Ghosts of WWII

[beth]

20 incredible photographs - too large to copy here, but not to be missed. Amazing!

www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/the-ghosts-of-world-war-iis

[Erasmus]

So many show the utter futility. When I see Des's boy who's now 14 and obsessed with the Soviet military, I have to readjust though Des is a couple of years older them I am. For Vincent, WW2 is as remote as the Boer Wars were to me at that age. WW1 is like the Crimea. Vietnam is like WW1 and even the first Iraqi war is as far as WW2 was. The father of one of my brother's friends volunteered for Organisation Todt (a suitable name!) to get out of Franco's jail as a Republican and hope to leg it to the French Resistance. He didn't anticipate an an offshore fortress - but maybe the Nazis did!

And there lies a point: 'we' fought Hitler and promptly fell out with Stalin but 'we' never raised a peep against Franco and Salazar who were every bit as allied in fact if not in name as Mussolini.

[Dex]

Great pics. Loved 'em

[Jessiealan]

Fascinating. I wish they had told where each of these was taken.

[mouse]

Aug 8, 2010 17:57:02 GMT -5 Erasmus said:

And there lies a point: 'we' fought Hitler and promptly fell out with Stalin but 'we' never raised a peep against Franco and Salazar who were every bit as allied in fact if not in name as Mussolini.

as franco..salazar never wanted to impose their will on us...that was why


and talking of ghosts..although not ww2
near where i live the roman army has been seen many times over the centuries marching..with banners flying along an old roman road .....seen by various and divers peoples over the centuries
one ocasion a shepard was bringing his flock along the said road when he saw the legionaires......the sheep moved to the side leaving a passage way for the army to march through

[Erasmus]

If you're going to talk about ghosts, I don't believe that they are 'spirits' in the Caspar quasi-person sense (leastwise, not all of them) because they 'wear out'. Your Roman Legion is an exception but even then it's an entire legion. More often older ghosts are reduced to just sounds, usually of battle. I think Bosworth, Bannockburn and Culloden are all associated with that sort of ghost. Some of them seem to be more like recordings that collect the power to continue from emotions of observers and often where there's said to be some kind of haunting, it's associated with cold, as if there is some physical energy involved, not something entirely metaphysical.

My mate Des was haunted. As a beleiving Catholic, he does not believe in spirits of the dead so considered it an evil entity taking the form of a ,am who'd hanged himself in the garage and possibly driven him to suicide. There was certainly something because the old-fashioned language and nightmares his son of 4 had been having stopped after exorcism, and he saw somebody glaring at him from next door that he knew were on holiday.

The thing that interests me is that it was the second exorcism (by the Anglican minister) that was effective doing the whole show with full 'uniform' and the whole bell book and candle while his own priest (who probably didn't believe it and was only humouring him) was ineffective in 'civvies' scattering Holy Water and prayers around. That is not the reaction of a being as much as of some sort of force to a counter-force, more what I'd consider magic than religion (from my perspective that religion is a mixture of practical magic and mystical experience degenerated into unsubstantiable belief).