Christopher Othen

@NicholasOShaug1 The most American traitor Britain ever had.

@ChrisOthen You mean, they got everywhere! And of course the teenage William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, was an amanuensis of the black and tans.

One often wonders what happened to them. Did they have a club, regimental tie, an alumni association: boozy reunions etc?

@UntoldWarFacts Jan Zumbach was a fighter ace in 303 Squadron. He went on to own a nightclub in Paris, work as an arms dealer for the Katanga secession, and fly as a mercenary in Biafra. There's a building side mural to him in the southern outskirts of Warsaw.

🧵 1/7 The RAF told Polish pilots they couldn't fight. So they made them ride tricycles around airfields while Britain burned. When they finally let them fly they became the deadliest squadron in the entire Battle of Britain. This is the story of 303 Squadron..

@FlaggHazel2 Well, reality is an unfocused mess of overlapping narratives. Films based on real events either carve out a clean path that distorts the truth, or go for honest chaos. Scandal was more the latter. A decent book on Ward came out 2 years earlier so that made it easier for viewers.

Watching Scandal (1989) for the first time. Knowing nothing about the events it’s based on, I’m quite puzzled by its lack of a central core. It’s not boring, but I can’t quite make it out: the fragmented structure and its too many, overly superficial characters don’t help.

@FundamentalLack @SinningLeli What the hell does "Despatch the vermilion length only should the metallic node repeat mean?" And is this a countdown? "Five ... Quatre ... Tre ... Dwa ... ". La boom.

@SinningLeli Bomb defusing scene in a movie, but it’s a guy trying to figure out AI mistranslated plugs and buttons

Slightly unrelated, but here's a fun fact. I applied for a translator job a couple months ago for an international school supply company. Went through the steps. They said they didn't need me after all. Months after, I check their website. It was such slip I couldn't get through-

@DanieruSan3 @hering_david We have a saying,” said George Fisher, stunt coordinator for the movie. “It’s always the easy ones that get you.”

@ChrisOthen @hering_david Yeah, that's the one. I think it's amazing and tragic how such a simple stunt got someone killed meanwhile this didn't. It almost did but you get what I mean.

Today I learned that Richard Fleischer’s final film was sponsored by garbage bags and had a competition whereby if you followed the clues in the film it would lead you to $1m in a real-world location. In the end a child found the money in the Statue of Liberty’s nose

@DanieruSan3 @hering_david That was Dar Robinson, a stuntman who never broke a bone in his long career but somehow slid off a highway curve during filming and 'plunged off a 40-foot embankment, hit a rock ledge and was gored by a sagebrush limb' [LA Times 23 Nov 1986]. Oof.

@hering_david Out of the very few It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World knockoffs, I'm fairly sure this is the one where a stuntwoman was killed after driving a motorcycle off a cliff, making this the only one of this sort of film to kill a stuntperson which is both tragic and unbelievable.

A fascinating, elegant read about the very complicated Italian that was Curzio Malaparte. Writer, soldier, international man of mystery, and all-round liar. Excellent book, recommended.

@DaveAndCatboi Lacombe, Lucien is an excellent film that really captures the moral complexities of the occupation. Based, at least in part, on the Lafont gang. Shame what happened to the actor who played Lucien - a real talent who could've had a great career.

@ChrisOthen Can’t find Docteur Death movie, but I just found this one

Here's a lineup of the books I've written so far. Mercenaries and extremists, gangsters and peacekeepers, lost causes and short-lived countries. And it’s all true. More here: shorturl.at/Cp5HQ #NewBook #spain #poland #France #Cuba #Congo #Ethiopia

@DaveAndCatboi Glad you liked it. There's also a decent French film called 'Docteur Petiot' from 1990 that's well worth a watch. Captures the gothic nature of occupied Paris very well.

@ChrisOthen You really did it justice. It’s a fascinating book. It fills in a lot of blanks from this book

@DaveAndCatboi It's a fascinating subject. Hope I did justice to it.

@ChrisOthen That’s impressive. I just received this one in the mail today Looking forward to reading it

Cleon: Cover Artist to the Lost Generation christopherothen.wordpress.com/2016/07/02/cle… via @ChrisOthen

In March 1977 four Japanese men walked into an office block in the Tokyo business district and took hostages. They had guns and a katana. Two of them were former comrades of celebrity writer turned nationalist suicide Yukio Mishima. Full story: shorturl.at/6fZD5

@ditataroitberg @ChivalryGuild I wrote an overview here: christopherothen.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/fra…

@ChrisOthen @ChivalryGuild I didn't know there was foreigners in the national side as well.

When the Englishman Peter Kemp (fighting for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War) asked his commanding officer where the order to shoot the prisoners of the International Brigade came from, he got a memorable response. “As far as we're concerned, from Colonel Peñaredonda. But we all think the same ourselves. Look here, Peter, it's all very well for you to talk about international law and the rights of prisoners. You're not a Spaniard. You haven't seen your country devastated, your family and friends murdered in a civil war that would've ended eighteen months ago but for the intervention of foreigners. I know we have help now from Germans and Italians. But you know as well as I do that this war would've been over by the end of 1936, when we were at the gates of Madrid, but for the International Brigades … Whether they know it or not, they are simply tools of the Communists, and they have come to Spain to destroy our country! What do they care about the ruin they have made here? Why then should we bother about their lives when we catch them? It will take years to put right the harm they've done to Spain!”

A few years back I did an interview with a former mercenary who fought in the Congo during 1965 as part of Mad Mike Hoare's 5 Commando. Eye opening stuff. Read it here: christopherothen.wordpress.com/2025/02/01/5-c…

@BovrilG There's an interesting book called 'Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan' with a lot on Edwardian Britain's interest in pagan themes. A lot of authors back then were interested in peeling back the polite CofE surface to reveal the old gods beneath. But WW1 wiped all that away.

A surprising amount of Edwardian literature - not just obvious things like Machen’s output but Saki and Kenneth Grahame as well - feature an appearance by the Horned God. A dim societal groping towards the realisation that Plutarch’s fisherman was wrong when he reported that the Great God Pan was dead

Jan Zumbach, Polish war hero who became a mercenary pilot in the Katanga secession, now has a building-side mural in south Warsaw where the streets still bleed into fields. More about him in my 'Katanga 1960-63' book. #poland #Congo #katanga

@indigo_bg @Noahpinion Maybe Dragoš Kalajić, the painter and Serbian television personality who became a pagan conspiracy theorist? shorturl.at/jAmJH

@Noahpinion Not true. Balkan countries have zero such theorists. We just have 20 Donalds (and have had them since before USA got theirs).

Every country has its own version of This Guy

I'm working on a book about The Years of Lead: the bloody, explosive 1970s when right and left tore Italy apart. The book is well underway but, like all narrative history, the beast needs feeding with raw data. Can you help? More here: tinyurl.com/mvrachs5 #italy #Italia