalucía" for more on the region's long-running tradition of radical working class action). Again, Beevor seems to be blissfully unaware of many of these factors, as his perspective - unlike Preston's - is so narrow in that he mostly focuses on military strategy. *See Graham's A Very Short Introduction to The Spanish Civil War for more on this.

[@LTrotsky21stCentury]

Beevor is what he is; a more or less classic, centrist, bourgeois historian. He gets recognition for this, while others with a more broad ranged, materialist analysis do not. That is the "manufacture of knowledge" by the capitalist class, a necessary adjunct to the manufacture of consent -- something Gramsci described.

[@charlesmaeger6162]

In WW 2 Poland lost nearly 20 per cent of it's population.

[@paigetomkinson1137]

Charles, 20 percent of anything is 1/5, which is what the man said. What a tragedy that was, Poland, then the whole rest of the world lost in brutal, savage war.

[@thevillaaston7811]

Antony Beevor brings nothing new to the subjects that he writes about.

[@phildyrtt6433]

This well-marketed book generator has a most pronounced leftist selectivity, sadly...so uneccessary.

[@apexxxx10]

*The Cambridge Union. Next time. A soundcheck! OK? Bangkok-Johnny CarSanook Media THAILAND*