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揽瓜阁俱乐部第五期 Day2 2021.02.09 Poland’s forgotten heroism and suffering：Roger Moorhouse’s history sets the wartime record straight （The Economist- 629 字 短阅读）
First to Fight: The Polish War 1939. By Roger Moorhouse.Bodley Head; 400 pages; £25.
Everyone agrees that the second world war was seismic. Ask when it started, however, and views differ, revealingly. For Chinese, it was the Japanese attack of July 1937. Soviet and Russian histories mark June 22nd 1941, when the perfidious Nazi invasion began. Britain and France regard the period between the declaration of hostilities in 1939 and May 1940 as the “phoney war”, or drôle de guerre.
But as Roger Moorhouse, a British historian, notes, there was nothing phoney about the war in Poland. The opening five weeks of slaughter were a gory template for the 300 that followed: 200,000 people died, the overwhelming majority of them Poles, and mostly civilians. Poles would be “exposed to every horror that modern conflict could devise”, including indiscriminate aerial bombing, and massacres of civilians and pows.
Yet the campaign fought by Nazi Germany from September 1st 1939, the associated Soviet invasion on September 17th, and the brave, chaotic and doomed defence launched by Poland, are strangely absent from standard histories, in any language. The last serious British study of this aspect of the war was published in 1972. The biggest television history of the conflict, “The World at War”, a 26-part documentary broadcast in 1973, interviewed most of the surviving decision-makers—but did not include a single Polish contributor.
Mr Moorhouse’s book remedies that gap, weaving together archival material, first-hand accounts, perceptive analysis and heartbreaking descriptions of Poland’s betrayal, defeat and dismemberment. Pre-war Poland was a big country, with the world’s fifth-largest armed forces. But it was an economic weakling. The combined Polish defence budget for the five years before the outbreak of war was just one-tenth of the Luftwaffe’s allocation for 1939 alone. The Poles had courage, flair and grit. But they lacked the decisive elements: armour and air-power. Military planning was plagued by secrecy and mistaken assumptions. Some of the top commanders were notable duds.
Despite that, Hitler’s stuttering war machine was repeatedly halted, bloodied and on occasion even defeated by the Polish defenders. The myth of invincible Blitzkrieg was burnished, self-interestedly, by the Nazis themselves. For their part, the Western allies, Britain and France, portrayed Poland as a hopeless cause to justify their defence of their ally “using vowels and consonants alone”. One of many striking anecdotes on this score concerns Britain’s reluctance to bomb Germany—on the ground (seriously) that it risked damaging private property.
Kremlin self-interest skewed the story, too. Stalin’s march into eastern Poland, under a secret deal with Hitler, was justified on the (fictitious) basis that the Polish state had already ceased to exist, and that only Soviet intervention could restore order. In fact, the savagery of the Soviet occupiers matched, and sometimes even exceeded, that of the Nazis. Both invaders, writes Mr Moorhouse, applied a “brutal, binary, totalitarian logic: a racist binary in the German case, a class binary in the Soviet.” In the eyes of the Nazis, a circumcised penis justified execution. For the Soviets, a soft, uncallused palm signalled an intellectual who ought to be eliminated. In all, 5.5m Polish citizens (including 3m Jews), or a fifth of the entire pre-war population, would perish.
The surrender of Poland’s regular forces on October 6th did not mark the end of the fighting. A well-organised underground army, reporting to the government-in-exile in London, continued the struggle until the further and final betrayal of Poland’s interests by the Western allies at Yalta. It all deserves more than the simplistic but widespread caricature of a country which met the invading tanks with a cavalry charge. As Mr Moorhouse admirably explains, Poland’s cavalry was in fact remarkably effective. The blame for defeat, and for the subsequent distortion and neglect of Poland’s story, lies elsewhere.
Source: The Economist
【人文科学-历史】 Hawaiian temples （ WSY -338 字 短精读）
Source: WSY
【人文科学-艺术】 Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man of math (TED-3分6秒-584字-精听)
先做听力再核对原文哦~
This image of the Vitruvian Man, taken from Leonardo's sketches, has become one of the most recognizable symbols of the Renaissance. But why? It's a simple pen and ink drawing, right? Wrong! Let's start to answer this question with a math problem. I know how to calculate the area of a circle. I take the value for pi and multiply it by the radius squared. I also know how to take the area of a square. I multiply the base by itself. But how can I take the area of a circle and create a square with an equal area?
This is a problem often called "squaring a circle" that was first proposed in the ancient world. And like many ideas of the ancient world, it was given new life during the Renaissance. As it turns out, this problem is impossible to solve because of the nature of pi, but that's another story. Leonardo's sketch, which is influenced by the writings of the Roman architect, Vitruvius, places a man firmly at the center of a circle and a square.
Vitruvius claimed the navel is the center of the human body and that if one takes a compass and places the fixed point on the navel, a circle can be drawn perfectly around the body. Additionally, Vitruvius recognized that arm span and height have a nearly perfect correspondence in the human body, thus placing the body perfectly inside a square as well. Leonardo used the ideas of Vitruvius to solve the problem of squaring a circle metaphorically using mankind as the area for both shapes. Leonardo wasn't just thinking about Vitruvius, though. There was an intellectual movement in Italy at the time called Neoplatonism. This movement took an old concept from the 4th century developed by Plato and Aristotle, called "The Great Chain of Being." This belief holds that the universe has a hierarchy resembling a chain, and that chain starts at the top with God, then travels down through the angels, planets, stars, and all lifeforms before ending with demons and devils.
Early in this philosophic movement, it was thought that mankind's place in this chain was exactly in the center. Because humans have a mortal body accompanied by an immortal soul, we divide the universe nicely in half. Around the time Leonardo sketched the Vitruvian Man, however, a Neoplatonist named Pico Della Mirandola had a different idea. He pried mankind off the chain and claimed that humans have a unique ability to take any position they want. Pico claimed that God desired a being capable of comprehending the beautiful and complicated universe he had created.
This led to the creation of mankind, which he placed at the center of the universe with the ability to take whatever form he pleases. Mankind, according to Pico, could crawl down the chain and behave like an animal or crawl up the chain and behave like a god, it's our choice. Looking back at the sketch, we can see that by changing the position of the man, he can fill the irreconcilable areas of a circle and a square. If geometry is the language the universe is written in, then this sketch seems to say we can exist within all its elements.
Mankind can fill whatever shape he pleases geometrically and philosophically as well. In this one sketch, Leonardo was able to combine the mathematics, religion, philosophy, architecture, and artistic skill of his age. No wonder it has become such an icon for the entire time period.
Source: TED
【笔记格式要求】 同学们任选 2 篇文章精读/精听并进行笔记打卡
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家三点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2021-2-8 23:36:43
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